Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The sustained provocations to order, decency, taste and common sense unleashed at the infamous Cabaret Voltaire in neutral Zurich during the war-torn February of 1916 have never really been matched; modernist performance began with an intensity it never fully regained. In almost encyclopedic you-are-there detail, Sandqvist, a professor of art history in Stockholm, convincingly shows that Dada did not emerge fully formed in Zurich but grew out of an already active Romanian avant-garde, one that simply relocated to Switzerland when a group of Bucharest's most advanced modernists settled there. Bucharest-then a mysterious, polyglot city at the fringes of Europe, with one foot in Paris and another in the East, had already been a hotbed of proto-Dada poetry, prose and performance in the period before 1914. That scene's leading light was Tristan Tzara, formerly Samuel Rosenstock, who coined the term "Dada." Tracing the careers of a remarkable group of men and women against a richly woven background of their competing yet complementary Yiddish, Eastern Orthodox, modernist and folkloric traditions was a massive task of intellectual archeology, which Sandqvist has accomplished with ease. In particular, his explorations of archives long hidden by Romania's Communist government provide an unprecedented depth of contextual information about one of art history's most influential movements. (Jan.)
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Review
"In almost encyclopedic you-are-there detail, Sandqvist, a professor of art history in Stockholm, convincingly shows that Dada did not emerge fully formed in Zurich but grew out of an already active Romanian avant-garde.... Tracing the careers of these remarkable group of men and women against a richly woven background of their competing yet complementary Yiddish, Eastern Orthodox, modernist, and folkloric traditions was a massive task of intellectual archeology, which Sandqvist has accomplished with ease. In particular, his explorations of archives long hidden by Romania's Communist government provide an unprecedented depth of contextual information about of the art history's most influential movements."
- Publishers Weekly
"Ordering the narrative of Dada is a nearly impossible task, given the powerful personalities of its founders, but Tom Sandqvist's determined scholarship succeeds. This would be reason enough to commend this book, but its scope ranges far beyond the founding of Zurich Dada to the rich atmosphere of Jewish life, learning, and art in the Yiddish Pale, and the intense, radical creativity of Romanian avant-gardes between the wars. Sandqvist has uncovered treasure troves of fresh material and connected aspects of life and art that were obscured until now. Dada East seeds the ground with a cornucopia of new and necessary questions."
-Andrei Codrescu, author of Wakefield and Messiah, MacCurdy Professor of English, Louisiana State University, commentator, National Public Radio
"'Ex oriente Dada-Dada comes from the East'? Tom Sandqvist makes an excellent argument to support this claim by excavating and retrieving the Romanian pre-Dada context."
-Rudolf Kuenzli, Director, International Dada Archive, University of Iowa
"Sandqvist must be congratulated for undertaking this investigation into the history of Eastern Yiddish culture with such alacrity, for showing its links to the European avant-garde, and for having done it all in such an accessible manner. His book reads like a novel: adventurers in search of a lost identity."
-Henri Béhar, Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne, Director of the Center for Research on Surrealism, and Editor of the complete works of Tristan Tzara
"DADA was a wind from the East, an ironic jubilation of Nothingness that swept away a world that had begun to age. Tom Sandqvist's book casts new light on what happened when several young, world-weary Romanians stepped onto the stage, among them Tristan Tzara, Dada impresario and central protagonist of Dada East. Even if apocryphal, the image of Tzara and Lenin squaring off over a chessboard as two revolutions were taking form couldn't be more emblematic of the twentieth century."
-Petre Raileanu, Paris-based writer and editor of Plural: The Romanian Avant-Garde
