Yiddish Empire

Yiddish Empire PDF Author: Debra Caplan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472037250
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Relates the untold story of a traveling Yiddish theater company and traces their far- reaching influence

Yiddish Empire

Yiddish Empire PDF Author: Debra Caplan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472037250
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
Relates the untold story of a traveling Yiddish theater company and traces their far- reaching influence

The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire

The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire PDF Author: Jeffrey A. Grossman
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130198
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts 1781 until the late nineteenth century. This book explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts from the onset of Jewish civil emancipation in the Germanies in 1781 until the late 19th century. Showing the various functions Yiddish assumedat this time, the study crosses traditional boundaries between literary and non-literary texts. It focuses on responses to Yiddish in genres of literature ranging from drama to language handbooks, from cultural criticism to the realist novel in order to address broader issues of literary representation and Jewish-German relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Professor Grossman shows how the emergence of attitudes toward Jews and Yiddish is directly related to linguistic theories and cultural ideologies that bear a complex relationship to the changing social and political institutions of the time. Amidst the rise of national ideologies and modern anti-Semitism, the increasing consolidation of institutions, and the drive to cultural homogeneity in the 18th- and 19th-century German context, Yiddish functioned as an anarchic element that, in the view of its opponents, "threatened" to dissolve German nationalculture. Grossman locates the response to Yiddish in the context of historical events (the Hep Hep Riots of 1819, the Revolution of 1848) and institutional changes (Jewish legal emancipation, the promotion of Bildung as an educational and cultural ideal). In its methodology and its focus, this study seeks to show how the conflicted responses to the Yiddish language point to the problems that connected and frequently divided Jews and Germans as they soughtto re-invent themselves for a new and unsettling context.

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater PDF Author: Alyssa Quint
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253038626
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

Yiddish Empire

Yiddish Empire PDF Author: Debra Caplan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472123688
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Yiddish Empire tells the story of how a group of itinerant Jewish performers became the interwar equivalent of a viral sensation, providing a missing chapter in the history of the modern stage. During World War I, a motley group of teenaged amateurs, impoverished war refugees, and out- of- work Russian actors banded together to revolutionize the Yiddish stage. Achieving a most unlikely success through their productions, the Vilna Troupe (1915– 36) would eventually go on to earn the attention of theatergoers around the world. Advancements in modern transportation allowed Yiddish theater artists to reach global audiences, traversing not only cities and districts but also countries and continents. The Vilna Troupe routinely performed in major venues that had never before allowed Jews, let alone Yiddish, upon their stages, and operated across a vast territory, a strategy that enabled them to attract unusually diverse audiences to the Yiddish stage and a precursor to the organizational structures and travel patterns that we see now in contemporary theater. Debra Caplan’s history of the Troupe is rigorously researched, employing primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, and is engagingly written.

Yiddish: Turning to Life

Yiddish: Turning to Life PDF Author: Joshua A. Fishman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027274304
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Worldwide interest in Yiddish has often concentrated on its secular forms of expression: its literature, its theater, its journalism and its political-party associations. This all-encompassing study, covers these phenomena as well as investigating the demographic and political mushrooming of Yiddish-speaking Ultra-Orthodoxy, both in America and in Israel. As the title suggests, this volume attempts to show that Yiddish is now finally on the path towards recovery. The volume consists of 17 papers grouped into five sections: Yiddish and Hebrew: Conflict and Symbiosis; Yiddish in America; Corpus Planning: The ability to change and grow; Status Planning: The Tshernovits Conference of 1908; Stock-taking: Where are we now? Each section is prefaced by an introduction. In addition there are also five papers written in Yiddish. The work emphasises an empirical and theoretical approach to the growing Ultra-Orthodox sector, that until now, has largely been ignored. Fishman's interest in Yiddish (among other Jewish languages) has previously been difficult to access and it is hoped that the appearance of this book will go some way toward alleviating this situation. The volume also includes a statistical appendix bringing together data on Yiddish for the past 100 years from the Czarist Empire, the USSR, Poland, Israel, the USA, and other parts of the world. This extensive and enlightening study should be of interest to sociolinguists and all those engaged in efforts on behalf of small languages everywhere.

Yiddish Civilisation

Yiddish Civilisation PDF Author: Paul Kriwaczek
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307430332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times

In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times PDF Author: David Stromberg
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 1524720356
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
You don't need to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread, nor do you need to read Yiddish to appreciate these wise tales. This engaging collection offers access to modern works--translated for the first time into English--for anyone who appreciates a well-told story rich with timeless wisdom. A year-round book for families. Includes a comprehensive introduction on Yiddish culture. Largely overlooked or forgotten, these hidden treasures from the early and middle twentieth century by some of the most respected Yiddish writers of their time—including Jacob Kreplak, Moyshe Nadir, and Rachel Shabad—remain surprisingly resonant for a contemporary audience. Folktales can be scary, as wrongdoers often get their comeuppance in unsuspected or even macabre ways, but the reinvigoration of values sometimes perceived as quaint makes for a stimulating read. In this collection you’ll meet a king who loves honey so much that instead of ruling over his people, he licks honey all day. You’ll ponder the conundrum of the moon, who longs for a playmate—but where to find a child who isn’t fast asleep at night? You’ll enter a forest in which the king of mushrooms and the queen of ants coexist autonomously but face the same threat: the little hands and trampling feet of children at play. And you’ll learn how flavoring food with the salt from tears can pose a challenging dilemma. "Collected and arranged with the lightest of touches by David Stromberg, this gathering of little-known Yiddish tales enchants with an always-new old-world magic. In the Land of Happy Tears is utterly and actively refreshing, for the wide-eyed child in every grownup and children wising up everywhere." —poet, translator, and MacArthur Prize winner Peter Cole

Yiddishkeit

Yiddishkeit PDF Author: Harvey Pekar
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1613122284
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A “fascinating and enlightening” collection of comics and writings that explore the Yiddish language and the Jewish experience (The Miami Herald). We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz, but how did they come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the far-reaching influences of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. This comics anthology contains original stories by such notable writers and artists as Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. Through illustrations, comics art, and a full-length play, four major themes are explored: culture, performance, assimilation, and the revival of the language. “The book is about what Neal Gabler in his introduction labels ‘Jewish sensibility.’...he writes: ‘You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.’ The book does this with gusto.” —TheNew York Times “As colorful, bawdy, and charming as the culture it seeks to represent.” —Print magazine “Brimming with the charm and flavor of its subject...a genuinely compelling, scholarly comics experience.” —Publishers Weekly “A book that truly informs about Jewish culture and, in the process, challenges readers to pick apart their own vocabulary.” —Chicago Tribune “A postvernacular tour de force.” —The Forward “With a loving eye Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history.” —Hadassah “Gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers.”––Tablet “Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely...because [it] is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.” —Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, from his introduction “A scrumptious smorgasbord of comics, essays, and illustrations...concentrated tastes, with historical context, of Yiddish theater, literature, characters and culture.” —Heeb magazine

Making Jews Modern

Making Jews Modern PDF Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253110794
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
On the eve of the 20th century, Jews in the Russian and Ottoman empires were caught up in the major cultural and social transformations that constituted modernity for Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewries, respectively. What language should Jews speak or teach their children? Should Jews acculturate, and if so, into what regional or European culture? What did it mean to be Jewish and Russian, Jewish and Ottoman, Jewish and modern? Sarah Abrevaya Stein explores how such questions were formulated and answered within these communities by examining the texts most widely consumed by Jewish readers: popular newspapers in Yiddish and Ladino. Examining the press's role as an agent of historical change, she interrogates a diverse array of verbal and visual texts, including cartoons, photographs, and advertisements. This original and lively study yields new perspectives on the role of print culture in imagining national and transnational communities; Stein's work enriches our sense of cultural life under the rule of multiethnic empires and complicates our understanding of Europe's polyphonic modernities.

American Yiddish Poetry

American Yiddish Poetry PDF Author: Barbara Harshav
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520328531
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 1092

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.