Szmuel Niger – pracownik i bojownik żydowskiego ruchu kulturalnego
Shmuel Niger, a Worker and Fighter of Jewish Cultural Movement

Summary/Abstract: The texts presented below were written by Shmuel Niger, a literary critic and social and cultural activist Shmuel Niger (also Shmuel or Samuel Charny, 1883–1955), who for nearly half a century exerted an immense influence on the shape of modern Yidddish literature and culture. The first text dates back to 1911 and was printed in the New York journal Dos Naye Lebn, while the second appeared twenty years later in Vilnius in YIVO Bleter, published by the Jewish Research Institute, currently known under the English name YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Both texts concern the place that Yiddish occupies and should occupy in contemporary Jewish culture and its role as, on the one hand, the language of the masses and of the intelligentsia, and on the other as the language as well as the object of research. Both text also ask the question about the relationship between culture created in Yiddish and other cultures with which it maintained contact, and also the possibility of the existence of Jewish culture outside Jewish languages. In his texts, Niger proposes a vision of a modern Yiddish culture which transcends the boundaries of folk culture—of which it was typically perceived to be z component until the early decades of the 20th century (and also later), providing space for full development of individuals and social groups

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