Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism(German Jewish Cultures)

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 modernism.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Weimar and Now Spectral Empires: Landscapes, Nation-States, and the Homelessness of Weimar Modernism 1. A Past Become Space: Alfred Döblin and Dovid Bergelson in Poland, the Soviet Union—and Berlin 2. At the Crossroads of the Twentieth Century: Neue Sachlichkeit and Dovid Bergelson's Berlin Stories Melancholic Conspiracies: Masks, Masques, and the Performance of Self in Yiddish and German Modernism 3. Watch the Throne: The Baroque, The Gothic, and Symbolism in Der Nister's Early Stories 4. Harold Lloyd and the Hermit: Popular Culture, Gothic Aesthetics, and the End of Der Nister's Symbolist Career Apocalyptic Origins: The Politics of Nostalgia in German and Yiddish Modernism 5. Arrested Development: Fragmentation, Apocalypse, and the Pursuit of Origins in Joseph Roth's Representation of Eastern Europe 6. Moyshe Kulbak's Berlin Writings: Here, There, Everywhere (Nowhere) Conclusion: Origin Is the Goal Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is full of sharp insights and bold statements, which at times can raise incidental doubts in the reader's mind. Caplan's book is a work of creative critical research on modern Yiddish literature, particularly well-suited to the contemporary historical moment. (Forward Magazine) Caplan [is] mindful of and likely alarmed by the parallels between the 2020s and the 1920s, and rightly draw our attention to works of art and literature that might help us navigate our own troubled era. (LA Review of Books) Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic, rich, and deeply earnest study of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and literary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery. - Jessica Kirzane (AJS Review) Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism. - Matthew Johnson (German Studies Review) Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic,rich, and deeply earnest stu y of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and lit rary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery. - Jessica Kirzane - The University of Chicago Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism. In lively and often memorable prose, Caplan analyzes "the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture, concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, taken in comparison with corresponding figures working in German-language literature, critical theory, journalism, and film. - Matthew Johnson (German Studies Review) Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin offers a riveting analysis of the poetic and political force of Yiddish modernism, but it is also an invitation to look at Yiddish avant-garde beyond the confines of Jewish culture. - Marc Volovici (In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies) Caplan's analysis is most fascinating when it is able to illuminate points of tension or difference between German and yiddish-language gazes east that appear in literary depictions produced in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s. - Emma Woelk (The German Quarterly) Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin teems with rich readings as it situates its texts within the tradition of Yiddish literature while attempting to expand the outer frame of reference. - Sophie Duvernoy (SHOFAR)