Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

Lingering bilingualism, modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in contact, Naomi Brenner

eng

no index present

non fiction

Lingering bilingualism

dictionaries

Naomi Brenner

Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art

modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in contact

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambitious young writers flocked fromJewish towns and villages to cultural centers like Warsaw, Odessa, and Vilnato seek their fortunes. These writers, typically proficient in both Hebrew andYiddish, gathered in literary salons and cafš to read, declaim, discuss, andponder the present and future of Jewish culture. However, in the years beforeand after World War I, writers and readers increasingly immigrated to WesternEurope, the Americas, and Palestine, transforming the multilingualism that haddefined Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe. By 1950, Hebrew was ensconcedas the language and literature of the young state of Israel, and Yiddishwas scattered throughout postwar Jewish communities in Europe and North andSouth America. Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformationsof Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew-Yiddishbilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddishwriters and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualismin response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture.She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and criticsintersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York-andimagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Heraim is neither to idealize the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism that once definedEast European Jewish culture nor to recount the "language war" that challengedit. Rather, Lingering Bilingualism argues that continued Hebrew-Yiddish literary contact has been critical to the development of each literature,cultivating linguistic and literary experimentation and innovation

adult