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Conclusion: From the Old to the New

Jean Baumgarten

Jerold C. Frakes (ed.)

in Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

From the second half of the eighteenth century, Old Yiddish literature underwent a progressive decline and loss of quality. Only one genre, represented by the Tsene-rene, some prayer books, such as ... More

From the second half of the eighteenth century, Old Yiddish literature underwent a progressive decline and loss of quality. Only one genre, represented by the Tsene-rene, some prayer books, such as the Korbon minkho, and some stories stayed in print until the twentieth century in the milieu of orthodox Jewry. The works in the vernacular, spread for almost three centuries in the vast geographical range of Ashkenazic communities, played a role in the transmission of the sacred tradition, the usages and customs of the Jewish populace, and in the struggle for cultural survival, as well as in the disruptions of traditional Jewish society at the dawn of the modern period. On the other hand, it remains clear that the Yiddish texts continued to play a role in the milieux that rejected modernity. Due to the upheavals that disrupted Jewish society, the works of Old Yiddish literature gradually came to be neglected.Less

Elia Levita and the Romanzo Cavalleresco

Jean Baumgarten

Jerold C. Frakes (ed.)

in Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

Northern Italy was the centre of one of the most creative periods in early Yiddish literature, and it was there that two of the indisputable masterpieces of Old Yiddish courtly romance were ... More

Northern Italy was the centre of one of the most creative periods in early Yiddish literature, and it was there that two of the indisputable masterpieces of Old Yiddish courtly romance were published. These texts are associated with the character and work of Elia Levita, well known as a friend and teacher of Christian Hebraists and as a Hebrew grammarian and author of treatises on the Massoretic tradition. The Bovo-bukh and Pariz un viene are adaptations of Christian texts and display a rare degree of sophistication and stylistic achievement. These texts brought about a radical break with the existing traditions and led to innovations in the literary forms that exercised great influence on the developing tradition of vernacular Jewish literature. These courtly romances showed the potential for creating previously unknown literary forms.Less

The Inter-Bellum Decades: Yiddish; Issues of Cultural Continuity in Revolutionary Times

in From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking

This chapter discusses developments in Yiddish literature during the inter-bellum period. It describes how Hebrew and Yiddish literature began following their own paths, evidenced by modernistic ... More

This chapter discusses developments in Yiddish literature during the inter-bellum period. It describes how Hebrew and Yiddish literature began following their own paths, evidenced by modernistic outburst or surge in both literatures after World War I and the civil struggles that followed it. In Yiddish, this surge was far more sweeping and immediately influential since it was articulated mainly in a new kind of poetry. But by the mid-1920s the skies of Yiddish modernism gradually became overcast. The issue, which from now on would cast an ever-lengthening shadow, was that of the survival of Yiddish and of Yiddish literature.Less

Bilingualism and the Development of Old Yiddish Literature

Jean Baumgarten

Jerold C. Frakes (ed.)

in Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

From the time Jews settled in the Rhine Valley, beginning in the ninth and tenth centuries, Jewish culture was marked by both internal and external bilingualism. Living in the midst of a dominant ... More

From the time Jews settled in the Rhine Valley, beginning in the ninth and tenth centuries, Jewish culture was marked by both internal and external bilingualism. Living in the midst of a dominant Christian population, they gradually adopted the coterritorial languages. It was evident that Old Yiddish literature was formed on the basis of two quite distinct traditions. On the one hand, it was influenced by models from coterritorial literatures, such as the chivalric traditions of medieval Europe. On the other hand, it was also affected by classical texts from Jewish literature, from the Bible and aggadic and midrashic texts, to liturgical texts. In the same manner in which the language itself was formed as a fusion of distinct components combined to form an autonomous system, so did literature grow out of the contact between coterritorial literatures and in symbiosis with the Hebrew tradition.Less

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature

Saul Noam Zaritt

in Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody

This chapter offers an account of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translation practices, from the beginning of his career in interwar Poland to his rise to fame in the postwar period. Like Asch, Bashevis ... More

