Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe: Experiences, Positions, Memories, edited by Renate Hansen-Kokoruš and Olaf Terpitz
Year: 2023
Type: book-review
Abstract: This impressive collection of articles exploring the field of Jewish literatures, languages, and cultures in Southeastern Europe is the outcome of a homonymous international conference that took place in Graz, Austria, in September 2019, and that was organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies, of the University of Graz.As the conference organizers and the book editors, both specialists in Slavic and Jewish literatures and cultures, state in the volume's introduction, Jewish literatures, languages, and cultural production originating from the heterogeneous region of European's Southeast, is still a largely under-researched area lacking comprehensive studies.Aware of the complex geopolitical divisions and cultural entanglements characterizing the region and Jewish experiences in it, Hansen-Kokoruš and Terpitz set out by raising an array of intriguing, yet unanswered questions and topics.Mainly focusing on literatures and languages, these questions-such as "how did Jewish writers position themselves in the multicultural and multilingual setting of the literary field?"; [...] "which topics did/do they address and how (e.g., segregation/integration; empire/nation; relations between Jewish and Christian and Muslim groups; the Shoah; World Wars I and II; migration; the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s)," [...] or "how were/are literary processes (avantgarde; modernism; postmodernism) reflected in Jewish literatures" (14-15)can serve as illustrations of such triggers.Coming from the close but not entirely 'insider's' position of a researcher dealing with the region's non-Jewish/Jewish history or cultural studies, the editors offer a novel view resulting from a comparative approach.By roughly following a chronological order they divided the volume in five sections that allows an encounter with research referring to the region's multiple languages (Judeo-Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, German, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Hebrew), written texts, and visual culture.The quotations that always appear in their English translations (in the body of the articles) as well as in their original languages (in the footnotes) allow the reader to learn about the original sources and mindsets, which in the case of such a multilingual region amounts to an enriching experience.The first section of the book entitled "Imperial Experiences, Entanglement and Encounters" reveals unforeseen contacts and intellectual cooperations between distinguished thinkers and literary figures.Tamir Karkason revisits
Authors: Katja Šmid, Mirjam Rajner
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4367396022