Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 10.047 March 11, 2001 1) Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies (Marie Wright) 2) Nayer numer "Der Bavebter Yid" (Sholem Berger)\ 3) Mendele Moykher Sforim's story in Onkelos (Noyekh Miller) 4) Miryam Ulinover (Natalia Krynicka) 5) quotes (Miriam Weinstein) 6) Literatur far dervakslingen un tsenerlingen (Sheva Tsuker) 7) 2nd Yiddish Summer University in Strasburg (Astrid Ruff) 8) Intensive Elementary Yiddish in Seattle (Anikke Trier) 9) Seminar on East European Jewry, 2002-3 (Ben Nathans) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 08:01:44 -0500 (EST) From: yiddishstudies Subject: Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies The Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies has a new website. Full details of all our programmes including the 2001 Summer Schools in Oxford and London and the first ever international Klezfest in London are on our website. Website address: http://www.oxfordyiddish.org Marie Wright 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 14:47:04 -0500 (EST) From: "Sholem Berger" Subject: Nayer numer "Der Bavebter Yid" Der Bavebter Yid 5:1 Literarisher internet-zhurnal http://cs.uky.edu/~raphael/bavebter Fun REDAKTSYE: Etlekhe iberzetsungen fun moderne hebreishe lider Dos lid TSUGEBUNDN fun LEYE ROBINSON Di tsveyte (un letste) stsene fun pyese LOYT DI KORTN fun MINDL RINKEVITSH un kinderishe meynungen vegn morgn fun yidishkayt ibergegebn fun Z. STIVNSON Un ir hot mistome nokh nisht geleynt di ale alte numern... Kumt tsu gast! Sholem Berger, literarisher redaktor, sholemberger@hotmail.com Refoyl Finkel, tekhnisher redaktor, raphael@cs.uky.edu 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 17:12:15 -0500 From: Norman Miller Subject: Mendele Moykher Sforim's story in Onkelos A modern Yiddish version of Mendele Moykher Sforim's "dos toysfes yontef kelbl" is now available at http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/onkelos.htm. An English translation of this story, as with the others in Onkelos, is to be found in Howe and Greenberg's _A Treasury of Yiddish Stories_, Penguin. Noyekh Miller Leonard Prager Mirl Schonhaut Hirshan 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 14:23:11 -0500 (EST) From: Natalia Krynicka Subject: Miryam Ulinover Ikh zukh ale informatsyes (byografishe protim, zikhroynes, retsenzyes, artiklen, notitsn ua"v) vegn der Lodzher dikhterin Miryam Ulinover (1890?-1944), vi oykh ire lider tseshpreyte in der prese un farsheydene antologyes. A bikhl mit ale bakante shafungen fun der doziker dikhterin un mit a hakdome vegn ir lebn un shafn darf bekorev dershaynen in der Medem Biblyotek in Pariz, un s'volt geven a groyse shod durkhtsulozn velkhe s'zol nit zayn gedrukte lider oder emetsn tsugenglekhe faktn fun ir lebn (vos iz say vi zeyer veynik bakant) un zey nit araynnemen in ot-der publikatsye. Bazunders interesant volt geven tsu gefinen di magister-arbet vegn Ulinover fun Dine Heller (der tokhter fun Binem Heller), vos zi hot ongehoybn tsu shraybn bay Khone Shmerukn in Yerushalaim, vi oykh tsvey lider, vos di dikhterin zol hobn geshikt in ksav-yad Rikude Potash (loyt Dov Sadans hakdome tsu der hebreisher iberzetsung fun "Der bobes oytser") un a lid vegn dem os "yud" vos iz (loyt Goldkornen) dershinen in a numer fun der tsaytshrift "Os". Avade vet men ale nemen fun mentshn vos veln tsushikn a nay lid oder a naye informatsye, opdrukn in dem bikhl mit a dankvort. A dank in foroys Natalia Krynicka 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 09:46:40 -0500 (EST) From: "Miriam Weinstein" Subject: quotes I am looking for the Yiddish originals of three quotes that I have found in English. They will be used as chapter heads in an upcoming English-language book about Yiddish. (We will be printing the quotes in Yiddish and in English.) If anyone could either email me the Romanized text of the Yiddish, or send me via regular mail a Xeroxed copy of the original Yiddish text, I would be very appreciative! First, is the Max Weinreich quote, "A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy." Second is two lines from Chaim Grade's poem, Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers. Can anyone tell me the name of the poem in Yiddish, and the two lines in Yiddish? The English is " 'am free, am free, am free! you said;/wild as your poems, you shook out your wild hair." These are from stanza eight, lines 13 and 14. (each stanza has 16 lines.) Third is a quote from