Imagining lives: autobiographical fiction of Yiddish writers
ISBN: 9780299209605
Platform/Publisher: ACLS / The University of Wisconsin Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time
Subjects: Jewish Studies;

In interwar and post-Holocaust New York, Yiddish autobiographers responded to the upheaval of modern Jewish life in ways that combined artistic innovation with commemoration for a world that is no more. Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers is the first comprehensive study of the autobiographical genre in Yiddish literature. Jan Schwarz offers portraits of seven major Yiddish writers, showing the writer's struggles to shape the multiple identities of their ruptured lives in autobiographical fiction. This analysis of Yiddish life-writing includes discussions of literary representation, self and collectivity, and memory in modern Jewish literature.
Schwarz shows how Yiddish autobiographical fiction fuses novelistic elements and memoiristic truthfulness in ways that also characterize Jewish life-writing in English and Hebrew. His accessible style, biographical sketches, glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish words, and careful survey of notable texts takes readers on an incomparable journey through modern Yiddish literature.

Jan Schwarz is lecturer in the department of German at Northwestern University and lecturer in the Committee on Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.

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