Packing up the Past: Vicki Baum’s Quest for Heimat

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.

Neopicaresque, Jewish Humor and Denunciation of Cosmopolitanism in Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

The neopicaresque novel is a nascent genre that was invigorated in the aftermath of World Wars I and II in Britain and the United States. Contemporary studies of neopicaresque depict the image of the picaro as the “alienated”, “the outcast” and the “rebellious” character. This study is an attempt to redefine the Jewish neopicaresque novel and proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitanism are indispensable aspects that need further investigation. It endeavors through these two aspects to comment on the Jewish exilic experience in cosmopolitan America. Further, the study proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitism unearth the inability of the ghetto-minded Jewish immigrant to fathom the traumatic and rapid social and political vicissitudes that lead him to escape this chaotic life. These propositions are expounded through a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man who Disappeared (1914) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953). These Jewish travel narratives are discussed as Jewish neopicaresque novels that demonstrate the exodus of Eastern Jewish immigrants to America in the aftermath of WWI and II. The study draws on Freudian psychoanalytic theory of Jewish “self-critical “and “self-deprecating” humor. Considerations of the cultural dilemma of the Jewish ghetto immigrant and his negative depictions as “the wanderer Jew” and the “displaced-person” are addressed from the critical perspective of contemporary cosmopolitan discourses of Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman and Ulrich Beck. Keywords: Jewish neopicaresque novel, Jewish humor, cosmopolitanism, Kafka’s Amerika, Soul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion

This chapter talks about “The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion,” which invited leading minds in Israel into Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's home to ponder together the Book of Joshua in 1958. As it analyzes the interpretations and discussions of the Joshua Study Group, the chapter also highlights the degree to which the participants reflected on the 1948 war through passages in Joshua. It explains how the group explicitly made a connection that is already evident in the name of Operation Bin-Nun, the 1948 battle at Latrun that intended to open the road to a besieged Jerusalem, after the biblical Joshua Bin-Nun. It also describes Ben Gurion, who declared that no one had better interpreted Joshua than the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and saw the enactment of biblical archetypes as the most fitting form of biblical commentary. The chapter also points out how the official Israeli interpretation of Joshua sought to unify the disparate Jewish immigrant communities through a war story.

“A Profound Love for Luscious Things”

To explore Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, this chapter utilizes research in Jewish immigrant history and migration patterns in the United States, Jewish-American foods and foodways, period-relevant Jewish-American cookbooks, food manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century, and roadside/programmatic architecture. This research reveals the rich cultural background of Sendak’s story as both quintessentially Jewish and deeply American. Mickey’s night kitchen holds a complex variety of legible social codes. Food embeds such codes, and its “messages . . . will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed” (Mary Douglas). Sendak’s experiences in a marginalized subculture mirror those of children. As a marginalized group, children are deeply aware of social hierarchies and their place within them: they understand their lack of power. Mickey fulfills children’s dreams for power within a context they can understand: the food they consume in their daily lives.

Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 250 pp.

The premise of this book, actually based on an article I published in 1982, is that rabbis can serve as indicators of the Orthodoxy they serve. In her examination of a once-dominant group within Orthodox Judaism, the so-called “Modern Orthodox,” Maxine Jacobson focuses on Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, a German Jewish immigrant to America who became a prominent spokesman and exemplar of these Jews. Admitting that a precise definition of Modern Orthodoxy is elusive and that even many of those who came to be associated with this worldview and its allied behaviors were uncomfortable with the term (nor did they all agree on its parameters), Jacobson falls back on metaphor: “The Modern Orthodox Jew has been pulled in two directions” (p. 10). Those two directions are defined by Jacobson as either “not religious enough” or “not modern enough” (p. 10). Effectively, Modern Orthodoxy hoped to harmonize these two opposites, having relationships of respect with non-Jews and embracing the larger surrounding open culture, while remaining conscientiously observant. In contrast, Jacobson notes, “the Ultra-Orthodox group seeks to exclude” all that is different from it (p. 11). Nothing new here. The many faces of Orthodoxy have been more or less defined, from almost the first days that Orthodox Jews were subject to critical analysis, by a variety of observers, including myself....

Jüdische und arabische Erinnerungen im Dialog

The Jewish-Canadian and Arab-American writers and professors of literature George Ellenbogen (*1934) and Evelyn Shakir (1938–2010) were life companions. In both their memoirs, the authors tell stories of neighborhood, enriching encounters and their search for roots. George grows up in the Jewish immigrant quarter of Montreal, goes to McGill University, and later travels to the places of his ancestors, the destroyed world of the shtetl. In her Boston childhood, Evelyn is perceived as an Arab who does not entirely belong. As visiting professor in Arab countries, however, her students see her as an American. The memoirs, three related articles, and an interview with George Ellenbogen raise basic questions of belonging and otherness, cultural location and the pursuit of mutual understanding and respect. The volume also appeals to teachers who want to turn their lessons into contact zones in which different cultures and perspectives collide and enter into mutual dialogue. With contributions by George Ellenbogen; Pascal Fischer, Christoph Houswitschka; Sally Michael Hanna; John Kinsella; Margueritte Murphy; Evelyn Shakir (†); Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn