Gallery 8: Postwar Years, 1944 to the present
Thanks to communist cultural policy – “national in form, socialist in content” – Poland became one of the largest publishers of YiddishYiddishthe historic Jewish vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, a fusion of German dialects, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Judeo-Romance and Slavic languages. The beginnings of Yiddish are in the Rhineland in the Middle Ages. About 13 million people spoke Yiddish before the Second World War. books, second only to Buenos Aires, during the postwar period. Yiddish Book Publishing House (Farlag Yidish Bukh) published everything from a Yiddish translation of Julian Tuwim’s poetry for children and illustrated classics of Yiddish literature to propaganda volumes and Yiddish textbooks. Yidish Bukh and the books it published are presented in an interactive bookcase in the 1950s club, the setting for exploring Jewish life under communism. With the onset of Stalinism, pluralism had ended and the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland (TSKŻ) became the official Jewish organization, with the TSKŻ club a center of Jewish life.