Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris Corey L. Twitchell Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, eds. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Hardcover $85, ebook $69.95. ISBN 978-0472130122, 0-47213-012-9. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, edited by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, represents a valuable contribution to German Studies, Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Transnational Studies, and Memory Studies, to name but just the most striking interdisciplinary points of contact in which the fourteen smartly wri en and convincingly argued essays contained in this volume productively engage. As its title suggests, this collection not only delves into the entanglements of German and Jewish in German-Jewish culture and history but also investigates the wider cultural, historical, linguistic, and political ramifications when the "bilateral relationship between German Jews and non-Jewish Germans" is further complicated by a third, far-reaching component: transnationalism. (1) Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin's life and work and with specific reference to his 1928 collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street, Three-Way Street is energized by the German Jewish philosopher's approach to historiography, reflecting "the urgency of collecting the fragments and pieces of the past as they are about to recede and [the insistence] on the necessity of reading history as a collection of fragments, as part of a constellation rather than a chronology of events." (1) Combining the multivalent concept of the "transnational" as formulated by Young-Sun Hong with a Benjaminian impulse toward uncoupling the teleological from the historical, Three-Way Street tells many different stories about real and imagined relationships between Germans, Jews, German Jews, Eastern European Jews, Jewish immigrants to the United States and other countries (to name just a handful of permutations), bringing to the fore the highly complex, crisscrossing nature of history, geography, language, and politics when mapped onto the very real human experiences of exile, immigration, and migration. From within this transnational network, the German-speaking world endures as a literal and figurative point of departure for the essays in this volume, for "Germany was an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture, including religious practice, philosophy, literature, and art beyond Germany." (7) Three-Way Street is divided into three sections. Part 1, "To Germany, from Germany: The Promise of an Unpromised Land?" recalibrates "the discussion about Jews and Germans from one of a static one-way street of emigration and exile to a fuller discussion of the complex and ongoing entanglements of Jews and Germans." (9) To this end, Deborah Her examines the fascinating financial, geographical, and philosophical zigzagging that characterized revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg's life, both public and private. Jeffrey Grossmann "seeks to reverse the optic and to consider the impact of German and German-Jewish culture on Sholem Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Anna Margolin, and Der Nister," (10) and Ofer Ashkenazi explores the intersections between photography, filmmaking, and Zionist politics in his essay on Helmar Lerski's 1935 Avodah (Work), a film that takes [End Page 260] inspiration from German classics such as Metropolis to construct a Zionist vision of the future. Alan Levenson discusses what he terms the "triple immersion" that helped shape the lives and work of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals Joseph Soloveitchik, Jacob Ka, Nehama Leibowi, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Part 2, "Germany, the Portable Homeland," engages with "the canonical notion of Jewish culture formulated by German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who famously declared not Germany but rather the Hebrew Bible the 'portable Homeland,' to consider various textual reimaginings of Germany." (11) Jay Geller takes a fresh look at the intricate relationships between Germany and the various members of the Scholem family, looking closely not only at Gershom (Gerhard) and the lingering "Germanness" of his identity after se ling in pre-state Palestine, but also at the fate and ultimately ambivalent a itudes of his brothers Reinhold and Erich. Michael Berkowi discusses the transnational issues that underpinned the photography of Walter and Helmut Gernsheim, German-Jewish émigrés in Britain, while Richard Mc-Cormick offers a tantalizing portrait of the Eastern...