Global Jewish Modernism

From translator-spearheaded movements like #NametheTranslator that aim to bring equality to the profession, to the rise in readership and visibility of translated works, we appear to be amid a translated literature revolution. Or should we call it a renaissance? After all, there is no doubt that the circulation of translated works is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, engagement with works from beyond one’s borders has always been crucial to the forging of national and transnational identities. Literature and translation tread a tightrope, between their complicity with the West’s colonization project, and their uses in resistance movements that challenge fixed notions of identity. What are the forces that shape translation and world literature in the present moment, and how do they influence us in turn?

The Global Jewish Modernism lab rang out the 2023-2024 academic year with a cross-disciplinary dialogue that explores these questions in multilingual contexts. On April 4, four Duke professors were joined by Oberlin College’s Stiliana Milkova Rousseva, author of an important book on Elena Ferrante, to probe the role of world literature in an increasingly globalized world, as well as the usefulness of this very concept for working across literary traditions. In an act of cosmic irony, Stiliana Milkova Rousseva was unable to join us in person at Duke’s Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, after several flight cancellations.

Instead, Milkova Rousseva delivered the opening remarks to the “Translation and World Literature” symposium on Zoom, against the bustling backdrop of a busy JFK terminal in New York. In her talk, she introduced her latest project on self-translation and world literature. Milkova Rousseva argued that self-translation exposes and undermines the hierarchy established between an original and its translation, where the latter is seen as an inauthentic copy and thus inherently inferior. Instead, self-translation reconfigures this relationship, showing how translation is not an act of copying or reproduction, but one of original creation. However, considering the “politics of prestige in the world republic of letters,” Milkova Rousseva uncovers the complicated dynamics embedded in self-translation, specifically through the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, translator, and academic who moved to Italy in 2012 and has since published four works in Italian. For Milkova Rousseva, Lahiri’s success is a double-edged sword. Lahiri has forged a new identity and a new home for herself in Italian, but both Lahiri’s otherness and her status as a literary juggernaut have been commodified in the marketplace of world literature. In some ways, her exemplary trajectory has outshined both translators and other migrant or non-white voices writing in Italian.

Keeping with the theme of Italy’s contributions to world literature, Milkova Rousseva’s remarks were followed by Martin Eisner’s presentation on Dante’s enduring international success. Perhaps Italy’s most famous literary export, the litany of translations of The Divine Comedy speak to the importance of translation for the survival of such texts. Eisner’s presentation focused precisely how Dante has managed to survive into the present, and how to reconstruct the rich path of Dante’s global reception. According to Eisner, these questions were of interest to Dante too: Dante’s works were preoccupied with change and survival over time, as he considered how to ensure Beatrice’s survival in poetic form. In tracing the journey of Dante’s global reception, Eisner pushed us to consider how the creation of the world literature canon is indebted to the material culture of the book and to a multitude of interpolations and interpretations that establish a conversation with Dante’s original texts, while also departing from them significantly.  This transformation was necessary to Dante’s survival, given our profound alienation from Dante’s own context, important as that context may be. As Eisner remarked, “We differ more from those who lived in our countries in the past, rather than those who live in the present with us in different countries.”

Reut Ben-Yaakov tackled the ethics of translation in world literature from its source: what pushes a translator to translate something in the first place? Ben-Yaakov attempted to answer this question by probing her own experience as a translator. She took us on a journey from her discovery of Eudora Welty’s 1963 short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” to her translation of the piece into Hebrew. The story, written by Welty in the aftermath of Medgar Evers’ murder by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi, is written from the perspective of the killer, continuously interpellating the reader into the logic of white supremacy. While Ben-Yaakov translated the story quickly after her first reading, she found herself unable to put it forward for publication. The story’s inquisitive title haunted her too: where was the voice coming from? Why did the imagined perspective of a white supremacist demand translation into Hebrew? Eventually, Ben-Yaakov had come to see the story as an attempt by Welty to implicate the reader in a literary gesture that seeks to represent the way systemic violence implicates us all. In this framework, the act of translation becomes another layer of implication, considering the translator’s conscious move to bring an uncomfortable tale to a new audience. She published an essay version of the talk in Reading in Translation.

