The Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project presents a portrait of a prolific writer and Jewish thinker, through the lens oral history. In this segment, we explore Solomon Simon’s children’s literature and work as a Jewish pedagogue.

According to his family, Solomon Simon was a unique source of wonder for children. He valued the ideas, opinions, and values of children as individuals, and spoke to even the youngest members of his family as equals. This approach, combined with his fervent commitment to the furthering of Yiddish culture, formed him into a fascinating pedagogical figure for the New York City Yiddish community.

Simon began his writing career as a children's author. His Yiddish prose and light-hearted humor combined into in books that would become well-known in the canon of American Jewish children's literature. The Wise Men of Helm and its sequels were his most well-known and best-selling books. Altogether, he published eleven children's stories in Yiddish.

Passing Yiddish to the next generation was the ultimate goal of his children’s stories, and Simon's commitment to this mission lead to a position of influence in the New York system of secular Yiddish education. He served as the President of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute from 1939-43, 1945-49, and 1952-53. He brought his pedagogical philosophies to the schools themselves, as well as the associated Yiddish summer camp, Boiberik, and the Folk Institute's Yiddish periodicals for children.

His children's books offered the new generations of American-born Jews a connection to their Eastern European origins through idealized yet tender representations of Jewish small-town life in the shtetl. Simon's secular ideology as reflected in his children’s books emphasized a love of Yiddish culture and Jewish tradition detached from religious dogma, so he intended for children to learn to love the language, the shtetl, and the secular components of their cultural ancestry.

In the phase of his work as an influential pedagogue after World War Two and the Holocaust, Simon views changed. He saw how American-Jewish children were assimilating, and rejecting the lessons from their early education. He was especially affected by this playing out in his own family. He looked back to his upbringing, his yeshiva education, and argued for more education through practice. He saw a more integrated Jewish lifestyle (analogous to traditional Halakhah, or daily life shaped by traditional Jewish laws and regulations) as the key to unlocking an active, devoted, and long-lasting secular Yiddish community in America.