heart attack - he opened the incoming email that inforrned hirn he had. Berlin Prize for ..... 'national film board coll
DE GRUYTER
Amir Eshel, Rachel Seelig (Eds.)
THE GERMAN. HEBREW DIALOGUE STUDIES OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
Mati Shemoelof
The Bertin Prize for Hebrew Literature Translated by Rachel Seelig (excerpt from a novel in Progress)
1 of the Landwehr The air was stale at urbanstrasse Hospital on the southem bank
including
canal.Anexhibitof photographsadomedthehallwaywithcolorfulfish, thetypeHelenahadseenintheRedSeawhenshewentdivingatBirSuwairwith the length of the wall that shabby red snorkel. Beneath the photographs running 6' room 145' where was a summery yellow stripe. Third floor, area 1B, building to the left pregnant women leave behind fluids and discharge in the bathroom bodily secretions' of the examination room. Detergents had lost the fight against under medical there remain to refused The result was putrid. No wonder Helena
observation. water tinged But now it was all behind her and she was sinking into warm
greenbyfoamingpinetreeoil.Usuallyshebathedonweekends,notTuesday impressions ftom the evenings. But she had to rinse off the smells and stale had made a mistake she Perhaps morning that now seemed an etemity away' tellingchezithetuth,butshehadtogetitout,lethimknowwhatahypocrite story iust left him to he was. He didn't even call to thank his own father for the
Yahud' Helena
wither in that cheap old age home on Yitzhak Bar Moshe Street in what their home was afraid of the future that was quickly approaching. Is that her husband's for to ask would be like? Full of squabbles, with her unable even couldn't get through help? Lately it was one fight after the other; it seemed they herself whether chezi could a single day without yelling at each other. she asked reasons she had always the of one was survive the truth. After all, her truth
she was unable to avoided serious relationships. one thought led to another and fotget the chaos that answer the question. She tried to focus on her breathing, to engulfed her, sfretching her nerves thin. over the carpet' a She got up to go to the bathroom and began dripping all parents say if they knew her small stream flattening tufts of dust. what would about getting in that shed become peguant, she wondered. Helena had thought But Easter dinner fell touch nany times ad elen made an attempt a while back. *those Arab irnmigrants" lYho are to blame apart after her fatterls rcoa* about
Dox'o,fi,6.Ig,ailp,,7fEllJl
for the rlse of sexual assault$, not to mentlon antl-Semltic attacks. Her ntrtlltpt trled to make contact a few tlmes, but Helena couldn't forgive her father, lttlllally for what he'd sald to her and later because he gave interuiews on the sublet'l lu lltp press. She suffered the fallout wherever she went. Her surname was a tllnnrlst,
Recently her mother had begun sendlng appeasing text messages antl r,tttnllr about her father's poor health, practically begging Helena to come vlslt. Ilr,ltrnrt dldn't want any contact with him, or with her. Not least because of thc tutrtrrt she heard. One afternoon on Boppstrasse she ran into Brigitte, the dowttnlnltr nelghbor from Stuttgart, who was in town visiting her son Mark. Brigltte tolrl ltpt the secret: Helena's mother had become a rightwing fanatic who wanted oul ol'lltc European Union - "Gerxit" - in order to prevent more immigrants from etrttrrlttg Germany. Helena could not believe it. She blamed her dad for bralnwurltlttg her mom, who used to be a liberal. Once, her mother even put up a famlly of Vletnamese refugees for an entire summer - the summer Helena lost her vlr8lnllv to Mark. He was fifteen at the time, she was sixteen-and-a-half. Her father tuxterl her about a surprise party for her mother in just a few days, asking her to t:ttttte, She didn't answer.
Helena feared she had miscarried the first time because she was nearlng lirrly, To make matters worse, Chezi avoided the subject and didn't know how to hrtttrlle the paln of losing the longed-for pregnancy. She didn't want to go back to wotlr,
having already prepared for a long maternity leave. Soon her coworkers wottlrl know about the miscarriage and she would return to her mindnumbing iob.
2 Chezt had overslept. He woke up
in a panic, worried that Helena might
huve
already checked out of the hospital before he had even managed to call or ht lgr her home. It occurred to him that he had forgotten to ask Johannes Birne, tho plano tuner, to drop by. Helena was supposed to come home to a tuned piano xo that she wouldn't need to tune it herself. Chezi was disappointed in himself. lk, put on his clothes without even brushing his teeth and rushed off to the Spdfi, The roses at the exit to the building opened up in front of him and he couldtr'l resist, plucked a few red blossoms, cupping them close to his nose, and took ltt the fragrance of an especially serene evening. Helena called just as he was standing in line to pay at the only open late-nlghl grocery store in the neighborhood. As Chezi glanced at his cell phone a Facebook invitation popped up for the Or Yehuda High School reunion. Behind Chezi in llnc stood a man, perhaps German, perhaps foreign, with small gray eyes, a chublly
face, and blul5h ttubblc on a tattooed face, who had placed on the black rubber conveyer belt a taurage resembllng a dissected penis, a gleaming eggplant, and some sort of spaghettl sauce that Chezi had never seen before; in front of him was a foreign woman wlth a large piercing, tiny bits of silver-plated iron fastened to her cheeks, a chain that looped through her eyebrow and descended to the outer
edge of her lip. Chezi was repulsed by this fashion of holes in one's face and wondered what might happen if the small iron bars were to be removed from her delicate ivory skin. A man ioined the back of the line, his skin covered in tattoos, with only the whites of his innocent eyes standing out, causing every shade of the greenish tattoo surrounding them to resemble a warrior from another era, perhaps from outer space. Chezi was glad to see Helena's name appear on his screen. He listened carefully to the nuances in her voice, checked how she was feeling and when she woke up. Helena asked him to buy a specific type of cabbage that's known to be particularly healthy and prepare it for her for when she returned from the recovery room at Urbanstrasse Hospital. She mentioned the name of the cabbage in German twice, but Chezi couldn't quite make it out. He had tried to learn the Iocal language but was dyslexic and struggled. Helena repeated the word again and again: Gri)nkohl. He heard Grukol. She repeated it again - Grtinkohl - as he reached the front of the line and noticed the cashier, Rosa Luxemburg, staring at him, irritated. Chezi was hesitant to deal with her. During their many previous encounters Rosa had spoken with such speed that the translation mechanism in his brain short-circuited. He looked behind him and realized the entire line was staring back at him impatiently, but unlike the convenience store in Or Yehuda, no one said a word. Rosa had no patience for the linguistic difficulties of immigrants. She said "Bitte" a few times and signaled him to move forward. Chezi glanced at her and then at the long line behind him. He lifted his cell phone to his ear and asked Helena quietly not to yell at him. (That was a trick he learned from her. She often asked him to lower his voice when speaking with her.) "Text me the name," he whispered to Helena in English, and wondered whether he still had time to find the cabbage, leaving behind on the conveyer belt all the items with barcodes that the cashier was eagerly preparing to scan. Chezi asked Rosa in broken German to wait a moment and then turned to the crowd, interlacing his fingers as he lifted and lowered his hands, and mumbled in English, "I am sorry." For a moment he thought they might not understand and switched to German: "Tur mir Leid." The crowd groaned and didn't exactly consent, nor did they protest, aside from Rosa, perhaps, who frowned dramatically.
