Dos eygene Daytshland: Anthologizing Jewish Multilingualism in and beyond the Habsburg Empire

Abstract

For the past century, anthologies containing German poetic texts in Yiddish translation have appeared in and beyond the former Habsburg Empire. Broadly conceiving translations as a series of “unfinished” published and unpublished texts that appeared before and after the Second World War, this dissertation traces the circulation in and beyond Central Europe of German-language poetry in Yiddish, and points to a relatedness between two seemingly disparate Jewish language groups that fell victim to marginalization, genocide, and displacement. In so doing, this dissertation maps contiguities “between” the languages used by Yiddish readers, writers, and translators. Furthermore, these contiguities destabilize traditional definitions of Ashkenazi Yiddish-Hebrew bi-/multilingualism within Eastern European Jewry, by noting the prolonged engagement with German and German Jewish culture across space and time. What emerges instead, is a longer, still-unfolding history of multilingual, communal, Jewish textual memory (i.e., translation). Often overlooked in the monolingual environs of North America and Israel, these texts have the ability to challenge English- and Hebrew-language hegemony that continues to render encounters with Yiddish and other languages obsolete, to instead provide resilient, multilingual, and diasporic Jewish cultural models.