Jenny Aloni

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Jenny Aloni (born Jenny Rosenbaum , born September 7, 1917 in Paderborn , † September 30, 1993 in Ganei Yehuda , Israel ) was a German - Israeli writer who is considered one of the most important authors of German-language literature in Israel.

Life

youth

Jenny Aloni grew up as the daughter of the businessman Moritz Rosenbaum and his wife Henriette, née Eichengrün, as the youngest of three sisters in a Jewish family that has been established in Paderborn for centuries . The father and his brother Sally ran a trade in skins and scrap metal in the family home. She attended the Catholic Lyceum St. Michaels-Kloster in Paderborn, a girls' school run by Augustinian choir women, from 1924 to the eleventh grade in 1935.

Due to the increasing number of anti-Semitic hostilities, she had been intensively concerned with Zionism since 1933 and decided against the will of her parents to drop out of school and emigrate to Palestine. In 1935 she was in preparation for her emigration to Palestine at the Hachschara training facility at Gut Winkel near Spreenhagen , where she learned how to grow fruit and vegetables.

Berlin

Out of consideration for her parents, she stopped her emigration plans and from 1936 attended the school of the Israelite synagogue community Adass Yisroel in Berlin until she graduated from high school. She made contact with socialist groups within the Zionist movement and learned Hebrew and Arabic . In 1939 she graduated from high school and worked as a group leader in a Hachschara camp in Schniebinchen, Świbinki in Lower Lusatia . She described this place as a “happy island” on which the Nazi dictatorship could be forgotten for a while.

Jenny Aloni memorial stone on the spot where the author's birthplace stood

Jenny Aloni's last visit to Paderborn before emigrating was immediately after the pogrom of November 9th and 10th, 1938 . The parents' house was almost completely destroyed, the furnishings and the shop were smashed. Father and uncle had been taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp and the forced business closure was imminent. In November 1939, Jenny Aloni made it to Palestine via Trieste on a transport of Jewish children and young people . In 1942 her sister was deported (destination and place of death are unknown). Her parents were also deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , where their father died in 1944; the mother was deported to Auschwitz in the same year , the exact year of death is unknown.

Israel

Jenny Aloni studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with the help of a scholarship , but had to work as a domestic help for a living. She also did voluntary social work for neglected children and young people. In 1942 she signed up for medical service with the Jewish Brigade of the British Army . In 1946 she finished her army service and then attended a school for social work. In 1946 she stayed in Paris and Munich to help return Jewish displaced persons to their home countries or to help them emigrate to Palestine.

In 1948 Jenny Rosenbaum married Esra Aloni, who immigrated to Palestine in 1934. During the Jewish-Arab war, Jenny Aloni was a medic. In 1950 their daughter Ruth was born. In 1955 Jenny Aloni visited her hometown Paderborn for the first time since 1935. Since 1957 the Aloni family lived in Ganei Yehuda near Tel Aviv in the Gush Dan (Ganei Yehuda has been a district of Savyon since 2004). From 1963 to 1981 Jenny Aloni was a volunteer at the Psychiatric Clinic in Beer Yaakov .

Jenny Aloni died on September 30, 1993 in Ganei Yehuda.

plant

Jenny Aloni has been writing literary texts since her youth, encouraged by a German teacher. Even after her emigration, she wrote mainly in German. Her work consists of novels, stories, poems and diaries and is strongly autobiographical . In Jenny Aloni's language, an almost existentialist , no longer contemporary pathos is mixed with brief and precise descriptions.

Jenny Aloni's topics are on the one hand her childhood and youth experiences in the Third Reich . The fifteen-year-old consciously experienced the day the National Socialists came to power as a rupture: “On that evening, the bridge jumped between her and the others.” The loss of her family members is usually only hinted at by her. On the other hand, Jenny Aloni's work deals with the integration of people of different origins in Israel and the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.

In the 1960s, the writer's work attracted short notice. Her first novel Cypresses don't break was praised by Max Brod and was reprinted a year later. Heinrich Böll expressed himself benevolently about some of her short stories. In 1967 the author received the Paderborn Culture Prize.

In the 1970s the author could no longer find a publisher, she self- published in Tel Aviv . A selection volume published in 1987 with works from 40 years brought her some attention from literary criticism. "Since the edition of her works provided an overview of her work, Jenny Aloni has been considered the most important among those in Israel who - still or again - write in German." In 1993 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung counted her among the "most distinguished storytellers of her generation".

Jenny Aloni was a long-time member of the Association of German-Language Writers of Israel (VdSI), which was founded by journalist Meir Marcell Faerber in Tel Aviv in 1975. The Jenny Aloni Archive at the University of Paderborn has been looking after her work and her estate since 1992 .

