In the collective memory of Czech Germans as it is saved and presented in published volumes of Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch and its Catalogue in Gießen (Collegium Carolinum), there are not only many cases of Bohemisms, but also Yiddishisms. Some of them are part of the Central European League vocabulary. In my survey, I analysed and classified several dozen Czech German Yiddishisms, showing that their semantics correspond with the heterostereotypical picture of a Jew itself. Designation of a Jew in Czech German are mostly negative or they indicate a depreciative meaning. On the other hand, a few of them are of a very positive sense. Consequently, so called core and cultural borrowings (Myers-Scotton, 2008) from Yiddish represent specific predominantly negative semantic categories. In addition, in most of the cases, the Yiddish cultural borrowings shift in semantics from simple cultural references to core borrowings through their connection to metaphoric meaning.
Researching a picture of Jew in Czech and Polish prewar collections of Pick’s, Poláček’s, Tuwim’s and Safrin’s Jewish anecdotes I concentrated on physical stereotypes. I showed how differences between Eastern European Jewry and Western European Jewry are revealed in Czech and Polish Jewish anecdotes. Moreover, a specific type of depicting an Eastern European Jew so-called Polish Jew (polský Žid) is present in both Czech collections of anecdotes (especially by Pick). Studying these four collections of anecdotes, I had to redefine the picture of Jew, which would have been either a heterostereotype or an autostereotype. The imagological research allowed to offer a new more suitable term called heterostereotypical autostereotype, which matches the specific position of the asimilated Jewish author-narrator.
The literary reflection of the Shoah in Czech war and post-war poetry is very limited. Only a few non-Jewish poets have ever returned to thistheme (e.g. František Halas,Jiří Kolář,Jaroslav Seifert, Jan Skácel, Karel Křepelka, Radek Malý). Additionally, literary “testaments” of Jewish authors (Karel Fleischmann, Pavel Friedmann etc.) resulted in only two collections of poems entirely dedicated to the suffering of the Jews during the Nazi oppression (Ota Reich and Michal Flach). On the other hand, there are several books of poetry about Lidice and suffering of the Czech people during the World War II by Viktor Fischl, Karel Šiktanc, Libuše Hájková, Miloš Vacík and others. After the war there were only Jaroslav Seifert and Jiří Kolář among well-known poets who refered to the Shoah in a more significant way. Seifert created a figure of a Jewish girl, Hendele, in his collection of poems Koncert na ostrově (Concert on the Island), which develops the literary narration of the Shoah. Jiří Kolář referred to the Shoah repeatedly, however, he only had a limited chance to publish his work. As a result of this fact, the reception of Czech post-war poetry about the Shoah is almost absent. In my article, I concentrated on some reviewers’ remarks that have already been published since the war-time and other reflections of this kind such as editions of books by Jiří Orten, Hanuš Bonn, Jiří Daniel. A hypothetical reaction on the Shoah verses by Pick’s cabaret audience or Halas’s anonymous poetic obituary paying tribute to Jiří Orten are rather specific sorts of reception. The critical reflection of Kolář’s work in the context of the mass murder commited during the WW II is exceptional. However, the specific motifs of the Shoah were significantly focused on only in recent years by three foreign reviewers (Leszek Engelking, Hanna Marciniak and Anja Golebiowski). Czech Shoah poems printed or reprinted in Jewish periodicals (e.g. annual “Židovská ročenka”, published since 1954) represent a commemorative function, even though sometimes with informative commentaries. They miss any analytical aspect.
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