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Yiddish Events
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and other addictions, she is helping to spread the lifesaving treatment
program, Hope Not Handcuffs, across Oakland County. She is a strong
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www.electamyforjudge.com.
Vote Amy Wechsler for 48th District Judge
in the Non-Partisan section on November 6th!
electamyforjudge.com
info@electamyforjudge.com (248) 633-8563
1BJEGPSCZ&MFDU"NZ8FDITMFSUI%JTUSJDU+VEHFt10#PYt,FFHP)BSCPS .*
24
October 4 • 2018
jn
ABOVE:
Antologye: Finf
Hundert Yor
Idishe Poeziye,
edited by Morris
Bassin (New
York: Literarisher
Farlag, 1917);
Jewish Museum,
London; The
Murdered Jewess,
Sarah Alexander.
The Life, Trial,
and Conviction
of Rubenstein,
the Polish
Jew (Barclay
Publishing
Company,
Philadelphia,
1876).
T
his fall, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the
University of Michigan will welcome three guest lec-
turers for a series of events centered around Yiddish.
Allison Schachter, Vivi Lachs and Eddy Portnoy will be giving
separate lectures on topics including Yiddish poetry, music and
underground culture. All the lectures will take place in Room
2022 of the 202 S. Thayer St. building,
Allison Schachter of Vanderbilt University will give a lecture
titled, “Madame Bovary in the Jewish Provinces: Fradel Shtok’s
Modernist Yiddish Prose” at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18.
Schachter will discuss Fradel Shtok, a celebrated poet credited
with writing the first sonnet in Yiddish. The talk will focus on
Shtok’s life after she published a collection of her lesser-known
prose writings in 1919, which were dismissed by critics at the
time as too similar to Gustave Flaubert, a French novelist and
leader in literary realism, and too dissimilar compared to prom-
inent Yiddish author and playwright Sholem Aleichem. The
common knowledge at the time was that Shtok, traumatized by
the negative reviews, rejected Yiddish and died in an asylum.
Schachter’s lecture will explain what really happened to Shtok
after these reviews and offer a revised account of Yiddish mod-
ernism, one that acknowledges the centrality of woman to the
modern Jewish revolution.
On Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 4 p.m., Vivi Lachs of Birkbeck,
University of London will examine Yiddish kupletn (rhyming
couplets) written by Jewish immigrant songwriters and poets in
pre-World War I London. During this period, Yiddish-speaking
immigrants were anglicizing to local British culture and, at
the same time, maintaining some aspects of the transnational
Yiddish-speaker world. The talk, “Whitechapel Noise: Politics,
sex and religion in Yiddish rhyme on the streets of London’s East
End 1884-1914,” is illustrated with song and explains how these
protest hymns, music-hall songs and satirical verses tell stories
that expand and nuance our knowledge of immigrant history.
Eddy Portnoy’s talk, titled “The Bizarre Tales of Yiddishland:
What the Yiddish Press Reveals about the Jews,” will wrap up
the series at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 13. Portnoy, of the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, will discuss the seamy underbelly
of pre-World War II New York and Warsaw, the two major cen-
ters of Yiddish culture in the late- 19th and early-20th centuries.
With true stories of Jewish drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers,
psychics and beauty queens, all plucked from the pages of the
Yiddish dailies, Portnoy will present the Jews whose follies and
foibles were fodder for urban gossip before winding up at the
bottom of bird cages or as wrapping for dead fish.
More information about these events, as well as six others the
Frankel Center will be hosting in Ann Arbor this fall, can be
found at lsa.umich.edu/judaic. ■