Jacob Glatstein: "A Yiddish poet is someone who reads Auden but Auden doesn't read him." I have a feeling that this comes from World of Our Fathers, where Howe quotes him as "once saying with a sardonic smile to the author of this book, "What does it mean to be a poet of an abandoned culture? It means that I have to be aware of Auden but Auden need never have heard of me." Howe does not have any note to this quote. Does anyone know if Glatstein originally said this in English or Yiddish? Another request: I am trying to correctly identify key people in a photo of participants in the Czernowitz Conference of 1908. Some sources identify the woman seated at left center next to Nathan Birnbaum as his wife; others identify her as Esther Frumkin. I have seen later photos of Frumkin, but I cannot decide if this is the same woman. Can anyone help? I will keep you posted on publication information for the book. In the meantime, many thanks! Miriam Weinstein Manchester, MA 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 20:53:44 -0500 (EST) From: SCZUCKER@aol.com Subject: Literatur far dervakslingen un tsenerlingen Literatur far dervakslingen un tsenerlingen (adolescents and teenager) Ikh volt gevolt hern fun undzere Mendelyaner vos zaynen take ufgevoksn in a yidish-redndiker svive. Vos hot ir geleyent af Yidish ven ir zayt geven an erekh in eltern fun 11-17. Oyb ir zayt gegangen in a Yidisher shul, vos hot ir geleyent in shul un vos hot ir geleyent stam azoy far farvaylung? Hot ir geleynt yidishe shraybers oder andere shraybers in yidisher iberzetsung? Fun vanen hot ir genumen di bikher? Vos hot ir geleynt vos, loyt ayer meynung, volt nokh alts geven interesant der hayntiker yugnt? A sheynem dank. Ayer Sheva Tsuker 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 06:11:16 -0500 (EST) From: Astrid Ruff Subject: 2nd Yiddish Summer University in Strasburg 2nd Yiddish Summer University : 16th - 27th July 2001 at the ORT School in Strasburg, France - Yiddish language course in 3 levels : (9 AM-12 30 PM) -level 1 : Sonia Pinkusowitz (Martin Buber Institute Brussels) - introduction to reading, writing and conversation -level 2 : Miriam Trinh (Jerusalem University) - more grammar; reading easy Yiddish texts - level 3 : Alan Astro (Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas) : - Yiddish literature in Argentina and South America - Workshops (15 PM-17 PM ) - Yiddish Theatre with Rafa‰l Goldwaser - Yiddish songs with Astrid Ruff - Yiddish Cuisine - Cultural events : - Conferences and Video-conferences - Theatre : S¡brent 3 monologues by Sholem Ale‹khem, interpreted by Rafa‰l Goldwaser - Sing, Reyzele, sing ! a concert of womens¡ songs by Astrid Ruff - Klezmer dance - Sight-seeing in Strasburg and discovery of local rural Jewish heritage Contact : Th‚ƒtre en l¡Air - der LufTeater 46, rue Baldner 67100 Strasbourg FRANCE tel :00333 88 44 18 14 fax (addressed to Rafa‰l Goldwaser) :00333 88 24 60 23 email : kruff@noos.fr web site : http://lufteater.free.fr Rafa‰l Goldwaser, Astrid Ruff 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 18:24:52 -0500 (EST) From: "atrier" Subject: Intensive Elementary Yiddish University of Washington Summer Quarter - "A" Term June 18-July 18, 2001 German 406A Intensive Elementary Yiddish 8 credits MTWThF 9:40 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Intensive study of Yiddish grammar, with oral and written exercises and reading of selected texts. The course will include several hours per week of Yiddish cultural events, including conversations with native speakers, films, visiting speakers, and Yiddish music. Students may earn an additional two credits in Jewish cultural studies by registering for SISJE 490. For further information call the Department of Germanics, (206) 543-4580 or email uwgerman@u.washington.edu For a free University of Washington Summer Quarter Bulletin and application, please call (206) 543-2320 or 1-800-543-2320 Anikke Trier 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 17:09:13 -0500 (EST) From: Benjamin Nathans Subject: Seminar on East European Jewry, 2002-3 Dear Colleagues, The Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania recently approved a proposal for a year-long seminar on East European Jewish history and culture, to be held at the Center during academic year 2002-3. You may be familiar with the Center's format: 15 to 20 scholars from around the world are brought in for one or two semesters to conduct research, share insights, and present new work