Lingering Bilingualism

Lingering Bilingualism Synopsis

In a famous comment made by the poet Chayim Nachman Bialik, Hebrew-the language of the Jewish religious and intellectual tradition-and Yiddish-the East European Jewish vernacular-were "e;a match made in heaven that cannot be separated."e; That marriage, so the story goes, collapsed in the years immediately preceding and following World War I. But did the "e;exes"e; really go their separate ways?Lingering Bilingualism argues that the interwar period represents not an endpoint but rather a new phase in Hebrew-Yiddish linguistic and literary contact. Though the literatures followed different geographic and ideological paths, their writers and readers continued to interact in places like Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York-and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Brenner traces a shift from traditional bilingualism to a new translingualism in response to profound changes in Jewish life and culture. By foregrounding questions of language, she examines both the unique literary-linguistic circumstances of Ashkenazi Jewish writing and the multilingualism that can lurk within national literary canons.