Yiddish literature
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Yiddish literature encompasses all those
It is generally described as having three historical phases: Old Yiddish literature; Haskalah and Hasidic literature; and modern Yiddish literature. While firm dates for these periods are hard to pin down, Old Yiddish can be said to have existed roughly from 1300 to 1780; Haskalah and Hasidic literature from 1780 to about 1890; and modern Yiddish literature from 1864 to the present.
Old Yiddish literature
Yiddish literature began with translations of and commentary on
A number of Yiddish epic poems appeared in the 14-15th centuries. The most important works of this genre are the Shmuel-Bukh and the Mlokhim-Bukh – chivalric romances about king David and other Biblical heroes. The stanzaic form of these poems resembles that of the Nibelungenlied. Following the example of other European epics, the Shmuel-Bukh was not simply recited, but sung or chanted to musical accompaniment; its melody was widely known in Jewish communities.
Far from being rhymed adaptations of the Bible, these old Yiddish
Another influential work of old Yiddish literature is the Mayse-bukh (“Story Book”). This work collects ethical tales based on Hebrew and rabbinic sources, as well as folk tales and legends. Based on the inclusion of a few non-Jewish stories, scholars have deduced that the compiler lived in the area that is now western Germany during the last third of the 16th century. It was first published in 1602. These instructional stories are still read in highly religious communities, especially among the Hasidim.
A commentary written for women on the weekly
Women wrote old Yiddish literature infrequently, but several collections of tkhines (personal prayers which are not part of liturgy) were written by women such as
Hasidic and Haskalah literature
Hasidic stories
The rise of
The saintly prayers of the Baal Shem Tov and his close circle were unable to lift a harsh Heavenly decree they perceived one New Year. After extending the prayers beyond time, the danger remained. An unlettered shepherd boy entered and was deeply envious of those who could read the holy day's prayers. He said to God "I don't know how to pray, but I can make the noises of the animals of the field." With great feeling he cried out, "Cock-a-doodle-do, God have mercy!" Immediately, joy overcame the Baal Shem Tov and he hurried to finish the prayers. Afterwards, he explained that the heartfelt words of the shephard boy opened the Gates of Heaven, and the decree was lifted.
As
Hasidic parables
Within the works of
A King sent his son away from the palace to learn new skills. Regrettably, the son lost his royal ways, and forgot his home tongue. After years in exile he remembered his true calling, and desired to return to the palace. Upon approaching the gates, the guards no longer recognised the King's son and refused him entry. At that moment the King appeared on the balcony and saw the commotion of the son at the gates, but also did not recognise his son who now appeared in peasant clothing. In distress, as the son could no longer remember the royal language, he cried out a heartfelt wordless call from his soul. Immediately, the King recognised his voice and delighted in being reunited with his son.
Rabbi Nachman's 13 Sippurei Ma'asiyot Wonder-Tales of 1816 take mystical parable to a self-contained literary purpose and art. Where the analogies of other masters have direct messages, Rabbi Nachman's imaginative, intricate tales, that can involve stories within stories, offer layered
"In the tales told by the Nations of the World are hidden sparks of holiness, but the tales are confused and spiritually out of order, so that the sparks remain hidden."
The thirteenth tale, "The Seven Beggars", is the most intricate. The story told on the seventh day is missing and Rabbi Nachman said that it would only be known when the
Haskalah
During the same years as the emergence of Hasidism, the most influential secular movement of Jews also appeared in the form of the
Modern Yiddish literature
The classic Yiddish writers
Modern Yiddish literature is generally dated to the publication in 1864 of
Abramovitsh's influence lay in two factors. First, he wrote in Yiddish at a time when most Jewish thinkers tended to Hebrew or a non-Jewish language such as German. Secondly, as Dan Miron demonstrates, Abramovitsh brought Yiddish belles lettres firmly into the modern era through the use of rhetorical strategies that allowed his social reform agenda to be expressed at the highest level of literary and artistic achievement. The outpouring of Yiddish literature in modernist forms that followed Abramovitsh demonstrates how important this development was in giving voice to Jewish aspirations, both social and literary. The most important of the early writers to follow Abramovitsh were Sholem Rabinovitsh (popularly known by his alter-ego, Sholem Aleichem), and I. L. Peretz. Rabinovitsh's best-known works are the stories centering on the character Tevye the Dairyman. Written over many years and in response to the variety of Jewish catastrophes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the stories epitomize Rabinovitsh's style, including his signature style of "laughter through tears". I. L. Peretz brought into Yiddish a wide array of modernist techniques he encountered in his reading of European fiction. While himself politically radical, particularly during the 1890s, his fiction is enormously nuanced and allows multiple readings. His work is both simple and caustic, more psychological and more individualistic than Abramovitsh or Rabinovitsh's. For these reasons, he is considered the first true modernist in Yiddish literature. He wrote primarily stories of which "Bontshe shvayg" (Bontshe the Silent) is one of his best known. As with much of his work, it manages to convey two apparently opposing messages: sympathy for the oppressed with critique of passivity as a response to oppression.
