Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.03
B. Pollock
Abstract:At first glance, it seems obvious that the secret with which Franz Rosenzweig is occupied in his 1928 essay “Secret of the Form of Biblical Narratives” is the inexplicit form through which the Bible transmits the meaning of its narratives. But the claim put forward in this article is that the role of intertextual allusions in determining the Bible’s meaning—concealed from those not privy to this literary device—is neither the only nor the most consequential secret to which Rosenzweig wishes to draw his readers’ attention in his essay. The more far-reaching secret Rosenzweig seeks to convey involves the redemptive role readers of the Bible are intended to play when they bring their respective acts of biblical interpretation into conversation with one another.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.04
S. Gollance
Abstract:Dance is a crucial yet largely unrecognized motif in I. J. Singer’s Yiddish-language family epic Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), which chronicles Jewish life in Łódź. In his famous article, “Mayufes: A Window on Polish-Jewish Relations,” Chone Shmeruk recounts how a Polish officer orders the brothers Max and Yakub Ashkenazi to dance a humiliating mayufes—Yakub resists, and the officer shoots him. Shmeruk claims Singer’s rendition is “perhaps the most poignant mayufes of all.” While this scene of forced dancing is arguably the best-known scene in the novel, this article approaches it in connection with an earlier transgressive mixed-sex wedding dance and demonstrates how dancing scenes in the novel juxtapose late nineteenth-century dreams of embourgeoisement with the reality of early twentieth-century antisemitism. As such, the dance floor both challenges and reifies power structures in the novel. What is more, these dance scenes take place at crucial moments in the plot, emphasizing the moments of rupture and reconciliation between the eponymous brothers and highlighting the physical contrast between cerebral striver Max and lusty, good-natured Yakub. By examining these seemingly disparate dance scenes, it is possible to gain a deeper perspective into the ways acculturation and antisemitism operate on the Polish-Jewish body.
摘要:在I. J. Singer的意第绪语家庭史诗《阿什肯纳兹兄弟》中，舞蹈是一个重要的主题，但在很大程度上没有被认识到，这部史诗记录了Łódź犹太人的生活。Chone Shmeruk在他著名的文章《马尤费斯:波兰与犹太人关系的窗口》中，叙述了一名波兰军官如何命令马克斯和雅库布这对德系犹太人兄弟跳羞辱性的马尤费斯舞——雅库布反抗，然后军官开枪打死了他。Shmeruk称辛格的演唱“可能是所有歌曲中最令人心酸的”。虽然这一被迫跳舞的场景可以说是小说中最著名的场景，但本文将其与早期越界的男女混合婚礼舞蹈联系起来，并展示了小说中的舞蹈场景如何将19世纪晚期的中产阶级梦想与20世纪早期的反犹主义现实并列。因此，舞池在小说中既是对权力结构的挑战，也是对权力结构的具体化。更重要的是，这些舞蹈场景发生在情节的关键时刻，强调了同名兄弟之间的决裂与和解的时刻，并突出了大脑奋斗者马克斯和精力充沛、脾气善良的雅库布之间的身体对比。通过研究这些看似不同的舞蹈场景，可以更深入地了解文化适应和反犹主义在波兰犹太人身上的运作方式。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.02
Roni Masel
Abstract:The scholarship on Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik’s most canonical Hebrew poem, “In the City of Killing,” persistently returns to its origin story in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. This article turns to the poem’s Yiddish translations—the first by Bialik’s colleague, admirer, and ideological opponent Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, and the second by Bialik himself—and challenges notions of origins, originals, and unfaithful translations. It pays attention to a consistently suppressed fact: parts of the poem in the canonized form known to us today, particularly those that bring the poem’s fascination with the gothic and grotesque to new heights, were introduced into the poem through Peretz’s Yiddish rendition. Bialik then borrowed these images and tropes and incorporated them into his own Yiddish translation, ultimately translating them into Hebrew and integrating them into the final, canonized version only in 1923. Rather than contesting accusations of Peretz’s “disloyal” translation or accusing Bialik in turn of plagiarism, this article grapples with the philological impetus to search for definitive originals and the desire for textual stability. An entangled web of bibliographical evidence, unfaithful renditions, and unacknowledged textual relatives exposes translation as a productive and unruly site of literary transfer, as a site of conflict. That conflict should be understood in political terms, as a conflict over the means, character, and grounds for a Jewish national revival. The poem’s translational history reconstructed in this article summons, finally, a renewed evaluation not only of the ties between Hebrew and Yiddish and between original and translation, but also more broadly of Jewish textual culture in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.