Chezi smiled like a silly child, ran through the aisles in search of the vegetable, and finally found an empty box emblazoned with the name of the salubrious cabbage. He returned in a sweat. By then Rosa had lost it and was
256
Mati Shemoetof
The Berlin prize for Hebrew
-
yelling loudly at him for holding everyone up. Nervously, Chezi put down on the conveyer belt just as it lit up, displaying an email adfuess. The orange iuice bottle fell out his hand and broke. Rosa got the mess, shaking her head continuously. All eyes were on Chezi. to her black chair silently, calmly scanned his groceries and dismisee0fi no one said a
word.
'
,sll
Chezi decidedthe road was too dangerous for a morning like onto the sidewalk built of large square stones and walked toward his Along the way he passed the name of the prolific German-Jewish
Literature
_ tf,
Baghdad that won brg. The words at the center of the enrail,appeared in bordt "The ceremony wlll take place in six days, on Iune 5,2OL6..
3 chezi stormed into the_ house, tossed the groceries on the smail wooden table that Helena had brought from her apartmJnt, the table
Miihsam peering at him ftom among the wotn, brass Sfolpersteime; stones" covered in a thin layer of dust. In the early morning of the sun iust beginning to emetge, Miihsam had bedn arrested blt the unknown transgression. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Fro Miihsam, then at the peak of his career, a subversive Jew, and planned to escape to Switzerland (why not, come to think of it?!). Over of the next seventeen months Miihsam was imprisoned in the camps of Sonnenbtrrg, Brandenburg, and finally Oranienburg, tortured, beaten, and eventually found hanged. Chezi had been to and to Oranienburg, and found it difficult to imagine that these quiet have contained such evil and wickedness, and so many bitter enernle&i' With his left hand Chezi put his conversation with Helena on She was eager to knowwhether had had found the cabbage, and he that the entire street could hear them. And with his right * he heart attack - he opened the incoming email that inforrned hirn he had Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature. He knew that he had been illustrious prize but was sure he didn t stand a chance of winning. lflas going to make this big step up from the national league to the writers league? Authors big and small, famous and obscure sent ln all over the world to the committee of The Berlin Prize for lJebrew most significant prize in the world for writers of Hebrew ( and territory didn't matter; the nominees could be non-lsraellel citizens of any country in the world). The prize offered an engrmoua money, translation into a dozen languages,'including English, Getm8ili Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian, and a contract for one the international publishing house of Else Lasker-schiiler. Perhaps thS advantage ofThe Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature, at least major German literary prizes, was that translatlon was not a prerequlEltl - Hebrew books could be subrnltted ln Hebrew. What's mote, the was open to all authors who wrlte tn Hebrew, and not lust to thoae who manage to make a ltvtng fiom lt, fu lt happens, lt was Chczl'e trb t
he saw as a symbor,of honest christian rabor, entirely devoid of opurence and ornamentation. Helena had come home ftom the hospital just minutes befbre him" she:ask"o rri, to help her remove,her faux reather boots as she lay dr*, rug in the bedroorn. He tugged off the right boot, .na as he shifted to the reft foot, blurted out suddenly, "I won The Berlin prize for Hebrew _
;;th.ilffi;,
Literatur" .u" yo, believe it?!,, "ls it for the first book or the second?" she asked, nudging him with her toes to remove the boot frorn hei other foot. "The second." chezi's*ddenly fert worthy, bven though he had been certain iust moments before reading the email that he d n"u., ,iut.-rt.finar cut. His second book had earned him a grant to spend a year writing i, ,"rrrr, but he had no idea what the following year would bring. ue would probabry have to appry for more writer'in-residence programs and piay ror something to corne through. "That's not a way to rive," chezi thought, 'Lspecially not with a pregnant w,ife,
Don',t you want to be abre to support a baby, buy a house, give your wife and child a future?" But everythingwas different ro*. The
generouJ_#;;;;;il;il;;
Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature was about to relieve him, at reast for a few years, of alr existential fear. And, who knows? perhaps it would even put him in the champions' league of literature. Fate had decided that he would win the prize. Fate crowned him and fate l_ooked after him. rt wasn,t tuck, he liked to thini, il;;r;;il;;;* come to fruition, creativity and tarent that alowed his words to ascend the biggest radder of all, climbing toward their glorious apogee before chezi, like all otier mortals, would pass on to the world to come. In soccer the trophy goes to the prayer that scores the largest number ofgoals in the European t"asue, ana yet trere was chezi
Morad from or yehuda taking the Gorden shoe ttranks to his measly second book. All of life's challenges, growing up under the poverty line, the constant feeling of not fitting in and doubts about his writing _ gone. Nobody in Germany is interested in yeianother Israeri author who writes in Hebrew Immlgrants belonged in the immigrant ghettoes. The big German publtshing hourea 3ambled only on authors with prior success in Israel. And what about thr hnrll communlty ln Berlln? euatsch,theywere nothing , Gurnisht,
258
The Bertin Prize for Hebrew
Mati Shemoelof
Literature
Not worth translating,,unless of course they offer German readeread perspective on Israeli culture. But Chezi didn't write about Israel. Israel, meanwhile, wasn't all that different. No author from Or made it onto Israel's national literature team. Besides, Israelis saw emigrant and interloper, a traitor who had abandoned his country brazenly about life in Germany. But now everything would change. would show them! Chezi would prove that it's possible to live in BerlIIt, prizes in the diaspora based on his Baghdadi origins. He was the fitet Germans recognized as capable of writing about Baghdad while r'i of an Israeli establishment that wins Helena excused herself to change her clothes and go to rthe', while Chezi waited patiently on the couch in the living roorm.tA wiping herself, she noticed drops of crimson blood on the Wldte FIer underwear was drenched with brownish red,blood, The pad given at the hospital hadn t held up. She wondered whethenthey harli cutting costs or had in fact purchased defective rnaterials'; was thig or accidental? She recalled the ultrasound that revealed damage to sac, Bed rest hadn't been sufficient. When she final$ enrergedfrom she asked for water. Something about her pale complexion wasnrt said she felt weak, lay down, and asked Chezi to let her sleep, But up, nearly vomited and couldn't calm down, so he drew her a bath wlth oils. They met in the kitchen.
prizes.
, "That's not the vegetable
,
I wanted you to buy,"
"I'm sorry. It's all they had." "Honey, I should have explained it in English." "No, no, it's good that you speak to me in German." Helena returned to the bathroom and Chezi ducked into the office check his email and refresh his Facebook page, dying to find out whethet had heard the news. Should he share the email he received, he
could hear Helena writhing uncomfortably as she yelled to him to bring tlrc bath oil. The sound of her favorite concefto emanated from the bathroom, Brandenburg No. 5, written for the, Duke of Btandenberg ln L7L9 composerfs return from Berlirn. Chezi located the foam ort the top shelf of thdhfl cupboard next to the shower and began to dttbble tt lnto the water when the eU ,' ti came loose, causing the flutd to gush uncontrollably into the
bathtub.
"lrVhy did you do that?" llelena atked,
..:l@,,.
