A research team from Duke Kunshan and Columbia University is shining a light on Jewish-China connections in literature.
Their project – One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature in China – aims to produce a collection of Chinese writings about Jewish literature from 1921 to the present.
“Our research seeks to answer the question: Who was engaged with Yiddish literature in China, when and where? We also seek to identify patterns in terms of interests in particular Yiddish authors, genres, and other Jewish languages,” said Dr. Yitzhak Lewis, assistant professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan University and one of the study’s heads.
Conceived and led by Lewis and Anruo Bao, a Ph.D. candidate in Yiddish studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, the project also included 11 undergraduate research assistants from DKU over the past two years: Weiran Li, Yifei Yang, Yongkang Chen, Xiaomeng Yan, Eldar Wang, Yunxiang Ma, Shuming Zhang, Yilin Xu, Shiyu Xiong, Weiran Dong and Ruohan Wang. Together they have painstakingly trawled through Chinese literary archives in search of a Jewish connection.
It all began in 1921, when Mao Dun, a journalist, novelist and playwright who later became China’s minister of culture, called on Chinese intellectuals to study Yiddish literature, in the mistaken belief that it replaced old Hebrew and could be paralleled to modern vernacular Chinese replacing classic Chinese, according to Lewis.
“Since then, Chinese intellectuals have seen in Yiddish literature a kindred spirit to the Chinese national rejuvenation efforts. At every step of modern Chinese history, central Chinese intellectuals and authors drew inspiration from Yiddish literature,” he said.
Prominent Chinese intellectuals have been reflecting on Jewish literature for over a century, leading to an archive of material showing the cultural importance of Yiddish language and literature in Chinese culture. Various social movements and changes have helped to continue interest in Jewish literature, according to Lewis, including China’s New Culture Movement of the 1920s, which promoted a culture based on modern progressive ideas, and Reform and Opening Up, beginning in 1978, which opened China’s economy to the world and spurred enthusiasm for global literature.
The project identifies “a constant that has somehow survived the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history: the role of Yiddish literature in the national imagination of China’s intellectuals and authors across several historical periods,” said Lewis.
“From a Jewish studies perspective, it opens new directions for the study of Jewish textual traditions, detached from the Jewish population centers that produce them. In a sense it develops a model for Jewish studies beyond ‘the Jews,’” he added.
The project has also been a learning experience for many of the student researchers involved in it.
“I joined this project in the spring of 2021,” said Chen. “My initial motivation was due to the charm of Professor Lewis, and I hoped to work with him even outside the class. Also, the field of Jewish literature study was a whole new perspective to me, and I was also willing to walk out of the so-called comfort zone to take some challenges.
“The participation in this project offers an opportunity to jump out of the box and see how seemingly ‘obscure’ literature also stands out and challenges the ‘world literature’ that is dominated by unequal power relations and culture influences,” he added.
Xu said: “Personally, I was surprised that in the journals I searched, most of the articles that met the requirements of the project were about theater and plays – thus I had the opportunity to learn about the history of Yiddish theater written by an American author [published a century ago in Chinese].”
The project, which is funded by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China that supports a broad range of faculty-student research projects across DKU, is ongoing and will probably take a couple more years to complete, such is the volume of literary archives to examine.
