Justin Cammy

Literary study and cultural history of the most important Yiddish literary and artistic group in Poland in the 1930s. Based in Vilna - a multinational city and one of the most significant Jewish centers of rabbinic, political, and Yiddish secular culture in Eastern Europe - the project explores ways in which Young-Vilna balanced popular demands for a humanistic,socially responsible literature that reflected material and political realities, and artistic desires for more rarefied forms of expression derived from the explosion in Yiddish modernism. It address broader issues involved in the study of 'imagined communities', borderland languages and literatures, and the relationship between minorities and cosmopolitanism in interwar Eastern Europe.