The Kliger Family

The surname Kliger is, according to lexicographical sources, a Jewish Ashkenazi family name whose language of origin is Yiddish [Q4223527 — Wikidata]. The major reference works in this field — Alexander Beider's dictionaries devoted to Jewish surnames of the Russian Empire (2008), the Kingdom of Poland (1996) and Galicia (2004), as well as Lars Menk's dictionary of Judeo-German names (2005) — constitute an indispensable tool for situating such a name within the typology of Jewish surnames of Eastern Europe [Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe, Beider; Menk].

From an etymological standpoint, Kliger is likely related to the Yiddish adjective klug, itself derived from Middle High German kluoc, meaning "wise," "clever," "intelligent." This lineage illustrates a fundamental trait of Yiddish: its structural Germanic component, upon which Hebrew and Slavic contributions were grafted. Yiddish, indeed, arises from the encounter between Jewish communities and the medieval Germanic world, then moves eastward, into Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, absorbing Slavic elements along the way. A name forged from a Germanic root preserved in Eastern Yiddish thus testifies to this long linguistic journey.

The form Kliger falls within a well-attested category among Jewish surnames: that of names derived from epithets or qualities, as opposed to patronymic names (formed from a given name), toponymic names (formed from a place) or occupational names. Names drawn from an eulogistic adjective — perhaps originally designating a man reputed for his learning or acuteness of mind — are inscribed in a tradition where intellectual value holds a central place. Caution must nevertheless be exercised: without a precise vital record attached to the first person to bear this name, the exact origin remains a lexicographical reconstruction rather than a biographical certainty.

The widespread adoption of hereditary surnames by Jews of Eastern Europe is moreover a relatively late phenomenon and largely imposed by imperial administrations: Austria as early as the late eighteenth century, Russia and Prussia at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is within this bureaucratic framework that names such as Kliger were fixed, sometimes chosen, sometimes assigned. The name thus becomes an administrative category as much as a transmitted identity — a point on which Beider's dictionaries shed decisive light [Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe, Beider; Menk].

What the history of the lineage subsequently reveals — a poet, a translator, a researcher — may not be unrelated to the connotation sedimented in the name itself. Klugshaft, cultivated wisdom, is not merely an etymology: it is, among the Kliger family members whom we are able to document, a vocation genuinely lived.

To situate the Kliger lineage, one must describe its ecosystem: the Ashkenazi world of Central and Eastern Europe. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, this world organized itself around communities — the kehillot — distributed across cities and towns, these shtetlekh whose Yiddish culture became an emblematic place. Yiddish was the everyday vernacular language there, Hebrew remaining the sacred language of prayer and study.

This division of roles between the two languages structured Jewish life profoundly. Naomi Seidman showed how Hebrew and Yiddish maintained a complex relationship, almost conjugal, one associated with the sacred and authority, the other with domestic life, orality and the everyday [Seidman, 1997]. For a family like the Kligers, whose very name is Yiddish, this duality is not abstract: it sketches the cultural horizon within which generations succeeded one another, between the beth midrash where one studied in Hebrew and the home where one spoke Yiddish.

Geographically, bearers of the name Kliger were probably found in the regions covered by Beider's dictionaries — the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia — as well as in the Judeo-German area studied by Menk [Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe, Beider; Menk]. These spaces corresponded to the famous "Pale of Settlement" that the Russian Empire assigned to its Jewish subjects, and to the neighboring Polish-Lithuanian and Hapsburg territories. Jewish demographic concentration there was considerable, and the density of communities fostered a cultural life of remarkable intensity. It was precisely in this basin of life that the network of landsmanshaftn — these associations of compatriots from the same town — constituted one of the most enduring forms of Jewish solidarity, a reality that Hannah Kliger was one day, from New York, to examine with the rigor of a scholar and the faithfulness of a witness [Zakhor Corpus id:6acdad90-c3c2-46b8-ba9a-b4636d28481a].

It is within this framework that there developed, from the nineteenth century onward, a Yiddish-language press that would play a decisive role in the modernization of Jewish populations. Sarah Abrevaya Stein analyzed how the Yiddish press — like the Ladino press in the Ottoman Empire — contributed to "making Jews modern," by disseminating information, debate and new forms of sociability [Stein, 2004]. A family established in an urban center of the Pale of Settlement would have been immersed in an environment of newspapers, serials and polemics in Yiddish. Abe Kliger, as will be seen, was himself to become one of the architects of this press, but under different skies — in Buenos Aires first, then in New York.