-
259
you?" "Why don't you Enswer when I call had written about the prize." Chezi if anyone check sorty. I needed to 'll'm
looked at the fllthy floor, rolls of dust mixed with water, his dark hairs entangledwith her llght ones. "I'rn'not,feellng well and I need you to come quick if something happens, :, '' okay?" Ilelena looked at him impatiently, trembling. the cloudy looked at himsqlf-in Chezi "Yes, mJ 7ove, neshama, I'm sorry." mirror. "I really don't feel well." Helena gently splashed the water thai cdme up to her breasts. 'fPoor thing.?'He lowered the volume of the music andlooked'atltrow ehe had changed as she lay in the water. Something childlike csutsed throt8h her 'I :rii,.,,;i' and hewanted to iumpinto the bathtub with her. "I don't want your pity. It's iust- I've been thinking a lot ab-nrl1u,i lately,tr
"Let's talk about it later on."
"Ihadastrangedream,"
' ' r'l
"Tell me later. Right now let's iust play a game." "Let me guess, the one where you imitate me? No. I don't want to play thgt. Not now."
ttNo'"
.;.,
..,
"Please, please, please?" "It's not the right time. Even now you refuse to take 'no' for an answef." Helena reluctantly complied and changed her voice to sound like chezi.
"I'm the great CheziMorad, Iwon the Berlin Prize forFucking Literature,.Andyou're a big failure. You lost our child. But dont worry my Helenushka, I'll buy you a child with the money I won, I'11 take you on vacations, buyyou a house, everything I was always unable to afford because I was a writer living from hand to mouth. All that time I kept saying, ')ust wait, it'll happen.'And now look! It happened! I won enough money to take care of us. And the money isn't just mine, Helena, itls also yours. Because you were there by my side and you're the love of my life. So there, Helena, now you should feel wonderful, fabulous, elated, because your partner is no longer a loser who can't even take care of his teeth or buy a.car,... Thank yoU very much, kind audience. Thanks for the money. I always knew I was worth it. I promise to spend it with reckless abandon out of respect for the capitalist values of the donors, iudges and respected audience. And while we'Ie at it, thank you for the antlsemltlsm and for the new trend of philosemitism, and, last but not least,
thanks for glvlng me an Ausldnder visa for artists." Helena had slipped out of her actlng mode End wr! no longer lmpersonating Chezl's deep voice.
/',
260
-
Mati Shemoetof
Chezi smirked and began imitating Helena: 'Poor me, Itn Helena. I lost my first child. I, the onewho fantasizes about a big family full of kids, want to thank
Chezi for winning that prize. Maybe we can use it to buy children from thirdworld families who are in desperate need of money and are willing to live with the biggest trauma of all in order to supply fertility to wealthy countries,with an abundance of every resource other than children." "Stop it. You're nearly shut.
a
lot nastier than me." Helena pleaded, her face drained, eyes
Chezi wiped his nose with the toilet paper next to the sink. On each square of paper were three green hearts arranged in a diagonal row. Yet inother excellent
purchase from 'Edefa', the supermarket chain known for its soft, comfortable, ecofriendly and efficient toilet paper "Your dad calletl. I told him you d gone grocery shopping." Helena's lake blue eyes gazed into Chezi's forest-green ones.
"I love you," he said. "I think that's enough of that game for today. You need to get well."
"l love you. And I'm asking you to help me, okayi Itfow maybe you call your dad to tell him the news?" "If you call your dad, I'11 call mine." "Don't be silly, Schatzi."
YmlAlmog Europr Wlll Br Stunncd: Vlrurllutlon
olr f rwlrh ltturn
Seellg wlth Amlr Eshet
'lntroductlon
-lgl
Amlr Eshel
"ln
J{lg
lmtge":
On Danl Karavan's Artwork ln Grrmrny
-
prnlng the dialogue
211
Tal Hever-Chybowskt
Mlkan ve'eylokh (From thls Polnt Onward), translated by Rachet Seellg
-
MatlShemoelof The Bcrlln Prlze for Hebrew Literature (excerpt from a novel in progress), tranrlated by Rachel Seetlg- 253 About the Authors
_
'fuluttersprache tst ntcht dle Muttersprache meiner Mutter. Die Muttersprache meiner
241
lat ntcht dle Muttersprache ihre Mutter: Die Mutter sprache ihre Mutter ist nicht die und so weiter Und So viel viel weifer. (Tomer G ardi 2Ot6, 91)
mother tongue ls not my mother's mother tongue. My mother,s mother tongue is not the hu tongue her mother. The mother tongue h"i moth"r is not her mother tongue and on 0n, And so much much more on,l
261
, ungrammatical, some might say ..improper,,' Broken German
is not tltle of Israeli writer Tomer Gardi's latest novel but also the language It was written, As a hopeful for the 2016 Ingeborg Bachmann prize, the dark horse in what has been described as the most diverse group es in the prize's thirty-nine year history with five out of fourteen claiming non-German citizenship or ancestry (incruding the winner,
novelist Sharon Dodua Otoo). yet unlike all of the other
Gardi, a native of Kibbutz Dan and resident of Ter Aviv, neither lives in country nor speaks German perfectly. His nomination for the Prize points to a loosening of norms surrounding the aesthetics
and
German. Is "proper German', (reines Deutscft) no longer a prerequisite
one of the highest German literary honors? This was the question mind at the Festival of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt,
i
question
is deceptively simple. Today, with three and even four of Turkish migrants and .,post-migrants,' calling Germany home,
of immigrants and refugees entering the country every year, most from syria, the country that Hermut Kohl once famously dlciared ..not Iand" (kein Einw anderungsland) isnow remarkably multicultural ngual. In light of the demographic changes _ as well as reactionary to these changes from the Radical Right _ the notion of ..proper has become highly controversial. According to I0aus Katsberger, the r
nominated Gardi for the Bachmann prize, "broken German', constitutes
alternative to this hegemonic concept. In his view, Gardi,s I idiom is the language of newcomers and a powerful symbol of emerging "welcome culture" (wiltkommensratltur)...one shourd have
l0,15tS I 9 7 B3lto 47 3384 - o o 7
mort falth ln German llteratur!," Krtrbtrtrt $gtltri-cfiruddrtdgwhercEutopedn pollttce /alls. Provldlng a homc to thr r.fuFa rnd to,Up4rl$tc tornigratlon, whlch arrlved long ago and llve among ur, lr lmong lthlr llteiature's] greatest tasks" (Katsberger 2016). Katsberger's remarks reflect a shlft tn the crltloal rcc6ptlon of writing by so.calledAusldnder (forelgners) in the last half century. It ts certalnly a departure fronr the reactlons provoked by Paul Celan's recelpt of the Georg Btichner Prize ln 1960, which betrayed abiding antl-Semitic sentiments in describing the poet's hermetic language as the product of an "alien" (Fremdling) from the "eastern outskirts of the German-language domain" (Eshel 2004, 59). In the postteunlfication era a similar argument about language was attributed to TurkishGerman migrant writers such as Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, the first non-native German speaker to receive the Bachmann Prize in 1991. One critic of 0zdamar's play Karagdz in Almania (1982) declared, "Broken German is tantamount to bad theatet" while another, commenting on Ozdamar's Bachmann-Prize gubmission,'condescendingly praised the "awkwardness" (Unbeholfenheit) of
the language as a sign of its "authenticity," ignoring the deliberate nature of Ozdamar's language errors (Jankowsky 1992 267).Today,twenty-five years since reunlflcation and Ozdamar's Bachrnann Prize victory writers who consistently
expand the horizon of the German language and the sphere of German llterature are respected, indeed celebrated around the globe. Yoko Tawada's agcendance to global literary recognition is but one indication of this tendency (Galchen 2016).
