New Yiddish Film and the Transvernacular
After a silence of over half a century, a body of Yiddish-language films (broadly defined to include movies, television, and web series) have appeared in Yiddish since 2005. Translated from an English or Hebrew script into Yiddish dialogue, these films showcase fluently spoken dialogue delivered by and for non- or non-fluent Yiddish speakers. While the Yiddish in these films can be described as “postvernacular”—a mode where the language’s primary mode is symbolic—they also point to a novel use of Yiddish as a communicative language derived via translation. This study identifies two distinct streams: (1) films that employ Yiddish to match a given historical context, including the television series Shtisel (Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky, 2013-) and the multilingual feature film, Félix et Meira (Maxime Giroux, 2014); the prologues to A Serious Man (Coen Brothers, 2009), and The Cobbler (Tom McCarthy, 2015); the Yiddish-language feature films Homeland (Dani Rosenberg, 2009) and The Pin (Naomi Jaye, 2014); (2) films that employ Yiddish as a new expression of Jewish culture, including the comedy web series YidLife Crisis (Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, 2014-present). The analysis proposes a new concept: “Transvernacular Yiddish,” or communicative Yiddish derived through translation from another language. This study suggests that transvernaculity offers a new stage in the development of Yiddish.
https://ingeveb.org/articles/new-yiddish-film-and-the-transvernacular
**************** ****************
Long read but fascinating!
