Charles Haimoff Lecture in German Studies

Yiddish Trash: Popular Fiction in Diaspora

Yiddish is the thousand-year-old language of Ashkenazi Jewry that before World War II was spoken by three-quarters of the world’s Jewish population. Speakers of the language produced all kinds of modern culture, from avant garde poetry to cheap sensationalist theater. Saul Zaritt’s talk focuses on popular Yiddish fiction—the thousands of romance novels, detective fiction, and adventure tales that made up the daily reading of Yiddish speakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He examines how writers and editors transformed and translated globally circulated genres for Jewish reading publics and how rereading such texts today might change our understanding of both Yiddish literature and modern Jewish culture.

The event will be moderated by Yiddish poet, translator, and cultural activist Jake Schneider.