Tomer Gardi, neither a native German speaker like Celan, nor a migrant to Getmany like Ozdamar and Tawada, is seen not as an illegitimate interloper but as emerging talent worthy of consideration. During the judges' discussion at the Bachmann Prize competition, Hildegard Keller summed up the state of affairs wlth a comment that mimicked what she called Gardi's "poetic pidgin," saying, "German belongs to everyone. German belongs also to me. I can Bachrnann Prlzel" Gardi's self-confident arrival on the German literary scene signals not only a transformation in German attitudes toward writing by so-called Ausldnderbtfi also a change in Israeli attitudes toward Germany and the German language. It is therefore an appropriate point of departure for the present volume, which is devoted to exploring the fraught yet fruitful relationship between German and Hebrew cultures, two cultures long viewed as separate or even as diametrically opposed. The essays gathered here call into question the prevailing beliel which galned purchase in the wake of World lAlar II and the Holocaust, that there was no space for German in Israeli culture, iust as there remained no trace of Hebrew
culturt. The notlon that German and Hebrew could occupy the same tDecc 3e€med unfathomable, even anathema. the early !,€ars of Israeli statehood, German became taboo, despite It had been the llngua ftanca of thousands of Jewish immigtants and most commonly heard language in the coffeehouses of the yishuv 1930g and 1940s (Halperin 2015, 46). At the Hebrew University of Getman language instruction was banned ia t934 in response to the Nazi regime, even though roughly fifty percent of the faculty at the natlve German speakers or trained in German universities. It was following the signing of a reparations agreement between Israel 6ermany, that German courses were reintroduced at the university . Even after,the establishment of diplomatic relations between West and Israel in 1965, the relationship between the two cultures remained once celebrated as a vehicle of. Bildung, came to be linked in the imagination with Hitler's regirne; the language of Goethe and now tied to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. years, however, the relationship between German and Israeli rrhae evolved from one of mutual estrangement to one of mutual Government-sponsored academic exchange programs, joint startup 'national film board collaborations, not to mention the sheer increased of students and young professionals, have impacted this relationship Whereas Germans growing up in the shadow of World War II were with iews and Jewish culture, their children are now traveling 6s volunteers and exchange students and immersing themselves in the llanguage and Israeli culture. And whereas Israelis born to Holocaust tended to boycott all things German, their children now flock to Berlin, grow.ing Israeli expat community has taken root.l These nomadic and Israelis share liberal values and view increased exchange between as: an important response to rising ethnic nationalism and rightin both Germany and Israel. More than seventy years since the War II, the rift between Germans and Israelis, especially those who ;age in the post-Cold War era, has begun to narrow.
estimates of Israelis living in Berlin range from 5,000 to 15,000. It is difficult to a precise figure, since many enter Germany with European passports, and Israel's iteau of Statistics does not identify as emigrants anyone who returns to visit Israel of departure. For a sociological study of the Israelis in Berlin phenomenon, see 2001; Yair 2015. For further demographic information, see AIon 2015.
4
Rachel Seetig with Amir Eshet
Editors'lntroduction
-
2 Gerrnan-Hebrew
studies
twfh
A maior outgrowth of increased exchange between Germany and Israel within the academic arena is the subfield sf 'rrGermafl-Hebrew studies.'r Moving heyond concepts of ruptur€, ftauma and collective mernory that long have dominated German.Jewish studies, while challenging the Zionist frame that has long defined the study of modern Hebrew literature and Israeli.culture, this new area of scholarship focuses on relational concepts such as rnigration, bilingualisrn,
dialogue and translation, concepts that,refer less to the boundaries between cultures than to the ways in which such boundaries are traverse d,. The GermanHebrew Dialogue: studies ofEncounter and Exchange is the first book dedicated to sketching out the parameters of this ernerging field. The idea for the volume, which follows a number of scholarly gatherings, articles and iournal issues on the subject, stems frorn a workshop convened at the Flebrew university.of Ierusalern in 2o15, entitled "The German.Hebrew: Dialogue in the Multilingual Erat
Expanding the focus of the workshop, which focused primarily on literature; the present study brings together essays on literature; film, art, theater and intellectual history that reveal the manifold ways in which German and Hebrew cultures have intersected from the Enlightenment until the present day. If German-Hebrew studies constitutes a "subfield," under which disciplinary ruhric does it fall? The question does not have a simple answex. As the hyphen indicates, German-Hebrew studies is by definition interdisciplinary and thug disrupts and decenters the boundaries by which various fields are defined. First, it adds a crucial new layer to German-fewish studies, which generally has been restricted geographically to German-speaking lands and chronologically to the pre-world war II period.'Gerrnan-tr{ebrew Studies points to the ways in whlch encounters between these two cultures emerged during the. eighteenth century and have persisted - albeit in a dramatically altered fashion - until today. The
interlinguistic, intercultural dialogr.le between German and llebrew dates back at least as far as Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the eighteenth century.Haskala.ft
oewish Enlightenment), whose Bible translation (1780-17ss), written in High German but transcribed in Hebrew characters for a broad pub lc of ]ewish reade,rs, not only marked the beginning of linguistic assimilation for Iews in Germany but also foreshadowed the linguistic "hybrids" that are beginning to emerge with greater freqrrency in contemporary literature (Eshel and Rokem 2013, L).
The adoption
of
German and assimilation
into
German society that
Mendelssohn's Bible translation was intended to promote did not result permanent reiection of Iewjsh languagee, as ls often assumed. During the
in a early
decades of the twentieth eemtury maay post eEslmllatton Gennen treun expracoed interest in Jewish languagea, speclflcally Hebrew and ylddlsh, as sourcee of the
trrdltlon and cultural cohesion that they feared had iidribbled
Frnr Krfka lamented in his famous letter to his father (I(afka t96G, lhtnwnotebook
is fust one concrete example of the
.-
S
away;,l, es
Bt).Kafka's
fascinationwith Hebrewthat
;otltd durlng this period of Jewish renewal. Anolher more,syrubolic example lB lll found tn Martin Buber's address at the,1909 congress for the Hebrew
l]$tlrr
ln Berlln. The paladin of iewish renewal, Buber would soon,trarmlate Hrbruw Blble into Gerrnan together with Franz Rosenzw,eig, yet ad,naitted &hrt whcn called upon to speak publicly in Modern ltrebrew: *unfortur,rately,
ln
hgt rpuk about the Hebrew language in a foreign tongue, as I am uot able to llal tn thc Hebrew language and I do not want to translate my thougt$s; which li lh9Ufht ln the foreign language, intoirny own but less known langqage" f nntr20u,13).ElseLasker-schiilertookadifferenttackwherathepoeturizvi hebrn rcquested to translate someof fislpoems from Germaninto Hebrew,.to *h rhr rhot back incredulously, "But I have alreadywritten thern.in,Hebrew,, Crnnrr 1995, x38). Kafka, Buber and liasker-sehiiler,regarded Hehsew a$ thdr f,tax tonSrrc, even if itwas less familiar than,Gerrnan, the,'foreign language" irr Tthh thry ryoke and wrote exclusively. As they grappled with questioua,of nafi.ve
ht$flr
rnd natlonal identity, they turned to llebrew as an imagi,ned longr,laige whtte faclng the conundrum that Kafka surnmed up as ,,theirnpomibllity flwtttnl Grrman and the impossibilfty of writing differently', (Kafka:1gfi4igg).
