European Jews Research Articles

Eastern European Jewish Studies: The Past Thirty Years

This study, based on quantitative analysis of several bibliometric datasets, examines the position of East European Jewish studies. It is argued here that the number of studies on East European Jewry, as exemplified by the datasets analyzed here, is not proportional to its demographic, sociopolitical, or cultural position in history. The proportion seems rather to replicate the mental maps of “centrality” and “marginality” in the contemporary world, with Israel as an important exception. It is further suggested that power relations between centers and peripheries of academic Jewish studies go along the lines of the more general mechanisms of systemic inequity in academia, for which geography and social diversity, together with gender, are the primary and best recognized factors of underrepresentation. The underrepresentation of Eastern Europe is even more transparent when viewed through the map of the geographical origin of the scholarship. Most high-profile scholarship is produced in North America and Israel, while the number of contributions coming from Eastern Europe is negligible. This is surprising when confronted with the apparent boom of Jewish studies in several countries of the region. The sample material analyzed here suggests the existence of self-limiting East European practices which create alternative local circulations for publications produced and distributed there that never merge into a wider international exchange of knowledge.

Entanglements in the colony: Jewish–Muslim connected histories in colonial India

AbstractThis article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

Contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew: The Grammatical Profile of an Overlooked Twenty-First-Century Variety

Abstract Ashkenazic Hebrew is a unique language variety with a centuries-long history of written use among Central and Eastern European Jews. It has distinct phonological and grammatical features attested in texts composed by Ashkenazic Jews (e.g. adherents of the Hasidic and Maskilic movements) in Europe prior to the twentieth century. While Ashkenazic Hebrew is commonly believed to have been replaced by Israeli Hebrew in the twentieth century, this traditional written variety of the language actually continues to thrive in contemporary Diaspora Haredi (strictly Orthodox) communities, chiefly the Hasidic centres of New York, London, Montreal and Antwerp. This fascinating and understudied form of Hebrew is used widely and productively in the composition of a rich variety of original documents for a Hasidic audience (about e.g. Covid transmission, United States educational stipulations, Zoom schooling, lockdown rules, etc.). In this article we demonstrate that contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew has many shared orthographic, phonological, grammatical and lexical features with its Eastern European antecedent. These include: orthography of loanwords based on Yiddish conventions (e.g. חולי הקאראנא xóylay ha-koróna ‘those ill with coronavirus’); morphology of plural loan nouns (בקאלידזשעס be-kóleǧes‘in colleges’, הפראגראמע״ן haprográmen ‘the programmes’); retention of the definite article with inseparable prepositions (בהשכונה be-ha-šxíne‘in the neighbourhood’);

Konsul Sugihara Chiune a polscy Żydzi w Kownie w okresie 1939–1940

Consul Sugihara Chiune and the Polish Jews in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939–1940The main subject of this article is the life and career of Sugihara Chiune, viewed in the context of the fate of European Jews during their stay in the Lithuanian capital, Kaunas, while they were escaping from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939 and 1940. The author investigates how the Japanese consul helped them obtain visas and thus saved their lives. She also deals with his private and professional life, including the turns of his diplomatic career in pre-war Lithuania, and his views on crucial issues involving his activities connected with saving the Polish Jews – even at the risk of his own life and the life of his family. Sugihara continued to issue transit visas even after he was forbidden to do so by his superiors from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Thus the war influenced his later life as a diplomat, not always in a beneficial way. However, today Consul Sugihara is considered a hero and is commemorated in many ways, both in his native Japan and in Lithuania.

