Jewish Literature

Quando ha conosciuto Piero Terracina, ebreo romano sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz, Erika aveva solo quattordici anni. Ma nel volto di quel vecchio signore ha saputo vedere qualcosa di importante. Qualcosa che non poteva andare perduto. Giorno dopo giorno il loro legame si è fatto più forte. Prima con le lettere, poi con le domande occhi negli occhi. Le speranze di Erika, il suo desiderio di capire si sono intrecciati ai ricordi di Piero e alla memoria dell'Olocausto, dando vita a un'amicizia che va oltre il tempo e le generazioni.
"Cioccolata contro dolore. Marmellata contro ricordi. È un metodo che funziona, lo uso anch'io quando sono triste, con i bottoni. Apro la scatola e li spargo tutti sul pavimento. Li metto in fila per forma, per colore, ogni volta mi stupisco di quanto sono diversi. Ti ricordi quando te l'ho raccontato? Dallo sguardo ho capito che sapevi di cosa parlavo. "Bottoni. Ma guarda il destino! Anche a me piacciono tanto. Ora che ci penso non te l'ho mai detto, ma ho diretto un'azienda di bottoni per anni." In questo libro, l'amicizia tra un sopravvissuto di Auschwitz, Piero Terracina, e una ragazza.

Shimon Lev
Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, the main cultural agents representing India and its culture to the Western world, including the Jewish communities in Europe and Palestine, were Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948).  Their work and stood at the core of the representation of India in the West and as a result, at the core of the Jewish world as well – Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. As is well known, Tagore was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913) and Mahatma Gandhi was a notable role model among India’s leaders who combined politics with ethics. This paper is focusing on the writing of some of the key intellectuals in the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine toward Gandhi.  The altitude to Gandhi was at the beginning acceptance and astonishment but later, even before the Holocaust, changed to unacceptance and ended in deleting Gandhi name from the Jewish discourse following his 19438 article The Jews.

A late Chabad text attributed to Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn speaks of the Maskilim in the following way: “All the maskilic writers, their students, and their students’ students take every chance to disparage the honor of Hasidism and its princes (that is, Chabad) and to belittle the value of their service to the ethical and financial good of the Jewish people." Even though some Maskilim did see Chabad as a particularly dangerous form of Hasidism, it is hard to accept the impression left by Chabad historiography that the Maskilim saw only the negative elements of Chabad – in fact they presented the group in a decidedly and uniquely positive light – even if their own motives in doing so were clear. The portrayal of Chabad in maskilic literature is important on three counts: first, because these images commanded a central place within the self-consciousness of Maskilim over different periods; second, because the hasidic movement itself adopted certain elements of those maskilic portrayals; and third, because these portrayals influenced – and continue to influence – scholarly understandings of Hasidism. The article presents a few of those images which frequently appear throughout the nineteenth century.

A distinct Anglo-Jewish identity developed in Britain between 1840 and 1880. Over the course of these forty years, a mature, increasingly comfortable, native-born Jewish community emerged and matured in London. The multifaceted growth and change in communal institutional and religious structures and habits, as well as the community’s increasing familiarity and comfort with the larger English society, contributed to the formation of an Anglo-Jewish communal identity. The history of this community and the ways in which it developed are explored in this volume using archival and also contemporary advertising material that appeared in the Jewish Chronicle and other Anglo-Jewish newspapers in these years.

To read more, visit: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/landsandages/we-are-not-only-english-jews-we-are-jewish-englishmen

This article compares two novels: Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog (“Monday”) and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Each novel ends with the death of its protagonist, figured as both a senseless act and the apotheosis of its hero’s self-reflexive, ironic rejection of community, faith, and purpose. Drawing on theories of Hannah Arendt, this comparison proposes to read the two narratives and their preoccupation with incarceration, institutionalization, revolutionary activity, religion, and the family as profound yet oblique parables on the nature of privation, resistance, and commitment in the multiple senses. Indeed, by arguing on behalf of a “politics of failure,” this comparison proposes a methodology for reading Beckett and Kulbak postcolonially that in turn invites further consideration of the postcolonial status of expatriate Irish and early-Soviet Jewish cultures, respectively. This essay creates for the two narratives a community of elective affinity that neither author would have envisioned for himself, and thus demonstrates that their respective critiques of ideological progress—via their shared strategies of parody, linguistic marginality, and exile—fulfill an explicitly political function.