The name Kliger, attached to the idea of wisdom and intelligence, resonates with a salient trait of the culture that gave it birth: the valorization of knowledge and intellect. This resonance stems from the intersection between Memory — the connotation carried by the name — and documented cultural History of the Yiddish world. It must be treated as an illuminating coincidence, not as genealogical proof; but the figures we can now name give it new density.

Modern Yiddish literature, which flourishes at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, places precisely intellect, irony, and acuteness of observation at the heart of its project. The three founding classics — Mendele Moïkher Sforim (Abramovitsh), Cholem Aleichem, and Y. L. Peretz — shaped a prose in which humor and critical intelligence became instruments for exploring the Jewish condition [Frieden, 1995]. Mikhail Krutikov showed how this Yiddish fiction confronted the crisis of modernity in the years preceding the First World War, giving voice to the tensions of a society in rapid mutation [Krutikov, 2001].

This ferment was not merely literary. Delphine Bechtel described a true "Jewish cultural renaissance" in Central and Eastern Europe between 1897 and 1930, where language and literature became vectors of national and identity construction [Bechtel, 2002]. Yiddish, long disparaged, was then reclaimed as a language of culture in its own right. Within this movement, the ideal of klugshaft — wisdom, cultivated intelligence — found collective expression.

Poetry offers particularly rich testimony to this, including from the side of women, whose voice had long been marginalized. Kathryn Hellerstein traced a long tradition of Yiddish poetesses from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, demonstrating that creation in this language was never the sole preserve of men [Hellerstein, 2014]. In this living poetic universe, Abe (Aba) Kliger emerges as a leading figure: his collection Di legende fun di Andn, lider ("The Legend of the Andes, poems"), published in Buenos Aires in 1919, made him one of the pioneers of Yiddish poetry on Argentine soil. This gesture — holding the language of Eastern Europe against the Andes, naming the landscapes of South America in the language of the shtetlekh — strikingly embodies this capacity of Yiddish to renew itself wherever a bearer brings it his voice.

Among the documented figures of the lineage, Abe (Aba) Kliger occupies an exceptional place. The Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur — the reference encyclopedia of modern Yiddish literature — designates him as one of the pioneers of Yiddish poetry and printed speech in Argentina [Yiddish Leksikon, yleksikon.blogspot.com]. This is a title that literary history does not dispute.

He made his first attempts in the pages of the weekly newspaper Der fertheydiger ("The Defender"), first in the small town of Carlos-Casares, in the Buenos Aires pampa, then in Buenos Aires itself. This biographical detail deserves our attention: Carlos-Casares, founded notably by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived under the auspices of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) from the 1890s onward, is one of those agricultural colonies where the Yiddish language took root far from its urban origins. That a young poet made his debut there says something about the real geography of the Ashkenazi diaspora in South America: it does not come down to Buenos Aires alone, it also radiates outward into the interior lands, into the villages of the pampa where Galician and Russian Jews exchanged the shtetl for the grassy steppe.

In Buenos Aires, Abe Kliger quickly integrated into the network of the Yiddish press, then in full ferment. He collaborated with Di shtrahlen ("The Rays"), with the daily Der tog ("The Day", 1914–1916), and became one of the founders of Di idishe tsaytung ("The Jewish Newspaper"). He also wrote in Di prese ("The Press"), in the weekly Der avangard ("The Avant-Garde", 1915), in Di gezelshaft ("The Society", 1917) and in Di naye tsayt ("The New Times", 1918) [Yiddish Leksikon]. This multiplication of collaborations draws the portrait of a man fully engaged in the collective life of his community, connecting through his pen readers scattered between the pampa and the capital. Involvement in collective life — this cardinal value of the Jewish tradition, which sees engagement within the klal, the community, as both a duty and a grace — here takes the concrete form of journalism and the founding of a press in the vernacular language.

