Download or read book The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin written by Ala Zuskin Perelman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described by theater critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime’s effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater—throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49)—maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members. Zuskin Perelman’s fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period’s most influential cultural icons.
Download or read book Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater written by Susan Tumarkin Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Jewish theater in a world of moral compromise / Susan Tumarkin Goodman -- The political context of Jewish theater and culture in the Soviet Union / Zvi Gitelman -- Habima and "Biblical theater" / Vladislav Ivanov -- Yiddish constructivism : the art of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater / Jeffrey Veidlinger -- Art and theater / Benjamin Harshav -- Habima and Goset : an illustrated chronicle
Download or read book Benjamin Fondane s Ulysses written by and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1923, when he emigrated from Bucharest, to his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Fondane made a unique and independent-minded contribution to the literary and intellectual life of Paris. One of the most significant pieces in Fondane’s body of work is the long poem Ulysses, first published in 1933. Fondane considerably revised his text during the dark years of occupied Paris, and it is this second “edition without an end,” left unfinished at the time of his deportation, that is translated here. It is a moving testament to the poetic voice and philosophical engagement of this exceptional figure of the Paris avant-garde.
Download or read book People Love Dead Jews Reports from a Haunted Present written by Dara Horn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity. Now including a reading group guide.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre written by Laurence Senelick and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A latecomer continually hampered by government control and interference, the Russian theatre seems an unlikely source of innovation and creativity. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had given rise to a number of outstanding playwrights and actors, and by the start of the twentieth century, it was in the vanguard of progressive thinking in the realms of directing and design. Its influence throughout the world was pervasive: Nikolai Gogol', Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gor'kii remain staples of repertories in every language, the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Vsevolod Meierkhol'd and Mikhail Chekhov continue to inspire actors and directors, while designers still draw on the graphics of the World of Art group and the Constructivists. What distinguishes Russian theater from almost any other is the way in which these achievements evolved and survived in ongoing conflict or cooperation with the State. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre covers the history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on individual actors, directors, designers, entrepreneurs, plays, playhouses and institutions, Censorship, Children’s Theater, Émigré Theater, and Shakespeare in Russia. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Theatre.
Download or read book When Sonia Met Boris written by Anna Shternshis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Jews lived through a record number of traumatic events: the Great Terror, World War II, the Holocaust, the Famine of 1947, the Doctors' Plot, the antisemitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Anna Shternshis unearths their everyday life and the difficult choices that they were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Drawing on nearly 500 interviews with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s, When Sonia Met Boris describes both indirect Soviet control mechanisms?such as housing policies and unwritten quotas in educational institutions?and personal strategies to overcome, ignore, or even take advantage of those limitations. The interviews reveal how ethnicity was rapidly transformed into a negative characteristic, almost a disability, for Soviet Jewry in the postwar period. Ultimately, Shternshis shows, after decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a complex sense of Jewish identity, but one that fully disassociates Jewishness from Judaism and instead associates it with secular society, prioritizing chess over Talmud, classical music over Hasidic tunes. Gracefully weaving together poignant stories, intimate reflections, and witty anecdotes, When Sonia Met Boris traces the unusual contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to its roots.
Download or read book Me r Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction written by David Gantt Gurley and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction presents a bold new reading of one of Denmark’s greatest writers of the nineteenth century, situating him, first and foremost, as a Jewish artist. Offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, Gurley examines Goldschmidt’s relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinical traditions, such as the Talmud and the Midrash. At the same time, he shows that Goldschmidt’s midrashic style in a secular context predates certain narrative movements within Modern-ism that are usually associated with the twentieth century and especially Czech writer Franz Kafka. Goldschmidt was remarkable in his era, both as a writer who explored his peripheral identity in the mainstream of European culture and as a writer of the first truly Jewish bildungsroman. In this groundbreaking study of Goldschmidt’s narrative art, Gurley refashions his position in both the Danish and Jewish literary canons and introduces his extraordinary work to a wider, non-Scandinavian audience.
