Jewish Writers Research Articles

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism by Tim Whitmarsh

BOOK REVIEWS Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. By TIM WHITMARSH. Berkeleyand LosAngeles: UniversityofCalifornia Press, 2013. Pp. xiii +278. Hardcover, $49.95. ISBN 978-0-520-27681-9. hitmarsh’s Goodwin Award-winning “Adventures” lives up to its title: itisindeedasafariintosomewildandwoollyterritory,includingforays intosomeoftheleastcanonicaltextsinanacademicfield—Classics— oftenobsessedwith canonicity.Even the first paragraph includes a shot acrossthe bow: for Whitmarsh, the notion of postclassicism requires us to “rethink classicist categories inherited from the nineteenth century” (1). Thus what might seem a book geared towards contemporary reception—“beyond” in terms of chronology —is really “beyond” in terms of ideology: how (and why) we’ve structured periods of the ancient world so that they seem to flow ineluctably from the previous to the next. For Whitmarsh, one consequence of this sort of macronarrative is a marginalization (almostliteral,here)ofalternativevoicesandliteratures:Jews,Christians, Egyptians, and “bad” (or to put it more economically, under-valued) poets. Indeed , Whitmarsh sees in poetry a more valuable entrance to politics than even prose:inpoetry,thehoarytropesof“antiquity”areredeployedtocunningeffectas poetsrenegotiate, though “traditional” verse, their power and privilege under new regimes. One value—though not necessarily the value—of studying the so-called Second Sophistic is thus to upend previously established “hierarchies of cultural value” (6) and to rethink how we periodize antiquityinto neatcategories and into more(orless!)privilegedauthors.Whitmarshasksus,rather,tosuspendinherited prejudicesand to investigate,with fresh eyes, these upstart artistsof 50 to 300 CE. Of the fifteen essays that comprise the volume, ten are previously published (and here revised), but all contribute to Whitmarsh’s overarching aim: to treat SecondSophisticthinkersasphilosophersofacontestedpastandanuncertainfuture . The book itself is divided into three general arcs: on fiction and fictionality (particularly as touching upon Greek prose); on the cultural significance of both prose and poetry in changed political circumstances; and, in “Beyond the Second W 236 BOOK REVIEWS Sophistic,” on the cultural poetics of Ezekiel’s Exagoge and on specifically Jewish receptionsofprevious Greek literature. Whitmarsh’stourthroughfictionalitybeginswith“TheInventionofFiction,” a sustained critique of teleological accounts of the Imperial Greek novel. (Teleologyisoften thewhipping-boyofthisstudy.)Whitmarsh particularlytargetsnarratives that privilege the importance of Hellenistic fiction over later Roman cultural considerations and which likewise over-emphasize the Greek-ness of the novel at the expense of non-Greek influences. Subsequent chapters variously examine the consequences of Whitmarsh’s will-to-demolish, including a reconsideration of the narrative worlds of the socalled “Romances”(chapter2);theinterplayoftheology,historicity,andfictionality in EuhemerusofMessene’sSacred Inscription (chapter 3);and complementary accountsof the literary“I” and Lucius’ Ass (chapters 4 and 5). (This last featuresa terrific précis of actor and auctor, adapted from Winkler’s ground-breaking narratological study of Apuleius (81–82)). Devotés of now-popular Philostratus will want to consult Whitmarsh’s chapter on Heroicus, which interweaves considerations of cultural identity with geography, genre (i.e. the mise en scene is “superpastoral ” (108)),and, ofcourse, fictionality. Whitmarsh’smiddlesection,“PoetryandProse,”examinestheinterplayofall things Greek and Roman, and his insightful, incisive chapter nine, on the Greek epigram,isamodelofitstype.Atfirstitseemstobetravelingalongwell-wornpaths in its analysis of epigram as an essential component of the Roman system of patronage : poetry as potlatch. But it is a virtue of Whitmarsh’s scholarship that he states exactly what he’s arguing against, in this case both (1) a Bundy-influenced interpretationin whicheveryaspectofa poem contributesto the praiseof the laudandusand (2)deconstructiveinterpretations(à la Newlands)thatemphasizerather the elements of covert criticism (148).1 For Whitmarsh, both schools of interpretation ultimately flatten the complexity of Greek epigram, which triangulates as well the element of the consuming Greco-Roman public. In this way, it is (paradoxically) a public display of private gift-giving and thus a commentary on the relationship between Greek artists and Roman colonizers: who is really “gifting ”culture towhom? Epigramsforclose-readingincludeAntipater2,Crinagoras 24, and the extremely weird Diodorus 1 (with its odd description of the “city of 1 Specifically cited in this context is Carole Newlands, Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. BOOK REVIEWS 237 Remus”); the chapter thus exemplifies Whitmarsh’s style, which ricochets betweencomplextheoreticalconstructsanddetailedreadingsofindividualpassages . The final arc of the study, on Ezekiel’s Exagoge, and on Jewish writers grappling with Greek myth, makes good on the author’s promise to consider Greek literaryhistoryfromneglectedviewpoints;inparticular,Whitmarsh’sexamination of the fragmentary Hellenistic Greek...

