Two New Classes in April: Peretz Short Stories and Leyenkrayz

 A Holy Man with a Psychic Nose and the First Yiddish Fan-Fic: Two New Classes in April

Six Week Reading Circle/Leyenkrayz with The Winding Road by Rokhl Feygenberg. 

This will be a hybrid, Yiddish-English leyenkrayz.  We will read the entire book using the new English translation. When we meet, the discussion will be in English and we will read selected passages out loud in Yiddish. (You’ll read as much or as little as you feel comfortable with.) Participants will be assigned Yiddish passages in advance so they can practice ahead of time. All levels of Yiddish reading are welcome. Participants will get valuable experience reading an older Yiddish publication which uses pre-YIVO standardization spelling. (Don’t worry, we’ll go over it together.) Reading the English translation simultaneously will also make working on the Yiddish a lot easier, especially for hesitant readers.

The Winding Road is Rokhl Feygenberg's memoir of her childhood, originally published serially in 1905 and now newly translated by Tamara Helfer. If you've taken Ashkenazi folk magic classes with me, you might recall that I've used Yiddish excerpts from the memoir before. (And there is quite a bit of interesting folk magic material in the book). The memoir presents Feygenberg's experience not just as a young girl at the turn of the century in the Russian Empire, but she is also a passionate reader and writer. As a young girl, Feygenberg created what might be the first instance of Yiddish "fan-fiction," when she wrote her own novel using the characters from Yankev Dinezon's shund-y best seller, The Dark Young Man. The Winding Road is a fascinating and intimate portrait of the life of a young Jewish woman at a historical inflection point. Just a few years later, Feygenberg's life would change when she would become known for her journalistic accounts of the catastrophic pogroms of the Russian Civil War in 1919.

All sessions are virtual, via Zoom. The dates of the leyenkrayz class are:

Wednesdays at 7pm (EST) April 15, 22, 29 May 6, 13, 20

Cost: $200. Email me at cjcrokhl@gmail.com to register.

The book releases on April 1, but you can pre-order now for $20

 

Ashkenazi Folk Magic through the short stories of YL Peretz: The stories of YL Peretz are full of the folk magic and lore of Ashkenaz. In this class, we will use Peretz's stories to explore some of the folk beliefs that make his work so rich. We will pay special attention to Peretz's use of the sensory and extra-sensory: a holy man who can read auras through smell; a cantor whose extraordinary voice ends up damning him to hell.

Each session will be dedicated to one story (in English translation) which you will read ahead of time. In our time together, we will explore each story's many magical and supernatural elements, including looking at the original Yiddish to enrich our understanding of the text.  

Thursdays, April 16, 23, 30 at 2pm or 7pm EST. [You are welcome to attend at either 2 or 7pm.] All sessions recorded and available to view afterwards.

Cost $125  Email me at cjcrokhl@gmail.com to register.