The Anthological Imagination and the Posen Method By David Roskies Co-Editor, Volume IX The Posen Library of Culture and Civilization   As literary genres go, the anthology achieves a wonderful balance between showing and telling—but telling is what it really does. Because the anthologizer decides who’s in and who’s out, where to begin and end, every anthology is a narrative, and every narrative is fraught with meaning: aesthetic, ideological, political. When your job as anthologizer is to pick and choose, your natural desire is to distinguish between major and minor players—to play favorites. But the Posen Method—which I practiced as co-editor, with Samuel Kassow, of Volume IX of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization—cuts in the opposite direction. Not only is there a mandate to give each Jewry its due, but the many voices that comprise each narrative need to be given equal time. The Posen Method, in short, stands on the three principles: 1) Inclusivity, 2) Equality, 3) Polyphony. Our mandate was to be all-inclusive; to cast our net as wide as possible; to embrace all forms and modes of Jewish self-expression in all languages, everywhere. And our mission was to apply the method to an era seemingly bracketed by catastrophe: 1939-1973. Which is how we, the Advisory Board of Volume IX, found ourselves at the Thistle Hotel in London in the summer of 2003. In our period, the Jews had been reimagined as the most hated people on earth: universally feared, pitied, and blamed. They had faced total annihilation at one end (1939) and near-disaster at the other (1973). Our challenge, working within this fraught and narrow time-frame, was to rewrite the chapter of the Jewish century called: "Catastrophe." Accordingly to received wisdom, Jewish life and creativity had come to a standstill between 1939 and 1943. Yet as we went around the room on that August afternoon, it became clear that this had been a period of intense innovation and reassessment. Anthologies, manifestos, and symposia were all the rage. Moreover, Jewish creativity in the occupied war zone was extremely varied and voluminous. By looking at all genres in all languages, by mixing and matching secular and religious forms of self-expression, it was clear that a new map and periodization of modern Jewish culture would begin to take shape. This was the Eureka Moment: It would be possible—under ideal laboratory conditions such as these—to put Jewish culture back together again. But the story-line did not easily fall into place. The flow of data was much stronger than the banks to contain it. Eventually, however, the bold outline of a story in 6 chapters did emerge, a master narrative of radical displacement, division and new diasporas. Not one, but two civilizations were utterly uprooted in our period: The Jews of Europe and the Jews in Arab lands. Even as everything was ending, however, everything was starting over. The challenge of political sovereignty in Israel and the self-empowerment of American Jewry were unprecedented phenomena. Although the foundations of each had been laid earlier, it was in our period that the dramatic, epoch-making story of Israel and American Jewry took shape. Geography, in our story, was destiny. Where a Jew lived, on what side of the great divide, was absolutely determinative. When our story began, the world was divided into the Free Zone and the Jew-Zone. The Free Zone covered all-to-half of the USSR, the United Kingdom, the Americas, and parts of the Middle East.  The Jew-Zone, a new term of art, signified that swatch of the globe where Jewish existence was outlawed, then obliterated. When our story ended, the Iron Curtain was showing signs of wear and tear, but only a few crazies were willing to defy it.  In 1943, people dreamed of an undivided postwar Europe. In 1973, Europe undivided seemed utterly messianic. With such a complicated story to tell, so unlike any Jewish narrative either before or after, we decided to open each of the six chapters in our volume with a contemporary map, as an aide mémoire, as the GPS of Jewish collective memory.   While gathering material for Volume IX, one of our most reliable sources was, curiously, other anthologies. There were so many, in fact, that we, the editors of Volume IX, had to pick and choose. Poor Joseph L. Baron, who specialized in apologetic anthologies, collecting every good thing that the gentiles ever wrote or said about the Jews, did not make the cut. By contrast, the four landmark anthologies and miscellanies that appeared in the Yishuv in 1943 alone—Knesset, Taf-shin-giml, Luah Ha'aretz and Basa'ar—yielded a wealth of material in poetry and prose, politics and thought.     Ultimately, hewing to the Posen Method meant resituating each text or extract in a new, contiguous setting and continuous narrative. The result, after much painstaking work, was stunning: an imagined community, debating society, yeshiva shel ma’alah—only this time open to men and women, adolescents and adults, free thinkers and pietists, rebels and revolutionaries, alienated and ultra-assimilated. A reimagined polity, in other words, acting in a plot of the anthologizer’s invention.  The Anthological Imagination and the Posen Method is adapted from a paper of the same name, originally presented by the author at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in August 2009. It was adapted with permission from the author.  David Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and Professor of Jewish Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author of Night Words: A Midrash on the Holocaust; A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling; and Yiddishlands: A Memoir, and other award-winning works; and co-founder of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.