The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction 9780748646166

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler

© editorial matter and organisation David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4615 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4616 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0448 8 (epub) The right of David Brauner and Axel Stähler to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Preface: Jews Have Legs Mark Shechner

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Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction David Brauner and Axel Stähler

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Part I: American Jewish Fiction   1 Pioneering Women Writers and the De-ghettoisation of Early American Jewish Fiction 19 Lori Harrison-Kahan   2 Sensibilities of Estrangement: Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow 33 Catherine Morley   3 The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction 43 Victoria Aarons   4 ‘Are you kidding me?’ Black Humour in the Work of Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, Wallace Markfield and Bruce Jay Friedman 53 David Gooblar   5 American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation 64 Aimee Pozorski   6 From Feminist to Housewife and Back Again: Orthodoxy and Modernity in American Jewish Women’s Writing 76 Rachel S. Harris   7 Soviet Jews, Re-Imagined: Anglophone Émigré Jewish Writers from the USSR 90 Sasha Senderovich   8 History on a Personal Note: Postwar American Jewish Short Stories 105 David Brauner

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Contents

  9 Disappointed Believers? The Jewish Question Mark in Eisner’s ‘A Contract with God’ 119 Sarah Lightman 10 The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction 138 Jennifer Lemberg 11 Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers 149 Monica Osborne 12 Marginal Writers; or, Jews Who Aren’t 161 Debra Shostak Part II: British Jewish Fiction 13 The Postwar ‘New Wave’ of British Jewish Writing Efraim Sicher 14 Jewish Émigré and Refugee Writers in Britain David Herman 15 Jewish Exile in Englishness: Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons Phyllis Lassner 16 Jewish, Half-Jewish, Jew-ish: Negotiating Identities in Contemporary British Jewish Literature Ruth Gilbert 17 Life Writing and the East End Devorah Baum 18 ‘Almost too good to be true’: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Pre-Lebanon Axel Stähler 19 The Writing on the Wall: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Post-Lebanon Axel Stähler 20 British Jewish Holocaust Fiction Sue Vice 21 Reading Matters: ‘Marginal’ British Jewish Writers Beate Neumeier Part III: International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction 22 Jewish Writing in Canada Ira Nadel 23 South African Jewish Writers Linda Weinhouse 24 Repairing Cracked Heirlooms: South African Jewish Literary Memory of Lithuania and Latvia Claudia B. Braude 25 Australian Jewish Fiction: A Bibliographical Survey Serge Liberman 26 ‘Migrant’ Jewish Writers in the Anglophone Diaspora Sandra Singer 27 Jewish Novels of the Spanish Civil War Emily Robins Sharpe

175 188 199 210 221 237 253 267 279

291 303 318 332 346 355



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28 Mooristan and Palimpstine: Jews, Moors and Christians in Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie 367 Shaul Bassi List of Contributors Works Cited Index Names Subject Title

378 383 415 420 431

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Will Eisner, ‘A Contract with God’ [1978] (2006: 25); detail. From A CONTRACT WITH GOD AND OTHER TENEMENT STORIES: A GRAPHIC NOVEL by Will Eisner. Copyright © 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1996 by Will Eisner. Copyright © 2006 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 120 2 Will Eisner, ‘A Contract with God’ [1978] (2006: 23); detail. 126 3 Jacques Lipchitz, Mother and Child II; bronze (1941–45). 127 4 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law (1659); Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. 127 5 Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 62); detail. 131 6 Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 63). 133 7 Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 64); detail. 135 8 Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 64); detail. 135 9 Sarah Lightman, The Book of Sarah (1996: n. p.). 137

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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riting the acknowledgements for a volume such as this one presents logistical difficulties. First, because if we were to be literal-minded, we would have to cite a list of individuals almost as long as the bibliography at the end of this book, since our work has been influenced and enabled by that of innumerable scholars. Secondly, as this is a co-edited volume, we will want in some cases to acknowledge individuals who have been important to one or other but not both of us. For practical purposes, then, we will confine ourselves to thanking those colleagues, friends and family within our immediate orbit who have helped us most, and we will specify where appropriate the nature of their contribution as it relates to one or other editor. Such a list must begin with two giants of Jewish Studies: Bryan Cheyette and Mark Shechner. Bryan was instrumental in initiating the project and sending Jackie Jones, from Edinburgh University Press, in our direction. David has also benefited from countless conversations with Bryan over the years in the corridors and offices of the Humss Building at the University of Reading where they both work. If Bryan was the midwife for the project, Mark has done more than anyone else to get it to stand on its own two feet and venture out into the world. When we asked him to write a preface for the volume, we had no idea (though perhaps we should have) how conscientiously and thoroughly he would read and re-read the manuscript. So engaged did he become with the book that he practically deserves a co-editing credit. We didn’t always agree with his comments and suggestions, but they were always invaluable in clarifying for us the strengths of the volume and the distinctive nature of its contribution to the field. David would also like to single out the following colleagues for their help, direct and indirect, with the project: Axel Stähler, for being so reasonable, reliable and thoughtful – in short the ideal co-editor; Debra Shostak, for her comments on my own essay, for being such a staunch ally and for her wisdom (academic and otherwise) during what has often been a trying time over the last two years; Catherine Morley and Celeste Marie-Bernier, for their friendship and moral support; Martin Halliwell, Heidi MacPherson and Philip Davis for repeatedly and uncomplainingly coming through for me with references of one sort and another; Vicki Aarons, for helping me out with some last-minute bibliographical queries and for being an all-round mensch (or the female equivalent!); Peter Robinson and Peter Stoneley, for their unfailing integrity, good sense and generosity; and all my other colleagues in the Department of English Literature at Reading, for making it such a congenial

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environment in which to work. Finally, I owe my biggest debt of gratitude, as ever, to my wife, Anne Button, who is the most supportive spouse anyone could have, a brilliant mother to our children and also no mean literary critic. Axel, in turn, would like to thank David Brauner: for inviting me to join him as coeditor of the Companion and for the ease and efficiency with which this collaboration developed. It was a real pleasure to work with him; David is an ideal co-editor himself: considerate, meticulous and erudite. I am also grateful to Bryan Cheyette, who – over the years – has given me much support, encouragement and precious advice, not least in relation to this rather ambitious project. My thanks also go to my colleagues in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent for their unstinting support and inspiration. As usual, my deepest gratitude is to my wife, Annette Kern-Stähler, makher extraordinaire (in the best sense), for intrepidly stemming the mounting tide of the sometimes harsh realities of family life spread across three countries. Finally, thank you also to Jackie Jones, Dhara Patel, James Dale and Jenny Daly at Edinburgh University Press for their support of the volume from the original commission through to the production process, to Andrew Kirk for his conscientious and sympathetic copy-editing, and to all the contributors, who, with their professionalism, intellectual ­curiosity and expertise, made this volume possible.

PREFACE: JEWS HAVE LEGS Mark Shechner

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arxist historian Isaac Deutscher, upon being asked about his European roots, replied ‘Trees have roots; Jews have legs’ (qtd in Garrett 2003: 9). The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a testament to those legs and all other conveyances – carriages, trains, ships – that Jews have employed to evacuate themselves from places of persecution and dread to harbours of safety. That so many flights have washed them up in Englishspeaking lands is no accident. Rejecting, exclusionary and cruel as they sometimes might have been, the Anglophone Abendland never developed mature cultures of pogrom and massacre towards Jews. Towards others, yes, but the Jews never felt the full brunt of their savagery. The greater cruelties lay in exclusion, particularly during the crucial years when Jews were trapped in Europe and could find no nation to accept them. However, a Jew setting foot in any English-speaking nation during the years of open immigration could be quite confident of not being slaughtered by his neighbours. Permitted simply to live, Jews, wherever they settled – in the United States, Great Britain, Canada and South Africa – began immediately to write books and in time to found durable literary cultures that would last generations.1 By now these cultures have matured and even grown vast, outstripping in the process anyone’s ability to keep track of the major publications or to identify anything like a canon of indispensable readings. We could think of the volumes of fiction written in the Anglophone nations as a wilderness or as a civilisation. They exhibit features of both: the tracklessness of one and the historical depth of the other. By inviting twenty-seven scholars of Jewish writing to contribute essays in their specialties, the editors of The Edinburgh Companion, David Brauner and Axel Stähler, have attempted to demonstrate the range of this literature and to help readers and other scholars navigate an uncharted terrain. Their collection does not aim to uncover a grand design or a hidden figure in the tangled carpet but to identify many of the key authors and their books and to highlight constellations that may have evolved around them. *** Among the many appeals of this book is its convincing demonstration that within the confines of the English language alone writing by Jews reflects the diasporic character of earlier generations. Jews entered Anglophone fiction in the twentieth century from Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, Polish, Italian, Arabic, Persian, French, Spanish, Serbian,

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Hungarian, German – all the languages among which Jews formerly lived. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews were a dispersed polyglot civilisation. Although the surviving remnant of that civilisation since the Shoah has made its home largely in Israel and the English-speaking lands, its earlier character as a Galut continues to leave its trace. Ira Nadel, writing about Canadian literature, identifies writers born in Ukraine (A. M. Klein), Vienna (Henry Kreisel), Serbia (David Albahari), Iraq (Naim Kattan) and Latvia (David Bezmozgis) (see chapter 21). He could have added Israel (Avner Mandelman, Ayelet Tsabari), Kenya (M. G. Vassanji), Lebanon (Rawi Hage), South Africa (Kenneth Bonert) or Sri Lanka (Shyam Selvadurai). Just skimming the surface of US-written books of recent years we find French-born Anouk Markovits, whose first novel, Pur Coton (1989), was written in French and second, I Am Forbidden (2012), in English. David Shrayer-Petrov, who has long lived in the United States, writes only in Russian and has his books translated into English by a committee directed by his son, Maxim Shrayer; his most recent is Dinner with Stalin (2014). And Guatemalan-born Eduardo Halfon, currently living in Nebraska, has his Spanish-language novels translated, including The Polish Boxer (2012) and Monastery (2014). Writers chafe at borders; they are citizens of the great republic of the imagination. Scholars and publishers by contrast thrive on national credentials. Rubrics such as American Jewish or British Jewish are made to order for the classroom and for the textbooks that package literature for the market. Even in literary studies, we live by branding. But the brand tells us little about what is actually in the package; it supplies only the public credentials of a pseudo-grouping. So I am particularly pleased to see the editors of The Edinburgh Companion open to the random, the contingent and the centrifugal in Jewish writing, offering, in the words of Ruth Gilbert, ‘a fluid, yet meaningful way in which to negotiate current Jewish identities within the progressively decentred conditions of twenty-first-century Britain’ (see Chapter 16). The essay collection itself is an act of decentring, making it thinkable that texts we currently deem marginal, due to their ambiguous national credentials, will prove to be central in a diasporic perspective. This is a much-needed project. Part of its basic design is to be a talking bibliography carried out over many chapters. The absence of a dependable list of writers greatly hampers efforts to move Jewish literary study forward. Every so often scholars need to take inventory. The Edinburgh Companion is more than that, however, and should do nothing less than remap the terrain of Jewish writing. It constitutes a rethinking of who the major voices are and which of them best embodies the spirit, the traditions, the dreams, the nightmares and the contradictions of Jewish life. In the 1970s Cynthia Ozick proposed that English might well have become the new Yiddish, and she wrote an essay by that name. Though she would later pull back from that thesis, it remains relevant as one way of conceptualising the centrality of English in the life of Jewish writing. Worldwide, not only do more Jews speak English than any other language, but vastly more Jews write fiction in it than in any other language. Writers born in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Guatemala, etc., have published fiction in English. If English is not the language of Jews exclusively, as Yiddish once was, it nonetheless serves as a virtual republic of letters where People of the Book may safely communicate with each other and address the rest of the English-speaking world. However, not only are the national credentials of writers sometimes attenuated or indeterminate, but so too are their Jewish credentials. Those who assemble anthologies in the untroubled certainty that something called ‘Jewish fiction’ exists and that they are its



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cartographers need to be aware that their map may be self-serving and revealing of their own biases and preoccupations, and that the boundaries they draw around their literature need to be flexible, porous and endlessly open to question. Several essays in this book remind us that not only is Jewishness as a self-identity sometimes far from clear but that writers themselves may write against the grain of their own Jewishness, even as they are struggling to come to terms with it. ‘In twenty-first-century Britain’, writes Ruth Gilbert in ‘Jewish, Half-Jewish, Jew-ish: Negotiating Identities in Contemporary British Jewish Literature’ (Chapter 16), Jewishness is one difference among many. Contemporary British Jewish writers highlight the desire to identify the particularity of their difference, while acknowledging that such difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to change, re-­signification and reinterpretation. In this context, Jewishness is an evolving term. Perhaps then ­‘Jew-ishness’ is not just a rhetorical trope. It might turn out to be the way forward. Debra Shostak, in her contribution ‘Marginal Writers; or, Jews Who Aren’t’ (chapter 12), raises the issue of the non-Jewish Jew in the American context, posing the question: ‘Is it possible to be, as Philip Roth has written, “A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple”’? In an effort to answer Roth’s question she examines five writers whom she identifies as her representative ‘non-Jewish Jews’: Nathanael West (1903–40), Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), J. D. Salinger (1919–2010), Paul Auster (1947– ) and Emily Prager (1949– ). To write about them ‘is therefore to embrace contradiction, to define a negative space – to explore, that is, what Leslie Fiedler calls the “Jewishness degree zero of . . . vestigially Jewish-American novelists”’. Shostak’s sampler of non-Jewish Jews is a modest list. Such writers exist in substantial numbers, and the non-Jewish Jew has been a fixture in the landscape for generations and indeed casts a long shadow. To cite a familiar example, the most ‘Jewish’ of the famous midcentury Jewish authors in the United States, Bernard Malamud, knew virtually nothing of religious lore and ritual. His ‘Jewishness’ was a Jewishness of atmosphere, of mood, of small lives lived in a minor key. His dour voice constituted a kind of Jewish poetics. He knew more about Italian art than he did about Jewish belief and ritual observance. But the non-Jewish Jew is also familiar to us through a famous essay, Isaac Deutscher’s 1958 declaration, ‘Message of the Non-Jewish Jew’, which introduced the term into our common idiom and also defined the type as a pivotal figure in Jewish, and world, history. Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jews were the Promethean figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose rebellions helped to shape the modern world: Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud and Leon Trotsky – Jewish heretics who transcended Jewry but belonged to a Jewish tradition of spiritual dissent: They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies,

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above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future. (Deutscher 1968: 26) The rhetoric of marginal and yet central – marginal to the nation state and to the Jews but central to the Zeitgeist – strikes a familiar chord, though the context of Deutscher’s proposition would have been alien to the contributors to this book. It was fuelled by antiZionism, as Deutscher, an anti-Zionist as late as 1958, could not have anticipated a cultural situation like our own in which Israel is a long-term fait accompli and, in literary terms, well-integrated into world Jewish literature, Anglophone or otherwise. The non-Jewish Jews of contemporary literature are a far cry from Deutscher’s fire-bringing Prometheans, and their relations to Jewishness appear to be less world-historical than somewhere along a continuum that stretches from rebellious to baffled to indifferent. It is among the women writers in particular that the contradictions of being Jewish and non-observant, rooted in millennia of ritual and faith but modern in secular habits and scepticism, are most keenly felt. Generations of rebellion and counter-rebellion have come and gone with almost wavelike regularity. Rachel S. Harris, in her essay ‘From Feminist to Housewife and Back Again: Orthodoxy and Modernity in American Jewish Women’s Writing’ (Chapter 6), examines how women over several decades, starting out mainly in the 1970s, have struggled over the creation of a modern Jewish identity. Complicated by the issue of gender, these women writers [i.e. those born after 1930] wrestle with the traditions of their family, Jewish rituals and the weight of the Holocaust. They explore American Jews’ desire for secularisation and modernisation, while negotiating the apparent conflict with a Jewish past. Furthermore, the desire to build a life and assimilate into American society is problematised by Israel and its alternate reality which threaten to destabilise the coherence of an American Jewish community. Harris notes how first-generation Jewish feminists were ‘preoccupied with women’s empowerment within the modern world and the conflict these women often experienced with the submissiveness of their mothers’ generation’. Her main foci, however, are her third- and fourth-generation writers. The third generation includes ‘Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Anne Roiphe, Naomi Ragen, Tova Reich and Allegra Goodman, to name a few’. In their fiction they create a world in which women wrestle with the traditional upbringing of their grandparents, the assimilationist tendencies of their parents, and the dichotomy between maintaining the world of Judaism, Jewish history and the Holocaust – and a desire to be free. Often profoundly affected by American life in the 1950s and the rise of feminism in the 1960s, the writing is feminist not only in its subject matter but in the battles that frame the protagonists’ lives. These novels establish a modern world in which a woman can be a professional as lawyer, doctor or academic, but in which she will forever be forced to explore the cost of working outside the home. But rather than seeing post-1960s feminism as the last word, Harris posits a post-assimilationist fourth generation for whom Jewish tradition has maintained its authority, and for whom domesticity, motherhood and family have not lost their significance. Among these writers Harris numbers Tova Mirvis, Ilana Stanger-Ross, Myla Goldberg, Dara Horn and Ruchama King Feuerman, who ‘exist in a world of domesticity, a world in which women do not have professions, and if they work, their employment is an extension of the domestic



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feminine realms in which they and their peers otherwise exist’. This development is recent: the positive presentation of the observant life by writers who live according to Halakhah – the formal structure of Jewish law – but have claimed the space within it to write in a Westernised, Hellenised medium, the novel. Harris cites King Feuerman, author of Seven Blessings (2003) and In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (2013): It was an artistic and spiritual challenge – could I make the religious world – my world – accessible and compelling to unaffiliated Jews and to non-Jews. For a religious novelist, it’s a gossamer thin line, what to reveal, what to conceal, what’s the fine balance between reverence and irreverence, the artist and the yid. I wanted real flesh and blood characters, lovable, hate-able, characters with a yetzer hara and a yetzer tov, the complexity that is our due. Much of the secular fiction I’d read about religious Jews only knew how to capture the yetzer hara. (King 2010) Writing by women now opens up a window on the observant Jewish life that does not focus on confinement or prohibition or modesty but on tradition, family, continuity, Talmud, Torah and congregation. This ‘fourth-generation’ view of the integrated life under the umbrella of Halakhah, however, may not be the last word on life among the haredim – those who live by strict adherence to the law. Harris introduces Anouk Markovits’s I Am Forbidden: A Novel (2012), in which the sterility of the sect is very much in evidence. Harris comments: ‘The novel’s articulation of violence within the Satmar community of her childhood, and later social ostracism in America for the woman whose infertile husband condemns their marriage to destruction, reflects the profound limitations and unreasonable strictures that the religious world places on women.’ The point to be made here is not who gets the last word; there can never be one. It is to see rather fiction itself for Jews as a pliable medium, capable of expanding horizons for competing points of view simultaneously. Writing by women who find themselves torn between tradition and modernity in our time happens to be a flashpoint for values among those who are most vulnerable to worlds in collision. Women’s rights issues have a deep history among Jewish women: names like Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman are legendary, and how many women, names now forgotten, were active in the labour movement in the 1930s? But except perhaps for Anzia Yezierska, the names of earlier feminist writers are now obscured by time and neglect. So we are fortunate to see, through the eyes of Lori Harrison-Kahan, a thriving West Coast literary scene at the turn of the twentieth century that was feminist, modernising and self-aware. In her ‘Pioneering Women Writers and the Deghettoisation of Early American Jewish Fiction’ (Chapter 1), Harrison-Kahan introduces the careers of early West Coast writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Miriam Michelson and Edna Ferber, who set out to ‘deghettoise’ Jewish writing and to push forward ‘the frontier not only by moving American Jewish fiction westward, but also by imagining unconventional female protagonists who helped propel the nation out of Victorianism and into the modern era’. *** The Edinburgh Companion is a fabric of claims and questions. In chapter after chapter it problematises a literature that remains stubbornly beyond our grasp, and it opens up the full dimension of the problematic. It offers no conclusion, no grand synthesis or master narrative that might give Jewish fiction writing a unity of theme or purpose. Dispersion? Disaster? Survival? Flight? Renewal? Zion? Israel? All of these are abundant but they are also a priori, before the fact, and not inevitably present in all the books. There are no prevailing schools

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of Jewish writing. There is no Mendele school, no Sholom Aleichem school, no Y. A. Peretz school, no midrash school, though a number of writers have tried their hand at writing in a midrashic mode or in imitation of famous Hasidic tales. See Pearl Abraham’s novel The Seventh Beggar (2005), which attempts to update a famous midrash by Nachman of Bratslav. But there are not many of these. There is no Isaac Babel school, though there may be a Franz Kafka school, whose main adherents are European writers. In the US, Philip Roth may be thought of as a Kafka school of one. The FSU (Former Soviet Union) writers, of whom there are many, are vastly different from each other and constitute at best a social movement but not a literary school (see Sasha Senderovich’s essay, ‘Soviet Jews, Re-Imagined: Anglophone Emigré Jewish Writers from the USSR’, Chapter 7). The Edinburgh Companion reinforces the conclusion drawn by an earlier anthologist, Ted Solotaroff, that writing by Jews in America constitutes an ‘open literary community’ (1992: xxv). There are, however, local, provisional and mid-range clusters outlined by contributors to this collection. They correspond to Jean-François Lyotard’s petit récits (Lyotard 1979). Writers often do their best work in response to historical movements, and so we may be looking for these constellations to rise and fall with historical and political tides. Efraim Sicher’s ‘The Postwar “New Wave” of British Jewish Writing’ may point to one such grouping (Chapter 13); Devorah Baum’s ‘Life Writing and the East End’ is certainly another (Chapter 17). David Gooblar’s ‘“Are you kidding me?”: Black Humour in the Work of Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, Wallace Markfield and Bruce Jay Friedman’ is still another (Chapter 4). Another significant constellation, which commonly goes unnoticed because it never arises as a focus of a conflict, is the long-period rise and decline of an I-centred literature that arose in the US during the formative years of the twentieth century and went into eclipse towards the end of the century, in the later novels of Philip Roth. Once upon a time, an entire movement could be epitomised by a phrase from Alfred Kazin’s memoir, A Walker in the City (1951): ‘I was so happy I could not tell what I felt apart from the evenness of the heat in which I walked . . . I was me, me, me, and it was summer’ (157–8). From Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) through Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) to Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), with its plangent refrain of ‘I want, I want, I want’, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) with its silent Dr Spielvogel taking notes in the background, the insistent ‘me, me, me’ had a thrust and implacability that made the obsessional self a cornerstone of Jewish writing in America. The writer’s freedom to reinvent her/himself as an ebullient or haunted individual was the measure of his/her initiation into the American republic of independence. It was all but a climate of thought, and even writers whose work has long since been submerged in the remainder bins of old titles were influenced by it: Delmore Schwartz (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, story, 1937; book, 1985), Michael Seide (The Common Wilderness, 1982), Ivan Gold (Sick Friends, 1969; Sams in a Dry Season, 1990); Isaac Rosenfeld (Passage from Home, 1946; Alpha and Omega, 1966); Harold Brodkey (First Love and Other Sorrows, 1957; The Runaway Soul, 1991). This agenda, however, could not have achieved its full expression without old world sponsorship – specifically a Mitteleuropean import in the form of the intoxicating theories of psychoanalysis. Fiction absorbed psychoanalysis at a moment in history when a writer’s sense of mission was to keep a fever chart of a character who was a thinly disguised surrogate for him/herself: Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, Bellow’s Moses Herzog, Malamud’s Arthur Fidelman. Saul Bellow’s hangdog heroes and the self-lacerating personae of Philip Roth answer most clearly to this



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preoccupation with taking guided tours into the catacombs of the self. Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg apprenticed themselves to the sexological dogmas of Wilhelm Reich. Isaac Rosenfeld absorbed the fluxions of eternity in an orgone box. A mode of investigation that seemed groundbreaking mere decades ago is now so passé as to seem as strange as, say, Jewish stories about whaling. The therapist is as rare as a harpoon. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, the inventor of the Oedipus Complex, who gave intellectual nourishment, not to say the promise of remedy, to a generation of Jewish writers and thinkers, has become himself a museum piece of intellectual history. And along with Freud has departed ‘the self’ to which his theories had once assigned disturbing meanings. In newer fiction, the arias of ‘me, me, me’ have surrendered to choruses of ‘us, us, us’: the Jews as a communal body embedded in history, culture and memory. At no time before have Jewish writers in the English-speaking nations turned so insistently to history for their visions and inventions. As collective Jewish experience becomes increasingly the standard for significance, more fiction immerses itself in history than ever before. The last two decades have seen a profusion of Jewish writers for whom Jewish experience en masse has become the touchstone for their personal sense of identity. In his memoir of self-awakening, Le Juif imaginaire (1983), French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut reveals the dawning of his Jewish self-awareness as a pariah in an impersonal, and yet implacable, historical drama: I projected the . . . profound truth of exile onto my sedentary existence; in every moment of peaceful times I sense the coming thunder of the apocalypse. In short, I was safe, but I had a remedy for the anguish that arises from excessive security: I was Jewish. The calvary of my people gave my life a prestige and a beauty that I would have been unable to discover in its own unfolding. I resolved to search my origins for the memorable stories I was denied by the uninterrupted flow of the wise and studious existence I led. (2002: 361) In the words of Jennifer Lemberg in her contribution to this volume, ‘The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction’ (Chapter 10): Towards the end of the twentieth century, American Jewish fiction kept pace with other art forms which began to explore historical traumas including the Holocaust but also slavery and the war in Vietnam. Yet some of the leading Jewish authors took up their subject reluctantly, uncertain of their role in fictionalising a genocide they had not witnessed first-hand . . . The Shoah is now a vast shadow over the work of all Jewish writers of all nations and probably will remain so many generations from now. Lemberg, speaking of American writers but clearly implicating all the others, tells us: Many American Jewish authors found themselves . . . called, and in the fiction we find authors seeking appropriate literary forms for the catastrophe, struggling to represent events that took place in other countries and languages, and attempting to articulate the meanings of the Holocaust for those born ‘after’, the volumes they produced too ­numerous to discuss within the confines of a single essay. ***

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What contribution, then, does this collection have to make? Certainly an admiration for the uninterrupted vigour, creativity and abundance of writing by Jews in the past halfcentury. It was naive to suppose otherwise. Irving Howe’s famed prophecy that Jewish writing in the United States – he does not address other places – would find itself short of compelling dramas to nourish future generations of writers did not come to pass. Howe’s mistake lay in assuming that writing by Jews was destined to be grounded in the Jewish passage through the cycles of immigrant and post-immigrant life. The life-passage itself, from stranger to American, from Yankl to Yankee, from peddler to penthouse, supplied the metanarrative on to which Howe’s generation’s personal narratives were grafted. Some recent immigrants may even still find it so. In a recent talk given at Indiana University, the novelist David Bezmozgis (born in Riga, Latvia) confessed that after three books he had run through all he could mine from his own immigrant experience and was now stranded without anything fresh to say: I find myself very much at a crossroads as a writer. If, after three books, I feel that I have strip-mined the material of my immigrant experience, what should I turn my hand to next? In fact, am I even capable of feeling strongly enough about another subject to be able to write about it to my satisfaction? This is no trifling question. I am 41 years old and by [now] essentially unfit for any other kind of work. (Bezmozgis 2014b) The Edinburgh Companion and so many contemporary novels and stories, however, show us that communal dramas have now overtaken the personal and significantly recentred the literary imagination. And there is no end to them. Yet the focus remains elusive. There is no escaping historian Dan Miron’s conclusion in From Continuity to Contiguity (2010) that ‘the modern Jewish condition is one of permanent identity crisis. In fact the most stable characteristic of the modern Jewish identity is its permanently being in a state of crisis’ (406). The modern Jewish literary complex, as he calls it, is ‘vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse, this complex [is] characterized by dualities, parallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hybrids, similarities within dissimilarities, mobility, changeability, occasional emergence of patterns and their eventual disappearance, randomness, and, when approximating a semblance of significant order, by contiguities’ (276). By that token, however, this complex is a more capacious locale to find ourselves in than any of the hyphenated taxa (Jewish-American, BritishJewish) that appear to freeze-dry literature into prefabricated balancing acts. The main purpose of the hyphenated description is less to describe a literature than to fence out the unwelcome: no Dickens, no Melville, no Hemingway. The hyphen does a more efficient job of housekeeping than of defining, and even as it filters out the Hemingways it can also be a firewall against texts that Miron’s more forgiving literary complex would permit. Writers whose national identities are indeterminate can be erased from the hyphenated universe. Think of John Auerbach, whose stirring fictions of wartime survival (Tales of Grabowski, 2003; The Owl and Other Stories, 2003) appear in no anthologies or histories because his national credentials are without pattern. He was born in Warsaw, survived the war in Gdansk (then Danzig), settled in Israel, married an American and wrote only in English. Where do you put the hyphen? This disorderly space of undefined contiguities is unfailingly robust. It is democratic; it owes allegiance to no dominant design or voice. The modern Jewish literary complex is open-ended on every matter, including who may be accounted Jewish. Nobody, Miron cautions, has a monopoly on pronouncing upon the Jewishness of any writer, as the many



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non-Jewish Jews attest. Axel Stähler, in his own contributions, ‘“Almost too good to be true”: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Pre-Lebanon’ and ‘The Writing on the Wall: Israel in British Jewish Fiction, Post-Lebanon’ (chapters 18 and 19), reminds us that the terms we use in these discussions are constructs that we ourselves endow with meaning. Stähler broaches the subject provocatively by referring to British author Howard Jacobson’s remark that Israel itself is ‘a subjective “poetical” construct and . . . a touchstone for the construction of identities. [Jacobson’s] suggestion is that Israel has been turned into an abstract concept, an abbreviation for, and a transnational marker of, Jewishness . . .’ His larger point is that our terms of identity are invariably constructions and that all of the conventional rubrics, from ‘hyphenated identity’ to ‘Jewish-American’ to ‘modern Jewish literary complex’, are placeholders for things we cannot adequately describe except by falling back on expedients. The benefit of a literary complex is the ability to embrace a heterogeneous array of texts without the strain of having to shoehorn any of them in by means of special dispensations. Are there other options? Stähler, following Jacobson, speaks of Israel as a poetic concept. Terms of identity may blend into poetic terms. In his essay ‘Mooristan and Palimpstine: Jews, Moors and Christians in Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie’ (Chapter 28), Shaul Bassi introduces the idea of a ‘Jewish poetics’ in his reading of non-Jewish writers of Indian origin. The main writers are Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, though Desai claims major space as well. The prooftexts are Ghosh, In an Antique Land (1992), Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and Anita Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). Ghosh and Rushdie ‘present Jewish characters as exemplary negotiators of cultures who complicate the conceptual, historical, geographical and even ethnic/ racial frameworks in which Jews have been traditionally portrayed in Western literatures’. ‘Where Jewish was, Indian is’, Bassi announces, quoting Sander Gilman, who, in his turn, is adapting Freud’s famous dictum about id and ego. Bassi goes on to claim that [w]here Christians have been arguing for centuries that they have replaced the Jews in the eyes of God, so Indian writers seem to appropriate the space and symbolic capital occupied by the Jews as model for a new diasporic literature. The sociological analogies between Indians and Jews as two diasporas, two model minorities with a strong cultural-religious background, well-guarded boundaries, close-knit families that have met with social and economic success appear particularly clear in the North American context. Bassi argues that ‘in many postcolonial texts the voyage towards the Indian self takes a detour through the Jewish other, often blurring or at least complicating the intimately Western distinction between self and other’. He concludes: ‘It would be futile to claim that Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie are Jewish writers, but it may be less hazardous to speak of the “Jewish poetics” of Ghosh and Rushdie and to include their texts in a Jewish literature course.’ This proposition strikes me as utterly sensible: the recovery of a Jewish poetics in the texts of other displaced and uprooted peoples, not just Jews or even Indians, from which some writers, to their benefit, like Ghosh and Rushdie and Desai, draw strength and an enriched appreciation of wandering, dispersion, hybridity and dispossession. If I may add a name of my own to this list, it would be W. G. Sebald who, before his untimely death, proved himself the master writer of enforced exile, from whom many writers, Jewish and others, have learned how to deal with all that is meant by being a cosmopolitan at the point of a sword.

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The Edinburgh Companion is a heroic and exhaustive labour and one of long-term value to scholars and students. Critical study of Jewish writers in the Anglophone lands has been stymied by the absence of a comprehensive road map, for which there is no GPS save the diligent industry of dedicated scholars working with a collective sense of mission. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured. And it opens doors for the next generation of studies which could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work. The Edinburgh Companion is a paradigm-changing event, and nothing in Jewish literary studies that follows can fail to pay close attention to it.

Note 1. My focus here is on the postwar period but it should be acknowledged that a clear awareness of a culturally defined Anglophone diaspora had already emerged in the 1840s and that this also resulted in literary production and the dissemination of Jewish writing from various Anglophone countries across the Anglophone diaspora – see for example Kiron (2006), Sarna (2006), Mendelsohn (2007) and Stähler (forthcoming).

INTRODUCTION: MODERN JEWISH FICTION David Brauner and Axel Stähler

T

his collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays on American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction with such a wide range of reference. Moreover, it complicates all these terms, emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness. For the sake of structural clarity, the volume is divided into three parts – ‘American Jewish Fiction’, ‘British Jewish Fiction’ and ‘International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction’ – but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. All of the contributors, in very different ways, interrogate and redefine the parameters of modern Anglophone Jewish fiction. Before any key terms are problematised, however, they need to be established and so this introduction will begin by providing a rationale for, and a provisional working definition of, the key terms contained in the title of the volume, before offering an overview of the essays that make up the main body of the book.

Modern What do we mean by ‘modern’? It is a helpfully ambiguous term that gives some indication of the period of history covered by the volume – from the start of the twentieth century to the present day – and avoids the theoretical and ideological implications of related terms, such as ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’, while at the same time potentially encompassing all of them. All of these terms have been associated, and used in conjunction with, Jewishness in ways that have inevitably influenced many of the contributors to this volume, but it would have been tendentious to privilege any one of them in the title of a collection that covers such a wide range of periods, genres and methodologies. In a number of influential critical/theoretical works published in the 1990s written and edited by British Jewish authors – Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Gillian Rose’s Judaism and Modernity (1993), Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb’s collection of essays The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of the Text (1995)1 and Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus’s edited collection

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Modernity, Culture and the ‘Jew’ (1998) – there emerged a subtle, nuanced account of modernity that placed at its centre the figure of ‘the Jew’ (almost invariably placed within quotation marks, to indicate an awareness of the problematic, contested nature of the term and its racialised history). On the other side of the Atlantic, too, the Mexican American Jewish author Ilan Stavans claimed that ‘transculturalism . . . and especially the need to use literature as a mirror of modernity, are the vertebrae of contemporary Jewish literary tradition’ (1998: xii) and the American Jewish critic Marilyn Reizbaum suggested that the ‘combination of affiliation and apostasy’ exhibited by Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) ‘signif[ies] modernity’ (1999: 4), while more recently Jonathan Freedman has revived this association of Jewishness and modernity in Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2008). Meanwhile, a number of French theorists – both non-Jews such as Jean-François Lyotard and Maurice Blanchot and Jews such as Jacques Derrida – were aligning, or arguably eliding, postmodernity with Jewishness (see Silverman 1999), a trend echoed in the subtitle of Alan Berger and Gloria Cronin’s collection of essays, Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World (2004). In his seminal book, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society (1993), Bryan Cheyette analysed the ways in which ‘the Jew’ had been implicated in the discourses of both modernism and postmodernism, arguing that ‘within a modernist aesthetic’ (267) the ‘slipperiness and indeterminacy of “the Jew”’ (11) became an ‘ideal objective correlative’ (267) for the ‘impossibility of “knowing” anything’ (9) and that in ‘a postmodern context, “semitic confusion” is . . . a prototype for the lack of fixity in language as a whole’ (274). All of these ideas fall within the remit of the ‘modern’ as it is constituted in the essays of this volume but none of them is pre-eminent, and arguably terms such as modernity and postmodernity have paradoxically become rather old-fashioned. Given that we are, according to some accounts, now in a post-postmodernist era, or alternatively have arrived at the belated conclusion that distinctions between modernism and postmodernism may be dubious or even spurious, ‘modern’ also has the virtue of remaining beyond the vagaries of literary-critical fashions. Finally, ‘modern’ can also be a synonym for ‘new’ and this is also relevant here because in this sense it is not just the fiction that is examined here that is modern, but our approach to it. In other words, this volume breaks new ground both by extending the canon of modern Jewish fiction and by analysing that fiction in fresh, often radically innovative, ways.

Jewish ‘Two Jews, three opinions,’ goes the old Jewish joke. When it comes to definitions of the word ‘Jewish’, there are as many opinions (or perhaps more) as there are Jews. According to orthodox Judaism, Jewishness is determined straightforwardly by genetics: a Jew is anyone whose mother is Jewish, although of course this raises the question at each stage of how that particular mother’s Jewishness might be verified. The American Jewish critic Leslie Fiedler once marvelled at ‘the fact that I can still call myself by that once tribal, sectarian name, though I have abandoned the traditional religion, almost completely lost the traditional culture and no longer speak the languages traditionally associated with Jewishness’ (1992: xvii). Fiedler speaks for many modern secular Jews who continue to self-identify as Jewish in spite of the fact that they have no affiliation to Judaism, no knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish and no concrete ties to the culture and traditions of their ancestors. Most of the authors discussed in this volume



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fall into this category, though their particular circumstances vary considerably. However, the collection also covers writing by religiously observant Jews, by ‘Jews who aren’t’, as Debra Shostak puts it (see Chapter 12), by ‘Jew-ish’ and indeed ‘Jew-ish-ish’ authors, in Ruth Gilbert’s formulation (see Chapter 16), and by authors whose writing is Jewish by virtue of elective affinity rather than historical affiliation, cultural inheritance, theological conviction or biological ties. Instead of employing a specific set of criteria for eligibility to this volume, we have defined ‘Jewish’ inclusively and flexibly, to accommodate canonical Jewish, marginally Jewish and non-Jewish Jewish writing. In so doing, we have deliberately sought to extend and redefine the canon of modern Jewish fiction.

Fiction We have interpreted fiction widely, to include not just novels, novellas, short stories and graphic novels but other kinds of prose writing that employ fictional strategies but traditionally have been designated as non-fiction: memoirs, biographies, autobiographies and other kinds of ‘life writing’. On the other hand, we have generally excluded detailed consideration of the two other major modes of literature – drama and poetry – except insofar as they are, at times, juxtaposed with fiction by individual contributors. The other criterion for inclusion in the volume is that the fiction be written in English. The essays collected here cover most of the major English-speaking nations across three continents – the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia – and also take in Africa (with two essays on South African Jewish fiction; see Chapters 23 and 24) and Asia (in Shaul Bassi’s essay, which discusses the representation of Jewishness in two Indian-born writers; see Chapter 28). There are other important national presences here as well. Sasha Senderovich’s essay focuses on the ways in which a new generation of Russian Jewish émigrés to the United States is exploiting the cultural capital that their origins give them. Irish literature features, in Catherine Morley’s discussion of James Joyce’s influence on Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow (see Chapter 2) and in Axel Stähler’s analysis of the Irish Jewish novelist David Marcus’s To Next Year in Jerusalem (1954; see Chapter 18). And of course, as the title of Marcus’s novel demonstrates, Israel is a recurring presence in Anglophone Jewish fiction, as much as a symbolic imaginary space as a contemporary political reality. There are references to Jewish literature written in other languages, notably the discussion of authors writing in Yiddish in David Herman’s essay on ‘Jewish Emigré and Refugee Writers in Britain’ (Chapter 14), in Serge Liberman’s essay ‘Australian Jewish Fiction: A Bibliographical Survey’ (Chapter 25) and in Claudia Braude’s essay ‘Repairing Cracked Heirlooms: South African Jewish Literary Memory of Lithuania and Latvia’ (Chapter 24), which concludes by pointing out that ‘critical comparison between South African Yiddish and English writing would add a new and significant dimension to South African literary history and post-apartheid literary criticism, as well as to representations of the destruction and the posthumous legacy in South Africa of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry’. Some of these writers were of course bi- or multilingual and many of the authors featured in the volume have lived in more than one country across the course of their writing careers. Many more were born in one country and moved to another before they began writing. Some, such as Rose Zwi (born in Mexico, moved to South Africa, then to Israel and now lives in Australia), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (born in Germany, moved to England, then divided her time between India and the United States) and Jonathan Wilson (born

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and educated in England, spent time in Israel, now lives in the United States), might be said to belong to several different national canons.2 This is partly a consequence of the particular circumstances of Jewish history in the twentieth century, in which the historically diasporic condition of world Jewry was exacerbated by the flight of Jews from pogroms in eastern Europe in the early part of the century and from Germany and occupied Europe during the Second World War, before being complicated by the foundation of the state of Israel. Towards the latter end of the century, the collapse of Soviet communism and the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Iran led to further migrations of Jewish populations from those countries, while Ethiopian Jews were resettled in Israel. In more recent years, however, the movements of Jews (among them Jewish writers) have as often as not been part of the larger phenomenon of globalisation, which has seen an unprecedented circulation of populations. It is partly in response to these new geopolitical realities that literary studies has taken a decidedly transnational turn in the twenty-first century, a trend that has also been reflected in Jewish Studies. In Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (2001), David Brauner argues for the existence of an ‘insistent transnational . . . sense of Jewishness’ (186) that manifests itself in a common discursive construction of identity, a cross-cultural tendency to ‘constitute Jewishness as a literary phenomenon’ (187). Pointing out that ‘classifications such as “English”, “American” and “Jewish” are neither fixed nor finite’, Brauner goes on to suggest that ‘the border between British- and American-Jewish fiction is becoming increasingly difficult to locate’ (186) and that ‘the old paralyzing polarization of the identities on either side of the hyphen’ (187) in such terms was being disrupted. Ulrike Behlau and Bernhard Reitz’s edited collection of essays, Jewish Women’s Writing of the 1990s and Beyond in Great Britain and the United States (2004), concludes with a panel discussion that drops the hyphen – ‘British and American Jewish Women’s Writing Today’ – in which the British Jewish playwright and short story writer Michelene Wandor identifies a movement towards a Jewish literature that is ‘crosscultural within the field but also across it; from the Jewish experience as it’s written in very many ways to whatever other experiences’ (306). In his edited collection of essays Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007), Axel Stähler makes the case for thinking of Jewish literature in such linguistic terms by pointing out that ‘English has become the major language of contemporary Jewish literary production’ (3). As such it has evolved as a tool of identity formation, community building, and the creation of culture in this linguistically defined space. Yet, significantly, it is also a shared language and an archive of the memory and culture of several ‘others’. As a shared language it not only admits into Jewish cultural creativity the experiences and patterns of cultural engagement of others, but makes Jewish history, contemporary culture, and experience in turn accessible to those others. English is a vehicle, and, indeed, a process, of ‘border-crossings’ between the particular and the universal. (Stähler forthcoming) Stähler accordingly argues that ‘the Anglophone segment of Jewish literature constitutes . . . a discrete, if widely diverse, body of literary achievement’ (2007: 3), not simply by virtue of ‘the use of English as . . . a language of literary expression in the Anglophone diaspora’ but also because of the ‘cultural affinities between the English-speaking countries’ and ‘between the Jewish communities living in these countries’ (3). Such an approach reflects a shift in perception which, as Stähler has argued more recently, finds articulation



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 5

in ‘[t]he conceptualization of an Anglophone Jewish diaspora’ which is a recent development in Jewish Studies that ‘suggests a transnational and transcultural coherence specific to Anglophone Jewry’ (Stähler forthcoming). In the wake of such a conceptualisation of an Anglophone Jewish diaspora, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, [t]he current pre-eminence of narratives of hyphenated Jewish literatures in English, such as Jewish-American or British-Jewish, may have to be re-thought. Moreover, the re-mapping of what may then appear to be the permeable boundaries of ‘national’ Jewish cultural production may equally entail shifting notions of center and periphery. (Stähler forthcoming) Stähler also suggests that there is an analogy between Anglophone Jewish literature and postcolonial literature which ‘indicates the useful interchangeability of the respective tools of critical inquiry’ of the two fields (2007: 4). This suggestion has been taken up in two recent books: Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse’s Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the ‘jew’ in Contemporary British Writing (2013) and Bryan Cheyette’s Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2013). In their preface, Sicher and Weinhouse claim that ‘the “jew” has become an emblem of the quintessential postcolonial migrant, at home everywhere and nowhere, a product of the postmodern condition, an exemplary figure of the repressed and humiliated of the Third World for South Asian and Caribbean writers seeking an identity in early twenty-first-century Britain’ (2013: x); while Cheyette argues for ‘a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures’ (2013: xii), based on an understanding of diaspora as not simply ‘a timeless exile from an autochthonous “homeland”’ but ‘a state of creatively disruptive impurity which imagines emergent transnational and postethnic identities and cultures’ (xiii). While this volume has no overarching thesis or programme, taken as a whole the diverse subjects and methodologies of the essays collected here consolidate, and extend, this movement away from the consideration of Jewish fiction in terms of homogeneous, discrete national literary traditions and towards a cross-cultural, cosmopolitan, transnational, diasporic, heterogeneous range of coexisting conceptions. Our editorial decision to dispense with the hyphen that has often joined but also separated hybridised identities, in terms such as ‘Jewish-American’ or ‘British-Jewish’, reflects and reinforces this scepticism of conventional categories and represents our own attempt to ‘deghettoise’ Jewish fiction, to borrow Lori Harrison-Kahan’s term (see Chapter 1). Similarly, we have decided to place national labels in front of ‘Jewish’ rather than the other way around so that the qualifying term in a category such as ‘American Jewish’ is the first, rather than the second word, in order to avoid the problem identified by the editors of the Norton anthology of Jewish American Literature (2001), who argue that ‘[t]he term “Jewish” in “Jewish American literature” matters because it distinguishes this literature from all other American literatures’ but go on to concede that ‘because it [“Jewish”] is an adjective, [it] is also subordinate to – merely modifies – “American literature”’ (Chametzsky et al. 2001: 1). We were also concerned to avoid perpetuating the de facto hegemony that American Jewish literature has enjoyed within Jewish Studies, a hegemony that has been implicitly reinforced by the use at times of the term ‘Jewish American’ to signify Jewish literature in toto. In the title of their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael Kramer refer to ‘Jewish American literatures’ to signify a pluralistic approach to the project of

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canon-formation to which companions of this sort must always contribute, however ­provisionally and sceptically: We have grown more sensitive to the web of transnational filiations that pervade Jewish American texts and have learned to question parochial formulations of a literature that has itself always been the fruit of a culture of exile, diaspora, homecoming; of a literary world in which Jewish authors from one country read and interact with Jewish authors from other countries; of a community in which Jews from America are intimately concerned with the European Holocaust and with the fate of the State of Israel. (Kramer and Wirth-Nesher 2003b: 7) In the essays that comprise their volume, however, there is only limited consideration of ‘the web of transnational filiations’ to which the editors refer. Instead, the assumption of the pre-eminence of American Jewish literature generally prevails, an assumption reflected in the fact that in a number of critical works on, and anthologies of, American Jewish literature the term ‘American’ has been omitted altogether and ‘Jewish’ treated as though it were synonymous with ‘American Jewish’.3 In contrast, this collection seeks to do justice to the rich diversity of modern Jewish fiction in English, giving due weight to both the distinctive contexts and common cultures in which this fiction has been produced.

The Essays The essays in this volume cover a wide range of authors, from the canonical to the potentially canonical to the largely forgotten, the neglected and the overlooked. All make valuable contributions to their fields; some also redefine them or establish new ones. Lori Harrison-Kahan’s essay (see Chapter 1) on first-generation immigrant writing radically reconfigures the traditional narrative of early American Jewish writing, which has focused on ‘the immigrant experience’ as represented by poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews living in urban ghettos. She focuses instead on a group of genteel, West Coast writers – Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Miriam Michelson and Edna Ferber – whose work was set ‘in the cities and small towns of the Western frontier’ and whose ‘unconventional female protagonists’ were modern women who ‘spoke in unaccented English’, in ‘marked contrast to the Yiddish-inflected immigrant dialect that had become the hallmark of Jewish urban realism’. Through her discussion of this alternative ‘tradition of pioneering women writers’, Harrison-Kahan ‘broaden[s] our current understanding of early Jewish literary production in the United States in terms of region, class and gender’ and demonstrates how the work of this group of writers ‘complicates accepted narratives about immigration and assimilation and challeng[es] national and ethno-racial demarcations between “Jewish” and “American” as well as religious ones between Judaism and Christianity’. Whereas Harrison-Kahan rewrites the canon of first-generation American Jewish literature, Emily Robins Sharpe identifies a pocket of Anglophone Jewish literature that has largely gone unnoticed (see Chapter 27). Her essay on Spanish Civil War novels demonstrates how ‘depictions of Jewish involvement’ in the conflict ‘use the trope of diasporic identity and transnational volunteerism to reconfigure the markers of national belonging, imagining a broadened conception of national community in which Jews played a foundational, rather than marginal role’. Exploring the ‘contradictory motivations at the core of Jewish representations of the Spanish Civil War’ and acknowledging that ‘[i]n their political investments and historical commentaries, Jewish writings about the Spanish Civil



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 7

War vary greatly’, Sharpe argues that the novels she discusses ‘bring a marginalised, nonnational perspective to bear on these global and national events, insistently confronting the conceptual borders of national affiliation so central to the discourse of war’. Sasha Senderovich also breaks new ground in his essay, but rather than excavating a long-buried body of literature, Senderovich examines an emergent field – contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish immigrants to the US – that was evolving quickly even as he was working on his essay (see Chapter 7). He argues that their work ‘is characterised by their reflection on’ a phenomenon that he calls ‘self-orientalisation’ (through which émigré Soviet Jews exploit the cultural capital that their history gives them, shaping the ways in which they are ‘imagined . . . by Jews in the West’). According to Senderovich, the work of these authors ‘make[s] us question pat assumptions about Soviet Jews and offer[s] a distinctive perspective on the way that Soviet Jews construct narratives attractive to their American Jewish counterparts and how, in turn, they are constructed by those narratives’. One of the writers Senderovich discusses, David Bezmozgis, also crops up in Ira Nadel’s overview of Canadian Jewish literature (see Chapter 22). Indeed, Bezmozgis’s transnational status, as a Russian-born Jewish writer with Canadian citizenship who has also spent time in the US, makes him an exemplary figure in Nadel’s account, since ‘transnationalism . . . characterises the writing of Canadian Jewish authors, writers who maintain the challenging duality outlined by Mordecai Richler in Joshua Then and Now (1980) where the hero’s awkward moral and physical posture defines the posture of the Canadian Jew’: Canadian-born, he sometimes felt as if he were condemned to lope slant-shouldered through this world that confused him. One shoulder sloping downward groaning under the weight of his Jewish heritage . . . the other thrust heavenwards, yearning for an inheritance, any inheritance weightier than the construction of a transcontinental railway, a reputation for honest trading, good skiing conditions. (Richler 1980a: 190–1) Richler himself only made it as a writer when he moved to London, and spent much of his later career, after he had returned to Montreal, engaging in polemical debates with Quebec separatists. Nadel ends his essay by anticipating a potential future in which ‘the next phase’ of Canadian Jewish fiction might involve exploring the ‘mythic possibilities’ of ‘a planet of the Jews’, although he points out with self-aware irony that to do so would itself involve looking across the border, to ‘American examples [such] as Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)’. An independent Jewish homeland not unlike that envisaged in Chabon’s alternative history was projected in the 1930s and 1940s with the Kimberley Plan in Australia. The scheme was rejected inter alia for its anti-assimilationist potential, which ran counter to inclusive Australian government policy. Yet Jews have been in Australia ever since its white settlement in the eighteenth century and, although a small minority, Jews have nevertheless contributed significantly to its cultural creativity. In his essay on ‘Australian Jewish Fiction: A Bibliographical Survey’ (see Chapter 25), the Australian Jewish writer Serge Liberman, ‘a non-academic aficionado of books who has become a bibliographer of Australasian Judaica by chance’, decided, ‘instead of adopting any analytical or interpretive approach to the subject . . . to present a kaleidoscopic survey and guide to the Jewish prose writers of Australia, while focusing particularly upon those who deal with Jewish themes’. True to his word, Liberman provides a panoramic overview of Australian Jewish fiction, which demonstrates the diversity and scope of a field that is crying out for

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a detailed academic study. Such a study would undoubtedly be indebted to Liberman’s compendious survey. David Gooblar undertakes a different kind of recuperative project, examining the work of four second-generation American Jewish authors – Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin and Wallace Markfield – whose greatest successes coincided with, and arguably contributed to, the vogue in American letters during the 1960s for black humour, which Gooblar defines as ‘a kind of joking that aims to provoke nervous laughter, comedy that is tense with the possibility of revealing very serious truths, a desperate lashing out by writers cornered by a world gone mad’ (see Chapter 4). Emphasising their differences as much as their similarities, Gooblar argues that these authors ‘nonetheless all made significant contributions to American literature through their use of dark comedy’ and that they ‘each explore the power of humour to reveal, to surprise, to shock and to destroy’. As well as offering sensitive readings of key works by each author, Gooblar’s essay invigorates a recent period of US literary history that has fallen into obscurity (with the exception of Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 these authors are little read and less discussed today, but were, for a few years, considered by many to represent the future of American fiction). Catherine Morley also revisits two writers – Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld – who enjoyed some prominence in the immediate postwar era but whose careers were curtailed by early death and whose reputations have since declined, alongside Saul Bellow, a close friend and associate of theirs who became a giant of postwar American letters and a Nobel laureate (see Chapter 2). Rather than aligning Bellow with the other great novelists with whom he is usually bracketed (principally Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth), Morley considers his short fiction alongside that of Schwartz (who is better known for his poetry) and Rosenfeld, whose mastery of the form remains largely unrecognised, in spite of the best efforts of Mark Shechner and Steven Zipperstein.4 Relocating Bellow with Schwartz and Rosenfeld in the context from which he originally emerged – the world of the New York Intellectuals, Partisan Review and an ambivalent engagement with modernism – Morley identifies the ‘literary inheritance’ that these three writers and their ­contemporaries shared: the isolated, scholarly, discontented and lonely man; the emphasis on city space as both a determinant and reflector of a consciousness in transition or approaching awakening; the fascination with the possibility of a plane of existence beyond the immediate; and an overriding sense of ambiguity or failure to somehow achieve the fulfilment seemingly promised by the intellectual life. Bellow is also a central figure in Victoria Aarons’ essay (see Chapter 3) but again he is examined in a context from which he has often been divorced: as one of a group of American Jewish authors, including not just Roth and Malamud but Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, Herman Wouk, Joseph Heller, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Herbert Gold, Grace Paley and Edward Lewis Wallant, who all ‘made their literary debuts in the two decades following the Second World War . . . and would come to define a rich and creative cultural and intellectual era in America’. In her discussion of Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961), Aarons claims that the novel’s ‘intersection of Harlem’s povertyridden, violent street life and the vivid, harrowing sequence of flashbacks of the concentration camps show the ineradicable effects of the Holocaust to have no geographical or temporal boundaries’. Aarons goes on to credit Wallant with creating ‘an opening for the literary representation of the Holocaust in American letters, breaking the fraught silence



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 9

surrounding the enormity of events wrought by the Nazi attempt to eradicate European Jewry’ and thereby initiating ‘an enduring legacy of American Holocaust literature, a legacy taken up by subsequent generations of American writers well into the twenty-first century’. This legacy and the question of the (lack of) geographical and temporal ­boundaries are the subjects of essays by Monica Osborne and Jennifer Lemberg. While they cover some of the same ground, Osborne and Lemberg take very different approaches to their material. Whereas Lemberg (see Chapter 10) takes an overview of American Jewish Holocaust fiction, drawing particular attention to the ways in which, while older works in this field often ‘[s]elf-referentially [question] their place among other Holocaust narratives’, more ‘recent works of fiction invite us to consider not only the Holocaust but the genre of its representation’, Osborne pursues a more polemical line (see Chapter 11), seeing a crucial distinction between the ways in which the work of the second generation has ‘in some cases [led to] the virtual displacement of survivors by the second generation’s appropriation of their stories and experiences’, thereby ‘complicat[ing] questions concerning the ethics of representation in the context of Holocaust writing’, while ‘[t]he third generation is more tentative about occupying such a role’, abandoning the ‘narcissism’ of their immediate predecessors ‘in favour of something less self-involved’. Both authors seem to agree, however, that contemporary American Jewish novelists are responding to the ethical and aesthetic challenges posed by Holocaust fiction in innovative ways. For Lemberg, while ‘the “end” of the Holocaust may be in view’, entailing ‘a new phase of representation that might offer only facsimile or nostalgia’, contemporary American Jewish authors are ‘experimenting with new forms and genres to keep the Holocaust before our eyes, acknowledging the complexity, even impossibility, of such a task, and persevering in this necessary endeavour’. Osborne in turn notes that ‘third-generation Holocaust writing has emerged not simply as a genre of writing generated by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but also as a literary mode utilised by a number of contemporary Jewish writers, whether or not they are direct inheritors of the legacy of the Holocaust’. In her essay on British Jewish Holocaust fiction (see Chapter 20), Sue Vice concedes that (unlike American Jewish Holocaust fiction) this ‘is not usually acknowledged as a category in its own right’, ‘partly because much British Jewish Holocaust fiction adheres to the reality of Britain’s relation to the events of the Holocaust, “on the edges of history”, rather than placing its narratives in Nazi-occupied Europe, as some recent American Jewish fiction has done, or imagining the occupation of Britain itself’. Through detailed analysis of three recent novels – Jeremy Dyson’s What Happens Now (2006), Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006) and David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes (2004) – that ‘bring the narratives of British and Jewish wartime history together, either in the form of historical reconstruction, or as a strand of self-definition’, however, Vice begins to construct an alternative kind of canon. Each of these novels ‘adopts what could be called a postmemorial perspective on the events of the Holocaust’ and they are ‘at least as much about Britishness and British Jewishness as they are about the Holocaust itself’; yet they also suggest that ‘the events of the Holocaust haunt British Jewish subjects even in the twenty-first century’, even if ‘such unforgettability is [accompanied by] the threat that such present-day preoccupation may turn into banality or self-pity’. Ultimately, these novels ‘guard against such a degradation’ by ‘turn[ing] to the documentary record to shore up their narratives, ­incorporating the imagery of life in hiding, in ghettos and camps into their British plots’. While this admission of the Holocaust into British Jewish fiction indicates a new confidence on the part of these writers in engaging with Britishness and with their British

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Jewishness, Efraim Sicher demonstrates in his essay on ‘The Postwar “New Wave” of British Jewish Writing’ (see Chapter 13) that these issues, albeit in a very different way, also had an impact on British Jewish writing of the 1950s and 1960s. Among these writers in postwar Britain were Jews who had little connection with the Jewish community and rejected it as materialistic and bourgeois. The children of immigrants became Anglicised and suburbanised when they made the journey from the East End to the prosperous suburbs in the north-west of the metropolis. The East End was nevertheless the subject of bittersweet nostalgia for those who were children at the outbreak of war. The label ‘Golders Green novel’ has been applied, retrospectively and sometimes derisively, to a number of works by Anglo-Jewry’s ‘Angry Young Men’, who rebelled against the centrally heated, carpeted comfort of bourgeois Jewish homes between Hampstead and Hendon, but also elsewhere. However, echoing George Steiner’s sense of his postwar identity as a ‘kind of survivor’, British Jews of the ‘new wave’ felt guilt at having comfortable, privileged homes when the six million perished, but also expressed anguish over the abandonment of European Jewry during the Holocaust. The postwar Anglo-Jewish novel continued a longstanding tradition of the Jewish family saga which is generally critical of the community and Judaism, but it increasingly turned back to the persistence of antisemitism and saw survival as the raison d’être of the diaspora. Another sub-genre of Jewish literature that is explored in essays dealing with Jewish literature on either side of the pond is life writing. Both Aimee Pozorski and Devorah Baum adopt unorthodox approaches to their subjects. Pozorksi (see Chapter 5) discusses four texts – Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992; 1994) and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) – that ostensibly have little in common with each other and that are not obviously accommodated (with the possible exception of the Roth) in the category of life writing. However, Pozorski argues that these texts all deploy illness ‘as a metaphor for human strength in the face of adversity – or, conversely, adversity in the face of human strength’ and ‘as a means not only to depict a life story, but also to speak back to an antisemitic tradition that aligns illness with human weakness and degradation’. Moreover, ‘[r]eading these texts as formal experiments in life writing rather than in terms of the generic categories they have been conventionally assigned allows us to see . . . an emergent tradition that values formal innovation in life writing as an ethical response to rigid conventions associated not only with literary genre, but with identity and politics as well’. Baum’s self-reflexive essay on ‘Life Writing and the East End’ (see Chapter 17) skilfully weaves together autobiography, biography, memoir, history and psychoanalysis. It is both about acts of (auto)biographical retrieval and is itself such an act of retrieval. It is full of striking insights – for example, that ‘the prolific state of Jewish life writing’ is partly a consequence of the fact that ‘diasporic lives, because of their mobility, are particularly prone to get lost (often deliberately) from the record books’; that ‘many of these memoirs [of the East End] are both critiques and continuations of the original East End dreams and dreamers’; and that ‘it is against the larger backdrop of the European genocide that each disappearing feature or vanishing sign of Jewish life in the East End has been more and more zealously mourned’ – but it is, like these memoirs, difficult to summarise or categorise. Sarah Lightman’s essay (see Chapter 9) similarly incorporates details from her own life (or rather, her representation of it in her autobiographical graphic novel in progress) in her essay on American Jewish graphic novels. Discussing how Will Eisner and Melissa Lasko-Gross ‘explore their complex relationships with God and Judaism through their



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 11

semi-autobiographical comics’, Lightman demonstrates, through a series of careful detailed close readings of particular pages and panels from Eisner’s seminal work ‘A Contract with God’ and Lasko-Gross’s less well-known ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, ‘how both comics proffer disaffected Jewish experiences while exploiting the unique possibilities of the medium’. In spite of the fact that these comics were ‘created by artists from different generations, genders and stages in their careers’, they ‘share numerous formal similarities, from their re-interpretation of Hebrew texts through to their use of splash title pages and limited palettes to consolidate their atmospheric narratives’. Lightman’s essay concludes with a consideration of the uneasy relationship in her work between orthodox Jewish tradition and modern feminism, a tension that is also at the heart of Rachel Harris’s essay on ­orthodoxy and modernity in American Jewish women’s writing. Harris’s wide-ranging essay posits an opposition between the ‘third generation’ of American Jewish women writers and a ‘fourth generation’ (see Chapter 6). The fiction of the former is typically located in a ‘peripatetic modern (New York-centric) Jewish world’, ‘wrestle[s] with the traditions of their family, Jewish rituals, and the weight of the Holocaust’ and is characterised by a view of ‘orthodox Judaism as inherently oppressive to women’ and of ‘the modern secular world as a liberation for the intelligent and rebellious Jewish female’. The fiction of the latter, in contrast, exhibits a ‘tension between the longing for and the rejection of a traditional and religiously observant world’ and attempts to preserve a delicate balance ‘between religion and a competing secular modern experience’. Focusing on four kinds of fiction – mystery, memoirs, historical novels and romance – and thereby challenging ‘the marginalisation of genre fiction within literary-critical discourse’, Harris argues that what these disparate novels share is ‘an attempt to penetrate into the private, typically domestic, life of a traditional Jewish woman, most frequently one who has come from a religiously observant background, has converted into the religious Jewish world, or who has “returned” to orthodoxy in the Jewish equivalent of “born again” as a ba’alat tshuva’. David Brauner’s essay (see Chapter 8) is also interested in the ways in which a number of postwar American Jewish women authors – in this case secular authors who have specialised in the short story form – explore the private, domestic dramas of ordinary women while at the same time highlighting some of the ways in which they embed into their ostensibly unassuming, fragmentary, elliptical tales a profound consideration of some of the most important political events of the second half of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries. Brauner sets out to challenge ‘two widely held assumptions: firstly, that the most important postwar American Jewish writers are male novelists and secondly, that the short story is a minor form, largely devoted to the representation of private revelations and domestic dramas’. Through detailed readings of four stories – ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ (1985) by Grace Paley, ‘Hair’ (1992) by Myra Goldberg, ‘Purim Night’ (2011) by Edith Pearlman and ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ (2006) by Deborah Eisenberg – Brauner demonstrates that these authors ‘dissolve the distinctions between the personal and the political, the private and public, the quotidian and the extraordinary’. In the work of these modern mistresses of the short story, Brauner concludes, ‘daily pleasures and domestic dramas become microcosms of the large historical debates of the last fifty years and the investigation of the personal politics of gender, class and ethnicity serves to ­deconstruct and complicate the grand political narratives of the postwar period’. Phyllis Lassner’s essay on Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons is similarly concerned with the relationship between gender and ethnicity and personal and public politics (see

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Chapter 15). Lassner argues that British Jewish women writers ‘share the ongoing concerns of Jewish male writers, but with a gendered difference’ and that ‘[a]lthough the multicultural study of women writers has been a growth industry since the rise of feminist studies in the 1970s, and British Jewish Studies is now a firmly established field, British Jewish women writers have remained on the margins of both’. Lassner aims to redress this neglect, emphasising the ways in which British Jewish women’s fiction in general ‘is invariably and indelibly marked by Jewish history, memory and consciousness’, and in which the fiction of Tucker and Solomons in particular ‘claim[s] a place for the Jewish refugee in British literary history by joining the haunting memories of lost European homes and families to the ghosts of Britain’s cultural past’. David Herman documents the literary journeys of some of these refugees, detailing the ways in which, from a history of ‘dislocation and loss, a tremendous body of work emerged’ that constitutes ‘one of the enduring achievements of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish literature’ (see Chapter 14). At one point in his essay, Herman discusses how the image of standing at the threshold of a half-open door (‘a doorway where the door is never fully closed but one is never entirely inside the room’) becomes a potent metaphor for the experiences of this group of British Jewish émigrés, ‘trying desperately to make sense of experiences of loss and devastation, sometimes overtly, other times through silences and absences’. This image recurs in Ruth Gilbert’s essay (see Chapter 16), in which she uses it (borrowing from Jonathan Leaman) to symbolise what she calls ‘half-Jewish identities’. Gilbert goes on to argue that ‘Leaman’s “not-Jewishness” is the flip-side to other more emotionally charged journeys of self-discovery’, journeys that are reflected in the ways that ‘concepts such as “Jewishness” and “half-Jewishness” are explored as sources of tension’ in contemporary British Jewish fiction. Gilbert concludes: In twenty-first-century Britain, Jewishness is one difference among many. Contemporary British Jewish writers highlight the desire to identify the particularity of their difference, while acknowledging that such difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to change, re-signification and reinterpretation. In this context, Jewishness is an evolving term. Debra Shostak’s essay is also concerned with writers who are ‘Jew-ish’ (in Gilbert’s formulation), but in a different context (see Chapter 12). She begins her essay on American Jewish writers ‘who aren’t’ by acknowledging that such a topic entails the need ‘to embrace contradiction, to define a negative space – to explore, that is, what Leslie Fiedler calls the “Jewishness degree zero of . . . vestigially Jewish-American novelists” (1991: 77), among whom Fiedler names West and Salinger’, to whom Shostak adds Tillie Olsen, Paul Auster and Emily Prager. Pointing out that none of these authors ‘has expressly taken Jewishness or Jewish experience as a subject, but all have alluded to, drawn on or taken for granted one or both, in diverse ways, allowing for a “Jewish” interpretation’, Shostak nonetheless avoids the temptation ‘to construct a grand narrative of what it means to write as a marginal Jew’ in favour of examining ‘traces of the “Jew”’ in, and drawing some connections between, their work. Shostak finishes by positing the possibility ‘that the writers on the margins have not-been American Jewish writers by writing their witness of the social, psychological, spiritual and metaphysical traumas of their century’. Beate Neumeier tackles the same subject as Shostak with reference to two British Jewish writers – Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner – whose Jewishness has generally been regarded as tangential to their work (see Chapter 21). Neumeier argues that ‘[w]hile the



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 13

apparent differences between Brookner and Spark prevent reductive classifications, their common concerns allow us to draw connections and to read their work as contributing to a diversified British Jewish culture’. Through detailed readings of a number of their novels, Neumeier acknowledges the important differences, both thematic and contextual, in their work but concludes that [b]oth writers continuously interrogate the reasons, implications and consequences of the difficulty of embracing difference. The history of critical reception and evaluation of both writers illustrates the preference for unilateral readings and categorisations and thus ironically reflects this shared concern with notions of difference and identity, diversity and normativity. It is precisely through this insistence on difference as a source of alienation and celebration that both writers have contributed important texts to British Jewish culture. Muriel Spark also features in the essays written by Axel Stähler on the representation of Israel in British Jewish fiction (see Chapters 18 and 19). Covering a wide range of fiction and contextualising it thoroughly in historical and cultural terms, Stähler argues that in the writing of the ‘new wave’ of British Jewish authors who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the literary response to Israel was still determined by what appears to be a split between the author persona and their literary engagement on one side and their personal view on Israel on the other’ and that ‘[n]one of these early novels entirely escapes the reiteration of Zionist tropes’. In contrast, Stähler attributes the reluctance of contemporary British Jewish novelists to engage with Israel to either a ‘search for detachment, the desire to remain aloof from the political and ethical dilemma in which Israel has become embroiled and to reject moral liability by association’, particularly ‘at a time when Israel has become increasingly entrenched in the wake of global criticism of its policies’, or ‘a process of normalisation, the overcoming of the compulsion to feel culpable and, instead, to view the Middle East conflict as one among many, as an Israeli concern and not a Jewish one’. This relationship between literature and politics is also at the heart of Claudia Braude’s essay on the legacy of Lithuanian and Latvian history in postwar South African fiction (see Chapter 24). For Braude, the ways in which ‘a generation of Eastern European, predominantly Lithuanian as well as Latvian and Russian Jewish immigrants, transmitted [this history] to their South African-born offspring is crucial’, as is ‘how this transmission, including its absence, is represented in South African Jewish fiction written in English’. Braude points out that ‘[s]ince the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and apartheid, reimagining and remembering historical connections between the geographically removed countries, and most particularly between South Africa and Lithuania, has significantly increased, rendering visible the absences and silences’, the exemplary figure in this context being Denis Hirson, who ‘helps to delineate the central literary absences formed in reaction to the destruction of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry, and to map the literary contours of silence and articulation in the fictional landscape written in English by South African Jewish writers’. Linda Weinhouse is similarly concerned with the relationship between politics, history and memory in her essay on South African fiction (see Chapter 23). She begins her essay by emphasising ‘the ambiguous status of the Jew [in South Africa], who is situated not only between Afrikaners and Englishmen, but between all the rigidly defined racial divisions in South African society, including the most significant one of all, between all whites and all blacks’ and concludes that ‘the significance of memory to the new South Africa and the

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ramifications of what its citizens choose to remember is a major theme for many of these post-apartheid South African [Jewish] writers’, many of whose ‘memories of their past in the old South Africa are inextricably linked to the legacy of the Jewish immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and their own experiences growing up Jewish in an environment that was often hostile to Jews’. This sense of dislocation and displacement is present also in Sandra Singer’s essay on ‘migrant’ Anglophone Jewish writers (see Chapter 26). Singer identifies ‘the exiled figure’ who exemplifies ‘contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession’ (Cho 2007: 14) as a recurring trope of cosmopolitan twentieth-century fiction, Jewish and otherwise. In the fiction of the writers she discusses, Singer argues that ‘multidirectional memory is deployed that is as rich and varied as the characters’ subjectivities and their contexts’ and that the work of these writers is part of a larger redefinition of the notion of diaspora, in which ‘postcolonial and cosmopolitan authors [have] extended the biblical notion of diasporic scattering to include dislocation based on various, widely divergent conditions, from being a survivor of genocide to actively participating as a global postmodern business consumer’. This matrix of postmodernism, postcolonialism and diasporism is also explored, in a different context, in Shaul Bassi’s essay (see Chapter 28). Bassi begins by pointing out that ‘in the main arenas of postcolonial reflection, Jews are perceived (and often perceive themselves) as too Western, too white, too middle class to be still considered a subaltern minority in need of a voice’, before challenging this consensus through a discussion of the ways in which ‘in many postcolonial texts the voyage towards the Indian self takes a detour through the Jewish other, often blurring or at least complicating the intimately Western distinction between self and other’. Bassi concludes that by ‘staging liminal Jewish identities in a trans-civilisational perspective’, Indian novelists such as Rushdie and Ghosh invite us to consider Jewish diasporas in their lesser known ramifications, in their negotiations with other diasporas and other cultures, challenging the East/West and the Jewish/Muslim divides, decentring, expanding, perhaps contributing to the process of ‘provincialization’ and decolonisation of the Western (and Jewish) literary imagination, complicating traditional perceptions of ‘race’ and colour in relation to Jews.

