Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt

The War Years, 1939-1945

Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Stromberg

• Publisher: White Goat Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9798988677314
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting

Isaac Bashevis Singer' s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, is the first major effort to fill the gap between the Nobel laureate's Yiddish and English oeuvre. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt--that they were all going up in flames before his very eyes--was crushing for Singer, driving him to put pen to paper and write. His wartime writing--appearing in an intensely urgent tone--sought to record not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that was taking place at that very moment.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Singer’s Wartime Writings:
• An Introduction by David Stromberg
• Agunot—Wives of Missing Husbands Not Allowed to Remarry by Jewish Law
• What Is a Dybbuk?
• What Is Kabbalah?
• Jews Would Oppose Nazis Even if Fascists and Hitlerites Were Not Antisemites
• Matchmaking, Weddings, and Divorces—Tragedy and Comedy in Old Jewish Life
• Elul—the Month When “Even a Fish in Water Trembles”
• Religious Jews Say That the Current War Is the War of Gog and Magog
• The Yiddish That We Spoke in the Old Country Is Being Forgotten
• Rabbi Nahman Told Stories That Delighted Our Grandparents
• Is Being Powerless a Jewish Ideal?
• Does Being Jewish Influence the Work of Jews Who Are American Writers?
• Pages Out of Jewish History from French Cities the American Army Is Now Liberating
• They Don’t Know Why They’re Jewish, but Don’t Want to Be Anything Else
• Each Jewish Street in Warsaw Was Like a Town of Its Own
• Famous Rabbis Who Spoke Out against Swinging Chickens as a Sacrifice before Yom Kippur
• The Ancient Jewish Notion that Good and Evil Are Always Battling Inside Us
• Yiddish Language and Culture Undergo Their Greatest Crisis in History
• Hanukkah Candles and the Stories They Tell
• Jewish Names and Yiddish Names
• Was Y. L. Peretz a Writer or a Rebbe?
• Jews and Jewish Life Not Yet Portrayed in Yiddish Literature
• The Destruction of Berlin and the Destruction of Jerusalem
• Why Movies Aren’t Made about Jewish Life
• Answer to a Tough Question on Jewish Rights in Palestine
• Increasingly Hard for Jewish Writers to Describe Jewish Life
• Acknowledgments