The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris Todd Samuel Presner Leslie Morris. The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001090 Bridging the fields of cultural studies, transnational literary and visual studies, translation studies, and urbanism, The Translated Jew is a theoretically rich and strikingly original contribution to Jewish studies. Situated outside the contours of conventional national literary and ethnic studies, Morris argues that "the Jewish" is always already translated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, which give rise to new mappings for the study of Jewish culture and identity. Placing translation at the center of her analysis, Morris undertakes a reassessment of German Jewish textuality by focusing on what she calls the "trans-Jewish." More than merely the act of "moving" from one language to another, the trans-Jewish is [End Page 218] about the continual accrual and dispersion of meaning that exceeds the referents "German" and "Jewish." In this sense, "trans" refers to translation, transnationality, and transformation—all processes that productively deterritorialize the object of study (the text, the work of art, the cultural artifact) as well as the very notion of Jewishness. As such, Morris problematizes the linkage between place and language—a connection that has been productively undone, she notes, by other scholars such as Werner Sollors and Marc Shell—to imagine modes of analysis that are unbound from assumptions that govern the study of national literatures. The theoretical framework of Morris's book is formed by a complex dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Hélène Cixous, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Yosef Yerushalmi, Roland Barthes, and many others. Her aim is to open up new conceptual and imaginative spaces of inquiry between Jewish studies and German studies by exploring zones of contact, intertextuality, transnationality, and translation. "Jewishness," like "Germanness," is hardly a given or authentic object of inquiry, Morris argues, but is instead something that is formed through various acts of translation, transmission, and movement. Rather than simply arguing this idea, she performs it through the original interweaving and staging that make up the structure of the book's chapters. Much more than an astute bricolage, the book coheres around a remarkably rich and highly nuanced set of cultural analyses of German and Jewish textuality, in its broadest possible sense, during the postwar period. To wit, she not only analyzes works of literature and poetry (such as that of W. G. Sebald, Paul Celan, and Rose Ausländer) but also delves into the interplay between urban spaces (Berlin's Sculpture Park) and public art practices, digital art, memory politics, and multidirectional translation (such as the works of Alfred Kazin and Daniel Blaufuks). As a whole, the book reconceives of the status of the "Jewish" literary, visual, and urban text (itself an unstable signifier and object of analysis) in ways that are provocative for literary studies writ large. Placing the Jewish text outside of the predefined and predetermined strictures of national literature, Morris focuses on the "klezmerical" dimensions of the object, unbounded and translated into the broadest possible range of cultural contexts. As she demonstrates so cogently in her chapter on Berlin's Sculpture Park, for instance, the indeterminate translation and movement of cultural objects and signifiers give rise to generative paradigms of entanglement between "Jewish" and "German" and, thus, new ways of thinking about cultural memory, public art, digital media, and urban spaces. This is also the approach she pursues in her "tangential" analyses of literary and visual texts that variously confront the representation of the Holocaust, such as the works of W. G. Sebald, Raymond Federman, Kazin, and Blaufuks. As such, she opens up and dismantles the hyphen between "German-Jewish" in ways that interrogate the basic categories of author and identity in the post-Holocaust world. As Morris argues, that which is "German" is already "Jewish," and that which is "Jewish" is already "German." By showing that the overdetermined space between the very words and concepts "German" and "Jewish" represents a kind of third space of encounter, Morris looks to the ways that fields and objects of study are intimately interwoven, and...