Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.02
Gabriella Safran
Abstract:Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and their critics embraced the notion that their work displayed an affinity to Russian and Yiddish literature, especially to the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Sholem Aleichem. Like these writers, the prominent American Jewish writers of the 1960s were understood as producing writing that emerged from their authentic, often negative emotions, work that voiced complaints. I first describe this generation's playful claiming of a Russian and Jewish genealogy, their definition of the Russian and Yiddish writers as a collective worthy of copying. I then use close readings of six passages to evaluate the American writers' assertions about their influence by the Russian and Yiddish ones. I compare the inset oral and written complaints in Roth and Bellow with those in Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Sholem Aleichem, both acknowledging their striking formal similarities and distinguishing the comic, satirically presented literary complaints of prerevolutionary Russia from the potentially more therapeutically oriented—albeit still satirical—literary complaints of postwar America. Finally, I look outside the literary texts to understand why it was appealing to 1960s American writers to think of themselves as influenced by prerevolutionary Russian and Yiddish verbal art. This article situates the American Jewish writers and their critics in an aural environment where Russian and Yiddish sounds were increasingly available in entertainment and where they were associated with authenticity and political opposition. In spite of the formal parallels among the American Jewish, Russian, and Yiddish literary complaints, and in spite of Roth and Bellow representing themselves compellingly as imitators, I argue that they need to be understood instead in their own national and temporal communicative context.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.01
S. Weitzman
Abstract:Launched from an essay published by Robert Alter in 1995, this essay introduces a forum that aims to bring new perspectives to bear on the "Jewish voice" as represented by American Jewish writers. Alter defines the Jewish voice as a cluster of characteristic speech habits that could be traced back to the culture of Yiddishkeit. Is the use of this voice by American writers, transmuted into English, evidence that an essential quality of Eastern European Jewish culture has persisted as a part of American Jewish life even in the face of all the social, cultural, and linguistic changes of the last century: the end of immigration as a formative experience for most Jews, the decline of Yiddish as a living language, and the integration of Jews into mainstream linguistic culture? The essays featured here suggest new ways to think about this question, as they focus in different ways on how the Jewish voices imagined by American Jewish authors are heard by the listeners to whom they address themselves.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.04
Sunny S. Yudkoff
Abstract:The following paper attends to the metaphorics of sclerosis across the poetry, prose, and criticism of the twentieth-century Yiddish writer Yankev Glatshteyn. I first turn my attention to his 1920 poem, "Arteriosclerosis," which takes as its subject an elderly man whose slow death by vascular constriction perfuses into the form and rhythm of the poem. The text has received scant scholarly attention, yet it stands as a performative intervention into modernist poetics and the development of Yiddish free verse. Furthermore, as my reading shows, this poem is also a hermeneutic key to Glatshteyn's 1940 novel, Ven Yash iz gekumen. Although Glatshteyn is not known as a particularly sanguine writer or as a writer of disease, the following paper demonstrates the centrality of the motif of sclerosis across his oeuvre. Indeed, sclerosis reveals what I call his "poetics of deformation," a modernist aesthetic that is simultaneously generative and incapacitating.
摘要:本文探讨了20世纪意第绪语作家扬基·格拉茨泰因在诗歌、散文和批评中对“硬化”的隐喻。我首先把注意力转向他1920年的诗《动脉硬化》(Arteriosclerosis)，这首诗以一位因血管收缩而缓慢死亡的老人为主题，这首诗的形式和节奏也体现了这一点。文本已经收到很少的学术关注，但它作为一个表演干预现代主义诗学和发展意第绪自由诗。此外，正如我所读到的，这首诗也是格拉茨廷1940年的小说《Ven Yash iz gekumen》的解释学关键。虽然Glatshteyn并不是一个特别乐观的作家，也不是一个疾病作家，但下面的文章证明了硬化症主题在他的全部作品中的中心地位。事实上，硬化症揭示了我所说的他的“变形诗学”，一种现代主义美学，它同时具有生动性和失能性。
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Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.05
R. Friedman
Abstract:This article provides a translation and analysis of the only extant Hebrew poem attributed to the Andalusi poet Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl al-Isrāʾīlī. This poem, a baqqashah (Jewish liturgical appeal), oscillates between despair and hope for the redemption of the Jewish people. A careful reading of the poem reveals it to be a rich expression of optative return from exile, especially in light of intertextuality with a passage on redemption drawn from Isaiah 62 as well as significant patterns of soundplay. Ibn Sahl was also a well-known Arabic-language poet whose collection of verse in that language is dominated by lachrymose poems of longing for a distant beloved, many of which yearn for an object of desire called Mūsā, the Arabic name for Moses. Reading the baqqashah together with Ibn Sahl's Arabic poetry invites a wider discussion of the poet's bilingual oeuvre.
