Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe: Experiences, Positions, Memories [1 ed.] 9783205212904, 9783205212898, 9783205212881

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Schriften des Centrums für Jüdische Studien

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Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe

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Band 37 The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy. Though recent interest in this region has grown impressively, Jewish cultural production is still under-researched. The contributions aim to showcase its rich and intertwined capacities.

Renate Hansen-Kokoruš, Olaf Terpitz (eds.)

Trimmed: (240H × 354W) Untrimmed: (270H × 384W) mm

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Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe Experiences, Positions, Memories

Edited by Renate Hansen-Kokoruš and Olaf Terpitz

978-3-205-21288-1_Hansen.indd Alle Seiten

25.08.21 09:55

Schriften des Centrums für Jüdische Studien Band 37 Herausgegeben von Gerald Lamprecht und Olaf Terpitz

Renate Hansen-Kokoruš / Olaf Terpitz (eds.)

Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe Experiences, Positions, Memories

BÖHLAU VERLAG WIEN KÖLN

Published with the generous support of: Amt der steiermärkischen Landesregierung, Referat Wissenschaft und Forschung Center for Jewish Studies, Karl-Franzens-University Graz

With 33 Figures Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2021 by Böhlau Verlag, Zeltgasse 1, 1080 Vienna, Austria, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike and V&R unipress. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storageor retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cover Illustration: Southeastern Europes; Artist: Grit Oelschlegel, 2021; Based on the map “Ethnographic overview of the European Orient” (Ethnographische Übersicht des Europäischen Orients) by Heinrich Kiepert (Berlin 1876), https://archive.org/details/EthnographischeUbersichtDes EuropaischenOrients Cover design: Michael Haderer, Vienna Typesetting: le-tex publishing services, Leipzig Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-205-21289-8

The volume was double-blind peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgments ................................................................................. 11 Renate Hansen-Kokoruš, Olaf Terpitz (Graz) Introduction:
Southeastern Europe in Jewish Experience and Imagination.... 13

I. Imperial Experiences, Entanglements and Encounters Tamir Karkason (Be’er Sheva) The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe .............................................................................. 21 Alessandro Grazi (Mainz) On the Road to Emancipation: Isacco Samuele Reggio’s Jewish and Italian Identity in 19th -century Gorizia ..................................................... 33 Fani Gargova (Vienna) Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal........................................ 47 Martin Stechauner (Vienna) El Koreo de Viena: A Sephardic Newspaper on the Western Fringes of Southeastern Europe .......................................................................... 63

II. Cultural Production in Modernity Damir Šabotić (Sarajevo) The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život in the Formation of a Jewish Cultural and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina Between the Two World Wars ......................................... 83 Menachem Keren-Kratz (Ramat ha-Sharon) Cultural Centres in Small Communities in Southeastern Europe: The Cases of Sighet, Zagreb, and Trieste.................................................... 101

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Contents

Željka Oparnica (London) Writers of the Sephardi Past: Historians and Sephardi Studies Scholars in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1900–1930 ........................ 115 Iskra Dobreva (Sofia) The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews as Reflected in Judeo-Spanish Sources From the 16th to the 20th Centuries .............................................. 129 Tatjana Petzer (Halle/Berlin) Rhythms of Creation: The Impact of Bergsonian Thought on Serbian Modernism ............................................................................... 143 Renate Hansen-Kokoruš (Graz) Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint: Ivo Andrić .. 161 Mirjam Rajner (Ramat Gan) Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple: At the Crossroads Between Orient and Modernity............................................... 175 Mirjam E. Wilhelm (Vienna) Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine: A Jewish Avant-Gardist in Budapest, Berlin, Belgrade and Beyond ............................ 197

III. Shoah Olga Ungar (Tel Aviv) Remembering the Victims: Vojvodina Holocaust Memorials ....................... 217 Rebecca Krug (Mainz) Just a Small Cog in the Wheel? Imagined Identities and the ‘Banality of Evil’ in David Albahari’s Gec i Majer ........................................ 237 Eva Kowollik (Halle) The Motif of the Hidden Child in Goran Paskaljević’s Film Kad svane dan and Filip David’s Novel Kuća sećanja i zaborava .......................... 251

Contents

Sabina Giergiel (Cracow) Closeness or Distance? Practices Used to Speak About the Sajmište Camp in Cultural Texts........................................................................... 265 Maciej Czerwiński (Cracow) Imagining Evil and Guilt: Miljenko Jergović’s Ruta Tannenbaum and Ivo Andrić’s Bar Titanic in the Context of Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Croatia ..................................................................... 279 Bojan Aleksov (London) Exile on Korčula .................................................................................... 295

IV. Contemporary Positions Bettina Hofmann (Wuppertal) George H. W. Bush Sr. in Babi Yar: The Holocaust in Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008)..................... 317 Giustina Selvelli (Venice) Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works ............................................................................ 329 Dijana Simić (Graz) Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život ....................................................................................... 345 Goran Lazičić (Graz) Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia: The Case of David Albahari’s Novel Leeches ......................................................................... 359 Miranda Levanat-Peričić (Zadar) (Re)Writing the Holocaust in Aharon Appelfeld’s and Daša Drndić’s Novels: Lost and Found Languages .............................................. 375

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V. Biographical Perspectives Branko Ostajmer (Zagreb) Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy .................................................................. 395 Yitzchak Kerem (Jerusalem) Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer: Crossing from Salonikian Sephardic Historian to Greek Short Story Writer... 407 List of Figures ....................................................................................... 419 Notes on Contributors............................................................................ 421

Acknowledgments

Without the support of numerous institutions and sponsors, the international conference “Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Experiences – Positions – Memory”,1 that took place in Graz in fall 2019, on which this volume is based, would not have been possible. The volume, in turn, is indebted to a great variety of persons and institutions. First, we want to thank our contributors for their detailed insights into matters hitherto neglected, under-researched or un-connected. Through the tremendous efforts of our student assistant Jakob Gruber, their contributions gained their formal appearance as required by the publisher. He thus completed the work begun by our other student assistants Diana Brunnthaler, Judith Enzenhofer, Haris Fatić and Lukas Sperlich, who invested much of their time and energy in making the conference happen. The task of sensitively copy-editing the contributions according to English (be it American or British) standards was masterly fulfilled by Ky Kessler. Last not least, we want to thank our peer reviewers who dedicated much of their precious time to helping sharpen the arguments and analyses of individual articles. Though this list is, due to personal preferences, incomplete, our thanks go to: Andreas Bouroutis, David M. Bunis, Vinko Drača, Davor Dukić, Aleksandar Kadijević, Magdalena Koch, Sonja Koroliov, Vladimir Levin, Leszek Małczak, David Malkiel, Andrea Meyer-Fraatz, Paweł Michalak, Nataša Mišković, Julia Phillips Cohen, Marina Protrka Štimec, Angela Richter, Silvia Schultermandl, Katarzyna Taczyńska, Aleksandra Twardowska, Krinka Vidaković-Petrov, Ivana Vučina Simović, Sarah Zaides Rosen, and Vladimir Zorić. Without financial support, this volume would not have seen the light of day. We would therefore like to thank the Land Steiermark that generously funded the publication of this volume. A last word on spelling: according to their preference, the authors of this volume have used either British English or American English. All quotations from languages not based on the Latin alphabet (e.g., Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish) have been transliterated. The editors Graz, January 2021

1 Please see for further information: https://static.uni-graz.at/fileadmin/gewi-institute/Slawistik/Dokumente/Programm_Konferenz4_2019.pdf. Accessed January 2021.

Renate Hansen-Kokoruš, Olaf Terpitz (Graz)

Introduction Southeastern Europe in Jewish Experience and Imagination

You can’t escape the history of the twentieth century. Everything takes place in a mishmash of Croatian, Judeo-Spanish and Hebrew until my head threatens to burst. Then, they grumble that my generation doesn’t understand anything and that everything was totally different from what we believe today. In the evenings, when I cower, close to tears from exhaustion, they show me, in their tiny apartments on scruffy sofas, their black and white photographs, capturing how they lead the brigades alongside Tito under the red flag, liberate Hvar and Rab and bury the camp guard alive. (Adriana Altaras)1

The regions of Southeastern Europe are characterized in historical as well as in contemporary perspectives by a high degree of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity and heterogeneity. Belonging to the Ottoman Empire or AustriaHungary, forming supranational nation states such as Yugoslavia, or arising as nation states such as Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, but also Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and (European) Turkey, they were framed in different legal, referential and ideological settings, providing spaces for various encounters, entanglements and conflicts. Jews, whether Sephardim, Ashkenazim or Romaniots—settling there in different periods—experienced divergent life worlds (Lebenswelten) which engendered a rich cultural production over the centuries. The language they chose depended on their respective cultural and political positions—be it Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, a Slavic language such as Croatian, Bosnian or Serbian, German, Turkish, Greek or Italian.

1 These are excerpts from Adriana Altaras’ debut novel Titos Brille: Die Geschichte meiner strapaziösen Familie (Tito’s Glasses: The Story of My Exhausting Family). Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, from 2011; in our translation: “Aus der Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts kann man nicht austreten.” (115); “Alles geschieht in einem Mischmasch aus Kroatisch, Spaniolisch und Hebräisch, bis mein Kopf zu platzen droht. Dann lasse ich mich beschimpfen, dass meine Generation nichts versteht und alles ganz anders war, als wir jetzt glauben. Wenn ich dann abends vor Erschöpfung den Tränen nahe in ihren winzigen Wohnungen auf schmuddeligen Sofas hocke, zeigen sie mir ihre Schwarz-Weiß-Fotos, auf denen sie an der Seite von Tito unter der roten Fahne die Brigaden anführen, Hvar und Rab befreien und den Lageraufseher bei lebendigem Leib begraben.” (208)

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Renate Hansen-Kokoruš, Olaf Terpitz (Graz)

Scholarly interest in this heterogeneous region has grown impressively in recent years, however, predominantly in the realms of historiography, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. Literature, language and cultural production are, in general, still an under-researched area demanding attention. To be sure, in the last decades a number of remarkable studies in this field have emerged, motivated, though, rather by individual interest than by a systematic approach. More recently established interdisciplinary research centres or networks committed to Jewish Southeastern Europe2 intend to and contribute to tackling this lacuna. Nevertheless, comprehensive studies are still lacking and desired. Such studies could address various questions concerning the medial representation of the tremendous shifts but also the continuities Jews in Southeastern Europe have experienced in the general European transformation processes from the nineteenth century until today—in the form of micro- or macro-studies, and from the perspectives of literary, comparative, or cultural studies and others. In other words, this means how Jewish experience and expression generally (re)acted to the transition from the premodern to the modern world, from the imperial setting to national, nationalizing and nationalized settings. In particular, this includes research topics and foci such as: – How did Jewish writers position themselves in the multicultural and multilingual setting of the literary field? In which ways did/do they reflect on identification processes (Jewish – Jewish, Jewish – Muslim, Jewish – Christian encounters; secularism, gender, intersectionality, etc.); – In what ways did/do they reflect on those experiences in religiously informed literary genres (e.g., Musar literature); – 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); – Which processes of entanglement and encounter took/take place (e.g., choice of genre; topics; translation) since the Enlightenment; – How did/do writers define their relationship to and their understanding of Europe and the idea of the European; – Which processes accompanied the transition from pre-modern times to modernity and postmodernity (self-perception; language choice—e.g., from Ladino

2 A few examples include: the “Network for Southeastern European Jewish Studies” within in the frame of the European Association for Jewish Studies (https://independent.academia.edu/SoutheasternEuropeanJewishStudiesSEEJS), the Stroums Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington (https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/), the issue “Sefarad in Österreich-Ungarn”, transversal 2 (2012), or the periodical Sephardic Horizons (https://www.sephardichorizons.org/index. html). Accessed 18 Mar. 2021

Introduction

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to Bosnian/Croatioan/Serbian, or from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian to German; translation practices); Which experiences were/are elaborated in literature, e.g., shared experiences vs. differing experiences (e.g., alienation; belonging; situativity of belonging and multiple attachments; similarity vs. difference; perceptions and attributions; gender constructions; ambivalences; ambiguities; contiguities; the role of cultural heritage in transnational and trans-lingual perspective); Which preferences in genre choice were/are displayed (e.g., the novel; biography; autobiography) and why; How were/are literary processes (avant-garde; modernism; postmodernism) reflected in Jewish literatures; What impact did/do conceptions of memory and post-memory have (Marianne Hirsch) on Jewish literatures in Southeastern Europe; To what extent and in which ways did/do translation activities enhance the visibility of these literatures and create an awareness among the readership of world literature; What were/are the positions and dispositions of non-Jewish writers such as Miljenko Jergović or Aleksandar Hemon writing about Jewish conditions (compared, e.g., to the nineteenth-century Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa); To what extent and in which ways can Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe be compared to other multiethnic regions such as the Russian and Habsburg Empires; What were/are the relationships between Southeastern, Central and Eastern European Jewish writers?

Our volume Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Experiences, Positions, Memories, of course, cannot address, due to the sheer abundance of (hitherto neglected or under-researched) themes and topics, and does not intend or pretend to address all those subjects mentioned above that, moreover, certainly could be expanded further. Rather, it seeks to address selected research fields and questions. The volume is structured in five general sections: “Imperial Experiences, Entanglements and Encounters”, “Cultural Production in Modernity”, “Shoah”, “Contemporary Positions” and “Biographical Perspectives”. The first section encompasses reflections on the manifold and ambivalent interactions and encounters within Jewish experiences in various imperial settings. Whereas Tamir Karkason, in his contribution on the Enlightenment, traces the encounters between Ottoman-influenced Southeastern Europe and Westernorientated Central Europe, Alessandro Grazi presents a case study of Isacco Samuele Reggio whose life and work oscillated between his Jewish and Italian identities and notably articulated this space of negotiation. Fani Gargova, in turn, illuminates the inter-imperial intellectual and geographical mobility of Marcus

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Ehrenpreis, who, through translations and the workings of the literary circle Misal introduced the works of Sigmund Freud into Bulgarian(-Jewish) thought. Martin Stechauner, finally, reconstructs meticulously the creation of the Judezmo Press (El Koreo de Viena) in Vienna and its interrelations with broader Sephardic print culture in Southeastern Europe. The second section is dedicated to the rich and diverse cultural production in modernity, including developmental aspects in ideological, linguistic, philosophical and literary perspectives as well as architecture and the arts in different cultural centres. While Damir Šabotić showcases the role of the press in shaping (modern) Jewish identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Menachem Keren-Kratz offers a comparative analysis of small cultural centres under different political and historical conditions in Southeastern Europe. In her contribution, Željka Oparnica provides insights into interpretations of the Sephardic past by historians and scholars in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the early twentieth century. Iskra Dobreva’s article focuses on the specific multilingualism of Balkan Jews since their arrival on the Balkan peninsula. Whereas Tatjana Petzer examines the impact of Bergsonian thought on the works of the Serbian-Jewish modernist writer Stanislav Vinaver, Renate Hansen-Kokoruš addresses the portrayal of Jews in the works of the nonJewish writer and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić. The last two articles are dedicated to topics of architecture and the arts: Mirjam Rajner shows how the architecture of Il Kal Grandi, Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic temple, is based on European and Oriental concepts, and Mirjam Wilhelm presents the nowadays nearly unknown Jewish Avant-garde artist Vjera Biller, who drew on cultural values from different centres in Europe and Byzantium. The third section concerns the Shoah, its actors, its repercussions, the relevance of post(memory) and transmedial aspects of representation. In her article, Olga Ungar focuses on the Vojvodina Holocaust memorials, their cultural and political embeddedness and divergent ways of remembering victims. Four contributions are dedicated to the presentation of the Shoah in literature and film. Whereas Rebecca Krug analyses the novel Gec i Majer (Götz and Meyer) by David Albahari with a view to imagined identities, Sabina Giergiel turns to the presentation of the Sajmište camp in literary texts, e.g., from David Albahari, Filip David and Zoran Penevski, as well as—understood more broadly—in other cultural texts such as comics, films, and epistolary narration. Eva Kowollik examines the motif of the hidden child in Filip David’s novel Kuća sećanja i zaborava (The House of Remembering and Forgetting) and Goran Paskaljević’s film Kad svane dan (When Day Breaks) in her comparative study. Maciej Czerwiński compares Miljenko Jergović’s novel Ruta Tannenbaum and Ivo Andrić’s story Bife Titanik (Bar Titanic) in light of evil and guilt. Finally, Bojan Aleksov presents a historiographical analysis of Jewish exile on the island of Korčula based on autobiographical accounts.

Introduction

The fourth complex accentuates contemporary positions in (more) recent literature. Bettina Hofmann focuses, thus, on the representation of the Holocaust in the novels Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project by the American-Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon, whereas Giustina Selvelli analyses multicultural aspects in the works of the Bulgarian author and popular screenwriter Angel Wagenstein. The specifics of Jewish memory as represented in the works of the Serbian-Jewish woman writer Judita Šalgo are explored by Dijana Simić. Goran Lazičić, in turn, examines how David Albahari caricatures Milošević’s Serbia in his novel Pijavice (Leeches). Miranda Levanat-Peričić closes this section with her comparative reflections on how the Holocaust is represented (and present in experience as well as in imagination) in the works of the Bukovina-born Hebrew writer Aharon Appelfeld and the Croatian writer Daša Drndić. The brief fifth section concentrates on biographical perspectives. Branko Ostajmer examines the life and work of Mavro Špicer, the pioneer of Esperanto in Croatia, and his cultural and political views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Salonikian author, historian and ethnographer Albertos Nar, in turn, is presented by Yitzchak Kerem, who pinpoints his work at the intercultural crossroads of Greek Salonikian and Izmir Sephardic culture. The present volume is based on the contributions of an international conference held at the University of Graz, 16–17 September 2019,3 and on additional contributions, having all passed a double-blind peer review. It seeks to bring together scholars working in the fields of literature, the arts, philosophy, and historiography, who—living and working around the globe—affiliate in various ways with the regions of the European South. Their contributions bridge genre divisions as much as they interconnect and challenge current theoretical strands of thought. The volume aims at creating a dialogue between Jewish studies, Balkan studies, and current literary and cultural theories. The volume highlights in an exemplary and survey-like way the diverse and conflicting Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation and their repercussions in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy. It is thus hoped that this volume provides a space of interlingual, intercultural and interregional communication and exchange that enables as well as inspires new research in the aforementioned fields of inquiry.

3 The conference was jointly organized by the editors and their institutions, the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, please see: https://slawistik.unigraz.at/de/veranstaltungen/jewish-literatures-in-southeastern-europe/. Accessed January 2021.

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I. Imperial Experiences, Entanglements and Encounters

Tamir Karkason (Be’er Sheva)

The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe1

Abstract:

In this paper I apply the methodology of “entangled histories”—which describes social, cultural, and political formations that are assumed to be interrelated—to the subject of Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Through several case studies, particularly that of the Salonican maskil Judah Nehama (1825–1899), the article seeks to paint a nuanced picture of the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of relations between Jewish intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Italian territories. The concept and methodology of entangled histories emerged about a generation ago in historiography in response to the end of the Cold War and “the more concerted reflection on the methodological pitfalls of the global turn in historical scholarship” (Burson 4). According to Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, this concept “associates social, cultural, and political formations […] that are assumed to bear relationship to one another” (Werner and Zimmermann 31). The concept of entangled histories brought with it a change in the techniques used to explore the subjects of historical research that interface with diverse historical contexts. It emphasizes the need to be alert to the specific historical contexts in which terms evolve, rather than assuming that these are “natural”. It also highlights the awareness that the subjects of a comparative study undergo mutual changes through contact, even if their relations are asymmetric (Werner and Zimmermann 33–38, 44–49; see also Burson 5–6). The Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement appeared in Berlin in the second half of the eighteenth century, and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the figure to whom its fundamental ideas are indebted. According to the definitions of Shmuel Feiner, the maskilim joined together in a unique Jewish enterprise of modernity and have considered themselves to be responsible to an unprecedented historic move [...]—the rehabilitation of traditional society

1 I am indebted to the editors and the anonymous reviewer, as well as to Prof. Yaron Ben-Naeh, Prof. Michelle Campos, Prof. Eyal Ginio, Dr. Menashe Anzi, Dr. Amos Noy, Dr. Miriam Szamet, Dr. Alex Waldman and Or Pitusi, for their valuable advice and generous help.

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in light of the values of Enlightenment, distribution of broad general knowledge of the world of nature and human being, [and] the education of the young generations for their integration in life as productive citizens that have access to the European society and culture [...]. (Feiner 2010: 29–30. My translation – T.K.; see also Feiner 2001)

During the Tanzimat and Hamidian eras, between 1839 and 1908, around one hundred maskilim were active in the Ottoman Empire. These maskilim operated in the urban Jewish centers in the Southern Balkans, mainly Salonica and Edirne, and Western Anatolia, primarily Istanbul and Izmir. They wrote predominantly in two languages: Hebrew, the lingua franca of the Haskalah movement; and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the Ottoman Sephardi vernacular. Some also wrote in additional languages, particularly French and Ottoman Turkish. The three most prominent Ottoman maskilim were Judah Nehama of Salonica (1825–1899); Barukh Mitrani (1847–1919), who travelled across Europe and Asia; and Abraham Danon (1857–1925), who was active in Edirne, Istanbul, and Paris (Cohen and Abrevaya Stein; Karkason 2018; Karkason 2020: 147–154).

Judah Nehama and his correspondence Judah Nehama was born in Salonica in 1825 to an affluent merchant family, and during the 1840s, he was introduced to maskilic literature by some other maskilim he corresponded with. In his early days as a Judaic studies scholar, Nehama was introduced, for example, to the Austro-Hungarian maskilic periodicals Bikurei ha-Itim and Kerem Hemed (Nehama 1893: 2, 10). Bikurei ha-Itim (First Fruits of the Times, Vienna 1820–1831) was edited by Isaac Samuel Reggio (1784–1855), Judah Jeitteles (1773–1838), and others, and its successor, Kerem Hemed (Vineyard of Delight, Prague and Vienna, 1833–1856) was edited by Samuel Goldenberg Leib (1807–1846) and Senior Sachs (1816–1892).2 The young Judah Nehama also looked through some of the maskilic works of Shmuel David Luzzatto (Shadal) of Padua (1800–1865), such as Ohev Ger (The Love of the Proselyte, Vienna 1830), a guide to the understanding of Targum Onkelus (the Jewish Aramaic translation of the Torah), and Betulat Bat Yehudah (Virgin Daughter Judah, Prague, 1840)—extracts from the diwan of Judah ha-Levi, edited with notes and an introduction (Nehama 1893: 21, 22). Nehama found great interest in the critical study of the maskilim and the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars,

2 On Bikurei ha-Itim and Kerem Hemed, see Pelli 2010: 181–229.

The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe

who sought to understand Jewish texts in the context of their time and place and insisted on its right to “free exploration” (Schorsch 177–183).3 Serving as an agent for European commercial companies in Salonica, Nehama also made his living as a bookseller, an occupation that allowed him to indulge in his bibliophilic passion. Nehama maintained extensive contacts with European peers, which he became acquainted with through intermediaries—or “connectors” in terms of network research (Moreno 2014: 39–48; Moreno 2020). The two main figures who mediated between Nehama and European maskilim were an unknown Eastern European maskil named Israel Stern (Karkason 2018: 181, 188, 190, 195, 200, 217–218, 288) as well as the Austro-Hungarian bookseller and bibliographer Chaim David Lippe (1823–1900), who was born in the Galician city of Stanisławów (today Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine) and since 1873 had lived in the capital Vienna.4 Many of Nehama’s correspondences, dated between 1850 and 1895, have been preserved in his printed collection of letters, published in two volumes, entitled Mikhtevei Dodim mi-Yayin (Letters More Delightful than Wine). Almost all the letters in these volumes were written in Hebrew (except one in Ladino); Nehama probably also conducted correspondences in other languages, such as Ladino and French, but these letters were not printed (Karkason 2018: 173). The first volume of Mikhtevei Dodim mi-Yayin was published in Salonica, on Nehama’s own initiative (Nehama 1893); the second volume, only partially edited, was published four decades after his death (Nehama 1939). The themes of Nehama’s letters were diverse: many letters in the collection included discussions on maskilic topics, such as recent studies, mainly philological and historical, and various controversies (for instance, in the field of biblical criticism). In numerous letters Nehama was asked to obtain rare books and manuscripts, with the help of various Ottoman colleagues, for his European correspondents, or to supply them “unmediated” historical knowledge on the Ottoman Jewry (Karkason

3 In the early 1860s, Nehama was one of the founders of the local committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Salonica. In this framework, he was engaged in a lively correspondence with senior Alliance officials in Paris ahead of the opening of its first school in Salonica (Nehama 1893: 150–154), though this only opened a decade later. The Alliance organization was established in 1860 by some members of the French Jewish elite with the aspirations of “regeneration” among Jewish communities its leaders perceived as “traditional”, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The founders of the Alliance believed that in order to constitute a “rational” and “progressive” society, the members of these communities should be transformed into “useful” citizens. The prominent means for that end were the schools, meant to uproot the “rotten” past of their students (Rodrigue 1990; Rodrigue 1993). This article is focusing on Nehama’s activity as a maskil and not in the other sub-groups of the Ottoman Jewish intelligentsia, including the “Westernizers” who promoted “Westernization” as a lifestyle in the spirit of the Alliance. On the internal division of the Ottoman Jewish intelligentsia, see Karkason 2018: 44–55; Karkason 2020: 150–151. 4 On the ongoing relationship between Lippe and Nehama, see Karkason 2020.

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2018: 192–196). Many of the letters were relatively laconic and included “technical” documentation of the purchase of books or subscription of periodicals, as well as requests for donation addressed to Nehama by different East European maskilim (Karkason 2018: 196–199). Other letters reveal warm friendships between Nehama and some maskilim, mainly the abovementioned Lippe (Karkason 2018: 199–201; Karkason 2020: 164–167). By publishing his letters after decades of extensive intellectual activity, Nehama apparently hoped to display his maskilic enterprise to his counterparts, and particularly to his Jewish peers in Central Europe. Publishing the edited letters might have helped him accrue great honor, as an Ottoman Jew strongly connected to the Haskalah “republic of letters”. Nehama’s two volumes together contain 315 letters, many of them were exchanged with luminaries, especially Austro-Hungarian ones, such as Luzzatto of Padua, Solomon Rubin (1823–1910), Moritz Güdemann (1835–1918), Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), Isaac Hirsch Weiss (1815–1905), and Meir Ish Shalom (Friedman, 1831–1908) of Vienna, Meyer Kayserling (1829–1905) of Budapest, the forefather of the discipline of “Sephardi Studies”, and even Yom-Tov (Leopold) Zunz (1794–1885) of Berlin. I have mapped Nehama’s exchange of correspondence in order to illustrate the geographical dispersion of the Ottoman Haskalah and offer a profile of the relations between Ottoman maskilim and their European peers (Karkason 2018: 154–204). I have found that almost half of Nehama’s exchanges of correspondence were with peers living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—140 letters out of 315. Almost 90 percent of the letters from Austria-Hungary were sent from Vienna, Galicia, and the Italian provinces—regions that formed the heartland of the Haskalah and the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the empire. We can illustrate this phenomenon with reference to the Viennese Hebrew periodical Bikurei ha-‘Itim: Moshe Pelli has shown that the appearance of this periodical during the 1820s marked the shifting of the center of gravity of maskilic literature and the revival of Hebrew from Berlin and its surroundings to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This area was home to a large Jewish population that had not yet undergone intensive secularization and which was gradually exposed to the ideas of the Haskalah. The periodical Bikurei ha-‘Itim was edited by maskilim who lived mainly in Galicia and Italy, as did the vast majority of the writers whose articles appeared in the publication (Pelli 2006: 62–64; Pelli 2010: 181–182, 192). The Jews of Austria-Hungary thus constituted Nehama’s principal reference group. Nehama’s correspondents came from all corners of the expansive Austro-Hungarian Empire: Austria (58% of Nehama’s correspondents in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Galicia (20%), Hungary (9%), the Italian domains (9%), Moravia (2%) and Bukovina (2%) (Karkason 2018: 174–186). These bonds are particularly notable given the relative dearth of contacts with other maskilic

The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe

centers, such as the Russian Empire: we are in possession of just eight letters with contacts from the Russian Empire (Karkason 2018: 186–189). Although we know much less about the network of contacts of other maskilim, it appears that they also maintained closer links with Austria-Hungary than with other areas. Nehama did not print books in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Barukh Mitrani and Abraham Danon developed contacts in this field, printing their works in Vienna, Pressburg, and Budapest. Around one-fourth of the works written by Ottoman maskilim were published in Austria-Hungary (Karkason 2018: 244–246). It is also interesting to note that the Viennese bookseller Yisrael Knöpfelmacher, who worked with Judah Nehama in the 1850s (Nehama 1893: 16, 24, 27, 30, 35, 38, 39–40, 69, 72, 85, 146), appears to have been a relative of the Viennese printer Moritz Knöpfelmacher, who in the 1890s printed one issue of Carmi Sheli (My Vineyard, Pressburg and Vienna 1890–1891), a bilingual periodical (Hebrew and Ladino) edited by Barukh Mitrani.

The importance of Austria-Hungary That being the case, we might ask ourselves why Austria-Hungary assumed this dominant role in the networks of Ottoman maskilim. In the spirit of the methodology of entangled histories, I will offer a very concise portrait of the historical background that facilitated these contacts between Ottoman maskilim and their Austro-Hungarian peers. Southeastern Europe has since ancient times served as a bridge between Central Europe and the Aegean and Anatolia. Moreover, from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire controlled almost all of the southeastern part of Europe, which served as a buffer zone with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a crossroads between “East” and “West”, Southeastern Europe—the Balkans—also constituted a transitional zone between cultures as well as an area prone to frequent military invasion (Ginio 11–25). A clear example of entangled histories in Southeastern Europe is BosniaHerzegovina, having passed from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian control in 1878. The country’s population comprised Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and a small Jewish population. Following the transition to Habsburg rule, the capital Sarajevo underwent rapid modernization from the late nineteenth century, as the new rulers sought to “extricate” the city from its Ottoman Muslim heritage and transform it into an Austro-Hungarian city (Donia 37–67; Sethre). Any discussion of the entangled histories of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires should take into account the importance of the history of Italy and its relations with these two empires. Austria-Hungary controlled extensive Italian territories, and the Ottoman Empire and its Jewry maintained a strong affinity to certain parts of Italy, such as Venice, Livorno, and Trieste (Rozen; Lehmann;

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Trivellato). In light of the close and protracted affinity between Ottoman Jews from Southeastern Europe and Italian culture, it is hardly surprising that Judah Nehama, in his essay Zekher Tzadik (Memory of a Pious Man, 1885), expressed admiration for Italy, Italian culture, and what he regarded as the positive attitude of its rulers toward the Jews (see Appendix). The historical entanglement of the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Italian territories—as well as their Jewish communities—can be illustrated through a section of a letter sent by Samuel David Luzzatto of Padua to Judah Nehama in November 1851, describing how Jacob Modiano of Salonica (Nehama’s father-inlaw) prepared a letter of recommendation for an Izmirli Jew, Ben-Zion Abraham, ahead of his commercial trip to Trieste. Abraham hoped to trade in Trieste with Aaron Pariente, who was an acquaintance of Nehama’s father-in-law. On his way from Izmir to Trieste, Abraham stopped for a while at Padua, where he met Luzzatto; Abraham wrote a letter to his son, who lived in Izmir, and asked Luzzatto to pass it to him. Luzzatto sent this letter to his Salonican correspondent, Nehama, asking him to send it by sea mail to a man named Abraham Ben-Yakar of Izmir, so that he could pass the letter to Ben-Zion Abraham’s son. At the same time, Luzzatto noted that he provided Ben-Zion Abraham with a book in Padua so that he could send it to Nehama in Salonica (Nehama 1893: 22). Additional figures also appear in this letter, and thus in only some 200 words, eleven figures who were involved in commercial activity between the empires are mentioned. At least four of them were also involved in maskilic activity: Nehama, his father and father-in-law, as well as Luzzatto. These eleven Jews lived in two multinational empires: eight in the Ottoman Empire (five in Salonica and three in Izmir), and three in Austria-Hungary (two Italians from Padua and Trieste, and a Sephardi Jew of Vienna, named Leon Adutt; on Adutt see Stechauner 2019: 186–187). This letter from the mid-nineteenth century, which is not one of its kind in Nehama’s collection, thus paints a picture of active international trade networks, personal contacts and maskilic activities that intersect. The Sephardi community in Vienna—which had existed since at least the early eighteenth century, and some of whose members held Ottoman citizenship—provides fascinating testimonies regarding the entangled history of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires (Arbel; Stechauner 2014; Stechauner 2019). Some members of the Sephardi community in Vienna spoke Ladino as their mother tongue, and, from the 1860s, newspapers were printed in this language (Stechauner 2019: 49–54). The members of the community were often identified as “Turkish Jews” (Stechauner 2019: 199, 259–60) and maintained extensive ties with the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire. By way of example, Yaron Ben-Naeh and Yochai Ben-Gdaliah have recently shown how the Sephardi community in Vienna supported the Jewish community of Bursa, in Western Anatolia, following an earthquake that struck the city in 1855 (Ben-Naeh and Ben-Gdaliah).

The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe

Rather surprisingly, almost all Nehama’s Viennese correspondents were Ashkenazi Jews, and members of the Sephardi community are relatively rarely mentioned in his letters (Nehama 1893: 22, 66, 149, 179; Nehama 1939: 24, 27, 107, 130, 156). Barukh Mitrani, however, who lived in Vienna at least once during his wanderings, maintained contacts with the Sephardi community. By 1872, if not earlier, Mitrani wrote articles for the Viennese Ladino newspapers (Mitrani 1872); and during his stay in the city, in 1877–1878 (after he left Southeastern Europe during the RussoTurkish War), he received assistance from the local patrons Abraham Benvenisti and Moshe Sarfati (Mitrani 1877: 8). In his articles in the Hebrew press, Mitrani sought to describe the character of Sephardi Jewry for his readers, the vast majority of whom were Ashkenazim from Central and Eastern Europe. In 1880, while he was living in Edirne, he included the Sephardim of Vienna in the following overview: My Sephardi brethren […], speakers of Spanish [Ladino], are many and are multiplying […] in many cities of European, African and Asian Turkey, in Austria [!], Wallachia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumelia. And although I do not have any clear statistics, I am convinced that they will total as sum of one million, or even more! (Mitrani 1880: 164, my translation – T.K.)

Thus, the protracted and close links existed between the two empires were also reflected in the contacts between their Jewish populations. The Sephardi community of Vienna was a direct outcome of this bond, and this community—embedded at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—formed part of the Ladino-speaking Sephardi world, whose center lay to the east. However, this in itself cannot explain the historical entanglement between the circles of maskilim in the two empires. To explain this affinity, we must turn to the social and ideological similarities between the two circles of maskilim. Most of the maskilim in the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Austria-Hungary, tended to come from a Jewish religious background, and most of them continued to observe the commandments even after adopting the scholastic methods of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, profoundly challenging traditional Jewish exegesis (Karkason 2018: 116–153). Eliezer Refael Malachi stated that most of the Austro-Hungarian maskilim “were religious and spent their youth learning Torah and attending yeshivot […], and they worked hard to acquire wisdom and knowledge. They were autodidacts, but they were among the leaders of H.ochmat Israel [Wissenschaft des Judentums – T.K.] in their generation […]” (Malachi 185). In accordance with the findings of Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein on the “Sephardi Scholarly Worlds”, Malachi’s comments regarding the AustroHungarian maskilim could equally well have been made about their Ottoman peers:

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The majority of [Ottoman Jewish – T.K.] intellectuals […] were not formally trained in an academic setting and often lacked institutional support […]. Nonetheless, even those without university training or institutions produced innovative studies based on their direct engagement with little-used archival sources […]. Many of the scholars […] were either rabbis themselves or hailed from rabbinic families. Contrary to what one might expect, their prestige as religious leaders often increased as their scholarly profiles expanded. (Cohen and Stein 367, 369)

Accordingly, it would appear that the similar background and the social and ideological affinity drew the two circles together.

Conclusion According to Werner and Zimmermann, “Histoire croisee [the concept of ‘entangled histories’ – T.K.] breaks with a one-dimensional perspective that simplifies and homogenizes, in favor of multidimensional approach that acknowledges plurality and the complex configurations that result from it” (38). This multidimensional approach led us to expose the close ties between Ottomans such as Nehama, Mitrani and their peers, and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts—ties that were facilitated by and developed against the background of the entangled histories of the two empires and their maskilim. My findings bolster the view that the Austro-Hungarian Empire not only influenced Sephardi Jewry in the Western parts of Southeastern Europe, which were mostly under its direct control—but had also a strong affinity to those parts of Southeastern Europe under Ottoman rule until well into the twentieth century (such as Salonica). The Jewish world in Southeastern Europe can therefore be seen as one “space”, entangled in different and varied histories.

The “Entangled Histories” of the Jewish Enlightenment in Ottoman Southeastern Europe

Appendix

Judah Nehama (1885: 50–51) on Italy and its Culture […] Italiya eretz haplaot, ertez hamle’a birkhot shamayim kegan ‘adanim asher mashkha ‘aleha ‘ene kol ha‘ammim beyif‘at h.emdatah vehadrat hateva‘, ba’aretz hazot eretz harat hamadda‘im hashir vehazimra vekhol h.aroshet hama‘ase; matze’u hayehudim pe‘amim rabbot menuh.a veseter mitigrat yede ‘aritzim vayyih.yu h.ayye menuh.a veshalvat hasheket betzel malkhe h.esed asher saru lemishpat utzdaka ba’aretz, uven kol hayedi‘ot vehamada‘im asher hitzivu lahem hayehudim bahem yad vashem ba‘ittot hahenna, va’asher ‘azru lo me‘at lehetiv matzavam hah.omri, ulfales lahem nativ ba’aretz habrukha hazot, hakhi nikhbedet hi h.okhmat harefu’a. Ah.okhma hazot hayta muda‘at h.akhme hayehudim ‘od miyyamim kadmonim, velo yad hamikre hayta baze asher gam be’ertz italiya matzata dorshim rabbim mehayehudim asher hisgu bahem h.ayil, ki im nir’e baze ah.at mimmif‘alot el hanifla’ot ki rak ‘am hana’or haze h.anun me’et hateva lihyot lo ‘eser yadot bah.okhma hazot ‘al kol ha‘ammim, vekhi rak ben hayehudim nimtze’u rof’im rabbim metzuyyanim ka’ele asher yedi‘atam h.okhmat harefu’a sama lahem mahalakhim beh.atzrot hamelakhim veroznim [!] vegam behekhle rashe knesiyyot hanotzrim, ha’apifyorim vekhol kedoshehem. (My transcription – T.K. I thank Elnatan Chen for his advice).

[…] The wondrous land of Italy is a land full of the blessings of the heavens, like a pleasant garden that has won the admiration of all the nations for its natural beauty and splendor. In this land, the hearth of science, poetry, song, and every craft, the Jews have often found rest and refuge from the violence of oppressors. They have lived in peace and quiet under the dominion of merciful kings who ruled justly and charitably over the land. Of all the knowledge and sciences in which the Jews have become renowned in these times, and which also helped their material condition considerably and opened up paths for them in this welcoming land, the most dignified is the science of medicine. This science was known to the Jewish savants from ancient times, and it is no coincidence that in Italy, too, many Jews excelled in this field. We may see it as one of the miraculous acts of God that only this enlightened people [the Italians – T.K.] was blessed by nature to succeed in this science [medicine – T.K.] above all the nations, and that only among the Jews were many such outstanding physicians found whose knowledge of the medical science opened doors to the courts of kings and counts, and even among the heads of the Christian churches, the popes, and all their saints. (trans. Shaul Vardi).

Works cited Arbel, Mordechai. “The Sephardi Community in Vienna.” Pe’amim 69 (1997): 95–114 (Hebrew). Ben-Naeh, Yaron, and Ben-Gdaliah, Yochai. “The Support of the Bursa Community by the Community in Vienna in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Pe’amim 139–140 (2014): 309–326 (Hebrew). Burson, Jeffery D. “Entangled History and the Scholarly Concept of Enlightenment.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8.2 (2013): 1–24. Cohen, Julia Phillips, and Abrevaya Stein, Sarah. “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100.3 (2010): 349–384.

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Donia, Robert J. Islam under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878–1914. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981. Feiner, Shmuel. “Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah.” New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Eds. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001: 184–219. Feiner, Shmuel. The Jewish Enlightenment in the 19th Century. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2010 (Hebrew). Ginio, Eyal. “Islam and Muslims in the Balkans: Orientalist Perceptions, Historical Myths, and Memory.” Jama’a 9 (2002): 11–52 (Hebrew). Karkason, Tamir. The Ottoman-Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment), 1839–1908: A Transformation in the Jewish Communities of Western Anatolia, the Southern Balkans and Jerusalem. Doctoral Dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2018 (Hebrew). Karkason, Tamir. “The Buffer Zone: Ottoman Maskilim and their Austro-Hungarian Counterparts – A Case Study.” Quest 17 (2020): 146–179. Lehmann, Matthias B. “A Livornese ‘Port Jew’ and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire.” Jewish Social Studies 11.2 (2005): 51–76. Malachi, Eliezer Raphael. “R. Isaac hirsch weiss, k”n shana le’huladeto. (R. Isaac Hirsch Weiss, 150 Years to his Birth).” Prakim IV (1966): 185–206 (Hebrew). Mitrani, Barukh. “Korespondensyias particular de ‘El Correo de Viena’ (Particular Correspondances of the El Correo de Viena).” El Trezoro de la Kaza 15 August 1872: 2 (Ladino). Mitrani, Barukh Ben Yitzhak. Sefer h.inuhei Banim (Educational Book for Children). Vienna: Eliezer Zuckerman, 1877 (Ladino and Hebrew). Mitrani, Barukh. “Ha-yehudim ha-sefaradim (The Sephardi Jews).” Ha-Magid 20 May 1880: 163–164 (Hebrew). Moreno, Aviad. The Emigration of Jews from Northern Morocco to Venezuela and Israel, 1860–2010. Doctoral Dissertation, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, 2014. Moreno, Aviad. “Beyond the Nation-State: A Network Analysis of Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco to Israel.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52.1 (2020): 1–21. Nehama, Judah Ben Jacob. Zekher tzadik (Memory of a Pious Man). Salonica: n.p., 1885 (Hebrew). Nehama, Judah Ben Jacob. Mikhtevei dodim mi-yayin: Eize mikhtavim shonim asher heh.lafti bein ohavay ve’doday (Letters More Delightful than Wine). Vol. I. Salonica: n.p., 1893 (Hebrew). Nehama, Judah Ben Jacob. Mikhtevei dodim mi-yayin: H.ibbur kolel h.aqirot al inyanim shonim (Letters More Delightful than Wine). Vol. II. Salonica: Bezes, [1939] (Hebrew). Pelli, Moshe. “From ha-Me’asef (1783–1811) to Bikurei ha-Itim (1820–1831).” Qesher 34 (2006): 61–77 (Hebrew). Pelli, Moshe. Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010.

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Rodrigue, Aron. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Rodrigue, Aron. Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1860–1939. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. Rozen, Minna. “Strangers in a Strange Land: The Extraterritorial Status of Jews in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.” Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership. Ed. Aron Rodrigue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992: 123–166. Sethre, Ian. “Occupation and Nation-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878–1914.” WechselWirkungen: Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans, 1878–1918. Eds. Clemens Ruthner, Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Ursula Reber, and Raymond Detrez. New York: Peter Lang, 2015: 41–66. Schorsch, Ismar. From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. Hanover: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1994. Stechauner, Martin. “Imagining the Sephardic Community of Vienna: A DiscourseAnalytical Approach.” Religion in Austria. Vol. 2. Eds. Hans Gerald Hödl and Lukas Pokorn. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2014: 49–91. Stechauner, Martin. The Sephardic Jews of Vienna: A Jewish Minority Crossing Borders. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Vienna, 2019. Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Werner, Michael, and Zimmermann, Bénédicte. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45.1 (2006): 30–50.

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On the Road to Emancipation Isacco Samuele Reggio’s Jewish and Italian Identity in 19th -century Gorizia

Abstract:

By addressing Isacco Samuele Reggio of Gorizia (1784–1855), one of the most prominent Italian Jewish intellectuals of the time, this paper wants to contribute a re-assessment of the importance of an Italian-ness feeling for the Jews living in the Italian portion of the Habsburg Empire, specifically in the city of Gorizia. Through an analysis of Reggio’s contributions to the journals Strenna Israelitica and L’Aurora, this paper wishes to show that a classic bipartite model does not suit Gorizia’s Jews and Reggio in particular (Italian citizen/Jewish faith) but that a tripartite model would be more appropriate (Habsburg citizen/Jewish faith/Italian language and culture). For many Italian Jews, the fight for civil emancipation and the Risorgimento national movement coincided, as many of them saw in the Risorgimento a chance for democratization and the achievement of full civil rights. Although we are currently reassessing the quality and extent of their participation in the national movement through a closer analysis of documentary and literary sources (Ferrara degli Uberti 19–22), there is no doubt that several Italian Jews contributed to the Risorgimento in different ways: with direct involvement in different aspects of the revolutionary struggle (military, intelligence, secret societies), raising awareness of public opinion (political journals, literary and cultural activities), or simply with financial support (Catalan 2015; Luzzatto Voghera 1997; Di Porto). Their strong fragmentation and the highly divergent social and legal conditions of the regions home to Jewish communities in the pre-unification period, however, do not allow us to address Italian Jews as a monolithic block and oblige us to take these differences into account (Grazi 2018; Luzzatto Voghera 1998: 19). For instance, the Jews living and working in the Italian portion of the Habsburg Empire have traditionally been considered less enthusiastic about the theme of emancipation, their relation to the Risorgimento national movement, and Italian identity, at least for the period preceding 1848. They were immersed in a different cultural atmosphere than the one characterizing other areas of the Italian peninsula, such as Piedmont or Tuscany (Grazi 2018: 262; Luzzatto Voghera 1997: 1216), and lived under distinct socio-economic conditions. The famous Toleranzpatent issued

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by Joseph II in 1782 improved the status of the Jewish communities residing there. This created a socio-cultural environment, at least for the economic and cultural elites, which favored a shift in their priorities away from emancipation and towards a deeper re-assessment of Judaism and Jewish identity in light of modernity. In this article, the concept of identity—a rather difficult one to describe—refers to processes of self-identification and interaction with one or more groups (Jews, Italians, Habsburg citizens, etc.), which include elements of distinctiveness (Klein 8), often called Italian-ness or Jewishness (Ferrara degli Uberti viii). By contrast, I argue in this article that the attachment of Habsburg Italy’s Jews to Italian identity, and thus to a sense of Italian-ness, during the Risorgimento was in fact relevant and has been underestimated by past scholarship, which did not sufficiently take into consideration the socio-political environment in which they were active. In another article, I have tried to show how Shmuel David Luzzatto’s1 alleged lukewarm attitude to the Risorgimento and Italian identity was mostly dictated by his public position at Padua’s Rabbinical College, while his enthusiasm was expressed only in private (Grazi 2018: 272–274). It is crucial to emphasize that the focus here is on the Risorgimento phase, as for previous centuries the general process of “Italianization” of Habsburg Italy’s predominantly Ashkenazi Jewry is well documented (Malkiel 2013). Furthermore, considering Habsburg Italy itself as one homogeneous entity does not take into account the clear differences between Lombardy-Venetia and the Littoral (including Gorizia, as we will see), where Jews were less willing to join the combat dimension of the revolutions against Austria, also because they were afraid of possible consequences (Catalan 220). In other words, the atmosphere in Milan was certainly not the same as in Venice or Padua, just as much as it was likewise different in South Tyrol, Trento, Trieste or Gorizia, where a sense of loyalty to Austria prevailed, as we will see. Thus, this strong fragmentation of Italian Jewry calls for an equally fragmented approach that considers the socio-political differences of the Jewries examined here to the extent of recognizing the viewpoints of individuals as intellectuals representing various trends of nineteenth-century Jewish thought (Catalan and Facchini n. pag.). With this methodological premise in mind, I will offer here one further nuance to the relation between Jews in Habsburg Italy, Italian identity and the Risorgimento: the specific perspective of Isacco Samuele Reggio of Gorizia (1784–1855), one of the most prominent Italian Jewish intellectuals of the time. By addressing this important figure, this article aims to contribute to a re-evaluation of the relevance of a sentiment of Italian identity for the Jews living in the Italian part of the Habsburg 1 Shmuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), the famous Shadal, is rightly considered the most prominent Italian Jewish intellectual of the 19th century. Native to Trieste, he was a teacher at Padua’s renowned Rabbinical College, the first official State institution for the formation of Rabbis in Europe, founded in 1829.

On the Road to Emancipation

Empire, particularly in the trilingual town of Gorizia, part of the Littoral region.2 Through an analysis of Reggio´s Jewish journal Strenna Israelitica (Jewish Periodical) and his contributions to the Italian community periodical L’Aurora (The Dawn), this paper wishes to show a hitherto unknown aspect of Reggio’s Weltanschauung, that is, his strong attachment to Italian identity and, at the same time, loyalty to the Austrian crown. This, in turn, will indicate how Gorizia’s Jewish minority, in spite of being predominantly Ashkenazi (unrelated to Reggio himself, however), unsurprisingly sided unhesitatingly with the town’s Italian speaking community, corroborating previous research on the subject (Malkiel 2013). Reggio is important, as he allows us on the one hand to reinforce the idea that a feeling of “Italian-ness” was rather diffused among Italian Jews under Habsburg and, on the other, gives us the opportunity to create a distinction that has not been emphasized before: namely, between a strong Italian feeling and the support for the Risorgimento national movement. Research on the relationship between Italian Jews and the Risorgimento has generally started from the assumption that a strong self-identification with Italian culture underlay equal support of the national movement. Reggio shows us this was not always the case, since he completely shared the former but not necessarily the latter. This distinguished him from other Jewish intellectuals in Habsburg Italy, like the aforementioned Shmuel David Luzzatto. In the first place, it is appropriate to sketch some biographical details about Reggio, as he is virtually unknown outside the realm of Jewish Studies and, in some respects, even within it. Reggio, or as he was known Yashar (meaning “upright” or “honest” in Hebrew), though rather prominent, has hitherto received little attention from scholars of Italian Judaism. The few studies devoted to this figure have mainly examined his relationship to the Haskalah and the German Jewish Reform movement (Grusovin 1996: 77–29; Malkiel 2000: 276–303; Tamani 29–40). He is a thinker from the small city of Gorizia. Gorizia offered a rather stimulating cultural environment in spite of its small size, being situated at the crossroad of three linguistic communities: Italian, Slovene, and German. Likely thanks to this, it included a flourishing Jewish community, whose members were engaged in silk factories or were landowners (Grusovin 2007; Ioly Zorattini). Reggio did not come from a wealthy family but grew up in highly educated surroundings. He married Rachel Levi, the daughter of an affluent merchant, which allowed him to dedicate his life to his studies and traditions. He took on the duty of the city’s Rabbi for about 10 years. In cultural terms, Reggio can be viewed as a typical maskil, although it is now clear that in his case this definition needs to be fine-tuned in light of several important nuances and exceptions (Grazi 2020). What is certain is that, following

2 Politically, the Littoral region was officially established by the Austrian rulers in 1849. For the period preceding it, the article refers to the equivalent geographical area for the sake of clarity.

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the footsteps of Moses Mendelsohn and Napthali Herz Wessely, he proposed a modern and scientific approach to the texts of Jewish tradition and a renovation of Judaism itself through modern educational plans which would place secular studies next to traditional Jewish subjects, thus leading the Jewish youth to an encounter with modernity without renouncing their tradition. Reggio contributed to several fields of Judaic studies, but most assiduously worked on the reconciliation between Jewish tradition and modernity and the consequent renewal of Jewish education. His work on this subject became the core of the program of Padua’s famous Rabbinical College (Del Bianco Cotrozzi; Vielmetti 23–35). He collaborated with some of the most prominent European Jewish journals of the time, such as Bikkure ha-Etim (The First Fruits), of which Reggio himself was chief editor in 1828–29, Bikkure ha-Etim ha-chadashim (The New First Fruits) and Kerem Chemed (The Pleasant Vineyard), which Moshe Pelli in 2009 defined as “the Hebrew Periodical of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in Galicia and Italy”3 (77–86). Finally, during the last years of his life he started his own periodical in Gorizia, the aforementioned Strenna Israelitica, which was published in only four issues between 1851 and 1855, ending due to his death. As aforementioned, Reggio had an Enlightenment-based approach and was a great admirer of Mendelssohn and Wessely and a promotor of their educational plans for young Jews. As such, he strongly believed in the importance of concepts such as acculturation, integration into the majority society and emancipation. In spite of that, he did not often elaborate on the Risorgimento and Italian identity, at least in his literary works written in Hebrew, in which he addressed an exclusively Jewish readership. As mentioned above, we now need to distinguish between the two concepts of Italian identity—that is, a feeling of “Italian-ness” and the support of the Risorgimento national movement. There is no doubt that Reggio perceived himself as an Italian Jew in linguistic and cultural terms and shared this strong perception of “Italian-ness” not only with the other Jews of the Italian peninsula but also with those under Habsburg rule. Abundant evidence of this can be found in the little-known journal Strenna Israelitica. Surprisingly, even the great historian of Italian Jewry, Attilio Milano, did not mention it in a detailed 1938 article, in which he celebrated one-hundred years of Italian Jewish press (96–133). Strenna was written in Italian with only occasional Hebrew quotations and poems. Each issue of the journal opened with an address to “my fellow Italian coreligionists” (miei correligionari d’Italia). In a time in which Italy did not yet exist as a country, this heading immediately shows how Reggio identified himself as part of the “greater family” of Italian Jews. From its very incipit, in less than one line, Reggio exposed

3 In the Hebrew original Ktav Ha’et Ha’ivri shel Chochmat Israel Be-Galizia vebe-Italia. This translation from Hebrew and all following translations from Italian are my own.

On the Road to Emancipation

the two facets of his self-perception: I am a Jew, I am an Italian. It is important to clarify once again that, in this case, “Italian” is a cultural and linguistic category, rather than national and political. Thus, deliberately placing himself within the realm of Italian Jews, Reggio accepted the role of mediator between the prominent German Jewish world, specifically, the milieus of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) and Italian Jewry. He possessed the tools to successfully act as a liaison between these two worlds, namely, the German and the Italian language Jewish cultural milieus: 1) he himself was an expert on the Science of Judaism; 2) his rather advanced knowledge of German, which he had learnt at the State Gymnasium. A thorough knowledge of this language was rather uncommon among Italian Jews, especially among those who did not live under the Habsburgs. Even Luzzatto, however, who did live in the Italian part of the Habsburg Empire, admitted that his German was not as good as Reggio’s (1890: 167). Reggio was aware of this and published several translations of texts on Judaism in his journal that had appeared in German, some of them several decades before the publication of Strenna. For instance, in the first issue he translated the well-known correspondence between Mendelssohn and Lavater of 1769 (Reggio 1852: 63–77). Reggio’s pride in his own Italian identity cannot only be evinced from his oeuvre but it emerges also in the ways he was perceived by others. One particular event in Reggio’s life is especially indicative of this. During the Napoleonic conquest of this area, between 1808 and 1813, Reggio held a teaching position at Gorizia’s Staatsgymnasium. This was a job in the public sector, which Jews were not allowed to have before the French domination of this region. After the Restoration of Austrian rule, however, Reggio was immediately dismissed from this position, although the legal regression had not always been so strict with Gorizia’s economically flourishing Jews, who were still allowed to own land in spite of official restrictions. The scholar Grusovin suggested that his dismissal not only had to do with his being Jewish tout court, but also because he was suspected by the Austrian police of being at least a sympathizer, if not a collaborator, of the Italian national movement (Grusovin 1996: 10). From this we can evince that, perhaps, Reggio was placed under suspicion by the Austrian authorities not simply for being a Jew but also because he was perceived as belonging to the Italian speaking community and, therefore, being ipso facto in favor of the Risorgimento from their perspective. Nevertheless, it was clear that, after the Restoration, Jews could not hold certain public positions and, in Gorizia, too, they lost jobs, particularly in the public sector (Grusovin 2007: 29). Whatever the reason, one could expect that Reggio’s dismissal by the Austrian authorities would cause his resentment towards them or, at least, a lack of open support for the Habsburg crown. This, however, appears to contrast with the dualism I propose in this paper—that is, Italian feeling on one side and support of Habsburg citizenship on the other—as I will soon try to show. Perhaps, the fact that in 1813 he was already married to the wealthy Rachel

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Levi mitigated Reggio’s disappointment at losing his job, thanks to the financial stability he achieved through the marriage, and kept deep feelings of resentment for the Habsburg rulers out of Reggio’s mind. In fact, Reggio supported the idea of an Italian Gorizia, under Austrian rule. A substantial attestation of Reggio’s deep sentiment of Italian identity and simultaneous support of the Habsburg crown can be found in other writings that were not addressed to a Jewish public. As is well-known, 1848 was a year of fervor and enthusiasm for the national movements throughout Europe, during which the Risorgimento acquired the extensive and open support of many Italian Jews throughout the peninsula. That same year in August, Reggio and several other Gorizian intellectuals, among which Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a prominent Jewish scholar of Semitic languages and an Orientalist, founded the journal L’Aurora. This journal was published almost daily between 8 August and 13 September 1848 for a total of 30 issues. The publisher was G. B. Seitz, a well-known publisher in Gorizia, who often cooperated with Reggio and possessed Hebrew typesets. It is crucial to establish which editorial and political line this periodical held in order to understand Reggio’s position vis-à-vis Italian sentiment, nationalism, and the Risorgimento. The Slovenian scholar Branko Marušič clarified that this journal had the purpose of publicly encouraging the pride and sentiments of the Italian speaking community of Gorizia but explicitly positioned itself on the side of Austria, stating lack of support for the Risorgimento and affirming its loyalty to the Habsburg crown (Marušič 518–520). In fact, L’Aurora went as far as praising Austria’s military victories against the revolutions in Italy, showing their true intentions of accepting Gorizia’s inclusion in the Habsburg Empire. At the beginning of each issue, the periodical published a sort of bulletin with all the official news concerning wars and political decisions. At the end of the first issue, for instance, the editor states that “Our town proved not inferior to the capital as regards loyalty and attachment to the common homeland and celebrated the victories of our brave troops in the nearby palace of the Count Giovanni d’Attems the day before yesterday”4 (Seitz “Notizie” 1848: 3). If one could doubt the honesty of these words, L’Aurora reported lists of all the citizens and institutions offering financial contributions to Austria’s National Guard, including the exact amount of money donated. In these lists, we also find the name of Isacco Samuele Reggio who offered one of the largest donations among those given by private citizens to the sum of 20 Florins (Seitz “Contribuenti” 1848: 60).

4 “La nostra città si dimostrò non inferiore alla capitale per fedeltà ed attaccamento alla patria comune e festeggiò jer’altro nel vicino palazzo del Conte Giovanni d’Attems in Podgora le vittorie riportate dalle nostre valorose truppe [Austria].”

On the Road to Emancipation

Having clarified its loyalty to the Habsburg Crown, the journal’s line was to support the Italian-speaking majority of Gorizia, which also included a large Slovenian minority and a smaller German-speaking minority, and, moreover, to defend what they believed was the town’s Italian character and language. L’Aurora promoted the use of Italian as the town’s official language, in order to avoid discrimination from Gorizia’s smaller German language community, as German was imposed by the Austrian authorities (Marušič 519). Gorizia’s specific situation was quite unique even within Habsburg Italy. As mentioned above, the town hosted three linguistic communities: Slovene, German, and Italian. All three communities coexisted within the same city and saw themselves as an intrinsic part of it, contained within the political entity of the Habsburg Empire, of course. L’Aurora sought also the support of the Slovenian community against the discriminations favoring the German speaking minority. It is not surprising, however, that Gorizia’s Jews identified with the Italian speaking community in spite of being Ashkenazim for the most part, due to the aforementioned, centuries-long “Italianization” process (Malkiel 2013). Furthermore, one has to keep in mind that the presence of some Sephardim (Jews from the Iberian peninsula) and Italkim (Jews from the Italian peninsula) was not rare in Gorizia, and that the rites in the synagogue were pronounced the Italian way, in spite of being Ashkenazi, and the music was Italian as well (Richetti 234). Having a proud Italian identity while at the same time supporting the Habsburg Crown could appear as contradictory. How could this contradiction be explained? Certainly, one could maintain that the statements of support for the Austrian ruler were present due to political opportunity in order to somehow reassure the Austrian censorship authorities. It would have been, of course, a crime to support the Risorgimento movement openly. However, if the journal’s founders wished to support the Risorgimento and attack Habsburg domination, they would not have needed to create a new public journal, to simply promote Gorizia’s Italian community while at the same time secretly plotting against the Austrians. This would have been extremely risky in 1848, because the Austrian authorities certainly were particularly alert, given the international revolutionary atmosphere. Their “bad intentions” would have easily been discovered. Indeed, I am convinced the founders of the journal simply wished to point out, from their perspective, the substantially Italian character of Gorizia, and defend its Italian speaking community against discrimination from the German-speaking minority. It is true, however, that Reggio was afraid that he and his Italian-speaking colleagues would be suspected of being collaborators with the Risorgimento or, at any rate, supporters of a republican constitution within Austria. This can be evinced through an article he authored and published in L’Aurora on August 13, 1848, titled “Liberalism”. In this article, Reggio essentially felt the need to specify that it was possible at the time to be a liberal without being a Republican simply by sharing the wish for equality for all citizens:

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In our time, this term has been applied to the civil life and conceptual area defined as liberal when they wish to guarantee political and religious freedom to everybody, which is what this century aspires to […]. Everyone can understand from it, that openly professing LIBERALISM is not only a very innocent thing, proper of this century, but it is even worth of praise and highly meritorious for the homeland [i.e. Austria, A.G.]. […] And yet, unfortunately this does not happen. If somebody manifests sentiments that are even slightly liberal, there is immediately somebody who interprets his thought negatively, who suspects dishonest aims, who attempts to make him a target of public contempt. There are even those who publicly denounce him as a republican without thinking that such a claim can damage the accused person severely.5 (Reggio “Liberalismo” 1848: 23–24; emphasis in original)

In a few lines and without ever mentioning key words, such as “Italy”, “Risorgimento”, “Austria” or “Judaism”, Reggio managed to claim civil equality for Jews in Habsburg lands and at the same time to distance himself from the suspicion of being a collaborator with the Risorgimento or in any way a supporter of a republican regime. That Reggio’s Judaism did not explicitly emerge in his articles in L’Aurora is mostly due to two interconnected facts, I believe. It is obvious that in such a small community every educated person knew he was the town’s chief rabbi, and even the Austrian authorities were certainly aware of it. Therefore, emphasizing his Jewishness would have been unnecessary in the first place and, secondly, misleading in terms of the message he wished to convey. He probably wanted the reader to concentrate on his article’s content without thinking his views were somehow dictated by his being Jewish. However, those who were acquainted with Reggio’s thought would have certainly recognized his frequent references to the Enlightenment and its values, which were as present there as in his Hebrew writings. This is clear in the aforementioned article, when he wished that people would finally “be willing to welcome the holy

5 “A’ nostri tempi si è applicato questo vocabolo alla vita civile e si chiamano idee liberali quelle che tendono a garantire ad ognuno la libertà politica e religiosa, a cui aspira principalmente il secolo presente. […] Ogun vede da ciò, che non solo innocentissima cosa e allo spirito del secolo consentanea si è il professare in oggi apertamente LIBERALISMO, ma che altresì degno d’elogio e sommamente benemerito della patria […]. Eppure sgraziatamente non accade così. Se taluno esterna sentimenti alcun che liberali, v’ha tosto chi sinistramente interpreta la sua parola, chi gli appone mire men che oneste, chi tenta di farlo bersaglio al comune disprezzo, chi pur anco minaccia denunziarlo alla plebe come repubblicano senza punto riflettere che una tale denunziazione può bensì più di una volta creare non lieve danno al denunziato.”

On the Road to Emancipation

ideas of justice, humanity, brotherhood, political and religious freedom”6 (Reggio “Liberalismo” 1848: 24). The reference to the Enlightenment’s famous concepts of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” is evident here. These values align with a general faith in the “progresso universale” (universal progress) that he mentions later in the same article (Reggio “Liberalismo” 1848: 24). Reggio was earnestly afraid of being accused of supporting a republican constitution or even sharing Risorgimento’s goals. He was equally afraid for the continued publication of the journal in which he was writing. In two subsequent issues, he felt the need to publish two more articles aimed at further clarifying his view of Liberalism. They are both apologetic in their tone but contain other interesting elements of Reggio’s Enlightenmentcentered philosophy. In the first place, his fear was not only of being misinterpreted in political terms by being mistaken for a republican, but he had social and moral concerns as well. He suspected that the “volgo” (“the people”) might attach a different meaning to the term “Liberalism”, in particular that they would “get scared and believe that [Liberalism – A.G.] means libertinage, debauchery, subversion of the social order, irreligion, unbelief, violation of every positive and moral law […]”7 (Reggio “Schiarimenti I” 1848: 51). This seems to be an appeal to his fellow Jews, aware as he was that in the Italian Orthodox milieus he was already considered an extreme reformist, if not a heretic (Tamani 40). In fact, later in the same article, after reassuring the readers that he did not refer to any of that, he advocated for an undefined reform, insisting there would be nothing to fear about it and comparing it to a recovery following a surgery (Reggio “Schiarimenti I” 1848: 51). This is a rather strong image for someone who intended to reassure readers. His final plea for Liberalism continued in his final article in L’Aurora. There, he traced back the origins of liberal ideals to the Bible, referring to a rather common concept among nineteenth-century European intellectuals (Jews and non-Jews), that is, ancient Israel as a cradle of democratic and Enlightenment values ante-litteram (Grazi 2018: 269)8 :

6 “disposti ad accogliere mano mano le sante idee di giustizia, d’umanità, di fratellanza, di libertà politica e religiosa […].” 7 “si spaventa e crede scorgervi libertinaggio, licenza, sovvertimento dell’ordine sociale, irreligione, miscredenza, violazione d’ogni legge positiva e morale […].” 8 The most prominent proposers of this concept were the French historians Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892). Much later in the century the Italian Jewish writer David Levi (1816–1898) quoted them and reiterated the same concept in his Ahasvero nell’isola del diavolo: versi, preceduti da uno studio sull’ebraismo e la rivoluzione francese. Torino: R. Streglio, 1898: 13. Although he did not elaborate further on this concept, Reggio appears to be a quite early advocate for it in 1848, at least in Italy.

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Isn’t the constitution written in the holy pages of the divine word, that the entire civilized world worships as God’s revelation the most liberal and perfect constitution, actually the foundation of any other constitution? Perfect equality of all individuals composing the state, a communal brotherhood without any distinction of rank, a law that binds everyone equally […].9 (Reggio “Schiarimenti II” 1848: 116)

Here, it becomes clearer, that the “reform” he foreshadowed in the previous article was a transition from Austria’s “enlightened absolute monarchy” to a constitutional monarchy proper. At the same time, Reggio’s plea for the Jews’ full civil emancipation appears quite evident in spite of never being mentioned explicitly. I am convinced that these were Reggio’s honest intentions and that he, as much as the journal he wrote for, did not envisage a complete transition to a republic nor supported the Risorgimento national movement, at least not in Gorizia. Nevertheless, it is clear that such words could easily be interpreted otherwise by the Habsburg authorities. And they were. On September 13, 1848, L’Aurora published its last issue, its thirtieth, and was forced to close by the Austrian censorship. In this last issue, the editor Seitz signed a final short article in which he explained the reasons for this sudden closure: “Ell’è repubblicana” (“It [L’Aurora - A.G.] is Republican”, Seitz “Congedo” 1848: 119). This was the “verdict” (“sentenza”, Seitz “Congedo” 1848: 119), in the words of Seitz himself, pronounced by the people blamed by the editor for having attracted the authorities’ suspicion with incessant gossiping about the alleged revolutionary nature of the periodical.

Conclusion By way of conclusion, we now need to return to our point of departure, which I hopefully delineated clearly: the distinction between a strong Italian identity and the support of the Risorgimento national movement. When talking about nineteenth-century Italian Jews, these two elements are generally connected and correlated, even by the newest approaches that wish to problematize and better define the Italian Jews’ complex relationship with nationalism and the Risorgimento movement. The main difference between older and newer approaches lies in the sequence of such correlation. Previous scholarship essentially maintained that, because Italian Jews already had a strong sense of Italian national identity, they happily participated in the Risorgimento with the goal of civil emancipation in 9 “La più liberale e la più perfetta di tutte le costituzioni, anzi il tipo primario di ogni altra, non riscontrasi, forse registrata in quelle venerande pagine della divina parola, che tutto il mondo incivilito adora come rivelazione di Dio? Perfetta uguaglianza di tutti gli individui componenti lo stato, fratellanza comune senza distinzione di ranghi, una legge che tutti vincola egualmente […].”

On the Road to Emancipation

mind (Milano 1963; Roth; Momigliano). Contrastingly, recent studies start from the involvement of a number of Jews in the Risorgimento alongside their non-Jewish compatriots, especially around 1848, claiming that it “did not automatically lead to their acquiring an Italian national identity […]. Patriotic sentiment and national identity in Italian Judaism were therefore acquired by stages […].” (Catalan 215). I believe that both approaches have problematic aspects that I cannot discuss in this essay. Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, they both find a correlation, albeit in different chronological order, between a feeling of Italian identity and support for the Risorgimento. In Reggio’s case, they need to be separated. A traditional twofold division of Reggio’s identity is insufficient, as he presents three layers: 1) religious: Jewish identity; 2) cultural: Italian identity; 3) political: Habsburg citizenship. In the Habsburg empire, this tripartition is not at all new and, in fact, rather common. But when talking about the emancipation process of Italian Jews, the traditional division is twofold—citizenship and religion. This is a crucial element for us. This tripartition I propose here adds one layer to the traditional bipartition, summarized by the popular Enlightenment-inspired sentence that circulated at the time to distinguish between Italian citizenship and Jewish religion: “Cittadino Italiano di fede Mosaica”. In this case, it would be more appropriate to use the expression “Habsburg citizen, of Jewish faith and Italian language and culture”. In conclusion, this brief investigation of Reggio’s relationship to Italian identity and the Risorgimento national movement, a topic which has hitherto been neglected by scholarship, yields two important results: if, on the one hand, Reggio was fine with Gorizia politically belonging to the Habsburg Empire, he wanted, on the other hand, to state loud and clear, as he did on the pages of his Strenna Israelitica: I am a proud Jew, I am a proud Italian!

Works cited Catalan, Tullia. “Italian Jews and the 1848–49 Revolutions: Patriotism and Multiple Identities.” The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Eds. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2012: 214–31. Catalan, Tullia, and Cristiana Facchini, eds. Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC 8, 2015. Del Bianco Cotrozzi, Maddalena. Il Collegio Rabbinico di Padova. Un’istituzione religiosa dell’Ebraismo sulla via dell’emancipazione. Firenze: Olschki, 1995. Di Porto, Bruno. “Gli Ebrei nel Risorgimento.” Nuova Antologia 2136 (1980): 256–272. Ferrara degli Uberti, Carlotta. Fare gli Ebrei italiani. Autorappresentazioni di una minoranza (1861–1918). Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011.

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Grazi, Alessandro. “Divergent Jewish Approaches to Italian Nationalism and NationBuilding.” The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D’Azeglio to Primo Levi. Eds. Jonathan Druker and L. Scott Lerner. Annali d’italianistica 36 (2018): 262–282. Grazi, Alessandro. “Il pensiero di Isacco Samuele Reggio tra Haskalah e Wissenschaft des Judentums.” Filosofia Ebraica in Italia (XV – XIX). Eds. Guido Bartolucci, Libera Pisano, and Michela Torbidoni. Filosofia Italiana, 2020: 181–194. Grusovin, Marco. “Isacco Samuele Reggio – Rabbino e filosofo.” Quaderni Giuliani di storia XVII 2 (1996): 7–29. Grusovin, Marco, ed. Cultura ebraica nel Goriziano. Udine: Forum, 2007. Ioly Zorattini, Pier Cesare, ed. Gli Ebrei a Gorizia e a Trieste tra “ancien régime” ed Emancipazione. Udine: Del Bianco, 1984. Klein, Shira. Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Levi, David. Ahasvero nell’isola del diavolo: versi, preceduti da uno studio sull’ebraismo e la rivoluzione francese. Torino: R. Streglio, 1898. Luzzatto, Samuel David. Epistolario italiano, francese e latino. Padua: Salmin, 1890. Luzzatto Voghera, Gadi. “Aspetti della cultura ebraica in Italia nel secolo XIX.” Storia d’Italia. Annali 22. Gli Ebrei in Italia. Ed. Attilio Milano. Torino: Einaudi, 1997: 1215–1244. Luzzatto Voghera, Gadi. Il prezzo dell’uguaglianza. Il dibattito sull’emancipazione degli Ebrei in Italia (1781–1848). Milano: Franco Angeli, 1998. Malkiel, David. “New light on the career of Isaac Samuel Reggio.” The Jews of Italy, 2000: 276–303. Malkiel, David. “Renaissance in the Graveyard: The Hebrew Tombstones of Padua and Ashkenazic Acculturation in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” AJS Review 37 (2013): 333–370. Marušič, Branko. “La stampa periodica italiana e gli sloveni nella contea di Gorizia (1774–1850).” Ricerche slavistiche 58.12 (2014): 513–524. Milano, Attilio. “Un secolo di stampa periodica ebraica in Italia.” La Rassegna Mensile d’Israel 12 (1938): 96–133. Milano, Attilio. Storia degli Ebrei in Italia. Turin: Einaudi, 1963. Momigliano, Arnaldo. Pagine ebraiche. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Pelli, Moshe. “Ktav Ha’et Ha’ivri shel Chochmat Israel Be-Galizia vebe-Italia.” Qesher 38 (2009): 77–86. Reggio, Isacco Samuele. “Liberalismo.” L’Aurora 6, 13 Aug. 1848: 23–24. Reggio, Isacco Samuele. “Schiarimenti.” L’Aurora 13, 23 Aug. 1848: 51–52. Reggio, Isacco Samuele. “Schiarimenti.” L’Aurora 29, 12 Sep. 1848: 115–116. Reggio, Isacco Samuele. “Mendelssohn e Lavater.” Strenna Israelitica I, 1852: 63–77. Richetti, Elia. “Cultura ebraica a Gorizia.” Ebrei e Mitteleuropa. Ed. Quirino Principe. Gorizia: Shakespear&Co., 1984. Roth, Cecil. The History of the Jews of Italy. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946. Seitz, G.B. “Notizie.” L’Aurora 1, 8 Aug. 1848: 1–3.

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Seitz, G.B. “Contribuenti volontari per la Guardia Nazionale.” L’Aurora 15, 25 Aug. 1848: 60. Seitz, G.B. “Congedo.” L’Aurora 30, 13 Sep. 1848: 119–120. Tamani, Giuliano. “Isacco Samuele Reggio e l’illuminismo ebraico.” Gli ebrei a Gorizia e a Trieste tra “Ancien Regime” ed emancipazione. Ed. Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini. Udine: Del Bianco, 1984: 29–40. Vielmetti, Nikolaus. “Das Collegio Rabbinico von Padua.” Wissenschaft des Judentums; Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa. Ed. Julius Carlebach. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992.

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Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal

Abstract:

This paper traces the friendship and intellectual collaboration of Marcus Ehrenpreis, chief rabbi of Bulgaria in the years 1900–1914, with Pencho Slaveykov and Mara Belcheva, leading Bulgarian poets of the turn of the twentieth century, and, through them, Ehrenpreis’ involvement in the Bulgarian literary circle Misal. It examines the mutual knowledge transfer, enrichment, and inspiration between two cultural and religious spheres which have largely been looked at separately and in isolation, and it shows how Ehrenpreis could mediate between this Bulgarian literary avantgarde and the young and budding Hebrew literature to tease out their commonalities.

About this time, Slaveykov together with Mara Belcheva began translating Nietzsche’s Zarathustra book into Bulgarian. It was a bold undertaking to transfer Nietzsche’s own refined and idiosyncratic language to the poor Bulgarian. Every now and then, when a sentence was particularly difficult to translate and they could not agree, they would knock on my door to ask me to act as a kind of ‘arbiter elegantiarum’ in order to determine which of their formulations was better. (Ehrenpreis 1946: 178)1

This passage in Marcus Ehrenpreis’ 1946 autobiography Mitt liv mellan öster och väster (translated into Hebrew as Ben mizrah le-ma’arav/Between East and West) acts as the starting point for the premise of this paper, which is to highlight how the friendship between Ehrenpreis, Slaveikov, and Belcheva led to mutual knowledge transfer, enrichment, and inspiration between two cultural and religious spheres which have largely been looked at separately and in isolation.2 The focus is exclusively on the first decade of the twentieth century specifically in the Bulgarian 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2 Pencho Slaveykov, Mara Belcheva, and the Literary Circle Misal are well researched subjects in Bulgarian literary studies (Kortenska). Marcus Ehrenpreis’ person and oeuvre has mostly been researched from two distinctly different perspectives whose studies have rarely been overlapping: In his capacity as chief rabbi of Đakovo, Bulgaria, and/or Stockholm, therefore, from a community politics point of view (see, e.g., Dadova; Conforti 267–353; Hultman) or from the perspective of a leading Zionist and literary scholar (Fruitman).

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capital Sofia, at a moment when literary and artistic circles were in the process of trying to ‘elevate’ Bulgaria’s culture out of the shadows of the ‘periphery’. The state and situation of the Jewish population of Sofia will also be explored in order to show the relevance of these processes for the local Jewish community. The main protagonist and ‘anchor’ of this paper is Marcus Ehrenpreis, since he acted in a personal and professional capacity as an intermediary between those seemingly separate worlds. On a broader theoretical level, this paper aims to highlight the importance of place, meaning the necessity to study cultural and artistic developments and initiatives on a decisively local but transdisciplinary, transcultural, and multilingual level in order to grasp the nuanced mechanisms of these processes in their contextual situatedness.

Marcus Ehrenpreis’ Zionist and literary careers Ehrenpreis was the chief rabbi of Bulgaria for fourteen years starting in 1900. In this position he left a lasting imprint on Bulgarian Jewry, especially in Sofia, through his educational, political, social, and cultural initiatives, but also because of his enduring struggles with the local Zionist factions (Conforti 267–353). Ehrenpreis’ career is of specific relevance to the aim of this paper and will therefore serve as a starting point. Ehrenpreis was born in Lviv in 1869, then the city of Lemberg in the Austrian province of Galicia (Ehrenpreis 1946: 11). As his family was in the printing business, Ehrenpreis was introduced to intellectual life and ‘enlightened’ ideas early on in his life. In 1890, Ehrenpreis moved to Berlin to study at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the German intellectual center of Reform Judaism, in order to become a rabbi. It is these Berlin years that seem to have profoundly shaped Ehrenpreis’ future political and cultural ideas. In Berlin, he also began his extensive writing and publishing career, which he would carry on through the different stages and languages of his life. His literary initiatives were fundamentally fueled by the conviction of the need for a Hebrew culture and literature as a source of the ‘elevation’ of Jewish life and thought (Ehrenpreis 1897). In this sense, he was, and remained throughout his life, a so-called cultural Zionist—with the firm belief that education, the nurturing of a Hebrew culture, both in terms of the language and in terms of a new direction of Jewish intellectual thought, were the right path to a modern Judaism (Fruitman). These ideas were fostered by Ehrenpreis’ acquaintance with Ahad Ha-am, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, and Martin Buber, figures that will be of interest to this paper. In 1895, Ehrenpreis received his doctorate in Erlangen and in 1896 at the age of 26, he became the rabbi of Đakovo (then Diakovár) in modern-day Croatia.

Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal

Fig. 1 Marcus Ehrenpreis, ca. 1900. Source: National Library of Israel, courtesy of the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection, Schwad 02 01 263.

Ehrenpreis is, however, best known as the right-hand man of Theodor Herzl in organizing the First Zionist Congress in 1897 (Ehrenpreis 1946: 126–37). He held this position primarily because of his connections to Ahad Ha-am and his founding of a new publishing house together with Berdyczewski, which had the mission to advance Hebrew education, culture, and literature—serving as a spiritual force behind political Zionism—a mission he laid out in an influential article the same year called “Die junghebräische Literatur”. This reputation as a leading Zionist3 was a crucial argument for his appointment as chief rabbi of Bulgaria in 1900 (Fig. 1), a time when the Zionist faction was

3 In Bulgaria, he was mistakenly thought to be a political Zionist like Herzl. This led to expectations towards his tenure, which clashed with Ehrenpreis’ own approach and convictions as a cultural Zionist.

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gaining political leverage in the country (Conforti 269–71). Initially, Ehrenpreis seemed a good fit. Soon enough, however, he encountered resistance from the local Jewish population. Animosity peaked when he refused to take sides in a dispute between the Zionists and the Alliance israélite universelle over the change of the curriculum in Jewish schools (Omer). He strived to solve the problem by developing a sensible new curriculum that would at once promote Hebrew language and culture, Bulgarian language and history, and an overall ‘enlightened’ attitude, ideals that reflect his endeavour for an intermediary role. This animosity, however, never vanished and calls for his resignation continued for several years.4 Ultimately, Ehrenpreis left Bulgaria to take up the position of chief rabbi of Stockholm in 1914, where he remained until his passing in 1951. Ehrenpreis, however, never stopped feeling connected to the Balkan country and he continued to put his faith in the opportunities that had opened up in Bulgaria for its Jewish citizens. He also continued his efforts to ensure the wellbeing of Sofia’s Jewish community (Tadjer 130) and simultaneously sought to present the riches of Bulgaria to a Northern European audience by initiating and co-editing, together with Alfred Jensen, a book on Bulgaria in Swedish (Ehrenpreis and Jensen) in the midst of World War I. In Stockholm, Ehrenpreis’ literary and publishing activities flourished, notably in Swedish. He founded the Judisk Tidskrift, which contributed greatly to developing a Swedish Jewish literature and he published widely as an independent author in several languages (see, for instance, Ehrenpreis “Gespräche”; Ehrenpreis 1928).

The Bulgarian literary avant-garde circle Misal The literary circle Misal5 (Fig. 2) was the first such group to form in Bulgaria around the literary journal Misal, which was first published by Krastyo Krastev in 1892 and continued as a primarily monthly publication through 1907. Subtitled “Journal for Scholarship, Literature, and Critique”, its mission was to enrich Bulgarian literature according to current European avant-garde ideas and to ‘catch up’ with European modernism (Kortenska 2008). Therefore, the journal published a wide variety of entries: from poems, short stories, and short theater pieces, to satire, literary criticism, translations of Western writings, or academic analyses for instance of literary trends. Accordingly, the four official, so-to-speak, members of the literary circle represented this variety of the journal’s content: 4 Ehrenpreis also became the target of parodical ridicule, as in the case of an “Agada kompozada i kontada para Pesah de tinyozos de Raban Aman de la Prasa” published in Sofia as late as 1914 (Papo 213). 5 Misal means ‘thought’ in Bulgarian.

Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal

Fig. 2 The four ‘official’ members of the literary circle Misal (from left to right): Slaveykov, Yavorov, Todorov, Krastev. Source: Bulgarian National Library, NBKM-BIA S II 5077.

The founder and first editor-in-chief of Misal, Krastyo Krastev also referred to as “Dr Krastev”, is known as Bulgaria’s first professional literary critic (Atanasova 2013). He also taught philosophy at Sofia University. In Misal, he published primarily critiques, translations, and popular scholarship. The youngest member of Misal was Petko Todorov, whose work includes dramas or so-called ‘idylls’, romantic poems on Bulgarian country-life or inspired by Bulgarian folklore. He is known for having explored techniques such as inner monologues or observations of ‘deep’ psychological states (Ivanova-Girginova 109–86). The best-known member of the literary circle was the poet Pencho Slaveykov, son of the writer Petko Slaveykov and thus someone already born into a literary family. Slaveykov’s poems and lyrical works are considered to have enriched and brought the Bulgarian language to life in an unprecedented manner (Yanakieva) by painting in great richness, his observations of the inner human condition or the trivial beauty of nature. Having studied in Leipzig, much of Slaveykov’s work was inspired by German and Scandinavian writers and, thus, it is no coincidence that Slaveykov was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912 by Alfred Jensen, the same person that later edited the volume on Bulgaria together with Ehrenpreis (Ehrenpreis and Jensen 209–21). Slaveykov also held significant official positions,

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most notably as a deputy director starting in 1901 and then beginning in 1909 as the director of the Bulgarian National Library. From 1903 onwards, Slaveykov was involved with Mara Belcheva who was a celebrated and talented poet in her own right. Even though authorship for Slaveykov compositions had already been attributed solely to him during his lifetime, Belcheva is known to have contributed significantly to his poetry. The two poets had a collaborative relationship, as is apparent in the opening quote. Even though Belcheva is never cited as part of the literary circle in scholarship, it is imperative to note that she was not only a constant presence in the circle (Vacheva 2010), she also regularly published her own poems in the journal. Finally, the last member was the poet Peyo Yavorov who, inspired by French literature, is best known for introducing Symbolism into Bulgarian literature (Dakova). He was the only politically active member of the group, being a stern supporter and fighter in Macedonian revolutionary groups. Usually considered to have been discovered by Krastev and Slaveykov, Yavorov became co-editor-in-chief of Misal by 1905 and in addition, librarian and dramaturge of the Bulgarian National Theater ‘Ivan Vazov’ (Kortenska 315–70). Therefore, it becomes apparent that this diverse group of (primarily) men did not merely shape early-twentieth-century Bulgarian literature through their contribution to Misal and their individual publications, it is of paramount relevance that they were actively involved in establishing and building the budding cultural state institutions of the Bulgarian capital.

Sofia, 12 Belchev street The lives of the head of the Bulgarian Jewish community, Marcus Ehrenpreis, and the members of the literary circle intersect in a house at 12 Belchev Street (Fig. 3), which was then owned by Mara Belcheva. At some point before 1904, the Jewish community rented the ground (Fig. 4) and first floors of the building to house the chief rabbinate’s office and private residence (Ehrenpreis 1946: 176). Belcheva kept the attic apartment for herself. Ehrenpreis vividly portrays the frequent evening gatherings that were held at the house. One can easily imagine the space6 on the ground floor of the building with its likely once-functioning fountain being used for such evenings of mutual intellectual exchange. Ehrenpreis describes them as follows:

6 Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the space was used as a lively café in the center of Sofia.

Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal

We had unforced, fruitful discussions during these evenings, alternately hosted by Mara Belcheva and us. These conversations were at a level that left everything current or partypolitical far behind. And it was remarkable what unifying and reconciling power lay in the spiritual, general human questions. Here, a Jewish theologian and Bulgarian poets could find common ground with one another: the human. Warm benevolence characterized these serious conversations. We felt like members of a family with their own attitude to life, unmoved by the surrounding nagging and bickering. And there was a sincerity in these exchanges of opinion, which only genuine sympathy and mutual respect can generate. Of course, literary issues dominated. Slaveykov used to read parts of his refined lyrical works—he was at the time writing a poetry cycle, which sprung from his love for Mara Belcheva called ‘Dream of Happiness.’7 […] Sometimes it was the warm-hearted Petko Todorov with his saintly noble physiognomy, who read one of his masterful idylls, in which he painted with rare eloquence the inner richness and beauty of Bulgarian country life. Sometimes, in improvised translation from Hebrew, I read some of my literary essays or the occasional short story by Peretz or Schalom Asch, which I had translated with Todorov. Some of them were published in the journal ‘Misal’. (Ehrenpreis 1946: 177)

Fig. 3 Exterior view from southeast of the house on 12 Belchev street, Sofia, where Ehrenpreis, Slaveykov and Belcheva were neighbors. Source: photo by author.

7 The cycle was first published in the October 1906 issue of the journal Misal (Slaveykov).

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Fig. 4 Interior view of the ground floor of the house on 12 Belchev street, Sofia, used as the chief rabbinate’s office until ca. 1912. Source: photo by author.

Here, Ehrenpreis gives a rare glimpse into the inner life of the literary circle, the modes of sharing original compositions or how open the members were in accommodating new inspirations and different contributions. It is central to the argument of this paper that Ehrenpreis was able to bring his own knowledge and familiarity with the young and budding Hebrew literature into the literary circle, since it seems that the deep concerns of developing a literary language in the respective contexts—Bulgarian and Hebrew—was a connecting element.8 Further commonalities can be found in the search for an appropriate voice for their generation and their place in the nation or the nation-building process. Another common concern shared by the Bulgarian and Hebrew literary avant-gardes was the wish to ‘elevate’ their respective languages and find appropriate modes for expressing

8 Ehrenpreis’ dismissal of the Bulgarian language in the opening quote seems misguided in the context of this commonality. In this, he reveals his own Balkanist biases, which he has also detailed in other writings (1928: 11–13), his own knowledge of Bulgarian and his involvement with the Bulgarian literary avant-garde notwithstanding.

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modern sentiments while still searching for a rootedness, a specific ‘identity’ in fast-changing times (cf., for instance, Wisse; Kortenska). In Sofia, Ehrenpreis also socialized and shared similar intellectual concerns with Boris Schatz, who had been appointed court sculptor to Prince Ferdinand in 1895 and who was instrumental in founding and establishing the Bulgarian National Academy of Arts (Kotlyar). As has been previously shown (Zalmona), Schatz’s professional and artistic aim focused on finding an appropriate expression of the ‘Jewish spirit’ in art, a project he later sought to fulfill with the founding of the Bezalel School of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Already in 1903, Ehrenpreis had written a piece on him in the Journal Ost und West (“Boris Schatz”) in which he praised the great potential of the sculptor who, according to Ehrenpreis, has had the typical fate or path of a “Ghettojude” rooted in the “Judengasse” (1903: 307). Ehrenpreis laments that most literature and arts that were considered ‘Jewish art’ were still only “Goluskunst” (308) because they rarely portrayed or expressed the pre-exilic or the modern-day Jew. As Ehrenpreis notes: “The new Jew, the Jew of today with his new beliefs and his new hopes has not yet been born for this art” (308). He also considers Schatz’s art to not yet be ‘Jewish art’ as he does not see it yet concerned with the “new and old language of the free and upright Jew” (308). But he sees potential in Schatz’s expressive characters and praises his Matitiyahu or Maccabi statue (Fig. 5) as being his most prodigious work. Ehrenpreis stresses the statue’s emotional strength by pointing out that he “loves this statue, because it elevates [him] and makes [him] better” (310), while Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who is known to have owned the statue, has expressed that “he gained new courage from it” (311). It speaks to the focus of this paper and the culturally, religiously, and ethnically entangled reality of intellectual life in Sofia at the turn of the twentieth century that Schatz’s work Matitiyahu, which Ehrenpreis praises as a true example of ‘Jewish art’, had its permanent place in the collection of the Bulgarian Royal Palace.9

The journal Misal as a place of encounter and entanglement According to Ehrenpreis’ own writings quoted above, he had also published with the journal Misal. As a matter of fact, this was indeed the case in the October issue of 1906. There, Ehrenpreis published under the pseudonym M. Benyakov10 on two exemplary figures of “new Jewish literature”, Isaac Peretz11 and Mordecai Feierberg

9 The statue’s whereabouts have not been known since the 1920s. 10 In the table of contents, his name is alternatively listed as “Dr M. Ben-yakov”. 11 Isaac Peretz is still considered one of the most influential writers for modern Jewry (Wisse).

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Fig. 5 Boris Schatz, Matitiyahu, 1894. Source: Yad Ben Zvi, Shoshana Halevi Album, YBZ.0057.089.

Marcus Ehrenpreis and the Literary Circle Misal

(Ehrenpreis 1906). In the text, he briefly presents the two rather different authors, their background, their writing style, and the common themes of their writings. The main topic relevant to Ehrenpreis seems to be the transition from Hasidic to ‘enlightened’ that Peretz and Feierberg portray as well as the theme of breaking with tradition and the need and process of gaining and raising one’s individual voice. In the following pages, the journal also published translations of Peretz’ Bontshe Shvayg 12 and Feierberg’s Ha-‘Egel13 , pieces that Ehrenpreis mentions in the quote above to have translated together with Petko Todorov. This was not the first time Ehrenpreis had published on Feierberg. Already in 1901, he had written a piece on him and Berdyczewski for Die Welt (Ehrenpreis 1901).14 In this article, Ehrenpreis expressed a similarly enthusiastic view, as was the case with Schatz, on the potential of those ‘young’ authors finding a literary voice that could truly be called ‘Jewish’. And it is no coincidence that both Feierberg and Berdyczewski were close to or endorsed by Ahad Ha-am.15 Similarly, Feierberg’s exploration of the technique of inner monologue is evidently mirrored and thus intersects with the individual poetic interests of Petko Todorov who helped Ehrenpreis translate these texts into Bulgarian. Thus, with Ehrenpreis’ contribution to Misal, it is possible to discern clear parallels between the struggles and explorations of young Jewish and Bulgarian writers and Ehrenpreis’ attempt to inspire and mediate between them. It is vital to point out that Ehrenpreis was, however, not the only Jewish writer to contribute to Misal. Dora Gabe, at the young age of seventeen, became a regular contributor with her poetry.16 It is worth noting in this context that Gabe evidently belonged to a generation and milieu of Bulgarian Jews that was completely and entirely assimilated into the majority Bulgarian society. In her case, this process might have been expedited and conditioned by her Russian Ashkenazi background, meaning that this could be attributed to a possible feeling of alienation from the local

12 13 14 15

The story first appeared in his collected volume Literatur un lebn (Peretz). The story first appeared in the Hebrew monthly journal Ha-Shiloah (Feierberg). His article was reprinted a year later in Ost und West (Ehrenpreis 1902). As a matter of fact, Feierberg and Berdyczewski had opposite but both very intense relationships with Ahad Ha-am, who was the founding editor of the journal Ha-Shiloah “the leading Hebrewlanguage literary journal at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Holtzman 2010). Feierberg was enthusiastically endorsed and celebrated on the pages of Ha-Shiloah. Berdyczewski, on the other hand, while on the editorial board of the journal, fiercely and throughout many years attacked the journal’s and by extension Ahad Ha-am’s stance of excluding any poetry with ‘non-Judaic’ subjects. With this, “Berdyczewski became the leader of the younger generation of Hebrew writers” (Holtzman 2017). 16 Her first contributions were under the name “Dora G.” (Gabe).

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majority Sephardic Jewish community.17 Therefore, unlike the writers highlighted by Ehrenpreis, Gabe found her literary expression and flourishing exclusively in Bulgarian.

The reality of Jewish life in Sofia ca. 1900 The question remains as to how these explorations of an intellectual elite were relevant for the local Jewish population. Jewish life in Sofia at the beginning of the twentieth century was in the process of transition: spatially, culturally, socially, and religiously. The majority of Sofia’s Jews lived in dire poverty in a new neighborhood to the west of the city that was hurriedly established in the 1890s to accommodate the Jews and the poor, the ones that previously lived in the center of the city and were expropriated to make way for the construction of a new representative and European-looking city centre (Gargova 81–86). Sofia’s Jews, like Balkan Jewry in general, were also in the process of adapting to the new nation state and their place and role in it, which had significantly changed from community organization and life under Ottoman rule. They were confronted with having to prove that they were ‘legitimate’ citizens of their new country. In addition, they had to learn new skills and adapt to a ‘modern’ way of life in order to be considered part of society (cf. Conforti 263–332 passim). These profound transformations were not least guided and fostered by Marcus Ehrenpreis himself. In many ways, his arrival in 1900 ushered in a period of change, modernization, and religious reform. In an Orientalist gesture and considering local religious traditions as misguided piety, he sought to completely reform every part of Jewish life in Sofia (Ehrenpreis 1946: 179–86). The main tools he had at his disposal for this task were education, religious rulings, and attendance and conduct during service. In all these instances, a focus of Ehrenpreis’ seems to have been the wish to empower the women and the young members of the community (Ehrenpreis 1946: 182–84; Conforti 298). As previously mentioned, he envisioned a balanced school curriculum between Hebrew and Bulgarian. During his tenure, furthermore, many extracurricular initiatives were aimed at educating and ‘cultivating’ Sofia’s Jews. One such initiative was the “Literary and Musical Evenings” instituted in 1905, which also acted as philanthropic events to gather funds for the poor Jews of Sofia.18 These evenings contributed to enriching the Jewish population’s exposure

17 The relationship between the established local Bulgarian Sephardic majority and the ‘immigrant’ Ashkenazi community were tense and characterized by mutual alienation ever since the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Romania starting in 1878 (cf. Gargova 90–92). 18 Evidence for these events is preserved in Ehrenpreis’ archives in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, box SE/RA/730128/07/01/F/F 1/3.

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to literature and music and therefore also to those new trends and artistic struggles that were at the center of the intellectual debates. Strikingly, in the program, the majority of performances were carried out by women, giving them an active voice and a purpose beyond a household context.

Coming full circle The intellectual intersection of Ehrenpreis, Belcheva, and Slaveykov at Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is by no means coincidental. Ahad Ha-am had just a couple of years prior extensively and quite critically discussed the embracement of Nietzschean ideas by young Jewish writers, one of whom was Micha Berdyczewski, a long-time intellectual companion of Ehrenpreis (Golomb 73–154). During the same years, Zarathustra was also translated into Serbian, notably by a Sephardic Jew, David Pijade with the help of his brother Moša (Rajner 20, 25). Preliminary versions of the Zarathustra translation into Bulgarian must have been finalized in early 1905, since excerpts were published in the journal Misal. In the March/April issue, a footnote informs the reader that the translation was collaboratively carried out by Mara Belcheva and Pencho Slaveykov, and that the full translation had been submitted with “Hr. G. Danov” for publication (Nietzsche I 1905). The second excerpt in the October issue credits Belcheva alone for the translation (Nietzsche II 1905). Ultimately, the final version of the entire Zarathustra text in Bulgarian was only published in 1915. In it again, Belcheva alone is credited with the entire translation, though edited by Slaveykov. Her dedication details that “this translation is a testament to Pencho Slaveykov under whose aegis it was begun and completed – in the years 1904–1906” (Nietzsche 1915) giving their collaboration a less partner-like and more hierarchical teacher-pupil character. Ehrenpreis’ help and contribution are nowhere noted, neither in Misal nor in the final version. Consequently, the vibrant personal and intellectual entanglements between the head of the Bulgarian Jewish community and the Bulgarian literary avant-garde remain mostly elusive. There is a fundamental disconnect between gentile and Jewish historiography of the same place, the same people, and the same circles. This does not do justice to the reality in Sofia in the first decade of the twentieth century, where among the stupor of everyday struggles, the intellectual elite, at least, seemed to transcend religious, ethnic, and language barriers.

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Works cited Atanasova, Tsvetanka. “D-r Krastyo Krastev.” Balgarskiyat literaturen modernizam, 2013. http://bgmodernism.com/rechnik/dr_krustev. Accessed 1 April 2021. Conforti, Joseph. Hanhagat yahadut bulgariah: metom hashilton haotmani ad erev milkhemet haolam harishona (1878–1913). Haifa: University of Haifa, 2012. Dadova, Yulina. “Ravin d-r Markus Ehrenpreis mezhdu iztoka i zapada.” La Estreya 2 (2009): 38–47. Dakova, Bissera. Yavorov. Arheologiya na avtora. Sofia: Stigmati, 2002. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Die junghebräische Literatur.” Die Welt: Zentralorgan der Zionistischen Bewegung. 7 (1897): 14–16. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Zwei Junghebräer: Feierberg und Berdyczewski.” Die Welt: Zentralorgan der Zionistischen Bewegung 49 (1901): 18–21. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Zwei Junghebräer: Feierberg und Berdyczewski.” Ost und West: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum 3 (1902): 171–174. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Boris Schatz.” Ost und West: illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum 5 (1903): 305–311. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Yu. Perets i M. Fayerberg. Stranitsa iz novo-evreyskata literatura.” Misal 16.10 (1906): 632–634. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. “Gespräche mit Berdyczewski.” Der Jude 3 (1922/1921): 174–180. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. The Soul of the East. Experiences and Reflections. Trans. Alfhild Lamm Huebsch. New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1928. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. Mitt liv mellan öster och väster. Stockholm: A. Bonnier, 1946. Ehrenpreis, Marcus. Ben mizrah le-ma’arav. Tel Aviv: ’Am ’oved, 1953. Ehrenpreis, Marcus, and Alfred Jensen (eds.). Bulgarerna. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1918. Feierberg, Mordecai. “Ha-’Egel.” Ha-Shiloah 2 (1897): 433–436. Fruitman, Stephen. Creating a New Heart: Marcus Ehrenpreis on Jewry and Judaism. Umeå: Umeå Universitet, 2001. Gabe, Dora. “Stihove.” Misal 15.6 (1905): 315–318. Gargova, Fani. The Central Synagogue of Sofia. Westernization, Urban Change, and Religious Reform. Vienna: University of Vienna, 2019. Golomb, Jacob. Nietzsche and Zion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Holtzman, Avner. “Shiloah, Ha-.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe 15 Oct. 2010. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shiloah_Ha-. Accessed 1 April 2021. Holtzman, Avner. “Berdyczewski, Mikhah Yosef.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe 7 Aug. 2017. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Berdyczewski_Mikhah_ Yosef. Accessed 1 April 2021. Hultman, Maja. Between Marginality and Multiplicity: Mapping Jewish Public Home-Making in Modern Stockholm. Southampton: University of Southampton, 2019.

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Ivanova-Girginova, Marieta. Blyanove po moderna drama. Dramaticheskiyat proekt na Petko Todorov. Sofia: Izdatelski Tsentar “Boyan Penev”, 2010. Kortenska, Miroslava. Kulturnata misiya na kraga “Misal”. Pencho Slaveykov, d-r Krastev, Peyo Yavorov, Petko Todorov. Sofia: Izdatelstvo “Emas”, 2008. Kotlyar, Eugeny. “The Making of a National Art: Boris Schatz in Bulgaria.” Ars Judaica 4 (2008): 43–60. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Tay reche Zaratustra.” Trans. Mara Belcheva and Pencho Slaveykov. Misal 15.3–4 (1905): 145–58. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Tay reche Zaratustra.” Trans. Mara Belcheva. Misal 15.10 (1905): 584–94. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Tay reche Zaratustra. Kniga za vsichki i nikogo. Ed. Pencho Slaveykov. Trans. Mara Belcheva. Plovdiv: Hristo G. Danov, 1915. Omer, Danielle. “Les écoles de l’Alliance israélite universelle en Bulgarie vers 1900. Un programme éducatif plurilingue et francophone contesté par les sionistes.” Educations plurilingues. L’aire francophone entre héritages et innovations. Eds. Frédéric Tupin and Danielle Omer. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013: 99–111. Papo, Eliezer. “Konstruksion de la memoria i rekonstruksion de la identidad: Agadot de gerra, un jenero neglejado de la literatura sefardi.” Los sefardies ante los retos del mundo contemporáneo: Identidad y mentalidades. Eds. Paloma Díaz-Mas and María Sánchez Pérez. Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, 2010: 205–224. Peretz, Isaac. “Bontshe shvayg.” Literatur un lebn. A zaml-bukh far literatur un gezelshaft. Ed. Isaac Peretz. Warsaw: Funk, 1894: 11–22. Rajner, Mirjam. Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918–1945. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2019. Slaveykov, Pencho. “Iz ‘San za shtastie.’” Misal 16.10 (1906): 615–617. Tadjer, Avram Moshe. Notas istorikas sovre los djudyos de Bulgaria i la komunita de Sofya. Sofia: Nadezhda, 1932. Vacheva, Albena. “‘Tshuy, tihiy izvor e dalbok!’ Mara Belcheva (1868–1937).” LiterNet 125.4 (2010). https://liternet.bg/publish4/avacheva/mara-belcheva.htm. Accessed 1 April 2021. Wisse, Ruth R. I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. Yanakieva, Miryana. “Pencho Slaveykov.” Rechnik na balgarskata literatura sled osvobozhdenieto. http://dictionarylit-bg.eu/Пенчо-Петков-Славейков. Accessed 1 April 2020. Zalmona, Yigal, editor. Boris Schatz. The Father of Israeli Art. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2006.

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Martin Stechauner (Vienna)

El Koreo de Viena A Sephardic Newspaper on the Western Fringes of Southeastern Europe

Abstract:

The article examines the cultural and social impact of El Koreo de Viena (1869–1883), Vienna’s most important Judezmo newspaper. Its journalistic content reveals how Sephardic Jews of Southeastern European origin thrived within a predominately Western European and, thus, Ashkenazi-based environment. It also shows how the periodical was perceived among its readers and, most notably, by other Sephardic journalists in the Balkans. Certain articles of El Koreo also point to the intermediary role that its editors took on when mediating between more traditional Southeastern European Sephardim and their Westernized brethren in Vienna. When thinking about Eastern Sephardic print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, important Sephardic centers such as Salonika, Istanbul, and Izmir usually come to mind. However, by the early eighteenth century, the Habsburg capital had also become home to a small but thriving community of Sephardic or “Levantine”1 Jews, originally hailing from the Ottoman Empire. From the beginning of the nineteenth until the early twentieth century, an impressive number of newspapers, books, and other Sephardica (i.e., religious literature intended for Sephardic Jews) printed in Judezmo—a language also known as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino—was published in Vienna.2 Not least for this reason, Vienna became an important cultural and intellectual center for many Sephardic Jews, both within the Habsburg Empire and beyond its borders. This article sheds light on the cultural and social impacts of El Koreo de Viena (The Messenger of Vienna, 1869–1883), Vienna’s most important Judezmo newspaper.3

1 The Judezmo term “levantinos” (Levantines) derives from the Italian word “levantino” (Levant) which refers to ‘the east, where the sun rose,’ parallel to ‘the Italian ponente, referring to the setting of the sun in the west’ (Ravid 21). The term “levantinos” was adopted as a self-designating term by many Ottoman Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as by the Viennese Sephardim, who had been in close contact with Italian culture (Bunis 1993a: 7–66; Lehmann 51–76). 2 For a detailed list of Sephardic prints published in Vienna, see Studemund-Halevy (437–470). 3 The analyzed issues presented here were gathered in the archives of the National Library of Israel and the Ben Zvi Institute during a research stay in Jerusalem in 2015. The project was generously

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As we will see, El Koreo provides many examples of how Sephardic Jews living in the Habsburg capital conformed more and more to their Western European and, thus, Ashkenazi-based environment. The article also shows how these transcultural encounters and their repercussions were perceived by El Koreo’s readership, most notably, other Sephardic journalists in the Balkans. In this regard, the article will also highlight El Koreo’s delicate role as a mediator between more traditional Sephardim in Southeastern Europe and their rather Westernized brethren in Vienna.

The short history of the Judezmo press in Vienna El Koreo de Viena forms part of the so-called ‘New Ladino Press’, a label primarily used for referring to the first long-lived Judezmo periodicals emerging in the 1870s in the main centers of Sephardic settlement, such as Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica. This period also meant the actual starting point of modern Sephardic journalism and entrepreneurship in the Ottoman Empire (Borovaya 23–75) but—with El Koreo de Viena serving as most prominent example—also in the Habsburg lands. El Koreo was founded and published by Shem Tov Semo (or Alexander Semo in German, 1810 or 1827–1881), certainly Vienna’s most important Sephardic journalist in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was born in Vienna but raised and educated in Ottoman Sarajevo before returning to the Habsburg capital as an adult (Bunis 2013: 44–45). Prior to El Koreo, Semo had already published two other short-lived periodicals. In 1864, Semo launched Vienna’s first Judezmo periodical, the literary paper Guerta de Istorya (Garden of History, 1864–1865). When creating this paper, Semo was most likely inspired by the popular Germanlanguage literary magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Hut). Guerta de Istorya mostly featured short and serial stories, which were translated from German into Judezmo. It reappeared under the same name between the years 1874 and 1876. From 1880 to 1881, it was published once again, albeit under a slightly different name—Ilustra Guerta de Istorya (Illustrated Garden of History)—featuring detailed illustrations and portraits in this period. Due to their large success, most of the content of the Guertas was republished with minor changes in Salonica between 1890 and 1894, this time under the original name Guerta de Istorya (Cimeli 147–158; Bunis 2013: 47–53). Like most Judezmo periodicals published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Guertas as well as all the other newspapers discussed here were printed in the traditional Rashi script, a modified Hebrew typeface.4 supported by an individual research grant provided by the Aron Menczer Fund and the Center for Austrian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 4 The traditional Hebrew square (meruba) letters were only used to highlight texts, such as headlines and captions.

El Koreo de Viena

Shem Tov Semo was also the founder of Vienna’s first political Judezmo newspaper El Dragomán (The Interpreter, 1864–1866). The paper was edited by Yosef Yaakov Kalvo (or Josef Jakob Kalwo in German, ca. 1800–1875), who originally came from the Hungarian city of Temesvar (now Timisoara, Romania) (Bunis 2013: 53–54). Unfortunately, no copies of El Dragomán have survived. However, popular Hebrew language newspapers, such as Ha-Levanon (1863–1886) and Ha-Magid (1856–1903), sometimes republished news and announcements originally printed in El Dragomán, which also attests to the paper’s wide range and popularity. Despite its success, the paper had to be discontinued by its third year of existence, as many subscribers failed to meet their subscription payments (Bunis 2013: 53–54).5 The same fate also befell El Nasional (The National), the third Judezmo weekly published in Vienna, which was edited and published by Yosef Kalvo from 1866 to 1867 (Bunis 2013: 66–68).6 It was largely modelled after El Dragomán.7 The paper featured regular rubrics about domestic as well as international politics. Most articles printed in the political news section are dedicated to the internal and foreign affairs of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. They were usually adoptions and translations from popular Austrian German-language newspapers, such as the Neue Freie Presse (1864–1939), Vienna’s most important liberal daily in the period. In addition, El Nasional reported regular news about domestic and international Jewish affairs. Domestic Jewish news was often taken from the Viennese Jewish newspaper Die Neuzeit (1861–1903). In turn, news about Ottoman Jewish affairs were often adopted from other Judezmo newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, as for instance the Judezmo periodical El Jurnal Israelit (1860–1873), which was Istanbul’s first long-lived and markedly secular newspaper (Borovaya 7–66). One year after El Nasional ceased to exist, Shem Tov Semo and Yosef Kalvo once again joined forces and began to publish Vienna’s most important and long-lived Judezmo newspaper, El Koreo de Viena. It was officially owned by Semo and edited by Kalvo. The latter continued to fulfill his task as the paper’s editor until his death in 1875 (Bunis 2013: 59–60). After Kalvo had passed away, the paper’s editorial was taken over by Shem Tov Semo’s son-in-law Adolf von Zemlinszky (1845–1900), who was married to Shem Tov Semo’s daughter Clara Semo (1848–1912). In 1871—the year of their marriage—Clara gave birth to their son, the renowned Austrian composer Alexander (or Shem Tov) Zemlinsky,8 who was named after his grandfather

5 Most Judezmo periodicals at that time depended heavily on the revenues from regular paying subscribers. For more information on the financial and logistical challenges that these one- or two-man enterprises had to face, see Martínez Galvéz (139–149). 6 See also El Nasional 16 Nov. 1866: 1. 7 El Nasional 16 Nov. 1866: 1. 8 Alexander Zemlinsky refrained from using the pseudo-aristocratic particle “von” in this name, as well as the Hungarian digraph “sz,” which he preplaced with a simple “s.”

