Book Review: Caroline Jessen, Kanon im Exil: Lektüren deutsch-jüdischer Emigranten in Palästina/ Israel. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. 398 p. ISBN: 9783835333482. [German]

Abstract

Kanon im Exil is an interdisciplinary biographical study of the reading canon and writings of five German-Jewish authors who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Caroline Jessen’s eloquent and creative work, an abridged version of her dissertation, brings together literary and exile studies, social and cultural history, history of the book, and the history of ideas. It is embedded in the specific political context of a newly formed society in Palestine/Israel, which chose Hebrew as its unifying language and embarked on new national literary expressions and cultural narratives. Immigrants to Palestine found themselves in a very different situation in comparison to those in other prominent places of German-Jewish emigration in the 1930s—mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom—where the newcomers entered established societies and negotiated their space there. The lives of the five people profiled in this book offer an impression of the tensions and conflict areas they encountered. Jessen argues that the conscious and unconscious discourse with the German literary canon that each of these writers grappled with is an invaluable tool for the study of contemporary discourses as an expression of cultural memory. 1 Before embarking on a theoretical framework for canon research, Jessen introduces the topic with an observation regarding German book collections taken to Palestine/Israel by emigrants from Germany as material manifestations of their literary culture: These once ubiquitous collections are now vanishing from everyday Israeli life together with the last generation of their owners.