Traveling and traversing Chabad's literary paths

Rubin, Eli
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Title Traveling and traversing Chabad's literary paths : From "Likutei torah" to "Khayim gravitser" and beyond.
Original Library/publisher In Geveb
a Journal of Yiddish Studies. Brooklyn, NY [electronic resource]
Host Item In Geveb
a Journal of Yiddish Studies (ULS)001229712 (2019)
Description The imprint of Hasidism and Hasidic tales in modern Jewish literature has already received some attention from scholars, and the literary significance of Hasidic mamarim and other mystical texts has also been noted. This paper seeks to take the interdisciplinary study of Hasidism and modern Jewish literature one step further, tracing some of the ways that Chabad Hasidism's internal tradition of "literary mysticism" has intervened in the broader trajectory of modern Jewish literature. My first task in this paper is to trace internal developments in the Chabad literary tradition over the course of the nineteenthth century, and to demonstrate how this internal trajectory was given broader expression in Khayim gravitser, a Yiddish novel by Dr. Fishl Schneersohn of Rechytsa, Berlin, and Tel Aviv (1888-1958). The second part of this paper takes a closer look at the Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973), who translated Schneersohn's novel from the original Yiddish, and at the ways that the novel's title character might be seen as an avatar for Shlonsky's own self-identification as a Hasidic rebel, traveling between opposing shores. Taken as a whole, this paper aims to complicate the neat chronology that bifurcates modern Jewish literature from its Hasidic roots, and show that both Schneersohn and Shlonsky actually continued the Hasidic literary tradition of Chabad even as they embraced alternative literary forms in the cause of new agendas. This paper began as a contribution to a seminar organized at the 2017 AJS conference by Yitzhak Lewis, which explored the imprint of Hasidic writing on modern Jewish literary production. I would like to thank him and the other participants, as well as the editors of In geveb - Madeleine Cohen and Jessica Kirzane - and also the peer reviewers, for providing the honest and clear criticism that enabled me to turn it into a finished piece.
Language English
National Library system number 990006478270705171
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MARC RECORDS

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