In 1919, an annus mirabilis for his bibliography, Abe Kliger publishes two collections simultaneously: Di legende fun di Andn, lider (twenty-eight pages) and Lider (thirty-four pages), both in Buenos Aires. That same year the collective anthology Af di bregen fun plata ("On the Banks of the Plata") appears, in which his poems stand alongside other voices of South American Yiddish poetry. This convergence of publications in 1919 marks a founding moment: for the first time, the southern American subcontinent endows itself with a visible, organized, claimed Yiddish literature. Kliger is one of its essential architects.

In 1920, he leaves Argentina for the United States, reaching Colorado first before settling permanently in New York in 1921 [Yiddish Leksikon]. This displacement does not tear him away from Yiddish intellectual life: he continues to publish in major American journals — Oyfsnay ("Anew"), Hamer ("The Hammer"), Di feder ("The Pen"), Tsukunft ("The Future"). His poems are also gathered in the anthology by Nakhmen Mayzil, Amerike in yidishn vort ("America in Yiddish Word", New York, 1955) [Yiddish Leksikon], which consecrates his place in the collective memory of American Yiddish literature.

But it is perhaps in his translations that the work of Abe Kliger most clearly reveals its singularity. In 1955, in New York, he publishes Dos getlekhe lid Bhagavad-Gita, poemen fun dveykes ("The Divine Poem of the Bhagavad-Gita, Poems of Mystical Ecstasy"), a volume of one hundred ninety-six pages. Three years later, in 1958, he brings out Der veg tsu layterung, budha lernt ("The Path to Purification, Buddha Teaches"), of two hundred eight pages. These two translations were hailed by Yiddish criticism of the time [Yiddish Leksikon].

One must measure what this double gesture represents. To translate the Bhagavad-Gita and the teachings of the Buddha into Yiddish is to inscribe the Ashkenazi language in universal dialogue with the great wisdoms of humanity. This is neither naive syncretism nor a dilution of Jewish identity: it is, on the contrary, an affirmation that Yiddish is a language capable of receiving all the thought of the world, that the Jew emigrating to the banks of the Plata or to New York does not abandon his intellectual curiosity, his thirst to understand the Other in its depth. The relationship to the foreign — to the radical alterity of Eastern wisdoms — manifests itself here not through mistrust or indifference, but through an effort of translation in the most noble sense: to pass into the language of home what comes from the farthest reaches. This openness to the universal, practiced in and through Yiddish, illustrates what the Jewish tradition has sometimes been able to accomplish at its most generous: to be the intermediary between cultures, the translator of humanity to itself.

If there is one domain where Yiddish culture carried its influence far, it is the theater. Born in the nineteenth century, modern Yiddish theater is associated with the figure of Abraham Goldfaden, whose foundational work Alyssa Quint studied [Quint, 2019]. From its beginnings in the cafés and taverns of the Pale of Settlement, this art became a considerable popular phenomenon, then an institution.

Nahma Sandrow embraced this world history in all its scope, showing how Yiddish theater, departing from Eastern Europe, spread to New York, London, Buenos Aires and beyond, following the very routes of Jewish emigration [Sandrow, 1996]. This itinerant dimension is at the heart of Debra Caplan's work on the famous Vilna Troupe, which made mobility and wandering a true art, transforming the constraint of exile into an aesthetic and economic strategy [Caplan, 2018].

This history illuminates the diasporic destiny of Jewish families from Eastern Europe, including the Kliger. The same roads that led theater troupes from one city to another, then from one continent to another, were traveled by emigrants fleeing misery and persecutions. Yiddish theater, through its capacity to reconstitute itself wherever an audience could be found, offers a powerful metaphor for the cultural resilience of a scattered people [Caplan, 2018]. Abe Kliger, in founding and sustaining a Yiddish press in Buenos Aires before settling in New York, participates in this same movement: reconstituting, everywhere, the conditions for a cultural life in the Yiddish language.

Buenos Aires deserves particular attention in this regard. The city on the Río de la Plata is, in the first half of the twentieth century, one of the great world centers of Yiddish. The Ashkenazi Jewish community there is one of the most important outside Europe and the United States. Newspapers, theaters, libraries, schools in Yiddish flourished there. Abe Kliger, in his Argentine years, knew or preceded other bearers of the same surname who marked this scene: Kehos Kliger, born in Ludmir in the Volhynia region (Russian Empire, 1904), arrived in Buenos Aires in 1936 and died in that same city in 1985, is the author of eleven volumes of poems and a translation of Martín Fierro into Yiddish [De Gruyter/Latin American Jewish Studies]. That two Kligers at different times nourished the literary life of Yiddish Buenos Aires with their pens is a documented fact that goes beyond simple surname coincidence; it says something about the density of a community where literary vocations could be transmitted or intersect.

