East European Jews in Switzerland

Description

During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation. Introduction Part I Migration, Politics, and Networks Les Russes – The Image of East European Jews in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Zurich Jewish Political Emigration from Imperial Russia: Mapping the World in a Different Way The Jewish Labor Bund in Switzerland Some Russian Jewish Writers in Switzerland and the Valorization of Jewish Argument Style Student Migration of Jews from Tsarist Russia to the Universities of Berne and Zurich, 1865-1914 Part II Individual Experiences, Switzerland, and the Literary Imagination Kalman Marmor in Switzerland: Reconstructing a Sojourner’s Biography East European Jewish Migration to Switzerland and the Formation of “New Women” Ben-Ami’s Swiss Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream “For the Pleasure of Life in Switzerland, I Had to Start Spitting Blood” Sholem Aleichem’s Scriptwriting Debut against the Background of the Beilis Case Kabbalah, Dada, Communism: Meir Wiener’s Lehrjahre in Switzerland during World War I Appendix I Herzl and the First Congress Appendix II Fragments of an Unfinished Yiddish Novel References List of Contributors List of Illustrations Index