Modern Yiddish Literature Research Articles

“ In Der Nakht Fun Nitl . . . ”: Christmas Folklore, Mythology and Stories in Yiddish

Abstract: A rich array of original Christmas folklore, mythology, and stories exists in Yiddish. In this paper, I present a framework for understanding the Yiddish literary response to Christmas in the context of a dark midwinter folklore that has evolved across cultures since antiquity. Among Christians, this midwinter folklore gave rise to the fundamental Christmas literary motif of the balance of cold and darkness with warmth and light, with the latter two often signifying comfort and goodwill. I argue that the fundamental Christmas literary motif employed in Yiddish is consistent with that of Christians, but key elements are distorted to reflect a distinctly Jewish perspective: Yiddish folklore inverts the figure of Jesus from being the Christian emblem of light into an emblem of midwinter darkness, and modern Yiddish literature adapts the motif of balancing darkness with light as a metaphor for balancing Old World and New World values. Whereas light characteristically prevails in the traditional Christmas story, the Yiddish Christmas story corrupts this optimism to express Jewish sentiments about Christianity and the non-Jewish world.

Literary Innovation in Yiddish Sea Travel Narratives, 1815–24

Sea travel was an influential literary genre in Europe in the eighteenth century, and this genre subsequently influenced enlightened and Hasidic Jewish circles. As a result, the genre of sea narratives assumed a significant role in the rise of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This article considers the place of Yiddish sea narratives—adapted from Campe's Reisebeschreibungen and in Hasidic writings—in the early nineteenth century. Both enlightened and Hasidic authors played a role in shaping modern Yiddish and Hebrew prose.

Modern Yiddish Literary Studies: A Shifting Landscape

This introductory essay maps significant contributions to the study of modern Yiddish literature over the past two decades. Studies of Yiddish modernism have tended to focus on three aspects of this literature: continuity through the use of traditional, mythic, and ethnographic sources; rupture expressed through alienation in modernity; and the intersection and dialogue with models of modern literature in a comparative context. Furthermore, Max Weinreich's contention that the process of fusion in Yiddish language formation did not stop with its creation but is continuous and cumulative, is also evident in recent studies of modern Yiddish literature that pay close attention to linguistic dimensions of Yiddish writing. This is exemplified by the subjects that have engaged scholars of modern Yiddish literature over the past two decades: canon formation, translation theory and practice, “postvernacular” language, and multilingual poetics. A brief overview of the essays in this special issue demonstrates the unique historical, linguistic, and literary features of Yiddish that offer new opportunities for exploring translation, poetics, hermeneutics, literary history, reading practices, commemorative sites in print, and intercultural relations.

Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing

This essay seeks to demonstrate how the spoken language became a central feature of modern Yiddish literature. This vocal strain was used at first to replace otherworldly with enlightened discourse, esoteric book culture with colloquial style, hackneyed phraseology with straight talk, and Hasidic speech with parody. Not until 1864–66, however, did the new orality enter its second phase, when the Hebrew writer Shalom-Yankev Abramovitsh fashioned an autonomous Yiddish-speaking voice and manipulated the Jewish textual tradition at will. Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz further developed the new orality by introducing gendered speech and professional argot, creating in turn a Yiddish of the common man, woman, and child and a Yiddish Sublime. In the next phase, two verbal artists, Eliezer Shteynbarg and Itzik Manger, perfected a single, minor speech genre that was performable, accessible, and sophisticated at the same time. Shteynbarg's Mesholim (Fables; 1932) and Manger's Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems; 1935) created a sovereign space for spoken Yiddish where all communication occurred in the mother tongue. Even while the oral-based writings of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz were enjoying extraordinary popularity in the major urban centers of North America, new dialects of spoken and written Yiddish came into being there: this new vocal strain ranged from Yiddish humor magazines to the Yiddish American polyphony of Jacob Glatstein's Yidishtaytshn (Yiddishmeanings; 1937). After the destruction of European Jewry, Glatstein, Yitskhok Bashevis Singer, and Aaron Zeitlin made the monologue into a vehicle of inner-cultural dialogue. As if to compensate for the ever-dwindling number of Yiddish speakers, professional actors, notably Hertz Grossbard, turned the written-as-spoken classics of modern Yiddish literature into performance art, so as to capture and commemorate the language. The representation of speech in modern Yiddish writing was not ethnography but the replacement of the old with a new orality, and it happened in five phases. By the final, post-Holocaust phase, the vocal strain moved from the periphery to the center of Yiddish literary culture, becoming “Jewspeak,” an essential expression of the once-living folk.

