Unashamedly Jewish

 

I may confess that my first encounter with Barbara Honigmann´s writing was not an outstanding experience. It may be that I was not prepared - mentally and linguistically - or just it was not a good book. It happens to everyone - both readers and writers.

My second meeting with this German Jewish author and translator living  in France is in fact a collection of discourses held on the occasion of being awarded literary prizes and public appearances, where elements of personal biography, particularly related to her Jewish identity are omnipresent. Written in German, they are inspiringly connecting European Jewish biographies - like Proust and Kafka´s - with personal literary experiences and her own Jewish journey. 

On one side, there are the intellectual references and the arguments for a critique, literary or philosophically. On the other side, there are her own personal/subjective encounters with her own Jewishness - that she assumes ´unashamedly´/unverschämt - as growing up in a secular Jewish family that decided to return from Exile after the war in the Soviet-occupied communist Germany. Some of the few whose family histories did not include Nazis. 

Honigmann writes about different kind of Jews. Jews like Heine or Proust or Edith Stein. Obviosuly, about Kafka too.  ´Western´ Jews that preferred to abandon their identity for joining the majorities, nevertheless Jews. Sometimes, there are the stories themselves that matter. Another time, the intellectual histories.

I may acknowledge that right now, I will not hesitate to start reading another book by Honigmann, particularly for the authentic GDR-Jewish stories, that keep interesting me and whose reliability through personal memoirs is at a certain extent problematic - for reasons that maybe will be able to explain one time.