Journey to Oblivion: The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature

Roman S. Struc is a professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the
University of Calgary.

Journey to Oblivion is one of those books that fill the reader with
sadness. One could think of a number of further subtitles for it, such
as “A Study of Black Holes” or “The Irony of Fate.” Indeed what
is left of the worlds Stenberg is writing about is at best a very
incomplete historical record. The expansion of Germans over hundreds of
years into the territories of central and eastern Europe was responsible
for the rise of a literature written in German, just as the immigration
of the Jews into roughly the same geographic territories necessitated a
literature written in one of the Germanic languages, Yiddish. Both
phenomena come to an end at roughly the same time—i.e., during and
after World War II (in the case of Yiddish literatures, as a result of
the “Final Solution”; for the literature of the German minorities in
eastern Europe, due to their expulsion from that area in the wake of
German defeat). The author offers a good historical introduction to this
unique development and its end, evoking both pages of history and their
images conveyed through the medium of literature. Very few of those
books, German or Yiddish—with some notable exceptions, such as the
works of Sholem Aleichem or of Isaac Bashevis Singer—actually became
part of our literary consciousness, and it is doubtful that there will
be a renaissance of these phenomena.

The book speaks of the two phenomena in terms of an ironic relationship
and a strangely similar end. What is perhaps not sufficiently emphasized
is the fact of “isolations.” These literatures existed in ignorance
of each other; they either were isolated or deliberately isolated
themselves from the indigenous context. For example, in Joseph Roth’s
Job, the world of the Volhynian or Galician peasants seems to be as
remote as China. The same is roughly true of German literature from the
eastern territories. Thus one can say that the tragic irony of these
linguistically related phenomena is compounded by the factor of a
further isolation from the context in which they came into being.

Sadness appears to be the only appropriate response to this ironically
tragic story, although that sadness is tempered with gratitude toward
the author who recorded it.