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Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture
by Gennady Estraikh"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."
Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission
by Rebecca MargolisThe language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities. Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media. Rebecca Margolis uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies from history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, digital humanities, and screen studies to examine the ways in which engagement with Yiddish has evolved across multiple planes.Investigating the products of an abiding dedication to cultural continuity among successive generations, Yiddish Lives On offers innovative approaches to the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of minority, heritage, and lesser-taught languages.
The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction: Selected Papers Arising from the Fourth and Fifth International Mendel Friedman Conference
by Joseph Sherman"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). With the contributions: Gilles Rozier- 'When Purim-shpiler meets Columbine': Characters of Commedia dell'arte and Purimshpil in the Works of Moyshe Broderzon David Bellos- In the Worst Possible Taste: Romain Gary's Dance of Genghis Cohn Florian Krobb- 'Muthwillige Faschingstracht': The Presence of Yiddish in Nineteenth-Century German Literature Ritchie Robertson- Kafka's Encounter with the Yiddish Theatre David Groiser- Translating Yiddish: Martin Buber and David Pinski Mikhail Krutikov- Yiddish Author as Cultural Mediator: Meir Wiener's Unpublished Novel David Midgley- The Romance of the East: Encounters of German-Jewish Writers with Yiddish-Speaking Communities, 1916-27 PolO Dochartaigh - Intimacy and Alienation: Yiddish in the Works of Jurek Becker Peter Sherwood- 'Living through Something': Notes on the Work of Imre Kertesz Joseph Sherman- Bergelson and Chekhov: Convergences and Departures Gennady Estraikh- Shmuel Gordon: A Yiddish Writer in 'the Ocean of Russian Literature'"
Yiddish Transformed: Reading Habits in the Russian Empire, 1860-1914
by Nathan CohenAs significant economic, social, political, and cultural transformations swept the Jewish population of Tsarist Russia and Congress Poland between 1860 and 1914, the Yiddish language (Zhargon) began to gain recognition as a central part of the Jewish cultural stage. Yiddish Transformed examines the secular reading habits of East-European Jews as the Jewish community began shifting to a modern society. Author Nathan Cohen explores Jewish reading practices alongside the rise of Yiddish by delving into publishing policies of Yiddish books and newspapers, popular literary genres of the time, the development of Jewish public libraries, as well as personal reflections of reading experiences.
Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (German Jewish Cultures)
by Marc CaplanIn Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.
Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land
by Harvey Pekar and Paul BuhleA “fascinating and enlightening” collection of comics and writings that explore the Yiddish language and the Jewish experience (The Miami Herald).We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz, but how did they come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the far-reaching influences of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. This comics anthology contains original stories by such notable writers and artists as Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. Through illustrations, comics art, and a full-length play, four major themes are explored: culture, performance, assimilation, and the revival of the language. “The book is about what Neal Gabler in his introduction labels ‘Jewish sensibility.’…he writes: ‘You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.’ The book does this with gusto.” —TheNew York Times“As colorful, bawdy, and charming as the culture it seeks to represent.” —Print magazine“Brimming with the charm and flavor of its subject…a genuinely compelling, scholarly comics experience.” —Publishers Weekly“A book that truly informs about Jewish culture and, in the process, challenges readers to pick apart their own vocabulary.” —Chicago Tribune“A postvernacular tour de force.” —The Forward“With a loving eye Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history.” —Hadassah“Gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers.”––Tablet “Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely…because [it] is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.” —Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, from his introduction“A scrumptious smorgasbord of comics, essays, and illustrations…concentrated tastes, with historical context, of Yiddish theater, literature, characters and culture.” —Heeb magazine
The Yield: Kafka's Atheological Reformation
by Paul NorthThe Yield is a once-in-a-generation reinterpretation of the oeuvre of Franz Kafka. At the same time, it is a powerful new entry in the debates about the supposed secularity of the modern age. Kafka is one of the most admired writers of the last century, but this book presents us with a Kafka few will recognize. It does so through a fine-grained analysis of the three hundred "thoughts" the writer penned near the end of World War I, when he had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Since they were discovered after Kafka's death, the meaning of the so-called "Zürau aphorisms" has been open to debate. Paul North's elucidation of what amounts to Kafka's only theoretical work shows them to contain solutions to problems Europe has faced throughout modernity. Kafka offers responses to phenomena of violence, discrimination, political repression, misunderstanding, ethnic hatred, fantasies of technological progress, and the subjugation of the worker, among other problems. Reflecting on secular modernity and the theological ideas that continue to determine it, he critiques the ideas of sin, suffering, the messiah, paradise, truth, the power of art, good will, and knowledge. Kafka's controversial alternative to the bad state of affairs in his day? Rather than fight it, give in. Developing some of Kafka's arguments, The Yield describes the ways that Kafka envisions we can be good by "yielding" to our situation instead of striving for something better.
Yo en tu lugar
by L. Ronald HubbardEl pequeo Tom es un enano de circo con sueos de gigante. Puede que sea el rey de los enanos, pero tiene ambiciones mayores: convertirse en el jefe de pista. Ahora, recurriendo a oscuros secretos antiguos, est a punto de conseguir su deseo: un diminuto Cheech Marin que se transforma en Omar Sharif. Pero al asumir la identidad de otro hombre, Tom debe tambin enfrentarse a sus enemigos. . . que quieren hacerle pagar por los pecados del gran hombre.
Yo no vengo a decir un discurso
by Gabriel García Márquez¿Qué hago yo encaramado en esta percha de honor, yo que siempre he considerado los discursos como el más terrorífico de los compromisos humanos? Gabriel García Márquez Los textos que Gabriel García Márquez ha reunido en este libro fueron escritos por el autor con la intención de ser leídos por él mismo en público, ante una audiencia, y recorren prácticamente toda su vida, desde el primero, que escribe a los diecisiete años para despedir a sus compañeros del curso superior en Zipaquirá, hasta el que lee ante las Academias de la Lengua y los reyes de España al cumplir ochenta años. Estos discursos del premio Nobel nos ayudan a comprender más profundamente su vida y nos desvelan sus obsesiones fundamentales como escritor y ciudadano: su fervorosa vocación por la literatura, la pasión por el periodismo, su inquietud ante el desastre ecológico que se avecina, su propuesta de simplificar la gramática, los problemas de su tierra colombiana o el recuerdo emocionado de amigos escritores como Julio Cortázar o Álvaro Mutis, entre otros muchos. El lector tiene entra sus manos el complemento indispensable a una obra narrativa que nos seguirá hablando en un largo porvenir. **** What am I doing here on this perch of honor, when I have always considered speeches the most terrifying of human obligations? The speeches that Gabriel García Márquez has gathered in this collection were written by the author with the intention of being read by him before an audience, and span the course of nearly his entire life; from the first, a farewell written at seventeen to his fellow students at Zipaquirá, to his appearance before the Spanish-language Academies and the kings of Spain on his eightieth birthday. Combined, these speeches provide a more profound understanding of the life of this Nobel Prize winner, revealing his fundamental creative and civil obsessions: his intense aptitude for literature and writing; his passion for journalism; his concerns over looming environmental dangers; his proposal for the simplification of grammar; the problems facing his beloved Colombian homeland; and the loving memory of fellow writers like Julio Cortázar and Álvaro Mutis, among many others. In Yo no vengo a decir un discurso (I did not come to give a speech), the reader holds in his/her hands the essential complement to a body of work that will continue speaking to us for a long time to come.
Yo soy el fuego
by Oscar VelaConsumidos por las tinieblas.Devorados por el fuego. Yo soy el fuego es un vertiginoso viaje hacia lo más sombrío de lamiseria humana. Sus personajes se embarcan en ruines empresas ignorandoque son marionetas de seres superiores. Beatriz y el Dragón portan laluz imperecedera del fuego, único elemento capaz de combatir laoscuridad; ese fuego que calcina y carboniza, pero que también sana ypurifica«Mientras, la mirada del Dragón se pierde en una gran masa pirotécnica,que parece penetrar con sus pupilas abriendo en el medio de ella unenorme orificio. Y allí está otra vez el aro mágico iluminando la noche,un gran cerco incandescente que parece aguardar al gigantesco tigre quelo atravesará de un salto, perforando el centro del aro con su cuerpobrillante».Reseña:«Con una prosa impecable y un manejo virtuoso de los distinto puntos devista, Oscar Vela nos introduce en el mundo de personajes que queremosconocer de inmediato. Difícil dejar de leer su novela hasta no respondera ciertas preguntas: ¿Qué será capaz de hacer Ramiro Leone? ¿Quién esese joven que salvó su vida gracias a la biblioteca de El Tata? ¿A quiénle habla el narrador en segunda persona? Pero sobre todo, ¿quérepresenta el fuego para todos ellos?».Claudia Piñeiro
Yo soy una señora
by Jaime Bayly"Yo desde chica, he sido muy de derecha. Nunca he sido comunista, tan bruta no soy. He sido marihuanera, pero no comunista, he sido marihuanera de derecha". Una mujer adicta al sexo, un esposo tarado que escoge los regalos más inadecuados para su mujer, una azafata que sueña con jubilarse, una locutora radial de madrugada, una derechista pistolera, una pintora que no consigue vender sus cuadros. Este universo de personajes, esta fauna de seres delirantes, es la que habita en Yo soy una señora. En estos cuentos, atravesados por el humor y la ironía, el autor ha logrado un registro oral que transita entre la confesión de parte, el relato testimonial y el chisme. Usted, lector, tendrá la impresión de estar sentado en alguna sala de espera junto a un extraño que, sin ninguna vergüenza, compartirá los detalles más privados de su vida, esos de los que normalmente nadie quiere hablar, pero que, a decir verdad, todos disfrutamos escuchar.
Yoga for Chickens
by Lynn Brunelle“A harried-looking but willing chicken clucks through all the poses, and the net result is an entertaining take on modern yoga practice.” —Yoga JournalChickens know a few things about feeling fried. That’s why they’ve been practicing yoga for centuries. As this hilariously illustrated guide to simple yoga poses reveals, we have much to learn from their bird-brained wisdom. Anyone who feels cooped up or stressed out by the pecking order will feel like a spring chicken in no time thanks to such postures as Chick’s Pose, Snake in the Grass, and Chicken of the Sea. Sections on breathing and stretching are included, and a series of fix-it routines unscramble such problem areas as neck, thighs, and aching feet. Plus, thoughtful hen koans (why did the chicken cross the road?) and plucky affirmations invite contemplation and inspire budding yoginis to spread their wings. Googly-eyed, combs akimbo, these very funky chickens will enlighten both beginners and the adept, and are sure to make anyone feel chirpy—all for a nice cheep price.
The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa (South Asia Across the Disciplines)
by Andrew QuintmanTibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052–1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.
Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner's Fiction and Southern Roots Music (Southern Literary Studies)
by Tim A. RyanDuring the 1920s and 1930s, Mississippi produced two of the most significant influences upon twentieth-century culture: the modernist fiction of William Faulkner and the recorded blues songs of African American musicians like Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, and Robert Johnson. In Yoknapatawpha Blues, the first book examining both Faulkner and the music of the south, Tim A. Ryan identifies provocative parallels of theme and subject in diverse regional genres and texts. Placing Faulkner's literary texts and prewar country blues song lyrics on equal footing, Ryan illuminates the meanings of both in new and unexpected ways. He provides close analysis of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in Faulkner's "Old Man" and Patton's "High Water Everywhere"; racial violence in the story "That Evening Sun" and Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues"; and male sexual dysfunction in Sanctuary and Johnson's "Dead Shrimp Blues." This interdisciplinary study reveals how the characters of Yoknapatawpha County and the protagonists in blues songs similarly strive to assert themselves in a threatening and oppressive world. By emphasizing the modernism found in blues music and the echoes of black vernacular culture in Faulkner's writing, Yoknapatawpha Blues links elucidates the impact of both Faulkner's fiction and roots music on the culture of the modern South, and of the nation.
Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright (Literary Translation)
by Yoko TawadaYoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ [‘Porträt einer Zunge’, 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult. Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman—referred to only as P—who has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English. The text is the first-person narrator’s declaration of love for P and for her language, a ‘thinking-out-loud’ about language(s), and a self-reflexive commentary. Chantal Wright offers a critical response and a new approach to the translation process by interweaving Tawada’s text and the translator’s dialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the reader to move seamlessly between the two parts. Chantal Wright’s technique models what happens when translators read and responds to calls within Translation Studies for translators to claim visibility, to practice “thick translation”, and to develop their own creative voices. This experimental translation addresses a readership within the academic disciplines of Translation Studies, Germanic Studies, and related fields. - This book is published in English.
