Yankev Glatshteyn and the Threat of Yiddish Joy
The following article investigates the topos of joy across the work of modernist Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn, from its earliest iterations in his 1929 collection Kredos (Credo) to his 1961 volume Di freyd fun yidishn vort (The joy of the Yiddish word). Although read frequently as a poet of mourni...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Penn Press
2024
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| In: |
The Jewish quarterly review
Year: 2024, Volume: 114, Issue: 2, Pages: 293-323 |
| Further subjects: | B
Schiller
B Joy B Poetics B Yiddish B “Di freyd fun yidishn vort” B Yankev Glatshteyn B Rage B Affect |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The following article investigates the topos of joy across the work of modernist Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn, from its earliest iterations in his 1929 collection Kredos (Credo) to his 1961 volume Di freyd fun yidishn vort (The joy of the Yiddish word). Although read frequently as a poet of mourning, Glatshteyn’s oeuvre evinces a decades-long interest in the politics and poetics of Yiddish freyd. As this article demonstrates, the Yiddish word freyd indexes the poet’s anger with the universalizing legacies of the Enlightenment and their iterations in Soviet communism and National Socialism. Glatshteyn contends that to engage joy is to find oneself yoked to promises that overdetermine aesthetic form and erase ideological independence. Drawing on the language of Soviet Yiddish allegiance, he argues that to experience freyd is to exist in shpan (in harness) to words and ideas that are not one’s own. In dialogue with critical studies of joy, this article tracks how freyd emerges in Glatshteyn’s work as a deleterious affective state that threatens to dissolve the Yiddish poetic self. |
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| ISSN: | 1553-0604 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The Jewish quarterly review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2024.a929056 |