Download or read book Lingering Bilingualism written by Naomi Brenner and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a famous comment made by the poet Chayim Nachman Bialik, Hebrew—the language of the Jewish religious and intellectual tradition—and Yiddish—the East European Jewish vernacular—were “a match made in heaven that cannot be separated.” That marriage, so the story goes, collapsed in the years immediately preceding and following World War I. But did the “exes” really go their separate ways? Lingering Bilingualism argues that the interwar period represents not an endpoint but rather a new phase in Hebrew-Yiddish linguistic and literary contact. Though the literatures followed different geographic and ideological paths, their writers and readers continued to interact in places like Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York—and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Brenner traces a shift from traditional bilingualism to a new translingualism in response to profound changes in Jewish life and culture. By foregrounding questions of language, she examines both the unique literary-linguistic circumstances of Ashkenazi Jewish writing and the multilingualism that can lurk within national literary canons.
Download or read book My Blue Piano written by Else Lasker-Schüler and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was born into an affluent German Jewish family. Following the death of her parents and the dissolution of her marriage, the fledgling poet became notorious in the fashionable cafés of Berlin for appearing in costume as a Persian girl or as an Egyptian boy. Her flamboyance was echoed in her poetry, which combined the sexual with the religious in its exploration of the ecstatic experience. Critics have long dismissed her poetry as decadent in its romantic use of references to moonlight, flowers, and woodland creatures. In his introduction, Haxton addresses such criticism by arguing that what others have termed kitsch and cliché in Lasker-Schüler’s poetry may be understood more fully as a kind of iconoclasm, like that of her Expressionist contemporaries, and as an authentic expression of emotional tenderness. Her poetry also resonates with the cultural moment of Sarah Bernhardt’s gender-bending stage performances and Freud’s sexual interpretations of the subconscious. The poems collected in this bilingual volume represent the full range of Lasker-Schüler’s work, from her earliest poems until her death. Haxton’s translation embraces the poems’ lyrical imagery, remaining faithful to the poet’s vision while also capturing the cadence and rhythms of the poetry.
Download or read book Literary Hasidism written by Jonatan Meir and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845–1904) was a journalist, author, and publisher whose literary projects spanned numerous countries and continents. Hero to some and scoundrel to others, Rodkinson was a polemical figure whose beliefs underwent many transformations over the course of his life, most significantly from Hasidism to combative Haskalah to eventually anticipating the neo-Romantic trends of the early twentieth century. Throughout his career, Rodkinson’s writing challenged the familiar genres of the literature of Hasidism and the Haskalah, shaping the religious realities of his readers and articulating a spiritual and community life among Jews, who took his ideas to heart in surprising ways. Today, Rodkinson is frequently referred to as a minor Hasidic author and publisher, a characterization based on the criticism of his opponents rather than on his writings. In Literary Hasidism, Meir draws upon those writings and their reception to present a completely different picture of this colorful and influential writer. Examining Rodkinson’s lifelong role as a catalyzing agent of different cultural phenomena, his diverse publishing activities, and his writings in their respective stages, Meir grants readers a provocative new vantage point from which to consider this divisive, enigmatic figure.
Download or read book Red Shoes for Rachel written by Boris Sandler and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Shoes for Rachel, Sandler’s award-winning collection of three novellas, features tightly wound tales that seamlessly incorporate diverse genres, including magic realism, satire, and autobiography, and profound psychological profiles to create touching portrayals of the human experience. Zumoff’s translation of Sandler’s original Yiddish collection makes the J. I. Segal Award–winning volume available to English readers for the first time. In the collection’s eponymous novella, Rachel, a daughter of Holocaust survivors raised in Brighton Beach, encounters a Moldovan Jewish immigrant divorcee as she is tending to her disabled, elderly mother along the Coney Island boardwalk. As the two begin a relationship, the story reveals their past and the commonalities between two children of Holocaust survivors raised in very different societies. In the novella Karolina Bugaz, an exhausted Moldovan Jewish immigrant architect leaves his wife and newly religious son behind to go on a cruise to a mysterious island, which may just be a direct voyage through space and time into his past. In the volume’s most acclaimed story, Halfway Down the Road Back to You, an elderly Moldovan Holocaust survivor in Israel separated from her children by emigration must confront her past as her failing mind begins to blur the boundaries between her daily life and the horrors of war sixty years before. The novella was adapted by the author into an acclaimed play, which has been staged in the United States, Belgium, and France.