Conclusion This volume does not constitute the last word on modern Jewish fiction but rather the start of a new conversation with which we hope other scholars will engage. No work of this sort can be comprehensive and inevitably we have not covered everything we would have liked to. At one point we hoped to include essays on Anglophone fiction written in Israel, in New Zealand and in Ireland. Within the American Jewish section it would have been nice to have had essays on LGBT Jewish authors (such as Gertrude Stein, Jo Sinclair, Leslie Feinberg, Leslea Newman, Edith Konecky, Kathy Acker, Judith Katz, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Andrea Freud Loewenstein, Sarah Schulman, Paul Goodman, Stanford Friedman, Lev Raphael, David Leavitt and Richard Zimler), black Jewish writers (Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, Walter Moseley and Rebecca Walker) and Sephardi Anglophone writers (Lucette Lagnado, Gina Nahai, Ruth Knafo Setton and Dalia Sofer). There are also authors who continue to slip through the cracks even of the open-ended categories with which our contributors have worked, among them eminent novelists such as Norman



Introduction: Modern Jewish Fiction 15

Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, Will Self and Marge Piercy, as well as a younger generation of emerging talent, such as Benjamin Markovits, Ned Beauman, Charlotte Mendelson and Jami Attenberg. Indeed, such is the vibrancy of contemporary Jewish fiction that it is likely that new names will have emerged in the interim between the completion of this manuscript and its publication. So there is plenty of work still to be done in this field. However, it is our hope that this volume will make a lasting impression, both on the basis of the scholarship that it contains and by identifying and delineating many of the directions that future scholars may take.

Notes 1. This book was in fact a transatlantic collaboration, with one British and one American editor and with a roster of contributors from both sides of the Atlantic. 2. Zwi is mentioned in both Claudia Braude’s essay on South African Jewish fiction and Serge Liberman’s bibliographical survey of Australian Jewish authors in this volume. In 1994 Wilson had a story anthologised in Best American Stories and the British counterpart, Best Stories. 3. See, for example, Murray Baumgarten’s City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982); The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction (1996), edited by Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport; and Shaking Eve’s Tree: Short Stories of Jewish Women (1990), edited by Sharon Niederman. 4. See Shechner’s Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (1988) and Zipperstein’s Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing (1989).

1 PIONEERING WOMEN WRITERS AND THE DE-GHETTOISATION OF EARLY AMERICAN JEWISH FICTION Lori Harrison-Kahan

I

n an essay published in Commentary in 1952, the writer Isaac Rosenfeld confessed that he had ‘long avoided’ Abraham Cahan’s 1917 classic The Rise of David Levinsky, believing that the novel was another ‘badly-written account of immigrants and sweatshops’. Although Rosenfeld stood corrected by his reading of the novel and went on to offer a sympathetic re-evaluation of Cahan’s magnum opus, his complaint that the genre of ghetto fiction had become ‘intolerably stale’ resounded with other critics as well (1952: 131). Writing in The Menorah Journal twenty years earlier, novelist Albert Halper bitterly lamented the confined terrain of American Jewish fiction, describing it as ‘a row of shacks without a single skyscraper to break the stubby level of novels that fall into a limited number of patterns’. ‘To the American reader, the Jewish novel and short story became the ghetto tale’, Halper complained, enjoining Jewish writers to look for source material somewhere other than in the tenements, factories and pushcarts of New York’s Lower East Side (1932: 61–3). From the end of the nineteenth century, when eastern European immigrants began settling en masse in the urban centres of the United States, through the First World War, the ghetto supplied the primary setting for countless novels and story collections, with tales and sketches of ghetto life appearing regularly in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s, McClure’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Immigrant writers Cahan and Anzia Yezierska remain the best-known of the early ghetto storytellers (and the only American Jewish writers of the period to have received sustained attention from literary critics), but a broader catalogue of writers and works affiliated with this mode evinces the genre’s tremendous productivity, as well as its often unacknowledged diversity. The list includes Isaac Kahn Friedman’s The Lucky Number (1896), a collection of sketches named for the seedy saloon that symbolises the unlucky fates of Chicago’s slum-dwellers, Jew and gentile alike; pharmacist Nathaniel Isaiah Gillman’s oxymoronically subtitled Circumstantial Affection: A Realistic Romance of the New York Ghetto (1901); the comic stories of Bruno Lessing, a frequent contributor to Cosmopolitan, whose work was collected in Children of Men (1903) and With the Best Intention (1914); the fiction of Herman Bernstein, a journalist devoted to exposing antisemitism (most famously, that of Henry Ford) and whose collection In the Gates of Israel: Stories of the Jews (1902) and novel Contrite Hearts (1905) were praised for their absence of ghetto stereotypes; the novels

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of Lithuanian American writer Ezra Brudno, notably his fictionalised autobiography The Fugitive: Being Memoirs of a Wanderer in Search of A Home (1904); another autobiographically inspired fiction, The Mediator: A Tale of the Old World and the New (1907), by Christian convert Edward A. Steiner, better known for his sociological studies of immigration; Rabbi Henry S. Stollnitz’s self-published Glimpses of a Strange World (1908), a collection of sketches detailing the religious rituals of Jews in different ghettos; Dr. Rast (1909), Seven Arts founder James Oppenheim’s first book, which presaged his later radicalism by following a Jewish physician committed to serving the ghetto poor; Montague Glass’s ‘Potash and Perlmutter’ series (c. 1908–27), a comic sensation responsible for widely disseminating stereotypes of the Jew as parvenu industrialist, especially when the ‘Ventures and Adventures’ of business partners Abe Potash and ‘Mawruss’ (Morris) Perlmutter were adapted for stage and screen; Fannie Hurst’s Just Around the Corner (1914), the debut collection by an author who would go on to become a sensation in her own right as the best-selling novelist and highest-paid magazine contributor of her time; and Nathan Kussy’s The Abyss (1916), a Dickensian coming-of-age novel about a pious ghetto boy sucked into the ‘abyss’ of the criminal underworld.1 Whether rendered luridly, comically, sentimentally or naturalistically, the ghetto in its various manifestations captured the imaginations of an American readership and appealed to the reform-minded social conscience of the Progressive Era. Certainly, the sheer volume and variety of ghetto fiction warrants further examination, but the dominance of the ghetto has also obscured the existence of other American Jewish writers, whose work provides alternatives to the ‘limited . . . patterns’ that concerned Halper.2 At the same time that Jewish writers, most of them men, were mining the ghetto for material, a group of Jewish women writers from the far- and mid-West were producing fiction that did not take the urban north-east as its setting. The works of writers such as Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Miriam Michelson and Edna Ferber were set instead in the cities and small towns of the western frontier and featured American-born protagonists who spoke in unaccented English – a marked contrast to the Yiddish-inflected immigrant dialect that had become the hallmark of Jewish urban realism. Although these writers incorporated Jewish characters and subjects into their fiction, none of them wrote exclusively on Jewish topics. Two of Wolf’s five novels, for example, were set in San Francisco’s Reform Jewish community, but fans of her short stories in the magazine The Smart Set would have been unlikely to categorise her as a Jewish fiction writer, given the absence of Jewish content in the short stories that appeared with her byline. Similarly, Michelson’s and Ferber’s readers would not have assigned them the label of Jewish fictionist. Among the most popular and prolific writers of their day, Michelson and Ferber drew on their training and experiences as journalists to create entertaining narratives that featured adventurous and independent female protagonists, prototypes of the early twentieth-century New Woman. Only occasionally do Jews take centre stage in their fiction – most notably in Ferber’s second, and most autobiographical, novel, Fanny Herself (1917), about a resourceful Jewish girl from small-town Wisconsin who rises to the top of the Chicago mail-order industry – but the writers’ minority backgrounds undoubtedly influenced their diverse portrayals of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic America. Lowenberg, a prominent California club woman and reformer, had more of a local following than Wolf, Michelson and Ferber, and her novels were written with explicit social purposes in mind: The Irresistible Current (1908) used the complicated entanglements of interfaith romance to argue for demolishing religious barriers between Jews and Christians; A Nation’s Crime



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(1911) tells a tragic love story to agitate for gender equality in marriage and divorce laws; and The Voices (1920) tackles a host of political and social issues through the character of a young stenographer who becomes a modern-day Joan of Arc, galvanising the masses with her inspirational calls to action. The works of writers such as Wolf, Lowenberg, Michelson and Ferber attest to the diversity of Jewish life in America, and the diverse ways that Jews contributed to American literature. By uncovering this tradition of pioneering women writers, this chapter calls for a ‘de-ghettoisation’ of American Jewish fiction in order to broaden our current understanding of early Jewish literary production in the United States in terms of region, class and gender. Rather than confining themselves to the ghetto, and thus to the expected parameters for prewar American Jewish fiction, these writers expose the porosity of the ghetto’s boundaries, complicating accepted narratives about immigration and assimilation and challenging national and ethno-racial demarcations between ‘Jewish’ and ‘American’ as well as religious ones between Judaism and Christianity. Wolf, Lowenberg, Michelson and Ferber pushed forward the frontier not only by moving American Jewish fiction westward, but also by imagining unconventional female protagonists who helped propel the nation out of Victorianism and into the modern era.

Emma Wolf and the De-ghettoisation of American Jewish Fiction Influential writer and editor William Dean Howells extolled ghetto fiction for exemplifying the aesthetic principles of realism. For Howells, writers of ‘the Hebraic school’ such as Cahan, Glass and Hurst displayed ‘an instinct for reality’ (1915: 959), and the streets of New York provided them with raw material that lent itself well to being rendered in crudest detail. The fiction of such writers succeeds because they ‘persuade us that they have told the truth’, explained Howells (1896: 18). But the ghetto genre also had its fair share of detractors, many of whom accused Jewish writers of sacrificing truth for exoticism. The debate about whether or not the ghetto was a fit subject for literary art first came to a head over the publication of Cahan’s 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto and the 1899 premiere of Children of the Ghetto, a play by British writer Israel Zangwill, whose Victorian-era stories of the London ghetto (not to mention his subsequent drama about American immigrants, The Melting Pot, 1908) profoundly influenced many American Jewish writers. The dissenters were largely uptown Jews from German and Sephardic backgrounds, who wanted to distance themselves from their newly arrived, eastern European co-religionists and who feared that they would be associated with such lowly literary representations of the ghetto Jew, with his broken English and coarse manners. In the American Israelite, for instance, Julius Wise, a prominent Chicago physician who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Nickerdown’, issued a scathing attack on Cahan, accusing him of ‘intentionally exaggerat[ing] what is worst among his own class of people’, labelling him ‘a scoundrel [who lies] for the sake of a few dollars’ and calling for a boycott of magazines that publish his ‘vile lucubration’ (qtd in Anonymous 1900a: 429). A more measured critique came from the pen of writer Annie Nathan Meyer. A Sephardic Jew who dated her family’s American heritage back to the Revolution, Meyer was a public advocate for women’s education and other causes, well known in philanthropic circles for her role in raising the funds to start Barnard College. While acknowledging the ‘genius’ of Zangwill and Cahan, Meyer summarised the concerns of her affluent, professional class:

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They realise perfectly that the foreign-looking, strange-speaking Hebrew of the Ghetto, with Talmudic lore at the end of his tongue, and a frayed talith at the end of his shoulder, is infinitely better ‘copy’ than the Talmudically ignorant Americanised Hebrew, who drives in his automobile or sits with his Gentile brethren on charitable boards and missions. The Americanised Hebrew is growing a little tired of this reiteration of the Ghetto type which the Gentile world find so interesting within the covers of a book. After all, when the good American used to be piqued because the cowboy filled the horizon of literary London, it was given him to point to some novels dealing with the average American banker who prefers to take his promenades without his six-shooter. But to the Americanised Hebrew is denied in toto the luxury of pointing to any literature that pretends to describe him seriously . . . [T]here is implanted in the breast of the Jew, quite as well as in the breast of his Gentile brother, the . . . desire to hold up his resemblances rather than his differences. The Jew is doing his best to show off his fine Oxford cloth coat of latest cut, while the public persists in looking for the gabardine. (1900: 533) Meyer’s response goes deeper than the shame voiced by Wise. The common representation of the ghetto Jew is not simply an ‘academic question of Art’, she writes, but also ‘a very real social problem’ (1900: 533). Given the Jews’ history of exile and the antisemitism that continued to plague even upper-class Jews who found themselves ‘bracketed with “dogs and other nuisances” at some select hotels and apartment houses’ (1900: 534), she asked if it was not wiser for Jewish writers to promote their similarities to, rather than differences from, gentiles.3 Meyer only occasionally gave voice to what she called ‘the unwritten-up Jew’ in her own fiction (1900: 534),4 but her contemporary, California writer Emma Wolf, produced two novels, Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1901), which featured cultured, professional, well-off Jews who could not be differentiated from their gentile neighbours except in their religious practices. In its front-page review of Heirs of Yesterday, The Jewish Messenger identified Wolf as ‘one of the rare exceptions to the general rule’ in the recent explosion of Jewish fiction. ‘She is expressly omitted from the category of Jewish novelists who exploit their religion and special class of people and call the result literature’, the article stated, going on to note that Wolf’s ‘delicacy, spirituality, [and] intellectuality are not restricted to Jewish subjects, although she has written with power and suggestiveness on certain Jewish character-studies and problems’ (Anonymous 1900b: 1). The fact that Wolf did not limit herself to Jewish subjects drew notice from other critics as well. In his review of The Joy of Life (1896), one of Wolf’s novels without Jewish characters, Zangwill described ‘the Jewish Authoress’ as much more than a ‘popular “lady novelist”’. Her work ‘stands out luminous and arrestive [sic] amid the thousand-and-one tales of our over-productive generation’, wrote Zangwill, while another review of The Joy of Life concluded with the declaration: ‘Emma Wolf is not only the best Jewish fiction writer of America, but the peer of the best novelists’ (Zangwill 1897: 19; Anonymous 1897: 236).5 Largely overlooked today even by scholars of American Jewish fiction,6 Wolf’s writings, as well as her background, compel a re-evaluation of early American Jewish literary history, which has genealogically positioned eastern European immigrant writers as its foremothers and forefathers. But Wolf, arguably the first American Jewish woman fiction writer to achieve renown, was no child of the ghetto. Born in San Francisco in 1865, Wolf



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grew up in a large family of French-Alsatian pioneers. Among the first Jewish settlers in the Bay Area, her father, Simon Wolf, was a successful businessman who established cigar and general merchandise stores in San Francisco and Contra Costa County. The Wolfs belonged to Temple Emanu-El, a Reform congregation founded by traders and merchants during the Gold Rush of 1849. Members of Emanu-El formed an elite society of Jews who had emigrated from central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and who lived as neighbours in upper middle-class Pacific Heights, the setting for several of Wolf’s novels. From social and literary clubs to Christmas celebrations, the Jews of Pacific Heights modelled their community and social lives on those of their gentile neighbours.7 Wolf’s writing career began at an early age, coinciding with her father’s sudden death, most likely from a heart attack, while returning from a business trip in 1878 (Cantalupo 2002a: 9; Tornheim 1983). The death of the father comes to play a symbolic role in many of her works, and in the Jewish-themed texts especially it represents a break with tradition and serves as a catalyst for the children to marry and form families of their own. Wolf’s own illness and disability further enabled her to become a woman of letters. Due to a bout of polio, she spent most of her life in a wheelchair; this confinement prevented her from following the conventional route for women of her social echelon. From this vantage point, however, she became a careful observer of her seven sisters’ courtships and marriages, which provided her with material for her romantic tales. Constance Herriott, the heroine of her 1894 novel A Prodigal in Love, for example, devotes her life to ensuring the happiness and well-being of her five younger sisters following the death of their parents. True to her name, Constance goes so far as to sacrifice her own love for the writer Hall Kenyon, who has also claimed the heart of the second eldest sister, Eleanor. In a reversal of Jane Austen’s well-known novel of sisterhood, Wolf’s Eleanor is ‘sensibility’ to Constance’s ‘sense’, and the resulting marriage between Eleanor and Kenyon leads to heartbreak and estrangement before resolving in love and understanding. Wolf favoured realistic depictions of love and marriage, often incorporating references to fairy tales to juxtapose her realism with the earlier romantic tradition of idealised love. Her short story ‘One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye’ – which, though it appeared in The American Jewess in 1896, is devoid of explicitly Jewish content – directly acknowledges and then rejects the fairy tale on which it is based to contrast the love lives of three sisters. ‘Fairy tales are impossible nowadays’, the story begins. ‘Fact is quite interesting enough at this epoch . . . Formerly we saw as through a glass darkly, now face to face’ (Wolf 1896: 279). As for other women writers of the era, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, realism – or seeing ‘face to face’ – allowed Wolf to offer intertwined critiques of romanticised domesticity and patriarchy, albeit more understated ones. Her fiction may conclude with domestic happy endings, but the bonds of matrimony tend to restrict women’s intellectual and artistic inclinations and ambitions, a theme derived from observing members of her family. For example, one of Emma’s sisters, Alice S. Wolf, a contributor of short stories to the San Francisco literary magazine The Argonaut and other periodicals, saw her career as a writer come to an end when she married Colonel William MacDonald, by whom she had been employed as a private secretary. Alice’s one novel, House of Cards (1896), published two years before her wedding, dealt with a woman who reluctantly chose marriage over a career as a teacher. It was left to Emma, the unmarried sister, to document stories of women who sought ‘fulfilment’ – as her last novel, published in 1916, was entitled – in lives outside the home, but who instead found themselves ­following the conventional path, which often ended in a loveless marriage.

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The duties of marriage might conflict with intellectual and professional engagement in the fiction of the Wolf sisters, but Emma’s first and best-known novel, Other Things Being Equal (1892), centred instead on a different obstacle to marriage: religious differences. The heroine, Ruth Levice, the beloved only child of prosperous French Jewish immigrants who mix freely with their Christian neighbours, finds love and intellectual companionship with a Unitarian, Dr Herbert Kemp. Ruth’s father, however, objects to their marriage on the grounds of the ‘great difference between the Jewish race and traditions, and the Christian’ (Wolf 2002: 184), fearing that his daughter, and her future children, would face a lifetime of social ostracism from both religious communities. By the end of the novel, however, Mr Levice is persuaded by the force of their love to overturn his objections. Stricken ill while doing business on the East Coast, he returns home to San Francisco, where his daughter and Dr Kemp grant him his deathbed wish, marrying that very day so that he can bless their new life together and publicly sanction their union as ‘a grave experiment’ (254) in social equality.8 As an alternative to the ghetto fiction that dominates studies of early American Jewish literature, Other Things Being Equal challenges several critical paradigms, not the least of which involves the intermarriage theme. In a 1958 survey tracing the American Jewish novel from its inception in the nineteenth century through the 1920s writings of Ben Hecht and Ludwig Lewisohn, Leslie Fiedler noted the prevalence of the ‘erotic-assimilationist’ theme in which the male protagonist’s love affairs take on symbolic meaning in relation to his social ascent (1958: 21). According to Frederic Cople Jaher, the eroticisation of assimilation reached its apotheosis in post-Second World War fiction and was closely associated with the trope of the self-hating Jew; in novels by writers such as Philip Roth, the male protagonist’s lust for a non-Jewish woman, or shiksa, was equated with a desire to rid himself of Jewish difference and elevate his status in order to be accepted by the gentile majority. ‘Gentile women represent tickets of entry into middle- and upperclass WASP society; they are trophies of success’, states Jaher, juxtaposing the fantasy of the ‘genteel elegant Anglo-American goddess’ with the stereotype of the unattractive, unrefined and often vulgar ‘Jewess’ (1983: 538). While Fiedler and Jaher exclusively draw their evidence from interfaith relationships in fiction by men, scholars who also include women writers in their analysis have noted a similar dynamic, albeit one that reverses gender roles, portraying unions between Jewish women and the shaygets, or gentile man. Indeed, it is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the fiction of Anzia Yezierska that taking a gentile lover or husband is the most direct escape route from the ghetto. Sonya Vrunsky, the protagonist of Yezierska’s 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements, for example, orchestrates an elaborate performance, making herself look ‘Fifth-Avenue born’ (1995: 26), in order to win the heart of the millionaire-philanthropist John Manning and flee her working-class, immigrant roots. But if Sonya and Manning are to provide the prototype, then interfaith, inter-class unions are cross-cultural experiments doomed to failure. Sonya comes to realise that ‘just as fire and water cannot fuse, neither could her Russian Jewish soul fuse with the stolid, the unimaginative, the invulnerable thickness of [her] New England puritan’ husband (147). As Adam Sol observes, intermarriage in early American Jewish fiction represents a ‘problematic solution to the temptations of assimilation’ (2001: 230), indicating that an unhyphenated American identity is ­unattainable – perhaps even undesirable – for Jewish immigrants.9 Wolf’s novel may explore the obstacles to a union between individuals of different faiths, but it ultimately depicts intermarriage as an attainable ideal rather than a ‘problematic



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solution’. Although Other Things Being Equal offers little insight into the couple’s married life together, concluding as it does with the solemnity of Ruth’s mourning for her father, it promises a future of matrimonial harmony. Nor is intermarriage in Wolf about eradicating the protagonist’s Jewish difference in order to achieve acceptance by mainstream society. Instead, as the title suggests, intermarriage functions as a public affirmation of a social equality that has already been achieved. The ‘erotic-assimilationist’ novel depends upon the attraction of opposites; difference itself is eroticised. Cultured, refined and well-mannered, products of the same affluent social milieu, Ruth and Kemp are drawn to each other because of their similarities, not their differences. As Ruth’s father explains in describing how he overcame his opposition to the couple’s marriage: I grasped your two images before me and drew parallels: Socially – in my opinion society is a mutual drawing together of resemblances – socially each was as fair as the other. Mentally, the woman of the same stratum as the man. Physically, both were perfect types of pure, healthy blood. Morally, both were irreproachable. Religiously, both held a broad, abiding love for man and God. I stood convicted. I was in the position of a blind reactionary who, with a beautiful picture before him, fastens his critical, condemning gaze upon a rusting nail in the wall behind – a nail even now loosened, and which, some day, please God, shall fall. (Wolf 2002: 253–4) Just as Ruth’s father reverses his initial judgement for this vision of equality, Ruth, too, comes closer to seeing Mr Levice’s point of view, conceding that his claims of Jewish difference are not completely unfounded. The prospect of marriage to a Christian provides an occasion for Wolf’s heroine to express pride in the religious identity that sets her apart. Horrified, for example, by her father’s suggestion that her marriage would be perceived by others as a renunciation of Judaism, Ruth declares, ‘I am a Jewess, and will die one’ (194). Her father’s argument against intermarriage also allows Ruth to entertain, seemingly for the first time in her life, the possibility that she herself could be subjected to prejudice based on imagined racial differences. ‘Involuntarily, the Christian mind always rears its ghettoes’, she tells Kemp in response to his insistence that there is no distinction between Christian and Jew. ‘And in that mental ghetto, I want you to know, I belong – and proudly’ (328). In contrast to the physical and material barriers present in ‘eroticassimilationist’ novels, the superficial construct of Wolf’s ‘mental ghetto’ can be more easily breached. In the familiar immigrant tale of the era, the ‘foreign-looking, strange-speaking Hebrew of the Ghetto’ (Meyer 1900: 533) provided the local colour; he was a part of his surroundings, and his surroundings were a part of him. In Wolf’s fiction, however, the Jewish ‘ghetto’ is no more than a figure of speech, a means of articulating elusive cultural differences – differences that become a source of pride rather than anxiety. Spatial ‘ghettos’ do exist in Wolf’s old San Francisco, but significantly, they do not contain Jews. Observe, for instance, Wolf’s description of Ruth’s excursion into the city’s ‘foreign and picturesque’ quarters, where she is sent by Kemp, early in the novel, on errands of goodwill: So immersed was she in this call of her deeper being, she walked on, [past] the old gray Greek church with its dome and minarets, the long flights of wooden steps leading up to the tinder-box homes with their spindly balconies, the Italian fishermen and

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bambinos, the Negros and gayly-garbed Negresses, the blue-smocked Chinese with their  queues, trotting along imperturbably – the whole motley bouquet of the Latin quarter. Though she remains ‘unconscious of her . . . surroundings’ (Wolf 2002: 104), this array of racial and ethnic types sharply contrasts with Ruth’s gentility and reminds the reader of the heroine’s lack of ‘foreignness’. The portrayal of Ruth as charitable do-gooder, soulmate to the similarly selfless Kemp, further emphasises the protagonist’s affinity with the Christian majority, especially through her adherence to the doctrine of brotherly love, but without compelling her to sacrifice her religion or her family. Wolf’s novel positions its Jewish characters outside – and as outsiders to – the ghetto, anticipating Meyer’s call for fiction that describes Jews ‘seriously . . . [by] hold[ing] up . . . resemblances rather than . . . differences’ (1900: 533).10 By 1901, when Wolf published Heirs of Yesterday, her fourth novel and her only work besides Other Things Being Equal to focus on a Jewish theme, ghetto fiction had firmly secured its niche in American letters. Wolf thus explicitly positions Heirs of Yesterday as a response to ghetto literature, distancing her writing from the trope of the slum-dwelling immigrant Jew while simultaneously acknowledging a transatlantic debt to Zangwill, one of the originators of the genre. The novel’s epigraph comes from ‘A Child of the Ghetto’, the short story that introduces Zangwill’s 1898 collection Dreamers of the Ghetto: ‘For something larger had come into his life, a sense of a vaster universe without, and its spaciousness and strangeness filled his soul with a nameless trouble and a vague unrest. He was no longer a child of the Ghetto’ (Wolf 1901: 20). Transposed from the conclusion of Zangwill’s late nineteenth-century tale of a Venetian youth to the opening of Wolf’s turnof-the-twentieth-century novel, these lines characterise Heirs’ male protagonist, Philip May. A young physician who had trained in the East, Philip returns to the San Francisco home of his Yiddish-speaking father and announces his intentions to dissociate from the Jewish community and live his life as a gentile. Philip’s reasons for rejecting his Jewishness are both social (‘I have discovered that to be a Jew, turn wheresoever you will, is to be socially handicapped for life’; 35) and religious (‘I consider Judaism a dead letter, a monument to the past’; 37). As in Other Things Being Equal, the ghetto is not a spatial entity that segregates Jews, but a mental construct, a metonym for immigrant identity and a vestige of the old world that inhibits movement into modernity. Heirs of Yesterday is notable for using the literary trope of ‘passing’, a genre most often associated with African American literature in which fair-skinned, mixed-race protagonists cross the colour line to take on a white identity. Yet Fiedler and other critics have understood the genesis of American Jewish literature in terms of assimilation, not passing. The ghetto fiction of Cahan and Yezierska, for instance, depicts assimilation as a gradual process in which ties to the past are shed slowly as characters become more American. Writers such as Wolf, Meyer and Ferber, in contrast, narrate the experiences of middleclass Jews who have achieved economic stability and, with that, a degree of social equality. The trope of passing thus becomes a way to question the very basis of Jewish difference. In contrast to the assimilationist theme, the question here is not whether Jews have the potential to become Americans; the fact that they can pass effortlessly proves that they already are. We see this, for instance, in Philip’s long speech to his father in which he explains how he came to pass as gentile:



Pioneering American Jewish Women Writers 27 I was an American – with a difference. I hated the difference. I wanted to be s­ uccessful – successful socially as well as professionally. I resolved to override every obstacle to obtain that perfect success. The opening came at Harvard. Thanks to you I have been endowed with a name which tells no tales, thanks to my mother my features are equally silent. I was thrown in with a crowd of young Bostonians . . . who, through the fact that I had been seen in the Unitarian church, took me for one of their own persuasion. It was a suggested evasion of an unfit shackle. There was no preconceived deception. I simply filled the bill. (Wolf 1901: 32–3)

What is notable here is that Jewish protagonists such as Philip do not need to work to become American; they do not need to achieve what Cahan calls, in reference to David Levinsky, a ‘convincing personation’ (1960: 194) or premeditate acts of deception and illusion, as Sonya Vrunsky does in Salome of the Tenements. Instead, they ‘simply filled the bill’. In some respect, such literature may answer Meyer’s call for fiction that emphasises similarities to rather than differences from the Christian majority. However, it is also important that such texts do not erase Jewish particularity. Instead, the protagonists choose to identify as Jewish even when their class status deems it unnecessary; they reclaim Jewish difference as a source of pride rather than anxiety, or what Werner Sollors would call ‘consent’ rather than ‘descent’ (1986: 5–6). By the end of Heirs of Yesterday, Philip May appears to be converted to the view that his decision and desire to pass were ill-founded, and this conversion takes place through a romance plot – this time between individuals of the same faith. Upon his return to San Francisco from the East, Philip falls in love with a Jewish woman, Jean Willard, his neighbour and the niece of his father’s best friend. A talented pianist, Jean is a sought-after companion in her circle of young intellectuals and artists. Jean’s religion, we are told, ‘had always lain lightly upon her’ (Wolf 1901: 63) and she ‘belong[ed] to none and to all of the finely demarcated circles which go to make Jewish society’ (52). Yet Jean, like Ruth Levice in Other Things Being Equal, holds fast to her Jewishness, and Jean and Philip are kept apart by their conflicting attitudes towards their Jewish heritage. Accusing Philip of violating the Fifth Commandment, Jean views her would-be lover as responsible for the death of his father, Joseph. Joseph died heartbroken at the idea that his son, in rejecting Judaism, had also rejected him. By the end of the novel, however, Philip comes to accept if not Judaism, then love as his religion. ‘You have become my religion’, he tells Jean in an effort to win her back. ‘If you are Jewish, must I not too be a Jew?’ (285) Jean never answers his question with words. Instead, the novel ends with an image of the two of them ‘walk[ing] on together over the hill’ (285). This image is followed by a coda depicting the Manila expedition departing San Francisco Bay for the Philippines with Philip onboard, having enlisted as a surgeon in the Spanish-American War, and Jean standing with the crowds of Pacific Heights in a patriotic farewell salute. The novel’s coda works in interesting counterpoint to ghetto fiction. Wolf’s characters have indeed become part of ‘a vaster’ and more spacious ‘universe’, to refer back to the Zangwill epigraph, but they have done so by reclaiming, rather than creating greater distance from, their Jewish identities. Nor does a return to Jewish identity require a return to the spatial and metaphorical ghetto, as it often does for Yezierska’s protagonists. Instead, Philip’s acceptance of his background and heritage coincides with his participation in the project of American expansionism – a fitting ending for a novel that expands the canon westward and points in the direction of new frontiers for early American Jewish literature.

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New Frontiers in Early Twentieth-Century American Jewish Literature The inclusion of Emma Wolf in early American Jewish literary history may help to clear trails overgrown by time, leading to the recovery of other pre-First World War Jewish women writers whose work similarly provides alternatives to the ghetto tale. As a member of San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El and Philomath Club, a women’s club founded by and for upper middle-class Jewish intellectuals, Wolf would have been acquainted with another Jewish woman novelist of the era, reformer and socialite Bettie Lowenberg. Born in Prairie Bluff, Alabama in 1845, Lowenberg, née Lilienfeld, migrated to California as an adolescent by way of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where she was educated at the Convent of St Vincent; her experiences as a Jewish girl at a Catholic convent in a small town on the Mississippi River supplied the seeds for her novel The Irresistible Current (1908). Arriving in San Francisco in 1860, she went on to marry businessman Isidor Lowenberg, with whom she had two children, and became a prominent civic leader, active in a variety of clubs and charities, both Jewish and ecumenical. In 1893, following a trip to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she attended the Jewish Women’s Congress as part of the World Parliament on Religion, Lowenberg was inspired to launch the Philomath Club, conceiving of it as a literary association exclusively for Jewish women; membership was drawn in part from the Sisterhood of Temple Emanu-El to which Lowenberg belonged. ‘I was imbued by the idea that there were many intellectual and brilliant Jewish women in San Francisco who lacked the opportunity of development by organization’, recalled Lowenberg of the Philomath Club’s inception. In response to this need, she envisioned a ‘conservative, but progressive’ women’s club that would ‘promote the general culture of its members through discussion of educational, moral and social topics’ (1916: 57). In the last decades of her life, Lowenberg combined her commitment to civic ideals with her literary inclinations as the author of three novels, which, as reviewers were quick to point out, were all written with a social purpose in mind.11 The Irresistible Current, the first and most autobiographical of these novels, might be dubbed the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of interfaith unions, though it was never to reach anywhere near the readership of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist best-seller. Lowenberg’s sentimental novel initially treads ground familiar to readers of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant fiction, as the first two chapters focus on Ruth Rheinberg’s transatlantic journey to New York to join her brother, Joseph, following the deaths of their parents in Wiesbaden, Germany. The novel takes an unexpected turn, however, in Chapter Three, jumping ahead more than eighteen years to find Joseph and Ruth, both now married, settled in a small town on the western frontier, where their daughters, the cousins Letitia Rheinberg and Grace Feld, are preparing to graduate from the local convent school. The frontier town provides the backdrop for Lowenberg’s exploration of the social exclusion faced by middle-class Jews: Civilization had reached the mighty West of the New Continent and had built the town of D-------, in Missouri, on the grand Mississippi. Progress had been born there, but struggled feebly for existence. The child was not yet strong enough to strangle the serpent Prejudice, which flourished on the soil and raised its hardy head with pride and insolence. (Lowenberg 1908: 24)



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As opposed to the spatial segregation imposed upon Jewish characters in fiction set in the urban ghetto, here there is little to separate and distinguish the town’s few Jewish families from their Christian neighbours. The novel tests the barriers of religious difference through a Victorian marriage plot, juxtaposing the courtships of endogamous Jewish and gentile couples with star-crossed interfaith romances. The ‘serpent Prejudice’ primarily resides in the mansion of sisters Alice and Amelia Hill, whose opposing personalities correspond with those of the Jewish cousins, angelic Grace and mean-spirited Letitia. Over the course of the 558-page novel, Amelia, the snootier and more vocally antisemitic of the Hill sisters, does finally overcome her prejudice when she falls in love with the town’s Jewish attorney, Mark Anthony Everard, and puts aside her ‘religious scruples’ (397) to accept his persistent proposals of marriage. The couple are able to resolve their religious differences by finding common ground in universalism; as Everard declares to his wife, ‘You are no Christian, I no Jew, we are simply Monotheists, believers in God and in immortality’ (547). As in Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal, intermarriage in The Irresistible Current is not a ‘problematic solution to the temptations of assimilation’ (Sol 2001: 230). Instead, religious difference in general, rather than Jewishness specifically, is construed as an unnecessary obstacle to true love between social equals. In the case of the novel’s sentimental heroine, Grace Feld, the social taboo of Christian–Jewish marriage leads to suffering and tragedy. Travelling with her parents to New York (a trip that notably includes the daughter’s first visit to a synagogue), Grace finds herself torn between two suitors, wealthy William LaValle, who, as her mother puts it, ‘is of our religion, and is every way a man to be encouraged in respectable families’ (Lowenberg 1908: 110), and Dr Arthur Montmartre, a Unitarian minister, whose kindness and intellect win Grace’s heart. But when Montmartre is unable to comply with Grace’s request that he convert to Judaism so that they can marry, Grace experiences her first heartbreak, setting in motion a chain of tragic events. Back in Missouri, Grace comes to accept LaValle, but Letitia, jealous of her cousin’s good fortune, schemes to break up their engagement. Letitia’s machinations lead, in rapid succession, to the financial ruin of the Felds, the suicide of Grace’s father and the death of her mother. Taking refuge at the convent, where she is cared for by her former teachers, the grief-stricken orphan finds comfort in her religious duties and decides to convert to Catholicism. Yet Grace, now the novice-elect Sister Catharine, is unable to reconcile her Jewish identity with her adopted Roman Catholic religion; she falls fatally ill and returns to her cousin Letitia’s home to wait out her final days. Those who loved Grace put aside their religious differences to join together around her deathbed: It was a harmonious, though sad, solemn and impressive scene. Such a closing tableau is seldom witnessed. Here were represented various denominations, the Jew, the Catholic and the Unitarian, supplicating God for one Jewish soul. Oh, Faith, brotherly love and sympathy, after such a concordant exhibition, a millennium on earth seems possible. Angels must have smiled over this chorus of religious sentiments, which partook of Divine unison. Such fruits of the reconciliation of different religious beliefs will be the euthanasia of atheism. Truly out of death comes life. (Lowenberg 1908: 536) The novel employs a device common to Victorian sentimentalism in which the death of an innocent transfigures the living in an effort to heal earthly divisions. Like the passing of Stowe’s Little Eva, whose love for all humankind promised to abolish differences between the enslaved and the free, the death of Grace Feld asserts the need to replace religious difference, and the ensuing prejudice, with a universal religion that would create harmony and

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unity among its believers. Through universalism, Lowenberg imagines an alternative to the pluralist and assimilationist stances prevalent in early American Jewish fiction; rather than have her characters fully embrace their Jewish difference, or erase their ethno-religious specificity in order to conform to the Christian majority, here the ‘various denominations, the Jew, the Catholic, and the Unitarian’ come together to form a new religious ideal. In this respect, The Irresistible Current goes a step further than Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal. Instead of simply ‘hold[ing] up . . . resemblances rather than . . . differences’ (Meyer 1900: 533) between Jews and gentiles, Lowenberg’s intermarriage plot demonstrates that social equality can only be achieved by eliminating differences. With their western settings and middle-class characters who defy Jewish stereotypes, the novels of Wolf and Lowenberg are many miles away – figuratively and literally – from the ghetto tales that have long dominated scholarship on early American Jewish literary history. For these California writers, the frontier fostered an expansiveness of vision in regard to religious identity and assimilation that differs in significant ways from the familiar narrative of the immigrant outsider labouring among the sweatshops and pushcarts while striving to become an American. There remains considerable work to be done in uncovering this tradition of western writers and examining how they expand and diversify the current view of Jews’ and women’s contributions to American literature. Scholars of modern Jewish fiction would do well, for instance, to consider another San Francisco-based writer, Miriam Michelson, whose remarkable range includes science fiction, a historical novel and literary journalism, alongside many stories about spunky, slang-speaking New Women protagonists that won her a popular following among female readers. The daughter of Polish immigrants-turned-pioneers who prospered in America by selling supplies to miners during the Gold Rush, Michelson set her fiction in California, Nevada and the Dakotas. In addition to drawing on her childhood adventures growing up on the frontier, Michelson also found ample material for her stories in her experiences as a journalist, which allowed her, a single woman, to travel to all corners of the United States, interviewing figures such as Emma Goldman and Susan B. Anthony and reporting on historic events such as the annexation of Hawaii and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A Yellow Journalist, Michelson’s 1905 collection of interlocking stories about a female reporter, inspired in turn the work of another western Jewish woman writer, Edna Ferber.12 Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885 to a Hungarian immigrant father and a secondgeneration German Jewish mother, Ferber spent most of her childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin. She became the first female reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent and went on to write for the Milwaukee Journal. Ferber’s first novel, Dawn O’Hara (1911), closely followed Michelson’s lead in its portrayal of the New Woman as journalist. Her second, Fanny Herself (1917), similarly centres on a working woman, while extending, too, the legacies of Lowenberg and Wolf in its treatment of provincial Jewish life in the mid-West and the theme of passing for gentile. The novel tells the story of Fanny Brandeis, a smalltown Jew from Wisconsin, who tries to leave her Jewishness behind when she sets out to ‘make something of herself’ (Ferber 2001: 107) as a businesswoman in Chicago; like Philip May in Heirs of Yesterday, Fanny comes to regret her decision to cut off her heritage and ultimately reclaims her Jewish identity. Fanny Herself was Ferber’s only full-length work with a Jewish theme, but the character of Fanny Brandeis served as the prototype for the author’s later heroines: spirited, independent women who achieve success by crossing ethno-racial lines and flouting gender norms. Through the adventures of such pioneering heroines, many of them frontierswomen, Ferber, like Michelson before her, set out to



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document a diverse, multi-ethnic panorama that extended along the Mississippi River in Show Boat (1926); across the heartland in So Big (1924), Cimarron (1930) and Come and Get It (1935); south to the Texas border in Giant (1952); and north to the new territory of Alaska in Ice Palace (1958). Writing in 1932, Albert Halper may have claimed that the American Jewish novel and short story fell ‘into a limited number of patterns’, but it was not true, in fact, that Jewish writers were unwilling to move beyond the ghetto. Instead, this sense of a limited terrain was, and continues to be, the product of a critical myopia that overlooks Jewish women writers, particularly those whose work does not conform to the ingrained expectations that literature by American Jews has to focus on the urban, working-class, immigrant experience in order to qualify as ‘ethnic’. The recovery of fiction by Progressive Era women writers such as Wolf, Lowenberg, Michelson and Ferber offers a fuller and more textured account of Jewish literary production in the United States, complementing and complicating the established canon by adding multi-faceted perspectives on gender, class, religion and regionalism.

Notes   1. Gentile writers, too, found rich source material in the Jewish ghetto, from the sociological tales of Hutchins Hapgood and Jacob Riis to Irish American writer Myra Kelly’s stories of Jewish schoolchildren; E. R. Lipsett’s ‘Denny the Jew’ series, about an Irish boy who becomes a Jew; and the writings of Henry Harland who published under the Jewish pseudonym Sidney Luska. Nor did Jewish writers confine themselves to writing about ghetto Jews; Cahan, for example, wrote about Italian immigrants in his story ‘A Marriage by Proxy’ (1900) and Swedish and Romanian immigrants in ‘Dumitru and Sigrid’ (1901). While the majority of works by Jewish writers from this period focused on ghettos in the US, some looked back to the ghettos of the old world; Martha Wolfenstein’s novel Idylls of the Gass (1901) and story collection The Renegade and Other Stories (1905) are cases in point. Although the present survey focuses on Anglophone fiction, this period also produced a rich tradition of ghetto fiction by Yiddish writers such as Sholem Asch; for a sampling of such writings in English translation, see Rosenfeld (1967). The tradition of ghetto writing extended far beyond the First World War, evident, for example, in works such as Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923), Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and Daniel Fuchs’s trilogy of Brooklyn novels, set in a Williamsburg tenement (1934, 1936, 1937).   2. Most existing surveys of prewar American Jewish fiction reinforce the emphasis on ghetto narratives, often to the exclusion of other writers. See, for example, Chametzky (1982), Chyet (1972), Fiedler (1958), Fine (1973a; 1973b; 1988), Harap (1974; 1987), Liptzin (1966), Marovitz (1988; 1990) and Sternlicht (2004). For some interesting early attempts to offer more comprehensive and diverse surveys of early American Jewish writing, see Lewisohn (1951) and Kiper Frank (1930).   3. Meyer was to come back to this topic four years later when she published a letter to The New York Times Book Review in response to Edith Wharton’s depiction of a money-grubbing Jewish art dealer in her 1904 story ‘The Pot-Boiler’. Questioning why ‘the mediaeval Jew of letters’ still dominates literature of the day, Meyer called for a writer who possessed ‘the delightful certainty of Mrs. Wharton’s art’ to paint a realistic portrait, suggesting, for example, that the Jewish patron of the arts would make a suitable and more accurate subject for literature (1904: 871).   4. Neither of Meyer’s two novels features explicitly Jewish characters, but some of her short stories did. See, for example, ‘Henry Brooke, Jr.’ (1895) in The American Jewess, about an

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  5.

  6.

  7.   8.

  9. 10.

11. 12.

Lori Harrison-Kahan upper-class Jew who passes for gentile in order to be admitted to his college’s drama club, and ‘The Shoe Pinches Mr. Samuels’ (1935) in the NAACP journal The Crisis, which features a Southern rabbi who must convince his congregation to speak out against the lynching of African Americans before Jews become the next victims of racial violence. On the relationship between Wolf and Zangwill, who served as her mentor by means of transatlantic correspondence, see Cantalupo (2002b). Wolf also fictionalises this epistolary literary mentorship in her short story ‘The Conflict’, published in The Smart Set in 1906. In common with the other stories in The Smart Set, this one does not identify its characters as Jewish. Notable exceptions include Cantalupo (2002a; 2002b; 2003; 2004) and Lichtenstein (1992). There is also evidence that Wolf received attention during her lifetime from scholars interested in Jewish fiction. For instance, her work was included on a syllabus for a course on ‘Jewish Characters in Fiction’ first published in 1903 and revised in 1911 by Rabbi Harry Levi in the Menorah for the Jewish Chautauqua Society. See Rosenbaum (2000; 2009). Given the dates, it is unlikely that Alice’s marriage to Colonel William MacDonald directly inspired Other Things Being Equal, as Barbara Cantalupo claims (2002b: 13), but the existence of the novel and the fact of her sister’s marriage together suggest the timeliness of the intermarriage theme. See also Shapiro (1996) and Lambert (2014: 118–30). It is notable, however, that the novel promotes such ‘resemblances’ between Jews and their Christian brethren at the expense of cross-racial and inter-ethnic solidarity. The novel may allow for a successful interreligious union and effectively upends Jewish stereotypes, but it seems to do so by reinforcing stereotypes, and the ‘ghettoisation’, of other racial and ethnic groups. See, for example, Anonymous (1908). See Ferber (1939: 115).

2 SENSIBILITIES OF ESTRANGEMENT: DELMORE SCHWARTZ, ISAAC ROSENFELD AND SAUL BELLOW Catherine Morley

I

n Saul Bellow’s 1951 short story ‘Looking for Mr. Green’, a lonely clerk called George Grebe makes his way through a desolated, post-Depression cityscape in search of the recipient of his last relief cheque. The story takes us into the weary consciousness of Grebe and reflects his overriding impression of loss in the damp, dark city, his grief at the death of his father and over the failure of his own intellectual endeavours, and his prevailing sense of alienation. As Grebe moves through the predominantly black section of the city, seeking out the disabled and the downtrodden, his mind wanders from his failed dreams of academic prowess to thoughts on the inequity of circumstances, from his disappointed father to his overbearing boss Raynor, and from relief recipients such as the assertive eastern European immigrant Staika to the wise, avuncular Winston Field. Grebe moves from a deep sense of the onset of an emotional depression to an almost epiphanic realisation of the necessity of self-possession and pride. Like the nation, overcoming its economic depression, he too must shrug off his black dog and find a purpose and outlet for his energy. He must commit himself to a purpose and through it attain the completeness of the spirit which seems to evade him. So he resolves to find the elusive Mr Green. As with all Bellow’s stories, ‘Looking for Mr. Green’ marries the layered textures of geographical space with the psychological state of the protagonist: the journey through a crumbling Chicago neighbourhood, ‘the blight bitten portion of the city between Cottage Grove and Ashland’, mirrors the inner meanderings of Grebe (2001: 179). The deployment of pathetic fallacy, with the grey skies and the gloomy tenements, assists this merging of the material and immaterial worlds which so characterises Bellow’s work, the quest for transcendence of the clod-hobbled mortal man with his emotional frailties. This structuring contrast between the earthly and the abstract in the mechanics of the story is repeated in Grebe’s idealistic insistence upon solving the mystery of Mr Green and the worldly realism of the scene (embodied in the passage of time) which insists upon the futility and unwieldiness of looking beyond appearances. And of course allied to this, the story betrays a religious sensibility, evident in the opening epigraph from Ecclesiastes: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might’ (174). Eusebio Rodrigues has recognised the story as a modern reworking of the Old Testament and Ketuvim story of Koheleth, wherein the limits and futility of the pursuit of wisdom are outlined and the joys of everyday tasks and simple pleasures celebrated. That the biblical story upon which ‘Looking for Mr. Green’

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is based straddles the tension between earthly and intellectual pleasures is yet one more example of the dualistic nature of Bellow’s story. But it is also a reminder of the intellectual and literary tradition from which Bellow emerges, a tradition which addresses head-on the uncomfortable tension between a secular and a spiritual life. Indeed, the story encapsulates many of the features of the literary inheritance Bellow shares with Jewish contemporaries such as Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld and others who were part of the group known as the New York Intellectuals: the isolated, scholarly, discontented and lonely man; the emphasis on city space as both a determinant and reflector of a consciousness in transition or approaching awakening; the fascination with the possibility of a plane of existence beyond the immediate; and an overriding sense of ambiguity or failure to somehow achieve the fulfilment seemingly promised by the intellectual life. All of these themes and the techniques with which they are explored are evident in the work of Schwartz and Rosenfeld; and Bellow’s debts to both writers are well documented.1 Rosenfeld appears, disguised, in a number of Bellow’s fictions: he was the model for Zetland in ‘Zetland: By a Character Witness’ (1984) and there is much of him in Dahfu in Henderson and the Rain King (1959). Schwartz, famously, was the inspiration for the curmudgeonly poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, mentor and friend to Bellow’s Charlie Citrine, the protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift (1976). Bellow’s portrait of Humboldt directly reflects Schwartz’s rise to fame and his initially warm guidance of the younger writer: The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that. An avant-garde writer, the first of a new generation, he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty, he was learned. The guy had it all. . . ‘You have sensibility,’ he said. He was a pioneer in the use of this word. Sensibility later made it big. Humboldt was very kind. He introduced me to people in the Village and he got me books to review. I always loved him. (1976: 3) The warmth of emotion in this opening passage from Humboldt’s Gift certainly reflects Bellow’s feelings towards Schwartz; while the ‘gift’ of the novel’s title refers to the late writer’s bequest of a screenplay, the novel, as a whole, suggests a literary inheritance passed from one writer to another. Citrine’s exuberant and loquacious retrospective narrative charts the contours of grubby gangster life and presents metaphysical musings on the nature of existence. It holds out the possibilities of what art can achieve but also illuminates its limits, as well as the incongruity of the spiritual quest in contemporary life. Bellow met Schwartz in the 1940s at the latter’s book-crammed Village apartment and initially played the role of the disciple to the older and, at that stage, more successful writer. Their relationship was to change after Bellow’s critical and commercial success with Herzog (1964), the story of an unsuccessful academic who struggles to reconcile the intellectual ideas which drive him with the more prosaic realities of marriage, sex and divorce. Ironically the protagonist of the book, which brought Bellow international acclaim and provoked Schwartz’s resentment, bears striking similarities to Schwartz. Indeed, Schwartz’s life offers a case study in the doomed potential of the intellectual life, with mental illness and alcoholism impeding his art in the years before his early death in 1966. The literary lineage from Schwartz to Bellow is especially evident upon examination of the stories from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (1978), the very title



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of which anchors the immaterial in the concrete. Schwartz’s reputation as a poet perhaps eclipses his work as a prose writer but, as James Atlas has observed, for a spell in the 1930s Schwartz concentrated almost entirely upon short story writing, especially tales written in the autobiographical mode, such as ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ (1938), which is undoubtedly his most famous story. The semi-autobiographical figure of the lonely, alienated and socially isolated Jewish man recurs throughout the collection in the figure of Shenandoah Fish.2 In ‘New Year’s Eve’ (1945), Fish reappears in a thinly veiled critique of the Partisan Review clique. The story includes characters based on F. W. Dupee, then an editor of the journal, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Abel, Gertrude Buckman and Leon Berg. Not unlike ‘Looking for Mr. Green’ with its biblical epigraph, ‘New Year’s Eve’ begins in the tone of a contemporary parable: The evening of the profound holiday drew much strength and unhappiness from such depths as the afternoon, the week, the year of unhappiness, and the lives that had long been lived. This secular holiday is full of pain because it is an ending and a beginning. In this way, it participates in some of the strangeness and difficulty of both birth and death. (Schwartz 1978c: 94) While grounding the story in a specific and identifiable locale, the opening gives it a universal and transcendent quality which extends beyond the Centaur Editions party set to speak to a wider cultural predicament of malaise, alienation and, indeed, transition (a phase between certainties). That those involved with the press are familiar with this kind of cultural anomie is evident in Arthur Harris’s objection to Macdonald’s inviting of complete strangers to the party: ‘There is enough alienation in modern life’ (96). But the argument between the men is not unique to them or their press as, we are told, ‘elsewhere in other boxes of the great city old conflicts were renewed and new ones quickly engendered’ (96), thus reiterating the sense that the story transcends the particular to encompass a broader implication of moral and social uneasiness, encapsulated in the awkward, transitory figure of Shenandoah. While the narrative is largely played out indoors, the urban setting of the story and the spaces or ‘boxes’ within the city play a large part in the exposition of the psychological malaise which unfolds at the party. The story begins with a lonely, male Jewish figure making his way through an urban landscape on a portentous date, in the early afternoon of the last day of 1937. Shenandoah seeks out the editors at his publishers for company, chat and praise for his recent book – ironically for a man in search of conversation, a book of fictional dialogues between factual personages. A little later in the evening, we meet Shenandoah again travelling across town in a streetcar with his friend Nicholas O’Neil, rehearsing more or less the same argument we have seen earlier between Harris and Macdonald. The argument, which we learn becomes more ontological and abstract in tone as it progresses, is carried across space and time in the streetcar to its conclusion, although it never really ends but rather insinuates itself into the party. As they travel and quarrel, Shenandoah’s girlfriend, Wilhelmina Gold, argues with her parents over the writer’s failure to call for her, instead allowing his date to wait for him at a street corner. The badtempered afternoon endured by each of the protagonists continues into the evening, with the displaced party arguing in the taxi en route to Harris’s house, and both Nicholas O’Neil and Delia Jones suffering feelings of alienation from the group. Even those already at the party in Harris’s home are preoccupied with feelings of disaffection:

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In general, the guests already present suffered in one or another way from the emotions which had distorted the newcomers. Some felt that they were not wanted before they arrived, and when they arrived they felt they saw that this view was incorrect, since no one seemed to care very much who was present. (101–2) This sense of uneasiness, of foreboding, of insidious argument culminates in the showdown between Oliver and Delia Jones. Having endured years of unhappiness because of her husband’s infidelities and her own inability to find a paramour, the heartsick young wife strikes both her husband and Arthur Harris, and her screams mark the passing of midnight. The striking of the men and the woman’s screams in place of the traditional ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the threshold of the year naturally cast a pall over the occasion, locking each of the characters, but especially Shenandoah, into ‘what was soon to be a post-Munich sensibility: complete hopelessness of perception and feeling’ (113). Old acquaintances will be forgotten and, indeed, by the end of the story both Shenandoah’s girlfriend and his best friend resolve to give him up for good. Thus the loneliness and sense of having nowhere else to go which propelled Shenandoah to the offices of Centaur Editions earlier in the day dog him through the turn of the year. And just as the story begins with Shenandoah in motion, so it concludes with the young writer effectively alone as he descends to the underground, thus underscoring the theme of alienation which characterises the story. But what perhaps emerges most resoundingly from the story is a sense of paralysis, paralysis by grief and loneliness, paralysis by fear, a paralysis which is underscored by a kind of suffocating geographical stasis throughout. Arthur Harris’s renovated tenement apartment, spatial home to the party but also home to the ‘psychological place of the party [which] was the sense of having nowhere else to go’ (101), is itself a site of strife, having earlier in the day been the scene of Frances Harris’s irritation at her husband’s failure to come home on time. Moreover, the apartment is the fractured site of resentments, with a festering O’Neil in the bathroom with his feet in a bucket of water and Delia and Oliver locked in argument in the bedroom. Earlier, of course, the protagonist and his friend argued in the confined space of the streetcar, Wilhelmina and her mother quarrelled in the intimate space of the bedroom, and Oliver and Shenandoah argued in the car while Delia fretted over the closeness of her fellow taxi travellers. This fractured apartment space is clearly symptomatic of the breakdown in human relations, the ‘difficulty of direct communication in modern life’ (106). The various pockets of resentment across the city suggest a kind of inexpressive anxiety, a failure within each example to break out of the confines of the isolated psychological and geographical space. While the influence of a story like ‘New Year’s Eve’ upon Bellow’s ‘Looking for Mr. Green’ is obvious in terms of its tone, tropes and theme, another lineage resonates too. The story exhibits a modernist sensibility which can be linked to James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), a story in which spiritual paralysis is intertwined with a sense of physical enclosure. At the threshold of the New Year, Schwartz’s partygoers turn their attention outward: They all went to the window to make sure it was already the New Year; and they saw that the rain had turned into snow, the most beautiful of all the illusions of the natural world. Yes, it was 1938. How strange that it should be 1938, how strange seemed the word and the fact. No one knew that this was to be the infamous year of the Munich Pact, but everyone knew that soon there would be a new world war because only a few unimportant or powerless people believed in God or in the necessity of a just society sufficiently to be willing to give anything dear for it. (Schwartz 1978c: 113)



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This scene at the window precedes Nicholas and Wilhelmina’s New Year resolutions to do without Shenandoah, suggesting perhaps that the shift from personal animosities to the beauty of the natural world engenders some kind of change within the characters. For Shenandoah, the snow is indicative of a different plane of existence, ‘some other world . . . some world of goodness; some other life; some life where the nobility we admire is lived’ (113). Thus the story returns to this notion of a disconnection between the earthly realities of the lives we lead and the beatific life to which we aspire. The snow in its delicate beauty holds out the possibility of a higher plane of existence, yet reminds us of the distance between that world and that which we must inhabit. The snow, after all, is an ‘illusion’. The scene strongly resembles that at the end of ‘The Dead’, another tale of paralysis and incipient death, at the end of which a battle-weary Gabriel Conroy, retiring from a tense party, looks from a window at Dublin city skies: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce 2000: 225) For Gabriel, limp and wounded from an evening of insult and argument, the snow in both celestial and earthy hues of ‘silver and dark’ precipitates an epiphany, indeed perhaps even a resolution. But the snow also connects the two worlds of ‘the living and the dead’ (225). Schwartz’s debts to Joyce ought not to be overstated, but neither should they be overlooked.3 The party scene, the alienated male figure clutched by a debilitating selfconsciousness, the antagonistic women, the intellectual infighting (between Shenandoah and Oliver and between Gabriel and Miss Ivors) and the romantic wistfulness are common to both stories. But perhaps more importantly, both stories demonstrate through images of urban entrapment modern man’s failure to achieve spiritual and intellectual freedom. Certainly throughout Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the city itself plays an important role in the lives of its inhabitants. A dark, oppressive and shadowy space, Joyce described it as ‘the centre of paralysis’, a space wherein characters fail to progress and where dreams and idealism are thwarted (1975: 83). In ‘The Dead’, party guests are announced by the ‘wheezy hall-door bell’ of the Morkan sisters’ ‘dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island’ (Joyce 2000: 175), a house teeming with illness, ill-temper and grievance, and the city itself is swathed in ‘a dull yellow light’ from whence ‘the sky seemed to be descending’ (214). Even the slush underfoot seems to ensnare the city walkers. Gabriel Conroy is insulted in spatial terms, described as a ‘West Briton’ for his reviews for The Daily Express and told off for holidaying in Europe instead of in the Aran Islands. Goaded to the point of exasperation, Gabriel retorts that he is ‘sick of my own country, sick of it!’ (190). The reference to illness is yet another example of the collection’s extended metaphor of disease, a metaphor not unlike the ‘post-Munich sensibility’ which engulfs Shenandoah and his friends, ‘complete hopelessness of perception and feeling’ (Schwartz 1978c: 113). The linkage of these sensibilities of estrangement to geographical spaces is compelling: Joyce’s Dublin was at the time riven with poverty, tuberculosis and industrial dispute; moreover it was a city still governed by a foreign power from Westminster. Schwartz’s reference to the Munich agreement refers of course to the territory of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking borderland claimed from Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in 1938.

