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E-book
Author Glaser, Amelia, author.

Title Songs in dark times : Yiddish poetry of struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine / Amelia M. Glaser
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2020]

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 353 pages) : illustrations
Contents Preface: The age of optimists -- Introduction: Passwords -- Yiddish poetry in the age of internationalism -- From the Yangtse to the Black Sea: Esther Shumiatsher's travels -- Angry winds: Jewish leftists and the challenge of Palestine -- Scottsboro cross: translating pogroms to lynchings -- No pasarĂ¡n: Jewish collective memory in the Spanish Civil War -- My songs, My dumas: rewriting Ukraine -- Teshuvah: Moyshe Nadir's relocated passwords -- Afterword: Kaddish -- mourning words after the Second World War
Summary "Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth-Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans-in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York-based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's 'At the Border of China.' These poets dreamed of a moment when 'we' could mean 'we workers' rather than 'we Jews.' Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English; poems in Yiddish with English translations
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 29, 2020)
Subject Yiddish poetry -- 20th century
Yiddish poetry -- Social aspects -- History -- 20th century
Poets, Yiddish -- Political and social views -- History -- 20th century
Jews -- Intellectual life.
Communist literature -- 20th century
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Jewish.
Communist literature
Jews -- Intellectual life
Yiddish poetry
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0674250451
9780674250451