Yiddish Texts Research Articles

Lena Jedwab Rozenberg Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941-1945 Translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld New York: Homes and Meier, 2002

Reviewed by: Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941-1945 Yehiel Grenimann (bio) Lena Jedwab Rozenberg Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941-1945 Translated from the Yiddish by Solon BeinfeldNew York: Homes and Meier, 2002 The genre of wartime diaries is well known in modern literature, and there is a particularly prominent place in it for diaries by witnesses to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews. The best known of these is, of course, that of Anne Frank, but many, many others come to mind. Two that I found particularly interesting were the diary of Moshe Flinker, published in Hebrew as Hana'ar Moshe (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971) and that of the poet Yitzhak Katznelson, Vittel Diary (English transl. by Myer Cohen, Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot: Ghetto Fighters' House, 1964). Written by individuals profoundly steeped in modern Jewish culture and particularly in the Hebrew language, these diaries serve as important and authentic testimony to the Nazi atrocities and the Jewish struggle for survival. They each attempt to give meaning to that struggle. Lena Jedwab's diary was written in very different circumstances from theirs. Born in Bialystock in 1924, she was wrenched abruptly from her family and evacuated to an orphanage deep in the Soviet Union when Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. Far from a home that, unbeknownst to her, had disappeared, she used her diary to hold onto the language and the secular Yiddish culture from which, too, she had brutally been separated. At the same time, she describes how, in the orphanage and in the Communist youth movement, she moved quickly from being a refugee outsider to becoming a cultural leader, well versed in and developing a love for Russian literature. [End Page 276] Nevertheless, Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab shares several characteristics with Anne Frank's diary. Both were written on the periphery of the genocide, though they were directly affected by it. Like Anne, Lena's development as a young adolescent with literary talent was disrupted by wartime events. She had to adjust to a social reality that was not conducive to literary activity, and she found in her diary a refuge and outlet. She attempted to understand catastrophic events without having knowledge of them and while contending with issues of personal identity and developing sexuality. Both young women were in some sense on the edge of Jewish culture, though they developed a stronger sense of Jewish identity as a consequence of their circumstances, and both held onto universalistic ideals despite the brutal and disheartening reality with which they were faced. However, Lena, unlike Anne, wrote in a Jewish language. She testifies in her diary that she made great efforts to acquire Yiddish texts such as the works of Y.L. Peretz, which she particularly loved. She even translated some passages into Russian so as to share them with other young Jews who were not acquainted with them. Loss of freedom, so dominant a theme in Anne Frank's diary, is not Lena's main issue, though she does suffer severe limitations in the Soviet institution. Rather, the underlying themes of her diary are the loss of contact with her family, her lack of a nurturing home, and her continual nagging concern for the fate of her family and friends in Bialystock. They reappear to her in dreams, which she records, and in a clearly autobiographical short story ("Mirl: A Story"), also written at the time, which is appropriately included in this volume. She recalls the past, nostalgically and lovingly recreating scenes and incidents from her previous life in Bialystock, all the while expressing her anguished worry. Like other Jews in the Soviet Union at the time, no information about the Holocaust reached her until near the end of the war. As in so much other literature of this period, particularly personal diaries, the reader's awareness of the fate of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe turns the reading of this otherwise innocent document by a talented adolescent into a moving, if not agonizing, experience. We know what Lena only suspects. Her oft-expressed hopes to...

On the Use of Hebrew Words in Parenthesis in a Yiddish Text: the Case of Keter Malkhut (Amsterdam 1673)

On the Use of Hebrew Words in Parenthesis in a Yiddish Text: the Case of Keter Malkhut (Amsterdam 1673)

Yiddish: Turning to Life (review)