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Each space implies the sense of an individual at the mercy of forces much larger than the self; each suggests the frailty of the individual; and each gestures towards a kind of suffocating enclosure, an insidious entrapment against which the protagonists pitch their personal idealism. Another point on which Joyce’s and Schwartz’s stories seem to converge is in the way in which the geographical spaces that inhibit and unsettle their protagonists become a metaphor for the deterioration of interpersonal relationships. When Gabriel is mocked by Miss Ivors for failing to know his own country, the rebuke is not simply a matter of geographical ignorance but refers to the distance between Gabriel and his Connaught-born wife Gretta. Throughout the evening, Gabriel comes to realise the source of his wife’s sadness and regret, the widening emotional gulf between them, and her ultimate unknowability to him. Therefore, the very end of the story, in which he resolves to set out on his own journey westward, is to be read as a vow to mend and restore emotional and physical plenitude with his wife. By contrast, Shenandoah Fish is not offered the opportunity to restore relations with Wilhelmina, and the gap of ‘emptiness and depression’ between them widens by the end of the story: ‘I wish I had not come,’ said Wilhelmina, ‘I will never have any children.’ ‘I won’t marry you, unless we are going to have children,’ said Shenandoah stupidly. ‘I don’t want to marry you,’ said Wilhelmina. (Schwartz 1978c: 114) Until this point, the couple have been observing each other all evening from a distance across the room, with Shenandoah lost in benevolent, and perhaps naive, contemplation of the uneasy relationship between Proust and Gide, and Wilhelmina chattering about the prosaic realities of her work at the Emergency Relief Bureau. Similarly, relations between Oliver and Delia deteriorate throughout the party, with each viewing the other across the room; Oliver moves between shame and embarrassment with his wife, while she is mired in deep confusion, failing to ‘understand their understanding’ (103). Shenandoah, disenchanted by his argument with Oliver, looks across the room at his intellectual nemesis and declares that ‘we are all antagonists’ (107). What emerges from each of these relationships is, ultimately, a failure of sensibility. Not one of the characters can actively imagine what it feels like to occupy the psychological world of another: therefore, Shenandoah cannot see Oliver’s deep uneasiness with himself, Oliver is affronted by Shenandoah’s idealism, Wilhelmina cannot reconcile herself to Shenandoah’s self-consciousness, and Oliver utterly fails to attribute to his wife any intellectual or rational capability at all. While spatial references abound – the distances across and between rooms, images of rooms as box-like containers, and even the paragraphing of the story (wherein characters are depicted in isolation) – the snow-clad New York city space is the key to the representation of this chasm between individuals, rather like the snow-covered landscape in ‘The Dead’. Presenting the illusion of innocence, freshness and new beginnings, the white cityscape also presents a kind of death mask which briefly shields the putrefaction of human relations and the lonely isolation and terror of modern man. Isaac Rosenfeld’s story ‘The Hand That Fed Me’, which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1944 and was later collected in Alpha and Omega (1966), also relates the story of a broken relationship between a young Jewish writer, Joe Feigenbaum, and a gentile woman, Ellen. This epistolary narrative, which concludes on New Year’s Eve 1942, gradually imparts Feigenbaum’s grief for the lost promise of love, his abiding sense of exile, and his vacillating between emotions ranging from anger to affection, and from antipathy to



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tenderness. Through a process of slowly distilled revelation, we learn of Joe’s initial (and final) encounter with Ellen at the Works Progress Administration and his subsequent work for the Writers’ Project, their flirtations, their walk to her home and their shared lunch of borscht and rye bread. Not unlike ‘Looking for Mr. Green’ and ‘New Year’s Eve’, Rosenfeld’s story is an exposition of psychological consciousness, focused on the Jewish intellectual’s condition of alienation and the perhaps necessary rupture in communication between the lonely intellectual figure and those around him. Indeed, ‘The Hand That Fed Me’ takes as its premise the inability (and perhaps unwillingness on Ellen’s part) to communicate: Joe’s letters from 21 December to 31 December go unanswered and we learn that on many occasions his attempts to see Ellen have been unsuccessful. Ironically, it is the absent and voiceless Ellen who succeeds in communicating, puncturing Joe’s world with her unexpected Christmas card. But through her silence, she also communicates a desire to cease contact. Ellen, not unlike Joyce’s unknowable Gretta, sets her would-be paramour on a journey of introspection which is both hopeful and hopeless, as articulated in Joe’s New Year message: I forgive you and release you, Ellen. You are beautiful – go. But God, if you only knew, if you only knew how willing I am – always – to take the risk of my happiness! Happy New Year! (Rosenfeld 1966: 18) At this transitional moment of the year Joe’s tortured admission that he would relinquish and risk everything for the joy he momentarily shared with Ellen reveals a consciousness in flux, a kind of No Man’s Land wherein the soul will fret eternally for what might have been. Again, the spaces of the story are important in illuminating the consciousness through which the narrative is filtered. At a meta-level, the spatial compartments which constitute each of Joe’s letters act as containers of sorts for the emotions which gush forth as he progresses through his days. Each letter acts as a kind of vessel, moving Joe towards his ambiguous New Year’s resolution but also constraining him, limiting his engagement with Ellen to unanswered words. The letters, while bringing him into contact with Ellen in a way that has been missing for the past three years, also keep her at a distance. Paradoxically, his words bring her closer but also alienate him from her, such that by the time we reach the final letter Ellen is further from him, in terms of temporal distance (and, we sense, in terms of emotional distance) than she has ever been. Joe’s harsh words, while saturated with unfulfilled desire, have undoubtedly inhibited the possibility of any fond return of love on Ellen’s part. But, at the same time, Joe’s words have released the shackles of his own heart so that the paucity of his own existence is clear to him. Joe’s words, the letters he composes, those epistolary compartments of the narrative, serve to liberate him from the resentments of the previous three years. We learn that while working for the WPA Writers’ Project, Joe is assigned the composition of a report on pigeon racing in the city. He completes a 100,000-word report before the project is shut down due to the war effort and the financial squeeze on New Deal funds. In a humorous but deeply moving entreaty in the last of his letters to Ellen, Joe speaks of the liberating capacity of his words: Besides, WPA will come back, have no fear. Do you think I wrote my report on pigeon racing for nothing? It stands there in the files, waiting, ready to be taken up again. Some

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day when the war is over, and the machines have been removed from the old buildings, after the dust has settled and the activity has died down, the steel vaults will be unlocked and the steel files will be brought out, and the pigeons will flutter again. (17) Joe’s words, the pigeons, await their liberation, and this metaphor of the birds being released from the steel vaults suggests the writer’s faith in words and language to release him and reinstate him with the brief happiness he once experienced with Ellen. The ‘steel vaults and the steel files’ which encase Joe’s words are manifold in their allusive possibilities: they may represent Joe’s letters which enclose his struggling emotions; they may represent a spatialised perception of the past, when Joe was happy; but, perhaps most poignantly, they represent Joe himself, a man who has built a protective fortress around his emotions and his heart. This fortress not only keeps Ellen at bay but is a means of preserving himself and his identity as a writer. For while ostensibly a story of a lovelorn young man, ‘The Hand That Fed Me’ is primarily about Joe’s coming to terms with his own identity and his social position as a writer. This introspective analysis was crucial to Rosenfeld’s conception of the short story, a mode which he felt should give itself over to ‘psychological interest’, a forum wherein ‘character could emerge in vividness of emotions, in the ambivalence of desire and the unity of moral meaning’ (Rosenfeld 1962b: 57). The Christmas card from Ellen is the catalyst for Joe’s torrent of introspective angst, releasing a glut of pent-up anger at her dismissal of him, as well as fierce self-loathing and nostalgia. The Christmas card reminds him of a time when he was regarded as having some kind of social value, a civic role, an ‘official existence’: ‘Do you appreciate what it means for a writer to exist officially?’ (Rosenfeld 1966: 6). And here, perhaps, is the root of the story: Ellen came into and then disappeared from his life at a moment when Joe’s conception of himself and his consolidation of an identity as a writer was cemented. His meeting with Ellen at the moment he publicly identifies himself as a writer instils confidence in him and, naturally, he associates finding the girl in the basement WPA office with finding himself. It is apposite therefore that he finds her seductively sucking the point of a pencil: I remember that summer, no work, no friends, no conversation, the realization I was meant for WPA. What a wonderful summer of self-discovery! . . . It is so much better to be an unemployed writer than an unemployed anything-else . . . A writer, at least, is always writing. Whatever happens, he records it. It begins to rain – he says to himself: it is raining. He walks down the stairs – he says to himself: I am walking down the stairs. . . . So there I was, looking at the men around me and recording them, putting down their coughs, their leanness, the dirt, the stubble on their faces, and meanwhile thinking: here am I, a writer, this is me, etc., etc. (6–7) Joe’s finding of himself, his transformation into ‘Mr. Knowthyself’ (6), as evident in the proliferation of the personal pronoun, is facilitated by Ellen at every turn. Indeed, she remains largely passive, ‘idling around the basement’ that is his sub-consciousness while he watches, motions, responds, sings, smiles and eventually goes on to the Writers’ Project (8). In short, Ellen seems to awaken in Joe a writerly sensibility. She forces him to perform the minute observations and the self-introspection he himself views as necessary components of the role. Indeed, her card causes him to write again: ‘look at all these pages I have written’ (11). Ellen is the muse brought to him under the auspices of the WPA. Both the girl and the Administration are the hands that feed him. And the loss of Ellen



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is synonymous, although not concurrent, with the closure of the project. The certainty Feigenbaum once held is gone, and in its place is a sensibility of loss and alienation. A final example of the spatial representation of this sensibility of estrangement is in Joe’s description of his condition as a ‘state of exile’ (13). Living in a rooming house on an allowance grudgingly given by his father, alongside a German and an Italian refugee, Joe occupies the No Man’s Land mentioned earlier in relation to Shenandoah Fish in ‘New Years’ Eve’. This sense of inbetweenness, also evident in his position at the cusp of the New Year, is accentuated by his position in (or rather outside) the war: ‘There is a war on and I am out of it on all fronts: neither losing nor profiting by it, and not even employed’ (13). Indeed, it is because of the war that he finds himself without a social purpose; the funds formerly channelled to the WPA have been redirected to the war effort. This desire to be of public benefit takes us back to Bellow’s George Grebe, another Chicago resident struggling with his emotions as he wanders the streets, seeking to make a social contribution by delivering his last relief cheque. Where the WPA provided an ‘official’ existence for the Jewish writer, the war effort fights for the preservation of the race, and in the midst of war Joe Feigenbaum finds himself rudderless, helpless and useless. His description of himself as occupying a state of exile naturally invokes the diasporic and peripatetic history of his people but it also speaks to the predicament of his generation. In one of his earliest reviews, a 1943 piece for the New Republic on Walter Morris’s book American in Search of a Way, Rosenfeld sets out the condition of this generation: The frustrations he [Morris] encountered were the same that have turned almost his entire generation into underground men – men who are not so much beyond belief as below it, incapable of the desperate exertion of rising which an affirmation of our time demands. This is the generation which remembers the last war dimly, and the Depression clearly; which was sustained by the WPA only to see the rise and flourishing of fascism, the death of Spain and the disgrace of the democracies; which lost, in Stalin, the last hope of imminent socialism and in the present war the hope of its own survival. (Rosenfeld 1962a: 46–7) As embodied in Joe, the exile, or the underground man as Rosenfeld describes him here, is caught between hope and despair, pride and humility, affection and antipathy. As Joe moves backwards and forwards in recounting his loneliness and frustration, what emerges from the narrative is a prevailing sense of insecurity. What Joe lacks is the terra firma of belief or idealism. It is this absence which animates the stories of Schwartz and Joyce; indeed, it is probably the strongest link between the American Jewish short story of the 1930s and 1940s and the wider international modernist project. In an essay entitled ‘The Situation of the Jewish Writer’ (1944), Rosenfeld located the Jewish writer ‘in the middle, in the overlapping area where events converge’ (1962c: 68). But for Rosenfeld, this position in the middle offers neither the comfort of home nor a sense of belonging, but merely the insecurity which is the condition of modernity: As a member of an internationally insecure group he has grown personally acquainted with some of the fundamental themes of insecurity that run through modern literature. He is a specialist in alienation (the one international banking system the Jews actually control) . . . Today nearly all sensibility – thought, creation, perception – is in exile, alienated from the society in which it barely managed to stay alive. (69)

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For Joe Feigenbaum, Shenandoah Fish and George Grebe, lives of transition, exile and loneliness seem both an inevitability and a necessity. To apprehend the modern world, the young intellectual Jewish subject must observe and analyse his surroundings. But such apprehension brings with it trauma and horror at the hostile state of modernity, be it the breakdown in communication between individuals, the dashing of political or personal idealism, the omnipresence of war or the end of love. And so the writer is trapped, condemned to watch, report, ruminate and reflect, contained within a series of literal and figurative spaces which ultimately represent the contours of the specifically Jewish consciousness through which the stories are filtered.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Zipperstein (2009); Sloan (1991). 2. This figure also appears in the verse play Shenandoah (1941). Hershey Green, who appears in Genesis (1943), presents another version of this kind of character. 3. In a 2012 piece for Poetry magazine, Lou Reed wrote: ‘We gathered round you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce. You’d annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library.’

3 THE MAKING OF AMERICAN JEWISH IDENTITIES IN POSTWAR AMERICAN FICTION Victoria Aarons

Introduction: The Hyphen and Jewish-American Identity

T

he second half of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of American Jewish fiction. Writers such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth emerged in rapid succession and re-imagined the possibilities, not only for Jewish writing, but for literary expression in America. The years directly following the Second World War saw the publication of exceptional debut works of fiction from writers who would go on to influence generations of American novelists: Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, published in 1944; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948 to stunningly enthusiastic reviews; Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Philip Roth’s novella and collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, published in 1952 and 1959, respectively. While Bellow, Mailer, Malamud and Roth might be thought of as the central Jewish literary figures of this time, a considerable number of American Jewish writers made their literary debuts in the two decades following the Second World War, writers who would contribute to a burgeoning literary tradition and would come to define a rich and creative cultural and intellectual era in America. In doing so, these writers fashioned a uniquely and distinctively transformed Jewish presence in American fiction, one that would metamorphose not only Jewish writing in America but American ­literature at large. A range of American Jewish voices infused the American novel during these years with an imaginative fervour that found new and varied means of literary expression. Edward Lewis Wallant’s first novel, The Human Season, was published in 1960, rapidly followed in 1961 by his landmark Holocaust novel The Pawnbroker, a haunting story of a survivor whose memories and nightmares of the atrocities of the Holocaust and his unrelenting suffering shatter his life forever. The publication of The Pawnbroker, produced as a film in 1964, created an opening for the literary representation of the Holocaust in American letters, breaking the fraught silence surrounding the enormity of events wrought by the Nazi attempt to eradicate European Jewry. The Pawnbroker’s intersection of Harlem’s poverty-ridden, violent street life and the vivid, harrowing sequence of flashbacks of the concentration camps show the ineradicable effects of the Holocaust to have no geographical or temporal boundaries. Indeed, the publication of The Pawnbroker began an enduring

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legacy of American Holocaust literature, a legacy taken up by subsequent generations of American writers well into the twenty-first century. Other notable writers establishing their place in the widening scope of American Jewish writing made their initial appearance during this flourishing, influential era in American literary history: Arthur Miller, whose novel Focus (1945) preceded the major stage plays for which he is best known; J. D. Salinger, whose memorable coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, appeared in 1951; Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, based on his experiences in the Pacific in the Second World War, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1952; Joseph Heller’s renowned Second World War satire, Catch-22, appeared in 1961; Cynthia Ozick’s first novel, Trust, an epic narrative casting its scope over two continents and four decades, was published in 1966; and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, an enduring narrative of fathers and sons caught in competing religious ideologies, appeared in 1967. Other significant figures, perhaps less prominent but contributing to the making of an American Jewish literary ethos, also emerged during these critical postwar years, such as Herbert Gold, whose novel Birth of a Hero was published in 1951, and Grace Paley, whose first collection of stories of the urban lives of ordinary Jews told through characteristic first-person narration, The Little Disturbances of Man, appeared in 1959. To be sure, the 1950s and 1960s, as Andrew Furman observes, might be thought of as ‘the golden age of Jewish American fiction’ (2001: 161). The eloquence and range of imagination brought forth by the outpouring of American Jewish voices during this tumultuous period of American history speaks to the urgency in establishing a place for a distinct and formative Jewish literary presence in the wake of the destruction of the Holocaust. These were writers for whom America became centre stage for the creation and expression of a Jewish identity in response to the aftershock of the Second World War. It is no surprise that the flourishing of Jewish writing in America emerged in the postwar years. The destruction of European Jewry and the widening intellectual and literary sensibilities that resulted from, as Saul Bellow put it, ‘the central event of their time’ (2010: 438) created the conditions for creative expression that moved American Jewish writers to the forefront of American letters. These writers redefined and refashioned an American Jewish identity and set the terms for American Jewish writing well into the twenty-first century. Postwar American Jewish fiction moves between Jewish and American identities. It reflects the charged intersections between a rising Jewish middle class in America and the lingering residue of marginalised otherness and difference, all of which create in this fiction a self-conscious preoccupation with issues of identity and place, the twin antagonists that contextualise the dramatic tensions in these narratives. Leslie Fiedler once referred to Bellow’s resilient protagonist Augie March as a character in whose comportment we discern ‘an image of man at once totally Jewish . . . and absolutely American’ (1972: 61). Yet Jewish and American identities might be seen in these novels as the pivotal points of intersection that create the greatest source of tension. At once decidedly American, the literature by this generation of writers of the postwar period is preoccupied with the place of an overarching Jewish cultural ethos and identity, even in the expressed reluctance to identify oneself as a ‘Jewish-American’ writer. As Debra Shostak points out, one of the central problems posed for American Jews of this time was ‘how to discover an identity that is authentic, both in the general sense of genuineness and in the existential sense of a subjectivity that is not the construction of the other’ (2004: 110). There is no doubt that the literature of this period draws from the rich tradition of



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Jewish thought and letters, all the while grafting that cultural voice upon developing American identities. As a result, a new direction for American literature was born: multicultural, multilingual, preoccupied with the influence of competing voices on American soil. What it meant to be both an American and a Jewish writer was redefined in what might be thought of as a highly choreographed doubling, as we find in the fiction of Philip Roth, for example: his Jews are Americans; his Americans are, for the most part, Jews. As one of Roth’s characters proclaims, with chiastic eloquence, to another: ‘You are us, we are you!’ (1966a: 265) Correspondingly, new conceptions of cultural ‘place’ and comportment emerged in light of an evolving Jewish experience in America, an opening of American Jewish experience. As Ruth Wisse has argued: ‘By force of their numbers, energy, and accomplishment, the Jewish intellectual and literary cohort of the 1940s and 1950s introduced the hyphen into American letters, creating the fact of an American-Jewish literature and a new standard of cultural authenticity’ (2003: 208).

Literary Predecessors What were the literary and cultural traditions from which these writers emerged? Prior to the new wave of postwar Jewish writers, American Jewish literature was defined primarily by the immigrant experience in America. To be sure, writers such as Bellow and Roth were modernists and thus deeply influenced by the European and Russian literary traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jewish writing in America, however, prior to the emergence of the wave of second-generation writers after the war, grew out of and responded to the experience of immigration. The Jewish immigrant literary tradition developed primarily from Ashkenazic Jewry and its rich Yiddish conventions of storytelling, established most notably by the eastern European writers Sholom Aleichem (1859–1916), Mendele Mocher Sforim (1835–1917) and I. L. Peretz (1852–1915). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers produced fiction primarily in Yiddish and drew upon the voices of European Jewry in a collective expression of Yiddishkeit – the distinctive ethos of a culture derived from the Yiddish-speaking Jews of eastern and central Europe – a culture ultimately threatened by the devastation of the Holocaust. As David Roskies comments: ‘From beginning to end . . . Yiddish literature in America gave voice to an anxious present caught between a severed past and an unattainable future’ (2003: 89). The infusion of Yiddishkeit into the rapidly growing urban centres of America by Jewish immigrants during immigration and relocation cannot be overestimated. Yiddishkeit took root in the dramatic articulation of a collective experience and flourished in the insistent expression of narrative voice embedded in the works of those immigrant writers who came to America in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Writers such as Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), Mary Antin (1881–1949), Henry Roth (1906–95) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91) wrote on the threshold of American culture, and their writing reflects the antagonisms and desires of newly developing American Jewish identities. For the immigrant novelist, America was the source of dramatic tension, a landscape of dichotomies and contradictions. America conjured ‘that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, of immense opportunity’, as longingly described in the prologue to Henry Roth’s 1934 novel Call It Sleep (1994: 16). But America was also the constant reminder of the unsettling sense of loss and dislocation experienced by the immigrant, ‘this wilderness in which I’m lost’, as Anzia Yezierska puts it in her autobiographical

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story ‘America and I’ (1922); lost, that is, amid the homogenising secularism of American modernity and acculturation (Yezierska 1990: 81). The Jewish literature responding to immigrant life in America chronicles a patterning of dualities: poverty and upward mobility, religion and secularism, tradition and change, Americanisation and foreignness, difference and assimilation. Conflicts of culture, language, custom and history define the lives of these immigrants and their first-generation American-born children. These conflicts create divided loyalties and selves, as captured in the title of Yezierska’s account of her arrival in the new land, ‘America and I’, where, as she ruefully acknowledges, ‘I was in America, among the Americans, but not of them . . . Between my soul and the American soul were worlds of difference that no words could bridge over’ (1990: 73, 81). Literature by and about Jewish immigrants reveals a deep ambivalence towards America, this ‘new world’, itself a place of extremes: prosperity and poverty, mobility and stagnation, promise and disenchantment. Such uncertainty is often articulated by literal and metaphorical references to collisions of disparate worlds. As the immigrant writer Mary Antin confesses in the introduction to her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), ‘It is painful to be consciously of two worlds’ (1969: xxii). The iteration of ‘two worlds’ marks an uneasy degree of self-division that is a consistent refrain in writing by immigrants of all ethnicities. Immigrant literature is preoccupied with uncertainty related to livelihood, sustenance and shelter. ‘Who can depict the feeling of desolation, homesickness, uncertainty, and anxiety with which an emigrant makes his first voyage across the ocean?’, Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky asks (1960: 85). For Cahan’s protagonist, as for other characters who people the literature of the Jewish immigrant, the long-anticipated arrival on the shores of America, this ‘second birth’ as Levinsky puts it (86), creates deeply ambivalent attitudes towards issues of identity and place, as if donning the attire, language and other more or less subtle cultural accoutrements of place definitively shape personhood. ‘It was as though the hair-cut and the American clothes had changed my identity’, a conflicted Levinsky confesses (101). Yet, finally, he ‘cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well’ (530). The tensions between past, present and future control the unfolding of these narratives, and issues of identity and belonging are revealed here as conjoined antagonists in a continuing drama. As Priscilla Wald suggests, ‘[t]he literature of East European Jewish immigrants . . . registers both the uncertainties of the dominant culture and their own ambivalent responses to assimilation’ (2003: 51). First-generation-born writer Delmore Schwartz, in the short story ‘America! America!’ (1937), constructs the immigrant’s enthusiasm for the ‘new world’ as ironically and comically hyperbolised extravagance: When the first plane flew, when elevators became common, when the new subway was built, some newspaper reader in the Baumann household would raise his head, announce the wonder, and exclaim: ‘You see: America!’ When the toilet-bowl flushed like Niagara, when a suburban homeowner killed his wife and children, and when a Jew was made a member of President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet, the excited exclamation was: ‘America! America!’ (1978b: 21–2) To be sure, the immigrants’ love affair with America, however comically exaggerated by Schwartz here, abated in the postwar years. Mid-century America is not the same America that we find in the response of Schwartz’s astounded immigrants to the ironically yet



The Making of Postwar American Jewish Identities 47

miraculously conceived ‘wonders of America’. The second-generation literature – the fiction of Bellow, Malamud, Mailer and Roth, for example – responds to a culture of assimilation; the past has receded, and lingering are the more proximate effects of a world changed by both the catastrophic vestiges of the Second World War and the economic expansion and uncontainable events that follow it. In the essay ‘Writing American Fiction’ (1961), Roth exposes the challenges of writing fiction in America during this stupendously erratic and impossibly volatile period of American life: ‘the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination’ (1985: 176). Irving Howe once famously suggested that, as American Jewish writing leaves behind its immigrant roots, there will be little imaginative capital from which to draw, leaving in its wake a creative vacuum, ‘a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories’ (1977: 16). Howe argues that the immigrant tradition, with its sources outside America, provides the last remnant of ‘origin’ within which one might locate a distinctive American Jewish identity. Howe in this way locates American Jewish literary production almost exclusively in the experiential reservoir of immigration, in a way that suggests that, for him, assimilation into both the social and literary mainstream of America deracinates the ‘Jewish’ part of American Jewish identity for the novelists after the Second World War. However, in the literature that follows the generation of immigrants, well into the second half of the twentieth century, there is a circling back in rich and complex ways to this preoccupation with immigrant identity. Many of the second-generation American Jewish writers were the children of immigrants themselves. Saul Bellow (Canadian-born) was the son of Russian immigrant parents who arrived in Quebec in the early years of the twentieth century, moving eventually to Chicago, whose cityscapes Bellow would come to draw on foundationally in his fiction. Bernard Malamud’s immigrant parents were also Russian-born, relocating to New York, the Lower East Side of which became the site of many of his novels and short stories. Norman Mailer’s mother was Lithuanian, and Joseph Heller’s parents emigrated from Russia, as did Cynthia Ozick’s and Herman Wouk’s families. Grace Paley’s parents came from Ukraine and Chaim Potok’s parents were immigrants from Poland. Post-immigrant American Jewish literature is indebted to the rich, imaginative expression of Yiddishkeit, a character of life and culture infused into the language and literary imagination of postwar writers, especially Bernard Malamud, Herbert Gold, Daniel Fuchs, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley and Saul Bellow. As Howe himself observes, novelists such as Bellow and Malamud have ‘a collective memory that arches over their work’ (1977: 5). As Saul Bellow said of his consanguinity with Bernard Malamud: We were cats of the same breed. The sons of Eastern European immigrant Jews, we had gone early into the streets of our respective cities, were Americanized by schools, newspapers, subways, streetcars, sandlots. Melting Pot children, we had assumed too much dark history in our mothers’ kitchens to be radiant optimists. (2010: 435) This is a ‘dark history’ that will come to define much of the writing of the second generation, a history that is the source of literary inspiration and largely contributes to the psychic disposition of character in this fiction. As one of Grace Paley’s characters asks, in the aptly titled short story ‘The Immigrant Story’ (1960), ‘Isn’t it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person’s sorrow?’ (1979c: 171). Paley’s speaker refers here to ‘the cruel

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history of Europe’ (171) as it defines the lives of the children of Jewish immigrants to America, shown here as the imagined context of a fraught past. Such deliverance from that ‘cruel history’, however, is not without its retrospective, critical assessment by a generation once removed from the immigrant experience but one that sees itself as flourishing and floundering in its wake. Thus, in mid-century American Jewish fiction, we find a continuing preoccupation with split identities, dualities of worlds, colliding loyalties, marginalisation and ironic self-reckoning; these tensions continue in subsequent generations of Jewish writers in America. ‘By midcentury’, as Hana WirthNesher argues in Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature, ‘Native-born Jewish Americans eager to “make it” in America left urban immigrant neighborhoods where Yiddish co-existed along with English . . . where Jewish identity meant religious affiliation marked by liturgical Hebrew’ (2006: 26). This newly achieved economic and social mobility also, of course, had implications for cultural identity. Wirth-Nesher further explains: As a religion, Judaism became a private matter, and the Enlightenment paradigm of Jew at home and citizen in the street took root in America just as the Nazi genocide of the Jews had already eradicated it in Europe. In the 1950s, Jews could carve out a comfortable place for themselves in the American landscape as white European children of immigrants. (26) This more ‘comfortable’ cultural place became a deep source for imaginative fiction, as American Jews rode the wave of postwar economic prosperity and the assimilative potential it brought, even if assimilation continued to be a burdensome project of negotiating personal and cultural identity, of engagements with self and other in which the idea of ‘the Jew’ was never far from the surface. This American-born, postwar generation of Jewish writers brought to these fraught negotiations emboldened perspectives determined by the passage of time, experience and assimilation. Enough literary and psychic space passed to enable ironic self-assessment, which projected a humorous gaze upon the provincialism and commodification of both place and identity that recurs in the literature of the immigrant. At the same time, this postwar generation measured the gains of ironic self-assessment against inevitable and cautionary losses. This second wave of American Jewish writers less emerged out of the immigrant tradition than wrote against it, and in doing so defined a new mode for American Jewish literary expression. As Timothy Parrish points out, Roth, like other Jewish writers of his time, ‘writes about the descendants of those immigrants who have found in America something they never imagined in Europe: the opportunity to define how they perceive or do not perceive themselves to be Jews’ (2007: 130). The immigrants’ nagging question, ‘can one remain a Jew in America?’, became rephrased for the first-generation Americanborn in questions that speak to this forceful and often adversarial duality: What does it mean to be both American and Jewish? How can the one identity not be subsumed by the other? How, in other words, can America become the source of Jewish identity? Thus we find in this literature the push and pull of Jewish and American, a Jewish outlook on American culture and also an Americanising of Judaism. Such ambiguities are captured eloquently in Cynthia Ozick’s description of herself as ‘a third-generation American Jew (though the first to have been native-born) perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal. I am myself sometimes taken aback by these contradictions’ (1984: 152). The iteration of ‘perfectly’ here makes emphatic the



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connective certainties of aspiration and resignation that define mid-twentieth-century Jewish experience in America. Such contradictions complement each other ‘perfectly’, resulting in a literature that actively engages in the making and renegotiating of the very idea of the Jewish experience in America, if not the very idea of America itself. While deeply embedded in American intellectual life and thought, these writers carry with them an inheritance beholden to a long and complex history of Jewish culture and sensibilities that includes the centrality of storytelling as the expression of self. These writers were formative in developing the multi-hued, richly nuanced and diverse voices that redefined American Jewish identity in mid-twentieth-century intellectual life. In particular, Bellow, Malamud and Roth greatly expanded the repertoire of American Jewish literature. The work of these three central figures characterises the range of expression for American Jewish writing, a corpus of work that speaks to an evolving Jewish experience in America. With the publication of Dangling Man, The Natural and Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories, these three writers changed the direction, not only of Jewish literature, but of American fiction as well. Their fiction defined a particular period of literary history, a period that would change the course of Jewish writing in America for generations to follow. It was a literary enterprise that sought, in the words of Saul Bellow’s protagonist Artur Sammler, the need ‘to figure out certain things, to condense . . . some essence of experience’ (1970: 274). This essence is invoked in the exuberant celebration of the opening lines of Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953), when his protagonist animatedly exclaims, both with wonder and certitude, ‘I am an American, Chicago born’ (3). Despite the insistent protestations of a writer such as Roth – ‘I don’t write Jewish, I write American. Most of my work takes place here. I am an American’ (qtd in Bohlen 2011) – these are writers for whom a recognisably Jewish ethos, idiom and character create the conditions for their fictional worlds.

The Urban Landscape The landscape of America, as Artur Sammler puts it, ‘advertised throughout the universe as the most desirable, most exemplary of all nations’, is the energetic centre of the fiction of postwar American Jewish writing (1970: 14). Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Paley are urban writers, their milieu the city, home to those characters who inhabit their fiction, rather than the vast, rural, open spaces of the American heartland. For postwar American Jewish fiction, the fictional landscape is the teeming world of the city, and it is on the streets of America’s cities that their characters play out their vocalised lives. The city is the nucleus of America, its quickened culture of exchange a metonymy for the changing character of the American Jew. The rapid growth and progressively cosmopolitan ethos of urban life, especially, of course, in New York City, becomes a measure of the rise of a Jewish middle class in America, mirroring the movement from steerage, tenements and cramped spaces to the ascending social, cultural and economic fabric of life for American Jews ‘mainstreamed’ during the postwar period. The city is the place where these writers are most at home. The English novelist Anthony Burgess, in celebrating the life and work of Bernard Malamud, describes him at his essence as a writer who ‘never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society’ (qtd in Bellow 2010: 438). Indeed, for the central literary figures of this time, the city is the locus for self-reflection, self-reckoning and self-reinvention, as well as for deep suspicion, anxious mistrust and panic.

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The urban metropolis, in Saul Bellow’s words, the very ‘soul of America’ (1970: 146), becomes, in the fiction of postwar American Jews, a charged, compressed, electric and often precarious landscape, the backdrop for the heightened anxiety, dramatic tension and at times desperate self-fashioning of their characters. The city shows itself in their work as a place of extremes, its streets and neighbourhoods a measure of the range and intensity of all things paradoxically ‘American’: ingenuity and cunning; resourcefulness and vulgarity; refined elegance revealing its menacing, electrifying other. Pickpockets, money launderers, gangsters, tenement dwellers, the working class, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, the marginalised, the outcast, the native-born and the displaced – all these types and more inhabit, as Saul Bellow writes in his 1947 novel The Victim, a cityscape awash with all the ‘barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery’ (1965: 11). As Bellow suggests, American urban life, in his novels as well as in those of his American Jewish contemporaries, has recreated the world of agricultural labour as a metaphor for the swarming life of the expanding, abundant American city. The urban landscape is the dramatic force in the work of postwar American Jewish writers, and it is on these vibrant, animated city streets that their characters perform their greatest fantasies and suffer their most ruinous despair. The city is the centre of life, of possibilities and interruptions, promises and risks. From its neighbourhoods and stoops come syllables of competing demands and desires, an urban language in which rough-hewn street dialect meets the residual cadences of Europe. Amid the city’s swelling tenements and apartments, as one of Grace Paley’s narrators puts it, ‘every window is a mother’s mouth’ (1985b: 55). Here the landscape is filled with sound, with people clamouring to be heard, ‘words spoken’, as another of Paley’s narrators puts it, ‘like cranking up a motor’ (1985d: 175). The diphthongs and rhythms of urban life create the conditions for the discursive dexterity and persistence of the assorted characters in the fiction of postwar American Jewish writers. Here we find characters who attempt to navigate the world through talk, and for whom the nimbleness, suppleness and elasticity of language shapes the tempo of their lives: the meditative soliloquies of Saul Bellow’s self-reflective protagonists; the communal chatter and ‘remembering tongue’ of Grace Paley’s ordinary men, women and children, who, in the transmission of stories, may ‘save a few lives’ (1985b: 62; 1979b: 10); the anguished laments of Bernard Malamud’s stumbling, defeated immigrants and workingclass Jews, in whose voices, as Saul Bellow observes, ‘Malamud . . . discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York’ (2010: 436); the comically crafted and cunning burlesque of Philip Roth’s exhibitionistic, hedonistic and unrestrained characters, for whom self-invention and the art of impersonation are achieved through ironic wordplay, life-like narrative, all a fantastic fabrication – ‘the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into’ (Roth 1986: 124). These are characters whose stories transcend them, stories that speak to the exilic history of Jewish survival and the intersections of place and identity in Jewish culture and self-reckoning. These are urban narratives, and although the literature of this period will deeply engage the upward social mobility of American Jews and the accompanying move from urban tenements to apartments and ultimately into the suburbs, the city will remain the measure of both identity and place. The Patimkin family, in Philip Roth’s novella ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ (1959), for example, can abandon the claustrophobic Newark neighbourhoods for the expansive suburbs of Short Hills, an ascension into the promised land of the country-club set deep in ‘Gentile territory’, ‘closer to heaven’ – but their roots



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in immigrant, working-class Jewish life are never far behind (1966b: 90, 8). Even Brenda Patimkin’s bobbed nose-job and her father’s hard-won attempts to reinvent their lives cannot quite take the grimy, rough city streets of Newark out of the Jewish small businessman and suburban homeowner in this period of upwardly mobile flight, a trajectory motivated by, as Artur Sammler puts it, ‘the charm, the ebullient glamour, the almost unbearable agitation that came from being able to describe oneself as a twentieth-century American’ (Bellow 1970: 73). America is at once the place where the socially unimaginable is imagined, but also where one’s failings are most glaringly made apparent. For so many of Bernard Malamud’s defeated Jews, for instance, ‘America had become too complicated. One man counted for nothing’ (1974: 206). So many of Malamud’s finely crafted narratives capture, with stunning clarity and timbre, the speaking voices of the impoverished, struggling, working-class, immigrant Jews of New York’s Lower East Side. Malamud, humanist, writer of deep moral reckoning and accountability, ‘myth-maker . . . fabulist . . . writer of exquisite parables’, as Saul Bellow describes him (2010: 436), brings to life characters for whom ‘what it means human’ [sic] is inextricably tied to what it means to be a Jew (Malamud 1997c: 280). For Malamud’s burdened and struggling Jewish characters know suffering when they see it. As Morris Bober, the beleaguered protagonist of The Assistant (1957), avows to the unsolicited clerk and lapsed-Catholic orphan who will become his immovable double and who haunts the poor grocer’s store searching for an indefinable yet lingering memory, ‘If you live, you suffer’ (1974: 151). And to the clerk’s question, ‘What do you suffer for, Morris’, the poor, struggling grocer can only concede, ‘I suffer for you . . . I mean you suffer for me’ (151). In their mutual, combined suffering, Malamud’s host of protagonists – the astounded tailors, the derailed matchmakers, the unorthodox rabbis, the impoverished grocers, the despairing ex-coffee salesmen, the apologists, the beseeching, imploring, defeated Jews, the banished ‘jewbirds’ – all try to negotiate their lives; all are characters of whom, like the Polish Jewish refugee in the short story ‘Take Pity’ (1958), it might be said: ‘Broke in him something . . . Broke what breaks’ (1997b: 176). Malamud’s fiction, for all its range, is centrally preoccupied with the condition of suffering and those moments of fortuitous and earned reprieve. It is thus through rachmones (compassion), a fundamental principle of Jewish ethics, that Malamud’s characters might hope to transcend their unhappy circumstances. The close of Malamud’s tense novel of doubling, The Tenants (1971), ends with the Yiddish plea for compassion, ‘Hab rachmones, I beg you’, followed by the simple iteration of faith, ‘mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy. . .’, in an unpunctuated, unending behest of one man to another (1971: 230). It is these three writers, in particular – Malamud, Bellow and Roth – who together form what might be considered the canonical trio of postwar Jewish writers in America. Taken together they represent the scope and depth of the literary vision that casts its brilliant gaze upon future generations of writers in America. Their presumed similarities are overshadowed by the range of expression – thematic, structural, tonal – revealed in their literary enterprise. Roth’s wily, anxiously and obsessively self-inventing and reinventing protagonists; Bellow’s worldly and world-weary monologists and elaborate elocutionists; and Malamud’s haunted and uneasy exilic ‘timeless Jews’, more with one foot in the past than either Bellow’s or Roth’s more urbane protagonists – all represent Jewish life against the backdrop of a radically changing American ethos (Roth 1985: 183). In the fiction of these three eloquent and influential writers, we are reminded that postwar American Jewish fiction, in its reconfiguration of an evolving Jewish voice, pays homage to the ways

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in which conditions for Jews in America are weighed by and beholden to a uniquely Jewish history of struggle, triumph and collective memory. So, too, American literature has come to be defined by the legacy of these groundbreaking postwar American Jewish writers and the worlds they created.

4 ‘ARE YOU KIDDING ME?’ BLACK HUMOUR IN THE WORK OF JOSEPH HELLER, STANLEY ELKIN, WALLACE MARKFIELD AND BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN David Gooblar

I

‘ t’ is called “Black Humor” and I think I would have more luck defining an elbow

or a corned-beef sandwich’ (Friedman 1965: vii). So Bruce Jay Friedman begins his foreword to the 1965 anthology he edited for Bantam Books, entitled Black Humor. Indeed, Friedman does not try to define the concept so much as sketch the cultural conditions that allowed black humour – whatever it is – to emerge as one of the most discussed literary modes of mid-1960s American letters. ‘[T]he source and fountain and bible of black humor’, according to Friedman, is The New York Times, whose headlines regularly stretch readers’ sense of what could actually be happening (viii). The barrage of apparently unreal events that seemed to characterise American reality in the early 1960s ‘confirms your belief that a new Jack Rubyesque chord of absurdity has been struck in the land’ (ix). This spells trouble for the American writer, who finds ‘that the satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter’ (x). This argument – that American reality had become so outlandish as to threaten to put the fiction writer out of business – was made five years earlier by Philip Roth, in a 1960 speech that went on to be published in Commentary in 1961 as ‘Writing American Fiction’. Roth, like Friedman, found himself astonished by the surreal quality of the daily news, leading him to famously state that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. (2001: 167) But whereas Roth, at the beginning of the decade, found evidence of this circumstance in the way that some of the era’s leading writers seemed to turn away from portraying contemporary reality, Friedman has no trouble finding, in 1965, a cohort of American authors who are provoked by the ‘fading line between fantasy and reality’, who engage with the surreal quality of American life (1965: xi). These writers – among them Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov and J. P. Donleavy – respond to the absurdities of the times by trying to outdo them, using humour to create fictional worlds that can transcend even

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the headlines. This, then, is black humour: a kind of joking that aims to provoke nervous laughter, comedy that is tense with the possibility of revealing very serious truths, a desperate lashing out by writers cornered by a world gone mad. Friedman was not the only observer in the mid-1960s to detect a new strain of sharpedged and fantastical comedy in contemporary American letters. A year before Friedman’s anthology was published, Conrad Knickerbocker wrote in the New York Times Book Review of ‘an immoderate new breed of American writers, who have wrenched the status quo until it begins to emit tormented laughter’ (1964: 3). Like Friedman, Knickerbocker portrays these writers as egged on to innovate by the volatility and ridiculousness of American culture: ‘traditional forms cannot accommodate a reality which now includes Jack Ruby’ (3). An unsigned 1966 essay in Time Magazine, noting that ‘the nature, quality, and targets of American humor are undergoing considerable change’, also identifies a class of black humourists ‘who examine the megaton-megalopolis age and find it funny only in a fearsome way’ (Anonymous 1993: 89, 92). Max Schulz, author of the first monograph devoted to black humour, defines the subject in a way that echoes these assessments in both their cultural diagnoses and their vagueness: ‘Black Humor is a phenomenon of the 1960’s [sic], comprising a group of writers who share a viewpoint and an aesthetics for pacing off the boundaries of a nuclear-technological world intrinsically without confinement’ (1973: 5). Another phenomenon of the 1960s that many were noticing was the rise of Jewish humour in mainstream American culture. Wallace Markfield, one of the authors discussed in this chapter, wrote, in 1965, of ‘the Yiddishization of American Humor’: ‘the Jewish style, with its heavy reliance upon Yiddish and Yiddishisms, has emerged not only as a comic style, but as the prevailing comic style’ (114). From Mike Nichols and Elaine May to Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks, Jewish humourists were seemingly everywhere, and a certain strain of Jewish comedy – self-deprecating, ironic, cutting – bled into the heart of American pop culture. Albert Goldman went so far as to call the 1960s ‘the Jewish Decade’, noting that ‘[f]ar from regarding the jokes of the Jewish humorists as offensive or self-serving or unintelligibly parochial, Americans embraced Jewish humor and the Jewish schlemiel as a perfect rendering of themselves and their own problems’ (1987: 86). So it is not surprising, then, that many of the foremost practitioners of black humour were American Jewish writers. This chapter will examine how these two strands – black humour and American Jewish humour – intertwined in the work of four second-generation American authors who all emerged in the five years between Roth’s and Friedman’s pronouncements. Born in New York within seven years of each other, Joseph Heller (1923–99), Stanley Elkin (1930–95), Wallace Markfield (1926–2002) and Friedman himself (1930– ) were dissimilar writers who nonetheless all made significant contributions to American literature through their use of dark comedy. Friedman admits, in his Black Humor foreword, that the thirteen writers he gathered together in the anthology ‘in so many ways have nothing at all to do with one another and would not know or perhaps even understand one another’s work if they tripped over it’ (1965: xi). So it is with the four writers discussed in this chapter. What Heller’s paradox-heavy satire, Elkin’s metaphysical flights of terrified fancy, Markfield’s Yiddish-inflected cut and thrust, and Friedman’s paranoid absurdism have in common is a shared tendency to wring laughter out of the stuff of terror and tragedy and despair. While Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) remains a much-loved classic, the work of Elkin, Markfield and Friedman is frequently overlooked, both in academic studies of the era and by contemporary readers and teachers. I hope, in this chapter, to underline Catch-22’s achievement,



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while calling attention to those aspects of Elkin’s, Markfield’s and Friedman’s work that deserve rediscovery and renewed appreciation. These four authors, particularly in their earliest works, have gone a long way towards setting the terms for what we think of when we think of Jewish literary humour, a strain which can be very black indeed.

Joseph Heller When an interviewer asked Joseph Heller, late in life, why he had never written anything as good as his first novel, Catch-22, Heller replied, ‘Who has?’ (Green 1995: 121). Indeed, Catch-22, published in 1961, casts a shadow over much of the American fiction of the decade, and certainly deserves pride of place in any discussion of black humour in the literature of the period. Heller, for one, knew that the mix of laughter and existential angst – the combination that would come to define black humour as a genre – was central to his book’s achievement. He provided Simon & Schuster’s marketing department with a series of sales pitches to use in publicising the book, including the following: ‘Catch-22 takes an uninhibited look at all those principles and institutions we have been taught to revere – and finds each one laughable. And as a consequence, Catch-22 is perhaps as tragic a novel as has ever been written’ (Daugherty 2011: 219). Robert Brustein, in his influential review of the book in the New Republic, wrote similarly that Heller ‘is concerned entirely with that thin boundary of the surreal, the borderline between hilarity and horror, which, much like the apparent formlessness of the unconscious, has its own special integrity and coherence’ (2008: 6–7). The novel, an often zany comedy about an Air Force squadron on the fictional Mediterranean island of Pianosa during the Second World War, was perhaps an unlikely candidate to connect with the readers of 1961. But although it was not an immediate commercial success, Catch-22, helped along by Simon & Schuster’s expensive marketing efforts and strong word-of-mouth recommendations, did eventually become one of the best-selling American books of the 1960s.1 John W. Aldridge accounts for the book’s success by arguing that Heller’s black humour allowed the book to transcend both its comic genre and its wartime setting: [M]any readers must have sensed that beneath the comic surfaces Mr. Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based . . . It was undoubtedly this recognition that the book was something far broader in scope than a mere indictment of war – a recognition perhaps arrived at only subconsciously by most readers in 1961 – that gave it such pertinence to readers who discovered it over the next decade. (1987: 381–2) Certainly, the book’s comic transformation of the American war machine into a huge, impersonal bureaucracy helped readers see the exploits of Yossarian and his fellow enlisted men and officers as not merely about the war, but also relevant to booming early 1960s America. Catch-22 convolutedly tells the story of Yossarian, a bombardier with one overarching motivation: ‘He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive’ (Heller 1961: 29). Standing between Yossarian and his ambition is Heller’s version of the military apparatus, here portrayed as a supreme bureaucracy, one fundamentally opposed to the interests of an individual who prefers not to die. One of the ways this bureaucracy makes its power felt is through Catch-22, the

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military regulation that accounts for the various ways that the status quo manages to defy normal logic. In the most famous application of Catch-22, Yossarian learns that, although insanity is a justifiable basis for avoiding combat missions, if a soldier asks to get out of active duty he has demonstrated a sane concern for his own well-being, and is thus required to continue flying missions: There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. (46) This passage, so indelible as to have added a word to the language, illustrates how paradox, Heller’s preferred mode in Catch-22, allows him to simultaneously evoke the tragic and comic. Such a paradox is tragic because of the closed circuit of Catch-22’s logic: no forward movement is possible. This logic thwarts the individual will as the choice of one option (insanity) inevitably loops back to the second, apparently opposite option (sanity). Any individual who attempts to outsmart the bureaucratic power of Catch-22 is doomed to fail.2 But this kind of paradox is also comic, of course. Heller continually mocks the apparently logical and rational workings of an apparently objective institution by following the institution’s logic to conclusions that are illogical, irrational and, to Yossarian, frankly unacceptable. Catch-22 conjures up a fictional world in which laughter and total annihilation are equally close at hand. The blackness of Heller’s humour stems from Yossarian’s obsession with death. Yossarian is always aware that ‘[a]ll over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives’ (16). No one seemed to mind. This paradox – nobody involved in the war acts as if there’s a war going on – is the central gear that drives the mechanism of the entire novel. Yossarian’s deep knowledge that war is an activity that centres on killing is at odds with the ritualised workings of military life, which must suppress the nearness of death to function effectively. His conflicts with those around him nearly always come down to this incompatibility. He tells his fellow soldier Clevinger that he is being targeted:

‘They’re trying to kill me,’ Yossarian told him calmly. ‘No one’s trying to kill you,’ Clevinger cried. ‘Then why are they shooting at me?’ Yossarian asked. ‘They’re shooting at everyone,’ Clevinger answered. ‘They’re trying to kill everyone.’ ‘And what difference does that make?’ (16)

Throughout the book, as in this exchange, the joke is that they really are trying to kill Yossarian, that death really is close at hand. David M. Craig argues that ‘[a]t root Catch-22 recounts Yossarian-cum-Heller’s attempt to overcome death. Within the novel, death is a worthy opponent for it is omnipresent, and by novel’s end most of its characters have died’ (1997: 50). Indeed, over and over again Heller gives Yossarian reminders of the proximity of death in the form of the deaths of the people around him. What makes this more than



‘Are you Kidding me?’ 57

merely a critique of war is the fact that Yossarian does not discriminate between causes of death; he is as terrified of dying from disease as he is of being shot down in combat. He prefers to spend his time in the hospital, with a variety of feigned ailments, not just because he then does not have to fly combat missions, but because although ‘[t]hey couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital . . . they certainly made her behave’ (Heller 1961: 165). Nonetheless, Yossarian remains aware of the countless ways that his life could end, every single day; what Heller biographer Tracy Daugherty calls ‘the ultimate hypocrisy: the death in life pumping through each and every organism, the body’s betrayal of itself’ (2011: 223). In this way, Heller’s skewering of military bureaucracy becomes a cri de cœur, both anguished and comical, against the very fact that life must end at all. During ‘the most illogical Thanksgiving he could ever remember spending’, Yossarian gets into an argument with a lieutenant’s wife, who tries to convince him that he has much to appreciate. ‘I’ll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for’, he replies, and matches her each step of the way: ‘Be thankful you’re healthy.’ ‘Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way.’ ‘Be glad you’re even alive.’ ‘Be furious you’re going to die.’ (Heller 1961: 179) The sting in Heller’s comedy is provided by this fury, which stays with Yossarian throughout the novel, implicitly imploring readers that they be furious too.

Stanley Elkin Stanley Elkin’s fiction was designated as black humour from the beginning of his career, and Elkin denied it every step of the way. ‘I resent the term Black Humor tremendously. I hate that term. I don’t know what it means. And yet if there is an anthology of Black Humorists I resent it if I’m not included in the anthology’ (Charney 1987: 178).3 A fundamentally restless writer who resisted all labels for his work, Elkin also resented the formulaic way that critics seemed to lump a whole range of fiction of the early 1960s under the black humour banner. He noted that the blurbs on the novels of the time seemed to all be written in ‘a code fixed as Morse. Humor, for example, was “wild” at the same time that it was “deadly serious.” There was something vaguely federal about it, like the warning on a pack of cigarettes’ (Elkin 1971: 13). Yet there was more to this opposition than a writer not wishing to be pinned down; Elkin may have thought black humour was an ill-defined term, but he resisted most of all the suggestion that his fiction was pessimistically commenting on the insanity of the times: ‘Black humor is pointless cruelty for pointless cruelty’s own sake . . . I don’t know how it ever came to be a critical term – from the same folks who brought us “absurdity,” I suppose’ (qtd in Emerson 1991). A look through early reviews of his work shows an understanding of Elkin’s writing as part of a wave of American literature responding, as Friedman suggested in his Black Humor foreword, to the unstable tenor of the times. Martin Levin, discussing Elkin’s Boswell (1964), facetiously gave instructions on how to write the au courant black humour novel: ‘You invent some nut, well outside the mainstream of American life, shove him through one interlude after another to reveal the absurdity of whatever you think is absurd and write until you are tired’ (1964: 28). Richard Brickner characterised Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) as Elkin ‘repeatedly’ ‘mak[ing] cases for life’s absurdity’ (1966: 25). And Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

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described Elkin’s stories as tales in which ‘man has deserted the firing line and retreated to the bivouac area to swill fantasy and anesthetize himself till the enemy comes and cuts him down’ (1966: 25). This critical shorthand saw Elkin sharing artistic aims with such writers as Heller and Friedman, interested in situating his protagonists in fantastic or nightmarish realities in order to comment on contemporary American reality. As David Dougherty points out, however, these critical definitions of black humour, which build on Friedman’s and Roth’s observations about the absurdity of American life, ignore the fact that Elkin’s fiction rarely, if ever, functions as social commentary. The ‘grim and cruel jokes’ found in Elkin’s early writing are not there to shed light on or parody a ridiculous culture; rather, Elkin introduces absurdity into his work because his work suggests that ‘the way we conduct ourselves in the face of absurdity is the measure of our worth’ (Dougherty 1990: 11). Doris Bargen, echoing Dougherty, calls Elkin a ‘comic moralist’. She argues that, while ‘true’ black humourists utilise caricatures to better reflect and poke fun at a world gone mad, Elkin is chiefly interested in characters, ones who ‘must possess a faculty for moral conflict’ (1980: 53, 46). Indeed, Elkin’s fiction of the early 1960s – Boswell and the stories that would make up Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers – shares Heller’s preoccupation with the injustice of mortality but funnels that preoccupation into wildly imagined tests for his characters’ mettle. Elkin is the least straightforwardly comic of the four writers discussed in this chapter; although there is much in his work that is darkly hilarious, the sense throughout is that the fate of these characters matters too much to Elkin for him to do much laughing at them. The laughter, when it does come, is hard-won. If, as Daniel Green has claimed, two characteristics of black humour are ‘irreverent treatment of the fear of death and its lack of the reformative impulse associated with satire’ (1993: 97), then Elkin’s fiction of the early 1960s fails the first test. Elkin’s early work is, if anything, overly reverent of the fear of death; his debut novel Boswell and the collection of stories Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers could ostensibly share a tagline borrowed from Kafka: ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’ The opening sentence of Boswell, in the voice of the novel’s eponymous hero, signals the central concern of the book: ‘Everybody dies, everybody.’ The problem, James Boswell continues, is that ‘no one really believes it. They read the papers. They see the newsreels. They drive past the graveyards on the outskirts of town. Do you think that makes any difference? It does not! No one believes in death’ (Elkin 1964: 3). Boswell, by contrast, claims to live his life in full knowledge of death, and his picaresque adventures – he becomes a strongman, then a professional wrestler (‘the Masked Playboy’), falls in with a Latin American revolutionary, and marries an Italian princess who calls herself ‘The Last of the Medicis’ – are carried out in the shadow of that knowledge. He believes that the only appropriate response to the fact of oblivion is to strive for greatness, to make a mark on the world: ‘I need plunder and booty and tribute and empire and palace and slave. I need monuments and flags and drums and trumpets . . . when the high tide of low death is in, I must still have my history, and it must, somehow, matter!’ (133). He does not, however, believe that he himself is a great man. Boswell therefore, like his famous namesake, strives at least to be near the great, to collect celebrity acquaintances, to seat himself at the table of significance. He eventually hatches a plan for ‘The Club’, a regular assemblage of the most famous people in the world. The plan’s success will be the key to Boswell’s immortality: ‘Heroes will sing in my caves, sit on my shores, seek sails on my illusory horizons’ (133). Ultimately, though, the prospect of succeeding, of mastering death, is impossible; Boswell, perhaps realising this, ends the



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novel by leading a crowd of people outside of the Club’s first meeting in a chant of ‘Down With The Club!’ (387). Death is the central fact of life in the world of Elkin’s early fiction, and his characters are gauged by the way they grapple with this fact. To Dougherty, Boswell’s antics, ostensibly part of a conscious response to his knowledge of death, are actually exercises in repression: ‘James is so anxious about his death that he devotes his life to finding ways to avoid facing it’ (1990: 20). Nonetheless, he is ever aware of the power of death. In one of the funniest sections of the novel, Boswell instigates a series of ‘death experiments’, in which he pretends to have died in public to see the effect of death’s presence on unsuspecting bystanders. ‘Living, I was simply one among others; dying, I was above them, imprudent and colossal as some lame-duck hero’ (Elkin 1964: 345). Many of Elkin’s short stories of the period re-enact these experiments, injecting death into the lives of his characters to see what happens. For Jake Greenspahn, the protagonist of Elkin’s 1961 story ‘Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers’, whose son has just died, what really rankles is that this death seems to have no impact at all on those around him. Everyone seems to keep going about their lives as if nothing has happened. When the television shop owner condescends with phony sympathy, Greenspahn thinks to himself: ‘He’s taking into account, that’s what he’s doing. He’s taking into account the fact that my son has died. He’s figuring it in and making apologies for me, making an allowance, like he was doing an estimate in his head what to charge a customer’ (Elkin 1966: 14–15). In ‘Among the Witnesses’ (1959), an ex-GI’s attempt to sow some wild oats at a Jewish resort in the Catskills is spoiled when a little girl drowns in the swimming pool. The guests soon leave the hotel en masse, shocked that such a thing could happen ‘where you pay good money just to keep everybody on top of the water’ (1966: 100). And in ‘In the Alley’ (1959), a man, stricken with cancer, outlives his doctor’s estimate of his time left and finds he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Suddenly aware that ‘he had not in fact thought about his death’, he enters the hospital in the hopes of learning from others how to die well (1966: 143). Before long he escapes, unwilling to be surrounded by so much pain and suffering: ‘dissolution and death are not as inscrutable as they’re cracked up to be. They’re scrutable as hell’ (150). In these stories, over and over again, people are shown to be unready to face the one thing that it is sure they all have to face. For Elkin, who admitted in a 1976 interview that ‘[t]here isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think, “Jesus Christ, how many more months do I have left?”’ (LeClair 1976), death is a fire to put under his heroes, an unignorable presence that spurs them to action. What comedy there is springs, miraculously, from that action’s futility.

Wallace Markfield If Wallace Markfield isn’t mentioned in any of the critical works on black humour, it is only because he is hardly mentioned in any critical works at all. The author of three novels firmly in the American Jewish literary tradition, and numerous stories and articles published in Commentary, Partisan Review and the New York Times, Markfield is a curiously forgotten figure. A search for his name in the MLA International Bibliography turns up ten unique pieces, nearly half of which are from a 1982 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to Markfield and Douglas Woolf. In some ways Markfield’s debut novel, To an Early Grave (1964), would set the pattern for his whole career. An often hilariously funny novel about New York Jews published at a time when such a work was very

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much in fashion, it would seem the book was just the thing to grant Markfield access to the American literary establishment. And yet, in another sense, the book seems to have courted its obscurity by design: it was at once ‘too Jewish’ for mainstream tastes (the book is filled, from front to back, with Yiddish words and expressions, without so much as an attempt at translation) and, in its satire of the New York Intellectuals, too vicious towards the very demographic it needed as boosters.4 The book tells the story of four sometime friends, instantly recognisable as members of the New York Jewish literary and intellectual crowd of the 1940s and 1950s, who must travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn to attend the funeral of a fifth man, the author and critic Leslie Braverman, dead of a heart attack at 41. That Braverman is clearly modelled on Isaac Rosenfeld, who led a similarly chaotic life and died young in 1956, has surely contributed to the temptation to read To an Early Grave, as most of the few critics who have taken it up have done, strictly through the lens of its place in the mythos of the New York Intellectuals and their milieu. But it is worth placing the novel in another context, that of Markfield’s contemporaries Heller, Elkin and Friedman, and reading the book as a long Jewish joke at death’s expense. When Morroe Rieff, the novel’s protagonist and the closest thing the book has to a likeable figure, first hears that Leslie Braverman, spirited contributor to the little magazines and his erstwhile friend, has died, he is taken aback. ‘“Whoosh. My God.” He groaned with sorrow and rage and smacked his forehead.’ The next moment, however, his thoughts quickly jump to more practical matters: ‘He remembered, with a sinking heart, that Leslie owed him a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Oh, goodbye now my money. Down, down under the earth’ (Markfield 1964: 10). This movement, in which death’s solemn presence is briefly acknowledged before swiftly disappearing underneath more worldly concerns, becomes a comic template, repeated throughout the book’s digressive journey. Rieff is tasked by Braverman’s widow with rounding up ‘the boys’ – Barnet Weiner, Holly Levine and Felix Ottensteen, each drawn from Markfield’s experiences running with the crowd that filled the pages of such journals as Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent.5 After a drawn-out beginning (Ottensteen thinks they are to meet at Washington Square, instead of Sheridan Square), the four embark on a nearly epic journey in Levine’s Volkswagen, a German-made car that draws out Ottensteen’s ire: ‘“A wonderful little automobile,” he said, fingering the upholstery. “I bet they used here only the finest human skins. The finest!”’ (116). Throughout, the conversation is rendered in what Melvin J. Friedman calls a ‘hybrid language which makes use of Yiddish, the idiom of American popular culture, and a literary vocabulary deeply informed by the presence of Joyce, Eliot, and the other essential figures of Modernism and New Criticism’ (1982: 42). And it is mostly through that hybrid language that Markfield turns what could be a sombre and mournful trip to a funeral into an uproarious and sometimes farcical celebration of a way of being that seems to prize mockery above all else. At every turn expectations are upended, pieties are deflated, insults are hurled. Even when things get serious for a moment or two in the car, when the men allow themselves to speak earnestly about their departed friend, a touch of ridicule creeps in, as when Levine pays tribute to Braverman as a ‘secondary talent of the highest order’ (Markfield 1964: 135). When the boys finally make it to the funeral chapel, we are treated to a chapter-long sermon by one of the great rabbinical gasbags in literary history. A tour de force of selfimportant dogmatic doggerel, the rabbi’s sermon drones on while the four men whisper about lunch plans and try to make each other burst into laughter. The punch line to this extended joke comes when the men finally approach the coffin, after waiting in the long



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procession through the chapel, to find that the dead man is not Leslie Braverman. They have gone to the wrong funeral, sat through and listened to an extended rabbinical tribute paid to a complete stranger. And even though the travelling party does eventually arrive at the graveside – the correct graveside – the emphasis throughout is not on the grief of these men for their friend, but on their Yiddish-inflected patter, their mundane complaints and their endless interest in the minutiae of both their intellectual milieu and American pop culture. Levine, before the coffin is in the ground, manages to secure an assignment from a magazine editor to write a piece called either ‘“Leslie Braverman: the Comic Vision,” or “The Comic Vision of Leslie Braverman”’, which he envisions as a ‘memoir-critique. The former lending tension to the latter, the latter lending irony to the former’ (190, 198). Rieff upbraids himself for his lack of emotion: ‘You could cry when the planes shot down King Kong off the Empire State Building. You could cry when Wallace Beery slapped Jackie Cooper then punished his hand. You could cry when Lew Ayres reached for that butterfly’ (220). But he cannot cry at the cemetery. Nor can he cry at other points in the narrative, despite his earnest attempts to feel genuine emotion. It is a testament to the novel’s approach to mortality – a strong preference for irreverent laughter rather than dutiful grief – that it is only at the book’s final sentence that ‘he began to cry freely and quietly’ (255). Whatever similarities this ending has to the end of Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956),6 whatever sympathies readers have for Rieff, finally able to shed a tear, pale next to the 254 previous pages. Markfield’s vision is of grief postponed for as long as possible, of comedy standing as a bulwark against death, right up until the inevitable reckoning.

Bruce Jay Friedman For all that Bruce Jay Friedman became identified with the black humour label – editing an anthology called Black Humor had something to do with it – he disliked the term. He preferred ‘tense comedy’, and, in his work of the early 1960s, this latter term seems apt (Schulz 1974: 14). There are more jokes and gags per page in Friedman’s fiction than in that of the other writers discussed in this chapter, but the humour always has a way of contributing to the protagonists’ – and the reader’s – unease, unsettling the books’ seeming realism. Again and again Friedman, or his characters, introduce a note of playful absurdity into an otherwise normal world, only to see it double back as something sinister or maddeningly opaque. In the 1960 story ‘For Your Viewing Entertainment’, the protagonist, Mr Ordz, gets a stomach ache that may or may not be caused by a variety show that seems to be speaking directly to him through his TV. He goes to the doctor: ‘It’s either real or imagined,’ he said to the doctor. ‘Can you describe it?’ asked the doctor. ‘It’s sort of red with gray edges and is constant.’ ‘It’ll probably go away,’ said the doctor. ‘If it turns blue, let me know and we’ll take it from there.’ ‘Are you kidding me?’ asked Mr. Ordz. ‘I’m a doctor,’ said the doctor. (Friedman 1963: 17–18) Often Friedman’s characters are oddly confident they know how things will turn out, spurred to arrogance by their extensive knowledge of pop cultural tropes. In ‘A Foot in the Door’ (1961), when an insurance agent offers to fulfil Mr Gordon’s wishes in exchange for certain hardships (for a new house in ‘Tall Hills’ Gordon has to agree that his son will be

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born ‘with a slightly bent nose’), the latter remarks that he ‘always expected something like this to happen. The only thing is I always thought there would be ethereal music in the background’ (1963: 72). In ‘23 Pat O’Brien Movies’ (1960), a young man threatening suicide on a building’s ledge assures a police officer that he knows the latter’s strategy for talking him down, having seen ‘the head-scratching and the we’re-just-two-fellows-outhere-having-a-chat routine’ in countless movies (1963: 210). And ‘Yes, We Have No Ritchard’ (1960) features a man, recently deceased, certain that the afterlife must resemble those versions that he has seen onscreen. What distinguishes these stories from mere postmodern exercises, parables that illustrate the ways life imitates art, are the twists Friedman never fails to include. In each case, the protagonist’s confidence is misplaced. Mr Gordon gets what he wants and more, but in the end loses his wife to the insurance agent, who himself ‘took asthma, a bleeding ulcer, and let a Long Island train wreck have six of my grandchildren for your wife’ (1963: 85–6). At the end of ‘23 Pat O’Brien Movies’, it is the policeman who commits suicide, leaving the young man on the ledge without a script to follow. And in ‘Yes, We Have No Ritchard’, the protagonist finds out that, although there is a ‘good side’ and a ‘bad side’ in the afterlife, ‘[t]here’s no one on the good side’ (1963: 181). The punch lines of Friedman’s jokes, when they come, tend to unsettle both his protagonists and his readers, defying expectations and raising new questions just as the stories are ending. This feeling of unease, of never having firm ground to stand on, is enlarged and deepened in Friedman’s 1962 novel Stern. The novel begins with its eponymous protagonist moving, with his wife and son, from the city to the suburbs, and this movement, from a many-peopled community to a sparsely populated near-wilderness (their ‘only neighbor at the new house was an ancient man with a thin chest who was always being placed and arranged in different positions’), sets the pattern for the whole novel, in which Stern is perpetually at a distance from his fellow man (Friedman 1962: 30). He is a man beset, never at rest, never able to communicate his troubles to others and feel that he is understood. In this sense, David Seed has noted, Stern ‘deals with themes familiar from 1950s fiction – anxiety, isolation, doubts about the meaning of prosperity’; but Friedman’s brand of black humour takes this well-worn trope and ‘pushes every detail towards the extreme so that the narrative becomes shrill and almost unbelievable at times’ (1988: 15). Friedman is not content merely to describe Stern’s suburb as a lonely and strange place; he has Stern walk across a deserted eighty-acre estate between the train station and the house every night, accompanied by two huge dogs that descend, take his wrists into their mouths and escort him most of the way. Each turn of the plot increases Stern’s discomfort. A man in the neighbourhood pushes Stern’s wife down, calling her a kike and forbidding their sons to play together. When Stern drives by the man’s house he sees ‘a line of giant American flags flying thrillingly and patriotically from the man’s every window’, the image underlining Stern’s isolation from the American dream the suburbs seemed to promise. At the very moment he sees the flags, he first feels the ‘great flower of pain’ within his stomach – an ulcer – that will put him in a rest home among an assortment of crippled patients whose grotesque maladies further reflect Stern’s own feelings of disfigurement (Friedman 1962: 74). Almost immediately after he leaves the rest home, seemingly recovered, he suffers a nervous breakdown which serves to further isolate him – ‘[a] film seemed to seal him off from the others around him’ (172) – and he decides to sell the suburban house. The criticism often made of Friedman is that his characters are mere caricatures, and indeed this can often seem the case with the minor characters in Stern.7 Characters often



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appear as wind-up toys, introduced as prone to doing one particular thing, and then shown doing that thing over and over again. But these comic devices serve Friedman’s overall purpose, which is to portray Stern’s general isolation and unease with those around him.8 Stern experiences the human world around him as two-dimensional and unresponsive; Friedman works to portray that experience to readers. Even at the book’s end, with his ulcer behind him and having survived his breakdown (‘I had the mildest nervous breakdown in town’, he tells a coworker; 181), Stern can’t quite fully inhabit the stability and repose that would seem to be his just desert. Telling his family that he ‘feel[s] like doing some hugging’, he embraces his wife and son to make an image of the stereotypically happy family. But the book’s final line tells us he holds ‘them a fraction longer than he’d intended’, calling attention to the artificiality and awkwardness of Stern’s position in the world (191). Friedman never lets his man have a moment’s rest. As in the work of Heller, Elkin and Markfield, the result of Friedman’s humour is never straightforward, never the uncomplicated belly-laugh. Rather, these four American writers each explore the power of humour to reveal, to surprise, to shock and to destroy, and their readers are left wondering if they should laugh, or cry, or both.