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht (review)

Reviewed by: Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht Judith Sebesta Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical. By Stuart J. Hecht. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. 240. $85 cloth. One might think that the subject of Jews and the American musical has been all but exhausted; after all, during the past decade, Andrea Most in Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004) and Henry Bial in Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) have provided insightful explorations of the topic, as has John Bush Jones in Our Musicals, Ourselves (2004), among others. But Stuart Hecht, in his entertaining and downright brilliant Transposing Broadway, proves that scholars have only just scratched the surface of this significant subject, opening a deep vein of gold that reveals just how important the contributions of Jewish artists have been in developing the American musical. His thesis is that “Jews shaped the musical, aside from its entertainment value, to represent their grappling with the promise of the American Dream and the methods of assimilation that might help one achieve it” (4); Broadway musicals are, he asserts, our “cultural Ellis Island” as they provide access to U.S. culture just as Ellis Island welcomed immigrants to America (5). The book focuses on transposition as change—changing styles of music, form and structure, the characters, and subjects in musicals—to reflect an ever-changing audience and nation (13). I knew I was going to love this volume when, right off the bat in the introduction, Hecht gives consideration to the noteworthy but oft-dismissed work of Jerry Herman, pointing out that although the form and structure of his shows, like Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage Aux Folles, are conventional, their subjects are not. They are models of characters attempting to integrate into mainstream American culture and life. The author’s method is primarily dramaturgical, with the volume organized topically by chapter; within each topic, Hecht engages in a close study of representative shows, analyzing how each works onstage “for both the immediate audience and for the larger community which that audience represents” (13). For example, chapter 2 focuses on how the use of the double couple expressed larger societal issues, with Guys and Dolls the quintessential double couple format and its assimilative associations. Like the introduction, chapter 3, “The Melting Pot Paradigm of Irving Berlin,” focuses on a Jewish writer of some of the most popular songs in musical theatre history, usually given short shrift in that history (including by Most), when his [End Page 157] “legacy has not been as recognized or acknowledged as his degree of popularity and artistry might dictate” (43). As Hecht suggests, Berlin embodied the American Dream. Chapter 4 explores musicals that offer instruction on how to achieve that dream, with an interesting examination of depictions of gambling as a short cut to it, as well as portrayals of labor unions and outsiders. He finishes this section with an assessment of Sondheim shows that both celebrate and question the American Dream. One of Hecht’s most brilliant moments occurs in this chapter when he briefly analyzes “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from Gypsy as an assimilation advice (87), taking a seemingly fluff, vaudevillian number and turning it into socio political statement. His good work on “Cinderella Musicals” in the next chapter leads to the climax of the book, and it is in the penultimate chapters 6 and 7 that I sensed that the author feels the closest personal connection to the shows examined, namely, Ragtime, Parade, and Fiddler on the Roof. Hecht opens up the latter to new readings by suggesting a through line from it to later musicals like Hair, Rent, In the Heights, and The Color Purple, arguing that, based in part on this legacy, Fiddler was “one of the most important American musicals ever produced” (185). (In fact, he so convinces me that I likely will be adding it to my syllabus next time I teach musical theatre history, when before I have glossed over it in that course.) And if these two chapters were not enough to convince me that I have encountered a model...

Nach der Befreiung: Ausgewählte Essays zur Geschichte und Soziologie by H. G. Adler, and: Orthodoxie des Herzens: Ausgewählte Essays zu Literatur, Judentum und Politik by H. G. Adler