Yiddish Literature’s Outliers: Early and Late, Italy and Poland, Rhetorical and Peripheral

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Elye Bokher: Due canti yiddish, rime di un poeta ashkenazita nella Venezia del Cinquecento. Translated by Claudia Rosenzweig. Ouademi di Traduzione 4. Siena: Bibliotheca Aretina, 2010. Pp. 144.Edward Fram, My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland. Monographs of the Hebrew Union College 33. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 337.Jordon D. Finkin, A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 202.Marc Caplan. How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 342.In the ACADEMIC LANDSCAPE of what Jeffrey Shandler has so aptly termed the postvemacular period of secular Yiddish,1 a method of scholarship has begun to appear in Yiddish studies that differs markedly from what had characterized the field in the post-Holocaust period, which was still to some degree defined on the one hand by a wide range of philological modes of scholarship, and on the other by nostalgia for a lost golden age of secular Yiddish literature, drama, and film, very directly by mourning for the largely destroyed Eastern European Yiddish-language culture, or more recently by a consciously distancing analysis of the phenomena of nostalgia and/or mourning itself. Now a new generation of Yiddish scholars has taken yet another step away from those participatory modes of looking back, and many now define their own scholarly work in terms of literaiy and cultural studies as practiced in a broad range of post-philological humanistic fields. The theoretically informed research that has characterized Anglophone and Francophone literaiy culture since the 1970s has not yet come to define contemporaiy Yiddish studies, but it is certainly no longer foreign to the field. Shandler's work is of course a prime example, as are the books by Fram, Finkin, and Caplan, here under review, which take on such issues as gender, rhetorical analysis, and cultural marginality as their central concerns.In the subdiscipline of early Yiddish studies (pre-1750), despite some recent scholarly forays beyond the realm of the philological,2 that method still by and large reigns supreme, which is understandable since there is yet a great deal of basic philological spade work to be done in the editing and translating of texts not widely known-Including even those revealed by actual spade work, as in the fragment of a mid-fourteenth-centuiy epic etched on a slate tablet recently unearthed in a synagogue excavation in Cologne.3 For there is indeed still widespread misinformation about the earlier periods of Yiddish literature, which ranges - in manuscripts and print-through essentially the same literaiy genres found in cotemporal European traditions, including Renaissance satires and the women's commandments discussed in this review.4 These last two genres represent more or less the two ideological poles of early Yiddish literature: on the one hand the quasi-secular world of the scholar, open to the world of cultural contact with the coterritorial Christian society, and on the other hand the introverted realms of Jewish custom and the rabbinical legislation of ritual female purity. Onto this subcultural positioning of these two genres, in sixteenth-centuiy Ashkenazic culture, it is also necessaiy to overlay two further analytical grids, one geographical and one temporal. These plot the shift in the cultural center of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenaz from northern Italy to Poland that took place over the course of the sixteenth century, during which Yiddish as the primaiy vernacular of Italian Ashkenazim diminished and then disappeared by the early seventeenth centuiy. As this chrono-topic shift took place, there was also a palpable transformation from the culturally extroverted culture of sixteenthcentuiy Ashkenazic Italy to a profound cultural introversion in late sixteenthand seventeenth-centuiy Poland. …

In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (review)

