Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler

Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler PDF

Author: Mendele Mokher Sefarim

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

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Two novellas by the founder of modern Yiddish fiction--Fishke the Lame and The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third--depict small-town Jewish life in Russia.

Classic Yiddish Fiction

Classic Yiddish Fiction PDF

Author: Ken Frieden

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 143840333X

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Yiddish literature, despite its remarkable achievements during an era bounded by Russian reforms in the 1860s and the First World War, has never before been surveyed by a scholarly monograph in English. Classic Yiddish Fiction provides an overview and interprets the Yiddish fiction of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. While analyzing their works, Frieden situates these three authors in their literary world and in relation to their cultural contexts. Two or three generations ago, Yiddish was the primary language of Jews in Europe and America. Today, following the Nazi genocide and half a century of vigorous assimilation, Yiddish is sinking into oblivion. By providing a bridge to the lost continent of Yiddish literature, Frieden returns to those European traditions. This journey back to Ashkenazic origins also encompasses broader horizons, since the development of Yiddish culture in Europe and America parallels the history of other ethnic traditions.

Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz

Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz PDF

Author: Ken Frieden

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2011-09-14

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0815650884

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Two novellas by S. Y. Abramovitsh open this collection of the best short works by three influential nineteenth-century Jewish authors. Abra- movitsh’s alter ego—Mendele the Book Peddler—introduces himself and narrates both The Little Man and Fishke the Lame. His cast of characters includes Isaac Abraham as tailor’s apprentice, choirboy, and corrupt businessman; Mendele’s friend Wine ’n’ Candles Alter; and Fishke, who travels through the Ukraine with a caravan of beggars. Sholem Aleichem’s lively stories reintroduce us to Tevye, the gregarious dairyman, as he describes the pleasures of raising his independent-minded daughters. These are followed by short monologues in which Aleichem gives voice to unforgettable characters from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side. Finally, I. L. Peretz’s neo-hasidic tales draw on hasidic traditions in the service of modern literature. These stories provide an unsentimental look back at Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Although nostalgia occasionally colors their prose, the writers were social critics who understood the shortcomings of shtetl life. For the general reader, these translations breathe new life into the extraordinary worlds of Yiddish literature. The introduction, glossary, and biographical essays contemporaneous to each author put those worlds into context, making the book indispensable to students and scholars of Yiddish culture.

Insiders and Outsiders

Insiders and Outsiders PDF

Author: Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780814324974

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Insiders and Outsiders addresses various aspects of Jewish and Gentile interaction since the development of the German-Jewish literary and cultural identity in the early nineteenth century. Containing the work of prominent scholars, critics, and journalists involved with German-Jewish studies from around the world, this ambitious anthology of literary and cultural criticism suggests a reevaluation of important cultural and literary issues, including the problem of cultural diversity with regard to German-speaking countries and the question as to what constitutes German cultural identity in multicultural central Europe. This volume highlights the centrality of the Jewish presence in the heart of German and Austrian culture as well as the important role German culture played in Jewish society. While most previously published studies emphasize either the grandeur of German-Jewish achievement or the tragedy of these two cultures in contact, Insiders and Outsiders examines both the failures and the successes of this tense and troubling relationship. It suggests that rather than being the product of a nurturing multicultural environment, the achievements of German-Jewish intellectuals and poets grew out of friction, unrest, and discomfort.

City of Rogues and Schnorrers

City of Rogues and Schnorrers PDF

Author: Jarrod Tanny

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0253356466

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Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.

Traces of a Jewish Artist

Traces of a Jewish Artist PDF

Author: Kerry Wallach

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0271098236

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Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, this book brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.

In a Maelstrom

In a Maelstrom PDF

Author: Zsuzsa Hetényi

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2008-01-10

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 6155211345

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The first concise history of Russian-Jewish literary prose, this book discusses Russian-Jewish literarature in four periods, analyzing the turning points (1881–82, 1897, 1917) and proposing that the selected epoch (1860–1940) represents a special strand that was unfairly left out of both Russian and Jewish national literatures. Based on theoretical sources on the subject, the book establishes the criteria of dual cultural affiliation, and in a survey of Russian-Jewish literature presents the pitfalls of assimilation and discusses different forms of anti-Semitism. After showing the oeuvre of 18 representative authors as a whole, the book analyzes a number of characteristic novels and short stories in terms of contemporary literary studies. Many texts discussed have not been reprinted since their first publication. The material offers indispensable information not only for comparative and literary studies but for multicultural, historical, ethnographic, Judaist, religious and linguistic investigations as well.

Stepchildren of the Shtetl

Stepchildren of the Shtetl PDF

Author: Natan M. Meir

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1503613062

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Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe—from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery—Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority.

Translating Sholem Aleichem

Translating Sholem Aleichem PDF

Author: Gennady Estraikh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1351538659

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Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read the original. Since the 1910s, however, Sholem Aleichem's works have been known to a wider international audience through numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famouslyFiddler on the Roof. This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature. With the contributions: Olga Litvak- Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal Yiddish Reader Alexander Frenkel- Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator Eugenia Prokop-Janiec- Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish Literary Audience Gennady Estraikh- Soviet Sholem Aleichem Roland Gruschka- 'Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt': The Sovietization and Heroization of Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems Mikhail Krutikov- A Man for All Seasons: Translating Sholem Aleichem into Soviet Ideological Idiom Gabriella Safran- Four English Pots and the Evolving Translatability of Sholem Aleichem Sabine Koller- On (Un)Translatability: Sholem Aleichem's Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) in German Translation Alexandra Hoffman- Laughing Matters: Translation and Irony in 'Der gliklekhster in Kodne' Kerstin Hoge- Lost in Marienbad: On the Literary Use of the Linguistic Openness of Yiddish Anna Verschik- Sholem Aleichem in Estonian: Creating a Tradition Jan Schwarz- Speaking Tevye der milkhiker in Translation: Performance, Humour, and World Literature