MLR, .,   Nach der Befreiung: Ausgewählte Essays zur Geschichte und Soziologie. By H. G. A. Ed. by P F. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. Orthodoxie des Herzens: Ausgewählte Essays zu Literatur, Judentum und Politik. By H. G. A. Ed. by P F. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. Peter Filkins, the editor of these two volumes, has already established a reputation as the American translator of H. G. Adler’s prose, in particular the novels Panorama (), Eine Reise (), and Die unsichtbare Wand (). ose familiar with Adler’s work will understand the complexity of this task. e work of this Czech Jewish writer, which has undergone a recent renaissance, is both complex and extensive (two of the novels mentioned here number well over  pages). Filkins’s endeavours as a translator of Adler’s creative work have clearly equipped him well for the task of editing these selected essays. e two volumes present a range of essays on the subjects which were most important to Adler, a Holocaust survivor and exile whose post-war life was devoted to ensuring that the experiences of European Jewry were not forgotten. Indeed, for Adler it was not simply about remembering what happened during the dark days of the National Socialist regime, although that was important too, but rather about understanding what caused it and how it became so entrenched and so coldly vicious in a continent which considered itself to be the heart of the civilized world. Many of the essays selected have been published before in collections or periodicals, but there are also a substantial number which appear here in print for the first time, taken from Adler’s Nachlass, which is held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. e material covers the entire post-war period until Adler’s death in  and in so doing enables the reader to follow the development of his thought from the days aer his release. e first of these volumes, Nach der Befreiung, contains Adler’s essays on Hitler, Artur Dinter, and Adolf Eichmann, as well as several reflecting on the role and ‘administration’ of the concentration camps. Adler’s prose is piercing, and while the shorter format forces him to forgo the detail found in monumental works on the period such as his eresienstadt – (), the factual and analytical approach in his writing belies the visceral experience upon which it is based. ese are essays which both take stock and condemn. e volume also contains several essays on sociological topics, including a discussion of what Adler termed ‘der mechanische Materialismus’, a bureaucratic manifestation of power which Adler claims underlies National Socialism and which has plagued, and arguably continues to plague, the Western world. e second volume, Orthodoxie des Herzens, presents Adler engaging with culture and Judaism and asking how writers and thinkers are able to exist in dialogue with politics and, more specifically, power and its many abuses. He reflects on his own experience as well as that of others, specifically Leo Baeck, but also in more general, conceptual terms. e two essays ‘Dichtung aus eresienstadt’ and  Reviews ‘Dichtung in der Gefangenscha als inneres Exil’ are particularly poignant in the context of his own life. Filkins provides an insightful aerword to each volume which contextualizes the essays and highlights parallels and connections. Both also benefit from a preface by Jeremy Adler, who has been instrumental in bringing his father’s work to the fore in recent years. e essays selected have something substantial to contribute to debates in the fields of Sociology, Literary Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, Political History, and Exile Studies. ey carry a relevance today which Adler himself sadly predicts. e lessons of history are seldom truly learnt. B U C T Literatur und Anthropologie: H. G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Bermann Steiner in London. Ed. by J A and G D. Göttingen: Wallstein. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. is volume draws together fourteen thoughtful essays on three writers and their reflections on the Holocaust in their British exile. H. G. Adler and Franz Bermann Steiner had been friends since attending Gymnasium in Prague. e ‘schwierige Freundschasgeschichte’ (p. ) with Elias Canetti began in  a...

Jewish Cultural Heritage in Serbian Literary Tradition

Hajim S. Davico (1854), born into a family which lived for two hudred years in Belgrade, was an influential figure in Serbian political life and the first Jewish writer in Serbian. In his collection of stories From the Bank of the Danube ( Sa Jalije , 1898) he described the life of the Jewish community living below the Dorcol region on the left bank of the Danube, illustrating some contrasts and meeting points of the Serbian and the Jewish cultural heritage. Isak Samokovlija (1889–1950), born in Goražde, graduated in medical studies in Vienna and worked as a general practitioner in Goražde, Fojnica and Sarajevo. In his best short stories “Raphael’s Courtyard” and “Simha” he described moving personal fates of poor Sephardic Jews in Sarajevo. Žak Konfino (1892–1975) was a physician in the Serbian army during the First World War and a German war prisoner during the Second World. In his collections of short stories My Fellow Townsmen (1934) and Both Sides (1936) he described with humorous touches some unexpected turns in the personal lives of the Jewish population in Leskovac. In his short stories under the title 100 years – 90 Pennies (1952) he wrote about the gradual linguistic assimilation of the Jewish population in Leskovac. The tradition of Jewish literature in Serbian finds its richest expression in the works of contemporary Jewish writers like Ivan Ivanji, David Albahari and Eliezer Papo.

Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 by Dean J. Franco (review)

