“Voci dal viottolo d’ortiche. Vieni, sulle mani, fino a noi”: Czernowitz tra realtà e scrittura

“A land where people and books used to live”: this is Paul Celan’s description of Czernowitz. A plural space par excellence, which bears witness to diversity in its many names, Czernowitz is an accretion of stories in itself. Especially in the Austro-Hungarian years, Czernowitz is a place where languages and cultures meet, where the various constituents – the German, the Jewish, the Yiddish, the Ukrainian, the Rumanian – turn the town into a mirror of Austro-Hungarian multiculturalism. The various definitions of Czernowitz as “little Vienna” “Babel of south-eastern Europe”, “Jerusalem upon the river Pruth”, “European Alexandria” date back to these years. The article begins with an introduction on the spatial dimension of the town, within the borders of the Bukovina region. This first section is followed by a description of its most relevant component: the Jewish German group. Having probed into the physical and symbolic space of Czernowitz, the article moves on to consider the literary testimonies of the kaleidoscope Czernowitz was. Among the many voices of Jewish-German intellectuality, it analyzes the images of the town in the works of Karl Emil Franzos, Rose Ausländer, Alfred Margul-Sperber and finally the public speeches given by Paul Celan.