Yiddish Literature Research Articles

Еврейское измерение Киева в „Кровавой шутке” Шолом-Алейхема

Sholem Aleichem is one of the authors of modern Jewish literature in Yiddish, and most of his works are closely related to the realities of Eastern Europe. In his books the writer presents, among others, images of life of the Jewish community in pre- revolutionary Kiev. His novel, The Bloody Hoax, is particularly noteworthy in this case and it has become the main object of research in this paper. The story of the novel mostly takes place in an unnamed city, the prototype of which has become a historical Kiev. The Bloody Hoax, the plot of which is largely based on real events, shows the specificity of life of the Jewish community in the big city, and the problems its representative shave to face.

Naomi Brenner. Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. 292 pp.

Naomi Brenner. Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. 292 pp.

Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact by Naomi Brenner

Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact by Naomi Brenner

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel

This paper discusses an early-eighteenth-century Yiddish translation of the famous early modern Schwankroman (jest-novel), Eulenspiegel . The uniqueness of the translation lies in its incorporation of five distinct tales, which do not appear in any other extant Jewish or non-Jewish edition. Four of these original tales feature monstrous creatures, such as cynocephali (dog-headed men), strong, venomous women, and monkey-faced men. The article offers a close reading of these monstrous creatures, revealing how they serve to unpack concerns surrounding problems of transgressed borders and confused hierarchies, which were shared by many of the unnamed Yiddish translator's Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries. I offer a review of these anxieties, locating them against their wider cultural background, and tracing their unique manifestations within the Jewish—and particularly Yiddish—literary realm. I argue that there was something special about writing monstrosity in Yiddish, and particularly in a Yiddish translation of a German work. A hybrid genre, formed by the unnatural coupling of separate tongues, literature, cultures, classes, and genders—Yiddish literature was a monstrous creation in its own right; an almost natural breeding ground for monsters.

The hasidic story and the Yiddish cabaret: folk performance as a barbaric disruption in S. Y. Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy

ABSTRACTFocusing on S.Y. Agnon’s novel The Bridal Canopy (Hakhansat kala), 1931, this article investigates an under-explored path in modern Jewish literature where folklore and popular culture serve as a radical disruption of European literary norms. Whereas modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures typically strove for what Dan Miron called “cultural normalcy,” struggling to mould Jewish materials (including language, modes and genres of writing, and ways of life) into European literary standards, Agnon’s first novel flaunts “Jewish otherness.” Agnon orchestrates a polyphony of Jewish performers, including the storyteller, the badkhn, the purim-shpiler and the popular Yiddish cabaret the Singers of Brod. Introducing the sensibilities of the Yiddish vernacular into the highbrow Hebrew book, improvised performance into the written text, simple rhyming into Agnon’s rich prose – all these disturbances add up to what might be called, following, Theodor W. Adorno’s term, a “barbaric” interference in the esteemed European genre.

Bridges to a bygone Jewish past? Abraham Tendlau and the rewriting of Yiddish folktales in nineteenth-century Germany

ABSTRACTFrom the late eighteenth century, as German Jews gradually replaced Yiddish with German, the publication of Old Yiddish literature practically ceased in Western and Central Europe. But this rich and once very popular literary corpus was by no means forgotten there. Rather, it gained a “second life” in the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, in the form of annotated anthologies and translations, bibliographic lists, and literary surveys. This article focuses on one prominent example, that of the German-Jewish folklorist Abraham M. Tendlau (1802–1878). In his popular anthologies, Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (1842) and Fellmeiers Abende: Märchen und Geschichten aus grauer Vorzeit (1856), as well as in his renowned collection of proverbs Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (1860), Tendlau incorporated German translations of older Jewish folktales, which he took primarily from the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh (1602) and Seyfer mayse nisim (1696). The article analyses Tendlau’s translations of the Old Yiddish folktales against the backdrop of Jewish modernization and acculturation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the culture of remembrance and nostalgia, which permeated Jewish culture in nineteenth-century Germany. By this, it hopes to shed light on the important yet hitherto underestimated role of Old Yiddish Literature in the formation of a distinct German-Jewish identity in the modern era.

