Article by Barbara Honigmann

What do goyim actually talk about?

On a plane, two Jews are having a conversation. In this short story – delivered at the 2004 Koret Jewish Book Award ceremony in New York – Barbara Honigmann humorously questions what Jews have in common, and what radically sets them apart.

Jacob Wassermann : His Way as a German and a Jew

Barbara Honigmann portrays the writer Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934), who expresses the unease of a generation at the beginning of the twentieth century at the idea of being both Jewish and German – or of not really being either one or the other. Wassermann said he believed in a possible symbiosis of the two identities, while deploring the condition of the Western Jew of his time, cut off from his past. Barbara Honigmann’s text plunges us into the heart of a tension experienced as an internal tug of war.

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