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(Moskovitz 12). In fact, in official, non-Jewish contexts, Shem Tov Semo was using his “Christian” name Alexander. Also, in the masthead of his newspaper El Koreo de Viena, he usually figured as “Eigenthümer A. Semo” (owner A[lexander] Semo) (Schmädel 242). For some time Semo also used to publish a literary supplement, El Trizoro de la Kaza (1871, 1872), and a political supplement, La Politika (1875) together with El Koreo de Viena. When he died in 1881, the ownerand chief-editorship passed on to his sons Shabbetay (or Sigmund, 1857–1904), Moshe Hayim (or Moses, 1851–1917), and Aharon Semo (or Aron, 1865–1931), who continued to publish El Koreo until it had to cease operations in 1883 (Bunis 2013: 54), once again due to financial problems like its forerunners.9 Like El Nasional, El Koreo de Viena featured regular columns about political news, primarily about current events taking place in the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, but also in other parts of Europe, the Middle East, and even distant parts of the world, like the Americas, East and South Asia, or Australia. As it was common practice, most of these new reports were adopted from popular German-language and fellow Judezmo newspapers, such as the aforementioned periodicals Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), Wiener Zeitung (Vienna, 1703-today), the Pester Lloyd (Budapest, 1854–1945), the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (Leipzig, 1837–1922), the Jewish weekly Die Neuzeit (Vienna), El Tiempo (Istanbul, 1872–1930), and La Époka (Salonica, 1875–1911), to name but a few. In addition, El Koreo regularly presented news about Jewish affairs inside and outside Vienna. Although El Koreo Viena has often been considered the official mouthpiece of the Viennese Sephardic community, it was a privately held enterprise. As such, the paper would have hardly survived for almost fifteen years if it had orientated itself solely towards its incredibly small readership in Vienna. In 1871, El Koreo’s second year of publication, the paper’s editorial page listed the names of twenty-three regular paying subscribers living in Vienna.10 One year later, the paper already counted twenty-eight subscribers in the Habsburg capital. However, compared to the approximately 800 Sephardic Jews living in Vienna at that time (Schleicher 68), the editorial lamented that the vast majority of their patriotes (compatriots) in Vienna seemed “to have no interest at all in ‘El Koreo de Viena’.”11 In fact, many (if not most) of El Koreo’s approximately 300 paying subscribers12 were to be found in other Sephardic communities outside Vienna, especially those

9 10 11 12

For additional information about El Koreo de Viena, see Smid (501–504). El Koreo de Viena 1 Dec. 1871: 10. El Koreo de Viena 15 Nov. 1872: 8. Unfortunately, the editors of El Koreo de Viena never published the official lists’ numbers of their effectively paying subscribers. However, in 1880, Shem Tov Semo noted that “within seventeen years […] my literature has not even reached 300 subscribers”. El Koreo de Viena 28 June 1880: 105.

El Koreo de Viena

in the Northern Balkans. In 1875, when celebrating ten years of Judezmo journalism in Vienna, the editors decided to publish a number of portraits about the communities they felt closest and most connected to. Not surprisingly, they started their review with “nuesta komuné de Viena” (our community in Vienna), which, in their judgment, was in excellent condition.13 Apart from reporting on the brilliant financial and communal prosperity of their own congregation, the editors also paid tribute to all the other Sephardic communities in which their newspaper was read. In the course of four articles, they wrote extensively about the small but prosperous communities of Budapest and Zemun (Semlin), but also about larger ones, such as the ones in Belgrade, Turnu Severin, and Vidin, all located along the Danube.14 El Koreo’s editors further mentioned that they even had subscribers in Trieste, in distant places like London and Manchester, as well as in all different parts of Turkey, Wallachia (Romania), and Serbia.15 However, on one occasion they also pointed out that the number of subscribers they counted in large Sephardic centers, such as in Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Vidin, and Sarajevo, was actually quite small and that their paper would not survive more than a month if based solely on the revenues coming from these cities.16 For this reason, we may assume that the subscription fees from the Northern Balkans added the largest part of the paper’s income.17 Yet, many readers constantly delayed the payment of the mandatory subscription fees—if they paid them at all. Thus, in order to increase their revenues, the editors of El Koreo decided to allocate more and more space for commercial advertisements in their paper from the early 1870s onwards (Ayala and Schmadel 15–38).

Sephardic-Ashkenazic encounters as portrayed in El Koreo de Viena The analysis of the journalistic content of El Koreo de Viena not only provides us with fresh, new insights into the community life of Vienna’s Sephardic community but also lays bare its relations with other Jewish communities, most importantly, the Ashkenazi-based Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), Vienna’s official Jewish

13 La Polítika 1 Jan. 1875: 1. 14 La Polítika 1 Jan. 1875: 1–2; La Polítika 8 Jan. 1875: 1; La Polítika 24 Jan. 1875: 5; La Polítika 8 May 1875: 35. 15 La Polítika 24 Jan. 1875: 5. 16 Polítika 8 May 1875: 35. 17 1869/70: 7 Austrian Florins for a one year’s subscription inside and outside Vienna; 1871/72: already 10 Florins in Vienna, 11 Florins en el Oriente (i.e., in the Balkans); 1875–1883: 10 Florins in Vienna, 12 Florins en el Oriente.

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community.18 As it turned out, the much larger IKG19 wielded much influence on their Sephardic brethren in Vienna, including their religious customs and, as we will see later, their attitude towards Jews in Southeastern Europe. An event that El Koreo de Vienna used to cover almost every year was the annual H.anukkah celebrations organized by the IKG. Also, in 1872, El Koreo’s editor reported extensively on the IKG’s celebrations of the fifth night of H.anukkah, which in that year took place in the rather profane yet brightly lit saloons of the Viennese Gartenbaugesellschaft. From the outset, the editors noted that on that special occasion some of Vienna’s most distinguished Jewish bankers and their wives had come to see the candle lighting ceremony.20 As the article describes in further detail, “[T]he service was opened by Dr. Jellinek by the lighting of the h.anukkiyah in front of the children” who immediately after the candle lighting “sang the song ‘Mizmor Shir H.anukkah’.” Afterwards, Adolf Jellinek (1820–1893), the preacher of the Stadttempel, the IKG’s main synagogue, “gave one of his highly brilliant speeches, as usual” and, to conclude the service, “all the children sang a song in the German language, composed to praise God and to honor their majesties the Emperor and the Empress of Austria as well as the entire royal family for their benevolence.”21 A few years later, in 1879, El Koreo de Viena reported on another prominent H.anukkah event, however, this time celebrated by the Viennese Sephardim. It took place in the community’s religious elementary school, the Talmud Torah. According to El Koreo, in this year’s H.anukkah ceremony, the organizers themselves intended to “follow the example of our Ashkenazic co-religionists.” The most striking parallels involved the special attention given to children during the celebrations, including the distribution of presents, the recitation of special holiday songs (featuring a choir and an organ), and the overall representative and semi-public—rather than religious—character of the event, drawing special attention to functionaries and generous donors. On this occasion, the community also decided to pay tribute to the deceased founder of the school, the Viennese Sephardic banker Menachem Abraham Russo (1816–1873). In doing so, El Koreo explained that the organizers decided to adopt yet another custom from their Ashkenazic brethren, namely to leave “a little fund of 500 florins, on the day of the ‘yahrzeit”’ [i.e., the memorial day

18 In 1852, the hitherto tolerated Ashkenazic Jews of Vienna were finally allowed to form an official community of their own, the so-called Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, most commonly known as IKG (Schubert 79; Kaul 74–75; McCagg 120). 19 In 1880, 73,222 Jews were living within the city limits of Vienna (not including its suburbs) which amounted to 10,1% of Vienna’s total population (726,105) at that time. For further information concerning Vienna’s Jewish demographics, see Rozenblit (17). 20 El Koreo de Viena 1 Jan. 1872: 5. 21 El Koreo de Viena 1 Jan. 1872: 5.

El Koreo de Viena

of a deceased donor], “to recite the hashkavah” [i.e., the traditional remembrance prayer22 ] and to “deliver a spirited speech to the community members, mentioning the good deeds of the deceased person.”23 That last example shows that the Viennese Sephardim were also incorporating a chiefly Ashkenazic practice for commemorating and honoring a deceased community member. The author of the article even employed the German term yahrzeit (stemming from the traditional Yiddish term yortsayt) for describing this borrowed practice. Except for this quite archaic custom of honoring a much-appreciated deceased community member, the overall solemnization of H.anukkah as celebrated by the Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Vienna was the product of a much more recent past. From a theological point of view, H.anukkah is a rather minor religious holiday. It is much less significant than the “Shabbat-like” high holidays of Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, the first and last days of Pesah., or even Purim.24 It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the importance of H.anukkah grew significantly. Similar to Christmas, H.anukkah was gradually designed to be a modern and national holiday. By the end of the eighteenth century, Christmas had become the most representative and self-referential festival of the aspiring bourgeoisie, particularly in Germany. There, Christmas had turned into a festival not only for commemorating the birth of the Christian messiah but also for celebrating the values of the nuclear family. As such, Christmas should not only solidify the ties of the bourgeois family by exchanging gifts among its innermost members; it should also confirm the rightfulness and righteousness of this rather new social model by giving away gifts and gratuities to domestic servants, the employees of the family business, and the deprived in general (Eberspächer 34). In Germany and particularly in Austria, Christmas also became known as the “Christmas tree festival,” for it introduced a new popular custom, namely, the placement of decorated fir trees in living rooms. The fascination of many Viennese Jews with Christmas even prompted some of them to obtain Christmas trees for themselves. Of course, the Viennese Judezmo

22 Here, the author of El Koreo’s article is using the traditional Sephardic expression hashkava (Hebr. for “final retiring”) to refer to the memorial prayer. Among Ashkenazim, the remembrance prayer is called yizkor (Hebr. for “memorial prayer”). 23 El Koreo de Viena 22 Dec. 1879: 7–8. 24 Otherwise, it would be prohibited to light candles during or after night falls which happens to be the central ritual during this holiday (cf. Shulh.an Arukh: Orah. H.ayim 672). The reason for its reduced religious importance is that H.anukkah, the holiday commemorating the miraculous rededication of the Second Temple in 167 BCE, is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and only incidentally referred to in a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (cf. Shabbath 21b). By the end of the eighteenth century, especially in the Western hemisphere and under the influence of the Haskalah, whose agents advocated for the authority of Biblical over Talmudic sources, the religious character of the holiday had further faded into the background (Pelli 33–34; Kugelmann 8).

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press was unable to ignore this popular practice, as it was taken up by some members of the Sephardic community of Vienna as well. In December 1880, shortly before Christmas, El Koreo de Viena published an anonymous letter to the editor in its section Novedades Tokantes a la Nasyón Israelita (News Concerning the Israelite Nation), recalling a criminal sin (“pekado krimináliko”) that had been committed by a Sephardic family in Vienna during the Winter holiday season a year earlier. The editors quoted the letter as follows: Dear Mr. Editor! […] A year ago, around this time, your grace published a very compelling article about the great feast day on December 25 during which the Catholics celebrated the birth of Christ and that in this feast that is held at night (i.e., Christmas Eve or Holy Night25 ) a great part of our Ashkenazic co-religionists also take part and that our Sephardic brethren in Vienna have also been inspired by them, so that these, too, have become accustomed to buying the tree called the “Tree of Christ” [Árvol de Hristus – M.S.] and they illuminate it, etc., as you [the editor – M.S.] will perfectly recall, since [it was] you [who] revealed the criminal sin that this celebration, in fact, is. Back then, one could read in your paper that a local Sephardic family had illuminated three such trees [in their house], of course, not to celebrate and honor the Catholic religion but only for the delight of the children[.] [T]his year, because of [what your article had shown] a year ago, [that indeed] the celebration of this ceremony is a great sin, that family forsook this practice and I think the honorable editor of the “Koreo de Viena” will be well pleased by receiving this news I am giving you.26

Indeed, the editor of El Koreo was quite satisfied with the observation made by this vigilant reader. In a footnote, he expressed his gratitude to the letter’s author. Furthermore, the editor noted that he had been informed that, after his article was published a year ago, “others among our Sephardic co-religionists have also given up this custom which,” as he emphasized, “does not belong to us, the children of Israel.”27 As these examples surrounding the Jewish holiday of H.anukkah show, the Viennese Sephardim had adopted some customs and practices of their already highly acculturated Ashkenazic co-religionists in Vienna. Furthermore, the last example especially demonstrates that, although El Koreo de Viena was a private enterprise, the editor could wield quite much influence over his fellow community members. However, as other exemplary articles of El Koreo de Vienna reveal, the editor’s

25 Here, the author actually used the German expressions Christnacht or Heiliger Abend (Hrist Naht o Hayliger Abend) for naming the feast by its proper name. 26 El Koreo de Viena 26 Dec. 1880: 187–188. 27 El Koreo de Viena 26 Dec. 1880: 188 n1.

El Koreo de Viena

moderating role was appreciated not only by attentive readers inside but even more so outside the Habsburg capital.

El Koreo de Viena and its Perception in Southeastern Europe In the Ottoman Empire, El Koreo was often praised by the editors of other important Judezmo newspapers, particularly its capital city, as for example by Isaac Gabay (d. 1930), owner and director of El Telégrafo (18781930), and by Isaac Haim Carmona (d. 1882), the patron of El Tiempo, Istanbul’s longest-running periodical (1872–1930).28 Although Shem Tov Semo had a great interest in maintaining strong, friendly ties with his colleagues and readers in the Ottoman capital city, Istanbul was certainly not the only major Sephardic center within his professional range. Another colleague that Semo had very good relations with was Saadi ben Betsalel Halevy (1875–1898) in Salonica, a city which at the time hosted one of the largest Sephardic communities worldwide. Halevy was the founder of La Époka (1875–1911), Salonica’s most important and longest-lived Judezmo periodical. Like El Koreo de Viena, La Époka was run as a local private enterprise. Although we have reason to assume that La Époka “reached only a small minority of Salonika’s Ladino-speaking public,” (Stein 239 note 51) that is, the liberal segments of the local Jewish community, it was certainly read by many Sephardic journalists and intellectuals inside and outside the Ottoman Empire, including Shem Tov Semo in Vienna. When La Époka was founded in 1875, Semo was among the first to compliment Halevy on his new periodical.29 In return, La Époka sometimes reprinted or paraphrased articles that had originally been published in El Koreo de Viena.30 From time to time, Halevy also posted announcements in La Époka, recommending that his readers in Salonica obtain copies of El Koreo de Viena, as well as Guerta de Istorya via his editorial office.31 Halevy’s deep appreciation for El Koreo de Viena found expression in one of La Époka’s lead articles. When taking notice of the temporary discontinuation of El Koreo de Viena in 1878 due to the lack of sufficient paying subscribers, Saadi Halevy called upon the readers of his own journal: “this Koreo, a liberal journal and de-

28 El Koreo de Viena 10 Dec. 1880: 179; El Tiempo 13 Nov. 1872 2; El Tiempo 25 Nov. 1880: 3. 29 La Polítika 1 Oct. 1875: 80. 30 E.g. see La Époka 15 Nov. 1875: 3–4; La Époka 19 June 1876: 4; La Époka 2 July 1877: 4; La Époka 11 Feb. 1878: 4; La Époka 5 Sept. 1880: 3–4. 31 E.g. see La Époka 3 Jan. 1876: 4; La Époka 2 July 1877: 1.

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fender in the most distant part of our nation, must not only be supported by the Jews of Vienna but on behalf of all Jews in the Orient […].”32 For Halevy, El Koreo de Viena was not only an important and reliable source of information but also the most westerly literary outpost of the Eastern Sephardic world. Thus, despite appearing on the very margins of the Sephardic diaspora, the paper and its editors enjoyed quite a prominent status among Jewish intellectuals in far greater Sephardic centers. Even after Shem Tov Semo’s death in 1881 and under the command of his sons Moshe Hayim and Shabbetay, El Koreo, as well as the Sephardic community of Vienna as a whole, continued to be an important point of reference and also a kind of role model for the editor of La Époka. In several articles, Salonican journalists pointed to the Viennese Sephardim’s general “moral deeds as Jews and their importance as a Levantine Israelite community”33 for others in the Ottoman Empire because they were “living in one of the largest capital cities in Europe.”34 Certainly, the most important article dealing with the “La Komunidad Leventina de Viena” (The Levantine Community of Vienna) in general, and the role of El Koreo de Viena in particular, was published in La Époka on February 1883.35 Undoubtedly, El Koreo’s editors were particularly flattered by yet again being made a central subject of discussion in Salonica’s most important Judezmo periodical, and they decided to reprint the article in their own paper roughly one month later.36 Already at the beginning of his article, the editor37 of La Époka pointed out that “El Koreo de Viena has always distinguished itself for its perseverant combat in favor of the advancement and progress of the Levantine Jews.” Furthermore, Saadi Halevy strongly appreciated El Koreo’s positive formative effect on Jews living in the Northern Balkans, by especially noting that “[t]he Oriental Israelite communities along the shores of the river Danube, among [which] this journal is widely distributed, have often been elevated by the frankly liberal discourses they could constantly come across in El Koreo de Viena”.38 However, apart from these overwhelmingly positive opening remarks, the editor of La Époka also had to mention some unpleasant details, not so much about El Koreo de Vienna itself but rather about the Sephardic community of Vienna in general as he wrote that

32 33 34 35 36 37

La Époka 29 July 1878: 1. La Époka 23 March 1883: 189. La Époka 21 Dec. 1883: 486. La Époka 9 Feb. 1883: 143–144. El Koreo de Viena 4 March 1883: 29–30. Although this article does not mention the name of its author, we can assume that it was written by Saadi ben Betsalel Halevy himself. 38 La Époka 9 Feb. 1883: 143–144, see also El Koreo de Viena 4 March 1883: 29–30.

El Koreo de Viena

it seems that the Levantine Israelite community living in the Austrian capital, a community, which should count on that paper as its mouthpiece, more and more tends to lose its character as a Levantine community as well as its relations [to other Sephardic communities – M.S.], which its members used to maintain many years ago.39

According to Halevy, the journalists of El Koreo de Viena were clearly not the ones to blame for this unfortunate state of affairs; for him, they had (like himself) a similarly strong interest in the continuous solidarity among all Sephardic Jews whether they lived in or outside of Vienna. When it came to the synthesis of modern and more traditional ways of life, the editor of La Époka found that “the Levantine community of Vienna may certainly be perceived as a sentinel of the Israelite communities of the Orient.”40 Nevertheless, Saadi Halevy emphasized that, although the Viennese Sephardim enjoyed “the fruits of [Western] civilization [,] [they] should not lose the idea of [belonging to a Jewish] nation and community.” With reference to what he had read in El Koreo de Viena, Halevy further argued that it was apparently the younger generation of Sephardic Jews already born and brought up in Vienna who were turning their backs on their brethren in the Orient. His comments already hint at the fact that the encounters between the progressive Viennese Sephardim and their more traditional brethren in the Balkans had not always been free of conflict and misunderstanding. Indeed, El Koreo de Viena presents a number of occasions in which members of the Turkish Israelite Community of Vienna met their visiting co-religionists arriving from Southeastern Europe with harsh refusal—which, in turn, would require the tasks of a tactful mediator.

The perception of Southeastern European Sephardim in Vienna The editors of El Koreo usually addressed their colleagues, readers and subscribers in Southeastern Europe in appreciative terms, such as konermanos (brethren) or kompatriotes (compatriots).41 However, whenever Sephardic traders from the Balkans came to Vienna for a business trip, these were generally referred to as forasteros (foreigners). Once every month or two, the paper published the names and the cities of provenance of the Forasteros en Viena (Foreigners in Vienna).42 Most of these visitors came to Vienna during the springtime and summer and used to stay in the city for several days—and only, in rare cases, for up to a few weeks. Yet, at 39 40 41 42

El Koreo de Viena 4 March 1883: 29–30. El Koreo de Viena 4 March 1883: 29–30. E.g. see El Koreo de Viena 19 December 19 1869: 1; La Polítika 15 July 1875: 58. Sometimes also Forasteros ke estuvieron en los últimos días en Viena (Foreigners who have been to Vienna in recent days). E.g. see El Koreo de Viena 1 Nov. 1870: 4.

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the beginning of the 1880s, as the road and rail network in Southeastern Europe rapidly expanded and improved—not least owing to Austria’s growing endeavors to gain more commercial and political influence in the Balkans—travelers were able to come to Vienna all year around and the number of visitors coming from that region grew rapidly.43 Many of the Sephardic visitors from the Balkans did not have sufficient money to spend more than a few days in the city. Yet, banking on the performance of the religious duties of their Viennese brethren, many of the Sephardic visitors to Vienna essentially took it for granted that the local community would provide for them during their stay in the city. In fact, hospitality or hakhnasat oreh.im is known as one of the most important biblical mitzvot (commandments). Thus, not practicing it is considered a terrible sin. In order not to break this sacred law, many Jewish communities used to maintain a charity fund, providing spare beds and food for their foreign guests. However, in the case of the Sephardic community of Vienna, the foreigners were usually sent to the shops of Sephardic businessmen to beg for alms. Yet, as noted by El Koreo, most members of the Sephardic community of Vienna showed a profound aversion to this practice, especially “the custom that every guest is taken to the shops of the yeh.idim [i.e. community members] for collecting donations.”44 The editors could not deny that some members of their community were deliberately bent on harsh and deterrent measures in order to keep less affluent visitors from coming to their city. Although these might have only been isolated cases, we may assume that the editors of El Koreo de Viena had regularly been confronted with such accounts, usually in the form of letters from enraged subscribers and readers.45 Consequently, the editors of El Koreo tried hard to improve the image of their community, which was obviously sometimes perceived as inhospitable and dismissive towards foreign visitors. The editors did not want to see their fellow community members blamed as rude anshé Sedom (people of Sodom), the most prominent Biblical example of violating hakhnasat oreh.im, the holy commandment of hospitality.46 For many Jews living in the Eastern Sephardic Diaspora, espe-

43 44 45 46

El Koreo de Viena 31 Nov. 1880: 169. El Koreo de Viena 21 Oct. 1880: 153. El Koreo de Viena 21 Oct. 1880: 153. The expression sinyores, djente or anshé Sedom (people of Sodom) was explicitly used in several articles in El Koreo de Viena in reference to the alleged lack of hospitality of the Viennese Sephardim. E.g., see El Koreo de Viena 1 Nov. 1871: 6; El Koreo de Viena 5 Nov. 1880: 161. It relates to the story of Lot in the city of Sodom (Hebr. Sedom). Lot was the only one willing to host two angels (disguised as foreign men), while the people of Sodom wanted to rape them (Gen 19:1–8). It is the most important Biblical story explaining and commanding the principle of hakhnasat oreh.im. For examples of the use of the word Sedom in Judezmo, see Bunis (1993b: 346).

El Koreo de Viena

cially rabbis and sheluh.im (rabbinical emissaries), this sacred law continued to be a religiously binding norm even in the nineteenth century.47 By the end of 1880, the editors of El Koreo had finally come to the conclusion that there was only one meaningful way to sustainably improve the community’s image outside Vienna. In their annual review that year, they noticed that there had been growing pressure both from outside Vienna and from some members of their own community, who had realized that their community as a whole could not avoid making concessions to their poor and more traditionally minded co-religionists coming to town. What many Sephardim in and outside Vienna demanded was the creation of a fund, similar to the Kupat Aniim (fund for the poor) and Bikur H.olim (fund for the sick), which were created to fulfill yet another mandatory commandment, that of tzedaka (charity) and of visiting the sick to support their recovery. Both these funds were exclusively accessible to regular community members. Thus, in addition to existing charity institutions, another proper fund for the visitors, frequently from the Balkans, should be created.48 However, it took more than a year after that announcement in El Koreo until a proper Hevrá de Hakhnasat Orehim (Hospitality Society) was finally founded in the Sephardic community of Vienna. In April 1883, the paper joyfully announced: With time and patience everything comes true. The foundation of a Hevrá de Hakhnasat Orehim, an extremely necessary and purposeful institution, for which “El Koreo de Viena” has spoken out in favor of for many years, has now effectively been established. The board of our community realized that the poor Levantine Jews, who come to Vienna looking for help from their [Viennese] co-religionists, do not find the support they are looking for […] – Being aware of this deficit, [the community board] determined that the aim of this society should be to assist the poor Levantine Jews coming to Vienna and to save the members of this society from the harassment of the poor.49

The Viennese community board further decided that the financial funds collected and administrated by the Hevrá de Hakhnasat Orehim should provide poor visitors with food and shelter for the maximum length of two days. Afterwards, the hosts were supposed to escort their guests to the steamship or railway station. There, the departing visitors would be redeemed with an amount of money covering their travel expenses for reaching their next destination. Visitors who were unwilling to cooperate with the society or who continued to beg for money in the shops and 47 For more information on the, at times, harsh disputes between the Sephardic community of Vienna and Sephardic sheluh.im from Jerusalem about the principles of hakhnasat oreh.im, see Stechauner (216–225). 48 El Koreo de Viena 27 Oct. 1880: 157. 49 El Koreo de Viena 30 April 1883: 59.

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offices of other Viennese yeh.idim were forced to leave the city by law. Furthermore, it was determined that frequent visitors were entitled to draw from the fund’s resources only once, and exceptions should only be made in very rare cases.50 The strictness of these rules reveals that the foundation of the Hevrá de Hakhnasat Orehim was as much a concession to poor visitors as it was to the airs and graces of some stingy Sephardic businessmen in the city who were generally quite unwilling to aid their co-religionists from the Balkans. Also, they had no interest in accommodating them for more than two days, as if they feared that the poor visitors would eventually come up with the idea to settle permanently in Vienna and live on the community’s welfare forever. Interestingly, similar fears and attitudes could also be found among the oldestablished Ashkenazic families in Vienna, whose ancestors had come to the city during the Vormärz era (i.e., before 1848/49) as tolerated Jews. As pointed out by Robert Wistrich (66), over the course of a few generations these previously tolerated and now-wealthy Jewish immigrants had managed to become “excessively represented in areas like banking, entrepreneurial roles, department stores, the liberal professions, and cultural life.” However, when after the abolition of the discriminating tolerance tax, more and more so-called Ostjuden—poor and unskilled Jewish immigrants from the Eastern parts of the Habsburg Empire, first and foremost Galicia51 —arrived in the city in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only notorious anti-Semites but also many of these old, established Jewish families in Vienna “responded negatively to what they perceived as a changing economic profile of the Jewish community” (Wistrich 66). Indeed, as pointed out by Peter Pulzer (14, see also Wistrich 66–67), “as the number of Galician Jews increased in Vienna the Jewish haute bourgeoisie became less and less representative of Viennese Jewry as a whole, while the pedlar, the old-clothes dealer, and the Lumpenproletarier, scraping an irregular existence on the periphery of the economic system became typical.” However, we must not forget that the scenarios described by Wistrich and Pulzer were perfectly normal developments for large cities like Vienna, which due to the ongoing urbanization in most parts of Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, attracted all kinds of immigrants—including Jews—with prospects of a better life (Staudinger 29).52 In the light of the changing social and demographic fabric among the Jewish (i.e., Ashkenazic) majority in the city, it is more easily comprehensible that many

50 El Koreo de Viena 30 April 1883: 59. 51 For more insights about the reality and the myth surrounding the “Ostjuden” in the late Habsburg Empire, see Mettauer and Staudinger. 52 The largest group of immigrants in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century were not the Jews but Czechs, who by 1900 constituted 25% of the entire Viennese population (Parsons 19). In turn, Jews, by 1900, made up 8.8% of the total urban population in Vienna (Rozenblit 17).

El Koreo de Viena

long-established Sephardic Jews in Vienna, especially wealthy businessmen and merchants, worried much about the prosperity, image, and prestige of their community. From their point of view, the poor forasteros were only coming to Vienna in order to get rich by exploiting the community’s wealth and welfare. This is why many members of the Sephardic community of Vienna had little to no interest in absorbing any of these visitors into their own community, not even temporarily. In fact, in order to prevent poor Sephardic Jews from settling down in the city, in 1868, the representatives of the Sephardic community of Vienna had stipulated that the only newcomers that would be eligible to become full members of the community were those who managed to sustain themselves in Vienna for at least two years (Schleicher 171; Kaul 39). Thus, apparently, the newly established charity fund would not only aid poor visitors to the town; it would also protect the rather exclusive and prestigious character of the Sephardic community of Vienna as well as the wealth of its members. The editors of El Koreo felt obliged to reassure their readers, especially those living outside Vienna, to take a proactive and intermediary role in this matter, as they “hope[d] that this beautiful recently established institution [would] […] soon succeed to the benefit of all people involved.” Furthermore, they also made sure that “‘El Koreo de Viena’ [would] keep a watchful eye over on this institution [and would do] everything in favor of its success.”53 We have reason to assume that El Koreo’s announcement to monitor the recently founded Hevrá de Hakhnasat Orehim was not entirely free of self-interest. Certainly, the editors had no intention of upsetting or even losing any of their supporters outside Vienna. On the contrary, by offering to monitor the society’s activities, the editors of Vienna’s most important Judezmo newspaper were also trying to reinforce their good relations with other Sephardic communities in the Northern Balkans, which were, after all, their most important sales market and where most of the visiting forasteros came from. Eventually, the engagement and the mediating role of the El Koreo’s editorial staff between the Viennese Sephardim and their co-religionists in the Balkans turned out to have some positive side effects concerning the overall reputation of the Sephardic community of Vienna in Southeastern Europe. There were also hopeful voices stating that not merely El Koreo de Viena but the Viennese Sephardim as a whole, living at the westernmost fringes of the Eastern Sephardic diaspora, could play an important role as intermediaries between the Jews in Western Europe and those in the Orient. Certainly, the most prominent voice in this respect was that of Saadi ben Betsalel Halevy, the above-mentioned editor of La Époka in Salonika, who despite his initial accusations against the Viennese Sephardim stated that

53 El Koreo de Viena 30 April 1883: 59.

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[g]iven their origins, our Levantine co-religionists in Vienna belong to our kind. They share our customs, understand our language and may best understand our necessities. [However,] due to their education, they [also] belong to the high society of Europe. They are already familiar with the requirements for leading a modern life. It is their task to confront themselves with the past [and] to reconcile their brethren in the Orient with their brethren in Europe. We are convinced that the Levantine community of Vienna, regardless of its small size, can play a major and beneficial role in the progress of their co-religionists in Turkey […].54

Works cited Ayala, Amor, and Stephanie von Schmadel. “Anuncios en la prensa judeoespañola de Viena como testimonio de la vida cotidiana de los sefardíes (siglo XIX y XX).” Sefarad an der Donau: Lengua y literature de los sefardies en tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halevy, Christian Liebl and Ivana Vucina. Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2013: 15–38. Borovaya, Olga. Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012. Bunis, David M. “The Earliest Judezmo Newspapers: Sociolinguistic Reflections.” Mediterranean Language Review 6–7 (1993a): 7–66. Bunis, David M. A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993b. Bunis, David M. “Shem Tov Semo, Yosef Kalwo, and Judezmo Fiction in Nineteenth Century Vienna.” Sefarad an der Donau: Lengua y literatura de los sefaradies en tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halevy, Christian Liebl and Ivana Vucina. Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2013: 39–146. Cimeli, Manuela. “La Gartenlaube y las Güertas de Historia.” Sefarad an der Donau: Lengua y literatura de los sefaradies en tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halevy, Christian Liebl and Ivana Vucina. Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2013: 147–158. Diaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Eberspächer, Martina. “Wie Weihnachten deutsch wurde: Die Erfolgsgeschichte der modernen Weihnacht.” Weihnukka: Geschichten von Weihnachten und Chanukka. Ed. Cilly Kugelmann. Berlin: Judisches Museum Berlin, Nicolai, 2005: 33–38. Fishman, Joshua A. “The Sociology of Jewish Languages from a General Sociolinguistic Point of View.” Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Ed. Joshua A. Fishman. Leiden: Brill, 1985: 3–21.

54 La Époka 9 Feb. 1883: 143–144; see also El Koreo de Viena 4 Mar. 4 1883: 29–30.

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Harris, Tracy K. Death of a language: the history of Judeo-Spanish. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Kaul, Christina. Die spanischen Juden (Sefardim) in Wien: Eine kulturgeschichtlich-historische Betrachtung. MA Thesis: Universitat Salzburg, 1989. Kugelmann, Cilly. “O Chanukka, o Chanukka! Eine historische Verortung des ChanukkaDilemmas.” Weihnukka: Geschichten von Weihnachten und Chanukka. Ed. Cilly Kugelmann. Berlin: Judisches Museum Berlin, Nicolai, 2005: 6–15. Lehmann, Matthias B. “A Livornese ‘Port Jew’ and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire.” Jewish Social Studies (New Series) 11.2 (2005): 51–76. Lowy, Moritz. Skizzen zur Geschichte der Juden in Temesvar bis zum Jahre 1865. Szegedin: Alexander Baba, 1890. Martínez Galvéz, Cristina. El periodismo sefardí ante su público. PhD Thesis: Universitat de València, 2012. McCagg, William O. A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918. Boomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Mettauer, Philipp, and Barbara Staudinger (eds). “Ostjuden” – Geschichte und Mythos. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2015. Moskovitz, Marc D. Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010. Parsons, Nicholas. Vienna: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pelli, Moshe. Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010. Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-semitism in Germany & Austria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Ravid, Benjamin. “How ‘Other’ Really Was the Jewish Other? The Evidence from Venice.” Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience Between Esxlusion and Inclusion. Eds. David N. Myers, Massimo Ciavolella, Peter H. Reill and Geoffrey Symcox. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008: 19–55. Rozenblit, Marsha L. The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984. Schleicher, Mordche Schlome. Geschichte der spaniolischen Juden (Sephardim) in Wien. PhD Thesis: Universitat Wien, 1932. Schmädel, Stephanie von. “Šem Tob Semo y la producción literaria sefardí de Viena en el siglo XIX.” La lengua sefardi: Aspectos linguisticos, literarios y culturales. Eds. Yvette Burki and Elena Romero. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2014: 235–250. Schubert, Kurt. Die Geschichte des osterreichischen Judentums. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2008. Šmid, Katja. “‘La pošta del Oriente’: Readers’ letters on the polemic between Semo and Papo in the Sephardic Newspaper El Coreo de Viena (1872).” Caminos de leche y miel: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Michael Studemund-Halevy. Volume 2. Language and Literature. Eds. David M. Bunis, Ivana Vucina Simovic and Corinna Deppne. Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2018: 497–524.

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Staudinger, Barbara. “Unerwünschte Fremde. Galizische Juden in Wien: Zwischen Integration, Wohlfahrt und Antisemitismus.” “Ostjuden” – Geschichte und Mythos. Eds. Philipp Mettauer and Barbara Staudinger. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2015: 29–48. Stechauner, Martin. The Sephardic Jews of Vienna: A Jewish Minority Crossing Borders. PhD Thesis: Universität Wien/The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: 2019. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. Studemund-Halévy, Michael. “Esbozo de un catálago de impresos sefardíes de Viena, siglos XIX y XX.” Sefarad an der Donau: Lengua y literature de los sefardies en tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halevy, Christian Liebl and Ivana Vucina. Barcelona: Tirocinio 2013: 437–470. Wistrich, Robert S. The Jews of Vienna in the age of Franz Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

II. Cultural Production in Modernity

Damir Šabotić (Sarajevo)

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život in the Formation of a Jewish Cultural and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina Between the Two World Wars

Abstract:

This article examines on what ideological bases the journals Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život were established and what role they played in the struggle of Bosnian Jews as an ethnic minority to consolidate a cultural and national identity between two world wars. Židovska svijest promoted a unitary approach, that is Zionism, as the only political option, and Hebrew as the basis of the national identity of all Jews. The other newspaper—with a decided allegiance to the Zionist idea—argued for the necessity of respect towards traditional and cultural distinctiveness of different Jewish communities, which specifically entailed the revival of the seriously endangered Judeo-Spanish vernacular as a recognizable part of the Sephardic cultural and historical identity. These different ideological guidelines had a significant impact on the overall cultural life of the Jewish community, further complicating the question of its collective identity.

Introduction Not long after World War I, Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina started a process of cultural and national emancipation that drew directly on the achievements of the cultural boom of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Owing to the new social circumstances created by the Austria-Hungarian government, new pathways opened to European culture and its values. Initiated in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austria-Hungarian administration, the processes of Europeanization were reflected in almost all segments of life. The break with the feudal order went hand in hand with the modernization of infrastructure, industrialization, the capitalist way of doing business, secularization and the formation of civil society, which had a sizeable impact on the cultural revival of all national communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including Jews. This period is a particularly important historical period for Bosnian Jews, because the Ashkenazim were also immigrating from

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European countries, bringing the spirit of European culture into a traditionally Sephardic environment. For the Sephardic community, this was a period of modernization that was reflected in the shift from the oriental model of social practices and codes to Western models, and thus facilitated the establishment of new communication channels within European frameworks, primarily with Vienna and Prague (Vidaković-Petrov 2013a: 25, 2013b: 330; Ayala and Schmädel 21). Under these new circumstances, Vienna became the cultural and intellectual center of Balkan Jews, and new generations of Sephardic students spread Enlightenment ideas from there, thus beginning a process of cultural and national revival. Herzl’s Zionist ideas would soon spread among the Bosnian Sephardim, who for centuries were a closed community, separated from others primarily by the Judeo-Spanish language. In 1892 in Sarajevo, the main Jewish center in Bosnia, the charity La Benevolencia was founded, and its activities played a key role in the emancipation and cultural revolution of the Sephardim. With scholarships for students and support for various social projects, this organization soon grew into the most important Jewish institution in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole. Other societies (La Lira, La Gloria, Matatja, etc.) would be founded, whose work would be the main driver of the cultural progress of the Jewish community. This progress would be broken off for a time by the First World War and the disintegration of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, but its end would mark a new era in the history of Bosnian Jews. With the creation of the Kingdom of SCS (Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), a new and different era began culturally and socially wither greater content. This two-decade long renaissance of Jewish public life was characterized by different and often contradictory ideological battles primarily related to national identity and Zionism as the most significant cultural-ideological programs of Jewishness in general. The launching of magazines intended primarily for the Jewish public has enabled not only a faster course of information and connections with the Jewish diaspora around the world but also the cultural and political activities of the most important intellectuals among Bosnian Jews. This created a public discourse in which ideas about the future of the community in the newly created political circumstances were openly confronted when the question of collective identity also became a central Jewish question. Two of the most significant Jewish newspapers published in 1920s Sarajevo—Židovska svijest (Jewish Consciousness, 1918–1927)1 and Jevrejski život (Jewish Life,

1 From March 25th, 1924, the newspaper will be published under the name Narodna židovska svijest (People’s Jewish Consciousness), but its concept and its program stayed the same. “And if our current ‘Narodna židovska svijest’ has a number 1 printed on the newspaper’s cover, this, like all subsequent issues, will have its content only as a continuation of the writing of the previous ‘Židovska svijest’.” (“I ako naša sadašnja ‘Narodna židovska svijest’ na glavi lista ima odštampan broj 1, to će ovaj kao i svi

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

1924–1928)—played a vital role in this regard, especially given the time in which they were launched and the ideas they promoted. On the one hand, this was a period of revival in Jewish culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had its roots in the cultural renaissance and national awakening of the Jews in general and in processes of modernization of the Sephardi Jews in particular. On the other hand, the first decades of the twentieth century were also marked by fierce ideological struggles between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim due to different understandings and concepts of the national identity of Jewish diaspora. In this article, I will examine on what ideological bases the journals Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život were established and what role they played in the struggle of Bosnian Jews as an ethnic minority in order to consolidate a cultural and national identity.2 Židovska svijest promoted a unitary approach, that is Zionism, as the only political option, and Hebrew as the basis of the national identity of all Jews, and established itself over time as the unofficial newspaper of Ashkenazim. The other newspaper—with a decided allegiance to Zionist ideas—argued for the necessity of respect towards traditional and cultural distinctiveness of different Jewish communities, which specifically entailed the revival of the seriously endangered Judeo-Spanish vernacular as a recognizable part of the Sephardic cultural and historical identity. These different ideological guidelines had a significant impact on the overall cultural life of the Jewish community, further complicating the question of its collective identity, while also causing political conflicts that were often characterized in the press as conflicts between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim.3

sledeći brojevi biti po svome sadržaju u istinu samo nastavak pisanja dosadašnje ‘Židovske svijesti’.”) (“Naš program” 1) 2 Apart from these two newspapers in 1921, four more editions were published of Jevrejska tribuna, an independent cultural and political newspaper whose editor was Sumbul Atijas, a Sarajevian lawyer. 3 It should be borne in mind here that ideological divisions among Bosnian Jews were not based solely on cultural differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, much less on differences in religious rites (which was initially the main reason for mutual intolerance with the arrival of the Ashkenazim in Bosnia). Likewise, the two aforementioned Jewish newspapers were not exclusively Ashkenazi or Sephardic, as the Ashkenazim and Sephardim collaborated on both the newspapers, but some polemical texts in them also represent such attitudes (e.g., see “Jevrejski život” 2). The conflict at the ideological level manifested itself in a practical struggle for social supremacy and gaining certain social positions, as evidenced by the words of an anonymous author from the introductory article of the first issue of Jevrejski život at the expense of ideas promoted by Židovska svijest: “In that struggle for control of Jewish public work, in the eternal fear of defaming, desecrating or tarnishing some ‘folk’ sanctity, they became a kind of policemen of one idea without ideology. This is, of course, one point in their program, and they call it by its full name: control over the public work of the Jews in Sarajevo.” (“U toj borbi za kontrolom jevrejskog javnog rada, u vječitoj bojazni da se ne blati, oskvrne ili okalja koja ‘narodna’ svetinja, postali su neke vrsti policiste jedne ideje bez idejnosti. To im je, naravski, jedna programska tačka i nazivlju je punim svojim imenom: kontrola nad javnim radom Jevreja u Sarajevu.” (“Uvodna riječ” 1)

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Years of division The founding of the first Jewish cultural and support societies during AustriaHungarian rule (such as La Benevolencia in Sarajevo), the development of the press, and then the publication of cultural and political newspapers during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia revitalized Jewish cultural life and worked to raise national awareness. After the short-lived La Alborada (1900–1901), a newspaper published in Judeo-Spanish, founded and edited by Aaron Cappon, there were no other Jewish newspapers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. i.e., papers that, like other nationally profiled media, would deal with important issues of the Jewish community. It was only after World War I, namely on November 1st , 1918, that the first issue of Židovska svijest appeared, a cultural-political paper of Zionist orientation, owned by the Židovsko nacionalno društvo4 in Sarajevo. The newspaper was published in the Serbo-Croatian language and founded and edited by Majir Musafija i David Levi (see Kamhi 1924: 169). Seeking to primarily represent the interests of the Jewish people in the Kingdom of SCS,5 the newspaper likewise proclaimed openness to all ideas that preoccupied Jewish intellectuals, but over time it profiled itself as an unyielding newspaper of political Zionism and as an unofficial newspaper of the Ashkenazim, especially after Jevrejski život was launched by the Sephardi community in March 1924. The owner of this paper was Albert D. Kajon, and its editor-in-chief was Albert Koen (Kamhi 1924: 169). Although ideological differences would begin in the mid-twenties with the socalled Sephardic movement, which advocated for the preservation of the JudeoSpanish language and the cultural uniqueness of the Sephardic Jews, its genesis can be traced back to the arrival of the Ashkenazim in Bosnia, and Sarajevo in particular, at the end of the nineteenth century. Traditionally isolated, the Sephardic community perceived the arrival of its European brethren of different rites and unknown languages as a direct threat to its own traditions, especially due to the fact that the much smaller Ashkenazi community, composed mainly of educated individuals, quickly became involved in the social life of their new environment. 4 The society was established by the transformation of the Zionist organization called the Society of Jewish Youth for Independent Education founded by the Ashkenazim in the early twentieth century. Later, this organization would become Mjesna cionistička organizacija (Local Zionist Organization) under the control of the Sephardim (see Loker 73). 5 Before Židovska svijest, a bi-weekly newspaper was published in Zagreb (later in Osijek): Židovska smotra (Jewish review) (1906–1916) which was actually the official newspaper of the National Society of Zionists of South Slavic Areas of the Austria-Hungarian Monarchy. Its founders were Hermann and Aleksandar Licht. It was published in Croatian but also featured articles in German. In 1917 in Zagreb, the Zionist newspaper Židov (Jew) was founded as a successor of Židovska smotra. It could be said that Sarajevo’s Židovska svijest, as a primarily Zionist-oriented weekly newspaper, continued the ideas of Židovska smotra and Židov.

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

The community developed rapidly, founding its own institutions: municipal, educational, and burial societies as well as organizations for charity and women, not to mention a synagogue (Vučina Simović 46). As they adapted linguistically to their new environment, their integration was more successful compared to the somewhat slower social integration of the Sephardim. According to Vidaković-Petrov, the polarization between these communities was therefore partly based on social differences: At the same time there was Ashkenazi-Sephardi polarization in the social domain because the former were better adapted to the new economic conditions and Western patterns of behaviour and communication (Vidaković-Petrov 2013a: 25).

But the main cause of the initial disagreements was still ideological. Židovska smotra, a newspaper from Osijek, which occasionally reported on the situation among Bosnian and Herzegovian Jews, also closely followed relations between the two Jewish communities. Thus, for example, in the February 28, 1909 issue, in the section “From the Universal Zionist Movement” (“Iz sveopćeg cijonističkog pokreta”) we read the news of the fraternal rapprochement of Esperanza and Bar Giore in Vienna, two societies founded by Jewish students: Saturday, the 13th, was the first joint evening of the Zionist academic societies “Esperanza” and “Bar Giore”. This fact is of great importance for Yugoslav Jews, because it is the first decisive step to reach an agreement between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim once and for all.6

The inclusion of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Austria-Hungarian Monarchy contributed to modernization—in other words, to the Europeanisation of Sephardi Jews (see Benbassa 89–98). The Sephardim were increasingly turning to the West, studied at European universities, and disseminated Western Enlightenment ideas upon returning. Sephardic students at the University of Vienna, mostly from Sarajevo, played a key role in this regard. In 1896 they founded Esperanza, an academic society of Sephardic Jews, whose goal was initially to preserve the Judeo-Spanish language and even considered its gradual replacement with standard Spanish (Ayala and Schmädel 24; Freidenreich 151). Precisely this Sephardic student organization can be considered a precursor of the cultural, educational and national engagement

6 “U subotu dne 13. o. mj. bila je prva zajednička večer cijonističkih akademskih društava ‘Esperanze’ i ‘Bar Giore’. Ta je činjenica od velike važnosti za jugoslavenske Židove, jer je to prvi odrješit korak da već jednom dođe do sporazuma između Sefarda i Eškenaza.” (“Bratsko zbliženje” 57)

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that would grow into a post-World War I Sephardic movement with its center in Sarajevo in Yugoslavia. Although Esperanza was deprived of its political dimension in the first phase of its activities, at the beginning of the twentieth century it was evident that there were new political tendencies in society, which, in line with the general national consolidation of Jews in Europe, was getting closer to Zionist goals. In the Esperanza statute of 1905, instead of preserving the Judeo-Spanish language, the awakening and maintenance of Jewish national consciousness is now stated as a priority of the society, or as Ayala and Schmädel put it: Their identity discourse, with an emphasis on (Judeo-) Spanish, is increasingly moving towards a political position that aspires to Jewish nationalism.7

That turn is a logical consequence of contact with the Ashkenazim from Germanspeaking areas, together with their Zionist ideas that were becoming increasingly powerful within Jewish communities. At the same time, this contact was an inspiring starting point for the establishment of a special Jewish national movement which the members of Esperanza propagated as their own version of Zionism and which would be known in interwar Yugoslavia as Sephardism (sefardismo). It opposed unitary Zionism and propagated its own national ideology based on the cultural peculiarities of the Sephardim, which the Esperantists represented as their intellectual credo, and programmatically implemented in their community upon returning from Vienna (Ayala and Schmädel 28; Vučina Simović 55; Freidenreich 151). This remark of an anonymous author also testifies to the importance of these individuals: A quarter of a century ago, Jewish academics who went to study at foreign universities began to spread the idea of Jewish nationalism among the Jews of the Slavic South and to promote Jewish self-awareness. They were recently joined by a few ‘senior citizens’ who, realizing the validity of this ideology, dedicated themselves to the service of this new orientation. This is the beginning of the Jewish renaissance in our countries.8

7 “Su discurso identitario, con el acento puesto en la lengua (judeo) española se desplaza cada vez mas hacia un posicionamento político que tiende al nacionalismo judío.” (Ayala and Schmädel 27) 8 “Prije četvrt stoljeća počeli su jevrejski akademičari, koji su pohađali studij na stranim sveučilištima da šire među Jevrejima Slavenskog Juga ideju o jevrejskom nacionalizmu i da propovijedaju jevrejsku samosvijest. Njima se doskora priključiše nekolicina ’starijih građana’ koji se, shvativši ispravnost ove ideologije, svom dušom dadoše u službu nove orijentacije. To je početak jevrejske renaissance u našim zemljama.” (“Naša štampa” 2)

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

This renaissance in fact meant the dissemination of Zionist ideology on a global level as a link for all Jews, regardless of language, cultural and other differences, secularization and secular education, while for the Sephardim in the Slavic South it also marked the process of Westernization, opening to the so-called external community but also overall national and cultural-economic progress (Vučina Simović 44–46; Vidaković-Petrov 2013b: 330). In fact, it is a time that an anonymous author calls “our Haskalah” in Jevrejski život, a belated but inevitable path of emancipation: And the time has come for our Enlightenment, our Haskalah. Much later than our brothers in the rest of Europe, but with similar consequences as with them. Faith does not occupy that omnipotent place in our lives, and this weakening of it conditions the collapse of the ghetto, above all the mental ghetto. It has been torn down by history and we are still treading on its ruins. In our soul we carry the remnants of the ghetto and speak the ghetto language.9

Secularization as a condition of modernization is emphasized here by the metaphorical “collapse of the ghetto,” i.e., social integration, which included the acceptance of a “state” language that suppressed the traditional languages of the Jews—JudeoSpanish by the Sephardim, and German, Hungarian and Yiddish by the Ashkenazim (Koljanin 90). The same author states: The national revival sanctifies our Jewry, although the latter cannot be clothed in the same spirit as the brothers who live under different conditions. We live in an environment that is alien to us by race: but we cannot and will not resist the influences of its culture.10

National revival did not imply a single generally accepted program for all South Slavic Jews. The Ashkenazim and Sephardim had different historical experiences and, in this regard, also different views on the future. The Sephardi intellectual elite took on the role of enlighteners with the task of initiating cultural reforms in their surroundings. These are exactly the Viennese students who, after acquiring academic titles, especially those with doctoral degrees, returned to their communities

9 “I došlo je vrijeme našega prosvijećivanja, naše Haskale. Mnogo docnije no kod braće ostale Evrope, ali sa sličnim posljedicama kao i kod njih. Vjera ne zauzima ono svemoćno mjesto u našem životu, i ovo njeno slabljenje uslovljuje rušenje geta, prije svega duševnoga geta. Srušila ga je historija i mi još gazimo po njenim ruševinama. U svojoj duši nosimo još ostatke geta i getskim jezikom govorimo.” (“Naše Jevrejstvo” 3) 10 “Nacionalni preporod osveštava naše Jevrejstvo, iako ovo posljednje ne može da se zaodjene u isto ruho kao kod braće koja žive pod drugim uslovima. Živimo u sredini koja nam je po rasi tuđa: ali se ne možemo i ne ćemo da opremo uticajima njene kulture.” (“Naše Jevrejstvo” 3)

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and, through cultural and educational engagement, enabled the transition from the old to the new cultural model (Vidaković-Petrov 2013b: 334–335). One should bear in mind here the cultural-ideological processes different ethnic groups experienced in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and accordingly established ethnic and linguistic identities as the basis for their national aspirations. The Ashkenazi Jews in Austria-Hungary adopted different languages (Yiddish, Hungarian, German, Polish, etc.) during the nineteenth century, taken that cultural assimilation did not imply ethno-national assimilation, so for example Jews who adopted the German language and culture did not become Germans, as Rozenblit notes: “Austrian Jews were simply Germans by culture, not by national identity.” (Rozenblit 23) The fact that Austria-Hungary was a multiethnic empire allowed AustroHungarian Jews to maintain a complex identity based on loyalty to the state, ties to the majority culture and awareness of Jewish ethnicity (Rozenblit suggests the term tripartite identity)11 . The dissolution of the monarchy and the creation of nation-states complicated the issue of the cultural and national identity of the Jews. Within the unique “triune” and later “Yugoslav” people, the Jews found their place because the new identity was wide enough that everyone who accepted the Kingdom as his homeland could accept it. Guaranteed collective rights, at the same time, enabled the preservation of the particularity which, with the overcoming of Zionism, was increasingly understood as a national uniqueness. Therefore, Yugoslav patriotism and Zionism were not mutually exclusive, moreover, they were largely complementary.12

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of the newly established South Slavic state where the Sephardim had lived since the sixteenth century and the Ashkenazim since the nineteenth century, the question of Jewish identity intensified precisely after World War I when new national identities were to be redefined anew in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

11 “Indeed, the very fact that the state was only a political construct and not a nation made it very easy for the Jews to adumbrate a staunch Austrian loyalty without having to adopt any particular national identity.” (Rozenblit 9) 12 “U okviru jedinstvenog ‘triomenog’ kasnije ‘jugoslovenskog’ naroda Jevreji su našli svoje mjesto jer je novi identitet bio dovoljno širok da su mogli da ga prihvate svi koji su Kraljevinu prihvatali kao svoju domovinu. Garantovana kolektivna prava su, istovremeno, omogućavala očuvanje posebnosti koja je prevladavanjem cionizma sve više shvatana kao nacionalna posebnost. Stoga se jugoslavenski patriotizam i cionizam nisu međusobno isključivali, štaviše bili su dobrim delom komplementarni.” (Koljanin 91)

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

Identity crisis Kalmi Baruh, one of the progressive intellectuals of his time and not merely within the Jewish community, was aware of the importance of the historical moment during which the processes of modernization of the Sephardi Jews took place: The epoch of Enlightenment and liberalism for European peoples, together with Jews, begins in the mid-eighteenth century and successfully ends in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Balkans, this historical process begins later. It ends with the Balkan wars and World War I, and the result is the collapse of Turkish rule in Southeast Europe. These historical events are a milestone for the Balkan peoples, and with them for the Sephardi Jews: in the last decades, the Sephardi Jews were entering new national-political formations (which are the result of the process mentioned), and with them – entering Europe. For Sephardi Jews, therefore, it is only in our time that a new chapter in history begins.13

The validity of Baruh’s interpretation of the historical moment were highlighted by the events that followed (above all, I mean here the discussions concerning the issues of language and cultural identity conducted in the pages of Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život in 1927). The national awakening of South Slavic Jews can thus be seen in the context of the collapse of the Austria-Hungarian monarchy and the establishment of new nation-states, on which Rozenblit remarks: The Jews of the former Habsburg monarchy thus faced a grave crisis right after World War I. They now had to craft new national identities to fit the new states in which they lived: German-Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia (...). (Rozenblit 129)

It was the very establishment of the multinational Kingdom of SCS that raised new questions about the national identity of its ethnic groups. Thus, the thought of galut—that is, exile, the mutual history, and the Hebrew language as a link to a lost homeland—formed the background and motivation of the ideological activity of

13 “Epoha prosvjećivanja i liberalizma za evropske narode, a sa njima i za Jevreje, počinje sredinom XVIII stoleća i uspešno završava u prvoj polovini XIX-og. Na Balkanu taj istorijski proces počinje kasnije. Njegov konac su balkanski i svetski rat, a rezultat njegov slom turske vlasti na jugoistoku Evrope. Ti istorijski događaji su kamen međaš za balkanske narode, a s njima i za sefardske Jevreje: Sefardi su u poslednjim decenijama ulazili u nove nacionalno-političke formacije (koje su posledica pomenutog procesa), a s njima i u Evropu. Za sefardske Jevreje, dakle, tek u naše dane počinje nov odsek u istoriji.” (Baruh 1926: 2)

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the newspaper Židovska svijest. Its appearance, however, not only confirms the selfawareness of a community with a recognizable cultural heritage but also signifies an identity crisis in a certain way. The crisis of identity precipitated by the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy induced many Jews, more than before the war, to assert a Jewish ethnic identity or even a Jewish national one. In all the successor states, Zionists formed Jewish national councils to demand the recognition of the Jews as a nation and the extension of their national minority rights. (Rozenblit 129)

Židovska svijest, as early as 1919, informed readers of the general outlook for the Jewish people’s politics in the countries of the diaspora, as presented by Samuel Pinto in his report to the National Assembly. These are precisely the guidelines of the World Zionist Organization, which, to put it succinctly, tried to determine the attitude of the Jewish minority to the country they lived in, but also to point out the relation of the state towards its Jewish minorities. Our goal is not only to recognize the Jewish nationality, we also seek to protect the rights, which arise from the recognition of Jewish nationality. […] In this way, our needs are identical with those of other citizens. Our demand is that all the things that concern us Jews, we tackle ourselves in an autonomous administration.14

Proclaiming Zionist ideas and closely following the world political scene and current questions on Palestine, Židovska svijest emerged as a predominantly political newspaper, political newspaper. Summarizing the five years of publication of Židovska svijest, a contributor who signed with the pseudonym u. reports his view on the role of this newspaper: First and foremost, “Židovska Svijest” dedicated its position to the development of Jewish nationalism and work on the restoration of the Jewish national home in Eretz Israel. In that direction goes “Židovska Svijest”, a Zionist newspaper, completely in line with the motto revealed in the first issue: “in galut – national consciousness, in Palestine – national freedom”.15

14 “Naš cilj nije samo priznanje židovske narodnosti, mi tražimo i zaštitu prava, koja proizlaze iz priznanja židovske narodnosti. […] U tom pravcu su naše potrebe identične sa ostalim građanima. Naš zahtjev ide onamo, da sve stvari, koje se tiču nas Židova, mi sami preuzmemo u autonomnu upravu.” (Pinto 1; emphasis original) 15 “U prvom i glavnom redu posvećivala je ‘Židovska Svijest’ poziciju razvitku jevrejskog nacijonalizma i radu oko restauracije jevrejske nacijske domaje u Erec Izraelu. U tom smjeru je Žid. Svijest’

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

But the national consciousness in galut had to be grounded in language. Thus, in the article Naš jezik (Our language) from 1920, Hebrew is spoken of in an apologetic tone as the most significant and most recognizable part of the identity of Jews on Palestinian soil where Hebrew is the “mutual language” and “the strongest link for all Jewish tribes from galut.”16 It is considered not only a crucial unifying factor of all Jews but also a direct link to the pre-Exile tradition. Moreover, since it already functioned as a spoken language in Palestine among Jewish immigrants,17 the necessity of linguistic knowledge of Hebrew was further emphasized, and therefore the whole article concludes with a remark on the work of Safa Berura,18 a Sarajevo school to which all Jews should have their children sent to learn Hebrew. There was already, in some way, a formulated relation to all the other languages spoken by Jews around the world since all of them should be replaced by Hebrew as the living tissue of national unity.

National identity and Sephardic separatism In Židovska svijest, in 1924, we can trace the controversial fervor discussed by the Sephardi movement, or the so-called separatist aspirations of the Sephardim in relation to the general Jewish questions, especially in relation to the Ashkenazi Zionists of Sarajevo, whose influence on Jewish national society as well as on the editorial policy of Židovska svijest was considered by some Sephardi intellectuals to be harmful and non-progressive. This shows how complex the question of the national consolidation of Sarajevo Jews was, despite a principled Zionist orientation, and that it developed on ideologically opposed points of view. Hence, conflicts were inevitable, which in practice meant a struggle for supremacy over local Zionist institutions (Loker 73), reflecting on the activities of Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život in the period from 1924 to

cijonističko glasilo, potpuno u skladu sa motom koji je objelodanjen u prvom broju: ‘u galutu – nacijonalna svijest, u Palestini – narodna sloboda’.” (“Naša štampa” 2) 16 “zajednički jezik i najjača veza za sva židovska plemena iz galuta” (“Naš jezik” 1). 17 During his stay in Yugoslavia (in Belgrade) in 1932, Menahem Usiškin confirmed in a speech at a Sephardic temple that even then the Hebrew language among the Jews in Palestine was not only a language of communication but also a language of literature: “[...] Well, isn’t it a great miracle that a language which was only used in prayers has become an everyday language on Palestinian soil, the language of communication, streets, books and art. One should be blind and deaf so that these modern Jewish miracles not be seen [...]” (“Pa onda, zar nije ogromno čudo, da je jezik koji je samo u molitvama bio u upotrebi, postao na palestinskom tlu jezikom svagdanjim, jezikom saobraćaja, ulice, knjiga i umetnosti. Treba biti slep i gluv da se ne vide ta novoveka jevrejska čudesa [...]”) (“Usiškin u Jugoslaviji” 2). 18 Safa Berura was a school for learning Hebrew language in Sarajevo. It operated until World War II.

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the end of 1927. The Zagreb Zionist newspaper Židov was also involved in the controversy between these Bosnian Jewish newspapers. Adolf Benau and Moritz Levy from Sarajevo, David Alkalaj Dača from Belgrade as well as the one of the most prominent Yugoslav Zionist leaders Dr. Aleksandar Licht wrote polemically in this newspaper regarding Zionist goals and Sephardic separatism (Loker 75). Strong unrest against the forces of assimilation is one of the features of Židovska svijest. The contributors to this paper see the possibility of assimilation and the loss of their own identity as the greatest misfortune. Samuel Kamhi therefore emphasizes in one of his articles the ability of the Jewish people to resist other people’s influences over the centuries: Yes, that’s what I want to emphasize and what I’m proud of, that anywhere and at any place we are in the sea of European nations in the West, and here in the Slavic South, we have retained what distinguishes a proud son of a sinewy and eternally young race from other peoples, and that is why today we do not come into contact with other Yugoslav youth to work with them in the literary, social field but have our own particular point of view and our own particular ideology.19

Kamhi thinks as a radical apologist of Zionist20 goals who sees the danger of assimilation even in a collaboration with others (“with other Yugoslav youth”) in the cultural field. He further makes a brief comparison between the ideological heterogeneity of the Yugoslav (Slavic) youth—which after liberation was either “obsessed with the mission of Slavdom” or went to extremes “always exposing the cult of Balkanism” and the firm Zionist ideas of the Jewish youth, which is unwaveringly close to Herzl’s thought, that is, it “seeks the establishment and regeneration of an independent Jewish culture in Palestine”21 as a mediator between Asia and Europe. Yet just a few lines later, the same author concludes that “there is no great pre-war enthusiasm and there are more skeptics than before,”22 and that it could even be concluded that young spirits were affected by “general and permanent mental sterility,”23 which

19 “Da, to je ono što želim da naglasim i čime se ponosim, da smo svugde i na svakom mestu u moru evropskih naroda na zapadu, a i ovde na slavenskom Jugu zadržali ono, što luči ponosnog sina žilave i večno mlade rase od ostalih naroda i zato mi danas ne stupamo u kontakt sa ostalom omladinom jugoslovenskom, da radimo s njom na literarnom, socijalnom polju, nego imamo svoje posebno stanovište i svoju posebnu ideologiju.” (Kamhi 1924: 4) 20 Later, in a pamphlet entitled Sephardim and the Sephardic Movement (Biblioteka Esperanza, Zagreb, 1927) Kamhi will advocate a Sephardic view of Zionist goals (see Vidaković-Petrov 2013b: 336–337). 21 “koja traži vaspostavljanje i regeneraciju samostalne kulture Jevreja u Palestini” (Kamhi 1924: 4). 22 “nema onog velikog predratnog oduševljenja a ima veći broj skeptičara nego pre” (Kamhi 1924: 4). 23 “opšta i permanentna duševna sterilnost” (Kamhi 1924: 4).

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

actually undermined personal belief in the ideological monolithic nature of the Jewish youth’s activities. The work of the Židovsko nacionalno društvo and Židovska svijest was also criticized at the assembly of the Jewish workers’ organization Poale Cion (held in Sarajevo in 1924). Members of the Jewish National Society were not given the opportunity to speak at that meeting. This is why Aleksandar Licht reacted in his article “Protiv separatizma” (Against Separatism) in which he emphasized that different ideological currents could cause a divide between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim. In fact, I am deeply convinced that there is a struggle between the two ideologies, and that a personal moment is only an ephemeral occasion, so that a conflict broke out, lead in forms which are for severe condemnation. One wants to create a gap between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim. If these separatist aspirations would be treated in a proper way, they could not be justified from the general Jewish point of view because they divide, but at least a discussion about them would be possible.24

The earlier Sephardi-Ashkenazi friction over identity issues and Jewish cultural politics show that ideological differences were deeper and more serious than Kamhi could have anticipated in his view of the work of Jewish youth. This was reflected in the reactions of Židovska svijest to a Sephardi gathering called the Fraternal Agreement (Bratski zdogovor) that took place in Sarajevo in January 1924.25 Several Sephardic intellectuals (S. Atijas, Vita Kajon, Ješua Izrael, Hadži Mošo Danon and Dudo Finci) sent an invitation to prominent Jewish citizens for a fraternal agreement, which in fact included a very sharp critique of the work of the Židovsko nacionalno društvo and Židovska svijest. Accusing them of serving the personal purposes of individuals and of spreading confusion and discontent among the Jewish masses, S. Atijas points out that the criticism does not apply to the Ashkenazi brothers, but the whole gathering for the Ashkenazim was precisely the anti-Ashkenazi speech of prominent Sephardim, which was enthusiastically supported mainly by the Sephardic audience. It was an obvious manifestation of the discontent of

24 “Ustvari, ja sam duboko uvjeren, da se tu vodi borba između dvije ideologije, a lični momenat da je tek efemerni povod, te je ta borba izbila i da se vodi u formama, koje su za najtežu osudu. Hoće da se stvori jaz između Sefarada i Aškenaza. Sve kad bi se ove separatističke težnje tretirale na doličan način, ne bi se sa stajališta općežidovskoga, mogle opravdati, jer razjedinjuju, ali bi bar bila moguća diskusija o njima.” (Licht 1) 25 Non-Jewish newspapers Jugoslovenski list, Srpska riječ were writing about this topic with a chronology of the report just as a detailed review from Večernja pošta was published by Židovska svijest, wanting to “keep it in this form for future times and generations” (“u ovoj formi sačuvati i za docnija vremena i pokoljenja”). (“Da se ne zaboravi” 1)

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some Sephardi intellectuals with the work of the Židovsko nacionalno društvo and Židovska svijest and their rigid Zionist course, which did not much care for the traditional, linguistic, and cultural differences between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the context of the goals of unity and unique political identity in future Eretz Israel.26 In his paper, Ješua Izrael even demanded that the name of the Židov, which he considered inappropriate, should be dropped, while V. Kajon accused the leaders of the Židovsko narodno društvo of obstructing the work of the Jewish political committee with their doctrines. Since these leaders were actually Ashkenazim, Kajon’s remark that they allegedly treated Sephardic Jews as “Dummer Bošnjaci”27 (“Dumb Bosniaks”) signals not only ideological differences in terms of national action and a common future but also cultural stereotypes about each other as well as their actions in the increasingly open struggle for social supremacy. In March 1924, several Sephardi intellectuals28 launched the newspaper Jevrejski život. From that moment on, the paper often acted both as a counterpart to the Židovska svijest and as a bulletin of the Sephardic movement. Although it claimed in the first issue (“Uvodna riječ” 1) that it was presented to the public without any particular program, it nevertheless took a clearly different stance than Židovska svijest, concluding that the newspaper would be a mirror of “our spiritual, emotional and real life.” It must be borne in mind that “ours” does not yet have to mean Sephardi, but it certainly marks decisive distance from the general tendencies of the Zionist movement. However, Kalmi Baruh’s Nova orijentacija (New orientation), which represented a response to the writing of other newspapers on the Sephardi movement, the Sephardic point of view dominates. Not accepting the views of some

26 This is best illustrated by the following sentences from the introductory text of Narodna židovska svijest: “Standing completely on the Zionist program, whose integral victory we want to promote, it is clear that we are standing on the basis of pan-Jewry, meaning, of unconditional national unity. We do not know and will not know what the difference is between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim, who we equally consider to be members of one single people, with the same past, the same present and the same future.” (“Stojeći potpuno na cijonističkom programu, čiju integralnu pobjedu mi želimo promicati, jasno je da stojimo na bazi svejevrejstva, t. j. bezuslovnog narodnog jedinstva. Mi ne poznamo i nećemo da znamo za kakovu raliku između Sefarada i Aškenaza, koje jednako smatramo pripadnicima jenog jedinog naroda, s jednakom prošlošću, istovjetnom sadašnjošću i istom budućnošću.”) (“Naš program” 1) 27 In the report of an anonymous author we read about Kajon’s paper: “We are fed up, he says, that these gentlemen continue to treat us as ‘Dummer Bosniaks’. We are not, he emphasizes, against our Ashkenazi brothers. But we seek fraternal unity, fraternal agreement and fraternal cooperation.” (“Siti smo, veli, toga da nas ta gospoda i dalje tretiraju kao ‘Dummer Bošnjaci’. Mi nismo, naglašava, protiv naše braće Aškenaza. Ali tražimo bratsko jedinstvo, bratski sporazum i bratsku saradnju.”) (“Da se ne zaboravi” 1) 28 Albert D. Coen, Kalmi Baruh, Benjamin Pinto, Braco Poljokan (see Nezirović 566).

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

Jewish intellectuals, that the Sephardi movement in Sarajevo was in fact separatist, Baruh explains: Everyone who knows the circumstances of the Jewish community in Sarajevo, ever since the Liberation to this day, knows that this is not about any pre-emptive improvisation, but rather that it is a phenomenon that must be sought in the first post-war year, when the Jews of Sarajevo had to lay the foundations for public Jewish work in terms of rebuilding the Jewish people and when they had to take a certain position on the new political situation. At that time, there was a certain discrepancy in the opinion of our public workers and this dichotomy must have led to conflict sooner or later.29

He emphasizes here the importance of the reconstruction undertaken by Jewish intellectuals immediately after World War I in order to redefine the identity of the Jews but also to accept ideological conflicts as inevitable consequences of such an endeavor. Baruh, of course, stands for the Sephardi position: Sarajevo is an eminent Sephardi environment, so every work in it must be Sephardi, that is, for the people and democratic.30

Baruh seems to bear in mind the words of Martin Buber, which were printed as the motto of the first issue of Jevrejski život:

29 “Svaki koji poznaje prilike jevrejske zajednice u Sarajevu, sve od Oslobođenja do danas zna da se tu ne radi ni o kakvom prepadu improviziranom na brzu ruku, nego da je to pojava čija se klica mora tražiti još u prvoj posleratnoj godini, kada su i Jevreji Sarajeva morali položiti osnove javnom jevrejskom radu u smislu obnove jevrejskog naroda i kada su oni morali zauzeti određen stav u novoj političkoj situaciji. U ono je vrijeme nastala izvjesna podvojenost u mišljenju naših javnih radnika i ta je podvojenost morala doći do sukoba, prije ili docnije.” (Baruh 1924: 5) Židovska svijest will react and recognize in it the two guidelines of Jevrejski život: “On the one hand Sephardism, an absolutely separate, separatist pansefardism centered in Sarajevo (because this is, in the eyes of the founder, the strongest Sephardic city and centrally positioned in the Sephardic life of the whole world), and on the other, purely hostile attitude towards the Jews of the Ashkenazi rite.” (“U jednu ruku sefardizam, apsolutno odvojeni, separatistički pansefardizam sa centrom u Sarajevu (jer je ovo u očima pokretača najjači sefardski grad i centralno položen u sefardskom življu cijelog svijeta), a u drugu ruku čisto neprijateljsko držanje spram Jevreja aškenaskog obreda.”) (“Jevrejski život” 2) Old quarrels will receive new attire. Now the Ashkenazi-Sephardic ideological relations are clearly named as open hostility based not only on cultural and ritual differences, but, especially intriguingly, on issues of relations between the majority and the minority. 30 “Sarajevo je eminentno sefardska sredina, pa zato svaki rad u njoj mora da je sefardski, t.j. narodan i demokratski.” (Baruh 1924: 5)

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Everyone should create from his fullest soul, building on their peculiarity, each in the tradition according to a certain environment, each in his own way, and everyone again together in the community. Only then souls and deeds will be merged into one whole—and Zion, our Zion will be resurrected.31

This specifically means that, for the Sephardim, a strict Zionist line, which, for the sake of all Jewry, tries if not to suppress then to minimize the cultural and linguistic differences between the Jewish communities, is unacceptable. Reaffirming the Sephardi tradition thus became one of the models of Zionist action for Sarajevo’s Sephardi Jews as well as a way of establishing national self-awareness. The idea also triggered other forms of cultural production in Jevrejski život after its editorial board published a proclamation in Judeo-Spanish: Muestras publikasiones en espanjol (Our editions in Spanish), inviting translators and authors to submit their works in Judeo-Spanish (see Nezirović 565). It was followed by the publication of translations by Jichak L. Perec, Sholem Aleichem, Bjalik, Asch, etc., but also of works in Judeo-Spanish, establishing a completely new literary field, which is a particularly important cultural phenomenon not only within the Jewish community but also in the overall cultural production of Bosnia and Herzegovina between the two world wars. In later years, exactly these contributions would raise the urgent question of Judeo-Spanish’s future, which was increasingly pushed out of the communication sphere as the Sephardim became more involved in the life of the wider community. Thus, in the aforementioned Bratski zdogovor of 1924 in Sarajevo, the question of language proved to be an indispensable question in debates about identity. But it was not until 1927 at the Sephardi Youth Conference, held in August, that the question of language was to be raised as a fundamental question of the identity of Bosnian Sephardi Jews. Now one of those goals that, twenty-five years before, the Viennese Esperantists considered crucial for successful national consolidation had been reaffirmed. Although it was determined that the Sephardi mother tongue was Judeo-Spanish and, as such, an inseparable part of Sephardi cultural and national identity, the debate was conducted in Serbo-Croatian. This ironically testifies to the inevitable extinction of that Jewish vernacular, which could not be reaffirmed to the level of a communicative and literary language, as was the case with Hebrew (see Georgijev 195–205). Nevertheless, if we take into account the way that Hebrew was kept “alive” through religious practice and that the planning of the language was revitalized for communication, then the question arises on how would the Judeo-Spanish language develop regarding to its relatively frequent usage inside

31 “Svako neka stvara iz pune duše svoje, izgrađujuć njenu osebujnost, svako u njemu po tradiciji određenoj sredini, svako na svoj način a svi opet u zajednici. Tek će se onda sliti duše i djela u jednu cjelinu – i Cijon, naš Cijon će da vaskrsne.” (“Uvodna riječ” 1)

The Role of the Newspapers Židovska svijest and Jevrejski život

family circle, especially because of the plan to develop its creative potential through its literary use in the Jewish journals of the 1920s and 1930s (Papo 302). The political perspective would, at any rate, be on the side of Zionist ideals, which would later be confirmed at the Conference of Sephardic Communities in the Balkans, held in 1930 in Belgrade, when important resolutions were adopted on the preservation of Judeo-Spanish and Sephardic culture. Perspectives, however, were on the side of Zionist ideals, regardless of the fact that Sarajevo’s Sephardim were never ardent Zionists (Freidenreich 149). That is why the controversies subsided at the end of 1927. Fulfilling its mission in creating a reading community, Narodna židovska svijest and Jevrejski život merged into one common newspaper for Sarajevo’s Jews—the Jevrejski glas32 . This newspaper synthesized the interests of former ideological opponents and continued the mission of consolidating the cultural and national identity of Jews, becoming the main bearer of their cultural progress in Bosnia and Herzegovina through an entire turbulent decade until the very beginning of World War II.

Works cited “Naša štampa.” Židovska svijest 243 (1923): 2. “Naš program.” Narodna židovska svijest 1 (1924): 1. “Jevrejski život.” Narodna židovska svijest 2 (1924): 2. “Uvodna riječ.” Jevrejski život 1 (1924): 1. “Bratsko zbliženje Esperanze’ i Bar Giore’ u Beču.” Židovska smotra 3/4 (1909): 57. “Naše Jevrejstvo.” Jevrejski život 3 (1924): 3. “Naš jezik.” Židovska svijest 60 (1920): 1. “Usiškin u Jugoslaviji.” Jevrejski glas 243.42 (1932): 2. “Da se ne zaboravi.” Židovska svijest 256, (1924): 1. Jevrejski glas 1 (1928): 1.

32 In the introductory article, the anonymous author explains it like this: “It is (Jevrejski glas, D.Š.) a work of agreement, reached between the groups around Jevrejski život’ and ‘Narodna židovska svijest’, which had been divided for years and disputed against each other for their principles and views. Since it was realized on both sides, that time has come, and that it is not only possible but necessary for both groups to collaborate, without hurting one or the other point of view, one or the other ideology, that fraternal agreement was reached in all areas of public work in our community.” (“On je [Jevrejski glas, D.Š.] djelo sporazuma, postignutog između grupa oko ‘Jevrejskog života’ i ‘Narodne židovske svijesti’, koje su godinama podvojene i borbenom stavu vojevale jedna protiv druge za svoja načela i stanovišta. Pošto se uvidilo i na jednoj i na drugo strani, da je vrijeme toliko sazrelo, te je ne samo moguća nego i potrebna kolaboracija obiju grupa, a da se pri tome ni u čemu ne povrijedi jedno ili drugo stanovište, jedna ili druga ideologija, pristupilo se tom bratskom sporazumu u svim oblastima javnog rada u našoj zajednici.” (Jevrejski glas 1: 1)

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Ayala, Amor and Schmädel, Stephanie von. “Viena y sus estudiantes sefardíes: la Sociedad Académica ‘Esperanza’ (siglo XIX y XX).” Judith Dishon, Shmuel Rafael (eds.) Ladinar. Estudios sobre la literatura, la música y la historia de los sefardíes, vol. VII-VIII, Universidad Bar-Ilan, Israel, 2013: 21–36. Baruh, Kalmi. “Nova orijentacija.” Jevrejski život 1 (1924): 5. Baruh, Kalmi. “Sefardski Jevreji i cijonizam.” Jevrejski život 103 (1926): 2. Benbassa, Esther. “The Process of Modernization of Eastern Sephardi Communities”. Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and culture in the Modern Era. Ed. Harvey E. Goldberg, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996: 89–98. Freidenreich, Harriett Pass. The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest of Community. Illinois: Varda Books, 2001. Georgijev, Ivana. “Revitalizacija hebrejskog jezika: sociolingvistički pristup uspješnoj jezičkoj revitalizaciji.” CASCA 1.2 (2013): 195–205. Kamhi, Haim. “Jevrejska publicistika u Bosni i Hercegovini.” Spomenica 400 godina od dolaska Jevreja u Bosnu i Hercegovinu 1566–1966. Sarajevo, 1966: 169. Kamhi, Samuel. “Jedan pogled na rad sarajevske naše omladine s opštom karakteristikom cele jevrejske omladine u Jugoslaviji.” Židovska svijest 253 (1924): 4. Koljanin, Milan. Jevreji i antisemitizam u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji 1918–1941. Beograd, 2008. Licht, Aleksandar. “Protiv separatizma.” Židovska svijest 259 (1924): 1. Loker, Cvi. “Sarajevski spor i sefardski pokret u Jugoslaviji.” Zbornik 7. Studije, arhivska i memoarska građa o Jevrejima Jugoslavije. Beograd: Jevrejski istorijski muzej. 1997: 72–79. Nezirović, Muhamed. Jevrejsko-španjolksa književnost. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1992. Papo, Eliezer. “Od jezičkog zamora do jezikoumorstva ili...” Zeničke sveske 14 (2011): 298–314. Pinto, Samuel. “Židovska narodna politika i nacijonalno organizovanje Židova u kraljevstvu SHS.” Židovska svijest 17 (1919): 1. Rozenblit, Marsha L. Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001: 9–39. Vidaković-Petrov, Krinka. “The Ashkenazi-Sephardi Dialogue in Yugoslavia 1918–1941.” Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective. Eds. Andrzej Katny, Izabela Olszewska and Aleksandra Twardowska. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2013a: 19–39. Vidaković-Petrov, Krinka. “The Role of Vienna in the Renewal of Sephardic Culture in Serbia and Bosnia.” Sefarad an der Donau, Lengua y literature de los Sephardies en tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halevy, Christian Liebl and Ivana Vučina Simović. Barcelona, 2013b: 330–335. Vučina Simović, Ivana. “The Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Sarajevo: From social, cultural and linguistic divergence to convergence.” Sefarad in Österreich-Ungarn. Transversal. Zeitschrift des Centrums für Jüdische Studien der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 2 (2012): 41–64.

Menachem Keren-Kratz (Ramat ha-Sharon)

Cultural Centres in Small Communities in Southeastern Europe The Cases of Sighet, Zagreb, and Trieste

Abstract:

Many scholarly works have reviewed the concept of modernity, and special attention has been given to its cultural aspects. Joining this trend were scholars who studied the influence of modernity on pre-Holocaust Jewish society, its culture and, especially, its literature and press. When such studies refer to Jewish cultural centers, and particularly to Jewish literature and the Jewish press, they generally speak of large cities. This article, however, demonstrates that cultural centers also evolved in small towns located far from any metropolises. Moreover, it asserts that despite their cultural and geographical isolation, small cultural centers sometimes became leading agents of change.

Introduction Over the past half-century, scholars from around the globe have engaged with the concept of modernity, a social and political phenomenon that spread through Europe and the USA from the mid-nineteenth century. Special attention has been given to the cultural aspects of modernity, which were sometimes referred to as modernist or modernism (Berman; Sheppard; Middleton). Joining this academic trend were scholars who focused their attention on the influence of modernity on pre-Holocaust Jewish society, its culture and, especially, its literature and press (Shavit; Shaked; Stein; Fishman). When such studies refer to Jewish cultural centers, they generally speak of large cities such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, New York, Paris or Constantinople (Etkes; Lowenstein; Cohen 2003; Feiner 2004; Stein; Feiner and Bartal; Zalkin). This reflects the commonly accepted notion that, since the dawn of time, all significant political, social and economic events transpired in urban rather than in peripheral spheres. It is likewise generally accepted that the most influential cultural trends in modern times originated in metropolises (Pinsker). There are many examples that support the contention that many, if not most, of the more influential Jewish literary figures, although born and raised in traditionalist

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families, forsook their religious lifestyle on their way to becoming successful authors, journalists or critics. In many cases this process was facilitated by their migration to a large city where they profited from both the anonymity it provided and the decline in the authority of religious institutions, which was far more prevalent in an urban environment (Cox; Stein 9–10; Pinsker 271–274). The correlation between life in the big cities and cultural phenomena that signify a decline in religiosity, such as enlightenment, modernization and secularization, is well documented (Sorkin; Feiner 2010). Considering these latest developments in the study of modern culture in general, and Jewish cultural centers in particular, this article demonstrates that cultural centers also evolved in small towns located far from any major city. Moreover, it reveals that despite their cultural and geographical isolation, small cultural centers had the potential to become leading agents of change. This will be demonstrated by focusing on three small cultural centers which developed in Southeastern Europe in the towns of Sighet, Zagreb, and Trieste. All three locations had a Jewish population of less than 10,000 and were hundreds of kilometers away from any major Jewish community.

Sighet: secular culture in an Extreme Orthodox community Sighet was the capital of the county of Maramaros, which until World War I belonged to Hungary. After the war the county was divided between Czechoslovakia, which annexed its northern part while Romania received its southern part, Sighet included. By the mid-nineteenth century, Maramaros’ Jewish population had grown significantly, and religious institutions had been established in many villages and towns. In that period Maramaros had become an exclusively ultra-Orthodox region, with almost no exceptions (Keren-Kratz 2013: 60–85). Belonging to such a conservative society meant that almost all children, even those living in the larger towns and villages, spoke Yiddish and studied in the heder, in which the language of instruction was also Yiddish (Keren-Kratz 2013: 86–120). The extraordinary Jewish life that developed in Maramaros also led to the development of a particular Yiddish vocabulary. Among other things, it reflected the fact that in Maramaros, unlike in most other parts of Eastern Europe, many Jews worked the fields and required Yiddish terminology for this occupation (Schwartz 1971; Tambur 1974; Katz; Tambur 1980). The several thousand Jews who lived in Sighet constituted some 40 percent of its total population. The majority of them prayed daily in one of the thirty synagogues and batei midrash, each representing a different social group: the Hasidim (of one court or another), the Ashkenazim, the intelligentsia, craftsmen, merchants, and Zionists (Gross and Cohen 19–24). Sighet also hosted one of the most renowned

Cultural Centres in Small Communities in Southeastern Europe

yeshivot in Hungary, which catered to some 300–400 students (Keren-Kratz 2013: 98–101). Less than one tenth of the Jews were religiously lax and only rarely would Jews breach the halakhic law in public (Keren-Kratz 2015). Maramaros’ rabbinical scholars published more than 200 books on all aspects of Jewish thought and were known throughout Hungary (Ben-Menachem 100–223; Keren-Kratz 2013: 273). Despite its religious and conservative atmosphere, a group of intellectuals, all raised in Orthodox homes, established a non-religious cultural center in Sighet and various sources reveal that from the mid-nineteenth century some maskilim wrote poetry while others published reports and essays in leading Jewish newspapers (Keren-Kratz 2013: 171–172). For many decades prior to World War I, Sighet was known for its printing industry, both in European languages and in Hebrew and Yiddish. In the mid1870s, the first Hebrew language newspaper in all of Hungary, titled Ha-Tor (The Dove), appeared in Sighet (Keren-Kratz 2013: 207–210). From then and until World War I another fifteen Jewish newspapers were published in the town, most of them in Yiddish. In addition, prior to World War I Sighet’s intellectuals published some forty non-religious books on topics such as biblical studies, Jewish history, religious thought and Zionism (Ben-Menachem 238–270). Following World War I, Sighet was annexed to Romania. Unlike Hungary, Romania boasted a more significant history of Yiddish culture. It was one of the first Eastern European countries to have a Yiddish newspaper, which was followed by dozens of daily, weekly and monthly Yiddish periodicals (Tambur 1977). These were subsequently joined by other literary and informational publications (Bickel; Mark 1973; Korn). This Yiddish cultural atmosphere had a marked effect on the small cultural centre that was then just beginning to evolve in Sighet and its vicinity. The literary circle in Sighet came about in the 1920s. In 1921, only a few years after the war, Sighet’s new Yiddish newspaper Yidishe Tsaytung (Jewish Newspaper), promoted and reported on various non-religious cultural activities. Professional traveling groups as well as local amateurs staged Yiddish plays, the local cinema presented movies on Jewish topics and a Jewish choir began rehearsing and performing its Yiddish and Hebrew repertoire. Jews also began to become painters, sculptors and musicians, and even formed their own big-band jazz ensemble named, in English, Keep Smiling (Keren-Kratz 2013: 130–133; Keren-Kratz 2017). During the 1930s, Sighet’s literati realized that they needed their own publication, and several activists established a Yiddish monthly cultural magazine named Maramarosher Bleter (Maramarosh’s Pages) which was published between 1931–1932 (Tambur 1977: 221–222). This magazine was devoted exclusively to cultural and literary life in Maramaros in general and in Sighet in particular. Its correspondents reported on local events including Jewish movies, theatre plays, sports events, art exhibitions, music performances, lectures and public readings (Maramarosher Bleter, January 1932: 1–2). The magazine likewise published literary works by both

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internationally renowned and young local authors. Shortly after this magazine ceased to appear in 1932, a new and radical bi-weekly Yiddish magazine named Der Shtern (The Star) was established by the young poet Berl Schnabel. Unfortunately, since not a single issue of this journal has survived, we know very little about it (Tambur 1977: 224–225). Prior to the publishing of Oyfgang (Rise), Sighet’s most renowned literary magazine, its editor, Israel David Yizrael, corresponded with potential writers across the Jewish world (Tambur 1977: 229–234). He impressed upon them the importance of his prospective magazine and the role it would play in the cultural life of hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews. He thus persuaded the most renowned figures of Yiddish culture worldwide to submit their articles to him. The magazine’s smart design, its plentiful pictures and illustrations, and the variety of authors and subjects indicated the immense effort made to make it an international rather than local magazine. Although Yizrael sought to address Oyfgang to Jewish readers from around the globe, he was not prepared to abandon his local literary community. Oyfgang’s growing success made its editors welcome guests at the YIVO conference held in 1935 in Vilnius, at which they reported on the Yiddish literary scene in Romania (Oyfgang, July-August 1935: 1–2). By now the very existence of Sighet’s literary magazine attracted the attention of several literary figures. However, after three years of continuous publication and worldwide recognition, the magazine became defunct even before the jubilee issue could appear. The competition, on the one hand, and the general state of anxiety that had befallen Europe, on the other, finally led the editors to shutter the publication. In a final attempt to raise money, Oyfgang’s editing team tried to publish a book (Mark 1937; Mark 1973: 104–107), but despite positive reception, Oyfgang could not be saved (Davar, 14 February, 1937: 4). Still refusing to relinquish their dream, the editors published another issue of Oyfgang in January 1938 (Oyfgang, January 1938: 1–26). It appeared as if this issue had simply continued from where the previous one had left off. However, although it announced the topics for its forthcoming issues, this was Oyfgang’s final issue (Mark 1973: 92–93). Despite the difficulties Oyfgang had faced, Sighet’s literary circle continued to attract new members. The final initiative of Sighet’s literary circle was the establishment of a group called Ying Maramarosh (Young Maramaros), which published a magazine by the same name which was edited by Yekhezkel Ring. It contained the work of many of Sighet’s authors, including Israel David and Avraham Yizrael, Yosef Holder, Herzl Apshan, Wolf Tambur, Berl Schnabel and Ring as well as several young members, such as Yekhiel Shtaynbakh, Yosef Eliash, Ayzik Polak and Judith Holder. The only issue to survive is that of March 1941, and it appears that this was the last literary periodical to be published in Romania before the Holocaust (Tambur 1977: 271–274).

Cultural Centres in Small Communities in Southeastern Europe

Its rebellious editorial statement demonstrated how, through Oyfgang’s influence and against all odds, Sighet’s authors had finally joined together to establish their self-proclaimed literary circle. One can only imagine what would have become of such an energetic and innovative group had it not been cut down shortly thereafter by the Holocaust (Ying Maramarosh, March 1941: 1). Despite its small Jewish population, which barely reached 10,000, remote location far from other big cities and its Orthodox character, Sighet became a leading and influential cultural center. From the 1870s until the Holocaust dozens of its authors published over thirty different Jewish periodicals, including four literary magazines. They also produced over seventy non-religious books, including no fewer than twenty books of prose and poetry and hundreds of short pieces that were published in local and international Jewish periodicals. Even if nowadays these numbers appear small, compared to towns that had a Jewish community of roughly the same size and even much larger cities, Sighet ranks among the top five with regard to the number of its publications (Keren-Kratz 2013: 124–125).

The cultural center of Zagreb The contemporary town of Zagreb has existed since the beginning of the eleventh century and was the largest town and capital of the territory known as Croatia. Jews arrived and settled in Zagreb a short time after its establishment and were first mentioned in the town’s chronicles since the fourteenth century. In 1526, Ferdinand I declared Croatia a military zone and expelled all its Jews. Some two centuries later, in the mid-eighteenth century Jews from Hungary, Moravia and Bohemia returned to Zagreb and in the 1740s there were about fifty Jewish families in the town. During that period, Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, yet it enjoyed some degree of autonomy. The official Jewish community was established in 1806 by seventy-five families, and in 1840 Orthodox Jews established their own community and appointed Rabbi Aaron Palota as Zagreb’s first chief rabbi. In 1864, the town’s Jewish school adopted Croatian as its primary language. The town’s great synagogue was inaugurated in 1867 and the community appointed Rabbi Hosea Jacoby as its chief rabbi, a duty he carried for almost sixty years. He oversaw the establishment of the Talmud Tora and the Jewish school, in which he taught religious studies and Jewish history. Following his first book, published in 1865 in Vienna, from 1872 until 1923 Jacoby published four other books which were printed in Zagreb, two in German and two in Croatian. Although most of Hungary’s Jews were awarded full civil rights in 1867, antisemitic activists delayed that right for Croatian Jews till 1873. A year after the establishment of the Zionist movement in 1897, Jewish high school students established their own cultural and literary organization, which also

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became a wing of the Zionist movement. In 1909 Jewish Zionist women established their own cultural forum titled Moriah which operated until World War I (Eventov 100). Following World War I, Croatia was united with other territories to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later known as Yugoslavia. Zagreb became one of its largest Jewish communities with a population of about 10,000 Jews. The town also became the center of Yugoslavia’s Zionist federation, and Zionist activists participated in the Jewish community’s leadership. In 1917, Zagreb’s Zionist women established a new cultural organization titled Benot Tsion (Daughters of Zion), and ten years later, they also established a branch of the international Zionist women’s organization WIZO (Eventov 103–106). Most of the first Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Croatia were acculturated. They identified as Neologs (i.e., Reform), forsook Yiddish and their common language was either German or Hungarian. Since their children were all sent to local schools, most of them spoke Croatian as well. Since Croatian became the dominant daily language, a divide formed between the Jewish culture which developed in Croatia and that of Eastern Europe, which was mainly in Hebrew and Yiddish. In addition, Jews in other parts of Yugoslavia spoke other languages such as Serbian and Ladino. This is one of the reasons why there were very few Jewish belletristic publications in Croatian, except those which was published in Jewish journals (Loker 1991: 100). Yet, a group of Zagreb’s Zionist intellectuals used to hold regular literary meetings and turned it into a cultural center (Loker 1991: 65). Zagreb’s Jews dominated the town’s printing industry, book commerce, and controlled some 80 percent of the imported book trade. The town’s largest book dealer was Ha-Tekufa (The Period), a Jewish book distributer which was established in 1795 and had some 150 workers. It had its own printing house, paper mill, binding factory and shops, one of which was the official bookstore of Zagreb’s university. Ha-Tekufa was responsible for the publication and selling of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish titles and many hundreds of musical notebooks (Loker 1991: 80). Zagreb’s publishing houses issued more than 100 Jewish titles during the interwar period. These included not merely religious books, such as translations of the Sidur, but also literary works and books on Jewish history, essay compilations as well as books on Zionism. Although many of the books were by local authors, some were translation of great Jewish authors such as Heinrich Heine, Martin Buber, Herman Cohen, Yehuda Burla and Avigdor Ha-Meiri (Loker 1988: 148–150). Zagreb was also a center of the Jewish press. The bi-weekly journal Židovska smotra (The Jewish Review) appeared in Zagreb in 1906, and save for a short period 1909–1910, continued to be published there until the beginning of World War I in 1914. It took a Zionist stance and published articles both in German and Croatian. In 1917 following the war, another Zionist publication titled Židov (The Jew) was

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published in Zagreb, first in a bi-weekly format and then as a weekly magazine. It became Yugoslavia’s central Jewish newspaper and conveyed the Zionist spirit of most of the country’s Jews. Židov was published continuously until Nazi Germany invaded Zagreb in 1941 (Eventov 473–474; Loker 1988: 97–98). On top of these general journals, Zagreb’s Jewish publishers issued journals which targeted children and adolescents. Ha-Aviv (The Spring, 1922–1941), was a weekly magazine for children. Gideon (1919–1926) and Ha-Noar (The Youth, 1926–1941) were published by the Zionist youth organization intended for Jewish youth. Ha-Barzel (The Iron) and Ha-Tenuah (The Movement) were published monthly by Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir Zionist movements between 1937–1940 and Jevrejska tribuna (The Jewish Tribune) which was published by the Beitar movement between 1937–1938 (Eventov 474–475). The Omanut (Art) movement was established by some of Zagreb’s Jewish musicians, authors and essayists in the 1930s. Since then its leaders organized concerts, public readings and art exhibitions in various locations, including in synagogues. The interest in Jewish music led to the establishment of a vocal ensemble titled Ahdut (Unity) in 1933 (Loker 1988: 137). Omanut published some two dozen music books containing notation of Jewish melodies including Hasidic, liturgic and popular songs. From 1936 till 1941 it also published Omanut, a bi-monthly cultural journal devoted to Jewish art, culture and especially music (Loker 1988: 98; Loker 1991: 164–177; Eventov 475). Both Židov and Ha-Noar published Serbo-Croatian translations of Jewish books in Hebrew, Yiddish and German, such as Rabinzon-Bistritsky’s Anthology of Modern Jewish Literature, which was published in Zagreb in 1933. Omanut also published several books including two by its editor Hinko Gottlieb. Gottlieb was likely Zagreb’s most outstanding literary figure and one of Yugoslavia greatest authors and playwrights. Although most of his writings were lost during World War II, a collection of his works published in Israel in 1980 reveals his talent and the scope of genres he covered (Gottlieb; Loker 1988: 137). A Jew, Sandor D. Alexander, was the publisher of Zagreb’s largest German daily newspaper, Morgenblatt (Morning Pages; this resulted from a merger of three of Zagreb’s newspapers: Agramer Tagblatt, Morgen, and Zagreber Tagblatt), which appeared from 1926 until 1940. Many Jews contributed to this newspaper (Banac 409). Jews were also involved in the establishments of Zagreb’s theatre and the city’s ethnographic museum (Loker 1988: 138). Zagreb’s Jews exceled in other arts as well. Marta Ehrlich and Oscar Herman were well-known painters. Herman also belonged to a group of Croatian artists known as the Munich Circle. Slavo Bril and Vera Fischer, who studied at Zabreb’s art academy, were sculptors, while Vatroslav Lisinski (born Ignatius Fuchs), Ivana Lang, Julius Epstein and Anton Schwartz were well-known composers and musicians.

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Another field in which Zagreb’s Jewish community exceled was sports. In 1913, Zagreb’s Jewish sportsmen received permission to establish their own gymnastics club. Shortly thereafter, World War I broke out, and the club was closed after many of the young athletes were recruited. The club reopened in 1919 and, like many other Jewish sports clubs, joined the international Maccabi movement. The club established its own soccer team and rented a large hall which was used by the athletes. It participated in sports events with other Jewish clubs in Europe and also in the Maccabi games held in Palestine in 1932 and 1935. Even after the beginning of World War II, the club held its own Sports Day in 1940. Furthermore, Maccabi Zagreb promoted other cultural activities, and its large hall was used for community meetings, lectures, theatre plays, public readings and even as a synagogue on the High Holidays. Moreover, the club, which at its peak counted more than 2,000 members, established its own library and reading room, organized trips, and held various theme balls. In 1938, it, too, established its own journal titled Vjesnik Maccabiju (Maccabee News) which was added as a supplement to the main Jewish newspaper Židov. In 1941 the club ceased operations and many of the athletes emigrated to Palestine (Avraham 107–112).

The early cultural center in Trieste The Jewish community in Trieste was established at the beginning of the second millennium and by the eighteenth and nineteenth century had become extremely prosperous (Cervani and Buda; Zorattini; Dubin; Catalan; Millo). From 1719, the year in which Trieste was declared a free port, the Jews were heavily engaged in the economic, social and cultural development of the city and contributed greatly to its economic growth (Martini de Antonellis). From a community of 103 Jews in 1735, it grew to 4,534 in 1875 and reached 5,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century, when, in 1908, it established its new synagogue, still one of the city’s most remarkable buildings. In the ensuing years, the Jewish community remained almost unchanged until the end of the 1930s, when fascist and racial laws ended the good relations between the Jews and the State (Catalan 59–75). Being a port city, Trieste welcomed many minorities and tolerated various cultures and modern influences. This impacted the Jewish community, which, in addition to the traditional heder, also opened Europe’s first modern school in 1786 where students studied both traditional and general subjects. The town also became one of Europe’s modern, scientific, and cultural centers, and Jews, who were open to modernity yet maintained their traditional lifestyle, played a great part in that. A list of Italian Jewish scholars compiled in the late nineteenth century reveals some thirty names from Trieste. In the early seventeenth century, Emanuel (Menachem Tsion) Porto, one of Trieste’s rabbis, published books on geography, astronomy

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and mathematics. He was followed by Moshe Hefetz (Gentilli), a scholar of mathematics and philosophy, and Jacob Levi, who in the late seventeenth century was affirmed as a medical doctor by the University of Padua (Kolbi). Trieste’s best-known scholar in the nineteenth century was Samuel David Luzzatto who became known as a philologist, philosopher, poet and a Talmudic scholar and is still recognized today by his unique and modernistic Jewish thought (Bonfil et al; Vargon). The town’s Jewish scholars spoke several languages, including Hebrew, and wrote dozens of books in several languages. Many of them exceled in the sciences as well as the humanities, and many wrote poetry books which was the most popular literary genre in Italy in that time. Unlike other places where the rabbis objected to modernity, in Trieste it was the rabbis who led the openness to other cultures and who appointed scholars and authors as the town’s teachers. This trend continued in the late nineteenth century. A key example for this was Josef Eliezer Morpurgo, the founder of one of the country’s largest insurance companies who was also a poet. Another prominent businessman and philanthropist was Yitshak Goite, who also became a poet. Avraham Haim Hai Morpurgo established Il Corriere Israelitico (The Jewish Courier), a journal dedicated to Jewish history and thought which was published in Trieste for over fifty years between 1862–1914 (it later merged with Florence’s La Settimana Israelitica (The Jewish Week) and was renamed Israel). Another scholar, Dr. Shaul Formigini, translated Dante Alighieri’s Inferno into Hebrew in 1869, while Yosef Almanatsi, a collector of old books and manuscripts, translated many poems written by classical Greek authors such as Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) and Anacreon. A unique example of this group of scholars was Rachel Morphurgo-Luzzatto, who is considered not only one of the first poets in modern Jewish history, but also one of the first Jewish women to express feminist ideas (Cohen 2016; Arbib; Zierler 23–28). The last of Trieste’s great Jewish scholars was Rabbi Zvi Perets Hayot, a historian, biblical scholar and a Zionist leader who served as the town’s chief rabbi between 1912–1918. He also published the weekly Il Messaggero Israelitico (The Jewish Messenger) which appeared between 1912–1915. Unlike the centers in Sighet and Zagreb which reached their zenith following World War I, this was not the case in Trieste. During the interwar period, the Jewish community experienced a cultural decline following a trend of acculturation and conversion. Jews no longer sought to distinguish their own national and religious identity and saw themselves as full Italians. Yet even in that period Trieste produced some outstanding Jewish authors, such as Aron Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo; Umberto Saba (born Poli) whose father converted to Judaism in order to marry his mother; Giorgio Voghera, and Roberto (Bobi) Bazlen (Pizzi; Voghera; Pellegrini; Principe; Cavaglion; Schächter; Lombardo; Paino).

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Conclusion Since most scholars of Jewish culture have focused their attention on the centers located in large cities, the smaller ones, such as those mentioned in this article, have been virtually ignored. The same can be said for the study of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, which has by and large overlooked the literary and journalistic products of the smaller communities. Studies such as the present one will contribute to filling in the geographical and cultural voids in the map of pre-Holocaust Yiddish culture. Although this study concentrated on the small cultural centers in Southeastern Europe, a region once largely ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, other studies should unveil other long-forgotten, less populous Jewish centers around the globe. This may eventually result in a more comprehensive mapping of Jewish cultural centers. Such scholarship will demonstrate the relations between “small” and “large” centers, between centers in various geographical zones, and between centers in different cultural environments, such as the Yiddish sphere, the Ladino sphere and the Hebrew sphere.

Works cited Arbib, Marina. “A woman and poet against the stream: Rachel Morpurgo, advocate of the Kabbalah in an anti-Kabbalistic age.” Nashim 29 (2015): 8–20. Avraham, Yosef. “Agudat Ha-Sport Ha-Yehudit ‘Makabi’ Zagreb.” Yalkut Tashah-Tashlah (1948–1978). Ed. Yakir Eventov. Jerusalem: Hita’hadut Olei Yugoslavia, 1978. Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Ben-Menahem, Naftali. Misifrut Israel beHungarya. Jerusalem: Kityat Sefer, 1958. Berman, Art. “Modernity and Modernism.” Preface to Modernism. Art Berman. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994: 3–26. Bickel, Shlomo. Rumenye: Geshikhte, literatur-kritik, zikhroynes. Buenos Aires: Kiyum, 1961 (Yiddish). Bonfil, Robert, Gotlieb, Isaac and Kasher, Hannah (eds.). Samuel David Luzzatto: The BiCentennial of his Birth. Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2004. Catalan, Tullia. La Comunità ebraica di Trieste, 1781–1914. Politica, società e cultura. Trieste: Lint, 2000. Cavaglion, Alberto. Italo Svevo. Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Cervani, Giulio and Buda, Liana. La Comunità israelitica di Trieste nel secolo XVIII. Udine: Del Bianco, 1973. Cohen, Nathan. Books, Writers and Newspapers: The Jewish Cultural Centre in Warsaw, 1918–1942. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003 (Hebrew).

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Cohen, Tova. Silenced Harp: The Life and Works of the Italian-Hebrew poetess Rachel Morpurgo. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2016 (Hebrew). Cox, Harvey. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Dubin, Lois C. (ed.). The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste; Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford: University Press, 1999. Etkes, Immanuel (ed.). The East European Jewish Enlightenment. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1993 (Hebrew). Eventov, Etelka. “Ha-Nashim Ba-Tenua Ha-Tsionit Be-Yugoslavia.” Yalkut Tashah-Tashlah (1948–1978). Ed. Yakir Eventov. Jerusalem: Hita’hadut Olei Yugoslavia. 1978: 100–106. Feiner, Shmuel and Bartal, Israel. Varieties of Haskalah. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005 (Hebrew). Feiner, Shmuel. The Jewish Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Feiner, Shmuel. The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Fishman, David E. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Gottlieb, Hinko. Works. Vols. 1–2. Tel Aviv: Eked, 1980 (Hebrew). Gross, Shlomo and Cohen, Yitzkhak Yosef (eds.). Sefer Marmarosh [The Marmaros Book]. Tel-Aviv: Beit Marmaros, 1983. Katz, Azriel. “He’arot Un Hosafot Fun A Maramarosher Kukvinkel.” Yidishe Shprakh 34 (1975): 43–49; 35 (1976): 71–75. Keren-Kratz, Menachem. “Marmaros, Hungary – The cradle of Extreme Orthodoxy.” Modern Judaism 35:2 (2015): 147–174. Keren-Kratz, Menachem. Maramaros-Sziget: Extreme Orthodoxy and Secular Jewish Culture at the Foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Jerusalem: The Dov Sadan Publishing Project and Leyvik House, 2013 (Hebrew). Keren-Kratz, Menachem. “The social and cultural role of small Jewish literary centres – the case of Sighet, Romania.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16.2 (2017): 179–197. Kolbi, Shaul. “Tekufat Ha-Zohar Shel Ha-safrut Ha-Ivrit Ba-It Trieste.” Sinai 83.1 (1978): 70–79. Korn, Yitzhak. Yiddish in Rumenye: Eseyen. Tel Aviv: Avuka, 1989 (Yiddish). Loker, Zvi (ed.). Pinkas Ha-Kehilot: Yugoslavia. Jerusalem: Yad Va-Shem, 1988. Loker, Zvi (ed.). History of Yugoslav Jews: The Jews of Croatia and Herzegovina in Modern Times. Tel Aviv: Hita’chdut Olei Yugoslavia, 1991 (Hebrew). Lombardo, Patrizia. “Trieste as Frontier. From Slataper to Bazlen and Del Giudice.” Cities, Words and Images: from Poe to Scorsese. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 80–95. Lowenstein, Steven M. The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Mark, Natan. Di leymene foyst: Meshalim-balades, lider, skitsen. Sighet: Oyfgang, 1937 (Yiddish). Mark, Nathan (Avi Abir-Zion). Safrut Yiddish Be-Romania: Me-Reshita Ve-Ad 1972. Haifa: Omanut, 1973. Martini de Antonellis, Laura. Porto franco e comunità etnico-religiose nella Trieste settecentesca. Milan, 1968. Middleton, Tim. Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Vols. 1–5. London: Routledge, 2003. Millo, Anna. Trieste, le Assicurazioni, l’Europa: Arnoldo Frigessi di Rattalma e la RAS. Milan: Angeli, 2004. Paino, Marina. La tentazione della leggerezza: Studio su Umberto Saba. Florence: Olschki, 2009. Pellegrini, Ernestina. La Trieste di carta: Aspetti della letteratura triestina del Novecento. Trieste: Lint, 1987. Pinsker, Shachar M. Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pizzi, Katia. Trieste: italianità, triestinità e male di frontiera. Bologna: Gedit, 2007. Principe, Quirino (ed.). Ebrei e Mitteleuropa: cultura, letteratura, società. Brescia: Shakespeare & Company, 1984. Schächter, Elizabeth. Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste. Leeds: Northern University Press, 2000. Schwartz, Yulian. “Maramarosher yidishe verter bay Volf Tamburn.” Yidishe Sprakh 30 (1971): 76–84. Shaked, Gershon. Modern Hebrew Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Shavit, Zohar. 1982. Ha-Haim Ha-Sifrutiyim Be-Eretz Israel 1910–1933 [The Literary Life in Palestine 1910–1933]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982. Sheppard, Richard. “Modernism and Modernity: The problem of definition.” Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism. Richard Sheppard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000: 1–30. Sorkin, David. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Tambur, Volf. “Vegen Maramarosher yidish verter.” Yidishe Shprakh 33 (1974): 47–49. Tambur, Volf. “Yidishe vertlakh un idiomen.” Bukareshter Shriftn 3 (1980): 105–129. Tambur, Volf. Yiddish-presse in Rumenye. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1977. Vargon, Shmuel. S. D. Luzzatto: Moderate Criticism in Biblical Exegesis. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2013 (Hebrew). Voghera, Giorgio. Gli anni della psicanalisi. Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1985. Zalkin, Mordechai. From Heder to School: Modernization Processes in 19th Century East European Jewish Education. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008 (Hebrew).

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Zierler, Wendy I. And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Zorattini, Pier Cesare Ioly (ed.). Gli ebrei a Gorizia e a Trieste tra ancien régime ed emancipazione. Udine: Del Bianco, 1984.

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Writers of the Sephardi Past Historians and Sephardi Studies Scholars in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1900–1930

Abstract:

This essay investigates tropes of modern Sephardi history writing in the Balkans, more precisely Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia between 1900 and the 1930s. It looks at Sephardi history writing from the perspective of complex position of Sephardi intellectuals and the development of Sephardi cultural, social and political institutions. While giving biographical and intellectual accounts of the most significant Sephardi history writers of the time, it poses a greater question as to the social importance of history for the Sephardi communities of the time. It is indeed odd how Serbian Jews—most of them Sephardim, the heirs of the once highly cultured Spanish Jews—have to this day failed to produce a work presenting a complete picture of their life since their arrival in the Balkans at the end of the fifteenth century, throughout the centuries. Numerous data, compiled in communities of the Mosaic confession, which could serve not only as an introduction to Jewish life in the Balkans but [as an introduction to] the various relationships [of Jews] with other Balkan peoples—all this material is decaying in the archives. Those most often invited to study and publish the material do not have an empathy for this work. Our Jews, even though many are degree-educated, do not have an appreciation for the study of their own past and present.1

Paulina Lebl Albala (1891–1967) wrote this reflection on the state of historical scholarship in 1924. It formed part of her review of Spomenica, the volume dedicated to and celebrating the first thirty years of La Benevolecia, a Sarajevo-based Sephardi cultural and humanitarian organisation. Her criticism comes across as harsh but was not unfounded. She was well acquainted with the Yugoslav academic and Jewish

1 “Doista je čudno kako srbijanski Jevreji – većinom Sefardi, potomci nekada visoko kulturnih španskih Jevreja, nisu do danas dali nijedno delo u kome bi se ogledale sve mane njihovog života od dolaska na Balkan, krajem XV. veka, pa da tokom idućih stoleća do danas. – Bezbrojni podaci, nagomilani

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cultural spheres. As both a secondary school (gimnazija) teacher in Belgrade and an established literary critic and translator, she was familiar with academia and academic publishing. Furthermore, her involvement in the Jewish community and marriage to David Albala, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement in Yugoslavia, kept her involved with Jewish cultural and political currents. Her legitimacy in posing this burning question came from her professional competence and informed insight and, ultimately, personal investment. Although her remarks were benevolent, even if challenging, Lebl Albala was commenting from the specific position of a Jewess of Ashkenazi origin. This background is significant in that it barred her from consulting works written in Judeo-Spanish. Furthermore, while Lebl Albala was an acclaimed translator from French, German and English, she lacked knowledge of Hebrew. Therefore, she was bound to omit developments in historical writings among Sephardi Jews in Serbia, but also across Jewish communities in what after 1918 became the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The editors of the newspaper Jevrejski život (Jewish Life) picked up on this oversight and pointed out the importance of history writing in Jewish scholarly production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among the Sephardim in the Balkans, especially in the work of Salomon Rozanes and Moishe Franco. Yet the editorial could not rebut Lebl Albala’s general criticism of the Serbian Sephardim and, more broadly, the Sephardim in the Yugoslav context, as they themselves identified only one Sephardi historian in their own setting—Moritz Levy. This brief exchange between Lebl Albala and the editors of Jevrejski život brought out the internal Jewish tensions that formed the Sephardi and broader Jewish intellectual sphere in this part of the Balkans. Moreover, bearing in mind that Jews only formed a small minority in this predominantly South Slavic region, both Jewish and non-Jewish political, cultural and scholarly settings informed Sephardi intellectual production. This article historicises these social tensions that decisively influenced Sephardi intellectual history and, in particular, Sephardi historians between 1900 and the 1930s. Sephardi historical writings belong to the wider context of Jewish historiography. Historians today agree that a critical approach to the past was among crucial steps to modernity. Moreover, scholars have linked modern, critical approaches to the past and to history writing with social and political changes. In his seminal work Zakhor, Yosef Yerushalmi called attention to how modern Jewish historical writing reflected a secular approach; as he put it, history writing had become “the faith of fallen Jews” (xix). Following this breakthrough, scholars dwelled on the role of the past po mojsijevskim veroispovednim opštinama, iz kojih bi se mogla crpsti obilata građa ne samo za upoznavanje jevrejskog života na Balkanu, nego i za različite veze i odnose njihove s ostalim balkanskim narodima – sva ta građa propada po arhivima, a oni koju su najpozvaniji da je prostudiraju i objave, nemaju razumevanja za te poslove.” (Lebl Albala 3) All translations are mine.

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for modern Jewish history. Nevertheless, ever since Jewish historiography started receiving attention, historians have omitted Sephardi historical narratives. Only in recent decades have scholars who focused on Sephardi history, such as Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Julia Philips Cohen, Aron Rodrigue and Devin Naar, raised the issue of including the Sephardi voices in debates on Jewish historiography. This notwithstanding, scholarship has yet to comprehensively incorporate Sephardi historical narratives in the wider Jewish historiographical tradition. Moreover, scholarship still needs to make an effort to understand and explain Sephardi intellectual history beyond mere comparisons with Western European Jewish trajectories. This article aims to untangle the complex relationship of Sephardi historians with their respective social and institutional context in the Yugoslav cultural space, including Sephardi intellectuals in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 1900s to the 1930s. The article focuses on historians who approached the Sephardi past having critically consulted both sources and the literature. However, it also includes writings that loosely document Sephardi history, such as memorial volumes and belles-lettres as a part of wider intellectual engagement with the Sephardi past. In order to contextualise the production of all these history writings, the article gives an overview of works dealing with the Jewish past, and more specifically the Sephardic Jewish past, in the Balkans. Concentrating on the communal and institutional circumstances that paved the way for Sephardi scholarship, the article draws conclusions on changing approaches to the past and, in particular, the social position of writers of the Sephardi past in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

Modern Sephardi histories The editors of Jevrejski život responded to Lebl Albala’s remark in a footnote in her article on the dearth of works on the history of Sephardi Jews in the Balkans. They singled out three authors who were recognised internationally. Salomon Rozanes (1862–1938), from Rusçuk in Bulgaria, had published a genealogy of his family, a treatise on ancient Jewish coins in Hebrew, and a history of the Jewish community in Rusçuk in Judeo-Spanish. His life’s work, the six-volume Hebrew-language History of the Jews in Turkey and in the Orient (Korot ha-Yehudim be-Turkyah ve-Arzot haHadem), was published between 1930 and 1945 and thus did not enter this classification. The second historian they mentioned was Moise Franco (1864–1907), an Istanbul-born Sephardi Jew who had composed a study of Ottoman Jewry under the title Essai Sur l’Histoire Des Israelites de l’Empire Ottoman: Depuis les Origines Jusqu’à Nos Jours (Essays on the history of Israelites of the Ottoman Empire: From the Origins to Our Own Times) published in Paris in 1897 (Stein and Cohen 358–359; Barnai). Their awareness of these works, as well as the pride with which the editors presented the writings of these well-known Sephardi scholars, testifies

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to the uninterrupted involvement and affiliation of Sephardim in the Yugoslav lands with the wider Sephardi scholarly world. Moreover, the Sephardim living in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had established their own way of writing the past. Yet they were, nonetheless, moulded by the particular social and political circumstances of their communities (kehila), including access to education but also the type and form of available education. All these factors played a distinct role in the writing of Sephardi histories. The response mentioned Moritz Levy and his work on Sephardim in Bosnia from 1911 as a representative of Sephardic historians. The article did not mention Levy’s direct predecessor, the Sarajevo-born scholar Moshe ben Raphael Attias (1845–1916), known as Zeki Effendi. What conspicuously set Attias apart from his contemporaries was his peculiar education. Sarajevo had been a well-regarded Sephardi scholarly centre since the seventeenth century, and in Attias’ time the city did not lack traditionally educated Sephardim. Unlike the majority of Jews, however, Attias attended the Ottoman secular school opened in his childhood during the period of reform (Tanzimat), and he continued his education in state schools in Constantinople. His academic background and dedication earned him the honorary title Effendi, reserved for esteemed scholars of Islam, but also equipped him with mastery of a number of languages. Upon his return to Sarajevo, Attias worked for the local Ottoman tax authorities and, after the occupation of the province in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian authorities as financial advisor. It was thus his broad education, linguistic expertise, and the respect he enjoyed in the community that gave him the standing to write the first history of Bosnian Jewry. Attias was already preparing his history when Abraham Cappon asked him to publish the work in Sarajevo’s short-lived Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Alborada (The Dawn). Unfortunately, only the beginning of Historia de los Žudios de Bosnia (History of the Bosnian Jews) was printed in this weekly paper and it ended abruptly, without explanation. Yet his approach was clear, with its reliance on historical sources and awareness of their biases. Firstly, Attias mentioned the importance of oral tradition, which had inspired him to collect proverbs and traditional stories in Judeo-Spanish and pursue his interest in the past. Furthermore, he included sources in Ottoman Turkish, pinkasim (Jewish communal chronicles), and Kore ha-Dorot (Caller of the generations), a literary chronicle by the seventeenth-century Venetian writer David Conforte published in Venice in 1746 (Nezirović 245–60; Benbassa, Rodrigue 113). However short, Attias’ first history of the Sephardim left its mark in Sarajevo, and clearly influenced the next historian of the community, Rabbi Moritz Levy. Like Moshe Attias, Moritz Levy also received an extraordinary education for a man of his generation. Although obtaining a secular education was already common for Jews at the end of the nineteenth century in Sarajevo, Levy was educated exclusively in a meldar, a Sephardi-type of Jewish elementary school (Talmud Torah)

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in Sarajevo, and only went to Sarajevo’s First Gymnasium to pass his high school exams.2 As a scholarship recipient of the Sephardi humanitarian organisation La Benevolencia, which aimed to shape a new generation of Sephardi scholars and entrepreneurs, Levy was able to pursue a secular education at the University of Vienna in parallel with his education at the Rabbinical Seminary. Again, like Zeki Effendi, Levy acquired linguistic proficiency through a degree in Semitic languages. He served as the secretary of the Sephardi community in Sarajevo, prior to becoming Chief Rabbi in 1912. In this period, he began to research his brethren in Bosnia, which resulted in the book Die Sephardim in Bosnien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden auf der Balkanhalbinsel (The Sephardim in Bosnia: A Contribution to the History of the Jews of the Balkan Peninsula) published in Sarajevo in 1911. Zeki Effendi’s Historia and his personal influence have tellingly shaped Levy’s approach. Their bibliographies diverge only slightly, as Levy also used Ottoman sources, pinkasim, and Conforte’s Kore ha-Dorot and Moise Franco’s work. He enriched his list of sources with contemporary works, including Gotthard Deutsch’s entry on Bosnia in the Jewish Encyclopaedia and Graetz’ Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews). Moreover, Levy mentions how he gathered information from scholarly exchanges with Zeki Effendi. Not only did these conversations constitute a source for Levy’s work, but they also symbolised a continuation and even granted the new scholar legitimacy in the eyes of the local elite. The role of local historian was an unofficial but still highly regarded position. As well as becoming Chief Rabbi, Levy was also appointed member of the Senate of Bosnia and Herzegovina and so could not dedicate himself fully to his role as communal historian. Nevertheless, he did keep an eye on the next generations of Sephardi academics. In the same period in Serbia, the Sephardim did not build a steady line of historians, as there was no established path for the secular education of Jews until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Thus, it is not surprising that two significant contributions that dealt with the history of the Sephardim came from scholars educated abroad. Two important works on Sephardi history were published in Belgrade in Judeo-Spanish in the 1890s. Yaakov Moshe Hay Altarats was employed by the Sephardi community in Belgrade as a teacher, preacher, hazzan (cantor) and shohet (ritual slaughterer). Born in Sarajevo but educated in Jerusalem, Altaras received a traditional religious education, which was reflected in the two treatises he published in Belgrade: Trezoro de Yisra’el (Israel’s Treasure) in 1890 and Sefer Zikhron Yerushalayim (Jerusalem’s Memorial Book) in 1897. His works relied on religious history and offered socio-political reflections on the past and future of the Sephardim. However, Altaras did not capture the interest of his contemporaries and his works did not receive wider recognition (Papo 2019; Lehmann 146–59).

2 Rigorosen Moritz Levy. Archiv der Universität Wien, 1906.

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In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a Jewish history in Judeo-Spanish was also published in Belgrade. This work came from the pen of the maskil (follower of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment) Simon Bernfeld (1860–1940). Born in Stanislau (today Ivano-Frankivsk), then Austria-Hungary, Bernfeld studied at the Hochschule für Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin and eventually became the assistant editor of the famous Hebrew journal HaMagid (The Declarer). Bernfeld held the position of the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in Belgrade during the years 1886–1894. Hiring Bernfeld, a Jew educated in the West who believed in the spirit of the Haskalah, was a sign of the Belgrade Sephardi community’s evergrowing interest in and goal of engaging with modern intellectual trends. During his years in Belgrade, Bernfeld wrote a history of the Jews in Judeo-Spanish, Istoria de los Djudios, published in Belgrade in 1894. The first generation of Sephardi intellectuals educated at universities was aware of Bernfeld’s work but took it as a newcomer’s perspective (Confino 56). This attitude did not engender clear dedication to the study of the Sephardic past, which came only in the second decade of the twentieth century from the Chief Rabbi of Serbia, Isaac Alcalay. Rabbi Alcalay published an essay on the history and culture of Jews in Serbia in the American Jewish Year Book in 1918. This brief text was an introduction to pleas for war relief which Alcalay had expressed during his stay in the United States during the First World War (Alcalay 75–87). Paulina Lebl Albala reflected on other media of recording the past and mentioned a set of novellas by Hajim Davičo which were well received: in her opinion, this showed there was interest in the Sephardi past. Davičo’s novellas portrayed Jalija, the historical Jewish quarter of Belgrade and its inhabitants, while reflecting on their traditional manners and customs with nostalgia (Davičo 1881; 1898). His stories rested on distorted and romanticised historical narratives typical of the genre of so-called ghetto stories. This type of literature, which Shmuel Feiner has since called “low manifestations” (5) of history writing, aimed to include non-scholarly text in the debate on the role of the past for Jewish political movements. Sephardi writers from Bosnia and Serbia contributed to this genre. Davičo had successors in Isak Samokovlija in Bosnia and Jacques Confino in Serbia, writers who developed the genre in the 1920s and kept it alive until their deaths well after the Second World War. Another example in this line was Laura Papo (1891–1942), known under her pseudonym Bohoreta. She collected and wrote down pieces from the Judeo-Spanish oral tradition, including proverbs, stories and romances (songs). Herself an intellectual and a prolific writer, Bohoreta left a valuable corpus of stories and plays, mainly focused on the position of women in the era of social change in the early twentieth century (Papo Bohoreta 2005; 2015; Večerina Tomaić; Papo 2007; 2009).

Writers of the Sephardi Past

Writing the Sephardi Past in Yugoslavia After World War I and the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, the majority of the Sephardim in the Balkans were living in a single state. Those settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia gained an official framework for scholarly cooperation, namely, the hospitality of the state research institutions, which, by including non-Jewish and Jewish scholars of Jewish history played a significant role in Sephardi history writing from 1918 onward. The volume that Lebl Albala reviewed, Spomenica o proslavi tridesetogodišnjice sarajevskoga kulturno-prosvetnog društva La Benevolencia (Memorial Volume Dedicated to Thirty Year Anniversary of the Sarajevan Cultural-Educational Society La Benevolencia) offered a new approach to the past in that it presented the Sephardic past in an accessible and inclusive manner. The volume made room for a variety of contributions, and the Jewish past was discussed from scholarly and rabbinical authorities alongside memoirs, legends and poems. The popularity of this genre of edited historical volumes increased in the 1920s, and Spomenica and other memorial volumes marked the new phase of what Hardtwig called Geschichtskultur (historical culture) through the growing presence of a historical narrative in Jewish publications in Yugoslavia (Hardtwig 8). Moreover, this opening of scholarship to a wider, Jewish and non-Jewish audience moved the boundaries of Jewish scholarship and changed the position of Sephardi scholars in the Yugoslav state. Spomenica was the first publication of the genre and it introduced new rules, as it was dedicated to the celebration of thirty years of La Benevolencia. Interestingly, the editor, Stanislav Vinaver (1891–1955), was an Ashkenazi Serbian-born Jew, broadly educated in physics and mathematics in Paris but known as a literary theoretician with significant recognition in Yugoslavia. Vinaver saw the volume as an attempt to show “the greatness and zest of the Jewish spirit and heart” (Vinaver 1924b: 5).3 Thus, he presented the first thirty years of La Benevolencia’s history, reflecting on the most important milestones, programmes and achievements. Alongside his study of Henri Bergson, Vinaver also translated Martin Buber and Simon Perez into Serbo-Croatian. The remaining texts in the volume cover topics from Jewish philosophy to Jewish literature. Among the contributors to the volume were Chief Rabbi Moritz Levy, who gave a short overview of Sephardi history and customs, Jakov Maestro, who reflected on his days as a pupil in a meldar (103–105), while Tihomir Đorđević (1868–1944), ethnologist and the only non-Jewish scholar in the volume, provided a short piece on the history of Balkan Jews (9–12). Spomenica introduced new names to Jewish academics, in particular Kalmi Baruh (1896–1945) who published a brief overview of his research on Judeo-Spanish (71–77). Thus,

3 “[V]eličinu i polet jevrejskog duha i srca […]”.

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the collective editions gave space for a range of histories and for voices of different types of ‘historian’. Including memoirs, literary and philosophical contributions, as well as ethnography and source-based histories, Spomenica broadened the scope of edited volumes but also perspectives on the Sephardi past. The Sephardi cultural associations and individuals from the two regions furthered their connections in their new political environment, which was evident from the attempts to merge historical narratives in Godišnjak (Yearbook), jointly published by La Benevolencia and its sister organisation from Belgrade, Potpora (Support), in 1933. This volume gathered works on the Sephardim in both Serbia and Bosnia for the first time. Following the example of Spomenica, Godišnjak offered a variety of forms: essays, biographies of noted community members and personal insights. Interest in the past had evidently widened, and the attention these volumes received among the Sephardim in the interwar period in Yugoslavia further encouraged this type of publication. Moreover, in the introduction, Kalmi Baruh offered insights into plans to develop the cultural and academic scene, which included enriching communal libraries, the preservation of the archival material and further publications of historical work. On this occasion, La Benevolencia and Potpora encouraged all communities (kehilot) to collect and preserve potentially significant documents. This plea was part of a larger strategy to collect and conserve historical documents. For instance, on the behalf of La Benevolencia, Kalmi Baruh examined the material on Jews in Dubrovnik in the State Archive and made a selection of documents that were to be copied with a photocopying machine which the association acquired in 1932. This systematic effort was to be crowned by a written history of Dubrovnik’s Jewry. The role of historian fell upon Jorjo Tadić (1899–1969), an acknowledged scholar of the Mediterranean world (Tadić 1937; 1962). While this amalgam of knowledge in edited memorial volumes had inspired publications and interest in the past, it neglected the need for structural and critical historical studies in accordance with modern scholarship, which was pursued outside of the communal sphere. Furthermore, not a single Sephardi intellectual took on the role of narrator of the communal past. Well-educated Sephardi circles did not lack intellectuals for the role of a historian. Due to the growing number of unemployed alumni in the 1930s, La Benevolencia ceased to provide scholarships for the humanities (Baruh 1933: 10). Thus, the Sephardim showed interest in historical and cultural volumes on the one hand while also demonstrating their inability to cultivate a generation of Sephardi historians, or at least a community historian, on the other. The lack of an institution which could provide training in the humanities, including a critical approach to history, removed the option for cultivating modern historical scholarship. Writing Sephardi history was delegated to distinguished professional historians who enjoyed institutional recognition and support, such as Tihomir Đorđević and Jorjo Tadić.

Writers of the Sephardi Past

The lack of an institutionally recognised historian did not discourage Sephardi scholars from dealing with the Sephardi past, however; rather, their engagement in this generation took a different direction. Kalmi Baruh’s career is indicative of this, as not only did he receive attention within Sephardi intellectual circles, but his research became part of a wider Yugoslav institutional interest. Born in Sarajevo in 1896 in one of the oldest Sephardi families in the city, Baruh grew up in times of accelerated social change in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the province went from being a part of Austro-Hungarian empire to a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Chief Rabbi Moritz Levy recognised his talent and diligence and became his mentor (Vidaković-Petrov iv). Thus, Baruh was included in a continuous line of Sarajevan Sephardi scholars starting with Moshe Attias in the late nineteenth century. Baruh received a prestigious secular education at the University of Vienna with the support of La Benevolencia. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the phonetic development of Judeo-Spanish in Bosnia (Baruh 1923). Prior to his thesis, there was no scholarly interest in Judeo-Spanish among the Sephardim in Bosnia. His research was well received by the public, mostly thanks to Rabbi Levy’s support, who reported on Baruh’s successful publications in Jewish newspapers in Sarajevo. The linguistic excellence nurtured by the previous generations of Sephardi intellectuals in Sarajevo reached its zenith in Baruh’s scholarship. His approach to Judeo-Spanish promoted the view of the Sephardi language as a continuous connection between the Jewish past in medieval Spain and the Sephardi present in the modern diaspora. Furthermore, Baruh’s stance on the place of Judeo-Spanish was at the core of the Sephardi movement, the political and cultural ideology of Sephardi intellectuals in Sarajevo in the 1920s. This cultural and political stand defended the Sephardi particularity in the larger Jewish context and saw Judeo-Spanish, alongside specific “historical developments”, as the essence of Sephardi difference (Kamhi 3–5). Moreover, these Sephardi intellectuals called for a systematic study of the Sephardi history and culture. Baruh’s scholarship was, thus, not only closely connected with the cultural aspects but also the political implications of the Sephardi movement in the late 1920s. Baruh was recognised as the most prominent Sephardi scholar when he assumed the position of editor of the second edited volume on Sephardi history—Godišnjak—in 1933. He proved, moreover, to be a successful facilitator of historical research; Baruh was put in charge of collecting historical documents and preserving the archival material in Dubrovnik’s State Archive. Furthermore, he was recognised as a Hispanic studies scholar in Yugoslavia, and his work was included in the framework of the Institute of Balkan studies, formed in 1934 in Belgrade. The incentive behind the institute was embedded in a geopolitical context and called for mutual understanding and rapprochement between all Balkan peoples, Jews included (Parežanin). Kalmi Baruh’s research had a place in this Balkan scheme, as

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it was centred around the Judeo-Spanish language from both linguistic and culturalhistorical perspectives. Thus, Baruh’s research on Judeo-Spanish fitted within both Sephardi Jewish and wider Yugoslav intellectual circles, while enjoying institutional support from both sides.

Conclusion Paulina Lebl Albala’s remark on the lack of an all-encompassing work covering Sephardi history in the Balkans remains relevant today, even though there have been significant changes in the field. From a technical standpoint, the reasons why scholars rarely invest time in studying this rich and under-researched field have not changed in the last century: to engage with the Sephardi history of the Balkans, a historian must be well acquainted with a number of languages and scripts. As this article shows, contrary to Lebl Albala’s remark, interest and commitment to the study of the past has persisted among the Sephardim in the Balkans. All the examples discussed testify to an ever-increasing historical consciousness which was expressed through a number of historical volumes, but also journalistic articles and antiquarian collections dedicated to Sephardi past. The position of the writers of the Sephardi past significantly influenced this written legacy. It is clear that, before 1918, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina developed a direct line of successors established among Sephardi scholars stretching from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Moshe Attias, Moritz Levy, and Kalmi Baruh gained a remarkable level of education for their time and location, while their personal investment in learning Oriental languages, especially Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, opened a broader base for consulting a range of sources. Their works testify to a refined approach to the Sephardi past but also to improved conditions of working and a better-informed audience, arguably with higher standards. In contrast, the Sephardim in Serbia produced disparate works which did not awaken a need for critical works and scholars in their community but passed the task of history writing on to non-Jews. Even after 1918, when the two streams merged in memorial volumes, the Bosnian Sephardim maintained higher standards in their works. The path of Sephardi history writing in the wider Yugoslav cultural space during the interwar period shows how deeply the lack of an institution shaped the production of historiography. While secular education gained ever-more esteem and generations of Sephardi intellectuals were educated abroad and in state schools, the Jewish and specifically Sephardi education relied on the meldar, which did not offer an introduction to modern approaches to the Jewish past. Likewise, state institutions did not show any interest in including the history of Jewish citizens within their institutions. In this situation, without institutional backing, the devel-

Writers of the Sephardi Past

opment of historical studies relied on conscientious, well-educated and dedicated individuals. This disparity in power between individuals and institutions explains the lack of Sephardi historians of the region and provides a valid answer to Lebl Albala’s question. While modern historical scholarship did not grow roots until the 1930s, the last great pre-war Sephardi scholar of Yugoslavia laid the foundations of Sephardi studies. Baruh’s works on linguistics and Judeo-Spanish literature channelled interest in the Sephardi past into Sephardi studies. One of the reasons for Baruh’s success was his position as a scholar in both the Jewish communal sphere and in the wider Yugoslav academic world. It was precisely this balance and dedication to scholarly and social spheres that made him an outstanding scholar of the Sephardim.

Works cited Alcalay, I. “The Jews of Serbia.” The American Jewish Year Book 20 (1918–1919): 75–87. Altarats, Ya’akov Mosheh Hai. Zikhron Yerushalayim. Belgrade, 1887. Altarats, Ya’akov Mosheh Hai. Trezoro de Yisra’el. Belgrade, 1890. Barnai, Jacob. “Rosanes, Salomon Abraham.” Encyclopaedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Ed. Norman A. Stillman. Brill Online, 2010. https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/ encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/rosanes-salomon-abraham-COM_0018630. Accessed 12 June 2020. Baruh, Kalmi. Der Lautstand des Judenspanischen in Bosnien. Dissertation. Universität Wien, 1923. Baruh, Kalmi. “Introduction.” Godišnjak [izdaju Jevrejsko kulturno-prosvetno društvo La Benevolencia u Sarajevu i Dobrotvorno društvo ‘Potpora’]. Sarajevo: Štamparija Menahem Papo, 1933/5694: 1–32. Benbassa, Esther, and Rodrigue, Aron. Sephardi Jewry. A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries. Berkley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1993. Bernfeld, Simon. Istoria de los đideos. Belogrado: Estamparia de Shemuel Horovitz, 1891/ 5651. Confino, J. “Zadatak i rad sefardske akademske mladeži.” Židovska smotra 20 Feb. 1914: 53–55. Davičo, Hajim S. “Slike iz jevrejskog života na Jaliji beogradskoj.” Otadžbina 3.7 (1881): 296–301. Davičo, Hajim S. Sa Jalije. Belgrade: Knjižara D. M. Ćorića, 1898. Deutsch, Gotthard, and Franco, M. Bosnia. Jewish Encyclopedia [1906]. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3592-bosnia. Accessed 2 September 2020.

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Feiner, Shmuel. Haskalah and History. The Emergence of a Modern Historical Consciousness. Trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston. Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2002. Graetz, Heinrich. Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart I-XI. Berlin: Institut zur Förderung der Israelitischen Literatur, 1856–1870. Hardtwig, Wolfgang. Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1990. Kamhi, S. “Sefardi i sefardski poket.” Biblioteka Esperanza. Sefardi i sefardski pokret. Zagreb: Štamparija “Lino Tip”, 1927: 3–18. Lebl Albala, Paulina. “Srpski književni glasnik o Benevolencijinoj Spomenici.” Jevrejski život 8 Aug. 1924: 3–4. Lehmann, Matthias B. “Jewish Nationalism in Ladino: Jacob Moshe Hay Altarats’ Zikhron Yerushalayim.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17.2 (2010): 146–59. Levy, Moritz. Die Sephardim in Bosnien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden auf der Balkanhalbinsel. Sarajevo: Druck und Verlag von Daniel A. Kajon, 1911. Naar, Devin E. “The ‘Mother of Israel’ or the ‘Sephardi Metropolis’? Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Romaniotes in Salonica.” Jewish Social Studies 22.1 (2016): 81–129. Nezirović, Muhamed. “Historija bosanskih Jevreja Moše (Rafaela) Atijasa – Zeki Efendije.” Prilozi 29 (2000): 245–60. http://www2.filg.uj.edu.pl/ wwwip/postjugo/files/ 118/bosanskih-jevreja.pdf. Accessed 31 Mar 2021. Papo Bohoreta, Laura. Sefardska žena u Bosni. Trans. Muhamed Nezirović. Sarajevo: Connectum, 2005. Papo Bohoreta, Laura. Rukopisi I-III. Trans. Sejdalija Gušić, Edina Spahić, and Cecilija Prenz Kopušar. Sarajevo: Historijski arhiv/Filozofski fakultet, 2015. Papo, Eliezer. “The Life and Opus of Laura Papo Bohoreta, the First Judeo-Spanish Feminine Dramatist.” El Prezente 1.8 (2007): 61–89 (Hebrew). Papo, Eliezer. “The Linguistic Thought of Laura Papo ‘Bohoreta’ in its Historical and Social Context.” Peamim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 118 (2009): 125–75 (Hebrew). Papo, Eliezer. “Sephardic Haskalah and Al-Andaluz: Transmission or Construction of Collective Memory? Case Study: Yaakov Moshe Hay Altarats’ Trezoro de Yisrael.” (Lecture, Kings College, 10 December 2019). Parežanin, Ratko (ed.). Knjiga o Balkanu I. Belgrade: Balkanski institut, 1936. Rigorosen Moritz Levy. Archiv der Universität Wien, 1906. Rodrigue, Aron. “Salonica in Jewish Historiography.” Jewish History 28.3–4 (2014): 439–47. Stein, Sarah A., and Cohen, Julia P. “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds. Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100.3 (2010): 358–359. Tadić, Jorjo. Jevreji u Dubrovniku do polovine XVII stoljeća. Sarajevo: La Benevolencia, 1937. Tadić, Jorjo. Iz istorije Jerveja u jugoistočnoj Evropi. Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1962. Večerina Tomaić, Jagoda. Bohoreta, najstarija kći. Zagreb: Židovska vjerska zajednica Bet Israel/Skaner studio, 2016.

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Vidaković Petrov, Krinka. “A Tribute to Kalmi Baruh.” Selected Works on Sephardic and Other Jewish Topics. Kalmi Baruh. Eds. Vidaković Petrović, Krinka, and Alexander Nikolić. 2nd, ext. and corr. ed. Beer Sheva, Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture; Jerusalem: Shefer Publishers, 2007: iii–xi. Vinaver, Stanislav (ed.). Spomenica o proslavi tridesetogodišnjice sarajevskoga kulturnopotpornog društva La Benevolencia. Sarajevo: Štamparija i cinkografija “Vreme”, 1924a. Vinaver, Stanislav. “Moj odgovor.” Jevrejski život 5 June 1924b/4 Sivan 5684: 4–5. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.

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The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews as Reflected in Judeo-Spanish Sources From the 16th to the 20th Centuries

Abstract:

By bringing together relevant excerpts from Sephardic texts from the early 1900s and 1600s, the paper attempts to analyze Sephardic multilingualism in the Balkans and to present their linguistic competence via the prism of Sephardic auto-perception. Of particular relevance are the references to the multilingual skills of Sephardic women, as female multilingualism contradicts the popular stereotype of Sephardic women as monolinguals and the main preservers of Judeo-Spanish for centuries in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans. Likewise, the specific cases outline the relevant facts concerning the formation of Judeo-Spanish in contact with Turkish, Greek, Italian and other Balkan and non-Balkan languages.

Introduction and socio-historic context This article focuses on the language contacts and the multilingualism of Balkan Sephardic Jews during the Ottoman period between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Like other ethnoreligious groups, so called millets, of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish communities lived in a rather secluded manner and, apart from trade, administrative and business relations, they did not maintain intense contacts with other socio-ethnic groups that composed the Ottoman society. Sephardic Jews settled in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire: in the largest port cities, such as Istanbul, Salonika, Izmir, but also in inland areas of the Balkans, along the Danube River up to Vienna, and southwards to Cairo and Aleppo. Moreover, Sephardic Jews had an elaborate trade network across the Balkans and Mediterranean ranging from Ragusa to Istanbul and beyond, and, when travelling for business, Jewish traders used to stay with their business partners and relatives. Sephardic traders used Judeo-Spanish for their daily communication and business correspondence; however, in their interactions with administrative authorities and clients, they used Turkish, Greek, South Slavic languages or other local languages. The linguistic usages of Sephardim throughout time has been discussed by several scholars, inter alia, Bunis (1999) and Schwarzwald (2003), providing relevant

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insights on the formation and development of Judeo-Spanish, hereinafter ‘JS’ in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. Beside several insights on JS in a Balkan context, its historical sociolinguistic framework and the social history of the Sephardim de Levante, it will suffice to quote the findings by Bunis (1982), further developed in his more recent works on JS periodization and formation (Bunis 2013): When dealing with Modern Judezmo speech communities of the former Ottoman Empire and its successor states, it is crucial to distinguish between the earlier, more insulated and traditional period (here called the Early Modern Eastern Judezmo, extending roughly from 1839 to World War I1 ), and the subsequent more extroverted and “cosmopolitan” period (Late Modern Eastern Judezmo), in which the influences of French, Italian and other Western European languages and civilization began practically to overwhelm significant segments of the Eastern Sephardic populace. (Bunis 1982: 47)

The adoption of Balkan elements into Judeo-Spanish During the Ottoman period, JS acquired Balkan elements—not only Balkan vocabulary but also plenty of grammatical structures found in the primary Balkan languages (Greek, Balkan-Slavic, Balkan-Romance, Albanian). Nowadays, JS is recognized as a Neo-Balkan language. The development of JS as part of the Balkan Sprachbund 2 has been studied, inter alia, by Gabinskiy (1992), Friedman and Joseph (2014), and Dobreva (2016). Dozens of Balkan structures adopted in JS have been detected, which, instead of innovations, represent reinforcements of its Hispanic legacy. A clearer picture of the Balkan features in JS may be obtained by focusing on its contact with local Balkan languages. This contact took the form of a bilingual and multilingual competence of JS natives who used several languages in daily communication. In fact, not only Jews but all other populations of Ottoman towns were multilingual (e.g. Lindstedt 2016, Nikolova 2006). This intense contact with Balkan languages reactivated several rare or peripheral Hispanic and Ibero-Romance features in JS which existed on an areal level across the Balkan Sprachbund.

1 Reference by Bunis (1982) to Luria (1930): Luria, Max. A study of the Monastir dialect of JS based on oral material collected in Monastir, Yugo-Slavia. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos. [Reprinted from The Revue Hispanique 79 (1930): 323–583]. 2 Balkan Sprachbund or Balkan Linguistic Area (introduced by Trubetzkoy 1923, 1928) is a term referring to the common features (grammatical, phonological, semantic, etc.) of Balkan languages despite their genealogical distance but instead resulting from their intense contact over the course of centuries in a single geographic area, i.e., the Balkan Peninsula.

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

However, the mechanisms for the adoption and establishment of Balkan features in spoken and written Judeo-Spanish (as detected in JS texts from the early twentieth century) took place gradually over centuries based on the active and daily multilingualism of the Ottoman urban population. On the one hand, JS is regarded as a conservative version of Spanish, but on the other, the same conservative Hispanic features which continued to be active in JS (but were dropped from Spanish) five centuries after its separation from its IberoRomance background coincide with the Balkan areal features. This coincidence often goes unmentioned and is perceived and interpreted as the conservation of old Hispanic or Romance features and the nature of their Balkan contact remains unknown. Despite receiving considerable attention over the last few decades, the Balkan influence in JS deserves further study, as the Old Hispanic features in question were maintained and strengthened in JS precisely because of the contact with local Balkan languages. While regarding JS in a diachronic perspective (over its development in the Balkans between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries) and tracing Hispanic and Ibero-Romance features, the historical-contrastive method is applied, while, in the analysis from Balkan perspective, the typological-areal approach is followed.

Specific JS features adopted via contact with Balkan languages When JS joined the Balkan Sprachbund (after the end of the fifteenth century), it adopted those features from local languages which had already established and spread as areal features3 across the Balkans. For instance, JS tended to narrow the use of infinitive. Immediative or accompaniative functions indicate just-accomplished or simultaneous event accompanying the main action. In immediative and accompaniative constructions, JS tended to replace the prepositional infinitive by a prepositional gerund. Thus, the JS en + gerundio prevailed over the Spanish al + infinitivo, which coexisted and competed for the same functions in Medieval Spanish. Due to the overall lack of preference for the infinitive form in the Balkan area, Balkan languages also apply gerunds or other non-finite forms other than the infinitive in the above functions. Examples of JS immediative follow: (1) […] en arivando a Samokov, todos estos ja vinieron a resivir sus ropas […] (Arie 93) […] upon his arrival at Samokov, all of them came to get their clothes […]

3 “A typological language feature was assumed to be areal if (a) shared by at least three languages of the area, at least two of which belong to different genetic families, but (b) not present in all the languages of the genetic family to which the language of the area belongs.” (Tomić 3)

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After separating from the Ibero-Romance languages, JS maintained and strengthened specific medieval Hispanic features thanks to Balkan support. In other words, JS kept and reactivated those Medieval Ibero-Romance features which were active in the Balkan languages. Contact with Balkan languages helped to reinforce those Medieval Hispanic features which were dropped from use in Modern Spanish. Another example may be the replacement of subjunctive by indicative in JS in several types of dependent clauses supported by the Balkan syncretism between indicative and subjunctive (complete syncretism in Greek and Balkan Slavic indicative and subjunctive forms and very reduced differences in Balkan Romance languages, limited to the third conjugation). Despite the co-referentiality of the abessive ‘without’-clause in the example below, JS prefers the finite form sin ke + Indicative (instead of Spanish sin + Infinitive): (2) […] i esto es lo ke azian sin ke pensavan para aprovetcharsen en el mizmo dija […] (Arie 313) […] and this is what they used to do without thinking of taking advantage the same day […]

The list of Balkan features in JS contains other characteristics unmentioned here (see for instance Gabinskiy 1996 and Dobreva 2016 referred above) and deserves further research, however, as Jews lived in the Ottoman towns in a rather secluded manner, the question arises of how JS acquired these Balkan structures and embedded them in its phonology, grammar and vocabulary?

Mechanisms of JS contact with local languages and historical background In approaching the contact between JS and Balkan languages, it suffices to notice that this contact took place at the level of the Jewish communities themselves, i.e., Sephardic Jews were in contact with Romaniotes and other Jewish groups, such as Ashkenazim who had settled in Ottoman territory prior to or concurrent with their arrival. Ottoman Jewry was an urban population enjoying relative independence, e.g., they had their own intracommunitarian court for civil and criminal matters. JS was used at the levels of family and community and as a business communication tool. Before the Ottoman conquest, Southeastern Europe had a rather linguistically heterogeneous Jewish population and JS came to fill the linguistic divide. Beside the Greek-speaking Romaniotes, several local Jewish communities, for instance, the ones in Danubian forts, used the Balkan Romance varieties developed on the basis of the Balkan Latin, a reminder of Roman heritage. During the Late Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, the Balkans became a hub for various religious

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

groups who tried to avoid Byzantine Christian persecutions or were settled by force at the northern borders of the Byzantine Empire, a place of constant unrest due to the invasions of foreign tribes. Greek and Romance-speaking Jews also used to escape northwards from Christian persecutions and settle in the Bulgarian and other Balkan Slavic kingdoms. Simultaneously, there was a constant influx of Ashkenazim from Central Europe, migrating from Hungary, Bohemia, Bavaria, and other European kingdoms. Beside these, Jewish traders from Venice and other Italian towns had also settled across the Balkan Peninsula. They were often invited by the local rulers to develop specific crafts and trade, as is the case of the Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II (r. 1218–1241), who invited Italian Jews to the capital Tarnovo and other important Bulgarian towns. They used to speak the respective Italian variety and were referred to as “Francos” by the local Romaniotes. During the Medieval period, more Francos settled in the Slavic kingdoms neighboring the Byzantine Empire to the North. Gradually, this Jewish population inhabiting the medieval Slavic kingdoms adopted the local languages, i.e., the respective medieval Balkan Slavic variety. In the fifteenth century, a significant Jewish migration to the Balkans took place from neighboring non-Ottoman territories. As mentioned above, Balkan society had always been multilingual, and linguistic contact and exchange constantly occurred. In Ottoman times, due to the unified political and economic structure, this trend intensified even more and, on a linguistic level, found expression in the development of numerous identical syntactic and semantic features between the contacted Balkan languages. The aforementioned identical features did not originate only from mutual contact and convergence, but also as a result of identical living conditions and external influences. During the pre-Ottoman period, the newly arrived as well as local Jewish communities could live alongside one another in the same Balkan town without much interaction between each other; they used to pray, for instance, in separate synagogues. Around the end of the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans became the military and political power in the Balkans, several separate Jewish communities used to co-habitate in the same towns and speak different languages. For instance, upon the Ottoman conquest of Sofia in 1393, Ottoman documents mention four Jewish communities: the Ashkenazim, the Hungarians, the Romaniotes and the Francos. However, a few centuries later, “some fiscal documents from the 17th century, mainly receipts for the payment of taxes, concern only the yahudi cemaat as an entity.” (Gradeva 229). The uniform structure of newly imposed Ottoman rule all over the Balkans entailed and contributed to the prevalence of JS over the other Jewish languages spoken at the time. An illustrative example of improvement in communication and openness may be the so-called “Vidin Haskala” from 1594, i.e., an agreement that allowed marriages between the relatively recently arrived Hungarian Jews and the local ones from Vidin.

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When the Sephardic Jews settled in Ottoman lands, JS filled the linguistic gap among Jews belonging to different communities and the Balkan Sephardic koiné4 was formed on the basis of JS absorbing elements from the languages spoken by the local Jews in the pre- and early Ottoman periods. In this way, the Balkan variety of JS was formed and received Balkan influence at the internal communitarian level, i.e., within the Jewish community and not so much through interaction with local Balkan non-Jews. During the Ottoman period, the different Jewish communities began to communicate and unite: those newly arrived from Hungary and other Central European kingdoms interacted with the Romaniotes (who, depending on the region, preserved their Greek or had switched to the respective medieval Balkan-Slavic language) and the Francos who spoke their native Venetian or other Italian variety. The process of lingual JS leveling and isomorphization5 was supported by the smooth relations (via trade networks, marriages) carried out by Ottoman Jews all over the imperial territory, not only in Istanbul, Cairo, but also in Raguza, Danube forts up to Adrianopolis, Candia and Beirut. By around the 1750s, the Sephardim had assimilated Romaniotes in most of the Ottoman towns. Referring to the case of Sofia (until 1830, the capital of Rumeli, the European lands of the Ottoman Empire), Gradeva points out that “in the records of the Sheriat court from Sofia we find Jews ‘of the frenk cemaat’ as distinguished from those ‘of the alaman’ one,” Gradeva (2004: 230). Therefore, as mentioned above, JS absorbed elements from the languages spoken by the Romaniotes (speaking Greek and Balkan Slavic languages), Francos (speaking Venetian and other Italian varieties), and to a certain degree by Hungarian and Ashkenazi Jews. This influence interacted with the Ibero-Romance inheritance (mixing Castilian and peripheral Ibero-Romance, i.e., Aragonese, Catalan, Portuguese, South Spanish elements). The linguistic levelling of JS is described in detail by Minervini (2002) but without mentioning the involvement of Balkan contacts in this process. JS flourished and was established as the language of trade and business relations among Jewish traders all over the Ottoman Empire. Over time, JS evolved into one of the languages of Balkan Jewry, alongside the Judeo-Greek preserved by the larger Romaniote communities (those in Istanbul and Yanina), and the Yiddish spoken

4 See e.g. Minervini (2002). 5 Minervini (ibid.) explains the factors contributing for the isomorphization of JS in the Eastern Mediterranean: “La reducción de variantes se hace a base de distintos factores: demografía (no automáticamente), prominencia (conciencia de los hablantes), simplicidad (regularización de los paradigmas), nivelación (abandono de variantes infrecuentes o marcadas).” (Minervini 500–501) (“The reduction of variants occured on basis of different factors, like demography (not automatically), prominence (consciousness of speakers), simplification (regularizatio of paradigms), levelling (drop of unfrequent or marked forms).”) If not noted otherwise, all translations are mine.

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

by the Ashkenazim. The contact of JS with the above mentioned languages used by local Jews ensured the replication of Balkan features in JS grammar and semantics. Likewise, Italian influence was strong in JS, as many Venetian Jews had settled Venetian-ruled islands and territories in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, where they developed bilingualisms based on Italian and Greek;6 moreover, several Sephardim passed through Italian towns before transferring to the Ottoman Empire. Last, but not least, the described change took place under the constant influence of Hebrew as the language of religious practice, reading and writing. Besides Hebrew, throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Ladino also assumed an important role as a language of religious and philosophical reasoning, as testified in various rabbinical responsa. In sum, the contact with Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan languages reshaped JS as a language of Ibero-Romance heritage; the process took place at an internal level within JS while in contact with Balkan and non-Balkan languages used by local Jews as outcome of exchange within these Jewish communities. In respect to these sixteenth century developments, Hacker describes the following historical process: These developments, alongside the gradual erosion of cultural and mental differences between communities of different origin (as a result of the Sephardic hegemony and the resulting “Sephardization” of non-Iberian communities), all contributed to a blunting of distinctions between groups in terms of their customs, lifestyles, and styles of prayer [...]. (Hacker: 845)

In sum, JS koiné was formed under intense contact with Balkan and other languages spoken by non-Sephardic Jews rather than by interaction with other ethnic groups.

Examples from relevant JS sources In the following, I will provide specific examples to illustrate the claims made above about the formation of JS and the replication of Balkan features therein. The next example is taken from Bunis (2017: 225–27), and it refers to a Sephardic woman who translates the words of her Bulgarian maidservant during a court hearing in front of the local Rabbi on account of an event that occurred in 1599. This case shows that the Sephardic woman communicated with her servants and

6 See, for instance Lauer 2014, on the specific socio-linguistic situation of Candia Jews between 14th and 17th centuries, speaking both Greek and Italian and writing in Hebrew letters.

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neighbors in the local (Bulgarian) language in the town of Nikopol (a port on the Danube, present-day North Bulgaria on the border with Romania). (3) […] in the responsa of Rabbi Šĕlomo Ha-Kohen (Maharšak) of sixteenth-century Salonika (part 4, no. 87). According to it, witnesses before the rabbinical court testified in 5359 [1599] on the murder of two Jews in Nikopol. Yis.h.aq Bar David testified that on the Ninth of Av the wife of Moše Bĕxar Šĕlomo was crying in the company of others about her murdered husband; a Gentile girl present told […] “bi-lšon burġaresko” (i.e., in Bulgarian) of the death of another Jew, saying […] (transcribed in the footnote, as follows: Gorgel Sebotin meshdú kyervasar[a]ya, udárihe udárihe, i zagine.). (Bunis 2017: 225–226)

The same author goes on remarking that: Her words were translated into Judezmo, evidently by the witness, as “Desdichao de Shabetay, entre los dos kieravasarás lo firieron i murió” (Poor Šabbĕtay, between the two inns they wounded him and he died). Other Gentile girls present asked her who she was referring to; it was to Šabbĕtay Ben El‘azar. Sarah, the wife of Avraham ‘Immanu’el, told the court that a Gentile girl told her how murderers came and burned the city and praised themselves for their act. Her statement “bi-lšon burgaresko” […] was translated […] (“bi-lšon la‘az” ’in Judezmo’) as “Mira unos peros ke se alavavan i dezían ke a Sebotin ijo de Lazar lo mataron i lo desharon dientro de kaza i se kemó” (Look at those dogs who praised themselves and said that they killed Sebotin [Šabbĕtay], son of Lazar, and left him inside the house and it burned). Sarah further reported that a Gentile girl came and told her “bi-lšon burgaresko” words that she translated as “Shabetay ben Lazar, lo mataron, i eya lo vio ke lo mataron i lo kortaron la kavesa por un kavo i el kuero por otro entre los dos kieravasarás” (Šabbĕtay Ben Lazar, they killed him, and she saw that they killed him and they cut off his head at the end [and it was in one place] and his neck in another, between the two inns). (Bunis 2017: 227)

Another example, also provided by Bunis (2017: 227), refers to a conversation conducted in Bulgarian in 1600, between a Jewish shopkeeper and a Bulgarian visitor in Vidin. As reported by Bunis, this conversation is mentioned in the responsa (1621: no. 2) by Rabbi Aharon Sason (b. 1550, d. Constantinople 1626). The conversation was partially reconstructed by the shopkeeper Yisra’el Šim‘on, a JS speaker, for the rabbinical court of Salonika in the following words: (4) Estando en mi butika en Vidin, vino un akum, konesido mío, i komo me vido se ayegó a·mi i estávamos favlando uno kon otro … i el … me disho, “Tanbién a·tu konpanyero, Yosef Ruso, i a·dos ermanastros ke siempre ivan djuntos, los fayí matados i los enterí yo.” (Bunis 2017: 227)

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

While in my shop in Vidin there came a Christian, an acquaintance of mine, and when he saw me he approached me and we spoke together … and he … told me, “Also your friend, Yosef Ruso, and two half-brothers who were always together, I found, murdered, and I buried them.” The following example also concerns the business communication carried out by shopkeepers’ wives in 1550s Istanbul: (5) […] se ponen en las boticas en los lugares de sus maridos a comprar y vender, de tal manera que los que suelen hacer los maridoos acaso, hacen ellas con mucha istancia y continuo orden. (Almosnino 230) […] they stay in the shops instead of their husbands to buy and sell in such a way that they do the tasks of their husbands better and with lots of excellence and order.

The same author provides relevant comments on the structure of the sixteenthcentury Jewish quarter in Istanbul and the communication by its female inhabitants from their houses: (6) […] como no tienen otro lugar de espaciarse ni conversar que las ventanas y puertas y lugares públicos que van a dar a la calle, de las cuales conversan y pratican con hombres y mujeres que están en otras ventanas y puertas enfrente dellas y a sus lados y con las que pasan por las callas, el costrumbre en este, junto con el ocio que de continuo tienen sin momento di trabaje, las hace tan disolutas que no se quiten jamas de las ventanas y puertas, y de allí vienen a comunicar con todos y dar pratica a todos, tanto hombres como mujeres. (Almosnino 229–230) As they lack other places to walk or talk, but the windows and doors and public places facing the streets, they speak and chat from there with the men and women staying at other windows and doors in front of them or near or the ones passing by the streets and this habit, as they have so much free time and leisure, absorbs them so as to never get away from the windows and from there they communicate with everyone and chat with everyone, both men and women.

The next example describes the arrival of a Sephardic family from Vienna and their settlement into the Ottoman Empire (also in Vidin, in the early nineteenth century) and their acquisition of Turkish: (7) […] ejos ke non konesian la lingua Turka, al prensipio soufrian ma mas tadre ejos si tomaron por profesor a oun djidio, para ke los enbezara los principios de la lingua Turka, ansi de mismo lo isieron i las moujeris, i ejos todos ke ja eran mountcho entelegentes foe ke ne pouko tiempo, si enpeso algo i a dar a entender i kon las turkas ke li vinian a la boutika por azer empleos de moda noevos de ropas ke traiva de Kostan, mas tadre ke li

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enpesaron a vinir a la boutika i de los Beges turkos, izo ke si tomo oun profesor turko i tomava liksion kada dia, ke en oun enterval de oun anio soupo avlar boeno i tambien eskrivir. (Arie 24) [T]hey did not know the Turkish language[;] in the beginning they suffered from this, but later they took a Jewish teacher to teach them the principles of Turkish, so did their wives and they all, being very smart, in no time began to understand their Turkish customers who used to come to the shop to order new fashionable clothes which would arrive from Istanbul[;] later on, when the Turkish beges started visiting the shop, he hired a Turkish teacher and every day he took a lesson and within a year he could speak and write well.

Another example refers to a case when the main character Abraham Arie from the Biography of the Family Arie (the author’s grandfather) was invited to and attended a Roma wedding as a show of gratitude and respect. As pointed out by the author, he used to know some words in Romani: (8) el S-r Abraam I esto todo saviendolo si detchizo de ir a esta boda ke unas koantas palavras en zinganesko ja savia. (Arie 127) And having known all this, Mr. Abraam decided to go to the wedding because he already knew some words in Romani.

The next case narrates an event where Sephardic wealthy women living in Samokov went to visit their Turkish women-neighbors. (9) [...] i si estaban fin ke si azia noche i en el tiempo ke ejas estaban kalia ke non uvieran ombres en kaza a razon del harem ke ejas lo goadran i ansi de mizmo lo azian i las mujeres moestras ke i ejas tambien lis ivan i de las mismas onores ke lis azian a ejas ke koando si dizia saraflar era kon boka jena, koanto a las tchorbadjis kristianas non se por koalo non lo azian si podra admeter a razon de la lingua ke las kristianas non konosian del todo la lingua turka i las moestras ke nou konosian del entodo la lingua bulgara kali dizir ke siria por esto ke otra razon nada non poedi aver ke entre ejos los ombres eran de mui boenas i tinian muntcho trato i barato kon ejos [...]. (Arie 92) [A]nd they stood until dark and during this time no men were allowed in the house because they preserve their harem and thus our women used to go to show respect and when they would say saraflar ‘money exchangers’ they used to say it with respect; however, I do not know for what reason, such honors were not shown to the wealthy Christians, probably the reason for this may be that the Christian women did not know Turkish at all and ours ignored the Bulgarian language; it should be probably for this reason and no other; the relations between men were smooth and lots of exchange and communication was going on.

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

The text above provides relevant linguistic facts about the development of JS over the nineteenth century, such as that, unlike las tchorbadjis kristianas (“the Bulgarian wealthy ladies”), the Sephardic ladies did know Turkish, but not Bulgarian. In the following lines, the author criticizes the young Jewish ladies for knowing more Western songs than Sephardic ones: (10) [...] i lis izo saver ke moestra santa Ley no defende a dinguno de alavarlo i rogarle seja a los ombres komo tambien i a las mujeres, solo ke lo sepan meldar para bendizirlo, foe en este tiempo (5578) ke empesaron a kantar las mutchatchas en el Kaal [...] i esto era solo las mutchatchas de la Familia Arie, ke a las mutchatchas de otroas familias non las dechavan sus padres porke es pekado, ma mas tadre foe alesensiado de su padre H. Chelomo Koen su ija Mazal, porke kantara i mas otra dinguno i esto turo fin a el tiempo de mi ija Rachel ke i eja tambien kantava los dotchos todos los kantos, djunto kon todas las mutchatchas de su edad tambien de entre la Familia Arie, i esto foe fin a el anio 5642-3 (1881-2-3) i mas non uvo porke ja troko la vida mas a la Franka i non es moderno, al menos en akel tiempo kon estas kozas ja era razon ke ja si enbezavan algo a meldar i en Lachon Akodech i savijan algo de la Tefilod, lo koal ke agora ja saven en las otras linguas i konosen muntcho mas mijor las tefilod de los kristianos ke de las moestras, de mizmo i los uzos. (Arie 217) [A]nd he made them know that our Holy law does not prevent anyone from praising or praying, be them men or women, it will suffice to be able to read in order to praise Him, it was in this time (5578/1817) the girls started singing in the Kaal, and these were but the girls from the Family Arie, while the girls from the other families were not allowed by their fathers, as it was sin, but later, H. Chelomo Koen permitted his daughter Mazal to sing, but nobody else did, and this lasted until the times of my daughter Rachel, as she could also sing all the praises together with the other girls from Arie Family and this went on until 5642-3 (1881-2-3) and then stopped, as life changed to a la Franca and it was not fashionable anymore, at least in those times, it was important to learn to read in Lachon Akodech and know some Tefilod, and now they know in other languages and they know Christian prayers much better than our own, same as their manners.

The examples above contradict the common portrait of Sephardic women as monolingual JS speakers who preserved their fifteenth-century Spanish for hundreds of years after leaving the Iberian lands. It appears just the opposite: the above examples show that Sephardic women communicated with their servants (and other witnesses in the court-case) in Bulgarian (in Nicopol at the end of the sixteenth century), and they paid visits and chatted in Turkish with women from the harem of Samokov’s bey in the middle of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, at the end of the nineteenth century, they knew Western European songs and etiquette better than Jewish ones.

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The same is true for Sephardic men who, as shopkeepers, tax-collectors, etc., used both Turkish and Bulgarian to communicate with their clients in Vidin throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The last example is relevant to show the levelling of JS, based on the case of a Sephardic family relocating from Vienna and Vidin to Samokov (nowadays Central Bulgaria). They speak in JS with local Jews; however, as pointed out by the author, the language is different: (11) [...] i por enfrentante, seja el s-r Abraam I, komo tambien la s-ra Buhuru, boltaron vijitas a todos estos ke lis vinieron i lis kontavan a todos los uzos de Vidin, a kada uno sigun su lenguaje ke todos los 2 tenian i savian boeno platikar. (Arie 84) [A]nd from now on, both Mr. Abraam I and his wife Mrs. Buhuru paid visits to all those who came to visit them and they would tell about the customs in Vidin, speaking to everyone according to their own language, as both of them were good at chatting.

Conclusions The excerpts presented above aim to show Sephardic multilingual skills and language acquisition via the prism of self-perception and were therefore left with minimal commentary. While Sephardic men, as traders, were multilingual, they were interested in communicating with their clients in their respective language; women, meanwhile, were frequently portrayed as monolingual Judeo-Spanish speakers. The examples presented above prove the opposite and show that Jewish men and women equally possessed multilingual skills. They communicated with their servants in Bulgarian, and they communicated in Turkish with the women from the harem of Samokov’s bey. As early as the sixteenth century some used to go to their shops and speak with their multilingual clients and, by the end of the nineteenth century, they knew Western European songs, language and manners better than their Jewish equivalents. Trade relations, frequent migration within the Ottoman Empire and beyond, settled marriages, etc., and, in general, the functioning organization of Jewish communities contributed to the formation of the Judeo-Spanish koiné. Simultaneously, the shared extra-linguistic reality with other Balkan peoples transformed Judeo-Spanish into a language of Balkan pragmatics which clearly projected onto its Hispanic grammar. Further studies remain to be carried out examining the socio-historical context of the formation and development of Judeo-Spanish in the Eastern Mediterranean

The Multilingualism of Balkan Jews

and its establishment as the language of Sephardic and local Balkan Jews living in the Ottoman Empire. Multilingualism is not regarded as an exceptional characteristic of Ottoman Jewry; on the contrary, like other people living in Ottoman territory, Jews and non-Jews used to speak several languages in their daily life, which reshaped their native language. Balkan multilingualism is studied, inter alia, by Nikolova (2006) and Lindstedt (2016) who observe that bilingualism and multilingualism were typical of the linguistic situation during the Ottoman period in the Balkans, when daily communication could require the use of two or three different languages (e.g., Turkish, Greek, etc.). Two examples above are taken from the responsa of Rabbi Šĕlomo Ha-Kohen (Maharšak), in sixteenth-century Salonika (part 4, no. 87) and Rabbi Aharon Sason (b. 1550, d. Constantinople 1626) (1621, no. 2), as reported by Bunis (2017). Other examples provide contemporary views from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries on Sephardic women’s multilingual skills and highlight the changes in the linguistic situation over the centuries: Judeo-Spanish was established as the main language of Sephardic and non-Sephardic Jews living in the Ottoman territory. Thus, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries JudeoSpanish became balkanized and adopted numerous Balkan features (Dobreva 2016) resulting from its contact with local languages. The Balkans and their neighboring areas are characterized by a continuous multilingualism, and the Ottoman period is no exception. Judeo-Spanish sources are a useful tool for studying Balkan language contact and the resulting multilingualism.

Works cited Arie, Abraam II. “Tchelebi-Moshe. Biografia de la Familia Arie.” Bulgarian Central State Archive. Archive unit 553, fund 1568к, description 1. vol. I, 1910. Almosnino, M. 1567. Crónica de los Reyes Otomanos. Transcription, edition and linguistic study by Romeu Ferré, P. Barcelona: Tirocinio, 1998. Bunis, David. “Lexical elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo in South Slavic Territory, 16–19th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics.” Journal of Jewish Languages 5.2 (2017): 217–252. Bunis, David. “Types of Nonregional Variation in Early Modern Eastern Spoken Judezmo.” International Journal of Sociology of the Language 37 (1982): 47–50. Bunis, David. “Una introducción a la lengua de los sefardíes a través de refranes en judezmo.” Judenspanisch I. Ed. Winfried Busse. (=Neue Romania 12). Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 1994: 7–36. Bunis, David. Judezmo. Introduction to the Language of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press/The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999.

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Bunis, David. “From Early Middle to Late Middle Judezmo.” El prezente, Studies in Sephardic Culture 7 (2013): 115–164. Friedman, Victor and Brian Joseph. “Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and contact linguistics.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 226 (2014): 3–23. Gabinskiy, Mark. Sefardskiy (evreisko-ispanskiy yazyk) [Russian: Judeo-Spanish (Balkan variety)]. Kisinev: Stiina, 1992. Gradeva, Rossitsa. “Jews and Ottoman Authority in the Balkans: The Cases of Sofia, Vidin and Rusuk, 15th–17th Centuries.” Rumeli Under the Ottomans, 15–18th Centuries: Institutions and Communities. Ed. Gradeva, Rossitsa. (=Analecta Isisiana LXXVI). Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2004: 225–285. Hacker, Joseph R. “The Rise of Ottoman Jewry (1400–1580).” The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7: The Early Modern Period, c.1500-c.1815. Eds. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017: 77–112. Lauer, Rena. Venice’s Colonial Jews: Community, Identity and Justice in the Late Medieval Venetian Crete. Doctoral dissertation Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274135. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021. Lindstedt, Jouko. “Multilingualism in the Central Balkans in late Ottoman times.” In Search of the Center and Periphery – Linguistic Attitudes, Minorities, and Landscapes in the Central Balkans. Eds. Maxim Makartsev and Max Wahlström. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2016: 51–67. Minervini, Laura. “La formación de la koiné judeo-española en el siglo XVI.” Revue de linguistique romane 66 (2002): 497–512. Nikolova, Nadka. Bilingvizmat v balgarskite zemi prez ХV-ХІХ vek [Bulgarian: Bilingualism in Bulgarian Lands in ХV-ХІХth centuries]. Shumen: Shumen University Publisher Konstantin Preslavski, 2006. Schwarzwald, Ora. JS/Judezmo/Ladino. Jewish Language Research Website. http://www.jewishlanguages.org/judeo-spanish.html 2003. Accessed Dec. 2020. Tomić, Mišeska, Olga. “The Balkan Sprachbund properties, An introduction.” Balkan Syntax and Semantics. Eds. Olga Tomić and Aida Martinovic-Zic. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, John Benjamins North America, 2004: 3–55. Trubetzkoy, Nikolay. “Vavilonskaya bashnnya i smeshenie yazykov [Russian: The Babylon Tower and Language Mixture].” Evraziiskiy vremennik 3 (1923): 107–124. Trubetzkoy, Nikolay. “Etablissement et délimitation des termes techniques, Proposition 16.” Actes du Premier Congrès international de linguistes. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff ’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1928: 17–18.

Tatjana Petzer (Halle/Berlin)

Rhythms of Creation The Impact of Bergsonian Thought on Serbian Modernism

Abstract:

The article traces Bergsonism in Serbian thought in the interwar period and the affirmation of intuition as the method of philosophy and creation, which was articulated above all in essays of the early 1920s published in the wake of expressionism in the magazine Misao (Thought). Examining the writings of Stanislav Vinaver in particular, who became a follower and an advocate of Henri Bergson’s philosophical ideas after attending his lectures in Paris, it will be shown how the new understanding of time, rhythm, and creative energy influenced Vinaver in developing a transformative modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. Moreover, as both Bergson and Vinaver had Polish Jewish backgrounds, the question will be raised whether the paradigm of modernity has received inspiration from Judaism. The transformational processes in Serbian society in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in particular against the backdrop of six years of the Balkan Wars and World War I (1912–1918) not only implied its modernization and Europeanization, but also the resistance to it (see Perović 1994; 2003), in other words: the process of “getting over Europe” (see Milutinović). Apart from political programs and individual attitudes which merged traditional and modernist elements, the following tendencies are characteristic: On the one hand, the young scientific culture had become the leading medium of Serbian society1 and modernist architecture and art became increasingly influential with urbanisation, paving the way for cultural integration with Europe (see Bogdanović et al.). On the other hand, intellectuals, writers, and artists turned against modernization and its imperialistic implications. For modelling a corrective to the Eurocentric belief in progress (Petzer 2007: 258), they collaborated in intellectual networks, such as the Zagreb-based journal Nova Evropa (New Europe).2 Finally, a modern

1 In Serbia, the institutionalisation of science did not begin until the late nineteenth century when the Royal Academy was founded in 1886. Belgrade’s Higher School was granted university status only in 1905. 2 The journal Nova Evropa (1920–1941) was edited by the Serbian poet, translator of Nietzsche und publisher Milan Ćurčin (1880–1960) who modelled this periodical according to the British magazine The New Europe (1916–1920) founded by the historian Robert William Seton-Watson.

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Serbian philosophy developed,3 characterised by spiritual and mystical mediations but paradoxically based on evolutionary and materialistic interpretations of the world and new scientific findings (Radulović 13). Interestingly, in this realm of Janus-faced modernity which permeated cultural and intellectual life in Serbia around 1900, philosophers, writers and artists were attracted and influenced by Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the noted French philosopher of Jewish descent and 1927 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. As will be shown in the following, Serbian modernism cannot be understood without Bergson’s concepts of durée and élan vital and his methodology of intuition, which fostered syncretism in thought and dynamism in aesthetics.

Bergson’s impact on modern Serbian philosophy In Serbian religious and secular philosophy in the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism in philosophical discourse found its expression in the cultural critique of Western rationalism. Life was not to be understood by intellect alone, and creation could not be ultimately explained by science and reason. This critique of the Western technicised culture was provided, for example, by the book Novi humanizam (New Humanism) jointly written by the pedagogue and publicist Vladimir Vujić (1886–1951) and the university professor of education Prvoš Slankamenac (1892–1952), in which they combined Bergson’s ideas with the pragmatism of the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) and the British pragmatist Ferdinand Schiller (1864–1937), whose 1903 book title, Humanism, they took up. Moreover, there was also a synthesis of Bergsonian intuitionism and the understanding that modern culture can only be saved by Eastern spirituality, which referred to South Asian traditions and to Orthodox Christianity. Against the background of the general cultural crisis around 1900, the contouring of the theanthropos as an existential orientation for human beings was becoming increasingly important for Slavic-Orthodox modernity. This is reflected in the Slavophiles’ recourse to the teachings of the Church Fathers and the mystical Hesychasm, to the theology of theosis (deification), synérgeia (cooperation of divine and human energies), and sobornost’ (conciliarity or an organic unity) as well as Vladimir Solovyev’s (1853–1900) concepts of bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood), vseedinstvo (all-unity), and bogodeistvie (theurgy), which is regarded as the first systematic approach in Russian religious philosophy towards a synthesis of knowledge and faith (see Petzer

3 The Serbian Philosophical Society was founded in 1938 by noted Belgrade intellectuals and religious thinkers.

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2021). Now, although Bergson would deny the existence of the world as an organic unity or absolute, there were “compelling parallels between […] intuition and the Orthodox concept of the immediate, noncognitive understanding by which man is capable of attaining the absolute” (Fink 28). The panhumanist ideas of the poet, art critic and erudite thinker Dimitrije Mitrinović (1887–1953) should be placed in this context. Mitrinović, a former leader of the pan-Yugoslav youth organisation Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), who emigrated to London via Munich and since 1914 had worked in the Serbian legation in London, where he shared his extensive knowledge of theosophy and mythology as well as his ideas on the foundation of a new Christianity-based universalism with the later Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (1880–1956) whose theological lectures on the spiritual rebirth of Europe show Mitrinović’s impact.4 Mitrinović’s weekly column “World Affairs”, written from August 1920 to October 1921 under the pseudonym “M. M. Cosmoi” for the magazine The New Age, gives insight into the syncretism of his social utopia based on panhumanism. It was a fusion of ideas and motifs from Orthodox religion, Solovyev’s sophiology, Bergson’s intuitive method, the Lebensphilosophie, psychology, theosophy and anthroposophy, nonEuropean teachings and mythologies, contemporary racial discourse as well as the mysticism of the German-Jewish esoteric Erich Gutkind (1877–1965). Mitrinović also inspired Dušan Stojanović (with the monk’s name Jovan; 1895–1949), who defended his dissertation Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyev (the thesis remained unpublished) in Oxford, and upon his return to Serbia, alongside others, published on Bergson’s philosophy in the journal Hrišćanski život (Christian Life); this series appeared later as a book (1925). This major current in modern Serbian philosophy based on intuition and mysticism was emphasized by the Serbian literary historian Radovan Vučković as “pravoslavni ekspresionizam” (Christian Orthodox expressionism) (292). Finally, the classical philologist and cultural philosopher Miloš N. Đurić (1892–1967) bears mentioning, a scholar who, in the newly established magazine Misao (Thought, 1919–1937), published an introduction to Bergson’s works and philosophy in two parts in 1921. In the beginning, Đurić positively highlights Bergson’s opposition to the purely mechanistic worldview, his philosophy of intuition and creative evolution, as well as its immanent aesthetics (1921: 483). Referring to Bergson’s principle works Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), also known under the translated title Time and Free Will, Matière et mémoire (1896), and L’évolution créatrice (1907), as well as to L’âme et le corps (1912), Đurić follows the philosopher’s insight that his understanding

4 This influence was already traced in Velimirović’s theological lecture (1920a) held at Kings College London (Bigović 176–178).

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of time is intuition (intuicija) rather than perception, an internal knowing, and that his concepts of élan vital (životni elan) and durée (trajanje) are crucial for the understanding of continuous creation and human experience. According to Đurić, with his concept of duration Bergson stands in a long tradition of holistic thought: Like the ancient Greek philosophers – Empedocles with love and hate, Heraclitus with the eternal flow, Anaxagoras with mind, Plato with his ideas, and more recently: Spinoza with the substance and its attributes, Leibniz with the monads, Schopenhauer with his logic of will and imagination, Hartmann with the unconscious and its dynamics, Spencer with evolution, Ostwald with energy, our Laza Kostić5 with crossing and Boža Knježević with order and proportion –, also Bergson gives the world a name, individualizes it; for him the world carries a certain physiognomy. That is the name of duration. With his philosophy of duration, Bergson is one of the greatest physiognomists of the universe.6

Duration is the continuum of life, and the relation between life and personality resembles that of a single tone in relation to a melody (Đurić 1921: 485, 488). Insight in the force behind duration was to obtain by intuition. At the end of his emphatic overview of Bergson’s philosophy of life, Đurić announces a critical study of it as part of all Heraclitic philosophies, under the title “Filosofija aktivizma” (The Philosophy of Activism) (1921: 583), however this book has never been published. His book Filozofija panhumanizma (The Philosophy of Panhumanism), published in 1922, opens with a chapter on “Život kao stvaralačko razviće” (Life as Creative Evolution), thus affirming a modern mystic cosmology, linking Bergsonian melody to Slavophile ideology. Also in 1922, in Misao again, Đurić reveals a “slovenskoindiski panhumanizam” (Slavic-Indian panhumanism) as tomorrow’s reality, which forsees the coming of the svečovek (all-man)7 as the eternization of the sveživot (all-

5 The Serbian poet, lawyer, publicist, and politician Lazar ‘Laza’ Kostić (1841–1910) is considered to be one of the greatest minds of Serbian literature. He promoted the study of English literature and its translation into Serbian, especially Shakespeare’s works. 6 “Kao stari grčki filosofi, Empedoklo ljubavlju i mržnjom, Heraklit večitim tokom, Anaksagora umom, Platon idejama, pa novije: Spinoza svojim supstancijom i njenim atributima, Lajbnic monadima, Šopenhauer voljom i predstavom, Hartman nesvestnim i dinami[k]ama, Spenser evolucijom, Ostvald energijom, naš Laza Kostic ukrštajem i Boža Knježevic redom i proporcijom; tako i Bergzon daje svetu ime, individuališe ga, svet za njega nosi jednu određenu fizionomiju. To je ime trajanje. Svojom filosofijom trajanja, Bergzon ide među najveće fizionomičare vasione.” (Đurić 1921: 484) Unless indicated otherwise here and in the following, these are my translations. 7 Term coined by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in his famous Pushkin speech of 1880, taken up by Nikolaj Velimirović and used in his 1915 brochure Serbia’s place in human history to point out the fundamental cultural differences of East and West, that is the dichotomy between ‘god-man’ and ‘man-god’ or ‘all-man’ and ‘super-man’ (5–8). It was further elaborated in Reči o svečoveku (1920b, Words on the All-Man).

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life) (166). Đurić’s 1929 dissertation, Problemi filosofije kulture (The Problems of a Philosophy of Culture), a step towards an anthropological and cultural philosophy, again bears traits of Christian Orthodox and Slavophile thought. In accordance with the Orthodox theology of synergism man is postulated as God’s ‘co-worker’ (1 Cor 3:9), and theurgy as the cooperation of man with God and nature (27, 46). Against this background, Đurić’s approach was described as “ekspresionistički ekumenizam” (expressionistic ecumenism) (Radulović 189). The vivid discussion of Bergson’s ideas circa 1920, when the first two translations of Bergson’s works in Serbian were published in Belgrade by the well-regarded publisher Svetislav Cvijanović (1877–1961), that is O smehu (Laughter; Le Rire, 1900), and an edition from Matière et Mèmoire (Matter and Memory) under the title O duši i telu (On Spirit and Body), also paved the way for a complete translation of Matière et Mèmoire (in Serbian Materija i memorija, 1927) in Géza Kohn’s publishing house.8 It was followed by the Serbian translation of Bergson’s 1907 book, Stvaralačka evolucija (Creative Evolution), in 1932. Further translations and studies, however, were long prevented by the strict rejection of Bergsonism by the Marxist philosopher Dušan Nedeljković (1899–1984), who after his doctorate at the Sorbonne took up a professorship in Skopje and later, Belgrade, in his article on “Bergsonov verski misticizam” (Bergson’s Religious Mysticism, 1935) and his treatise Anti-Bergson. Prilog kritici savremenog intuicionizma i društvenog misticizma (AntiBergson: A Contribution to the Critique of Contemporary Intuitionism and Social Mysticism, 1939). Nevertheless, Bergson’s influence on modern Serbian thought, as will be shown in the next section on modernist aesthetics, could not be undone.

Stanislav Vinaver’s Bergsonism Bergson’s reception among Serbian and Yugoslav writers and artists was mainly promoted by Stanislav Vinaver (1891–1955), who was one of the key representatives of the Serbian literary avant-garde. Having a Polish-Jewish background, he was raised in the cosmopolitan milieu of the Serbian city of Šabac, where his parents moved in the 1880s, when a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Russian Empire. In 1910, Vinaver went to Paris to study mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne under Henri Poincaré as well as to take piano lessons with world-renowned Wanda Landowska. He also attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, becoming a follower of his philosophical ideas as Vinaver testified in “Na Bergsonovom

8 The Hungarian Jewish publisher Géza Kohn (1873–1941) established the largest publishing house in Serbia and Yugoslavia in central Belgrade in 1901, which was run until the occupation by Germany in 1941, when Kohn was arrested and shot (see also Köstner).

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času”9 (1938: 320–325). However, several years passed before he began mediating Bergsonism in Serbia. First, Vinaver volunteered in the Balkan Wars and served as lieutenant in the students’ battalion in World War I. In 1915, his father Avram Jozef, a physician and pioneer in radiology in Serbia and head of its military hospital during the War, died while fighting the typhus epidemic.10 During the following years, he travelled to France and the United Kingdom in the service of Serbia and finally to Petrograd where he was a witness to the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Since his debut as a poet in 1911 with the collection Mjeća11 and as a prosaist in 1913 with his Priče koji su izgubile ravnotežu (Stories that Have Lost Their Balance), he has also worked as a journalist, art and cultural critic, and translator.12 Together with the later Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić (1892–1975) and others, he founded the expressionist “Grupa umetnika” (Artists’ group), which was renamed “Alfa” in 1920 and existed until 1923; its members frequented Hotel Moskva’s café in central Belgrade. Vinaver’s first programmatic essay on the Bergsonism, “Bergson i novi pokreti u umetnosti” (Bergson and the New Movements in Art), was published in the journal Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement) in 1922 (repr. in 2012: 60–67), and in the same year, the two-part study “Bergsonova estetika” (Bergson’s Aesthetics) appeared in the journal Misao. In 1924, it was also published as a book titled Problemi nove estetike. Bergsonovo učenje o ritmu (Problems of a New Aesthetics:

9 Considering the multiple meaning of Serbian čas, ‘hour, moment, lesson’, the title reads “In Bergson’s class [time]”. 10 In his poetry collection Ratni drugovi (War Comrades, 1939) Vinaver did not explicitly mention him as a Jew but, as the title reads, as a “war comrade”. 11 Dedicated to his deceased sister Mjećeslava, nicknamed Mjeća (1898–1910), who died young. 12 Vinaver’s unique style was witty and evidently grounded in his multilingual experience. Like his father who spoke Hebrew, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Serbian, Vinaver was a polyglot, and challenged Serbian language, literature, and aesthetics. This can also be traced in his supreme translations from many European languages which were sometimes rejected from publishing houses because they strayed from the source text in order to maintain the spirit of the original—e.g., he added two hundred new pages to his translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Critical to traditional artistic expression, he turned upside down the “patriotic canon” of Bogdan Popović’s Antologija novije srpske lirike (Anthology of Recent Serbian Lyrics, 1911) in his parody Pantologija novije srpske pelengirike (Panthology of Recent Serbian Pelengyrics—from Serbian pelen, ‘wormwood’, 1920). In short, Vinaver was probably the most pronounced modernist in Serbian art and culture. Also, Vinaver was revealed as the real person behind Rebecca West’s character “Constantine the Poet”, her insider-guide during her 1936–1937 journey through Yugoslavia, documented in her travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). However, after World War II the poet and intellectual nearly fell into oblivion. For many years, the literary critic and theorist Gojko Tešić, professor at the University of Novi Sad, has been advocating Vinaver’s recognition in Serbia and, in 2012, succeeded in publishing an edition of his works in nine volumes.

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Bergson’s Theory of Rhythm).13 Bergson and Vinaver shared a strong affinity for music; they both had one Jewish parent who was a musician from Poland.14 Not surprisingly, in the core of Vinaver’s dialogue with Bergson was his concept of rhythm as continuous movement, the rhythmic movement of the élan vital. In music, Bergson has found an adequate symbol for his concept of temps réel (real time), that is durée (duration), a notion he introduced in his 1889 doctoral thesis, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. And, as Bergson later pointed out in Matter and Memory, every duration lived by a consciousness is “a duration with its own determined rhythm” (1911: 272). Besides the links between music theory or notation and mathematics, there is no quantification of music: music was the essence of everything. And, rhythm was, as Vinaver claimed in his very first essay on Bergsonism, the artist’s means to produce “hypnosis” (2012: 65). All things or beings have their own duration or rhythm. Bergson’s theories were not mere invitations to set aside conventional temporal structures but inspirations to explore consciousness as inescapably temporal, or as the title of his first book reads: as immediate data. For Vinaver, the Bergsonian imperative of intuitive vision, the approach to duration as unceasing creation and uninterrupted novelty, is twofold: It addresses the self-creation of the artist and the artist’s creation of mankind (2012: 66). Preceding to Vinaver’s publications, Miloš Crnjanski (1893–1977) in his “Objašnjenje Sumatre” (An Explanation to [the Poem] Sumatra) in the Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Herald) of 1920 referred to Bergson’s time as a psychological spacialization in rhythm and melody: Bergson long ago drew a line between psychological and physical time. Therefore, our metrics are personal, spiritual, misty, as a melody. We are trying to find the rhythm of every mood in the spirit of our language, whose expression is at the level of feuilletonistic opportunities!15

Crnjanski, who in 1913 began studying mathematics and philosophy in Vienna and was soon drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to the Galician front to fight against the Russians, turned to literature after the war and became a

13 Two relevant reviews of the book, published in 1924 in the Belgrade journals Novi Život (New Life) and Raskrsnica (Crossroads), were fully re-printed in Vinaver 2012: 466–470. 14 The pianist Ruža Vinaver (née Rozenberg), who also worked as a piano teacher and translator, was killed in 1941. Vinaver himself spent World War II in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Osnabrück. 15 “Davno je Bergson odelio psihološko vreme od fizičkog. Zato je naša metrika lična, spiritualna, maglovita, kao melodija. Pokušavamo da nađemo ritam svakog raspoloženja, u duhu našeg jezika, čiji je izraz na stupnju feljtonskih mogućnosti!” (Crnjanski 267).

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proponent of radical modernism. Within the Serbian avant-garde, his local ism, that is “Sumatraism”, denotes a mysticism of time and harmony of the cosmos. Vinaver, however, introduces rhythm as an aesthetic image of creative energy, also drawing from Bergson’s collected essays L’Énergie spirituelle (1919). With rhythm, we think in terms of duration; rhythm, Vinaver elaborates in his 1922 study on Bergson’s aesthetics, is higher freedom (965) which requires an effort of intuition and not of intellect, which rather focuses on object’s surface appearances. It is intuition which returns to us the original creative impulse or élan vital. According to Vinaver, the task of art is thus “traži[ti] nad-sintezu u ritmu” (to find a metasynthesis in rhythm) (1922: 966). As an advocate of Bergsonism, the philosophy of the AvantGarde, of activism and revolution towards the new, and the turn towards rhythm, Vinaver quotes in his translation long passages with pyrotechnical metaphors which Bergson uses in L’évolution créatrice (Engl. Creative Evolution, 1911) to describe the fundamental principle of the élan vital, the vital life force that underlies all living things, namely creation, the dynamic of becoming: Two things only are necessary [for life]: (1) a gradual accumulation of energy; (2) an elastic canalization of this energy in variable and indeterminable directions, at the end of which are free acts. This twofold result has been obtained in a particular way on our planet. […] If its essential aim is to catch up usable energy in order to expend it in explosive actions, it probably chooses, in each solar system and on each planet, as it does on the earth, the fittest means to get this result in the circumstances with which it is confronted … (255)

Continuing on, Vinaver argues as follows: Explosives, bombs, dynamite—this seems to be the basic law for the actions of life. This general law is to be applied to all mankind if the man of the planet is the one who leads to the final obvious consequences of a creative upswing. Everything presents itself in this form: culture, art, history. Constant: Collect energy in the storerooms of our memory, desires, movements, ideals, and traditions so that the storerooms can be emptied as easily as possible when needed.16

16 “Eksploziv, bomba, dinamit – to izgleda da je osnovni zakon za postupke života. Ovaj se opšti zakon da sprovesti i u sve čovečansko, ako je planetarni čovek onaj koji dovodi do završno-očiglednih konsekvenci nešto od stvaralačkoga poleta. Sve nam se predstavlja u tome vidu: kultura, umetnost, istorija. Stalno: nagomilati energiju u magaze našeg pamćenja, naših želja, pokreta, ideala, tradicije – s tim da se u slučaju potrebe delanja, magaze što lakše mogu isprazniti” (Vinaver 1922: 808).

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Preceding the essays on Bergsonism, Vinaver’s avant-garde book Gromobran Svemira (The Lightning Rod of the Universe, 1921) offers a vision of the vital and cosmic energies in modern writing. The volume is opened by Vinaver’s “Manifest ekspresionističke škole” (Manifesto of the Expressionist School), first published in 1920, which proclaims an aesthetic revolution, unleashing creative forces equal to that of nature. The expressionist is not interested in that which is created but in creating. According to Vinaver it has become impossible for a creator to stand outside creation, impossible to control one’s creation and bundle everything in one direction with a lightning rod of energy. However, there is a new dynamic and a new rhythm of creation which to some extent has been revealed by mystics: to interpret things differently, for example to understand Christ as light and wave, and not to flee from things with the help of illusion but to use all opportunities of interpretation which pre-exist in the universe without falling into old patterns. The following short stories of the collection are non-mimetic, a mix of surrealism and science fiction, essayism and polemics. His ornamental prose involving, above all, the radiograms sent from the planets of our solar system and from our galaxy discussing the emergence of new centres of power in the title story (Vinaver 1921: 29–38) and the playful cosmic mathematics on the occasion of the appearance of “plus-duhovi” (plus-spirits) in “Posledni ispit u mandarinskoj školi” (101–108; Last Examination in the School of the Mandarins) shifts the relationship between intuition and intellect to an opposition within language, namely between grammar and rhythm. Furthermore, Vinaver sets his vision of aesthetic revolution in the mythicalallegorical space of the ocean and on musicians like Čiurlionis, Skrjabin, Pokrovski and Rosenthal. These essays included in Gromobran are dedicated to the search for the absolute, for integral experience—meta-synthesis, as the rhythm of music or creation, memory and duration are contractions of plural moments into intuition, that is, inner consciousness. In the following years, Vinaver defended modernism in Serbian literature, free verse and intuitive expression, against the prevailing conservatism of the local critics with Bergsonism. Based on musicality and intuition and transposing the laws of music into language and grammar, he was thus developing a nadgramatika17 (surgrammar), in other words, a modernist paradigm of Serbian poetics (see Matejić 718–719). Finally, Vinaver advocates Bergsonian aesthetics of new media, and follows Bergson’s early illustration of the opposition between intellect and intuition using the example of cinematographic expression (1922: 813).18 The authorship of a short but 17 Also the title of a posthumous 1963 edition of Vinaver’s essays. 18 Bergson’s reflections on cinematographic motion deeply inspired Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume filmphilosophy published in 1985 which draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image in cinema.

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programmatic note to the theory of avant-garde cinema, “Poetika kinematografa” (The Poetics of the Cinematograph) (repr. in Žečević 299), which in 1920 was signed only with “S”, is also attributed to Vinaver (Žečević 98–99). This note offers an alternative to narrative cinema, to mechanistic illusion. Along with Bergson, the author denies causality and motion which is constructed as chronological unity. He rather designs the scenario of a movie which has neither a defined beginning nor an end, and which can be started at any point in time, thus resembling a rhythmical cycle. In this respect, a film should be directed to the most impossible, that is go beyond the obvious and be most confusing, aside from the general idea. The ideal of cinematographic poetics is contained in motion, the endless flow of duration, and the method, upon which artistic creation in the new medium builds on, is intuition and invention.

A footnote on Judaism In “Bergson’s aesthetics”, Vinaver sums up the concept of creation in hinting at its immanent duality: “Bergson posits a duality: compression and branching, (contraction and expansion, bomb and explosion).”19 In the 1924-edition of this study, Vinaver added a footnote saying that this duality is “Slično onome jevrejskom mističkom dvojstvu iz Kabale” (akin to the Jewish mystical duality in the Kabbalah). Vinaver was by no means the first to write about Bergson, however he might have been the first to outline Bergson’s relation to the idea of tzimtzum, the process of divine self-limitation, from the teachings of the Jewish kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–1572), which means ‘contraction’, in fact the self-contraction of God before, and for the purpose of, the creation of the world from nothing (Sérouya 1947: 168; see also Scholem). To the best of my knowledge, it was not until the middle of the century that a connection between Bergson and Jewish mysticism was drawn by the French Jewish philosopher Henri Sérouya (1895–1968) in his article “Bergson et la Kabbale” (1959). During his lifetime, Bergson would deny this influence, though, at least until the death of his grandfather in 1898, he was most likely in contact with Jewish mysticism, and he even told friends that he counted among his ancestors Polish Hasidim, i.e., members of the mystical Jewish movement which is strongly connected to some of the concepts of the Lurianic Kabbalah. In his 1932 publication on Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Bergson even seems to ignore the mystical tradition within Judaism, stressing its prophetic call for justice and placing it in opposition to dynamic religions based on mysticism (256–257).

19 “Bergson postavlja dvojstvo: sažimanje i razvejavanje, (stezanje i širenje, bomba i eksplozija)” (Vinaver 1922: 945).

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Bergson did not study Jewish sources but accepted the Christian interpretation of Judaism as was pointed out by the prominent Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) in his 1951 New York lecture “The Silent Question”: The image of Judaism conceived by Bergson is the conventional Christian one, the origin of which lies in the endeavor to depict the new religion as a release from the yoke of the older one. This picture is of a God of justice Who exercised justice essentially on His own people, Israel, being followed by a God of love, of love for humanity as a whole.” (Buber 1952: 34)20

Bergson who stressed Christianity’s superiority because of its transformation from a national to a universal religion in whose mysticism he found more religious truth than in Jewish belief, and thus challenged the “religious significance of Judaism for the world of today” (Buber 1952: 33). As is known, Bergson’s criticism of the Jewish religion correlates with his increasing sympathy with Catholicism, but, prior to his death and protesting against the anti-Semitic politics of the Vichy regime, he reaffirmed his Jewishness. Moreover, “Bergson was close to true Judaism which he did not know” (1952: 40), as Buber claimed, referring at the end also to the Hasidic interpretation of love and religious praxis (1952: 43–44). Since the 1960s Jewish thinkers, such as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi and the philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch, who were working on Bergson’s ambiguous relation to Judaism, argued that Bergson’s concepts of time and creation show similarities to Jewish understandings of these concepts (see Teboul). Until today, as Jacob Haberman’s recent study (2018) constitutes, this approach to Bergson is widely shared. As temporality is essential to human experience, the centrality of time in contemporary Jewish thought is recognised today; it “thus discloses an ever-expanding realization of the significance of time and the uniqueness of historical events to the Jewish consciousness” (Kaufman 986) and owes much to the discussion led in the years surrounding 1920 by thinkers of Jewish origin. In his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University (1917–1918), published later in the two-volume book Space, Time, and Deity (1920), the Jewish philosopher Samuel Alexander referred to Bergson as “the first philosopher to take time seriously” (44). According to Alexander, Bergson conceptualized time as the creative advance into novelty, or, in Alexander’s understanding, as bringing forth new emergent qualities.

20 The reference to Buber I owe to my colleague Martin Treml. See also Buber’s critical introduction “Bergson and Intuition” in the Hebrew edition of Bergson’s Spiritual Energy, published 1944 in Tel Aviv (in German: Buber 2017), which just as the latter text reads Bergson from the perspective of his philosophy of dialogue.

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On this subject, the most significant discussion Bergson led with the GermanJewish scholar Albert Einstein who represented another modern conception of time – relativistic space-time. In their public debate on 6 April 1922, in Paris, Bergson stressed the qualitative uniqueness of ‘lived’, that is, real time and duration, opposing his concept to the physicist’s objective (measured) time, that is, a mathematical time which refers to space.21 The controversy was sparked years earlier at a 1911 conference of philosophers in Bologna, when the French physicist Paul Langevin (1872–1946), in accordance with fellow participant Einstein, proposed the so called twin paradox, a thought experiment in special relativity. In his philosophical reaction to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the treatise on Duration and Simultaneity (1922), Bergson did not doubt the physical theory and its methods but rejected its metaphysical claims. For Bergson, the theory of relativity could not make any statements about real time and its relativity or similarity because real time is not determined by clocks or other forms of measurement but manifested itself in experience. By the middle of the century, comments on time in Judaism were raised in various contexts. To quote just two Jewish thinkers with different backgrounds and reach: Comparing Israel and Hellas in The Idea of Nationalism, Hans Kohn (1891–1971), a US historian of Czech-Jewish origin who was a member of the Prague circle of young Zionists and one of Buber’s disciples before World War I, argued that the “ancient Greeks were the people of sight, of the spatial and plastic sense” (30) while the “Jew did not see so much as he heard; he lived in time […] His organ was the ear” (31). Even more importantly, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who became a spiritual leader for East European Jewish immigrants to the United States and who himself came from the Hasidic milieu that had fascinated Buber so much, wrote in his book on the Shabbat: Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. (Heschel 8)

From the very beginning, the Bible stresses the holiness in time, it is the Sabbath, the holy day of rest after creation which is the fundament of religious thinking. 21 Immediate reactions to this debate were published by the French pioneer of radio astronomy Charles Nordmann (1924), and the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead, who was also a mathematician, and Martin Heidegger; both introduced their own philosophies of time. Bergson’s concept influenced philosophers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as writers, such as Marcel Proust and T.S. Elliot, and artists, such as Henri Matisse.

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The sacred time22 of the Shabbat provides the basic rhythm of Judaic time. In keeping the Sabbath, the Jew ritually establishes a connection to God’s creation and remembers the relativity of human time. Vinaver’s hint at the traces of Jewish mysticism in Bergson’s thought shows the awareness of secular Jews to the spiritual heritage of Judaism. Vinaver’s poetry and writings did not so much address “Jewish themes”23 nor were they perceived as an explicit Jewish take on the world.24 Nevertheless, he was committed to Judaism and acted as the editor of the thirty-year anniversary Spomenica (Commemorative Volume) of the Sephardim Community in Sarajevo, La Benevolencija, which was published in Belgrade in 1924. Beside some of his early poems, Vinaver included his essay on “Bergson’s teaching of rhythm” in this volume (Spomenica 79–101). It might well be that this challenge of editing the Bosnian Jewish community’s yearbook also pointed Vinaver to his footnote cited above (here: 88).25 The Jewish background is a nonnegligible factor for Bergson as for Vinaver, and the compatibility of modern Jewish thought with the major trends in philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century is likewise not to be neglected. The twofold reception of Bergsonism in Serbia from the perspective of Slavophile synthesis and Jewish universalism appeared together in the magazine Misao, which served as a platform for the theoretical articulation of expressionism. In consideration of this, this article concludes that Vinaver’s allusion to the probable impact of the Kabbalah on Bergson also reveals the consciousness to the deeper layers of Judaism which was transformed into the aesthetics, metaphysics, and cultural religious syncretism of modernity.

22 The Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade spoke of a passage from the “profane time, ordinary temporal duration” to the “sacred time” of religious rituals (1959: 68). 23 An exception is Vinaver’s action against anti-Semitic tendencies and his talks to the Croatian politician and founder Stjepan Radić of the Croat Peasant Party, who in 1906 published the pamphlet “Židovstvo kao negativni elemenat kulture” (Jewry as a negative element of culture). As he wrote in 1925, Vinaver was convinced that Radić would change his attitude. 24 According to Dina Katan Ben-Zion (458), the best-known Jewish writers who wrote about Jews in Belgrade at Vinaver’s time were Hajim Davičo (1854–1918) and Žak Konfino (1892–1975). Krinka Vidaković-Petrov at least mentions Vinaver together with the Serbian-Jewish surrealist Oskar Davičo (1909–1989), who was also from Šabac but of Sephardic background, pointing out that the differences between Sephardic and Ashkanazi tradition were losing relevance due to secularization, cultural integration, and linguistic assimilation (2014: 446). In his study on Jewish heritage in Serbian literature, Predrag Palavestra (1998: 93) was pointing to the plurality of Jewish themes and in this context stressed also Vinaver’s significance for Serbian modernism. 25 The contribution preceding to Vinaver’s in this yearbook was written by the Bosnian Jewish pioneer of Sephardic studies Kalmi Baruh (1896–1945) on the Judeo-Spanish language (Spomenica 71–77) which explicitly refers to the Lurianic Kabbalah (here: 74).

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Works cited Alexander, Samuel. Space, Time, and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow 1916–1918 in 2 Vols., Vol. 1. London: Macmillian and Co., Ltd, 1920. Ardoin, Paul, Stanley E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (eds.). Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Arsenović-Pavlović, Marina, and Latinka Perovic. Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. veka. 2, Položaj žene kao merilo modernizacije: naucni skup. Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1998. Bergson, Anri. O smehu: esej o značenju smešnoga. Trans. Srećko Džamonja. Beograd: S. B. Cvijanović, 1920b. Bergson, Henri. Durée et Simultanéité: A Propos de la théorie d’Einstein. 2nd ed. Paris: F. Alcan, 1923. Bergson, Anri. Materija i memorija: ogled o odnosu tela i duha. Beograd: G. Kon, 1927. Bergson, Anri: Stvaralačka evolucija. Trans. Filip Medić. Beograd: Kosmos, 1932. Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1889. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. by F. L. Pogson. M. A. London: George Allen and Unwin LTD, 1910. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul, and William Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. Bergson, Henri. L’Énergie spirituelle: Essais et conférences. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1919. Bergson, Henri. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1932. Bergzon, Anri. O duši i telu. Trans. and introd. Nikola M. Popović. Beograd: S. B. Cvijanović, 1920. Bigović, Radovan. Od Svečoveka do bogočoveka: Hrišćanska filosofija vladike Nikolaja Velimirovića. Beograd: Raška Škola, 1998. Bogdanović, Jelena, Lilien Filipovitch Robinson, and Igor Marjanović (eds.): On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918–1941). Leuven: Leuven UP, 2014. Buber, Martin. “The Silent Question [: on Henri Bergson and Simone Weil].” At the Turning. Three Addresses on Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952: 29–44. Buber, Martin. “Zu Bergsons Begriff der Intuition.” Werkausgabe. Vol. 12: Schriften zur Philosophie und Religion. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017 [1944]: 214–218. Crnjanski, Miloš. “Objašnjenje Sumatre.” Srpski književni glasnik 4 (1920): 265–270. Đurić, Miloš. “Anri Bergzon ili filosofija stvaranja.” Misao V.7 (1921): 481–488 (pt. I), Misao V.8 (1921): 574–583 (pt. II). Đurić, Miloš. Filozofija panhumanizma. Beograd: Knijžarnica Rajkovića i Ćukovića, 1922.

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Đurić, Miloš. “Slovensko-indiski panhumanizam. Sutrašnja stvarnost.” Misao VIII.3 (1922): 161–169. Đurić, Miloš. Problemi filosofije kulture. Beograd: Knjižarnica Rajkovića i Ćukovića, 1929. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1959. Fink, Hilary L. Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900–1930. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2012. Haberman, Jacob, “Bergson and Judaism.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 12 (2018): 56–87. Heschel, Abraham J. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951. Katan Ben-Zion, Dina. “Tangled Fragments of Identity in a Changing World: Judaism as an Open Question in the Literature of Former Yugoslavia.” Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages. Eds. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Boris Kotlerman. Newcastle Upon Type: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014: 453–478. Kaufman, William E. “Time.” Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought. Eds. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr. New York et. al.: Free Press, 2009: 981–985. Kohn, Hans. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944. Kostadinović, Aleksandar. “Vinaverova čitanja Bergsona – pojam stvaralačke evolucije.” Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 64.3 (2016): 715–730. Köstner, Christina. “Das Schicksal des Belgrader Verlegers Geca Kohn.” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Buchforschung in Österreich 7 (2005): 7–19. Matejić, Julija. “Stanislav Vinaver – paradigma modernizma i bergsonizma u srpskoj međuratnoj estetici i umetnosti.” Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji XX vek, III tom, Moderna i modernizmi. Ed. Miško Šuvaković. Beograd, 2014: 717–723. Milutinović, Zoran. Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011. Mitrinović, Dimitrije. Certainly, Future: Selected Writings by Dimitrije Mitrinović. Ed. and introd. Henry Christian Rutherford. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1987. Nedeljković, Dušan. “Bergsonov verski misticizam.” Letopis Matice srpske 344.1 (1935): 81–88. Nedeljković, Dušan. Anti-Bergson. Prilog kritici savremenog intuicionizma i društvenog misticizma. Skoplje: Slavija, 1939. Nordmann, Charles. Notre maître le temps: les astres et les heures: Einstein ou Bergson? Paris: Hachette, 1924. Norris, David A. The Novels of Miloš Crnjanski: An Approach Through Time. Nottingham: Astra Press, 1990. Palavestra, Predrag. Jevrejski pisci u srpskoj književnosti. Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1998.

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Palavestra, Predrag. “Sprache und Identität jüdischer Autoren in der serbischen Literatur.” Jüdische Identitäten in Mitteleuropa: Literarische Modelle der Identitätskonstruktion. Ed. Armin A. Wallas. Tübingen, 2002: 235–243. Perović, Latinka (ed.). Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 20. veka. Vol. 1, Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1994. Perović, Latinka (ed.). Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. veka. Vol. 3: Položaj elite. Beograd: Izdanje autora, 2003. Petzer, Tatjana. Topographien der Balkanisierung. Programme und künstlerische Manifestationen der Demarkation und Desintegration. Südosteuropa 2/3 (2007): 255–275. Petzer, Tatjana. Wissen und Glaube. Figurationen des Synergos in der slavischen Moderne. Paderborn: Brill, Wilhelm Fink, 2021. Radulović, Milan. Modernizam i srpska idealistička filosofija. Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1989. Rutherford, Henry Christian. The Religion of Logos and Sophia: From the Writings of Dimitrije Mitrinović on Christianity. London: The New Atlantis Foundation, 1966. Rutherford, Henry Christian. “Erich Gutkind as Prophet of the New Age.” 18th New Atlantis Foundation Lecture. 1975 (engl.-germ.). www.pkgodzik.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ Gutkind/Rutherford__Erich_Gutkind.pdf. Accessed 01 Oct. 2020. Scholem, Gershom. “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes.” Eranos-. Jahrbuch 25 (1956): 87–119. Sérouya, Henri. Kabbale: ses origines, sa psychologie mystique, sa métaphysique. Paris: Édition Grasset, 1947. Sérouya, Henri. “Bergson et la Kabbale.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 149.3 (1959): 321–324. Spomenica o proslavi tridesetgodišnjice jevrejskog kulturno-potpornog društva “La Benevolencija” maja 1924. Ed. Stanislav Vinaver. Beograd: Štamparija i cinkografija “Vreme”, 1924. Stojanović, Dušan. Filosofija Anria Bergsona. Beograd: Knižara S. B. Cvijanović, 1925. Teboul, Margaret. “Bergson, Time, and Judaism: A 1960s Debate.” Archives Juives 38.1 (2005): 56–78. Velimirović, Nikolaj. Serbia’s Place in Human History. London: The Council for the Study of Internat. Relations, 1915. Velimirović, Nikolaj. The Spiritual Rebirth of Europe: A Lecture. London: The Faith Press, 1920a. Velimirović, Nikolaj. Reči o svečoveku. Beograd: S. B. Cvijanović, 1920b. Vidaković-Petrov, Krinka. “From Sephardic Traditional to Modern Serbian/Yugoslav Literature.” Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages. Eds. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Boris Kotlerman. Newcastle Upon Type: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014: 434–452. Vinaver, Stanislav. Gromobran svemira. Beograd: Sveslovenska knižarnica M. J. Stefanovića i druga, 1921.

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Vinaver, Stanislav. “Bergsonova estetika”. Misao IX.3 (1922): 801–815 (pt. I); Misao IX.5/6 (1922): 945–966 (pt. II). Vinaver, Stanislav. Problemi nove estetike: Bergsonovo učenje o ritmu: tehnika izražaja i smisao konstrukcije. Beograd: Vreme, 1924. Vinaver, Stanislav. “G. Radić i Jevreji.” Jevrejski život 71.2. (1925): 1. Vinaver, Stanislav: Čardak ni na nebu ni na zemlji. Beograd: Francusko-srpska knjižara A.M. Popović, 1930. Vinaver, Stanislav. Ratni drugovi. Beograd: G. Kon, 1939. Vinaver, Stanislav. Dela 6: Videlo sveta: Knjiga o Francuskoj. Ed. Gojko Tešić. Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2012. Vučković, Radovan. Poetika srpskog i hrvatskog ekspresionizma. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1979. Vujić, Vladimir, and Prvoš Slankamenac. Novi humanizam. Beograd: Iždavacka knižara Gece Kona, 1923. Žečević, Božidar. Srpska avangarda i film 1920–1932. Beograd: Udruženje filmskih umetnika Srbija, 2013.

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Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint Ivo Andrić

Abstract:

The article examines the impressive literary figures of Sephardic and Ashkenazi origin in stories by Ivo Andrić, situated in Bosnia, but with different historical backgrounds and mostly written from the perspective of post-World War II memory. While the first lived there already for centuries, remembering their former home country Spain, the second came as specialists with the Austrian occupation. The main topics are suppression of the non-recognized, non-Muslim people, Jewish isolation and self-isolation but also the attempt to escape from the hatred. Special attention is given to Bar Titanic, an “anatomy of the holocaust” and to Children, a study of hatred, aggression and guilt. The Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, who was not Jewish himself, created several quite expressive works on Jewish topics, more than many of his contemporary Jewish colleagues (Puvačić 143; Palavestra 13).1 He dedicated several essays to Jewish culture and writers from Sarajevo: Jevrejsko groblje (The Jewish Cemetery, 1954), Isak Samokovlija (1955), Letnji dan (A Summer Day, 1955), both on the writer Samokovlija,2 as well as Spomen Kalmiju Baruhu (Remembering Kalmi Baruh, 1961) and Sećanje na Kalmija Baruha (Memory of Kalmi Baruh, 1952).3 Andrić considered Samokovlija to be a Jewish Chekhov and one of the best Bosnian writers. With the Bosnian intellectual Kalmi Baruh, an expert on Sephardic culture, Spanish language and literature, who died in 1945,4 Andrić cultivated a lifelong friendship and association, originating in their childhood in Višegrad. During Andrić’s career as a diplomat in Madrid at the end of the 1920s, they spent a winter together into which the essays on Baruh deliver insights (Andrić 1977: 230–234; 236–238; 1 The Jewish critic Eli Finci already in 1930 underlines the role of Jewish characters in Andrić’s stories and praises his story Love in the Small Town as “the best artificial story on Jews” (Vidaković-Petrov 192). 2 They had known each other since their school days in Sarajevo—they attended the same high school but were in different classes—but were never very close to each other (Andrić 1977: 225–226). 3 The essays on Samokovlija and Baruh are published in Andrić (1977). 4 He died after the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen from the conditions suffered (Nezirović 286–288).

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Palavestra 107). Both essays, especially the final one, are a mournful expression of remembrance for this lost friend. Andrić created few but nevertheless impressive Jewish literary figures in his fictional work: in imbedded stories within the novels Travnička hronika (Bosnian Chronicle/The Days of the Consuls, 1945) and Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina, 1945), or in the separate stories Pobednik (The Winner, 1922), Ljubav u kasabi (Love in the Small Town, 1923), Pismo iz 1920. godine (A Letter from 1920, 1946), Reči (Words, 1954), Deca (Children, 1935), Bife Titanik (Bar Titanic, 1950), and the short novel Prokleta avlija (The Damned Yard/Devil’s Yard, 1954).5 The anthology, which combined texts published much earlier,6 was edited in 1991, long after the writer’s death under the title Jevrejske priče (Jewish Stories) by Radivoje Konstantinović, followed in 1995 by a German translation, which also includes the essay Jevrejsko groblje (Jewish Cemetery) as an introduction to the topic.7 As he explains, the topic was much more important to Andrić than indicated by the coverage of pages (Konstantinović 1995: 175). The characters are of Sephardic and Ashkenazi origins, and all of them—with the exception of the protagonists of The Winner and Words—live in Bosnia and are portrayed in a realistic way within the historical context. The Sephardim had already been living there for centuries, since the middle of the sixteenth century, remembering their former homeland in Spain, while the Ashkenazim came as specialists with the Austrian occupation in 1878: They were called “kuferaši”—“people with suitcases” and settled down instead of staying shortly as intended. Andrić’s characters act in settings in the early (Mordo Atijas, Salomon Atijas in Bosnian Chronicle) or late nineteenth century (the young girl Rifka in Love in the Small Town), in the early twentieth century (Lotika in The Bridge on the Drina), the interwar period (Maks Levenfeld in A Letter from 1920 and the figures in Children), and during the Holocaust (Mento Papo in Bar Titanic), in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo but also in Travnik and Višegrad. Only The Winner is located in an ahistorical setting and an

5 Puvačić mentions also the stories Put Alije Đerzeleza (The Journey of Alija Đerzelez) and San i java pod Grabićem (Dream and Vigil Under the Grabić) but omits others. He and Vidaković-Petrov (2012) also analyze the novel Gospođica (The Woman from Sarajevo). Here we will focus our interest on the different functions of Jewish characters and therefore include only stories or parts of novels with Jewish protagonists. 6 Konstantinović (1991: 129; 1995: 171) also provides a short overview of the other texts concerning Jewish topics (the essays, which are not included, and the unfinished story Pre nesreće/Before the Disaster), and explains the reasons they were not included in the collection with the composition of the anthology and the aim “to reconstruct Andrić’s novelistic Jewish chronicle” (ibid. 171). Translations are, if not mentioned otherwise, mine. 7 This is not the only difference between the two editions. The German publication contains a preface by the translators and Konstantinović’s afterword, which differ in some aspects from the Serbian original.

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

Old Testament context. In Words and Letter Andrić chooses a moving chronotopic perspective in the train or at the train station, which is of high semantic importance for their meaning. The author wrote many of these stories or stories integrated into novels from the perspective of memory and his reflections on hatred and war—after World War II, but also some in respect to World War I. Literary studies have discussed the treatment of Jewish characters in Andrić from different perspectives. In 1986, Puvačić gives the first broad overview of these characters and analyzes their presentations in Andrić’s fictional texts. The critic emphasizes the author’s sympathetic relationship to Jews in Bosnia8 based on historical pessimism. Konstantinović, the editor of the first anthology of Andrić’s selected stories with Jewish motifs, introduces the topic in his two afterwords (Konstantinović 1991; 1995). He contextualizes the author’s Jewish characters in his historical worldview, regarding them as important players in the Levantine, intermediating between different economic, social and ethnic powers. Palavestra’s study of Jewish writers in Serbian literature did not focus especially on Jewish figures; nevertheless, Andrić is included as a non-Jewish writer in whose texts “Jews appear as regular companions of events and stories, often as the best interpreters of historical ideas and as media of fateful tragedy” (Palavestra 194). Whereas the painter Savić Benghai adds illustrations to her story-oriented analyses, as Gorup shows in her review of the book, Müller, in his doctoral thesis, offers a comparative imagological study of the characters in the prose works of Ivo Andrić and Isak Samokovlija, stressing among other aspects self-image and social perception by others. He brings into focus not only the representation of Jews, but also of other ethnic and religious groups in Bosnia. A detailed analysis of Andrić’s Jewish figures is provided by VidakovićPetrov (2012), embedding them in a historical contextualization. As the first critic to address Andrić’s Jewish figures, she suggests a typology of six functional types of Jewish characters.9 In her interpretation of The Bosnian Chronicle (2015) she gives a typology of the “other” and discusses Jewish characters connected to the Levant in her second group in a world between “self ” and “alien”. Filipović and Vučina Simović provide a discourse analysis of Andrić’s essays and his dissertation, noting the author’s romantic understanding of the Jewish otherness. In current scholarly studies, there are three different types of texts in which Andrić presents Jewish protagonists and topics: 1. stories without a visible connection to Jewish motifs or where they are in question; 2. stories with a Jewish

8 He expresses an even “prosemitic attitude” (144). 9 She mentions 1. the psychologically deepened archetypal character, 2. the individual example of the Bosnian Jewish community with characteristics of the collective mentality, 3. the Anti-Semite as an explanation of the genesis of evil, 4. characters with an in-between identity, 5. female characters, expressing a gender perspective and 6. Jewish characters, which are subordinated in the narrative and fulfil the function of pointing out protagonists (200).

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worldview and a specific attitude towards Bosnian society; 3. stories connected to the Holocaust and the question of evil. In the following, I will discuss the attributes of Jewish characters and their functions within these three types. 1. In The Winner and Words, Andrić uses Jewish characters for various purposes that are not evident and unquestioned. The Winner (1922), written with the deep impression of World War I and the terrible fates of young men in mind, belongs to the anti-heroic stories with the highly symbolic value10 of the young student and former enemy of the Habsburg Empire. The narrator presents David after his fight with Goliath; David cannot bear the burden of being the winner and thus fits into a typical anti-heroic image, rejecting pathos, egocentrism, collective attributions as decisive for the individual, and binary thinking, on the one hand, in favor of acceptance of the “other”, emphasizing self-reflection and individualism, on the other. David does not feel like a hero; he senses the fight with his entire body and is barely able to cut off Goliath’s head to show it in triumph to his people. The motif from the Old Testament does not serve for a specific discussion of Jewish topics11 but has its justification in the anti-heroic image of David. Nevertheless, this could be noted as a comment on or an allusion to the widespread image of the Jew: the character of the deprived, the underdog in a battle without the expectation of winning. Even under the circumstances of an unexpected victory that is essential for the survival of the whole collective, this figure cannot reproduce the anticipated image of a hero. David is a winner who is overwhelmed by his moral energy; however, his critical authority towards heroism does not change. In this opposition of individualism and collectivism—thus the narrator’s conclusion—the latter is always dominant and emerges the winner. We find a different case in Words where the narrator remembers an elderly Austrian Jewish refugee couple in Paris who appear to him as an ideal couple, always together and in harmony. After her husband’s death, the wife tells him that they never spoke a word more than strictly necessary and that she could not talk to him even during his final hours when he begged for a few words. Why Andrić chose Jewish figures for this story can be explained in different ways: That their silence was a kind of trauma caused by one of three kinds of Jewish suffering—discrimination, persecution and genocide (Konstantinović 1975: 175)—is unconvincing since it lasted about 30 years, as of the late 1920s, and no causes are mentioned or suggested. What is central to the understanding of this story is, however, the absence of any

10 Other prominent stories on this topic are The Journey of Alija Đerzelez (1920) and Mustafa Madžar (Mustapha Madyar, 1923). In both of these stories, Andrić developed his concept of the anti-heroic in contrast to the heroic that is collective, anti-individual, militaristic and inhuman (cf. HansenKokoruš; Hansen-Kokoruš and Simić 412–414). 11 Puvačić (141) also mentions that the references to apocryphal and biblical texts are often used for philosophical contexts and mostly not linked to Jewish topics.

