Suchergebnisse

An original investigation into the reading strategies and uses of books by Jews in the Soviet era. In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way

The article provides a comparative analysis of how two key poets, Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii, responded to World War II, in which they both fought, in the poems written at the front or shortly thereafter. Via Lydia Ginzburg's notion of the deductive and inductive modes in lyric poetry, the article reveals how Slutskii and Satunovskii approach the figure of the enemy and shuttle between particulars and the universal in their verse. Dissimilar in their life choices (official for Slutskii and underground for Satunovskii), they share an aesthetic kinship, with Slutskii pressing harder toward generalizations, often radically revisionist, and Satunovskii insisting on the particulars and aphoristic fragmentariness. Both poets resist the grandiose and odic in figuring out how to navigate between the collective, personal, and intimate in confronting the catastrophe.

The American Yiddish film Tevye (1939), produced, directed, written by and starring Maurice Schwartz, has been discussed solely in relation to its source—Sholem Aleichem's famed cycle of stories—and the history of its adaptations. Moving from the question of adaptation to that of intertextuality and cultural continuity, this essay argues that the film ought to be recognized as a seminally subversive work and a contradictory visual text, whose indebtedness to the Yiddish classic is surpassed by its internal complexity. Positioning the film within the network of intersecting influences, cinematic, theatrical, and literary, the essay shows that in Tevye , the patriarchal character becomes the platform for a turning point in the Jewish intellectual psyche on the eve of the Holocaust, marked by a sense of tortured ambivalence toward the traditional Jewish world to which American Yiddish artists and intellectuals felt compelled to return. By suggesting that the film was a response to Yankev Glatstein's seminal poem, "Good Night, World," the essay begins to (re)construct the engagement between Yiddish cinema and literature and their formation of a new historical moment out of the mixture of intellectual and artistic anxieties.