Contemporary Jewish Writing In Europe

With contributions from a dozen American and European scholars, this volume presents an overview of Jewish writing in post--World War II Europe. Striking a balance between close readings of individual texts and general surveys of larger movements and underlying themes, the essays portray Jewish authors across Europe as writers and intellectuals of multiple affiliations and hybrid identities. Aimed at a general readership and guided by the idea of constructing bridges across national cultures, this book maps for English-speaking readers the productivity and diversity of Jewish writers and writing that has marked a revitalization of Jewish culture in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

This book examines Jewish writers and intellectuals in Austria, analyzing filmic and electronic media alongside more traditional publication formats over the last 25 years. Beginning with the Waldheim affair and the rhetorical response by the three most prominent members of the survivor generation (Leon Zelman, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky) author Andrea Reiter sets a complicated standard for ‘who is Jewish’ and what constitutes a ‘Jewish response.’ She reformulates the concepts of religious and secular Jewish cultural expression, cutting across gender and Holocaust studies. The work proceeds to questions of enacting or performing identity, especially Jewish identity in the Austrian setting, looking at how these Jewish writers and filmmakers in Austria ‘perform’ their Jewishness not only in their public appearances and engagements but also in their works. By engaging with novels, poems, and films, this volume challenges the dominant claim that Jewish culture in Central Europe is almost exclusively borne by non-Jews and consumed by non-Jewish audiences, establishing a new counter-discourse against resurging anti-Semitism in the media.

Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.

This book brings together for the first time the works of Jewish authors writing in Swedish, who describe the special circumstances confronting Jews in the twentieth century in Sweden and Scandinavia. During the Second World War, Sweden?s small, long-established, and well-assimilated Jewish community was never subject to the open and ultimately fatal ethnic identification that most European Jews suffered. Older and middle-aged Swedish-born Jewish authors tend to think of themselves only as Swedes. Within the last few decades, however, Sweden has become an immigrant country, and a younger generation writes from a different perspective. Twenty of the twenty-two authors represented in this anthology are still very active, and many of the pieces were written in the last fifteen years. Each work chosen illustrates some aspect of Jewish identity in Sweden, either today or in the course of a century in which Sweden played a crucial, controversially neutral role in a war that had a catastrophic impact on Europe and led to the near-annihilation of the European Jews. This volume provides the complex historical framework in which these events occurred and elucidates the role played by the largest Scandinavian country within it. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Sweden brings together superb work by major writers in one of Europe's foremost national literatures and includes the first English translation of an excerpt from Peter Weiss's recently discovered 1957 Swedish novel.

Voices of the Diaspora offers, for the first time, representative works by major Jewish women writers from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Russia. These stories and essays, written over the last twenty-five years, speak to the challenges confronting the post-Shoah generations of Jews living in Europe: a need to commemorate the lives extinguished in the camps; a desire to repair a ruptured culture; and a determination to reclaim a Jewish identity resistant to assimilation and the threats of anti-Semitism. At the same time, these writers address themes specific to their national contexts. Berlin-born Barbara Honigmann questions the possibility of Jewish life in the country responsible for the "final solution." Maghreb-born Marlène Amar and Reina Roffé address the experiences of displacement and emancipation as Sephardic women in Western, post-colonial societies. Clara Sereni describes how Jews in post-Fascist Italy reemerged with a self-assertiveness that troubled a society that had found comfort in amnesia. Ludmila Ulitskaya portrays a Jewish girlhood on the eve of Stalin's death empowered by the religious traditions of Jewish resistance. From the unique perspective of women's literary voices, this volume reveals to English-speaking readers the extraordinary vivacity and diversity of European Jewry, and introduces them to a new generation of women writers.

This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon. Baumgarten finds in these writers a distinctive and symbolic use of the urban scene arid style of life—whether the city is Brooklyn, Chicago, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, or Jerusalem. He examines the pariah stance, and the different kinds of tension between freedom from communal ties and the pull of traditional culture. He demonstrates how Yiddish can flavor and inflect the syntax, how scripture can permeate the thinking and narrative devices, in writers of various nationalities.

This book examines Jewish writers and intellectuals in Austria, analyzing filmic and electronic media alongside more traditional publication formats over the last 25 years. Beginning with the Waldheim affair and the rhetorical response by the three most prominent members of the survivor generation (Leon Zelman, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky) author Andrea Reiter sets a complicated standard for ‘who is Jewish’ and what constitutes a ‘Jewish response.’ She reformulates the concepts of religious and secular Jewish cultural expression, cutting across gender and Holocaust studies. The work proceeds to questions of enacting or performing identity, especially Jewish identity in the Austrian setting, looking at how these Jewish writers and filmmakers in Austria ‘perform’ their Jewishness not only in their public appearances and engagements but also in their works. By engaging with novels, poems, and films, this volume challenges the dominant claim that Jewish culture in Central Europe is almost exclusively borne by non-Jews and consumed by non-Jewish audiences, establishing a new counter-discourse against resurging anti-Semitism in the media.

This anthology features a diverse and compelling array of writings from prominent Jewish authors in Germany today. The writers included here-Katja Behrens, MaximøBiller, Esther Dischereit, and Barbara Honigmann-did not experience the Holocaust firsthand, though their works continually explore the meaning of it as it is remembered and forgotten in contemporary Germany. From different perspectives these authors offer incisive reflections on German-Jewish relations today. They wrestle in particular with the strangeness of living in a country where unencumbered relationships between Germans and Jews are rare. Also surfacing in their writings are the many foundations and challenges to modern Jewish identity in Germany, including the vicissitudes of gender roles, and the experience of emigration, intergenerational conflict, and sexuality. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany not only features a set of engaging stories but also encourages a deeper understanding of the experiences of Jews in Germany today.