Yiddish Culture After the Shoah: Refugee Writers and Artists as “Fresh Creative Energies” for Buenos Aires (original) (raw)
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Survivors and exiles – Yiddish culture after the Holocaust
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2016
Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to "present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture" (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945-1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of "irreversible decline and extinction" during these postwar years, instead claiming that its "cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity. .. completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war" (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem "Yiddish" by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: "Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!" (3). Sutzkever (1913-2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state's establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz's fascinating recount of Sutzkever's works in chapter 1, "Vilna," continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever's "Israeliness" and highlighting instead his "European" Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, "Yiddish," which serves as the book's starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz's book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918-1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman's memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was "the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the af
Historia Crítica, 2021
Objective/Context: This article examines the role of translators as agents and translation as a mediating strategy to establish Jewish-Argentine identities in Argentina, from the rise of Nazism until the end of the Second World War. It presents the case study of Jewish-Russian immigrant Salomón Resnick and his publishing project Judaica (1933-1946). The journal translated Jewish literary works to positively influence the opinions of Argentine intellectual elites about Jews, while aiding in the construction of Spanish-language Jewish-Argentine identities and culture. Methodology: A qualitative textual analysis of articles and works of fiction, original pieces and works translated by Judaica, as well as reviews of translated books of Yiddish literature by Argentine literary critics. These primary sources are interpreted vis-à-vis the global and local sociopolitical contexts to identify motives, editorial choices, and reception. Originality: This article adds to the historiography of R...
Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2016
Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to "present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture" (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945-1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of "irreversible decline and extinction" during these postwar years, instead claiming that its "cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity. .. completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war" (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem "Yiddish" by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: "Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!" (3). Sutzkever (1913-2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state's establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz's fascinating recount of Sutzkever's works in chapter 1, "Vilna," continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever's "Israeliness" and highlighting instead his "European" Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, "Yiddish," which serves as the book's starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz's book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918-1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman's memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was "the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the af
Yiddish in the Andes. Unbearable distance, devoted activists and building Yiddish culture in Chile
Jewish Culture and History , 2019
This article elucidates the efforts of Chilean-Jewish activists to create, manage and protect Chilean Yiddish culture. It illuminates how Yiddish cultural leaders in small diasporas, such as Chile, worked to maintain dialogue with other Jewish centers. Chilean culturists maintained that a unique Latin American Jewish culture existed and needed to be strengthened through the joint efforts of all Yiddish actors on the continent. Chilean activists envisioned a modern Jewish culture informed by both Eastern European influences and local Jewish cultural production, as well as by exchanges with non-Jewish Latin American majority cultures.
Yiddish Survivors’ Literature (a research project).docx
The study of the Jewish response to the Holocaust, as part of the research and teaching of Holocaust literature, especially the corpus of Yiddish literature written in the ghettos and concentrations camps, is a relatively new discipline that is slowly developing . The corpus of Yiddish survivors’ literature has not yet been researched and analyzed. Until recently, the main emphasis was placed on the study of Jewish literature written in the ghettos and camps in Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages, and especially on authors who were murdered. This corpus of assembled Yiddish literature has been partly analyzed and anthologized, becoming a specific discipline in Holocaust studies as of the early 1990s . The study of Yiddish literature composed about the Nazi concentration camps, by authors who survived the Holocaust, is only at its beginnings. Apart from occasional articles, references to authors-survivors by historians, and assorted lists in anthologies and in some other studies, no systematic study has yet relied on a defined corpus, in Yiddish, of survivors-authors. For the most part, the tacit assumption has been that the development of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century was interrupted by events in Europe. The assumption was that this literature died out – meaning, by implication, that the broken chain of Jewish existence in Europe inevitably arrested Yiddish literary creativity after the war. Yiddish Survivors’ Literature has only recently been acknowledged as an integral part of the Jewish response to the Holocaust, notwithstanding the work already done on the She’eirit Hapleita . This assumption is perhaps one of the reasons for the neglect of research on Yiddish authors-survivors, who immigrated to the United States, Israel, France, Canada, Argentina, and many other countries. Many of these authors-survivors lived not only in the ghettos under Nazi rule, but were also sent to the different Nazi camps. Their Holocaust experience included the concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps. Their Yiddish writings, following liberation, usually bear impressions of the Second World War under Nazi rule, and their life experiences in all stages of Nazi persecution and mass-murder (including the camps in which they were incarcerated).