?Jiddische Literaturtheorie des früheren 20. Jahrhunderts. Ein zweisprachiger Reader“

The planned reader of Yiddish literary theory and criticism aims to fill a gap in the German-language research and publication landscape with its bilingual layout (Yiddish-German) and its academic focus. There is no direct equivalent to such a publication in other languages, but it draws inspiration from the few collections of Yiddish art and literary criticism published in previous years. The groundbreaking collection of essays from the Düsseldorf Yiddish Studies department, Der ganzen Welt benachbart. Anthologie jiddischer Essays (Neighboring the Whole World: Anthology of Yiddish Essays) from 2023 (eds. Gal-Ed, Neuberg, Vakhrushova), printed entirely in Yiddish, remains reserved for a narrow circle of Yiddish scholars. The same is true of the Ukrainian-language anthology “Manifeste[n] und Dokumenten der jüdischen Avantgarde” (Manifestos and Documents of the Jewish Avant-Garde) (ed. Kazovski), published in Ukraine in 2024, which brings together manifestos and essays on art theory written in Yiddish, but hardly deals with literary phenomena. The early (2005) Polish-language anthology edited by Karolina Szymaniak, which brings together art and literary criticism texts by the Warsaw avant-garde, is also a rare source of manifesto-like texts in translation.
This anthology offers German-speaking and international Yiddish-speaking audiences the opportunity to discover the breadth of Yiddish literary theory in the early 20th century. The volume is primarily aimed at students, literary scholars, and those interested in Slavic studies, Yiddish studies, and Jewish studies. As a Yiddish counterpart, the collection complements the first volume on Ukrainian literary theory and contrasts it with Yiddish in its national and transnational specificity. Thus, formalist ideas found their way to the US with the flight and migration of renowned Yiddish modernist poets at the beginning of the 20th century, where a literary-theoretical and critical debate parallel to that in Russia and the later Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, as well as Poland, took place in Yiddish.