In the Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after WWII - yet an idealized version lives on. This book chronicles the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory.

Built on up-to-date field material, this edited volume suggests an anthropological approach to the palimpsest-like milieus of Wrocław, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Chişinău. In these East-Central European borderline cities, the legacies of Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, and violent ethno-nationalism have been revisited in recent decades in search of profound moral reckoning and in response to the challenges posed by the (post-)transitional period. Present shapes and contents of these urban settings derive from combinations of fragmented material environments, cultural continuities and political ruptures, present-day heritage industries and collective memories about the contentious past, expressive architectural forms and less conspicuous meaning-making activities of human actors. In other words, they evolve from perpetual tensions between choices of the past and the burden of the past. A novel feature of this book is its multi-level approach to the analysis of engagements with the lost diversity in historical urban milieus full of post-war voids and ruptures. In particular, the collected studies test the possibility of combining the theoretical propositions of Memory Studies with broader conceptualizations of borderlands, cosmopolitan sociality, urban mythologies, and hybridity. The volume’s contributors are Eleonora Narvselius, Bo Larsson, Natalia Otrishchenko, Anastasia Felcher, Juliet D. Golden, Hana Cervinkova, Paweł Czajkowski, Alexandr Voronovici, Barbara Pabjan, Nadiia Bureiko, Teodor Lucian Moga, and Gaelle Fisher.

A founding father of modern Israel, Ahad Ha-am (1856-1927) was one of the shapers of the contemporary Zionist consciousness. His career spanned the era of Russian Jewry's nationalist awakening. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, he was the leading theorist of the Russian Zionist movement. Afterwards, he was overshadowed by Theodore Herzl, who imposed his own stamp on Zionism. With the failure of Herzl's diplomacy and his early death in 1904, Russian Zionists abandoned Herzl's priorities and gradually refashioned the program of the Zionist organization in their own image. More than anyone else, Ahad Ha-am provided the ideological authority for this shift. Until At the Crossroads, there were no up-to-date studies of Ahad Ha-am. This long-awaited collection includes 14 essays by internationally known scholars in modern Jewish history and literature. The essays range from studies of Ahad Ha-am as a literary stylist, his role in the revival of Hebrew, his political thought and activity, his debates with famous contemporaries about the Jewish future, and the reinterpretation of his ideas by his Zionist disciples. The overall picture presented by this book is a new image of Ahad Ha-am—far less Westernized and far more embedded in the nineteenth-century Jewish and Russian cultural milieu than was previously thought.

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet. Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan’s reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, "to measure the area of the given and the possible." Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction and extensive commentary. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century. This volume collects Celan’s first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose).

Only monuments remind us today of the golden age of Czernowitz, once the lively capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even after the once-mighty empire crumbled in 1918, Czernowitz remained a haven of multicultural coexistence, peopled by Jews, Ruthenes, Bessarabians, Germans, Turks, Poles, and Armenians and animated by a proudly Austrian culture. That culture, literary and cosmopolitan, has vanished from this corner of Europe. Local fascists, the Nazis and the Holocaust, and the region’s absorption into the Soviet Union insured that the past has here been lost irretrievably. Now the Bukowina is part of Ukraine, where history is being made again. Otto Appenzeller is a child of prewar Czernowitz, where he absorbed its culture even as the storm clouds gathered. He was born there in 1927; his father was an architect and professor and his mother an accountant. He and his parents escaped the horror of pogroms by emigrating after he joined the Czech brigade, which supported the Soviet efforts to defeat the Germans. He became a neurologist and was delighted to know at least three boyhood acquaintances from this small city followed similar paths in medicine. For him, translating this book summons memories of literary evenings and family gatherings in the old style and festive occasions to celebrate an era that has now long vanished. Cover design by Rose Appenzeller