Author: Anita Norich Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 9780253113269 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 172
Book Description
"... the most incisive study to date of the lesser-known but equally talented Singer: Israel Joshua... " -- Choice "... exceedingly well researched and written... " -- Shofar "This critical examination of the fiction of I.J. Singer is deft in its placement of the novels and short stories in historical context, but with new perspectives on that historical context." -- AJL Newsletter Although Israel Joshua Singer has existed, for English readers, in the shadow of his famous brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, this book reasserts his rightful place at the center of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe and America. A comprehensive bibliography of Singer's fiction, essays, and journalism is included.
Author: I. J. Singer Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0761871837 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 122
Book Description
While Willy has neither the multi-generational sweep nor the moral gravitas of I. J. Singer’s family sagas, its themes are nonetheless timeless, its struggles archetypal. A father and son quarrel, and, in the process, a richly compact narrative emerges. Their respective stories define what is lost and what is gained in immigrant passage to the new world. The eponymous hero, Volf Rubin—Willy (Vili) Robin in America—is the rare agon who shares center stage with his antagonist, that is, his more voluble paterfamilias. The sententious Hirsh—modeled on the chief rabbi of Nyesheve and Singer's own painful childhood encounters with his savage brutality—tenaciously holds on to some of the more merciless pronouncements derived from a literalist reading and application of Jewish law. Such is the heavy baggage which, according to Volf, should have been left behind in steerage. Volf's lapsed Judaism is his father’s dystopian nightmare: a collection of Halakhic transgressions, and worse, his renunciation of study. Volf’s school is the meadow, the farm, and the stable: all comprise an idyllic revision of the scene of instruction. He is a devotee of nature, its flora and especially its fauna. Volf’s love for his horses is steadfast and “unbridled”: he holds on to their manes without the mediation of man-made straps of leather. Through an unforeseen turn of events and peripety, Hirsh finds undeserved recompense. Volf, on the other hand, has subverted his own life-long effort to spurn his father's spiritual patrimony. Hence the dual narrative of father and son, deriving from orthodox observance and heterodox dissent respectively, has been lifted wholesale from Europe to America and obtains with equal force on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Sorrel Kerbel Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135456070 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1394
Book Description
Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.
Author: Ezra Mendelsohn Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195354680 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts collects essays on Jewish literature which deal with "the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the 'Jewish question.'" Essays in this volume explore the tension between Israeli and Diaspora identities, and between those who write in Hebrew or Yiddish and those who write in other "non-Jewish" languages. The essays also explore the question of how Jewish writers remember history in their "search for a useable past." From essays on Jabotinsky's virtually unknown plays to Philip Roth's novels, this book provides a strong overview of contemporary themes in Jewish literary studies.
Author: Janet Hadda Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 0299186938 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl" and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth century.
Author: Daniel Syrovy Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110641879 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 656
Book Description
The third volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature" includes contributions that focus on the interplay between concepts of nation, national languages, and individual as well as collective identities. Because all literary communication happens within different kinds of power structures - linguistic, economic, political -, it often results in fascinating forms of hybridity. In the first of four thematic chapters, the papers investigate some of the ways in which discourses can establish modes of thinking, or how discourses are in turn controlled by active linguistic interventions, whether in the context of the patriarchy, war, colonialism, or political factions. The second thematic block is predominantly concerned with hybridity as an aspect of modern cultural identity, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of domestic life and in society at large. Closely related, a third series of papers focuses on writers and texts analysed from the vantage points of exile and exophony, as well as theoretical contributions to issues of terminology and what it means to talk about transcultural phenomena. Finally, a group of papers sheds light on more overtly violent power structures, mechanisms of exclusion, Totalitarianism, torture, and censorship, but also resistance to these forms of oppression. In addition to these chapters, the volume also collects a number of thematically related group sections from the ICLA congress, preserving their original context.
Author: Ruth R. Wisse Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226903187 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.
Author: Saul Noam Zaritt Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192609149 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody studies Jewish American writers' relationships with the idea of world literature. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The work examined in this study was deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. Jewish American Writing and World Literature tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.
Author: Hugh Denman Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004494480 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
A quarter of a century after Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature it is time to take stock of his achievement. Penetrating studies of his fictional and autobiographical works by leading scholars in the field reveal that for all the acclaim he has received on the basis of the English versions of his works, no adequate evaluation of Bashevis's significance can be made without careful examination of the original Yiddish texts. Critical readings assess inter alia his themes and motifs, the impact of Kabbalah on his work, reflections of society in his original Polish homeland as well as his place within the context of contemporary Jewish American letters and the canon of modern Yiddish and Hebrew writing.
Author: Glenda Abramson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134428642 Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture is an extensively updated revision of the very successful Companion to Jewish Culture published in 1989 and has now been updated throughout. Experts from all over the world contribute entries ranging from 200 to 1000 words broadly, covering the humanities, arts, social sciences, sport and popular culture, and 5000-word essays contextualize the shorter entries, and provide overviews to aspects of culture in the Jewish world. Ideal for student and general readers, the articles and biographies have been written by scholars and academics, musicians, artists and writers, and the book now contains up-to-date bibliographies, suggestions for further reading, comprehensive cross referencing, and a full index. This is a resource, no student of Jewish history will want to go without.
Author: Anita Norich
Author: I. J. Singer
Author: Sorrel Kerbel
Author: Ezra Mendelsohn
Author: Janet Hadda
Author: Daniel Syrovy
Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Author: Saul Noam Zaritt
Author: Hugh Denman
Author: Glenda Abramson