Princeton University Press
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature
About this book
How modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identity
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness.
Udel provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life.
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
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Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
ix -
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Illustrations
xi -
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Preface
xiii -
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Introduction
1 -
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Part I Claiming a Usable Past
23 -
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Part II Contesting the Jewish Future
113 -
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Part III Cataclysm and Creativity
211 -
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Conclusion
257 -
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Afterword
275 -
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A Note On Orthography, Transliteration, And Translation
283 -
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Acknowledgments
285 -
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Notes
291 -
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Selected Bibliography
331 -
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Index
345
