Staub und Sterne. Aufsatze zur deutsch-judischen Literatur

Abstract

Pazi, Margarita. Staub and Sterne. Aufsatze zur deutsch-judischen Literatur Gottingen: Wallstein, 2001. 300pp. DM 48.00 paperback. Edited by Sigrid Bauschinger and Paul Michael Lutzeler, two of the foremost senior experts in German-Jewish and minority literature, and recommended by Ruth Kluger, the distinguished author of weiter leben, this edition of selected scholarly articles by the late Margarita Pazi comes with the highest recommendations. To Pazi, who had a prominent career as Professor of German language and literature at Tel Aviv University, many of the authors whose works she examined were her peers in more than one way. Like Max Brod, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Jenny Aloni as well as less well-known authors of German language in Israel, history had forced Pazi to work on the periphery of two dominant discourses, that of postwar German Studies and post-Shoah Jewish Studies. Pazi wrote with authority and sensitivity derived from her intimate knowledge and first-hand experience of the processes shaping and affecting German speaking culture in Israel, and she brought the same keen insights to writers from her native Bohemia, including Kafka and Werfel. Pazi was a scholar of the old school in the best sense of the word. Her insights are supported by a wealth of detailed information, which occasionally stands in the way of more abstract, theoretical conclusions. Indeed, Pazi is careful to avoid universalizing and anchors her analysis in concrete facts, historical, biographical, and social. Without the kind of basic research for which she became known many of the Israeli German authors she introduced to German and Jewish Studies, Werner Kraft, Alice Schwarz, Netti Boleslav, Fritz Nashitz, and Hanna Blitzer, among many others, would be forgotten. So would be the less prominent authors of the Prague Circle, another one of her areas of specialization. Indeed, it was history itself that required Pazi to begin with the basics, which meant collecting information about writers whose names, had the Nazis had their will, would have been erased from the annals of literary history. Largely due to Pazi's attempts to reintroduce the multiply repressed German-Jewish literary legacy in Israel and its authors to scholars of German these authors continue to be reprinted, anthologized, and studied by a select readership. Pazi's position as a scholar was difficult. A professor of German in Israel, who published and lectured internationally in German, she was the representative of a problematic tradition in a country where for decades things German were suspect. When the terms German and Jewish were cast as irreconcilable opposites, Pazi dared analyze and discuss the literary themes and styles that had evolved from the tenuous history of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Central Europe. Pazi revealed that for one or two generations, at least, the German-Jewish cultural heritage continued to be productive in Israel. Poetry and prose written in German by writers, the majority of whom had been born at the turn of the century, were devoted to a once flourishing European Jewish culture, addressed the horrors of the Shoah or the anguish of exile, and examined the difficulty of adjusting to life in the newly founded Jewish state. …