Three-Way Street

Three-Way Street

Author: Jay Howard Geller

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0472902571

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As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany. Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.


The Politics of Contested Narratives

The Politics of Contested Narratives

Author: Ilse Josepha Lazaroms

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-17

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1317615409

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The twentieth century in Europe was characterized by great moments of rupture, such as two world wars, ideological conflict, and political polarization. In these processes, as well as in the historical writing that followed in its wake, the individual as an historical entity often appeared crushed. In line with contemporary theories about the precariousness of historical writing and the self, this volume seeks to understand the important developments in modern Europe from the perspective of the single, sometimes isolated, but always original viewpoint of individuals inhabiting the space at the other side of the traditional grand narratives. Including theoretical chapters as well as detailed case studies, this volume takes a biographical approach to dystopian events—the Holocaust, Fascism, Communism, and collectivization—by starting with the voices of unknown historical actors and relating their experiences to larger processes in modern European history, such as the emergence of the national, collective memory, and state formation, as well as changes in the understanding of modern identities and the (re)formulation of the self. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.


Endless Flight

Endless Flight

Author: Keiron Pim

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2022-10-06

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1783785101

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The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of the World War II. With keen insight, rigor and sensitivity, Keiron Pim delivers a visceral portrait of Roth's internal restlessness and search for belonging, from his childhood in the town of Brody to his Vienna years and his unsettled roaming of Europe. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, and his attitude to his Jewishness, Roth's biography has particular relevance to us now, not only in the growing recognition and revival of his works, but also because his life's trajectory speaks powerfully to us in a time of uncertainty, fear, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.


Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century

Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century

Author: Włodzimierz Borodziej

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-19

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 100003741X

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Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century challenges widespread conceptions of Central and Eastern European countries as merely countries of origin. It sheds light on their experience of immigration and the establishment of refugee regimes at different stages in the history of the region. The book brings together a variety of case studies on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and the experiences of return migrants from the United States, displaced Hungarian Jews, desperate German social democrats, resettled Magyars, resourceful tourists, labour migrants, and Zionists. In doing so, it highlights and explores the variety of experience across different forms of immigration and discusses its broader social and political framework. Presenting the challenges within the history of immigration in Eastern Europe and considering both immigration to the region and emigration from it, Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century provides a new perspective on, and contribution to, this ongoing subject of debate.


Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin

Author: Marc Caplan

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0253051975

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In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.


Catastrophe and Utopia

Catastrophe and Utopia

Author: Ferenc Laczo

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 3110557088

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Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve case studies explore how Jewish intellectuals responded to the unprecedented catastrophe, how they renegotiated their utopian commitments and how the complex relationship between the two evolved over time. They analyze proximate Jewish reactions to the most abysmal discontinuity represented by the Judeocide while also revealing more subtle lines of continuity in Jewish thinking. Ferenc Laczó is assistant professor in History at Maastricht University and Joachim von Puttkamer is professor of Eastern European History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg.


Jacob & Esau

Jacob & Esau

Author: Malachi Haim Hacohen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 1316510379

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Accommodates both the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and their culture.


Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Author: Cathy Gelbin

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2019-01-25

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0472901117

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Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews adds significantly to contemporary scholarship on cosmopolitanism by making the experience of Jews central to the discussion, as it traces the evolution of Jewish cosmopolitanism over the last two centuries. The book sets out from an exploration of the nature and cultural-political implications of the shifting perceptions of Jewish mobility and fluidity around 1800, when modern cosmopolitanist discourse arose. Through a series of case studies, the authors analyze the historical and discursive junctures that mark the central paradigm shifts in the Jewish self-image, from the Wandering Jew to the rootless parasite, the cosmopolitan, and the socialist internationalist. Chapters analyze the tensions and dualisms in the constructed relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews at particular historical junctures between 1800 and the present, and probe into the relationship between earlier anti-Semitic discourses on Jewish cosmopolitanism and Stalinist rhetoric.


The Hotel Years

The Hotel Years

Author: Joseph Roth

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2015-09-03

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1783781297

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The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.