Yung-Vilne

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the Yiddish literary group 'Yung-Vilne' (1929--1941). It explores the intersection of language, lineage, and locus, and its influences on a new generation of Yiddish writing in one of Eastern Europe's most important Jewish cultural centers. I argue that the group embraced a populist modernism that allowed it to appeal to audiences in both high and mass culture, and tolerate members who ranged from the politically engaged to the aesthetically detached. Through my excavation of the group's work, and a discussion of its members' role in the broad cultural life of Vilna, I highlight the symbiotic relationship between artistic corpus and cultural context. The primary goal of the dissertation is to provide a framework for understanding the group's struggle to satisfy the expectations of local audiences for a humanistic, socially engaged literature against some members' gravitation towards more rarefied forms of artistic expression that could expand the borders of Yiddish art. Chapter one shows how Yung-Vilne was an organic outgrowth of its cultural community. Chapter two introduces Yung-Vilna's first star, Leyzer Volf. I explain that Volf's comical engagement with canonical texts from the European and Yiddish literary spheres, and his grotesque re-interpretations of Vilna's physical and cultural landscape were emblematic of larger generational anxieties of Yiddish cultural parochialism. Chapter three discusses the group's magazine, Yung-Vilne, as a way to introduce its choir of visual artists, poets, and prose writers. My discussion highlights the tension between the pull of radical politics and the desire to escape from reality through literature. Chapters four and five offer extended readings of the group's two most famous writers, Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever. I show how Grade re-introduced the language of faith and religious struggle into Yiddish literature at the precise historical moment when Yiddish writing was most alienated from tradition. Chapter five suggests that Sutzkever was also striving to recover metaphysical wonder. I show how his modernist innovation transcended the limitations of Vilna's material realities. The dissertation underscores the extent to which artistic choices made by Yung-Vilne were connected to the national struggle for cultural self-definition.