Acknowledgments

Among the birthplaces of this book is the National Yiddish Book Center, where a class taught by Aaron Lansky led to a discussion with Rena Fischer and Chana Pollock. At the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Summer Program, Abraham Novershtern showed me what Yiddish literary scholarship could be. The most rewarding aspect of writing the dissertation that became this book was the privilege of working with Chana Kronfeld, who is surely one of the great critics and teachers of our day. Chana fulfilled her function of adviser with a remarkable blend of boundless enthusiasm, a critical engagement with every aspect of the work, and her insistence on teamwork, academic cooperation, and intellectual community. Robert Alter encouraged me in my own work and inspired me with his teaching, his research, and his witty and lucid prose style. Bluma Goldstein went over my manuscript with careful attention and sharp critical insight; her honesty and political engagement have demonstrated to me the possibility of combining a truly rigorous academic career with the most intensely felt personal and political concerns. Ruti Tsoffar was an engaging and supportive study partner in the first stages of my work. The writing and revision of this book occurred in the context of an intellectual friendship and partnership with Michael Gluzman and Peter Eli Gordon. I finished the dissertation and began reworking it at Stanford University, where Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht made me feel very much a part of the Department of Comparative Literature and Steven Zipperstein extended the resources of the Jewish Studies Program to me. Chava Weissler and Dorothy Bilik, important critics in the field of Yiddish and women's studies, generously answered my questions about their work and mailed me additional material. My mother, Sara Seidman, was my ideal reader, and her astute comments kept me honest.

My father's influence and support is beyond measure: the Ph.D. in history he received from a university in Warsaw before the war was of very little practical use to an immigrant refugee and survivor in New York, and he turned to (mostly Yiddish) journalism as a career—and worked at the writing trade until the last day of his life. I like to think that my own Ph.D., which draws so much on the Eastern European world from which he came, is something of a tikkun for an academic path diverted by catastrophe.

I wrote this book with the help of an Andrew Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, began revising it at Stanford University as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature, and finished it at the Pennsylvania State University, with the help of a grant from the Pennsylvania State University Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies for travel to Israel. There, the librarians at the Zionist Archives were particularly helpful. The distinguished sociolinguist Joshua Fishman graciously provided me with copies of the Yiddish cartoons that appear here. Pearl Noble, daughter and executor of the estate of Melech Grafstein, gave me permission to reprint the photograph of Sholem Aleichem's grave. Irena Klepfisz inspired and enlightened me, as she did a generation of feminist Yiddishists. You-Mayhem, rebbe of Torah and contact, pushed me to a lot of places I otherwise would have missed. David Biale, my new colleague at the Center for Jewish Studies of the Graduate Theological Union, has become a valuable intellectual resource and a wonderful conversational partner. I am also especially grateful to Eliyah Arnon, who tirelessly helped me get this manuscript into its final form.

John Schott was there through it all, and I could not have done it without him.