Teaching Literacy in Soviet Yiddish school: «Shpil un Arbet» Textbook and the Teaching methodology by Eli Spivak

Abstract

Once the national restrictions in Russia had been abolished (1917), Jewish artists, writers, and educators took up the foundation of the Kultur-Lige – an association for Jewish national art and education in Yiddish. In 1925, the Kultur-Lige in its Kyiv publishing house published a Yiddish primer by Eli Spivak, who would later become a leading figure in Yiddish philology and a corresponding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Mark Epshteyn who led the artistic department of the Kultur-Lige made the illustrations for the primer. Its subsequent editions were illustrated by Nathan Altman, another member of the Kultur-Lige.

Spivak shared the pedagogical ideas which Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for Education) had taken as the basis for the Soviet Unified Labor School. He titled his primer “Shpil un Arbet” – ”Game and Work,” in accordance with the call addressed to teachers by the head of Narkompros Lunacharsky to convey knowledge to children “in a joyful active form of game or work”. In teaching literacy, Spivak employed the whole-word method, which entails incorporating reading and writing into the everyday lives of children as tools of meeting real-life challenges rather than merely academic ones. A whole-word method primer supposes a synthesis of text and image. This aligned with the Kultur-Lige’s approach to the book as a separate form of art, where text, design, illustrations, and the medium all play equally important roles.

The article reproduces graphic works by Epshteyn and Altman that have not previously been published in academic editions, along with information about Spivak’s biography.