Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

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.

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.

Yung Yisroel, which consisted of refugees and immigrants situated within an emerging social and cultural backdrop indifferent or even hostile to their activities.

most of the audience associated Yiddish both with Soviet and pre-Soviet times.

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].”

they tried to use Yiddish as a bridge across time and space, connecting the tradition of Yiddish with the new environment.

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

The development of nostalgia for the Soviet past and the Soviet space coincided with the largest migration of east European Jews to the Western Hemisphere since the turn of the twentieth century.

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.