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

discussion and the rigid self-isolation of the Jewish community which had fatal effects: becoming silent means to abstain from one’s own life perspectives and rights. The story shows the essential need of verbal communication between human beings. The “lost habit of conversation” (Hawkesworth 100) was thus a kind of torture, a “verbal bullying” (Nemec 193), the hiding of one’s own views and feelings which is to be understood as a fundamental challenge to marriage (Nemec 201). Since these characters are situated in a post-war setting of a non-fixed exile situation living in a hotel, they attest—as another interpretation—to an identity conflict (Vidaković-Petrov 2012: 200) not caused by the Holocaust but being a late effect of political, cultural or other conditions of discrimination. 2. Andrić depicts the Jewish community of Bosnia12 from various perspectives, which often show the approach of an historian but also a diplomat. This explains the tendency in the writer’s abovementioned works to present a more general configuration he observed in the Bosnian Jewish community through a single story or fate. All these figures show a kind of strangeness, of not belonging to their Bosnian surroundings, of which some are more conscious, others less. Nevertheless, all of them have internalized this fact and made it a constant part of their habit. They preserved their language and isolated themselves by using Judeo-Spanish not only for communication at home but also—until the 1920s—for cultural purposes.13 Even their graves—with strange images, scripts and languages—testified to their otherness, as Andrić notes in The Jewish Cemetery: Behind all these incomprehensible Hebrew letters, like behind a thin curtain, which is harder than any wall, the part of the Sephardim’s life they conserved over long centuries is hidden. Another curtain is their Spanish language. For more than four centuries, they preserved and watched over their wonderful mother/stepmother tongue, and yet they were not able to develop or save it from a petrification or degradation. In this language, they sang their wedding and love songs and romances from their home Andalusia; they used it in their intimate and professional life.14

12 One should be aware that most of his Jewish characters are Sephardic, only Lotika (The Bridge over the Drina) and Max Levenfeld (A Letter from 1920) are of Ashkenazi origin. This specific situation becomes apparent also in the relationship of different Jewish characters towards Bosnia and the question of their homeland. 13 Laura Papo, who wrote her works in this language and not in the widely used Serbo-Croatian Jewish publications used since the Haskalah, was thus received only by a small community. This situation has changed with translations, but, to this day, not all of her works have been translated into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. 14 “Iza svih tih nama nerazumljivih hebrejskih slova, kao iza tanke, ali od svakog zida tvrđe zavese, krije se onaj deo sefardskog života koji su oni održavali kroz duge vekove. Druga takva zavesa, to je njihov španski jezik. Za više od četiri veka, oni su čuvali i pazili taj divni materinski-maćehinski jezik, iako nisu mogli da ga razvijaju ni da ga sačuvaju da se ne okameni i ne iskvari. Na njemu

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Their multilingualism is, in the author’s view, a very important factor for their feeling a lack of affiliation with their surrounding whose influences cannot be denied: In their homes and within their community they spoke Spanish (in the same way they brought it with them in the fifteenth century and a bit rotting with a lot of our words, as well as Turkish words), in the synagogue and in their religious rituals they used to speak Hebrew, with the people they spoke “Bosnian” and with the representatives of power Turkish.15

Here, the Sephardim are grateful that the Ottoman Empire received them and gave them a place to live and work after Queen Isabella’s edict of 1492 and their expulsion from Spain. However, they neither felt welcome and at home in their new country, nor as fully integrated or constitutive, respected members of Bosnian society. They had the same social status as the rest of the non–privileged people, the “raja”.16 Andrić depicts their position often from outside, sometimes also from inside, but always from a “zero focalization” (as defined by Genette); his narrators do rarely express empathy for the Sephardim (Puvačić 143; Filipović and Vučina Simović 2018: 213). He does not exclude them into an oppositional “us” and “them”, nevertheless, the Bosnian Jews are shown with their contradictory self-image as a part of the complex cultural situation. Vidaković-Petrov (2012: 200) classifies them into her third category where they figure “as individual personifications of the Jewish community as interactive parts of the Bosnian multicultural space”.17 The Atijas chapters (“Mordo Atijas” and “Odlazak Napoleonovog konzula”/“The Departure of Napoleon’s Consul”) in the Bosnian Chronicle attest to this approach quite clearly: Salomon Atijas, member of the oldest Jewish family in Travnik and a widely recognized member of the public, lends money to the French ambassador Daville. In a conversation with the Frenchman, he offers the history of Sephardic

su pevali svadbene i ljubavne pesme i romanse iz rodne Andaluzije, njime se služili u intimnom i poslovnom životu” (Andrić 1991: 9). As the bibliography of the Andrić Foundation shows, this text, like most other texts on Jewish topics, has not been translated into English. Even the famous story Bar Titanic was published in English only in 1968 (N.Y: A.A. Knopf) and 1969 (Trans. by Joseph Hitrec; London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.) in the anthology The Pasha’s Concubine. 15 “U kući i između sebe govorili su španski (onakav kakav su ga u XV veku poneli i još natrunjen množinom naših i turskih reči), u sinagogi i verskim običajima služili su se hebrejskim, sa narodom su govorili ‘bosanski’, a sa predstavnicima vlasti turski” (Andrić 1991: 7). 16 The term is used for all people of non-Islamic faiths; they did not belong to the ruling class. 17 “ovde su likovi individualna otelotvorenja jevrejske zajednice kao interaktivne komponente bosanskog multikulturalnog prostora.” See footnote 7 for Vidaković-Petrov’s typology.

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

experience with the Ottoman rulers in a concentrated way—as the result of life experience and a kind of wisdom: And the Vizier is really a severe, a severe and hard gentleman. But he has only to deal with the Jews once, and we have endured dozens and dozens of viziers. Viziers are replaced and leave. […] But we remain, we remember, we record everything we have suffered, how we defended ourselves and we pass this dearly-bought experience on from father to son (Andrić 1996: 421).18

Instead of Atijas who does not find the right words to express his world-view, the narrator summarizes in Atijas’ imagined speech the dilemma of being in-between.19 The lost habit of verbal communication also symbolizes the lack of a definitive position towards the society they live in: And our torment lies in the fact that we were unable either completely to come to love this land to which we owe the fact that it took us in and gave us refuge, nor were we able to come to hate the one that drove us unjustly away, exiling us like unworthy sons. We do not know whether it is harder for us to be here or not to be there. Wherever we were outside Spain, we would suffer, for we would always have two homelands, I know that, but here life has confined and belittled us too much (Andrić 1996: 424).20

Their former home, Spain, is—not only for the Atijas familiy, but also for many other Sephardic characters—a retrograde utopia, a vision of the Golden Age, of religious, cultural, social and economic recognition, prestige and a paradise lost. In this context, their relatedness to Spain, to the Spanish language and heritage, which they brought with them, shapes a melancholic, past-oriented atmosphere of mourning this loss, which causes isolation. Nevertheless, Atijas is also futureoriented. He lends money to the French consul as a representative of the West,

18 “I vezir je zaista oštar, oštar i težak gospodin. Ali on jedanput ima posla sa Jevrejima, a mi smo preturili desetine i desetine vezira. Veziri se menjaju i odlaze. [...] A mi ostajemo—pamtimo, beležimo sve što smo podneli, kako smo se branili i spasavali i—predajemo od oca na sina ta skupo plaćena iskustva” (Andrić 1991: 26). 19 Vidaković-Petrov (2012: 200) truly links her fourth category (people in-between) to the problem of identity (The Damned Yard, Words, A Letter from 1920); this, however, does not contradict the individual self-image, which expresses collective characteristics (her second category). 20 “I naša je muka u tome što nit smo mogli da potpuno zavolimo ovu zemlju kojoj dugujemo što nas je primila i dala nam utočišta, nit smo mogli da zamrzimo onu koja nas je nepravedno oterala i prognala kao nedostojne sinove. Ne znamo je li nam teže što smo ovde ili što nismo tamo. Ma gde bili izvan Španije, mi bismo patili, jer bismo dve otadžbine imali uvek, to znam, ali ovde nas je život suviše pritisnuo i unizio” (Andrić 1991: 29).

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who after centuries pays respect to the Jews. Atijas dreams of returning but is also sufficiently realistic concerning the circumstances in Bosnia and elsewhere. However, they do not differ from other nationalities in their passivity because, for all of them, “[t]he outside world can offer them nothing but change, and change, in their view, is always the worse” (Wachtel 164). While Atijas concentrates on the suffering and tactical manoeuvring throughout the centuries in his resigned worldview, the young Ashkenazi Maks Levenfeld (A Letter from 1920) acts resolutely and actively in the present. He is not obsessed with the past but struggles for a humanistic future and the search for his identity.21 The son of an Austrian Jewish physician, who came to Sarajevo in 1878, takes clear decisions. Born in Sarajevo, Maks neither views Bosnia nor other countries as his homeland and leaves the “country of hate”.22 His profession—he is also a physician—is not fortuitous: as a man possessing critical distance, he analyzes what goes wrong in the Bosnian society. He has a vision of assisting other people, not of them suffering. His diagnosis of “the hatred” is not an historical generalization, but the identification of a split society, one without “social cohesion”, but not typical of Bosnia as the ending shows; Levenfeld denies all that is conducive to division (Vidaković-Petrov 199). Bosnia is a metaphor for the whole world and the hatred which knows no borders. His path leads him to Paris and then to Spain: not as a vision of a lost paradise, but as an option for a better future and solidarity. He dies as an active fighter against European fascism. Those characteristics of Jewish political engagement are very rare in Andrić’s work; a nephew of Lotika is also politically active, which causes her pain, because he is simultaneously political and a Jew. Even though Maks dies in the Spanish Civil War, he is fighting in the international brigades where national, cultural and other differences do not matter. In all of his works, only in this story does Andrić depict Jewish resistance. Maks Levenfeld is the opposite of most Jewish characters in Andrić’s texts who are more passive, enduring unacceptable circumstances. Lotika (The Bridge on the Drina), the Ashkenazi businessperson from the Habsburg Empire, performs a very up-to-date—for the time around 1900—an even revolutionary gender role by managing a hotel and supervising men in a patriarchal small town and society.23

21 Vidaković-Petrov (2012: 200) classifies Levenfeld, together with the Sephardic Haim from The Damned Yard, a prototype of the narrator in general, into the topic of identity and people in-between (group four). 22 This story is the most misinterpreted text of Andrić in general and was misused especially in the 1990s to impart an ideological concept of hatred onto Andrić. Nemec discusses in detail the theses of the text and comes to the convincing conclusion that, for Levenfeld, as the end clearly shows, hatred is a metaphysical power he cannot escape anywhere (Nemec 191–193). 23 Together with her antipode Rifka she fits in Vidaković-Petrov’s fifth group: female figures. For this special category, other gender relations should be incorporated, too.

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

She represents the European cultural model (Vidaković-Petrov 2012: 194; Nemec 260): she acts very professionally in her business life, belongs to the elite of the town and seems to be successful. According to the sociological model of Max Weber, she stands for the religion of money (Nemec 261). However, she devotes herself to serving her many relatives, never starting a family herself. In her constant craving for success, she shows an almost Protestant work ethic. She is convinced, however, that Jews should not attract public attention and, especially, not be politically active. Thus, she demonstrates the historical experiences and traditional views of the Jewish community. At the beginning, her economic success enables her to support the education of her young nephews, until she loses her wealth due to the economic crisis. She is a combative but altruistic character in her private sphere, denying herself the right to intimate happiness. Over time, her struggle becomes decreasingly successful and similar to that of Sisyphus. Lotika is, in short, a character with a very optimistic start and a revolutionary gender performance but with a pessimistic end and a symbolic, negative view of the twentieth century. Rifka (Love in a Small Town) represents a model contrary to Lotika (VidakovićPetrov 2012: 194). The young Jewish girl Rifka, who falls in love with the Austrian Catholic officer Ledenik, is confronted with deeply ingrained traditions and prohibitions; when driven into a hopeless situation, she commits suicide. Her family stands for Jewish self-isolation as a mortal threat. Müller (87) even mentions Jewish fanaticism, which guides Rifka’s family in their self-image as a part of their cultural heritage.24 Nevertheless, Rifka is not only linked to Jewish topics, but to traditional female fates in patriarchal families of different cultural backgrounds in the region (Nemec 176). Like the beautiful Fata (The Bridge over the Drina) and other female characters, she is existentially limited by a deep-seated traditional society where women are prevented from transgressing cultural and societal boundaries. 3. Of special interest are the two stories Children and Bar Titanic, which present different aspects of the Holocaust, the “genesis of the evil” (Vidaković-Petrov 2012: 196). As a study of hatred in human society, Children focusses on its very nucleus in the initial stages of life and in learned behavior in youth, of becoming a victim and a perpetrator. The question behind this story is how human beings start to act in hateful ways, how collectives are strengthened by group processes and what happens with individuals in relation to this. An elderly man tells a story from his childhood in Sarajevo and gives a prime example of group dynamics and psychology, of inclusion and exclusion. The boys Mile and Palika, whose mother or father is Hungarian, earn respect in their “ruling gang” by coopting others into this “holy”

24 For this proposition, which means the extremely self-isolation in the own community and the orientation toward traditional and ritualized life concepts, Müller (84) quotes the words of Ledenik: “… Jews who are very fanatic…” (“… Jevreji, koji su vrlo fanatični …”).

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group, fighting against a vaguely defined “enemy”. Like adults, they wear weapons, which can cause serious injuries. For the first time in his life, the young first-person narrator is invited to be part of the group and therefore has to show that he is a worthy representative by actively participating in the fight. The unquestioned “enemies” are Jewish boys, who are already used to being attacked by other children, with internalized experiences of fear.25 The reason for the attack is not any kind of guilt or conflict, but boredom and self-affirmation of the gang. The narrator gives insights into his former motifs and feelings as a child: the honor of being a group member, the participation in the hunting of the Jewish boy, but also the impossibility of beating him. Confronted with him face to face, he sees him for the first time as a human who represents the “dehumanization of the victim” (Vidaković-Petrov 2012: 196): Now I could see him closely. He wore a new cheap suit, was wet and muddy from the hiding-place under the toe boards, plump and small, without a cap over his curly hair. Instead of Milo’s moves, his [moves – R.H.-K.] were neither dreadful nor exciting to me.26

The group relies on a clear hierarchy and the fear which its members are subjected to. The driving forces behind its group dynamics include: exclusion by fighting and inclusion by involving members in illegal actions which are directly related to solidifying the group. Whoever fails to pay respect to this order, will not fit into the group. The reasons for hatred, as shown in this story, are not actions, views, religions, or other standpoints, but group consolidation, i.e., distinguishing the ingroup from the out-group. Andrić does not enquire about the societal conditionality of otherness, but his casual remark that the Jews are used to being attacked27 has to be understood as a critique of anti-Semitism in society. Bar Titanic (1950), which renders an “anatomy of the Holocaust” (Konstantinović 1995: 173), is a psychological masterpiece and its “main characters […] fall into archetypal categories” (Hawkesworth 91). Set in 1941, a few months after the installation of the Ustasha regime in Croatia and Bosnia by Hitler, the story shows the changes in the public sphere through insights into the private life of Mento Papo,

25 As Puvačić (139) shows, fear and the “heritage of fear” are a significant characteristic of Jewish characters in Andrić’s texts. 26 “Sad sam mogao da ga vidim izbliza. Bio je u novom jevtinom odelu, mokar i kaljav od zaklona pod daskama, ugojen i kratak, bez kape na kovrčastoj kosi. Protivno od Milovih, njegovi pokreti nisu imali za mene ničeg ni strašnog ni uzbudljivog” (Andrić 1991: 86). 27 “We went down the street where the Jewish children usually were expected for beating.” (“Spustili smo se u ulicu gde se obično sačekuju jevrejska deca radi tuče”, ibid. 83) and “However, whether our outfit betrayed us, whether the Jewish boys already were used to get such visits ...” (“Ali, bilo da nas je odavao naš izgled, bilo da su jevrejska deca već navikla na takve posete [...]”, ibid. 84).

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

the impoverished Sephardic owner of the Titanic bar, and the Croatian Ustasha member Stjepan Ković, “a well-known slacker and juggler from Banjaluka”.28 Before presenting both figures—the victim and the perpetrator—the narrator leaves no doubt about the dangerous political situation: Before the Ustasha regime systematically started to lead large groups of Sarajevo Jews away to an alleged working camp, but in fact to the first place of execution … 29

In the first chapter, the reader becomes acquainted with Mento, a poor alcoholic pariah in the Jewish community involved in an ongoing dispute with his partner Agatha who will soon leave him. His small, dark bar without windows but featuring a hidden gambling den was a formerly popular meeting place for drinkers and gamblers but is soon empty; everyone avoids him and Mento feels that this is really “a black Friday after which for the Jews there will be no Saturday, but only a black decline and sinking.”30 However, he does not do anything in the atmosphere of “growing fear” (Hawkesworth 92) but apathetically awaits the Ustasha.31 The Ustasha member Ković is introduced to the reader with his and his family’s history: the unsuccessful son of an ambitious but dissatisfied father32 fails in every profession and earns no respect in his town. In the new political order, he sees his chance, but even the officers do not appreciate him. His motifs for searching Mento are of a material and psychological kind: like the other officers, to rob the Jew’s wealth—a widespread stereotype—in order to be accepted by the ruling group and thus to bolster his low self-esteem. Andrić puts him into the group of “less important and competent” Ustashas who had “to be satisfied by a little robbery, corruption or pressed gifts by the poor Jews from the periphery” and therefore spread “unexpected pain and terror” (Andrić 90). He offers deep psychological insight into the increase of evil and its banality.33 Between the victim and the perpetrator an unequal duel takes place, which ends with the killing of Mento: 28 “poznati banjalucki besposlicar i svastar” (ibid. 103). 29 “Pre nego što će ustaške vlasti početi sistematski i u velikim grupama da odvode sarajevske Jevreje tobože u radni logor, a u stvari na prvo gubilište …” (ibid. 90). 30 “Sad već i Mento uviđa da je ovo zaista crni petak posle kojeg za Jevreje i nema više subote, nego crna propast i crni svršetak” (ibid. 101). 31 The Ustasha was a Croatian fascist and terrorist movement between 1929 and 1945. They were the leading political and military power of the Independent State of Croatia (1942–1945), a puppet-state of Nazi Germany, which ‘incorporated’ Bosnia. They were responsible for the sadistic murder of Serbs, Roma, Jews and political opponents. The number of the victims only in the concentration camp of Jasenovac was about 90,000, but the true number was much higher—many were deported to other camps or extemporaneously killed (Goldstein 26–27). 32 He has doubts about his paternity and is not close to his son. 33 For the discussion of this aspect, see Czerwiński (116–117).

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on the one side, Mento, who tries to talk in an “analogy to Shererzada’s stories” (Vidaković-Petrov 2012: 197) to prolong his life, on the other hand, the weak Ković gets increasingly angry because he once again feels like a loser. The writer introduces the psychological perspective of the perpetrator transcending sheer crime; in him, he identifies a mixture of an inferiority complex,34 greed and opportunism, which become violent and dangerous when the political power uses them for their fascist purposes. Moreover, he shows that, even when the image of Jews did not fit the stereotypes, the fascists executed their elimination program. Poor Mento has no power; he is unable to form any kind of resistance, as he is without any support and is isolated in society and the Jewish community. His fatalism and resignation are not just individual characteristics as the symbolic “name of the tragically sunken English Ocean liner” (“ime tragično potonulog engleskog prekookeanskog broda”, Andrić 1991: 91) already shows.35 With the help of this character, Andrić criticizes these features, which emphasize ahistorical views and do not pay heed to the historical facts. To conclude, Andrić presents a panorama of Jewish characters with the empathy of the narrator and/or implied author in his works. Their classification is helpful for analyzing their special characteristics; however, they also all share common features. All characters are marginal and demonstrate the existence of a border; often they are conscious of this fact, especially concerning their language (JudeoSpanish) or their origin (Spain, the Habsburg Empire). Some characters embody this relation as being in-between through their function (helping family members or other persons in other countries, as mediators) or profession (as translators, tradesmen, physicians, pharmacists, etc.). All of them bear the nucleus of a possible transition in themselves, sometimes in a social, cultural or existential sense or breakdown, which appear in instances such as life visions (Rifka), rescues (Mordo) or dangers (David). Lotika is even linked to one of Andrić’s important motifs of highly symbolic value: the bridge connecting two sides, where her hotel is located (Andrić 1991: 147). With few exceptions, the Jewish characters are part of multicultural Bosnian society where other non-privileged groups are marginalized, too, but mostly without transgressive potential. Characters who are incapable of verbal communication (Words, Atijas) are confronted with other configurations where talking means life (Mento); while the latter talks, a transgression (not being murdered) is possible. Linking different narrative worlds is also the function of the narrator Haim (The Damned Yard). Andrić pays

34 Czerwiński (114) adds as well selfishness. 35 For Vidaković-Petrov (2012: 197), however, the name of the bar bears ironically associations, like a symbol of modern Western society, the belief in technical progress which ends in a catastrophe. For this general interpretation, which does not pay attention to a possible view on the Jewish fate, I could not find substantial arguments in the text.

Jewish Life Perspectives from a Non-Jewish Writer’s Viewpoint

special attention to the origin of evil and human aberration in collective processes. While the old narrator of Children represents a rare example of a self–critical and wise man who wants to pass his own experience to others, Bar Titanic functions as a pessimistic comment on this vision. Anti-Semitic resentments in the fictional characters are not caused by facts ascribed to the victims but always by the problems and views of the perpetrators—be they of a psychological nature, such as low self-esteem, or the claim to power, such as manipulating the masses through the consolidation of collectives, by excluding any form of otherness.

Works cited Andrić, Ivo. The Bridge on the Drina. Trans. by Lovett F. Edwards. Beograd: Dereta, 2009. Andrić, Ivo. The Damned Yard and Other Stories. Ed. by Celia Hawkesworth. Trans. by C. Hawkesworth, S. Koljević, F. Rosslyn a.o. Beograd: Dereta, 2010. Andrić, Ivo. Bosnian Chronicle or The Days of the Consuls. Trans. by Celia Hawkesworth with Bogdan Rakić. London: The Harvill Press, 1996. Andrić, Ivo. Liebe in einer kleinen Stadt. Jüdische Geschichten. Jüdische Geschichten aus Bosnien. Trans. Miodrag Vukić. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Andrić, Ivo. Jevrejske priče. Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1991. Andrić, Ivo. Umetnik i njegovo delo. Eseji II. (= Sabrana dela. Vol. 13). Beograd, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Skopje: Prosveta, Mladost, Svjetlost, Državna založba Slovenije, Misla, 1977. Czerwiński, Maciej. “Drugi svjetski rat u prozi Ive Andrića.” Nova Istra 23.61 (2018), 109–118. Filipović, Jelena, and Vučina Simović, Ivana. “Andrićeva vizija drugosti: bosanski Jevreji kao ‘zamišljena jedinica’.” Ivo Andrić u našem vremenu. Zbornik radova. Beograd: Filološki fakultet, 2018, 195–220. Goldstein, Ivo. Jasenovac. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2018. Gorup, Radmila. “Jewish Portraits in the Works of Ivo Andrić by Dušica Savić Benghai. Toronto: Serbian Literary Company, 2004.” Serbian Studies 20.1 (2006), 206–208. Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate, and Dijana Simić. “Heroik und ihre Subversion. Entwicklungslinien des Antiheroischen in der bosnischen, kroatischen, montenegrinischen und serbischen Literatur.” Heroes – Repräsentationen des Heroischen in Geschichte, Literatur und Alltag. Eds. Johanna Rolshoven, Toni Janosch Krause and Justin Winkler. Bielefeld: transkript, 2018, 407–423. Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate. “Identitätskonstrukt und -dekonstruktion am Beispiel von Mustafa Madžar, oder: Die Demontage des Heldentums.” Ivo Andrić. Das Grazer Opus von Ivo Andrić (1923–1924). Grački opus Iva Andrića (1923–1924). Ed. Branko Tošović. Graz, Beograd: Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Beogradska knjiga, 2010, 61–76. Hawkesworth, Celia. Ivo Andrić. Bridge Between East and West. London, Dover N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

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Konstantinović, Radivoje. “Andrićeva Jevrejska hronika.” Jevrejske priče. Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1991, 128–133. Konstantinović, Radivoje. “Nachwort.” Andrić, Ivo. Liebe in einer kleinen Stadt. Jüdische Geschichten. Jüdische Geschichten aus Bosnien. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995, 170–175. Martens, Michael. Im Brand der Welten. Ivo Andrić. Ein europäisches Leben. Wien: Zsolnay, 2019. Müller, Michael. Die Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung der bosnischen Völker in der historischen Prosa von Ivo Andric und Isak Samokovlija. Frankfurt a.M., Berlin a.o.: Lang, 2006. Nemec, Krešimir. Gospodar priča – poetika Ive Andrića. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2016. Nezirović, Muhamed. Jevrejsko španjolska književnost. Sarajevo: Institut za književnost, Svjetlost, 1992. Palavestra, Predrag. Jevrejski pisci u srpskoj književnosti. Drugo, dop. izd. Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1998. Puvačić, Dušan. “Ivo Andrić i Jevreji.” Sveske Zadužbine Ive Andrića Vol. 4 (1986), 137–148. Vidaković-Petrov, Krinka. “Tipologija ‘drugog’ u Travničkoj hronici Ive Andrića.” Studia slavica XIX.2 (2015), 249–258. Vidaković-Petrov, Krinka. “Jevrejski likovi u delu Ive Andrića.” Naučni sastanak slavista u Vukove dane 41.2 (2012), 189–202. Wachtel, Andrew. Making a nation, breaking a nation. Literature and politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford: Standford University Press, 1998.

Mirjam Rajner (Ramat Gan)

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple At the Crossroads Between Orient and Modernity

Abstract:

The article’s aim is to revisit Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple (Il Kal Grandi), a little known, short-lived twentieth century synagogue. Built between 1926 and 1930 in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capital, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it was the last such project before the outbreak of World War II in the region. The article explores this synagogue’s oriental and specifically Sephardic identity as well as the politics surrounding the decision to build it. Although built by Sarajevo’s Sephardic community, a number of Il Kal Grandi’s sociological, architectural and aesthetic choices, as the article argues, originate in the Ashkenazic, German-speaking cultural sphere. German architects in the first half of the nineteenth century were the first to use an oriental style based upon the style of the Alhambra palace in order to stress Jewish oriental, non-European identity. The use of the very same style, along with modern innovations, enabled the Sephardic community in Sarajevo to be part of the united (Ashkenazic and Sephardic), predominantly Zionist Yugoslav Jewry while preserving its specifically Sephardic distinctiveness. On September 14, 1930 the citizens of Sarajevo—then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia— witnessed an important celebration of their city’s Sephardic community—the consecration of a monumental new synagogue.1 A picture-postcard issued for this occasion shows the new structure, officially known as the Great Sephardic Temple (fig. 1). Its majestic, mosque-like dome took its place in the city’s skyline, a proud symbol of the Sephardic community’s three-and-a-half century-long presence in the city (Rajner 47; Gotovac 39–42). Called by the local Judeo-Spanish speaking Jews Il Kal Grandi, it was meant to replace a number of small synagogues scattered throughout several neighborhoods, as well as the old synagogue in use since 1581 (Bejtić 26); this building, the first Il Kal Grandi (Great Temple), was also known as Il Kal Vježu (The Old Temple).

1 This article is a revised version of my article in Hebrew, “Ha shiluv bein ha’mizrah l’ma’arav: batei hakneset b’signon ha orientali ve – il kal grandi – beit hakneset ha sfaradi b’sarajevo” accepted for publication in Pe’amim (Hebrew, submitted 2019). I would like to thank Ivan Čerešnješ of Sarajevo and Jerusalem for his generous help and for enabling me to use his vast photo archives. I would also like to thank Fani Gargova for reading the article and for her helpful comments.

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Fig. 1 The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, picture-postcard, 1930. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem.

The need for a new synagogue had already become pressing by the turn of the century. Those advocating for the ambitious project claimed that there was not enough room in Sarajevo’s synagogues for the burgeoning community, and especially for women and young people during the High Holidays (Spomenica 16). Moreover, some felt that Sarajevo, as a Sephardic center second in importance only to Salonica, had to have a proper central synagogue “which [would – M.R.] in its outer […] and inner design be a true song, chiseled out from beautiful and noble marble” (Jevrejski život 1925)2 . The importance of the Great Sephardic Temple was underscored in a post-card printed during the 1930s, where it was juxtaposed with Sarajevo’s famous sixteenth century Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque; the parallel between the two domed structures symbolized the two religious communities which had lived side by side since Ottoman times (figs. 2–3).3

2 “koji će svojom spoljašnosti […] i nutarnjim uređenjem biti jedna pravcata pesma, isklesana sva u lepom i plemenitom mermeru”. All translations, if not noted otherwise, are mine. 3 Due to its large mosque-like dome, Sarajevo’s synagogue was often referred to as the “Mošeja” (from German “die Moschee” – mosque).

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Fig. 2 Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque, Sarajevo, 1900, print. Private collection, Jerusalem.

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Fig. 3 The Great Sephardic Temple and Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque, Sarajevo, picture-postcard, 1930s. Private collection, Jerusalem.

The new Sephardic synagogue, seating nearly a thousand worshipers (686 men and 298 women) was a majestic structure built in a mixture of oriental and artnouveau styles. The original building was heavily damaged during World War II and rebuilt during the era of Socialist Yugoslavia as part of a “workers’ university;” in its original form it can be recognized nowadays mainly through an elaborate description written by its creator Rudolf Lubynski, a renowned German-trained Zagreb architect of Jewish origin, which complements its preserved architectural plans (figs. 4–5) (Lubynski 21–23; Čerešnješ). In this article, I wish to revisit this grand, little-known, and short-lived twentieth-century Balkan synagogue, to explore its oriental character, stemming from both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi visual imagination, and to examine the politics surrounding the decision to build it.

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Fig. 4 Worker’s University “Djuro Djaković” (former Great Sephardic Temple), Sarajevo, photo 1970s. Private collection, Jerusalem.

Fig. 5 The original plans for the Great Sephardic Temple, arch. Rudolf Lubynski, 1926 © The Center for Jewish Art, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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The Turkish Temple in Vienna and Sarajevo’s Sephardim Many of the choices Sarajevo’s Sephardic community made for their great synagogue had their origins in Vienna. Between 1878 and 1918, during the Austro-Hungarian reign in the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Empire’s capital became an important cultural and educational center for Sarajevo’s young Sephardic Jews. They, as well as other Jewish students who had come from Balkan countries to study in Vienna, were active in a student organization called Esperanza, founded at the end of the nineteenth century, which enabled them to build a unique Sephardic national identity in the midst of their German-speaking surroundings (Amor and Schmädel 83–102; Vučina Simović 2013: 341–360). Stemming from families that had until recently lived under Ottoman rule, the young newcomers likely felt close to Vienna’s Turkish Sephardic community. Established primarily by Jews from Istanbul who had initially settled in Vienna for commercial reasons, by the end of the nineteenth century the Turkish Jewish community was successful and wellintegrated into the city’s multicultural fabric (Gelber 359–396). An important sign of this community’s presence in the city was its beautiful oriental synagogue that opened in 1887 (fig. 6). As the only Sephardic synagogue in the city, it must have been well-known to Sephardic students studying in Vienna.

Fig. 6 Turkish Temple, Vienna, interior, 1887. Arch. Hugo von Wiedenfeld. Illustrirte Zeitung 8 Dec. 1888: 596.

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Among these students was Moritz Levy (1879–1942), a young man from Sarajevo who registered at the University of Vienna in 1901 and studied Semitic philology, philosophy and theology. In 1906, Levy attained his doctorate and a year later he passed the rabbinical exam (“Levy, Moritz”; Pinto 23–37; Šarić 151–153). Levy, who came from a religious family and was being trained as a rabbi and Sephardic cultural leader—tasks which he would enthusiastically fulfill upon his return to Sarajevo—would certainly have visited the Viennese Turkish Temple. Like many other visitors, Levy would have admired the Turkish synagogue’s outstanding design and rich orientalist decoration. Built by Hugo von Wiedenfeld, an Austrian architect, this prayer house successfully balanced its oriental character with modernity and functionality. The historian N.M. Gelber left a detailed description which stresses this duality: The synagogue was built in Moorish style with motifs from the Alhambra… An arcaded yard decorated with marble columns led into the interior of the synagogue. On the left side of the vestibule there was a room especially adapted for weddings and on the right side there was a meeting-room. A passage, at the end of which stairs led to the women’s gallery, led to the second floor. Three doors opened into the splendid hall. The walls were covered with marble, the marble columns and the magnificently decorated ceiling making an imposing impression. The interior was dome-shaped and had an octagonal cupola, while passages opened in semi-circle into many niches. Opposite the entrance rose the altar. The ark for the scrolls of the law was made of marble and ornamented richly with gold. Over the doors leading to the chamber itself rose a plate on which the ten commandments were inscribed. On the first floor there was a hall fitted for winter services and on the second story there were the offices. (Gelber 380)4

In contrast to Gelber’s detailed architectural description, the contemporary press was especially interested in the synagogue’s Sephardic identity. In 1888, an Illustrirte Zeitung journalist thus admired the “pure Moorish style” that “followed motifs from Alhambra”, not because of the broadly popular “architectural eclecticism,” but because it is “the style in which the Sephardim once built their synagogues in their Spanish home, [the style] they took with them as a memory of their lost fatherland to the distant lands, and also retained here” (qtd. in Hammer-Schenk 1: 439).5 The author of an article in Österreichische Wochenschrift was even more interested in the

4 N. M. Gelber is probably Nathan Michael Gelber, an Austrian-Israeli historian, who studied and lived in Vienna until 1934, which made him familiar with the city’s Turkish synagogue prior to its destruction in 1938. 5 “[…] ist eben der Stil, in welchem die Sephardim ihre Synagogen einstmals in ihrer spanischen Heimat bauten, den sie als Erinnerungen an das verlorene Vaterland in die Ferne mitnahmen und auch hier festhielten.”

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community itself and commented upon its members’ self-image—he found it to be characterized by a proud, patrician self-esteem, and he concludes his article with an explanatory observation: “The Spaniards or Sephardim, who look back on a glittering historical tradition, are viewed as the elite among the Jewry.” Hammer-Schenk, basing his assessment upon such contemporary comments, also concludes that the choice of an oriental style was a conscious one, which served to remind the community of former times, especially—as the German author, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, observes—the times in which the Jews of Spain, and later of Turkey lived peacefully without fear of persecution (qtd. in Hammer-Schenk 2: 636). This “oriental style,” emphasizing the community’s Sephardic origin, was actually in harmony with a broader trend, characteristic of numerous synagogues erected throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, not by Sephardic Jews, but primarily by the Ashkenazim. Although often called “Moorish” by contemporaries, the style was actually an imaginative mixture of Moorish, Turkish, Indian and Byzantine elements, which to a Western mind symbolized the “Orient.” Such a style, in contrast to the “autochthone” European architectural styles—classic, Romanesque or Gothic—was believed to be suitable for Jews, who throughout the centuries were considered to be “others”—the “Asians of Europe.” Moreover, it did not resemble the architectural styles of the churches, thus clearly marking the difference between the two religions. Eventually, in the wake of emancipation, Jews underwent a process of “self-Orientalization,” deliberately emphasizing their Oriental, non-European origins, by building magnificent “Moorish-styled” synagogues. Much has been written about these structures, which were indeed primarily inspired by the famous Moorish palace Alhambra in medieval Granada, whose designs were first applied to synagogue architecture in early-nineteenth-century Germany (Kalmar 68–100; Klein 117–131; Giese and Varela Braga 113–164). It was also initially among German Jews that the glorification of medieval Sepharad offered a base for developing a new, proud, integrated yet distinctive, modern Jewish identity (Efron). The oriental synagogue became its visual expression. Moreover, as pointed out by Gargova with respect to the Central Synagogue in Sofia, Bulgaria, the modern Sephardic synagogues, in adopting this Ashkenazic “oriental vogue,” were expressing not only nostalgia for the community’s (in this case actual) past tied to the Iberian Peninsula, but also its aspiration for acculturation, integration and modernity (131–134). This was the case with Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple as well.

Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple as a token of reconciliation Sarajevo’s Sephardic synagogue was the last such project to be built prior to World War II in the region of Yugoslavia, a country where a number of other orientalist synagogues had already been built, as elsewhere in Europe, primarily by Ashkenazic

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

communities (Karač). The first one had been erected in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1867 during Austro-Hungarian rule by the local Viennese-trained architect Franjo Klein (Knežević 121–148). This synagogue, built for Zagreb’s Ashkenazic community, closely followed Ludwig von Förster’s well-known Tempelgasse Synagogue, built in Vienna in 1858. Förster had drawn inspiration from the Temple of Solomon, as evidenced by the Tempelgasse’s (and Zagreb’s) inner division and tripartite façade, with slender side turrets; at the same time, he made abundant use of the German orientalist style of synagogue decoration and thus helped to spread the ‘Moorish vogue’ among Austro-Hungarian synagogues (Förster 14–15; Krinsky 81–85, 194). The Ashkenazic community of Sarajevo, which had established itself after the Austro-Hungarian occupation of the city, had built its own oriental-style synagogue in 1902. It was designed by Karl Pařik, an architect of Czech origin who had settled in Sarajevo. Pařik based his design on earlier plans by Wilhelm Stiassny, a Jewish architect from Vienna specializing in synagogues (Gotovac 27–29; CJA).6 Belgrade, too, had a new oriental synagogue, built for the Sephardic community by the local Serbian architect Milan Kapetanović and the Jewish, Viennese-trained local civil engineer and architect Victor D. Azriel. This Belgrade synagogue, known as Bet Israel, was inaugurated in 1907 (Nedić 299–308).7 All of these synagogues, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic (as in Belgrade), had in common the fact that they were planned by Viennese-trained professional builders. Paradoxically, they thus brought the West- and Central European imaginary vision of the Orient to Southeastern Europe, a region that was of course culturally and even physically close to the actual Orient. In contrast to these new “oriental” yet westernized synagogues, Sarajevo’s Sephardic community, as mentioned earlier, had its own old synagogue, Il Kal vježo which had been built in 1581, during the Ottoman reign. Enlarged in 1821 to hold 500 seats and with two stories of galleries for women, it had served the community continuously for more than three and a half centuries. One of the oldest synagogues in the region, still standing today and housing Sarajevo’s Jewish Museum, it was a source of community pride. “The dignity of this first Sarajevan place of worship radiates from each of its ancient walls and permeates each of its visitors”, wrote Atijas in a nostalgic article dedicated to the “atmosphere of Sarajevan synagogues” (Atijas 66; Gotovac 17–21).8 Atijas’ article, which describes with emotion other

6 Stiassny’s plans prepared for the 1895 competition are preserved at Sarajevo’s city archives and documented by the architect Ivan Čerešnješ, Center of Jewish Art, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. See http://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=set&id=21240. 7 My thanks to Miloš Jurišić of the Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade, for additional information about this synagogue and its builder Victor D. Azriel. 8 “Dostojanstvo ove prve sarajevske bogomolje proizvire iz svake njezine starinske stijene i obuzima svakog njezinog posjetitelja.”

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smaller prayer houses scattered through Sarajevo’s poor neighborhoods and colorfully depicts an array of traditional Sephardic characters praying in them, was published in 1924. The same year, members of a special committee announced an international competition and invited architects to submit their ideas for a new central synagogue. This duality—the wish to preserve and cherish the distinctive character of Sarajevo’s old Sephardic community on one hand while striving to embrace modernity by building a large new synagogue like those in Zagreb and Belgrade (and other European cities) was characteristic of the changes being undergone by Sarajevo’s Sephardim. After their studies in Vienna and active involvement in the Esperanza academic society, a number of Sarajevo’s young Sephardic intellectuals continued to be involved in the Sephardic nationalist movement upon their return home and were eager to preserve and promote Sephardic distinctiveness. The foundation of Sephardic cultural institutions and the study of Judeo-Spanish language, literature, folklore and music, as well as the strengthening of cultural ties with Spain, which supported such endeavors, became central to their activity. However, by the early 1920s, they found themselves part of the newly-founded multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (in 1929 renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Now, Sarajevo’s Sephardim were expected to conform and integrate into the country’s mainstream Jewish organization and ideology, which favored Yugoslavism and Zionism, both of which were less interested in local, ethnic identity. Moreover, since the majority of the Zionists in the new Kingdom were Croatian Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, even if they supported Zionism, felt excluded (Freidenreich 148–149; Loker 72–79; Papo 348; Vučina Simović 2012: 55–56). This tension, ultimately expressed through the so-called “Sarajevo dispute” was well expressed by Dr. Vita Kajon (1888–1942), one of the leaders of Sarajevo’s Sephardic movement. In a report sent to the central committee of the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Yugoslavia, Kajon wrote: “We do not see in Jewry only two poles, nor do we recognize on the one side Zionism and on the other side assimilation. Our life is full-blooded. For us, the center and pivot of Jewish life is not to be found within the Zionist organization. Also, outside of it there is a Jewish national life” (3).9 Dr. Moritz Levy, by then the chief rabbi of Sarajevo’s Sephardic community, was more inclined to reconciliation and sought a middle path: “It is our duty to unite hand in hand with our brothers, the Ashkenazim, in this great effort for the Renaissance of the Jewish spirit,” wrote Levy, “But why should we

9 “Mi ne vidimo u Jevrejstvu samo dva pola, niti ne priznajemo s jedne strane Cijonizam a sa druge asimilaciju. Naš život je punokrvan. Za nas centralni stožer jevrejskog život nije unutar cijonističke organizacije. I izvan nje postoji jevrejski narodni život.”

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

neglect all that is specifically Sephardic which we inherited from our forefathers?” (Levy 42).10 One of the major symbols of this path of reconciliation, which also desired recognition on the basis of equality, was precisely, I would like to argue, the building of the New Sephardic Temple. Although attempts to build a new Sephardic synagogue had been made since 1900, all of the efforts to raise money for the costly project were unsuccessful due to an apparent lack of interest and energy (Spomenica 16). It was only in 1923, during the height of the dispute and efforts to resolve it, that a newly-founded committee for building the synagogue went into action. It included the chief rabbi Moritz Levy and the chief rabbi of the entire Kingdom, Dr. Isaac Alcalay, along with Sephardic dignitaries from Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade, as well as from Baden and Vienna. The committee, headed by Avram Mayer Altaraz, the president of Sarajevo’s Sephardic Jewish community, immediately initiated fundraising by turning to each and every member of the community—“to Jews and Jewesses, to poor and rich, to do everything in one’s power for the building of the new temple,” because “it is upon us to fulfill our holy duty […] to erect in our city a worthy temple, a monumental building, which will do honor to God and be a source of pride to the Jews of Bosnia’s capital” (Leaflet 1923).11 Their efforts soon bore fruit. The very next year, a long and narrow piece of land (95 x 25 m), stretching between the main street and the River Miljacka, was bought from Josef Baruh (Jevrejski život 1924). Simultaneously, a competition for the projected synagogue was publicized internationally and yielded forty-five projects designed by architects from many European countries, lending the project a breath of cosmopolitanism. A jury comprised of three professionals and four laymen chose eleven projects, which were finally narrowed down to Rudolf Lubynski’s proposed design.12 But, with all its good intentions and professionalism, from the very beginning the grandiose project proved to be far too costly. Augmented by a growing economic crisis, it was often criticized, especially by younger members of the community; increasingly assimilated, they did not feel the same commitment as the community elders, who had hoped that the new and attractive synagogue

10 “Es nuestro ovligo de aunarnos mano kon mano kon nuestros ermanos los ashkenazim en esta grande ovra por el renasimyento del djenio djudio. Pero, por kualo neglijar todo akelyo spesifiko sefardi ke eredimos de nuestros avuelos? […]” (translation Ivana Vučina Simović) 11 “[…] svaki Jevrej i Jevrejka, siromah kao i bogataš, da učini sve što je u njegovim silama za gradnju ovo novoga hrama”; “Na nama je da izvršimo svetu dužnost […] da u našem gradu podignemo dostojan hram, jednu monumentalnu zgradu, koja će služiti Bogu na čast, a Jevrejstvu glavnog grada Bosne na diku.” 12 The other projects were shown in an exhibition that aroused the interest of professionals and the broader public (Spomenica 17–18).

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would curb the assimilatory trends. Nevertheless, determined not to give up on their efforts to place Sarajevo’s Sephardim on an equal footing with other Jewish communities in the country, they persisted in their endeavors. The fundraising and appeals for financial help continued throughout the years that the temple was under construction, and were directed not only at members of the community itself, but also to Jewish organizations in the city, the municipality, other Jewish individuals and communities around the country, and finally to the royal government itself, which helped with the lumber necessary for building. Some of the mortgages and loans raised for completing the building were left unpaid until 1941 and the outbreak of World War II in Yugoslavia (Spomenica 19–20; Gotovac 39–40).13 Rudolf Lubynski (1873–1935), whose project won the competition, graduated with a degree in architecture in Karlsruhe, Germany; before opening his own firm in Zagreb in 1907, he had worked on building projects in a number of German cities (Radović Mahečić).14 In designing the Great Temple in Sarajevo, he, as I have noted, combined the innovations in synagogue-building characteristic of early twentieth-century German synagogues with the nineteenth-century oriental style. Aware of this somewhat anachronistic combination, he wrote: “While thinking about the style of the future temple which I am about to build in Sarajevo, a city on the crossroads of Eastern and Western culture… I came to the conclusion that only a temple designed in the spirit of Moorish style, with an appropriate use of materials, modern construction and division of spaces, will fully answer [the needs of – M.R.] the city, locality, mentality and goals” (Lubynski 21).15 The long and narrow plot, and the future synagogue’s position on a north-south axis required a deviation from the traditional, east-west orientation; as a result, the main entrance faced north, and the Torah Shrine was placed on the southern side (fig. 7). Nevertheless, the interior division followed the traditional plan of German Reform synagogues, with a vestibule, central hall, and area surrounding the Torah Ark. As was customary in other contemporary cities’ central synagogues, Lubynski added additional spaces to serve the community’s needs. Thus, adjacent to the entrance in the north, a small

13 The ensuing accusations and conflicts became especially painful and continued many years after the tragedy of the Holocaust. The surviving members of the community and their descendants claimed that the building expenditures had left the community’s bank accounts empty and, therefore, unable to help its members at the onset of the persecutions in 1941, while the committee members’ descendants’ defended their predecessors’ decisions (“Još o gradnji novog …”). 14 See http://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak.aspx?id=11902. 15 “Razmišljajući tako o stilu budućeg hrama, koji bi se imao podići u Sarajevu, u gradu na raskršću istočne i zapadne kulture […] došao sam do zaključka da će jedino hram, zasnovan u duhu maurskog stila, sa odgovarajućom upotrebom materijala, modernom konstrukcijom i rasporedom prostorija, potpuno odgovarati gradu, mjestu, mentalitetu i svrsi.”

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

prayer-hall to be used during the week, along with offices and an apartment for the temple’s caretaker, were planned. In the anteroom of the central area was a men’s cloakroom, the entrance to an adjacent wedding hall and stairs leading to the upper-floor women’s gallery. The area behind the Torah Ark included a genizah, a space designed for storing holy books and religious artifacts that could no longer be used, rooms for the rabbi and a hazzan, as well as stairs leading to a platform planned for a choir and an organ (which was ultimately never realized). Within the building there was also a hall for meetings, with a library, administrative offices and an archive. The entire complex was thus meant to serve not only as a synagogue but also a community center (Lubynski 22–23).

Fig. 7 The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, ground plan, 1926. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. ARH II/8. Sarajevo, 1964: 29.

But, the true uniqueness and grandeur of this synagogue was provided by the mixture of traditional and modern architectural design, the materials used, and its lavish decoration. Consequently, the northern façade had a tripartite division recalling Vienna’s Tempelgasse and, according to its builder Förster, Solomon’s Temple; even though the building was surmounted with the customary Tablets of the Law, its small side domes, Moorish crenellation, and the horse-shoe arches surrounding the windows lent it a distinctively oriental, even Islamic character. The building’s entrance was novel: it featured a majestically broad (9 m) elliptical arch, reminiscent of an art-nouveau arch at the 1913 synagogue in Essen, Germany, probably known to Lubynski (Wischnitzer 229–230) (fig. 8). On passing through this entrance, one entered a rectangular peristyle surrounded by an arcade of multifoil arches resting on elegant columns, clearly recalling the Alhambra’s “Patio of Lions” (fig. 9). Similar arcades graced the southern side, behind the Torah Ark area. A similar arcaded yard is mentioned by Gelber in his description of the Turkish synagogue in Vienna (380); this would have been well-known to many of the committee’s members, and may well have served as a direct inspiration for the design.

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Fig. 8 Petar Šain, The Great Sephardic Temple in Sarajevo, whereabouts unknown, reproduced in Spomenica Jevrejske vjeroispovjedne opštine sefardskog obreda prigodom osvećenja Novog Hrama. Sarajevo, 14 September 1930: n.p.

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Fig. 9 The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, peristyle on the north, photograph, before April 1941. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem.

However, the most breathtaking experience a visitor to Sarajevo’s temple must have had, was upon entering the main prayer hall; this was elliptical in plan and covered by an immense dome, spanning 30.8 m lengthwise and 22.3 m in transverse. Once again, the Essen synagogue comes to mind; its central hall was round and featured a dome of 30 m in diameter. In contrast, the oval plan may have been inspired by the shape of the main hall in the Seitenstettengasse Temple, an early 19th century synagogue in Vienna (Krinsky 188–190). In Sarajevo, the curve of the upper gallery accentuated the beautiful, untraditionally-designed space. The dome and the fourteen columns that supported it (square on the ground floor, round and doubled on the gallery) were built from reinforced concrete (fig. 10). The modernity of the architectural design was complemented by the oriental horse-shoe-arched windows, and most importantly—by an abundance of colorful wall decorations based on designs from the Alhambra (fig. 11). The wall decorations were designed by a certain Kemerer, an artisan from Stuttgart. Apparently a member of Sarajevo’s Sephardic community was sent to visit a number of European synagogues; he was most impressed by the synagogue in Stuttgart and “sought out its artisan” (Jevrejski glas 1930: 2).16 In an interview given to the local Jewish newspaper, Kemerer explained that his starting point had been Moorish design, with some free stylization—color

16 This claim has the character of an anecdote: Stuttgart’s synagogue was consecrated in 1861 and Kemerer could not be the same artisan appearing almost seventy years later in Sarajevo. Nevertheless,

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designs, gold and an imitation of green marble that would offer “the dignity of a temple, tranquility and grandeur” (Jevrejski glas 1930: 2).

Fig. 10 The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, interior, photograph, before April 1941. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem. the designs applied in Stuttgart’s synagogue were based on the Alhambra’s designs (Hammer-Schenk 278–279; Eschwege 113–114).

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Fig. 11 The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, interior, picture-postcard, 1930. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem.

The ceremony of laying the foundation stone on June 13, 1926 exemplified what Sarajevo’s Sephardic community leaders had aimed for—respect, recognition and inclusion. Those present included an impressive array of distinguished guests, including representatives of the royal government, Sarajevo’s mayor and members of the municipal government, representatives of the city’s cultural, educational and humanitarian societies, civil and military dignitaries, the country’s chief rabbi, and delegates of all Jewish communities, including the Sephardic community of Vienna (Spomenica 18). The writer of the commemorative text was careful to distance himself and the community from old-time “Turkish rules and limitations,” and professed complete loyalty and thankfulness for the “unlimited freedom of religious confession and full equality which reigns in our liberated and united fatherland, under the wise and happy reign of our glorious King Aleksandar the First Karadjordjević” (Spomenica 15). In 1930, when these lines were written, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was in the first year of a dictatorship ruled by Aleksandar I; the Ottoman period, remembered by the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia as benevolent and welcoming, especially after their expulsion from Spain, had to be disavowed, in contrast to their full recognition and acceptance of the current ruler. Four years later, in 1930, the new Temple was consecrated in ceremonies attended by all three rabbis—the chief rabbi of Yugoslavia, Belgrade-based Dr. Isaac Alcalay, the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community of Sarajevo Dr. Moritz Levy, and the chief rabbi of the Ashkenazic community of Sarajevo Dr. Hinko Urbach. The cere-

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mony took a reconciliatory and integrationist approach—envisioning the union and equality of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in one Yugoslav Jewish society (fig. 12).

Fig. 12 Consecration of the Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, photograph, 14 September 1930. Private collection, Jerusalem.

*** Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple was probably the last European synagogue to intertwine Jewish oriental otherness, stemming in this case from genuine Sephardic historical ties with Moorish Spain, with modern efforts to adapt and integrate. Sadly, the synagogue—the symbol of an effort to embrace the future while retaining ties to the past—was to be brutally ransacked by the Nazis and local looters in April 1941 at the onset of World War II in Yugoslavia. It was the prelude to the destruction of Sarajevo’s entire Jewish community (fig. 13).

Il Kal Grandi—Sarajevo’s Great Sephardic Temple

Fig. 13 Looting of the Great Sephardic Temple, photograph, 16–18 April 1941. Ghetto Fighter’s House Museum, Israel, ©Photo Archives.

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Works cited Jevrejski život 22 August 1924: 3. Jevrejski život 15 May 1925: 2. Jevrejski glas 16 May 1930: 2. Jevrejski glas 29 August 1930: 3. “Još o gradnji novog sefardskog hrama u Sarajevu.” Jevrejski pregled I-II (1981): 3–5. Leaflet issued in November 1923 by the Committee for building the new synagogue, private collection Ivan Čerešnješ. “Levy, Moritz.” Proyectos. http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/sefardiweb/node/734. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020. Amor, Ayala and Stephanie von Schmädel. “Identitätskurse und Politisierung der Sepharden in Wien am Beispiel des Studentenvereins Esperanza (1896–1924)”. Transversal. Zeitschrift für Jüdische Studien 11.2 (2010): 83–102. Atijas, Sumbul. “Štimunzi iz bosanskih sinagoga.” Spomenica o proslavi tridesetogodišnjice sarajevskoga kulturno-potpornog društva ‘La Benevolencia’. Ed. Stanislav Vinaver. Sarajevo: Štamparija i cinkografija “Vreme”, 1924: 66. Bejtić, Alija. “Jevrejske nastambe u Sarajevu.” Spomenica 400 godina od dolaska Jevreja u Bosnu i Hercegovinu, 1566–1966. Eds. Samuel Kamhi et al. Sarajevo: Oslobodjenje, 1966: 24–32. CJA. Center for Jewish Art. The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art. http://cja.huji.ac.il. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021. Center for Jewish Art. “Competition design for the Ashkenazi Synagogue in Sarajevo.” http:// cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=set&id=21256. Accessed 3 Mar. 2020. Čerešnješ, Ivan. “Design for the Great Temple (Kal Grandi) in Sarajevo.” The Center for Jewish Art Jerusalem. http://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=set&id=21250. Accessed 19 June 2020. Čerešnješ, Ivan. “Drawings of the Great Temple (Kal Grandi) in Sarajevo.” The Center for Jewish Art Jerusalem. http://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=set&id=21240. Accessed 19 June 2020. Efron, John M. German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Eschwege, Helmut. Die Synagoge in der deutschen Geschichte. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1980. Förster, Ludwig von. “Das israelitische Bethaus in der Wiener Vorstadt Leopoldstadt.” Allgemeine Bauzeitung 24 (1859): 14–15. Freidenreich, Pass Harriett. The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979.

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Gargova, Fani. “The Alhambra and the Dream of Sepharad.” The power of Symbols. The Alhambra in a Global Perspective. Eds. Giese, Francine and Ariane Varela Braga. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018: 125–137. Gelber, N. M. “Sephardic Community in Vienna.” Jewish Social Studies 10.4 (1948): 359–396. Giese, Francine and Ariane Varela Braga (eds.). The power of Symbols. The Alhambra in a Global Perspective. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018. Gotovac, Vedrana. Sinagoge u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Novi Hram, 1987. Hammer-Schenk, Harold. Synagogen in Deutschland, Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780–1933). Vols. 1–2. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1981. Kajon, Vita. “Izvještaj Saveznom vijeću u Beogradu.” Židov 27 June (1924): 3. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson. “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture.” Jewish Social Studies 7.3 (2001): 68–100. Karač, Zlatko. Synagogue Architecture in Croatia in the Age of Historicism. Zagreb: Museum of Arts and Crafts; University of Zagreb, Centre for Mediterranean Studies, 2000. Klein, Rudolf. “Oriental-style Synagogues in Austria-Hungary: Philosophy and Historical Significance.” Ars Judaica 2 (2006): 117–131. Knežević, Snješka. “Zagrebačka sinagoga.” Radovi Instituta za poijest umjetnosti 23 (1999): 121–148. Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Synagogues of Europe, Architecture, History, Meaning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Levy, Moritz. “Letra de Saraevo.” El Mundo Sefardi 1.1 (1923): 42. Loker, Zvi. “Sarajevski spor i sefardski pokret u Jugoslaviji.” Zbornik 7 (1997): 72–79. Lubynski, Rudolf. “Nova sefardska sinagoga u Sarajevu.” Spomenica Jevrejske vjeroispovjedne opštine sefardskog obreda prigodom osvećenja Novog Hrama. Sarajevo 14 September (1930): 21–23. Nedić, Svetlana V. “Sinagoga Bet Jisrael – delo arhitekta Milana Kapetanovića.” Zbornik, Jevrejski istorijski muzej u Beogradu 8 Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Srbije i Crne Gore, 2003: 299–308. Papo, Eliezer. “Serbo-Croatian Influences on Bosnian Spoken Judeo-Spanish.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 2 (2007): 343–363. Pinto, Avram. “Dr. Moric Levi, Sarajveski nadrabin.” Jevrejski almanah 1971–1996. Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština, 2000: 23–37. Radović Mahečić, Darja. “Lubynski Rudolf (Loewy, Lubinski).” Hrvatski biografski leksikon. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 2009–2018. http://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak. aspx?id=11902. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021. Rajner, Mirjam. “Sinagogalna arhitektura.” Židovi na tlu Jugoslavije. Eds. Ante Sorić and Slavko Goldstein. Zagreb: Muzejski prostor, 1988: 39–47. Spomenica Jevrejske vjeroispovjedne opštine sefardskog obreda prigodom osvećenja Novog Hrama. Sarajevo 14 September 1930.

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Šarić, Samija. “Zum Autor Moritz Levy.” Die Sephardim in Bosnien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden auf der Balkanhalbinsel. Nachdruck der Ausgabe von 1911. Ed. Moritz Levy. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 1996: 151–153. Vučina Simović, Ivana. “The Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Sarajevo: From Social, Cultural and Linguistic Divergence to Convergence.” Sefarad in Österreich-Ungarn. Transversal, Zeitschrift für Jüdische Studien, Centrum für Jüdische Studien der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 13.2 (2012): 41–64. Vučina Simović, Ivana. “Los sefardíes ante su lengua: los esperancistas de Sarajevo.” Sefarad an der Donau. Lengua y Literatura de los Sefardíes en Tierras de los Habsburgo. Eds. Michael Studemund-Halévy, Christian Liebl, and Ivana Vučina Simović. Barcelona 2013: 341–360. Wischnitzer, Rachel. The Architecture of the European Synagogue. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1964.

Mirjam E. Wilhelm (Vienna)

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine A Jewish Avant-Gardist in Budapest, Berlin, Belgrade and Beyond1

Abstract:

This paper deals with Vjera Biller (1903–1940), a ‘forgotten’ Jewish artist of the interwar avant-Garde active in Budapest, Berlin and Belgrade, and her embracing of a distinct Neo-Byzantinist ‘style’ in her oeuvre. This Neo-Byzantinism is characterized by an archaistic rendering of space, perspective and corporality aimed at an overall impression of iconicity highly reminiscent of mosaics. The ‘Byzantine’ is thus adapted and modified within Biller’s avant-Gardist practice as a semantic and aesthetic method of modernity. In addition, the artist’s elaborate Neo-Byzantinism is developed in close correspondence to contemporary debates on Jewish material culture revolving around the motif of the ‘Byzantine’, employed mostly – but not exclusively – in the context of German-speaking, assimilated Ashkenazi Jewry.

I am, in fact, a Yugoslav. I was born in Croatia and my first language was Croatian. My mother is also Yugoslav.2

On 26 January 1924, Vjera Biller offers this empathic self-description, centred on the notion of identifying herself as Yugoslav, in a handwritten letter to Zenitist leader Ljubomir Micić.3 Having exhibited widely with the Berlin expressionist avant-garde

1 Research for this article was generously funded by the Österreichische Austauschdienst (OeAD) as part of the Ernst Mach Scholarship Program. 2 “Ich bin noch immer den Tatsachen nach eine Jugoslawin. Ich wurde in Kroatien geboren und meine erste Sprache war Kroatisch. Meine Mutter ist ebenso Jugoslawin.” Letter from Vjera Biller to Ljubomir Micić, (16.01.1924) (Pisma Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću). 3 Zenitism and the experimental magazine Zenit (1921–26)—a monthly collection of avant-gardist essays, poems, artworks and manifestos initially published in Zagreb, then in Belgrade—was founded and headed by Ljubomir Micić (Bozović 135). The Zenitist program called for the resurgence of Serbian national and cultural authenticity and self-sufficiency by invoking the so-called Balkan barbarogenius (Mishkova 89). Among the most renowned contributors to Zenitism were Yvan Goll, Jo Klek (Jossip Seisel), Marijan Mikac, Nina-Naj (Anuška Micić), Mihailo Petrov and Branko Ve or

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group Der Sturm between 1921 and 1922 (Subotić 2015: 24–31), the young artist was at that point looking to establish a collaboration with the Belgrade Zenitcircle prior to their first big exhibition in 1924 (Siegel 104). Biller’s participation and her collaborations with the Zenitists would prove incredibly fruitful and, in fact, lead to her art-historical reception as a Zenitist, and thus, a ‘Balkan’ avantgardist within scholarly discourse (Subotić 1983: 89–91). In 1919 prior to her Berlin years, sixteen-year-old Biller had already successfully presented her works with the Hungarian MA-group in Budapest alongside prominent and well-established colleagues such as Sándor Bortnyik, János Máttis-Teutsch, Béla Uitz and Lajos Kassák.4 Nevertheless, the stunning success, complex biography and sophisticated oeuvre of Vjera Biller has mostly been reduced to marginalia within familiar ‘-isms’ (Zenitism, Expressionism, Primitivism, etc.) or slotted into questionable categories (‘the Balkan avant-garde’, ‘naïve art’) in previous studies (Bilang 230–238; Ćurić 22; Subotić 2015: 26). The little existing scholarship on Biller’s life and work references such categorizations with almost tautological circularity and, as I argue, has yet to recognize her profound engagement with both the ‘Byzantine’ and the ‘Jewish’. Through my in-depth analysis of Biller’s linocut Piazza San Marco, the artist’s Neo-Byzantinism—characterized by an archaistic rendering of space, perspective and corporality—will become apparent culminating in an overall mosaic-like impression of flatness and two-dimensionality.5 Within Biller’s avant-Gardist practice, the ‘Byzantine’ is thus adapted and modified as a “semantic and aesthetic method of modernity” (Betancourt and Taroutina 10). Furthermore, Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism is developed in close correspondence to contemporary debates on Jewish material culture revolving around the motif of the ‘Byzantine’, employed mostly— but not exclusively—in the context of German-speaking, assimilated Ashkenazi Jewry (Wittler 63–81).

Virgil Poljanski (Micić’s younger brother). The Zenitist visual aesthetics are comprised of expressionist, futurist, Dadaist, primitivist and constructivist forms (Bozović 138). 4 The exhibition catalogue was published by art-critic Iván Hevesy in the first issue of the Hungarian avant-gardist MA-magazine. See Hevesy: A MA grafikai, and Hevesy: Katalogus. 5 Biller’s stencil-like figures are also closely connected to an avant-gardist interest in the aesthetics of early comics and the elaborate graphics of Japanese cutting techniques in wood and linoleum associated with manga-style. Particularly, the Berlin-based Sturm expressionists, with whom Biller spent her formative years during 1921–22, are known for such an on-going engagement culminating in a Sturm exhibition fully dedicated to graphics and titled Mokuhanga tenrankai mokuroku at the Hibiya Art Museum in Tokyo as early as 1914 (Walden 1954: 29).

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

Piazza San Marco (1921–22) and the mosaics of St. Mark’s in Venice Piazza San Marco (fig. 1) prominently features not only Biller’s programmatic children’s figures but also St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. This work is infused by the artist’s Neo-Byzantinism on two levels: the subject of the artwork as well as its rendering.

Fig. 1 Vjera Biller: Piazza San Marco (1921–22), Black-line Linocut, 33,0 x 24,5cm, Serbian National Museum, Belgrade, Inv.No. 35_2883.

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Both levels are inspired by San Marco and its mosaics, which, by the 1920s, had already been established as one of the paramount examples of Byzantine artisanship and architecture in the West within contemporary art historical and Byzantine studies (Bullen 34–54). In the following decades, this paradigm was especially strengthened by art historian Otto Demus and his well-known studies on the mosaics of San Marco from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which had a significant impact on the equalisation of the ‘Byzantine’ with this building and its mosaics in terms of a research paradigm with reference to the close cultural, economic and political connections between Venice and the Byzantine Empire (Verstegen 1–24). Two of Biller’s characteristic children’s figures are depicted on the Piazza San Marco in Venice feeding a flock of pigeons. By including the iconic architectural shape of St. Mark’s Basilica in the background of the linocut, the visual narrative is clearly mapped out in geographical terms avoiding all ambiguity concerning its locality. The children are surrounded by birds shown in schematized postures flying, sitting, and picking up grains from the ground. Both of Biller’s children are barefoot. Architectural fragments act as a framework delimiting the image field on its edges to the left and the right. On the left side, a quinquepartite façade with arcades and oculus-shaped windows is presented, while the right part of the picture frame is comprised of a tower structure characterized by blind arches reaching all the way up to the spire and by crenel-shaped apertures highly resembling the iconic Campanile on Piazza San Marco, while the building on the left might possibly reference the on-site landmarks of Procuratie Vecchie, Scala de Giganti or Arco Foscari. Biller adapts and modifies the characteristics of Byzantine mosaics, exemplified by the following scene from the northern transept of San Marco (fig. 2), where the life of the Virgin Mary is depicted, by concentrating on such a schematised corporality denoted by sharp contours. In addition, Biller choses an equally Byzantinising artistic approach with regard to her children’s figures, whose bodies consist of basic geometric forms: circle (the children’s heads), semi-circle (the children’s hair), segmental arch (the children’s torsos) and two pairs of legs, which are reduced to elongated cuboids and shown in profile view without any anatomical details such as toes. Moreover, the antiindividualistic design of Biller’s figures is aimed at recognizability and can thus be interpreted as an avant-gardist technique of the ‘Byzantine’ in its own right (Maguire 46). The omittance of individual physiognomies for the benefit of a repetitive ensemble borrows from Byzantine artistic traditions in referencing a Western understanding of its iconicity (Maguire 46). With regard to the rendering of faces, Biller’s figures—with their unvarying almond-shaped eyes, never facing the viewers, and their heart-shaped mouths—attest to this Byzantinised understanding of figurativeness: “In Byzantine art and mosaic, the most holy figures never make

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

Fig. 2 Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Visitation and Joseph Scolding Mary.

eye-contact as a sign of their otherworldly presence. These averted eyes as well as an omittance of individual facial expression thus constitute the characteristics of iconicity.” (Nelson 343) Just like the pair of spectators witnessing the Scolding of Mary by Joseph in the above-mentioned mosaic from the Vita of the Virgin (figs. 3a–3b), Biller’s children’s figures are presented in a ‘distorted’ perspective without curvatures, while their helmet-like hair—sharply contoured, (pitch black) bob hairstyles—equally resemble these mosaicist designs.

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Fig. 3a Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Joseph Scolding Mary (Detail).

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

Fig. 3b Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Joseph Scolding Mary (Detail).

Additionally, Biller’s frame-like and highly schematized architecture acts as “iconographic shorthand” (Boeck 219). The architectural fragments are reduced to their most important, that is to say: the most iconic elements, which again guarantee recognisability. In doing so the artist explicitly follows a Byzantinised perception of spatial renderings, characterised by the visual translation of three-dimensional architecture into the two-dimensional plane through iconic abbreviation. This key characteristic of Byzantine art concerning architectural space (Ćurčić 26–28) can once again be found in the Joseph Scolding Mary-scene. The tower structure on the left edge of this mosaic, with a façade reduced to one distinct, protracted pilaster and a polygonal spire on top is particularly reminiscent of Biller’s rendering of the Campanile and, in addition to that, vividly illustrates the characteristically Byzan-

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tine art practise of framing image fields with ‘scattered’ and iconic architecture in shorthand (fig. 4).

Fig. 4 (left): Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Joseph Scolding Mary (Detail).

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

Fig. 5 (right): Mosaics of San Marco, Porta Sant’ Alipio.

Even Biller’s inclusion of the iconic shape of San Marco in the background of her linocut, has a prominent predecessor in the Byzantine mosaics on-site: at the Porta Sant’ Alipio (fig. 5) on the outer façade of the church, where the transfer of St. Mark’s relics to Venice is depicted, San Marco’s iconic structure, placed in the background of the mosaic, facilitates an unambiguous localization by referencing the city’s most distinctive sacral building: “in Byzantine art […] visualizations of site-specific urban topography were extremely rare. […] Site-specific iconography was reserved for spaces of special political, spiritual, and emotional importance” (Boeck 224). Hence, Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism, encompassing these site-specific, aesthetical and compositional references, shapes the artist’s understanding of corporeality and space, and is aimed at an overall impression of mosaic-like iconicity in reference to San Marco. The question, however, of whether or not Biller had in fact visited Venice in the first decades of the twentieth century and thus was able to draw on these mosaics for inspiration by witnessing them on-site remains uncertain due to a lack of historiographic evidence.

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Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism and the Zenitist ‘Serbo-Byzantine’ Biller’s participation in the 1924 Belgrade Zenit exhibition organised by Ljubomir Micić has meanwhile played a key-role in the reception of the artist as a ‘Balkan’ avant-gardist. Biller, the eldest daughter of Emil and Malvina Biller, née Kugel, was born in Đakovo in 1903;6 Biller’s childhood was, however, characterized by her family’s constant and often transnational relocations (Subotić 2015: 26): from Đakovo to Osijek (1905–1912), to Opatija (1912–13), to Budapest (1914–1921), to Berlin (1921–1924), again to Opatija (1924–1932), then to Vienna (1932–1935), and finally to Graz (1935–1938), where her father Emil died in 1936.7 From him—a Styrian Jew, born in Graz in 1878—Biller inherited her Austrian citizenship, which—together with her multilocal biography—complicates not only her art-historical reception as an avant-gardist from the Balkans but also Biller’s self-identification with the sphere of the ‘Yugoslav’ in her letter to Micić.8 This is even more so the case, as their mutual correspondence encompassing seven letters is written consistently in German on Biller’s part (Golubović 1980: 11). In these letters, the artist appears inclined to emphasise her own Balkan roots and her birthplace in the Slavonian city of Đakovo (modern-day Croatia, then Southern Hungary) prior to her participation in the Zenit exhibition while at the same time reducing her hybrid position between national borders, cultural capitals and multiple avant-gardist groups to the notion of Yugoslavism. Furthermore, this emphasis on jugoslavenstvo in Biller’s self-description with its clear focus on the supranational instead of national and/ or ethnic particularisms (e.g., the Croatian or Serbian) attests to Paul Benjamin Gordiejew’s notion that “Yugoslavia and Yugoslavism were contradictions to most Yugoslav peoples, but not to the Jews. Being without a territory and dispersed throughout the country and beyond, […] many of them, […] saw Yugoslavia and Yugoslav unity (jugoslavenstvo) as a real possibility […].” (Gordiejew 143) Regardless of this self-description strongly centred on the notion of jugoslavenstvo, Micić most surprisingly presented Biller’s works as part of a decisively Serbian art tradition in the 1924 exhibition in Belgrade. There, Biller’s contributions were included in the curatorial category of “Srb., S.H.S.” (Serbia, S.H.S.), as evidenced by the exhibition catalogue, which puts into writing Micić’s eminently national categorizations (Micić 3). While Micić’s own chauvinistic tendencies and Serbo-nationalist leanings have been discussed widely in research on Zenitism (i.e., Marjanović 63–84, Siegel 99),9 scholarly interest has only recently acknowledged 6 7 8 9

Letter from Vjera Biller to Ljubomir Micić, (08.12.1923) (Pisma Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću). According to the registration form (Meldezettel Emil Biller). Letter from Vjera Biller to Ljubomir Micić, (16.01.1924) (Pisma Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću). Born in 1895 to a family with modest means in Sošice, Micić (1895–1971) received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Zagreb in 1918 and co-founded Zenit in 1921 with his

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

that the Zenitist discourse on the ‘Serbian’ is also characterized by a profound involvement with the ‘Byzantine’ (Bogdanović 299–317; Levinger 260–278). For the Zenitists, the ideological recourse to the ‘Byzantine’ as a form of Serbian nativism offered an important semantic space for their self-legitimization and affirmation as a Balkan avant-garde (Mishkova 92). The Byzantine legacy of Serbia was primarily identified by the Zenitists in relationship to the medieval and the national,10 closely correlating to a broader enthusiasm for “Serbo-Byzantinism” within the context of 1920s Belgrade in terms of a ‘new national-style’ (Jovanović 235–258). Micić’s essay Beograd bez architekture (Belgrade without Architecture) has received ample scholarly interest in this regard, focussing on the manifold references to Micić’s understanding of and fascination with Byzantine sacral spaces (Bogdanović 299–317; Levinger 260–278). Within Zenitist discourse, Byzantine architecture with its characteristic use of (multiple) domes was referenced in artistic terms as well, when Jo Klek—the only trained architect of the group—incorporated modernized Serbo-Byzantine forms in his sketched designs for the Zeniteum I and II, a highly symbolic edifice representing the Zenitist movement (Bogdanović 305). Even though such a symbolic structure was never built, either in its first or the second designs, the ‘Serbo-Byzantine’ continued to be one of the primary discursive threads of Zenit.11 Already by the early 1920s, the geographical focus of this inner-avant-gardist and highly ideological debate had, however, shifted somewhat from the formerly Byzantine realms of medieval Serbia towards the Italian Mediterranean. Boško Tokin’s article on St. Peter’s in Rome, published in the Zenit issue nr. 5 in 1921, is an apt example to that end. Here, Tokin argues how, given its continual (re-)construction over longer periods of time, the dome of the church could be viewed as simultaneously Roman, Byzantine and “Renaissance”—all at once (Tokin 3–4). Bogdanović has noted that, in doing so, Tokin seems to point to the Zenitist position that the avant-gardist Serbo-Byzantine should dissolve traditional geographical and historical divisions (Bogdanović 304). However, I argue, that Tokin’s interest in St. Peter’s and Italy might—additionally—be read as a prelude to those series of Serbian nativisms, which the Zenitists would later try to locate

younger brother Branislav (1898–1947), who appears under various pseudonyms. Micić’s prominent self-identification with the Serbian minority in Sošice and in Zagreb, his strong opposition to Roman Catholic Habsburg culture and his nationalistic radicalization have made him a particularly controversial figure. (Bozović 136) 10 On the intricate ideological connections between the medieval and the Byzantine in politicized national discourses in the Balkans beyond the Serbian context: Gargova 152–167. 11 Zenitism shares its interest in the Byzantine and an equally anti-Eurocentric spirit with the Russian avant-gardes (Taroutina 20). In 1922, a special issue on Russia was published by Zenit and prominent Russian avant-gardists like Archipenko, Kandinsky, Lissitzky and Zadkine exhibited in the 1924 Zenit-exhibition in Belgrade (Micić 2).

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in the ‘Byzantine Balkans’. Following an almost interventionistic impulse, Tokin emphasises how the Other—the Balkanic, Byzantine and Serbian—is inscribed into this simultaneousness of St. Peter’s architectural history, borrowing from Ancient Roman, Italian Renaissance and especially Serbo-Byzantine building traditions. Moreover, both Rome and the figure of Saint Peter are of paramount importance for medieval Serbian heroic epics and the nationalist nativisms derived from them, given that one of the most prominent examples of Serbian icon painting dating back to the late thirteenth century depicts not only Saint Peter and Saint Paul but also the portrait of its female donor and commissioner (Evans 50): the Serbian queen mother, Helena of Anjou. Her sons Milutin, who was crowned King of Serbia in 1282, and his brother Dragutin, who renounced the throne the same year, are included in the depiction as well, and both were subsequently romanticised as heroic figures in Serbian national narratives, invoking a close historical and symbolic connection to medieval Italy (ibid.). Thus, Tokin’s engagement with St. Peter’s in Rome may well be read in close proximity to the prevailing nativist and autarchic currents in Zenitist intellectual thought centring on the Serbo-Byzantine as a Balkanism (Mishkova 89), which Micić—editor-in-chief and sole organiser of the 1924 Zenit-show in Belgrade—would later radicalize in chauvinist terms. In 1921, the same year Tokin’s article was published, Biller finished her linocut Piazza San Marco. Considering the importance of the ‘Serbo-Italian’ vernacular for the Zenitists, her artistic rendering of yet another iconic Byzantine sacral building fitted extremely well into this paradigm. For Zenitist—in this case, Micić’s—eyes, Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism might have appeared, more unintentionally than not, in accordance with Serbo-Byzantinist sentiments offering an explanation for her reception as a decisively Serbian artist in the Belgrade exhibition, which not only completely dismissed Biller’s own written self-description to the organiser, but also ignored the fact that the artist had never even visited the Serbian capital Belgrade, or Serbia itself (Ćurić 33).

Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism and the Jewish tradition In search of a Jewish tradition in art and architecture during the 1920s, the Byzantine served as a prominent and almost omnipresent reference, especially within metropolitan and German-speaking Ashkenazi contexts (Wittler 63–81). This phenomenon has been subsumed under the umbrella term “German-Jewish (Self-) Orientalization” in the aftermath of the Haskalah and strongly conforms with some of the contemporary Zionist sentiments in Germany and to a lesser extent in Austria (Wittler 70). Following the major academic trends in art and architectural history at the turn of the twentieth century, which identified the domes and the spatial concept of San Marco as an epitome of the ‘Byzantine’, a significant number of

Vjera Biller (1903–1940) and the Neo-Byzantine

German synagogues were built in such Byzantinising forms, most prominently, the Charlottenburg Synagogue from 1912 in the Fasanenstrasse in Berlin (HammerSchenk 445–452). In the roof of the Charlottenburg Synagogue with its succession of domes, the key-characteristic of such a San Marco-esque Byzantinism was readily adapted and incorporated as part of a decisively Jewish space. At the same time, archaeological excavations in the geographical area of Palestine were intensified by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), who had already undertaken the so-called “synagogue-expedition” in 1905, marking a watershed moment in the on-going (self-)identification of Byzantine late-antique Palestine with Jewish material culture for assimilated segments of the German Jewry (Faßbeck 101–120). Founded in 1898 in Berlin by well-known Jewish patrons like James Simon, the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft oversaw several field surveys in Kapernaum and Megiddo between 1903 and 1905 (Faßbeck 102). Their findings—ancient synagogue-buildings and their mosaics from the Byzantine era between the third and sixth centuries—were published in Leipzig in 1916 in a compendium titled Antike Synagogen in Galilaea (Ancient Synagogues in Galilee), which further accelerated this notable nexus between the Byzantine and the Jewish in the academic field and beyond (Faßbeck 110). In light of this link, Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism, centred on an engagement with San Marco and its Byzantine mosaics, could easily be read as an artistic attempt to establish the ‘Venetian’ in terms of such a Byzantine-Jewish symbolic topography. Biller’s involvement with the Berlin-based avant-Garde group Der Sturm between 1921–22, culminating in her twelve exhibits at the Sturm gallery,12 amplifies this notion. Due to its mainly Jewish protagonists—Marc Chagall,13 Else Lasker-Schüler and Herwarth Walden among others—the Sturm expressionists were known as the so-called “Hebrew avant-garde” in contemporary public discourse and some, if not all, of the above-mentioned artists actively performed Jewish identities: Chagall with his shtetl motifs (Harshav 51–87) and Lasker-Schüler with her orientalised alter-ego Prince Yussuf of Thebes (Körner 31). Walden, alias Georg Lewin, who founded Der Sturm in 1910, had in turn published his adaption of Die Judentochter (The Jew’s Daughter), a song from Ludwig Achim von Arnim’s collection Des

12 While scholarship on Biller has as yet only recognized seven Sturm exhibitions (Subotić 1983: 27), the artist’s on-going activities in this group, culminating in an overall number of twelve participations at the well-known Sturm gallery, are evidenced by the respective exhibition catalogues of the 98.-100., 103.-105. and 108.-112. exhibitions in 1921 and 1922. 13 Chagall’s shared interest in the ‘Byzantine Revival’ of the Russian avant-gardes, especially through neo-primitivist artists such as Mikhail Larionov or Natalia Goncharova, has been discussed with regard to imagery, iconography and self-transcendence (Spira 128). The strong links between Russian avant-garde art and the Byzantine icon painting tradition may thus have come to Biller’s personal attention via Chagall, with whom the artist exhibited frequently at the Sturm gallery in Berlin.

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Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), as early as 1915 in collaboration with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka,14 equally catalysing the reception of Sturm artists as part of a Hebrew avant-garde (Körner 67). Moreover, strong ties existed between Der Sturm and Frieda Riess’ salon in Berlin, where the renowned photographer and self-declared Zionist regularly entertained guests and prominent figures from the city’s most avant-gardist circles (Beckers and Ehrsam 90). However, in contrast to Chagall’s or Lasker-Schüler’s overt self-positioning as Jewish artists, Biller relies on the more subtle Venetian and San Marco-esque ‘Byzantine’ to denote a certain idea of Jewishness in her oeuvre. Her generic Neo-Byzantinism, referencing the motif of San Marco and the aesthetic of its mosaics as part of a Byzantine and, thus, inherently Jewish art and architectural tradition, unostentatiously discloses the artist’s engagement with this topic. Regardless of its subtlety, given the historical influence of the city of Venice as one of the key centres for Jewish life in the Mediterranean (Katz 113–114), Biller’s programmatic reference to the Serenissima incorporates the entire spectrum of contemporary German debates on Jewish material culture, which have oscillated ever since between (self-)Orientalisation and an Othered Byzantine (Swarts 189–232). My analysis has shown the means by which Biller’s Neo-Byzantinism occupies a major role in her artistic practice and how Biller’s Byzantium draws from both of the artist’s Lebenswelten: the cosmopolitan gesture related to her Sturm activities in 1920s Berlin, a possible visit to Venice and her own understanding of jugoslavenstvo with regard to her Zenit contributions, all inspired but not limited by the notion of Jewishness. Therefore, this specific and transnational experience ultimately attests not only to the complexity of Biller’s avant-gardist approach and practice, but to the many-faceted and multi-focal entanglements of Jewish culture(s) themselves.

Works cited Beckers, Marion and Thomas Ehrsam. Die Riess. Fotografisches Atelier und Salon in Berlin 1918-1932. Berlin: Wasmuth, 2008. Betancourt, Roland and Maria Taroutina. Byzantium/Modernism. The Byzantine as Method in Modernity. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015. Bilang, Karla. “Avantgarde vom Balkan. Vjera Biller (Belgrad) und Mascha Jiwkowa-Usunowa (Sofia).” Frauen im Sturm. Künstlerinnen in der Moderne. Berlin: AvivA, 2013: 230-238.

14 On Wednesday, 8 October 1924, Walden would perform this particular song during the 240th Sturm-soirée at the Charlottenburg Music Academy in the Fasanenstrasse 1 and thus in close spatial proximity to the prominent, aforementioned Fasanenstrasse Synagogue (Walden 1924).

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Boeck, Elena. Imagining the Byzantine Past. The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bogdanović, Jelena. “Evocations of Byzantium in Zenitist Avant-Garde Architecture.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75.3 (2016): 299-317. Bozović, Marijeta. “Zenit Rising. Return to a Balkan Avant-Garde.” After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Ed. Radmila Gorup. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Bullen, J.B. Byzantium Rediscovered. The Byzantine Revival in Europe and America. London: Phaidon Press, 2003. Ćurčić, Slobodan. “Architecture as Icon.” Architecture as Icon. Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art. Eds. Slobodan Ćurčić and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2010: 3-38. Ćurić, Mirko. Vjera Biller. Umjetnica u Zenitu Oluje. Đakovo: Đakovački kulturni krug, 2019. Demus, Otto. The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice. Vol. I-IV. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Evans, Helen. Byzantium. Faith and Power (1261-1557). New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Faßbeck, Gabriele. “The Longer, the More Happiness I Derive from This Undertaking’ James Simon and Early German Research into Galilee’s Ancient Synagogues.” Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology. Vehinnei Rachel, Essays in Honor of Rachel Hachlili. Eds. Gabriele Faßbeck and Ann E. Killebrew. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015: 101-120. Gargova, Fani. “Medievalism, Byzantinism, and Bulgarian Politics through the Archival Lens.” The Middle Ages in the Modern World. Eds. Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017: 152-167. Golubović, Vidosava. “Časopis Zenit. Biografije saradnika zenita.” Zenit 1921-1926. Eds. Vidosava Golubović and Irina Subotić. Belgrade: Narodna biblioteka Srbije, 2008: 11. Golubović, Vidosava. “Pisme Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću (Književni arhiv Ljubomira Micića 4).” Književna reč 154.10 (1980): 11. Gordiejew, Paul Benjamin: Voices of Yugoslav Jewry. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. Hammer-Schenk, Harold. Synagogen in Deutschland. Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780-1933). Hamburg: Christians, 1981. Harshav, Benjamin: “The Role of Language in Modern Art. On Texts and Subtexts in Chagall’s Paintings”. Modernism/Modernity 1.4 (1994): 51-87. Hevesy, Iván. “A MA grafikai kiállitásához. Biller Vjera, Bortnyik Sándor, Máttis Teutsch János, Ruttkay György, Schadl János, Uitz Béla.” MA 1/IV (1919): n.p. [1]. Hevesy, Iván. “Katalogus. A Ma grafikai (VII.) kiállitásához.“ MA 1.IV (1919): n.p. [2-3]. Jovanović, Miodrag. “Teofil Hanzen hanzenatika’ i Hanzenovi srpski učenici.” Zbornik za likovne umetnosti 21 (1985): 235-258. Kadijević, Aleksandar. Jedan vek traženja nacionalnog stila u srpskoj arhitekturi (sredina XIX-XX veka), 2nd ed. Belgrade: Građevinska knjiga, 2007.

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Katz, Dana. The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Körner, Birgit. Hebräische Avantgarde. Else Lasker-Schülers Poetologie im Kontext des Kulturzionismus. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2017. Levinger, Esther. “Ljubomir Micić and the Zenitist Utopia.” Central European Avant-Gardes. Exchange and Transformation 1910-1930. Ed. Timothy Benson. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MIT Press, 2002: 260-278. Maguire, Henry. The Icons of Their Bodies. Saints and their Images in Byzantium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Marjanović, Igor. “Peripatetic Discourses of Ljubomir Micić and Branko Ve Poljanski.” On the Very Edge. Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918-1941). Eds. Jelena Bogdanović and Lilien Filipovitch Robinson. Leuven: Leuven University Press 2014: 63-84. Meldezettel Emil Biller. Sig. 732.18, Stadtarchiv Graz, Graz. Micić, Ljubomir.“Voimja Zenitizma. Katalog Prve zenitove međunarodne izložbe u Beogradu 1924 g.“ Zenit February 1924: n.p. [2-4]. Mishkova, Diana. Beyond Balkanism. The Scholarly Politics of Region Making. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. Nelson, Robert. “Later Byzantine Painting. Art, Agency, and Appreciation.” Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS853. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007: XIV, 414. Pisma Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću. Bequest of Ljubomir Micić, Narodni muzej, Belgrade. Siegel, Holger. In unseren Seelen flattern schwarze Flaggen. Serbische Avantgarde 1918-1939. Leipzig: Reclam, 1992. Spira, Andrew. The Avant-Garde Icon. Russian Avant-Garde Art & The Icon Painting Tradition. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2008. Subotić, Irina. “Vjera Biller (1903-?).” Zenit i avangardna 20-tih godina. Eds. Vida Golubović and Irina Subotić. Belgrade: Narodni muzej i Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1983: 89-91. Subotić, Irina. “Vjera Biller. Malerin der urbanen Naiven Kunst.“ Sturmfrauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910-1932. Eds. Max Hollein and Ingrid Pfeiffer. Köln: Wienand, 2015: 24-31. Swarts, Lynne. Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation. Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. Taroutina, Maria. The Icon and the Square. Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Tokin, Boško. “Rim. Kupola Svetog Petra.“ Zenit June 1921: n.p. [3-4]. Verstegen, Ian. “Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the Spatial Icon.” Journal of Art Historiography 19 (2018): 1-24. Walden, Herwarth. “100. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm September 1921: n.p. [1,4]. Walden, Herwarth. “103. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm December 1921: n.p. [1,8]. Walden, Herwarth. “104. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm January 1922: n.p. [1,5].

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Walden, Herwarth. “105. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm February 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “108. Ausstellung.” Der Sturm May 1922: n.p. [1,4]. Walden, Herwarth. “109. Ausstellung.” Der Sturm June/July 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “110. Ausstellung.” Der Sturm August 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “111. Ausstellung.” Der Sturm September 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “112. Ausstellung.” Der Sturm October 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “114. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm December 1922: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “98. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm May 1921: n.p. [1-2]. Walden, Herwarth. “99. Ausstellung.“ Der Sturm July/August 1921: n.p. [1,5]. Walden, Herwarth. “Sturm-Monatsbericht. 15. Jahrgang.“ Der Sturm October 1924: n.p. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/sturm1924/0291. Accessed 21 Mar. 2021. Walden, Nell. Der Sturm. Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis. Baden-Baden: Klein, 1954. Wittler, Kathrin. “Good to think’. (Re-)Conceptualizing German Jewish Orientalism.” Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. Eds. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig and Axel Stähler. Berlin and Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015: 63-81.

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Olga Ungar (Tel Aviv)

Remembering the Victims Vojvodina Holocaust Memorials

Abstract:

The article analyzes material gathered for the project “Vojvodina Holocaust Memorials”, which studies patterns of Holocaust commemoration in Vojvodina. This comprises pioneering research that seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on cultural memory, introducing the case of the Vojvodina Holocaust memorials. The article focuses on memorials located in Jewish cemeteries and at the sites of destroyed synagogues. After an introduction and brief historical survey of Vojvodina’s Jewry, the article provides more detailed analysis of the memorials and commemoration patterns of the Holocaust victims developed by both the Jewish and general community. Jewish Cemetery1 No new graves will ever be here: sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that Braun, and Mendelssohn, and that Leipsira Klopoter whose remains are marked on headstones half sunk into the ground and the grass,

perished in the last war in gas chambers of annihilation camps taking with them into unmarkedness also the “eternal remembrance” which they had inscribed on their elders’ graves. (Tišma 35)

1 “Jevrejsko groblje”: Tu više neće biti/ novih raka:/ sinovi i kćeri/ i unuci i praunuci/ tog Brauna i Mendelsona/ i te Leipsire Klopoter/ čije ostatke oglašuju/ kamene ploče/ do pola utonule/ u zemlju i travu/ izginuli su/ u prošlom/ ratu/ u gasnim komorama/ logora za uništavanje/ ponevši sa sobom/ u nezabeleženost/ i ta “večna sećanja”/ što su ih starima na grob uklesali. (Translated from SerboCroatian to English by Mirna Pinsky.) Aleksandar Tišma (1924-2003), author and novelist, born to a Serbian father and Jewish mother, who lost relatives on his mother’s side in the Holocaust. The translations from Hungarian, Hebrew, and Serbo-Croatian in this article are by the author together with Vera Ungar and Mirna Pinsky, to whom I would like to express my deepest gratitude.

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Introduction In this article, I will present some of the findings of my on-going research project “Vojvodina Holocaust Memorials” that began in April 2018.2 My research investigates the post-war memorialization of Holocaust victims in Vojvodina. It includes monuments erected in Jewish cemeteries, monuments on properties previously—or still owned—by its Jewish communities and memorials to the Holocaust victims in public spaces. In addition, it analyzes the commemorative practices developed by Jewish communities as well as local and state authorities and discusses the role of these sites in the formation of cultural memory, collective memory, and the identity of certain cities. By researching commemorative patterns, the project has only started to unpack the broader issue of how Jewish communities, on the one hand, and the wider society in Vojvodina, on the other, commemorate the tragic fate of this once-thriving Jewish community. The project creates a link between the past and the present, as well as between personal and public spaces. It traces how and why cultural memories of Holocaust experiences have been formed and transmitted. The focus of this article is on communities’ memorials erected in Jewish cemeteries and on memorial plaques at the sites of destroyed synagogues. Through the analysis of commemorative inscriptions, I will explore key patterns of remembrance developed and nurtured by the Vojvodina Jewish communities and the wider society from the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust until the present day. In order to investigate developments and changes within the culture of remembrance of the Holocaust in Vojvodina, I will discuss the memorials’ symbolic, material, and functional aspects, which include questions of memory, responsibility, power, and continuity, while following changes in their structure and function. To this day, the systematic murder of the Vojvodina Jewry has been marginalized and removed from the collective consciousness. Through examples and analysis of the Holocaust memorials, I will attempt to explain reasons for this marginalization. This article does not discuss commemoration ceremonies, however, I find it important to note that the active Jewish communities of Vojvodina (Subotica, Sombor, Novi Sad, Zrenjanin, Kikinda, Pančevo, and Zemun3 ) commemorate their dead through memorials in Jewish cemeteries and on the sites of the demolished

2 Research findings are published on the website: https://vhmproject.org/. This project has been realized thanks to the financial support of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia, from funds acquired pursuant to the Law on Remedying the Consequences of Seizure of Assets of Holocaust Victims with No Living Legal Heirs. 3 Even though geographically located in the Vojvodina’s district of Srem, Zemun is today a municipal borough of the city of Belgrade. Due to its shared history with the other Vojvodina Jewish communities, it is included in this research.

Remembering the Victims

synagogues in their town and often neighboring towns with no Jewish communities or residents. Dates commemorated either mark the anniversaries of deportations and/or International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27. Nevertheless, some of these memorials have been forgotten. Even though representatives of municipal governments often attend these ceremonies, commemoration events are organized and primarily attended by members of the Jewish community, thus stressing the intimate character of these gatherings.

Historical background on Vojvodina Jewry Vojvodina is an autonomous province in northern Serbia. Once part of the AustroHungarian Empire, it was incorporated after World War I into the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Sotirović 30). On the eve of World War II, Vojvodina was home to some twenty-thousand Jews.4 More than half of the Jewish population lived in the two largest cities in the region, Subotica and Novi Sad. The majority were middle class and followed the Neolog or a moderate reform strain of Judaism, which dominated much of Hungary from the late nineteenth century.5 There were also substantial numbers of strictly observant Orthodox communities mostly located along the Tisza River with their largest center in Senta, which also had a small Hasidic community (Loker 92–93). Jews resided in about eighty cities, towns, and villages. In each one of these settlements, there was at least a prayer house and a cemetery, while in larger towns there were also Jewish schools, cultural centers, Zionist and charitable organizations, hospitals, old-age homes, rabbinates, and yeshivas. The Holocaust forever altered Jewish life in this region. After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia that began on April 6, Germany, Hungary, and the Independent State of Croatia divided and occupied Vojvodina on April 12, 1941 (Klajn 16). The Jews of Banat, a region occupied by German forces but administered by its volksdeutsche minority, were deported to Belgrade by the summer of 1941. The men were interned in the Topovske šupe concentration camp and murdered in October of the same year. At the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the women and children were taken to the newly established Jewish camp at Sajmište (Judenlager Semlin). They were either killed on site or in a moving van in which victims were

4 According to the 1931 census. The data of the 1931 census is available at: http://publikacije.stat.gov.rs/ G1938/Pdf/G19384002.pdf. Accessed 12 Dec. 2020. 5 The Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–69 led to the institutional division into Orthodox, Neolog, and “Status Quo” factions. Many Hasidic communities had opted for “Status Quo” over Orthodoxy in 1869, but some later joined the Orthodox camp.

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suffocated to death with carbon monoxide. Banat was announced judenrein in August 1942 (Manoschek 255–257). In Bačka, which was under Hungarian occupation, Jewish men were almost immediately mobilized in forced labor brigades. In January 1942, the Hungarian authorities conducted a series of raids targeted against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. The German occupation of Hungary in the spring of 1944 marked a new phase of terror against the Jews. It began with the imprisonment of all remaining Jews starting in April 1944. The prisoners were first taken to transit camps and ghettos from which they were transported to concentration camps, mainly to Auschwitz (Braham 121–124, 146–151). In Srem, which became part of the Independent State of Croatia, the persecution and killing of Jews began immediately upon the state’s proclamation on April 10, 1941. They were eventually sent to the Ustaša concentration camps, mainly to Jasenovac where most of them perished (Tomasevich 233–241). The number of the Holocaust victims in Vojvodina was 15,411—more than 80 percent of its pre-war Jewish population (Živković). The human loss was accompanied by the loss of an identifiable Jewish material culture. During the war but also in its aftermath, most representative buildings and Jewish heritage assets were demolished. Nevertheless, the trauma of the human loss was so great that it overshadowed the loss of material heritage. It is only over the past two decades that the demolished, looted, and nationalized Jewish-owned property in Vojvodina has become a subject for public political and scholarly debate.

Theoretical background—sites of memory and developments in commemorative sculpture in the region Monuments and memorials as testimony to the cultural legacy of a society’s history—the interaction between individual and collective memory as well as the dialectics between remembering certain segments of the past while forgetting the others—have been extensively researched in the past decades, especially in the context of a culture of remembrance. Much research has been done in regard to collective memory, the most influential concepts to have emerged being sites or realms of memory, the term coined by the French historian Pierre Nora, that covers a wide array of phenomena: from sites in the literal sense, monuments, events, symbolic objects to representations in media, rituals, shared beliefs, and any form of cultural production (Nora 1989: 7–25; Nora 1996: xvii). As memory transforms over time, the perception of monuments changes with it. Therefore, monuments institutionalize memories, giving the past a material identity and serving as tools in the process and the politics of remembering and forgetting (Hutton 150–151). Nevertheless, material culture captures the zeitgeist,

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serving as an important means by which one can interpret society and its collective identity (Tilley and Rowlands 500–501). Monuments, thus, could be construed as an expression of a society’s memory, culture, and history but also of its ideological and political narratives (Crownshaw 220). In relation to the specifically Jewish context, while memory has been a constitutive component of Jewish identity throughout history (Soltes 136), in the modern era historiography became “divorced from Jewish memory” and historians became those who have the power to arrest the decay of memory (Yerushalmi 93). On the other hand, the centrality of interpersonal networks in facilitating mourning processes and the importance of rituals, have played an important part in structuring both individual and collective Jewish bereavement cycle after the Holocaust (Ornstein 642–643). Developments in the culture of remembrance of Holocaust victims have not been an isolated phenomenon but were affected on a conceptual level by general sociocultural patterns and on a local level by different ideological elements constructing desirable patterns of commemoration of World War II and the Holocaust. In both the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav eras, these were shaped by political and social systems and concepts. Trends in commemorative practices are reflective of different political and ideological agendas. They change and evolve in the course of time along with contexts of memorialization and styles of commemorative sculpture. In the first decades of Socialist Yugoslavia, monuments to the fallen heroes of the partisan revolution and to the victims of fascism were erected across the country. The construction of collective memory was embedded in the grand narrative of heroic partisan struggle, martyrdom, and the concept of brotherhood and unity. Centering on the heroic acts of the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, the official policies aimed to smooth over ethnic tensions that had disrupted the country during World War II (Karge 106–118; Jakir 151–175). A Yugoslav-era commemorative narrative was to group together all the Yugoslav people who perished as “victims of fascism.” Even more so, the Yugoslav authorities saw the Holocaust as an atrocity perpetrated against all Yugoslav nations (Subotić 56). Therefore, the specificity of the Jewish fate in the Holocaust, or the fact that they were victims of a planned, systematic, and total destruction, was never fully recognized. After the disintegration of Yugoslavia and de-unification of the Yugoslav identity, ethnic nationalism and anti-communist ideologies spread rapidly. Consequently, new memorials have been unveiled reflecting highly nationalistic interpretations of history, which, in a heterogeneous environment such as Vojvodina, often means conflicting memories of wartime (and peacetime) among different ethnic groups. In many areas of the country, memorials that stood as anti-fascist symbols were often the first to be destroyed in a possible attempt to erase memory of the Yugoslav and socialist past. Others stand neglected (Manojlović Pintar 287–307).

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Jewish cemeteries The practice of inscribing the names of the victims on existing family graves in Jewish cemeteries was developed by survivors in the immediate aftermath of World War II. There are hundreds of such graves, and the exploration of this phenomenon deserves a separate discussion exclusively devoted to it. For the purposes of this article, I will note several commemoration models fostered by local Jews. Some of them tended to follow the officially accepted pattern of commemorating the perished as “victims of fascism” or “victims of the occupation forces” or just as “disappeared in 1941”,6 as we can see on the Kassowitz family grave in Novi Sad (fig. 1).7 Some of them list the names of the camps, in which their loved ones were murdered, such as the Fürst family grave in Čantavir that commemorates “our loved ones from Auschwitz and Ukraine” (fig. 2).8 Those who came from a more traditional or Orthodox background often used the phrase “died as martyrs”. It seems that these earliest and most intimate commemorative practices, initiated and developed by survivors in the realm of private memories, were the necessary process of coming to terms with past experiences, giving them strength to deal with their loss. Fig. 1 Kassowitz family grave, Jewish cemetery in Novi Sad, 67 Doža Đerđa Street.

Collective memorials in Jewish cemeteries created a platform for collective mourning for survivors. They were mostly created during the first decade after World War II at the initiative of local Jewish communities or the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. In 1946, the first commemorative monument in Čakovec, Croatia, was already unveiled. In the following decade and prior to the

6 “Nestali 1941. god.” 7 Due to a limited number of illustrations in the volume, some of the monuments or places that I refer to will not include illustrations. For those please visit the website: https://vhmproject.org/. Accessed 23 Mar 2021. 8 “Auswitzi és Ukrajnai kedveseink emlékére.”

Remembering the Victims

Fig. 2 Fürst family grave, Jewish Cemetery in Čantavir, 52–56 Kanjiška Street.

departure of more than half of the fourteen thousand Yugoslav Jews9 who survived the Holocaust (Ristović 523), mostly to Israel, similar monuments were erected throughout the country, most of which were in the territory of Vojvodina for a total of eighteen. The commemoration patterns seen on the examples of family monuments reappear on collective memorials. In this context, it is interesting to compare commemoration patterns within the two communities, the Orthodox-observant, following a fully traditional Jewish way of life, in comparison with Neolog-reform community, which was acculturated or even secular in nature. Monuments to the former contain commemorative inscriptions almost exclusively in Hebrew,10 for example, the memorial in Senta, unveiled in 1957 (fig. 3). The monument consists of a memorial wall and a black marble obelisk. Both feature the Magen David on top. The inscription on the obelisk in Hungarian reads: “In the sad years of the Jewish persecution of 1941–1945, in commemoration of the martyrs deported and exterminated by the fascists.”11 The memorial wall bears the names of those who perished written in Yiddish spelling. The inscriptions on the memorials wall include modified lines of the Av Harachamim (Father of Mercy)

9 The Jewish population of Yugoslavia was eighty-two thousand prior to the Holocaust. 10 Memorials can be found in the Jewish cemeteries of the Orthodox communities in Ada, Bački Petrovac, Bačko Petrovo Selo, and Senta. 11 “A zsidó üldöztetés gyászos éveiben 1941–1945 a fasiszták által elhurcolt és kiirtott vértanúk emlékére.”

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and Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King) prayers. The first one reads: “Names of the martyrs of our community who were killed and burned for the sanctification of God’s Name in Ukraine, Hungary, and Germany,”12 and the later: “Our Father, our King avenge before our eyes, the outpoured blood of Your servants.”13 The first prayer on the ability to die “al Kiddush Hashem” (in sanctification of God’s name) is recited every Saturday in memory of the destruction of the Ashkenazi communities along the Rhine River during the First Crusade and at the end of the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. A self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom in sanctification of God’s name shaping the collective memory of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come and during the Holocaust and its aftermath (Cohen 39–42). The second prayer consisting of a series of supplications to God is recited on Jewish High Holidays; however, this particular verse turns our thoughts to utter evil and non-repentance and tells us that God’s righteousness requires payment for murder or unjust death (Michman 678).

Fig. 3 Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Senta, unveiled July 4, 1957, Predgradski venac Street bb.

12 In the prayer: “The pious, upright, and blameless holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of His name.” 13 Based on Psalm 79:10 that reads: “Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes!”

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Distinctly different are inscriptions on the memorials to the predominantly Neolog communities, which are mostly written in Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian and only partially in Hebrew, containing few references to Judaism. These memorials use the officially accepted patterns on the inscriptions commemorating the perished as “victims of fascism”. For example, a monument in Novi Sad commemorates: “4,000 Jews of Novi Sad who perished as victims of fascism 1941–1945” (fig. 4).14 The memorial consists of a path filled with pebbles leading to the central section that carries the inscription and is decorated with traditional Jewish motifs—the Magen David and Menorah. This memorial, arguably the key symbol of the remembrance of Holocaust victims in Novi Sad, was erected as part of a larger action initiated by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia to unveil central monuments to the victims of the Holocaust in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Đakovo in the late summer of 1952. The unveiling ceremonies were attended by Yugoslav state and Communist Party officials and Israeli and U. S. Jewish delegates. The events were fully covered by the mass media (Kerenji 180). The official support for the commemoration and the invitation of representatives from Israel and the United States were related to Tito’s attempt to establish a place for the country within a broader international context that included western countries (von Klimó 753). It is interesting to note how strongly the memorialization patterns of the Holocaust victims reflect the ways in which the assimilated communities sought Fig. 4 Sculptor Dejan Bešlin, “Monument to the Victims of Fascist Terror”, unveiled September 1, 1952, Jewish Cemetery in Novi Sad, 67 Doža Đerđa Street.

14 “4,000 novosadskih Jevreja poginulih kao žrtve fašizma 1941–1945.”

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ways to reconcile the act of memory with the leading political ideology. This was mirrored in the appearance of the five-pointed star, the symbol of the communist ideology on the memorials in Zrenjanin, unveiled in 1947 (fig. 5) and Bačka Palanka, unveiled in 1955. In addition, the memorial in Zrenjanin features the famous slogan used by the Yugoslav resistance movement, “Death to fascism, freedom to the people.”15 Inscriptions often separately commemorate fallen Jewish fighters, as in Bačka Palanka: “In memory of 400 Jews [...] who fell as freedom fighters and victims of the fascist terror”16 and “progressive” (a synonym for communist) thinkers, as on the memorial in Subotica unveiled in 1948: “to 4000 Subotica Jews, […] who laid down their dear lives on the altar of their faith and nationality and general progressive thinking” (fig. 6).17

Fig. 5 Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Zrenjanin, unveiled 1947, Bašadinska Street, courtesy of Mr. Neven Popović.

15 “Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu.” 16 “Spomen i sećanje nad 400 Jevreja […] palih kao borci za slobodu i žrtve fašističkog terora.” 17 “[…] 4000 subotičkih Jevreja […] položili svoje drage živote na oltaru svoje vere i narodnosti te opšte napredne misli.”

Remembering the Victims

Fig. 6 Architect Lajos Deutsch, Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Subotica, unveiled 1948, 2 Majevička Street.

Apart from the communities along the Tisza River, Orthodox Jews lived in smaller numbers in other places in Vojvodina. One of the largest centers was in Subotica, where the Orthodox community numbered some six hundred, or 10 percent of the Jewish population of the town. Therefore, due to the significant presence of the observant community, a division into Orthodox and Neolog communities’ memorialization patterns is naturally not a clear-cut one. For instance, above the mentioned inscription in Serbo-Croatian commemorating the “progressive thinkers” in Subotica, stands an inscription in Hebrew in memory of “the martyrs who fell as a burnt offering on the altar of their faith and nationality”,18 recalling the “burning bodies” of the ten martyrs killed by the Romans for ignoring the prohibition on studying the Torah. A different character of the inscriptions, on the one hand, in line with socially accepted patterns of remembrance and, on the other, closely connected to Jewish tradition, reflects the amalgamated heritage of this community caught between tradition and acculturation. In addition, the memorial also features traditional Jewish motifs: Magen David, Ner Tamid (Eternal Flame) and a Torah scroll. A unique inscription can be found in Zemun, where, before World War II, both the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities were active. A simple obelisk-shaped monument with the Magen David on top, unveiled in 1948, bears an inscription in Hebrew: “Remember what Amalek did to you”,19 which contextualizes the per18 Based on Avodah Zarah 17b-18a. 19 Deuteronomy 25:17.

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Fig. 7 Memorial to the Victims at the site of the exhumed Jewish Cemetery in Mali Iđoš, unveiled 1955, 93 Glavna Street.

petrator in a metahistorical archetype of Amalek, the eternal enemy of the Jewish people. The inscription asks us to remember who our enemies are, and that evil for evil’s sake is unforgivable and should never be forgotten. Some of the communities’ memorials stand on the sites of Jewish cemeteries whose graves have been exhumed. For example, the memorial in Mali Iđoš (fig. 7) unveiled in 1955, which commemorates the “beloved martyrs”20 featuring the names of those who perished, is today the only indicator of what was once a Jewish cemetery. In 2000, the cemetery was exhumed and transferred to the Jewish cemetery in Subotica. This is not an isolated case. From the end of World War II onwards, some ten larger Jewish cemeteries were exhumed, and the remains were transferred to other cemeteries and buried in common graves, while in the last three decades some twenty small cemeteries have disappeared due to negligence.21 This fact represents an important indicator of the municipal and state authorities’ relationship to historical heritage and the culture of remembrance. To summarize this section, I argue that there are shared patterns of commemoration of the Vojvodina Jewish communities. However, while the memorials to the Orthodox communities with the inscriptions in Hebrew made the message of these monuments incomprehensible to the wider public and less accessible even

20 “Drága mártírjaink”. 21 I would like to thank Mr. Ivan Čerešnješ for sharing with me his knowledge and information about the condition of Jewish cemeteries in Vojvodina that he acquired during a research project on Jewish heritage in the region of Yugoslavia by the Center for Jewish Art in Jerusalem.

Remembering the Victims

to assimilated Jews, the diversity of the inscriptions on the memorials to the Neolog communities clearly indicates their attempt to communicate with the wider population about Jewish suffering during World War II. In communist Yugoslavia, civilian victims who were simply murdered in camps were not part of the political culture of memory (Subotić 56), and it seems that the commemorative patterns featured on the monuments in the Neolog Jewish cemeteries were an ideal compromise solution as they created a unique combination of Jewish and Yugoslav bereavement rituals. While, on the one hand, the specific Jewish elements on these monuments enabled a unique Jewish collective and individual bereavement, on the other hand, their overall message did not separate Jewish experience during World War II from that of other Yugoslav peoples.