This chapter offers an account of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translation practices, from the beginning of his career in interwar Poland to his rise to fame in the postwar period. Like Asch, Bashevis agreed to various forms of essentialization, approximation, and even erasure in order to embed Yiddish within the institution of world literature, declaring his sense of security in US culture while announcing worldly ambitions. Bashevis at times courted the image of the “last Yiddish writer,” self-mythologizing as a paradigmatic Jewish storyteller in order to propose the universalization of Yiddish through translation. Yet, like Glatstein, he remained conscious of the impossibilities of such a task, despite his own strict authorial control over the translation process. This chapter tracks that uncertainty in a series of pseudo-autobiographical short stories written in the 1960s and ’70s, in which Bashevis encounters the ghosts of a vernacular past hovering at the foundation of his work.Less

Jews and Poles in Yiddish Literature in Poland Between the Two World Wars

Chone Shmeruk

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 1: Poles and Jews: Renewing the Dialogue

This chapter discusses Yiddish literature in Poland between the two World Wars. After World War I, a schism began to divide the two major centres of Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe. Despite ... More

This chapter discusses Yiddish literature in Poland between the two World Wars. After World War I, a schism began to divide the two major centres of Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe. Despite certain difficulties with Polish censorship and in contrast to Soviet Yiddish literature, in independent Poland, Yiddish literature continued to develop in great freedom. Unlike the case of Soviet Yiddish literature, a direct and natural connection existed between writer and reader deriving from an unbroken cultural-historical continuum and enjoying the benefits of a native habitat. Despite the often bitter internal arguments, there was room in Yiddish literature in Poland for all possible ideologies and trends. Yiddish literature in Poland was essentially a secular literature, although there was also a surviving traditional religious Yiddish literature, as well as a new literature in Yiddish with religious orientations. Politically, Yiddish literature encompassed a wide range of ideological positions, from extreme nationalist literature which totally negated the ideological left, to fanatical communistic orientations.Less

On the Way to Yiddish and Emigration

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

Jewish culture underwent radical changes in the aftermath of the wars, revolutions, and other upheavals in Eastern and Central Europe from 1914 to 1921. Multinational empires collapsed and Yiddish ... More

Jewish culture underwent radical changes in the aftermath of the wars, revolutions, and other upheavals in Eastern and Central Europe from 1914 to 1921. Multinational empires collapsed and Yiddish cultural space disintegrated, to be replaced by a new constellation of cultural centers outside the traditional area of Jewish settlement in Austria, Germany, and Russia as a result of the mass migration of Jews out of the regions affected by the wars. A small number of Yiddish intellectuals, poets, and writers tried to develop Yiddish cultural life in Vienna. In 1921–1925 Meir Wiener befriended young Yiddish poets and writers in Berlin who belonged to the so-called Kiev group, which included Leyb Kvitko, Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, and Perets Markish. In the chaotic years following the end of World War I, many intellectuals actively searched for a new expressive language in Yiddish literature, especially in poetry. This chapter explores Wiener's early Yiddish writing in the context of the Yiddish literary scene in Vienna, Berlin, and Kiev after World War I.Less

Farewell, Spinoza: I. B. Singer and the Tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist

Daniel B. Schwartz

in The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image

This chapter analyzes the Spinoza image in the work of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) in three stages. First, relying primarily on Singer's autobiographical ... More

This chapter analyzes the Spinoza image in the work of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) in three stages. First, relying primarily on Singer's autobiographical writings, this chapter charts Singer's path from worship to wariness of Spinoza in Warsaw between the wars, the very period that witnessed a broad and ecumenical revival of the Amsterdam philosopher and a veritable explosion of his popularity within Yiddish literature. It then turns to an analysis of the two works in Singer's canon most pivotal to his use of Spinoza, “Der Shpinozist” (“The Spinoza of Market Street”) and Di familye mushkat (The Family Moskat). These two works reflect the range of the Spinoza theme in Singer, from the miniature scale of the short story to the multigenerational novel, and from gentle comedy to harsh post-Holocaust tragedy.Less

Folklore, Language, and the Haskalah

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

Meir Wiener linked the development of modern Yiddish literature to the collective creativity of the Jewish masses, viewed the study of folklore as part of literary studies, and also argued that ... More

Meir Wiener linked the development of modern Yiddish literature to the collective creativity of the Jewish masses, viewed the study of folklore as part of literary studies, and also argued that modern Yiddish culture resulted from the interaction of folklore and Haskalah. He saw Soviet ethnography as a Marxist reconstruction of the culture of the oppressed classes and accused contemporary Yiddish folklorists abroad of still practicing the “bourgeois-nationalist” approach of S. An-sky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport). This chapter examines Wiener's theory of folklore and its role in the emergence of Yiddish literature, along with its relation to language and the Haskalah. It also considers Wiener's views about the problem of Jewish military conscription, the place of Yisroel Aksenfeld and Shloyme Etinger in his arguments, and his use of Marxism to develop a conceptual framework that incorporated literary and social aspects of Jewish cultural development in the Russian Empire during the early nineteenth century.Less

