“Modernism”

Review

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

Sonia Gollance

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

Review

Review of Women Writing Jewish Modernity by Allison Schachter

Jessica Kirzane

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

Texts & Translation

Erasing the Written, Rewriting the Erased: A Fragmented and Imperfect Tribute to Vogel

Zackary Sholem Berger

Zackary Sholem Berger renders two poems by Vogel anew via the poetic method of translation-erasure, revealing through distortion the contours that lead from language to language across the decades. 


Special Issue

Walking with Vogel

New perspectives on Debora Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship

This special issue invites you to walk with Debora Vogel as she maps the spaces of Jewish life through avant-garde forms. We bring together new perspectives on Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship, all in an attempt to follow the many lines of creative and critical inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work.

Texts & Translation

Lwowska Juderia

Lwów’s Jewish Quarter

Debora Vogel

Translation by Jordan Lee Schnee

Debora Vogel’s 1935 essay, Lwowska Juderia, gives us a valuable snapshot of Lwów’s Jewish streets with an eye to the modern.

Review

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

Marek Tuszewicki

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

Roy Ginsberg

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

Article

The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads

Ekaterina Kuznetsova and Anastasiya Lyubas

By considering the image of the streetwalker in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this article deepens the understanding of Yiddish creativity as ultimately multimodal and interconnected.

Article

Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts

Agnieszka Legutko

Hertz Grosbard's “word concerts” were an embodiment of "Jewspeak," performances that sought to give life to the Yiddish literary tradition.

Article

Louis Zukofsky: Building a Poetics of Translation

Sarah Ponichtera

How the poet Louis Zukofsky constructed his English-language American modernism by citing, translating, and adapting the Yiddish poetry of Yehoash.

Article

The Shtik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter

Nathan Wolski

This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s (1898-1973) poem “Keter: Fragmenten fun a rapsodye,” published in 1923, at the height of the Warsaw expressionist explosion of the early twenties. 

Blog

In Edenia, a City of the Future

Yevgeniy Fiks

Yevgeniy Fiks and Larissa Babji invited artists to engage with Kalman Zingman’s 1918 Yiddish-language utopian novella In der tsukunft-shtot edenia (In Edenia, a City of the Future), published in Kharkiv, Ukraine. They displayed the results in an exhibition at Yermilov Center in Kharkiv, Ukraine in June 2017. Here they discuss the novel, the process that led to the exhibition, and the political and social realities that their project sought to address.

Review

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

Jeffrey Yoskowitz

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.

Blog

Yiddish Moves

Richard J. Fein

Not a translation! An original English-language Yiddish poem. 

Review

Strangers in Berlin by Rachel Seelig

Sunny Yudkoff

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

Miriam Udel’s Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque

Matthew Johnson

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.

Texts & Translation

דער פֿערציקיעריקער מאַן

The Forty-Year-Old Man

Peretz Markish

Translation by Rose Waldman

New translations of four sections from Markish's book-length modernist poem. 

Blog

The Virtuoso of Loneliness: A Brief Invitation to Leyeles

Zackary Sholem Berger

Hear the voice of Yiddish poet Aaron Glantz-Leyeles as he meditates on the loneliness of the Yiddish writer while still embracing the magic of the American landscape.