American-Yiddish Short Stories

Class starts Jan 10 10:45am-12:00pm

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

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This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, 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 English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Anita Norich

In each of these six sessions, we will read a Yiddish writer (in English translation) who came to the U.S. and reflected both on the European past and American present and future. We’ll spend a day each on Tsilye Dropkin, Blume Lempel, Moyshe Nadir, Lamed Shapiro, Fradl Shtok, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The first five authors have been translated fairly recently and we’ll ask why and how they’ve been translated. We’ll also ask how they fit into or change our sense of Yiddish literary history. Some stories are humorous, some may be shocking. Taken together, they underscore the extraordinary range and sophistication of Yiddish story stories.

Course Materials:
All readings will be in English translation. The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Questions? Read our 2023 Winter Program FAQ.

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991); and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

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