Description
Book SynopsisBringing together contributions by historians and literary scholars, Culture Front explores how Jews and their Slavic neighbors produced and consumed imaginative representations of Jewish life in chronicles, plays, novels, poetry, memoirs, museums, and elsewhere.
Table of ContentsPreface
—David B. Ruderman
Introduction: A New Look at East European Jewish Culture
—Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran
PART I. VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY
1. Jewish Literary Responses to the Events of 1648-1649 and the Creation of a Polish-
Jewish Consciousness
—Adam Teller
2. "Civil Christians": Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789-1830
—Marcin Wodziński
PART II. MIRRORS OF POPULAR CULTURE
3. The Botched Kiss and the Beginnings of the Yiddish Stage
—Alyssa Quint
4. The Polish Popular Novel and Jewish Modernization at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries
—Eugenia Prokop-Janiec
5. Cul-de-Sac: The "Inner Life of Jews" on the Fin-de-Siècle Polish Stage
—Michael C. Steinlauf
PART III. POLITICS AND AESTHETICS
6. Yosef Haim Brenner, the "Half-Intelligentsia," and Russian-Jewish Politics, 1899-1908
—Jonathan Frankel
7. Recreating Jewish Identity in Haim Nahman Bialik's Poems: The Russian Context
—Hamutal Bar-Yosef
8. Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917-1919
—Kenneth Moss
9. Beyond the Purim-shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poems
—Kathryn Hellerstein
PART IV. MEMORY PROJECTS
10. Revealing and Concealing the Soviet Jewish Self: The Desk-Drawer Memoirs of Meir Viner
—Marcus Moseley
11. The Shtetl Subjunctive: Yaffa Eliach's Living History Museum
—Jeffrey Shandler
List of Contributors
Index
