Molodowsky, Kadya (1894–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Legutko
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
First Lady ◽  
The Holocaust

Known as ‘the first lady of Yiddish literature,’ Kadya Molodowsky published continuously between 1927 and 1974. Molodowsky earned renown as a prolific poet, prose writer, playwright, essayist, and as the co-founder and editor of such Yiddish literary magazines as Svive [Milieu] (one of the first apolitical Yiddish periodicals), and Heym [Home]. Born in Bereza Kartuska, Belarus, Molodowsky made her literary debut after surviving the Kiev Pogrom in 1920. Her first book of poetry, Kheshvendikenekht, featured ‘Froyen-lider’ (‘Women-Poems’), her most famous sequence of poems addressing the modernist struggle between the newly acquired sense of female subjectivity, and the religious and societal constraints imposed on Jewish women. Kheshvendikenekht, along with her other early volumes of poetry, Mayselekh, Dzhike Gas, and Freydke, despairingly evoked the poverty and desperate situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Before she emigrated to New York in 1935, she developed poetry for and about children. In 1946 she published a volume of poetry, Der melekhDovidaleynizgeblibn (widely considered her finest work), dealing indirectly yet profoundly with the loss of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Throughout her oeuvre, Molodowsky explored the issues surrounding the reconciliation of the Jewish identity with modernity.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

Wartime Crises

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-116
Author(s):  
Doris Kadish
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Marital Status ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
New York Intellectuals ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Partisan Review ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter considers how Rahv’s Marxism and anti-Stalinism shaped his timid response to fascism. It presents the loosening of his ties with Marxism and move toward the American identity manifest in “Paleface and Redskin,” which divided American writers into plebian redskins (Steinbeck, Dreiser) and patrician palefaces (Eliot, James). The muted response to the Holocaust by major newspapers, the Roosevelt administration, and Jewish groups sets the stage for a discussion of how Partisan Review responded, including publishing Eliot despite his alleged anti-Semitism. A discussion of the complexities of Rahv’s marital status and military record is followed by a consideration of “Under Forty,” essays on Jewish identity by eleven young Jewish writers which Rahv published as editor of Contemporary Jewish Record in February 1944 and which reflected his evolving identity as an American Jew. The chapter closes with reactions to the Holocaust—by Rahv, New York intellectuals, and in my own life.

A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling

1999 ◽  
pp. 358-362
Author(s):  
David G. Roskies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Old World ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Primary Function ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject

This chapter presents David G. Roskies's book, A Bridge of Longing. The book focuses on Yiddish literature and Roskies's views on the subject. According to him, the book is ‘all about loss and reinvention’. Yiddish literature, born of a tremendous desire by authors and readers alike to challenge and to meet challenge, has come to be perhaps uniquely susceptible to a certain tendency for wishful reading. Written by and for the ‘millionaires of individuality’, as Isaac Bashevis Singer called the Yiddish-speaking Jews, published in weekly instalments in dozens of competing newspapers and in impressive numbers of book copies, read and discussed everywhere from Kiev to New York, Yiddish literature yet saw its primary function shrink after the Holocaust. It became a mere make-believe repository of tradition, a storehouse of serviceable myths about the Old World, an attic full of humour samples and bedtime stories. Few have come to the rescue of Yiddish in the last several decades, hence the chapter presents Roskies as one of the small coterie of post-Holocaust Yiddishists worthy of reading.

The Lamp, Qasim Amin, Jewish Women and Baghdadi Men: A Reading in the Jewish Iraqi Journal al-Misbah

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
State Institutions

This chapter provides a detailed reading of al-Misbah, a Jewish Iraqi publication which appeared in Baghdad between the years 1924 and 1929 and has been characterised both as a Zionist mouthpiece and a testimony to the success of Arab nationalism. In addressing this apparent contradiction, the chapter examines the issues which dominated its pages in order to highlight the identity of the paper and to enrich our understanding of the Iraqi press under the British Mandate. The chapter addresses two discursive circles – the Iraqi and the Jewish – and proposes that al-Misbah conveyed an unmistakable Iraqi and Arab identity. Despite the editor’s Zionist inclinations, the conversations between readers and writers acquired a life of their own and the paper, in fact, promoted a new Arab Jewish identity and illustrated how Jews sought to use state institutions as venues for the cultivation of non-sectarian and democratic citizenship.

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