People Without Power: Interwar Accounts of Electrical Outages in the Yiddish Daily DER MORGEN ZSHURNAL

• In Event: Modernism and the Migration of Jewishness to the Americas

Abstract

Floods, earthquakes, strikes, riots, war, rebellious cats — all of these and more disrupted the fledgling electrical infrastructures that powered places across Yiddishland during the first half of the twentieth century. This was a period of electrification, during which the presence of electric lights and appliances in the domestic sphere was normalized. From the turn of the century onward, Yiddish-speaking communities grew increasingly reliant on electrical power in both the public and private spheres — and also increasingly vulnerable to its sudden, unexpected absence.

This paper surveys the New-York-based Yiddish daily DER MORGEN ZSHURNAL for interwar mentions of moments in which electrical infrastructure was rendered inaccessible to consumers, whether due to calamity or cost. In the context of post-World-War-I reckoning with the devastation of Eastern Europe, and the economic crises of the interwar period, the MORGEN ZSHURNAL reported on outages as indications of the political and economic status of places of interest to their readers. Meanwhile, writers also bemoaned the cost required to install and keep electric lights on, noting that even when infrastructure functioned smoothly, some still might not have the financial means to access it — whether yeshiva students in Raduń or immigrant families in East Side tenements.

Taken together, I argue that these MORGEN ZSHURNAL reports, editorials, and humoristic pieces are a reminder of the precarity of electric power — particularly important in a period characterized by expanding access to electrification across different geopolitical contexts. Instead of hewing to a triumphalist narrative of infrastructural growth, the MORGEN ZSHURNAL sources foreground a history of the inaccessibility of electricity that is as equally salient as (and, indeed, a product of) electricity’s growing accessibility. This paper expands on the work of scholars of infrastructure who argue that infrastructure remains “invisible” except in moments of unruliness or failure, by arguing that the Yiddish press maintained a sustained consciousness of the unreliability of nascent systems and the uneven distribution of access to resources. The MORGEN ZSHURNAL provides a case study from the perspective of people without power, where, counter to mainstream accounts, unruliness is a feature of infrastructure rather than an anomaly.

Author

• Alona Bach, MIT