Our Small World: Hebrew Children’s Letters and Modern Upbringing in Czarist Russia

Abstract

The historiography of modern Hebrew culture views early twentieth-century Russia largely through the lens of canonical literature. However, Hebrew played a role in many other aspects of Jewish society, prominent among them children’s literature. By examining readers’ letters published in four Hebrew children’s magazines, this article explores the spread and meaning of the language for different sectors of Russian Jewry. It claims that Hebrew played a role in Jewish modernization for those who did not identify with Zionism and even those who claimed to reject modernism entirely. To better understand East European Jewish life through the prism of multifaceted Hebrew culture, this article studies publications of varied ideological positions—Zionist, nonpartisan nationalist, and Orthodox—to provide a more comprehensive picture of Jewish perception of Hebrew. It shows how, despite their disparities, the four publications employed similar strategies when addressing young readers, directing them to a desired worldview and mobilizing them to social activity. The readers’ letters in these magazines reveal the experience of learning, reading, and speaking the renewed language in the context of family life, social pressure, and gender dynamics. They provide essential information about methods, habits, and patterns of using Hebrew inside and outside the classroom. In addition, the letters shed light on the interaction between children and adults—parents, teachers, and newspaper editors—against the backdrop of the vibrant ideological discourse of the era. On balance, the current research offers a contribution to the study of revitalized Hebrew culture as well as the social history of modern European Jewry.