Eldercare and Its Impossibilities

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The writing of some late-19th-century religious seekers in Russian and Yiddish suggests that people look for models for their own eldercare work, but do not find them fully adequate; confessions, diaries, and plays signal the unquestionable virtue of some care workers and the awareness that most humans might not measure up. Each paper considers a collection of texts at the nexus of the religious and the secular. The first panelist analyzes journals and written confessions by Russian Orthodox Christian women who are honest about the stress of caring for elders. The second looks at the intersection of Tolstoyan and medical discourses in diaries describing peasant end-of-life care at Yasnaya Polyana. The third examines the stage depictions of eldercare in the Yiddish plays by the Jewish Tolstoyan and religious radical Jacob Gordin, whose adaptations of the Lear plot gesture toward émigré practices of sending remittances. The commentator’s response will draw on her own research that links her study of Russian literature to her experience as a hospice social worker.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Inessa Medzhibovskaya, The New School

Papers

• Aging, Eldercare, and Late Imperial Religious Sensibilities - Nadieszda Kizenko, SUNY Albany

• Medical and Tolstoyan Practices among Peasants at Yasnaia Polyana - William Scott Nickell, U of Chicago

• King Lear of the Remittances: Eldercare on the American Yiddish Stage - Gabriella Safran, Stanford U

Discussant

• Jehanne M Gheith, Duke U