Current ProjectAshkenazi Renaissance; 1881-1941My dates mark two catastrophic events for European Jewry: the late-nineteenth-century pogroms in Russia, which launched a wave of Jewish migration from Eastern to Western Europe, Palestine, and the Americas; and the triumph of German fascism, culminating in the Holocaust. In 1881, Czar Alexander III instituted a "solution to the Jewish question" whereby one-third of Russia's Jews were to emigrate, one-third to convert, and one-third to die of hunger; in 1941, at Wannsee, the Nazis set out the program for a Final Solution, "total annihilation." Between these dates, Jews in the arts and sciences produced a body of cultural riches comparable to the highest achievements of any other group in history (Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England) and unsurpassed in modern times. To some extent those achievements are grounded in certain disciplines (as in the case of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein) or certain artistic traditions (as in the case of Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz, Yasha Heifitz and Gustav Mahler, Max Reinhardt and Solomon Mikhoels). But in all cases their Jewishness affected the work of these men and women. Sometimes the effects are indirect, sometimes they register a rebellion against Judaism, sometimes they are the product of attribution (as in anti-Semitism), generally they express complex personal forms of creative engagement -- with a rediscovered past, with the impact of modernism, with contesting claims of identity (religious, "racial," ideological). This is the era of Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary internationalist, and Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, of the anarchist Emma Goldman and the aesthete Gertrude Stein; but there is a certain coherence, through a common Jewishness, to the diverse worlds they represent. The Jewishness I speak of is multifarious but basically it comprises two very different segments of the Jewish people: the Eastern European Jews who in the 1880s were just breaking out of the confines of the shtetl; and the assimilated Jews of Western Europe, children of the Enlightenment, who in some cases were discovering their premodern past. There are marked disparities between the two groups (e.g., one group created Yiddish literature, the other contributed centrally to national literatures). There are also crucial cross-currents, as in the case of Zionism and Marxism, and constant transmigrations, from Russia and Poland to Germany to Palestine, from the various enclaves of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to France, England, and the Americas. My aim is not to establish some kind essential Jewish character, situation, or set of qualities. It is to describe the various kinds of negotiations between a felt Jewishness, the impact of twentieth century modernisms, and the global creative forces -- trans-national, multi-lingual, inter-cultural -- that issued in this diaspora renaissance. I do not (cannot) hope to write in depth about most of the figures mentioned above. Since my training is in literature, I will focus mainly on a representative group of literary-cultural figures and their corresponding intellectual circles. These figures and circles are diverse but interconnected - and (for my purposes) interconnected because in every case there is a conscious relation to Jewishness. Among these figures are Franz Kafka (Prague and Vienna circles), the epicenter, as I see him, of Jewish modernisms; Y. L. Peretz and Scholem Aleichem (Warsaw and Kiev circles), the founders of modern Yiddish literature; Isaac Babel (Odessa and Moscow circles), chronicler of Russian Jewry and the Soviet Army; S. Y. Agnon (Berlin and Palestinian circles), whose work merges diaspora and nationalism; and I.B. Singer (American Jewish immigrant circles), whose work bridges rabbinic tradition and Jewish New York. Through these writers and their cultural circles I hope to convey something of the vast panorama of Jewish achievement of that turbulent time. In doing so, I intend to give special attention to certain artists and thinkers relevant to my themes: Marc Chagall ("Jewish art"), Gustave Mahler and Arthur Schoenberg ("Jewish music"), Bruno Schultz ("Jewish expressionism"), Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin (Jewish radical marginality), Joseph Roth (the expatriate Jewish circles of Paris), Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas (theologian-philosophers of, respectively, Chasidism and the Enlightenment), perhaps something of the scientific circles (Budapest, Berlin), and finally Hannah Arendt, who represents a somewhat later generation -- one that came of age during World War II (Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Nellie Sachs, Simone Weil) -- and whose life and work span many aspects of the astonishingly vibrant, tragically ill-fated cultural-intellectual world with which I am concerned. Of course, there continues to be an abundance of scholarship on each of these figures and on every component of this modern Ashkenazi renaissance, but no one to my knowledge has yet attempted to present the period as a whole. I am all too aware of the enormous range of this undertaking, even within the limits I have set. My plan involves a representative (not an encyclopedic) study. And though I start with Kafka, which is already to commit myself to a certain angle of vision, my hope is that the work as it develops will express the diverse shapes of Jewishness in the texts, persons, and places I discuss. Personal NarrativeIn one way or another, I feel I've been engaged most of my life in this project. I was brought up in a Yiddish-speaking home by immigrant parents and began my reading with the stories of Scholem Aleikhem; Kafka was my first (and lasting) literary love. After high-school I lived for several years on a kibbutz and that experience persisted, indirectly, in my academic work (as in my view of the New England Puritans and of the utopian strain in American culture). Throughout all these years I have remained intellectually involved with issues of Jewishness, and have taught courses at graduate and undergraduate levels in Jewish literature and thought.At the same time, my work on this project began only after my retirement. My academic career was devoted to American literature and culture. Except for translations from the Yiddish (and a few essay-reviews), virtually all of my publications are in the Americanist field, as are most of my other professional activities. It's only in the past few years that I've considered a study of these writers, artists, and thinkers who in fact I'd been studying for decades. No one knows better than I the hazards of what I'm attempting, but I believe it's a project that should be done. |