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact. By Naomi Brenner . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. xv, 292 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $29.95, paper.

Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact. By Naomi Brenner . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. xv, 292 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $29.95, paper. - Volume 76 Issue 3

A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada by Ester Reiter

Reviewed by: A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada by Ester Reiter Hadassa Kosak Ester Reiter, A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines 2016) This is a study of the forging and flourishing of Jewish immigrant left culture in Canada beginning in the early 1920s, concluding with its decline (though not demise) following the dramatic revelation of the Soviet betrayal of the Jewish cause in 1956. The left secular culture had its origins in the breakdown of the traditional religious Jewish culture and of its attendant social structures within the communities of Eastern Europe, and in the mass migration to North America sparked by the pogroms and proletarianization of the Jewish masses. The newcomers to North America constructed a new secular identity based on the merging of Yiddish-based culture and politics. The immigrants shared a common tradition, language, and familiarity with cultural and political references, the latter acquired during the politically tumultuous years leading to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Significantly, the shared historical experience of Jewish Communists in the US and in Canada as an oppressed ethnic group and as an oppressed class defined their political struggle for liberation by addressing both dimensions of their identity. The unfolding events in the early years of the Soviet Union, where minorities' rights were recognized and Jewish theatres (Yiddish and Hebrew) and Yiddish literature flourished, were interpreted by many secular Jews as the fulfillment of their hopes. As Itche Goldberg, a well-known Yiddishist, Communist, and activist in both Canada and the US, affirmed in an interview with the author in 1996: "Jewish consciousness led us very naturally to the Soviet Union." (37) The underlying assumption of the study of the Canadian left is the belief that communism held powerful appeal to a broad variety of Jewish political and cultural organizations albeit with varying degrees of acceptance of party dogma. In the words of the historians Matthew Hoffman and Henry Srebrnik, the Soviet Union was a "solar system" offering the possibility of belonging to the communist orbit without the obligations of strict loyalty to Moscow (Hoffman and Srebrnik, eds., A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century, [Albany: suny Press, 2016], 6). And, as Ester Reiter demonstrates, Jewish organizations inspired by communism were not always extensions of the Party. Rather, they were the products of historical and immigrant experience as "lived" in ethnic enclaves in the cities of North America. The common experience of working in the garment industry and participating in cultural institutions and organizations, some imported but others inspired by local conditions, contributed to the formation of organizations imbued with the spirit of solidarity and progressive ideologies independently of a communist dynamic. The foundation of the culture was Yiddish, the workers' language. While [End Page 307] Yiddish literature was a medium expressing and celebrating universalist concerns for social justice, the Jewish left did not abandon its particularistic Yiddish culture and concerns for national emancipation. This contradiction, when standards of communist dogma were applied, created tensions between the party, the leadership, and the rank and file. There were, for example, cases where a Jewish communist leadership, also known for its uncompromising attachment to Yiddish and Jewish culture, stood at the helm of organizations of non-communist rank-and-file membership being accused of negligence in exerting pressure on the grass roots to conform to the Moscow line. (In similar cases in New York, leadership resorted to quoting Lenin's definition of communist culture as "socialist in content and national in form" to smooth relations with the party at these moments of tension.) The variety of fraternal organizations rendered such demands mostly impractical. Thus, since broadly speaking, the non-aligned secular left played an important but self-driven role in the making of the left culture, the author pays attention to the varieties of socialists and other progressive groups, as well as communists. Importantly, however, she does not shy away from examining the realities of the relations with Moscow, especially in the years 1928 to 1935. She notes, for example, the...

"A biblyotek vos felt" [A library that is lacking]: Planning and Creating the Book Collection Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Buenos Aires, 1957–1984)

