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Debora Vogel (1900-1942) wrote in Yiddish unlike anyone else. Yiddish, her fourth language after Polish, Hebrew, and German, became the central vehicle for her modernist experiments in poetry and prose. This ground-breaking collection presents the work of a strikingly original yet overlooked author, art critic, and intellectual, and resituates Vogel as an important figure in the constellation of European modernity. Vogel’s astute observations on art, literature, and psychology in her essays, her bold prose experiments inspired by photography and film, and Cubist poetry that both challenges and captivates invite the reader on a journey of discovery—into the microcosm of the talented thinker marked by tragic fate and the macrocosm of Jewish history and Poland’s turbulent twentieth century.
Inspired by the use of montage in film and photography, cubist collage, atonal music, and the genre of reportage at the intersection of literature and journalism, Vogel created her own literary montage in which she conveys the mundane, seemingly insignificant events of a day together with the events usually considered to be momentous and important. Fiction. Jewish Studies.
A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers w...
“A fascinating, exciting story.” — Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind While still in his early 20s, and under Hitler's shadow, Leonid “Leo” Hurwicz (1917-2008) left his home in Warsaw, Poland, seeking safety and a degree at the London School of Economics. The following years, while challenging and potentially life-threatening, contained the seeds of a lifelong intellectual adventure. Leo's story is personal (born a refugee, precarious war years for himself and his Polish-Jewish family, a new life in America), global (revolutions, wars, depressions), ideological (socialism, capitalism, economic planning, free markets) and professional (a sixty-year career as a professor of economics leading ultimately to a Nobel Prize). This book tells his story.
A bold recovery of Yiddish anarchist history and literature Spanning the last two centuries, this fascinating work combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. The narrative unfolds through a cast of historical characters, from the well known—such as Emma Goldman—to the more obscure, including an anarchist rabbi who translated the Talmud and a feminist doctor who organized for women’s suffrage and against national borders. Its literary scope includes the Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the journalism and modernist poetry of Anna Margolin, and the early radical prose of Ma...
This book comprises interviews with some of the last surviving veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by never previously published photographic “postcards” from a number of ghettos, and a reconstruction of the only surviving contemporary list of those soldiers. The first part of the book, “Still Circling,” is a collection of interviews with the last surviving soldiers of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The section opens with an interview recorded in 1985 with ŻOB commander Marek Edelman, and ends with another conversation with him recorded in 2000. Grupińska’s other interlocutors are als...
From the second half of the nineteenth century through to World War II, Eastern Europe, especially the territories that formerly made up the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist Empire, witnessed a Jewish cultural flowering that went hand-in-hand with a multifaceted literary productivity in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages. Accompanied and sometimes directly affected by the dramatic political ruptures of the era, many authors experimented with various modernist poetics in the context of a culturally and literarily closely interwoven milieu. This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents for the first time some of the key figures of the era, including in each case a portrait of the author and a close reading of selected texts, including Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, Leah Goldberg, Moyshe Kulbak, and Deborah Vogel. Of particular interest here is the productive entanglement of cultures and literatures, of cultural contact and transfer, and the significance of space and place for the development of modern Jewish literatures.
In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again. Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove’s time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters—an older woman navigat...
In Translation Sites, leading theorist Sherry Simon shows how the processes and effects of translation pervade contemporary life. This field guide is an invitation to explore hotels, markets, museums, checkpoints, gardens, bridges, towers and streets as sites of translation. These are spaces whose meanings are shaped by language traffic and by a clash of memories. Touching on a host of issues from migration to the future of Indigenous cultures, from the politics of architecture to contemporary metrolingualism, Translation Sites powerfully illuminates questions of public interest. Abundantly illustrated, the guidebook creates new connections between translation studies and memory studies, urban geography, architecture and history. This ground-breaking book is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in broadening the scope of translation studies.