Vladimir Dawidowitsch Medem

Image Medems from the Medem Library Paris

Wladimir Dawidowitsch Medem , actually Grinberg ( Russian Владимир Давидович Медем ; born July 30, 1879 in Libau , Courland ; † January 9, 1923 in Brooklyn , New York ) was a Russian-Jewish politician and ideologist of the socialist General Jewish Workers' Union . The Medem library in Paris was named after him.

Life

The son of a Russian military doctor who converted from Judaism to Christianity received training at a high school in Minsk, now in Belarus . He later studied at the University of Kiev and became increasingly interested in the Yiddish-speaking proletariat and its troubled living conditions. He was concerned that the Russian Jews had no national right and no right to strike .

Medem only learned Yiddish at the age of 22, which was frowned upon in his family environment. Because of a student strike he had to leave the university in 1898 and, inspired by Marxist friends, joined the Minsk Socialists. His great interest in the world of Yiddish-speaking workers and political anti-Semitism made him the leading ideologue of the Jewish-Socialist General Jewish Workers' Union (Bund). In 1921 Medem emigrated to New York.

The federation, which was founded in 1897 in Vilnius , Lithuania , campaigned for the cultural and national rights of Jews in Eastern Europe . In this regard, Medem dared to oppose the view of Russian Marxists, including Lenin . In the interwar period , these goals received support in Central and Western Europe. a. with the Austromarxists and especially in several workers' clubs of Jewish immigrants in Paris , where they called themselves Bundists . One of these clubs, which also saw the adult education of workers as its main task, was named Arbeter-klub afn nomen Vladimir Medem ( workers' club in the name of Vladimir Medems ). His educational policy ambitions finally led to the founding of the Medem Library in 1929, which today with 30,000 volumes is the largest Yiddish cultural institution in Europe.

Major works

• 1916: The doctrine of the " covenant "
• 1938 (posthumously): Di legende fun der jidišher arbeter movement (eds. Gros, Naftole; Gros, Naftoli). Verlag Kinder-Ring, 87 p., Illustrated. Again: Nju-Jork 1938. Again: National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, Mass. (USA) 1999. Series: " Steven Spielberg digital Yiddish library" No. 06827 (Yiddish, in Hebrew script; available in Düsseldorf University and State Library )

Web links

• Literature by and about Vladimir Dawidowitsch Medem in the catalog of the German National Library