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"Yiddish language Fiction."
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Too young for Yiddish
When Aaron was a boy his Grandpa, or Zayde, would not teach him Yiddish, but as an adult, Aaron longs to learn the language and history of the old country from Zayde and his many books.
Book
It Could Lead to Dancing
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues
for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any
reader of Pride and Prejudice , War and Peace , or
Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social
dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In
the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture,
dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and
acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women
from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as
the very sign of modernity--and the ultimate boundary
transgression.
Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a
charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of
acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications
of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while
simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering
study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of
dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader
social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining
cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to
contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance
illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor
for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural
transitions.
eBook
Alternative Histories—Alternative Identities? Jewishness and the (Al)lure of “What if . . . ?”
In this article, I explore negotiations of alternative Jewish identities as a response to the Holocaust in two alternative histories by the Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch. Both engage in very different ways with the destruction of a physical Yiddishland in central and eastern Europe and explore notions of Jewish guilt and the projection of Jewish identities into the future. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon explores the imaginary persistence of Yiddish language and culture in a Yiddishland that, after a mitigated Holocaust, has been transferred to Alaska. The Yiddishland in Zelitch’s Judenstaat (2016) is divested of its Yiddishness. Jewish statehood after the Holocaust is conceived in her novel in retributive guilt and relies upon a potent imaginary of Jewish Germanness which, extends to culture, language, and territory in an illusory continuation of a mythical Ashkenaz and eventually ends in the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty.
Journal Article
Change and Decline in London's Jewish East End: The Yiddish Sketches of Katie Brown
The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London's Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London's Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years.
Journal Article
Before the Beginning
This article presents a joint reading of two school novels, both written in the span of one year: the Yiddish novel Hibru by Yoysef Opatoshu and the Hebrew novel Mehatḥalah (From the Beginning) by Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner. These two novels, when read together, offer a consideration of language education and monolingual trajectories in both New York and Tel Aviv, and of both Hebrew and Yiddish. The article charts connections between the two works that have never been discussed before, showing how both authors foreground an anxiety with the vernacular future of Jewish communities around the world, and how both novels, although very different in narrative and style, reflect a shared uneasiness about the viability of monolingual Jewish existence. In doing so, this article offers a transnational reading of these two novels, showing how in 1919 the world of Jewish literature was embroiled in similar questions of immigration and origins, as well as both the power and the shortcomings of language education.
Journal Article
“In Der Nakht Fun Nitl . . .”: Christmas Folklore, Mythology and Stories in Yiddish
A rich array of original Christmas folklore, mythology, and stories exists in Yiddish. In this paper, I present a framework for understanding the Yiddish literary response to Christmas in the context of a dark midwinter folklore that has evolved across cultures since antiquity. Among Christians, this midwinter folklore gave rise to the fundamental Christmas literary motif of the balance of cold and darkness with warmth and light, with the latter two often signifying comfort and goodwill. I argue that the fundamental Christmas literary motif employed in Yiddish is consistent with that of Christians, but key elements are distorted to reflect a distinctly Jewish perspective: Yiddish folklore inverts the figure of Jesus from being the Christian emblem of light into an emblem of midwinter darkness, and modern Yiddish literature adapts the motif of balancing darkness with light as a metaphor for balancing Old World and New World values. Whereas light characteristically prevails in the traditional Christmas story, the Yiddish Christmas story corrupts this optimism to express Jewish sentiments about Christianity and the non-Jewish world.
Journal Article
Lectures to Specters: Ozick's Genealogies
Cynthia Ozick is often considered one of the few writers willing to identify herself specifically as a Jewish writer. Yet this characterization of Ozick obscures more than it illuminates. By attending to the understudied themes of genealogy and sexuality in Ozick's work, a more complicated picture of her relation to Jewish identity emerges. This article shows how Ozick figures the ambivalent relation of Jewish identity and literature through deviant sexualities and genealogical breakdown, through a reading of her novella \"Envy; or Yiddish in America\" (1969). Drawing on studies of the biological imagination in Jewish literature, post-vernacular Yiddish histories, and recent critical scholarship on identity in Jewish literary study, I read Ozick as a theorist of the entanglement, tense but generative, of literature and desire. My reading seeks not only to revise our scholarly relation to this canonical figure, but also to use genealogy to ask how literature complicates normative models of identity in Jewish studies.
Journal Article
“I stopped liking the country I was born in – the motherland”: Nostalgia and Anti-nostalgia in the Israeli Works of Kalman Segal
The subject of reflection in this article is the Israeli period in the work of Polish-Yiddish writer Kalman Segal (1917–1980), who decided to emigrate to Israel after the antisemitic campaign inspired in 1968 by Poland’s Communist authorities. Referring to Przemysław Czapliński’s definition of “nostalgia” (“a narrative manifestation of the [longed for] past, an effort to meticulously reconstruct personal experiences, spaces, people and customs preserved only in memory”), the author analyzes literary texts in which the writer, already a citizen of Israel, continues his life-long mission of nostalgically remembering the “Murdered Shtetl” (as the author calls it), a symbol of Jewish civilization in the Polish lands, and commemorating its Jewish inhabitants murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, using Jora Vaso’s definition of “anti-nostalgia” (“the emotions of a modern exile who has left his ‘backward’ homeland to live in the modern world, being aware of its shortcomings, as a result of which it becomes an object of recollection, which arouses his harsh criticism and roots him in the past, making obsessive thinking about his former homeland his main preoccupation”), the author tries to show Segal’s difficult process of adaptation to the Israeli reality that was alien to him and how he was disturbed by the suffering and longing accompanying the decision to leave his former homeland. Over time, one can see in Segal’s work a growing acceptance of the new situation and commitment to the new reality. This can be read as overcoming both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia towards Poland. Life experiences lead Segal to believe that being in exile is a universal experience and an existential condition of the Jewish people.
Journal Article
Dance as a Tool of Pleasure and Humiliation in I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi
Dance is a crucial yet largely unrecognized motif in I. J. Singer’s Yiddish-language family epic Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), which chronicles Jewish life in Lódz. In his famous article, “Mayufes: A Window on Polish-Jewish Relations,” Chone Shmeruk recounts how a Polish officer orders the brothers Max and Yakub Ashkenazi to dance a humiliating mayufes—Yakub resists, and the officer shoots him. Shmeruk claims Singer’s rendition is “perhaps the most poignant mayufes of all.” While this scene of forced dancing is arguably the best-known scene in the novel, this article approaches it in connection with an earlier transgressive mixed-sex wedding dance and demonstrates how dancing scenes in the novel juxtapose late nineteenth-century dreams of embourgeoisement with the reality of early twentieth-century antisemitism. As such, the dance floor both challenges and reifies power structures in the novel. What is more, these dance scenes take place at crucial moments in the plot, emphasizing the moments of rupture and reconciliation between the eponymous brothers and highlighting the physical contrast between cerebral striver Max and lusty, good-natured Yakub. By examining these seemingly disparate dance scenes, it is possible to gain a deeper perspective into the ways acculturation and antisemitism operate on the Polish-Jewish body.
Journal Article