A lingering legacy : the afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish culture, 1818-1938 / Aya Elyada.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Elyada, Aya, 1977- Author.

Series:

Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture http://id.loc.gov/resources/hubs/73a3b9ba-8e62-a1a7-d09e-928f124d95ee

Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Yiddish literature--Appreciation--Germany--History.

Yiddish literature.

Yiddish language--Germany--History.

Yiddish language.

Jews, German--Languages--History.

Jews, German.

Sociolinguistics--Germany--History.

Sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguistics--History.

Yiddish language--History.

Germany.

Physical Description:

xvi, 293 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2026.

Summary:

"This book explores a unique and under-researched chapter in German-Jewish cultural history: the engagement of German-speaking Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage. From the late eighteenth century onwards, as growing circles of the German-Jewish population shifted from speaking Yiddish to German, the once-popular early modern corpus of Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German-speaking lands. But this rich literary corpus did not entirely disappear from the cultural landscape of modern German Jews. Aya Elyada shows how Old Yiddish texts continued to be retold, translated, adapted, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German Jewish authors. In doing so, she uncovers a rich afterlife, in which these beloved Yiddish works were not only newly appreciated as historical monuments, but served as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics within modern German-Jewish culture, including tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. Illuminating how modern German-Jewish authors engaged with their premodern Yiddish heritage as central to modern Jewish experience and their distinctive cultural identity, this book unfolds a new dimension to German-Jewish history, culture, and literature."-- Back cover.

Contents:

Introduction : Old Yiddish literature in German-Jewish culture : diachronic translation and the (re)turn to the past

Contested heritage : Wissenschaft des Judentums and Yiddish Biblical literature in the nineteenth century

Gender, tradition, and nostalgia : the Tsene-rene and the Jewish renaissance in Weimar Germany

Bridges to the Jewish past? : Yiddish folktales and the return to the ghetto

"A fusion of the Jewish and the German spirit" : the Mayse-bukh and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880-1938

The allure of the foreign : Yiddish adaptations of German literature and the reshaping of the German-Jewish past

Conclusion : Yiddish as a postvernacular in German-Jewish culture.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-279) and index.

Other Format:

Online version Elyada, Aya, 1977- Lingering legacy

ISBN:

9781503645998

1503645991

OCLC:

1529576741

Publisher Number:

CIPO000356524