Makom—deterritorialisiert: Gegenorte in der deutschsprachigen jüdischen Literatur by Marjan Asgari (review)

What's in a name? Marjan Asgari has written a thorough, extensively researched, and often evocative study of "deutschsprachige jüdische Literatur." Not German literature written by Jews, but rather Jewish literature in the German language—a language that was for much of the twentieth century discouraged in Israel itself, whether from a nationalist desire for the unifying force of Hebrew as a common language, or in reaction against German in the wake of the Shoah. Asgari explores a wide range of authors who fall into this category, with its blurred outlines: they are Jewish, writing in German but perhaps not (or no longer) German, perhaps living in Israel but not (or not yet) Israeli. Her subjects include familiar names like Franz Kafka, Leo Perutz, and Max Brod but also less familiar ones, or less familiar to me at least: Herbert Freeden, Eugen Hoeflich, or Jenny Aloni (a recurring voice and, one senses, a particular favorite of Asgari's). These are figures who find themselves caught between two worlds, German-speaking Europe and Israel, who journey to Palestine sometimes only temporarily but often as permanent emigrants, sometimes out of Zionist conviction but (too) often fleeing growing antisemitism or Nazi persecution. Among the broad cast of characters whom she treats, Asgari is especially interested in those writers belonging to the Prager Kreis. As German-speaking Jews in Czech Prague, these authors were almost inevitably drawn toward questions of identity; their complex relationship to Palestine thus intensifies a feature that had already been present in their work.

The concept that especially interests Asgari in this body of work is "place," in Hebrew "makom," hence the book's title. She examines how these authors experience and describe place, or specific places, and how those places—ships, cemeteries, synagogues, brothels, libraries, colonies, bridges—function as sites for the negotiation of identity and difference, working to dissolve or reconfigure lines of inclusion and exclusion. While she draws on a number of theoretical devices (ideas of performativity the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, "kleine Literatur"), her primary theoretical framework for analyzing these places is Foucaults concept of "heterotopias." These are discursive but also social and cultural spaces that are somehow other or set apart from the broader worlds that contain them and that bring together disparate persons or ideas that do not necessarily have any inherent relation to one another. These spaces are partially constituted by their surrounding social worlds but also, through their difference and the diverse identities that they contain, challenge and upset those worlds.

The book's greatest strength lies in the close readings Asgari gives of many different authors and texts, excavating the different roles played by specific "places" or heterotopias that recur in multiple works. In a discussion of Leo Perutz's Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke, for example, she shows how the Charles Bridge in Prague functions as a symbol of union and connection—between Judaism and Christianity or the old Prague and the new. At the same time, however, it shelters an imaginary place, site of the ultimately failed union between Rudolf and Esther, and it thus reveals that those connections are absent in the real-world Prague. Similarly, Asgari nicely examines the role played by the cemetery in Jenny Aloni's novel Der blühende Busch. A young couple, seeking escape from the confines of Kibbutz life, meets secretly in an arid, old Arab cemetery in Tel Aviv. As a meeting place for lovers, the cemetery should point the way into the future and toward new life, but at the same time this unfruitful final resting place symbolizes the tension between older and younger generations, and between Jews and Arabs, as well as the difficulties faced by German-speaking immigrants seeking to find a foothold in their new country. These are just two of many books to which Asgari gives careful attention, sometimes touching on them briefly in two or three pages, sometimes devoting...