Realism and the Yiddish Literary Canon

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

This chapter examines Meir Wiener's Marxist history of Yiddish literature from the Haskalah to socialist realism. Wiener considered literature to be an arena of class struggle for conflicting ... More

This chapter examines Meir Wiener's Marxist history of Yiddish literature from the Haskalah to socialist realism. Wiener considered literature to be an arena of class struggle for conflicting ideologies that reflect the socio-economic interests of antagonistic classes. Unlike many leading critics and scholars outside the Soviet Union, such as Shmuel Niger and Max Weinreich, who extolled the harmony, unity, and continuity of Yiddish literature, he emphasized the literary representations of socio-economic tensions, conflicts, and discontinuities among the Jews in East Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The chapter looks at Wiener's view of the ideological evolution of Yiddish literary history in the context of Soviet Marxism of the 1930s, and, in particular, places Wiener vis-à-vis leading theoreticians such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács.Less

The Emergence of Yiddish Literature and the Crisis in Jewish Society

Jean Baumgarten

Jerold C. Frakes (ed.)

in Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

It was in the context of crisis that Yiddish literature developed and served a double function. On the one hand, it testifies to the authorities' move for control of the disoriented Jewish populace, ... More

It was in the context of crisis that Yiddish literature developed and served a double function. On the one hand, it testifies to the authorities' move for control of the disoriented Jewish populace, and to an effort toward vernacularization of the tradition's canonical texts. It developed a mechanism of religious instruction where popular books played a significant role. On the other hand, this literature signified the beginnings of a gradual emancipation of knowledge from the exclusive guardianship of the scholars, the talmidei khakhomim, who exercised a monopoly on the writing, the interpretation, and the reading of the texts. This led to the development of an audience of new readers, entailing new ways of reading that differed from the models and conceptions which had existed essentially in a world of scholars. The increase in the numbers of popular Yiddish books contributed to the new relationship with knowledge during this period.Less

Vertical and Horizontal Continuities and Discontinuities

in From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking

This chapter discusses the Hebrew and Yiddish meta-literary thinking of literary scholars and historians between the end of World War I and the first years of Israeli independence. This meta-literary ... More

This chapter discusses the Hebrew and Yiddish meta-literary thinking of literary scholars and historians between the end of World War I and the first years of Israeli independence. This meta-literary thinking organized itself along two axes, a vertical and a horizontal one. Those with a proclivity for thinking vertically were intrigued by the questions of whether and how the literature retained a unifying common denominator as it evolved throughout the epochs and eras predicated upon one or another paradigm of periodization. They were mostly Hebrew scholars who studied the development of Hebrew literature. Those whose thinking gravitated toward the horizontal axis, mostly non-Hebraic scholars, with Yiddishists at their head, tended to think in spatial terms and look for patterns of significant simultaneity in Jewish writing. The scholar who more than anybody attempted to conflate the two axes was Sadan, whose vast scholarly project was divided between the canonical new Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, and at the same time also between canonical literatures and their sub-canonical extensions, such as writing that belonged in the space between literature and folklore, historiography and linguistics.Less

Soviet Beginnings

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

In 1926, Meir Wiener immigrated to the Soviet Union for economic and ideological reasons. While in Kiev, he worked as a research fellow at the Department for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the ... More

In 1926, Meir Wiener immigrated to the Soviet Union for economic and ideological reasons. While in Kiev, he worked as a research fellow at the Department for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in April 1927. Wiener then transferred to the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture, where he was appointed as the head of the Section of Ethnography and Folklore, and published in Di royte velt a long essay reviewing two collections of poetry by the American Yiddish author H. Leyvick (Leyvik Halpern, 1888–1962). In 1929 a series of high-profile ideological campaigns were waged, first against prominent Russian writers such as Evgenii Zamiatin and Boris Pilnyak, and subsequently against Yiddish literature. The Communist Party's efforts to consolidate control over Soviet literature from 1929 to 1934 did not spare Yiddish literature and scholarship. This chapter, which focuses on Wiener's time in the Soviet Union and his adjustment to Soviet conditions in Kiev, also examines the “Leninist Period” in Soviet literary criticism and Wiener's move from Kiev to Moscow.Less

