Download or read book Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature written by Jean Baumgarten and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-06-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Baumgarten's Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, thoroughly revised from the first edition and translated into English, provides students and scholars of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern European cultures with an exemplary survey of the broad and deep literary tradition in Yiddish. Baumgarten conceives of his work as the study of an entire culture via its literature, and thus he conceives of literature in a broad sense: he begins with four chapters addressing pertinent issues of the larger cultural context of the literature and moves on to a consideration of the primary genres in which the culture is expressed (epic, romance, prose narrative, drama, biblical translation and commentary, ethical and moral treatises, prayers, and the broad range of literature of daily use - medical, legal, and historical). In the field of early Yiddish studies the book will be the standard of intellectual breadth and scholarly excellence for decades to come. In this second edition, the hundreds of text citations and bibliographical references that are the scholarly basis of the study have been verified, and the citations translated anew directly from the original source.

Download or read book Three Cities of Yiddish written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume borrows its title from the first international Yiddish bestseller, Sholem Asch's epic trilogy Three Cities. It examines the variety of Yiddish publishing, educational, literary, academic, and theatrical activities in the former imperial metropolises from the late nineteenth through to the late twentieth century.

Download or read book History of the Yiddish Language written by Max Weinreich and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language is a classic of Yiddish scholarship and is the only comprehensive scholarly account of the Yiddish language from its origin to the present. A monumental, definitive work, History of the Yiddish Language demonstrates the integrity of Yiddish as a language, its evolution from other languages, its unique properties, and its versatility and range in both spoken and written form. Originally published in 1973 in Yiddish by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and partially translated in 1980, it is now being published in full in English for the first time. In addition to his text, Weinreich's copious references and footnotes are also included in this two-volume set.

Download or read book Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period written by Israel Zinberg and published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc.. This book was released on 1975 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories written by Sholem Aleichem and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

Download or read book Survivors and Exiles written by Jan Schwarz and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Holocaust’s near complete destruction of European Yiddish cultural centers, the Yiddish language was largely viewed as a remnant of the past, tragically eradicated in its prime. In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Jan Schwarz reveals that, on the contrary, Yiddish culture in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust was in dynamic flux. Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. Schwarz traces the transition from the Old World to the New through the works of seven major Yiddish writers—including well-known figures (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Avrom Sutzkever, Yankev Glatshteyn, and Chaim Grade) and some who are less well known (Leib Rochman, Aaron Zeitlin, and Chava Rosenfarb). The first section, Ground Zero, presents writings forged by the crucible of ghettos and concentration camps in Vilna, Lodz, and Minsk-Mazowiecki. Subsequent sections, Transnational Ashkenaz and Yiddish Letters in New York, examine Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain, in Israel and the Americas. Two appendixes list Yiddish publications in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum (published in Buenos Aires, 1946–66) and offer transliterations of Yiddish quotes. Survivors and Exiles charts a transnational post-Holocaust network in which the conflicting trends of fragmentation and globalization provided a context for Yiddish literature and artworks of great originality. Schwarz includes a wealth of examples and illustrations from the works under discussion, as well as photographs of creators, making this volume not only a critical commentary on Yiddish culture but also an anthology of sorts. Readers interested in Yiddish studies, Holocaust studies, and modern Jewish studies will find Survivors and Exiles a compelling contribution to these fields.

Download or read book Yiddishlands written by David G. Roskies and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 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.

Download or read book The Book Rescuer written by Sue Macy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of a Sydney Taylor Book Award for Younger Readers An ALA Notable Book A Bank Street Best Book of the Year “Text and illustration meld beautifully.” —The New York Times “Stunning.”​ —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Inspired...[a] journalistic, propulsive narrative.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The story comes alive through the bold acrylic and gouache art.” —Booklist (starred review) From New York Times Best Illustrated Book artist Stacy Innerst and author Sue Macy comes a story of one man’s heroic effort to save the world’s Yiddish books in their Sydney Taylor Book Award–winning masterpiece. Over the last forty years, Aaron Lansky has jumped into dumpsters, rummaged around musty basements, and crawled through cramped attics. He did all of this in pursuit of a particular kind of treasure, and he’s found plenty. Lansky’s treasure was any book written Yiddish, the language of generations of European Jews. When he started looking for Yiddish books, experts estimated there might be about 70,000 still in existence. Since then, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has collected close to 1.5 million books, and he’s finding more every day. Told in a folkloric voice reminiscent of Patricia Polacco, this story celebrates the power of an individual to preserve history and culture, while exploring timely themes of identity and immigration.

