Dear Safranim, I'm forwarding this announcement on behalf of Yechiel Szeintuch.
Sincerely, -- Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel Librarian Dorot Jewish Division, Room 111 The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Reference Desk: 212-930-0601 Fax: 212-642-0141 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/jewish-division Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/schwarzmanbuilding From: From: Yechiel Szeintuch <[email protected]> The Importance of the Correspondence between Mordechai Strigler and H. Leivick: Between Destruction and Reconstruction: The Correspondence between M. Strigler and H. Leivick, 1945-1952 Jerusalem, Dov Sadan Publishing Project, Hebrew University, 2015 Mordechai Strigler (1918-1998), a survivor of twelve Nazi camps, was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, at the age of 26. Strigler, an ordained rabbi and graduate of the Lithuanian yeshiva system, ultimately became a prominent Yiddish author and Jewish intellectual. A gifted essayist, he also made valuable contributions to Hebrew journalism. Between Destruction and Reconstruction, a critical edition of the Yiddish correspondence between Strigler and the poet H. Leivick (a luminary of the Yiddish literary scene in America), presents new research about an under-investigated period in Jewish literary history – the period immediately following the Holocaust – through an examination of the exchange of words and friendship between two Yiddish authors who left their mark on the Yiddish literary world of the twentieth century. Scholarship in modern Yiddish literature generally focuses on the great classical Yiddish authors and their predecessors and immediate heirs, up until the advent of World War II. Few scholars have dedicated their attentions to later periods in Yiddish history, with the result that there is an egregious dearth of research on the miraculous survival of the Yiddish literary world into the post-war period. Rarer yet is scholarship that focuses upon post-war Yiddish journalism in particular, despite the fact that the first decades following World War II were, against all odds, a vibrant period for the Yiddish press. This volume is designed to serve as one small step toward filling these lacunae – one small step toward demonstrating that, in contrast to the widespread misconception, the Nazi regime did not succeed in annihilating Yiddish literary creativity. The decision to undertake research into an under-investigated period of history requires more than the asking of new questions. It requires the assembly from scratch of the necessary corpus of primary and secondary source materials. In light of the absence of pre-formed archives of Yiddish journalistic material from the post-war period, the editors spent fourteen years unearthing, collecting, deciphering, transcribing, and annotating the 75 letters that the two authors exchanged between 1945-1952, the time period during which M. Strigler lived and edited a Yiddish newspaper in Paris. Additionally, in 2001, due to the lack of secondary sources on Strigler’s biography, the Dov Sadan Project turned to Strigler’s widow and daughter in New York for permission to transfer Strigler’s extensive private archive from his house in New York to Israel, to arrange it, and ultimately to entrust it to the archival division of the National Library in Jerusalem. His personal archive offers abundant insight into his life and work, and provided a large percentage of the information that comprises the book’s footnotes. During the final two years of research, Dr. Miriam Trinh contributed her invaluable assistance to the project. The book coalesced in its ultimate form thanks to her diligence, extensive knowledge, and devoted efforts to the final arrangement and annotation of the letters. Mordechai Strigler was an exceptional figure in the annals of Jewish cultural history of the twentieth century; yet to date, no scholar has devoted systematic attention to his life and work as a whole, much less undertaken detailed research into any one of the four stages of his curriculum vitae, namely: (1) Poland in the interwar period; (2) twelve Nazi concentration camps; (3) Paris immediately after the Liberation; and (4) New York until his death. Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction focuses on the most under-researched of these four periods: Strigler’s seven-year sojourn in Paris after his liberation from Buchenwald. The most compelling primary source from that time period is the correspondence between M. Strigler and the poet H. Leivick in New York. The letters that Strigler sent to Leivick are of especial interest, in comparison with other letters that he wrote during the same time period, because of their deeply sensitive tone and psychological and existential content. Strigler was prepared to expose himself to Leivick in this way because of his long relationship with Leivick’s poetry, which he read for the first time, in secret, at the age of 11, as a student at a musar-yeshiva in the city of Zamość, Poland. (After the headmaster of the yeshiva caught him with the forbidden literature in hand, Strigler was compelled to leave the yeshiva.) In light of the complexity