The Yiddish Book Center's

Yiddish Book Center Recorded Programs

Lectures, events, and public programs recorded at the Yiddish Book Center

The Extraordinary Voyages of the Yiddish Jules Verne, with Sebastian Schulman

Sebastian Schulman

About this program:

The Extraordinary Voyages of the Yiddish Jules Verne, with Sebastian Schulman

Featuring: Sebastian Schulman

Whether it was on the Lower East Side of New York or in the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe, Yiddish speakers were voracious readers of Jules Verne (1828–1905), the 19th century’s most celebrated author of science fiction. With stories of adventure that crossed borders and investigated new technologies, these books had a direct appeal for Yiddish readers that were daily faced by the challenges of industrialization and mass immigration. But does Jules Verne en français really resemble his counterpart af yidish? This presentation will explore how Verne’s Yiddish translators reshaped the writer, at once domesticating him to fit the norms of Jewish readership, while at the same time using Verne to advance a message of modernization, science, and empire to their supposedly backward and superstitious readers. Based on close readings across several languages, this lecture will show how these processes created a distinctly Yiddish “Zhul Vern,” a member of the Jewish literary pantheon that was related to, but somehow very different from his Parisian namesake.

This program is co-sponsored with the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

This event took place on January 07, 2021. It was presented online by the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA.

This recording was digitized and added to the library in November 2022.

This recording is in English

More information about this recording:

View the full record for this recording on Internet Archive.