Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature

Wirth-Nesher, Hana

doi:10.1177/1477570006071762

Cited by 37 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…It is no accident that the song is written by a famous American-Jewish songwriting team that deeply influenced an era of American popular culture 1 . Hana Wirth-Nesher has written of the tendency among American-Jewish writers to expunge traces of Jewish languages or accents from their writing in order to assimilate [18]. Here we have a contemporary inversion of this theme, in which English is elided from an Israeli Hebrew representation of American Jewish life.…”

Section: Transcultural Israeli Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Nationalism and Monolingualism: the “Language Wars” and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism

Weininger

Мелисса²

2019

polylinguality

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With the establishment of a Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early 20th century, and a Hebrew culture with it, furious debates arose among Jewish writers about the future of Jewish literary multilingualism. Until this period, the idea that Jewish monolingualism was a preferred mode of cultural existence or that a writer would have to choose between the two primary languages of European Jewish cultural production was a relatively new one. Polylingualism had been characteristic of Jewish culture and literary production for millennia. But in modernity, Jewish nationalist movements, particularly Zionism, demanded a monolingual Jewish culture united around one language. Nonetheless, polylingual Jewish culture has persisted, and despite the state of Israel's insistence on Hebrew as the national language, Israeli multilingualism has surged in recent years. This article surveys a number of recent developments in translingual, transcultural, and transnational Israeli literary and cultural forms

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Section: Transcultural Israeli Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Nationalism and Monolingualism: the “Language Wars” and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism

Weininger

Мелисса²

2019

polylinguality

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“…41 Aspiring to write a "pure poem, pure Yiddish poem," Osherow uses semantic doubling to instructive ends. This commitment to voicedness has particular consequences for her engagement with Yiddish, as played out in the poem "Ch'vil Schreiben a Poem auf Yiddish."…”

Section: I Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“None Are Like You, Shulamite”: Linguistic Longings in Jewish American Verse

Shreiber¹

2010

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A B S t R A c tIn 1924, the German theologian and philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, completed his translation of the Hebrew lyrics of the medieval Spanish poet, Yehudah Halevi. Reflecting upon his achievement, which included wrestling with the decision to " introduce foreign rhymes into German," Rosenzweig provocatively declared: "All Jewish poetry in exile scorns to ignore this being-in-exile." That is, Jewish poetry, by definition, necessarily occupies an estranged relation to the world of which it is a part. This estrangement is especially acute in Jewish American poems which orient themselves toward Jewish languages (Hebrew and Yiddish) that are at a distance from the poet's own native tongue.My essay expands our understanding of how Jewish American verse may be animated by this linguistic longing-by examining two very different poets, Charles Reznikoff and Jacqueline Osherow, each of whom struggles with the obstacles posed by writing in English, a decidedly non-Jewish tongue.For even as these poets share this longing, it informs their verse in significantly different ways. Reading Reznikoff within a theoretical frame provided by Rosenzweig's work on translation, we discover a poet who believes that since translation is possible, relation with an Other may be achieved. His poems about Hebrew, as well as his own translations of Halevi, are restorative examples of poems born out of the conviction that one's own language can be renewed through an active relation to the language of another. Turning to Osherow, we discover a markedly more elegiac position-a position made especially vivid when read within the framework of Walter Benjamin's classic essay, "The Task of the Translator." Osherow's poems are poignant scenes of unfulfilled linguistic desire steeped in the knowledge of their exilic condition.

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“…: 4) case, the use of Yiddish became a powerful linguistic and cultural "weapon," capable of producing "the secret communication of a subjugated group." Hana Wirth-Nesher (2006) highlights the crucial yet largely submerged components and traces of Yiddish in American Jewish literature, written mainly in English. I propose to examine a parallel phenomenon in a very different cultural and ideological sphere, namely, the ways in which Yiddish -as a language and a set of literary traditions as well as what Jeffery Shandler (2008) has termed "postvernacular" 7 -has continued 5.…”

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confidence: 99%

“That Yiddish Has Spoken to Me”: Yiddish in Israeli Literature

Pinsker¹

2014

Poetics Today

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This essay examines the ways in which Yiddish -as a language, a set of literary traditions and practices, and a "postvernacular" -operates within the context of Israeli, Hebrew-dominated literature. After establishing the subject's poetic, historical, and political framework, I present two examples of how Yiddish exerted a (largely unacknowledged) influence on Israeli literature. The first concerns the striking similarities and intersections between two literary groups active in Israel during the 1950s: a famous Hebrew group (Likrat) and a little-known Yiddish group (Yung Yisroel). The second example consists in the parallels and intertwined literary histories of two writers, Yossl Birshtein (who was a member of Yung Yisroel) and the Hebrew writer Ya'acov Shabtai, in order to demonstrate the presence of Yiddish in Shabtai's poetic work and to discover an untold story in the history of modern Hebrew literature.On December 14, 1967, the poet Yehiel Perlmuter (1904, better known by his adopted Hebrew name Avot Yeshurun, gave an address titled "Ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ta'aroch et ha-tfila" ("Hebrew Literature Will Recite the Prayer") on the occasion of receiving the Brenner Prize. In his speech, he said the following about his relations with Yiddish:That Yiddish has begun to come to you when you dream and when you are awake, because it became known to her that you are determined not to speak it, not to think in it and not to dream it -in times of sleep or in times of awareness.

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Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature

Cited by 37 publications

References 19 publications

Nationalism and Monolingualism: the “Language Wars” and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism

Nationalism and Monolingualism: the “Language Wars” and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism

“None Are Like You, Shulamite”: Linguistic Longings in Jewish American Verse

“That Yiddish Has Spoken to Me”: Yiddish in Israeli Literature

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