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Taking Levinas’s essay “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other” (1972) as point of departure, this article explores the relationship between Celan and Hölderlin along the conceptual pairs of exile and Heimat, wandering and rootedness, homelessness and dwelling. Two well-known verses by Friedrich Hölderlin constitute the subtext of Levinas’s essay on Celan. The first, “Why poets in times of distress?” addresses the task of the poet in modernity, the second, “Poetically man dwells on earth,” defines this task in terms of the relationship of the human being to place. Both verses play a major role in Martin Heidegger’s late collection of essays, Holzwege (1950), where the German philosopher, invoking Hölderlin, articulates his poetics in terms of the poet’s task to provide modern man with a home on earth. Levinas’s essay polemically questions this poetics through a juxtaposition of Hölderlin and Celan in light of the idea that the Jew is “free with regard to place,” a condition opposed to a pagan attachment to native soil. This juxtaposition opens up a series of far-reaching questions concerning Jewish extraterritoriality as a praiseworthy opposition to a politics of “blood and soil” and the potential of poetic language to capture both the attraction and the precariousness of substituting territorial rootedness with a Jewish attachment to the word.

This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.

On Getting It Right MOSHE IDEL. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and TwentiethCentury Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336.THE IMPORTANCE of Moshe Idel's Old Worlds, New Mirrors can hardly be overstated. It is both a seminal and daunting intervention in the field of modern European Jewish thought that takes to task its towering figures: mainly German Jewish modernists from Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin, and Buber to Steiner, Celan, and Derrida, with occasional references to Freud, Arendt, Adorno, Jonas, Leo Strauss, and others. The book also questions the cult that developed around these figures, suggesting that it led to a disproportionate attention to a "quantitatively tiny elite culture" (p. 70) at the expense of the actual wealth of Jewish thought and writing. Idel's critique of the ways these celebrated European Jewish figures and their followers approach Judaism and integrate elements of the kabbalistic tradition in their thinking is pertinent and profound. It is also unsettling, disconcerting, and even shocking at times.Idel's intervention in this field is more important than he himself concedes in his misleadingly mild introduction where he defines the objective of his book in a dry scholarly manner as "adding the Eastern European perspective to the Central European one," an approach, he states, that "would yield a more complex and informative description" of the field (p. 12). Idei believes that this added perspective can correct "misunderstandings of the mystical texts under scrutiny" (p. 12). If these two assertions-complementing and correcting existing scholarship- covered the scope of the book, it would be little more than another scholarly revision. The book's importance, however, lies neither with being a more complete description nor a rectification of modern understandings of Jewish mystical texts. Of course this is a key part of the book: an eminent expert sets things right and chides those who have torn kabbalistic elements out of their rich and variegated context at the price of the distortion and reduction of their original meaning. The title points to this aspect of the book: the Old are worlds, alive and manifold; the New are mirrors- a treacherous medium of representation in which the Old is reflected as a mere illusion. But the book's scope reaches far beyond this delimitation and also beyond another assertion at the end of its introduction where Idei claims that his effort "should not be seen as a critique of the Central European [translate: essentially German Jewish] approaches to Judaism but as an interrogation of the two perspectives, the Eastern and Western one, a questioning that may serve as a corrective to each" (p. 12). It is, however, noteworthy that the shortcomings of the Eastern perspectivedescribed by Idei essentially as a "lack of critical approach" (p. 12)- are barely addressed. Instead, the book offers an extended critique of the Western perspective from an Eastern one that is implicitly considered more authentic. Idel's critique of the group of mainly German Jewish intellectuals mentioned above and of their impact on a widely accepted vision of Judaism in contemporary thought is his real work in this collection of essays. As a challenge to current approaches and practices in the field of German Jewish studies, it is monumental, both in what I consider to be the book's most important and its most problematic claims.In what follows I will sketch two examples for each of these assessments, the remarkable and the dubious, taken mostly from the chapter on George Steiner. In the first two cases, these examples will illustrate Idel's powerful and convincing critique of the modern understanding of the "Jewish spirit" and of a liberal and cosmopolitan metaphorization of Jewish existence. In the last two examples, I question critically Idel's perspective on the relation between the Holocaust and Israel as well as his understanding of the German Jewish legacy as a whole. …

Even though Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot count among the most important literary critics of the past century and shared many concerns, they have rarely been considered together. There is, however, evidence that Blanchot read parts of Benjamin's writings and was inspired by them. Blanchot's most extensive references to Benjamin appear in a text entitled Translating. This essay was composed on the basis of notes that Blanchot took while reading Benjamin's essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers and that have remained unpublished. These notes, which consist mainly of translations of passages from Benjamin's essay are a rich source of insight into Blanchot's reading process, which resulted in a powerful affirmation as well as a radical transfiguration of Benjamin's theory of translation. They also shed light on the similarities and differences between the two thinkers' respective theories of translation, their philosophies of language, and the divergent traditions in which their thinking is embedded.

