Professor Jeffrey Shandler dedicates his lecture to Joseph Opatoshu’s short story on the black wedding ceremony.
Opatoshu’s short novels became genuine chronicles of European Jewry and description of Jewish customs associated with death in the wake of epidemics. Professor Shandler takes the Opatoshu’s plague weddings as a benchmark to Jewish reactions to human tragedy caused by cholera epidemics. The lecturer efficiently combines the problem of literary descriptions of beliefs and rituals with social divisions and problems of stratification among East European Jews.
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His translations from Yiddish include Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil and Karl, the first Holocaust novel for young readers. His next book, Yiddish: Biography of a Language, has been published this fall.