If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is yet another great book: Jean-Richard Bloch ou A la découverte du monde connu : Jérusalem et Berlin (1925-1928). The book includes two fascinating essays by Jean-Richard Bloch (1884-1947) Le Robinson Juif, written in 1925 and Mitropa (i.e. Europe of the middle), written in 1928, which had only appeared in magazines. In addition, the book presents the personal letters that Bloch wrote to his wife at the time, and contain fantastic, unfiltered background information to both texts (that Bloch had actually planned to publish in a book, but never did).

Initiated by prominent historian Michel Trebitsch (1948-2004), whose preface to Le Robinson Juif is included, the project was carried out by Wolfgang Asholt, Professor at the Osnabrück University, who prefaced Mitropa, and by my sister, Claudine Delphis-Goettmann, Professor at the University of Paris VII, who put together and annotated the correspondence.

Jerusalem and Berlin: two different worlds of the twenties reunited by a common denominator, a then well-known French author. Like many intellectual Jews of the time, he looked for novel cultures – a world without borders, beyond entrenched ideologies, that would enable both Jews and non-Jews to share a common humanist faith in progress and peace. The creation of the University of Jerusalem, for which inauguration* he was invited, sounded to him like “a natural letter of universal naturalization”: “If so many men came over here from all the corners of the world, with so much trust and hope, it’s because today as we have fallen into allotments, particularisms, nationalisms where the mind, the very free mind, is undergoing a balkanization process, eyes eagerly look towards all the pieces of universalism that remain among the peoples, towards everything, wherever in the world, that tells us about unity and restores the big dream of mutual understanding, something that — madly, maybe — humanity keeps on pursuing.” Kfar Yeladim (the village of the children) was yet another sign of a new future to come. In Tel Aviv and in the “mystic Valley of Galilee,” any Jew from any part of the world, regardless of his/her history, beliefs, or political denomination was like Robinson, finding the island where it’s up to each and every one to create a meaningful future.

The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – Kfar Yeladim (in 1930) – Silent with Hebrew inter-titles.

As he hung out in the bars, theaters and salons of Berlin, Bloch similarly experienced the German youth’s need for pervasive changes poised to destroy the “old gothic cell,” and relegate to the history books the images of tanks that plowed the villages of Mitropa and killed a whole generation of young men. The “neue Sachlichkeit” (the “new reality”) provided an unconventional perspective on the world, and unprecedented beats, “the tempo of a new Berlin,” fully international, resounded in the ebullient street scenes and avant-garde theater stages. “I live in such a whirlwind,” Bloch wrote to his wife as he worked on his play with Karl Heinz Martin and Piscator. He experienced the same joy as he traveled to Leipzig, where he met with his friend Wilhelm Friedmann, who welcomed all the French authors! Then, absolute bliss in Vienna, too. Berlin had spread its modernity throughout Mitropa.

Jerusalem and Berlin: Two complementary utopias, and dozens of friends or common friends whom Jean-Richard Bloch saw or heard about, whether in Palestine or in Mitropa. As he visited the Jewish Library of Jerusalem, he found that the librarian, Bergmann, was a schoolmate of his friend Paul Amann. As you read Bloch’s letters to his wife (and the three hundred plus footnotes that my sister added to tell you who is who!), you experience two phenomenal cultural melting pots, where you often meet the same people or people who know one another, as well as their amazing constructive optimism.

Yet, here and there in these two very modern essays, you can’t help think that clouds were looming – and that the “old reality” never really disappeared. The League of Nations that was to secure the Jews of Palestine and the peace in Europe was to be unable to fulfill the promises of its idealist mandates – “of preventing war through collective security, disarmament, and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.” Jean-Richard Bloch, as most Jews, had to come to the realization that having been French for generations and fought in the WWI by no means equaled to personal security. Bloch emigrated to Russia, and coming back to Paris early 1945, found out that his second daughter, France, had been arrested as a resistant in 1942 and executed in Hamburg in 1943, and that his 86 year-old mother had died in Auschwitz in June 1944.