What we saw throughout this panel is the unexpected connections enabled by looking beyond the usual framework of translation from a “foreign” language into English. Sarah Quesada addresses the limits of world literature by using a Global South perspective, as she outlines the conversation established by African and Latin American authors throughout the 20^th century. Quesada exposes the wealth of African francophone novels that take as their subject matter stories from Latin America. Works like Kously Lamko’s Les racines du yucca that takes place about Guatemala, or Tierno Monénembo’s Les Coqs Cubains Chantent à Minuit, are not translated into English but they testify to South-South axis of cultural exchange that is rooted in the two continents’ struggle for decolonization. In her work, Quesada also outlines the African roots of Latinx literature and how much Africa’s decolonization efforts mattered to the Latin American imaginary, not least the under reported history of Gabriel García Márquez’s time in Angola, whose ensuing chronicles exist only in Spanish. Of course, Quesada warns us not to see Global South solidarity as a given, or the South-Sough axis as an inherently positive one, given the evidence of antagonism between both camps. But a comparatist approach between Latin American and Africa provides a fruitful terrain for exploring the role and limits of world literature as a concept beyond a Global North perspective.

Fittingly, Eileen Chengyin Chow rounded up this panel by bringing us to the topic of home and diaspora—or rather, to the question of what kind of literature is produced by those who have left home and return to a place that they thought they knew very well, only to find themselves alienated from it? Where do these works fit in the realm of world literature? Chow explored this topic by conducting a close reading of her translation of “Upon Returning to my Home Village,” a poem by Chinese writer He Zhizhang 賀知章 (659-744). Playing with that well-known adage that “the past is a foreign country,” Chow breaks down the porosity of the term “world” in world literature and reflects on alienation as a function not only of space, but time and language. She puts He’s poem in conversation with other works that testify to the enduring appeal of homesickness and alienation as fodder for literature: moments from Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Diaspora Blues, or excerpts from poems written on walls by displaced Cantonese workers who longed to return home. Chow suggests that migration and exile produce literature that mixes memoir, fiction, and poetry to create a new language in order to express the diasporic subject’s uncertain place in a world made of boundaries, including in the realm of world literature.

The concept of world literature, from its inception in Goethe’s Weltliteratur, to its institutionalization in classrooms across the globe, has proven hard to shake off. It has served both to narrativize the creation of a global literary canon, and to criticize Western cultural hegemony. This panel discussed topics as diverse as the survival of Dante’s works across the centuries, the translator’s ethics, and even contended with the changing landscape of one’s position across the elusive domain of time. Working across centuries of literature and a myriad of linguistic traditions, the panelists showcased the importance of thinking about and through world literature in the contemporary moment. And while world literature has its limits, they also testified to the enduring appeal of the notion of a shared literary consciousness.

What do we talk about when we talk about Jewish Modernism? On February 28, the Duke community was invited to explore the porous, intersecting, and ever-shifting boundaries of this question at the opening of the “Mapping Jewish Modernism” exhibit. The exhibit, housed at the Mary Duke Biddle Room between February 9 and August 10, displays key moments and figures in the history of Jewish modernism as curated by Duke and UNC students. The objects on display were the result of the work conducted by these students in Kata Gellen and Saskia Ziolkowski’s eponymous class, taught in Spring 2023.

Using materials from Rubenstein’s rare books collections, the students’ projects showcase the diversity and global expanse of Jewish life and culture in the 20^th century. Some pieces map the influence of Jewish thought in modernist literature and art, including by unearthing the Jewish elements embedded in James Joyce’s Ulysses or in the creation of Hogarth Press in London by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.  The exhibit is a testament to the enduring legacy of Jewish writing in Western literature and beyond: from Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig in Europe to Philip Roth and Alan Ginsberg in the U.S. In fact, a copy of Ginsberg’s poem Kaddish was on display at the exhibit.

