Rare Yiddish literature available online

The resources are available to the public through the Fenno-Ugrica Collection http://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/85838.

The main part of the material has been digitised from the National Library's Hebraica Collection, including literature in Hebrew and Yiddish which was received as legal deposit copies from Imperial Russia between 1828 and 1917.

In addition to fiction, Yiddish textbooks from the 1920s and 1930s from the collections of the National Library of Russia have been digitised into the Fenno-Ugrica Collection’s Hebraica Collection.

The Yiddish resources digitised from the Hebraica Collection are primarily fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, published in different parts of the Russian Empire.

These digitised titles comprise several pamphlets which could be described as pulp literature, including poems and stories, that featured exciting covers and fascinating titles intended to boost sales. Such romantic literature was particularly popular among urban youth of the time. In addition to fiction, the digitised material includes issues of the Yiddish edition of Pravda from autumn 1918.

The related data packages, including all TIFF, CSV, TXT and Alto XML files relating to the titles, will be released to benefit linguistic researchers and any others interested in the information. The data packages can be found in the collection by title.

Further information
Hebraica in the Fenno-Ugrica collection: http://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/85838
Digitisation Project of Minority Languages: https://www.kansalliskirjasto.fi/en/projects/digitisation-project-of-minority-languages