Debora Vogel

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Debora Vogel

Debora Vogel (also: Yiddisch דבורה פוגל ; Dvojre Fogel; Deborah Vogel; born January 4, 1900 in Bursztyn in Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † August 1942 in the Lemberg Ghetto ) was a Polish writer and philosopher .

life and work

Debora Vogel came from a Jewish intellectual family from Bursztyn in Galicia . During the First World War , the family fled to Vienna. When Poland regained its independence after the First World War ( Second Polish Republic ), she settled in Lviv - now Lwów in Poland . Vogel graduated from the Polish grammar school in Lwów and initially worked as an educator in an orphanage. From 1919 she studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Lviv , in 1924 at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow , where she in 1926 with a thesis on the influence of Hegelian aesthetics on Józef Kremer doctorate was. Then she worked in Lwów as a lecturer in psychology.

Vogel wrote in Polish and Yiddish and often translated her own Yiddish texts into Polish. She made the decision to write Yiddish as an adult. Yiddish was not her mother tongue; Polish and German were spoken in the Vogel house. The decision to write Yiddish rather than Polish literature can be seen as the most idiosyncratic feature of this artistic biography.

In 1930 she published her volume of poetry Tog-figurn ( Tagfiguren ), followed by another volume of poems in 1934: Manekinen ( tailor's dolls ). In 1935 she published the prose pieces Akazies blien ( Acacias bloom ), which she called “ Montages ” , the Polish version ( Akacje kwitną , 1936) recognized by Bruno Schulz with an enthusiastic review. Both bird poetry and in prose enthusiasm are for constructivism in the painting and the literature of modernity can be seen. Debora Vogel belonged to the Polish avant-garde circle around Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Władysław Strzemiński . Your correspondence with Bruno Schulz must be regarded as a decisive inspiration for his prose cycle Die Zimtläden .

Debora Vogel's texts - and especially the poems that go far beyond the common themes and motifs of the Yiddish poetry of the time - are characterized by an idiosyncratic imagery that many critics found irritatingly "cool" or "monotonous". Debora Vogel describes her marginal position within the literary business both soberly and precisely in many of her letters: By choosing Yiddish, she placed herself outside the Polish canon; With its avant-garde aesthetic, it refused to meet the expectations that its Yiddish audience - which was in any case not numerous in Lviv - placed on it. In her essays she reveals herself to be an excellent expert on contemporary European painting and literature. Her contribution on Lviv Judaism should also be mentioned. Vogel was in contact with the New York avant-garde of Yiddish literature - the circle of "Insichists" - in whose magazine she published regularly. She conducted a lively correspondence with the most important personalities in Yiddish literature at the time, such as Aron Glanz-Leyeles, Melech Rawitsch or Schlomo (Shloyme) Bickel (Bikel).

In August 1942 she was shot with her husband, the architect Szulim Barenblüth, her mother and her five-year-old son Aszker in the Lviv ghetto .

Debora Vogel's work was long forgotten. In Polish literary history she often appears (not least with Jerzy Ficowski ) only as the “muse” of Bruno Schulz, but her own literary work is not mentioned.

One of the few traces in the years of the People's Republic of Poland can be found in the great anthology of Yiddish poetry in Polish translation prepared by Arnold Słucki and Salomon Łastik. A poem by Debora Vogel was included in this volume: Wieczorny spacer ( Evening Walk ), from Yiddish by Jerzy Ficowski.

In Poland, among others, Joanna Wysiecka, Barbara Sienkiewicz and Karolina Szymaniak have contributed to the rediscovery of Debora Vogel. In 2006 Szymaniak published a volume of prose: Akacje kwitną. Montaże ( acacia bloom. Mondays ).

In the Ukraine, Vogel first became known again through an exhibition in Lviv in 2014, then through Jurko Prochasko's translation of the day figures .

The Germanist and art historian Anna Maja Misiak, who was born in Łódź and has been living in Bern for several years, provided the first German-language edition with texts by Debora Vogel.

Works

Literature (selection)

  • Shloyme Bikel: Dvoyre Fogel's 'White Words.'. In: Writers of My Generation. Tel Aviv 1965.
  • Jacob Birnbaum, Eliahu Shulman (eds.): Lexicon of the New Yiddish Literature , Vol. 7, New York 1968.
  • Lothar Quinkenstein : Memory of Klara Blum: Essays and reviews from Central Europe . Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2015, ISBN 978-3-86110-587-9 , pp. 257-268.
  • Karolina Szymaniak: Być agentem wiecznej idei. Przemiany poglądów estetycznych Debory Vogel. Krakow 2006. ( To be an agent of the eternal idea. The changes in the aesthetic positions of Debora Vogel. )
  • Annette Werberger: Just a muse? The Yiddish writer Debora Vogel and Bruno Schulz. In: Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Schamma Schahadat (ed.): Put into words, put into pictures. Gender in Science, Art and Literature. Bielefeld 2007, pp. 257–286.
  • Lothar Quinkenstein , Lisa Palmes , Marcin Piekoszewski: Perigraphies. Europe's borders - Europe's center. Buchbund bookstore, Berlin-Neukölln 2017 ISBN 9783000544767 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://medaon.de/pdf/Q_Misiak-3-2008.pdf
  2. ^ In: Nasza Opinia , No. 72, 1936.
  3. ↑ Lwowska Juderia (1937), translated into German: Lemberger Judaism. A contribution to the monograph of the Jewish quarter in Lemberg , in: Die Geometrie des Verzicht, pp. 462–467.
  4. ↑ Annette Werberger: Just a muse? The Yiddish writer Debora Vogel and Bruno Schulz. In: Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Schamma Schahadat (ed.): Put into words, put into pictures. Gender in Science, Art and Literature. Bielefeld 2007, pp. 257–286.
  5. ↑ Antologia poezji żydowskiej. Warsaw 1983, p. 314.
  6. ↑ Akacje kwitną. Montaże. Edited, translated from Yiddish and with an afterword by Karolina Szymaniak. Krakow 2006, 195 pages.
  7. ↑ On the photo exhibition of Andrij Bojarov in summer 2014 cf. [1] . The "Фігури днів" in Prochasko's translation was published in Kiev in 2015.
  8. ↑ The Geometry of Surrender. Poems, montages, essays, letters. Translated from Yiddish and Polish and edited by Anna Maja Misiak. Arco publishing house. Vienna 2016, 663 pages.
  9. ↑ one of 3 chapters on birds
personal data
SURNAME Vogel, Debora
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogel, Debora; Vogel-Barenblüth, Debora; Fogel, Dvoyre; Fogel, Devorah; Vogel, Deborah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish philosopher and poet
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Bursztyn
DATE OF DEATH August 1942
Place of death Lviv