This is a postcard with an allegorical representation of the past year and the upcoming new year. The past year is depicted as an old bearded man in a yarmulke, drowning in the sea. An inscription written above his head in Yiddish identifies him as the “Old Year.” The “New Year,” identified by an inscription in Yiddish, is represented by a young woman with flowers in her hair and more flowers in her hands. She is standing on the rocky coast and pointing to the old man in the sea. A Yiddish poem is written on the postcard asking the old year, with all of “sorrow and misfortune,” to sink and be gone. A new year, it states, is coming and bringing with it “new luck and joy,” a new year that will “free the world.” The card refers to cycle of the year and may also reflect the artist’s attitude towards the past and tradition in contrast to modernity and the future. Although not dated, the postcard is thought to be from the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Shana Tova Cards - The earliest instance of a written “shana tova” greeting is a fourteenth-century letter written by the Ashkenazi rabbi known as the Maharil (Jacob ben Moses Moelin). This letter affirms the existence of this custom in German Jewish communities at the time. In the eighteenth century, the custom began spreading beyond the German-speaking realm to other large concentrations of Jews in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. By the end of the century, Shana Tova cards began to take on distinct characteristics, such as special writing paper, with the custom spreading throughout the entire Ashkenazi world during the nineteenth century. The postal service emerged around this time, and in the 1880s, Jewish entrepreneurs began to print commercial greeting Shana Tova cards. By this time, Shana Tova cards constituted the main body of postcards sent by Jews, and this would remain so for around 100 years.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of First World War, a time known as the “Golden Age of Postcards,” the vast majority of the mail sent by Jews in Europe and America consisted of Shana Tova cards. Today, in the digital era, cards sent by post have given way to text messages and emails.
Yiddish – Yiddish is a historic Jewish language originating in the Ashkenazi communities in the ninth century. It is based on a combination of German together with elements taken from Hebrew and Aramaic and is written either in Hebrew or English letters. Yiddish was the common language of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities for both for religious and secular use in Europe and, later on, in the United States. Much of the famous Jewish literature of Eastern Europe and the United States was written in Yiddish by writers such as Shalom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978). The desire to integrate into mainstream society and the decimation of European Jewry during the Holocaust brought a great decline in the number of Yiddish speakers. Today this language is almost only spoken in ultra-Orthodox communities.
