Download or read book Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin written by Marc Caplan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Yiddish in Weimar Berlin written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."
Download or read book Strangers in Berlin written by Rachel Seelig and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berlin in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan hub where for a brief, vibrant moment German-Jewish writers crossed paths with Hebrew and Yiddish migrant writers. Working against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study, Strangers in Berlin is the first book to present Jewish literature in the Weimar Republic as the product of the dynamic encounter between East and West. Whether they were native to Germany or sojourners from abroad, Jewish writers responded to their exclusion from rising nationalist movements by cultivating their own images of homeland in verse, and they did so in three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Author Rachel Seelig portrays Berlin during the Weimar Republic as a “threshold” between exile and homeland in which national and artistic commitments were reexamined, reclaimed, and rebuilt. In the pulsating yet precarious capital of Germany’s first fledgling democracy, the collision of East and West engendered a broad spectrum of poetic styles and Jewish national identities.
Download or read book Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin written by Marc Caplan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Three Way Street written by Jay Howard Geller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture
Download or read book The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century written by Leo Wiener and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writer on the Run written by Ena Pedersen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first academic treatment of the life and work of the German-Jewish writer, Henry William Katz (1906-1992), who was exiled from Nazi Germany in 1933. From a combined literary, historical, biographical and sociological perspective, Ena Pedersen analyses Katz's depiction of the Eastern European Jews in Galicia, Weimar Germany and in exile, focusing on the problems of anti-Semitism, assimilation, German-Jewish symbiosis, and Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Narratorial technique and structuring principles of his works are examined carefully as is the development of themes and characters from his early journalism through to his later fiction. The book further contains the first biography of Katz's life, based on interviews with friends and relatives of Katz in Germany, France and the USA, as well as an analysis of his journalistic articles and political engagement with the SPD in the context of the crisis of left-wing journalism towards the end of the Weimar Republic. Through comparisons with contemporary Weimar journalists such as Alfred Polgar and Kurt Tucholsky, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish writers in exile such as Joseph Roth, Martin Beradt, Lion Feuchtwanger and Ernst Glaeser, Katz is placed within the body of Weimar journalism, German exile literature, and Jewish ghetto literature. Through her analysis of his works, Ena Pedersen shows how Katz conforms to the patterns of German-Jewish exile literature yet stands out from his contemporaries through his focus on the Eastern European Jews, describing in a uniquely personal and yet often sarcastic and critical way the particular concerns and dilemmas of this minority within the German-Jewish community at the time.
Download or read book From Kabbalah to Class Struggle written by Mikhail Krutikov and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.
Download or read book The Zelmenyaners written by Moyshe Kulbak and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “masterpiece” of a comic novel following four generations of a Jewish family in Minsk torn asunder by the new Soviet reality (Forward). This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.
Download or read book German as a Jewish Problem written by Marc Volovici and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews, representing different—often conflicting—historical currents. It was the language of the German classics, of German Jewish writers and scientists, of Central European Jewish culture, and of Herzl and the Zionist movement. But it was also the language of Hitler, Goebbels, and the German guards in Nazi concentration camps. The crucial role of German in the formation of Jewish national culture and politics in the late nineteenth century has been largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events that befell Jews under Nazi rule. German as a Jewish Problem tells the Jewish history of the German language, focusing on Jewish national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Palestine/Israel. Marc Volovici considers key writers and activists whose work reflected the multilingual nature of the Jewish national sphere and the centrality of the German language within it, and argues that it is impossible to understand the histories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish without situating them in relation to German. This book offers a new understanding of the language problem in modern Jewish history, turning to German to illuminate the questions and dilemmas that largely defined the experience of European Jews in the age of nationalism.
Download or read book Passing Illusions written by Kerry Wallach and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach outlines the key elements of visibility, invisibility, and the ways Jewishness was detected and presented through a broad selection of historical sources including periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents, as well as cultural texts including works of fiction, anecdotes, images, advertisements, performances, and films. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (photographs, works of art, cartoons, advertisements, film stills) complement the book’s analysis of visual culture.
Download or read book Diasporic Modernisms written by Allison Schachter and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers--S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, and others--who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Download or read book How Strange the Change written by Marc Caplan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.
Download or read book The Holocaust the Exile of Yiddish written by Barry Trachtenberg and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.
Download or read book The History of Yiddish Literature written by Leo Wiener and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUGGESTION to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898. At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies, the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be constructed.
Download or read book The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany written by Michael Brenner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Jewish participation in German society increased after World War I, Jews did not completely assimilate into that society. In fact, says Michael Brenner in this intriguing book, the Jewish population of Weimar Germany became more aware of its Jewishness and created new forms of German-Jewish culture in literature, music, fine arts, education, and scholarship. Brenner presents the first in-depth study of this culture, drawing a fascinating portrait of people in the midst of redefining themselves. The Weimar Jews chose neither a radical break with the past nor a return to the past but instead dressed Jewish traditions in the garb of modern forms of cultural expression. Brenner describes, for example, how modern translations made classic Jewish texts accessible, Jewish museums displayed ceremonial artifacts in a secular framework, musical arrangements transformed synagogue liturgy for concert audiences, and popular novels recalled aspects of the Jewish past. Brenner's work, while bringing this significant historical period to life, illuminates contemporary Jewish issues. The preservation and even enhancement of Jewish distinctiveness, combined with the seemingly successful participation of Jews in a secular, non-Jewish society, offer fresh insight into modern questions of Jewish existence, identity, and integration into other cultures.
Download or read book An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature written by Joseph Leftwich and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-03-18 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature".
