Yiddish Trash

This chapter applies the taytsh paradigm to Yiddish entertainment fiction, demonstrating how a series of mostly unknown Yiddish writers, from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period, from Warsaw to New York, used translational strategies to meet the demands of the mass Yiddish reader. The vast corpus remains mostly unstudied, due in part to a tradition of critical dismissal of such works. Yiddish entertainment fiction was labeled, already in the nineteenth century, as shund, trash, and it is still treated with disdain in Yiddish literary studies. As such, scholars lack even a basic bibliographic outline of its parameters. This chapter begins to redress this oversight by reading several of these works closely—including fiction by women writers and for women readers—and proposes an initial theorization of the genre, seeing its lack of institutional or canonical legibility as a key to its cultural dynamism. The chapter’s account of shund tracks how writers translated and adapted European forms in response to the urgency of urban life and without concern for ideas of national representation. Shund foregrounds and advertises a logic of cultural entanglement—deploying literary strategies of theft, borrowing, and adaptation that inform the entire project of modern Jewish culture.