Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice

Description

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War provides unprecedented engagement with the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure and of compounding return for various writers and artists producing Jewish imaginaries who volunteered to fight fascism in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1930s or responded from abroad, as well as their successors. These essays demonstrate the importance that this event—the preamble to the Second World War and the Shoah—has had for the Jewish people and Jewish cultural production through the 20th century and into the 21st. Jewish literature journalism, letters, and music from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. Many were writing against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to align with the anti-fascist fight. Most contributions in this volume discuss subaltern voices from across the globe—including from Germany, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, France, and Spain—which were left under the shadow of the continuously growing corpus of world literature of the Spanish Civil War. There is also an analysis of the “Jewishness”—aesthetics as well as ideas—of the secular imaginaries of these artists and intellectuals as embedded in Jewish topics and ethos. Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War thus proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature. Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Preface and Acknowledgments A Note on Translations and Transliterations Abbreviations Introduction: The Spanish Civil War and Its Jewish Cultural Phenomenon Part I: Textualities of War in Journalism, Epistolaries, and Music Chapter 1: León Azerrat Alias Ben-Krimo: A Moroccan Jew in the Spanish Civil War Chapter 2: Beyond Music: Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) Chapter 3: Simón Radowitzky: Revolution, Exile, and a Wandering Jew Imaginary Chapter 4: Max Aub, the Exile Who Returns to the Diaspora Chapter 5: The Holy War on Fascism Part II: Textualities of Memory and Postmemory in Contemporary Literature and Thought Chapter 6: Jewish Argentine Perspectives and Intellectual Mission around the Spanish Civil War: The Cases of Alberto Gerchunoff and Enrique Espinoza Chapter 7: “The World Exists and We Are Part of It”: The Inzikh’s Poetic Response to the Spanish Civil War Chapter 8: A Better Earth: Spain’s Land and Inquisition in Jewish Canadian Spanish Civil War Literature Chapter 9: A Novel That Never Was: Ruth Rewald’s Vier Spanische Jungen Chapter 10: Using the Kabbalah to Make Sense of the Spanish Civil War: Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s War of the Unicorn (1983) Chapter 11: A Jewish-Spanish Outlook on the Civil War: La canción de Ruth by Marifé Santiago Bolaños Conclusion: Poetic Justice for the Lost Spain: Deciphering Jewish Keys in Modern and Contemporary Imaginaries Contributors Index