Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive
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n her new book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive, Na'ama Rokem investigates written exchanges by a range of literary twentieth century authors, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul Celan, and Tuvia Ruebner. This remarkable bilingual archive encompasses not only letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemeral documents. Written in German and Hebrew, these documents were sent to and from Jerusalem, primarily in the decades following 1948. The writers at the center of Rokem's study contend with the genocidal violence that brought the rich historical relation between German and Hebrew to a seeming end. They also grapple, in different ways, with the new reality in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. The bilingual conversation that crosses over between German and Hebrew in these letters thus ce
