Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933

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Acknowledgments True to its theme, this book evolved over the course of my own migration. It began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of three wonderful guides. I thank Paul Mendes-Flohr for modeling superb scholarship and for his warmth and unflagging encouragement. Eric Santner inspired me with his acumen and strengthened my motivation to press forward. Jan Schwarz, my first guide through “Yiddishland,” has always shared his knowledge and time generously. The Centre for Jewish Studies and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto provided a collegial home as I began the process of transforming the dissertation into a book. I was privileged to hold the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellowship, which allowed me to further my research among talented colleagues and to discover my love of teaching. The most recent chapters were written during my time as a Mandel Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I extend my gratitude to the Mandel Foundation for supporting my research and for creating such a vibrant and welcoming place to work. During my time in Israel I was fortunate to visit the home of the bilingual poet Tuvia RГјbner on Kibbutz Merhavia. As we sat in his modest living room talking at length about his beloved mentor Ludwig Strauss, Tuvia brought the man I knew only from books and archives to life. Alternating between Hebrew and German, the eloquent, mild-mannered nonegenarian offered me a precious link between past and present. Our meeting is a memory that I will cherish. Several colleagues read and commented on parts of this book at various stages of its development. I am especially grateful to Na’ama Rokem and Page xii →Marc Caplan for their superb insights. I also thank Anna Shternshis, Justin Cammy, and Shachar Pinsker for helping me navigate the publishing process. You are not only excellent colleagues; you are true friends. My research on Ludwig Strauss and Moyshe Kulbak has furnished articles published in the Jewish Quarterly Review, Prooftexts, and Modern Language Notes. I thank David Myers for encouraging me early on to publish my work, and Amir Eshel for giving me the confidence that it would command an audience. I wish to thank Aaron McCollough for accepting the book for publication and Scott Ham and his staff at the University of Michigan Press for shepherding it to completion. Scott Spector read the manuscript thoroughly and offered invaluable suggestions for improvement. Writing is for the most part a solitary activity. Family and friends prevent it from becoming a lonely one. My mother, Julie, read every page of this book before it saw print, and although she is not exactly impartial, she is certainly perspicacious, never failing to spot an awkward turn of phrase or to delight at an especially graceful one. My father, Michael, is my biggest fan, and I thank him for reminding me to live life with confidence and to enjoy every moment. Erol Boran read my work both critically and generously and was by my side as this project meandered its way to completion—from Toronto to Berlin to Tel Aviv and back. Amid all the wandering, Erol, with you, I am home.

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A Note on the Orthography and Transliteration When quoting from Hebrew and Yiddish, I have preserved the original text rather than transliterating it. For the sake of consistency, I have updated the Yiddish orthography to the YIVO system. In my discussions of these texts I have adhered to YIVO transliteration rules for the Yiddish and the ALA/LC system for the Hebrew. Names of Hebrew and Yiddish authors are also transliterated according to these conventions, unless the spelling preferred by scholars differs from the transliteration, such as Uri Zvi Greenberg (instead of Uri Tsevi Grinberg). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German, Hebrew, and Yiddish are my own.

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Introduction At the Threshold From his sickbed in Berlin-Steglitz during the winter of 1924, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his friend Hugo Bergmann, then living in Palestine, in which he described his surroundings warmly: 50 paces from my balcony is the holiday house of the Berlin Jewish People’s Home. Through the trees I can see the children playing. Happy, healthy, spirited children. East European Jews [Ostjuden] rescued by West European Jews [Westjuden] from the dangers of Berlin. Half the days and nights the house, the forest, and the beach are filled with song. When I am among them I am not happy but at the threshold of happiness.1 Although Kafka’s health had deteriorated significantly in Berlin, it was there, in the small apartment he shared with his beloved Dora Diamant, that he found himself “at the threshold of happiness” (vor der Schwelle des GlГјcks). Dora, a twenty-five-year-old rabbi’s daughter who had broken away from her Hasidic family in Poland, worked as a volunteer at the jГјdisches Volksheim (Jewish People’s Home), a relief center for East European Jewish refugees displaced by war and pogroms who now struggled to make a new life in the Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s Jewish quarter. In addition to providing material relief, the Volksheim helped prepare Jewish orphans for resettlement in Palestine and encouraged community traditions through a variety of cultural programs, including folk dance, hiking, and Hasidic storytelling, for which Dora displayed a particular penchant. Her voice likely accompanied those of the cheerful children that Kafka overheard from his balcony.2 At the center of Kafka’s relationship with Dora was the dream of Palestine. In Berlin they playfully discussed immigrating to Tel Aviv and openingPage 2 → a restaurant where she would cook and he would wait tables.3 He even took Hebrew lessons in preparation for the journey mentioned repeatedly in his late letters and diaries.4 This fantasy was not new, however. It had played an equally important role in Kafka’s first romance with Felice Bauer, which he initiated in 1912 with a letter written in an uncharacteristically decisive tone: “[M]y name is Franz Kafka, and I am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at Director Brod’s in Prague, the oneВ .В .В . who finally, with the very hand now striking the keys, held your hand, the one which confirmed a promise to accompany him next year to Palestine.”5 Over the next four years, Kafka continually reminded Felice of their shared Zionist bond, urging her to volunteer at the volksheim and monitoring her involvement closely.6 Yet he never made any concrete plans to accompany her to Palestine, nor did he fulfill his promise to marry her. In fact, he broke their engagement twice. To this self-proclaimed “antisocial man,” marriage and Zionism represented the most “social of acts,” a threat to the solitary life of the writer, and thus an impossible path.7 It is therefore striking that he only committed to marriage and to Palestine after meeting Dora, at which point it was certain that his poor health would prevent him from fulfilling either promise. For him, Zionist aliyah would never amount to more than “something to hope for.”8 Yet it was precisely this hope that held such powerful appeal. Kafka’s Zionism was neither an end goal nor an unrealizable dream but rather “an entrance to something far greater,” as he wrote to Felice in 1916, “the only path or thresholdВ .В .В . that can lead to spiritual liberation.”9 How was this spiritual threshold connected to the “threshold of happiness” mentioned in the 1924 letter to Hugo Bergmann? In both instances, Kafka used the word “threshold” (Schwelle) to signify a latent possibility, a potential gateway from his assimilated, bourgeois milieu to a purer cultural and spiritual origin located in the mythologized East. The “East” was not confined to Palestine. Kafka’s encounter with Yitzhak LГ¶wy’s Yiddish theater troupe in 1911 has been acknowledged as his initiation into the world of East European Jewish culture, to which he turned in search of an alternative to the spiritless nature of his parents’ generation, whose Judaism, he lamented, had “dribbled away.”10 Shortly after his encounter with the Yiddish theater troupe, he delivered his “Speech on the Yiddish Language” to the Bar Kochba Society of Prague, in which he informed his assimilated German-speaking audience, “[You] understand much more Yiddish than you

think.”11 He presented Yiddish as a language “without grammar” that is understood intuitively rather than intellectually. “Remain still,” he urged his listeners, “and you will suddenly be in the midst of Yiddish.”12 Page 3 →In the Berlin of 1924, nearing the end of his life, Kafka found himself once again in the midst of Yiddish. The joyous crooning of East European children at the Volksheim reawakened in him a sense of redemptive possibility. His idealistic impression of the Volksheim as a space in which Westjuden and Ostjuden harmoniously aid and uplift one another represented the ultimate expression of the spiritual threshold that he had previously discovered in the Zionist movement. Berlin hardly seems a natural place for Kafka to have discovered joy, however. For a body ravaged by sickness (tuberculosis had spread from his lungs to his larynx, making it almost impossible to speak) urban living was anything but salubrious. Upon his arrival in Berlin in 1923, moreover, he discovered a city in the throes of spiraling inflation, staggering unemployment, and violence between extremists of the Left and Right. In an effort to insulate himself from the dismal urban reality, he settled in the leafy neighborhood of Steglitz-Zehlendorf on Berlin’s western edge, as far removed from the inner city as possible.13 It was not the bustling metropolis that inspired hope in the ailing writer; it was the melody heard from his balcony. Although Kafka saw Berlin as a mere “whistle-stop” (Zwischenstation, literally “in-between station”), the city occupied an important role in his imagination as the site of a quasi-messianic encounter between Ostjuden and Westjuden, and as the space from which he envisioned his own desired eastward journey. During the last months of his life he and Dora fantasized not only about Palestine but also about returning to her native Galicia, where they might join a rural farming community and live out the rest of their days in nature.14 While the couple imagined their passage from Berlin eastward to either Palestine or Poland, Berlin continued to gain prominence as a major destination for Jewish exiles and refugees from Eastern Europe, including some of the most prominent names in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, such as S. Y. Agnon, H. N. Bialik, Dovid Bergelson, and Moyshe Kulbak.15 In the famed Romanisches CafГ©, German-Jewish patrons such as Alfred DГ¶blin and Else Lasker-SchГјler regularly crossed paths with Hebrew and Yiddish writers for whom the locale represented, in the words of the Yiddish poet Avrom Nokhum Stenzel, a temporary “ingathering of the exiles.”16 Berlin was the transit point where native German Jews and Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe crossed paths for a brief, tumultuous, yet extraordinarily rich moment. Like Kafka, many of these writers experienced Berlin as a “whistle-stop” suspended between empire and nation-state, between the painful political status quo and an anticipated final destination. In Kafka’s case, the destination remained elusive. By the winter of 1924 his battered windpipes could Page 4 →produce little more than wheezing sounds reminiscent of the eponymous heroine’s “whistling” in “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” the last story he would write. In March of that year worsening symptoms forced him back to his family home in Prague, and then to a sanatorium in Kierling, outside Vienna, where he died soon thereafter. Although Kafka saw Berlin as the spiritual threshold between West and East, between his own mundane reality and the dream of “something far greater,” it was also the site of relentless decline. As in his parable “Before the Law,” he remained perforce at the threshold, never quite to cross over.

Strangers at the Threshold Berlin figures in this book as a threshold. The term signifies a relational concept: the border or link between inside and outside, between intimacy and estrangement. An image comes to mind of a door to a house that has been left open or closed, signaling either hospitality or exclusion. The relationship between German Jews and East European Jews in Germany typically has been depicted in terms of the latter image, with the German Jews figuring as reluctant hosts, cultural insiders who viewed the so-called Ostjuden as outsiders or even infiltrators.17 Strangers in Berlin is aimed at destabilizing these designations by presenting Berlin as a border traversable in both directions, from the outside in and from the inside out. Martin Heidegger defined the threshold as “the groundbeam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between.”18 In keeping with this description, the threshold may

be understood in the present context as a shared point of access for German and East European Jews where outside and inside interpenetrated and even became reversed. Foreigners arriving from abroad availed themselves of artistic inspiration and anonymity in order to cultivate new forms of culture, while those native to Germany ascertained their increasing estrangement from the fatherland, which they similarly channeled into artistic production. Whether they were coming or going, exiled in Germany or soon-to-be exiled from Germany, these writers experienced Berlin as a transitional site between a moribund pre–World War I political order and an increasingly divided, nationalistic European reality. Berlin was the space that allowed them to dwell together momentarily in the midst of transition, the space that “bears the between.” For Yiddish and Hebrew writers from Eastern Europe, Berlin offered an open door. Fleeing physical and institutional violence in their native realm—pogroms,Page 5 → civil war, censorship, and political suppression—they took temporary refuge in the cultural and political diversity of Berlin. As representatives of a homeless literary establishment, these writers saw the German capital as a bastion of cosmopolitanism among dissolving multiethnic empires, and as the last possible entry point into European modernist culture. While eastern migrants traveled westward in search of cultural opportunity, many of their German-Jewish counterparts looked eastward in search of cultural authenticity. Facing rising vГ¶lkisch and anti-Semitic sentiments within Germany, they began to reevaluate their national loyalties and to develop an idealized image of the “Orient” as a “way out.” Mutual consciousness of the East-West nexus played a central role in shaping aesthetic programs and ideological commitments for German Jews and East European Jews alike. Although eastern and western Jews converged in Berlin, it would be misleading to describe the city as a cultural center; it was, in fact, utterly decentralized. After 1881, when Berlin was separated from Brandenburg to become an autonomous borough, immigration caused the population nearly to double, putting it at 1,879,000 by the outbreak of World War I.19 After the war, the sleepy seat of the Prussian government was rejuvenated as the vibrant new capital of the Weimar Republic, doubling its population yet again to reach nearly four million. Unprecedented urban growth during the immediate postwar years was the result of two key factors: mass immigration (especially from Eastern Europe) and outward expansion. The 1920 Greater Berlin Act (GroГџBerlin-Gesetz) united the six districts of Old Berlin with its surrounding suburbs to form a massive metropolis of twenty boroughs spanning a total of 883 sq. km, thirteen times the city’s original size. The center had engulfed the periphery, producing the second largest city in Europe and the third largest city in the world. This was not simply a changed city; it was an entirely new city. As one historian put it, “Berlin was always a marketplace for brash newcomers. More than that, among European capitals, Berlin was itself a brash newcomer.”20 The physical layout of the young metropolis both reflected and fueled its diversity. Herwarth Walden, founder of the expressionist journal Der Sturm (The Storm), portrayed the haphazard arrangement of Berlin’s neighborhoods as a microcosm of postwar European division and disarray: “Is it not a great city in which Russians live in the west, the Germans in the south and the Italians in the north?”21 As Walden’s sardonic question implies, Berlin was less the mainstay of a unified Kultur than a clutter of disparate cultures, traditions, and ideologies. According to Eric Weitz, “no single group, no individual, could claim Berlin as its own. No one dominated Berlin, and no consensus reigned. That, too, was Berlin modern.”22 Indeed, the city signified Page 6 →either center or periphery depending on the origins and aspirations of the beholder. Thoroughly assimilated German Jews regarded it as the center of an enlightened Europe, whereas those with Jewish nationalist leanings looked toward Eastern Europe and Palestine as alternative cultural and spiritual centers. For Yiddish writers like Dovid Bergelson, Berlin was merely a de facto center, a temporary outpost located halfway between New York and Moscow on the borderless map of Yiddish culture. The Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, by contrast, came to Berlin in search of a viable center for a homeless literature; he was therefore dismayed to discover, just two years after his arrival, that the local Hebrew readership had dwindled dramatically and that his own publishing house was on the verge of collapse. For writers from East and West alike, Berlin was the threshold between center and periphery where chance encounters among strangers caused identities to be reexamined, reclaimed, and rebuilt. According to Peter Gay, Berlin’s scale, sprawl, and diversity made it especially “hospitable to the

strangerВ .В .В . not only because it gave its residents conspicuousness, but also because it allowed them to disappear.”23 But who were the strangers of Weimar Berlin? Historians have long cast German Jewry in this role. Gay, for instance, counts a disproportionately large number of German-Jewish artists and intellectuals among the liberal layer of German society responsible for producing Weimar’s experimental culture, the product of “outsiders, propelled by history into the inside.”24 German Jews, he writes, “imprinted upon [Weimar culture] something of their rootlessness, their restlessness, their alienation from soil and tradition, their pervasive disrespect for authority, their mordant wit.”25 In a similar vein, Paul Mendes-Flohr presents the German Jew as the paragon of Berlin’s cosmopolitan culture. Taking a cue from Georg Simmel, he describes the German Jew as the quintessential “stranger,” who gains entry into the host society, “yet remains apart, bearing the marks of his origin.”26 Gaining access to the universal (ethical, intellectual) dimension of the host society’s culture but not the specific (ethnic) dimension, the stranger represents “the synthesis of nearness and distance,” in Simmel’s words, and is thus a natural rebel and critic.27 Whereas Gay and Mendes-Flohr focus on the iconoclastic nature of Weimar Jewish culture, others have emphasized the persistence of assimilation. According to George Mosse, German Jews’ “unbending allegiance to the tenets of Enlightenment Liberal thought” reached its apex during the years of the Weimar Republic, rendering their transformation into unwelcome strangers during the Nazi era an unanticipated rupture of the “German-Jewish symbiosis.”28 Whether focused on assimilation or recalcitrance, scholarship on GermanPage 7 → Jewry has generally portrayed the German-speaking Jew exclusively in relation to the non-Jewish German, thus producing a one-dimensional image of “the Jew” as the undifferentiated “stranger” of German society. This dualistic approach obscures the heterogeneity of Germany’s Jewish population and ignores the cultural contributions of nonGerman Jews, specifically East European migrants, who made up roughly a quarter of the Weimar Republic’s urban Jewish population. For example, Gay’s “insider-outsider” thesis acknowledges German Jews who were forced into exile upon Adolf Hitler’s rise to power but fails to acknowledge the Jews exiled within Germany, the “insiders” of Hebrew and Yiddish culture propelled into the center of Europe yet relegated to its margins. As Georg Simmel cautioned in his essay “Exkurs Гјber den Fremden” (“The Stranger,” 1908), defining this figure solely in terms of “strangeness of origin, which is or could be common to many strangers,” means casting away his individuality and reducing him to a collective “other.”29 Simmel was aware of the extent to which crude distinctions between insider and outsider blur the unique characteristics of the individual within the group, as well as those of individual groups among minority cultures. The present study offers a heterogeneous approach to Weimar Jewish culture that calls into question simple dichotomies of insider vs. outsider, German vs. Jew, and native vs. migrant. The “strangers” featured in the ensuing chapters, Jewish writers of varying cultural and political stripes, are suitable delegates for this approach, not only because they occupied the indistinct space between home and exile but also because they exploited their precarious status to power their creativity. These writers on the margins were not merely cultural outsiders vis-Г vis the surrounding German society. Rather, they faced three distinct forms of estrangement: first, they were excluded from the nation-building projects rampantly expanding throughout Europe in the wake of World War I, and thus were forced to seek out new sites of community; second, they were strangers to each other, coexisting but not necessarily converging within the staggeringly diverse urban environment in which they had either permanently or provisionally settled; and third, they were strangers to themselves, struggling to form a coherent collective identity in the face of extreme alienation and the loss of tradition. The experience of threefold estrangement profoundly shaped Jewish national consciousness during this period of unprecedented political transformation, and, in turn, left an indelible imprint on the cosmopolitan culture of Weimar Berlin. In light of its size and sprawl, Berlin, the city of strangers, was less a coherent center of Jewish culture than a Zwischenstation, a transitory, revolutionary site of migration and intercultural contact. Such a view of Berlin is indebtedPage 8 → to the “transnational turn” in literary and cultural studies, which offers a corrective to postcolonial approaches that reduce marginalized minorities to a collective “other.”30 As FranГ§oise Lionnet and Shuh-mei Shih point out, “We study the center and margin but rarely examine the relationships among different margins. The dominant is positedВ .В .В . as a powerful and universalizing force that either erases or eventually absorbs cultural particularities.”31 Rather than presenting Weimar Jewish culture in terms

of assimilation or resistance to the dominant German culture, Strangers in Berlin highlights cultural bordercrossings, both vertical, between “major” (German) and “minor” (Jewish) cultures, and horizontal, among native and migrant Jewish communities. Berlin plays the lead role because it represents, to echo David Myers, “a unique space and moment—one regulated by a cultural code that was neither eastern nor western, native nor foreign.”32 Indeed, Berlin represents the thriving threshold that destabilizes such dichotomies. Yet Berlin must be understood as more than a theoretical “contact zone” in which languages, cultures, and disciplines collide. The Weimar capital figures in this study not as a placeholder, as one of many undifferentiated sites of transnational movement and encounter, but as an actual place, the historical locus of transfer and transformation.33 As Heidegger reminds us, although a threshold is crossed fleetingly, its existence is not ephemeral but rather “hard” and “stony.” This geographically situated approach builds on recent developments in transnational theory, such as Susan Stanford Friedman’s “cultural parataxis,” a model she employs to explore the intricate geography of contact zones around the globe in which cultures intersect.34 Friedman’s approach complements what Andreas Huyssen has called “modernism at large,” a comparative model of literary study that moves beyond the compartmentalization of national cultures and enters “that crucial cultural space between the local, the national and the global.”35 Taking a cue from Friedman and Huyssen, Strangers in Berlin presents Jewish culture in Weimar Berlin as the product of a unique encounter in a particular time and place, which remained in contact with other sites of modernism, such as Moscow, Tel Aviv, and New York. Focusing on contact zones that can eventually be placed in a broader comparative model enables us to understand not only the ways in which borders between cultures are constructed but also the ways in which they are traversed. Furthermore, the multilingual, transnational approach opens up a much-needed space for writers who resist categorization according to the conventional linguistic and national borders of literary study. All four of the poets around whom this book revolves—Ludwig Strauss, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Gertrud Kolmar—challenge the borders of Page 9 →national literatures, either because their stylistic proclivities were out of step with the dominant trends of the day or because they wrote in more than one language and thus resist straightforward national labels. In this regard, they may be described, to borrow Chanah Kronfeld’s term, as “marginal prototypes” of modernism, writers who exemplify certain literary trends yet remain atypical of or inconsistent with the dominant languages, genres, and styles of their period or cultural milieu.36 These are the true strangers of Weimar Berlin, representatives of a culture that was produced between homelands, languages, and cultures, who reveal the limitations of the monolingual literary histories with which they are associated, or from which they have been excluded.

Jewish Modernism between East and West Roughly twenty years ago, David Myers drew attention to the limits of the German-Jewish dualism in a brief essay calling for scholarship dedicated to “the diversity, intensity and ephemerality of Jewish cultures in the Weimar period.” According to Myers, future scholarship must not only take account of the many German Jews who believed that the Weimar regime represented the final stage in the process of Jewish emancipation. It must also focus on the spectrum of alienation and disaffection occupied by German Jewish intellectuals, as well as on the diverse forms of Jewish culture imported from Eastern Europe. . . . The moment that eastern European cultural traditions reached Germany, they were transformed by a constant process of mediation between East and West. The mediators were dozens of German Jews and scores of eastern European Jews whose meeting yielded not a deepening of their respective senses of marginality, but a shared culture, or, at least, a shared cultural possibility.37 This passage highlights the prevailing tendency to view German-Jewish culture as “western,” and thus as separate from the culture of East European Jewry. True to Myers’s description, the existing scholarship on German-Jewish attitudes toward East European Jews has focused primarily on the deployment of stereotypes and

rarely on cross-cultural identification. The most notable example is Steven Aschheim’s seminal work, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1880–1923, which traces the evolution of German-Jewish attitudes and Page 10 →policies toward East European Jews as an integral aspect of German-Jewish modernization and secularization. Aschheim demonstrates how negative stereotypes of the so-called Ostjuden were deployed during the late nineteenth century in order to establish a clear distinction between the “enlightened” Jews of Germany and their “oriental” counterparts, and the manner in which this distinction was challenged during the early twentieth century by a postliberal image of the romanticized eastern Jew. Following Aschheim’s lead, various scholars have drawn attention to the importance of German-Jewish orientalism for the self-definition of German Jewry. Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, for instance, posits a turning point in German-Jewish cultural consciousness around World War I, which led to a renewed engagement with Jewish education, philosophy, literature, and languages during the Weimar era.38 Part and parcel of the dialectic of “dissimilation,” to invoke Shulamit Volkov’s term for the process of Jewish renewal that originated at the nexus of assimilation and alienation, was a profound fascination with both the spiritual world of Polish Jewry and the ancient biblical homeland.39 This shift can be felt, for instance, in the pages of the journal Ost und West (East and West), which stridently promoted the concept of Gesamtjudentum, or “total Judaism” inclusive of East and West. Since its readers were highly acculturated, the journal promoted ethnic Jewish identity through various “marketing” techniques, whereby anti-Semitic stereotypes associated with the “eastern Jew” were manipulated and transferred to the selfhating, assimilated “western Jew.”40 Scholars have attributed a similar postassimilation critique to the orientalist motifs that crop up in the writings of various German-Jewish writers, such as Arnold Zweig, Else Lasker-SchГјler, and Franz Kafka, who despaired over the decline of Jewish cultural integrity and turned eastward in search of a viable myth of origins.41 Notwithstanding the immense contribution such research has made to German-Jewish studies, it betrays a disciplinary and conceptual blind spot; the relationship between German Jews and their East European coreligionists is depicted as a one-sided affair. The exclusive focus on German-Jewish attitudes toward the socalled Ostjuden overlooks the manner in which East European Jews based in Germany both drew from and contributed to Weimar culture, as well as the interaction between German and East European Jews. Moreover, the abundant research on German-Jewish orientalism betrays a dearth of research “oriented” in the opposite direction, that is, toward the role of German Jews in the East European Jewish imagination.42 The small amount of work dedicated to this topic is mostly reserved to the image Page 11 →of the German Jew in the nineteenthcentury literature of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Recently, however, a growing body of scholarship has begun to expose the thriving presence of East European Jewish culture in twentieth-century Germany, marking a turning point to which the present study is indebted. Michael Brenner made an important overture by concluding his book on the “Jewish Renaissance” with a chapter on East European migrant culture that touches upon several prominent figures, including H. N. Bialik, S. Y. Agnon, Simon Rawidowicz, and Simon Dubnow, and institutions, such as the Hebrew Habimah Theater and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, established in Berlin in 1925.43 While Brenner’s work provides only a brief cultural historical overview of Jewish migrant culture, Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov’s Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Culture and Politics offers a more thoroughgoing account of Yiddish literary activity in the German capital, and demonstrates the manner in which Yiddish modernism flourished in the German capital and benefited from continued contact with major literary centers in Poland, the United States, and Soviet Russia.44 Other scholars have moved beyond the exclusive focus on Yiddish and emphasized the significance of Berlin in the interconnectedness of Yiddish and Hebrew literatures during the interwar period, well before Hebrew was territorialized as the official language of the Jewish state. Shachar Pinsker, for example, counts Berlin among several European “urban enclaves” in which Hebrew and Yiddish fiction unfolded side by side, thus calling into question the Zionist narrative of a monolingual Hebrew national canon centered in Israel.45 In a similar vein, Allison Schachter identifies Berlin as one of the shifting centers of “diasporic modernism,” a concept she

uses to theorize the ways in which Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literary networks operated beyond national borders.46 Emphasizing exile and diaspora, these studies inspire a host of questions in need of further exploration: How did Hebrew and Yiddish migrant writers interact with Berlin? In what ways were they influenced by German culture? How did mutual awareness of the East-West tension shape the respective cultural programs of German Jews and East European Jews? To what extent did the encounter between these two groups produce the “shared possibility” to which Myers referred? These questions provide a point of departure for the present study. Against the prevailing tendency to view the Jewish culture of Germany and Eastern Europe as separate fields of study, Strangers in Berlin presents Jewish culture of the Weimar era as the product of a unique encounter betweenPage 12 → “eastern” and “western” Jews. Bringing together German, Hebrew, and Yiddish literature within the context of a shared time and place, it not only yokes German-Jewish studies with the discourse on diasporic Hebrew and Yiddish culture but also contributes to the burgeoning subfield of GermanHebrew studies, which moves beyond concepts of trauma, rupture, and collective memory that have long divided German and Hebrew literary cultures. A growing cohort of scholars associated with this emerging field has begun to explore the ways in which German and Hebrew literary cultures, traditionally held as separate or even diametrically opposed, have impacted one another since Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1743.47 Strangers in Berlin triangulates the discourses on German-Jewish, Hebrew, and Yiddish modernisms by focusing on the impact of migration—of individuals, languages, and cultural concepts—on Jewish national consciousness between the world wars, a period of dramatic political change and astounding creative richness. Strangers in Berlin further contributes to the above discourses by focusing on poetry. Perhaps more than any other literary genre, poetry provided fertile ground for investigating questions of national identity, not only because it allowed the artist to project a nostalgic image of homeland or to escape to different realms, but also because establishing an autonomous and multifaceted poetic tradition was a crucial component of modern national movements. During the 1920s, Yiddish and Hebrew poets attempted to assimilate a wide range of styles and movements with which the major European languages were bountifully endowed to their own fledgling national literatures. Those writing in Hebrew struggled to transform the ancient language of the Bible, which was only beginning to reemerge as a modern tongue, into a vehicle for modernist expression, while those writing in Yiddish, a predominantly oral tongue, sought to expand a literary tradition that had henceforth been confined primarily to folkloristic prose. German-Jewish poets, by contrast, were able to draw upon a lavish German lyric tradition in their work, yet their status and sense of belonging within this tradition was precarious. The prevalent anti-Semitic belief in the “impurity” of the Jew’s language placed German-Jewish poets in an impossible predicament as they struggled to produce “original” verse in a native language to which they were denied a legitimate claim.48 Whether they wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, or German, all of these Jewish artists grappled with similar questions of linguistic affiliation, national belonging, and creative prowess. Moreover, they regularly looked to each other’s languages, liberally adopting and adapting from the culture of the “other” to their own ideological and aesthetic ends. Whether they arrived in Berlin as immigrants or left as emigrants, all Page 13 →four poets featured in the ensuing chapters shared the experience of exile. Strangers in Berlin concentrates on a historical moment in which the experience of exile became especially acute. Yet it does not promote exile or diaspora as an ethical alternative to statehood and modern nationalism,49 nor does it romanticize diaspora by transforming refugees and migrants into flГўneurs and free-floating intellectuals.50 Although exile may be understood as an expression of cosmopolitanism, the capacity to “break barriers of thought and experience,” as Edward Said wrote, it is also bound up with dispossession, dislocation, and estrangement.51 Realizing that exile both empowers and enervates, the goal of this study is to balance the productive outcomes of cross-cultural exchange against the painful ramifications of national homelessness. Thus, the threshold figures throughout this book as a site of simultaneous productivity and pain. As Heidegger observed, the threshold is “petrified by pain,” for it constitutes “the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the joining of the rift. The joining is the threshold.”52 This paradoxical division and gathering constitutes the dialectic that shaped Jewish literature in interwar Berlin, an insoluble tension that engendered new forms of creative production and a broad

spectrum of Jewish national identities.

Chapter Overview Before turning to the “strangers” whose stories form the heart of this book, chapter 1 establishes the context for their meeting in Weimar Berlin. Bringing together texts by German-Jewish, Yiddish, and Hebrew writers, it offers an overview of the evolving relationship between German and East European Jews from the time of the Haskalah (beginning in the eighteenth century in Germany and reaching Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century) through the first decades of the twentieth century, reaching its zenith in the Weimar period. Alternating between the perspectives of these two groups, this chapter considers the role of stereotypes in constructing conceptions of self and other, and the way in which preconceived notions were modified by real encounters, particularly during and after World War I. It focuses mainly on ethnographic (or pseudo-ethnographic) and fictional texts by wellknown authors in a manner that addresses gaps in the existing discourses on Weimar Jewish culture and adjusts the predominantly one-sided approach to the relationship between German and East European Jews. The comparative approach reveals the ways in which the meeting of East and West in Weimar Berlin often served to blur the borders these Page 14 →terms imply, between secularism and tradition, native and migrant, and self and other. The remaining four chapters turn to the protagonists of the book—Ludwig Strauss, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Gertrud Kolmar—four strangers who resided in Berlin either briefly or continuously between the wars and wrote in at least one of three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Excluded from the nationbuilding projects in their various countries of origin, all four poets acknowledged the need for their own myth of origins and national culture, in which a unique poetic tradition played a key role. As a site of intense artistic experimentation shaped by the collision of eastern and western influences, Berlin allowed them to absorb a broad range of poetic trends and adapt them to their respective cultural projects. Ordered chronologically, the four case studies begin on the eve of World War I and end with the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. Chapter 2 is dedicated to Ludwig Strauss, who arrived as a student in Berlin from his native Aachen in 1912. During his twelve years of residence in the German capital, Strauss became increasingly drawn to classical Hebrew texts and Yiddish folk culture, which he regarded as key ingredients of a “pan-Jewish” (alljГјdisch) identity undivided by borders between East and West. Tracing Strauss’s poetic development alongside his geographical trajectory between Germany and Palestine, where he resettled in the 1930s, this chapter explores the significance of the “pan-Jewish” concept for his development as a bilingual German-Hebrew poet. It explores in depth Strauss’s attempt to transform the maligned image of the German Jew, widely regarded within German society as an avaricious, unproductive “middleman” (Mittler) who only profits from German art, into a positive, authentic cultural identity informed equally by German culture and Jewish textual tradition. Strauss sought to overcome the charge of Jewish parasitism and lack of creativity by positing a unique and autonomous German-Jewish literary culture rooted in Jewish sources, a theory that culminated in his own turn to bilingual composition later in his career. I argue that the emergence of his bilingualism must be understood against the backdrop of vociferous debates about the role of the Jew in German culture underway in Germany around World War I and the early years of the Weimar Republic. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the “golden years” of the Weimar Republic, 1921–24, which were as culturally rich as they were economically precarious. By the time hyperinflation reached its peak in 1923, Berlin had become one of the largest centers of Yiddish and Hebrew publishing worldwide and a provisional home to numerous migrant writers fleeing civil war and pogroms in the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Moyshe Kulbak, the Page 15 →subject of chapter 3, spent just over two years in Berlin, during which he produced the poetry volume Naye lider (New Poems, 1922), an idealized portrait of his native White Russia as imagined from afar, and the experimental novella Meshiekh ben efrayim (Messiah Son of Ephraim, 1923), which at once idealizes rural life in Eastern Europe and conveys apocalyptic anxiety in the wake of war and revolution. Although Berlin does not register as a physical presence in the writing Kulbak produced there, the absence of the city

reveals its importance as a site of simultaneous arrival and exclusion for the exiled Yiddish poet, a provisional haven that provided Kulbak with the inspiration and the distance he required to construct an idealized “Yiddishland” in verse. While Berlin makes no appearance in the writing Kulbak produced there, a cynical portrayal of the German capital can be found in his later mock-epic poem “Disner tshayld herold” (Childe Harold of Dysna, 1933), written shortly after he had resettled in Soviet Minsk. Kulbak’s use of German expressionist literary techniques suggests that his dream of an extraterritorial Yiddish culture did not diminish even after he resettled in the Soviet Union. I argue in this chapter that the imprint of Weimar wit and experimentation on this ostensibly Soviet work reveals Kulbak’s measured acceptance of the new communist order and his continued longing for an autonomous Yiddish literary culture. In contrast to Kulbak, who came to Berlin in search of inspiration and cultural freedom, the bilingual Yiddish and Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg viewed the city through the lens of an illegal migrant. Forced into exile from Warsaw in 1922 based on the publication of his incendiary anti-Christian poem “Uri Zvi before the Cross,” Greenberg spent a year in Berlin before resettling permanently in Palestine. Chapter 4 presents Greenberg’s Berlin sojourn as a dramatic turning point in his life and career. It was in Berlin, the poet later recalled, that he rejected Europe and Yiddish in order to become a Zionist Hebrew poet in Palestine. But what Greenberg envisioned as a moment of rupture and rejection was in reality a moment of cultural cross-fertilization. Although Greenberg’s Berlin writing vociferously rejects the “Kingdom of the Cross,” as he disparagingly referred to Christian Europe, it also reveals the profound influence of European modernism, especially German expressionism, on his artistic and ideological development. This chapter argues that Greenberg’s brief Berlin period must therefore be seen as more than a moment of rupture; it was, rather, a creative break that allowed him to announce his farewell to Europe and “return” to the Land of Israel in a bold poetic voice infused with the avant-garde spirit he had absorbed in exile. Chapter 5 turns to the twilight years of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to Strauss, Kulbak, and Greenberg, who merely sojourned in Berlin, Gertrud Page 16 →Kolmar was born in Berlin and never left. Yet her poetry from the late Weimar period expresses increasing estrangement from her bourgeois urban environs through an imagined escape to other worlds, or, as she put it, “a research expedition into my own ancient land.” At first glance, this statement conveys the desire to return to a pristine site of Jewish origin; upon closer inspection, however, it betrays profound doubt over the possibility of such a journey in the postassimilation era. Chapter 5 follows Kolmar’s imagined expedition through several poems and a novel, all produced between 1927 and 1931. Although her poetry and fiction appear to have little in common at first glance—the poems escape to alternate realms, whereas the novel is explicitly situated in early 1930s Berlin—the theme of self-estrangement emerges as a common factor. Blurring the border between colonizing subject and soon-to-be colonized “other,” Kolmar’s poetry and fiction from the late Weimar period reveals the anxiety of the German-Jewish woman poet struggling to reclaim an unadulterated identity as a “Jewess” while acknowledging the inability to overcome the orientalizing gaze of the German writer. Although the four poets featured in this book differ dramatically in terms of language, aesthetics, and politics, they share a crucial characteristic: they all looked toward an imagined “East” as the wellspring of an authentic Jewish national culture. Yet the “East” took on different meanings for each. For Strauss, it was a continuum extending from Eastern Europe to the mythologized Land of Israel. For Kulbak, the “East” designated a nostalgic re-creation of the rural White Russian landscape that he was forced to leave behind due to the upheaval of war and revolution. Greenberg rejected his point of origin in Europe as part of the anti-Jewish “West,” and set his sights on the reconstituted “Hebrew Kingdom” located in the “Orient.” For Kolmar, the “East” signified a submerged Atlantis, an idealized place to which she could never “return.” Differences among them notwithstanding, all four poets looked eastward from Berlin, and all four experienced the Weimar capital as a temporary threshold between past and future homelands, between a lost origin and a longedfor destination. Nearly a century after the establishment of the Weimar Republic, Berlin has reclaimed its status as a cosmopolitan hub and a magnet for Jewish migrants. Since reunification in 1990, the German capital has attracted over 200,000 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, putting Berlin’s Jewish community on the map as the

fastest growing in Europe. More recently, Berlin has witnessed the influx of many young Israelis, a phenomenon that has raised the ire of conservative Israeli critics who see migration to Berlin, of all places, as the ultimate antiZionist act. Unlike their deracinated predecessors, the new “Israeli Berliners” are voluntary exiles who know that Page 17 →they can return at any moment to a country in which their status as Jews in not only accepted but also privileged. Viewing Israeli migration to Berlin through the lens of the past, the epilogue considers how the transnational history of Weimar Jewish culture might shed light on the current phenomenon of Israeli “diasporization” and the implications of this comparison for both German and Jewish national identities today.

Expert in Thresholds “Away-from-here, that is my destination” (Weg-von-hier, das ist mein Ziel) announces the hero of Kafka’s brief tale “Der Aufbruch” (The Departure). Playing on the double entendre of two words, Weg, meaning “way” or “away,” and Ziel, meaning “goal” or “destination,” this enigmatic statement captures what Judith Butler has called Kafka’s “poetics of non-arrival,” a mode of expression that privileges the journey over the destination and interpretation over arrival at immanent meaning.53 The reference to that which is “away” or “over there” speaks to the nature of Weimar Berlin as a threshold, a space that exists only in passage, in passing, a way in or a way out. For natives and migrants alike, Berlin was not a destination in the conventional sense but rather a site of transition from old to new homelands. Heidegger’s reference to the space that “sustains the between” underscores the spatial dimension of the concept, but it also gestures toward the temporal dimension, the notion of crossing over in a moment of transition. In his essay “The Return of the FlГўneur,” Walter Benjamin underscored both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of Berlin qua threshold: Berlin has few gates, but this great expert in thresholds [Schwellenkundige] is familiar with the lesser passages, those that separate the city from the lowland and one district from another. Building sites, bridges, light rail overpasses, and squares are all observed here and honored, to say nothing of the transitional hours [schwellige Stunden], the sacred twelve minutes or seconds of microcosmic life that correspond to the Twelfth Nights of the macrocosm, and which may seem the opposite of sacred at first glance.54 The vivacious, erotically charged city of eternal “twelfth nights” was as exciting as it was ominous. In retrospect, the twelve years between the signing of the Weimar constitution and the entry of the National Socialist Party into the Reichstag (1919–31) seem to have been as fleeting as the “twelve minutes Page 18 →or seconds of microcosmic life” to which Benjamin refers. As the capital of an unstable democracy, Berlin’s existence teetered constantly on the threshold of collapse, “a dance on the edge of the volcano,” as Peter Gay put it, or, in the words of the Hebrew writer Leah Goldberg, “a solid city suspended over nothing, a city of peace and freedom on the edge of the bloody abyss.”55 As these parallel descriptions indicate, the Weimar Republic did not simply collapse; its precarious foundations deliberately were destroyed by the rise of fascist forces. Weimar Berlin, the boisterous “Twelfth Night” of German history, was the embodiment of cosmopolitanism weighed down and ultimately overwhelmed by the violent demands of ethnic nationalism.

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1. Imagining Self and Other Encounters between Ostjuden and Westjuden Sholem Aleichem’s story A friyer peysekh (“An Early Passover,” 1908) transports the reader a long way from the shtetl to the fictional city of Naarenberg, Germany. The Jewish residents of this aptly named city (which sounds like the German name for Nuremberg but translates loosely as “Foolsville”) are, as Sholem Aleichem quips, “Jews plain and simple” (yidn on khokhmes).1 Lacking all basic knowledge of their religious tradition, they require a religious calendar to keep track of the only three rites they observe: Yortsayt (death anniversary), Bar Mitzvah, and Passover. The year is 1908 and a stranger has arrived from abroad. Having escaped pogroms in his native Warsaw, the penniless bookseller Pinkhas Pinkus must take up the challenge of earning an honest wage on foreign turf. But there is a problem: he doesn’t speak German. Hoping to make himself understood in Yiddish, Pinkhas Pinkus tries to gain the sympathy of a local Naarenberger, addressing him as “Herr Daytsh” (Mr. German) in the most elegant “Jewish German” (yidish-daytsh) he can muster. But his plea, replete with Hebraisms and biblical expressions, falls on deaf ears. Unaware that the German Jew cannot understand Yiddish, Pinkhas Pinkus reaches the conclusion that the Naarenberg Jews are indifferent to his plight and begins to despise them. Desperation and spite drive Pinkhas Pinkus to illicit dealings. Knowing that these Reform Jews rely on a liturgical calendar to keep track of holidays, he strikes a deal with a publishing house in Warsaw: for every Jewish calendar he purchases for the new year, 5668, they will provide three additional calendars from twenty years prior free of charge. The Naarenberg Jews buy the outdated calendars and follow them to a tee, performing religious rites on all the wrong dates. The ruse reaches its comic height when one of them travels to Berlin. It is the first working day of Passover (or so his calendar indicates) Page 20 →and he is hungry after the long journey. Taking a seat at a kosher restaurant on Friedrichstrasse, he is dumbfounded when the waiter offers him a doughy hamentash, the three-cornered pastry eaten on Purim but forbidden during Passover. Only upon his return home is the misunderstanding resolved: the calendar did not account for the leap year, causing the Naarenberg Jews to commemorate the exodus from Egypt a month early, when they should be celebrating Queen Esther and Mordecai’s victory over the wicked Hamman. Pinkhas Pinkus’s devious scheme is thus exposed. The Naarenberg Jewish community resolves to teach him a lesson, but he is nowhere to be found. As the story comes to an end, Sholem Aleichem relates Pinkhas Pinkus’s fate: From the dumb luck that he fell upon from the “Germans,” he just barely scraped together enough dough for a ticket and boarded a ship headed for the Golden Land, the country that Columbus discovered so that poor Jews from all over the world, persecuted and exiled, robbed and shamed, could honestly and honorably, albeit with great effort, earn their bit of bread.2 Pinkhas Pinkus’s arrival in Germany is emblematic of the mass westward migration of over two million East European Jews between 1881 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, as violent pogroms raged in the Russian and Habsburg Empires. Most had their sights set on America, but Germany was the main gateway to the West, and numerous migrants settled there either provisionally or permanently, provoking fear and indignation on the part of German Jews who saw the “invasion” as a threat to their hard-won integration into German society. Pinkhas Pinkus embodies the deplorable stereotype of the East European Jew as scammer, parasite, and parvenu. But Sholem Aleichem offers a twist: it is the refusal of the Naarenberger Jews to help the Ostjude make good in Germany that drives him to swindle and cheat. In the end, the “Polish Jew” leaves Germany for America, just as his adversaries would have hoped, but he does so at their expense.3 True to form, Sholem Aleichem gives the Ostjude the last laugh. “An Early Passover” reflects the fraught relationship between German Jews and East European Jews that is the subject of this chapter. Tracing the relationship from its origin during the Haskalah, the ensuing pages explore the changing images that German and East European Jews created of one another, and the significance these

images held for the development of national consciousness on both sides of the assumed East-West divide. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, German Jews sought to distinguish themselves from the socalled Ostjuden in order to prove themselves Page 21 →loyal Germans deserving of citizenship and equal rights. As the winds of reform blew from Germany eastward, an idealized image of the enlightened German Jew, or daytsh, was imported into the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and held up against a crude stereotype of parochial shtetl life. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the dichotomy of sophisticated daytsh and provincial Ostjude was altered by incipient Jewish national sentiments in both Germany and Eastern Europe, which inspired a romanticization of the “East”—encompassing both Eastern Europe and ancient biblical homeland—as the wellspring the Jewish national spirit. Preconceived notions and inherited myths were further altered by concrete encounters during and immediately following World War I. While German Jewish soldiers stationed on the eastern front were exposed firsthand to the squalor of the eastern territories during the war, a new wave of East European refugees streamed into Germany from the crumbling Russian and Habsburg Empires in its aftermath. Whether Germany went to the ghetto or the ghetto came to Germany, mutual exposure of Ostjuden and Westjuden caused each group to reassess the image of the other, and, in turn, of itself. Nowhere was the meeting of East and West more visible during the postwar years than in Berlin, the fledgling capital of the Weimar Republic and cultural hub of Central Europe. Berlin was the transit point where native German Jews and Jewish migrants crossed paths as the chaos of changing borders and mounting anti-Semitism swirled around them. At times this meeting served to strengthen preconceived notions, yet in many cases it encouraged a reexamination of this opposition, which in turn kindled unforeseen affinities and alliances.

The West Gazes East: Ostjuden in the German-Jewish Imagination Jewish emancipation in German lands was a slow and uncertain process that dragged on from the Prussian Edict of Toleration of 1812 until the consolidation of the German Republic in 1871. Even the most “enlightened” supporters of the cause assumed that the Jews could attain full civil rights only after having achieved intellectual and moral improvement. Although the revolution of 1848 ushered in new rights and freedoms for German Jewry, Jewish citizens remained barred from positions in government, the civil service, education, and the military. According to Paul Mendes-Flohr, such exclusionist practices made German Jews aware of their inability to integrate into the Volksnation, wherein “an abstract sense of peoplehood had ontological priority in determining one’s qualification for citizenship.” They therefore embracedPage 22 → “a cultural coding of Deutschtum [Germannness],” becoming enthusiastic supporters of the Kulturnation, a national ethos defined by shared cultural bonds.4 Excluded from most facets of institutional life, Jews became disproportionately involved in German culture as writers, artists, publishers, critics, and more generally as active members of the BildungsbГјrgertum (educated middle class). In their ongoing efforts at acculturation, they relinquished the national dimension of the divine covenant, effectively reinventing themselves as “German citizens of the Mosaic faith.” Dissolving Jewish national moorings meant disassociating from the traditional, self-enclosed identity associated with the Jews of Eastern Europe. As Steven Aschheim has shown, acculturation produced a decisive distinction between the “new” assimilated German Jew and the “old” Jew of Eastern Europe, who stood for the antiquated characteristics of Jewish culture to be supplanted by the rules of German Sittlichkeit (morality and refinement). Assimilating German Jews therefore emphasized the superiority of an integrated secular society over the traditional life in the Pale of Settlement, which in their eyes signified not only a confined physical space but also a self-segregating worldview. They discarded the traditional caftan and donned the modern cravat while deriding Yiddish in lofty Hochdeutsch (high German).5 Moses Mendelssohn, the chief spokesman of the German Haskalah, referred to Yiddish, his own mother tongue, as “a language of stammers, corrupt and deformed, repulsive to those who are able to speak in a correct and elegant manner.”6 While German Jews clung to the liberal ideal of the Kulturnation, a deeply conservative element was taking hold in German society.7 Against the encroaching developments of urbanization, liberalization, and capitalism, the

vГ¶lkisch movement glorified the peasant as a symbol of the transcendental “essence” (Wesen) linking the Volk (people) with its land, and they vilified the deracinated urban Jew as a parasitic presence and symbol of the insidious forces of modernity.8 This ideology of “rootedness,” inspired largely by romantic philosophy of the eighteenth century, gained steam during the 1848 revolution as a means of bolstering German national unity, and became even more strident toward the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of mass Jewish migration from the East. Many of these vГ¶lkisch voices ceased to differentiate between German-born Jews and Jewish immigrants and began to target all Jews as a deracinated foreign element.9 When, in 1880, the historian and politician Heinrich von Treitschke condemned the Jewish “pants-selling youths” who had stolen into German society, he deliberately conflated the stereotype of the penniless East European peddler and that of the established, opportunistic parvenu.10 Ostensibly a response to the influx of Betteljuden,Page 23 → Jewish beggars and peddlers from eastern Prussia, von Treitschke’s critique bolstered the anti-Semitic claim that all Jews were unwelcome strangers on German soil, or, to echo the words of J. G. Herder, “parasitical plants on the trunks of other nations.”11 By the early twentieth century, the realization that assimilation had failed to provide German Jewry with complete equality inspired various German-Jewish writers and intellectuals to reexamine the two halves of their hyphenated identity. The result was a rekindling of Jewish cultural consciousness, a veritable “Jewish renewal,” as Steven Aschheim has written, that turned upon “a hypostatized conception of вЂessences,’ of visible and hidden, external and internal characteristics taken to be profoundly determinative of вЂJewishness.’”12 A clear example of this essentialist bent can be found in Franz Rosenzweig’s writings on Jewish learning, which posit an expressionistic definition of Jewishness based upon the obscure notion that “there is something inside the individual that makes him a Jew, something infinitesimally small yet immeasurably large, his most impenetrable secret.”13 Jewish renewal went hand in hand with a reappraisal of the long maligned Ostjuden. Distant strangers became long-lost brothers; images of the ghetto no longer signaled provincialism but rather totality, spirituality, and organic community, the antithesis to urban alienation and bourgeois ennui.14 For a small but significant cohort of German Jews, the eastern Jew became a symbol of ethnic and spiritual unity, the very bearer of that “impenetrable secret.” The paladin of the so-called cult of the Ostjuden was Martin Buber.15 Born in Vienna but raised in a Yiddishspeaking home in Lvov and later educated in Germany, Buber embodied both eastern and western customs and values.16 His Drei Reden Гјber das Judentum (Three Speeches on Judaism), delivered before the Bar Kochba Society of Prague between 1909 and 1911, became a kind of spiritual guide for young German Jews in search of their roots.17 Buber reacted in the speeches against the anti-Semitic proponents of German vГ¶lkisch ideology while simultaneously echoing their logic, calling for a spiritual return to the “Orient,” the source of the Jewish Volksgeist,18 as the foundation for cultural and spiritual renewal.19 For him, the Orient was not synonymous with the ancestral Jewish homeland but rather constituted a geographical and temporal continuum extending from the ancient Land of Israel to the Hasidic world of Eastern Europe, “the nurturing source of all true religiosity.”20 The only way to revive and strengthen Jewish culture, in Buber’s view, was to unite the assimilated German Jew, who had lost sight of his spiritual roots, and the eastern “ghetto Jew” mired in the strictures of a stagnant halakhic tradition. This dialectical vision became the mission of the JГјdischer Verlag (Jewish Publishing House), inaugurated in 1902 by Buber Page 24 →and Berthold Feiwel with the express purpose of combining “the rootedness in folklore and tradition of the Ostjuden with the commitment to European culture of West European Zionism.”21 Only through the convergence of eastern and western influences, Buber and Feiwel argued, could a richer and more complete Jewish culture come into being. Buber’s romantic portrayal of East European Jewish culture in his Drei Reden and commentated translations of Hasidic tales captured the imaginations of many assimilated German Jews, whose fascination with East European Jewish culture betrayed profound dissatisfaction with the bourgeois values upon which they had been raised.22 As Aschheim notes, while their parents’ generation had been “shamed by the presence of their cousins from the East,” these young postassimilation German Jews “were now embarrassed by the affluence and philistinism of their parents and looked East for a source of pride.”23 A prominent example of this cultural rebellion was undertaken by Franz Kafka, whose encounter with Itzhak LГ¶wy’s Yiddish theater

troupe coincided with Buber’s Drei Reden.24 In 1911, the same year Kafka fell under the spell of the Yiddish theater, he wrote a revealing entry in his diary about the difference between the German word Mutter, an expression of “gentile coldness,” and the Yiddish word mame, which invokes “memories of the ghetto [that] preserve the Jewish family.”25 Evidently Kafka found in the language and culture of East European Jewry an expression of communal cohesion that was altogether absent from his own assimilated German-speaking household. Although Jewish orientalism had a powerful symbolic function for soul-searching Jews of Kafka’s generation, this fascination did not necessarily translate into concern for the material reality of East European Jewry. The writer Jakob Wassermann, for example, openly embraced the notion of the German Jew’s “oriental” origins while expressing extreme contempt for East European Jewish immigrants. In his autobiography, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (My Path as German and Jew, 1921), Wassermann recalls: “If I spoke with a Polish or Galician Jew and tried to understand his way of life and thinking, I could stir myself to feel compassion or sadness, but never a sense of brotherhood. He was entirely strange and, when individual human sympathy was lacking, even repulsive.”26 Nonetheless, Wassermann was drawn to the mystique and apparent authenticity of the “oriental” Jew. In an essay titled “The Jew as Oriental” (1913), he argued that the German Jews’ involvement in “intermediary” fields such as journalism and publishing was inversely proportionate to their creative capacity as writers and artists: “The Jew as European, as cosmopolitan, is a mere man-of-letters (Literat); only as oriental, as one who makes the transformed force of the present into a condition, Page 25 →can the Jew be a creator (SchГ¶pfer).”27 The tension between Wassermann’s affinity for the mythological “oriental Jew” and his disdain for the “eastern Jew” reveals the extent to which the “Orient” remained for many a purely imagined ideal. There were notable exceptions, however. The essayist Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann championed East European Jewish culture not as a mythical concept but as a “lived reality.” In the opening issue of his journal, Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue (Sanctuary: Pan-Jewish Revue), a short-lived yet robust enterprise that produced a total of sixteen issues between 1913 and 1914, Kaufmann announced his intention to “blaze new paths for western Jewry to a stronger Jewishness that encompasses the entire nation [by establishing] unmediated contact between the western periphery and the central national components.”28 Kaufmann’s pan-Jewish vision was predicated on a revolutionary conception of Jewish geography; whereas both German and East European Jewish intellectuals had throughout the nineteenth century regarded Germany as the hub of enlightenment and reform, Kaufmann repositioned Eastern Europe as the thriving Jewish cultural “center” to which assimilated German Jews, now consigned to the periphery, must draw near. Die Freistatt was not unique in its focus on the Ostjuden, but it was the only publication of its kind to showcase German, Yiddish, and Hebrew texts within a single forum.29 Pronunciation guides were even provided in order to aid German readers to read the Jewish languages. By attributing equal cultural value to all three languages, Kaufmann aimed for nothing less than a “radical revision and regeneration of west European Jewry’s view of the Jewish present.”30 Kaufmann’s notion of Alljudentum was strongly influenced by the cultural philosophy of Nathan Birnbaum, a regular contributor to Die Freistatt and one of the first German-speaking Jews to press for the acknowledgement of East European Jewish culture as the benchmark of Jewish integrity.31 An unlikely candidate for the task, Birnbaum was an assimilated Viennese Jew who began as a Zionist and eventually turned around to embrace Yiddishism and the diaspora nationalist cause.32 In contrast to Buber, who deployed the symbol of the Ostjuden in the service of Jewish cultural renewal within Germany, Birnbaum fought for the social and political rights of East European Jews in Germany while furthering Yiddish language and culture in Eastern Europe. Whereas Buber saw the Ostjuden as a symbol of an idealized Jewish past, Birnbaum saw them as the future: “I not only believe that Judaism will not decline but also in its exaltation and glorious future. And in this way I fear Golus not.”33 With the deliberate use of the Yiddish term for “exile” (golus), Birnbaum emphasized his preference for Yiddish as the living language of the Jewish nation, the “only medium through which the experience of Page 26 →eternity may be joined with real life.”34 It is therefore not surprising that he served as a co-organizer, together with I. L. Peretz, Matisyohu Mieses, and Chaim Zhitlovsky, of the 1908 Czernowitz Conference for recognition of Yiddish as a Jewish national language. The only native German speaker among the

organizers, Birnbaum reportedly struggled to address the conference participants in his broken Yiddish.35 During the first decade of the twentieth century, German Jews held up a romantic image of the Ostjude as a mascot for Jewish renewal within German society and a safeguard against the increasing dilution of their own cultural identity. Occasionally, however, as the examples of Kaufmann and Birnbaum reveal, their interest in East European Jewish life and culture was more than symbolic. The shift from romantic fascination to genuine concern for the Ostjudenfrage, or “Eastern Jewish Question,” became even more pronounced during and after World War I as the image of the dancing Hasid was supplanted by the faces of actual refugees and victims of antiSemitic violence. With the increasing threat of German volkism and other forms of ethnic nationalism throughout Europe, growing numbers of German Jews began to reevaluate their national affiliations and political aspirations. Before we explore this process of redefinition, however, we must consider the counterimage of the Germanspeaking Jew, or daytsh, in the eyes of East European Jewry.