Scholars of postwar American Jewish history have traditionally focused on highbrow texts in charting the shifting ways that “Jews,” as a category, has been defined and characterized. Including postwar middlebrow publications in our analysis offers a more comprehensive picture of the changing discursive representation of Jews during the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Gentleman’s Agreement rarely receives more than a line or two of mention in scholarly accounts of postwar Jews, it is a text that ably demonstrates the power that popular novels wield in shaping cultural sensibilities. Hobson was not the only 1940s novelist to publish an anti-Semitism themed novel, and her connection to a larger body of such literature contributes to the value of Gentleman’s Agreement. The novel’s best-selling status (and its adaptation into an Academy Award-winning film) is what makes it exceptional among this genre. The making of Gentleman’s Agreement, with all of the debate and opposition it aroused, indicated tectonic shifts within publishing circles and the wider American culture about how to treat the topic of Jews and anti-Semitism.

In this essay, I argue that the publication of this book opened up a symbolic space for  Jewish immigrants in the lettered culture of Buenos Aires and also in the future of the country.  Paradoxically, this is achieved, not through a text thematizing the cosmopolitan life of Jews in  the city, as has been the theme of Jewish modernist writers in other countries, but rather through  a depiction of bucolic Jewish life following biblical prophecy. Published at a time when  nationally a realist literature taking up rural themes was emerging in Argentina in contraposition  to more avant-garde forms, Gerchunoff’s opera prima condensed Jewish life in the country as a  usable past – albeit contrived – for the Jews of the city of Buenos Aires. To achieve inclusion in  the literary and political world of the city, Gerchunoff claimed a past rooted in Argentinean  traditions, and the Argentinean landscape for himself and for the nascent Jewish community by  extension. This connection to the land distanced Jews from the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the  time that portrayed them as money-hungry metropolitans.  Gerchunoff’s literary strategy is not only set in the land as home, but in the domestication of identity by using Jewish women as the  keys to integration into modern life in Argentina. As I will show, his female characters as home-savy characters are used to bridge the old and the new worlds.

The full syllabus for a freshman\sophmore seminar taught at UC Berkeley during spring 2019. The seminar reflects on the connection between Jewish literature and the American comic books industry. It also explores main tensions of Jewish living, as it relates to race (where do white-passing Jews fall in the USA racial hierarchy), gender (what are Jewish masculinity and femininity), and God (how do Jews imagine the divine).

Israelis do not read science fiction and fantasy Like any generalization, this one has many exceptions: a small but dedicated community of fans; youngsters hooked on Harry Potter; computer geeks with their Dungeons and Dragons and Spore games. But en masse, it is true: the average Israeli reader despises fantasy and prefers solid, old-fashioned realism. Many an enthusiastic new publisher, hoping to bring the latest in cyberpunk and urban fantasy to the Hebrew-speaking public, has found this out hard way. Had the publisher but known that there is a huge market for all sorts of fantastic literature in Israel; the market that consumes books at stunning speed, always eager for more! But this knowledge would not save him from bankruptcy because the market in question has no need of expensive Hebrew translations. It is buying science fiction and fantasy in its own shops and in its own language, Russian. Among the many divides between the Hebrew-speaking majority and the huge Russian-speaking minority, this one is seldom referred to by the media. But the fact that Israelis, or rather Sabras, dislike fantasy and Russians adore it is profoundly significant. It is a reflection of the different histories and different mindsets of the two communities. And unless we understand the roots and implications of this difference, the communication between the Sabras and the Russians is likely to be as hard as a conversation with space aliens. Like and unlike PAGE 11

EvT version 003 “Gabriel”
…is finally online! Although this version is only slightly larger than its predecessor (585 units versus 560 units in version 002 “Belfegor”), it features several important changes.
• All the units of the previous version have been revised and their descriptions reconsidered.
• The class of angels has been significantly expanded, numerous new names (both general and personal) have been recognized and included in the database.
• For the time being the class of angels of the BT can be considered more or less complete. To celebrate this occasion, meet Gabriel (top right corner).
• Several new and less popular demons have been added (inter alia arognavtis).
• New topics have been introduced, both first-tier and second-tier, inter alia physiology and help. Some of the topics gained new sub-topics, e.g. description and proficiency.
• Comas were removed.
• As with previous versions the criteria provided in the “summaries” sheets are just for exemplification purposes. New functionality allows you to substitute the criteria online. For instance, navigate to “summary entities” sheet and exchange *malakh* with *satan* and you will get all the numbers for the latter. You can do this with what you wish: different topics, entities, classes and the like. To start anew, simply reload the page. The changes you make to the database are not saved – if you wish to tinker with the data, download the file instead.
• As of version 003 genre-specific topics have been introduced.
I am currently working on the monsters class in the BT and hope to include it in the forthcoming version 004 (code-name still to be revealed). The estimated (though optimistic) date of the publication of the next version is summer 2018. Meanwhile navigate to the database and enjoy!