"A biblyotek vos felt" [A library that is lacking]:Planning and Creating the Book Collection Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Buenos Aires, 1957–1984) Malena Chinski (bio) and Lucas Fiszman (bio) Introduction Between 1957 and 1984, there appeared in Argentina a collection of one hundred books, entitled Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Model Works of Yiddish Literature), hereafter designated as Musterverk, which quickly gained visibility throughout the transnational world of Yiddish letters.1 The volumes were published by the Instituto Científico Judío (translation of Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) (IWO), often referred to as a "branch" of the YIVO Institute, currently located in New York City.2 The editor of the collection was Samuel Rollansky (1902–1994), a foremost educator, writer, journalist, and institutional organizer in the Argentine Jewish community.3 This article represents the first study of this collection, just one part of the vast corpus of Yiddish books and periodicals produced in Latin America, a nearly submerged bibliographical continent that scholars are only now beginning to explore.4 Indeed, only recently has the field of Yiddish Studies acknowledged Buenos Aires as a main postwar Yiddish cultural center.5 In the prologue to the first volume, a mighty motto is provided: Musterverk will fill the gap represented by a "biblyotek vos felt" (a library that is lacking).6 Thus we see the logic behind Rollansky's ambitious project. Having diagnosed a bibliographical deficiency, he proposed to offer the library so sorely needed. If we keep in mind the fate of the Yiddish-speaking world in the twentieth century, the plan to realize such a momentous task in Argentina appears all the more significant. It makes patent the geographic displacement of the traditional centers of Yiddish culture to regions of the world that had been perceived as peripheries prior to World War II.7 [End Page 135] In this article, we propose to examine the context in which the Musterverk emerged and circulated, to describe its defining characteristics, and to analyze its multiple objectives (as haphazardly put forth in prefaces and appendices of various volumes and in the promotional materials of its publishers). Our hypothesis is that Musterverk should be understood as an attempt to create the ultimate collection of Yiddish literature, through several strategies that we analyze in four sections: representativity of the works, standardization of the language, procedures of legitimation, and criteria on aesthetics. However, Musterverk, as we shall see, must also be viewed as a didactic undertaking and an enterprise of cultural transmission. These aspects of Musterverk coexisted and sometimes interfered with each other. Musterverk in the Context of the History of Yiddish in Argentina Of the millions of Ashkenazi Jews, speakers of Yiddish, who left Eastern Europe, fleeing persecution and seeking prosperity, some 170,000 headed for Argentina in two major waves of immigration.8 The first, made up of Bessarabian Jews, established itself toward the end of the nineteenth century in rural areas and small provincial towns, as a result of a Jewish agricultural settlement program funded by the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch. The second wave, consisting mostly of Polish Jews, arrived after World War I, and chose to reside in major cities. Yiddish, as the everyday secular language of Ashkenazi Jews, saw its greatest expansion in the period between the wars, with the number of speakers reaching some thirteen million.9 Immigrants from Poland played a fundamental role in fostering the use of Yiddish in Argentina, publishing periodicals in the language, developing Yiddish theater, opening schools for children, and venues for adult educational activities.10 As Leonardo Senkman wrote: It was the main Jewish center in Poland that pressed its unmistakable seal onto the ethno-transnational identity of Ashkenazi Jews [in Argentina], who sorely missed the alte heym (old country) in Eastern Europe and tried to revive it in the social settings of the Buenos Aires kehila on the eve of the Shoah.11 Following World War II and the annihilation of Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, the task of ensuring cultural continuity fell upon Jewish communities elsewhere, especially in the Americas.12 Particularly in Argentina, the use of Yiddish persisted, thanks considerably to dynamic prewar cultural institutions and networks.13 Indeed...

Listening, reading and understanding: how Jewish women read the Yiddish ethical literature (seventeenth to eighteenth century)

ABSTRACTFor a long time, the study of the Old Yiddish literature was centred on the content of the books. Now the research is also focused on the information, written by the authors, translators, editors and printers, included in the introductions, prefaces and preliminaries of the printed editions. A central question concerns the practices of reading. In this article, inspired by the research of Shlomo Berger, we analyse how the Old Yiddish ethical books were read and studied by women, either during private or collective readings. The ethical literature, one of the main genres of the Old Yiddish literature, contains a great deal of information about the readership and the ways Jewish women used to read the Jewish popular books printed during the Early Modern period.