The East Gazes West: Images of the Daytsh in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature Just as depictions of the Ostjuden in German-Jewish literature mirrored the evolving self-image of German Jewry, so too the portrayal of the German Jew, or daytsh, in Yiddish and Hebrew literature can be seen as a barometer for changing political and cultural aspirations. A comparison of the changing functions of these two figures reveals two processes of self-definition that were in fact mirror images of one another; whereas the German-Jewish image of the Ostjude evolved from a source of shame into a source of pride, the daytsh in Hebrew and Yiddish literature served initially as an object of admiration, only to become a sinister symbol of assimilation and self-abnegation. As Dan Miron has shown, the emergence of national movements and ideologies during the early twentieth century transformed the image of the daytsh, which had been deployed by the proponents of the Haskalah as “an ideal figure of enlightened Jewish existence,” into “the incarnation of the spiritual Page 27 →failure of assimilation.”36 For German and East European Jews alike, budding Jewish national consciousness brought about a positive redefinition of the “eastern Jew.” Like their German predecessors, the Russian maskilim (proponents of the Haskalah, literally “enlighteners”) held up the figure of the urbane German Jew as a positive countermodel to the simpleminded, superstitious shtetl Jews. Yisroel Aksenfeld’s didactic Yiddish novel Dos shterntikhl (The Headband, written in 1840 and published in 1862), an unflinchingly critical portrait of Jewish life in provincial Galicia, recounts the journey of a young Hasid named Mikhel to the Prussian city of Breslau, where he enters the employ of Oxman the contractor, a mouthpiece for Aksenfeld’s maskilic agenda.37 Oxman exposes his protГ©gГ© to German customs and culture, especially the didactic value of German theater, which he deems “more useful than the preacher’s moral sermonizing.”38 In Breslau, under the tutelage of the daytsh, Mikhel acquires humanistic values that he later imports to the shtetl in order to save the Jewish masses from their own ignorance, superstition, and destitution. Aksenfeld’s novel thus exemplifies the idealization both of the daytsh as an agent of reform and of the German city as the locus of enlightenment. While his story takes place in Breslau, other Yiddish and Hebrew writers singled out Berlin as the city that “gave birth to the enlightenment of my people and its improvement,” in the words of the great Hebrew poet Yehuda Leib Gordon, “the city in which the enlightened of Israel waged God’s struggles against twisted minds and crooked hearts and vanquished them.”39 While Aksenfeld and Gordon presented the German Jew as the agent of enlightenment and the German city as its cradle, Joseph Perl portrayed the German language as its medium. Megale temirin (The Revealer of Secrets, 1819), a satirical epistolary novel published first in Hebrew and later translated into Yiddish by the author, portrays a pair of dimwitted Hasidim whose search for a German-language book believed to defame their beloved rebbe (spiritual leader) devolves into a comedy of errors.40 When the two fools finally discover what they believe to be the book in question, they are unable to confirm the suspicion because they cannot read even the first word of the German title: Buch. Although the German word for “book” is the same in Yiddish, what it signifies remains a mystery to the Hasidim, who devote their energy to interpreting the Hebrew seyfer, or holy book, and

spurn all worldly literature.41 The irony introduced by this simple monosyllabic word betrays Perl’s own misgivings about writing in Yiddish. As Miron has stated, the maskilim were fearful of “degrading” their pens by writing in Yiddish, preferringPage 28 → loftier languages like Russian, German, and Hebrew, and therefore turned to the lowly “jargon” solely for purposes of “cultural warfare,” since it was the language of the masses.42 Perl is reported to have offered only one public statement in Yiddish, a sermon at the Tarnopol synagogue in 1838, in which he insisted that “necessity” alone drove him to speak in the “vulgar” tongue, for no other language would be understood by the congregation. He quickly added that he would have preferred to address his audience in the “gentle” language of German.43 Until the late 1870s, the figure of the daytsh personified the normative behavior, language, and ideas of the maskil.44 As national consciousness increased toward the turn of the century, however, the negative assessment of the backward Hasid was overtaken by distrust of the daytsh as the agent of extreme secularization. This shift is clearly visible, as Miron has demonstrated, in the evolution of the novel Dos vintshfingerl (The Wishing Ring) by S. Y. Abramovitch, better known as Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller). The first version of the text, published in 1866, took the form of a brief didactic pamphlet intended to teach the masses that redemption would come through knowledge, not through talismans and wishing rings.45 Yet Abramovitch’s growing concern for the repressive measures of the Tsarist regime caused him to shift the target of his critique from the downtrodden shtetl to the external injustices performed against it. When Dos vintshfingerl reappeared between 1888 and 1905 as a serialized novel with both Hebrew and Yiddish versions, the maskilic agenda had been shed in favor of a protonationalist stance.46 The first stages of the plot seem to adhere to maskilic convention, with the protagonist, Hershele, making his way from a poor shtetl to Germany, where he becomes a wealthy scholar. Yet in contrast to earlier maskilic writing (including Mendele’s own), Hershele’s time in Germany arouses compassion for his browbeaten brethren in Kabtsansk and neighboring Tuneyatevke (“Beggarsville” and “Do-Nothingstown,” respectively), who are in need of “bread, not books.”47 The role of the reformed native who imports the teachings of the Enlightenment to the shtetl is thus replaced by the penitent prodigal son who comes to identify as “a son of the people, a Jew like all [his] ancestors, fathers and forefathers.”48 As East European Jewish writers dedicated themselves to furthering a national literature they shifted their focus from ridiculing and reforming the masses to providing their readers with a positive self-image. Since redefining the self necessitated a new definition of the “other,” the daytsh now took on a questionable hue as a symbol of self-abnegation and apostasy, a Jew so assimilated that he is practically indistinguishable from a gentile. The lexical ambiguity of the word daytsh, which may denote either a German Jew or a Page 29 →German national, contributed to the implied equivalence between the non-Jewish German and the assimilated German Jew.49 A third definition of the word—daytsh also signifies the German language—added yet another layer of anxiety; indeed, the linguistic proximity between Yiddish and German could be seen as either a boon or a danger. While some Yiddish writers believed that incorporating elements of High German would produce a more refined Yiddish, others dismissed excessive borrowing as pompous, hackneyed daytshmerish, a derogatory term for Germanized Yiddish.50 Ambivalence toward German language and culture plays an important role in I. L. Peretz’s epic ballad Monish (1888), regarded as the first modernist poem in Yiddish. A prodigy of the golden age of Polish Jewry, the eponymous hero is unspoiled by the admiration showered upon him by the community elders who believe him to be a herald of the Messianic Age. When the archangel Samael and his consort Lilith learn of the Jewish wunderkind’s messianic potential, they plot to corrupt him.51 Their evil machinations result in the arrival of a wealthy daytsh from Danzig, accompanied by his beautiful daughter, Maria.52 As the daytsh corrupts the locals with his easy money, his daughter dazzles them with her lovely singing voice, a motif reminiscent of Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei,” in which the crooning of the flaxen-haired beauty is capable of overpowering the strongest of men.53 Defenseless against the lure of her siren song, Monish swears his love and devotion by all the symbols of his religion. Maria goads him to climb “higher and higher” on the spiritual ladder until he finally succumbs and performs the forbidden—he pronounces the name of God in vain. Lightning strikes! Laughter ascends from Gehenna! Samael and Lilith celebrate the victory of evil over good and Monish is nailed to

the satanic ark by his earlobe, a punishment reminiscent of Dante’s rule of contrapasso, whereby the punishment must fit the crime. On the surface a traditional tale of sin and punishment about the dangers of secular culture, Monish offers, as Ruth Wisse has written, “a painful parable about the makings of the modern Jew out of compounded acts of betrayal.”54 The ballad’s production history casts this tension into stark relief. When it first appeared in 1888 in the inaugural issue of Sholem Aleichem’s Yudishe folksbibliotek (The Jewish People’s Library), the text had undergone significant revisions by Sholem Aleichem, who evidently sought to make the lofty poetic language more accessible to the average reader. Outraged by Sholem Aleichem’s editorial license, Peretz sent him an angry letter in which he lambasted his contempt for literary ingenuity. Whereas, in Peretz’s view, Sholem Aleichem wrote “jargon from jargon-land,” a crude language of the people, he aimed to enrich Yiddish so that it may be used in service of Bildung, or “Jewish humanism transmitted through culture.”55 Since literature Page 30 →was the key instrument in this process, according to Peretz, it was incumbent upon the Yiddish writer to “leave the ghetto, see the world,” yet to do so “with Jewish eyes.”56 Peretz’s conception of Bildung as a worldly yet distinctly Jewish phenomenon betrays an insoluble conundrum. How could the modern Yiddish writer elevate the language of the Jewish masses without renouncing its distinctive Jewish character and reducing it to a derivative dialect? Peretz’s own uncertainty regarding this question registers in a brief discursive passage from Monish in which the implied author interjects to lament the meagerness of the Jewish “jargon,” a language replete with “jokes and pranks” (vitsn un blitsn) but bereft of suitable expressions for love: Not a single word is soft and smooth, All words for love are dead and dull– Darling, treasure, sweetie, sweetheart— All these taste like licorice crackers; They have no flavor, they have no salt, And merely taste like pig fat!57

Redolent of licorice and lard, the paltry few terms of endearment Yiddish provides, such as Seele (soul) and Schatz (treasure), are borrowings from German and thus lack a distinctive “Jewish” flavor of their own.58 Writing a romantic ballad in Yiddish is deemed treyf-posl (unkosher), for doing so requires Germanic ingredients.59 The juxtaposition of Monish’s tragic fate with the implied author’s ironic commentary reveals Peretz’s ambiguous attitude toward European culture, for which German serves as a metonym. The unctuous infiltrator from Danzig, just like the German importations that pepper the ballad with an “unkosher” flavor, was in Peretz’s view both attractive and repellent, a source of literary inspiration and of secular peril. In the literature of both the German and the East European Haskalah, images of the Yiddish-speaking Jew were employed as a target of ridicule, a foil for the German-speaking Jew as an agent of reform and enlightenment. As Jewish national consciousness ripened in Eastern Europe and the movementPage 31 → for Jewish renewal took shape in Germany, however, the tables were turned. Around the turn of the century, a romantic image of the Ostjude came into view as the bearer of an unadulterated tradition, whereas the worldly, assimilated daytsh devolved into a cautionary symbol for the loss of cultural distinctiveness. This reversal is palpable in Sholem Aleichem’s story “An Early Passover,” in which the maskilic critique of simpleminded shtetl Jews is replaced by a distorted image of reform German Jews as uninformed, hypocritical chumps. Insofar as imagining the other served as a tool of self-definition, each group’s image of the other remained largely confined to the

realm of caricature. The meeting of Ostjuden and Westjuden around World War I transformed the nature of this relationship profoundly.

The Changing Face of the Ostjude around World War I Although many German Jews initially embraced the jingoistic fervor of 1914, their optimism was deflated by the realization that rising German patriotism had ushered in a new wave of anti-Semitism.60 Many German Jews who initially expressed reservation over the “infiltration” of Jewish refugees from the East were now deeply offended by the anti-Semitic vitriol that accompanied the Grenzschluss (border closing) of 1914, a policy that severely curtailed the entry of Jewish refugees. A second blow was dealt with the JudenzГ¤hlung (Jewish census) of 1916, issued by the German military to prove that German Jews were betraying Germany by shirking military responsibility. When the charges were disproved—over 100,000 Jews had in fact enthusiastically enlisted in the service of the Fatherland—the results were not published and only later leaked out in a distorted fashion in an anti-Semitic pamphlet. The slanderous act provoked Arnold Zweig to write the short story “JudenzГ¤hlung vor Verdun” (Jewish Census at Verdun), in which German-Jewish soldiers who had fallen in battle are summoned from their graves to be counted.61 The census was also the inspiration for Martin Buber’s new journal, Der Jude (The Jew), which called upon German Jews to establish a proud Jewish Volksgemeinschaft (national community) linking “Europe and the Orient.”62 As the headline of an article in the journal Ost und West put it, the Ostjudenfrage had now become a Westjudenfrage.63 Awareness of this fact was especially acute among German Jews who had served on the eastern front. It was given literary expression by those who had worked as part of the press corps for the Ober-Ost (German Headquarters in Eastern Europe).64 The experiences of these writer-soldiers inspired a new form of German-Jewish writing Page 32 →about the Ostjuden, a kind of romanticized pseudo-ethnographic reportage that defended East European Jewry while polemicizing against German-Jewish assimilation. Yet, in contrast to the prewar “Cult of the Ostjuden,” which emerged in reaction to the spiritless character of bourgeois GermanJewish life, writers with real exposure to Jewish life in the eastern territories were less concerned with questions of religiosity and cultural identity than with the problem of national belonging. Their depictions of the Ostjuden therefore differed in accordance with their political views. The range of viewpoints becomes apparent if we compare the writings of three of the most prominent representatives of the genre: Arnold Zweig, Joseph Roth, and Alfred DГ¶blin. Arnold Zweig’s Das ostjГјdische Antlitz (translated as The Face of East European Jewry, 1920), a series of literary portraits with accompanying drawings by Hermann Struck, displays the author’s burgeoning Zionist commitments. In the introduction, the author addresses his audience directly: “We know that our forefathers were relatives of the men we find today in the cities of Lithuania, Poland, and Galicia. Today, we speak different languages, think different thoughtsВ .В .В . and we have traded part of our soul with Europe, giving up part of our Jewishness.”65 Whereas German Jews had willingly relinquished their Jewish identity, according to Zweig, the East European Jew had “preserved his face,” the embodiment of the indelible Jewish national spirit (Volksgeist). In Zweig’s view, the Jewish national spirit could only be realized in the Zionist movement, which he took pains to distinguish from other ethnocentric forms of nationalism: The Eastern Jew disavows the oppressive state—the Roman conception of the state—because he lives in a vital folk community (Volksgemeinschaft), because he recognizes the infinitely bloodier existing form of society-building (Gesellschaftung) as the brutal, order-based, authoritarian state that it is. The poor man whose hand, marked by grief and resolve, grasps the community charity box and holds it timidly, while his sorrowful and trusting eye examines the giver and feels the amount of compassion contained in the donation—he is the most visible expression of this kind of community.66 The passage suggests that the Ostjude’s inherent commitment to a national community makes him especially “capable of experiencing the power of the national and Zionist ideology.” By presenting the East European

Jew in this way, Zweig aimed to transform the negative stereotype of the weak, downtrodden diaspora Jew into a powerful symbol for Zionist revival while allayingPage 33 → potential charges of chauvinistic nationalism. Zionism, he maintained, was qualitatively different from every other European national movement vying for territory and political power. The “man of the people” type depicted above is just one example of the inverted stereotypes that appear throughout Das ostГјdische Antlitz. Another is that of the lascivious Jewess, which became commonplace during the war due to the fall of many East European Jewish girls into prostitution. As white slavery increased with mass transatlantic migration from Eastern Europe, Jewish girls facing increased poverty and the decline of traditional communal values became especially vulnerable to trafficking, which ran rampant in Germany due to its position as a major transit point from Europe to the New World.67 Prostitution therefore became a rallying issue for both feminist activists and proponents of Jewish renewal.68 While the former addressed prostitution as a social problem, the latter invoked the issue as a metaphor for the degradation of Jewish culture within indifferent western bourgeois society, as the following passage by Zweig reveals: Look at these innocent, full lips that are nothing more than childlike, whereas the European raised on the catchwords of operettas thinks he is discerning sensuality and who knows what else, anticipating the mass-produced kitsch fantasies to which the Jewish woman is subjected: that racial traits such as dark eyes and black hair, whose bearers may be pure as Luna, cannot prevent either soldier or student from wanting to make love to a dusky female Jew, Pole, or Spaniard.69 Zweig excoriates the boorish German officer for corrupting and exploiting the penniless Jewish girl, who seeks only “the protection of a soldier who receives bread and meat.” But his depiction of this dynamic is not intended to be interpreted literally; rather, it serves as a symbol of the deleterious effects of encroaching westernization (represented by German officers) on Jewish culture, and thereby insinuates that West European Jews must cease serving as handmaidens to European culture in order to reclaim the purity embodied in the East European Jewish girl, “the victim and symbol of our European situation.” While Zweig presented the collective face of East European Jewry as a symbol of national unity and Zionist revival, Joseph Roth did not regard Zionism as a viable solution to Jewish suffering, and therefore romanticized the Ostjuden to different ends. In 1917, Roth returned to his hometown of Brody, Galicia, as an Austrian press officer, an experience that profoundly influenced his take on the Yiddish-speaking communities from which he Page 35 →Page 36 →himself hailed. Yet, rather than depicting the Ostjuden in their own environment, he focused on East European Jewish migrants and refugees gathered in the slums of western metropolises, such as Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, that “strange and mournful ghetto world.” Roth drew attention to the abiding rootlessness of the foreign-born Scheunenviertel dwellers, whose presence increased shortly after the war from 5 percent of Berlin’s Jewish population to roughly 25 percent. This dramatic demographic change can be felt in his depiction of Grenadierstrasse, the main drag of the Jewish quarter: Page 34 →Illustrations by Hermann Struck for Das ostjГјdische Antlitz by Arnold Zweig (Berlin, 1920). (Public domain.) It’s not only in Jerusalem that there is a Wailing Wall. Grenadierstrasse is one Wailing Wall after another. The punishing hand of God is clearly visible over the bent backs of the people. Of all the thousand ways that they have gone, and go, and will go, not one is a way out, not one leads to a concrete, earthly goal. No “fatherland, ” no “Jewish homeland,” no “place of refuge,” no “place of liberty.” There are various opportunities to discern the so-called will of history. And nowhere does it show itself as plainly as in all the many Grenadierstrassen in which Jews don’t so much live as drift up and down. (Theirs is no pathologicaldegenerative unrest so much as a historically conditioned one.) Clearly it is the secret “will of history” for this people to have no country to live in but to wander the roads. And that daunting will corresponds to the daunting constitution of the Jews. In seeking a “homeland” of their own, they are rebelling against their deeper nature.70

Placing the emphasis on “constitutional wandering,” Roth portrays the Ostjuden not as a cohesive Volksgemeinschaft, as Zweig had done, but rather as representatives of an extraterritorial ethos, that is, the very antithesis of Zionist territorialism. Indeed, the reference to Europe’s multiple “Grenadierstrassen” betrays a profound disdain for the Zionist movement. By depicting the Ostjuden as “unconcerned with their вЂnationality’ in the Western European sense,” Roth consciously pursued his polemical agenda while ignoring the mounting nationalist and revolutionary impulses among East European Jews in the post–World War I era.71 What united Westjuden and Ostjuden, in his view, was not the shared longing for an autonomous Jewish state in their ancestral homeland but rather “the Jewish aptitude for cosmopolitanism.”72 Moreover, it was precisely this predisposition that put the Ostjuden in such a vulnerable position now, as increasingly ethnically homogenous nation states rose up all around them. If Zweig saw the Ostjuden as the collective face of the Zionist dream, and Roth saw them as the victims of declining cosmopolitanism, Alfred DГ¶blin Page 37 →regarded the Ostjuden as a suprareligious symbol for disenfranchised people everywhere. DГ¶blin was one of the few German-Jewish writers to have sustained contact with East European Jews both within Berlin and abroad. Born to Jewish parents in Stettin, eastern Prussia, he moved to Berlin at the age of ten with his mother and siblings, where he lived what he described as a “beggar’s existence” in the eastern part of the city.73 The dГ©classГ© boy grew up to become a successful physician with a medical practice in a working-class neighborhood not far from where he grew up. Although DГ¶blin had no connection to traditional Judaism, he had a strong affinity for the East European Jews of the Scheunenviertel, who in his view represented the “nation of the poor” from which he stemmed. He was therefore deeply shaken when a pogrom broke out in the Jewish quarter on November 20, 1923. The violent riot prompted DГ¶blin to travel to Poland and write about the persecuted communities where Berlin’s Ostjuden originated. As he later recalled: “I realized I did not actually know Jews. I only knew my relatives who once called—but no longer call—themselves Jews.В .В .В . I asked myself and others: вЂWhere are the Jews?’ I was told: вЂIn Poland.’ So to Poland I went.”74 The two months that DГ¶blin spent in Poland during the fall of 1924 provided the material for Reise in Polen (Journey in Poland, 1925), arguably the most in-depth travelogue of its kind. The book follows the journey of an unnamed traveler through the newly formed Polish state. Moving freely between church and synagogue, study house and marketplace, his observations are interwoven with historical anecdotes and snatches of contemporary political discourse.75 Presenting himself as a detached observer, the traveler appears most interested in that which unites or separates people, be it religion, ethnicity, or economic status.76 In contrast to Zweig and Roth, whose travels to the “East” roused feelings of Jewish unity, DГ¶blin’s encounter with the Jews of Poland did not reawaken a suppressed Jewishness (as his conversion to Catholicism in 1941 would later confirm). Rather, he discovered in the Ostjuden the specter of fallen multiethnic empires and failed cosmopolitan ideals. Thus, although the stated purpose of DГ¶blin’s journey was to familiarize himself with the new Republic of Poland, Germany’s neighbor to the east, throughout the book he opposes state formation and borders of any kind. The penultimate chapter, for instance, offers a powerful excursus on the mutual hostility between the Polish majority and the affluent German minority of Lodz, a mirror image of tensions between German and East European Jews within Berlin, and concludes with a passionate plea to overcome the “tyranny” of state borders.77 As the comparison of Zweig, Roth, and DГ¶blin indicates, German-Jewish encounters with the Ostjuden around World War I sparked a proliferation of Page 38 →literary portraits of the long maligned “other.” Most were positive (if also maudlin), but they certainly were not all cut from the same cloth. For all three writers, reflecting on actual encounters with their eastern brethren was a means of negotiating the status of European Jewry within an ethnically divided postwar context, and a means of repositioning themselves within the increasingly chauvinistic German state. In short, renewed fascination with the Ostjuden around World War I was inspired not only by increased contact between German Jews and East European Jews but also by the new borders that divided them. For Yiddish and Hebrew writers, as we shall see, the drawing of new borders in the wake of the war provoked similar—if not greater—anxiety regarding the future.

Location vs. Dislocation: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in Weimar

Germany “Don’t know if I’m at home / Or abroad— / I’m running!” (Veys ikh nit, tsi kh’bin in der’heym/tsi in der fremd—/Ikh loyf!). This verse, composed by Peretz Markish in 1919, anticipates the poet’s own desultory path from Kiev to Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and London, and captures the untrammeled spirit of the interwar generation of Hebrew and Yiddish writers who were forced to reexamine their diasporic identity within newly demarcated national boundaries. With the collapse of the Russian and Habsburg Empires, a remarkable number of these writers sought refuge in Berlin. Long held as the hub of humanism and religious reform, Berlin was seen by these ambitious young artists as the hotbed of cultural diversity and a bastion of political freedom. Like their German counterparts, who deployed images of the Ostjuden to express a range of political beliefs, these exiles from the East viewed the German capital and its inhabitants through a variety of political lenses. Markish’s poem captures the restlessness that these writers experienced during the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution when they found themselves neither aheym (at home) nor in der fremd (literally “in a foreign land”) but rather caught between a vanished old country and new lands stretching from America to Zion. The rise of the Bolshevik regime placed new constraints on Hebrew and Yiddish writers. Hebrew writers fared especially badly, since the Soviet authorities associated their language of composition with Zionism and Judaism, both antithetical to the Communist Party line. When the Soviet order was firmly established in 1921, Hebrew was officially banned, and its leading proponents, based in Odessa, were forced to look for new terrain.78 Many of Page 39 →these writers, such as Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yakov Shteinberg, were drawn to Berlin because of the Hebrew intellectual infrastructure that had been put into place there at the start of the twentieth century. Berlin’s first Hebrew journal, He-Atid (The Future), was established in 1907, followed by the first Conference of Hebrew Language and Culture in 1909. In 1911 the headquarters of the World Zionist Organization were transferred there. Berlin had already served as a temporary home to several prominent Hebrew writers, such as David Frishman and Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, later adding to its ranks S. Y. Agnon, who lived in Berlin for twelve years (1912–24), longer than any other Hebrew writer of his stature.79 But it was the violent aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution that triggered the greatest influx of Hebraists to Berlin. As Michael Brenner put it, “Before World War I Berlin was one center of Hebrew culture, but it became the center between 1920 and 1924.”80 Yiddish writers who left the Soviet Union for Berlin had slightly different motivations from their Hebrew counterparts. In contrast to Hebrew, which was banned outright by the Bolshevik government, Yiddish initially was acknowledged as the “indigenous” language of a recognized ethnic minority and therefore received state support based on the policy of “nativization” (korenizatsiaa).81 This privilege came at a price, however: Yiddish culture was required to subordinate itself to the demands of the revolution and to shed its distinctly Jewish character. According to Kenneth Moss, Yiddish writers “encountered two faces of Bolshevik policy toward secular Yiddish culture: a surprising readiness to pledge unprecedented support, and a view that claims on behalf of national cultural self-development were вЂobjectively reactionary.’”82 For the “fellow travelers” among them, intellectuals who supported the revolution but harbored doubts about certain aspects of the regime, this ambiguous policy generated immense anxiety, which escalated around 1920 when all non-Communist Yiddish organizations were either disbanded or handed over to the Jewish Section of the Communist Party (Evsktsiia).83 One such organization was the Kiev Culture League (Kultur-lige), headed by David Bergelson, Der Nister, and Dovid Hofshteyn, who reestablished the organization and its goal of an extraterritorial Yiddish culture in Berlin. Berlin was certainly not the only major city that attracted Jewish intellectuals during the 1920s. It was, however, uniquely well suited to Hebrew and Yiddish literary production for several reasons. First, the political climate was particularly welcoming of Left-leaning Russian Jews. Socialist agitation in the wake of World War I resulted in the replacement of the imperial government with a republic, the first democracy in Germany’s history. Page 40 →Its fledgling capital, which Josef Goebbels would later dub “the reddest city in Europe after Moscow, ” became a natural haven for impoverished immigrants with socialist and communist sympathies.84 Dovid

Eynhorn, who worked in Berlin between 1920 and 1924 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward), wrote extensively about the German Communist Party and relations between German Jews and East European Jewish workers.85 His reports depict the city as a site in which, ironically, political turmoil and economic desperation fuel cultural freedom, creativity, and harmony: Berlin is a city of a defeated country, where deep mourning fills every place. But one has to admire the fact that people are good towards strangers—you do not feel any mean hatred. I sense that the deep, tragic atmosphere which prevails in Germany will bring forth great poets and, possibly, a new direction in religion.86 As Eynhorn’s remarks suggest, the turbulent political situation of Weimar Berlin was counterbalanced by incomparable creative richness, which Left-leaning writers interpreted as a glimmer of hope during dark days. Whereas communist and socialist migrants found political freedom in Berlin, the more opportunistic arrivals discovered unparalleled economic opportunity. This may seem surprising in light of the crippling economic effects of massive postwar reparations payments and incapacitated industry. Yet Germany’s dire postwar economic situation was a blessing for migrants carrying foreign currency. Avrom Nokhum Stenzel described the situation with characteristic Weimar glibness, noting that “a foreigner with a London pound, a Dutch guilder, or an American dollar could wander from cabaret to cabaretВ .В .В . and saunter after midnight along the garishly lit KurfГјrstendamm, ending up in a hotel with not one woman, but one on each arm.”87 Staggering inflation and the increased value of foreign currency made Berlin a paradise for foreign publishers facing the censorship and economic collapse in war-torn Eastern Europe.88 Between 1920 and 1924, the heyday of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing in Berlin, more than ten Hebrew publishing houses sprouted, including Jacob Klatzkin’s Eshkol (Cluster) and Bialik’s Devir (Inner Sanctum), alongside Yiddish presses of all stripes, such as Klal-farlag (Public Press) and the Idisher literarisher farlag (Yiddish Literary Press), both known for their eye-catching avantgarde aesthetic.89 Berlin was second only to Warsaw as the world’s largest center of Yiddish book publishing, producing over 200 titles at its apogee in 1924, roughly a quarter of all Yiddish books produced worldwide that year.90 An example of the avant-garde visual style preferred by the Yiddish Literary Publishing House (Idisher literarisher farlag): Leyb Kvitko, 1919, cover designed by Yosef Chaikov (Berlin, 1923). (Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.) Page 41 →Yet Berlin was less a literary hub than a publisher’s clearinghouse. Most Hebrew and Yiddish books produced there were intended for audiences abroad, while those published abroad rarely traveled in the opposite direction, making it difficult for Hebrew and Yiddish writers based in Berlin to access literature produced in their languages. Moyshe Kulbak once complained that he could not get his hands on a single copy of an anthology in which he himself had published several poems.91 Page 42 →As a culture made for export, Berlin’s Hebrew and Yiddish publishing naturally awakened little interest on the part of local German-Jewish readers. When Bialik arrived in Berlin in 1921, he held out false hope that local Jews would provide support for his publishing endeavors and, in a fundraising letter to the Gesellschaft fГјr die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Society for the Science of Judaism), made the following plea: “At a great and historic hour brothers who had been separated by the strong arm of history, met at the same inn. Is it conceivable that this confrontation will be for naught? My heart says this will not be the case.”92 Two years later, Bialik’s hopes were dashed. Inflation was checked with the help of the Dawes Plan of 1923, causing Hebrew and Yiddish publishing—including Bialik’s own publishing house—to go into immediate decline. When Devir collapsed in 1924, Bialik was stunned. “Has it all ended?” he wrote to Simon Dubnow. “Have all the book buyers suddenly died?”93 What Bialik failed to realize is that Berlin’s Hebrew readership had not vanished; it simply had never existed as such. Other writers understood from the outset that Berlin would not amount to more than a temporary haven. It is no coincidence that Dovid Bergelson, who led a relatively settled existence in Berlin between 1921 and 1933, chose

to set most of his Berlin stories in the boardinghouse, the same site of temporary respite made famous by the British expatriate Christopher Isherwood. Marc Caplan has interpreted Bergelson’s fictional boardinghouse as a microcosm of the city as a whole, a site of simultaneous intimacy and anonymity defined less by specific physical markers than the profound sense of social dislocation it evokes.94 “In the boarding house,” remarks one of Bergelson’s characters, “you feel you are both in the city and very remote and isolated from its millions of inhabitants.”95 In contrast to his characters, Bergelson lived comfortably with his wife and son in Berlin’s affluent Zehlendorf neighborhood, where the couple regularly hosted prominent members of the Berlin literati, including Arthur Koestler, Erwin Piscator, and Alfred DГ¶blin.96 The dislocation experienced by his characters was rooted less in personal experience than in the belief that Berlin could never be a permanent home for Yiddish. It is therefore telling that his essay “Dray tsentren” (Three Centers) which compares New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as the main sites of interwar Yiddish literature, makes no mention of Berlin, the city in which it was written.97 As Bergelson’s example reveals, even the most well-adjusted migrant writers treated Berlin as a temporary home, a “transit-inn” (transit-kretshme), in the words of the critic Daniel Charney, from which they would soon be “released into the wider world.”98 This does not mean, however, that they were cut off from their local surroundings or the local culture, as Bergelson’s networkPage 43 → of friends and colleagues attests. Although German Jews and East European Jews were predominantly focused on their respective cultural projects, shaped and confined as they were by language and political orientation, they were not nearly as isolated from one another as is often assumed. During the Weimar period, each group continued to cultivate an image of the other as part of its own process of national self-definition, yet notable efforts were made to produce a collective Jewish identity that transcended divisions of East and West. Thus we arrive at the last stage of the encounter between Ostjuden and Westjuden in Weimar Berlin, where unusual collaborations and unexpected friendships were formed.

East Meets West in Weimar Berlin Increased contact between native and migrant writers within the transitional environment of Weimar Berlin opened up new possibilities for cultural exchange. One virtual meeting point for German-Jewish and East European Jewish writers was found in collaborative publishing endeavors, such as literary anthologies and journals. While German-Jewish periodicals like Der Jude marketed Hebrew and Yiddish literature in translation to an assimilated German readership, Hebrew and Yiddish publications such as Berliner bleter (Berlin Pages) featured original translations of works by German-Jewish authors in its pages. One of the most striking examples of this kind of cultural crossover was the 1922 miscellany Der onheyb (The Beginning), edited by Dovid Eynhorn, Max Weinreich, and Shmeryahu Gorelik. Featuring original Yiddish poetry and essays alongside translations of German texts by writers like Max Brod and Else Lasker-SchГјler, as well as miniatures by Oscar Wilde and August Strindberg, the anthology’s pan-European scope reflected its editors’ desire to “Yiddishize” European literature via translation while simultaneously “Europeanizing” Yiddish.99 The combination of texts written in various languages reveals the indispensible role played by translation for forging a pan-European Jewish cultural identity, a goal pursued by German Jews and East European Jews alike. This type of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic publishing took place not only between German Jews and East European Jews but also occasionally between Yiddishist and Hebraist camps, which were at this stage otherwise locked in an ideological showdown. An important yet unusual example was the bilingual journal Milgroym/Rimon (meaning “pomegranate” in Yiddish and Hebrew, respectively), which was published in Yiddish and Hebrew in two separate language versions between 1922 and 1926. Established by Mark WischnitzerPage 44 → and Rachel Wischnitzer Bernstein, the twin publications displayed high quality art reproductions accompanied by essays on art, theater, music, and literature, as well as original literary works by leading Hebrew and Yiddish writers. As Naomi Brenner has shown, bilingualism was the defining cultural contribution of Rimon/Milgroym within the specific context of Weimar Berlin. The journal’s opening mission statement presented bilingualism as a reaction to the “language wars” that had polarized Hebrew and Yiddish.100 “By focusing on visual art rather than literature,” argues Brenner, the journal promoted “a shared language of modernism and the

translingual nature of the visual.”101 Rimon/Milgroym therefore fell out of step with contemporaneous periodicals that were clearly aligned with specific ideological or political movements.102 The multilingual and, by extension, apolitical nature of this publishing venture was made possible by the cosmopolitan environment of Berlin, where political, religious, and gendered distinctions between Hebrew and Yiddish were overshadowed by the common experience of exile.103 While literary publications provided a virtual space for multilingual, intercultural exchange, physical encounters among Yiddishists, Hebraists, and Germanists occurred within the four walls of the literary cafГ©. Shachar Pinsker describes the Berlin cafГ© as a “thirdspace” located “between real and imaginary, the inside and outside, public and privateВ .В .В . a space in which complex negotiations between Jews and Gentiles, вЂEast’ and вЂWest,’ вЂthe local’ and the immigrant took place.”104 The Romanisches CafГ©, one of the most famous haunts of Berlin literati in the 1920s, was a veritable microcosm of the city’s overall diversity. It was there that the poet Else-Lasker SchГјler, a prominent member of the prewar Berlin expressionist circle, befriended the Yiddish poets Uri Zvi Greenberg and Avrom Nokhum Stenzel. Known for her lavish costumes and exotic, gender-bending personae, Lasker-SchГјler is said to have approached Stenzel with a note curiously scrawled on a napkin, addressed to “Hamid” and signed “Prince Jussuf.”105 Despite the age and culture gap (Stenzel was twenty-seven years her junior), Lasker-SchГјler regarded the Polish-born Stenzel as a kindred spirit who hailed, like her alter ego Prince Jussuf of Thebes, from the ancient Orient.106 Her 1924 poem, “Abraham Stenzel,” begins: When Abraham was very young, God named him: Hamid. This I know, for it was only four thousand Years and one leap year ago. Page 45 →I still hung then on a tree In the shadow of a coconut palm. My playmate, Abraham Stenzel, Fermented from the sap of the trunk.107 Als Abraham ganz jung war, Nannte ihn Gott: Hamid. Ich weiss es noch, denn erst viertausend Und ein Schaltjahr ist es her. Ich hing zwar noch am Baum Im Schatten einer Cocospalme. Mein SpielgefГ¤hrte, Abraham Stenzel, GГ¤rte mit dem Mark im Stamm. Playing on the double meaning of the word Stamm, meaning “trunk” or “tribe,” the speaker presents her “playmate” in primitivist terms as her own kin. Lasker-SchГјler was drawn to Stenzel not only because he appeared to her to be the quintessential “wild Jew” but also because he was similarly removed from the

ancient “Land of the Hebrews” from which they both hailed. She, the poet trapped in the German language, and he, “the poet of jargon,” were two “noble desert animals” in exile. Lasker-SchГјler’s friendship with Stenzel, which continued via correspondence until her death, is one of several examples of friendships formed between German and East European Jews at the Romanisches CafГ©.108 David Bergelson and Alfred DГ¶blin also met there, and went on to influence one another profoundly. In addition to their coffeehouse encounters, DГ¶blin and Bergelson met at the latter’s home and at the Sholem Aleichem Club, where DГ¶blin was invited to speak publicly on German literature.109 Shortly before departing for his journey to Poland in 1924, DГ¶blin published a glowing review of David Bergelson’s 1913 novel Nokh alemen (translated as When All Is Said and Done), which had recently appeared in German translation under the title Das Ende vom Lied. The wording of DГ¶blin’s accolade is striking: “One realizes after just a few pages that this is a crossover piece (Гњbergangswerk), not an original Yiddish work, though it was indeed written in Yiddish. The author understands western writing styles and novelistic techniques.”110 Although the tenor of DГ¶blin’s review seems condescending, his Page 47 →intention in describing the novel as a “crossover piece” (Гњbergangswerk) was to laud Bergelson as a consummate European modernist rather than as the proponent of an insular and outdated “Yiddishkayt.”111 Indeed, DГ¶blin found in Bergelson’s writing the cosmopolitan ethos underlying modern Yiddish literature, its inherent ability to cross cultural borders. It is therefore interesting to note that DГ¶blin drew inspiration not only from Bergelson’s writing but also from his political proclivities. Following his journey to Poland, he began learning Yiddish and became involved in the Yiddish Territorialist movement, which called for a Jewish national home outside of Palestine. In 1935, DГ¶blin became an outspoken supporter of the newly formed anti-Zionist, anti-Soviet Frayland-lige far yidisher teritoryalistisher kolonizatsye (Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization).112 Page 46 →Illustration by Else Lasker-SchГјler, “Thebes with Jussuf.” The dedication reads, “To Hamid Stenzel in friendship.” (Public domain.) The cafГ©, like Berlin as a whole, was a multilingual site of contact and exchange that “buzzed like a beehive, ” to borrow Stenzel’s metaphor.113 Since most of its patrons regarded Berlin as merely a provisional home, they were often open to interacting with writers whose linguistic, political, and ideological commitments differed from their own. As Gennady Estraikh observes, “Berlin was arguably the only place where one could see around the same table journalists of ideologically and aesthetically rivaling dailies.”114 The very fact that Yiddish and Hebrew coexisted harmoniously within the literary cafГ© testifies to the openness of this particular time and space.115 Yet many patrons regarded the literary cafГ© as an isolated Sprachinsel (language island) within a tumultuous foreign world where languages in exile could find only momentary reprieve. The protagonist of Leah Goldberg’s posthumously published novel Avedot: Mukdash leвЂantonia (Losses: Dedicated to Antonia), a Hebrew poet and student of orientalism named Elhanan Yehuda Kron, goes to the cafГ© to escape the hubbub of Berlin’s linguistic diversity: It was hot. Yet comfortable. It was a homeland. Beyond the partition of the cafГ© there was the commotion of the foreign neighborhood. The cold of the foreign night. The chime of many foreign languages, languages that were dative, accusative, and past perfect. A cruel and foreign world. They were on a remote and blessed island. In their own tiny world.116 For Kron, whose fictional experiences were inspired by Goldberg’s own three-year stint as a doctoral student of orientalism in Germany, Berlin provides a culture to which he is drawn and yet from which he is simultaneously displaced.117 Goldberg’s novel, a KГјnstlerroman (artist’s novel) of exceptional depth, Page 48 →exemplifies the tension of simultaneous attraction and dislocation that became a dominant theme in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction set in and inspired by Weimar Berlin. Set in 1932–33 on the cusp of the Nazi takeover of power, the plot revolves around the loss of Kron’s Hebrew masterpiece, a poem written in pseudo-medieval script on antique parchment that portrays “Mary Magdalene surrendering herself to Judas Iscariot in exchange for a single drop of blood from the crucifix.” Entitled “Brihat elohim” (God’s Abandonment), the poem ironically

abandons its author when the parchment disappears from his pocket. It eventually makes its way into the hands of the wrong readers, a pair of Nazi sympathizers who publish it in an orientalist journal as evidence of medieval Jewish anti-Christian sentiment. The missing poem becomes a powerful metaphor for the status of Modern Hebrew literature, which has its roots in Europe (represented in the novel by Berlin), yet can find no appropriate readers there.118 Thus, the East European Jews whom Kron encounters in the Scheunenviertel (which he ironically dubs “Kasrilevke” after Sholem Aleichem’s fictional shtetl of fools) are literate in Hebrew but have no taste for secular literature. Kron exhibits profound ambivalence toward what he sees as the parochial culture of the Ostjuden while in the same breath professing his undying loyalty toward them: “Aren’t you certain,” he asks himself, that everything you write, if we ignore for a moment the question of language, is clearly closer and dearer to every goy whose education is your education and worldview is your worldview, than to any one of them, your own nation? And yet you also know, in your very essence, that if one of those wise guys even touches a hair on the head of one of those Haimies, you will yell violently, you will sob and shout at the top of your lungs.119 Kron’s poetry is culturally alien to the Jews who can read it and linguistically inaccessible to the non-Jewish European readers who could appreciate its content. It fares no better with the German orientalists, who are well versed in classical Hebrew but ultimately misappropriate and misinterpret it as an orientalist object. Just as Kron’s poem becomes lost (avud) in Berlin, so too, Goldberg suggests, is the enterprise of secular Hebrew literature in Europe revealed to be hopeless (avud), for it can find no appropriate audience there, and thus no home. A similar tension between attraction and dislocation runs through the Berlin writing of S. Y. Agnon. Agnon arrived in Berlin in 1912 and remained Page 49 →in Germany, moving between Berlin and Bad Homburg, until 1924, when a fire destroyed his library and unfinished manuscripts and propelled him back to Palestine. He enjoyed a comparatively successful career in Germany, earning the admiration of German-Jewish readers like Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and the business magnate Salman Schocken, who saw in Agnon an authentic reincarnation of the Jewish folk spirit.120 Buber glorified him as “Galician and Palestinian, Hasid and pioneer, [who] carries the essence of both worlds in the equilibrium of consecration.”121 Some of Agnon’s most important stories, such as “Aggadat hasofer” (The Tale of the Scribe, 1917), appeared in German translation in Buber’s Der Jude before the original Hebrew versions even saw print.122 The story revolves around a childless couple, Raphael, a Torah scribe, and his wife, Miriam, whose troubles appear at first glance to reveal the inscrutable will of God. But a closer reading exposes the real reason for their inability to conceive: having devoted themselves strictly to a life of sanctity, they have annulled all sexual desire and neglected to consummate their marriage. When Miriam dies of sorrow at an early age, Raphael dedicates a Torah scroll to her memory, investing in his scribal work all of the erotic energy that he failed to invest in his marriage, yet the scroll remains an imperfect surrogate for life. His failure as a scribe (sofer) points to Agnon’s own doubt over the capacity of the modern author (sofer) to revitalize tradition through the modern word. Enthusiastically yet erroneously consumed by German-Jewish readers as an authentic shtetl tale, the story is in fact a somber elegy for a fading traditional world as imagined from afar.123 While the stories Agnon composed in Berlin reflect melancholic longing for a lost home, the experience of displacement and isolation within the foreign metropolis left an imprint on his later work. Ad hena (translated as To This Day, 1952), his last novel, is the semiautobiographical tale of a Galician Jew who leaves his new home in Jaffa for Berlin, where he is “forced to wander from place to place, from room to room” in a city overrun by refugees, bereaved families, wounded war veterans, and nouveau-riche profiteers.124 At the beginning of each chapter the protagonist finds himself in a different boardinghouse, train station, or railcar, the various symbols of his endless transit and psychological unrest. It is a veritable “jest of Fate,” the protagonist reflects, that he must take so many trains simply “to get from Berlin to Berlin.”125 Meanderings to, from, and within the capital reveal an endless internal battle—between the craving for secular experience and nostalgia for Jewish tradition, between the draw of the West and the longing for the East, and between cosmopolitan Europe and the

Jewish homeland. Restless wandering and unplanned encounters with characters of various Page 50 →backgrounds attune the protagonist to cultural commonalities and differences, which in turn contribute to a more nuanced self-perception. The character he admires most is the learned bibliographer Dr. Isaac Mittel. Whereas most of the other Jewish characters in the novel are either native-born German Jews or East-European Jewish refugees, Dr. Mittel, whose name translates as “middle” or “medium,” is a rare blend of both, a Polish-born Jew who earned his doctorate in Germany and married into a wealthy German-Jewish family. He devotes himself to collecting Jewish books that, like their collector, were driven out of Eastern Europe into Germany, where they find refuge yet are rendered stale and irrelevant, the illegible relics of a bygone era. And yet, the novel suggests, without the disciplines of bibliography and ethnography, two important intellectual products of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectual movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism), the tradition that these books represent might have disappeared altogether. Like Dr. Mittel, the protagonist’s identity is suspended between East and West. Although he is repeatedly mistaken for a Russian Jew and must show his passport in order to prove his legal status in Germany, his Austrian citizenship makes him eligible for military conscription to the army of his occupiers. As both a Yiddish-speaking Jew and a Habsburg citizen, he belongs neither to the Ostjuden nor to the Westjuden, yet identifies to some degree with both groups. His initial resentment toward the Yekkes, or German Jews, whom he disparages for trying to be “more German than the Germans,” is overcome by his encounter with the Lichtenstein family, who rescue him from the wartime housing shortage by renting him a room in their Charlottenburg home: Although there may be other Jews who are more learned, pious, and perfect in their faith, the Jews of Germany yield to none in their honesty, trustworthiness, responsibility, and common sense. Moreover, Herr Lichtenstein’s library made me realize that all our knowledge of Jewish history, philosophy, and literature are but the crumbs fallen from the tables of those great polymaths, the scholars of Jewish Germany.126 As a liminal figure—neither Ostjude nor Westjude, or perhaps both at once—the protagonist represents what Dan Miron has described as Agnon’s “catholic Jewish vision,” the desire to overcome the age-old division between East and West.127 Yet this ecumenical vision cannot be read as a direct outgrowth of Agnon’s experiences in Weimar Berlin. Written during World War II and Page 51 →published only after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, the novel is in fact the product of a historical moment in which the old distinction between Ostjuden and Westjuden could no longer hold, for both groups had become heirs to a shared fate. The relatively late appearance of the novel suggests that the transnational legacy of Weimar Jewish culture, the “shared cultural possibility” to which we alluded in the introduction, comes into view primarily through the lens of history. Indeed, the common fate of German Jews and East European Jews became increasingly apparent during the final years of the Weimar period, and all the more so upon Hitler’s rise to power. As Weimar democracy was consumed by the terror of the Third Reich, the long-held distinction between migrant Ostjuden and native Westjuden was overshadowed by a far more decisive distinction between Germans and Jews, which in turn became a de facto source of unity for all European Jews. This shift comes to the fore in the second edition of Joseph Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews, 1937), published a decade after the first edition and shortly after the Nuremberg Laws were introduced. In his preface to the second edition, Roth remarks with deep despair that the title no longer refers solely to the East European Jewish refugee but also to the native German Jew, who was now “more exposed and more homeless even than his cousin in Lodz.”128 By the 1930s, as Roth’s prescient words indicate, the image of the “alien” Ostjuden had become an allencompassing metaphor that anticipated the indiscriminate devastation of Jewish life not only in Germany but throughout Europe. The fact that Ostjuden and Westjuden had now merged into one target of anti-Semitic animus was especially apparent in Nazi literature, such as the picture book Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom, 1938), published by

the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda with the purpose of warning German children against the threat of the Jews. The story “So kamen die Juden zu uns” (How the Jews Came to Us) depicts two boys, Fritz and Karl, as they observe three traditional Jews engaged in an illicit business transaction. When Karl identifies them as Ostjuden based on their distinctive attire, Fritz informs his friend that all Jews in Germany are in fact infiltrators from Galicia and Poland who cheated their way to affluence, only to “remove their dirty rags, cut off their beards, delouse themselves, .В .В .В speak the German language and pretend to be Germans.” Yet this “Jewish swindle” (Judenschwindel) is easily exposed, Karl explains, for the Jews “can never remove their bent Jewnoses, their Jew-ears, their crooked Jew-legs, and their flat Jew-feet.” Whether or not it is discernible to the eye, Fritz warns (and here the story comes to an end), it is important to remember that “a Jew remains a Jew.”129 Page 52 →

Beyond East and West The above examination of the evolving relationship between Westjuden and Ostjuden from the time of the Haskalah until the rise of the Third Reich reveals a striking reversal in trajectory: whereas both groups initially viewed Germany as the wellspring of liberal, Western values, by World War I they had begun to “reorient” their gaze toward the “East,” extending temporally and geographically from the ancient Near East to contemporary Eastern Europe. Plagued by the uncertainty of national homelessness and the terror of rising anti-Semitism, both groups looked eastward with a combination of nostalgia, hope, and despair in an effort to come to terms with the failure of the West to fulfill the promise of coexistence predicated on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment. Indeed, melancholic longing for the “East” betrayed profound dislocation in the “West,” which in turn fueled the search for a new national homeland, whether real or imagined. This chapter has focused on the evolving relationship between Ostjuden and Westjuden in fiction and ethnographic reportage. As we shall see in the following chapters, images of a homeland proliferated especially within the realm of poetry. More than any other literary genre, poetry was the locus for investigating questions of homeland and national belonging, and efforts to construct a distinctly Jewish poetic tradition in German, Hebrew, or Yiddish became a key element in the project of self-realization for Ostjuden and Westjuden alike. A cornucopia of poetic styles employed by Jewish writers during the 1920s—ranging from expressionism to symbolism to neoromanticism—represents a broad range of strategies for coping with the difficult transition from old world to new world and from a cosmopolitan reality to fervently nationalistic one. All four poets featured in the ensuing chapters experienced Weimar Berlin as a crossroads between East and West and as the thriving yet precarious hub of a diverse culture that would soon be consumed by fascistic forces for which democracy had ironically paved the way.

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2. “Entwined in Dialogue” Ludwig Strauss on the Border of Bilingualism Shortly after arriving in Palestine in 1934, Ludwig Strauss stood atop Mount Carmel overlooking the bay of Haifa. In his memoirs, he recalls this moment as the culmination of a long journey. Ten years previously, in the winter of 1924, he had visited Palestine for the first time, spending three months traveling through the country marveling at the deserts and coastline that were so unlike the scenery of his native Germany. During this visit, Strauss writes, he established with the exotic landscape “a relationship of passionate inwardness, which remained as good as mute.”1 It was only upon his return to Palestine a decade later, this time as an immigrant, that his awestruck silence was finally broken. Standing “at the precipice of the Carmel, abandoned for a while by the genius of the German language, the first blessed touch of the genius of the Hebrew language was received.” This spontaneous linguistic transfer “loosened the tongue,” in Strauss’s words, allowing him to write about the beauty before him in German.2 The result was two separate versions of his ode “To the Bay”—one in German and one in Hebrew—and the transformation of a German poet into a bilingual poet. Strauss’s archive at the National Library of Israel contains two bilingual notebooks in which the Hebrew script, written from right to left, and the German script, written from left to right, literally meet at the seam. The contrast between his flowing German penmanship and his meticulously formed, almost childlike Hebrew letters, as well as the numerous pen marks that adorn the Hebrew pages, casts doubt on the anecdote related above. These signs of extensive editing reveal that his first bilingual composition was not, as he asserted, the result of sublime revelation, but rather the product of painstaking self-translation between his native German and his newly acquired Hebrew, a language he labored to master relatively late in life. Why, Page 54 →then, did he construct the romantic myth of poetic genius surrounding his first bilingual poem? Strauss’s account of the Haifa bay “revelation” responds to the German romantic theory of language according to which “every writer can produce original work only in his mother tongue,” in the words of Friedrich Schleiermacher.3 This idea was often accompanied by the belief, infamously articulated by Richard Wagner, that the Jew speaks German as “a foreign tongue” and can therefore “only parrot and imitate (nachsprechen und nachkГјnsteln)—not create a poem of his own words nor true works of art.”4 Seeking to overcome this malicious charge, which remained prevalent in his own day, Strauss posited the intrusion of Hebrew as a recovered Ursprache, a primordial language that facilitates honest and authentic expression in his “illegitimate” Muttersprache, or mother tongue, German. By embracing bilingualism Strauss reappropriated what Sander Gilman has described as the most maligned aspect of Jewish difference within German society, namely the perception of a “hidden language of the Jews,” a corrupted German inflected with Hebrew and Yiddish.5 Indeed, he transformed the negatively construed German-Jewish “doublespeak, ” a dubious language of furtive allegiances, from a source of suspicion into a source of genuine creativity. This chapter explores the emergence of Strauss’s German-Hebrew bilingualism alongside his geographical trajectory between Germany, his native land and beloved lyric landscape, and the Land of Israel, his imagined ancestral and later adopted homeland. Beginning during his student days in Berlin just before World War I, it examines Strauss’s vision of an autonomous Jewish literary culture, which took shape against the backdrop of a broader discourse on the role of the Jew in German culture. In Berlin, Strauss became drawn to both cultural Zionism and the Yiddish culture of East European Jewry, which together inspired his vision of a pan-Jewish (alljГјdisch) tradition encompassing the Hebrew Bible, Yiddish folklore, and modern German-Jewish verse. This ideal of a unified Jewish culture undivided by borders between East and West set the stage for Strauss’s bilingual turn while feeding another romantic vision, that of binational coexistence between Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel. After fleeing Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1935, Strauss discovered a political reality that did not entirely live up to his earlier ideals. His bilingual writing of the 1940s was forced to contend with the violent ascent of homogeneous, monocultural national ideologies both in Europe and in the nascent Jewish state. Though ultimately reduced to a pipe dream, Strauss’s binational vision and attendant bilingualism reflect a process of

cross-fertilization that was sparked at a moment of political transformationPage 56 → and achieved through the continuous transfer between languages, cultures, and literary landscapes. Page 55 →Excerpt from Strauss’s bilingual notebooks, a Hebrew transcription of “To the Bay.” Below the poem Strauss identifies the above text in German as “the edited version of my first Hebrew composition, which originated in the summer of 1934.” (Courtesy of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.)

