Literary Passports ─ The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

"Literary Passports is a breakthrough in the understanding of the literary modernism that flourished in Hebrew on European soil during the early decades of the twentieth century. Its vivid investigation of the cafe world of the Hebrew writers locates their work in concrete cultural space, and the discussion of sexual themes in Hebrew modernism shows how deeply engaged it was in the prevalent European discourse of the era."---Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley

"Pinsker's work, which is informed by deep learning and a lively critical mind, is an important revision of our understanding of the emergence of modern Hebrew fiction. He liberates modernist Hebrew literature from the hold of conventional Zionist historiography and allows it to be illuminated by new comparative studies in modernism."---Alan Mintz, Jewish Theological Seminary

"Pinsker convinces us that for early twentieth-century Hebrew writers in European cities, change was the only constant, and Hebrew literature theironly true community. He takes us beyond the shtetl, the romantic celebration of `nature, and the various utopian/ dystopian representations of the Holy Land, and into the actual transnational spaces where this literature was inclubated: cafes, publishing houses, and other urban sites of exchange. Literary Passports invites us to reread some of the Hebrew `classics' as a very European and very modernist phenomenon and contributes to a new post polemical conversation on modernism and nationalism."---Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Literary Passports is 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 the genre from the Zionist-nationalist narrative to which previous studies have constrained it 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 European literature and culture as it exploded in the artistic revolution known as modernism.

The first part of this book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, describing the European cities in which it was created and analyzing how it portrayed the urban experience. A second part explores the ways in which this literature dealt with issues of sexuality and gender during a time when European and Jewish society was undergoing a crisis of masculinity and seeing the rise of the "New (Jewish) Woman." The third part examines the complex relations among tradition, modernity, and religion in modernist Hebrew fiction, situating them within the context of emerging modern Jewish culture and post-Nietzschean European modernism.

To scholars and students of modern Jewish literature, Literary Passports poses a new model of literary history and geography, as well as new readings of important texts. To historians of modern European and Jewish culture, it offers different ways to understand and evaluate an important cultural endeavor. To scholars of modernism, it affords a chance to widen the modernist corpus and a challenge to rethink central concepts about modernism and the relations between modernism, nationalism, urbanism, gender, and religiosity.

Shachar M. Pinsker is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the co-editor of Hebrew, Gender and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron's Fiction (2007).