Yael Chaver lecturing on The History of Yiddish Language and Literature for KlezCalifornia’s 2010 Yiddish Culture Festival in Palo Alto, CA.
Throughout its thousand-year history, Yiddish has been enriched by elements of ancient, medieval, and modern languages, thanks to the widespread geographical distribution of its speakers and readers. Most Yiddish texts up to the mid-nineteenth century were religious, but Yiddish literature then started moving quickly into the modern world. Fiction, drama, and poetry flourished, mainly in Europe. In the twentieth century, avant-garde poets, many of them women, were influenced by international literary trends and wrote in Europe and the United States. Yael will survey Yiddish literature from its origins to modern times.
Biography:
(Berkeley) Yael Chaver teaches Yiddish language and literature at U.C. Berkeley. Her interests lie at the intersection of modern Hebrew and Yiddish cultures. She is the author of What Must be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine, and has written and presented extensively on modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature and the culture of the Zionist Yishuv (settlement) in Palestine. She is currently engaged in a study of 20th-century Hebrew and Yiddish adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
