Reviewed by: Deutschsprachige Autoren aus der Bukowina by Natalia Shchyhlevska Joseph W. Moser Natalia Shchyhlevska, Deutschsprachige Autoren aus der Bukowina. Second corrected edition. Studien zur Deutschen und Europäischen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 55. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 249 pp. Over the course of the last ten years, numerous publications have appeared on the topic of German-language literature and culture in the Bukovina, ranging from picture books to serious academic studies. Natalia Shchyhlevska’s book falls into the latter group, but even though it is a scholarly examination of the Bukovina, it does not reveal much of any new insights into the topic. As a dissertation defended in 2003 at the Ruhr Universität Bochum, it has all [End Page 146] the trappings of such a project—static organization of chapters and a reliance on introducing readers to a topic rather than expanding on established knowledge and bringing to light new ideas. The subtitle of this book—published in 2009 with Peter Lang as a second corrected edition, though it is not clear from this book how it has changed from previous editions—has the subtitle “Die kulturelle Herkunft als bleibendes Motiv in der Identitätssuche deutschsprachiger Autoren aus der Bukowina.” This “bleibende Motiv” points to the fact that most scholarship on Bukovina authors has focused on the important issues of cultural origin, and this book also explores this “persistent motif.” Yet the book is not without merit, as it provides a compact introduction to readers on the important German-speaking Bukovina authors: Paul Celan, Rose Ausländer, Alfred Kittner, Alfred Gong, Moses Rosenkranz, Immanuel Weißglas, Alfred Margul-Sperber, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Klara Blum, and Else Keren. Graduate students and scholars not familiar with the topic will find this book an interesting read, though those readers should be alerted to her treatment of Hebrew as a language in the Bukovina. While the author sets out to explore the significance of the German language to Jewish Bukovina writers, she devotes too much space to the role of Hebrew (beyond its use as the language of scripture), thus ignoring the pivotal debate between supporters of Yiddish and Hebrew. Before the Holocaust, when the Bukovina was inhabited by a large Jewish minority, the Czernowitzer Jews, being assimilated to Western culture, spoke German, while the rural Bukovina Jews spoke and wrote in Yiddish. Today—more than half a century since the creation of the State of Israel—Hebrew as a spoken language is of course more important in the world than Yiddish, but this does not mean that this situation applied to Bukovina Jews, and devoting almost a tenth of the book to the topic of Hebrew as a spoken language in the Bukovina without proper acknowledgment of Yiddish leaves out a large part of the multilingual history of Bukovina Jews. The debate between Yiddish and Hebrew as the main spoken language of the Jews of the Bukovina had not yet been decided in favor of Hebrew, when Bukovina Jews were deported by the Nazis in summer 1941. In fact, the Soviets had even tried to persuade German-speaking Jews during the initial Soviet invasion of Czernowitz 1940/1941 to speak Yiddish instead of German, so it is not clear why the author chose to devote this much space in her book to discussing Hebrew when her actual focus was supposed to be the German language in the first place. The second half of the book explores a more established part of research [End Page 147] into Bukovina, which is the question of finding and inventing identities in exile. The author examines this over the course of three chapters: one devoted to religion and identity, including one subchapter on Christian motives in Jewish poetry; another chapter devoted to the topic of exile; and finally a chapter on “Gefundene und erfundene Identität,” which addresses the Bukovina as an imagined space in literature. The latter is quite an interesting topic, as the Holocaust and subsequent Soviet rule have turned this former Austrian crown land into a mythical land, being mostly spared of war damage and yet completely lacking its pre-1941 German-speaking Jewish population. While this book may not...