Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America by Bronislava Volková (review)
- Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America by Bronislava Volková
The author of this slim publication is not only an experienced scholar of central European literature but also an expert in semantics, as well as a renowned poet and collagist. In this book of essays she creates an original and ingenious typology of the forms of exile. Her grasp of this phenomenon is unusually inventive, not only as a result of her long-term study, but also through personal experience of more than forty years of exile.
The book treats material by European Jewish writers and thinkers. Much of it is devoted to forms of inner exile, which often precede the outer (literal) one. Bronislava Volková creates a special typology of the forms that exile can take, as well as the effects it may have on individual humans and humanity as a whole. Her division between inner and outer exile is set out in a very original, distinctive, and timeless way. The study encompasses such concepts of exile as expulsion, wandering, aesthetic revolt, social renewal, resistance, moral stance, gender marginalization, various forms of anxiety, doom and revenge, loss of identity, abandonment, meaninglessness, but also the awakening of consciousness, transformation, and will to meaning. She stresses that refusal of communication is an important collateral consequence of ostracism and of not fitting into prevalent moral and social values [End Page 247] (p. 13). She looks at the roots of exile, i.e. at the ways in which societies fail individuals and force them into inner withdrawal or physical wandering from home, or remove individuals forcibly from their homes. The inevitable implication of these actions is broken communication.
In the first part of the book, Volková follows the movements of authors from eastern Europe, predominantly from areas that today form part of Ukraine, but also from various central European countries and areas to Vienna and westwards during the early twentieth century. These movements were due to wars, persecution, poverty, and pogroms. We see the large cultural influence of Jewish authors in central Europe in that period. The second part of the book focuses largely on the Holocaust and its aftermath.
America was always one of the options, though not the easiest. During German expansion and occupation in the 1930s and 1940s, America became one of the few places of hope. Intellectuals and writers were travelling there from all over Europe. They usually settled where they had some connections and where they could continue to work. Some of them returned to Europe after the war was over. The emigration resulting from the totalitarian regimes of eastern and central Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was not confined to Jews, and typically became a permanent move.
Exile is often the fate of a free individual who cannot fit into a group, cannot obey its rules, and therefore imposes inner exile on himself. The Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the century was falling apart and those who tried to save it simply lacked the strength and ethical stamina to succeed. Austria was dragged into an absurd and useless war, during which the majority of intellectuals helped to promote an atmosphere of hatred between nations. This collapse of the value system is discussed by all of the major writers of the time—Musil, Broch, Kraus, and others. They comment on how ethical values became gradually irrelevant and thwarted. Volková argues that the most distinguished contemporary writers could not integrate into the mainstream on account of the sophistication of their work, their intensity of feeling, and the depth of their thought. Karl Kraus, for example, was an epitome of the decaying European civilization. He was highly critical of mankind and believed it deserved total annihilation because of...
