Di gantse velt af a firmeblank: The World of Jewish Letterheads

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing.

Di gantse velt af a firmeblank (The Whole World on a Letterhead) is an experiment in building that portrait. Here, we hope to bring you several times a month, a different example of letterhead from a single collection in the YIVO Archives, the Papers of Kalman Marmor.

Marmor, a Yiddish writer and cultural activist, was born October 11, 1879 in Mayshigola, Vilna Gubernia (today Maišiagala, Lithuania). In 1906, he settled in the U.S. Initially active with the Labor Zionist movement, he later became a Communist. He was an organizer of the 1937 World Yiddish Culture Congress, cultural director of the International Workers Order, and a contributor to the Communist Yiddish newspaper, Morgn Frayhayt.  Between 1933 and 1936, he lived in Kiev, where he worked at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture and prepared scholarly editions of the work of American Yiddish poets and writers. During Stalin’s Great Terror, the Institute was liquidated, and much of its leadership was arrested and executed. Marmor, an American citizen, returned to the U.S. He died in Los Angeles in 1956.

His papers at YIVO contain several thousand letters from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s. He had an astonishingly diverse array of correspondents, not limited to Zionist and Communist activists.

From Morris Bernstein in Chicago to Kalman Marmor in New York, ca. 1929. RG 205 Folder 106.

Morris Bernstein, the proprietor of The Community Book Store, a lending library in Chicago writes to order additional copies of Marmor’s recently published 10-volume collection of the writings of Jewish socialist and poet Morris Winchevsky (1856-1932). (The Papers of Morris Winchevsky are included in the Papers of Kalman Marmor as Series 7.)

He sends birthday greetings in honor of Marmor’s 50th birthday, as “your former enemy, now your disciple.” He hopes that Marmor will live another 50 years to spite “scoundrels” who spread ugly rumors about him in Chicago. (This was around the time that Marmor and other leftists were expelled from the Workmen’s Circle). “If you weren’t a leftist, they wouldn’t bark.” Bernstein himself supports Marmor’s “noble and idealistic” cultural work.

Series curated by Roberta Newman; Images digitized by Vital Zajka. Biographical information on Kalman Marmor from biographical note by Daniel Soyer in the inventory to RG 205, Papers of Kalman Marmor.