Reviews

Review

Miriam Udel’s Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque

Miri­am Udel’s new book trav­els with the genre of the picaresque from the shtetl to the USA to the USSR and brings it into the twen­ti­eth century.

Review

Strangers in Berlin by Rachel Seelig

Seel­ig’s new book explores the city of Berlin dur­ing the Weimar peri­od as a tran­sit sta­tion” for Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture writ­ten in Ger­man, Yid­dish, and Hebrew.

Review

Review of A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker

Shachar M. Pinsker’s lat­est work is a live­ly exam­i­na­tion of the role of cafés as meet­ing grounds for Jew­ish writ­ers and thinkers in the mod­ern peri­od of transna­tion­al migra­tion, from 1848 – 1939.

Review

Review of Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People by Mikhail Krutikov.

Krutikov’s philo­log­i­cal skillset and metic­u­lous archival research shine through­out this book, a land­mark study of both Der Nis­ter and Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture under Stalin.

Review

Review of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity by Yitzhak Lewis

Yitzhak Lewis shows how Reb Nach­man ini­ti­at­ed a new era of Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture that shaped nine­teenth- and twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Yid­dish and Hebrew writing.

Review

Review of Women Writing Jewish Modernity by Allison Schachter

Schachter calls us to think beyond the andro­cen­tric, to imag­ine and cre­ate an under­stand­ing of mod­ern Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture that places women at its center.

Review

Review of From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter

From the Jew­ish Provinces is a valu­able and high­ly read­able addi­tion to Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in translation.

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