Download or read book Studies in Jewish and World Folklore written by Haim Schwarzbaum and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Anthology in Jewish Literature written by David Stern and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthology is a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature--arguably its oldest literary genre, going back to the Bible itself, and including nearly all the canonical texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, the Talmud, classical midrash, and the prayerbook. In the Middle Ages, the anthology became the primary medium in Jewish culture for recording stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts. In modernity, the genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, especially in works of the Zionist project and in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. No less importantly, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. This volume is the first book to bring together scholarly and critical essays that investigate the anthological character of these works and what might be called the "anthological habit" in Jewish literary culture--the tendency and proclivity for gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting traditions and stories, and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Indeed, The Anthology in Jewish Literature is the first book to recognize this habit and genre as one of the formative categories in Jewish literature and to investigate its manifold roles. The seventeen essays, each of which focuses on a specific literary work, many of them the great classics of Jewish tradition, consider such questions as: What are the many types of anthologies? How have anthologists, editors, even printers of anthologies been creative shapers of Jewish tradition and culture? What can we learn from their editorial practices? How have politics, gender, and class figured into the making of anthologies? What determinative role has the anthology played in creating the Jewish canon? How has the anthology served, especially in the modern period, to create and recreate Jewish culture. This landmark volume will interest educated laypersons as well as scholars in all areas of Jewish literature and culture, as well as students of world literature and cultural studies.

Download or read book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem written by Jeremy Dauber and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Jewish Encounters series The first comprehensive biography of one of the most beloved authors of all time: the creator of Tevye the Dairyman, the collection of stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers throughout the world with a fascinating window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of Tevye, Golde, Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl was Sholem Aleichem’s own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovich in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish, in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work throughout Europe and the United States, and his death in 1916 was front-page news around the world; a New York Times editorial mourned the loss of “the Jewish Mark Twain.” But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and to introduce his characters to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In Jeremy Dauber’s magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages. (With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

Download or read book Early Yiddish Epic written by Jerold C. Frakes and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike most other ancient European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean civilizations, Jewish culture surprisingly developed no early epic tradition: while the Bible comprises a broad range of literary genres, epic is not among them. Not until the late medieval period, Beginning in the fourteenth century, did an extensive and thriving epic tradition emerge in Yiddish. Among the few dozen extant early epics, there are several masterpieces, of which ten are translated into English in this volume. Divided between the religious and the secular, the book includes eight epics presented in their entirety, an illustrative excerpt from another epic, and a brief heroic prose tale.These texts have been chosen as the best and the most interesting representatives of the genre in terms of cultural history and literary quality: the pious “epicizing” of biblical narrative, the swashbuckling medieval courtly epic, Arthurian romance, heroic vignettes, intellectual high art, and popular camp.

Download or read book Modern Yiddish Verse written by Irving Howe and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 1987 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gift dedicated to Leonard Bernstein on his 70th birthday (1988). It was signed by the artist, Yossi Stern, and by Teddy Kollek. In addition to the numerous line drawings illustrating the poetry, Stern crafted an original book cover with a colorful drawing of a wedding scene.

Download or read book Music from a Speeding Train written by Harriet Murav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe—one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibrant Soviet Jewish culture that persisted beyond Stalinist oppression.

Download or read book Classic Yiddish Stories of S Y Abramovitsh Sholem Aleichem and I L Peretz written by Ken Frieden and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two novellas by S. Y. Abramovitsh open this collection of the best short works by three influential nineteenth-century Jewish authors. Abra- movitsh’s alter ego—Mendele the Book Peddler—introduces himself and narrates both The Little Man and Fishke the Lame. His cast of characters includes Isaac Abraham as tailor’s apprentice, choirboy, and corrupt businessman; Mendele’s friend Wine ’n’ Candles Alter; and Fishke, who travels through the Ukraine with a caravan of beggars. Sholem Aleichem’s lively stories reintroduce us to Tevye, the gregarious dairyman, as he describes the pleasures of raising his independent-minded daughters. These are followed by short monologues in which Aleichem gives voice to unforgettable characters from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side. Finally, I. L. Peretz’s neo-hasidic tales draw on hasidic traditions in the service of modern literature. These stories provide an unsentimental look back at Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Although nostalgia occasionally colors their prose, the writers were social critics who understood the shortcomings of shtetl life. For the general reader, these translations breathe new life into the extraordinary worlds of Yiddish literature. The introduction, glossary, and biographical essays contemporaneous to each author put those worlds into context, making the book indispensable to students and scholars of Yiddish culture.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 7 The Early Modern World 1500 1815 written by Jonathan Karp and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 1154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism provides an authoritative and detailed overview of early modern Jewish history, from 1500 to 1815. The essays, written by an international team of scholars, situate the Jewish experience in relation to the multiple political, intellectual and cultural currents of the period. They also explore and problematize the 'modernization' of world Jewry over this period from a global perspective, covering Jews in the Islamic world and in the Americas, as well as in Europe, with many chapters straddling the conventional lines of division between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi history. The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative work in this field currently available, this volume will serve as an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history.

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.