The exhibition explores also Jewishness at the margins of and beyond Europe. There are artifacts that testify to the presence of Jewish communities in the remote villages of Ethiopia whose isolation provided fertile ground for the conservation and reinterpretation of Jewish traditions.  Other items recount the history of the founding of Birobidzhan, a town in the far east portion of the former Soviet Union (today’s Russia) that became the country’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast. A series of prints made by Chicago artists to support Birobidzhan reflect the utopian aspirations of the community and its significance for Jews around the world.

Across these texts and objects, the exhibition “Mapping Jewish Modernism” shows how important Jewish history and thought, broadly conceived, was for the birth and promulgation of the modernist movement on a transnational scale. The exhibition makes a clear case that this influence was due both to the global reach of the Jewish diaspora, and the affinity that many non-Jewish writers and thinkers demonstrate for Jewish intellectual history, including Jewish hermeneutics. This latter is also the argument put forward by Yitzhak Lewis whose lecture, “Reading Globally: Redrawing the Map of Jewish Modernism,” looks at the influence of Jewish literature and critical traditions across three continents.

Yitzhak Lewis is an assistant professor of the Humanities at Duke Kushnan, where he works on Hebrew, Spanish, and Yiddish literatures, as well as literary theory and world literature. Lewis is the author of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020) and his new book on Borges’s ties to Kabbalah and other Jewish traditions is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. Along with a team of undergraduate research assistants at Duke Kushnan, in recent years Lewis has spearheaded a project tracing the reception of Yiddish literature in China. Building on these interconnected research strands, Lewis’ lecture at Duke focused precisely on the role that Jewish thought has played in the works of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and Chinese novelist Mao Dun.

Referring to the concept of “mapping” that guided the exhibition, Lewis considered the insufficiency of current cartographic frameworks that attempt to draw boundaries around Jewish textual practices and what Jewish modernism entails. Untethering these practices from specific communities or nations, Lewis suggests instead that the category of the “Judaic” need not be only a genetic affinity, but also an affective one. This is the case for Borges, whose short stories and literary criticism are rife with references to Jewish traditions. Lewis explores the breadth of Borges’ engagement with Jewishness, including the tension that arises due to Borges’ insistence of the purity of classical Jewish texts and his rejection of modern Jewish literature. In this sense, Lewis reads Borges’ affinity for Jewish literature as arising also from something other than aesthetic appreciation. For Lewis, while we see Borges as a canonical writer, his position within 20^th century modernism is not an easily definable one. Considering the way that Jewishness is conceptualized as an emblematic Other that exemplifies the alienation at the heart of 20^th century modernism, so Borges’ position in the literary landscape is one of tension rather than easy belonging. According to Lewis, this aspect of Borges’ relationship to Jewishness is as crucial as the writer’s direct engagement with Jewish thought.

In his lecture, Lewis spoke also of the research he, collaborator Anruo Bao, and his students have conducted on the reception of Yiddish literature in China, mainly through the work of novelist Mao Dun (1896-1981). Mao Dun was instrumental to the translation and promulgation of Yiddish literature in China, as in 1921 he penned an article on “A Survey of New Jewish Literature.”  As in the case of Borges, the affective affinity that Mao Dun establishes with Jewishness works along two planes: it is both material, and ideological. According to Lewis, Mao Dun found inspiration in the trajectory of Yiddish language and literature as a budding movement that was trying to establish its own independent identity apart from Hebrew. Mao Dun noticed strong parallels to China’s own trajectory and contemporary political moment, rooted in the rejection of Western hegemony. China’s national revival, as with Yiddish culture, relied on language and literature to shape national consciousness. In this sense, Mao Dun was also taken by the idea of Yiddish as a colloquial and everyday language, an aspect crucial to the creation of a literature accessible to the masses.

Both Lewis’ lecture and the “Mapping Jewish Modernism” exhibit reveal the symbiotic relationship between Jewishness and modernism. In some instances, this relationship is one of direct influence: how Jewish textual and religious practices have shaped both Western and non-Western writers and thinkers. But as Lewis argues, Jewish modernism is also about engaging with Jewish literary and textual practices as a form of Modernist expression. During his lecture, Lewis references several moments of misunderstanding and mistranslations in the works of Borges and Mao Dun, as these authors engage with traditions that are not their own. But accuracy of understanding is less important than the desire and openness to Jewish traditions, and their application to these writers’ poetics and politics. In this sense, Lewis presents a thought-provoking opportunity to any project that contends with the circulation of literature and art in a multiplicity of languages and cultures: we must reinterpret the very concept of the map, and thinking of mapping not as fixing boundaries, but rather as attempts at mapping encounters.

February 28^th, 5-7 p.m. Mapping Jewish Modernism Exhibit Opening in the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153

March 20^th, 12-2 p.m. Archives, Exhibits, and Literature dialogue in the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153

April 4^th, 12-2 p.m. Translation and World Literature dialogue in the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153

The Global Jewish Modernism Lab will hold two spring events that complement an exhibit (February-August 2024), curated by the graduate and undergraduate students of “Mapping Jewish Modernism,” taught by Kata Gellen and Saskia Ziolkowski Spring 2023. February 28^th 5-7 p.m. come to the opening of “Mapping Jewish Modernism,” held in the Holsti-Anderson Family Room (153 Rubenstein) and exhibit space (Mary Duke Biddle Room in Rubenstein). Yitzhak Lewis, Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, will give a talk and students involved in curating the exhibit will briefly present their work. There will be beverages and food. March 20^th, 12-2 p.m., also in the Holsti-Anderson Family Room (153 Rubenstein), the Archives, Exhibits, and Literature Dialogue will take place during lunch. Two Duke Romance Studies faculty, Annette Joseph-Gabriel and Felwine Sarr, and two visitors, Emma Bond and Max Czollek, will examine the intersections, problems, and productive intersections between archives, exhibits, and literature.

In The Pages, Hugo Hamilton writes a compelling story about a curious young woman through the voice of Joseph Roth’s book Rebellion. Rebellion is not only the narrator of the story but also the source of the young woman’s curiosity. Her curiosity inspires her to embark on a journey to learn more about her Jewish identity and family history. Throughout the book she meets new people, finds her identity, and ultimately answers her questions about the past. 

In most cases, when readers finish a book, they must resort to online forums or their own imagination to answer any burning questions they might have. Luckily, after reading The Pages by Hugo Hamilton, we were not left to our own devices to get answers. Being able to talk with Hamilton was an amazing opportunity that provided insight and clarity about the book. After reading The Pages, there were a couple different questions I had such as why Hamilton chose to write the book in English and why he decided to have a book narrate the story.   

To understand The Pages more deeply, it is important to understand Mr. Hamilton’s background. He grew up in Dublin, Ireland with his German mother and Irish father. In our class, we have explored quite extensively the role and impact language has on storytelling. Language is not only the words that are being spoken but also the history of those words in context of the culture they are used in. As a child, Hamilton spoke both German and Gaelic but was forbidden to speak English at home. Because he was not allowed to speak English, described as the “language of the street,” Hamilton says he felt a “kind of homelessness in [his] experience as a child. [He] felt as if [he] was migrating every time [he] walked out onto the street.” Because English was forbidden in his household, Hamilton gravitated to it and longed to conquer it. English was the language that connected Hamilton to the world and writing in English, in contrast to German or Gaelic, gave him a sense of freedom and belonging on “the streets” where English was so prevalent. Understanding Hamilton’s choice of language helps us to understand more about his family history and culture.  

