Yiddish shundliteratur and Modernization of Jewish Society in Eeastern Europe (1860–1914)

Yiddish Shundliteratur was a phenomenon that emerged right in the middle of dynamic change as both Yiddish Eastern European culture and society started to fully enter the modern era. Taking into account how popular and widespread literary shund became in a short time (starting from the 1860s), it was one of the main components of creating modern Yiddish literature and modern Eastern Yiddish-speaking society. But to this time, its influence was not recognized by most of scholars. I’m going to present how shund approached and shaped Yiddish literary modernity. Thanks to its unique ability to adjust to readers’ tastes it brought to Yiddish new ideas about genres, distribution and advertising. On the content level, most of the shund novels had a very clear orientation toward modernity and basing on memoirs, the potential of shaping the reader’s life aspirations was quite significant.