The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction: Selected Papers Arising from the Fourth and Fifth International Mendel Friedman Conference

Early in the twentieth century, Yiddish, previously stigmatized as a corrupt jargon, came to be recognized as a language in its own right which was already the vehicle for a rich literature. Many writers in other languages gradually became aware of the status of Yiddish, sometimes by encountering Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, and responded to Yiddish language and culture in their own works, while Yiddish writers adopted, and sometimes anticipated, modern trends in other literatures known to them. This collection of papers ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from France to Lithuania, and from classic modernist writers such as Svevo and Kafka to Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2002.