Leslie Morris – författare

This anthology features a diverse and compelling array of writings from prominent Jewish authors in Germany today. The writers included here-Katja Behrens, Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, and Barbara Honigmann-did not experience the Holocaust firsthand, though their works continually explore the meaning of it as it is remembered and forgotten in contemporary Germany. From different perspectives these authors offer incisive reflections on German-Jewish relations today. They wrestle in particular with the strangeness of living in a country where unencumbered relationships between Germans and Jews are rare. Also surfacing in their writings are the many foundations and challenges to modern Jewish identity in Germany, including the vicissitudes of gender roles, and the experience of emigration, intergenerational conflict, and sexuality. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany not only features a set of engaging stories but also encourages a deeper understanding of the experiences of Jews in Germany today.

The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German-Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German-Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, The Translated Jew challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read. This book explores the myriad acts of translation, actual and metaphorical, through which Jewishness leaves its traces, taking as a given the always provisional nature of Jewish text and Jewish language. Although the focus is on contemporary German-Jewish literary cultures, The Translated Jew also turns its attention to a number of key visual and architectural projects by American, British, and French artists and writers, including W. G. Sebald, Anne Blonstein, Hélène Cixous, Ulrike Mohr, Daniel Blaufuks, Paul Celan, Raymond Federman, and Rose Ausländer. In thus realigning German-Jewish culture with European and American Jewish culture and post-Holocaust aesthetics, this book explores the circulation of Jewishness between the U.S. and Europe. The insistence on the polylingualism of any single language and the multidirectionality of Jewishness are at the very center of The Translated Jew.