Ellen Kellman

The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era. In particular, editors Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen are interested in three different narratives and their occasional intersections. The first narrative is the real, hands-on interaction between American Jews and European Jewish refugees and how the two groups influenced one another. Second were the imaginative reconstructions of a wartime or prewar Jewish world to meet the needs of a postwar American Jewish audience. Third is the narrative in which the Holocaust was mobilized to justify postwar political and philanthropic activism. econstructing the Old Country will contribute to the growing scholarly conversation about the postwar years in a variety of fields. Scholars and students of American Jewish history and literature in particular will appreciate this internationally focused scholarship on the continuing reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Yoysef Opatoshu died in 1954 after a long and productive career as a fiction writer and activist in the worldwide Yiddish cultural movement. His novels and short stories have been largely ignored by scholars and translators during the past six decades, however, and have fallen into obscurity. Several of Opatoshu's longer works were serialized in newspapers and literary magazines before they appeared in book form. By 1914, Opatoshu had, with Yoysef Rolnik, Y. Y. Shvarts, Yoyl Slonim, and M. Y. Khayemovitsh, broken artistic ties with Di Yunge, producing a new anthology, entitled 'Di naye heym'. Opatoshu was a regular contributor of short fiction to the New York daily Der tog (Day) from its inception in November 1914. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent wars over the borders of new states had vitiated cultural contact between Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world.

In this volume we announce materials of the international conference JEWISH SPACE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: DAY- TO- DAY HISTORY which took place in Vilnius, on 10-11 th May, 2006. In the articles of appreciated scholars and perspective young researchers the Jewish space is revealed as diverse forms of life and relations developing in the rich context of urbanism, social life, leisure, economic expression, and coexistence with the non-Jewish world. Having undergone various transformations, the Jewish space has preserved its authenticity and individuality. In the proceedings, the Jewish space is analyzed in a wide chronological period from the point of view of literature, history, architecture, and social relationships. It is worth opening this volume for everyone who is interested in means of entertainment, (sports, leisure, parties in cabaret), living and participating in social life, reading and writing of Jews in towns and shtetls of East Europe in during the 19 th and at the beginning of 20th century.

Although many works have been devoted to serials in France, Great Britain and the United States, there was no comparative study between these three countries. "Romans-feuilletons", "serials", "serialized fictions", have been developing and multiplying since the end of the 18th century in these three geographical and cultural areas. Historians specializing in literature, but also image and media, sociologists, question the birth of the soap opera, then present the different actors, authors, publishers, illustrators, advertisers, as well as the modes and media of its publication. Finally, they question the distribution of the soap opera, initially designed to entertain the general public and sometimes intended for specific readerships, for union or political purposes. A few reflections on the future of soap operas, among others on the "serial movies" screened in cinemas in the United States during the two world wars, complete this approach. Fascinating in its richness and diversity, a major economic issue, a reflection of the society that produces it, the soap opera is a real cultural phenomenon. This work, through the study of the production, distribution, and certain forms of reception of the soap opera, invites the reader to meditate on the extraordinary success of one of the most fertile genres, after the epic, of the universal literature. This book concerns the sociology of reading, the history of publishing and cultural and social history. a major economic stake, a reflection of the society that produces it, the soap opera is a real cultural phenomenon. This work, through the study of the production, distribution, and certain forms of reception of the soap opera, invites the reader to meditate on the extraordinary success of one of the most fertile genres, after the epic, of the universal literature. This book concerns the sociology of reading, the history of publishing and cultural and social history. a major economic stake, a reflection of the society that produces it, the soap opera is a real cultural phenomenon. This work, through the study of the production, distribution, and certain forms of reception of the soap opera, invites the reader to meditate on the extraordinary success of one of the most fertile genres, after the epic, of the universal literature. This book concerns the sociology of reading, the history of publishing and cultural and social history. universal literature. This book concerns the sociology of reading, the history of publishing and cultural and social history. universal literature. This book concerns the sociology of reading, the history of publishing and cultural and social history.

In the first half of the 20th century, Sholem Asch was well known in both Jewish and non-Jewish literary circles. Born in Poland, he divided his time between Europe and the United States. He wrote in Yiddish but thanks to the great popularity of both his novels and plays, Asch was translated into English and other languages early on. At the height of his fame he was a household name in the Yiddish-speaking world and on the world literary stage. With the publication of his novels on the origins of Christianity (The Nazarene, 1939; The Apostle, 1943; Mary, 1949), Asch's fortunes began to falter. His Yiddish-reading public--primarily in the United States--turned away from him, and he was never able to re-establish his bond with them. This is the first modern discussion of Asch by some of the most distinguished Yiddish literary critics of our time, among them Dan Miron, David Roskies and Seth Wolitz. Along with a discussion of the Christological novels, the writers examine the author's play God of Vengeance, his American fiction, and his novels that deal with the European Jewish reality of radical change and dislocation at the beginning of the 20th century. The book also includes an overview of Asch's life by his great-grandson, David Mazower.

This chapter traces the history of Yiddish reading in inter-war Poland. Jewish public libraries played a pivotal role in working-class Jewish culture in the period between the wars. Since many young people typically left school in their early teens to enter the workforce, libraries and the cultural activities that took place in and around them enabled young people to continue to develop intellectually. The symbiosis between the Yiddish book industry and Yiddish libraries in inter-war Poland meant that the relative health or infirmity of libraries strongly affected the book industry. Thus, when the Yiddish book sounded the alarm in 1939, it was an indication of the troubled state of the libraries as well. Although the twenty-year interlude between the two world wars was an extremely difficult period for Polish Jewry, one that, with hindsight, one may see as characterized by significant losses, it was also distinguished by the tremendous creative energy of its cultural activists.