Together, Abramovitsh, Rabinovitsh and I. L. Peretz are usually referred to as the three "classic" Yiddish writers ("di klasiker" in Yiddish). They are also nickednamed respectively the "grandfather", the "father" and the "son" of Yiddish literature. This formulation erases the fact that they were all roughly contemporaneous and are best understood as a single phenomenon rather than as distinct generational manifestations of a tradition. Nonetheless, this formulation was propounded by the classic writers themselves, perhaps as a means of investing their fledgling literary culture with a lineage that could stand up to other world literatures they admired.
Literary movements and figures
Dramatic works in Yiddish grew up at first separately, and later intertwined with other Yiddish movements. Early drama, following Ettinger's example, was written by
While the three classic writers were still at their height, the first true movement in modern Yiddish literature sprang up in New York. The “Sweatshop Poets,” as this school has come to be called, were all immigrant workers who experienced
During the radical turn of the 1930s, a group of writers clustered around the U. S. Communist Party came to be known as “Di Linke” (“The Left Wing”). This group included
Certain male writers also did not associate with a particular literary group, or did so for a short time before moving on to other creative ethics. Among these were Itzik Manger, whose clever re-imaginings of Biblical and other Jewish stories are accessible and playful but deeply intellectual. Other writers in this category are Joseph Opatoshu, I. B. Singer (who is always called “Bashevis” in Yiddish to distinguish him from his older brother), I. J. Singer and Aaron Zeitlin.
Many of the writers mentioned above who wrote during and after the 1940s responded to the Holocaust in their literary works—some wrote poetry and stories while in ghettos, concentration camps, and partisan groups, and many continued to address the Holocaust and its aftereffects in their subsequent writing. Yiddish writers known best for their writings about the Holocaust include
.Female authors in Yiddish literature
An interesting feature of Yiddish literature in its most active years (1900–1940) is the presence of numerous women writers who were less involved in specific movements or tied to a particular artistic ideology. Writers such as Celia Dropkin, Anna Margolin, Kadia Molodowsky, Esther Kreitman, Katie Brown and Esther Shumiatcher Hirschbein created bodies of work that do not fit easily into a particular category and which are often experimental in form or subject matter.[6] Margolin's work pioneered the use of assonance and consonance in Yiddish verse. She preferred off-rhymes to true rhymes. Dropkin introduced a highly charged erotic vocabulary and shows the influence of 19th century Russian poetry. Kreitman, the sister of I. J. and I. B. Singer, wrote novels and short stories, many of which were sharply critical of gender inequality in traditional Jewish life.
In the developing Yiddish literary scene in Europe and the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, women writers were regarded by literary critics as a rare phenomenon, at the same time that editors of newspapers and journals, especially those of the socialist and anarchist press, were eager to publish women's work, as a hallmark of modernity and in the hope of boosting circulation; however, a few leading male writers and editors, including
Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Nobel Prize
The awarding of the
Contemporary writing in Yiddish and influenced by Yiddish literature
The last prewar European-born writers who published or are still publishing in the early 21st century include the Canadian authors
A new generation of Yiddish writers has emerged from the
European literatures have had a strong influence on Yiddish literature, but until the late 20th century there was little return flow into English, except through bilingual writers who chose to write in English, such as Anzia Yezierska and Ab Cahan. The poet Irena Klepfisz, who was born to Polish-speaking Jewish parents in Nazi-occupied Poland and learned Yiddish in school after immigrating to the United States, is influenced by the language in her work and also translates poetry from the Yiddish.
