Looking for Yiddishland: Galicia in Interwar Yiddish Travelogues
Hosted By: The National Library of Israel (NLI)
For generations, Galicia was home to vibrant and diverse Jewish life.
The region officially ceased to exist following World War I, yet it remained distinct, somehow exotic and intriguing.
In the 1920s, Polish Jewish writers and journalists traveled to Galicia, writing dispatches for major Yiddish newspapers. They were looking for signs of “traditional Jewish life” inspired by Hasidic culture, but were disappointed to find only rampant misery, struggle, and widespread neglect of Jewish material culture.
The general destruction of Yiddish life is the recurring theme that surfaces in their writings.
These authors, generally non-Galician by origin, observed distinct Jewish communities, including Hasidim, Jewish workers and peasants, late adherents of the Frankist movement, and even the remnants of a broken Jewish nobility. Unlike German writers, the Polish Yiddishists considered the region an ethnographic curiosity, and hoped to reorganize Galician Jewish life through their literary activism.
Join the National Library of Israel online for the first installment of its new “Ukrainian-Jewish Voices Series”:
“Looking for Yiddishland: Galicia in Interwar Yiddish Travelogues”
with Dr. Vladyslava Moskalets, historian and lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University and researcher at the Center for Urban History in Lviv
Sunday, May 15th
8 pm Israel / 7 pm CET / 6 pm UK / 1 pm EST
The event listed here is hosted by a third party. My Jewish Learning/70 Faces Media is not responsible for its content or for errors in the listing.
