Israeli Salvage Poetics

Download or read book Israeli Salvage Poetics written by Author Sheila E Jelen and published by . This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Israeli Salvage Poetics written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incorporation of eastern European culture in Israeli Hebrew-language literature. Through thoughtful analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Israeli literature, Israeli Salvage Poetics interrogates the concept of the "negation of the diaspora" as addressed in Hebrew-language literature authored by well-known and lesser-known Israeli authors from the eve of the Holocaust to the present day. Author Sheila E. Jelen considers the way that Israeli writers from eastern Europe or of eastern European descent incorporate pre-Holocaust eastern European culture into their own sense of Israeliness or Jewishness. Many Israelis interested in their eastern European legacy live with an awareness of their own nation's role in the repression of that legacy, from the elevation of Hebrew over Yiddish to the ridicule and resentment directed at culture, text, and folk traditions from eastern Europe. To right the wrongs of the past and reconcile this conflict of identity, the Israeli authors discussed in this book engage in what Jelen calls "salvage poetics": they read Yiddish literature, travel to eastern Europe, and write of their personal and generational relationships with Ashkenazi culture. Israeli literary representations of eastern European Jewry strive, sometimes successfully, to recuperate eastern European Jewish pre-Holocaust culture for the edification of an audience that might feel responsible for the silencing and extinction of that culture.

Download or read book Salvage Poetics written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary approach to American Jewish ethnic identity in post-Holocaust America. This volume explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts—those that exist on the border between ethnography and art—Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust. S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (1912–1914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (1906–1935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Maurice Samuel's The World of Sholem Aleichem (1944), Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski's Life Is with People(1952), Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition(1967), and Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1983), alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations. Salvage Poetics is particularly attentive to how literary scholars deploy the notion of "ethnography" in their readings of literature in languages and/or cultures that are considered "dead" or "dying" and how their definition of an "ethnographic" literary text speaks to and enhance the scientific discipline of ethnography. This book makes a fresh contribution to the fields of American Jewish cultural and literary studies and art history.

Download or read book Building a City written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiction of Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the foundation of the array of scholarly essays as seen through the career of Alan Mintz, visionary scholar and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Mintz introduced Agnon's posthumously published Ir Umeloah (A City in Its Fullness)—a series of linked stories set in the 17th century and focused on Agnon's hometown, Buczacz, a town in what is currently western Ukraine—to an English reading audience, and argued that Agnon's unique treatment of Buczacz in A City in its Fullness, navigating the sometimes tenuous boundary of the modernist and the mythical, was a full-throated, self-conscious literary response to the Holocaust. This volume is an extension of a memorial dedicated to Mintz's memory (who died suddenly in 2017) which combines selections of Alan's work from the beginning, middle and end of his career, with autobiographical tributes from older and younger scholars alike. The essays dealing with Agnon and Buczacz remember the career of Alan Mintz and his contribution to the world of Jewish studies and within the world of Jewish communal life.

Download or read book Envisioning Israel written by Allon Gal and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how North American Jews have envisioned Israel From the late 19th century to the present.

Download or read book Testimonial Montage written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance explores interconnected testimonies of four Holocaust survivors who were members of the Akiva youth group in Cracow, Poland, who participated in the ghetto resistance. Drawing on literary and photographic discourse, Jelen extracts the contours of personal narrative from the collective voice present in these interconnected testimonies. Attuned to stories of lost youth, sexual exploitation, and the dissolution of community and family, Jelen approaches Holocaust testimonies as one would members of a family with their shared experiences and common background, but also as individuals with their own unique voices. Departing from historical methodologies, Jelen models a different, wholistic approach to Holocaust testimonies, one which seeks to make sense of testimonies in the full breadth of their unfolding, across time, across space, and across genre.

Download or read book No Place in Time written by Sharon B. Oster and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James's modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.