Reviewed by: In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern Marion Aptroot In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern, by Jeremy Dauber. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 399 pp. $85.00. In the Demon’s Bedroom, a major contribution to the study of Jewish literature in the Early Modern Period, centers on a selection of Yiddish literary works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which feature supernatural, fantastic, or simply incredible elements: collection of fables, a story of the marriage between a man and a she-devil, a dybbuk story, and a romance. However, the attractive subject matter is not the most important factor that makes this book deserving of the attention of scholars of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, but rather the innovative analyses, the inspiring theoretical discussions, and Jeremy Dauber’s theses on the sophistication of a Yiddish reading audience and on the way tensions between rich and poor and challenges to the notion of theological order and the place of women in a changing world are dealt with in a literature that may at first glance seem unsophisticated. Dauber first briefly introduces the reader to Early Modern Yiddish literature and its scholarship in order to set out the theoretical framework of this study, which he does brilliantly and lucidly. In the Demon’s Bedroom is [End Page 180] primarily a work of literary analysis and focuses on the capacities for nuance and reading on the part of the audiences of popular Yiddish literature. The analyses draw specifically on the reader-response approach and genre theory, and consider the works and their readership in their historical, cultural, and socio-economical context. An excursus on ghosts and demons in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus in Chapter 2 serves to elucidate methodological points set out in the methodological discussion and honed in a scholarly field which is more developed than that of Older Yiddish Literature. These analyses prepare the reader for similar ones of the Yiddish texts that follow in the subsequent chapters. The Yiddish works Dauber analyzes were written or adapted and reissued in a period of historical ferment and of growing skepticism, and he examines them with “an eye to potential fissures, complexity, skepticism, and anxiety, rather than simple acceptance, blind piety, and implicit assumption of stupidity” (p. 10). Although these texts were composed by educated authors for a non-educated audience, this lack of education on the part of the Yiddish reading audience is relative and mainly pertains to a command of Jewish canonical works in Hebrew and Aramaic, not to a lack of literacy skills. In fact, as Jeremy Dauber demonstrates in his sophisticated and erudite analyses, texts which may at first glance seem simple reveal that they were written for readers with a capacity for both belief and skepticism who knew how to decode genre conventions: the composers tried to preempt the readers’ ability to recognize incongruities between the narrative and metanarrative levels by incorporating potential critiques. As Dauber points out, some of these strategies may elicit further skepticism on the part of the audience by alerting it to a disparity between the conservative order (re)presented by the author and its own, more complicated experience of the world. This book fills a gap in the study of Older Yiddish literature and will undoubtedly inspire others to engage with it and its subject matter. Therefore it is fortunate that the narrative works selected by Dauber are available both in scholarly editions and in good English translations, which makes the subject matter accessible even to an audience which may be less familiar with Yiddish language and literature of the Early Modern Period. They are Seyfer mesholim, the Yiddish fable collection of Moshe Wallich (Book of Fables, translated and edited by Eli Katz, Detroit, 1994), Mayse fun Vorms (“The Man who Married a She-Demon: A Tale of the Town of Worms”) and Mayse shel ruekh bk”k Korets beshas haraash milkhome (“The Tale of the Evil Spirit in Korets During the Turmoil of War”) (both published as scholarly editions by Sara Zfatman and available in translation in Joachim Neugroschel, ed. and trans., The...

Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore

“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele'sKitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi(The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish,di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people.

A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature (review)

A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature (review)

A rhetorical conversation: Jewish discourse in modern Yiddish literature

A rhetorical conversation: Jewish discourse in modern Yiddish literature

Kabbalah and Early Modern Yiddish Literature Prior to 1648

Les textes et les enseignements commencent a etre plus ouvertement diffuses et discutes dans la litterature juive a partir du XVI e siecle. Cette tendance culmine avec la publication du Zohar en 1560. Durant la decennie suivante, on voit des rabbins s'indigner de constater que de simples maitres de maison puissent se mettre a s'interesser aux idees et a la litterature kabbalistique. Dans les textes de la litterature yiddish religieuse, destinee au hommes ordinaires et aux femmes, nombre d'auteurs, a partir des annees 1570, commencent a citer le Zohar et d'autres textes mystiques. Dans le Brantshpigl (1596), par exemple, on trouve des mentions du Zohar ou de kabbalistes une soixantaine de fois. A peu pres tous les textes ethiques et religieux du XVII e siecle citent certains concepts et textes de la kabbale. Ils les traitent comme s'il s'agissait de Midrashim, de livres ethiques ou de commentaries bibliques. Par contre, ce qui fait defaut dans ces ouvrages en yiddish restent les references aux enseignements theosophiques et speculatifs de la kabbale, dont, notamment, la doctrine des Sefirot. Le Qav ha-Yashar (1705), qui a ete considere comme marquant le debut de l'influence de la kabbale dans la litterature yiddish pre-moderne constitue, en fait, le point culminant d'une longue tradition qui commence juste apres la premiere edition du Zohar.

Jewish Jokes, Yiddish Storytelling, and Sholem Aleichem: A Discursive Approach

This article examines the relationship between Jewish jokes and the development of modern Yiddish literature. Beginning by exploring the central role of humor within the environment of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi culture, the article goes on to outline how jokes, especially their orality, have come to be understood as representative elements of that humor. During the formative period of modern Yiddish literature, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors experimented with forms and genres to expand the literature and its expressive potential. Sholem Aleichem, one of that literature’s most famous exponents, used humor as a central component of that expansion. This article concludes with an analysis of how he used the joke as an experimental tool in the development of Yiddish literature.

