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 Ellis Glickman in Chicago to Kalman Marmor in Chicago, October 2, 1919. RG 205, Folder 115.
 

From Ellis Glickman  in Chicago to Kalman Marmor in Chicago, February 7, 1920. RG 205, Folder 115.

Ellis Glickman (1869-1931) an actor and an impresario, was the proprietor of Glickman’s Palace Theatre, one of the most prominent Yiddish theaters in Chicago ca. World War I. Here, he offers Kalman Marmor tickets to two different plays, “Shloimke Charlatan” by Jacob Gordin and “Daniel Deronda,”a Yiddish adaptation of George Eliot’s famous novel.

Marmor was seen by Glickman as someone worth courting when it came to Yiddish culture. At the time, Marmor was the editor of Chicago socialist daily, Di yidishe arbeter velt, which was in the process of merging (or would soon merge) with the Forverts (Forward).

(A detailed profile of Ellis Glickman can be found, along with a photo of his tombstone, at the website “Under Every Stone.”)

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.