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How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

€19.99
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In stock with our UK publisher. 14-28 days
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19th and 20th century
Abraham Cahan
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alfred Kazin
Americas
anthology
Art Spiegelman
Ashkenazi immigrants
assimilation and transformation
automatic-update
B01=Ilan Stavans
B01=Josh Lambert
Ben Katchor
Blume Lempel
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BG
Category=CFB
Category=DNB
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=JBSR
Category=JFSR1
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Chaim Grade
coffee table book
COP=United States
cuisine
Cynthia Ozick
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gift book
Grace Paley
Harvey Pekar
Hollywood
illustrated book
immigrant politics
Irving Howe
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Jewish diaspora
Jewish holidays
Language_English
late 1800s
Liana Finck
Massachusetts
melting pot
Michael Chabon
mixed genre
New York City's Lower East Side
PA=Available
Paula Vogel
personal stories
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
Sophie Tucker
Yiddish Book Center in Amherst

Product details

  • ISBN 9781632062260
  • Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
  • Publication Date: 08 Jun 2023
  • Publisher: Restless Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Description

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City’s Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity.
About
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico City and is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast." Josh Lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), which received a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies and a Canadian Jewish Book Award. His reviews and essays have been published by the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Haaretz, Tablet, the Forward, New England Public Radio, and many other publications.