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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Debora Vogel’s Blooming Spaces: An Introduction -- Essays on Literature and Poetics -- Essays on Art, Artists, and the Applied Arts -- Essays on Socio-Critical Issues -- Selections from Day Figures (1930) -- Selections from Mannequins (1934) -- Selections from Acacias Bloom: Montage (1935/36) -- Reviews of Day Figures (1930) and Mannequins (1934) -- Reviews of Acacias Bloom -- Discussions of the Yiddish Edition of Akatsyes blien (1935) -- Reviews of the Polish Edition of Akacje kwitną -- Index This ground-breaking collection features the oeuvre of Debora Vogel (1900-1942), a Modernist Polish and Yiddish writer, philosopher, translator, and art critic. The author’s poems are examples of Cubist-Constructivist experimentation in a language that is at once lyrical and philosophical.Vogel’s poetry challenges every notion of writing in Yiddish literature from the author’s lifetime to ours. The writer’s prose collection transplants experiments in photography, film, and painting, into the literary medium. Vogel’s articles deal with a variety of topics ranging from abstract art, and individual artists like Marc Chagall and Fernand Leger, to matters of applied arts, including discussions of the interiors of modern apartments, the typography of children’s books, and an overview of fashion exhibitions. In addition, Vogel’s essays examine racism and anti-Semitism, the tasks of progressive intellectuals’ engagement in the society, and the use of literary montage as a way literature ‘does politics.’ Vogel’s extensive travels to Berlin, Stockholm, Vienna, and Paris, and her intimate familiarity with the cityscapes of her native Lwów are reflected in her writings. Vogel’s multimodal writing could be read in conjunction with Giorgio de Chirico’s, Pablo Picasso’s, or El Lissitsky’s paintings, Max Ernst’s painterly and writerly experiments, or Fritz Lang’s, Dziga Vertov’s, and Sergei Eisenstein’s films. Lyubas situates Vogel as the key, yet unrecognized figure for thought and literature of the early and late 20th century, as well as a thinker whose insights are crucial to grasp the contemporary socio-political issues. This is the first collection of Vogel’s writings in English translation
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