Yiddish literature

Yiddish literature encompasses all belles-lettres in Yiddish, the language of European Jewry. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.

Quotes

• In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike. The founding father of this literature, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, championed the liberation of Jewish women in his stories, poems, and plays, as did his protégés Sholem Asch, Avrom Reisen, and Yoysef Opatoshu, among others. Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization. In the realm of poetry, four female writers deserve special mention: Miriam Ulinover, Kadia Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, and Rajzel Zychlinsky.
  • Emanuel Goldsmith Introduction to Songs to a Moonstruck Lady (2005)

• Yiddish literature accepted challenges of European literature and culture. At its best, it produced innovative works which harnessed the inimitable features of its language, folklore, fictional world, and character typology and confronted them with a whirlpool of the modern world and the challenges of modernist art.
  • Benjamin Harshav. The Meaning of Yiddish (1990), page xiv^{external link}

• I can hardly overemphasize the significance of the present collection. Found Treasures presents for the first time a body of Yiddish writing by women who speak to us directly...What is evident is that women's prose contributions to modern Yiddish literature are now being recovered only because of feminist efforts. This work is motivated by scholarly interests, but also by Jewish women's needs to reconstruct and claim an authentic past in which women are included. Without it, most of us feel unrooted and incomplete. Found Treasures is a major step towards such reconstruction.
  • Irena Klepfisz "Queens Of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers"

• The translation of Yiddish literature into English by the -- beginning with, like, Irving Howe, and that totally erased women, so it was even worse in English than it actually was in Yiddish.
  • Irena Klepfisz Interview with Yiddish Book Center (2017)

• The great flowering of Yiddish literature took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the rise of Jewish secularism and the Jewish labor and socialist movements.
  • Adrienne Rich Introduction to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems by Irena Klepfisz (1990)

• There is a saying in Yiddish, vi es kristlt zikh azoy yidisht zikh meaning that there is little difference between Yiddish literature and any other literature. But this is not so. If a people's literature is a mirror in which it finds it own reflection, then modern Yiddish literature holds up just such a mirror to Jewish life. Just as our history has for the last two thousand years meandered through a path very different from that of any other people, so has our literature followed a distinctive route.
  • Chava Rosenfarb "Feminism and Yiddish Literature: A Personal Approach" (1992) in "Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays" edited and translated from the Yiddish by Goldie Morgentaler (2019)

• The Jewish mothers' songs and stories put wind in the sails of the male Yiddish writers' creativity. They in turn transformed the mother into the primary figure among their female heroines. Modern Yiddish literature attained its maturity with the work of three classical masters: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. These three authors were the literary forebears whom subsequent generations of Yiddish writers both emulated and rebelled against. Under the influence of the liberating movements of socialism and Zionism, the Jewish male grew more self-confident and began to consider the Jewish woman as his partner-in-arms in the fight for a better life. At least, he did so superficially...We Jews have every right to be proud of our Yiddish literature, which flowered in such a short time, and which explored both the heights and the depths of Jewish thought and feeling. But the depiction of Jewish women is, with some exceptions, not among our literature's finest accomplishments. Throughout all of Yiddish literature, beginning with the classical writers, for instance Mendele and his portrayal of Beyle in Fishke the Cripple, or Sholem Aleichem's depiction of Tevye's daughters in Tevye the Milkman, or Rokhele in Stempenyu, or Bashevis's "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" and Grade's The Agunah, there is an undercurrent of sympathy for the Jewish woman, as well as guilt about her double enslavement, both as woman and as Jew...Thus, some male Yiddish prose writers did faithfully and realistically describe the situation of women in the late-nineteenth century. They depicted their female characters with great tenderness and understanding. But as a general rule, they avoided looking deeper into the more complicated qualities that make up a woman's individuality. The male writer sympathized with the woman's plight; he idealized her, sang her praises, wondered at her, but he knew nothing about who she really was. He did not illuminate her from within.
  • Chava Rosenfarb "Feminism and Yiddish Literature: A Personal Approach" (1992) in "Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays" edited and translated from the Yiddish by Goldie Morgentaler (2019)

• The past ninety years have seen the spectacular rise and development of Yiddish poetry which, until the beginning of the twentieth century, had remained virtually arcane for six hundred years. Its development as an art form between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries was very slender, but it was eclectic, various, and above all, persistent. It reached its full flowering in the twentieth century because the horizon of the European Jew, having broken through the cultural as well as the physical ghetto, became one with the rest of the world. Immigration, especially to the United States, brought new literary experience to the Yiddish writer; the loosening of restrictive laws and customs released him to the contemporary world...Certainly the moment of ripening of Yiddish poetry possesses a terrible historical irony. For just when Yiddish poetry had entered the mainstream of modern European and American literature, overcoming the handicaps of history through its sheer will and dynamism, the Nazi genocide and Soviet purges destroyed many of the writers and readers of Yiddish. But there are poets and novelists writing in Yiddish today in the United States, in Israel, Canada, South America, Mexico, France and the USSR. Yiddish poetry in the twentieth century may well be the most enduring artistic expression of its people's creative vitality.
  • Ruth Whitman and Robert Szulkin Introduction to An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry