"Jewish discourse" and the Hebraic subtext in the development of Yiddish literature and culture

Abstract

This dissertation is rooted in the observation that, in the development of Yiddish, certain tendencies of Yiddish discourse bear a distinct resemblance to features found in Talmudic and Rabbinic texts. These are elements of a system where the patterns and logic of conversation are the dominant organizing principles. These principles were internalized by the male study-house culture. However, in the contact between those scholars and the rest of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi culture, these discursive patterns were diffused in a process of nativization. I trace those features so often noted of Yiddish, such as irony, sarcasm, digressive style, and answering questions with questions, to their most observable Yiddish literary roots in the Tsenerene and the language of study. I argue that the apprehension of these conversational patterns of thought was a significant feature in the development of modern and modernist Yiddish literature, and ultimately of modern Hebrew literature as well. In close readings of poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Yankev Glatshteyn I describe how these poets make use of these linguistic patterns as part of a distinctly modernist way of encountering the world. In the final chapter I analyze at length one of Y. L. Peretz's Yiddish short stories which he translated into Hebrew. This kind of autotranslation was a prevalent feature of Jewish Eastern European literary production toward the end of the 19th century. In Peretz's case, the uses to which Rabbinic language and discourse were put diverge significantly between the Hebrew and Yiddish versions. The Yiddish version imitates and stylizes the Talmudic, study-house language and talkative behaviors of the story's Hasidic protagonists in order to create a specifically literary conversational style. The Hebrew version, on the other hand, develops a more naturalistic style, organized around the Rabbinic stratum as the unmarked foundation of the language, in an attempt at a more unified toneand language which at the same time allows for subtle irony and critique. This is a very different project from the canonical translations of the Yiddish classics into Hebrew.In effect, by yoking together linguistics with close literary analysis, in a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to these texts, I attempt to see whether there is a way of formulating how such conversational logic and discourse becomes normalized in Yiddish, expressed in the Yiddish literary tradition from the Tsenerene to Y. L. Peretz, and ultimately reintroduced into Hebrew language and literature. This project opens the field to further research into the historical linguistics of Yiddish but also to the inherent multilingualism of Jewish culture.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2006.School code: 0028