Books by Michal Ben-Horin
Reading the Voices (The Bialik Institute), 2022
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Musical Biographies, Apr 25, 2016
Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, ... more Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience, which escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their work invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they 'fail' to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers' and readers' most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.
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The Natural History of Destruction, 2009
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Essays by Michal Ben-Horin
odot: e-journal for Literary Criticism, 2017
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Papers by Michal Ben-Horin
Israel Studies in Language and Society עיונים בשפה וחברה, 2021
In her series of essays from the 1980s Amalia Kahana-Carmon criticized the way women writers have... more In her series of essays from the 1980s Amalia Kahana-Carmon criticized the way women writers have been excluded from or marginalized in the Hebrew literary canon. In her view, just like bats singing in flight, which cannot be heard by the human ear, the topics women chose to write about did not comply with the hegemonic literary traditions. Drawing inspiration from Kahana-Carmon's vocal metaphor, this article intends to examine the profound role of the voice – not only as a theme but also as a rhythmic component and sound figure – in her poetics of resistance. I employ both gender and reflections on musicality in critical theory and how they are expressed in "Veil" (1968) and "The Bridge of the Green Duck" (1984), two of Kahana-Carmon's prose texts that focus on women's struggle to free themselves from oppressive situations.
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Weimarer Beitrage Zeitschrift Fur Literaturwissenschaft Asthetik Und Kulturwissenschaften, 2004
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Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, 2024
Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystaliz... more Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystalized form of “literature” or the “poetic”) have been regarded as “twin sisters,” constituting a productive source of creation and inspiration. In the Romantic era (especially German Romanticism) this affinity reached one of its peaks, as demonstrated in the emergence of symbiotic musical-poetic forms and modes of aesthetic expression. From the perspective of cultural history, however, the scope of this relationship is even wider and can be traced back to the overlap between language and music. The compatibility of music and poetry has produced a range of scholarship elaborated in various traditions of knowledge and research disciplines, including semiotics, poetics, aesthetics, musicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is well known that sound is a central component of both musical and verbal sign systems. What happens to this sound, however, when we read a story? Moreover, whe...
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Yod Revue des études hébraïques et juives, 2021
Originally written in German, Conversation in the Mountains [Gespräch im Gebirg], one of Paul Cel... more Originally written in German, Conversation in the Mountains [Gespräch im Gebirg], one of Paul Celan’s very few prose texts that were published during his lifetime, was conceived in August 1959. At that point, Celan, the 39‑year‑old Jewish Romanian poet and translator, had already published four poetry collections. Born in Czernovitz to a family of a Jewish descent, Celan grew up speaking several languages, including German, his
mother tongue, Romanian, Russian, and French. In 1942, during the Second World War,
Celan was sent to a forced‑labor camp, and his parents were murdered. After the war
he moved to Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948.
2 This peculiar short prose text reveals a personal biography inseparable from a
collective history. Celan combines the public and the private experience in his
enigmatic story describing a Jew named Klein who leaves his home and walks to the
mountains. On the way he meets another Jew named Gross, his cousin, and they begin
to converse. At this stage the external third‑person perspective turns into a strange
dialogue between a second‑person “you” [Du] and a first‑person “I” [Ich], which eventually ends up in a first‑person monologue. Very little happens in this story, at least in terms of action. The two characters do not even manage to reach the top of the mountain. What does happen seems to belong to the realm of language—and, no less important, to how this language is heard. What then is heard in the mountains?
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ARCHIWUM EMIGRACJI Studia – Szkice – Dokumenty, 2020
This article explores the relationship between German and Hebrew in the work of the poet Tuvia Rü... more This article explores the relationship between German and Hebrew in the work of the poet Tuvia Rübner, who emigrated from Slovakia to Israel in 1941. Even though his first poems were written in German, his published poems were in Hebrew. Only in the 1990s did he start translating his poems and publishing in German. I claim, however, that this shift is neither monolithic nor one-directional but rather translingual. In continuously crossing the lines between different traditions of language, Rübner’s poetics transcends the binary model based on hegemonic culture, on the one hand, while providing a countermovement to global standardization, on the other. By focusing on examples of autotranslation, as well as on Rübner’s late poems that refer to Franz Kafka’s mythical figure of the hunter Gracchus, I suggest that this
oscillation ethically bears witness to the other embodied in different life stories.
