Sholem Aleichem provided an incisive analysis of the role of Yiddish among Kiev's Jews in a 1910 feuilleton in the short-lived Kiever vort (this piece was sent from abroad, as the Yiddish writer had left Kiev after the 1905 pogrom).85 Asking, "Who needs a Yiddish newspaper?" he enumerated the city's Jewish groups and their attitude toward the language. The wealthy elite looked down on Yiddish as something shameful and uncultured; it might be good for a joke or a song, but nothing more. The brokers at the exchange had no use for Yiddish, since during the day they spoke in the rarified dialect particular to the exchange, a Russian of economic and commercial terms (vyvoz [export], obmen [exchange], perechislennyi [transferred]) while at night they spoke "French"—at the card tables, playing Macao, Diabolique, Bezique, and Ecarte. The "simple Jews" in Podol and Demievka loved the Yiddish word, continued Sholem Aleichem (perhaps playing on the name of the newspaper for which he was writing), "but we ask ourselves: how have they gotten along without a Yiddish word till now?" The upshot was that even the masses, who still used and loved Yiddish, were unwilling to actively support it and its expression. Even among those who spoke it, much less among those who did not, Yiddish was an orphan language in Kiev.
To survive, a Yiddish newspaper needed a willing audience, but it also needed cooperative authorities, who were increasingly rare in the last decade of the empire. Only a few would-be publishers were granted permission to print newspapers, and none of the publications that saw the light of day lasted for more than a few months. Dos folk (The People), a radical, antiestablishment daily, emerged out of the ferment of 1905 and lasted through 1906, but folded early the next year. In 1910, Kiever vort, also a daily, lasted all of eleven issues over thirteen days.86 Were these short-lived newspapers closed down by the authorities? Were their publishers expelled from Kiev, or did they simply run out of money? The answers are unclear, though the fact that Kiever vort was fined 150 rubles for some offense—a detail found in the records of the Kiev Committee for Publications, a government body—suggests that all of these could have been the case.87 an idiosyncratic publication with a territorialist slant, Yudishe naye leben (New Jewish Life), lasted somewhat longer (1912 to 1914, irregularly), perhaps because it was a monthly.88 applications for proposed newspapers called Folks-shtime (People's voice; 1907) and Kiever tagblat (Kiev Daily Paper; 1909) were never approved.89 an unsolved mystery is a Hebrew organ with the title Ha-tsofe u-mabit (The Observer and Watcher), whose publisher, D. A. Fridman, submitted an apparently unsuccessful petition for permission to publish in 1906 and had better luck on his second try in 1912, when he shortened the title to Ha-tsofe. It was still being published in 1913, but almost no information on the newspaper has survived—nor, seemingly, have any copies of the paper itself.90 The fact that it was so difficult to publish a Jewish newspaper in Kiev must have been a serious hindrance to the development of Jewish civil society in the city; other than learning through word of mouth and rumors, the only ways for Jews to learn about the goings-on in their own Jewish community was from national Jewish newspapers published in St. Petersburg such as Ha-melits or Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda, or from local newspapers—which often took their irregular reports on Jewish Kiev from Russian Jewish organs like Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda!91 If one of the fundaments of civil society is a free and thriving press, then Kiev Jewry did not pass the test; building a separate Jewish public sphere would be nigh on impossible without a Jewish press.92 As a Jewish political activist wrote in a letter intercepted by the secret police, "Without a newspaper, without a language (iazyk) as it were, we can do too little."93 Perhaps Kiev was also an inhospitable place for the written word: in 1890, it had only 38 bookstores compared to Moscow's 205, Warsaw's 137, and Odessa's 68. Even Saratov had more bookshops (42) than Kiev!94
World History