Notes 1. See Daugherty (2011: 224–41). 2. Later on, the tragic, even totalitarian, implications of Catch-22 become even clearer when Yossarian encounters an old woman in Italy who inexplicably knows about Catch-22. She explains: ‘Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing’ (Heller 1961: 407). 3. Maurice Charney points out that Elkin responded to being read as a Jewish writer in nearly identical terms: ‘I don’t identify myself with Jewish writers. However, you know, I resent it if I see an anthology with Jewish writers, and I’m not included’ (1987: 178). 4. In an essay written almost two decades after the publication of To an Early Grave, Sanford Pinsker reported that Leslie Fiedler, when asked about Markfield’s debut, remarked: ‘Some books deserve their obscurity!’ (1982: 35). On the other hand, the novel was adapted into the 1968 movie Bye, Bye, Braverman, directed by Sidney Lumet. 5. Markfield would go on to say, in an interview conducted in 1978, that he ‘would lump all these writers together into one word: Partisan Review. Of course there were distinctions among Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, and Hannah Arendt; but then in a sense I see them in aggregate’ (O’Brien 1982: 8). 6. Sanford Pinsker points out this similarity in his essay on the novel, adding that ‘To an Early Grave is, on one level, the story of how a hung-up Morroe got unblocked and was able, at last, to shed the tears he had been harboring during the novel’s day’ (1982: 31). 7. Josh Greenfeld, in an admiring 1968 magazine profile of Friedman, notes that ‘[t]here are many who believe that his vision is a limited one, incapable of expressing, let alone diagnosing, the important ills of our time . . . They accuse him of painting crude caricatures in gimmicky situations, and they point out his one-note sameness of subject’ (1968: 32). 8. Max Schulz writes that Stern ‘is both physically part of and mentally apart from the collective community. He lives in it but does not belong to it. That he is a nonperson is vividly demonstrated by his lack of involvement with people. With neither wife, parents, co-worker, employer, friend, nor acquaintances does he successfully communicate’ (1974: 42).

5 AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE WRITING, ILLNESS AND THE ETHICS OF INNOVATION Aimee Pozorski You mustn’t forget anything – that’s the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory – to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing. (Roth 1991: 124)

I

n the midst of his 1991 memoir Patrimony – long understood as one of Philip Roth’s most elegiac and personal books – Roth reveals a strong desire to call his friend Joanna, a woman whose own father was shot in a trench defending Warsaw in 1939. From the book’s first lines – dedicated as it is to ‘our family, / the living and the dead’ – to the last line, ‘you must not forget anything’, Patrimony appears to be as much a Holocaust memoir as it is the memoir of Roth’s confrontation with his father’s cancer diagnosis, illness and death. When the grief in anticipation of his father’s last days consumes him, Roth calls on Joanna, explaining: ‘All I wanted was her ear – having fatherless, courageous, rejuvenated Joanna just listening to me might provide whatever it was I now needed at eleven-thirty at night to face putting my own father, at eighty-six, through a ten-hour operation, five lifeless days in bed, three or four months of convalescence and all of it with no real certainty that it would do him a damn bit of good’ (121). On the surface, then, and through many layers underneath, this is as much a memoir about Roth’s grief as it is about his father, Herman. The focus on listening here is important throughout the text, which emphasises the ways in which Roth diligently listens to his father’s stories, the fond remembrances of all who knew his father in youth, and the diagnoses of doctors. But Joanna is a special figure as well: she not only listens to Philip recount the decisions he must make, she also embodies Jewish survival after the Holocaust, her own father a warrior of Warsaw until his death in 1939. When Roth talks with Joanna, they discuss Herman in particular – the importance of memory for him, the idea that if one has no memories then one has nothing at all – but also his generation and their values as new Americans: ‘The Europe in him is his survivorship. These are people who will never give up. But they are better than Europe, too. There was gratitude in them and idealism. That basic decency’ (125). The key word here, for the reader and for Roth, too, is ‘survivorship’: it is central for understanding Herman in the face of his illness, but also Joanna’s father’s bravery in Warsaw and the Holocaust survivors of their generation who so influenced Roth. In a paragraph that would not be out of place



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in a Holocaust memoir, Roth continues: ‘That was why I’d called Joanna – that was what she shared with my father and what I prized in both of them: survivorship, survivorhood, survivalism’ (125). With his characteristic wordplay – ‘survivorhood’ and ‘survivalism’ are hardly standard extensions of the word ‘survivor’ – Roth underscores what is at stake in caring for his father, in agreeing to a ten-hour operation, in staving off death: his father’s survival, Roth’s survival, and the patrimony that links them both. This moment begins with the prescription, ‘You mustn’t forget anything’ (124): a sentence that is expressed slightly more formally at the very end of the memoir. The memoir ends with ‘You must not forget anything’ (238) – the second person ‘you’ this time referring as much to the reader as the writer; the rejection of the contraction in this utterance imbuing it with the formality of a commandment. If American Jewish life writing values anything, Roth seems to show us, it values that – memory as inscribed on a coat of arms, an indication of a family history and ethnic legacy. It is about telling life stories so that we do not forget anything. And it is about confronting illness and death through the listening and witnessing of an other. Nonetheless, Patrimony seems to fit somewhat outside of the traditional category of ‘life writing’. Generally, when scholars consider the category of ‘life writing’ – even more particularly, ‘Jewish life writing’ – they tend to characterise it as straightforwardly autobiographical. However, I would like to propose here that a more careful consideration of the term ‘life writing’, or even ‘autobiography’, would allow us to expand the generic boundaries but also, paradoxically, to say something rather specific about what American Jewish authors have been able to achieve when writing creatively about their own lives. Such diverse texts as Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986; 1991), Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992; 1994), although typically defined variously for the range of genres they represent (experimental biography, modernist fiction, confessional poetry, graphic novel, cultural analysis, memoir, drama), all embody a crucial common element: they depict certain realities about living as a Jew in America – grounded in a singular lived experience conveyed via an experimental style not ordinarily associated with autobiography. Reading these texts as formal experiments in life writing rather than in terms of the generic categories they have been conventionally assigned allows us to see a specific tradition emerge – one that redefines Jewishness over and against an antisemitic discourse imposing from the outside a stereotypical view of Jewish life and death. In response, these literary and highly stylised texts not only convey the details of a given life, but also participate in an emergent tradition that values formal innovation in life writing as an ethical response to rigid conventions associated not only with literary genre, but with identity and politics as well. This essay will consider three texts by American Jewish writers who focus on a very particular aspect of life in their writing: illness. In drawing on illness not only as a literal fact of life, but also as a metaphor for human strength in the face of adversity – or, conversely, adversity in the face of human strength – they critically engage the antisemitic discourses linking Jews with illness throughout the twentieth century (and, indeed since long before then). In closely reading Roth’s Patrimony, Kushner’s Angels in America (Parts One and Two) and Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, I will argue that the most effective American Jewish life writing not only manipulates genre and form, but also

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pushes the envelope in terms of content through direct representations of sickness, illness and death as a means not only to depict a life story, but also to speak back to an antisemitic tradition that aligns illness with human weakness and degradation. In writing illness into the life story, these authors implicitly intervene in a discourse that has for so long been deformed by antisemitism. In talking back – in reframing this conversation – such authors as Roth, Kushner and Sontag also simultaneously ask serious questions of us all about how we deal with the sick and dying, establishing an ethics of the moment that goes far beyond the American Jewish literary tradition. These authors seem to be out of their elements, a startling and disorienting reminder about the legacy of Jews in life, but also in facing terminal illness and death. Beyond Steven J. Rubin’s early encyclopaedic work in the tradition – works such as ‘American-Jewish Autobiography, 1912 to the Present’ (1988) and ‘Ethnic Autobiography: A Comparative Approach’ (1981) – valuable discussions to date regarding Jewish life writing tend to fall into two categories: those that depict the tension between assimilation and acculturation, on the one hand, and those that depict overcoming persecution, on the other. There is good reason for these two thematic concerns. When considering the waves of immigration into the United States, one also must consider the costs of such a move: the loss of a European homeland and the language and cultural practices that went with it – all while taking on a new American life that does not always seem like a good fit. Similarly, when considering the history of persecution endured by American Jews – as well as Jews worldwide – one must also theorise the literary response: writing has become a way of fighting back, with the pen rivalling the sword in fighting hateful practices and rhetoric. A strong example of work in the area of assimilation in American Jewish life writing is Mark Krupnick’s ‘Assimilation in Recent American Jewish Autobiographies’, which emphasises the tension between maintaining Jewish tradition and/within the American form. For Krupnick ‘[i]t is inevitable that in America the recovery of Jewish roots will take an American form. But one hopes that this return and the writing it engenders will seem in retrospect more than a fashion, that it will not appear as a type of middlebrow conformity’ (1993: 473). The focus on ‘American form’ here in addition to content is what interests me – the idea that Jewish life writing in America might necessarily take on new qualities in the craft itself, qualities that represent American expression and experimentation and that, on the surface, might seem to work against the ethnic project of maintaining one’s roots. Mary Antin’s work exemplifies this tension, as articulated by Michael P. Kramer in his essay ‘Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and Jewish Origins of the American Self’. That Antin’s work is by now canonical in the field is perhaps an understatement. As Kramer points out: ‘For Antin, assimilation was not the antithesis of Jewishness but its embodiment – not a failure but an achievement, albeit paradoxical and perhaps ­unpalatable, of the imagination of an American Jew’ (1998: 144). In addition to Mary Antin’s contributions to the field, we might also consider Ludwig Lewisohn’s Up Stream (1930), Leon Sciaky’s Farewell to Salonica (1946), Anzia Yezierska’s Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Lost in America (1981) – all texts self-conscious in significant ways about the intersections of form and content as well as the tensions between tradition, on the one hand, and experimentation, on the other. Of this tension in Sciaky’s work, Diana Matza has argued that ‘[n]oting how Farewell to Salonica breaks a pattern in Jewish memoir writing should spur us to do more comparative studies of Jewish immigrant autobiographies and to examine analytically the role national background plays in immigrant aspirations and accomplishments’ (1987: 41). Sepp



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Tiefenthaler’s ‘The Search for Cultural Identity’ sees in Lewisohn, Yezierska and Singer an answer to Antin, whom he seems to be contrasting with these other three writers when he argues: Instead of creating a new self, a New World self, through a process of one-way assimilation to standard norms and values provided by the Anglo-American Christian cultural inventory, these three autobiographers tried to achieve a cultural identity of their own either by renegotiating their initial assimilatory attempts, or by an act of rejection and of resistance to such smooth assimilation. (1985: 49) Valuing representations of the struggle to assimilate rather than focusing on success, Tiefenthaler sees these works as ‘new cultural creations’ in their ability to look forward and backward and their awareness of ‘cultural discontinuity and displacement’ (49). In addition to the tradition of Jewish immigrant autobiographies, there has been a rich tradition in contemporary American Jewish life writing that looks back to the Holocaust in order to exemplify the Jewish struggle in terms of discontinuity and displacement within the history of persecution and loss of a viable homeland. The controversy surrounding Binjamin Wilkormirski’s Fragments (1995) – a book initially received as an exemplar of Jewish life writing, then exposed as a hoax and subsequently rehabilitated as a work that appears paradoxically more authentic because of its fictional techniques – helps to frame the vexed relationship between fiction, memoir and life writing. Andrew Gross and Michael Hoffman, in their essay ‘Memory, Authority and Identity’, state that we can understand why Fragments has become such a controversial book, namely because it exposes the politics of commemoration. It teaches us that a ‘people’ is as contingent as its history, and that memory is a highly political metaphor. Wilkomirski might not be an actual victim of the Holocaust, but he is a fitting monument to victim culture. (2004: 43) Wilkomirski’s text was so powerful because of its level of detail and specificity, all told from the perspective of a child’s memory. Perhaps this should have been a clue that it is more fiction than life writing; nonetheless, it forces us to grapple with what is at stake in commemoration and with questions about who is entitled to narrate a life and what form it may take. Mark Anderson has done similar work in his article ‘The Child Victim as Witness’, which seeks to underscore ‘the key role of the child victim in the representation of the Holocaust, especially in mainstream American life . . . While rhetorically effective, the figure of the child victim can also distort, personalize, and dehistoricize the Holocaust, providing a false sense of solidarity and understanding in mainstream American audiences’ (2007: 1). Surely, as Anderson, Gross and Hoffman contend, considering responses to the Holocaust and traumatic history – especially through the eyes of a child – contributes to an understanding of life writing that goes beyond the question of assimilation. And yet even then, something gets lost in the translation of a life – especially through the highly vexed and bathetic figure of the child, notorious for gaining sympathy in American audiences. Working beyond the confines of American Jewish life writing and its connections with assimilation, on the one hand, and broad historical trauma, on the other, Hana WirthNesher is perhaps closest to my thinking about American Jewish illness narratives in particular, considering as she does quotidian traumas and subsequent experimentation at

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the heart of the American Jewish experience. Beyond works by Mary Antin and Ludwig Lewisohn, Wirth-Nesher also sees potential in studying such figures as Henry Roth and Philip Roth as a part of this tradition. In their introduction to the highly influential special issue of Prooftexts entitled ‘American Jewish Autobiography’, Wirth-Nesher and Janet Hadda suggest that three predominant features of American Jewish autobiography worth further exploration include the Mary Antin influence, the role of multilingualism and those works that fall outside of the traditional generic expectations (1998: 118). Henry Roth and Philip Roth are perhaps two examples of that final category. In ‘Facing the Fictions’, Wirth-Nesher argues that they share features that ‘thicken the plot of the writer’s self-exposure’: (1) Their art has been the source of intense public debate, and hence, their lives have received extensive coverage; (2) The ardent interest in their work has been partly due to their perceived representativeness as Jewish-American writers; this accounts for the drama of their reception and for the public debate; (3) Their autobiographical writings are self-reflexive responses to public discussion of their careers, and they engage in ­metanarrative strategies in the course of their ‘telling’ of their lives. (1998: 260) Such metanarrative strategies – postmodern, experimental and self-referential in their own right – might contribute to the fact that both Henry Roth and Philip Roth, and I would add Susan Sontag and Tony Kushner, tend not to be examined in the context of life writing. What does it mean to use tools from fiction to put to work ‘setting the record straight, of telling “the facts[?]”’ as Wirth-Nesher asks early on in her essay (1998: 259). In a word, it means alienation – one of the most useful qualities of contemporary American Jewish life writing, but also very far from the comfort offered by assimilationist texts of the past. For the remainder of this essay, I will focus on the alienating effects in contemporary American Jewish writing of narratives about illness, death and dying – about cancer and AIDS in a country that privileges health as a sign of good moral standing. I propose that such recent and graphic depictions of illness allude to the tradition of antisemitic discourse that culminated in the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s. The rhetoric linking Jews to illness goes back centuries, but manifested itself most virulently in Nazi propaganda, which relied heavily on the idea of the sickly Jew corrupting the pure blood of the Aryan race. Half a century before Hitler, however, Adolf Stoecker connected illness with Jews not only in terms of physical health, but also in terms of their threat to the ideal German spirit. His 1879 essay begins with an uncanny reference to fire and burning: ‘The Jewish question has long been a burning question’, he begins. ‘Amongst us it has flamed brightly for several months’ (1991: 58). Throughout his essay, Stoecker advances a case for marginalising Jews in political life by discussing Germany as a body growing ill from ‘alien spirits’. He continues: ‘Symptoms of illness are present. Social evils are visible in all the limbs of the body politic’ (59). By the end of the essay, Stoecker’s rhetoric linking Jews with illness has escalated to the point where Jews become a metaphorical tumour that must be excised. He concludes: ‘The social maladies that Jewry brought with it must be cured by wise legislation. It will not be easy to place Jewish capital under the necessary limitations. Only organic legislation can achieve this . . . Either we will succeed in this and restore Germany to blessedness, or the cancer from which we suffer will continue to eat away at us’ (66). In the context of the rhetorical connection that such antisemitic texts forge between illness and the Jewish community, I want to discuss the American Jewish memoir about



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illness not only as a personal story or as embellished fiction and drama but also as a political and ethical response to this rhetoric in the wake of the Holocaust. Patrimony is an ­exemplary case in this tradition. On the surface, Roth’s memoir appears concerned specifically with the death of his father in 1989. Its title promises a reconsideration of the tangible and intangible gifts inherited from one’s father or passed down from one’s ancestors after death. In other words, Patrimony seems like a straightforward memoir in the sense that it is Roth’s story of the illness and passing of his own father. However, resonances with the Holocaust pervade the text, which features not only an extended discussion of the family background and origins of Joanna, Roth’s friend, but also an extended description of Walter Hermann: ‘a survivor of two concentration camps who had come to Newark in 1947, speaking only German; fresh from Auschwitz and only twenty-two’, he had found a way to make a new life in New Jersey. Walter, as it happens, is a writer like Philip. He appears at a dinner party, in part to support Roth’s ailing father, in part to be connected with an established author such as Roth. Walter’s section takes up fourteen pages at the end of a personal, elegiac book. Ultimately, we learn that Walter’s manuscript could be ‘a pornographic best seller about the Holocaust’ (Roth 1991: 220) – a memoir that details not man’s inhumanity to man, but Walter’s sexual exploits while hiding in Berlin. When asked how he survived in Berlin, Walter responds: ‘Women. With women. I was the only man left in Berlin. I was eighteen, nineteen. All the German men were in the Army and all the Jewish men were gone’ (212– 13). When he says he does not write Holocaust literature like Elie Wiesel, he is hinting at the pornographic focus of the work in the absence of the philosophical, ethical and lyrical dimensions of memoirs by such authors as Wiesel and Primo Levi, the latter of whom is honoured over the course of two pages of Patrimony (211–12). Ordinarily, I would argue that such a digression about an author of ‘Holocaust pornography’ has no place in a personal memoir about living with, and ultimately dying from, cancer. However, here Walter not only makes an important contribution to the emotional levity of the work – whereas the story of Roth’s father tends towards pathos, Walter’s story adds humour at a crucial moment – but also exemplifies survival in the face of the death camps and propaganda about Jewish illness and the Final Solution. Juxtaposed, in this section, with details of life in the camps – ‘show him your number’, Philip’s father instructs (210) – are graphic depictions of sex with the Holocaust looming in the background. In response to Walter’s prose: ‘I came . . . She came . . . It was a delirium’, Philip reflects: ‘And meanwhile, I thought, there was a Holocaust going on’ (216). The point here may be not only to provide a counterpoint to the additional two hundred plus pages of details of Roth’s father’s illness – the tests and operations, incontinence and blindness – but also to show how they might go hand in hand: no ordinary life writing about the effects of illness, Patrimony is also a response to Nazi propaganda about Jewish illness itself. Thwarting any kind of expectation about what illness and writing about illness ought to detail, Patrimony includes references on over twenty pages to what it took to survive in Germany as a Jew during the war and the imperative to tell about it. However, I want to go further in order to suggest that the memoir’s now infamous ‘shit scene’ is an important counterpoint to the sex scene, as it helps us to see Roth’s elegiac memoir in terms of our relationships with an other, even in, or especially in, the face of his illness and undoing. About fifty pages from the end of the book, Roth describes the patrimony he is to inherit – a patrimony that is literally shit in his hands.

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Surprisingly, fewer than twenty peer-reviewed articles exist on the topic of Patrimony, and scholars tend to read it as an experimental genre-bending exercise (Gooblar, WirthNesher) or as taking part in a larger conversation in American literature about fathers, sons and intergenerational conflict (Iannone, Kahane, Gordon). Although it focuses more on the meta-fictional aspects of Patrimony, David Gooblar’s reading is perhaps closest to my own in its focus on ethics; considering also other autobiographical works such as The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), Gooblar claims that ‘Roth’s introduction of his undisguised self into his books leads to . . . a heightened concern with the ways in which writing inevitably affects others’ (2008: 32). Gooblar’s reading, in fact, allows me to come full circle in order to return to my proposition that American Jewish texts featuring aspects of the writer’s own life – especially those that attest in graphic detail to sickness and the body – not only account for the author’s local intergenerational conflict, but also talk back to, and even appropriate, fascist accounts of Jewish life in order to present an ethical demand that we tend with compassion to the sickness of others. Roth’s encounter with otherness – indeed, his care for his father during the devastating, emasculating scene in the bathroom – and his insistence that ‘you must not forget anything’ (1991: 124, 177, 238) casts the memoir not simply in terms of his personal grief, but also in terms of a cultural grief, an awareness of the importance of honouring the dead. Andrew Gordon, Claire Kahane, Mark Krupnick (2005: 16–17) and David Brauner (2007: 163–5) have all addressed closely Patrimony’s notorious scene – as have I (Pozorski 2013: 17–22) – but I believe it is worth returning to here, as it is, to my mind, the most powerful depiction of the alienating effects of the sick body of an other. Roth takes a full five pages to narrate the event: his father was concerned that he had not had a bowel movement for an extended period of time and, when visiting Roth at his home, excused himself from the lunch table. Roth begins: ‘I smelled the shit halfway up the stairs to the second floor . . . Standing inside the bathroom door was my father, completely naked, just out of the shower and dripping wet. The smell was overwhelming’ (1991: 171). Although Roth’s focus is on the smell here – ‘I smelled the shit halfway up’; ‘The smell was overwhelming’ – Roth’s representation of his father as vulnerable, naked, dripping wet, forlorn, humiliated, and of Roth himself as kind, gentle, caring, seems to be a lesson in compassion in the face of difference above all else. ‘I beshat myself’, says the elder Roth twice, the second time reduced to tears. ‘It’s okay,’ says Philip, ‘it’s okay, everything is okay . . . I won’t tell anyone . . . I’ll say you’re taking a rest’ (172–3). But Roth must set out to clean up the mess. He reflects: The shit was everywhere, smeared underfoot on the bathmat, running over the toilet bowl edge and at the foot of the bowl, in a pile on the floor. It was splattered across the glass of the shower stall from which he’d just emerged, and the clothes discarded in the hallway were clotted with it. It was on the corner of the towel he had started to dry himself with. In this smallish bathroom, which was ordinarily mine, he had done his best to extricate himself from his mess alone, but as he was nearly blind and just up out of a hospital bed, in undressing himself and getting into the shower he had managed to spread the shit over everything. I saw that it was even on the tips of the bristles of my toothbrush hanging in the holder over the sink. (172) In one sense it is entirely true, as Kahane has argued, that the memoir is largely about cleaning up the messes of our fathers, of tidying their lives before or after putting them to rest and then doing the best with what remains. But I hate to stray too far from the fact



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that this is also literal shit – it has exploded everywhere into Philip Roth’s personal space – in his ‘smallish bathroom . . . ordinarily mine’ and even on the bristles of his toothbrush. This is shit, Roth seems to be saying, that could possibly end up in his own mouth. And if the content of the passage alone is not enough to convey a sense of profound alienation in the face of the illness of an other, the repeated sounds of the words themselves are ugly: the plosive /b/ and /p/ sounds of spitting and the hard /c/ fricative sounds of a frequent and annoying cough. Nonetheless, Roth proceeds: Where his shit lay in front of the toilet bowl in what was more or less a continuous mass, it was easiest to get rid of. Just scoop it up and flush it away. And the shower door and the windowsill and the sink and the soap dish and the light fixtures and the towel bars were no problem. Lots of paper towels and lots of soap. But where it had lodged in the narrow, uneven crevices of the floor, between the wide old chestnut planks, I had my work cut out for me. The scrub brush seemed only to make things worse, and eventually I took down my toothbrush and, dipping in and out of the bucket of hot sudsy water, proceeded inch by inch, from wall to wall, one crevice at a time, until the floor was as clean as I could get it. After some fifteen minutes on my knees, I decided that flecks and particles down so deep that I still couldn’t reach them we would simply all live with. (174) Roth’s use of the conjunction ‘and’ at the beginning of the passage emphasises just how much of it there remains to clean up; the emphasis on the crevices in the floor suggests just how deeply it lies ingrained. But the image of a son on his knees on the floor in a pile of his father’s shit is the most profound for me, as it reveals a necessary humility in the face of what we cannot master – in this case, his father’s illness and his own vulnerability – the cancer and the shit that carries it. In the end, Roth theorises this episode as a way to come to terms with one’s father’s life and impending death: ‘You clean up your father’s shit,’ he says, because it has to be cleaned up, but in the aftermath of cleaning it up, everything that’s there to feel is felt as it never was before. It wasn’t the first time that I’d understood this either: once you sidestep disgust and ignore nausea and plunge past those phobias that are fortified like taboos, there’s an awful lot of life to cherish. (175) For every bit of emphasis this observation places on Roth’s cleaning up his bathroom, however, there is a way in which we can read this as a reflection on everyday life – of encountering the ill among us who are sick and filthy and vulnerable: once you plunge past those phobias, there is an awful lot to cherish. With a new focus on what remains to be cherished, I might just end with a reminder that Roth tells us he arrives at this understanding of his father ‘not because cleaning it up was symbolic of something else but because it wasn’t, because it was nothing less or more than the lived reality that it was’ (176). In other words, Roth seems to be telling us, when dealing with others’ humanity, all we have, at the basest level, is the shit. And yet I believe in this moment that Roth is not telling the entire truth about what the shit represents. Contrary to previous interpretations offered by such scholars as Gordon, Kahane and Iannone among others – and, indeed, against the explanation provided so straightforwardly by Roth – I interpret the text not simply as a memoir of taking care of his father, and not simply as a genre-bending autobiographical account of Roth’s father’s

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last years, but rather as a philosophical treatise on ethics after the Holocaust. For Roth’s text also shares the philosophical dimensions of his post-Holocaust contemporaries who warn against forgetting; like such thinkers as Wiesel and Levinas, Patrimony insists on an encounter with otherness that acknowledges the radical differences that exist among us – especially in the context of illness and Jewishness, which had become linked hundreds of years ago in antisemitic and widely read texts. After all, this memoir seems to be saying that we need to be a little better at recognising the full humanity of others – disease and debilitation and all. And, when necessary, you must clean it up – not because the person is your father, but, more importantly, because he is a man. In this way, Roth’s literature – its alienating style and content alike – calls for an adequate ethics of the moment: the ability to pass on knowledge and to act on that knowledge while understanding this impossibility in advance. The belief that we must confront such a figure as an ill father is, on the one hand omnipresent; but these figures also remind us instantaneously that we cannot possibly confront them with the attention they deserve. Not surprisingly, sex and shit also combine in Tony Kushner’s account of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s in Angels in America (1992; 1994) – a crisis he lived through and undeniably despaired over. As James Fisher argues in The Theater of Tony Kushner, ‘In bringing his own autobiography to the stage, Kushner emphasizes that life is loss . . . As a gay man, a Jew, and a political leftist, Kushner strives to express a capacity for forgiveness in the human spirit, but adds that the losses suffered by the groups of which he is a part make a forgiving spirit difficult’ (2001: 11). Fisher’s work is one of the few I have seen that goes so far as to argue, as I do, that this surreal play is, in fact, autobiographical – the latest in the tradition of life writing that takes on new forms and a new style. And, like Roth, it takes on a provocative new content: that of illness and dying and their place in American society. As Kushner has Belize say in Part Two, Perestroika: ‘The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy, and mean’ (1994: 96). Despite Belize’s angry emphasis on the overlooked and disenfranchised in American society, Perestroika ends with its own kind of rebuilding that features a reconstructed American family. Gathered around the Bethesda fountain in Central Park at the end of a decade – in February 1990 – Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah all have their eyes towards the future as ‘The Great Work Begins’ (148). The first part of the play, however, is much less optimistic. Louis in Millennium Approaches could be the voice of Kushner in many ways, a vision of himself that Kushner is afraid to confront – the voice of America, but also a coward in the face of illness. As Louis reflects late into Part One: ‘what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth: Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred’ (1992: 90). While Louis is the theoretical voice in the play – sometimes more misguided than other times – the figures who actually live with the limits of tolerance are those who are sick with AIDS: Prior and Roy Cohn, radically different characters who share the same ‘bad news’ in Part One. Whereas Prior is associated with alternative states and experimentation with literary language, Cohn is associated with the law and the conservative right; whereas Prior comes to understand his diagnosis in terms of puns, Cohn is made to see the reality of his diagnosis through the scientific language of medicine.



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Prior’s puns at the beginning of the play purposely conflate the word ‘lesion’ with ‘legion’, as in ‘I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire’s disease’ (1992: 21) and ‘My troubles are lesion’ (21). Through this wordplay, Prior not only reveals his difficult confrontation with AIDS but also an implicit, covert desire to fight: in his juxtaposition of ‘lesion’ (‘damage’, ‘injury’, ‘morbid change in the exercise of function or texture of organs’) with ‘legion’ (‘a body of infantry’, ‘a host of armed men’), Prior masks his utter terror with the wordplay of a poet and the prophet he is revealed to be. Later in the play, Prior becomes much more morbid and focused on the reality of his syndrome, explaining: ‘It’s not going well, really . . . two new lesions. My leg hurts. There’s protein in my urine, the doctor says, but who knows what the fuck that portends. Anyway it shouldn’t be there, the protein. My butt is chapped from diarrhea and yesterday I shat blood’ (39). Here again, as with Roth, Kushner draws on the image of ‘shit’ not only to underscore the reality of disease, but also to see how far tolerance will go in the eyes of his audience. Such alienating language in an alienating play demands that readers, too, confront the reality of illness. In moving from playful poetic language to the mundane, graphic nature of ‘the shit’, Kushner reappropriates the function and rhetoric of illness in American Jewish writing. By the end of Act I, Scene 9, Kushner’s description of AIDS and its realities has become very direct. As explained through the textbook knowledge of Cohn’s physician, Kushner seems to be giving a lesson in the history and effects of AIDS – a lesson that was so long in coming to the American people at large. When diagnosing Cohn, Henry, Cohn’s doctor, explains: Nobody knows what causes it. And nobody knows how to cure it. The best theory is that we blame a retrovirus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Its presence is made known to us by the useless antibodies which appear in reaction to its entrance into the bloodstream through a cut, or an orifice. The antibodies are powerless to protect the body against it. Why, we don’t know. The body’s immune system ceases to function. Sometimes the body even attacks itself. At any rate it’s left open to a whole horror house of infection from microbes which it usually defends against. (42) Such educative prose seems to be an answer to Ronald Reagan’s silence in the face of the AIDS crisis, a silence that angered Kushner and many in the gay and mainstream communities in the US in the 1980s. Allen White, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004, observed that as ‘America remembers the life of Ronald Reagan, it must never forget his shameful abdication of leadership in the fight against AIDS. History may ultimately judge his presidency by the thousands who have and will die of AIDS.’ Monica B. Pearl’s work on Angels in America bears this out, as she argues that ‘The story of America in the 1980s . . . was the story of AIDS, for Angels in America is the story of AIDS in America in its most devastating and devastated years’ (2007: 761). She goes on to say that ‘Angels in America suggests that the story of AIDS has become the story of America in the late 20th century’ (761). Reading AIDS as a figure for American history is nothing if not provocative – but certainly, through Kushner alone, it reveals, to return to his phrase, ‘the limits of tolerance’. As with Philip Roth and Tony Kushner, Susan Sontag’s work in the American Jewish tradition and in the field of illness narrative grows out of her own experiences with illness. Her first treatise on the subject, Illness as Metaphor (1978), was informed by her diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia. According to Margalit Fox (2004), Sontag ‘had been ill with

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cancer intermittently for the last 30 years’ of her life. When doctors diagnosed Sontag’s breast cancer, they gave her a 10 per cent chance of surviving the next two years. Fox suggests that ‘[o]ut of her experience came Illness as Metaphor, which examined the cultural mythologizing of disease’. What made Illness as Metaphor so significant was its understanding that using metaphors in everyday life, especially when referring to terminal illness, has a tangible effect on the lives of those carrying the weight of the diagnosis: metaphors, Sontag reminds us, change the way we see things and, in turn, change the way we act. For her, ‘[t]he most striking similarity between the myths of TB and of cancer is that both are, or were, understood as diseases of passion’ (1990: 20). She goes on to say: ‘With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses’ (46). In what is perhaps her most scathing critique of understanding illness through metaphor, Sontag writes that ‘[i]llnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust’ (72). Such a linkage between illness in a person and societal illness implicitly alludes to the antisemitic rhetoric that argues that Jews must be exterminated and removed from an ailing society. Sontag’s critique is radical, as she is not reclaiming the metaphor but banishing it altogether – a banishment that seemed even more crucial twelve years later in the face of the AIDS crisis in America. In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag writes: ‘Twelve years ago, when I became a cancer patient, what particularly enraged me – and distracted me from my own terror and despair at my doctors’ gloomy prognosis – was seeing how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it’ (100). In closely reading associations between AIDS ‘invasion’ and ‘pollution’ (105), ‘guilt’ and social ‘pariahs’ (112) and, ultimately, the ‘plague’ (132), Sontag deconstructs the responses of the medical community and the political parties equally, especially when arguing that AIDS seems to foster ominous fantasies about a disease that is a marker of both individual and social vulnerabilities. The virus invades the body, the disease (or, in the newer version, the fear of the disease) is described as invading the whole society. In late 1986, President Reagan pronounced AIDS to be spreading – ‘insidiously’ of course – ‘through the length and breadth of our society.’ (153–4) Sontag’s project is eye-opening but also slightly threatening to literary critics, especially those of memoir writing, who celebrate metaphorical flourishes as key to the aesthetic endeavour. What would it mean not to have literary language at our disposal to write about such a traumatic moment in history, a trauma dealt to our physical and social bodies? Leon Wieseltier reminds us what is at stake in the project of writing about illness when he argues that ‘[t]he theme that runs through Susan’s writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic’ (qtd in Fox 2004). Cynthia J. Davis is perhaps a bit more direct in her analysis of Sontag’s project when she argues in the introduction to the 2002 special issue of American Literary History with a special focus on ‘Contagion and Culture’ that ‘[f]acing a grim cancer diagnosis some 25 years ago, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor (1978) in an effort to get us to get illness literally’ (2002: 828). Mary K. DeShazer reinforces the autobiographical connection between Sontag’s diagnosis and her writing as she suggests that ‘[a]lthough she did not



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acknowledge it until years later, Sontag wrote this book shortly after her own treatment, at forty-two, for stage-four metastatic breast cancer’ (2009: 216). What is gained by reading these non-traditional forms – among them, drama and ­philosophy – as autobiographical? Although reading such texts as Roth’s, Kushner’s and Sontag’s in terms of life writing is estranging, even alienating and unexpected, this is part of the point. In fact, writing a life through experimental forms results in a moment of reckoning for the reader: it presents an ethical situation in the very confrontation with otherness – an otherness not to be mastered in terms of what can be understood, but rather respected in terms of what cannot be understood. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once wrote that, when confronted with an other, there are two possible responses: to speak or to kill. Some read this literally as the presentation of only two choices before us – understanding that there is life between us, hanging in the balance of the written and spoken word. To be shocked into recognising this difference is to gain a new appreciation for life itself, of the life that is written within these forms. ‘You mustn’t forget anything’, Roth tells us in Patrimony – and Kushner and Sontag seem to have anticipated or reckoned with this charge. As Mary Antin and others writing in the form knew decades ago, estrangement is always a part of that project: taking something old, such as assimilation, historical trauma, illness and death, and making it new again. For literary writers, that is – necessarily – the inscription on their coat of arms.

6 FROM FEMINIST TO HOUSEWIFE AND BACK AGAIN: ORTHODOXY AND MODERNITY IN AMERICAN JEWISH WOMEN’S WRITING Rachel S. Harris The women’s movement in the late 60s and 70s stimulated a quantity of writing by American women about women – resulting in what has been described as a ‘renaissance’. (Showalter 1991: xii) Meanwhile, spurred on by ethnic identity movements, ethnic women asserted their difference from mainstream women and their right to their own distinct literature and scholarship. An outgrowth of both movements was Jewish women’s literature, described as representing ‘the most significant literary achievements’ in Jewish American writing in the past few decades. (Rubin 2005: 9)1

F

ollowing on the heels of writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick, a literary boom began among American women writers. These grandchildren of Jewish immigrants to America, born in the 1930s and 1940s, constitute a third generation of women writers considering a modern Jewish identity in feminist terms.2 Complicated by the issue of gender, these women writers wrestle with family traditions, Jewish rituals and the weight of the Holocaust. They explore American Jews’ desire for secularisation and modernisation, while negotiating the apparent conflict with a Jewish past. Furthermore, the desire to build a life and assimilate into American society is problematised by Israel and its alternate reality which threaten to destabilise the coherence of an American Jewish community. Caught in a tension between their expected roles as wives and mothers, and their hopes and ambitions for careers, these women explore a peripatetic, modern (New York-centric) Jewish world. Spurred on by second wave feminism, they regard ultra-orthodox and even orthodox Judaism as inherently oppressive to women, and depict escape into the modern secular world as a liberation for the intelligent and rebellious Jewish female. Nora Rubel explains in relation to her analysis of Pearl Abraham’s The Romance Reader (1995) and Erich Segal’s Acts of Faith (1992) that these writers ‘indict the haredi [ultra-orthodox] world for their resistance to women’s religious and secular education, women’s public religious participation, and for the imposed physical and spiritual separation of women from men’ (2009: 48).3 Reflecting a sentiment shared by many writers of this generation, Norma Rosen has written of her own life:



From Feminist to Housewife and Back Again 77 [My] father went to reform services on the extra-special ‘high’ days. But not my mother, who could not stand even this skimpy slice of official Jewish life. I think now that she was an early women’s liberationist, at least in Jewish matters. Even then I knew that she bitterly resented the treatment of women in her mother’s orthodox synagogue – on the one hand, the denial of women’s spiritual life, on the other, the physical wearing down of women under the burdens of homemaking. (1992c: 128)

Like Rosen, this generation’s writing was, in its early years, preoccupied with women’s empowerment within the modern world and the conflict these women often experienced with the submissiveness of their mothers’ generation. By contrast, their grandmothers’ generation denoted a world so remote that the tension evident with their mothers is absent in their relations and descriptions of their grandmothers. Instead these ancient matriarchs stood for a religious and domestic world that had become alien both practically and conceptually. Sharing neither the religious Hebrew of their grandfathers nor the ethnic immigrant languages of their grandmothers, the Yiddish, Hungarian, German, Russian and Polish existed only through a nostalgic, often fictional and certainly idealised recasting of the shtetl within the literary imagination. Thus these women writers had become American feminists and secular Jews, only connected to their Jewishness through a cultural or imaginative lens. Despite their apparent emancipation and assimilation into American society, playing active roles within the feminist movement, their later fiction and writings reveal a sense of disconnection with their daughters’ generation. Imagining they had bestowed the following generation with every advantage, these writers often found themselves taken aback by the choices that these young women finally made. The imagined freedoms of the mothers appeared rejected by the daughters who often re-embraced the traditionalism of their great-grandmothers. While this third generation continues to write and publish, simultaneously the explosion in American Jewish women’s writing has continued to a fourth generation for whom, as Judith Lewin has argued, ‘the return of contemporary Jewish women to religious practice, to a Jewish sense of self and community, and to a Jewish spirituality and family’ is a central concern (2008: 49). Though there is no automatic correlation between these two generations of women writers, the fourth generation reflects the transformation that the third generation had already observed about their daughters within their own writing. Interested in depicting the experience of Jewish women, both in the traditional orthodox world and beyond, the novels of the fourth generation have become the medium in which the tension between the longing for and the rejection of a traditional and religiously observant world is addressed. Consequently this fourth generation’s writing is often characterised by a ­negotiation between religion and a competing secular modern experience. Moreover, in recent years it has become apparent that there is a great diversity in writing and genre style among American Jewish women writers, and in the rest of this essay I will examine four major genre types among the hundreds of novels which have appeared since the 1980s, reflecting the increasing range that has developed: mystery, memoirs, historical novels and romance. Many of these novels tread a fine line between popular fiction and literary fiction, oscillating between primarily plot-driven and character-driven styles. What they share with one another and with the writing of the fourth generation is an attempt to penetrate into the private, typically domestic life of a traditional Jewish woman, most frequently one who has come from a religiously observant background, who has converted into the religious Jewish world, or who has ‘returned’ to orthodoxy in

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the Jewish equivalent of ‘born again’ as a ba’alat tshuva. Unlike general women’s fiction, in which domesticity, human relationships and personal development may also feature strongly, these texts are concerned with women’s lives in relation to a religious Jewish framework; thus food, cooking, shopping and eating are explorations of kashrut; dress is concerned with modesty; education is concerned with religious faith; and the goal of dating is marriage rather than romance or love, with the expectation of children. Thus one may conclude from this writing that ‘[f]or a woman, homemaking and raising children are seen as her way of serving God’ (Roller 1999: 152). Though the latter generation appears to be countering the feminist activism of their mothers by positively embracing the orthodoxy, domesticity and tradition that a secular generation had rejected, genre fiction complicates this historical binary. Therefore contemporary American Jewish women’s fiction offers a kaleidoscopic range of attitudes towards the religious world. For both the third and fourth generation, these novels are generally written with an eye towards a less religiously observant, secular (or even non-Jewish) readership. The books wrestle with a dual role; they attempt to explain the habits and practices of the orthodox Jewish world, often paying great attention to regional or sectarian nuances, working to translate religious words and ideas into a secular language or context; and they negotiate modern feminist ideas, adopting, adapting or rejecting such theories according to each author’s understanding of the relationship between Judaism, women’s roles and experiences within it, and the writer’s acceptance, approval or rejection of traditional Jewish life.4 The third generation – Norma Rosen, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Anne Roiphe, Naomi Ragen, Tova Reich and Allegra Goodman, to name a few – recast female protagonists in their novels, creating a world in which women wrestle with the traditional upbringing of their grandparents, the assimilationist tendencies of their parents, and the dichotomy between maintaining the world of Judaism, Jewish history and the Holocaust – and a desire to be free. Often profoundly affected by American life in the 1950s and the rise of feminism in the 1960s, the writing is feminist not only in its subject matter but in the battles that frame the protagonists’ lives. These novels establish a modern world in which a woman can be a professional as lawyer, doctor or academic, but in which she will forever be forced to explore the cost of working outside the home. Generally these texts present women in broken marriages or handling difficult husbands. There is, however, a general absence of fully developed male characters, who mostly remain outside the text, serving as a vehicle for plot development and as a focus for the female character’s personal growth. The female protagonists rarely have close relationships with their children, from whom they are often alienated. Ultimately these ‘modern’ women are represented as angst-ridden (or even narcissistic), struggling with their life choices. Paradigmatic of this group of writers is Anne Roiphe, whose early novels established her as a major feminist and Jewish writer, exploring intergenerational relationships between parents and children during the middle of the twentieth century. Her oeuvre includes memoirs, essays and novels, reflecting an intellectual and literary diversity which signifies a permeability between her fictional and non-fictional texts. Like many of her generation, her writing has explored coming of age, motherhood, cancer and most recently widowhood, from the perspective of a culturally Jewish woman engaged in the modern American landscape. Contrasted with the passivity of her mother’s generation, her generation is portrayed as being in the frontline of the battle for women’s rights. Yet, as she writes in Lovingkindness (1987), what once seemed a victory for women may also be deemed



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destructive by the succeeding generation. In this novel Roiphe presents Annie Johnson, feminist, political scientist, teacher, single mother and assimilated Jew, whose activism for women’s rights is undermined by her wayward, drug-addict daughter Andrea. After three abortions, eating disorders, a tattoo and a long disappearance, Andrea turns to religion and the Bruriah Yeshiva where she finds salvation in domestic tasks.5 In response Annie is horrified, torn between the desire to rescue her daughter from what she sees as a cult, and the belief that she should appear to accept her daughter’s choice so that they will no longer be estranged, ultimately to enable her to educate her grandchildren in feminism. Engaged in an ongoing dream dialogue with a Rabbi who represents a nostalgic Yiddish figure of eastern European legend, a Bashevis Singer-like mythical figure, Annie must navigate the gap between the sympathetic and worldly generation whose feminist agenda improved women’s lot, and her daughter’s generation whose absolute liberty ultimately leads to confusion and self-destruction, and in which the oppressive strictures of religion become a sanctuary for a woman who cannot tolerate or moderate her freedom. As one review in The New York Times put it: Familiar Roiphian themes are revisited in ‘Lovingkindness’: the pendulum of generations, each child seeking to undo the mistakes of her parents; the gilded ghetto of her mother’s life; the immigrant’s culture shock, her loss of contact with Judaism; contemporary religion’s decay from vibrancy to stultification. Families crumble; moral structures give way. There is feminist loneliness. Finally, there is the yearning for Judaism to serve Caesar. (Ari Goldman 1987) While Roiphe represents the secularised American Jew, Allegra Goodman’s critically acclaimed novel Katerskill Falls (1998) presents an insular Jewish community in upstate New York (see Aarons 2004; Socolovsky 2004). Like many novels about Jewish women, the novel depicts a microcosm that reflects the orthodox Jewish world’s insularity. In Goodman’s novel, this community of neighbourly gossip and domestic disharmony is tied together by the charismatic Rav Kirshner, whose dynastic concerns threaten to destabilise his life’s work. In this world, the English Elizabeth Shulman struggles for financial independence by establishing a catering business alongside her small kosher grocery store, and by educating her daughters about literature and ideas beyond the tiny religious enclave in which she exists, symbolised by the literary names she gives her daughters. As Victoria Aarons explains: ‘Goodman’s characters are deeply divided, torn between an open, unhampered, but ambiguous secular future and the persistent, desired, but equally ambiguous Jewish past, one seemingly resistant to the very mechanisms of change that would seem to have insured its survival in the present Age’ (2007: 200). Despite her attempts at liberation within the conformist community, Elizabeth is stymied when Rav Kirshner, worried about her unconventionality, demands her business be closed and her eccentric habits halted. Her failure to create a hybrid world can be seen in her daughters’ rejection of their alternative names, choosing instead to preserve their Jewish labels. Like Roiphe, Goodman presents the strictures of orthodoxy, arguing that traditional Judaism serves to bind women. Thus the third generation is isolated from the consumerism and emotional instability of their parents’ generation who longed to assimilate into American society but were not accepted, and from their grandparents whose immigrant past and religious way of life is remote and foreign. Yet they are also alienated from their children who reject the feminist ideals for which they have battled. By contrast to the third generation’s activism, the generation of writers that follows

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– Tova Mirvis, Ilana Stanger-Ross, Myla Goldberg, Dara Horn, Ruchama King among others – exist in a world of domesticity, a world in which women do not have professions, and if they do work their employment is an extension of the domestic feminine realms in which they and their peers otherwise exist. Often divorced from the larger questions of Jewish history and destiny, this is a world in which Israel and the Holocaust do not exist, even as looming spectres. Only Dara Horn, through her historical novels, looks beyond American Jewry, which has become a place of conformity and tradition whose contact with the outside world exists as a threat to the stability and comfort of a traditionally religious way of life. Drugs, sex, popular music and the gentile boyfriend are the great enemies of this little world. By contrast with Goodman’s and Roiphe’s engagement with immigration, assimilation, the Holocaust and Israel, topics considered central in the American Jewish literary imagination, works such as Tova Mirvis’s first novel The Ladies Auxiliary (1999) depict Jewish spaces remote from a New York-centric Jewish literary tradition. Her construction of the Memphis Jewish community whose history predates the twentieth century and the major issues commonly featured in American Jewish literature disrupts the pattern of migrant generation, assimilating generation, feminist generation, presenting an alternative historical pedigree. Describing a world of neighbourly gossip, festival observance and domestic (dis)harmony, this novel shies away from the feminism of the third generation, which by comparison appears extinguished in the literature of the fourth generation of American Jewish writing.6 Though the converted woman, with her feminist and freethinking ways, interrupts the conservative-minded society of which she becomes a part, finally she is banished, leaving only vestiges of female empowerment among women otherwise determined to return to their regulated domestic lives. Like Mirvis, many of the women writers of this generation are themselves religiously observant and frequently orthodox Jews, whose work is designed to educate about the Jewish world. In the words of Ruchama King: It was an artistic and spiritual challenge – could I make the religious world – my world – accessible and compelling to unaffiliated Jews and to non-Jews. For a religious novelist, it’s a gossamer thin line, what to reveal, what to conceal, what’s the fine balance between reverence and irreverence, the artist and the yid. I wanted real flesh and blood characters, lovable, hate-able, characters with a yetzer hara and a yetzer tov, the complexity that is our due. Much of the secular fiction I’d read about religious Jews only knew how to capture the yetzer hara. (King 2010)7 Unlike the critical eye of the previous generation, whose views about the religious community were negative, this younger generation seeks to make the religious world accessible and sympathetic. King’s disclosure of the desire to ‘conceal’ as well as reveal hints at an ideological agenda that radically differs from that of her predecessors. In an ever expanding market whose reading lists seem often tailored for Jewish book clubs and sisterhood groups (the final pages of books are often dedicated to a glossary, a selection of suggested discussion points or an interview with the author), the range of texts produced by these authors seems less varied in subject matter, and diversity generally exists primarily in the ways in which similar storylines seem reframed for different audiences. Often written as popular fiction, the sensationalist and highly sexual content that can be found in some novels, often aimed at assimilated or liberal Jews, can be contrasted with similar domestic narratives written specifically for an ultra-orthodox community in which the characters serve as modest role models with inspirational or moralistic tales for the



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target audience. The endless parade of Rachels, Saras, Rebeccas and Dvorahs who cook, clean and raise large broods of children are evident across the literary spectrum, though among the ultra-orthodox their lives are less sensationalist (by modern standards) and by extension less well known outside of religious communities (and unlikely to be reviewed by The New York Times or The Forward). Nevertheless, in style, characterisation and plot, the material is often remarkably similar, narrating the domestic lives of women.

Feminist, Homemaker and Well-Read Domestic Goddess: The Orthodox Jewish Romance The feminism of the third generation which disenfranchises orthodoxy of any positive attitudes towards females is reflected in Rebecca Goldstein’s early novel The Mind Body Problem (1983). Goldstein’s novel explores discrimination against women through the cultural conventions of orthodox Judaism, in which mind and body are divided between the sexes. If the mind, with its association with scholarship and study, has been defined as the realm of the Jewish male, then females have been defined by their bodies. In a religiously observant sense, this has led to a preoccupation with a woman’s body: its nakedness (’arvah), its impurity (tumah) and its capacity to corrupt Jewish males’ religious observance. ‘Women are often treated within Jewish law – within halakhah – in terms of their bodies rather than in terms of their minds’ (Jacobowitz 2004: 74). Women’s menstruation, childbirth and sickness forbid them physically and sexually to an observant Jewish man; thus responsibility for women’s bodies becomes a pre-eminent value in a society which promotes procreation. At the same time, keeping the body hidden from the gaze of others, including hair covering and dress (whose understanding varies between observant Jewish groups), preserves but also isolates the Jewish woman from secular society. Almost every novel since the 1980s representing orthodox Jewish women has considered the subject of her body through questions of modesty (dress, hair covering and behaviour) and purity (represented by the mikveh – the ritual bath). Whether these ritualistic matters are viewed positively or negatively, the Jewish woman’s body has become the defining trope of Jewish women’s fiction. The body’s protection and purity within Jewish ideology is challenged by the abuse enacted against it actively (through rape or violence) or passively through the strictures of the Jewish community. The third generation’s feminist attempts at liberation of the woman’s body both actually (bra burning) and symbolically by, for example, fighting for the right to abortion, is contrasted with their daughters’ active defilement of their own bodies through tattoos, drugs, eating disorders and the abortions for which their mothers had ideologically battled, as is evident in Roiphe’s Lovingkindness. In a return to the sanctity of the Jewish woman’s body (which includes her concealment) among the fourth generation, there has nevertheless been a transformation in the meaning of women’s bodies and women’s space. Though some writers have attempted to convey, in literary terms, the modesty they wish to represent, many have used the occasion to describe and thereby expose the private and intimate (otherwise hidden) spaces of the Jewish woman. Hence a pattern of displaying the orthodox woman’s body – in the mikveh, in the underwear store, during sexual intercourse, during illness – has arisen, whereby the unclothing and revealing of her intimate and hidden world occurs. The body also becomes a metaphor for seeing inside the domestic and religious spaces of women that are otherwise hidden from view: inside the home, behind the mehitzah, inside the mikveh, at the seminary, in the girls’

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school. Should these perspectives be considered empowering, by reclaiming female space, or are they offered for their sensationalist and titillation value, functioning as a way to exoticise and eroticise the otherwise protected Jewish woman? Goldstein, working within the conventions of Jewish woman’s corporeality, transforms the mind/body paradigm in the modern context to mean that a woman with an attractive body will never have her mind taken seriously. Susan Jacobowitz argues that this does not have to be publicly enacted discrimination, but rather becomes an internalised sense of identity that impacts on Renee’s inability in The Mind Body Problem to focus seriously on any one aspect of her intellectual life, and finally allows her to give up her academic work to become a wife. This metaphor may be extended to see the Jewish female body as an allegory for being Jewish (and for the orthodox world from which the protagonist comes). Only by erasing any trace of her ‘alternative’ identity as a Jew can she be taken seriously as a secular scholar. Instead Renee internalises the expectations of being ‘American’ which lie in conflict with the traditional religious world. In her fiction, Goldstein deliberately creates female protagonists who are high-achieving in the secular world. Renee’s scholarly achievements are paralleled in ‘Rabbinical Eyes’ by Rachel’s success at Harvard Law School and as an attorney. Both women love their fathers, which should perhaps also signal a love for and acceptance of the God of their fathers. Yet both reject Judaism in a sense as they intermarry: Renee with Noam, a completely a-religious assimilated Jew, and Rachel with Luke, a Christian ‘Semitophile’ and son of a minister. The high achievement in the secular world is meant to contrast with the traditional position of women in Judaism, particularly with regard to religious education. (Jacobowitz 2004: 78) For third-generation Jewish writers, a Jewish woman’s mind can never be developed within the traditional orthodox community. At best she can read surreptitiously acquired nonreligious literature in an attempt to self-educate, which will ultimately lead to her secularisation. Though in many ways Goldstein’s early writing is emblematic of her generation, her later writing also offers a bridge between the secular alienation of the third generation and the domestic idyll of the fourth. As Helene Meyers has shown in her study of Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), a novel of three generations, the first generation’s traditional Jewish life is supplanted by the secularisation of the middle generation; yet in the final generation, the heroine, Phoebe, both mathematics professor and ba’alat tshuva, ‘challenges feminist narratives that can only imagine orthodoxy as antagonistic to female bodies’ (Meyers 2007: 62). Anna Ronell has demonstrated that Goldstein’s heroines struggle ‘to find a niche for themselves where they can attain a balance between Western civilization and their Jewish heritage’ (2007: 152). According to Ronell, Goldstein ‘creates a new combination of a complex multifaceted persona: The Intellectual Jewish Woman’ (162). Thus a hybrid character is formed symbolising a union between Jewish and feminist possibilities. However, this character all but disappears in the writing of the fourth generation, which moves away from this fusion and instead recreates a traditional orthodox world self-contained by its own sense of community. Despite the apparent gap between genres, writers, generations and world views, this literature does not offer a broad representation of women’s experience within the religious world, but rather shares numerous characteristics. Concerned with representing the inner domestic lives of women – marriage, childbirth, domestic life, faithful relationships (both of the woman and her partners) – these novels



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focus constantly on the ways in which a religious woman enacts her life cycle events within the strictures of the community (positively or negatively) and in so doing recycles a series of tropes about the ritual bath (and women’s roles in the laws of family purity), hair covering, the importance of marriage to social position, and the disconnection between men and women within the society, which leads either to naive, idyllic marital relations when they occur, or brutal and alienated relationships in the early years of marriage. Indicative of this alienation of the sexes is the awkward and rarely fulfilling union between the newly married couple. Unable to communicate with one another in an open and positive manner, their interaction signifies not, as the writers would have us believe, the start of a beautiful relationship, but rather the failure of what might exist in a reality in which social interactions between the genders are normalised. In these novels, the family, and by extension the community, play an important role in enforcing both the religious and social boundaries, which the protagonists may either embrace or rally against. Like the third generation, heroines of the fourth generation often display attempts at independent thought, frequently represented by a desire to read illicit books – a reading list that would be recognisable for the women readers who are the consumers of this fiction, a list which includes Jane Eyre (1847), Little Women (1868–69), Anne of Green Gables (1908) and occasionally Jane Austen’s novels, whose satire of domestic and social relationships (which echo those of the novel) may in general be deemed too risqué for comparison. Yet in the end this superficial attempt at education is stultified. Unlike the former generation in which this writing leads to emancipation, within the fourth generation secular reading merely heightens their sense of being barricaded against an outside world. Alone, with rarely a close friend or trusted companion and with selfish, alien or absent mothers, these women are bound within Jewish society. By contrast with their mothers, the father figure in these novels, sometimes represented by a grandfather or Rabbi, is often kind, loving and tolerant but dies before his time. He may also be represented as a distant and absent figure, beloved but remote. Thus as children these women seem isolated even within otherwise loving homes. Most directly, among both generations of writers the female protagonists have their behaviour contrasted with that of their mothers (or daughters). If the mother is a docile and kindly domestic creature, the daughters are intellectuals (Rashi’s Daughters); if she is a failed housewife and a nervous creature, then the daughters will be strong and often ambitious (Anne Roiphe’s novels towards her mother’s generation); if she is deeply religious, the daughter may look to the secular world for inspiration (Naomi Ragen, The Saturday Wife, 2007) or even elope with a gentile (The Ladies Auxiliary); while the secular feminist professor gets a daughter who becomes ba’al tshuva and longs to cook, clean and breed (Lovingkindness and the daughter’s generation). Or, at its most extreme, the daughter may abandon Judaism entirely, as does the nun in Tova Reich’s My Holocaust (2006) in which Nechama, the daughter (and granddaughter) of Holocaust commemoration fundraisers, joins a convent opposite Auschwitz. The journey of these novels usually includes some kind of resolution between mother and daughter, though at best it is distant and never suggests equality. This fascination with intergenerational female relationships highlights the religious gap and the estrangement between mothers and daughters. By exploring this divergence among members of the same generation, we can see that this is more than just a domestic power struggle. Elisa Albert’s collection of short stories, How This Night is Different (2006), marks her out from the fourth generation, who are her historical peers. Rather than immerse her characters within a hermetically sealed religious world, she grants perspective to the

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orthodox woman by situating her in comparison to Jews who worship outside orthodoxy, and in relation to the born again’s own past. In the short story ‘So Long’, Rachel (‘“Ra” as in the sun god, “chel” as in “hell” pronounced by someone drowning in their own phlegm’; Albert 2006: 39), a ba’alat tshuva, is preparing for her marriage. Her best and oldest friend Miri, the story’s narrator, attempts to understand her friend’s transformation and embracing of orthodox values, which are alien to their upbringing. The story encapsulates the friction between the American Jewish community’s liberalminded attitude towards religion and this trend towards increasing orthodoxy. By avoiding the intergenerational tensions and conflicting attitudes that generally pervade American Jewish women’s fiction, Albert is able to complicate the disconnection as a transformation within the society – not a result of age, but a result of something else, a search or hunger for the untried, or a need to belong. Like other fiction by writers in this generation, the story provides explanation for religious attitudes and behaviour, serving to educate the reader, yet Albert’s sophisticated writing also engages with the hypocrisy embodied by Rachel’s conversion and subsequent abandonment not only of her own past, but of her and Miri’s shared identity. Albert through Miri simultaneously critiques that which she is now asked to understand. ‘(“Modesty,” she says. “Women’s bodies are sacred.”) This from the girl who, in the tenth grade, flashed a tit at the hot math teacher and got suspended’ (40). Miri becomes the voice of a critical generation, asked to accept her peer group’s embracing of orthodox Judaism: ‘“Miri,” she said. “Try and be happy for me.” “I am,” I said, meaning I was trying’ (41). But Miri’s innate sarcasm, which functions as a form of self-defence in the face of the trauma she experiences losing her friend, also articulates the judgmental secular attitude towards the ba’alot tshuva and bubbles over into rude and aggressive remarks: ‘“Go take a ritual bath,” I mutter’ (45). Moreover, her attempt to question the logic of Jewish ritual such as wearing a wig as a modest hair covering – ‘[h]air that looks better than your own would be, like, even more erotic’ (44) – highlights the insurmountable barrier between the secular feminist and the newly orthodox. Moreover, her refusal to embrace this orthodox way of life or accept without question her friend’s religious ideas situates her, rather than the ba’alat tshuva Rachel, as deviant. Though she had been raised in a Conservative Jewish household where she attended six years of Sunday school, and regularly went to synagogue, she is forced to defend her ‘version’ of Jewish identity in the face of the zealous: ‘“You act like you’re not Jewish,” says Chava. “It’s not some weird cult, you know.” Is there anything more condescending than being pitied for not having seen the light?’ (45). Miri’s hyper-consciousness of the unreality of her friend’s orthodoxy and its seeming playacting falsity is accompanied by a profound understanding of the necessity of the ritualistic actions, not just for creating a separation between the old and new lives, but to serve as an aide-memoire for those embracing these orthodox Jewish ideas: ‘When you adopt a radical identity change, it’s not just other people you have to remind, right?’ (48). ‘So Long’ offers the non-religious public access to the religious world, not by creating an alien and mysterious space, as many of Albert’s peers have done, but by bringing the religious world into the normality of the modern world. The apparent contradictions within religious law are contrasted with the sincerity of those who believe in them.

She’ll Tell You Who Did It: Jewish Detective Fiction Though Albert’s writing may prove the exception, the proliferation of mainstream fiction about Jewish women and the orthodox community generally displays an apparent rejection



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of feminist values within contemporary literary romance novels, a stance that differs profoundly from that taken within genre fiction. The detective novels of Faye Kellerman, Marissa Piesman, Rochelle Krich, Roz Siegel, Sara Paretsky, Hallie Ephron, Aileen Baron, Sharon Kahn, Laura Levine, Serita Stevens, Rayanne Moore and Annette Meyers (who, with her husband Martin, publishes under the pseudonym Maan Meyers) weave Jewish themes into their fiction, often through the dynamic character of an orthodox gumshoe who may find herself juggling the role of mother and Jewish community member alongside her investigative work. Faye Kellerman, by far the best known and most influential of these writers, created the Lazarus/Decker detective series, a pairing of an orthodox Jewish widow and a formally Baptist detective in California. The opening book, The Ritual Bath (1986), offers the reader an intimate view of the traditional Jewish world, and Rina Lazarus’s committed Jewish practice, but as with the writing by fourth-generation Jewish writers, it serves to educate. Rina lives among Mitnagdim rather than Hasidim (a distinction impossible for the uninitiated to identify).8 She outlines religious laws and her reasons for maintaining their observance, and she serves as the heroine, the traditional mother working within the Jewish community group as teacher and mikveh attendant while also displaying independence of mind and good sense in the face of crime. The negative reaction of feminists to orthodoxy is transformed as Kellerman empowers the domestic, Jewishly observant woman. As Naomi Sokoloff notes, though in some of the novels Rina is Decker’s help-mate, in others she becomes integral to the successful solving of the case: ‘By demonstrating a woman’s fearlessness [in Sanctuary], her skill at sleuthing, and her willingness to hold forceful (in this case, strongly rightwing) political and religious views, Rina injects overt feminist emphases into the novel’ (1997: 74). In addition, Kellerman’s writing becomes emblematic of the transformation occurring in Jewish detective fiction, in which, as Sokoloff notes in her comparison of American Jewish and Israeli detective fiction, ‘Kellerman’s novel shows clearly the piling up of themes that has occurred in American detective fiction (a turn to Jewishness, added to an interest in women’s roles and women’s rights)’ (69). Kellerman’s writing centralises the relationship between femininity and orthodox women’s practice, thereby empowering the orthodox Jewish female. Though Rina exists within the traditional environment, fulfilling the expected roles as mother and teacher, she is also keenly aware of the modern world and is able to translate her values through the language of secularism, to explain not only her position but that of other Jews, including those she may not agree with religiously. Sokoloff has argued that the novels integrate Judaism into the very structure of the series, using the discovery of Jewish roots in Decker’s past to parallel the detection of clues that the mysteries themselves take. The development of the partners’ relationship over the course of the novels, including the marriage of the once Baptist detective to the widowed orthodox Jewess, serves to provide endless opportunities to explain and elucidate Jewish practice, belief and the nuanced distinctions between different streams within Judaism.

Once Upon a Time in the Talmud . . .: The Historical Novel The mystery genre demonstrates a proactive, independent-minded protagonist engaging with the modern world, a trait that is shared with the explosion in pseudo-historical novels which draw on biblical and medieval texts. The heroine in these tales of bygone eras is situated within events of historical importance for the Jewish people. Moreover, her character,

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and that of her entire family dynasty, are invariably imagined out of a few choice verses from the Bible or Talmud, thus reinforcing the sense that she is not a typical woman of the period, but is endowed with a special identity. Established as an important, independently minded and powerful figure, her limited representation in historical documentation is suggested to be a result of the power men had over letters, but is not representative of the impact that the woman had in the time in which she lived. Novels like The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant, Maggie Anton’s series about Rashi’s Daughters, or Shira of Ashkenaz (2009) by Michelle Cameron reveal an attempt to recreate a Jewish past with proud female role models whose lives are reread through contemporary notions of feminism. While meticulous research often characterises the settings and male histories of these novels, the female elements are constructed out of flimsy notions of women’s domestic positions, often inscribing layers of feminist ideals of egalitarianism – ideas that characterise American liberal Judaism today which are transposed to a world in which these ideas would have been unlikely if not utterly incongruous. At the same time these novels project nostalgia for a simpler life, one in which marriage is always a perfect union of likeminded souls whose sexual connection occurs in an act of perfect, dreamlike ecstasy without fear, pain or confusion. In this world without divorce or domestic violence, in which fathers and husbands are beneficent and tolerant of their women’s intellectual advances, the only evil comes from the gentile world outside, which seeks to murder and destroy the Jewish communities of Europe. Though these novels have received no scholarly attention, they have been extremely popular among the reading public and among those wishing to create alternative feminist traditions within contemporary Jewish practice (see Frankel 5769/2008). By situating the discussion of life in the past, these novels bypass questions of orthodox Jewish observance and the hegemonic position of men within the creation of religious law, and open up a space for women’s interpretative and alternate practices. Often serving as a catalyst within strains of liberal Judaism and feminism more broadly, these novels have had a profound impact, as can be seen in the rise of ‘The Red Tent Movement’, which has become the impetus behind creating meeting sites for alternative women’s groups and has inspired contemporary female midrash. As Rubel explains: ‘The runaway success . . . is a reflection of the hunger for women’s readings of the Bible, as well as for the need women have to see themselves reflected in tradition’ (2009: 73). Accordingly, the orthodox world, though alien for the writers and marginal in the books’ reception, nevertheless retains a strong historical hold over the readers of these novels.

