The American academia has an issue with PhDs focused on one writer. Such dissertations are usually considered to be “narrow” and therefore unworthy to be pursued. Some, though very few, established scholars allow themselves the “luxury” of writing on an author. As a result, there are significant—or simply huge—lacunae in academic biographical studies. In the field of Yiddish literature, for instance, serious monographs or collective volumes on leading writers can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Meanwhile, doctoral students often lump together several writers, making their research (really or ostensibly) broader. Creation of a “group portrait” demands a theoretical framework, which explains and justifies the construct, especially if the protagonists never met in their entire life, and never mentioned each other's names in their writings and correspondence.

Rachel Seeling's PhD-based monograph illustrates this trend. It is a well-researched and well-written study that assembles under the same roof four poets of the same generation: Ludwig Strauss (1892–1953) who wrote in German and, after emigrating to Palestine, also in Hebrew; Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937), a poet of Vilna, and later a prominent and tragic figure in Soviet Yiddish literature; Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981), a Yiddish and Hebrew poet, and a rightwing Zionist activist; and Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943), a German poet deported to Auschwitz. They may give the impression of being a rather disparate lot, but Seeling finds a common denominator that, she argues, unites them. It is the time (between a lifetime and a short sojourn) spent in Berlin, which became for them “a temporary threshold between past and future homelands, between a lost origin and a longed-for destination” (16).

In addition, and even more significantly, the four poets—who “differ dramatically in terms of language, aesthetics, and politics”—“share a crucial characteristic: they all looked toward an imagined ‘East’ as the wellspring of an authentic Jewish national culture” (16). Thus, Kulbak's native Lite, or historical Jewish Lithuania (which incorporates Belorussia), falls into the same “eastern” category as Palestine, or the Land of Israel. As a result, Avrom Nokhum Stenzel appears in the book only as an extra, despite his strong credentials as a poetic member of Berlin literary circles. It seems, however, that his poetry does not reveal a look toward any east, and he himself ultimately wound up in London rather than in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, as Vilna was known, or Jerusalem proper. Incidentally, David Hofshteyn, who also spent a short spell in Berlin and later a longer time in Palestine, could be a more logical figure in this collective portrait.

Weimar Berlin was a tough place for immigrants, particularly for Yiddish writers who (like Kulbak) failed to find a source of a journalistic or other sufficient income. Still, it is hard to agree with the statement that “even the most well-adjusted migrant writers treated Berlin as a temporary home, a ‘transit-inn’ (transit-kretshme), in the words of the critic Daniel Charney, from which they would soon be ‘released into the wider world’” (42). Charney—who was a poet, memoirist, and essayist, but least of all a “critic”—certainly did not want to leave Berlin and wrote about it, including a piece on his going to a reception thrown for foreign journalists by Joseph Goebbels. His friend David Bergelson was also well settled in the Weimar capital and only Adolf Hitler's coming to power forced him to flee to Copenhagen and, a year later, to Moscow. The same can be said about a number of other Jewish literati, who arrived in Germany following the violent disintegration of imperial Russia and established themselves there, on the “threshold,” rather comfortably.

In all, this is a book that contains original and insightful chapters on the four poets, but some readers may have problems figuring out why these chapters are bound into one volume, under the same title.