German Jews in Palestine 1920-1948

With an approach both personal and symbolic this volume leads us through the imagined worlds delusions discoveries questions hopes ambivalences anxieties and historical cultural and psychological dynamics of six German-Jewish writers and intellectuals who arrived in Palestine between the 1920s and 1930s. Hugo Bergmann Gershom Scholem Gabriele Tergit Else Lasker–Schüler Arnold Zweig and Paul Mühsam witnessed the gap between dream and reality from their own perspectives representing it at many levels: intellectual cultural historical psychological and literary. As these six figures arrived in Palestine this ancient land long imagined by diaspora generations with life-long nostalgia was new and open to different interpretations outcomes and realities. <BR />This book explores the difficulties and challenges that these figures had to face as they returned to the land of their fathers a return shadowed by a historical symbolic and metaphysical exile. It tells the story of a culture suspended and balanced between many worlds— a story of exile and return that is still unfolding under our eyes today.