Teaching

What is a Jewish shtetl? How does it differ from a Jewish city? And how have these been imagined, remembered, and recreated in Yiddish literature? Though Jews in Eastern Europe had called many places home after centuries of settlement and expulsion, by the late nineteenth century modern Yiddish writers found ways of locating Jews squarely (and historically) within the towns and cities in which they lived. Fictional towns and real cities—together comprising the literary territory known as Yiddishland—create a complex geographical map in which Jewish history and memory intertwine. This course take a “tour” of this map, stopping along the way to consider the many ways in which Jewish towns, cities, and other spaces were imagined, negotiated, and continue to be reimagined today. 

Through close readings of the Jewish town and city in Yiddish literature, we consider the way Jewish spaces—both real and imaginary—were constructed as a vision for Jewish life in two directions: backward, into the past, and forward, into the future. We think about how the city/shtetl itself functions as a literary device that constructs a discrete “world” within a broader narrative. Students will come away with an understanding of how the real and imagined Jewish city/town was constructed through a combination of Yiddish literature and Jewish memory, and how these ideas changed over time. They consider how those literary constructions produced visions both of the Jewish past and of the Jewish future and how those images inform conceptions of Jewish cities, towns, and space today through encounters with museums, monuments, walking tours, and spaces of post-Holocaust Jewish renewal.