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JEWISH BOOK ANNUAL
of contemporary taste.”6 Its value as source information on in
stitutions, personalities, and statistics for Jewish communities
in distant lands cannot be over-estimated as is readily apparent
from the following examples collected by many of our research
libraries:
Sovetish; literarisher almanakh
(Moscow, 1934-41), an en
during source of Soviet Yiddish literary criticism at the height
of the Stalinist terror;
Almanac-Shanghai
(Shanghai, 1946), in
both English and German and highly fascinating for its portrait
of crowded conditions in the Jewish refugee community in post
war Shanghai;
Almanaque cultural peruano
(Lima, 1948), edited
by the “Colectividad Israelita del Peru”;
Annuaire des Juifs
d’Egypte et du Proche-Orient
(Cairo, 1942), issued by the Societe
des Editions Historiques Juives d ’Egypte;
Jahrbuch der Jiidischen
Wochenschau
(Buenos Aires, 1942-44), a now brittle resource on
newsprint and valuable as a record of the German-speaking
Jewish community in Argentina;
Literaturnyi almanakh
(Jerusa
lem, 1976), a literary almanac in Russian containing prose and
poetry by Soviet Jewish writers newly arrived in Israel; and most
recently, the Polish-language almanac compiled by the Religious
Union of the Mosaic Creed, the
Kalendarz zydowski,
indicative
of efforts by professing Jews to maintain a precarious existence
in a communist country.
Although fewer almanacs in Israel and the diaspora are pub
lished today, the appearance of
The Jewish Almanac,
compiled
and edited by Richard Siegel and Carl Rheins (New York, 1980)
and Ivan Tillem’s
Jewish Directory and Almanac
(New York
1984-current) suggests that a very special ecological niche exists
for these hardy “perennials” in the world of Jewish publishing.
6. Ruth R. Wisse, “Judaism for the Mass Market,”
Commentary
71 (January
1981), p. 41.