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David Shneer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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how eastern european jewish immigrants modernist Yiddish culture and anti fascist politics dragged the netherlands into the twentieth century
East European Jewish Affairs, 2016Co-Authors: David ShneerAbstract:ABSTRACTMy essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between...
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Yiddish and the creation of soviet jewish culture 1918 1930
2004Co-Authors: David ShneerAbstract:Introduction 1. Soviet nationalities policies and the making of the Soviet Yiddish Intelligentsia 2. Ideology and Jewish language politics: How Yiddish became the national language of Soviet Jewry 3. Modernising Yiddish 4. Who owns the means of cultural production? The Soviet Yiddish publishing industry of the 1920s 5. Engineers of Jewish souls: Soviet Yiddish writers envisioning the Jewish past, present and future 6. Becoming revolutionary: Izi Kharik and the question of aesthetics, politics and ideology Afterword. How does the story end? Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.
Ruta Magdalena - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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"We were slaves" : deportation to a Soviet forced labor camp during WWII as depicted in the memoirs of the Polish-Yiddish writer Avrom Zak
'Project Muse', 2021Co-Authors: Ruta MagdalenaAbstract:This essay discusses the memoir Knekht zenen mir geven (Buenos Aires, 1956), by Avrom Zak (1891–1980), a Polish-Yiddish journalist, poet, and prose writer who survived WWII in the Soviet Union. While in the USSR, he was deported in summer 1940 to a forced labor camp in the Republic of Komi, where he spent more than a year. The essay focuses on the reconstruction of the existential experience that Zak's memoirs contain against the backdrop of the memoirs of Polish Gulag prisoners who, unlike the Jewish prisoners, have already become the subject of extensive research by literary historians. Moreover, the essay addresses the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. Yiddish memoirs of Polish Jews who were prisoners of Soviet forced labor camps during WWII, heretofore absent from studies of so-called Gulag literature and/or Soviet exile literature and, in a broader sense, from Holocaust studies, are still waiting to become incorporated into that discussion. It is only by collecting the greatest possible corpus of testimonies that we shall be able to reconstruct a wider image of the Soviet aspect of the Jewish experience of WWII
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"Nusekh Poyln" and the "New Jewish Man" : the image of the Jewish communist in Yiddish literature of post-war Poland
2018Co-Authors: Ruta MagdalenaAbstract:After World War II, the Communist regime took over power directly after the liberation of Poland in 1945. Jewish survivors, having stayed in the country for a certain period of time, tried to revive their multilingual cultural life. Literary works of writers in that community are a fascinating testimony of their struggles: how to be loyal to the Socialist state (condition sine qua non to take part in the official cultural life) on the one hand, and on the other how to express their feelings, thoughts and convictions which they could not and did not want to ignore. Their struggles can be observed on the sample of the three most important motifs of postwar Polish-Yiddish literature: the Holocaust, Communism itself, and Polish-Jewish relations. The article discusses selected literary works of the most prominent Polish-Yiddish writers, whose main character or lyric subject is the ‘new Jewish man’ shaped according to the Communist principles. The author attempts to answer the question of what the most important features of a personality formed by Communist doctrine are, and also to learn about the circumstances of the communist world in which that literary hero lives. Close reading of the programmatic literary pieces of some Communist writers also enables observing whether and how Polish Jewish Communists managed to find a compromise between the mutually exclusive Communist internationalism and their attachment to Yiddish-language culture, and how they reacted when information of Stalinist crimes came to light and their party comrades turned the blade of antisemitism against them. The ambitious project to build a new model of secular progressive Yiddish culture (the so-called ‘nusekh Poyln’), failed to bring the expected results. In spite of concerted attempts to meet the unrealistic demands of Socialist Realism, it soon transpired that Polish-Yiddish literature under Communism was unable to deal with the lack of space afforded by Communist ideology for mourning its murdered nation or with the spasms of unease that were the reaction to the periodic antisemitism in the non-Jewish environment
Jordan Finkin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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constellating hebrew and Yiddish avant gardes the example of markish and shlonsky
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2009Co-Authors: Jordan FinkinAbstract:This essay is an attempt at rethinking the connections between modernist Hebrew and Yiddish Poetry in the 1920s. It uses representative works and themes from two significant poets, Avraham Shlonsky in Hebrew and Perets Markish in Hebrew, to understand both the points of contact and discontinuity between the two, and how in turn this understanding can help refine our understanding of the literary history of the period.
