Deprovincializing European Jewish Literature

Abstract

Deprovincializing European Jewish Literature Allison Schachter A review of: Jewish Primitivism by Samuel Spinner. Pp. xiii 251+. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Cloth, $65 Samuel Spinner's lucidly written new book, Jewish Primitivism, is an exciting new addition to a growing body of scholarship that has aimed to deprovincialize Eastern European Jewish literature through the lens of European literary modernism. These works include, but are certainly not limited to, Chana Kronfeld's ground breaking book, On the Margins of Modernism (UC Press, 1996); Shachar Pinsker's Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford UP, 2010); Allison Schachter's Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2013); Jordan Finkin's An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms (Penn State UP, 2015); and Rachel Seelig's Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016). All of these works read Jewish modernism as an aesthetic project enmeshed with broader European modernist developments. This broadly comparative approach has rescued Jewish literary studies from a sometimes limiting connection to Jewish national revival, making visible the cosmopolitan worlds these writers inhabited and their deep ties with their Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries, whether in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French or Russian. Spinner's book takes up this mantle by tackling a particularly thorny corner of the Jewish literary world: Jewish folklore and its influence on Jewish modernisms. When scholars turn to the folklorist elements of Jewish writing, the discussion too often turns to nationalism and ends there. Spinner's book chooses a different and promising path. He contextualizes Eastern European Jewish writers' investment in Jewish folklore in relationship to European primitivism. Reading Jewish writers as primitivists, he offers new and thought-provoking readings of a broad range of Jewish literary works. A central claim of the book is that Jewish primitivists approached this aesthetic movement from a minority perspective, resisting the orientalizing impulses of their Christian [End Page 283] European contemporaries. For Spinner, Jewish primitivism shares as much in common with Negritude as it does with German modernism. This is a complicated claim because of the diversity of works under consideration, which include not only the Yiddish writers, I. L. Peretz, S. Y. Ansky, and Der Nister, but also Else Lasker-Schüler and Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and Uri Zvi Grinberg, to name a few. The book ties them all together by finding connections between the visual world of primitivism and the formal structures of modernist prose. Spinner reads these writers as part of a Jewish minority culture writ large. What does it mean to read such disparate writers as part of a shared minority literature? Jewish identity here becomes a central concept that goes sometimes undertheorized in the book. However, Spinner succeeds in highlighting how these writers engage with an overlapping series of aesthetic and political concerns about the meaning and form of Jewish difference. In this way, he makes an important case for reading them together. Primitivism serves as generative frame for linking these diverse writers and also for reframing Jewish folklorism in broader intellectual and political contexts. Primitivism as a frame, however, also elides women's participation in Eastern European Jewish literary culture, as I discuss towards the end of the review. The chapters offer provocative pairings that highlight how Jewish writers grappled with European colonial ideologies that could often be turned against Jews. Even when I remained skeptical about whether primitivism appropriately captured the modernist impulses of all of the writers involved, I found the readings to be compelling. They raised important question for me that the book introduces and complicates. Is Jewish modernist writing always written from a minority perspective? Did Jewish writers absorb the orientalist and racist presumptions of their European contemporaries or did their difference generate alternatives to orientalist assumptions about Africa or the Middle East? When the book is at its best, it shows how the writers themselves struggled with their own ambivalences towards the European primitivist project and what Spinner names Jewish primitivism Chapter one delves into the history of modern Jewish folklorism. Here Spinner asks a critical question for reframing the...