Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War

In Search of Poetic Justice

Cynthia Gabbay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501379413
• eBook ISBN: 9781501379444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• 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
• Part II: Textualities of Memory and Postmemory in Contemporary Literature and Thought
• Conclusion: Poetic Justice for the Lost Spain: Deciphering Jewish Keys in Modern and Contemporary Imaginaries
• Contributors
• Index