One of Art Spiegelman’s motivations for using animal forms for the characters in the two volumes of Maus was to depict the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust and as well the inhuman behavior of the Nazis and people of other nations. There is another side to this dehumanization in Maus that we will explore, namely what Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) call “becoming animal,” which is a mode of social and personal transformation undergone for the sake of survival and vitality and obtained through adaptation and mutation. D&G use Spinoza’s account of bodily composition and affective alteration to explain how threatening influences can push people and their groups into a temporary state of anonymity. While under this mode of indeterminacy, new arrangements and compositions may freely form and dissipate, which allows them to effectively survive, evade, and subvert the intruding powers. D&G further elaborate these notions of “becoming-animal” and the formation of anonymous “packs” by utilizing their concept of the “machinic assemblage,” whose parts reconfigure in order to disrupt or “minorize” the machinery of the larger system. This minorization operates as well on the level of language, where the minor group works within the major language system to undermine their oppressor’s regime of signs and values. Maus for example adopts the visually metaphoric language that presented the Jewish people in rodent form, as seen for instance in the Nazi propaganda documentary The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, Der Ewige Jude, 1940), which depicts the Jews as rats infesting the entire world. But by shifting to mice and by drawing the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman evades the fixed meanings of the major visual language and introduces very different connotations and interpretations. Yet, one criticism of Spiegelman’s use of animal forms is that it sanitizes the horrors of the Holocaust and falsifies them by rendering them cute and harmless. I reply by including Maus under what D&G call a “minor genre,” in this case a particular kind of minor documentary. Filmed documentaries are rarely objective and unbiased, as we have seen already with the propaganda film The Eternal Jew’s distortions and misrepresentations. And Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), instead of presenting any archival footage of the Holocaust, merely interviews survivors, witnesses and former Nazi SS officers to “document” the subjective realities internal to the events. Maus as well is based on the recorded interviews of a Holocaust survivor, but instead of providing objective depictions of the visual horrors in his experiences, it instead documents the existential experience of losing cultural and personal identity. And the horrors of this particular element of the events are more effectively and faithfully documented using animal forms.

This essay uncovers and analyzes the crucial role of Feuchtwanger's historical novels in shaping Soviet Jewish consciousness and identity, which began to play out in the 1930s and through the post-Holocaust period. Feuchtwanger's collected works in Russian translations, supplied with extensive commentary, were the most significant installment in what the essay calls the "Soviet Jewish Book Shelf "-Soviet Jews' makeshift Jewish heritage. To a large extent, Jewish memory and identity were fostered in the Soviet context through Jewish intelligentsia's subversive and implicit reading strategies directed toward a few books with significant Jewish content that were officially published. The essay argues that the Feuchtwanger-Soviet Jewish nexus was a two-way street. Starting with Feuchtwanger's (in)famous visit to Moscow in 1936-7, he was deeply aware of the centrality of Soviet Jews to his overall vision of Jewish history and the impact his works would have on them. The essay concentrates on the Josephus trilogy and The Spanish Ballad as most pivotal in the drama of Soviet Jewish fascination with and idolization of Feuchtwanger.

עיון פילולוגי בכתב היד של דרשות האדמו"ר מפיאסצנה, ר' קלונימוס קלמן שפירא (1889-1943), שנכתבו על ידו בזמן השואה בגטו וורשה, מעלה תובנות חדשות שלא ידועות עד כה למחקר, ואף מטלטל את המחקר הקיים.
ככל הידוע לי, כל החוקרים שהתייחסו לספרו זה של האדמו"ר, ללא יוצא מן הכלל, הסתמכו על מהדורות הדפוס בלבד ולא עיינו בכתב היד. ואולם עיון בכתב היד מורה שלא ניתן לסמוך על הדפוסים, הן בפענוח כתב היד, הן בתיחום וסדר הדרשות, הן במחיקות שהוכנסו ובמשפטים שהושמטו. הסוגיה הסבוכה ביותר העולה מעיון זה היא שספר זה בנוי משכבות שכבות ולא ניתן לסמוך על תיארוך הדרשות המופיע בדפוס. סוגיה זו הינה בעלת השלכות חשובות ומכריעות בהבנת תורת הייסורים של האדמו"ר, וקוראת למחקר חדש ומורכב יותר.