The Rabbi’s Daughter, a Tale of Oppression and Abuse: Memoir Fiction The fictionalised historical novels, and their empowerment of liberal Judaism, stand in direct contrast to the spate of memoirs or pseudo-memoirs depicting women trapped within the contemporary orthodox and ultra-orthodox world. The modern period has served to create the Rabbi’s daughter as a victim oppressed by patriarchy and the religion it wields. Innumerable texts construct the kind but absent father, the vicious selfish mother unsuited to child-rearing, and the intelligent trapped daughter who must escape but whose departure brings more sorrow both to her family and to herself. A return to religion, perhaps in a different guise, offers temporary respite and beauty, but soon fails to offer the long-sought-for redemption as marriage to an unreasonable and callous man means that the heroine must escape again. Reva Mann’s The Rabbi’s Daughter (2007), written about an English Jewish



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girl’s rejection of her modern orthodox father’s religious practice and her turn towards ultra-orthodoxy following a rebellious secular and drug-fuelled period, though not strictly American, echoes the fictional world constructed by Anne Roiphe in Lovingkindness. My father had tried to teach me, of course, but his lessons always ended up in prohibitions. He’d tell me we were forbidden to turn on the lights or tear the toilet paper on the Sabbath, but he’d never explain why. Rabbi Rabinowitz clarified everything. As God rested on the seventh day and ceased to create, he said, we must emulate Him and rest from creating on the Sabbath . . . Once I heard the rabbi speak, I understood . . . that the key to enlightenment was in our very own Torah and that spirituality was in our backyard. All we need to do is cultivate it, pull out the weeds and fertilize the soil. But I cannot connect to all that now. Paradise for me at this very moment would be hanging out and relaxing with Chris. (Mann 2007: 27) Reva’s redemption through religion ultimately fails as she divorces her ba’al tshuva husband and returns to her nomadic life and a search for a feminist equilibrium between the passivity of her mother and the strictures of the religious world, which after all she cannot endure. In the same style, Anouk Markovits’ I Am Forbidden: A Novel (2012) presents four generations of Satmar Jews spanning prewar life in eastern Europe to contemporary Williamsburg. The novel’s articulation of violence within the Satmar community of her childhood, and later social ostracism in America for the woman whose infertile husband condemns their marriage to destruction, reflects the profound limitations and unreasonable strictures that the religious world places on women. Recently, a new thread has appeared in this genre, that of sexual abuse within the ultra-orthodox community and the conspiracies of silence that allow such behaviour to continue. In an earlier generation, Naomi Ragen’s novels had traversed this territory, and her first three books, Jephte’s Daughter (1989), Sotah (1992) and The Sacrifice of Tamar (1995), critically examined the orthodox (and ultra-orthodox) Jewish community’s attitudes towards rape, adultery and physical abuse. Rubel has characterised these novels as a new kind of gothic fiction in which the frisson of sex and violence, and ‘the beautiful young women held against their will’, offer ‘titillating “peep shows”’ threatening and sexually enticing the reader (2009: 95). The latest novels that highlight the ways in which women are trapped within these social environs have, to some degree, moved away from these sexual elements and focused instead on the social coercion that creates a conspiracy of silence. Speaking out leads to estrangement from the community, and most directly negatively affects marriage prospects, which are established as the primary goal of women within this world. Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox (2011) and Judy Brown’s Hush (2012), published under the pseudonym ‘Eshet Chayil’, depict the extreme strictures of the haredi world. Like the feminist literature of an earlier age that had rejected the possibility of women’s liberation within an orthodox and observant Jewish world, these writers demonstrate a critique of Jewish society absent in the works of Mirvis, Goldberg, Horn and others.

Conclusion The proliferation of fiction by and about Jewish women since the 1960s and 1970s reveals two distinct generations: those representing the rigidity of the orthodox world and those

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representing the flexibility that exists within it. The older generation tends to depict the traditions as oppressive and excluding of women. By contrast, the younger generation generally represents women’s position within Judaism positively, portraying beauty in time-honoured customs and rituals. This recent generation argues that the orthodox Jewish world has been impacted by a modern feminist discourse within which their texts operate. Through their intimate rendering of this otherwise hidden world, they appear to liberate the women within it. Just as they have integrated feminism into the religious world, they have likewise challenged the assumption of a previous generation that religious strictures inherently disenfranchise women of their rights. Nevertheless, contemporary writing’s relationship to the orthodox Jewish world is not uniform. In romance novels, the simplicity of women’s domestic lives among the fourth generation’s writing, preoccupied as it is with weddings, marriages and trousseaus, suggests that, despite their protests to the contrary in interviews and newspaper columns, feminism has bypassed this generation’s fiction entirely. Returning to the model of homemaker and silencing alternative lifestyles implies a rejection of the feminist advances of their literary mothers. In the fiction of the fourth generation, the recurrent trope of depicting women’s most intimate spaces, and particularly religious women’s nakedness, belies the attempt to normalise religious ritual actions and instead eroticises the otherwise shielded female body. Furthermore, as the memoir fiction demonstrates, shrouding religious women’s lives in secrecy has been used to mask abuse within the religious community and to suppress the voices of those who dare to speak out. Though the memoir fiction opposes this position, in so doing its authors reject the possibility of empowered religious women within the traditional space, thereby returning to an attitude analogous to that of the third generation. Historical fiction offers a traditional domain replete with feminist orthodox figures. Yet rather than model a positive contemporary parallel, this literature may be considered an unusual ethnic phenomenon which separates an observant, traditional Jewish past from an open, Jewishly liberal, interpretative and highly feminist present. Notwithstanding the marginalisation of genre fiction within literary-critical discourse, in the final reckoning it is the detective novel which has most successfully trodden the line between these two opposing outlooks of religious traditionalism and secular modernism. It is the Jewish woman detective whose knowledge of her own community and of the religious law enables her to contribute to the secular world. She is empowered, and as such her decisions to preserve her religious observance are not presented as a cowing to social pressure, but as the independent choices of an intelligent, rational and thoughtful modern woman. It may appear that within detective fiction at least, Goldstein’s model of the ‘Intelligent Jewish Woman’, both homemaker and feminist, with one foot in the orthodox world and one in the modern world, exists and thrives.

Notes 1. Rubin references Elaine Showalter, Sister’s Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991) and Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers (1997), edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. 2. Allegra Goodman (b. 1967) is the youngest of this generation, and like Rebecca Goldstein (b. 1950) is a bridge to the younger generation of writers born in the 1970s and 1980s. 3. Rubel (2009) extends this to include Allegra Goodman, Tova Reich and Tova Mirvis –



4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

From Feminist to Housewife and Back Again 89 though she makes no distinction between the generations, and I would argue that Tova Mirvis represents a different generational style, as discussed within this essay. As Alyse Fisher Roller has shown in her study on literature in the ultra-orthodox world, this material, for example the ‘orthodox’ writing of novelists such as Naomi Ragen, is not read: ‘Ultra-Orthodox readers view this fiction as a mistreatment of religious Jewish themes, a misrepresentation of their community and an overplaying of its aberrations. It is simply not condoned reading in ultra-Orthodox Jewish circles’ (1999: 142). Bruriah is one of several women quoted as a sage in the Talmud. Her renowned learning and her chastisement of several male scholars has made her a popular figure as women reclaim the Jewish written tradition. However, the end most commonly given to her within the fiction that identifies her as a Jewish role model is that described by the later commentator Rashi. Supposedly, her husband, Rabbi Meir, organised a student to seduce his wife in response to her conceit that women were not ‘light-minded’. Although she resisted at first she eventually succumbed and died (or committed suicide) out of shame. The return to writing about Jewish religion and culture has been described as a ‘new wave’, a term coined by Thane Rosenbaum; however, Judith Lewin (2008) traces this trend to an early period in the 1980s and 1990s where writers of the third generation such as Rebecca Goldstein and E. M. Broner were already concerned with writing the ‘ethnic Jewish’ identity. Since this study is concerned particularly with orthodoxy and domesticity, the gap between the third and fourth generation is more clearly delineated, as the fourth generation is interested not only in an intellectual or spiritual growth, but in the return to a traditional practice model, and one which is not necessarily constrained by the New York metropolitan area historically depicted among the earlier generation. Yetzer is human beings’ inclination to types of behaviour; here King contrasts the Yetzer tov, the good inclinations, with the Yetzer hara, the bad inclinations. King extends the description to imply positive and negative representations of religious Jews. Though the term ultra-orthodox is often used synonymously with Hasidim, it also refers to the Mitnagdim community. Their differences arose in the eighteenth century when the Hasidim turned to a spiritual, folk-driven form of Judaism led by charismatic leaders. The Mitnagdim, who placed an emphasis on religious scholarship, objected strenuously to this radical movement and even excommunicated the Hasidim. However, with the external threat of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and its eventual impact on the Jewish community and the move towards secularism and alternative streams of Judaism, allied with an increasing emphasis by the Hasidic community on religious study, to the external eye these communities seem similar and even within the two communities much antagonism has been ameliorated. Though popular women’s fiction has generally focused on specific sects of Hasidim based in New York State (Lubavitch and Satmar), Kellerman’s heroine Rina Lazarus comes from a Mitnagedic group based in California.

7 SOVIET JEWS, RE-IMAGINED: ANGLOPHONE ÉMIGRÉ JEWISH WRITERS FROM THE USSR1 Sasha Senderovich ‘Dystopia’ is my middle name. I was born in the Soviet Union, and then we moved to Reagan’s America. (Gary Shteyngart, qtd in Solomon 2010)

W

hen the Bermans, the Soviet Jewish émigrés who are the protagonists of David Bezmozgis’s story ‘Roman Berman, Massage Therapist’ (2003), arrive at the house of Jerry Kornblum, a well-to-do Toronto doctor who, together with his wife, has invited them for a Shabbat meal, a comic misunderstanding ensues. Roman Berman, the narrator’s father, used to be a weightlifting trainer with the USSR’s Olympic team – a position that bespoke connections with the Soviet authorities and a good deal of privilege. Upon arriving in North America at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement that rallied Jews in the West around the cause of Jewish emigration from the USSR, he hoped to succeed as a massage therapist by touting his credentials as both ‘Soviet Olympic coach and refugee from Communist regime’ – the latter, reluctantly, at the behest of his wife (Bezmozgis 2004b: 27). The émigré family sets out to impress their native-born hosts: My father was dressed in his blue Hungarian suit – veteran of international weightlifting competitions from Tallinn to Sochi. I had been put into a pair of gray trousers and a pressed white cotton shirt, with a silver Star of David on a silver chain not under but over the shirt. My mother wore a green wool dress that went nicely with her amber necklace, bracelet, and earrings. (31) Bezmozgis’s nearly cinematic attention to detail is ripe with comedy. The Bermans are not religious, so an outwardly displayed symbol that would successfully project that they are Jewish – the Star of David – is forced upon the couple’s child to elicit compassionate feelings in the local Jews, Jews imagined as people who would fall for this type of outwardly worn symbolism. These carefully presented identities are out of place when Kornblum himself appears, in his own costume: ‘a man in slacks and a yellow sweater opened the door. The sweater had a little green alligator emblem on it’ (31). The alligator emblem on Kornblum’s yellow sweater might project a preppy look in the same way that the Star of David projects a clear Jewish identity, but the Bermans, fresh off the boat, are not familiar with the Lacoste brand. The reader sees Kornblum’s attire



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through the Bermans’ eyes as if seeing it for the first time – a good example of what the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky famously called ‘estrangement’. Estrangement seals the comic juxtaposition of those who perceive themselves as exiled Soviet intelligentsia overdressed for the occasion in their old world best with the affluent doctor with a tiny alligator on his sweater not dressed well enough to receive them. We also see the Bermans as they expect themselves to be seen by their North American Jewish hosts. Their old world attire is their native costume of sorts – and their image of themselves is consistent with what can be called self-orientalisation, a concept stemming from Edward Said’s writing about how Western orientalists constructed the image of the orient in such a way that it has turned ‘orientals’ themselves into native informants who parrot the West’s assumptions about themselves (1979: 323–5). As the story progresses, the mismatched expectations of the two sides continue to accumulate. The Bermans had thought of themselves and their story of oppression as unique, but the Kornblums, it turns out, have invited friends who bring along another émigré Soviet Jewish family. This other family is a mirror image of the Bermans (dad, mom, son, all of them equally overdressed) but with litanies and stories of persecution, which anthropologist Nansy Ries has called the Soviet intelligentsia’s ‘discursive art of suffering’ (1997: 83), that appear more impressive in the eyes of the hosts. Roman Berman’s rival lifts up his shirt to show a scar from when his co-workers attacked him after they found out that the family had applied for an exit visa. This other family had been refuseniks and have literal scars to show for it, whereas, as the narrator puts it, ‘[we] knew some refuseniks, and we were almost refuseniks, but we were not refuseniks’ (33). Unable to engage in sufficient litanies to prove their refusenik intelligentsia status, the Bermans concede that they haven’t suffered as much as the imaginary Soviet Jews who existed in the minds of their hosts and whose more perfect incarnations now appear to be sitting across the table from them. Adrian Wanner has suggested that ‘Bezmozgis presents North American Jews as less than sympathetic characters . . . It becomes apparent that Kornblum has an ulterior motive in inviting the Bermans: he wants to enjoy stories about the horrible life of Jews in the Soviet Union’ (2011: 140). This analysis places the blame squarely at Kornblum’s door. What makes Bezmozgis’s story work, however, is the amount of satire it casts not just in one but in both directions. As much as the story lampoons the Kornblums and their expectations, the Bermans are not innocent either. Bezmozgis dwells on a peculiar mutual dependence that allows the Jews from the Soviet Union to imagine themselves in ways that dovetail with how Jews in the West wish to imagine them. Building on Said’s work, Faye Harrison defines self-orientalisation as a process that ‘complies with existing stereotypes. The orientalised subject absorbs the dominant sense of self-identity and uses it as a way of marketing to the outside world, remaining within understandable and understood frames of reference’ (qtd in Georgiev 2012: 15). Imagined as their suffering Soviet brethren by their Western saviours, the Bermans internalise this projection and perform their constructed identity accordingly: their best attire to fit the intelligentsia stereotype, and their child’s Star of David worn visibly over his shirt to make it clear that the suffering intelligentsia family is also Jewish in ways that the Kornblums would have imagined. What the Bermans learn, however, is that the other Soviet Jewish family at the dinner table has outdone them in their self-orientalisation. Bezmozgis is one of a cohort of émigré Jewish writers from the Soviet Union who have started to publish in English during the last decade. Their work, I will argue, is

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characterised by their reflection on this intriguing self-orientalisation by émigré Soviet Jews which resulted from them being imagined this way by Jews in the West.2 These writers’ stories make us question pat assumptions about Soviet Jews and offer a distinctive perspective on the way that Soviet Jews construct narratives attractive to their American Jewish counterparts, and how, in turn, they are constructed by those narratives. Who are the Soviet Jews, these works invite us to ask, and how are they different from the concept of ‘the Soviet Jews’ that has crystallised in the imagination of Jews in the West?3 How can we differentiate between a set of experiences that may be shared among Jewish émigrés from the Soviet Union and the constructed nature of narratives about these experiences?4 How do those in the new cohort of Jewish writers from the former USSR make their Englishlanguage readers question Cold War dichotomies and why do they repeatedly point to ways in which Soviet patterns of thinking were not always so different from those in the West?5 To the extent that scholars have begun to take an interest in the steady flow of Anglophone fiction by Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union in recent years, their focus has been on the difficulties of contextualising the authors’ Jewish identities in relation to the notion of Jewish identity in North America.6 This essay leaves the task of qualifying and quantifying the Jewish identity of émigré Soviet-born authors aside and, instead, offers a different set of observations about this ever-growing literary output. First, with a few exceptions, this emerging corpus of texts has so far been marked by a certain amount of irony about both the desire (exemplified by Bezmozgis’s Bermans) to fit into the context of a (North) American Jewish environment and the constructs that native-born American Jewish hosts have deployed in understanding the new arrivals. In turn, however, these writers’ mastery of the English language, coupled with their familiarity with the Soviet Jewish narrative, allows them to point out curious similarities between Soviet and American ways of thinking that enable them to explore how the existence of ‘Soviet Jews’ has shaped the Jewish imagination in America. Second, these literary texts’ oft-ironic questioning of myths about ‘the Soviet Jews’ must be situated within the post-9/11 context in which they have begun to appear. Jerry Kornblum may be eager to see the scars of his Soviet Jewish guests in early 1980s Toronto and his Soviet Jewish guests may be eager to show them, but what might be the added significance of this story when it is told in the initial years of the twenty-first century? I will argue that the Soviet Jewish story has had a particular appeal in the post-9/11 world, because some of the politicians shaping this world were influenced by it; and that, in turn, a number of the Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers who have begun writing in English in the past decade have started to question the validity of this received narrative. To address these questions, I will examine a set of recurring tropes in stories and novels by David Bezmozgis, Anya Ulinich, Nadia Kalman and Gary Shteyngart: the distinction these works hint at between real and imagined Soviet Jews, the place of Israel in the story of the migration of Jews from the Soviet Union to America, and the applicability of the legacy of dissidents to contemporary realities. As I will argue, these tropes recur in works of fiction by Soviet-born Anglophone émigré Jewish writers because of the wider cultural and political context of the early twenty-first-century America in which this body of literature has emerged. In her novel Petropolis (2007), Anya Ulinich offers another example of the type of encounter that Bezmozgis mapped out in ‘Roman Berman, Massage Therapist’. Sasha Goldberg, the novel’s Soviet-born protagonist, ends up, for a period of time, staying with an American Jewish family in the suburbs of Chicago. The host family’s surname



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is Tarakan, which means ‘cockroach’ in Russian. The Tarakans, as befits their caricature of a name, are an exaggerated portrait of American Jews, but so is Ulinich’s depiction of Sasha’s Siberian hometown, named Asbestos-2, which is a kind of oversaturated portrayal of a Soviet industrial wasteland. Ulinich sets up these hyperbolic Soviet and American polarities to highlight the imaginative work of one about the other. Sasha, who, like the self-orientalised child narrator of Bezmozgis’s story, has been made to wear a Star of David pendant around her neck, is asked to attend an evening gala called ‘Operation Exodus’, aimed at raising funds for the benefit of Soviet Jews (Ulinich 2007: 155). The name of the event, which references a 1990s campaign to resettle post-Soviet Jews, highlights the near-ritualistic place that Soviet Jewry occupied in the American Jewish mindset: it evokes the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and Leon Uris’s novel about Jewish migrants to Palestine.7 Ulinich describes the event thus: ‘After the last of the guests were seated, Mr. Tarakan began to speak . . . Sasha heard Mr. Tarakan say “thousands upon thousands of Soviet Jews,” “freedom,” and “hope.” Trained by years of Asbestos-2 schooling, her mind automatically tuned out the speech’ (157). Ulinich’s description of the gala deconstructs a basic Cold War dichotomy that pits that which is Soviet against that which is not. Sasha’s Soviet schooling, in which words like ‘Lenin’ and ‘the state of workers and peasants’ would have been routinely blanked out by any student who heard them too often, is presented here as the appropriate background from which to understand Mr Tarakan’s speech, even though it is supposed to be antiSoviet by definition, in so far as it promotes the Jewish immigration that the USSR seeks to thwart. This equation makes the structure and the style (though not the content) of a speech in defence of Soviet Jewry no different from the clichés of a Soviet schoolteacher. Sasha Goldberg is not the only ‘example of Soviet Jews’ (157) present at the Tarakans’ fundraiser: there is also Yulia, a young woman from Kiev. While Sasha is sceptical about being paraded before the donors because she realises that she is being seen as a kind of ‘oriental’ native informant by her American Jewish hosts, Yulia, in a speech that relies solely on self-orientalisation, is more than willing to play the part: My mother and I have been fortunate to slip through a crack in the Iron Curtain, to escape anti-Semitism and oppression, but thousands of Jews are still trapped in the former Soviet Union, unable to worship openly. Because of your efforts, many of them will receive the gift of freedom. In the name of all the Jews from the former Soviet republics, I would like to thank everyone present here. You will be in my prayers tonight. (156–7) Ulinich, in satirical mode here, fills Yulia’s speech, like Mr Tarakan’s, with keywords that emphasise her mastery of the language of her American Jewish benefactors and her ability to exploit it as a poster child for the Soviet Jewish cause. These keywords should theoretically make Sasha tune out from the speech just as she had tuned out from Mr Tarakan’s appeal, but in fact Sasha finds herself paying attention to the details of Yulia’s speech and wondering whether Yulia really prays, ‘and to what’ (158). Additionally, by paying attention to Yulia’s words along with Sasha, the reader can identify an inconsistency in Yulia’s speech: this benefit on behalf of ‘Soviet Jewry’ is occurring at a time when the Soviet Union itself has ceased to exist. In her speech, Yulia refers to ‘the former Soviet Union’ and ‘the former Soviet republics’. Now that official Soviet atheism has disappeared together with the USSR, the issue of emigration for the purpose of free religious expression is no longer the desperate necessity

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that Yulia implies. Yulia has learned to mimic a Cold War discourse that resonates in the American Jewish community, which is all the more appealing because she is the beneficiary of such a discourse. If, in Bezmozgis’s story, seeing the bodily scars sustained by a refusenik is timely, as some Jews in the Soviet Union at that time had been refused exit visas and were waiting to emigrate, here the oppressive regime, though it is already in the past, continues to exist as a discursive construct that can still be played with. In other words, in Ulinich’s novel there is no more Soviet Union – but there are still ‘Soviet Jews’ imagined in a very specific way that conforms to the values of their American brethren. The Tarakans want to show Sasha off at their fundraiser. In fact, Mrs Tarakan’s own sense of Jewish identity depends on doing her part to help, as she says to Sasha, ‘people like you’. To do her part to help, Mrs Tarakan gives Sasha a kind of crash course in Judaism – evidence that her own sense of Jewish identity relies on making the non-religious Soviet Jews more ‘Jewish’ in the sense of ‘Jewish’ in the United States, which has much more to do with religion than it does in the former Soviet Union. In a further element of the plot that upsets Mrs Tarakan’s conception of Jewishness, Ulinich’s novel hinges on a brilliant twist: Sasha’s Soviet Jewish identity – even though any identity is a construct – is an imaginary construct several-fold. Sasha Goldberg, despite her name, is not Jewish either in ethnic terms or in terms of upbringing: her father, Victor, born to a Russian woman and an African man visiting Moscow in the 1950s, was adopted by the Goldbergs, a Jewish couple, who died in a car accident when he was a teenager (Victor spent his adolescence in an orphanage). One-quarter African and three-quarters Russian, Sasha has the deceptive appearance of someone who is an ‘other’ – seen by some as black and by others as Jewish. Moreover, Sasha herself has come to the States not as a Soviet Jewish refugee, but rather as a mail-order bride in search of her half-African father, who himself had left the Soviet Union several years earlier, claiming to be a political refugee (his real reasons for leaving, however, were not political). In Ulinich’s novel, which satirically exaggerates many things, the racial and ethnic underpinnings of Sasha’s identity, which shift more than the likes of Mr and Mrs Tarakan expect, call attention to the claim that no identity is ever fixed. Re-evaluating why exactly Soviet Jews – or, in the case of Ulinich’s novel, those imagined as ‘Soviet Jews’ – come to America entails questioning the purpose of the fundraiser the Tarakans put on in the Chicago suburbs. In fact, Ulinich’s novel elides another important fact, which has generally been elided in the memory of American advocacy on behalf of Soviet Jews: American Jews mostly did not campaign for the right of Soviet Jews to resettle in America, but for their right to emigrate to Israel. Providing a good illustration of American Jewish collective memory of the Soviet Jewry movement, Refusenik, a documentary produced in 2009, presents the struggle of Soviet Jews to resettle in Israel without ever mentioning the several hundred thousand Jews who ended up in North America in the process.8 Despite the fact that the film was shown widely on the Jewish film festival circuit in the US, it did not prompt a wider conversation about what the film omitted as far as the destination of many Soviet Jewish émigrés was concerned. David Bezmozgis has begun to address this lacuna in the American Jewish cultural imagination about the Soviet Jewry movement. Some of his work has focused on the socalled dropouts – the vast majority among Soviet Jews who left the USSR on Israeli exit visas during the 1970s and the 1980s without any intention of proceeding to Israel. In ‘An Animal to the Memory’ (2004), while the narrator’s grandparents decide to continue on to Israel when his family arrives in Vienna (which, along with Rome, served as a midway



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point for Soviet Jewish émigrés), the boy’s parents refuse to follow: ‘We were bound for somewhere else. Where exactly we didn’t know – Australia, America, Canada – but someplace that was not Israel.’ The narrator’s parents try to avoid representatives from the Jewish Agency milling around Vienna’s train station; they try even harder to avoid these agents’ questions, which the narrator sums up: ‘Why were we rejecting our Israeli visas? Why were we so ungrateful to the State of Israel, which had, after all, provided us with the means to escape the Soviet Union?’ (Bezmozgis 2004c: 67). In his novel The Free World (2011), Bezmozgis devotes his attention fully to the exploration of these questions. Bezmozgis focuses on the Krasnianskys, a family from Riga who spend six months in Rome in 1978 awaiting their visas to places beyond western Europe. The family’s patriarch, Samuil, is an old communist who remembers his Yiddish-language socialist upbringing fondly. He is also a Second World War veteran who left Riga reluctantly, whereas his two sons – one, an opportunist, another, a skirt chaser – are happy to seize the possibilities that emigration has created. Calling into question the lofty associations with Western freedoms that the novel’s title ironically suggests, Bezmozgis focuses on a fairly average Jewish family leaving the Soviet Union in search of better opportunities, rather than protagonists who seek freedom of worship or freedom of expression. Their choice not to continue on to Israel may have more to do with their sense that opportunities were more readily available elsewhere than with any ideological stance. However, an ideological rationale for rejecting Israel is presented to the Krasnianskys by another character they encounter in transit. In Rome they come into contact with Lyova, who at that point has been in Rome for several years awaiting his visa to America. His trajectory is more unusual than the Krasnianskys’: he had left the USSR earlier for Israel and has now left Israel in the hope of getting to America. Lyova describes his decision to immigrate to Israel in the first place: I know it’s hard to believe, but I was a military man, a tank officer. I grew up on my father’s war stories and I also wanted to be a hero. But instead of a war, I drew Czechoslovakia. I was one of those poor bastards on top of a tank in Prague, pointing a submachine gun at a bunch of students. Pretty girls in raincoats spat at me. After that, I was done with the army and the Soviet Union. And when people started applying for exit visas, I didn’t think twice. (Bezmozgis 2011a: 125) Lyova’s stint in the Soviet army – as he relates it in the novel – was in the beginning shaped by stories of the heroism of Soviet soldiers during the Second World War, the war itself (referred to as the Great Patriotic War in the USSR) being a potent nation-building myth in the Soviet Union in the postwar years. However, for Lyova, this heroic myth crashed in 1968 during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which ended a period of liberal reforms there. Lyova emigrated to Israel shortly thereafter but another disappointment awaited him there in the wake of Israel’s Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which Lyova participated as an army reservist: When the war ended, they sent me to Gaza. Once again I found myself on top of a tank pointing a gun at civilians. When they saw us coming, women clutched their children, and the men turned to face the walls. In Czechoslovakia, I had consoled myself with the thought that my people weren’t responsible. The Russians were doing it, and I was a Jew. In Gaza, I couldn’t think this. With me was an Israeli, another reservist with a wife and kids. He said, It’s shit, but it’s our shit. For me, this wasn’t an excuse, this was the

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problem. I’m sure there is much I don’t know about America, but I know that their sons don’t have to go and do this. (126) Like Ulinich’s Sasha, who pays no attention to an anti-Soviet speech in support of Jewish emigration because of its Soviet-like rhetoric and style, Bezmozgis’s Lyova draws a parallel between Israel’s suppression of the Palestinian Arabs and Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia. For Lyova, both societies, which valorise military heroism, find themselves in situations where war has failed to be heroic for some – though certainly not most – of their citizens, who begin to see their soldiers turn into occupation forces left to stare down innocent civilians. Just as the occupation of Czechoslovakia causes Lyova to become disenchanted with the Soviet ideal and prepared to bolt to Israel, the occupation of Gaza now makes him flee from the Jewish state. (Lyova’s certainty that America is different from both Israel and the Soviet Union itself seems ironic given that the remark is made only about three years after the end of the Vietnam War. Moreover, by making Lyova sound so naive about America, Bezmozgis is being tongue-in-cheek with his own knowledge of the Iraq War, which was being drawn down as The Free World was published.) As Lyova seeks a visa to America and the Krasnianskys await their papers, Bezmozgis, like Ulinich before him, reveals the consequences of seeing non-Soviet parts of the world through a Soviet pair of eyes. In this particular case, Bezmozgis reveals how many Soviet Jews chose to move to America in part out of opposition or resistance to Israel, and/or scepticism about its self-heroising narrative. As it appears to the novel’s protagonists, Israel, like the Soviet Union, requires an ideological commitment from its citizens, whereas to some Soviet Jews the preference in emigration is for a life without the need to subscribe to a new ideology – as Lyova puts it, he wants ‘the country with the fewest parades’ (278). Of course, as these writers also make clear, moving to America does, in the end, involve choosing an ideology – one of consumerism (for example, Kornblum’s Lacoste sweater is a symbol of Western consumerism that the narrator of Bezmozgis’s story is keen to observe). Yet while American Jews in Ulinich’s novel imagine that Sasha Goldberg is helping to raise money for Soviet Jews to move to Israel, Bezmozgis’s Lyova calls into question the extent of Israel’s appeal to the new émigrés. The prisoner of Zion – a courageous person sacrificing everything for the sake of wanting to fulfil the Zionist dream and emigrate to Israel, and thrown in jail for his convictions – is a figure who reigns supreme in the cultural imagination of many Jews in the West in relation to the Soviet Jewish experience.9 However, just as most Soviet Jews leaving the Soviet Union at the pinnacle of the Soviet Jewry movement did not emigrate to Israel, so most Jews in the USSR were not dissidents. Several works by Anglophone émigré Jewish writers from the Soviet Union have focused on the figure of the dissident, calling its persistent claim on the present-day experience into question. Some of these works feature characters who claim to have been dissidents and whose stories make claims on contemporary relevance; Nadia Kalman’s and Gary Shteyngart’s literary constructs of dissidents within their respective comic novels are particularly notable. Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans (2010) is a twenty-first-century version of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s classic Tevye the Dairyman, written in instalments between 1894 and 1914. Kalman’s work is perhaps the funniest novel of the émigré Russian Jewish literary output in English – a true equal-opportunity satire where nothing and nobody is spared the writer’s wit. The novel features Osip Molochnik (whose last name literally means ‘dairyman’ in Russian), his wife Stalina (named after the dictator) and,



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in the vein of Fiddler on the Roof (1964), the musical based on the Tevye stories, three daughters on the brink of marriage. Milla, the eldest, chooses a spoiled American Jew instead of the high-achieving Russian Jew her parents had picked for her. Yana, a radical feminist, weds a Bangladeshi exchange student in what her family sees as defiance of her own views about women’s equality. Finally, Katya, a drug addict who involuntarily quotes Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (she is the product of her mother’s extramarital affair with one of Brezhnev’s speechwriters and this reason is cited to explain her hilariously strange ailment), falls for a no-goodnik with a mouth full of gold teeth who floods the Molochniks’ house when he attempts to drown himself in the bathtub. Kalman’s wit targets the older generation of Jewish émigrés from the Soviet Union who, it turns out, have constructed their family history as far more heroic than it was, and the generation of the daughters and their romantic partners, as well as the various non-Russian Americans who come on the scene. One night, at a performance of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Stalina has an epiphany that she subsequently describes in her comically broken English. Scoffing at Americans who imagine that Russian Jews are poor, backward and in need of civilising (like Tevye’s family in the musical), she rejects the idea that émigrés came to America for financial reasons: ‘We come for freedom,’ she says, ‘not pantyhose. I can get new pantyhose on black market’ (Kalman 2010: 122). A showdown follows in which Stalina impresses her version of the family’s narrative on to her daughter and her daughter’s American husband: They [American Jews] think we are only talking spletnya [rumours], who marries who. We had bigger fish. Who is in jail? Who is expelled from party, who is making protest, who is printing samizdat? You know how we decide to immigrate? . . . To show that we are free people, and not afraid of the worst punishment. And then they [Americans] take us to supermarket and expect that we will have fainting over food. Five different kinds of apples. (122) Fiddler on the Roof, as the cultural product most emblematic of how American Jews in the 1960s conceptualised themselves as having emerged from Russia a couple of generations before Stalina and her family did, provokes Stalina’s realisation about how she and other Soviet Jews have been ‘orientalised’ by the American Jews. Unlike Bezmozgis’s Bermans, who are keen to present themselves as fitting such stereotypes – to indulge their self-orientalisation – and find a way to use them as they ask the natives for help, Stalina’s rejection of this self-orientalisation is more neoliberal in nature, angling to present Soviet Jews not as people who need to be helped but rather as those who claim to know the true value of freedom. Stalina’s broken English and the plot’s numerous twists resulting from Stalina’s superstitions obscure the message she is trying to convey to her children – that the search for freedom was the primary motivating factor in immigration; and, as a result, the message gets garbled. With Stalina’s voice rising to an even higher pitch in the bar, the scene is more a kind of embarrassing acting-out than a way for the generations to actually relate to each other. In Kalman’s novel, the younger generation has no way to relate to the parents’ stories except through myth, the implications of which for their own lives are not clear. Similarly to Kalman, Gary Shteyngart offers his own version of a freedom-loving parent who tries to impress upon his son his Jewish dissident credentials in Absurdistan (2006). In the process, his novel questions whether the dissident narrative could be a useful model for the next generation. Of the three novels by Shteyngart to date, Absurdistan is the most

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biting exercise in satire, tackling allegorically some of the problems of the post-Cold War world: America’s involvement in wars in the Middle East; the country’s penchant for multiculturalism; and Shteyngart’s own literary success as an émigré writer and the appeal of émigré narratives in the American literary marketplace.10 Where the popular account of émigré Russian Jewish discourse sees the Soviet and American experiences as polar opposites, Shteyngart, like Bezmozgis, Ulinich, Kalman and others, explores the Soviet experience as a way of understanding life after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including in America. The novel’s protagonist, Misha Vainberg, ‘age thirty, a grossly overweight man with small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the most distinguished breed of parrot’ and a son of the ‘1,238th-richest man in Russia’, is unable to return to his beloved America, where he had attended college and remained for several years afterwards (Shteyngart 2006: 3). The narrator dedicates his first-person narrative to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, ‘with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth’. His experience with the INS has not been positive; the agency will not let him back into the country because his father has killed a certain businessman from Oklahoma (vii). The novel follows Misha and his trials and tribulations across the former Soviet expanses, including the fictional oil-rich republic of Absurdsvanï (the eponymous Absurdistan of the title), as he tries to return to America at the behest of his recently deceased father, Boris. One of Misha’s strongest memories of his father touches upon the elder Vainberg’s credentials as a dissident and a Zionist: ‘For his dissident Zionist activities in the mid-eighties (particularly for kidnapping and then peeing on our neighbour’s anti-Semitic pooch in front of the Leningrad headquarters of the KGB), my father had received a two-year sentence’ (57). The heroic image of the dissident Zionist came to define the popular image of the Soviet Jew and those who suffered such trials were endowed with a sense of moral authority. By contrast, in Absurdistan, the incarceration gives Misha’s ‘beloved Papa’ something less heroic but no less useful: an important set of connections in the underworld, which became Russia’s newly made capitalist elite when the Soviet Union fell apart. The elder Vainberg’s self-identification as a Jew transmitting the tradition to the next generation reaches its full parodic expression when he forces his son to be circumcised by drunken Lubavitchers when Misha moves to America, and the circumcision is tragicomically botched. Beside the consequences of Boris Vainberg’s heroic deed, the description of the deed itself ironically deconstructs an act that would have normally passed for Zionist resistance. In the comic world of the novel, urinating on a dog constitutes Jewish self-defence because the dog is said to be antisemitic. Moreover, the whole performance is said to be dissident because the protester stages it in front of the headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet secret police which, among its other operations, tracked Soviet Zionists from the 1960s to the 1980s. Like Ulinich’s Sasha Goldberg, who is highly attuned to the use of ideological buzzwords, Shteyngart’s Misha locates ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘the KGB’ within the same sentence as he shares the memory of his father. Misha is conscious that he can evoke his father’s ‘dissident’ and ‘Zionist’ legacy in dealing with impressionable US officials. At the US consulate in St Petersburg, while demanding to see the chargé d’affaires to press the case for his American visa, Misha trots out his story: ‘I am Misha Vainberg, son of the famous Boris Vainberg who peed on the dog in front of the KGB headquarters during the Soviet times’ (68). In Misha’s case, his choice to deploy his father’s supposedly heroic legacy is doubly dubious, because in the end his



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father’s less heroic accomplishment (his killing of an Oklahoman businessman) actually prevents him from receiving his American visa. Finally, an Israeli intelligence agent definitively denies the story’s relevance: ‘In the seventies, a drunk, charming refusenik was sort of poignant. Shabbat shalom in Leningrad and all that. But by the nineties, your father was just another Russian gangster . . .’ (304). The statement comes from the mouth of a Mossad agent – an Israeli official who hints at the appeal and usefulness of the refusenik narrative to the Israeli state apparatus in the Soviet period, a narrative that may have expired afterwards. The novel is a satire: in no way does Shteyngart suggest that someone’s experience as a refusenik would necessarily lead him to become a criminal mastermind, but Misha might have guessed that in his father’s case, the love of Jews somehow coexisted with criminal activities. That sort of juxtaposition sat right on the elder Vainberg’s bookshelves, which held ‘the collected texts of the great rabbis, the Cayman Islands Banking Regulations, Annotated in Three Volumes, and the ever-popular A Hundred and One Tax Holidays’ (76). The elder Vainberg urinates on his neighbour’s antisemitic dog in front of the KGB in what is presented as an act of Zionist dissidence, and presses the case for Jewish emigration to Israel in a comically outlandish way. But even the elder Vainberg eventually becomes disappointed in Israel when he gets to visit the previously mythical country: He lived in an abstract world where the highest form of good was . . . the state of Israel. To move there, to grow oranges, to build ritual baths for menstruating women, and to shoot at Arabs – this was his lonely goal. Of course, after socialism collapsed and he finally got a chance to get drunk and happy-fisted on a Tel Aviv beach, he discovered a goofy, unsentimental little country, its sustaining mission nearly as banal and eroded as our own. I guess the lesson is – freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity. (234) The last sentence of this ironic reflection on the Jewish state finds resonances of the Soviet Union in Israel: both countries are powerfully structured by an ideology. Just as the Soviet version of socialism was a dream nurtured in captivity (including, in Lenin’s case, in Czarist jails), his father’s Zionist dreams were likewise nurtured in the captivity that was the Soviet Union itself. Freedom to turn such dreams (including dreams of ‘shoot[ing] at Arabs’) into reality is anathema to both. The equation of the Soviet experience and Zionism, imagined as its apparent opposite, lingers over this description: Shteyngart’s comic fiction, like fiction by other émigré Jewish writers, blurs the border between realms that were long held to be distinct. Why have émigré Soviet-born Jewish writers highlighted in their works unexpected parallels between certain Western and Soviet ways of thinking and ideologies, often with the help of satire and irony? Granted, many Jews from the former Soviet Union would dispute the analogy between Soviet values and American or larger Western ones, to judge by the Russian-language Jewish émigré press in America, Israel and other countries. Moreover, most émigré ex-Soviet Jewish communities, whose politics tend to the right in a rejection of anything that appears ‘leftist’, perceive and protest against a completely different analogy between the West and the Soviet Union: they see the United States slipping dangerously into a Soviet-like socialism – a position not attuned to the criticism, from the left, that what in the US passes for liberal politics is actually quite conservative. ‘Socialism’ in this case becomes a code word for negative associations with the Soviet experience.11 Émigré authors, who have grown up on their parents’ generation’s narratives, have created

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a body of fiction that works through common narratives about the Soviet experience and have opened up a space for a new generation to hammer out its own perspectives about that experience and its influence on post-emigration attitudes and identities. This kind of work seems to have been essential for a generation of young writers who are likely to continue to offer their interpretation of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from the vantage point of émigrés writing in English, and of the Soviet Jewish immigrant experience in America and other places.12 By disrupting established narratives, the new generation of writers has begun grappling with issues of the present day; the most recent novel by Gary Shteyngart provides a case in point. Intriguingly, the narrative present in Absurdistan, published in 2006, ends on 10 September 2001 – a day before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The events described in Super Sad True Love Story, published in 2010, take place in the near future in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. The skyline, marked by the (Freedom) Tower, points us towards the post-9/11 context (the (Freedom) Tower is a skyscraper built on the site of the destroyed World Trade Center). By avoiding setting these two novels in the present and by describing America in dystopian terms, Shteyngart offers new ways of understanding America’s present and near future. He does so in part by referencing a point of similarity between what America has become and what the Soviet Union was perceived to have been: that is, a complete surveillance state.13 The United States, he suggests, has appropriated a discourse of ‘freedom’ (embodied, among other manifestations, by the Freedom Tower) not unlike the discourse present in the authoritarian Soviet state. The legacy of the Soviet Jews’ fight for freedom, moreover, buttressed the American discourse on ‘freedom’, which was understood to exist in opposition to Soviet tyranny. Super Sad True Love Story is a dystopian novel but, like any description of a dystopia, it appropriates aspects of actual cultural discourse and exaggerates them to a point where the real world itself comes to seem dystopian as well. In the world of the novel, the citizenry has voluntarily surrendered to complete observation, in part through their penchant for constant wireless connectivity and their desire to share facts of their lives with complete strangers. The American economy was long ago eviscerated by a financial crisis and is now run by China, US troops are engaged in a war with Venezuela, and a very powerful Secretary of Defense (who is Jewish and is said to be a great friend of Israel, referred to in this novel as ‘SecurityState Israel’) is the de facto leader of the country. In Shteyngart’s novel, Lenny Abramov is a nearly middle-aged protagonist in a country obsessed with youth and youthfulness. Lenny is a Russian Jew only by virtue of being born, in America, to émigré Soviet Jewish parents – this distinguishes him from Shteyngart’s early characters, who end up in America as children or young adults. Abramov may be fully American but, given the series of transformations that America has undergone, being American does not prepare him well for living in what the country has become. Lenny describes his family just as he is about to be subjected to intense questioning by something called the New York Army National Guard, one of the institutions of the newly dictatorial America: ‘My parents were born in what used to be the Soviet Union, and my grandmother had survived the last years of Stalin, although barely, but I lack the genetic instinct to deal with unbridled authority’ (Shteyngart 2010: 41). In other words, skills that one would have acquired in the Soviet Union are the skills that are now necessary in America. America, far from being the bastion of freedom it may have seemed from the vantage point of the Soviet years, now appears to be as much of an authoritarian state as the Soviet Union.



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The subtext of Shteyngart’s novel is deeply political. Just as Halliburton’s oil drilling in the fictional Absurdistan implicitly alluded to America’s oil industry-backed Iraq misadventure, so the future dystopia of Super Sad True Love Story evokes the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, a campaign conducted in the name of ‘freedom’ but actually destructive of civil liberties. This link between post-9/11 America and the US fight against the Soviet Union is not merely imagined. Natan Sharansky – the famous Soviet Jewish dissident who spent nearly a decade in jail in the USSR for his Zionist convictions – helped America justify its war on terror. In his 2004 book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, Sharansky, who was then a minister in Israel’s right-wing government, made a case for America as the enforcer of freedom around the world. Sharansky defined freedom in his book simply as the ability to speak freely in the middle of a town square without fearing arrest (Sharansky 2006b: 40–1). The book was written in English and published in the United States at a time when it had already become clear that the US government’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, used by the George W. Bush administration as a pretext for expanding the ‘war on terror’ to Iraq, were unsubstantiated. Bush met with Sharansky in the White House in the autumn of 2004, shortly after his re-election, to discuss the book, embraced Sharansky’s logic and presented Sharansky’s concept of freedom as the new raison d’être for America’s involvement in Iraq.14 Sharansky became a model for Bush not only because of his writing but because of his biography; the story of the world’s most famous dissident-turned-important-Israelipolitician appealed to the White House as well as to the American public. When Bush’s popularity tanked two years later in 2006, Sharansky defended him in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. Titled ‘Dissident President’, Sharansky’s op-ed gutted the definition of ‘dissident’ just as severely as he had gutted the definition of ‘freedom’ in his book three years earlier: ‘There are two distinct marks of a dissident’, he wrote. ‘First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures’ (Sharansky 2006a). Drawing on his personal experience as a dissident and the moral authority that came with it, Sharansky called on Bush to remain steadfast in his policies, which had by that point been subject to worldwide discussion and debate. In doing so, Sharansky was – ironically – calling for an authoritarian style of leadership to defend a specific view of ‘freedom’ rather than promoting engagement in the free and open debate characteristic of democratic societies. Cold War discourses emerged in force during the Bush administration, a trend attributable in part to the fact that several of Bush’s key advisers came of age politically and intellectually during the Cold War, and one of the chief causes that had motivated these advisers was the Soviet Jewry movement.15 A prominent and morally authoritative Soviet Jewish dissident played an important role in the American (and, more broadly speaking, Western) political discourse. Sharansky’s reappearance on the public stage may help explain the new and persistent caricatures of the figure of the dissident by Shteyngart and other émigré writers. In a certain sense, Sharansky, by continuing to channel Soviet-era wisdom and saying what he, given his biography, was expected to say (in his op-ed on Bush as ‘dissident’, the byline identifies Sharansky as a one-time political prisoner), turned into someone whose cultural capital relied in no small part on a continued process of self-orientalisation as well. The visible interjection of this kind of self-orientalisation into public discourse in the early twenty-first century has most certainly influenced writers such as Shteyngart who, rather than taking Cold War stereotypes and typologies as straightforward

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models for present-day politics, turn to satire and caricature to question these self-orientalising models’ substance and applicability. Instead of indulging a discourse such as Sharansky’s that pits Soviet ways of thinking against Western approaches, Shteyngart, like other émigré writers of his generation, stands Sharansky’s logic on its head. Fearing that he might get fired from his job at a company that works to offer indefinite life extensions to a select group of wealthy customers, Lenny Abramov makes a list of action points that would help him improve his work situation and, more generally, his adaptability skills: ‘Seek similarities with Parents – they grew up in a dictatorship and one day you might be living in one too!!!’ (Shteyngart 2010: 51). America, in this presentation, is quickly becoming like the Soviet Union, rather than its polar opposite, when it comes to open debate and personal freedoms. Assessing this similarity in fiction has perhaps been the most lasting – and the most political – contribution by émigré Jewish writers from the Soviet Union writing in English in the past decade. Answering questions from a New York Times reporter about his reasons for writing a dystopian novel, Shteyngart replied: ‘“Dystopia” is my middle name. I was born in the Soviet Union, and then we moved to Reagan’s America’ (Solomon 2010). The statement is a succinct suggestion – which, of course, is itself a product of a kind of liberal bias – that to understand the experience of present-day America, one needs to re-evaluate the Soviet experience that used to appear as the polar opposite of what could be possible in the United States. In Shteyngart’s witty formulation, Reagan’s America, which, to a great extent, produced a certain kind of dystopian discourse about the Soviet Union, was itself a comparable dystopia. Shteyngart and his peers – writers who can move between the worlds of Soviet narratives and their American experiences – can help their readers navigate this terrain of unlikely analogies. The ability to move between these worlds, however, is itself a matter of speculation both for this generation of writers, whose own recall of Soviet experiences is relatively thin, and for the next generation to come after them. In his parents’ house on Long Island, Shteyngart’s Lenny Abramov observes the pictures of Moscow that his parents have hung in their upstairs hallway. Among the photos of different landmarks is one of ‘the gothic Stalin-era skyscraper of prestigious Moscow State University, which neither of my parents had attended, because, to hear them tell it, Jews were not allowed in back then’ (Shteyngart 2010: 136). Lenny’s parents have told him what to him are halfmythical stories that present antisemitism as the central feature of the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union, and Lenny knows to mistrust them (‘to hear them tell it’ implies scepticism). The Soviet experience has begun to pass into the realm of mythic narrative, which like other culture-structuring narratives is meant to give subsequent generations ritualistic ways of understanding their present as the consequence of a historical experience. Lenny doesn’t say that the story is not true – it may very well be true and most certainly was true at least to some extent – but the emphasis here is on those in the younger generation who cannot know for sure and are left to figure out the implications of such narratives on their own. The implications of these narratives are thus less about the meaning of the past than about the ways in which the past is or is not relevant to the present. Surveying his parents’ photos of Moscow, Shteyngart’s protagonist notes: ‘As for me, I have never been to Russia. I had not had the chance to learn to love it and hate it the way my parents have. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other’ (136). Trying to make



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sense of how their generation can relate to the Soviet legacy, the new cohort of Sovietborn émigré Jewish writers have been writing their vision of America.

Notes  1. I am grateful to the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, Germany for hosting me as a visiting research scholar in May 2013 – an appointment that allowed me to work on this essay. I thank Natasha Gordinsky, Joshua Lambert and Mark Lipovetsky for reading drafts of this essay and providing valuable feedback.   2. In addition to the works discussed in this essay, the list of recent works by Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers writing in English includes, among others, works by Yelena Akhitorskaya, Boris Fishman, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Irina Reyn and Lara Vapnyar.  3. For the purposes of this essay, by ‘the West’ I generally refer to the United States and Canada.  Though there are now Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers working in German and Hebrew, in Germany and in Israel respectively, the phenomenon of émigré Jewish authors  from the former Soviet Union writing in English since 2002 is mainly a North American one.   4. I call these narratives ‘constructed’ not because they are not true but rather because they may have been rehearsed, clothed – in Bezmozgis’s story, literally so – and presented in ways that make the Soviet Jewish story believable and appealing to Jews in the West. Noting the difficulties of capturing the extent of the phenomenon of this literary output by ‘Russian-American’ authors, as she calls them, Yelena Furman observes that ‘contemporary Russian-American writers can be most succinctly characterised as Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants who live in North America and write in English’ (2011: 20).   5. As Amelia Glaser has noted about the new cohort of Soviet-born émigré writers, ‘[i]t is significant that since the end of the Cold War, a group of writers has emerged that is not always critiquing Russian culture, or American culture, as such. Rather, they are engaging with both cultures simultaneously, allowing the intersection to reveal substantial differences as well as unexpected similarities’ (2011: 17).   6. Yelena Furman helpfully summarises the discussion of the authors’ hybrid identities in her article (2011: 22); Adrian Wanner discusses the peculiarities of the authors’ Jewish identities in light of both the nationalities policy in the Soviet Union – the writers’ country of birth – where they were considered ‘Jewish’ in their official documents, and in the countries of their destinations where they had to, in various ways, confront their cultural identity as ‘Russian’ newcomers (2011: 6–8).   7. See Gal Beckerman (2010) on the Soviet Jewry movement. Among other issues, Beckerman notes the role that involvement in the Soviet Jewry movement played in shaping post-­ Holocaust American Jewish identity and in helping American Jewry to flex its lobbying muscle.  8. Acknowledging problems involved in wading through statistical data on immigration as reported by various branches of US government, sociologist Larissa Remennick concludes that ‘the total size of the Russian-speaking Jewish population in this country is estimated at between 600 and 750 thousand’ (2007: 175).   9. To a great extent this narrative is shaped by the experience of Natan Sharansky, the Soviet Union’s most famous Jewish dissident, whose imprisonment catalysed a major international campaign for his release. Sharansky’s subsequent memoir, Fear No Evil (1988), solidified his presence in the cultural imagination of Jews in the West. 10. The protagonist’s evil double in Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a caricature of the author himself, who is presented as capable of duping naive American readers into lapping up his stories: ‘Let me give you an idea of this Jerry Shteynfarb. He had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental

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College, a perfectly Americanised Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-yearold) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process. After graduation, he made good on his threat to write a novel, a sad little dirge about his immigrant life, which seems to me the luckiest kind of life imaginable. I think it was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job or something of the sort. The Americans, naturally, lapped it up’ (2006: 54–5). 11. ‘When Russian Jews naturalise and show interest in politics, they usually exhibit conservative and right-wing views; in America they vote for the Republicans, in Israel, for Likud and other nationalist (but nonreligious) parties’ (Remennik 1998: 253). 12. At the time of writing (2014), several new books have just been published that I was not able to consider in this essay, including Gary Shteyngart’s memoir Little Failure, Boris Fishman’s debut novel A Replacement Life, Lara Vapnyar’s novel The Scent of Pine, Ellen Litman’s novel The Mannequin Girl, Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, David Bezmozgis’s novel The Betrayers and Yelena Akhitorskaya’s novel Panic in a Suitcase (all 2014). On most of this new literary crop, see my review essays in Tablet Magazine and New Republic (Senderovich 2014a; 2014b; 2014c). 13. In Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart – quite uncannily – predicted events that occurred in real life shortly after the book’s publication, including the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in 2011 and the arrival of Google Glass technology (Shteyngart 2013). 14. In the preface to the second edition of The Case for Democracy, published in 2006, Sharansky recounts his meeting with George W. Bush in the White House and their discussion of what would become known as ‘the Bush Doctrine’. In this preface, Sharansky implicitly takes credit for Bush’s ideas (2006b: xi–xiv). 15. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, for instance, started out as an aide to Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, one of the key figures in the Soviet Jewry movement who influenced a number of neoconservatives.

8 HISTORY ON A PERSONAL NOTE:1 POSTWAR AMERICAN JEWISH SHORT STORIES David Brauner

I

n this essay I want to challenge two widely held assumptions: first, that the most important postwar American Jewish writers are male novelists; secondly, that the short story is a minor form, largely devoted to the representation of private revelations and domestic dramas. In an essay on ‘Jewish-American Fiction’ in A Companion to TwentiethCentury United States Fiction (2010), I proposed an alternative, feminocentric canon of American Jewish literature that foregrounded women writers and the short story, rather than focusing on male novelists such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. In this chapter, I develop this approach further, looking at a group of women writers who have devoted themselves exclusively to, or at least specialised in, the short story. Many of the best-known Jewish novelists in the postwar canon of American literature (to the triumvirate mentioned above one might add Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, Paul Auster and Michael Chabon) also published/publish short stories. Indeed, Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953), Malamud’s The Magic Barrel (1958), Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959), Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella (1984), Bellow’s Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984), Chabon’s Werewolves in their Youth (1999) and Auster’s The Red Notebook: True Stories (2002) are all excellent collections, arguably as impressive as many of their authors’ more celebrated novels. There are also male Jewish writers who have specialised in the short story form, such as Isaac Rosenfeld, Leonard Michaels, Joseph Epstein, Harold Brodkey, Max Apple, Frederick Busch and Nathan Englander, as well as female Jewish authors known primarily for their novels who have also published short fiction, for example Anzia Yezierska, Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, Edith Konecky, Jo Sinclair, Johanna Kaplan, Lore Segal, Erica Jong, Marge Piercy, Kathy Acker, Allegra Goodman, Francine Prose, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Elana Dykewomon, Sarah Schulman, Binnie Kirschenbaum, Tova Reich and Ayelet Waldman. Particularly striking, however, is the number of Jewish women writers of fiction who are either best known for their short stories (Cynthia Ozick, Hortense Calisher, Tillie Olsen, Aimee Bender, Rebecca Goldstein, Lesléa Newman, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Rosellen Brown, Amy Bloom, Joan Leegant, Rachel Kadish and Lara Vapnyar) or who rarely if ever publish(ed) longer forms of fiction, such as Marcie Hershman, Faye Moscowitz, Marsha Lee Berkman, Ivy Goodman, Marjorie Sandor, Judy Budnitz, Grace Paley, Deborah Eisenberg, Edith Pearlman and Myra Goldberg. In this essay, I will focus on the last four of these,

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highlighting some of the ways in which they embed into their ostensibly unassuming, fragmentary, elliptical tales a profound consideration of some of the most important political events of the second half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries. The conventional wisdom is that the short story form deals with the minutiae of everyday life – with private epiphanies and domestic dramas, with the peripheral, the marginal and the transient – in other words, that the brevity of the form corresponds to a slightness in subject matter. But the four stories that I will discuss – ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ (1985) by Grace Paley, ‘Hair’ (1992) by Myra Goldberg, ‘Purim Night’ (2011) by Edith Pearlman and ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ (2006) by Deborah Eisenberg – dissolve the boundaries between the personal and the political, the private and public, the quotidian and the extraordinary. Grace Paley is probably the most celebrated American Jewish short story writer. Although she was also a poet and a prominent political activist, Paley’s reputation rests on the three collections of stories that she published: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). Elliptical and lyrical, compassionate but unsentimental, her stories are often rich in dialogue (which appears without speech marks in her later work) and invariably conversational in tone even when actual dialogue is sparse. Many of them feature an alter ego named Faith – sometimes as narrator, sometimes as a protagonist, sometimes as both – whose feminism and liberal values reflect Paley’s own but whose sympathies are not entirely coextensive with her creator’s. One of her finest stories nicely illustrates the ways in which Faith both articulates some of Paley’s political convictions and at the same time exemplifies the problems inherent in allowing ideology to determine the nature of one’s relationships with others in one’s community. ‘Zagrowsky Tells’, from Paley’s final collection Later The Same Day, is narrated by an elderly, garrulous, bigoted retired pharmacist, who meets Faith in the park (based on Washington Square Park) where a number of Paley’s stories are set. The story begins with a characteristic appearance of artlessness that is in fact very artful: I was standing in the park under that tree. They call it the Hanging Elm . . . I said to my grandson, Uh oh, Emanuel. Here comes a lady, she was once a beautiful customer of mine in the pharmacy I showed you . . . She looks O.K. now, but not so hot. Well, what can you do, time takes a terrible toll off the ladies. This is her idea of a hello: Iz? what are you doing with that black child? (Paley 1999b: 359) What seem here to be incidental details take on unforeseen resonances as the story proceeds. Although the nickname of the tree presumably derives from the days of capital punishment under the Puritans, the revelation that Zagrowsky’s grandchild is black immediately invokes a different chapter in American history, through the association of lynching. Zagrowsky’s casual sexism (couched in an idiosyncratic idiom inflected by Yiddish – ‘time takes a terrible toll off the ladies’ – whose jauntiness is at odds with the dubious sentiments he expresses), together with his implicit pride in the business he used to own, and Faith’s incredulity and suspicion at seeing him with a black child, similarly hint at a personal history that intersects with larger political concerns. The story that Zagrowsky tells is in fact three stories: the story of his encounter with Faith in the park, the story of how and why the two of them fell out some years previously and the story of how he comes to be the primary carer of a black boy. It turns out



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that Faith was indirectly responsible for the decline (and possibly the eventual demise) of what Zagrowsky describes as his ‘public business’ (360), a business he characterises as both a service (‘I cured more people in a day than a doctor in a week’; 361) and a ‘store’ with ‘customers’ (364). As Zagrowsky tells it, a picket line appears like a bolt from the blue: A perfectly nice day. I look out the window of the pharmacy and I see four customers, that I seen at least two of them in their bathrobes crying to me in the middle of the night, Help! Help! They’re out there with signs. ZAGROWSKY IS A RACIST. YEARS AFTER ROSA PARKS, ZAGROWSKY REFUSES TO SERVE BLACKS. (363) Faith admits to being one of these customers and to having gratefully received Zagrowsky’s help out of hours for her ailing child. However, in her version of events she and her fellow activists organised the boycott of the pharmacy only after Zagrowsky repeatedly served white customers before blacks and failed to respond to a letter asking him to talk to the women about their grievances. In turn, Zagrowsky defends his practice of ‘serv[ing] the old customers first’ while conceding that he ‘discourage[d] them [non-white customers] a little, they shouldn’t feel so welcome’ because of concern that his store might acquire ‘the ­reputation of being a cut-rate place for them’ (364). This incident is a fine example of the way in which Paley extends her sympathies to all her characters without identifying herself with any of them. On the one hand, Zagrowsky not only discriminated against customers from ethnic minorities but also, as Faith reminds him, used to express disgust ‘whenever I saw . . . a black-and-white couple’ (368). On the other hand, there is something self-righteous and vindictive about Faith’s campaign against him (Zagrowksy calls her the ‘Queen of Right’; 368). The signs that she and her allies display are misleading and self-aggrandising. By invoking Rosa Parks, who famously sparked off the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white man, the women protesters are implicitly associating themselves with those who boycotted the Montgomery buses, and Zagrowsky with the history of segregation and those who defended the Jim Crow laws that enforced it. These comparisons are questionable: Zagrowsky held bigoted views when he owned the pharmacy but he didn’t actually refuse to serve blacks and arguably does not deserve to be bracketed with the opponents of civil rights. The disagreement between Zagrowsky and Faith is partly a disagreement about the relative importance of private beliefs and personal loyalties as opposed to political principles and public affiliations. For Zagrowsky, the fact that he helped out Faith in her hour of need should have trumped any concerns she might have had about how he ran his store; for Faith, the imperative to show solidarity with those whom Zagrowsky was treating unfairly outweighs any sense of gratitude she might have. Subtly, however, Paley demonstrates that this is not just a clash of different personalities and points of view but also of the values of different genders, generations and ethnic groups. When Zagrowsky tells Faith about the mental illness that afflicts his daughter, Cissy, leading to her incarceration in an asylum and subsequent pregnancy, tears appear in Faith’s eyes and she gives the old man a kiss on the cheek, demonstrating the compassion that was arguably lacking in the young woman brandishing the placard denouncing him as a racist. But Zagrowsky’s account both confirms and complicates her youthful verdict. Zagrowsky’s initial reaction when he discovers that the father of the child is a black gardener is fury directed at the man (‘I would tear him limb from limb’; 371) and horror at the prospect of the baby being born: ‘Out of my Cissy, who looked like a piece of gold, would come a

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black child’ (371). Once he and his wife take Cissy and the child home, however, the old man welcomes him into the family and the tribe, reflecting that ‘long ago we [the Jews] were mostly dark’ and that ‘there are plenty black Jews’ in Israel (373).2 The experience of (grand)parenting Emanuel transforms Zagrowsky so radically that he takes to reproaching people exhibiting the very prejudices he used to articulate himself: ‘A person looks at my Emanuel and says, Hey! he’s not altogether from the white race, what’s going on? I’ll tell you what: life is going on’ (364). If this represents Zagrowsky’s attempt to establish a correspondence between the Jewish and black experience, he is at other moments in the story forced to confront the radical disjunction between the history of Jews and blacks in the US. Explaining to Faith that his wife, Nettie, ‘stays home, her legs swell up’, he illustrates her disability with the following anecdote: In the subway once she couldn’t . . . get up. She says to . . . a big colored fellow, Please help me get up. He says to her, You kept me down three hundred years, you can stay down another ten minutes. I asked her, Nettie, didn’t you tell him we’re raising a little boy brown like a coffee bean. But he’s right, says Nettie, we done that. We kept them down. We? We? My two sisters and my father were being fried up for Hitler’s supper in 1944 and you say we? (364–5) In order to refute the accusation of complicity with the history of oppression of African Americans, Zagrowsky invokes not only his current personal circumstances – the fact that he is now ‘raising’ a black child himself – but also his status as a Holocaust survivor. Through his exchange with Nettie, Paley reprises the terms of the acrimonious debate over the relative enormity of the European genocide of the Jews and the history of slavery that so disfigured black–Jewish relations in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Whereas Nettie – who Zagrowsky earlier points out is ‘very fair . . . Like for instance maybe some big blond peasant made a pogrom on her great-grandma’ (361) – seems to accept that American Jews share in the national collective responsibility for the discrimination suffered by African Americans, Zagrowsky believes that the Jews’ own dark history of persecution exempts them from such responsibility. The flippant euphemisms he employs when referring to these historical manifestations of antisemitism – ‘made a pogrom’ for ‘raped’ and ‘fried up for Hitler’s supper’ referring to the ovens used in the camps to burn the bodies of the Jews killed in the gas chambers – paradoxically draw attention to Zagrowsky’s pain, by virtue of the effort he makes to disguise it. For Jews of Faith’s generation, however, this history of suffering has been displaced by other, more contemporary concerns. When she defends her role in the boycott of Zagrowsky’s pharmacy, Faith cites not only his racism but also his sexism: She also says . . . I was winking and blinking at the girls, a few pinches . . . maybe I patted, but I never pinched. Besides, I know for a fact a couple of them loved it. She says, No . . . They only put up with it because it wasn’t time yet in history to holler. (An American-born girl has some nerve to mention history.) (369) Once again, there is a tension here between ideas of personal ethics and tribal allegiances, encapsulated in the different ways in which Faith and Zagrowsky understand the term ‘history’. When Faith claims, as Zagrowsky puts it, that the girls whom he ‘patted’ ‘only put up with it because it wasn’t time yet in history to holler’ she is referring to the



