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

About the Author

Cynthia Gabbay is Researcher in Latin American and Romance Studies at Université d'Orléans, France, and an Associate Researcher at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Los ríos metafísicos de Julio Cortázar: de la lírica al diálogo (2015) and dozens of articles on contemporary Latin American poetry and literature, political art, Latin American Jewish literature, semiotics and metafiction, including in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. She is a member of the international research group “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War in the Intellectual Life of Spanish America” at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, at San Francisco State University, USA. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Her book, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), analyzes the constitutive side of victimization within three groups, slaves in the Americas, Africans under German colonization, and death camp survivors of the Reinhard camps.

Product Description

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.

Review

“Cynthia Gabbay has assembled an important collection of articles defining a Jewish library of the Spanish Civil War. By turning their attention to the literature of a war that took place on the eve of the Holocaust, these authors shed new light on both Jewish internationalism and the history of the 20th century. This illustrative and well-researched anthology helps to show how Jewish thinkers, whether from Morocco, Argentina, Moscow, or New York, saw the struggle against fascism in Spain as a fight for their own communities.” ―Amelia Glaser, Professor of Literature and Chair in Judaic Studies, University of California, San Diego, USA

“Jewish Imaginaries unveils a kaleidoscope of Jewish experiences from all over the world about the Spanish Civil War, expressed in a diversity of literary and musical genres that transcend time and space.” ―Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, Associate Professor Emeritus of Translation and Interpretation, University of Salamanca, Spain and author of Languages in the Crossfire. Interpreters in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (20