Forty Years In America (ePub)

Forty Years in America

Memoirs of a Jewish Educator

by Zevi Scharfstein

Professor, Teachers Institute, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Translated from Hebrew and edited by Daniel M. Chernoff

Zevi Scharfstein was born in 1884 in a small town in what is now Ukraine but was then the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia. Growing up in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, he became an adherent of Zionism, in particular the movement to change Hebrew from a purely liturgical language to the common secular language of Jews throughout the world. His entire long career was devoted to making Hebrew a living language, in teaching Hebrew to generations of future Hebrew teachers, and in studying the history of Hebrew pedagogy in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Scharfstein and his wife had an unplanned emigration to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, when they found themselves in Switzerland on their honeymoon and unable to return home. Arriving with thirty-nine dollars, several letters of recommendation as a Hebrew teacher, and little else, Scharfstein quickly became an author of Hebrew textbooks for the Jewish Bureau of Education in New York City, then an independent author with his own publishing house (Shilo Publishing) producing a prolific number of textbooks and dictionaries for students and teachers of Hebrew. He also interacted with and observed many of the leading lights of Jewish education and Zionism of the day.

In the 1950s, Scharfstein wrote two autobiographical works in Hebrew, one detailing his youth up until the time of his emigration to the United States, the second recounting forty years of personal history as an important figure in Hebrew education in the United States. This is an English translation of that second book, Forty Years in America. It is not simply an autobiography, it is also a history of American Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, and includes mini-biographies of famous and less-famous but influential scholars and Zionists whom Scharfstein knew, among them Louis Brandeis, Henrietta Szold, and Chaim Nachman Bialik.