European Judaism

Alena Heitlinger, In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews Since 1945, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2006. 238 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7658-0331-3. $39.95 US.

Maria Kühn-Ludewig, Jiddische Bücher aus Berlin (1918–1936). Titel, Personen, Verlage/Yiddish Books in Berlin (1918–1936). Titles, People, Publishers. Nümbrecht, Bruch: Kirsch-Verlag, 2006, 227 pages. ISBN 978-3-93358-645-2

This issue is largely given over to the proceedings of a conference on ‘Jewishness, Literature and the Child’ organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp (12–14 December 2007). Edited and introduced by Katrien Vloeberghs, the papers explore the various ways in which issues surrounding the Holocaust find direct and indirect expression in Jewish children’s literature.

This collection of scholarly essays addresses figurations of Jewishness and childhood in literary texts from a variety of perspectives in literary theory and cultural analysis. Literature appears as one of the revealing instances where these two figurations interact with each other in important ways. Fundamental to the interrelationship between Jewishness and childhood is the endeavour to transmit Jewish culture, history and religion to the children of future generations and to emphasize the latter as both the keepers and renewers of tradition. The contributions aim at illuminating both the referential and metaphorical interrelations between Jewishness and childhood in the medium of literature.

This article focuses on the intertwinement of the Romantic and the Jewish tradition in Maurice Sendak's picture book Dear Mili (1988) whose original text was based on a legend retold by Wilhelm Grimm, the German fairy tale collector. This picture book demonstrates precisely the extent to which the project of writing about Jewish children is influenced by elements of Romantic thought such as proximity to nature, the child as symbol of hope, the contrast between imagination and education, and the new concept of the “strange child”, created by the German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann. Moreover, by juxtaposing Romantic images of childhood with the Shoah, Dear Mili works in multiple dimensions that transcend the meaning of the original story thus transforming it into both a timeless parable about the perpetual menace to children from war, violence and loneliness and a historicised narrative about the Holocaust.

For years, it had been assumed that since the end of the Second World War and up until the Eichmann trial in 1961, Hebrew culture in Israel tended to repress the Holocaust or narrate it according to the Zionist ideology's viewpoint – to accentuate the events of the rebellion against the Nazis and to infer from them a lesson of national revival and restoration. The consensus concerning children's literature, in particular, maintained that it had been utterly committed in the early decades of statehood to extracting out of the Holocaust a 'fortifying tale' bearing a national lesson. This paper, however, argues the existence of a developed Holocaust discourse in children's literature written in Jewish Palestine during the war years, and suggests that children's literature even predated adult literature in setting the Holocaust theme at centre stage. This article aims to shed light on a rare narrative in the Israeli public discourse of the Holocaust: the literary story told to Jewish children in Palestine during the years of the Holocaust. At the time, this new narrative for children was extensive and diverse. For the first time in the history of Zionist children's literature, it challenged the Diaspora-negating code that had been dominant since its beginning. Nevertheless, only a few years later, with the founding of the State of Israel, this new narrative was rapidly 'forgotten' by the Israeli collective memory and proceeded to be neglected by literary and educational research as well. Although it spanned a short time period and failed to leave a literary impact on writings for children in Israel, this Holocaust narrative is tremendously important, having evoked the unique voice of the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv) during the Second World War. It also serves as a case study of the crucial function of children's literature within the public discourse during traumatic times, illuminating the advantages of children's literature as a marginal and peripheral form of communication in the public domain.

This article investigates the recurring patterns in narration and visual aesthetics with which the Shoah is commemorated in children's literature. On the one hand, the essay undertakes an intercultural comparison of the differing iconographic, narrative and commemorative structures found in the varying contexts of publication, i.e. in Germany, other European countries and the United States. On the other hand, the author analyses the heterogeneous figurations and experiences of childhood on three levels of textuality: the representation of children living in the Third Reich, the intergenerational communication taking place between the narrator - often of the grandparents' generation - and the reader, and the construction of implied child readers of the picture books today.

An investigation of discursive characteristics of the child figure shows how they enter into a specific interaction with the conceptualization of the Holocaust. This contribution particularly analyzes manifestations of discontinuous temporality which has been associated both with childhood in various influential literary and philosophical discourses of Modernity and with the literary enactment of the historical reality of the Holocaust. The concentrationist universe and the place of childhood are conceptualized as standing outside linear chronology, though in diverging forms and with different implications. These two discourses mutually influence and change each other, thereby shifting the boundaries of what is deemed to be irrepresentable in Holocaust writing with the eye and the voice of the child.

This essay will examine the concept of third-generation trauma after the Holocaust and the ways in which Jewish American novelists seek to access, recreate and artistically represent (or 're-present') such a traumatic past that is by definition inaccessible. A striking feature in the novels by the latest generation of Jewish American writers – notably the work of Jonathan Safran Foer and Judy Budnitz – is the almost obsessive return to mythology and fairy tales in the literary recreation of their grandparents' era. My essay will argue that this is due to a commonality of purpose that characterizes and drives both mythology and fairy tales on the one hand, and the third generation's imaginative, postmemorial approach to the past on the other hand.

In a speculatively intertextual way, Bruno Schulz's disappeared manuscript The Messiah re-appears in Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) and See Under: Love by David Grossmann (1989). Deeply concerned with the late effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their (grand) children, the two books either feature Schulz as the alleged father of Ozick's protagonist or refer to him and his oeuvre as crucial for Grossmann's hero Momik's project of writing the life and Holocaust survival story of 'Grandfather Anshel'. Models from literary theory which allow for a framing of Schulz's imaginary paternity and his adaptation by and through fictional adoptees range from trauma theory in Grossmann's case to discussions of 'original' works as opposed to plagiarism and forgery in that of Ozick's.

