Artists' Books and the Repurposing of Jewish Literature

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores the material history of Jewish literature by examining a trio of artists' books featuring the work of early twentieth-century poets. Each artists' book treats its original source material as a physical object: Moshe Gershuni's Thirteen Etchings for Poems by H. N. Bialik (1987) reproduces pages of the landmark 1923 edition of Bialik's collected poems, illustrated by Yosef Budko, alongside Gershuni's prints; City-Poem: Unpublished Poems by Leah Goldberg Inspired by Woodcuts by Franz Masereel (2012), includes expressionist woodcut prints and images of handwritten poems from a 1929 Masereel edition once owned by Goldberg; The Unlocked Diary: Collected Works (2021), contains facsimile reproductions and translations of poems and excerpts from a personal diary by Matilda Okinaite, a Lithuanian Jewish poet who was murdered in 1941. I use the term "repurposing" to indicate how these works respect the autonomy and inviolability of the earlier texts while also promoting the creation of new meaning for contemporary readers. As a group, these books illuminate the often-precarious conditions in which modern Jewish literary sources were produced, and their ongoing physical vulnerability in archival settings. This appreciation for literature's material qualities allows for a better understanding of how residual traces of the sacred continue to shape the evolution of secular literary genres.