Book Reviews 111 including (for the first time) his pseudonymic articles published under his wife's name of G[enya] Kuper. In its entirety, Norich's bibliography supersedes the previous compilations of primary sources in the lexikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (Biographical Dictionary of Modern Yiddish literature). This monograph is exceedingly well researched and written, which is no mean accomplishment considering the enormous difficulties confronting Yiddish scholars in the absence of critical text editions, insufficient library holdings, and many others normally not encountered in other literary fields. A recurring motif of this study (not surprisingly) .is the question of audience, that the resurrection of Yiddish literature is merely a literary conceit: the Yiddish texts survive but the audience disappears. This irony will surely not be lost on Norich's present and future readers (may their tribe increase!) for whom her study ought to prove a splendid pathway indeed to an important part of the Yiddish literary canon (the present canon debate in other literatures notwithstanding). Arthur THo Alt DepartmentofGermanic Languages and literature Duke University Yiddish: Turning to Life, by Joshua A. Fishman. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1991. 522 pp. $110.00 (c); $37.95 (p). There was Max Weinreich, and now there is Joshua Fishman. These two names represent the very best of the academic commitment to the field of Yiddish language studies in America. As we enter the last years of this century, there could be no more timely volume than a collection of the most significant writings of Joshua Fishman, Distinguished University Research Professor, Emeritus, of Yeshiva University, and one of the true giants of Yiddish linguistic study in the world. Besides the marvel of Fishman's scholarship, there is history of the academic discipline here. Fishman trained in America as a socio-linguist and began teaching social psychology at CCNY more than forty years ago. He came to the field of Yiddish after first establishing a sound reputation in his major area of research. The introductory pieces, written by Mordkhe Schaechter and Fishman, are touchingly anecdotal and help to establish Fishman in the context of Max Weinreich's pioneering work. 112 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 But the hean of this marvelous collection is the approximately two dozen essays and papers, written over a period of nearly three decades. Some are left in the original Yiddish. Most represent the impeccable scholarly apparatus which Fishman brought to the field of Yiddish. A few are for the lay reader, and occasionally one is overwhelmed by the technical side of the linguistic discipline. But, if my library were limited to one lonely volume on the study of the Yiddish language, with all its facets reflecting on the European origins, the relationship to Hebrew, the emergence out of the shtetl as a literary device after centuries of numerous inferiority complexes which eventually led to a Nobel Prize, detailed dialect studies, and the impact of the Holocaust on Yiddish, I would select this collection of Fishman's essays. He is panicularly impressive on the status of Yiddish in America. Fishman is comfonable commenting on the relationship of the Hasidic community to the future of Yiddish in this country. He writes with ease and conviction. Above all, he has the scholar's detachment for a subject he loves, obviously and with considerable passion. There are wondrous chans, elegant tables, a useful bibliography in English and transliterated Yiddish, and a terminological appendix which can walk any beginner through these pages. As if realizing that one work among all was essential, Fishman includes the entire text of Yiddish in America, which originally appeared in 1965 under the imprint of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology , Folklore and Linguistics, some eighty pages in this anthology. We should be eternally grateful that Professor Fishman is one of those academics who speaks clearly and writes the way he speaks. Many of these published works were addresses, and they flow along the page with the same clarity that graced their presentation in the lecture rooms of American universities. If you know a little Yiddish, it won't hun. If you know a lot, you are in for a delightful experience. If you...

Variation and change in Yiddish subordinate clause word order

Early Yiddish exhibited a root-subordinate asymmetry with respect to the verb-second (V2) phenomenon, whereas modern Yiddish does so no longer. A quantitative investigation of early and modern Yiddish texts reveals that the generalization of the V2 phenomenon in the history of Yiddish can be described as the result of two syntactic changes: (1) a change from INFL-final to INFL-medial phrase structure, and (2) a change in the locus of the finiteness operator [+F] that affects nominative case assignment and allows non-subjects as well as subjects to occupy the clause-initial position Spec(IP). Specifically, the quantitative investigation provides evidence that the phrase structure change progressed via synchronic grammatical variation in the usage of individual speakers. It is further proposed that modern Icelandic, like early Yiddish, exhibits synchronic variation with respect to the locus of [+F].

Accessibility, Audience and Ideology: On Editing Old Yiddish Texts

One of the basic purposes of text editions of all forms is to render the texts accessible to a wider audience than would be possible if they were available only in manuscript. The concept of accessibility is, however, in itself problematic, for in order to achieve its goal, it initially demands a conscious identification of audience. Moreover, just as the expectations of the intended audience condition both form and content of literary genres, so too does this apply to the genre of text editions. In making the edited text accessible to his intended audience, the editor necessarily manipulates the manuscript text to a greater or lesser degree in transcribing, printing, normalizing, standardizing and repunctuating the text. We generally accept some or all of these procedures simply as the editor's task. But even the ostensibly most innocuous editorial decision and mechanical task is interpretive, an exercise of judgment and thus also of editorial power. As in the exercise of any form of power, here too there can be abuse: depending on their degree of extremity, their unity of purpose, their guiding principle, the editor's interpretations can become ideological. The problem of accessibility with respect to Old Yiddish literary texts is somewhat more complex than normal, for both textual and cultural reasons. A simple list of some basic facts of the Old Yiddish textual tradition demonstrates the potential for the abuse of editorial power: Old Yiddish manuscripts are written in the Hebrew alphabet; yet at the time that the traditional Hebrew orthography was adapted for use in representing Old Yiddish texts, it had no established tradition of graphemically representing the vowels of a non-Hebrew language text; vowel pointing in Old Yiddish texts is very rare; only five graphemes represent all Old Yiddish vowels (in addition to their consonantal functions); thus specific identification of vowel phonemes is, except in rare cases, all but impossible. Yet the determination of vowel

Sheldon R. Brunswick (ed): Studies in Judaica, Karaitica and Islamica, Presented to Leon Nemoy on his Eightieth Birthday. 285, [34] pp. [Hebrew and Yiddish text]. Ramatgan: Bar-Ilan University Press, [1982

Sheldon R. Brunswick (ed): Studies in Judaica, Karaitica and Islamica, Presented to Leon Nemoy on his Eightieth Birthday. 285, [34] pp. [Hebrew and Yiddish text]. Ramatgan: Bar-Ilan University Press, [1982]. - Volume 47 Issue 2

A Suggestion for a Library of Yiddish Texts

Journal Article A Suggestion for a Library of Yiddish Texts Get access Karl Wolfskehl Karl Wolfskehl Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 1960, Pages 333–337, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/5.1.333 Published: 01 January 1960