  Books are powerful tools. They can inspire, encourage, and teach their readers. To keep “Anti-German” literature from inspiring people, the Nazi regime had ritual book burnings in which thousands of Jewish books were burned. On the very first page of The Pages, we are introduced to the narrator, a book who has been saved from the book burning of May 1933. When I realized that Hamilton used a book as the narrator, I was curious to why he made that stylistic choice. Hamilton explained that he chose The Rebellion by Joseph Roth to narrate this story because it was the book that one of his relatives saved from being destroyed. Many years later, as Hamilton got to hold the book in his hands, he was curious about where the book had been and what it had seen. These questions inspired him to let The Rebellion guide him. He stepped back as the author and allowed the voice of The Rebellion to take center stage. By using an inanimate object as the narrator, Hamilton hopes that his readers will feel a sense of helplessness. Hamilton admits that “a book cannot actually do anything. They cannot stop somebody from saying something or affecting people’s actions.” I admit, the narrator’s lack of ability to act or change the story’s course made me frustrated. The frustration and helplessness that I felt parallels the helplessness the characters felt as they were searching for their identities and places in the world. Hamilton appointed The Rebellion as the narrator to creatively connect his readers to the characters in the story. 

On Friday morning, Allison Schachter of Vanderbilt University shared her research on a number of women writers who worked in a global Jewish context in the 20th century. Through her speech, I learned about the experience of isolation shared by many of these women writers—something that was elucidated in the writings of Debora Vogel, who lived between 1902 and 1942. According to Professor Schachter, Vogel was born in Galicia and educated in a number of languages, including Polish, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Her work bounced between these languages while also bouncing between styles of writing: while she began as a Hebrew poet, Vogel later published a number of “prose montages” in Yiddish.

In our class, we have explored a variety of short stories and essays from a vast range of languages. I have read all of them in English; many are translated editions. Something that became clear to me after learning about Debora Vogel’s writing is that the language in which an artist chooses to write is a significant choice—it denotes culture, indicates personal history; language means something. When Vogel wrote in Hebrew, she was largely dismissed as a “Hebrew nationalist,” because she was Jewish. When writing in Yiddish, Vogel’s work was widely ignored; Yiddish was a language for women, for feminine men—not for real writers. But Vogel herself saw Yiddish as an international Jewish language, which is an incredibly powerful idea. Language, most of the time, is regional, meaning that distance is often a barrier in communication, even in a modern world where mail moves quickly and people can travel the globe in fewer than eighty days. Yiddish was a solution to that problem in the 20th century, existing as the universal solvent for whatever might stand in the way of international Jewish communication and connection.

The power of language is remarkably delicate. Using Yiddish to communicate artistic thought across the globe is a remarkable thing, especially for a Jewish people living far and wide in a post-diaspora world. Jewish literature demands an audience; the Jewish people demand literature; Yiddish was, in the 20th century, the tool that would bring Jewish literature around the world to its people. This momentous solution, however, was held captive by misogyny. Women were not credited with the intellectual power that they very much possessed, and Yiddish was associated with women, so the language lost its credit, too. The effects of this are clear in the way that the literary world of the last century refused to acknowledge the value of Vogel’s work. Language is as vulnerable to social marginalization as people are.

I had the opportunity to attend the third panel of the Global Jewish Modernism Lab Conference on Friday, February 10^th, which contained two presentations.

The first was by Monique Balbuena, who presented on “Transnational Sephardic Poetry”. Balbuena explored the use of Ladino as a written language and the lack of significant cultural production in the language. It was most interesting to hear about the Sephardic poets who are reviving the language through their works, like Clarisse Nicoidski. The course Mapping Jewish Modernism introduced me to the topic of Jewish modernist literature for the first time, so everything is still new to me. Hearing about Nicoidski’s bilingual English-Ladino book of poems, “Ojos, las manos, la boca” was therefore truly eye-opening, since I had never encountered this kind of bilingual poetry before I was struck by how these poems deal with the loss of connection and celebrate the Sephardic Jewish experience through memories, traditions, and the search for identity, themes that we have seen repeatedly in works we have discussed in class.

