VIDEO: This moving film about seven young Yiddish scholars may surprise you

In ‘The Secrets of Yiddish Poetry,’ director Nurith Aviv explores the role that Yiddish plays in their work and lives

Courtesy of Nurith Aviv

By Forverts Staff July 11, 2024

A remarkable documentary about the passion of seven young people for the Yiddish language, and in particular for Yiddish poetry, was posted on YouTube this week.

In the film, The Secrets of Yiddish Poetry, French director Nurith Aviv, who was born in Tel Aviv, gives viewers a chance to hear these students and scholars — both Jews and non-Jews — describe how Yiddish inspires them in their work and in their lives.

Each of them shares their connection to a particular poet they love from the years between the two world wars, and some recite a favorite excerpt of their work. Among the poets discussed are Celia Dropkin, Moyshe-Leyb Halperin, Anna Margolin and Abraham Sutzkever. The interwar period was an exceptional era for the Jews of Eastern Europe, one which saw a deep flowering of Yiddish culture and creativity, including modernist, avant-garde poetry.

Aviv makes the point that the poets of that period were polyglots, often moving from one country to another. “The protagonists of my film also move between countries and languages,” she writes in her description of the film.

Filmed in France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania and Poland and released in 2020, The Secrets of Yiddish Poetry is itself multi-lingual, including conversations in French, Hebrew, Yiddish and English. The entire film is accompanied by English subtitles.

Rukhl Schaechter and Zach Golden are the staff of the Forverts, the Yiddish Forward.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor