My project, “’One's Country, Liberty, an Ideal, and So On’ or The Lost Object of Hebrew Modernism,” explores a form of melancholic rejection of contemporary politics evident in the works of many central figures in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This melancholic stance does not propose an attainable political objective and has often been criticized for its perceived “non-commitment” or weakness—criticisms frequently interpreted as aesthetic or personal-psychological failings, which were then explained away in national literary historiography.
In my research, I argue that far from being “failures,” the silences, lacunae, and contradictions that recur in major works of Yiddish and Hebrew modernism are haunting remnants of futures that never came to be: foreclosed possibilities for addressing ethnic diversity and self-determination beyond nationalism or centralized control. These represented unresolved dilemmas for adherents of Hebrew and Yiddish nationalism.
Building on the work of Benjamin and Butler on melancholia, Derrida and Fisher on haunting, and Kornfeld, Hever, and others on Hebrew melancholia and nationalism—and drawing on the extensive historiographic research now available on cultural autonomy among Jews and other groups—I argue that the foreclosed possibilities in question constitute concrete political alternatives to monolingual nationalism and Zionism. Specifically, these were notions of cultural autonomy modeled on Austro-Marxist ideals, which enjoyed popularity in the late Tsarist period. These ideas, however, were always politically defensive and lost viability as projects after 1917. Authors committed to cultural autonomy consequently faced severe disillusionment, which had to be worked through in a world that did not recognize their loss as “real”.