Fluid Exile

'Fluid Exile' is the first comprehensive investigation of the literary and cultural production of the Jewish Canadian writers Henry Kreisel, Eric Koch, Carl Weiselberger, and Charles Wassermann, who all came to Canada from Austria and Germany as internees in the 1940s and stayed on after 1945. It sets out to define the subject matter for a study long overdue, by combining methods from various disciplines, making use of German Studies' investigations of 'Exilliteratur', methodologies developed in Latin American Exile Studies, Holocaust Studies, Canadian Studies, and theories of transculturalism. As the temporal scope includes more than 60 years, concepts such as 'host society' cannot be regarded as static; account is taken of the tremendous changes within the Canadian socio-cultural formation during this time. A close analysis of the lives and works of the authors leads to the introduction of the concept of 'fluid exile' to do justice to the divergent constructions of their transcultural selves meandering between and negotiating Jewish, Canadian, Austrian, and German worlds and their manifold crossings.