Lingering Bilingualism
Regular price
€29.99
A01=Naomi Brenner
Author_Naomi Brenner
bilingual writers
bilingualism
Category=CFDM
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSR
Category=JHMC
comparative literature
cultural identity
diaspora literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Hebrew literature
Hebrew-Yiddish relations
Jewish culture
Jewish intellectual history
Jewish literary studies
Jewish modernism
Jewish studies
language and identity
language contact
language politics
linguistic hybridity
literary criticism
literary theory
sociolinguistics: multilingualism
translation studies
Yiddish literature
Product details
- ISBN 9780815634232
- Weight: 585g
- Dimensions: 151 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jan 2016
- Publisher: Syracuse University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambitious young writers flocked from Jewish towns and villages to cultural centers like Warsaw, Odessa, and Vilna to seek their fortunes. These writers, typically proficient in both Hebrew and Yiddish, gathered in literary salons and cafés to read, declaim, discuss, and ponder the present and future of Jewish culture. However, in the years before and after World War I, writers and readers increasingly immigrated to Western Europe, the Americas, and Palestine, transforming the multilingualism that had defined Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe. By 1950, Hebrew was ensconced as the language and literature of the young state of Israel, and Yiddish was scattered throughout postwar Jewish communities in Europe and North and South America.
Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformations of Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddish writers and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualism in response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture. She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and critics intersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York—and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Her aim is neither to idealize the Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism that once defined East European Jewish culture nor to recount the ""language war"" that challenged it. Rather, Lingering Bilingualism argues that continued Hebrew–Yiddish literary contact has been critical to the development of each literature, cultivating linguistic and literary experimentation and innovation.
Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformations of Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddish writers and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualism in response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture. She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and critics intersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York—and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Her aim is neither to idealize the Hebrew–Yiddish bilingualism that once defined East European Jewish culture nor to recount the ""language war"" that challenged it. Rather, Lingering Bilingualism argues that continued Hebrew–Yiddish literary contact has been critical to the development of each literature, cultivating linguistic and literary experimentation and innovation.
Naomi Brenner is assistant professor of Hebrew and Israeli culture in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University, USA.
