In Jerusalem

A common language?

02/04/2013 12:10 By PEGGY CIDOR

Hava Pinhas-Cohen, founder and director of the Kisufim writers’ conference, talks about why some authors don’t like to be categorized as Jewish and how Israelis are not embracing Diaspora literature.

Photo by: Marc Israel Sellem

T he city of Czernowitz, Bukovina (today part of Ukraine and Romania) produced three Jewish writers: Norman Manea, Paul Celan and Aharon Appelfeld. Like thousands of other Jews from that city, famous for its German culture, the three fled the Nazi extermination machine, each ending up in a different place. The three shared a background and a culture – they spoke German at home and Romanian in the street, and they all knew Yiddish.

Appelfeld finally made it to Israel and became a writer, working in Hebrew. Celan moved to Paris, where he wrote in German, in fact becoming the most important German-language poet of the second part of the 20th century. As for Manea, he first tried to become a communist writer in Romania, where he remained until the late ’80s, before fleeing to the West. Today, he lives in New Jersey, where he writes only in Romanian. Spread out over the world, each writing in a different language, these three can be considered to represent the Jewish literary condition today. But interestingly enough, Manea, who writes exclusively about Jewish identity and culture, who is a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature and whose works have been translated into 20 languages, has never been translated into Hebrew and remains almost unknown to Israeli readers.

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A common language?

Hava Pinhas-Cohen, founder and director of the Kisufim writers’ conference, talks about why some authors don’t like to be categorized as Jewish and how Israelis are not embracing Diaspora literature.

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