Natasha Gordinsky

This essay focuses on the autobiographical trilogy titled The Road Leads Off into the Distance (Doroga ukhodit v dal') by Soviet-Jewish writer Aleksandra Brushtein (1884-1968). It traces a specific use of a documentary aesthetics that enabled Brushtein to address previously taboo themes in a fictional and allegorical form. Thus, for the first time in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, the novel recasts the life of an educated socialist Jewish family in Tsarist Russia in the form of a fictionalised autobiography narrated by a girl. Furthermore, by implementing various documentary forms, Brushtein provides a detailed account of the Dreyfus affair and the issues of antisemitism within this fictionalised 'ego-document.' By recounting the affair to a broader audience for the first time in decades, the novel's depiction may also be read as an Aesopian reflection on the late Stalinist 'Doctors' Plot.'

This article explores the understudied role of Gomel as an important center of literary production during the emergence of Hebrew modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. Prominent writers such as Gershon Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin fostered personal and literary dialogues in and with the city. By combining various methodological approaches—New Historicism, literary cartography, and regional history—we analyze the unique spatial dynamics that sparked Gomel's transformation into a laboratory of Hebrew modernism. While grounding our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin in the spatial turn in literary theory, we argue that these three canonical Hebrew writers created literary texts that captured the urban experience of this eastern European Jewish metropolis.

We trace the evolution of Hebrew texts written in Gomel from a synchronic perspective and construct a detailed description of the town's literary-cum-cultural history. At the same time, we focus on Gomel's broader historical and geographical status within the Pale of Settlement and demonstrate how each of the three writers used a different literary genre—the urban miniature, the novel, and the novella—to create a unique representation of Gomel's urban space. Furthermore, by focusing on the chronotope of Gomel, our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin underscore that these texts are grounded in Gomel's urban fabric through particular forms of local belonging, rather than an abstract notion of "uprooted" existence.

der 1911 in Königsberg geborenen und in Litauen aufgewachsenen Lea Goldberg verbindet dichterische Praxis, literaturwissenschaftliche Reflexion und literarische Übersetzungen mit publizistischen Interventionen im öffentlichen Raum des Jischuv und Israels. In diesem vielfältigen OEuvre nahm die Form des Essays eine zentrale Rolle ein. 1 Dies gilt in mehrfacher Hinsicht: Der Essay verband in seiner Ausgestaltung durch die spätere Leiterin der Abteilung für Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaften an der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem nicht nur wissenschaftliche Erkenntnissuche und sprachlich-künstlerische Gestalt, sondern vergegenständlichte auch ihr Bemühen, die humanistische Tradition Europas mit der hebräischen Sprache zu verschmelzen. Denn seit Michel de Montaigne seine Reflexionen mit dem Titel Essais (1580), dem französischen Wort für "Versuch" ausgestattet hat, gilt diese Form nicht nur als Verbindung wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Schreibens, sondern auch als Ausdruck eines humanistischen Geschichtsdenkens. Lea Goldberg war sich dieser Formgeschichte genau bewusst, als sie am 30. April 1945 im Jischuv einen hebräischsprachigen Essay mit dem Titel "Euer Europa" veröffentlichte. Die dort enthaltene Antwort auf die Frage, was für "uns"und von diesem kollektiven Textsubjekt wird im Folgenden noch die Rede sein-Europa gewesen sei, lautete: "Dante, Giotto und Michelangelo. Goethe und Flaubert und Mozart und Stendal, und Verlaine, Rilke und Rodin, Cézanne und Strawinsky, und James Joyce" (Goldberg 1945). Europa besteht in der Logik dieses Essays aus der Kultur des Humanismus, der Aufklärung und der Moderne. Diese Bilanz ist angesichts des Zivilisationsbruchs, der am Erscheinungsdatum des Essays der Welt vor Augen stand, alles andere als Zufall, bedarf jedoch der Kommentierung. Die Sprachen und Kulturen Europas nahmen in der intellektuellen Biographie Lea Goldbergs schon früh eine zentrale Rolle ein. Die Autorin hatte das  Die Hinweise zu Leben und Werk im ersten Teil dieses Aufsatzes stützen sich auf meine bisherigen Veröffentlichungen zum Werk Lea Goldbergs, insbesondere auf meine in der Schriftenreihe des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur erschienene Studie "Ein elend-schönes Land": Gattung und Gedächtnis in Lea Goldbergs hebräischer Literatur, die von Rainer Wenzel aus dem Hebräischen übersetzt wurde und 2019 in Göttingen erschien.

This article addresses Uri Nissan Gnessin's modernist poetics through the notion of the contemporary. Examination of a selection of his early texts-a letter, a literary review, and the short story "Jenya"-written between 1900 and 1902 reveals his perception of Eastern European Jewish modernity as heterochronous and polytopic.

