Beschreibung
In Yiddish. 1,4359 pages: (V. 1: 13p, columns 11-1000 (2 columns per page). V.2: 16p, columns 17-880. 25 x 17 cm. Very heavy (c. 9 pounds) so shipping outside the U.S. would be costly. Minor water damage at bottom margin of volume 2, see image here. Volume 1 is rebound. Volume 2 rebacked spine. Goldblatt. His father Ruvn died when he was a few months old. His mother Khane-Nekhame descended from a Hassidic line (the name Dovid came from the rebbe of Shidlovits [Szyd?owiec], R. Dovidl). He was raised under the supervision of R. Shmuel Mohilever, who was then the rabbi of Radom. As he grew up, he worked in various trades and devoted his evenings to studying. He lived for a time in Warsaw, later in Berlin and in London where, while studying at the British Museum, he came to know Pyotr Kropotkin, William Morris, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Eleanor Marx (Aveling), and other well-known revolutionaries. He would come to the Berner Street Club [International Working Men?s Educational Club] where he was inspired by Morris Wintchevsky. His first publication appeared in Arbayter fraynd (Worker?s friend) in London. In 1898 he left English for South Africa where he arrived in Cape Town just after General Jameson?s ambush at Johannesburg (early in the Boer War). In Cape Town he met the first pioneer of Yiddish printing and newspapers in South Africa, Nehemia Dov Hoffmann, who was publishing the Yiddish weekly Haor (The light) there and who also lured him to the newspaper. Goldblat did not work with Hoffmann for long, and in 1899, between October 16 and December 13, he himself brought out forty issues of Dos krigs shtafet (The war?s herald), the first Yiddish-language daily newspaper in South Africa. It was a small paper that only handled news of the war. He later jointly published with Hoffmann the weekly Der telegraf. Between 1903 and 1906, together with the well-known Cape Town community leader and member of Parliament, the lawyer Morris Alexander, he led a campaign for public recognition of Yiddish as a European language. According to the South African immigration law of 1902, each immigrant when coming to the country (in the provinces of Cape Colony and Natal) had to sit for an examination in a European language; Goldblatt fought to have Yiddish accepted as European, and thus Jewish immigrants would be able to enter the country. He succeeded in influencing the deputies to rule in parliament in 1906 that Yiddish was a European language, an intellectual language, and the language of the Jewish people. He described this battle and victory in the weekly Der yidisher advokat (The Jewish lawyer), which he had been publishing in Cape Town from 1904 until 1914. For his newspaper he brought the first linotype to South Africa from afar and taught a Gentile typesetter to operate the machine. Goldblatt explained in his autobiography that he had affiliated his newspaper with the Bund in Geneva, and that through the newspaper he ran propaganda and collected money for the Bund. For a long period of time, he also worked with the Cape Town English-language newspaper Cape Argus and took an active role in the political life of the country. In 1914 Goldblatt left South Africa with the aim of coming to the United States to realize his lifelong interest of thirty years: publishing an encyclopedia in Yiddish. After having lived in Cape Town, he had already published the first 12 sections of the projected encyclopedia, and on the way to America he stopped off in England and in other Western European countries, where he carried out public relations for the encyclopedia and received the assent of Chief British rabbi, Dr. Hertz, Dr. Moses Gaster, Dr. Ludwig Geiger, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Israel Zangwill, etc. . . . Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 013864
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