"Drawing from essays, letters, poems, interviews, and other sources, the book offers a fresh look at figures who shaped modern Hebrew literature and introduces fascinating yet little-translated writers. Ranges from early twentieth-century Warsaw through the formative years of Hebrew modernism in Europe and Palestine, to the complexity of contemporary Israel"--Provided by publisher.
Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky-who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew. Schachter examines how the relationships between mi...
The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society's lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mu...
Meir Wieseltier's verbal power, historical awareness, and passionate engagement have placed him in the first rank of contemporary Hebrew poetry. "The Flower of Anarchy", a selection of Wieseltier's poems spanning almost forty years, collects in one volume, for the first time, English translations of some of his finest work. Superbly translated by the award-winning American-Israeli poet-translator Shirley Kaufman - who has worked with the poet on these translations for close to thirty years - thi...
Antisemitismus Im Kontext Der Politischen Romantik (Conditio Judaica, #72)
by Marco Puschner
This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, or agunes ('chained wives') - women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce -and of the men who deserted them. Looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany and then late nineteenth-century eastern Europe and twentieth-century United States, "Enforced Marginality" explores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Je...
Making German Jewish Literature Anew (German Jewish Cultures)
by Katja Garloff
In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gesture...
Memory and Mastery (SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century's catastrophes at the expense of literature's prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in "Futurity" that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the p...
The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Jews in Eastern Europe)
by Alyssa Quint
Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (ne Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden's work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a...
Civil Antisemitism, Modernism, and British Culture, 1902-1939
by Lara Trubowitz
This book addresses the development of 'civil' anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Britain, a crucial and often critically neglected strand of anti-Jewish rhetoric that, prior to 1934, was essential to the legitimization of proto-fascist political and literary discourses, as well as stylistic practices within literary modernism.
The story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural historian Ilan Stavans focuses on its multilingual and transnational nature. Stavans presents a wide range of traditions within Jewish literature and the variety of writers who made those traditions possible. Represented are writers as dissimilar as L...
The Vanguard Messiah (Europaisch-judische Studien - Beitrage, #21)
by Sami Sjoeberg
In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925-2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a mov...
Judisch-Christliche Liebesbeziehungen Im Werk Leopold Komperts
by Ingrid Steiger-Schumann
The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German-Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German-Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, The Translated Jew challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read. This book explores the myriad acts of tran...
This interdisciplinary study explores the evolving representations of diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American writing from 1880 to the late 20th century. Beginning with the often neglected proto-Zionist verse of Emma Lazarus, through the urban and Holocaust-inflected lyrics of Marie Syrkin and Charles Reznikoff, to the post-assimilationist novels of Philip Roth in the 1990s, Ranen Omer-Sherman analyzes literary responses to the competing claims on the self made by this dual allegiance. He explor...
Between Snow and Desert Heat (Monographs of the Hebrew Union College, #27)
by Rina R Lapidus
Hebrew literature, from the second half of the nineteenth century to well into the twentieth, was unmistakably influenced in style and substance by Russian prose and poetry. These influences have been readily acknowledged but have been studied only in an episodic and fragmented way. Rina Lapidus systematically identifies those Hebrew authors and poets upon whom Russian influence is most striking and upon whom it seems to have exerted the greatest power. After examining the textual parallels in t...