Literary Passports The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe [Hardcover]

Literary Passportsis the first book to explore modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It not only serves as an introduction to this important body of literature, but also acts as a major revisionist statement, freeing this literature from a Zionist-nationalist narrative and viewing it through the wider lens of new comparative studies in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernist Hebrew prose-fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the highly charged encounter of traditionally educated Jews with the revolution of European literature and culture known as modernism.

The book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, explores the ways in which the genre dealt with issues of sexuality and gender, and examines its depictions of the complex relations between tradition, modernity, and religion.

Shachar M. Pinsker argues vigorously in his extraordinarily impressive book that this Zionist teleology distorts the fundamental character of European Hebrew literature in the early twentieth century. Pinkser's study is based on wide-ranging and thorough research that includes scrutiny of many forgotten texts and also actual visits to the places where Hebrew writers gathered . . .Literary Passportsperforms a valuable service in reminding us how rich and varied [poetic interpretation] was. Shachar M. Pinsker is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the co-editor ofHebrew, Gender and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron's Fiction(2007). Focusing on Hebrew writers who lived in various European cities during the first decades of the twentieth century, Shachar Pinsker convinces us that change was the only constant in their lives, and that Hebrew literature constituted the only community to which they really belonged. Taking us beyond the shtetl/study house, beyond the romantic celebration of 'nature,' and beyl£I