“Ben-Ami’s Swiss Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream” in: East European Jews in Switzerland, T. Lewinsky, S. Mayoraz (Eds.), Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, pp. 178-198. ISBN 978-3-11-030069-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-030071-0 ISSN 2192-9645 This article specifically analyzes a question that has received only minor attention in my previous research on Ben-Ami, a question concerning the role of Switzerland in the writer’s prose and his attitude toward this beloved but temporary shelter. Ben-Ami spent more than two decades in Geneva, after leaving the Russian Empire with his family (in 1905) and before moving permanently to Palestine (probably in 1924); moreover, even before settling in Geneva, he visited Switzerland repeatedly both on holiday and as a representative from Southern Russia at Zionist congresses. Even though the number of pages that Ben-Ami dedicates wholly to his Swiss experiences is small, these are of great interest insofar as they contain crucial details about the “Jewish question” at the beginning of the 20th Century. Ben-Ami’s first “Swiss work” is a short story entitled “Tovarishchi” (‘Friends’) and published in 1909 in the Journal Evreisky Mir (‘The Jewish World’). The second is a short but extraordinary memoir of the First Zionist Congress, published in Moscow in 1918 (it is proposed for the first time in English translation as the Appendix 1 in the same volume). The third work is still in manuscript: a tale under the title “Na vershine gory” (‘On the Mountain Peak’), written in Geneva in 1911 and never published (at least in its Russian original version). The analysis of these three works offers a very coherent and detailed picture of Ben-Ami’s approach to the exceptional crises that beset European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, i.e. the power struggle among Social Democrats, Bundists, nationalists, Hasidim, the assimilated petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists, etc. Finally, the theoretical suggestions by Svetlana Boym (2001) and Yuri Sleskine (2004) are applied for a enriched interpretation of Ben-Ami’s obsessive and paradoxical feeling of toska/nostalgija.
Ben-Ami's Swisse Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream
SALMON, LAURA
2013-01-01
Abstract
“Ben-Ami’s Swiss Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream” in: East European Jews in Switzerland, T. Lewinsky, S. Mayoraz (Eds.), Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, pp. 178-198. ISBN 978-3-11-030069-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-030071-0 ISSN 2192-9645 This article specifically analyzes a question that has received only minor attention in my previous research on Ben-Ami, a question concerning the role of Switzerland in the writer’s prose and his attitude toward this beloved but temporary shelter. Ben-Ami spent more than two decades in Geneva, after leaving the Russian Empire with his family (in 1905) and before moving permanently to Palestine (probably in 1924); moreover, even before settling in Geneva, he visited Switzerland repeatedly both on holiday and as a representative from Southern Russia at Zionist congresses. Even though the number of pages that Ben-Ami dedicates wholly to his Swiss experiences is small, these are of great interest insofar as they contain crucial details about the “Jewish question” at the beginning of the 20th Century. Ben-Ami’s first “Swiss work” is a short story entitled “Tovarishchi” (‘Friends’) and published in 1909 in the Journal Evreisky Mir (‘The Jewish World’). The second is a short but extraordinary memoir of the First Zionist Congress, published in Moscow in 1918 (it is proposed for the first time in English translation as the Appendix 1 in the same volume). The third work is still in manuscript: a tale under the title “Na vershine gory” (‘On the Mountain Peak’), written in Geneva in 1911 and never published (at least in its Russian original version). The analysis of these three works offers a very coherent and detailed picture of Ben-Ami’s approach to the exceptional crises that beset European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, i.e. the power struggle among Social Democrats, Bundists, nationalists, Hasidim, the assimilated petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists, etc. Finally, the theoretical suggestions by Svetlana Boym (2001) and Yuri Sleskine (2004) are applied for a enriched interpretation of Ben-Ami’s obsessive and paradoxical feeling of toska/nostalgija.
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