Reviewed by: Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 by Dean J. Franco Stella Setka Dean J. Franco. Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. vii + 239 pp. Dean J. Franco’s latest book explores the works of contemporary Jewish authors who engage the themes of group-based rights and recognition. Through careful close readings of texts that speak to ongoing debates about race, rights, and liberalism, Franco recalibrates our understanding of familiar Jewish American authors such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Allegra Goodman by juxtaposing them with names perhaps less familiar in the context of this type of literary analysis: Lore Segal, Harriet Rochlin, Tony Kushner, and Gary Shteyngart. Franco asserts that in engaging contentious debates like the problem of multiculturalism, these authors “take us right to the edge of what can be thought and said” when addressing political claims for group-based rights and recognition (4). “In so doing,” he continues, “they test the ethical bases for the claims of multiculturalism. . . . [and] help us think productively about our current crises of [End Page 882] global rights and recognition.” Franco cogently articulates the paradox that confronts these writers, which is the fact that the concepts of individuality and multiculturalism are essentially at odds; indeed, as he shows, multiculturalism in its most basic incarnation represents a radical call for group-based recognition at the expense of the individual. Franco’s examination of how this paradox is addressed in contemporary Jewish texts provides a new—and necessary—focus on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of the issue of race and the rise of multicultural philosophies and policies in the United States. Although the Jewish writers addressed in Franco’s study engage the same themes of group-based rights and recognition that are commonly examined by African American, Native American, and Latino authors, they are wary of adopting or promoting some semblance of a group identity. This hesitance is demonstrated by the fact that they generally tend to deploy postmodern literary strategies as a means of distancing themselves from—and therefore avoiding the sin of presuming to speak for—the broader Jewish American public. Caught between the ideologies of liberalism on the one hand and radical multiculturalism on the other, the Jewish writers included in Franco’s book often seek to occupy a middle ground fraught with competing impulses: “sympathy for an ethical basis for human recognition” versus “criticism of recognition’s expedient circuit into normative politics—the politics of naming groups, claiming rights, and shaming the perceived antagonists of social equality” (4). Franco’s text is divided into two parts. The first, titled “Pluralism, Race, and Religion,” examines texts that address the “dilemma of the moral, ethical, or political conflict that occur when individuals are also members of social groups” (8). Focused on the works of Roth, Ozick, and Goodman, this section examines cultural divisions. The second section, “Recognition, Rights, and Responsibility,” “extends the topic on civil rights and race to the international dimension of human rights and social recognition” (23). The chapters in this section highlight the works of Segal, Kushner, and Shteyngart, and, in Franco’s own words, “offer ways of overcoming those divisions” addressed in the first half of the book (21). Also central to the book are “two major topics, less divisible according to section”: 1) literary accounts of diversity and multiculturalism, and 2) theorizations of human and civil rights. As if the roadmap of sections and subthemes wasn’t enough, Franco suggests yet another metric by which to read the book, directing readers interested in Jewishness and diversity in America to read chapters 2, 3, and 4 and encouraging those who might be drawn to “focused critiques and theorizations of discourses of civil and human rights” to refer to chapters 1, 5, and 6. The thoroughness of the book’s directives bespeaks the author’s efforts to guide [End Page 883] the reader as carefully as possible and will likely be appreciated by scholars seeking to engage with specific subthemes. Throughout his study, Franco adopts a deconstructive methodology, one that challenges the tendency toward binarism and takes to task the reductive thinking that arises...

Fashioning the “Mother of Israel”: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica

Using sources in Judeo-Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew, this article explores the complex processes through which Ottoman Jewish intellectuals fashioned their own vision of Ottoman Jewish history, positioned Salonica at the center of that narrative, and in the process popularized an image of the city as the “mother of Israel.” Ottoman Jewish history writers internalized Enlightenment discourses about “regeneration,” “civilization,” and “modernity” that also shaped the nineteenth-century historiography of Greek Christian, Ottoman Muslim, French Jewish, and German Jewish intellectuals. This article focuses on how Ottoman Jewish intellectuals translated French Jewish and German Jewish historical narratives about Ottoman Jewry into Judeo-Spanish, adapted and rewrote them, and ultimately overturned them. Discovering that German Jewish historians portrayed Ottoman Jews as being in decline while French Jewish writers adopted a more sympathetic perspective, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recast their own former narrative of tragedy as an exceptional story of Jewish redemption and romance in the Ottoman realm. In reclaiming Ottoman Jewish history they sought to strengthen their position within the Ottoman Empire and to elevate their status in the eyes of world Jewry. The Salonican Jewish intellectuals who participated in this effort presented an image of their city and its storied Jewish past as an idealized symbol of the broader Ottoman Jewish experience and founded a Salonican Jewish historiography that still shapes our understanding of the city’s history today.

“Unwelcome Guests” – The Legacy of Violence in the Work of Hungarian Jewish Writers

“Unwelcome Guests” – The Legacy of Violence in the Work of Hungarian Jewish Writers

Anchoring Revelations in the Authority of Sinai: A Comparison of the Rewritings of “Scripture” in Jubilees and in the P stratum of Exodus

As a contribution to the on-going scholarly process of developing a new paradigm for the study of authoritative Scripture within Second Temple Judaism, this paper investigates the use of one particular authority-conferring strategy both within the Scriptural texts themselves and in a prominent example of “rewritten Scripture.” After some introductory reflections on the notion of “Authoritative Scripture,” it specifically explores how the tradition of the theophany at Sinai functions in the book of Jubilees and in the Priestly layer within the Pentateuch. As such, it also attempts to bring classical redaction criticism of the biblical texts into dialogue with the study of other Second Temple Jewish writings.

