mendele moykher sforim

The Subject of the Jewish Underworld in Jewish literature is complicated, realtively new in the study of modern Jewish history and the cultural history of the Jews. It is connected to historical context, which covers five continents and more than 120 years of literature and history. The Underworld itself is also multifaceted. The classification of different types of thieves includes entire and different divisions: the world of horse thieves, the world of border smugglers and contrabandists, and all of the different types of plain thieves. In addition, there exists the world of white slavery. The present article deals mainly with this aspect of the Jewish Underworld. The full list of sources on which this article is based will be uploaded soon.

This is a review essay discussing the evolution of modern Hebrew literature, from the first pioneers through contemporary questions about what constitutes a modern Hebrew "canon." It discusses the lessons of two recent books: "The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion," by Hillel Halkin (Toby Press, 2020) and "Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making," Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, eds. (SUNY Press, 2020).

Bilingual catalogue of books issued by the Dov Sadan Publishing Project of the Hebrew University. The catalogue contains information about books dealing with Yiddish cultural history of the Jewish people in modern times, issued and sponsored by the Dov Sadan Publishing Project. Edited by Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy and Yechiel Szeintuch.

This paper focuses on the way national symbol is constructed in the Hebrew novel 'Susati', which was written as a national allegory at around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The paper sheds new light on the Jewishness of the chosen aesthetic representation. The paper argues that Abramovitch’s symbolic method accentuates a new understanding of Jewish national existence, that is represented through the behavioral constructions that develop between the novel’s human protagonist and the animal protagonist – the mare, as well as between these two and the devil. This elaborate and complicated literary representation mirrors the chaotic reality experienced by many Jews in Eastern Europe around the same time.

דמות היהודי הנודד במובן הקונקרטי של מסורת הסנדלר הירושלמי שנענש בשל דחייתו א ישוע מלנוח על קיר ביתו, מוכרת גם בספרות העברית החדשה.
מדברי הסיכום של המאמר: העבודה שפרק ממנה הוצג כאן מתמקדת בפרטים קונקרטיים המפרקים לכאורה את
מסגרת היצירה היחידה ומתייחסים למערכת רחבה של סמלים וסימנים תרבותיים במשך
זמן ארוך ובתפוצה גאוגרפית רחבה. מחקר כזה אינו בבית בסיפור היחיד או ביצירתו
של סופר מסוים, אלא הוא נודד כמו מושא המחקר על פני יצירות ותקופות בחיפוש
אחר דמות נודדת, חולפת, המקדימה תמיד את מבקשיה בכמה צעדים. החוקרת פוסעת
כמו ההלך בעיר המשרטט במעשהו את מסלולי היום־יום על פי מישל דה סרטו.
בתקווה לבנות לאט לאט את הידע התרבותי על דמות מורכבת ובעלת היסטוריה ארוכה.

This is a first comprehensive description of the topic, a phenomenon in the history of the Jewish people since the middle of the 19th century until the Second World War (included). We hope it will be a sound background for further research of its literary perception in Yiddish Literature and in Jewish literature in general. The full sources on which this research is based will follow soon.

Di kliatshe, a novella published in 1873 by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, has been credited as one of the first literary works to register the failure of the Haskalah to achieve Jewish integration into Russian society. However, analysis of the literary and historical contexts in which this work emerged shows how Di kliatshe also engaged in a subtle literary dialogue with non-Jewish authors in order to promote a radical ethical position on the question of human and animal suffering. The awareness of a dimension of suffering in which Jews and animals are equivalent provides an alternative account to the conventional debate on the Jewish Question. Instead of a formal affirmation of universal human rights, in Abramovitsh's work the relation to questions of Jewish identity remains informal and marked by attentiveness to the dehumanized aspects of Jewish existence.

