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In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.
Chava Rosenfarb (1923–2011) was one of the most prominent Yiddish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1923, she survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, immigrating to Canada in 1950 and settling in Montreal. There she wrote novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and essays, including The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto, a seminal novel on the Holocaust. Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays comprises thirteen personal and literary essays by Rosenfarb, ranging from autobiographical accounts of her childhood and experiences before and during the Holocaust to literary criticism that discusses the work of other J...
Taking stock of Yiddish literature in 1939, critic Shmuel Niger highlighted the increasing number and importance of women writers. However, awareness of women Yiddish writers diminished over the years. Today, a modest body of novels, short stories, poems and essays by Yiddish women may be found in English translation online and in print, and little in the way of literary history and criticism is available. This collection of critical essays is the first dedicated to the works of Yiddish women writers, introducing them to a new audience of English-speaking scholars and readers.
A powerful story about a man's discovery of faith and identity after his escape from Nazi persecution in Poland, new to Penguin Modern Classics From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent is the story of Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned and aimless man who discovers a purpose to his life through the Jewish faith. Following his journey as he flees Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939, through wealth and a failed marriage in New York, and on to Israel, it charts his transformation from worldly confusion to spiritual certainty in orthodox Judaism. This powerful work is an examination of the nature of faith, the question of identity and the notion of how to lead a good life.
Here is a detailed glimpse into the lives and times of Yiddish writers enthralled with Communism at the turn of the century through the mid-1930s. Centering mainly on the Soviet Jewish literati but with an eye to their American counterparts, the book follows their paths from avant-garde beginnings in Kiev after the 1905 revolution to their peak in the mid-1930s. Notables such as David Bergelson—who helmed the short-lived Yiddish periodical called In Harness—and Der Nister and David Hodshtein come to life as do Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, Moshe Litvakov, Yekhezkel Dobrushin, and Nokhum Oislender. Gennady J. Estraikh charts the course of their artistic and political flowering and decline and considers the effects of geographyprovincial vs. urbanand party politics upon literary development and aesthetics. No other book concentrates on this aspect of the Jewish intellectual scene nor has any book unveiled the scale and intensity of Yiddish Communist literary life in the 1920s and 1930s or the contributions its writers made to Jewish culture.
The first of its kind, this anthology showcases women's writing previously available only in Yiddish. A book of voices from an almost forgotten female heritage, it features eighteen writers who speak powerfully of the events that shaped their lives; the daily fabric of life in Europe, the struggle from which new lives in North America, Palestine and then Israel were forged, the terror and challenge of survival during the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Taking stock of Yiddish literature in 1939, critic Shmuel Niger highlighted the increasing number and importance of women writers. However, awareness of women Yiddish writers diminished over the years. Today, a modest body of novels, short stories, poems and essays by Yiddish women may be found in English translation online and in print, and little in the way of literary history and criticism is available. This collection of critical essays is the first dedicated to the works of Yiddish women writers, introducing them to a new audience of English-speaking scholars and readers.
Sexual anti-Semitism and pornotopia: Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and the Harrad experiment -- The prestige of dirty words and pictures: Horace Liveright, Henry Roth, and the graphic novel -- Otherfuckers and motherfuckers: reproduction and allegory in Philip Roth and Adele Wiseman -- Seductive modesty: censorship vs. Yiddish and Orthodox tsnies -- Conclusion: Dirty Jews and the Christian right: Larry David and FCC v. Fox.
Written in the form of a suspense novel, Emil and Karl draws readers into the dilemma faced by two young boys in Vienna--one Jewish, the other not--when they suddenly find themselves without homes or families on the eve of World War II. This unique work, written in 1938, was one of the first books for young readers describing the early days of what came to be known as the Holocaust. Published before the war and the full revelations of the Third Reich's persecution of Jews and other civilians, the book offers a fascinating look at life during this period and the moral challenges people faced under Nazism. It is also a taut, gripping, page-turner of the first order. Originally written in Yiddish, Emil and Karl is one of the most accomplished works of children's literature in this language, and the only book for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn, a major American Yiddish poet, novelist, and essayist.
From the shtetl to the Holocaust, lost voices from a rich and lively tradition.