Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art – serie

As a young man in interwar Warsaw, newspaperman Ber Kutscher threw himself into the city’s vibrant Jewish arts and culture scene from the headquarters of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists at Tlomkatse 13. In Once There Was Warsaw, Kutsher’s achingly human depictions of writers, cabbies, artists, neighbors, and more are translated from the Yiddish into English for the first time, painting a tangible portrait of a moment in Polish history too quickly buried by the horrors of World War II. Kutsher viewed his memoir, originally published in 1955 after witnessing the devastation of his home and relocating to France, as something of a holy mission, an opportunity to present the lives of the people who brought Warsaw to life while still making room to mourn the past. Written with humor, heart, and a deeply felt grief, Once There Was Warsaw is a complex and layered portrayal of a city and its people and the pain in remembering just how much was lost in its absence.

This text provides an illustrated world history of the Yiddish theatre covering five continents and more than 300 years.

In an exposition of writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, this work shows the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and explores the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the 19th century.

The writings of David Bergelson-virtually unknown to readers in the United States-are now available in this exciting collection. Composed of two short stories and a novella, this volume brings to life Bergelson's rich, elegiac prose. Golda Werman's highly literate translation perfectly captures his elusive literary style. Bergelson's writings evoke the declining world of small-town Eastern European Jews. His world captures the dreariness of the uncommitted life. His characters are cast adrift in a society whose traditions are coming unhinged by powerful modernist forces. In her Introduction Werman offers readers an engaging and tragic portrait of Bergelson, who was arrested on orders from Stalin and died in a prison camp in 1952.

A study of the history of Jewish exiles and genocide, and the literary expressions that attempt to make sense of these catastrophes.In this book Alan Mintz devotes a chapter each to selected catastrophic events and the literary response to them: for example, the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.B.E. and the resulting biblical literature; the massacre of the Rhineland Jewish community by the Crusades in 1096 and synagogue poetry; and the pogroms in Russia and modern Hebrew poetry. These earlier responses are then compared to the treatment of the Holocaust in the Hebrew literature of the State of Israel with special attention given to the works of Uri Zvi Greenberg and Aharon Appelfeld.Deeply felt and highly original, Hurban is a revealing study of an exceptionally rich literature in the context of an unavoidably tragic history.

Hayim Nahman Bialik is considered by many to be one of the greatest Hebrew poets of modern times. This volume presents translations of a selection of his work.

The author of Yiddish novels and short stories, Sholem Aleichem, evokes the voices of Yiddish speakers in these monologues written between 1901 and 1916. In each piece, a man or a woman comes forward to tell the story.

An abridged version of a collection originally published in 1961, the 42 stories here are written by Jewish writers of the 20th century, including Sholem Aleichem, Abraham Raisin and Joseph Opotashu. They offer a testament to the mother tongue through the trials of Americanization.

Expertly translated from the Yiddish by award-winning author and translator Curt Leviant, this edition features the fables printed in both English and Yiddish.

Two novellas by S. Y. Abramovitsh open this anthology, the first comprehensive overview of works by the three classic Yiddish authors. They describe Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century and introduce the reader to Abramovitsh's alter ago, Mendele the Book Peddler. Here he presents a diverse cast of characters including Isaac Abraham as tailor's apprentice, choirboy, and corrupt businessman, and Fishke traveling through the Ukraine with a caravan of beggars. Sholem Aleichem reintroduces us to Tevye the Dairyman's beloved daughters Hodel and Chava, known to everyone familiar with the musical or film fiddler on the Roof. Tevye is a gregarious storyteller who describes the pleasures of raising independent-minded daughters. We catch glimpses of inspirational rebbes and awe-inspiring rabbis. These translations breathe new life into the unforgettable worlds of Yiddish literature.

A House of Seven Windows by Kadya Molodowsky is the famed Yiddish poet's only collection of short stories. Written in simple prose, these stories are subtle portraits - tragic-comic, bittersweet, always generous spirited - of ordinary people: Jews in pre-World War II Eastern Europe and Jews struggling to adjust to life in America. A traditional-minded husband is defeated by his wife who wants only the latest fashion. A community leader's position is supported and maintained by his more energetic and political-minded wife. A couple, ardent supporters of the newly formed state of Israel, nevertheless find themselves at odds with their son who intends to live there. An American Jew who almost single-handedly supports his shtetl in Europe returns to find that it has been obliterated by the Nazis. A couple, newly arrived from the DP camps in Europe, struggles to set sail on the wide seas of America and succeeds, but at a price.While many of the stories are set in Europe and are, in fact, memoirs of Jewish shtetl life, others depict the classic dilemmas of immigrants wrestling with their own identity - stories about adapting to a new culture, yet attempting to maintain traditional customs, stories about the inability of one generation to understand the other. Molodowsky's lucid style and keen observation of the absurd and the sublime offer readers beautifully crafted stories filled with richly drawn character portraits.