Currently, many young writers with little knowledge of Yiddish have been influenced by Yiddish literature in translation, such as Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer. An exception is Dara Horn, who has studied both Yiddish and Hebrew and draws on both of these traditions in her English-language novels.
The last Yiddish language writers in the former Soviet Union were
Literary works written originally in other languages continue to be translated and published in Yiddish. UNESCO's Index Translationum database lists 98 foreign-language books published in Yiddish translation since circa 1979, in a number of countries including Israel, the US, Romania, Germany, and the USSR.[13]
See also
- California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language
- Hebrew literature
- Jewish political movements
- List of Yiddish language poets
- Shtetl
- Yiddish Book Center
- Yiddish Renaissance
- Yiddish theatre
References
- ^ Introduction to Old Yiddish literature, by Jean Baumgarten, Jerold C. Frakes
- ^ The Great Maggid, Jacob Immanuel Schochet, Kehot Publication Society: "The academy of Mezeritch"
- ^ Life Stories: Shivhei Ha-Besht Archived 2012-12-07 at the Wayback Machine - An excerpt from "Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov" by Moshe Rosman at www.hasidicstories.com, summarising academic views on "the most fecund, interesting, intriguing, problematic, and most exploited source relating to the Ba'al Shem Tov"
- ^ For biographical and literary analysis of the storytelling activity of Nachman of Breslov see A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, David G. Roskies, Harvard University Press, chapter on Rabbi Nachman
- ^ A Bridge of Longing by David Roskies traces the history of Yiddish literary, imaginative reinvention of the world of the shtetl with chapters devoted to each classic writer in turn. The book begins with Rabbi Nachman's Tales, the only religious figure in the subsequent development
- OCLC 1261302213.)
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has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link - ^ Pratt, Norma Fain. "Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers in America, 1890-1940." Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing. Ed. Judith R. Baskin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. 120-135; here: 119-120.
- ^ "Fradl Shtok, 1890-ca. 1930" [biographical note]. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. 290-291.
- ^ "Lost Homeland: Poems of Pain by Tyler Kliem - Issuu". issuu.com. 2023-03-17. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
- ^ Alana Newhouse (2004-06-17). "Dissent Greets Isaac Bashevis Singer Centennial - New York Times". Select.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2014-06-15.
- ^ קטלא קניא (2013-12-24). "katlekanye.blogspot.com". katlekanye.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2014-06-15.
- ^ "natirlich.blogspot.com". natirlich.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2014-06-15.
- ^ Index Translationum: translations into Yiddish - lists 98 items, as of 2013-01-06. The index starts in 1979; however, several items in the list far predate that year.
Further reading
- Estraikh, Gennady. In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005) ISBN 0-8156-3052-2
- Frieden, Ken. Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). ISBN 0-7914-2602-5
- Glasser, Amelia (trans.) Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) ISBN 0-299-20800-1
- “Ma’aseh books,” “Aksenfed, Israel,” “Ettinger (Oetinger),” “Dick, Isaac Mayer”. Jewish Encyclopedia (1904–11). 11 August 2006 [1]
- Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. (New York: Schocken, 1973; reprint edition Syracuse University Press, 1996). ISBN 0-8156-0330-4
- Norich, Anita. The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: IUP, 1991) ISBN 0-253-34109-4
- Riemer, Nathanael: Some parallels of stories in Glikls of Hameln "Zikhroynes". In: PaRDeS. Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e.V. (2008) Nr. 14, S. 125–148.
- Roskies, David G. A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Harvard University Press, 1996) ISBN 978-0-674-08140-6
- Seidman, Naomi. A Marriage Made in Heaven: the Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) ISBN 0-520-20193-0
- Sokoloff, Naomi, Anne Lapidus Lerner and Anita Norich, eds. Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. New York: JTSA, 1992. ISBN 0-674-34198-8
- Wex, Michael. Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language And Culture in All Its Moods. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005). ISBN 0-312-30741-1
- Wisse, Ruth. A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) ISBN 0-674-53659-2
- “Yiddish literature.” Written by Ken Frieden. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 31 July 2006
- "Yiddish literature", “ISBN 1-57958-139-0
- Steinhoff, Thorsten. Zeitgenössische jiddische Lyrik Odessaer Autoren (Regensburg) : [Lehrstuhl für Neuere Dt. Literaturwiss. I der Univ.], [1996], Als Ms. gedr.