Commemoration by Deformation: Julian Stryjkowski's Linguistic Strategy

The article focuses on Julian Stryjkowski's best-known novel, Voices in the Darkness, analyzed in the context of this leading Jewish Polish writer's biography and his complicated linguistic and cultural position. A special emphasis is placed on the author's use of the Yiddish language below the Polish surface, so that it comes to the Polish reader in the form of literal translation and leads to stylization at different levels: syntactic, semantic-lexical, and phonetic-orthographic. This strategy has met with a mixed reception, because it can be perceived either as an innovative way to commemorate the world of the writer's childhood or as a deformation on the verge of mockery.

Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969

Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969

Eichmann and His Ghosts: Affective States and the Unstable Status of the Human

Eichmann and His GhostsAffective States and the Unstable Status of the Human Cynthia G. Franklin (bio) I was not surprised by the “sensitivity of some Jews [responding to Eichmann in Jerusalem],” and since I am a Jew myself, I think I had every reason not to be alarmed by it. … However, the violence and, especially, the unanimity of public opinion among organized Jews (there are very few exceptions) has surprised me indeed. I conclude that I hurt not merely “sensitivity” but vested interests, and this I did not know before. —Hannah Arendt, Jewish Writings EICHMANN IN AMERICA, POST-9/11 As the controversial and influential Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil reached its fifty-year anniversary, Hannah Arendt has been very much on the minds of humanities scholars and public intellectuals. Throughout the post-9/11 era, Arendt has been the subject of journal and newspaper articles, editorials, monographs, edited collections, special journal issues, films, and conferences.1 The Arendt revival can be attributed to a number of conditions within as well as beyond the academy that have thrown definitions of the human into crisis, and raised urgent questions regarding the interrelations between humans and human rights that Arendt’s political theorizing addresses. Arendt’s investigations in works including Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, and The Human Condition of humans’ relationships to authority, freedom, civil dissent, violence, imperialism, and power prove timely today. As Dirk Moses remarks, “Hailed once again as a thinker for our ‘dark times’ in offering guidance on all manner of pressing issues, her star shines in the firmament” (872).2 The United States’ ongoing war on terror and the escalation of violence against Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian [End Page 79] Territories (oPt) give Arendt’s writings particular pertinence. Arendt provides ways to understand—and challenge—contemporary human rights violations perpetrated by Israel and the United States that crucially depend on deployments of clear-cut binaries between the human and the inhuman. So, too, in the humanities, turns to the “posthuman” and to affect studies give Arendt’s writings currency. Arendt is preoccupied not only with what constitutes the human condition, but also with the relationship between reason and emotion. As well, disputes over Arendt’s own affect in Eichmann in Jerusalem provide insights both into consequential understandings of who and what count as human, and also into the ideological role affect plays in determining this. In the humanities today, we see narratives about scholars’ inappropriate affect working to undermine the academy as a site that can foster critical dissent, and more expansive understandings of who gets recognized as human and therefore deserving of human rights. Affect is at once evasive and invasive; palpably present, yet open to misinterpretation; individual yet collective; variable yet structurally constituted; tied to thought, yet set in opposition to the more highly valued qualities of reason and the intellect; a marker of humanity, yet viewed as a competitor with the uniquely human quality of rationality. Precisely because affect encompasses these various and often contradictory meanings, it is deployed in wars of ideas in multiple, unpredictable, and often difficult-to-pin-down but powerful ways. Through attention to stories focused on intellectuals’ affect, or on their emotional state, or feelings—when tracking their ideological function, these terms resist precise differentiation—I look to how affect gets marshaled to defend and camouflage the human rights violations that sustain imperialism and other forms of structural oppression.3 Narratives that castigate individuals for having the wrong emotions or feelings, or for lacking them altogether, stand in for and distract from an engagement with their ideas. We can see a particularly clear delineation of how this works in stories that represent public intellectuals’ support for Palestinians or opposition to Zionism as character deficiencies, as evidence of their anti-Jewish sentiment, their hate mongering, and/or their rudeness and insensitivity. This conversion of anti-Zionist thinking into anti-Jewish or otherwise undesirable sentiment is not a new phenomenon, and as I focus on this symptomatic—and in itself urgent—example, for insights into how this process works, I turn to past and present [End Page 80...

