Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art

New to Jerusalem and to adulthood, Rutha serves Café 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 café 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 café-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 café that became an important Jerusalem cultural venue and landmark, Café Shira is a work of disarming tenderness and bittersweet love.

Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography-both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images- Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans. Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.

With his intense, quickfire psychological fiction and consistent portrayal of characters' subconscious minds, Jonah Rosenfeld is a standout among Yiddish authors of the early twentieth century. In his dedication to observing human psychology, he frequently confronted issues rarely dealt with by his contemporaries. In A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories, Rosenfeld confronts the issues of his day, whether they be epidemics, differing social expectations for men and women, financial instability, or challenges to Jewish life at the beginning of the twentieth century. His themes are as relevant today as when the stories were first published. This new translation from the original Yiddish is culled from anthologies spanning Rosenfeld's career, starting in 1924 and running through 1959 and contextualized alongside Rosenfeld's biography and other writings. These short stories are presented in a fresh, approachable way, welcoming to students as well as seasoned readers of Yiddish texts and translations. By narrating the lives of impoverished and working-class Jews in Europe and urban North America, A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories shines a light on the secular, uniquely Yiddish challenges of its day while offering a comprehensive, informed perspective by one of the most prominent writers of the language.

When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove's A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove's narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again. Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove's time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters-an older woman navigating widowhood, a writer rebuffed by dismissive audiences, American-born Jewish girls unable to communicate with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and a painter so overcome with jealousy about his muse's potential lover that he misses his opportunity with her-each portrayed with both sympathy and irony, in ways unexpected and delightful. Also included are Karpilove's recollections of her arrival in Palestine in 1926, chronicled with the same buoyant cynicism and witty repartee that is beloved by readers of her fiction.

A major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, Jonah Rosenfeld was recognized during and after his lifetime as an explorer of human psychology. His work foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety, and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships-themes just as relevant to today's Western society as they were during his era. The Rivals and Other Stories introduces nineteen of Rosenfeld's short stories to an English-reading audience for the first time. Unlike much of Yiddish literature that offers a sentimentalized view of the tight knit communities of early twentieth-century Jewish life, Rosenfeld's stories portray an entirely different view of pre-war Jewish families. His stories are urban, domestic dramas that probe the often painful disjunctions between men and women, parents and children, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, self and society. They explore eroticism and family dysfunction in narratives that were often shocking to readers at the time they were published. Following the Modernist tradition, Rosenfeld rejected many established norms, such as religion and the assumption of absolute truth. Rather, his work is rooted in psychological realism, portraying the inner lives of alienated individuals who struggle to construct a world in which they can live. These deeply moving, empathetic stories provide a counterbalance to the prevailing idealized portrait of shtetl life and enrich our understanding of Yiddish literature.

Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845–1904) was a journalist, author, and publisher whose literary projects spanned numerous countries and continents. Hero to some and scoundrel to others, Rodkinson was a polemical figure whose beliefs underwent many transformations over the course of his life, most significantly from Hasidism to combative Haskalah to eventually anticipating the neo-Romantic trends of the early twentieth century. Throughout his career, Rodkinson's writing challenged the familiar genres of the literature of Hasidism and the Haskalah, shaping the religious realities of his readers and articulating a spiritual and community life among Jews, who took his ideas to heart in surprising ways. Today, Rodkinson is frequently referred to as a minor Hasidic author and publisher, a characterization based on the criticism of his opponents rather than on his writings. In Literary Hasidism, Meir draws upon those writings and their reception to present a completely different picture of this colorful and influential writer. Examining Rodkinson's lifelong role as a catalyzing agent of different cultural phenomena, his diverse publishing activities, and his writings in their respective stages, Meir grants readers a provocative new vantage point from which to consider this divisive, enigmatic figure.

Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004) was born in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), the city that serves as both the backdrop and the central character for his stories. He survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and, after two years in an internment camp on the island of Cyprus, moved to Israel, where he lived until his death. In this collection, Karpinowitz portrays, with compassion and intimacy, the dreams and struggles of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of his native city before the Holocaust. His stories provide an affectionate and vivid portrait of poor working women and men, like fishwives, cobblers, and barbers, and people who made their living outside the law, like thieves and prostitutes. This collection also includes two stories that function as intimate memoirs of Karpinowitz's childhood growing up in his father's Vilna Yiddish theater. Karpinowitz wrote his stories and memoirs in Yiddish, preserving the particular language of Vilna's lower classes. In this graceful translation, Mintz deftly preserves this colorful, often idiomatic Yiddish, capturing Karpinowitz's unique voice and rendering a long-vanished world for English-language readers.

Letters to America presents the life and work of an accomplished Jewish poet who exchanged the American promised land for the Israeli one, yet struggled to exorcise the ghosts of his American past and make his home in the Jewish state. Born Robert Reiss in 1930s New York, in 1959 Reuven Ben-Yosef bade farewell to his affluent, assimilated family, immigrated to a kibbutz on Israel's border with Syria, changed his name, and began the process of recreating himself as a Hebrew poet. He went on to publish volumes of exquisite Hebrew verse and win literary awards, to fight in the Yom Kippur War and in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and to raise three Israeli children. Yet many of his greatest and most emotionally rending poems were about his stormy relationship with his parents and siblings and the American world he left behind. This volume offers a wide selection of Ben-Yosef's poems in English translation, as well as an engaging biographical essay about the poet's life and work, based on interviews with the Israeli family he created in Israel and the American family he sought to come to terms with. Reframing our notions of Jewish American literature, and deepening our understanding of the Israeli-American relationship, Letters to America puts American-Israeli writing on the literary map.

First published in 1936, The People of Godlbozhits depicts the ordinary yet deeply complex life of a Jewish community, following the fortunes of one family and its many descendants. Set in a shtetl in Poland between the world wars, Rashkin's satiric novel offers a vivid cross-section not only of the residents' triumphs and struggles but also of their dense and complicated web of humanity. With biting humor and acerbic wit, Rashkin portrays the stratified society-the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, and proletariat-observing the crookedness at every level. The novel's brisk and oftentimes lively Yiddish prose and its colorful and irascible cast of characters give readers a Yiddish Yoknapatawpha in all its tragic absurdity.

In his short life (1865–1921), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky was a versatile and influential man of letters: an innovative Hebrew prose stylist; a collector of Jewish folklore; a scholar of ancient Jewish and Christian history. He was at once a peer of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Brothers Grimm, and a diverse circle of Jewish writers in the Russian Empire and German-speaking countries. As a Yiddish writer, however, he remains unknown to gen­eral readers. Written in 1902-1906, but not published in full until the 1920s, his stories were dismissed by prominent critics and viewed as out of step with the literary taste of his own time. Yet these vivid portraits of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in the southern Russian Empire can speak powerfully to new audiences today. With enchanting humor, social satire, and verbal dexterity, From a Distant Relation captures the world of the shtetl in a sharp realist prose style. Themes of repressed desire, poverty, relations with non-Jews, and historic upheavals echo in a cast of memorable characters. Many of the stories and monologues feature strong female protago­nists, while others shed light on misogyny in the culture of the shtetl. At the border between fiction and reportage, with a gritty underbelly and a deceptive naïveté, Berdichevsky's stories explore dynamics of wealth, power, and gender in an intimate setting that resonates profoundly with contemporary Jewish life.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Paul Celan moved to Bucharest, where he spent more than two years working as a translator at Carta Rusa publishing house. During that time he was introduced to poet and translator Petre Solomon and began a close friendship that would endure many years, despite the distances that separated them and the turbulent times in which they lived. In this poignant memoir, Solomon recalls the experiences he shared with Celan and captures the ways in which Bucharest profoundly influenced Celan's evolution as a poet. He recounts the publication of the famous "Todesfuge" for the first time in the Romanian magazine Agora and his fertile connection with the Romanian surrealist movement. Through Solomon's vivid recollection and various letters Celan sent to friends, readers also get an intimate glimpse of Celan's personality, one characterized by a joyful appreciation of friendship and a subtle sense of humor. Translated from the original, Tegla's edition makes this remarkable memoir available to a much-deserved wider audience for the first time.

In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922—2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic orchard, and Rozenbaumas's early apprenticeship as a tailor once his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during, and after WWII, Rozenbaumas's account stands out for the singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.