in a weekly seminar-style gathering. It is a rare opportunity for sustained dialogue about the state of the field, for taking stock of the remarkable body of research that is now emerging, and for bringing different disciplines into fruitful contact with one another. Details of the 2002-3 proposal are given below. I hope you will seriously consider applying to participate in the seminar for part or all of 2002-3. I am sending out this advance notice because leave-schedules are notoriously complicated and I'm sure your own calendar gets booked well in advance. Please feel free to share this information with graduate students and colleagues. A more formal announcement will be appearing in several months, along with information about how to apply. The deadline for applications will be in October 2001. JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1600-2000 A Year-Long Seminar at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2002-3 For most of the modern period, the Jews of Eastern Europe constituted the single greatest reservoir of Jewish civilization in the world, the seat of Jewish learning and the inspiration for Dubnov's theory of "hegemonic centers" in Jewish history. Among the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, Russia, and Ukraine there formed many of the key religious, intellectual, and political currents that shape Jewish life even today, and from their ranks emerged the dominant new "centers" of the twentieth century in Israel and North America. During the last two decades, East European Jewry has begun to move to the center of the study of modern Jewish history and culture. Fresh questions and new areas of inquiry -- now fueled by unprecedented access to long-hidden archival riches in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union -- have stimulated a new generation of scholarship. Drawing on expertise in the areas of history, literature, religion, folklore, and allied fields, we seek to create an inter-disciplinary seminar at the CAJS whose goal will be to assemble and place in perspective the fruits of this new scholarship. We anticipate that several broad concerns will structure the research and dialogue that develop over the course of the year. First, in scholarship concerning East European Jewry from the seventeenth century to the present, the dominant mode of explanation for all kinds of historical and cultural change has been the idea of "crisis." What appears to be a virtually unending series of "crises" includes the 1648 Chmielnicki uprising, the messianic "crises" associated with Shabbetai Tsevi and Jacob Frank, the breakup of the Council of the Four Lands and of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the emergence of Hasidism and Haskalah as responses to an alleged "crisis" in traditional society, the forcible imposition of military service and the Pale of Settlement, abolition of the kahal, the pogroms of 1881-82 and the accompanying "crisis" of the Haskalah and liberal politics, the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Sovietization and mass urbanization, and finally - and most emphatically - the Holocaust. Three centuries of East European Jewish history, in other words, have served as evidence for the idea that the path away from "tradition" leads inexorably through "crisis" - personal and collective. How far then have we moved from what Salo Baron famously disparaged as the "lachrymose conception" of the Jewish past? Has the paradigm of crisis merely taken its place? Recent studies of East European Jewry have stepped back to explore the ideas of crisis and catastrophe as Jewish cultural motifs, while others have called into question the crisis model with respect to a wide range of historical episodes and movements. As yet, however, there has been no comprehensive discussion of alternative modes of change. Are there deep continuities in East European Jewish history and culture that bridge the recurrent ruptures? Second, the seminar will provide a much-needed opportunity to bring together the study of elite and popular culture, and to encourage dialogue among disciplines that rarely speak to each other in any sustained way. Areas in need of cross-disciplinary exploration include the intersection of Kabbalah and various forms of popular magic, including practices absorbed from surrounding Slavic populations; the emergence of an East European orthodoxy within the force-field of the struggle between Hasidism and Haskalah; the evolution of the various