Ebook: Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War provides unprecedented engagement with the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure and of compounding return for various writers and artists producing Jewish imaginaries who volunteered to fight fascism in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1930s or responded from abroad, as well as their successors. These essays demonstrate the importance that this event—the preamble to the Second World War and the Shoah—has had for the Jewish people and Jewish cultural production through the 20th century and into the 21st.
Jewish literature journalism, letters, and music from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. Many were writing against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to align with the anti-fascist fight. Most contributions in this volume discuss subaltern voices from across the globe—including from Germany, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, France, and Spain—which were left under the shadow of the continuously growing corpus of world literature of the Spanish Civil War. There is also an analysis of the “Jewishness”—aesthetics as well as ideas—of the secular imaginaries of these artists and intellectuals as embedded in Jewish topics and ethos. Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War thus proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.