Jewish Literature and Culture

"In this study Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, North American and British writers struggled to keep memory of it alive.". "Many contemporary writers - among them Anthony Hecht, Gerald Stern, Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Michael Hamburger, Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Jacqueline Osherow, and Anne Michaels - have grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. Through confessional verse and reinventions of the elegy, as well as documentary poems about photographs and trials, poets serve as proxy-witnesses of events that they did not experience firsthand. By speaking about or even as the dead, these men and women of letters elucidate what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation."--BOOK JACKET.

"Published in Germany in 1920, Sammy Gronemann's satirical novel set in 1903 at the time of the Sixth Zionist Congress follows the life of a baptized Jew, Heinz Lehnsen, as he negotiates legal entanglements, German culture, religious differences, and Zionist aspirations. A chance encounter with a long-lost cousin from a shtetl in Russia further complicates the plot and challenges the characters' notions of Jewish identity and their belief in the claims of the Zionist movement. Gronemann's humor and compassion slyly expose the foibles and contraditions of human behavior. With deep insight into German society, German-Jewish culture, and antisemitism, Utter Chaos paints a highly entertaining portrait of German Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century" --

"In the Footsteps of Orpheus considers the life and work of Miklos Radnoti, one of Hungary's greatest twentieth-century poets. Radnoti's story evokes the experience of many great artists of Jewish origins in Central Europe. Repelled by the rise of anti-Semitism, yet tied to the poetic and national traditions of the Magyars, he was fated to confront the destruction that enveloped Europe during World War II. In response, he composed some of the most sublime poems in Hungarian literary history.". "Zsuzsanna Ozsvath traces the development of Radnoti's childhood and young adulthood, his attraction to the political Left, his sense of becoming an outsider in his own country as Fascism took hold in Hungary, and his marriage to Fanni Gyarmati, the woman who inspired much of his poetry. A concluding chapter depicts Radnoti's final journey, a forced march from the copper mines of Bor, in Serbia, to Abda, in western Hungary, where he was shot and buried in a mass grave in 1944. When his body was exhumed nearly two years later, a small book of poems, among Radnoti's most moving verse, was retrieved from his coat pocket. Ozsvath's incisive readings of Radnoti's work reveal the sources of the poet's inspiration and imagery. Her sensitive translations from the Hungarian lend poignancy to this tragic and forcefully told story."--BOOK JACKET.