The Processing of Fish and Fowl in Elye Bokher’s ‘Ha-mavdil Song’

or: What Yiddishists Do on Tuesday Nights when No One is Looking Lecture Admission: Free

In his Old Yiddish poem, ‘Ha-mavdil Song,’ Elye Bokher uses fish and fowl as vehicles of his critique of an intellectual with whom he was engaging in a polemic. This talk will illustrate the nuts-and-bolts philological processing of the ‘evidence’ (textual, lexicographical, cultural, historical) to try to arrive at some plausible interpretation of this early 16th century Old Yiddish text from Venice.

About the Speaker

Jerold C. Frakes is Distinguished Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. His research is in the field of medieval European literatures, especially German, Latin, Norse, and Yiddish. Frakes’s current research focuses on the emergence of Yiddish literature in the late medieval period. As radical social, demographic, economic, and political upheaval transformed Ashkenazic Jewish society, new genres and forms of literary and cultural expression developed. He has written six books, most recently The Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature: Cultural Translation in Ashkenaz (Indiana University Press, 2017) and A Guide to Old Literary Yiddish (Oxford University Press, 2017) – the first Old Yiddish textbook ever published. Frakes has edited or translated eleven books, including Max Weinreich’s German dissertation Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung (Scholars Press, 1993). He has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Frakes earned master’s degrees from Memphis State University and the University of Minnesota and a doctoral degree in Germanic philology from the University of Minnesota.