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Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide, edited by Vivian Liska and Thomas Nolden. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 224 pp. $29.95.
In addition to expert literary analyses, this informative survey of contemporary writing by authors in over twelve European countries also includes synopses of postwar Jewish writing, much of which is not available in English, and a number of insightful discussions of little-known writers from around the continent. By arranging chapters based on national or regional literatures in one volume, the editors have succeeded in their goal of providing readers with a literary “map” charting Jewish writers and their works in the various countries of Europe since the end of World War II. While comparative chapters on experiences of Jewish writers in different countries or on different continents might be welcome in other contexts, the strength of this “guidebook” lies in the space it provides for readers to synthesize commonalities and elucidate contrasts among national literatures for themselves.
The effects of the Holocaust and their representation in literature remains a central, inescapable aspect of contemporary European Jewish writing even if, as Alvin Rosenfeld notes in the foreword, many of the authors mentioned in this compendium were born after 1945 (p. xi). In fact, first-, second-, and even third-generation writers form the core of authors examined in the book, though survivors such as Primo Levi and Imre Kertész are also given their due. Yet, as the editors point out in their informative introduction, plenty of themes outside the Holocaust occupy the pages of contemporary Jewish literature in Europe as well, ranging from Israeli culture and society to political shifts in Europe and the Middle East, and including much discussion of religion, sexuality, relationships, assimilation, immigration, and citizenship. In this regard, the introduction might have delved even deeper into an exploration of the vicissitudes of “Jewish writing” and the inherent limitations of the term in general, particularly since so many of the essays in the volume add to recent debates about the utility of categorizing writing—or any cultural products—as “Jewish.”
Individual chapters are rife with illuminating details and insightful readings of authors from France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia; especially welcome are surveys on countries in which Jewish writing was most affected by the end of the Cold War such as Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Several chapters begin with helpful background information on Jewish writing before World War II, followed by skilled and detailed literary analyses. Others provide more descriptive information about authors and their works, such as the chapter on Scandinavia, which contains an extensive bibliography of Jewish writing in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland; an especially useful aspect of the book in general is its inclusion of up-to-date publication information for the texts mentioned in each chapter that also indicates those that have been translated into English.
A number of essays not only reference authors of the immediate postwar period, but also explain how more contemporary writers have departed from or continued with traditional images of Jews and literary concerns that evolved from particular pre-war narratives of Jewish emancipation. In his nuanced and insightful account of the development of Jewish writing in Great Britain, Bryan Cheyette explains why the current trend of British Jewish writers to deal explicitly with Jewish themes was only made possible in the immediate recent past since up until then, British Jewish writers were caught between universalizing—and therefore eliding—their Jewishness, or representing it according to British society’s stereotypes, a dual pressure which, according to Cheyette, “has until recently deformed much of the literary output of Anglo-Jewry into either tame satire or crude apologetics” (p. 94). Most of the chapters on Western and Central Europe cover well-known writers who have already received considerable scholarly attention, such as Robert Schindel and Doron Rabinovici in Austria and Maxim Biller, Barbara Honigmann, and Vladimir Kaminer in Germany, but many also move beyond a study of those with international reputations; the Netherlands, for example, boasts a considerable number of Jewish women authors born both before and after the war whose publications are less well-known.
Many of the volume’s contributors face head-on the difficulties of situating authors not born in their countries of residence and writing; the most innovative foreground biographies of displacement and the reflection of the ensuing complications that inflect their writing. As a result, these essays challenge the categorization of contemporary European Jewish writing according to national boundaries and focus on how literary qualities of displacement forge their own unique style. For example, according to contributor Christopher Miething, Giorgio Pressburger is one of the most interesting contemporary Italian Jewish writers, since his return to his native Budapest to serve as Italy’s cultural minister complicates an easy placement of his ouevre into any one particular national paradigm (p. 152). In their chapter on Jewish writing in Russia, Rainer Grübel and Vladimir Novikov argue convincingly that the texts of Russian Jewish writers are best understood with consideration of the de-centered qualities of their narrative histories; that an author such as Dina Rubina, a well-known Russian writer in Israel who now works for the Jewish Agency in Moscow, tempers pessimistic allusions to the experiences of Russian Jews in Israel with traditional optimistic Jewish humor is best understood when readers consider both her background in Uzbekistan and her experiences as a Russian immigrant in Israel.
This volume should prove useful not only for educators planning to use the material in classrooms but also for scholars and general audiences seeking recommendations for literature on specific themes. As such, it also serves as a helpful analytical complement to the material contained in the series on Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World published by the University of Nebraska Press. Taken together, the essays indicate that contemporary Jewish writing in Europe is constantly evolving; this volume not only helps bring us closer to understanding the complicated nature of that evolution in the recent past, but also inspires us to imagine what shape it might take in the future.
Lisa Silverman
University of Wisconsim-Milwaukee
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