The adventure continued even under regimes hostile to religion. Jeffrey Veidlinger documented the existence of the Jewish State Theater of Moscow (GOSET), where Yiddish culture found, for a time, an official place on the Soviet stage, before being stifled by Stalinist repression [Veidlinger, 2000]. For Jewish families remaining in the Soviet Union, some of whom could bear the name Kliger, this theater represented a last institutional hearth of a language and culture soon to be threatened.

The twentieth century shattered the world in which the name Kliger had taken root. Three forces, principally, scattered and decimated Ashkenazi communities: massive emigration westward from the 1880s onward, revolutionary violence and sovietization, and finally the annihilation of the Shoah. Each marked the destiny of those bearing this surname.

Emigration, first, led hundreds of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, Western Europe, Latin America, and Palestine. Names forged in the Pale of Settlement or in Galicia thus crossed the oceans, sometimes preserved intact, sometimes altered by the transcriptions of immigration services. A name like Kliger, simple and legible, could traverse these transformations without undergoing major mutation, which today facilitates its identification in diasporic sources. This passage to South America is documented in vivid fashion by the trajectories of Abe Kliger and Kehos Kliger: both left Europe — one around 1913 or 1914 to judge by his early collaborations with the Argentine press, the other in 1936 fleeing perhaps the rising perils — to lend their voices to the Yiddish of Buenos Aires.

The Russian Revolution and the advent of the Soviet regime then radically transformed Jewish life. If Yiddish culture initially experienced official promotion — as evidenced by the GOSET studied by Veidlinger [Veidlinger, 2000] — it was progressively stifled, then violently repressed, particularly during the purges targeting Jewish intellectuals in the final years of Stalinism [Veidlinger, 2000]. Families remaining in the USSR experienced the progressive erasure of their language and, often, of their communal memory.

The Shoah, finally, annihilated the majority of communities where the name Kliger had been able to flourish. The centers of Eastern European Yiddish life were destroyed, and with them countless families. Dovid Katz has evoked the unfinished history of Yiddish, language of a world largely disappeared but whose heritage continues to live in the diasporas and in scholarship [Katz, 2004]. Survivors reconstituted, in Israel, North America, France and elsewhere, fragments of this world — and it is in these new homes that the Kliger lineage, like so many others, continued its existence.

In this context of ruptures and reconfigurations, the transmission of communal memory takes on crucial importance. It is precisely to this task that Hannah Kliger dedicates herself, whose scholarly work will be examined in the following chapter.

If Abe (Aba) Kliger embodies the creative vocation of the lineage — the poet who forges language in foreign lands — Hannah Kliger represents its memorial and scientific vocation: that of understanding and preserving the collective forms through which immigrant Jews survived uprooting.

Associate Professor of Communication Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hannah Kliger has published work on the communication of ethnic identity in immigrant communities [Barnes & Noble, Indiana University Press]. Her masterwork is titled Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York: The WPA Yiddish Writers' Group Study, published by Indiana University Press in 1992 in the series « The Modern Jewish Experience » [Zakhor Corpus id:6acdad90-c3c2-46b8-ba9a-b4636d28481a ; Indiana University Press]. This book is an annotated English edition of a study originally written in Yiddish by the Yiddish Writers' Group of the Federal Writers' Project (WPA program), published in 1938–1939 under the titles Di yidishe landsmanshaftn fun nyu york and Yidishe familyes un familye krayzn fun nyu york [Oxford Academic/Studies in Contemporary Jewry]. A third volume in English had been prepared by the original group, but remained manuscript and unpublished; Hannah Kliger made the entire corpus accessible.

The landsmanshaftn — those associations of compatriots from the same town or city of Eastern Europe — are the subject of this study. For Jewish immigrants who arrived in numbers in New York from the 1880s onward, they constituted the first network of solidarity in a foreign country. People would gather among those from Bialystok, Minsk, Warsaw, or Kraków; they pooled resources for the sick and unemployed, organized burials according to rites, maintained an affective bond with their city of origin. The WPA study, as Hannah Kliger presents and annotates it, examines their structure — their constitutions, their memorial journals, their social roles — their roots in the East European context, and their evolution across three generations of American Jews [Indiana University Press].

