Yiddishland
Author: Gérard Silvain
Publisher: Gingko Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 596
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPostcards are used to tell the story of Jewish life in Poland and Russia in the early 20th century.
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Adventures in Yiddishland
Author: Jeffrey Shandler
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 0520244168
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Shandler takes a wide-ranging look at Yiddish culture, including language learning, literary translation, performance, and material culture. He examines children's books, board games, summer camps, klezmer music, cultural festivals, language clubs, Web sites, cartoons, and collectibles - all touchstones of the meaning of Yiddish as it enters its second millennium. Rather than mourn the language's demise, Adventures in Yiddishland calls for taking an expansive approach to the possibilities for the future of Yiddish. Shandler's conceptualization of postvernacularity sheds important new light on contemporary Jewish culture generally and offers insights into theorizing the relation between language and culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Yiddishlands
Author: David G. Roskies
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2008-07-24
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0814335446
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA renowned scholar looks back on his life and the life of his mother, tracing the Yiddish experience through major historical events of the last century. A rich, sweeping memoir by David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands proceeds from the premise that Yiddish culture is spread out among many different people and geographic areas and transmitted through story, song, study, and the family. Roskies leads readers through Yiddishlands old and new by revisiting his personal and professional experiences and retelling his remarkable family saga in a series of lively, irreverent, and interwoven stories. Beginning with a flashback to his grandmother’s storybook wedding in 1878, Yiddishlands brings to life the major debates, struggles, and triumphs of the modern Yiddish experience, and provides readers with memorable portraits of its great writers, cultural leaders, and educators. Roskies’s story centers around Vilna, Lithuania, where his mother, Masha, was born in 1906 and where her mother, Fradl Matz, ran the legendary Matz Press, a publishing house that distributed prayer books, Bibles, and popular Yiddish literature. After falling in love with Vilna’s cabaret culture, an older man, and finally a fellow student with elbow patches on his jacket, Masha and her young family are forced to flee Europe for Montreal, via Lisbon and New York. It is in Montreal that Roskies, Masha’s youngest child, comes of age, entranced by the larger-than-life stories of his mother and the writers, artists, and performers of her social circle. Roskies recalls his own intellectual odyssey as a Yiddish scholar; his life in the original Havurah religious commune in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the 1970s; his struggle with the notion of aliyah while studying in Israel; his visit to Russia at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement; and his confrontation with his parents’ memories in a bittersweet pilgrimage to Poland. Along the way, readers of Yiddishlands meet such prominent figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Melekh Ravitch, Itsik Manger, Avrom Sutzkever, Esther Markish, and Rachel Korn. With Yiddishlands, readers take a whirlwind tour of modern Yiddish culture, from its cabarets and literary salons to its fierce ideological rivalries and colorful personalities. Roskies’s memoir will be essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past and of the living Yiddish present.
Recovering "Yiddishland"
Author: Merle L. Bachman
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2008-01-17
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 9780815631514
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAccording to traditional narratives of assimilation, in the bargain made for an American identity, Jews freely surrendered Yiddish language and culture. Or did they? Recovering "Yiddishland" seeks to “return” readers to a threshold where Americanization also meant ambivalence and resistance. It reconstructs “Yiddishland” as a cultural space produced by Yiddish immigrant writers from the 1890s through the 1930s, largely within the sphere of New York. Rejecting conventional literary history, the book spotlights “threshold texts” in the unjustly forgotten literary project of these writers—texts that reveal unexpected and illuminating critiques of Americanization. Merle Lyn Bachman takes a fresh look at Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts, tracing in them a re-inscription of the Yiddish world that various characters seem to be committed to leaving behind. She also translates for the first time Yiddish poems featuring African-Americans that reflect the writers’ confrontation with their passage, as Jews, into “white” identities. Finally, Bachman discusses the modernist poet Mikhl Likht, whose simultaneous embrace of American literature and resistance to assimilating into English marked him as the supreme “threshold” poet. Conscious of the risks of any postmodern—“post-assimilation”—attempt to recover the past, Bachman invents the figure of “the Yiddish student,” whose comments can reflect—and keep in check—the nostalgia and naivete of the returnee to Yiddish.
Socialist Yiddishlands
Author: Miriam Chorley-Schulz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2024-11-12
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 3110764091
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter the khurbn (destruction) perpetrated by Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators, the Yiddish communities in Eastern Europe were shattered and largely decimated. For most survivors, the old homeland in the East was a lost place of longing and a place of mere transit to the centers of the reconfiguring ‘West’: in North America, the global South, and the young state of Israel. Research has for the most part ignored the cultural activities, the political engagement, and the diverse visions of those cultural activists who remained in Eastern Europe in their thousands. This volume examines their activities as well as the role of and language policy regarding Yiddish in various socialist states, as well as trans-socialist and cross-bloc dialogues during the "Yiddish Cold War." How did the actors position themselves within socialist narratives of the past, present, and future and vis-à-vis the Jewish diasporas? What were their visions for Yiddishlands in the new world of really-existing socialism and how did they attempt to implement them? In this volume, case studies on Poland, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and Romania uncover diverse cultural reconstruction initiatives and cross-bloc entanglements with ‘Western’ countries, such as Great Britain, the United States, Argentina, and Israel.
YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-04-21
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 1139867385
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is the first history of YIVO, the original center for Yiddish scholarship. Founded by a group of Eastern European intellectuals after World War I, YIVO became both the apex of secular Yiddish culture and the premier institution of Diaspora Nationalism, which fought for Jewish rights throughout the world at a time of rising anti-Semitism. From its headquarters in Vilna, Lithuania, YIVO tried to balance scholarly objectivity with its commitment to the Jewish masses. Using newly recovered documents that were believed destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, Cecile Esther Kuznitz tells for the first time the compelling story of how these scholars built a world-renowned institution despite dire poverty and anti-Semitism. She raises new questions about the relationship between Jewish cultural and political work, and analyzes how nationalism arises outside of state power.
Jewish Radicals
Author: Tony Michels
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2012-07-09
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 0814763456
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Cover Design Jewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.
Yiddish
Author: Jeffrey Shandler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0190651962
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--
A Fire in Their Hearts
Author: Tony Michels
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-04-15
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9780674040991
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.
Yiddish Paris
Author: Nick Underwood
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2022-03
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 025305981X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKYiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.
