Literary Passports in Tablet Magazine

On December 13, Josh Lambert wrote in Tablet Magazine:

Shachar Pinsker's innovative cultural history Literary "Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe" (Stanford, December) presents another pointed case of Jewish literary transnationalism, one that unsettles simplistic narratives about the rebirth of literary Hebrew among the farmers of the yishuv. Describing the flowering of Hebrew prose fiction in cities including London, Vienna, Odessa, Homel, and Berlin, Pinsker demonstrates that the revival of Hebrew as a modern phenomenon owed at least as much to the atmosphere of European cafés and bustling avenues as it did to, say, the experience of tilling soil on a kibbutz. Thus modern Hebrew is a language of the Diaspora, of crossed borders, just like Yiddish and, for that matter, English.