Modern Yiddish Literary Studies

In the spirit of new scholarship on Yiddish, the essays in this special issue approach Yiddish literature from diverse perspectives current in literary criticism and theory. Ken Frieden addresses the cross-fertilization of German and Yiddish in his analysis of the impact of German literature on Yiddish sea narratives at the start of the nineteenth century. Shachar Pinsker traces the parallels between Hebrew and Yiddish literary expression in the Likrat and the Yung Yisroel movements and in the prose of Yossl Birshtein and Ya’akov Shabtai. In Naomi Seidman’s essay, she focuses on twentieth-century translations of the New Testament that emphasized the Hebraic component of Yiddish and received a positive response from secular Yiddish writers. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska takes a close look at the syntactic, semantic-lexical, and phonetic-orthographic levels of Julian Stryjkowski's stylized representation of Yiddish and at how it functions as a form of commemoration through deformation. Hana Wirth-Nesher examines the traces of Yiddish in non-Yiddish writing, specifically in post-Holocaust literature, where Yiddish is often represented as a commemorative site. David Roskies’s essay offers an innovative overview of modern Yiddish writing by identifying spoken language as a central feature of this corpus. Although the essays in this volume discuss modern Yiddish literature from a variety of approaches, genres, and periods, all of them address Yiddish textuality, its production and its reception, in a multilingual context. The unique historical, linguistic, and literary features of Yiddish offer new opportunities for exploring translation, poetics, hermeneutics, literary history, reading practices, commemorative sites in print, and intercultural relations.