of M. Strigler’s biography and the range of H. Leivick’s professional roles and accomplishments, the letters are richly allusive and intertextual. For the contemporary reader – even the educated contemporary reader – they raise scores of historical and literary questions that are difficult to answer without extensive research. Moreover, the letters themselves, in their original form, are rife with lexical and orthographic snares for the unsuspecting reader. In order to provide access not only to the text of the letters, but also to their content and significance, the editors performed ten stages of scrutiny and annotation: (1) the deciphering of the letters themselves (those that were handwritten and those that were typed) and their reproduction in printed form according to the standards of YIVO Yiddish orthography; (2) the addition of 730 footnotes that clarify historical and cultural references mentioned in the correspondence, based upon external primary and secondary sources in six languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, English, German, Polish, and French); (3) individual appendices to a large percentage of the letters, consisting of reprinted supplementary primary source materials from the international Jewish press that further illuminate allusions found in the letters themselves; (4) nine general appendices to the book as a whole; (5) graphic reproductions of various letters from the corpus that provide visual access to the original manuscripts; (6) a detailed index both to the letters that comprise the correspondence (including the date and location of each letter’s composition) and to the supplementary documents reprinted in the book; (7) a detailed index of topics; (8) an index of names including personal, organizational, geographic, and bibliographic names, etc.; (9) a foreword explaining the provenance of the sources and the method employed in building and deciphering the corpus; and (10) a trilingual introduction (in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English) that offers full background information about Mordechai Strigler’s life, his work, and his extraordinary intellectual and spiritual connection with the poet H. Leivick. Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction is the first book of its kind – the first attempt to make scholarly use of archival and journalistic sources to investigate the cultural and literary history of the decade immediately following the Holocaust. The book, broadly interdisciplinary in its approach, reaches into the abyss of oblivion in order to elevate one Yiddish author’s heroic struggle to maintain his sanity in the face of unbearable devastation, and to ensure the survival of literary creativity, in Yiddish, after the Holocaust. For more information and to order, contact [email protected]. < [email protected]> The Importance of the Correspondence between Mordechai Strigler and H. Leivick: Between Destruction and Reconstruction: The Correspondence between M. Strigler and H. Leivick, 1945-1952 Jerusalem, Dov Sadan Publishing Project, Hebrew University, 2015 Mordechai Strigler (1918-1998), a survivor of twelve Nazi camps, was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, at the age of 26. Strigler, an ordained rabbi and graduate of the Lithuanian yeshiva system, ultimately became a prominent Yiddish author and Jewish intellectual. A gifted essayist, he also made valuable contributions to Hebrew journalism. Between Destruction and Reconstruction, a critical edition of the Yiddish correspondence between Strigler and the poet H. Leivick (a luminary of the Yiddish literary scene in America), presents new research about an under-investigated period in Jewish literary history – the period immediately following the Holocaust – through an examination of the exchange of words and friendship between two Yiddish authors who left their mark on the Yiddish literary world of the twentieth century. Scholarship in modern Yiddish literature generally focuses on the great classical Yiddish authors and their predecessors and immediate heirs, up until the advent of World War II. Few scholars have dedicated their attentions to later periods in Yiddish history, with the result that there is an egregious dearth of research on the miraculous survival of the Yiddish literary world into the post-war period. Rarer yet is scholarship that focuses upon post-war Yiddish journalism in particular, despite the fact that the first decades following World War II were, against all odds, a vibrant period for the Yiddish press. This volume is designed to serve as one small step toward filling these lacunae – one small step toward demonstrating that, in contrast to the widespread misconception, the Nazi regime did not succeed in annihilating Yiddish literary creativity. The decision to undertake research into an under-investigated period of history requires more than the asking of new questions. It requires the assembly from scratch of the necessary corpus of primary and secondary source materials. In light of the absence of pre-formed archives of Yiddish journalistic material from the post-war period, the editors spent fourteen years unearthing, collecting, deciphering, transcribing, and annotating