David Bergelson's Strange New World explores the work of one of the most highly regarded Yiddish writers of the 20th and his untimely world of characters who live ahead and behind the times in the Eastern European shtetl.
"Harriet Murav treats Bergelson with the care and sincerity that literary critics have shown other important writers. This is a masterpiece of literary scholarship that will be sure to transform not only how people read Bergelson and who chooses to read Bergelson, but how readers engage with the entire concept of modernism itself."—David Shneer, author of Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 1918-1930
Harriet Murav is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique and translator (with Sasha Senderovich) of David Bergelson's 1929 novel Judgment.