Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

linguistic acrobatics that Yeshurun performed in his poems—e.g., multilingualism, neologism, formal hybridity—also characterized Yiddish modernism of the early twentieth century, so arguably a Yiddish poetics or poetic sensibility shaped his very approach to writing Hebrew.

his poetry, like theirs, maps not only the linguistic shifts and transformations that occurred within modern Hebrew itself but also the long-standing tension between a “revived” Hebrew vernacular and native, diasporic languages, Yiddish in particular.

As a result of these interactions, Yiddish—and specifically the writers and work associated with Yung Yisroel—affected and was at the root of some highly significant changes in Israeli literature from the 1950s onward. But since Yiddish was deemed as, to use Yael Chaver’s expression, “the language that must be forgotten,” this influence remains hid

During the first two decades of Israel’s existence, few literary works sought to actualize the human experiences of the Holocaust by transmuting them into a poetic discourse that would make them emotionally and intellectually accessible.

accepts “art for art’s sake” as suggested by Rinzler, but as part of a self-conscious approach to writing in a minor language.

post-Holocaust Yiddish literature, which according to David Roskies is built on two pillars: utopian faith and collective lamentation.

he suggests the Yiddish writer who writes in the distinctly Israeli paradigm of Zionist-socialist culture should carry on as if in the diaspora, namely, surround himself with Yiddish books and create a spiritual atmosphere in which Yiddish will not be forgotten. However, in Israel, for the first time, Birshtein wrote of the need to justify his writ

synthesis manifested in areas of plots and narrative, characters, diction, images, the representation of landscape, and the ways in which they transformed Yiddish literary language.

tendency within the group, which saw itself as attempting to find light within the shadows and to connect with what Yungman called a “nation that is not yet a nation, but erev rov fun shvotim [a multitude of tribes].”