Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

Karolina  Koprowska

Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

Publication date: 19.09.2023

Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, 2021, Volume 19, pp. 15 - 28

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843925SJ.21.002.16411

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Titles

Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

Abstract

The author analyses Isaac Leib Peretz’s play Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) through the lens of the ambivalences of the carnival, which give rise to various transgressions of socio-political and cultural, as well as metaphysical and existential, orders. The carnival category positions Peretz’s drama in the dialectic of beginning and end, and it suggests the violation of the existing normative order in order to expose the tension between the traditional world of the shtetl and the modernity that is impinging on it. Moreover, the carnival spectacle reveals metaphysical and historiosophic dimensions, since it tackles the question of the human condition, which is defined by the opposition of life and death and is entangled in the course of history.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu finansowym POB Heritage w ramach Programu ID.UJ (edycja specjalna I).

Translated by Jessica Taylor-Kucia

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu finansowym POB Heritage w ramach Programu ID.UJ (edycja specjalna I).

Translated by Jessica Taylor-Kucia

Keywords

Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, Isaac Leib Peretz, Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, Jewish modernism

References

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Information

Information: Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, 2021, Volume 19, pp. 15 - 28

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/20843925SJ.21.002.16411

Article type: Original article

Titles:

Polish:

Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

English:

Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

Authors

Karolina Koprowska

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7177-5554

Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland

Published at: 19.09.2023

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY

Percentage share of authors:

Karolina Koprowska (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

Publication languages:

English

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Number of downloads: 398

Facing Down the Watershed: The Drama Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) by I.L. Peretz as a Carnival Mystery Play

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