Filmography of the Genocide: Official and Ephemeral Film Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews 1933–1945

Filmography of the Genocide: Official and Ephemeral Film Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews 1933–1945

Yehuda Bauer’s Assessment of the US Government and American Jewry During the Holocaust: An Analysis

ABSTRACT Beginning with well-deserved personal praise for Professor Yehuda Bauer celebrating his 95th birthday, this article then examines Bauer's brief but important work Could the US Government Have Rescued European Jewry?, in which he challenges the preferred narrative of American and Israeli Jews: that American Jews were silent, ineffective, divided, timid, self-absorbed, weak, and incapable of bringing a Judeo-centric request to the American political establishment and did not effectively come the aid of their European brethren; that American Jew had the power to do something significant, if only they had tried to use it; and that the American government was antisemitic or, at best, unconcerned about Jews. The article then examines Bauer's contentions regarding the US government's and American Jews' capabilities, interest, and responsibility in saving European Jews. Bauer's consideration is divided into four periods: from 1933 until the Reich's November Pogroms in 1938; from Kristallnacht until the onset of the war in September 1939; from the war until the beginnings of the systematic murder of the Jews, which coincided with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941; and finally during the period of the mass murder, which only ended at the war's end on 8 May 1945. Bauer reconsiders the controversial issue of the bombing of Auschwitz, which he examines from the perspective of the Yishuv in Palestine and the British and American bombing capabilities and wartime priorities as well as the effectiveness of aerial bombardment. The paper also considers Elie Wiesel's challenging of multiple US presidents regarding the decision not to bomb and questions Wiesel's depiction of his discussion with President Jimmy Carter on this issue. Ultimately Bauer's conclusion is that US was not powerful or well-positioned enough to save European Jews, and the Jewish community in the United States did not have the power to impose its will even if it had tried.

The problem of Eastern European Jews and their position in the German-speaking Jewish press

The problem of Eastern European Jews and their position in the German-speaking Jewish press

Drawing is The Best Medicine: Somatic Dis-ease and Graphic Revenge in Miriam Katin's Letting It Go

Drawing is The Best MedicineSomatic Dis-ease and Graphic Revenge in Miriam Katin's Letting It Go Julia Watson (bio) I guess the Germans moved on and I didn't. — Miriam Katin, Letting It Go Comics memoirs have the "potential … to open up new and troubled spaces," as Gillian Whitlock has observed (976). Miriam Katin's Letting It Go, an autobiographical comic published in 2013, opens up these spaces in spectacular fashion by telling a new story of Holocaust traumatic memory. It is at once a manic romp by her irrepressibly witty, slightly foul-mouthed—in four languages—Hungarian-American protagonist Miriam, its narrated I, and a deadly serious engagement by Katin's narrating I with the persistent injury of the Holocaust for surviving European Jews, particularly women.1 And maintaining the distinction of autobiographical theory between these two "I"s is crucial in reading the trouble it makes for both survivors' stories and their diagnosticians, readerly and medical. Letting It Go crafts a new story that is both comic and vengeful in its refusal of unending victimhood while insisting that the somatic dis-ease generated by traumatic Holocaust experience, personal and intergenerational, endures for the duration of life, even if its symptoms may seem trivial or transient in ways that medical treatment does not address. By emphasizing dis-ease, I intend to call attention to the affects and bodily manifestations of traumatic experience, some medicalized as "illness," others as disruptions of well-being, that may persist long after the event. In Bessel van der Kolk's phrase, "the body keeps the score."2 Furthermore, Letting It Go to an extent redirects our focus from the suffering of individuals to the pathology of a national ideology of systemic racism and anti-Semitism that wreaked widespread devastation on a scale medical intervention cannot redress; indeed, grotesque medical experiments were a feature of Nazi death camps. In that sense, Letting It Go serves as a limit case for graphic medicine, one that, I argue, writes back to normative concepts of what medical treatment entails and what constitutes treatable suffering. In her account of lifelong suppressed trauma that she both can and can't let go of, Katin deploys her comic as a mode of wry self-investigation into persistent somatic dis-ease as a means of graphic revenge against Holocaust ideology and violence, as well as questioning the health of the "new" Germany that memorializes horrors it did not experience. Katin, who characterizes herself in the acknowledgments to Letting It Go as "this manic old lady" (born 1942), has had a career as a graphic artist working on backgrounds for animated films.3 [End Page 147] Her earlier comics memoir, We Are on Our Own (2006), luminously registered an autobiographical mix of puzzlement, pathos, and atheistic defiance about being a toddler survivor in flight with her Jewish mother to escape both the Nazi occupation and the Soviet invasion of Hungary during WWII, events that continued to exert pressure in various ways on her adult life.4 Clearly, for a child survivor, such recall is a form of postmemory, in Marianne Hirsch's term.5 But Katin complicates that formulation by linking enduring posttraumatic memory to a kind of amnesia in the "New Germany," despite its culture of remembrance around the Holocaust, that she observes during the two trips she and her husband make to Berlin in 2010. As the comic depicts, in a sense Germany still makes her sick, a reaction that the often-irascible narrated "I" Miriam experiences even as she aims to "let it go." To situate the field of narrative medicine beyond conventional understandings of medical practice and discourse, I turn briefly to a few key concepts. G. Thomas Couser terms patient-centered experiential writing or "autosomatographies" (self-body-writing) as "accounts of living with an anomalous somatic condition, an illness or disability" ("Medical Humanities" 130). In their emphasis on agency in self-narration, these are what he calls "some body memoirs"—that is, life narratives by seeming "nobodies" who foreground stories of their bodies. Crucially, such memoirs "often challenge the authority of medical discourse and seek to destigmatize the conditions in question" as a kind...