A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature

Saul Noam Zaritt

in Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. ... More

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. Asch’s fame in the interwar period, in Europe and then in the US, in Yiddish and in translation, relied on his belief in the possibility for reconciliation between Jews and Christians, especially through the creation of a unified redemptive literary institution. Focusing on his novels Three Cities and Salvation, the chapter posits that Asch is a model for a monolingual world literature, which may be written in multiple languages but whose texts seek to employ a mutually translatable universal vocabulary. This chapter counters this faith in translation by reading vernacular incongruity back into Asch’s texts, revealing a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments.Less

Introduction: Apples and Oranges: On Comparing Yiddish and African Literatures

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

This book explores the paradoxical centrality of peripheral literatures to a theory of global modernism, taking the “minor” literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a point of ... More

This book explores the paradoxical centrality of peripheral literatures to a theory of global modernism, taking the “minor” literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a point of departure. It compares Yiddish literature produced during the nineteenth century and African literature written in English and French in the mid-twentieth-century. The book considers two pioneering figures in these respective cultures, Amos Tutuola and Reb Nakhman of Breslov. In particular, it compares the “Complete Gentleman” episode from Tutuola's first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard with Nakhman's first story “The Story of a Lost Princess.” It then turns to the first consciously modern ideologies in Jewish Eastern Europe and Francophone Africa, haskole (the “Jewish Enlightenment”) and negritude. It also offers readings of novels by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Wole Soyinka, and Ahmadou Kourouma. The book concludes by considering Jewish literature after the Holocaust.Less

Modern Jewish Literature in the Tsarist Empire and Galicia

Antony Polonsky

in Jews in Poland and Russia: 1881-1914 v. 2

This chapter describes how the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and to a lesser extent in German, Polish, and Russian, was a development linked with the modernization of ... More

This chapter describes how the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and to a lesser extent in German, Polish, and Russian, was a development linked with the modernization of the Jewish communities in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was only in the 1860s that a word for literature—sifrut (sifrus in the Ashkenazi pronunciation)—became current among the Jews of this area. The development of a literature of this type among the Jews, as among other nations in Europe, was linked to secularization, the waning of the power of religion and of traditional ways of life, and the growth of a consciousness of individual identity. Indeed, much of the literature written by Jews in the nineteenth century is concerned with the discovery of self. This was a new phenomenon in the Jewish world.Less

Introduction: A Jewish Language in a Christian World

in A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

This book explores Christian preoccupation with Yiddish language and literature in early modern Germany, that is, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the second half of the eighteenth ... More

This book explores Christian preoccupation with Yiddish language and literature in early modern Germany, that is, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. The Yiddish which was the focus of Christian literature during that period is known today as “Western Yiddish,” “Jewish-German,” or “Judeo-German,” which differs from the “Eastern Yiddish” of the Jews from Eastern Europe. The book looks at how Christians became interested in the Hebrew language, Yiddish literature, and Yiddish culture, and the implications of this interest for theological, cultural, and social discourses on Jews and Judaism. It also discusses the place of Christian Yiddish scholarship in the broader context of early modern Christian Hebraism, the association of Yiddish with criminality, and how the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew was represented in the Christian texts.Less

Yiddish in the Judenmission

in A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

Both the Reformation and the Protestant movement provided an impetus to the long-standing Christian ambition to convert the Jews to Christianity. This Jewish conversion initially failed to ... More

Both the Reformation and the Protestant movement provided an impetus to the long-standing Christian ambition to convert the Jews to Christianity. This Jewish conversion initially failed to materialize, but remained a constant hope for Protestant thought and practice in early modern Germany. Protestant theologians and missionaries turned to non-violent ways to conduct successful missionary work by embracing Yiddish, the colloquial language of the German Jews. The use of Yiddish in the early modern Judenmission was founded on so-called “linguistic adaptation.” This chapter examines the use of the Yiddish language by Christian missionaries to write texts, from the sixteenth century up to the seventeenth century, with the rise of the Pietist movement. It also discusses the advantages of Yiddish as a missionary language, the strategies employed by missionaries to overcome Jewish resistance to missionary work, and Yiddish literature devoted to missionary efforts.Less