A Letter Mirjam Zadoff
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
It was still early on a Friday afternoon in August 1883, before the beginning of the Sabbath, when Judah Leib Gordon wrote in a letter to his friend Shlomo Rubin:²
It’s been already 20 days since I ...arrived in your country, am drinking well water and bathing in baths of manure. In this mudhole,³ I am searching for the Holy Spirit,⁴ which abandoned me four years ago when I sank deep down into this hole of mud. Since then my spirit has been overstrained and I have lost vitality. My sleep has been stolen from me, my veins refuse to
WarmbodGrotesques Mirjam Zadoff
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
Professor Hermann Neumann from Potsdam was not only addressing a warning to his colleagues when he published an article in 1910 in the Zeitschrift für Balneologie. His opinions constituted a rare ...public statement in a controversy that had been raging in Germany since the turn of the century:
There has been serious criticism both from physicians and from the spa administrations . . . about the level of noise in spas. The time has finally come to say something about the ‘noise’ being generated in our spas by politics, class and racial hatred, and which do harm to the sick.
A Map Mirjam Zadoff
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
As a staff member of the Hilfsverein für die Juden in Deutschland
(Relief Association of Jews in Germany), Dr. Gutfeld had the task of locating potential emigration possibilities and destinations for ...persecuted German Jews. This was an especially difficult job, and Gutfeld and his colleagues could in fact only assist a very limited number of people. In 1939, when the Hilfsverein was finally dissolved, Dr. Gutfeld drew several extraordinary fictional maps of a utopian island state that he dubbed Jutopia.²
As a colony of the Hilfsverein, this country, in its fantastic regions and landscapes, combines the past and a possible
A Story Mirjam Zadoff
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
In its Hanukkah issue of 1919, the Zionist paper Selbstwehr published a short story by Franz Kafka.² “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (The Cares of a Family Man) had been written in 1916–1917 and was being ...published now for the first time. The story begins:
Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning
