I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

By Wisse, Ruth R. and Isaac Leib Peretz (Eds.)
University of Washington Press, 1991, Hardcover, 146 pp., Out of print, ISBN: 0295970898

Peretz helped shape a national identity for Jews at the end of the 19th century through his writing of Yiddish literature.

Wisse (Yiddish literature, McGill Univ.), also the author of The Schlemiel as Modern Hero ( LJ 7/88), focuses on the power of his influence by studying his ideas. She attempts to understand Peretz's role in the development of modern Jewish culture - what he wrote and why it mattered. Wisse summarizes and analyzes many of Peretz's stories, showing how the author strove for a kind of divinity in a new secular sphere for Jews. Of interest to students of modern Jewish history, literature, and politics, as well as the nonspecialist reader.