Download or read book Pioneers written by S. An-sky and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what’s in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil’s messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man’s attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shtetl on the brink of transformation.
Download or read book Vilna My Vilna written by Abraham Karpinowitz and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004) was born in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), the city that serves as both the backdrop and the central character for his stories. He survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and, after two years in an internment camp on the island of Cyprus, moved to Israel, where he lived until his death. In this collection, Karpinowitz portrays, with compassion and intimacy, the dreams and struggles of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of his native city before the Holocaust. His stories provide an affectionate and vivid portrait of poor working women and men, like fishwives, cobblers, and barbers, and people who made their living outside the law, like thieves and prostitutes. This collection also includes two stories that function as intimate memoirs of Karpinowitz’s childhood growing up in his father’s Vilna Yiddish theater. Karpinowitz wrote his stories and memoirs in Yiddish, preserving the particular language of Vilna’s lower classes. In this graceful translation, Mintz deftly preserves this colorful, often idiomatic Yiddish, capturing Karpinowitz’s unique voice and rendering a long-vanished world for English-language readers.
Download or read book Bridging the Divide written by Sharon Hart-Green and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised in a Ladino-speaking family of Bulgarian Jewish immigrants, Pinhas-Cohen fuses the ancient Sephardic chant of her childhood with the contemporary rhythm of Israeli life. This singular talent for bridging the ancient and the modern sets her apart from most other Hebrew poets of her generation. Secular in style and spirit, yet rooted in the life cycle of religious Judaism, Pinhas-Cohen’s poems portray everyday life in modern Israel through a sacred yet personal language. Awarded the coveted Prime Minister’s Prize for her poetry, Pinhas-Cohen is a poet whose verse in English translation is long overdue. This bilingual collection offers readers a careful selection of poems from each of her seven published volumes. Hart-Green has worked closely with the poet herself on these translations, several of which have appeared in journals such as the Jewish Quarterly and the Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought. Her lively translations display the dazzling breadth and depth of Pinhas-Cohen’s oeuvre, making Bridging the Divide not only the first but the definitive English-language edition of this vital Hebrew poet’s work.
Download or read book Yiddish Empire written by Debra Caplan and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates the untold story of a traveling Yiddish theater company and traces their far- reaching influence
Download or read book The Moscow Yiddish Theater written by Benjamin Harshav and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid portrait of the Moscow Yiddish Theater and its innovations and contributions to the art of the theater in the modern age The Moscow Yiddish Theater (later called GOSET) was born in 1919 and almost immediately became one of the most remarkable avant-garde theaters in Europe. It flourished in the 1920s but under Bolshevik pressure soon lost much of the originality that had distinguished it. In 1948 Stalin's henchmen slaughtered GOSET's legendary actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, and the theater was liquidated. This book focuses not on how the theater was persecuted but on its ambitious beginnings as a revolutionary organization of passionate artistic exploration. The book brings to English readers for the first time selected writings that reflect the aesthetics and politics of the Yiddish revolutionary theater. The book also incorporates miraculously salvaged images of Marc Chagall's famous theater murals, as well as paintings of costumes and stage sets created by the best artists of the day. These illustrations, discovered only after the fall of the Soviet Union, have never been published before. With emphasis on the theater's early achievements and its centrality in Moscow's burgeoning theater world, the book makes a major contribution to the understanding of modern Jewish culture and the art of theater.
Download or read book Jews in the Soviet Union A History written by Oleg Budnitskii and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s. Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community. Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.
