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Tevye's Daughters: Jews and European Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2007

MARCI SHORE
MARCI SHORE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Yale University, PO Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520, USA; [email protected].
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Type
Review Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 2007 , pp. 121 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 See, for instance, Dynner, Glenn, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gross, Jan T., Fear (New York: Random House, 2006)Google Scholar; Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nathans, Benjamin, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Veidlinger, Jeffrey, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

2 Harshav, Benjamin, Language in the Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 45.Google Scholar

3 Manea, Norman, The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir, trans. Angela Jianu (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 241.Google Scholar

4 See Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988)Google Scholar, and Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, and Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

6 Deutscher, Isaac, ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’, in Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Deutscher, Tamara (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 25–41.Google Scholar

7 The classic work on the origins of modern Jewish politics, and the way in which Marxism and Zionism grew up side by side in the Russian empire, remains Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

8 On the question of Israel, Slezkine shares certain ideas with Tony Judt. ‘Israel’, Slezkine writes, ‘was the only postwar European state (“European” in both composition and inspiration) to have preserved the ethos of the great nationalist and socialist revolutions of the interwar period . . . Only Israel continued to live in the European 1930s; only Israel still belonged to the eternally young, worshiped athleticism and inarticulateness, celebrated combat and secret police, promoted hiking and scouting, despised doubt and introspection, embodied the seamless unity of the chosen, and rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness . . . Israel of the 1950s and 1960s was not simply Apollonian and anti-Mercurian – it was Apollonian and anti-Mercurian at a time when much of the Western world, of which it considered itself a part, was moving in the opposite direction’ (pp. 327–8). Judt argues (albeit in a harsher tone and in a different – and more overtly political – context) that Israel today is an anachronism, embodying a certain nationalist ethos of the European fin-de-siècle and interwar years that followed. Judt, Tony, ‘Israel: The Alternative’, New York Review of Books, 50, 16 (23 Oct. 2003), 8, 10.Google Scholar

9 On the common language and aesthetic of Zionism and communism, see Marci Shore, ‘Język, Pamięć i Rewolucyjna Awangarda: Kształtowanie Historii Powstania w Getcie Warszawskim, 1944–1950’, Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 188, 4 (Dec. 1998): 44–61.

10 Harshav, Benjamin, Language in the Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 43.Google Scholar

11 Taylor, A. J. P., The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 17.Google Scholar

12 Harshav, Language in the Time of Revolution, 42.

13 On the subject of acculturation or the lack thereof, Perloff is strikingly bitter towards Theodor Adorno, who, she believes, should have been more grateful to the United States for saving him from the Holocaust. ‘Indeed, when Adorno asks whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz, he is really asking whether the European – specifically the German – can write poetry after Auschwitz. He seems to have known nothing of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Eliot and Stevens, much less the poets of Latin America or the Caribbean. It was as if excessive contact with American culture might contaminate one's post-Kantian purity’ (pp. 138–9).

14 The tone and effect is similar to that of Ruth Wisse's conclusion to her own, generally admiring, book about the Polish Jewish writer I. L. Peretz: ‘the schoolchildren of Vilna and of all Poland were murdered with the words of Peretz on their lips’. Wisse, Ruth R., I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).Google Scholar

15 In Hahn's understanding, Celan plays the role for Susman that literary scholar Vivian Liska claims Kafka played for Celan: the one who knows how to write/speak about the impossibility of writing/speaking, the one who knows how to write silence and absence.

16 Sebastian, Mihail, Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years, trans. Camiller, Patrick, ed. Ioanid, Radu (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 429.Google Scholar

17 On the construction of subjectivity in modernity, see also Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

18 See Stanisław Krajewski, ‘Jews and Communism’, in Bernard, M. and Szlajfer, H., eds., From the Polish Underground: Selections from Krytyka 1978–1993 (State College: Pennsylvania State University, 1996), 353–94.Google Scholar

19 Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 34.Google Scholar

20 Kafka, Franz, Tagebücher 1910–1923 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), 274, 341.Google Scholar

21 See Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

22 Berlin, Isaiah, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 14.

24 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27.Google Scholar

25 According to Slezkine, ‘In January 1937, on the eve of the Great Terror, the 111 top NKVD officials included 42 Jews, 35 Russians, 8 Latvians, and 26 others’ (p. 254).