Conceptions of Time and History in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Train Stories

The train had a remarkable and meaningful role in the process of modernization and secularization within European Jewish society during the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, this central role is reflected in the literature of the period, in what I would like to call “the train genre.” This essay examines the role of the train in three works by prominent Jewish writers: S.Y. Abramovitsh's “Shem ve-Yefet ba-agala” [“Shem and Japheth on the Train”], Sholem Aleichem's Di ayznbangeshikhtes [The Railroad Stories], and Shmuel Yosef Agnon's “Bi-kronin shel rakevet” [“In the Railroad Car”]. All three writers use the train to represent a common experience in pre-World War I Eastern Europe. However, Agnon, who published his story decades later, assumed that his audience would be unfamiliar with this experience and even with the language of his protagonists. This distance both in time and in language suggests that Agnon's story should be read as a retrospective look at the experience with which the earlier works deal. The essay traces the transformations of the train as a symbol of modernity and shows how Agnon uses a different mechanism to reconstruct the symbolic role of the train against the collective post-World War II memory that had come to associate it with the Holocaust. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” provides a theoretical tool that captures the unique characteristics of the use of time and temporality in the Jewish train genre. The speeding train and the interior of the railcars symbolize the conflict between dynamic changes and timeless space. These stories reflect the ambivalence that Jews felt toward the rapid changes of modernity and their dilemma about whether to take part in this process or to remain outside of it. Moreover, the theme of the train allowed Jewish writers to counter old and new understandings of causality and historical processes. These changes were represented both in the narrative content and in the structure of these works.

Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (review)

Reviewed by: Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker Laini Kavaloski (bio) William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 149. $65.00. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist is a welcome addition to the small but growing number of critical works on twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish writers. Indeed, this is the first book-length study of the works of Bernard Kops, the understudied contemporary playwright, poet, and novelist. In this new volume, William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker make the case that Kops is important to the so-called new wave of British drama as well as to the [End Page 315] historical and social critique of Jewish life in twentieth-century London. So too, much of his work details the London Bohemian subculture of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s of which he was a part. As surely as this is a study of Kops the innovative contemporary writer, it is also a study of Kops the social critic, the activist, and the careful chronicler of London’s Jewish East End. Baker and Shumaker’s approach to Kops’s work explores not only his techniques but also “the subjects that inform his work” (xv). Kops’s texts are examined within chapters that are organized according to themes and issues of identity. For example the first three chapter titles (of seven total) are titled, “The Writer’s I,” “The Role and Function of Family,” and “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging.” While these chapter titles are useful for exploring the central themes of Kops’s work, they make locating specific works difficult. Due to the inevitable complexity of themes in any given work, the discussion of a play or novel may be scattered throughout several chapters. For example, The Hamlet of Stepney Green is found in chapter 3, “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging,” under the subheading “Breaking Bonds, Skinning Cats, Talking Animals.” It is also discussed in chapter 4, “Jewish Identity within British Culture.” While these titles make navigation of the text confusing, the authors do provide a useful set of subsections within each chapter: “Fiction,” “Non-Fiction,” “Plays,” “Radio Plays,” and “Poetry.” These subheadings remain consistent in each chapter, making browsing within the chapters more efficient. Bernard Kops is well known for his depictions and critiques of Jewish London, and the authors are careful to include discussions of the places and events that inspire Kops’s writing. Central to the setting and political contexts of many of Kops’s works are the marginalization of Jewish writers, the experiences of the war years in London, and the shifting populations of the East End community. For example, Kops reconstructs the world of the London Blitz in his radio play The Lost Love of Phoebe Meyers (2006). Though the play is set in Whitechapel in 1994, Baker and Shumaker suggest that flashbacks to the destruction of 1940s bombed-out London (created in part through the skillful use of sound and music) mirror the lost world of the once-vibrant Jewish community in the East End (xiv). The many historical connections made by the authors throughout the text sharpen their focus on Kops’s portrayal of his own identity, and on Jewish identity more generally. The authors claim rightly that “Kops’s plays, poems, and novels express this poignant quest for meaning,” particularly in a demoralized post-Holocaust world (xviii). Critical volumes such as this generally include at least one critical reassessment of an author’s work. Baker and Shumaker’s analysis of one of Kops’s most well known plays, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1956), though an astute interpretation, may finally oversimplify the play. The authors approach this rich text by comparing the characters to those of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Baker and [End Page 316] Shumaker suggest that the Hamlet figure, David Levy, is a portrayal of “the era’s so-called angry young man” (35), a character caught in the languishing Jewish East End and burdened by the Jewish legacy of the Holocaust. David struggles with his father’s ambiguous accusation that David’s mother has...

