Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin PDF Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253051991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
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.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin PDF Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253051991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Passing Illusions

Passing Illusions PDF Author: Kerry Wallach
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472053574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Challenges the notion that Weimar Jews sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by "passing" as non-Jews

Strangers in Berlin

Strangers in Berlin PDF Author: Rachel Seelig
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Insightful look at the interactions between German and migrant Jewish writers and the creative spectrum of Jewish identity

Yiddish in Weimar Berlin

Yiddish in Weimar Berlin PDF Author: Gennady Estraikh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351193651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
"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."

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle PDF Author: Mikhail Krutikov
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477725X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
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.

German as a Jewish Problem

German as a Jewish Problem PDF Author: Marc Volovici
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503613100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
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.

Three-Way Street

Three-Way Street PDF Author: Jay Howard Geller
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture

How Strange the Change

How Strange the Change PDF Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804782555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
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.

Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures

Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900443528X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In the past years, reflections on Jewish literatures and theoretical and methodological approaches discussed in Comparative Literature have converged. Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures. Transfer, Mediality and Situativity brings together close readings and contextualizations of Jewish literatures with theories discussed in Comparative and World Literature Studies. The contributions are arranged in five chapters capturing central processes, actors and dynamics in the making of literatures, namely Literary Agents, Literary Figures, Writing Voids, Making of Literatures and Perceiving and Creating Languages. The volume seeks to illuminate the interrelations between literary systems, and to highlight Jewish literatures as a prism for encounters on the levels of text, discourse and culture, and their transformative force.

All My Young Years

All My Young Years PDF Author: Abraham Nahum Stencl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
"Weimar Berlin was the home of many poets, revolutionaries and dreamers who frequented the Romanische Cafe. These included AN Stencl (1897-1983) who arrived in Britain from Germany in 1936. His poetry was admired by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig, among others, and published in Yiddish and German. Stencl settled in London where he founded the literary journal Loshn un lebn (Language and Life) which he edited until his death." "This collection includes selections from two of Stencl's poem sequences from his Berlin years - Un du bist Got And you are God) and Fisherdorf (Fishing Village), in turn Expressionist and pastoral. Heather Valencia contributes a biographical essay on the author's life in Berlin and London." "Stencl's poems are printed in Yiddish, with English translations by Haike Beruriah Wiegand and Stephen Watts. The book is completed by a short memoir of Stencl by East London historian William J. Fishman, and a concluding family memoir by Miriam Becker." --Book Jacket.