Jidišakalbių literatūrinių sambūrių savikūra tarpukario Kaune: Vispe ir Mir Aleyn
Self-Creation of Yiddish Literary Groups in Interwar Kaunas: Vispe and Mir Aleyn . 83

Summary/Abstract: The article explores two programmatic texts of the Yiddish literary groups Vispe and Mir aleyn as documents of collective identity construction and seeks to answer the question: Which possible local and trans-national discourses meet up in such processes of self-creation and how may the articulated positions be further incorporated into global contexts? Both texts appeared in the miscellanies of the groups, published in Kaunas in 1921 (Vispe, Yiddish “Island”) and in 1930 (Mir aleyn, Yiddish “We Alone” or “We Ourselves”) under the titles Di vispe and Mir aleyn. Although neither is called a “manifesto,” the paper demonstrates that their structures, subjects, rhetoric, and metaphors coincide with characteristics of avant-garde manifestoes. Di vispe and in part Mir aleyn are written in “we” form and suggest that collective intentions are expressed. The manifesto Di vispe has a structure of short paragraphs, some of them anaphoric; both manifestoes distinguish between “old” and “young,” call for a fight against traditions, materialism, and authorities, and express the aim to change reality by means of art; finally, the manifesto Mir aleyn seeks to downgrade the literary works of the Vispe authors as graphomanic literature and launches a local Yiddish avant-gardistic polemic.

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