Red Shoes for Rachel, Sandler's award-winning collection of three novellas, features tightly wound tales that seamlessly incorporate diverse genres, including magic realism, satire, and autobiography, and profound psychological profiles to create touching portrayals of the human experience. Zumoff's translation of Sandler's original Yiddish collection makes the J. I. Segal Award-winning volume available to English readers for the first time. In the collection's eponymous novella, Rachel, a daughter of Holocaust survivors raised in Brighton Beach, encounters a Moldovan Jewish immigrant divorcee as she is tending to her disabled, elderly mother along the Coney Island boardwalk. As the two begin a relationship, the story reveals their past and the commonalities between two children of Holocaust survivors raised in very different societies. In the novella Karolina Bugaz, an exhausted Moldovan Jewish immigrant architect leaves his wife and newly religious son behind to go on a cruise to a mysterious island, which may just be a direct voyage through space and time into his past. In the volume's most acclaimed story, Halfway Down the Road Back to You, an elderly Moldovan Holocaust survivor in Israel separated from her children by emigration must confront her past as her failing mind begins to blur the boundaries between her daily life and the horrors of war sixty years before. The novella was adapted by the author into an acclaimed play, which has been staged in the United States, Belgium, and France.

Joseph Rolnik is widely considered one of the most prominent of the New York Yiddish poets associated with Di Yunge, an avant-garde literary group that formed in the early twentieth century. In his moving and evocative memoir, Rolnik recalls his childhood growing up in a small town in Belarus and his exhilarating yet arduous experiences as an impoverished Yiddish poet living in New York. Working in garment factories by day and writing poetry by night, he became one of the most published and influential writers of the Yiddish literary scene. Unfolding in a series of brief sketches, poems, and vignettes rather than consistent narrative, Rolnik's memoir is imbued with the poet's rich, sensuous language, which vividly describes the sounds and images of his life. Marcus's elegant translation, along with his introduction situating Rolnik's poetry in its literary historical context, gives readers a fascinating account of this under-appreciated literary treasure.

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 Yiddish literatures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualismin response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture.She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and criticsintersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York-andimagined 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.

When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what's in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil's messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man's attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shetl on the brink of transformation.

Described by theater 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 theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime's effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater―throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49)―maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members. Zuskin Perelman's fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period's most influential cultural icons.

Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction presents a bold new reading of one of Denmark's greatest writers of the nineteenth century, situating him, first and foremost, as a Jewish artist. Offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, Gurley examines Goldschmidt's relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinical traditions, such as the Talmud and the Midrash. At the same time, he shows that Goldschmidt's midrashic style in a secular context predates certain narrative movements within Modern-ism that are usually associated with the twentieth century and especially Czech writer Franz Kafka. Goldschmidt was remarkable in his era, both as a writer who explored his peripheral identity in the mainstream of European culture and as a writer of the first truly Jewish bildungsroman. In this groundbreaking study of Goldschmidt's narrative art, Gurley refashions his position in both the Danish and Jewish literary canons and introduces his extraordinary work to a wider, non-Scandinavian audience.

Since the nation's founding, Israel has existed in a state of near perpetual warfare. Despite this, Hebrew novels that deal with the experience of contemporary conflict are surprisingly rare. In War Lives, Nitza Ben-Dov argues that Israeli writers employ the freedoms granted by fiction to challenge the heroic myth of war. She suggests that these writers do so not only by turning inwards, towards the home front and the psyches of individuals marked by post-trauma, but also by unsettling the relationship between historical fact and fiction, between purported reliability and representation. Through close readings of a range of novels by authors such as S. Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, and Amos Oz, Ben-Dov foregrounds war as a coordinate from which Israeli novels are driven and to which they return in equal measure. While each chapter focuses on a different theme-from mourning to battleground camaraderie to vengeance-Ben-Dov's literary analyses demonstrate how these canonical works afford an in-depth view of the symbiosis between civilian and military life, the comorbidity of life living under the constant threat of war.

This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich's "Litvak saga," his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman? As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters-Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; Golda, the resourceful widow; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and Morta, their devoted servant girl. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich's novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl's inhabitants.