*gltln
Whlh
urly
twentieth-century German-Iewish writers expressed .fasciilaffoo
Slh Hrbnw as the wellspring of a dormant |ewishness, Iiebrewr(and,illddieh) illtrn ol the lntenvar years were strongly influenced by Geuaan literatffsraad tl&n, wrltera such as Michah yosef Berdichevsky, Irayim Nahma&rEial{ki lL Afnon, Awaham Ben-Yltzhak and Leah Goldberg (to name just a few) wrots Ittl Fublhhcd not only in Gerrnan"speaking cities hut also a,bout these cltlee. I 6gty of ncw research on intenuar llehrew and Yiddish cultures identifies Itilln rnO Vtenna as two leading centers, ror temporary lienclaves,,,,in which li mplfrrly dlaeporic Iewish literary rnodemism developed, (Brenner 20t5r l$rad 2013i Plneker 201t schachter 2011; seelis 2015); Scholars intorested"la ll mnrnrtlonal, mulfllingual nature of Iewish modernism increasingly reslsf
llllvlrton
of Hebrew and Ytddtsh literatures;,their exclusion from the study,of modernlam, and the conflation of Hebrew with Zionism and the,6tate Thdr work casts doubt on ttre monocultural na hnalist,narrative,that Fvrrnca thc rtudy of Hebrew culture by drawing attention to the vaflous Jnprtn c.nter! ln whlch Hebrewltterature developed elongside Jewtghwrlttng lHAafn rnd othfflan8uages durlng the fhst half of the twentleth centufy. ?hh nrw body of scholarshlp reflecte a growlng discourse on ,dlasporlc
'DDrlln
Ilill' $ -
tlGntYr"
frr$lrm,
r
eonccpt that celebraiec lntercultural exchalrgn and ltnguletlc Inrofar at lt contrlbute! to,thtE dhcowre, Gamm.t{cbpw Studlu
,
6r
-
Rachel Seetlg wlth Amir Eshel
Editors,lntroductlon
corresponds to another area of Hebrew literary scholarship that rejects monolithic
conceptions of "Israeli Hebrew" by drawing attention not only to lost European heritage languages such as German, yiddish and R.ussian but also to the suppressed heritage languages of Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent), especially Arabic and Ladino (Hochberg 2007; Le\ry 2014). with increasing scholarly efforts to expose a wealth of cultural and linguistic origins and lnfluences the multiplicity of voices that make up Israeli society slowly ls comlng lnto clearer view The Holocaust of European Jewry changed the relationship between German and Hebrew cultures irrevocably. But the relationship was not cut shortr German. ]ewlsh culture persisted after world war II in the newly formed state of Israel, with Getman"Jewish vrrriters and thinkers such as werner Kraft, Gershom Scholem, Else Lasker-schiiler and Ilana shmueli continuing to write German in the Jewish
state. some writers who once had expressed a purely symbolic fascinatiort with Hebrew actually began writing bilingually in both German and Hebrew, such as Arieh Ludwig strauss, whose oeuvre has garnered renewed interest in recent years (Barouch 2oi5; Seelig 2016). strauss is remembered not only as a bilingual poet but also as a prominent Hrjlderlin scholar and influential teacherj his lectures on Hebrew literature and world literature at the Hebrew university of ]erusalem strongly impacted the next generation of Hebrew writers, including Yehuda Arnichai, Tuvia Riibner and Dan pagis, likewise native German speakers. Although these writers are associated with the so-called "statehood Generation,l the first crop of Hebrew writers to produce ostensibly ,,national literature', in vernacular Hebrew, their abiding attachment to German betrays the inherent limitations of such designations (Gold 2008; Rokem i whereas early statehood writers often concealed German behind a veneer of "native" Hebrew, more recent Israeli fiction reflects the process of coming to term$
2010).
with Germany and the German language and its relationship to Israeli culture. The semi-autobiographical protagonists of chaim Be'er's Lifney ha-makom (,.upon a
certain place," 2007) and yoram Kaniuk's Der letzte Berliner (,,The last Berlilerr4 published in German translation in 2001 and then in the original Hebrew in 2004) travel to Germany as representatives of Israeli culture, where they are forced to grapple with the German-]ewish past. The experimentatr novelist yoel Hoffmann, meanwhile, demonstrates the manner in which German has been pushed to the margins of Israeli society byincorporating Gennan words and phrases (alongside Yiddish, Arabic and the occasional Hungarian) - accompanied by explanatory notes in the rnargins directly into his ostensibly monolingual Hebrew texts (Barzilai2OL4).
-
writing "between" Hebrew and German, or between Iarael and Germany, these writers represent the r.novement of languageg acroog llngulsflc and natlonal
_
7
l€rdrrr, Thls brings us to the third area to which German.Hebrew studles t3ntrlbutee, namely the study of migration, diaspora and transnationallsrn.
furt
Gardl's Broken German exemplifies the fluidity of linguistic and naflonal The epigraph of this essay, whlch unr
lg6rrr ln the age of globalization.
l6Eludrrt ln Gardi's submission for the Bachmann prize, is on the surface a slmplo Obrlt grmmatlcally flawed) statement about language, but in fact lt refera to fu rfttcffects of ongoing migration, the repeated transmutation of the mother Blma Wutterspractre) from one gmeration to the next in an age deflned by Foblllty and mass migration. As the epigraph suggests, the seemingly narsow of German-Hebrew exchange may be regarded as emblernatic of a rnuch
Iile
htFt wne of linguistic migration and subsequent cultural transformatlonr hfirpl "iubfleld," then, is not the correct term, since German.Hehrew gtudtGl
$tlrlbutcc to several different disciplinary categories while also calltng lnto lufitlon the ways in which these categories are demarcated and divided. Indeed, uhrt mrkes German-Hebrew Studies so rich is that fact that it reflects on the Opfflnl of borders while itself crossing borders.
