The Perlis Family

Understanding Perlis means first understanding the given name Perl. In Yiddish anthroponymy, Perl figures among the "secular" feminine given names — that is, non-biblical — borrowed from ornamental and natural vocabulary like Gitl ("good"), Freyde ("joy"), Sheyne ("beautiful") or Blume ("flower"). These given names, often coupled with a Hebrew synagogue name, belonged to the domestic and feminine culture of the Ashkenazi world, where Yiddish was the language of the home, the marketplace, and women's daily piety [Baumgarten, 2002]. The "pearl" — a precious object, pure, patiently formed — was an affectionate metaphor for the worth of a daughter in the eyes of her kin.

The ending -is/-es is a possessive genitive: Perlis means "[the child] of Perl," exactly as Rivkes designates the child of Rivke (Rebecca), Malkes that of Malke, or Dvoyres that of Dvoyre (Deborah). This mode of matronymic formation is one of the best documented in Eastern Jewish onomastics. It crystallized during the campaigns of compulsory family name attribution conducted by the Austro-Hungarian — Galicia was annexed by Austria in 1772 — and Russian empires, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many families, called upon to choose a patronym, then adopted as a fixed name what was already a surname in use: the given name of a respected ancestress [Baumgarten, 2002].

From this matrix is born a first virtue, discreet but profound, which the Jewish tradition calls the kavod owed to parents and respect for lineage: in bearing the name of a mother or grandmother, the Perlis inscribed in their very identity the recognition of a feminine figure — a way of rendering present, generation after generation, she who gave and transmitted. The name becomes monument.

The reference notice anchors the Perlis in Galicia and Central Europe. This province, divided between present-day southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, was one of the great centers of Ashkenazi Jewish life: cities of Lemberg (Lwów/Lviv), Kraków, Brody, Tarnopol, and a constellation of shtetlekh where Yiddish reigned. There, in this dense network of communities, the given name Perl and the surnames derived from it were most frequent [Katz, 2004].

Nineteenth-century Galicia was also the laboratory of tensions and renewals that marked all Eastern Judaism: the rise of Hasidism and its fervent piety, the resistance of the mitnagdim attached to rigorous study, the breakthrough of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — which advocated openness to secular knowledge. A Galician family bearing a name as rooted in the vernacular language as Perlis found itself at the heart of these currents. Yiddish was not merely the idiom of daily life: it became, in the second half of the century, the vehicle for literature, press, and theater in full ferment, the instrument of a genuine cultural renaissance [Bechtel, 2002].

It is in this soil that one reads a collective virtue to which Galician families took their part: attachment to study and the transmission of knowledge, talmud Torah as an obligation of the entire community. Whether knowledge was talmudic in the yeshiva or, later, literary and journalistic in the language of the people, it remained the cornerstone of a world that understood itself as the "People of the Book" [Katz, 2004]. The silences of the archive, here, are real: we do not possess a continuous register of names of "the" Perlis family, and honesty demands that we speak of a milieu rather than a lineage documented act by act.

If the name Perlis is a Yiddish object, the lineage that bears it inherits thereby the adventure of that language itself. Long scorned as a "jargon" against sacred Hebrew, Yiddish was, from the Rhineland Middle Ages to the plains of the East, the living language of millions of Jews, that of prayers murmured by women, of tales, songs, and transactions [Katz, 2004]. Jean Baumgarten retraced its destiny as a "wandering" idiom, born of contact between Middle High German, Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavic languages — a linguistic mirror of the diaspora condition itself [Baumgarten, 2002].

At the turn of the twentieth century, this long-domestic language attained literary dignity. What Delphine Bechtel named the Jewish cultural renaissance in Central and Eastern Europe, between 1897 and 1930, made Yiddish the vehicle of a national and cultural construction: newspapers, journals, novels, poetry, theatre [Bechtel, 2002]. Mikhail Krutikov showed how Yiddish fiction of the years 1905–1914 confronted the crisis of modernity — rural exodus, urbanization, massive emigration to America — by giving voice to the uprooted [Krutikov, 2001]. Naomi Seidman analyzed the "sexual politics" that opposed and linked Hebrew, the masculine language of the sacred, to Yiddish, associated with the feminine and the home [Seidman, 1997] — a polarity that the matronymic name Perlis sums up in itself.

The virtue here is that of implication in collective life and of contribution to Jewish thought: in cultivating their language rather than denying it, the bearers of this culture affirmed the dignity of ordinary people, an assumed form of humility that refused to measure the worth of an existence by the sole measure of scholarly prestige.

Among the domains where the name Perlis emerges in cultural documentation figures Yiddish theatre, the total art of the modern Ashkenazi world. Born officially in 1876 with Abraham Goldfaden in Romania, this theatre became within a few decades a transnational phenomenon, carried by itinerant troupes that linked Odessa, Warsaw, Vilna, Bucharest, London and New York [Sandrow, 1996]. Nahma Sandrow wrote its world history under the eloquent title of "wandering stars," and Debra Caplan showed how the famous Vilna Troupe erected itinerancy itself into an artistic principle, making Jewish theatre an "empire" without territory [Caplan, 2018].

