Geographies of Jewish Culture: Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism in New York

FAIN: FT-56107-08

Allison Schachter
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

I will spend the summer researching New York as a center of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism during and after World War II, focusing on two central Hebrew and Yiddish poets of the period, Gabriel Preil and Kadia Molodowsky. This research is part of a larger book project, which examines the relationship between Jewish modernisms and the movement of Jewish culture from Eastern Europe to new centers in Western Europe, pre-state Palestine, and North America. I show how Jewish modernist writers engaged, translated, and revised modernist trends of their period, as they moved among diverse Jewish cultural centers. My research in New York and the study as a whole touch on central concerns of Jewish modernity, including changing gender roles, language choice, and national affiliations. My examination of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism explodes the boundaries of modernist studies, challenging the nationalist presumptions that continue to underlie our grasp of modernism.

Associated Products

Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Book)
Title: Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century
Author: Allison Schachter
Abstract: Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Jewish/?view=usa&ci=9780199812639
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-19-9812

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