Quote

“I suffer from Erez Israel as I used to suffer from Germany. Here as there I am a stranger. It almost seems to me that this current foreignness is harder to break, because it is deeply rooted in the language, in relation to the people and, last but not least, in the fact that the life of the country should actually be closer to me. "

- Jenny Aloni shortly after her arrival in Palestine

Works

Poetry and prose

  • Poems. Henn, Ratingen near Düsseldorf 1956.
  • Cypress trees don't break. Novel. Eckart, Witten - Berlin 1961.
  • Beyond the desert. Stories. Eckart, Witten - Berlin 1963.
  • The blooming bush. Ways home. Novel. Eckart, Witten - Berlin 1964.
  • The silver birds. Stories. Starczweski, Munich 1967.
  • The waiting room. Novel. Herder, Freiburg i. Br., Basel and Vienna 1969.
  • In the narrow hours of the night. Poems. Self-published, Ganei Yehuda 1980.
  • The brown packages. Stories. Alon, Ganei Yehuda 1983.

Collections

  • Selected Works. 1939-1986. Edited by Friedrich Kienecker and Hartmut Steinecke . Schöningh, Paderborn - Munich - Vienna - Zurich 1987.
  • Collected works in individual editions. Edited by Friedrich Kienecker and Hartmut Steinecke. Schöningh, Paderborn - Munich - Vienna - Zurich
    • Volume 1: The Barrens. Notes from a loneliness. 1990.
    • Volume 2: Cypresses don't break. Novel. 1990.
    • Volume 3: Stories and Sketches 1. 1991.
    • Volume 4: The Flowering Bush. Ways home. Novel. 1992.
    • Volume 5: The waiting room. Novel. 1992.
    • Volume 6: Stories and Sketches 2. 1994.
    • Volume 7: Poems. 1995.
    • Volume 8: Corridors or the building with the white mouse. 1996.
    • Volume 9: Short Prose. 1996.
    • Volume 10: Reports. Poems in prose. Radio plays. Conversations. 1997.
  • "... one would have to give a report to a later generation". A literary reader on German-Jewish history and an introduction to the life and work of Jenny Aloni. Edited by Hartmut Steinecke. Schöningh, Paderborn - Munich - Vienna - Zurich 1995.
  • “I don't want to live in any other country forever.” An Israeli reader 1939–1993. Edited by Hartmut Steinecke. Schöningh, Paderborn - Munich - Vienna - Zurich 2000.
  • "I have to write this time from my soul ..." The diaries 1935–1993: Germany - Palestine - Israel. Edited by Hartmut Steinecke. Schöningh, Paderborn - Munich - Vienna - Zurich 2006.
  • Crystal and shepherd dog. In: Joachim Meynert (Ed.): A mirror of your own self. Testimonials from anti-Semitic persecution. Pendragon, Brackwede 1988, ISBN 3-923306-71-7 , pp. 86-112.
  • Reading book Jenny Aloni . Compiled and with an afterword by Hartmut Steinecke (= Nylands Small Westphalian Library. Vol. 35). Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-944-6 ( online ; PDF; 6.4 MB).

Awards

literature

  • Hartmut Steinecke : The Jenny-Aloni-Archive of the University of Paderborn. The donation of the estate in 1996. Comprehensive University, Paderborn 1996.
  • Hartmut Steinecke (Ed.): Why is it always the past? Life and work of Jenny Aloni . Ardey-Verlag, Münster 1999. ISBN 3-87023-124-6
  • Petra Renneke: The lost, abandoned house. Language and metaphor in Jenny Aloni's prose . Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2003. ISBN 3-89528-410-6
  • Judith Poppe: “Between yesterday that cannot be found” and “Heaven full of confidence”? Concepts of the Old and New Homeland among German-speaking Israeli writers (Jenny Aloni, Netti Boleslav, Benno Fruchtmann ). In: José Brunner (Ed.): Germans in Palestine and Israel. Everyday life, culture, politics. Tel Aviv yearbook for German history , vol. 41/2013.
  • Judith Poppe: “I poetry in the desert time” - I-constructions in the poetry of the German-speaking writers Jenny Aloni and Netti Boleslav. Ediss, Göttingen 2016 ( "I poetry in the desert time" ).
  • Hartmut Steinecke : “To experience what history is, you have to be a Jew”. Jenni Aloni - a German-Jewish writer . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8498-1227-0 .
  • Klaus Weissenberger: The literary diary. The young generation: Werner Vordtriede and Jenny Aloni. In: The genres of non-fictional art prose in Nazi exile. Misunderstood forms of literary confirmation of identity. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-5031-7446-1 , pp. 19-27.
  • Norbert Otto Eke, Stephanie Willeke (eds.): Between languages ​​- with language? German-language literature in Palestine and Israel (= publications of the literature commission for Westphalia. Volume 79). Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2019, ISBN 978-3-8498-1361-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jenny Aloni in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors , accessed on May 21, 2013
  2. ↑ On Hachscharah in Schneebinchen at www.zydzi-zycie.net , accessed on May 21, 2013
  3. ↑ a b The writer Jenny Aloni at www.lwl.org , accessed on May 21, 2013
  4. ↑ Jenny Rosenbaum from Paderborn at www.zydzi-zycie.net, accessed on May 21, 2013
  5. ↑ Hartmut Steinecke: Jenny Aloni. A portrait for the 75th birthday. In: Literature in Westphalia 2
personal data
SURNAME Aloni, Jenny
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenbaum, Jenny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Paderborn
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1993
Place of death Ganei Yehuda , Israel