A New Yiddish Renaissance: Der Veker's creative writing contest

• In Event: Post-Holocaust Yiddish Publishing and Theater

Abstract

The history of Yiddish literature must now include a renaissance in the 21st century. For some time, scholars have drawn attention to burgeoning literary creativity in the Hasidic communities that have maintained (or revived) Yiddish as their vernacular (e.g. Dovid Katz, WORDS ON FIRE, 2004). Yiddish potboilers with a carefully kosher worldview are beginning to share the stage with a self-conscious literature unafraid of challenging convention and grappling with intellectual questions. A striking example of this development is the 2017 creative writing contest in DER VEKER. Not to be confused with the early-20th-century Bundist journal of the same name, this is an all-Yiddish magazine emerging from the fringes of the Hasidic world. Its authors and editors are largely men from the insular and resolutely Yiddish-speaking Satmar community of Brooklyn. The three winners of the 2017 writing contest, however, include a man from Los Angeles and a woman from Jerusalem. The contents of the journal as a whole reflect a thirst for knowledge about the Jewish world, past and present, and the world at large, together with a struggle to find a foundation for Jewish faith and practice more solid and more livable than the sectarian and rather childish approach of present-day Satmar. The Yiddish of the journal is fluent and shows attention to grammar and style. This paper will look at the writing contest as a conscious move toward a new independent Yiddish literature emerging from the Hasidic milieu, and at the three winning stories as harbingers of what this renaissance may yet produce.

Author

• Justin Jaron Lewis, University of Manitoba