Syracuse University Press Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambitious young writers flocked from Jewish towns and villages to cultural centers like Warsaw, Odessa, and Vilna to seek their fortunes. These writers, typically proficient in both Hebrew and Yiddish, gathered in literary salons and cafés to read, declaim, discuss, and ponder the present and future of Jewish culture. However, in the years before and after World War I, writers and readers increasingly immigrated to Western Europe, the Americas, and Palestine, transforming the multilingualism that had defined Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe. By 1950, Hebrew was ensconced as the language and literature of the young state of Israel, and Yiddish was scattered throughout postwar Jewish communities in Europe and North and South America.Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformations of Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddish writers and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures 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. Her aim is neither to idealize the Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism that once defined East European Jewish culture nor to recount the ""language war"" that challenged it. 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. Review A rewarding learning experience in Hebrew-Yiddish cultural-linguistics.-- "Newsletter of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew"Brenner's meticulously researched and elegantly written work reveals a unique set of cultural and linguistic conditions during a time when the majority of Jewish people were linguistically and culturally bound to two Jewish languages. Brenner convincingly demonstrates that Hebrew and Yiddish constantly altered each other and presents a solid case for the idea that Jewish culture was truly 'bilingual' for most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that such a persistently bilingual quality--even to this day--profoundly shaped modern Jewish literary culture.-- "Colorado Review"By detailing the perspectives of the main writers and publishers on each side of the debate and illustrating the ideologies of bilingualism that characterized both Yiddishists and Hebraists, the author shows how these years saw the development of diverse paradigms in which, at least for a time, Yiddish and Hebrew cultures coexisted and were even seen as nurturing each other. Brenner thus tells the poignant story of how Jewish writers and intellectuals strove through bilingualism to move toward a new and forward-looking Jewish linguistic and literary culture.-- "Choice"The author analyzes several examples of poetry and prose in minute detail. She discusses the debates and theories about translation between the languages throughout the twentieth century. In addition to her own meticulous investigation of the particular bilingualism and translingualism of these Jewish languages, she synthesizes all the modern research on this subject. This is an academic work that presupposes familiarity with the languages and writers under discussion. Highly recommended for academic collections on language, literature, and translation studies.-- "AJL Review"This book questions the clear-cut division between modern Yiddish and Hebrew literatures, arguing that they maintained multifaceted cultural contacts across linguistic boundaries.-- "The Yiddish Forward" About the Author Na