Realtime File Ybc Great Jewish Books Book Club Video Conference with Prof
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REALTIME FILE YBC GREAT JEWISH BOOKS BOOK CLUB VIDEO CONFERENCE WITH PROF. ANITA NORICH MAR. 15, 2018 CART CAPTIONING* PROVIDED BY: ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC** www.CaptionFamily.com * * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings Post-production editing by Jessica Parker JESSICA PARKER: So it is now 8 o'clock. So let's get going. Hi everyone and welcome to our first video conference of the 2018 Book Club. Thank you for your careful reading, your thoughtful comments and your insightful perceptions in our Facebook group and via email. I'm so glad that you are all joining us this evening. And we have our largest group to date with 50 participants. I'm Jessica Parker. I'm sure many of you know who I am, the coordinator for the Great Jewish Books Book Club. In just a moment I'm going to introduce our featured guest Prof. Anita Norich, but first I want to tell you about the structure of this evening. All participants will be muted to prevent excessive background noise. Prof. Norich will start with about a 15-minute introduction and then we will open it up to questions for about 45 minutes. You can ask her questions by typing in the chat box. Prof. Norich will be repeating questions for the members watching the video recording after the fact and won't have access to the chat box. In addition, for the first time ever we are offering live captioning for this video conference. If you would like to see the closed captions, please click on the “CC” icon at the bottom of your resume window. To turn them off click on the “CC” icon again. And if you use the closed captioning I'm keen to receive your feedback afterwards so please do call or email me to let me know about your experience. And those instructions are also at the very top of the chat feed if you scroll up to see that. And if you are having a technical difficulty or issue this evening please send a private chat message to me at Jessica Parker, you can send private one through the chat box, email me at [email protected], the usual email address, or call me at 413-256-4900 extension 131. And I can take calls during the webinar because I will be muting myself. And so, without further ado I'd like to introduce Prof. Anita Norich. Prof. Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish-American Literature in America During the Holocaust, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer, the author we are clearly here to discuss tonight, translator of Kadya Molodovsky’s Fun Lublin biz Nyu York, which is forthcoming and other volumes including Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext, and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. She translates Yiddish literature and teaches, lectures and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish-American literature and Holocaust literature and we are very lucky to have her with us tonight. So, thank you very much and without further ado, Prof. Anita Norich. ANITA NORICH: Thank you, Jessica and thank you everyone. Can everyone hear me? just nod. Thank you I've never done a webinar before so I will be practicing technology as we talk about this text. And I just wanted to give an introduction to it for a few minutes. I'm sure everyone has lots of questions. It's a very very full book. One of the questions that I had about this book is why Lodz? That is, why the city in which IJ Singer actually never lived? Singer lived in Warsaw for his time in Poland and came to New York in 1935. For the second time. The first time was occasioned by the theater production of his earlier novel Yoshe Kalb. This novel, The Brothers Ashkenazi, came out, as did most of Yiddish literature, in serial form between 1933 and 1935. And as Rebecca Goldstein points out in the introduction to the volume that you have it was an almost immediate bestseller in English when it was translated. The why Lodz question: you’ll remember we are tracing Lodz and The Brothers Ashkenazi for about a century from just after the Napoleonic Wars as Jews are moving more and more into Lodz, through the German occupation of Lodz, to post-Russian Revolution and the reestablishment of Poland which as you know was not a sovereign nation between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of the First World War. Lodz was known as the Manchester of England, and I think that accounts mostly for his use of Lodz. That is, Singer was interested in looking at what industrialization has done, and what changes it may or may not have brought for the Jews of Eastern Europe and Lodz as an industrial city is really, as you saw in much of this, is really kind of the poster child for Marxist and socialist ideas. The urge for the workers unity, for unions, from each according to his means, etc., etc. But what I think is crucial here is not just the period of time that he covers in this century, but when this work was written and published. Hitler had already come to power. Pilsudski, head of Poland, was in a pact with Hitler from 1934 on, the anti-Semitism in Poland was unavoidable, unmistakable. And some of the, most of the despair and the tensions that you see in this book emerge from that. The Brothers Ashkenazi was also put on stage by Maurice Schwartz, and I just want to show you two pictures from that public, from that production, that will give you some idea of what an American audience was seeing in the 1930s. So, this is a picture of Maurice Schwartz cutting off his payes as Max Ashkenazi, and here is one of both Brothers Ashkenazi, just to give you an idea of the traditional clothing. There are other pictures showing them with what is called German style, that is short coats, and no yarmulkes, no payes. Nothing. There is a really clear distinction between the way in which English readers read this text and the way that Yiddish readers read it. If you read the Yiddish criticism about the Di brider Ashkenazi what you hear most of the critics saying is how modern, how modernist the novel is, how psychologically astute it is, how carefully he developed the psyche of both of these characters. If you read the English critics, who are writing at the same time, you get comments that say there’s no psychological depth in this work, so exactly the opposite of what the Yiddish critics are saying. And obviously this points to the different audiences who read this, who were interested in Yiddish literature, either in Yiddish or in translation and the different contexts in which they find themselves. But it also points to, I think, something that is often overlooked in Singer’s, in criticism of Singer, which is not that these two kinds of critics, the English and the Yiddish, are reading different texts, but rather that Singer is not interested in what we, who have a psychological language, would call the self. He is not interested in the psyche of “the self” in the way that we are, quite often. Rather, he sees the individual as a kind, as a social construct. And he's interested in the individual as a... what should I say? As a model for the Jewish people, that is, as an exemplar of the Jewish people. He's interested in history, he's interested in the broad canvas rather than in the psyche of the individual. There's, this novel, like most of his writing, is divided into three parts. And in that tripartite division, the structure of the novel reproduces what is clear throughout the novel. That is, the novel is built on a series of tensions between oppositions that can’t come to a synthesis. We have Max and Jacob, we have Max and Lodz, and the city as a whole, we have Max and Nissan, we have Nissan’s Marxism and his father’s holy studies, as Singer calls them, we have Hasidim and assimilators, workers and manufacturers, these are all in opposition to one another, and there is no synthesis possible in this, in these oppositions, and I think that also is part of Singer's response to the prevalence of Marxist thought in his age. That is, Marxist thought that depends on some fundamental level on a thesis and antithesis and then a synthesis is exactly what he is rejecting here. It's not that one of these characters is a thesis and the other one and antithesis, although they are often quite opposite, what really matters is that no synthesis is possible here. And synthesis implies a kind of movement that he is no longer, if he ever did, he is no longer believing in. Singer's main theme, I think, here and through most of his work, is the delusion of those who believe in any kind of messianic thought.