Shared Space – Contact Zones: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in Eastern Europe

Concept: Yfaat Weiss (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig), Efrat Gal-Ed (Institute of Jewish Studies, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf), Natasha Gordinsky (Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of Haifa) and Sabine Koller (Institute of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Regensburg)

The Yiddish- and Hebrew-language literature that emerged in the transitional period from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century in Eastern Europe anticipated the elements of classical modernism in various respects. With a deep awareness of language and the courage to experiment with literary form, Jewish writers created an avant-garde in these languages that combined influences of the cultures surrounding them with their own traditions. These authors, who were rooted in two or more cultural worlds of reference, created essays, prose, and poetry from within the political and ideological tensions vis-à-vis the national renewal movements arising at the same time.

This year’s Annual Conference of the Dubnow Institute aims to investigate this transcultural and multilingual amalgamation and its universally oriented values more closely. The participants from Israel, America, and Germany are interested in both the appertaining intersections and interpenetrations in intellectual history as well as the historical conditions of their emergence in the so-called Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire between the Baltic and the Black Sea.

Although these authors were also deeply familiar with the German language – alongside Russian and Polish – the Yiddish- and Hebrew-language literature of classical modernity remains a neglected field in the German-speaking world. The tradition of this “little world literature” was almost entirely extinguished from European memory by the Shoah. This Annual Conference is dedicated to this topic with the aim of stimulating an interdisciplinary exchange, thereby to re-embedding these hitherto often unknown authors in the canon of literary history.