ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar proposes to investigate in historical and theoretical terms the multilingual contexts in which Yiddish literature has appeared. The vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish has a thousand-year history of functioning at territorial, linguistic, and cultural crossroads. A fusion language consisting of Romance, German, Slavic, and Semitic components, Yiddish throughout the modern era has excited considerable anxiety among its linguistic neighbors: it has been vilified as a thieves’ language; a degraded form of German; a linguistic symbol of irrationality and disorder; a mark of provincialism, parochialism, or Ashkenazic chauvinism; a language of the anti-Zionist left as well as the anti-modern right. In spite of these pejorative and stereotypical labels—which have been applied to Yiddish as much by Jews themselves as by antagonistic non-Jews—the Yiddish language has functioned as Ashkenazic Jewry’s primary language of mediation and cultural negotiation for nearly a millennium, and Yiddish culture for the past 150 years has produced a roving, experimental, subversive literature fully engaged with the leading modernist trends active in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. This seminar will therefore attempt to understand Yiddish literature as an inherently multi-lingual, liminal cultural production that can only be understood fully with reference to its dialogical relationship with contemporaneous and co-territorial literary cultures. As such, it intends to demonstrate the relevance of Yiddish, as well as other local, “minor” languages, to a theoretical understanding of the politics of literary form, the self-perception of the Other, and the problematic assumptions of the Human in the age of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Friday, March 24

Jerold Frakes, USC
“Elia Levita’s Venetian Satires as Cultural Hybrids”
Sheila Spector, Independent Scholar
“The Perennial Others: Byron and the Yiddishists”
Marie Schumacher-Brunhes, University of Lille, France
“Being Oneself through the Other: the Strategy of Y.L. Peretz”
Amelia Glaser, Stanford University
“To and From the Fair: Sholem Aleichem Reads Nikolai Gogol”

Saturday, March 25

Yael Chaver, UC Berkeley
“Taming the Other: Yehoyesh’s Palestine Memoir in Hebrew”
Marton Balo, ELTE University, Budapest
“Yiddish as the Language of a Nation - Overburdened Dreams - Zionism, Birobidzhan and Yiddish”
Alisa Braun, UC Davis
“Translating the Ghetto: Yiddish Poetry Encounters America”
Christine Poirier, McGill University,
“Yiddish literature in Montreal: Between the French and the English”

Sunday, March 26

Zehavit Stern, UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union
“Modernized Traditions: Yiddish Film Melodrama and the Secularization of Religion”
Charlotte Szilagyi, Harvard University
“Not Like the Rebetzin: Chaim Grade and the Sin of the Simile”
Marc Caplan, Harvard University
“The Blue Angel, Under a Fence: Der Nister’s Response to German Culture In the Weimar Era”