Rethinking the Role of the “Middleman” Conceived over the course of ten years between Strauss’s first visit to Palestine in 1924 and his eventual immigration in 1934, Strauss’s ode to the bay of Haifa took shape between countries and between languages. In order to understand the poem’s pivotal role within his oeuvre, it is necessary to examine the development of Strauss’s poetics and his politics during the years prior to his first visit to Palestine. In 1912, the year he left Aachen to take up his studies in Berlin, an open debate erupted in the journal Der Kunstwart (The Art Guardian) in response to a controversial essay by the young critic Moritz Goldstein. Goldstein argued that assimilation was an illusion amplified by the stubborn refusal of the Jews to admit their rejection by German society, and that the relationship of the Jews to Germany was “that of an unrequited love,” with the Jews foolishly “administrating the spiritual property of a nation which denies our right and our ability to do so.”6 The essay provoked over ninety published responses, including one by Strauss, which fell into two main camps: those who embraced Goldstein’s antiassimilation argument (especially the Zionists), and those who denounced its pessimism about German-Jewish integration.7 Strauss, then a relatively unknown poet of twenty, positioned himself in the antiassimilation camp with an essay that not only endorsed but also amplified Goldstein’s position by criticizing the assimilated German Jews who had neglected their cultural identity and thereby facilitated their own decline. He concluded the essay by calling upon all Jewish writers to fulfill their “duty” of expressing their Jewishness openly. This would be most easily done, Strauss maintained, in the forum of a journal committed to a “national Jewish movement in Germany.”8 The idea for the journal became the topic of a brief correspondence between Strauss and his classmate Walter Benjamin, whom Strauss invited to serve as cofounder and editor. Sharing Strauss’s concerns about the deleterious effects of assimilation, Benjamin was positively disposed to the idea.9 The two disagreed vehemently, however, on the issue of Zionism. Whereas Benjamin supported cultural renewal in the Diaspora and endorsed the role of the Literatenjude (a catchall term for Jewish journalists, publishers, and editors) as the bearer of this cosmopolitan “mission,” Strauss saw the true proponent of Jewish culture as the national poet, who must set his sights on a new Page 57 →national home in Palestine.10 Moreover, Strauss insisted that the only way for the Jewish poet to produce a distinctly Jewish form of culture was by learning Jewish languages and becoming well versed in Jewish literary sources.11 Benjamin and Strauss were unable to settle their differences. Consequently, the journal never came to fruition. Not long after their correspondence came to an end, however, Strauss’s friend and future brother-in-law, Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann, established a journal conceived along similar lines, to which Strauss became a key contributor. Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue (Sanctuary: Pan-Jewish Review), as its title indicates, promoted the ideal of Alljudentum (pan-Judaism), defined as the binding of Jewish culture in Germany with the Yiddishspeaking communities of Eastern Europe. Kaufmann saw East European Jewish culture not merely as a mythical source of inspiration for German-Jewish renewal but rather as a thriving culture, “living, flesh and blood,” and thus a viable foundation for a pan-Jewish identity.12 He described the mission of the journal as follows: To serve the consciousness of a still small, yet growing, cohort of western-Jewish poets through whom the best of the nation will be allowed to resonate. Against the boycott of Yiddish, which for the West is synonymous with voluntary self-enclosure from the strongest, most fruitful national values, we will take a first step by offering original samples of Yiddish poetry in flawless old typeface. For Hebrew poetry there remains no other path than translation. We hope gradually to find language artists capable of exposing the nuances of Hebrew cloaked in a foreign language.13

Showcasing German poetry and essays alongside Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, Die Freistatt was the only publication of its kind to encourage German Jews not only to read East European Jewish texts but also to learn Jewish languages. By attributing equal cultural value to German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, Kaufmann aimed for nothing less than a “radical revision and regeneration of west European Jewry’s view of the Jewish present.”14 The alljГјdisch ideal represented a reaction to German vГ¶lkisch ideology, with its equation of ethnic purity and creativity, which portrayed the Jews as having a corrupting effect on German culture and the economy. The fact that many of Germany’s most prominent editors, publishers, critics, and art dealers were Jewish provided fodder for the anti-Semitic claim that increasing monetary success in “intermediary” fields was directly proportional to a lack of creativity. The prevalence of this claim attested to a painful impasse faced Page 58 →by Jewish writers and intellectuals: Would they continue to contribute to a culture to which they were denied any rightful claim or redirect their energies to fashion their own? Jakob Wassermann expressed support for the latter argument in an essay entitled “Der Jude als Orientale” (The Jew as Oriental), in which he promoted a doctrine of self-realization conceived along ethnic lines. Conceding to the Volkists an inherent link between ethnic identity and creative capacity, Wassermann posited a distinction between the cosmopolitan Literat and the poet, or SchГ¶pfer (creator), whose poetic capacity is inseparable from his “oriental” identity.15 The fact that fewer Jews took on the role of poet than critic was in Wasserman’s view a clear sign of persistent self-deception and exilic weakness. Like Wassermann, Strauss believed that the only way for the Jewish poet to reinvigorate his creativity was to abandon the role of Literat and reestablish “a connection with Jewish culture, which today means EastEuropean Jewish culture.”16 This idea became the kernel of a heated exchange between Strauss and the prominent Jewish literary critic Julius Bab, which unfolded in the pages of Die Freistatt. Bab initiated the debate with a reply to Strauss’s Kunstwart piece, entitled “Der Anteil der Juden an der deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart” (The Participation of the Jews in Contemporary German Poetry), in which he argued that German Jews failed as poets because they are inherently uncreative: “The Jews lack the innocence of the senses; they must force everything through idea, reflection and comparison and have therefore never become poets in the elementary sense of the word.”17 This lack of creativity, Bab asserted, was the result of a historical and constitutional predisposition to play the role of the “middleman” (Mittler) within a foreign culture. With the use of the word Mittler, Bab deliberately insinuated a connection between the Jews’ traditional economic function as moneylenders and their current role in German culture as literary agents, publishers, translators, and critics.18 Notwithstanding his critical tone, however, Bab’s intention was apologetic rather than derisive; he aimed to defend the contributions of Jews to German culture while allaying suspicions about their corrupting influence.19 By affirming the role of the Jew as Mittler and denying his role as SchГ¶pfer, Bab sought to refute the malicious claim that the Jews not only dominated German culture but also contaminated it. This defense of the “middleman” was also an endorsement of assimilation, which in Bab’s view was not self-abnegating but productive, a “commitment to the experienceВ .В .В . that we in truth are both Jewish and German, and that we can live only through a harmonious cooperation, an вЂadaptation’ (Anpassen) of these two elements.”20 He therefore rejected Strauss’s call to turn to the “ghettoized” culture of East European Jewry as a source of Page 59 →cultural inspiration. How could German Jews “go to the Ostjuden to experience what art is,” Bab asked incredulously, when it was Yiddish culture that wanted and needed a Western education?21 Strauss bristled at the self-hating tenor of Bab’s argument, which relied on a Hegelian conception of a singular European “high culture.” In his rebuttal, he invoked an alternative definition of culture, one promulgated by J. G. Herder, as a pluralistic anthropological category, that which distinguishes individual Volksgeisten, the “singular and wonderful spirits” of nations. Herder extolled the ancient Israelites as a pure, “primitive” culture of the East, but argued that two thousand years of estrangement from their native land had caused the Jews to degenerate into “a race of cunning brokers” whose sole purpose is to defraud their host nations.22 Echoing Herder’s argument yet purging its anti-Semitic sting, Strauss presented East European Jewry as the torchbearers of a pure and primitive Jewish Volksgeist that had been sapped by the rationalism of the bourgeois West.

Having established East European Jews as the proponents of an authentic Jewish culture, Strauss then took Bab to task on the matter of creativity. He argued that the dominance of intellect and spirit, which his opponent dismissed as overly cerebral and impenetrable by sensual experience, was in fact a distinguishing feature of German-Jewish poetry. Jewish poetry, according to Strauss, was qualitatively different from German poetry, since the nature of the Jew is fundamentally different from that of the German. “The German detects (erfaГџt) the sensual form and senses (ahnt) the spirit in it,” Strauss wrote, “whereas [t]he Jew experiences (erlebt) the spirit and creates (erschafft) the sensual world from and in service of it.”23 The Jew’s attunement to spirit (Geist) over and above sensual experience was not an impediment to poetry, in Strauss’s view, but rather its unique driving force. Insofar as German-Jewish poetry was distinct from German poetry, moreover, the problem of Jewish creativity lay not with Jewish poets but with assimilated Jewish critics like Bab, whose “slavish” adherence to the norms of German culture had prevented them from evaluating Jewish poetry on its own terms.24 Strauss pursued two aims in his response to Bab’s essay: to highlight the negative effects of assimilation (for which Bab’s flawed criticism served as a key example), and to build a case for a distinct German-Jewish poetic tradition rooted in classical Hebrew sources. The primacy of intellect and spirit, which Bab had flatly dismissed as antithetical to poetic expression, was in Strauss’s view the unique legacy of the Bible. Offering as an example a phrase from the Song of Songs—“His head is the finest gold” (5:11)—he pointed out that biblical imagery “does not offer a conceivable sensual image but rather vaguely affects the power of imagination by encouraging an intermediaryPage 60 → emotion.” The consummate inheritor of this technique, according to Strauss, was Else Lasker-SchГјler, whose poetry makes up for what it lacks in terms of the “innocence of the senses” through its “subjective re-evaluation of nature (Umwertung der Natur)В .В .В . in which the spiritual, emotional and even the psychic outweigh the sensual.”25 Linking Lasker-SchГјler’s unusual form of poetic abstraction with the tradition of the Song of Songs, Strauss presented contemporary German-Jewish verse as the progeny of classical Hebrew verse, thus establishing a chain of tradition linking Lasker-SchГјler’s Hebrew Ballads to the Song of Songs. Positing a unified literary tradition that encompasses classical Hebrew and modern German verse, Strauss suggested that German-Jewish poets remain separate from mainstream German culture, and therefore cannot be accused of writing hackneyed verse. In this way, he countered the charge of Jewish imitativeness while defending the Jewish poet’s relationship to the German language. But how could the claim of a single literary tradition linking classical Hebrew with modern German be substantiated? The argument presented an obvious linguistic obstacle. Strauss was well aware of the conundrum faced by the German-Jewish poet: denied ownership of German, his natural medium of expression, yet unable to communicate freely in any other language, the German-Jewish poet faced what Kafka described as three linguistic impossibilities: “The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.”26 The only way to justify the use of German while endorsing a withdrawal from German culture proper was to establish an intermediary term linking the primordial Hebraic Volksgeist with contemporary German-Jewish culture. Strauss identified Yiddish as the missing link, the nexus of German, to which it was linguistically tied, and Hebrew, with which it shared a religious and cultural bond. Not Muttersprache (mother tongue) but Mittlersprache (mediating language), Yiddish linked the German Jew’s “mythic language” with his natural “vernacular.”27 Ironically, it was as an intermediary language that Yiddish was to aid the German Jew in overcoming his intermediary status within German culture. The view of Yiddish as a mediating language is the crux of Strauss’s novella Der Mittler (The Middleman), published in the January 1914 issue of Die Freistatt as a last salvo in the debate with Bab. The plot relates the tragic fate of David R., a young German-Jewish student who has been wrongfully convicted of murder. David’s story begins on the fateful day that he arrives at his neighbor’s front door to deliver a letter addressed to her but accidentally delivered to him. When the elegant neighbor welcomes him into her home, he is suddenly overtaken by desire and embraces her passionately before fleeingPage 61 → in shame. Upon returning home, David learns that the neighbor has been found murdered on her divan and that he is the only viable suspect. He is immediately arrested and imprisoned, forced to spend his remaining days in the confines of a solitary prison cell reconstructing the chain of events that led to his undoing.

The peculiar plot offers an allegory for German Jewry’s attempt to embrace German culture, only to be accused of defiling it. While the invitation into the neighbor’s home symbolizes the limited acceptance of the Jews into the BildungsbГјrgertum, which lured them with seemingly ecumenical promise, the embrace and subsequent murder charge indicate that assimilation was not matched by acceptance into German society. Yet Strauss places the onus for this unfortunate situation squarely on the protagonist. Although the outside community accuses David of murder, it is his misplaced desire for the neighbor that put him in a quandary in the first place. Looking back, David realizes that the seeds of self-defeat were sowed during his youth, when he, “the weak and peculiar bloke,” was taunted and abused by his peers for being “the Jew, the clearly marked child of a despised and homeless nation.”28 His exclusion from the closed circle of Urdeutschtum (primordial Germanness) represented by his brutish classmates is juxtaposed with his attraction to the refined female neighbor, who stands for the nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung, the desired entry ticket into the educated middle class.29 David’s frustrated longing for the neighbor demonstrates what Moritz Goldstein identified as the existential crisis of German Jews who remain trapped in their unrequited love for a culture that will never fully accept them. The deleterious consequences of self-hatred are revealed through David’s psychological unraveling in prison. As he descends into a spiral of delusion and self-doubt, he gradually believes himself to be the culprit and confesses to a crime that he did not commit, thus condemning himself to life in prison. The turning point occurs when he receives a visit from his mother, who addresses him tenderly by a name she had never used before: And then, stroking my hair: “My boy.” And then, something she had never called me before: “My Dovidleh.” With these words, which released a boundless pain in my heart, I saw the simple house of those old village-Jews, my grandparents; I saw myself as a child during my beautiful vacations with these chaste and simple, honest and happy people; the name that my mother had just called me for the first time was the name that her mother, in tender moments, called my grandfather.30 Page 62 →The sound of his diminutive Yiddish nickname, Dovidleh, awakens in David the memory of his “chaste and simple” lineage and, in turn, the recognition of his own innocence. This newfound selfknowledge in turn facilitates honest written expression: “And so my days elapse, identical and clear in the bitter surroundings and care of the prison. Occasionally I write verses and just recently began writing the story of my life, which I see before me in ever-clearer lines from an uncorrupted distance.”31 It is only at the moment that David acknowledges his true ethnic origins—a moment of self-discovery facilitated by the intrusion of his Yiddish name—that he is able to tap into his creative prowess and become a true poet. No longer an “intermediary” (Mittler) within German culture, David is transformed—through the intrusion of Yiddish—into a “creator” (SchГ¶pfer). Der Mittler reveals Strauss’s growing interest in Yiddish, which was kindled during his student days in Berlin. Under the influence of Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann and his sister Riwka, Strauss’s wife, he came to see Yiddish literature as a reservoir of folk sources that communicated Jewish ethnicity in its most authentic form.32 Yet, in contrast to Kaufmann’s diaspora nationalist leanings, Strauss’s fascination with Yiddish emerged simultaneously with his burgeoning interest in Zionism. Strauss’s fascination with Zionism can be attributed largely to the influence of another mentor, Martin Buber. The extensive correspondence between Strauss and Buber, which commenced in 1913 and continued until Strauss’s premature death four decades later, provides a valuable account of Strauss’s ideological, artistic, and political development. Following a brief lapse in communication due to Strauss’s military service during World War I, he wrote to Buber of his intensive Hebrew studies and his decision to join the Labor Zionist movement Hapoel Hatsair (The Young Worker),33 which he believed offered the only viable solution to Europe’s “internal wasteland.”34 In 1919, Strauss was invited by Chaim Arlozorov, head of the movement’s German faction, to serve as a coeditor of its main organ, Die Arbeit (The Work). His first assignment was to travel to Prague to interview the leader of the movement, A. D. Gordon. Having only just begun to study Hebrew, Strauss addressed Gordon in German, which resulted in an awkward misunderstanding that only strengthened his ambition to master the language.35 Strauss also reported in his letters to Buber on his growing interest in Yiddish literature, which provided a muchneeded distraction from the alienation and disarray of postwar Berlin. Upon returning from the front, he wrote that

he was in the midst of a “unique internal and external crisis” brought on by the “ghastly and noisy mechanisms” of the city and “the stressful political commotion that accompanies every party action.”36 Desperate Page 63 →to escape his urban environs, he took a ten-day vacation in Buckow, a picturesque lake town just east of Berlin, where he “swam, rowed, hiked and a hail of verses descended” upon him. During the brief hiatus, Strauss composed enough poems for an entire volume, published in 1921 under the title Die Flut—Das Jahr—Der Weg (The Flood—The Year—The Way), and immersed himself in the world of Yiddish letters, especially the stories of Mendele Moykher Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitch), the poetry of Hayim Nachman Bialik, and a collection of Yiddish folk songs, all of which he eagerly translated into German.37 The only way to fulfill the ideal of Alljudentum, in Strauss’s view, was to consolidate the tradition of the East with the aesthetic proclivities of the West. He articulated this belief clearly in the afterword to his only published Yiddish translation, OstjГјdische Liebeslieder (Eastern Jewish Love Songs). In this brief essay, Strauss insists that the translations will resonate naturally with German readers, who can “easily and automatically adapt the translation to the linguistic world (Sprachwelt) of the German folk song.”38 In the next breath, however, he protests that he “resisted Germanization (Verdeutschung) at all costs,” making an effort in his translations to execute in German “a reflection of the Jewish spirit as it became a poetic event (dichterisches Ereignis) in the folk song.”39 Strauss presented the Yiddish folk songs as being familiar to a German-speaking audience, while insisting that the Yiddish folk song is distinctive, unique.40 This seemingly contradictory maneuver reveals his desire to communicate the Jewish Volksgeist in a manner that would be readily accessible to a Germanspeaking, assimilated audience.41 By presenting pieces that reflected the culture of the East and the aesthetic sensibilities of the West in equal measure, he consciously catered to an assimilated German audience while deftly circumventing the charge of imitation. Yiddish, the essential Mittlersprache, played a crucial role in Strauss’s attempt to construct a multilingual yet coherent Jewish literary tradition and provided a foundation for his eventual bilingual turn.

Dialogue, Bilingualism, and the Binational Dream The formal correspondence between Strauss and Buber concerning matters of philosophy, politics, and poetry eventually made room for more intimate exchanges on love and family. In January 1924 Strauss informed Buber that his wife, Riwka, had left him.42 In need of a change of scenery following the separation, he spent the rest of the winter traveling through Palestine, the country that he had long only imagined. The journey inspired a handful of Page 64 →poems, some of which he later sent to Buber to pass on to his daughter, Eva, whose acquaintance he had made at the Bubers’ home in Bad Homburg a few years earlier.43 Evidently, the poems endeared Strauss to father and daughter alike.44 By 1925, Eva and Ludwig were married, and the letters between father- and sonin-law shifted from formal address to the intimate Du form. Over the next ten years, Strauss continued writing poems in German, committed to what he called “a national Jewish culture in Germany.” He had not yet entertained the idea of making aliyah, even though his visit was extraordinarily meaningful, both personally and artistically. Strauss’s memory of the varied landscape fed his imagination for the next ten years, the gestation period for Land Israel, published in 1935. Inspired by his first sojourn in Palestine, conceived over the next decade in Germany, and completed in Palestine shortly after his family had settled there, Land Israel emerged between languages, landscapes, and cultures. The collection marked not only Strauss’s physical transfer between countries but also his artistic meanderings between the lyric universe of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich HГ¶lderlin and the biblical terrain of the Song of Songs. Strauss was also involved at this time in researching a monograph on HГ¶lderlin, entitled Das Problem der Gemeinschaft in HГ¶lderlins вЂHyperion’ (The Problem of Community in HГ¶lderlin’s Hyperion, 1933).45 He turned to Hyperion, a lyrical epistolary novel in which ancient Greece is idealized as the site of natural purity and a template for a messianic community of the future, as a model for his poetic depiction of the Land of Israel. Like HГ¶lderlin’s depiction of Greece, Hyperion’s native land, Strauss portrayed the Land of Israel as the site of natural purity and a template for a messianic community of the future, a “brotherhood of human beings.”46

In keeping with the theme of Gemeinschaft (community), the vision of primordial unity depicted in Land Israel brings together more than Promised Land and “Chosen People”; it also includes another nation, the local Arab population. The first poem in the volume to depict harmony between Jews and Arabs is entitled “Orangenhain” (Orange Grove). Appearing in the section entitled “Landschaften” (Landscapes), the poem is at first glance a lyrical portrait of a kibbutz orange grove; upon closer inspection, however, an allegory of coexistence comes to the fore. Orange Grove Great golden fruits in the darkly lacquered crown of Foliage hang and glow, Glow in shade and glimmer in radiance and rain in wind Page 65 →Slowly through dusk and effulgence. Deep to the bed of the grove, like a small Sun presses intimately against neighboring suns! True, the peel stores the cool, soaking fire, So that no spark may escape, Yet with the light of its self-contained abundance It looks at me calmly. Whence comes such wonder? Has the silent, nurturing earth So much luminous blood? Sun hangs with sun, like word with word of love Lines up inexhaustibly: Like a golden whisper passing from branch to branch And from tree to tree. O if only we knew the love-language of fruits, The secret gold of heaven-enclosed earth Might finally strike our eyes And from the shielding foliage of our villages and cities Fortune with fortune might ripen.47 Orangenhain GroГџe, goldene FrГјchte im dunkellackigen Kranz des Laubwerks hГ¤ngen und glГјhn, GlГјhn im Schatten und glГ¤nzen im Strahl und regen im Wind sich

Langsam durch DГ¤mmer und Glanz. Tief bis zum Grund des Hains, wie innig nachbarlich kleine Sonne zu Sonnen sich drГ¤ngt! Wohl, es verwahrt die Haut das kГјhle, trГ¤nkende Feuer, Dass ihm kein Funken entrinnt, Doch mit dem ganzen Licht der innen verhaltenen FГјlle Schaut sie ruhig mich an. Soviel Wunder, woher? Hat die stumme, nГ¤hrende Erde Soviel leuchtendes Blut? Sonne hГ¤ngt bei Sonne, wie Wort an Worte der Liebe UnerschГ¶pflich sich reiht: Wie ein goldenes FlГјstern ergehts von Zweigen zu Zweigen und von Baume zu Baum. O verstГјnden wir erst die Liebessprache der FrГјchte, Uns auch leuchtete wohl So in Augen das heimliche Gold der himmelumschloГџnen Page 66 →Erde, endlich auch uns Wie aus hГјtendem Laub aus unsern DГ¶rfern und StГ¤dten Reif Geschick an Geschick. The opening verse bears a striking resemblance to a song by Goethe: “Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom? In the dark foliage the golden oranges glow” (Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blГјhn? Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glГјhn). These words from the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship are attributed to Mignon, the little girl from a far-off land who embodies pure poetry. Like Goethe’s idyllic land of lemon trees, Strauss’s land of orange groves is an orientalist vision imagined from afar. In terms of sound, the poem brings to mind HГ¶lderlin’s balanced rhythms, as in the poem “HГ¤lfte des Lebens” (At the Middle of Life), which likens the prime of life to fully ripened “golden pears.” The affinities to Goethe and HГ¶lderlin reveal the extent to which Strauss’s imagined Land of Israel was nourished by the German poetic tradition; yet the poem is equally tied to the physical landscape of the modern Middle East. The Jaffa orange, a symbol of Israeli production, was developed by Arab farmers and cultivated by Jewish pioneers, and partnerships in growing and exporting became one of the most advertised examples of ArabJewish cooperation. In the poem, the tightly packed oranges, pressed up against each other with “neighborly intimacy,” serve as a metonym for Arab and Jewish residents and as a symbol of future harmony. The image of the grove is re-created linguistically through the repetition of nouns, including “sun,” “branch,” and “tree.” Strung together like beads in a necklace, the duplicated words reflect the crowded yet cooperative atmosphere of the orchard: “Sonne hГ¤ngt bei Sonne, wie Wort an Wort der Liebe unerschГ¶pflich sich reiht” (Sun hangs with sun, just as love lines up word by word inexhaustibly). The poem projects the dream of peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs, which will only be attainable, Strauss cautions, if its inhabitants internalize the message of tolerance contained in the grove. “O if only we knew the love-language of

fruits”—with this turn to the subjunctive, the poem ends on a note of profound longing. Throughout Land Israel, the concepts of doubling and dialogue are emphasized as essential to the vision of a new homeland, a homeland shared by two nations. One of the clearest reflections of the binational ideal, appearing in the second section of the volume, “Not und Hoffnung” (Need and Hope), is the poem “Dem Nachbarn II” (To the Neighbor II), the second in a three-part cycle. As in “Orangenhain,” the poem presents the concept of a doubled Page 67 →language as the ideal language of coexistence, yet here language takes on explicitly messianic overtones. To the Neighbor II Two worlds—and no Sense shared by both? For me as for you this is suffering— Bear it with me! We need the burden; And if we falter under it, God give us the strength to be thankful That he bade us so! This I saw today: In nascent scaffolds On the narrowest precipice Two workers standing, One from your tribe, one from mine. Around them nothing But the mighty flame Of pure heavenly light. While they speak two tongues— The future house Exhales a language Which holds them Entwined in dialogue: As they fastened the beams, Arm understood arm

And world understood world.48 Dem Nachbarn II Zwei Welten—und kein Sinn Gemeinsam beiden? Mir ists wie dir ein Leiden— Nimms mit mir hin! Last ist uns not; Page 68 →Und wenn wir drunter wanken, Gott geb uns Kraft, zu danken, DaГџ er sie uns entbot! Dies hab ich heut gesehn: In werdendem GerГјste Auf schmalster AbgrundkГјste Zwei Werker stehn Von dein- und meinem Stamme Und um sie nichts Als puren Himmelslichts Gewaltige Flamme. Und reden sie zwei Zungen– Das kГјnftige Haus Haucht eine Sprache aus, Die sie umschlungen In ZwiegesprГ¤ch hГ¤lt: Wie sie die Balken banden, Hat Arm den Arm verstanden Und Welt die Welt. Though unable to communicate in a common spoken language, the two workers, Jew and Arab, are “entwined in dialogue” that transcends speech. Their shared labor is likened to the language of “the future house” (das kГјnftige Haus), a common homeland and projected messianic end. This notion of supralinguistic dialogue is bolstered by the chosen mode of lyric address. Written in the intimate Du form, the first stanza is written as an apostrophe, a typical convention of romantic verse. According to Jonathan Culler, the apostrophe represents

“the pure embodiment of poetic pretension” because it calls on beings that are absent, and therefore resists being reduced to an imitation of a real utterance.49 Insofar as Strauss’s imagined neighbor is a projected reality, as opposed to a real person, the mode of address must surpass ordinary speech. Language takes on a metalinguistic function, exceeding the barriers of earthly speech on two levels: through the “language” of shared labor, which is in and of itself a messianic projection, and through the apostrophe form, the purest mode of poetic address. Strauss’s ideal of a messianic, supralinguistic dialogue acquires an additional layer when read in the context of his emerging German-Hebrew bilingualism.Page 69 → The first line of the second stanza—“Though they speak two tongues” (Und reden sie zwei Zungen)—brings to mind the German idiom mit gespaltener Zunge reden, literally “to speak with a forked [split] tongue,” which refers to deliberately deceitful speech. Strauss subverts the notion of a disingenuous “doublespeak” associated in the anti-Semitic imagination with the imitative and dishonest “language of the Jews” by transforming the negative image of a “split” tongue into a unitary ideal; the “language of the future home” turns “two tongues” into one. Translating one pairing of languages and national identities (German and Hebrew) into another (Hebrew and Arabic), Strauss presents the doubling of language as the utmost expression of messianic fulfillment. The supralinguistic dialogue in which the two workers are “entwined” is likened to the very essence of poetry, a mode of expression that surpasses the strictures of earthly speech. The binational ideal that emerges in “Orangenhain” and “Dem Nachbarn” dovetails with Strauss’s syncretic conception of Jewish culture and rejection of monolingual, monocultural concepts of national identity. Indeed, the poems not only anticipate his bilingual turn, with their emphasis on doubled language, but also betray his political leanings. Strauss was an ardent supporter of Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), a movement founded in 1925 by a group of Berlin- and Prague-based Jewish intellectuals, including Arthur Ruppin, Hans Kohn, Gershom Scholem, and Martin Buber, with the purpose of promoting “an understanding between Jews and Arabs as to the form of their mutual social relations in Palestine on the basis of absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples.”50 Influenced by the collapse of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire after World War I and the attendant rise of ethnic nationalism throughout Central Europe, the members of Brit Shalom expressed concern over what they saw as a similarly chauvinistic form of Jewish nationalism taking root in Palestine.51 As Shalom Ratzabi suggests, Brit Shalom took up the “Arab Question” as a “touchstone for the possibility of combining Zionism and humanism in particular, and nationalism and humanism in general.”52 By the time the poem was published, facts on the ground in both Germany and Palestine had overwhelmed Strauss’s binational dreams. Brit Shalom was met with hostility in the years following the 1929 Western Wall riots, instigated by local Arabs, that ultimately left 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead. Lambasted by the mainstream Zionist establishment in the wake of the violent clash as overly conciliatory, even traitorous, the organization succumbed to animosity and external pressure by disbanding in 1933.53 In Germany, meanwhile, the rise of Nazism foreclosed any dream of coexistence in that Page 70 →arena. Shortly after Hitler took power, a policy directed at all “non-Aryan” faculty stripped Strauss of his academic position at the Aachen Technical University, cutting off a promising academic career in its prime.54 Unemployed, humiliated, and without prospects, he promptly prepared for his family’s emigration. He left for Palestine in 1934 to set up a new home, returning to Germany only once more to gather his wife and two sons. By 1935, the Strauss family had settled in Kibbutz Hazorea, a newly established collective community founded in 1934 by German Jews. As Strauss’s life in Germany came to an end, the longed-for Land of Israel became a forced reality, and the symbolic relationship between German and Hebrew was replaced by actual bilingualism. For better or worse, the Zionist dream had come true.

Between Languages, between Literary Landscapes In his reminiscence about the epiphany atop Haifa’s Mount Carmel, Strauss recalled that the inarticulate “stammers” that descended upon him in Hebrew enabled him to write authentically in German. Yet a

comparison of the German and Hebrew versions of the poem “To the Bay” reveals that the practice of bilingualism diverged from his romantic myth of miraculous inspiration. Conceived at the very moment that he was contemplating immigration, Strauss’s first bilingual poem was less a perfect gift from the muses than the product of rigorous language study and simultaneous self-translation. In contrast to the more conventional practice of delayed translation whereby a finished work is translated by a second party from the source language to the target language, simultaneous self-translation is an unrestricted, nonlinear process, a kind of “cross-linguistic creation” in which the borders between source and target language, original and translation, poet and translator are deliberately transgressed and confounded.55 As Menachem Perry observes, this blurring of boundaries affords the writer-translator freedom to produce two distinct “originals,” in which certain “bold shifts” become visible.56 Since the author and translator are one and the same, and since he is equally familiar with both literary traditions at play, simultaneous self-translation produces a link between the two versions while allowing for major differences between them. A comparison of the two versions of “To the Bay” exposes several “bold shifts” that betray opposing influences of two separate literary traditions. Whereas the German version is deeply personal and romantic, the Hebrew version is tied to biblical and medieval Hebrew verse. The German version reads as follows: Page 71 → To the Bay You lay sand Pure as fire Upon the blue, Nestling sea, Like a lover lays his hand Upon a breast. I want only To look— But you cut Through my heart With the mild Sickle of your beauty, And my senses like stalks Fall.57 An die Bucht Du legst Sand Rein wie Feuer Um das blaue,

Sich schmiegende Meer, Wie ein Liebender die Hand legt Um eine Brust. Nichts als Schauen will ich— Aber mit der sanften Sichel deiner SchГ¶nheit Schneidest du Durch mein Herz, Und meine Sinne wie Г„hren Fallen. The poem begins as a silent exchange between the male speaker and the female bay; soon, however, the genders are subtly reversed. In the first stanza the speaker views the soft hand of the shore curving like the hand of a male lover around the breast of the sea, while in the second stanza the poet’s breast Page 72 →is pierced by the elegant curve of the bay. The volta that divides the first stanza from the second offers an impassioned exclamation of personal desire—“I want only to look!” (Nichts als schauen will ich!)—which places the focus on the speaker’s unique, subjective experience in nature, a defining characteristic of romantic poetry. In the Hebrew version, the influence of German romanticism vanishes. Instead, the emphasis is placed on repetition and wordplay, key elements of classical Hebrew verse. To the Bay You place sand,58 Burning purity, Round the azure sea, Clinging59 Like a lover’s hand Placed upon a breast. I said to my soul: “Awake and behold!” While you with the soft sickle Of your beauty Cut through my chest, And my senses like stalks fall, Finish.60

Page 73 →The German version emphasizes unmediated emotional experience in nature, whereas the Hebrew version privileges form and sound. For example, the first line of the second stanza in the Hebrew version, ulenafshi sakhti: вЂuri khazi!’ (And I say to my soul: arise and behold!), not only contains a biblical allusion (to Isaiah 60:1, “Arise and shine!”), but also produces a homonym: the word ḥazi, meaning “behold, ” is repeated three lines down with a different meaning, “my chest.”61 In contrast to the Hebrew version, which turns inward in an almost prayerful gesture, the German version offers a bold statement of desire: “Nichts als schauen will ich!” (I want only to look!). In short, the German version emphasizes the unique subjective experience of the speaker in nature, while the Hebrew version offers a spiritual dialogue between the subject and nature in which form and sound take precedence. The variation described above, arguably the boldest shift in translation, reveals Strauss’s interest in the virtuosic wordplay of medieval Hebrew poetry, which manifests itself in the abundant use of various types of tsimud, a technical term designating the juxtaposition of homonyms, near-homonyms, and similar sounding words or syllables.62 Strauss regarded this medieval technique as a natural outgrowth of biblical poetry, in which repetition of words and sounds is never merely decorative but rather used to amplify the theme. Sound and meaning, in other words, build and rely on each other.63 Various instances of tsimud drive the Hebrew version of “To the Bay,” which further distinguish it from the German version.” The last two lines contain an example of tsimud shone shoneh ’ot (literally “change of a letter,” i.e., consonance), producing a sound effect that is entirely absent from the German version. Whereas in German the poem ends with the word fallen (fall), in Hebrew the word yiplu (fall) is followed by the similar-sounding yikhlu (meaning “vanish” or “become finished”), which brings the image of falling stalks to a stronger sense of completion in terms of both sentiment and sound. A similar technique is used in the pairing of yad (hand) and shad (breast), which amplifies the image of the shore’s soft “hand” encompassing the rounded “breast” of the sea. Another form of tsimud, tsimud nosaf (repetition of a single syllable with an additional syllable in the second word), can be seen in the pairing of ḥol (sand) in line one with takhol (azure) in line three, producing a rhyme that brings the blueness of the sea almost physically closer to the shore to which it “clings” (mitrapek).64 In contrast to the German version, which emphasizes personal content over sound, the Hebrew version uses sound to produce a spiritual image. The former appears to be the work of a HГ¶lderlin student, while the latter was produced by a devotee of Yehuda Halevi. At first glance, it is hard to fathom that these are one and the same poet. Page 74 →Insofar as the two versions of “To the Bay” are not in fact direct translations of one another but rather belong to two different literary traditions, they exemplify what Dan Miron calls “bi-literaturalism,” the contribution to two separate yet “contiguous” literatures.65 This notion becomes even more pronounced in the context of the two volumes in which they were published. “An die Bucht” appeared first, as the centerpiece of Land Israel, while “El ha-mifrats” appeared significantly later in Strauss’s only collection of Hebrew poems, ShaвЂot vador (Hours and the Generation, 1952). In a sense, the Hebrew version was the germ-seed of the entire volume, which consists mainly of poems written after 1938, the year that the Strauss family left Kibbutz Hazorea for the Ben Shemen Youth Village.66 At Ben Shemen, Strauss served as a teacher of literature and history, and he devoted his spare time to writing poems and children’s stories, some of which he published in the newspaper Ha’aretz and the children’s literary supplement of Mishmar under the Hebraicized name Arieh Ludwig Strauss. His bilingual notebooks, which contain unpublished German versions of many of these poems, reveal the centrality of self-translation in Strauss’s creative process. In contrast to Land Israel, which invokes a future peace between nations in romantic free verse, ShaвЂot vador sheds the messianic tone in favor of measured neoclassical forms. The seemingly retrograde shift from romanticism to neoclassicism can be explained in part by the fact that Strauss learned Hebrew relatively late in life through his study of biblical and medieval Hebrew poetry, which he pursued with a meticulousness befitting a German academic. Yet the turn to neoclassicism was not just the result of a strained relationship to vernacular Hebrew; it also reveals a change of heart. By the 1940s, the pioneering Zionist spirit was overwhelmed by violence, and the multinational ideal in Europe utterly destroyed by fascism. The longing for a Zionist utopia that Strauss had expressed in German during the 1920s could not persist in his later Hebrew poetry, which was forced to acknowledge “the crises of destruction that flood every shore,” to quote one of his poems, a reference to

World War II and ongoing strife between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.67 Strauss turned to neoclassical forms not based on a bookish fascination with classical Hebrew verse but also because they allowed him to express despair over a failed binational ethos with thoughtful precision and emotional restraint.68 Moving away from the pseudo-messianic tone of his earlier German verse, Sha’ot vador reflects diminishing Zionist zeal and increasing anxiety over the social and political challenges that accompanied the establishment of a Jewish state. Although the volume responds to the challenges and tragedies of the twentieth century, it resists emotive outbursts at all costs. One of Page 75 →the most striking examples of this marriage of strict form and emotional content is the poem “Kefar shadud” (Plundered Village). Appearing in the section entitled meruba’im (quatrains), the brief poem consists of two quatrains written in the form of the rubaiyat (derived from the Arabic word for “four), a rhyming a-a-b-a quatrain originating in Persian verse that Strauss knew from the poetry of Yehuda Halevi. Plundered Village I killed and took possession, woe upon my plunder. The maw of my non-nation swallowed mother and child! God’s grief hovers upon the face of the village, Upon His high places my nation’s honor fell. At midnight a bitter cry awakened the land, The voice of a great mother bowing atop the mountain, Woe to city and village, woe to nation and to nation, To the son killed, to the tree uprooted.69

The poem offers a calm yet forceful response to the event that came to be known as the Deir Yassin Massacre. On April 9, 1948, members of the Zionist Irgun attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, leaving over 100 villagers dead.70 In the wake of the massacre, Israel’s fledgling government announced a plan to settle Holocaust refugees in the now vacant village, provoking a vociferous response from former members of Brit Shalom, led by Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, who wrote to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion demanding that the village remain in its plundered state as a tragic symbol of Israeli aggression. The letter went unanswered.71 Page 76 →Strauss echoes the message of the letter in two tightly structured quatrains replete with biblical allusions. The first three words—“I killed and took possession”—are a variation on the Prophet Elijah’s reproach of King Ahab, who killed a Jezreelite in order to appropriate his vineyard: “Have you killed, and also taken possession?” (1 Kings 21:19). With the turn to the first person, the prophet’s query becomes a painful confession of his people’s wrongdoing. The sense of guilt is amplified by another biblical allusion to David’s eulogy for Jonathan: “How are the mighty fallen in battle! Jonathan upon thy high places is slain!” (2 Samuel 1:25). For Strauss, it is the honor of the entire nation that has fallen from grace. The second quatrain contains a reference to the book of Jeremiah, in which the matriarch Rachel is described weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31:15). Here, “the great mother” stands for actual mothers who lost children to the conflict, but also for the overall failure of coexistence. The poem modernizes the Bible, but not to nationalistic ends. Elijah and Jeremiah are invoked for subversive rather than redemptive effect. The lyrical “I” is not the Zionist national subject but rather the “I” of collective responsibility.72 By cultivating a preromantic style stripped of messianic overtones, Strauss called into question the assumed homology between poetry and the nation-building project. His emphasis on neoclassical form signals both a

dramatic departure from his earlier quasi-messianic vision of Land Israel and an ethical stance against the pathos and extreme emotion of Hebrew expressionist poetry, which addressed themes of national struggle and redemption.73 In a sense, Strauss’s first bilingual poem, “To the Bay,” represents a link between two dramatically different phases of his literary career. Viewed in the context of the two volumes in which they were published, the German and Hebrew versions reflect Strauss’s trajectory from German Zionist romanticism to mournful Hebrew neoclassicism, and from the idealistic belief in the possibility of binational coexistence to a mournful lament over the decline of these values in the era of the modern nation-state. But if we regard the two versions as one poem—indeed, as the linchpin of Strauss’s bilingual turn—they reflect an enduring desire to inhabit two literary landscapes simultaneously. Notwithstanding the challenges, Strauss remained steadfast in his commitment to dialogue, doubling, and bilingualism.

Two Lips, Two Tongues, One Poet Strauss did not achieve great acclaim as a poet in his lifetime. During the final years of his life, however, he left a lasting mark as a teacher. In 1949 he and his Page 77 →family moved from Ben Shemen to Jerusalem, where he assumed a post as a lecturer and founding member of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University. Among the students in attendance at his lectures—which ran the thematic gamut from the Psalms and Yehuda Halevi to Goethe, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and HonorГ© de Balzac—were several young poets who would become prominent members of the “Statehood Generation,” including Yehuda Amichai, T. Carmi, Hayim Gouri, Dan Pagis, and Nathan Zach, as well as the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld.74 In his autobiography, Appelfeld professes admiration for two teachers, Ludwig Strauss and Leah Goldberg (who would take the reins as the head of the Comparative Literature Department after Strauss’s untimely death in 1953): “Leah Goldberg and Ludwig StraussВ .В .В . had much to say about the dichotomy of having two languages and two homelands. They were poets and spoke like poets. From them I learned how to respond to a line of poetry and, indeed, to an individual word, and to understand that every sound has a meaning.”75 As Appelfeld’s tribute indicates, Strauss imparted to his students (most of whom did not speak Hebrew as a mother tongue) the pain and the beauty of split linguistic and cultural loyalties. He attributed great value to a concept that gradually was being suppressed by a monolithic, monolingual conception of the Hebrew nation. Ironically, Strauss challenged the claim of Jewish imitativeness and parasitism by becoming a broker between languages and cultures, thus transforming contemptible conceptions of the Jewish Mittler and his dubious “doublespeak” into positive characteristics of a proud and productive Jewish identity. As a young student and poet in Berlin, he posited a continuous alljГјdisch tradition that would validate Jewish writing in German by exposing antecedents in the Hebrew Bible. Later, this unitary ideal was transformed into a complex practice of bilingual composition and self-translation whereby Strauss tied together two separate literary traditions within a single oeuvre. Today, Strauss’s bilingual oeuvre can be seen as the result of ongoing transfer between Germany and the Land of Israel and between German and Hebrew. The emphasis in his writing on dialogue—interpersonal, intercultural, and interlinguistic—reflects a transnational, translational approach that decenters entrenched doctrines of exile and rupture in favor of continuous exchange. Understood in these terms, his bilingual legacy signals neither a divestment from German culture nor an infringement of the border between German and Hebrew but rather the possibility of occupying this border as a viable cultural space. Page 78 →But where is such an in-between space located? The cover of one of Strauss’s bilingual notebooks raises this very question in verse:

Martin Buber translated this unpublished Hebrew verse into German, adding in parentheses a necessary and telling twist: Wo ist die Sprache [Lippe] in der ich alles sagen kann, was in mir ist? Meine zwei Sprachen [Lippen] sind das Lippenpaar meines Herzens.76

Where is the language [lip] in which I can say everything within me? My two languages [lips] are the lip-pair of my heart. Buber’s German translation reveals parenthetically the double entendre of the Hebrew word safah, meaning both “language” and “lip.” The bilingual pun, trapped, as it were, between languages, might be described as the result of “writing with a lisp.” For Strauss, the “tongue in between” was not a speech impediment, however, but a mode of expression that transcends normal speech. As the untranslatable pun suggests, the tongue in between German and Hebrew is quite simply the language of poetry.

Page 79 →

3. “A Youthful Rogue Am I” Moyshe Kulbak between Exile and Arrival “I am presently in Berlin. Now I have arrived in вЂEUROPE.’”1 So wrote Moyshe Kulbak on September 13, 1920, to the literary critic Shmuel Niger. Eager to immerse himself in Berlin’s thriving cultural life, the wide-eyed twenty-four-year-old was speaking not only for himself but also for Yiddish poetry when he announced his European arrival. Implicit in his individual artistic aspirations was the broader cultural mission of enriching a relatively undeveloped Yiddish poetic tradition. Yet Kulbak’s enthusiastic arrival did not correspond to his overall experience of Berlin. After all, a diet of German literature and philosophy may have whetted the intellectual appetite, but it would not satisfy an empty stomach. “In terms of livelihood, things are very difficult for me,” he informed Niger. Lacking a local audience and earning little for his sporadic publications, he was unable to become part of local literary circles and struggled to make ends meet. Nevertheless, as his letter goes on to explain, Kulbak had “no intention of leaving Berlin,” for he had begun studying and was “thrilled to discover that nearly every subject fascinates.”2 Kulbak’s instinct to remain in Berlin was not misplaced. His brief sojourn there between 1920 and 1923 may have been a lonely time, but it was also exceptionally prolific. The dichotomy of arrival and exclusion that characterizes Kulbak’s letter to Shmuel Niger is the key to understanding his perception of Berlin and its impact on his work. As both the center of European Kultur and an exilic outpost far removed from his native White Russia, Berlin provided Kulbak with the freedom and the distance he required to recreate an imagined homeland in verse.3 His two major works from this period, a stylistically diverse collection of poems titled Naye lider (New Poems, 1922) and the experimental novella Meshiekh ben efrayim (Messiah Son of Ephraim, 1924), reveal no trace of the German metropolis but rather escape to the idealized Page 80 →countryside of his youth on the outskirts of Vilna. Indeed, just as Kulbak was relegated to the shadows of Berlin, so too Berlin makes no discernible appearance in the writing he produced there. Yet it is precisely the absence of Berlin from these works that exposes the impact of his time there on his literary development. Finding himself on the periphery of his native realm, now in the throes of revolution and on the margins of Berlin society, he was perfectly positioned to imagine “Yiddishland” from a nostalgic distance. This experience of twofold alienation—from Eastern Europe and from the vast metropolis in which he had provisionally settled—enabled him to construct a portable Yiddish landscape in a broad range of experimental styles. It was only after Kulbak had resettled in the newly formed Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic that he was able to write explicitly about Berlin. “Disner tshayld herold” (Childe Harold of Dysna, 1928–31), a mockepic poem about an aspiring poet struggling to survive in Weimar Berlin, was written in Minsk, the emerging center of a new proletarian Yiddish culture, at a time when increasing economic and political disorder within the Weimar Republic threatened its very existence. A kaleidoscopic portrait of a decadent metropolis overrun by violence between Right and Left, the mock-epic poem was intended to herald the ascent of a new Soviet order. Despite its pro-revolutionary theme, however, it does not resemble the propagandistic style of emerging Soviet literature, but rather consists of a series of playful, pseudo-expressionistic verses, a continuation of the avant-garde aesthetic that Kulbak had begun to cultivate in exile. Even after his arrival in the Soviet Union, Kulbak did not waver in his commitment to an autonomous and stylistically varied Yiddish poetic tradition. The writing that he produced between Berlin and Belorussia, between center and periphery, and between exile and arrival attests to the tenacity of this diasporic ideal.

The Yiddish Word and the Birth of the Modern Poet The years following World War I and the Russian Revolution witnessed a proliferation of Yiddish poetry produced in exile, marking a turning point for a young literature that had hitherto consisted mainly of folkloristic,

satirical, and revolutionary prose.4 New styles and movements were influenced by the avant-garde trends and extreme individualism that distinguished European poetry of the interwar period.5 However, as Seth Wolitz notes, the transition from a prophetic, collective voice of national rebirth to highly personal poetry was delayed for Yiddish artists. In contrast to European writers working in major languages tied to specific geographical centers, Yiddish Page 81 →poets lacked a sovereign territory after the war, and thus remained preoccupied with questions of national self-realization.6 Pascale Casanova posits a similar connection between collective politics and the “small” literatures of emerging nations, noting that “the absence of autonomy” causes the border between subjective and collective concerns to become blurred. In her discussion of Franz Kafka’s interest in Yiddish and Czech literatures, Casanova argues that Kafka “insisted upon the necessarily political position of writers in emerging nations.”7 In the absence of an autonomous territory and cohesive cultural center, Yiddish poets did not feel free to engage in “art for art’s sake,” but rather grappled with collective political concerns while pursuing individual artistic goals. This is the backdrop against which Kulbak’s artistic development took place. In a sense, his coming of age as a poet ran parallel to that of Yiddish poetry. Having escaped political upheaval and attendant anti-Jewish violence in his native Vilna Province, he discovered in Berlin the freedom to craft a new aesthetic while negotiating collective national concerns. The experience of exile exposed him to a wide array of contemporary literary influences, which in turn provided the necessary fodder for producing an imagined homeland in verse. Though ostensibly located in the fields and forests of Belorussia, Kulbak’s literary landscape was purely a cultural construct, a nostalgic projection nurtured equally by Jewish folklore and European modernism. In this regard it corresponds to the extraterritorial vision of the Yiddishist movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century as an alternative to territorial nationalist movements. In contrast to the Zionist goal of political sovereignty in the ancestral homeland, Yiddishism promoted an alternative form of Jewish autonomy unrestricted by national borders, a national identity rooted in Yiddish language and culture.8 The landscape that Kulbak constructed in verse exemplifies the persistence of this cultural ideal, which took on a nationalist hue during the 1920s. Kenneth Moss counts Kulbak among the Yiddish and Hebrew writers who promoted cultural production during and immediately after the Russian Revolution as “a means of national mobilization.”9 Driven by a “principled distinction between culture and politics,” these “culturists” conceived of Jewish culture as a marriage between modern European forms and indigenous Jewish content.10 Inspired by this extraterritorial vision, Kulbak saw the need to develop a Yiddish literary culture varied enough in voice and technique to be integrated into European belles lettres but that also retained the elements of Jewish folklore that set it apart from other national literatures. Predicated on a fusion of ethos and ethnos, or universal and particular definitions of culture, this view of Yiddish literary culture comes through in a rare programmatic Page 82 →essay entitled “Dos yidishe vort” (The Yiddish Word, 1918), the closest Kulbak came to writing a literary manifesto. In the essay, Kulbak traces the evolution of Yiddish literature from its modest folkloristic beginnings to the modernist present. He argues that the Yiddish language, once “crooked and lame,” came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century with the birth of the folk song, in which “heartily Jewish (yidishlekh) and folksy (folkstimlekh) words were woven together in naГЇve verses and infused with the primitive precision of folk-creation.” At this stage, however, the language had not yet become a true literary tongue, for “the nation did not appreciate the artistic worth of the word.”11 An inkling of the artistic potential of Yiddish emerged with Mendele Moykher Sforim (S. Y. Abramovich), who pioneered the “epic phase” in Yiddish literature with his tales of travel and transformation. After Mendele came I. L. Peretz, whose revolutionary ballad, Monish, marked the beginning of a “lyric phase” for Yiddish. Yet, Kulbak stresses, Peretz’s literary lexicon remained insufficient, for it lacked expressions for tenderness and delight in nature. As we saw in chapter 1, Peretz voiced the very same concern about his own writing in a brief section of Monish which self-consciously ridicules the attempt to write a love poem in a language whose few paltry terms of endearment “taste like goose fat.” According to Kulbak, Peretz paved the way for a poetic tradition in Yiddish, but it was only with the next generation of writers that this vision came to fruition and Yiddish became fully capable of sentimental expression. Kulbak attributes this achievement in particular to Dovid Eynhorn and Sholem Asch, Romantics whose verse “emits the smell not of вЂgoose

fat’ but rather of вЂgrasses,’ the smell of the field that God has blessed.”12 Whereas the creators of the Yiddish folk song had shaped the language “unconsciously,” Eynhorn and Asch deliberately began to “purify” the language and to usher it into the phase of lyric modernism. Moving from the folk song through the “epic phase” of Mendele and finally to the “lyric” and “sentimental” strains of Peretz, Asch, and Eynhorn, Kulbak’s “Dos yidishe vort” delineates a literary genealogy originating in Jewish folk culture and concluding with romanticism, a precursor to avant-garde modernism. With his presentation of folklore as the necessary foundation of a national canon Kulbak was endorsing Peretz’s understanding of “Yiddishkayt” as the marriage of Jewish textual tradition with the dynamism of modern secular literature. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Peretz called upon Yiddish writers to take up “new prophets and new books,” meaning secular European literature, while preserving the authenticating tradition of scripture and folklore.13 Kulbak’s essay echoes Peretz’s demand: “If our language has something to conquer, it will do so with its flowersPage 83 → rather than with its pamphleteering paper swords.”14 In other words, modern literary expression, as opposed to superficial political slogans, was the only viable tool for national revival. Yet Kulbak was well aware that Yiddish writers faced a major obstacle: they did not yet have an extensive body of literature from which to grow. “A Turgenev or a Balmont of our own has yet to arise to sing the Yiddish language as the Russian language has been sung.”15 Without the shoulders of literary giants upon which to stand, Yiddish poets would have to borrow and imitate European literatures in order to develop a varied literary tradition of their own. The volume Naye lider (1922), written in Berlin and published in Kiev, constitutes Kulbak’s response to this challenge. Merging Jewish motifs from Jewish folklore with techniques borrowed from modern European poetic movements, the volume was intended to display the capacity of Yiddish to express a variety of styles, moods, and genres. Only one element endows the volume with thematic coherence, namely the valorization of the Belorussian countryside as the site of indigenous roots and authentic individual experience. This symbol of unity, however, is counterbalanced throughout the volume by the wanderlust of the individual in exile. The tension between homesickness and wanderlust exposes the itinerant status of the interwar Yiddish writer and the challenge of inspiring a national renascence without subordinating the concerns of the individual artist to the needs of the nation. This tension is already present in the opening poem, a cheerful ditty sung by a penniless wandering minstrel: A Youthful Rogue Am IВ .В .В . A youthful rogue am I, A stick held at my side, Tra-la-lie, tra-la-lie, I travel far and wide. I come upon an inn And knock against the door, “Who are you? Who wants in?” I say: a wanderer. Loafer travelin’ free! You idle and you squanderВ .В .В . Tra-la-lee, tra-la-lee

So I wander farther. Page 84 →Over to the well I stray To drink till thirst is quenched, I stand in graying light of day, Like a rooster fully drenchedВ .В .В . A farmer strolling by Greets me with a “Howdy!” I shrug bewildered and reply: Howdy?—howdy shmowdyВ .В .В .16

A mischievous native son who sings proudly in Yiddish, the speaker is not only indigenous to the White Russian countryside through which he proudly strides but also heir to the Jewish tradition of irreverent humor and entertainmentPage 85 → associated with the playful purim-shpiler (Purim player) and bawdy badkhn (wedding jester).17 The rolling trochaic meter and tonic-syllabic structure of his song, composed of rhyming quatrains with a fixed number of syllables and stresses per line, provide the folksy feeling of a nursery rhyme.18 In this way, the poem exemplifies what David Roskies has identified as a defining feature of post–World War I Yiddish literature: the use of folkloric elements as the “vehicle of Jewish self-determination, the basis for the Jewish claim to normalcy and nationhood, to land and to landscape.”19 Yet the free-spirited wanderer’s cheerful tone is undermined in the second stanza by references to poverty, alienation, and homelessness. Jordan Finkin points out the contrast that emerges between the speaker’s proud self-definition as a geyer (“traveler”) and the innkeeper’s pejorative epithet, leydikgeyer (meaning “idler,” or literally “empty traveler”).”20 This subtle variation amplifies the tension between the pride of diasporic freedom and the plight of statelessness—the blessing and curse of living on the margins. In the final quatrain the tension reaches its zenith as the wandering Yiddish poet encounters a local peasant, who greets him not in Yiddish but in Belorussian—“Sho chuvac’ na svecia?”—a phrase that translates literally as “What’s heard in the world?”21 To the typical Yiddish reader from the Vilna region, the sudden intrusion of a Slavic language, such as Belorussian, Ukrainian, or Polish, would register as both foreign and familiar, since multilingualism was a defining feature of Jewish life in the Diaspora, particularly in the linguistically heterogeneous province of Vilna.22 The speaker would thus appear to be a hero of diasporic Jewish culture, a Jew who sings proudly in Yiddish within a multiethnic, multilingual sphere. At the same time, however, his nonsensical response, petshe metshe (translated loosely above as “howdy-shmowdy”), exposes the proud wanderer as a rootless vagabond who is linguistically alien to his own land.23 Kulbak’s rogue is an appropriate ambassador for Naye lider. His song is both the cry of national rebirth and the credo of personal aesthetic freedom. It is worth noting that the recalcitrant ikh (I) of the youthful rogue puts Kulbak in step with other leading avant-garde poets of his day. In Moyshe Leyb Halpern’s “Der gasnpoyker” (The Street Drummer), for instance, the rebellious speaker masks pain and solitude behind boisterous percussion. Not unlike the recurring tra-la-li of Kulbak’s rogue, Halpern’s drummer drives the poem with the dzin-dzin-dzin of his instrument. He, too, is a self-proclaimed vagabond: “Wild, wild through the strange world! / I have no dress, no shirt / I have no wife, no child” (hefker, hefker durkh der fremt! / hob ikh nit keyn rok, keyn hemt. / hob ikh nit keyn vayb, keyn kint).24 The term hefker, meaning “wild” or “unclaimed,” like hultay, meaning “rogue,” “ruffian,” or “vagabond,” Page 86 →frequently appears in Yiddish modernist poetry as a mode of poetic identity that merges freedom and homelessness, the privilege and the predicament of not belonging.25 Another example of this hefker-wildness can

be found in the following lines from a poem by Peretz Markish: “No bridle restrains me, / I’m nobody’s, I’m stray, / Without a beginning, without an end” (Nito z’af mir keyn tsoym, / kh’bin keynems nit, kh’bin hefker, / on an onheyb, on a sof).26 As with Kulbak’s “youthful rogue” and Halpern’s “street drummer,” the pluckiness of Markish’s boisterous speaker conceals immense anxiety. Although all three of these poets resided in different cities—Kulbak in Vilna and Berlin, Halpern in New York, and Markish in Kiev and Moscow—the common theme of wildness in their work attests to the interconnectedness of Yiddish poetic production during the post–World War I period, when writers were forced to read and publish internationally. Like the unrestrained “I” who cries out in their poems, the Yiddish poets of the interwar period were both everywhere and nowhere at home.