A partir de varios contextos históricos y con ayuda de su autobiografía, este artículo elabora una cartografía de las zonas de contacto entre la vida y la obra del escritor judío de origen austríaco Paul Engel, quien bajo el pseudónimo de Diego Viga publicó durante su exilio en Colombia y Ecuador una veintena de novelas, un centenar de cuentos y varios títulos de ensayo y teatro entre las décadas de 1930 y 1980.

Drawing from various historical contexts and with the help of his autobiography, this article elaborates a cartography of the contact zones between the life and work of the Austrian- born Jewish writer Paul Engel who, under the pseudonym of Diego Viga, published during his exile in Colombia and Ecuador some twenty novels, a hundred short stories, and several essay and theater titles between the 1930s and 1980s.
Keywords: Diego Viga, Paul Engel, National Socialism, literature, exile, Jewish, Ecuador, Colombia, novel, short story, autobiography.

This article offers a close reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony, exploring the text as a radical reflection on the nature of modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular. The article posits that In the Penal Colony is a meditation on the relation between suffering, transgression and law. For Kafka, where modernity is understood as the incapacity of linking suffering and transgression (sin), the old order is one where the relationship between suffering and transgression is understood as fundamental, and functions as a principle of readability of reality. For the ancients, it is this readability that endows the law with meaning and validity. By integrating parts of Foucault's thesis' on modernity as elaborated in Discipline and Punish with this analysis of In the Penal Colony, this article situates Kafka's text in the context of his literature in general, positing that it is the key text to understanding his oeuvre. In addition, this article offers an original reflection on one of the hidden themes of Kafka's work: the crisis of the modern Jew.

"Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence Towards the Jews and the Notion of Exile," in: Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz (eds.), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 276-298.

מהדורה ניסויית של פרק אחד של הבבלי כשלצידו המקבילות בתלמוד הירושלמי.
במהדורה זו מציגים את הסוגיות זו מול זו, וכבר לימדונו רבותינו זיכרונם לברכה שבנושאים אלו 'טוב מראה עיניים ממראה מקום' (ר"ש ליברמן, תלמודה של קיסרין).
כדי להצמיד את הירושלמי למקבילה בסוגיא בבבלי לא הבאנו את הירושלמי כסדרו גם בפרק החליל, ומראה מקום גם למהדורת האקדמיה ללשון העברית המבוססת על כתב יד ליידן (ציון לעמודים, ובעיקר לשורות). הפנייה זו  נועדה גם לראות את סדר הסוגיות בירושלמי. לדוגמא, עיינו בסוגיה הראשונה ממש.

מהדורה מעודכנת - אלול תשפ"א

È quasi un'epopea quella dei Moncalvo, storia della famiglia di un ricco banchiere ebreo che vive a Roma e cerca con ogni mezzo di entrare a far parte dell'aristocra-zia reazionaria papalina cui si contrappo-ne la figura del fratello Giacomo, austero scienziato positivista. Il libro, in fase di ri-scoperta e di studio nelle università ame-ricane, è uno dei testi tipici del realismo tardo-romantico a cavallo del 1900 dentro «il ritratto quasi buddenbrookiano di una fa-miglia ebraica tra l'ansia di riconoscimento sociale e la fedeltà ai valori della scienza».

Mourning is German-Jewish novelist Grete Weil’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual project. My intent in this paper is to explicate and defend that claim. Weil’s two major autobiographical novels, Meine Schwester Antigone (My Sister Antigone) and Der Brautpreis (The Bride Price) deal with complex issues of guilt, Jewish identity, and irreparable loss; Weil is concerned to mourn these losses through texts that explore and ask questions of them. I will also examine Weil’s collection of short stories, Spätfolgen (Aftershocks), published in 1992, to show that mourning remained a consistent preoccupation as Weil continued her late-life writing. Meine Schwester Antigone and Der Brautpreis appeared in German in 1984 and 1988, respectively, and looked backward. The Aftershocks stories are set in the contemporary now of the early 1990s and work through ways that the Holocaust pervades the lives of survivors and second-generation Jews without regard to proximity to the event.
Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?”