Described by theater critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime’s effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater - throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49) - maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members.Zuskin Perelman’s fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period’s most influential cultural icons.

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was born into an affluent German Jewish family. Following the death of her parents and the dissolution of her marriage, the fledgling poet became notorious in the fashionable cafés of Berlin for appearing in costume as a Persian girl or as an Egyptian boy. Her flamboyance was echoed in her poetry, which combined the sexual with the religious in its exploration of the ecstatic experience. Critics have long dismissed her poetry as decadent in its romantic use of references to moonlight, flowers, and woodland creatures. In his introduction, Haxton addresses such criticism by arguing that what others have termed kitsch and cliché in Lasker-Schüler’s poetry may be understood more fully as a kind of iconoclasm, like that of her Expressionist contemporaries, and as an authentic expression of emotional tenderness. Her poetry also resonates with the cultural moment of Sarah Bernhardt’s gender-bending stage performances and Freud’s sexual interpretations of the subconscious.The poems collected in this bilingual volume represent the full range of Lasker-Schüler’s work, from her earliest poems until her death. Haxton’s translation embraces the poems’ lyrical imagery, remaining faithful to the poet’s vision while also capturing the cadence and rhythms of the poetry.

Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004) was born in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), the city that serves as both the backdrop and the central character for his stories. He survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and, after two years in an internment camp on the island of Cyprus, moved to Israel, where he lived until his death. In this collection, Karpinowitz portrays, with compassion and intimacy, the dreams and struggles of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of his native city before the Holocaust.His stories provide an affectionate and vivid portrait of poor working women and men, like fishwives, cobblers, and barbers, and people who made their living outside the law, like thieves and prostitutes. This collection also includes two stories that function as intimate memoirs of Karpinowitz’s childhood growing up in his father’s Vilna Yiddish theatre. Karpinowitz wrote his stories and memoirs in Yiddish, preserving the particular language of Vilna’s lower classes. In this graceful translation, Mintz deftly preserves this colorful, often idiomatic Yiddish, capturing Karpinowitz’s unique voice and rendering a long-vanished world for English language readers.

When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what’s in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil’s messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man’s attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shetl on the brink of transformation.

As they do every year, Yosef Zinman, a well-to-do Tel Aviv grocer, and his beloved wife Zippi plan a vacation during the holiday of Sukkot to Seefeld in the mountainous Tirols region of Austria. This year, Zippi decides to invite her sister, who has fallen on hard times with a failing perfumery business. Soon, more and more relatives join in on the trip, and the expenses quickly begin to add up. To gather all the funds needed, the family goes into the business of inexpensive clothing and fashion shows for workers’ unions. The summerpromises handsome revenues, but as the Zinman family nears their goal, they become increasingly vexed by their competing interests. A tragic-comic novel in its essence, Petty Business chronicles a year inone family's life, set against the backdrop of Tel Aviv’s rapidly changing global economy in the early 1990s. Pinkus’s biting critique of Tel Aviv’s provincial character and its residents’ shtetl mentality is delivered with a perfect combination of wit, humor, and tender pathos.

First published in 1936, The People of Godlbozhits depicts the ordinary yet deeply complex life of a Jewish community, following the fortunes of one family and its many descendants. Set in a shtetl in Poland between the world wars, Rashkin’s satiric novel offers a vivid cross-section not only of the residents’ triumphs and struggles but also of their dense and complicated web of humanity. With biting humor and acerbic wit, Rashkin portrays the stratified society— the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, and proletariat—observing the crookedness at every level. The novel’s brisk and oftentimes lively Yiddish prose and its colorful and irascible cast of characters give readers a Yiddish Yoknapatawpha in all its tragic absurdity.

First published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper di Varhayt in 1916-18, Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, shot through with a dark humor. From the perch of a diarist writing in first person about her own love life, Miriam Karpilove's novel offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York City. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances with wry irreverence. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics.Karpilove immigrated to the United States from a small town near Minsk in 1905 and went on to become one of the most prolific and widely published women writers of prose in Yiddish. Kirzane’s skillful translation gives English readers long-overdue access to Karpilove’s original and provocative voice.

