'More Catholic than the Pope'

Instructor: Miriam Udel

1 session | Monday, February 8
 

Tuition: $80
YIVO members: $60

Since at least the publication of the Mayse bukh in 1602 (but with antecedents stretching back centuries further), Jewish authors and their readers have been fascinated with the motif of the Jewish Pope. That is to say, a Jew who converts to Catholicism—often in childhood, and often under duress—and then rises to prominence within the Church hierarchy. Unraveling a dense knot of folklore, fiction, and history, this three-session course will examine the strands that made this narrative arc so compelling. Particular attention will be paid to the resurgence of this trope in Yiddish literature in the 1940s. The course will include both well-known texts, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Zeidlus the Pope” (1943) and an important lesser-known Young Adult novella newly available in original translation, Yudl Mark’s The Jewish Pope (1947).

Miriam Udel is assistant professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where she teaches Yiddish language, literature, and culture and conducts research on the modern Jewish literary complex with a particular focus on Yiddish. Her first book, a study of the picaresque genre as a form for Jewish modernism, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in early 2016. In a nod to Sholem Aleichem’s insouciant humor that masked existential despair, the book is entitled “Never better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque.”

Udel’s current research focuses on Yiddish children’s literature. She is working concurrently on a translated, annotated anthology that will propose and render accessible a canon of approximately 125 key texts, and a scholarly study of how that textual tradition helped to shape Yiddish modernity. She was selected as one of the inaugural Translation Fellows at the National Yiddish Book Center, where she has also taught in the intensive Steiner Summer Program.