Mendele’s 'Di klyatshe' (The Mare)

Tuition: $200 | YIVO members: $150**

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: Josh Price

This course will offer a close reading of Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh’s landmark novel Di klyatshe (The Mare, 1873). Written in the wake of the Odessa pogrom of 1871, the novel follows the path of aspiring doctor Yisrolik, gone mad from exams, who finds himself in the (hallucinated) company of the titular wretched mare and then of the devil himself, culminating in an air balloon ride over the ravages of Eastern Europe. In our reading, we will consider not only the formal and stylistic innovations of Abramovitsh (better known as Mendele Moykher-Sforim), but also the novel's animating and enduring political and cultural questions: the Enlightenment and its discontents, the fraught journey from shtetl yid to European mentsh, and the place of (Jewish) writing in an age of intractable antisemitism.

Yiddish Level:
The course will be conducted in English, and we will work mainly from the novel’s English translation (Joachim Neugroschel, 1976). But our mode of reading will permit and encourage those with intermediate-advanced Yiddish literacy to read the original and bring insights to bear on the discussion.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials (including primary sources and a bibliography of secondary sources) digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Joshua Price is a lector in Yiddish at Yale. He received his Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia, with a dissertation on the translation of world literature into Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through studies of the relationship between translation and original writing in canonical figures (Mendele—Jules Verne, Der Nister—Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer—Thomas Mann, etc.), distant readings of translations produced and discussed in and across literary markets (Warsaw, New York, Moscow), and close(r) readings of the shift from (pre-)maskilic norms of Judaization to modern and contested standards of “fidelity,” his dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.

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