Only one independent study, one non-Colgate course, and one Liberal Arts core course can be counted. A course in Hebrew language is strongly recommended. The focus of this course is the great secular flowering of Yiddish literature that began in Eastern Europe in the 1860s and came to an end, along with its audience, in the years following the Holocaust. Readings are drawn from fiction, memoirs, and poetry. The aim of the course is to understand all works both as masterful literary texts and as complex responses to the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
All readings are in English translation.
This course covers representative works of fiction by Italian, French, English, Russian, American, Canadian, and Israeli Jewish writers. Not all nationalities are covered in the syllabus for any given year. Discussion centers on a close analysis of the novels, comparing individual and national responses to the Jewish twentieth-century experience. By including fiction written across Europe, North America, and Israel, while limiting the time frame to the years following World War II, the question of whether there exists one or more approaches to fiction that are characteristically Jewish is addressed. All readings are in English translation.