Author Description

Volume 6 presents a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive collection of essays by Yiddish artists and intellectuals from the interwar period, including Perets Markish, Nakhmen Mayzel, Shmuel Niger, Melekh Ravitsh, Fradl Shtok, and Debora Vogel. The focus is on manifestos by writers and artists, on the perspectives of modern authors, in particular on their positions vis à vis world literature, including their opinions regarding the so-called language war between Hebrew and Yiddish. The volume also documents the debate that accompanied the plan to organize a Yiddish literary congress in 1927, intended to strengthen the fragmented Yiddish cultural community. A separate chapter is devoted to essays by the poetess and fiction writer Kadya Molodowsky. A longtime editor of the literary periodical Svive (Surroundings), she was an exception in a field largely dominated by men. The volume contains some 60 Yiddish essays, printed in Hebrew letters, accompanied by a foreword in English and German. This first comprehensive edition of Yiddish essays presents central voices and discourses of Jewish and Yiddish artists and intellectuals of the interwar period.