From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to ‘take a cure’—to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish.
In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season.
Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.
Table of Content
Introduction: The (Mirrored) Playroom
PART I. BE’ERA SHEL MIRYAM
Chapter 1. A Letter
Chapter 2. Consuming Places
Chapter 3. In a Large Garden of Modernity
Chapter 4. Bourgeois Experiential Spaces of Worry and Concern
PART II. BEIT DIMYONI
Chapter 5. A Conversation
Chapter 6. Miscounters
Chapter 7. Encounters
PART III. ODRADEK
Chapter 8. A Story
Chapter 9. The City in the Hills
Chapter 10. Warmbod Grotesques
PART IV. JUTOPIA
Chapter 11. A Map
Chapter 12. Traveling to Bohemia
Chapter 13. To Bohemia and Beyond
Afterword: Return to Bohemia
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the author
Mirjam Zadoff is the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of Werner Scholem: A German Life, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. William Templer is Chief Translator at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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