Description

---

Bohemian Jewish culture and literature during the underexamined 1820s to 1880s.

This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíćek Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.

About the Author

---

Jindřich Toman is professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Michigan.

Praise For…

---

"This welcome study by Toman (Slavic languages and literature, Univ. of Michigan) treats the 1820s to the 1880s, examining the Jewish experience in Bohemia (the Czech lands) by analyzing a wide variety of sources and genres. Overviews of and concluding summaries to each chapter facilitate readers' understanding of the author’s arguments. Among the themes he treats are the complexities of ghetto images, how to understand the famous Jewish cemetery in Prague, whether Jewish fortunes were best served by reference to their inclusion in the Habsburg empire or by more narrow identification with the Czech lands, which context best expressed the Jewish experience (idealistic or realistic), and how Jews should or could respond to their legal equality in the Czech lands after 1867. Issues such as whether the German or Czech language should frame Jewish identify are expertly handled. Some of the authors Toman treats are probably not familiar to an Anglophone audience, but his close and skillful analyses make their works come alive. He is especially good at dealing with anti-Semitism, and his revisionist treatment of Jan Neruda as an anti-Semite is powerfully argued. The volume is enhanced by 15 well-chosen illustrations."
— Choice