Although The Last of the Just was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1959, the novel and its author have been forgotten. The accusations of plagiarism were such a hard offence to the Polish-Francophone author that he nearly stopped writing as a Jew and a (although oblique) witness of the Shoah. He turned to another Diaspora in his subsequent novel, La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972) and published novels with his Guadeloupean wife Simone Schwarz-Bart in which the Shoah and slavery are intertwined. In this article, I revisit The Last of the Just, which is a masterpiece because, as a hybrid form, it combines lamentation and encyclopaedic narrative, Talmudic legend and Yiddish folktales, marvellous realism and Borgesian 'journalism'. I illustrate how Schwarz-Bart's chronicle of centuries of anti-Semitism in eight European countries offers a vast chronicle 'preparing' for Auschwitz and how his dynasty of the Lévy family, elected as being the Lamed-Vov, sheds light on the unbearable tragedy and the urgent necessity to reclaim and to remember the events of the 'Last of the Just Man', killed six million times.

A close reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust – Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze', Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' – discloses different positions assigned to the child that are paradigmatic for poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The three poems invoke the child as carrier of memory and continuity, and therefore as a link between past and future. However, the temporal modes in which this link is inscribed in each case could hardly be more different. These modes correspond to temporalities associated with the child in traditional – respectively Jewish, romantic, 'enlightened' – discourses. While Celan's figure of the child is bent on eternally holding a wake over the past, Sachs poetically conjures up a reawakening in the guise of a child resurrected in the poetic present. In Kaschnitz' poem, which addresses the perpetrators, the child is evoked as the voice awakening an as yet somnolent conscience to responsibilities to be taken up in the future. A close reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust – Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze', Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' – discloses different positions assigned to the child that are paradigmatic for poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The three poems invoke the child as carrier of memory and continuity, and therefore as a link between past and future. However, the temporal modes in which this link is inscribed in each case could hardly be more different. These modes correspond to temporalities associated with the child in traditional – respectively Jewish, romantic, 'enlightened' – discourses. While Celan's figure of the child is bent on eternally holding a wake over the past, Sachs poetically conjures up a reawakening in the guise of a child resurrected in the poetic present. In Kaschnitz' poem, which addresses the perpetrators, the child is evoked as the voice awakening an as yet somnolent conscience to responsibilities to be taken up in the future.

In the late nineteenth century the great European project of nation-building was set in motion. It was meant to end in a Europe of unified nation-states, each with its own language, history, traditions and a people undivided in its loyalty. The local or ‘merely ethnic’ communities would be effaced, subsumed into the homogeneous nation. Assimilation was the means whereby outsiders would become insiders, strangers would become citizens.

The growing trend in the Jewish community to raise the alarm about Europe and the ‘new antisemitism’ is alarmist and misplaced. The main threat to Jews in Europe lies in the reassertion of atavistic nationalist ideologies and the rise in the persecution of minorities, not in the growth of the transnational institutions of the European Union. The current European polity was born and continues to develop in the great European tradition of pluralism that Jews have done so much in modern times to foster.

This address and subsequent responses were delivered on 30 June 2008 at a gathering of LBC rabbinic graduates who had been serving as rabbis for 25 years or more.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to respond to Professor Saperstein’s excellent and impassioned plea for the survival of the art of the sermon. Our first contact with each other was over this very topic, when he approached me for the text of a sermon I had given during the Falklands war. I told him that I had made a cull of all ‘tied and timely’ sermons, from which I could only derive a p’rat, but not a c’lal. Historian that he is, this greatly distressed him, and we had a few tos and fros about the nature of the sermon.

It is an honour to have been asked to respond to Professor Saperstein’s lecture. He is a ba’al d’rashah, a master of sermonic material, and therefore what he has to say on the subject should always be listened to carefully.

On the first page of the seventy-seventh report, the president of the committee of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich (the main Jewish community of Zurich, Switzerland) writes: ‘During the first regular assembly of the 12th March 1939, President Saly Braunschweig gave a detailed lecture about the situation of the Jews in Switzerland and beyond its frontiers. The speaker anxiously raised the question whether peace would be preserved in Europe or not. On the 1st September 1939 the answer followed: The [Second World] War with all its unforeseeable consequences broke out.’ Despite this horrifying statement, it was only three months after the beginning of the war which brought death and deportation to all European Jews that the new building of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich was inaugurated. Interestingly, the library of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich was founded in those days and was – as opposed to most other European Jewish libraries – never closed down during the Second World War; on the contrary, during the war the ICZ Library was a place for refugees, where they could read the daily press and keep themselves informed about important Jewish questions.

Asherah (for Jehon Grist)

The Languages of Leaves

Smoke and Words

Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), £24.95, 283 pp., ISBN 978-0-8014-4545-3. Review by Marc Saperstein

Bernard Kops, Bernard Kops’ East End, By the Waters of Whitechapel (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2006), £9.99, 238 pp., ISBN 978-1-905512-11-9.

Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud, A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), £18.99, 377 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-927009-5. Reviews by Frank Dabba Smith

Edie Friedman and Reva Klein, Reluctant Refuge. The Story of Asylum in Britain, foreword by Maeve Sherlock, British Library, London, 2008, 153 pp., ISBN 978-0-7123-0887-8 Review by Susan Cohen

Karen E. Starr, Repair of the Soul: Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis, New York/London, Routledge, 2008, 134 pp., ISBN 978-0-88163-487-7 Review by Howard Cooper