Lingering Bilingualism
Cód:
491_9780815634232
At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambitious young writers flocked fromJewish towns and villages to cultural centers like Warsaw, Odessa, and Vilnato seek their fortunes. These writers, typically proficient in both Hebrew andYiddish, gathered in literary salons and cafés to read, declaim, discuss, andponder the present and future of Jewish culture. However, in the years beforeand after World War I, writers and readers increasingly immigrated to WesternEurope, the Americas, and Palestine, transforming the multilingualism that haddefined Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe. By 1950, Hebrew was ensconcedas the language and literature of the young state of Israel, and Yiddishwas scattered throughout postwar Jewish communities in Europe and North andSouth America.Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformationsof Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew-Yiddishbilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddishwriters and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddishliteratures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualism in response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture. She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and critics intersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York-and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Heraim is neither to idealize the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism that once definedEast European Jewish culture nor to recount the language war that challengedit. Rather, Lingering Bilingualism argues that continued Hebrew-Yiddish literary contact has been critical to the development of each literature, cultivating linguistic and literary experimentation and innovation.
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