This is the first academic treatment of the life and work of Henry William Katz (1906-1992) who has been forgotten by scholars and critics for fifty years although his first novel won him the Heinrich-Heine-Prize in exile in 1937. From a combined literary, historical, biographical and sociological perspective, Ena Pedersen analyses Katz's depiction on the Eastern European Jews in Galicia, Weimar Germany and in exile, focusing on the problems of anti-Semitism, assimilation, German-Jewish symbiosis, and Jewish identity. The book further provides a first biography of Katz and places him in the context of German exile literature through comparisons with contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish writers in exile.

Fresh articles about a much neglected genre, fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ghetto fiction played an important part in the expression of a particularly German-Jewish quest for identity. The volume Ghetto Writing takes the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leopold Kompert's collection of ghetto stories Aus dem Ghetto (1848) to fill a gap and give testimony to an important genre that has been unduly silenced in the literary histories of the post-war period. The volume presents some 15 articles by scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland whose contributions offer new analyses of ghetto writing by well known authors such as Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, andcompletely new material on forgotten ghetto writers who deserve to be rediscovered, such as Alexander Granach. The articles cover various types of ghetto writing, ranging from ghetto fiction in the tradition of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, to diaries, travelogues, autobiography, and even contemporary German HipHop and Rap lyrics.