This anecdote is quoted at the beginning of this volume on Jewish writing in post-Second World War Europe and comprises two important aspects of the topic of the book. Not only does Einstein’s witty answer express the well-known problem – if it is one – of ‘Jewish identity itself in the post-Enlightenment period’, the fact that its hybrid nature, including the literary articulations of that nature, resists conceptual clarification and definition, but it also suggests that artistic expression – whether it be music or, for that matter, literature – may nevertheless succeed in striking its essence in a non-conceptual mode and displaying that identity in its very hybrid and heterogeneous character. With the contributions of 11 European and American scholars on Jewish literature in German, Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Russia and – a pioneering contribution – the Scandinavian countries, this volume aims at an overview as well as at an exemplary set of analyses of the literary productivity and diversity of Jewish writers throughout Europe after the Second World War. Whereas contemporary American Jewish literature has been the subject of many anthologies, studies, university programs and research projects, critics who have analyzed the complex literary production of Jewish writers in Europe have done so from an exclusively national angle; the allegedly transnational focus on Europe in this survey could therefore fill a gap in scholarly research. The role of Jewish emancipation in the development of modern European culture up to the Second World War may be a well-known and intensively studied fact, but contemporary Jewish authors residing in Europe today have also been influenced by, and are active participants in, an intense and ongoing debate about the Continent’s past and future. The contributors to the volume do not fail to situate the emergence of contemporary Jewish writing against the backdrop of critical – societal, cultural, political, etc – developments and events that have shaped post-Second World War Europe, such as the 1968 and 1989 events, the reconfiguration of Europe both after 1945 and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the repercussions of the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict within Europe, and the new immigration waves that challenge ‘the idea of Europe’ and confront it with the problem of multiculturalism. The editors wanted the contributions to reflect the creative and irresolvable dialects of particularism and universalism, rootedness and nomadism at the heart of Jewish writing so as to correct hyperbolic tendencies in recent cultural studies as well as in cultural and literary theory to overstress the aspects of nomadic alterity, troping the Jew as the ‘nomadic other’ and – paradoxically at the same time – as ‘the implicit model of European identity’ (p. xxvii). Against (and after) the ideological master narratives that either aimed at annihilation or at the forced acculturation of the Jewish culture in the name of Marxist universalism, or – one could add – against the fashionable postmodern labeling of Jewishness as the Absolutely Other, a call for a reassessment and reassertion of Jewish identity was issued by Alain Fienkielkraut in his seminal essay ‘Le juif imaginaire’, Paris, Seuil (1980), in which he summoned his peers ‘to search […] for notions of Jewishness that would adequately reflect their own historical situation as members of the “génération d’après” ’ (p. xix).

Reading through the 11 chapters of this volume it becomes clear that the ‘European’ focus on the ‘transnational dynamics of Jewish Writing’ (p. xxii) creates a survey that primarily reflects the discontinuous, asynchronic character of sociopolitical and cultural situations and developments within Europe, rather than binding together the surveys and analyses of the different national scenes of Jewish writing. Whereas anti-Semitism is still alive in Russia, and readers as well as writers there are confronted with the persisting influence of a ‘false dichotomy’ put forth by Russian nationalists, between a dominant ‘pure’ Russian literature and an allegedly peripheral ‘literature in the Russian language, which is supposedly written primarily by Jews’ (p. 193), contemporary Dutch Jewish writers are not minority writers but ‘part of the mainstream’ (p. 46), as Elrud Ibsch argues. Christoph Mieting comes to a comparable (although not identical) conclusion on the Italian Jewish tradition, which ‘stands out in its strong awareness of continuity’, going back to Roman times and seemingly unbroken by the traumas of repression and persecution (pp. 140, 152).

Notwithstanding the post-war perspective, the new cultural-political issues and the heterogeneity of the different ‘national’ scenes, the Shoah remains probably the most central theme of contemporary Jewish writing, even though it does not ‘originate in the immediate experience of the Nazi genocide but rather in the secondary trauma of growing up within families shattered by the Shoa’ (p. xvi). The original post-war dilemma of ‘the limits of representation’ – of the impossible or unacceptable representation of the Shoah – has not been overcome, but it has shifted to another level, since the younger generations have to cope with the fact that they are dependent on the ‘remembered history’, the transmitted testimonies of their predecessors, as Elrud Ibsch stresses in her contribution. The tension between the transgenerational perspective in which the traumas of the ancestors are still handed down and the generation gaps between the first (the survivors), the second (post-war) and the contemporary third generation is a fascinating topic in many contributions and one of the most rewarding of the volume. It is also the point where a survey of Jewish and of other contemporary European writings focusing on the difficulties of remembrance in an era of hypermediatization might intersect.

In their contributions on Austrian, respectively German, Jewish writers, Vivian Liska and Stephan Braese discern in the youngest generation a strong desire to stress the present as the situation in which they live and from which they write in order ‘to bring the present into […] the writing of the past’ (p. 4). However, whereas contemporary German Jewish authors have freed themselves of the ‘pressure to legitimize’ their existence in post-war Germany – a Legitimationsdruck that still casts a shadow on the second generation – and want to write about themselves ‘as Jews in the concrete German present’ (p. 28), Liska convincingly shows how the work of three contemporary Austrian authors (Schindel, Menasse, Rabinovici) expresses a firm rejection of a tradition prevalent in the preceding generation (the dominant voices of which were Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan) to ‘endow the past with the aura of a negative sublime’ (p. 15) and speechless mysticism. Beyond their ‘nonsacrosanct treatment of the past’ (p. 16), they are resolutely in search of a non-transcendental, ‘talkative’ poetics of everyday life, since – and I quote (with Liska) one of the figures in Robert Schindler’s novel Gebürtig (1992) who is irreverently distorting Paul Celan’s weighty oxymoron ‘zwei Mundvoll Schweigen’ (two mouthfuls of silence) – ‘I would like another snout full of silence, but the supply is used up’ (p. 16).