Weinstein

Course Lecture Titles: 1. The City as Container, the Artist as Mapmaker 2. Lost in Space 3. The Marketplace 4. The Family Plot, or Municipal Bonds 5. Urban Apocalypse 6. Transmission and Storage 7. The Industrialized City and the Machine Vision 8. A Movable Feast

As individuals we are defined by relationships, by our connection to people, places, and things. Such connectedness can be not only emotional and erotic but also political, environmental, and even textual, enacted through writing. In this course we explore the nature and meaning of such connections in ten major works of narrative fiction from the 18th century to the present.

Here is the remarkable story of how this humble language took vigorous root in Eastern European shtetls and in the Jewish quarters of cities across Europe; how it achieved a rich literary flowering between the wars in Europe and America; how it was rejected by emancipated Jews; and how it fell victim to the Holocaust. And also how, in yet another twist of destiny, Yiddish today is becoming the darling of academia.Yiddish is a history as story; a tale of flesh-and-blood people with manic humor.