With reference to the establishment of the Venice Ghetto 500 years ago as a landmark in the history of Jewish spaces, the “Introduction” surveys the literary/geographical/cultural spaces of modern Jewish experience discussed in the papers of the forum.

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era.  At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust.  Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity.  By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.

In their book Kafka Deleuze and Guattari mention Samuel Beckett as a prime example of a minor writer. The article explores this insight about Beckett’s practice as a minor writer, focusing on his first novel published in French, Molloy (1951). It further inquires into the importance of multilingualism to the change in Beckett’s style after World War II and its connection with the transition from English to French.

Suffering is at the core of Jewish-American literature in general and in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok in particular. Bellow and Potok, affirmative writers who believe in man’s redemption through suffering, portray characters that evoke the Job-like “suffering man” whose endurance and faith in God are finally rewarded. “Schooling in grief,” a phrase borrowed from Bellow’s Herzog (1964), can also be applied to Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Potok’s The Chosen (1967). The paper reads these two novels with the notion of the I/It and I/Thou relationship as explained in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923). The characters in The Victim and The Chosen move from the I/It to the I/Thou encounter through suffering, which eventually leads towards mutual understanding and love for the other.

In 2014 New Perspectives Theatre Company staged the first adaptation on the stage of a short story by Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” The changes made to the story in its adaptation for the stage inform our understanding of the comic effect of the story, particularly in relation to the different endings involved. The dynamic of the story depends upon the deployment of two different concepts of comedy — as the expression of an aggressive, materialistic society (Freud, The Joke in Relation to the Unconscious)  or as a means of reforming society in green comedy (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism). The story focusses upon the legitimate irresponsibility of comedy, and on the relation of comedy to freedom, defending it as a social and even a sacred good. The one-liners uttered by the hero exemplify comedy of a corrective nature, offering a healthy critique of social behavior, particularly in terms of the relation of art to money, and contest Freud’s theory as tainted by its social context and economic basis.

According to Saul Bellow (1915–2005), one of the main responsibilities of the novelist is to expose “the center” and to adjudicate among the many explanations, rationalizations, defenses, and subterfuges that constitute modern life. Bellow cautions against the “noise” of modern life because, he believes, it distracts one from the center, from the essence of human experience. Amidst the chaos of modern life, Bellow’s fiction — novels and short stories of contemplation and of meditated reflection — is a stay against confusion. The “Introduction to the Forum” establishes the context for a discussion of Bellow’s works and frames the issues raised in the individual articles in the Forum.

Saul Bellow’s fiction is decidedly philosophic, particularly as he celebrates depth of personhood in his characters while denigrating superficiality. The discursive action of this focus on personal depth involves the idea of soul, which, for Bellow, resonates in individual characters in his fiction as well as in the “character” of culture, usually viewed in historical decline, one of his preoccupations. This essay examines this dual understanding of soul — as a function of individual character and as the “character” of culture — in two of Bellow’s novels: Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000). Both are concerned with the tension between the grandeur of art and ideas and the depredations of rising commercial culture in America. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow offers an initial view of the messy genius of a great intellectual, while in Ravelstein the persona of a great intellectual is fully developed and even more explicitly presented in terms of the relation between such “greatness of soul” and cultural and intellectual decline in late-capitalism. In both novels, an aesthetic of great personhood works through characterization, with “greatness” revealing itself metonymically as aestheticized relational energy and in the genius for seeing revealed essences. In the characters of Von Humboldt Fleisher and Abe Ravelstein, characters based on two of Saul Bellow’s teachers and intellectual heroes, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom, Bellow explores a type of intellectual heroism, the loss of which, he believes, has severe, even catastrophic, cultural consequences.

This article explores Heinrich Heine’s two texts about Jews and Jewish life, Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, to show how the foundations for a Jewish homeland were laid in Jewish literature of early 19^th-century Western and Central Europe. The article demonstrates how a common Jewish space was established in Heine’s texts and how this space intellectually and emotionally came to signify home for modern Jewish readers. It presents a new perspective on the spaces of Heine’s early works by focusing on what was particularly Jewish about these spaces. Heine’s establishment of a Jewish cultural space began with a journey to Eastern Europe. In Polish villages Heine found the inspiration for a Jewish cultural landscape that he would describe in a romantically idealized way in Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, attaching positive values to Jewish traditional lifestyle and incorporating scriptural references of the kind that made traditional Jewish life accessible to assimilated Jews and non-Jews alike. Heine took his readers into Jewish spaces such as a Jewish home, synagogue, and street. He gave the Jewish readers a sense of togetherness, of belonging to a Jewish space that was available through literature. The article explores the potential of Jewish cultural space and shows how Heine constructed a modern Jewish cultural space with room for both traditional and modern Jews.

June 2016: Cecilie S. Schrøder Simonsen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Culture and Identity at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work approaches an understanding of modern Jewish spaces by exploring the cultural significance of home in 19th-century Western European sources. She is particularly interested in Jewish ghetto literature, historical novels, and village tales. Her publications include articles and chapters on 19th-century Jewish cultural space and Danish Jewish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt.