Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

2011

In 1896 renowned Jewish historian and diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow warned a friend, the bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, that the audience for his Hebrew prose was going to disappear given the dramatic transformations of Jewish literary culture in the Russian empire. Sixty years later, in 1964, Yiddish writer and critic Melech Ravitch asked his American readers "Is Yiddish literature at an end?" These two historical moments bracket Allison Schachter's elegantly written Diasporic Modernisms, which traces the ways in which Jewish-language modernism not only survived despite the dire predictions but also thrived over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, from the Russian empire to postwar New York. Schachter follows a series of writers who grew up in the Yiddish-speaking milieu of the Russian empire and then immigrated to different centers of modern Jewish culture, arguing that diaspora was the defining feature of this transnational literary community. Without territory or national borders, this community shared Jewish languages (Hebrew and Yiddish), cultural identities, and-a key contention of this book-a common set of aesthetic practices. Ambitious in its literary and geographic scope, Diasporic Modernisms situates Jewish literary culture within contemporary discussions of diaspora and modernism by historically and conceptually linking the two terms. Recent scholarship on diaspora has, for the most part, overlooked Jewish diaspora. In his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," for example, Stuart Hall alludes to Jewish diaspora as "the old, the imperializing, the hegemonising form of 'ethnicity,'" which contrasts with "the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity" that he privileges (235). "Diasporic identities," Hall continues, "are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference" (235). Schachter's analysis of Hebrew and Yiddish proto-modernist and modernist texts complicates Hall's distinction between old and new as it details the literary production and reproduction of Jewish diasporic texts and identities. By examining the transnational production of East European Hebrew and Yiddish culture outside the binary of exile and home, Schachter seeks to "denaturalize" theological and political discourses of Jewish diaspora. Instead of a teleological narrative in which diaspora gives way to national revival across the early decades of the twentieth century, Schachter focuses on what she calls "a diasporic cultural system": "how two nascent literary cultures, developing outside of the boundaries of national territory, formulated a diasporic modernist aesthetic" (28). She develops this link between diaspora and modernism over the course of four chapters by interrogating the concepts with respect to geography, language, and gender as manifested in specific Yiddish and Hebrew texts. Schachter's reading of modernism as a diasporic strategy is not simply based on individual writers' experiences of exile and displacement. Building on contemporary discussions of European modernisms, she understands diasporic modernism as a set of aesthetic practices that lend themselves to the representation of the social conditions of early twentieth-century Jewish readers and writers but whose main components-narrative frames, fragmentation, and breakdown-are also familiar to readers of modernist texts in other languages. While Schachter situates each of the Hebrew and Yiddish (and Hebrew-Yiddish) writers she discusses within a particular historical, scholarly, and linguistic context, she also considers them in terms of the broader aspects of diasporic literary production. For example, the book's third chapter examines Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson's interwar Berlin writing as part of Yiddish culture's changing relationship with the traditional East European shtetl and the modern metropolis. In stories such as "The Baritone" and "Blindness," Schachter shows how the instabilities of Yiddish writers and Yiddish culture more generally are thematized in fractured texts that "waver between realism and allegory" (87). One of the strengths of this book is its perceptive close readings, evident in

Dibur Literary Journal, 2020

The modernist fascination with the Far East is a well-known phenomenon, driven among other things by the "decline of the West" zeitgeist. When adopted by peripheral communities involved in nation building, it often served other needs and, in the process, became distorted or disproportioned. This article focuses on the representation of the Far East in the Hebrew and Yiddish literatures of the interwar years. Its main argument is that the longing for the Far East in these literatures has contributed to their self-fashioning precisely as occidental and modern. Accordingly, this is an intriguing test case that sheds light on how one peripheral culture gazes at another, how one Other gazes at another-as opposed to traditional postcolonial research that tends to examine Self-Other or majority-minority relations. The article proposes the term "second-order modernism" to describe the fertile changes and disruptions inherent to the displacement of any modernist model onto a peripheral culture.

AJS Review, 2018

Modern Language Quarterly, 2011

This article traces notions of Jewish Orientalism current in German-speaking countries around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Expounding the cultural context of its production, it focuses in particular on an anonymously published novel which provoked a short but heated debate among German-Jewish critics. Purporting to be the work of a Jewish author, but in fact written by a non-Jewish anti-Semite, Das neue Jerusalem appears to be situated quite deliberately at the interface between anti-Semitic and Zionist discourses and to be the vehicle of subversive strategies of dissociation: it presumes not only to speak to its Jewish readers but, from an (allegedly) inside perspective, to speak for them. Thus, in effect, it attempts to insinuate Orientalist stereotypes to its Jewish readers with the aim of relegating them quite literally to “their” place in the Orient (Palestine). But it is obviously also intended to intervene in the contemporary debate about the “authenticity” of Jewish cultural production and ventures to set prescriptive standards to proper Jewishness, especially in the field of literary production. For its gentile reader, the supposedly Jewish provenance of the novel confirms Jewish otherness, lends credibility to its allegations, and seemingly takes the edge off its anti-Semitism: Jewish dissociation appears to be justified and, indeed, mutually desirable.

Since ancient times, diaspora has been intrinsically connected to Judaism. Whereas modernization and emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century had promised to end the principal rootlessness of Europe's Jewish population, the rise of Nazism once again set them back into a diasporic and extraterritorial state. According to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents' continued dislocation. As the homeland of their ancestors has 'ceased to exist', they are destined to remain forever exiled from the 'space of identity', even if they choose to return to the former homeland of their parents. According to Hirsch, the expression of this ongoing diaspora gives rise to a special narrative genre that is governed by photographic aesthetics. The authors' imaginative completion of their parents' experiences in the work of postmemory imitates the capacity of photography to simultaneously make present and 'signal absence and loss'. This article will differentiate Hirsch's approach to artistic representations of diaspora in the aftermath of the Holocaust. By outlining different conceptual-izations of diaspora, I will show that in addition to the aesthetics of photography the postmemory of homelessness can also be expressed by means of nostalgic aesthetics and transcultural aesthetics. The article exemplifies all three of these types of aesthetics by investigating works by the contemporary