In her quest to find her roots, North York resident Debbie Rose found a trove of hundred-year-old Yiddish letters that hold secrets of some radical Jewish anarchists and open the window to a world long gone.

The mass of correspondence not only provides a genealogical gold mine for Rose, but also an invaluable glimpse into Jewish history and the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, she said.

“Even in the tenth I’ve had translated so far, the information is phenomenal,” Rose said.

The correspondence belonged to her great-great-uncle Leon Malmed, a pack rat who kept every letter he ever received. Malmed was involved in Emma Goldman’s anarchist movement in the first quarter of the 20th century. He was also Goldman’s lover.

About 450 letters from Goldman to Malmed, from the same collection and written in English, were acquired by Harvard University in the 1980s. But Rose has more than 1,000 letters written in Yiddish and dating as far back as 1889 that beg for translation.

Malmed comes alive in the notes sent to him by his family, business associates, friends, and anarchist comrades, from shtetls and cities around the world.

Rose’s goal is to create a database of the information from the letters. Many Jews were lost in Europe, she said, and the tidbits from the letters would help people remember.

“Every time I find a name and a connection, I’m bringing somebody back to life,” Rose said.

But with the dwindling number of people who can read Yiddish — let alone some of the writers’ handwriting — Rose fears the secrets could remain hidden unless she can get them translated soon.

“Every letter answers some questions and raises some new ones,” she said.

Scrawled on yellowed, slightly frayed paper, the letters are in remarkably good shape after years of casual storage in shoeboxes. (Rose now keeps them in archival plastic sleeves.)

Rose’s cousin in Albany, N.Y., sent her the letters after they found each other online. She found a ship’s log that linked her family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, to her cousin, Malmed’s grandson.

Malmed was a Russian-born immigrant who settled in New York. He ran a successful delicatessen and travelled across Canada and the U.S. to promote the anarchist movement with his lover Goldman.

In a 1928 telegraph, Goldman writes of her longing for Malmed while on a “ghastly” trip.

And in many more letters, Malmed’s wife struggles with the pain of her husband’s infidelity and the death of their young daughter.

Toronto resident Sharon Power has helped Rose with the translations. It’s a “frustrating” process, she said, but the end result can feel “magical.”

Each letter takes about two hours to translate, depending on how bad the handwriting is, Power said. She uses Photoshop to blow up the characters and fiddle with the contrast so she can identify the script.

At 31, Power is exceptionally young for a Yiddish speaker. She felt compelled to learn the language because of her family history, but added that language classes in Toronto are mostly attended by older people. Now a teacher, her classes usually have only six to eight students.

Rose is searching for additional people to help translate the letters. After the translations are complete, she plans to donate them to a public facility interested in Jewish history.

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New York-based YIVO, an institute that works to preserve the Yiddish culture, collects letters and has about 30 million documents, said archivist Leo Greenbaum. However, translation remains a problem.

The Jewish Family History Foundation and the National Yiddish Book Centre, both American institutions, have shown interest in Rose’s letters.

Please email ejackson@thestar.ca if you would like to get in touch with Rose.