The Unique Character of Prayer Chant Among the East European Jews: Part I: System, Practice, and Aesthetics—A Preliminary View

The Unique Character of Prayer Chant Among the East European Jews: Part I: System, Practice, and Aesthetics—A Preliminary View

Migration de masse et solidarité transnationale : le cas juif au tournant du xxe siècle

À la fin du xixe siècle, plusieurs organisations juives, fondées en Europe occidentale pour promouvoir l’émancipation juive dans l’espace méditerranéen et en Europe orientale, se coordonnent pour venir à l’aide des réfugiés et migrants quittant l’Europe de l’Est pour l’Amérique. Apportant secours, renseignements et aide matérielle pour la traversée transcontinentale, elles créent par ailleurs des infrastructures d’éducation et de formation en amont et en aval du mouvement. Cette œuvre, peu abordée par l’historiographie, vise en même temps à rassurer les inquiétudes nées de l’apparition de mouvements antisémites dans le monde occidental.

ПЕРСОНАЛІЇ І ПРОСТІР ПАМ’ЯТІ ПРО ГОЛОКОСТ У СУЧАСНІЙ УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ЛІТЕРАТУРІ

The Holocaust theme was concealed and falsified for a long time because of non-literary reasons. Therefore, only when our country got its independence, a lot of aspects became clarified – especially the increasing of geographical markers of the Shoah, the aspect of memory and traumas of its victims and witnesses, the aspects of a woman history of the Holocaust etc. One of actual problems of nowadays is the problem of personalization of the Holocaust history with including the names of victims, saved and saviors for extending the space of memory about the tragedy of European Jews in the times of WWII. Literature, as well as historical science and commemorative practices, actively participates in this. The object of our attention in the following article is modern Ukrainian prose – novels “Sonya” (2013) by K. Babkina, “Me, You, And Our Drawn And Undrawn God” (2016) by T. Pakhomova, “A Story Worthy of a Whole Apple Orchard” (2017) by M. Dupeshko, “The Beech Land” (2019) by M. Matios. The aim of investigation is the characters of victims and saviors who have real prototypes: an icon of the Holocaust in Poland and Liublin, 9-years-old Henio (Henryk Zhytomirski), Righteous Among the Nations Maria and Stepan Vrublevski (Maria and Stepan Sichevliuk-Vrublevski), the Chernivtsi poet Selma Meerbaum- Eisinger, the mayor of Chernivtsi Traian Popovici, the diplomats Grzegorz Szymonowicz and Fritz Schellhorn. Implementation the life stories of real personalities into fictional form leads to expanding the memory about the Holocaust in Ukraine, and it’s also a way of creating a modern culture of memory, that is particularly important in a context of the international tendencies of finding the common understanding through awareness of a personal responsibility of others’ lives, and non-admission of repeating the tragic pages of the XX ct. history, one of those was the Holocaust. Since the long-term silence of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust victims didn’t create an intergenerational connection in the process of transmitting the memory of the Holocaust, modern literature, with its artistic construction of the past, becomes not only a tool for spreading knowledge about the Shoah, but also a way of creating the cultural memory about this tragedy. The prospect of further research of the following aspect is seen in a deep analysis of new examples of both Ukrainian and translated literature, including novels written by authors that are biographically related to Ukraine.

