BRIYO VE-ZIMRO

BRIYO VE-ZIMRO, anonymous Yiddish narrative from 1585. This remarkable tale is a love story without equal in early Yiddish literature, features one of the earliest significant female characters in Yiddish, and displays the intense emotion of contemporary Shakespearean tragedy, while uniting the lovers by means of a post-mortem wedding in Paradise, thus weaving a variety of international motifs (a quasi-Solomonic judgment, a hero's journey to the bewitched Other World, star-crossed lovers whose union is blocked by parental prohibition, the riddling hero who saves himself by his wits while in the power of the enemy leader, the sword in the stone) into an essentially Jewish narrative set during the Maccabean monarchy. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Schulmann, Sefat Yehudit-Ashkenazit ve-Sifrutah (1913), 155–71; E. Timm, Graphische und phonische Struktur des Westjiddischen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Zeitum 1600 (1987), 521–53; J.C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (2004), 355–67 (Jerold C. Frakes (2nd ed.)