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Tevye, the Yiddish form of the Hebrew-Biblical Tovyah (Tobias), is the most nuanced and three-dimensional literary figure in the works of Shalom Rabinovitch (1859–1916), published under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. The writer, whose popular-humoristic texts (Humor) played a significant part in the evolution of modern literary Yiddish, described the confrontation between the traditional shtetl and the European modern age in tragicomical monologue form in a series of nine short stories published between 1895 and 1914 under the title of Tevye der milkhiker (“Tevye the Dairym…

The form of the poem, always reserved for individual feeling and marked by musicality and lively imagery, reflects, to a special degree, the difficulties of a strongly collectivist culture, regimented in its conceptual world, in finding a creative expression for that which is individual and unconventional – hence the belatedness with which authentic Hebrew poetry made its appearance in the modern era. The history of modern Hebrew poetry, down to the present, has been marked by the two poets Ḥayi…

The Yiddish word shtetl (“[small] town”; pl. shtetlach), distinct from shtot (“large town,” “city”), was used to describe the type of settlement that was most frequently the home of Eastern European Jews from the 13th century onward. The shtetl usually consisted of a few thousand inhabitants, sometimes the majority of them Jews. Their economic activity was linked closely to the feudal economy of their rural surroundings. With the economic and political changes of the 19th century, the shtetl lost its orig…

Title of a poem by the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886–1932) from his first poetry collection  In Nyu York (1919; “In New York,” 1982). Memento Mori is an example of the poet’s ability to cast a very personal pronouncement in lively Yiddish everyday language. In the context of modern lyric poetry, the poem illustrates Halpern’s unmistakable synthesis of modern individualism with the dynamic of Yiddish as the language of the “simple folk.”1. IntroductionThe poem Memento Mori, with its strophic structure, haunting repetitions, and refrain, is situated somewhere …

Literally “the king’s mountain”; originally the Aramaic name of a hill southeast of Jerusalem. It is also the pseudonym of the Hebrew-Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896–1981; Poetry), which he adopted during his Aliyah in December 1923 and later also bore in civilian life together with his wife, the poet Aliza Gurevitch (b. 1926). While his early poems, influenced by Expressionism and Modernism, were published in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, after turning to Zionism, he dedicated himself…

The concept of a single, comprehensive Jewish literature and a Jewish literary canon became dubious after the idea of a unified Jewish religious culture was shattered in the modern period. The nationalist viewpoint, according to which Jewish literature is the literature in the two Jewish languages Hebrew and Yiddish, written by Jews and for Jews, fell increasingly into a crisis in the 20th century. Decisive in this regard were not only the inner contradictions of this view, but also the diverse …

Originally the title (with the spelling In zikh) of a collection of poems published in New York (1920) by eight young American-Yiddish authors. The volume includes a programmatic introduction entitled “Introspectivism,” which is signed by three of the participating poets. Two of them, Jacob Glatstein (Yankev Glatshteyn, 1896–1971) and Nokhem-Borekh Minkoff (1893–1958), were still hardly known at the time. A. Leyeles (pseudonym of Aaron Glanz, 1889–1966), the third one, had made a name for himself as a …

The term  Di Yunge (Yidd.; "the young ones”) was adopted by a group of young American-Yiddish writers toward the end of the 1900s. The name may be derived from Yugent, the title of a literary anthology published in 1907, with which some of the more active members of the group distinguished themselves by a first important publication. It expressed the self-understanding of the authors, who wished to distinguish themselves clearly from their older, generally socialistically or anarchistically-minded predecessors. Very quickly…

Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s first poem  El ha-tsippor (“To the Bird,” 1948), published in spring 1892, belongs to the conventional melancholy lyric typical for the epoch of sentimentality in modern Hebrew literature. In several respects, it expresses the mood, poetics, and worldview of an interim period – a poetic transition phase between neoclassicism and romanticism, politically the period between Haskalah and Herzl’s political Zionism. The poem directly announces the beginning of a new Jewish subjectivit…

At the end of 1947, the Tel Aviv daily  Davar published the political poem  Maggash ha-kesef (The Silver Platter) by Nathan Alterman (1910–1970). The poem, which was written shortly after the beginning of hostilities in the run-up to the foundation of the State of Israel, refers to Chaim Weizmann’s remark that “a state is not presented to a people on a silver platter.” The public of the emerging state received the poem ecstatically and integrated it into the cultural canon. In his work, Alterman reflects the …

Fishke is the eponymous hero of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh’s Yiddish novel  Fishke der krumer (first published 1869, “Fishke the Lame,” 1996) about the life of an itinerant Jewish beggar in Ukraine in the middle of the 19th century. Written in the 19th century tradition of European novels about the poor and downtrodden (Victor Hugo’s  Les Misérables, Dostoyevsky’s  Poor Folk and  Humiliated and Insulted) as well as underworld romanticism (Dickens’s  Oliver Twist, Eugène Sues’s  The Mysteries of Paris), the novel gave voice to the author’s critique of East European Jew…

Bontshe became a synonym for the passive and humble Eastern European Jew who is not able to defend himself. The name goes back to  Bontshe shvayg ("Bontshe the silent," 1927), a satirical short story by I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) published in 1894. Together with several other works published in the early 1890s, it catapulted Peretz – hitherto an unimportant Hebrew poet of late Haskalah and early Zionism – to the top of contemporary Yiddish literature. Within just a few years he became an author in an authoritative positio…