The Jewish Labor Bund

On the Occasion of its 100th Anniversary, 1897–1997

De: Marvin Zuckerman

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In October 1897, under cover of the Jewish high holy days, in the attic of a small, rundown house on the outskirts of Vilne (Vilnius), 13 Jewish intellectuals, writers, and workingmen gathered together, illegally, from five different cities of the Pale, to form what they decided to call “Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund fun Rusland, Lite, un Poyln”—“The General Jewish Labor Bund of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland”—which came to be known by the one word: “BUND.” The organization which they formed came to play a large role in East-European Jewish life for the next close to 50 years until it was destroyed by the two great destroyers of our time, Hitler and Stalin, Nazism and communism.

Marvin S. Zuckerman was born in 1932 in the Bronx, New York City. His parents were Yiddish-speaking garment workers, members of the Jewish Labor Bund from Warsaw, Poland. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1950s, he became a professor of English and Yiddish at Los Angeles Valley College, where he chaired the English Department for 15 years and was Dean of Instruction for six years. He also founded the Courtlandt Literary Agency. His books range from the humorous Yiddish Sayings Mama Never Taught You (Perivale Press, 1975), to the educational Learning Yiddish in Easy Stages (Joseph Simon / Publisher, 1984), to the monumental Three Great Classic Writers of Modern Yiddish Literature in three volumes: Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem-Aleykhem, and I. L. Peretz (Joseph Simon / Publisher, 1991-1996). Recently, he translated Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund: A Memoir of Interwar Poland by Bund militia leader Bernard Goldstein (Purdue University Press, 2016), and published Dickinson in Yiddish & Other Essays & Translations (Brass Tacks Press, 2024).