Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages.
Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging. Born in the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book-Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel-seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women's labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story, and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages.
Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.