In Afgrond zonder vangnet, kijkt Yra van Dijk naar de betekenis van thema’s als geloof, liefde en ouderschap in de romans van Grunberg. Wat betekenen deze thema’s als alles ‘kapot’ is? En hoe kun je met een ander leven, als die zelf niet echt meer leeft? Gedreven om dit alles te begrijpen, laat  Van Dijk in haar studie zien hoe zijn romans zulke vragen stellen, en beantwoorden.

Speciaal voor scholieren: van iedere roman zijn aparte interpretaties opgenomen: zie de inhoudsopgave.

Met dank aan mijn genereuze uitgeverij, Nijgh en Van Ditmar, die het boek Open Acces beschikbaar maakt, en aan instituut LUCAS, Universiteit Leiden.

Księgi pamięci jako źródło historyczne do badań społeczności żydowskiej na terenie obecnego województwa podkarpackiego Księgi pamięci (sefer zikkaron), zwane również sefer pinkas (księga kronik) czy ickor-buch (księga pamięci) 1 , opowiadają o świecie żydowskiej społeczności zamieszkującej miasta, miasteczka i wsie położone na ziemiach dawnej Rzeczpospolitej. Tradycja ich powstawania narodziła się w średniowiecznej Europie, na terenie Szwajcarii oraz zachodnich i południowych Niemiec, gdzie tworzono odczytywane później podczas nabożeństw za zmarłych tzw. memorbuecher 2. Zwyczaj ten przetrwał do XVIII wieku, a na ziemiach polskich spotykany był jeszcze na początku lat 20. XX stulecia 3. W okresie międzywojennym wydano księgi pamięci poświęcone ofiarom pogromów z 1919 roku z Żytomierza (1921) 4 , Płoskirowa (1924) 5 oraz będącą wzorem dla późniejszych ksiąg-księgę Felsztyna (1937) 6. W felsztyńskiej sefer obok listy pomordowanych przez Ukraińców w 1919 roku Żydów dodano historię gminy żydowskiej oraz wspomnienia mieszkańców 7 .

As the first prominent Yiddish writer from the Polish territories of the Pale of Settlement, I. L. Peretz (1852-1915) was from the beginning of his career an outlier in the geographical politics of Yiddish culture. He dramatized this difference in a number of ways: insisting on the linguistic difference of his Yiddish from that of his colleagues, dispensing with the overt appeals to oral discourse which Yiddish literature had adopted and adapted from Russian literary models, and demanding of himself and his readers a sensitivity to literary style on the highest level of sophistication. As an outlier, these aesthetic differences find representation in analogously exceptional approaches to the question of literary space. Unlike his primary colleagues, and competitors, in Yiddish literature of the day-Sh. Y. Abramovitsh (c. 1835-1917) and Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)-Peretz dispenses with the convention of creating prototypical, imaginary shtetlekh in order to situate his stories, including his most fantastic and parodic narratives, in a verifiable Eastern European geography. He is moreover the first great Yiddish writer to describe these traditional communities from a perspective of the writer living in a modern metropolis, even if the metropolis itself figures in comparatively few of his narratives. What emerges from these strategies is a writer who situates himself not only as an "outlier" with respect to the linguistic and literary conventions of his contemporaries, but also with respect to the territories he describes. His narratives are neither traditional nor modern, neither metropolitan nor peripheral, neither realistic nor phantasmagoric, but in each instance somewhere in between and, more significantly, constantly in a state of flux among these contrasting locations. This essay will trace the narrational techniques and representations of space in Peretz's fiction to demonstrate the dislocations which determine his best writing and provide a model for the leading trends in Yiddish modernism that follow in his wake. ___________________

The Formation of the “Russian Soviet Canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s Works

* Abstract: The author refers under the term “the Russian Soviet canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s works to the corpus of Russian translations, which includes three editions of his collected works in six volumes (1st edn: 1959–1961; 2nd edn: 1971–1974; 3rd edn: 1988–1990). The appearance of these collections was the most important achievement of the long-term program of publishing the Yiddish classic writer’s works in the USSR – a program that has been unprecedented in its size in the history of translations from Yiddish.

The article traces the history of the formation of the “Russian Soviet canon,” analyzes the specific features of translations presented in six-volume collections and in other editions, examines some examples of translation errors and identifies the cases of omissions that were motivated by either ideological or aesthetic considerations.

The author emphasizes that in fact, the “Russian Soviet canon” of Sholem Aleichem’s works was not determined once and for all since all the three editions of his six-volume collections differed significantly from each other.