News Release
August 2004
Bethlehem, Pa.—Moravian College’s Reeves
Library is one of 60 libraries nationwide to receive a grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities to observe the centenary
of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer who won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1978.
The Singer observance at Moravian will feature
a slide-lecture by Dr. Jeffrey Shandler of Rutgers University on
the shtetl as it has been used by Singer and other writers of Eastern
European Jewish life. “Shtetl” is
a work of Slavic derivation that means “cluster,” and it
has come to mean the self-sufficient Jewish communities connected to
peasant villages in 19th-century Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
In the course of his 87 years (1904-1991), Isaac
Bashevis Singer enjoyed an impressive career as a writer, first in
his native Warsaw and later in the United States, to which he emigrated
in 1935. Singer’s
literary output includes short stories, novels, children’s books,
and his memoirs, as well as articles, reviews, and essays. By the time
he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was one of the foremost Yiddish
writers of the 20th century. In addition, he won two National Book
Awards. Among the films made from Singer’s stories are Yentl
the Yeshiva Boy (which became a vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1983
and won an Academy Award for its music) and Enemies:
a Love Story (1989),
which garnered three Academy Award nominations.
Singer reflected his own experiences in his writing,
depicting the painful problems of adjustment to America experienced
by European Jewish émigrés.
But his work is most notable for the way he vividly recreated for an
English-speaking and reading public Jewish life as it was lived in
Eastern Europe in the decades before World War II.
Dr. Shandler will
give his presentation at 8 p.m. Thursday, October 21, 2004, in
Prosser Auditorium at the Haupert Union Building. Shandler, a scholar
of modern Jewish culture, is assistant professor in the Department
of Jewish Studies at Rutgers. His Ph.D.is in Yiddish Studies from Columbia
University. He has been a Dorot Teaching Fellow in the Skirball
Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and
a post- doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and
the Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He also
has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Tel Aviv University,
and Vassar College.
Shandler has written and lectured extensively on modern Yiddish culture,
American reactions to the Holocaust, and the role that broadcasting,
photography, film, and other media play in modern Jewish life. His
books include While America Watches: Televising
the Holocaust (1999),
awarded the Saul Viener Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society.
He edited Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of
Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust (2002), which was a Dorot Jewish Book Award finalist.
Other publications include Entertaining America:
Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, (co-author/co-editor with J. Haberman) (2003); Remembering
the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (co-edited with Hasia
Diner and Beth S. Wenger); and Profiles of a Lost
World: Memoirs of Eastern European Jewish Life before World War II (co-edited with Dina
Abramowicz). He also has curated exhibits for The Jewish Museum in
New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia
and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is completing a study
of Yiddish culture after World War II
His presentation at Moravian, “Remembering the
Shtetl: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Beyond,” will examine the ways
that writers, artists, scholars, photographers, and others have sought
ways to record Jewish life in those Eastern European Jewish communities
that have largely disappeared. Though focused on Singer, he will discuss
such artists as painter Marc Chagall and photographer Roman Vishniac,
as well as amateur writers and painters who drew on their own memories
of growing up in a shtetl in the first decades of the 20th century.
Finally, Shandler will touch on the remembrance of shtetl
life in works ofpopular literature and entertainment as well as museum
displays, and he will describe plans to build a full-scale “living history” shtetl
in Israel.
