Beginner II Reading Yiddish

Tuition: $400 | YIVO members: $325**
Students: $215 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Josh Price

Who should take this course?
This course is for those with working Yiddish literacy, including those who took Beginner I Reading Yiddish in fall 2021. Those interested in improving Yiddish reading proficiency for academic purposes or archival research are strongly encouraged to enroll in this course. Those who have taken two semesters of standard Yiddish would also be prepared for this course. The focus of this class will be on reading and translation, with only as much discussion of grammar as is necessary.

What topics will this class cover?
This course will treat a wide swath of Yiddish texts, taking its cue from students' own interests. The default focus will be on prose fiction, supplemented with: topical selections from the historical and contemporary press (Twitter too); poetry (American, Soviet, Sutskever); and songs galore. Possible authors include: Ayzik Meyer Dik; Shomer; Mendele; Sholem Aleichem; Peretz; Avrom Reyzen; Morris Rosenfeld; Yoysef Opatoshu; Fradl Shtok; Chaim Grade; Blume Lempel; Shira Gorshman; Yosl Birshteyn; Yente Mash.

Is knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet required?
Yes, knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is required.

Course Materials:
Students should acquire a Yiddish-English dictionary. Recommended: Beinfeld-Bochner, available online and in print. The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Joshua Price is a lector in Yiddish at Yale. He received his Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia, with a dissertation on the translation of world literature into Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through studies of the relationship between translation and original writing in canonical figures (Mendele—Jules Verne, Der Nister—Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer—Thomas Mann, etc.), distant readings of translations produced and discussed in and across literary markets (Warsaw, New York, Moscow), and close(r) readings of the shift from (pre-)maskilic norms of Judaization to modern and contested standards of “fidelity,” his dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.

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