Memorials at the sites of destroyed synagogues Apart from the cemeteries, other Jewish heritage sites and places of remembrance are synagogues and sites of destroyed synagogues. Eighty-two synagogues existed before the Holocaust. Sixty-five were demolished; fifteen during and fifty-one after World War II, most in the period between 1948 and 1951 but some as late as 1980, e.g., the synagogue in Bač.22 Today, there are only two synagogues in Vojvodina with interiors and exteriors which have been preserved, in Novi Sad and Subotica, while a further fifteen extant synagogue buildings now serve different purposes or have been abandoned without any indication that they had once been Jewish houses of prayer. The question that arises is why so many synagogue buildings had been destroyed years, even decades, after the end of World War II. The answer to this lies partially in the fact that some of the buildings were damaged during the war and Jewish communities lacked the financial means to renovate them. Most communities vanished, and those who managed to reestablish themselves after the Holocaust were not only impoverished but also saw welfare activities as a priority. Therefore, Jewish communities and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia sold dozens of synagogue buildings across the country and used the funds to support their members (Subotić 55). While some of the synagogue buildings were repurposed, in Vojvodina the vast majority was destroyed. Mounting memorial plaques to commemorate destroyed synagogues was quite rare in the Yugoslav era. However, from the 1990s onwards, a handful of memorial plaques were installed at the sites of destroyed synagogues, mostly by local authorities and, in some cases, by local Jewish communities, the Federation of Jewish

22 Based on my current research “Jewish Material Heritage in Vojvodina” due in June 2021.

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Communities of Serbia, or the Association of Yugoslav Immigrants in Israel.23 This phenomenon of redesigning the environment with new remembrance sites as part of the cultural reinvention in the post-Yugoslav era is by no means specific to Jewish sites or to Vojvodina. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the need for planning public spaces and practices differently—in a way that would shape the new states’ identities—emerged in all its former republics. Even though there is no obvious link between the memory of the vanished Jewish communities and the affirmation of a new democratic identity in urban spaces, I consider the mounting of memorial plaques marking the sites of destroyed synagogues in light of these changes as a part of the process of reclaiming Vojvodina’s multicultural past. Frequently, commemorative inscriptions on these plaques simply state that a synagogue stood there, as for example in Bajmok (fig. 8). The plaque was unveiled at the initiative of the Municipality of Subotica and its local office in Bajmok in 2004.24 The inscription in Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian reads: “On this site once stood the Bajmok synagogue, 1906–1955.”25 Such content seems so awkwardly neutral and obtrusive that one has to wonder what the reason for installing this plaque was. Indeed, the cautious wording trivializes Jewish suffering and avoids dealing with the disturbing aspects of Vojvodina’s past.

Fig. 8 Memorial plaque on the site of the destroyed synagogue in Bajmok, unveiled in 2004, 1 Mije Mandića Street.

23 Hitahdut oley Yugoslavia beIsrael. 24 Inscriptions with similar content also appear on plaques in Ada, Senta, Mol, and Bečej. 25 “Ezen a helyen állt a bajmoki zsinagóga, 1906–1955/Na ovom mjestu je stajala bajmočka sinagoga, 1906–1955.”

Remembering the Victims

Fig. 9 Memorial Pillar at the site of the destroyed synagogue in Vrbas, late 1990s, 51 Narodnog fronta Street.

Another example of the municipal initiative to erect a monument to a demolished synagogue can be found in Vrbas. The synagogue in Vrbas was built in 1914 and demolished in 1948, however, not in its entirety. Three external facade pillars as well as internal pillars have been preserved. The internal pillars were incorporated into a building that currently houses a local public library. In addition, the tablets of the covenant that adorned the synagogue were brought to Israel and have been incorporated into a monument in memory of the Vrbas community in Karmiel (Grgurović 83). One of the facade pillars was transformed into a memorial to fellow Jewish citizens of Vrbas and their synagogue (fig. 9). The inscriptions on a hexagonal base in six languages (Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, English, Slovak, and Hebrew) have almost identical content: “Let this pillar be a reminder to us all of the destroyed temple and 176 Jews of Vrbas who were murdered only because they were Jews.” The important addition, noted only in Hebrew, says that they were murdered “during Nazi-fascism.” The inscription commemorates the destroyed synagogue and acknowledges the powerlessness of the Jews in the face of the annihilation of their people, but at the same does not provide much explanation, possibly assuming that one knows what happened to the Jews and when and by whom this community was destroyed. The next example is a memorial plaque in Zrenjanin, which was installed at the initiative of the local Jewish community in 1997. The inscription reads: “In memory of the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Jews to this area, as an honor to their contribution to the development of our city, participation in the national liberation struggle, and in commemoration of 1260 victims who lay down their

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lives in the Second World War […] on this site once stood a grand synagogue […] built in 1896 and demolished by the Nazis in 1941.”26 It commemorates the local Jewish community, provides information about the synagogue, and when and by whom it was demolished. However, even though unveiled in the late 1990s, the overall message of the inscription adheres to a great extent to the Yugoslav-era remembrance patterns and the narrative of victimhood as part of the “national liberation struggle”, according to which victims were not murdered but “laid down their lives” for their country, intentionally. A monument to the demolished synagogue in Bačka Palanka, unveiled in 2007, is very much different from the previous three examples. The inscription on the plaque (in Serbo-Croatian and Hebrew) reads: “From 1806 to 1956, a synagogue, a gathering place for Jews, citizens of Bačka Palanka, stood on this site. Most of them were tragically murdered by fascists during World War II in the Holocaust. In December 1948, 37 Jewish survivors immigrated to Israel with Rabbi Jakob Gross.”27 Rachel Frisch from Israel, a daughter of Rabbi Gross, the community’s last spiritual leader,28 initiated the erection of the monument. Perhaps the use of the word Holocaust but also the mentioning of the survivors, their Rabbi, and their Aliyah, can be related to the fact that the initiative for the monument’s erection came from Israel. Regarding the memorial plaques on the sites of the destroyed synagogues based on the four examples that are representative of the main trends, it is possible to differentiate two largely different patterns of commemoration: one that does not raise awareness of the Holocaust, and the other that does recognize and show empathy for the atrocities the Jewish people endured during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the plaques at the sites of the demolished Jewish houses of prayer display different commemoration patterns from the ones we encounter on the memorials in Jewish cemeteries which preserve the memory and distinct features of the communities to which they were erected. The plaques seem to lack a unique character with messages directed toward some generic, random audience, perhaps revealing what people are ready to accept and learn about their past and the former Jewish presence in their towns.

26 “U spomen 250 godina od dolaska Jevreja u ove krajeve, njihovog doprinosa razvitku našeg grada, učešća u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi i 1260 žrtava koje dadoše u Drugom svetskom ratu […] na mestu gde je stajala velelepna sinagoga […] podignuta 1896, a nacisti je srušili 1941. godine.” 27 “Na ovome mestu je stajala od 1896 do 1956 sinagoga, kuća okupljanja Jevreja, građana Bačke Palanke. Većina njih je tragično nastradala od strane fašista tokom Drugog svetskog rata, u holokaustu. Decembra 1948. godine 37 preživelih Jevreja su se sa rabinom Jakobom Grosom iselili u Izrael.” 28 The rabbi’s full name is Eugene Jakob Gross; in some sources he appears only as Eugene Gross.

Remembering the Victims

Conclusion After World War II, some four thousand Holocaust survivors returned to their hometowns and villages across Vojvodina only briefly before more than a half of them immigrated to Israel. Most survivors had no bodies to bury and no graves to visit since their loved ones were murdered in mass shootings or in concentrations camps. This fact deprived individuals and communities of traditional Jewish mourning rituals to a great extent. What were the patterns individuals and communities developed due to the abovementioned circumstances? The earliest mourning and commemorative practices in postwar Vojvodina were developed by survivors haunted by a need to honor the memory of their family members who perished in the Holocaust. By adding the names of the victims to pre-war family monuments in Jewish cemeteries, the survivors tended to preserve the memory of their loved ones in the family circle in a symbolic way. While some family monuments repeat the official patterns of commemoration, honoring the dead as “victims of fascism”, others display more personal acts of remembrance. Memorials in Jewish cemeteries that have inscriptions in Hebrew and the local languages, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian, and use communist and Jewish symbols simultaneously convey two different cultural contexts—one compatible with the reigning ideological mode of commemorating the victims of World War II and another more elusive and accessible only to those familiar with the Hebrew language, Jewish culture, and tradition. However, in the majority of the memorials, we encounter commemoration patterns that perceive Jewish victimhood within the framework of the central myth of Titoist Yugoslavia according to which all victims have become the “fallen in the war of liberation,” with no specific indication of the circumstances or who committed the killings. At the same time, these monuments do have a local character and preserve the memory of victims from a particular community, its character, experience, and traditions. Yet no matter how open or closed their message was, they stood isolated in Jewish cemeteries, and therefore hidden from the eyes of the wider public. Thus, the message they transmit remained directed mainly towards the Jewish population. Without exception, all these memorials, both to the Neolog and Orthodox communities, preserve Jewish identity and tradition by using different symbols commonly used in Jewish funeral architecture. The most frequent are the Magen David, Ner Tamid and Torah scroll. The reasons why local authorities in the 1990s began to set up memorial plaques on the sites of demolished synagogues is not entirely comprehensible because awareness of the tragedy of the Holocaust and the acknowledgment of Jewish suffering have not become part of the public historical discourse. Only the monument in Bačka Palanka, initiated in Israel, mentions the Holocaust and at the same time

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sends a message of redemption for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, possibly seeking to heal the wound that the Holocaust represents in Jewish history. The past three decades, sadly, have not brought justice to the memory of the vanished Jewish communities of Vojvodina. With memorials and individual graves honoring the Holocaust victims, one could say that Jewish cemeteries in their entirety have a commemorative character and significance for Jewish identity in Vojvodina as realms of memory of collective trauma. In that sense, the entire area of the cemeteries has become a multidimensional memory site in which the victims have found a final resting place. Furthermore, it seems that, over the years, Jewish cemeteries have become for survivors places of the fulfillment of the mitzvah of Zakhor (Remember!), an ethical imperative and responsibility to remember. Regardless of the fact that this article shows the worrisome condition of some of the memorial sites and multifaceted, often political aspects of remembrance and forgetting, the presence of Nerot Neshama (Memorial Candles), pebbles, and flowers at these memorials ensure the continuation of remembrance and bring the past events starkly into the present (fig. 10).

Fig. 10 Nerot Neshama (Memorial Candles) in the Jewish cemetery in Bačko Petrovo Selo, 76 Balázs Árpád Street.

Remembering the Victims

Works cited Braham, Randolph L. The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Cohen, Jeremy. Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Crownshaw, Richard. “History and Memorialization.” Writing the History of Memory. Eds. Stefan Berger and Bill Niven. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Cvetković, Dragan. “Logori Topovske šupe i Sajmište kao centralna mesta holokausta u okupiranoj Srbiji – numeričko određenje i kvantitativna analiza.” Istorija 20. veka 1 (2018): 69–92. Freidenreich, Harriet. The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979. Grgurović, Vesna. Gradski muzej Vrbas. Vodič. Vrbas: Kulturni centar Vrbasa, Gradski muzej, 2017. Hutton, Patrick H. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993. Jakir, Aleksandar. “‘Spomenici su prošlost i budućnost.’ Politički i administrativni mehanizmi financiranja spomenika za vrijeme socijalističke Jugoslavije.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 51.1 (2019): 151–182. Karge, Heike. “Sajmište, Jasenovac and the Social Frames of Remembering and Forgetting.” Filozofija i društvo 4 January 2012: 106–118. Kerenji, Emil. Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish Identity in a Socialist State, 1944–1974. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008. https://deepblue.lib.umich. edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60848/ekerenji_1.pdf?sequence=. Accessed 1 Jun. 2020. Klajn, Lajčo. The Past in Present Times: The Yugoslav Saga. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. Loker, Zvi (ed.). Yehudei Vojvodina be-Et he-Hadashah. Tel Aviv: Hitahdut oley Yugoslavia, 1994. Manojlović Pintar, Olga. “Uprostoravanje ideologije. Spomenici Drugog svetskog rata i kreiranje kolektivnih identiteta.” Dijalog povjesničara/istoričara 10.1 Ed. Igor Graovac. Zagreb: Friedrich Neumann Stiftung, 2008: 287–307. Manoschek, Walter. “The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia.” Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies. Vol. 2: From the Persecution of the Jews to Mass Murder. Ed. David Cesarani. London; New York: Routledge, 2004: 241–261. Michman, Dan. “The Impact of the Holocaust of Religious Jewry.” Major Changes Within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust. Proceedings of the Ninth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Ed. Yisrael Gutman. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–25.

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Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Obšust, Kristijan. “Istorijska groblja Novog Sada i Petrovaradina kao prostori sećanja.” https://kulturasecanjabiblioteka.wordpress.com/istorijska-groblja-novog-sada-ipetrovaradina-kao-prostori-secanja/. Accessed Jun. 2020. Ornstein, Anna. “The Missing Tombstone: Reflections on Mourning and Creativity.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 58.4 (2010): 631–648. Popov, Branislav. Nemački zatvori i koncentracioni logori u Banatu, 1941–1944. Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1992. Pejin, Attila. “In a Double Diaspora with Triple Identity: Jews of Bácska after Trianon (1918–1941).” South-East Europe International Relations Quarterly 3.4 (2012): 1–6. http://www.southeast-europe.org/pdf/12/DKE_12_A_DK_Pejin-Attila_Diaspora_ Horvath-Benigna.pdf. Accessed Jan. 2016. Ristović, Milan. “Yugoslav Jews Fleeing the Holocaust, 1941–1945.” Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. Volume One: History. Eds. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell. New York: Palgrave, 2001: 512–526. Soltes, Ori Z. “Memory, Tradition, and Revival: Who, Then, Speaks for the Jews?” Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations. Eds. Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010: 121–146. Sotirović, Vladislav B. Creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 1914–1918. Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2007. Subotić, Jelena. Yellow Star, Red Star. Holocaust Remembrance after Communism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019. Šosberger, Pavle. Sinagoge u Vojvodini: Spomenica minulog vremena. Novi Sad: Prometej, 1998. Tilley, Christopher, and Michael Rowlands. “Monuments and Memorials.” Handbook of Material Culture. Ed. Christopher Tilley et al. London: Sage Publications, 2006: 500–515. Tišma, Aleksandar. Antologija Tišma. Izabrane stranice Aleksandra Tišme. Novi Sad: Prometej, 2006. Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. von Klimó, Árpád. “1956 and the Collapse of Stalinist Politics of History: Forgetting and Remembering the 1942 Újvidék/Novi Sad Massacre and the 1944/45 Partisan Retaliations in Hungary and Yugoslavia (1950s-1960s).” Hungarian Historical Review 5.4 (2016): 739–766. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Schocken Books, 2 1989. Živković, Dragoljub (ed.). Imenik stradalih stanovnika AP Vojvodine 1941–1948 Jevrejske nacionalnosti [Elektronski izvor]. Tom 5. Novi Sad: Skupština AP Vojvodine, 2009.

Rebecca Krug (Mainz)

Just a Small Cog in the Wheel? Imagined Identities and the ‘Banality of Evil’ in David Albahari’s Gec i Majer

Abstract:

This paper deals with David Albahari’s Holocaust novel Gec i Majer from 1998. It focuses on the increasingly split and fragile narrator’s personality, his search for his family history, a new identity and his imagination of the gas van drivers Götz and Meyer, who murdered most of his Jewish relatives in World War II. Including Hannah Arendt’s well-known thesis, the paper interprets the Nazi perpetrators as typical representatives of the “banality of evil”, who see themselves as a negligible part within a larger and more complex mechanism and who are, consequently, unwilling to assume responsibility for their atrocities.

The novel and its historical context David Albahari’s Gec i Majer (Götz and Meyer), published in 1998, was the first novel to address the extermination of Jews in the concentration camp Sajmište near Belgrade in the years 1941–1942. The concentration camp Sajmište—also known as “Judenlager Semlin”—was established in 1941. It was located at the Belgrade fairground on the left Sava riverbank near the town of Zemun, on the territory of the Independent state of Croatia (NDH—Nezavisna Država Hrvatska). In the years between 1941 and 1944, nearly 20,000 people perished in the camp, which was the largest created by the occupation authorities in Serbia during World War II. From December 1941 to March 1942, around 7,000 Jews, mostly women, children and elderly people were brought to the concentration camp. This number amounts to almost half of the pre-war Jewish population of German-occupied Serbia. Within only six weeks in the spring of 1942, all 7,000 people were systematically murdered through the use of a lethal gas van (Byford 11). The action in David Albahari’s novel takes place in two different timeframes: the narrative present plotline takes place in the summer of 1990, when a nameless, fifty-year-old teacher from Belgrade—the first-person narrator in the novel—explores the history of his family during World War II. At this time, nearly all of his

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ancestors were interned in the concentration camp Sajmište and killed in the lethal gas van operated by Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer. Consequently, the second, past plotline focuses on the months between the imprisonment of the Serbian Jews at the end of 1941 and the gassings in the spring of 1942 (Ribnikar 73–74; Kowollik 2012: 122; Kowollik 2013: 133–134; Messner 298). These two timeframes are directly connected to the narrator’s perspective and his attempt to reconstruct the events of the early 1940s. As a result, the timeframes are not consistently separated, but melt into each other, sometimes even within a single sentence. This non-chronological manner of narration gives an impression of synchronicity and simultaneity (Kowollik 2013: 192; Messner 303).

The first-person narrator and his imagined identities Shortly before the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, the first-person narrator finds himself in a personal crisis which turns out to be much more than the typical midlife crisis of a middle-aged man without a family or any close social relationships. Due to his profession—the narrator is a teacher of Serbo-Croatian language and Yugoslavian literature—and his Jewish origins, both his previous life and his identity seem to collapse in the face of the political upheaval and ever-growing nationalism in Serbia. Seeing himself explicitly as a Yugoslavian citizen, he is unable to find his place within the new politically rooted, artificial and divisive categories of ethnic and religious groups (Kowollik 2011: 323; Kowollik 2013: 136–137). To overcome these difficulties and the process of disintegration in his present time and life, he turns toward the past. Although he does not seem to be particularly religious up to this crisis, he tries to create a new identity for himself by recollecting his Jewish roots. In order to do so, he begins to reconstruct the fate of his relatives in various ways. First of all, he carries out investigations—for example in the museum of Jewish history in Belgrade. He researches historical documents and receives the support of an old uncle with dementia, who spends his final days in a retirement home and must be “lured” with chocolate candies—an action which creates an appalling and, at the same time, ironic parallel to the methods of the gas van drivers (Lopičić 144–145; Kowollik 2011: 323; Kowollik 2013: 137–138): When I first tried to sketch out my family tree, it looked like [...] a bare tree, without leaves. I gleaned a few names from a senile old relative of mine [...]. I enticed him with chocolates, which he was not allowed to eat because he had diabetes, and so it was that, for a moment, I pulled aside the curtain of his memory loss. At that point I didn’t know

Just a Small Cog in the Wheel?

that Götz, or was it Meyer, had also used chocolate as a form of deceit […].1 (Albahari 2005: 25)

Step by step, he is able to reconstruct his family tree and learns the names and fates of sixty-seven relatives during World War II. All in all, he finds out about twelve children, eighteen women and five old men, who were interned and killed in the concentration camp Sajmište, while most of his male relatives had already been shot before the internments started. Just five members of his family survived, but all of them are old men and women, living in solitude all over the world. Thus, the narrator—who is childless himself—comes to the realization that his family will die out without a trace (Lopičić 144) if he is unable to keep their memory alive, that the Nazis will somehow have succeeded with their extermination even now, fifty years after the war: I was an ear of corn with nothing but a few loose kernels left on it. [...] I had never married. In other words, when all of us died off, when our kernels fell into the washtub of time, nothing would be left from my parents’ families. At first, this realisation stirred a fierce rebellion within me […].2 (Albahari 2005: 29)

Consequently, the narrator feels like a “wrinkled apple at the end of a dry branch” (Albahari 2005: 29). As time passes, his withered family tree becomes the new focus of the narrator’s empty and isolated life. He begins to work through dusty files, documents and old photographs. But in the end, all these objective sources cannot revive the past which is why he tries to fill the gaps within the documents by using his own imagination (Kowollik 2011: 323). However, the first-person narrator not only imagines the personalities and the last months in the lives of his murdered relatives and tries to empathize with them, he also imagines the perpetrators and begins to identify with them in a more and more grotesque way. In order to understand real people, the narrator needs to create “unreal people” first:

1 “Kada sam prvi put pokušao da nacrtam svoje porodično stablo, izgledalo je [...] kao golo drvo, bez listova. Napabirčio sam nekoliko imena od senilnog rođaka [...]. Obrlatio sam ga čokoladnim bombonama, koje su mu, zbog povišenog šećera, bile zabranjene, i tako, na trenutak, uspeo da skinem koprenu njegovog zaborava. Tada nisam znao da je Gec, ili Majer, takođe koristio bombone kao sredstvo obmane […].” (Albahari 1998: 29–30) 2 “Bio sam klip kukuruza na kojem je ostalo još nekoliko klimavih zrna. [...] Ja se nikada nisam ženio. Drugim rečima, kada svi mi poumiremo, kada naša zrna padnu u vanglu vremena, od porodica mojih roditelja neće ništa ostati. U prvi mah, to saznanje je u meni izazvalo pravu pobunu […].” (Albahari 1998: 33–34)

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For me to truly understand real people like my relatives, I had first to understand unreal people like Götz and Meyer. Not to understand them: to conjure them. Sometimes I simply had to become Götz, or Meyer, so I could figure out what Götz, or Meyer (really I), thought about what Meyer, or Götz (really I), meant to ask.3 (Albahari 2005: 65–66)

In doing so, the narrator’s interior monologue—which sometimes resembles a “stream of consciousness” as its narrative mode—is not only transformed into a special kind of dialogue between the narrator and the gas van drivers Götz and Meyer, the perspective of the narration also develops from mono-perspectivity into an “imagined multi-perspectivity”, as Eva Kowollik calls it in her article (2011: 329–330). But the narrator fails in his attempt. Neither is he able to reconstruct the history of his ancestors in a way that helps him to understand his present situation, nor does his approach give him a new identity for the future. Instead, by the imagining of and identification with his relatives and with the perpetrators in particular, his already fragile personality is split into three different identities (Kowollik 2012: 124–125). As time goes by, these different identities merge ever more, they melt away or influence each other. By searching for a new identity, the narrator becomes completely lost: Nothing easier than to stray into the wasteland of someone else’s consciousness. It is more difficult to be master of one’s own fate; simpler to be master of someone else’s.4 (Albahari 2005: 66)

As a result, the narrator is thrown into an existential crisis (Ribnikar 75). He gets physically and mentally weaker and weaker and is unable to master the balancing act between his starving and suffering relatives on the one hand and the imagined personalities of the perpetrators on the other hand: I could talk for hours of my dreams – more wrestling matches than dreams. I dreamed, for instance, how I was wandering through the labyrinth of the family tree; I was wandering for ages, my feet hurt; finally I caught sight of a way out and gladly ran towards it and found myself at the gate to the pavilion at the Fairgrounds, choked by the stench of fear and desperation; I feel nausea rising and try to hide, crouching in a corner, but no matter

3 “Da bih doista shvatio stvarne ljude, kakvi su bili moji rođaci, prvo sam morao da shvatim nestvarne ljude, kakvi su bili Gec i Majer. Ne da ih shvatim: da ih stvorim. Stoga sam ponekad jednostavno morao da budem Gec ili Majer da bih doznao šta Gec, ili Majer, zapravo: ja, misli o onome što ga je Majer, ili Gec, takođe: ja, poželeo da upita.” (Albahari 1998: 72–73) 4 “Ništa lakše nego zalutati u bespuću tuđe svesti. Mnogo je teže biti gospodar svoje sudbine; jednostavnije je gospodariti tuđim.” (Albahari 1998: 73)

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how I try, I can’t regurgitate anything; then in the distance I catch sight of Götz and Meyer wearing white hospital gowns; with their arms outstretched, faceless, walking towards me.5 (Albahari 2005: 114)

Not only does this passage show how the different levels of time melt into each other within the narrator’s fantasy, the image of the labyrinth—also a symbol of the descent into the underworld (Lurker 421)—underlines how fatal and deeply the narrator goes astray in the imagination of his family history. His only exit from the labyrinth seems to end up in the Sajmište camp and in the arms of Götz and Meyer, wearing white gowns like hospital nurses or orderlies in a psychiatric hospital—a detail which emphasizes the narrator’s ever-growing mental disruption.6 In his increasing madness, at the end of the novel, the narrator even considers suicide and—rather ironically7 —wants to kill himself in an analogous manner to his murdered relatives using car exhaust fumes: I’d kill myself. Once that idea had nudged my consciousness, I could no longer shake it off. [...] I was drawn to the possibility of interpreting that as a symbolic liberation from Götz and Meyer, a statement of my superiority and their defeat. Taking everything into consideration, the most natural way to do it, if you can say such a thing of suicide, would be ending my life in a car. [...] I ignored the fact that I had no car and did not know how to drive [...].8 (Albahari 2005: 162–163)

5 “O mojim snovima – nisu to snovi, to je rvanje – satima bih mogao da pričam. Sanjao sam, na primer, sebe kako lutam lavirintom porodičnog stabla; lutam dugo, bride mi tabani; napokon ugledam izlaz i veselo potrčim prema njemu, i nađem se na ulazu u paviljon na Sajmištu, zagušen jakim mirisom straha i očajanja; osećam prodor mučnine i nastojim da se sakrijem; šćućuren u uglu, ma koliko pokušavao, ne uspevam ništa da povratim; onda u daljini ugledam Geca i Majera, odevene u bele bolničarske uniforme; izpruženih ruku, bez lica, hodaju prema meni.” (Albahari 1998: 124) 6 For the motif of madness in the novel and the interpretation of the narrator as a kind of “mad monologist”, see Kowollik 2013: 156–158. 7 In his novel, Albahari uses a lot of those ironic parallels and contrasts, e.g., in connection with the chocolate candies, the narrator’s physical and mental condition or in the context of the motif of breathlessness and death by asphyxiation. Lopičić also mentions that Albahari “as a great master of plot and narrative structure” repeats every significant scene at least twice (144). For the function of (self-)irony in Albahari’s poetics, see Lazović, esp. 815–817, 820–821. 8 “Ubio bih se. I kada mi se jednom ta misao ugnezdila u svest, nisam više uspevao odatle da je izbacim. [...] Privlačila me je i ona mogućnost tumačenja koja je to sagledavala kao simbolično oslobađanje od Geca i Majera, kao iskazivanje nadmoći i nanošenje poraza. Imajući sve u vidu, najprirodniji izbor, ako se tako može reći za samoubilački čin, predstavljalo je okončanje života u automobilu. [...] Pritom sam zanemario činjenicu da nemam automobil i ne umem da vozim [...].” (Albahari 1998: 175–176)

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The imagination of Götz and Meyer During his research in the archives, the narrator comes across the names of the historically verified gas van drivers who murdered his ancestors. On the basis of these names—Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer—he tries to reconstruct the people behind the atrocities. While his Jewish relatives remain more or less without individual features, without specific thoughts and feelings, and are mostly presented as a collective without the possibility for self-determined action9 (Kowollik 2011: 329), the perpetrators Götz and Meyer, however, are very plastically described and possess individual traits of character. Instead of the popular phrase “to give the victims a voice”, the narrator, in some grotesque way, gives a voice to the perpetrators while trying to understand their deeds. At the beginning he tries to visualize the appearance of Götz and Meyer, and—ironically—his imagination oscillates between something akin to a comedic duo and typical sergeants of the SS: Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them. In twosomes like theirs, one is usually taller, the other shorter, but since both were SS non-commissioned officers, it is easy to imagine that both were tall, perhaps the same height. I am assuming that the standards for acceptance into the SS were rigorous, below a certain height you most certainly would not qualify.10 (Albahari 2005: 1)

In that way, Götz and Meyer not only advance to the archetype of Nazi accomplices, in the narrator’s fantasy they are also unexpectedly normal and human, full of 9 The only exception is the thirteen-year-old boy Adam (“the first man”), who is an invention of the narrator without any true example in his family. Adam explores the concentration camp more or less like an adventure playground, and he is the only figure that realizes the fatal truth behind the daily transports in the truck. Searching for a way to rescue his life, Adam becomes at first a symbol of hope for the narrator. Although Adam survives the gassings due to his ingenuity, at the end he is shot by one of the soldiers and, with his death, the narrator finally loses all his hope (Ribnikar 80–81; Kowollik 2013: 146–151). But facing his inescapable fate with his eyes open, Adam also advances to an embodiment of triumph, because he is the only one who exposes the deceit of Götz, Meyer and the camp commander and who is willing to offer resistance: “More important is what happened with Adam when he saw the grey truck. That same moment he began to understand the language spoken by Commander Andorfer and the other soldiers, suddenly he could see that there were parallel worlds, that the worlds were created by language, and that it was enough to alter the meaning of several words in order to change the existing world into a new one.” (Albahari 2005: 146) For the interpretation of Adam as a “keeper of memory” and the “ultimate witness”, see Volynsky 161–162. 10 “Gec i Majer. Nikada ih nisam video, mogu samo da ih zamišljam. U takvim parovima jedan je obično visok a drugi nizak, ali, s obzirom da su obojica bili SS-podoficiri, lako je pomisliti da su bili višeg rasta, možda čak iste visine. Pretpostavljam da su norme za prijem u redove SS-a bile izuzetno stroge, ispod nekih granica sasvim sigurno nije se išlo.” (Albahari 1998: 5)

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everyday worries (Ribnikar 77). The narrator reconstructs their daily routine in Serbia as much as he creates a detailed personal background and private life for them. In his imagination, one of them, Götz, or maybe Meyer—the narrator does not make this clear11 —surely must have been married, longing for his nearly perfect family in Germany or Austria, while sometimes worrying about his little daughter named Hilde, who often has a sore throat. Of course, it is him who always gives candies to the Jewish children at the concentration camp to win their confidence: How Götz, or was it Meyer, loved children! It would be hard to find the right words to describe the warmth he felt when his hands rested on those tousled little heads. He gave no thought to lice at moments like that, although he could often spot them crawling in the closely cropped hair.12 (Albahari 2005: 10)

By contrast, the other one, Meyer, or maybe Götz, does not like children at all and always tries to keep his distance from them because he is disgusted by their lice. He dreams about being a pilot and sometimes, when driving the gas van, he envisions flying a Messerschmitt aircraft while the Jews are dying inside the hermetically sealed truck: As a boy, for instance, he had longed to be a pilot […]. His leather pilot’s jacket hung in the cab, and from time to time he’d put it on […]. Then he liked to open the window and feel the wind in his face. At first he was distracted from his fantasies by the dull thumps and muted cries audible from the back of the truck, but as time passed he no longer noticed them.13 (Albahari 2005: 17–18)

11 In the novel, Götz and Meyer always appear as a duo, as a “pair of characters” that cannot be separated from each other. Mitrović even describes them as a “single character with two names” (88–89). Furthermore, they are always introduced with the conjunctions “and” and “or”, which creates the effect of “interchangeability”, as Obradović calls it, and that functions as a sign for their perpetrator identity. The personalities of Götz and/or Meyer are exchangeable, ambiguous and universal at the same time (128–131; Mitrović 88–89; Lopičić 147). 12 “Kako je Gec, ili Majer, voleo decu! Teško bi mogle da se pronađu prave reči koje bi opisale toplinu koju je osećao dok mu je ruka počivala na njihovim tršavim glavicama. U tim trenucima nije čak ni pomišljao na vaške, iako je mogao često da ih vidi kako promiču između kratkih dlaka.” (Albahari 1998: 14) 13 “Kao dečak, na primer, on je želeo da bude pilot […]. Kožna pilotska jakna visi u šoferskoj kabini, i ponekad je doista oblači [...]. Tada voli da otvori prozor, da oseti nalete svežeg vazduha na licu. U početku su ga u tim sanjarenjima ometali tupi udari i mukli povici koji su dopirali iz stražnjeg dela kamiona, ali posle ih više nije čuo.” (Albahari 1998: 21–22) Interestingly and strikingly—not only in this passage, but in the whole novel—is the contrast between the motif of breathlessness and death by asphyxiation, which becomes one of the leitmotifs of the text, and the repeated references to open windows, fresh air and the possibility of breathing deeply in the context of Götz and Meyer.

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Götz and Meyer see themselves as conscientious soldiers who only follow orders and want to do their jobs as carefully as possible without making any mistakes. In their world view, they are only a negligible part within a much bigger and complex mechanism: small cogs in a wheel, unable, unwilling or not required to make their own decisions or to assume responsibility for their actions. They neither analyse the business of killing nor the system behind the bureaucratically organized and scientifically optimized extermination of the Jews. In their daily working routine, they do not think about the people inside the van. Entering the truck, the Jews, even the children, are simply transformed from human beings into cargo (Obradović 132–133): Once you become part of the mechanism, you assume the same responsibility as every other part. Götz and Meyer didn’t know about that. The truck was theirs to drive, and they drove, always smiling, even when the wind blew dust in their faces, and they couldn’t care less what was going on in the back, whether the load was Jews or sugar beet.14 (Albahari 2005: 24)

Götz and Meyer, like the other perpetrators in the Nazi regime, do not act under the premise of humanity or moral principles, but hide themselves behind the law and the apparent legality and necessity of their deeds. Together with the camp commander Andorfer—who is also historically verified—they even think about how they can optimize the economic efficiency of the gassings and how to make the killings more “human” because, “if we have been called upon to give people a better life, then we should also give them a finer death”15 (Albahari 2005: 78). To live in peace with their conscience, Götz and Meyer—and Andorfer—consequently separate their work and duty from any human or private emotion, and in doing so, they lose any relation to the real world and the circumstances of their assignment. Instead, they create for themselves a parallel reality, playing with the children or inventing “fairy-tales” about comfortable camps somewhere in Romania or Poland to encourage the interned Jews to voluntarily enter the truck (Albahari 2005: 82).

14 “Ako postaneš deo mehanizma, onda na sebe preuzimaš istu odgovornost kao i svaki drugi njegov deo. Gec i Majer ne znaju ništa o tome. Njihovo je da voze, i oni voze, uvek nasmejani, čak i kada im vetar nosi prašinu u lice, i sasvim im je svejedno šta se nalazi u stražnjem delu kamiona, tovar Jevreja ili brdo šećerne repe.” (Albahari 1998: 29) 15 “[...] ako smo već pozvani da svetu damo bolji život, onda treba da mu damo i bolju smrt.” (Albahari 1998: 85–86)

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Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” Many details in David Albahari’s presentation of the perpetrators show parallels with Hannah Arendt’s description of the Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in her report about his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In her controversially discussed book (Volk 195–196),16 first published in the magazine The New Yorker in 1963, Eichmann advances to the embodiment of the “banality of evil”. In the eyes of Arendt, Eichmann was neither mentally ill, nor a sadistic or fanatic mass murderer. On the contrary, he seems to have had an ordinary personality, displaying neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for the Jews in general (Arendt 26). Psychologists who examined Eichmann before the trial in Israel likewise remarked that his attitude towards other people was “most desirable” and that his behavior was completely “normal” (Arendt 22–23; Lopičić 142). During the trial, Eichmann presented himself as a loyal follower of the Nazi system and the law. He was simply eager to do his duty: So Eichmann’s opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many […]. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, [...] he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law. (Arendt 120; emphasis in original)

Eichmann was certain he could not to be guilty because he thought that he had done nothing wrong under the existing laws of the Nazi system. From his perspective, what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state” (Arendt 18). The “banality of evil” of course does not mean that Eichmann’s actions were in any way ordinary, that there was nothing exceptional about the Shoah or that the crimes should be trivialized, as some readers and scholars have misinterpreted Arendt’s popular phrase. In fact, for Arendt the specific “banality” was within Eichmann’s personality and expressed itself in different ways: [...] everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. (Arendt 49)

According to Arendt, and following Christian Volk’s analysis of her Eichmann characterization, four particularly important attributes of this banality can be distilled—besides the fact that Eichmann did not seem to be very intelligent (Volk 196–197): First, his unrealistic world view, which expresses itself, for example, in

16 For the dispute about Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, see e.g. Rabinbach 33–56 and Ezra 141–165.

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his tendency to create for himself his own reality about the Nazi system, far removed from the truth. Not very smart at all and unable to even finish high school, Eichmann also created for himself a fictive curriculum vitae in which he advanced to be a construction engineer born in Palestine (Arendt 25). A second important point is his inner emptiness: Arendt classified him as a man without an individual personality. Eichmann acted without any personal motives and was instead able to adapt to every possible action pattern given to him (Volk 202). The third aspect of his “banality” is his inability to think for himself,17 which was so powerful that at the end of the Nazi regime he was left without any orientation whatsoever: “I [Eichmann – R.K.] sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me [,] […] in brief, a life never known before lay before me.” (Arendt 28)

This aspect mentioned by Arendt is deeply connected with his “blind obedience”—the “obedience of corpses” or “Kadavergehorsam”, as Eichmann called it himself (Arendt 120): [H]e [Eichmann – R.K.] remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do – to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. (Arendt 22)

And finally, his complete lack of any sense of responsibility made Eichmann the archetype and the embodiment of the “banality of evil” (Volk 212–216). Arendt’s description of Eichmann reminds the reader of David Albahari’s presentation of Götz and Meyer. As already stated, Albahari’s perpetrators are also characterized by an unrealistic world view and an inner emptiness, for example when one of them dreams of being in the cockpit of an aircraft or when the other imagines a “cosy candy world” while playing with the moribund Jewish children in the camp. They also cannot think for themselves beyond the borders of the Nazi system. Their unquestioned daily killing activities express their blind loyalty and obedience to Nazi ideology and—due to their worldview—they never feel responsible for their deeds because they are certain they are acting within the law. Drawing on Arendt’s thesis established in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the perpetrators in David Albahari’s novel can be interpreted as representations of the

17 This inability to think cannot automatically be equated with stupidity, as Arendt states more precisely in a later explanation, but it can be interpreted as an “indication of shallowness” (Lopičić 143).

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“banality of evil”.18 In the narrator’s opinion the banality within their personalities, of course, does not excuse the atrocities of Götz and Meyer, just as Arendt never relativized the guilt of Adolf Eichmann. The perpetrators had never been just “a small cog in the wheel”, unaware of the consequences of their actions or the “Final Solution”: I have to confess that this drew me to Götz and Meyer, the fact that they were not little cogs in a vast mechanism, blissfully unaware of what the mechanism was for, rather they were entirely aware of the nature of their assignment, being simultaneously the heralds of death and death itself.19 (Albahari 2005: 15–16)

Conclusion In analogy to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann characterization, in Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer are conceptualized as ordinary people, neither showing any kind of mental illness, nor any trait of fanaticism or sadism. Instead, in an ironic twist, it is the narrator who is in danger of losing himself in his ever-growing mental disruption (Kowollik 2013: 157). At home in Germany or Austria, Götz and Meyer live the normal life of an average person: as already mentioned, in the narrator’s imagination, one of them likely has a loving family while the other one seems to be a confirmed bachelor. During their time in Belgrade, they develop different strategies which help them to repress the real character and consequences of their assignment. Convinced they are acting within the law, they conscientiously follow their daily work routines and never question their despicable deeds. At the same time, they suppress their emotions, dehumanize their Jewish victims and seem to live in a parallel universe far away from the camp’s reality. Whether intentional or not, as a consequence, all main attributes of Arendt’s “banality of evil”—an unrealistic

18 Referring to Jean Améry, Gessen explains the banality within the personality of Götz and Meyer with the narrator’s specific perspective. Améry—Holocaust survivor and writer from Austria—criticized Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and her concept of the “banality of evil” in general. He stated that Arendt knew the “evil of mankind” only from hearsay and that this was the reason why Eichmann seemed to be the embodiment of banality for her. To her, Eichmann was only an abstraction, as Götz and Meyer are only an abstraction to the nameless narrator in Albahari’s novel because he has no personal remembrance of the Holocaust. Due to the narrator’s “outsider” position, Gessen argues, the perpetrators can appear banal in his imagination (98–99). 19 “To me je, priznajem, privuklo Gecu i Majeru, ta činjenica da nisu bili šrafčići u ogromnom mehanizmu koji ne znaju čemu mehanizam služi, nego da su bili potpuno upućeni u tajnu svog zadatka, u isto vreme glasnici smrti i sama smrt.” (Albahari 1998: 19–20)

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world view, the inner emptiness, the inability to think for oneself and finally the lack of any sense of responsibility—can be found in Albahari’s depiction of the Nazi perpetrators generally and particularly in the characterization of Götz and Meyer.20 Despite all the details about their seemingly banal personalities and thoughts as imagined by the narrator, Götz and Meyer remain faceless until the end of the novel. The narrator not only fails in his attempt to devise a new identity for himself, but—by “creating” the people behind the names of the perpetrators—he also is unable to understand the inconceivable crimes of the past. In the end, he sees himself confronted with the unbearable emptiness of their faces, a detail which becomes a leitmotif within the novel. As a consequence of this omnipresent facelessness, he realizes that Götz or Meyer could be anyone and that anyone could be Meyer or Götz and act just like them—that even he himself is perhaps, under specific circumstances, in danger of becoming a perpetrator or a representative of these empty faces (Gessen 98–100; Lopičić 146–147; Kowollik 2013: 142). As long as the “true faces” of the perpetrators and their atrocities are not disclosed, the narrator fears that history can always repeat itself. Facing the narrator’s present timeline, the summer of 1990, Albahari in this way illustrates the danger that occurs if history and historical events are not properly processed—or even forgotten: Because as long as there is remembering […] there is a chance, no matter how slim, that someone, once, somewhere, will look at the real faces of Götz and Meyer, something I hadn’t managed to do. And as long as their faces are nothing but a stand-in for any face, Götz and Meyer will return and repeat the meaninglessness of history that becomes, in the end, the meaninglessness of our lives.21 (Albahari 2005: 167)

The author also demonstrates that “preserving the memory” is the only way of building a hopeful future without having to fear the repetition of the crimes of the

20 In her article “Who are Götz and Meyer? Albahari’s ‘Banality of Evil’” Vesna Lopičić also analyses the “banality of evil” in the novel. In doing so, she focuses on the narrator’s specific behaviour while searching for his ancestry. Lopičić states that even if the narrator’s motives seem to be mostly honourable and his humanity is beyond doubt, he is, at the same time, so obsessive about his goal that “he begins to assume the role of the victimiser as well”. For example, he accepts the death of his old diabetic uncle in order to learn about the names of his family members and he also manipulates his students by “giving them the names of his executed relatives so that he feels among his folk” during an excursion to the Belgrade fairground. In this regard, not only the perpetrators, but also the narrator shows certain attributes of the “banality of evil” (Lopičić 144–146). 21 “Jer sve dok postoji pamćenje, [...] postoji mogućnost, ma koliko mala, da neko, jednom, negde, sagleda prava lica Geca i Majera, što meni nije pošlo za rukom. A sve dok su ona samo odraz praznine, te mogu da predstavljaju zamenu za svako lice, Gec i Majer će se vraćati i obnavljati besmisao istorije koji, na kraju, postaje besmisao naših života.” (Albahari 1998: 180) For the motif of remembrance and memory, see also Volynsky 156–166 and Gessen 95–102.

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past (Gessen 102). In this way, Albahari’s Gec i Majer is not only a novel about the Shoah in Serbia but also a novel about the Balkans in the 1990s (Kowollik 2013: 134–135). It illustrates the great importance of peace education and an adequate culture of memory because—in the words of the first-person narrator—“Memory […] is the only way to conquer death [...].”22 (Albahari 2005: 137)

Works cited Albahari, David. Gec i Majer. Beograd: Stubovi kulture, 1998. Albahari, David. Götz and Meyer. Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać. London: Vintage-Random House, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. Byford, Jovan. Staro sajmište: Mesto sećanja, zaborava i sporenja [Staro Sajmište: A site remembered, forgotten, contested]. Belgrade: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava, 2011. http://www.fondacija-boell.eu/downloads/Staro_sajmiste_-_Jovan_Bajford_ 72_dpi.pdf. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020. Ezra, Michael. “The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics.” Demokratiya 9 (2007): 141–165. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/ 1390334198d9Ezra.pdf. Accessed 26 July 2020. Gessen, Anna. “Where Imagination Fails: Remembering the Holocaust in ‘Götz and Meyer’ by David Albahari.” Serbian Studies. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 19.1 (2005): 95–102. Kowollik, Eva. “Erzählend gegen das wiederkehrende Trauma: Die narrative Annäherung an die Shoah im Spiegel der jugoslavischen Zerfallskriege im Roman Gec i Majer des serbischen Autors David Albahari.” Zwischen autobiographischem Stil und Autofiktion: Narrative Funktionen und Identitätskonstruktionen der Figur des Ich-Erzählers in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Eds. Johannes Brambora et al. Halle: Germanistisches Institut MartinLuther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2012: 119–134. urn:nbn:de:gbv:3:2–13019. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020. Kowollik, Eva. Geschichte und Narration: Fiktionalisierungsstrategien bei Radoslav Petković, David Albahari und Dragan Velikić. Berlin: LIT, 2013. Kowollik, Eva. “Realitätsgewinn und -verlust in der Auseinandersetzung mit Vergangenheit in David Albaharis Roman ‘Gec i Majer’.” Texturen – Identitäten – Theorien: Ergebnisse des Arbeitstreffens des Jungen Forums Slavistische Literaturwissenschaft in Trier 2010. Eds. Nina Frieß et al. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 2011: 321–335.

22 “Pamćenje je [...] jedini način da se pobedi smrt […].” (Albahari 1998: 149)

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Lazović, Milica M. “Istina (istorija) i poetika u Romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija.” Zbornik Matice Srpske za književnosti i jezik 62.3 (2014): 811–824. Lopičić, Vesna. “Who are Götz and Meyer? – Albahari’s ‘Banality of Evil’.” Culture and Ideology: Canadian Perspectives. Culture et idéologie: Perspectives canadiennes. Eds. Jelena Novaković and Biljana Dojčinović-Nešić. Belgrade: Faculty of Philology of Belgrade, 2009: 141–148. Lurker, Manfred. Wörterbuch der Symbolik. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1991. Messner, Elena. “David Albaharis Belgradroman ‘Gec i Majer’ [Götz und Meyer].” Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 2.1 (2015): 293–305. doi: doi.org/ 10.1515/yejls2015–0018. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020. Mitrović, Marija. “‘Gec i Majer’ or Situational Education.” Serbian Studies. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 19.1 (2005): 83–93. Obradović, Dragana. Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1whm98w. Accessed 25 July 2020. Rabinbach, Anson G. “Hannah Arendt und die New Yorker Intellektuellen.” Hannah Arendt Revisited: Eichmann in Jerusalem und die Folgen. Ed. Gary Smith. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000: 33–56. Ribnikar, Vladislava. “History as Trauma in the Work of David Albahari.” Serbian Studies. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 19.1 (2005): 53–81. Volk, Christian. “Wo das Wort versagt und das Denken scheitert: Überlegungen zu Hannah Arendts Eichmann-Charakterisierung.” Aschkenas – Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 16.1 (2006): 195–227. Volynsky, Masha. “Language within the Battle between History and Memory in David Albahari’s ‘Götz and Meyer’.” Serbian Studies. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 20.1 (2006): 156–166.

Eva Kowollik (Halle)

The Motif of the Hidden Child in Goran Paskaljević’s Film Kad svane dan and Filip David’s Novel Kuća sećanja i zaborava

Abstract:

This contribution is dedicated to Filip David’s novel The House of Remembering and Forgetting and Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks. Both the film and the novel thematize Jewish identity in relation to the trauma of the Shoah in a Serbian context drawing on the motif of the hidden child. The specific strategies used in the film and the novel include the use of fantastic elements and a highly reflexive level in David’s novel and, on the other hand, the contextualization of the motif by socially controversial questions (e.g., the stigmatizing of Roma in present-day Serbia) in the film.

The motif of the hidden child The question of the representation of the National Socialist persecutions in art has been examined in a differentiated manner in literary and cultural studies—not least through the lens of trauma theory. In the following, I will take a closer look at two such perspectives: the motif of the hidden child and strategies of representation in literature and film. I shall first focus on the Serbian-Jewish writer and screenwriter Filip David, in whose case the motif is related to his longstanding involvement with questions of Jewish identity. Filip David, born in 1940, survived the Holocaust as a small child. The autobiographical text “Porodična hronika – kako smo se spasavali” (2004, “Family Chronicle–How We Saved Ourselves”) is an impressive testimony to this traumatic time that shaped the author and his understanding of Jewish identity and authorship.1 David wrote the screenplay for Goran Paskaljevićs’s (1947–2020) film Kad svane dan (When Day Breaks) from 2012 together with Paskaljević, which features the hidden child as central motif. The comparison with David’s novel Kuća sećanja

1 Published in David 2004: 49–57.

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i zaborava (The House of Remembering and Forgetting)2 from 2014, for which the author was awarded the renowned literary prize of the journal NIN,3 allows a comparative perspective on different media strategies of representing memory and post-memory. In addition, the wide range of the motif presented in the novel and the specific contextualization in the film also raise questions of Jewish self-understanding in the book and the relationship to different explosive tendencies in contemporary Serbian society, such as the latent Antiziganism in the film.4 One of the specific characteristics of the trauma of persecuted Jewish children is that the traumatic experiences occurred during a phase of life in which identity is first formed. The trauma influences identity formation so deeply that a reconstruction is impossible in the absence of memory of the traumatic events (see Lezzi 94). Paskaljević’s film staged the extreme situation of a boy hidden as a toddler, who reconstructs the past with only his imagination, without his own memory. David’s novel, on the other hand, demonstrates the variety of retrospective means of identity formation through the very different fates of hidden children.5 According to Lezzi, traumatisation before the age of four can indeed be reflected in the imagination (see Lezzi 86). If the author’s perspective is taken into account, this circumstance also becomes important in the case of Filip David: his examination of Jewish identity, especially in his earlier texts, is marked by a specific fantasy, although David’s own autobiographical statements about the time of persecution are striking for their richness of detail and realistic precision.6 These remarks are intended to illustrate that children who survived a severe trauma such as the National Socialist persecutions had to find ways to reconstruct and represent the past autobiographically, more so than adult survivors, in order to supplement or even replace their own memories. The two works interpreted here

2 Translated by Christina Pribichević Zorić, see David 2017. 3 The literary prize of the news magazine NIN (Ninova nagrada) has been awarded since 1954 and, as the most prestigious Yugoslavian award for literature, is considered the most important literary prize in modern Serbia. On the implications of the award in the context of a reconstitution of collective identity in the 1990s, see Vojvoda. 4 By concentrating on the motif of the child and comparing the strategies of representation in the novel and the film, other aspects of the novel must be left out. For a comprehensive analysis of the novel, see Giergiel and Taczyńska, who have commented in detail on the contextualisation of the novel in the context of Yugoslav and Serbian Holocaust literature, the fragmentary form of the novel and the question of evil raised within it. 5 For the historical context and the diversity of the fates of hidden children in Serbia, see Mirna Zakić. 6 In addition to the above-mentioned essay (David 2004), see also the interview with Jaša Almuli (David 2002). For concrete autobiographical implications of David’s novel, from autobiographical motifs to the assumption of a text wavering between autobiography and fiction, see Giergiel and Taczyńska 80–81.

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represent stagings of these (post)memorial quests for traces of the past, in each of which the motif of the hidden child plays a central role.

When Day Breaks: Postmemorial searching for traces and contemporary parallelization In the film When Day Breaks, the extermination of Belgrade’s Jews and the former concentration camp on the old Belgrade fairground (Staro Sajmište)—which today is part of Belgrade’s urban area7 —are thematized from a post-memorial perspective.8 In the winter of 1941–1942, Jewish women, children and the elderly as well as Roma were interned in this camp. In spring 1942, the camp inmates were killed in gas vans.9 In the film When Day Breaks, the old fairground appears in the plot as a place where people on the periphery of society live, for example former refugees from Bosnia. Water pipes were being laid when construction workers found a box containing the personal documents of the Jewish family Vajs. The papers show that the retired Belgrade professor and musician Miša Brankov was of Jewish origin. His parents hid him as a toddler in a Serbian village. He himself knew nothing of his origins. The plot of the film is broadly similar to the tenth chapter in David’s novel, which begins with “When day breaks; Misha Wolf ’s story” (David 2017: 87, “Kad svane dan. Ispovest Miše Volfa”, David 2016: 97). The differences between this chapter of the novel and the film will be addressed in the film analysis. The film starts with documentary scenes of the opening of the 1937 Belgrade Fair. The story then begins with the presentation of the box to Professor Miša at the Belgrade Jewish Historical Museum. The rudimentary plot takes place almost exclusively in the present and shows in strictly chronological order Miša’s efforts to integrate his newly discovered past into his biography. This happens through conversations: with an employee in the Jewish museum, with his brother Kosta Brankov and with the rabbi of the Belgrade Jewish community. Miša’s astonishment that his brother had withheld his true origins from him already points to the looming identity conflict. On the whole, however, this early scene in the film bears witness to the professor’s deep ties to his (foster) family by showing divided childhood memories and Miša’s familiar behaviour on the

7 David Albahari’s novel Gec i Majer (1998, Götz and Meyer) is an impressive literary representation of this marginalized place of remembrance, including critical implications for the discourse of memory in Serbia. 8 Marianne Hirsch used the term postmemory to describe the intergenerational transmission of memories in families, for example through photographs (see Hirsch 22). 9 Approximately 7000 Jews and 3000 Roma and forced labourers died, see Vogel 2016.

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farm and shared memories of Brankov’s parents: “You didn’t tell me that we’re not brothers. […] Why did you keep a secret? – Because… You are my brother.” (“Nisi mi rekao da mi nismo braća. […] Zašto si prećutao? – Zato… što ti jesi moj brat.”)10 (00:25:52–00:26:19). The protagonist’s identity conflict becomes much more apparent during a dialogue in the synagogue, which only occurs after a key moment in the plot. In answer to the question of a Jewish congregant’s question: “Are you a Jew?” (“Jeste li Jevrejin?”), he replies: “I don’t know, I really don’t know” (“Ne znam, zaista ne znam”), to which a reaction full of astonishment follows: “How can you not know?” (“Kako ne znate?”), and he is asked to at least cover his head in the synagogue (00:52:38–00:52:55). Miša’s approach to his Jewish origins via places of remembrance is important as well, such as the old fairground and the house where his parents lived in the former Jewish quarter Dorćol: “These houses remember” (“Ove kuće pamte”) (00:31:00); these are the protagonist’s thoughts about the auratic place of Dorćol. The first scene, situated on the old fairground, also gives an authentic impression of the current dilapidated state of this place and the precarious situation of the people living there at the time the story takes place (in 2011). One resident says that she is a refugee and has lived in this place for twenty years, which suggests that she fled to Serbia during the Yugoslav wars. Paskaljević thus succeeds in integrating the heated topics of Serbian society into Miša’s post-memorial research; in this respect, the film differs strikingly from David’s book chapter. For example, Miša is confronted with the problem of gentrification when an inhabitant of the house in Dunavska ulica (Danube Street), where his family is said to have once lived, mistakenly considers him to be the new homeowner. The latter intends to evict the socially disadvantaged residents from their apartments in order to rent the premises as lucrative offices—a problem that has since become extremely acute in light of the Belgrade Waterfront. In addition to conversations and places of remembrance, the box containing a letter from Miša’s father, a photograph of his parents with him as a toddler, and the notes of a composition by his father functions as a further level of post-memorial mediation—not least in a haptic sense. Miša’s hesitation becomes clear in the film: when the box is presented to him in the Jewish Museum, he initially refuses to accept it. Non-verbal elements are regularly used at this and other points of the film in order to illustrate the identity conflict of the main character: The film’s many long shots and close-ups of the protagonist’s face (played by Mustafa Nadarević) reveal his gradual understanding.

10 The English translation of the film sequences corresponds to the English subtitles, translated by Inglourious @KG.

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Miša’s preoccupation with the unfinished piece of music left in the box by his father (composed for the film by Vlatko Stefanovski)—much more than the photography or the real place of remembrance of the old fairground—will ultimately prove decisive for the post-memorial constellation designed in the film. In this medial, multi-layered examination of his newly discovered Jewish identity, Miša develops obsessive traits, to be discussed later. The post-memorial character of David’s and Paskaljević’s portrayal of the hidden child becomes particularly evident through this obsession which takes on progressively imaginative traits. The film, though narrated from the present, also depicts the Jewish victims and the protagonist’s involvement in the story of the murder of Belgrade’s Jews through the form of a dream. The main character observes visions of the deportation, the camp and the loading into the gas van (00:41:26–00:44:56). In this sequence, the continuous calling of names is a strategy to counteract the anonymization of the victims. The separation of the protagonist from the people deported is intensified by motifs of separation, such as a window11 or barbed wire fences. In this way, the survivor becomes a witness from whose perspective the deportation to the camp and the loading of Jews into the gas van is shown. The film thus creates a framework of testimony. Miša, as both survivor and retrospective witness, plays an active role in the dream the moment he hears the names of his parents Isak and Sara Vajs during the loading when they look at him directly as they enter. The scene ends with the departure of the gas truck when the protagonist shouts “Wait, wait, wait for me” (“Čekajte, čekajte, čekajte me”) (00:44:48–00:44:56) while running after the truck, then he wakes up. Paskaljević and David chose for the protagonist to participate in the dream, which on the one hand expresses the increasingly imaginative side of the main character’s post-memorial search. On the other hand, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the dream could express the wish fulfilment. The film suggests this interpretation through a previous dream: in one of the first scenes Miša excitedly tells the Roma boy Bole, to whom he gives music lessons, about a dream from which he had just awoken and in which Bole had passed an important entrance exam. In contrast to the novel chapter—“He shouted as loud as he could, but no sound came out of his mouth” (David 2017: 98; “On povika što je glasnije mogao ali nikakav zvuk ne napusti njegove usne”, David 2016: 110)—Miša’s wish for the gas van to stop so that he could enter and be together with his parents is clearly articulated in the film.12 These words express a feeling of guilt regarding his parents, guilt for having survived while others died. This

11 On the image of the window, see Bachmann 63 and footnote 88. 12 A differentiated analysis of the dream sequences in this film and in David’s novel from the perspective of Freud’s interpretation of dreams would be quite revealing since the dreams of the main character Albert Vajs also play a key role in The House of Remembering and Forgetting, and there are also direct references in the novel to Sigmund Freud.

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interpretation is, in turn, suggested by David’s chapter in the novel, which—after Miša had completed his father’s musical fragment—concludes with the conciliatory words: “[H]e had paid the debt owed to his father but also to all those who had gone from this place to their deaths” (David 2017: 99; “ispunjen [je] dug prema ocu ali i prema svima koji su sa ovog mesta otišli u smrt”, David 2016: 111). In the film, however, it is the dream sequence that introduces the protagonist’s obsession: namely, to complete his father’s fragmentary piece of music and to organize a concert as a commemoration ceremony at the old fairground. This obsession is mirrored in Miša’s expectations to enthuse an ensemble for his idea. However, the ensembles react negatively, and even Miša’s son (played by Nebojša Glogovac), who himself directs an orchestra, shows a clear lack of understanding: – Without monuments, without proper signs. Thousands of people died there. – Alright, that happened in the past. Who cares about that now? Leave the country to take care of that. If that isn’t marked, there’s a reason. (01:06:45–01:07:04)13

In this instance, Paskaljević integrates the memory policies of the Holocaust in Serbia into the plot, specifically the neglected space of the old fairground,14 which is problematically marked as a place of remembrance. Professor Miša finally hires a Roma band and an alcoholic singer whose son died in the Bosnian war and who has not performed since then. Paskaljević thus draws attention in the film to the discrimination against the Roma in contemporary Serbia and to the important fact that the Romani genocide (Porajmos), which in Serbia is also associated with the space of the old fairground,15 has hardly ever been publicly remembered: (“– Where are we now, professor? – Judenlager Semlin, a camp for the Jews and for you Gypsies. – It’s spooky, professor.” (“– Gde smo to stigli, profesore? – Judenlager Semlin, logor za Jevreje i za vas Cigane. – Bogami, jezivo, profesore.”) (01:15:58–01:16:08) In the film, Paskaljević consistently draws parallels between Jewish and Roma identities and fates, presenting them as communities of destiny, and links these to current antiziganistic tendencies, which—and this not only concerns Serbia—also expose structural characteristics.16 In Paskaljević’s presentation, however, a singular

13 “– Bez spomena, bez pravog obeležja. Pa tamo, tamo je stradalo hiljade ljudi. Hej! – Pa dobro, pa bilo, pa prošlo, pa šta sad. Koga to zanima sad? Pusti državu da o tome misli. Ako nije obeleženo ima razlog zašto nije obeleženo.” 14 For current commentary on the situation of the old fairground see Nikolić and Milanović; Dragićević Šešić and Rogač Mijatović. See also Manojlović Pintar and Ignjatović. 15 For concepts of the design of a future memorial from this perspective see Nikolić and Milanović 43. 16 See e.g., Christoph et al., especially the chapter “Why can’t Serbia be considered to be a safe country for Roma?” by Jovana Vuković.

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act of violence dominates: In the scene immediately following the dream, Miša is invited to a Roma wedding. At the wedding, Bole and his brother Rade, who studies at the Vienna Conservatory with the professor’s support, play the melody of When Day Breaks together with other musicians. During the performance, a Molotov cocktail hits the building, setting it ablaze and ending the wedding festivities. Bole’s grandfather summarises, sitting together with Miša around a campfire and a bottle of rakija: “We’re living in a world of unpunished violence. […] They want to drive us away from here, but where to? Where should we go to?” (“Živimo u svetu nekažnjenog nasilja. […] Hoće da nas oteraju odavde. A kuda? Kuda ćemo?”) (00:51:03–00:51:29). He then comments on Rade’s and Bole’s parents living in Germany: “God knows what happened to them. That’s a Gypsy destiny, you know.” (“Bog zna šta im se dogodilo. E, to ti je ciganska sudbina, znaš.”) (00:51:46–00:51:52) In addition, the film adopts an accusatory attitude towards the forced mobilizations in Serbia in the 1990s through the character of the singer Marko. Similar to his film Medeni mesec (Honeymoons) from 2009 in which the strategy of parallelization is also dominant, When Day Breaks testifies to Paskaljević’s commitment to addressing current and socially contested issues. Returning to the motif of the hidden child, Miša’s father’s melody heard at the concert, finally performed at the old fairground, carries Miša into his next fantasy, the final scene of the film: He sees himself, portrayed as an old man, together with his parents, young at heart, in a winter landscape, frolicking in the snow. On the one hand, the image ties in with the desperate statement of one of the current residents of the old fairground: Living there under precarious circumstances, a woman finds solace only in the fairy-tale beauty of the snow. In When Day Breaks, snow is associated in this way with fairy tales and a fantastic world that makes the reunion with dead parents possible. On the other hand, by allowing the main character to access this imaginary reunion with his parents through music, the film employs a medium, that is otherwise underrepresented in post-memorial representations.17

The House of Remembering and Forgetting: Polyphony of hidden children The novel Kuća sećanja i zaborava (The House of Remembering and Forgetting) was published in 2014, two years after When Days Break appeared, although parts of the novel had already been published in other contexts. The novel connects four different biographies through the motif of the hidden child. The story of the music

17 In David’s novel, this scene is not staged for Miša but for the main character Albert Vajs under slightly different circumstances. I will address this point later in my analysis of the novel.

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professor, here named Miša Volf, is one of them. Compared to the film, Miša’s story is told only briefly in the novel and, as in two other biographies, serves as a contrast to the story of the main character Albert Vajs. In addition to a heterodiegetic narrative instance, the characters themselves speak as first-person narrators through diaries or letters. The life of the protagonist Albert Vajs is marked by the death of his parents and his younger brother. These losses of primary caregivers, along with the guilt of having abandoned relatives, are regarded as the essential characteristics of traumatized children who survived the Holocaust (see Lezzi 84, 88). Albert originates from a Jewish family in the Serbian town K.; his background on his mother’s side stems from Sephardic Jews and on his father’s side from Ashkenazic Jews from Lemberg. There are obvious parallels to Filip David’s own autobiography, whose family history displays a comparable constellation in Kragujevac (see David 2004: 49). In the novel the family is deported by train, whereby the parents are able to help the children to escape from said train. However, Albert loses his younger brother Elijah and feels personally responsible for this loss. He himself is rescued by an ethnic German couple who wishes to raise him in place of their deceased son, i.e., for rather selfish reasons. He flees and ultimately grows up in an orphanage. The fourth chapter, “which tells the story of the Volksdeutsche Johann Kraft, as told to the investigating authorities in N. in 1945” (David 2017: 47; “sadrži ispovest folksdojčera Johana Krafta datu istražnim organima u N. 1945. godine”, David 2016: 43) corresponds to a large extent to the story “Zovem se Andreas” (“My name is Andreas”), first published in 2013 in the volume Princ vatre. Sabrane i nove priče (Fire Prince: Collected and New Stories). However, the plot varies at two crucial moments: In the story, the German denounces the recalcitrant boy who refuses to take on the dead German boy’s role, so, in the end, he is deported along with his German foster mother who has decided to accompany him. In the novel, the man does not denounce the boy, but Albert runs away and his foster mother hangs herself because of this second loss of a child. In both versions, the non-conformity of the child and his clinging to his original family triggers tragedy in the foster family. In the novel, the outburst of the German foster father is expressed in the following manner: “‘You piece of scum’, I said to the little Jew. ‘Your parents have abandoned you, forever! They’re not coming back for you, not ever!’” (David 2017: 54; “‘Ti, mali gade’, kazao sam Jevrejčetu, ‘tvoji roditelji su te napustili, zauvek! Nikada neće doći po tebe!’”, David 2016: 51–52). In the novel’s plot, Albert’s fate is placed in the context of similar but also extremely individual fates of surviving children. These four characters are connected by the trauma of the Holocaust and the question of one’s own guilt, but each in an individual way. The four companions meet at a conference in the USA: “The First International Gathering of Hidden Children During World War II”. This conference is well documented, e.g., in Jane Marks’ publication of surviving children’s

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testimonies in The Hidden Children. The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust (1993). This places the biographies of the four Serbian Jewish protagonists in the broader context of hidden Jewish children. Moreover, the novel addresses the belated start to the official reappraisal of specific childhood fates by staging this first international gathering of formerly hidden children in New York in 1991, and it forms a cornerstone of the plot. The eleventh and eponymous chapter is situated in the context of this conference, which, however, takes on fantastic traits and thus follows Filip David’s earlier works such as Hodočasnici neba i zemlje (1995, Pilgrims of the Earth and the Sky) or San o ljubavi i smrti (2007, A Dream of Love and Death), in which the author integrates elements of Kabbalistic philosophy into the textual structure of his fantastic literature (see Todorović; Hansen-Kokoruš). The Kabbalistic tradition teaches an immediate experience of God; in David’s novel A Dream of Love and Death, this mystical experience is contrasted with the “struggle for naked physical existence” (Todorović 445) to which Jewish children were subjected in the Nazi institute Ahnenerbe and the experiments on humans undertaken there. This contrast is continued in The House of Remembering and Forgetting, in which the motif of the dream as another level of reality plays an important role. In the plot line of Miša Volf this is realized through the musical elements described as “Hassidic music” (Engl. 96, orig. 108), through which the soul of the musician—Miša’s father—can be felt. After intensely studying the notes of Kabbalistic and Hasidic songs, Miša’s encounter with his parents at the old fairground experienced in the dream is directly connected with Kabbalistic mysticism: Hassidism is connected to the Kabbalah and its mysticism. The Professor became increasingly convinced that the composition was a kind of prayer that enabled a heightened level of devotion, wherein the difference between past and present disappeared and the gates of time opened up. (David 2017: 96)18

How is the level of the fantastic expressed in the plot line of Albert Vajs? During a restless nocturnal walk during the New York conference, a mysterious house appears to Albert. The scene is realized in the novel as an incursion of the fantastic into the reality of the protagonist, who is searching for a quiet corner in the hectic city, has lost his way and then panicked. The house with the neon sign The House of Remembering and Forgetting exerts an attraction on him, “thinking that someone there might be able to help him” (101, “u uverenju da će tu možda dobiti pomoć”, 114). The fantastic is understood in functional terms as a manifestation of the

18 “Hasidizam je povezan sa kabalom i njenim misticizmom. Profesor je bio sve sigurniji da je ova kompozicija neka vrsta molitve koja omogućava da se dostigne onaj važan stepen posvećenosti kada se gube razlike između prošlosti i budućnosti, kada se otvaraju kapije vremena.” (David 2016: 108)

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unconscious (see Schmitz-Emans 71), right up to the visibility of the unconscious of culture (see Lachmann 11). The house thus makes it possible to externalize painful memories projected onto a screen in the “Remembering Room”, while also offering, within the framework of the fantastic reality of the house, the possibility of forgetting, for which the visitor is offered various medicines and herbs (see David 2017: 102–103; David 2016: 116–117). This means that he is confronted with the choice between his haunting memories and the possibility of forgetting. The latter, however, would mean the abandonment of everything that constitutes his identity. The possibility of making a decision, which appears within the framework of the fantastic, can be interpreted as a process of becoming aware of one’s own identity, as the conscious acceptance of the traumatic memories as part of one’s own self. Within the plot of the novel, Albert decides against forgetting and for pain instead: But, what would he do without that deep, penetrating pain? It held the memory of his father, his mother, Elijah. That pain was everything he was, and without it, he, Albert Weisz, did not exist. Nor did the people he cared about most. (David 2017: 103)19

It is also, as Giergiel and Taczyńska demonstrate, a conscious decision against changing his identity: “For what defines us is memory, an endured experience, very frequently difficult and painful. Therefore, to abandon memory would mean to become someone else” (Giergiel and Taczyńska 87). Saša Ćirić interprets David’s image of the “Remembering Room”, which depicts all the protagonist’s memories on a screen, as an homage to Enciklopedija mrtvih (1983, The Encyclopedia of the Dead) by Danilo Kiš. It should be added, though, that David’s “Remembering Room” differs from Kiš’s encyclopedia in its focus on the trauma of memory, so that the “Remembering Room” is, consequently, contrasted with the “Forgetting Room”. At the end of the novel, the phantasmagoric journey on the “Orient Express” turns into the journey in a deportation train, so that Albert finds himself once again on the ramp at Auschwitz. By closing his eyes, the protagonist’s (fictive) escape from this hopeless situation evokes the scenery of an imaginary winter world and a reunion with his family. This image corresponds to the end of Paskaljević’s film, which shows Miša in a fantasy scene with his parents in the snow. But how this togetherness is achieved or envisioned is different. Whereas the novel offers “an escape from the worst circumstances – by closing our eyes” (Giergiel and Taczyńska 85), Miša succeeds in reuniting with his parents during the commemoration ceremony at the

19 “Ali, šta bi on bio bez toga, bez duboko prožimajućeg bola? U njemu se čuvaju sećanja na oca, majku, Elijaha. Taj bol je sve ono što je on sam, bez tog bola on, Albert Vajs, ne postoji. A ni oni do kojih mu je najviše stalo.” (David 2016: 117)

The Motif of the Hidden Child

old fairground and under the impression of his father’s melody “When Day Breaks”. In the novel, as in A Dream of Love and Death, Filip David links the idea of fleeing into one’s self and the possibility of escaping danger with the historical American escape artist Harry Houdini, whose birth name was Erik Weisz. The protagonists in both novels are assumed to be related to Houdini, and in both novels the motif of escape is linked to the Holocaust. The biographies of Albert’s friends accent different experiences, individualizing the biographies of surviving children. For example, Albert learns that his friend Solomon Levi was actually the son of the Jewish Nazi collaborator Ruben Rubenović and was able to survive only through privileges. The fourth character, Urijel Kon, was born in 1942 with his mother in hiding. She had been raped by the caretaker who exploited her helplessness. Urijel’s life is constantly marked by self-hatred:20 “Uriel was Jewish only to the extent that others saw him as such” (David 2017: 115; “Urijel je bio Jevrejin samo po tome što su ga drugi videli kao Jevrejina”, David 2016: 134). Various aspects of Jewish identity construction thus intersect in the characters: the characters speak about the feelings of alienation and self-hatred; the other’s gaze is also mentioned as the basis of one’s own identity. Filip David has investigated the question of what constitutes Jewish identity for many years: literarily, essayistically, and in his correspondence with Mirko Kovač between 1992 and 1995. In his literary texts, he resolves this question by including fantastic worlds.

Jewish identity in Filip David’s works David’s novel proposes a profound examination of Jewish self-understanding in Serbia. The child Albert resisted appropriation by an ethnic German family, fleeing from a false identity. In Pilgrims of the Earth and the Sky, this question is explored using the example of a Jewish converso in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century and, as Renate Hansen-Kokoruš has demonstrated, outsiderism and inner conflict are postulated as key criteria of Jewish identity (see Hansen-Kokoruš 249). In addition, according to Filip David in his text “O jevrejskom kulturnom identitetu” (“On Jewish Cultural Identity”),21 strategies of self-hatred and self-destruction are connected to efforts of assimilation. In the novel The House of Remembering and Forgetting, which contains a distinctly reflexive level, these authorial considerations

20 For a history of the syntagma borrowed from Theodor Lessing (Der jüdische Selbsthass, 1930, Jewish Self-Hatred) and its functional mechanisms, see Doppelbauer; for a detailed account of the discourse, see Leder. In Yugoslavian literature, the phenomenon is addressed by the Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma, for example in his novel Kapo (1987). 21 David 2004: 5–13.

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are incorporated from David’s essays. This also applies to his thoughts on the nature of evil, which he outlines in the essay “O prirodi zla, krivici i kulturnom modelu” (“On the Nature of Evil, Guilt and a Cultural Model”).22 David’s polemic on Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil and his plea for Daniel Goldhagen’s approach in Hitler’s Willing Executioners are also integrated into the character’s reflection.23 In the novel, the polemic is unveiled in the introductory chapter, which is part of Albert Vajs’ diary. A figure who remains nameless, who takes part in a conference on the theme “Crimes, Reconciliation, Forgetting”, vehemently opposes the conference credo, based on Arendt, that the crimes of National Socialism were due to the actions of criminals, manipulators and fanatics. Instead, he argues for the metaphysical nature of evil, drawing on the concept of the Greek daimon. This chapter corresponds to parts of the author’s short story “Daimon” (“Daemon”), first published in 2013 in Fire Prince: Collected and New Stories; reflections on the nature of evil run through the entire novel as a leitmotif – in harmony with David’s earlier texts. A new moment in the construction of identity in the current novel as well as the film When Day Breaks is revealed through the post-memory approach with a focus on the motif of the hidden child, which—as the biographies of the novel’s characters show—clearly display individual traits and can be traced back to very different traumas in the context of the Holocaust. The mediality of the film brings out the importance of music for the post-memorial experience, which is equated with a mystical experience, as mentioned in the novel. This equally concerns visual elements, given the places of remembrance in Belgrade’s urban space and the old fairground. The film further visually portrays the psychological transformation of the protagonist during the reconstruction of his Jewish identity and of himself as a member of a (murdered) Jewish family, so that the motif of the hidden child is depicted in depth. In addition, there is the parallelization with socially relevant problems in contemporary Serbia, of which antiziganistic tendencies are an example. In the novel, on the other hand, the breadth of the motif of the hidden child is used to show the diversity of traumatic Jewish children’s fates and to demonstrate the protagonists’ individual confrontation with questions and doubts regarding Jewish identity. In contrast to the film, the reflexive component dominates in the novel, in which the recognition of pain as a part of one’s individual (Jewish) identity is central, along with the philosophical question of the nature of evil. The fantastic level, especially in the eponymous “House of Remembering and Forgetting”, illustrates this examination of aspects of Jewish experience in the tradition of David’s earlier fantastic texts.

22 Ibid.: 14–18. 23 This primarily concerns the dialogue with Arendt. The reference to Goldhagen is not explicitly mentioned in the novel, but it is mentioned in the essay.

The Motif of the Hidden Child

Works cited Bachmann, Michael. Der abwesende Zeuge. Autorisierungsstrategien in Darstellungen der Shoah. Tübingen: Narr, 2010. Christoph, Wenke, Tamara Baković Jadžić and Vladan Jeremić (Eds.). Not Safe at All. The Safe Country of Origin Legislation and the Consequences for Roma Migrants. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2016. Ćirić, Saša. “Šta će biti s kućom? Filip David: Kuća sećanja i zaborava (Laguna, 2014).” Beton 155. 21 Jan. 2015. David, Filip. “Pod sretnom zvezdom.” Živi i mrtvi. Razgovori sa Jevrejima. Ed. Jaša Almuli. 2nd ed. Beograd: S. Mašić, 2002: 133-145. David, Filip. Svetovi u haosu. Beograd: Forum pisaca, 2004. David, Filip. Princ vatre. Sabrane i nove priče. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2013. David, Filip. Kuća sećanja i zaborava. 3rd ed. Beograd: Laguna, 2016 [2014]. David, Filip. The House of Remembering and Forgetting. London: Peter Owen, Istros Books, 2017. Doppelbauer, Max. “Selbsthass – eine jüdische Begriffsgeschichte”. Europa ethnica 68.3-4 (2011): 106-114. Dragićević Šešić, Milena and Ljiljana Rogač Mijatović. “Od spornog prošlosti do zanemarene sadašnjosti: kulturna politika sećanja beogradskog Starog sajmišta.” Protiv zaborava. Wallpaper. Beograd: Centar za kulturnu dekontaminaciju, 2015. http://www.protivzaborava.com/wallpaper/od-sporne-proslosti-do-zanemarene-sadasnjosti-kulturna-politikasecanja-beogradskog-starog-sajmista/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019. Giergiel, Sabina and Katarzyna Taczyńska. “‘When Night Passes’ and ‘When Day Breaks’ – Between the Past and the Present. Borderlines of Holocaust in Filip David’s Works.” Colloquia Humanistica 6 (2017): 75-96. Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate. “Zur Frage jüdischer Identität in der jüngeren serbischen Literatur. Filip Davids ‘Hodočasnici neba i zemlje’.” Die Welt der Slaven XLVIII (2003): 239-250. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kad svane dan [When Day Breaks]. Dir. Goran Paskaljević. Perf. Mustafa Nadarević. Mica Films, 2012. Kovač, Mirko and Filip David. Knjiga pisama 1992.-1995. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2008. Lachmann, Renate. Erzählte Phantastik. Zur Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik phantastischer Texte. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Leder, Sebastian. Morbus iudaicus. Zum Meta-Theorem des „jüdischens Selbsthasses“ der Spätmoderne [Dissertation an der Fakultät I der Technischen Universität Berlin]. Berlin: Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, 2011. Lezzi, Eva. Zerstörte Kindheit. Literarische Autobiographie zur Shoah. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2001.

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Manojlović Pintar, Olga and Aleksandar Ignjatović. “Prostori selektovanih memorija: Staro sajmište u Beogradu i sećanje na Drugi svetski rat.” Kultura sjećanja: 1941. Povijesni lomovi i suvladavanje prošlosti. Eds. Sulejman Boško, Tihomir Cipek and Olivera Milosavljević. Zagreb: Disput, 2008: 95-111. Marks, Jane. The Hidden Children. The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Nikolić, Mirjana and Aleksandra Milanović. “Na margini kolektivnog sećanja. Spomenkompleks Staro sajmište.” Graničnici sećanja. Jevrejsko nasleđe i Holokaust. Eds. Nevena Daković and Vera Mevorah. Beograd: Jevrejski istorijski muzej Saveza jevrejskih opština Srbije, 2018: 35-50. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Phantastische Literatur: ein denkwürdiger Problemfall.” Neohelikon XXII.2 (1995), 53-116. Tišma, Aleksandar. Kapo. Beograd: Nolit, 1987. Todorović, Gordana. “‘San o ljubavi i smrti’ Filipa Davida ili potraga za istinom (rekonstrukcija postupka).” Istina, mistifikacija, l’ža v slavjanskite ezici, literaturi i kulturi. Eds. N. Ivanova and E. Daradanova. Sofija: Sofijski univerzitet Sv. Kliment Ohridski, 2011: 443-448. Vogel, Sonja. “Geteiltes Erinnern in Belgrad.” Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung. 29 Aug. 2016. https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/juedische-welt/geteiltes-erinnern-in-belgrad/. Accessed 30 Mar. 2020. Vojvoda, Gabriela. “The NIN literary award in Serbia in the 1990s: A search for cultural identity.” The South Slav Journal 30.3-4 (2011): 117-134. Vuković, Jovana. “Why Can’t Serbia be Considered to be a Safe Country for Roma?” Not Safe at All. The Safe Country of Origin Legislation and the Consequences for Roma Migrants. Eds. Wenke Christoph, Tamara Baković Jadžić and Vladan Jeremić. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2016: 21-26. Zakić, Mirna. “Hidden in the Plain Sight: Jewish Children’s Survival in the Occupied Serbian Banat.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 32.3 (2018): 424-444.

Sabina Giergiel (Cracow)

Closeness or Distance? Practices Used to Speak About the Sajmište Camp in Cultural Texts

Abstract:

The article aims to demonstrate the modes of representation of the Sajmište concentration camp as presented in contemporary Serbian culture. The author refers to the camp’s both literary (Albahari, David, Penevski, Niemann) and visual representations (comic books, films). Doing so, she determines the positions occupied by the ones who pass on knowledge about the camp. Each of them is characterized by a different distance from the depicted reality, which results in a graphic perspective stemming from temporal distance or its absolute lack (narrating from within). Between these two opposite points, there are positioned the additional endeavours of description (of both venue and experience) whose goal is to represent the camp’s reality. The history of the Sajmište camp (initially called Judenlager Semlin, and then renamed to Anhaltelager), which between 1941–1944 operated in a location that is today part of the city of Belgrade, has so far been the subject of two important books in Serbia. A ground-breaking monograph on the camp was published by Milan Koljanin as Nemački logor na beogradskom Sajmištu 1941–1944 (The German Camp at the Belgrade Fair (Sajmište) 1941–1944) (Koljanin), and Jovan Byford, in his book Staro sajmište. Mesto sećanja, zaborava i sporenja (Staro Sajmište: A Site Remembered, Forgotten, Contested) (Byford), focused on the post-war history of this place. The first of these studies is a classical historiographical work, while the author of the other work follows the designations of the former camp site as they changed with time and the position this place has occupied in Serbian memory politics after the war. The number of recently published texts (both research-based and essays) focusing on this place leads to the conclusion that there is currently a growing interest in the former camp site among researchers (historians, specialists in literature and art history as well as architects).1

1 Researchers focusing on Sajmište include e.g. Ana Martinoli, Olga Pintar Manojlović and Aleksandar Ignjatović, Srđan Radović, Predrag Maksić; also Magdalena Bogusławska in Poland, and to some extent Sabina Giergiel.

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This text differs slightly from the books and articles mentioned above. The intention is to examine the way in which Sajmište is represented in non-academic texts available in Serbia, especially how the place is viewed from a larger perspective. This means, firstly, the literary representations of the camp but also cultural texts in general in which Sajmište appears. The intention is not to focus on quite highly conventionalized and predictable ways of presenting the fragmentary camp infrastructure or on the images of hunger, suffering and death. It should also be specified at the beginning that the notion of a “cultural text” is understood here quite broadly, as the subjects of this analysis include a literary work as well as visual representations (a comic, a film) and an epistolary narrative. This article will refer to the following works of fiction: Götz and Meyer by David Albahari,2 Manje važni zločini (Less Important Crimes) by Zoran Penevski, The House of Memory and Oblivion by Filip David (together with the movie based on the book, Kad svane dan (When Day Breaks), from 2012, directed by Goran Paskaljević) and to the short story Na starom Sajmištu (At Old Sajmište) by Borivoj Adašević. Other texts included here are the Serbian translation of Beate Niemann’s book Moj dobri otac. Život sa njegovom prošlošću. Biografija moga oca zločinca (My Good Father: Living with His Past. A Biography of My Father the Murderer) and the letters of Hilda Deitch, written in the Sajmište camp. The comic by Aleksandar Zograf, a visual retelling of Deitch’s epistolary narrative, is also mentioned. It needs to be emphasized from the beginning that the main frame of reference for authors dealing with camp issues in fictional texts (Albahari, David and Penevski) are historical data, which then are enhanced with imagined details. The camp was established on the site of an inter-war exhibition centre (on the left bank of the Sava River). During World War II this territory was part of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska). In this location a camp was created, initially for the Jewish population (December 1941 – March 1942), and later, after implementation of the “final solution to the problem of Jews”, for the political opponents of the occupiers, members of the Partisan movement and forced laborers (summer 1942 – July 1944). In the first phase of its existence, the Sajmište camp was the place of incarceration of approximately 6,500–7,000 people of Jewish origin (women, children and elderly men), who were to be murdered in a Saurer gas van during the spring of 1942. Only 50 women survived their incarceration; they were released because they held citizenships of other countries or their husbands were Serbs (Byford 41). This fact is mentioned here for a reason: When “objective” factors are involved—in this case, the scarcity of direct witnesses of the events (i.e.,

2 The reference here is to the Polish edition of the book. In Serbia the text was first published in 1998, and the first English translation appeared in 2003 in the UK.

Closeness or Distance?

the survivors)—the stories about the camp are told and re-told from an external perspective. However, its specific projection varies between different cultural texts. Using the cultural texts mentioned above, the intention is to pinpoint the position from which the texts “speak” (testify) about the camp. For the purpose of this article, three positions are provisionally determined about which a person talking about the Sajmište camp can take. The first is characterized by distance, predominantly resulting from the fact that the story is told at a different time (and thus from a place outside the world the story depicts) so that the speaker’s knowledge is secondhand (its basis are documents and monographs, which are somewhat secondary artefacts). The second position assumes an attempt (which seems to be doomed to fail) to achieve unity with the world which is spoken about. It is characterized by painstaking attempts to reach the essence of that world, which leads to such a degree of identification with the subject of the story that the border between the inside (camp reality) and the outside (the world beyond the camp) disappears. The third position is defined by the speaker being positioned so that the story comes solely from the inside, and the speaker in this case is someone who has “experienced” personal existence in this place. The first position is characteristic of the contemporary protagonists of Penevski’s prose,3 the second—of the narrator in Albahari‘s short novel, and the third describes the position of Hilda Deitch. The other texts mentioned here in passing are situated between these three models. Among the literature dedicated to the camp, Albahari’s novel is one which has become the subject of quite a few interpretations4 (Albahari). Its narrator is a teacher of the Serbian language who attempts to understand the circumstances in which members of his family have died—they were imprisoned in the camp and later murdered in a gas van. As Stijn Vervaet notes, the narrator is a typical representative of the “post-memory generation” (Vervaet 119). His investigation focuses on the two authentic figures of the gas van drivers, the eponymous Götz and Meyer. They can be perceived as one of the few certain elements of a family puzzle which the narrator is trying to assemble. They are central to the plot around which he weaves his speculations about a probable past, as the narrator practically invents the rest of the story about the camp based on primary foundations (historical facts). The teacher-narrator, who seems to believe (at least until a certain moment) in the creative power of words, strives to achieve the directness of experience. What is more, he attempts to share this unity with his students which he seems to achieve in the end. During a trip to Sajmište, which follows the path his ancestors walked to the camp in the 1940s, the teacher sees that the majority of his students are struggling to 3 The novel has a story-within-a-story structure; there are two timeframes—the past (comprising the inter-war period and World War II) and the present (the turn of the twenty-first century). 4 For more information on Albahari’s mini-novels see, e.g., Masha Volynsky, Vesna Lopičić, Gordana Todorović, Petra Pešić, Milica Lazović, Urszula Putyńska.

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breathe (one of the girls is pressing her throat; someone’s hand helplessly stretches to the window only to slide back powerlessly; Albahari 117). This demonstrates how the students identify themselves with their peers transported to the camp half a century earlier. Albahari’s tale assumes a specific distance between the narrator and the world he talks about. The distance is justified by the passage of time: the narrator speaks from his contemporary perspective (the end of the twentieth century), but at the same time he attempts to move into the past, understand it and experience it affectively. The position the readers perceive in this text is paradoxical: it assumes a distance but at the same time it continuously questions this distance—what is happening in the world depicted is a multiplication of time frames, accordingly Albahari’s narrator seems to live in two timeframes at the same time. This situation enables a quasi-documentary story about the camp. The paradox involves the fact that the reader knows that Albahari’s book is not a document (the author himself includes in the text signs that it is a work of fiction); however, since the novel is constructed on the basis of historical facts, the reader perceives the content as at least probable. Due to this particular positioning, Albahari’s approach can be called an ambiguous narration, i.e., told as if from the centre of the world depicted, but it is also a world which the storyteller has not visited; a world which remains only imagined even if the narration about it is supported by facts. The narrator, who places himself in the position of an investigator, testifies on behalf of his relatives, and teaches his students (more or less imagined) knowledge about what happened in the Sajmište camp and what the Jews imprisoned there experienced. The position from which the story in Götz and Meyer is told can thus be described by the second defined model. In contrast to Albahari, Penevski consequently maintains an external perspective in his novel Manje važni zločini. This perspective is marked both by the position of the narrator and the position of the protagonists of the text, who look at Sajmište from a distance, thus becoming bystanders, “incidental” observers of the drama. Taking such a position is characterized by a presence during the event; a presence necessary not by choice but due to a birth certificate or an “incidental” presence (Koprowska 90). The distance to place and events is thus doubled to a certain extent. As in Albahari’s novel, the perspectives have been multiplied in Manje važni zločini, although in a slightly different way. The text contains the past (the period of World War II and the years before) in which the protagonists act, and the turn of the twentyfirst century, when the contemporary protagonists of the text who are interested in the history of the Sajmište camp are active. The protagonists from the past (Petar Milić and Stanimir Pavlović) perceive the events related to the extermination of the Jews in a negative way, but they do not involve themselves directly in actions intended to prevent the killings. Although they are next to the scene of violence, they hardly speak about it. Their position is based on the model of an observer. It

Closeness or Distance?

should be emphasized that the novel itself does not contain images of the victims; there is only the camp (as a place where repression occurs) and the van. It might seem that the lack of temporal distance, characteristic of the protagonists in one of the timeframes in Penevski’s novel, should have resulted in greater involvement, a particular form of focusing the perspective on the place and people (the prisoners). Yet, this does not happen. Penevski focuses on the people who are standing by/ bystanders (Hilberg). They know that the camp exists (what is more, Stanimir Pavlović is employed by the Germans as a mechanic), they condemn the occupants’ actions and sympathize with the prisoners. However, fearing for their lives, they do not express those feelings openly. Still, Pavlović’s character is more problematic than that of Petar Milić since Stanimir works for a short time as the driver of the lorry transporting the prisoners to the site of execution in Jabuka (Penevski 105). The knowledge that—although not being directly guilty of their death, he has become involved in the killing machinery against his will—awakens in him a sense of uneasiness and discomfort. Yet—as he responds to his friend’s comment—he had to do this because in those times “one must keep one’s head somehow” (Penevski 101). The title of the novel (Manje važni zločini) should probably be read in the context of the lack of or insufficient involvement of both protagonists.5 This lack of involvement leads ultimately to their death: They are executed by communists who consider them as the occupants’ helpers. Besides the past timeframe, the novel also presents a contemporary perspective. Its protagonist is Miloš Milić, invited by Dušan Pavlović to cooperate in an internet project on the history of Belgrade. It is not accidental that the names of both protagonists sound like characters from a text referring to World War II: The young men are the descendants of Petar and Stanimir. Miloš’s task is to describe the location of a pre-war trade fair, which was later to become the location of the Sajmište camp. As mentioned earlier, this place is not directly represented in Penevski’s novel, yet direct images from Sajmište appear in the book twice. The first situation takes place when Petar Milić notices a photograph in the hands of German soldiers guarding the entrance to the synagogue in Pančevo, which was transformed into a warehouse during the war. The photo was taken secretly and presents a female prisoner washing herself, naked from the waist up. The second representation of the camp reality is seen from the contemporary perspective—when a member of the Yugoslavian Film Institute discovers a minute-long film which shows women cautiously moving on

5 Interrogated by the communists after the war, Pavlović stated that in 1942 he was the person who broke the mobile gas chamber down in which the Germans murdered all the prisoners of Sajmište in spring 1942. A Saurer van (a mobile gas chamber) returned to Berlin a month after the liquidation of the Jewish population from the territory of Serbia, i.e., 11 or 12 June 1942. The van with a broken axle (a damaged part mentioned by the protagonist of the novel, claiming it was him who did it on purpose) was transported to Germany by train (Koljanin 127).

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the frozen Sava River. They carry dead bodies across the river to hand them over to gravediggers. The image of corpses being taken out of the camp, combined with the painful sensation of being exposed to the eyes of the population of the capital, is a clear sign of the extermination in progress. It is a motif which also appears in other works of fiction focusing on the camp that were written by authors of Jewish origin (Albahari, David). Thus, in Serbian literature the sense of sight is most often used to identify the Holocaust occurring in Belgrade. Another author addressing the topic of the Sajmište camp is Filip David, who survived World War II as a child by hiding in a village. In his novel The House of Memory and Oblivion, the so-called Judenlager Semlin is mentioned as a place to which the parents of one of the characters have been deported. The mention is brief and the reader learns about life in the camp from a descendant of the murdered victims. In his novel, David focuses not so much on representations of the camp itself but rather on the lack of reaction from the inhabitants of Belgrade—first to the Jews being transported to the camp, and second to the increased mortality rate in Sajmište, illustrated by the columns of women carrying dead bodies across the Sava (David 82–83). In the text, the Serbian writer includes a scene in which we see Jews leaving their apartments and being deported. This fragment is very suggestively presented in Goran Paskaljević’s film Kad svane dan, based on David’s work. Unlike the novel (where the sense of sight is given prominence in the context of the Holocaust), the film uses other perceptions, i.e., hearing. The noise accompanying the events increases the fear and disorientation of future prisoners (Alsatians bark, children cry, soldiers shout). The sense of being lost is amplified by the floodlights sweeping the street. It should be noted that, in contrast to the images from the film, the transports to the camp probably took place during the day. So supposedly the night transport was intended by the author of the novel (and later by the movie director) to emphasize the terror of the situation.6 The noise awakens one of the protagonists, who goes out and sees the camp: “In the middle of the camp, the Tower shines its sinister searchlight. A lighthouse in the night. Like the jaws of a huge beast, the camp swallows up the people streaming in” (David 89). This quote shows that the Serbian author evidently gives the camp animalistic features, showing it as an entity that devours people who enter its maw, symbolized by the gate.

6 I did not manage to uncover information confirming without a doubt whether prisoners were also transported to the camp during the night. The Serbian historian Milan Koljanin writes that Jews appeared at Washington Square (where the Gestapo central office was) at different hours of the day. The actual transports of prisoners to the camp lasted from 8 to 13 December 1941. The Jews received summons (delivered by gendarmes) that probably specified the hour at which they should appear at Washington Square the following day (Koljanin 56).

Closeness or Distance?

The perspective of speaking from the site of the tragedy is characteristic of the epistolary narration of Hilda Deitch.7 This nineteen-year-old prisoner of the camp managed to pass four letters from the camp to her friends who remained outside. The first letter is dated December 1941 and was written a day before her arrival at the camp. The second was written on December 9 and offers the first impressions of life in Sajmište; the third was written around December 13, and the last one in February 1942.8 The letters are a unique document portraying life in the camp. At the same time, they allow us to follow the metamorphosis of the author herself and the changes in her perception of reality. The first letter is omitted here, which explains Deitch’s motivation to write it. The second letter, however, is worthy of a closer look, as the prisoner notes here her impressions from her initial days in the camp. The sense of isolation and abandonment is the dominant motif in this personal document. This corresponds with the earlier statement that Hilda Deitch’s letters originate from the inside of the world described (the inside of the camp, i.e., the inside of hell). The position of the author approaches the one Giorgio Agamben9 thought to be impossible to achieve—that of the complete or true witness (Agamben). This spatial perspective of “being inside” is emphasized in Deitch’s epistolary narration in the first paragraph of the second letter, where the writer refers to her surroundings: I’m writing to you from the idyllic surroundings of a cowshed, lying on straw, while above me, instead of the starry sky, stretches the wooden roof construction of Pavilion No. 3. From my gallery (the third), which consists of a layer of planks and holds three of us and on which we each have an 80 cm wide living space, I am gazing down on this labyrinth, or rather this ant heap of wretched people whose tragedies are as widespread as those who live not because they think that one day things will be better but because they haven’t got the strength to end it all.10

7 Hilda Deitch was an inmate of the Sajmište camp and died there. She was born in 1922 into a family of Ashkenazi Jews. When World War II broke out, she began working as a volunteer in a Jewish hospital in the Serbian capital. In December 1941, Deitch voluntarily went with a transport to the camp. From there, she managed to smuggle letters to her friends. 8 The letters were published for the first time by Jaša Almuli in the anthology Jevrejke govore (Jewish Women Talking; Almuli 2005: 132–133), and later in another collection compiled by the author Stradanje i spasavanje srpskih Jevreja (Suffering and Saving of Serbian Jews; Almuli 2010). They are also available on the internet at http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letters.php. 9 Giorgio Agamben—Italian philosopher, born in 1942. For scientists who are interested in Holocaust studies, the most influencial is his project Homo sacer. He is taking a dialogue with some well-known philosophers of the XX century (such as Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Michael Foucault). 10 http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letter-2.php. Accessed 7 Jan. 2020. Here, the letters can be found on the Jovan Byford-administrated English and Serbian bilingual webpage, financed by the British Academy. There is no information about the translator of the Deitch’s letters. The Serbian version: “Pišem ti iz stalske idile, ležeći na slami dok se umesto zvezdanog neba nalazi nad

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The following paragraphs also contain such statements as “There are walls everywhere” and “the pavilions are surrounded by barbed wire”.11 The next letter contains a dose of irony as the author mentions her humble library which brings her much joy in the camp. The most harrowing letter is the last one, likely written shortly before her death. It becomes clear that the nine weeks Hilda spent in the camp had entirely changed her perception of the world. While the earlier correspondence had the undertone of youthful optimism, in the last letter it is difficult to find any trace of hope, as the primary feelings experienced by humans in the camp are hunger and biting cold which overshadow any other human feelings and reflexes. “We are all becoming evil because we’re starving—we’re all becoming cynical and count everyone else’s mouthfuls—everyone is desperate—but in spite of this, no one kills anyone because we’re all just a bunch of animals that I despise. I hate every single one of us because we’ve all fallen as low as we can go”.12 Let us recall here the different types of witnesses Giorgio Agamben outlines: there is the testis, or the one who (in trial proceedings or a dispute) appears as a third party, and there is the superstes, a witness whose position is founded on the fact that s/he experienced or survived something and can thus give a testimony. Deitch’s position is close to that of a superstes, and her narration to such a testimony. The prisoner is a woman who has reached the end and does not survive,13 but who—just before her death—speaks from the inside of the world about which she is testifying; the world where the dominant feeling (besides hunger and cold) is the sense of isolation. This becomes particularly clear in the following fragment of the last preserved letter: We are so near the outside world, yet so far from everyone. We have no contact with anyone; the life of every individual out there carries on as usual, as if half a

mojom glavom drvena konstrukcija krova paviljona br. 3. Sa moje galerije (treće) koja se sastoji iz niza dasaka, a na kojoj nas tri imamo svaka po 80 cm u širini životnog prostora, posmatram ovaj lavirint, odnosno mravinjak bednika čije su tragedije brojne kao i oni koji žive ne zato što su svesni da će jednom biti bolje, već zato što nemaju snage da prekinu sa životom.” http://www.open.ac.uk/ socialsciences/semlin/sr/pismo-2.php. Accessed 15 Sep. 2020. 11 http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letter-2.php. Accessed 7 Jan. 2020. Serbian: “Zidova ima dosta”, “Paviljoni [su] ograđeni žicom”. http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/sr/pismo-2. php. Accessed 15 Sep. 2020. 12 http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letter-4.php. Accessed 7 Jan. 2020. It should also be added that such conclusions are close to the well-known thoughts of Primo Levi on the human condition in concentration camps. Serbian: “Svi postajemo zli jer smo gladni, svi postajemo zajedljivi i brojimo jedan drugom zalogaje, svi smo očajni – a ipak se niko ne ubija jer smo svi skupa jedna masa životinja koju prezirem. Mrzim nas sve jer smo svi jednako propali.” http://www.open.ac.uk/ socialsciences/semlin/sr/pismo-4.php. Accessed 19 Sep. 2020. 13 On this foundation, the notion of the Holocaust as an “event without a witness” is built (Felman and Lauba).

Closeness or Distance?

kilometre away a slaughterhouse containing six thousand innocent people doesn’t exist. Both you and we are equal in our cowardice. Enough of everything!14 The alienation of the camp inmates found an excellent visual representation in a short comic published in Belgrade in 2018 by Aleksandar Zograf, which is an equivalent of the letters in picture form15 (Radojković). In one of the panels, we see the camp buildings with the characteristic tower in the centre and a couple walking at a certain distance from Sajmište. From behind the wall come cries, expressed by the illustrator as onomatopoeias. The walking couple seems to be looking towards the building with surprise or fear. What is most striking in this picture is the distance (presented visually with great suggestiveness) that separates those in the space surrounded by the wall from those who are leading a relatively normal life in the capital of Serbia under German occupation. The walking couple is placed in the forefront while the wall and the desperate cry coming from behind form the background. This suggests that the inhabitants of Belgrade were able to realise with their senses the signs of the camp inmates’ suffering—Zograf ’s picture shows that the testimony of the prisoners could be heard.16 When describing the positions from which contemporary texts refer to the Sajmište camp, we should also mention texts that do not so distinctly focus on Jewish suffering, but to a greater or lesser extent refer to the topic of the camp’s existence. The first is a book originally published in German in 2005.17 The Serbian translation was published in 2012 under the title Moj dobri otac. Život sa njegovom prošlošću. Biografija moga oca zločinca. It documents the research of Beate Niemann which she conducted for more than two years in order to reconstruct the biography of her father.

14 http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letter-4.php. Accessed 6 Feb. 2020. Serbian: “Blizu smo sveta, a tako udaljeni od svih. Ni sa kim nemamo veze, život svakog pojedinca napolju teče isto tako dalje, kao da se pola kilometra dalje ne odigrava klanica šest hiljada nevinih. Svi smo jednaki po svome kukavičluku i vi i mi. Dosta!” http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/sr/pismo-4. php. Accessed 15 Sep. 2020. 15 The comic appeared in February and March 2014 in the Serbian weekly Vreme. 16 It should be added as a side note that such positioning of the witness is close to the relation (whose fundamental element was distance—both real, expressed in units of distance, and mental) of Poles towards Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, described by the critic and historian of literature Jan Błoński in his famous 1987 essay Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto), a ground-breaking text for Polish culture and self-image. Today it remains a reference point for Holocaust researchers who keep (re)interpreting it and debating with the author, as Jan Błoński was the first to point out that the Polish share in the guilt for the Holocaust—guilt which (as it should be clearly stated) he by no means identified with participation (Błoński 1, 4). 17 German original: Niemann, Beate. Mein guter Vater. Mein Leben mit seiner Vergangenheit. Eine Täter-Biographie. Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich Verlag, 2005.

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From February 1942 to October 1944, Niemann’s father stayed in Belgrade as the head of the city’s Gestapo branch, responsible for, e.g., the efficient elimination of the Sajmište camp prisoners. The camp itself appears in Niemann’s text as a place connected with her father’s life. The author comes to Belgrade during her investigation, so she looks at this space from today’s perspective. At the former camp site, she meets a woman who survived the camp, which is an extremely difficult experience for the writer. It is impossible to determine whether her fear, tension and somatic reactions are a reaction to her apprehensiveness before the meeting, to the impossibility of accepting the role her father played in the killing of the prisoners, or to visiting the place itself. The book states that during the visit to Sajmište her heart was “beating like crazy”. At first, she would have liked to immediately run to the former prisoner and the tension is difficult to withstand; she then feels a compelling need to escape. At one point, Niemann begins to shake and the tremors do not stop until she returns to her hotel room (Niemann 89). The survivor offers Niemann her own perspective, that of a participant in the events. In her case, it is someone who observed the events (specifically, the moment the prisoners entered the van) from some distance. As a girl, Ljiljana Đorđević climbed the tower in the centre of the camp every day, and, from there, she watched the arrival of the empty gas van and then its departure.18 Thanks to her, the reader gets the witness’s perspective. It is, however, a slightly disturbed one: Ljiljana observes the events, she is not participating in them although she is at the centre of the world she is describing. The sense of distance is strengthened by the place from which the girl observes the camp, i.e., the tower from which she can see a significant part of the route taken by the van full of people. She sees it leave the camp gate and proceed along the bridge on the Sava; finally, she sees the lorry with luggage drive away and the van with people continue along its route. If we compare her position with that occupied by Deitch, we can say that the place from which Đorđević speaks (both the one that determined her position during the observation of the events and the one she occupies today, whose constitutive element is the fact

18 Between March and May 1942, two cars came to the camp every day (except Sundays). The prisoners had been informed earlier that they would be transported to other places of internment, so they were to pack the necessary luggage. The luggage was put on an open-bed lorry parked in front of the camp gate, and the prisoners entered the van waiting in front of the commandant’s office. This mobile gas chamber held 50–80 persons. After the back door was closed, the van started to drive over a bridge on the Sava towards Belgrade, followed by the lorry with the luggage. On the other bank of the river the luggage lorry drove away while the mobile gas chamber stopped and one of the drivers connected the exhaust pipe to the part where the prisoners were. The van continued to drive across Belgrade towards the place named Jajinci (about 15 km from the capital), where freshly dug graves were ready to be filled with bodies of the gassed camp inmates (Gruden Milentijević and Ozimić 15–16; Koljanin 120–125).

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that she survived) makes her narration not as committed as the story told by Hilda Deitch in her letters. What also bears mentioning in this context is the short story Na starom Sajmištu by Borivoj Adašević. In this case the Holocaust motif appears only in the background of the text. A tram stopping near the former camp becomes the stimulus for the story’s narrator’s memory to return to the times when, as a student, he had rented an apartment on the New Belgrade bank of the Sava. The fate of the camp inmates is referred to only at the beginning of the story where we read that the tram was stopped “by the victims” (Adašević 32). In this way the author reminds the reader of an interpretation of the Holocaust, based on the conviction that the dead (particularly the Jewish dead) return to this world as ghosts or apparitions, demanding “a proper burial, a closing of the symbolic ‘cryptic’ syntagm” (Ubertowska 102). This article has focused on the position from which the testimony on the Sajmište camp is given. It could be complemented by an analysis of the position occupied by a Serbian (bystander) witness to the Holocaust, i.e., a person who was not directly involved in the events. This category seems to have escaped an in-depth analysis so far, which may be strange, considering that the literary texts dealing with the extermination of Jews in the camp located on the left bank of the Sava have asked multiple times which position the residents of the Serbian capital held at that time.19 Translated by Izabela Dąbrowska

Works cited Adašević, Borivoje. “Na starom Sajmištu.” Letopis Matice srpske Jun.-Aug. (2000): 32–40. Agamben, Giorgio. Co zostaje z Auschwitz. Archiwum i świadek (Homo sacer III). Trans. Sławomir Królak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2008. Albahari, David. Götz i Meyer. Trans. Milan Duškov. Toruń: Graffiti BC, 2007. Almuli, Jaša. Jevrejke govore. Beograd: Signature, 2005. Almuli, Jaša. Stradanje i spasavanje srpskih Jevreja. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, 2010. Błoński, Jan. „Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto.” Tygodnik Powszechny 2 (1987): 1, 4. Bajford [Byford], Jovan. Staro sajmište. Mesto sećanja, zaborava i sporenja. Beograd: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava, 2011. Bogusławska, Magdalena. “Zagłada Żydów w serbskim porządku pamięci.” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały 12 (2006): 470–488.

19 I mentioned the existence of this motif in one of my articles (Giergiel 2018); however, it still seems to be in need of further, clear interpretation.

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David, Filip. The House of Memory and Oblivion. Trans. Christina Pribichevich Zorić. Beograd: Geopoetika Publishing, 2015. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Lauba. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalisys and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Giergiel, Sabina. “Nie ma takiej wiedzy, która jest ostateczne. Każda stanowi przedsionek do nowych obszarów niewiedzy. ‘Götz i Meyer’ Davida Albahariego.” Folia Litteraria Polonica 1.47 (2018): 159–178. Gruden Milentijević, Ivana, and Nebojša Ozimić. Niški Jevreji u logoru na Sajmištu. Les Juifs nichois dans le camp de concentration de Sajmište. Niš: (publisher unknown), 2017. https:// www.academia.edu/34919139/Ivana_Gruden_Milentijevi%C4%87_Neboj%C5%A1a_ Ozimi%C4%87_-_Ni%C5%A1ki_Jevreji_u_logoru_na_Sajmi%C5%A1tu. Accessed 22 Mar 2021. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992. Koljanin, Milan. Nemački logor na beogradskom Sajmištu 1941–1944. Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1992. Koprowska, Karolina. “Okolica: wymiary postronności na wsi.” Świadek: jak się staje, czym jest? Eds. Agnieszka Dauksza, and Karolina Koprowska. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2019: 83–98. Kostić, Dragan. “Tragika logora Sajmište 1941–1944.” Međunarodna konferencija Holokaust nad Srbima, Jevrejima i Romima u Drugom svetskom ratu. Zbornik radova. Eds. Vojislav Vučenović, Vjekoslav Solovjov and Edit Dér Seregély. Beograd: Fakultet za poslovne studije i pravo and Fakultet za strateški i operativni menadžment, 2015: 51–56. Lazović, Milica. “Istina (istorija) i poetika u romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija.” Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 62.3 (2014): 811–824. Lopičić, Vesna. “A Soul that Remembers Can Never Be Lost: Tragic Cultural Encounters in Albahari’s Götz and Meyer.” Recounting Cultural Encounters. Eds. Marija Knežević and Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009: 63–78. Maksić, Predrag. “Memory space: Memorial complex Staro Sajmiste.” Techno Science 1 (2016): 66–71. Manojlović Pintar, Olga, and Aleksandar Ignjatović. “Prostori selektivnih memorija. Staro sajmište u Beogradu i sećanje na Drugi svetski rat.” Kultura sjećanja. 1941. Povijesni lomovi i svladavanje prošlosti. Eds. Sulejman Bosto, Tihomir Cipek, and Olivera Milosavljević. Zagreb: Disput, 2008: 95–112. Martinoli, Ana. “Staro sajmište – istorijsko sećanje i virtuelno promišljanje budućnosti.” Zbornik radova Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti 1 (1997): 417–437. Niman [Niemann], Beate. Moj dobri otac. Život sa njegovom prošlošću. Biografija moga oca zločinca. Trans. Ljiljana Glišović. Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2012. Penevski, Zoran. Manje važni zločini. Beograd: Okean, 2005. Pešić, Petra. “Odnos diskursa istorije i diskursa fikcije u romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija.” Jezik, književnost, diskurs: književna istraživanja: zbornik radova. Eds. Vesna Lopičić and Biljana Mišić Ilić. Niš: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Nišu, 2015: 445–455.

