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. 

In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism. Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.

In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur. She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.

Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing María Estela Martínez de Perón; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.

The article focuses on Zangwill’s unusual depictions of ghetto life in late-Victorian London. Zangwill portrays the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures — all features of earlier Victorian writing about the ghetto — but through its affective power. It begins by situating Zangwill’s depictions of ghetto life amidst a longer trajectory of Victorian ghetto discourse. The essay moves on to explore the significance of Zangwill’s innovation in depicting ghetto life as a place that emerges from borders born of the interplay of intimate encounters, emotional knowledge, and embodied experience.