Yoko Yak's Yakety Yakking (Animal Antics A to Z)
by Barbara deRubertisYodel-odel-odel, yak yak yak! Yoko Yak can’t seem to stop chatting! And it makes her classmates wonder—what do you do with a yakety yak?
Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
by Kathryn A. RemlingerYooper Talk is a fresh and significant contribution to understanding regional language and culture in North America. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan—known as "the UP"—is historically, geographically, and culturally distinct. Struggles over land, labor, and language during the last 150 years have shaped the variety of English spoken by resident Yoopers, as well as how they are viewed by outsiders. Drawing on sixteen years of fieldwork, including interviews with seventy-five lifelong residents of the UP, Kathryn Remlinger examines how the idea of a unique Yooper dialect emerged. Considering UP English in relation to other regional dialects and their speakers, she looks at local identity, literacy practices, media representations, language attitudes, notions of authenticity, economic factors, tourism, and contact with immigrant and Native American languages. The book also explores how a dialect becomes a recognizable and valuable commodity: Yooper talk (or "Yoopanese") is emblazoned on t-shirts, flags, postcards, coffee mugs, and bumper stickers. Yooper Talk explains linguistic concepts with entertaining examples for general readers and also contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of dialect and identity in sociolinguistics, anthropology, dialectology, and folklore.
York's Hidden Stories: Interviews in Applied Linguistics
by Rachel Wicaksono Dasha ZhurauskayaThis book explores the mechanics of storytelling within a study aimed at focusing on a ‘hidden’ population of migrants in the city of York, UK. Taking applied linguistics to mean the consideration of real-world ‘problems’ as identified by a ‘client’, in which the use of (and beliefs about) language is a significant component, the authors describe the benefits and challenges of working in a partnership with a community organisation. With project participants from Africa, Europe, Asia and South and Central America who had lived in York between two and fifty years, the study considers the co-construction of meaning in interviews from a range of practical and theoretical perspectives. The book will be of interest to students, academic researchers and community project leaders who are interested in migration stories and interviews as a method of data collection.
Yorkshire Dialect in the Nineteenth Century: Enregisterment, Authenticity, and Identity (Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics)
by null Paul CooperThis book draws on a framework of enregisterment and indexicality to chart the ways in which the Yorkshire dialect came to be associated with particular linguistic repertoires and social stereotypes from the nineteenth century through to today. Cooper situates the work within a historical enregisterment framework, rooted in an ideological approach to the study of language.Focusing on representations of the Yorkshire dialect in a corpus of nineteenth-century writing, comprising poetry, ballads, songs, and plays, Cooper explores how the dialect came to be enregistered and indexical of social values such as friendliness, directness, or authenticity, and how sub-varieties impacted the division of communities along ideological lines. The volume also includes qualitative analyses of metalinguistic commentary from such historical sources as dictionaries, glossaries, and magazines. Taken together, the book offers a holistic picture of the evolution of the Yorkshire dialect and in turn, stereotypes of “Yorkshireness” which persist to this day. Cooper shows how an enregisterment approach can offer a deeper understanding of the historical relationships between dialect and identity and in turn, contemporary perceptions of dialects and their speakers.This volume will be of interest to students and scholars in historical sociolinguistics, dialectology, and English language.
A Yorkshire Tragedy
by ShakespeareThe plot of the play is based on the biographical account of Walter Calverley of Calverley Hall, Yorkshire, who was executed on 5 August 1605 for murdering two of his children and stabbing his wife. <P> <P> The crimes were a well-known scandal of the day; a pamphlet on the case was issued in June 1605, with a ballad following in July. The chronicler John Stow reported the case in his Annals.[1][2] The murders were also dramatised in a play titled The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), by George Wilkins. Scholars have disagreed on the relationship between Wilkins's play and A Yorkshire Tragedy; some of have seen one play as a source for the other, or even the work of the same author, while others regard the two dramas as essentially separate works.[3]
Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics
by Glenn OdomThis book explains the connections between traditional performance (e.g. masked dances, prophecy, praise recitations), contemporary theatre (Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Tess Onwueme, Femi Osofisan, and Stella Oyedepo) , and the political sphere in the context of the Yorùbá people in Nigeria.
Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies #28)
by Gaye Rowley G. G. RowleyYosano Akiko (1878–1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Her renown derives principally from the passion of her early poetry and from her contributions to 20th-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko’s involvement with The Tale of Genji. The Tale of Genji provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer and inspired many of her most significant literary projects. She, in turn, refurbished the tale as a modern novel, pioneered some of the most promising avenues of modern academic research on Genji, and, to a great extent, gave the text the prominence it now enjoys as a translated classic. Through Akiko’s work Genji became, in fact as well as in name, an exemplum of that most modern of literary genres, the novel. In delineating this important aspect of Akiko’s life and her bibliography, this study aims to show that facile descriptions of Akiko as a “poetess of passion” or “new woman” will no longer suffice.
Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life
by translated by Anthony Berris Anita ShapiraBased on previously unexploited primary sources, this is the first comprehensive biography of Yosef Haim Brenner, one of the pioneers of Modern Hebrew literature. Born in 1881 to a poor Jewish family in Russia, Brenner published his first story, "A Loaf of Bread," in 1900. After being drafted into the Russian army, he deserted to England and later immigrated to Palestine where he became an eminent writer, critic and cultural icon of the Jewish and Zionist cultural milieu. His life was tragically ended in the violent 1921 Jaffa riots. In a nutshell, Brenner's life story encompasses the generation that made "the great leap" from Imperial Russia's Pale of Settlement to the metropolitan centers of modernity, and from traditional Jewish beliefs and way of life to secularism and existentialism. In his writing he experimented with language and form, but always attempting to portray life realistically. A highly acerbic critic of Jewish society, Brenner was relentless in portraying the vices of both Jewish public life and individual Jews. Most of his contemporaries not only accepted his critique, but admired him for his forthrightness and took it as evidence of his honesty and veracity. Renowned author and historian Anita Shapira's new biography illuminates Brenner's life and times, and his relationships with leading cultural leaders such as Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel's National Poet, and many others. Undermining the accepted myths about his life and his death, his depression, his relations with writers, women, and men#151;including the question of his homoeroticism#151;this new biography examines Brenner's life in all its complexity and contradiction.
Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees: A Masterpiece of the Eighteenth-Century Japanese Puppet Theater (Translations from the Asian Classics)
by Jones Stanleigh H. Jr.A masterpiece of eighteenth-century Japanese puppet theater, Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees is an action-packed play set in the aftermath of the twelfth-century Genji–Heike wars. It follows the adventures of the military commander, Yoshitsune, as he tries to avoid capture by his jealous older brother and loyal henchmen. The drama, written by a trio of playwrights, popularizes Japan's martial past for urban Edo audiences. It was banned only once in its long history, for a period after World War II, because occupying American forces feared its nationalizing power.In this expert translation by Stanleigh H. Jones Jr., readers learn why Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees became one of the most influential plays in the repertoires of both kabuki and bunraku puppet theater. He opens with an introduction detailing the historical background, production history, and major features of the bunraku genre, and then pairs his translation of the play with helpful resources for students and scholars. Emphasizing text and performance, Jones's translation underlines not only the play's skillful appropriation of traditional forms but also its brilliant development of dramatic technique.
Yosl Rakover Talks to God
by Zvi KolitzA dying Jew's last words to God -- a text that is regarded as the greatest piece of writing to have emerged from the Holocaust -- the story of how it came to be written, and the afterlife of both the author and his creation.As the German tanks destroy the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the few remaining fighters, Yosl Rakover, writes out his last words to God, seals the text in a glass bottle, and thrusts it into the rubble before preparing to die. The text surfaces in Europe in the 1950s, is passed from hand to hand, is broadcast on Radio Berlin -- where it is acclaimed by Thomas Mann as a religious masterpiece -- is anthologized and translated into many languages.But what is hailed as the most important testament of the Holocaust is in fact a short story, written in 1946 for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz, in Buenos Aires, where he had gone to raise money for the Jewish underground in the struggle to establish the State of Israel. The Borgesian story of what happened to the text and to Kolitz in the fifty years since, and the detective work of German journalist Paul Badde that resulted in their eventual rejoining, form the second part of this fascinating book. And in an afterword, the great French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas's meditation on the text is answered in a commentary by Leon Wieseltier.Already an acclaimed bestseller in Europe, Yosl Rakover Talks to God restores a blazing artifact of twentieth-century writing to its true setting.