A close reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze', Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' discloses different positions assigned to the child that are paradigmatic for poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The three poems invoke the child as carrier of memory and continuity, and therefore as a link between past and future. However, the temporal modes in which this link is inscribed in each case could hardly be more different. These modes correspond to temporalities associated with the child in traditional respectively Jewish, romantic, 'enlightened' discourses. While Celan's figure of the child is bent on eternally holding a wake over the past, Sachs poetically conjures up a reawakening in the guise of a child resurrected in the poetic present. In Kaschnitz' poem, which addresses the perpetrators, the child is evoked as the voice awakening an as yet somnolent conscience to responsibilities to be taken up in the future. Words, in poetry, are less protected than in prose, by meaning, context, syntax and perspective, and therefore resonate with more intensity, immediacy and further reach. Earth, sky or rose, in verse, suffice to call up life, infinity or beauty, but also nothingness, death and transience. A child in verse is not just this one little man or woman but is, immediately, exposed mankind, nostalgia of bygone times or open hopes, is innocence and speechlessness, or else a creature using words like poets do, as sounds and building blocks for song and play. Appealing to what has been lived by each and every reader and what he or she carries in him or herself as memory, the child in poetry transforms the now into the future of that past. Beyond ultimate vulnerability and frailty, the child becomes the carrier of continuity between the former and the present self, between one generation and the next, between the darkest recollection and the furthest hopes. Holocaust poetry invoking children conjures up, no matter what its content, the abyss between what man could be and what he has become in blackest * Vivian Liska is professor of German Literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp (www.ua.ac.be/ijs). Her research focuses mainly on Modern German literature and literary theory. Book publications include Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe (with Thomas Nolden), 2007; and When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German Jewish Literature (Indiana University Press, 2009) European Judaism Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2009: 107-120 doi: 1 0.3 1 67/ej. 2009.420 110 ISSN 0014-3006 (Print), ISSN 1752-2323 (Online) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:24:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms In the Wake of the Child times. It is in this sense that the title of this essay 'In the Wake of the Child' plays on two different meanings and origins of this English word. 'Wake' in the sense of 'track left by the passage of a ship' comes from Old Norse, where 'vok' meant 'hole in the ice', of the sort left by a moving ship. From there it metaphorically turned into an expression of a trace, of remnants in the aftermath of destruction. This sense is present still when 'wake' refers to watching over a dead person, but here the other meaning of the word as in 'awakening' or 'waking up' is also heard. Deriving from the ancient IndoEuropean root 'wog' or 'weg', it has the meaning of 'to become or stay alert'. When held over a dead body, the wake, in many cultures, means the vigil over something that is held in the precarious state between the actual death and the concluding burial meant to restore the shattered surface of the earth after the closing of the grave. 'In the Wake of the Child' points both to watching over and to waking up, to caring over the weak child and to the wake-up call of vigilance that emanates from its potential future. This essay will present a reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust Paul Celan 's 'Vor einer Kerze' (Celan 2003, 73-74; 'Before a Candle' in Celan 2002, 55), Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' (Sachs 1965, 106-107) and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' (Kaschnitz 1981, 406). I will read them 'in the wake of the child', evoking 'wake' as keeping watch over the dead, as reawakening to life and as waking up to watchfulness itself. Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze9 ('Before a Candle9) In his seminal talk 'The Meridian' (Celan 1999), Paul Celan describes the effect of his poetry as a 'crossing through' (ein Durchkreuzen) of the traditional tropes and metaphors of the poetic tradition. This process is defined by the simultaneous invocation and negation of the traditional semantic connotations evoked in the language of his poetry. In 'Before a Candle' the figure of the child as carrier of continuity is drawn into this process; its traditional thrust towards the future is halted, turned towards the past and arrested in that position. Celan 's poem is a commemoration of the dead that transforms a collective ritual into a radically private poetic act. In a crossing of dialogue and meditation, prayer and blasphemy, quotation and secret language it develops a poetic conjuration Beschworung in all the dimensions and meanings of the word: as oath (Schwur), as entreaty, as mystical spell.1 In the kindling of memory the poem probes the possibilities of the poetic word to return the present towards the past, collapse the 'then' and 'now' into each other and, 108 European Judaism Volume 42 No. 1 Spring '09 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:24:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms