The Yiddish Patient: Postwar Illness and the Sanatorium in Daniel Charney’s Oyfn shvel fun yener velt
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in East European Jewish Literature
The Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship Admission: Free Registration is required |
This talk examines the life and work of memoirist, poet, and journalist Daniel Charney (1888-1959), with a focus on his time at the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) tuberculosis sanatorium in Liberty, New York in the mid-1940s. Drawing on Charney’s trove of letters, photographs, and mementos from his time at the sanatorium, as well as his highly entertaining, subtly moving sanatorium memoir, Oyfn shvel fun yener velt [On the Threshold of the Other World] (1947), Jacqueline Nekhe Krass argues for Charney’s significance as an underread voice of postwar Yiddish American literature and the Yiddish memoir genre. His work offers new ways of thinking about illness, institutionalization, and humor in the immediate wake of the Holocaust.
About the Speaker
Jacqueline Nekhe Krass is a writer, translator, and PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on postwar Jewish American literature in English and Yiddish, situating it within histories of multilingual writing, publishing, and translation in the United States.