This article pursues a twofold goal: Based on the recent interdisciplinary
theoretical approaches that emphasizes spaces of the Holocaust, it
reconstructs the history of Drobytsky Yar as the site of the extermination of
Kharkov Jews and as a place of remembrance in the Soviet era and in the last
three decades. Secondly, the article analyzes the representation of the
Holocaust in Kharkov in Jan Himmelfarb's novel Sterndeutung and
contextualizes his work in post-Soviet literary space. This double epistemic
movement makes it possible to work out the complexity of Drobytsky Yar as a
Holocaust and post-Holocaust space.

This article explores Yehuda Amichai's reflection on the meaning of language and demonstrates how his early poetry navigates between different views on the concept of 'mother tongue.' Building on Jacques Derrida's seminal essay Monolingualism of the Other, it proposes a new hermeneutic frame for interpreting Amichai's early poetry-particularly the poems collected in Shirim 1948-1962-through the prism of monolingualism. In order to examine Amichai's version of Derridean monolingualism, the article offers close readings of his paradig-matic poems, such as "Be-yalduti" ("When I Was a child") and "Va-hagirat horai lo nirg'eah bi" ("And the Migration of My Parents Has Not Subsided in Me"), that address, both directly and indirectly, the question of language. Furthermore, this article traces the influence of the experience of immigration on the development of Amichai's poetic thinking on language. The various lyrical manifestations of this experience, such as a mediation on the meaning of the language of the mother, or the possibility to write with an accent, reveal Amichai's growing ethical understanding of language as something that belongs to the other. Thus, I argue that Amichai's unique monolingualism should be understood as a poetic site of negotiation between owning and dispossessing a language.

This article explores the representation of provincial space in Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Sideways. By analyzing the way in which Gnessin constitutes the lives of three young Jewish sisters living in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century, I argue that his novella sets the ground for a new understanding of a provincial town, namely as a modernist space. In order to characterize this space, the article compares Sideways to Chekov’s seminal play Three Sisters. This comparative reading explores a crucial difference between the chronotopes of the two literary texts. While Three Sisters depends on the metropolitan space of Moscow, which serves as an absent presence in the play, Gnessin imagines a provincial space for which the metropolis does not function as its gravitational force. The contextualization of the relationship between time and space in Sideways within current theories of space and modernism underscores the unique features of Gnessin’s early modernism, which does not rely on a metropolitan chronotope. Instead, it is connected to the provincial space that Gnessin associates with his female protagonists. Thus, from an epistemic standpoint, moving sideways holds a twofold meaning: on the aesthetic level it reflects literary issues that were on the margins of Hebrew literary discourse (as Dan Miron has argued), and on the poetic level it constitutes the representational space of a province in which young Eastern European Jewish women became agents of cultural change

This article sheds light on an important and previously un-explored aspect of the oeuvre of the prolific Hebrew-American poet Gabriel Preil (1911–1993). The essay argues that Preil elaborated a lyrical theory of nostalgia in his poetry, which was unique for Hebrew literature both in its scope and its poetic depth. Building on an interdisciplinary corpus of nostalgia research developed by such scholars as Linda Hutcheon, Svetlana Boym, and Nicholas Dames, I trace the poetic-historical development of Preil's nostalgic thinking over almost five decades of his writing in Hebrew. In the first part of the article, I focus on Preil's early poetry to demonstrate that he found in nostalgic discourse a partial poetic solution for reflecting on the postwar historical condition. In the second part of the article, I draw on recent theories of diaspora developed by scholars such as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, as well as Lily Cho, to argue that, starting in the 1970s, Preil attributed a radically new function to nostalgic discourse—namely, it became a literary device through which he constructed and represented his diasporic literary subjectivity.

Among the modern Hebrew poets, Lea Goldberg is perhaps one of the few who not only wrote nostalgic poems about the homeland that was left behind and destroyed in the Second World War and the Holocaust, but was also aware of the historicity of her own nostalgic discourse. While explicitly acknowledging the permanence of the absence of the past, she reflected on the meaning and even the legitimacy of nostalgia in her writing. Building on contemporary theories of nostalgia, this essay traces the development of a nostalgic discourse in Lea Goldberg’s lesser known poems written between the years 1939 and 1945. It argues that Goldberg’s nostalgic poems composed during the Second World War should be divided into two periods: from 1940 to 1942 and from 1943 to 1945. It suggests understanding the crucial poetic difference between the nostalgic modes present in each period through the prism of recent theories of nostalgia. Such a hermeneutic approach enables us to reveal the moulding of nostalgia as a “regime of seeing” in Goldberg’s wartime poetry.