Yiddish Literature Today? - A Lecture with Dov-Ber Kerler

Despite the widely spread expectations, Yiddish literary creativity hasn’t completely disappeared in the first two decades of the 21st century. It continues in poetry, prose and to a lesser degree drama even though the number of both authors and readers leave much too much to be desired and today’s Yiddish poets’ existence is often solitary. Still, the brave new age of the IT and Digital revolution provides effective new means for socialization, creative interaction and publication of contemporary Yiddish literary “production”. We will look at some of the ongoing work in the field poetry in the allegedly “postvernacular” age with a fleeting reference to some energetic but even less known poetry-related creative urges and aspiration among some of the present-day native Yiddish speaking Hasidic Jews.   ​

Dov-Ber Kerler is the Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He taught Yiddish as well as courses on Yiddish literature, culture and scholarship in Jerusalem, Oxford, Moscow, and Vilnius. A son of the noted Yiddish poet, Yosef Kerler, Dov-Ber has been publishing his own original Yiddish poetry since 1993, in addition to scholarly and general articles (mostly in Yiddish). To date, since 1996, six collections of his poetry have been published in Britain and Israel, including a joint volume of his and his father’s poems, entitled “Shpigl–ksav” (Words in a Mirror). He is one of the editors of Yidishland, the new quarterly literary and Yiddish culture magazine published in Jerusalem and Lund.