SURVEY OF YIDDISH LIT (ENG)

For the better part of a thousand years Yiddish was the primary language of European Jewry – and the language of its most exciting and vibrant literary and cultural achievement. This class hopes to trace the history of that literature – which is at its heart a history of much of the Jewish people as it lived traditionally faced modernity and suffered catastrophe. Stories poems plays – by authors ranging from Nobel prize winners like Isaac Bashevis Singer to seventeenth century women like Gluckel of Hameln – are not only great works of art in their own right but they open a window into a largely vanished world.