Hebraizing the Arab-Israeli: Language and Identity in Ayman Sikseck’s To Jaffa and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular

Hebraizing the Arab-Israeli: Language and Identity in Ayman Sikseck’s To Jaffa and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular Rachel S. Harris (bio) Hebrew unified Jews from disparate countries and ethnic backgrounds as part of Israel’s nation-building process; consequently, linguistic mastery of the Jewish language served as the sine qua non of social mobility. Arab citizens living within the new state were caught in this wide net; knowing Hebrew and becoming familiar with secular Jewish Israeli culture was a precondition for advancement and integration.1 In time, Arab writers, such as Emile Habiby, would write in Hebrew, which like Jewish writers in Israel who continued to write in their mother-tongue Arabic, confronts what Lital Levy has described as the conventional binaries of Israel: “Hebrew Arabic, Arab and Jew.” By disrupting these traditional dichotomies, writers “engage translation inside their texts as a creative alternative to barking, as a mode of resistance to the authority that has displaced them from their pasts and their homes.”2 This binary division has traditionally assumed that Arab means Palestinian, and is separate from Israeli, which implies Jewish; but two young writers, the prolific and widely known Sayed Kashua, and the first-time novelist Ayman Sikseck, offer a new hybrid identity in which the Arab-Israeli (non-Jewish Arab citizens of Israel) casts off the polar division the two options represent, and instead these writers present a third path.3 Rejecting the isolated position of the Arab within Israel, and arguing his increasing assimilation in the twenty-first century through mastery of language, integration within the education system, changing social values and economic status, as well as a radical reformulation of political values, the hybrid identity offers ways in which a generation of Arabs coming of age within Israel have staked out a cultural and intellectual space that confounds previous categorizations. The history of Arab writers using Hebrew has been viewed within a framework of post-colonial criticism in which writing in Hebrew is deemed an act of protest. Arab-Israeli writers are considered to produce minor literature: literature by a minority in the language of a majority. This position assumes, as Hanan Hever has shown in his study of Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques, that Arab-Israeli authors de-familiarize and de-territorialize Hebrew by separating it from its Jewish identity while simultaneously opening up space within Hebrew for the Arab-Israeli.4 Writers such as Shammas and Habiby satisfy the criteria of writing minor literature that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [End Page 35] consider an act of dissent by the colonised protesting against established hierarchies of power.5 Arab-Israeli writers, moving between Hebrew and Arabic in poetry, prose, political writing, and journalism have established Hebrew as a space of “otherness,” creating a distance in representations of self.6 In an Israeli context, Hever has argued that Arab minor literature, in Hebrew, “invades and subverts the majority culture,”7 whereby Arab writers, as Lawrence Silberstein elucidates, “problematize and subvert the dominant Zionist/Israeli conception of Hebrew literature as Jewish literature and Israeli culture as Jewish culture.”8 In inscribing the Arab’s story in Hebrew, Arab-Israeli writers have called attention to identities that remain separated within the otherwise Jewish social space. Nonetheless, writing in Hebrew is not only a political act against the Jewish/Zionist elements of Israeli culture, as Hever and Levy claim. It can also, as Yael Feldman contends in discussion of Arabseques, release the Arab-Israeli from the constraints and taboos of his own Arab language and culture: “[F]or Shammas the Hebrew language has become the language of liberation that set free the forbidden story of an internal Arab conflict.”9 Scholars view the dichotomy of Arab-Hebrew writing from multiple perspectives. Rachel Feldhay-Brenner has claimed that an Israeli Arab uses Hebrew as a “relational act that accepts the status of second class citizens and appeals against it at the same time,”10 and Hever has described the use of Hebrew by Arab writers as an “Achilles’ heel,” attacking Hebrew culture from within. Catherine Rottenberg, who argues in reference to the writing of Sayed Kashua that the Arab subject is not a “free...

Mapping the Unreal: Max Blecher in the Shadow of the Avant-garde

Max Blecher, a paradigmatic case of marginality, has been the subject of recent critical reevaluations that established his canonic status in modern Romanian literature. His novel Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality (1936) bears not only the mark of Blecher’s affinity with the Avant-garde, but of his intense and original perception of issues pertaining to identity and the construction of the self. His status as a Jewish writer struggling for authenticity and recognition in the complex historical context preceding World War II and the instauration of Communism adds depth and detail to a dramatic biography lying in the background of his fiction. Peripheral spaces, childhood and immaturity, the revelation of sexuality and death become decisive elements in a metaphysical adventure that is simultaneously an initiation and a metamorphosis. A narrative that validates the author’s Surrealist lineage, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality favors a comparative perspective that equally connects Max Blecher to a Central and Eastern-European framework.

Veza Canetti: uno sguardo al femminile sulla Vienna degli anni Venti

The aim of this article is to analyse some short stories of the Austrian Jewish writer Veza Canetti in order to demonstrate her interest for women lives in Vienna, especially in the period following Worl War I.

