Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism

by Marc Caplan

Overview

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253052001
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Series:	German Jewish Cultures
Pages:	394
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Marc Caplan is Visiting Professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is author of How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Weimar and Now
Spectral Empires: Landscapes, Nation-States, and the Homelessness of Weimar Modernism
1. A Past Become Space: Alfred Döblin and Dovid Bergelson in Poland, the Soviet Union—and Berlin
2. At the Crossroads of the Twentieth Century: Neue Sachlichkeit and Dovid Bergelson's Berlin Stories
Melancholic Conspiracies: Masks, Masques, and the Performance of Self in Yiddish and German Modernism
3. Watch the Throne: The Baroque, The Gothic, and Symbolism in Der Nister's Early Stories
4. Harold Lloyd and the Hermit: Popular Culture, Gothic Aesthetics, and the End of Der Nister's Symbolist Career
Apocalyptic Origins: The Politics of Nostalgia in German and Yiddish Modernism
5. Arrested Development: Fragmentation, Apocalypse, and the Pursuit of Origins in Joseph Roth's Representation of Eastern Europe
6. Moyshe Kulbak's Berlin Writings: Here, There, Everywhere (Nowhere)
Conclusion: Origin Is the Goal
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Na'ama Rokem

Marc Caplan offers us an entirely new vantage point from which to read a set of fascinating literary texts. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin demonstrates why they matter and why it is useful to spend time with them under the guidance of an knowledgeable and playful reader like Caplan. Through Caplan's lens, the texts both illuminate their own historical moment and remind us that history continues to pulse through our present.

"In this richly informed study, Marc Caplan gives voice to the radically cosmopolitan "Weimar Yiddishists." His brilliant juxtapositions both capture these writers' unique contribution to modernist aesthetics and illuminate the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and interwar German culture. The result is intellectual history as it should be written: lucid in style and capacious in breadth."

author of Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition - Naomi Seidman

"After having resigned myself to feeling mystified by these and other Yiddish writers, Marc Caplan helped me to see not so much what these writers meant as how to make sense of my mystification without thereby dissolving it. I was particularly impress by how Caplan shed new light on the distinction between mourning and melancholy and demonstrated how these psychological and cultural attitudes manifested themselves even in apparently purely stylistic choices."

Mikhail Krutikov

This original, insightful and thought-provoking book opens up a new avenue in comparative literature studies by engaging the leading Yiddish and German authors of the Weimar period in a multilayered conversation. Caplan navigates the diversity of literary voices with confidence and finesse, taking his lead expertly from the key European thinkers of the age. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin will significantly enrich our understanding of European Jewish modernity and generate lively scholarly debate.

Vivian Liska

In this richly informed study, Marc Caplan gives voice to the radically cosmopolitan "Weimar Yiddishists." His brilliant juxtapositions both capture these writers' unique contribution to modernist aesthetics and illuminate the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and interwar German culture. The result is intellectual history as it should be written: lucid in style and capacious in breadth.

Editorial Reviews

Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic, rich, and deeply earnest study of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and literary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery.

AJS Review - Jessica Kirzane

Caplan's analysis is most fascinating when it is able to illuminate points of tension or difference between German and yiddish-language gazes east that appear in literary depictions produced in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The German Quarterly - Emma Woelk

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism.

German Studies Review - Matthew Johnson

Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic,rich, and deeply earnest stu y of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and lit rary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery.

Jessica Kirzane - The University of Chicago

"In this richly informed study, Marc Caplan gives voice to the radically cosmopolitan "Weimar Yiddishists." His brilliant juxtapositions both capture these writers' unique contribution to modernist aesthetics and illuminate the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and interwar German culture. The result is intellectual history as it should be written: lucid in style and capacious in breadth."—Vivian Liska, author of German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife

"This original, insightful and thought-provoking book opens up a new avenue in comparative literature studies by engaging the leading Yiddish and German authors of the Weimar period in a multilayered conversation. Caplan navigates the diversity of literary voices with confidence and finesse, taking his lead expertly from the key European thinkers of the age. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin will significantly enrich our understanding of European Jewish modernity and generate lively scholarly debate."—Mikhail Krutikov, author of Der Nister's Soviet Years

"Marc Caplan offers us an entirely new vantage point from which to read a set of fascinating literary texts. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin demonstrates why they matter and why it is useful to spend time with them under the guidance of an knowledgeable and playful reader like Caplan. Through Caplan's lens, the texts both illuminate their own historical moment and remind us that history continues to pulse through our present."—Na'ama Rokem, author of Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature

"Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic,rich, and deeply earnest stu y of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and lit rary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery."—Jessica Kirzane - The University of Chicago

"Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism. In lively and often memorable prose, Caplan analyzes "the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture, concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, taken in comparison with corresponding figures working in German-language literature, critical theory, journalism, and film."—Matthew Johnson, German Studies Review

"Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin offers a riveting analysis of the poetic and political force of Yiddish modernism, but it is also an invitation to look at Yiddish avant-garde beyond the confines of Jewish culture."—Marc Volovici, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies

"Caplan's analysis is most fascinating when it is able to illuminate points of tension or difference between German and yiddish-language gazes east that appear in literary depictions produced in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s."—Emma Woelk, The German Quarterly

From the Publisher

Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic,rich, and deeply earnest stu y of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and lit rary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery.

Jessica Kirzane - The Universityof Chicago

Caplan [is] mindful of and likely alarmed by the parallels between the 2020s and the 1920s, and rightly draw our attention to works of art and literature that might help us navigate our own troubled era.

LA Review of Books

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is full of sharp insights and bold statements, which at times can raise incidental doubts in the reader's mind. Caplan's book is a work of creative critical research on modern Yiddish literature, particularly well-suited to the contemporary historical moment.

Forward Magazine

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin offers a riveting analysis of the poetic and political force of Yiddish modernism, but it is also an invitation to look at Yiddish avant-garde beyond the confines of Jewish culture.

In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies - Marc Volovici