Thinking with Shedim: What Can We Learn From the »Mayse fun Vorms«?

An essential question to the study of early modern Yiddish literature is how our understanding of its particular genres an understanding not solely literary, but generally conceptualized in literary terms may help us to understand the early modern Jewish community. Such a genrebased approach can suggest how literary readings of a narrative text readings that attend to ambiguities, unresolved contradictions, extrusive symbols, and the like also yield what may be called epistemological evidence. That is, they provide the opportunity to reassess audiences' capacities as textual interpreters, which may in turn revise traditional conceptualizations of the audiences' literary sophistication, dissociating it from direct linkage to their linguistic and textual knowledge, the traditional markers of cognitive differentiation in historical approaches to the early modern Jewish community. Such an approach may also suggest how vernacular narrative texts written in and possessing the conventions of particular genres allow us a nuanced view of social norms and transgressions which complement and complicate our scholarly understanding of early modern Jewish society, a view whose nuance derives in part from the change in social positioning occasioned by the switch to the vernacular.

The Judaization of Wilhem Busch

At first glance, it may seem surprising to note the inclusion of Wilhelm Busch in the canon of modern Yiddish literature. Busch, the well-known nineteenth-century satirist of German life, was considered not only iconoclastic, but also anti-semitic by many of his readers. Known for his negative portrayals of Jews—as well as numerous other groups—Busch was, in fact, a writer who attacked many cultural, religious, and national institutions and figures. Similarly, his Yiddish translator, Der Tunkeler (pseudonym of Yoysef Tunkel), was a satirist of Jewish life in his native Eastern Europe. In his efforts to produce satirical literature, Der Tunkeler adapted several works by Wilhelm Busch. In his process of translation, Der Tunkeler not only translated the German author's works into Yiddish, but rather judaized them, making them more accessible to his Eastern European Jewish reading audience, thereby reinventing Wilhelm Busch in the annals of Yiddish literature. (MM)

On pre‐modern Hebrew and Yiddish encyclopedias

The use of the term “encyclopedias” for pre‐modern writings is problematical. Nonetheless, medieval and early modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature comprises a number of texts that reveal encyclopedic features and therefore can be considered to belong to the genre of encyclopedias. Their authors strove to transmit introductory knowledge on a broad variety of subjects and to make it easily accessible to their readers. As was the case in the non‐Jewish world, the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries bore witness to heightened encyclopedic activity among Jews. Jewish encyclopedias were often composed in times of transition, change and crisis both in the non‐Jewish and Jewish worlds. They may be viewed as responding to changed paradigms and as attempts to provide guidance. This article considers the “encyclopedic” nature of three major thirteenth‐century Hebrew texts (Midrash hahokhmah, De‘ot hafilosofim, Sha‘ar hashamayim), three pre‐modern Yiddish books (Brantshpigel, Sefer Lev Tov, Simkhes Hanefesh) and the late eighteenth‐century Hebrew Sefer haberit, paying attention to the socio‐intellectual context in which they were composed.

Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches by Joel Berkowitz (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 581 Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches. Ed. by Joel Berkowitz. Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 2003. xiv+ 269 pp. ?39.50. ISBN 1-874774-81-1. Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches is a collection of articles aiming to be a compre? hensive study of the history of Yiddish theatre. It is a stimulating and encouraging book that I am happy to recommend to the specialist and the curious reader alike. As Joel Berkowitz states, the volume 'seeks not only to contribute to the telling of that story [of Yiddish theatre] froma variety of perspectives, but, in doing so, to make readers aware of some of the methodological possibilities that can be brought to bear on this scholarship' (p. 1). The book attempts to convey a coherent history of Yiddish theatre. Thus, it sees the inception of Yiddish institutionalized theatre in the period of Romanticism. According to Barbara Henry, the recognition ofYiddish theatre as a national theatre dates back to Schiller's correlation between the political ideas of nationhood and the artistic aims of a national poet or a national theatre. 'In this identification of national stage with nationhood itself he [Schiller] was echoed particularly by the nineteenth-century Yiddish intelligentsia who created modern Yiddish literature. For them theatre was the voice and validation of a fine national culture' (p. 58). The book employs Henry's position to describe and analyse the aesthetic and historical role of Yiddish theatre and guides the reader in that direction. The layout of the chapters reflects the content, which suggests the most compre? hensive approach to the subject, appealing to both specialists in Yiddish and theatre studies and the general public. Chronologically, it unfolds from the religious rituals and secular entertainment performed in the shtetl(Ahuva Belkin describes the tradi? tions of Yiddish popular culture, purimshpil in particular, as the point of departure for Jewish theatre (pp. 29-46)) to the theatre ofthe Jewish intelligentsia, which 'expected both to achieve an artistic standard equal to that of reputable non-Jewish theatres, and to contribute to the discussion about modern Jewish identity and the future of the nation' (Miroslawa Bulat, p. 155). The book portrays the geographical scope of Yiddish theatre, from the Slavic world to the United States. As a part of its new approaches, the book proposes to include in the history of Yiddish theatre not only the well-known names of playwrights, artists, and companies , but also forgotten figures and non-traditional theatrical genres. As an example of Yiddish theatre heritage, the book features musical soirees performed by Yiddish companies in Europe and America. In addition, itlooks at some ofthe evidence ofthe? atrical censorship in Europe and the history of Yiddish theatre criticism in America. However, the collection is not quite consistent in answering the major questions it poses. Is Yiddish theatre a national theatre? How can the theatrical practice ofa certain populace be defined as national? Although each article offersits own view, a consensus has yet to be reached since there is no concluding chapter conceptualizing the issue. One example ofthis lack ofoverall conceptualization is the inconsistency in presenting the relationships between Yiddish theatre and that of the dominant cultures. Some articles analyse the former in a sort of artistic isolation, as ifYiddish companies were never influenced by the dominant theatrical practices of their countries. As this collection demonstrates, the traditions and development of Yiddish theatre were differentfrom those of other national theatres, on account ofthe distinct socioeconomic situations of European and American Jewry.The book makes it clear that the initial step in defining Yiddish theatre is to recognize the language spoken by a populace as the official language of its stage. As Brigitte Dalinger suggests, the uniqueness of Yiddish theatre practice in Vienna, forinstance, is in the establishment of the Yiddish-speaking troupes performing in Yiddish during the 1920s and 1930s (pp. 115-16). As Yiddish, the language of a culture in transition, is full of borrowings 582 Reviews and neologisms, so the theatre should be seen as built on aesthetic borrowing and ex? change (Bertolone). The authors recognizing this dynamic as the fundamental feature of Yiddish theatre?Barbara Henry, Paola Bertolone, Seth...

A journey to a nineteenth-century shtetl: the memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik

A masterpiece of modern Yiddish literature, the first volume of memoirs by Yekhezkel Kotik, is now available in English. Originally published in Warsaw in 1913, this beautifully written memoir offers a panoramic description of the author's experiences growing up in Kamieniec Litewski, a Polish shetl connected with many important events in the history of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry. Although the way of life portrayed in this memoir has disappeared, the historical, cultural, and folkoric material it contains will be of major interest to historians and general readers alike. Kotik's story is the saga of a wealthy and influential family, through four generations. Masterfully interwoven into this story are colorful vignettes featuring Kotik's family and neighbors, including rabbis and zaddikim, merchants and the poor, hasidim and mitnaggedim, scholars and illiterates, believers and heretics, matchmakers and informers, teachers and musicians. Stories of personal warmth and despair intermingle with descriptions of the rise and decline of Jewish communal institutions and the relationships between Jews and the Russian authorities and Polish lords. Such events as the brutal decrees of Tsar Nicholas I, the abolishment of the Kahal, and the Polish revolts against Russia are reflected in the lives of these people. The English edition includes a complete translation of the first volume of memoirs and contains notes elucidating terms, names, and customs, as well as bibliographical references to the research literature. A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl not only acquaints new readers with the talent of a unique storyteller but also presents an important document of Jewish life during a fascinating era.

Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature

As the apocryphal story goes, in the 1840s when Tsar Nicholas I decided to develop the railroad in Russia, he placed his hand on a map and traced the line it would follow along the edge of his hand. However, the line he drew inadvertently included the ridge of his thumb. The tale says that, when the train system was built, it included that ridge. The tale is an unlikely one, but it points to how the railroad of Russia was a tsarist railroad. It would transport the gentry between St. Petersburg and Moscow, move soldiers to the front, and bring merchants around the country. Clearly the last thing the Tsar had in mind was that the great Russian train system would become for many Jewish writers something that they conceived of as Jewish rather than Russian.

Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature

As the apocryphal story goes, in the 1840s when Tsar Nicholas I decided to develop the railroad in Russia, he placed his hand on a map and traced the line it would follow along the edge of his hand. However, the line he drew inadvertently included the ridge of his thumb. The tale says that, when the train system was built, it included that ridge. The tale is an unlikely one, but it points to how the railroad of Russia was a tsarist railroad. It would transport the gentry between St. Petersburg and Moscow, move soldiers to the front, and bring merchants around the country. Clearly the last thing the Tsar had in mind was that the great Russian train system would become for manyJewish writers something that they conceived of asJewish rather than Russian.

Israel and America: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Literary Imagination: Introduction

Naomi Sokoloff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington. She is the author of Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and has co-edited two books: Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (JTSA, 1992) and Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (Wayne State University Press, 1994).

Yiddish in France: A Conversation with Rachel Ertel

Yiddish in France YIDDISH IN FRANCE: A CONVERSATION WITH RACHEL ERTEL by Jean Baumgarten Jean Baumgarten is a research director at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scholarly Research). He is the author of Introduction a fa litterature yiddish ancienne (paris: Le Cerf, 1993) and an editor of the volume Mille ans de cultures ashkenazes (paris: Liana Levi, 1994). 125 [Rachel Ertel is the author of various works on such topics as shted life (I.e shtetl: la bourgade juive de Pologne [Paris: Payot, 1982]), the Jewish literary avant-garde in Eastern Europe (Khaliastra et la modernite europeenne [Paris: Lachenal & Ritter" 1989]), and the poetry of the Shoah (Dans la langue de personne: poesie yiddish de l'aneantissement [Paris : Seuil, 1993]), as well as Jewish American literature (Le roman juif americain: une ecriture minoritaire [Paris: Payot, 1980]). She is a French translator of Avrom Sutzkever and other major Yiddish writers, and teaches in the Department of Judeo-American Studies at the University of Paris VII, where she has established a center for Yiddish studies. Professor Ertel also edits a series, Domaine yiddish, which publishes the great works of modern Yiddish literature in French translation. As one of the main players in the renewal of interest in Yiddish language and culture in France, Ertel provides vital keys for understanding the particular history of Yiddish in that country and the state of Yiddish studies there. She also sketches for us a panorama of Yiddish literary creativity within the context of French culture generally. ' -Jean Baumgarten] J. B.: Let us begin by looking at the paradoxical situation of Yiddish in France as compared to the Central and Eastern European 126 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 countries, where a continuous Jewish presence allowed the development of Yiddish culture over the long run. The paradox is that, on the one hand, the presence ofJews in France over the course of time has been discontinuous, most notably because of the expulsions , and Yiddish has thus occupied no more than a marginal position, both historically and socially; on the other hand, we must not downplay the importance of France in the Yiddish world, because, for example-and this is of major significance-the oldest traces of Judeo-German are to be found in the glosses within Rashi 's commentaries. How shall we characterize the particular place of France within "Yiddishland"? R. E.: Indeed, Yiddish has always played a marginal role here, especially because the "French Israelites" [as the well-assimilated French Jews called themselvesl ) stood in the foreground of Jewish life. Let us recall some major events: after the waves of expulsions starting in the Middle Ages and the resultant gaps in the history of Jews in France, Yiddish returned in the 1880s, when immigrants began to settle in Western Europe in the aftermath of pogroms and various forms of political discrimination, especially in Russia. Between the two world wars, this wave of immigration grew stronger. At that point, Yiddish speakers came to constitute an expanding social group and the language took on greater cultural importance as ever more journals, books, and newspapers were published, theatrical events staged, and cultural centers founded. Paris turned into a hub for Yiddish writers, poets, actors, with some remaining and others traveling onward, mostly to the United States. That time also saw the emergence of Yiddish-speaking labor unions within the Jewish workers' movement. In the milieus frequented by immigrants, the importance of Yiddish grew as a means of both general communication and literary expression. J. B.: During the nineteenth century, there existed a community that formed a kind of cultural entity unto itself. That was A1sace, a region where Yiddish played a significant role, especially in the countryside. Is there a parallel to be drawn with other areas of Europe, where, at the time, Jewish proponents of the Enlightenment fought against "Jargon" [zhar.gon, a widespread pejorative name for Yiddish), while for a large proportion of the Jewish population Yiddish constituted a mainstay of culture and everyday life? 'All material appearing henceforth in brackets, as well as in the footnotes, has been added by the translator. Yiddish in France 127 R. E.: It...