The Journal of American Ethnic History hailed in this work an « important service rendered to historians »; the American Jewish Archives saw in it « a precious primary source for the study of immigrant Judaism » and a demonstration of « the resilience and adaptability of ethnic institutions as mechanisms of adaptation and Jewish survival » [Amazon.com]. These formulations deserve to be weighed carefully. What Hannah Kliger brings to light, through this study, is one of the most discrete and most fundamental expressions of a Jewish value: involvement in collective life, a sense of klal Israel, each person's responsibility toward all. The landsmanshaftn are not mere nostalgic clubs; they are institutions of charity, of care given to the other, of maintaining bonds between generations. In studying them, Hannah Kliger honors what these men and women had built in the shadows, without pretension to history.

There is in this approach something that resembles a distinctly Jewish virtue: the humility of one who does not seek to glorify great names but to make heard the voice of the voiceless, of ordinary immigrants who organized their survival in the basements and meeting halls of Manhattan. Hannah Kliger's gaze upon the landsmanshaftn is also, in this sense, a gaze upon the world from which the Kliger lineage itself emerged: that of these displaced East European communities, which reconstituted everywhere they went the forms of their ancient solidarity.

The dimension of continuity between generations — a central theme of the study, which examines mutations across three generations — resonates particularly when read in light of Abe Kliger's trajectory. Both the poet and the researcher confronted the same fundamental question: what survives, how does it survive, of what one brings across the ocean? One answers through poetry, the other through analysis; both answer in Yiddish, or about Yiddish.

At the end of this enriched journey, the name Kliger is no longer simply the thread running through a collective cultural history: it is also the name of identifiable women and men whose works have left verifiable traces in the world's Yiddish heritage. A surname likely derived from the adjective klug — "wise," "prudent" — attributed by reference sources to the onomastics of Eastern European Jewry [Q4223527 — Wikidata; Dictionaries of East European Jewish Surnames, Beider; Menk], this name carried, over the course of the twentieth century, lives remarkably consistent with what it signifies.

Abe (Aba) Kliger, pioneer of Yiddish poetry in Argentina from 1919 onwards, then translator of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and the Buddha into Yiddish from New York [Zakhor Corpus id:b258b946-7386-4bc4-b1fc-08f1abf6dcf6 ; id:6249bed4-9f53-49ed-91d2-be26244e6b5d] ; Hannah Kliger, researcher who exhumed and made accessible the memory of Jewish associations in New York [Zakhor Corpus id:6acdad90-c3c2-46b8-ba9a-b4636d28481a] ; Kehos Kliger, poet of Volhynia who became the voice of Buenos Aires for half a century — these figures constitute, together, a striking illustration of what Ashkenazi dispersion produced at its best: men and women who transformed exile into creation, loss into memory, otherness into dialogue.

The value that this lineage will have, above all, best expressed is that of knowledge placed at the service of transmission. Not knowledge as accumulation or as social distinction, but knowledge as an act of fidelity: fidelity to a threatened language, to fragile communal forms, to the thought of the Other that one translates in order to offer it to one's own community. Abe Kliger translating the divine poem of India into Yiddish, Hannah Kliger restoring to historians the speech of ordinary immigrants of New York, Kehos Kliger bringing the voice of the Argentine gaucho into the language of the shtetl — all three accomplished the same fundamental gesture: ensuring the circulation of thought and human experience across the boundaries of language, culture, and time.

As Dovid Katz has reminded us, the history of Yiddish remains unfinished [Katz, 2004]. The name Kliger, through its persistence across continents and generations, is one of its living witnesses: it continues to transmit, to those who know how to read it, the memory of a people, a language, and an ideal that the Ashkenazi world forged on both sides of the Atlantic. What the Jewish tradition calls talmud Torah — study as sacred duty — has been embodied here not only in books of law, but in collections of poems, anthologies of Oriental wisdom, and annotated archives of immigrant associations. It is this form of knowledge, open, itinerant, turned toward the other as much as toward itself, that the Kliger lineage will have borne with remarkable constancy.