摘要:本文翻译并分析了安达卢西诗人Ibrāhīm伊本·萨尔(ibn Sahl al- isrna ā al- ā l ā)创作的唯一一首希伯来诗。这首诗，一首巴卡沙(犹太礼仪的呼吁)，在对犹太人的救赎的绝望和希望之间摇摆。仔细阅读这首诗就会发现它是一种丰富的从流放中选择回归的表达，特别是考虑到与以赛亚书62章中关于救赎的段落以及重要的声音播放模式的互文性。伊本·萨尔也是一位著名的阿拉伯语诗人，他的阿拉伯语诗集主要是关于对遥远的爱人的渴望的伤感诗歌，其中许多是对一个被称为Mūsā的欲望对象的渴望，这是摩西的阿拉伯语名字。将baqqashah与伊本·萨尔的阿拉伯语诗歌一起阅读，可以更广泛地讨论这位诗人的双语作品。
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Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.07
Amit Assis
Abstract:S. Yizhar's literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar's poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar's poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story "The Prisoner" as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation.
{"title":"\"His Ancestors Were Calling Him Back to His Origins\": Zionism and the Poetics of Space in the Early Work of S. Yizhar","authors":"Amit Assis","doi":"10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:S. Yizhar's literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar's poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar's poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story \"The Prisoner\" as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"55 1","pages":"383 - 412"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89093299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.03
J. Levinson
Abstract:This article proposes a view of Jewish storytelling according to which the meaning of a given Jewish story should be sought in its implicit representation of the fantasies, desires, psychic conflicts, and self-idealizations of a specific set of readers or listeners. The unique role of Jewish storytellers, according to this theory, is to identify and re-present the quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies their audience have as Jews. That is, these are quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies bound up with an individual Jew's sense of himself or herself as a Jew. In order to make this argument, I draw a distinction between two models of Jewish storytelling: an ethnographic model, which conceives of stories as reflection of some underlying, largely coherent cultural ethos, and a counterethnographic model, according to which stories expose prevailing self-conceptions and fantasies of specific Jewish audiences. The first model is elaborated through a reading of a widely disseminated Hasidic story about a rebbe who saves the community by telling a story about a lost ritual in the forest. The second model is elaborated through a reading of Nathan's parable to King David in 2 Samuel about the rich man and the ewe lamb. Examples of this audience-based, counterethnographic mode of reading are adduced from stories by Isaac Babel, Grace Paley, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In these stories, three modern Jewish types—the heedless gangster, the woman whose life force bursts all decorum, the resolute returnee to Orthodoxy—are read as wish fulfillments of modern Jewish readers.
