Professor
krutikov@umich.eduOffice Information:
3008 MLB
812 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275
phone: 734.647.2136
Judaic Studies; Slavic Languages and Literatures; Russian; Faculty
Education/Degree:
Diploma, Mathematics, Moscow State University, 1979Certificate, Yiddish Language and Literature, A.M. Gorky Institute of Literature, Moscow, 1991
Ph.D., Jewish Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, 1998
Highlighted Work and Publications
Three Cities of Yiddish: St Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow
Editor
This volume borrows its title from the first international Yiddish bestseller, Sholem Asch’s epic trilogy Three Cities. Whereas Asch portrayed Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow at the crucial historical moment of the collapse of the Russian Empire, this volume examines the variety of Yiddish publishing, educational, literary, academic, and theatrical activities in the former imperial metropolises from the late nineteenth through to the late twentieth century, and explores the representations of those cities in Yiddish literature.
Edited by
See MoreChildren and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity
Editor
Children have occupied a prominent place in Yiddish literature since early modern times, but children’s literature as a genre has its beginnings in the early 20th century. Its emergence reflected the desire of Jewish intellectuals to introduce modern forms of education, and promote ideological agendas, both in Eastern Europe and in immigrant communities elsewhere. Before the Second World War, a number of publishing houses and periodicals in Europe and the Americas specialized in stories, novels and poems for various age groups. Prominent authors such as Der Nister, Joseph Opatoshu, Leyb Kvitko...
See MoreTranslating Sholem Aleichem
Editor
Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read him in the original. Since the 1920s, however, Aleichems works have been known to a wider international audience through numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famously Fiddler on the Roof. This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature.
See MoreFrom Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener
Author
Winner of the 2012 Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize, sponsored by the Modern Language Association.
From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar...
See MoreYiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture
Editor
Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while Russian emigres spread westward in the 1920s, a thriving East European Jewish community remained. Jewish intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, radically modernized Jewish culture. Even after 1933, Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem ...
See MoreYiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914
Author
This book examines representations of modernity in Yiddish literature between the Russian revolution of 1905 and the beginning of the First World War. Within Jewish society, and particularly Eastern European Jewish society, modernity was often experienced as a series of incursions and threats to traditional Jewish life. Writers explored these perceived crises in their work, in the process reconsidering the role and function of Yiddish literature itself.
The orientation of nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction toward the shtetl came into conflict with the sense of reality of young writers...
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