Modern Jewish literatures
Subtitle: intersections and boundaries
By: edited by Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner
Series: Jewish culture and contexts
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780812242720
Subjects: History and criticism; Judaism in literature; Jews; Jews in literature; Jewish literature; Hebrew literature; Judaism and literature; Yiddish literature; Identity
Description: Is there such a thing as a distinctive Jewish literature? While definitions have been offered, none has been universally accepted. Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has neither a common geography nor a shared language-though works in Hebrew or Yiddish are almost certainly included-and the field is so diverse that it cannot be contained within the bounds of one literary category. Each of the fifteen essays collected in "Modern Jewish Literatures" takes on the above question by describing a movement across boundaries-between languages, cultures, genres, or spaces. Works in Hebrew and Yiddish are amply represented, but works in English, French, German, Italian, Ladino, and Russian are also considered. Topics range from the poetry of the Israeli nationalist Natan Alterman to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; from turn-of-the-century Ottoman Jewish journalism to wire-recorded Holocaust testimonies; from the intellectual salons of late eighteenth-century Berlin to the shelves of a Jewish bookstore in twentieth-century Los Angeles. The literary world described in "Modern Jewish Literatures" is demarcated chronologically by the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, and the French Revolution, on one end, and the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel on the other. The particular terms of the encounter between a Jewish past and present for modern Jews has varied greatly, by continent, country, or village, by language, and by social standing, among other things. What unites the subjects of these studies is not a common ethnic, religious, or cultural history but rather a shared endeavor to use literary production and writing in general as the laboratory in which to explore and represent Jewish experience in the modern world. -- Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface / David B. Ruderman; title: Introduction: intersections and boundaries in modern Jewish literary study / Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, L. Scott Lerner; title: Literary culture and Jewish space around 1800: the Berlin salons revisited / Liliane Weissberg; title: Joseph Salvador's Jerusalem lost and Jerusalem regained / L. Scott Lerner; title: The merchant at the threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the poetics of apostasy / Amelia Glaser; title: Shmuel Saadi Halevy/Sam Lé́vy between Ladino and French: reconstructing a writer's social identity / Olga Borovaya; title: I. L. Peretz's "Between two mountains": neo-Hasidism and Jewish literary modernity / Nicham Ross; title: Neither here nor there: the critique of ideological progress in Sholem Aleichem's Kasrilevke stories / Marc Caplan; title: Brenner: between Hebrew and Yiddish / Anita Shapira; title: Eisig Silberschlag and the persistence of the erotic in American Hebrew poetry / Alan Mintz; title: The art of sex in Yiddish poems: Celia Dropkin and her contemporaries / Kathryn Hellerstein; title: Ethnopoetics in the works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: gender, popular ethnography, and the literary face of Jewish Eastern Europe / Sheila E. Jelen; title: Eternal Jews and dead dogs: the diasporic other in Natan Alterman's The seventh column / Gideon Nevo; title: Inserted notes: David Boder's DP interview project and the languages of the Holocaust / Alan Rosen; title: Unpacking my father's bookstore / Laurence Roth; title: The art of assimilation: ironies, ambiguities, aesthetics / Michael P. Kramer; title: Hebraism and Yiddishism: paradigms of modern Jewish literary history / Anita Norich.