The nebbish in popular culture or, how the underdog can win

ABSTRACTThis essay uses an exploration of the history of the nebbish, one of Yiddish literature’s most enduring comic stock characters, to discuss how and why this stereotype has evolved, and even been reclaimed, in contemporary popular culture. The nebbish is an interesting case study because it began as a negative, often anti-Semitic stereotype and evolved into an Everyman character with whom the audience can, and even wants to, identify. Furthermore, the contemporary nebbish is complicated by two shifts in the depiction of the character. First, nebbishness has moved from being an explicitly Jewish characteristic to a general attribute that anyone can possess. Second, all the Yiddish stock types started out as male characters, but most of them have been able to encompass women in their contemporary manifestations. The nebbish, however, has remained almost exclusively male. Women who are treated in a nebbish-like way become tragic figures, not comic relief. This essay briefly investigates some examples of potential female nebbishes to interrogate why society has been able to reimagine the nebbish as non-Jewish much more easily than as non-male. The essay concludes by arguing that only by truly embracing the idea of the nebbish as more than a hapless loser can popular culture effectively craft female nebbishes, and only by effectively crafting female nebbishes can the nebbish really be an Everyperson character.

Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz (review)

Reviewed by: Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz Adi Mahalel Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. xi + 355 pp. Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to “present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture” (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945–1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of “irreversible decline and extinction” during these postwar years, instead claiming that its “cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity . . . completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war” (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem “Yiddish” by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: “Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!” (3). Sutzkever (1913–2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state’s establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz’s fascinating recount of Sutzkever’s works in chapter 1, “Vilna,” continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever’s “Israeliness” and highlighting instead his “European” Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, “Yiddish,” which serves as the book’s starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz’s book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918–1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman’s memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was “the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the aftermath [End Page 128] of the Holocaust, that welcomed and encouraged the survivor writers to publish their Holocaust memoirs” (68). However, since these memoirs were written in a minor language, none of them even came close to the popularity of Anna Frank’s or Primo Levi’s works, despite their tremendous value. Schwarz uses historian Timothy Snyder to assert that they were just too Jewish and too Eastern European for mass Western consumption (76). A highly interesting fourth chapter is devoted to the monumental Yiddish Argentinean project of Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry). It was a series of hundreds of books that came out in the years 1946–1966 in Buenos Aires that were distributed in 22 countries in hundreds of thousands of copies. This project “indicates the existence of a vibrant Yiddish book market that empowered Jewish survivors to share their experience about life before, during, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (93). This valuable resource of survivors accounts “became a venue of hope for the continued creativity of Yiddish literature” (116); and this rich body of work remains accessible to this day almost exclusively in Yiddish. It was followed by another Argentinean project focused on republishing Yiddish literary classics (the Musterverk series). The centrality of the Yiddish cultural center established in North America, with New York City as its undisputed capital, explains why Schwarz dedicated the second half of his book to this region. Chapter 5 focuses on particular years (1953–1954) in Yiddish literature, which included I. B. Singer’s debut in English translation. Chapter 6...

The Discovery and Publication of Joseph Perl’s Yiddish Writings

The attitude of Tarnopol satirist Joseph Perl (1773–1839) towards the Yiddish language has been discussed by a number of scholars. In particular, researchers have examined his views with regard to his most well-known satire, Sefer Megaleh temirin, which was printed in Hebrew in Vienna, 1819, with a partial Yiddish translation of the work appearing in Vilna, 1938. However, there remains much to be said concerning the creative process which guided Perl’s writing in Yiddish, as well as the later discovery and publication of his Yiddish works, both of which are chapters in the wider story of the development of Yiddish literature in the first half of the nineteenth century and the increasing scholarly interest in it at the outset of the twentieth century. This article briefly describes these multifaceted matters and then offers suggestions for the future study of Perl’s writing in particular, and maskilic Yiddish literature in general.

The writer as the people's therapist: Der Nister's last decade, 1939–49

ABSTRACTWorld War II and the Holocaust caused profound changes in the style and themes of Der Nister's writing. He reevaluated his symbolist legacy and emerged as one of the most powerful and tragic voices in Soviet Yiddish literature. His transformation from a respected but marginal literary figure into a self-styled national leader became complete with his adventurous journey to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, which he envisioned as a site of new Jewish revival. His illusions were crushed by his arrest in 1949.

From Shtetl to Ghetto: Recognizing Yiddish in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums

AbstractThis article has two aims: it seeks, first, to explore the German reception and translational context for Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And second, it seeks to explore the problem of recognition in relation to this literary reception. In so doing, it responds to ongoing disputes around the translation of Yiddish literature into German. A standard practice in such disputes is to attack the widely read translations of Alexander Eliasberg in terms that tend to echo the young Gershom Scholem’s own attack of 1917. By exploring the German translational and reception context to which these translations responded, this article seeks a different approach. It does so by asking: what kind of recognition – whether understood as knowledge or acknowledgement – were critics and translators able to bestow on Yiddish literature? Focusing on the

Lithuanian Jewish Writers’ Career Paths During the Soviet Period: Between Adapting Within the Republic and Participating in the Empire

The author of this article analyzes how Soviet national policy and Jewish culture’s lack of legitimacy impacted the career paths of Jewish writers living in Lithuania and their relationship with the Lithuanian literary field. The article examines the careers of five Jewish writers – Hiršas Ošerovičius, Jokūbas Josadė, Ichokas Meras, Mykolas Sluckis, and Grigorijus Kanovičius – and their different relationships to the Lithuanian literary field. The author applies an interdisciplinary approach, examining these writers’ strategies within the contexts of Soviet ethnic policy and national processes. Building on previous studies, the article opens up a broader perspective on Jewish writers’ options, constraints, and choices both within Lithuania and at the union level.These examples of Soviet-era Jewish writers’ career paths reflect the considerable tensions felt by writers not belonging to the dominant culture when experiencing Soviet ethnopolitics. Writers experiencing a lack of cultural legitimacy had to maneuver: they had to blend into the Lithuanian literary field, participate in it episodically, or be involved in several literary fields simultaneously. It is possible to single out writers’ participation only within the Lithuanian literary field (Meras, Sluckis); their totally or partially articulated strategies of assimilation; their participation within the Lithuanian literary field and within rather fragmented “islands” of Yiddish literature (Josadė, Ošerovičius); as well as (drawing increasingly on the thematics of Jewish history) their active maneuvering between the Lithuanian and Russian literary fields (Kanovičius), which offered artists greater possibilities for recognition. Kanovičius’s model of the Jewish writer/artist’s participation in the empire is the most marked embodiment of the Soviet-era Jewish intellectual’s multi-layered identity.

“Receive with Simplicity Everything That Happens to You”: Schlemiel (Meta)Physics in the Coens’ A Serious Man

Before Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2009 production A Serious Man, Jewish motifs have consistently appeared in their cinematic output. However, the Jewish characters functioned in an ethnically diverse setting and rarely took centre stage, with the notable exception of the eponymous struggling leftist playwright in Barton Fink. Nevertheless, even here the Jewishness seemed to be universalized into “humanity.” Elsewhere, through their accessory characters, the Coens primarily offered a nod to the illustrious and/or notorious Jewish presence in various spheres of American society (e.g., smalltime gangster Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing or movie mogul Jack Lipnick in the aforementioned Barton Fink). In addition, steadfast religious observance has been an object of affable ridicule (e.g., store owner Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski). A Serious Man, however, reveals an unprecedented strategy. Described by the Coens as their most autobiographical film to date, it has a predominantly Jewish cast, deals almost exclusively with a Jewish community in the Midwest, and is heavily steeped in themes which have long been the staple of the Jewish literary tradition. Most evident is the familiar figure of the schlemiel, the eternal loser, embodied in the protagonist Larry Gopnik, whose seemingly endless predicaments form the spine of the plot. Marketed as a comedy, A Serious Man nevertheless consistently exhibits a dark, existential undercurrent, which renders its decidedly grim ending a rather logical payoff. Drawing on the research of seminal scholars on the subject of schlemiel narratives (e.g., Ruth Wisse, Sanford Pinsker), the essay is an attempt to situate the film within this tradition. Furthermore, I argue that the Coens reinvest the figure of the schlemiel with a philosophical charge that it possessed in folk legends and Yiddish literature; at the same time, they adapt the schlemiel to the postmodern condition. This allows them to address the fundamental uncertainty of our age, signalled in the film through the formulae of Heisenberg and Schrödinger.