Poetry and Correspondence: A German-Hebrew Network

In her new book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive, Na’ama Rokem investigates written exchanges by a fascinating range of literary figures, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul Celan, and Tuvia Ruebner. This remarkable bilingual archive encompasses not only letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemeral documents. Written in German and Hebrew, these documents were sent to and from Jerusalem, primarily in the decades following 1948.

The writers at the center of Rokem’s study contend with the genocidal violence that brought the rich historical relation between German and Hebrew to a seeming end. They also grapple, in different ways, with the new reality in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. The bilingual conversation that crosses over between German and Hebrew in these letters thus centers around the question of Jewish fate in the twentieth century and is immersed in negotiations about Jewish nationalism, the Zionist movement, and the possibilities of Jewish poetry. In the space between German and Hebrew, Rokem argues, the protagonists of her study articulate forms of ambivalence and doubt that remain absent from their published writings.

In conversation with Dina Berdichevsky, Na’ama Rokem will discuss forms of belonging and resistance that emerged in relation to the Zionist movement throughout the twentieth century, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of Jewish nationalism and its discontents. With an introduction by Eva Geulen.

Na’ama Rokem is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she has directed the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and chaired the department of Comparative Literature. In her first book Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature she used the Hebrew reception of Heine as a case study through which to consider the politics of genre in the context of Hebrew revival and Jewish nationalism.

Dina Berdichevsky is Associate Professor of Literature at Tel Aviv University and currently an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the ZfL. Her work focuses on Hebrew modernism, comparative literature, aesthetic theory, and the cultural imagination of destruction. Her current research project, In Search of a Lost Name: Lot’s Wife and the Poetics of Ravaged Cities, explores literary responses to devastated urban landscapes across different historical and cultural contexts.