This paper was first published in 1968, following the author's research work at the Mendele Project at the Institute of Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (place of publication see at the end of this article).
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, through the beginning of the twentieth, Mendele Mokher Sfarim published most of his short stories  in various Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals. There is at the moment no bibliography of these stories and their versions in both languages.
Most of the texual criticism of his long works may be based on a comparative analysis of the versions in Yiddish and a subsequent examination of each Hebrew version as compared to its Yiddish prototype. This is not the case with his short stories. Here we have usually more than one Hebrew version and only a single version in Yiddish. Whereas his long works were written first in Yiddish and then translated into Hebrew, in many of his short stories the order was reversed.
Most of Mendele's work in rewriting the first Hebrew version of his short stories was done towards their publication in one volume by Ravnitzky in Odessa, in 1900. The Yiddish version appeared much later. During the early 1900's he applied himself less to translating stories from Hebrew and commenced a new series of Yiddish stories. His own translation into Yiddish of the Hebrew stories was done mainly towards the Yubileum Oysgabe (the first compleate edition of his Yiddish works) in 1910-1912.  Not having ample time to translate all of them by himself, he was aided by a translator and then edited the translation. But even this partial work was not completed by Mendele; several of the stories were entered in this Yiddish edition without his editing nor with any indication as to the translator's identity.
This article attempts to clarify the creative history of each story in both languages, with the aid of his letters, bibliographies, memoirs of friends and secretaries, etc.

Recently published in "Afn Shvel", volume 378-379, as a tribute to the 100th anniversary of Mendele Moycher-Sforim's demise, delineating the establishment of the first bilingual research project of Mendele Moycher-Sforim's Yiddish-Hebrew literary heritage.

On occasion of the 180th birthday of Mendele Moycher Sforim and the 100th anniversary of his death, the Dov Sadan Publishing Project renews the edition of the catalogue of an exhibition, which had been published for the first time by the Mendele Project, edited and annotated by Shmuel Werses Z''l and Yechiel Szeintuch.

Comment visualiser deux mondes plus différents que la société bourgeoise de Plassans décrite par Zola dans La Conquête de Plassans (1874) et le shtetl juif de Touneïadevka peint par Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh dans Les Voyages de Benjamin III (1878) ? Cet article propose d'étudier comment les deux auteurs mettent en doute le rôle du genre des personnages de François Mouret et Sender-la-bonne-femme dans chacun de ses romans.

It is difficult to imagine two worldw more different than the bourgeois society of Plassans described in Zola's La Conquête de Plassans (1874) and the Jewish shtetl of Touneïadevka in Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh's The Voyages of Benjamin III (1878). This article studies the manner in which both authors construct the tradition gender roles of François Mouret and Sender-la-bonne-femme in each of these novels.

The Yiddish translation of Dov Sadan's  Hebrew introduction to:
חנא שמרוק,  שמואל ורסס, (עורכים), "מנדלי מוכר ספרים" - רשימת כתביו ואיגרותיו להתקנת מהדורתם האקדימית, האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים, המכון למדעי היהדות, מפעל מנדלי, הוצאת ספרים ע"ש י"ל מאגנס, ירושלים, תשכ"ה

יונתן מאיר -עלייתו ונפילתו של מפעל מנדלי

לינק לכל הכנס
Full Conference (Lectures by Israel Bartal, Haim Be'er, Jonatan Meir, Dror Burstein, Chava Turniansky, Avner Holtzman and Dan Miron/// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeGQEK_ReMU

Chaim Grade, the well known poet and prose writer from Vilna, is less known as an outstanding orator and lecturer before Jewish audiences in five continents. In this article we want to draw attention to Chaim Grade's art as an orator, his broad knowledge of Jewish studies and  World Literature. Hereto we bring a public lecture Grade held on December 6 1958 at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. The article was published in: AFN SHVEL (New York), Vol. 376-377, Summer-Automn 2017, pp. 18 - 23.

Bibliography, publications 1968 - 2016, in the field of Yiddish and Hebrew Literature, Holocaust Studies, Yiddish Humor, Latin American Jewry, Yiddish Press, Yiddish Literature in Interwar Poland, The Monologue as a literary form, Yiddish Theatre, Correspondence between Yiddish writers.