Bøker i Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art-serien

The emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century and the evolution of Zionist society in Palestine were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew literature of the day. This book traces the tensions between the extraliterary - the historical, social, and political - and the literary - the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic - in Hebrew fiction.

New to Jerusalem and to adulthood, Rutha serves Cafe Shira's devoted customers with a quiet compassion and a sensitive gaze, collecting their stories and absorbing them at her peril. Avigdor, the melancholy and somewhat weary cafe owner, philosophizes about love as he attends to the needs of his patrons while ignoring his own. Christian, a young religious pilgrim, has come to Jerusalem to find God but stumbles upon a much different revelation. These characters form the heart of this wry, often poignant novel narrated through a series of vignettes. They are joined by a colorful cast of characters who frequent the literary cafe-long-married couples, young lovers, an eccentric poet, and a traumatized veteran-all finding refuge and occasionally wisdom among their motley urban community.Closely based on Ehrlich's own experiences over the twenty-five years he devoted to running a cafe that became an important Jerusalem cultural venue and landmark, Cafe Shira is a work of disarming tenderness and bittersweet love.

Reuven Ben-Yosef (1937-2001) was born Robert Eliot Reiss to an assimilated Jewish family in New York. He switched from writing English poetry to Hebrew poetry after his immigration to Israel in 1959. In this edited volume, Weingrad includes expertly translated poems and an extensive, fascinating introduction that helps us see Ben-Yosef's personal poetry as part of a larger family story.

This book explores the important and barely examined connections between the humanitarian concerns embedded in the religious heritage of Jewish American artists and the appeal of radical political causes between the years of the Great Migration from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and the beginning of World War II in the late 1930s. Visual material consists primarily of political cartoons published in leftwing Yiddish- and English-language newspapers and magazines. Artists often commented on current events using biblical and other Jewish references, meaning that whatever were their political concerns, their Jewish heritage was ever present. By the late 1940s, the obvious ties between political interests and religious concerns largely disappeared. The text, set against events of the times--the Russian Revolution, the Depression and the rise of fascism during the 1930s as well as life on New York's Lower East Side--includes artists' statements as well as the thoughts of religious, literary, and political figures ranging from Marx to Trotsky to newspaper editor Abraham Cahan to contemporary art critics including Meyer Schapiro.

Described by theatre critics as one of the twentieth century's greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899-1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theatre in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director.

This volume - a sequel to the author's ""A traveler disguised"" - further develops the analysis of the fictionality and aesthetic autonomy of the classics of Yiddish fiction. The essays in this work concentrate on the artistic reconstruction of the ""world"".

"The Dybbuk" is arguably the most famous play in the Yiddish repertoire and plays an intrinsic part in the cultural system that created the Yiddish imagination. Along with this new translation, this text offers a variety of literary works spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries.

This volume includes multiple renditions of every prayer. In accordance with the traditional role assigned to the prayer leader of each service, renditions are presented at levels appropriate to the lay cantor (baal t'filo) as well the professional cantor (chazz'n).

Illuminating the Jewish art exhibition at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1901, this study looks at its contributions to art and Jewish history and culture. Cultural Zionism was for the first time included into the official agenda, an important step for the politics of Zionism.

Explores the relationship between Judaism and writing in the works of four twentieth-century Italian writers: Umberto Saba, Natalia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, and Primo Levi. This book examines the different ways in which each author's work responds to Judaism and the notion of Jewish identity.

In Facing the Fires, Bernard Horn introduces A. B. Yehoshua, Israel's greatest living novelist, to an English-speaking audience. Yehoshua is also his country's most audacious thinker about politics, culture, history, and Jewish identity.Yehoshua's achievement has been recognized throughout the world, and he has been awarded literary prizes in both Israel and the United States. A lively, controversial, and prophetic voice in his homeland, Yehoshua rigorously tests his community's deepest pieties: religion, Zionism, the agony of the Holocaust. He is a Jew who does not believe in God and a committed Zionist, and member of the "peace camp" in Israel who welcomed the Palestinian uprising of 1987.In the tradition of the Paris Review interviews, Horn's conversations with Yehoshua reveal the intricate play of literary, psychological, mythological, and political motifs in the novelist's work. Stimulated by a warm friendship between the two scholars, the intellectual energy of Facing the Fires offers readers a pleasure they might expect only from fiction.

