GERM 44.09 Exile and Hope in Yiddish and Hebrew Literature
This course examines the role of exile and hope in literary representations of the lives of young Jewish people in late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. We will ask questions about Jewish belonging, modernity and Jewish society, shifting gender roles, and the development of ideological movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Focusing on a major trope of Jewish literature, the talush, usually translated as “the uprooted,” though it literally means “cut-off” or “pluck”. This term describes Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who left behind their Orthodox upbringing to embrace modern secular existence, yet found themselves stuck between two worlds, struggling to belong fully to either realm. Students will embark on a journey, tracing the roots of this figure in Jewish autobiographical writing of the Jewish enlightenment of Eastern Europe in the end of the nineteenth century, comparing it with modernist figures of other literary traditions, such as the French Flâneur, and exploring different iterations of the uprooted in literature written in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English and in different spaces: Eastern Europe, America, Palestine and later Israel. Students will consider the place of Jewish women in this trope; the trope across languages and time; the scholarship on this trope and why it was primarily researched in Hebrew literature for many years; and the talush across different spaces, such as in American Jewish literature and the Mizrachi uprootedness in Israel.
Department-Specific Course Categories
German Studies