The Wandering Jew in Yiddish Literature
Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: Anita Norich
Where do Jews belong? Where have they been, or where should they be? What changes when Jews emigrate, or move from village or shtetl to cities? Such questions have been at the center of Yiddish literature and Jewish thought. For some writers, Zionism offered an obvious answer. For others, it was doikeyt—“hereness”—the belief that Jews should improve their lot in the countries in which they live. Still others saw emigration as the only solution to “the Jewish problem.” Reading literary texts (in English translation, but also available in Yiddish for those who wish to use them), we will consider where Yiddish writers have imagined a place for themselves and for the Jewish people. We’ll consider works by such writers as Sh.Y. Abramovitch, Sholem Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Yankev Glatshteyn, Chaim Grade, Anna Margolin, Kadya Molodovsky, and I.J. Singer.
Course Materials
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.
Questions? Read our 2026 Winter Program FAQ.
Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously untranslated stories of Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, and, with Ellen Cassedy, Hand to Hand by Rashel Veprinski (2025). She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer.
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