BiblioVault - Books about Yiddish

A History of German Jewish Bible Translation

Abigail Gillman

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Between 1780 and 1937, Jews in Germany produced numerous new translations of the Hebrew Bible into German. Intended for Jews who were trilingual, reading Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, they were meant less for religious use than to promote educational and cultural goals. Not only did translations give Jews vernacular access to their scripture without Christian intervention, but they also helped showcase the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and the foundational text of modern Jewish identity.

This book is the first in English to offer a close analysis of German Jewish translations as part of a larger cultural project. Looking at four distinct waves of translations, Abigail Gillman juxtaposes translations within each that sought to achieve similar goals through differing means. As she details the history of successive translations, we gain new insight into the opportunities and problems the Bible posed for different generations and gain a new perspective on modern German Jewish history.

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The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish

A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye

Barry Trachtenberg

Rutgers University Press, 2022

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966.

The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

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Immigrants against the State

Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

Kenyon Zimmer

University of Illinois Press, 2015

From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. Kenyon Zimmer explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions.

Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.

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Jerusalem of Lithuania

A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History

Jerold C. Frakes

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Yerusholayim d’lite: di yidishe kultur in der lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania: A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History) by Jerold C. Frakes contains cultural, literary, and historical readings in Yiddish that vividly chronicle the central role Vilnius (Lithuania) played in Jewish culture throughout the past five centuries. It includes many examples of Yiddish literature, historiography, sociology, and linguistics written by and about Litvaks and includes work by prominent Yiddish poets, novelists, raconteurs, journalists, and scholars. In addition, Frakes has supplemented the primary texts with many short essays that contextualize Yiddish cultural figures, movements, and historical events.

Designed especially for intermediate and advanced readers of Yiddish (from the second-year of instruction), each text is individually glossed, including not only English definitions, but also basic grammatical information that will enable intermediate readers to progress to an advanced reading ability.

Because of its unique content, Yerusholayim d’lite will be of interest not only to university students of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, but it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and Yiddish reading groups and clubs worldwide, as well as for all general readers interested in Yiddish-language culture.

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The Range of Yiddish

A Catalog of an Exhibition from the Yiddish Collection of the Harvard College Library

Marion Aptroot and Jeremy Dauber

Harvard University Press

The facsimiles of Yiddish documents and title pages reproduced in this volume, their captions, and the accompanying introductory essays are a succinct introduction to Yiddish culture. They cover religion, education and daily life, politics, Yiddish literature, history, and scholarship, Yiddish theater, and the Yiddish press, as reflected in materials printed over the last 400 years.

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Songs in Dark Times

Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

Amelia M. Glaser

Harvard University Press, 2020

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.”

These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

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Yiddish & English

The Story of Yiddish in America

Sol Steinmetz

University of Alabama Press, 2001

This is the only book to seriously treat the intriguing linguistic and cultural phenomenon of the intimate contact between Yiddish and English over the past 120 years.

Yiddish arrived in America as the mother tongue of millions of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Not only did this language without a homeland survive in the great American melting pot, it infiltrated the majority language, English, with a wide variety of new words and expressions and helped to establish a new ethnic language called "Jewish English." New Yorkers, in particular, have adopted a long list of Yiddish words, including the well-known "kosher," "chutzpah," "klutz," "yenta," "nosh," "mavin," "schlep," and "shmo."

Yiddish had first developed from language sharing as Jews of northern France and northern Italy migrated into the German-speaking region of the Rhine Valley in the Middle Ages. Sol Steinmetz traces the development of such words as bonhomme from the Old French meaning "good man" to the Yiddish of bonim, or shul for synagogue derived from the German schuol, meaning "school," which had come originally from the Latin schola, for example. With a rich collection of quotations from literature and the press, Steinmetz documents the unusually high lexical, semantic, and intonational exchanges between Yiddish and English in America. He offers more than 1,200 Yiddish words, expressions, idioms, and phrases that have melted into the English vernacular.

Yiddish and English is important for Judaica collections with its two appendixes-one on the romanization of Yiddish and another of Yiddish-origin words, a Jewish-English glossary, a selected bibliography, and an index. But this slim volume is so entertaining and informative for the general reader that it is recommended for anyone who delights in word derivations and language.

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