A Traveler Disguised

A Traveler Disguised PDF Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
In an exposition of writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, this work shows the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and explores the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the 19th century.

A Traveler Disguised

A Traveler Disguised PDF Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
In an exposition of writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, this work shows the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and explores the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the 19th century.

Travels in Translation

Travels in Translation PDF Author: Ken Frieden
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653646
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book Here

Book Description
For centuries before its “rebirth” as a spoken language, Hebrew writing was like a magical ship in a bottle that gradually changed design but never voyaged out into the world. Isolated, the ancient Hebrew ship was torpid because the language of the Bible was inadequate to represent modern life in Europe. Early modern speakers of Yiddish and German gave Hebrew the breath of life when they translated dialogues, descriptions, and thought processes from their vernaculars into Hebrew. By narrating tales of pilgrimage and adventure, Jews pulled the ship out of the bottle and sent modern Hebrew into the world. In Travels in Translation, Frieden analyzes this emergence of modern Hebrew literature after 1780, a time when Jews were moving beyond their conventional Torah- and Zion-centered worldview. Enlightened authors diverged from pilgrimage narrative traditions and appropriated travel narratives to America, the Pacific, and the Arctic. The effort to translate sea travel stories from European languages—with their nautical terms, wide horizons, and exotic occurrences—made particular demands on Hebrew writers. They had to overcome their tendency to introduce biblical phrases at every turn in order to develop a new, vivid, descriptive language. As Frieden explains through deft linguistic analysis, by 1818, a radically new travel literature in Hebrew had arisen. Authors such as Moses Mendelsohn-Frankfurt and Mendel Lefin published books that charted a new literary path through the world and in European history. Taking a fresh look at the origins of modern Jewish literature, Frieden launches a new approach to literary studies, one that lies at the intersection of translation studies and travel writing.

The Jews of Odessa

The Jews of Odessa PDF Author: Steven J. Zipperstein
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination

The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination PDF Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815628583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
While A Traveler Disguised focused on the rhetoric of the speaking voice or the persona in these classics, the nine essays gathered here concentrate on the artistic reconstruction of the "world" conveyed by that persona. As much as the earlier volume put to rest the conventional understanding of "Mendele the Book-Peddler" as a mere representative of the author, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, this book invalidates the common views of the literary shtetl as a mere mimetic reflection of the historical Jewish shtetl of Eastern Europe and examines its structure as an autonomous aesthetic construct. These essays dwell particularly on the fictional modalities displayed in some of Sholem Aleichem's major works. They also offer innovative insights into the works of both earlier and later masters such as A. M. Dik, Y. Aksenfeld, Y .Y. Linetski and Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Y. L. Peretz, I. M. Vaysenberg, Sh. Asch, D. Bergelson, and I. B. Singer.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Benjamin Schreier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

Never Say Die!

Never Say Die! PDF Author: Joshua A. Fishman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110820803
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 780

Get Book Here

Book Description
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Yiddish

Yiddish PDF Author: Joshua A. Fishman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027220751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Get Book Here

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.

Czernowitz at 100

Czernowitz at 100 PDF Author: Joshua A. Fogel
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073914071X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Czernowitz at 100 represents a collection based on the proceedings of a 2008 international conference convened at York University in Toronto. Each chapter looks back at a portion over a long century, one marked with the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews across the globe, two world wars, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, and the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc. They assess the achievements and fate of those who participated in the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference that was held at Czernowitz, now known as Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Featuring contributions from a new generation of scholars re-examining eastern European Jewish life, the successes and failures of the Yiddishist movement are examined. The contributors discuss how Yiddishism_a fascinating example of language-based nationalism_shaped the political and cultural landscape of territorially dispersed Jews across Eastern Europe and the world during the twentieth century.

Rewriting Russia

Rewriting Russia PDF Author: Barbara J. Henry
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801476
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most successful and scandalous dramas--The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan--were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia PDF Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611684552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 665

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.