FALL 2020 | JEWISH STUDIES
Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin A Fugitive Modernism Marc Caplan In 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. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan’s masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic.
January 2021 Judaica 344 pages, 6 x 9 Paperback 978-0-253-05200-1 $40.00, £31.00 Cloth 978-0-253-05198-1 $95.00, £74.00 Also available as an e-book
Marc Caplan is Visiting Professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is author of How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms. GERMAN JEWISH CULTURES EDITORIAL BOARD: MATTHEW HANDELMAN, IRIS IDELSON-SHEIN, SAMUEL SPINNER, JOSHUA TEPLITSKY, KERRY WALLACH, GETTYSBURG COLLEGE SPONSORED BY THE LEO BAECK INSTITUTE LONDON
“After having resigned myself to feeling mystified by these and other Yiddish writers, Marc Caplan helped me to see not so much what these writers meant as how to make sense of my mystification without thereby dissolving it. I was particularly impressed by how Caplan shed new light on the distinction between mourning and melancholy and demonstrated how these psychological and cultural attitudes manifested themselves even in apparently purely stylistic choices.” —Naomi Seidman, author of Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition
“Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a thoroughly enjoyable and meticulously researched account of a cultural constellation that took shape in the first half of the 20th century. Marc Caplan focuses his powers of analysis on the cultural dynamics at the intersection of Yiddish and German-Jewish literature in Central Europe and how it is crucial for understanding Jewish literary history and its implications for today.” —Na’ama Rokem, author of Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature
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