Polyphony of Jewish Culture

Benjamin Harshav is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Until 1987, he taught at Tel Aviv University, where he established a department of poetics and comparative literature. He is also the founding editor of the journal Poetics Today. His recent books include Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford, 2003) and Sing, Stranger: A Century of American Yiddish Poetry—A Historical Anthology (Stanford, 2006). He is also the editor of Marc Chagall on Art and Culture(Stanford, 2003)

"By the evidence of this volume, Harshav's recent intellectual energies have been harnessed to the project of making the achievements of high Yiddish culture present to the contemporary Jewish mind and, by so doing, allowing us to hear something of the polyphonic music that has accompanied his life from his earliest childhood until now." - Alan Mintz (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) "This book is an illuminating companion to Harshav's Explorations in Poetics." - CHOICE "Using 'polyphony' as its unifying thematic thread, this book addresses the dynamic cultural systems which form the kaleidoscopic core of the modern Jewish experience. In this collection of articles, introductory essays, and memoirs culled from a body of work spanning over forty years, we are given a rich diversity of access points to what Benjamin Harshav calls the 'Modern Jewish Revolution'." - Jordan Finkin, The Oriental Institute (Oxford)

• CONTENTS Prefacexxx Culture and History1 1. Theses on the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Revolution00 2. Multilingualism00 3. The Crisis of Jewish Identity: S.Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday00 4. American Poetry in Yiddish and its Background00 5. The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania00 Art and Poetry00 6. On the Beginnings of Israeli Poetry and Yehuda Amichai's Quatrains: A Memoir00 7. The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself: Nathan Alterman, Abba Kovner00 8. The Role of Language in Chagall's Early Paintings00 9. A. Sutzkever: Life and Poetry00 10. Note on the Systems of Hebrew Versification: Bible to Present00 Sources of the Chapters00