Contemporary Jewish Writing in Switzerland: An Anthology

This anthology features an eclectic mix of eighteen previously unpublished modern works from Switzerland’s heterogeneous Jewish writers. Questions about Jewish identity and the legacy of the Holocaust remain current and controversial in Switzerland due to the country’s well-publicized connection to Jewish bank accounts from World War II and the scandal that erupted when the purported Holocaust memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski was challenged by Swiss-Jewish writer Daniel Ganzfried. Anti-Semitism is again on the rise in Switzerland. Included in this collection is noted writer Daniel Ganzfried; a tragicomedic story from television scriptwriter Charles Lewinsky; an epistolary novel from Sergei Hazanov, a Russian-Jewish immigrant writer; a memoir from Austrian Jewish refugee Regine Mehmann Schafer; a memoir from Luc Bondy, a celebrated French-Swiss man of the theatre; strikingly harsh accounts of contemporary Jewish life from painter and performance artist Miriam Cahn; a theatrical masterpiece of high modernism from Shelley Kastner; and a screenplay about the Holocaust by Swiss filmmaker Stina Werenfels. Surprising in its diversity and sometimes disturbing in its preoccupations, this anthology will make it hard to generalize about Jewish life in Switzerland, or to think in polarities like Switzerland and the Jews . Rafael Newman is a freelance writer and translator in Zurich, Switzerland. He is the author of The Visible God: Staging the History of Money.