Utter Chaos

Sammy Gronemann, Penny Milbouer

Description

Published in Germany in 1920, Sammy Gronemann's satirical novel set in 1903 at the time of the Sixth Zionist Congress follows the life of a baptized Jew, Heinz Lehnsen, as he negotiates legal entanglements, German culture, religious differences, and Zionist aspirations. A chance encounter with a long-lost cousin from a shtetl in Russia further complicates the plot and challenges the characters' notions of Jewish identity and their belief in the claims of the Zionist movement. Gronemann's humor and compassion slyly expose the foibles and contradictions of human behavior. With deep insight into German society, German-Jewish culture, and antisemitism, Utter Chaos paints a highly entertaining portrait of German Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Foreword Joachim Schlör
Translator's Introduction
1. Goethe in Borytshev
2. A Literary Enterprise
3. A Pious Fund
4. Pastoral Care
5. Paradise Apples
6. The Sounds of Easter
7. The Trumpet Sounds
8. The Minyan Man
9. The First Born
10. Resistance
11. Pogrom
12. The Grand Festival Week
Glossary and Comments
Index

Sujets

• Historical
• General officer
• Historical fiction
• General
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019639
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

UTTER CHAOSJewish Literature and Culture
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor
A Helen B. Schwartz Book
Published with the support of the Helen B. Schwartz Fund
for New Scholarship in Jewish Studies of Te Robert A.
and Sandra B. Borns Jewish Studies Program,
Indiana UniversityUTTER CHAOS
SAMMY GRONEMANN
TRANSLATED BY PENNY MILBOUER
Foreword by Joachim Schlör
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLISTis book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Ofce of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission i n writing
from the publisher. Te Association of American University Presses’ Resolution
on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Te paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence o f Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ZA3N 9SI.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gronemann, Samuel, 1875-1952, author. | Milbouer, Penny,
translator. | Schlör, Joachim, 1960- writer of foreword.
Title: Utter chaos / Sammy Gronemann ; Translated by
Penny Milbouer ; Foreword by Joachim Schlör.
Other titles: Tohuwobahu. English
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2016] | Series: Jewish
literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
IdentifersL: CCN 2015034850| ISBN 9780253019608 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780253019578 (cloth : alk. paper) | I 9SBN780253019639 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Germany—Fiction.
Classifcation: LCC PT2613.R6 T613 2016 | DD 8 C33/.912—dc23 LC
record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034850
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16For Shep, who knows how to laugh.This page intentionally left blank Warnung! In diesen Blättern wird viel von Juden und jüdischen Dingen die
Rede sein. Ich mache aber ausdrücklich darauf merksam, dass niemand irgend
etwas daraus lernen oder etwas Neues erfahren wird, und wüsste er von Juden
und Judentum so wenig, wie ein australisches Kaninchen oder ein Ordinarius
für Völkerkunde oder ein Synagogenvorsteher des Westens.
(Warning! In these pages there is a lot about Jews and Jewish things. I expressly
call your attention to the fact that no one will learn anything here or fnd
anything new, even if he knew as little about Jews and Judaism as an Australian
rabbit or a professor of ethnology or a leader from a synagogue in Berlin-West.)
—Sammy Gronemann, Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich
(Havdoloh and Military tattoo), 1924This page intentionally left blank Contents
Foreword / Joachim Schlör xi
T ranslator’s Preface xix
Acknowledgments xxi
1 G oethe in Borytsh ev 1
2 A L iterary Enterpr is2e1
3 A P ious Fund 36
4 Pastoral Ca re57
5 Paradise Apple s 104
6 Te Sounds of East er122
7 Te Trumpet Soun ds145
8 Te Minyan Man 166
9 Te Firstbor n 181
10 Resistance 199
11 Pogrom 216
12 Te Grand Festival We ek 236
Notes and Glossary 257This page intentionally left blank FOREWORD
An Introduction
Samuel (Sammy) Gronemann was born on March 21, 1875, in the West Prussian
town of Strasburg (today Brodnica, Poland) to Rabbi Selig Gronemann and his
wife, Helene Breslau. Selig Gronemann (December 7, 1843–March 6, 1918) had
been a student of Zacharias Frankel and Heinrich Graetz at the Br-eslau Teo
logical Seminary. Selig held ofce in Danzig (Gdańsk) before going to Hannover,
where he took the position o Laf a ndrabbiner (a rabbinical ofcial appointed by
the government to oversee Jewish institutions), responsible for the s -maller Jew
ish communities outside the city. From early on, Sammy’s life was shaped by
three interrelated allegiances: adherence to orthopractical Judaism, which was
concerned with right belief and right behavior (“I really cannot change my diet
every three thousand years”), combined with ahavat a l Israo elv,e for the Jewish
people; a deep interest in justice and the workings of both Jewish and general law;
and a profound admiration for literature, especially the theater.
At frst, Sammy Gronemann followed in his father’s footsteps. He studied for a
year at the Halberstadt Klaus, the only German-Jewish Talmudic school that came
