Author: Harriet Murav
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.
Author: Joseph Sherman
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1905981120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
Among the finest prose stylists in Yiddish literature, David Bergelson (1884-1952) was caught up in many of the twentieth century's most defining events. In 1909 he emerged as a pioneer of modernist prose, observing the slow decay of the Tsarist empire. In 1917 he welcomed the Revolution, but the bloodshed of the ensuing Civil War and the dogmatism of the Bolsheviks drove him to emigration. For more than a decade (1921-1934), he lived in Weimar Germany, travelling extensively in Europe and the United States. Shocked by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, disheartened by the decline of Yiddish culture in the West, and inspired by Soviet promises to create a Jewish republic, Bergelson became a Communist sympathiser and moved towards socialist realism. Returning to the Soviet Union after Hitler's rise to power, Bergelson flourished in a state-sponsored cultural environment in which his work was widely read both in Yiddish and in Russian translation. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Bergelson became a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, writing extensively about the Holocaust. In the paranoia of the Cold War years, the Stalinist regime accused him of anti-Soviet activities and, after a secret military trial he was executed on 12 August 1952, his 68th birthday.For years, critics have argued that Bergelson produced his best work before the Revolution, and afterwards largely wrote Communist propaganda. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism challenges this view by examining Bergelson's entire oeuvre. The book argues that Bergelson continually reinvented himself as a writer, experimenting with style and narrative technique even under the most severe restrictions of Party dogma. With contributions from an international team of Bergelson experts, the volume offers a full-length biography, the first complete bibliography of Bergelson's work, translations of two of his most influential programmatic articles, and a range of essays dealing with all periods of the writer's life.With the contributions:Joseph Sherman — David Bergelson (1884–1952): A BiographyLev Bergelson — Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934)Daniela Mantovan — Language and Style in Nokh alemen (1913): Bergelson's Debt to FlaubertKerstin Hoge — For Children and Adults Alike: Reading Bergelson's 'Children's Stories' (1914–1919) as Narratives of Identity FormationSeth L. Wolitz — Yoysef Shor (1922): Between Two WorldsSasha Senderovich — In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees (1928)Mikhail Krutikov — Narrating the Revolution: From 'Tsugvintn' (1922) to Mides-hadin (1929)Ellen Kellman — Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson's Years at Forverts (1922–1926)Gennady Estraikh — David Bergelson in and on America (1929–1949)Ber Boris Kotlerman — 'Why I am in Favour of Birobidzhan': Bergelson's Fateful Decision (1932)Harriet Murav — Memory and Monument in Baym Dnyepr (1932–1940)David Shneer — From Mourning to Vengeance: Bergelson's Holocaust Journalism (1941–1945)Jeffrey Veidlinger — 'Du lebst, mayn folk': Bergelson's Play Prints Ruveni in Historical Context (1944–1947)Joseph Sherman — 'Jewish Nationalism' in Bergelson's Last Book (1947)Roberta Saltzman — A Bibliography of David Bergelson's Work in Yiddish and EnglishDavid Bergelson — Appendix A. Belles-lettres and the Social Order (1919)David Bergelson — Appendix B. Three Centres (Characteristics) (1926)
Author: Megan Abbott
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
ISBN: 0316175099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
From the award-winning author of The Turnout and Dare Me: a "mesmerizing psychological thriller" about a teenage girl who disappears during a 1980s suburban summer (Los Angeles Times). Thirteen-year old Lizzie Hood and her next door neighbor Evie Verver are inseparable. They are best friends who swap bathing suits and field-hockey sticks, and share everything that's happened to them. Together they live in the shadow of Evie's glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides a window on the exotic, intoxicating possibilities of their own teenage horizons. To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie's big-hearted father, is the world's most perfect place. And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the Midwestern suburban community, everyone looks to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger? Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth, prowling nights through backyards, peering through windows, pushing herself to the dark center of Evie's world. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power at the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secrets and lies that make her wonder if she knew her best friend at all.
Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805242465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)
Author: David Bergelson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals. Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry—confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.
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
Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815603306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
This exposition of writer S. Y. Abramovitsh explores the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the nineteenth century.
Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253051975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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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.
Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814318492
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting--the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic--the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost. In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.
Author:
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815604020
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
The writings of David Bergelson—virtually unknown to readers in the United States—are now available in this exciting collection. Composed of two short stories and a novella, this volume brings to life Bergelson's rich, elegiac prose. Golda Werman's highly literate translation perfectly captures his elusive literary style. Bergelson's writings evoke the declining world of small-town Eastern European Jews. His world captures the dreariness of the uncommitted life. His characters are cast adrift in a society whose traditions are coming unhinged by powerful modernist forces. In her Introduction Werman offers readers an engaging and tragic portrait of Bergelson, who was arrested on orders from Stalin and died in a prison camp in 1952.
