The Yiddish Presence in European Literature Inspiration and Interaction : Selected Papers Arising from the Fourth and Fifth Mendel Friedman Conferences in Yiddish

Early in the twentieth century, Yiddish, previously stigmatized as a corrupt jargon, came to be recognized as a language in its own right, and one moreover that was already the vehicle for a rich literature. Many writers in other European languages steadily became aware of the status and richness of the Yiddish language, sometimes by encountering Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, and they responded to Yiddish language and culture in their own works, while Yiddish writers adopted, and sometimes anticipated, modern trends in other European literatures known to them. The collection of papers in this volume examines some of these fruitful interactions between Yiddish and the European literary tradition, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present, from France to Lithuania, and from classic modernist writers such as Kafka to Imre Kertesz (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2002).