Anita Norich - Böcker

Writing in Tongues examines the complexities of translating Yiddish literature at a time when the Yiddish language is in decline. After the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and American assimilation, the survival of traditional Yiddish literature depends on translation, yet a few Yiddish classics have been translated repeatedly while many others have been ignored. Anita Norich traces historical and aesthetic shifts through versions of these canonical texts, and she argues that these works and their translations form an enlightening conversation about Jewish history and identity.

Writing in Tongues examines the complexities of translating Yiddish literature at a time when the Yiddish language is in decline. After the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and American assimilation, the survival of traditional Yiddish literature depends on translation, yet a few Yiddish classics have been translated repeatedly while many others have been ignored. Anita Norich traces historical and aesthetic shifts through versions of these canonical texts, and she argues that these works and their translations form an enlightening conversation about Jewish history and identity.

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

In recent years, gender studies and feminist thinking have had a growing influence on the study of world literature. But only noe, in this volume, is a range of studies devoted to the field of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Here international scholars bring a diversity of approaches, perspectives, and themes to the works of women writers and to the representations of women in writing by men. Among the many writers discussed in the book are Esther Raab, Yocheved Bat Miriam, Celia Dropkin, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, A.B. Yehoshua, and Ahron Appelfeld. In addition, three women novelists write about thier own craft. Annotated bibliographies provide strong guidance for future research into gender issues.

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. Anglo-Jewish writers of the period provide a counterpoint to and commentary on this Yiddish story. Norich seeks to demythologize Yiddish as mame-loshn (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.