{"title":"Subjects in Question: Jewish Storytelling as Counterethnography","authors":"J. Levinson","doi":"10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article proposes a view of Jewish storytelling according to which the meaning of a given Jewish story should be sought in its implicit representation of the fantasies, desires, psychic conflicts, and self-idealizations of a specific set of readers or listeners. The unique role of Jewish storytellers, according to this theory, is to identify and re-present the quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies their audience have as Jews. That is, these are quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies bound up with an individual Jew's sense of himself or herself as a Jew. In order to make this argument, I draw a distinction between two models of Jewish storytelling: an ethnographic model, which conceives of stories as reflection of some underlying, largely coherent cultural ethos, and a counterethnographic model, according to which stories expose prevailing self-conceptions and fantasies of specific Jewish audiences. The first model is elaborated through a reading of a widely disseminated Hasidic story about a rebbe who saves the community by telling a story about a lost ritual in the forest. The second model is elaborated through a reading of Nathan's parable to King David in 2 Samuel about the rich man and the ewe lamb. Examples of this audience-based, counterethnographic mode of reading are adduced from stories by Isaac Babel, Grace Paley, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In these stories, three modern Jewish types—the heedless gangster, the woman whose life force bursts all decorum, the resolute returnee to Orthodoxy—are read as wish fulfillments of modern Jewish readers.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"64 1","pages":"286 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91003139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-22DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.06
Dana W. Fishkin
Abstract:This article explores Jewish-Christian relations in Italy from a new vantage point: the poetic Hebrew literature composed by Immanuel of Rome in the fourteenth century. By focusing on a particular sinner in Immanuel's hell, the Jesus figure, the article illuminates the ways in which Immanuel marshaled polemical imagery from Ashkenazic and Sephardic sources as well as the Talmud and biblical exegesis. It also explores the ways in which Immanuel subverted his model text, Dante's Comedy, to insult Christianity and its holiest figure. This examination sheds light on Immanuel's textual and glossatorial practices, as well as his engagement with anti-Christian invective that was developing throughout thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe.
{"title":"The Sting of Satire: The Jesus Figure in Immanuel of Rome's Hell","authors":"Dana W. Fishkin","doi":"10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.3.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores Jewish-Christian relations in Italy from a new vantage point: the poetic Hebrew literature composed by Immanuel of Rome in the fourteenth century. By focusing on a particular sinner in Immanuel's hell, the Jesus figure, the article illuminates the ways in which Immanuel marshaled polemical imagery from Ashkenazic and Sephardic sources as well as the Talmud and biblical exegesis. It also explores the ways in which Immanuel subverted his model text, Dante's Comedy, to insult Christianity and its holiest figure. This examination sheds light on Immanuel's textual and glossatorial practices, as well as his engagement with anti-Christian invective that was developing throughout thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"48 1","pages":"355 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73855389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-10DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.1-2.02
D. Berdichevsky
Abstract:In this article I discuss the late essayistic prose of two Hebrew writers, essayists, and readers of world literature—Leah Goldberg and Shlomo Grodzensky. Both of these writers belonged to a distinct generation of intellectuals in Hebrew literature. Grodzensky named this generation "the children of World War I." This article focuses on their essays written during the 1960s, as they became the last representatives of world literature in the Israeli-Hebrew literary republic. Their work as unique writers and as members of their literary generation represented a critical moment in the history of Hebrew modern literature, a moment of renegotiation of the boundaries of national literature in a multilingual world. Goldberg's and Grodzensky's essayistic prose showed a new and empathic relation of the Hebrew text toward foreign words. Furthermore, a central claim in this article is that these writers' self-estranged mode of mediation modestly posed a question mark over the very notion of a Jewish national unified native language.
