A Bridge of Longing
Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling
David G. Roskies(Author)
Harvard University Press
Published on 21. April 1998
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-0-674-08139-0 (ISBN)
Description
This text provides a history of how Yiddish storytelling became the politics of rescue for successive generations of displaced Jewish artists, embodying their fervent hopes and greatest fears in the languages of tradition. Its protagonists are modern writers who returned to storytelling in the hope of harnessing the folk tradition and who created copies that are better than the original. When the cultural revolution failed - as it did for Rabbi Nahman of Bratslaw in the summer of 1806, I.L. Peretz in the winter of 1899, Kiev novelist Sholem Aleichem in 1890, kibbutz novelist Yosl Birstein in 1960 and Polish-Jewish refugees Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jechiel Isaiah Trunk when they cast ashore in America - there seemed but one route out of the spiritual and creative impasse, and that was storytelling. Yiddish storytelling was a lost art, relegated to obscurity among religious texts and synagogue sermons, then abandoned by Jewish rebels and immigrants seeking more cosmopolitan forms of expression. Thus its recovery is a tale of loss and redemption. Beyond the weddings that end the fairy tales and romances of Rabbi Nahman, I.L.
Peretz, Der Nister and Abraham Sutzkever and beneath the folksy facade of holiday stories by I.M. Dik and Sholem Aleichem this text suggests that there lies an aesthetic and moral sensibility totally at odds with the coarse humour and conventional piety of the folk. Taken together, these writers and their deceptively simple folk narratives weave a pattern of rebellion, loss, and retrieval that Roskies calls "creative betrayal" - a pattern he traces from the weddings of Yiddish fantasy to the reinvented traditions of contemporary Jews.
Peretz, Der Nister and Abraham Sutzkever and beneath the folksy facade of holiday stories by I.M. Dik and Sholem Aleichem this text suggests that there lies an aesthetic and moral sensibility totally at odds with the coarse humour and conventional piety of the folk. Taken together, these writers and their deceptively simple folk narratives weave a pattern of rebellion, loss, and retrieval that Roskies calls "creative betrayal" - a pattern he traces from the weddings of Yiddish fantasy to the reinvented traditions of contemporary Jews.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
5 halftones, 33 line illustrations, 1 table, index
Dimensions
Height: 243 mm
Width: 161 mm
Weight
750 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-08139-0 (9780674081390)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
The people of the lost book; the master of prayer - Nahman of Bratslav; the master of love - Issac Meir Dik; the conjurer - I.L. Peretz; mythologist of the mundane - Sholem Aleichem; the storyteller as high priest - Der Nister; the last of the Purim Players - Itzik manger; the demon as storyteller - Issacbashevis Singer; estates of memory - after the Holocaust.