«Fuir la Shoah. Ma rencontre avec des témoins». Une application numérique pour enseigner la Shoah avec des témoignages audiovisuels

The educational application «Fleeing the Holocaust. My encounter with witnesses» enables a sensitive topic to be addressed in the classroom - the teaching of the genocide of European Jews - with the help of audiovisual testimonies. It gives access to the stories of five witnesses who tell, with courage and strength, of their lives overhelmed by the Holocaust and the way they were able to survive, to build themselves as individuals capable of keeping faith in life and in humanity. Aimed at young people from the age of 14, it is based on an innovative digital device that scripts the student’s learning path. In addition to a unique encounter between young people and witnesses, the application offers a series of tasks based on original documents that lead students to become familiar with the theme and to explore it in greater depth.

My Embrace of Politics: A Cuban Public High School in the 1950s

My Embrace of Politics:A Cuban Public High School in the 1950s Samuel Farber (bio) I am the youngest of three children born, on the eve of World War II, to a Polish Jewish couple who separately immigrated to Cuba in the 1920s, met each other, married, raised a family, and became Cuban citizens. Along with my siblings, I attended the largest bilingual Yiddish-Spanish elementary school in Old Havana, a good distance (seven miles) from my home in the neighboring city of Marianao. Although it was there that I began to openly rebel against what I perceived as unjust behavior by my superiors toward me and others, it was only after I entered a far more diverse public high school in Marianao, in September 1951, shortly before General Fulgencio Batista's coup d'état in March 1952, that I became politicized in my second year of high school, at the young age of thirteen. This was not an uncommon pattern in the Cuba and Latin America of that period, full of revolts against the many military dictatorships supported by US Cold War foreign policy. I liked my new school. The double sessions (half a session in Spanish for the regular subjects and half a session in Yiddish for the Jewish subjects) in the Jewish elementary school, which I badly resented for the distance I had to travel back and forth twice each day, had thankfully been replaced by either a morning or an afternoon session (depending on the academic year), with a few extra hours a week in the other half session for labs and physical education. There were of course major social differences between the two schools. The majority of the students at the Jewish elementary school came from the lower to the upper rungs of middle-class families, with a substantial minority of poor students and a spattering of wealthy kids. Most of those middle-class students were, like I had been, the children of tenderos (shopkeepers) who sold clothing and related dry goods. My parents had been tenderos too, but by the time I began attending the Jewish school, they had sold their small clothing store to a relative to become full-time middlemen in the wholesale business of manufacturing working men's pants. In a manner similar to the "jobber" in the New York garment industry of the mid-twentieth century, my parents' work, performed in a small warehouse next to our house, consisted of having the fabric for the pants cut by size and distributing the finished product according to their clients' orders. The pants were sewn together and ironed outside their warehouse by contractors who worked for them and other small firms like theirs. [End Page 282] My public high school, the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de Marianao, was a totally different world. Although the children of lower-middle-class and middle-class families were a large and important group, there were far more working-class and poor students than at the Jewish school. Students were charged a modest tuition that was discreetly and almost automatically waived for those who could not afford it. Because it was located right across the street from Cuba's main army headquarters at Camp Columbia, a considerable number of my fellow students were the children of military men. These included hardly any high military officers, who would have almost certainly sent their children to private high schools whether secular, Catholic, or, in some cases, Protestant. (Notwithstanding their military background, I found out later on as things began to heat up in my school after Batista's coup that only a very small number of those students supported the Batista coup and his nonideological, corrupt and repressive dictatorship. However, they tended to abstain from openly expressing their skepticism or opposition to the government for fear of risking their fathers' jobs.) The most striking contrast with my elementary school was, of course, that while the approximately three hundred students in my Jewish school were all children of East European Jewish immigrants, there were no more than twenty or twenty-five Jews, almost all Ashkenazi, among the approximately one thousand students in my high school. This was obviously a...