A major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, Jonah Rosenfeld was recognized during and after his lifetime as an explorer of human psychology. His work foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety, and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships - themes just as relevant to today's Western society as they were during his era.The Rivals and Other Stories introduces nineteen of Rosenfeld's short stories to an English-reading audience for the first time. Unlike much of Yiddish literature that offers a sentimentalized view of the tight knit communities of early twentieth-century Jewish life, Rosenfeld's stories portray an entirely different view of pre-war Jewish families. His stories are urban, domestic dramas that probe the often painful disjunctions between men and women, parents and children, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, self and society. They explore eroticism and family dysfunction in narratives that were often shocking to readers at the time they were published. Following the Modernist tradition, Rosenfeld rejected many established norms, such as religion and the assumption of absolute truth. Rather, his work is rooted in psychological realism, portraying the inner lives of alienated individuals who struggle to construct a world in which they can live. These deeply moving, empathetic stories provide a counterbalance to the prevailing idealized portrait of shtetl life and enrich our understanding of Yiddish literature.

In his short life (1865-1921), Micha Josef Berdichevsky was a versatile and influential man of letters: an innovative Hebrew prose stylist; a collector of Jewish folklore; a scholar of ancient Jewish and Christian history. He was at once a peer of the Brothers Grimm, Sholem Aleichem, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a diverse circle of Jewish writers in the Russian Empire and German-speaking countries. As a Yiddish writer, however, he remains largely unknown to gen­eral readers. Originally published in the 1920s, his stories were dismissed by prominent critics and viewed as out of step with the literary taste of his own time. Yet these vivid portraits of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in the southern Russian Empire can speak powerfully to audiences today.With enchanting humor, social satire, and verbal dexterity, From a Distant Relation captures the world of the shtetl in a sharp realist prose style. Themes of repressed desire, poverty, relations with non-Jews, and historic upheavals echo in a cast of memorable characters. Many of the stories and monologues feature strong female protagonists, while others shed light on the misogynistic culture of the shtetl. At the border between fiction and reportage, with a gritty underbelly and a deceptive naïveté, Berdichevsky's stories explore dynamics of wealth, power, and gender in an intimate setting that resonates profoundly with contemporary Jewish life.

New to Jerusalem and to adulthood, Rutha serves Café Shira’s devoted customers with a quiet compassion and a sensitive gaze, collecting their stories and absorbing them at her peril. Avigdor, the melancholy and somewhat weary café owner, philosophizes about love as he attends to the needs of his patrons while ignoring his own. Christian, a young religious pilgrim, has come to Jerusalem to find God but stumbles upon a much different revelation. These characters form the heart of this wry, often poignant novel narrated through a series of vignettes. They are joined by a colorful cast of characters who frequent the literary café—long-married couples, young lovers, an eccentric poet, and a traumatized veteran—all finding refuge and occasionally wisdom among their motley urban community.Closely based on Ehrlich’s own experiences over the twenty-five years he devoted to running a café that became an important Jerusalem cultural venue and landmark, Café Shira is a work of disarming tenderness and bittersweet love.

When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again.Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove’s time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters—an older woman navigating widowhood, a writer rebuffed by dismissive audiences, American-born Jewish girls unable to communicate with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and a painter so overcome with jealousy about his muse’s potential lover that he misses his opportunity with her—each portrayed with both sympathy and irony, in ways unexpected and delightful. Also included are Karpilove’s recollections of her arrival in Palestine in 1926, chronicled with the same buoyant cynicism and witty repartee that is beloved by readers of her fiction.

This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich’s "Litvak saga," his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman? As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters—Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; the resourceful widow Golda; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and their devoted servant girl Morta. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich’s novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl’s inhabitants.

With his intense, quickfire psychological fiction and consistent portrayal of characters’ subconscious minds, Jonah Rosenfeld is a standout among Yiddish authors of the early twentieth century. In his dedication to observing human psychology, he frequently confronted issues rarely dealt with by his contemporaries. In A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories, Rosenfeld confronts the issues of his day, whether they be epidemics, differing social expectations for men and women, financial instability, or challenges to Jewish life at the beginning of the twentieth century. His themes are as relevant today as when the stories were first published. This new translation from the original Yiddish is culled from anthologies spanning Rosenfeld’s career, starting in 1924 and running through 1959 and contextualized alongside Rosenfeld’s biography and other writings. These short stories are presented in a fresh, approachable way, welcoming to students as well as seasoned readers of Yiddish texts and translations. By narrating the lives of impoverished and working-class Jews in Europe and urban North America, A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories shines a light on the secular, uniquely Yiddish challenges of its day while offering a comprehensive, informed perspective by one of the most prominent writers of the language.