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Putyńska, Urszula. “Odegrać przeszłość. Szkic o powieści Götz i Meyer Davida Albahariego.” Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne 12 (2017): 271–282. Radojković, Stefan. “Aleksandar Zograf ’s The Letters of Hilda Deitch.” The Jerusalem Post 22 Aug. 2018. https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Aleksandar-Zografs-The-Letters-of-HildaDeitch-567749. Accessed 22 Mar 2021. Radović, Srđan. “Gradski prostori od mesta do nemesta, i vice versa: slučaj beogradskog Starog Sajmišta.” Zbornik Etnografskog instituta SANU. Spomen mesta-istorija-sećanja. Ed. Dragana Radojčić. Beograd: Etnografski institut SANU, 2009: 145–160. Syrri, Despina. “The Story of Staro Sajmište Concentration Camp, Produced/Producing Europe.” European Review 2.1 (2012): 23–42. Todorović, Gordana. “Interpretacija romana Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija u ključu obrazovanja o Holokaustu.” Metodički vidici. Časopis za metodiku filoloških i drugih društvenohumanističkih predmeta 3 (2012): 73–90. Ubertowska, Aleksandra. “Rysa, dukt, odcisk (nie)obecności. O spektrologiach Zagłady.” Teksty Drugie 2 (2016): 102–121. Vervat, Stejn [Vervaet, Stijin]. “Sećanje na Holokaust u jugoslovenskoj i postjugoslovenskoj književnosti: transnacjonalne domenzije traumatskih sećanja na Balkanu.” Holokaust i filozofija. Eds. Mark Lošonc, and Predrag Krstić. Beograd: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju, 2018: 103–130. Volynsky, Masha. “Language within the Battle between History and Memory in David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer.” Serbian Studies. Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 20.1 (2006): 157–166. http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/. Accessed 19 Sep. 2020.

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Imagining Evil and Guilt Miljenko Jergović’s Ruta Tannenbaum and Ivo Andrić’s Bar Titanic in the Context of Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Croatia1

Abstract:

In the article the representations of evil and guilt in Jergović’s and Andrić’s novels are taken into consideration. The author attempts to demonstrate how this problem is elaborated in fictional accounts and how it refers—as a metonymy—to the memory of the Holocaust in Croatia. It is suggested that, in striving for answers on the nature of evil, Jergović holds a deliberate dialogue with Andrić. Whilst Andrić, however, points out more psychological foundations of evil, Jergović concentrates predominantly on social dimensions. This is a common hallmark in Andrić and Jergović because the authors focus on both dimensions but give one priority over the other. The nature of evil is one of the topics to which literature generally refers, and the term ‘evil’ is commonly used when speaking about the Holocaust. Samuel Lederman underlines: “The Holocaust is perceived today, at least in Western society, as the most intensive and stunning manifestation of human evil, a kind of Archimedean event in addressing the question of evil” (Lederman 178). In her study on the nature of evil Eve Garrard, dealing with the term within secular frameworks, underscores that “if there is such a thing as evil in the world, then the Holocaust was evil, and any elucidation of the nature of evil should be applicable to it” (Garrard 43). Yet, since ‘evil’ may have various meanings and may refer to various theoretical paradigms, as documented in Gerrard’s study, the very use of the term may provoke several contradictions, some of them deeply counter-intuitive (as underlined by Lawrene L. Langer, “What we consider evil was for the Nazis an expression of good, supported by a political and moral value system totally alien to our orthodox minds”; Langer 2005: 26). The term ‘evil’ flooded scholarship on the Holocaust and was influenced by Hannah Arendt’s second edition of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (to which I will refer in this paper). Although it is ‘banality’ that attracted more attention, the term ‘evil’ gained popularity, especially when referring to the perpetrators. For

1 I would like to gratefully acknowledge Ellen Elias-Bursać for editing this article.

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instance, Yaacov Lozowick underlined that he had wished in his study to “recognize evil in them [the perpetrators – M.C.]” (Lozowick vii). In the following study I will focus on settings provided by Ivo Andrić and Miljenko Jergović in their oeuvres in which an act of persecution during the Holocaust, undeniably understood as wrong/evil, is committed, and in which the characters’ features are suggested as meaningful in that persecution. The term ‘evil’, in this sense, does not refer to an abstract meaning that could be elaborated within, say, moral theory or philosophy. It rather refers to evil acts, acts that “produce an enormous amount of disvalue in the world” (Garrard 45) and as a man’s predilections to perpetuate that evil act. The writers of literature, and this applies to Andrić and Jergović, do not elaborate on this problem scientifically but, by narrating a story in which some issues matter and some do not, draw the attention of their readers to some problems concerning evil. When reading Jergović’s novel Ruta Tannenbaum (2004) one easily discovers a clear, more or less explicit, reference to Ivo Andrić’s short story Bife Titanik (1950, Bar Titanic). There is an intertwined relationship between Andrić and Jergović in terms of writing in general,2 but in this particular instance the main plot of both narratives is triggered by the horror of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the Independent State of Croatia (the NDH). I argue that a comparison of these two oeuvres is important because of two problems. Firstly, both writers problematize the question of evil and guilt during the Holocaust in the NDH. They both, using various literary means, refer to the very same question: why and how this could happen. Yet, they do not ask why and how the Holocaust became a reality but why and how an individual becomes a perpetrator3 under this set of circumstances, in this particular place, and thus how the perpetrator contributes to the Holocaust. Secondly, both narratives are interrelated with social phenomena that are crucial to an understanding of the processes shaping the collective memory in Croatia today. In this article, I will notably engage with the former issue, but also refer to the issues of collective memory that haunt the Croatian historical imagination about World

2 Some scholars have argued that Jergović inherits from Andrić some literary preoccupations, including literary techniques and the choice of topoi. It is sometimes called a ‘Bosnian way of writing’ (bosansko pismo) (see Škvorc and Lujanović). 3 I use the term ‘perpetrator’ in the meaning that has been attributed to it by the Holocaust researchers who confront it with reference to victims and by-standers. In such a triangular model a perpetrator is defined as an individual who “played a specific role in the formulation and implementation of antiJewish measures” (Hilberg IX). Such a model is subject to a number of interpretations emphasizing that the relationship between perpetrators, victims and by-standers is dynamic (Erenreich and Cole). It has to be added that Hannah Arendt, to whom I will later refer, uses the term ‘criminal’ referring to Eichmann’s activity although it was by no means against the laws of the Third Reich.

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War II. In order to make my thesis fully understandable, I need to streamline the argument, using as my starting point the Andrić story. Bar Titanic is one of the first fictional responses to the Holocaust in the literature of Yugoslavia (1950). The narrative radically deviates from schematic post-war depictions of the war. There are no great battles, none of the brave heroes of the National-Liberation Struggle who were celebrated in public discourse; there are no collective Yugoslav victims, and no Nazi and Fascist invaders. There are only two individuals—one perpetrator and one victim, an Ustasha, Stjepan Ković, and a Jew, Mento Papo. Although the latter lives in Sarajevo and the former in Banja Luka, the logic of the war happens to arrange their encounter in which the former deliberately kills the latter. This masterpiece is narrated in such a way that the very encounter seems to be accidental yet, at the same time, unavoidable. On the one hand Papo, as a Jew, would have been annihilated by the Ustashas in any case, while on the other, he might have been killed by someone else. Yet, he is killed by this very individual—Stjepan Ković. And this is the starting point for Andrić’s investigation of the nature of evil. The question that the reader inevitably asks is: why does Ković become an Ustasha who murders an innocent victim? Why is it that these two common and simple people are doomed to be in these very positions and under what circumstances? Andrić attempts to penetrate to the core of the Holocaust and understand the nature of evil, but in order to do so, he focuses not on the collective, but on the individual. Already at this very stage, there is a rejection of the main trends of postwar prose, in which evil was identified with collectives (the occupiers, the Germans, Italians, fascists, domestic traitors: Ustashas and Chetniks), and individuals merely served as representatives of these groups.4 The story of Andrić re-defines the main trends of post-war literature in one more respect. Whilst Fascists were dominantly portrayed as representatives of essential, ontological evil, Stjepan Ković is not categorized by such a pattern. He is not a typical monster, but a common man, a simpleton who has found himself in a position in which he kills. He is “an idler from Banja Luka” (“banjalučki besposličar”) and “factotum” (“svaštar”) (Andrić 126). Had there been no war, he would probably have remained in the same position 4 A declaratively unified vision was produced during World War II and afterwards as a result of the victory over fascism by the antifascist guerilla in which the communists prevailed. The conceptual framework of this binary paradigm was very simple: communists (the sole antifascists) were positive and the fascists were negative. Seen in this perspective, World War II was a struggle between the collective forces of good and evil. Moreover, the binary representation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ followed the “imagery of irregular and individualized partisan fighters from the narod (people) confronted with an amorphous mass of foreign fascist invaders who turn the people—more or less involuntarily—into dauntless defenders: into partizane (partisans)! This narrative, with the fascist invasion in the role of a natural catastrophe within the partisan master plot, has been constantly written and rewritten in Yugoslavia since the 1940s.” (Jakiša 10)

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for the rest of his life. But there is a war and he puts on the Ustasha uniform. Andrić, by sketching out Ković’s biography, searches for psychological warrants that play a decisive role in turning this common man into a perpetrator. Ković is unsuccessful in life, as the narrator underlines many times, and suffers from an inferiority complex. This, in turn, leads him to jealousy, a longing to be above average and to obtain glory or “be something in the eyes of the world” (Andrić 129).5 He feels in himself a sort of duality and self-hatred (and less so hatred towards the others). This produces a capacity for constant shifts in identity, which entail fabrications and lies, and leads him to the creation of various masks. But this is not the end. Not only does he hate his real self, but he also hates all his new masks. And so on, ad infinitum. His wish for an above-average standing in society and his failure to achieve this goal fuel more frustrations, which feed his inferiority complexes. Ković fails in all his efforts. And moreover, he is also unsuccessful in imitating his Ustasha fellow combatants in their slaughtering of Jews. In short, he is unsuccessful in doing evil. Neither of his masks is effective enough. Compared to the others, who unscrupulously rob and kill people (in the story, not just Jews but also Serbs), he remains—at least for a time—powerless. And continues to be a dumbass. “No matter how hard he tries, he cannot, he cannot keep up with them” (Andrić 1976: 132).6 Is he evil, then? Of course, he is, as he kills an innocent man, but he does not do this for the sake of any ideology. This does not make him a better man. No matter what the reason for the crime, a crime is always a crime. Such a depiction only refers to different psychological impetuses for crime.7 There are some similarities between him and Adolf Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (Arendt 287)

5 “Da bude nešto u očima sveta.” 6 “Ma koliko se trudio, on ne ume, ne može da drži korak za njima.” 7 I fail to understand the term ‘crime’ in legal terms because the activity against Jewish people within the framework of states governed by laws introduced in countries following the Third Reich’s policies were not illegal. ‘Crime’ in this context means “a regrettable or blameworthy act”, i.e., violating a moral code. In this way, the term Nazi ‘crimes’ is commonly used and refers to acts of persecution and/or extermination during the Holocaust or, in the words of Raul Hilberg, ‘crimes of bureaucracy’.

Imagining Evil and Guilt

Of course, I am not making a straightforward comparison between a historical figure and a fictional character, between a person responsible for the mass murder of European Jewry (an organizer of crimes) and a low-ranking Ustasha (a man who, himself, had killed). Moreover, Andrić published his story more than ten years prior to the Eichmann trial, so any mutual influence is, thus, impossible. There is, however, something that cannot be ignored. Namely, these two instances imagine people who might commit a crime not because of an ontological hatred with which they are imbued (“radical evil”, as Arendt calls it in The Origins of Totalitarianism), but because of much more practical things such as a desire to achieve something, to rise above average. Thus, I rather take these two instances as presumed psychological portraits of what is in the background behind an activity that is taken as criminal. Although Arendt’s analysis has been challenged many times, and even sharply criticized, I use it not in order to offer veridical proof, but rather to draw a conceptual parallel between him, as described in Eichmann in Jerusalem, and the fictional character of Stjepan Ković. With respect to Eichmann, Arendt observes that it “was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind” (26). She also refers to his misfortune and mediocracy in earlier life. Eichmann “was doing poorly in the school” (29), had “rather modest mental gifts” (135), and that even his “disasters were ordinary” (28); in his professional life he changed his professions “without any prospects for a career; the only thing he had learned, perhaps, was how to sell” (29). Similarities with Ković are striking as “the boy did not learn well” (Andrić 127),8 he was unsuccessfully searching for a prosperous job, and ended up as a salesman: “Stjepan travelled throughout the whole country as a salesman” (Andrić 127).9 Eichmann was, thus ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. This ‘normality’, referring to Arendt’s concept of ‘banality of evil’, provoked fierce polemics. It was an unforgiving war because it was being fought over the right to define what Arendt meant by associating the words banal and evil in the context of the most massive moral failure of the century: what the Nazis had called “the final solution of the problem of the Jews.” (Bergen ix)

Without deciding whether Arendt was right or not in picturing Eichmann as she did, I would like to point out a similarity between Andrić’s protagonist and the presumed nature of Eichmann. Ković is the same—incapable of succeeding in life, and this fuels his unhappiness and frustration.

8 “Ali dečak je slabo učio.” 9 “Stjepan je putovao po celoj zemlji kao trgovački putnik.”

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No matter what his job was and wherever, and no matter how he left and returned to his place of birth, Stjepan Ković was and remained an odd figure. He was one of those vain and industrious people who neither withered nor matured, could not reconcile with his small and average lifestyle, and did not have the strength and ability to change it with work and perseverance. (Andrić 128)10

Although it is tempting to declare that Ković does not realize what he is doing when he kills Papo, such a judgment seems risky. One could rather say that he does know this, but, for some reason, he doesn’t want to recognize this premise when acting. He subverted his morality to his desires. This does not mean that he loses his capacity to discern good and evil. It means that he does not want to take this duality into consideration in this particular circumstance. Ković wants, thus, to be like those ‘outstanding’ members of the Ustasha Movement he observed, though—it seems—he did not essentially share their beliefs. He wants to be an extraordinary member of the Ustasha not because he advocates their ontological evil but because he is of weak character, unstable or in a disturbed psychological state. This leads him to adaptability and opportunistic behavior. Yet, there is one dilemma that the narrator does not resolve, but leaves the reader to face it alone: What actually prevents Stjepan, at least for a time, from killing? What is the force in him that does not allow him to commit violence? Is this his true nature that he is so ashamed of? If we accepted this thesis, then that would mean that he is not essentially an evil man but that this is his weakness, his sick desire and his sense of unfulfillment that makes him a perpetrator. Stjepan Ković eventually does become a perpetrator. By making efforts to suppress his weaknesses, he decides to deal with a Jew as a proper Ustasha would. And this is how destiny brings him to Mento Papo, owner of a Sarajevo inn. Ković forces himself to act aggressively with Mento, to imitate the Ustashas, to threaten Papo, to frighten him but he cannot find the strength for violence in himself. He can hate Mento not because of his Jewish origins (it is said he was not anti-Semitic), but because Mento does not admire him and does not see in him a real and brutal Ustasha. What Mento seems to think of Stjepan is exactly what he thinks of himself. Mento, consequently, is a witness to Stjepan’s weakness—the same weakness Stjepan wants to suppress, to reject, as he is ashamed of it. The narrator says: “He hates Mento now more than anything, he hates him in equal measure to his natural born powerlessness.” (Andrić 139)11 10 “Ma kakvim se poslom bavio i ma kuda odlazio i vraćao se, Stjepan Ković je bio i ostao smešna figura svog rodno mesta. To je bio jedan od ovih jalovih i upuštenih ljudi koji niti venu niti sazrevaju, ne mogu da se pomire sa sitnim i prosečnim načinom života, a nemaju snage i sposobnosti da ga radom i istrajnošću ismene.” (all translations of Andrić: Maciej Czerwiński and Ellen Elias-Bursać) 11 “A ovog Mentu mrzi sad više od svega, mrzi ga kao tu svoju rođenu nemoć”.

Imagining Evil and Guilt

Jergović’s novel is set in Zagreb which was—like Sarajevo and Banja Luka—a part of the same NDH. Jergović is more interested in the various circumstances in which the NDH Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. Moreover, unlike in Andrić’s story, various perpetrators are envisaged which undoubtedly opens up space for a more social than psychological enquiry, more collective and less individualistic. I do not argue that the psychological aspect of evil in perpetrators’ actions is reduced, it is, rather, less foregrounded than in Andrić’s novel. Whereas Andrić foregrounds psychological affairs, Jergović more overtly underlines the social. In order to grasp the difference, I will now deal with several elements of the novel, taking into account the settings and the characters. The main protagonist of the novel is a little girl, the well-known theater actress Ruta Tannenbaum from Zagreb. Her destiny, based on a historical figure (Lea Deutsch), creates the deictic centre for the narrative from which, like concentric circles, various intrigues emerge (as digressions), and various protagonists are foregrounded (her family, friends, neighbors and people from near or far). Until the war gets under way, as epitomized by a picture showing German troops marching into Zagreb, the action focusses in general on every-day practices and not on the eventual reasons for the Holocaust. It is under these circumstances that the story about Ruta as a victim of the Holocaust is narrated, although two thirds of the novel is set prior to the war. Although Ruta had been celebrated in Zagreb and overseas till 1941 (being called Zagreb’s Shirley Temple), with the establishment of the NDH her admirers are either indifferent or actively contribute to Ustasha activities. The former are bystanders, the latter are perpetrators. The first is exemplified by Branko Mikoci, a theater man who used to be a friend of Ruta and the second by Radoslav Morinj, a neighbor of Ruta’s family who becomes an Ustasha. In the novel, the people of Zagreb are portrayed as prone to conformism and hypocrisy, the typical mentality of the petite bourgeoisie (Jergović refers to the literary visions of the Agramer people created by Miroslav Krleža). This is epitomized at the moment when the German troops march into Zagreb. And then on the tenth of April, in the afternoon, while respectable people were resting after lunch, the German army marched into Zagreb. Damn, how snappy those soldiers were! Tall and blond, each one of them two meters tall, and maybe in the twenty-some-odd years we were under the Serbian boot we’d kind of forgotten what a real army looks like. (Jergović 2011: 226–227)12

12 “A onda je desetoga travnja, u popodnevnim satima, dok pošten svijet počiva poslije ručka, njemačka vojska umarširala u Zagreb. Jebemti, kak su bili lepi ti vojnici! Visoki i plavi, dva metra u svakome, a može biti da smo u dvadeset i nešto godina pod srpskom čizmom već pomalo i zaboravili kako prava vojska izgleda.” (Jergović 2006: 343)

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The second sentence in this quotation, given in free indirect speech in the original version, is in the Kajkavian regiolect of Zagreb (“Jebemti, kak su bili lepi ti vojnici!”), giving the impression that this attitude is typical for this milieu. Almost everyone is presented in such a way that the reader has the impression that the arrival of the German soldiers is welcomed by many people who become immune to the tragedy of their former Jewish neighbors, although until recently they had celebrated Ruta. The moment which exposes such behavior is when a friend of Ruta, Professor Branko Mikoci, walking in Zagreb with an actress, witnesses the murder of Samuel Tannenbaum, Ruta’s father. Samuel wants to camouflage his Jewish origins at all costs, and Mikoci doesn’t want to interfere. Branko Mikoci caught sight of that terrible scene too late, and didn’t have time to pull Mrs. Anđelija to the other side of the street, but he was completely absorbed in babbling about her singing jubilee and wasn’t watching where she was going, so that they passed not two paces from Salomon, whose body was absorbing blow after blow from the chain, which was crushing his flesh and breaking his bones, turning a living person into something else, a bloody human barnacle struck to the Zagreb asphalt. […] It seemed to him that Mikoci didn’t recognize him; he only turned his head away, to hide that terrible scene from Mrs. Ferenčak-Malinski. Professor Mikoci’s eyes seemed to say terrible is the land in which such things occur on the street. (Jergović 2011: 247–248; emphasis original)13

The irony with which this scene ends, refers to the passivity of Mikoci who, by allowing this to happen, does not oppose the evil but, in fact, enables it. Yet, the professor is not evil (he commits no crimes and openly speaks against Hitler), he even feels remorse, but he does nothing because he wants to get through the war and secure peace for himself. The author forces the reader to ask oneself whether this behaviour is evil and what Mikoci ought to have done. The other instance, that of Radoslav Morinj, is more complex. Morinj does not belong to the Croatian cultural elite like Mikoci but is only a poor neighbor of the Tannenbaums. His life is feeding his family, and defined by the tragic death of his little child. After the establishment of the NDH, he remains employed as a switchman on the railway in Novska. “No matter how much his life in Novska had changed, he was still only a switchman who was mostly interested in which

13 “Branko Mikoci je prekasno ugledao taj strašni prizor, i nije stigao gospođu Anđeliju povući na drugu stranu ceste, a ona se bila razbrbljala o ovome pjevačkom jubileju, pa nije ni gledala gdje hoda, tako da su prošli na vda koraka od Salomona, po kojemu su pljuštali udarci lancem. Gnječili mu meso i drobili kosti, i pretvarali živoga čovjeka u nešto drugo, u krvavi ljudski priljepak na zagrebačkom asfaltu. […] Učinilo mu se da ga Mikoci nije prepoznao, samo je okrenuo glavu na drugu stranu, da gospođi Ferenčak-Malinski zakloni taj strašni prizor. Strašna je zemlja u kojoj se ovakve stvari događaju na ulici, govorile su oči profesora Mikocija.” (Jergović 2006: 374)

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direction and at what speed to direct the trains.” (Jergović 2011: 242)14 Yet, the trains now are responsible for the transportation of the detainees to the death camp in Jasenovac, although Morinj himself sincerely does not know about the camp and the activity of the Ustasha (although he knows that nobody should escape from the train). At a certain point, and by accident, he finds himself in a position to kill a young medical student who is trying to escape (she is from Sarajevo and her name is Papo, like Andric’s Mento, which is likely not a coincidence). From that very moment on he experiences various mental states. The narrator describes him in that way that he initially sees himself as an accidental killer who did not what to kill. “He shot only because he’d had a pistol. He’d wanted to go through the motions, so that drunk Ustashas wouldn’t shout at him later. Radoslav wouldn’t ever shoot to kill…” (Jergović 2011: 244)15 So, Radoslav, unlike Ković, is a person who wants to keep far away from the main currents. At the same time, he feels ashamed to find himself in front of the Jasenovac freight train, in which he saw people who did not resemble bandits, as they were officially called by the Ustashas but rather looked like doctors and lawyers. Then remorse arises, but he justifies it: “If she hadn’t been guilty of something, she wouldn’t have jumped out of the train. The bullet that hit her had happened to be fired from his gun. If Radoslav Morinj hadn’t done it, someone else would have.” (Jergović 2011: 255)16 In this way, his shooting the woman is presented by the narrator as something that inevitably was bound to happen, with or without his active participation, to which his decision is completely irrelevant. Finally, he suppresses his remorse, becomes an Ustasha and grows accustomed to the killings in the death camp. The psychological profile of an individual who becomes a perpetrator is significantly different from that of Ković. The egocentric Ković suffers from “being in the eyes of the world, someone and something”, whereas switchman Radoslav Morinj has no such intentions. There are some indications given by the narrator that the unexpected fame he receives after the first killing or the inferiority complex derived from his class membership might be the sources for his final decision to become an Ustasha, but they seem to be irrelevant. He is reconciled to his low status in society. Morinj starts killing because of an irrationality that drives his actions. His fate, thus, is defined by circumstances, the political situation, and an accident. Maybe if he had not worked in the train company, he would not have had the opportunity to meet and kill anybody. Thus, unlike Ković, he is not looking to join the Ustasha,

14 “Koliko god se njegov život u Novskoj promijenio, on je još uvijek bio samo skretničar kojega je najviše zanimalo na koju će stranu, i koliko brzo, uputiti kompoziciju.” (Jergović 2006: 365) 15 “Pucao je samo zato što je imao pištolj. Htio je ispuniti formu, da pijane ustaše kasnije ne viču na njega. Radoslav nikada ne bi pucao da ubije…” (Jergović 2006: 368) 16 “Da nije bila kriva, ne bi ni bježala iz vlaka. Metak koji ju je pogodio, slučajno je bio ispaljen iz njegovog pištolja. Da to nije učinio Radoslav Morinj, pucao bi netko drugi.” (Jergović 2006: 385)

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but rather fate leads him to them (one could object to this thesis by saying that the narrator reveals some features of the working class that drive people from this milieu to support Fascist policies; indeed this is true, it is somehow implied, but I think it is not that relevant to understand Morinj’s actions). What makes Ković and Morinj similar is their ‘normality’. They are not demonic figures recognizable at first glance. True, they are different in some respects. Andrić concentrates on the psychological aspects of Ković’s predilection that drive his actions and end up with a decision, a conscious decision, to become a perpetrator. Jergović, in turn, deals with social problems in the respect that he focuses on social background as crucial in turning normal citizen into a perpetrator. He does not concentrate on Morinj’s desires and his responsibility for the crime, but rather on how he is influenced by social settings. And moreover, he problematizes his morality after the crime. This crime, unlike Ković’s, was incidental but becomes a trigger for further more or less conscious decisions. Both Ković and Morinj are agents, conscious of their activity. Yet, the consciousness of the former is set a priori of agency, whereas that of the latter is a posteriori. Whilst we know what Ković feels before he kills, we follow Morinj’s feelings after his killing. At first, he feels remorse but, with time, he makes an argument enabling him to justify the crime he committed. And justification is the first step to becoming a notorious perpetrator after the first killing. Andrić does not deal with Ković in the aftermath. The crime he commits is the last moment of the story, making for a dramatic climax of his psychological development. Jergović, by contrast, takes the act of the crime as a starting point to deal with one’s psychological capacity to justify the crime. Both oeuvres can be read with respect to Croatian collective memory of World War II. The problem that provokes fierce polemics is who is to be blamed for the Holocaust in the NDH.17 Who is the agent, the perpetrator? In both prose oeuvres analyzed here, this is the Croatian Ustashas who, forming a puppet state of Nazi Germany, annihilated the Jewish people. True, there are in Ruta Tannenbaum Germans who enter Zagreb in 1941, but the novel focuses not on the Germans carrying out the Holocaust but on the Ustashas. The same applies to Bar Titanic.

17 There have been a number of studies dealing with the memory of the World War II in Croatia. The issues are centered on a variety of questions, ranging from who were the true fascists (were the Croatians in general supporting the Ustashas?), who bears responsibility for the genocide and how the past is commemorated (see for instance Đurašković; Pavlaković 2008 and 2012; Goldstein and Hutinec; Barić), and, lastly, what is ‘historical revisionism’ and whether the Croatian case could be applied to it (see Kasapović; Marijan). The books on the Holocaust in Croatia have been written notably by Slavko and Ivo Goldsteins. Their contributions have been critically evaluated. Regarding the most recent publication on the Jasenovac Death Camp entitled Jasenovac (Ivo Goldstein), the historian Vladimir Geiger published a long polemical review (46 pages) (see Geiger).

Imagining Evil and Guilt

Although Croats are depicted in both narratives as perpetrators, Jergović’s novel gives a stronger impression of the responsibility of the Croats, not all of course, but at least a majority. They are common people from Zagreb. This may be why the novel gives the impression that it ‘accuses’ Zagreb’s inhabitants, in general, for the crimes of the Holocaust. This is not my reading of the novel but, rather, this point is based on the critical reactions it provoked. Zlatko Crnković for instance underscores: “Prominent citizens of Zagreb are portrayed in this book mostly as careerists, hypocrites and snobs. It would seem that the author is sick of displaying and evoking the sadistic crimes of humans who until yesterday were normal citizens“ (Crnković). Igor Gajin, in turn, asks rhetorically whether “little Ruta is not a manipulated means for one’s demagogic ambitions” (Gajin). Jagna Pogačnik in her generally positive review also asserts that Jergović has written a novel with “a critical image of pre-war and wartime Zagreb, including the relationship between Croats and Jews” (Pogačnik). There were also a few negative reviews referring to stereotypical depictions by Zora Dirnbach and Andrea Feldman. Jergović—who has responded to these criticisms—has also been accused of ignoring historical and social circumstances, like some details and local vernacular (the accusations were primarily concerned with the black-and-white depictions of the Zagreb people and the use of the vernacular of Zagreb which was, according to the critiques, not the language that was actually spoken but coloured for the purposes of the novel). Andrić’s short story is different as it focuses on an individual. True, such an individual can be taken as a metonymical representation of the entire Croatian nation but since the narrator depicts the sources of his criminal activity in the human and psychological spheres, and not within social-national settings, this hardly warrants such an interpretation. Andrić is questioning human intent by illuminating the individual aspects of the crime, while Jergović is portraying the behavior of Zagreb townspeople (which could also generally represent—as a synecdoche—the population of the NDH). Dealing with the fiction of Cynthia Ozick, Lawrence L. Langer states that: The tension between the Holocaust as a chaotic event and our need to find a form that makes it manageable to our imagination continues to hound us, as language veers between truth and myth in its efforts to extract from history a meaning that may not in fact be there. (Langer 1995: 139)

Fiction on the whole is, thus, a means for enabling us to imagine the Holocaust, sometimes to the detriment of historical accuracy but with a strong capacity to make sense of the effect of the Holocaust—that is to say, to perform how it really was (that is how one can imagine how it really was). And this is why, as Sue Vice points

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out, “Holocaust fictions are scandalous: that is, they invariably provoke controversy by inspiring repulsion and acclaim in equal measure.” (Vice 1) Jergović uses means that create apparent factuality. Ruta and her family and friends are fictive (although referring to Lea Deutsch’s life), yet in the background there are real figures—Krleža, the king of Yugoslavia, Adolf Hitler, etc. This background forms the setting for the plot, and it provides the narrated story with a claim of authenticity. Even though one can easily discern who is real and who is fictive, the whole story creates a hybrid universe. Thus, historical ‘forces’ are taken as historical facts. This is how a sense of the novel, through the act of reading, is produced. Since it might have nothing to do with the real author’s intentions, it is better to locate such a reception within performance theory, and say that the novel performs something, rather than describing something. The sense, to which the critical reviews abovementioned react, is produced in the act of reception, and thus is subjective (one could also speculate to what extent such a reception might be a consequence of Jergović’s ‘reputation’ in Croatia and of him as an author of generally critical approaches), but at the same time it is derived from some traces in the novel such as the fact that the majority of Croats are depicted in a negative light. For instance, among the bystanders—who might be “those who hid Jews and those who stood idly by” (Lipstadt 111)—the latter are foregrounded in the novel. It seems that this book will always be seen more as a novel about Zagreb and less as a novel about the Holocaust. In the novel, regardless of whether the characters are fictional, the guilt is—as the aforementioned reviewers highlight—attributed to the Croats from Zagreb. They are either bystanders or perpetrators. Such a representation is so different from the one that is conveyed by many scholars and public figures, and was officially propagated in Croatia especially when the first president, Franjo Tuđman, was in office (see Bing; Pavlaković 2008; Czerwiński). There is a tendency to remember Croatian participation in World War II within the framework of the ‘two Croatias’. In such imagery, Croatia is represented as a divided nation: inevitably fascist and communist. Yet, Croats are essentially neither fascists nor communists, since they joined either of the groups because of a lack of other honorable choices. Thus, they are seen not as perpetrators but as victims; whether they are Ustashas, or communists, they bear no responsibility for crimes against anyone. This creates a depiction of Croats who were deprived of their own agency in World War II. They are an object in the hands of others. Lawrence L. Langer, referring to the trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s, says: “Guilt exists, but the agent is always someone else.” (Langer 2005: 89) So, who are the agents? This question was raised recently with respect to a project that was approved by the Zagreb City Council in June 2019 to erect a monument to the victims of the Holocaust in the centre of Zagreb. The project that won the competition, proposed by Dalibor Stošić and Krešimir Rogina, represents a large wall of pieces of

Imagining Evil and Guilt

luggage, referring to the deportation of Jews to the death camps. Yet, the matter of controversy is not its aesthetics but its content, as the official name of the monument emphasizes that it aims to commemorate the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Such a conceptualization frames the Holocaust within a broader, non-localized context. The question is: why is the Croatian capital Zagreb commemorating all six million Jews annihilated in the war and not Croatian Jews? In light of what was said about the tendencies of the visions of the war, one could wonder if this is not a political decision enabling a blurring of responsibility for the Holocaust carried out in Croatia by the Ustashas. Although there were also some positive responses to this project in Croatia, including Jewish intellectuals, critical answers were more frequent. The historian Ivo Goldstein, author of many books about the Holocaust (and criticized for them both by right-wing activists and, on the basis of scholarly accuracy, by historians), says that “the monument suggests the crime happened somewhere else, not here, but it unfortunately did happen here.” (Borić) Giving a name to the monument referring to the commemoration of all six million Jews implies that the Holocaust was perpetrated by someone else, that it is someone else’s responsibility. I would call this procedure a conceptual dislocation of guilt, in contrast to the precise location of guilt made in Jergović’s novel. This confronts the widely-accepted vision present in the Croatian collective memory and is partly also why the novel was criticized.

Works cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised and enlarged edition. Middlesex/New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Andrić, Ivo. “Bife Titanik.” Priča o kmetu Simanu i druge pripovetke. Beograd: Prosveta, 1976 [1950]: 116–143. Bergen, Bernard J. The Banality of Evil. Hannah Arendt and “the Final Solution”. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998. Barić, Nikica. “Antifašistička borba u Drugom svjetskom ratu u političkim interpretacijama hrvatskih predsjednika 1991–2006.” Revizija prošlosti na prostorima bivše Jugoslavije. Zbornik radova. Ed. Husnija Kamberović. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju u Sarajevu, 2007: 211–234. Bing, Albert. “Samoodređenje naroda i koncepcije hrvatske državnosti u kontekstu Drugog svjetskog rata – refleksije povijesnog kontinuiteta.” Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 45.1 (2013): 129–154. Borić, Rada. “Zašto sam glasala protiv zaključka o podizanju spomenika žrtvama Holokausta.” Novosti 6 June 2019, n. pag. https://www.6yka.com/novosti/zasto-sam-glasala-protivzakljucka-o-podizanju-spomenika-zrtvama-holokausta. Accessed 31 January 2020.

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Crnković, Zlatko. “Jergović uvredljivo o Zagrebu.” Nacional (dnevno online izdanje) 566 (2006), n. pag. http://arhiva.nacional.hr/clanak/27740/jergovic-uvredljivo-o-zagrebu. Accessed 31 January 2020. Czerwiński, Maciej. Drugi svjetski rat u hrvatskoj i srpskoj prozi. Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 2018. Đurašković, Stevo. “National Identity-Building and the ‘Ustaša-Nostalgia’ in Croatia: the Past that Will not Pass.” Nationalities papers 44/5 (2016): 1–17. Erenreich, Robert M. and Cole, Time. “The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation: Rethinking Genocidal Relationships.” Human Organization 64.3 (2005): 213–224. Gajin, Igor. “Sredstvo i cilj.” Vijenac 333 (2006), n. pag. http://www.matica.hr/vijenac/333/ sredstvo-i-cilj-6731. Accessed 31 January 2020. Garrard, Eve. “The Nature of Evil.” Philosophical Explorations 1.1 (1998): 43–60. Geiger, Vladimir. “Jasenovac.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 51.1 (2019): 269–314. Goldstein, Ivo and Hutinec, Goran. “Neki aspekti revizionizma u hrvatskoj historiografiji devedesetih godina XX stoljeća – motivi, metode i odjeci.” Revizija prošlosti na prostorima bivše Jugoslavije. Zbornik radova. Ed. Husnija Kamberović. Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju u Sarajevu, 2007: 187–210. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Jakiša, Miranda. “On Partisans and Partisanship in Yugoslavia’s Art”. Partisans in Yugoslavia. Literature, Film, Visual Arts. Eds. Miranda Jakiša and Nikica Gilić, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009: 9–28. Jergović, Miljenko. Ruta Tannenbaum. Zagreb: Durieux, 2006. Jergović, Miljenko. Ruta Tannenbaum. A Novel. Trans. Stephen M. Dickey. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Kasapović, Mirjana. “Povijest, povijesni revizionizam i politike povijesti.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 51.3 (2019): 939–960. Langer, Lawrence L. Admitting the Holocaust. Collected Essays. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Langer, Lawrence L. “The Literature of Auschwitz.” Literature of the Holocaust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004: 171–192. Lederman, Samuel. “History of Misunderstanding: ‘The Banality of Evil’ and Holocaust Historiography.” Yad Vashem Studies 42 (2013): 173–209. Lipstadt, Deborah E. “The Holocaust.” Literature of the Holocaust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004: 109–128. Lozowich, Yaakov. Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil. London and New York: Continnum, 2000. Marijan, Davor. “Suvremena hrvatska povijest i nevolje s revizionizmom.” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 51/2 (2019): 385–420.

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Pavlaković, Vjeran. “Flirting with Fascism: The Ustaša Legacy and Croatian Politics in the 1990s.” The Shared History and The Second World War and National Question in exYugoslavia. Ed. Darko Gavrilović, Novi Sad: CHDR, 2008: 115–143. Pavlaković, Vjeran. “Contested Pasts, Contested Red-Letter Days: Antifascist Commemorations and Ethnic Identities in Post-Communist Croatia.” Transforming National Holidays: Identity Discourse in the West and South Slavic Countries, 1985–2010. Eds. Ljiljana Šarić, Karen Gammelgaard and Kjetil Raauge. London: John Benjamins Publishing, 2012: 149–169. Pogačnik, Jagna. “Miljenko Jergović Ruta Tennenbaum.” Moderna vremena, 2006: n. pag. https://www.mvinfo.hr/clanak/miljenko-jergovic-ruta-tannenbaum. Accessed 31 January 2020. Puvačić, Dušan. “The Echoes of the Second World War in Ivo Andric’s Prose.” Serbian Studies 4.4 (1988): 5–21. Škvorc, Boris and Lujanović Nebojša. “O ‘piscima između’: od Ive Andrića do današjnih pisaca stiješnjenih između dva (ili više) jezika i kultura.” Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta u Splitu 2–3 (2009): 45–64. Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. London/New York: Routlegde, 2000 Young, James E. “Holocaust Documentary Fiction: Novelist as Eyewitness.” Literature of the Holocaust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004: 75–90.

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Exile on Korčula

Abstract:

No other place provides a better microcosm of the Jewish wartime exile in Dalmatia than the island of Korčula in the Yugoslav South Adriatic. From 1933 onwards, Korčula became a destination for emigrants—mostly artists and political opponents to the Nazis. During the war years under the Italian occupation, Korčula became an internment site for several hundred Jews, among others, and a remarkable oasis of safety in Europe. The writings of Csokor and Sacher-Masoch, who found themselves among the exiles, provide the backbone for this article in addition to later historical research, interviews and memoirs of other survivors.

On the most glorious island of the Adriatic, the Hebrews now nest—Korčula has become their nature reserve.1

From 1933 onwards, Korčula, like the rest of Yugoslavia, became a Jewish emigration destination. According to scholarly estimates, Yugoslavia was a transit or exile country for over 55,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism and anti-Semitism in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, and elsewhere). Forty thousand are thought to have reached Yugoslavia only in the short period between 1938–1940, mostly from neighbouring Austria following the Anschluss (Friedenreich 180; Grünfelder; Ristović). The exact numbers could not be validated by my extensive research into the issue. Nevertheless, the findings in my forthcoming book, whose section about Korčula is featured here, verify that a vast majority of refugees reached Yugoslavia on their own. With the exception of some Austrian Jews with family connections, most of those fleeing to Yugoslavia from the German Reich and its occupied territories did so as their last resort. Yugoslavia’s location on the transit route from Central Europe to British Palestine, Italy and further overseas destinations offering a promise of freedom facilitated this choice. Its lax immigration regulations and a relative lack

1 “Auf dem herrlichsten Eiland der Adria nisten nun die Hebräer – Korcula ist ihr Naturschutzpark geworden.” (Csokor 1957: 174) This was the original wording of German radio speaker and newspaper in the Balkans moaning about the Italian treatment of Jewish refugees. German media often published pictures of Korčula claiming Jews were there on holiday. All translations from German are mine.

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of anti-Semitism compared to other European countries further increased its appeal, while other countries’ refusal to take Jewish refugees meant that thousands remained in Yugoslavia for many years. In addition, from 1937 the international Zionist movement organized the escape of 18,000 Central and Eastern European Jews to Palestine, mostly via Danube through Yugoslavia and then further to Black Sea ports in Bulgaria and Romania (Ofer; Patek). After Yugoslavia was invaded and partitioned in April 1941, thousands were stuck and perished at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, among them over a thousand mostly Austrian Jewish refugees of the so-called Kladovo-Šabac transport (Ofer and Weiner; Anderl and Manoschek). The only escape possible was into parts of Yugoslavia occupied or annexed by fascist Italy (Slovenia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina), and further South into Italian controlled Albania and parts of Greece. Up to 10,000 Yugoslav and foreign Jews fled into Dalmatia. Overwhelmed by the influx of refugees, the Italian provincial government of Dalmatia decided in September 1941 to turn Korčula into an island for the internment of Jews, relocating refugees away from Split and creating a remarkable oasis of safety in Europe for two years.2 The story told here sketches chronologically the Jewish exile on Korčula in the 1930s, followed by the internment experience and then the dramatic rescue by the Yugoslav Partisans, German re-occupation and its aftermath. The writings of the survivors provide the backbone for the story in addition to archival research and literature. Among the first exiles from Germany to land on Korčula was the painter Richard Ziegler (1891–1992), close to the so-called Novembergruppe in Berlin, who moved in with his Jewish wife from Cologne Edith Lendt (1905–2004) in 1933. His diary, detailing the reasons for migration and describing their time in exile, is preserved thanks to his colleague and friend Walter Höffner, who followed him to Korčula, bought a house and even married a local girl, Fani Kondenar.3 The Zieglers bought a villa from the local noble family Smrkinić, built in 1881 with a beautiful garden, wine colonnades and a stone pergola. Life in Korčula was cheap, but the artist needed expensive paints. Besides family support from back home in Calw, the Zieglers enjoyed having as patron the famous Zagreb architect Hugo Ehrlich, who also introduced them to the art world of Zagreb. Ziegler and Lendt’s house in Korčula became a magnet for German friends and artists who brought or sent them newspapers which Richard used for drawing caricatures of German leaders. Their

2 A short account about the Jewish internment on the island is provided by Hoppe. More extensive sources exist in Croatian for some aspects of Jewish exile in Korčula during the war in Maričić. 3 The segment on Ziegler is compiled based on the info provided by the Richard Ziegler Foundation in Germany: http://www.richardziegler.de. Later Richard worked for the UK (War) Ministry of Information and the American War Office of Information and finally published what became a famous book of caricatures ridiculing Nazi leaders and Germany drawn in Korčula entitled We Make History.

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best-known guest Manès Sperber (1905–1984) described his stay with the Zieglers in the summer 1934, and then again in 1937–1938 in his book Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards (1977) as a separation from the world, an extraterritorial island of biblical landscapes.4 Eventually, a functioning artistic colony was established on the island with writers such as Antonio Eger and Leo Glauss and painters as Walter Höffner, Eduard Arnthal and Maria Strauss. From the same leftist circle of Manès Sperber and the so-called Berlin Wilmersdorf Artist Colony also came Dinah Nelken (1900–1989).5 In Berlin Nelken ran the cabaret Die Unmoglichen (The Impossibles), authored poems, film scripts, small plays and two novels in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1933, her husband, the communist activist and book seller Heinrich Ohlenmacher, was taken to the concentration camp Esterwegen. Once he was released, they moved to Vienna together with Dinah’s brother Rolf Gero Schneider, but after the Anschluss the three fled to Korčula, where they spent the next five years. Nelken described her exile experience and war time involvement with Yugoslav Partisans in her novels Geständnis einer Leidenschaft (1954) and Addio amore (1957) while she confronted her experience of fascism in her 1955 novel Spring über deinen Schatten, spring! (Puschak 39–40) Yet, Korčula was not a sanctuary only for Jews and antifascists fleeing the rise of Nazism.6 Its beautiful medieval capital was frequently compared to the walled town of Dubrovnik, and its mild Mediterranean climate and beautiful scenery were just being discovered by foreigners. The one to publicise them the most widely was actually one of the rare American Nazi sympathisers Douglas Chandler, a contributor to National Geographic Magazine, who in 1933 bought one of the largest and most beautiful houses in the old town. Chandler spent seven years on Korčula with his wife and daughters, enjoying a life of luxury until he transferred to Berlin in 1940, to become one of the main broadcaster of Nazi propaganda for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German State Radio), under the pseudonym Paul Revere but better known as America’s ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (Strochlitz). Chandler was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947 yet released in 1963; still unrepentant, he moved back to Germany. A few wealthy Jewish families also bought villas on the island and moved there or spent time in the 1930s, such as the Grünwalds or the Schwarz/Severs, and

4 An Austrian Jewish writer, psychologist and Alfred Adler’s disciple, Sperber first set foot in Yugoslavia in 1929. A staunch Communist, Sperber maintained close links with Zagreb leftist intellectuals and described his experience in Yugoslavia in Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt (1977), the third part of his novel trilogy Wie eine Träne im Ozean (Like a Tear in the Ocean: A Trilogy). 5 Her first Jewish husband Fritz perished in Auschwitz. Their son Peter was also persecuted and later became a leading GDR Communist official. (Rheinsberg; Kroger) 6 For the following information I thank Neven Fazinić, photographer and historian of Korčula.

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others who managed to escape before the war started. The island was also a familiar territory for Yugoslav Jews who came as visitors or through business (mostly wine), which explains why many of them headed there even before the Italian provincial government decided to intern or confine Jews on the island on September 4, 1941. At odds with the wealthy and/or artistic exiles and visitors in the island’s capital, the port town on the other side of the island known as Vela Luka (Vallegrande in Italian), was mostly home to poor fishermen and workers in a canned sardines’ factory, but nevertheless it too saw newcomers motivated by the rise of Nazism. A Hachshara school, preparing the Jewish youth to become fishermen in Palestine, was set up there in late 1937 by the Zionist Techelet-Lavan (Blue-white) youth movement. Eventually, it was taken over by the Hashomer Hazair (The young guard) youth mostly from Sarajevo and Belgrade, who were very close to the Yugoslav Communists.7 Between 30 and 40 young men and a few women trained there until 1941, learning how to fish but also many other crafts such as boat-, barrel- and rope-making, fish conservation, etc. Besides Hachshara activists in Vela Luka, a couple of Yugoslav Jews hid on the island as Communists before the war. When the war started more Jews began to arrive in Vela Luka, especially relatives or friends of Hachshara fishermen, as the island was easily accessible from the nearby Pelješac Peninsula. Enriko Josif (1924–2003), later a famous Serbian composer, escaped to Korčula to hide with his teenage friend Zvonko Letica, son of the island’s dentist and hotelier. Letica would later be essential in connecting the local and Jewish refugee antifascist youth.8 Oskar Davičo (1909–1989), a Communist activist and one of the leading artists of Serbian surrealism, also came to Vela Luka at this time, having previously escaped from Belgrade, Dubrovnik and Split. Two more prominent writers arrived in the early days during the turmoil following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia. Fleeing Belgrade after the bombing in a tumultuous journey self-described as his Anabasis, Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969) arrived after two weeks at the house-atelier of the most famous Yugoslav/Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, in the vicinity of Split. The sculptor, who would later be arrested by Croatian Fascist Ustašas and escape to Switzerland with the help of the Vatican, provided him with contacts on the island and promised that this was the place to disappear (Csokor 1964: 302). This was almost unnecessary, as once he arrived, Beppo (the carrier from Korčula port) immediately introduced him to the German colony of painters. Csokor, an outspoken opponent of National Socialism joined the anti-Nazi petition at the PEN congress in Dubrovnik in 1933, which

7 For more information on the fishing school, see Maričić 14–34; the Diary of David Maestro, one of the later lodgers on the Hachshara premises, O boravku židovskih izbjeglica u Veloj Luki, was translated from Hebrew to Croatian and incorporated in Maričić’s book. 8 See the oral history interview with Enriko Josif available at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/ catalog/irn513558. Accessed August 2018.

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meant a total ban on the publication and dramatisation of his works in the German Reich. In 1937, his most successful and best-known play November 3, 1918, about the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was staged in Vienna’s famous Burgtheater to great, if short-lived, acclaim and success (Schulenburg). In 1938, after the Anschluss, he fled to Poland first, then the following year to Romania and finally to Belgrade at the end of 1940, where he joined the circle of mostly Austrian antifascist artists.9 Another prominent Korčula exile was Alexander von Sacher-Masoch (1901–1972), stemming from a famous aristocratic family originating in Bohemia that produced many authors or, as he liked to joke, invented Sacherism and the Masoch Torte. After 1933, as a known opponent of the Nazis, Sacher-Masoch had to move from Berlin to Vienna. Furthermore, his mother was a (baptised) Jew, and he was married to a Jewish woman, which made him Jewish under Nazi racial laws even though he did not self-identify as such. In 1938, Sacher-Masoch was a political refugee again, this time fleeing to Belgrade, where he worked as a correspondent for the Swiss Der Bund (The Alliance) newspaper, taking any other available job and liaising with other refugees and anti-fascists. In 1940, Sacher-Masoch published a book of poems, Die Zeit der Dämonen, about the exile and Nazi threats, and met Milica, the daughter of the prominent lawyer and Social Democratic politician Marko Leitner from Osijek, who also served as president of the Osijek Jewish Community. She followed him to Korčula where he fled via Sarajevo and Dubrovnik dressed as a Muslim and on fake papers. During two and a half years on the island Sacher-Masoch penned three books about his experiences that were published after the war—Beppo und Pule: Roman einer Insel, Die Ölgärten brennen, Plaotina: Geschichten vor einer Dalmatinischen Insel. On Korčula, Csokor and Sacher-Masoch were joined by their fellow colleague and antifascist Piero Rismondo10 and also encountered prominent Zagreb intellectuals and leftists from the circle of Sperber, Ina Juhn-Broda, her sister Vera Ehrlich Stein and her husband Ben, who hosted Tito, the future Partisan leader, when he was staying in Zagreb.11

9 In 1947, Csokor became president of the Austrian PEN Club and, in 1968, vice-president of the International PEN. Csokor described his refugee years in Yugoslavia in his above-cited novel, in his memoirs Auf fremden Strassen, a tragedy in four acts on Yugoslav Partisan struggle played in Burgtheater in 1946 entitled Der verlorene Sohn, and a collection of his letters from exile Zeuge einer Zeit. 10 Piero Rismondo (1905–1989), born into a wealthy Italian Jewish family in Trieste, was a journalist and dramatist in Vienna, famous for his antifascist piece Grillparzer in 1936. After the war Rismondo was culture editor in Die Presse newspaper and translator from Italian. See http://members.chello.at/dr. rismondo/htm/pieroabout.htm. Accessed 18 Aug. 2018. 11 (Obad) Ina Juhn Broda was later a poet and translator of South Slavic literature into German in Vienna, whereas Vera Ehrlich-Stein became a scholar and pioneering ethnologist.

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For Csokor and Sacher-Masoch the island’s beautiful Mediterranean landscape offered a canvas for literary, utopian, exotic or purely aesthetic reverberations. Dinah Nelken described how the exile affected artists: “Then, all of us wrote, the expelled poets and thinkers, deprived of their former reality and in the search of that un-reality, where the hope replaced the present with future.” (Puschak 40) In their novels exile obtained an additional, higher literary value, transcending its individual paradigmatic experience as they used literature or art to come to terms with what was happening to them and to the world as they knew it. The self-understanding of the biographical in their fictional texts represents a typical topos of exile literature as they internalized their individual experiences in an aesthetic form. A mixture of autobiographical, biographical, and merely fictional (the use of alter-ego), these works were written during the exile and published immediately or soon after the war, whereas the historical works or memoirs were written and the interviews conducted half a century later, adding another layer of questions regarding the hierarchy and validity of sources. This article will use them interchangeably in order to draw as detailed a picture as possible. One example is how Sacher-Masoch witnessed the occupation by the Italian Army and described it as a rather comical affair compared to the German Army’s murderous bombing of Belgrade he had experienced. The Italians arrived with three tanks that looked like toys or cans and attempted a mini parade on the main square, watched by most inhabitants and the few exiles already on the island. But one of their Lilliput tanks broke, making the sound of an alarm clock breaking down. The driver got out, yelled “Madonna mia” and began to punch it. Then he just spat at his Lilliput, abandoned it and joined other soldiers who went for wine in the local tavern called the Pigeon (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 48). While few Jews and antifascists came to Korčula to hide (or due to some prior connection), the bulk of Jewish refugees ended up in Split, which was the city in the part of Dalmatia annexed by Italy by the agreement signed by Mussolini and the Ustaša leader Pavelić on May 21, 1941. Among the thousands of newcomers, most were from the Yugoslav cities of Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo, but there were many from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, who had been on the run for several years. By the late summer, hundreds of refugees were sleeping on the floor of the Jewish cultural centre “Yarden” (Jordan), where they were also subject to an attack by the Italian Fascist “Black shirts”. Supplies and order were difficult to maintain and the Italian Questura (police) became concerned about a large number of Jewish (and other) refugees in the politically volatile city of Split. Eventually, the Italian authorities decided to dispatch them away from the city. From September to December 1941, hundreds of refugees, who had no means or connections to stay in Split or go to Italy, were sent to remote islands or Italian-occupied Albania. Of all the islands (Brač, Hvar, Lopud, Mljet…), most were sent to Korčula, which was a fully annexed Italian territory, with 400 sent to the town of Korčula and around

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300 to Vela Luka, greatly increasing the number of Jews who had already found shelter there (Maričić 36–41). Csokor wrote in the fall of 1941 that there were eight hundred refugees on the island, almost all Jews save for ten Catholics, who were typically spouses.12 The Jews sent from Split initially did not know whether the island would be their Elba or St. Helena, as Csokor wondered. The wealthier bribed the authorities to be spared from relocation away from Split. Others would only accept Italy. For many, the remoteness of the island was a punishment and the Italian authorities certainly used it in this way to remove the poor and the Communists from Split and Dubrovnik. The selection of destitute young single men sent to the poor port of Vela Luka in addition to previous settlement of young Hachshara activists and Communists would later account for the fact that many of them would join the Partisans. The refugees interned in Korčula, as elsewhere in territories annexed or occupied by Italy, obtained a status of “confined” which permitted free movement only in the place of residence. At the same time, it provided basic food provisions with monthly coupons distributed by the Italian authorities. Some refugees were housed in former hotels, while others stayed with friends or rented from locals with extra living space. The Italian Jewish Aid Agency DELASEM (Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti) from Genova also provided financial assistance for the refugees on behalf of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy via the Jewish Community of Split. It funded accommodation for the poorest while a tax was introduced for the well-todo so that all refugees could survive and thrive. This solidarity was enforced and extended to gentiles too, such as the prominent anti-fascist refugees mentioned above. Furthermore, a sort of cooperative was established by two Yugoslav Jews who managed the hotel Bon Repos, where more than 100 wealthy refugees initially stayed. Around 20 youngsters with no money were allowed housing there in return for work in the hotel kitchen or cutting wood, washing up, carrying water, etc. When, at the end of 1941, around 100 mostly wealthy refugees from both towns, were transferred to Modena, the situation worsened for the remaining 500, most of whom were poor (Altarac 777). In Vela Luka, the wealthier among the refugees stayed in the two small hotels Istra (Ashkenazi Jews) and Šantić (Sephardi Jews) while others stayed in the Hachshara fishing school or mostly with locals, paying a small rent or helping out with household chores, fishing, grape and olive harvesting. The house with a canteen and a fishing boat became a valuable asset for the refugees, as the Hachshara activities had to cease with the influx of so many refugees. The young people organised the first canteen on its premises, which was not supervised by the Italians as the one in the town of Korčula. The hall was also used for public celebrations and events.

12 Csokor 1964: 302. According to Hoppe in the Holocaust Museum Encyclopaedia, 740 were interned.

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Tailors, shoemakers and carpenters found work easily, teachers and bookkeepers instructed privately or held courses. There were also classes in Italian and English organised among the refugees themselves. The celebrated writers lived in the same conditions as others and gave classes in art and history to refugee children and also lent their books to other refugees. Eva Fischer drew portraits for people. Marcel and Tilda Kalef ran a shop (Maričić 45–47). Sacher-Masoch worked in the local shipyard from the fall of 1942 and had to give up writing completely (Cyprian 111). One of the destitute refugees, Moric Danon, wrote how he accepted any job as porter, carrier, waiter, wall painter, beach guard, and servant to wealthy refugee families, refusing any financial help from the Refugee Committee (Danon). Like Moric, after a year in hotels or private accommodation, many were left without funds but continued to stay free of charge or for a little help with whatever work was required. Nevertheless, there was a clear social division between those able to maintain themselves and those forced to work and survive by the aid and meals in the canteens. The reason people quarrelled was mostly food or rather the lack of it. Digestive systems, weakened by years of eating very little, could not adjust to it, and many recount sufferings from upset stomachs and the like. As there was nothing to do, people showed exaggerated interest in food (Njemirovski 33). The Sarajevo Jew Heinrich Levi, who spoke Italian, was appointed as the representative of the refugee community in Korčula town (Mošić 2005: 214). In Vela Luka, Josef Maestro, another refugee from Sarajevo, was chosen to represent its three hundred strong refugee community. In both towns, the Jewish children were schooled by their own teachers according to the old Yugoslav syllabus and prepared to take exams in Split, which was financed and praised by the DELASEM. These visits to Split were rare escapes from the monotony of the island for schoolchildren and their parents who were allowed to escort them. Some Korčula refugee students did rather well like Darko Suvin (Šlesinger), who later became a prolific author, critic and professor at McGill University (Suvin 53–54). But the deteriorating war conditions and the remoteness of the island meant that many high school students never got the chance to pass their exams. Compared to Kraljevica, the largest internment camp in Italian Dalmatia, the cultural life and the school organisation in Korčula was much worse (Kušec 201–209). After a while, schooling became a burden to the community and the aid money they were receiving. As the war progressed and the number of refugees grew the DELASEM found it increasingly difficult to provide adequate funding. Its president, Lelio Vittorio Valobra, repeatedly wrote to the Split Jewish Community president, Viktor Morpurgo, asking to rely on local means or on the wealthier among the refugees to share what they had (Maričić 51–53). Initially, the Italian authorities were friendly and helpful, even making sure to remove any anti-Semitic sign that fascist sympathisers had previously placed in island tavernas (Csokor 1947: 125). Later on, when the Italians banned all fishing

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boats to prevent the Partisans making connections, the Vela Luka Hachshara’s boat was exempted. Thus, the Hachshara youngsters could ferry people from one side of the bay to the other and earn money to keep up the canteen. The Germans could only observe and photograph the island and its dwellers, including the refugees, from aboard their passing ships. Despite demands from Croatian and German authorities, the Provincial government, based in Zadar (Zara), continuously refused to deport the refugees from Korčula, like the rest of the territories the Italians controlled. That is why many refugees praised the exile on the island under Italian administration until its capitulation as paradise-like conditions compared to that on the continent (Mošić 2005). Sacher-Masoch also wrote to his parents that it was so peaceful on the island that one slowly became human again (Cyprian 110). Besides social divisions the most pronounced difference among the refugees was their background. Those from Yugoslavia differed from German, Austrian, and Czechoslovakian refugees in how they dressed, in their moral codes and customs, and especially political persuasions, ranging from pious to very liberal, from Communists to Zionists to proud members of their purported nations. Both SacherMasoch and Csokor were especially delighted with what they described as Spaniards, or Sephardic Jews from Serbia and Bosnia, big families like Altarac, Almuli, Alkalaj, Demajo, Montiljo, Poljukan and others. Their songs from Granada, rituals and colourful dresses, and especially their “royal” attitude, as Csokor admits, impressed their central European Ashkenasi co-religionists much less (Csokor 1947: 126). Yet, music was cherished by all, as described by Csokor: We have been quarrelling about everything and found peace only in songs, in the songs of all the countries from which we have gathered here; Sephardic among them, old Castilian from the Spanish fatherland, which the Spanish-speaking ancestors of some of us left half a millennium ago.13

Among the musicians in Korčula there was Bruno Bjelinski, born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Trieste, who later became the foremost composer of Partisan songs (Weber). Others were the accordionist Samuel Čačkez from Mostar (later a schlager and operetta artist in Israel and New York), the bass-baritone Maks Savin (later a soloist in Belgrade and at the Sarajevo Opera), and the tenor Zvonko Glück from Croatia. From Zagreb also came the jazz musician Miroslav (Fred) Schiller.14

13 “Heiser gestritten haben wir uns um diese Heimat, wir haben sie schliesslich in Liedern gesucht, in den Liedern aller jener Länder, aus denen es uns hier zusammengefegt hat; sogar sephardische waren darunter, altkastilische aus dem spanischen Vaterland, das die spaniolischen Ahnen einigen unter uns vor einem halben Jahrtausend verliessen.” (Csokor 1947: 126) 14 For Schiller, see https://collections.ushmm.org/findingaids/1991.172_01_fnd_en.pdf. Accessed 28 Aug. 2018.

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Among those who first performed in Korčula was the young Flory Jagoda, who later became a legendary Ladino singer. She was born Flora Papo in 1923 to the musical Bosnian Altarac family, which was rounded up and murdered by the Ustaša except for Flory and her parents, who were reunited on the island of Korčula.15 Initially, with all radios confiscated, the refugees spent their time in blissful ignorance of what was happening on the continent and especially what their children, parents, siblings, and cousins, who stayed behind, were facing. When the post service was established and letters from neutral Switzerland or the US began to arrive via Split, these daily boats became the biggest event as crowds gathered for pieces of news that arrived at the isolated Adriatic shelter after undergoing a series of censorship by a number of authorities. As evident from all sources, the news about the extermination of Jews, or the lack of news from loved ones, caused much more pain than any form of destitution. In 1942, the news about deportations in Croatia spread quickly and reached the island. A survivor from Jasenovac, who eventually landed on the nearby island of Hvar, brought news of the horrific deportations of Zagreb’s male Jews to Jasenovac, and women and children to Đakovo in January 1942, as recorded by Csokor. He learnt how his two Viennese friends Ilse and Grete hanged themselves on a window ledge in the Zagreb guesthouse before they were to be deported. They wore long dresses and those who saw them thought they were only standing together by the window. Among those deported were three Bulgarian merchants that were stuck in Zagreb when the war started and a 75-year-old carpet dealer from Graz, Rendi, who went mad on encountering the horrors of the camp and was thus shot immediately upon his arrival (Csokor 1947: 135). Even more terrifying was the tragic fate of children and women in Đakovo camp, many of whom were from Bosnia. News also arrived about Marko Leitner, the renowned Osijek’s lawyer decorated with the Theresia Cross for bravery during the World War I, Sacher-Masoch’s father-in-law. Leitner had stayed behind and, thanks to his connections, saved many fellow Jews but was himself deported in 1943 to Auschwitz and murdered. Sacher-Masoch’s fictional account of Leitner’s fate in Ustaša-governed Osijek based on hearsay reaching the island remains the only, albeit literary monument, to this brave lawyer and his actions during the war.16 As the news from the continent could only offer a fragmentary picture, the exiles spent endless hours debating the war, its outcome and their fate, usually alongside their most favourite pastime of playing cards. They also swam in the sea and enjoyed the beaches until late October. They watched locals do the traditional Moreška sword dance and Lent processions and took part in grape and olive harvesting and wine pressing. In Vela Luka there were also two weddings (Boris Njemirovsky

15 A film about her life, The Key from Spain: The Songs and Stories of Flora Jagoda, appeared in 2000. 16 The story forms the second half of his novel Die Ölgärten brennen.

Exile on Korčula

and Melita Gross; Oscar Rössler and Anita Bischitz) (Maričić 77). In the winter months people in Korčula town would usually gather at Sacher-Masoch and Milica Leitner’s old house in the centre to listen to Csokor’s lectures on art history held in German. They continued to discuss the war, where to go and what to do to stop the Nazis if they could for long after the lecture was over (Cyprian 110; Csokor 1964: 302). The German-speaking refugees were caught in the paradox of being the victims but speaking the same language as their hunters and murderers. Those most struck by this paradox were the German speaking Austro-Hungarian Jewish war veterans. Chased by their much-idealised Heimat and sometimes members of their own former camaraderie, they found themselves at the mercy of their former Great War enemies—the Italians. Most refugees indeed wanted to move to Italy proper, which offered far better living conditions and opportunities to travel further. The families Hirschler, Neumann, Salom, Fischer and Heršković succeeded after protracted appeals and negotiations. Many others failed while some managed only to be transferred from Vela Luka to Korčula town or to Split which both boosted better connections. Nevertheless, almost all refugees on Korčula survived thanks to the Italian authorities, DELASEM support and the warm welcome from Korčulaites. There were only three deaths from natural causes, but also three births. Despite the apparent idyllic exile, the troubles were also brewing on the island as refugee Jews were caught up in Korčula’s political tensions. In the interwar period many islanders, like most in Southern Dalmatia, initially espoused the centralized and unitary Yugoslav Monarchy. Later on, the oppositional Croatian Peasant party also took hold. Once the Italian army occupied and annexed the island there were some attempts at resistance under the umbrella of the Yugoslav government in exile, but it was eventually the Communist-led Partisans which took the lead against what was legitimately perceived as foreign occupation and Italian assimilationism. Compared to the rest of occupied and dismembered Yugoslavia, the island was initially all “laughter and singing”, as Csokor described it, before the war began to close in around those stranded. From early 1942, the Partisans gave up any cooperation with the Yugoslav nationalists and began armed attacks against the Italians. Similarly, if not more cruelly, the Partisans treated their potential competitors harshly, killing several of them, in a scenario played out elsewhere in the country meant to create conditions for an anti-fascist uprising. In late 1942 and the first six months of 1943, the situation in Korčula confirmed the fears of many Jewish refugees – the reason they tried everything they could to remain in Split or go to Italy.17 Former Hachshara members and other mostly Sephardi youths from Sarajevo in Vela Luka established links with local Partisans already during 1942 (Altarac 778). Mirko Rosenberg, a student from Osijek interned in Vela Luka,

17 As told by Sara Raisky in her memoir La matassa.

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was the first to join the Partisans in June 1942 and later joined the celebrated First Proletarian Brigade.18 Đuro Engl Pavlović, another pre-war Communist in Vela Luka, also joined that summer and later became the commander of the Biokovo Partisan platoon and one of the Commanders of the XXVI Dalmatian Brigade (Altarac 779). Alarmed by these defections and continuous disputes between the poor and rich refugees, in September 1942, a delegation of DELASEM, made up of its president and lawyer Lelio Vittorio Valobra and E. Luzzato, came to Split, Vela Luka and Korčula. In their meetings with the governor of Dalmatia and the Split police prefect, Valobra and Luzzato intervened for smoother administrative processing of requests for transfers to Italy and measures that would ease and lessen the costs of aid delivery (Maričić 85–87). By that time not only food was scarce, but the wear and tear and constant washing of refugees’ few clothing items meant that many were desperate for clothes and shoes. In January 1943, 35 young men living in the former Hachshara wrote to DELASEM detailing their total destitution. The number of DELASEM aid dependents was constantly on the rise. By February 1943, DELASEM reported fully supporting 200 refugees in Split, 300 in Vela Luka, 200 in Korčula, 200 on the island of Hvar and 100 on Brač. Because of malnutrition new diseases began to appear. Donations were sought directly from wealthy Jews and many came from Florence, Milano, Verona, Genova, Parma and Livorno, but also from many refugees from Yugoslavia who had settled in Italy. The biggest donors remained the families Stock and Morpurgo from Trieste (Maričić 97–111). Eventually, out of 35 Jewish refugees who signed a letter to DELASEM, 14 young men and one woman joined the Partisan resistance in February 1943. Besides membership of the leftist Jewish Hashomer Hatzair, their total destitution also played a role in their decision as recorded by David Maestro, who was too young to join (Maričić). Others claimed that even youths from most affluent families, such as Danon and Salom, joined Partisan ranks (Samokovlija 28–30). Twelve out of fifteen would die fighting as Partisans in Yugoslavia in the next two years. The Italians arrested the remaining young men in Vela Luka and transported them to prison in Korčula town, severely beating them along the way. Eventually, they were released and placed in Bon Repos under strict surveillance. The commander of the Italian 6th Army Corpus, Paride Negri, alarmed the governor of Dalmatia in Zadar about the turmoil in Korcula, claiming the Communist propaganda was supported by around 400 Jews, who were freely interned on the island. For reasons of security and undermining Communist activity, the commander demanded that all Jews be interned in a concentration camp. Nevertheless, Negri requested that humanitarian conditions were met, enabling Jews to live together in proper sanitary

18 Barčot 145. After the war Rosenberg emigrated to Israel.

Exile on Korčula

conditions and with food and water supplies. At the same time the commander was well aware that the island of Korcula could not provide adequate facilities, so he in fact asked for the Jews to be transported elsewhere (NOB 477). This was indeed the Italian strategy in order to protect Jews from the Ustaša or possible deportation as more than 3,000 refugee Jews from all over Dalmatia were being taken to the island of Rab. Yet those in Korčula were spared as the island was considered a safe Italian territory. Apart from young Hachshara activists, most other refugees remained silent witnesses to the dramatic events around them. According to Suvin, the refugees knew little about the Partisans except the fact that one of their leaders was a fellow Jew Moše Pijade. Their source of information was Radio London which until 1943 reported little on the Yugoslav resistance (Suvin 129–130). Yet as the Partisan actions intensified, the Italian forces turned to hostage taking and executions. At the end of March 1943, after an act of sabotage by the Partisans, Italians executed four hostages in the village of Lumbarda including the sculptor Ivo Lozica, a disciple of Ivo Meštrović and the creator of voluminous sculptures of peasants and fishermen. It was the beginning of a deadly spiral of attacks and counterattacks, executions and retaliations that would frighten all on the island for the next four months. In early June, Viktor Morpurgo and two other officials from Split visited the refugees in Vela Luka again amidst heightened tensions and in a desperate attempt to confirm the authority of the Refugee Committee and its representation with the Italian authorities. Morpurgo also met with tenente (lieutenant) Giuseppe Gaetano of the carabinieri reassuring him of the loyalty of the refugees. Sacher-Masoch left a rather warm portrait of tenente Gaetano who had promised to protect the refugees as long as they stayed loyal (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 70). Yet only days later a tragedy occurred when Partisans killed seven carabinieri who, according to Csokor, only a night before sang “Bandiera rossa” and not fascist songs. Italian troops retaliated and arrested and shot ten locals and three youngsters from the Vela Luka Hachshara group (Isak Kabiljo, Leon Romano and Abram Romano, all three from Sarajevo) from 22nd to 25th of June 1943 (Maričić 117–119). Further unrest was prevented by the fall of Mussolini at the end of July 1943. Like the rest of the island the exiled artist colony and the Jewish refugees rejoiced, but the celebrations were soon replaced by worries as Morpurgos and other Jewish officials from both Split and Trieste, DELASEM leaders and the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Dante Almansi all pressed to resolve the situation of Korčula Jews either by evacuating them or improving their legal status and aid provisions. Korčula internee, Kaim Alkalaj, once a lawyer in Belgrade, was to travel to Rome to directly deliver the demands of his fellow refugees (Csokor 1947: 170). Despite the hard work of the Italian Jewish representatives, nothing could be done before Italy capitulated on September 8, 1943. After some skirmishes with the Partisans, Italian soldiers were allowed to evacuate the island under the

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condition that they leave all their weaponry, munitions and provisions. The Jewish refugees, like the rest of the island’s population, wholeheartedly supported the Partisan takeover. Many refugees helped the locals to organise the new regime. Sacher-Masoch was in charge of all newspapers. Even some Italian soldiers decided to stay and join the Partisans. There was a demonstration at which the widows of two executed Jews spoke. Nevertheless, as it soon became clear that the Germans were advancing to recapture the islands, the Jewish refugees presented the Partisans with a plea for evacuation to the island of Vis, which housed the Partisan headquarters, and beyond to Southern Italy (Maričić 127–137). The Partisans mobilised all Jewish doctors and nurses but after some deliberation allowed others to leave, with the sick and old going first. Sacher-Masoch described what happened when the boat was supposed to leave: [...] besides those who in the Commander’s opinion were supposed to sail to safety there were many who were neither sick nor old but just faster and cleverer than the others. There was a lot of injustice. Families set apart who had suffered for so many years together and were now separated without knowing whether they would ever see each other again.19

As only one suitcase was allowed per person, an intense trade off took place between the haves and have nots. Sacher-Masoch also described the evacuation ship: The ship called “Swallow” was made to fit 100 passengers. On that night there were 280 on board. Lying, standing, crouching and kneeling next to and over each other; in the hold, on the deck, in the only rescue boat; holding onto the masts; stepping, kicking and cursing each other and much worse as there was no space whatsoever between their squeezed bodies.20

These all-too-familiar scenes from the 2015 Mediterranean refugee boat disasters also exposed the ugly dimensions of flight. The rich then were those who, after all their journeys and accidents, possessed more than one set of clothes. Sometimes

19 “Denn neben jenen, die nach der Meinung des Kommandanten an dieser Fahrt vor allem teilnehmen sollten, haben sich viele vorgedrängt, die weder krank waren noch alt, nur eben schneller und tüchtiger als die anderen. Dadurch geschieht viel Unrecht. Familien kommen auseinander, die ihr Leid jahrelang gemeinsam getragen haben, ohne zu wissen, ob sie einander je wiedersehen werden.” (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 112) 20 “Die Barke heißt ‘Schwalbe’ und faßt hundert Menschen. In dieser Nacht sind zweihundertachtzig an Bord. Sie liegen, kauern und knien neben und übereinander, im Bauch der ‘Schwalbe’, auf dem Deck, im einigen Rettungsboot, sie umklammern die Masten, treten, stoßen und beschimpfen einander und tun noch Ärgeres, da den zwischen Menschenleibern Eingekeilten jede Möglichkeit freier Bewegung mangelt.” (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 145)

Exile on Korčula

these last pieces of clothing were tuxedo trousers, as recalled by Sacher-Masoch. One passenger, a certain Montillo, had them torn on a boat spike revealing himself and causing an even more tragicomic situation because this “accident” happened during a life-saving journey and, besides, no one had ever been seen to travel on these decrepit boats in fancy outfits. What happened next was an ugly conflict over borrowed trousers bringing the worst out of people in the worst situations (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 125). Back on the island, the Partisans and the locals were ritually destroying the Venetian stone lions on churches and public buildings. No arguments of art historians were heeded. Csokor tried to enlist help from the popular friar Vid from nearby Badija Island, who discarded his religious habit and instead participated in Partisanled antifascist resistance.21 Yet, this was the least violent revanchism compared to the executions that followed. The Partisans arrested an innocent young Italian shipyard manager who returned to the island now under Partisan control to bring his employees their pay. Sacher-Masoch, who knew his boss from the shipyard well, pleaded with the Partisan commander to no avail. Eduard Arnthal’s wife, who lived in one of the most luxurious villas on the island from before the war, also fell victim to the Partisan rage.22 While Arnthal was Jewish, he and his wife Hedwiga did not socialise with other refugees or register with their committees, claiming they were German. Once the Partisans took over somebody accused them of being spies with absolutely no evidence. Csokor wrote that the couple remained quiet during the Italian occupation due to their son serving in the Wehrmacht (Csokor 1947: 190–197). Sacher-Masoch recorded that Hedwiga looked at their executioners and did not shed a tear. Leo Andreis, the Bon Repos hotel owner, escaped to Hvar with the refugees but was halted there and executed by the local Partisans, most probably for reasons of collaboration with the Italians, even though his son died fighting with the Partisans. The so-called People’s Liberation Committees established their hold on power with these executions and rejected any arguments or legal reasoning. “We have no time,” explained one Partisan, as the only argument against court proceedings. This short digression to describe Partisan brutality is even more striking given that Sacher-Masoch owed them his survival and that he supported them. Yet he was and remained an outsider who eventually left the Yugoslav lands (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 106–111). On the other hand, it was not all senseless. The refugees Milan Valder and Olga Njemirovski were also initially arrested for collaboration with the

21 Csokor 1947: 179–197. Father Vid born as Andrija Andro Mihičić (1896–1992) after the war worked as a university professor and well-known art critic, essayist, poet and public intellectual. 22 Fond Općinski sud u Korčuli (HR-DADU-SCKL-160), serija Konfiskacije, nr. 13 and 32/1945. Hedwiga was also accused of appropriating items from Hotel Bon Repos along other refugees named as Piliš Edo, dr. Revan Stanislav, Has Oskar, Altarac Bianka, Lowy Aleksandar, Rendeli Jelka, Borešić Ivo, dr. Sacher-Masoch, Kamhi Emica, Altarac Mošo, Salom Jakov, Kraus Adolf.

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Italians but released as theirs was deemed necessary due to their vulnerable status (Maričić 132). In November 1943, as the Germans amassed troops on Pelješac Peninsula opposite Korčula the Partisans decided to evacuate the second group of refugees and almost 3,000 locals, who were transferred via the islands of Hvar, Vis and Lastovo to Allied-controlled Southern Italy (Gjivoje 67–81). In December, only 84 non-combatant Yugoslav and 4 Austrian Jews remained on Korčula including Sacher-Masoch and Milica Leitner. As the Germans occupied the town of Korčula on December 23, 1943, they fled to Vela Luka and managed to evacuate at the last moment to Vis and eventually to Bari in Italy, where, according to Sacher-Masoch, the era of justice would end, and the bond of Equality and Brotherhood would break, and they would split into rich and poor again and the wheat would separate from the chaff and everything would be as it was before (Sacher-Masoch 1956: 126). Whereas refugees and locals were evacuated, the war began on the island in earnest as the Germans proceeded to take over all former Italian controlled areas. In order to support the Yugoslav Partisans on 20 October 1943, the First Brigade Oltremare (overseas) was formed among the Italian anti-fascists in Bari. Twenty-two of the evacuated Jews joined them. Others like the Florentine Jews Claudio Paggi and Franco Luzzatto joined and were all transferred to the island already in November (Paggi). Together with the other poorly trained and unprepared Partisans they had their baptism of fire on 21 December, when the German 118th Division launched the operation Herbstgewitter (Autumn thunder) to occupy the Adriatic islands. Over 500 islanders and 600 other Partisans died in poorly organised and futile resistance, including at least 220 executed as prisoners in an act of Nazi-German revenge.23 Among those defending the island were also 800 hastily recruited Italians from the Oltremare Brigade, 300 of whom would die along the Yugoslav Partisans. Having suffered heavy losses, the surviving Partisans and Italian volunteers were eventually evacuated and then later transferred to the Dalmatian coast to join the bulk of Partisan forces. Many, including Claudio Paggi, would die from typhus soon after. Luzzatto survived the end of the war in German captivity hiding his Jewishness. Among the 22 Jews, former internees who joined the Partisan forces in Bari and later returned to Korčula, 15 died (Altarac 780). The Partisan disaster at Korčula changed their decision to defend Dalmatian islands, as they were all abandoned except for Vis, which was much more distant from the mainland. Instead, a mass exodus from South Dalmatia and islands to Vis and further to Italy began. Among 28,000 exiled Dalmatians there were around 5,000 inhabitants of Korčula, who, like the Jewish refugees, were taken to Southern Italy

23 Description at http://www.vojska.net/eng/world-war-2/operation/herbstgewitter-1943/. Accessed 1 Sep. 2019.

Exile on Korčula

but then transferred to a British military base in El Shatt near Suez on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They stayed in Egypt until March 1946, when the majority returned to the island and a minority joined the Yugoslav monarchist exile in overseas countries. According to British reports there were some Jewish refugees among the Dalmatians in Egypt, and all sought to re-locate to Palestine. The British commander Mayor P. B. Webb stressed that this was not because the Yugoslavs were anti-Semitic but because it was most opportune at the time given its vicinity (Plenča; Bratanić). The Jews from Korčula however, remained in Southern Italy and eventually many ended up in the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina, though a large group returned to Yugoslavia and others remained in Italy. When the Germans finally abandoned Korčula in the summer of 1944, the Partisans returned. There were no more Jews on the island until the new authorities decided to set up a hospital on Badija Island, just off Korčula, which housed a large Franciscan convent, to take in hundreds of heavily wounded Partisans mostly from Montenegro. The hospital was run by a group of seven Swiss doctors, a few of whom were Jewish. Deeply disturbed by the Swiss complacence and collaboration with Nazis, these doctors sought a way to actively participate in anti-fascist resistance. Joining Yugoslav Partisans was their chance, and they were able to access the funds of Centrale Sanitaire Suisse (CSS) and bring some medical equipment with them (Parin). Altogether 987 men and women from Korčula died in the war, either as Partisans or as civilian victims shot by the Italian and German occupiers (Tomasevich 399). The victimhood of the island inhabitants and the subsequent exile in Egypt became one of the cornerstones of the Communist-led Yugoslavia’s war narrative. After the Croatian declaration of independence in 1991 and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, it has been marginalised if not entirely erased. New narratives built around each nation’s victimhood and righteousness in Yugoslavia’s successor states had less space for Jewish suffering or the international nature of the Second World War resistance. The experience of Jewish refugees on Korčula or the mission of Swiss doctors on Badia is now largely forgotten. There are no monuments or signs that would remind the islanders and visitors except for the names of three shot hostages on the old Partisan monument. Yet, there is much to remember and cherish. The inhabitants of Korčula treated the Jewish refugees very humanely despite their own suffering. Some of the Yugoslav Jewish refugees intermarried with locals while others married foreign refugees.24 Altogether 37 of the Yugoslav and foreign Jews interned in Korčula joined the Partisan forces and 27 of them lost their lives. Some 24 Alkalaj Sadit married a local girl, Vinka Marinović, and both fled to Italy with a baby daughter (Altarac 1990: 776–9). Joy Levi (1920–2014), refugee from Vienna, met and married Yugoslav refugee Joe Alkalaj, and the couple eventually fled via Italy to Portland, Oregon where they later became well-known benefactors of the Jewish community.

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refugees later returned to the island that Sacher-Masoch called “good mother”, and their descendants still live there. Others kept close contact with their hosts and friends on the islands, writing letters or returning to visit. Most importantly, 700 Jewish refugees survived the war spending a shorter or longer time on this island. This article is another effort to keep the memory of their extraordinary experience in war-torn Europe alive.

Works cited Altarac, Majer, and Eli Altarac. “Jevrejski konfinirci u Korčuli i njihovo učešće u NOP.” Sjećanja jedne generacije: grad Korčula, 1900–1946. Eds. Zvonko Letica et al. Korčula: Gradski odbor udruženja boraca, 1990: 776–782. Anderl, Gabriele, and Walter Manoschek. Gescheiterte Flucht: der jüdische „KladovoTransport“ auf dem Weg nach Palästina 1939–42. Wien: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1993. Barčot, Ivan. Od Korčule do Sutjeske. Split: Izdavački centar, 1980. Bratanić, Mateo. “Hrvatski zbjegovi u Italiji od 1943. do 1945. godine.” Casopis za suvremenu povijest 1 (2016): 161–196. Csokor, Franz Theodor. Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg. Vienna: Ullstein, 1947. Csokor, Franz Theodor. Auf fremden Strassen. Vienna: Kurt Desch, 1955. Csokor, Franz Theodor. Zeuge einer Zeit. Munich: Müller, 1964. Cyprian, Jens-Peter. “‘Noch konnte ich nicht daran glauben…’ Die Exilzeit Alexander SacherMasochs 1935–1938.” Amici amico III. Festschrift für Ludvík E. Václavek. Eds. Ingeborg Fiala-Fürst and Jaromír Czmero. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2011: 103–118. Danon, Moric. Mali čovjek u velikom ratu, Zagreb: Grafički srednjoškolski centar, 1975. Friedenreich, Harriet Pass. The Jews of Yugoslavia. A Quest for Community. Philadelphia, 1978. Gjivoje, Marinko. Otok Korčula. Zagreb: [no publisher], 1968. Grünfelder, Anna Maria. Von der Shoa eingeholt: ausländische jüdische Flüchtlinge im ehemaligen Jugoslawien 1933–1945. Wien: Böhlau, 2013. Hoppe, Jens. “Kurzola Island.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany. Eds. Geoffrey P. Megargee and Joseph R. White. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018: 546–548. Kröger, Marianne. “Nelken, Dinah.” Neue Deutsche Biographie. http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd106795392.html. Accessed 1 Aug. 2019. Kušec, Mladen. Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica. Lasciapassare per il campo concentramento Porto rè. Rijeka: adamić, 2007.

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Maričić, Zvonko. Luka Spasa. Židovi u Veloj Luci od 1937. do 1943. Vela Luka: Matica hrvatska, 2002. Mošić, Aleksandar. “Jews on Korčula.” We survived: Yugoslav Jews on the Holocaust 1. Ed. Aleksandar Gaon. Belgrade: Jewish Historical Museum, 2005: 208–222. Mošić, Alexander Fredi. “Erinnerungen – verfasst im Mai 2007 in Belgrad.” Zwischenwelt 27.4 (2011): 44–49. NOB u Dalmaciji 1941–1945. Zbornik dokumenata knjiga 5 [February-March 1943]. Split: Institut za historiju Radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1983. Njemirovski, Olga. The Holocaust and the Jews of Yugoslavia. Jerusalem: Gefen, 1996. Obad, Vlado. “Verbindende Kunst. Erste literarische Kontakte zwischen Kroatien und Österreich nach 1945.” Germanistik im Kontakt. Tagung österreichischer und kroatischer Germanist/inn/en. Eds. Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, Doris Moser, and Slađan Turković. Zagreb: FF press, 2006: 221–232. Ofer, Dalia. Escape from the Holocaust. Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939–1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Ofer, Dalia, and Hannah Weiner. Dead-End Journey: the Tragic Story of the Kladovo-Sabac Group. Trans. Anna Barber. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. Paggi, Vera. Claudio... una storia ritrovata. La vicenda di Claudio Paggi, ebreo italiano sfuggito alle persecuzioni razziali, morto partigiano in Jugoslavia. 2003. http://www.cnj.it/ PARTIGIANI/JUGOSLAVI_IN_ITALIA/DOC/paggi.pdf. Accessed 1 Aug. 2019. Patek, Artur. Jews on Route to Palestine 1934–1944: Sketches from the History of Aliyah Bet – Clandestine Jewish Immigration. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2012. Parin, Paul. Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin. Bei den jugoslawischen Partisanen. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991. Plenča, Dušan. “Jugoslavenski zbjeg u Italiji i Egiptu.” Istorija radnickog pokreta. Zbornik radova 4 (1967): 335–477. Puschak, Christiana. “Fluchtpunkt Korčula. Dinah Nelken 1900–1989.” Zwischenwelt. Literatur, Widerstand, Exil. Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft (Vienna) 26.3–4 (2009): 39–40. Raisky, Sara. La matassa. Ovvero la signora delle tredici picche. Trieste: Mgs Press, 2010. Rheinsberg, Anna (ed.). Bubikopf. Aufbruch in den Zwanzigern. Texte von Frauen. Darmstadt, 1988. Ristović, Milan. “‘Unsere’ und ‘fremde’ Juden: Zum Problem der jüdischen Flüchtlinge in Jugoslawien 1938–1941.” Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen. Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteuropa 1918–1945. Eds. Anke Hilbrenner and Dittmar Dahlmann. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007: 191–215. Sacher-Masoch, Alexander. Beppo und Pule. Roman einer Insel. Wien: Verkauf, 1948. Sacher-Masoch, Alexander. Die Ölgärten brennen. Hamburg: Zsolnay, 1956. Sacher-Masoch, Alexander. Plaotina: Geschichten vor einer Dalmatinischen Insel. Basel: Gute Schriften, 1963. Samokovlija, Danko. Dolar dnevno. Zagreb: Džepna knjiga, 1956.

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Schulenburg, Ulrich N. (ed.) Lebensbilder eines Humanisten. Ein Franz Theodor Csokor-Buch. Wien: Löcker, 1992. Strochlitz, Nina. “The Nazi Who Infiltrated National Geographic.” https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/lost-found-douglas-chandler-nazi/#close. Accessed 1 Sep 2019. Suvin, Darko. “Slatki dani, strašni dani. Iz memoara jednog skojevca. Dio 1.” Gordogan. 15–18 (2008–2009): 25–54. Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Weber, Zdenka. “Bruno Bjelinski, hrvatski skladatelj europskih obzora.” Kolo 3–4 (2009). https://www.matica.hr/kolo/313/bruno-bjelinski-hrvatski-skladatelj-europskihobzora-20667/. Accessed 1 Aug. 2019.

IV. Contemporary Positions

Bettina Hofmann (Wuppertal)

George H. W. Bush Sr. in Babi Yar The Holocaust in Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008)

Abstract:

In his novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), the Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon turns to European Jewish history, from the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 to the Holocaust. This essay argues that by turning to key issues of Jewish history in the twentieth century, such as ethnic persecution, the relationship between homeland and diaspora, features of emigration and immigration, Hemon considers Jewish history as a blueprint for understanding not only Bosnian and the European experience but eventually even the American predicament. During the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump in early 2020, the Ukraine, not usually the center of attention in the American media (nor of American writers for that matter), enjoyed a brief spell in the international spotlight. The forty-fifth American president, however, is not the first to have meddled in Ukrainian politics. In April 1991, when the Soviet Union was disintegrating, George Herbert Walker Bush Sr. gave a speech at Babi Yar, the infamous site of the ravine, today part of Kiev, where the Germans had killed more than 30,000 Jews over two days in 1941. Bush’s speech occupies a crucial position in Nowhere Man (2002), the first novel by the contemporary Bosnian American author Aleksandar Hemon. It is interesting to note that this is not the only reference to the Holocaust in Hemon’s fiction. Rather, it is striking how often the Nazi genocide of the Jews in particular and Jewish history in general are referred to by Hemon. His topics revolve predominantly around the immigrant experience and the Bosnian War (1992–95)—especially on the siege of his hometown of Sarajevo. Returning this frequently to Jewish topics is thus not an obvious choice. While many critics have noted both the recurrent autobiographical references1 and the post-modernist features in Hemon’s texts, his books “always raise questions about history and history writing” (Raudvere 190). His novel Nowhere Man (2002), which may be considered a composite novel, primarily looks back to the time between the 1960s and 1990s. The book is divided into seven sections, told by

1 For instance, the essays by Jessy Carton, Corina Crisu, Soren Frank and Wendy Ward in general. With particular regard to The Lazarus Project, see Angeliki Tseti.

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different narrators and perceived by different focalizers.2 The first and last chapters are narrated by the same unnamed Bosnian young man. But while the first chapter is set in Chicago in 1994, the last is set in Shanghai in 2000, attended by flashbacks revisiting the beginning of the twentieth century. In between there is a chapter by an American focalizer and a letter written by a Bosnian who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In this way fragmentation is a very distinctive feature concerning both time and space. These characteristics of fragmentation, a-chronological narration and intertextual allusions that are typical of the postmodern novel3 are used to signify the “loss of home and the dissolution of family [… and the] fragmentation of the public space and the instability of socio-political systems” (Crisu 24). The keywords Raudvere has identified for Nowhere Man are “a long-lost homeland,” and “the predicaments of diaspora and belonging” (180). Interestingly enough, these are equally apt keywords to describe Jewish history in the twentieth century. Herein might well lie the explanation for the frequent occurrence of Jewish topics. Hemon sees Jewish history as a blueprint for understanding not only Bosnian but the European predicament. The Lazarus Project (2008), the other text of interest in this essay, treats Jewish topics still more conspicuously in turning to the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and Jewish immigration to the US at the turn to the twentieth century as its subject matter.4 The novel offers two narrative strands in alternating chapters: the American writer Brik,5 of Bosnian heritage, travels to Moldova with his friend Rora, a photographer and fellow Bosnian, in order to undertake research for a book project on Lazarus Averbuch. This historically verifiable person emigrated to the U.S. after surviving the Kishinev pogrom, only to be shot dead by the Chicago chief of police as a presumed anarchist. Here it is the mixture of different media—photography alongside letters and narrative—that is strikingly postmodernist.6 The unifying thread between the two narrative storylines can be traced in “two Eastern European immigrants to the US at different moments in time [,] […] Brik and Rora running

2 Manfred Jahn defines the concept of focalization that goes back to Gérard Genette and has been applied especially in narratology as follows: “Focalization denotes the perspectival restriction and orientation of narrative information relative to somebody’s (usually a character’s) perceptions, imagination, knowledge, or point of view” (173). 3 For an introductory essay outlining most prominent features and functions of postmodernism, see McHale. 4 For a comprehensive historical analysis of the events that prompted the pogrom and its international impact, see Zipperstein. 5 The name Brik might be an intertextual allusion to the eponymously named protagonist Owen Brick in Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark (2008). Auster’s novel also depicts a quest prompted by a civil war. 6 For the use of photography in The Lazarus Project and historical metafiction, see Lewis. For a comparison with Sebald’s use of photography, see Ward.

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from the 1992 Sarajevo siege and Lazarus, his sister Olga and friend Isador Maron, from the 1903 Kishinev pogrom” (Mihailescu 32). Averbuch’s first name and the title of the novel of course evoke the eponymous Biblical character. As Georgiana Banita points out, Lazarus “the biblical figure is himself an immigrant, an exile from death hurled back into the world and forced to confront the challenging task of finding a home for himself ” (Banita 209). The turn to Jewish history is more subtle in Nowhere Man, yet nonetheless detectable. The beginning of his earlier novel already offers a clue as to how important Hemon considers writing about the Holocaust to be. The book starts with a quote from Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish fine artist and writer who was killed by the Germans in 1942.7 This epigraph poses a metafictional question about narrative order and closes with: “Yet what is to be done with […] events that have been left […] hanging in the air, errant and homeless?”8 Clearly, the topic of (not) belonging is addressed here. One character, reappearing throughout Nowhere Man and tying the different narrative strands together is Jozef Pronzek, a Bosnian of Ukrainian heritage. In the first chapter, Pronzek is mentioned only briefly as part of a group and does not even utter a line. The narrator, who is also from Sarajevo, happens to recognize Pronzek as a student in an English language class he stumbles into when looking for a teaching job. In the following chapter, which chronicles his growing up in Sarajevo, Jozef Pronzek is both the main character and focalizer; in a subsequent chapter with the Bosnian war already looming in the background, Pronzek finds temporary refuge in Kiev attending summer school together with Americans who are exploring their Ukrainian roots. The first chapter entitled “Passover – Chicago April 18, 1994” opens with an unnamed first-person narrator, a young Bosnian man who is stranded in Chicago and in dire need of earning money. He holds a degree in English and therefore applies to a Jewish center that offers English language courses for newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe. Waiting for someone in charge, the narrator hears “a discordant choir chanting […] [in] rigid consonants and willowy vowels” (Nowhere Man 12). The adjectives pointing out the aesthetic qualities of the Russian sound system reveal that the students are of Eastern European origin. The “discord” can be read both literally and figuratively. There is no harmony, no group coherence but different individuals pooled together who do not necessarily belong together. In a rather humorous scene, the class is practicing the present perfect: “I have never read Moby Dick/ I have never seen the Grand Canyon/ I have never been in 7 Bruno Schulz is also a point of reference in The Lazarus Project (58) where he appears in passing as a bartender who lives in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. For a monograph about Bruno Schulz, see Banks. 8 Epigraph without pagination to Nowhere Man.

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New York/ I have never been rich” (Nowhere Man 12–13). The model sentences may appear as innocuous exercises, but again—and this may be called a characteristic feature of Hemon’s style—such scenes work on both a literal, realistic level as well as a figurative one. In this case the negation in the phrases show that the American literary tradition, as the allusion to Herman Melville’s romance Moby-Dick (1851) indicates, is still strange to these immigrants. Likewise, the American landscape, evoked by the Grand Canyon, appears equally unfamiliar to them, including all the myths about the West and American exceptionalism that are connected with it. The immigrant students have neither access to the country’s riches nor are they familiar with its most iconic city. In sum, they express their alienness to America. Together with the other administrator Marcus, Jennifer shows him around the institution. They enter a class: “All rightie,” Jennifer said. “We don’t mind guests, do we?” She beamed at the class, expecting them to beam back, but they didn’t. “Do we?” she said with a tinge of threat in her voice. “Yes, we do,” the class chanted back. “You mean: No, we don’t,” Jennifer said. “No, we don’t,” the first row only responded. (Nowhere Man 18)

This scene throws into sharp relief the cultural difference between the cheerful, ever smiling American and the more reserved foreigners. The suppressed aggression in Jennifer’s voice reveals that the American woman, however, does not appreciate this kind of diversity. That there is no mutual understanding is highlighted by the confirmation-seeking tag question and follow-up echo question. English grammar rules in this instance require a “no” response when in agreement with the utterance. The learners obviously have no knowledge of this rule. The reversal of yes and no shows that their world is upside-down and that the rules that govern it are unintelligible. Many in the class do not bother to answer at all. Whether this is due to resistance or to boredom remains unclear. In any event, the overriding suggestion is that they do not form a coherent group at all. Jennifer wants to show this class off to the newly recruited staff member and asks in connection with the lesson plan: “‘What do Jewish people do for Passover?’ Jennifer asked again, not giving up on her smile, but glancing at Marcus warily” (Nowhere Man 19). Despite her ostensible friendliness, she is actually trying to bond with the other American as opposed to the class, thus reinforcing the us-vs.-them dynamic. They said nothing. “How many of you are Jewish?” she asked, and stepped away from the chalkboard and toward them.

George H. W. Bush Sr. in Babi Yar

“Don’t be frightened,” Marcus said. Two first-row women raised their hands, and then another half a dozen. “Okay,” Jennifer said. “Sofya, can you tell us?” Sofya took her glasses off—her eyes were blue and she had a crescent scar under her left eye. “Jewish people run from Egypt,” she said, reluctantly, as if it were a well-kept secret. “But what do they do today?” Jennifer asked. The silence filled up every corner of the classroom. We could hear the staccato rain against the windows and the swooshing of trees, the anger and the sorrow. (Nowhere Man 19–20).

The pathetic fallacy lends a somber note to the otherwise slightly comical scene. The students are not prepared for any joyful celebration. Instead, the communication gap widens further. The question about one’s Jewish heritage may appear innocent to Americans, but it harbors dangers for the former Soviet citizens. Sofya, whose name means “wise” in Greek, is especially prescient when she uses the present tense. It may be primarily read not as a grammatical error but rather indicating that the flight from persecution is still a pressing issue. Jennifer’s question, which implies a positive trajectory toward freedom and safety, remains instead unanswered, unaffirmed. The next class the narrator enters is practicing a different tense, namely the past perfect. The language learners discuss a text on the separation of a set of Siamese twins. The students are unanimous in rejecting such humans as monsters. Four students carry the discussion, and one man among them, Mihalka, comments: “I must know Past Perfect,” Mihalka said, and shrugged resignedly, as if Past Perfect were death and he were ready for it. “The Nazis,” the fourth man said, “killed all people like that.” (Nowhere Man 21)

Again, this short dialogue contains more than at first meets the eye. The number of students engaging in the discussion is not arbitrary but can be linked to the four children who pose questions during the Passover Seder when reading the Haggada, the text on the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt. Here, however, it is death, not liberation, that is being discussed. Verb forms express states of being. So, when Mihalka is curious about the grammatical feature of the past perfect, he should be learning about actions that have been completed and over with.9 Here, however, the presumedly bygone past is approaching with ominous signs. The topic of the lesson is also laden with symbolic meaning. As Vladimir Zoric has noted, “[I]n this

9 As the grammarians Greenbaum and Quirk state, “The past perfect […] refers to a time earlier than another past time” (53).

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top-bottom regulated learning process, conjoined twins become a symbolic channel for transactions between language and body and vice versa” (Zoric 92). The narrator witnesses a “twofold freak show” (Zoric 93), that is, both in the corporal Siamese twins and distorted language used by the students in the classroom. In the context of the ongoing war in Bosnia—while he is waiting for the job interview, the narrator browses through some papers with headlines of atrocities committed in Gorazde (Nowhere Man 8)—the Siamese twins may be regarded as an indirect reference to Yugoslavia, which was likewise being split up in the war. Like the body of Siamese twins that cannot be separated without causing death, parts of the population died when this separation took place. Finally, the reference to the Nazis’ extermination policy is a reminder that a life form deviating from a set norm makes life precarious and vulnerable. That this is not a thing concluded in the past, for which the past perfect is used, is shown by the newspaper headlines. This opening scene has been discussed at length because it may be compared to one of the classic texts of Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century, namely Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912). Antin, like other writers such as Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, belonged to the cohort of American Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe—predominantly from Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine—between 1880 and 1924. They were part of a greater mass migration that tripled the population of the United States and which for the first time, in addition to the traditional immigrant groups from Western and Northern Europe, now included large numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.10 Among these masses, the Jews were highly visible, particularly in respect to the field of cultural production. One factor was their high literacy rate—especially in comparison with the other newcomers. This explains why so many writers emerged among them who were to give expression to the immigrant experience. In a short time they had exchanged their native language, typically Yiddish, adopting English as their literary language. In The Promised Land, an autobiographical text, Antin depicts her own rise from an artless shtetl girl in Belarus to a sophisticated and successful American writer. In particular, Antin praises her exposure to the American school system for providing a path to inclusion in American society. In chapter XI, “My Country”, she extols the virtues of the system: The Public School has done its best for us foreigners and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad it is mine to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it, you born Americans; for it is the story of the

10 See Polland and Soyer 197–204.

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growth of your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from the far ends of the earth to the flag you love. (Antin 175)

This kind of sincere pathos characterizes the entire book. The Promised Land is lavish in its praise of the freedom America offers and identifies the US with freedom from political and economic oppression, from anti-Semitism, and other constraining traditions such as religion that were characteristic of Europe. Most of all, it celebrates American individualism and the self-made (wo)man.11 There is a clearcut dichotomy that casts the “before” in Europe in stark contrast with the “after” in America. This dualistic worldview, at least in part, goes back to Puritan models of the seventeenth century that the Jewish writers of the early twentieth century adopted as their role models.12 A sharp dichotomy is a general feature shared by Jewish immigrant literature from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Essentially, the new world is contrasted with the old in a positive light. In comparison to Mary Antin, Aleksandar Hemon, writing roughly a century later, is much more disillusioned. While both authors posit the Jewish students’ experience as paradigmatic for the immigrant experience, Antin explores its positive potential for acculturation and progress whereas Hemon highlights the cultural differences that are there to stay. The rejection of the Siamese twins as monsters implies that “immigrant students, just like their American hosts, do not like foreigners” and are not open to cultural difference (Zoric 93). Multicultural understanding and empathy—and this is even more pronounced in The Lazarus Project—are mainly illusions. In yet another chapter in Nowhere Man, towards the middle of the novel, a different narrator, Victor, American-born with Ukrainian roots, meets Jozef Pronek at a summer school in Kiev in 1991 where both hesitantly engage in a homosexual affair. As a young man Victor’s father belonged to the Bandera partisans and ended up in the US after the war.13 This reference to nationalist Ukrainians who, in their pursuit of national interests, variously turned against or supported Nazi Germany introduces a further historical complication. Within the novel, it remains vague whether Victor’s father was indeed a fascist. While Corina Crisu considers this episode in the novel of minor importance—“the summer spent in Ukraine […] has the function of an intermezzo, preparing the passage from Bosnia to the U.S.A.” (Crisu 29)—I would contend that it is of much greater significance when considered in the context of Jewish history.

11 See Fine, Girgus, a Wald and Wirth-Nesher in particular for a discussion of this first cohort of Russian Jewish immigrant writers. 12 For the use of Puritan discourse in literature by twenty-first century Jewish authors see Hofmann. 13 See s.v. “Bandera” (Magosci and Petrovsky-Shtern).

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The American summer school students in Kiev are all taken by bus to Babi Yar in order to attend and cheer the speech by their President George Herbert Walker Bush. Jozef Pronzek tags along with his dorm mates. When the president concludes with “May God bless you all [….. wheeeeeumph…….] the memories of Babi Yar” (Nowhere Man 105),14 Bush has the surprised Pronek, who is standing nearby, ushered onto the stage: “This place is holy ground. May God bless your country, son.” “It is not my country,” Jozef said. “Yes, it is,” Bush said, and patted Jozef on his shoulder. “You bet your life it is. It is as yours as you make it.” “But I am from Bosnia…” “It’s all one big family, your country is. If there is misunderstanding, you oughtta work it out.” Bush nodded, heartily agreeing with himself. Jozef stood still, his body taut and his smile lingering on his face, bedazzled by the uncanniness. (Nowhere Man 106)

Crisu detects here a critique of American politics by noting the “president’s absurd, disarticulated speech, punctuated by phoney ideals and lacking in real substance” (Crisu 31). Indeed, Bush appears here as condescending and full of misplaced selfconfidence. Notwithstanding his good intentions, this passage argues that it is the lack of attention to detail that will prove fatal. The “uncanny” feeling foreshadows the sinister events to come. After Bush left, an attempted putsch against Gorbachev (August 19–21, 1991) took place, the Ukrainian parliament declared Ukraine’s independence on August 24, and by the end of the year the Soviet Union dissolved (Magosci and Petrovsky-Shtern 85). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was no superpower left to stop Yugoslavia from disintegrating. Ultimately, the point of this scene is that there was no lesson learned from history and that the disaster in Bosnia cannot be averted. It is significant that the lofty vows, which are finally exposed as empty, were pledged at Babi Yar, one of the most atrocious sites of the Shoah. Once again, Hemon uses the merging of history, autobiography, and fiction, culminating in a scene that pertains to the Holocaust to raise questions about morals in politics that are also relevant for every individual. Jewish suffering thus projects from a blueprint not only for the ensuing disaster in the Balkans but to one for the whole human condition.

14 The passages of Bush’s speech of August 1, 1991 in Hemon’s novel are indeed direct quotations from Bush’s text. See George H.W. Bush. The dialogue between the president and Pronek, however, constitute a fictional element.

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In the Lazarus Project, Brik’s quest to discover some traces of Lazarus Averbuch opens the topics of Jewish migration and anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century. Brik and his friend Rora’s itinerary includes stops in several towns and countries, among them also Sarajevo. The most memorable encounter, however, takes place neither in his hometown nor at his destination but in Chernivtsi, formerly Czernowitz, which used to be a major Jewish center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Brik and Rora stop here because it was in Czernowitz that Averbuch spent some time in a refugee camp before he reached Chicago (Lazarus 60). Both visit the local Jewish Center for the few aging survivors of the Holocaust. It becomes clear that the pogrom of 1903 was one event in an entire sequence of repeated acts of violence and persecution. ‘“All of you foreigners come looking for your ancestors and roots,’ Chaim [who runs the Jewish Center, B.H.] said. ‘You are only interested in the dead. God will take care of the dead. We need to take care of the living’” (Lazarus 156). As Mihailescu explains, “in the context of an ever-smaller and constantly aging Jewish community in present-day Eastern European cities, the primary interest is the struggle for prolonging survival rather than to primarily preserve the traces of their traumatic past” (Mihailescu 44). Historic curiosity must lead to ethical consequences in the present. Neither here nor at first at the Jewish Museum at Chisinau, the current name of former Kishinev and now the capital of the independent Republic of Moldova, does Brik reveal that he is not Jewish. This is not a ploy to hide his identity in order to deceive others but due to what in a different context Jessy Carton has noted as Hemon’s “unwilling[ness] to accept ethnoreligious categorizations” (Carton 337). By not drawing attention to his being different, Brik opens space for the others to share their grief. Without denying the particularity of the horrors the Jews had to undergo in twentieth century Europe, by this move the Jewish experience appears as exemplary of the human condition, not an exceptional one. In Chisinau, then, when Brik visits the exhibition on the Kishinev pogrom, twenty-five year old Iuliana Averbuch acts as tour guide through the museum. Her grandmother, Iuliana reports, was killed by Romanians in 1942 during the Holocaust. Since Averbuch happens to be a common name in the area, a familial connection of Lazarus Averbuch’s sister Olga, who returned to Kishinev after her brother’s death, may not be likely but is by all means possible. Yet nothing can be ascertained. Like so many others, Olga probably perished in the Holocaust. The fact, however, that there is a young woman namesake, who is moreover married to someone in the community, holds out the prospect that there might nonetheless be a future for Jews in Moldova and in Eastern Europe. Brik confesses to Iuliana Averbuch that he entertains violent fantasies of revenge and draws parallels between the Jewish and Bosnian genocide.

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“My grandfather,” Iuliana said, “was in the Red Army. He was in the platoon that raised the Soviet flag on the Reichstag. He was the only Jew in his battalion.” She said nothing else – apparently that was a fully completed statement. [...] “When I think about the pogrom,” Iuliana said, “I feel love for those people. When I think about my grandfather, I think about how hard it must have been for him, how lonely and happy he was on top of the Reichstag. When I think about those things, I love him.” (Lazarus 251)

Despite all the suffering, love and admiration remains for those who endured. One way to achieve this is by keeping the record straight, i.e., by writing. This is demonstrated in the last chapter after the narrator has eventually acted on his violent impulses by beating up a pimp. Rora’s sister Azra, a medical doctor, bandages Brik’s hands, and, significantly, the novel ends with these words: “No reason to be sorry, Azra said. Let’s take care of your hand now. You will need it for writing” (Lazarus Project 292). The proper purpose of the hand is not to beat someone up or pull a trigger but rather to hold a pen. The purpose of the eyes is not fix themselves on the target like a sniper but to look squarely at history and, even more importantly, at fellow human beings, regardless of their ethnicity. While The Lazarus Project ends with a metafictional comment on writing, Nowhere Man closes with a comment on reading. The last chapter of the novel returns to the same narrator of the initial chapter, the unnamed Bosnian young man. The setting is the summer of 2000 when he spends his honeymoon with his American wife in Shanghai “where her grandparents met” (Nowhere Man 239). This information alludes to the fact that the wife is Jewish since Shanghai was a port of refuge for European Jews in World War II.15 While the wife peruses Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the husband reads the historical treatise “Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai” (Nowhere Man 240), a convoluted story about a Russian double agent for the British and the Japanese in Shanghai during World War II who might have tortured the wife’s grandfather. Both types of book, one fictional, the other historical, point to the more gruesome sides of human beings. It is in Asia, seemingly unrelated to Jewish history, that the Holocaust and the personal history of the Bosnian narrator (and author) coalesce. While human history is characterized by violence and death, the newlyweds show that there is also love and hope for the future. Like the Jewish American writers of Lazarus Averbuch’s generation, such as Mary Antin and others, Hemon adopted American English as a means of literary expression in his adulthood. He posits two aspects that have defined the (American-) Jewish experience of the twentieth century, namely mass emigration early in the

15 A collection of essays on Jewish exile in Shanghai can be found in Armbrüster.

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century and the Holocaust in mid-century, as paradigmatic, not only for the disaster that befell the Bosnians and the people of Yugoslavia with the war at the end of the twentieth century but also more broadly for the conditio humana. It is the Holocaust that time and again informs his writing.16 This earlier genocide provides the context in which to also understand post-war European history, war and migration as well as immigration to the US.

Works cited Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin, 1997 [1912]. Armbrüster, Georg, Michael Kohlstruck, and Soja Mühlberger (eds.). Exil Shanghai 1938–1947: Jüdisches Leben in der Emigration. Teetz: Hentrich and Hentrich, 2000. Auster, Paul. Man in the Dark. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Banita, Georgiana. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Banks, Brian R. Muse and Messiah: The Life, Imagination and Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Ashford, Kent: Inkermen Press, 2007. Bush, George H.W. “Remarks at the Babi Yar Memorial.” The Collected Speeches. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009: 221–224. Carton, Jessy. “Complicated Refugees: A Study of the 1951 Geneva Convention Grounds in Aleksandar Hemon’s Life Narrative.” Law and Literature 30.2 (2018): 331–347. Crisu, Corina. “Bosnian Ways of Being American: Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man.” When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989. Ed. Kathleen Stark. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009: 24–35. Fine, David Martin. “In the Beginning: American-Jewish Fiction, 1880–1930.” Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources. Ed. Lewis Fried. New York: Greenwood, 1988: 15–34. Frank, Soren. “Mobility.” Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis. Ed. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. London: Bloomsbury, 2017: 273–83. Girgus, Sam. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Greenbaum, Sidney and Randolph Quirk. A Student’s Grammar of the English Language. Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman, 1990. Hemon, Aleksandar. Nowhere Man. London: Picador, 2002. Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. London: Picador, 2008.

