Jewish Salon

A garden of words, as the editors write: a guide to indeterminate Jewish identity, and it raises multiple political and linguistic questions that we will discuss with Eran Schaerf - in search of new questions.

The book that starts the conversation explores Jewish experience, history and thought through the construction of an imaginary landscape of literature. Around 160 plants grow here, acacias by Clarice Lispector and Bruno Schulz next to a carob from the Talmud, in between a magnolia by Chantal Akerman, a chestnut by Yasmina Reza, nuts by Paul Celan and Anton Shammas, and the mustard seed by Primo Levi. The democratic plant alphabet creates surprising new neighborhoods and relationships across centuries, classes, religions and ethnic groups in the migrating garden.

How does Lilith haunt the Garden of Eden in Jewish memory? Why does the Palestinian Anton Shammas belong in the Jewish garden? Who will be expelled from their own language? How is a cultural memory created? Yiddish as a world language – where did this idea come from and where is it leading to? How unscathed (or not) do words cross geographic and political borders?

“I left a country that wasn't mine and moved to another that isn't mine either. I took refuge in a vocabulary of ink, with the book as space.” Edmond Jabés

(Program in German)