Lingering Bilingualism

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambitious young writers flocked from

Jewish towns and villages to cultural centers like Warsaw, Odessa, and Vilna

to seek their fortunes. These writers, typically proficient in both Hebrew and

Yiddish, gathered in literary salons and caf s to read, declaim, discuss, and

ponder the present and future of Jewish culture. However, in the years before

and after World War I, writers and readers increasingly immigrated to Western

Europe, the Americas, and Palestine, transforming the multilingualism that had

defined Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe. By 1950, Hebrew was ensconced

as the language and literature of the young state of Israel, and Yiddish

was scattered throughout postwar Jewish communities in Europe and North and

South America.

Lingering Bilingualism examines these early twentieth-century transformations

of Jewish life and culture through the lens of modern Hebrew-Yiddish

bilingualism. Exploring a series of encounters between Hebrew and Yiddish

writers and texts, Brenner demonstrates how modern Hebrew and Yiddish

literatures shifted from an established bilingualism to a dynamic translingualism

in response to radical changes in Jewish ideology, geography, and culture.

She analyzes how these literatures and their writers, translators, and critics

intersected in places like Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York--and

imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Her

aim is neither to idealize the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism that once defined

East European Jewish culture nor to recount the "language war" that challenged

it. Rather, Lingering Bilingualism argues that continued Hebrew-

Yiddish literary contact has been critical to the development of each literature,

cultivating linguistic and literary experimentation and innovation.