The second presentation, given by Saskia Ziolkowski, delved into the significance of Modern Jewish Italian Writing as World Literature. Ziolkowski discussed what constitutes Jewish literature and its importance in the Italian context, using the author Elsa Morante as an example. The discussion touched upon the tension between Jewish identity and the feeling of not belonging, alienation, and rejection that comes with having multiple or even split identities (e. g. being Jewish, Italian etc.). To me, it seemed like being Jewish was often deemed insignificant in Italy, I was disheartened by this realization. At the same time, I was thrilled to see that the presentation highlighted the importance of Jewish Italian Literature.

Overall, the panel provided enlightening insights into the issue of Jewishness in literature and the tension it creates in terms of identity. Through the works of Sephardic poets and Jewish Italian writers, the panel demonstrated the importance of preserving cultural heritage and exploring the connection between language, identity, and history. The most valuable message I received from attending the panel was that specific languages like Ladino and specific identities like Jewishness in Italian literature have been sidelined. By discussing these topics, we gain enlightening information about those obscured minorities. I not only learned about important writers and their formative works, but I also saw how it ties in well with what we have been learning in the Mapping Jewish Modernism Course throughout the semester. We read several texts where the challenges faced by Jewish writers like Franz Kafka or Jewish protagonists like Leopold Bloom emphasize the importance of a modern Jewish canon in literature just as much as this panel did.

Prior to Adi Nestor’s presentation at the Global Jewish Modernism Conference on February 10th, 2023, I had never heard of Rudolf Borchardt or his project to create a German literary canon to rival that of the Italians and the English primarily through the art of translation, but I did harbor an interest in the act of translating itself. In a 2012 article, Ryan Bloom provides an overview of the various translations and mistranslations of the first line of L’Étranger by Albert Camus: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Is she? That article is what prompted me to study French, so that I could read Camus in its original language. It’s what prompted me to attempt to learn to read Russian in order to best understand Dostoevsky. But what about translation not as an individual literary project but as a comprehensive political agenda? 

Nestor began her presentation with a big question and only complicated its answer as she went on: what is the distinction between a German and a Jewish identity? Rudolf Borchardt was a prototypical case of a bourgeois assimilationist Jew in early 20th century Germany. His parents both converted to Protestantism. Borchardt therefore defined himself as a strictly German, Protestant translator-poet. His style was, in Nestor’s words, “formalist” and purposefully “archaic”, in an attempt to embrace a German traditionalism that never necessarily existed, and which utilizes artful and extensive fictive elements in order to “correct” the past, to create the traditions to which he wanted to adhere. Nestor supplied Borchardt’s Book of Joram as an example of the prototypical work of his German Traditionalist project. It is an attempt to write an apocryphal, Germanic biblical text using almost entirely Lutheran German outside of several deliberate neologisms. The ending to the epic poem is distinctly New Testament: a new messiah born as a redeemer to purge his progenitors. 

Borchardt was determinedly Christian, but in his translations he could never escape an association with Judaism which would only be cemented when the Nazis banned his “Jewish” works. His works are subconsciously acutely related to the so-called “East Prussian Process” of assimilation according to Nestor: a total subsumption of religious Judaism in order to embrace one’s Germanness, an embrace of “one nation, one language”. Not only was Borchardt’s work concerned with Jewish themes and motifs beneath the surface (dissatisfaction, self-hatred, reculturation), but his very act of constant translation, of being uncomfortable in just one language, is distinctly Jewish and modern. The talk left me pondering pre-war German-Jewish culture, a culture to which I have some connection: what is the distinction, if any, between Borchardt’s wandering German, searching for purpose in language, and the stereotype of the wandering Jew? Does there need to be one? Is there a point where the distinction becomes regressive and anti-modern, as suggested by Nestor by way of Theodor Adorno?