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self-consciousness and self-confidence that second-wave feminism brought to her generation of women. For Zagrowsky, however, his ‘winking and blinking’, his ‘pinches and pat[s]’ (the charm of his poetic patter contrasting again with the actions he describes) are private transactions divorced from any larger political context. Furthermore, he implies that for her to mention history in the context of women’s liberation is to show disrespect for the history that really matters: the history of the Holocaust, from which, as an ‘American-born’ Jew, she was protected. The ending of the story sees a reconciliation between the two antagonists and arguably a redemption of sorts as well: Zagrowsky makes amends for his earlier racism through his fierce pride in his black grandson and Faith atones for her part in destroying Zagrowsky’s business by chasing off a man in the park whose inquiry about Emanuel (‘Gosh what a cute kid. Whose is he?’; 375) elicits a defensive response from Zagrowsky (‘how come it’s your business, mister? Who do you think he is?’). Yet it is also an ironic ending, since the man’s questions echo, in more innocuous form, Faith’s own at the start of the story (‘She says, Your grandson? Really, Iz, your grandson? What do you mean? your grandson?’; 360) and since the manner in which she and her friends banish him mirrors the circumstances of their boycott of Zagrowsky’s store: The women . . . turn around sharp like birds and fly over to the man. They talk very soft. Why are you bothering this old man, he got enough trouble? Why don’t you leave him alone? The fellow says, I wasn’t bothering him. I just asked him something. Well, he thinks you’re bothering him, Faith says. Then her friend . . . starts to holler, How come you don’t take care of your own kid? . . . the third woman . . . taps him on his jacket: I seen you around here before, buster, you better watch out. He walks away from them backwards. They start in shaking hands. (375) Just as their participation in the demonstration might have proceeded from the best of motives but was a disproportionate response to Zagrowsky’s crime, so their confrontation with the man in the park, while perhaps intended as a gesture of goodwill and restitution towards Zagrowsky, ends up as a gratuitous act of intimidation and self-congratulation. The final words of the story – ‘they burst out laughing . . . And the women walk away from us. Talking. Talking’ (376) – suggest either that Faith hasn’t acquired any humility or selfknowledge, or that Zagrowsky retains his bitterness towards her (and perhaps a misogynist fear of women in general), or both. Paley’s nuanced treatment of gender and racial politics, and the dialogical form of her fiction, heavily influenced the subsequent generation of American Jewish women short story writers, among them Myra Goldberg. Goldberg (not to be confused with Myla Goldberg, author of the best-selling novel Bee Season, 2000) established herself in the 1980s and 1990s as a short story writer of note, publishing in journals such as The New England Review, Ploughshares and The Kenyon Review and having a number of her stories reprinted in anthologies. Although she has also published a novel (Rosalind: A Family Romance, 1998), she remains best known for her collection Whistling and Other Stories (1993). The final story in Whistling, ‘Hair’, is indebted to Paley both in form (it is written entirely in the sort of elliptical direct speech that is one of the hallmarks of Paley’s fiction) and in its oblique engagement with politics through the revelation of the personal ­experiences of ordinary women.3

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‘Hair’ begins metafictionally, with a question posed by an unidentified speaker to an unidentified interlocutor: ‘Got a hair story?’ (Goldberg 1993: 167). As the story proceeds, it emerges that all of the voices in the story belong to a women’s group (possibly a writing group, although this is left ambiguous) who meet regularly to discuss nominated topics. At first the topic of hair seems to have stumped the women and all they are able to say about it is that they have nothing to say about it. But when the first line of the story is repeated, more formally this time (‘Have you got a hair story?’; 169), it leads to a disclosure of family history that is also part of a much larger history: I’m thinking that maybe I’m thinking I’m going to have to get my hair cut. That’s my only story about hair. Also, when my grandmother came to this country – she got married, you know, over there, and all her beautiful hair got cut off, which is what those Jews in Europe did. But secretly, she knew she was coming here, so she grew it a little under the wig. And when she saw that Statue of Liberty, she took off her wig with her children beside her and threw it in the harbor. After that she never cut her hair. (170) The awkward self-consciousness with which Ruthie (who is the only character in the story to be addressed by her name) begins (‘I’m thinking that maybe I’m thinking’), the fact that she only mentions her grandmother’s story as an apparent after-thought, having initially demurred (‘That’s my only story about hair’), and the way in which she distances herself from the traditions of orthodox Judaism (she implies that the cutting of the hair of married women is a benighted practice carried out only by ‘those Jews’ ‘over there’) all suggest a reluctance to talk about her ethnicity and/or a conviction that her anecdote is ­inconsequential or irrelevant. In one sense it is irrelevant, since it is only incidentally a story about hair and is more fundamentally about the transformation effected in her grandmother by the journey from the old world to the new. And the grandmother’s decision to discard her wig and grow her hair symbolises not only the sense of freedom instilled in her by her first sight of the new world but also the journey of a whole generation of Jewish immigrants to America at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, from the religious tradition and endemic antisemitism of the old world to the assimilation demanded and the opportunities offered by the new. This was a gradual process, however, as is illustrated by the fact that although her grandmother never cut her hair off after landing on the shores of the US, Ruthie adds that she ‘always wore a turban to hide that long black hair’ (170). In spite of the tentative, almost apologetic manner in which Ruthie relates her grandmother’s tale, it acts as the catalyst to a series of stories that all testify to the symbolic power that hair has (had) in the history of (female) identity, so that by the end of the story it is clear that, far from being a trivial and uninteresting topic, it is one that has multiple personal and political resonances. The stories that immediately follow Ruthie’s move away from Jewish history, but it makes an abrupt return when one of the other speakers tells the group: When my mother was twelve or so, she got sent to Majdanek, which was a death camp, not so well known as Auschwitz, but with the same purposes and the same lining up naked to get your head shaven, which they did to her and all these other girls. Only her hair, which was black and thick and curly, clung to her and covered her instead of falling like the others’ to the floor. She felt different, like God had sent a sign she’d be okay. If it



History on a Personal Note 111 were me, at that age, I’d think being different was a sign of – oh, trouble only. But then she was Viennese and I’m American. (174–5)

Like Ruthie, the speaker here demonstrates a certain diffidence about the significance of her story and an ambivalence about its relevance to her. Employing the euphemism ‘the same purposes’ and invoking Auschwitz, the speaker manages both to reveal and conceal the horrors that her mother witnessed. Although their circumstances are radically different, the mother’s story has in common with that of Ruthie’s grandmother (whose arrival in America would most probably have been prompted by the upsurge in pogroms that led to the two main waves of Jewish immigration to the US) the fact that it is redemptive. The mother survives the camp, a fate that she believed was anticipated by the positive omen of the protective covering that her hair continued to provide for her even after it had been cut. Yet just as Ruthie had distanced herself from her grandmother’s history, so the speaker here implies scepticism of her mother’s old-world superstitions, juxtaposing her own status as an ‘American’ with her mother’s ‘Viennese’ identity. Later, this speaker returns to the subject of her mother’s experiences in the camp: ‘My mother says – how we all say things like, well, you only get one youth. Then she goes on to say that since she spent hers in a concentration camp, she made jokes with her friends, like girls anywhere would. About how weird their heads looked bald. Or that somebody would use them to wash his hair with.’ ‘Meaning what?’ ‘That they’d be soap.’ ‘I don’t want to talk about hair anymore.’ (179) Here the mother (and/or the speaker, who is of course reporting her words) initially tries to normalise her history by drawing attention to the ways in which, in spite of the extremity of their situation, ‘she made jokes with her friends, like girls anywhere would’. These jokes turn out to be morbid and too disturbing for one of the group, who asks for clarification of the reference to washing hair either because she does not understand the allusion to the Nazis’ alleged use of the fat of corpses from the camps for the production of soap, or because she cannot believe that camp inmates would want to joke about such a horrifying prospect.4 Because none of the dialogue is attributed, we do not know who declares that they do not wish to talk about hair any more, but what is clear is that for at least one of the group the limits of what can be discussed have been reached. In this sense, the story has a cyclical structure, as it ends with a speaker who had claimed at the start of the story that what the group was really concerned with was not hair, but ‘language’, concluding, enigmatically, that ‘language is just what people can say that other people can hear them [sic]’ (182). Earlier in the story, however, mention of the camps as a context in which hair (and its absence) came to take on heightened meaning, far from closing down discussion, prompts other members of the group to weigh in with other historical traumas that have entailed the loss of hair. Just as in ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ the Holocaust is juxtaposed with the history of slavery, so in ‘Hair’ an African American member of the group instinctively associates the two, following the story of the mother’s cut hair clinging to her body by wondering aloud: ‘did they chop off my ancestors’ hair on the boat coming over here? Or afterwards, on the plantation . . . I’d sure like some photographs’ (175). This prompts her, in turn, to recount a trip to ‘the atom bomb museum’ in Hiroshima, where she sees a sign declaring ‘JAPANESE WOMEN VALUE THEIR BLACK HAIR’ alongside a photograph of ‘a

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woman with most of her scalp bare’ (175). Although she initially is convinced that this woman’s ‘whole life is ruined’, ‘something American, tastelessly pragmatic but smart, came over me. Why doesn’t she just forget her shame and buy a wig, for God’s sake, I thought, and get on with her life and solve her problems?’ (175) Although the speaker claims a direct connection to the slaves whose hair was shorn, she can only speculate about the circumstances in which this was done and she admits that before hearing the story about the mother in Majdanek she ‘had never even thought about it’ (175). In Hiroshima, even when faced with photographic evidence of the suffering of the victims of the atom bomb, her sympathy is limited by what she defines as her American pragmatism. This echoes the way in which Ruthie distances herself from her grandmother’s experiences by grouping her with ‘those Jews in Europe’ (170), and the daughter of the Holocaust survivor distances herself from her mother’s experiences by similarly locating her as a European other: ‘she was Viennese and I’m American’ (175). Because hair is a universal human characteristic but also one that signifies differently in different social and historical contexts, it acts both as a unifying thread running through the different stories in ‘Hair’ and as an illustration of the incommensurability of historical events such as slavery, the Holocaust and the atom bombing of Japan: the perfect metaphor for the continuities and discontinuities between private lives and public events. For the various women in the story, the topic of hair both appears to offer access to some of the most traumatic episodes in human history and demonstrates the limitations of imaginative sympathy. Whereas in each of these anecdotes the loss of hair functions metonymically, signifying the damage done to the bodies of the victims, historically hair has often been identified as a signifier of collective identity (as well as gender) by members of victimised groups (usually ethnic minorities) as well as by their persecutors. ‘Hair’ touches on this history, again juxtaposing Jewish and black ethnicities, through the mention of the son of one of the women, ‘who calls himself a Halfrican-American [and] flattens his hair by pressing the top of his head against the wall in our hallway’ (177), and the ex-lover of another, who ‘had an Izro’ (177). The hybridity implied by the terms ‘Halfrican-American’ (presumably referring to someone who has African American heritage only on one side of his family) and ‘Izro’ (referring to the Jewish equivalent of an Afro hairstyle) mirrors the ethnic diversity (and indeterminacy) of the women’s group itself and points to one final cultural signification for hair in this story: as a symbol of the cosmopolitanism of a younger generation of Americans for whom appearance is more a matter of personal fashion preferences than historical exigencies. There is a moment in one of Edith Pearlman’s stories that recalls ‘Hair’. It comes from ‘Purim Night’, the middle of three stories from Binocular Vision (the first is ‘If Love Were All’, the last ‘The Coat’) that centre on different periods in the life of their shared protagonist, Sonya Sofrankovitch, an American who volunteers to work for the American Joint Distribution Committee during the Second World War, helping Jewish refugee children sent to London from central and eastern Europe, and who after the war becomes coordinator (together with her lover and eventual husband, Roland Rosenberg) of Camp Gruenwasser, a centre for Displaced Persons in Germany. The phrase ‘writer’s writer’ might have been invented to describe Edith Pearlman. Until the publication of Binocular Vision (2011), which was short-listed for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, she was known to and loved by aficionados of the contemporary short story but had received relatively little recognition beyond US literary circles.



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‘Purim Night’, although it is partly focalised through Sonya, has at its centre a newcomer to Camp Gruenwasser: a camp survivor named Ida. As secretary at the camp, Ida, ‘a Person who had been a milliner Before’ (Pearlman 2011: 159), spends most of her time typing requisition requests and immigration applications for other residents. After typing up the latest plea for supplies Ida pauses for a moment, lost in thought: Ida ran a hand through her hair. It was as dense and dark as it had been ten years earlier, when she was captured, separated from the husband now known to be dead, oh Shmuel, and forced to work in a munitions factory. Not labor camp, not escape from labor camp, not the death in her arms of her best friend, oh Luba, not recapture, not liberation; not going unwashed for weeks, not living on berries in the woods, not the disappearance of her menses for almost a year and their violent return; not influenza lice odors suppurations; not the discovery in the forest of an infant’s remains, a baby buried shallowly, dug up by animals; not the one rape and the many beatings – nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair. (164) The initial description of Ida defines her only generically as a Person (the capital letter ironically depersonalising her by allocating her to the category of Displaced Persons) and alludes to the events of the Holocaust only obliquely, through the use of the word ‘Before’ (the upper-case ‘B’ implying the epochal change effected by the events that this period preceded). The paragraph that follows elaborates on the horrors that came after the pre-lapsarian ‘Before’, iterating a series of traumatic experiences and privations, including the loss of her husband and best friend. However, this list is couched in the form of a paradoxical negative catalogue that suggests overwhelming suffering and at the same time Ida’s indefatigable spirit, symbolised by the resilience of the hair, which is a signifier both of the Jewishness that causes her suffering and her transcendence of that suffering. On the one hand, the accumulation of sub-clauses, each with their particular impact (such as the concurrence of symptoms of physical deterioration implied by the lack of punctuation in ‘influenza lice odors suppurations’), syntactically enacts a succession of blows from which no ordinary person might expect to recover. On the other hand, the repetition of ‘not’, culminating in the triumphant conclusion that ‘nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair’, inverts or at least subverts the trajectory of trauma, so that the untrammelled body of Ida’s hair becomes a metonym for the buoyancy of the person of this ‘Person’. The redemptive power of Ida’s hair is reinforced by a reference to it later in the story, as she dances with a number of the inmates at the party organised by Sonya to celebrate Purim, the Jewish festival that commemorates the Jews’ survival of an ancient potential holocaust: ‘Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another . . . Below the iridiscent helmet her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck’ (171). Like the hair of the camp survivor in ‘Hair’, which clings to her even after it is shorn as a symbol of the life that will not be expunged, the adherent qualities of Ida’s hair reflect her inner tenacity. If Ida improbably survives and even retains her natural optimism, however, she is the exception among the inmates at Camp Gruenwasser. ‘Purim Night’ begins with the bold question ‘Purim?’ posed by Ludwig, a newcomer to Camp Gruenwasser: He was twelve – pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin Before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat. (158)

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This is the first use of ‘Before’ as shorthand for ‘before the Holocaust’ but in this context it is used to stress continuity rather than disjunction – the continuity of Ludwig’s appearance and the implied continuity between this camp for Displaced Persons (‘What a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty they were; homeless they were; despised’; 158) and the camps which the DPs had eluded or survived in order to be given refuge here. This continuity manifests itself in the state of the inmates themselves – many of whom are unable to celebrate the Jewish holiday because they are either ‘disabled, paralyzed with despair, stuck in the TB hospital, too old, too young, or (by some mistake in assignment) Christian’ (163) – and in Ludwig’s state of mind, for it turns out that he is only pretending not to know about Purim, having become habituated to the idea that ‘[f]eigning ignorance was always a good idea’ (161). The fact that the DPs’ camp is on the site of a former Wehrmacht base, together with Sonya’s sardonic declaration that the food shortages in the camp will be alleviated by local ‘kindly German farmers . . . [who] will certainly butcher some calves for our [Purim] party’ (161), reinforces the idea that if there is a definable ‘Before’ there is not yet a corresponding ‘After’ for the Holocaust survivors. Indeed, ‘Purim Night’ is punctuated with references to the enduring legacy of the Holocaust, both material (for example a chess set that is hired out by a Lithuanian inmate who had inherited it from his brother, ‘now ashes’; 163) and spiritual (‘for the Persons, one grey day got sucked into the next’; 168). For Sonya, too, there is an overriding sense of her life having somehow slipped away from her: ‘She had been a free spirit once, she thought she recalled. At the young age of fifty she had dwelled on a Rhode Island beach; she had danced under the moon’ (167). The tentative formulation here, ‘she thought she recalled’, implies that the events Before for Sonya are so remote that she can barely remember the person she was then. Yet her decision to exchange her life of self-indulgence in the US for a life of self-sacrifice in Europe – to replace the pleasures of a placid private life with the rewards of a life devoted to public service – is ultimately vindicated in ‘Purim Night’. Sonya’s reflections on her work for the Joint Distribution Committee in London are characteristically self-deprecating (‘She had saved some children’; 167) and she represents her decision to enter into a professional and personal partnership with Roland Rosenberg as evidence of her passivity (‘she had accepted [his] . . . invitation to run Camp Gruenwasser with him. She had allowed his fat, freckled hand to rest on hers’; 167). However, in the course of the story, while making love to him, Sonya finds herself declaring a love she did not realise she felt: ‘Roland, I love you,’ she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders, the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. (168) Like the description of Ida’s hair, this is a paradoxical catalogue, since the items it lists would conventionally be regarded as unattractive features rather than motives for love, which makes the fact that Sonya finds them endearing all the more moving. The ‘silly mess’ that is Roland represents the choice that Sonya has made not just to commit herself politically to a life of public service but also personally to embrace life itself in all its silliness and messiness, its chaos and arbitrariness; and her belated recognition of the strength of her feelings for Roland makes ‘Purim Night’, in the end, a life-affirming story. As a result (or so Sonya and Roland suspect) of Ida charming an American general who dances with her at the party, the allotment of cigarettes for each Person is increased,



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which ‘changes things [for the better] significantly’ (172) (because of the high exchange value of the cigarettes) and the story closes with the news that Ida, Ludwig and a group of other former DPs have arrived in the promised land: ‘We have reached Palestine, wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. We have been saved, again’ (172).5 Like Edith Pearlman, Deborah Eisenberg has been renowned in literary circles for many years as one of the greatest short story writers of her generation but has not received much critical attention. Eisenberg is the author of four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). In 2011 all these stories were published together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. One of her longest and most ambitious fictions is the title-story from Twilight of the Superheroes. The story focuses on the impact of 9/11 on the lives of Lucien, a Manhattan art dealer, and his nephew through marriage, Nathaniel, but the story is also an elegy of sorts for the city of New York that existed before the attacks on the Twin Towers. Like Paley, Goldberg and Pearlman, Eisenberg is able skilfully to interrogate events of great historical moment through moments of personal significance in the lives of a few individuals; to move seamlessly between the microcosmic and macrocosmic. The story begins with Nathaniel imagining a moment, many decades in the future, when he will tell his grandchildren about the catastrophe that didn’t happen at the start of the new millennium. He recalls how, in the days and weeks leading up to 2000, ‘Everyone was thinking of more and more alarming possibilities’ (Eisenberg 2007: 5) prompted by widely circulating prophecies of the global chaos that would be caused by Y2K. Some of the fears that Nathaniel articulates are satirical in tone (‘Would we have to huddle together for warmth and scrabble frantically through our pockets for a pack of fancy restaurant matches so we could set our stacks of old New York Reviews ablaze?’; 4) but others seem to allude to the catastrophe that did happen, twenty-one months after the damp squib of the millennium bug: ‘Might one be fatally trapped in an elevator? . . . would all the airplanes in the sky collide?’ (4). The details that Nathaniel imagines having to gloss for his grandchildren (‘[he] might have to explain what computers had been . . . and airplanes and New York and America’; 5) reinforce the sense that his account of the much-anticipated non-event of 2000 functions implicitly as a premonition of the event of 2001 that was not at all anticipated. In an essay entitled ‘The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery’, the American Jewish novelist, essayist and short story writer Norma Rosen claims that, to ‘a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas’ (1992b: 47). In the early sections of ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’, Eisenberg deploys what we might call the second life of 9/11 imagery to invoke obliquely the terrorist attack on New York.6 Contemplating the imminent end of the three-year tenancy of the luxurious downtown apartment that he and his friends have enjoyed, courtesy of Lucien’s friendship with the Japanese businessman, Mr Matsumoto, who had been temporarily recalled home as a result of the ‘general economic blight that had withered the New York branch of [his] firm’ (Eisenberg 2007: 9), Nathaniel reflects that they have all been ‘hanging in temporary splendor thirty-one floors above the pavement’ (9). Here the metaphors – of a poisonous atmosphere infiltrating and damaging the economy of New York and of an apartment being suspended precariously in space – become literal in the context of 9/11, when many occupants of the World Trade Center were seen briefly hanging on to the windowsills of the building before plummeting to their deaths on the pavements below, and ‘toxic dust’ released after the attacks on the towers led to health problems for survivors and rescue workers at Ground Zero as well as inhabitants of the city.

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The description of this dust as a ‘sticky layer of crematorium ash’ (29) and of the accompanying ‘st[in]k’ in the air of ‘particulate matter . . . chemicals and blood and scorched bone’ (34) – applicable as much to the atmosphere of the death camps as to post-9/11 Manhattan – unify the second life of Holocaust imagery with the second life of 9/11 imagery. As well as implying a parallel of sorts between the way in which the Holocaust and the events of 9/11 have altered the connotations of certain words, Eisenberg also alludes obliquely to the notorious use of euphemistic jargon to justify the Nazi genocide when she draws attention to the debasing of political discourse in the US in the aftermath of 9/11: The wars in the East were hidden behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyalty, freedom – the words bounced around, changing purpose, as if they were made out of some funny plastic. What did they actually refer to? It seemed that they all might refer to money. (33) Through Nathaniel’s history Eisenberg also explicitly juxtaposes the Holocaust with 9/11 (comparing the ‘panic [that] had sent his grandparents and parents scurrying away’ from wartime Europe to the ‘same . . . panic’ that sends Nathaniel ‘back to Manhattan’; 21), both in order to reinforce the connection and to emphasise the disjunction between the two events. On the one hand, the description of the voyage made to America by Isaac and Rose, Nathaniel’s parents (‘Both sailed as tiny, traumatized children . . . right into the Statue of Liberty’s open arms’), recalls the arrival in the new world of Ruthie’s grandmother in ‘Hair’, implying that they have made good their escape ‘from murderous Europe, with its death camps and pogroms, to the safe harbor of New York’ (39). On the other hand, if the metaphor of sailing straight into the Statue of Liberty is literalised, it becomes an eerie anticipation of the planes flying straight into that other quintessential symbol of New York, the World Trade Center. Moreover, it soon becomes clear that the traumatic history of antisemitism – the ‘death camps and pogroms’ – is not so easily shed, as Isaac and Rose continue to live as adult US citizens ‘as if secret police were permanently hiding under the matching plastic-covered sofas, as if Brownshirts and Cossacks were permanently rampaging through the suburban streets’ (14). In this sense, 9/11 is a confirmation of lingering paranoia and at the same time a reminder of the fundamental differences between ‘murderous Europe’ and the New York of (post-)9/11. In the horrible old days in Europe when Rose and Isaac were hunted children, it must have been pretty clear to them how to behave, minute by minute. Men in jackboots? Up to the attic! But even during that time when it was so dangerous to speak out . . . heroes emerged . . . now there are even monuments to some of them . . . . . . maybe everything is really back to normal and maybe the whole period will sink peacefully away, to be remembered only by scholars. But if it should end, instead, in dire catastrophe, whom will the monuments of the future commemorate? (39) Whereas in the context of the Final Solution the moral lines were clearly drawn, in the aftermath of 9/11 the question of what constitutes heroism (another one of those words that became overused and devalued in the days and weeks after the attacks) is vexed, as is the question of what constitutes normality. The use of the word ‘catastrophe’ here, alongside the speculation about how this period will be remembered in the future, recalls the opening of the story, but because this passage occurs in the section entitled ‘Back To Normal’ it also draws attention to the ways in which the parameters of ‘the normal’ have been recalibrated



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in the period between 1 January 2000, the day on which ‘nothing catastrophic happened at all’ (5) and 12 September 2001, the day after the day ‘when the sky fell’ (30). In one sense, ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ seems to support the notion that 9/11 was a paradigm-changing event, a historical watershed that fundamentally altered not only the geopolitical landscape but the tenor of everyday life: At the moment when all this – as Lucien thinks of it – began, the moment when a few ordinary-looking men carrying box-cutters sped past the limits of international negotiation and the frontiers of technology, turning his miraculous city into a nightmare and hurling the future into a void, Lucien was having his croissant and coffee. (25) For Lucien, in spite of the historical specificity implied by the term ‘9/11’, the terrorist attack was not a finite incident but rather both the start of a new era (‘when all this . . . began’) and the end of any conception of linear history (‘hurling the future into a void’). He (or rather Eisenberg’s narrator, paraphrasing his thoughts) juxtaposes the ‘ordinarylooking men’ and the apparently innocuous nature of the equipment they carried with the exceptionally transgressive nature of their mission (exceeding all previous ‘limits’ and ‘frontiers’). This tension between the quotidian and the extraordinary (reinforced by the image of Lucien enjoying his habitual ‘croissant and coffee’, oblivious to the imminent ‘nightmare’ about to engulf his ‘miraculous city’) recurs in the description of how a ‘shining, calm, perfectly blue September morning’ that Nathaniel and his friends are spending on the terrace of Mr Matsumoto’s Manhattan apartment is disrupted by a ‘moment . . . when Lyle spilled his coffee and said “Oh, shit” and something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited’ (13). Symbolically, this ‘moment’ seems to represent the death of a cosmopolitan, culturally vibrant city – the disappearance of what a visitor to the flat refers to as ‘ur New York’ – and its displacement by what Nathaniel’s European girlfriend, Delphine, calls ‘a small-minded, mean-spirited provincial town’ (32). Even when things are supposed to be ‘back to normal’ (39) the new normality is defined negatively by the diminution of trauma (‘For a long time now they’ve been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise’; 16) or qualified by absence: So, Mr Matsumoto will be coming back, and things seem pretty much as they did when he left. The apartment is clean, the cats are healthy, the art is undamaged, and the view from the terrace is exactly the same, except where there’s that weird, blank spot where the towers used to stand. (40–1) Although ‘things seem’ largely unchanged, in fact in the interval between Mr Matsumoto’s departure to Japan and his return to New York everything has changed, not just physically, in terms of the skyline of Manhattan, but psychologically, in terms of the world view of its inhabitants: It was as if there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents . . . The planes struck, tearing through the curtain . . . exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by. (32–3) Eisenberg seems here to be appropriating Winston Churchill’s famous metaphor of the iron curtain and using it, subversively, to refer to Western capitalism rather than Soviet

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communism. The image of the curtain being rent complicates the conventional narrative that the events of 9/11 transformed reality, suggesting instead that they disclosed the reality that was there all the time, obscured by the curtain of privilege and the ideology that underwrites that privilege. It is this revelation of the consequences of unregulated global capitalism and the US foreign policy that enforces it, as much as the destruction of the towers, that alters the way that Lucien, Nathaniel and others in their orbit think and feel about the world they live in. The post-9/11 malaise of Nathaniel’s comic-book hero, Passivityman, illustrates graphically the predicament implied in the question posed in the passage above, ‘whom will the monuments of the future commemorate?’ (39). Prior to 9/11, Nathaniel had worked for years on his unusual comic-strip, but after the attacks on the towers he loses motivation: ‘It was hard to live the way his superhero lived – constantly vigilant against the premature conclusion, scrupulously rejecting the vulgar ambition, rigorously deferring judgement and action’ (23). The glib response of Amity (one of his flatmates) (‘Oh, it’s probably just one of those slumps . . . I’m sure he’ll be back to normal, soon’; 23) implicitly connects Passivityman’s fate with the economic slump which hastened Mr Matsumoto’s initial departure (itself implicitly linked with 9/11 earlier in the story) and echoes the mantra (‘back to normal’) that reverberates with cumulative irony through the latter half of ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’. It also suggests, as does the title of the story, that the plight of Passivityman is a metaphor for the demise of a heroic ideal in the context of the war on terror; for the definitive rejection of all that Passivityman stands for and the moral dissolution manifested in the precipitate rush into action and kneejerk judgements of the US government after 9/11. At one point the narrator of the story observes (again ventriloquising Lucien’s feelings) that in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘[p]rivate life shrank to nothing. All one’s feelings had been absorbed by an arid wasteland – policy, strategy, goals. One’s past, one’s future, one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty little curios on a shelf’ (36). Yet in the work of Eisenberg, and also of Paley, Goldberg and Pearlman, private life is never fully absorbed by public policy. Instead daily pleasures and domestic dramas become microcosms of the large historical debates of the last fifty years, and the investigation of the personal politics of gender, class and ethnicity serves to deconstruct and complicate the grand political ­narratives of the postwar period.

Notes 1. I have taken this title from Binnie Kirschenbaum’s second collection of short stories, which is one of the many texts I would have liked to discuss here had space allowed. 2. This seems likely to be an allusion to ‘Operation Moses’, the mass resettlement of Ethiopian Jews in Israel that took place in 1984, a year before Later the Same Day was published. 3. Paley is quoted on the back cover of the first edition of the book acclaiming the collection: ‘A very fresh voice. I love the stuff. Deeply serious and very funny’ (n. p.). 4. There is disagreement among historians about the extent to which this practice actually took place. 5. This note of optimism is tempered when Sonya finds herself wondering, in ‘The Coat’, the story that follows ‘Purim Night’ in the collection, whether Ida is ‘safe in Israel née Palestine’ or has been ‘maybe killed by mortar fire’ (Pearlman 2013: 176). 6. The story is divided into twenty-one short sections, each with its own subtitle.

9 DISAPPOINTED BELIEVERS? THE JEWISH QUESTION MARK IN EISNER’S ‘A CONTRACT WITH GOD’ Sarah Lightman Two disappointed believers. (Simon 1983)

F

rimme Hersh’s question marks stand out in ‘A Contract with God’ (1978; Fig. 1). Written in a unique font, these markings intertwine English punctuation with Hebrew lettering, and articulate faith, anger, expectation and disappointment. These question marks are both text and image, end sentences but also look for answers from a God found wanting: ‘Then is not GOD ALSO, so obligated??’ (Eisner 2006: 5). In this essay I will consider how American graphic novelists explore their complex relationships with God and Judaism through their semi-autobiographical comics. Focusing on Will Eisner’s ‘A Contract with God’1 I will also examine Miss Lasko-Gross’s ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (Lasko-Gross 2006: 62–4) and consider how both comics proffer disaffected Jewish experiences while exploiting the unique possibilities of the medium. Though created by artists from different generations, genders and stages in their careers, these comics share numerous formal similarities, from their reinterpretation of Hebrew texts through to their use of splash title pages and limited palettes to consolidate their atmospheric narratives. How far do Frimme Hersh and Melissa Gross, dissatisfied and complex protagonists, sit comfortably within a literary, artistic and theological tradition in which ‘wrestling with identity and ethereal projections is an archetypal Jewish story’ (Meyers 2011: 7)?

‘Ach . . . these Jews . . . yesterday a poor tenant, today the owner . . . how do they do it?!’ ‘A Contract with God’ marks a watershed in comics history and a turning point in Will Eisner’s creative life: ‘Will Eisner reinvented both himself and . . . the industry he had helped create . . . with the release of A Contract with God’ (Carpenter 2014). The choice of the term ‘reinvented’ is significant and appropriate, as put another way, this comic crystallises the moment where personal tragedy is a transformational moment in literature: ‘After great turmoil, instead of laying down in darkness Jews have traditionally reinvented themselves through texts’ (Cappell 2007: 9). Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy (1978), of which ‘A Contract with God’ is the opening story, is a series of short works based around one tenement building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Depression.

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Figure 1  Will Eisner, ‘A Contract with God’ [1978] (2006: 25); detail. From A CONTRACT WITH GOD AND OTHER TENEMENT STORIES: A GRAPHIC NOVEL by Will Eisner. Copyright © 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1996 by Will Eisner. Copyright (c) 2006 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Eisner was an American-born comic artist who already had enjoyed great success before he created The Contract with God Trilogy with his acclaimed strip ‘The Spirit’ (1940–52) about a masked crime fighter. While some critics have argued that the characters are weak, the artwork was always surprising and inventive: ‘His characters are rumpled and rubbery, emoting like ham actors’ (Wolk 2007: 168). ‘The Spirit’ was published in many newspapers with a combined circulation of five million, but Eisner himself felt limited both by the format and his readers’ expectations: ‘My early work in newspaper comics and comic books allowed me to entertain millions of readers weekly, but I always felt there was more to say’ (Eisner 2006: xix). In ‘A Contract with God’ Eisner develops character metamorphosis and transformation in ways that had previously been confined to Superman. Eisner exploits the built-in complexity of the mixed format of comics to give expression to difficult human experience and involved emotional responses. He also celebrates Jewish literary tradition by establishing bridges between biblical stories and his experiences of contemporary American life. This visual and textual exploration of ‘the tensions between modernity and the past’ (Smith 2010: 183) illustrates precisely the old world/new world tension both of his characters and of Eisner himself, whose parents were immigrants from eastern Europe. Frimme Hersh is introduced as an ungainly impoverished immigrant, and fits comfortably within an art form accessible to outsiders. Comics have traditionally been considered a low art form, often dismissed as neither literature nor fine art, ‘outside notions of artistic credibility’ (Sabin 1996: 8). Eisner’s experience of the comics scene reflects both on the status of Jews and of



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comics in society. As he himself put it, comics was ‘a medium that was regarded as trash, that nobody really wanted to go into . . . There were Jews in this medium because it was a crap medium. And in a marketplace that still had racial overtones, it was an easy medium to get into’ (qtd in Royal 2011a: 4). Excluded from other areas in the arts, Jewish artists found in comics a space to use their talents. Similarly Frimme Hersh, lacking the necessary education and social credentials to become a respectable businessman, makes his fortune as a slum landlord, his first purchase including the dilapidated tenement of 55 Dropsie Avenue, which he refuses to upgrade: ‘Why don’t you sell those crummy buildings Frim?!’ (Eisner 2006: 39). Later Hersh continues to make his fortune through other symbolically undesirable purchases: ‘That garbage dump you were stuck with’ (2006: 37). These are all spaces that correspond to the ‘crap medium’ of comics that Eisner refers to. Andres Romero Jodar argues that Mikhail Bakhtin was wrong to cite the novel as the ‘sole genre that continues to develop’ (Bakhtin 1988: 3) and that comics are a ‘changing art form that tries to accommodate . . . social changes’ (Romero Jodar 2006: 94). It would be fitting then to consider how ‘A Contract with God’ broke new ground for comics in this retelling of Hersh’s own transformations. The comic form itself is an apt medium for a narrative that reflects the multiple identities of Jewish America and the American Jewish experience: The ambiguous genre distinction of Eisner’s text . . . parallels a more fluid understanding of American ethnic identity, where no one means of expression in isolation can stand as ‘essentially’ Jewish . . . Eisner sequentially sketches Jewish American identity by juxtaposing diverse yet interlinked, although at times potentially incompatible, ­representations of Jewishness. (Royal 2011b: 152) Comics, with their ongoing negotiation of text and image on each individual page, parallel the theme of a constantly changing sense of identity and, in the case of Hersh, a fluctuating relationship with God. Hersh’s life encompasses many expressions of being Jewish, both religious and secular. We also see a range of behaviours and lifestyles, including acts of morality and exploitation, altruism and selfishness, poverty and financial success. Change is also an intrinsic part of the artwork of the drawn comic. The repetitive but mostly non-identical drawings of characters involved in comics production reflect a life that can contain many phases. Each drawing of the same character is a new drawing, a new self, and this aspect of comics has narrative possibilities. Tahneer Oksman reflects on Aline Kominsky-Crumb, an American comics artist, whose work records the ugliness of life, her parents’ abusive marriage and the artist’s own unhappy childhood. KominskyCrumb’s drawing style is often harsh, with sharp crude markings and deliberately unflattering representations of herself. In ‘Goldie: A Neurotic Woman’ (Kominsky-Crumb 2007: 140–4) her alter ego protagonist is drawn very differently over twenty-two years within one comic: ‘The serial rendering of Goldie in dramatically divergent depictions collapses the possibility of a straightforward, linear narrative of the self or of self-image’ (Oksman 2010: 215). Kominsky-Crumb’s multiple drawing styles reflect a complex relationship to time and memory, an unsettled sense of identity and the difficulty in bringing together many different aspects of self on the page. Appearance and a crisis about how she sees herself are intrinsic to Kominsky-Crumb’s work – she was brought up in a community where looks were highly valued, and plastic surgery encouraged, something she reflects on in ‘Nose Job’, created in 1989 (Kominsky-Crumb 2007: 86–8). This comic emphasises her refusal to

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conform to the Jewish middle-class aspirations of the community she grew up in, and her ongoing drawing style can be seen as a continual rejection of these values. Another context in which both complex identity and immigrant aspirations are explored is superhero comics. Superman was created by two Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in 1938 and follows the story of one man with two identities: Clark Kent, a journalist, and Superman. In Superman on the Couch Danny Fingeroth writes on ‘The Dual Identity – Of Pimpernels and Immigrants from the Stars’: For the readers of early superhero stories, many of whom were children and grandchildren of immigrants, the characters were a symbolic re-enactment of their own ambivalent feelings about where their roots lay, and where their lives in America were taking them. (2004: 55) Frimme Hersh’s metamorphosis in ‘A Contract with God’ reverberates with aspects of this theory of superheroes – his transformation begins ‘with deliberation . . . he shaved off his beard’ (Eisner 2006: 31). The removal of this facial hair is a shock for the viewer but represents more than a visual change. When we now see Hersh’s face he no longer is or looks anonymously like an archetypal religious Jew, ‘the self . . . from the old country’ (Fingeroth 2007: 49). His act of facial revelation, and thus individualisation, is also one of profound disobedience – orthodox Jews are forbidden to shave; moreover during the immediate period of mourning after a family member dies it is traditional not to shave. This act of defiance disregards the orthodox faith and the traditions of mourning. ‘Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy’, states Jules Feiffer (1996: 15). Clark Kent removes his glasses to become Superman, changing from a fearful, bookish and nerdy character to a self-assured and all-powerful figure. In the transformation from a bearded, poor and badly dressed immigrant with sidelocks to a clean-shaven, portly, successful businessman, Hersh moves from underdog to ubermensch2 as Mr Cragg, the superintendent of the building declares in disbelief: ‘Ach . . . these Jews . . . yesterday a poor tenant, today the owner . . . how do they do it?!’ (Eisner 2006: 36). In this way, Frimme Hersh enacts ‘one of the hallmarks of American social mobility . . . the freedom . . . to serially reinvent yourself’ (Fingeroth 2007: 19). Hersh also changes his name, Anglicising it in a way that is often part of the immigration process from ‘Frimmehleh’ to ‘Frimme’ to ‘Frim’, similar to Superman’s childhood name Kar-EL becoming Clark Kent. As Fingeroth writes in Disguised as Clark Kent: ‘When your history tells you that you can be murdered because of who your parents happened to be, the freedom provided by being able to blend into the mainstream culture is essential to survival’ (2007: 49).

‘But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was mine’ The act of reinvention in ‘A Contract with God’ is not just an expression of aspiration, but also one of desperation, and reflects Eisner own experience of loss. ‘A Contract with God’ is entrenched in a moment of trauma and grief, a personal tragedy and an unfulfilled ‘promise of redemption’ (Gaiman 2005: n. p.).3 Significantly, Eisner approached death very differently in ‘The Spirit’. Denny Colt, the protagonist, is presumed murdered and uses this as an opportunity to become a masked vigilante, operating under the symbolic pseudonym of ‘The Spirit’. As Colt works undercover to catch criminals, ‘The Spirit’ becomes about a ‘life after death’. The opening scene of ‘A Contract with God’, however, shows Frimme Hersh exposed to the drenching rain, a broken man, returning from the funeral of



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Rachele, his adopted daughter. The main body of the comic ends with Hersh’s death. For Hersh there is no life after death – he dies just after plotting to rebuild his family, dreaming of giving his dead daughter life after her death: ‘I shall have a daughter . . . and I shall name her Rachele, yes, yes!!’ (Eisner 2006: 51). Both Frimme’s and Rachele’s deaths in ‘A Contract with God’ are absolute: ‘The immediacy of the death sequence [of Rachele] is a single panel, with no flair or “idiot in tights” to save the day’ (Warren 2014). Eisner found the move to autobiographical comics ‘very, very hard to do, because all my early years I was hiding behind a guy with a mask’ (Eisner 2001: 259). Even within ‘A Contract with God’ the artist used mask-like layers within the narrative to obfuscate. Philip Smith and Michael Goodrum write about the re-enactment of trauma in superhero comics after 9/11. They explain: ‘By telling a story in different locations, happening to different people and with different outcomes . . . an event can be stripped of its immediacy and horror whilst maintaining a certain kernel of truth which could not otherwise be told’ (2011: 488). Eisner’s autobiography seeps surreptitiously through ‘A Contract with God’, like the extraordinary downpour that, as we shall see, opens the comic: The creation of this story was an exercise in personal agony. My only daughter Alice, had died of leukemia eight years before the publication of this book. My grief was raw. My heart still bled. In fact I could not even bring myself to discuss the loss. I made Frimme Hersh’s daughter an ‘adopted daughter’. But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was mine. I exorcised my anger at a deity that I believe violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it. This is the first time in thirty-four years I have openly discussed it. (Eisner 2006: xiv) Eisner closes his confession with the acknowledgement that it has taken thirty-four years ‘to openly discuss it’, even though this openness is just one paragraph in a preface that closes as quickly as it opens. However, Eisner’s limited discussion of the death of Alice is not unusual; research has shown that ‘it is typical for men [who have lost a child] to . . . grieve alone or in private’ (Aho et al. 2006: 648). The storyline in ‘A Contract with God’ traces Hersh’s grief through his actions. His immediate change of appearance and trip to the bank (Eisner 2006: 31) to start his new business also reflects his process of grief: ‘Participant fathers attempted to regain a sense of control through activity as soon as possible’ (Aho et al. 2006: 648). Grieving fathers were isolated – a theme we shall see emerging through the formatting of the comic, in particular the sense of loneliness fashioned in the single panel pages. Additionally Hersh’s death could be attributed to his grief: ‘Physical symptoms such as ulcer, high temperature . . . high blood pressure might also appear later after the death of a child’ (Aho et al. 2006: 649). Eisner and Hersh both experience anger after the deaths of Alice and Rachele – as Eisner describes, he vicariously ‘exorcised [his] anger at a deity’. Another father who lost a child described his first response to hearing of the death: ‘I kicked the closet. It was kind of powerless rage or something’ (Aho et al. 2006: 654). This anger can be directed elsewhere: ‘The fathers experienced strong and prolonged feelings of guilt, anger and bitterness . . . these feelings were directed at themselves, [and] God . . .’ (Aho et al. 2006: 660). Julie Exline has researched anger with God: It occurred to me that people could also become angry at God. For those with religious commitments, the topic is interesting in part because it is often seen as taboo. For the nonreligious, the topic can also be interesting because anger toward God can be part

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of a process of disaffiliating with religion or deciding not to believe in God. (qtd in Meiselwitz 2011) In ‘A Contract with God’ there is both confrontation and also avoidance, engagement with God and Jewish culture and also disaffiliation, as Exline notes. Hersh remains angry at God but also attached to his past. His appearance may have changed, as may his home address, but with his unresolved grief he is uncomfortable and displaced in this new world, pictured in shadows, looking out of the window of his home: ‘at least once every week he would come there [to 55 Dropsie Avenue] . . . just to look at it’ (Eisner 2006: 38).

Noah, Moses and Frimme Hersh In a comic about leaving behind Jewish life what is the significance of Eisner’s continual reference to biblical characters, and how far do these references support Exline’s premise that it is ‘taboo’ to argue with God? ‘In a post-Holocaust diasporic world, most American Jews would prefer the salve of myth to the reality of history’, writes Ezra Cappell (2007: 11), noting that the drive for fiction emanates from survival. After his own personal tragedy, Eisner incorporates Jewish literature into his comics, in particular threading references to Noah and Moses into ‘A Contract with God’. The opening sentence describes how ‘[t]he tenement at No. 55 Dropsie Avenue seemed ready to rise and float away on the swirling tide. “Like the ark of Noah,” it seemed to Frimme Hersh’ (Eisner 2006: 5). In the story of Noah, mankind is nearly wiped out, with only virtuous Noah and his family saved: ‘So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created . . . But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord’” (Genesis 6:7–8). Eisner himself notes: ‘The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete”’ (2006: xv). The building seems to defy the natural order of things, becoming something extraordinary – floating while made of a heavy material. If the building itself were like the Ark of Noah, the suggestion is that Hersh and his neighbours would be saved from destruction and drowning. There are other moments when Hersh himself is compared to Noah. Both are described as being favoured, and saved as a result. In a flashback about Hersh’s younger life in eastern Europe, the elders of his community say to him: Frimmehleh, we have put together all that’s left of our money to send you to America. The next [antisemitic] attack may wipe us out, so we have selected YOU to save, for we believe you are favored by God! (16) Later on, even when Hersh is a non-religious businessman engaging in unethical practices, in the absence of any explicit mention of God he seems to be protected by providence: ‘His success appeared to be as much the result of uncanny luck as anything else’ (37). Another notable similarity between Hersh and Noah is compliancy. When God chooses to destroy the world, Noah does not complain or argue with this decision. Noah accepts God’s decision and behaves in an obedient manner: ‘Noah did everything just as God commanded him’ (Genesis 6:22). This is reminiscent of the earlier version of a passive Hersh: ‘He took religious instruction and devoted himself to good works. Faithfully and piously, he adhered to the terms of his contract with God’ (Eisner 2006: 19). There is simplicity here, as Eisner himself writes: ‘We are told early on that God will either punish or reward us, depending on our behaviour’ (xvi).



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Moses had a more direct and confrontational relationship with God, and seems closer to the transformed post-traumatic Frimme Hersh. There are obvious narrative similarities: both Hersh and Moses use stones upon which they write their texts. Hersh declares: ‘I will make a contract with God!’ The narrator continues: ‘And that night in the cold forest, he wrote the contract on a small stone’ (18), a direct reference to the Ten Commandments, of which it is stated: ‘The Lord said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets”’ (Exodus 34:1). According to Hebrew scriptures, the first set of Ten Commandments was written down by God and the second set by Moses. In ‘A Contract with God’ the first contract is written by Hersh (18) and the second by the elders (47–9). In both cases the original text is lost/ destroyed and a second version, distinctly less directly created, is produced. Another sense in which Hersh’s narrative echoes that of Moses is in their arguments with God. In Exodus, Moses confronts God, imploring him not to destroy the Jewish people after they create the Golden Calf on the basis of an earlier promise: ‘Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self . . .’ And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. (Exodus 32:11–14) When Hersh feels the contract he has with God has been broken he cries out: ‘NO! Not to me . . . You can’t do this . . . We have a contract!!’ (Eisner 2006: 23; Fig. 2) But God neither answers nor relents: ‘The special contracts . . . between Jews and their God are redrawn by Eisner as distinctly unglamorous and unfulfilled agreements’ (L. Roth 2007: 466).

Arms Raised, Text Erased When Frimme Hersh accuses God of breaking his contract, he stands arms outstretched facing heavenward, in an expression of beseeching – a ‘broad gesture’ (Smith 2010: 186). According to Greg G. Smith this reflects the ‘expressive forms and narrative structures of vaudeville [that] show their imprint throughout Eisner’s career’ (2010: 185). Eisner himself acknowledges: ‘Each page is . . . like theatre, it’s a scene. A book is a series of scenes’ (Brownstein 2005: 83). Eisner’s image of Hersh is part of a narrative, but also, literally, a standalone piece. Eisner’s figurations and emphasis on the individuality of each image suggests not just theatre, but also works of sculpture and painting. I see similarities with artworks that draw out the two major concerns in this moment – personal tragedy and a moment of biblical and religious significance. In the first case, Hersh’s pose is reminiscent of Jacques Lipchitz’s Mother and Child II (1941–45; Fig. 3). Lipchitz, like Eisner’s parents, came from Europe. He was born in Lithuania in 1891 and moved to Paris in 1909 to make art, where he became influenced by cubism. After the Nazi invasion of France he moved to America, settling in New York: The massive bronze sculpture depicts a legless woman with arms raised in pitiful supplication with a child clinging desperately to her neck. When Lipchitz finished the work in New York after arriving in America, he related the work to the scene he had witnessed in Moscow in 1935 on a dark rainy night when he heard the sound of a pathetic song that he tried to trace. He came to a train station where he saw a beggar woman, a cripple without legs, on a cart, who was singing. (Toll 2012) Mother and Child II by Lipchitz shows a desperate woman who, like Hersh, faces the death of her child. Both she and Hersh cry out ‘on a dark and rainy night’. Another artwork that uses a

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Figure 2  Will Eisner, ‘A Contract with God’ [1978] (2006: 23); detail. From A CONTRACT WITH GOD AND OTHER TENEMENT STORIES: A GRAPHIC NOVEL by Will Eisner. Copyright © 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1996 by Will Eisner. Copyright (c) 2006 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.



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Figure 3  Jacques Lipchitz, Mother and Child II; bronze (1941–45). ‘Mother and Child II’, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Estate of Jacques Lipchitz.

Figure 4  Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law (1659); Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Rembrandt’s Moses (Kat.Nr. 811) in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Foto: Jörg. P. Anders’

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similar pose is Rembrandt’s painting Moses Breaking the Tablets (1659; Fig. 4). Whereas Moses holds the tablets aloft, Hersh’s hands are empty, bar a small prayer book in his left hand. But the motif of the tablet/contract/Ten Commandments still looms strongly. The background of the room forms a tablet shape with the text ‘NO! not to me . . . you can’t do this . . . we have a contract!!’ hovering within. Hersh is now inside the broken contract, his anger and grief erasing the initial text and now filling it with his own outburst. Why might Eisner have used these biblical examples? I want to argue that Eisner is placing himself squarely within Jewish tradition, where the process of subjective biblical interpretation is central to Jewish life. As we have seen, Eisner brought his own life and experiences into the story, plaiting this with biblical references, imagination and retelling. This process could be considered midrashic: The word midrash is a Hebrew noun derived from a verb meaning ‘to seek out’ or ‘to inquire’. It is used to describe both a methodology and a genre of literature in which biblical texts are imaginatively interpreted in ways that extend the meaning of the text and often make the text more accessible to contemporary experience . . . Narrative ­traditions can be retold, extended or elaborated. (Birch 2005: 115) Midrashic texts have been in circulation for thousands of years and have heavily influenced the tradition of Jewish literature. Central to ‘A Contract with God’ is, of course, the contract text itself, a rewriting of the Jewish laws defining a relationship to God, Frimme Hersh’s own unique Torah. By incorporating allusions to Moses and Noah in his narrative, Eisner accomplishes a number of effects. First, these stories take on a mythical resonance through their use of the biblical archetypes, passive (Noah) and argumentative/assertive (Moses); they become about the human condition in their ageless questioning of the fairness of life and God’s decisions. The individual quest becomes universal. This approach is repeated by Eisner in The Dreamer (1986), as Lan Dong highlights in his essay ‘Thinly Disguised (Autobio)Graphical Stories: Will Eisner’s Life, in Pictures’: ‘It is his story; yet it is also the story of many artists who share similar hopes and ambitions’ (2011: 18). The use of these biblical comparisons also serves to highlight the obvious differences. Where Moses experienced and instigated many wonders, Hersh is beset by tragedy, as Victoria Aarons writes in What Happened to Abraham: ‘There are no “miracles” in the fiction of contemporary American Jewish writers, no covenantal fulfilment’ (2005: 15). Ironically, for a work that Eisner described as having ‘more to say’, the central theme of the comic is God’s silence. Where there was a verbal communication between Moses and God, there is no sign or sound of God in ‘A Contract with God’ except in the weather: ‘locating this voice [of God] . . . is problematic at best’ (Aarons 2005: 15).

Me-drashics Biblical stories filtered through the prism of everyday life can be argued to continue to manifest a Jewish understanding of the relationship between God and reality. Dennis Prager notes: ‘Arguing/struggling with God is not only Jewishly permitted, it is central to the Torah and later Judaism . . . In no other foundational religious text of which I am aware is arguing with God a religious expectation’ (Prager 2012). Frimme Hersh continues the line of great biblical dissenters and in this way Eisner’s approach to the biblical texts could be considered midrashic. Deborah Kahn-Harris, in her essay ‘Midrash for the Masses: The Uses (and Abuses) of the Term “Midrash” in Contemporary Feminist Discourse’, writes



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that the term midrash is used too freely with not enough ‘serious, intellectual engagement in what the midrashic process might be’ (2013: 303). I want to form a new terminology that acknowledges Jewish responses to biblical texts and Jewish experience, as well as the incorporating of autobiographical details through comics. Where midrash is the commentary and act of analysis, ‘medrash’ is the process of placing oneself in biblical stories and using oneself or alter egos to extrapolate a new commentary. I want to argue that Eisner engages in medrashics, finding comfort in his discomfort with God as he adapts and adopts the language and stories of his forebears, as I have in my own graphic novel The Book of Sarah. Though they feel alone, neither Eisner nor Hersh are really alone on the page. They stand arms stretched out, in a gesture that links them to generations of other questioning, arguing Jews, each forming their own question mark. As James A. Diamond notes in ‘Questioning Jew and the Jewish Question’: ‘Jewish identity is a question mark because a critical constituent of it is, if anything else, the enterprise of questioning itself’ (2014: 127). In addition to narrative exegesis, ‘A Contract with God’ addresses the visual reinterpretation of Hebrew texts, something that is made possible in comics with its alchemy of text and image. In a story that places itself in the early twentieth century, Eisner incorporates an older traditional Hebrew-style font at various moments, bridging the gulf between contemporary life and events thousands of years ago: ‘The stories of the covenant, as told in Jewish literature and lore, are tales of a mythic past, and so they also may be seen as an articulation of beginnings and thus a blueprint for the future’ (Aarons 2005: 13). These moments include the climax of Hersh’s argument: ‘I ask you . . . were the terms not clearly written?? . . . Did I ignore even one tiny sentence – or perhaps a single comma?’ (Eisner 2006: 26). Even earlier in the comic there is a similar presentation of text. On the opening splash page the word ‘GOD’ is also written in this Hebrew-style script, so that the ‘G’ resembles the Hebrew letter ‘Pay’. At the same time there is a sense of incompletion, with dissent and dissatisfaction drawn into each letter, suggesting a world that is not perfect. The letters of ‘GOD’ do not form a complete circle; they are open, with neither the ‘O’ nor the ‘D’ complete. In the face of the downpour that opens the story, neither the contract nor the letters are watertight; the contract itself is unfinished and inadequate. The font is reminiscent of text carved on to a gravestone, referencing both Rachele’s funeral which opens the comic and Hersh’s own demise which closes it. The tombstone suggests themes of memory and loss, the passing on of faith across generations; and in turn Shlomo Krieks, in the epilogue, after finding Hersh’s discarded contract on the small stone, signs his own name to it. The cycle begins again. The biblical themes and struggles and arguments animate and reanimate in all generations, and as Eisner shows, each ending is also a beginning. Eisner draws an ongoing conversation, even argument, with God and religion, not one that concluded thousands of years ago.

No One Else Is There I want to introduce the second comic here and identify some formal and narrative similarities between the works. In ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ by Miss Lasko-Gross, the artist engages with language and translation and the capacity to rewrite/redraw tradition. This three-page comic touches on other themes including her antagonism towards fundamentalism, her sense of being an outsider and her ambivalence towards religion. Lasko-Gross was born in Boston in 1977, and has published two semi-autobiographical comics, Escape from ‘Special’ (2006) and A Mess of Everything (2009). ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ is in Escape from ‘Special’, which tells the story of Melissa, who moves through a number of

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different schools and struggles with many aspects of her Jewish life, including going to synagogue and Hebrew School. Both Hersh and Melissa are very much alone, and their shared predicament is portrayed in the formatting of their graphic narratives. ‘A Contract with God’ portrays loneliness through the page designs, both in the title page and through the rest of the comic. In the opening splash page of ‘A Contract with God’, key elements – the stone contract, 55 Dropsie Avenue, Hersh and a heavy downpour – interact with each other. The page is sliced with sheets of rain, trapping the hero within his tragic destiny. Each line drawn gives a sense of time, of how much time the image took to create – the artist himself is trapped in the process of creating the artwork. Humanity’s own power and powerlessness is portrayed in the fire hydrant, a common site on a New York street, which is clearly closed yet is sodden, with a river of water surrounding it. These hydrants are man-made and access water at a great deal of pressure, but they are no competition for the great gushing of water that appears from the heavens. This metaphor is further enhanced as Hersh’s hat mirrors the helmet of the water pump. Hersh is hunched against the rain, about to be caught in the dripping underneath the contract. The water also alludes to the emotional nature of the story, with drips of rain falling on the stone contract like tears. The splash page is literally soaking, the drops of rain suggesting an overwhelming narrative. This rain is, of course, an example of the pathetic fallacy often found in canonical literature, in which ‘symbolism . . . is traditionally Gothic in using landscapes and weather to mirror the existential and emotional circumstances of the characters’ (Magill 1983: 578). The extreme weather that surrounds this opening scene is also reminiscent of important biblical scenes, such as Moses on Mount Sinai, when ‘the whole mountain trembled violently’ (Exodus 19:16–18). In ‘A Contract with God’, God’s presence is suggested in the storm and the shuddering of the tenement building: ‘the old tenement trembled’ (Eisner 2006: 24–5). The positioning of motifs spatially develops the interwoven narratives: the stone contract is superimposed on the building, two items becoming one. The contract also looks like a hole, an emptiness, even a bullet-hole in the building. This visualises what the shikse recognises in Hersh: ‘Why don’t you sell those crummy buildings Frim?! . . . Y’know, Frim, you got, like, a black hole, inside o’you!’ (39). Most of the pages in ‘A Contract with God’ have one single image, often with minimal text. These whole unbroken pages, without panels and borders, reflect Frimme Hersh, an orphan, alone in a new country, the single survivor from his village. In fact he writes his contract with God at the exact moment he is leaving everything and everyone he knows behind him in eastern Europe. The format of ‘A Contract with God’ compounds this sense of isolation, this one-sided conversation. Moving away from the conformity and formal limitations of conventional comics, with the waffle shape of six or nine images per page bordered by panels and gutters, ‘A Contract with God’ sustains a sense of silence, a lack of communication – a book of individual drawings. Alone on the page, these images exist without the community of other panels, creating an arguably existential format. As Eisner himself acknowledged: ‘With “A Contract with God” it’s just you and the reader. You’re in the room with the guy and no one else is there’ (Brownstein 2005: 15). Miss Lasko-Gross also uses her title page with narrative intent: and her ‘alienation . . . manifests itself visually’ (Brauner 2014: 136). ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ opens with a drawing of one lit and one unlit candle, long phallic objects that dominate the space, like the patriarchal father (Fig. 5). The mother is drawn in the act of lighting one candle. This image is one of symbolic obedience and acquiescence, with the placing of the ‘good’ daughter Vera by the lit candle. Melissa, meanwhile, looks to the unlit candle and sits outside



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Figure 5  Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 62); detail. ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, by Miss Lasko-Gross, reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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the light, an excluded onlooker. Even the hairstyles of the characters are symbolic – while the young Melissa has hair that is naturally wavy, Vera’s hair is very straight, again suggesting obedience. The title text itself is uncomfortably close to the lit candle, with the flame burning through the letter ‘A’ and the Star of David within it, an act of visual rebellion. The wording of the title, like Eisner’s, uses an article very deliberately: whereas Eisner’s ‘A’ contract belongs to no one and, as we see, gets handed to another, ‘The’ as part of the possessive noun phrase in the title of Lasko-Gross’s piece makes ‘The Sabbath’ belong to the Gruswerks. Lasko-Gross is aware of the effect of intricate patterns, and this has a role in the pacing and narrative of the story: You always hope people will slow down and experience every panel, reading the visuals and giving them the same weight as the written word. While the patterns in this story don’t have a literal meaning they are a graphic representation of the somewhat claustrophobic dining room. I spent a lot of time on patterns in these books. Sometimes they have ‘hidden’ messages, other times they’re meant to be a physical representation of the mood in a space. Crackling anxieties, swirling emotions in the air. Other times they’re simply part of an over-decorated suburban world. (Lasko-Gross 2014a) The panels in ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ resonate with heavy wood furniture and an oppressive black background. When the family recites the blessings, the young girls are drawn from behind, the backs of chairs looming over them (Lasko-Gross 2006: 63). Two panels later the heavy curtains, drawn in a similar style to the chairs, continue this impression. The graphic style also oppresses, subduing the characters within the straight lines that designate the wooden table in a style similar to Eisner’s rainstorm. Lasko-Gross emphasises the sense of isolation of the protagonist through the format of her graphic novel. The book is constructed out of individual stories of different lengths. The isolated narratives coalesce but do not unify, to reflect a protagonist very much alone, rejecting and rejected. Each of the recorded incidents has short titles. ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ is positioned about a third of the way through the book, with ‘Child Therapy’ and ‘Relative Deprivation’ before, and ‘Bully’ and ‘Child Psychology’ afterwards. When asked whether her work is formed of ‘seemingly unrelated vignettes’ Lasko-Gross replied: ‘It’s what’s unsaid. There’s an unspoken philosophical point behind every one of those short stories . . . [But] there’s a meaning behind every story’ (Oksman 2014: 178). Lasko-Gross continues by describing how one reviewer thought they were all put together randomly. This suggested to the artist that the reviewer did not understand the work. Reading these works, there is a sense of being alone, misunderstood and unheard.

If You Cannot Speak It Correctly, Say Nothing I want to explore references to Hebrew and the process of translation and transliteration in ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’. The Gruswerk parents, Vera, their daughter, and Melissa are drawn speaking the second phrase of the Hebrew prayer for lighting the Shabbat candles, translatable as ‘Our God King of the universe’. The momentary unity and uniformity is highlighted by the fact that all the speakers share the same speech bubble (Lasko-Gross 2006: 63; Fig. 6). The Hebrew letters are black on a white background and handwritten without vowels. There is no translation of this Hebrew, and if one did not know Hebrew this would make no sense, much as the prayer might be experienced by Melissa. In the next panel the faces of the two girls appear, with Melissa smiling broadly, eyes closed, holding



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Figure 6  Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 63). ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, by Miss Lasko-Gross, reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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her hand up as if she is lighting the candles, and Vera looking at her from the corner of her eyes, moving her hand to cover her smile. There is no speech bubble in this panel. The words that appear are initially random but make sense when spoken: ‘Barbie-ruck-a-toy-adannoy’. In fact they are a transcription of the first part of the prayer for lighting the candles: ‘Barak Utah Adnoi’, translatable as ‘Blessed are You our God’. Lasko-Gross explained to me the background of her unusual relationship with language: ‘I was pushed out of public school for being unmanageable and attended a Waldorf school where they don’t teach reading . . . When I went back to public in third grade, I had a deficit which is why I was in special ed[ucation]’ (Lasko-Gross 2014b). Melissa’s perceived learning difficulties are cruelly highlighted by her classmates: ‘HAHA! You’re the worst in the lowest reading group’ (Lasko-Gross 2006: 78); ‘Ha! Your handwriting is like a little kid’s!’ (79). The humiliation is institutionalised: in ‘(Special)’ she is drawn in an extra class, being told ‘lets practice holding our pencil correctly’ (83). ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ can be read as an extension of her struggle with language; Melissa’s use of transliteration when reading out English in class is similar to what she does with the Hebrew text: ‘T-the doe-, doctor, stew-studied medikin . . . at the ooni-uni . . .’ (78). Mr Gruswerk’s face shows his angry eyebrows as he sits at the head of the table, the ultimate authority. He silences Melissa: ‘If you cannot speak it correctly, say nothing’ (Fig. 6). His words are not attached to him through a speech bubble. Instead the words take up the whole top section of the comic, as if in a text box: a ‘disembodied “voice”’ (El Refaie 2012: 114). The father’s voice is reminiscent of those who laugh at Melissa’s handwriting and reading, where there is a ‘correct way’, a policing of language – though ironically his sentence is awkward and ungainly, the word ‘it’ careless and dismissive of the very language Mr Gruswerk is trying to protect.

Kippah-tulation Returning to the transcription, Melissa acts as a textual intermediary, translating the sound of Hebrew into words that are reminiscent of her ‘toys’: ‘Barbie’ ‘Toy’ (Tabachnick 2014: 183). These references are significant because Melissa is playing with language and incorporating words that are associated with play objects. The words themselves are written uncontained by a speech bubble; instead they are floating above Melissa and Vera, almost dancing in the space above them, freed from external familial constraints. This theme is explored further in the later panel where Melissa knocks off her kippah (Fig. 7). The other panels in the comic have a black background, but here there is a design, unique in this story, but one Lasko-Gross does introduce in other episodes. For example, the same pattern is used in a crisis moment in the ‘First Mind Fnck’ after Melissa realises ‘I could be wrong about everything’ (Lasko-Gross 2006: 15). Lasko-Gross introduces triangles, a graphic mosaic that suggests a whole shape that has been splintered – like ‘cracking up’. In ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ this background reinforces the notion that there is an imposed world view being broken up in Melissa’s act. The family name tells us much about their emphasis and character – ‘grus werk’: ‘Grus is crumbled granite that forms by physical weathering’ (Alden 2004). These triangle shapes introduce randomness and disorder – the absurd. The pattern introduced is similar to ‘grus’, the coarse-grained fragments. What Melissa does both in speech and action is ‘play’. Play is dangerous and unwelcome in this space, threatening the patriarchal order and opposing the family focus on ‘werk’. Her closing comment, ‘I’m glad my family isn’t Orthodox and has a sense of humor’, foregrounds the words ‘glad’ and ‘humor’ and suggests elements entirely absent within this family (Fig. 8). Lasko-Gross



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Figure 7  Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 64); detail. ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, by Miss Lasko-Gross, reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Figure 8  Miss Lasko-Gross, ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’ (2006: 64); detail. ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, by Miss Lasko-Gross, reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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describes the family she based the comic on as ‘SO serious, and SO humorless. (No praising, sky high expectations, constant corrections/scolding) even as a guest, I was snapped at for using the wrong fork’ (Lasko-Gross 2014a). The artist asserts just how ‘humorless’ this family is by portraying the laughter between Melissa and Vera as something that must be covered by hands (Lasko-Gross 2006: 63–4). Yet even in this space of corrections and scolding, of enforced inhibitions, Lasko-Gross has shown how such environments can be transformed: ‘comics have become a place, par excellence, for writers and artists to “play”’ (Sabin 1996: 9). Melissa plays with purpose and, in my mind, her play supports a feminist agenda. Traditional Hebrew texts within orthodox teaching represent God as male and allpowerful. In ‘Eating the Bread of Affliction: Judaism and Feminist Criticism’ Susan Gubar writes about ‘[m]ale god language . . . the assumption that normative Jewish presence in the present time is masculine’ (1994: 294). Melissa’s approach to language and ritual produces a feminist and revisionist commentary. Melissa creates her own version of the language of her tradition and this relates to how the artist uses her own handwriting for the opening Hebrew text, Melissa’s version, similar to Hersh’s drive for his contract. Vocally she refuses to remain within the confines of the pre-ordained linguistic limitations, and transforms the Hebrew words, which are foreign and alien to her, into terms she knows: ‘barbie’, ‘ruck’, ‘annoy’. Melissa upturns the regimented Gruswerk household, where women light candles and men wear kippot. The two lines above Melissa’s head signify the kippah falling forward, the only movement in this story. This sign of movement relates to a shift outside of the defined roles, official texts and readings, and processes. In putting the kippah on her head she is blurring gender difference; by knocking it off she is upsetting the central authority of the all-powerful father figure. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie writes: ‘Comics are . . . unique in the way that it is possible for every panel to have potential relationship not just with other panels on the double page, but with every other panel in the book as well’ (2012: 127). Melissa’s final statement is the partner and mirror to the earlier panel with Mr Gruswerk. Her text about her family, orthodoxy and humour fills a third of her panel, in a direct parallel to the father’s statement about her silence. LaskoGross ends the comic with her own commentary, immortalised, and from the perspective of the drawing she is taking her (rightful) place at the head of the table.

