Left-Wing Egg
I’m a big fan of YIVO, but who is not? Founded in Lithuania in the years between the wars, it named itself the “Jewish Scientific Institute.” Each letter in the acronym feels like a musical note, a prayer chanted across the generations. Think of YIVO as the Smithsonian of the Jews, an attic storage room for history and culture that somehow captured the Jewish experience. The founders assumed that everything about the Jews was worthy of study, analysis, archiving, and publication, especially in the lands of Eastern Europe. It was an heroic enterprise of self-conscious nationalism. I wish that I had been present at the founding.
Miraculously, YIVO continues to exist. After surviving the Holocaust at the end of a thread, it re-established itself in Golden Land of Manhattan, where it continues to operate as part of a consortium. It preserves material it shipped out of Europe and continues to build its formidable collection. I visited this summer and nearly wept with emotion. For its anniversary year, it exhibited material collected during the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto. The work of the so-called “Paper Brigade” is one of the glories of Jewish history, a fragment that somehow suggests a whole.
What I missed, however, was equally important. I follow the YIVO website carefully, and it just posted a video on a single egg. The story is that it was the very first egg laid by a hen at Linke Fligl (literally “Left Wing”). Founded in Dutchess County, New York in 2016, Linke Fligl was a queer Jewish commune that closed up shop several years later. I knew nothing about it until seeing the video, but it appears that the project was for like-minded Yiddish fanciers eager to bring their various identities together. How could a group of gender-fluid utopians meld their vision of American agrarianism with the claims of justice and traditional-ish Judaism. The answer—for a time—was Linke Fligl, a little spot of heaven in downstate New York.
I can’t tell you how this story touches me. I’ve looked at that egg for a very long time. It could have been laid by one of those hens in Martha Stewart’s coops at Turkey Hill. But more than that, it stands for a set of gifts that I always associate with the Jewish people, to create realities in three-dimensions from ideas and abstractions that might otherwise evaporate. It also deserves a larger group of fans, even if the project has run its course. Take a look at https://linkefligl.com/.
Most meaningful of all, it suggests the truth that wherever Jews settle can be a place of holiness, a fertile ground for the cultivation of identity, a share of Jerusalem wherever we are. If all of Jewish life is a seder plate, it’s the gift of the hen in the middle of the platter. And if you need a symbol of diasporic community-building, founded in noble values and ideals, you need to look no further than the egg of Linke Fligl. For an American Jew like me, it belongs on a flag. If not that, then at least a commemorative T-shirt.