Make Your Limit the Sky: Yiddish Children's Literature and the Cultivation of Resilience

The Clara Sumpf Yiddish Lecture Series

At this tumultuous moment of global pandemic, we will examine the path-breaking work of Yiddish children’s authors in making fictive worlds so as to cultivate resilience in their young readers. This corpus of literature offers a new vantage point from which to apprehend the emergence of Jewish modernity. This talk strives not only to begin opening up some of these texts for critical scrutiny, but also to situate the speaker scholastically and maternally as a reader (often a reader aloud) and translator (between languages and cultures) of a set of long-neglected stories and poems.

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. She was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox rabbinate.

Udel’s academic research interests include 20th-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, will appear with New York University Press in October, 2020.