Three Disappointed Believers I was drawn to write about these two comics because I, too, am a disappointed believer exploring similar themes in my graphic novel The Book of Sarah, an autobiographical text/ image project created to remedy the textual silence of my biblical namesake, the matriarch Sarah. I began the project when I was a student at the Slade School of Art, London and the first page is an appropriated page of biblical commentary, questioning the value of the undertaking (Fig. 9). I also share an approach to the formal act of comic-making with Eisner and Lasko-Gross. My artwork takes the form of splash pages as I never use panelling for my drawings, and I have worked on a drawn diary project for years, in the manner of Eisner, who used to ‘do a page each day’ (Brownstein 2005: 83). Lasko-Gross produces books that are a series of incidents and events that do not form a traditional extended narrative, similar to my own studies which will ultimately form my graphic novel. There are visual comparisons as well. My artwork is mostly pencil, where I enjoy the intimacy, immediacy and the slow build-up of form. I like the modesty of pencil – it is cheap and can make



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Figure 9  Sarah Lightman, The Book of Sarah (1996: n. p.). From The Book of Sarah (1996) by Sarah Lightman. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

statements quietly, even with strength. I am drawn to these other artists partly because of their limited palettes. ‘The Gruswerk’s Sabbath’, with its black and white with greys, reflects the ‘black and white’ approach to life of the Gruswerk family. Eisner used sepia, the colour of early photographs, in ‘A Contract with God’: ‘People say that you dream in brown . . . I felt it developed an intimacy between me and the reader as if we were talking in hushed tones’ (Brownstein 2005: 21). However, it is in relation to modernising biblical stories and confronting the uncomfortable within Jewish life that my work is closest to these two comics artists. In the series ‘And God Remembered Sarah 21:1’ (2012) I personalised biblical stories. I made drawings and an animation film that compared my biblical namesake Sarah and my own pregnancy later in life. I drew egg boxes and empty baking trays and considered how we both seemed to have subsumed our experiences of childlessness into acts of hospitality and baking. I also discussed leaving behind a religious lifestyle and confronting the unapologetically patriarchal orthodox Jewish world I grew up in in ‘The Reluctant Bride’, where I ask ‘How can I be a feminist in a traditional Jewish Wedding?’ (Lightman 2012). My question remains unanswered as I become distracted by my dying grandfather, and then find comfort in the Jewish rituals surrounding his death. When J. T. Waldman writes that the graphic novels of Will Eisner ‘typify the skepticism and unending questioning that fuelled Talmud and created a cultural reticence that challenges authority and status quo’ (2010: xii), I want to suggest that this applies equally to Miss Lasko-Gross and to my own artwork.

Notes 1. I use the 2006 reprinted edition of The Contract with God Trilogy. 2. I borrow these terms from Indick (2004: 197). 3. Neil Gaiman describes how ‘The Spirit’ comics were ‘[w]onderful tales of beautiful women, and unfortunate men, of human fallibility and of occasional redemption’ (2005: n. p.).

10 THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN JEWISH FICTION Jennifer Lemberg

A

cknowledging the ‘note of skepticism’ in the title of his recent volume The End of the Holocaust (2011), Alvin H. Rosenfeld concedes that as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ the Holocaust has in recent years achieved greater visibility than ever before. He points to the vast amount of research, cultural productions and educational organisations dedicated to Holocaust memory, and anticipates his reader’s probable question: in the face of so much attention to the Holocaust, ‘why . . . speak about its “end”?’ His answer is that the representation of the Holocaust in the arts, though an important means of sustaining Holocaust memory, is also the most likely source of its distortion (2011: 9–10). While in his earlier volume A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (1980) Rosenfeld affirms the power of Holocaust literature, here he shares his concern for the future of Holocaust representation. In particular, he warns, popular American representations of the Holocaust ‘promote a tendency to individualize, heroize, moralize, idealize, and universalize’, or, in other words, to reduce the horror to something comprehensible within, rather than outside of, familiar cultural mores (60). The book concludes with apprehension as to whether ‘in the years to come, public awareness of the Holocaust will be widely and responsibly maintained’ (268) in such a way as to prevent a return of the Jewish people ‘to the kind of vulnerability that preceded Auschwitz and helped to bring it about’ (270). While Rosenfeld reserves his deepest concern for popular entertainments, he turns a careful eye to serious artists, educators and others whose distinctly American perspective may obfuscate what he sees as the deeper significance of the Holocaust, particularly for contemporary Jews. The End of the Holocaust is one of the latest works to interrogate the meanings and effects of Holocaust representation, but it is certainly not the first. From Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum to Geoffrey Hartman’s later recognition that ‘art constructs . . . a cultural memory of its own, in which the struggle of the individual with (and often for) ­experience – including the collective memory itself – never ceases’ (1996: 54), the relationship between art and the Holocaust has engendered a decades-long debate. To represent the horror risks failure, disrespect, even desecration; to remain silent is to advance the work of the perpetrators. Within these discussions, the place of Holocaust fiction has been especially complex. As Sara R. Horowitz observes, as a genre often suspect in its relationship to the ‘truth’, Holocaust fiction ‘goes against the grain’ (1997: 1). Yet for American Jewish authors, separated from the Holocaust by space and time, fiction presents itself as a likely



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form of expression. The very real destruction of Jewish life in Europe and the frightening prospect of its disappearance worldwide made the Holocaust an American Jewish issue, as did the survivors who carried their stories to America’s shores. Any discussion of Holocaust representation in the United States must acknowledge the importance of The Diary of Anne Frank, described as easily ‘the most important landmark’ in the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust (Flanzbaum 1999: 1). From its initial publication in English in 1952, The Diary has epitomised the qualities of resilience and redemption that are emblematic of the American imprint on Holocaust memory (Flanzbaum 1999: 4). The original, edited version is often cited as having popularised a Holocaust narrative that makes few references to Judaism and elides the existence of the camps. Yet The Diary, or what the editors of Anne Frank Unbound call ‘the Anne Frank phenomenon’ (KirshenblattGimblett and Shandler 2012a: 2), continues to exert an enormous influence in the United States. It is ‘a fixture of American pedagogy’, as one contributor to that volume notes, observing that ‘according to a 1996 survey cited on the Anne Frank Museum website, 50 percent of American high school students had read Anne Frank’s diary as a classroom assignment’ (Abramovitch 2012: 160). Joining mainstream American and Jewish cultural interests, The Diary has naturally found its way into fiction. Most recently, it appears in the work of two younger American Jewish authors gesturing towards the burden of Holocaust memory borne by contemporary American Jews. Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012) and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012) summon The Diary in order to pose questions about the mediated nature of our relationship to the Holocaust as well as its continuing impact. Auslander and Englander draw from an important literary forebear: three decades earlier, in Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman declared his intention to marry Anne Frank, whom he imagines to be alive and living under the name Amy Bellette. As an emerging American Jewish writer, Zuckerman understands the ‘perversity’ but also the authenticating promise of such a union; as the author of the text, Roth offers criticism of what he sees as an over-investment in Holocaust memory on the part of American Jews (Budick 2003: 213). Twenty-five years later, in Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007), Zuckerman admits the folly of his fantasy and recognises that Amy is not Anne but one Holocaust survivor among many, a decrepit old woman suffering from brain cancer. In Hope (whose title and themes implicitly reference Roth) Auslander takes up this melancholy vision, presenting a version of Anne who, like Roth’s later Amy Bellette, is no ‘sprightly, youthful Jewish saint’ (Roth 2007a: 171). Auslander’s biting farce envisions Anne once again in hiding, this time in a rural New York attic. She is caustic and selfish, at work on a manuscript likely to shock those dedicated to memorialising her as a martyr (or in her character’s words, ‘the Jewish Jesus’; 2012: 266). Anne’s bitterness unnerves the novel’s evocatively named protagonist, Will Kugel, and her presence in his attic suggests the inescapable hold of her history. Englander’s story riffs on a well-known story by American author Raymond Carver, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (1981). Here, a woman named Deb and her husband, the unnamed narrator of the story, receive a visit from Deb’s childhood friend Lauren and her husband Mark, both now ‘ultra-orthodox’ and living in Israel. During their conversation on a languid Florida afternoon, ‘Anne Frank’ emerges as the name of a childhood pastime that was, for Deb, quite serious. ‘It’s not a game’, she says, when her continued predilection for this disturbing form of play-acting is revealed, ‘it’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank’ (Englander 2012b: 29). Referred to

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sardonically by the narrator as ‘Who Will Hide Me . . . in the event of a second Holocaust’ or an ‘American Holocaust’ (29), the ‘game’ tests the two couples’ marriages, and one fails miserably. Despite their visitors’ assertions that living as ‘sound, solid Jews’ in Israel guarantees stronger family bonds than does a secular American Jewish life that depends on the Holocaust ‘as a necessary sign of identity’, when the game begins Deb is confident in her husband’s readiness to risk his life for hers, while Lauren is unsure of Mark’s loyalty. Although Englander is more sympathetic towards his characters’ emotional investment in the Holocaust (the game, after all, yields new understandings), the use of ‘Anne Frank’ as a referent for Deb’s generalised fear of persecution, rather than as a proper name for the murdered young girl, offers insight into how American Jews relate to the Holocaust in the present day. Anne Frank’s story requires no explication, here or in Hope, nor does the significance of the Holocaust require further explanation. Instead, both texts take a metacritical approach: in ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’, Mark warns of the dangers of the ‘second Holocaust’ of intermarriage, while in Hope, Kugel’s mother sets Anne Frank’s manuscript on fire, causing a fatal blaze. Self-referentially questioning their place among other Holocaust narratives, these recent works of fiction invite us to consider not only the Holocaust but the genre of its representation. It is poignant, then, to read Rosenfeld’s acknowledgements in A Double Dying, where he thanks a ‘small but unusually dedicated group of scholars, writers, and survivors’ (1980: xi). The book is, in itself, a sign of the critical times and the impending flood of interest in the Holocaust. Towards the end of the twentieth century, American Jewish fiction kept pace with other art forms which began to explore historical traumas including the Holocaust but also slavery and the war in Vietnam. Yet some of the leading Jewish authors took up their subject reluctantly, uncertain of their role in fictionalising a genocide they had not witnessed first-hand. As Cynthia Ozick has said: ‘I cannot not write about it. It rises up and claims my furies . . . I am not in favor of making fiction of the data, or of mythologizing or poeticizing it’; nonetheless, she acknowledges, ‘I constantly violate this tenet; my brother’s blood cries out from the ground, and I am drawn and driven’ (1988: 284). Many American Jewish authors found themselves similarly called, and in the fiction we find authors seeking appropriate literary forms for the catastrophe, struggling to represent events that took place in other countries and languages, and attempting to articulate the meanings of the Holocaust for those born ‘after’, the volumes they produced too numerous to discuss within the confines of a single essay. Steeped in Holocaust memory as we are, it can be difficult to recall the leap of imagination required to write the earliest works of fiction about the event.1 Although Adorno made his famous pronouncement in 1949, the theoretical debate around Holocaust representation did not get fully underway until much later. In the early fiction especially, we find the literature moving in two primary directions, with some authors fearlessly experimenting with language and form in an effort to represent the horror directly, and others exploring the postwar lives of survivors in the United States. Both approaches faced particular challenges. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi points out that while English was one of the few major languages that ‘was not spoken in the concentrationary universe, and was therefore never tainted by the Holocaust vocabulary’ (1980: 12), it therefore remained at a particular distance from Holocaust representation. The nature of the Holocaust further complicated the use of language by defying familiar structures used to narrate human experience and by perverting even ordinary language so as to confound our understanding of the everyday (Langer 1995: 77).



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The Diary lent immediacy to events that had taken place overseas, but the early fiction also played an important role in presenting the Holocaust to American readers. Following the publication of The Diary, Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night was published in English translation in 1960, followed by Leon Uris’s popular Mila 18 in 1961. Along with its predecessor The Wall (1950), by (non-Jewish) author John Hersey, Mila 18 made an important contribution to the prominence of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in America’s cultural memory of the Holocaust. The uprising, like The Diary, suited an American interest in tales of redemption and offered a story of resistance in an overwhelming narrative of mass death. For American Jews, the proximity of the uprising to the observance of Passover had already provided ‘a symbolic way to fuse their much-observed holiday’s transcendent theme of the Jews’ liberation from oppression with the tragedy of the Holocaust’ (Diner 2009: 66). Mila 18 assisted in this synthesis, continuing to ‘Americanise’ the Holocaust through depictions of heroic masculinity and approaching its subject with what Ezrahi reads as ‘an attitude in which the ambiguities of history and the challenge to ethnic pride are resolved by heroic epic’ (1980: 34). Among authors moved by an urgent need to bring readers close to the suffering ‘over there’, not all sought to domesticate foreign horrors through narratives of redemption or to find consolation in literary form. Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory (1969), which, like Night, is based partly in the author’s experience as a survivor, focuses on a group of women in an unnamed labour camp, the daily effort required to survive and the complex choices they make under extreme conditions (Kremer 1999: 35). Following four main characters, we read of their memories of prewar life but are also confronted with the disorientation of life in the camps. Ruth K. Angress observes that An Estate of Memory is not an easy book to read. For not only does it take place within a foreign, a borderline territory where we have to orient ourselves as we go along, but as a psychological novel it asks us to follow shifts of perception and misperception in circumstances we ourselves have not fully grasped. (1986: 447) As an example, Angress points to the impact of scenes of terror that reveal ‘the facts and their partially incorrect perception’ by the prisoners (such as when the inability of a character named Barbara to understand German makes enduring a selection even more frightening), which allow the reader to experience the action on more than one ‘level’, bringing our historical knowledge to bear on our reading but identifying with the ­characters’ ­confusion (1986: 448). Leslie Epstein’s The King of the Jews (1979) adopts a very different mode in order to convey the disorientation of the Holocaust, relying on farce to subvert moments of profound agony with dark humour. The book offers a fictional portrait of the Lodz Ghetto, here presented as ‘the Baluty suburb’, with the historical figure of Chaim Rumkowsky, the ghetto ‘king’, portrayed as the larger-than-life I. C. Trumpelman. In common with An Estate of Memory, the novel evokes the astonishment sometimes felt by first-hand witnesses. In one instance, members of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) attempt to commit suicide rather than compile a list of fifty people for deportation. Before taking cyanide pills, they engage in heightened arguments, recalling the principles of Jewish law, the possibility of Hitler’s imminent defeat and, chillingly, the murder of previous Council members. When Trumpelman awakens them from what is sleep, not death, we learn that he has tricked them, the cyanide tablets only sleeping pills. Finding themselves alive, they readily comply with the order to compile the list, undermining the pathos of their earlier debate.

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Scenes such as these unsettle the reader, who struggles to maintain balance during such profound shifts in the book’s moral ground. However, the seriousness of the novel’s purpose is continually underscored by descriptions of the degradations of the ghetto and, at one point, an eyewitness account of exterminations in gas vans. Shortly after its release, Rosenfeld characterised The King of the Jews as ‘a badly misconceived slapstick version of the Holocaust’, objecting to its ‘reversion to farce as the principal mode of representing personal and historical tragedy’ (1980: 171). Over time, critical opinion took a more sympathetic turn. S. Lillian Kremer asserts that the novel demonstrates ‘how conventional forms can be adapted to Holocaust subject matter . . . by using classical forms to elucidate Western civilisations’ role in the creation of a social and political atmosphere that fostered and supported the Holocaust’, and admires how it depicts Jews working together to resist (1989: 108, 117). Terrence Des Pres suggests we read the book alongside works such as Polish author Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (published in Polish in 1959, in English in 1967) or Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus (1986; 1991), which offer similarly radical perspectives on the Holocaust through unexpected forms of expression, including Spiegelman’s drawings of human beings with animal faces (1988: 219). The varied responses to the novel illuminate the difficulty attending American Jewish and other forms of Holocaust fiction and the challenges to finding appropriate literary forms. Other fiction takes up the subject of the aftermath of the Holocaust, with the figure of the survivor providing a medium through which to explore the meaning of the event. For American Jews, who suddenly comprised a greater percentage of the world’s Jewish population and for the first time lacked traditional leadership in Europe (Diner 2009: 111), survivors raised sometimes uncomfortable questions about their commitment to Judaism. For Americans more generally, the Holocaust had come to be seen as a decisive break from the past (hence Rosenfeld’s notion of ‘a double dying’, based on Elie Wiesel’s pronouncement that ‘at Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man’; qtd in Rosenfeld 1980: 5), a rupture that was closely followed by the social upheaval of the later twentieth century. Novels and stories depicting survivors therefore raised questions as to what insights they might offer into the character of a contemporary America undergoing profound change. While two notable stories in Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel (1958), ‘The Last Mohican’ and ‘The Lady of the Lake’, feature American Jewish travellers who arrive in postwar Italy in search of art or romance, only to be disabused of their naivety by a survivor or ‘refugee-mentor’ they encounter there (Kremer 1989: 82), much of the fiction claims survivors as a distinct if sometimes curious part of the postwar American landscape. E. L. Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961) and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) offer notable examples of fiction written in this vein. The Pawnbroker’s Sol Nazerman – his name conjuring Nazarite, Nazareth, Nazi – lives at a careful distance from his feelings and describes himself as already ‘extinct’. He is entombed by the objects surrounding his work in a Harlem pawn shop owned by Murillio, a local criminal, and finds little relief in the suburban home he shares with his more assimilated sister and her family. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Artur Sammler finds himself entangled in the conflicts of the younger generation, including his daughter, niece and nephew, even as he wrestles with emotions provoked by encounters with an African American ‘pickpocket’ stealing from passengers on New York City buses. Both protagonists are aware of the qualities that others attribute to them and are wary of this externally created identity. Sammler reflects on the esteem paid to him by his adult nephew, Elya Gruner, for example, thinking:



The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction 143 Mr. Sammler had a symbolic character. He, personally, was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest. And of what was he a symbol? He didn’t even know. Was it because he had survived? He hadn’t even done that, since so much of the earlier person had disappeared. It wasn’t surviving, it was only lasting. (Bellow 1970: 74)

Similarly, in The Pawnbroker, Wallant’s protagonist observes of his patrons, jokingly at first and then growing more serious, ‘say I am like their priest. Yes, do not be shocked, I am. They get as much from me as they do from their churches’ (1961: 143). In Cynthia Ozick’s well-known novella The Shawl (1989), we find motifs from these earlier novels transposed to reflect the specificities of a woman’s experience. Notable among the Holocaust-themed works that Ozick has written, including The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), The Shawl comprises two stories originally published in The New Yorker: ‘The Shawl’ (1980), which depicts the death of an infant girl, Magda, in an unnamed camp where she has been interned with her mother, Rosa Lublin; and ‘Rosa’ (1983), which chronicles Rosa’s subsequent life in America. In the latter story, Rosa has moved to Florida after destroying the New York City ‘junkshop’ (akin to Sol Nazerman’s pawn shop) she once owned. She lives in thrall to her deceased daughter’s memory, writing letters to the adult she imagines Magda would have become and nurturing an attachment to the infant girl’s blanket. Rosa is isolated, living in the past, until a nascent relationship with an American Jew named Persky begins to pull her, reluctantly, into the present. The Shawl helped to instantiate what Claire Kahane calls the ‘maternal metaphor’ in Holocaust fiction where, she points out, ‘the painful spectacle of a mother and child torn from one another in an anguish of loss’ is a ‘recurrent scene’ (1985: 164). For Kahane and others, Ozick’s text provided an important object through which to bring feminist analysis to Holocaust literature. Marianne Hirsch writes, for example, that ‘in Ozick’s Rosa I found something I had been searching for . . . a way to represent the subjectivity of the mother herself, the unspeakable mother who cannot protect her child, who cannot keep her alive, but who, devastatingly, survives her brutal murder’ (2012: 11). In the work of these feminist critics, we find references to what Joan Ringelheim identifies as ‘the split between gender and the Holocaust’, or the historical reluctance of scholars to consider ‘that Jewish women were victims as Jewish women’ (1998: 345), an idea some believed could undermine critiques of a Nazi ideology based solely on race but one that has gained greater acceptance over time. That Ozick’s stories opened up new forms of discourse is related in part to the timing of their publication, which followed an increase in Americans’ awareness of survivors of the Holocaust and other historical traumas. Scholars often point to several important landmarks in this development, including the publication of Terrence Des Pres’s volume The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps in 1976; the television broadcasts of Roots in 1977 and Holocaust in 1978; the establishment of President Jimmy Carter’s Holocaust commission, formed with the idea of creating a museum in Washington, DC, also in 1978; and, in 1979, the publication of non-Jewish author William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and ‘the first “Days of Remembrance” of the Holocaust . . . in the Capitol Rotunda’ (Sicher 2005: 121; Novick 1999: 217). As Holocaust commemoration entered a new era, its associated modes of representation were adopted by others laying claim to their own histories. David Brauner points out that American Jewish women published in greater numbers as they wrote about the Holocaust, ‘choosing to break their silence by breaking this other

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silence’ (2001: 116). And where Wallant and Bellow attempt, however awkwardly, to explore parallels between the experiences of Holocaust survivors and African Americans, resemblances between The Shawl and Toni Morrison’s novel about slavery, Beloved (1987), prompt Emily Miller Budick to observe that in their likeness we find ‘competition . . . for the rights to a public trope’ (1998: 332). During this time a new generation was also entering maturity, a ‘post-Holocaust’ generation or ‘new wave’ of American Jewish authors who began to add their voices to a growing body of Holocaust fiction (Royal 2011a: 4). Among these were members of the ‘second generation’ of the Holocaust, an identity position defined through psychoanalytic studies examining the multigenerational effects of trauma. As clinicians working with Vietnam veterans developed the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis to address veterans’ continued suffering, others noted the ‘intergenerational transmission of trauma’ among Holocaust survivor families (Danieli 1998: 3). Accordingly, in the fiction of the second generation, we find narratives of ‘postmemory’, which, Hirsch writes, ‘characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’ (1997: 22). A rich theoretical framework has developed in order to describe the particular qualities of second-generation experience and to account for sometimes contradictory views as to whether ‘memory can be transferred’, or if ‘received memory is distinct from the recall of contemporary witnesses’ (Hirsch 2012: 3). Fiction about survivor families frequently dramatises tensions arising from a conflicting impulse on the part of adult children who simultaneously seek to understand their parents’ experience and to rid themselves of its weight, and shows them engaged in ‘acting out’ traumatic histories through endless repetition or ‘working through’ the past by finding appropriate ways to mourn (LaCapra 1999: 713). These patterns are evident in Ehud Havazelet’s Bearing the Body (2007), which depicts a Holocaust survivor named Sol and his sons, Nathan and Daniel, who suffer from addiction and violent behaviours presumably stemming from the brutality of their father’s unspoken memories. When Daniel dies mysteriously in San Francisco, Nathan and Sol travel there to claim his remains and make sense of his death. Slowly, the book reveals the violence that attended not only Sol’s time in the camps but also his prewar life in Poland, experiences that interfered with his ability to parent his children. The novel’s title refers to the day Sol spends carrying Daniel’s ashes through the streets, overcome by memories, but also to his wartime realisation that it was his ‘fate . . . to live, despite his wishes, despite everything he desired . . . to take memory in the body and carry it, forever’ (Havazelet 2007: 242). The final scenes depict Nathan helping Sol to scatter Daniel’s ashes into the sea, lightening the burden they carry and initiating the transformation of a troubling paternal legacy. Bearing the Body explores what it means to encounter, as Sol thinks, ‘the limit of human aggression’ (75) and to subsequently find a way to connect to everyday life, and is unsparing in its treatment of the challenges Nathan and Daniel face in trying to solve that dilemma as members of the second generation. The novel shares an important theme with much of the fiction by second- and third-generation men, which foregrounds questions as to how Jewish masculinity can be constructed after the Holocaust. Warren Rosenberg describes a widespread impulse towards ‘remasculinization’ in male-authored fiction written after the Vietnam war (2001: 208),2 including among Jewish authors who, like other American artists and filmmakers, sought to counterbalance a perceived (rather than actual) shift in



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gender relations attributed to the women’s movement and the losses incurred in Vietnam. In the work of Havazelet as well as others, including Thane Rosenbaum, we encounter characters who must learn to control aggressive behaviours growing out of an inherited, sometimes unconscious, memory of violence.3 Often they are required to uncover buried secrets, forgive the generations that came before for their shortcomings and, in the most recent fiction, to once again look back at Europe. In her meditative reflection on the meaning of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman writes that as the Holocaust recedes from us in temporal distance, it may also be time . . . to unfreeze our vision of the past from the point of historical trauma and start exploring again the multifarious life before . . . It may be time to return the Shoah, in our imaginations and collective consciousness, to the longue durée of previous and subsequent history. (2004: 199) Hoffman advocates a mode of working through that installs the Holocaust within a longer narrative, counter to observations like the one offered by Melvin Jules Bukiet that ‘for the Second Generation there is no Before. In the beginning was Auschwitz’ (2002b: 13). Yet even in Bukiet’s oeuvre, we find that from tales about Proszowice, Poland in Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992) to the liberated survivors of After (1996) and the complex postwar lives of American Jews in While the Messiah Tarries (1997), the fiction reaches imaginatively towards a longer span of Jewish history. Where much of the early fiction about survivors is concerned with their postwar lives in America, towards the beginning of the twenty-first century the literature shows their children and grandchildren returning to Europe in an effort to understand the past. Efraim Sicher observes that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘since around 1989 a “recovery” has become possible of lost Jewish spaces, and they are being marketed on a tourist itinerary’ for Jews from around the world (2001: 61). The fiction reflects this practice, though with varied amounts of access granted to ‘the life before’. Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling Everything Is Illuminated (2002) chronicles the journey of a young protagonist (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) on a search for the woman who saved his grandfather; in the book the prewar life of the shtetl of Trachimbrod, by now reduced to an empty field marked with a small plaque of remembrance, is presented through a tale created through Jonathan’s imagination. Thane Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke (1999), the middle volume of his ‘post-Holocaust trilogy’ which also includes the short story collection Elijah Visible (1996) and the novel The Golems of Gotham (2002), depicts a return to Poland but situates Auschwitz as an origin point or ‘beginning’, reaching back in time no further than the flight of the protagonist’s mother from a postwar Poland hostile to Jews. American Jewish women have also sought to broaden the scope of Holocaust fiction by looking beyond American borders. Nicole Krauss entwines the history of a Polish survivor named Leo Gursky with that of a young girl named Alma and her family in New York in The History of Love (2005), in a narrative that manifests the profound displacements of postwar Jewish life. Great House (2010) further explores this idea, employing narrators based in New York, London and Jerusalem and including the disappearance under Pinochet’s regime in Chile of a young man named Daniel Varsky. Where a manuscript unites the characters in The History of Love, in Great House they are connected by their claims to a large desk that once belonged to a Jewish scholar in Budapest. His son, Weisz, an antiques dealer who pursues items of displaced furniture as if they are human beings, spends decades trying to find it, and the narrative moves among the desk’s various

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owners, including Daniel Varsky and a refugee named Lotte who escaped from Germany on a Kindertransport. The ‘Great House’ of the novel’s title refers to the school where the Talmud came into being after the destruction of the Temple, but also denotes the Temple itself. As Weisz explains of the Talmud’s creation, ‘turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form’ (Krauss 2010: 279). The desk becomes just such a holding place for loss (a child, a parent, a lover, an entire world destroyed by the Holocaust), marking the empty spaces in its owners’ lives. Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition (2009) unfolds in wartime Paris, foregrounding the Nazis’ looting of artwork and attributing symbolic meaning to the paintings that figure in the narrative. Important to the book are the efforts of Rose Clément (a character based on the historical figure Rose Valland) to resist the Nazis by cataloguing the stolen art and smuggling information about its whereabouts to the Resistance. Just as in Great House Weisz seeks to recover the desk in order to complete a recreation, in Jerusalem, of his father’s lost study, in Pictures at an Exhibition a young man named Max Berenzon fights to reclaim masterpieces stolen from his father’s gallery. Max spends the war in hiding and returns to Paris so dedicated to his task he is asked by a survivor: ‘Is each painting of your father’s a token for a thousand of us that were killed?’ (Houghteling 2009: 119). Buried at the heart of Max’s quest is also the secret of the prewar death of his young sister, Micheline, whose existence has been hidden by his parents. This private familial loss is folded into the more public disappearance of the paintings and of Max’s Jewish friends and acquaintances. Krauss and Houghteling give voice to a yearning for the past, with the losses of the Holocaust bound up with other painful events that take place before and after the war. Both authors employ devices that Hirsch identifies as emblematic of ‘narratives of return’, which she suggests are advanced by ‘images and objects’ that take on particular significance, including, importantly, ‘the figure of the lost child’ (2012: 206). While Great House and Pictures at an Exhibition are not strictly narratives of ‘return’ in the manner of Second Hand Smoke or Everything Is Illuminated, they each foreground a postwar search for lost people and objects linked by delicate networks of feeling (in Great House, the large desk, the baby Lotte gives away for adoption after the war and the repeated motif of the lost son; in Pictures at an Exhibition, the stolen paintings and the secret of Micheline). Both books offer the possibility of mourning: Great House ends as Weisz finally encounters the longed-for desk, while Pictures at an Exhibition closes as Max examines one of the few paintings he has recovered, a Matisse ‘still life that had not been granted stillness’, and remarks ‘I thought of the dimensions of the painting, of its flat and hovering planes, and that somewhere, in between the two, lingered those whom I had lost’ (Houghteling 2009: 231). In his non-fiction chronicle of ‘returning’ to Ukraine in search of knowledge about the life of his uncle Shmiel, The Lost: In Search of Six of Six Million (2006), Daniel Mendelsohn emphasises the importance of the detail, or the ‘specific’, in learning about those who have been killed. As he says: ‘there is so much that will always be impossible to know, but we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story’ (2006: 502). Mendelsohn’s comments resonate with novels written by women, such as Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s early novel Anya (1974), which spends more than a hundred pages on the lavish details surrounding the early education and marriage of the titular character, and Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), which begins in present-day New Jersey but



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moves backward in time to prewar life in Poland. More recently, Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge (2010) offers a sweeping narrative following the experience of Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jew, in the years leading up to and during the war. Forced to abandon architecture school in Paris and return to Budapest, Andras is drafted into service into the Hungarian labour corps and later sent to a prison camp in Ukraine. While still in Paris, Andras falls in love with Klara Morgenstern, a Hungarian Jew living in exile due to a traumatic childhood encounter with the police. The Invisible Bridge documents how Andras, Klara and their circle of friends and family experience the gradual dismantling of structures on which they have built their lives. Based on the experience of Orringer’s grandfather and at a length of more than 700 pages, the book renders the ‘specifics’ of individuals caught up in a larger historical narrative and brings readers deeply into a less familiar dimension of Holocaust history. Rather than choosing to reimagine the historical past, in The Plot Against America (2004) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) Philip Roth and Michael Chabon seek to reinvent it, in novels that give space to contemporary anxieties produced by Holocaust memory. Roth and Chabon set their fiction in the United States, but render it unfamiliar through invented historical contexts. Chabon employs the detective fiction genre to imagine a surviving post-Holocaust Yiddish culture in Sitka, Alaska, where a hardboiled detective named Meyer Landsman and his fellow Jews are about to be displaced as a result of Sitka’s imminent ‘reversion’ to being a US-controlled territory. Roth, in his ‘alternate history’, poses the question, what if an avowed antisemite came to power in the United States?, and offers an answer in his depiction of the struggle of a fictionalised 7-year-old Philip Roth, his family and other Jews against an increasingly hostile national climate. Instead of taking readers on a journey to see the traumatised landscapes of Europe, these authors confront them with familiar threats against Jews but the possibility of their occurrence in North America. Both authors take readers to dark places they may not want to admit to having feared: American antisemitism, sanctioned by the government and in cooperation with a Nazi power; stateless European Jews barred from entering the United States, adrift in a world where Israel is closed to them. The novels reverberate with a specifically post-9/11 consciousness, moving readers to work through their response to the complex associations activated by present-day traumas. Perhaps these novels can be accused of a kind of nostalgia, of indulging in a literary version of the ‘Anne Frank’ game in which Nathan Englander’s characters become caught. But just as ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’ appears in a volume that includes stories about Jews living variously in Israel and the United States, these books form part of a larger American Jewish literary landscape. Part of what must happen there is making sense of the Holocaust past, its meaning in the present and the possibility of its having become too familiar. The impulse to seek out fresh approaches, to point out to us our own reified thinking, is a useful and necessary corrective. At the time of writing, new research has just revealed that the total number of Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos across Europe exceeded 42,000 (Lichtblau); efforts to reclaim art looted by the Nazis are ongoing. Survivors are passing away, and the USC Shoah Foundation is working to make videotaped testimony from Holocaust survivors available to teachers and students while also recording accounts from survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. While the ‘end’ of the Holocaust may be in view and we enter a new phase of representation that might offer only facsimile or nostalgia, American Jewish authors remain responsible to history: researching, writing and experimenting with new forms and genres to keep the Holocaust before our

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eyes, acknowledging the complexity, even impossibility, of such a task, and persevering in this necessary endeavour.

Notes 1. Though popular opinion holds that American Jews were silent about the Holocaust for decades, Hasia Diner argues that the beginning of Holocaust commemoration is more accurately located in the postwar period, in memorials created by landsmanshaft (associations of Jewish compatriots), in yizker bukher (memorial books commemorating Jewish communities that perished in the Holocaust) published in the United States and across the globe, journalism appearing in Commentary and Midstream, and in creative forms of memorialisation established within local communities (2009: 17). 2. In his arguments Rosenberg draws on the work of Susan Jeffords (1989). 3. Alan Berger (2000) offers a useful analysis of the role of anger in Elijah Visible and Second Hand Smoke.

11 REPRESENTING THE HOLOCAUST IN THIRD-GENERATION AMERICAN JEWISH WRITERS Monica Osborne

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n A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Ruth Franklin criticises what she interprets as the narcissistic impulses of many second-generation writers. In what she calls ‘one of the most disturbing trends in contemporary Jewish literature’, a number of the children of Holocaust survivors have created ‘elaborate literary fictions in which they identify so strongly with the sufferings of their parents as to assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust’ (2011: 216). Indeed, one of the effects of the writing of children of survivors has been in some cases the virtual displacement of survivors by the second generation’s appropriation of their stories and experiences. They imagine that their parents’ memories are their own, and in so doing further complicate questions concerning the ethics of representation in the context of Holocaust writing. In Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979), Helen Epstein quotes an anonymous child of survivors: ‘I kept thinking it was time for Elie Wiesel to move over. That there was another generation coming up behind him’ (qtd in Franklin 2011: 225). The work of some of the most notable second-generation novelists – Melvin Bukiet, Thane Rosenbaum, perhaps even Art Spiegelman in some moments – manifests this impatience to appropriate the mantle of Holocaust victimhood, this desire to be recognised as the inheritors of a unique brand of trauma. Despite the pervasiveness of this compulsion, it has gone for the most part unnoticed or at the very least unmentioned, possibly because of a reluctance to subject the ‘children of the Holocaust’ to the same kind of scrutiny applied to other writers who address collective tragedies and atrocities. The children and any critique of their imaginative sensibilities have tended to be off-limits. Current conversations about the responsibility to art that must govern good writing do not address this specific genre. The 2Gs, as they are sometimes called, are curiously and conspicuously absent from such dialogues. This of course is not to suggest that there is not value in the writing of the second generation. Within the discourse on the Holocaust, their voices are distinctive. Having been born to people who survived the horrors of the camps and other atrocities, they occupy a special place in the canon of Holocaust literature. Their insights and artistic impulses are critical to our understanding of the Holocaust. Moreover, the very existence of their narratives is useful in that they allow us to bear witness to the ways in which the Holocaust, as some scholars have suggested, is ongoing. What may be sometimes seen as narcissistic,

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ambition-driven or unethical in other contexts becomes, in the case of second-generation writers, a trace of the trauma introduced into the lives of the survivors – and therefore their children as well. After all, it is not that the children of survivors have not been marked by the trauma that haunted their parents’ post-Holocaust lives. It may be impossible to transmit trauma to the next generation – to somehow pass it on in a way that renders the child traumatised in the same way – but it is undeniable that the effects of trauma come to bear considerably on the second generation. But it is also true that in many of these texts there are blind spots – remnants of trauma – inherent in the narratives of some of the second generation. Whereas in Maus there is an awareness of the dangers of spuriously laying claim to a tragedy that is only ‘secondhand’ for the children of survivors, in a number of second-generation texts this awareness becomes yet one more in a long list of absences left in the wake of the Holocaust. When a second-generation character in Rosenbaum’s novel Second Hand Smoke (1999), for example, comments on the ‘staggering reality’ (1–2) of the gas chambers and crematoria, we cannot help but realise, as Franklin points out, that this is a substitution of imagination for memory, despite the second-generation trope of memories transmitted to the next generation. Rosenbaum’s parents, both of whom were Holocaust survivors (and neither of whom, it goes without saying, experienced the ‘reality’ of the gas chamber or crematorium), could not have transmitted to him a memory that they themselves did not possess. And yet perhaps it is in this ethically problematic artistic instinct that we are most able to bear witness to the ongoing legacy of Holocaust trauma. When Melvin Bukiet, in a discussion about the Holocaust and Holocaust memory, claimed provocatively that ‘[t]o be shabbily proprietary, we own it. Our parents owned it, and they gave it to us’ (2002b: 16), he failed to take into account the next generation – that is, the third generation, the grandchildren of survivors. Bukiet continued, infamously, by criticising those who have written about the Holocaust without having a direct connection to it. He even named both Saul Bellow, who addresses the Holocaust in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), The Bellarosa Connection (1989) and elsewhere, and Cynthia Ozick, whose The Shawl (1989) has become central to the canon of Holocaust fiction, in his indictment. His words betray a symbolic obliviousness to his own mortality. For certainly the second generation, too, must pass. Certainly, there must be someone else to whom the burden of memory and remembering must fall. The third generation is more tentative about occupying such a role and being the inheritors of such a tremendous legacy of collective suffering. In the writing of the third generation, the narcissism of the second is abandoned in favour of something less self-involved. They are less sure of themselves in some moments, but it is this uncertainty – this care and concern, and sometimes unwillingness to tread on what we have come to understand as sacred ground – that gives their work legitimacy as well as arguably a more authentic quality than much of the writing of their parents’ generation. Franklin contends that we have ‘an obligation’ not simply to remember the Holocaust, but also to ‘situate it properly in historical perspective’ (2011: 233). The third generation takes this responsibility very seriously. The desire to have witnessed the actual events of the Holocaust – a desire conspicuous in some second-generation writers – is absent from the work of the next generation. Instead, they confront it with a deeper awareness of the ethical context, without the ‘traumatization and commodification’ that mark the writing of their parents’ generation (Bayer 2010: 116). Hilene Flanzbaum, who did not discover that she was the grandchild of Holocaust



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survivors until well into adulthood, has written extensively about her generation, sometimes called the 3Gs, although many scholars resist the naming of transgenerational trauma in this way. Like many of her generation, Flanzbaum grew up in a void of information, not knowing even the questions to ask, let alone the answers to these questions. Her parents and grandparents spoke little of their shared traumatic history. Flanzbaum remembers hushed conversations in Yiddish that were always cut short when the speakers realised or suspected that she was listening. And so, like many others of her generation (most notably Daniel Mendelsohn, who details his journey in his memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, 2006), she travels to Europe (France) as an adult to trace her family’s past and its connection to the events of the Holocaust, which leads her to further consider her father’s ‘traumatic’ childhood as correlating directly to the traumatic impact of the Holocaust on his parents. With regard to the third generation, however, she ultimately questions whether it makes any sense, psychological or otherwise, ‘to attribute behavior to the Holocaust when so many other narratives have intervened’ and whether it is at all ‘beneficial to define oneself as a third-generation Holocaust survivor’ (2012: 15). Still, Flanzbaum finds this categorisation of herself as extremely useful because she finds that it holds her ‘accountable to [her] past’ (15). Flanzbaum’s unease with situating the events of the Holocaust as the only set of defining moments in her cultural and family history is typical of many third-generation writers, and it is a radical departure from the sensibilities of the second generation. Many such writers feel at odds with the ‘burden of inheritance’ as it has been called by third-generation novelist Nicole Krauss. In fact, many writers of this generation have very little to say about specific events of the Holocaust, and yet the atrocity haunts their narratives in a marked way. Krauss in particular, as noted by Alan Berger and Asher Z. Milbauer in a recent essay, is uncomfortable being called a ‘Holocaust writer’ and is more concerned with the ‘response to catastrophic loss’ in general as well as a survivor’s capacity to deal with the experience of exile and to forge a new life, a second life, as it were, for it is of course impossible to rebuild the life one had previous to the catastrophe (2013: 64). Certainly this is true in ‘Rosa’, the second part of Ozick’s The Shawl. Ozick’s Rosa is focused precisely on what happened to her ‘over there’, an experience for which there are no words. Metaphors for brokenness become less representation and more reality as she smashes up her shop and finds herself unable to enter into meaningful relationships with other people. Krauss’s survivors are no less broken than Ozick’s Rosa, but Krauss, in both Great House (2010) and The History of Love (2005), seems less interested in proving this fact than in delineating the ways in which survivors move on, how they live a life that has been called survival. Leo Gursky of The History of Love, for example, is certainly traumatised, but there is something that feels less raw about his post-Holocaust experience. The wild-eyed Rosa is displaced by Leo Gursky and his more tempered insistence that ‘life [demands] a new language’ – a character who, even as he searches relentlessly for the words to write his story, knows that it will be ‘impossible to find the right ones’ (Krauss 2005: 6, 9). Like many of the novels of this generation, there is a substantial focus on writing, documentation and manuscripts in Krauss’s work. Before emigrating to the United States as a Holocaust survivor, the character Leo Gursky wrote a novel in Poland, also called The History of Love, which he left for safekeeping with a friend, who later claimed it was lost but actually published it under his own name in Spanish in Chile. Fragments of this imagined manuscript haunt the pages of Krauss’s novel to the extent that it becomes almost a character itself. Meanwhile, a woman named Charlotte works on translating the

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book into English. Her 14-year-old daughter, Alma – named after the book’s heroine, who was named after the woman Leo loved in Poland – comes of age in this context. It is an awkward adolescence, marked and haunted by the legacy of beloved books and mysterious manuscripts. It is not unlike the real-life collective coming of age of third-generation survivors. But the existence of a third generation is evidence that life, after surviving the events of the Holocaust, must and does in fact go on, and for this reason it is not surprising that the focus of writers such as Krauss and others is a clear shift away from the obsession over detailed descriptions of events of the Holocaust and towards discovering what it looks like to survive, even and perhaps especially the shape that survival takes generations later. Much like the shawl in Ozick’s ‘Rosa’, in Krauss’s Great House it is an artefact from a past generation that looms larger than life. A large antique desk becomes an almost living and breathing character in the novel. An American writer uses the desk for more than two decades before a mysterious woman, claiming to be the daughter of the owner (a Chilean poet who was executed by Pinochet), takes it from her. While the mysterious woman is not actually the daughter of the poet, she is the daughter of someone else who has a legitimate claim to the desk. Her father, a Jewish antique dealer, painstakingly attempts to recreate his father’s office exactly as it appeared before it was destroyed in Hungary in 1944 – the desk the woman takes from the writer is the desk of her grandfather’s original office. And there are still others with reasonable claims to the desk. The desk moves between owners and across generations. It both carries and conceals memory. It becomes a burden to be inherited. It was precisely a very real, large desk at which Krauss, a year and a half after becoming a mother, found herself writing that was the impetus for Great House. Not that the desk itself had meaning – rather, she had inherited it from whoever lived previously in her home, and she hated it but preferred not to waste it by disposing of it (it was so large it would have needed to be chopped up in order to remove it from the house). As Krauss began to conceive of the desk as a kind of concrete burden, she began to think more theoretically about the burden of inheritance and what kinds of emotions get passed down unconsciously from one generation to the next. The characters in Great House are all burdened in some way with tragedy and loss. But the narrative does not always make clear the source of their sorrow – both readers and characters within the novel struggle to understand the impetus for certain characters’ sadness. The husband of Lotte Berg, for example, struggles throughout his life with her to understand her depression, and begins to learn only near the end of her life that she had been a chaperone on a Kindertransport, and that she would have had to leave her parents behind to be exterminated. The discovery of such details, however, is secondary to the more general consequences of what it means to live in the shadow of loss, or to live with someone who has experienced profound loss. Instead, it is the characters’ connection to loss and the part they play in a legacy of tragedy that emerge as central to the novel’s significance. We read loss in the characters. They read loss in each other. And that is what we, in turn, inherit. In the spirit of Jewish thought, the novel resounds with questions rather than answers. It is as if the narrative suggests, this is what we have, and now what do we do with it? How do we deal with it? How do we live with it or in spite of it? For third-generation writers, as we see with Krauss’s work, it is less about imagining that one knows or remembers what happened during the Holocaust than it is about struggling to piece together bits of information through exposure to documents and narrative fragments. For this reason a great deal of third-generation writing is fragmented and experimental.



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Probably the best-known example of this approach is Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), in which the character Jonathan Safran Foer travels to Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the liquidation of their family’s shtetl. Foer’s novel contains two distinct voices: one is comprised of pieces of the protagonist’s novel-in-progress which describes the citizens of Trachimbrod; the other is a more linear narrative told, in broken English, by Alex Perchov, a Ukrainian man of the same age as Foer. Memory and identity are the core themes of Foer’s novel, but his is a quest for identity rather than the assertion of identity that dominates the work of his parents’ generation. While fragmented and experimental narrative forms can have many literary functions, in the work of Foer and other writers in this genre its overarching emphasis seems to be a resistance to the use of a linear or neatly cohesive narrative. Krauss’s Leo Gursky claims that post-Holocaust life demands ‘a new language’, and third-generation writers seem to know this intuitively. To tell the story of post-Holocaust existence is theoretically demanding, not least because the linear cohesiveness of traditional representational modes of writing is presumptuous in its implicit claim to know the so-called unknowable. Often what accompanies a fragmented, experimental or short narrative form is a direct or indirect acknowledgement that the origins about which the writer writes – that is, the Holocaust – is a blind spot. Krauss has articulated exactly this in an essay as well as numerous interviews, though for her it was a realisation that came after she had begun writing. Autobiography, for Krauss, is confining because it prohibits imaginative access to worlds to which she has no direct connection. But it is also true that her writing is necessarily informed by her biography and the legacy of trauma that she has inherited through her survivor grandparents. Finding the ethical balance between these two imperatives is what gives her writing, and the work of other third-generation survivors, a unique perspective on the legacy and transmission of trauma. In Great House, the fact that we know very little about the origins of characters’ brokenness speaks to the tentativeness with which Krauss approaches the subject matter – her unwillingness to tell a story she could not possibly know, or to lay claim to it in a way that would foreclose opportunities for meaningful dialogue about subject matter that continues to haunt us even generations later. Fragmentation and experimental narrative forms are a hallmark of third-generation writing, but there are also a number of novels written by the grandchildren of survivors that adhere to more traditional models of writing. Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge (2010), for example, is an extraordinary novel written in sweeping epic fashion that bears few distinctive characteristics of what we are calling third-generation Holocaust writing other than the epilogue that follows the nearly 600-page story of a Hungarian Jewish architect named Andras Lévi and his family. The nameless 13-year-old female narrator is the granddaughter of Andras and his wife Klara, who survive the Holocaust and emigrate to the US. Orringer makes painstakingly clear the daily horrors of living in Europe, as Jews, during the Second World War. She avoids the sentimentality and presumption of recreating death camps and crematoria, and yet our knowledge of those historical facts hangs insistently over the trajectory of the novel. It is instead the horror of Hungarian labour camps and the day-to-day terror of not knowing the whereabouts of loved ones at the end of the war and after that Orringer relates with such searing descriptions that we cannot help but think of these characters long after the novel is finished. In The Invisible Bridge, we see with startling certainty the ways in which the vastness of such catastrophic historical events comes to bear on private individual lives.

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But for the narrator of the epilogue, these horrors are little more than a mysterious shadow that hangs at times over the family, materialising only in the ‘strands of darker stories’ that she occasionally infers from what is both said and unsaid by her grandparents and parents (Orringer 2010: 596). She is aware of the historical facts of the war, but her textbooks have said very little about Hungary and the specific experience of Hungarian Jews during the war, and so she experiences a sense of disconnection from the historical narrative. Her grandparents say little about the war, except when it drifts subtly into their speech, but she gleans bits of information from the way her grandmother saves ‘plastic bags and glass jars, and [keeps] bottles of water in the house in case of disaster’, often beginning to ‘cry for no reason’ (596). She learns similarly from her father, who was little more than a baby at the end of the war, but who remembers walking through the ruins with his mother Klara. Much like the children of the second generation, this third-generation narrator cannot account for some of her memories of hearing stories of atrocity – of lice and labour camps – and imagines she must have ‘absorbed them through her skin like medicine or poison’ (596). She experiences nightmares in which her grandfather is placed on to a conveyor belt that takes him to his violent death. When awake, she reminds herself that her grandfather is not in fact dead, that he and his wife, brother and son survived the war. But there was another brother – her great-uncle – who did not survive, and she is haunted by his absence, by the fact that she never knew him. She wants to know who he is, to hear ‘the whole story’ (597). The impression is one of a young girl constantly searching for information about her past and constantly denied access to this information. But the very last paragraph of the novel deflates this impression. We learn that she has not asked any questions: Maybe that was the problem: She hadn’t asked. Or maybe even now they didn’t want to talk about it. But she would ask, next time she went to visit. It seemed right that they should tell her, now that she was thirteen. She wasn’t a child anymore. She was old enough now to know. (597) We see in this an admission of the frailty, and in many cases the absence, of memory – particularly as it is passed down to or withheld from subsequent generations. This third generation is uniquely caught between the infamous admonishment to never forget, and the complex imperative that one will never know. The exquisite detail of Orringer’s story is not undercut by the tentative voice of the third-generation narrator of the epilogue. Rather, the story becomes a more ethical response to the Holocaust because it contains within it what is missing from so many second-generation narratives – that is, an implicit acknowledgement that even the inheritor of traumatic memory cannot know, cannot remember, the authentic story of the Holocaust. One need look only to Primo Levi – who, for example, in his preface to The Drowned and the Saved suggests that the history of the camps has been written by those who were not ‘drowned’, since those who did drown did not return, or their ‘capacity for observation was paralyzed by suffering and incomprehension’ (1989: 17) – and later Giorgio Agamben for the theoretical discourse surrounding this notion. For Agamben, for instance, the speechless Muselmann is the most authentic witness; he has seen the ‘impossibility of knowing and seeing’ (1999: 54). And yet the stories must be told. In The Invisible Bridge, the two most loveable characters survive the war, and this might be seen as a weakness in the novel. It is not a happy ending, but there is some happiness in the ending because Andras and Klara survive. One might see this as problematic



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because the true story of the Holocaust – and, here, again, we must look to both Levi’s and Agamben’s notions of what in fact constitutes the authentic story of the Holocaust – is one that does not culminate in survival. Yet from the third-generation perspective, someone must live, someone did in fact live. Perhaps the third generation is uniquely equipped to tell the partly happy story, the story where survival outweighs loss. And yet Orringer’s novel is so masterfully written that despite our tempered relief that Klara and Andras survive the war, their survival does not in fact outweigh or overshadow the preceding loss and devastation. Alison Pick’s Far to Go (2010) may be one of the most heartbreaking books authored by a third-generation survivor. Pick, raised as a Christian, discovered as a young adult that her father’s parents had been Jews from Czechoslovakia. Her grandparents – one was a practising Jew while the other was secular – escaped the country in 1939 and emigrated to Canada, where they decided to raise their children as Christians. Pick’s father discovered his Jewish identity – and connection to the Holocaust, since his grandparents had lost many of their family in Auschwitz – in his twenties, when he was told in a Jewish cemetery that Pick is a Jewish name. He confronted his mother and learned of his origins. Still, out of respect for his mother’s wishes, the subject was not discussed, and so his daughter grew up similarly unaware of her Jewish origins. Far to Go is a historical novel set in the days leading up to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Told in part by a character whose identity is unknown for much of the narrative, it is a story of loss and escape, but it is also a story that is shrouded in mystery and secrecy, which reflects the author’s attempt to understand the complexity of her own family history. In an interview with Renee Ghert-Zand, Pick states: ‘I wanted to have a contemporary narrator because writing the book was an attempt in one way to deal with my own past and the legacy of secrecy over the generations in my family. I wanted to keep the identity of the present-day narrator concealed’ (Pick 2011). The effect is that as readers we are carried along by a compelling narrative, but there are numerous moments at which we feel as if we have opened up a story midway through and are struggling to put the pieces together – as if there is a piece of information that eludes us. Indeed, a frightening sense of the unknown frames the narrative, which centres on the Bauer family and their governess, Marta, who takes care of their 5-year-old son, Pepik. Ultimately the story is about Pepik, who leaves Czechoslavakia on one of the Kindertransports. He survives, but it is a portrait of survival in which a young boy’s world collapses as soon as the train leaves the station: his food is stolen by an older child, his caretakers are not there to receive him when he disembarks, and when they finally do retrieve him it is into a dark and tragic environment that he is brought. Arthur, his new ‘brother’, is an invalid who dies soon after Pepik arrives, after which Pepik is sent to an orphanage where he ultimately forgets his family and identity. Only at the very end of his long life does he receive ­information that communicates to him that he once had a family, that he was once loved. A series of fictional archival documents – mostly letters – helps to tell the story of Far to Go. But as the narrator says: ‘People disappear . . . We can guess what happened but we cannot say for certain. And there is nothing to be done about it now anyway, so late in time. Even in the instances where there are surviving cables and telegrams, they tell only a fraction of the story’ (Pick 2010: 85). The narrator continues by suggesting that, having read one letter so many times, she could probably recite it from memory. And yet she is ‘aware of its failure, of all the white space surrounding its words’ (85). This too – this acknowledgement that the combination of memories and archival documents

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still cannot tell the complete story of the Holocaust – is a characteristic of a number of third-generation texts, whose authors tend to lack the perceived sense of entitlement of the previous generation. The story of the Holocaust is both theirs and not theirs, and this paradox guides the writing of many such narratives. ‘Memory bleeds out,’ writes Pick. ‘We have databases . . . lists . . . whole libraries full of books on the subject. It is even possible to construct little narratives, to attempt to give the whole thing order.’ But, she writes, ‘it is all just memory’s attempt to make order from chaos . . . a trick of the mind . . . The enormity of the loss can be too much to handle’ (84–5). The novel includes other references to the mind playing tricks, and this overwhelming sense, experienced especially by the grandchildren of survivors, may in fact be the reason that documents are so important to this generation of writers. Whereas second-generation writing seems unable at times to escape the trauma that it lays claim to as its inheritance, third-generation writers typically refuse to allow the Holocaust’s painful legacy to dictate the details of their lives. These writers are concerned primarily with the possibility of healing and recovery, even as they peruse archives for remnants of their family history. ‘This is one of the things the social sciences teach, one of the few things about which psychology is abundantly clear: we will re-inflict our own wounds on those in our care’ (Pick 2010: 190). The third generation demonstrates a deep awareness of the legacy of violence and the ways in which it is transmitted generationally. But it is also accompanied by a sense of anxiety, a desire not to infect the future generation with the residue of trauma. Perhaps this is why Erika Dreifus, in her short story collection Quiet Americans: Stories (2011), is so particularly adept at conveying the emotional complexity of the third-generation survivor experience. In ‘Mishpocha’, the final and longest story of the collection, David Kaufmann’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, has just died. We learn that David, the ‘family historian’, has a substantial gap in knowledge when it comes to the details of family members during the Second World War (Dreifus 2011: 130). He knows virtually nothing about his parents’ lives before his birth, other than that they met in Deggendorf. For his parents, life simply began anew with him. There is no ‘before’. David sets out to discover more about his family identity, joining an online second-generation survivor group and later attending a Jewish-American Family History conference where he learns about developments in DNA genealogy testing. He spends months buried in online databases and archives, searching in vain for something other than a historical fact, something that will give him insight into his family identity, before deciding to undergo genetic testing. The results reveal that he is not in fact the biological child of his parents. Instead he shares genetic material with a number of men who share the surname McMahon. In a painful recounting of the story, his father Max confirms this, and tells David that he and his wife were unable to conceive, but when their young neighbour became pregnant with a baby she might not be able to keep, they decided to take the baby as their own and add to the world ‘one more Jewish soul, from which still others might be created . . . to recover all those that had been lost’ (159). The story, and the collection as a whole, ends with David’s overwhelming sense of confusion regarding his identity. But even as he realises there will be other genealogical quests on which he will embark – namely, a trip to Indiana – he still vehemently insists on his claim to Jewish identity. When his son jokingly asks if they are half-Catholic, David is stunned by the ferocity of his response: ‘We’re Jews!’ (162). Additionally, he has no intention of disregarding all of the months of research into his Jewish identity. And yet there he hangs, suspended between identities, no longer a biological inheritor of the trauma that



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touched his parents but still marked by it. Although Dreifus expresses this ambiguity of identity through a second-generation character, we see in her description a glimpse of the third-generation survivor’s position. Quiet Americans is influenced largely by the experiences of Dreifus and the stories passed down to her by her paternal grandparents, German Jews who came to the US in the 1930s, although she admits that her grandfather, part of whose story is told in ‘Lebensraum’, never actually articulated the details of his story to her. Instead she was forced to piece things together on the basis of primary documents and secondary sources. ‘Lebensraum’ is a particularly important story in the collection, as it implicitly articulates some of the complexity associated with Dreifus’s own family history as it pertains to the events of the Second World War and her place within that narrative. The story is set in a prisoner-of-war camp in Clarinda, Iowa in 1944 and depicts a young man of German Jewish descent who fled Europe in 1937 and became naturalised after joining the United States Army. A baker by trade, he is made to run a large kitchen, where he will be in charge of a large number of German prisoners. His anxiety upon learning his new assignment is palpable. He, a Jew, will be in a position to give orders to Nazis, although he is assured by a lieutenant that they are ‘mainly farm boys’ and not ‘the political ones’ (Dreifus 2011: 69). He agonises over whether his appearance and name (Josef Freiburg) will give him away. He is afraid, but is told repeatedly by the lieutenant not to worry. He is, after all, a member of the United States Army. The story ends with the bris of Josef’s newborn son, named Michael Jacob after both grandfathers, one of whom died of diabetes, the other of whom ‘died of Dachau’ (80). The ritual is performed on the base, and some of the German prisoners who had become fond of Freiburg attend, but they are made to leave because Freiburg’s wife does not want Nazis to attend the bris of her son. The story makes clear that as a Jew, even in America, Josef Freiburg is a stranger wherever he goes – a perpetual foreigner. Despite the assurance of safety, he cannot live a full life because he is haunted by the shadow of the past and by what he escaped by fleeing Germany in 1937. And though the past is past, the infiltration of his American assimilation by a group of Nazi prisoners is a harsh reminder that anything can happen, even in America. But perhaps most interestingly, the complexity of this story centres on the question of whether Josef Freiburg is truly a ‘survivor’ of the Holocaust – a question not directly dealt with in the story itself but in Dreifus’s scholarly work. In a paper delivered at a conference on intergenerational transmission in 2003, Dreifus challenges second-generation writer Melvin Bukiet’s assertions about how to define who is a survivor of the Holocaust. Bukiet states: Obviously, anyone who spent any time in a German extermination, concentration, or labor camp qualifies. Also obviously, anyone in hiding for their lives in the woods of Poland or in an attic in Amsterdam qualifies. But what if you fled eastward, into Russia? Is there a line on the map . . . that, when crossed, makes you a refugee rather than a survivor? I believe so. Certain such people survived the catastrophe of the war, but they were fortunate enough to avoid the catastrophe of the Holocaust. (2002c: 27) Given that Bukiet’s own father was in a concentration camp, his definition of a survivor conveniently reaffirms his claim that the second generation ‘owns’ Holocaust memory. But his definition risks marginalising the hundreds of thousands of people who were brutalised and murdered outside of concentration camps during the Holocaust. Pick’s Far to Go, for example, details some of the humiliations and degradations suffered by Jews well before

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they were sent to concentration camps or pushed into hiding. By Bukiet’s logic, however, the characters of Pick’s and Orringer’s novels are not survivors at all because they did not pass through the barbed wire of the camps. Dreifus takes his remarks personally, given that her own grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, fled Germany in 1937 and did not see the inside of a concentration camp: The sharp distinctions Bukiet draws certainly seem to leave no place for me, and this may be the (selfish) heart of the second point from which I cannot ‘escape’: If my grandparents were not ‘survivors’, then how can I have remained so affected? So tied to this territory? Has there been something toxic, wrong, inauthentic about my obsessions? Have I, too, in the phrasing of Alain Finkielkraut . . . become an ‘imaginary Jew’? (2010: n. p.) Dreifus’s indictment of Bukiet is certainly much less harsh than the criticisms levied by Franklin, but it is nonetheless a bold critique of what has become a very loud voice in the scholarly and artistic debate over Holocaust fiction and who has the right to make claims on the Holocaust as subject matter. Dreifus’s response to Bukiet, however, even as it challenges his assertions, is tempered by a tentativeness that is characteristic of the third generation. There is an impulse to reframe or recontextualise the same questions, asking them anew rather than insisting fervently on answers and categories that foreclose the brand of dialogue that is critical to our understanding of the legacy of the Holocaust. In keeping with the third-generation tendency to distance themselves from the actual events of the Holocaust, the British Jewish novelist Natasha Solomons tells the tale of a family of Jewish refugees from Berlin in London. Based on the story of her own grandparents, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English (2010; the title of the original British publication is Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman) is the humorous but deeply tragic story of Jack Rosenblum’s process of assimilation into British culture. While his wife Sadie prefers to speak German, Jack refuses to speak it aside from instances in which he cannot help but utter it (when he is compelled to curse, for example). Jack reads obsessively from a blue pamphlet he is given when he first arrives: While you are in England: Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee. But he is frustrated by the fact that despite his reason for emigrating – to escape the Nazis – he is still labelled a ‘class B enemy alien’ and arrested (Solomons 2010c: 13). He does everything he can to assimilate into British culture, yet the complexities of his past continue to haunt him. Solomons’ narrative ultimately articulates the experience of being suspended between identities – a theme commonly explored in third-generation narratives. In a conversation at the end of her novel, Solomons is asked about the refugee’s need to adopt a host country’s customs while not losing one’s own heritage, as well as about the desire for one’s children to blend in even if they ‘become strangers in the process’ (Solomons 2010d: 7). Alluding to her own family experience, Solomons in response suggests that these tensions can never be reconciled. Her own mother was not allowed to speak German and her family did not attend synagogue or observe Jewish holidays. Solomons writes: ‘A generation later, I feel no less confused. My upbringing was totally secular, and yet I feel acute discomfort at any church service or assembly. This is only matched by my unease during any religious Jewish event. I’m still not quite sure where I belong’ (7). The loss or ambiguity of identity is often the cost of survival, and for this reason questions about identity often characterise the work of the third generation. And so while the nature of survival in this genre does not appear as chaotic as it does in earlier works (for Ozick’s Rosa, for example, or for the character of Sol



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Mirsky in Ehud Havazelet’s Bearing the Body, 2007), it is not without a profound sense of loss and tragedy that the characters struggle to make their way in a new world. The list of third-generation writers is slowly growing, as is scholarship on the genre. In Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (1998), psychologist Dan Bar-On explains that survivors are more comfortable communicating with their grandchildren than with their own children, which accounts for some of the differences in how secondand third-generation survivors deal with the subject matter. In terms of literary scholarship, however, very little has been written on the subject of third-generation Holocaust writing. The most promising is Third Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory by Alan Berger and Victoria Aarons (2015). Both Berger and Aarons have generated substantial scholarship pertaining to the writing of second-generation survivors (see Berger’s Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, 2012; Second-Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, an anthology edited by Berger and Naomi Berger in 2001; and Aarons’ ‘Memory, Conscience, and the Moral Weight of Holocaust-Representation’, 2013), and this transition into thinking through the next generation is certainly an important addition to the field. Belgian scholar Philippe Codde has also written a number of essays on the issue of third-generation Holocaust literature. Ruth Franklin, in addition to her scathing critique of the second generation, also includes a short chapter on the third generation in her book A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. However, she curiously omits some of the major writers of the genre – writers such as Orringer and Pick who are grandchildren of survivors. For Franklin, the question of whether a narrative can be categorised as ‘third-generation’ has less to do with the author’s family history than with the style and subject matter of the text, particularly the manner in which the Holocaust is – or is not – treated. For instance, Franklin discusses Michael Chabon in the context of third-generation writing, noting that three of his novels – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Final Solution (2004) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) – rely on the backdrop of the Holocaust to tell their stories. But they do so through the ‘filter of fantasy’ or, in the case of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, through an alternate history (in this novel, Chabon creates a scenario in which the Holocaust never actually occurs) (Franklin 2011: 240). Like most third-generation Holocaust narratives, these novels make use of the Holocaust but avoid representations of the camps and other standard components of traditional Holocaust writing. Nathan Englander’s short story ‘The Tumblers’ (1999) is also sometimes discussed in the context of third-generation Holocaust writing – and one might imagine that his newest collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank (2012), will probably be gathered into this discussion. Even though Englander is a fourth- or fifth-generation American, the Holocaust was central to his upbringing. ‘We really were raised with the idea of a looming second Holocaust, and we would play this game wondering who would hide us’, he says in an interview with NPR. ‘I remember my sister saying about a couple we knew, “He would hide us, and she would turn us in.” And it struck me so deeply, and I just couldn’t shake that thought for all these years, because it’s true’ (Englander 2012c). It is inconceivable that such a persistent fear of a second Holocaust would not make its way into Englander’s writing. And yet, while a few of his stories deal tangentially with the Holocaust, most of them do not. Still, it is impossible not to see the ways in which it marks the pages of his best work. And so it seems that third-generation Holocaust writing has emerged not simply as a genre of writing generated by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but also as a

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literary mode utilised by a number of contemporary Jewish writers, whether or not they are direct inheritors of the legacy of the Holocaust. Still, the Holocaust is not always their main focus, and they are more tentative when it comes to making assertions about what is the truth, what are the facts. They imply, in many cases, that even the possession of archival and historical documents does not guarantee knowledge of the facts. But while they attempt to reconstruct narratives that they do not know, they do so with caution and trepidation. Perhaps we might read in this tentativeness an implicit acknowledgement that they do not know because they were not there. As they wrestle with the complexities of this subject matter, what materialises is a more ethical approach to some of the most impossible subject matter in history. It is about rescue and recovery – especially when things seem irretrievable. Perhaps most importantly, it also seems that third-generation writers are less proprietorial about their place in the legacy of trauma, and they are not likely, any time soon, to criticise scholars’ tendency to place the work of writers such as Englander and Chabon in the same category as third-generation Holocaust writing, because, after all, third-generation writers are engaged in a process of exploring memories that they understand are not theirs, but which have impacted them immensely in some cases. As in many works that deal with the Holocaust, memory and identity continue to play a key role in the writing of third-generation survivors. But it is not an assertion of identity, rather a quest for or question regarding identity that marks the narratives of survivors’ grandchildren and their contemporaries.