close to an Eastern Europyeeasn hiva. He even enrolled at Esriel Hildesheimer’s
Rabbinical Seminary, which, according to his memoirs, was located not in Berlin
but “in der Gipsstrasse.” Located in close proximity to the Scheunenviertel, the
area of settlement of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the stree-t was a sepa
rate world, a part of German-Jewish orthodoxy that opposed the predominant
Reform movement. Tis was a milieu too narrow for him. He lef it, he remarked,
in order not to lose it completely. He studied law at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelm
University, graduating in 1898. During this period around the turn o-f the cen
tury, Berlin was home to Germany’s largest Jewish community and the capital of
Jewish fantasies—between complete assimilation into German culture and the
xixii | Foreword
dream of a Jewish national revival. It was also home to a wide varie-ty of move
ments and intellectual, cultural, political, and religious opportunities.
Like many young Jews of his generation, Gronemann was searching f - or a di
rection that would help him integrate his Jewish and his German identities; he
found it in Zionism. His father was among the very few German rabbis who did
not want to be counted among the Protest-Rabbi tnehar,t is, those who opposed
Teodor Herzl’s plan to hold the frst congress of the Zionist movem-ent in Mu
nich in 1897. Te congress would fnally be held in Basel. Gronemann -partici
pated in his frst Zionist meeting in 1900, and soon thereafer he found -ed the lo
cal Zionist group in Hannover. In 1901 he represented Hannover as a delegate to
the Fifh Zionist Congress, and he would participate in all the following Zionist
Congresses between 1911 and 1947, frst as a delegate and then as the chief judge
of the Zionist Congress Court and until 1933 as the president of the Zionist Court
of Honor.
In 1902 Sammy married his cousin Sonja Gottesmann, who came from the
Ukrainian city of Zhitomir. In his memoirs he describes a trip to the region, the
very hospitable family, the peace and quiet of the surrounding forests—and his
immediate need to fee this pastoral scene and return to the bustle of life that was
Berlin.
During his legal clerkship both in Berlin and in diferent cities in the German
provinces, Gronemann ofen witnessed the confrontation between the Jewish
and the secular Prussian law systems. He realized not only that there was a need
to act as a translator between these two worlds but also that the confrontations
provided humorous and satirical insights for him as a writer—court debates
about dietary laws or the rules of the Sabbath and of holidays. He mined his
observations and experiences for such miscommunications in Schalet: Beiträge
zur Philosophie des “Wenn schon” (Cholent: Essays on the philosophy of the “so
1what”), a collection of stories and anecdotes from that period published in 1927.
Already thirty-nine when World War I broke out, Gronemann was drafed
in 1915, wounded and hospitalized, and then sent back to the front, but this time
to a special unit that provided even more material for anecdotes, stories, and
the novel we have in our hands right now. Te Pressestelle beim Stab Ober–Ost
(Military Staf Press Ofce for the Supreme Commander–Eastern Front) of the
German occupation army in Eastern Europe—Poland and Lithuania between
Bialystok, Wilna (now Vilnius), and Kovno (now Kaunas)—consisted of a group
of “former intellectuals,” as they called themselves: writers such as Arnold Zweig
and Herbert Eulenberg and artists such as Magnus Zeller and Hermann Struck,
who all served in functions that were rather irrelevant to the o -verall war ef
fort. Gronemann and Struck were responsible for the censorship of the Yiddish
press (albeit afer publication), and Gronemann, together with a group of others,
worked on one of the most fascinating and most useless books ever written: Te Foreword | xiii
Sieben Sprachen Wörterbuch (Seven languages dictionary), a lexicon tha-t trans
lated German military and administrative expressions into the languages of the
occupied countries and their main minority groups: Polish, Russian, W - hite Ru
thenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Yiddish. Te occupying German army was
having difculty communicating with the population. One order, to g - reet Ger
man military ofcers with respect, had been translated into the loca-l White Ru
thenian dialect as an order to greet the ofcers by shaking hands, wi-th undesir
able results. Te need for a dictionary of useful terms was obvious. Gronemann
was responsible for the Yiddish part, although he didn’t really sp-eak the lan
guage. His translations were ofen philologically oBrurgiginfarile. den (truce), a
frequent military tactic in World War I, was translated with the Hebrew phrase
shalom bayit, which is in Jewish law the harmony of domestic relation-s. Te su
preme commander of the Eastern forces decreed that shal (opm e bacay e iitn the
home) was to be used in all ofcial communications. Te book was fna-lly pub
2lished shortly before the occupation and the war were over.
More importantly, during his two years on the Eastern front, Gronemann and
other German-Jewish soldiers discovered what they saw as the authentic world of
Eastern European Judaism. Tey went to synagogues and restaurants, to libraries
and private family homes, and they showed their non-Jewish comrades around
the Jewish sections o