German-Jewish celebration of eastern Jews revealed German-Jewish ideology, not ghetto realities.

Evidence

Zweig writes of the boy, “Your body will no longer be without light, without air, no longer suffocate beneath heavy clothes in barracks that are overcrowded with people or in toxic streets. When you are a man, it will still readily show that which it shows you as a child, and that which among us is so startlingly seldom revealed: physical power and physical beauty” (160). Viewed in the context of a larger pan-European discourse on national and cultural rejuvenation, Zweig’s treatment of his Eastern-Jewish subjects ultimately has implications far beyond the parameters of the eastern Jewish question. Indeed, the tour of eastern Jewry on which Zweig leads his readers inevitably lands on utopian Zionist ground (i.e., in the Jewish homeland, in the Orient itself), an even more exotic and mythical site than the shtetlach of Lithuania. This development in Zweig’s narrative is no doubt a result of his own still evolving conception of Zionism. As Steven Aschheim has rightly suggested, “the representation of the Ostjude was designed to give the German Jew a new and different picture of himself,” and he goes on to remark: “Of course, this celebration … tells us more about the ideological predicament and proclivities of these German Jews than it illuminates the realities of ghetto culture.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 440

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how a group’s idealized portrait of another group functions as self-description — the Ostjude as mirror for German Jews maps onto contemporary ‘authenticity’ discourses across cultures.