the 75 letters that the two authors exchanged between 1945-1952, the time period during which M. Strigler lived and edited a Yiddish newspaper in Paris. Additionally, in 2001, due to the lack of secondary sources on Strigler’s biography, the Dov Sadan Project turned to Strigler’s widow and daughter in New York for permission to transfer Strigler’s extensive private archive from his house in New York to Israel, to arrange it, and ultimately to entrust it to the archival division of the National Library in Jerusalem. His personal archive offers abundant insight into his life and work, and provided a large percentage of the information that comprises the book’s footnotes. During the final two years of research, Dr. Miriam Trinh contributed her invaluable assistance to the project. The book coalesced in its ultimate form thanks to her diligence, extensive knowledge, and devoted efforts to the final arrangement and annotation of the letters. Mordechai Strigler was an exceptional figure in the annals of Jewish cultural history of the twentieth century; yet to date, no scholar has devoted systematic attention to his life and work as a whole, much less undertaken detailed research into any one of the four stages of his curriculum vitae, namely: (1) Poland in the interwar period; (2) twelve Nazi concentration camps; (3) Paris immediately after the Liberation; and (4) New York until his death. Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction focuses on the most under-researched of these four periods: Strigler’s seven-year sojourn in Paris after his liberation from Buchenwald. The most compelling primary source from that time period is the correspondence between M. Strigler and the poet H. Leivick in New York. The letters that Strigler sent to Leivick are of especial interest, in comparison with other letters that he wrote during the same time period, because of their deeply sensitive tone and psychological and existential content. Strigler was prepared to expose himself to Leivick in this way because of his long relationship with Leivick’s poetry, which he read for the first time, in secret, at the age of 11, as a student at a musar-yeshiva in the city of Zamość, Poland. (After the headmaster of the yeshiva caught him with the forbidden literature in hand, Strigler was compelled to leave the yeshiva.) In light of the complexity of M. Strigler’s biography and the range of H. Leivick’s professional roles and accomplishments, the letters are richly allusive and intertextual. For the contemporary reader – even the educated contemporary reader – they raise scores of historical and literary questions that are difficult to answer without extensive research. Moreover, the letters themselves, in their original form, are rife with lexical and orthographic snares for the unsuspecting reader. In order to provide access not only to the text of the letters, but also to their content and significance, the editors performed ten stages of scrutiny and annotation: (1) the deciphering of the letters themselves (those that were handwritten and those that were typed) and their reproduction in printed form according to the standards of YIVO Yiddish orthography; (2) the addition of 730 footnotes that clarify historical and cultural references mentioned in the correspondence, based upon external primary and secondary sources in six languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, English, German, Polish, and French); (3) individual appendices to a large percentage of the letters, consisting of reprinted supplementary primary source materials from the international Jewish press that further illuminate allusions found in the letters themselves; (4) nine general appendices to the book as a whole; (5) graphic reproductions of various letters from the corpus that provide visual access to the original manuscripts; (6) a detailed index both to the letters that comprise the correspondence (including the date and location of each letter’s composition) and to the supplementary documents reprinted in the book; (7) a detailed index of topics; (8) an index of names including personal, organizational, geographic, and bibliographic names, etc.; (9) a foreword explaining the provenance of the sources and the method employed in building and deciphering the corpus; and (10) a trilingual introduction (in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English) that offers full background information about Mordechai Strigler’s life, his work, and his extraordinary intellectual and spiritual connection with the poet H. Leivick. Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction is the first book of its kind – the first attempt to make scholarly use of archival and journalistic sources to investigate the cultural and literary history of the decade immediately following the Holocaust. The book, broadly interdisciplinary in its approach, reaches into the abyss of oblivion in order to elevate one Yiddish author’s heroic struggle to maintain his sanity in the face of unbearable devastation, and to ensure the survival of literary creativity, in Yiddish, after the Holocaust. For more information and to order, contact [email protected].
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