Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade ReviewYiddish 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 *
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 *
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.
-- Jessica Kirzane * AJS Review *
Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism.
-- Matthew Johnson * German Studies Review *
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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
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