From Minstrel to Modernist The confident “I” that opens Naye lider disappears from nearly all of the subsequent poems, which together reveal a broad range of modernist influences. “A levone nakht” (A Moon Night), the poem that follows “A Youthful Rogue,” marks a decisive stylistic shift. A Moon Night In distant stillness Queen Sheba swims, Her veils glimmering in the cool night— Dreams of heaven-blueВ .В .В . And extinguished moonlight Drips succulent-cool upon Every village dozing quietlyВ .В .В . A soft moonbeam stirs And brings together: The little chick in the yard, The fishy in the water, And the sweet white lambkin in the stall—— Page 87 →In distant stillness Queen Sheba swims From her trembling marble castlesВ .В .В .27

Departing from the balanced rhythms of “A Youthful Rogue,” the rules of versification are suddenly loosened. Although the meter is consistently iambic, the rhyme follows no set scheme, and the strophic structure is remarkably varied. This is a dramatic departure from the folk ditty that opens Naye lider. Three visible techniques mark “A Moon Night” as a symbolist poem. The first is enjambment, the running over from one line to the next without punctuation, used to combine seemingly disconnected words, images, and concepts in a unified picture or emotional milieu. Second, compound nouns such as himl-blo (heaven-blue) and

mirml-shleser (marble-castles) are employed to evocative rather than descriptive effect. These concrete descriptions are intended to expose the state of the poet’s soul, or in the words of the Symbolist Manifesto, “to house the Idea in a meaningful form not its own end, but subject to the Idea.”28 The third technique is synesthesia, the confoundingPage 88 → of the senses for emotional effect, as in the compound adjective “succulent-cool” (zaftik-kil), which blurs the lines between taste, smell, and touch. A prominent example of this technique can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” which depicts “the forests of symbols” (des forГЄts de symboles) where “sound, perfumes, hues echo in harmony” (les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se respondent).29 Kulbak exploits the synthetic quality of Yiddish in order to produce neologisms and new concepts that reveal the language’s capacity for virtuosic sound. A noticeable change occurs in the third stanza, however. Flowing enjambment is disrupted by staccato breaks; dreamlike images are replaced by concrete objects that bring to mind a fable or nursery rhyme; and the repetition of the diminutive form—hindele, fishele, lemele (chick, fishy, lambkin)—infuses the poem with the “hearty yidishkayt” that Kulbak identified as a defining feature of the Yiddish folk song. Taken together, these aspects produce an unanticipated folkloric echo in what would otherwise appear to be a symbolist poem par excellence. In the final verse, the poem comes full circle, turning from the naГЇve, natural objects of the barnyard to the refined symbolist image of “trembling marble-castles.” In this conscious crisscrossing between folklore and symbolism, the poem sketches out the natural development of the Yiddish poetic tradition from its folkloric foundations to the age of modernism. Binding the raw roots of the Jewish folk song with the refined structures of European poetics, the poem fulfills Kulbak’s wish to chisel modernist verse from the rough stuff of folklore.30 The result is a carefully crafted poem that “ascends” aesthetically like a floating castle yet remains grounded like farm animals in the local soil. No trace of either folklore or symbolism is to be found in the following poem, entitled “In a yadlovn vald” (In a Forest of Firs), yet the desire to root Yiddish poetry in his native landscape abides. In a Forest of FirsВ .В .В . still. where blinking red of strawberry— and little worm climbs quietly in web of clumsy branch with branch, lattice of mossy trunk and rootsВ .В .В . deepening thicket, hairy Page 89 →and dense— overflowing spring delights by green-bearded tree stumpsВ .В .В . a hush passed from

grass to grass, a sound a splash a gentle source and spring of humble hare— gray fur turns round through ferns, cold nettles, upon old rotВ .В .В . and still, and cool the forest echoes blue-concealmentВ .В .В .31 Page 90 →

In contrast to “A Youthful Rogue,” the presence of a speaker is scarcely felt in this poem. Nature in its interconnected splendor is the true hero. In contrast to “A Moon Night,” moreover, in which visual description cloaks abstract concepts, here the emphasis is placed on economy of language and the purity and precision of the image itself. In the opening lines, the pairing of the gerund pintelt (“blinking” or “winking”) and the color royt (“red”) depicts the active reddening of the strawberry as it ripens, effectively transforming color into a verb.32 This two-word phrase is followed in the next line by the word pozemke (wild strawberry), with the line break concretizing the shape and color of the strawberry as it comes into view. Through a few carefully placed words, the poem reifies a vital image, a technique typical of another modernist movement that likely influenced Kulbak: Anglo-American imagism.33 In fact, the poem displays two techniques that closely resemble one of the great imagist poems of the day, William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” (1923). The first is the strategic use of line breaks for visual effect. In Kulbak’s poem, the line break that divides the first two lines serves to highlight the active image of a ripening strawberry: “still. where pointing red of / strawberry.” A similar technique can be found in the final stanza of Williams’s poem: But now the stark dignity of entrance—Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

The line break between the subject (“they”) and the verb (“grip down”) animates the image of carrots taking root in their native soil, much like the first line break of Kulbak’s poem zooms in on the active reddening of the strawberry, effectively rooting the Yiddish language in its native landscape. Page 91 →This sense of rootedness is amplified by the frequent use of Slavicisms, which brand the language as indigenous to the landscape it is used to describe. As the Slavic word pozemke (wild strawberry) breaks through the Germanic topsoil of the language, the roots of Yiddish grip down ever more firmly in the Belorussian earth. This concretization of language constitutes the second imagist technique found in Williams’s “Spring and All,” which comes through explicitly in the following lines: Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined– In Kulbak’s poem, objects are similarly defined “one by one”—from the single sprouting strawberry to a worm, a branch, roots, ferns, nettles, and so on—until all objects are woven together in a great cosmic web. The cataloguing of natural objects occurs simultaneously on linguistic and concrete levels, linking the growth of the Belorussian forest with the flourishing of a Yiddish idiom heavily laden with Slavic influences. Plural adjective endings (e.g., knokhike) are paired with diminutive nouns such as kvelkhele to produce a natural rhyme. The repeated suffix enish, which creates an abstract noun or gerund, not only lends assonance but also blurs the conceptual boundary between stasis and movement. For instance, the neologism kvelenish could be interpreted as either a synonym for kvel (“spring” or “source”) or an inflected version of the verb kveln (“to delight”), thus infusing the natural object with emotion.34 Ostensibly a poem about stillness (shtilerheyt), “In a Forest of Firs” contains a great deal of movement that is enacted by the language itself. Even the proper noun gedikhtenish (“thicket”), like the German word Gedicht (вЂвЂpoem’’), gestures toward the continued вЂвЂthickening’’ of the forest as a metaphor for poetic composition. Objects emerge one by one, layer upon layer, eventually coming together in nature’s mighty network. Both the poem’s thematic content and its musicality grow naturally from the intrinsic properties of the Yiddish language, a Yiddish indigenous to the particular region it depicts. In mere pages, Naye lider moves from folk song to romanticism through symbolism and imagism to form an eclectic montage of disparate modernist poetic styles and techniques. This panoply of styles culminates in the concluding section of the volume, entitled Raysn (Belorussia), a cycle of twelve narrative poems that romanticize the Jews of the Belorussian soil.35 Blending a mythic landscape with rich, earthy realia, Raysn straddles Jewish and secularPage 92 → thematic registers, while the long-breathed romantic verses rely equally upon Hebraic and Slavic linguistic registers. In contrast to his Zionist contemporaries, who produced images of an orientalized Palestine, Kulbak locates his Promised Land on the rural outskirts of Vilna Province where he grew up. As Marc Caplan points out, Raysn distinguishes itself from the conventions of Yiddish literature by focusing on the natural Slavic landscape rather than on explicitly Jewish spaces, such as the shtetl synagogue, marketplace, or bathhouse.36 The concept of indigenousness is especially pronounced in the final section, entitled “Grandfather Prepares to Die,” a variation on the biblical poem known as the Blessing of Jacob (Genesis 49:1–27). Whereas the biblical source poem establishes Jacob’s sons’ claim to the Land of Israel, Kulbak’s version bestows upon the native sons of White Russia the forests, fields, and rivers that nurtured them. In a parody of Zebulun’s blessing (“Zebulun shall dwell by the seashore; / He shall be a haven for ships,” Genesis 49:13), Uncle Shmulie is promised the sludgy rivers of Vilna Province: “You smell of fish scales and the slime of rivers. / Blessed are you on land, and blessed on water!” According to Caplan, Kulbak’s nostalgic portrayal of his native Raysn served as a strategy for examining and reclaiming the past “from the standpoint of a present time and place in flux.”37 In other words, Berlin afforded Kulbak with the distance he required to reexamine and reconstruct his lost homeland. In fact, this

sentimental portrait of an idyllic Jewish Belorussian countryside could only have been produced in exile, for the actual region in which it is set had undergone a dramatic transformation since Kulbak’s departure for Berlin in 1920. Physical borders had changed, as had the political order that governed them. Vilna Province, which was part of the Pale of Settlement under Russian imperial rule during Kulbak’s youth, was now divided between the Poles and the Soviets. Although Vilnius (as the city is known in Lithuanian) was named capital of the new independent Lithuanian state after World War I, it was immediately captured by the Russians and then by the Polish army, and remained part of the Republic of Poland (under the name Wilno) for the next twenty years, a period marked by incessant tension between Jews and Poles. In the midst of ongoing strife, Kulbak’s parents relocated from his birthplace, Smorgon (today SmarhГіn, Belarus), which was on the front line between the German and Russian armies during the war, to Minsk, the new capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.38 When Kulbak left Berlin for Vilna in 1923, he was well aware that the recent geographical and political changes, coupled with his family’s migration, had made an authentic “homecoming” impossible, since shifting borders had transformed his native region beyond recognition. His journey Page 93 →from Berlin back to Eastern Europe was not a “return” but rather a tentative new beginning.

Belorussia in Berlin, Berlin in Belorussia If Raysn reflects an attempt to negotiate the past in a transitional time and space, Meshiekh ben efrayim, the last piece Kulbak wrote in Berlin before returning to Vilna, exposes his profound reservations about the future. Like Raysn, this experimental novella is replete with earthy language that honors indigenousness to Eastern Europe and the value of simplicity as the foundation for a socialistic life in the Diaspora. Yet, in contrast to the romantic tone of Raysn, an overriding sense of madness runs throughout the novella, which signals doubt about the feasibility of this ideal in a newly redrawn Europe. Moreover, while Raysn reveals the influence of Berlin covertly, that is, through its absence, Meshiekh ben efrayim displays the influence of the metropolis through the use of avant-garde motifs typical of German expressionism.39 Like the poetry and especially painting of the German expressionists, which alternates between portrayals of impending apocalypse and the idealized return to nature as the panacea to stolid urban life, Meshiekh ben efrayim juxtaposes apocalyptic fantasy with redemptive primitivist motifs.40 The same themes and stylistic techniques employed by the German expressionists to convey the ominousness and impending terrors of 1914 appear in Meshiekh ben efrayim as a response to the revolutionary mood of Eastern Europe during the 1920s.41 The tension between redemption and destruction is encapsulated in the work’s title. Rabbinic literature relates that a precursor to the true Messiah of the House of David, known as the Messiah Son of Ephraim, will gather the nation of Israel and ascend to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, only to fall in battle and thus be exposed as a false messiah.42 In Kulbak’s version, the apocalyptic myth is joined with the redemptive Hasidic legend of the lamed-vovniks, the thirty-six hidden righteous or saintly people who justify the existence of humanity in each generation.43 Among the characters that make up the legendary Jewish landscape are two semimessianic figures. The first, Benye the miller, stands for earthy corporeality: “He gradually understood the clay of his body, his face was buried in the sand, and his crooked fingers were clutching the roots.В .В .В . And it was as if the clay were breathing and shaping up in hands, feet, head, chest, and there were no difference in the world between Benye and the clay of the earth.”44 Representing asceticism in nature Page 94 →is Simkhe Plakhte, a former rabbi who has retired to a simple life in the woods and whose physical appearance points to a kind of pandenominational, nature-based Hasidism: “[Simkhe] looked like a Christian peasant, he wore a straw hat on his head and, on his feet, shoes of birch bark; but he did have a beard, an enormous Jewish beard, that was bright gray. His beard was beautiful!”45 Throughout the novella, the apocalyptic mood is mitigated by sympathetic portraits of salt-of-the-earth characters.46 The thematic ambiguity of the novella is matched by stylistic and generic ambiguity.47 In contrast to Raysn, which reflects nostalgia for a lost homeland through conventional meters and rhyme schemes, Meshiekh ben efrayim blends nostalgia and dread through its fragmented form, a jumble of sparse prose periodically interrupted by poems and incantations. Though jolting and seemingly disruptive, these incantations constitute the work’s “lyric-philosophical breath,” in the words of Shmuel Niger.48 This experimental fusion of forms reveals

the novella’s status as a transitional work not only with respect to Kulbak’s literary development but also in terms of his geographical trajectory. By the time it saw print in 1924, the golden years of Yiddish publishing in Berlin had come to an end, the dust of revolution had settled in Eastern Europe, and Kulbak had resettled in Vilna. Suspended generically between poetry and prose, stylistically between folklore and avant-garde expressionism, and thematically between redemption and apocalypse, Meshiekh ben efrayim reveals the combination of longing and anxiety that Kulbak experienced as he prepared to leave Berlin and return to Eastern Europe. Initially, Kulbak settled in Vilna, or “Jerusalem of Lithuania” (yerusholayim d’lite), as it is known in Yiddish. This decision was not a foregone conclusion, but it is hardly surprising. As the conditions with foreign publishing deteriorated in Berlin, Vilna’s cultural life beckoned. Boasting a rich network of institutions that operated exclusively in Yiddish, Vilna was imprinted in Kulbak’s memory as the cultural capital of Yiddishland.49 Upon his arrival there in 1924, he placed himself at the very epicenter of the city’s cultural life as both a poet and a teacher. He also penned the poem “Vilna” (1926), a romantic ode to the city that is widely regarded as the unofficial anthem of Lithuanian Jews.50 It would appear that the Yiddish bard had at last returned home. Yet this period in Vilna’s history was also a time of political insecurity, extreme poverty, and increasing anti-Jewish violence.51 The volatile political situation was likely one of the deciding factors that influenced Kulbak to leave Vilna in 1928 and to resettle in Minsk, where his parents now resided. In contrast to the impoverished Jewish institutions in Vilna, Jewish life in Minsk received ample state support.52 Within the newly formed Byelorussian SSR, Yiddish attained the status of an official language Page 95 →(along with Byelorussian, Russian, and Polish), the first state-level recognition for Yiddish anywhere in the world.53 For Kulbak, the self-styled poet of the White Russian soil, this was surely a promising sign. Yet the transition into an increasingly stringent communist culture proved challenging, particularly because the “youthful rogue” refused to be domesticated. Although his later writing reveals an attempt to adhere to the Soviet party line, aesthetically it is anything but conformist. In contrast to the prescribed socialist realist style that characterized the proletarian literature of writers such as Itzik Feffer and Izi Kharik, which stripped the Yiddish language of its cultural and religious aspects, Kulbak’s Minsk writing shows that he was not willing to relinquish his creative license or forego Jewish themes.54 This recalcitrance is especially apparent in the mockepic poem “Disner tshayld herold” (Childe Harold of Dysna), which he began to write shortly after arriving in Minsk in 1928 and published in 1933, the year of the Weimar Republic’s collapse. The delayed imprint of expressionism on this work, employed to parodic effect, demonstrates Kulbak’s resistance to the socialist realist aesthetic that was gradually taking hold in the young Soviet Union. Evidently, he had no intension of abandoning the vision of a varied, experimental Yiddish culture even as he adapted himself to a new and increasingly stringent political order. In sixty-two satirical cantos, “Childe Harold” portrays the journey of Lyulkeman (a name that literally translates as “man with a pipe”) from his Lithuanian shtetl to Berlin, a great cultural capital on the brink of its bloody demise. Despite the Byronic associations invoked by the title, Kulbak’s “Childe Harold” is not a romantic epic poem but rather a jagged, expressionistic account of an aspiring poet’s descent into chaos. Like his Byronic namesake, the artless hero leaves his hometown, located somewhere near the Dysna River (which flows along today’s Lithuanian-Belarusian border), to seek adventure and enlightenment on foreign soil. Armed with only a pack of cigarettes and “a bunch of wild poems” (a bintl vilde lider), Lyulkeman is an intrepid young man who belongs neither to the bourgeoisie nor to the Bolsheviks: Page 96 →And suddenly he’s on the train. He is going to study In Europe. To each his own: a bird sings, A Bolshevik makes revolutions, and Lyulkeman has to study.55

Delphine Bechtel points out that Kulbak distinguishes Lyulkeman in this passage from three categories of Soviet

citizens: the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution to Berlin, the Moscow businessmen who crowd the elegant KurfГјrstendamm, and the Bolsheviks who refuse to board the train to Berlin for their task is to consolidate the revolution.56 Penniless and intellectually hungry, he is the quintessential starving artist in exile. In contrast to Lord Bryon’s Harold, who leaves behind an empty life of debauchery to acquire heightened introspection overseas, Lyulkeman is met with immediate disappointment in Berlin, for—as he quickly learns—“Childe Harolds rarely eat.” Instead of glitz and glamour, he finds a Janus-faced Berlin ravaged by economic and political turmoil. Poetry readings in smoke-filled cafГ©s and the riveting nightlife ablaze in electric lights signal nothing more than decadence and decline: Lyulkeman listens, hears an age gone mad: Berlin fades in screams; Old bourgeoisie screaming in bells. Screaming in the theaters and museums. Granach rushes on a barren stage In madness Moissi57 croons like a pale, sickly ballerina. And dead poetry stinksВ .В .В . The dying body of a distant glimmer, Its demise is sweet,— Expressionism treads on red feet, Dada with its pants down.58 Page 97 →

Kulbak’s scathing critique of Weimar Berlin’s bourgeois culture falls into step with the poetry of German expressionists like Georg Heym and Jakob van Hoddis, who treated Berlin as an object of simultaneous fascination and contempt.59 The resemblance is not only thematic but also stylistic. In place of the flowing musicality and organic imagery of Naye lider we find abrupt end-stopping and a flurry of disconnected images linked only by the rhyme, a technique that resembles the “sequence style” (Reihungstil) made famous by Jakob van Hoddis’s “Weltende” (End of the World, 1911):60 The bourgeois’ hat flies off his pointed head, the air re-echoes with a screaming sound. Tilers plunge from roofs and hit the ground, and seas are rising round the coasts (you read). The storm is here, crushed dams no longer hold, the savage seas come inland with a hop.

The greater part of people have a cold. Off bridges everywhere the railroads drop. Dem BГјrger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, In allen LГјften hallt es wie Geschrei. Dachdecker stГјrzen ab und gehn entzwei, Und an den KГјsten—liest man—steigt die Flut. Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen An Land, um dicke DГ¤mme zu zerdrГјcken. Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den BrГјcken.61 Like Kulbak’s portrayal of Berlin, van Hoddis presents impending decline through pseudo-reportage. The poem cobbles together a variety of calamitous events, only to deflate them with a banal interjection, effectively placing mass destruction on par with the common cold. Mordant wit combines with a maelstrom of catastrophic images to convey the haste, simultaneity, and cynicism of the modern metropolis. The result, as Edward Timms argues, “is a poem of disconcerting originality in which humor only accentuates the existential unease.”62 Page 98 →Like van Hoddis, Kulbak’s “Childe Harold” combines major historical events (“a Bolshevik makes revolutions”) with benign occurrences (“a bird sings”) to produce a glib, disdainful portrait of bourgeois life in the big city. In the second half of the cycle, the allure of Berlin’s grand boulevards is replaced by an image of the “other Germany,” that of the worker’s movement in the proletarian neighborhoods of NeukГ¶lln, Wedding, and Moabit, where violent street fights between Communists and fascists anticipate the Republic’s impending decline.63 Lyulkeman’s growing contempt for overwrought urban life, bourgeois superficiality, and chauvinistic nationalism becomes a pretext for his absorption into the Communist Party. His turn to communism stems less from ideological conviction than from his difficult circumstances in this alienating city, which he likens to “a cold clenched fist.” This practical, measured approach to revolutionary politics corresponds to Kulbak’s conditional embrace of the Soviet Union. Like Lyulkeman, Kulbak was drawn to the Soviet Union not based on ideological conviction but because he believed that the Soviet Union was the only environment in which Yiddish had a future. Like Lyulkeman, Kulbak saw the Soviet Union as a means, not an end.

“A Simple Wreath of Oak Leaves” While the influence of Berlin registers in Kulbak’s Berlin writing through its absence, the presence of Berlin in his later Soviet writing reconfirms his cultural agenda from the opposite angle. Like the expressionist poetry of Jakob van Hoddis and others, “Childe Harold of Dysna” is written in a sardonic tone and conveys contempt for bourgeois culture and, conversely, sympathy for socialist values. Thematically, it accords with the Soviet party line. Yet the use of avant-garde literary techniques distinguishes this work from the propagandistic “proletarian” Soviet Yiddish literature gaining prominence in Minsk and throughout the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, then, Kulbak’s disavowal of Europe in his later Soviet writing represents the culmination of his earlier efforts to integrate Yiddish poetry into European letters. This was the final phase in the development of Yiddish poetry—as Kulbak had outlined it in вЂвЂDos yidishe vort’’—from folklore to romanticism to avant-garde verse. The attempt to blend socialist themes with Jewish content ultimately proved scandalous. As the Soviet Union

grew increasingly totalitarian, especially after Josef Stalin had consolidated his power in 1929, the guidelinesPage 99 → for Soviet literature became more severe. Little room was left for irony or subtlety of expression. Soviet Yiddish writers who had been led to believe that commitment to the revolution could go hand in hand with commitment to Yiddish cultural autonomy despaired. By the late 1930s, as Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg note, “The mere factВ .В .В . of writing in Yiddish, a language notoriously entangled with national and religious traditions, was cause for nervousness.”64 Kulbak’s rude awakening occurred in October 1938, when he was arrested by the Soviet authorities on false charges of Zionism and espionage. Following a brief show trial, he was executed, becoming one of the first Yiddish writers to fall victim to Stalin’s infamous “anticosmopolitan” purges. This was a mere prelude to the night of August 12, 1952, when thirteen writers and leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including Peretz Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Feffer, and Dovid Bergelson, were rounded up and killed. Remembered as the “Night of the Murdered Poets,” this tragic event offers a lasting reminder that Yiddish culture, even in its most revolutionary form, would never be entirely secular. Indeed, “Yiddish” would always translate as “Jewish.” Tracing Kulbak’s trajectory from Belorussia to Berlin and back again, it becomes clear that the roots he sought for Yiddish could not be planted territorially but only poetically. Through exposure to modern literary trends within the artistically open yet alienating environment of Berlin he was able to produce new literary styles to enrich Yiddish literature at a moment of profound political change and uncertainty. Exclusion from the dominant German culture combined with distance from his native realm provided the freedom to cultivate his own national agenda, as well as the isolation needed to cultivate a unique aesthetic. The persistent tensions underlying his work from this period—between exile and wanderlust, arrival and exclusion, redemption and apocalypse—reflect the complex process of developing an indigenous yet expressly diasporic Yiddish literary tradition, a tradition unmoored from a physical center. In Berlin, Kulbak was free to construct an alternative literary homeland, a cultural construct impervious to the political changes rampant throughout Europe. This imagined homeland was not a remembered native land locatable on a historical atlas but rather a mythologized space confined to the mental maps of Jewish cultural memory. If Kulbak’s literary image of Raysn did in fact possess a center it was undoubtedly Vilna, the “dark amulet set in Lithuania,” as Kulbak described it in his famous ode to the city. For Yiddish speakers of Belorussia, Vilna was not a capital in the literal sense but rather the Page 100 →capital of Yiddish culture, a literary heartland in which “every stone is a book, parchment every wall.” And Yiddish is the simple wreath of oak leaves Upon the sacred-everyday entrances of the city. Gray Yiddish is the light that glimmers in the windows.65

Longed for in Berlin and remembered in Minsk, Kulbak’s Vilna was an ideal and as such impossible city, a city built of Yiddish itself.

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4. “Orient, So It Is!” Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Farewell to Europe One afternoon in 1922 Uri Zvi Greenberg took a seat aboard a tram in Berlin. Seated across from him was an overweight German man whose entire body reeked of schnapps. The man caught Greenberg’s eye and bellowed: “I stink like a pig!” In an effort to ignore him, the poet reached into his back pocket for the Yiddish newspaper Haynt (Today), lowered his eyes, and began to read. But his disregard only goaded the lout, who leaned in closer, raising his voice: “They beat up a Jew in the street today, smacked him up good!” Greenberg paid no attention, engrossed in his reading, until a fellow Jewish immigrant approached him and quietly urged him in Yiddish to put the newspaper back in his pocket. At KurfГјrstendamm Greenberg exited the tram, the drunk still glowering at him, and made his way to the Romanisches CafГ©. As he took a seat at the table of Zalman Schneor and Yaakov Shteinberg, two fellow writers in exile, he asked: “Did you hear there was a pogrom here in Berlin?” His friends were unmoved: “Nu, nu, don’t exaggerate. Are things really so bad for you here?” But Greenberg was distraught. “Very bad indeed,” he shot back. “Why am I condemned to wander the streets of Berlin on a fake passport? Why don’t I have citizenship somewhere? I stem from a homeland and kingdom that were once mine.” It was at that moment, Greenberg later recalled, that he decided to immigrate to the Land of Israel.1 This anecdote, which Greenberg related in an interview with the Israeli journalist Shmuel Huppert in 1971, provides a revealing glimpse into the poet’s brief sojourn in Berlin. As an illegal migrant, his status in Germany was unstable, and it was the sense of insecurity elicited by his situation that left the greatest imprint on his ideology and his art during this short but intense period. A native son of LwГіw (known under German occupation as Lemberg), Greenberg came to Berlin via Warsaw, where he had resettled in 1921. In Warsaw he formed the avant-garde literary group Di Khalyastre (The Page 102 →Gang) together with Peretz Markish and Melekh Ravitch, and established the journal Albatros (Albatross), his first attempt to bring together poetry, graphic art, and literary essays within a single forum.2 The second issue of the journal, published in November 1922, contained the poem “Uri tsvi farn tseylem INRI” (Uri Zvi before the Cross INRI), which presented Jesus on the cross as a symbol of Jewish suffering in Europe. The poem angered the Polish Catholic authorities, who swiftly banned the journal and issued a stern warning to its editor. Greenberg fled immediately to Berlin. Circumstances brought Greenberg to Berlin. He had no desire to go there, nor did he intend to remain. Yet his one-year sojourn marked an important turning point. He later remembered Berlin as the place where he performed the painful task of “cutting his mother-tongue from his mouth” in order to “write in Hebrew on Hebrew soil.”3 But why did this turning point occur in Berlin, of all places? Why was the cosmopolitan epicenter of European Kultur the site from which he chose to leave Europe behind and to embrace a radical form of Zionism? Greenberg’s experience of Berlin, I argue in this chapter, was one of artistic refuge combined with immense anxiety about the future. Unlike Kulbak, who basked in the city’s intellectual fervor, Greenberg saw himself as a fugitive, an illegal interloper who could only find refuge by escaping Europe and resettling in his ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel. The counterfeit passport with which he entered Germany illustrates the urgency of this desire. In contrast to what Shachar Pinsker has described as the “literary passports” that afforded Jewish writers freedom of mobility during the years prior to World War I,4 Greenberg’s false papers symbolize the terror of statelessness in the immediate aftermath of the war, when passport requirements were introduced and standardized in European countries.5 The existential tension borne by this tenuous situation facilitated a shift of focus in his poetry from the “Jewish cry” (yidish-geshray) of the Jewish masses to a jingoistic Zionist vision and quasi-prophetic Hebrew voice. It was in Berlin that Greenberg was able to bid farewell to the “Kingdom of the Cross” (malkhes tseylem) in Yiddish and proclaim his departure for the “Kingdom of Israel” (malkhut yisrael) in Hebrew.

The Albatrosses of Yiddish Poetry

Greenberg opened the inaugural issue of Albatros with a literary manifesto titled “Proklamirung” (Proclamation) in which he announced: “This is no time for literary experiments. An entire generation is bleeding from the throat.”6 Brash and forceful, this statement captures the spirit of Greenberg’s Page 103 →emerging expressionist style while concealing the experimental nature of his new publishing endeavor. Despite the author’s protests to the contrary, Albatros was nothing if not a study in experiments. Its four issues, which appeared over the course of just two years, are a testament to his dramatic literary, aesthetic, and ideological development. The progression from the first issue, published in Warsaw in September 1922, to the last two issues, which appeared in a combined volume in Berlin in July 1923, reveals a process of intense negotiation between literary styles, between identification with the Jewish masses and a particularist Jewish national vision, and above all between the artistic influence of the West and the siren song of the East. The outcome of this short-lived enterprise was not only the explosive voice of a new poet-prophet but also the turn away from Europe and the Yiddish language toward the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language, Greenberg’s chosen tongue. Experimentation is built into the journal’s very title, which signals dueling symbolist and expressionist influences. The first allusion contained in the title is to Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros” (The Albatross) one of the consummate achievements in symbolist verse. Baudelaire’s poem likens the fate of the solitary poet to those “kings of azure” (ces rois de l’azur) who soar effortlessly above the sea before being forcibly pulled from the sky by scornful sailors for sport. Incapacitated, the elegant and free “winged voyager” (voyageur ailГ©) becomes “weak, comic, and “ugly.” Similarly, the poet, majestic and invincible as he glides above the earth to spiritual heights, is reduced to an object of neglect and derision once “exiled from his heights to earth below.”7 Greenberg’s exposure to Baudelaire, as Avidov Lipsker has shown, was mediated through the German lyricist Stefan George, who translated Les Fleurs du Mal into German, paying careful attention to typography and calligraphy as part of the symbolist vision, which he carried over into German poetry of the fin de siГЁcle.8 If Greenberg took from Baudelaire antisocial aestheticism, he adopted from George a fastidious visual style. The influence of George’s interest in the visual aesthetics of symbolism can be felt in the arresting pages of Albatros, in which graphic design and visual art figure as prominently as the written content.9 Yet, in contrast to Baudelaire and George, Greenberg rejected the notion of “l’art pour l’art” and the withdrawal of the poet from society. He therefore turned to expressionism as an alternative style that removes barriers between the poet and the masses. The second allusion contained in the title Albatros is indeed expressionistic, namely to Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatcher’s “Albatros,” which appeared in the journal’s inaugural issue. Like Baudelaire, Shumiatcher presented the mythological bird as an artistic symbol, the nexus of artifice and creativity, Page 104 →with a “body of mother-of-pearl, wings of bronze, and eyes of sky and water.” Yet, in contrast to Baudelaire’s majestic creature of the sky, her albatross is wild, restless, and ravenous: Wandering is your fate! Crossing winds After steel ships. Circling Your hunger seeking Earthly refuse. Albatross!10

The unrhymed, staccato lines, ranging from one to four words, imitate the narrowing circles of the albatross’s descent. This is no celestial creature torn from the sky but rather a desperate scavenger and bird of prey. Homeless, hungry, and shamed, he trails the steel ships (rather than being pursued by them) in search of scraps of

food. The Yiddish word for “refuse” or “waste,” opfaln, can also be read as a verb that carries multiple meanings, such as “to lose one’s way,” “to withdraw,” or “to decline.” The verb-noun ambiguity captures the winged creature’s uncertain condition: condemned to eternal wandering, he either descends in search of earthly waste, or remains aloft and adrift in the sky overlooking the earth’s decline. Like Kulbak’s “rogue” (hultay), discussed in the previous chapter, Shumiatcher’s albatross symbolizes the “wild” (hefker) Yiddish poet whose rootlessness is simultaneously a source of freedom and isolation. Transforming the pathetic bird of prey into a literary mascot, Greenberg dedicated the first issue of the journal to “the albatrosses of young Yiddish poetry,” the voracious yet lost Jewish writers of the post–World War I years.11 The dual reference contained in the title Albatros—to Baudelaire (via George), on the one hand, and to Shumiatcher, on the other—illustrates Greenberg’s attraction to both symbolism and expressionism, and, by extension, to the universalizing pull of European aesthetics and the demand to Page 105 →speak on behalf of the Jewish masses in the wake of war, revolution, and pogroms.12 As Lipsker suggests, the first issue of Albatros was an attempt to strike a compromise between the poetic innovation of symbolism and the concern for basic human need and suffering emphasized by expressionism.13 This stylistic ambiguity was matched by political indecision. Experimentation with various literary styles and movements at this early stage of the journal’s existence reflects Greenberg’s own unresolved political commitments. It was only after his arrival in Berlin, as we shall see, that he adopted an unequivocal Zionist stance.14 Although the first issue of Albatros reveals opposing literary influences, its opening manifesto, “Proklamirung,” betrays an increasing attraction to the expressionist movement, which seemed to provide the most effective means for negotiating between personal poetics and national politics. Not surprisingly, the essay bears a striking resemblance to Kasimir Edschmid’s monumental expressionist manifesto, “Über den dichterischen Expressionismus” (On Poetic Expressionism, 1917). Edschmid argues in this piece that contemporary German poets, in contrast to their French counterparts, are free to express themselves in a “wild” and “fractured” manner because they have no loyalty to their literary forebears. Theirs is the poetic expression of a Nietzschean new morality, which rebuffs established authority and forges the path of the intellectually unfettered, self-sufficient “new man.” Yet Edschmid also expressed disdain for poets who privilege experimentation over artistic integrity, and therefore stressed that a blatant rejection of tradition merely for the sake of “originality” must not be mistaken for a true goal of expressionism.15 In “Proklamirung,” Greenberg makes a similar distinction. He stresses the difference between the authentic “albatrosses” of Yiddish poetry and the megalomaniacal crop of “pseudo-expressionists” who care only about breaking the mold at all costs. Against “vulgar imitation” and “talentlessness,” the essay calls for the stripping away of the “sacred veil of modern poetry” in order to expose a “free, bare, blood-seething human expression.”16 It was not enough, Greenberg argues, for the new Yiddish poetry to be experimental; it had to be brutally honest in its depiction of a brutal reality. Like Edschmid, who insisted that “[t]here is but one demand: cruelty [Grausamkeit],”17 Greenberg maintained that a violent world requires a violent mode of expression: “Thus cruelty in the poem. / Thus chaos in the image. / Thus protest of the blood. / Such songs must be sung. Cruel. Chaotic. Bleeding.” The true expressionist poet, according to this view, was not the solitary poet of Parnassus but rather a prophet capable of communicating on behalf of the suffering masses, the “heroic wounded man,” who represents “the millionfold-head-and-heartindividualism”Page 106 → and carries on his shoulders the “weight of the black global pain.”18 Greenberg’s growing attraction to what he interpreted as the populist aspects of expressionism was the most important factor in mitigating the elitist aestheticism of Baudelaire and the French symbolists. The reference to the “heroic wounded man” anticipates a central feature of Greenberg’s work, to which we will turn momentarily, namely the depiction of Jesus as the embodiment of the new Yiddish poetry. Yet the expressionist break with tradition was also a source of disquiet for Greenberg. This anxiety was the main topic of a second manifesto, entitled “Manifest tsu den kegner fun der nayer dikhtung” (Manifesto to the Opponents of the New Literature), which appeared alongside “Proklamirung” in the opening issue of Albatros. In this piece, Greenberg argues that Yiddish writers, in contrast to the “healthy national cultures with

one home” (gezunte eyn-heym-hobndike kultur-felker), cannot become “rooted” by adopting external influences, for Yiddish poetry represents “the fruit of familiarity and pain, which we carry with all our twohundred-forty-eight limbs throughout our Jewish-human homelessness.”19 He goes on to express doubt over the ability of the Yiddish poet to draw upon European literary traditions after having turned his back on his own Jewish tradition: “Am I, who stem from a noble family of holy peopleВ .В .В . to feel guilty because I cannot remember the tune of my father’s sacred вЂBeloved of the Soul’ (Yedid nefesh) or my grandfather’s вЂThank God, Searcher of the Heart’ (’Odeh la’el levav ḥoker)?”20 In reality, Greenberg remembered these liturgical poems well.21 He feigned amnesia, however, in order to show the impossibility of furthering Jewish tradition in Europe, which “has spit us out with blood from the throat.”22 In Greenberg’s eyes, the post–World War I Yiddish poet was—like the albatross—both free-floater and homeless scavenger. The sense of vulnerability invoked by the albatross image is the dominant theme in the inaugural issue of Albatros. Another clear example emerges in Melekh Ravitch’s essay “Di naye, di nakete dikhtung: Ziben tezisn” (The New, Naked Poetry: Seven Theses). In keeping with the expressionist style that Greenberg favored for the journal, Ravitch privileged a rough, often brutal aesthetic of ugliness as the only honest reflection of Europe’s postwar reality. Likening the Yiddish poet to “a newborn on earth, who cries out from within, ” Ravitch drew attention to the incipience of avant-garde Yiddish poetry, which, as we saw in chapter 3, scarcely predated World War I.23 The metaphor of the naked newborn depicts the Yiddish poet’s mode of expression as equally instinctual, inarticulate, and unaesthetic as the infant’s cry. In the final section of the essay, entitled “Vetalu ’oto вЂal ha’ets” (And They Hung Him on the Tree), Ravitch invokes another image to convey the helplessPage 107 → condition of the Yiddish poet: Jesus on the cross. “Naked the word hangs on the cross. The proud INRI laughs at it. It wanted to be the king and redeemer of pain. From its hands and feet drips blood.”24 Jesus is thus replaced by the Yiddish word. As Matthew Hoffman observes, Ravitch offers a “hyper-literal” reading of the Christian metaphysical concept of the Logos as Jesus himself, whereby “Jesus physically becomes dos vort (instead of вЂthe word’ becoming flesh).”25 Adorned with the Latin inscription “INRI” (IД“sus NazarД“nus, RД“x IЕ«daeЕЌrum, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), a symbol of European aesthetics, Jesus is marked as an object of ridicule—as is the Yiddish language.

Before the Cross Like Ravitch, Greenberg saw the crucified Jesus as the corporeal manifestation of the new Yiddish poetry.26 Yet he did not seek simply to reappropriate Jesus as a positive source of identification.27 Jesus appears repeatedly in his poems not as prophet or deity but as a multivalent emblem—on the one hand, the embodiment of Jewish passivity and wretchedness, and, on the other hand, a symbol of Christian hegemony and anti-Jewish terror.28 One of the most interesting portrayals of Jesus in Greenberg’s oeuvre is contained in “Uri tsvi farn tseylem” (Uri Zvi before the Cross), the provocative poem that forced Greenberg into exile in Berlin. In this poem, Jesus appears as the quintessential exilic Jew, estranged from his native Galilee and fated to die violently in exile. The speaker pleads with him, addressing him by his Hebrew name as “Brother Yeshu,” to remember his national origins: “Do you remember, brother, the holy village of Bethlehem?” Jesus remains silent throughout the poem, while the speaker becomes more stridently outspoken: “You no longer remember. Too many thousands of bells—bells ringing.” The din of church bells, sounded repeatedly in Greenberg’s poetry as a metonym for the chaos of urban exile, is overwhelming, even stupefying: “Ah, you have forgotten everything. Your coagulated brain (fargliveter moyekh) does not think.”29 Broken and tormented, Jesus can only wail: “You—for the painful nights of everyman—cry, cry, the wailing-of-Jewish-misfortune (Du—far alemens veyennakht—shrayst, shrayst, yidish-umglik-geshrey).” Recalling Ravitch’s image of the infant who “cries out from within,” Jesus’s inarticulate cry is the embodiment of bare expression; it is the Yiddish word “naked on the cross.” Greenberg’s crude portrayal of the crucified Jesus was not the only subversive aspect of “Uri Zvi before

the Cross.” The typographic form—a cross Page 109 →composed of Yiddish words—was a blatant provocation directed against Christian and Jewish orthodoxies alike. As Avidov Lipsker notes, Greenberg’s decision to print the poem as a calligram (a poem in which the typeface is arranged to create a visual image) betrays both modernist and classical antecedents.30 On the one hand, the cross-poem brings to mind Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), a series of poems printed in the form of a horse, a plant, and so forth, as well as the concrete poems of Christian Morgenstern, such as “Fisches Nachtgesang” (Fish’s Night Song, 1905), arranged in the shape of a fish, consisting solely of scansion marks that resemble either fish scales or bubbles, as well as musical notation. On the other hand, the cross invokes the genre of the Kreuzgedichte (cross poems) popularized in German prayer books of the Middle Ages. Greenberg at once invokes and denigrates the classical genre by constructing the cross out of Yiddish words. This was a blasphemous gesture on two counts, since Yiddish is not only a Jewish language but also a profane language written in the sacred letters of scripture.31 By merging a sacred liturgical form with the modernist genre of the calligram, Greenberg deliberately subverted the religious impact of the Christian icon, just as Apollinaire used the tip of his Eiffel Tower to “jab” at France’s adversarial neighbor to the east: “Hello world, of which I am the eloquent tongue which your mouth, O Paris, will forever stick out at the Germans.” Page 108 →“Uri Zvi before the Cross INRI,” Albatros 2 (Warsaw, 1922). (Public domain.) “Uri Zvi before the Cross” was intended as a confrontation, which takes place on three levels: first, there is the iconoclastic use of iconography, a provocation for Jews and Christians alike; second, the poem confronts the reader graphically, just as the speaker confronts Jesus; and third, as the title indicates, the cross confronts the poet, Uri Zvi himself, who stands before it as though before a mirror, forced to contend both with the violence of Christian power and the consequent decline of Jewish life in Europe.32 The deafening din of church bells combined with the “naked cry” of Jesus’s suffering form the violent sounds of veyland (pain-land), to invoke the title of another poem by Greenberg. This is the land from which he longs to escape, yet it also provides inspiration for a new, explosive, and profane Yiddish poetics. The intolerable cacophony that Greenberg attributes to Christian Europe thus becomes a constitutive element of his expressionist poetics.33 In short, the discord that is life in Europe inspires as it repels. Considering that “Uri Zvi before the Cross” was intended as a provocation, it was remarkably successful. Upon its publication in the second issue of Albatros, the Polish authorities saw fit the ban the entire periodical. But their efforts to silence Greenberg were counterproductive. Exile served only to liberate his voice and sharpen his critique. In Berlin he published two more issuesPage 112 → of Albatros in a double volume, which included his most inflammatory anti-Christian poem to date: “In malkhes fun tseylem” (In the Kingdom of the Cross). Written in the form of narrative long poem (known as a poema in Yiddish and Hebrew),34 the piece depicts Jewish suffering within the gruesome setting of Europe’s “forest of pain” (veyvald). With its jagged, uneven verses and violent imagery, the poem marks the zenith of Greenberg’s expressionist style. In the first section, the speaker identifies as “the owl, a bird of mourning in the forest of pain,” a nocturnal witness and guardian of the dead, who declares: Page 110 →Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Tour Eiffel” (1918). (Public domain.) Page 111 →Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang” (1905). (Public domain.) I want to open up the forest and expose all the trees From which the decaying bodies of my dead hang. Take pleasure, Kingdom of the Cross!35 As the poem unfolds, the voice of the owl is replaced by that of the indignant Jew whose irascibility exposes Greenberg’s own increasingly militant politics: Aha, I am King in a prayer shawl of wounds and blood!

I want to murder, light Nablus on fire for spilled blood In mire, On pavement, In stalls, And the stairwells of churches.36 Page 113 →Cover design of Albatros 3–4 (Berlin, 1923). (Public domain.) Page 114 →Unwelcome in the Kingdom of the Cross, the Jews must find a new home. In contrast to Kulbak’s romantic image of Jewish rootedness in the woods of Belorussia, Greenberg portrays deracinated Jewish existence in the forests of Europe as a source of shame and self-sacrifice. If “Uri Zvi before the Cross” offers a lament over the Jews’ suffering, “In the Kingdom of the Cross” demands a solution to their plight. Defiant rather than mournful, the poem lambastes the “fifteen million who remain silent,” referring to the Jews of Europe who suffer passively, and vehemently renounces the doctrine of self-sacrifice, for which Christ serves as a cardinal symbol, as a hindrance to national revival. Thus, the human image of a Jewish Jesus hanging from a tree, which figured in “Uri Zvi before the Cross” as a source of identification, is replaced by an inanimate, explicitly Christian icon for which the speaker feels only cold contempt: The dead man in the church is not my brother, it is JESUS. Bethlehem is LATIN, not my hometown of Beys-lekhem.

The speaker no longer identifies with Jesus, proclaiming himself instead one of the “wild Jews” (vilde yidn) of the East trapped in Europe. In the final section of the poem he proposes a possible answer to this life of endless pain: Cloak me in a wide Arab abaya, toss a prayer shawl over my shoulder, Ignite once again the extinguished flames of the East in my poor blood And take back the frock coat, cravat, and shiny shoes That I bought in EU–RO–PA.37

Page 115 →As he sheds all the trappings of European existence, the speaker prepares for a pilgrimage to the desert, where he will “cry out to the stars: Ahava.” Ending with the Hebrew word for “love,” ahava, the poem marks Greenberg’s turn not only from Europe’s forests to the Near Eastern deserts but also from the “cry of Yiddish” to a new “Hebrew melody.” If the first two issues of Albatros printed in Warsaw convey the vulnerability of young Yiddish poets in exile, the final two Berlin issues can be read as Greenberg’s attempt to find his way, to reroute a rootless literature from European exile to an oriental homecoming. Greenberg understood that leaving Europe behind also meant relinquishing Yiddish. In his essay Klapey tishim vetishвЂah (Against the Ninety-Nine), the first Hebrew literary manifesto that he published in Palestine, he defended the turn from Yiddish to Hebrew as a necessary evil: “For there must be a reason that a man rises and cuts his mother-tongue from his mouth and begins вЂfor some reason’ to take up the suppressed blood-

language of the ancient race.”38 Yet the graphic language with which this “cut” is described signals profound ambivalence toward his mame-loshn. This ambivalence comes through in an earlier essay, entitled “Baym shlus: Veytikn-heym af slavisher erd” (At the End: Pain-Home on Slavic Earth), that appeared alongside “In the Kingdom of the Cross” in the final issue of Albatros. In this piece, Greenberg reacts to the fact that the Jews are perceived not as a European “nation” (natsiye) but merely as “a population, a wandering flock, in which everyone has either a phony or authentic passport and withers in the waiting rooms of the consulates in order to acquire a visa.”39 He rejects both immigration to America and communism as potential solutions to this stateless purgatory, and endorses what he sees as the only viable alternative: “Europe disavows my birth here. She affirms, after long generations, my pedigree: Orient, so it is!”40 And yet, although Greenberg explicitly rejects exile in the West in favor of a “return” to the “Orient,” the essay betrays an abiding affinity for Yiddish: “I want my child to say mame, not matushka. He should speak like me: woeful Yiddish. He should be the living naysayer to crucifix-Europe.”41 The tension between the apparent need to abandon Yiddish and a persistent attachment to the language captures the overall irony driving Albatros. The journal constitutes one of the most innovative publishing feats in modern Yiddish precisely because it reveals a tortured relationship to the very language in and for which it purports to speak. Greenberg’s Albatros poems made unprecedented strides in advancing an avant-garde Yiddish poetics, but they did so in an almost nihilistic manner, drawing upon European culture while railing against it, and crying out in Yiddish while forecasting its demise. In a sense, Albatros attested to the “crucifixion” of Yiddish, a language stripped bare, beaten, and shamed. No glory of redemption can be Page 116 →found here, for, in the eyes of their creator, the “Jewish Logos” could only be “resurrected” in Hebrew and on Hebrew soil. It is striking that the Hebrew words for resurrection (teḥiyah) and ascension (вЂaliyah) were invoked by the Zionist movement to refer to immigration (aliyah) to the land of Israel and the revival (tehiyah) of the Hebrew language as a modern vernacular. For Greenberg, the transition from Yiddish to Hebrew was not unlike the miracle of resurrection that followed crucifixion.

