Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948–1967

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Israel's cultural space is frequently studied as if it were synonymous with the Hebrew-Israeli one. But within the borders of Israel, a fascinating culture was (and continues to be) created in many languages other than Hebrew.

I Am Your Dust: Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948–1967 expands the boundaries of current studies of Israel's cultural history by presenting and analyzing Yiddish-Israeli prose written during the country's first two decades as an independent state. It offers a comprehensive study of that unique, and hitherto little understood, literature, a detailed historical documentation of the contexts of its production, and an eye-opening comparison of its themes to the more familiar outputs of Hebrew-Israeli prose.

I Am Your Dust is the first socioliterary investigation of Yiddish-Israeli culture, and it explores how Yiddish-Israeli writers played a vital role in shaping the country's cultural identity in its early years.

Join YIVO for a discussion of the newly published translation of this book with author Gali Drucker Bar-Am, led by Barbara Mann.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Gali Drucker Bar-Am is a scholar of modern Yiddish culture, studying its contribution to the formation of modern and post-World War II Jewish and Israeli (subjective and collective) identities. Her work closely interacts with wider studies of the modern experience, most notably studies of migration and exile cultures, of genocide and trauma, and of the emergence of modern ideologies and political movements and their influence on the collective ethos of place, space, tradition, and memory. She teaches the art of teaching literature at the Levinsky-Wingate Academic Center, Tel Aviv.

Barbara E. Mann is the inaugural holder of the Stephen H. Hoffman Professorship in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006), Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers, 2012), and The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History (Yale, 2022).