t
tttween Berlin and Tel Aviv
Effmrn.Hcbrew exchange is not merely a topic of academic fasclnaflon but ithrr thrtvtng aspect of contemporary German and Israeli cultural llfe,
r
pltlculrrly ln the wake of increasing
Israeli migration to Germany, especlally to lndced, "lsraelis in Berlin" has become a kind of catchphrase in lts own filht, rllctttng a wlde range of reactions in the media. Some Israeli polltlclane lfrd publlc personallties have lambasted young Israelis for choosing to ,,return', tho eountry responsible fog the destruction of twentieth century Jewtsh ltfe h luropr. Former Mlnister of Finance yair Lapid, for instance, expressed utter It€ndullty and dlsdaln over the willingness of these young migrants to ,,throur enly country the Jews have in the trash just because life ls easler ln Berlln.', ilcmtty' the cholce of Berltn has touched a nerve. As Hahretz editor Aluf Benn
tltlln,
l
*r
GtmfnEd aardonlcally, the Israeli establishment sees Israell immlgaflon to the 0rmm crpltal, of all places, as "the ulflmate fallure of zlonism', (Rudoren zol4),
Itlt
tlnrlon reveals a growtng rift between mounting zlonlst natlonaHsm end the
*:prrrtlon and dlsenchantment of a generaflon of secular young Israells who utgclrtr Gcrmanywlth future opportunlfles rather than wlth the traurnatlc paet, Tbr controversy provoked by Israell mtgratlon to Berlln polntg to another -european la llft lrrr:ll aoclety, namely between lshlcenaztm (lewa of orlgtn)
und Mbrahtm (lews of Mlddle Eastern and North Afrlcan orlgln). Mtsraht lewe
8
-
Editors'lntroduction
Rachel Seetlg with Amlr Eshel
residing in Berlin feel alienated by the incendiary critiques of a Iewish "return" to Germany, since they descend not from Holocaustvictims or survivors but from Jews who emigrated or wele exiled from Muslim lands, for whom Arabic and LadinO; Iather than German and Yiddish, represent repressed heritage languages. Mati Shemoelof, a Mizrahi iournalist, activist and writer based in Berlin, co-olganizea the Poetic Hafla ("party" in Arabic), a monthly event for multilingual literary readings, spoken-word poetry and interdisciplinary performance art that taked place at various venues throughout the city. Organized by Israelis but attended by guests of various national backgrounds, the Poetic Hafla reflects Shemoelof's belief that Berlin is not simply a city once conquered by Hitler or divided by d menacing wall but rather a liberal environment in which linguistic, cultural and religious identities can be negotiated openly, indeed, a city where walls can and should be toppled. Berlin, for Minahiwriters like Shemoelof, must not be reduced
future.
' -r! to its blighted past but rather viewed as the city of a hopeful imaginatiou the It is not only the city but also its language that is capturing of a growing cohort of young Israeli writers, some of whom take up German a$ a language of composition, as in the case of Tomer Gardi, or as a metalinguis;
Whereas Gardi writes "broken German" in Latin letters, Shemoelof experiments with code-switching, occasionally incorporating translie ''l: terated German fragments into his Hebrew
tic preoccupation.
writing:
urN']f, il
ilfrtlu urq
nt..Ey
f)r: Ix lrltttftn
fnD urtl
ulN ;'l:it''ll, tr'l"lNl UDJN-I!.]'I y.rt' x5':x ,nlxl\
[Ish shreibeh Hebreyish/ A man writes Hebred Du fragst varum shreibehl ish hebrayish in Berlin/ Wallah,I don't knowl (Shemoelof 2016) 'i: ,rJ .A.nother Israeli poet, Almog Behar, who does not actuallyspeakGermanbutclaims
connection to it as one of the languages of his grandparents (along with Arabic, Ladino, and Dutch), incorporates quotes from Hebrew translations of Germa8 texts by writers such as Gershom Scholem and Paul Celan as part of his ongolng critique of "Israeli Hebrew" and the suppression of lewish heritage languageer Not unlike the early twentieth century German Jews who felt a connection tS Hebrew despite their limited familiarity with the language, contemporary Israell writers like Behar claim a connection to German despite their tenuous gtasp of a
the language. In a sense, Israeli wrlters looktng to German and Germany are worklng to salvage the multilingual tradltlon of thelr ptedecessors. Thle ts how Tal
-
9
hlruffihybowski describes the mission of his Berlin- and Paris-based Hebrew
Itrry fgurnal, Mikanvebylakh("From here onward"), whose rnission statement Inldt "th€ return of diasporic Hebrew to here - to Europe, to Ashkenaz, -
not ,ust to the site of its destruction but also a place that was once et thr greatest centers of the diasporic republic of Hebrew letters." Hever' vlews his journal as part of a broader movement of "non-hegemonic; lnterlingual literatute."2 In a similar vein, the Berlin-based iournal
*il
flfe founded in 2015 by a German, Hanno Hauenstein, and an lsraeli, Itarnar h rlmrd at "renew[ing] the relationship between the Hebrew and German lnd culture" by showcasing art, literature, and journalism that present dlveratty as enrichment and bilingualisrn as a gift."3
,tlLll btfore the new crop of "Israeli
Berliners" began writing
in
and
0ltmln, German writers of both Iewish and non-Jewish origin began to Hrbrew and Israel as a kind of imagined second home. For example, Bllhr'c ghort story "Land der Vdter und V€rrdter" ("Country of fathers in Haifa's Mount Carmel neighborhood, seamlessly such as "Shuk" (market) and "Alliiah" (immigration Hebrew words whlle Katharina Hacker's Tel Aviv: Eine Stadterziihlung ('Tel Aviv: tale tlty,tt t99Z) conveys intimate details of living in Tel Aviv from the perspective IBtllll, non.Jewlsh German woman. The increased mobility of Germans and ud rttcndant decline of inherited stigmas have facilitated new forms of
Ftpattrtors," t994),
set
flgloratlon and expression.
For these cultural nomads, the relationship
Orrman and Hebrew is no longer confined to conventional binaries of and exile/homeland, but rather serves as a source of creativity ldenttty. Futnrtlonal Hhlh contemporary literature produced in German and Hebrew tends to r two.alded tralectory between disparate cultural spaces, cross'cultural rnd lnter.llnguistic exchange increasingly takes place in the world A wrterahed achievement in this field was Eytan Fox's WalkonWater 9l ha.maytm,2004), produced in Israel and premiered to great acclaim lrrlln Fllm Festlval. The film tells the fictional story of Eyal, an Israeli fpnt hlred to assassinate a former Nazi, who poses as a tour guide and
htf
hlr trrget's grandchildren, Axel and Pia (Pia now lives on a kibbutz, and rrrlvrd to vlslt her from Germany). Although the film uhfolds primarily
thr dlalogue often weaves seamlessly between German and Hebrew.
lir
hlfrlon rtttrmrnt on thr
on the lournbl's webglter http://mlkanve.net/wp/ (10lanuary 2017). me$dm'a webglter http!//avlvmeg.com/en/ (10 lanuary 2017).
10
-
Editors,lntroduction
Rachel Seelig wlth Amlr Eshel
!t
In the last ten years since Fox's success, there has been a veritable renaisr of German-Israeli film co.productions, many dedicated to exploring
sance
postwa.r German-Israeli relations, including Arnon Goldfinger's The Flat (2OL2):,
EsterAmrami'sAnderswo(2Ol4)andMorKaplansky'sCaf,iNagler(2016).Perhapo
E thr arrly twentieth century in its comparison of Moses Mendelssohn's and lollnzweig's translations of the medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi. llIUCo that working with poetry specifically with Halevi's most famous
lht Zlonlde, shaped both philosophers'vocation
I
the most interesting of these films in terms of linguistic and cultural exchange ie i Anderswo (tneaning "elsewhere"), about a romantic relationship between Israell Noa (Neta Riskin) and Getman Jdrg (Golo Euler). The relationship is put under pressure when Noa leaves their home in Berlin to visit her ailing grandmothst and Jtirg follows her unannounced. Although he manages to find common grounfi with Noa's mother (played by Hanna Laszlo) thanks to a mishmash of Germd and Yiddish, he is tone deaf with respect to Israeli gallows humor. When Nodr$ brother, Dudi, mentions that the grandfather of the German football star Basti Schweinsteiger died in Auschwitz, 16rg is perplexed. "He fell from a watch says Dudi without cracking a smile, eliciting nothing but a blank stare. "It waE joke, man," Dudi quickly adds. Although the relationship between Noa and 1619 survives such moments, culturaltensionspersistandsome thingsareinevitablylostintra The culture gap forms the heart of Noa's floundering academic research a "dictionary of untranslatable words," featured throughout the film in a of short linguistic "excursions" in which immigrants from China, Korea, America, Russia and Israel attempt to explain untranslatable words from native languages. Yet, as the movie clearly demonstrates, this gap also serves fertile ground for artistic engagement and the creation of new narratives and of art - indeed, the very fabric of an emerging German-Hebreq German. shared life and culture. While the generation of Schweinsteiger's may have lived or served in the grim locations where many Jews were murder@, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren tell each other stories about th'dU divided and shared histories, creating herewith new literaiure, cinema and.eu@ new families. Katharina Hacker's more recent novels, Eine Art Ifebe (2O03), arid: Sktp (2015) are just one example of what is a clearly discemable, broade'r traiecto$i
Chapter overview
,1.