This nascent theatre was at first contested and fragile: Alyssa Quint described the troubled beginnings of modern Yiddish drama, torn between popular entertainment and literary ambition [Quint, 2019], while Jeffrey Veidlinger traced how, at the other end of the century, the Jewish State Theatre of Moscow brought this art to the Soviet stage before repression stifled it [Veidlinger, 2000]. In this universe of comedians, playwrights and singers circulating from city to city, artists bearing the name Perlis — or its close variants — are attested in the milieu of Yiddish theatre and culture in Eastern Europe and the diaspora, according to the repertories of this theatre. Caution is warranted: lacking access here to a verified biographical notice by name, it is fitting to attach the name to this documented milieu rather than to assert a precise individual path.

The virtue that is expressed there is that of care for the other through art: Yiddish theatre was an instrument of collective consolation, a way of holding up to the people a mirror of their joys and sorrows. David Roskies showed how much Yiddish narrative art — from the Hasidic tale to the modern short story — aimed to repair, by the "bridge of desire," a world in the process of disappearing [Roskies, 1995].

No chapter is better suited to a matronymic name than one devoted to the voice of Jewish women. Kathryn Hellerstein devoted a major work to Yiddish-language poets over nearly four centuries, from 1586 to 1987: she demonstrates how women, long excluded from the sacred study reserved for men, made Yiddish their language of creation and forged their own poetic tradition [Hellerstein, 2014]. The name Perl, from which our surname derives, belongs precisely to this feminine universe of the vernacular language.

Here tradition and archive answer each other. Memory held that woman was guardian of the hearth and domestic piety — reciting the tkhines, these feminine Yiddish prayers, conducting trade, transmitting tales. The literary archive of the twentieth century confirms and extends this place by revealing creators in their own right [Hellerstein, 2014]. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, studying the Yiddish and Ladino press of the Russian and Ottoman empires, further demonstrated how printed modernity progressively integrated a female readership and female voices [Stein, 2004]. The name Perlis thus becomes emblematic: it bears inscribed, in its very grammar, the acknowledgment of an ancestress and, beyond that, of all the anonymous Perls who kept the households of Israel upright.

The virtue honored here is twofold: the kindness and daily care traditionally attributed to mothers, and justice belatedly rendered to their creativity by scholarship. In lending her name to her descendants, a woman named Perle accomplished, without knowing it, an act of Memory that Jewish tradition places highest — for "the memory of the righteous is a blessing."

The fate of the Perlis, like that of all Galician and East European Jewry, was sealed by the great convulsions of the twentieth century. The great transatlantic emigration, between 1881 and 1914, scattered hundreds of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, England, Argentina, and Palestine. Those bearing the name Perlis, like so many others, crossed the ocean, often carrying as their only baggage their language and their trades. Yiddish theatre and press followed these migratory routes, making New York, London, and Buenos Aires new capitals of Ashkenazi culture [Sandrow, 1996] [Stein, 2004].

Then came catastrophe. Galicia, the heart of the world that had given birth to the name, was at the center of the destruction of European Jewry. The communities of Lemberg, Brody, the countless shtetlekh where Perl and Perlis resonated were annihilated. With them disappeared an immense part of the Yiddish-speaking world — this "unfinished history" of Yiddish that Dovid Katz evokes with gravity, a language cast into fire but not reduced to silence [Katz, 2004]. The survivors bearing this name transmitted it to Israel, North America, France, Australia, making Perlis one of those surnames which, scattered to the four corners of the reconstructed diaspora, attest to a continuity beyond erasure.

The virtue here is not triumphal: it is that of fidelity and relationship to the other, tested in exile. To continue bearing, on a new land, a name of "pearl" forged in a threatened Yiddish, is to refuse oblivion — to accomplish what the tradition names zakhor, "remember," the cardinal commandment of Judaism.

The name Perlis is a pearl with a double radiance. An object of Yiddish language, it condenses in three syllables an entire civilization: the Galicia of its origins, the feminine hearth of its matronymic formation, the cultural renaissance that raised Yiddish to the dignity of a literary language, and finally the worldwide dispersion after the catastrophe. Where the nominative archive falls short — and honesty requires us to say so — it is the milieu that speaks: that of a family inscribed in the Ashkenazi world of speech, commerce and the stage.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried, the one that this lineage will have, above all, best expressed is the recognition of woman and the memory of the mother. A matronymic surname is not a linguistic curiosity: it is an act of kavod, a tribute rendered, generation after generation, to an ancestress whose given name was deemed precious enough to become that of all her descendants. In this, the Perlis embody a discrete justice — one that makes visible what official history has too often kept silent: the central place of women in the economic and spiritual survival of Jewish communities [Baumgarten, 2002] [Hellerstein, 2014]. Bearing the name of a "pearl," they remind us that the value of a people is measured also by what it patiently, silently, forms and preserves — and that remembering, zakhor, remains the first of all loyalties.