Short stories - between personal narrative and Jewish "cultural memory" (Dr. Max Salzberg, 1882 -1954)

Short stories - between personal narrative and Jewish "cultural memory" (Dr. Max Salzberg, 1882 -1954)

History

Max Salzberg’s stories – 20th century Jewish literature between personal memories and portraits of Jewish cultural life

Emma Kühnelt

2024

This paper looks at the fictional writings of Dr Max Salzberg. Born into an orthodox Jewish community in present-day Lithuania in 1882, Salzberg moved to Germany for medical treatment when a young man. He survived the Holocaust in Hamburg, Germany in a "Mischehe" with his non-Jewish German wife, Frida Salzberg-Heins. Particularly during this time he wrote fictional stories about the culture and religion of his childhood. In my project, I considered these texts as places of both personal and “cultural” memory. On the personal level, the stories were Salzberg’s way to re-encounter his individual experiences. Furthermore, the stories acted as “cultural memory” by preserving Eastern European Jewish culture. This culture was almost rendered extinct in the Holocaust. Looking at the different contexts of his publications in Germany in Israel in the early post-war period, I discuss different national approaches to collective memory and the merit of the stories “mainstreamness” in the genres of “shtetl literature” and the “Zionist novel”.

History
Jewish History
Literature
Short Stories
Holocaust