Lively and engaging new view of London’s Jewish East End through translated stories of its Yiddish writers. In London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930–1950, Vivi Lachs presents a selection of previously un-translated short stories and sketches by Katie Brown, A. M. Kaizer, and I. A. Lisky, for the general reader and academic alike. These intriguing and entertaining tales build a picture of a lively East-End community of the 30s and 40s struggling with political, religious, and community concerns. Lachs includes a new history of the Yiddish literary milieu and biographies of the writers, with information gleaned from articles, reviews, and obituaries published in London's Yiddish daily newspapers and periodicals. Lisky's impassioned stories concern the East End's clashing ideologies of communism, Zionism, fascism, and Jewish class difference. He shows anti-fascist activism, political debate in a kosher café, East-End extras on a film set, and a hunger march by the unemployed. Kaizer's witty and satirical tales explore philanthropy, upward mobility, synagogue politics, and competition between Zionist organizations. They expose the character and foibles of the community and make fun of foolish and hypocritical behavior. Brown's often hilarious sketches address episodes of daily life, which highlight family shenanigans and generational misunderstandings, and point out how the different attachments to Jewish identity of the immigrant generation and their children created unresolvable fractures. Each section begins with a biography of the writer, before launching into the translated stories with contextual notes. London Yiddishtown offers a significant addition to the literature about London, about the East End, about Jewish history, and about Yiddish. The East End has parallels with New York's Lower East Side, yet London's comparatively small enclave, and the particular experience of London in the 1930s and the bombing of the East End during the Blitz make this history unique. It is a captivating read that will entice literary and history buffs of all backgrounds. A Yiddish Book Center Translation.

The East End is an iconic area of London, from the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George. Located east of the Tower of London and north of the River Thames, it has experienced a number of developmental stages in its four-hundred-year history. Originating as a series of scattered villages, the area has been home to Europe's worst slums and served as an affluent nodal point of the British Empire. Through its evolution, the East End has been the birthplace of radical political and social movements and the social center for a variety of diasporic communities. This reference work, with its alphabetically organized cross-referenced entries and its original and historical photography, serves as a comprehensive guide to the social and cultural history of this global hub.

The symposium that kicks off the latest volume of Studies in Contemporary Jewry focuses on the city that is at the very center of contemporary Jewish life, both geographically and culturally. Jerusalem is an extremely engaging and beautiful city as well as a source of continual controversy and contestation. The authors in the symposium discuss a wide range of topics, with a focus on politics and culture, offering readers provocative views on the city over the last 120 years. Essays by historians and cultural scholars in the volume engage with such issues as visions of the city among Jews and non-Jews and musical and literary imaginings of the city, while other scholars bring original interpretations of the city's political evolution in the past century that will both surprise and intrigue readers. The extensive book review section illustrates the consistent interest in modern Jewish history and culture.

What do Persian robes of honour, 20th-century still-life painting, fur garments, and 18th-century porcelain all have in common? Prized, possessed and modelled, they highlight the deep connections we share with cultural objects. Establishing new connections between people and things via artistic media and material culture, this highly interdisciplinary volume brings together both established and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, material culture, museum and heritage studies and literary studies to investigate the intersection of the personal with the material. Raising vital questions of cultural identity, belonging and selfhood, Material Selves is the first book of its kind to consider the relationship between people and things across transcultural and transhistorical contexts. It employs innovative methodologies across ten chapters and critically expands on current models for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and things by tracing the central role objects have played in the construction, creation and performance of identity throughout history. Structured around four key sections exploring biography and narrative; adornment and ornament; reclamation and intervention; and subjects and objects, the volume presents a global selection of case studies that explore, amongst other things, Margaret Olley's enduring fame, the significance of the Khil'a in Safavid Persia and early modern Europe, and 17th-century French painter Charles LeBrun's royal portraiture. Fusing these with contemporary theories of identity, the contributors provide analyses informed by posthumanism, the environmental humanities, race and gender. At the same time, they confront vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, and highlight the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. In doing so, the book illuminates a wide range of cultural and chronological settings whilst giving close attention to the mobility of people and things between, across, and through time and place.

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2.3, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Historisches Institut), course: YIDDISCHKEIT: THE LITERARY AND POPULAR CULTURES OF YIDDISH SPEAKING JEWS, 1750-2000, language: English, abstract: In the 1930s, about 5,2 million Jews were able to speak Yiddish in Eastern Europe, but after the Second World War almost five million of them were dead. This led to a declining importance and use of the Yiddish language. But it is not a dead language but a language that gained interest of the descendants of the former yiddish-speaking Jews and research at the universities and gets more and more known. Furthermore, there are still speakers of Yiddish, mostly in the ultra-orthodox milieu in Israel. To show that Yiddish is still used, I will examine the graphic novel “Maus“ by the American author Art Spiegelman whose parents immigrated to the USA in the early 1950s. It deals with the story of his jewish father in Poland during the Second World War. This paper shall deal with the use of Yiddish and Yinglish and its representation in the graphic novel. The aim of this paper is to show that traces of Yiddish can be found even in a graphic novel. Following that aim, chapter I.A deals with the immigration of Jews to the USA and the impact that the big jewish community in America had on the American language – the influence of Yiddish on English and the other way round. The second chapter (II.) focuses on the life of Jews in Poland and their use of Yiddish. The chapter shall give an overview of the social premises, the Jews lived in. Nevertheless it shall also give a short introduction of the Yiddish language and how it was used. As the graphic novel deals with the Holocaust, the third chapter (III.) sums up the events after the invasion of the German Reich to Poland and shows what the Germans did to Poland. Furthermore the important polish places for the graphic novel are introduced. The next chapter introduces Art Spiegelman and gives a short biography of him. Furthermore his work “Maus“ will be represented and a short summary of the graphic novel focusing on the storyline in the 1930s and 1940s will be given. Chapter V. now analyzes the use and representation of Yiddish and in the last Chapter a conclusion will be drawn towards the question, how Yiddish is represented in “Maus“.

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. "Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

This is a compact guide to the Jewish sights of western and eastern Europe, including Turkey and Russia, and covers everything from major collections of Jewish art to medieval Jewish ghettos, Holocaust memorials, synagogues, and cemeteries.

On March 31, 1943, the musical Oklahoma! premiered and the modern era of the Broadway musical was born. Since that time, the theatres of Broadway have staged hundreds of musicals--some more noteworthy than others, but all in their own way a part of American theatre history. With more than 750 entries, this comprehensive reference work provides information on every musical produced on Broadway since Oklahoma's 1943 debut. Each entry begins with a brief synopsis of the show, followed by a three-part history: first, the pre-Broadway story of the show, including out-of-town try-outs and Broadway previews; next, the Broadway run itself, with dates, theatres, and cast and crew, including replacements, chorus and understudies, songs, gossip, and notes on reviews and awards; and finally, post-Broadway information with a detailed list of later notable productions, along with important reviews and awards.