Resurrection and Ascension “Before I came to Berlin,” Greenberg told Shmuel Huppert, “I was a different man. I was not a Zionist.” In August 1923 the poet traveled to Carlsbad to attend the thirteenth Zionist Congress. At that moment, recounts Huppert, he “stopped having doubts and returned to Berlin as a Zionist, who knew which side he was on.”42 About a week before the congress took place, Greenberg published his first Zionist statement in the main organ of the World Zionist Organization, HaвЂolam (The World). Entitled “Hatsiyonut haвЂartila’it vehamekonenim beshuleyhah” (Vague Zionism and the Lamenters in the Margins), the essay sharply attacked World Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann, referring to him as “the European Yohanan” in reference to the first-century sage Yohanan Ben Zakkai, remembered for negotiating with Vespasian during the Roman siege of Jerusalem for the salvation of a religious center at Yavne.43 Greenberg’s essay saw Weizmann’s attitude toward the British and the Arabs as similarly conciliatory; just as Yohanan Ben Zakkai capitulated to Vespasian regarding the destruction of the Second Temple, so too Weizmann accepted the Balfour Declaration, which promised a “national home” for the Jews but not, in Greenberg’s words, “a Hebrew state.” Settling for “the dwelling of Israel within the Arab nation” was in his view a self-defeating compromise.44 Against this “moderate” proposal, he proposed an alternative “thuggish Zionism” (tsiyonut biryonit) that eschews diplomacy and refuses to settle until its ultimate goal is achieved: the return of the “Kingdom of Israel” (malkhut yisrael).45 Greenberg’s growing attraction to a religiously inflected Zionism culminated with the decision, in the winter of 1923, to immigrate to Palestine. The plan was accompanied by a clear a shift in his writing from Yiddish expressionism to redemptive Hebrew verse.46 As Arnold Band notes, the transformation from “a radical Yiddish cosmopolitanism to an equally radical Zionism” was accompanied by a shift from “the nihilism of expressionism to the Page 117 →messianism of traditional Jewish longings for a return to the ancestral homeland.”47 This shift is visible in several of the Hebrew poems that Greenberg wrote in Berlin shortly before his departure for Palestine, all of which later were enfolded into the first volume of poetry he published in

Palestine, Eymah gedolah veyareah (Great Terror and a Moon, 1925).48 According to Tamar Wolf-Monson, the handwritten version of the prologue to this volume contains a description of the entire work as a companion piece to the poet’s first Yiddish expressionist epic poem, Mephisto: “Today is a holiday, for a Hebrew brother to my book Mephisto has been born.” The sentence was cut from the published version, however, evidently in an effort to minimize the “brotherly” connection between the Yiddish and Hebrew works and to emphasize instead the differences between them.49 Greenberg wished to demonstrate that he had been reborn, as it were, as a Hebrew poet. The last Hebrew poem that Greenberg published in Berlin before making aliyah was “Al drakhim bamaarav” (On Paths in the West), which later appeared in a slightly altered form in Great Terror and a Moon under the shortened title “Ba-maarav” (In the West). With its elevated linguistic register and redemptive tone, the poem signaled Greenberg’s emerging radical Zionist politics and attendant aesthetic shift.50 In contrast to the Albatros poems, in which the speaker is trapped in the “land of pain” (veyland), “Paths in the West” presents a speaker who projects himself onto his longed-for destination. It begins: On paths in the West I face the farthest shore Of European soil. The sun shrivels in the heavens that become fodder For smoldering firebrands—– The sun screams in the heavens but no one listens. In the holy Ganges a man like me, Yet Christian by birth, Escapes to drink of purity . . . And I shall wander to the Hebrew river to cool My two aching eyes From the sight of the crosses.51

Echoing the lament of the medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, “My heart is in the East and I am at the farthest edge of the West” (libi bamizraḥ ve’anokhi besof maвЂarav), the speaker looks longingly toward the Orient. Page 118 →Once again Jesus makes an appearance, but this time he takes the guise of a Christian rather than an exilic Jew. Freed from the cross, Jesus is fully immersed in the “purity” of the East, signified by the Ganges River, a common motif in European romanticism.52 Like Jesus, the speaker longs to travel to the distant shores of the “Hebrew river,” where he will no longer be oppressed by the sight of Christian Europe. The geographical shift is matched by an aesthetic shift from the ghastly noise of European forests to more mellifluous sounds: Ancient lyres gleam in the darkness—– I heard their vanquished joy From many rivers

In this great world.53

The “naked cry” of Yiddish is overtaken by an elevated biblical Hebrew that contains numerous words for joy and music, as well as images of sun, wells, rivers, and sea. The deafening din of church bells and wailing in the “forest of pain” are replaced by the ancient melody of lyres heard in the darkness. Evidently, Greenberg envisioned a redemptive possibility in his Hebrew writing that was both inconceivable and unavailable to him as a Yiddish poet. And yet, as the musical metaphor unfolds, the poet’s apprehensions about writing in the renewed language of the Bible come to the fore. In a sudden spell of self-doubt, he asks: “How shall I draw forth a gitit?! / How shall I draw forth a gitit for myself / So that I might play?” The word gitit, an untranslatable term that appears in the Psalms in reference to a string instrument,Page 119 → possibly resembling a lyre, signals the poet’s anxiety over producing modernist verse in the ancient language of scripture, a language less accessible to him as his mother tongue. His uncertainty is amplified by the tension between the perceived beauty of the instrument and the pained expression to which it must give voice. Placing himself before “wells of blood” in the “Kingdom of the Christians,” the speaker struggles to sing in Hebrew with a “throat [that has become] dry from screaming / In the middle of Europe.” How, he wonders, will he be capable of producing beautiful poetry in a new language and in the aftermath of so much suffering? His doubts are partially assuaged as the attempt to make music from misery is interrupted by a different kind of tune: And my feet, as they advance, play Upon a piano like no other An eastern variation—–54 \ The melody of the East enters the speaker’s body and guides his footsteps out of exile to the ancestral homeland. It is as though the “eastern melody” has possessed him and now leads the way. His anxieties are never fully assuaged, however. The following two sections of the poem, entitled “Lefanav” (Before Him) and “Ha-ma’ane” (The Reply), structured as a dialogue between the speaker and Jesus, represent an internal monologue through which the poet anxiously anticipates his impending aliyah. Addressing Jesus directly as his “condemned brother,” the speaker sets forth doubts over his ability to become one of the “tanned Galilean shepherds.” He fears that these indigenous Jews harbor little sympathy for exilic Jews like him, who bear “no memory of the flaming eastern sunrise, / But only the fading gleam of the sunset: dark blood.” Thus, the speaker momentarily rediscovers his connection with Jesus, whose terrible fate symbolizes the suffering of European Jewry in the Kingdom of the Cross: What will I say in the Galilee to the dreaming shepherds Who carry the precious sky in their red blood? How will I push aside your disgrace and your pain In the exile of the worldВ .В .В .55 Page 120 → Neta Stahl suggests that the “shepherds of the Galilee” stand for the mainstream Zionist establishment with which Greenberg had fallen out. She therefore reads the tension between the speaker and the shepherds as an overt

criticism of the Jewish establishment in Palestine and its hostility toward diaspora Jews, whose shame is likened to that of Jesus.56 Anticipating this animus toward the “exilic Jew,” the speaker finds himself in a quandary: although he wishes to reinvent himself as a Galilean, he is both unable and unwilling to forego his diasporic origins. This anxiety reflects Greenberg’s distrust of a pragmatic Labor Zionist ideology that called for the “negation of exile” (shlilat hagalut) without demanding the restoration of a sovereign Hebrew Kingdom. As the essay “Vague Zionism” demonstrates, he drew a clear distinction between the “national home” promoted by the mainstream Zionist establishment, which he saw as the ultimate symbol of conciliatory realpolitik, and the “Kingdom of Israel,” an uncompromising ideal. Greenberg understood that this ideal, for which he was willing to fight to the end, could never be realized in the absence of exilic memory, since the treasures of Jewish tradition were cultivated in the Diaspora. In “The Reply,” Jesus appears for the first time in Greenberg’s oeuvre as a speaking subject—indeed, as a prophetic voice. He enjoins the speaker with immense confidence: “Go, go to the Galilee, With your body wrapped, But do not say: He is hanging there Dead On a tree. Say he is hanging in the middle of the world looking To the end of all generations, To the end of the world, And his longing for the Land of Israel is great, And he will return to the Land of Israel in the same prayer shawl That was on his shoulders when he was about to be crucified. He will ascend at the appointed time Of world redemption Page 121 →At the end of the generations, [Like an ascending menorah] With the crown [of the Son of David] to be removed Upon his holy head”—–57

In contrast to the silent Yiddish Jesus, the Jesus of “Paths in the West” takes on messianic proportions as a figure whose ascent (aliyah) to the Land of Israel, like the Christian doctrine of the Ascension, will herald the end of days. In the later version of the poem published in Great Terror and a Moon, Greenberg added distinctly Jewish symbols: the Messiah is likened to an “ascending Menorah” with “the crown of the Son of

David” upon his head. By transforming a universal portrayal of Jesus into a distinctly Jewish messiah, he shifted the focus from “world redemption” to Jewish national redemption, marking a crucial turning point in his writing and self-perception as a national poet. The poem represents the emergence of the “pseudoprophetic mode” in Greenberg’s writing, which Dan Miron has described as the ultimate “front line at which Hebrew poetry involved itself with Zionism.”58 Greenberg’s pseudo-prophetic voice began to crystallize in Berlin as he negotiated the transition from Eastern Europe to Palestine and from Yiddish to Hebrew. This process is discernible in the gradual evolution of the image of Jesus. Transformed from silenced victim into would-be savior, Jesus serves Page 122 →as a malleable emblem for the poet’s changing political, aesthetic, and linguistic commitments. In “Uri Zvi before the Cross,” he is a shamed victim who has forgotten his national origins and the embodiment of the “new, naked [Yiddish] poetry,” tortured, exposed, and bloodstained. The poema “In the Kingdom of the Cross” rejects the doctrine of martyrdom as an obstacle to national revival, and the Jewish Jesus is supplanted accordingly by a deplorable Christian icon that is at odds with the Jewish speaker. Whereas Greenberg’s Yiddish poetry portrays Jesus almost exclusively as a silent victim on the cross, in the Hebrew poema “Paths in the West” he is “resurrected” in preparation for Greenberg’s own “ascent” to the Land of Israel. The speaker now identifies with Jesus as the embodiment of the exilic Jewish identity (and language) that must be compromised and yet should not be renounced. This messianic incarnation of Jesus demonstrates Greenberg’s ambivalence toward the secular Zionist establishment, as well as his steadfast longing for the “Hebrew Kingdom.” In this regard, the messianic Jewish Jesus—or Jesus Son of David—symbolizes Greenberg’s ties to the Diaspora, which persisted even after he had made aliyah.

The Poet-Prophet of Exile Despite Greenberg’s unequivocal rejection of Jewish life in Europe, exile continued to occupy his imagination as the site of longing for the Hebrew Kingdom, an ideal that Labor Zionism alone could never fulfill. In a sense, this longing was also Greenberg’s eternal tie to Berlin, which for him represented the threshold between Europe and the Orient, between exile and homeland, and between Yiddish and Hebrew. Even after that threshold had been crossed via physical migration and attendant linguistic transfer, Greenberg was not prepared to renounce that which he had left behind. Until the dream of the Hebrew Kingdom was transformed into reality, he maintained, exile had not come to an end. Moreover, until Hebrew had become the language of this kingdom, the language of exile would endure. Greenberg discovered the quintessential expression of longing in the language of exile in the German poetry of Else Lasker-SchГјler, one of the few writers whom he praised generously in his critical writing. The two poets met at the famed Romanisches CafГ© in Berlin. During one of their early encounters, Greenberg reportedly asked Lasker-SchГјler (addressing her, as per her request, by the biblical name Abigail) if he might translate some of her poems into Hebrew, to which she shot back incredulously, “But I have written them in Hebrew.”59 Despite her peculiar rebuff, he proceeded with the translations,Page 124 → yet he took Lasker-SchГјler’s words of protest to heart. Although her knowledge of Hebrew was minimal, Greenberg saw the German poetess’s unique poetic idiom and orientalized, pseudo-biblical universe as apposite symbols of the Hebrew Kingdom. In February 1926, he published a brief essay in the journal Davar, entitled “Dvorah bishviyah” (Deborah in Captivity), which portrays Lasker-SchГјler as the “great Hebrew poetess withering in solitude in Berlin.” Page 123 →Postcard from Else Lasker-SchГјler to Uri Zvi Greenberg: “I dedicate the crest of my city Thebes to the Albatross. Prince Jussuf. I dedicate the crest of the wild Jews.” (Courtesy of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.) The essay opens with a direct quote from Lasker-SchГјler, in which she introduces herself in the voice of her favorite alter ego, Prince Jussuf of Thebes: “I was born in Thebes (Egypt), although I came into the world in Elberfeld in the Rheinland.”60 Greenberg dispels this “lie” with an even more elaborate myth of his own invention:

She was not born in Elberfeld, or even in Thebes. She was born atop the same Roman ship that brought the chained captives of Judea to the forum in Rome.В .В .В . Or rather, truth be told, she was born in the holy city of Jerusalem within the cracks of the same rock that she imagined in 1920 as “growing brittle” in her foreign rhymes of Ashkenaz.61 The passage alludes to the opening line of Lasker-SchГјler’s poem “Mein Volk” (My People, 1920), in which the speaker laments the inexorable distance from her ancient point of origin: “The rock grows brittle / From which I spring, / And to which my canticles I sing” (Der Fels wird morsch, / Dem ich entspringe / Und meine Gotteslieder singe). Greenberg read these lines as the consummate expression of Jewish anguish and longing for Jerusalem, the independent capital of the vanished Jewish Kingdom. For Lasker-SchГјler, he writes, “the Hebrew Kingdom was not destroyed. The Kingdom still exists,” yet no ship has arrived “to redeem her from Berlin, from the Latin alphabet.”62 Having identified her as a captive in “the language of Ashkenaz,” Greenberg makes a striking volte-face in the second half of the essay. Turning to her poem “Love Song” (Liebeslied)—which he quotes, interestingly enough, exclusively in his own Hebrew translation—he declares: “The non-Hebrew reader of this poem is reading scriptural Hebrew. Living Hebrew in the twentieth century.”63 The phrase “scriptural Hebrew” (вЂivrit mekorit) carries a secondary meaning, “original Hebrew.” With this subtle pun Greenberg implies that Lasker-SchГјler’s idiosyncratic German is in fact a purer Hebrew, a language both ancient and new, creative yet divinely inspired—indeed, the ideal poetic language. Page 125 →Although Greenberg firmly rejected the trappings of European exile and endorsed the “blood language” (sfat dam) over the “people’s language” (sfat ’am), his reading of Lasker-SchГјler as Hebrew poet par excellence suggests that the “blood language” was not synonymous with Modern Hebrew. Underlying the extravagant praise for his “big sister in Ashkenaz” is a clear distinction between the new vernacular that had gained ascendancy in Palestine, a language touted by the Labor Zionists as an antidote to exile, and an idealized language of poetry that retains the painful lamentation for the vanished Jewish Temple and kingdom. In other words, Greenberg’s paean to Lasker-SchГјler implicitly promoted a national language that does not efface the Diaspora but rather preserves the memory of exile as a bolster for an ongoing battle in the name of absolute sovereignty. Even after the geographical and linguistic move from Europe to Palestine had been accomplished, his longing for the spectral Hebrew Kingdom did not abate. It is therefore not surprising that Greenberg continued to voice support for Yiddish even after he had abandoned it in favor of Hebrew. In a letter to Yehuda Magnes, the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Greenberg enthusiastically supported a controversial proposal to establish a professorship in Yiddish: Allow me, esteemed sir, to express in writing my response to the idea of establishing a professorship [in Yiddish]. I address you not as a former Yiddish poet in exile but as a Zionist Hebrew when I say that territorial concentration in the Land of Israel is contingent upon a concentration of all national spiritual assets from the diaspora—[this is necessary for] the process of transition from exilic Jewishness (yehudiut galutit) to sovereign Hebraism (вЂivriyut mamlakhtit).64 Greenberg was adamant in his belief that a new Zionist Hebrew culture in the Land of Israel must be built upon a diasporic cultural framework, of which Yiddish was an integral component. This belief left a strong imprint on his poetry of the late 1920s and 1930s, which developed against a backdrop of increasing Arab-Jewish and BritishJewish tensions. The powerful call articulated in the Albatros poems for unfettered expressionism in the face of European anti-Semitism reemerged after he had resettled in Palestine in response to new obstacles to Jewish sovereignty. Until Hebrew had become the language of a sovereign Jewish Kingdom, Greenberg maintained, it simply could not stand on its own. Not even Zionist aliyah put an end to the experience of exile for Greenberg.Page 126 → His scorn for the Labor Zionists intensified, and he became more virulent in his campaign to defend the messianic destiny of the Jews

against the encroaching threat of “the cross and the crescent.” As he drifted gradually toward Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s right-wing Revisionist movement, the rift between him and the Left, then synonymous with the Mapai Party, expanded.65 This rift grew even wider in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots when Greenberg established together with Abba Ahimeir and Yehoshua Yeivin the “Strongmen Alliance” (Brit habiryonim), a clandestine fascist faction of the Revisionist movement and the first Zionist organization to engage in active resistance against the British colonizers.66 Marching under the banner of “thuggish Zionism,” as envisioned in his earliest Zionist essay, Greenberg began to cultivate a persona of the poet-prophet through a new poetics characterized by visionary pronouncements and political invective, marking a remarkable new phase in his poetic career. A society controlled by the Left would not tolerate such pugnacious and overtly fascistic views. The selfproclaimed poet-prophet quickly became persona non grata. The public shunning that he experienced in Palestine served only to buttress his identification with the messianic Jesus as “other and indeed banned, and yet one of my brothers.”67 Like a spurned prophet, he went back into exile in 1931, returning to Poland and to Yiddish as editor of the Revisionist newspaper Di velt (The World). Even more than the previous decade, the 1930s were a period of wandering for Greenberg, who drifted repeatedly between Poland and Palestine. He came back to Palestine in 1933 during the tumultuous days surrounding Chaim Arlozorov’s murder, only to set for for Poland once again in 1934, and finally returned to Palestine in 1936 around the time of the Arab Revolt. These events inspired the content and structure of Sefer hakitrug veha’emunah (The Book of Condemnation and of Faith, 1937), Greenberg’s most ambitious and most incendiary work to date.68 A hefty compendium of political poems that censured the Zionists, Arabs, and British in equal measure, the volume provoked outrage among the Labor Zionists, who denounced Greenberg openly. Ironically, The Book of Condemnation and Faith carried Greenberg to his artistic peak while simultaneously driving him to the political margins. As Dan Miron points out, his unparalleled ability to convey extreme emotion in his poetry was employed in the service of an aggressive vision that prevented him from achieving the status of a “national poet.”69 The facility with which he combined unfettered personal emotion, precision of form, and clarity of political vision was on par with that of H. N. Bialik, but the violence and intolerance that his poetry promoted rendered him an outcast within a Labor Zionist country. Page 127 →The reason for Greenberg’s pariah status becomes clear if we look at the poem “’Emet aḥat velo’ shtayim” (One Truth and Not Two), in which bloodthirsty fierceness is pitted against a weak Labor Zionist doctrine of purchase and toil: Your Rabbis taught: a land is bought with money. You buy the meadow and work it with a hoe I say: a land is not bought with money And with a hoe one digs and buries the dead. I say: a land is conquered with blood. And only when conquered with blood is it hallowed to the people with the sanctity of blood. [В .В .В .В ] Your rabbis taught: there is one truth for the nations: Blood for blood—yet not so for the Jews. I say: there is one truth, not two. As there is one sun and there are not two Jerusalems.

[В .В .В .В ] And there will be a day when from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates And from the sea to Moab my boys will ascend And call my enemies and haters to the last battle. And the blood will decide: Who shall be the sole ruler here.70 Page 128 →

The bloody imagery that runs through Albatros, which Greenberg considered the defining feature of an uncompromising Yiddish expressionist poetics, comes to the fore in this later Hebrew poem in service of an unabashedly belligerent political agenda. The Book of Condemnation and Faith reflects, in its most aggressive guise, the vision of a Jewish poetry that is not afraid to “cry out.” Violent expressionism resurfaces as a form of recalcitrance; the authority it resists, however, is not the “Kingdom of the Cross” but rather the Labor Zionist establishment and any other hindrance to absolute dominion. Were The Book of Condemnation and Faith to have been the last work Greenberg published in Palestine, his writing undoubtedly would have remained outside the purview of the modern Hebrew canon. In fact, the outrage provoked by the volume was so strong that Greenberg felt compelled to go back into exile in Europe. Shortly after its appearance in 1937 he returned to Warsaw, where he served as an editor for the newspaper Der Moment (The Moment) for the next two years, until the outbreak of World War II impelled him to return to Palestine once and for all. As the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, Greenberg remained silent for several years after the war, refusing to put pen to paper. Eventually, however, he began to channel his grief and survivor guilt into a softer, elegiac style that differed dramatically from his earlier political invective. In stark contrast to the bellicosity of The Book of Condemnation and Faith, a sense of profound loss and lamentation run through Reḥovot hanahar (Streets of the River), published in 1951, in the wake of World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel. Met with great acclaim, the volume earned Greenberg the place of privilege in the Hebrew canon that had long been denied him on the basis of his belligerent, unpalatable political views. Having already descended into obscurity, he was suddenly lauded as “the Jeremiah of our generation.” The renegade apocalyptic prophet was now celebrated as a commanding voice for a deeply scarred country-in-themaking.71

From Victim to Warrior Reading Greenberg’s poetry today, the medium continues to astound while the message offends. Hannan Hever has described his approach to Greenberg’sPage 129 → writing as necessarily contradictory, a “double-reading” that is at once “beguiled by the aesthetic power and spiritual intensity” and “repelled, often with absolute disgust, by the world of values the poems present.”72 What is striking about Greenberg’s poetic development is the way in which it reached this controversial stage. In the seemingly linear journey from European exile to the Jewish homeland, Greenberg actually came full circle. Although he explicitly rejected Jewish life in the “Kingdom of the Cross,” and although he donned the cloak of religious Zionism, his arrival in Palestine opened his eyes to the interminable nature of exile. As the tribute to “the great Hebrew poetess,” Else Lasker-SchГјler, makes clear, Greenberg did not simply renounce the language of exile in favor of Modern Hebrew. Rather, he clung tenaciously to the ideal of a “blood language” that not only proves the bond between a people and its land but also sustains the “Jewish cry” (yidish-geshray) needed in the fight for absolute domination of the ancestral homeland. In short, the terror that Greenberg experienced in Europe became fodder for a chilling political vision. It was in Berlin that Greenberg bid farewell to the “Kingdom of the Cross” in Yiddish and proclaimed his

departure for the “Kingdom of Israel” in Hebrew. As he prepared to abandon one language in order to embrace another, he enjoyed the freedom to compose simultaneously in both. This freedom was afforded by the in-between status of Berlin. There, Greenberg was able to negotiate not only the linguistic shift from Yiddish to Hebrew but also the transfer of a shockingly new aesthetic from one language and landscape to another. His Berlin stopover must therefore be seen not as a moment of rupture, as he himself suggested, but as a creative break with a decidedly dialectical thrust. As Yiddish apostate turned Hebrew prophet Greenberg cultivated a new Hebrew idiom laden with the painful history of exile. This language—bellicose, subversive, and rabblerousing—reveals a dubious outcome of the transition from exile to homeland. For him, crossing that threshold meant transforming the bloodstained language of the victim into the bloodcurdling warrior’s cry.

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5. “I Am Foreign” Gertrud Kolmar’s Orientalist Expedition I want to lie in my bed and cover the earth. Over the lands of Europe and Africa there I lie. I shall extend my left arm deep into Asia. And the right to America. My serpentine hair will frighten the auk of the northern sea.1 Ich will in meinem Bette ruhn und die Erde bedecken. Гњber den LГ¤ndern Europas und Afrikas liege ich da. Meinen linken Arm will ich tief hinein nach Asien strecken. Und den rechts nach Amerika. Mein schlГ¤ngelndes Haar wird im Nordmeer den Alk erschrecken. The opening stanza of Gertrud Kolmar’s poem “MГ¤dchen” (Girl, 1927) invokes the imperialist trope of feminizing far-off lands. Through the ages, as Anne McClintock has shown, explorers have mapped discovery of new worlds as a “gendered erotics of knowledge” wherein “a male power penetrates and exposes a veiled, female interior.”2 McClintock’s take on the gendered aspect of imperialist discourse is indebted to Edward Said’s conception of the orientalist imagination. According to Said, acquiring “knowledge” of newly discovered space “means rising above immediacy, beyond the self, into the foreign and distant” in order ultimately “to dominate it.”3 Kolmar’s poem reflects a similar expansionist fantasy, yet it offers a striking twist: the female speaker longs to travel to the “uncertain continents”—from Asia to Africa and the Americas—without ever leaving the confines of her bedroom. The distinction between colonial and domestic space is thus blurred, as is the distinction between colonizer and colonized. As both colonizing subject and soonto-be-colonized object, the speaker relates to her own body as terra incognita. Page 132 →Kolmar’s fascination with distant realms belies a stationary existence. Of the four poets featured in this book, she is not just the only woman but also the only native Berliner. Aside from short-term employment opportunities in Hamburg and Braunschweig and a summer studying in France, she spent virtually her entire life in Berlin, until the fateful day in March 1943 when she was transported to her death in Auschwitz. Yet Kolmar saw herself as a stranger in her own home. Although she lived comfortably in Berlin’s affluent Westend, her gaze was decidedly fixed in the opposite direction: “My face looks to the East” (mein Gesicht blickt nach Osten), she wrote to her sister Hilde in 1940.4 This statement has been interpreted as an expression of longing to escape from the terror of Nazi-occupied Berlin,5 and Kolmar’s writing from the period of the Third Reich has been described as “exile literature written in Germany.”6 Yet the tendency to emphasize her displacement under National Socialism obscures the fact that she felt estranged from German bourgeois society well before Hitler rose to power.7 Like other Jewish writers of her generation, she looked to the “Orient” in search of cultural authenticity and a spiritual alternative to the assimilated milieu in which she had been socialized yet never felt fully at home. Whereas the previous three chapters highlighted the physical paths of migration taken by Strauss, Kulbak, and Greenberg, this chapter is dedicated to a purely internalized migration enacted in poetry. It focuses on the

profound tension between rootedness and estrangement that shaped Kolmar’s literary outpouring during the final years of the Weimar Republic, her most prolific period by far. Between 1927 and 1930, she wrote one poetry volume, Das PreuГџische Wappenbuch (The Prussian Book of Crests) and three additional cycles, Weibliches Bildnis (Feminine Portrait), Kind (Child), and TiertrГ¤ume (Animal Dreams), from which she selected thirty-eight poems to compile into a single volume entitled Die Frau und die Tiere (The Woman and the Animals). The first part of the chapter focuses on two exemplary poems from Weibliches Bildnis, “Die JГјdin” (The Jewess) and “Die Unerschlossene” (The Undiscovered), which invoke the theme of colonial discovery as a means of meditating on the paradoxical situation of the German-Jewish woman writer in the postassimilation era. In both poems, an estranged “lyrical I” straddles the border between her domestic European identity and the uncharted spaces of her suppressed identity as an “oriental Jewess.” The second part of the chapter turns to the novel Die jГјdische Mutter (The Jewish Mother), which Kolmar began writing following the death of her mother in the summer of 1930 and completed in February 1931, shortly after the National Socialist Party had gained a parliamentary foothold.8 Set in the very time and place in which it was written, the novel appears at first Page 133 →glance a dramatic departure from the exoticist motifs of Kolmar’s poetry; but a closer look reveals a similar journey into the “foreign and distant” that is the protagonist’s repressed Jewish identity. Often neglected or mischaracterized as an anomaly within Kolmar’s oeuvre, the novel examines the same process of fated self-discovery that comes through in the poems from a temporally and geographically situated perspective. In both the poems and the novel the border between colonizing subject and colonized object—self and other—is obscured. Although Kolmar turned inward from a position of presumed authority as a Jewish woman, the persistent hegemonic gaze of the bourgeois German writer produced a new kind of orientalist fantasy. Her imagined “expedition” into “the foreign and distant” was in effect the orientalization of the self.

Between Colonizer and Colonized “Ich bin fremd” (I am foreign/strange). Perhaps the most provocative statement in Kolmar’s oeuvre, the opening line of the poem “Die JГјdin” (The Jewess) has been interpreted as an expression of alienation from either German society or humanity in general, while the poem as a whole has been described as a projection of Zionist longing for the Land of Israel.9 The reading is not entirely misplaced. It is known, after all, that Kolmar’s fascination with the writings of Martin Buber sparked such an interest in cultural Zionism that she later took Hebrew lessons and attempted to write poetry in the language.10 Yet Kolmar never made any concrete plans to immigrate to the Land of Israel. This fact has important implications for the interpretation of her poetry, especially the poem “Die JГјdin,” arguably her most well-known piece. Although the poem presents a bold female speaker planning to mount a “research expedition” into the ancient land of her forefathers, it also betrays profound alienation not only from her surrounding society but also from her imagined place of origin. Thus, rather than reading “Die JГјdin” as a Zionist invocation of a lost homeland, which would mean subjecting it to the very orientalist fantasy it calls into question, careful attention must be paid to the context it invokes, that of nineteenth-century colonial archaeology. Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos have shown that the attempt to recover a non-European past was an integral part of the colonialist project intended to bolster the authority of imperial powers. Shaped by orientalist attitudes that “impelled the primitivist search for вЂpure’ cultures,” nineteenth-century archaeology “valued the indigenous heritage of pre-colonial eras as a cornerstone of the nation’s authenticity and legitimacy.”11 Page 134 →Insofar as “archaeology is enmeshed with colonialism,” Lyons and Papadoupolos explain, “our imagination of the past has been colored by recent colonial enterprises and studies of native peoples that may, in fact, have little bearing on the realities of societies preceding the advent of Europe as a world power.”12 Archaeology, in other words, constitutes a nationalist enterprise that tends to reveal more about the goals and self-perception of the archaeologist’s nation and society than about the primitive cultures she or he purports to uncover. Read through the lens of this power structure, the “lyric I” of “Die JГјdin” may be described as a

European archaeologist in search of her precolonial roots, as opposed to a “Hebrew” native enacting a long-awaited homecoming. In contrast to the typical colonial archaeologist, however, she does not occupy a place of privilege or power; a profound sense of exclusion from her own society propels her on her mission to the distant spaces of her pre-European self. The poem therefore opens with images of isolation and self-enclosure: I am strange. Since people do not dare approach me, I shall be girded with towers Bearing steep, stone-gray caps That stretch into the clouds. You will not find the iron key To the musty stairway. It reels upward, Like the flat, scaly head Of an otter entering the light.13 Ich bin fremd. Weil sich die Menschen nicht zu mir wagen, Will ich mit TГјrmen gegГјrtet sein, Die steile, steingraue MГјtzen tragen In Wolken hinein. Ihr findet den erzenen SchlГјssel nicht, Der dumpfen Treppe. Sie rollt sich nach oben, Wie platten, schuppigen Kopf erhoben Eine Otter ins Licht. Page 135 →The first stanza invokes the Song of Songs: “Thy neck is like the tower of David builded with turrets, whereon there hang a thousand shields, all the armor of the mighty men” (Song of Songs 4:4). Whereas the biblical poem features a male speaker addressing his female beloved, however, Kolmar’s Jewess is neither lover nor beloved; her “towers” symbolize exclusion rather than feminine sensuality, while the reference to an undiscoverable key suggests an intimate secret attainable by no one.14 Both untouched and untouchable, the speaker carries within her valuable and inaccessible treasures. In contrast to the traditional image of the Jewess as the transmitter and sustainer of tradition, the female speaker is impregnable in every sense: impenetrable as a mighty fortress and impossible to inseminate—neither protector nor progenitor but rather utterly isolated.15 In the next stanza, however, the girding wall of her protective tower is rendered vulnerable: Alas, the fortress grows brittle as rock

Washed by a thousand-year stream; The birds with coarse, wrinkled necks Perch in gouged-out caves. Ach, diese Mauer morscht schon wie Felsen, Den tausendjГ¤hriger Strom bespГјlt; Die VГ¶gel mit rohen, faltigen HГ¤lsen Hocken, in HГ¶hlen verwГјhlt. Moving from the biblical register to modern German verse, this stanza offers a direct allusion to the first line of Else Lasker-SchГјler’s poem “Mein Volk” (My People): “Der Fels wird morsch, /Dem ich entspringe” (The rock grows brittle from which I spring).16 Like Lasker-SchГјler, Kolmar describes the brittle wall of the fortress as weathered and eroded by the “thousand-year stream,” a reference to a millennium of Jewish exile in Ashkenaz, as Germany was known in medieval Hebrew. However, whereas Lasker-SchГјler presented the brittle rock as a symbol of the speaker’s primordial place of origin from which she has become estranged, Kolmar deploys a similar image of a crumbling wall to signal the transition from self-enclosure to selfexploration. Estranged both from her current environment and from her mythic place of origin, the speaker decides to embark on a journey into her ancient past: In the arches of rippling sand, Cowering lizards with speckled chests— Page 136 →I wish to mount an expedition To my own ancient land. In den GewГ¶lben rieselnder Sand, Kauernde Echsen mit sprenkligen BrГјsten— Ich mГ¶cht’ eine Forscherreise rГјsten In mein eigenes uraltes Land. In place of the typical term for “expedition,” Forschungsreise, we discover a neologism, Forscherreise, a lexical variation that places the emphasis squarely on the Forscher (meaning “researcher,” “explorer, ” or “searcher”) rather than on the projected destination. Venturing as an explorer into her “own ancient land,” the speaker is the sole focus of her own quest. The projected destination is identified through a series of references to ancient lore: Perhaps I can still discover somewhere The buried Ur of the Chaldeans, The false God Dagon, the tent of the Hebrews, The trumpet of Jericho.

The one that blew down those scornful walls Now blackens in the depths, desolate, covert; I too once drew of the breath That pushed forth its sound. Ich kann das begrabene Ur der ChaldГ¤er Vielleicht entdecken noch irgendwo, Den GГ¶tzen Dagon, das Zelt der HebrГ¤er, Die Posaune von Jericho. Die jene hГ¶hnischen WГ¤nde zerblies, ShwГ¤rzt sich in Tiefen, verwГјstet, verbogen; Einst hab ich dennoch den Atem gesogen, Der ihre TГ¶ne stieГџ. According to Carola Daffner, this passage invokes biblical narratives of “decisive events in Jewish history, ” with references to Ur, the city from which Abraham departed for Canaan (Genesis 12), the trumpet that toppled the walls of Jericho during the Hebrew conquest of the city (Joshua 6), and the Page 137 →Temple of Dagon that Samson destroyed (Judges 16:23–30).17 A careful inspection of these references points to a different interpretation, however. The sequence does not invoke Jewish history per se but creates rather a portrait of an explicitly pre-Judean landscape. For instance, the “Tent of the Hebrews,” or the tabernacle (a portable sanctuary believed to be the dwelling place of the divine presence), existed from the time of exodus from Egypt until the conquest of Canaan, that is, prior to the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem that marked the consolidation of Jewish sovereignty under King Solomon. Ur is presented not as the birthplace of Abraham but as the home of the Chaldeans, the ancient kings of Babylonia. Rather than offering a Zionist vision of the Promised Land, the poem presents an undifferentiated vision of the ancient Near East as an unconquered realm in which the Israelites are both indigenous and foreign. The speaker’s “research expedition” leads her deep into the past, to a presovereign landscape and not, as a Zionist interpretation would suggest, to an autonomous Jewish Kingdom. It is important to note, moreover, that the undifferentiated image of the Orient is refracted through the German language, a signifier for the colonial imaginary. Germanic and Semitic registers converge in the pairing of the terms uraltes Land (ancient land) and Ur der ChaldГ¤er (Ur of the Chaldeans). Here, Kolmar deliberately juxtaposes the German prefix ur, meaning “primeval” or “ancestral,” with the Semitic name Ur, the ancient Sumerian city-state, in order to demonstrate divided ties to Orient and Occident. The meeting of two separate linguistic systems—one European and the other Semitic—signals the German-Jewish poet’s attempt to locate and thereby authenticate her German roots in the ancient Near East. Her Urwelt (primordial world) is in a sense constituted by the nexus of two realms in a single syllable, the hitherto unconquered Orient and the realm of colonial European culture. This locus is at once familiar and strange, discoverable yet uninhabitable. The ensuing stanzas underscore the speaker’s inherent connection to the ancient Semitic landscape while drawing attention to her unbridgeable distance from it: And in coffers, buried in dust,

The noble vestments lie dead, Fading luster from the wings of doves And the pall of the Behemoth. I clothe myself, stunned. I am indeed small, Far removed from those magnificent, powerful times, Page 138 →Yet the resplendent wide spaces stiffen around me Like a shelter, and I grow and merge with them. Und in Truhen, verschГјttet vom Staube, Liegen die edlen GewГ¤nder tot, Sterbender Glanz aus dem FlГјgel der Taube Und das Stumpfe des Behemoth. Ich kleide mich staunend. Wohl bin ich klein, Fern ihren prunkvoll mГ¤chtigen Zeiten, Doch um mich starren die schimmernden Breiten Wie Schutz, und ich wachse ein. As the speaker imagines donning the ancient vestments of this extinct land, she finds herself in a state of simultaneous consolation and confusion. Although she experiences a sense of belonging, she struggles to recognize herself in this foreign setting: Now I appear odd and do not recognize myself, For I stood long before Rome, before Carthage, Suddenly the altars of the Judgess and her band Flare up inside me. From the hidden vessel of gold A painful blaze flows through my blood, And a song calls me by names That suit me again. Nun seh ich mich seltsam und kann mich nicht kennen, Da ich vor Rom, vor Karthago schon war, Da jГ¤h in mir die AltГ¤re entbrennen Der Richterin und ihrer Schar.

Von dem verborgenen Goldgefäß LГ¤uft durch mein Blut ein schmerzliches GleiГџen, Und ein Lied will mit Namen mich heiГџen, Die mir wieder gemäß. From within herself the speaker suddenly hears the voice of the “Judgess,” Deborah, arguably the first Hebrew female poet. The “Song of Deborah” Page 139 →(Judges 5:2–31), which follows an account of Deborah’s successfully led campaign against the Canaanites, is considered the earliest sample of poetry in the Bible and the only passage of its kind to lionize valiant women in battle. Perhaps it is Deborah’s rousing chant that “flares up” inside the speaker, beckoning her by the names of courageous foremothers to join in the celebration. Yet she is nonetheless disoriented, finding herself in a time and place that existed “before Rome, before Carthage,” that is, prior to the Punic Wars that would establish Rome as the most powerful country in the classical world, the precursor to modern European empires. She is unable to “recognize” herself because her proto-European lineage is rendered indistinct. The Orient provides no respite, for it is merely reconstructed out of the ancient artifacts of a prior existence. Excavation exposes an identity eroded by history, an identity that remains enigmatic and incomplete. The poem comes full circle in the final two stanzas with a reference to the subject’s marginalization by those who refuse to look upon the “colorful sign,” a reference to Noah’s rainbow and symbol of humanity’s universal moral code: The heavens proclaim a colorful sign, Your face is closed up: Those who roam about me timidly with the fennec fox Do not look. Himmel rufen aus farbigen Zeichen. Zugeschlossen ist euer Gesicht: Die mit dem WГјstenfuchs scheu mich umstreichen, Schauen es nicht. Finally, the last stanza sets up a clear division between the speaker’s unenlightened oppressors and her embattled yet resilient self: Green as jade, red as coral, Giant crashing pillars of wind sway Above the towers that God allows to decay And yet for millennia remain standing. Riesig zerstГјrzende WindsГ¤ulen wehn, GrГјn wie Nephrit, rot wie Korallen,

Гњber die TГјrme. Gott lГ¤sst sie verfallen Und noch Jahrtausende stehn. Page 140 →As the speaker unearths her origins, she literally cloaks herself in her ancient past. The archeological expedition is no Romantic metaphor for introspection, however. As self-proclaimed Forscher, she places herself at the helm of a discovery mission driven by orientalist fantasy. “Die JГјdin” self-consciously presents a colonialist vision that renders the excavated object both familiar and foreign. Although easily misinterpreted as a Zionistic statement, the poem does not, in fact, convey a wish to leave Germany for the Land of Israel, despite the speaker’s intrepid “research expedition.” Instead, it reveals the desire to recover her repressed origins in the ancient Semitic landscape, a longing that necessarily remains unfulfilled. Her journey to the space from which she ostensibly hails confirms the intractability of her alienation both from her place of origin and from her present environment. Clad in the garments of a lost realm, she is removed not only from the society from which she sets forth but also from her primordial self.

Lost Atlantis Kolmar’s imagined migration into the ancient Near East constituted a reversal—and implicit critique—of the trajectory that had defined her identity as an assimilated member of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Her father, Ludwig Chodziesner, came to the German capital from a traditional Jewish community in Chodzies, a city in the East Prussian province of Posen known in German as Kolmar (the source of Gertrud’s nom de plume). With his increasing success as a lawyer the family migrated incrementally westward within the city, enacting the so-called haul to the West (der Zug nach dem Westen) of upwardly mobile citizens to and within Berlin during the Wilhelmine period (1890–1918).18 From Gertrud’s birthplace in the Nikolaiviertel on the eastern shore of the Spree River, the Chodziesners moved to the affluent Tiergarten area, then to a private villa in Berlin’s Westend, and finally, in 1923, to the idyllic Finkenkrug, just west of Spandau.19 The Finkenkrug home, surrounded by water and woods, was both a comfort and an inspiration for Kolmar, who spent hours communing with the lizards, toads, and other small creatures that appear repeatedly in her poems as a source of identification. This symbiotic relationship came to an end in 1938, however, when the Nazis confiscated the Finkenkrug home based on a policy known as “Aryanization” of private property. Kolmar was forced to relocate with her ailing father to a designated Judenwohnung (Jewish apartment) at Bayerischer Platz, where she resided for roughly five years before her deportation to Auschwitz.20 Page 141 →In contrast to her three younger siblings, who fled Germany in 1938, Kolmar had no intention of emigrating.21 Instead, she chose to remain in the company of her elderly father, who was too infirm to leave. But it was not just daughterly loyalty that kept Kolmar in Berlin. From early on, she identified as a homebody with strong ties to her surroundings. Her unbounded imagination and remarkable facility with foreign languages provided numerous opportunities to study and work abroad, some of which she seized, only to return home soon thereafter.22 In a revealing letter to her sister Hilde, Kolmar divides humanity into three metaphorical categories: “wild plants, potted plants, and cut flowers.” All three, she explained, share the same fate: “I don’t want to speak about the difficulty of supplanting the wildflowers; but potted flowers will wither when the pot has been taken away and how many cut flowers [will die] for lack of water.”23 For all intents and purposes, Kolmar saw herself as a solidly potted plant. A recluse and animal-lover, she was not to be found among Berlin’s coffeehouse intelligentsia, even though the famed Romanisches CafГ© was located steps from her front door. “We cannot imagine her as an eager coffee house patron,” Hilde commented, “not because she was not brought up this way, but because it was not in accordance with her nature.”24 The great distances that Kolmar traversed in her writing were disproportionate to her static existence in Berlin. The tension wrought by this discrepancy—between apparent rootedness and a profound sense of displacement—was the driving force that fueled her poetics of self-estrangement. This tension is especially apparent in the poem “Die Unerschlossene” (The Undiscovered). In contrast to “Die JГјdin,” in which the speaker is both the subject and the object of her self-directed “research expedition,” in this poem

the speaker’s body figures as the unequivocal orientalist object. The Undiscovered I, too, am a landform. I have mountains never reached, unpenetrated bushland, Pond inlets, stream deltas, salt-licking coastal tongues, Caves wherein a giant reptile gleams in dark jade, An inland sea with amber-orange jellyfish arrayed. My breast buds are not washed by the rain, No stream tore them open: these gardens are secluded. No adventurer has conquered my desert valleys of golden sand Page 142 →Nor the snow lying virginal upon high wastelands. Condors with clawed fingers strangle bare red rock gullets, Splaying their feather coats in the air, knowing nothing of conquerors. Are they eagles? Primeval eagles—who would listen if one cried?— But my great vultures are more powerful and more strange. What I conceal will never again break forth from enclosed earth; For no Aries-snake guides flocks of stiff quivering vipers there, No toads light the way at night with carnelians in their heads. The secrets of the copper chalice have long been culled from the protective moss. Above me there are often skies with black stars, colorful storms, In me there are limp, jagged craters that tremble with a coercive glow; But a pure and icy spring is there too, and the bellflower, which drinks from it: I am a continent that will one day sink silently into the sea.25 Die Unerschlossene Auch ich bin ein Weltteil. Ich habe nie erreichte Berge, Buschland undurchdrungen, Teichbucht, Stromdelta, salzleckende KГјstenzungen, HГ¶hle, drin riesiges Kriechtier dunkelgrГјn funkt, Binnenmeer, das mit apfelsingelber Qualle prunkt.

Meiner BrГјste Knospen spГјlte nicht Regen, Kein Strahl riГџ sie auf: diese GГ¤rten sind abgelegen. Kein Abenteurer hat noch meiner WГјstentГ¤ler goldenen Sand besiegt Und den Schnee, der auf hohen Г–den jungfrГ¤ulich liegt. Nacktrote Felsgurgel wГјrgen Kondore mit kralligen Fingern, Spreiten die FedermГ¤ntel in LГјfte und ahnen nichts von Bezwingern. Sind Adler? Auch Urweltadler—wer lauschte, wenn einer schrie?– Doch meine groГџen Geier sind mГ¤chtiger noch und fremder als sie. Page 143 →Was ich hГјlle, bricht nie mehr aus schon erschlossenen Erden; Denn dort leitet kein Schlangenwidder starr zuckende Vipernherden, Leuchten durch NГ¤chte nicht KrГ¶ten sich mit dem Karneol im Haupt. Der Geheimnisse kupferner Kelch ward lГ¤ngst aus dem wehrenden Moos geklaubt Гњber mir sind oft Himmel mit schwarzen Gestirnen, bunten Gewittern, In mir sind lappige, zackige Krater, die von zwingendem GlГјhen zittern; Aber auch ein eisreiner Quell und die Glockenblume ist da, die ihn trinkt: Ich bin ein Kontinent, der eines Tages stumm im Meere versinkt. The poem’s striking last line—“I am a continent that will one day sink silently into the sea”—has been read as foreshadowing Kolmar’s marginal position within German literary history. Monica Shafi points out that Kolmar’s work did not receive the same level of scholarly attention in postwar Germany as that of Else Lasker-SchГјler and Nelly Sachs. It was only in the 1980s with the rise of feminist criticism that her writing enjoyed a modest revival. Shafi attributes the protracted silence surrounding Kolmar’s work to a Nachgeschichte (postwar history) that presented itself as an attempt to “overcome or conquer the past” (VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung) and therefore focused on poets who escaped Nazi terror as exiles and Г©migrГ©s while relegating victims of the Holocaust to obscurity.26 Reading “Die Underschlossene” through the lens of this reception history, Shafi interprets the final line as a kind of self-conscious personal prophecy for Kolmar’s inevitable obscurity. Notwithstanding its allure, Shafi’s reading reveals the problem of “back-shadowing.” Mobilizing the poem in the campaign to recover lost female and Jewish voices, however tempting, not only endows Kolmar with implausible foresight but also runs the risk of reducing the poem to a protofeminist critique. I argue that the speaker’s perceived invisibility should be read not as a projection of the future but as an expression of alienation from the only literary tradition to which she belongs. This interpretation gains purchase if we compare the final line to a similar statement in the third stanza, “wer lauschte, wenn einer schrie?” (Who would listen if one cried?), a variation on the first line of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923): “Wer, wenn ich schrie, hГ¶rte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?). With this allusion to one of the most widely read and Page 144 →hotly debated works of German poetry of the day, Kolmar emphasizes her anonymous—and anomalous—position within the very lyric tradition into which she inscribes herself intertextually.27 Understood in such terms, the poem does not simply critique the subordinate status of female poets, nor does it forecast the obscurity of writers murdered in the Holocaust. Rather, it offers an

ambivalent expression of simultaneous belonging (as a German poet) and exclusion (as a Jewish woman). The speaker becomes the embodiment of what Barbara Hahn has called the “Jewess Pallas Athena” (Jüdin Pallas Athena), an enigmatic phrase adopted from a poem by Paul Celan that captures the constitutive predicament of life as a Jewish woman in modern Germany.28 The function of the speaker’s self-proclaimed obscurity becomes clearer in light of the nineteenth-century colonial imagery invoked in the poem. As the personification of unconquered space, the lyric “I” has withdrawn from the bourgeois cult of domesticity and retreated to a prior identity located in a wild, untamed setting. The uncharted Weltteil (continent, or “world-part”)—playing on the similar-sounding Körperteil (body part)—that is the speaker’s body is therefore likened in erotically charged terms to bountiful “virgin land.” Composed of sandy deserts, snowy wastelands, and lush gardens, the impossibly vast and varied continent is devoid of specific geographical markers, and thus remains unidentifiable. Like the land of the ancient Hebrews in “Die Jüdin,” this Weltteil is both pure and purely imagined, an idealized landscape that resembles Atlantis on the brink of oblivion. This reference to Plato’s evanescent island offers a self-conscious meditation on German-Jewish orientalism. According to Michael Brenner, “Many popular writers in Weimar Germany evoked positive images from distant realms in time or space to offer remedies for what they perceived to be the malaise of modern European civilization.”29 Kolmar exemplifies this exoticist trend, but in a selfconscious manner. That is, the poem intimates that the object of German-Jewish orientalism is in and of itself a mythologized concept and that salvaging an unadulterated Jewish “essence” is but an act of the imagination. By transposing a mythologized realm onto the speaker’s body, Kolmar portrays self-discovery as ultimately self-defeating. The object of her quest remains beyond reach.

The New Jewess On July 23, 1941, Kolmar wrote to Hilde: “I am a poet, this I know; but I never wish to be a writer.”30 Ten years earlier, however, she had already crossed Page 145 →the boundary between poetry and prose to compose a novel.31 Set in Berlin on the eve of the Third Reich, Die jГјdische Mutter tells the story of Martha Wolg (nГ©e Jadassohn), a middle-class Jewish widow and mother to five-year-old Ursula. When the little girl mysteriously disappears one afternoon, Martha sets out on a desperate search that leads her to a nearby slum, where she discovers her daughter in a wretched state, a victim of sexual assault. Ursa is rushed to the hospital to receive treatment, but her psychological condition rapidly deteriorates. Seeking to put an end to her daughter’s prolonged trauma, Martha administers lethal poison to the sleeping child, and then, in a strange turn of events, disassociates from her crime. Exactly one year later, on the first anniversary of Ursa’s death, Martha resolves to hunt down the “true” murderer, a mission that will lead to her own undoing. Her solitary quest takes her deep into the urban underbelly of Berlin, an unfamiliar world of prostitutes, homosexuals, and gypsy fortune-tellers. She takes a lover in the hope that he will help avenge her daughter’s death but soon is jilted. Alone and without prospects, Martha must reexamine her own identity and, consequently, acknowledge her act of filicide. As the novel comes to a tragic close, she imagines holding an infant in her arms as she drowns herself in the Spree River. Why would a poet who sought refuge in alternate realms compose a dark work of fiction that is clearly situated in the time and place in which it was written? Critics have somehow glossed over this question; few, in fact, have paid significant attention to the novel at all. Yet the novel is deceptively resonant with Kolmar’s poetry. Although it appears anomalous in terms of genre and style, it reveals a significant effort on Kolmar’s part to uncover new and different aesthetic strategies for elaborating the same dialectic of self-discovery and selfestrangement that dominates her poetry. If her poems depict an imagined expedition into the uncharted territory of a lost identity, the novel presents the flip side of this trajectory: the estrangement of the German-Jewish woman from bourgeois Berlin society and, in turn, from herself. Reading the novel in tandem with Kolmar’s poetry from the period reveals a process of reckoning with the loss of identity, a theme that is all too easily ignored if the novel is read in isolation as an early example of anti-Jewish terror.32

The novel’s primary chain of events—rape, filicide, search, and suicide—has been interpreted as an allegory for the fate of German Jewry, whose ill-fated efforts to assimilate led only to self-destruction.33 According to this reading, Ursa’s misfortune symbolizes the violence perpetrated against the Jews by bourgeois society, while Martha’s unacknowledged filicide signifies the acquiescence of assimilated Jews who served as accomplices to their own Page 146 →demise. The allegorical approach is convincing, yet taken alone it presents two limitations that hinder a nuanced and thorough interpretation: first, it dehistoricizes the novel, ignoring the specific cultural context that shaped it; second, it overlooks Martha’s quest and attendant transformation, which comprise the bulk of the plot. As Martha persists in pursuit of the murderer, the trappings of Wilhelmine propriety melt away. Rebuffed by friends and neighbors, she unknowingly internalizes and performs converging stereotypes that have been imposed upon her as a Jew and a woman. In a sense, Martha “regresses” from “respectable” wife and mother into a dubious figure that we might call the “New Jewess,” an amalgamation of misogynistic and anti-Semitic stereotypes associated with the Jew and the “New Woman” that were prevalent in middle-class society during the late Weimar period. Kolmar’s unflinching engagement with controversial issues—such as intermarriage, prostitution, homosexuality, and pedophilia—clearly exceed the level of allegory. Indeed, novel is best categorized as a Zeitroman (novel of the times), one of the most popular, and certainly the most politically charged, genres of the Weimar era.34 Kolmar deliberately selected topics relating to sexuality that were invoked by right-wing critics as indices of Weimar decadence, thus drawing attention to the convergence of anti-Semitic and misogynistic sentiments in German society at the time.35 All of these issues come together in her portrayal of the female Jewish protagonist, Martha, a middle-aged working mother and the Jewish widow of a Christian man. Yet the depiction of Martha—and indeed the novel as a whole—departs dramatically from the dominant style of late Weimar fiction known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which took up contemporary concerns from a detached and often cynical point of view. Helmut Lethen has identified the classic Neue Sachlichkeit hero as the “cool persona,” the indifferent (male) subject who cultivates aloofness and anonymity in response to the national castration complex plaguing postwar middle-class society.36 The masculine ethos embodied in the Neue Sachlichkeit hero reflects the desire, as Richard McCormick suggests, “to master chaos, anxiety, and the specific social and economic problems plaguing intellectuals and artists—all of which tended to get subsumed under the supposed threat of women and the fear of male impotence or вЂFeminization.’”37 Martha occupies the opposite end of the character spectrum from the masculine “cool persona.” As she is transformed from assimilated bourgeois wife and mother into childless New Jewess, she assumes the role of the “creature,” which Lethen describes—in terms that aptly evoke chauvinistic attitudes of the day—as an “irrational bundle of nerves and impulses.”38 Whereas the aloof “cool persona” figured as the mascot of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the Page 147 →“creature” was popularized in expressionist literature of the early twentieth century as the symbol of primitive, unmediated expression.39 Kolmar’s portrayal of the “creaturely” Jewish woman may therefore be understood as a critical corrective to the glib bourgeois male hero typical of Weimar fiction. By casting the protagonist in this role, moreover, Kolmar offers a pained reflection on the impossibility of salvaging a viable German-Jewish female identity in an era when both Jewishness and femininity were under siege. If Martha’s “creaturely” transformation evokes an expressionist motif, the catalyst to this process, child murder, hearkens even further back to a popular theme in eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literature. Virtually all of the major writers of this period, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jakob Lenz, Friedrich von Schiller, and Heinrich Leopold Wagner, deployed the figure of the “child murderess” (KindesmГ¶rderin) in their writing as a tragic symbol of bourgeois virtue corrupted by an inequitable society that upholds barriers between classes and transforms unwed mothers into unredeemable outcasts.40 Their tales of infanticide invariably revolve around the virtuous virgin who submits to the advances of an aristocratic suitor out of love, is then callously abandoned, and is ultimately driven out of desperation to murder her innocent child.41 As Isabel Hull observes, the Sturm und Drang writers “sympathized with the women and censured the perfidious fathers, hypocritical society (upholder of the sexual double standard), and injudicious law.”42 Through the tragic fate of the shamed child murderess, these writers critiqued the corruption of middle-class life and bourgeois virtue by the pitiless upper class.

