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Yiddish Paris
Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France
Nick Underwood (Author)
9780253059789
Hardback, published 1 March 2022
266 pages, 4 b&w illus. - 4 Illustrations, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.499 kg
Anyone with a serious interest in the Yiddish diaspora from Eastern Europe and Russia should treat this as required reading. Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris offers readers a wealth of information about the development of Eastern European Jewish immigrant cultural institutions in Paris between the World Wars. Nick Underwood's excellent book restores the place of Paris as a major center of Yiddish life in the interwar period.... This volume is rich and generous in its sources and opens new directions of study. Underwood's book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish and Yiddish studies.... Underwood's faithful chronicling of Yiddish life in Paris brings it into the scholarly and general imagination of twentieth century Yiddish culture, which usually centers Eastern Europe or the so-called New World.
Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.
Acknowledgments: Yiddish Culture, Interwar Paris, and the Crisis of Belonging
List of Organizations and Groups Named by Acronym
Introduction
1. Institutionalizing Yiddish Cultural Life in Paris
2. Cultural and Intellectual Strongholds Are Stronger than all Others
3. Drama in Yiddish Paris
4. Singing for the People and Against Fascism
5. Parisian Yiddish Culture on the World's Stage
Conclusion: From Rassemblement to Résistance
Epilogue: The Marianne of Yiddishland
Index