TO THE QUESTION ON REFLECTION OF ROMANIA AND TRANSNISTRIA SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE HISTORY OF EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWS IN THE AMERICAN PRESS PUBLICATIONS IN 1940s

This article covers the content of information about the place of Romania in the 1920–1940s and Transnistria in the history of Eastern European Jews, which was published in predominantly English language materials in a number of American newspapers in the 1940s, such as «Românul American», «The Southern Jewish Weekly», «Evening Star» and «Detroit Evening Times». The purpose of the study is to determine the structure of the newspaper narrative regarding the place of Romania in the 1920–1940s and Transnistria in the history of Eastern European Jews, contained in the mentioned newspaper publications. As a result of the study, a conditionally holistic information narrative on the isignificance of Romania and Transnistriain the history of Eastern European Jews in the 1920–1940s was reconstructed in publications of a number of American newspapers, which spread in mass opinion. The main components of this English-language narrative are following: in pre-war Romania was an increased influence of official actual anti-Semitism; this was of particular importance given that Transnistria was predominantly a zone of Romanian administration during World War II; the plight of Jews in Romania and Bukovina during the war; cases of non-Jewish support for Jews; brutal deportations of the Jewish population from Romania, Bukovina, Bessarabia (sometimes also Moldavia, which regarding changes in the characteristics of Bessarabia and Bukovina) to Transnistria; domination of the atmosphere of fear of the possibility of deportation to Transnistria among the still undeported Jews; manipulation by the Romanian government of the Jewish population through this fear; the plight of Jews, the Holocaust in Transnistria; repatriation to Romania and migration to Palestine as the «historical homeland» of Jews deported during the war to Transnistria. According to some materials, this narrative had not only an exposing anti-Nazi purpose, not only appealed to the public support of Jews who had experienced repression, deportation and the Holocaust, but also had to serve to preserve the democratic worldview of the Romanian minority in the United States (most of the used publications were contained in the newspaper «Românul American»).

A figura de Eichmann e a faculdade do pensar em Hannah Arendt

Resumo: In her work Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt (1999) analyzes the trial of Adolf Eichmann – a former Nazi regime official responsible for the deportation of European Jews during the Holocaust, who, in turn, became an expert on the matter. Jewish. During her trial, the author highlights her inability to escape bureaucratic clichés and her conspicuous superficiality in conventional and standardized conduct. Faced with this figure, Arendt is amazed (thaumazein) with the absence of thought in him: the lack of stopping to think. This astonishment led Arendt to question whether the absence of thought was one of the conditions capable of leading man to do evil. From this perspective, this work seeks to analyze the conflicting relationship between the evil that becomes banal, expressed in the figure of Eichmann, and the human faculty of thinking, in order to avoid catastrophes.

