Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War inaugurates a new field of research in literary and Jewish studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. With the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure, this volume proposes a definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple poetic modes. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, these essays unveil non-canonic authors across the West and explore these works in the context of antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism, among other cultural phenomena.
Jewish writings from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. They offer perspectives on memorial and post-memorial literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination, and many were written against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to tune with the anti-fascist fight. This book revindicates the polyglossia of Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide and proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.
List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgments A Note on Translations and Transliterations Abbreviations Introduction: The Spanish Civil War and Its Jewish Cultural Phenomenon Cynthia Gabbay (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, Germany) Part One. TEXTUALITIES OF WAR IN JOURNALISM, EPISTOLARIES, AND MUSIC 1. León Azerrat alias Ben-Krimo: A Moroccan Jew in the Spanish Civil War Asher Salah (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel) 2. Beyond Music: Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) Antonio Notario Ruiz (Universidad de Salamanca, Spain) 3. Simón Radowitzky: Revolution, Exile, and a Wandering Jew Imaginary Leonardo Senkman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) 4. Max Aub, the Exile Who Returns to the Diaspora Mauricio Pilatowsky Braverman (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico) 5. The Holy War on Fascism Deborah A. Green (Independent Scholar, USA) Part Two. TEXTUALITIES OF MEMORY AND POSTMEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND THOUGHT 6. Jewish Argentine Perspectives and Intellectual Mission around the Spanish Civil War: The Cases of Alberto Gerchunoff and Enrique Espinoza Melina Di Miro (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) 7. “The World Exists and We Are Part of It”: The Inzikh’s Poetic Response to the Spanish Civil War Golda van der Meer (Universidad de Barcelona, Spain) 8. A Better Earth: Spain’s Land and Inquisition in Jewish Canadian Spanish Civil War Literature Emily Robins Sharpe (Keene State College, Canada) 9. A Novel That Never Was: Ruth Rewald’s Vier Spanische Jungen Tabea Alexa Linhard (Washington University in St. Louis, USA) 10. Using the Kabbalah to Make Sense of the Spanish Civil War: Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s War of the Unicorn (1983) E. Helena Houvenaghel (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) 11. A Jewish-Spanish Outlook on the Civil War in La canción de Ruth by Marifé Santiago Bolaños Rose Duroux (Université Clermont Auvergne, France) Conclusion: Poetic Justice for the Lost Spain: Deciphering Jewish Keys in Modern and Contemporary Imaginaries Cynthia Gabbay (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, Germany) Index Notes on Contributors Index
Cynthia Gabbay is Researcher in Latin American and Romance Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. This work is one of the products of her Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at Freie University of Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Los ríos metafísicos de Julio Cortázar: de la lírica al diálogo (2015).
Reviews for Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice
"""Cynthia Gabbay has assembled an important collection of articles defining a Jewish library of the Spanish Civil War. By turning their attention to the literature of a war that took place on the eve of the Holocaust, these authors shed new light on both Jewish internationalism and the history of the 20th century. This illustrative and well-researched anthology helps to show how Jewish thinkers, whether from Morocco, Argentina, Moscow, or New York, saw the struggle against fascism in Spain as a fight for their own communities."" --Amelia Glaser, Professor of Literature and Chair in Judaic Studies, University of California, San Diego, USA ""Jewish Imaginaries unveils a kaleidoscope of Jewish experiences from all over the world about the Spanish Civil War, expressed in a diversity of literary and musical genres that transcend time and space."" --Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, Associate Professor Emeritus of Translation and Interpretation, University of Salamanca, Spain and author of Languages in the Crossfire. Interpreters in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (2021)"
