The Ballroom
The Ballroom
Questions of Admission and Exclusion
Participation in social dancing was an important marker in the Jewish process of embourgeoisement. European Jewish literary texts portray the ballroom as site for testing Jewish admission to elite pastimes and present the ball as a window into Jewish cultural aspirations. The question of whether both Jews and Christians are included in these social spaces is an important issue in many of these texts, revealing the way the dance floor shows gendered pathways to acculturation. Authors frequently underscore this theme by using the dance floor in the service of (unsuccessful) marriage plots. This chapter explores two types of ballroom space: elite non-Jewish balls to which only very select Jews were invited (such as in Karl Emil Franzos’s Judith Trachtenberg, 1891) and Jewish balls that might also include non-Jewish guests (such as in Clementine Krämer’s Der Weg des jungen Hermann Kahn, The Path of Young Hermann Kahn, 1918).
Keywords: balls, Congress of Vienna, Karl Emil Franzos, Orthodox fiction, Israel Zangwill, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Amy Levy, Clementine Krämer
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