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Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, 2020
Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystaliz... more Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystalized form of “literature” or the “poetic”) have been regarded as “twin sisters,” constituting a productive source of creation and inspiration. In the Romantic era (especially German Romanticism) this affinity reached one of its peaks, as demonstrated in the emergence of symbiotic musical-poetic forms and modes of aesthetic expression. From the perspective of cultural history, however, the scope of this relationship is even wider and can be traced back to the overlap between language and music. The compatibility of music and poetry has produced a range of scholarship elaborated in various traditions of knowledge and research disciplines, including semiotics, poetics, aesthetics, musicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is well known that sound is a central component of both musical and verbal sign systems. What happens to this sound, however, when we read a story? Moreover, whereas the connection between sounds and poems seems obvious, as shown in the field of research called prosody, which explores various phenomena such as rhythm and alliteration, metric and intonation, the connection between sounds and prose fiction is less obvious. This article focuses on a body of works—theoretical, methodological, and textual—dedicated to the exploration of literature and music relationships in general, in order to understand the relationship between Hebrew literature (including poetry, but mainly prose fiction) and music in particular. Compared to other national literatures such as French, English, and above all German, the scholarly study of Hebrew literature and music is relatively young. Central domains of this study are the employment of sound and acoustic components (i.e., prosody), the incorporation of musical intertexts (i.e., texts that are connected to the realm of music, such as musical terminology, descriptions of music playing, allusions to musical repertoire and themes), and the shaping of analogies between musical forms and narrative structures (i.e., the sonata form or the counterpoint). Hebrew literature also has a history, of course, from the Bible and other ancient texts, to medieval Hebrew poetry, and up to modern Hebrew and contemporary Israeli literature. Viewing these poetic traditions through the specific lens of language/literature and music relationships, an emerging field of study dealing with representations of music in modern Hebrew and Israeli prose fiction will be discussed, alongside scholarship on the relationship between Hebrew poetry and music.
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Criticism, Jul 1, 2019
Music plays a crucial role in the prose of Yehudit Hendel and Ruth Almog, two Israeli women write... more Music plays a crucial role in the prose of Yehudit Hendel and Ruth Almog, two Israeli women writers who have been active since the second half of the twentieth century. This essay focuses on "Dwarves on the Pajamas" from Almog's collection of stories Invisible Mending (1993) and "A Tale of the Lost Violin" from Hendel's collection of stories The Empty Place (2007) and examines how the employment of acoustic images and musical intertexts creates subversive modes of representing a traumatic past. Moreover, scholars have pointed out the complex history of the reception of Almog and Hendel's respective work and how critics neglected or dismissed the social, ethical, or political aspects of their literature. I refer to psychoanalytical and critical theory to show that both writers borrow musical means in order to effectively explore cultural issues of testimony and remembrance, documentation, and narration of past events relating to Europe and Israel, the catastrophe of World War II, and the War of 1948. The analysis of their prose sheds light not only on these writers' specific works but also on the dynamics of Israeli memory, as conveyed through the literary representations of a monolithic national narrative as opposed to the stories that are rejected by this narrative.
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Religions, 2019
This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcen... more This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.
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מכאן: כתב עת לחקר הספרות והתרבות היהודית והישראלית, Apr 2019
In his last poetry collection Tuvia Ruebner, one of the most prominent Israeli poets, processes a... more In his last poetry collection Tuvia Ruebner, one of the most prominent Israeli poets, processes a painful situation of becoming speechless. Searching for the appropriate word for that which is non-representable or unspeakable is characteristic of his oeuvre, as can be seen in his response to Theodor Adorno’s dictum regarding the impossibility of writing after Auschwitz. In 1942 Ruebner’s family was murdered in Auschwitz. He himself immigrated from Pressburg-Bratislava to Palestine a year earlier and wrote in German for twelve years until another disaster led him to switch into Hebrew, the language of his poems published since the 1950s. In 1990, Piper Verlag published a first translation of Ruebner's poetry into German by Meckel and Gal-Ed, which seemed to open the way for the poet (a translator of other writers’ work from German into Hebrew and vice versa) to begin to translate his own work and publish it with Rimbaud Verlag. How can one view this oscillation between his mother tongue and the language of his new homeland, and how does this oscillation bear witness to that which was lost? Characteristic of Ruebner's translation strategy, as I intend to show, is an emphasis on its foreign elements. The article explores these questions by suggesting a close reading of a few poems that were written in both Hebrew and German. In light of recent theories of multilingualism and (auto)translation, I claim that Ruebner’s self-translations not only transgress the lines between the source and the target-language texts, but also constitute a powerful testimony of those who are absent.
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Geschichte und Repräsentation Sinne – Sprache – Bilder, 2018
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Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies , 2018
My exploration of works by the Israel-based artist Dina Shenhav, such as City (2000), Game Over (... more My exploration of works by the Israel-based artist Dina Shenhav, such as City (2000), Game Over (2001), Dog (2005), End of the Forest (2008), Crystal (2008), and Rest (2008), aspires to develop a critical reading of visual artwork associated with literary texts. This essay suggests a reading of Dina Shenhav's art as an “autobiographical narrative in pictorial terms” that highlights the tensions derived from the interplay between different modes of representation—word and image, poetic and visual—in the past and the present, in Europe and in the Middle East, in German and in Hebrew. Interacting and corresponding with aesthetic theories by Walter Benjamin, as well as with concepts in the fields of art (Dürer, Kiefer) and poetics (Sebald, Yehoshua, Yeshurun), I intend to show how Shenhav shapes a visual poetics of catastrophe in her coming to terms with a private and collective traumatic past that is inseparable from bearing witness to an ongoing political present.
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PPSY, 2018
Immigration highlights the question of language and raises the dilemma of the relationship betwee... more Immigration highlights the question of language and raises the dilemma of the relationship between the mother tongue and the language of the new land. For writers this question is even more crucial: should they write in the language of the place and its readers? Immigration to Israel is not exceptional, of course. What choices are open to those writers, and how are they to convey the complexities inherent in the formation of an Israeli identity? This paper focuses on two writers who demonstrate the role played by the " chosen language " in the cultural construction and deconstruction of Israeli identity. Tuvia Ruebner emigrated from Bratislava, Aharon Appelfeld from Bukovina. Ruebner shifted from German to Hebrew and back to German; Appelfeld wrote only in Hebrew. In both cases, their arrival in Israel enabled them to survive. However, the loss of their families in Europe continued to haunt them. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's concept of 'translation' and responding to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' , the paper shows how their work conveys a mul-tilayered interrelation between national and foreign languages, and between images of exile and homeland, past, present and future – all of which shed light on contemporary issues of Israeli identity.
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The is Special Issue of the Polish Political Science Journal on Israel Studies, which we are happ... more The is Special Issue of the Polish Political Science Journal on Israel Studies, which we are happy to present, is a result of the cooperation between the European Association of Israel Studies (EAIS), the University of Wrocław, and the Jagiellonian University. The cooperation began at the EAIS 6th Annual Conference on Israel Studies held in September 2017 in Wrocław, Poland. Th e aim of the conference was to bring together international scholars from a variety of disciplines, who are engaged in research in any aspect of Israel studies – including Politics, Literature, Security, Minorities, Social Studies, History, Economics, Law, Culture, Film, Music, and Art.
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Critical Essays on Yehoshua Kenaz: The Beauty of the Defeated, 2016
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Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, 2015
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The Languages of the Arts: Aesthetics and Cultural Aspects, 2015
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Books by Michal Ben-Horin
Essays by Michal Ben-Horin
Papers by Michal Ben-Horin
mother tongue, Romanian, Russian, and French. In 1942, during the Second World War,
Celan was sent to a forced‑labor camp, and his parents were murdered. After the war
he moved to Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948.
2 This peculiar short prose text reveals a personal biography inseparable from a
collective history. Celan combines the public and the private experience in his
enigmatic story describing a Jew named Klein who leaves his home and walks to the
mountains. On the way he meets another Jew named Gross, his cousin, and they begin
to converse. At this stage the external third‑person perspective turns into a strange
dialogue between a second‑person “you” [Du] and a first‑person “I” [Ich], which eventually ends up in a first‑person monologue. Very little happens in this story, at least in terms of action. The two characters do not even manage to reach the top of the mountain. What does happen seems to belong to the realm of language—and, no less important, to how this language is heard. What then is heard in the mountains?
oscillation ethically bears witness to the other embodied in different life stories.
mother tongue, Romanian, Russian, and French. In 1942, during the Second World War,
Celan was sent to a forced‑labor camp, and his parents were murdered. After the war
he moved to Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948.
2 This peculiar short prose text reveals a personal biography inseparable from a
collective history. Celan combines the public and the private experience in his
enigmatic story describing a Jew named Klein who leaves his home and walks to the
mountains. On the way he meets another Jew named Gross, his cousin, and they begin
to converse. At this stage the external third‑person perspective turns into a strange
dialogue between a second‑person “you” [Du] and a first‑person “I” [Ich], which eventually ends up in a first‑person monologue. Very little happens in this story, at least in terms of action. The two characters do not even manage to reach the top of the mountain. What does happen seems to belong to the realm of language—and, no less important, to how this language is heard. What then is heard in the mountains?
oscillation ethically bears witness to the other embodied in different life stories.
Moral Legitimacies for action in Extreme States
(The Rector’s Grant for Interdisciplinary Research Group)
14-15 May 2018
Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan