Meeting Sam Philips: How Newly Translated Letters and Research at YIVO Helped Us Get to Know Our Grandfather

by CAROL and SUSAN PHILIPS

Our grandfather, Sam Philips, had ten grandchildren, none of whom, now elders ourselves, can recall him speaking. To us, he was a cipher—a small, silent house painter. That is, until his 60-plus letters, published in The Forward from the 1940s to 1960s, were translated from Yiddish this past year. Through that process, we learned that he was born in the Polish shtetl Biała Rawska, about his life there as a yeshiva-bokher (a young, male yeshiva student), before immigrating to America at age 17.

His prolific, heartfelt, highly literate, well-argued Yiddish letters elucidated his life and ideas. We now know that he was deeply involved in the New York socialist Yiddish world as a worker, an intellectual, and an activist. He wrote in real time about such diverse topics as the murder of Jews in Europe, the establishment of the state of Israel, kosher meat prices in New York, labor laws in New York State, and Yiddish in America. In sum, the letters demonstrate his belief in the importance of his own contributions, those of an everyman, to ongoing Jewish conversations.

We concur with our translator, Tara Neuwirth, who undertook this work while attending the 2024 YIVO summer intensive Yiddish program, that this project “could have only happened at YIVO.” Conducting research in the Archives, helped by her instructors, classmates and archivists, she found additional materials, including our grandfather’s contributions to the Biała Rawska yizkor (memorial) book. While this project has produced not only a plethora of answers, it has also raised even more questions, questions that we hope to pursue further.