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the poetics of schadenfreude n b minkov on the edge of Yiddish diction
The Jewish Quarterly Review, 2008Co-Authors: Jordan FinkinAbstract:PRELIMINARIESBENJAMIN HARSHAV MAINTAINS that "Yiddish always was an open language, moving in and out of its component languages and absorbing more or less of their vocabularies, depending on the group of speakers, genre of discourse, and circumstances. l This essay is an examination of one facet of component-consciousness (koinponentn-visikeyt)2-that is, the consciousness among Yiddish speakers and writers of the particular linguistic provenance (Romance, Germanic, Hebraic, Slavic, international) of the specific words they choose and use. This consciousness is brought into sharper focus when examined through the lens of writer, genre, and circumstance. I will concentrate on the Introspectivist poets (Inzikhists) who were particularly concerned with the resonances of these strata, focusing on the poetry of one member of that group - N. B. Minkov; one particular genre of discourse - modernist Yiddish poetry in New York; and ultimately one particular set of circumstances -poetic responses to the Holocaust. Minkov maintained a fairly consistent affikation with certain poetic principles, but the intrusion of history altered some of the categories under which those principles, when applied, were apprehended. Many Yiddish poets felt that history demanded a reaction to the German language that Minkov was ultimately not willing categorically to accept. Through this analysis I hope to outline the shifting boundaries of one sociolinguistic category in the shadow of history and the light of poetry.This analysis pursues three broader goals. The first is a preliminary step in a recovery project of Minkov, a unique voice of Inzikhist poetry and theory whose work is unfortunately kttle mentioned and even less examined in English-language scholarship.3 The second is to enhance a more nuanced picture of the Inzikhist movement. As Inzikhism was easily a match for any of the contemporaneous modernist movements in theoretical subtlety and complexity and in poetic vibrancy, understanding Minkov and his employment of component-consciousness and politics means understanding better Inzikhism s status as a dynamic and thoroughly American movement in letters. The third is to add to the portrait of the heterogeneity of the responses to the Holocaust within American Yiddish modernism. For Yiddish poets in America, language was a sensitive site of cultural participation, action, and reaction to historical events across the sea. This is one reason why the debate surrounding germanisms (daytshmerish) becomes an important gauge for assessing differing responses to the Holocaust, as typified by Jacob Glatstein (a fellow Inzikhist) and Minkov. As Anita Norich has pointed out,[t]he history of Yiddish literature at this period must tell the story of modernist Yiddish poet after poet transforming his or her poetic form and content in response to the unfolding events, eschewing the modernist, individualist tones they had once heralded and expressing the need to write a poetry of consolation and mourning, and giving voice to the millions who could no longer speak, in a language they would themselves have used.4Glatstein drifted away from the Inzikhist philosophy and ideology of language; Minkov remained more faithful, averring that ideology's ability to say something meaningful and offering a different set of possible literary responses than Glatstein s, which became the regnant response in Yiddish literature. In tracing a poetic word-biography of shodnfreyd and the concept of Schadenfreude behind it in Minkov's poetry, I am looking to examine what is at stake in his response.MINKOV, INZIKHISM, AND COMPONENT POETICSNokhum Borukh Minkov (1893-1958) was not only a talented poet, authoring five books of poetry, much of it accomplished and some of it of a quality disguised only by its complexity (as Jacob Glatstein noted, his talkative verses possess a visionary pathos and they sit well on the tongue, even if they resist interpretation"). …
Allison Schachter - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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diasporic modernisms hebrew and Yiddish literature in the twentieth century
2011Co-Authors: Allison SchachterAbstract:Introduction Chapter 1 The Protomodernist Storyteller in Odessa: S. Y. Abramovitsh's Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims Chapter 2 Translation and Transnationalism in Yosef Chaim Brenner's Shekhol ve-khishalon Chapter 3 The Crisis of Yiddish Modernism in Weimar Berlin: Dovid Bergelson's Interwar Short Fiction Chapter 4 Gender and the Language of Modernism in Leah Goldberg's Ve-hu ha-'or Chapter 5 The Afterlife of Diasporic Modernism: Gabriel Preil and Kadia Molodowsky in Postwar New York Postscript Index
Shlomo Berger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a note on the opening sentence of pirqei avot in two eighteenth century Yiddish editions of the tract
Zutot, 2016Co-Authors: Shlomo BergerAbstract:The opening sentence of Pirqei Avot evokes a history of Torah transmission which is also of particular importance in legitimizing the existence and roles of the Oral Torah as an integral section of Torah. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Yiddish translators of the tract frequently expanded the original Hebrew text while following the strategy of Yiddish translations of the Bible known as Khumesh mit khiber , or ‘a Yiddish rendition with additions’: a Yiddish version of the Hebrew text aimed at providing its reading public a coherent text to understand in their Ashkenazi vernacular. As may be expected, the boundaries between translation and commentary were consequently blurred, but the Yiddish version was nevertheless considered as a translation of the original Hebrew text.
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producing redemption in amsterdam early modern Yiddish books in paratextual perspective
2013Co-Authors: Shlomo BergerAbstract:Producing Redemption in Amsterdam offers an analysis of Yiddish early modern paratexts and subsequently a history of Yiddish printed books.
