Shlomo Berger )ed.), Early Modern Yiddish Poetry; Amsterdam Yiddish Symposium 3 (ISBN 978-90-806570-5-2, 63 p., Amsterdam 2009)
€7,50
The third volume in the Amsterdam Yiddish Symposium series, this collection of essays focusses on Yiddish poetry. Claudia Rosenzweig discusses realism and fictionality in the Yiddish Bovo d’Antona or Bovo-bukh, a chivalric poem written by Eliyahu ben Asher HaLevi Ashkenazi in 1507, using the chivalric literary tradition in Yiddish as a basis for examining the relationship of non-Jewish sources with texts intended for a Jewish audience, and the skills demonstrated by the Jewish authors to adapt these for their readers. Oren Roman examines the Yiddish version of the Song of Deborah in Jacob zu der Kannen’s Sefer Shoftim (Mantua 1564), analyzing its author’s choices and the poem’s style, a case study of the way Ashkenazi Jews in the early modern era envisaged the stories of the Bible and an example of the influences of Hebrew and German literature on Yiddish literature, in both form and content. Chava Turniansky, in ‘Between Hebrew and Yiddish in Bilingual Ashkenazi Poetry,’ looks at the intended reader of the bilingual Hebrew-and-Jewish body of literature.
Contents:
Claudia Rosenzweig: The Jewish knight, the Jewish princess, and the sceptical reader. Some remarks on realism and fictionality in the Yiddish Bovo d’Antona;
Oren Roman: The Song of Deborah in Sefer Shoftim (Mantua 1564);
Chava Turniansky: Between Hebrew and Yiddish in Bilingual Ashkenazi Poetry.