Maktub di Iris Eliya-Cohen o le retour du refoulé degli scrittori della seconda generazione d'immigrazione in Israele

This autobiographical novel is analyzed as a novel typical of the second-generation of mizrahi writers , characterized by a particular relationship, marked by close ties with the tradition - represented by the generation of mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers - and with memory and that differentiates them from ashkenazim. These narratives leave a lot of space to autobiography and fill the silence that has occurred in the post-migration period, similarities that can also be found among the Jewish writers of the second generation originating from Algeria and emograted to France.

Jesus and Menachem by Siegfried van Praag (review)

Reviewed by: Jesus and Menachem by Siegfried van Praag Michael Shapiro Jesus and Menachem Siegfried van Praag . Translated by Lewis C. Kaplan. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013. 183 pp. Subtitled "A Historical Novel in the Time of the Second Temple," Jesus and Menachem was first published in Dutch in 1951. Its author, Siegfried van Praag (1899-2002), was born and raised in Amsterdam, where he attended the university and became a teacher of French. He moved to Brussells in 1936 and then to London in 1940, where he worked for the Belgian and Dutch sections of the BBC. He returned to Holland after the war, resumed teaching, and joined a circle of Jewish writers. He published a memoir, many essays, and over forty novels. Jesus and Menachem, set in first-century Palestine during the Roman occupation, reflects the plight of Jews under [End Page 129] Nazi control. It attracted the attention of Lewis C. Kaplan, a gifted student of languages, who died in 1958 before finishing the translation, recently completed by Peter Uys and Lewis Kaplan's son, Kalman J. Kaplan. Menachem appears in no Gospel account of the life of Jesus, but van Praag has invented this character, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, in order to write the novel from his point of view, that of a not unsympathetic, somewhat skeptical but deeply Jewish perspective. Their friendship begins with their first encounter in adolescence, when Jesus saves Menachem from stoning by hostile youths. Although Menachem finds Jesus aloof and detached, he admires his friend's courage, abhorrence of violence, and capacity for compassion. Menachem and Jesus enter adulthood in a fragmented, politicized Jewish world. The main factions are Sadducees (Hellenized Jews willing to collaborate with Rome); Pharisees (rigid adherents to the letter of the Torah); and Zealots (seeking to overthrow Roman rule by violence). Into this seething mix comes a new faction—the growing number Jesus' followers, who are loathed by the others and who return the sentiment. Van Praag has Menachem report many of Jesus' deeds recorded in the Gospels: driving the money changers out of the temple, his baptism by John, turning water into wine at Cana, the Sermon on the Mount, his defiance of Satan's temptations, betrayals by Peter and Judas, and finally his crucifixion and death. As someone who also yearns to rescue his people from their appalling condition, Menachem admires Jesus' integrity but feels that his friend's vision is both too narrow and too broad: he questions Jesus' focus on a personal salvation possible only through faith in him, as well as the availability of such salvation not only to the Jews but also to "the nations" (which historically seems to have been Paul's idea rather than Jesus'). Menachem is also troubled by Jesus' convictions that he is somehow the actual son of God and that universal salvation will only come through his own death. Menachem fears that Jesus is playing into the hands of the other Jewish factions and of the Romans, who would all welcome his death, and he accompanies his friend on the trek to Golgotha in order to protect him from his enemies and to try, unsuccessfully, to dissuade him from martyrdom. Never accepted as a disciple, he hears Jesus' last words and comforts Mary, but he is not a witness to the Resurrection and never becomes a member of the cult. In opposing the claims of competing Jewish factions in first-century Palestine, Menachem struggles to assert the unity of the Jewish people, whose salvation will come, he believes, when they accept the oneness of their [End Page 130] peoplehood despite doctrinal or political differences, treat each other with respect and compassion, and find the collective strength to offer spiritual resistance to their temporal overseers. For him, and presumably for van Praag, the Jewish people were chosen as both central agents and chief subjects of a historical process, a role they must sustain no matter what suffering it entails or what sectarian notions divide them. Through Menachem's eyes, van Praag has also produced a portrait of Jesus as charismatic if self-delusional, a portrait worthy of comparison with such other imaginative depictions...

WHAT MAKES A JEWISH WRITER? Jemma Wayne reflects on what it means to write a non-Jewish novel …

WHAT MAKES A JEWISH WRITER? Jemma Wayne reflects on what it means to write a non-Jewish novel …

THE DIASPORIC IMAGINATION. Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History

by Bryan CheyetteYale University Press, 2013Review by Isabelle HesseBryan Cheyette's long-awaited Diasporas of the Mind draws together his earlier discussions on the intersection between Jewish and...