Desire in Yiddish Literature
Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: Anita Norich
“Not to have is the beginning of desire,” wrote Wallace Stevens. But what do Yiddish writers want? What does “desire” mean to a Yiddish writer? The object of desire may be a person, but it can also be a thing, an idea, an art form, and more. We will read a range of familiar and unfamiliar Yiddish stories and poems—all in English translation—that consider how Yiddish writers responded to the social and political issues of their day: emigration/immigration, various forms of nationalism, socialism, religious belief, and rejection of religious observance. We’ll choose from among these authors: Sh. Y. Abramovitch, Tsilye Dropkin, Yankev Glatshteyn, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, H. Leivick, Anna Margolin, Kadya Molodovsky, Y.L. Peretz, Israel Joshua Singer, and Malka Heifetz Tussman.
Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following text:
- Desires, Celia Dropkin, translated by Anita Norich (MA: White Goat Press). (Purchase)
The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.
Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Celia Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories. She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991), and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.
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