Yet Martha does not embody the classical ideal of the honorable bourgeois maiden duped by the unscrupulous aristocracy. Ursa, moreover, is not the unwanted child born out of wedlock; she is deemed “illegitimate” only because she is the product of a mixed marriage. In short, neither mother nor child fits into the established framework of the infanticide story rehearsed by eighteenth-century authors in service to a male-centered bourgeois Enlightenment fantasy. Yet both Martha and Ursa emerge as victims of a covert form of bourgeois violence that excludes them from the very social categories to which they ostensibly belong. Kolmar subverts the classical infanticide theme in order to draw attention to the limits of the very liberal values that her male literary predecessors advanced. In the eyes of her society, Martha is no victim. Early on she is described as “vampire-like” and “Medea, ” labels that portend the fatal act she will soon commit. With the latter epithet Kolmar invokes yet another classic convention of German literature to subversive ends. German literature had already set a precedent during the nineteenth century for the portrayal of a Jewish Page 148 →Medea, most notably in Franz Grillparzer’s 1819 drama Medea, which portrays the tragic protagonist as a sultry, dark-skinned Jewess bearing sexual disease.43 Playing on this tradition, Die jГјdische Mutter posits a connection between Martha’s Jewishness and her perceived depravity. Even her own husband, Friedrich Wolg, sees her as a dangerous seductress. He is astounded by his wife’s sexual prowess, which he attributes to her “different blood,” her “irremovable, indissoluble” Jewishness.44 Friedrich’s view of his wife as dangerously other is buttressed by the birth of their daughter. Upon Ursa’s entry into the world, Martha is transformed before his eyes from his demure suburban housewife into a caged “savage” who hovers over the child like an “animal mother.”45 These flashes of primal difference betray the tenuousness of Martha’s acculturation into bourgeois society, while also anticipating her act of child murder and subsequent descent into madness. Moreover, there is a clear sense that Ursa’s existence was threatened from the outset due to her visible “otherness.” On the day of her birth, she betrayed a suppressed gene inherited from her mother and absolutely no resemblance to her father: It was as if the lightness of the father had been battling with the darkness of the mother as it was coming into being, and her darkness ultimately demolished and devoured his light. Ursula’s eyes and hair were dark as night, her skin yellowish, almost brown, of a deeper hue than the ivory tone of her mother’s face.46 The contrast between Martha’s fair complexion and her daughter’s yellow-brown coloring, a stereotypical mark of Jewish “degeneracy,” symbolizes the tension between acculturation and incontrovertible difference that defined German Jewry’s transition from the age of Enlightenment into the age of ethnic nationalism.47 According to the laws of Mendelian inheritance, which the Nazis later invoked as validation of their concepts of racial purity, Ursa’s dark skin exposes a recessive gene that skipped a generation before becoming a visible trait.48 Though imperceptible in the assimilated mother, the mark of difference rears its head in the child born of intermarriage. Ursa’s undeniable “Jewishness” trumps status and custom as the arbiter of cultural belonging. The deep, yellowish hue of Ursa’s skin recurs as a leitmotif that reveals the limits and consequences of assimilation. Throughout the novel, Martha associates her daughter with a particular breed of yellow rose called Melody—“This dark yellow, fragrant song was her child”—an image that simultaneously invokes ethnic difference and cultural integrity.49 Ursa, the dark yellow rose, is likened to the enduring Jewish “essence” (Wesen) that Jakob WassermannPage 149 → described as the BlutbewuГџtsein (blood-consciousness) of the “Oriental” Jew, the singular source of genuine creativity, which has been threatened and thinned by acculturation.50 Her death therefore signifies the loss of a stable cultural identity. As the embodiment of an authentic “Jewishness,” Ursa’s wellbeing is threatened not only because of her physical appearance but also because of the nature of the assimilated environment into which she was born. We learn that Martha had failed to nurture her Jewishness by depriving her of the tradition she herself had received as a child in “the East.” Only once did she offer to take her daughter to “Temple,” but ultimately failed to follow through:

As she spoke, suddenly the temple of her birthplace was before her, the parade of children with colorful little flags—an apple stuck to each point and inside the apple a light—and the sweets and showers of raisins that fell on their heads. She had to tell Ursa. And then, then came Sukkos and the day of rejoicing in the law went by unnoticed. She never kept that promise. Was never able to keep it. She had not been in a synagogue since.51 Ursa’s physical appearance betrays her status as “other” within her bourgeois, secular environs, while Martha’s failure to recognize or celebrate her daughter’s difference threatens her very existence. Kolmar suggests that the failure of the assimilated mother to acknowledge her own ethnic identity or to nurture it in her offspring, in whom it is undeniably visible, is tantamount to cultural suicide. It is therefore telling that Martha’s attempt to reconnect with her Jewish heritage while mourning her daughter’s death proves a failure. She attends services at the Reform synagogue but is not moved by the words of the “bareheaded preacher,” who speaks in German “of Goethe and Schiller, and Schopenhauer and Kant,” and yet she is unable to recall the Hebrew prayers she knew as a child, words that “long had been buried under the rubble.”52 The secular sermon is directed at the assimilated Jews who saw themselves as the bearers and defenders of Bildung, or, in more colloquial terms, “Germans by the grace of Goethe.” This popular quip, notes Paul Mendes-Flohr, had “an ironic edge,” for the romance with Bildung took on “an unanticipated and ultimately deeply troubling dialectical spin.”53 Ursa’s death and Martha’s failure to mourn properly reflect what Mendes-Flohr describes as the ultimate cost of assimilation: the loss of Jewish literacy and cultural specificity. Moreover, Martha’s failure to acknowledge her own role in Ursa’s demise amplifies the self-deception upon which her entire middle-class life has been based. Page 150 →Thus, the act of filicide, in contrast to the Sturm und Drang convention, figures not as the tragic end of Martha’s story; instead, it sets in motion a thorny process of self-discovery that inevitably will culminate in self-destruction.

Stations of Self-Discovery As Martha embarks on her fated quest for Ursa’s murderer, she gradually moves from self-deception to recognition of her crime, a process that calls into question the liberal ethos upon which Jewish assimilation into the BildungsbГјrgertum had been based. She arrives at this terrible self-knowledge through a series of encounters, which produce a narrative structure similar to the expressionist Stationendrama (station drama), which consists of symbolically intertwined “stations” that lead to a self-awakening on the part of the protagonist.54 One of the earliest “stations” in Martha’s quest is the office of Fritz Pommer, an assimilated Jewish lawyer to whom she turns for counsel. Unmoved by her plight, the supercilious Pommer declines to help her track down Ursa’s attacker, noting that investigations into such crimes rarely yield results. His refusal to provide aid stems less from pragmatism than from disdain for her vengeful fantasies. In Pommer’s eyes, Martha is spiteful, lawless, and irrational, the embodiment of every ancient (Jewish) characteristic that Enlightenment philosophy had supposedly overcome. He hopes to “disabuse” her “with a few words of reason” of the “primitive notion [that] spilled blood cries out for revenge.”55 But Martha is not easily persuaded. She views Pommer’s position as capitulatory and self-defeating, the result of “the religion of reason” gone awry. The debate ends in stalemate with Martha’s sardonic last remarks: “вЂYou are probably right. I am such a monstrous creature [ungetГјmes Wesen].’ She thought: Only my mouth lies like that outwardly, and inside there is something that is true and puts you in the wrong. But she did not show it.”56 The word ungetГјm, used neologistically as an adjective, invokes both the noun UngetГјm (a monster found in legends and fables) and the adjective ungestГјm (impetuous), thus merging the stereotype of the “monstrous” Jew with that of the brash New Woman. The scene highlights the intimate links between anti-Semitic and misogynistic sentiments that were prevalent in middle-class Weimar society. Having gained equal rights under the constitution of 1919, notes Dagmar Lorenz, both women and Jews had become “more visible on the horizon of European consciousness through their articulated demands for emancipation, both legal and cultural.”57 Misogynistic and anti-Semitic tropes regularly overlapped in the discourse on cultural identity, with “deviant” sexuality serving Page 151 →as a link between two fearful stereotypes: the insubordinate New Woman and the predatory Jewish parvenu.

Conservatives seeking to safeguard their middle-class privileges and to rebuild a healthy Germany VolkskГ¶rper (national body) regarded independent women and integrated Jews as similarly “decadent” social elements that must be monitored and controlled. The result of this conservative campaign was a new form of male repression, which was often shrouded in xenophobic sentiments. Atina Grossmann has shown that the German sex reform movement encouraged monogamy and responsible motherhood in an effort to reverse a declining birthrate and curb the spread of venereal disease, a phenomenon associated not only with the nonreproductive New Woman but also with the syphilitic Jew.58 The ideal of the “redomesticated” woman who cheerfully juggles family and wage labor was often contrasted, as Grossmann points out, with the “malicious stereotype of the New Woman: short, dark hair; dressed in a unisex shift, distinctly unmaternal—the image not only of the prostitute but also of the Jewess and the lesbian.”59 Fear of female sexuality was often indistinguishable from fear of the Jew.60 As Sander Gilman has shown, the image of the feminized Jewish male became commonplace in German literature of the fin de siГЁcle, such as Otto Weininger’s notorious comparison of the male Jew with an irrational and oversexed woman in Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903).61 Such images became especially prevalent in conservative critiques of the Weimar Republic, which invoked the weak, “feminized” male as a symbol of decadence and anemic democracy. The image of the feminized Jewish male may therefore be understood as a doubly charged manifestation of the national “castration complex” that developed in response to the shame of military defeat and ensuing economic upheaval after World War I. Although this stereotype was attached exclusively to men, it betrays a deep distrust of female sexuality. As Gilman argues, popular representations of the Jewish woman aroused even greater suspicions than those of Jewish men. In contrast to the stereotype of the jaundiced, effeminate Jewish man, whose physical appearance marks him as visibly degenerate, the modern Jewess was portrayed as the dark and desirable belle juive (beautiful Jewess) who exploits her feminine wiles to entice and ensnare her victims. Since her Jewishness was seen as indistinguishable from her femininity, the Jewess was thought to be more difficult to identify—and thus more insidious—than her male counterpart.62 By the turn of the century, the destructive Jewish female had become “the epitome of the modern woman.”63 The New Woman (die neue Frau), a figure with whom the modern Jewess was often conflated, was a similarly slippery Page 152 →concept. The term could refer to the seductive femme fatale, the boyish “GarГ§onne,” the athletic “Girl,” or the masculinized lesbian. Several of the “types” associated with this vague rubric appear in one of the novel’s pivotal scenes. Following her meeting with Pommer, Martha finds herself in a homosexual dancehall (an unlikely setting for a bourgeois widow), which had been identified in a recent newspaper article as the site where a dangerous pedophile had been apprehended. Seated across from her is a “long and thin” man with a “debauched, hardly masculine” face. Martha suspects him to be both the convicted rapist and Ursa’s murderer, a logical fallacy that only the reader, at this stage, is able to see clearly.64 Her uncontainable wrath is directed at the entire dancehall, which she sees as a hotbed of lechery: “She clenched her fist under the table and could have smashed the table, assaulted the people, torn them to pieces—the drinkers, the dancers, the jazz musicians, the whole rabble [das ganze Gesindel].”65 Martha’s unwarranted suspicion toward the man and her disdain for the setting as a whole betray an inability to look beyond the hideous stereotypes of decadence that she has internalized as an assimilated member of the bourgeoisie. In Martha’s eyes, the “unmasculine man” is a hideous caricature of the lascivious, feminized Jew come to life. Ironically, Martha’s failure to overcome conventional rules of propriety prevents her from realizing that the dancehall patrons see her as one of them. When she is invited to dance by a cheerful blonde with a shortly cropped “man’s haircut” (Herrenschnitt), she politely declines, noting that she does not dance with women. “I don’t either,” responds the blonde. “You are a boy [Du bist doch ein Bubi]. Well, so am I, in case you haven’t noticed yet.”66 Gender-benders converge: Martha’s scorn for the effeminate gentleman is set against the blonde’s perception of her as either cross-dressing man or “masculine” woman.67 The blonde’s invitation implicates Martha in the world of “sexual intermediaries” while confirming her status as “other,” as Jewess.68 Transformed from the respectable wife of a German Protestant into a childless widow, she is now embroiled in the social subclass from which she has been taught, as

an adherent of Sittlichkeit (morality and refinement), to recoil. The tension between Martha’s disdain for the dancehall and her perceived belonging within it explains her violent reaction to the blonde’s proposition: “She threw herself somewhere, held on to something, dug her nails into something, an arm, a neck, a cheek. She was on fire.”69 By lashing out at those around her, Martha unleashes pent-up self-hatred imposed upon her as a Jewish woman and internalized by her as a member of the bourgeoisie. This moment of violence marks an important turning point in the novel. Having internalized the stereotypical traits and behaviors of the New Jewess, Martha now willingly adopts the role assigned her by her surrounding society.Page 153 → She initiates a love affair with Albert Renkens, an acquaintance of her late husband, in the hope that he will help find and bring Ursa’s murderer to justice. Like Friedrich, Albert is astounded by Martha’s lack of sexual inhibition, referring to her as “whore” (Dirne) and “Jewess” (JГјdin) as though the terms were interchangeable.70 Martha does not protest; in fact, she begins to dress and perform the part: Martha looked in the mirror. Her face was powdered in its natural ivory tone, but the mouth was painted too bright. It shimmered poison-red and large, a wonderful, mature cleaving pod. Poison mushroom (Fliegenpilz), she thought, whoever eats of it must die.71 The red lips anthropomorphize a familiar anti-Semitic metaphor that compared the Jew to a poisonous mushroom, 72 and at the same time pay homage to the New Women of Weimar cinema, such as Marlene Dietrich’s maneating Lola Lola (The Blue Angel, 1930) and Louise Brooks’s Lulu (Pandora’s Box, 1929).73 As Fliegenpilz, femme fatale, menacing Medea, lascivious belle juive, and masculinized New Woman, Martha has become a pastiche of stereotypes attached to her as both a Jew and a woman, exposing the fragile line between self-abnegation and exclusion, between the willful denial of difference and the inevitability of being othered. Despite her increasing isolation, however, Martha clings tenaciously to bourgeois values, as the end of her affair with Albert reveals. He is her last delusion, so to speak, a representative of liberal ideals to which she desperately clutches but that ultimately elude her, leaving her humiliated and alone. Even after Albert dismisses her and she discovers his virulently anti-Semitic views Martha pleads with him to stay, assuring him that she will “bury” the “child’s corpse” that divides them.74 This sudden willingness to renounce Ursa’s memory for Albert’s sake reflects the persistence of assimilatory values, which translate in their most extreme expression into self-loathing. An insoluble tension thus emerges between Martha’s estrangement from bourgeois society and her inability to acknowledge this process as such. This tension exposes Kolmar’s own indignation as an assimilated German-Jewish female writer, not only toward the chauvinism of middle-class German society but also toward the assimilated German Jews who were complicit in their own demise. As Martha reaches the last station of her story, she is forced to confess her crime: “She had killed Ursa.В .В .В . What else? Nothing. Not even this aching, wretched passion. The love for a man, the desire, her lust was as if touched by the nocturnal cold, frozen, diminished.” The belated admission of guilt gives Page 154 →way to a statement of defeat: “It was as if a creature [Wesen] were waiting upstairs, a miserable, pining creature, she was unable to face in her abject, helpless state, with her empty hands.”75 The ambiguous word Wesen, meaning both “creature” and “essence,” gestures toward a concept invoked by the expressionists to refer to the unadulterated identity of the Nietzschean “New Man,” the bearer of Geist (spirit) and embodiment of a spiritual rebellion against the strictures of “civilization.”76 As we saw in chapter 1, a similar concept was put forth by the proponents of Jewish renewal. Kolmar’s enigmatic reference to the “creature [Wesen] waiting upstairs” suggests a hidden “essence” suppressed by bourgeois propriety and forced to recoil into the deepest recesses of the psyche. Having reached the final station in her story, Martha can no longer deny this essence, nor can she salvage it. Her only viable choice is to subject it to the same fate visited upon her daughter, for how can a creature so battered and beleaguered survive? Over the course of her search for the murderer, which doubles as a search for her own repressed identity, Martha is unwittingly transformed into the New Jewess, a fusion of anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotypes imposed

upon and internalized by her. This seemingly regressive development represents the ultimate orientalist fantasy; after all, Martha can only see herself through the hegemonic bourgeois gaze. As her search comes to a tragic close, she is forced to acknowledge not only her irretrievable loss but also her own role in Ursa’s death. Her estrangement from the society to which she ostensibly belongs is juxtaposed with the dreadful realization that she is a stranger to herself.

Stranger to Herself Taken together, Kolmar’s poetry and fiction from the late Weimar period represent the writer’s own “research expedition” into a female Jewish identity both threatened by anti-Semitism and thinned by assimilation. The poems “Die JГјdin” and “Die Unerschlossene” trace a movement from interior bourgeois space to vanished or undiscovered lands and continents vulnerable yet resistant to conquest. In both, the blurred line between colonizing explorer and colonized territory, between subject and object, reveals the cultural predicament of the Jewish woman who seeks to unearth her buried identity yet cannot free herself of the orientalizing gaze of the German writer. In the novel, the theme of ill-fated self-discovery is reprised in a different guise. In place of an imagined research expedition into an uncharted, exotic landscape, the novel portrays the protagonist’s Berlin-based quest for her daughter’sPage 155 → murderer, which doubles as a psychic expedition into her own repressed Jewishness, an identity that she ultimately is unable to salvage. Thus, Kolmar’s work should not be read through the lens of Jewish nationalism or of German acculturation; instead, it should be understood as an expression of an irresolvable dialectic between the two, a painful admission of unnecessary loss and abiding longing. On December 26, 1939, about a year after Kolmar’s family home at Finkenkrug was confiscated by the Nazis, she wrote to her sister from a cramped apartment on Speyerer StraГџe at Bayerischer Platz: I have been feeling for a long time here as if I was living in a strange land. And even if I migrated to a far-off region and be it the most beautiful, in my heart I would always remain “a wanderer, at home in two strange lands but without a true homeland.” I long to return home. To a land further south and east of HellasВ .В .В . For everВ .В .В .77 Kolmar quotes a poem by the nineteenth century German poet Franz Grillparzer, which captures the insoluble tension between the joy of eternal wanderlust and the pain of eternal exile. While the sentiment resonates with Kolmar’s experience of uprootedness, the choice of Grillparzer reveals the extent to which German neoclassicism was ingrained in her. The tension is amplified by an apparent contradiction contained in the above passage: Kolmar expresses reservation about the possibility of making a home in another region and, in the same breath, intense longing for a far-off land, a land located southeast of Greece, evidently a reference to Palestine. Yet the use of the word “Hellas,” as opposed to modern Greece, indicates that she pines for an ancient homeland, not an existing country. Like the speaker of “Die JГјdin,” Kolmar expresses the wish to mount a “research expedition” to her “own ancient land” despite the knowledge that it can never be undertaken, for the land of the fathers is as remote from her as the German culture from which she is estranged. With her gaze directed toward the East, Kolmar witnessed the transformation of her Heimat into terra incognita, while her projected point of origin and longed for destination remained, like Atlantis, sunken into the sea.

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Epilogue Between East and West, Past and Present Effervescent and ephemeral, the brief twelve-year lifespan of the Weimar Republic marked the temporal threshold between the decline of empire and the rise of the nation-state in Central and Eastern Europe. Through the individual stories of four poets this book has traced the short life of the Republic from its rise out of the ashes of World War I in 1919 to its descent into totalitarian madness in 1933. For all four poets this period was a time not only of political change but also of artistic transformation. In fact, these developments were intimately linked. Whether the poet was native to Germany (like Ludwig Strauss) or even to Berlin (like Gertrud Kolmar), or only sojourned briefly in the German capital (like Moyshe Kulbak and Uri Zvi Greenberg), each was forced to confront the question of homeland, a process that left a lasting imprint on the individual’s national identity and art. Berlin was thus a creative threshold, a provisional domicile in which an array of literary styles, techniques, and movements could be explored openly. Motivated by nostalgic longing and tinged with either hope or trepidation for the future, the images of homeland that these poets constructed in verse reflect not only a broad spectrum of national identities but also a remarkable flowering of literary styles. Strauss’s transformation into a bilingual German-Hebrew poet involved not only a linguistic shift but also continuous transfer between the spirit of German romanticism and the world of classical Hebrew verse, which resulted in a bilingual oeuvre equally indebted to the lyric universe of HГ¶lderlin and the rhythmic virtuosity of Yehuda Halevi. Produced via linguistic and physical migration—between German and Hebrew, between Germany and Palestine—Strauss’s oeuvre occupies the threshold between two literary traditions. Moyshe Kulbak, by contrast, was tied to one realm alone, and that was Belorussia, specifically the countryside of Vilna Province. Yet Kulbak understood that newly drawn borders had transformedPage 158 → his native land beyond recognition. As he pined from Berlin, his vanished homeland became the poetic manifestation of Yiddishland, an extraterritorial ideal that could be reified only through literature. Constructing a homeland in verse meant cultivating a relatively underdeveloped poetic tradition. Finding himself on the margins of both his native land and German society, Kulbak exploited his artistic freedom and anonymity in order to experiment with various literary styles, from French symbolism to Anglo-American imagism to German expressionism. As the threshold between a lost native land and an uncertain future, Berlin was the space from which he reconstructed Belorussia and to which he later looked back from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, thus fulfilling the modernist maxim that images of home are most readily created from afar. Whereas Kulbak arrived in Berlin as an intrepid artist, Uri Zvi Greenberg came as a fugitive in need of asylum. Although his Berlin sojourn lasted barely a year, it marked a profound turning point for him both artistically and politically. The renegade runaway from Lemberg became a committed Zionist in Berlin, a choice that went hand in hand with a decisive shift in his writing from violent Yiddish expressionism to quasi-prophetic Hebrew verse. Yet Berlin was a cultural refuge that facilitated creative expression in both languages simultaneously. It was there that Greenberg developed the notion of a “blood language,” a language deeply rooted in the indigenous landscape that also is capable of expressing the gut-wrenching agony of exile. This language, as his poetry of the 1930s reveals, was not simply synonymous with Modern Hebrew; rather, it was the ideal language of longing for the spectral “Hebrew Kingdom.” Even after he crossed the threshold from the “Yiddish cry” of European exile to the bellicose “blood language” of the Orient, Greenberg never forgot the intimate relationship between his two tongues. Gertrud Kolmar likewise longed for the Orient. In contrast to Greenberg’s ideal of a sovereign Hebrew Kingdom, however, she imagined the Orient as an unconquered, pre-Judean landscape, a primordial point of origin to which she was unable to “return.” The exotic realm to which she escaped in her poetry betrays profound ambivalence toward her identity as a German-Jewish woman writer, the bearer of a suppressed “Jewishness” that could only be expressed through the orientalist fantasy of the bourgeois German writer. Identifying as both colonizer and colonized, Kolmar found herself in a state of paralysis knowing that she could

never return to her pristine ancient homeland and that her own native Germany, now on the cusp of totalitarianism, was becoming terra incognita. Although she was the only native Berliner among the four poets, she was no less a stranger to her environs. Berlin Page 159 →was the space from which she escaped in her poetry and into which she descended in her prose, a site of simultaneous stasis and internalized migration, the threshold between belonging and exclusion. For all of these poets, the poetic construction of homeland involved a negotiation not only between past and future but also between East and West. But these terms signified something different for each. Strauss, Greenberg, and Kolmar associated the “West” with Europe and the “East” with the Orient, yet the disparate orientalist fantasies cultivated by these poets reveal a range of national aspirations. Strauss privileged both Yiddish and Hebrew as the indispensible “oriental” component of a unified “pan-Jewish” tradition. Greenberg, by contrast, identified Yiddish as the language of suffering “in the West,” whereas he found in Hebrew a regenerative “eastern melody.” For Kolmar, the Orient represented a lost Atlantis for which she pined but to which she could never return as an assimilated German-Jewish writer capable of expressing herself in one language alone. In contrast to the previous three, for Kulbak the location of the “East” was not Palestine but “Raysn,” the landscape of Jewish Belorussia, which was similarly unsalvageable. Migration from West to East, whether real or only imagined, seemed to signify the return to an idealized point of origin. In reality, however, it meant venturing into the new and unknown. The three poets who left Berlin for the East discovered a new reality that departed dramatically from the imagined ideal. The political reality in Palestine of the 1930s did not accord with Strauss’s dream of binational harmony, nor did it live up to Greenberg’s vision of a sovereign Hebrew Kingdom. Although Kulbak managed to return to his beloved Belorussia, the pure earthy landscape of his poetry had been transformed by an unfamiliar Soviet political order. In the wake of Weimar’s demise, life in the “East” may have provided political refuge, at least temporarily, but it was by no means a dream come true. Whether they chose to immigrate to Palestine or to the Soviet Union, the rise of homogeneous, monolingual national ideologies had a profoundly alienating effect on all of these migrating writers. The divergent destinies of the four poets whose stories are the heart of this book reveal various consequences of the decline of republican democracy and the rise of ethnic nationalism. Two of them fell victim to totalitarian governments; Kulbak’s life was cut short by Stalin’s first anticosmopolitan campaign in 1938, while Kolmar was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. The other two, Strauss and Greenberg, lived on to witness World War I from Palestine and soon thereafter became citizens of the State of Israel. Yet their responses to these later political events were diametrically opposed. Greenberg’s writings of the late 1930s and 1940s betray the same fascistic worldview Page 160 →that had engulfed and ravaged Europe, whereas Strauss held fast to the ideals of tolerance and binational harmony that were quickly losing traction in a nascent Jewish state overrun by Arab-Jewish strife. Thus, whereas Strauss lamented the Holocaust as the calamitous result of the decline of multiethnic Europe, Greenberg saw the mass destruction of Jewish life as the tragic fulfillment of the apocalyptic vision that he had prophesied in exile. Notwithstanding the stark political differences between them, however, Greenberg and Strauss had in common a complex relationship to bilingualism. Although both poets eventually adopted Hebrew as a primary language in their professional lives, neither was prepared to endorse the Zionist doctrine of the “negation of exile” (shlilat hagolah) by sacrificing his mother tongue. Strauss maintained an actively bilingual literary life, composing and translating between German and Hebrew until his death. Although Greenberg stopped writing poetry in Yiddish upon leaving Berlin in 1924, he supported the establishment of Yiddish studies at the Hebrew University and remained involved in Yiddish journalism in Poland throughout the 1930s. He eventually returned to writing in Yiddish to mourn the victims of the ḥurban, the great destruction, as he referred to the Holocaust.1 Both poets may therefore be seen as representatives of a multilingual literary spirit stifled by the ascendency of monolingual national ideologies in both Europe and Israel. Berlin of the 1920s was a multilingual, cosmopolitan space upon which Jewish writers of various cultural and political stripes left an indelible mark. Today, nearly a century since the formation of the Weimar Republic, Berlin

has once again become a cosmopolitan enclave for young Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals in search of opportunity. Since reunification, in fact, Berlin’s Jewish population has been named the fastest-growing Jewish community in Europe.2 In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, that number had dwindled to 30,000 and was declining rapidly. A dramatic reversal of this trend took place between 1991 and 2005, when more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union immigrated to Germany. They have been joined more recently by a new wave of migration from Israel.3 In a sense, these “wired Hebrew nomads,” to borrow Fania Oz-Salzberger’s term, are following in the diasporic footsteps of their forebears, the migrating Jews of interwar Europe.4 Israelis arriving in Berlin today encounter a city that has been reborn, a city transformed almost beyond recognition. Yet Berlin has in certain respects recaptured the cosmopolitan spirit of the 1920s. With the fall of the Page 161 →Wall, the city reclaimed its status as the capital of the reunified East and West Germany. In place of the treacherous “death-strip” (Todesstreife) responsible for keeping potential defectors behind the Iron Curtain stands a parade of modern buildings. Postdamer Platz is once again the heart of the city center; its glitzy Weimar pleasure palace Haus Vaterland has been supplanted by an even flashier symbol of globalization in the form of Helmut Jahn’s imposing Sony Center. This architectural facelift exposes Germany’s struggle, which it took up in earnest after reunification, known as VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung, a controversial term that denotes “grappling with” or “overcoming” the past. The urban landscape is now dotted with memorials of all shapes and sizes that commemorate the horrors perpetrated by the National Socialist regime. The largest and most striking is Peter Eisemann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, erected in 2005, which resembles a vast cemetery of oversized concrete blocks reminiscent of tombstones. Bordered by the Reichstag, the imperial parliament whose destruction by arson in 1933 was a violent symbol of democracy’s demise, the Jewish memorial forms a massive scar at the very heart of the city. Simultaneously old and new, Berlin has re-created the dynamism of the Weimar Republic while revealing numerous reminders of how life in Germany has been irrevocably changed by the horrific period that followed it, the years of the Third Reich. Just as contemporary Berlin both resembles and differs from its Weimar era incarnation, Israeli migration to Berlin both resembles and differs from the wave of East European Jewish migration a century ago. While Jewish migrants from the former Russian and Habsburg Empires benefited from the increased value of foreign currency in Weimar’s climate of hyperinflation, Israelis today choose Berlin over the high cost of living in Tel Aviv. Golden Milki, a screen print by the Berlin-based Israeli artist Guy Briller, captures the aspirational, even opportunistic spirit of those associated with the 2014 “Milki Protest” (meha’at hamilki), named for the popular Israeli chocolate pudding that has become a symbol of the low cost of living in Berlin relative to Tel Aviv.5 The protest was instigated by a Facebook post created by an Israeli in Berlin that featured a copy of a grocery receipt listing “pudding with cream” (Pudding mit Sahne) at just nineteen cents per unit, followed by the challenge to “find any supermarket in Israel where you can get this for less.” The “Milki” post appeared on the Facebook page called Olim le-berlin (Let’s Ascend to Berlin), a provocative name that invokes the verb Jews reserve for immigrating, or “ascending,” to the Holy Land. A similar provocation can be heard in the lyrics of the song “Berlin,” released in 2014 by the Israeli band Schmemel: Page 162 →Berlin, Berlin, Even if I forget my right hand You will wait there for an eternity Until we return to you. Reichstag of peace And of euros and of light,

For all your songs I have no passport.

With a subversive reference to two of the most iconic paeans to Jerusalem, Psalm 137 (“If I forget thee, JerusalemВ .В .В .”) and Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” the satirical pop song casts Berlin as the longed-for site of “return,” reminding the listener that “[e]ven Jacob our forefather descended to Egypt because rent there cost a third and the pay was double.” Although the motivation behind Israeli migration to Berlin is primarily pragmatic, the choice of Berlin is not driven by economic concerns alone. Many Israeli migrants regard the German city as a last bastion of cosmopolitanism and liberalism, and, as such, a desirable alternative to life under Israel’s right-wing government. Like their predecessors, moreover, most regard themselves as temporary sojourners who socialize primarily with members of their own language community.6 The contemporary reincarnation of the Romanisches CafГ© might be the Gordon CafГ© and Record Store, an Israeli-owned coffeehouse and cultural hotspot in the primarily Turkish neighborhood of NeukГ¶lln, or CafГ© Kotti in central Kreuzberg, where the StammgГ¤ste (regulars) are immigrants of all stripes. In short, the three main similarities between Jewish migrants then and now are the attraction to economic opportunity, the appeal of liberalism and cultural openness, and the self-enclosed nature of migrant life. Yet Israelis in Berlin also differ from their Weimar era predecessors in two major ways. First, history has cast the current migration phenomenon in a questionable light. Although demographic research indicates that Israeli migration to Berlin is comparatively less significant than migration to other metropolitan cities, such as London, New York, and Toronto, the perceived Page 163 →“Chocolate Pudding Exodus” has provoked a disproportionate reaction in the Israeli media.7 The choice of Berlin, it appears, has touched a nerve. As Aluf Benn, editor of the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, noted, critics and politicians regard voluntary migration to the city “where Hitler designed the final solution” as “the ultimate failure of Zionism.”8 This was precisely the tone taken by former Israeli finance minister Yair Lapid when he lambasted young Israelis who choose to settle in the country that persecuted their grandparents and to “throw the only country the Jews have in the garbage just because life is easier in Berlin.”9 In a similar vein, the headline of an article by Dan Margalit in the newspaper Yisrael hayom (Israel Today) depicted migration to Berlin as a deplorable “sin,” the most unkosher of acts: “Milki Emigrants Return to the German Meat Stew!”10 Such unbridled vitriol points to a widening rift between mounting Zionist nationalism and the desperation of a generation of secular young Israelis for whom Germany, seventy years since the Holocaust, is seen not as “the land of perpetrators” but rather as the land of opportunity, which welcomes creative, industrious Jews with open arms. “4 Golden Milki,” Guy Briller 2014, CMYK screen print on paper, 4 Sheets 40Г—30 cm. The second and perhaps more significant difference between Israeli migrants to Berlin and their stateless European predecessors is that the former Page 164 →are voluntary exiles who know that they can return at any time to a country in which their status as Jews in not only accepted but also privileged. The new “Israeli Berliners” hold passports to a Jewish state where they feel culturally and socially secure, even as they struggle with the economic and political stresses that being Israeli entails. Moreover, some possess European passports in addition to their Israeli ones, a precious inheritance from parents and grandparents who were either denied or stripped of their European citizenship years ago. The Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the interwar period, by contrast, often carried no valid passport at all (as we saw in the case of Uri Zvi Greenberg), and their status was likely to be revoked with the rise of new nation-states and totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt once quipped that the “spurious world citizenship of [the interwar] generation, this fictitious nationality which they claimed as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, in part already resembled those passports which later granted their owner the right to sojourn in every country except the one that issued it.”11 The Jewish migrant writers who came to Berlin during the 1920s were cosmopolitan exiles in both the positive and negatives senses this formulation implies; they spoke multiple languages and were intimately familiar with different cultures, but they were also utterly deracinated. Most Israelis in Berlin cannot be described in the same

terms. Yet the fact that many are seeking the prestatehood roots of Hebrew culture points to a new phenomenon that might be termed “Israeli diasporization.” As a phenomenon that is both backward-looking and forward-thinking, Israeli diasporization provides a new framework for rethinking dominant national narratives and for forging new intercultural relationships. For this reason, Fania Oz-Salzberger suggests that Israeli migration to Berlin should be viewed, not as an “anti-Zionist dynamic,” but as an expression of “zionism, with a small z,” a movement that is not “centripetal, drawing everything Jewish into the land of Israel,” but centrifugal, “sending fascinating signals to the world.”12 Whether Israelis go to Berlin as a deliberate political stance or simply as a pragmatic response to an economic impasse, they are certainly learning the meaning of the Diaspora. This awareness, as Edward Said remarked, affords “plurality of vision,” which comes at the cost of being “satisfied, placid or secure.”13 One example of this budding diasporic consciousness among Israelis is the Berlin-based Hebrew journal Mikan ve’eylakh (From Here Onward), initiated in 2012 by Tal Hever-Chybowski. A PhD student in history at Humboldt University and the son of Hebrew literary scholar Hanan Hever, Hever-Chybowski established the journal with the aim of reviving the “anti-hegemonic, non-sovereign Hebrew” of interwar Hebrew writers like S. Y. Agnon, David Fogel, and Leah Goldberg.14 Hever-Chybowski belongs to a growing cohort of Israelis who come to Berlin seeking more than economic Page 165 →comfort; they seek an alternative space within which to renegotiate a postnational identity without renouncing their “Israeliness” altogether. This development is undergirded by what Bruce Robbins calls the “new cosmopolitanism,” that is, “the provocatively impure but irreducible combination of a certain privilege at home, as part of a real belonging in institutional places, with a no less real but much less commonВ .В .В . extension of democratic, anti-imperial principles abroad.”15 Robbins’s statement holds true for Israeli expatriates searching for an alternative to monolingual, monocultural conceptions of Israeli identity. It also applies to American Jewish expatriates who reject what they regard as the imperialist-capitalist ethos of contemporary American society and search for an alternative identity in the socialistic, diasporic roots of the East European Jewish Labor Bund. A particularly boisterous example thereof can be heard in the music of Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band founded in 2005 by Detroit native Daniel Kahn whose self-described style is “a mixture of Klezmer, radical Yiddish song, political cabaret and punk folk.” The band is known for its politically charged polyglot songs in English, Yiddish, and German, which often bear explicitly socialistic titles, such as the bilingual English-Yiddish “March of the Jobless Corps.” Not all of Berlin’s Jewish migrants have Ashkenazi roots. The poet and journalist Mati Shemoelof represents Berlin’s many Mizrahi (literally “eastern” in Hebrew), the term attributed to Israeli Jews who descend from Arab and Muslim countries of the Middle East, such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. Shemoelof’s relationship to Berlin is influenced by the fact that he descends not from victims or survivors of the Holocaust but rather from Jewish Iranian exiles who spoke Arabic, rather than German or Yiddish.16 The following passage captures his view of the privileged predicament of exile: I’m afraid my two lovers won’t manage to live inside one body.В .В .В . Because every moment in Berlin displaces me from Tel Aviv, and every moment in Tel Aviv distances me from my home in Berlin. Will I manage to survive this path of takeoff and landing that I invented for myself, with my broken English taken from rock songs, my heavily accented German, my Arabic filled with blessings, and my Hebrew collapsing under the weight of its own slang?17 For Shemoelof, Germany is not simply “the land of victims and perpetrators” but rather a blank canvas for negotiating complex linguistic commitments. The above passage reveals both a profound desire to revive the multilingual ideal and deep disappointment, as an Israeli citizen socialized exclusively in Hebrew, over its gradual disappearance. As a Mizrahi Jew, Shemoelof sees Berlin as more than a city once conquered Page 166 →by Hitler or divided by a menacing wall. For him, Berlin is the city where walls can and do come down. In an article published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, he narrates an encounter with Iranian refugees at the popular CafГ© Kotti, which he

nicknames “the parliament of exiles” (the same expression Abraham Nokhum Stenzel used, coincidentally, to describe the Romanisches CafГ© in the 1920s). The article begins: “During one of my special evenings in Berlin, I jumped over the wall between Israel and Iran and opened a parliament for Iranian Mashhadi exiles with two other refugees.”18 The Iranian exiles recount their past struggles in Iran and their current struggle to build new lives in Germany, to learn German, and to integrate into a society that is not entirely welcoming toward AuslГ¤nder (“outsiders” or “foreigners”). Hearing their stories causes Shemoelof to reflect both on the dangers of xenophobia in Europe and on Mizrahi cultural memory—on the expulsion of his grandparents from Iran, and the erasure of Arabic as a Jewish tongue in Israel: Back at the parliament of Iranian exiles that we opened at CafГ© Kotti, I look at my new friends and ask myself: how can civilians topple the walls that politicians built with a lack of imagination, vision, love and basic humanity? This not a theoretical discussion; it’s about us. It’s about the citizens of a Middle East that is bleeding to death.В .В .В . If we figure out how to sit together, get to know each other, talk, the walls will come down, and maybe we won’t have to go into exile, to immigrate, to wander away from the spring into the freezing German snow. And if we’ve already gone into exile how can we bring the walls down between us and the local society? Why should we be treated differently? Are we not human beings like the Germans and the Europeans? Did we want to leave everything we knew behind in our countries of origin? How do we build a humanistic society, in which everyone is equal? Is this even possible?19 Shemoelof suggests that being among migrants in Berlin has not only awakened empathy for Iranians and Arabs driven into exile but also has made him more aware of how integration and assimilation affected the generation of his parents, who were forced out of Arab lands for being Jewish, only to have their cultural heritage suppressed in Israel because it was tied to Arabic. Moreover, his encounters with fellow migrants in Berlin have led him to reflect on various iterations of the East-West division and, in turn, on the need for a common struggle against xenophobia. In Shemoelof’s view, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, which had for decades divided “Ossis” and “Wessies” (as East Germans and West Germans are commonly known), may serve as a model for erasing other East-West divisions: in Israel, between Ashkenazim Page 167 →and Mizraḥim, and between Jews and Arabs; and in Germany, between the local population and immigrants from Muslim countries. This desire to redefine and thereby overcome the dichotomy of East and West, Orient and Occident, hearkens back to the Jewish writers of Weimar Berlin who gazed toward one another in an effort to redefine their own national identity. To be sure, their “gaze” was often orientalist in nature, shaped by inherited myths and prejudices, yet in many instances it also reflected the desire for a cohesive Jewish national culture that knows no geographical boundaries. As we have seen, the encounter of Ostjuden with the West and of Westjuden with the East led to a redefinition of the terms “us” and “them.” In certain cases this process had radical consequences, as with Uri Zvi Greenberg, whose embrace of the “Orient” was accompanied by a resolute rejection of the Christian West. For other writers, however, including Kulbak, Strauss, and Kolmar, real and imagined journeys between East and West served to broaden their cultural horizons and self-perception, even as they realized the urgency of demarcating the borders of a national home. Their examples are instructive today, as narrow nationalist voices threaten to drown out cross-cultural sentiments, for they reveal the fallout of the transition from multiethnic European existence to a divided, nationalistic reality. The work of young, politically engaged Israeli writers like Shemoelof might be seen as the belated legacy of the diasporic, multilingual moment when Ostjuden and Westjuden crossed paths in Weimar Berlin. Moreover, the coexistence of Israelis with other “outsiders” (AuslГ¤nder) within the culturally mixed, metropolitan environment of Berlin may cast new light on the treatment of migrants and minorities both in Germany and in Israel, where similar debates about the status of foreign workers and asylum seekers are under way. History has shown that the definition of “Germanness”—not unlike the definition of “Israeliness” today—has relied on delineating the foreigner or stranger.20 In 1908 Georg Simmel described the European Jew as the quintessential “stranger”; today, he would be unlikely to cast Israelis in this role. Arriving as nationals of a sovereign state rather than as stateless refugees hoping to put down roots, Israelis in Berlin do not fit the mold of the stranger who “comes today and stays tomorrow,” as Simmel put

it.21 In present-day Germany, the role of the stranger is more readily associated with the Turkish community, which has been a major presence for three generations and yet still struggles with the problem of integration. In the wake of reunification and subsequent xenophobic violence during the 1990s, Turkish Germans wondered whether they weren’t becoming “the Jews of tomorrow.”22 Indeed, as Ruth Mandel has observed, a similar ambivalence that defines today’s “Turkish Question” once defined the “JewishPage 168 → Question.” Both Jews and Turks have been criticized for attempting to “pass” as Germans, on the one hand, and for failing to abandon their distinctive signs of identity, on the other; both groups have therefore been depicted “simultaneously as wrongful insiders and unintegratable outsiders.”23 The Turkish German writer Zafer Ећenocak has written of the need to seek “touching points” (BerГјhrungspunkte) between Jews and Turks, points of contact, comparison, and exchange that stem less from a perceived resemblance between the two groups than from the fact that they provoke similar debates about “Germanness.”24 Since discussions of citizenship, national loyalty, multilingualism, and integration are as crucial for today’s Turkish community as they once were for Germany’s Jews, Ећenocak argues, any talk of national memory in Germany must not be relegated to the realm of the past but rather brought into the present context. In the words of Sascha Muchteschem, the fictional German-born, half-Turkish, half-Jewish protagonist of Ећenocak’s novel GefГ¤hrliche Verwandschaft (Perilous Kinship): “Today, when the question is asked as to who is German and who is not, one looks at the Turks. The borders of вЂGermanness’ (Deutschsein) are tested on them. Jews who want to take stock of their Germanness discover the Turks in the mirror.”25 A similar discovery of the self as reflected in the other informed constructions of Jewish identity in Weimar Berlin. Weimar Jewish culture therefore represents a valuable example for present-day German and Israeli cultures. For just as “everyone is someone’s Ostjude,” in the words of one of Leah Goldberg’s characters, so too everyone has the ability to discover the “other” in the mirror.26 Weimar’s potential dissolved into tragedy. Its cosmopolitan vigor, experimental edge, and democratic spirit were swallowed whole by fascistic forces for which democracy had paved the way. Yet the cultural promise of Weimar Berlin persists today. As a space of transit suspended between East and West and between empire and nation-state, Weimar Berlin remains the consummate example of a transnational literary center, a decentralized center, where the meeting and blurring of center and periphery, native and migrant, insider and outsider, produced remarkable new cultural possibilities. The four protagonists of this book—Ludwig Strauss, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Gertrud Kolmar—differed in terms of politics, cultural commitments, and artistic predilections. Yet they shared a common thread: they all experienced Berlin as a threshold, a time and place of transition in which they negotiated between nostalgia and hope, anxiety and longing, exile and arrival. Locating these writers within this shared context brings into view their shared transnational legacy, that of a homeless yet worldly literature par excellence.

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Notes Introduction

1. Franz Kafka, Briefe, 1902–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 429. 2. Diamant viewed her role at the Volksheim in terms of an East-West symbiosis, as the following quote reveals: “After the catastrophe of the war everyone expected salvation through the intermediary of the East. But I had run away from the East because I believed the light was in the West.В .В .В . I had the feeling that the people there needed something which I could give them.” Kathi Diamant, Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 13. 3. Dora Diamant, “Mein Leben mit Franz Kafka,” in “Als Kafka mir entgegenkamВ .В .В .”: Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995), 180. 4. Alfred Bodenheimer suggests that Kafka’s Hebrew lessons were not preparation, but rather a substitute, for immigration. See Alfred Bodenheimer, “A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka’s Hebrew Notebooks,” in Kafka, Zionism and Beyond, ed. Mark H. Gelber (TГјbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 270. 5. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 5. 6. Scott Spector notes that Kafka encouraged Felice’s involvement in the Volksheim while repeatedly asserting that he himself was incapable of such work. Scott Spector, “вЂAny reality, however small’: Prague Zionisms between the Nations,” in Gelberg, Kafka, Zionism and Beyond, 19–20. 7. Kafka, Letters to Felice, 423. This statement is taken from Kafka’s letter to Grete Bloch, dated June 11, 1914. 8. John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 191. 9. Kafka, Letters to Felice, 500. 10. Kafka, Letter to His Father: Brief an den Vater, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 81. For a discussion of Kafka’s relationship to the Yiddish theater, see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 19–50; Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: UniversityPage 170 → of Wisconsin Press, 1971); and Ritchie Robertson, “Kafka’s Encounter with the Yiddish Theatre,” in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature, ed. Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson (London: Legenda, 2005), 34–44. 11. Kafka, “Rede Гјber die jiddische Sprache,” in Das Kafka-Buch: Eine innere Biographie in Selbstzeugnissen, ed. Heinz Politzer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1965), 94. 12. Ibid., 97. 13. Mark Harman, “Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles about Kafka and Berlin,” New England Review 25,nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2004): 227. 14. Bokhove, “вЂEntrance to the More Important,’” 56. 15. Berlin in the 1920s was also a major site of migration and exile for Russian-language writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Victor Shklovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Belyi, and Georgii Ivanov. For more on Russian emigrГ©s in Weimar Berlin, see Karl SchlГ¶gel, Das Russische Berlin: Ostbahhof Europas (Munich: Pantheon Verlag, 2007); Shoshanah Dietz, “The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Г‰migrГ©s and the Berlin Experience,” in The Literature of Emigration and Exile, ed. James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992), 43–50. 16. Shachar Pinsker, “The Urban Literary CafГ© and the Geography of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism in Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 452. 17. See, for example, Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1880–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1990); Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 18. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 204. 19. Sigrid Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-SchГјler and CafГ© Culture,” in Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 61. East European Jews arriving in Germany during the period of the Kaiserreich fell into four categories, broadly speaking: transmigrants (generally intending to move on to America); transients and Betteljuden (beggars); students (particularly following Tsar Alexander II’s May Laws of 1871, which severely limited educational opportunities for Jews in Eastern Europe); and those drawn by economic opportunity who sought permanent residency and even citizenship. East European Jews represented all political leanings: Zionist, Hebraist, Yiddishist, Bundist, and so on. 20. Ian Buruma cited in Mendes-Flohr, “Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 28. 21. Cited in ibid., 30. 22. Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 79. 23. Peter Gay, “The Berlin-Jewish Spirit: A Dogma in Search of Some Doubts,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 15 (1972): 5. 24. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), xiv. Page 171 →25. Gay, “Berlin-Jewish Spirit.” 26. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 22–23. 27. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 407. 28. George L. Mosse, “German Jews and Liberalism in Retrospect,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987): xvii–xviii. See also Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 29. Simmel, “The Stranger,” 407. 30. In Black Skin, White Masks, one of the seminal works of postcolonial thought, Frantz Fanon refers to the “common destiny” of all “minor cultures.” Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 42. Following this logic, postcolonial theorists Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd have argued that “minority groups, despite all the diversity and specificity of their cultures, share the common experience of domination and exclusion by the majority”: Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, ed., The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), ix. 31. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, ed., Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 32. Myers, “Distant Relatives,” 77. 33. Mary Louise Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” in “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33. 34. The term “cultural parataxis” is adapted from a term in rhetoric that refers to coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions. Friedman uses this term to establish a complex geography of modernism comprised of multiple sites around the globe with their own divisions, power structures, and historical overdeterminations, which produce their own forms of modernity but can also be placed in relation to each other. See Susan Stanford Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies,” in Modernism: A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, vol. 1, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Philadelphia: Johns Benjamin, 2007), 38. 35. Andreas Huyssen, “Modernism at Large,” in ibid., 57. 36. In her seminal study of Hebrew and Yiddish literary modernism, Kronfeld argues that such marginal prototypes may only come into clearer view through a “kaleidoscopic vision” of literary affiliation and periodization, one that is “partial, potentially contradictory, and ambivalent.” Chana Kronfeld,

On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 12. 37. David N. Myers, “Distant Relatives Happening onto the Same Inn: The Meeting of East and West as Literary Theme and Cultural Ideal,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 93. 38. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 39. Shulamit Volkov argues that German-Jewish culture was defined, not by an ongoing process of assimilation, but rather by a dialectical process of “dissimilation” set in Page 172 →motion by two parallel forces: “The hostility and exclusiveness of the host society and the inner dynamics of assimilation itself.” Having attained levels of education and lifestyle choices comparable to the rest of the German bourgeoisie, yet still limited in terms of professional and economic opportunity, the Jews were a “partly segregated social element,” and therefore began to establish “parallel Jewish bodies,” cultural organizations and institutions that resembled those of their German counterparts yet remained distinctive from them by virtue of their Jewishness. See Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 195–211. 40. See chap. 5 of David A. Brenner, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 41. The search for German-Jewish identity based on cultural and ethnic community in the works of Arnold Zweig, Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, and others is the focus of Noah Isenberg’s Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). On Else Lasker-SchГјler’s “Orientalist imagination,” see Donna Heizer, Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-SchГјler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996). 42. See, for example, Jeremy Asher Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Modern Yiddish Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Published scholarship on the image of Germany and German Jews in Yiddish and Hebrew literature is reserved to individual articles, including Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 265–80; Israel Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry in East European Jewish Society during the 19th Century,” in Danzig, between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 3–17; and Hans-JГјrgen Becker and Hillel Weiss, eds., Agnon and Germany: The Presence of the German World in the Writings of S. Y. Agnon (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010). 43. See Michael Brenner, “Authenticity Revisited: Jewish Culture in Jewish Languages,” in Renaissance, 185–211. 44. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds., Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture (London: Legenda, 2010). Another recent attempt to bring the discourse on the “Yiddish-German encounter” up to date is the edited volume Between Two Worlds: Yiddish-German Encounters, ed. Jerold C. Frakes and Jeremy Dauber, Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 41 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 45. Shachar Pinsker, “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, ed. Estraikh and Krutikov, 31. 46. Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 47. Na’ama Rokem and Amir Eshel provide a valuable overview of this emerging field in the editors’ introduction to a special issue, “German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation,” of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–8. Other representative titles include Yfaat Weiss, Lea Goldberg: Lehrjahre in Page 173 →Deutschland 1930–1933, trans. Liliane Meilinger (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Na’ama Rokem, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013); Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Maya Barzilai, “Translation on the Margins: Hebrew-German-Yiddish Multilingualism in

Avraham Ben Yitzhak and Yoel Hoffmann,” Journal of Jewish Identities 7, no. 1. (January 2014): 109–29; Galili Shahar, “The Silent Syllable: On Franz Rosenzweig’s Translation of Yehuda Halevi’s Liturgical Poems,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 153–72; and Giddon Ticotsky and Lina Barouch, eds., ZukunftsarchГ¤ologie: Eine Anthologie hebrГ¤ischer Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2015). 48. Friedrich Schleiermacher famously argued that “every writer can produce original work only in his mother tongue.” As Yasemin Yildiz has shown, this statement encapsulates the bias toward monolingualism that became a normative principle of modernity during the eighteenth century. Schleiermacher quoted in Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 8–9. Insofar as Jewish writers regularly were denied a rightful claim to German, the notion of “original” writing was particularly fraught. 49. The concept of diaspora is regularly invoked by critics of Israel and Zionism as an alternative or corrective to chauvinistic forms of ethnic nationalism. For instance, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin deploy the concept of diaspora as “a positive resource in the necessary rethinking of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of modern nation-state system and ideal,” including their own critique of what they characterize as the cultural hegemony of the Jewish state. See Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 95. In a more scathing manner, Stuart Hall presents his ideal of “new world hybridity” as an ethical alternative to “backwardlooking” Jewish diasporism, which he depicts as the neurotic attachment to a lost homeland, the reclamation of which involves “pushing other people into the sea.” See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse, 402. Judith Butler’s more recent study, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), attempts to forge an ethos for a “one-state solution” in Israel/Palestine based on Jewish diasporic traditions and an ethical critique of Zionism. 50. Ali Behdad warns against this tendency in “Postcolonial Theory and the Predicament of вЂMinor Literature,’” in Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 223–36. 51. Edward W. Said, “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harper’s 269 (September 1984): 54. 52. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 204. 53. I borrow this expression from Butler’s “Who Owns Kafka?” without endorsing the specific political critique of Zionism and the State of Israel in service of which she deploys the term. 54. Walter Benjamin, “Die Wiederkehr des FlГўneurs,” in Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 197. 55. Gay, Weimar Culture, xiv; Leah Goldberg, Avedot: Mukdash leвЂantonia (Losses: Dedicated to Antonia, 1936), ed. Giddon Ticotsky (Kibbutz Hame’uchad: Sifriyat Poalim, 2010), 14. Page 174 → Chapter One

1. Sholem Aleichem, “A friyer peysekh,” in Likhvoyd yontef (Warsaw: Program, 1913), 163. 2. Ibid., 176. 3. Steven Aschheim has shown that German-Jewish attitudes toward East European Jewish refugees during the pre–World War I years were mixed. They established aid agencies intended to fight for the refugees’ basic rights, such as the Hilffsverein der deutschen Juden (Aid Agency of German Jews), yet most of these organizations did not support mass settlement of refugees in Germany but rather encouraged settlement abroad, especially in the United States and Palestine. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 37. 4. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 5. 5. For a detailed account of this transformation, see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 58–79. 6. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 43. For more on the symbolic role of Yiddish in the era of the Haskalah and

Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000). 7. The word vГ¶lkisch, which denotes a romantic form of German populism, derives from the German word Volk (“folk” or “people”) but carries overtones of “nation,” “race” or “tribe.” The vГ¶lkisch movement had its origins in Romantic nationalism, as expressed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation, 1808). For a thorough analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the vГ¶lkisch movement and its influence on the rise of the Third Reich, see George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964). 8. Mosse notes that the German peasant was often portrayed in nineteenth-century German art and literature as a tree, its “roots anchored in the past while the crown aspires toward the cosmos,” whereas the Jew was “the snake at the root.” Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, 26–27. 9. Ibid., 143. 10. Heinrich von Treitschke, “A World About Our Jewry” (1880), in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 343. 11. J. G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 140. Herder celebrated the “primitive” nations of the East as the bastion of all that had been annulled by the Enlightenment and the rationalism of the bourgeois West. Counting the Jews among these long-debased “Asiatic” nations, he argued that the Jewish people had failed to fulfill their political constitution because they remained permanently estranged from the land “given them by Heaven itself.” According to Herder, the proud, rooted nation of the Bible had deteriorated in the Diaspora to become “a race of cunning brokers, almost throughout the whole world, who, in spite of all oppression, have never been inspired with an ardent passion for their own honor, for a habitation, for a country of their own.” 12. Aschheim, “Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Page 175 →Goldstein, ” in In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 67. 13. Franz Rosenzweig, “Toward a Renascence of Jewish Learning,” in On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 58. 14. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 213. 15. I borrow the phrase “cult of the Ostjuden” from the title of chapter 8 in Aschheim’s Brothers and Strangers. 16. Buber was raised and educated by his grandfather, Solomon Buber (1827–1906), a prominent scholar of Talmud remembered for his editions of Midrash and medieval Jewish literature and for his pioneering research surrounding those texts. 17. On Buber’s orientalism and its influence on the next generation of German Jews, see MendesFlohr, “Fin de SiГЁcle Orientalism,” 77–132; and chapters 5 and 6 in Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. For a wide-ranging analysis of orientalism in the German context, see Todd Curtis Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 18. George Mosse has shown a striking parallel between the efforts of vГ¶lkisch ideologue Eugen Diederichs to locate a unique German Geist in the writings of Meister Eckhart with Martin Buber’s attempt to unearth a distinct Jewish Geist in the tales and homilies of the Hasidic masters. See chapter 3 in Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology. Mendes-Flohr discusses the relationship between and mutual influence of Buber and Diederichs in Mendes-Flohr, “Fin-de-SiГЁcle Orientalism, the Ostjuden and the Aesthetics of Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 88–91. 19. Buber adopted Herder’s distinction between the ancient Jewish Volksgeist and the spiritless nature of exilic Jewry, arguing that the Jews had developed a culture of “detached intellectuality” as a result of being “torn out of its Oriental soil” (Buber, “The Spirit of the Orient,” 75). In contrast to Herder, however, Buber maintained that the Jewish Volksgeist could be reclaimed through a return to the ancestral homeland combined with a renewed connection with Jewish folk culture and mythology. 20. Buber contrasted “religion,” which he defined as “prescriptions and dogmasВ .В .В . rigidly determined and handed down as unalterably binding to all future generations,” with “religiosity,”

the individual’s “longing to establish a living communion with the unconditioned, his will to realize the unconditioned through his action, transposing it into the world of man.” Insofar as Hasidism emerged during the eighteenth century as a revolutionary response to the strictures of a life lived only in accordance with halakhah (Jewish law), Buber saw it as the ultimate expression of religiosity. See Martin Buber, “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 80. 21. Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel, eds., JГјdischer Almanach (Berlin: JГјdischer Verlag, 1902), 19. The JГјdischer Verlag was one of the earliest undertakings of the Democratic Faction, established in 1900 as the first self-proclaimed party within the Zionist movement. Led by Buber, Berthold Feiwel, E. M. Lilien, Chaim Weizmann, and Leo Motskin, the Democratic Faction emphasized the positive relationship between national and cultural aspirations and promoted aesthetic and scientific education and the Hebrew language. For more on the JГјdischer Verlag, see Anatol Schenker, Der jГјdische Verlag, 1902–1938: Zwischen Aufbruch, BlГјte und Vernichtung (TГјbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003). On the Democratic Faction, see chap. 2 in Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture Page 176 →and West European Jewry before the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 22. Buber published two important collected translations of Hasidic folk tales: The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1906) and The Legend of the Baal Shem (1908). He regarded himself as continuing a long tradition of Jewish myth makers. In the introduction to the latter volume, Buber writes of the origins of the Hasidic tale and his role in its transmission: “A stammer gave birth to it and a stammer bore it onward—from generation to generation. I have received it from folk books, from note-books and pamphlets, at times also from a living mouth, from the mouths of people still living who even in their lifetimes heard this stammer.В .В .В . I stand in a chain of narrators, a link between links; I tell once again the old stories, and if they sound new, it is because the new already lay dormant in them when they were told for the first time.” Buber, Legend of the Baal Shem, xiii. 23. Ashcheim, Brothers and Strangers, 191. 24. Although there are no records indicating that Kafka attended Buber’s lectures, he was affiliated with the Bar Kochba Society and well acquainted with fellow members who were present. See Ritchie Robertson, “Kafka’s Encounter with the Yiddish Theatre,” in Robertson and Sherman, Yiddish Presence, 37. 25. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1965), 111. 26. Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921), retrieved from www.projectgutenberg.org 27. Jakob Wasserman, “Der Jude als Orientale,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Hans Kohn (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 5. 28. Fritz Mordecai Kauffmann, “Zum Programm der Freistatt,” Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue 1, no. 1 (April 1913): 3. 29. Other important journals that drew attention to the so-called Ostjudenfrage (Eastern Jewish Question) include Leo Winz’s Ost und West and Martin Buber’s Der Jude. For a nuanced study of Ost und West, see Brenner, Marketing Identities. 30. Kaufmann, “Zum Programm,” 3. 31. Kaufmann likely adopted the term Alljudentum from Birnbaum, who used it to refer to a theory of nonZionist nationalism that sought to further Jewish national and cultural life in the large centers of Jewish population throughout the world and simultaneously secure the recognition of Jewry as a nationality by the world powers. 32. Interestingly, the terms “Zionism” and “Yiddishism” were both coined by Birnbaum. For more on his intellectual biography, see Joshua A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers, 1987); and Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 33. Birnbaum, “Das Erwachen der jГјdischen Seele,” in Vom Judentum, 241. 34. Ibid., 247. 35. For more on Birnbaum’s interest in Yiddish and role in the Czernowitz Conference, see Olson,

“The Eastward Gaze: The 1907 Elections and the Yiddish Language Conference,” in Nathan Birnbaum, 154–208; and Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 100–113. 36. Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” 265. Page 177 →37. Yisroel Aksenfeld, “The Headband,” in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Overlook Press, 1989), 100. In Yiddish: Dos shterntikhl: Roman (Moscow: Farlag Emes, 1938). 38. Ibid., 107. 39. Y. L. Gordon cited in Bartal, “Image of Germany and German Jewry in East European Jewish Society,” 8. 40. Megale temirin is widely regarded as “the first Hebrew novel.” 41. The implicit contrast between the German word bukh and the Hebrew (loshn-koydesh) word seyfer exemplifies the “internal bilingualism” typical of the Yiddish language. This linguistic stratification was expressly hierarchical, with Hebrew elements denoting sacred, masculine concepts and Germanic (or Ashkenazi) elements associated with profane, feminine concepts. See Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). It is no coincidence that the sacred Hebrew seyfer was reserved for male eyes, whereas the Yiddish bukh and the diminutive bikhl were consumed exclusively by women. For a nuanced account of the gendered politics behind the Hebrew-Yiddish relationship, see Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 42. Miron, Traveler Disguised, 59. 43. Dauber, Antonio’s Devils, 222. 44. Israel Bartal suggests that the terms daytsh and maskil were practically synonyms. Bartal, “Image of Germany,” 5–6, 11. 45. Miron, Traveler Disguised, 113. The message echoed that of Abramovitch’s first novel, Dos kleyne mentshele (The Little Man, 1864), which portrays the rise of the traditional shtetl Jew out of the depths of poverty and intellectual stagnation to economic success and enlightenment, with Germany and German Jews figuring as the source of improvement. 46. Dan Miron offers a thorough discussion of the evolution of Mendele’s shift from a maskilic to a nationalistic agenda in Traveler Disguised, 95–129. 47. Hershele makes this comment during his first encounter with Mendele the Bookpeddler, the implied author and narrator of the text. When Mendele, voicing the maskilic agenda, criticizes the shtetl Jews for their lack of interest in secular literature, Hershele hastens to their defense. Dan Miron points out that Hershele’s invective, which echoes the slogans of the Russian “realist” critics of the 1860s, reflects the prevalent mood among Russian-Jewish intellectuals following the death of Nicholas I and the rising anti-Jewish violence that ravaged the Pale during the reign of Nicholas II and the consequent rise of “nationalistic enthusiasm.” See Miron, Traveler Disguised, 105. 48. Miron, Traveler Disguised, 104. 49. In his etymological survey of the word daytsh, Nicholas Block notes that most Yiddish dictionaries offer the simple definition “German” (implying the term is inclusive of non-Jewish Germans), yet Nahum Stutchkoff’s Yiddish thesaurus associates the term with “disbelief, heresy, conversion,” indicating a clear connection with the German Jew. In this context, the word daytsh is considered a synonym of daytshuk, daytshun, and daytsh-milokh, as well as berliner and berlinstshik, which highlight Berlin as a hotbed of Jewish enlightenment and reform. Block shows that the etymological ambivalence informs the depiction of the daytsh in Yiddish literature, in which he sometimes appears as a secular German-speaking Jew and at other times, particularly in literature of the 1930s, Page 178 →as an antiSemitic German. See Nicholas Alexander Block, “In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of GermanJewish and Yiddish Modernisms” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013), 40–50. 50. As Yiddish language and literature became more developed and independent, the disdain for daytshmerish, as a holdover of the Haskalah, became more vehement. Shmuel Niger’s 1911 essay “Kultur un bildung: Vegn der yiddisher inteligents” (Culture and Bildung: On the Jewish Intelligentsia) depicts the continued existence of daytshmerish as an “affliction from which we must be freed.” See Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse,

NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 99. The anti-daytshmerish position can also be found in the writings of Max Weinreich, most explicitly in his 1938 essay “Daytshmerish toyg nit” (“Daytshmerish Will Not Do”). According to Weinreich: “There is no greater enemy of a correct, tasteful, exact, Jewish General Yiddish than daytshmerish.” Cited in Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 134. For an overview of the evolving discourse on daytshmerish among Yiddish linguists from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1990s, see Rakhmiel Peltz, “The Undoing of Language Planning from the Vantage of Culture History: Two Twentieth Century Examples,” in Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, ed. Michael Clyne (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), 339–48. 51. The satanic figure Samael originates in the Talmud as a fallen archangel, tempter, and destroyer. In later kabbalistic and Hasidic lore he is joined with Lilith, his consort in the realm of evil. 52. Avraham Novershtern points out that Peretz renders the religious identity of the alien daytsh, just like the term itself, ambiguous. See Avraham Novershtern, “History, Messianism, and Apocalypse in Bashevis’s Work,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth Wolitz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 56. The final version of the poem, written in 1908, suggests that the ambivalence was intentional. In contrast to the previous two versions (published in 1880 and 1888, respectively), the final version replaces the Christian name Maria with the ambiguous term daytshke, the female version of daytsh. For more on the transformation of the poem, see Chava Turniansky, “Di gilgulim fun y.l. peretses вЂmonish’, Di goldene keyt, no. 52 (1965): 205–24. 53. Nicholas Block, “In the Eyes of Others,” 50. According to David Roskies, as Block notes, Peretz identified Heine as an important influence. See David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 108. 54. Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 16. 55. Ibid., 10–11. Peretz maintained that the only way for a “foundling culture” to develop and thrive was to draw from other traditions while simultaneously nurturing its own. 56. I. L. Peretz, “What Our Literature Needs,” trans. Nathan Halper, in Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1975), 27. 57. In another version of the poem, Peretz used the phrase “goose fat” (gentsn-shmalts) instead of pig fat. See I. L. Peretz, “Monish,” in Ale verk (New York, 1947), 23. 58. The preceding English translation of the terms is not literal but idiomatically approximate.Page 179 → Yiddish in fact possesses a large number of terms of endearment for children, many of them diminutive designations for members of the older generations (e.g., bubaleh, tateleh, mameleh), yet comparatively few romantic terms of endearment. 59. It is interesting to note that Peretz removed the polemical passage from the final version of the poem, published in 1908, the year of the Czernowitz Conference. Evidently he believed that Yiddish had accrued sufficient nuance and vocabulary in the twenty years that had elapsed since the poem’s initial appearance. While the presence of this critique in the 1888 version reflects Peretz’s will to enrich and elevate the language, its absence in the 1908 version demonstrates his sense that his goal had been achieved and that Yiddish had accrued a broad range of registers. 60. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 173. For an account of German responses to the Grenzschluss, see 171–84. 61. Arnold Zweig, “JudenzГ¤hlung vor Verdun,” Die SchaubГјhne 13, no. 5 (February 1917): 115–17. The story first appeared in the JГјdische Rundschau in November 1916. For a concise discussion of Zweig’s wartime experiences and their influence on his writing, see the editor’s introduction to Arnold Zweig, The Face of East European Jewry, trans. Noah Isenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), xiii–xv. 62. Buber, “Die Losung,” in Der Jude 1 (April 1916): 1–3. 63. “Wie aus der Ostjudenfrage eine Westjudenfrage wurde” (How a Western-Jewish-Question Has Emerged from the Eastern-Jewish-Question), in Ost und West 2, no. 3 (February/March 1916): 75. This entire issue of the journal was dedicated to the Ostjudenfrage. 64. For more on the Ober-Ost press corps, see David Midgley, “The Romance of the East: Encounters of

German-Jewish Writers with Yiddish-Speaking Communities, 1916–1927,” in Sherman and Robertson, Yiddish Presence, 87–98. 65. Arnold Zweig, The Face of East European Jewry, trans. Noah William Isenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1. For the original quote, see Zweig, Das ostjГјdische Antlitz, illustrated by Hermann Struck (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920), 13. 66. Zweig, The Face, 16–17; Antlitz, 31. 67. Although Jewish involvement in white slavery was pronounced, there was a tendency to exaggerate the percentage of Jewish sex workers and traffickers in media reports, which betrayed an increasing climate of anti-Semitism. For more on this topic, see Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 68. For instance, members of Bertha Pappenheim’s JГјdischer Frauenbund (Federation of Jewish Women, est. 1904) fought against sex trafficking in Germany and abroad. See Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 38–39. For a full-length study of Bertha Pappenheim, see Elizabeth Loentz, Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007). 69. Zweig, The Face, 87; Antlitz, 106–7. 70. Roth, “Wailing Wall” (1929), in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 47. 71. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews: A Classic Portrait of a Vanished People, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 15. For the original German quote, see Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft: Berichte aus der Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede, 1927), 16. 72. Roth, What I Saw, 215. Page 180 →73. DГ¶blin, Schicksalsreise: Bericht und Bekenntnis (Munich: mbH & Co., 1993), 126. For an English translation, see DГ¶blin, Destiny’s Journey, trans. Edna McCown (New York: Paragon House, 1992). 74. Ibid. 75. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Reise in Polen was the testing ground for new narrative strategies that would reach maturity in DГ¶blin’s 1929 masterwork, Berlin Alexanderplatz. See Jonathan Skolnik, “Yiddish, the Storyteller, and German-Jewish Modernism,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 215–23. 76. Julian Preece, “The вЂGrateful’ Traveller: Ways of Seeing in DГ¶blin’s Reise in Polen, ” in Alfred DГ¶blin: Paradigms of Modernism, ed. Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 160–77; 168. 77. Ibid., 310–13. This sentiment echoes the book’s epigraph, taken from Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell: “For a border has a tyrant’s power” (Denn eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht). 78. Among the writers and intellectuals of the Odessa circle who flocked to Berlin were the biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann, the poet Yakov Shteinberg, and the Hebrew national bard, Hayim Nahman Bialik. Odessa had become a major center of Hebrew literature during the mid-nineteenth century due to the influence of the cultural Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) and his Hebrew monthly, Hashiloah (The Dispatch). For more on the journal and its importance for the development of Zionist literature, see Steven J. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Culture: Ha-Shiloach and Herzlian Zionism,” in Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 105–69. 79. For a brief yet thorough discussion of Berlin’s Hebrew diaspora, see Tamara Or, “Berlin, Nachtasyl und Organisationzentrum: Die hebrГ¤ische Bewegung 1909–1933,” in Transit und Transformation: OsteuropГ¤isch-jГјdische Migranten in Berlin 1918–1939, ed. Verena Dohrn and Gertrud Pickhan (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 136–55. 80. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 198. 81. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39–41. 82. Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 229. 83. Moss describes that situation faced by Bergelson and the other Culture League writers as “a strange

sort of double-entry bookkeeping: relative formal freedom coupled with demands for revolutionary expression that were, indeed, impossible to satisfy.” Ibid., 252. 84. Goebbels began his address at a Nazi rally in October 1937 with the following words: “I greet you in the heart of this once Red city, which we conquered with the FГјhrer, a city which once was the reddest city in Europe after Moscow, and which we have made German once more!” The tension between “redshirts” (i.e., Communists) and “brownshirts” (i.e., National Socialists) was once of the defining political tensions of Weimar Germany. An excerpt from Goebbels’s speech is in Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 104. 85. According to Gennady Estraikh, the most financially successful and well-adjusted Yiddish writers in Berlin worked as correspondents for foreign newspapers. The New York-based Yiddish daily Forverts had the largest number of Berlin attachГ©s. Estraikh, Page 181 →“Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin,” Aschkenas—Zeitschrift fГјr Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 16, no. 1 (2006): 118. 86. Eynhorn quoted in Anne-Christin Sass, “Reports from the вЂRepublic Lear’: David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 1920–24,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 184. 87. Heather Valencia, “Stencl’s Berlin Period,” Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language 7, no. 4 (April 6, 2013), http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr07/tmr07004.htm 88. Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree,” 109. 89. For more on Hebrew literary and publishing activity in Berlin, see Zohar Shavit, “On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin in the Twenties: Hebrew Culture in Europe—the Last Attempt,” GutenbergJahrbuch 68 (1993): 371–80. 90. Glenn S. Levine, “Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture 1919–1924,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42 (1997): 85–108; 87. For a detailed analysis of the emergence of Berlin as a center of Yiddish publishing, see Leo and Renate Fuks, “Yiddish Publishing Activities in the Weimar Republic, 1920–1933,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988): 417–34. 91. Kulbak, “Finef briv fun moyshe kulbak tsu shmuel niger,” Di goldene keyt 13 (1952): 237. 92. Bialik cited in Shavit, “On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin,” 374. For an account of Bialik’s time in Berlin, see Shlomo Sheva, Hozeh herah: Sipur hayav shel hayim nahman bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1990), 195–219. 93. Ibid., 378. 94. Marc Caplan, “The Corridors of Berlin: Proximity, Peripherality, and Surveillance in Bergelson’s Boarding House Stories,” in Dohrn and Pickhan, Transit und Transformation, 47. 95. Dovid Bergelson, “The Boarding House of the Three Sisters,” in The Shadows of Berlin, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005), 43. In Yiddish: “In pension fun di dray shvester,” in Geklibene verk, vol. 6, ed. B. Kletskin (Vilna: Klatzkin, 1928–30), 101. All references to the story are taken from the above sources and referenced bilingually as “E” (English) and “Y” (Yiddish). 96. Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree,” 114; Estraikh, “Arcadian Dreams of Dovid Bergelson and His Berlin Circle,” Studia Rosenthaliana 41 (2009), 148. See also Lev Bergelson, “Erinnerungen an meinen Vater,” in David Bergelson: Leben ohne FrГјhling (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000), 284. 97. In the essay, Bergelson dismisses New York and Warsaw in favor of Moscow as the only place where Yiddish literature could thrive. For a translation of “Three Centers,” see Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh, eds., David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (London: Legenda, 2007), 347–56. 98. Daniel Charney, “Dos yidishe berlin,” Literarishe bleter 20, no. 419: 312. 99. Dovid Eynhorn, Shemarya Gorelik, and Max Weinreich, eds., Der onheyb: Zamlbukh far liб№-eraб№-ur un б№їisnshafб№-(Berlin: Farlag VМЈostМЈokМЈ, 1922). 100. Naomi Brenner, “Milgroym, Rimon and Interwar Jewish Bilingualism,” Journal of Jewish Identities 7, no. 1 (January 2014): 27. 101. Ibid., 32 (emphasis added). 102. Moreover, the apolitical nature of the publication earned the staunch disapproval Page 182 →of ideological critics. Brenner discusses the negative reviews of the journal among Yiddish critics such as Melekh Ravitch, Yoysef Tshaykov, and Yaakov Koplevitz. It is interesting to note, in this context, that the Yiddish literary section of the first issue of Milgroym was edited by David Bergelson and Der Nister, two

“fellow travelers” in exile from the Soviet Union. By the time the second issue was published, however, their names had disappeared from its imprint. Brenner, Estraikh, and others speculate that the two “fellow travelers” feared that their continued involvement with this highbrow bourgeois journal might cost them positive relations with their compatriots in Russia. In an open letter to the Moscow journal Der Shtrom (The Stream), Bergelson and Der Nister renounced their involvement with Milgroym and dismissed it as a “dead [publication] created for dead people.” See Estraikh, “Arcadian Dreams, ” 149. 103. Ibid., 29. 104. Pinsker, “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics,” 61. The term “thirdspace” is adopted from the cultural geographer Edward Soja. 105. Heather Valencia, “A Yiddish Poet Engages with German Society: A. N. Stencl’s Weimar Period,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 58. 106. The 1914 prose work Der Prinz von Theben (The Prince of Thebes) presents a narrator with an uncertain gender, identifying as both male prince and female “dreamer” (TrГ¤umerin), who stems from a world where Muslim sheiks and Jewish sultans coexist in harmony. This staged androgyny and cultural hybridity marked the borderline not only between German and Jewish but also between western Christian bourgeois culture and oriental exoticism. Else Lasker-SchГјler, Der Prinz von Theben: Ein Geschichtenbuch mit sechsundzwanzig Zeichnungen der Autorin und farbigen Bildern von Franz Marc (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 34. 107. Else Lasker-SchГјler, “Abraham Stenzel,” in Mendele: Yiddish Literature and Language 5, no. 191 (December 11, 1995), http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/languages/yiddish/mendele/vol5.191 108. For a detailed study of Lasker-SchГјler and Stenzel’s friendship, see Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-SchГјler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1995). 109. The Sholem Aleichem Club, which was made up of writers, artists, and political activists, was established in December 1924 at 9 Kleiststrasse. See Estraikh, “Arcadian Dreams,” 151. 110. Alfred DГ¶blin, “OstjГјdische ErzГ¤hler,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 402 (August 24, 1924). 111. I do not share Jeffrey Sherman’s view that DГ¶blin’s understanding of Yiddish as nonWestern and antimodern betrays “the false aesthetic criteria” by which Yiddish literature was adjudicated by German-Jewish readers. See Sherman, “David Bergelson: A Biography,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 32. 112. Estraikh, “Arcadian Dreams,” 170–71. 113. Stencl quoted in Valencia, “Stenzel’s Berlin Period.” 114. Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree,” 116. 115. During the post–World War I period, Hebrew and Yiddish divided into camps identified with social trends (in particular, Yiddish with socialism and diasporism, and Hebrew with Zionism and Jewish life in Palestine). Shmuel Niger argues that the decline of bilingualism after the war was accelerated by the migrations and displacements of the Page 183 →war as well as the increasing polarization between the “Jewish homeland” in Palestine and the Soviet Union. See Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990), 107–8. 116. Goldberg, Avedot, 89. 117. On Leah Goldberg’s student days in Berlin and Bonn, see Yfaat Weiss, “A Small Town in Germany: Leah Goldberg and German Orientalism in 1932,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 200–229. For a full-length account, see Weiss, Lea Goldberg: Lehrjahre in Deutschland 1930–1933, translated from Hebrew by Liliane Meilinger (GГ¶ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 2010. 118. In her excellent essay on Goldberg’s posthumous novel, Allison Schachter argues: “The fate of Kron’s poetry illuminates a crisis within secular Hebrew culture in twentieth-century Europe. Could a generation of Hebrew writers who embraced European literary culture find a home within that culture? Could a European-inflected Hebrew literature embrace a secularism that is not subject to, or representative of, European Orientalism?” Allison Schachter, “Orientalism, Secularism, and the Crisis of Hebrew Modernism: Reading Leah Goldberg’s Avedot,” Comparative Literature 65, no. 3 (2013): 346. 119. Goldberg, Avedot, 176. 120. Schocken’s generous patronage relieved Agnon of all financial concerns. For more on their

relationship, see Dan Laor, “Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924: A Chapter of a Biography,” AJS Review 18, no. 1 (1993): 75–93. 121. Buber cited in Laor, “Agnon and Buber: The Story of a Friendship, or: The Rise and Fall of the вЂCorpus Hasidicum,’” in Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 54. In a similar vein, Gershom Scholem, who translated several of Agnon’s stories for Der Jude, recalled that Agnon had attained a certain celebrity among the “Cult of the Ostjuden”: “For usВ .В .В . every Eastern Jew was a carrier of all the mysteries of Jewish existence, but the young Agnon appeared to us as one of its most perfect incarnations.” See Gershom Scholem, “Agnon in Germany: Recollections,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken, 1976), 119. 122. See S. Y. Agnon, “Die ErzГ¤hlung vom Toraschreiber,” trans. Max Strauss, Der Jude 2, no. 4 (1917): 253–64. Max Strauss (the brother of Ludwig Strauss) translated several other works by Agnon, including the novellas Der VerstoГџene (“The Abandoned One”), serialized in Der Jude from 1920 to 1921, and Und das Krumme wird gerade (“And the Crooked Is Made Straight”), published in 1919. 123. See Agnon, “The Tale of the Scribe,” trans. Franck Isaac, in A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories, ed. Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), 177–93. 124. S. Y. Agnon, To This Day, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), 174. 125. Ibid., 71. 126. Ibid., 103. 127. Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” 267. 128. Roth, Wandering Jews, 123–4. 129. Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz: Ein StГјrmerbuch fГјr Jung und Alt (Nuremberg: Verlag der StГјrmer, 1938), 12–13. Page 184 → Chapter Two

1. Ludwig Strauss, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Werner Kraft (Munich: KГ¶sel-Verlag, 1963), 699. All translations of Strauss’s poetry in German and Hebrew are my own. 2. Ibid., 700. 3. Friedrich Schleiermacher quoted in Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 8–9. Yildiz’s book interrogates the concept of monolingualism as “a structuring principle of modernity.” She posits the term “postmonolingualism,” or multilingual activity that disrupts the dominant monolingual paradigm, as a productive challenge to the hegemony of monolingualism and mother tongue. 4. Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1869), 15, http://sammlungen.ub.unifrankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/187460 (my translation). 5. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers. 6. Moritz Goldstein, “Deutscher-judischer Parnass,” Der Kunstwart 25, no. 11 (March 1912): 281–94. 7. For more on Goldstein’s essay and the Kunstwart debate, see Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 36–50; and Steven Aschheim, “The Publication of Moritz Goldstein’s вЂThe German-Jewish Parnassus’ Sparks a Debate over Assimilation, German Culture, and the вЂJewish Spirit,’” in Gilman and Zipes, Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought, 299–305. 8. Ludwig Strauss, “Beitrag zur Kunstwart-Debatte,” in Gesammelte Werke Band 4: Dramen, Epen, Vermischte Schriften, ed. Tuvia RГјbner and Hans Otto Horch (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), 442. The original essay appeared without a title under the same heading as the other replies to Goldstein’s essay: “Sprechsaal: Aussprache zur Judenfrage,” Der Kunstwart 25, no. 22 (August 1912): 238–45. 9. Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-SiГЁcle Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 141.

10. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 39. 11. Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 50–52. 12. The patron saint of Jewish renewal was Martin Buber, whose writings and lectures on Hasidism and the “Spirit of the Orient” inspired young German-Jewish idealists in search of cultural authenticity to embrace the perceived nobility of life in the shtetl as the antithesis of the spiritless character of the GermanJewish bourgeoisie. See Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967). On the influence of Buber’s orientalism, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de SiГЁcle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions, 77–132. 13. Fritz Mordecai Kauffmann, “Zum Programm der Freistatt,” Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue 1, no. 1 (April 1913): 4. 14. Ibid. 15. Jakob Wasserman, “Der Jude als Orientale,” in Vom Judentum, ed. Hans Kohn (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 5. 16. Strauss, “Ein Dokument der Assimilation,” Die Freistatt 1, no. 14 (April 1913): 19. 17. Ibid., 15. Page 185 →18. Julius Bab, “Der Anteil der Juden an der deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart,” KГ¶lnische Zeitung, September 17, 1911. 19. He therefore extolled the famous nineteenth-century Jewish salon hostess Rachel Levin Varnhagen, who, according to his account, supported but in no way “judaized” Goethe’s work. 20. Bab, “Assimilation,” Die Freistatt 3 (June 1913): 172. Elizabeth Albanis suggests that Bab’s views on the German-Jewish relationship were strongly influenced by the poet Richard Dehmel, with whom he shared a close relationship. In Dehmel’s “Kultur und Rasse” (Tag, 1908), a fictitious dialogue between a Berlin Jewish artist and a non-Jewish German poet, the former insists that his talent derives from his pure Semitic lineage, whereas the latter argues that cultural achievements result from ethnic and cultural mixing. Eventually, the artist concedes that a certain amount of racial mixing is necessary for a better race to evolve. Elisabeth Albanis, German-Jewish Cultural Identity from 1900 to the Aftermath of the First World War (TГјbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 153. 21. Bab, “Assimilation,” 176. 22. J. G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 5. 23. Strauss, “Beitrag zur Kunstwart-Debatte,” Gesammelte Werke Band 4, 445. 24. Echoing Nietzsche’s distinction between master-morality and slave-morality, Strauss concluded that the Jews could only become “masters” of their own culture by establishing their own norms and parameters for creative production and evaluation. Strauss, “Ein Dokument der Assimilation,” 18. 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 289. 27. I base this linguistic continuum loosely on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion of Kafka’s languages, which they identify as vernacular (Czech), vehicular (German), referential (Yiddish), and mythic (Hebrew). As a German-language writer in Prague, Kafka wrote in the “deterritorialized” vehicular (official bureaucratic and commercial) language, which was distinct from the vernacular (the language of territorialization). Traces of Yiddish, the language of “sense and culture,” and Hebrew, the mythic language of spirituality and religion, serve to “deterritorialize” German. In Strauss’s case, German was both the vernacular and the vehicular language, thus a trilingual model is more appropriate in this context. Yiddish, for Strauss, represents the “nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German language” but that also “reterritorializes” German by providing a linguistic and cultural link with Hebrew. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23–25. 28. Strauss, “Der Mittler: Eine Novelle,” Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue 10 (January 20, 1914): 557. 29. On the tension between humanistic and ethnic definitions of culture in the construction of German-

Jewish identity, see Mendes-Flohr, “Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 23–26. 30. Strauss, “Der Mittler,” 587. 31. The epiphany provides a contrast to an earlier episode in which David flees the neighbor’s home and attempts to calm his nerves by reciting a favorite German poem but Page 186 →is “unable to recall a single word,” a moment that betrays his parasitic relationship to German culture. Ibid., 579. 32. Strauss acknowledged the Kaufmann siblings for introducing him to the world of Yiddish folklore and music. In 1919, Kaufmann published Die schГ¶nsten Lieder der Ostjuden (The Most Beautiful Songs of the Ostjuden), a collection of Yiddish folk songs in German translation, which was a major inspiration for Strauss’s OstjГјdische Liebeslieder. 33. HapoвЂel hatsвЂair was a non-Marxist movement founded in Palestine by A. D. Gordon in 1905. The German faction was established under the leadership of Chaim Arlozorov during World War I, and earned a modest following among Berlin’s young Jewish intelligentsia during the war, competing for their loyalty with the Marxist PoвЂaley tsiyon (Workers of Zion), founded in Russia in 1901 under the leadership of Ber Borochov and brought to Berlin around the same time. The two movements merged on January 5, 1930, to become Mapai (Mifleget poaвЂley вЂeretz yisrael, or the Workers Party of the Land of Israel). 34. Tuvia RГјbner and Dafna Mach, eds., Briefwechsel: Martin Buber-Ludwig StrauГџ, 1913–1953 (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990), 63. 35. This anecdote was related by Zalman Shazar, Strauss’s compatriot in the Zionist movement (and later the third president of Israel). According to Shazar, Gordon asked Strauss what he intended to do after immigrating to the Land of Israel, to which Strauss replied, “I will be a shepherd” (Ich werde SchГ¤fer sein). Evidently, Gordon did not know the German word SchГ¤fer, and confused it with the verb Schaffen (to create), which he interpreted as a euphemism for writing literature. Gordon shot back in Hebrew that there was no place for “detached writers” (sofrim telushim) in the Land of Israel; only pioneers fit for agricultural labor were needed. Strauss was too ashamed to clarify the misunderstanding and returned to Berlin dejected, yet with the new resolve to learn Hebrew. See Zalman Shazar (Rubashov), Or ’ishim: Divrey masвЂa vezikaron вЂal pegishot shetamu (Jerusalem: Ha-sifriya Ha-tsiyonit, 1963), 227–28. 36. RГјbner and Mach, Briefwechsel, 69. 37. The volume OstjГјdische Liebeslieder (East European Jewish Love Songs) was published in Berlin in 1920, and was soon followed by a selection of Yiddish poems by Hayim Nachman Bialik. Strauss’s archive at the National Library of Israel contains a complete translation of part I of Mendele’s Dos vintshfingerl (The Wishing Ring), which evidently was never published. Strauss also proposed a full translation of Mendele’s B’emek ha-bokhe (In the Valley of Tears) for publication in Buber’s Der Jude that similarly was not published. See RГјbner and Mach, Briefwechsel, 73. 38. Strauss, “Nachwort,” OstjГјdische Liebeslieder: Гњbertragungen jГјdischer Volksdichtung (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920), 82–83. 39. Ibid., 82. 40. The relationship between German and Yiddish folk songs is a subject that demands scholarly attention. Benjamin Harshav briefly discusses the influence of the German folk song on Yiddish poetry in his essay, “On Free Rhythms in Yiddish Poetry,” in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore and Literature, ed. Uriel Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 219–66. Although Strauss’s analysis reflects a German bias, it appears to dovetail with Yiddish writers’ understanding of the relationship between German and Yiddish folk literature. 41. Strauss’s theory of translation resembles that of Martin Buber, who maintained that the translator could enliven the Jewish “spirit” (Geist) in a language and aesthetic Page 187 →format accessible to German readers. In his introduction to Die Legende des Baal Schem (The Legend of the Baal Shem, 1908), a collection of folktales by the founder and spiritual leader of the Hasidic movement translated by Buber into German, Buber claimed faithfulness to the original despite having taken significant artistic license to appeal to his target audience. He justified the changes by arguing that the tales were “not translated but retoldВ .В .В . out of their own spirit, as it is present to me.” Buber, The Legend of the Baal Shem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), xiii.

42. RГјbner and Mach, Briefwechsel, 85. 43. One of these poems, the only one Strauss claimed to have written during his visit to Palestine, is “An den Berg Tabor” (To Mount Tabor), which Buber described as an extraordinary expression of the “dialogical, biblical soul.” For a detailed analysis of the poem and Buber’s reaction to it, see my essay, “The Middleman: Ludwig Strauss’s German-Hebrew Bilingualism,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 33, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 76–104, 25–27. 44. In a letter dated October 24, 1924, Buber wrote to Strauss: “I handed your poems over to Eva as their lawful receiver [EmfГ¤ngerin] and possessor, and thereby fulfilled your wish. These poems are such very real words [so sehr wirkliche Worte] and, as such, confront me so closely that I am unable to say anything вЂabout’ them; but at bottom there is no need.” RГјbner and Mach, Briefwechsel, 91. 45. Strauss was a devoted HГ¶lderlin scholar. His doctoral dissertation at the Aachen Technical Academy, “HГ¶lderlins Anteil an Schellings frГјhem Systemprogramm” (1929), was followed by a number of scholarly publications, most notably the Hyperion monograph. 46. Strauss, Dichtungen und Schriften, 175. 47. Strauss, Lyrik und Гњbertragungen: Gesammelte Weke Band 3.1, ed. Tuvia RГјbner and Hans Otto Horch (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000), 340. 48. Strauss, Lyrik, 356. 49. Jonathan D. Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 143. 50. Arthur Ruppin et al., “Brith Shalom, 1925,” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern World, 675. 51. Zohar Maor suggests that Brit Shalom emerged as a reaction to the failure of liberal cosmopolitanism in Europe, and therefore defines the movement as a product of “post-liberalism.” See Zohar Maor, “Ha’arets habilti museget: вЂal hashorashim hamerkaz ’eyropeyim shel вЂbrit shalom, ’” in вЂBrit Shalom’ vehatsiyonut hadule’umit: Ha-she вЂelah haвЂaravit keshe’elah yehudit, ed. Adi Gordon (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2008), 96. In a similar vein, Yfatt Weiss argues that Hans Kohn, the leader of Brit Shalom’s radical faction, believed that German-Czech Bohemia had missed the opportunity for a binational solution, and thus “viewed Palestine in the late 1920s through his experience in Central Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” See Yfatt Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 103. 52. Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–1933 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2002), xiv. 53. According to Ratzabi, the willingness of Brit Shalom’s members to negotiate not only with the Arabs but also with British mandatory forces seeking to limit Jewish immigration (as laid out in the 1922 White Paper) “aroused public polemics accompanied Page 188 →by defamation of the society and its members, to the point at which doubt was being cast on their allegiance to the Zionist idea.” Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism, x. 54. In 1992, the Rheinisch-WestfГ¤lische Technische Hochschule Aachen established the position of Ludwig-Strauss-Professor of German-Jewish Literary History to honor Strauss’s memory. 55. Rainier Grutman, “Self-Translation,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translations Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (New York: Routledge, 2009), 259. 56. Menachem Perry, “Auto-Translation,” in ibid., 181. 57. Ludwig Strauss, Land Israel (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), 16. 58. The word shata, translated as “you place,” is biblical and rarely used in Modern Hebrew. It appears in Psalm 90:8: “Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance” (Shata вЂavonoteinu lenegdekha; вЂalumeinu limeor panekha). 59. The Hebrew word mitrapek means both to “hug/cling” and “to remember fondly.” My intention was to echo—albeit subtly—the double entendre in translation; the word “clinging” invokes both a passionate physical embrace and, idiomatically, “clinging to memories of the past.” 60. Arieh Ludwig Strauss, Shirim uma’amarot, ed. Tuvia RГјbner (Tel Aviv: Keshev leshira, 2013), 20. The poem originally appeared in Land Israel (Berlin: Schocken, 1935). Only in Hebrew did Strauss publish under the name Arieh Ludwig Strauss.

61. The handwritten version of the poem reproduced in this chapter reveals that Strauss added the biblical allusion while editing the poem. 62. Scholars disagree on the precise number of forms of tsimud; some count only eight, others as many as ten. Nine types of tsimud are identified and explained in Shulamit Elizur, Shirat hahol haК»ivrit bisfarad hamuslemit, vol. 3 (Ramat Aviv: Open University of Israel, 2004), 127–30. 63. In his seminal essay on the poetry of the Psalms, Strauss observed that repetition in the Psalms is always a result of parallelism, which is used exclusively for conceptual emphasis, while the absence of vowels in Hebrew means that assonance and rhyme are achievable only as a consequence of morphological or syntactical variation, which likewise serve to amplify theme and content. See Strauss, “Zu Psalm 131, ” Gesammelte Werke Band 2, 286. For a summary of the argument and its relationship to Strauss’s “El hamifrats,” see my “Middleman,” 91–92. 64. For a detailed discussion of Strauss’s use of tsimud, see Shimon Sandbank, “Aryeh ludvig shtraus: вЂPerek tehilim shav ligvulo,’” in Shtey berekhot bayaвЂar: Kesharim umakbilot ben hashirah haвЂivrit vehashirah ha’eropit (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame’uhad, 1976), 87. See also my “Middleman.” 65. Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 296. Miron identifies Mendele (S. Y. Abramovich) as the champion of this model, crediting him not with “bilingualism” but with the formation of two different yet overlapping literatures in Hebrew and Yiddish. 66. Located near Modi’in in central Israel, the Ben Shemen Youth Village, still in existence today, was established in 1927 by the German educator Siegfried Lehmann with the aim of endowing children, many of them orphaned refugees from Europe, with both a humanistic education and agricultural training. Among the school’s prominent alumni Page 189 →are former Israeli president Shimon Peres and former minister of education Shulamit Aloni. 67. Strauss, “Shir layla” (Night Song), Sha’ot vador: shirim [Hours and the generation: Poems] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1951), 63. 68. For a fuller account of Strauss’s engagement with romanticism and neoclassicism, and the manner in which his engagement with form relates to his politics, see my essay, “Unsettling the Land: Ludwig Strauss’s Journey from German Romanticism to Neoclassical Hebrew,” Modern Languages Notes 128, no. 3 (April 2013): 530–52. 69. Strauss, Sha’ot, 107. 70. “Irgun” is an abbreviation of Ha’irgun hatsva’i hale’umi be’eretz yisrael (National Military Organization in the Land of Israel). An offshoot of the larger paramilitary organization Haganah (literally “defense”), the Irgun was in operation between 1931 and 1948, at which point its members were absorbed into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Based largely on the Revisionist Zionist teachings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Irgun’s activities often involved acts of terror and retaliation against both the British occupiers and the local Arab population. Two of the Irgun’s most well-known operations are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, and the Deir Yassin Massacre of April 9, 1948. 71. In the wake of the massacre, Martin Buber and Ernst Simon wrote a letter to Prime Minister David BenGurion, which bore the signatures of many more former Brit Shalom members, in which they pleaded with him to “leave the land of Deir Yassin uncultivated and the housesВ .В .В . unoccupied, rather than to carry out an action whose symbolic importance vastly outweighs its practical benefit.” The letter went unanswered. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 393. 72. Yonatan Vardi argues that the poem “Kfar shadud” “takes on the collective вЂI’ of the Book of Psalms rather than the вЂI’ that stands aside at the gate in protest, as in the books of the Prophets.” Yonatan Vardi, “Al shirato ha-klatsisistit shel ariyeh ludvig shtraus,” in Makom leshira no. 30 (May 2008). http://archive.is/YIS6g 73. Dan Miron argues that H. N. Bialik’s 1903 epic poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” introduced to modern Hebrew poetry the uncontrollable expression of rage. Taking on the role of the poet-prophet, Bialik was responsible for ushering Hebrew poetry into the nationalistic phase of romanticism and expressionism, which “marked the ultimate front line at which Hebrew poetry involved itself with

Zionism.” According to Miron, Uri Zvi Greenberg adapted Bialik’s fire and brimstone style to later events, infusing his responses to the Holocaust and to Arab-Jewish violence with messianic urgency. Dan Miron, H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 47. 74. Seventeen of these lectures were published by Tuvia RГјbner in the volume Be-darkey hasifrut: К»Iyunim besifrut yisrael uvesifrut he’amim (In the Paths of Literature: Studies in Jewish Literature and World Literature, Mosad Bialik, 1965), a wide-ranging study of Hebrew literature and world literature that is still regularly assigned in Israeli comparative literature courses. Although RГјbner did not actually study with Strauss formally, he was in a sense his most devoted pupil and a loyal friend. RГјbner, who also writes bilingually and self-translates between German and Hebrew, has been instrumental in sustaining Strauss’s legacy by editing most of his oeuvre, including four volumes of his Page 190 →collected works in German, his correspondence with Martin Buber, and, more recently, a new edition of Strauss’s Hebrew poetry. RГјbner discusses their friendship and Strauss’s influence at length in his autobiography, A Short Long Life [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Keshev, 2006). 75. Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life (New York: Schocken, 2004), 149. 76. Strauss, Dichtungen und Schriften, 12. The original Hebrew verse is taken from Lina Barouch, “Ludwig Strauss: Polyglossia and Parody in Palestine,” Naharaim 6, no. 1 (2012): 121.

Chapter Three

1. Kulbak, “Finef briv,” 236. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Kulbak’s work are my own. 2. Ibid., 237. 3. Throughout this chapter I will refer to Kulbak’s native realm as either “White Russia” or “Belorussia” in accordance with pre-Bolshevik convention. The name “Belorussia,” which loosely translates as “White Russia,” was used in the days of the Russian Empire to refer to a part of the empire. In Yiddish this region is known as Raysn, which similarly is used strictly in reference to the period prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. After the Russian Revolution, the term “Byelorussia” was preferred and used to name the new Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Byelorussian SSR). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 the Byelorussian SSR was replaced by the independent Republic of Belarus. 4. New styles and movements were influenced by the avant-garde trends and extreme individualism typical of European poetry during the interwar period. As Mikhail Krutikov has shown, a similar turning point took place for the Yiddish novel in Eastern Europe between the Revolution of 1905 in Russia and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He argues that the transition from the preindustrialized shtetl to modern, urbanized life, combined with attendant political and economic transformations contributed to the development of realism and the novel form. Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 5. The flourishing of Yiddish poetry in America began somewhat earlier with the emergence in 1907 of Di yunge (The Young Ones), a coterie of lyric poets based in New York that included Mani Leyb, Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Zishe Landau, Reuven Ayzland, and H. Leyvik. For more on Di yunge and the flourishing of Yiddish poetry in America during the first decade of the twentieth century, see Ruth R. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 6. Seth L. Wolitz, “Between Folk and Freedom: The Failure of the Yiddish Modernist Movement in Poland,” Yiddish 8, no. 1 (1991): 26. 7. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Deveboise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 201. 8. According to Jeffrey Shandler, “While the revival of a vernacular Hebrew came to be linked especially with Zionist plans to create a new Jewish state, Yiddishism was generally tied to a validation of Jewish life in the diaspora, centered in Eastern Europe.” Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 36. Page 191 →9. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 19.

10. Ibid., 107. 11. Kulbak, “Dos yidishe vort,” in Oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. Shmuel Rozshanski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1976), 299. 12. Ibid., 302. 13. Peretz, “Vegn, vos firn op fun yidishkayt,” in Ale verk (New York: CYCO, 1947–48), 58. Peretz elaborated: “A new Jewish life must flourish, a new Bible must be carried to the people as a seed, the Jewish folk (folkstimlikhe) symbols and legends rejuvenated as dew and rain!” 14. Kulbak, “Dos yidishe vort,” 303. 15. Ibid. 16. Kulbak, Naye lider (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1922), 7. 17. The traditional purim-shpiler is a costumed performer who recounts the story of the Purim holiday in rhymed paraphrases and parodies on liturgical texts, often adding obscenities and vulgar humor to entertain the audience. The badkhn likewise uses irreverent humor to entertain the guests at Jewish weddings. Other poets of Kulbak’s generation, perhaps most famously Itzik Manger, took on such roles in their writing as part of the process of constructing a Jewish national canon. 18. In his seminal work on Yiddish prosody, Benjamin Harshav explains that the “syllabic” organizational principle refers to the number of syllables per verse, while the “tonic” principle refers to the number of stressed syllables per verse. A verse is “tonic-syllabic” if it is organized into a fixed number of stressed and unstressed syllables in a fixed order. In Kulbak’s poem, the syllabic count of each quatrain is 7–6-6–6, with the number of stressed syllables per line following the pattern 4–3-4–3. According to Harshav, poems such as this one, which have a fixed strophic structure composed of equal numbers of measures per line, betray the influence of the folk song, whereas freer length and number of measures are associated with more modern, experimental forms. Kulbak played with both rhythmic groups in Naye lider. See Benjamin Hrushovski (Harshav), “On Free Rhythms in Modern Yiddish Poetry,” in Weinreich, Field of Yiddish, 219–66. 19. David Roskies, “The Last of the Purim Players: Itzik Manger,” Prooftexts 13, no. 3 (1993): 211. This ideology of rootedness gained expression in the Landkentenish movement, which emerged in Poland in the mid-1920s. Landkentenish, meaning “knowledge of the land,” promoted hiking, travel, and the study of regional geography, folklore, and history as a powerful challenge to the long-held belief that the Jews do not belong in nature, since they never held a claim to land. Landkentenish sought a solution to the Jews’ deracinated existence by promoting Jewish national identity and integration with the surrounding population based on the concept of doikayt (hereness), a sense of rootedness in the Polish lands where Jews had resided for centuries. See Samuel Kassow, “Travel and Local History as a National Mission: Polish Jews and the Landkentenish Movement in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphart, and Alexandra Nocke (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 241–64; and David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 211–35. 20. Jordan Finkin, “вЂLike fires in overgrown forests’: Moyshe Kulbak’s Contemporary Berlin Poetics,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, ed. Estraikh and Krutikov, 80. 21. The farmer’s greeting resembles modern Byelorussian, but the phrasing is unusual. It is possible that Kulbak was approximating a slightly different phrase that is more commonlyPage 192 → used as a greeting: “Sho slyhac’ na sviecie?” (What’s going on in the world?). Yet Kulbak’s spelling of the first two words in this phrase more closely resembles Polish. The Polish phrase co sЕ‚ychaД‡ is a greeting that translates roughly as “What’s up?” I thank Yuliya Torosjan and Siarhei Biareishyk for interpreting the Byelorussian, and Paula Polowniak Rubin for helping with Polish resemblance. 22. Since the Jews were always a minority in a non-Jewish milieu, they had to know, in addition to their own Jewish language, the language of the coterritorial majority, and where the non-Jewish population was itself divided linguistically, more than one non-Jewish language. See Max Weinreich, “Internal Jewish Bilingualism,” in History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 247–314. 23. In an effort to approximate the effect of simultaneous familiarity and discomfort, I have resorted in my translation to the dialect of the American South, which the average (presumably monolingual) Anglo-

American reader will recognize as “local-yokel” vernacular. In my translation, the speaker’s “Yiddishized” response (howdy shmowdy) calls into question his “indigenousness” to his current environment. One can imagine the response “howdy shmowdy” coming from any American Jewish “Yankee” finding himself in the rural Deep South and feeling, as it were, not at home on the range! 24. Moyshe Leyb Halpern, “Der gasnpoyker,” In nyu york (New York: Farlag Vinkel, 1919). The poem was originally published in 1911 in the satirical New York journal Der kibitzer. For a translation, see Halpern, In New York: A Selection, trans. Kathryn Hellerstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1982). 25. The word hefker originates as a Hebrew rabbinic term referring to ownerless or unclaimed property. It appears in the modern sense of wild, deracinated, and unrestrained in the work of many more Yiddish poets, including H. Leyvick, Avrom Nokhum Stenzel, and Uri Zvi Greenberg. 26. Peretz Markish, “Veys ikh nishtВ .В .В .В ,” in A shpigl oyf a shteyn: Antologye, poezye un proze, ed. Binyomin Hrushovski [Benjamin Harshav], Avrom Sutzkever, and Khone Shmeruk (Tel Aviv: Di Goldene Keyt, 1964), 376. For an excellent reading of Markish’s poem, see Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 202–8. 27. Kulbak, Naye lider, 8. 28. Jean MorГ©as, “The Symbolist Manifesto” (1886), in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 50. 29. Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences” (Correspondances), in Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 12–13. 30. Finkin, “Like fires,” 82. 31. Kulbak, Naye lider, 9. 32. The verb pintelt, meaning “blinking” or “winking,” also contains the noun pintel, meaning “dot” or “point.” The verb-noun ambiguity captures the practically imperceptible reddening action of a ripening strawberry. The word “strawberry” is placed deliberately at the end of line one in order to rhyme with “quietly” in line four, thus approximating the natural end-rhyme of the original. 33. Although there is no evidence indicating that Kulbak read the American imagists, it is likely that he absorbed aspects of the movement from reading the work of his New York compatriots, especially the “Introspectivists,” who were strongly influenced by the Page 193 →Anglo-American modernism of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others. For more on the influence of Anglo-American poetry on the New York Yiddish poets, see the introduction to Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 36–46. 34. The organic convergence of language and landscape becomes even more pronounced when the poem is recited aloud. Hailing from Vilna Province, Kulbak would have spoken with the Lithuanian pronunciation, meaning the word for “red” would be pronounced reyt, and “stillness” as shtilterheyt, thus establishing a consistent rhyme that amplifies the sense of organic unity. 35. With the help of Shmuel Niger, “Raysn” was first published in the New York-based newspaper Di tsukunft in 1922. It later was gathered into Naye lider. 36. Marc Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus: Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh benEfrayim between Nostalgia and Apocalypse,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, ed. Estraikh and Krutikov, 90. 37. Ibid., 94. 38. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), founded in 1922, was one of the four original founding members of the Soviet Union, along with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (SFSR), and the Russian SFSR. Although Minsk was proclaimed its capital as early as 1919, it came under Polish control during the Polish-Bolshevik war and was only returned to the Soviets under the Peace of Riga in 1921. 39. Neil H. Donahue, ed., A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism: Studies in German Linguistics, Literature, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 14. 40. These opposing tendencies are especially visible in the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a leading

member of the German expressionist painters known as Die BrГјcke (The Bridge), which encompasses both natural landscapes and the mirror image of modern urban life. The painting Winter Landscape by Moonlight (Wintermondnacht, 1919), featuring placid blue mountains set against the backdrop of a feverish red sky, stands in stark contrast to his iconic Potsdamer Platz (1914), in which two veiled prostitutes on a platform at the center of Berlin’s dizzying cityscape. 41. Edward Timms and David Kelley, ed. Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), 1. 42. The same figure is sometimes referred to as the Messiah Son of Joseph. 43. The term lamed-vovnik derives from the Hebrew letters lamed and vav, whose numerical value adds up to thirty-six. According to Jewish mystical numerology, the number eighteen stands for “life” since the letters that comprise it spell out khay (“living”); thus, the number thirty-six represents “two lives.” According to traditional lore, there are at all times thirty-six concealed righteous ones whose purpose it is to justify the existence of humanity in the eyes of God. For historical sources on the legend of the lamed-vovniks, see Gershom Scholem, “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 251–56. 44. Kulbak, “The Messiah of the House of Ephraim,” in Yenne Velt: The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult, vol. 1, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Stonehill, 1976), 274–75. 45. Ibid., 277. Page 194 →46. Based on this ambivalent treatment of the “end of days,” Avraham Novershtern suggests that the work is neither “messianic” nor “apocalyptic” but rather “eschatological.” Avrom Novershtern, “Moyshe kulbaks вЂmeshiekh ben efrayim’: A yidish-modernistish verk in zayn literarisher gerem,” Di goldene keyt 126 (1989): 192. 47. Because Meshiekh ben efrayim is so stylistically diverse, scholars disagree as to how it should be categorized. Novershtern reads it as a breakthrough from poetry to prose and from romanticism to modernism (ibid., 194). By contrast, Marc Caplan finds in Kulbak’s idiosyncratic prose style the “anachronistic yet characteristically modernist desire” to “apostrophize” a lost rural landscape in poetry (Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 90). 48. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in sovyet-rusland (New York: Kultur-kongres, 1958), 86. 49. These institutions included a secular school system, sports and scouting groups, theaters, daily newspapers, and—the crowning achievement of Yiddishism—YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research, est. 1925). For an excellent overview of Jewish culture in Vilna during the interwar period, see chap. 1 of Justin Daniel Cammy, “Yung-vilne: A Cultural History of a Yiddish Literary Movement in Interwar Poland” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2003). 50. For specific recollections about Kulbak’s role as a teacher in the Yiddish High School and the Yiddish Teachers Seminary, see Dina Abramowicz, “Heschel in Vilna,” in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, ed. Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner (Summer 1998); and D. Lazar, “Mit moyshe kulbak in vilne,” Di goldene keyt 77 (1972): 36–37. Justin Cammy notes that Kulbak was the “main literary mentor” of Yung-vilne (Young Vilna, 1929–40), a group of Vilnabased Yiddish poets, writers, and artists, including Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who synthesized individual aspirations for artistic experimentation with a collective concern for the social, political, and cultural life of the city. See Cammy, Yung-vilne, 22–24. 51. For more on the complex political history of Vilna between the world wars, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 213–40. 52. For a nuanced study of Jewish cultural life in Minsk during the interwar period, see Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 53. Because Yiddish was viewed as a secular, “native” language, it was preferred to Hebrew, associated with Judaism and Zionism, both of which went against the atheistic dimension of communism. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 39–41. 54. According to Gennady Estraikh, Minsk was particularly attractive to iconoclastic, experimental writers, especially those with Communist leanings, because it lacked traditional Jewish cultural associations. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse

University Press, 2005), 106. 55. Ibid., 231. 56. Delphine Bechtel, “Babylon or Jerusalem: Berlin as Center of Jewish Modernism in the 1920s,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 119. 57. Alexander Moissi and Alexander Granach were popular stage actors in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s. Page 195 →58. Moyshe Kulbak, Disner tshayld herold: Poeme (MinskМЈ: Melukhe-farlag fun VМЈaysrusland, 1933), 239. 59. See, for example, Georg Heym’s “Berlin,” a sequence of eight sonnets, begun in 1910. 60. Jakob van Hoddis (1887–1942) was the pen name of the German-Jewish poet Hans Davidsohn, of which “van Hoddis” is an anagram. Regarded as the prototypical expressionist poem, “Weltende” inspired many poets to write in a similarly grotesque style. 61. Jakob van Hoddis, “Weltende” (End of the World), trans. Christopher Middleton, in Timms and Kelley, Unreal City, 119. 62. Ibid. 63. This includes an account of the infamous Bloody May (Blutmai), a riot in Berlin-Wedding that took place on May 1, 1929, between members of the Berlin Communist Party and the police, which left thirtythree dead and hundreds injured. 64. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, Ashes out of Hope (New York: Schocken, 1977), 15. 65. Kulbak’s “Vilne” first appeared in the New York newspaper Di tsukunft (The Future) in 1926. It is republished in Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking, 1987), 407–11.

Chapter Four

1. Shmuel Huppert, Kodkod ’esh: Bemehitsato shel hameshorer ’uri tsvi grinberg (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2006), 41. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hebrew and Yiddish in this chapter are my own. 2. The fusion of poetry, journalism, and graphic art reappeared in the Hebrew journal Sadan (Anvil), which Greenberg established in 1925 shortly after immigrating to Palestine. For more on this venture and its relationship to Greenberg’s political poetry in Hebrew, see Hannan Hever, “Lirikan ve-publitsist bishnato harishona be’erets yisrael,” in Moledet hamavet yafa: Estetika ve’politika beshirat ’uri tsvi grinberg (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004), 30–42. 3. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Klapey tishim vetishah, in Kol ketavav, vol. 16, ed. Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 195. 4. Shachar Pinsker observes the “astonishingly mobile” nature of Hebrew writers during the first two decades of the twentieth century, such as Gershom Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and David Fogel, who were linked “by their restlessness, and by what we’ll come to see as their literary passports: de facto certifications of affiliation in a community of Hebrew writers that enabled them to travel through multiple geographical spaces as вЂresident aliens,’ and to participate in multiple cultural contexts, while maintaining a sense of belonging to something approximating a coherent group.” Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7. 5. In 1920, the League of Nations held the Paris Conference on Passports & Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. Passport guidelines and a general booklet design resulted from the conference, which was followed up by conferences in 1926 and 1927. These events attested to the disappearance of the Central and East European empires in Page 196 →which passports had not previously been required and the consequent restricted mobility and precarious political status of migrants and stateless individuals. 6. Greenberg, “Proklamirung,” Albatros 1 (Warsaw, September 1922), 3–4. Republished in Greenberg, Gezamelte verk, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1979), 421. Translation by David G. Roskies, “Proclamation,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 15, no. 1 (January 1995):

109–112, quotation on 109. 7. Baudelaire, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal, 8–9. 8. Shmuel Huppert notes that Greenberg discussed his admiration for George’s poetry during their conversations. See Huppert, Kodkod ’esh, 131. 9. Avidov Lipsker notes that Greenberg’s fastidious visual style was inspired by George’s BlГ¤tter fГјr die Kunst (Pages for Art), published between 1892 and 1919, in which graphic design and visual art complement and enhance the written content. For a detailed discussion of George’s calligraphic and typographic style and its influence on Greenberg as editor of Albatros, see Avidov Lipsker, “Hamuza haвЂasirit: Musag programati leshiluv shira, publitsistika, ve’omanut hazutit bikhtav-haвЂet hayidi ’albatros,” in ShevaК» masot К»al shirat uri tsvi grinberg ushtayim К»al shirat elzeh laskМЈer shiler (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010), 21–28. 10. Esther Shumiatcher, “Albatros,” in Albatros 1, no. 10. 11. Greenberg, “Proklamirung,” 421; Roskies, “Proclamation,” 110. 12. Avidov Lipsker, “The Albatrosses of Young Yiddish Poetry: Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Albatross, ” Prooftexts 15, no. 1 (January 1995): 89–108; quotation on 92. Tracing three phases in Greenberg’s Yiddish poetry—romantic impressionist (1912–21); expressionist (1922–23), and postexpressionist (from 1956 onward)—Shalom Lindenbaum argues that the move from impressionistic romantic verse to expressionism was accompanied by the turn from a universalizing tendency to specifically Jewish concerns. See Shalom Lindenbaum, “Shirat uri tsvi grinberg beyidish veyahas habikoret eleyhah ve-elav,” in Yehuda Friedlander, Uri tsvi grinberg: MivhМЈar maКјamre bikМЈoret К»al yetsirato (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974), 242–83. 13. Lipsker, “Albatrosses,” 92. 14. Although Greenberg insisted that he officially became a Zionist in Berlin, scholars disagree regarding the prehistory of his Zionist affiliation. According to Dan Miron, Greenberg first became drawn to Zionism during his time in Warsaw, where he was also exposed to Communism. Both movements attracted him, argues Miron, yet neither appeared to provide a feasible solution to the plight of European Jewry. See Dan Miron, Akdamut le-atsag (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), 40. In contrast to Miron, Tamar Wolf-Monson argues that Greenberg developed Zionist leanings in childhood, although he did not portray the Land of Israel in his early Yiddish poetry. See Tamar Wolf-Monson, Lenogah nekudat hapele’: Hapoetika vehapublitsistika shel ’uri tsvi grinberg bishnot haвЂesrim (Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 2005), 30. 15. Edschmid eschewed superficial forms of experimentation, noting that “nobody is good simply because he is new.” He maintained that only honest, unadorned expression qualified as “good” poetry. Kasimir Edschmid, “Über den dichterischen Expressionismus,” in Гњber den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (Berlin: Erich ReiГџ Verlag, 1919), 70. 16. Greenberg, “Proklamirung,” 423–24; Roskies, “Proclamation,” 112. 17. Edschmid, “Expressionismus,” 40. 18. Greenberg, “Proklamirung,” 421; Roskies, “Proclamation,” 110. Page 197 →19. Greenberg, “Manifest tsu den kegner fun der nayer dikhtung,” Gezamelte verk 2:425. 20. Ibid., 427. “Yedid nefesh” (Beloved of the Soul) is the title of a liturgical poem (piyut) attributed to the sixteenth-century kabbalist Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri, which expresses yearning for the closeness of God. “Ode la’el levav hoker” (I Thank God Who Investigates the Heart), also known as “Simu lev” (Pay Heed), is a sixteenth-century North African piyut by Shemayah Kuson, which deals with the ascent of the soul to heaven every night to be evaluated by the creator of the world and its return every morning. 21. In fact, the poem “Ode la’el levav hoker” served as the main reference for his Hebrew poem “Ba’elef hashishi” (In the Sixth Century). In an interview with Shmuel Huppert, Greenberg sang this piyut from memory. See Huppert, Kodkod ’esh, 100. 22. Greenberg, “Manifest tsu den kegner,” Gezamelte verk, 427. 23. Melekh Ravitsh, “Di naye, di nakete dikhtung: Ziben tezisn,” Albatros 1, no. 15. 24. Ibid., 16. 25. Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 146.

26. The figure of a judaized Jesus already appeared in Yiddish fiction, most notably in Lamed Shapiro’s “The Cross” and Scholem Asch’s “In a Carnival Night,” both published in 1909. As David Roskies suggests, the two radically dissimilar stories can be described as “crucifictions” intended either to promote ecumenical ideals, in the case of the former, or to reflect interreligious strife and apocalyptic dread, in the case of the latter. Greenberg was the first (though certainly not the last) Yiddish writer to introduce the Jewish Jesus in poetry. For a brief yet nuanced discussion of the origins of the Jewish Jesus in Yiddish literature, including a discussion of Greenberg’s use of the motif, see David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 263–75. 27. Although Greenberg’s portrayal of Jesus was an outright scandal, Jesus was becoming a common motif in the Yiddish literature of the period. Matthew Hoffman has shown that the reappropriation of Jesus as a fellow Jew, a common feature of Yiddish modernist writing after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, constituted a dialectical process whereby Jewish writers subverted Christian culture while simultaneously assimilating into a broader European cosmopolitan culture. 28. In contrast to Matthew Hoffmann, who posits a “deep bond between the Jews and Jesus” in Greenberg’s writing of the 1920s (ibid., 120), I argue that Greenberg’s engagement with the figure of Jesus went beyond positive reappropriation. Jesus figures in his writing as a source of both sympathy and disdain, a symbol of simultaneous identification and differentiation. 29. The vulgar image of the coagulated or frozen brain resembles Gottfried Benn’s expressionist prose work Gehirne (Brains, 1916), in which the titular image signifies the tension between the hyperrationality and madness of the age. 30. Lipsker, “Ha-muza ha-asirit,” in Shir ’adom, shir kahol, 21–24. 31. Lipsker mentions the earliest extant example of the Kreuzgedicht, “In Praise of the Holy Cross,” by Hrabanus Maurus (784–856), archbishop of Mainz and the leading figure in the Carolingian Empire. Ibid., 24. 32. Neta Stahl, Other and Brother: The Figure of Jesus in the 20th Century Jewish Literary Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61–62. Page 198 →33. I am indebted to Neta Stahl’s reading of this poem, but I disagree with her interpretation of the Latin words and church bells as symbols of “the aesthetic pleasure of the West” and a reflection of “Greenberg’s inner struggle to leave European culture behind for the sake of reuniting with his people.” 34. The Hebrew and Yiddish poema has its origins in the tradition of epic poetry that developed during the early nineteenth century under the influence of Russian poetry. Beginning in the late 1850s Yehuda Leib Gordon popularized the form with a series of neoclassical Hebrew epic poems that promoted tenets of the Haskalah, several of which were gathered into the volume The Songs of Judah (1868). The form was later adapted to a more lyrical Hebrew style by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernikhovsky. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the poema was frequently adapted by Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poets under the influence of various modernist strains, including symbolism, surrealism, futurism, and expressionism. Some employed the form to reflect on the horrors of the pogroms, as in Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “BeвЂir haharigah” (In the City of Slaughter, 1906), Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Heap, 1922), Moyshe Leyb Halpern’s “A nakht” (A Night, 1919), and Uri Zvi Greenberg’s “In malkhes fun tseylem” (In the Kingdom of the Cross, 1922). In contrast to the traditional poema, which contains a coherent story, the modernist incarnation often lacks a logical sequence of events. 35. Greenberg, “In malkhes fun tseylem,” Gezamlte verk 2:458. 36. Ibid., 460. 37. Ibid., 472. 38. Greenberg, Klapey tishвЂim vetishвЂah, in Gezamelte verk, 195. 39. Greenberg, “Baym shlus: Veytikn-heym af slavisher erd,” Gezamelte verk, 2:475. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 477. 42. Huppert, Kodkod ’esh, 161. 43. Greenberg, “Hatsiyonut haвЂartila’it vehamekonenim beshuleyhah,” Kol ketavav, vol. 16,

22–26. 44. According to Dan Miron, Greenberg believed that the Zionist leadership under Weizmann was deceiving the nation in telling them that the Balfour Declaration promised a sovereign state, when in fact it only promised a Jewish enclave, minority rights within an Arab-majority state. Miron, AkМЈdamud leatsag, 40–41. 45. Greenberg uses the transliterated German word gemäßigt (moderate) in his description of Weizmann, a deliberate jab at the latter’s German Zionist cohort. His pugnacious tone certainly earned Greenberg foes within the mainstream Zionist movement. Hayim Greenberg, the editor of HaвЂolam, later denied any responsibility for the essay’s appearance, and Greenberg recounted that no copies of the issue in which it was published were made available at the Zionist Congress, which he interpreted as a deliberate attempt to sideline his radical politics. 46. Miron, Akdamut, 41. 47. Arnold Band, “The Rehabilitation of Uri Tzvi Greenberg,” Prooftexts 1 (1981): 321. Shalom Lindenbaum claims that a political-messianic element was present even in Greenberg’s earliest Yiddish poetry, published between 1912 and 1919. Shalom Lindenbaum, “Between the Pole of Existence and the Pole of History: The Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg,” Jewish Affairs 53, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 111. 48. The poems, which appeared in HaвЂolam, include “Mispar ha-to’im hagdolim” (A Number of Great Wanderers), “Ba’elef hashishi” (In the Sixth Millennium), “Habasar Page 199 →vehadam” (The Flesh and the Blood), and “Drakhim bamaвЂarav” (Paths in the West). When Greenberg arrived in Palestine he published the essay “вЂAley karka†kan” (Here Upon the Soil), in which he announced that the Jew cannot return to Europe, for his only home is in the Land of Israel, where a sovereign Jewish state will soon arise. See Wolf-Monson, Lenogah nekudat hapele’, 13–33, 59–62. 49. Ibid., 74. For more on the significance of Mephisto for Greenberg’s emerging expressionist style, see Avraham Novershtern, “HamaвЂavar ’el ha’ekspresyonizm biyetsirat вЂuri tsvi grinberg: hapo’emah вЂmefisto’; gilgule вЂamadot vedovrim,” Hasifrut, nos. 35–36 (1986): 122–40. 50. The poem first appeared in Mark and Rachel Wischnitzer’s Berlin Jewish art journal Rimon (Pomegranate). Although Rimon had a Yiddish companion version, entitled Milgroym, only the visual content of the two versions remained consistent, whereas there was no overlap with respect to literary content. Greenberg’s piece appeared exclusively in the Hebrew edition. Evidently, he had no intention of translating the poem, which departs significantly from his Yiddish writing of the same period. See WolfMonson, Lenogah nekudat hapele’, 27. For more on the nature and function of bilingualism in the production of Rimon/Milgroym, which includes a discussion of Greenberg’s contributions, see Brenner, “Milgroym, Rimon and Interwar Jewish Bilingualism,” 23–48. 51 Greenberg, “Al drakhim bamвЂarav,” Rimon: Me’asef ’itey la’omanut ulesifrut 6 (1924): 19–21. The later version of the poem, “BamaвЂarav,” appears in Eymah gedolah veyareaḥ, in Kol ketavav, vol. 1, 42–47. 52. The Ganges appears frequently in European Romantic poetry as the quintessential exotic setting. For example, in “Auf FlГјgeln des Gesanges” (On the Wings of Song, 1827), Heinrich Heine describes the distant “fields of the Ganges” (die Fluren des Ganges) as “the most beautiful place,” while Elizabeth Barrett Browning portrayed the Ganges as the site of the tension between female virtue and passion in “A Romance of the Ganges” (1838). 53. Greenberg, “Al drakhim,” 19. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Stahl, Other and Brother, 72. 57. Greenberg, “Al drakhim,” 21. The alternate verses in parentheses appear in the revised version of the poem, “Bama’arav,” 46. 58. Miron, H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry, 13, 47. 59. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 138. 60. Sigrid Bauschinger, Else Lasker-SchГјler: Biografie (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), 8. 61. Greenberg, “Dvorah bishviyah,” Kol ketavav, vol. 15, 122–23.

62. Ibid., 123. 63. Ibid., 127. 64. Hever, Moledet hamavet, 30–31. 65. The left-wing political party known as Mapai (an acronym that stands for Mifleget PoвЂaley ’erets yisrael, or the Workers Party of the Land of Israel) was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party (Mifleget ha’avodah) in 1968. 66. For more on the Brit habiryonim faction, see Eran Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Page 200 →Press, 2005); and Colin Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right (London: I.B. Taurus, 2006). 67. Stahl, Other and Brother, 81. The quote is taken from the poem “Mehutakh mi-kol ehav, me damo” (Cut Off from All His Brothers, from His Blood, 1929). 68. Hever, Moledet hamavet, 49. 69. Miron, Akdamut, 128. 70. Greenberg, Sefer hakitrug veha’emunah (Jerusalem: Sadan, 1937), 163–64. 71. For more on the reception of Greenberg’s post-Holocaust writing, see Miron, Prophetic Mode, 230–37. 72. Hever, Moledet hamavet, 50.

Chapter Five

1. Gertrud Kolmar, “MГ¤dchen,” in Das lyrische Werk (Munich: KГ¶sel, 1960), 59. All translations of Kolmar’s poetry are my own. 2. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 24. 3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 32. 4. Gertrud Kolmar, My Gaze Is Turned Inward: Letters, 1934–1943 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 62. 5. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 119. 6. Monika Shafi, “Turning the Gaze Inward: Gertrud Kolmar’s Briefe an die Schwester Hilde 1938–1943,” in Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present, ed. Elke P. Frederiksen and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 103. 7. Hilde Wenzel, Kolmar’s younger sister, indicated in a diary entry from 1922 that the family witnessed the assassination of Walter Rathenau and right-wing demonstrations, and therefore was aware of the dangers that lay ahead. See Woltmann, Kolmar, 116. 8. The novel appeared posthumously in 1965, under the auspices of an East German press, with the shortened title Eine Mutter. It was republished in 1978 under the title Eine jГјdische Mutter. 9. Brigitte Goldstein, “Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943): German-Jewish Poetess,” Modern Judaism 15, no. 3 (1995): 268; Silke Nowak, Sprechende Bilder: Zur Lyrik und Poetik Gertrud Kolmars (Berlin: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 186. Carola Daffner, “Gertrud Kolmar: Dichten im Raum” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2007), 138. 10. In a letter dated May 15, 1940, Kolmar informed her sister Hilde that she had just “perpetrated” (verbrochen) her first poem in Hebrew (Kolmar, Gaze, 62). In two additional letters, she refers to Buber’s Hasidic tales (ibid., 67, 146). Unfortunately, none of her Hebrew writings survive. 11. Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, eds., The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002), 2. 12. Ibid. 13. Kolmar, “Die JГјdin,” in Das lyrische Werk, 36. 14. Daffner, Dichten, 139. Page 201 →15. For a synoptic account of the transformation of traditional female roles in Jewish society in

Europe and America between 1850 and 1950, see Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 16. Nowak, Sprechende Bilder, 189. 17. Daffner, Dichten, 138. 18. This popular nineteenth-century phrase is the title of the first novel in Paul Lindau’s trilogy, Berlin, published in 1886. Lindau observed that Berlin had developed into a metropolis as a result of the massive influx of poor and proletarian immigrants from the eastern provinces. The same migratory pattern was reproduced within the city as immigrants successfully integrated into the middle and upper classes and steadily streamed into the “better” neighborhoods in the western part of the city, leaving new immigrants in the poorer areas on the eastern bank of the Spree River. 19. Johanna Woltmann, Gertrud Kolmar: Leben und Werk (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1995), 39, 50, 118. 20. Today, two Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) bearing the names Ludwig Chodziesner and Gertrud Kolmar along with their respective years and sites of deportation and execution can be seen in front of MГјnchener Strasse 18a (formerly Speyerer Strasse 10) at Bayarischer Platz. In 1993, the entire square was turned into a memorial designed by Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock to commemorate Jewish persecution under the Nazis. Known as Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), the memorial is a public art installation of eighty double-sided signs placed on lampposts, each carrying a condensed versions of an anti-Jewish Nazi regulation on one side and a related image on the other. The purpose of the installation is to remind passersby of the daily deprivation and humiliation—as well as the ultimate deportation—experienced by Jewish residents in this quiet residential neighborhood. 21. Kolmar’s sister Margot (1897–1942) immigrated to Italy and later to Australia, where her brother, Georg (1900–1980) had resettled, while the youngest sibling, Hilde (1905–72), went to Switzerland. 22. In 1916 Kolmar successfully completed her provincial exams to qualify as a teacher of English and French. Between 1917 and 1918 she worked as a French and English interpreter and mail censor at the postal station of the DГ¶beritz Prison Camp. She studied Russian with the help of a female friend and possibly also through her work at DГ¶beritz, which housed many Russian prisoners as well. She could also read Czech, Flemish, and Spanish, and toward the end of her life took up the study of Hebrew. 23. Kolmar, My Gaze Is Turned Inward: Letters, 1934–1943, trans. Brigitte M. Goldstein (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 32. 24. Woltmann, Gertrud Kolmar, 122. 25. Kolmar, “Die Unerschlossene,” in Das lyrische Werk, 12. 26. Shafi, “Turning the Gaze Inward,” 104. 27. Kolmar was a great admirer of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, but she equivocated regarding its influence on her own. On November 5, 1934, she wrote to her cousin Walter Benjamin: “Among the German poets who might have influenced me are Rilke and [Franz] Werfel, in both cases, various details from their works; in Rilke it’s the вЂplastic’ of the later poetry that attracts me,” Kolmar, Gaze, 155. In a letter to Hilde from September 11, 1940, however, she writes: “RilkeВ .В .В . is very close to me. Critics have claimed to detect Page 202 →his influence in my poetry. They are mistaken. I became acquainted with Rilke (with the exception of the вЂCornet’) so late that he was no longer able to influence my development,” ibid., 53. 28. Barbara Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, trans. James McFarland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Through fragmentary case studies of intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Margarete Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Hahn reconstructs the evolving concept of the “Jewess,” a term that once captured the elegance and esprit of the salons and that came to be associated with all that the dominant culture deemed dangerous. 29. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, 130. 30. Kolmar, Gaze, 94. 31. She published only one other work of fiction, the novella Susanna (1938), the last literary piece she completed before her deportation to Auschwitz. 32. A clear example of this is Irena Kacandes, “Making the Stranger the Enemy: Gertrud Kolmar’s Eine juedische Mutter,” in Women in German Yearbook 19 (2003), ed. Ruth-Ellen Joeres and Marjorie

Gelus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 99–116. In an otherwise sensitive reading, Kacandes describes the novel as a narrative portrayal of the complex processes that allowed Germans to view the Jews as strangers and enemies. Focusing exclusively on Martha’s ostracism, she reads the novel as a critique of anti-Semitism and therefore ignores the attendant lament over the consequences of assimilation. 33. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland, 97–101; Ursula Mahlendorf, “Medea Darning Socks: German Child Abuse Fiction as Cultural Critique,” Pacific Coast Philology 36 (2001): 10–31; Woltmann, Kolmar, 155–62. 34. Karl Leydecker, German Novelists of the Weimar Republic: Intersections of Literature and Politics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 1. 35. Anja Colwig argues that Kolmar’s inclusion of social issues under debate in Weimar (including motherhood, working women, euthanasia, suicide, sexual violence, criminality, and homosexuality), as well as of real geographical locations and dates, suggests that she expected her readers to make connections between her story and their actual knowledge of Weimar Berlin. See Anja Colwig, “Eine jГјdische Mutter: ErzГ¤hltes Berlin, deutsches Judentum und Antisemitismus in Gertrud Kolmars ErzГ¤hlung,” in Lyrische Bildnisse: BeitrГ¤ge zu Dichtung und Biographie von Gertrud Kolmar, ed. Chrysoula Kambas (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1998), 89–114. 36. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 18. A good example is the protagonist of Erich KГ¤stner’s novel Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten (Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, 1931), written at the same time as Kolmar’s Die jГјdische Mutter (GГ¶ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1999). 37. Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 51. 38. Lethen, Cool Conduct, 128. 39. Ibid., 198. 40. Among the first works of literature on this theme to receive critical acclaim was Hans Leopold Wagner’s 1776 drama Die KindesmГ¶rderin, in which the well-bred virgin Evchen Humbrecht is lured by the officer von GrГ¶ningseck into a house of ill repute, where he drugs, rapes, and impregnates her. Although the officer later repents and promisesPage 203 → to marry her, Evchen believes she has been abandoned and consequently goes mad and kills her child. 41. Schiller’s 1780 poem “Die KindesmГ¶rderin” articulates this critique overtly. The innocent heroine, Luise, is seduced, impregnated, abandoned, and, consequently, is driven to kill her infant son. In the final stanza, Luise becomes a mouthpiece for Schiller’s didactic agenda with the following warning: “Trauet nicht den Rosen eurer Jugend, / Trauet, Schwestern, MГ¤nnerschwГјren nie!” (Trust not the roses of your youth! / Sisters, never trust the oaths of men!). 42. Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 113. Hull notes that although infanticide was a subject of concern throughout Enlightenment Europe, “in no other place did it capture the attention of dramatists, novelists, and essayists as it did in Germany,” ibid., 111. 43. Mahlendorf, “Medea Darning Socks,” 12. 44. Kolmar, A Jewish Mother from Berlin, trans. Brigitte M. Goldstein (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997), 11. In German: Kolmar, Die jГјdische Mutter, 18. Citations from the novel will henceforth appear with the page number from the English translation (Mother), followed by the page number in the German original (Mutter). 45. Kolmar, Mother, 14; Mutter, 21. 46. Ibid. 47. Sander Gilman notes that yellow skin was part of the standard image of the diseased Jew, as evidenced by Johann Jakob Schudt’s description: “among several hundred of their kind [i.e., the Jews] he had not encountered a single person without a blemish or other repulsive feature: for they are either pale and yellow or swarthy,” Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the вЂModern Jewess, ’” German Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1993): 199. 48. Gregor Johann Mendel’s theory of inheritance, considered highly controversial when published in 1866, was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and became a core principle of classical genetics

invoked by the Nazis in their pseudo-science of racial classification. 49. Kolmar, Mother, 34; Mutter, 43. 50. Wasserman, “Der Jude als Orientale,” in Kohn, Vom Judentum, 7. 51. Kolmar, Mother, 64; Mutter, 83. 52. Ibid., 90, 109. 53. Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 5. 54. The Stationendrama (station drama) form was influenced largely by the theatrical works of August Strindberg, such as the plays To Damascus (1898) and A Dream Play (1902). Prominent examples of the form in German expressionist theater include Georg Kaiser’s Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight, 1912) and Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (The Transformation, 1919) and Masse Mensch (translated as Man and the Masses, 1920). 55. Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 98, 119. 56. Ibid. 57. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 244. 58. Atina Grossmann, “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?,” in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, ed. Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 62–80. Nineteenth-century Page 204 →German medical discourse and popular literature portrayed the Jewish rite of circumcision as a leading cause of the spread of venereal disease, specifically syphilis. See Jay Geller, “From Mohels to Mein Kampf: Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification,” in Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 88–131. 59. Grossmann, “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female,” 62. 60. According to Richard McCormick, “Female identity was in many ways a metonymy for the broader debate on cultural identity, a source of male anxiety about modernity and a topic of intense negotiation for women themselves, who were confronted with new choices, opportunities and burdens,” McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 3. 61. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 244. 62. Gilman, “Salome,” 202. Gilman cites Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895), which depicts the introduction of syphilis into the world through the biblical Jewess Salome. In contrast to her male consort, a hideous Jewish devil, Salome is portrayed as dark-skinned and beautiful. Her femininity is necessary for the seduction, which facilitates the devil’s corruption of the flesh. “Two related images of difference are thus conflated,” writes Gilman, “that of femme fatale and belle juive, the former misogynist and the latter anti-Semitic.” 63. Ibid., 205. 64. Kolmar, Mother, 100; Mutter, 121. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 104, 126. In Weimar parlance the term Bubi (meaning “lad” or “boy”) brings to mind the immediately masculine Bubikopf, a bobbed hairstyle made popular by celebrities like Louise Brooks and Coco Chanel. 67. See Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 68. The term “sexual intermediaries” was coined by Weimar sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to refer to a broad range of cross-gender preferences that could be found in Berlin’s vast array of cabarets and nightclubs. Hirschfeld, who was Jewish and homosexual, founded the Institut fГјr Sexualwissenschaften in 1919, which played a leading role in the campaign for homosexual rights. In addition to popularizing a taxonomy of “sexual intermediaries,” Hirschfeld is known for coining the terms “third sex” to refer to the idea that homosexuality is biologically determined and naturally occurring, and “transvestite” as a category distinct from homosexuality. 69. Kolmar, Mother, 104; Mutter, 126. 70. Ibid., 119, 144. 71. Ibid., 108, 131. 72. Der Giftpilz (The Poison Mushroom), a pedagogical book published by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in 1938, was intended to teach young readers to distinguish between Germans and Jews just as they learn to

distinguish between “normal” and poisonous mushrooms. The cover image portrays an anthropomorphized greenish toadstool bearing a Star of David on its chest and, on its face, a large hooked nose and fire-red beard. Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz: Ein StГјrmerbuch fГјr Jung und Alt (Nuremberg: Verlag der StГјrmer, 1938). 73. It is interesting to note that Lulu is featured early on in the film standing in her apartment before a menorah. The Jewess and the femme fatale is thus subtly yet perceptibly conflated. Page 205 →74. After Albert callously abandons her, she rushes to his office to plead with him to take her back, whereupon she discovers a copy of the anti-Semitic periodical, Bulletin for Nationalistic Thinking, on his desk. Mother, 151; Mutter, 182. 75. Ibid., 157, 189–90. 76. Barbara D. Wright, “Intimate Strangers: Women in German Expressionism,” in Donahue, German Expressionism, 292. 77. Kolmar, Gaze, 30. The quotation is taken from Franz Grillparzer’s 1843 poem “In der Fremde” (In a Strange Land), which appears as the epigraph to this book.

Epilogue

1. Greenberg preferred the Yiddish convention of referring to the Holocaust with the biblical word ḥurban, “destruction” to the more widely used term shoah (literally “conflagration” or “holocaust”). As David Roskies explains, Zionist ideology emphasized the heroism (gvurah) of the fighters in the midst of destruction (for this reason, the holiday commemorating the Holocaust in Israel is known as Yom hashoah vehagvurah), whereas Greenberg stressed the destruction alone. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 273. 2. Peter Schneider, Berlin Now: The City after the Wall, trans. Sophie Schlondorff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 301. 3. According to Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola, as of 2012 roughly 3,000 Israelis were living in Berlin (although other reports indicate higher numbers). A more precise and up-to-date figure is difficult to determine because not all Israelis in Berlin have settled there permanently, and because a significant portion enter Germany on a European passport. See Lior Dattel, “Israeli Emigration Slowing Down, despite Fears of вЂBerlin Aliyah,’” Ha’aretz, October 14, 2014. 4. Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The New Generation of Wired Hebrew Nomads” (October 24, 2014), http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/48436-141024-the-new-generation-of-wired-hebrew-nomads. This piece is adapted from the new introduction to the second edition of Oz-Salzberger’s Israelis, Berlin, published in Hebrew in 2014. The first edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 2001) was the first full-length sociological study to map the trend of Israeli migration to Berlin. 5. “The Milki Protest” reprised “The Cottage Cheese Protest” of 2011, when a desperate middle class took to the streets for weeks in response to the rising cost of living in Israel relative to the low income of the average family. 6. Facebook groups such as Olim le-berlin and Yisraelim be-berlin (Israelis in Berlin) attest to strong ties among Israeli expatriates. 7. I borrow this phrase from the title of an article by Rania Salloum featured in the English edition of the German newspaper Der Spiegel on October 10, 2014. 8. Jodi Rudoren, “An Exodus from Israel to Germany, a Young Nation’s Fissures Show,” New York Times, October 16, 2014. 9. This statement, which appeared on Yair Lapid’s public Facebook page on September 30, 2014, garnered thousands of responses, both positive and negative. 10. Dan Margalit, “Yordey hamilki: Behazarah ’el sir habasar hagermani,” Yisra’el hayom (October 11, 2014), http://www.israelhayom.co.il/article/224415. The newspaper is considered the mouthpiece of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party. Page 206 →11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 53. 12. Oz-Salzberger, “Wired Hebrew Nomads.” 13. Said, “Mind of Winter,” 55.

14. Tal Hever-Chybowski quoted in an interview with Erad Ben Yitzhak for his blog, “Hasho’el hahaviv” (The Cheerful Questioner). 15. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 261. 16. Shemoelof is associated with a group of highly political Mizrahi poets known as Ars Poetica, who call into question the Eurocentric biases underlying Israeli culture. The name Ars Poetica is a play on words that reappropriates the derogatory epithet ars, derived from the Arabic word for “pimp” and used in Hebrew to designate a sleazy (usually Middle Eastern) male. As their name suggests, these young poets aim to revalorize Arabic as a silenced Jewish language. 17. Mati Shemoelof, “Lihiyot berlina’i-yisrae’li,” Ha’aretz, October 12, 2014. All translations from the Hebrew are my own. 18. Shemoelof, “Hineh ’ani yoshev, вЂim shney plitim mimashad,” in Ha’okets (April 12, 2014). http://www.haokets.org/2014/04/12/ . For an alternate English translation of this essay, see Shemoelof, “At the Exiled Iranian Parliament,” in +972 Magazine (June 21, 2014), http://972mag.com/at-the-exiled-iranian-parliament-in-berlin/92370/ 19. Ibid. 20. “Germanness” as a concept has undergone transformation over the years. Deutschtum is a historical term that arose during the Enlightenment within the context of emerging nationalism to delineate the cultural and ethnic identity of an ostensibly homogeneous German language community (Sprachgemeinschaft) with a unified national spirit (Volksgeist). When one speaks of “Germannness” or “being German” (Deutsch-sein) today, it is within the discourse on citizenship, which concerns a multiethnic society of German speakers. 21. Simmel, “Stranger,” in Sociology of Georg Simmel, 407. 22. GГ¶kce Yurdakul and Michal Bodemann suggest that the equation of Jews and Turks was prevalent during the 1990s and early 2000s among members of the radical Right, as exemplified by a piece of neoNazi graffiti that read: “What the Jews have behind them is what is still to come for the Turks.” In response to such public displays of xenophobia, a group of Turkish immigrants at a street protest in Berlin in 2001 carried a banner that read: “We don’t want to be the Jews of tomorrow.” Whereas the neo-Nazis employ the German-Jewish narrative in negative terms, according to Yurdakul and Bodemann, the Turkish immigrants “use the cultural repertoire of German-Jewish relations positively, for their own objectives.” GГ¶kce Yurdakul and Michal Bodemann, “вЂWe Don’t Want to Be the Jews of Tomorrow’: Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11,” German Politics and Society 24, no. 2 (2006): 52. 23. Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 130–31. 24. Ећenocak argues that Turkish migrants and “post-migrants” (i.e., second generation Turkish Germans) should look to the history of German Jews as a “creative influence” and “experiential background” against which to reposition and redefine themselves Page 207 →within German society. See Zafer Ећenocak and BГјlent Tulay, “Germany—Home for Turks? A Plea for Overcoming the Crisis between Orient and Occident,” in Zafer Ећenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998, trans. Leslie A. Adelson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 5–6. Leslie Adelson discusses Ећenocak’s notion of “touching” in her preface to the aforementioned volume and in the essay “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s,” New German Critique 80 (2000): 93–124. 25. Ећenocak, GefГ¤hrliche Verwandtschaft (Munich: Babel Verlag, 1998), 90. 26. Leah Goldberg, Avedot, 20.

Page 208 →Page 209 →

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Index Abramovitch, S. Y., 28, 63, 82; 179n45, 179n47, 190n65 Agnon, S. Y., 3, 11, 39, 48, 165, 185n120; Ad hena, 49–51; “Aggadat hasofer,” 49; friendship with Martin Buber, 49; 185n121 Albatros, 102–11, 125, 128. See also Uri Zvi Greenberg aliyah, 2, 64, 116–19, 121–22, 125, 207. See also migration American literature, 90–91, 158, 194n33; and Yiddish, 86, 192n5, 194n33 anti-Semitism, 21, 31, 51, 55, 57, 146, 150; Jewish women, 16, 33, 146–54, 151, 153, 206n62; parvenu, 20, 22, 151; stereotypes: feminized Jewish male, 151–52; Apollinaire, Guillaume, 109–10 Arab-Jewish relations, 54, 66, 116; Arabic language, 165–66; references to Arabs in Jewish literature, 64–68, 114; violence, 69, 74–76, 125–26 Arendt, Hannah, 164, 204n28, 208n11 Aschheim, Steven, 22–23; Brothers and Strangers, 9–10, 24, 176n3, 117n17 assimilation, German-Jewish, 2, 6, 8, 10, 22–23, 32–33, 58, 140; critique of, 24–25, 26–29, 56, 61–63, 145–54, 166; postassimilation, 10, 16, 24 132 Auschwitz, 132, 140, 159, 160, 204n31. See also Holocaust; World War II Austro-Hungarian Empire. See Habsburg Empire avant-garde, 40–41, 80, 82, 85, 93, 94, 98, 101, 115 Bab, Julius, 58–63, 187nn19–20, 187n24 Bar Kochba Society of Prague, 2, 23, 178n24 Baudelaire, Charles, 88, 103–6. See also symbolism Belorussia, 80, 81, 90–91, 157, 159; Byelorussian language, 85, 95; Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, 80, 92, 157; White Russia, 16, 79; See also Vilna Benjamin, Walter, 17–18, 203n27; debate with Ludwig Strauss, 56–57 Ben Shemen Youth Village, 74, 77, 190n66 Bergelson, Dovid, 3, 6, 184n102; and communism, 39, 99, 182n83, 183n97; life and work in Berlin, 42–47 Berlin Wall, 160–61 Bernstein, Rachel Wischnitzer, 43–44 Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 3, 6, 11, 39, 63, 126, 182n78; Devir Publishing House, 40, 42, 188n37; “In the City of Slaughter,” 191n73, 200n34

Bible, 12, 54, 59–60; literary allusions, 73, 76, 92, 136–39, 162, 190n58 Bildung, 22, 29, 30, 61, 149, 150; BildungsbГјrgertum, 22, 61, 150 bilingualism, 14, 15, 160, 165, 190n65; German-Hebrew, 53–54, 69–78, 157; Hebrew-Yiddish, 43–44, 184n115, 191n74, 201n50; internal bilingualism, 179n41, 184n115, 194n22 Page 222 →Birnbaum, Nathan, 25–26, 178nn31–32, 178n35 Bolsheviks, 38–39, 95, 96, 192n3, 195n38, 199n27 Brenner, Michael, 10–11, 39, 144 Brit Shalom, 69, 74, 189n51, 189n53, 191n71 Brod, Max, 2, 43 Buber, Martin: and Brit Shalom, 75; and Der Jude, 31, 43, 49, 178n29, 188n37; friendship with Ludwig Strauss, 63–64, 69, 78, 189nn43–44; interpretation of Hasidism, 23–25, 133, 177n18, 177n20, 178n22, 189n41; and Jewish renewal, 24, 31, 49, 186n12 Caplan, Marc, 42, 92, 196n47 communism, 38; 39, 40, 47, 95, 98; Anti-Fascist Committee, 99; See also Soviet Union Czernowitz Conference, 26, 178n35, 181n59 daytsh, 19, 21, 26–31, 179n49, 180n52; daytshmerish, 180n50 Der Jude, 31, 43, 49, 178n29, 185nn121–22, 188n37 Diamant, Dora, 1–3, 171n2 Diaspora, 11, 13, 32, 56, 164, 175n49; diaspora-nationalism, 25; galut, 120, 125, 160; Israeli Diaspora, 17, 164 Die Freistatt: AlljГјdische Revue, 57, 63, 178n31. See also Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann DГ¶blin, Alfred, 3, 32; friendship with Dovid Bergelson, 42, 45–47, 184n111; Reise in Polen, 36–37, 42, 45–47, 182n75 empires, 3, 5, 37, 139, 157, 168: Russian Empire, 14, 20–21, 38–39, 69, 92, 157, 161, 172n15, 192n3, 197n5; Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire, 14, 20–21, 38–39, 69, 161; Prussian Empire, 5, 21, 23, 27, 37, 140 Enlightenment, 6, 174n39, 205n42, 208n20; critique of, 52, 147–50, 176n6, 176n11; in Eastern Europe, 28, 179n45. See also Haskalah expressionism, 5, 15, 23, 44, 80, 158; Expressionist Manifesto, 105, 198n5; German art, 195n40; German literature, 97–99, 147, 154, 197n60, 199n29; Hebrew literature, 76, 191n73, 200n34; Yiddish literature, 52, 80, 93–95, 103–06, 112, 116–17, 125, 128 Eynhorn, Dovid, 40, 43, 82 fascism, 18, 52, 74, 98, 168; and Revisionist Zionism, 126, 159 Feffer, Itzik, 95, 99

filicide, 145, 150; KindesmГ¶rderin, 147, 204n40, 205n41 folklore: folk song, 83, 82, 88, 188n32, 188n40, 193n18; German-Jewish interest in, 14, 24, 49, 54, 63, 94; and Yiddish literature, 12, 62, 80–84. See also Hasidism Forverts, 40, 182n85 Galicia, 3, 24, 32, 33, 49. 51 Gay, Peter, 6–7, 18 George, Stefan, 103–4, 198nn8–9 German reunification, 16; Berlin Wall, 160–61; VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung, 143, 161 Gilman, Sander, 54, 151, 205n47 Goebbels, Josef, 40, 182n84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 64, 66, 77, 147, 149 Goldberg, Leah, 18, 77, 174n47, 185n117; Avedot, 47–48, 165, 168, 175n55, 185n118 Goldstein, Moritz, 56, 61 Gordon, Yehuda Leib, 27, 200n34 Greater Berlin Act (GroГџ-Berlin-Gesetz), 5 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 8, 14, 45: Albatros, 102–11, 125, 128; arrival in Berlin, 101–2; and Di Khalyastre, 101; Eymah gdolah veyareaḥ, 117–122; friendship with Else Lasker-SchГјler, 122–25; portrayal of Jesus, 105–9, 114–16, 118–22, 126, 199nn26–28; Reḥovot hanahar, 128; “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” 15, 102, 107–12; writing in Palestine: Sefer hakitrug veha’emunah, 126–28; and Zionist movement, 101–2, 116–17, 120–22, 126 Grillparzer, Franz, vii, 148, 155, 207n77 Habsburg Empire, 14, 20–21, 38–39, 69, 161 Halevi, Yehuda, 73, 75, 118, 157 Page 223 →Halpern, Moyshe Leyb, 85–86, 200n34. See also American literature and Yiddish Hasidism, 1, 28, 49, 93–94; folktales, 2, 178n22. See also Martin Buber Haskalah, 11, 13, 20, 52; in Eastern Europe, 26–31; in Germany, 21–23; Moses Mendelssohn, 12, 22; and Yiddish literature, 27–28, 52 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 77, 125, 160 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 8, 13, 17 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 23, 59, 176n11 Heym, Georg, 97. See also expressionism Hitler, Adolf, 7, 51, 70, 132, 163. See also National Socialism

Hoddis, Jakob van, 97–98, 197n60. See also expressionism Hofshteyn, Dovid, 39, 99 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 64, 66, 73, 157, 189n45 Holocaust, 51, 75, 165, 207n1. See also Auschwitz; World War II imagism, 90–91, 158 inflation, 40, 42 Israel, 51, 75, 77, 159, 160; Israeli poetry, 70; Tel Aviv, 1, 8, 161 jargon, 28–30, 45 Jesus, portrayal in Yiddish literature, 102, 106–7, 199nn26–38. See also Uri Zvi Greenberg Jewess, 16, 33, 148, 204n28, 206n62; belle juive, 151, 153; “New Jewess,” 146–54. See also antiSemitism, stereotypes Jewish renewal, 10, 23–33, 57, 154 Jüdisches Volksheim, 1–3, 171n2, 171n6 Kafka, Franz: attitude toward Zionism and Hebrew, 1–4, 10, 171n4, 171n6, 178n24; “Before the Law,” 4; “The Departure,” 17; and Dora Diamant, 1–3, 171n2; and Felice Bauer, 2, 171n6; interest in Yiddish, 2–3, 24, 60, 81, 187n27; “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” 4; and Max Brod, 2, 43 Kaufmann, Fritz Mordecai, 14, 25–26, 54, 62, 188n32; Die Freistatt: Alljüdische Revue, 57, 63, 178n31 Kiev, 38–39, 83, 86; Kultur-lige, 39 Kindesmörderin. See filicide Kolmar, Gertrud, 8, 14, 16, 157; and colonial motifs, 131–44; Die Frau und die Tiere, 132; “Die Jüdin, ” 132, 133–40, 141, 154, 155; Die jüdische Mutter, 132, 145–54; “Die Unerschlossene,” 141–44, 154; gender and sexuality, 131–32, 135, 141–44, 151–53; Hilde Wenzel (sister), 132, 141, 144, 155, 202n7, 202n10; under National Socialism, 132, 140, 155, 203n20, 203n21; Weibliches Bildnis, 132 Kronfeld, Chanah, 9, 173n36 Krutikov, Mikhail, 11, 192n4 Kulbak, Moyshe, 3, 8, 14, 157: Disner tshayld herold, 15, 80, 95–98; “Dos yidishe vort,” 82–83; Meshiekh ben efrayim, 15, 79, 93–94; Naye lider, 15, 41, 79, 82–93; Raysn, 91–93; in the Soviet Union, 80, 95–98; “Vilna,” 94, 99–100, 197n65 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 3, 10, 43, 60, 135, 142; friendship with Avrom Nokhum Stenzel, 3, 44–47; friendship with Uri Zvi Greenberg, 122–25, 129; personae, 44–46, 135; 184n106 Lipsker, Avidov, 103, 105, 109, 199n31 Markish, Peretz, 38, 86, 99, 102, 194, 200n34 maskilim, 27–28, 31, 179n44, 179nn46–47. See also Haskalah

Mendele Moykher Sforim. See S.Y. Abramovitch Mendelssohn, Moses, 12, 22 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 6, 21–22, 149, 177n18 migration, 5, 7, 12, 16, 132, 159, 172n15; aliyah, 1–2, 64, 70, 92, 101, 116–19, 121–22, 125, 157, 189n53; East European Jews to America, 20, 115; East European Jews to Germany, 20, 22, 33, 160, 172n19, 203n18; Israelis to Berlin, 16–17, 160–67, 207n3 Milgroym. See Rimon/Milgroym Minsk, 80, 92, 95, 98–100, 196n54 Miron, Dan, 26–28, 50, 74, 121, 126, 190n65, 191n73, 198n14, 200n44 Mizrahi Jews, 165–66, 208n16 Morgenstern, Christian, 109, 111 Page 224 →Moscow, 6, 8, 40, 42, 86, 96 Myers, David, 8, 9, 11 nationalism, 12, 18, 148; Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe, 26–28; vГ¶lkisch movement in Germany, 22–23, 26, 57–58, 151, 176n7, 117n18; Volksgeist, 59, 63, 208n20 National Socialism, 6, 17, 69–70, 74; Adolf Hitler, 7, 51, 70, 132, 163; Josef Goebbels, 40, 182n84; Nazis, 140, 148, 155, 160, 205n48; propaganda, 51, 206n72; Third Reich, 14, 51–52, 132, 144, 176 Neue Sachlichkeit, 146 New Jewess. See Jewess New Woman, 150–53, 205n58, 146 Niger, Shmuel, 79, 94 Odessa, 38, 182n78 orientalism, 16, 23, 24, 45, 115, 131–36, 158–159 Ostjuden, 1–3; animus toward, 4, 10, 20–23, 176n3; and prostitution; 33, 146, 181nn67–68; romanticization of, 23–26, 31–38, 177n18, 178n22 Ost und West, 10, 31 Oz-Salzberger, Fania, 160, 164 Pale of Settlement, 22, 92 Palestine, 1–3, 14, 15, 47, 125; Arab-Jewish coexistence in, 69, 74; idealization of, 6, 57, 92, 155; immigration to, 53, 56, 69–70, 116, 117, 121, 125–26, 128 passports, 50, 101–2, 115, 162, 164, 197nn4–5, 207n3 Peretz, I. L., 26, 82; Monish, 29–30, 82, 180nn52–53, 180n55, 181n59

Perl, Joseph, 27–28 Pinsker, Shachar, 11, 44, 102, 197n4 poema, 112, 122, 200n34 pogroms, 1, 5, 14, 19, 20, 37, 101, 105, 200n34 Poland, 11, 32, 37, 92, 126; Warsaw, 15, 101, 103, 115, 128 postcolonialism, 8, 173n30, 175n49 prostitution, 33, 146, 181nn67–68 Prussian Empire, 5, 21, 23, 27, 37, 140 publishing industry: German-Jewish, 23, 24; Hebrew and Yiddish, 6, 14, 40–44, 94, 103, 115 refugees, 13, 49, 51, 166: East European Jews, 1, 3, 21, 26, 31, 36, 75, 166, 167, 176n3 Ravitch, Melekh, 102, 106–7, 184n102 Rilke, Rainier Maria, 144, 203n27 Rimon/Milgroym, 43–44, 160, 183n102, 201n50 Romanisches Café, 3, 44–47, 101, 122, 141, 162, 166 romanticism: German philosophy, 22, 24; German literature, 52, 68, 72–76, 95, 157; Yiddish literature, 33, 82, 91–94, 118 Roth, Joseph, 32, 33–36, 51 Russian Empire, 14, 20–21, 161, 172n15; collapse, 38–39, 69, 157, 197n5 Russian Revolution, 38–39, 80–81, 94, 99, 182n83, 192nn3–4, 199n27 Said, Edward, 13, 131, 164 Schachter, Allison, 11, 185n118 Scheunenviertel, 1, 36, 37, 48 Schiller, Friedrich von, 147, 149 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 54, 175n48 Scholem, Gershom, 49, 69, 185n121 sexuality, 145–53, 204n35, 206n68 Shemoelof, Mati, 165–67, 208nn16–18, 220 Şenocak, Zafer, 168, 208–209n24. See also Turkish Germans Sholem Aleichem, 19–21, 29, 31, 48 Shteinberg, Yakov, 39, 101, 182n78

shtetl, 19, 21, 27–31, 48, 49, 92, 95 Shumiatcher, Esther, 103–4 Simmel, Georg, 6, 7, 167 Soviet Union, 11, 15, 16, 94–95, 98–100, 159, 160; Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, 80, 92, 94, 158, 192n3, 195n38; former Soviet countries, 16, 160; and Hebrew, 38–39; Josef Stalin, 98–99, 159; and Yiddish, 39–41, 80, 95, 98–99, 184n102 Stationendrama, 150, 205n54 Stenzel, Avrom Nokhum, 40, 166, 194n25; friendship with Else Lasker-SchГјler, 3, 44–47 Strauss, Ludwig, 8, 14; bilingual writing, 53–55; debate with Julius Bab, 58–63, 187nn19–20, 187n24; friendship with Martin Buber, 62–64, 78; interest in Yiddish, 60, 62–63, 188n32, 188n37, 188n41; Page 225 →in Israel, 77, 157–160; Land Israel, 64–70; marriage to Eva Strauss (nГ©e Buber), 64, 189n44; Sha’ot vador, 74–76; and Zionism, 56–58, 62, 69–70, 74–76 Struck, Hermann, 32–35 Sturm und Drang, 147, 150 symbolism, 52, 87–88, 91, 103–6, 158, 200n34. See also Charles Baudelaire Tel Aviv, 1, 8, 161, 165 Third Reich. See National Socialism threshold, 1–6, 17–18, 157–59, 169 translation; between Hebrew and German, 49, 57, 122, 124, 160; self-translation, 53, 70–74, 191n74; from Yiddish into German, 24, 43, 45, 63, 178n22, 185nn121–22, 188n32, 188n37, 188n41 transnationalism, 8, 17, 51, 77, 168–69, 173n31, 173n34, 217 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 22–23 Turkish Germans, 168, 208n22, 208n24. See also Zafer Ећenocak VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung. See German reunification Vilna, 80–86, 94, 99–100, 157, 196n49 Volkov, Shulamit, 10, 173–74n39 vГ¶lkisch movement, 5, 22–23, 26, 57–58, 176n7, 177n18 Wagner, Hans Leopold, 147, 204n40 Warsaw. See Poland Wassermann, Jakob, 24–25, 58, 148–49 Weimar cinema, 153, 206n73 Weinreich, Max, 43, 180n50, 194n22

Weizmann, Chaim, 116, 200n45 Westjuden, 1–3, 21, 36, 43; daytsh, 19, 21, 26–31, 179n49, 180n52; East European disdain for, 28–30; maskilic admiration for, 21, 26–28; Yekkes, 50 White Russia. See Belorussia Williams, William Carlos, 90–91 Wischnitzer, Mark, 43–44 Wolf-Monson, Tamar, 117, 198n14 World War I, 14, 20, 62; encounters between East European Jews and German Jews, 31–38; Germany’s defeat, 151, 157; and migration, 5, 39, 102; and nationalism, 7, 17, 20, 52 World War II, 50, 74, 128. See also Auschwitz; Holocaust Yiddishist movement, 25, 43 81, 178n32, 192n8, 196n49 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 11, 196n49 Zionism, 2, 15, 16, 25, 56, 69; Bar Kochba Society of Prague, 2, 23, 178n24; Chaim Arlozorov, 62, 126, 188n33; cultural Zionism, 54, 133, 177n21; David Ben-Gurion, 75, 191n71; Germany, 32–38; Labor Zionism, 118, 122, 125–28, 188n33, 188n35; negation of exile, 75, 120, 160; Revisionist Zionism, 125–26, 191n70; World Zionist Organization, 39, 116; Zionist Congress, 116. See migration aliyah Zweig, Arnold, 10, 31; Das ostjüdische Antlitz, 32–35