On October 15, at 4 pm, University of Michigan Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and Posen Library will be hosting an online panel via zoom on Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918-1939. The event celebrates the publication of Volume 8 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a collection of ten volumes of primary sources on Jewish creativity, diversity, and culture, compiled under the directorship of Deborah Dash Moore, the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. The volume on the interwar period was edited by Frankel Center Professor Emeriti Todd Endelman and Zvi Gitelman, who will be joining Professor Dash Moore for the panel discussion.
Endelman, Gitelman, and Dash Moore will discuss a period in Jewish history that was simultaneously tense and innovative. During these decades, Jews vigorously debated religion, politics, migration, and their relation to the state and to one another. The selections of documents in the volume capture the variety, breadth, and depth of Jewish creativity in those tempestuous years. The texts, translated from many languages, span a wide range of politics, culture, literature, and art.
Philanthropist Felix Posen launched the project more than 15 years ago as an effort to highlight previously unknown or forgotten works of Jewish artists and writers. Dash Moore was appointed editor in 2016. The volumes are available for purchase online and free as a PDF via The Posen Digital Library. Endelman and Gitelman’s volume is the third released and was added to the online library in April.
“The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization tackles an enormous challenge: to make accessible in English a rich and varied sampling of the many dimensions of Jewish experience from antiquity to the twenty-first century,” stated Dash Moore. “Each volume’s selections, are fully extracted from longer works, allow a reader to savor a myriad of juxtapositions of sources that often illuminate the familiar through the unfamiliar, or, conversely, introduce what is new and unexpected by placing it in conversation
with what is well known. Insofar as any culture is itself a composite of multiple peoples, nations, languages, traditions, and beliefs, The Posen Library’s volume editors have emphasized the heterogeneity of Jewish culture and civilization.”
The editorial responsibilities for the volume were divided geographically. Gitelman was responsible for the material from Eastern Europe and Endelman was responsible for the rest - Latin America, the United States, Western and Central Europe, and Africa. “We decided that Czechoslovakia outside of Prague was in Eastern Europe, but that Prague was in Central Europe,” quipped Endelman. “And Hungary was in Central Europe,” added Gitelman.
Endelman and Gitelman wrote an extensive introduction to the volume to place the sources in context. Gitelman stated, “It’s not as if Jews lived in a vacuum. They were profoundly influenced by their surroundings and many of them deeply engaged in them. One has to appreciate the cultural, political, economic contexts in which all of these arguments and writings played out.”
In order to help narrow down what to include in the volume, they decided to only use one piece of art per person. To narrow it down further, they chose to include only the work of Jewish artists’ whose work dealt with portraying Jewish life. Gitelman said, “I came to this project from more of a social science perspective. So I’m not as concerned with the writer or the quality of the writing, but more focused on the issues that were raised--Yiddishism, Hebraism, socialism, communism, Zionism, all the ideologies and ideas that agitated Jews during this inter-war period.”
They also decided to include large excerpts from the primary texts, rather than short snippets. “That meant a great deal of editing,” said Endelman. “So after, or even before, material had been translated, we cut out a lot of material, but still the final product, rather than a few quotations, was a comprehensible story or essay.”
Another one of the challenges in compiling the volume was working with translators to convey the meaning, beyond a word for word translation, of the text. Translating text written in Germany or Russia before World War II was difficult for some translators because of significant differences in terminology from the 1920s and ‘30s to the present. Endelman noted that the goal of the volume is not only to portray the Jewish artists and writers who lived at the time, but also the age in which they lived. “It is not as if one viewpoint emerges, but I would say many of the essay writers in our period are dealing with the difficulties of being Jewish in inter-war Europe. They wanted to know what the future would be, and offered all kinds of projections, solutions, and alternatives.”
Many of the writers were previously unknown due to a lack of accessibility. Works were translated from more than ten languages, including Hungarian, Croatian, Czech, and Romanian, some for the first time. Some of the authors were famous in their time, but are now long forgotten. “Nothing dies quicker than a literary reputation,” observed Endelman. “Some of the authors are well known- Franz Kafka, Martin Buber--others, readers will have never heard of before.”
Endelman and Gitelman believe that one of the reasons this period had such a large and varied amount of Jewish viewpoints compared to other eras was the high rate of literacy and density of population. “There is no intellectual diversity in the university today, but in this period there really is. There really are solutions on the total spectrum,” stated Endelman.
The selections in the volume “range from ultra-orthodoxy to communism, from radical assimilation to fierce nationalism,” added Gitelman. “It is inevitable that you look at this 20-year period backwards from the Holocaust and you can see what was destroyed. How vibrant, multifarious, and variegated Jewish life was and how passionate people were about being Jewish, or becoming not Jewish, or becoming more Jewish.”
The volume is principally intended for use by specialists and students, but has illustrations and passages that can be enjoyed by anyone interested in the Jewish authors of this era. “One of the primary goals of this enterprise is to make original material available, largely online, for pedagogical use at a variety of levels,” said Gitelman.
