The Nazi suppression of Jewish writers led to the near eradication of an entire genre of German literature—that of the so-called "ghetto story." By tacitly accepting the Nazi-established canon of German literature, we are continuing to abet this crime. The only names of writers in this genre that are at all recognized now are Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, but there were many other writers of such stories, some of whom are at least equal to these. One of the best—if not the best—was Nathan Samuely (1847-1921), whose name and works have been forgotten. It is time Samuely and the group of other "ghetto story" writers were restored to the canon of German literature.
Although Meïmlr Goldschmidt was around forty years old when he began the serious study of English, he soon mastered the language so thoroughly that he could consider settling in England and pursuing a career in English letters. His published English writings have traditionally been either ignored or belittled, and his manuscript notes for an English novel, preserved in the Royal Library, have been scoffed at. A close examination of his published correspondence of the period traces his progressive mastery of the English language, and a careful study of his publications in English journals, as well as his notes for the novel, demonstrates that this aspect of his literary activity deserves to be taken seriously. Argument over whether Goldschmidt could or would have become a great novelist in English, if he had not returned to Denmark, is pointless. His English writings, published and unpublished, must be taken into account, however, in determining Goldschmidt's place in the history of literature.
Although the noted nineteenth-century Danish-Jewish writer Meïr Goldschmidt (1819–1887) made his entry into literature with a novel on Jewish themes, his later novels treated non-Jewish subjects, and his Jewish heritage appeared progressively to recede into the background of his public image. Literary historians have paid little attention to his complex perception of his own Jewishness and have made no effort to discover the immense significance he himself felt that Judaism had for his life and for his literary works. Moreover, no previous study has comprehensively treated Goldschmidt’s far-reaching network of interrelationships with an astonishing number of other major Jewish cultural figures of nineteenth-century Europe. During his restless travels crisscrossing Europe, which were facilitated by his phenomenal knowledge of the major European languages, he habitually sought out and associated with the leading Jewish figures in literature, the arts, journalism, and religion, but this fact and the resulting mutually influential connections he formed have been overlooked and ignored. This is the first focused and documented study of the Jewish aspect of Goldschmidt’s life, so vitally important to Goldschmidt himself and so indispensable to a complete understanding of his place in Danish and in world literatures.
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