Contaminated Science: The Contribution of German Spatial Research to the Genocide of the European Jews

Contaminated Science: The Contribution of German Spatial Research to the Genocide of the European Jews

Goldmark’s “Thoughts on Form and Style”—and on the Wagnerians’ Anti-Semitism

Abstract In the summer of 1896, Carl Goldmark (1830–1915), a Viennese Jew of Hungarian origin, drafted an essay in which he wrote bitterly about fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism as he experienced it in the critical reception of his operas Das Heimchen am Herd and Die Königin von Saba. The late Austrian musicologist Gerhard J. Winkler characterized this extraordinary text “as [a] private confession of disillusionment, namely, the destruction of the lifelong illusion that Jews could seamlessly ‘assimilate’ . . . into German culture.” Yet Goldmark’s cri de coeur did not, in fact, remain off the record. In the spring of 1911, the Neue freie Presse, Vienna’s most influential assimilationist organ, published the bulk of it as “Thoughts on Form and Style (a Defense).” As I show through a close reading of this text and others in which the Jewish Question figures prominently, “Thoughts on Form and Style” eventually served as a spirited, public defense of Goldmark’s self-perception as a German composer—and this in an age of not only increasing anti-Semitism but also, because of that seemingly intractable prejudice, growing doubts in a younger generation of Central European Jews about the viability of the acculturation project itself.

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism by Marc Volovici (review)

Reviewed by: German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism by Marc Volovici Michael Brenner Marc Volovici. German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 352 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000301 When I was a student at the Hebrew University in the 1980s, I often heard older professors ask half-jokingly: "So, what is the second most important language for Jewish studies?" The answer was Hebrew. The most important one, of course, was German—as most of the significant nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature of Wissenschaft des Judentums was written in German. Marc Volovici's important study could have been entitled "German as a Jewish Language"—but as he makes clear, after the 1930s, this language which once had been identified with so many Jewish endeavors had become a Jewish problem. The language of Goethe was now branded as the language of Goebbels. The language was identified with hashmadah rather than with haskalah. As time passed, the attempts to reclaim German as a Jewish language could be heard again. When Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke in German in the Knesset in 2008, right-wing Israeli politician Arieh Eldad objected by pointing to the fact that this was the language "in which my grandfather and grandmother were murdered." He was countered by former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, who claimed it was also "the language in which Herzl wrote." He concluded: "Languages are not guilty, only those speaking them." Volovici begins his thorough analysis of the love-and-hate affair between the Jews and the German language with the Enlightenment. It was the Maskilim's resistance to the Jargon (as they denounced Yiddish), and their followers' inability to read Hebrew well enough, which opened the door to the use of German as the new language of educated Jews. Moses Mendelssohn's Bible translation initially still had to be printed in Hebrew letters, as most German Jews were not able to read other characters. Not only the early Haskalah but also the Reform movement was initially largely a German-speaking project. German was used as the language of religious reform not only in Germany itself but also in nineteenth-century America, where many synagogue sermons were delivered in German and Jewish periodicals appeared in German. Soon, German was vilified by some Yiddish-speaking east European Jews as the language of assimilation. What an irony that it would also become the language identified with the new Jewish national movement, Zionism. Not only German Jews like Moses Hess wrote their early Zionist writings in German, but the most important Zionist pamphlet before Herzl's Judenstaat, Leon Pinsker's Selbstemanzipation, was written in German despite the Russian Jewish identity of its author. With the emergence of Herzl on the political stage, official Zionist leadership was firmly in the hand of German speakers. The new movement's journal appeared in German, and the lingua franca at the Zionist congresses was, if not pure German, then Kongressdeutsch. Instead of trying to define what Kongressdeutsch is, Volovici is absolutely right in telling his readers why he would rather not define it: "The fact that Kongressdeutsch could not be easily defined was one of its main sources of practicality, allowing participants of the congress to transcend some of the political sensitivities involved in making language choice" (199). One of the most fascinating chapters in the book deals with the gap between theoretical and practical usage of Hebrew by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. While both translated the Hebrew Bible [End Page 476] into German, they struggled with spoken Hebrew. This was a greater dilemma for the Zionist Buber, who confessed to Gershom Scholem: "I believe I have a right to say that 'I know' Hebrew, but as soon as I want to express a thought, it crumbles in my mouth" (160). For the non-Zionist Rosenzweig, Hebrew remained a holy tongue. Both Buber and Rosenzweig continued to express themselves in German—and the Hebraized German of their Bible translation. It was a long way from Kongressdeutsch and Bibeldeutsch to the role of German in postwar Israel. The country that issued passports valid for all countries with the exception...

Black Islands, White Ocean: Postcolonial Paradoxes in a Caribbean “Paradise"

Black Islands, White Ocean:Postcolonial Paradoxes in a Caribbean "Paradise" William F.S. Miles (bio) Welcome to "Paradise" Vauclin, French West Indies Let's play a geographical word association game: I say "Martinique," and you say _______ (fill in the blank). Plausible answers may be "beach," "tropics," "Caribbean." Somewhat informed players might add "French," "sugar," or "rum." But few will think "misery" or "prison." It was quite by accident that I learned the most rudimentary facts about this island in the Lesser Antilles. As my two-year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) teacher in the former French West African colony of Niger was drawing to an end, I chanced upon a pamphlet circulating among PCVs about other teaching opportunities. One, by the same organization that administers Fulbright, sought applicants to be English language teaching assistants in France. Though this was forty years ago, I'll never forget the asterisk and associated footnote in the program description that would come to change my life forever: "Those candidates with teaching experience are eligible to apply for a teaching assistantship in Martinique." That is how I first learned that Martinique was (and still is!) part of France. It put me on a path that would net me not only a doctoral dissertation topic but a Martinican woman to wed and two cherished fruit of that love. Websites were inconceivable back then; all I had was my imagination to conjure up an idea of Martinique. After two years in a parched and landlocked African post-colony of France, the notion of spending seven months speaking French in proximity to an ocean, where sand embroidered the beach rather than encroaching from the Sahara, was appealing. Little did I know how complicated race relations were on the "Old Colony" island compared within the independent republics of former French West Africa. Even today, with Internet galore, the ambivalence of Martinique's place within greater France pierces through the French Government website that describes the teaching assistantship [End Page 255] program today: "The history of Martinique appears to be intimately linked to colonial expansion and the evolution thereof." "Appears" to be linked? Before Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc claimed for Louis XIII in 1635 the island then called Madinina or Madiana, the indigenous Caribs, and before them the Arawaks, had left little in the way of historical records. By the 1670s, French colonists had already given up on enslaving the island's Amerindians in favor of importing much more disoriented ones from Africa. By the 1700s, the original Amerindian islanders had virtually ceased to exist as a community, having succumbed to genocide and deportation (to a reserve in neighboring Dominica). Enslavement of deported Africans followed: the otherwise heralded beauty of the island certainly was lost on them. Slavery was abolished twice—first during the French Revolution, until its restoration by Napoléon in 1802—and definitively in 1848, thanks largely to the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. Technically, Martinicans were thereafter citizens of France. In reality, racial equality on the island was a struggle—not only between blacks and whites, but between "real" blacks and mixed-race Creoles (still called "mulattos"). The entire population of the capital—save for a single prisoner in thick walled dungeon of a jail—was wiped out by a tremendous volcanic explosion in 1902. Colonial functionaries posted to this remote outpost of France in the Americas received hardship pay. Local conscripts who survived the Battle of the Somme to freeze in the winter of 1916–1917 may have pined for the tropical warmth back home; but malaria, yellow fever, and malnutrition were scarcely reasons for nostalgia. France's abdication to Nazi Germany in 1940 gave way to Vichy governance on the island, and overt racism, well into 1943. Refugees from Europe—Jews, anti-fascists, intellectuals—sailed to Martinique as an escape from persecution, only to be detained and in some cases expelled back to the continent from which they fled. Some were held in a former leper colony; war-time tropical island anguish suffused the camp. For four decades I have been returning to Martinique. At first it was as a teaching assistant in a lycée technique, a vocational high...