摘要:关于Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik最经典的希伯来诗《杀戮之城》(In The City of Killing)的研究，不断地回到它的起源故事——1903年的基什涅夫大屠杀。这篇文章转向了这首诗的意第绪语翻译——第一个是由拜力克的同事、仰慕者和意识形态上的对手伊茨霍克·莱布什·佩雷茨翻译的，第二个是拜力克本人翻译的——并挑战了起源、原创和不忠实翻译的概念。它关注的是一个一直被压抑的事实:我们今天所知的被封圣的部分诗歌，特别是那些将诗歌对哥特式和怪诞的迷恋推向新高度的部分，是通过佩雷茨的意第绪语翻译引入诗歌的。然后，Bialik借用了这些图像和比喻，并将它们融入他自己的意第绪语翻译中，最终将它们翻译成希伯来语，直到1923年才将它们整合到最终的、被册封的版本中。本文并没有反驳对佩雷茨“不忠实”翻译的指责，也没有指责拜力克抄袭，而是探讨了寻找权威原作的语言学动力和对文本稳定性的渴望。一个由书目证据、不忠实的翻译和未被承认的文本亲属组成的错综复杂的网络，暴露了翻译作为一个富有成效和不受约束的文学转移场所，作为一个冲突场所。这场冲突应该从政治角度来理解，是关于犹太民族复兴的手段、性质和基础的冲突。最后，本文重构的这首诗的翻译历史，不仅唤起了对希伯来语和意第绪语之间、原文和翻译之间关系的重新评价，而且唤起了对20世纪初东欧犹太文本文化更广泛的评价。
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Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.05
M. Reingold
Abstract:This article analyzes approaches to familial and communal memory in Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Asaf Hanuka’s Hayehudi haʿaravi, two Mizrahi graphic novels published in 2020. Both make use of comics-specific modalities to communicate the struggles of contemporary Mizrahim who feel burdened and bound to a past of which the authors possess no memories. Isaacs’s employment of wordlessness as she navigates 1930s and 1940s Jewish Baghdad facilitates an immersive sensory experience that enables her to extract meaning from the past and locate it in Mizrahi life in the present. Hanuka uses “braiding,” a concept described by Thierry Groensteen to refer to the complex interweaving of visual and linguistic narratives across a work, to link his own life story with the stories of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Doing so allows him to understand the ways in which his own life has paralleled his ancestors’ choices while leading him to make changes in order to avoid repeating their mistakes. Considered together, both artists model creative approaches to navigating the Mizrahi past and present and modelling ways to create a cohesive Mizrahi identity in the twenty-first century.
{"title":"Unpacking the Past in Wordless and Braided Comics: Contemporary Mizrahi Graphic Novelists and Traumatic Historical Memories","authors":"M. Reingold","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes approaches to familial and communal memory in Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Asaf Hanuka’s Hayehudi haʿaravi, two Mizrahi graphic novels published in 2020. Both make use of comics-specific modalities to communicate the struggles of contemporary Mizrahim who feel burdened and bound to a past of which the authors possess no memories. Isaacs’s employment of wordlessness as she navigates 1930s and 1940s Jewish Baghdad facilitates an immersive sensory experience that enables her to extract meaning from the past and locate it in Mizrahi life in the present. Hanuka uses “braiding,” a concept described by Thierry Groensteen to refer to the complex interweaving of visual and linguistic narratives across a work, to link his own life story with the stories of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Doing so allows him to understand the ways in which his own life has paralleled his ancestors’ choices while leading him to make changes in order to avoid repeating their mistakes. Considered together, both artists model creative approaches to navigating the Mizrahi past and present and modelling ways to create a cohesive Mizrahi identity in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87787954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.01
Chana Kronfeld
Abstract:The land as woman is one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical systems in Jewish as well as Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and it has been used to support the discourses of colonialism and nationalism throughout history, as well as in some of the most beautiful devotional poetry. The metaphor has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where the male prophet, ventriloquizing a male God, addresses Zion as his beloved—yet often unfaithful—wife, thus metaphorically and lexically linking idolatry with adultery and whoredom (both are zenut in biblical Hebrew). In modern Hebrew poetry, the male poet lays claim to this biblical trope, but now within a secular, nationalist “conquest” of the land as woman. In this article, I explore what happens when modernist women poets critique a tradition that views women always as metaphors, never as literal subjects. I read Esther Raab’s early poetry as an example of the revolutionary work of modern Hebrew women poets who develop a new erotics of address to the land that calls into question patriarchal models of conquest and subjugation.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.03
Amir Engel
Abstract:The purpose of this essay is to explore a unique kind of Jewish diasporism in contemporary German-Jewish literature. As in all forms of diasporism, the German-Jewish authors under consideration here confirm the necessity of living in exile. Unlike most other thinkers, who affirm exile for political or religious reasons, the diasporism discussed here is existential and personal. This form of diasporism, it is argued, is connected to the specific kind of Jewish exile that these authors have chosen. All three live in Berlin, which occupies a special role in the contemporary Jewish imagination. And all of them explore through literature the desires, fears, and disappointments of exile and homecoming.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.2.02
Yaakov Herskovitz
Abstract:This article presents a joint reading of two school novels, both written in the span of one year: the Yiddish novel Hibru by Yoysef Opatoshu and the Hebrew novel Mehatḥalah (From the Beginning) by Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner. These two novels, when read together, offer a consideration of language education and monolingual trajectories in both New York and Tel Aviv, and of both Hebrew and Yiddish. The article charts connections between the two works that have never been discussed before, showing how both authors foreground an anxiety with the vernacular future of Jewish communities around the world, and how both novels, although very different in narrative and style, reflect a shared uneasiness about the viability of monolingual Jewish existence. In doing so, this article offers a transnational reading of these two novels, showing how in 1919 the world of Jewish literature was embroiled in similar questions of immigration and origins, as well as both the power and the shortcomings of language education.
摘要:本文将对Yoysef Opatoshu的意第绪语小说《Hibru》和Yoysef Ḥayyim Brenner的希伯来语小说《Mehatḥalah (From the Beginning)》这两部在一年内完成的校园小说进行联合阅读。这两部小说放在一起读，可以让我们思考纽约和特拉维夫的语言教育和单语发展轨迹，以及希伯来语和意第绪语的发展轨迹。这篇文章列出了这两部作品之间从未被讨论过的联系，展示了两位作者如何突出了对世界各地犹太社区未来的担忧，以及两部小说如何反映了对单一语言犹太人生存能力的共同不安，尽管它们在叙事和风格上非常不同。在此过程中，本文提供了对这两部小说的跨国阅读，展示了1919年犹太文学世界是如何卷入类似的移民和起源问题的，以及语言教育的力量和缺点。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.06
Ariel Pridan
Abstract:This article attempts to explore the role of betrayer and betrayal as a literary, political, and critical position in Israeli author Yigal Mossinsohn's (1917–94) novel Judas (1962). Mossinsohn situates Judas Iscariot at the heart of the Jewish national project and presents him not as a betrayer but as an obedient man ordered by his commander to turn Jesus in as a means of changing the balance of political power in occupied Canaan. The presentation of the Christian betrayal narrative in the framework of a plot revolving around political intrigue associated with the aspiration for autonomous Jewish sovereignty enables a reading of Mossinsohn's novel as an exploration of the meanings and ramifications of betrayal against the context of the Israeli political and ideological reality in which it was written. Mossinsohn's novel fosters an unresolvable tension between the desire to present an active and effective model of political betrayal and its failure—the failure to burrow an escape route out of what this article refers to as "the Israeli industry of saints." This industry renders betrayal an inherent part of a prescribed Zionist redemption narrative. In the novel, the failure of betrayal is rooted in the fact that it does not have a world-changing effect and does not constitute a point of departure for the imagining of alternative forms of political and social relations. Therefore, what may seem in Mossinsohn's novel to be a necessary position of betrayal, which harshly criticizes the political underpinnings of Israeli sovereignty, is eventually replaced by a less treacherous impasse into which the betrayer is sucked against his will.
{"title":"Judas Iscariot: Between Betrayer and Betrayed: On Igal Mossinsohn’s Novel, Judas","authors":"Ariel Pridan","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article attempts to explore the role of betrayer and betrayal as a literary, political, and critical position in Israeli author Yigal Mossinsohn's (1917–94) novel Judas (1962). Mossinsohn situates Judas Iscariot at the heart of the Jewish national project and presents him not as a betrayer but as an obedient man ordered by his commander to turn Jesus in as a means of changing the balance of political power in occupied Canaan. The presentation of the Christian betrayal narrative in the framework of a plot revolving around political intrigue associated with the aspiration for autonomous Jewish sovereignty enables a reading of Mossinsohn's novel as an exploration of the meanings and ramifications of betrayal against the context of the Israeli political and ideological reality in which it was written. Mossinsohn's novel fosters an unresolvable tension between the desire to present an active and effective model of political betrayal and its failure—the failure to burrow an escape route out of what this article refers to as \"the Israeli industry of saints.\" This industry renders betrayal an inherent part of a prescribed Zionist redemption narrative. In the novel, the failure of betrayal is rooted in the fact that it does not have a world-changing effect and does not constitute a point of departure for the imagining of alternative forms of political and social relations. Therefore, what may seem in Mossinsohn's novel to be a necessary position of betrayal, which harshly criticizes the political underpinnings of Israeli sovereignty, is eventually replaced by a less treacherous impasse into which the betrayer is sucked against his will.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87919760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.05
A. Maoz
Abstract:For over sixty years, the traumatic memories of the 1948 war haunted the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. His experiences of the fighting, his injuries, and the friends who were wounded or killed left their mark on Kaniuk's personality and became a source of inspiration for his writing. This article discusses the phases in Kaniuk's writings on the war by examining the numerous variants on an identical episode that reappear in his books and his written drafts. It argues that Kaniuk's process of writing on the traumatic events of 1948 shifts from a distal standpoint in the 1950s and 1960s to a much more intimate vision of personal testimony in his seminal novel 1948 (Tashaḥ) and shows that tracing Kaniuk's poetics of displacement can shed light on his process of becoming a witness.
{"title":"Fragments from the Past: Kaniuk's Witnessing and the Poetics of Displacement","authors":"A. Maoz","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:For over sixty years, the traumatic memories of the 1948 war haunted the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. His experiences of the fighting, his injuries, and the friends who were wounded or killed left their mark on Kaniuk's personality and became a source of inspiration for his writing. This article discusses the phases in Kaniuk's writings on the war by examining the numerous variants on an identical episode that reappear in his books and his written drafts. It argues that Kaniuk's process of writing on the traumatic events of 1948 shifts from a distal standpoint in the 1950s and 1960s to a much more intimate vision of personal testimony in his seminal novel 1948 (Tashaḥ) and shows that tracing Kaniuk's poetics of displacement can shed light on his process of becoming a witness.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88638474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.04
Gideon Nevo
Abstract:For many years Natan Alterman, the main poetic voice of the Jewish community in Palestine before and after the establishment of the state of Israel, published a regular poetic column in major Hebrew dailies. His major body of journalistic verse—"Hatur hasheviʿi" ("The Seventh Column") published in Davar from the 1940s through the 1960s—enjoyed unprecedented popularity and influence and, in effect, earned him the title of national poet. In "Hatur hasheviʿi" Alterman provided a resonant poetic response to all the tragic and dramatic events in the history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century, culminating in World War II, the Holocaust, and the bitter struggle for Israel's independence. He continued this in the early years of the state. One of the challenges facing the new state was absorbing the massive waves of immigration streaming to its gates. This challenge was compounded when dealing with immigrants from Asian and North African countries (Mizrahi, or "Oriental"), whose cultural background was very different from that of the veteran absorbing population, which was mainly of European origin (Ashkenazi). In his journalistic poetry Alterman evinces a consistent pro-Mizrahi stance. He sides with them in all their struggles, empathizes with their pain and hardship, idolizes their toil and trouble. At the same time, his poems dealing with the Mizrahi aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) are strewn with extreme Orientalist images and motifs. This article exposes and analyzes Alterman's Orientalist discourse but also tries to provide a reading that might bridge the gap between this discourse and his political stance.
{"title":"Was Alterman an Orientalist?","authors":"Gideon Nevo","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:For many years Natan Alterman, the main poetic voice of the Jewish community in Palestine before and after the establishment of the state of Israel, published a regular poetic column in major Hebrew dailies. His major body of journalistic verse—\"Hatur hasheviʿi\" (\"The Seventh Column\") published in Davar from the 1940s through the 1960s—enjoyed unprecedented popularity and influence and, in effect, earned him the title of national poet. In \"Hatur hasheviʿi\" Alterman provided a resonant poetic response to all the tragic and dramatic events in the history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century, culminating in World War II, the Holocaust, and the bitter struggle for Israel's independence. He continued this in the early years of the state. One of the challenges facing the new state was absorbing the massive waves of immigration streaming to its gates. This challenge was compounded when dealing with immigrants from Asian and North African countries (Mizrahi, or \"Oriental\"), whose cultural background was very different from that of the veteran absorbing population, which was mainly of European origin (Ashkenazi). In his journalistic poetry Alterman evinces a consistent pro-Mizrahi stance. He sides with them in all their struggles, empathizes with their pain and hardship, idolizes their toil and trouble. At the same time, his poems dealing with the Mizrahi aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) are strewn with extreme Orientalist images and motifs. This article exposes and analyzes Alterman's Orientalist discourse but also tries to provide a reading that might bridge the gap between this discourse and his political stance.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76179359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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