From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

When YIVO relocated to the United States in 1940, it wasted no time in establishing itself as a major repository of Jewish history. While it waited to learn the fate of its collections, building, workers, and associates in Vilna, it set out building a new home and mission for itself in New York, and this included the ongoing acquisition of books and documents for its library and archive.

Among the books that came its way in the mid-1940s, was this oddity, Ancient Pictures for Little Moderns of Things Once Seen by Jewish Children, by Frederick Starr, published in New Haven in 1889. The librarians and archivists must have found it as quaint and weird as we do today, though the Yiddish caption in the June 1946 issue of Yedies seems to take it as an ethnographic document on its own terms, pointing out “the characteristic clothing” of the boys in the illustration, newspaper sellers on the Lower East Side.