Books by Barry Montgomery
Irish Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Alternative Histories, New Narratives. Kathryn Laing, Sinéad Mooney & Pilar Villar Argaiz (eds), 2020
Hannah Berman is a largely forgotten novelist, prolific translator and short story writer in Engl... more Hannah Berman is a largely forgotten novelist, prolific translator and short story writer in English, who produced well in excess of one hundred publications during her lifetime, including two novels, one novel length serialisation, Irish-Jewish memoirs, as well as articles on Yiddish fiction and the Jews in Ireland. Much of Berman’s work was produced in Dublin between 1909 and 1916, including numerous original short stories and her best known novel, Melutovna (1913).
A preliminary survey of periodicals and newspapers has uncovered more than fifty original short stories, which when read in conjunction with Berman’s novels, paint a vivid portrait of Lithuanian Jewish village life in the Russian Pale under the oppressive and discriminatory “May Laws” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had invoked a mass exodus and emigration of Jewish refugees to England and Ireland. Berman herself immigrated to Ireland circa 1892 from Kovno at the age of three under such circumstances. Her stories focus on religious life and culture, characterised by examinations of social and gender hierarchies, all against the backdrop of fear, persecution, poverty, famine and pogroms. Generational tensions between traditional orthodoxies and modern reforms within Judaism form a central theme, as does the ever present spectre of exile and a steadily dying culture.
Berman’s fiction also has an oblique Irish context. Newspaper evidence shows that she presented her tales publically as a member of the National Literary Society, reading alongside such notables as Katharine Tynan. She had stories published in periodicals such as The Irish Review; and most significantly contributed a number of works to Seumas O’Sullivan’s The Dublin Magazine during the 1920s, with illustrations by the celebrated Irish artist, Harry Kernoff. Her stories may have been set in Lithuania; but she claims to have populated those fictions with personages from the Dublin Jewish community, suggesting a geographically displaced commentary on the Jewish experience in Ireland.
The importance of Berman’s translation work will also be discussed in relation to her literary style and use of idiom, which reflects her efforts to recreate a form of the Yiddish folk tale in English (The Jewish Chronicle reports that Berman spoke Yiddish with “a soft Irish brogue”). Berman has not been credited as a pioneering translator of Yiddish fiction (encompassing more than a dozen writers). Most notably, she brought the work of the renowned Yiddish fiction writer, Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) to an English readership, and was declared Aleichem’s official translator in 1911. Berman discusses the power, pathos, humour and importance of Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Tevye’s Daughters tales, although she did not produce the translation famously adapted into the hugely successful Broadway musical and film, Fiddler on the Roof, which may have been due to ill health later in life. Over thirty Aleichem translations have been sourced for consideration and comparison with Berman’s original fiction, a novel, Stempenyu (1913), and a series of earlier translations collected as Jewish Children (1926), both published to critical acclaim.
Papers by Barry Montgomery
Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Representations of Jews in Irish ... more Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Representations of Jews in Irish Literature is a landmark project between Ulster University and the National University of Ireland, Galway. It examines the portrayal of Jewishness through an exhibition and publications which include a selection of key Irish-Jewish writing and Irish literature about Jews. Adopting a thematic and chronological approach, it investigates the depiction of Jews and Jewishness in Ireland from the Annals of Inisfallen in the medieval period, then through to centuries of poetry, prose and drama to the present day. Exploring the relationship between Jews and Ireland as found in the literary record, it reveals both the prejudices of writers who often had little or no direct contact with Jews and, later, an emerging Irish-Jewish literary sphere that shows a vibrant, vocal community at ease with its hyphenated sense of identity and culture. It also acknowledges the fraught past faced by a minority c...
Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Representations of Jews in Irish ... more Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Representations of Jews in Irish Literature is a landmark project between Ulster University and the National University of Ireland, Galway. It examines the portrayal of Jewishness through an exhibition and publications which include a selection of key Irish-Jewish writing and Irish literature about Jews. Adopting a thematic and chronological approach, it investigates the depiction of Jews and Jewishness in Ireland from the Annals of Inisfallen in the medieval period, then through to centuries of poetry, prose and drama to the present day. Exploring the relationship between Jews and Ireland as found in the literary record, it reveals both the prejudices of writers who often had little or no direct contact with Jews and, later, an emerging Irish-Jewish literary sphere that shows a vibrant, vocal community at ease with its hyphenated sense of identity and culture. It also acknowledges the fraught past faced by a minority c...
This essay will conduct an examination into the as yet under-researched history of Jewish drama a... more This essay will conduct an examination into the as yet under-researched history of Jewish drama and theatre in Ireland. It will explore a number of socio-political and cultural contexts pertinent to shared or paralleled Jewish, Irish, and Irish Jewish concerns over language, identity, history, nationalisms, prejudice and oppression. It will also explore direct or implicit engagements and dialogues between various Irish Jewish dramatic societies and non-Jewish Irish movements and societies such as the Irish Literary Revival and the Gaelic League. Ultimately, the research hopes to provide a framework for future studies into Irish Jewish theatre providing a public platform giving voice to Ireland's largest non-Christian minority during the first half of the twentieth century.
Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies Vol 10, No 10 (2020): "Minorities in/and Ireland" edited by Patrick McDonagh, 2020
This essay will conduct an examination into the as yet under-researched history of Jewish drama a... more This essay will conduct an examination into the as yet under-researched history of Jewish drama and theatre in Ireland. It will explore a number of socio-political and cultural contexts pertinent to shared or paralleled Jewish, Irish, and Irish Jewish concerns over language, identity, history, nationalisms, prejudice and oppression. It will also explore direct or implicit engagements and dialogues between various Irish Jewish dramatic societies and non-Jewish Irish movements and societies such as the Irish Literary Revival and the Gaelic League. Ultimately, the research hopes to provide a framework for future studies into Irish Jewish theatre providing a public platform giving voice to Ireland’s largest non-Christian minority during the first half of the twentieth century.
Talks by Barry Montgomery
An introductory talk for the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, on early 20th century Irish Jewish liter... more An introductory talk for the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, on early 20th century Irish Jewish literature, featuring the works of controversial novelist and political activist, Joseph Edelstein, novelist, short story writer and journalist, Edward Raphael Lipsett, and novelist, short story writer and translator, Hannah Berman
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Books by Barry Montgomery
A preliminary survey of periodicals and newspapers has uncovered more than fifty original short stories, which when read in conjunction with Berman’s novels, paint a vivid portrait of Lithuanian Jewish village life in the Russian Pale under the oppressive and discriminatory “May Laws” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had invoked a mass exodus and emigration of Jewish refugees to England and Ireland. Berman herself immigrated to Ireland circa 1892 from Kovno at the age of three under such circumstances. Her stories focus on religious life and culture, characterised by examinations of social and gender hierarchies, all against the backdrop of fear, persecution, poverty, famine and pogroms. Generational tensions between traditional orthodoxies and modern reforms within Judaism form a central theme, as does the ever present spectre of exile and a steadily dying culture.
Berman’s fiction also has an oblique Irish context. Newspaper evidence shows that she presented her tales publically as a member of the National Literary Society, reading alongside such notables as Katharine Tynan. She had stories published in periodicals such as The Irish Review; and most significantly contributed a number of works to Seumas O’Sullivan’s The Dublin Magazine during the 1920s, with illustrations by the celebrated Irish artist, Harry Kernoff. Her stories may have been set in Lithuania; but she claims to have populated those fictions with personages from the Dublin Jewish community, suggesting a geographically displaced commentary on the Jewish experience in Ireland.
The importance of Berman’s translation work will also be discussed in relation to her literary style and use of idiom, which reflects her efforts to recreate a form of the Yiddish folk tale in English (The Jewish Chronicle reports that Berman spoke Yiddish with “a soft Irish brogue”). Berman has not been credited as a pioneering translator of Yiddish fiction (encompassing more than a dozen writers). Most notably, she brought the work of the renowned Yiddish fiction writer, Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) to an English readership, and was declared Aleichem’s official translator in 1911. Berman discusses the power, pathos, humour and importance of Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Tevye’s Daughters tales, although she did not produce the translation famously adapted into the hugely successful Broadway musical and film, Fiddler on the Roof, which may have been due to ill health later in life. Over thirty Aleichem translations have been sourced for consideration and comparison with Berman’s original fiction, a novel, Stempenyu (1913), and a series of earlier translations collected as Jewish Children (1926), both published to critical acclaim.
Papers by Barry Montgomery
Talks by Barry Montgomery
https://www.facebook.com/108102135903133/videos/423104722315865
A preliminary survey of periodicals and newspapers has uncovered more than fifty original short stories, which when read in conjunction with Berman’s novels, paint a vivid portrait of Lithuanian Jewish village life in the Russian Pale under the oppressive and discriminatory “May Laws” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had invoked a mass exodus and emigration of Jewish refugees to England and Ireland. Berman herself immigrated to Ireland circa 1892 from Kovno at the age of three under such circumstances. Her stories focus on religious life and culture, characterised by examinations of social and gender hierarchies, all against the backdrop of fear, persecution, poverty, famine and pogroms. Generational tensions between traditional orthodoxies and modern reforms within Judaism form a central theme, as does the ever present spectre of exile and a steadily dying culture.
Berman’s fiction also has an oblique Irish context. Newspaper evidence shows that she presented her tales publically as a member of the National Literary Society, reading alongside such notables as Katharine Tynan. She had stories published in periodicals such as The Irish Review; and most significantly contributed a number of works to Seumas O’Sullivan’s The Dublin Magazine during the 1920s, with illustrations by the celebrated Irish artist, Harry Kernoff. Her stories may have been set in Lithuania; but she claims to have populated those fictions with personages from the Dublin Jewish community, suggesting a geographically displaced commentary on the Jewish experience in Ireland.
The importance of Berman’s translation work will also be discussed in relation to her literary style and use of idiom, which reflects her efforts to recreate a form of the Yiddish folk tale in English (The Jewish Chronicle reports that Berman spoke Yiddish with “a soft Irish brogue”). Berman has not been credited as a pioneering translator of Yiddish fiction (encompassing more than a dozen writers). Most notably, she brought the work of the renowned Yiddish fiction writer, Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) to an English readership, and was declared Aleichem’s official translator in 1911. Berman discusses the power, pathos, humour and importance of Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Tevye’s Daughters tales, although she did not produce the translation famously adapted into the hugely successful Broadway musical and film, Fiddler on the Roof, which may have been due to ill health later in life. Over thirty Aleichem translations have been sourced for consideration and comparison with Berman’s original fiction, a novel, Stempenyu (1913), and a series of earlier translations collected as Jewish Children (1926), both published to critical acclaim.
https://www.facebook.com/108102135903133/videos/423104722315865