{"product_id":"never-better-the-modern-jewish-picaresque-by-miriam-udel","title":"Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque by Miriam Udel","description":"\u003cp\u003e                   \u003cstrong\u003e     2016 National Jewish Book Council Award Winner\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably \u003ci\u003enever\u003c\/i\u003e get better.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish \u003ci\u003epícaro\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the \u003ci\u003epolit\u003c\/i\u003e is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously \u003ci\u003ewithin\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eagainst\u003c\/i\u003e the literary traditions of Europe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePaperback book 2016\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"CHICD","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44181780791383,"sku":"yxi1787285305497","price":16.75,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0631\/1706\/6327\/files\/never-better-the-modern-jewish-picaresque-by-miriam-udel_1.jpg?v=1787285310","url":"https:\/\/chicedgestore.shop\/products\/never-better-the-modern-jewish-picaresque-by-miriam-udel","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}