Ruth R. Wisse

Ruth R. Wisse (born May 13, 1936 in Czernowitz , Romania ) is a literary scholar and socially critical journalist with a focus on Jewish literature and culture. Born in Romania, she grew up in Canada and studied, teaches and currently lives in the USA. She is Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University .

biography

Ruth R. Wisse was born on May 13, 1936 in Chernivtsi, Romania. Ruth, her older brother Benjamin and their parents Masha and Leo Roskies emigrated to Canada via Budapest , Athens , Lisbon and New York in 1940 . The Roskies' house in Montreal became a salon for Yiddish writers, actors, and artists. a. Isaac B. Singer , Melekh Ravitch , Itzik Manger , Avrom Sutzkever and Rachel Korn were guests. All four children (two were born in the New World) received a consistent education in Hebrew and Yiddish. Her youngest brother, David G. Roskies, is Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary , and her younger sister, Eva Raby, is a professional narrator and was director of the Norman Berman Children's Library of the Jewish Public Library in Montreal for 17 years .

In Montreal she studied at McGill University with Louis Dudek , who was also a mentor to Leonard Cohen , and received her BA in 1957. However, it was the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever who directed her career towards studying Yiddish at Columbia University , the only place in North America at the time that offered Yiddish as a diploma course. After marrying Leonard Wisse, she studied with both Max Weinreich and his son Uriel Weinreich and received her MA from Columbia University with an award-winning thesis on Sutzkever's Prosapoem Green Aquarium . After returning to Montreal, she did her PhD with Dudek. Her dissertation, published as The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971), examined the transformation of Schlemiel from Yiddish into modern American-Jewish narrative literature.

Fields of work

Academically, Wisse did pioneering work. From 1968 she taught Yiddish literature at McGill University and built the program, later the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. In 1993 she became a professor of Yiddish at Harvard University . Intellectually, however, Wisse found her home in the political culture of the 1970s magazine Commentary . Here she measured American-Jewish narrative literature against the giants of twentieth-century Yiddish culture such as Moyshe-Leyb Halpern , Chaim Grade , Isaac B. Singer, and Abraham Sutzkever . In addition to her commitment to Yiddish culture, Wisse wrote articles about modern Jewish politics and the reality of a Jewish state.

Wisse is best known in literary circles for her anthologies, which she edited together with Irving Howe : The Best of Scholem Alejchem (1979) and The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987, together with Khone Shmeruk ). Her most enduring works in literary history are A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (1988) and her monographic study IL Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (1991). She was also the first chief editor of the Library of Yiddish Classics . In addition to her political essays, which appear regularly in publications such as Commentary , The New Republic , and The Jerusalem Report , Wisse published a Zionist critique of the American-Jewish political climate: If I Am Not for Myself ...: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992).

In her further work, Wisse dealt with two fundamental questions in Jewish literature: “What is a great Jewish book?” And “What makes a book primarily Jewish?” By using books in Yiddish, German, Russian, Hebrew and English from stylistic, involved linguistically and culturally diverse authors such as Scholem Alejchem , Franz Kafka , Samuel Agnon and Cynthia Ozick , Wisse tried in The Modern Jewish Canon (2000) to track down the phenomenon of multilingual Jewish literature through a discussion of some of the greatest works of the twentieth century get. For The Modern Jewish Canon , Wisse received the National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship / Criticism and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Scholarship .

Bibliography (selection)

• The Best of Sholom Aleichem , edited with Irving Howe (1979)
• The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse edited with Irving Howe and Khone Shmeruk (1987)
• A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (1988)
• IL Peretz Reader (1990)
• IL Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (1991)
• If I Am Not for Myself ...: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992)
• The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (2000)
• Jews and Power (2005)

Journal articles (selection)

• "Hura! Hura! ” Moment (December 1975): pp. 21-23
• "A Golus Education." Moment (January 1977): p. 26ff
• "The Most Beautiful Woman in Vilna." Commentary (June 1981)
• "What My Father Knew." Commentary (April 1995): 44-49.
• "My Life Without Leonard Cohen." Commentary (October 1995): pp. 27-33

Sources and individual references

Source: Roskies, David G .: Article "Ruth R. Wisse." In Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive . March 2009 , accessed January 19, 2010

1. ↑ see web links
2. ↑ Susanne Klingenstein : Enlarging America: the cultural work of Jewish literary scholars, 1930–1990 . Syracuse University Press, 1998, ISBN 0815605404 , p. 310
3. ↑ www.jweekly.com , accessed January 17, 2010.
4. ↑ JTS website for DG Roskies ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 17, 2010. 
5. ↑ Website of the Norman Berman Children's Library ( Memento of the original from July 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 20, 2010. 
6. ^ McGill University website

Web links

• Daughter of Vilna Documentary for an event at Wayne State University in 2002 shows Ruth R. Wisse, her mother Masha Roskies and her brother David G. Roskies u. a. Singing Yiddish songs (5 parts, approx. 50 min video material, wsupress on youtube), accessed on January 18, 2010
• Literature by and about Ruth R. Wisse in the catalog of the German National Library