Songs from Bialik

Songs from Bialik
Author: Atar Hadari
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2000-06-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780815628149

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) is considered Israel's national poet and one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time. Several of his poems, particularly his immensely popular children's verse, were set to music and proved to be among the most popular twentieth-century Hebrew songs. An essayist, storyteller, translator, and editor, he had a unique ability to use fully the entire linguistic and conceptual inventory of the Hebrew language. Bialik's career was a turning point in Hebrew literature, bringing Biblical Hebrew into a contemporary usage and forming the basis of its renewed vigor. His legacy remains embedded in modern Hebrew literature like an immovable foundation stone. Atar Hadari's new translation of Bialik's major poetry fills a long-standing gap in English letters.

Songs in Dark Times

Songs in Dark Times
Author: Amelia M. Glaser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674248457

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Great Immortality

Great Immortality
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 900439513X

Winner of the Excellence Award for Collaborative Research granted by the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL) In Great Immortality, twenty scholars from considerably different cultural backgrounds explore the ways in which certain poets, writers, and artists in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory. Through individual case studies, many of the contributors expand and challenge the concepts of cultural sainthood and canonization as developed by Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason in National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe (Brill, 2017). Even though the major focus of the book is the nineteenth-century cults of national poets, the volume examines a wide variety of cases in a very broad temporal and geographical framework – from Dante and Petrarch to the most recent attempts to sanctify artists by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and from the rise of a medieval Icelandic author of sagas to the veneration of a poet and national leader in Georgia. Contributors are: Bojan Baskar, Marijan Dović, Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, David Fishelov, Jernej Habjan, Simon Halink, Jón Karl Helgason, Harald Hendrix, Andraž Jež, Marko Juvan, Alenka Koron, Roman Koropeckyj, Joep Leerssen, Christian Noack, Jaume Subirana, Magí Sunyer, Andreas Stynen, Andrei Terian, Bela Tsipuria, and Luka Vidmar.

Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan

Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan
Author: Axel Englund
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317049950

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

Bialik

Bialik
Author: David Aberbach
Publisher: Halban Publishers
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1912600064

During his lifetime, Chaim Nachman Bialik was hailed and the poet larueate of Jewish nationalism and was regarded as one of the major Jewish cultural influences of his age. He was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age which witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revoltuion, the rise of Zionim and of Hebrew as a living language. David Aberbach explores the historical, social and literary background to Bialik's rise a a Romantic-nationalist poet, his ambivalence to this national role, his obsession with intensely private themes and the interplay between the public figure and the confessional lyric poet. Aberbach shows how Bialik's poetry reveals a profoundly tortured inner life and how strongly he felt the inseparble links between his art and his life.

Prosaic Conditions

Prosaic Conditions
Author: Na'ama Rokem
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810166399

In her penetrating new study, Na’ama Rokem observes that prose writing—more than poetry, drama, or other genres—came to signify a historic rift that resulted in loss and disenchantment. In Prosaic Conditions, Rokem treats prose as a signifying practice—that is, a practice that creates meaning. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prose emerges in competition with other existing practices, specifically, the practice of performance. Using Zionist literature as a test case, Rokem examines the ways in which Zionist authors put prose to use, both as a concept and as a literary mode. Writing prose enables these authors to grapple with historical, political, and spatial transformations and to understand the interrelatedness of all of these changes.

Girling Up

Girling Up
Author: Mayim Bialik
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0399548610

Mayim Bialik, Jeopardy! host and star of The Big Bang Theory, puts her Ph.D. to work as she talks to teens about the science of growing up and getting ahead. A must-have book for all teenage girls. Growing up as a girl in today’s world is no easy task. Juggling family, friends, romantic relationships, social interests and school…sometimes it feels like you might need to be a superhero to get through it all! But really, all you need is little information. Want to know why your stomach does a flip-flop when you run into your crush in the hallway? Or how the food you put in your body now will affect you in the future? What about the best ways to stop freaking out about your next math test? Using scientific facts, personal anecdotes, and wisdom gained from the world around us, Mayim Bialik, the star of The Big Bang Theory, shares what she has learned from her life and her many years studying neuroscience to tell you how you grow from a girl to a woman biologically, psychologically and sociologically. And as an added bonus, Girling Up is chock-full of charts, graphs and illustrations -- all designed in a soft gray to set them apart from the main text and make them easy to find and read. Want to be strong? Want to be smart? Want to be spectacular? You can! Start by reading this book. Praise for Girling Up: "Bialik is encouraging without being preachy . . . many teens will be drawn to this engaging and useful book." --Booklist "Ultimately, the author stresses that 'Girling Up' does not end with adulthood—it is a lifelong journey. Thanks to Bialik, readers have a road map to make this trip memorable." --School Library Journal "Written in conversational style . . . the tone remains understanding, supportive, and respectful of the reader’s individuality throughout the text." --VOYA

Sunshine, Blossoms and Blood

Sunshine, Blossoms and Blood
Author: Sara Feinstein
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2005
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780761831426

This literary biography brings the life and work of H. N. Bialik, widely known as the National Hebrew Poet, to the English reader for the first time. With appreciation for his brilliance and depth, Sara Feinstein expounds how Bialik drew upon sources in Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, and the Hebrew poets of the Golden Age of Spain in creating an archetypal mode of writing in Modern Hebrew Literature. In this work, segments of Bialik's best-known oeuvre are rendered in English translations that illustrate his power of expression and mastery of language. Feinstein's research and interpretation also show how Bialik intertwined personal and collective elements of imagery and emotion that endeared him to his readers. Extensive endnotes, bibliography, glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an index of works by Bialik make this literary biography of the National Hebrew Poet a valuable resource in Modern Hebrew Literature.This literary biography brings the life and work of H. N. Bialik, widely known as the National Hebrew Poet, to the English reader for the first time. With appreciation for his brilliance and depth, Sara Feinstein expounds how Bialik drew upon sources in Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, and the Hebrew poets of the Golden Age of Spain in creating an archetypal mode of writing in Modern Hebrew Literature.

In the City of Slaughter

In the City of Slaughter
Author: Chaim Nachman Bialik
Publisher:
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2021-02-07
Genre:
ISBN:

Chaim Nachman Bialik's epic response to the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom roars with with fresh urgency and rage in this dynamic literary translation by Jeffrey Burghauser, one of America's premier formalist poets.

From Mesopotamia To Modernity

From Mesopotamia To Modernity
Author: Burton Visotzky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429979983

From Mesopotamia to Modernity is a one volume introduction to both Jewish history and literature from its earliest times up to the present. Leading experts in each field of Jewish history and literature contribute original and comprehensive essays introducing their subjects. Beginning readers will learn the rudiments for further study, and scholars will be refreshed by the balanced, yet challenging treatments found here.These introductory essays cover most major aspects of Jewish studies from the Bible and its time up to modern Judaism. The work is designed to serve undergraduate and graduate courses in Judaism as well as Church and Synagogue adult study courses. Ideal for reading groups, this work will lead readers to further study of the varied subjects considered. Each essay covers the basic field, be it in a given era of Jewish history or in a defined area of Jewish literature. Suggestions for further reading will assist the reader in moving beyond this volume to explore a given area in further detail. The introductions range from encyclopedic detail through elegiac essay and enthusiastic appreciation of the field considered. The authors hold positions in major academic institutions throughout the United States and Israel.