Book, Adventures of a Wandering Tongue: ens Literat and Yiddish Theater[LS]

An impressive journey through time, revealing the history and cultural richness associated with Yiddish, the everyday language of the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, how it developed, generating great works in theater and literature, how it mediated the great ideological and religious controversies of the Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe, of how he crossed the Atlantic to help reorganize the lives of groups exiled from their homelands until they came close to extinction. Language-resistance, language-diaspora, language-passport. Wandering tongue. FOURTH COVER Yiddish was the lingua franca spoken by the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe for centuries until the genocide perpetrated by the Holocaust eliminated 90% of its speakers. At that point, the language was no longer just used in everyday exchanges, but also dictated other areas of culture, contributing to an enormous literary and theatrical activity, disseminated mainly in the Americas (USA, Brazil, Argentina). In this diaspora, as in any other, where the immigrant's collective consciousness is always in the process of disintegration, as Kafka highlights, the language and its literature acquire the function of being the voice of a people, a voice that is often revolutionary. In Adventures of a Wandering Tongue: Essays on Yiddish Literature and Theater, J. Guinsburg, one of the greatest Yiddish scholars among us, recovers this rich tradition and presents us with the sweeping history of Yiddish's trajectory, from its formation in the Middle Ages to vigorous contemporary cultural and ideological production. To this end, it visits the unique achievements of Jewish literature and theater movement and its art of staging, in its multiple currents, from the dispute between the Enlighteners of Haskalah and the religious figures of Hasidism in the 19th century to the conflicting coexistence between communists and Zionists . It is a personal travel itinerary that brings back to the Brazilian reader aspects that are still little known about a culture that is both ancient and modern. PERSPECTIVES The Perspectives collection brings together important texts, in extensive research on the scope of the subject. It includes biographies, history, art, anthropology and literature. FROM THE COVER Cover image: scene from Night in the Old Market, by IL Peretz, staged by the State Jewish Theater, Moscow, 1925. The image, filtered through crimson, brings the energy and vigor of Yiddish theater as a representation of the creative power of language.