We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
"Penny Books": Modern Original Hebrew Literature in Eastern Europe (1891-1896) - A Bibliography.
- Authors
Lapon-Kandelshein, Esther
- Abstract
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an increase in demand for secular belles-lettres among Jewish readers in eastern Europe. An expanding readership, including both women and children, supported the appearance of popular dime-novels (shund) in Yiddish, which was the everyday, spoken language of the Jewish masses. At the same time, the ongoing process of Jewish assimilation into non-Jewish society and its culture prompted Jews to become consumers of non-Jewish literature. As a result, there was a noted decline in the status of Hebrew literature toward the end of the nineteenth century. That situation prompted the writer and publisher Abraham Leib Shalkowitz (1866-1921), known as "Ben-Avigdor", to establish a Penny Book series of literary works in Hebrew. This project, initiated in 1891, initially included mainly stories by Shalkowitz himself. It was greeted at first with suspicion and scorn, and at some point it was even boycotted by leading representatives of the Hebrew press of the time. Yet the almost immediate popularity it gained with its readers bolstered its status as a publishing project and attracted both famous writers like Y. L. Peretz and young upcoming talents to contribute their stories and poems to later editions. The article presents as full and accurate a bibliography as possible of all Penny Book editions. With one exception, the registry is based on visual identification of each booklet. In most cases this list supplements bibliographical details that have not been registered in databases in Israel and elsewhere.
- Subjects
HEBREW literature; JEWISH literature; READERSHIP; HEBREW language; JEWISH history
- Publication
Gal-Ed: On the History & Culture of Polish Jewry, 2015, Vol 24, p115
- ISSN
0334-4258
- Publication type
Article