Koch, MC; (2020) I and the Village: Nostalgia for a Homeland in Yiddish Art and Literature. Moveable Type , 12 , Article 2. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.106.

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Abstract

This paper addresses nostalgia for the lost homeland of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry, whose state of exile and lack of national boundaries problematized this complex notion. It focuses on Marc Chagall’s 1911 painting I and the Village. The painting is viewed, both critically and popularly, as a fantastical image of Chagall’s childhood home in a predominantly Jewish town in Eastern Europe, otherwise known as the shtetl. Yet it is more than a personal expression of memory and loss. Its transfiguration of the past into an idyllic world relates to traditional Judaic notions of remembrance found in sacred texts, Walter Benjamin’s reconciliation of these notions with modernist thought, and the birth of modern Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century. Through nostalgic depictions in literature and art, the shtetl was brought to the popular imagination at the moment of its historical dissolution. These fictional representations offered a terrain that could not be confiscated and a space, inseparable from the past, in which historical transformation could occur. In this respect, nostalgia captured the paradox of the twentieth-century Jewish experience as an historical process; that is, the dissolution of and longing for a traditional way of life, and the transfiguration of this life into the modern age.

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