{"title":"Measuring Distances: Hebrew Essayists Reading World Literature","authors":"D. Berdichevsky","doi":"10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.1-2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.1-2.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article I discuss the late essayistic prose of two Hebrew writers, essayists, and readers of world literature—Leah Goldberg and Shlomo Grodzensky. Both of these writers belonged to a distinct generation of intellectuals in Hebrew literature. Grodzensky named this generation \"the children of World War I.\" This article focuses on their essays written during the 1960s, as they became the last representatives of world literature in the Israeli-Hebrew literary republic. Their work as unique writers and as members of their literary generation represented a critical moment in the history of Hebrew modern literature, a moment of renegotiation of the boundaries of national literature in a multilingual world. Goldberg's and Grodzensky's essayistic prose showed a new and empathic relation of the Hebrew text toward foreign words. Furthermore, a central claim in this article is that these writers' self-estranged mode of mediation modestly posed a question mark over the very notion of a Jewish national unified native language.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"36 1","pages":"27 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82347088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-10DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.1-2.08
Danielle Drori
Abstract:In the study of comparative literature today, World Literature has come to function as a subdiscipline that probes the circulation of literary texts, seeking to overcome or minimize cultural hierarchies. While proponents of World Literature view translation as the ultimate vehicle for achieving these goals, critics emphasize the limits of translation and the need to acknowledge cultural asymmetries rather than assume they might be abolished. In the work of the Hebrew writer Y. H. Brenner (1881–1921), one finds similar discussions around translation and linguistic and cultural hierarchies. Brenner's 1907 play Beyond the Borders (Me'ever lagvulin) tackles explicitly the issue of literary marginality, anticipating contemporary discussions around World Literature. Brenner's 1908 review-essay "From the World of Our Literature" (Me'olam sifruteinu) complements the play, grappling with the question of what makes a literary work worthy of translation. In both works, Brenner refers to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen as a problematic example of global or European literary fame. In discussing Ibsen, Brenner converses implicitly with the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, whose work and success drew the attention of Hebrew intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century. Offering an analysis of the representation of translation in Brenner's play and review essay, this article compares Brenner's ideas to the ideas that Brandes articulated in his 1899 essay "World Literature" (Weltliteratur). The article argues that at a time in which nationalist and internationalist views clashed in Europe, both Brandes and Brenner offered a nuanced, ambivalent understanding of translation and marginality, which challenges the assumptions shared by proponents of World Literature today.
摘要:在今天的比较文学研究中，世界文学已经成为一个探索文学文本流通的分支学科，寻求克服或最小化文化等级。虽然世界文学的支持者认为翻译是实现这些目标的最终工具，但批评者强调翻译的局限性和承认文化不对称的必要性，而不是假设它们可以被废除。在希伯来作家y·h·布伦纳(Y. H. Brenner, 1881-1921)的作品中，人们发现了关于翻译、语言和文化等级的类似讨论。布伦纳1907年的戏剧《超越国界》(Me'ever lagvulin)明确地处理了文学边缘化的问题，预测了当代围绕世界文学的讨论。布伦纳1908年的评论文章《来自我们文学的世界》(Me'olam sifruteinu)补充了这部戏剧，并努力解决了什么使文学作品值得翻译的问题。在这两部作品中，布伦纳都把挪威剧作家亨里克·易卜生(Henrik Ibsen)称为全球或欧洲文学名声的一个有问题的例子。在讨论易卜生时，布伦纳含蓄地与丹麦文学评论家乔治·布兰德斯(Georg Brandes)进行了对话，后者的作品和成功在20世纪初引起了希伯来知识分子的注意。本文分析了布伦纳的戏剧和评论文章中的翻译表现，并将布伦纳的观点与布兰德斯在1899年的文章《世界文学》(weltliterature)中所阐述的观点进行了比较。这篇文章认为，在民族主义和国际主义观点在欧洲发生冲突的时候，布兰德斯和布伦纳都对翻译和边缘性提出了微妙而矛盾的理解，这挑战了当今世界文学支持者所共有的假设。
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Pub Date : 2018-01-10DOI: 10.2979/PROOFTEXTS.36.1-2.09
Na’ama Rokem
Abstract:This article examines Jewish responses to the discourse of Weltliteratur and its universalist, humanistic underpinnings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It compares Heinrich Heine's polemical rejoinder to Goethe's use of the term in his long narrative poem "Atta Troll" (1843) with Leah Goldberg's comments on Goethe in a lecture on comparative literature in the 1960s, to make the point that Jewish authors repeatedly used Weltliteratur as a foil through which to think their ambivalent position within European literature. The article also presents a brief history of comparative literary studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to make the point that this field is a fascinating lens through which to consider the formation of the University and its role in the Zionist movement.
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