Elements of yiddish style : sensibility in the late Soviet Union in comparative perspective
Keywords: Ilchuk, Yuliya degree committee member.
Slavic Languages and Literatures.

"Elements of Yiddish Style: Sensibility in the Late Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective" addresses the ways in which Soviet artists made strategic use of a certain kind of Yiddish speech style in Russian-language literature and performance in the 1960s and 1970s. Further, it explores how a parallel style is detectable in English-language American texts of the same era, and it shows how this secular but still identifiably Jewish style contributed to a larger postwar sensibility that was accessible and appealing to Jews and non-Jews in both places. As a literary history of this historical phenomenon, "Elements of Yiddish Style" begins with two paradoxes. First, according to most scholarship, Yiddish literature, theater, and song flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s as part of a state-sponsored effort to fashion a modern, secular Jewish public that was integrated into Soviet society. World War II, the assassination of actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, and the murder of five prominent Yiddish poets in 1952 marked the effective end of Yiddish literature and Jewish public culture. This narrative suggests that free artistic production in Yiddish for a sizeable audience in the Soviet Union was all but terminated. However, examination of artistic production from the 1960s and 1970s reveals that a certain kind of Yiddish-linked Jewish artistic style thrived after the death of Stalin despite these violent ruptures. This style continued to develop throughout the second half of the twentieth century and diffuse throughout Soviet culture. It is visible in writing in Yiddish, but it was especially influential and accessible in Russian translations of Yiddish and in Russian works with Yiddish interjections and other elements of a Jewish verbal repertoire. It appealed to an ethnically diverse audience and can be observed both in sophisticated texts composed for an elite audience and in highly popular songs, films, and children's books. "Elements of Yiddish Style" tells the story of this style and the larger aesthetic sensibility of which it was a part. Second, postwar Soviet and American Jewish experiences are often assumed to be very different. Broadly stated, scholarly narratives have focused on limited access to Jewish culture in the Soviet Union and on Jewish assimilation into the middle class in the United States. However, the particular kind of Jewish language and style that I identify can be observed in Soviet and American texts of the same postwar era. While acknowledging the specificity of each artist and his context, this dissertation also asks what can be made of the presence of this Jewish style as an element of major-language art in both places and across media and levels of sophistication, and it seeks to identify the reigning discourses that can explain the common appetite for Jewish speech style. "Elements of Yiddish Style" argues that, in a postwar era when the expansion of ideologies of monolingualism stimulated and enabled the counterculture desire for language that felt forbidden, forgotten, dangerous, strange or playful, Jews and Jewishness in both places made Yiddish uniquely well suited to fulfilling these desires. Yiddish was imagined as a language that barely survived but persisted, albeit in a form that acknowledged permanent loss, and so it could be used as a symbol of the persistence and adaptability of other endangered enterprises, such as literary modernism and the humanist ideals behind socialism. It was also a language that was seen as an absorptive, adaptive product of diaspora and inherently polylingual. These qualities made the language a feisty and appealing answer to the standardized major languages of former empires and contemporary superpowers, as well as to the controlled traditions and ideologies that those languages were perceived as representing. Finally, it was imagined as a language of intimate identity. Elements of Yiddish could create a feeling of creative intimacy among audiences, even when those elements were embedded in media such as songs or popular film that utilized the technologies that were seen as threatening intimate experiences of art in the first place. In turn, Jewish artists made use of the creative opportunities that the market for the linguistic nonstandard created. Investigating the topic of Jewish style in predominantly Russian and English works by secular writers requires taking seriously something that some people think was not there, should not have been there, or is somehow distasteful or taboo to hear as Jewish. Such concerns bespeak the success of the style itself, because these texts and performances were produced with a kind of deniability that was part of their appeal. This deniability—this reserving of the right to claim despite the unmistakable use of Yiddish that traces of Jewishness weren't there or didn't matter in the way this dissertation claims— accompanied and enhanced the kinds of irony and playfulness that typify these texts and the tastes of their audiences. This dissertation, therefore, is an exercise in examining a style that left evidence but also covered its tracks, and it is an inquiry into why it was so satisfying to access this almost ineffable space. In exposing how and why elements of Yiddish speech culture were useful to postwar writers and compelling to their audiences, "Elements of Yiddish Style" celebrates these materials and their creators, engages with the difficult questions they raise, and helps us better understand postwar secular Jewish culture as a transnational phenomenon.