DOS ANDERE DAYTSHLAND: German Literature, Yiddish Translation, and Multilingualism in and beyond the Habsburg Empire

• In Event: Translation and Innovation in Yiddish

Abstract

Requiring further scholarly intervention is a rich complex of German literary texts in Yiddish translation that appeared in and beyond the former Habsburg Empire. This circulation of German literature in Yiddish, and in various interwar and postwar centers for Yiddish culture, points to a relatatedness between two seemingly disparate Jewish language groups from Habsburg Austria that fell victim to marginalization, genocide, and displacement. By also moving beyond traditional definitions of Ashkenazi, Yiddish-Hebrew bilingualism, and placing Habsburg Yiddish writers into a needed and understudied dialogue with the former empire’s German-Jewish culture, the subsequent writers, readers, and texts of two major languages of Habsburg Jewry become part of a much longer history of multilingual, communal, Jewish textual memory. The resilient, multilingual, and diasporic Jewish cultural model—often overlooked in the monolingual environs of North America and Israel—challenges English- and Hebrew-language hegemony that continues to render encounters with Yiddish and other languages obsolete.

Author

• Meyer Weinshel, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities