Strangers in Berlin : modern Jewish literature between East and West, 1919-1933 / Rachel Seelig.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Seelig, Rachel, author.

Series:

Michigan studies in comparative Jewish cultures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jewish literature--Europe--History and criticism.

Jewish literature.

European literature--Jewish authors--History and criticism.

European literature.

Jewish literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Jewish authors.

Europe.

Physical Description:

x, 225 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Modern Jewish literature between East and West, 1919-1933

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

Summary:

Berlin in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan hub where for a brief, vibrantmoment German-Jewish writers crossed paths with Hebrew and Yiddish migrant writers. Working against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study, thisis the first book to present Jewish literature in the Weimar Republic as the product of the dynamic encounter between East and West. Whether they were native to Germany or sojourners from abroad, Jewish writers responded to their exclusion from rising nationalist movements by cultivating their own images of homeland in verse, and they did so in three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Author Rachel Seelig portrays Berlin during the Weimar Republic as a"threshold" between exile and homeland in which national and artistic commitments were reexamined, reclaimed, and rebuilt. In the pulsating yet precarious capital of Germany's first fledgling democracy, the collision of East and West engendered a broad spectrum of poetic styles and Jewish national identities.

Contents:

Introduction: At the threshold

Chapter 1. One imagining self and other: encounters between Ostjuden and Westjuden

Chapter 2. Entwined in dialogue? Ludwig Strauss on the border of Bilingualism

Chapter 3. A youthful rogue am I? Moyshe Kulbak between exile and arrival

Chapter 4. Orient, so it is! Uri Zvi Greenberg's farewell to Europe

Chapter 5. I am foreign? Gertrud Kolmar's orientalist expedition

Epilogue: Between East and West, past and present.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780472130092

0472130099

OCLC:

949922866