A letter that begins thus—written in Yiddish and dated May 4, 1903—certainly confirms some established stereotypes about Jewish parents:
Beloved son, Shloyme!
Your letter did not bring us any pleasure. Don’t think that we expected anything else from you—we always said that this would be how your quest would end. You have robbed yourself of time and us—our health! What is it that you are running after? Do you lack for anything in your parents’ home, do we fall short in our service to you?
But this was not an actual letter sent by disappointed parents, but a translation of a template for such a missive found in a Brivnshteler, or letter-writing manual. Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman describe their research into this genre, which flourished in Yiddish around the turn of the last century:
These little self-help books provided prose to help Yiddish speakers navigate the modern world. In addition to teaching their readers whom to write to about the touchier issues of Jewish family life, courtship, and migration, these books offered models for business letters and other necessary correspondence. But it wasn’t all instruction: the letter manuals were the cheapest form of written entertainment in Yiddish, providing their readers with immigration dramas and exemplary tales of love found and lost; brivnshtelers cost even less than the popular works derided by sophisticates as shund (trash).
Jewish letter-writing manuals go back at least as far as 12th-century Spain, to a manuscript that included models for requesting money for dowries and securing the redemption of captives. By the late-19th and early-20th centuries, over 30 different brivnshtelers by more than twenty authors had been published in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, with another handful in the United States. Many went through multiple printings. Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Forverts, even gave away copies of [the lexicographer] Alexander Harkavy’s 1902 Amerikanisher briefen-shteler un speller as a premium for new subscribers.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/9568/write-a-modern-letter-live-a-modern-life/