This book Jean-Richard Bloch ou A la découverte du monde connu : Jérusalem et Berlin (1925-1928) is published by French publisher Honoré Champion (Biblothèque d’Etudes Juives, directed by Daniel Tollet with the collaboration of Catherine Coquio)

More books by my sister related to Jean-Richard Bloch and/or his friends:

Survies d’un Juif européen, Correspondance de Paul Amann avec Romain Rolland et Jean-Richard Bloch (I discussed this book in an earlier post).

Wilhelm Friedmann (1884-1942). Le destin d’un francophile 

Georges Duhamel – Stefan Zweig, Correspondance – L’anthologie oubliée de Leipzig 

(*) You may want to see a short 1925 film on the opening (with Hebrew inter-titles): The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – Opening of the Hebrew University

If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is a fascinating book:

The history of literature rarely remembers translators, yet they are the ones who bridge cultures, hoping that an understanding between people and nations will reduce warfare. This was definitely the case of Paul Amann (1884-1958), a German Jew from Bohemia, who lived in Austria and, French at heart, translated multiple French authors into German at a time of maximum bad blood between the two countries (before and after WW1). While he was in the Austro-Hungarian forces, Jean-Richard Bloch was in the French army. While officially “ennemies,” they continued to communicate through their common friend and mentor Romain Rolland, and became even closer after the war.

This correspondence of Paul Amann with Romain Rolland (from 1911 to 1938) and with Jean-Richard Bloch (from 1912 to 1947), recounts the personal and intellectual friendship between three people no war would alter, as well as the unwavering faith in a European spirit of freedom capable of overcoming evil. Reality at some point had to sink in. Amann tried to fight off the persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria as long as he could before emigrating to France in 1939, which was not going to be safer. After harrowing months in Marseille, Amann and his family made it to Lisbon from where they sailed to the United States in 1941, accompanying fify-six Jewish children (including the ten-year-old Wolfgang Grajonca, who was to become Bill Graham), that had been rescued by l’Œuvre au secours des enfants (OSE), the American Friends Service Commitee (AFSC), and the United States Committee for the Care of Refugee Children (USC).

The life of Amann that comes across this huge correspondence is a story of an extraordinary resilience powered by a mission – a personal commitment to carrying out humanistic ideals – which enables him to survive as a penniless teacher in Moravia, overcome personal losses, or become part of the ebullient intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, both in Austria and France, building long-lasting friendships with Stefan and Friderike Zweig, Thomas Mann, Andrée Jouve, and George Duhamel to name of few.

Amann was a typical European Jew. Adjusting to the United States was not easy, but he owed this country his life and a remarkable career for his children. His son, Peter Amann is a retired Professor of the University of Michigan – and arguably the best specialist of the French Revolution of 1848 (Revolution and mass democracy: The Paris club movement in 1848) and his daughter Eva Irrera a successful illustrator and co-founder of the Irrera Studio Arts.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

You can order this book (1065 pages) directly from the publisher: http://www.univerlag-leipzig.de/article.html;article_id,958

Claudine has written a significant number of articles as well as a postface to

Georg Brandes’ Nietszche. Essai sur le radicalisme philosophique, Paris, L’Arche, 2006.

She is also the author of the following books:

Wilhelm Friedmann (1884-1942). Le destin d’un francophile, Leipzig 1999

Stefan Zweig – Georges Duhamel. Correspondance. L’anthologie oubliée de Leipzig, Leipzig 2001

With Wolfgang Asholt: Jean-Richard Bloch ou A la découverte du monde connu: Jérusalem et Berlin (1925-1928), to be published this spring 2010; Honoré Champion, Paris, Publisher.

Article about this book in German:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/X5R38y/3256591/Der-Uebersetzer.html