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On Revival
A critique of the discourse of language revival in modern Hebrew literature On Revival is a critique of one of the most important tenets of Zionist thinking: “Hebrew revival,” or the idea that Hebrew—a largely unspoken language before the twentieth century—was revitalized as part of a broader national “revival” which ultimately led to the establishment of the Israeli nation-state. This story of language revival has been commemorated in Israeli popular memory and in Jewish historiography as a triumphant transformation narrative that marks the success of the Zionist revolution. But a closer look at the work of early twentieth-century Hebrew writers reveals different sentiments. Ron...
In Their Surroundings
From the second half of the nineteenth century through to World War II, Eastern Europe, especially the territories that formerly made up the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist Empire, witnessed a Jewish cultural flowering that went hand-in-hand with a multifaceted literary productivity in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages. Accompanied and sometimes directly affected by the dramatic political ruptures of the era, many authors experimented with various modernist poetics in the context of a culturally and literarily closely interwoven milieu. This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents for the first time some of the key figures of the era, including in each case a portrait of the author and a close reading of selected texts, including Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, Leah Goldberg, Moyshe Kulbak, and Deborah Vogel. Of particular interest here is the productive entanglement of cultures and literatures, of cultural contact and transfer, and the significance of space and place for the development of modern Jewish literatures.
A Permanent Beginning
Situates a Hasidic master in the context of his time, demonstrating his formative influence on Jewish literary modernity. The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial ...
Jewish Primitivism
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L...
The Animal in the Synagogue
The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafka’s sense of being a Jew in the modern world and its literary and linguistic ramifications. It falls into two parts. The first is organized around the theme of Kafka’s complex and often self-derogatory understanding and assessment of his own Jewishness and of the place the modern Jew occupies in “the abyss of the world” (Martin Buber). That part is based on a close reading of Kafka’s correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafka’s only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as “In Our Synagogue” (t...
Translating the Jewish Freud
There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.
Middle Eastern Gothics
The chapters in this study cover the four major Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish) and are authored by experts in these literatures, who read and engage with these texts in their original languages. Their intimate knowledge of the linguistic and cultural contexts of the works they analyse provides readers access to nuances in the texts and, ultimately, to a more profound understanding of them. This is the first cohesive collection addressing the Gothic in the geographic/linguistic context of the Middle East region. There has been increased interest not only in global iterations of the Gothic but also in Middle Eastern writing, particularly when it intersects with the Gothic (i.e. Frankenstein in Baghdad). The Introduction of the volume offers a new theorisation of Gothic literature, proposing the "transnational region" as a frame for reading literary texts that cross national and linguistic boundaries.
Strange Cocktail
For centuries, poets have turned to translation for creative inspiration. Through and in translation, poets have introduced new poetic styles, languages, and forms into their own writing, sometimes changing the course of literary history in the process. Strange Cocktail is the first comprehensive study of this phenomenon in modern Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth century to the present day. Its chapters on Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel offer close readings that examine the distinct poetics of translation that emerge from reciprocal practices of writing and translating. Working in a minor literary vernacular, the translation strategies that these poets...
Love
Winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation An incendiary tale of sex work from a young literary provocateur Love is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to neg...