16 Hemon’s novels may be read also within the context of second and third generation writers on the Holocaust. For a discussion of this transgenerational and transnational literature whose corpus is growing, see Hofmann and Reuter.

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Hofmann, Bettina. “Transitland Italien: Jüdische Auswanderer aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion erzählen von der Durchgangsstation Italien auf dem Weg nach Kanada, Österreich und in die USA.” Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 5 (2018): 142–155. Hofmann, Bettina and Ursula Reuter (eds.). Translated Memories: Transgenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust. Lanham: Lexington, 2020. Jahn, Manfred. “Focalization.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2008: 173–177. Lewis, Charles. “The Coincidence of Historical Fiction: ‘Code-Orange’ Reading after 9/11.” Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity. Eds. Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016: 38–55. Magosci, Paul Robert and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millenium of Co-Existence, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2016. McHale, Brian. “Postmodern Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Hermann Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2008: 456–460. Mihailescu, Dana. “Negotiating Traumas via Cross-Cultural Urban Identity”. Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives. Eds. Dana Mihailescu, Roxana Oltean, and Mihaela Precup. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014: 31–5. Polland, Annie, and Daniel Soyer. Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920. New York: NY UP, 2012. Raudvere, Catharina. “Experience and Expression: Aleksandar Hemon, Fiction, and (Dis)placement.” Contested Memories and the Demands of the Past: History Cultures in the Modern Muslim World. Ed. Catharina Raudvere. Cham: Palgrave, 2017: 179–194. Spickard, Paul. Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Tseti, Angeliki. “(Auto)pathography, Photography, Trauma in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project.” Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 15.1 (2017). http:// journals.openedition.org/erea/6070. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.6070. Wald, Priscilla. “Of Crucibles and Grandfathers: The East European Immigrants.” The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003: 50–69. Ward, Wendy. “Does Autobiography Matter? Fictions of the Self in Aleksandar Hemon’s ‘The Lazarus Project’.” Brno Studies in English 2.37 (2011): 185–99. Wasserstein, Bernard. Secret War in Shanghai. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Zipperstein, Steven J. Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018. Zoric, Vladimir. “Body-Language Fraks and Conjoined Twins: Aleksandar Hemon’s Poetics of Error.” (M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflexions of a Difficult Distinction. Ed. Juliane Prade. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013: 78–97.

Giustina Selvelli (Venice)

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

Abstract:

In this paper, I present the work of Bulgarian scriptwriter and novelist Angel Wagenstein (b. 1922), with a specific focus on his triptych composed of the novels Isaac’s Torah (1998), Far from Toledo (2002) and Farewell, Shanghai (2004) and on the movie Stars (1959), all dealing with Jewish topics. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the motif of the experience of the Jewish diaspora in the broader Eurasian space, with related issues of multiethnic coexistence and multicultural legacy, and to the author’s sensibility towards questions of minority communities’ inclusion and exclusion.

Introduction Angel Wagenstein, scriptwriter and novelist, was born in 1922 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, into a Jewish family of mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazic background. The author spent part of his childhood in France after fleeing with his family for political reasons and returned to Bulgaria as a teenager. During World War II, he was arrested for his participation in anti-fascist activities, sentenced to death, and saved by the arrival of the Soviet Army. After the war he studied in Moscow at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), and after his graduation (1950) he returned to his country to work at the Center of Bulgarian Cinematography. Angel Wagenstein is thus not only a writer and a director but, above all, a scriptwriter. Among the fifty screenplays (for both documentaries and feature films) he has written, he is particularly remembered for the one he composed for the movie Zvezdi/Sterne (Stars, 1959), directed by Konrad Wolf, that gained international success and recognition. In this article, I will focus on some fundamental aspects concerning both the life and the work of Wagenstein. These are well represented in his triptych including the novels Petoknižie Isaakovo (Isaac’s Torah, 1998), Daleč ot Toledo (Far from Toledo,1 2002) and Sbogom, Šanhaj (Farewell, Shanghai, 2004): the richness of the Jewish 1 This novel has not yet been translated into English.

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diasporic experience in a variety of settings away from the “lost homeland”, the fruitfulness and challenges of interethnic relations, and the attention to marginalized communities and minority groups. These crucial motifs appear to be deeply intertwined in all three of his novels as well as in the movie Stars, which I will also briefly discuss, and embody in my opinion the basis of his entire artistic and intellectual work as well as of his ethical world view. The connection between all of the works I consider appears to be that of “polycentrism”, treated in this paper as a salient marker of Wagenstein’s epistemological perspective. Polycentrism is not only a feature of his books and film, but derives from and is traceable in Wagenstein’s migratory experience during his youth—as well as in his genealogy—, and in his travels around the world as a socially engaged intellectual: it translates into a kind of committed and sensitive nomadism, and an ability for “metamorphosis”, comparable to that of his fellow Bulgarian Elias Canetti. Concerning the Jewish component, what is characteristic of the Jewish experience is a non-exclusive spatial belonging, non-exclusive language identity, and, in a way, even a non-exclusive temporal dimension, by virtue of the sense of nostalgia for a past of uninterrupted traditions. This particular existential model shares many elements with the concept of “ethnic and cultural polyvalence” (Zekiyan 1997), denoting the co-presence of different cultures in the same person and in the same community. Furthermore, it resonates equally with the concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1980) and further explored by Edouard Glissant (1996), who view it as a metaphor for multiple, composite identities, that contravene the monolithic character of the single root, in this case that of the majority, dominant culture and of the nation state. In this article, I will show that, through his engagement with different Jewish experiences, as well as his valorization of minority voices, the author is opposed to the homogenizing features of “universalism” and “globalization” (Spivak 2003) and the related elements of nationalism that accompany it, contributing to the legitimization of a sort of cultural “pluriverse” (Reiter 2018). I argue that these conceptions are reflected in Wagenstein’s depictions of the Jewish experience, embodying a conception of multiplicity in line with the idea of the rhizome, capable of “destructuring national compactness and [...] correcting the idea of ethnocentric and simplifying exclusivity” (Selvelli 2020: 82). This is possible by virtue of Wagenstein’s sensitivity towards issues of migration, cultural diversity and diaspora and in his dealing with the contradictions of history in a non-binary way, between the single place and the expansive world, between identity and alterity. Wagenstein’s novels are of broad historical and geographical significance and speak to the horrors and socio-cultural transformations of the twentieth century, rendering it in all its paradoxes, in an acute, touching and sometimes also ironic way that facilitates and evokes productive reflections. “We Bulgarians have always

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

been good smugglers” (Engelberg), Wagenstein affirmed. His stories, whether in the form of a novel or a film, are always “double-bottomed suitcases”2 (Wagenstein 2015: 8).

Wagenstein’s hometown of Plovdiv and the Sephardic diaspora in Bulgaria Plovdiv, the birthplace of Wagenstein, played a privileged role in his personal development, in the formation of a particular care for diasporic forms of multiple belonging and values of mutual respect among different cultures, religions and languages. Far from Toledo, the second part of his trilogy, dedicated to the Jewish diaspora during World War II, presents some crucial aspects regarding his relationship to his native city. These are further elaborated upon in his collection of autobiographical notes Predi kraja na sveta: Draskulki ot neolita (Before the End of the World: Scribbles from the Neolithic Age, 2011), especially in the chapter bearing the title of the novel. The reader is here familiarized with the author’s vision of his hometown’s multicultural composition: It just so happened that on a trip through Andalusia I came across a magnificent celebration in the orange treed city of Seville – the traditional Feast of the Three Cultures […]. I was a little worried about being a poor relative at lunch with noble cousins, but when I said to myself that there were three cultures celebrating here, and we in Orta Mezar could safely count seven of them, I relaxed.3 (Wagenstein 2011: 32–33)

The novel Far from Toledo deals with the vicissitudes of a young Jewish boy in the post-Ottoman microcosm of ethnic coexistence in the social texture of the city of Plovdiv. Here the families of Jews, Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Roma and others were tightly woven together, so that everyone was able to get by in the language of the other: as an example, Bulgarian kids addressed each other in Turkish, and on Friday nights the Jewish inhabitants would be greeted with the expression “Shabbat Shalom!” (Wagenstein 2002: 110). In his memories, Wagenstein dwells on the description of the intense inter-ethnic contacts between the various communities of his hometown in the years preceding and immediately following World War II, highlighting the value of communal life in his native quarter:

2 “kufari s dvojno dno”. All translations from Bulgarian are mine. 3 “Taka se sluči, če pri edno ptešestvie iz Andalusija popadnah na velikolepno praznenstvo v grada na portokalovite drveta Sevilja – tradicionnija Praznik na trite culture [...]. Pritesnih se malko, kato beden rodnina na objad pri znatni bratovčedi no kato si pomislih, če tuk praznuvat tri kulturi, a nie v Orta mezar spokojno možem da gi izbroim do sedem, se pootpusnah.”

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My neighborhood Orta Mezar, which in Turkish means “middle graveyard” [...] populated with the most simple-hearted and well-intentioned people in the world – Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Gypsies, Albanians, Tatars, and a series of transitional ethnic mixtures – was the most vital and fascinating part of the city as well as, so it seems to me now, its warm pulsing heart.4 (Wagenstein 2011: 36)

During the first few years of the author’s life, the city was still characterized by a high level of multi-ethnicity and multilingualism and represented a dynamic cultural and economic center. The exposure to such a fertile, multifaceted context allowed Wagenstein to develop a special attention for forms of multiplicity which proved decisive for his later (inter)cultural engagement, in particular for his attentiveness to so-called “non-exclusive identities” (Selvelli 2017: 70). Wagenstein, whose family was mainly of Sephardic origin, continues a genealogical story shaped by long dispersions and movements between “East” and “West”. Sephardic Jews originally came from the Near East and settled on the Iberian Peninsula during the Roman Era (early centuries AD). They lived for many centuries in the land they called Sefarad until 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabel of Aragon decided to expel non-Christian communities. That was the moment when their long journey started, leading Sephardic Jews to scatter all across Europe and in various parts of the Ottoman Empire. Wagenstein remembers some significant features about his ancestors’ relationship with their “lost homeland”: To this day, they have not forgotten the folklore and songs of their distant Iberian homeland, including [...] those one hundred and one ways of utilizing eggplants, or, in the Judeo-Spanish “las merenjenas”. And if you want to pamper yourself with a detail of this fidelity to the memory of our grandparents and the native land they forcibly left behind, I will tell you that there are Jewish families in the Balkans who still keep the keys of the houses they abandoned five centuries ago in the Sephardic hubs.5 (Wagenstein 2011: 38)

On the occasion of birthdays, mournings or other important festivities, the Sephardic Jews in Plovdiv would prepare the “filled pastry, whose Turkish name

4 “Mojata mahala Orta mezar, koeto na turski znači sredna grobnica [...] naselen s naj-dobronamernite i prostodušni hora na sveta – blgari, turci, evrei, armenci, cigani, albanci, tatari, kakto i s redkite togava meždinni etničeski smeski, beše naj-žiznenata, naj-očarovatelnata čast na grada i kakto sega mi se struva, tuptjaštoto mu gorešto srce.” 5 “Te i do dnes ne sa zabravili ezika, bita i pesnite na dalečnata si iberijska rodnina, vključitelno [...] onezi sto i edin načina za opolzotvorjavane na patladžanite, ili na judeo-ispanski ‘las merendženas’. I ako iskaš da te razneža s detajl ot tazi vjarnost km spomena na dedite i nasilstveno izostavena rodna zemja, šte ti kaža, če iz Balkanite ima evrejski semejstva, koito ošte pazjat ključovete ot izostavenite si predi pet veka domove v sefaradskite žarki prostori!”

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

was just slightly adapted with a Hispanic suffix: burekas”6 (Wagenstein 2002: 110). Furthermore, as already mentioned, the Jews continued to use and pass on their language, preserving their Spanish dialect as their mother tongue (Harris 121). […] the idiom that Seniora Mazal would use on occasions of multiethnic encounters was a crazy hodgepodge of Slavic terms with Spanish suffixes, Hebrew archaisms and insults in impeccable Turkish, the whole thing set in a methodical confusion between masculine and feminine gender – in other words, a great linguistic menu that my grandmother served drowned in Ladino sauce.7 (Wagenstein 2002: 89)

Wagenstein never stopped speaking Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish), which he also sometimes uses as a language for written communication.8 In his novel, the topic of Ladino, as a proud element of a culture that could not be assimilated, is treated with irony and nostalgia, also through the use of lively Sephardic expressions. The title of the novel itself, Far from Toledo, recalls an Iberian dimension never forgotten in the Sephardim’s Balkan exile, in which the survival of the ancestral language imposes itself as an almost miraculous example. […] My mother’s family name is Behar – the name of a city not far from Madrid, and some of the families with whom we were friends were from the well-known Plovdiv families Toledo, Seville, Cordoba and Catalan – a sort of certificate of origin and quality of product, with a warranty period of 500 years.9 (Wagenstein 2011: 38)

In relating to this language, the dimension of memory appears as an essential element since Ladino “is not a language, it is the memory of a language”10 (Wagenstein 2010): It therefore depends on the need to remember the migratory past of one’s ancestors and to cultivate multiple attachments and connections at a spatial and temporal level. Wagenstein himself represents this link with a tradition that is disappearing although, with his usual critical and somewhat provocative style,

6 “[...] banički, koito kato znak za proizhod noseha tursko nazvanie s prikačenoto ispansko okončanie – burekas.” 7 “[…] narečieto, koeto senjora Mazal upotrebjavaše pri podobni mežduetničeski kontakti, beše neopisuema smes ot slavjanski dumi s ispanski okončanija i obratnoto, arhaizmi na ivrit s implantirani turski rugatni i s naj-uporito obrkvane na ženskija s mški rod, kato cjaloto tova ezikovo menju be obilno poljato ss sos ‘ladino’.” 8 Personal communication with Angel Wagenstein. 9 “[…] familjata na majka mi e Behar – nazvanieto na grad, nedaleče ot Madrid, a njakoi semejstva, s koito našite družaha, byaha ot izvestnite plovdivski rodove Toledo, Sevilja, Kordova i Katalan – nešto kato atestat za proizhod i kačestvo na produkta, s garancionen rok 500 godini.” 10 “no es una lengua, es el recuerdo de una lengua”.

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he defines Ladino as “a lost language” and hopes Spanish will be learned by the remaining Sephardic communities in its place (Wagenstein 2010). In relation to the “lost Sephardic homeland”, it is worth considering that Spain has recently started to recover its multicultural heritage, even offering Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews (Ojeda-Mata 13). With this perspective in mind, the country has also dedicated attention to Angel Wagenstein, acknowledging him as a great writer whose novels are to be considered part of a fundamentally anti-fascist universal literature.

The Jewish question and Bulgarian responsibility in the movie Stars (Sterne) The migration of Bulgarian Jews to the newly-founded State of Israel has been immortalized in Wagenstein’s novel Far from Toledo as well as in the movie After the End of the World (Sled kraja na sveta, 1998),11 as a further step in the migration experience for the Sephardic community. With regard to the condition of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II, although he recalls the role played by Dimitar Peshev, the vice-president of the parliament, in the rescue of this community (Wagenstein 2011), Wagenstein does not idealize this story at all, and, characteristically, he also remembers the less “romanticizable” aspects of this vicissitude. He indeed recalls the dark moments that preceded it, such as when the Jews had to suffer restrictions, discrimination and humiliation, and were forced to wear the Star of David (Wagenstein 2002: 194). At the same time, he does not forget about the great deal of solidarity by virtue of which Bulgarian Jews could survive (Wagenstein 2002: 195). What remained a difficult subject for him, however, was the fate of the nonBulgarian Jews who found themselves passing through Bulgarian-occupied territory (Ragaru). In the aftermath of the war, he contributed to raising attention to a crime for which Bulgaria had been responsible. This manifested itself in a movie he wrote the screenplay for, Stars (Sterne), thanks to a co-production between Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic (Doncheva 12–13), which shed light on some aspects that had been excluded from the country’s official narrative. The Holocaust, an important subject in Central and Eastern European cinema, was missing in both Bulgarian cinema and in public discussion, and so the cooperation between director Konrad Wolf and scriptwriter Angel Wagenstein sought to make up for this deficiency (Garbolevsky 14). As it has been affirmed, the movie can be categorized as a “film-reflection” or “film- discussion” (ibid., 87), touching highly important existential and philosophical questions: It deals with the topic of the deportations of Sephardic Jews from the

11 The script of the movie was written by Angel Wagenstein and the movie was directed by Ivan Nitchev.

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

territories that Hitler had assigned to his Bulgarian ally (Wagenstein 2011: 83), corresponding today to Northern Macedonia and Greece. Only a few people survived among the many thousands that left for the concentration camps. Wagenstein met some of these survivors after the war and decided to make a film on this subject, in order to remind the Bulgarian audiences that the story of rescuing Bulgarian Jews had not been light-hearted fun as might have been believed (see Sage). The movie’s plot is set in 1943, and evolves around the fate of the Greek Sephardic Jews, who, while in transit to Auschwitz, stood waiting for three days in a small Bulgarian city in the southwest of the country, in Gorna Dzhumaya (today Blagoevgrad). In particular, the focus is on the intense human relationship between Walter, a sergeant of the Wehrmacht, and Ruth, a young Jewish schoolteacher (Doncheva 12), and the solidarity and empathy stemming from their encounters. Emotions flow intensely in this portrayal of a little-known story within the immense tragedy of the Holocaust, taking place in a secluded Bulgarian village at the “margins” of Europe and dealing with essential questions of guilt and responsibility. Narrated with integrity and clarity, one of its salient aspects is also that of its fascinating multilingualism, as many languages alternate in the movie: German, Bulgarian, Greek, Ladino as spoken by the Greek Jews (a fact capable of rendering a sort of “post-imperial” dimension of this former Ottoman corner), Yiddish in the performance of Mordechai Gebirtig’s Jewish resistance anthem “Undzer Shtetl Brent!”12 and finally Hebrew, through the song and prayer “Eli, Eli”13 . The impressive resonance of different tongues in the film can be interpreted as an acknowledgment and tribute to the diversity and richness of Jewish diasporic experiences and identities. The movie, released in 1959, received twelve awards at major film festivals, including in particular the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in that same year. Although it was purchased by 72 countries, it encountered difficulties in entering the film market, since it had been produced by the GDR.14 Today, the film is considered to be a classic that addresses the tragic fate of European Jews in a particularly neglected area of Europe.

12 “Our little town is burning!”, composed by Gebirtig in 1938. 13 “My God, my God”. 14 In Cannes, for example lacking diplomatic representation between France and GDR, the film was presented as a Bulgarian film, but in Bulgaria it was initially prohibited, because of its so-called “abstract humanism”. In Israel, in turn, approval for screening of the movie was long refused, since the positive and moral transformation of a member of the Wehrmacht was intolerable. Finally, in the Arab countries, the suffering of the Jews could not be shown in cinema.

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The topic of Jewish migration and diaspora in Wagenstein’s first novel Isaac’s Torah Wagenstein’s life was to a certain extent characterized by the condition of the diaspora: his origins are both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, and both these worlds became a fertile inspiration for him. His surname is Ashkenazic and derives from an ancestor who came from Galicia, a Habsburg region of Central Europe that today belongs to Poland and the Ukraine. This region constitutes the setting for Wagenstein’s debut novel, Isaac’s Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands (Petoknižie Isaakovo). As a source of inspiration for the Ashkenazi Jewish world, Wagenstein refers to highly significant names such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel, whose legacies he considers part of his own experience. Having been trained at the Moscow Film Academy, he had the opportunity to deepen the subject of the Jewish question in Central and Eastern Europe by confronting direct testimonies from several friends and acquaintances. They provided him with insights into and previous information on the vanished world of the shtetl, the predominantly Jewish small town that was immortalized in a variety of ways by authors and artists with an Eastern European background, such as Isaac Singer, Joseph Roth and Marc Chagall,15 among others. [T]hat shtetl in the heart of Europe, that town we love so much, is the point where all Slavic, Germanic and Jewish passions cross. The incestuous womb of the Hasidim that always gives birth to some new Chagall [...].16 (Wagenstein 2009: 25)

It is, thus, not surprising that his trilogy, dedicated to the exploration of Jewish life in different diasporic settings, emphasizes and depicts the end of a series of cultural worlds of the past, in particular those multicultural and multilingual territorial entities of Eastern Europe (Lörinzci 33) where a number of ethnicities, religions and worldviews coexisted, and to which the protagonists seem to be looking with a dose of nostalgia:

15 Interestingly, the cover of the Russian version of Wagenstein’s book Isaac’s Torah includes a picture of a Chagall’s painting depicting a couple of lovers flying over a Jewish village. 16 “[…] quello shtetl nel cuore dell’Europa, quella cittadina che tanto amiamo, è il punto in cui si incrociano tutte le passioni slave, germaniche ed ebraiche. Grembo incestuoso dei chassidim che partorisce sempre qualche nuovo Chagall [...]”. Here and below: my translation from the Italian version of the novel into English.

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

[…] the Kolodez17 girls: Jewish, but also Polish and Ukrainian. All in all, it can be said that we inhabitants of the shtetl lived in peace with everyone, without paying too much attention to differences of confession or nationality.18 (Wagenstein 2009: 31)

As writer and playwright Moni Ovadia, himself of Jewish Bulgarian origin, stated, 95% of the Jews in Bulgaria were of Sephardic origin. Nonetheless, both he and Wagenstein were captivated by the culture of the Ashkenazi minority, that is, particularly with Yiddish (Ovadia). This language occupies an important role in Wagenstein’s novel, similarly to the one played by Ladino in Far from Toledo. The protagonist Isaac Blumenfeld uses this tongue with a particular sense of pride: [O]ur Yiddish, even if it appeared to be softened by some Russian grace on the maternal side […] could be considered a brother of the German. So, with wounded national pride, I took a step forward – a philological step, so to speak – in defense of the mother tongue.19 (Wagenstein 2009: 155)

Isaac Blumenfeld uses “pure Yiddish”, adding that, however, he is not sure whether “[…] the concept of purity can be applied to that mixture of German and Slavic languages with an addition of Assyrian-Babylonian”20 (Wagenstein 2009: 50). And by stating this, we can understand that it is precisely the variety of influences on diasporic life that defines the most important element of this language: its hybridity (King). Through his praise of the fertile confusion of languages, of the rich and diverse traditions and lifestyles Jewish communities were exposed to in the imperial towns of the past, Wagenstein is defending a concept of multiculturalism and interculturalism, of non-exclusivity, in opposition to the brutal and tragic interpretations of identity which those places also produced. The novel focuses on the almost thirty years of life of Isaac Blumenfeld since the end of World War I up to his deportation to Kolyma with a narration that does not fuel any hatred but rather has as its strength

17 A shtetl in the vicinity of Drohobycz. 18 “[…] ragazze di Kolodez: ebree, ma anche polacche e ucraine. Tutto sommato, si può dire che noi abitanti dello shtetl vivevamo in pace con tutti, senza troppo badare alle differenze di confessione o di nazionalità”. 19 “[…] il nostro yiddish, anche se si presentava ingentilito da qualche graziosità russa da parte materna […] poteva essere considerato fratello del tedesco. Perciò, con l’orgoglio nazionale ferito, feci un passo in avanti – un passo filologico, per così dire – in difesa della lingua madre”. 20 “[…] il concetto di purezza si possa applicare a quel miscuglio di tedesco e lingue slave con l’aggiunta di assiro-babilonese.”

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the presence of humor, manifested in typical Jewish jokes21 . These irresistible jokes and anecdotes seem to indicate an evidence of continuity and rootedness amidst the historical ruptures that the protagonist, personifying to a certain extent the destiny of the Jewish people, faces in his dispersion in ever-varying sociopolitical and geographical settings. Central European towns inhabited by Ashkenazi Jews were, similarly to the ones of their Sephardic counterparts, specific places of cultural encounters and multiple roots, where national definitions of identity did not count much, as in the case of the region of Galicia. In this special, multiethnic region of Eastern Europe where Wagenstein’s Ashkenazi grandfather originated, five political powers marked the collective history of the local population. They are five just as in the number of books of the Torah, and the protagonist acquires five different nationalities in less than 30 years: Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Soviet, Nazi German, and then again Soviet, a fact that is a cause of a great many perplexities for him: [...] I found myself from one moment to the other a patriotic citizen of the Soviet miasteczko22 of Kolodez, once belonging to the Voivodeship of L’vov and even earlier to the Austro-Hungarian district of Lemberg, but which has now become an outpost of the proletarian revolution.23 (Wagenstein 2009: 91)

As we shall see in the next chapter, all three books of Wagenstein’s trilogy are devoted to the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century in Europe, the fate of exile.24 However, this first novel symbolically represents the starting point of a particular journey that Wagenstein feels to have started as well as the beginning of a tragedy, because the tragedy began precisely in these areas: The journey, dear brothers, is difficult. It won’t last only a year or two. It won’t last only a generation or two. Trials along this path will bring injustice and even horrors. […] We

21 Furthermore, the same Wagenstein affirmed that, after being sentenced to death during World War II, locked in a cell for one person together with seven other prisoners, he continued to tell jokes to try to overcome the fear of death, for 137 consecutive nights, as a defense against the terror that was growing inside of him. See the interview with Wagenstein in 2009 which appeared on the Spanish portal ABC, available at: https://www.abc.es/espana/abci-angel-wagenstein-incluso-noches-pase-condenadomuerte-bromeaba-200911020300–1131121790412_noticia.html?ref=https:%2F%2F. Accessed 31 Mar 2021. 22 Polish for “small town”, i.e., “shtetl”. 23 “[…] mi ritrovai a essere da un momento all’altro un patriottico cittadino del miasteczko sovietico di Kolodez, un tempo appartenente al voivodato di L’vov e ancora prima al distretto austro-ungarico di Leopoli, ma ora diventato un avamposto della rivoluzione del proletariato.” 24 Moreover, the Russian title of the trilogy bears the title Dvadcatyj vek. Izgnanniki: “The Exiled of the Twentieth Century”.

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

have not yet accepted the truth of the journey, which alone represents both the goal and faith in the goal. Yes, the path itself! And whoever loses faith, who scatters it in the sand like small pearls of Baghdad from a broken necklace, will also lose the strength and will to continue on the journey. [...] The land of Canaan, my brothers, is still far away, very far away!25 (Wagenstein 2009: 126)

The diversity of the Jewish diaspora in a non-European context: Farewell Shanghai As we have observed from the examples of Sephardic life in Plovdiv and the Ashkenazi one in the Central European shtetls, an essential aspect of Wagenstein’s representation of Jewish life is its irreducible diversity. For him, the term “Jew” does not represent a monolithic reality but rather a multifaceted reality, experienced in numerous geographical, cultural and even linguistic ways. This topic is particularly explicit in the last book of his trilogy, Farewell Shanghai,26 which deals with a little-known chapter in the history of the Jews during World War II, namely the arrival of European Jews in the Chinese city of Shanghai that was at the time an international settlement. Here, Wagenstein focuses again on the exilic path of the Jewish community, narrating their dispersion during and after World War II. The group in question is the community of wealthy Jews, who spoke German and could escape from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s. Two steamships formed a regular connection between Trieste or Genoa and Shanghai, a city that was unconditionally open to Jewish refugees without a visa until it was occupied by Japanese forces in December 1941. As we read in the author’s introduction to the novel: […] in the years when the great democracies were witnessing impassively Hitler’s genocide, Shanghai, with its limited status of an open city, was the only place in the world that welcomed and offered salvation [...] to about 20,000 German and Austrian Jews […]

25 “Il cammino, cari fratelli, è difficile. Non durerà solo un anno o due. Non durerà solo una generazione o due. Le prove lungo questo cammino porteranno in giustizia e persino orrori. […] non abbiamo ancora accettato la verità del cammino, che da solo rappresenta sia la meta che la fede nella meta. Sì, il cammino stesso! E chi perde la fede, chi la disperde nella sabbia come piccole perle di Bagdad di una collana spezzata, perderà anche la forza e la volontà di proseguire nel cammino. […] La terra di Canaan, fratelli miei, è ancora lontana, molto lontana!” 26 The novel received the European Literature Award in 2004.

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and another 3,800 Jews who had managed to flee from various occupied countries.27 (Wagenstein 2008: 12)

The journey to Shanghai lasted three to six weeks, with stopovers in Port Said, Bombay, Singapore, Manila and Hong Kong (Wagenstein 2008: 94). In the host city, this group of European Jews met with other Jewish communities who had settled there earlier. One of these communities already established in Shanghai was of Ashkenazi origin, composed of two different groups, albeit both Yiddish-speaking and coming from Russian territories: the first corresponded to the “[...] survivors of the Cossack pogroms at the beginning of the century and of the wave of antiSemitism following the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905”28 (Wagenstein 2008: 113). The second one was composed of families that had found refuge in China after the October Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War, “when, to release anger after a military reversal, both the Reds and the Whites raged on the Jewish quarters of Berdichev and Odessa, or on the villages and towns of the Chernovtsi region, called shtetl or miasteczko”29 (Wagenstein 2008: 113–114). Such violence had caused huge migratory waves to Europe and America and, via Siberia and Irkutsk, to even more remote places such as China and Korea. Finally, the last Jewish community present in Shanghai upon the arrival of the European refugees was constituted by the so-called “Baghdadi Jews”, wealthy Arab Jews who had arrived in the city in the late nineteenth century (see Betta), mainly from India, and settled in its richest quarter. Many of these were descendant of families of Jewish merchants from Baghdad who “had once walked with the caravans of their good neighbors and Arab associates along the Silk Road after the sunset of the Abbasids”30 (Wagenstein 2008: 156). The story therefore takes place in the “chaotic body of a new Babel”31 (Wagenstein 2008: 10), an open city that “[...] crystallized all the anguishes of an uncertain

27 “[…] negli anni in cui le grandi democrazie assistevano impassibili al genocidio voluto da Hitler, Shanghai, con il suo limitato statuto di città aperta, fu l’unico posto al mondo che accolse e offrì salvezza a caro prezzo a circa ventimila ebrei tedeschi e austriaci, tra cui molto intellettuali, e ad altri tremilaottocento ebrei fuggiti per un soffio da vari Paesi occupati […]”. The other Jews included were for example Polish, Czech, and other Central European Jews. 28 “[...] sopravvissuti ai pogrom cosacchi di inizio secolo e all’ondata di antisemitismo seguita alla sconfitta nella guerra russo-giapponese del 1905 [...]”. 29 “[...] quando, per scaricare la rabbia dopo un rovescio militare, sia i rossi sia i bianchi si accanivano sui quartieri ebraici di Berdičev e Odessa o sui villaggi e le cittadine della regione di Černovci, chiamati shtetl o mestechko.” 30 “[...] dopo il tramonto degli Abbasidi, si erano incamminati assieme alle carovane dei loro buoni vicini e soci arabi lungo la Via della Seta”. 31 “corpo caotico di una nuova Babele”.

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

future, in infinitely distant and foreign waters”32 (Wagenstein 2008: 93). In spite of Jewish solidarity, these groups, characterized by deeply different backgrounds, had hardly any contact. They were divided by an urgency of competition and every newcomer was seen as a rival in the struggle for bread and living space. There was only religion and a vague feeling of belonging to the same ethnic group that united them (Wagenstein 2008: 114). In the narration we find, however, some examples of friendship between Baghdadi Jews and German Jews. The destiny of migration and exile does not seem to stop even in Shanghai: here, from 1941 onwards, the European Jews were forced out of their houses and obliged to move to a ghetto, officially called the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees” within the district of Hongkew, an industrial area of the city (Wagenstein 2008: 211). This represented a further experience of displacement, as expressed through the words of an eccentric Rabbi holding Sabbath services in a Buddhist temple: […] I don’t think it is a punishment. Maybe it is an exodus. Not just any, but a biblical exodus. [...] Of course, this is not an escape from Egypt to the Promised Land, but rather a passage from slavery in Egypt to that of Babylon. [...] Maybe South Hongkew will be a new Sinai. So I think. We will wander again, with divine help, until a dispersed community becomes aware that it is not a mass of slaves, but a small part of a great people with a common destiny.33 (Wagenstein 2008: 213)

Conclusions: questions of minorities and alterity Wagenstein spent his youth between Bulgaria, France and Russia, and then settled in Bulgaria, although he continued to travel a lot, even to remote places such as Vietnam, for professional reasons (Wagenstein 2011). Considering the width of his historical, cultural, geographical interests, we can state that in the author’s intellectual path and his pursuit of artistic ways to represent reality, there is not a single, defined centre. For him, the centre is multifarious, and therefore, especially in relation and opposition to the divisions between the East and the West, he succeeds supporting multipolarization over bipolarization in his artistic creations (Fortunati 8). Perhaps precisely his original experience of multiculturalism and diaspora led

32 “[…] cristallizzava tutte le angosce di un avvenire incerto, in acque infinitamente lontane e straniere”. 33 “[…] non credo che sia un castigo. Forse è un esodo. Non uno qualunque, un esodo biblico. […] non è la fuga dall’Egitto verso la Terra promessa, ma piuttosto un passaggio dalla schiavitù in Egitto a quella a Babilonia […] forse Honk Yu sud sarà un nuovo Sinai. Così penso. Vagheremo ancora, con l’aiuto divino, finché una comunità dispersa non prenderà coscienza di non essere una massa di schiavi, ma una piccola parte di un grande popolo con un destino comune.”

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Wagenstein to consider migration and displacement, multiple identities and nonexclusivity as central topics in his works. Wagenstein belongs to the generation of witnesses of the World War II, in which he actively participated, taking part, for example, in the largest acts of sabotage against the Nazis in Bulgaria. Decades later, he made a fierce stand against the persecution and discrimination against Bulgarian Turks when, in the period between 1984 and 1989, the then-Bulgarian government, led by the late Todor Zhivkov, attempted the forced Bulgarization of the country’s Turkish minority (Eminov). It was not the first time that he showed his support and interest in minority questions, as it can be deducted from one of the first movies he directed, Rebro Adamovo (Adam’s rib) from 1956, in which he focuses his attention on the harsh vicissitudes of life of a young Muslim woman in Plovdiv in the early years of communism. His defense of the Turks in those delicate years is accompanied by his closeness to the suffering of other communities in the early phase of communism in the country as highlighted in his book Far from Toledo. These include, for example, Roma communities who were forced to sedentariness (Wagenstein 2002: 116–120) as well as Armenians who were politically persecuted, forcibly resettled and interned in work camps (Wagenstein 2002: 212–213 and 219–222). The most significant fact is that the point of view of the weakest is always included in his works, as well as the exposure of injustices, forced exoduses, and the uprooting of populations. Every theme he deals with, from the Jewish question in Bulgaria and elsewhere, to that of the Roma’s conditions, is presented in a critical and complex way without ever reducing it to a one-sided perspective, accentuating, rather, its various implications for history, both collectively and individually, with the aim of a sort of “pluriversality”. All this is accompanied by a sensitivity towards manifestations of “rhizomatic identities” that are non-exclusive and non-homogenous cultural models as well as with an anti-hierarchical attitude in relation to so-called majority and minority cultures. The ways in which he explores these topics in his works refuse to follow any dualistic track, manifesting the writer’s ability to make it a fertile and rhizomatic intellectual operation, proving he can imagine himself as a “planetary creature”, committed to the elaboration of collective responsibilities rather than a mere “global agent” (Spivak 73). Consequently, and only in this way, we can apply the principle expressed in Spivak’s famous words to his work: “alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away” (ibid.).

Multilingualism, Polycentrism and Exile in Angel Wagenstein’s Jewish-themed Works

Works cited Betta, Chiara. “From Orientals to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai.” Modern Asian Studies 4 (2003): 999–1023. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizofrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Doncheva, Gergana. “The modest presence of the Holocaust and Jewish people in Bulgarian Cinema: Facts and Reasons.” Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media. Ed. Nevena Daković. Belgrade: Diskurs, 2014: 9–18. Eminov, Ali. There are No Turks in Bulgaria. Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1990. Engelberg, Achim. “Der bulgarische Schriftsteller und Drehbuchautor Angel Wagenstein.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 October 2012. https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/buecher/derbulgarische-schriftsteller-und-drehbuchautor-angel-wagenstein-1.17681275?reduced= true. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020. Fortunati, Vita. “Introduction.” Morte di una disciplina. Ed. Gayatri C. Spivak, Roma: Meltemi, 2003: 7–22. Garbolevsky, Evgeniya. The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema: 1945–1989. PhD Dissertation. Waltham: Brandeis University, 2011. Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Harris, Tracy K. Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. King, Robert D. “The Paradox of Creativity in Diaspora: The Yiddish Language and Jewish Identity.” Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 1 (2001): 213–229. Lörinczi, Marinella. “Da maggioritario a minoritario, da minoritario a maggioritario. Aspetti linguistici.” Letterature di frontiera. Littératures Frontalières IX (1999): 27–38. Ojeda-Mata, Maite. “The Spanish citizenship and the Sephardim: identity, politics, rights.” Mentalities/Mentalités 2 (2015): 1–22. Ovadia, Moni. “Ogni popolo dovrebbe vivere sulla sua terra.” L’Unità 9 May 2011. Ragaru, Nadège. “Contrasting Destinies: The Plight of Bulgarian Jews and the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Greek and Yugoslav Territories during World War Two”. Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence [online], 15 March 2017. https://www.sciencespo.fr/massviolence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/contrasting-destinies-plight-bulgarianjews-and-jews-bulgarian-occupied-greek-and-yugoslav-.html. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Reiter, Bernd (ed.). Constructing the Pluriverse The Geopolitics of Knowledge. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Sage, Steven F. “The Holocaust in Bulgaria: Rescuing History from ‘Rescue’.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 2 (2017): 139–145. DOI: 10.1080/23256249.2017.1346743. Selvelli, Giustina. “Die Poetik der Beziehung”. Dober tag!: die Grußmaschine: ein Sprachrohr zur besseren Verständigung in Kärnten. Eds. Ulrich Kaufmann and Werner Wintersteiner. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras, 2020: 82–83.

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Selvelli, Giustina. “Identity and multiplicity in Canetti’s and Wagenstein’s birthplaces: exploring the rhizomatic roots of Europe.” Bulgarian Studies Journal 1 (2017): 60–85. Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Wagenstein, Angel. Daleč ot Тоledo (Avram Krčaka). Sofia: Colibrì, 2002. Wagenstein, Angel. Shanghai addio. Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2008. Wagenstein, Angel. I cinque libri di Isacco Blumenfeld. Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2009. Wagenstein, Angel. “Interview [by Ilya U. Topper].” MediterràneoSur, May 2010. http://www. mediterraneosur.es/prensa/wagenstein_angel.html. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Wagenstein, Angel. Predi kraja na sveta: draskulki ot neolita. Sofia: Colibrì, 2011. Wagenstein, Angel. “Interview [with Mihailina Pavlova].” Alef, 2015. alef-bg.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/12/Angel.pdf. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Zekiyan, Boghos L. “L’identité polyvalente dans le témoignage d’un artiste: Sergueï Paradjanov. Reflexions sur le problème de la polyvalence ethnique et culturelle.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 1–3 (1997): 337–347.

Filmography Rebro adamovo (Adam’s Rib). Writ. Anton Marinovich. Dir. Angel Wagenstein. Perf. Emilia Radeva, Georgi Popov, Lubomir Kabakchiyev, and Nikola Popov. Boyana Film, 1956. Sled kraja na sveta (After the end of the world). Writ. Angel Wagenstein. Dir. Ivan Nitchev. Perf. Stefan Danaylov, Katerina Didaskalou, Vasil Mihaylov. BNT, Hellenic Radio & Television, Marathon Films, Meta BM-4 & Saxonia Media Filmproduktion, 1998. Zvezdi/Sterne (Stars). Writ. Angel Wagenstein. Dir. Konrad Wolf. Perf. Sasha Krusharska, Juergen Frohriep, Erik S. Klein, and Stefan Pejchev. Boyana Film & Deutsche Film, 1958.

Dijana Simić (Graz)

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

Abstract:

By drawing on selected concepts of memory studies and Jewish studies, the article examines how Judita Šalgo’s early prose texts Trag kočenja (1987, Skid Marks) and Da li postoji život (1995, Does Life Exist) process aspects of Jewish post-/memory and to what extent her literary works can be considered media of collective memory. Informed by the familial experience of the Shoah, Šalgo’s narrator introduces postmodernist narratives of remembrance in which memory processes are not simply depicted but, rather, initiated. In so doing, Šalgo offers complex fictions of memory that do not answer the question of identity but rather raise it. In December 2017, the Serbian daily newspaper Danas (Today) published an article titled “Judita Šalgo: Zaboravljena pesnikinja” (Judita Šalgo: The Forgotten Poet) to call attention to the Hungarian-Jewish author from Novi Sad (1941–1996), who wrote in Serbian and understood herself as a Yugoslav. In post-Yugoslav Serbia, the scholarly exploration of this forgotten author’s literary work started only in the 2000s. The existing research focuses on auto-referentiality and the relationship between the real and the imaginary in Šalgo’s works,1 questions of identity in general,2 and gender-relevant questions in particular3 as well as aspects of feminist anti-/utopia.4 According to German Slavic studies scholar Eva Kowollik, Šalgo embraces the following (biographically motivated) aspects in her literary and essayistic texts: 1. writing about the experience of the Shoah; 2. women’s writing that is closely related to Šalgo’s neo-avantgardistic poetics; 3. processing the loss of home and identity that accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia (Kowollik 2018: 256).

1 2 3 4

See Beleslijin 2013a; 2013b; 2014; Dražić 2013; Todoreskov 2014. See Dražić 2012; 2015; Gordić-Petković 2007. See Đurić 2015; Gordić 1998; Gordić-Petković 2007; 2016; 2017; Todoreskov 2016. See Kowollik 2018; Lukić 1998; Grujić-Grmuša 1999; Rosić 2006. Other research focusses on war (Bojanić-Ćirković), poetry (Đerić; Pavković 1990) and the novel Put u Birobidžan (The Road to Birobidzhan) (Gordić-Petković 2006; 2007; 2016; Gruić-Grmuša; Ilić; Kowollik 2017; 2018; Lukić; Rosić).

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Referring to Šalgo’s reflections in Jednokratni eseji (2000, One-Time Essays), Kowollik argues that the preoccupation with the “Jewish fate” constitutes one of the essential aspects of Šalgo’s work, even though it is expressed mostly indirectly through doubt, absence, and emptiness (Šalgo 2000: 130 in Kowollik 2018: 256). Silvia Dražić, who has published one of the few monographs on Šalgo, even poses the question of whether her texts could be regarded as Jewish writing (Dražić 2013: 95–96). In Šalgo’s early prose texts, Jewish aspects are primarily depicted through the fragmented post-/memory of the Shoah from the perspective of the children of survivors (or the so-called second generation), to which the author herself belongs. Compared to her posthumously published, unfinished novel Put u Birobidžan (1997, The Road to Birobidzhan), Šalgo’s earlier texts have not been sufficiently examined in existing research in Slavic literary studies. Therefore, the present article focuses on Šalgo’s debut novel Trag kočenja (1987, Skid Marks) and her story collection Da li postoji život (1995, Does Life Exist). On the one hand, it addresses aspects of remembering and forgetting in Šalgo’s work. On the other hand, it aims to revive this forgotten author’s memory in Slavic literary studies by drawing on selected concepts of memory studies and Jewish studies.

Literature and memory The literary scholars Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, who in 2005 published a lucid introduction to literary memory studies in German, define three concepts of memory within literary studies: 1. memory of literature; 2. memory in literature; and 3. literature as a medium of collective memory (Erll and Nünning 2005: 2, Erll and Nünning 2006: 13).5 The last two concepts are particularly fruitful for reading Šalgo’s early prose texts since they focus on how memory is represented within literature and the functions these representations might hold. A focus on memory in literature means investigating the representation of memory in literary texts as mimesis of memory. In this regard, Birgit Neumann describes 5 Due to the necessity of dealing with the responsibility for World War II and the Shoah, the field of memory studies started widely developing in Germany in the 1980s. In a German-language context, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s cultural studies concepts were soon adapted in literary studies by researchers such as Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll, whose works are also available in English translations. In this sense, the edited volume Literature and Memory published in 2006 by Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer gives an introduction to the aforementioned field in English. Erll’s introductory volume Cultural Memory Studies (2008) is also available in English translation. Of particular interest is the chapter on “Literature and Cultural Memory” (Erll 2008: 301–356), with contributions by Renate Lachmann, Herbert Grabes, Max Saunders, Birgit Neumann, and Ann Rigney. The listed publications serve solely as impulses, Nünning, Gymnich, and Sommer offer a more detailed state of the art—see Nünning et al. 1–7.

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

novels that process the correlation between memory and identity in their individual and collective dimensions as “fictions of memory” (Neumann 2005: 164; original emphasis). Characteristically, such fictions of memory are articulated through reminiscing narrators or figures looking back on their pasts (Neumann 2008: 335). As central literary strategies of memory-creation, she mentions aspects of time structure, narrative mediation, and narrative texts’ perspective structure. Representing memory in literature can give voice to previously silenced fictions of memory as so-called counter-memory, which—according to Neumann (2008: 339)—are “challenging the hegemonic memory culture and questioning the socially established boundary between remembering and forgetting”. Literature can, consequently, act as a medium of collective memory, as the third concept suggests. Erll and Nünning first associate it with Aleida Assmann’s reception-oriented idea of the so-called cultural text, locating texts within two different reception frames: reading them either as literary or cultural texts. However, the respective reading does not derive from the textual characteristics themselves but is based on an individual’s or collective’s active decision. Thus, from the corpus of all the literary texts of a community, some texts are selected and elevated to cultural or rather canonical texts, which gives them a special status: they now act as mediators of cultural, national, religious, or other group identities as well as collective values and norms. Erll and Nünning criticize Assmann’s theory as limited exclusively to canonical literature. For this reason, they argue for the equally profound reflection of non-institutionalized memory formation as manifested, for example, in the medium of popular literature (Erll and Nünning 2003: 19–20). In this way, literature becomes a means of cultural change; it can be regarded as “a formative medium within the memory culture” (Neumann 2008: 341). Similarly, the researchers of the Collaborative Research Center on Memory Cultures at the University of Gießen (Germany) have determined different types of so-called remembrance work (“Erinnerungsarbeit”), ranging from the scientific-discursive to the imaginative-fictitious (Erll 2011: 36–39).

Literature and Jewish memory In Jewish tradition, remembrance has played an important role ever since, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted in his book Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory from 1982. The call to remember already recorded in the Hebrew Bible is closely related to the history of salvation. It is of central importance for Jewish self-conception. Until the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), salvation history played an essential role in the identity constitution of Jews. But with the onset of secularization and the acculturation of European Jews to their non-Jewish environment, the discourse of remembrance started to diminish. As Bettina Bannasch and Altmuth Hammer

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(278) argue, the traumatic experience of the Shoah emphasized the necessity of remembering again. Consequently, this new conception of Jewish memory is also reflected in literature.6 In the literature of the first generation of survivors, the experience of the Shoah is seen as the founding event of a Jewish remembrance community.7 Their literary texts claim to provide authentic testimony. Second generation authors as members of what Eva Hoffman has called a postgeneration are characterized by the awareness that their existence is due to the miracle of their parents’ survival. For them, it is not a matter of authenticity but about addressing Jewish aspects of their identity in public. Nonetheless, here, too, the Shoah functions as the founding event of a Jewish community of remembrance. Addressing the second generation’s mediated memories of the Shoah, Marianne Hirsch has introduced the well-adapted concept of postmemory to describe “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” (Hirsch 5). Taking into account Theodor W. Adorno’s famous dictum about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, a focus on the aforementioned transgenerational memory practices opens up not only further questions about the possibility but also the appropriateness of literary procedures to create consistent meaning. In this regard, Bannasch and Hammer consider modernist literature, in particular avantgardistic texts, to be especially useful to express the inexpressible by literary means, since their disrupted poetics can mirror traumatic experiences. In this sense, authors have processed the trauma of World War I in Dadaism and Surrealism (Bannasch and Hammer 291). Consequently, postmodernist poetics after World War II can be regarded as their continuation.8 Based on these considerations, the present article examines how Šalgo’s early prose texts process aspects of Jewish post-/memory and to what extent her literary works can be considered media of collective memory.

6 Summarizing the question of Jewish memory, Bannasch and Hammer cite the biblical, salvationhistorical memory discourse, its weakening during the Haskalah and revival after World War II. 7 Bannasch and Hammer draw attention to the complexity of the subject by also referring to positions that see a focus on the Jewish experience of the Shoah as a continuation of racist attribution. They demand that the Shoah should rather be seen as the founding event of a global, not only a Jewish community of remembrance, in order to prevent the duty to remember from being delegated to the victims exclusively (Bannasch and Hammer 286). 8 After studying literature in Belgrade, Šalgo returned to Novi Sad in 1966 and became a central figure in the local literary and cultural scene until her death in 1996. There, she belonged to the neo-avantgardistic artist group around the cultural institution Tribina mladih (Youth’s Platform) in the 1960s. For further reflection on neo-avantgardistic and postmodernist aspects in Šalgo’s texts, see Dražić 2014: 60–63.

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

“[A] need for justice”: writing Jewish post-/memory, writing a Jewish novel Šalgo’s debut novel Trag kočenja centers around a bookseller and writer, a firstperson narrator who can be understood as the author’s alter ego. Formally, the text consists of three parts: the “pre-novel” (“predroman”), the main section titled “novel” (“roman”), and the “post-novel” (“postroman”). As metatextual, auto-referential frames, the former and latter present the narrator’s intention to write her “first elementary monocellular novel” (Šalgo 1987: 115; “prvi, elementarni, jednoćelijski roman”, Šalgo 1987: 11). But a closer look at its content reveals that it is not as monolithic as professed, since it encompasses three storylines following different sets of characters: 1. a book thief and a policeman; 2. a driver and his companion (referred to as “the girl”, “devojka”); 3. the narrator’s family, in particular her father Aleksandar and sister Vera. As Dražić (2013: 53) points out, the first two stories serve as a test run for the actual novel, represented by the third story as a family chronicle. Due to the explicit reflection of the writing process, Dražić (2013: 19) classifies Trag kočenja as a novel about a novel. In a typically postmodernist manner, the narrator draws attention to the novel’s emergence by taking into account the complex relationship between life and literature: My private and literary life, that is, my life in society and my life in the novel, should not be mutually exclusive but complementary. If, in reality, I have a mother called Jelisaveta, a husband called Zoran, daughters called Ivana and Tamara, in the novel, I will also have a father called Aleksandar, a sister called Vera, a son called Bojan. Those who play the leading roles in my life stand aside in the text. […] Neither do I go into the book to have a better or different life than in reality, much less to double my life. I write out of a need for justice. To create the one who couldn’t be born or extend the life of those from whom it was taken too early.9

In the so-called post-novel, these metatextual reflections are complemented with further information about the mentioned relatives’ deaths: Aleksandar (Šandor) 9 The translations are mine, D. S. The page numbers refer to the text passages in the original publications: “Moj privatni i književni, to jest moj život u društvu i moj život u romanu ne bi trebalo da se međusobno isključuju, već dopunjuju. Ako u stvarnosti imam majku Jelisavetu, muža Zorana, kćeri Ivanu i Tamaru, u romanu ću imati i oca Aleksandra, sestru Veru, sina Bojana. Oni koji u mom životu igraju glavne uloge, u tekstu stoje po strani. […] Ni ja ne ulazim u knjigu da bih živela bolje ili drugačije nego u stvarnosti, još manje da bih udvostručila svoj život. Pišem iz potrebe za pravdom. Da bih stvorila onoga kome nije bilo dato da se rodi, ili da bih produžila život onima kojima je bio pre vremena uzet.” (Šalgo 1987: 20) Understood as some kind of English epilogue to the novel, the short text “Skid Marks” (Šalgo 1987: 115–117) summarizes the novel’s intention and gives a translation of the quoted extract: “I write from a need of justice. To create one to whom it was not given to be born, or to prolong the life of people who were deprived of it too soon.” (Šalgo 1987: 116; original emphasis)

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was burnt in 1942, Vera suffered the same fate two years later in what the narrator calls “hell fire” (“do paklene vatre u kojoj je 1944. nestala Vera”, Šalgo 1987: 112). At this point, only drawing on the author’s biography sufficiently explains the loss of certain family members and why they need to be brought back to life through literature.10 Namely, Šalgo, the author, was born in 1941 as Judita Manhajm in Novi Sad. Her parents, Jewish communists, were deported during World War II: her father Šandor Manhajm to the Hungarian concentration camp Baja, later to the Eastern Front, her mother Jelisaveta Abraham (later Šalgo) to Bergen-Belsen. During this period, Judita lived in Mali Iđoš with a Hungarian woman whom she addressed as her mother. Her father was murdered in 1942. After her birth mother’s return, Judita took over the surname Šalgo from her stepfather. Thus, Šalgo’s writing (as well as her narrator’s) is informed by the familial experience of the Shoah, which—typical for the second generation—seems to be the starting point of her literary reflection. This postgeneration’s awareness of the wonder of their mere existence is reflected in the idea “[t]o create the one who couldn’t be born” as well as in the aim “[of] extend[ing] the life of those from whom it was taken”. By emphasizing the complementarity of autobiographical facts and fictional elements,11 Šalgo’s narrator introduces a complex fiction of memory in which memory processes are not simply depicted, but rather initiated through imagining the absent family members’ possible lives. What Dražić identifies as a lack of memory in Šalgo’s Trag kočenja (“nije reč o sećanju”, Dražić 2013: 53) can, in a more nuanced way, be understood as a postmodernist narrative strategy capable of fostering Jewish postmemory. Furthermore, even though Šalgo is not directly addressing but, rather, only indicating her Jewish family’s experience of the Shoah, all of her characters still share what Dražić calls a Jewish destiny: they are floating and fluctuating. In this respect, Šalgo herself in Radni dnevnik 1967–1996 (2012, Working Diary 1967–1996)—in her entry from May 27th , 1991—even poses the question of whether every Jewish author must write a “Jewish novel” (“jevrejski roman”, Dražić 2013: 95). Only a year later, on December 14th , 1992 she notes that such a novel would solely be a repetition of Trag kočenja, thereby implicitly defining this particular text as a Jewish novel (Beleslijin 2014: 4). In the foreword to Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, Harold Bloom holds that the debate on the correlation of historiography and (collective) memory initiated by Yerushalmi

10 Here it should be noted that in the context of ex-/Yugoslav literatures, the motive of the missing Jewish father is most prominent in Danilo Kiš’s work. 11 Drawing on Šalgo’s reflections about her own literary works in the anthology Hronika (2007, Chronicle), Dražić (2013: 53) shows in her book Stvarni i imaginarni svetovi Judite Šalgo (2013, Judita Šalgo’s Real and Imaginary Worlds) how Šalgo aims at making possible in her text what is not possible in reality.

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

has also raised questions of Jewish writing again: “Is it a definable entity, with characteristics of its own?” (Bloom in Yerushalmi XXII) Bloom rightly states that it is impossible to “decide whether modern Jewish writing possesses common elements without defining the undecidable issue of who is or is not Jewish” (Bloom in Yerushalmi XXII). Therefore, Yerushalmi (XXXIII) himself speaks of “various genres of Jewish literature” in the plural form, which—according to his book’s central argument—need to be distinguished from historical writing. Thus, literary texts written by Jewish authors and/or dealing with Jewish topics belong to the sphere of memory (not historiography) and do not necessarily need to be understood as Jewish literature, but they can be—especially when containing Jewish post-/ memory like Šalgo’s.

“To remind me that I forgot”: on remembering and forgetting In general, the victims’ (and their descendants’) repression of traumatic experiences as well as the perpetrators’ (and their descendants’) unwillingness to confront themselves with—or remember—their past manifest themselves in forgetting. Therefore, processes of forgetting and remembering can be regarded as a double-edged sword. Furthermore, the present discussion becomes more complex when we take into account Šalgo’s view on the correlation between remembrance and oblivion. According to Dražić (2013: 54), Šalgo defines this correlation determinedly, since she does not necessarily see memory as a basis for literature. For her, literature emerges from a refusal to forget and can, therefore, be regarded as compensation for a lack of memory: “kao način da se nadoknadi nedostatak sećanja”. In this sense, memory processes are certainly being negotiated in her literary texts on several levels. For example, the character of the father in Šalgo’s Trag kočenja illustrates the interdependency of remembering and forgetting: My father brought some old books and wanted me to sell them second-hand. […] This ‘chronicle of the arrest and struggle of a patriot from Bačka in the prison of Szeged (1941–1944)’ is some kind of repository of my father’s memories […]. It seems to be the repository of all his memories, including those that have nothing to do with Szeged and the detention: his entire memory. […] I used to view the Chronicle as part of my father’s personality, as an important spare part of him. […] I do not believe he really wanted to sell that book. He tried to get my attention. To remind me that I forgot him. (original emphasis)12

12 “Otac je doneo neke stare knjige i traži da ih prodam, antikvarno. […] Ova ‘hronika o tamnovanju i borbi rodoljuba iz Bačke u Segedinskom zatvoru (1941–1944)’ svojevrsno je skladište očevih sećanja

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Representing memory processes in literature, the mentioned diary of the literary father qualifies as a first-generation survivor’s witness testimony from captivity and thus acts as “repository of all his memories”, “his entire memory”. Even though the narrator (similar to the author) understands the receipt of her father’s chronicle primarily as a demand not to forget, his warning against oblivion simultaneously underlines the need for remembrance, echoing the Hebrew imperative to remember (“zakhor”). In this regard, previously mentioned historian Yerushalmi (1996: 117) even poses the intriguing question, whether it is possible “that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice” (original emphasis) noted in one of the narrator’s previous quotations in which she describes her writing as emerging “out of a need for justice”, as compensation for a lack of memory. Thus, how can such a compensation aiming at creating justice come about, if not via an incentive to remember however fragmented and fragile it might appear? Particularly interesting in the present example is that the reason for commemoration—the murder of Jews in Vojvodina during World War II—is only gradually revealed. Thus, the word “Jew” (“Jevrejin”) is found only once in Šalgo’s Trag kočenja, as mere footnote information on the imprisonment of the narrator’s father: * Manhajm Aleksandar, a civil servant from Novi Sad, a Jew, born in 1911, an associate of the National Liberation Movement, sentenced to 10 months in prison. Brought from the inquiry in Novi Sad on February 24th , 1942, taken for forced labor on October 13th , 1942, to the working unit No. 451.13

As if hidden (or almost forgotten), these aspects of the familial memory of the Shoah are mediated only indirectly through a citation from the literary father’s chronicle in one of the text’s footnotes. Containing biographical, bureaucratic, and political information, the chronicle’s documental style forms part of Šalgo’s postmodernist fiction of postmemory, as I would like to describe her novel drawing on Hirsch’s and Neumann’s previously discussed reflections.

[…]. To je, izgleda, skladište svih njegovih sećanja, pa i onih koji sa Segedinom i tamnovanjem nemaju nikakve veze: čitava njegova memorija. […] Navikla sam da Hroniku gledam kao deo očeve ličnosti, kao njegov važan rezervni deo. […] Ne verujem da je stvarno hteo da proda tu knjigu. Želeo je da privuče moju pažnju. Da me podseti da sam ga zaboravila.” (Šalgo 1987: 33–55; original emphasis) 13 “* Manhajm Aleksandar, činovnik iz Novog Sada, Jevrejin, rođen 1911. godine, suradnik NOP-a, osuđen na 10 meseci tamnice. Doveden sa istrage u Novom Sadu 24. februara 1942. godine, odveden na prisilni rad 13. oktobra 1942. godine u radnu četu broj 451.” (Šalgo 1987: 35)

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

“[I]n the passive form”: telling one’s own story The motivation for writing “out of a need for justice” discussed earlier is further specified through the previously mentioned note. Reflecting on the linguistic portrayal of her father’s biography through “four verbs in the passive form: born, sentenced, brought, taken” (original emphasis),14 Šalgo’s narrator is initiating a discussion about the im-/possibility of the Shoah’s victims’ self-articulation and self-determination. In addition to her father’s deportation, she also describes her mother’s deportation, identifying a desire to tell their story actively against the background of heteronomy manifested in the passive form: Their fate was like mine; and mine was to go to sleep in one bed and wake up the next day in another, to be kissed by my mother in the evening, and to be awakened by another one the following day because mine had already left, was “taken away” and would continue her story if she survives, if she remembers the story, if she can speak, if I can still listen to her. Perhaps that explains my obsessive desire, even forty years later, to tell the story.15

Here, Šalgo’s narrator does not only counter oblivion by giving impulses to remember the Shoah but also calls for self-determination manifested in the ability of telling one’s own story. At the same time, she acknowledges the difficulties of story-telling constrained by the necessity of surviving, remembering, articulating oneself in the face of traumatic experiences, and finding a willing audience. Her “need for justice” is complemented by an “obsessive desire” to tell her parents’ story, who did not have the opportunity to speak for themselves about their deportations. Furthermore, the weighty feelings of “need” and “desire” can be read as a means to reply to the challenges of remembering the Shoah, here still merely depicted through rather unemotional allusions in documental style, hidden in the text’s footnotes and autopoietic chapters. In this sense, Šalgo’s postmodernist fiction of postmemory can be regarded as a complex remembrance text evoking memory processes by reflecting oblivion. In doing so, the novel conducts remembrance work from a postmemorial perspective and, therefore, functions—in the words of

14 “I suppose that he [the father – D. S.], too, observed how the whole note is kept—like on pillars—on four verbs in the passive form: born, sentenced, brought, taken […].” – “Pretpostavljam, naime, da je i on [otac – D. S.] zapazio kako se čitava beleška drži – kao na stubovima – na četiri glagola u pasivu: rođen, osuđen, doveden, odveden […].” (Šalgo 1987: 35; original emphasis) 15 “Njihova je sudbina bila kao i moja; a moja je bila da uveče legnem u jedan krevet, a da probudim se idućeg dana u drugom, da me uveče poljubi moja mama, a da me sutradan ujutru probudi neka druga, jer moja je već otišla, ‘odvedena’, i svoju će priču nastaviti ako preživi, ako se seti priče, ako bude mogla da govori, ako budem još umela da je slušam. Možda otuda moja opsesivna želja, još i četrdeset godina kasnije, da ispričam priču.” (Šalgo 1987: 50–51)

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Erll and Nünning—as a medium of collective memory. Thus, even though Dražić claims that the novel is not about memory (“nije reč o sećanju”, Dražić 2013: 53), it certainly becomes about memory through the postmemorial writing process displayed in the notion of “post-/memory” in the present article.

“And who am I?”: literature, memory, and identity In the story Irena ili o Marini ili o biografiji (Irena, or About Marina, or About Biography)16 in the collection Da li postoji život, the previously described scene is explored in more detail by addressing the replacement of the narrator’s birth mother through a young Hungarian woman. Consequently, the remembrance of this event opens up a reflection on identity: And who am I? Was my identity determined at the moment when, in the spring of 1944, my mother was replaced by another, or the other moment one year later, when, upon liberation, that second mother was replaced by the first? […] Truth is, Miroslav Mandić in his book I Am You Is He […] does not say ‘I am Judita Šalgo’. So then, am I? (original emphasis)17

Assmann, Erll, and Nünning assume that literary texts as media of collective memory are identity-enhancing for the group addressed. But the arithmetic, according to which memory and identity go hand in hand, does not work in the case of Judita Šalgo. Her postmodernist poetics, whose characteristics are fragmentation and pluralism, do not permit such a simplification. Instead of a purely representational medium of collective memory, Šalgo offers a complex narrative of remembrance that does not answer the question of identity but rather raises it. Her narrator realizes: “[E]verything in the world can be replaced: the child’s mother as well as itself.”18

16 Da li postoji život contains intertextual references, like this one to Irena Vrkljan’s (auto-)biography Marina ili o biografiji (1985, Marina, or About Biography) referring to Marina Tsvetaeva. In this collection, all the titles are references to other writers. Only after their titles were chosen, these particular stories were written. 17 “A ko sam ja? Da li je moj identitet određen trenutkom kada je, u proleće 1944 moja mati zamenjena drugom, ili onim, godinu dana kasnijim kada je, po oslobođenju, ta druga mati zamenjena prvom? [...] Istina, Miroslav Mandić u svojoj knjizi Ja sam ti je on nigdje [...] ne kaže ‘Ja sam Judita Šalgo’. Pa onda, jesam li?” (Šalgo 1995: 54; original emphasis) 18 “[S]ve na svetu može da bude zamenjeno: i njegova [detetova – D. S.] mati, i ono samo.” (Šalgo 1995: 52) Partly, Šalgo touches questions of replacement also through the depiction of the imagined lives of her father and sister as literary characters.

Writing Jewish Post-/Memory in Judita Šalgo’s Trag kočenja and Da li postoji život

Conclusion or on starting, continuing, and finishing Admittedly, the selected texts’ subtle preoccupation with the Shoah experience—besides the more obvious aspects of gender relations and the collapse of Yugoslavia not discussed in the present article—only became visible through an informed analysis. Nonetheless, the reference to concepts of memory studies and Jewish studies revealed not only the possibility but—using the narrator’s words—a “need” to situate Šalgo’s postmemorial texts within the context of Jewish memory culture. Thus, if “everything in the world can be replaced”, what is Jewish post-/memory’s function in Judita Šalgo’s early prose texts? Furthermore, could remembrance—as Dragana Beleslijin’s (2014: 4) allusion to Freud suggests—be regarded as a form of recovery? Šalgo’s postmodernist poetics emphasize fragmentation and processuality as a means of dealing with questions of memory and identity through literature. In this regard, Šalgo’s narrator reflects the processual character of writing: “Seriously, how do you tell a story from beginning to end? You just have to start, continue, finish.”19 In this sense, the present article started investigating Jewish post-/memory in Judita Šalgo’s literary work, it just has to be continued.

Works cited Bannasch, Bettina, and Altmuth Hammer. “Jüdisches Gedächtnis und Literatur.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Theoretische Grundlagen und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 2005: 277–296. Beleslijin, Dragana. Modeli stvarnog u kontekstu autoreferencijalnosti poezije i proze Judite Šalgo. Novi Sad: Dissertation, 2013a. Beleslijin, Dragana. “Montaža i demontaža stvarnosti u romanima Judite Šalgo.” Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 61.3 (2013b): 721–738. Beleslijin, Dragana. “Jedno kompletno umetničko delo o smrti. Uz dnevničke beleške Judite Šalgo.” Lamed. List za radoznale 7.5 (2014): 2–9. Bojanić-Ćirković, Mirjana. “Diskurs o ratu u zbirci Da li postoji život Judite Šalgo.” Žene, rat, umjetnost. Zbornik radova sa naučnog simpozijuma. Eds. Dragan Žunić et al. Beograd, Niš: Centar za naučnoistraživački rad SANU, University of Niš, 2015: 39–49. Dražić, Silvia. “Judita Šalgo. Identitet i strategije identifikacija.” Zbornik za jezike i književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta u Novom Sadu 2 (2012): 245–257. Dražić, Silvia. Stvarni i imaginarni svetovi Judite Šalgo. Novi Sad: Futura publikacije, 2013.

19 “Zaista, kako ispričati priču od početka do kraja? Treba samo početi, nastaviti, završiti.” (Šalgo 1987: 50)

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Dražić, Silvia. “About writing the Jewish novel. A little speculation on the examples of Judita Šalgo and Joseph Roth.” Nova misao. Special Edition (2014): 73–77. Dražić, Silvia. “Oprezni identiteti Judite Šalgo.” Moderna ženska proza i društveni kontekst. Eds. Mihajlo Pantić et al. Beograd, Novi Sad: Službeni glasnik, Zavod za kulturu Vojvodine, 2015: 125–132. Đerić, Zoran. “Nad otvorenom knjigom. O poeziji Judite Šalgo.” Pro Femina 9–10 (1997): 111–114. Đurić, Dubravka. “Judita Šalgo. Granice diskursa književnosti.” Pro Femina 9–10 (1997): 115–119. Đurić, Dubravka. “Ženska književnost i žensko autorstvo Judite Šalgo.” Polja 60.493 (2015): 209–211. Đurić, Dubravka. “Prevrednovanje radikalne književne prakse. Slučaj Judite Šalgo.” Beogradski književni časopis 12.42–43 (2016): 138–141. Erll, Astrid. “Literatur als Medium des kollektiven Gedächtnisses.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Theoretische Grundlagen und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 2005: 249–276. Erll, Astrid (ed.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin u. a.: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart et al.: Metzler, 2011. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning: “Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Ein Überblick.” Literatur – Erinnerung – Identität. Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien. Eds. Astrid Erll, Marion Gymnich, and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2003: 3–28. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning. “Literaturwissenschaftliche Konzepte von Gedächtnis. Ein einführender Überblick.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Theoretische Grundlagen und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 2005: 1–10. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning. “Concepts and Methods for the Study of Literature and/as Cultural Memory.” Literature and Memory. Theoretical Paradigms – Genres – Fictions. Eds. Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer. Tübingen: Francke, 2006: 11–28. Gordić, Vladislava. “Judita Šalgo. Priče o t(e)lu.” Reč 5.46 (1998): 114–121. Gordić-Petković, Vladislava. “Glasovi obećane zemlje. Put u Birobidžan Judite Šalgo.” Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 54.2 (2006): 139–143. Gordić-Petković, Vladislava. “Rod, identitet i ženski kontinent. Sazrevanje i transformacija u prozi Sare Voters i Judite Šalgo.” Filološki pregled 34.1 (2007): 61–71. Gordić-Petković, Vladislava. “London i Birobidžan. San o ženskoj slobodi u prozi Sare Voters i Judite Šalgo.” Istraživanja 11 (2016): 159–176. Gordić-Petković, Vladislava. “Transformacija i emancipacija kao relevantni koncepti u prozi Sare Voters i Judite Šalgo.” Žanrovska ukrštanja srpske i anglofone književnosti. Eds. Vladislava Gordić-Petković et al. Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 2017: 99–114.

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Gruić-Grmuša, Lovorka. “‘Njena’ zemlja i zemlja ‘duge’: dvije feminističke utopije.” Fluminensia 11.1–2 (1999): 83–100. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Ilić, Dejan. “O histeričkom mehanizmu Birobidžanskog fenomena.” Reč 46.5 (1998): 104–113. Kowollik, Eva. “Die Reise der Anna O. an ‘das weibliche Ende der Welt’. Empathie als Strategie des Umgangs mit gesellschaftlichen Tabus und der Bewältigung von Traumatisierungen in Judita Šalgos Put u Birobidžan.” Zerreißproben. Trauma – Tabu – EmpathieHürden. Eds. Gabriela Lehmann-Carli et al. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2017: 131–154. Kowollik, Eva. “Vom ‘weiblichen Kontinent’ zum ‘Megagon’. Judita Šalgos Put u Birobidžan und Mirjana Novakovićs Johann’s 501 als feministische (Anti-)Utopien.” Schwimmen gegen den Strom? Diskurse weiblicher Autorschaft im postjugoslawischen Kontext. Eds. Angela Richter, Tijana Matijević, and Eva Kowollik. Berlin: LIT, 2018: 251–272. Lukić, Jasmina. “Birobidžan kao ženska utopija.” Reč 46.5 (1998): 93–97. Malbaški-Pupovac, Vesna. “Glas Judite Šalgo.” Philologia Mediana 3.3 (2011): 159–163. Neumann, Birgit. “Literatur, Erinnerung, Identität.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Theoretische Grundlagen und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 2005: 149–178. Neumann, Birgit. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll. Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 2008: 333–344. Nünning, Ansgar, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer (eds.). Literature and Memory. Theoretical Paradigms – Genres – Fictions. Tübingen: Francke, 2006. Pavković, Vasa. “Zadovoljstvo u senci. O pesničkim knjigama Judite Šalgo.” Letopis Matice srpske 166.445–446.2 (1990): 289–296. Pavković, Vasa. “Beleške o prozi Judite Šalgo.” Kvartal 5 (2006): 32–36. R., A. “Judita Šalgo: Zaboravljena pesnikinja.” Danas 7 Dec. 2017. Rešin Tucić, Vujica. “Judita Šalgo – devojčica postupaka. O knjizi priča pisanih po tuđim naslovima.” Natron 2.3 (2003): 6. Rosić, Tatjana. “Autopoetika kao antiutopija. Motiv ‘nove zemlje’ u romanima Vojislava Despotova i Judite Šalgo.” Sarajevske sveske 13 (2006): 265–289. Šalgo, Judita. Trag kočenja. Novi Sad: Književna zajednica Novog Sada, 1987. Šalgo, Judita. Da li postoji život. Beograd: Vreme knjige, 1995. Šalgo, Judita. Jednokratni eseji. Beograd: Stubovi kulture, 2000. Šalgo, Judita. Hronika. Novi Sad: Studentski kulturni centar, 2007. Todoreskov, Dragana. Tragom kočenja. Prisvajanje, preodevanje i raslojavanje stvarnosti u poetici Judite Šalgo. Novi Sad: Zavod za kulturu Vojvodine, 2014. Todoreskov, Dragana. “Žena koja nestaje. Vidovi ispoljavanja ženske seksualnosti u prozi Judite Šalgo.” Izazovi identiteta. Rod između kreacije i tradicije. Eds. Aleksandra Đurić Bosnić. Beograd, Novi Sad: Cakum-pakum, Centar za interkulturnu komunikaciju, 2016: 9–34.

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Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 1996.

Goran Lazičić (Graz)

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia1 The Case of David Albahari’s Novel Leeches

Abstract:

The paper focuses on the novel Pijavice (2005; Leeches, 2011) by the contemporary Serbian-Jewish author David Albahari. The plot of the novel takes place in Belgrade in the late 1990s and depicts the final phase of Slobodan Milošević’s rule. The analysis focuses on intertextual connections between the novel and the Kabbalistic traditions, i.e., on the author’s diverse narrative approaches and modes of referring to this mystical heritage (irony, parody, fantastic features, etc.), but also on the question of how this postmodern narrative adaptation of Jewish tradition goes along with the social and ideological literary subversion in a post-Yugoslav context.

Postmodernism meets Far East esotericism and Jewish mysticism The spirituality and esotericism originating in the religions and philosophy of the Far East, important influences on the Beat poets, were also intriguing and inspiring for American postmodernists, primarily as plausible potential counter-cultural narrative patterns during the 1960s (Freer 14–39; Šuvaković 55–57). This line of cultural influence can be traced in the works of the contemporary Serbian-Jewish author David Albahari (b. 1948), who has been publishing short fiction and novels in Serbian since the early 1970s, primarily under the influence of Anglophone postmodern literature. As a writer, editor, translator, and anthologist, he was one of the pioneering figures of Yugoslav and Serbian literary postmodernism.2 In the 1980s, Albahari was active on the editorial board of the Belgrade magazine Kulture Istoka (Cultures of the East). During that time, he translated, often in cooperation with Mirko Gaspari, several books and many texts on Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Kabbalah.3 As he later points out, he came to the 1 Research for this article was generously funded by a DOC-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 2 David Albahari has been living in Canada since the early 1990s, and in recent years he has lived between Belgrade and Calgary. 3 The list includes, among others, the monograph Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki, Gary Snyder’s essays on ecology and Zen Buddhism in the context of the Beat movement, as well as Norman Brown’s book

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philosophy and mysticism of the Far East indirectly, through rock’n’roll and the hippie movement.4 These different philosophical and spiritual traditions will have an evident, though often parodied and sometimes only indirect echo in Albahari’s fiction. The most notable example is the novel Pijavice (2005, Leeches), where the Kabbalah tradition is primarily used as a cultural foil for the politically subversive aspects of the narrative. In the analysis that follows the focus will lie, firstly, on the motifs and symbolical aspects of the Kabbalistic traditions in the novel; secondly, on the author’s diverse narrative approaches and modes of referring to the Kabbalah heritage: intertextuality, irony, parody, fantastic features, etc.; and, thirdly, on the question of how this postmodern narrative adaptation of Jewish tradition goes along with socially and ideologically subversive literary engagement in a post-Yugoslav context.

From the neglecting to the retelling of history Until the beginning of the 1990s, Albahari’s fiction was, as one critic put it, predominantly “ahistorical” and “phlegmatic” in terms of its political and ideological interest (see Brajović 76–93), or in other words, it was characterized by a somewhat “neglecting attitude towards history” (“eine Verweigerungshaltung an Geschichte”, Richter 272). In the “Preface” of his two-volume anthology of the contemporary short story (publ. 1982), Albahari himself declared his preferences towards “ideologically unencumbered literature” (“ideološki neopterećena književnost”; Albahari 1982/I: 12). After emigrating to Canada in 1994, the author published two novels, Snežni čovek (Man of Snow, 1995) and Mamac (Bait, 1996), focused primarily on his personal experiences of exile, alongside dealing with the traumatic events from his family heritage. By now, these two novels belong to the canonical works of post-Yugoslav exilic literature. In the works published afterwards, however, Albahari shifted his interest to topics concerning the ex-Yugoslav and Serbian socio-historical, political,

Love’s Body, an esoteric mixture of psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism. For the journal Kulture Istoka, Albahari translated, for instance, the essay “Gilgul”, authored by one of the most prominent Kabbalah scholars in the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem. For the thematic issue on Kabbalah of the Belgrade student magazine Vidici, Albahari translated an excerpt “Torah and Kabbalah” from Leo Schaya’s study The Universal Meaning of Kabbalah, see Asić 9–12. 4 The author himself once noted: “My interest in the Eastern thought originated from my interest in the contemporary pop and rock culture. The Far East was one of the signposts for the beats, hippies, and anyone who, especially in the 1960s, wanted to change the world. I was soon attracted to Zen Buddhism and in the following years I dedicated myself to it with sincere amateur devotion.” (Albahari 2010: 40; if not noted otherwise, all translations are mine.)

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

and cultural reality. The novels—which he himself labels as “retelling of history” (Albahari 2010: 20)—are Mrak (Darkness, 1997) and Leeches, the latter of which being the focus of this paper. The unnamed first-person narrator and the novel’s main protagonist is a lonely Belgrade journalist and literary translator. One day in the spring of 1998, during his everyday walk along the Danube River, he observes a young woman being slapped by a young man. The narrator has the impression that the event was staged for him, consequently triggering his paranoia. Soon afterward he receives a manuscript about the history of Jews in Zemun, a historical border-district of Belgrade. Although not Jewish himself, he establishes close contacts with a group of Jewish intellectuals. Finally, he finds the slapped girl, Margareta, only to discover that he was purposely chosen by a secret (counter-)conspiratorial society to which she belongs in order to participate in a Kabbalah-inspired experiment intended to save Serbian Jews, as well as the Serbian society in general, from the war and social hopelessness. However, after publishing a series of subversive political columns, the narrator receives numerous death threats from far-right, antisemitic organizations and finally leaves the country, which is attacked by NATO shortly thereafter in the spring of 1999. The narrative takes the form of the protagonist’s retrospective confession, handwritten in exile six years after the portrayed events took place.

Kabbalah patchwork With the principal meaning of “tradition”, where the emphasis lies particularly on “reception”, the term Kabbalah is a common signifier for the Jewish mystical esoteric teachings, primarily regarding religious questions and theosophy. In general, Kabbalah remains within the framework of Judaism, but its main philosophical tendencies can be related to Gnosticism and Neoplatonism (see Bloom 15–22). Gershom Scholem (1946) distinguishes three historical periods in the development of Kabbalah: the first began in late Antiquity and lasted until the tenth century, with its esoteric teachings focusing primarily on the throne-mysticism and the images of God as Holy King; the classical period of Kabbalah came in the late Middle Ages and was marked by the seminal written document of the Kabbalah heritage, Zohar; modern Kabbalah began after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, its main personality was Isaac Luria of Safed in Palestine (sixteenth century), and later important movements were Sabbatianism (seventeenth century) and Hasidism (eighteenth century), with the latter of which—in Scholem’s words—marking the transformation of Kabbalism into a popular movement. By the twentieth century, Kabbalah had found its way as an inspiration or intertextual source in art and literature, most notably by Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.

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The acquisition of the manuscript entitled Bunar (The Well), which contains various references to the heritage of Kabbalah, marks the point in the plot of Albahari’s novel after which for the protagonists there is no return from the (counter-) conspiratorial “trap” made for him. The manuscript itself is a strange, hybrid text: It started off as an historical narrative, then turned into a history of dreams, followed by a collection of Kabbalistic exercises, furnished with an assortment of lists of people and events and material expenditures, books and artwork and porcelain bowls, and the lists were followed by verses, anecdotes, and dramatic dialogues, supplemented by a brief epilogue and, at the end, a detailed index which, I later established, had little to do with the manuscript itself. (Albahari 2011: 34)5

Reading the manuscript, the narrator discovers the history of Belgrade Jews since the mid-eighteenth century, the time when they settled in Zemun, on the northern bank of the Danube, which at the time was a border zone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The manuscript has some fantastic features, as the protagonist notices that the text constantly undergoes significant transformations and that the same thing cannot be read twice on the same page. Later he learns more about the manuscript from Margareta: The Belgrade Hebrew scholar Eugen Verber6 first elaborated on the notion of the manuscript as a living organism, which, as I just said, said Margareta, the interpreters and translators had already ascertained. According to Verber, the author of the manuscript had based the text on the Kabbalistic technique of bringing to life nonliving matter, hence on the technique of creating a golem, which had been modified in such a way that the text itself came alive, was designed to be self-sustaining, but also not physically mobile. In other words, the manuscript was not a bizarre ambulatory creature, but it did possess the capability of re-fashioning itself, as if it were searching for the most apt structure for its meaning. Verber was also the first to note that the manuscript can propel itself forward,

5 “Počinjao je kao istorijska hronika, zatim se pretvarao u povest o snovima, potom je sledila zbirka kabalističkih vežbi, koje su pratili razni spiskovi, ljudi i predmeta, događaja i materijalnih troškova, knjiga i slika i porcelanskih činija, a posle njih gomilale su se pesme, anegdote i dramski dijalozi, dopunjeni kratkim pogovorom i, na samom kraju, detaljnim indeksom koji, utvrdio sam to tek kasnije, nije imao skoro nikakve veze sa samim rukopisom.” (Albahari 2005b: 35) 6 This is an example of Albahari’s narrative strategy of incorporating real existing people into his fiction. Eugen Verber (1923–1995) was a prominent Serbian-Jewish Hebrew-scholar and translator, but also a well-known theatre and television actor in the socialist Yugoslavia. His notable works are The Sarajevo Haggadah (1983) and Introduction to the Jewish Religion (1993). He authored an abridged and commented Serbo-Croatian translation of Talmud (1982), as well as the Serbian translation of Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1981).

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

Margareta said, like a sort of virus: if a complete fragment of the manuscript were to be introduced to any other text, in any other language, that text, too, would begin to behave in the same way, in other words, it, too, would be alive. This is the way the manuscript which was in my apartment had originated, she told me. Actually, fragments of The Well were introduced to the material about the Zemun Jews, and, as I had seen for myself, she said, the manuscript was still seeking its final form. (Albahari 2011: 230–231)7

Margareta compares the manuscript with a computer program, since it can be repeatedly copied and installed and is highly adaptable to various new contexts and circumstances (Albahari 2005b: 215). In other words, it could be described as a hypertext. In this regard, the protagonist points to his extensive studies of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes (or I Ching), the script which could be seen as a prototype of a hypertext (Albahari 2005b: 142–143, 200–201).8 Moreover, the extraordinary manuscript could also be related to Borges’ The Book of Sand (1975), as the protagonist himself believes (Albahari 2005b: 35). However, the manuscript is chiefly a reference to the Zohar (Sefer ha-Zohar, “The Book of Splendor”), the main document of Kabbalistic tradition, focusing on the doctrine of the ten Sefirot, as ten complex allegorical images and emanations of God. According to Scholem (1946: 156–204), the bulk of the scripture was written between 1281 and 1286 by Moses de Leon in Guadalajara. Scholem himself already suggests the possibility of reading the book as a “mystical novel” (157). For the literary imagination of the twentieth century, Zohar is primarily attractive because of its generative heterogeneity and its open, unconcluded structure. As literary critic Harold Bloom points out, Zohar is “a unique book in that it is impossible to say what a complete version of it would be. The book (if it is a book) varies from manuscript to manuscript and seems more a collection of books or a small library than what ordinarily we would describe as a self-contained work” (Bloom 24).

7 “Beogradski hebraista Eugen Verber je prvi detaljno razradio ideju o rukopisu kao živom organizmu, koja je, kako sam malopre pomenula, rekla je Margareta, već bila prisutna među tumačima i prevodiocima. Prema Verberu, autor rukopisa je spis zasnovao na kabalističkoj tehnici oživljavanja nežive materije, dakle, na tehnici stvaranja golema, koja je modifikovana tako da oživi sam tekst, da ga načini samoodržavajućim, ali ne i fizički pokretnim. Drugim rečima, rukopis nije bio neki čudan stvor koji hoda, ali je posedovao sposobnost vlastitog preoblikovanja, kao da sam traga za najboljim rešenjem svoje strukture i samog smisla teksta. Verber je takođe prvi primetio da rukopis može, da tako kažem, rekla je Margareta, da se prenosi dalje, kao neki virus: ukoliko bi se jedan celovit fragment rukopisa uneo u bilo koji drugi tekst, na bilo kom jeziku, i taj tekst bi počeo da se ponaša na isti način, dakle, da bude živ. Tako je nastao rukopis koji se nalazio u mom stanu, rekla je, odnosno, u građu o zemunskim Jevrejima uneti su fragmenti Bunara i, kao što sam mogao da se uverim, rekla je, rukopis i dalje traga za svojim konačnim oblikom.” (Albahari 2005b: 214–215) 8 David Albahari has published two translations of I Ching (1980 and 1982), with the latter, based on John Blofeld’s edition of the scripture, becoming a bestseller in Yugoslavia in the 1980s.

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Regarding Albahari’s figuration of the Kabbalistic manuscript in Leeches, Scholem’s insight (1946: 14) that the Torah was by the Kabbalists conceived of as a living organism, with a multitude of secret meanings hidden beneath the literal meaning of the text is also important. The motif of a golem is one of the most frequently recurring themes in Jewish mysticism, especially when it comes to the magical aspirations of Kabbalah. One of the most famous of its versions dates to the sixteenth century and tells the story about Rabbi Loew’s creation of a golem with the purpose of defending the Prague ghetto from antisemitic pogroms. In Leeches, the motif of creating a golem with the intention to save a threatened community occurs in an unusual transformation: Just before their decisive, Kabbalah-inspired action, the supporters of the counterconspirators form ritual incantation letters out of their own bodies (Albahari 2005b: 90–92, 159, 221).9 One could argue that such a reworking of the golem narrative rests on the metaphorical insight into the fact that human lives in Serbia in the 1990s were worthless, that human bodies had the status of inanimate matter used as consumables in the nation-building process or as cannon fodder in the war. The counter-conspiracy is also based on the Kabbalistic tales of reincarnation. Gilgul neshamot, the cycle of souls, is one of the distinctive teachings of Kabbalah; in most of the interpretations, however, the migration of a male Jewish soul into the body of a woman or gentile is not possible (Šolem 34). In his novel Albahari is going exactly in this transgressive direction. Two characters that particularly attract the protagonist’s attention during his reading of the Kabbalistic manuscript are Eleazar, a mystic and teacher, and Volf Enoch, a water carrier and leech merchant.10 Gradually, the narrator begins to identify himself with these characters (Albahari 2005b: 50–53, 95, 151). While reading about Volf Enoch he feels, in his own words, that “something moved in me, came unstuck inside my skin” (2011: 201; “nešto se pomerilo u meni, odlepilo se iznutra od moje kože” – 2005b: 186). The identity transformation of the protagonist could be related to a special form of gilgul, called ibur, the case when reincarnation does not take place at the birth of a man but at a certain point in his life (Šolem 34–35). Nevertheless, the narrator is said by the conspirators to have been selected for the experiment precisely because they were strongly convinced that the soul of the Kabbalist Eleazar was now within him (Albahari 2005b: 220–225).

9 Unconventional use or even metaphorical transformations of the term golem exist already in some original manuscripts of the Kabbalistic tradition, see Idel 242–246, 285–313. 10 Both lived in Zemun in the mid-eighteenth century, and, although this remains unclear, some of the information in the manuscript suggests that it was actually the same person, who, for pragmatic reasons, used two different names or perhaps even two different identities (Albahari 2005b: 68–69, 101, 154–156).

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

The Kabbalistic tradition also includes the motif of obsession or possession with an evil spirit, called dibuk (Šolem 35). This would be a plausible way of interpreting the character of Marko, the protagonist’s best friend who turns out to be a collaborator of the opposing far-right extremists. Marko’s character could be therefore seen not only as the dark, diabolical side of the narrator’s personality11 , but in the terms of the Kabbalah, as an evil spirit that “clung” to the protagonist’s soul. A ritual sexual act between Margareta and the narrator, planned to be the climax of the action with the aim of enforcing political and social change in Serbia (233–234), is based on a Kabbalistic adaptation of the myth of reunion of the masculine and feminine divine principles, whose separation was caused by human sin (Scholem 1969: 108). In this regard, one could conclude that the adaptation and transformation of the Kabbalah motifs in Albahari’s novel turn out to be first and foremost a question of a text, which in this case means a postmodern reception and interpretation of texts. French sociologist Luc Boltanski argues that, when it comes to the structural and epistemological level of their investigative quest, a detective character in crime fiction, a clinical paranoid, and a social scientist are all dedicated to similar studies of their respective social realities: they strive to solve a problem or a mystery they are confronted with, and try to expose the deeper, (supposedly) hidden true reality that lies behind the superficial, visible one (Boltanski 75).12 The character of Albahari’s protagonist includes all three mentioned roles and habitus: he is simultaneously a detective, a paranoiac and a sociologist (since in his newspaper columns he is dealing with the vital social topics and controversies and is, generally, a man of letters). Typically for the postmodern genre of metaphysical detection, the focus of the investigation in Leeches is on the textual sources, and it also partly shifts into the realm of literary and mystical fantasy (see Merivale and Sweeney). Both the protagonist’s readings of the Kabbalistic manuscript and his writing of the columns are forms of his textual investigations, but at the same time they have a decisive performative effect on the plot of the novel. The final result of such textual research is constantly elusive; every fact turns out only to open new questions about textual sources. The Kabbalistic manuscript achieves in the novel the same postmodern ironic epistemological effect associated

11 The relation between the protagonist and Marko could be interpreted as a reworking of the motif of a pact with the devil, which—besides the name of the main female character—further underlines a potential link between Leeches and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, see Kowollik 256–257. 12 The crucial difference is that a detective and a sociologist are being considered by the society as mentally healthy, and are nevertheless mostly appointed by the state to conduct their investigations (Boltanski 45–46).

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with fantastic elements.13 As literary critic Tatjana Rosić put it, the history of Belgrade, and especially the history of Zemun Jews, functions semantically as a palimpsest, given that its meanings cannot be definitively deciphered (Rosić 134). At the time of writing down his confession, the main dilemma of the protagonist lies in the question of what has actually happened during the Kabbalistic experiment (Albahari 2005b: 250–259). By the end of the novel, the protagonist remains, and the readers alongside him, without a definitive answer regarding what the final result of the counter-conspiratorial action is and even whether it actually took place or not. Kabbalah as a pretext in this case serves as a sort of freely interpreted intertextual source, and as a subverted, (anti-)structuring principle of the text, where the fantastic elements essentially do not differ from other aspects or causes of disabled, transformed, or transfigured perceptions of the world (arising from misuse of drugs and alcohol, existential uncertainty, traumatized memory, etc.).14 Albahari’s fictional treatment of the Kabbalistic tradition is primarily to be understood as a playful intertextual borrowing, as an example of a postmodern rhizomatic textual patchwork. For the narrator Kabbalah is a sort of cultural terra incognita into which he was first lured against his will and which ultimately is a symbolic expression of his existential insecurity and the lack of effective political agency in the society around him.

Jewish identity: between the personal and the political When it comes to the question of Albahari’s personal Jewish identity it must be mentioned that his father was Jewish, and his mother was of Serbian origin from

13 In his novel Hodočasnici neba i zemlje (1995, Pilgrims of the Heaven and the Earth), a contemporary Serbian-Jewish author of an older generation, Filip David (b. 1940), besides drawing extensively on the Kabbalistic heritage, uses the history of persecution of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century as a foil for the contemporary context of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. The narrator’s worldview in David’s novel is hence decisively determined by the Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah (Hansen-Kokoruš 242–243 and 248–249). An opposite manner of referring to Kabbalah, and more similar to the one in Leeches, could be found in the works of Svetislav Basara, a postmodernist Serbian author belonging to the same generation as Albahari, in such works, for instance, as his early novel Fama o biciklistima (The Cyclist Conspiracy, 1988), where the Golem motif is primarily used for mocking and comical purposes within the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction (Basara 173–174). 14 Metaphorically speaking, the text of the novel, i.e., of the narrator’s retrospective confession, functions itself as a golem: it is formed at the crossroads of realism and the fantastic, memory and trauma, mysticism and mathematics, between descriptive and performative language, critical and escapist response to the political and social circumstances, see Despić.

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

Bosnia and converted to Judaism when she married her first husband, who perished in the Holocaust. Albahari grew up in a secular Jewish family in the open, multicultural climate of socialist Yugoslavia. He describes his first trip with his family to Israel in 1961, as a thirteen-year-old, as one of the key events of his upbringing. Another crucial event was his trip to England in the summer of 1966 after graduation from high school, when he came into immediate contact with British rock ’n’ roll culture, which at the time was at its peak (Albahari 2010: 14–18). He concludes about that transformative experience: “The spirit of Jewishness and the rhythm of the Rock ’n’ Roll influenced everything I later did, spoke or wrote.” (Albahari 2005a: 25) As he states in an interview, identity is primarily a matter of choice, as for him Jewishness is also a matter of choice, especially when it comes to modern secular Jewish identity.15 Albahari, on the other hand, emphasizes that the identity of an individual is not so seldom imposed by others or it often represents the way in which an individual is—most often negatively—determined and disclosed by the others. (Pantić 11) Although inclined to de-essentializing collective identities as such, Albahari defined himself from the beginning of his literary career, first as a Yugoslav-Jewish, then as a Serbian-Jewish writer (Albahari 2010: 104–106). Since the beginning of the civil war and the disintegration of the supranational Yugoslav identity, however, his Jewish self-consciousness has become increasingly distinctive.16 The protagonist in Leeches can be interpreted as the archetypical figure of the outcast artist—but also as an allegorical figure of an intellectual opponent and political dissident in 1990s Serbia who is eventually physically removed from his city and exiled from his nation.17 This is important in order to properly understand the transformation of the character from his “original” non-Jewish identity prior 15 The notion of mimicry, referring to the process or result of imitation and assimilation, is important for Albahari who uses it both in the context concerning the construction of collective, most notably Jewish, identities (Albahari 2004: 70), but also in order to describe, from his perspective, one of the key narrative strategies of postmodern fiction (Albahari 1982/I: 7). 16 From the beginning of the 1990s until he emigrated to Canada, he was the chairperson of the Federation of Jewish Communes of Yugoslavia. His engagement in this position intensified especially in 1992 when the Bosnian war started and the evacuation of the Jewish population became an urgent priority (Pantić 10–11). The process is likewise reflected in his literary activities, as he started and edited the magazine for Jewish literature Mezuza (three issues in total: 1993–1994, 1998) as well as editing the Anthology of Jewish Prose Fiction (Antologija jevrejskih pripovedača, Belgrade, 1998). In 1983 Albahari edited the thematic issue “Contemporary Israeli Literature” for the Belgrade literary magazine Književna reč (no. 214–216), which then coincided with the suspension of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and Israel. 17 In one interview, Albahari highlights the similarity between the social status and the symbolic meaning of the figures of a Jew and an artist: “A Jew is primarily an exile, and an artist is by his nature an exile, and perhaps that sign of equality that can be put between them is what attracts me to both of them.” (Pantić 11) In this regard, in one of his essays he quotes a famous verse of the

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to being drawn into the counter-plot, toward a fluid Jewish identity which in the course of the novel is fantastically and symbolically portrayed by invoking the Kabbalistic motif of cycling souls and reincarnation. By examining Albahari’s views on the notion and status of Jewish literature within the hegemonial context of other national literatures as formulated in some of his essays, and emphasizing that in this sort of generalizations there is always a risk of becoming arbitrary, Matthias Meindl points out that “what is special about Jewish literature—its minority status—is generalizable” (“das Besondere an der jüdischen Literatur, ihre Minorität, [ist] verallgemeinerbar“, Meindl 270). This hypothetical insight, transferred to the status of Jewish identity itself, perfectly detects the function and ethical meaning of the narrator’s identity transformation in Albahari’s novel. His appropriation of Jewish identity is first and foremost a sign of political solidarity with the persecuted minority group, which is in this case primarily to be understood as a political statement and ideological intention, and only then ethnically or religiously determined.

The subversive meaning of the novel In order to understand and examine the various ways and possibilities of the literary treatment or fictional references to the Kabbalah, one has to bear in mind not only the fact that this spiritual tradition itself does not historically belong to mainstream Jewish philosophy, but also holds a genuinely subversive position and meaning within this religious and intellectual heritage. For instance, gilgul, the belief in the cycling of souls and reincarnation—one of the crucial motifs in Leeches—is one of the most important concepts and narratives in Kabbalah, while mainstream Jewish philosophy rejects it (Šolem 33). The secrecy of Kabbalah is historically twofold: firstly, its focusing on the hidden meanings of religious dogmas as well as on the concealed aspects of human life; and secondly, its esoteric, almost sectarian manner of transmitting its teachings within a small elite of adepts. As a secret doctrine, it historically developed essentially as a sort of counterpoint to classical Rabbinical literature, and later in opposition to Jewish philosophical Enlightenment and Rationalism as such (Scholem 1946: 18–25). What is crucial, however, is the reception and status of Kabbalah within Jewish studies in the nineteenth century when it is being suppressed as a mystical and irrational tradition (Biale 13–32).18 This context behind Scholem’s studies of Kabbalah, which Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva from “Poem of the End” (1924): “In this most Christian of worlds all poets – are Jews.” (Albahari 2004: 83) 18 As David Biale points out, Kabbalah could be indirectly seen as a platform that served Gershom Scholem to maintain his “rebellious and individualistic” intellectual attitude regarding the dogma-

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

Biale calls “Counter-History”, could be transferred to the interpretation of Albahari’s novel, where the literary re-actualization of this cultural heritage is used primarily as a platform for an attempt to take an oppositional, subversive ideological and political position within a given socio-historical context. One could in this respect argue that Leeches belongs to the subversive line of contemporary Serbian literature, one with an unequivocal political potential, which could be linked to the concept of minor literature by Deleuze and Guattari (24–39). In this case the minor language designates in fact the worldview, as well as the moral values, of political and ideological outsiders, of those who are opposing the hegemony and the language of nationalist collective hysteria. At the heart of Albahari’s novel is how, in the Serbian socio-political context of the 1990s, to find and adopt the position of a subversive minority, a position which would possess a potential of rebellion and which could effectively oppose the dominant narratives of a conservative, nationalist retrotopia, or, to follow Deleuze and Guattari, the novels are based on the literary and intellectual effort to find or create a minoritarian language that would be able, in the particular circumstances, to produce and to disseminate ideological, political and literary subversion. In Leeches, Serbia during the 1990s is portrayed as a country “in exile”; as a society that has been isolated from the rest of the world. The narrator stresses the fact that “the country was in a state of collapse, threats of bombardment hung in the air like overripe fruit, people were snapping apart as if they had been made of Lego blocks, lunacy had nearly been declared the norm” (Albahari 2011: 79).19 In the spring of 1998, when the plot in the novel takes place, the last phase of Milošević’s regime began, with the Kosovo crisis reaching its peak, leading to the NATO bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. The schizoid atmosphere in society at the time is perfectly caught and reflected in the novel. In their nationalist and antisemitic social environment, Albahari’s counterconspirators are to be understood as a resistance and an emancipatory formation; they are politically uninfluential and belong to an oppressed social group. Their action is not a classic conspiracy, because—from a universal, humanist point of view—it is not harmful or morally bad, but just the opposite, with a clear subversive and emancipatory potential. The state in Albahari’s novel is by no means a rational authority that ensures ethical order within the society. Moreover, the state

tization of the Jewish cultural and religious heritage, characteristic primarily of rationalist and objectivist German-Jewish philosophy and humanities of the nineteenth century. With its inclination toward intuition and irrationalism, Kabbalah corresponded with Scholem’s nonconformism and anarchist impulses in regard to the dominant normative culture around him (Biale 1–12). 19 “[Z]emlja je u raspadu, pretnje bombardovanjem vise u vazduhu kao prezrelo voće, ljudi se lome kao da su napravljeni od lego kocki, ludilo tek što nije proglašeno za normalno stanje.” (Albahari 2005b: 79)

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(Milošević’s Serbia) and the (Serbian Orthodox) Church are depicted as the power structures that are thoroughly corrupted and intertwined with organized crime. Supported by the state apparatus, most of all by the secret police, many ultranationalist and racist organizations—satirically named as “Patriotic Army of Unity and Salvation” (“Rodoljubiva vojska jedinstva i spasa”), with their factions “Salvation for All”, “The Patriots” and “The Eagle Avengers” (“Spas za sve”, “Rodoljubi”, “Orlovi osvetnici” – Albahari 2005b: 224)—are operating in society. These organizations are described as “the forces of darkness” (“zagovornici mraka”; Albahari 2005b: 188), and they are producing and disseminating various conspiracy theories, such as those about the conspiracy of the Western world against Serbia, as well as many other victim narratives according to which Serbia is caught “in the claws of an international Zionist conspiracy” (“u kandžama međunarodne cionističke zavere”; Albahari 2005b: 60). Literary critic Davor Beganović emphasizes that the novel presents a society divided into positive and negative conspiracies, the good and evil conspirators. The key question in this regard posed by Leeches is: “Is there a benign conspiracy, a conspiracy that could lead to something that is ultimately good?” (Beganović 361).20 On the one hand, conspiracy means emancipation and revolution, and on the other, there is one dominant and despotic ideological system based on various victimization narratives and conspiracy theories. Matthias Meindl interprets Leeches as based on a thematic limitation of the conspiratorial plot, and on narrowing and diminution of its scale. In this sense he sees it as an example of an “understated counter-narrative” (“unterbietender Gegenentwurf ”), unlike the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin whose Ice Trilogy (Ledyanaya trilogiya, 2002–2005) is characterized by the augmentation and globalization of the conspiratorial and paranoid imagination, which Meindl therefore observes as an example of an “overstated reconstruction“ (“überbietender Nachvollzug”; Meindl 250) The critic stresses that Albahari’s attitude towards conspiracy theories and paranoid narrative imagination is both productive and subversive: the writer uses matrices of such poetics to develop his story, but also persistently questions and deconstructs them. This is recognizable firstly on the structural level of the text, primarily considering the narrator’s subsequent rationalization of his own paranoia at the time when the plot takes place. Secondly, the ambiguous perspective on the phenomena of paranoia and conspiracy theories in the novel becomes obvious in the parallel development of two diametrically different conspiracy narratives

20 In the theoretical framework of his interpretation, Beganović seeks to integrate Reinhart Koselleck’s theses on philosophers of Enlightenment as “conspirators” against the absolutist state (from Critique and Crisis) with Wolfgang Wippermann’s more “conventional” explanation of the conspiracy theories as consequences of social crisis (from The Agents of Evil).

Kabbalah Revisited in Milošević’s Serbia

carried out by two opposing socio-political movements. In this respect, and especially with the novel Leeches, Albahari continues the intellectual tradition of Danilo Kiš and his views on Jewish history as a “historical paradigm”, or, with respect to antisemitism, as a “worldview”, a line that could be primarily linked to Sartre’s argumentation in the essay “Réflexions sur la question juive”.21 Motifs and symbols from Kabbalah can thus be interpreted as protagonists’ actively defensive strategy of searching for a structuring pattern to keep the distorted and disintegrating world around them together. But Kabbalistic motifs also—and more importantly—generalize the positions of majority and minority, as well the roles of perpetrators and victims in the novel, as in that way the ethical meaning of the plot obtains a broader, universalizing scale that is not exclusively contained within and determined by the socio-historical reality of Serbia in the late 1990s. Although the history of Belgrade’s Jews, characterized by oppression and expulsion, takes a central stage in Albahari’s novel, the topic of antisemitism in Leeches is rather to be understood as an historical paradigm and literary allegory, i.e., as a narrative universalization of the xenophobia and extreme nationalism in the society. While writing Leeches, David Albahari published an essay collection entitled Teret (Burden) dealing with questions of exile but primarily focusing on antisemitism. In one of the essays he writes: Antisemitism has been just one of many expressions of the nationalist hatred which at that time in Serbia (and the situation was similar in other parts of former Yugoslavia) have been openly supported by the various government structures as well as by some political parties, but while the other expressions of nationalist hatred slowly faded away or became irrelevant with the gradual cessation of the war conflicts, antisemitism—which was not directly connected to the small Jewish community in Serbia (and in former Yugoslavia)—was constantly gaining in importance. Everything that was happening to Serbia internationally, all the condemnation and reactions of some countries and especially the NATO air strikes in the spring of 1999—everything has been interpreted as the actions of Masonic and Jewish clique, which—although for unclear reasons—have had the destruction of the Serbian state and Serbian people as its very purpose. (Albahari 2004: 91)

For the European collective memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the antisemitism and the experience of the Holocaust represent a sort of a cultural meta21 Also when it comes to the personal Jewish identity, Albahari is closer to Kiš’s position of not unconditionally accepting Jewish identity as exclusively minoritarian, unlike, for example, Filip David, for whom the Jewish identity is not primarily a literary and “metaphorical” category, see Hansen-Kokoruš 249. In this sense, the antisemitism for Kiš always borders on paranoia and as such is a structural component of every nationalism, see Petzer 335–336.

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narrative: it is an inexhaustible reservoir of topics and motives which constantly acquire new expressions or new realizations in literature and art. In this sense, the meaning of antisemitism is sometimes expanding and becoming universalized as an allegory for various forms of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in a society. Albahari’s novel offers the possibility of interpreting antisemitism as an allegorical political narrative about the closed, nationalist, xenophobic Serbian society of the 1990s. In the context of the proposed allegorical interpretation, it should also not be overlooked that the counter-conspirators came up with the idea of their “action” in the spring of 1992, which means immediately after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia, when Jewish refugees from Sarajevo arrived in Belgrade (Albahari 2005b: 284). Most of the defense strategies of individuals within the unstable and perverted living conditions such as war or social transition, are primarily escapist and politically ineffective, like the misuse of drugs or entering spiritually esoteric worlds. Existential uncertainty and anxiety turn into paranoia as a consequence of surreal and radicalized social circumstances. To Albahari’s protagonists, the absurd Kabbalah-inspired conspiracy seems to be the only way to achieve a political change. The failure of the counter-conspiracy in the novel could therefore be read as a message about the necessity of persisting on real-political alternatives and non-escapist means of subversive activism, no matter how (at least in the short term) inefficient and futile they may seem in the given circumstances.

Works cited Albahari, David (ed.). Savremena svetska priča I–II. Beograd: Prosveta, 1982. Albahari, David (ed.). Antologija jevrejskih pripovedača. Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1998. Albahari, David. Teret: eseji. Beograd: Forum pisaca, 2004. Albahari, David. “Peć.” David Albahari. Gradac: Časopis za književnost, umetnost i kulturu 31.156 (2005a): 24–27. Albahari, David. Pijavice. Beograd: Stubovi kulture, 2005b. Albahari, David. David Albahari. Beograd: Stubovi kulture (Pamtivek: knj. 1), 2010. Albahari, David. Leeches. Trans. E. Elias-Bursać. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Asić, Nenad (ed.). “Kabala.” Vidici: časopis beogradskih studenata za kulturu, književnost i društvena pitanja 257–258 (1988): 7–50. Basara, Svetislav. Fama o biciklistima. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, 2005. Beganović, Davor. “Books and Leeches: Conspiracy Theory in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literatures.” ‘Truth’ and Fiction. Conspiracy Theories in Eastern European Culture and Literature. Eds. Deutschmann, Peter et al. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020: 357–375.

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Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1993. Boltanski, Luc. Rätsel und Komplotte: Kriminalliteratur, Paranoia, moderne Gesellschaft. Trans. Ch. Pries. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. Brajović, Tihomir. Kratka istorija preobilja. Zrenjanin: Agora. 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Für eine kleine Literatur. Trans. B. Kroeber. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2017. Despić, Đorđe. “Roman-golem.” Letopis Matice srpske 182.1–2 (2006): 178–182. Freer, Joanna. Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hansen-Kokoruš, Renate. “Zur Frage jüdischer Identität in der jüngeren serbischen Literatur. Filip Davids ‘Hodočasnici neba i zemlje’.” Die Welt der Slaven XLVIII (2003): 239–250. Idel, Moshe. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Kowollik, Eva. “(Adoleszente) Bewegtheit als treibendes Moment für Verantwortung – David Albaharis (Jugend-) Roman ‘Marke’ im Schatten von ‘Pijavice’.” (Südost-)Europa. Narrative der Bewegtheit: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Angela Richter. Eds. Kowollik, Eva et al. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2017: 243–260. Meindl, Matthias. “Verschwörung, Paranoia und Verschwörungstheorie in David Albaharis ‘Pijavice (Die Ohrfeige)’.” Jugoslawien-Libanon: Verhandlungen von Zugehörigkeit in fragmentierten Gesellschaften. Eds. Jakiša, Miranda and Andreas Pflitsch. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2012: 247–274. Merivale, Patricia and Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “The Games Afoot. On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story.” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Eds. Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999: 1–24. Pantić, Mihajlo. “Umetnik je izgnanik. (Razgovor s Davidom Albaharijem).” David Albahari. Gradac: Časopis za književnost, umetnost i kulturu 31.156 (2005): 6–24. Petzer, Tatjana. “Verschwörung und Paranoia im Werk von Danilo Kiš.” Welt der Slaven XLVIII (2003): 335–358. Richter, Angela. “Erinnern und Vergessen in der Fremde. Die Kroatin Dubravka Ugrešić und der Serbe David Albahari.” Welt der Slaven XLVIII (2003): 263–274. Rosić, Tatjana. “Pijavice u tami idiotske noći.” David Albahari. Gradac: Časopis za književnost, umetnost i kulturu 31.156 (2005): 132–136. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1946. Scholem, Gershom. On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Šolem, Geršom. “Gilgul.” Trans. D. Albahari. Kulture Istoka 5.15 (1988): 33–35. Šuvaković, Miško. Postmoderna. Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1995.

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(Re)Writing the Holocaust in Aharon Appelfeld’s and Daša Drndić’s Novels Lost and Found Languages

Abstract:

Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was an Israeli writer from Bukovina who wrote in Hebrew, recalling in his prose the lost Jewish world of Czernowitz. Among the many stories he wrote on the basis of his experiences as a survivor of the Shoah, there is one—sippur h.ayyim (1999; The Story of a Life, 2004)—which is partly included as intertext in the novel Totenwande by the Croatian authoress Daša Drndić (1946–2018). This is the starting point of the comparative analysis in this paper, which is aimed at exploring different authorial poetics but also an attempt to place their writing in the context of different policies for addressing the violent past of World War II. Special attention is paid to the topic of language(s), which is problematized in different ways in their Holocaust novels.

