| Benjamin Harshav comments that, for Yiddish poets who were not part of a “normal nation-state,” “literature was ‘everything,’…a state in itself, ‘Yiddishland’” (see American Yiddish Poetry, University of California Press, 1986; 22). My dissertation claims that such a “Yiddishland” once existed in the United States as a construction of Yiddish immigrant writers, a cultural space temporarily anchored in parts of several boroughs in New York City, most famously the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My dissertation seeks to resurface this lost, American “Yiddishland,” through examining poetry and prose of selected Yiddish immigrant writers, some whose work is familiar in English (e.g., Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska) and some whose work has heretofore never been translated (e.g., the modernist poet, Mikhl Likht). In the preoccupations of self-representation, translation, and split identification that fill these texts, I identify a threshold poetics: a writerly positioning in which Yiddish and American identities attract, repel, and commingle. Ultimately I argue that the literary efforts of selected Yiddish immigrant writers in the United States constitute an important discourse of the “minor,” in the radical sense that the minor has been privileged in postcolonial and cultural studies.; Rather than pursue a single line of argument, each chapter of this dissertation cuts across the terrain of Yiddishland in response to “threshold” questions raised by different sets of texts, published from the late 1890s into the 1940s. For example, one chapter examines the phenomenon of Yiddish poetry's preoccupation with African-Americans. I translate and critically read poems by Ruvn Ludvig, Alter Eselin, Rosa Nevadovska, and other writers, arguing that the poems do not appropriate Black experience so much as illustrate the writers' own experiences of displacement and their slippery positioning as “not quite white” Americans.; In choosing to recover a forgotten American literature, written in a language other than English, I would locate my work closely adjacent to that of Werner Sollors and Cary Nelson. In addition, because such a work of “recovery” is never innocent, issues of personal identity, ethnography, nostalgia, and collective memory filter into and become, themselves, texts for scrutiny. Among the cultural and literary critics most important to this analysis are Stuart Hall, Meena Alexander, Ralph Ellison, and Caren Kaplan. |
