Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing by Sunny S. Yudkoff

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing by Sunny S. Yudkoff Rachel Rubinstein Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing By Sunny S. Yudkoff. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. 241 pp. In their 2015 essay "Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational," Lital Levy and Allison Schachter persuasively argue that modern Jewish literature's "transnational networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint" to the dominant model of "center-periphery" circulation assumed by much of comparative literary studies.1 Jewish print culture easily crossed linguistic and geographical boundaries between Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and Jewish readers and writers all over the globe participated in a variety of local, national, and transnational debates via translation and adaptation. Ultimately, Levy and Schachter call for a new vision of comparative Jewish literary studies, arguing that the "rich, multilingual body of modern Jewish writing exemplifies the dynamic interaction of diverse literary cultures along circuits of exchange in the so-called global peripheries."2 One would not think that a seemingly modest book about tuberculosis in modern Jewish literature might serve as an exemplar of Levy and Schachter's bracing vision of Jewish literature as world literature. But according to Sunny Yudkoff's book, which was awarded the 2018 Salo Baron Award for the best first book in Jewish studies, tuberculosis provided a "generative context" for writers and served as a "condition of possibility" for their careers (2), despite the devastation that it wrought on their bodies. In functioning as a "critical mediator" in the creation and circulation of modern Yiddish and Hebrew writing, alongside their German and English intertexts, across Europe, the Middle East, and America, tuberculosis became an engine for transnational and translingual literary exchange in both material and metaphorical ways. [End Page 315] Yudkoff's introduction provides a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary introduction to tuberculosis and its various meanings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the Romantics, tuberculosis was the poet's disease, but for social reformers of the nineteenth century, it was the tragic by-product of industrialization and labor exploitation. Tuberculosis, like other illnesses such as syphilis and neurasthenia, was frequently coded as a racialized Jewish disease. Tuberculosis, that is to say, was a flexible signifier, deployed to invoke a multitude of connotations. But Yudkoff is attentive not only to the "symbolic range" of tuberculosis, but also to its material, lived realities, from the economics and social dynamics of the sanitorium, to the medical profession's changing treatment protocols (15–16). Yudkoff's four case studies focus on the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the Hebrew poet Rahel, the American Yiddish writers who sojourned in the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society in Denver, Colorado, and the Hebrew writer David Vogel. Each of these case studies describes a uniquely multilingual and transnational context for these writers' literary production, complexly mediated by tuberculosis. Sholem Aleichem's illness became a global fundraising opportunity and catalyzed his career, literalizing the "Tubercular Capital" of Yudkoff's title. For the poet Rahel, writing between Russian and Hebrew in pre-state Palestine, tuberculosis as poetic subject and her sickroom as "spatial-experiential frame" (55) helped to crystallize her signature literary style of pashtut [simplicity]. The Yiddish writers who were sent to the Denver sanitorium included Yehoash, H. Leivick, David Edelshtat, and many others. Indeed, the sanitorium, a veritable writers' colony, published its own bilingual literary journal called the Sanatorium. The journal solicited work from Yiddish writers all over the country in its effort to raise funds for the sanitorium, and the writers then used the journal as a testing ground for writing in English—notably, Yehoash himself, for whom the Sanatorium "became the venue for him to test out his American voice and to engage the Anglo-American literary tradition—both in English and Yiddish" (91). Finally, Yudkoff turns to David Vogel, considered a Hebrew writer but who, as Yudkoff persuasively demonstrates, wrote across Yiddish, German, and [End Page 316] Hebrew. Like the peripatetic Sholem Aleichem, Vogel moved between Vilna, Palestine, Vienna, Merano, Italy (formerly Austria), and Paris largely because of his precarious health. His Hebrew novel, In the Sanatorium, was based on his...