Emigre New York

Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism — Maurice Maeterlinck — came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism — André Breton — came to survive; and where French structuralism — Claude Lévi-Strauss — came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Pétain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France’s floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, presenting a series of surprising and expertly etched portraits against the backdrop of an overriding irony: the United States, the world’s principal hope in the battle against Hitler’s barbarism, was for the most part more eager to deal with Pétain’s collaborationist regime than with what Secretary of State Cordell Hull called de Gaulle’s "so-called Free French" movement. “One of modern European history’s great stories. Jeffrey Mehlman tells the tale appealingly and persuasively... The individual stories — not least the symbolism of the ocean liner Normandie’s tragic burning and capsizing... — would be plenty to go on with, but Mr. Mehlman’s theme is a larger one. He finds the French intellectuals in World War II New York not very different from the French aristocrats who found refuge in Koblenz in the last decade of the 18th century, hoping for a reversal of the Revolution and restoration of the ancien regime.” — Colin Walters, Washington Times “Subtle, erudite, and often humorous. Previous attempts by literature professors to tackle culture have not always resulted in works as mind-stretching and entertaining as this account.” — Stanley Hoffman, Foreign Affairs “A series of elegant essays of cultural criticism.” — Kim Munholland, American Historical Review “Jeffrey Mehlman has written an intriguing, highly original work... [He] has succeeded in achieving a personal, yet erudite, series of insights about intellectual production of French writers and philosophers exiled in New York during the Second World War... Mehlman deftly and sometime humorously brings to life this motley cast of characters.” — Jonathan Gosnell, French Review “Mehlman’s insightful book on French exiles in wartime New York City enriches the understanding of how very diverse political exiles reacted to the traumatic suffering of their homelands and other countries occupied by the Nazis.” — Edmund J. Campion,Magill’s Literary Annual “Mehlman’s greatest achievement... is neither the history he’s opened up nor the reputations he’s reclaimed. It is the quality of the close reading that is most admirable, tracing words and themes as they echo and resonate from one text to another.” — David Herman, Jewish Quarterly “Mehlman has written a brilliant, original, and challenging work. There is quite simply no other work like it, because Mehlman works on two levels at once, historical and metaphysical. It should find an eager audience among scholars working in the fields of twentieth-century French literature, the history of French thought, and the history of France in World War II.” — Arthur Goldhammer, Center for European Studies,Harvard University

From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Petain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France's floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, during one of the most vexed periods in French history."--BOOK JACKET.

A survey of avant-garde cultural and political magazines and journals.

As a pioneering volume to consider the impact of exile on historical scholarship in the twentieth century in a systematic and global way, looking at Europe, North America, South America and Asia, Dynamics of Emigration asks about epistemic repercussions on the experience of exile and exiles. Analyzing both the impact that exile scholars had on their host societies and on the societies they had to leave, the volume investigates exiles’ pathways to integration into new host societies and the many difficulties they face establishing themselves in new surroundings. Focusing on the age of extremes and the realms of exile from fascist and right-wing dictatorships as well as communist regimes, the contributions look at the reasons scholars have for going into exile while providing side-by-side examination of the support organizations and paths for success involved with living in exile.

A brilliant look at the writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars—ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang—who fled Hitler's Germany and how they changed the very fabric of American culture. In a new postscript, Heilbut draws attention to the recent changes in reputation and image that have shaped the reception of the German exiles. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983 with a paperback in 1997.

Offering a rare look at the musical life of Russia Abroad as it unfolded in New York City, Natalie K. Zelensky examines the popular music culture of the post-Bolshevik Russian emigration and the impact made by this group on American culture and politics. Performing Tsarist Russia in New York begins with a rich account of the musical evenings that took place in the Russian émigré enclave of Harlem in the 1920s and weaves through the world of Manhattan's Russian restaurants, Tin Pan Alley industry, Broadway productions, 1939 World's Fair, Soviet music distributors, postwar Russian parish musical life, and Cold War radio programming to close with today's Russian ball scene, exploring how the idea of Russia Abroad has taken shape through various spheres of music production in New York over the course of a century. Engaging in an analysis of musical styles, performance practice, sheet music cover art, the discourses surrounding this music, and the sonic, somatic, and social realms of dance, Zelensky demonstrates the central role played by music in shaping and maintaining the Russian émigré diaspora over multiple generations as well as the fundamental paradox underlying this process: that music's sustaining power in this case rests on its proclivity to foster collective narratives of an idealized prerevolutionary Russia while often evolving stylistically to remain relevant to its makers, listeners, and dancers. By combining archival research with fieldwork and interviews with Russian émigrés of various generations and emigration waves, Performing Tsarist Russia in New York presents a close historical and ethnographic examination of music's potential as an aesthetic, discursive, and social space through which diasporans can engage with an idea of a mythologized homeland, and, in turn, the vital role played by music in the organization, development, and reception of Russia Abroad.

This book explores the impact of migration, including its causes, upon the key ideas and directions of psychoanalytic theory and practice from the twentieth century until today. Having originated with a conference called "Émigré Analysts," developed through the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research, this collection encompasses a wide array of often personal insights into the historical effects of exile and migration upon psychoanalysis. Divided into three sections, the book first attends to the political crises that affected the exile of psychoanalysts after the Second World War, tracing their journeys from Eastern Europe to the United States; secondly, the rise of antisemitism and the impact of the Holocaust upon these analysts is closely examined; and finally, this book attends to the protection and safety of analysts forced into exile in our contemporary moment with reference to the work being done by existing national and international psychoanalytic institutions. As an engaging and thoroughly detailed account of the influence of exile upon American psychoanalysis, this book will be of as much interest to scholars of history and twentieth-century culture as to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice.

Most think of an émigré as one who leaves her native land to find home in another. Claudia Keelan, in essays both personal and critical, enlists poetic company for her journey, engaging both canonical and common figures, from Gertrude Stein to a prophetic Las Vegas cab driver named Caesar. Mapping her own peripatetic evolution in poetry and her nomadic life, she also engages with Christian and Buddhist doctrines on the virtues of dispossession. ​ Ecstatic Émigré pays homage to poets from Thoreau and Whitman to Alice Notley, all of whom share a commitment to living and writing in the moment. Keelan asks the same questions about the growth of flowers or the meaning of bioluminescence as she does about the poetics of John Cage or George Oppen. Her originality is grounded by the ways in which she connects poetic principles with the spiritual concepts of via negativa demonstrated both in St. John of the Cross and Mahayana Buddhism. In addition, her essays demonstrate an activist spirit and share a commitment to the passive resistance demonstrated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of the “beloved community” and philosopher Simone Weil’s dedication to “exile.”