'lti
The following essays are divided into two parts. The first part, "German-Hebrevf Exchange in Modernist Literature," concentrates on twentleth.century German.
Hebrew literary exchange, whlle Fart l\rro tEkeE up conternporary toplcs. Tht essays gathered ln Part one coal,gtql Etound questloni of tranrlatlon, blllnguallam and llngulstlc mlgratlon. Ablgrll Gllmrn'r contrlbutlon apans the Enllghtenment
as
translatore and served
ttpplnS.stone on the path that led both to translate the Hebrew Bible.
l ntrl of the essays that follow take up the topic of self-translation. Using dlrcovered materials from the archive of Awaham Ben-Yitzhak (born Sonne), Maya Barzilai explores the interplay of German and Hebrew in modest yet seminal oeuwe. By tracing common motifs in poetic drafts produced in both languages, Barzilai demonstrates an "interlingual dlrlogue" that reveals a profound tension between fin-de-si6cle Viennese md the Zionist conception of Hebrew as the "language of revival." p0tt whose archive betrays a continuous, non-linear movement between
Ifafn
rnd Hebrew is Dan Pagis, the subfect of Na'ama Rokemrs essay. Through of two archival documents written in German, a translation of the f ln thr Laboratory" (Ba-ma'abadah) and a letter addressed to the Austrian
lmrt lrndl that includes
two poems of homage, Rokem offers an intimate
of PaElc'g bllingual "laboratory" her metaphor for the process of self. that creates space for experimentation, uncertain otrtcomes and
pb eontlngent paths. The process of self-translation is likewise the focus
lfehrl Ercllg'e essay on Tuvia Riibner, a contemporary and,close friend of ttlllg trkes as her point of departure the concept of "stuttering" as both a rRd an aesthetic strategy that calls into question monolithic notlons of rnd challenges the conventional binary categories oftranslation theot'y. Whlh thr ebove essays focus specifically on translation and bilingualism ln ilorkr ol lndlvldual poets, two of the essays in Part One examine cultural. rvanB and trends through the genres of memoir and book history. Giddon ptalents a new readin g of Leah Goldberg's Encounter with a P oet (Mifgash
llfihonr,1952), lnsplred by the life and work of Awaham Ben Yitzhak, as a ht thr ancounter of East Eutopean Jews with Gerrnan and Austrian moder:
tluil{
4
11
-
the flrat of the twentieth century. He argues that lewish writers who lron tho "perlphery" of the German Kulturlcreis saw themselves as sclons Eutopa (the true Europe), ldentified strongly with German culture and to ptaaarve lt as part of thelr collective memory. Stefanle Mahrer turm to #drr fhld of book publlshlng as an lndex for German-lewish cultural contlln r trrnmatlonal context. Her study of the Salman Schocken Publishtng (gcfiockcn Verlag) traces the venture's tra,ectory from Berlln to New York luumhm End dlacuases lts role tn promotlng Iewloh cultural llterary, facl. eollrbotatlonr bGtwe€n Iewtsh publlahera and non,Jiudgh arttaane and tbr pollclos of the Natlonal Soclallst Reglme. Flnally, thc lsst e$ay ln
k }l hffi
72
Editors'lntroduction
Rachel Seetig with Amlr Eshel
73
-
-
Part One provides a kind of poetic coda and spiritual mediation on bilingUalisrn, the loss of language, Ioss and mourning. Focusing on the lexically distinct ye{ vocally similar words n:,$ and Ach, Gatili Shahar considers the ways in whieB words of despair, in both Hebrew and German, are reduced to mere sounds, crieq
and breath. The pairing of these words, which are utterly emptied of meaning' allows German and Hebrew to meet, as Shahar puts it, "at a place of lingual
poverty."
rt
,,German-Hebrew Encounters in the Arts Today," we mov&, In the second part,
from discussions of literary modernism and twentieth century German' and Israeli culture into the twenty-first century and recent discourses s ing contemporary art. Ruth Ginsburg proposes a fresh approach to the poet Behar's notion of "multilingual Hebrew," a concept that implicitly critiques heg6tt monic ,.Israeli Hebrew,' by remaining open to the past and to silenced languages. While most scholars interested in Behar's work have emphasized
Mizrahi origins and critique of the suppression of Arabic as a fewish Ginbsurg examines two poems that betray Behar's relationship to German, a guage he does not speak but that he regards as an equally integral aspect of family history, the site of collective memory and acknowledged rupture. Rokem transports us into The Ruth Kanner Theatre Group's experimental performance , The Hebrew Notebook - And Other Stories by Franz Kafka' sioned in 2013 in honor of the 120th anniversary of the National tibrary of I where the notebook is now housed. A non-traditional performance recitation (in both German and Hebrew), interactive performance and storytelling, The Hebrew Notebook, Rokem argues, investigates the mech
of translation between languages and cultural contexts while offering a critique of the dominant Israeli Hebrew culture. The focal point of Yael Almog's essay is Yael Bartana's experimental' trilogy, And Europe will Be stunned, which mirrors the classic Zionist thems "return" to the Land of Israel in its portrayal of an imagined "Jewish return Europe." Almog shows how Bartana, an Israeli artist based in Berlin and A dam, critiques established Zionist narratives and memorial practices while part in the broader discourse on migration, integration and xenophobia underway in Europe. Transnational arflstic production is a central theme of Eshel's essay on the Israeli artist Dani KaIavan, whose work combines sc
and architecture with natural topography and literary sources, often from Hebrew Bible. Focusing on some of Karavan's maior public works in Germamry from the t970s to the present, Eehel examlnes the role of Hebrew names in fac{l litating a meaningful aesthetlc exped€flce that tnvlteg the vlewer to reflect OG' on btoadil ethlcal and poltttcal dtlcmi the German and Jev{i$h pa8t as wdl mas of modern hlstory Dranrtnl on th! phtlorophter of Metttn Hetdegger ald
lt
Arendt, Eshel presents Karavan's works in Germany as a crucial expresof thc relationship between German and Hebrew and as a case study for hfftl;lttng the German-Hebrew junction in the arts. Both Almog and Eshel how polltically aware and internationally active artists such as Bartana and not only erect bridges between Israeli and German/European cultures dro move beyond hermetic discussions of national identity to take part in the discourse on the politics of memory. Thf volume concludes with previously unpublished translations of texts by hE hedtng representatives of the new Israeli culture in Berlin. The first is the Ittoduetlon to the inaugural issue of the Berlin- and Paris-based Hebrew litefournrl Mlkan ve'eylakft (From here onward), written by Founding Editor Hlvu.Chybowski. This programmatic essay endorses the concept of "world " ('lwlt blamit), a term that encompasses both spatial and temporal (the Hebrew adlective blami means "worldwide," 'iuniversaln' and hltnrl") rnd htghlights the reach of the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature SfgUlhout the world and across generations. Calling into question "the myth of derth of Hebrew," Hever-Chybowski makes a powerful plea to salvage the SlPortc orlglns and legary of Hebrew by celebrating the continuity of literary ln clties like Paris, London, New York and Berlin. Pride of place is
tgfnrh
*n
Ilf
h
of. Ashkenaz, not only as a historical site of cultural lhd transformation since the period of.the Haskalah but also as the locaht whrrr most of the essays and literary works gathered in the journal were Slttrn rnd edited. t Thr volume closes with a literary contribution by Mati Shemoelof (pubhrtr ln English ttanslation), an excerpt from his novel in progress, The Ptllc for Hebrew Literature. Whereas Hever.Chybowski's essay concenon the relationship between Hebrew and'the languages of Ashkenaz, rnd Ytddish, Shemoelof's piece introduces us to the inner world of Mond, a Berlin-based Israeli writer of Iraqi origins who feels snubbed thl Eurocentrlc mainstream Israeli literary establishment, and his'German ftlfnd, Helena, who is coping with the psychological aftermath of a misShcmoelof's writing takes us into the most intimate quarters of this nt rnd rtruggllng Berlin couple, offering a restrained portrait oflove and eOmpaSalon and inevitable misunderstanding. Taken together, Heveressay and Shemoelof's literary excerpt reveal the dynamism and of Hebrew culture in Berlin, which spans not only a vast historical , cxtendlng from the days of Moses Mendelssohn to the present, but thr ethnlc and cultural spectrum that encompasses Hebreq German, ilCatln rnd Arablc, llterary languages cultlvated ln the dlaspora and nouris' ha ly ont rnother.
