This book is part of the growing trend in the study of modern Jewish literature that considers the Yiddish and Hebrew branches of that literature in their interaction.Footnote ¹ Schachter's thematic and theoretical interest focuses on what she describes as the “nonterritorial relationship between Jewish-language writers and their audiences,” which, in her view, “amplified the writers’ engagement with modernist forms and trends” (7). This interrelationship between the extraterritorial situation of the writer and modernism is investigated at four intersections between diachronic and synchronic axes: starting in late nineteenth-century Odessa with the memoirs of the “grandfather” of both modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, S. Y. Abramovitsh; moving to the Jewish Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine as portrayed by Y. Ḥ. Brenner's novel, Breakdown and Bereavement; proceeding to two representations of Central Europe, in Dovid Bergelson's Yiddish stories of the 1920s and Leah Goldberg's 1947 Hebrew novel And That Is the Light; and concluding with two Yiddish and Hebrew poets in post-World War II New York. Taken together, these elegant and insightful readings of canonical Yiddish and Hebrew writers form, to use the term coined by the American Yiddish critic Borukh Rivkin, the kmoy-teriteorye (virtual territory) of diasporic Jewish modernism.

Abramovitsh's last major work, written simultaneously in Hebrew and Yiddish, unlike his previous novels, serves as a starting point for the examination of the emerging modernist linguistic polysystem that Shachter links to the diasporic condition of Jewish culture. She reads this memoir as a precursor of both Yiddish and Hebrew modernism, interpreting its form as an experimental series of third-person “novels” framed by the first-person narrative discourse which “calls into question authorial agency” (34). (Her use of the term “novels” in the plural seems confusing; apparently, she means chapters which can be read as individual novellas, because later (37) she refers to the entire work as one novel.) This structure, she argues, captures the “illegibility” of the Jewish past associated with the traditional shtetl for a modern urban literary intellectual, by conveying the “instable conditions of Jewish literary languages and the alienation of Jewish storytellers and their audiences” (37). One might question, however, the applicability of Walter Benjamin's concept of the storyteller to the case of Abramovitsh's early works, for which he used the pen name Mendele Moykher-Sforim. As has been argued by several critics, these works were inspired by English, French, and Russian novels rather than by traditional Yiddish folklore. Indeed, the “disarticulation of authorial identity and the questioning of authorial subjectivity” (49) is a characteristic feature of Abramovitsh's entire oeuvre, reaching its culmination in his masterpiece Di kliyatshe (1873), the precursor of both modernism and post-modernism in Jewish literature.

Contrary to the common view that Brenner broke with Abramovitsh's tradition of nusekh, Schachter argues for continuity between the two authors by shifting the focus to the “fracturing of the authorial persona” and “reflection of loss and nostalgia” (53). Written shortly after his arrival in Palestine, Brenner's novel depicts the travails of a group of young Russian ḥaluẓim of the Second Aliyah, with the implied author acting as a compiler, editor, and translator of diverse materials. As in the previous chapter, Schachter's primary interest is to explore the tensions between Yiddish and Hebrew as a window onto the complexity of Jewish consciousness; she sees Hebrew as disrupting the intimate relationships among the characters, which are the product of their multilingual diasporic experience. She argues that despite Brenner's commitment to Hebrew and Zionism, he remained deeply sympathetic and attached to the multilingual diasporic culture and critical of the simplistic Zionist ideal. While this interpretation of Brenner is already largely accepted even by mainstream historians such as Anita Shapira, Schachter's nuanced and sophisticated textual analysis provides it with a more solid foundation.

Moving from Hebrew to Yiddish and from pre-World War I Palestine to 1920s Berlin, Schachter examines the position of a modernist Yiddish writer in “double” exile in a European metropolis, removed from his traditional Eastern European goles. From this position of dislocation, Bergelson produced, in his Berlin stories, a “modernist allegory about the condition of Yiddish culture” (97) as alienated both from its audience and its roots. Unlike his fellow Hebrew writers, most of whom eventually moved from their Berlin “exile” to the new “home” in Palestine, Bergelson's Berlin narrator, in Schachter's interpretation, personifies a new, decentralized, deterritorialized, and deeply destabilized world of modern Yiddish culture, whose very survival was jeopardized by the rise of exclusive nationalisms. In her insightful reading of three stories, informed by contemporary critical debates, she argues that even as Bergelson was ideologically increasingly drawn to the Soviet utopian experiment, his fiction “represents an attempt to shape a Yiddish modernism set outside both the shtetl and the steppes” (113). One should probably add that at that time Bergelson was also closely involved in practical projects of Jewish “productivization” carried out by ORT in various parts of Eastern Europe.

Unlike Bergelson's forever uprooted characters, Goldberg's semi-autobiographical heroine does return to her Baltic hometown from Berlin, but, in an act of “symbolic patricide,” she refuses to converse in Yiddish and be dragged back to the familiar territory of traditional Jewish patriarchy. As a female Hebrew writer, Goldberg inhabits a liminal space between European and Jewish culture, which also places her at the avant-garde of contemporary Hebrew literature. Unlike male modernist Hebrew writers, she never attended a yeshiva, and her Hebrew education was decidedly secular. Hebrew offered her a way out of the European conundrum, which is symbolically represented as a train journey from Lithuania to Germany on the eve of Hitler's ascent to power, yet she “resists the project of nationalizing Hebrew literature and the demand to locate Hebrew culture in the new Jewish home” (151).

The final chapter examines the “afterlife of the diasporic modernist tradition” (154) in post-World War II New York by looking at the works of the Yiddish poet Kadia Molodowsky and the bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish poet Gabriel Preil. While their Yiddish works of that period mourn the destruction of Eastern European Jewry, Preil's Hebrew poetry challenges the domination of Hebrew literature by the Zionist master narrative. In her conclusion, Schachter reiterates her polemical argument against the notion of the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of Jewish modernism. (In an eerie way this term echoes the denunciatory tone of Stalinist rhetoric of the late 1940s directed against Jews writing in the Russian language.) She finds this notion in the contemporary theory, influenced by Deleuze and Guatarri, in which Kafka serves as “an awkward representative of Yiddish culture” and Yiddish as “an object of modernist fascination, rather than a language of modernist creation” (104–105). Schachter's nuanced and perceptive analytical readings certainly make her argument convincing and strong; whether it will be heard outside of the field of Jewish literary studies remains to be seen. One would wish, however, that she would provide more ammunition for her arguments, namely, engage more forcefully with Yiddish and Hebrew literary criticism of the time and elaborate on the somewhat enigmatic concept of “nonterritorial readership” and its relationships with “diasporic modernism.”