Introduction to the links between the (Croatian) authoress and the (Israeli) author In the introductory section, I would first like to briefly explain the reasons that led me to connect the Croatian authoress Daša Drndić (1946–2018) and the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) in my research.1 The explanation is neces-

1 As we can see, Appelfeld and Drndić died in the same year, 2018. Unlike Appelfeld, who gained the status of a recognized Israeli writer during his lifetime and about whom numerous papers have been written (cf. comprehensive list in Miller Budick 181), about Daša Drndić in Croatian literary criticism it was written sporadically. The reason for this may be the fact that most of her novelistic opus originated in a relatively short period from the 1990s to her death. However, in all recent works dealing with the topic of Drndić, her fiction is approached as an exceptional phenomenon in Croatian literature. Thus, among the first, Renata Jambrešić Kirin researched Drndić’s poetics in the context of autobiographical discourse and the dissident experience of exile (2001), Andrea Zlatar analyzed her writing in the context of contemporary women’s literature (2004), and Milka Car placed her fiction in the genre of documentary novel written by narrative strategies inherent to Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction (2015). In the journal Fluminensia, publishing by the Department of Croatian Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka, some studies dedicated to Drndić’s specific narrative style in

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sary because, in addition to certain (mostly thematic and motif-related) links that can be found in their texts, when it comes to style and language, there are more differences and divergences than similarities. In general, though Appelfeld and Drndić thematically focus on mostly the same motifs such as the (post)Holocaust world of alienation, displacement, and exile in their novels, they differ significantly in the way they present these themes. As I will try to demonstrate in my close reading later in this article, those differences are not only seen in their literary style but also in their views on the function of literature, and particularly in their approach to the topic of the Holocaust, to which they frequently return in their novels. However, their attitudes about the issue of their own identity or classification to a particular national canon are comparable. In their literary texts and interviews, Drndić and Appelfeld often expressed a sense of non-belonging, marginalization, and resistance to national or ethnic boundaries in literature. Although Daša Drndić can without doubt be considered a Croatian author, her writing in many ways goes beyond the narrow framework of this national classification. Moreover, very often, she explicitly refused to be included in a community governed by hierarchies based on ethnonational categories. Also, while writing in Croatian, at the same time, she resisted that language, mocking linguistic purism and confronting the Croatian cultural space from the ironic position of an eternal political dissident.2 On the other hand, Appelfeld never presented himself as a political writer, and claimed that he did not write about politics but about ‘inner life’. Yet from this non-engaged, non-political position, he did not see himself as a writer of a particular national canon. So, even though he wrote all his literary texts in Hebrew, Appelfeld did not consider himself an Israeli but exclusively a Jewish writer permanently preoccupied with his Central European roots,3 recalling in his prose the lost Jewish world of her novel Leica format (2003) were released before the author’s death (Aleksandar Mijatović 2010; Anera Ryznar 2014; Dejan Durić 2015), and after her death this journal dedicated a special thematic section to Daša Drndić in which six articles were collected (Fluminensia: Journal for Philological Research, Vol. 32 No. 1, 2020). In this session, the authors Vlad Beronja, Sabina Giergiel, Zrinka Božić Blanuša, Miranda Levanat-Peričić, Ivana Žužul and Iva Kosmos approach Drndić’s novels from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. Also, after the death of Daša Drndić, a special issue of the magazine Književna republika (2018, No. 5–8) was published with occasional essays written by those familiar with her work, but mostly by her friends and those who knew her personally (e.g., Velimir Visković, Bora Ćosić, Nadežda Čačinović, Jasmina Lukić and Sanjin Sorel). 2 That is why Stijn Vervaet includes her writing in the “Central European literary tradition of Nestbeschmutzer” (130), among intellectuals like Thomas Bernhard or Elfriede Jelinek, who have been accused by nationalists and certain media of “polluting their own nest” (German: Nestbeschmutzer) for openly criticizing their countries’ Nazi past. 3 As he pointed out in one of his interviews: “I want to emphasize that even though my roots were in Central Europe, I was never a German writer. And I am not an Israeli writer in the sense of seeing all the world from an Israeli perspective. This openness is Jewish, and possessing it, I am, foremost, a Jewish writer” (Cohen 136).

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

Czernowitz, where he had lived before World War II with his assimilated Jewish family4 . Perhaps we could assume that the authors’resistance to national and local determinants is a consequence of their devotion to the topic of Holocaust, which, “as the limit-event of twentieth century history, has been going through a process of globalization” (Beronja 18). However, although this turn in the reception of the Holocaust has some positive consequences, Vlad Beronja nevertheless warns of some of the dangers that this process of globalization brings with it. Namely, while on the one hand we have “the potential of a global moral consensus, there is also the risk of abstraction and decontextualization of the event or the set of events which—although prodigious in scope—has historical, local, and national specificities” (ibid.). In this sense, the difference between Drndić’s and Appelfeld’s approach to the Holocaust is not only a consequence of generational differences, i.e., the fact that Appelfeld belongs to the generation of survivors and witnesses, and Drndić to the second generation, or the generation that can access these events through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory.5 The differences between their writing in this paper will also be analyzed in the context of different policies for dealing with the past. Namely, the attitude towards the history of violence as well as towards the dark and shameful sides of national pasts are not only the subject of the strategies of political parties in contemporary Poland, Ukraine or Croatia but also the result of different political strategies inherited from the past. Accordingly, the perceptions of the Holocaust nurtured by the official policy of SFR Yugoslavia differed significantly from institutionalized anti-Semitism in some Eastern European countries. In the fourth chapter of this paper, I will analyze precisely this context of different policies for dealing with the past. Accordingly, the representation of the Holocaust in the novels of these two authors shows not only the local and historical specifics of the events themselves but also the specifics of (post)memory transmission, specifics related to the actualization of the topic of extreme violence, and the perpetrator-victim relationship. In addition, whereas Appelfeld began his writing from his own traumatic experi-

4 According to Stillman—“[h]is parents spoke German by choice instead of Yiddish, which was the language of his traditional grandparents. His mother was killed in 1940 when he was eight, and he was first sent to the ghetto with his father, then deported to a concentration camp and separated from him. Somehow, he managed to escape and lived for three years in the forests of Poland and Ukraine, occasionally finding work and shelter with peasants, and even for a few months with a prostitute” (120). 5 She defines this concept as follows: “‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma to those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (Hirsch 5).

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ence without openly expressed social engagement, Daša Drndić wrote about the Holocaust from an outsider position. As a person who had not experienced the torture of a concentration camp, i.e., writing from the position of a non-survivor, non-witness, and non-Jewish writer, she takes responsibility for passing on the experience of the trauma of those deprived of a voice, that is, the victims left behind by their names alone. However, in addition to the stories of victims, she often gives voice to the perpetrators, especially unpunished war criminals, with the intention to write a broader indictment accusing post-Holocaust Europe of being built on terrible atrocities and the theft of Jewish property. Stijn Vervaet rightly observes that, in her novels, Daša Drndić is “obsessed” in a particular way with the need to emphasize the failed efforts of “de-Nazification in the German, Austrian and Croatian twentieth and twentieth-first century” (134). In contrast to Appelfeld, who tried to escape from historical facts and documents and who wrote about unutterable emotions, Drndić incorporated documents, photos, court records, original testimonies and lists of the victims’ names in her prose. Her novels are an example of historiographic metafiction in which documentary material is often mixed with fiction so that the boundary between them is blurred. The reader’s inability to draw a sharp line between this fiction and facts, or between literature and history, is primarily manifested in cases when other writers appear, which frequently occurs in her novels. Authors such as Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Umberto Saba, Wisława Szymborska, etc. are sometimes directly involved in her prose as historical figures who play particular roles in her fiction, but occasionally are present intertextually through quotations from their texts. However, these two modes of presenting literature, historically or personally, through biographical facts, and intertextually, through the mediation of quotes, interfere in some cases. It is difficult, for example, to distinguish them in instances where other writers’ autobiographical prose is interpolated into her text. This is precisely how Aharon Appelfeld appears in her novel Totenwande. Zidovi smrti (Totenwande: The Walls of Death; 2000). He is inserted into fiction as a character who has the role of presenting his own life story.

Drndić’s struggle for language—or how to speak on behalf of silent witnesses? Among the many stories he wrote based on his experiences as a survivor of the Shoah, there is Appelfeld’s novel—sippur h.ayyim (1999; The Story of a Life, 2004). Despite this novel’s autobiographical basis, Emily Miller Budick suggests that it is not an autobiography “in the sense of being an accurate, complete record of personal historical events. Rather, it is the story of how one particular human being,

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

the author himself, endowed his life with meaning, or more accurately how he discovered the meaning that his life contained, by simply being a human life” (154). Concerning the facts, the novel reconstructs memories of Appelfeld’s childhood and youth—from idyllic pre-war images of a Carpathian village where the boy spent summers with his grandparents, through the shocking stories of ghetto life, memories of the separation from his parents, survival in the woods to his postwar departure to Israel, where he served in the army and gained his first literary experience. In Drndić’s book Totenwande, beginning on page 29, there is a chapter inserted under the title “A Short Biography of Aaron Appelfeld and Some Other Little Things”. Although several characters in this chapter are confirmed to be historical figures, it is difficult to separate their fictional roles from the historical facts. So, alongside Appelfeld, there are Jacqueline Morgenstern,6 Paul Celan and Đorđe Lebović,7 all participating as part of Aharon Appelfeld’s life story. But these names do not appear in Appelfeld’s novel The Story of a Life. Daša Drndić arbitrarily chooses and includes them in “her” story of Appelfeld’s life, though all of them are in some way connected with the “real” Appelfeld. Most of them, Paul Celan, Jacqueline

6 The character of Jacqueline Morgenstern is related to the issue of unethical medical experiments conducted in prisons and camps, which is frequently the topic in other novels by Daša Drndić. Thus, in the novels April in Berlin and Leica format (2003), the problematic nature of Edward Pernkopf ’s medical atlas is analyzed, in the novel Sonnenschein the theme is the “Lebensborn” project. In Totenwande, besides Dr Kurt Heissmeyer, there is a mention of the research conducted by Professor Herman Stieve, who used the bodies of political prisoners executed by Nazis for this purpose. The novel even included a fictitious transcript of the Stieve trial, even though it never happened. At the end of the novel, there is a chapter with the title “A Small Incomplete Chronology of Performing Medical Experiments on Humans in the Name of Peace, Democracy and the Advancement of Humanity”. Statistics on American, Japanese, and German experiments are inserted and sorted by year. These historical facts are interspersed with the fictitious testimonies of the tortured and killed. The chronology ends with the inscription: “Did you remember their names? No, it was Saturday (talk at the bus station).” This closing sentence, which points at a general disinterest in the public discourse on these issues, can be compared with the sentence which ends Appelfeld’s story. It confirms the narrator’s suggestion to skip it while reading. 7 Đorđe Lebović (1928–2004) was a Serbian playwright of Jewish descent who managed to survive the horrors of several concentration camps during World War II. His drama tetralogy Nebeski odred (Heavenly Squad) from 1956, co-authored with Aleksandar Obrenović, presents the first literary text on the subject of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. After the beginning of the 1992 war on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, due to disagreement with official policy, he left Belgrade and moved to Israel. In the novel by Daša Drndić, the character of Đorđe Lebović is inserted into the story about Appelfeld’s life only to connect the character of Konrad Koše with Appelfeld, who says that he met him at Lebović’s play in Jerusalem, where he has lived since 1991. However, in Drndić’s novel we do not learn anything more about Lebović except that he had previously lived in Belgrade “with a tattooed (Dachau) number on his forearm” (Drndić 2000: 31). After that, the character of Lebović disappears from the story.

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Morgenstern and Aharon Appelfeld, are linked by their origins in the same place, the city of Czernowitz. The story is narrated by the fictitious character, Konrad Koše, who appears in several novels by Daša Drndić. He includes personal stories of these historic characters starting in 1932, when Appelfeld and Jacqueline Morgenstern were born, to 1991 when Koše met Lebović and Appelfeld in Jerusalem. In a fictitious dialogue with Konrad Koše, Aharon Appelfeld recounts his memories of Paul Celan (or Paul Antschel, his birth name) and his parents’ deaths, and then recites verses from Celan’s Totenfuge.8 Thus, the nine-year-old Appelfeld in Drndić’s novel first meets the twenty-yearold Celan in the Transistria concentration camp in Moldova in 1941 but is on familiar terms with him later in Paris in 1968. The character of Jacqueline Morgenstern is one of the key figures in the novel Totenwande. Although she was born the same year in the same city as Appelfeld, they had never met because the following year her family moved to Paris. She was also a real, historical figure, and her biography can be found on the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. There it says that she was killed as one of 20 children who fell victim to medical experiments conducted by Dr Kurt Heissmeyer at the Neuengamme concentration camp—“[o]n April 20, 1945, when the British were less than three miles from the camp, all 20 children were brought to a school in Hamburg. They were injected with morphine and fell asleep. Thirteen-year-old Jacqueline and her friends were then hanged one by one.”9 In the novel Totenwande, after reciting Celan’s Fugue of Death, Aharon Appelfeld says, “I have to show you something” (36) and gives Konrad Koše a document listing 20 children aged five to twelve killed in the Neuengamme concentration camp.10 Referring to the “act of archiving, writing down and grouping” the names

8 The character of Paul Celan in Totenwande has complex and multiple meanings. Andrea Zlatar has already cautioned about the layering of Celan’s role in this novel. Namely, the biography of Paul Celan and his poetic opus are an “internal leitmotif ” in the novel, and its title Totenwande Zlatar interpretated as “a novelistic response to Celan’s Todesfuge (Death Fugue)” (Zlatar 147, 148). But in Drndić’s novel, Paul Celan also becomes a guide to the biographies of other authors, and he introduces the reader to the other characters and expands the network of narrative voices that intertwine with their biographical data and literary texts. 9 “Jacqueline Morgenstern. Born 1932 – Czernowitz, Romania.” Museum of Tolerance: A Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum. http://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/teacher-resources/holocaustresources/children-of-the-holocaust/jacqueline-morgenstern.html. Accessed 14 Sept. 2020. 10 However, we notice something quite interesting just before the list. There is Aharon Appelfeld’s monologue, in the first person, which ends with a rather unusual narrative intervention. He puts in brackets a sentence which reads “Aaron Appelfeld’s short biography should be crossed out or skipped in reading” (33). This kind of narrative intervention is typical of Daša Drndić’s writing strategy. This strategy aims not only to attract readers’ attention but also to provoke readers by blaming them for indifference.

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

of victims as a frequent procedure in Drndić’s novels about the Holocaust, Sabina Giergiel pays special attention to the role of children’s characters as paradigmatic “weak victims”. Since in her Holocaust narratives Drndić “gives voice to those who cannot speak (as they are most often dead)” (106), Giergiel introduces Agamben’s concept of the “integral/absolute witness” as a “witness without words” or “those who did not survive” (110). Agamben analyzes this concept through the child character named Hurbinek from Levi’s novel The Drowned and the Saved (1986). For Hurbinek who, instead of comprehensible speech, utters meaningless sounds, Agamben concludes that he “cannot testify because he has no tongue” (39): This means that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance—that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness (ibid.).

The characters of the children from the Neuengamme camp in Totenwande are in fact “complete witnesses”, who by definition cannot bear witness. Those children are marked by stillness and silence for several reasons. Because they come from different parts of Europe, they speak different languages and do not understand each other. In addition, their silence is related to the impossibility of articulating a terrible experience. Finally, they did not survive and cannot testify for themselves. Recalling the story of the boy Hurbinek from Primo Levi’s novel The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Sabine Giergiel concludes that “both Levi and Drndić take the position of a medium of sorts and provide a way of communicating for those who cannot testify themselves” (111). In her ethically engaged novels, Daša Drndić continuously makes a kind of accusation. As Anera Ryznar pointed out, this accusation, written on behalf of the victims, does not aim to establish the guilt of the Nazis and their allies as this is wellknown. Drndić wants to show that the scientific achievements and brilliant progress of our civilisation are based on the historical remnants of crimes which have never been prosecuted. Indeed, some of them are even celebrated. She also wished to point out, as Ryznar observes, that today’s development is based on the forgotten victims whose names are tedious to remember, as well as on the chronology of evil that goes far back in history and whose continuity we cannot forget to this day (Ryznar 123). Accordingly, Stijn Vervaet also notices the author’s intention to shock the reader by leaving him “with the extreme pessimistic feeling that Nazism is still very much present throughout Europe, and [that] during the 1990s in Yugoslavia, specific subspecies of Nazism were bred” (135). In her writing, Daša Drndić often

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expresses a kind of neurotic obsession with a traumatic topic, as evidenced by a series of ironic, self-referential remarks, for example in April in Berlin: “They tell me, you are boring with this Holocaust, what do you want, write about Croatia and about love. Now I can write about approaching old age, but I will not” (2009: 54).11 But this resistance to writing about love and aging can also be interpreted as a resistance to the principle of “art for art’s sake” and advocating against the concept of the self-involved writer who has no obligations to his/her audience. Namely, in Drndić’s prose, in full accordance with the poetic principles of “littérature engagée”, the artist’s serious responsibility for society is constantly emphasized. At the same time, literary engagement for the author in this case does not mean positioning oneself on a particular political side but engagement as a moral challenge that the narrator must constantly deal.

Appelfeld’s struggle for language—or how to witness in silence? The most affecting passages of Appelfeld’s novel The Story of a Life are related to the stories of other children,12 told through the testimony of a child who has lost everything—home, parents, freedom and, most importantly, language. It is the story of the life of an adult writer in search of a language in which he can reconstruct and articulate memories of his childhood and the childhoods of other children who cannot speak for themselves. In this sense, his intention is comparable to that expressed by Daša Drndić in her novels. But, unlike Daša Drndić, writing about trauma for Appelfeld was never based on the reconstruction of facts. Moreover, in his texts, he expresses resistance to this kind of memory which would be based on facts or historical circumstances. Events such as the murder of his mother or the parting from his father are not treated as facts that can be described but as unspeakable traumas that are not discussed. In his novels, he thus developed a distinctive minimalist style, with silences and pauses that have to be filled by the

11 This and all subsequent translation from Drndić’s novels are mine. 12 I will mention some of these episodes from the novel—the story from the ghetto about the choir of blind children from the Gotesman’s Institute for the Blind singing classical and Yiddish songs on the road to the railway station before “being pushed into the cattle cars” (69–77); the story about a four-year-old abandoned child at a railway station “filled with people being deported” on the way to Ukraine (78–82); the story of a “little dark figure” of an unknown boy who was hunted by peasants armed with axes and scythes in a corn field somewhere in Ukraine on the edge of a forest where the narrator was hiding as a child (103–106); the story about the Keffer, a pen for German shepherds in Kalschund camp where small children were pushed and closed to be brutally murdered (115–119); the story of the orphan Chico, a seven-year-old Wunderkind who completely lost his memory after a fever (136–140); the story about a joyful little girl he met after the war on the boat to Palestine, the five-year-old Helga with an amputated leg who remembered nothing but rain (147–154).

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

reader’s individual imagination. Moreover, his recollection of the past reconstructs only emotions, impressions, and images because he witnessed the war as a child. So, he might not even know about facts or so-called “objective circumstances”. Regarding this, Appelfeld said: “As a boy of eight, when war destroyed my former life and that of my relatives, my experience was not embedded in facts but feelings and emotions. In the forests by myself, I was like a frightened animal sensing danger everywhere – what was essential was survival” (Stillman 121). But after surviving, when he came to Israel, he began to feel guilty about surviving, something that Giorgo Agamben detects as a locus classicus of Holocaust literature. In his case, guilt was followed by shame. This shame was related to his linguistic (in)competences, particularly concerning German, as his mother tongue, Yiddish, the language of his ancestors, and Hebrew, which he did not speak. As he stated in an interview on 25 September 1986: I came from a very assimilated Jewish family, with a lot of mixed marriages. German was my mother language because Bukovina, where I was born, was part of the AustroHungarian Empire. My grandparents still spoke Yiddish, but at home we used German. My parents cultivated it deeply, but after what happened, I was always ambivalent about it. (Cohen 131, 132)

And again, in his novel: It is 1946, the year I came to Israel, and my diary is a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I say “words” and not “sentences” because in 1946 I was not able to connect words into sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without language. The diary became a hiding place where he could pile up the remnants of his mother tongue and the words that he had just acquired. [...] Without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Without language, one’s naked character is exposed. (Appelfeld 169)

Aversion to German was his attitude. German was both his mother language and the language of his mother’s murderers, but the rejection of Yiddish was a consequence of the then-Israeli ideology which nurtured the cult of heroes through the Hebrew language. From this ideological position, Yiddish was considered the language of defeated European Jews. But for him, the resistance to adopting Hebrew was resistance to abandoning Yiddish. Once he realized that Hebrew liberated him from emotions which he could express only in Yiddish and offered him the necessary emotional distance from his lived experience, he became an exclusively Hebrew writer.

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Daša Drndić expresses similar resistance to the adoption of a new language after she departed from Belgrade to Rijeka in the 1990s.13 After fleeing from thengrowing Serbian nationalism, she arrived in Croatia where she was confronted with another nationalism and experienced similar xenophobic attacks. In her novels, she often describes her daily meetings with the inhabitants of the city and linguistic misunderstandings with them. At the market, in shops, at the university, she comes into conflicts because they perceive her as a person who speaks Serbian, or as a Croat who speaks in ‘unclean’ language, i.e., Croatian with a strange accent, or with some Serbian and Turkish words. As is well known, Serbian and Croatian are the languages spoken by nations who were at war with each other in the 1990s. Precisely because the differences between Croatian and Serbian are not so significant,14 maintaining those differences during the war became an ideologically very important part of Franjo Tuđman’s politics. So, Drndić’s literary discourse is shaped by resistance to the concept of linguistic purism. Exactly through this resistance to 13 Most of her novels have autobiographical passages in which the central identity problem of nonbelonging is presented through disorientation in the ‘new’ Croatian language. After coming to Rijeka from Belgrade, he faces rejection because of her inappropriate, insufficiently ‘pure’ language. She expresses her resistance to linguistic purism through the accumulation of ‘inappropriate’ words, Turkisms and Serbisms. For example, in the novel Leica format, she lists several words of Serbian and Turkish origin and that would be difficult to translate (“Ćumur. Bakaluk. Plotna [...] Plotna. Bakalnica. Piljarnica. Ćumurabadžijajorgandžijatabut. Patišpanj. Mileram. Šargarepa, tigan, rerne. Viršle. Saksija. Tegla”, 268–269). But the meaning of these words is not important at all for the plot of the novel; these words are there simply to indicate the otherness of the narrator, she utters/writes them in an attempt to provoke the interlocutor/reader. Furthermore, in the novel April in Berlin she compares contemporary Croatian nationalistic language censorship with the Third Reich’s regulation of language. For that purpose, she recalls and often quotes Victor Klemperer’s book LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook (1947). In this regard, interpreting her novel April in Berlin Stijn Vervaet rightly observes: “The legacy of Nazi Germany in contemporary Croatia seems to survive not only through extreme right-wing ideological groups but is deeply imbedded into everyday practices, specifically on the level of language usage. The narrator draws a clear analogy between Franjo Tuđman’s language politics, which she illustrates with lengthy quotes from Victor Klemperer Lingua Tertii Imperii on the one hand, and with references to situations in which people in Croatia ‘corrected’ the ‘Serbianisms’ her language allegedly contains even 17 years after she moved from Belgrade to Rijeka, on the other hand” (130). 14 It is a linguistic fact that Croatian and Serbian belong to the same diasystem, but the language policies of the post-Yugoslav countries were not always based on indepedent linguistic research. Croatian language policy since the 1990s has been aimed at consolidating the differences between Croatian and Serbian (for example, distinctive dictionaries of the Serbian and Croatian languages have been published, public debates have been held on whether Serbian films should be translated, etc.). In this sense, the book Jezik i nacionalizam (2010; Language and Nationalism) in which the Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić presents a thesis on polycentric language has provoked heated reactions in Croatia. Namely, she believes that the dialects of the Croatian language (Chakavian, Kajkavian, Shtokavian) differ more from each other than the standard variants of Croatian and Serbian.

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

linguistic and stylistic purification in her novels she formed a creative linguistic amalgam as her own language as opposed to the ideological linguistic policies of the time. In case of Appelfeld’s writing, however, it was not just about learning and adopting a completely new language but also learning how to speak the unspeakable, how to talk without words, or how to adopt silence as a form of speech. The really huge catastrophes are the ones that we tend to surround with words so as to protect ourselves from them. The first words I wrote were a kind of desperate cry to find the silence that enfolded me during the war. A sixth sense told me that my soul was enveloped in this same silence, and if I managed to revive it perhaps the right words would come (Appelfeld 157).

For Appelfeld, writing is made more difficult by his need to translate that very experience of silence into words. As he wrote in his novel, war involves physical suffering (“the hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death”) which makes words superfluous. Narrating about suffering that made words superfluous meant, paradoxically, narrating by silence. So, after refusing to write testimonial literature, Appelfeld was in constant search of an expression that could testify about suffering in silence. Speech does not come easily to me, and it’s no wonder: we didn’t speak during the war. It was as though every disaster defied utterance: there was nothing to say. Anyone who was in the ghetto, in the camp, or hiding in the forest knows silence in his body. In time of war you don’t argue, you don’t sharpen differences of opinion. War is a hothouse for listening and for keeping silent. The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death – all these make words superflous. There’s really no need for them. In the ghetto and in the camp, only people who had lost their minds talked, explained, or tried to persuade. Those who were sane didn’t speak (ibid. 161).

Regarding Appelfeld’s autobiographical fiction in which the search for the meaning of life is the same as the search for a literary expression that can describe that life, Emily Miller Budick made an interesting observation—“The Story of a Life does not simply tell the story of a life. Rather, it narrates the life of storytelling. It concerns the ways in which life is a story, and how, without its storied quality, it ceases to be life at all” (158).

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Contemporary actualization of the past: some examples from Croatian and Polish Vergangenheitsbewältigung In his book Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg suggested that “coming to terms with the past always happens in a comparative context and via the circulation of memories linked to what are only apparently separate histories and national or ethnic constituencies” (272). Accordingly, the context of the Holocaust violence in Drndić’s novels is linked to post-Yugoslav ethnic violence. Openly and explicitly, she compared the Independent State of Croatia (a Nazi ally) with the modern Croatian state. She goes even further in her accusations—all segments of contemporary European society are based on political atrocities committed in the fascist past. Thus, the Holocaust is an event located in the heart of Europe. In connection with this attitude, when speaking of the simultaneous ‘uniqueness’ and ‘normality’ of the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman recalled a comparable warning about so-called ‘Western civilization’, the civilization that produced the Holocaust and the society that still carries within it the possibility of the Holocaust: It is not the Holocaust which we find difficult to grasp in all its monstrosity. It is our Western Civilization which the occurrence of the Holocaust has made all but incomprehensible [...] True, the Holocaust occurred almost half a century ago. True, its immediate results are fast receding into the past. The generation that experienced it at first hand has almost died out. But – and this is an awesome, sinister ‘but’ – these once-familiar features of our civilization, which the Holocaust had made mysterious again, are still very much part of our life. They have not gone away. Neither has, therefore, the possibility of the Holocaust. (Bauman 84; italics in original)

However, the representation of the Holocaust in literature as well as the political processes of dealing with the violent past after World War II took place in different directions and included different processes in individual European countries. In his recent study about Holocaust narratives in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literature, Stijn Vervaet started from the following observations—in some communist countries “the Holocaust remained a taboo topic, [...] whereas in others there was a form of institutionalized anti-Semitism”, Holocaust perception “in socialist Yugoslavia differed significantly from the situation in other Eastern European countries” (3). Vervaet’s notion that survivor testimony in Yugoslavia was treated as a “historical document” could be connected with the work of the Yugoslav State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Perpetrated by the Occupiers and their Accomplices (Državna komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača), established in 1943. Natka Badurina made interesting remarks on the work of this Commision in her study about the memory of Italian concentration camps

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

from World War II. According to her, while recently published research by some Croatian revisionist historians was conducted to deny data from the Commission’s archives,15 Italian historiography has been working intensively since 1990 to debunk the myth of the good Italian soldier, using for this purpose precisely the data from the Yugoslav Commission (Badurina 91). This change in the perception of Croatia’s violent past, which began with the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, could be related to the processes that Vlad Beronja calls the “de-traumatization” of the historical heritage of the NDH (Independent State of Croatia) in contemporary Croatia (Beronja 19). In that sense, Beronja reads Drndić’s novels as a “specific response to historical revisionism and outright denialism of the Holocaust in Croatia, which has emerged into the political and cultural mainstream during the War of Independence (1991–1995) and persisted into the post-war period” (18). To place Appelfeld’s life story (historical and fictional) into the contemporary political context, we must return to Vervaet’s remark about “institutionalized antiSemitism” in some Eastern European countries and look briefly at the example of Poland, specifically, at the Jedwabne debate “which took place between 2000 and 2002 and was triggered by the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors in May 2000” (Michlic 296). In his book, Gross describes and explores in detail the Jedwabne massacre, an event which has become “the key symbol of the countermemory of the old, hegemonic, biased narratives of the Holocaust promulgated between 1945 and 1990s” in Polish historiography (Michlic 297). Gross’s book seems to have completely shattered the illusion of Polish-Jewish relations in World War II nurtured by the canonized story, which spoke of the war-time solidarity of the majority of Poles with the Jews. In her study about Jedwabne, Joanna Beata Michlic points to the overall political consensus that existed in the public sphere around the above-mentioned illusion—“both the Communist authorities in the country and the right-wing nationalistic circles among Polish émigrés had promulgated it, regardless of their ideological differences” (296). Gross’s book Neighbors marked the beginning of a confrontation with dark images from the violent past of PolishJewish relations. From the perspective of right-wing politicians and historians in

15 In that sense Badurina mentions the works of Grahek Ravančić, Zlatko Begonja and Ante Uglešić.

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Poland,16 this process is perceived today, however, as an attack on Polish identity and Polishness. Quite unexpectedly, in the middle of a shocking story in Poland’s history of violence, Gross begins the chapter “What Do People Remember?” with the story of Aharon Appelfeld, who in 1996 returns to his native village of Czernowitz, located in present-day Ukraine. He returns after fifty years of absence to find the grave of his mother, who died in a World War II-era pogrom. Apparently, with this move, Gross wants to draw a parallel between Appelfeld’s search for his mother’s grave and Henryk Grynberg’s17 search for the remains of his father, killed in Poland in 1944, near the place where the family had been hiding at that time18 . In both cases, local residents, Polish and Ukrainian peasants, gradual discover the graves as well as the circumstances of the event. In the end, it turns out that everyone witnessed the violence from the beginning and even the children were familiar with the details of the crime. Although in Jedwabne the locals participated in the crime not as observers but as perpetrators, Gross apparently does not consider this difference relevant. Moreover, similar patterns of behaviour leave room for doubt in the responsibility of all participants, both observers and perpetrators, and also the disturbing assumption that we continue to live in a society that, as

16 Regarding the official Polish political attitude towards the Jedwabne pogrom, Michlic mentions the so-called politika historyczna (historical policy) enforced by right-wing conservative politicians in 2005. As the primary goal of historical policy, Michlic points out “condemnation of critical patriotism and pedagogy of shame (pedagogika wstydy) as unpatriotic” (230). Among politicians pursuing this program of ethno-nationalistic historical revisionism, she mentions mostly members of the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), namely Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński and Andrzej Duda. Among right-wing historians who write about Jedwabne from positions opposed to Gross, he singles out the work of Piotr Gontarczyk (2016), who “asked for a new historical and forensic investigation of the Jedwabne pogrom” (299). The results of this political and historical revisionism can be traced in popular culture, in tasteless and frightening fashion products celebrating the Jedwabne massacre as a patriotic act. In that sense, Michlic encloses photographs of T-shirts with the image of an eagle as a Polish state symbol next to the inscription ‘Jedwabne’. These T-shirts could be bought on Amazon.com, but on the internet, even scarier examples can be found, such as photographs with inscriptions directly celebrating the massacre and insulting the Jewish victims. 17 Henryk Grynberg was born on 4 July 1936. He survived the Holocaust, spending the years 1942–1945 in hiding places with his large family. At the end of the war, he and his mother were the only survivors from their entire family. The first years after the war he spent in Poland and then emigrated to the USA in 1967. He wrote several books (novels, short stories, essays) preoccupied with the fate of the Polish Jews. (“Henryk Grynberg”. Culture.pl, https://culture.pl/en/artist/henryk-grynberg. Accessed 1 Nov 2020). 18 Both Appelfeld and Grynberg went in search of the graves of their parents, who died in local violence during the war. They were accompanied by a film crew that made a documentary along the way. According to Gross, “Polish film audiences could see the whole story unfold as a handheld camera followed Grynberg’s quest for his father’s grave in the prize-winning documentary by Pawel Łoziaski called The Place of Birth.” (128)

(Re)Writing the Holocaust

Bauman concluded, carries the ‘enduring possibility’ of the Holocaust. The unsettling impression that the development of violent scenarios as a possibility hovers above ‘careless joy’, located in a ‘familiar landscape’, can also be read in Appelfeld’s reflections when he returned to his native village. The past was still there, implanted in the place from which he had long since fled. And so, when he returned fifty years later, the beauty and odd familiarity of the landscape once again evoked sense of well-being and careless joy. “Who could imagine that in this village, on Saturday, our Sabbath, sixty-two souls, most of them women and children, would fall prey to pitchforks and kitchen knives, and I, because I was in a backroom, would manage to escape to the cornfields and hide?” (Gross 127)

To conclude my article, I will close with this image of an abandoned homeland that evokes the impression of an “odd familiarity” in Appelfeld. The fact that this beautiful landscape was the scene of a terrible crime fifty years ago is at the present moment inconceivable even to him, who survived rather by accident. Although Drndić’s and Appelfeld’s literary texts belong to different aesthetics, and although various circumstances have shaped their autobiographical discourses, when it comes to dealing with a violent past, both of them give comparable warning in their prose. In Daša Drndić’s novels, the past is a kind of ghost that hovers over contemporary Europe. The obsessive return to the theme of the Holocaust in her prose is part of the mission or responsibility the narrator adopts in order to warn of the invisibility of the victims, on the one hand, and the visibility of the economic progress of crime-based ‘Western civilization’ on the other. In her novels, she thus writes both the indictment for the perpetrators and the ritual text for the victims. Like a kind of literary priestess, she inserts lists of camp victims, the countless names of people no one remembers, asking readers to stop and read the names of those who cannot testify for themselves. A requirement that the names be read aloud is both a form of literary engagement and ritual devotion. On the other hand, like a prosecutor, she participates in fictitious trials, writing indictments on perpetrators of crimes in order to highlight the fact that many crimes went unpunished and that Europe has never been completely de-Nazified. Unlike Drndić, who seeks to reconstruct history using documents incorporated into fiction, and who often exposes readers to explicit and shocking descriptions of crimes and horrifying scenes, in his novels Appelfeld indulges in contemplation and avoids the graphic representation of violence. Most of his stories about the Holocaust in fact concentrate more on the time prior to the crime. He seeks to reconstruct the lost world of his idyllic pastoral childhood in the Carpathians. His style is simple: he never resorts to pathos; he is not interested in the reconstruction

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of facts but emotions. That is why, in his stories of a world lost forever, he does not even try to achieve referentiality. But for both, Drndić and Appelfeld, writing is the only way for language to overcome history, thus, they are in constant search of an appropriate linguistic expression that can convey a traumatic experience. Drndić connects the struggle for language with the question of how to speak on behalf of a silent witness, one who did not survive, while Appelfeld’s question is how to testify in silence after surviving.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 1999. Appelfeld, Aharon. The Story of a Life. Translated from Hebrew by Aloma Halter. New York: Schocken Books, 2001. Badurina, Natka. “Pamćenje talijanskih logora iz drugoga svjetskog rata.” Naracije straha. Eds. Natka Badurina, Una Bauer and Jelena Marković. Zagreb: Leykam International and Institut of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2019: 73–96. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Beronja, Vlad. “Shards of Broken Glass: Daša Drndić’s Archival Poetics.” Fluminensia 31.1 (2020): 11–38. Car, Milka. Uvod u dokumentarnu književnost. Zagreb: Leykam, 2016. Cohen, Joseph. Voices of Israel. Essays and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Drndić, Daša. Totenwande. Zidovi smrti. Zagreb: Meandar, 2000. Drndić, Daša. Leica format. Zagreb: Meandar, 2003. Drndić, Daša. Sonnenschein. Dokumentarni roman. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2007. Drndić, Daša. April u Berlinu. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2009. Durić, Dejan. “Od hodanja gradom do mapiranja: ‘Leica format’ Daše Drndić kao topografska proza.” Fluminensia: Journal for Philological Research 27.1 (2015): 171–188. Giergiel, Sabina. “The Saving Narratives od Daša Drndić.” Studia Judaica 41.1 (2018): 9–116. doi:10.4467/24500100STJ.18.006.9176. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Jambrešić Kirin, Renata. “Egzil i hrvatska ženska autobiografska književnost 90-ih.” Reč 61.7 (2001): 175–197. Kordić, Snježana. Jezik i nacionalizam. Zagreb: Duriex, 2010.

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Michlic, Joanna Beata. “‘At the Crossroads’: Jedwabne and Polish Historiography of the Holocaust.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31.3 (2017): 296–306. Mijatović, Aleksandar. “Vrijeme nestajanja. Sjećanje, kino i fotografija u romanu Leica format Daše Drndić.” Fluminensia: Journal for Philological Research 22.1 (2010): 25–44. Miller Budick, Emily. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Myers, David N. “Finding a Voice: Aharon Appelfeld between Czernowitz and Jerusalem.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103.4 (2013): 431–433. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Ryznar, Anera. Suvremeni roman u raljama života. Studija o interdiskurzivnosti. Zagreb: Disput, 2017. Stillman, Dinah Assouline. “Encounters with Aharon Appelfeld.” World Literature Today November-December (2010): 120–123. Vervaet, Stijn. Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory. Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Zlatar, Andrea. Tekst, tijelo, trauma. Ogledi o suvremenoj ženskoj književnosti. Zagreb: Ljevak, 2004.

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V. Biographical Perspectives

Branko Ostajmer (Zagreb)

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy1

Abstract:

Today, the Croatian publicist, writer, translator and anthologist of Jewish extraction Mavro Špicer (Spitzer) (1862–1936) is known primarily as a pioneer of the Esperanto movement in Croatia (in 1909, he founded the Society of Croatian Esperantists in Zagreb, in the same year he published the first Esperanto textbook and launched the first Croatian Esperanto journal Kroata Esperantisto). But his activity in promoting Esperanto is only one segment in Špicer’s rich and diverse activity as a publicist; most of it has remained largely neglected and unknown until today. This article addresses the relatively unknown segment of Mavro Špicer’s publicist activity and, in particular, his views on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Croatian-Hungarian alliance within the Habsburg framework.

Introduction The Croatian publicist, writer, translator and anthologist of Jewish extraction Mavro Špicer (Spitzer) (Našice, 1862 – Zagreb, 1936) left a mark in many areas during his relatively long creative life, but despite his extensive opus he remains a relatively little-known figure, especially outside Croatia and Hungary, where he spent most of his life. However, even in Croatia or Hungary, little has been written about him, and what has been written largely refers to his activity in promoting Esperanto. Despite this neglect, Mavro Špicer is not unimportant, and is in fact a very interesting person. His significance is multifaceted. First of all, he spoke fluently Croatian, Hungarian and German, which in itself is quite a rarity. To this should be added his great knowledge of Esperanto, although it is less important in the context of this paper. Furthermore, Špicer was undoubtedly the most important correspondent in Budapest for Croatian newspapers in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

1 This article was co-funded by the Croatian Foundation for Science and its project IP-2018–01–2539; European Origins of Modern Croatia: Transfer of Ideas in the Political and Cultural Field in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

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This assessment, however, can be relativized by the fact that Croatian newspapers, primarily those from Zagreb, did not have many correspondents from Budapest or Vienna and certainly had fewer than we might expect given the nature of the state system and all its mutual cultural, social, intellectual, economic and other ties. As a correspondent for a Croatian newspaper, Špicer reported primarily on cultural life in Budapest but did not completely neglect political life. Finally, objective reporting on Budapest and Hungarian cultural life in general at a time of deteriorating Croatian-Hungarian relations, when mistrust, ignorance and stereotypes were rampant, was also a kind of political manifestation. As expected, he was also interested in Hungarian political events related to Croatian-Hungarian relations, but he reported on them in a very restrained way, refraining from any commentary. Furthermore, he was one of the few, and perhaps the only Jew from Croatia who had a significant military career while remaining connected to his native land. Finally, and most importantly, Špicer left behind a huge opus of works he authored or translated, which remains largely unknown to this day. Špicer is the author of a large number of books on a wide variety of subjects and several hundred articles, also of highly varied content. He also left many literary works which are not insignificant either (short stories and poems predominate, followed by sketches and travelogues). He wrote until his death and his book Ženska duša u svijetlu povijesti (The Female Soul in the Light of History) was published just a few months before his death (Zagreb, 1936). Mavro Špicer died on 14 July 1936 in Zagreb, and only Zagreb newspapers paid attention to his death. It was relatively modest coverage, much more modest than he deserved—he had already had multiple entries included in several lexicons and encyclopedias by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the first encyclopedias which contained Špicer’s short biography was the Hungarian A Pallas nagy lexikona (Pallas Great Encyclopedia), a lexicon published in sixteen volumes between 1893 and 1897. In that lexicon, Špicer is presented as a Croatian writer who worked towards familiarity between the cultures of Croats and Hungarians and published many reviews of Hungarian literature in Croatian magazines with the “honorable intention of arousing Croats’ feelings of sympathy for Hungarians” (“azon dicséretes szándékkal, hogy a horvátokban a magyarok iránt rokonszenvet keltsen”; Piškorec 146). Today Špicer is probably best known as pioneer of Esperanto, the founder of the Esperanto movement in Croatia, but in the last ten years something more has been written about him; he has been included in all relevant Croatian encyclopedias and lexicons, as well as in Židovski biografski leksikon (“Špicer, Mavro”). This paper discusses the biography of Mavro Špicer, and special attention is paid to his journalistic work, which has remained largely neglected until now, and his cooperation with Croatian newspapers in particular. In this context, an attempt is made to distinguish what Špicer’s views were on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

its past and future, and especially on the Croatian-Hungarian community within the Habsburg framework.

Biography Mavro Špicer was born in 1862 into a Jewish (Ashkenazi) family in Eastern Croatia, in the region of Slavonia, in the small town of Našice. Though it cannot be verified, his family probably arrived in Slavonia from Hungary, as did most Slavonian Jews. It is possible, and even probable, that the arrival of the Špicer family in Našice had something to do with the noble Pejačević family2 and their manor in Našice. One of the arguments for this thesis is Špicer’s dedication of the book Blätter und Blüthen aus Kroatiens Gauen (Berlin, 1894) to Count Pavle Pejačević (1813–1907). Špicer finished elementary school in Našice, and then finished high school in Osijek in 1881 (Gimnazije 115). He then went to Vienna to study Slavic and classical philology. Little is known about Špicer’s student days in the imperial capital, but some information is available. Thus, we know that he moved among other students from Croatia and Slavonia as a member of the Croatian Academic Society “Zvonimir”, the most important Croatian academic association in 1880s Vienna. However, unlike most of his Croatian colleagues—members of “Zvonimir”—Špicer seemed to be wary of politics and his motives for participating in the society were purely literary. The vast majority of members of this society, named after the eleventh-century Croatian king, were primarily interested in history and politics. These Croatian students did not become any more loyal in the capital during their student years than they were before coming to Vienna, which means that most of them were supporters of the Croatian nationalist, anti-dualistic Party of Rights and followers of its leader Ante Starčević (1823–1896). Špicer’s two lectures, held at literary evenings organized by Zvonimir, were not—judging by the titles—politically inspired: his first lecture was about the poet Sappho3 and the second about the prominent Croatian writer August Šenoa (1838–1881).4 At the same time, shortly after his arrival in Vienna, his literary career began. As far as is known, the first text, about the presence of the motif of a woman in a South Slavic folk song, was published in the daily Neue Freie Presse in 1881 (Mađer 256). Apparently, he did not complete his studies, but entered military service, becoming

2 Pejačević (Hungarian: Pejácsevich) is an old and influential Croatian noble family. During the nineteenth century three branches of the family owned large estates and castles in the territory of Slavonia and Srijem. The branch that owned the manor of Našice was especially important and from its ranks came two Croatian bans (governors)—Ladislav and his son Teodor. 3 “Hrvatsko” 31 Jan. 1883. 4 “Hrvatsko” 7. Feb. 1883.

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an administrative officer of Hungarian Honvéd (Home Guard Army) and spending the first and largest part of that service in Budapest. In the last decade of the nineteenth century he published many works; most important among them were three anthologies of Croatian literature published in German. Also of note is the Croatian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Croatian Dictionary (Magjarsko-hrvatski i hrvatsko-magjarski rječnik), published in 1893 in Budapest. It was the first dictionary of its kind (medium-sized), and the next one would be published 120 years later, in 2013. At the beginning of the twentieth century, around 1905, Špicer moved to Zagreb, still remaining in military service. Shortly after arriving in Zagreb, he became actively involved in the cultural and social life of Zagreb and Osijek. Among other things, he collaborated with Klub hrvatskih književnika (Club of Croatian Writers) in Osijek, and for a time he was a member of the board of the association (“Desetgodišnjica”). He was actively involved in the work of Društvo hrvatskih književnika (Society of Croatian Writers) in Zagreb, of which he was a founding member (the society was founded in 1900) (Jelčić 14). In the following years, Špicer collaborated on the pages of the newspaper of that society (Savremenik/ The Contemporary), publishing various articles. He also distinguished himself in Zagreb between 1906 and 1911 by holding various public lectures, especially within the Military-Scientific Society (Vojnoznanstveno društvo) in Zagreb. During World War I, he was the cashier senior advisor in Zagreb and headed the War Auxiliary Office of the Royal Hungarian Ministry of Land Defense (Kriegshilfsbureau). In 1916, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Francis Joseph, which valued his merits during the War (“Odlikovanje”). After the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the Yugoslav state, he remained in military service in Belgrade but retired in 1921, allegedly for health reasons. An overall look at Mavro Špicer’s life and his bibliography reveals that he was a man of exceptional erudition, broad interests and even greater knowledge. This was evident in the exceptional diversity of his opus and, perhaps more than anything else, in his book Dvije tri o “Jugoslovenskom Leksikonu”. Jedan književni unikum (Few Words on the “Yugoslav Lexicon”. One Literary Unique; Zagreb, 1931).

On the Monarchy Mavro Špicer’s views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, i.e., his texts that are more or less related to this topic, constitute only one, not particularly large segment of his overall work but a segment that is worthy of attention and which has so far been almost completely neglected. He was born five years before the creation of Austria-Hungary, before the Ausgleich of 1867, and he outlived the Monarchy by

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

18 years. How did he perceive the Monarchy and, within this context, how did he perceive Croatian-Hungarian relations? First of all, it should be emphasized that the great majority of Croatian political and general public was dissatisfied with the dualistic or subdualistic state system established in 1867 and 1868, and consequently they were dissatisfied with CroatianHungarian relations; this was also reflected in the literary and cultural life of Croatia. There is no important Croatian writer in the second half of the nineteenth century who would have been a supporter of (sub)dualism. If one considers the most prominent Croatian literary names of the time—August Šenoa (1838–1881), Ante Kovačić (1854–1889), Ksaver Šandor Đalski (1854–1935), Eugen Kumičić (1850–1904) and Antun Gustav Matoš (1873–1914)—one sees that all were opponents of the monarchy, of the Habsburgs and Hungarians, and some were even politically active as members of parliament. Their ideal was an independent Croatian or Yugoslav state created from the ruins of the monarchy. By the end of this epoch, certainly the greatest Croatian writer—Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981)—appears and his attitudes toward the Habsburgs and their empire were also quite negative. Mavro Špicer stands out in this corpus, though he is a much less prominent writer than those listed earlier. Living for about twenty years in Budapest, Špicer witnessed the rapid development of Hungarian capital in the late nineteenth century and was more or less impressed with it. In 1896, on the occasion of the great Hungarian Millennium Exhibition, he published a newspaper article in Sarajevo in which he presented the strong growth and development of Budapest, concluding that by the end of the century it had developed with “American speed” (Špicer 1896a: 143). At the same time, and on the same occasion, Špicer repeatedly presents Budapest in Zagreb newspapers, and these texts—as Špicer himself presented them—were to serve as a kind of guide for all those from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina who intended to visit the city and the Millennium Exhibition. However, he could not publish such texts in opposition newspapers because the Croatian opposition was not generally interested in them; the opposition did not think positively of the Hungarian capital, or at least they refused to say anything positive in public. On many occasions, the Croatian opposition press commented gleefully on the strong Jewish influence in all spheres of public life in Budapest. The same circles were, of course, aware of the fast growth and development of Budapest, and the new parliament building, a chain bridge or underground were thorns in their eyes; such giant projects were attributed to the exploitative character of the sub-dualist arrangement, and it was said that these constructions were also built with Croatian money. The next important and interesting Špicer text is one on the crown of St. Stjepan, one of the most important Hungarian national symbols, published in the Zagreb daily Narodne novine (The People’s Newspaper). In a more extensive, positively

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framed presentation, Špicer addresses the history of the crown of St. Stjepan, and at the end of the text he says: “What awaits her in the future? Who would know that! We should rejoice if the sun shines on us today from clear heights!” (Špicer 1896b: 2) It was also a text which one cannot imagine in the pages of any Croatian opposition newspaper. In the eyes of the opposition, the Hungarian crown was despised just as much as the figure of St. Stephan—the saint and first Hungarian king. For example, in the center of Zagreb, there was a hotel To the Hungarian Crown for many years, but in 1890 that name was removed and the Grand Hotel was opened in the same place (“Novi hoteli …”). St. Stephen, as well as St. Ladislav (another Hungarian medieval king and saint), was present in Croatia and Slavonia during many centuries of close Croatian-Hungarian relations. His representation—as a statue or portrait—was part of the interior of many Croatian churches, but at the end of the nineteenth century there was a tendency to displace the figure of the saint, who is also the protector of Hungary, or to replace it with some other saint who was not directly connected to the Hungarians (who were perceived as Croatia’s main, or among its main, political rivals) (Karakaš Obradov). For the topic of this article, Špicer’s translation activity is especially important, both from Croatian into Hungarian and German, and from Hungarian and German into Croatian. It is logical that he paid special attention to Hungarian literature and it can be freely concluded that in the period of dualism he published more about Hungarian literature in Croatian newspapers and magazines than all other authors combined. The translation of Croatian literature into Hungarian, and vice versa, was also a reflection of political views at the time. It is no coincidence that, for example, August Šenoa, although he was educated in Pécs, Hungary and his knowledge of the Hungarian language was excellent, never translated anything from Hungarian.5 As an editor, Šenoa gave such an anti-Hungarian tone to the most important Croatian literary magazine Vienac (The Wreath) in the 1870s (the magazine almost completely ignored Hungarian literature). It is also interesting to mention that Špicer introduced the Hungarian public to those Croatian writers who, somewhat earlier during the revolution of 1848/ 49, fought against the Hungarians with sword in hand. One of them was Ivan Trnski (1819–1910), who was a highly respected poet in Croatia at the end of the nineteenth century. On the occasion of Trnski’s death, Špicer published an article in the Budapest newspaper Pester Lloyd, and mentioned in it that Trnski, a military officer, rode with ban Josip Jelačić (1801–1859)6 during the suppression of

5 August Šenoa was the most significant and influential Croatian writer of the 1870s. He was of Czech descent and editor of the literary magazine Vienac (1874–1881). 6 As one of the officers who led the imperial Habsburg army, Jelačić was one of the most negative figures in Hungarian public opinion in the nineteenth century—and little has changed to this day when it comes to Croatian-Hungarian relations.

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

the Hungarian revolution of 1848/49. Špicer, however, added that literature was Trnski’s most important battlefield.7 Špicer’s translation work was not an end in itself and it had a further, indirect goal. It was a mutual acquaintance of two nations who were (politically) divided and who actually knew each other too little and knew each other less and less after the abandonment of the Latin language that connected their elites (in the last fifty years of the common state, there must not even have been a hundred Croats who learned Hungarian, and perhaps even fewer Hungarians who learned Croatian in the same period). That his translation work was indeed encouraged by the mission of building trust between the two nations, Špicer himself testifies in one place: It is not a new idea to put a culture in the service of politics, and to build a bridge between those two. […] If some day all the prejudices, which are now preventing the cultural cooperation between Croats and Hungarians, would disappear, then both of the sides will be ashamed and they will have to confess that they were wrong for not working earlier on growing closer in the fields of art and literature. (Špicer 1906: 374)8

These were, however, illusions, and Špicer’s efforts were doomed to failure. Prejudices were strong on both sides of the Drava river, and the possibility of compromise and coexistence was diminishing. The century-long common life of the two nations was coming to an end, and Mavro Špicer and other individuals with similar views could only observe such a turn of events with disappointment.

Millennium Exhibition in Budapest An important place when considering Špicer’s views on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy belongs to the already mentioned Hungarian Millennium Exhibition from 1896. This exhibition was undoubtedly one of the greatest events during the dualist period of Hungarian history. The exhibition attracted a lot of attention from the imperial and European public. The exhibition was written about also in the entire Slavic South, both within the borders of Austria-Hungary and outside them, but likely no journalist wrote more articles about the exhibition than Mavro Špicer. Špicer published dozens of articles about the exhibition in Zagreb and Sarajevo newspapers (in Zagreb in Narodne novine and Pravi prijatelj naroda (The True Friend of the People), and in Sarajevo in Nada (Hope) and Sarajevski list (Sarajevo

7 The text was first published in Pester Lloyd on 5 July 1910, and then in Croatian translation: Špicer 1910. 8 If not otherwise mentioned, all translations are mine.

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Daily)). Apparently, he objectively reported on various aspects of the exhibition, including the participation of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Of course, these were also articles that he could not publish everywhere because the opposition in Croatia and Bosnia was not interested in the Budapest millennium celebrations. The opposition public and its newspapers, especially in Croatia, tried to ignore or devalue the exhibition and all its accompanying events.9 Although he wrote about the exhibition for newspapers that were under the control of the Zagreb and Sarajevo governments, Špicer objectively assessed the entire event; consequently, we find in his descriptions not only praise, but also critical tones. Among other things, he noted that there were fewer visitors to the exhibition than expected, that the income was less than expected, and he critically commented on some events and content. Špicer’s exceptional knowledge of all information related to the Millennium Exhibition also stemmed from the fact that he was actively involved in the exhibition (he was engaged as a guide for visitors to the Croatian department of the exhibition).10 Although Špicer was trying to avoid political topics in mentioned reports, it was still clear that he was among those who were certain that Austria-Hungary represents the best political framework for all of its nations and that the eightcentury-long Croatian-Hungarian state union should be preserved. In that sense he was critical towards Hungarian nationalism: It can already be noticed that enlightened people are prepared to destroy that Chinese wall which has been built by the chauvinists with the intention of separating Hungary from abroad. There are growing voices that constant contact with the enlightened West must be maintained and that such contact has positive consequences for the moral success of the exhibition. During the exhibition, this fatal chauvinism was napping, but did not quite fall asleep. (Špicer 1896e: 436)

Thus, Špicer welcomed the Millennium Exhibition, looking forward to the economic and cultural progress of Hungary and Croatia, but at the same time condemned the Croatian and Hungarian nationalisms that clashed over the exhibition. On the other hand, the Croatian opposition reacted extremely negatively to the Millennium Exhibition, insisting on the primarily political character of the event (which, however, was also not in question). The opposition criticized all of those who visited the exhibition, especially those who organized such collective visits, and 9 All four listed newspapers were controlled by the Zagreb and Sarajevo authorities: Narodne novine and Pravi prijatelj naroda were controlled by the government of Dragutin (Károly) Khuen-Héderváry, and Nada and Sarajevski list were controlled by Bosnian Governor Benjamin (Beni) Kállay. 10 For example, he was a guide to the Vienna Society of Writers and Journalists Concordia. (“Naš izložbeni odjel.”)

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

Zagreb daily Obzor 11 on one occasion also criticized Mavro Špicer and his reports from Budapest. Špicer’s name was not mentioned explicitly, but it was suggested that his reports were not true.12 Špicer was forced to react. He wrote that this aforementioned article, published in Obzor, was full of lies and inspired by hatred of anything resembling friendly relations with the Hungarian people. Finally, he guaranteed that every word he wrote was true and that he wrote from personal experience, as an eyewitness (Špicer 1896c). Špicer’s reaction then provoked a surge of anger in the Obzor editorial board and a response under titled “‘The Writer’ – God Have Mercy on His Mother!” It was a bitter, fierce, and even ugly continuation of the controversy. First, although Špicer signed his article as “M. Šp.”, with the Croatian version of his last name, in Obzor he was referred to in its original form, as Spitzer (six times), which obviously alluded to his foreign, and probably quite specifically, to his Jewish origins. At the beginning of the article we read: From the opening of the Millennium, the reptile newspaper of the Croatian and Bosnian government publishes letters and reports written by ‘a writer’ Mavro Spitzer, who sings bombastic dithyrambs and hyperbolic hymns to the Magyar exhibition on one hand, and spits the truth into its cheek on the other, defending Pest and writing phantasmagorias about the shining welcomes of the guests and the cheap life in Judeo-Hungarian Mecca. (“Književnik …”)

Thus, Špicer was attacked fiercely, and it was pointed out in an even more pointed way that his descriptions of Budapest events were untrue and that no one believed them. Furthermore, Špicer was attacked personally; he was called a small clerk who writes solely for the sake of money, a servant of the Zagreb County governor (veliki župan), a miserable writer, and so on (“Književnik …”). Špicer’s new response was fairly calm and he stated that such way of writing is shameful, and he only emphasized that, in the past three years (1893–1896), Obzor had published as many as five articles in which he praised Špicer and his activities, especially as a translator (Špicer 1896d). The Zagreb newspaper Pravi prijatelj naroda also joined the discussion. It was a pro-regime paper, an unofficial newspaper of the ruling Narodna stranka (People’s Party), thus, the editorial board was expected to side with Špicer. An anonymous contributor to the paper pointed out that their correspondent Špicer—contrary

11 At the end of the 19th century, Obzor was the most prominent Croatian newspaper. With minor interruptions, it was published in Zagreb from 1860 to 1941. 12 “O izletu …16 Sep. 1896”.

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to Obzor’s accusations—was a man who writes exclusively for a salary, and also reminded the Obzor editorial board that they had recently praised Špicer: At the same time, they forgot that a short time ago they praised the same gentleman as a clever writer, a very skilled translator and a connoisseur of our language, German and Hungarian. They forgot that such a man could earn much more if he wrote for German and Hungarian newspapers. (“Možda …”)

However, it should be noted that relations between the main Zagreb daily and Špicer would later calm down, and Špicer would even contribute to Obzor’s pages.

Esperanto Political conditions in Croatia (and Hungary) began to change rapidly in the early twentieth century. From everything we know, we can assume that Mavro Špicer did not observe these changes with approval, which indicated new temptations for the Croatian-Hungarian community and the monarchy as a whole. From 1908/1909, a new area of interest and work appears in the life of the versatile Špicer. It was Esperanto. It is possible that this new interest was related to the development of political conditions in Hungary and Croatia, i.e., it can likely be related to the defeat of the Liberal Party in Hungary (1905), the defeat of the People’s Party and the victory of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition in Croatia (1906). In 1909, Špicer founded the Society of Croatian Esperantists in Zagreb, in the same year he published the first Esperanto textbook and launched the first Croatian Esperanto journal Kroata Esperantisto. The idea of an artificial language that would connect people around the world and mediate cultural interconnection could certainly be a consolation and hope to a man who witnessed nationalisms tear apart the unity of Austria-Hungary and who in the early twentieth century could see that there were too few like him who struggled to build bridges while too many of those dismantled them and led the Monarchy to ruin. Špicer himself, on the example of Croatian-Hungarian relations, was convinced that the language issue was one of the important reasons for conflict between nations and he was aware that no nation would give up its own language in favour of a living foreign language (Špicer 1909: 10). But he was convinced that the new language, the work of the genius Ludwik Zamenhof, had the power to at least alleviate tensions among various nations. In this sense, he wrote in 1909: And who knows, perhaps nations, using one neutral means of mutual understanding, would respect each other more? It is not likely, however, that such a language would end

Mavro Špicer (1862–1936) and His Views on the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

conflicts between nationalities, but it would certainly rip out their poisonous sting. And the allegory of language turmoil in Babylon would get its natural and practical solution. (Špicer 1909: 4)13

It is certainly interesting to note that, at the same time, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Zionism became more and more powerful among Croatian Jews. Apparently, both ideas—Esperanto and Zionism—received additional impetus in Croatia with the deterioration of political circumstances, i.e., the disappointment of the Jews, who saw that growing uncertainty loomed over the future of AustroHungary.

Conclusion Mavro Špicer was a Croatian Jew and an officer, an officer of Hungarian Honvéd. These two facts greatly shaped him, but I believe that this paper confirms that his military vocation did not restrain him, that Špicer was truly personally convinced that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as well as the Croatia-Hungarian alliance within this framework, should have been preserved, despite its many problems and conflicts. Like many other Croatian Jews, Špicer also tried to maintain old bridges and build some new ones between the centuries-old Croatian-Hungarian political alliance and cultural affinity. However, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this proved to be a difficult—even too difficult—mission.

Works cited “Desetgodišnjica opstanka Kluba hrvatskih književnika u Osijeku.” Dom i svijet 15 Jan. (1920): 40. “Hrvatsko akademičko družtvo Zvonimir.” Sloboda 31 Jan. (1883): 4. “Hrvatsko akademičko družtvo Zvonimir.” Sloboda 7 Feb. (1883): 4. “‘Književnik’ – žalostna mu majka!” Obzor 19 Sep. (1896): 3. “Možda zadnja o posjetu milenarne izložbe.” Pravi prijatelj naroda 30 Sep. (1896): 2.

13 The significant successes of the Esperanto movement in the early twentieth century were the basis for the optimism of many of Zamenhof ’s supporters, including Špicer. In 1909, he had the impression that the noble idea of a language that would bring the nations of the world together was already becoming a reality, and he considered it “more than likely” that Esperanto, a practical language that could be easily learned, would soon replace living foreign languages in international communication (Špicer 1909: 23). In the coming years, Špicer’s hopes and beliefs would prove to be an illusion.

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“Naš izložbeni odjel.” Pravi prijatelj naroda 27 May (1896): 2. “Novi hoteli u Zagrebu.” Narodne novine 21 Sep. (1890): 3. “O izletu hodočastnika na milenijsku izložbu.” Obzor 14 Sep. (1896): 4–5, and 16 Sep. (1896): 3. “Odlikovanje.” Jutarnji list 25. Jan. (1916): 4. “Špicer, Mavro”. Židovski biografski leksikon. https://zbl.lzmk.hr/?p=2512. Accessed 23 Mar 2021. Gimnazije u Osijeku. Ravnatelji, profesori i maturanti 1829–2000. Osijek: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Zavod za znanstveni i umjetnički rad u Osijeku, 2001. Jelčić, Dubravko. “Početak ljetopisa Društva hrvatskih književnika. Prvih dvadeset godina (1900–1919).” Spomenica Društva hrvatskih književnika 1900.-2000.-2010. Ed. Božidar Petrač. Zagreb: Društvo hrvatskih književnika, 2010: 9–96. Karakaš Obradov, Marica. “Čašćeni Florijan i osporavani Stjepan Kralj.” Hrvatska revija, 5.3 (2005): 81–84. Mađer, Rudolf Franjin. “Špicer Mavro.” Znameniti i zaslužni Hrvati 925–1925. Ed. Emilij Laszowski. Zagreb: Odbor za izdanje knjige “Zaslužni i znameniti Hrvati 925–1925”, 1925: 256. Piškorec, Velimir. “Iz života i djela Mavra Špicera.” Našički zbornik 8 (2007): 145–210. Špicer, Mavro. “Budimpešta i njezin okoliš.” Nada 15 Apr. (1896a): 143. Špicer, Mavro. “Kruna sv. Stjepana.” Narodne novine 3 June (1896b): 2. Špicer, Mavro. “Malo odgovora.” Narodne novine 18 Sep. (1896c): 2. Špicer, Mavro. “Još malo odgovora.” Narodne novine 22 Sep. (1896d): 2. Špicer, Mavro. “Sa milenijske izložbe XV. Zaključak.” Nada 15 Nov. (1896e): 435–436. Špicer, Mavro. “Madžarska književnost.” Savremenik 1.10 (1906): 374–376. Špicer, Mavro. Medjunarodni jezik Esperanto i njegovo općenito značenje. Zagreb: Naklada Društva hrvatskih esperantista, 1909. Špicer, Mavro. “Ivan vitez Trnski.” Mi 1 (1910): 135–137.

Yitzchak Kerem (Jerusalem)

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer Crossing from Salonikian Sephardic Historian to Greek Short Story Writer

Abstract:

Albertos Nar was a post-World War II historian of the Salonikian Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century and the Holocaust. Toward the end of his life, he became an author of Greek prose fiction and social commentary. He also became an ethnographer, highlighting Greek cultural influences on Jewish culture in Ottoman Salonika and Izmir. He left his Jewish Sephardic environment and located and detected Greek influences not only locally in Thessaloniki but also across the Aegean and, in Izmir, in Greece’s foreign rival Turkey, which was previously thought to have been an alien, insular Sephardic Jewish enclave. Through his exposure to contemporary Greek culture, Nar broke down borders and cultural barriers through his literary short stories. Albertos Nar, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was born in Thessaloniki in 1947, in the midst of the Greek Civil War, and never left his city until his untimely death from cancer on 2 March 2005. Nar studied at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and worked as the secretary and historian of the Jewish community, as the director of the Historical Centre for the Study of Judaism of Salonika (Thessaloniki) where he joined numerous cultural societies. Nar authored books on the history and culture of the Jews in Salonika and their demise in the Holocaust. Nar was a frequent contributor to Chronika, the historical periodical of KIS, the Board of Jewish Communities in Athens, wrote articles in local newspapers and was also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Center for the History of the Municipality of Thessaloniki. His journalistic career began when he travelled to Athens to cover the Salonikian Maccabi Sports Club in 1968. Albertos Nar was a modern Greek Jew. He grew up in the Maccabi sports youth movement under the legendary boxer Dino Ouziel, was passionate about football and his local Paok football club. Nar began his journalistic career covering the international Maccabi games in Israel in the 1960s. He befriended the Macedonian newspaper sports writer Taki Dranitsa, without whose help he would never have been able to start at this traditionally anti-Semitic newspaper for Asia Minor’s Greek (i.e., Christian-Orthodox) refugees, founded in the 1920s. Nar was a publicist on

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Jewish and more general civic issues for the newspapers during the last decade or so of his life. Born in 1947, Nar belonged to the baby boomer generation. Living in areas near the mountains of the city in partisan strongholds, his infancy occurred against the backdrop of the Greek Civil War, but his formative years as a young adult at the Aristotelian University in the mid-to-late 1960s widened Nar’s horizons beyond Greece. His first book Oi Synagōges tēs Thessalonikēs. Ta tragoudia mas (The Synagogues of Thessaloniki. Our Songs) was published in 1985. He wrote many folkloric accounts of the Jews of Salonika and tried to illustrate the character of the Jewish community throughout history. As a novelist, his first short story appeared in 1985 in the magazine The Tree, and he then published stories in the Greek magazines Parodida (Parody) and Tram (Tramway). His writings were translated into English, German, French, and Hebrew. In the last decade of his life, he became an active author of short stories and was part of the broader local Greek literary scene. In 1997 Nar published a book of short stories in Greek entitled Se anazētēsē yfous. Diēgēmata (In Search of Style. Short Stories). He relived the lives of Salonikian Jews in the interwar period through the eyes of the poor in the bedlam of the old train station, the Modiano market, or the petit-bourgeoise neighborhood of Via Egnatia. Additionally, he explored the post-World War II era through his sporting activities in basketball and soccer as well as in the cafes of the Upper Town, which he called “Our Manhattan”. He depicted the White Tower and the gates of the old wall as secret hiding places and recalled Greek-Orthodox refugees from Asia Minor and local Jewish Sephardic women, such as Stella Hezkel and Rose Ashkenazi, singing Rembetika music in Vardar tavernas in the 1930s. He also included stories about growing up and playing billiards and cards, roaming through the fruit market Lemonadika, being in his father’s store, or going to school. As a young boy, Nar thought that all culture was in the bustling capital city of Athens where was a theater and entertainment sector. Once he reached adulthood, he discovered Thessaloniki’s culture: the music festivals “Park”, “Theodorakis” and “Omorfi Poli”, the evening shows at Metropolitana, and night life at ChatzidakisChorn and Odos Oneiron. In the summer he discovered life near the Old Train Station and behind Freedom Square where his father’s store stood opposite the bank (Nar 1991: 89). Nar stated the trivial, reflecting the background of the once-cosmopolitan Ottoman city which existed until the 1922 Greek-Turkish population exchange. His intellectual frame of reference ranged from the era of Jewish migration to the Americas, Western Europe, and Eretz-Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Ottoman decline, extending to the Greek interwar period, the Great Depression, the anti-Semitic Campbell riots of 1931, and continuing until the late 1930s. He recalled Albert Nahmia, a taxi driver who was a quintessentially

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer

Salonikian Jew (Nar 1991: 91). Through Nahmia, he learned that the Karagiozi initially was a cultural performance of Jewish puppetry later associated with Greek society. In his essay “The Sephardi vs. the ‘Rembetiko’ Folk Song”, Nar explored the relationship between the songs of the Jewish community of Salonika and popular contemporary Rebetiko songs with many musical examples and rare photos of Jewish performers (Nar 1999b: 139–165). He noted the Sephardic songs of Thessaloniki that bore a resemblance to the Rembetiko genre like Yedi Kule (The White Tower) and those that took melodies from Rembetiko like Jaco and Elenitza, Decidi de me kazar (Decide to Marry Me), and Kanaraki (Little Canary), and Rembetiko songs with Jewish themes such as O Bochori (The First-Born Son), Dudu, Mousourlou, Xanthē Evraiopoula (Blond Jewish Girl), and Katochi 4-5-42 (Occupation 4-5-42). In his book on the synagogues and songs of Salonika’s Jewry, he presented JudeoSpanish ballads and translated them into Greek, unravelling not only the medieval Judeo-Spanish culture but also showing their Ottoman-Turkish, Greek, French, and Italian elements. Nar published the Judeo-Spanish song Todos se van a la qehila (Everyone Goes to Synagogue) and translated it into Greek. Below are two verses in English translated from Judeo-Spanish:1 Everyone is going to the synagogue But I am going to your house. Everyone kisses the mezuzah I kiss your face. I passed by your door And found it closed. The lock I kissed Like I kiss your face. (Nar 1985: 152)2

It is a song from a time when a great part of the population was traditional, went to synagogue and kissed the mezuzah. Clearly nostalgic and simple, Nar translated it into Greek for the local Greek-Orthodox population to understand its small Jewish minority. Another Judeo-Spanish song is Dia de alhad de manana (Sunday Evening):

1 All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. 2 The Judeo-Spanish version reads: “Todos se van a la quehila,/ yo vengo a tu casa,/ Todos bezan la mezusa,/ yo beso la tu kara.// Por la tu puerta yo pasi/ y la topi asserada./ La yavedura yo bezi/ como besar tu kara.”

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Sunday evening Passing by the coffee house I see a misfortune, Taking a break on the nargila pipe. Monday evening Very painfully I took it. Very painfully I took it That Rachel who I adored cried out. Don’t pain my son And don’t take it with difficulty. If you leave Rachel Otherwise you will take it better. Don’t tell my mother And don’t give me more difficulty. If Rachel will but leave With valor I will stay.3 (Nar 1985: 172)

The song contains a sign of the East, visiting the coffee house and smoking the nargila pipe, and the loss and heartbreaking love typical in Sephardic songs. Rachel leaves her environment at the beginning of the week and no one will speak of her anymore. Her mother suffers while refusing to speak of it to her offspring. In Keimenē epi aktēs thalassēs (Lying on a Beach by the Sea) from 1997, Nar showed how the Greek author Georgos Ioannou lamented the loss of the large Jewish community of Thessaloniki, having been annihilated in the Holocaust, and recalled previous Jewish-Greek (Orthodox) interactions in daily life. Nar presented an analysis of the hybridization of Judeo-Spanish from Turkish and Greek based on Martin Schwartz’s field research, which involved recording Jack Mayesh. Martin Schwartz, an ethnomusicologist from Berkeley, California, published a study of Jack Mayesh in 1986. Mayesh was born in Kuşadası (Asia Minor), migrated to Los Angeles and died there (Nar 1997: 301). A singer and cantor, Mayesh was releasing records as early as 1948. Mayesh set Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) lyrics to Greek and Turkish melodies. In this way, Mayesh made his own version of Missirlu (Egyptian) and transformed this song, first known in Turkish as 3 The Judeo-Spanish version is: “Dia d’lhad de manana/ passi por la kafene/ Ya vido un desditchado/ biviendo la narguile.// Dia de lunes la mañana/ muy sikleoso se topava./ Muy sikleoso se topava/ que a Rachel guet ya le dava.// No te siklees tu mi hijo/ y no te tomes sehora./ Si tu a Rachel la quitas/ otra mijor vas a tomar.// No me hable, la mi madre / y no me da mas sehora./ Si yo a Rachel la quito/ con la dolor yo v’a quedar.”

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer

Benim güzel bülülüm, into the Greek Kanarini and finally into the Judeo-Spanish song Ven canario (see Bresler). In one record, Mayesh took up the melody of Pou na vrō gynaika na sou moiazei (Where I Found a Woman Who Would Be Like Me) by the renowned countercultural Rebetiko singers and musicians Andoni Diamantidi and Dalga that had been already recorded in 1936. In Keimenē epi aktēs thalassēs, Nar transcribed the Greek version of this love song. He also related the cultural background for Mayesh’s singing of the song Bülbülüm (My Beautiful Nightingale).4 In the case of another love song Kanaraki, Nar presented the Judeo-Spanish and the Greek (Nar 1997: 302) together. This Judeo-Spanish song was recorded by Joe Elias in New York in 1992, but the Greek version in fact originated from a song by the composer Panagioti Tounta, sung by Rosa Eskenazi. The Anatolian melody was developed by Taso Schereli. Another interpretation in Greek was put forward by the poet Ilias Petropoulos to the music by Agapio Tobouli. The remarks above are presented in the writing of Nar, and he presented the text of Kanaraki as translated from Judeo-Spanish to English below: Kanaraki [the little canary – Y.K.] is your name, Bird of beauty. Such, such is your spirit! God bless your face! Come to my side There where I live, I will make a palace for you Entirely of glass. (Nar 1997: 302)5

Nar was unusual in his manner of synthesizing Jewish history and culture in a Greek setting, whether in the context of the late Hellenistic era or during the Ottoman period. He presented the Jewish past and culture not as a mere anecdote, but as an important facet of Hellenistic society and a catalyst of Hellenic and modern Greek political awareness.

4 The Rebetiko genre was a protest Bohemian-style movement. Nar presented the social background of these songs. Mayesh chose them as melodies reflective of Turkey of the time and not as protest songs, but tunes he could adapt to Judeo-Spanish and Turkey and the Aegean region of the time. This style was acceptable to his milieu of Sephardic immigrants in Los Angeles as well as in New York. Traditionally it was common for Sephardim to take local Greek melodies and folktales and convert them into Judeo-Spanish songs. 5 The original in Judeo-Spanish is: “Kanaraki es tun ombre,/ passaro de ermosura./ Tanto, tanto es tu brio!/ Benditcho tu Figura!// Ven a mi lado/ onde yo bivo,/ te are un palacio/ entero de vidro.”

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After his premature death in 2005, his essays, newspaper articles from the local newspapers Makedonia and Thessaloniki, and prose were published in the book Epipolaios epi poleōs (2007). There, Nar presented anecdotal and superficial aspects of the city, life in its neighborhoods, childhood memories, and popular leisure spots, on the one hand, but likewise highlighted how local residents related to Jews and their memories of Jews, and their urban cultural achievements on the other. In this way, Nar underscored Jewish participation in the city’s culture, such as their pioneering role in the Karagiozis shadow puppet theater, which Greek society had previously appropriated as its own (Kerem). Nar was accepted by Greek society and published frequently in the local Greek newspaper Makedonia, which had traditionally been hostile towards the local Jewish population. Nar sought to show the Greek origins of Jewish culture in Greece and Turkey in order to raise public awareness of and respect for local Jewish culture among the Greek public, which included his citing of Georgios Zalakosta’s midnineteenth century I agapē tēs voskopoulas (A Shepherdess’ Love) which initially was an Italian ballad but was introduced into Judeo-Spanish after its adaptation from a Greek translation. Nar also researched and published how the Jewry of Izmir adapted Judeo-Spanish ballads from local Greek traditions. Hadas Pal-Yarden, an academic musicologist and popular Sephardic singer in Turkey and Israel, bolstered research on such Judeo-Spanish ballads as the song Katife, which was released in various versions in Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Sarajevo, and Jerusalem (Pal Yarden 2005 and 2015; Refael). Salonikai, dēladē Salonikios (Salonikai, or From Thessaloniki: Short Stories), published in 1999, may be counted as Albertos Nar’s literary claim to posthumous fame by literary critics. From its name, it can be seen as a Jewish work. A Greek-speaking Greek-Orthodox person would call the city Thessaloniki—its historic Greek name—but Nar depicted its residents as Salonikians, i.e., the way Jews perceived and portrayed their city. Nar died on March 2, 2005. During the 2011 Thessaloniki Book Festival Tassos Kaloutsas, Thomas Korovinis, Manolis Xixakis and Periklis Sfyridis discussed Nar’s work. On 10 May 2015, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, the publishing houses Efeli and Eurasia organized a literary event for the Twelfth Thessaloniki International Book Fair with the speakers Christos Zafiris, Thomas Korovinis, Giorgos Skambardonis and Thanasis Triarides. For the event, Nefeli prepared and presented an edition of Albertos Nar’s short stories entitled Salonikai: All the Short Stories (Nar 2015). Nar’s narrative work, written independently and on his own initiative, was connected to Thessaloniki and the lives of its Jews. He wrote from the perspectives of the old and young alike, depicting and referring to many places, streets, buildings, and neighborhoods of the city. Be it the train station or the Modiano Market, he de-

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer

scribed the life of poor Jews in the city and their motion and labor. In Salonikai, Nar takes the reader, through the nostalgic lens of the old Salonikian Jew Jako Soulema, from the days of yore and proceeds into the landscape of the city now transformed by modernity. In the short story Drapetēs apo tote (Runaway From Then) (Nar 2015: 204–210), the narrator Soulema describes the neighborhood in which he was born (“in an interwar, three-story apartment building at the corner of Egnatia and Antigonides”),6 where his father’s shop was located (“at Filippou Street, approximately at the point ‘kai’ where it crosses Venizelos Street”),7 where he studied in school (“the school complex was surrounded by the streets of Kostas Krystallis, Syngrou and Ambrosios”)8 and where he took shape “as a football figure”9 on the marble paving stones of the Governor’s Square. Nar was an author of individual experiences as well as those of the community and collective memory. He was a “second generation” Salonikian Jew, raised in a post-Holocaust environment in which he did not experience the rich local Sephardic culture prior to its almost complete annihilation in the Holocaust. He knew Judeo-Spanish passively and not as a living language with organized grammar and structure; however, he was motivated to record what he could about the Jewish communal history and culture. On the back cover of Salonikai (Nar 1999a), the editors summarized: While I was unable to say “goodbye”, the particular psychosynthesis of the Jewish Hebrew, while seeking his personal identity, recalling memories. The author draws his material from a wealth of personal experiences, while at other times, as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, he outlines the painful remnants that Nazi atrocities left in the souls and bodies of his own people. The associative tone of his writing is harmoniously combined with realistic records, especially in texts that highlight the author’s longing for his birthday. The constant of Albertos’ writings is the past-present relationship, which is always the best reason for drastic reflection.

In 2013, literary critic Periklis Sfyridis composed a memorial tribute to Albertos Nar (Sfyridis 2013): Recently, in the last issue of Septembris of 2005, in between subjects of scientific works and labour issues, I saw mentions of “Salonikians, in other words, a Salonikian” related

6 “Sena mesopolemiko triōrofo stē symvolē tēs Egnatias me tēn Antigonidōn” (Nar 2015: 204). 7 “[…] stēn odo Filippou, peripou sto sēmeiō pou diastaupōnetai me tēn odo Venizelou” (Nar 2015: 204). 8 “[…] To scholiko syngrotēma pou perivalletai apo tis odous Kōsta Kristallē, Syngrou kai Amvrosiou” (Nar 2015: 204). 9 “hōs podosfairikē fysignōmia” (Nar 2015: 204).

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to my friend Albertos Nar who passed away a few months ago in his native city. I was on the island when I was informed on television. Falsely denying why I could not be there, I couldn’t send a flower and a little sympathy to say goodbye; I only later called his spouse Elvira and expressed my condolences. While I was unable to say goodbye forever to Albertos, as I learned, and I had the privilege to return to his place of birth [Salonika – Y.K.], from a small town in central Germany, after receiving a letter resembling a telegram from a woman connected to [my wife – Y.K.] Magda. A cold object, but shiny and paper, I thought, because I became aware from abroad of [the loss – Y.K.] a beloved person...10

Thessaloniki expanded from east to west. The eastern side is the affluent side; the western areas are the poorer areas, such as Vardar. The primary hub of Jewish life was in the city centre. The affluent Jewish population lived on the eastern side. Nar refers to the newer Jewish areas in the east and northeast as if they are “uptown” or on the Upper West Side of New York City. These were the areas of the grand villas, but also traditional neighborhoods and synagogues. By contrast, the historian of architecture Christina Pallini sees Greek Thessaloniki in the interwar period as rebuilt from north to south with diagonal and horizontal Greek streets patterned after classical Greek architecture (Pallini). For Jewish Salonika, this was the destruction of the Ottoman and old Sephardic city built with enclaves, courtyards, neighborhoods, and compounds. The fatal fire of 1917 destroyed all of this and Salonika’s synagogues, and this is what Nar sought to portray in his prose, short essays, historical magazines, and books.

Conclusion Nar was a chronicler of Thessalonikian (Salonikian) Jewish history, and portrayed its Sephardic culture, but also provided a unique perspective on the Jewish role in Greek history, in Hellenism, or during the Greek national awakening in the

10 This quotation is especially hard to follow as it uses more of a telegram style than an organized, literary essay form. The original text in Greek is as follows: “Sto teleutaio malista teuchos tou, Septemvrēs tou 2005, anamesa se epistēmonikes ergasies kai syndikalistika aitēma-ta, eida na anadyetai to diēgma ‘Salonikai, dēladē Salonikios’ tou filou mou Almpertou Nar, pou ligous mēnes prin efige apo tē genethlia polē. Ēmoun sto nēsi hotan plēroforēthēka tēn apodēmia apo tēn tēleorasē. Analythika se lygmous giati den ēmoun ekei, den boresa oute m’ hena louloudi kai ligo chōma na ton apochairetēsō, mono argotera tēlefōnēsa stē syzygo tou Elvira kai tē syllypēthēka. Hopōs den ēmoun ekei gia na apochairetēsō ton allon Almperto para ematha kai tē dikē tou anachōrēsē apo to enethlio topo tou, mia kōmo-polē tēs kentrikēs Germanias, me hena syntomo san tēlegrafēma gramma tēs gynaikas tou Magdas. Psychro pragma kai to gyali kai to charti, skeftēka, hotan gnōsto-poioun tēn apodēmia prosfilōn prosōpōn.”

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer

modern era. He highlighted many Greek influences on Sephardic culture and vice versa. He outlined how both societies simultaneously intersected and not only lived separately. At the end of his relatively short life, Nar chronicled his contemporary Thessaloniki, which will contribute to his notoriety in the future. During his life Nar was known for writing about Salonikian Jewry in the Holocaust and synagogues before the Holocaust in his native city of Salonika. In the last decade of his life, he wrote in the Greek press, presenting his perspective on the city in his essays, novels, and books. Only after his death was he appreciated by Greek authors and entered the Greek literary canon of the city.

Works cited Abravanel [blog]. O Alberto Nar, to xylo kai to prōtathlēma (Alberto Nar, the beating and the championship). https://abravanel.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/alberto_nar/. Accessed 28 Jan. 2016. Bresler, Joel. “Jack Mayesh.” Sephardic Music: A Century of Recordings, 2008–2012. http://Sephardicmusic.org/artists/Mayesh,Jack/Mayesh,Jack.htm. Accessed 17 Mar. 2021. EHRI: Greek Literature and Historical Archive, Thessaloniki. Morfotiko Institute of the National Bank, S2 Collection Albertos Nar. Kerem, Yitzchak. “The Research of Giulio Caimi on the Karaghiozi Puppet Theater.” International Conference ‘Greek Art and Culture, Origins and Influences’. Program of Modern Hellenic Studies. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, May 21, 2007. Nar, Albertos. Oi Synagoges tēs Thessalonikēs. Ta tragoudia mas: meletēmata giro apo tēn historia kai paradosē tōn Evraiōn tēs Thessalonikēs (The Synagogues of Thessaloniki – Our Songs. Studies about the history and songs of the Jews of Thessaloniki). Salonika: Jewish Community of Salonika, 1985. Nar, Albertos. Se anazētēsē yfous. Diēgēmata (In search of style. Short stories). Thessaloniki: Nefeli, 1991. Nar, Albertos. Keimenē epi aktēs Thalassēs, meletes kai arthra gia ten Hevraike Koinotita tēs Thessalonikēs (Lying on the Sea Coast, Studies and articles about the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki). Thessaloniki: Ekphrase-University Studio Press, 1997. Nar, Albertos. Salonikai, dēladē Salonikios (Salonikai, or From Thessaloniki: Short Stories). Athens: Nefeli, 1999a. Nar, Albertos. “The Sephardi vs. the ‘Rembetiko’ folk song.” Judeo-Espaniol; the Evolution of a Culture. International Conference. Ed. Rafael Gatenio. Thessaloniki: Ets Ahaim Foundation 1999b: 139–165. Nar, Albertos. Epipolaios epi poleōs. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2007. Nar, Albertos. Salonikai. All the Short Stories. Athens, Nefeli, 2015. Pal Yarden, Hadas. Ibranice Konusma Kilavuzu. Istanbul: Ffono, 2005. Pal Yarden, Hadas. Yahudice. Istanbul: Kalan Musik, 2003.

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Pallini, Christina, and Scaccabarozzi. “In Search of Salonika’s Lost Synagogues. An Open Question Concerning Intangible Heritage.” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC 7 (2014): 1–29. Refael, Shmuel. “The Judeo-Spanish Folk Songs in Israel: Sephardic Music and Literature between Survival and Revival.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 9.1 (2015): 28–51. Schwartz, Martin. Recordings of Jack Mayesh. Los Angeles, 1986. Sfiridis, Periklis. “In memory of Alberto Nar and the other Alberto.” Planodion 4 Oct. (2013): 332–338.

Appendix A bibliography of the literary works of Alberto Nar and works on him after his death Books Oi Synagogēs tēs Thessalonikēs; ta tragoudia mas: meletimata yiro tin historia kai paradose ton Evraion tēs Thessalonikēs (The Synagogues of Thessaloniki – Our Songs, Studies about the history and songs of the Jews of Thessaloniki). Salonika: Jewish Community of Salonika, 1985. Se anazētēsē yfous. Diēgēmata (In search of style. Short stories). Thessaloniki, 1991. Keimenē epi aktēs thalassēs. Meletes kai arthra gia ten Evraikē Koinotēta tēs Thessalonikēs (Lying on the Sea Coast. Studies and Articles About the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki). Thessaloniki: Ekphrase-University Studio Press, 1997. With Erika Kounio-Amarillio and Frankiski Abatzopoulou Amarillio, Prophorikes martyries Evraion tēs Thessalonikēs gia to Holokautoma (Oral Testimonies of the Jews of Thessaloniki on the Holocaust). Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1998. Salonikai, dēladē Salonikios (Salonikai, or From Thessaloniki: Short Stories). Athens: Nefeli, 1999. Epipolaios epi poleōs (All the Short Stories). Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2007.

Anthologies Timē stē Thessalonikē. Meletes gia tēn Evraikē Koinotēta Thessalonikēs. Afierōmatiko teuchos tou periodikou tou KISE Chronika (Honor in Thessaloniki. Studies on the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki. Special issue of Chronika, by KIS, the Board of Jewish Communities in Greece). Athens, 1985. Ē fiziognomia tou Evraon stē neoterē ellēnikē logotechnia. Keimena ellēnōn logotechnōn pou anaferontai stous Evraios. Afierōmatiko teuchos tou periodikou tou KISE Chronika. (The

Albertos Nar, From Historian to Author and Ethnographer

figure of the Jew in modern Greek literature. Texts of Greek writers referring to the Jews. Special issue of the KIS magazine Chronika). Athens, 1990.

Articles by Albertos (Almbertos) Nar “The Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki.” Holocaust Museum of Greece, Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece. http://www.holocausteducenter.gr/the-holocaust-ofthe-jews-of-thessaloniki/. Accessed 03 Mar. 2021. “Social Organisation and Activity of the Jewish Community in Thessaloniki.” Queen of the Worthy, Thessaloniki, History and Culture. Volume I, History and Culture. Ed. I.K. Hassiotis. Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1997: 266–295. “Evrai kai rembetiko” (“Jews and Rembetiko”). Judeo Espaniol; the Evolution of a Culture. International Conference. Ed. Rafael Gatenio. Thessaloniki: Ets Ahaim Foundation, 1999, 139–165. “Die jüdische Gemeinde von Thessaloniki.” Jüdische Gemeinden in Europa; zwischen Aufbruch und Kontinuität. Ed. Brigitte Ungar-Klein. Wien: Picus, 2000, 69–77.

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List of Figures

Fani Gargova Fig. 1: Marcus Ehrenpreis, ca. 1900. Source: National Library of Israel, courtesy of the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection, Schwad 02 01 263. Fig. 2: The four ‘official’ members of the literary circle Misal (from left to right): Slaveykov, Yavorov, Todorov, Krastev. Source: Bulgarian National Library, NBKM-BIA S II 5077. Fig. 3: Exterior view from southeast of the house on 12 Belchev street, Sofia, where Ehrenpreis, Slaveykov and Belcheva were neighbors. Source: photo by author. Fig. 4: Interior view of the ground floor of the house on 12 Belchev street, Sofia, used as the chief rabbinate’s office until ca. 1912. Source: photo by author. Fig. 5: Boris Schatz, Matitiyahu, 1894. Source: Yad Ben Zvi, Shoshana Halevi Album, YBZ.0057.089. Mirjam Rajner Fig. 1: The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, picture-postcard, 1930. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 2: Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque, Sarajevo, 1900, print. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 3: The Great Sephardic Temple and Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque, Sarajevo, picturepostcard, 1930s. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 4: Worker’s University “Djuro Djaković” (former Great Sephardic Temple), Sarajevo, photo 1970s. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 5: The original plans for the Great Sephardic Temple, arch. Rudolf Lubynski, 1926 © The Center for Jewish Art, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Fig. 6: Turkish Temple, Vienna, interior, 1887. Arch. Hugo von Wiedenfeld. Illustrirte Zeitung 8 Dec. 1888: 596. Fig. 7: The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, ground plan, 1926. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. ARH II/8. Sarajevo, 1964: 29. Fig. 8: Petar Šain, The Great Sephardic Temple in Sarajevo, whereabouts unknown, reproduced in Spomenica Jevrejske vjeroispovjedne opštine sefardskog obreda prigodom osvećenja Novog Hrama. Sarajevo, 14 September 1930: n.p. Fig. 9: The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, peristyle on the north, photograph, before April 1941. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 10: The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, interior, photograph, before April 1941. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 11: The Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, interior, picture-postcard, 1930. Arch. Rudolf Lubynski. Private collection, Jerusalem.

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Fig. 12: Consecration of the Great Sephardic Temple, Sarajevo, photograph, 14 September 1930. Private collection, Jerusalem. Fig. 13: Looting of the Great Sephardic Temple, photograph, 16–18 April 1941. Ghetto Fighter’s House Museum, Israel, ©Photo Archives. Mirjam E. Wilhelm Fig. 1: Vjera Biller: Piazza San Marco (1921–22), Black-line Linocut, 33,0 x 24,5cm, Serbian National Museum, Belgrade, Inv.No. 35_2883. From Subotić, Irina. “Vjera Biller. Malerin der urbanen Naiven Kunst.” Sturmfrauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932. Eds. Max Hollein and Ingrid Pfeiffer. Köln: Wienand, 2015: 28. Fig. 2–4: Ekkehard Ritter. “Life of the Virgin: Joseph scolding Mary.” Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974–1990s. Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C. https://images. hollis.harvard.edu/primoexplore/viewcomponent/L/HVD_VIAolvwork426349vid=HVD_ IMAGES&imageId=urn-3:DOAK.LIB:2799942&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine. Accessed 1 Apr. 2021. Fig. 2: Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Visitation and Joseph Scolding Mary. Fig. 3: Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Joseph Scolding Mary (Detail). Fig. 4: Mosaics of San Marco, North Transept: Joseph Scolding Mary (Detail). Fig. 5: Mosaics of San Marco, Porta Sant’ Alipio. Photo by Fani Gargova (2011). Olga Ungar The photographs, unless otherwise noted, were taken by the author in June-July 2018. Fig. 1: Kassowitz family grave, Jewish Cemetery in Novi Sad, 67 Doža Đerđa Street. Fig. 2: Fürst family grave, Jewish Cemetery in Čantavir, 52–56 Kanjiška Street. Fig. 3: Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Senta, unveiled July 4, 1957, Predgradski venac Street bb. Fig. 4: Sculptor Dejan Bešlin, “Monument to the Victims of Fascist Terror”, unveiled September 1, 1952, Jewish Cemetery in Novi Sad, 67 Doža Đerđa Street. Fig. 5: Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Zrenjanin, unveiled 1947, Bašadinska Street, courtesy of Mr. Neven Popović. Fig. 6: Architect Lajos Deutsch, Memorial in Jewish Cemetery in Subotica, unveiled 1948, 2 Majevička Street. Fig. 7: Memorial to the Victims at the site of the exhumed Jewish Cemetery in Mali Iđoš, unveiled 1955, 93 Glavna Street. Fig. 8: Memorial plaque on the site of the destroyed synagogue in Bajmok, unveiled in 2004, 1 Mije Mandića Street. Fig. 9: Memorial Pillar at the site of the destroyed synagogue in Vrbas, late 1990s, 51 Narodnog fronta Street. Fig. 10: Nerot Neshama (Memorial Candles) in the Jewish cemetery in Bačko Petrovo Selo, 76 Balázs Árpád Street

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Bojan Aleksov is an Associate Professor in Modern Southeast European History at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Among his publications in 2020 are the volumes Wars and Betweenness: Big Powers and Middle Europe 1918–1945 (co-edited with Aliaksandr Piahanau), published by Budapest CEU Press, and “Transnational perspectives on Jews in the Resistance” (co-authored with Renée Poznanski and Robert Gildea), in Fighters across frontiers: Transnational resistance in Europe, 1936–48, edited by Robert Gildea and Ismee Tames and published by Manchester University Press. Maciej Czerwiński is a Professor of Slavic Philology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, head of the Department of Slavic Philology. In 2003, he was a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University, in 2015 Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg (Jena). His research interests include: post-Yugoslav languages and literatures in the twentieth century (predominantly from comparative and historical perspectives), cultural semiotics and discourse studies. He is the author of seven books, four co-edited monographs, and over 150 scientific articles and essays. His recent books include: Naracije i znakovi. Hrvatske i srpske sinteze nacionalne povijesti (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2015), Drugi svjetski rat u hrvatskoj i srpskoj prozi (Zagreb: Biblioteka L, Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 2018), Chorwacja. Dzieje, kultura, idee (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2020), Čvorovi prijepora. Jezici i znakovi tradicije (Zagreb: Alfa, 2020). Iskra Dobreva is an independent researcher in Judeo-Spanish and Balkan Linguistics. Her interests center on the mechanisms/outcomes of contact between the main Balkan languages and Judeo-Spanish, which participated in the Balkan Linguistic Area for a relatively short period (sixteenth to twentieth centuries). Dobreva defended her doctoral thesis in 2016 at Sofia University, Bulgaria, which dealt with the Balkanisms in Judeo-Spanish followed by several short-term post-doctoral projects 2016–2020 focusing on the replacement of the infinitive by converbs or finite forms and the loss and maintenance of the subjunctive in Judeo-Spanish as well as the perfective aspect and change in negation. Since 2014, Dobreva regularly takes part in linguistic events across Europe and online, resulting in some twenty peer-reviewed works.

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Fani Gargova is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Vienna. She received her doctorate from the same institution in 2019 with a thesis on the Central Synagogue of Sofia. Previously, she was a Byzantine research associate at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, and has held fellowships from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv), and the IFK in Vienna. Her research focuses on architectural Byzantinisms, medievalisms, and Orientalisms with a special interest in Jewish architecture and Jewish spaces in the Balkans as well as the historiography of Byzantine art history. Recently, she has published on choir and organ in synagogue architecture, the Byzantine revival at the 1900 Paris World Fair, and has edited the publication of the 1940s project materials for The Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past (2020). Sabina Giergiel, PhD (habilitated), philologist, specialization: literature. Affiliation: Institute of Slavic Philology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). Grants: co-author and the researcher of the project “Emigration literature of the Visegrád Group and other Slavic Nations” on a grant from the Visegrád Fund. Currently, she is working on the project, financed by the Polish Science Centre, “Transgenerational Memory about WWII among Germans from Serbian Banat”. Her current research focuses on the memory of the past in the culture of former Yugoslavia (e.g., the Holocaust, post-World War II repression). Recent publications: ”Additional Testimony. Photographs in the Prose of Daša Drndić”, Fluminensia 2020 (1), ”Memory in Action – Performative Practices in a Dispute about the Past: Serbia and Croatia at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Century”, Slavia Meridionalis 2019 vol. 19, (co-author: K. Taczyńska). Alessandro Grazi is a Research Associate, Department of History of Religions, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, working on a DH project on nineteenthcentury Italian Jewish prayer books, titled Minhag Italia. Previously, he has been a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish Studies, University of Amsterdam. Grazi holds a PhD in the Humanities from the University of Groningen with the dissertation “Patria ed Affetti: Jewish Identity and Risorgimento Nationalism in the Oeuvres of Samuel Luzzatto, Isaac Reggio, and David Levi”. He has earned a Research Master in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam and an MA in Hebrew codicology and paleography at the University of Bologna. He is co-editor of the book Believers in the Nation – European Religious Minorities in the Age of Nationalism (1815–1914), 2017. Renate Hansen-Kokoruš is a Professor emerita of Slavic literatures and cultures (until 2019) at the Dept. of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz (Austria), after affiliations in Mannheim, Berlin, Waterloo (Can.), Zadar, Frankfurt am Main and

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Innsbruck. Her research topics are satire and humor, the chronotope of the return in South Slavic literatures, space in Siberia and Russia, identity in literature and film, gender and intertextuality. She is co-editor of the journal Anzeiger für Slavische Philologie and editor of the book series Grazer Studien zur Slawistik (Dr. Kovač, Hamburg). With Darko Lukić and Boris Senker, she published Satire und Komik in der bosnisch-herzegowinischen, kroatischen, montenegrinischen und serbischen Literatur (Dr. Kovač, 2018), other recent articles are dedicated to social critiques, utopia and satire in Croatian detective stories and film, space in Dostoevsky, gender presentations, memory and trauma. Bettina Hofmann teaches American studies at the University of Wuppertal. She studied English and Jewish studies at the University of Heidelberg, the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien and Brandeis University. She has recently published Translated Memories: Transgenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust. Ed. with U. Reuter, 2020. She has also published “Four Approaches to Teaching ‘Goodbye, Columbus,’” together with J. Lambert, R. Gordan, B. Schreier, and J. Levinson in Teaching Jewish American Literature. Eds. R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein. 2020: 317–27; “Transatlantische Perspektiven: Jüdisch-amerikanische Schriftsteller blicken auf die Ukraine.” Blondzhende Stern: Jüdische Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller aus der Ukraine als Grenzgänger zwischen den Kulturen in Ost und West. Eds. K. Schoor, Ie. Voloshchuk and B. Bigun. 2020: 338–355. Tamir Karkason is a historian of the Mediterranean Jewry, focusing on issues of enlightenment, Haskalah and nationalism. After completing his doctoral thesis, he was the Olamot center visiting fellow at the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University (2018–2019). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Karkason has completed the Hebrew manuscript of his first book, Home and Away: The Ottoman Jewish Enlightenment in the Nineteenth Century; he is also working on an English version of this book. Yitzchak Kerem, historian and researcher on Greek and Sephardic Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Formerly he was affiliated with Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece; has been editor of the monthly academic e-mail publication Sefarad vehaMizrah (formerly Sefarad, the Sephardic newsletter) since 1992, was a visiting Israeli scholar in Sephardic Studies, American Jewish University of Los Angeles (2008–2009), is Founder and Director of the Institute of Hellenic-Jewish Relations, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado. He was also a researcher on Greek Jewry in the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, a contributor to Pinkas Kehilot Yavan (Greek Memorial Book) published at Yad Vashem in 1999, a past subeditor of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (section on the Balkans), Yad Vashem,

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and a section editor on Greece, The New Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2008. He is also the founder and CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Diversity, Los Angeles, and the Heritage House for the Sephardic and Eastern Jewish Communities, Jerusalem, Israel. Menachem Keren-Kratz is an independent scholar. In 2009, he completed a PhD in Yiddish literature (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), and he received an additional PhD in Jewish history (Tel Aviv University, Israel) in 2013. His first book was Maramaros-Sziget: Extreme Orthodoxy and Secular Jewish Culture at the Foothills of the Carpathian Mountains (Jerusalem: The Dov Sadan Publishing Project of the Hebrew University, 2013, in Hebrew). His most recent book is The Zealot: The Satmar Rebbe – Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2020, in Hebrew). He has published some fifty articles, both in Hebrew and in English, in academic and semi-academic publications and lectured at many international conferences. Eva Kowollik is a researcher (post doc) at the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. She completed her doctoral thesis on metahistoriographic novels in contemporary Serbian literature, published in 2013 (Geschichte und Narration. Fiktionalisierungsstrategien bei Radoslav Petković, David Albahari und Dragan Velikić). She is co-editor of the volumes: Schwimmen gegen den Strom? Diskurse weiblicher Autorschaft im postjugoslawischen Kontext (2018, with Angela Richter and Tijana Matijević) and Trauma – Generationen – Erzählen. Transgenerationale Narrative zum ost-, ostmittel- und südosteuropäischen Raum (2020, with Yvonne Drosihn and Ingeborg Jandl). Her research interests include trauma and memory in South Slavic literature and children and youth literature. Rebecca Krug is a research associate of Russian and South Slavic literatures at the Department of Slavic, Turkic and Circum-Baltic Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. She studied Slavic studies, political science and ethnology at the University of Mainz, where she also completed her PhD on the influence of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West on Russian literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Her dissertation was published in 2019 under the title Kulturpessimistische Variationen – Der Einfluss von Oswald Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlandes auf die russische Literatur der 1920er und 1930er Jahre. Her research interests focus on Russian and South Slavic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Currently she works on the depiction of violence in East and South Slavic war narratives. Goran Lazičić is a DOC-fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz. He completed his

Notes on Contributors

graduate studies at the Department of Serbian Literature, Faculty of Philology, at the University of Belgrade and his master’s degree at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. His research interests include Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian modern and postmodern literatures and films as well as the post-Yugoslav literary field in the context of nationalisms. Recent publication: “Spying on the Balkan Spy: Paranoia and Conspiracy by Dušan Kovačević.” »Truth« and Fiction: Conspiracy Theories in Eastern European Culture and Literature. Eds. P. Deutschmann, J. Herlth and A. Woldan, transcript, 2020. Miranda Levanat-Peričić is Associate Professor at the Department of Croatian Studies, University of Zadar, where she teaches courses in comparative literature, contemporary literature and literary theory. Her research interests include literary posthumanism, speculative fiction and dystopian novels, monster theory/monster studies, post-Yugoslav literatures and Balkan studies. Recently, she published two books in Croatian: Introduction to the Monster Theory: from Humbaba to Caliban (2014) and Comparative Binoculars: On Croatian Literature and Culture (2017) and co-edited two books, also in Croatian: Liber Monstrorum Balcanorum (2019) and The First May of Brešan (2020). Željka Oparnica is a doctoral candidate studying at Birkbeck, University of London. She holds a MA degree in history of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe with a specialisation in Jewish studies from Central European University and a BA in history from University of Belgrade. In the academic year 2019/2020, she was a Leo Baeck Fellow. Her doctoral thesis investigates the politicisation of the Sephardi diaspora based on the example of the so-called ‘Sephardi circle’ based in Sarajevo. She is interested in the history of minorities, their impact on modern European history, Jewish and especially Sephardi history, and modern European and Mediterranean history in general. Branko Ostajmer was born in 1978 in Djakovo where he attended primary school and grammar school. In 2004, he graduated with a degree in history from the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He attended a postgraduate course at the Centre for Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. At the same institution, he defended his Ph.D. thesis The National Party in Slavonia and Srijem 1883–1903 in 2011. Since 2006, he has been employed at the Croatian Institute of History. His research interest is focused on the political, social and cultural history of the 19th century with an emphasis on the territory of the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia. Tatjana Petzer is an Interim Professor of Slavic Cultural Studies at the MartinLuther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, and a Dilthey fellow of the Volkswagen

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Foundation at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin. She holds a PhD in Slavic philology from the University of Halle-Wittenberg, with the dissertation History as a Palimpsest: Memory Structures in the Poetics of Danilo Kiš (published in the series Pegisha – Encounters. Jewish Studies, 2008). After researching and teaching in Germany and Switzerland, she received her habilitation in Slavic literary and cultural studies from the University of Zurich. Her recent publications in German include the monograph Knowledge and Faith: Figurations of the Synergos in Slavic Modernism (Brill, Wilhelm Fink 2021). Mirjam Rajner is Professor in the Jewish Art Department of Bar-Ilan University and co-editor of Ars Judaica, The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art. Her research and articles published in edited volumes and journals, such as Jewish Art, Images, Studia Rosenthaliana, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Sefarad (CSIS), Zbornik of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, address the early period of Marc Chagall’s artistic activity, and the visual culture of the East-, South- and Central European Jews during the nineteenth century, the interwar period, the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath. Her book Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918–1945 was published by Brill in 2019. A book co-authored with Richard I. Cohen A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil: Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), will be published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Liverpool University Press), in 2022. Damir Šabotić graduated from the Department of Philosophy in Sarajevo and obtained a MA degree in postmodern literature from the Department of Philosophy in Tuzla. Currently, he is a PhD student at the University of Graz. He works on the topic of Bosnian Jews’ cultural identity between the two world wars and researches Jewish literary and cultural production in the Jewish newspapers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which played a crucial role in creating national self-consciousness and in establishing the field of Jewish literature as an important part of regional cultural production. He published the poetry collection Privatna svetilišta (2006), short stories (Zazivač meleka, 2008) and the novel Nađi me (2013), which was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2016. Furthermore, he has published essays on Bosnian literature. Giustina Selvelli is a Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She holds a PhD in Slavic Studies and a master’s degree in cultural anthropology, both from the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She has been an Erasmus Mundus Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Novi Sad and a lecturer at the University of Nova Gorica, Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt, Yildiz University in Istanbul and the University of the Aegean in Mytilene. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Bulgaria, Turkey and Serbia, approaching questions of ethnic minority languages/media/literature,

Notes on Contributors

diaspora, writing systems and national identity. One of her recent publications is “Preserving the Postmemory of the Genocide: The Armenian Diaspora’s Institutions in Plovdiv”, which appeared in Studia Territorialia, Acta Universitatis Carolinae (2019). Dijana Simić is an Elisabeth-List-fellow at the Coordination Centre for Gender Studies and a lecturer of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literary and cultural studies in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz. Her teaching and research focus on migration, gender, and memory studies in a former Yugoslav context. In 2015, she published the monograph Poetik des Nirgendwo (Poetics of Nowhere), in which she examined questions of identity in Aleksandar Hemon’s and Bekim Sejranović’s texts. As a Marietta-Blau-fellow in 2017, she conducted research at the Central European University in Budapest and the Universities of Banja Luka, Sarajevo, and Tuzla for her PhD project “Intimate Counterpublics in Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose Since 2000” which she is currently completing. Martin Stechauner has recently completed his PhD dissertation, entitled “The Sephardic Jews of Vienna: A Jewish Minority Crossing Borders,” within the framework of a joint study program between the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published several articles about Sephardic Jewry in the Habsburg capital, the most recent being “Vienna: A Cultural Contact Zone between Sephardim and Ashkenazim” (Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Ed. Sina Rauschenbach, De Gruyter, 2020). His research interests include the Jewish history of the Habsburg Lands, religious movements within the realms of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as Psychology of Religion. Besides his research activities, he is currently also pursuing a degree in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Vienna. Olaf Terpitz received his PhD in literature and cultural studies from the University of Leipzig, and his habilitation in Slavonic studies from the University of Vienna. He teaches Jewish literatures and cultures at the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Graz, where he serves as deputy director and co-editor of the center’s book series (Böhlau). His research interests encompass Slavic-Jewish encounters, European Jewish literatures, memory studies, and translation. Among his recent publications are the German translation and edition of Sh. An-Ski’s World War I diary Der Khurbn in Polen, Galizien und der Bukowina. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg (2019); the edited volumes Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures: Transfer, Mediality and Situativity, Rodopi/Brill: Leiden/Boston 2021 (together with Marianne Windsperger); Yiddish and the Field of Translation: Agents, Concepts and Discourses across Time and Space, Böhlau: Wien/Weimar/ Köln 2020.

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Olga Ungar graduated from the Academy of Arts of Novi Sad, Serbia, and continued to pursue higher education at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where she earned an MFA degree. She completed her doctorate in 2017 at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, with a dissertation concentrating on Hungarian Jewish sculptor Michael Kara (1885–1964) as a doorway to the historical analysis of Hungarian-speaking East-Central European Jewish communities. Her current research examines Vojvodina’s Jewish heritage and, in particular, the phenomenon of the erection of the Holocaust memorials in Jewish cemeteries by local Jewish communities in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Olga is currently employed as a content developer and educator at the E-Learning Department at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. She is also active as an independent artist. Mirjam E. Wilhelm was an OeAD fellow affiliated with the Karl Franzens University in Graz. She has studied at Trier University, Goethe-University and Städelschule in Frankfurt as well as Yale University, and completed her PhD at the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg in 2021 with a doctoral thesis on Vjera Biller. Her research interests encompass the interwar avant-Gardes, women artists, Expressionism and Primitivism, and Jewish Modernisms in a transnational perspective. Avant-Garde-related publications include: “‘Ich war nie zufällig befreundet...’ – Wilhelm Uhdes Vermarktungsstrategien und seine Korrespondenz mit Georg Szwarzenski.” Vergessene Körper. Helmut Kolle und Max Beckmann, exhibition catalogue Städel Museum. Ed. Stefanie Heraeus. Frankfurt a.M., Bielefeld: transcript 2014, 81–86.