With little of his fiction available in English translation, David Bergelson is revealed in this book to new readers seeking a more complete picture of worldwide Yiddish literature. The collection includes two short stories and a novella, which offer a taste of Bergelson's elegiac prose style.

Explores S Y Agnon's theological and philosophical attitudes toward language, attitudes that to a large extent shaped his poetics and aesthetic values. Drawing on anthologies compiled by Agnon, this book examines his theoretical orientation and the ways he integrated into his poetics ideas about language that are rooted in Jewish theology.

Examines the 1907 Yiddish play ""God of Vengeance"" by Sholem Asch, the cross-dressing films of Yiddish actress Molly Picon, and several short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This book analyzes the English-language novels ""The Rise of David Levinsky"", ""Wasteland"", and Portnoy's ""Complaint"".

The debate over the representation of Jews in Russian literature has been dominated by the dichotomy of anti- and philo-Semitic discourses. This title explores the construction of Jewishness as ""Otherness"" in the works of three of Russia's greatest nineteenth-century authors - Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev.

Recaptures a vanished moment of cultural history.

This volume presents a cultural record of the Jewish folk music of Eastern Europe, through the eyes of ethnomusicologist, Moshe Beregovski. It includes contextual responses to Jewish folk music, essays on musical influences, and notes and lyrics of nearly 300 folk songs.

According to traditional narratives of immigrant assimilation, Jews freely surrendered Yiddish language and culture in their desire for an American identity. This book offers a challenge to this conventional literary history, returning readers to a threshold where Americanization also meant ambivalence and resistance.

The first Yiddish writer to serve successfully as an interpreter and representative of this world was Morris Rosenfeld. This title examines the career of Rosenfeld, a key figure in the development of Yiddish literature geared to American immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

A coming-of-age story of a shtetl child, the events of this novel unfold through the eyes of Hershl, who leaves his small town to become educated only to return to the Pale of Settlement in the wake of the 1881 pogroms. This epic novel explores the social upheaval faced by Russian Jews.

Meir, the narrator of the story, is the personal servant of Nathan, a rich tycoon consumed with his obsessions. The deep connection between Meir and Nathan takes its toll on the relationships each man has with the women in his life, revealing issues of national identity and human weakness.

A study of the history of Jewish exiles and genocide, and the literary expressions that attempt to make sense of these catastrophes.

Captures the artist, Grisha Bruskin's experiences as a Jew in Russia, the reality of life in an empire permeated by ideology, and the centrality of family. This book features photographs which create a distinct dialogue between word and image.

Place and Ideology examines literary depictions of vernacular places, the lived places of everyday life, such as balconies and cafs, to propose a reconceptualization of how space informs Israeli identity. In illuminating the intimate relations between vernacular place, identity, and ideology in the cultural imagination, it confronts issues central in Israel and beyond.

An encyclopedic introduction to French Jewish literature as it has emerged since the late 1960s. This book provides an analysis of French Jewish authors born after the Shoal, and traces the development of the rich agenda of jeune litterature juive (young Jewish writing) from its beginnings in the late 1970s, into the 1980s and 1990s.

The world of Saul Bellow is peopled largely by men - often intellectuals - who manifest Bellow's unique conception of American masculinity. This work analyzes Bellow's oeuvre from a feminist perspective. It incorporates the insights of French feminist theory on Western male philosophers.

Exploring the ambivalent relationship between multiculturalists and contemporary Jewish American literature, this text advocates a more inclusive and intellectually valid form than is currently practiced. It includes an historical overview of Jewish American fiction.

An illuminating inside look at the life and times of playwright and author Jacob Gordin, a central presence in the Golden Age of Yiddish theatre.

An abridged version of a collection originally published in 1961, the 42 stories here are written by Jewish writers of the 20th century, including Sholem Aleichem, Abraham Raisin and Joseph Opotashu. They offer a testament to the mother tongue through the trials of Americanization.

In an exposition of writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, this work shows the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and explores the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the 19th century.