Discovering Exile
Subtitle: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: November 6, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780804756907
Subjects: Jewish studies; Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Social & cultural anthropology; The Holocaust; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Yiddish; USA; European - German; Jewish; Literary Criticism & Collections / Jewish; 20th century; History and criticism; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Influence; United States; Yiddish literature
Description: "Discovering Exile analyzes American Yiddish culture and its development during the European Holocaust and shows how our understanding of American Jewish culture has been utterly distorted by the omission of this context. It explores responses to some of the most intense cultural controversies of the period, examining texts in various genres written by the most important Yiddish writers and critics and placing them at the center of discussions of literary modernism and cultural modernity." "American Jews who wrote in English in this period provide a counterpoint to and commentary on this Yiddish story. Norich seeks to demythologize Yiddish as mameloshn (mother tongue) - as merely the language of the home and the past - by returning to a time of great, if ironic, vibrancy, when Yiddish writers confronted the very nature of their existence in unprecedented ways. Under increasing pressure of news from the war front and silence from home, these writers re-imagined modernism, the Enlightenment, political engagement, literary conventions, and symbolic language."--book jacket.