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1.3.3 Yiddish culture

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The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

Université de Californie à Santa Cruz

4.6 (131 notes) | 14K étudiants inscrits

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

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4.6 (131 notes)

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JB

Mar 05, 2017

Took this course for job purposes. It is great for everyone, although I believe that people with some background in comparative literature will benefit from it the most,

KN

Jun 20, 2016

Dark and disturbing though the course material is, this course is an absolute must for all who are interested in the Shoah and the depths of mans' inhumanity.

À partir de la leçon

Who were the Jews?

This module is an introduction to the study of the Holocaust and a prehistory of the Holocaust. Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the roots of modern antisemitism, the culture of European Jews in the 19th century, Nehama Tec’s Dry Tears, and the various genres of Holocaust literature. The module also contains general information about the course.

1.3.1 Expectations of reality13:15

1.3.2 Hier ist kein warum11:04

1.3.3 Yiddish culture13:00

1.3.4 On Account of a Hat18:04

Enseigné par

Murray Baumgarten
Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Peter Kenez
Professor Emeritus

Transcription

I want to go to Yiddish culture,

because the whole issue of how

mother knows that she can resist,

while being passive,

while accepting the blows,

which is a theme, is also central

to Yiddish culture, to Jewish culture,

as a culture of resistance in general.

So, a culture that teaches people about being different

from the usual stuff of European culture.

And Peter elaborated how the Jews were, and continue to be,

different, last time.

And that difference turns out to be very important as the world becomes modern.

There are a whole bunch of passages from the that I want you to look at in

particular, as well as to read the whole book!

And they are part of what I sent around as an announcement to eCommons.

And I also sent a copy of this story by Shalom Aleichem, but

I want to talk a little bit about Yiddish culture,

the culture of Eastern European and Jews.

Part of their difference is that they spoke a different language.

A language called Yiddish.

A fusion language.

That's a technical term for the linguists among us.

A fusion language that,

on the armature of some German dialect,

and the use of much Hebrew,

becomes a language that the Jews spoke.

We have a text from the 12th century in Yiddish.

So it's a language that's got a long history,

and there are even classes in it here.

Hebrew, the language in which God created the universe,

according to the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible.

Hebrew is an intellectual language.

That is, it was used for intellectual discussions.

Think of it as how physicists talk.

But it lacked certain things when you got to Europe, it was fine in the Middle East.

But even there is became part of another linguistic fusion language, Aramaic.

Which some of you have heard about from movies.

Aramaic, which is known as the little sister of Hebrew.

You go back and forth.

And almost all languages that I know of are next to other languages they share,

so there are no languages or words in isolation.

Yiddish was known as the mamaloshen,

a word that is made up of the Hebrew word lashon, tongue,

language, and the word mama, which you've probably already guessed.

So Yiddish, is the mother tongue.

It's the language that Jews use to talk to each other

about all the everyday life experiences.

When, in the middle of the 19th century,

Jews said they had to start writing Hebrew again as part of their nationalism.

The first Hebrew novel had a problem, because like novels everywhere,

it was about love, but Hebrew doesn't have much in the way of love talk.

So, that first novel, by Abraham Mapu,

had to turn to the language of the Song of Songs,

which is elegant, elevated poetry.

And when I was a kid, I thought I would be a failure in talking to women.

So I talked to my sisters all the time, but other women,

because I couldn't use that fancy language or, my experience was the movies, and

there, when the young man wants to talk to the young woman and impress her, he sings!

Forget it.

>> [LAUGH] >> Right?

But Yiddish was the language in which Jews made love.

In which they had families, in which they lived everyday life.

And Sholem Aleichem, in the middle of the 19th century, as Jews become

welcomed more and more, and have access,

is part of a group of people who are writing modern literature.

And as writers of modern literature,

they are breaking with Jewish tradition, because everything has changed.

And before that,

when Jews wanted to talk about serious subjects, they wrote in Hebrew.

And they wrote commentaries on the great texts, commentaries.

And when they had fantasies to bring, they did the backstory on Jacob and

Esau, Jacob wrestling with the angel, all kinds of things.

Very brief in Hebrew.

But here is Sholem Aleichem writing literature because

there are now newspapers, and the newspapers bring

news of new situations, the new experiences of life.

And there are newspapers in Yiddish.

Sholem Aleichem, like many of us, said well,

the big thing is to write in Russian like Tolstoy.

So he tries writing in Russian, but he doesn't have many readers.

He tries writing in Hebrew, doesn't have many readers.

But when he writes in the mamaloshen, suddenly everybody wants to read him.

And he becomes one of the great writers to a community.

I sent you one story because

it's a very special moment, but it's like so many of his stories,

tries to deal with what it means to be a traditional society

changing into a modern society.

So if you want to know about women's lives in the 19th century,

Jewish women's lives, you should read Sholem Aleichem.

Because women's lives are changing.

They're both traditional and modern at the same time.

I know, you're young and you believe you should only be one thing.

But as you'll get older, you'll know that you'll have to play many roles or

maybe you've already learned that.

Women, especially, got to this point

as industrialization happened,

urbanization, all of those experiences.

So, here is a story in which Sholem Aleichem is

telling us that women's roles change.

But how can he tell us a story, using past tense,

that gets us to experience it in the present?

And again, many young writers only write in the present because that's present and

that's our experience of films and so on.

Sholem Aleichem has a different understanding.

He's telling us that Jews are responding to

the new modern world and the old traditional world they live in and

they talk to each other.

So Sholem Aleichem's stories

give us a series of experiences

in which two Jews are talking.

Not did talk, not talked, past tense, but

they're in the process of talking, they're talking about each other

And that's the trick of the narrator in this story.

Because the narrator doesn't narrate, the narrator does the listening.

Now, to listen is an interesting idea and

deserves lots of serious discussion.

I can only give you a sense of how important listening is

by telling you that Isaiah Berlin, a wonderful modern philosopher,

told his audience,

when he won the Jerusalem Prize, that you need to

belong somewhere in order to be able to communicate.

That listening and speaking depend upon belonging,

and that that's the condition of being understood.

So the narrator of Sholem Aleichem's tale, On Account of a Hat,

and the speaker, by their listening to each other,

are telling us they belong together.

And they're telling us that the frame of reference works for both of them.

So this is literary analysis, and I hope you'll think about this for

all the stories in your lives and all the stories you are inventing.

I didn't finish the homework because the dog ate the, whatever.

The stories that you're constantly inventing.

Sholem Aleichem's narrator meets someone who's

a merchant, as he puts it, in snips of paper.

Snips of paper.

He sells cigarette papers.

If you want to know about those,

I think there are several smoke shops here in town, you can all get snips of paper.

And the narrator tells us that while he tells us this story,

he's smoking constantly.

And what is he doing?

He's saying to Sholem Aleichem, I want to tell you about something extraordinary.

Why is it extraordinary?

Somewhere I have that.

Oh, here.

The story.

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