Yiddish Literature and Culture

1919 saw a tremendous growth of modern Yiddish poetry. Five of it's great superstars published their first collections of poems that year -- two in New York -- Moyshe-Leyb halpern and H. Leyvik, and three in Kiev -- Dovid Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish and Leyb Kvitko. At the same same  the acclaimed Yiddish modernist poet Zishe landau publishes an interim summing up Anthology of Yiddish American poetry created until 1919. A Yiddish collection of articles by Moyshe Olgin presented in a monographic form  and dedicated entirely to Yiddish and some general poetry, and a new "small magazine" dedicated exclusively to poetry and poetry criticism were published in New York. The latter while a short-lived publication, had a direct role in stimulating the rise of the Introspektivist Yiddish poetry.

Distinct from multicultural Vilnius, inter-war Kaunas is often associated in
Lithuanian cultural memory with the myths of Lithuanianness and centrality.
The paper explores reflections of the temporary capital of Lithuania from
the ‘peripheral point of view’ (Ingenschay, 2000) that are inscribed in
the literary works of Lithuanian Yiddish writers. In these texts Kaunas is
viewed from the perspective of Jewish artists, intellectuals, revolutionaries,
bohemians, and outsiders, and emerges in manifold and ambivalent images.
Arriving from the province, the protagonists perceive it as a big city, but
then they experience Kaunas as a restricted, vanishing and insignificant
space. The most often occurring metaphors associate the temporary capital
with a cage, prison, cellar, labyrinth, cobweb, swamp, and the like. The
paper shows how this imagery is related to the modern European discourse
on the metropolis, discriminatory policies of the Republic of Lithuania, and
shifts in Jewish identity.

This essay compares the Yiddish novel Mides ha-din (roughly, "Stern Judgement," 1927) with the German travelogue Reise in Polen ("Journey to Poland," 1925) to consider complementary Jewish perspectives on the post-WWI transformation of Eastern Europe. For Döblin, the journey to Poland offers an effort, ultimately frustrated, at encounter with traditional Jewish life in the land of his birth; at the same time it presents his first encounter with Roman Catholicism, to which he would eventually convert. For Bergelson, similarly, the temporal contradictions of a "Soviet shtetl" exemplify the paradoxes of a Yiddish-language, Jewish culture struggling to emancipate itself, via communism, from old economic practices, religious beliefs, and social organization. The dilemmas that both authors recognize between an emancipated modernity and ethnic or religious authenticity resonate with larger thematic and linguistic tensions that characterize an inclusive yet historically specific aesthetic modernism in Jewish literatures.

This book offers annotated editions of four distinct sixteenth-century Yiddish epic poems, all preserved in single copies. Two of them retell the narrative found in the book of Joshua, and two relate the events described in the book of Judges. As typical specimens of the once popular literary genre, the Old Yiddish biblical epic, the content of the works is based on Jewish sources, while their style and form were influenced by German epic and chivalric literature. The epics often elaborate on the biblical narrative, with rich passages that echo the cultural setting in which they were composed, presumably German and Italian lands. The four epics are presented here for the first time in modern academic editions. They are studied and compared with one another, and footnotes provide information concerning the sources of additions and changes, translation methods, historical details, obscure words and idiomatic expressions, and more. As these epics represent some of the earliest examples of biblical epics in Yiddish, the discussion also touches upon the origins of the genre, tracing its path from orality to written text. The annotated edition presents the original Old Yiddish texts together with an English introduction.

* Four accurate editions of thus far unpublished Old Yiddish works.
* Close comparison of the epics to the original biblical text and additional 
  Jewish sources.
* Research into the beginnings of the genre.

Non so raccontare una storia senza distorcerla. Per dirla tutta sono un contaballe nato." L'autoritratto sinteticissimo prodotto da Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) nel suo romanzo più famoso, è di una sincerità disarmante. Lo si capisce bene scorrendo le irresistibili pagine di "La versione di Barney", una vera e propria autobiografia sempre negata come tale dall'ebreo di Montreal che ha cercato, (invano occorre dirlo) di rimuovere l'indelebile e inconfondibile pelle ebraica che i genitori gli avevano cucito addosso iscrivendolo anche a una scuola talmudica. Ma il ragazzino terribile non era fatto di carta assorbente e, dopo la separazione dei genitori, si avvicinò con grande precocità all'ateismo e al "politically incorrect." Ma il substrato yddish è inamovibile. Lo si avverte immediatamente, fin dalle prime pagine del capolavoro di Richler lungo le cui forsennate digressioni, sparate a raffiche ravvicinate sul lettore, l'"ebraicità" personale, ambientale, culturale, artistica emerge scintillante come la prosa corrosiva con la quale R. descrive il mondo di Barney Panofsky, l'universo profondamente ortodosso del "vecchio quartiere ebraico e operaio di Montreal in cui sono cresciuto". Dal quale avrà inizio la vera e propria fuga del diciannovenne Richler-Panofsky, verso un'europeissima Parigi, crogiolo bohémien negli Anni 50 et ultra, di nuovi pensieri, ardite costruzioni intellettuali, avventure artistiche, arrembanti e marxisteggianti visioni del mondo. Un intento platealmente iconoclasta serpeggia fra le spire dell'umorismo caustico della "Versione".

Railroad is a play of intense yet highly confined action (a narrow boxcar: imagine whirling atomic particles spiraling inward into a black hole) that explodes outward in the human dimensions of three living families from three cultures (Dutch Jewish, World War II German, and 21st-century American), four generations, and two eras -- all played by the same four actors. Centripetal, centrifugal, and reeling by turns, the play emerges from the defining center of the 20th century (the Holocaust, the nadir of civilized Europe) to create the wobbling imbalance of the present day on a “grassy knoll” in polyglot Battery Park, New York City. In design, acting, and production, we seek to create the pressure of confinement and the joy of childish hopes, the lack of air and the freedom of flight (emigration), the bleakness of the black German Lugar, and the audaciously bright colors of the American flag, all in their centrifugal/centripetal dance.

A new English-Yiddish dictionary with focus on (a) genuine Yiddish usage, (b) elaboration of Yiddish culture, and East European Jewish civilization, synthesizing its ancient and modern, and its religious and secular components; (c) contours of living Yiddish in the 21st century (ranging from Hasidic to modernist environments); (d) conscious adoption of a descriptive and variationist stance, to complement the normativist, purist perspective of other works; (e) Yiddish as a vibrant living language (hence a descriptive apparatus that is  entirely in Yiddish, hence a determination to include contemporary terms and trends).
The Yiddish Cultural Dictionary is in a very early stage of a work in progress, to which colleagues are invited to contribute words, phrases, nuances and corrections (both typographic and substantive). It emerges largely from the author's teaching of intermediate and advanced Yiddish courses in Vilnius, Lithuania, with much gratitude to his many students over the years.