As a young man in interwar Warsaw, newspaperman Ber Kutscher threw himself into the city’s vibrant Jewish arts and culture scene from the headquarters of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists at Tlomkatse 13. In Once There Was Warsaw, Kutsher’s achingly human depictions of writers, cabbies, artists, neighbors, and more are translated from the Yiddish into English for the first time, painting a tangible portrait of a moment in Polish history too quickly buried by the horrors of World War II. Kutsher viewed his memoir, originally published in 1955 after witnessing the devastation of his home and relocating to France, as something of a holy mission, an opportunity to present the lives of the people who brought Warsaw to life while still making room to mourn the past. Written with humor, heart, and a deeply felt grief, Once There Was Warsaw is a complex and layered portrayal of a city and its people and the pain in remembering just how much was lost in its absence.

As millions of Jews immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe starting in the 1870s, they brought with them not only their religious heritage but also a definitive idea of the place and value of art and aesthetics in society. These ideas, motivated by local customs, morality, and political and social interests, are clear in the work of twentieth-century Jewish artists such as Mark Rothko, Leon Israel, Max Weber, Saul Bernstein, and more. In Heritage: Jewish Artists in America since 1900, Matthew Baigell situates these artists in a uniquely Jewish context. Starting from the shared values and references that informed generations of work, Baigell explores a century of progress through that specific lens. Placing these artists in a focused and continuous history of their own, Baigell shows how Jewish art in America has been informed by national and political trends, how first-generation Jewish artists responded to the works of their predecessors and images from a world away, and how contemporary artists reckon with modern Judaism. A pioneering effort to isolate a Jewish art stream all its own, Heritage challenges traditional assumptions about modern American art history and the connections between generations of Jewish artists.

Rokhl Feygenberg became one of the youngest authors published in Yiddish when her autobiographical debut novel, The Winding Road, was released serially in 1905. This fictionalized account of her own rough childhood in a small Belarusian shtetl in the 1890s is framed by the deaths of her father when she was five and that of her mother when she was fourteen. Forced to provide and care for her family, the narrator finds escape through books and is inspired by them to invent an alternate fantasy life for herself, transforming the challenges of her everyday into a dreamscape world of city life and romance. In Tamara T. Helfer’s masterful translation, the narrator describes her fictional village of Bulin, deep in wild swampland and forests, far away from the world of books where she finds solace. Readers are enmeshed in the daily rituals of rural Jewish life, following the narrator through her long days of labor and caring for family. Her story, at times very funny, at times full of pathos, is a clear-eyed description of youthful imaginings with three-dimensional, flawed characters, and vivid descriptions of everyday shtetl life. The Winding Road presents an unvarnished portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish life and offers readers a deeper understanding of the vast distance turn-of-the-century women traveled to find a fully realized life.

Introspectivism: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America is the first comprehensive and comparative study of the modernist group of Yiddish poets and poetry written in New York by the In Zikh, also known as the "Introspectivists" or Inzikhistn Introspectivism forced social and political topics into the margins in order to create space for imagination and fantasy distant from the lived experience of the poets. As such, the worsening conditions of European Jews and the rise of totalitarianism in the early 1930s pushed the poets to address the theme of cultural heritage and reconnect with their Jewish roots. Although the Inzikhistn have been acknowledged as one of the most important groups of Yiddish writers, only certain aspects of their poetry and poetics have been explored. Itay Zutra focuses primarily on In Zikh’s poetry to show how it determined the course of the group’s development and the development of Introspectivism as a movement. Introspectivism is a modernist take on the poets’ search for Jewish self-consciousness that weaves together Yiddish, Jewish, and American poetry, history, and culture. Zutra offers close readings of modern Yiddish poetry’s journey from the generalized folklike persona to an individualized poetic "I." By developing a methodology that explores Yiddish poetry as context for the expansion of individualism in Jewish culture, Zutra affirms how the overall movement carved out room for Yiddish-speaking American Jewish identity.

This is an anthology of five Yiddish plays in translation, plus two additional independent scenes. The settings vary from a luxurious parlour, to a haunted graveyard,to a sweatshop on strike.