The newest monograph in the field of comparative Jewish-Polish-German studies is a rigorous analysis of the multi-lingual literary production in east central Europe during the interwar period of the past century. The linguistic scope of Alina Molisak's study encompasses literary works by Jewish authors written in Polish, Yiddish, and German, but not in Hebrew. The book explores two capital cities—Warsaw and Berlin—as prominent sites of the multilayered cultural production fused with religious and socio-political activities and the oft-antagonistic and competitive relationship among members of their respective Jewish populations. The genealogy of this conceptual framework harks back to the Levi-Straussian view of cultures as developed along binary oppositions. Molisak maintains the binary perspective through concepts such as contrast, while persistently interweaving the two poles of Warsaw and Berlin as complex scenarios of interactions occurring among both cities’ Jewish inhabitants. The manner in which she proceeds is to foreground the residents of Jewish Berlin and Jewish Warsaw against the backdrop of the tumultuous politics, religious life, and economic stratification of the time. The east European Jewish population, largely Litvak or Hasidic, immigrating to or through Berlin to their destination points in America or Palestine, stood apart from the assimilated and better-off German Jewry; political, economic, and religious differences were a source of antagonisms and tensions between these two groups.
Berlin's Scheunenviertel and Warsaw's Nalewki Street (with its adjacent environs) were the neighborhoods where Jews of the diaspora lived and built their networks of houses of worship, mikvahs, religious schools, and small kosher shops geared to their religious needs. Along with the commonly-used Yiddish language and the prevalence of the traditional Jewish code of dress, these factors co-created the visible intensity of street life and a sense of neighborhood, of its familiarity, which Molisak aptly calls swojskość (roughly, familiarity).
Using Sander Gilman's concept of a boundary, the author describes the oft-invisible and permeable delineations of Jewish space, as both Jewish neighborhoods were “ghettos with open gates.” In her comparative readings of Berlin and Warsaw's topographies, Molisak does not strive to find exact similarities, nonetheless she describes a rather persuasive likeness between the main thoroughfares of Krochmalna Street and Grenadierstrasse. It is Mary L. Pratt's concept of a contact zone that proves to be most instrumental in Molisak's study of the miejsca wspólne (common sites), among which she includes apartment buildings, public parks and gardens, night bars and seedy restaurants where the poor Poles and Jews conducted their criminal and illegal activities. It is through her culturalist analysis of these sites that the multilayered phenomenon of a neighborhood is enhanced.
Bridging three languages, Molisak recreates multiple points of reference to Warsaw and Berlin in the literary works by Jewish writers of that time. Her sources are not only taken from the sphere of belles-lettres, but also from travel writing and journalism, especially reportage. The fictional and non-fictional representation of the urban spaces of Warsaw and Berlin has its own history that begins with writers of Yiddish literature: Scholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Israel J. Singer, David Bergelson, and Fischl Schneerson. It also includes Polish-Jewish writers such as Jakub Appenszlak and Bernard Singer, as well as Polish writers such as Maria Kuncewiczowa, Helena Boguszewska, and Wanda Melcer, among others. Molisak's thorough purview of the interbellum Jewish-German literature foregrounds Alfred Döblin's innovative Berlin Alexanderplatz and his Travel to Poland in which he touched—in an almost epiphanic way—the pulse of east European Jewish authenticity.
Because of its multidisciplinarity, Molisak's title, which translates as Jewish Warsaw-Jewish Berlin: A Literary City Portrait in the First Half of the 20th Century, can be aligned to an interesting group of works that map the built environment of both cities. I would mention in this context Michael Meng's 2011 monograph Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland and the studies of postwar developments, especially those occurring during the post-communist period. Examples include, for instance, Agata Lisiak's “Berlin and Warsaw as Brands” (2009) and Ewa Korcelli-Olejniczak's “Berlin and Warsaw: In Search of a New Role in the European Urban System” (2007).
Supported by solid archival and historical research, as well as readings in the theory of Jewish identity and space, this study is more than a foray into a literary sphere of topical urban strategies of representation. Rather, it is an informative reconstruction of the intricate texture of the Jewish world, which was erased from the map during WWII. Subsequently, this valuable monograph and its wide-ranging interventions contribute to the discourse of the less-studied aspects of international modernism.
