The possibilities and pitfalls of a Jewish cosmopolitanism. Reading Natan Sznaider through Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians love Birch trees)

In his Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Natan Sznaider shows how Jewish thinkers both before and after the Holocaust have advanced universalist ideas out of their particularist Jewish identities, connecting the Jewish experience to contemporary cosmopolitan concerns such as Human Rights, genocide prevention and international justice. Sznaider focuses on Hannah Arendt and illustrates how this post-Holocaust Jewish thinker both defended her rootedness in her Jewish identity and drew universalising conclusions from it. This article explores Sznaider’s notion of a ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’ in tandem with a close reading of Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s 2012 Grjasnowa, Olga. Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Munich: Hanser, 2012. German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees). The empathy Grjasnowa’s protagonist feels for the plight of Palestinians reveals her commitment to a universalist ideal of Human Rights even as she remains rooted in her Jewish identity: her activism draws on the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust down through the different generations of her family. At the same time, Grjasnowa’s novel also suggests some of the limitations – and indeed problems – of Sznaider’s conceptualisation of a Jewish cosmopolitanism.