Raising Red Cavalrymen and Red Greenhorns: Politics and Poetics in Yiddish Children’s Literature

• In Event: Beyond DI KLASSIKER: Amplifying the Yiddish Canon

Abstract

This talk will explore a selection of stories composed for children and published in the Soviet Union and in New York City in the 1920’s. The stories-in-verse of Leyb Kvitko are overtly communist, while Khaver-Paver’s children’s novel Labzik is socialist. Both tend toward mimetic realism, in contrast to the romanticizing, folkloric predilections of the much Yiddish children’s literature of the period. We will untangle complicated knots of politics and poetics that help to stick these works together and place them in relation to the canon of Yiddish-language fiction and poetry for children that emerged during this perfervid period.

author

• Miriam Udel, Emory University