Copyright

Yankev Leshchinsky

Published On

2024-09-16

Page Range

pp. 159–164

Language

  • English
  • Yiddish

Print Length

6 pages

12. Is emigration a solution?

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
Chapter of: The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37(pp. 159–164)
Socialism and brotherly love may be in our future but they are only a program of promises and hope. The socialist messiah may be a few decades late, and the situation of the masses is so dire that it is necessary to think of a way to provide people with immediate help. Such a concrete and realistic approach applied to Jewish life in Poland must recognize emigration as at least a partial solution. The reality is that Poland’s rural population is miserably poor and rural residents are flocking to villages and towns where they compete with Jewish artisans and small merchants. The children of déclassé landowners and well-to-do peasants who receive a mid-level or higher education compete with Jewish mid-size merchants and liberal professionals. Even if the government renounced its current anti-Jewish policies, it would not relieve the plight of Polish Jewry. Polish Jews must learn from Russian Jews, who fought for revolution and, at the same time, sent 150,000 Jews to America annually. 10 June 1936.

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus at University of Toronto
Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.