A01=Kata Gellen
Author_Kata Gellen
Category=DNT
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSR
Category=NHB
Eastern Europe
emancipation
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fiction
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Galicia
Galician Jews
german-language literature
Holocaust
Jewish culture
Joseph Roth
literary imagination
modernity
secularization
shtetl
Soma Morgenstern
tradition
urbanization
Product details
- ISBN 9781487528898
- Weight: 600g
- Dimensions: 159 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2026
- Publisher: University of Toronto Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In the decades following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the former province of Galicia inspired the literary imagination of two German-language natives of this region, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern. Galicia as a Literary Idea explores what their engagement with Galicia means for modern Jewish culture, history, and memory.
For Roth and Morgenstern, Galicia encapsulates the rich interplay between contemporary developments – including urbanization, secularization, embourgeoisement, political self-determination, and new technologies – and traditional Jewish life in Eastern European villages and shtetls, characterized by tight-knit families and communities, religious observance and ritual, Yiddish language and culture, and Hasidic belief systems. Despite the tensions between these elements, this book presents them as a complex network rather than a battle between old and new, east and west, or tradition and modernity. German and Jewish studies scholar Kata Gellen also traces the shifting attachments of Galician Jews to German, a language that symbolized emancipation, culture, empire, and, ultimately, disillusionment and persecution.
Through original readings of well-known and neglected works by Roth and Morgenstern, Gellen shows how the literary idea of Galicia is shaped by continuous struggle and emergent hope, whether as earthly possibility or redemptive promise. This book thereby uncovers the complex relationship between center and periphery in Jewish modernity and reanimates a dimension of modern Jewish literary history that has been obscured by the dark shadow of the Holocaust.
For Roth and Morgenstern, Galicia encapsulates the rich interplay between contemporary developments – including urbanization, secularization, embourgeoisement, political self-determination, and new technologies – and traditional Jewish life in Eastern European villages and shtetls, characterized by tight-knit families and communities, religious observance and ritual, Yiddish language and culture, and Hasidic belief systems. Despite the tensions between these elements, this book presents them as a complex network rather than a battle between old and new, east and west, or tradition and modernity. German and Jewish studies scholar Kata Gellen also traces the shifting attachments of Galician Jews to German, a language that symbolized emancipation, culture, empire, and, ultimately, disillusionment and persecution.
Through original readings of well-known and neglected works by Roth and Morgenstern, Gellen shows how the literary idea of Galicia is shaped by continuous struggle and emergent hope, whether as earthly possibility or redemptive promise. This book thereby uncovers the complex relationship between center and periphery in Jewish modernity and reanimates a dimension of modern Jewish literary history that has been obscured by the dark shadow of the Holocaust.
Kata Gellen is associate professor of German studies and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University.
