Zadoff, Mirjam William Templer (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 768 Army). Whilst they destroyed the dynasty, much of the old ruling elite, and the ideologies that sustained them, they replaced them with a new cosmopolitan ruling elite and over-arching ideology of their own, albeit one that was able to accommodate minority nationalisms in ways which neither the tsarist regime nor Ungern ever contemplated. The Baron’s Cloak manages the rare feat of being both readable and scholarly — my only real criticism would be that, no doubt with an eye to the general reader, the publishers have banished the references to endnotes, rather than at the foot of each page where they belong. Nazarbayev University Alexander Morrison Zadoff, Mirjam. Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture. Translated by William Templer. Jewish Culture and Contexts. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2012. x + 320 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95: £32.50. Mirjam Zadoff’s rigorous study of Carlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad, recently translated from German, will be of great interest to scholars of multi-ethnic central Europe, Jewish historians and medical humanists, alike. Beginningherstudyinthe1870sandendingin1938,Zadoffexaminesthewestern Bohemian spa not only as a cosmopolitan place of healing and leisure but as a ‘Jewish place, with different sides and protagonists, infused with connotations both positive and negative’ (p. 4). Although she focuses on the experience of a minority population, Zadoff powerfully insists on the heterogeneity of the Jewish subjects who lived, visited and worked in the spa triangle. As she posits: ‘an important prerequisite’ of her project ‘is to conceptualize the individual Jewish groups as “cultures” and not as static units’ (p. 6). The merits of this approach become apparent over the course of the study’s four sections. In part one, Zadoff turns her eye to the group of Jewish physicians and balneological scientists who found work in the newly established sanatoria and hospitals. The spas offered opportunities for career advancement otherwise denied these Jewish professionals. In part two, Zadoff moves away from the Jewish medical professionals to examine the overlapping individuals and social groups who encountered each other in the spa. They included now famous figures as Franz Kafka, Ernst Bloch and Theodor Lessing alongside middle-class women looking for marriage matches, Yiddish writers who combined ‘taking the cure’ with public performances, and Chassidic rebbes and their followers. Zadoff plots the ‘invisible social boundaries’ (p. 9) and ‘miscounters’ (ch. 6) of these individuals and groups, exploring how they both engaged each other and self-segregated everywhere from the promenade to the REVIEWS 769 hotel dining room. Zadoff profiles the diverse motivations of these ‘cultures’ by drawing on memoirs, travel guides, fictional texts, spa ephemera and various archival sources in German, Hebrew, Yiddish and, to a lesser extent, Czech. For scholars unfamiliar with the diversity of Jewish life, Zadoff provides a nuanced portrait of intracommunal differences. It was the ability of the spa to anchor such variegated moments of Jewish self-identification and differentiation that also motivates Zadoff’s second interpretive key. Zadoff looks to Foucault to argue that the spas functioned as ‘compensatory heterotopias’ or, in her words, as ‘idealized counter-worlds of everydaylife’(p.9).Andinpartsthreeandfour,theabilityofthespastofunction as such idealized, orderly and protective espaces autres assumes the clearest urgency. These final sections draw attention to Jewish spa culture between the World Wars. Located between western and eastern Europe, the Bohemian resort offered tourists a reachable sanctuary of ‘relaxation and recuperation’ as German and Austrian spas became increasingly hostile to Jewish visitors (p. 208). In 1921 and 1923, for example, the World Zionist Congress convened in Carlsbad. In this atmosphere, the rhetoric of bodily healing easily translated into a Zionist discussion of national-political revivification and many Congress participants ‘stay[ed] on afterward to take the healing waters’ (p. 199). ThesefinalsectionsarealsowhereZadoff’sskillsasbothreaderandinterpreter are at their best. Here, Zadoff does the most work to examine the reaction of local Jews to the growing sentiments of antisemitism in the spa towns. As she does throughout, Zadoff draws on the tools of microhistory to narrate a number of conversations as to how best to respond to such obstacles. Jewish business owners and community organizations feared that such antisemitic rhetoric would discourage the arrival...