Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund

Abstract

perspective on the margins, it is one of its strong points to leave the well-trodden tracks of canonized key German-Hebrew literary figures: the study explicitly puts forward the literary works of less known, if not forgotten, writers like Moshe Yaakov Ben-Gavriel (Eugen Höflich), Baruch Kurzweil, and Rudolf Kastein, whose book Eine palästinensische Novelle [A Palestinian Short Story] was the product of an economically difficult self-publishing effort. Their protagonists struggle with the impossibility of settling in Palestine and with their literary projections of European landscapes and cities. Their invocation of fictitious settings challenges the Zionist ideal through what Schirrmeister calls ‘deterritorialisation by means of fantasy’ (‘fantastische Deterritorialisierung’, 219). The book does not isolate the writers in their German-speaking bubble. Very loosely inspired by Bourdieu’s field theory, it goes beyond the personal (and literary) biographies and the current leitmotiv of a lost ‘Heimat’ by taking into account the writings’ agitated publication histories that actually reflect the literary conditions of pre-State Israel. In a further research perspective, this angle would allow to study the German-Hebrew entanglements in more detail through their conflicts, their concurrences, and their struggles for legitimation. Who among the German-speaking authors, for instance, succeeded in establishing themselves? Who did not? Why? In consequence, these German-Hebrew contacts would be characterized not only by the textual migrations and the material movements through personal archives but also by the moves of the literary field’s constant fights for position and categorization. This potential leads us back to the beginning of both the book and this review: the author’s participation in the search for a category that would finally situate the German-speaking literature in Palestine/Israel is characterized less by the attempt to ‘reterritorialise’ (221) it by a new concept and more by the acknowledgement of its multidirectional paths and movements. This engaging, very readable book, based on Schirrmeister’s PhD thesis, completed in 2017 at the Research Center Exile Literature at the University of Hamburg, distinguishes itself by its theoretical and historical awareness that demonstrates the author’s understanding of Hebrew culture as a framework for the conditions and possibilities of German speaking literary production in pre-State Israel. It also provides an approach to think about German literary production in Palestine/Israel beyond the authors’ individual biographies within a relational German-Hebrew perspective. The German-Hebrew literary entanglement is by no means a phenomenon of the past, as the author convincingly shows at the end of his study. Writers like Tomer Gardi and Mati Schemoelof are part of this developing research field which the existence of this study proves to be both fruitful and promising.