Nathan Samuely – A Jewish Writer from Galicia

Abstract

This article is dedicated to Nathan Samuely (1846-1921), a little-known Jewish author from Galicia, and his main work, the two volumes Cultur-Bilder aus dem jüdischen Leben in Galizien (1885, 1892), written in German. Samuely, who also wrote in Hebrew, was one of the most important representatives of so-called ghetto literature, which was intended to familiarise non-Jewish readers with the life of the Jewish community in the segregated area of the small Galician town, which was predominantly populated by Jews. In the numerous short stories from these two volumes, the author deals with all the important aspects of Jewish life, education, contacts with the non-Jewish environment, the question of assimilation and the insistence on Jewish traditions, Jewish women and types, cult and idyll. The political history of Galicia is only rarely addressed in these tales; they also draw on events from the history of neighbouring Russia, which leads to a contamination of different historical narratives. Where Samuely describes conflicts and tensions between Jews and non-Jews as well as within the Jewish community, there is a tendency to harmonise and balance the opposites; a happy ending to the plot serves to eliminate conflicts. However, this does not apply to those stories in which the author depicts the stark social differences within the Jewish community – the rich dominate society, the poor perish. In these stories, Samuely probably holds up a mirror to his own Jewish group. Of particular interest is the question of the genre of the Cultur-Bild, which Samuely probably adopted from K.E. Franzos, but which is clearly different in his work: the tales only comprise a few pages, longer forms are missing. The story is reduced, with characters and genre scenes dominating. Both the genre and its form allow a comparison between Samuely and other important representatives of ghetto literature (K.E. Franzos, Leo Herzberg-Fränkel, Hermann Menkes), but they also reveal parallels to Polish authors from Galicia in the second half of the 19th century.