to Bcrlln, the cradle
74
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Rachel Seelig with Amlr Eshel
Editors,lntroduction
15
-
The essays gathered in this volume do not exhaust the parameters of tlld broad, emerging field of German-Hebrew Studies, but they gesture at the deptb and hreadth of an ongoing and constantly evolving encounter. Indeed, the twertX tieth and twenty"first centuriec alone account for four generations of writers artists whose creative consciousnegs bears the imprint of multilingual, tional exchange between German and HebreW two languages and cultures are anything but separate.
Works cited Aton, Tat. "The most comprehensive survey about lsraelis in Germany reinforces the image: secular, educated - and leftwing." Spitz Nlogazine (December 2015). http://
webonly/7238 (9 January 2017)
The 1991 lngeborg-Bachmann-Prize Debate,
j'
The Germon
QuarterlytO.3 (Summer
on den Vater. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins.
lltW Yorkr Schocken Books, 1966.
Itlnr, trtters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Xftv Yo;kr Schocken Books,7977. , Khui, "Wlr schaffen das!" Die Zeit, August 19, 2016. httpr//www.zeit.de/kultur/ lllfntUt/ZOt0-08/tlteratur-migration.tomer-gardi-broken-german (9 March 2017). lltft, Portlc Trespass: Writing between Hebrew ond Arabic in lsrael/Palestine. Princeton: lilnilton Unlverslty Press, 2014. , Lllrch, "Davld Vogel's Lost Hebrew Novel, Viennese Romonce." Prooftexts: Alaurnal 4lOwhn Lfierary Hlstory 33.3 (Fatl2013) r3O7-332. , Fanla. /srael/s in Berlin.1. Auf[. Frankfurt am Main: Ji.idischer Vertag im The Making of Modernist Hebrew
fiction in Europe.
CAr Stanford University Press, 2011.
l{l'tmr, "German-Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence ofYehuda AmlChrt and Paul Celan," Proofte*s: A lournal of lewish Literary Hrstory 30.1 (Winter l0l0)r 97-122 t'An
Exodus from lsrael to Germany, a Young Nation's Fissures Show," lhe New lodl, lQrhllmu,Octoberl5,20T4.https,tllwww,nytimes.conl2}lalfiltTlworld/mtddleeast/
ln,lxodur.from-lsraet-to-bertin-young-nations-fissures-show.htmt?-r=0 (9 March 20lfl. Alllton, Dlasporlc Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentleth
IiUhlu,
Clntury. Nrw York: Oxford University Press, 2011. l|chrl. Strange rs ln Berlin: Modern lewish Literature between East and West, ttlt-r1rt, Ann Arbor: Unlversity of Michigan Press, 2016. Mtll, Germanlt shvurah fun ayn yuden dikhter ("Broken German by a Jewlsh
folt"), Habkrts,
September 23, 2076. http://www.haokets.otgl2ot6
lTlllll.nlt:rrr-I!-IN-lllt-"lNu:rl I @ March 2017). Yfflt, "Rtlckkehr ln den Etfenbelnturm: Deutsch
| og I 23
|
an der Hebrdischen Universitat."
lleharalm Zcltschrlfr filr deutsch - lt)dische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte 8,2 (2014)t
lll-74r, 0td, loyr It not Praktlsh: The tsraell Mruchrd/Poatlm, 2015. .,
DiaspoTa Politics and Culfure. Legenda: O.xfOrd, 2010. Galchen, Rivka. "lmagine That: The Profound Empathy ofYoko Tawada." ihe NewYork
Tines, 27 October 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/20 T6lt0l3Otlmagazlnel yoko-tawada.htmt?_r=O (5 Jan uary 2OU), Gardi, Tomer. Broken German, Graz & Wion: Droschl, 2016. Gotd, Niti Scharl, Yehudo Amlchol: lhe Moklng of lsro.l's Natlanal Poet, Wdtthamr Brandels,r 1f{ University Press,
2008.
D)r|t261-276. ?nnt, httar to hls Father. Brief
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Look at Germany (Hebrew). Tet Aviv: Klbbutz
In the wake of World War II and ttp Holocaust, it seerncd there was no the two place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Gerrnany languag€s end their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when plrced side by side on opposing lxtges, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Cornprised of essays on literaturg history, philosg,phy, and th€ visual and ecrforming arts, this volume explores ttre mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as rcparate or sven as .dinmetrically opposed. Frour Mooes Mendelssohnk arrival in Bslin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Bedin, the essays gattrered here shed new light on the painfrrl yet productive relatiurship betw'een rnodern German and Hebrew c,ultures.
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TtlE SERIE9: PERSPECTIVES Otl JEWISH TEXTS AND CONTE:XTS This series focuses on the Jewish textual tradition as well as the ways it evolves in response to new intellectual, historical, social and political contexts. Fostering dialogue htwecn literary, philoaophical, political and religious perspectives, this series, which consists of original rcholarship ad proceedingc of international coltferenc*, reffects contsnporary ctxmerns of Jewish Studies in the broadest sense. Perspectives on JewishTexts and Contexts is edited by Vivian Liska, the Institute of Jewish Sttldics' University of Antwerp, Bclgium.
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