strands of Hasidism after their crystallization in the early decades of the 19th century; the political mobilization of the Jewish "silent majority" at the beginning of the 20th; the popular reception of a socialist Yiddish culture in the early Soviet period; and the resurgence of Jewish national identity in the USSR during the Cold War. We expect that the interstices between history and literature will provide a particularly rich arena for discussion and debate. Scholars of the Yiddish and Hebrew literature that flowered in Eastern Europe have placed the shtetl, the family, and the search for a modern, emancipated self (and its characteristic genre, the autobiography) at the heart of their work. Historians are only beginning systematically to investigate the specific historical contexts that conditioned Jewish cultural modernism. The extraordinary place of literature and literary criticism in late 19th- and early 20th-century East European Jewish society also has yet to be fully explored, including its relationship to parallel developments in the surrounding Slavic populations. Third, the seminar will begin the work of critically examining the foundations of modern Jewish scholarship in Eastern Europe, and in particular its strikingly ethnographic, not to say populist, orientation. The scholarly study of East European Jewry began with a generation of fin-de-siecle intellectuals, writers, and artists who in many cases had repudiated the Haskalah as politically naive even as they inherited the role of the maskilim as social critics. As Jewish Studies becomes more self-conscious about the roots of its own enterprise, we need to investigate scholarship in Eastern Europe as intensively as has been done for the Wissenschaft des Judentums. The founding generation of the East European Jewish intelligentsia, from Ansky to Zinberg, fashioned an interpretive lens (including the paradigm of crisis) through which we still perceive much of the East European Jewish past. In addition, many of them led politically engaged lives that intersected with their work (and personal lives) in ways that have scarcely been explored. Greater attention to the pioneering figures who first conceived of East European Jewry as a distinct historical entity promises to cast in sharper relief the categories and assumptions that became the field's intellectual lineage. Finally, there is the question of whether and in what manner the Jews of Eastern Europe constituted a single society with a distinct culture. To what extent did they remain a coherent entity across the various upheavals (internal and external) and recastings of political boundaries, in the course of which they became subjects, and occasionally citizens, of a wide range of states and empires, from the Poland of the magnates to the Russia of the Commissars? How did East European Jews define themselves vis-a-vis their host societies, and other segments of world Jewry, and how did this self- definition change over time? These are just a few of the arenas in which the seminar might focus its work. The list of lacunae in the field is, not surprisingly, considerably longer. In fact, so many scholars are now turning their attention to the East European Jewish past, and from such diverse vantage points, that it is impossible to predict the full range of questions that will guide the work of the seminar's participants. In addition to the outstanding holdings of the CAJS and Van Pelt libraries, we expect that many fellows will want to utilize the archival and library collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, now in its new home at the Center for Jewish History. In fact, collaborating with YIVO in the organization of lectures by individual fellows, a public conference, an exhibition, and/or publication of fellows' research, could considerably expand the audience for the seminar's work. Similar forms of collaboration may be explored with the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. Given the widespread interest among the broader Jewish community in the history and culture of East European Jewry, we anticipate that fellows will have ample opportunities during the seminar year to share their research beyond the walls of the academy. If you have any questions or comments about the seminar, please let me know. Best, Ben Nathans ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 10.047 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://www.mendele.net http://ibiblio.org/yiddish/mendele.html