12 MARGINAL WRITERS; OR, JEWS WHO AREN’T Debra Shostak

Guildenstern: Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I’ve frequently not been on boats. (Stoppard 1967: 109)

H

ow does one write as a ‘marginal’ Jew? What is Jewish literature when it sits on the margins? Tom Stoppard pithily establishes in existential terms the problem of how one might understand the negative of a condition. The conceptual conundrum posed in this chapter, placed within a volume presupposing the Jewish subject position of each writer whom my fellow authors take up, is exactly this. How to describe what isn’t (quite) there? Writers have frequently not been Jewish. What does it mean to not-be a Jew, or a Jewish writer, especially in the twentieth century? Is it possible to be, as Philip Roth has written, ‘[a] Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple’ (1986: 324)? To speak of the margins requires that one must first be able to describe what lies at the centre, as governed by two questions: what is a ‘Jew’ and what constitutes ‘Jewish’ art? Scholars have attempted to derive working criteria for the categories of ethnic identity and literature. Consider, for example, Werner Sollors’ central binary, whereby ethnic identity is constituted either by ‘descent’, based on relations of ‘blood or nature’, or by ‘consent’, premised on free agency and based on social relations such as marriage (1986: 6). In the case of Jewishness, each condition would assume some essential, inherited or chosen characteristics – but therein lies the difficulty. Jewishness isn’t a ‘race’; Hebrew and Yiddish may be Jewish languages, but Jews do not all share a language; although the identity of the Jew historically formed around the practice of Judaism, Jews can be not only secular but atheists; unlike, say, the Irish or Italians, for most of history Jews have neither occupied nor recognisably derived from a circumscribable geographical homeland or nation state; and persons can be considered Jews by others even when not by themselves. David Brauner captures the ambiguities in the category: For some . . . Jewishness is an innate, inalienable property, for others a learned tradition; for some, a belief system, for others a cultural construct; for some a race, for others a

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religion; for some a nationality, for others a sensibility; for some a historical legacy, for others a metaphysical state. (2001: 3) If one cannot describe a Jew as one would a glass or an apple, the category of ‘Jewish literature’ must be similarly indeterminate. Hillel Halkin, for example, succinctly infers from Ruth Wisse’s Modern Jewish Canon (2000) two possible conditions – that a writer possesses a Jewish identity and/or that a text is about Jews (Halkin 2008: 17). The condition of authorial identity is conceptually slippery, not to mention tautological: a Jew has a Jewish identity. Furthermore, the fact of ‘Jewish’ birth is complicated by whether a writer practises as a Jew and by the matrilineal requirements of orthodox doctrine. Beyond reductive biography, then, what confirms that a writer experiences a ‘Jewish identity’? Perhaps the condition of subject matter is more reliable. Stephen Wade identifies common material: ‘the Holocaust, Zionism, European Jewry, assimilation and religious practice’ – to which I would add antisemitism – and such motifs as the ‘little man’ or schlemiel (1999: 2, 4–5). But what remains if a putatively Jewish writer does not represent recognisably ‘Jewish’ subject matter? Attempting to address a writer such as Kafka, for example, Halkin proposes a third condition, located in the reader: the ‘possible “Jewish” interpretations’ of a text (2008: 18).1 Yet what might stimulate a reader to interpret a text on the margins as Jewish? If one turns to the nebulous notion of a ‘Jewish sensibility’, can it be said to reside in a philosophical or psychological perception of or stance to the world or the self, a way of using language, a tone? To write about a cross-section of ‘marginal’ American Jewish writers, including Nathanael West (1903–40), Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), J. D. Salinger (1919–2010), Paul Auster (1947– ) and Emily Prager (1949– ), is therefore to embrace contradiction, to define a negative space – to explore, that is, what Leslie Fiedler calls the ‘Jewishness degree zero of . . . vestigially Jewish-American novelists’ (1991: 77), among whom Fiedler names West and Salinger. These five writers, publishing over some eighty years, do not normally appear in canonical lists of American Jewish writers, suggesting that readers do not typically construct them as significantly Jewish.2 Yet all were born as Jews in the United States. Taking cover in Stoppard’s distinction, then, this chapter explores how these five writers have each not-been ‘Jewish writers’ without, if you will, not being Jewish writers. None has expressly taken Jewishness or Jewish experience as a subject, but all have alluded to, drawn on or taken for granted one or both, in diverse ways, allowing for a ‘Jewish’ interpretation. This chapter cannot pretend to construct a grand narrative of what it means to write as a marginal Jew; at best, it examines traces of the ‘Jew’ in a modest sample of each writer’s work and draws some connections while attempting to avoid stereotype. Ultimately, just as ‘an apple’ does not exist, but rather a Macintosh or a Pink Lady or a Braeburn, as many ways of being a marginal Jewish text exist as there are such texts. Nathanael West, chronologically the first of the five writers under consideration here, was born Nathan Weinstein in New York in 1903, the only son of prosperous Jewish parents who had fled Russia in the 1890s. West expressed ambivalence towards his Jewish background, not least in changing his name to ‘Nathanael West’ at the age of 22 and in repeated antisemitic references in his work and life, such as calling Jewish girls ‘bagels’ (qtd in Hyman 1965: 109). West spoke of himself as a ‘Jew and not-Jew at the same time’ (qtd in Olster 1988: 57). His life cut short at 37 by an automobile accident (Widmer 1982: 16), West left behind four short novels that suggest that he wrote out of an indelible, if fractured, Jewish identity. His disillusioned critique of American society during the 1930s



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seems grounded in awareness of ‘an anomalous status’ particular to American Jews as ‘insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders’, standing ‘between the dominant position of the white majority and the marginal position of peoples of color’ (Biale et al. 1998b: 5). West’s apocalyptic vision of an American wasteland and his forecasts of doom, especially concerning the capitalist enterprise and the degradation of erotic life, convey the secularised wrath of a prophet like Jeremiah (Schulz 1969: 52; Widmer 1982: 4), fitted into grotesque, nightmarish satires. From the vantage point of his ‘divided psyche’ (Olster 1988: 58), West mocks four illusions that sustain American culture: in The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), the modernist faith in transcendent art; in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), the false promise of Christ the Redeemer; in A Cool Million (1934), the myth of the American meritocracy; and in The Day of the Locust (1939), the illusion of Hollywood self-fulfilment (Schulz 1969: 37). West peoples the latter two novels with grotesquely comic antisemitic stereotypes to allegorise his despair at the false consolations of prosperity and the erotic in the modern wasteland. The picaresque A Cool Million parodies the Horatio Alger tales, concluding in the literal dismemberment of a young innocent, Lemuel Pitkin, endangered by a feminised Jew, the ‘interior decorator’ Asa Goldstein (West 2006: 69), and by a fascist capitalist who blames ‘Jewish international bankers’ (96) for society’s ills. The more complex, morosely tragic Day of the Locust aims its satire at the masses who ‘come to California to die’ (West 1965a: 2). Through the houses, movie sets and fantasies of stardom that Hollywood signifies, West repeatedly exposes this world as artificial and sterile. Characters sink out of their dreams into symbolic prostitution and mob violence, presided over by the likes of the ‘dwarf’ ‘homunculus’ Abe Kusich (140) and the old vaudevillian Harry Greener, who once ‘played a Jew comic’ (79) and for whom clowning was ‘his sole method of defense’ (24). These Jewish types appear largely as shorthand figures in West’s dystopic satires. West makes more pointedly productive use of his ambivalence about his Jewishness in his earlier novels, however. In Balso Snell, the dream life of the titular poet consists of a Dantesque journey through the entrails of a Trojan horse. West satirises both Western literary culture and the collapse of the flesh/spirit distinction fundamental to Judeo-Christian intellectual and spiritual strivings. When Balso’s first Virgilian guide cries out ‘I am a Jew!’ his stereotypically antisemitic response provides a key to the narrative: ‘Some of my best friends are Jews . . . The semites . . . are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brows touch heaven’ (West 2006: 7–8). To Balso, the Jew epitomises the human condition, poised between spiritual heights and abject flesh. In a narrative swaddled in parody and allusion – to Homer, Joyce, Melville, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Picasso and many more – West with heavy irony deconstructs the Cartesian dualism sustaining the Enlightenment adulation of intellect and art. With excremental resonances, Balso discovers that the wooden horse’s alimentary canal is ‘inhabited solely by writers in search of an audience’ (37). Balso’s journey ends in the sexual pursuit of a woman, as West rejects art and judges that humans tend downward, towards waste. When ‘[h]is body broke free of the bard’ – in the novel’s formal and literal climax – Balso ejaculates in a wet dream that asserts the primacy of the physical: ‘His body screamed . . . as it marched and uncoiled; then, with one heaving shout of triumph, it fell back quiet . . . victorious, relieved’ (61–2). Deploying his vantage point as the ‘insider/outsider’ (Biale et al. 1998a), West targets Christian salvation rather than art with his satire in Miss Lonelyhearts. Lonelyhearts, a journalist named for his newspaper’s cynically devised advice-to-the-lovelorn column, in time responds to the pitiable letters he receives by developing a ‘Christ complex’ for

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‘[a]ll the broken bastards’ (West 1965b: 25). When Lonelyhearts considers that ‘Man has a tropism for order . . . The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy’ (55), he articulates West’s persistent world view, which renounces the ordering properties of any ideology – religious, cultural or political. The novel fleshes out the protagonist’s truism by stripping symbolic gestures of their meaningfulness in the face of suffering. When Lonelyhearts imagines the flotsam of a pawnshop shaping into a ‘gigantic cross’, West undercuts the redemptive symbol of crucifixion with Lonelyhearts’ recurrent confusion of love with sex, action with violence, life with death. The imagined cross, for example, first appears as ‘a phallus of old watches and rubber boots’ (56); Lonelyhearts’ pastoral interlude with his beloved is tarnished by images of decay – ‘in the deep shade there was nothing but death . . . and over everything a funereal hush’ (67); his dream of sitting ‘on the right hand of the Lamb’ (18) takes form in the botched ritual slaughter of a lamb; and the final sacrifice of his death is caused by an absurd accident involving an exploding gun and a jealously crazed ‘cripple’ (103). Finally, for West, the world resists human attempts to impose a redemptive order. Such nihilism and hallucinatory representation are by no means characteristic of Tillie Olsen, however. On the contrary, her sense of human suffering committed her to social action and sensuously narrated realism. If West’s rage at the status quo takes the form of satire, Olsen’s vision causes her to depict suffering and to seek moments of transformation and insight; their difference is not so much ideological as tonal, West’s bitter ironies as opposed to Olsen’s compassionate ironies. Although Olsen’s background nominally resembles West’s – her father was a Jew who emigrated with her mother from Russia after the 1905 revolution (Frye 1995: 4) – it was also diametrically opposed, as her parents were revolutionaries and socialists without means. Leaving aside the fact that, by orthodox standards, Olsen would not be considered a Jew, she claimed Jewishness only insofar as it tends towards a socially activist politics. ‘I was an atheist’s daughter from the beginning’, she asserted; her positive identification was not with religious Judaism but with the tradition of ‘socialist communist Jews . . . what I feel is my Yiddishkeit, my Jewish heritage, that needs to change the world’ (qtd in Frye 1995: 79). Olsen’s ‘secular messianic utopianism’ (Lyons 1986: 89) led her to devote herself to the causes of the working underclass and to women, and scholars have chiefly attended to the representation of those concerns in her fiction rather than her Jewishness as such. Indeed, Olsen’s Jewishness is nearly invisible in Yonnondio: From the Thirties, the unfinished protest novel she began in 1932 when she was 19 (Olsen 1974: vii). Apart from a passing reference to Anna Holbrook’s memory of her grandmother ‘bending . . . over lit candles chanting in an unknown tongue’ (27), nothing in the text suggests that Jim Holbrook or his wife are Jews. Instead, in heightened sensory language, Olsen focuses on the privations, violence and hopelessness of poverty in early twentieth-century America. Olsen’s symbolic opening note issues from the ‘iron throat of the whistle [that] shrieked forth its announcement of death’ (2) in the Wyoming mines where the Holbrooks begin their traumatic journey. Neither nature nor society supports these immigrant labourers who seek health and minimal sustenance, travelling first to the frozen, isolated wastes of an unproductive tenant farm in Nebraska, then to the ‘vast unmoving stench’ (37) of the infernal slaughterhouses of Chicago. Olsen focalises much of Yonnondio in the perspective of the Holbrooks’ child Mazie, whose innocent hopes and poetic perceptions are crushed as she watches her parents sink, according to ‘poverty’s arithmetic’ (16), into exhaustion, sickness and domestic violence. Olsen gives Mazie a hunger for education, for the books



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Anna tells her about that might take her ‘places your body aint ever been’ (96), and for self-expression, in the ‘words swollen big within her’ (43); but material conditions cause her self, like her mother’s, to remain in many ways stillborn. Olsen’s compassion for the thwarted lives of women reappears in her short stories. ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ (1961) narrates the tormented confessional monologue of a mother besieged by guilt over how, consumed by her domestic cares and the burden of work, she became blind to her daughter Emily’s needs for maternal affection and nourishment. Remarking Emily’s metaphoric transition from being sickened by food to an ‘enormous appetite’ (Olsen 1961: 10), the narrator marvels at her daughter’s compensatory ‘gift’ of performance, the ‘convulsive and deadly clowning’ that brings ‘rare and precious laughter’ to audiences (11). Knowing that her own ‘wisdom came too late’ (12) and that she will never understand her own child, the mother nevertheless has faith that ‘[s]he will find her way’ (11) – a faith, signalling Olsen’s ‘secular messianic utopianism’ (Lyons 1986: 89), that the individual has the power to survive and enact change. Such a hint of Olsen’s utopianism is not at first discernible in her best-known and most overtly ‘Jewish’ story. ‘Tell Me a Riddle’ (1961) is marked by curses, barbed pet names and English locutions that bear the rhythms of translated Yiddish, but also by the repudiation of Jewishness, as the protagonist, Eva, defiantly announces herself a secular humanist: ‘Race, human; Religion, none’ (Olsen 1961: 80). The elderly Eva and David, whose marriage has become a ‘quarrel’ (63), clash over how to live as they approach the discovery that Eva is dying. Just as she juxtaposes her characters’ voices, Olsen organises the narrative around oppositions: David’s desire for community vs. Eva’s for solitude; the American values of material comfort and personal liberty to which their immigrant family has subscribed vs. memories of their political activism in revolutionary Russia; the weight of Eva’s past and present familial obligations (‘Tell me a riddle, Grammy’) vs. her distaste at even holding a grandchild (‘I know no riddles, child’; 85). The narrative is linear as well, the couple’s travelling to visit their children delineating Eva’s reverse movement, inward: ‘Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning. If they would but leave her . . . in the reconciled solitude, to journey to her self’ (84). Eva’s primary desire, repeated insistently throughout the text, is, like that of the Wandering Jew, to go home. Olsen figures home as, at once, the physical space from which Eva has travelled; the past, where she locates her political actions, the proof of her humanist virtues, and twentieth-century history, including the Holocaust, which she must work through; and the self, buried beneath years of obligation. As the narrative engages her on her journey, her body shrinks under the cancer’s assault, but the transformation is surprisingly liberating as Eva lies ‘coiled, convoluted like an ear’ (102), listening for the music of her own life. Her renewal, David’s and their reconciliation are all accomplished when, in her delirium, she sings a ‘song of their youth of belief’, proclaiming freedom and knowledge (110–11), and returns, in memory, to the home of her childhood village to recall a wedding dance. Olsen expresses her Jewishness, then, like other mid-century activist American Jews: in her commitment to the values of social justice and her optimistic belief in the transformative power of the human spirit. Not so, however, the Jewishness of J. D. Salinger. Salinger probes the metaphysical, rather than socio-economic, sources of psychological dysfunction and, if anything, returns to the mordant disillusionment of West, but without West’s nihilistic satirical bent. Born in 1919 in New York City, Salinger was, like Olsen, the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, but, like West, he was raised in relative comfort. He published a few

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short stories in the early 1940s, but most of his slim output, before he became a recluse and stopped publishing, occurred between the end of the war and the mid-1960s. He had, as Leah Garrett suggests, ‘no interest in labeling himself either as a Jew or a Jewish writer’ (2008: 648), and yet his world view resembles a hybrid of the concerns of 1950s Jewish writers and the Beats – representing both philosophical alienation (Garrett 2008: 651) and Eastern spirituality. With the exception of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Salinger’s longer fiction and many of his stories remain obsessively focused on the siblings of the half-Jewish, half-Irish Glass family, in whose damaged brilliance, Leslie Fiedler argues, he represents for mid-century America ‘the pathos and silliness of middle-class, middle-brow intellectual aspiration – the sad and foolish dream that certain families, largely Jewish, dreamed for their children’ (1962: 57). Salinger pursues his vision of America in a distinctive style as well. His narration is highly personal, even quasi-autobiographical, with frequent use of first-person narrators who speak their anxieties and complaints in conversational, idiomatic discourse – Holden Caulfield of Catcher, for example, has often been compared to Huck Finn. Indeed, Garrett intriguingly suggests that ‘Salinger has not transformed a Jewish voice into an American one, but instead made the American voice Jewish’ (2008: 657). Still, Salinger’s material is not identifiably ‘Jewish’. Rather, however inflected with a tone of neurotic Jewish intensity – alternately humorous and self-dramatising – his characters are agonised seekers after a more generalised, conflicted obverse of the American success story. They are desperate to learn how ‘true spiritual life can be realised in a modern materialistic society’ (Schulz 1969: 200) but thwarted by their psychological fragility. Salinger seems to transform the bourgeois Viennese ‘hysterics’ Freud analysed at the turn of the century into depressed young New Yorkers bound for nervous breakdown or suicide. Consider, for example, the breakdown of Sergeant X (a Seymour or Buddy Glass surrogate) in ‘For Esmé with Love and Squalor’ (Salinger 1964: 87–114), Franny’s collapse in Franny and Zooey (Salinger 1955: 3–43), as well as Seymour’s suicide, to which Salinger alludes in numerous stories. The pattern begins famously, however, with Holden’s breakdown at the end of Catcher in the Rye, the novel that struck such a chord with its 1950s readers, especially young people, as to alter American fiction and wrap Salinger in the glow of a holy sage. Holden’s confiding, vernacular, moralistic voice, with its choric vocabulary of value judgement, sentiment and psychic damage – ‘phony’, ‘depressed’, ‘goddam’, ‘puke’, ‘crazy’ and ‘lonesome’, for example – diagnoses the malaise of modern American material culture. Sickened by the jaded prosperity around him – ‘The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has’ (Salinger 1951: 4) – and refusing to ‘play by the rules’ (8), Holden is expelled from his private school to undertake a journey that ultimately leads him, like Olsen’s Eva, home. But instead of returning to self or past, Holden’s object, like Huck’s, is to preserve moral innocence in the face of contemporary social decadence – specifically, to protect his younger sister, Phoebe, from the Fall. Holden longs for a pastoral fantasy of America, figured in his daydream of escape to the woods with a girl (132) and his plan to hitchhike out West – like Huck, to light out for the territories – ‘where nobody’d know me’ (198). But he finds no support. His parents are unsympathetic and virtually absent, his fellow students are narcissistic and violent, and the adult world tells lies. In his crusade against ‘phoniness’, Holden attacks organised religion (100) and the movies (104) for the illusions they perpetrate. Yet Salinger also makes Holden a reader, ‘crazy about The Great Gatsby’ (141), and willingly taken in by the novel’s nostalgic devotion to innocence. He commits himself



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to going home to protect Phoebe from the knowledge inscribed in the ‘Fuck you’ graffiti he sees on the school wall (201). To bolster his resolve, Holden wilfully misremembers the line from the titular Robert Burns poem as ‘if a body catch a body coming through the rye’, rather than ‘meet a body’; his ‘crazy’ desire to be a saviour, to catch children ‘on the edge of some crazy cliff’ (173) before they fall, expresses an act of hope to complement his sheer happiness at the sight of Phoebe riding a carousel in the rain. Such modest gestures of optimism are even subtler in Salinger’s subsequent works, apparently dominated more by breakdown than recovery; religious thinking offers solace only when the reader interprets from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nine Stories (1953) begins with ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, which ends in Seymour Glass’s suicide. The stories that follow portray grief, extramarital affairs, missed intimacies, antisemitism and futile obsessions. When Salinger depicts spirituality, however, in ‘Teddy’, the precocious child loves God unsentimentally (1964: 187) and practises an Eastern detachment. Remarking that ‘it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America’ (188), Teddy chooses to escape by embracing death as his fate. His emotionlessness makes sense as other than ‘inhuman’ (186) only in the context of Salinger’s interest in Zen Buddhism – wherein, as James Lundquist argues, ‘for those like Seymour and Teddy who have experienced awakening by seeing through the absurdity of the logic that blinds “normal” people, physical death may be spiritual life’ (1988: 108). Salinger follows a similar trajectory when he explores the possibilities of Christian redemption in Franny and Zooey (1955). Franny, made despondent by the intellectual posing and empty social relations of her college peers, is ‘sick of ego, ego, ego’ (29). She turns to the ‘Jesus Prayer’ that simply asks for Christ’s mercy, hoping that by ceaseless prayer she will ‘purify [her] whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about’ (37). At the ambiguous end of ‘Franny’, she lies with the prayer soundless on her lips; but she closes the companion story ‘Zooey’ smiling, in a ‘deep, dreamless sleep’ (201), feeling that the world’s wisdom is hers because she has understood that ‘Christ’ is everyone, everywhere. However much a reader may be inclined to take Salinger’s resolution ironically, there is no whiff of spirituality at all in the work of Emily Prager. Nor is there much material that might be interpreted as ‘Jewish’. Born in 1949 in the US, and, like Salinger, the offspring of a Jewish father and Christian mother, Prager travelled at seven to live for several years with her father in Taiwan and Hong Kong after her parents divorced. Subsequently in New York, she has written topically wide-ranging fiction and journalism, especially satirical columns for such magazines as National Lampoon and Penthouse (Prager 2002: 11; Newman 2007: 95). Prager tends to imagine extreme, even grotesque situations in support of an acerbic feminism, as in the title story of A Visit from the Footbinder (1982), which recounts the ritual mutilation of an unsuspecting child; or, from the same volume, ‘The LincolnPruitt Anti-Rape Device’, in which a female platoon drops into Vietnam armed with a weapon that poisons the men they seduce through the penis; or the reverse Lolita tale of Roger Fishbite (1999), which gives the murderous nymphet a knowing voice. The work of Prager’s to receive the most attention from critics and reviewers, however, and the one that adheres most closely to ‘Jewish’ concerns, is the novel Eve’s Tattoo (1991), which continues her focus on women but with a significant difference. While Prager gives little hint that she identifies herself as a Jew, she devotes Eve’s Tattoo to thinking through the traumatic Jewish subject of the twentieth century. Indeed, she takes on the most hotly contested concern in Holocaust studies – the question of the ethics of Holocaust representation. Eve Flick, like Prager a writer of magazine satires, undertakes a project of Holocaust

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remembrance and recovery. Although she is not herself Jewish, she has her arm tattooed with a concentration camp number she sees in a photograph she discovers among her boyfriend’s possessions, and she names both the unknown woman in the photograph and the tattoo itself ‘Eva’: ‘the only difference between fantasy and history is living people’, she tells her partner, Charles César. ‘I’m going to keep Eva alive’ (Prager 1992: 11). Eve thus rewrites an identity for the anonymous victim on her own body, drawing on her knowledge and fantasies of Holocaust victimhood. That this appropriation causes her to tell multiple stories about ‘Eva’ to the many people she encounters who are pruriently fascinated with the tattoo suggests the degree to which her participation in this traumatic history is a record of fantasy. Eve’s Tattoo poses significant interpretative challenges to the reader. The central concern is how one understands or aligns ethically with Prager’s protagonist. Eve is suffering from ennui and gets the tattoo on her fortieth birthday; she presumes to tell Eva’s varied stories as ‘enlightenments’ (114) to others, usually tailored to her audience’s interests and predilections, in order to instruct them in the Holocaust’s random, inexplicable savageries; she fetishises the tattoo like a scarlet letter, in the belief that her act of self-mutilation and abjection has the symbolic power to revive both the dead and the actual horror of their victimisation. Eve’s project may therefore seem arrogant and ‘crude’ (King 1999: 101–2), a perverse presumption of authenticity as she commodifies Holocaust stories merely to salve her midlife crisis. Certainly, her project classifies her as a ‘Holocaust Consumer’ (Baum 2010: 129) who, in her ‘ontologically postmodern’ condition of self-projection into the ‘texts’ of the Holocaust and her fascination with ‘fascism and the ethos of Nazi eroticism’ (130), enacts her surrogate victimhood as a potentially pornographic drag performance. Yet Prager also exposes the dangerous ambiguities posed by the project of Holocaust memory. As David Brauner suggests, Eve stumbles upon the ‘vexed’ problem of Jewish identity – ‘who was Jewish and who wasn’t’ (2001: 53). Prager also underscores the ethical ambiguity of Eve’s impersonation by revealing that she has identified imaginatively with a Nazi collaborator tattooed ‘by mistake’ (1992: 193); that her revered Eva is ‘an anti-Semite rather than a Jew’ may unwittingly make ‘Eve’s identification with her more authentic, rather than less so’ (Brauner 2001: 54). The heart of the matter is whether Prager maintains aesthetic distance from her protagonist. Is the narrative perspective ironic about Eve’s appropriation of Holocaust victimhood? Or does Prager herself perform the appropriations? That is, is Eve’s project Prager’s? Just who is in drag? Rob Baum, for one, argues that Prager’s achievement is to have ‘understood the uncanny compulsion of Nazism’ (2010: 124). To be sure, when the narrating voice shifts from focalisation on Eve’s self-serving perceptions to relate her stories of the many Evas, the stories themselves are direct and compelling. Furthermore, when Eve’s illusions are shattered, as she uncovers the ‘real’ story of the woman in the photograph, the narrative seems to judge her for her fantasies. So, perhaps, does the sequence in which Eve finally encounters a ‘real’ Holocaust survivor, who escaped death by becoming a transvestite. Readers must choose whether Prager sees this figure as a reproach to Eve’s performative impulses or a validation of them, just as they must choose whether the erasure of the tattoo – and Eve’s ‘Jewish identity’ – at the end of the novel represents, as Brauner proposes, either ‘triumph over anti-Semitism’ or ‘the terminal decline of Jewish identity itself’ (2001: 56). Nevertheless, Eve’s Tattoo does important cultural work by asking ­discomforting ­questions for Jewish and non-Jewish readers and writers alike. Paul Auster, while wholly secular, seems more firmly rooted than Prager in a Jewish



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frame of reference. Born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Auster recurrently shows a fascination in his work with the father–son relationship that is at once intimate and a metaphor for the metaphysical relationship of humans to an (absent) God in the post-Holocaust world. Insofar as Jews have been the People of the Book, with a long rabbinic tradition of word-obsessed exegesis, Auster’s preoccupation with how language constructs order as a stay against such absence marks his Jewishness (see Cohen 2000–01: 94). His formal strategies and thematic concerns take a more postmodern shape than the other ‘marginal’ writers considered here, however, when he focuses on how, faced with the inexplicable traumas of existence, we rely upon language to create meaning, however austere and disjunctive it may be. Auster’s meditative memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), maps his recurrent concerns as well as outlining his Jewish biography as a second-generation American. The first chapter traces how his father, Sam, remained invisible to his son and, perhaps, to himself, which Auster implicitly ascribes to Sam’s childhood witness of his immigrant mother’s murder of his father. The chapter traces as well Auster’s impassioned but futile need to write his way into recovering and memorialising his father after his death. ‘No matter how useless these words might seem to be,’ he writes, ‘they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me. When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever’ (1982: 65). The figures of diasporic exile that recur in Auster’s fiction are embedded in his portrait of estrangement from his father; his work is notable for its episodes of literal and metaphoric hunger and homelessness and its many sons whose fathers have vanished or who seek surrogates. A few examples must suffice, since Auster has been too prolific to deal with except glancingly: the essay ‘The Art of Hunger’ (1973) on Knut Hamsun and Kafka; the post-apocalyptic privations in In the Country of Last Things (1987) that recall Auschwitz or the Warsaw Ghetto (Cohen 2000–01: 102; Peacock 2010: 12); Moon Palace (1989), in which Marco Fogg starves himself before beginning a genealogical quest for a succession of father figures; and City of Glass (1985) in The New York Trilogy, in which Daniel Quinn, hired to track down a missing father who his son believes will kill him, so hones his pursuit as to become homeless and sleepless, reduce his appetites nearly to zero and, effectively, turn himself into a surrogate for the threatened son. The silence Auster fears in Invention of Solitude is existential and points towards the trauma of multiple estrangements: from language, from social relations, from one’s origins. The postmodern detective novel City of Glass knits these concerns together within Quinn’s futile search for Peter Stillman, Sr, which echoes Stillman’s own mad quest for a language that might return the world to a prelapsarian unity, when ‘[a] thing and its name were interchangeable’, before ‘words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; [and] language had been severed from God’ (Auster 1990: 52). Stillman, who feels it is his ‘job to put [the world] back together again’ (91), combines his messianic delusion and utopian fantasies to attempt a brutal experiment. He raises his son, Peter Stillman, Jr, in isolation, stripping away his language and social experience, like a new ‘wild boy of Aveyron’ (39), in the hopes that the exile and existential silence will permit the boy to rediscover the lost prelapsarian language. What he produces, instead, is a man damaged beyond recognition, an automaton whose transformation figures the humanly unspeakable and, though it is unnamed in the text, the end product of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Peter Stillman, Jr, is a ‘boy who can’t remember’ (19), embodying an absolute negative of human existence: ‘no words, and then no one, and then no, no, no’ (20).

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Quinn becomes as seduced by this project of language and silence as Stillman, and his work of detection goes beyond identification to embodiment. He remains uncertain that he is not simply ‘embarked on a meaningless project’ (73) of finding order in randomness, yet he contradictorily also maintains faith in the meaningfulness that language constructs. Hence Quinn obsessively records his observations in a red notebook – such notebooks, and the act of writing in them, are recurring motifs in Auster’s fiction – until he has come to the end, which signals the end of his own existence. In Quinn’s final sentence, Auster suggests an equivalence between writing and existence: ‘What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?’ (157). Quinn, then, however ambiguously, affirms the incontrovertible duty – arguably ‘Jewish’ in post-Holocaust history – to bear witness to the traumas of existence. Indeed, to bear witness appears to be one of Auster’s main objectives, as he demonstrates in the second chapter of The Invention of Solitude, entitled ‘The Book of Memory’. In a highly allusive, lyrical, fragmentary juxtaposition of anecdote and meditation, covering his relationship with his own son as well as with many people and books in his past, Auster regroups from the portrait of his father’s traumatic absence. His project is to return, by way of the inscription of memory, to some recuperative mode of understanding and presence. ‘For the story of memory is the story of seeing’ (1982: 154), he notes, and ‘the moment we step into the space of memory, we walk into the world’ (166). The duty to remember appears in a number of Auster’s novels as well, including Oracle Night (2003). The highly wrought, reflexive structure of Oracle Night’s interpenetrating levels focuses on the injured, blocked writer Sidney Orr’s attempts to write himself out of his loss of self. Midway through the narrative appears the story that Orr writes about Nick Bowen, into whom he displaces his own traumas. Bowen, lost and homeless, is assigned the task of organising a roomful of nearly fifty years of telephone directories documenting the inhabitants of many cities in the western world and housed in a fallout shelter. The directories have been collected by a man who helped liberate Dachau in 1945, who calls his collection the ‘Bureau of Historical Preservation’ – both a ‘house of memory’ and ‘a shrine to the present’. In an act of faith, he intends the two functions to prove to him, in the wake of the Holocaust, ‘that mankind isn’t finished’ (2003: 91). That is, the written record – no matter that it includes simply names, addresses and numbers – is a testament to the enduring presence of the lost. In the narrative arc that Auster inscribes for Orr, he eventually comes to himself with the help of a blue notebook, beyond the disguises and suppressions of mere words but fundamentally aided by them, emerging at last into the real of a post-traumatic life. For Auster, as for the other marginal Jewish writers, seeing, memory and writing – whether in satires, or in lyrical social realism, or in narcissistic psychological realism, or on the body, or in coloured notebooks – appear as the ingredients of the essential act of witness. Norman Finkelstein writes that Auster is ‘haunted . . . by the Jewish attitude toward writing: to witness, to remember, to play divine and utterly serious textual games’ (1995: 49). If such an attitude, as readers find it in these Jews who aren’t (quite) Jews, legitimately marks them as ‘Jewish’, then it is fair to say that the writers on the margins have not-been American Jewish writers by writing their witness of the social, psychological, spiritual and metaphysical traumas of their century.



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Notes 1. For other fine discussions of the categorical problems of ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish literature’, see WirthNesher (1994: 3–5), Furman (2000: 1–21) and Biale (1998: 29–32) on post-ethnic American Jewish identity. 2. Consider, for example, the list of ‘100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature’ compiled by the Great Jewish Books Project, in association with the National Yiddish Book Center (no date).

13 THE POSTWAR ‘NEW WAVE’ OF BRITISH JEWISH WRITING Efraim Sicher

The East End and Beyond

T

he ‘new wave’ of writing in postwar Britain turned its back on the high modernism of T. S. Eliot et al. and opened up the novel, poetry and drama to regional, workingclass and women writers. Among the ‘new wave’ of English novelists and dramatists were Jews who had little connection with the Jewish community and were in fact alienated from it. They rejected it as materialistic and bourgeois, lacking any real interest in culture. For this reason one Jewish novelist, Brian Glanville (b. 1931), declared there were AngloJewish writers but there was no Anglo-Jewish writing (1960). When the Anglo-Jewish novelist wrote about London’s Jewish community, it was with the critical eye of the outsider, just as Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs (1888) had earlier scandalised the community with its critique of Jewish life. In fact, most postwar novels by Jews cannot be classified as ‘Jewish’ in theme, nor do they necessarily address antisemitism and Jewish history. Rather, these novelists were Jews who had gone ‘beyond marginality’ (Sicher 1985) and claimed a place in English writing without being tagged as regional or ethnic writers. Their critique of the Jewish family fitted in with satires of materialistic and mediocre English middle-class suburbia and the nouveaux riches (as in C. P. Snow’s novels). Before the war, Simon Blumenfeld had written in Jewboy (1932) about the East End of the 1930s as a tough school in politics and love, and Willy Goldman’s East End, My Cradle (1940) had described the back streets of East London as a rough territory in which Jews had to struggle for a living. Now London’s thriving centre of Jewish life was vanishing. Battered by German bombing, the traditions and harsh poverty of the East End were discarded as Jews moved on and upward. The children of immigrants became Anglicised and suburbanised when they traversed the passage from the East End to the prosperous suburbs in the north-west of the metropolis. The East End was nevertheless the subject of bitter-sweet nostalgia for those who were children at the outbreak of war, most famously in Arnold Wesker’s dramatic Trilogy (1960), which had a strong social message for postwar Britain. The first play in the trilogy, Chicken Soup with Barley, looked back to the solidarity of East Enders in resistance to fascism in the 1930s and described the disillusion with socialism when it came into power after the war; Roots describes a family of farm labourers in East Anglia whose daughter, Beatie, inspired by her lover, the Jewish intellectual

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Ronnie Kahn, tries to waken them from their indifference and sloth; I’m Talking about Jerusalem deals with the failure of two East End idealists to put their socialist ideals and the vision of William Morris into practice (Wesker later published a novel that took off where Roots ends, entitled Honey, 2005). Bernard Kops (1926– ) wrote a play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959), about a typical misfit, and celebrated his East End childhood in an autobiography, The World is a Wedding (1964). His novels dwell on drop-outs who rebel against the stifling embrace of the Jewish mother (By the Waters of Whitechapel, 1969) and defy the pressure to conform to dreams of bourgeois suburbia by joining protest marches (Yes From No-Man’s Land, 1965). However, as in The Dissent of Dominick Shapiro (1966), running off with a shiksa does not satisfy the need to belong, or to find meaning in post-Holocaust despair when all ideologies have failed to redeem the world. For Kops, the dissolution of the East End leads to a universal disillusion in politics, religion and society (Home Sweet Home, 1963). His fictional world is peopled by marginal figures and aspiring authors craving an impossible fulfilment of their erotic desires (as in The Passionate Past of Gloria Gaye, 1971). In his numerous plays, poetry and novels, Kops is one of the last ‘angry young men’, fired by the energy and dissent of the generational conflict, but also by lyricism and fantasy (Baker and Shumaker 2013). Another East Ender, the successful screenwriter and popular novelist Wolf Mankowitz (1924–98), wrote a Gogolian play, The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), about an East End tailor, as well as two novellas, Make Me an Offer (1952) and A Kid for Two Farthings (1953), which summon a whimsical affection for East End Jewish traders and middlemen. Emanuel Litvinoff (1915–2011), who also grew up in the East End before the war, wrote poetry and novels, and was active in the 1970s in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry. His historical trilogy, Faces of Terror, followed the fate of East End revolutionaries and included A Death Out of Season (1973), about the siege of Sidney Street. Litvinoff’s memoir about the East End, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), looks at the lessons of poverty for the new generation of South Asian immigrants who followed in the Jews’ footsteps. Not all East End Jews made it up the social ladder to Golders Green and Hendon, and some found themselves in the déclassé limbo of Hackney’s inner city slums, described by the forgotten novelist Roland Camberton (1921–65), pseudonym of Henry Cohen, in Rain on the Pavements (1951), a novel which conveys childhood fears of the world outside East London and which Iain Sinclair has called an ‘obituary’ for Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts (2008). Hackney was where Camberton, the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008) and the novelist Alexander Baron (b. Alec Bernstein, 1917–99) grew up; all three attended Hackney Downs School. Pinter needs no introduction as an internationally acclaimed playwright, best known for his comedies of the absurd such as The Birthday Party (1957), which features a suspicious character called Goldberg, who may be a Jew from Hackney. Jewish themes in Pinter’s work are generally transmuted into larger metaphysical concerns (Sicher 1985: 98–110). Pinter’s sole novel, The Dwarfs (written in the 1950s but published only in 1990), on which he based the play of the same name (1961), is set in Hackney and presages something of the language and preoccupation with loss of identity in The Caretaker (1960), as well as anxieties about sexuality and respectability in The Homecoming (1965). Baron made his name as an author of Second World War fiction, such as From the City From the Plough (1948), largely based on his wartime experiences. In a collection of stories, The Human Kind: A Sequence (1953), he did not fail to note the xenophobic racist



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prejudice of English soldiers, including one who prided himself on being British and above the level of the ‘Wops’, such as the starving Italian woman he abused. This is intended as an eye-opener for Baron’s generation, who matured as conscripts on the front lines and in the air force. For all the camaraderie and solidarity which radicalised the armed forces, we feel the disappointment of Mark in With Hope, Farewell (1952) on meeting antisemitic violence again and having to square his dearly won sense of Englishness with his desire to hit back. Having grown up in East London, Mark witnesses prejudice when his family is thrown out of a seaside boarding house before the war; the Jews are not wanted because, he realises, they are not considered respectable or decent. After the war, people are too tired and weary to bother about antisemitic agitation, particularly the Jews (Baron 1952: 181). The old antisemitic violence, which Mark encountered before the war and instinctively fought with his fists, has not gone away. After a fascist meeting gets out of control, his pregnant wife Ruth is crushed by a mob on a bus and she loses their baby. Mark rallies in his despair to guard a synagogue that has been targeted by arsonists and realises that hatred came from what the crowd did not understand and therefore feared (254). He recoils at his own shame at Jewish victims of the Holocaust and now recognises that his attempt to distance himself from his fellow Jews ‘had not made him any the more an Englishman, but the less a man’ (255). He knows he belongs with the pioneers carving a new state out of the desert, but he also identifies with the men and women of England, with their ‘stoic calm in the face of life’s cruelties’ (255), whose steadfastness prevented the descent into bestiality: to ‘belong with them was to belong wherever he lived’ (255). In this novel, postwar disorientation and disillusion give way to an accommodation with prosaic reality, yet the lessons of the Holocaust and antisemitism are carried over into Baron’s novel The Lowlife (1963), about a shlemazl drifter, Harry Boas, who rents a room in Hackney. This is where East End Jews who did not make it to the wealthy middle-class suburbs of north-west London found themselves among the new immigrants from the Caribbean and young English couples stuck on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Boas (‘Harryboy’) witnesses the racial prejudice of one such English family, while he enjoys his West Indian neighbours’ cooking and zest for life, which they have learned, like the Jews, from centuries of social inferiority and discrimination. This identification strikes home painfully because ‘Harryboy’ knows that he may have had an illegitimate son who no doubt perished in the Holocaust at the hands of the ‘haters of life’ (Baron 1963b: 123). A sequel, Strip Jack Naked (1966), was less successful, but in King Dido (1969) Baron revisited the East End. This is not the Jewish quarter of sentimental nostalgia, but the world of protection racketeers in working-class Bethnal Green in 1911, where the Jews are on the margins of a marginal class. The time is the coronation of George V, a remote figure, as was any symbol of authority, but an occasion for a little light relief from the relentless drudge of poverty and street violence. The novel affords an unusual brief glimpse of immigrant Jews as seen by an East End ruffian, Dido Peach, who does not share the general hostility towards the Jewish aliens in his respect for Barsky, a muscular cobbler whose days in the Russian army have proved a tougher school than even Dido’s own miserable upbringing.

The Golders Green Novel The label of ‘Golders Green novel’ has been applied, retrospectively and sometimes derisively, to a number of works by Anglo-Jewry’s ‘Angry Young Men’, who rebelled against the centrally heated carpeted comfort of bourgeois Jewish homes between Hampstead and

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Hendon, but also elsewhere, as in Jericho Sleep Alone (1964) by Jewish Chronicle columnist and comic novelist Chaim Bermant (1929–98) (Bermant 1970: 176). They were angry at the sterile materialism that transmitted neither Judaism’s ethical vision nor the ideals of the radicals of the immigrant generation. Brian Glanville’s The Bankrupts (1958), for example, castigates the moral bankruptcy of the newly prosperous Jews of north-west London. For the Friemans, their daughter Rosemary’s potential marriage to a research student, Bernard Carter, is worse than her marrying a non-Jew, since his pursuit of literature is not a profitable business. Bernard warns Rosemary that it is impossible to get out intact from the tight embrace of the Jewish family. The generation gap has arrived, and there can be no understanding between Jewish parents and rebellious children. The Friemans value the middle-class decency and respectability that measures their distance from the Jewish East End, and they want to force their 20-year-old daughter into a marriage that will enhance their social status. Money is God, and the Friemans are too stereotypically loud and vulgar to be accepted as English; indeed, Mr Frieman harbours feelings of contemptuous superiority towards the gentile ‘yoks’. Rosemary Frieman rejects her parents’ empty values, but neither she nor her brother, a law student, know what they want out of life. They only know they do not want their parents’ way. Rosemary has been emotionally crippled by her parents’ stifling care and finds it difficult to get away from the comforts and luxuries that money can buy. Sensing the trap of becoming like her mother and her friends, Rosemary imagines them responding: ‘And what is wrong with us anyway? . . . We’re comfortable. We’ve got homes, we’ve got children. We’ve got mink coats and jewellery. What do you want us to be? What do you want to be yourself?’ (Glanville 1958: 75). Rosemary feels English and does not share Bernard’s wish to live in Israel, where nobody will call him a filthy Jew. But after his tragic death in Israel at the hands of terrorists, she makes her final escape from her family to a kibbutz with her unborn child. The Jewish community reacted angrily to Glanville’s satire of the hypocrisy and vacuity of Jewish family life in north-west London, because they preferred uncritical and flattering portrayals to unsavoury scandals and illicit love affairs, which ought to be swept under the carpet and not displayed in front of gentiles. Accused of disloyalty to the community and self-hatred, the Jewish writer was likely to write one novel on a Jewish theme and move on, addressing a general readership and disguising any criticism in a universal form (Glanville 1960; Sicher 1985: 119–20). Glanville (the son of a Dublin dentist whose family name was originally Goldberg) did not always openly address Jewish themes in his writing, and made a name for himself as a football writer. Some of his identifiably Jewish characters are (like Baron’s) lowlifes or social misfits. Others project the pain of growing up in an oppressive household with possessive parents, like Janet, the narrator of A Second Home (1966), a transformation of Rosemary from The Bankrupts, who is plunged into suicidal depression and emotional dysfunction in the world of the theatre (the ‘second home’). Glanville’s Diamond (1962) returns to the anguish of trying to escape the confines of the Jewish home, but this time with a sharpened awareness of antisemitism. In the 1930s Jack Diamond, an Irish Jew, marries Dolly Ruben, brought up in Hackney and Stoke Newington, and after thirty years finds that all his ideals have been stifled by her demanding will and endless bridge parties, just as his ambitions were thwarted by his overbearing manipulative father. English antisemitism is evident in ostracism in smart hotels, but also erupts on the streets during fascist marches. After the war little seems to have changed, and Jack’s son, Michael, is subject to open Jew-baiting at



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his private school. When Diamond is left dying of leukaemia at the end of the novel, the family has disintegrated and there remains little comfort for him. The Financiers (1972), by contrast, fantasises how Judaism could be transformed from an artificial, materialistic worship of money to what Ezekiel (Zeke) Vine calls Creative Capitalism. Following economic theorists from Marx to Marcuse, Zeke awakes from disillusion in the student revolts of the late 1960s to discover the sexual and political power of money. Manipulating the incredulity and money-fetish of wealthy women and business executives, Zeke builds up an empire that conscripts hippies in a mystical communion of dope and promiscuity infused by kabbalah, and persuades his rabbi father, at the risk of losing his position, to blow the shofar to declare universal salvation. He even manages to penetrate the Kremlin and meet the Pope, as well as taking on the United States. His mind blown by hallucinogens, Zeke aspires to messianism, yet his vision of redeeming the world is a terrible distortion of Judaism, and the black comedy of the novel lacks sufficient irony to fully expose the delusion of substituting one bankrupt ideology for another.

The Crossing Point of Judaism One way in which Judaism could potentially offer moral and spiritual meaning that is relevant to modern times is suggested in a novel by Gerda Charles (the pseudonym of Edna Lipson, 1914–96), The Crossing Point (1960). The familiar vacuous materialism of the Jewish home in north-west London is ugly and tasteless. The picture of dreary reality in the thinly disguised Hampstead Garden Suburb and Golders Green depicts mercantile considerations in all affairs and above all in matchmaking. The snobbish, portly Jews who drive to synagogue and park their cars round the corner on the Sabbath so as to hide their desecration of the day of rest are conservative and narrow-minded, mix English with Yiddishisms and, though not uneducated, cannot understand why not all their daughters want to marry a ‘nice Jewish boy’ and live happily ever after. Essie Gabriel, like Esther Ansell in Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892), revolts against the exacting rules of Judaism when she realises how hateful to her are the long Sabbath afternoons that exemplify the shallowness and isolation of her Jewish family life. After her father ruins her chance of marriage to someone without prospects, she befriends non-Jewish students at the evening college she attends and absents herself from the ritual Friday night dinner, sacred even to many assimilated British Jews. The fanatical, deluded Mr Gabriel is furious at his daughter’s ingratitude for her education and parental love. But his fury (like Mr Frieman’s in The Bankrupts) merely covers up his own failure and impotence. Yet when Essie elopes with a non-Jew, she falls for her lover’s faking of the social status symbols (a smart car and posh accent) that represent the values she rejected; however, she goes through with marriage after she discovers the deceit because she has no other hope of happiness and escape from her bullying father and the Jewish home. Nor, despite the lack of social skills that results from her upbringing, does Essie fail to notice the limitations of the genteel English lower middle-class men and women or the staid atmosphere at the college Christmas party, which she compares unfavourably with her warm, lavish home. She instinctively feels alien and set apart by the economic and social status that her comfortable Jewish upbringing has conferred on her. Excited by the freedom and fun of the outside world, she nevertheless is restrained by guilt for her disloyalty to the Jewish community. Rabbi Leo Norberg represents modern orthodox Judaism’s potential for vitality and change, but (unlike Leon Raphael in Children of the Ghetto) he cannot carry through his

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ideals: he remains the minister of a well-to-do congregation and his marriage partner is a second choice. Of course, north-west London Jews are no more narrow-minded than their English neighbours, but Jews are supposed to live up to a higher moral standard, and Rabbi Norberg is an example of a prophet in his own country, ignored in the general superficiality which Charles, through her novels, calls upon us to see and react against (interview in Coleman 1971: 11). Explaining why Judaism is the perfect medium between the human and the divine, why it is more perfect than the Greek ideal of beauty or Christianity’s demand that mankind go beyond the natural limits of this world in order to connect with the divine, Leo exclaims that Judaism is ‘the crossing point between the world and God. Only we possess this wise and tender balance, this joyous realism, this marvellous sense in the use of life’ (Charles 1960: 123; italics in the original). Unfortunately, Leo, like several other characters in Charles’s novels, is misplaced both in society and in love. Charles published her first novel, The True Voice, in 1959, the story of a 39-year-old woman vainly searching for love that brings fulfilment and that is not compromised by sexual transactions. The intelligent lower middle-class young woman relating her attitudes towards sexuality and asserting her femininity admits she has a ‘weakness’ for Jews, just as she has for blacks, attracted by their dark complexion. This is why, Ruth says, she likes (but is not attracted to) the American playwright Bernard Zold, who gives her a chance to start over again as housekeeper in St John’s Wood after she flees from an unhappy marriage in a dreary Liverpool suburb. Here and elsewhere in her novels, Charles presents Jews from the perspective of provincial young English women in search of respect for their intellect and in need of understanding. They see Jews as exotic and (like Americans, with whom they are often associated) fun-loving, open-minded intellectuals. But the Jew also appears as a scapegoat for revenge and release from emotional distress, in the sense that Ruth calls her estranged husband her ‘Jew’. Strangely, the epithet is literalised in Hugo Lee, né Harvey Levy, a surrogate of her abandoned lover and therefore the object of her disapproval and disgust, but also the object of her desire and admiration (though she becomes disillusioned and bored by him). She takes his Jewishness to be the persistently misunderstood ‘role of the Jew . . . to exemplify the suffering, the humane, the pacific, the enduring, the compassionate strands in the composite human nature of society’ (Charles 1959: 249). When his guests turn on Zold and viciously tear his play to pieces, Ruth thinks she understands the concentration camps and the hatred provoked by the patience of the Jews forced by the Nazis to scrub the streets (283). However, despite seeking goodness, she too is guilty of petty retribution and using others. A Logical Girl (1966) exemplifies how writing that is ostensibly unconnected with Jewish themes addresses antisemitism and Jewish history. Rosie Morgan, an innocent young English woman living in a small seaside town during the Second World War, slowly emerges into sexual and emotional maturity with the realisation of the complex power relations around her in which she is the ‘Jew’. Her developing moral sensibility alerts her to the goodness and justice missing in her relations with her family and those around her, and she awakens to empathy with Jewish refugees who have passed through her family’s hotel in flight from Hitler. Later, she forms a relationship with Stefan, a foreign soldier from Czechoslovakia, who has lost all his relations in Nazi-occupied Europe. Only when Rosie feels what it is like to be a guest in someone else’s home does she begin to understand the meaning of being human and being morally responsible. Thinking of the visiting American GI Benjy’s adultery with her sister-in-law, she invokes the Nazi treatment of the Jews as a limit case of ethical conduct that makes forgiveness as culpable as cruelty itself, more or



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less a betrayal of the victims. Her inexperience and the inhibitions of both upbringing and class delay the revelation of the true nature of intimacy, which dims her naive expectations of happiness. This new awareness of the pleasure-seeking amorality around her is facilitated in part by her identification with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and by her own metaphorical status of ‘Jew’ in family conflicts. When Stefan reveals that he was previously married to an Austrian refugee in Mandate Palestine, Rosie is disappointed to find that she is not relevant to his suffering, which offered her the only hope of involvement in the life of someone she did not love. For the greatest injustice (greater, she thinks, than political or economic inequity) seems to be the experience of not loving or being loved. Life offers its lesson that sex traps women in a situation which deprives them of dignity and liberty, and the novel closes with Rosie rejecting Stefan’s marriage proposal, which he makes because he thinks of her as a ‘nice girl’; she does not want to be paired off into a tidy arrangement in suburbia. Something of the frustration felt by Jewish writers and artists in postwar Britain is expressed in another novel by Charles, The Destiny Waltz (1971), which was inspired by the life of the poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the trenches of the First World War. The ageing musician Jimmy Marchant is approached by a Europeanised intellectual of Jewish descent to share his recollections of Paul Salomon, a talented artist from the East End, for a television documentary. In the course of making the film, Jimmy forms a close relationship with Michele Sandberg, a rabbi’s daughter who broke with her Jewish family and lived with a married man. The revelations and confidences that emerge reflect the social humiliation and grievances of wasted live and sad misalliances. However, any expression of injuries and grievances goes unheard by the Jewish community.

Elected Members A further dimension of the unhealthy effects of the close-knit Jewish family can be seen in Bernice Rubens’ Booker Prize winning novel, The Elected Member (1969; US title, Chosen People). Rubens (1928–2004) grew up in Wales during the Depression and became a teacher, then a novelist and screenwriter after the war. She deals in her fiction with emotional and psychological disability, often the result of family tensions and childhood guilt. The Anglo-Jewish home offers a paradigm in Rubens’ first novel, Set on Edge (1960), about an overgrown child, Gladys Sperber, who marries at the age of 60 but whose husband dies on their honeymoon. The matriarch of the family, Gladys’s mother, Mrs Sperber, invests all her despair and bitterness in getting back at her own children who have disappointed her hopes that they would find wealthy matches who would help the family out of their poverty. Her daughter Gladys bears the brunt of the family’s apportioning of vicarious guilt, but she never really frees herself from the mother who could not let go. ‘Everything that happens in a family is more so in a Jewish family’, Rubens once said (qtd in Watts 2004), and we can see similar conflicts in I Sent a Letter to My Love (1975), a Welsh counterpart to Set on Edge, or Autobiopsy (1996), where the narrator Martin literally sucks out family secrets from the brain of Walter Berry, a famous novelist, on his deathbed. An unloved child, Walter discovers the primal scene of his father’s adultery, but is made to suffer for divulging this secret. Rubens’ later novels continue to explore the psychodynamics of manipulation and exploitation, the lies and secrets in bizarre human behaviour and (based on her own experience) failed marriage (Mate in Three, 1965; Go Tell the Lemming, 1973).

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In The Elected Member, Rubens describes the effects on his family of Norman Zweck’s mental breakdown and his overdependence on his dead mother. Rabbi Zweck’s shame and anger at his inability to break his son’s drug addiction, as well as the inner workings of Norman’s disturbed mind, reveal the secrets and tortures of possessive love which have condemned Norman and his spinster sister Bella to a vicious cycle of blame and guilt. Norman has inherited his mother’s double bedroom, where he acts out his Oedipal complex on his father’s side of the bed. David Brauner has credited Rubens with discovering the Portnoy complex even before Philip Roth in her 1962 novel Madame Sousatzka, where the child prodigy is emotionally and psychologically murdered by the stereotypical Jewish mother and an equally possessive music teacher (Brauner 2006: 98), though the Yiddishe mama may go back to the biblical Sarah and, as Harold Fisch suggested, to Mrs Morel in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). In any case, Roth focuses on Alex Portnoy’s sexual appetites, whereas Rubens is more concerned with the twisted logic of the parent’s emotional hold on the child, as well as the child’s on the parent. Norman is (like Marcus in Madame Sousatzka) a prodigy, but turned into Gregor Samsa in an updated version of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (Brauner 2006: 99). He is the family’s scapegoat who inverts the Jewish family’s pride (nakhas) in his success as a lawyer into the terror of his shameful failure, terrorising his father and arresting his sister Bella’s sexual development. She, too, is trapped, an emotional cripple who will never grow out of ankle socks. She blames another sister, Esther, for opting out of the responsibility for the family by marrying out of her faith and causing them all pain and trouble. The truth, however, is that Norman is the one guilty of breaking his sister’s relationship with his friend David, who then committed suicide. The silver fish that plague Norman may be the result of his hallucinations, but all the members of this dysfunctional family have fallen victim to their own delusions and self-deceptions. The psychology of disablement is explored further in Spring Sonata: A Fable (1979). This time the child prodigy musician overhears the heated in-fighting of the Jewish family in the womb and decides he wants nothing to do with this constant emotional blackmail and distress. He initially chooses silence over having his voice taken away from him and used to boost his parents’ pride (as well as to fill their pockets), but is then tricked into performing in the uterus (on a violin that has somehow mysteriously slipped in). His refusal to be born delivers a reproach to his over-expectant mother and protests against the crippling hereditary stranglehold of the Jewish family, its bourgeois values and the exploitation of its progeny. In cutting the umbilical cord, the prenatal Wunderkind violinist vindictively breaks his mother’s heart, literally killing her hopes in him.

The Holocaust and its Aftermath The prize-winning screenplay writer and novelist Frederic Raphael (b. Chicago, 1931), remains true to the story of generational disaffection and disillusion in The Earlsdon Way (1958), a study of a suffocating suburban English family whose daughter Karen breaks out of her shell in an adulterous relationship with a celebrity in the publishing world. The humdrum tranquillity of middle-class suburbia in Finchley is disturbed when a Jewish family, the Epsteins, move in; scandal and the discovery of fraud disturb the complacent conformism of the ‘Earlsdon Way’, and everyday relationships are exposed as a sham. The novel was turned down by one publisher because its depiction of the antisemitic prejudices and racism of the Model Boat Club was felt to be too caustic.



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In The Limits of Love (1960), what threatens the north-west London Jewish family is the spectre of the past that they do not want to think about: the six million dead of the Holocaust. They do not wish to hear what a long-lost relative, Otto Kahane, has to tell them of his suffering in Dachau. The Adlers are doing well after the war (profiting, as Jews were rumoured to be doing, out of the war, especially on the black market) and resent having their new-found wealth and security disturbed with questions of identity and freedom. Their daughter, Julia, busy reading Livy for her private school, thinks the move to the Finchley side of Golders Green should have put Judaism and the Jewish family behind them and cannot understand why weeds from the past should be transplanted into their new English garden. Another daughter, Susan, has turned her back on the artificial fire and pre-lunch sherry of the Jewish nouveaux riches by marrying a Jewish communist from the East End, yet she can only pay lip-service to Marxism out of allegiance to the bourgeois institution of marriage, while her husband stays in the Party after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. The language of the radicals after the war sounds as false as the pleasantries of assimilated Jews in north-west London. Mr Adler’s son Colin moves to Wimbledon, joins a golf club and tries not to think about his Jewish origins or to overhear antisemitic remarks, for example when Jewish terrorists commit atrocities in Palestine. Only at the end of the novel does Colin have a chance to realise an ideal, of designing a building for a renewed Jewish life not in the dying East End, but in Israel; however, the Suez crisis puts paid to that dream. Julia’s husband, Paul Riesmann, acts out a similar pattern of Jewish disassociation and identification. Paul grows up in centrally heated aridity and conformity with middle-class Anglicanism without roots in anything. Once exposed to antisemitism, however, Paul finds he has no language to express his anguish; and his monstrous self-image, the ‘Jewy truth’ within him, condemns him to impotence. He is appalled when a classmate, Marino, is stigmatised as a ‘Jew’, as the perennial outsider and bed-wetter, and he fears lest his own identity is discovered, though he is also relieved that he has a decoy. Paul works hard (as a Jew must) to show he is not a Jew, that he is one of the boys, who can take punishment and suffer bravely. Through Paul’s inner voice Raphael reveals a paradox about self-hating Jews: Behind his face of conformity, Paul worked feverishly to destroy the truth before it came out, as if by the time they realized he was a Jew he could, by good works, be one no longer. He cut pieces out of the paper which mentioned black market dealings by people with Jewish sounding names: he wanted to destroy the Jews so that no one would ever speak of them again. He covered up feverishly. (Raphael 1960: 172) He determines to write the Jewishness out of him in a satirical novel, and finds a language to do so at Cambridge, where his studies in moral philosophy expose him to the influence of Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). But logical positivism does not solve the problem of Jewish identity when Paul meets a non-Jewish woman he wants to marry. He begins to think of Jewishness as a disease, as incurable as being an artist. This diaspora dis-ease with Jewishness, familiar from Kafka’s alienation from self, makes Paul self-conscious in his desire to get back at his upbringing through success and fame. The thought of Bergen-Belsen incenses him. But he has neither the courage nor the words to do anything about it. His freedom is curbed by marriage and suburban life, and he discovers the limits of love of the novel’s title.

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Echoing George Steiner’s sense of his postwar identity as a ‘kind of survivor’ (Steiner 1967), Raphael confesses: [T]he Final Solution . . . lies always at the back of my mind even if I myself, as a child growing up in England, suffered nothing more than its bad breath blowing in my face from across the Channel. It may be an indulgence for anyone who did not have closer experience to claim personal acquaintance with the Holocaust; it is equally frivolous to ignore it. (Raphael qtd in Sicher 1985: 131) This is, no doubt, why Adam Morris, the hero of The Glittering Prizes (1976), carries in his pocket the famous picture of the Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto holding his hands up. At Cambridge, Adam protests about the antisemitism of a high-ranking visiting preacher, but he is mainly interested in sex and, after rebelling against the token observance of traditions by his Anglo-Jewish parents, he settles down to a happy marriage and suburban prosperity. Cambridge in the 1950s stands for the general position of sceptical neutrality, unlike the following generation of the student revolts. Nevertheless, Adam plays the typical role of the Jew as catalyst and victim, symbolic of the ‘double life’ in the title of the novel he writes, faithful to his conscience and his non-Jewish wife, yet tempted by the pleasures that wreck the lives of others; he does not consciously identify as a Jew or a gentile, yet he has his son circumcised. Adam feels guilty for being alive and happy, though one chamber of Bluebeard’s castle is firmly locked; he feels guilty for being ‘a kind of survivor’ when six million died. This sense of identity informs Raphael’s own conclusion, in a public lecture, that genocide has clarified the Jews’ true position as universal outsiders who are marginal in Europe, whose postwar recovery is built over the bodies of the victims of genocide (Raphael 1989b). In After the War (1988), Raphael reworks the theme of growing up in the shadow of the Second World War and Nazi genocide. At his private school, which has been evacuated to a coastal hotel, Michael Jordan, from an Anglicised Jewish family, makes friends with Joe Hirsch, the son of Jewish refugees, and betrays his English schoolmates to save him from expulsion for a crime he did not commit. His father, a leading barrister, works for a while for the Control Commission in occupied Germany and later takes on a de-Nazification case, in which he is cynically used to serve American interests. Yet despite what he has seen in Europe, he is steadfast in his loyalty to Britain and will not have anything to do with efforts to raise money for the Jewish struggle against the British in Palestine, although his daughter assists the illegal smuggling of child survivors out of Europe. After the war, Michael attends a memorial service for Holocaust victims and becomes dimly aware amid the incomprehensible prayers that an unspoken truth ‘marked us for the survivors of a calamity we could neither remember nor forget’ (Raphael 1989a: 57). The question of his own position does not come up until Michael meets up with Joe Hirsch in Paris after graduating from Cambridge. A chance encounter with Pierrette, a young French Jewish woman, opens his eyes to the choices people had to make during the war in order to survive, forcing him to detest English hypocrisy and regret his safe little world with its double talk and duplicity. But he cannot make the commitment to what his parents’ American friend Bud Nathanson sees as a historical necessity after the world’s abandonment of the Jews. His attempt to blow the gaff on the Suez affair is buried by his newspaper, and he also becomes disenchanted with the world of the theatre. Joe accuses him of envying the victims their suffering in the camps, but at the end of the novel gives him the opportunity to redeem his father’s failure to nail a Nazi and make a commitment as a Jew when Israel is in danger on



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the eve of the Six Day War. Michael’s feeble attempt at solidarity is, however, overtaken by Israeli victory. The conversation in the novel is scintillating, the wordplay brilliant and the moral issues very real. Nevertheless, Raphael shows that, caught in his own faithlessness, Michael can only hope for a new beginning on an isolated Greek island far away from England, where opportunistic men and women greedy for sex are busy acting out their lives. Michael is haunted by Pierrette’s story, which inhabits his literary imagination and his erotic fantasies, and the shadow of the Holocaust cannot be easily exorcised. The Holocaust gives the lie to assimilation as the solution to the Jew’s alien identity. Language does not help uncover the truth about identity, or for that matter about moral responsibility. In Raphael’s Lindmann (1963), this is a question which troubles a British civil servant responsible for the order which leads to the sinking of a boatload of Jewish refugees trying to escape from Nazi Europe and reach Palestine, similar to the Struma incident in February 1942. In a study of the disintegration of personality imitative of T. S. Eliot, but in rebuttal of his hostile image of the ‘jew’ in Gerontion (1920), Raphael shows how this young Englishman takes on the identity of a survivor from the sinking boat, Jacob Lindmann, until he is forced to face the fiction of his identity when a young Jewish friend writes a film script about the sinking of the boat and he is asked to make a contribution to the Zionist cause. Lindmann is one of a number of novels published in the wake of the Eichmann trial and following Arendt’s report on the banality of evil, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which probe the question of guilt both for the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust and the world’s indifference to their fate. In fact, the payment of German restitutions had already made Jewish writers consider whether things could be the same again after Auschwitz. Making Good Again (1968), a novel by award-winning popular author Lionel Davidson (1922–2009), the son of impoverished Jewish immigrants, takes its title from the literal translation of the German term for the controversial restitution payments made to Holocaust survivors, Wiedergutmachung. In Davidson’s thriller, an English lawyer discovers all the ambiguities of the phrase in his own life and in his mission to Germany on behalf of a client in a reparations case. Davidson ends his story with the possibility of a personal ‘making good again’ as the ex-Nazi Haffner is reconciled with his wife. But for the Jewish characters there can be no forgetting the past, only a remembering that makes it possible to go on with dignity, as does old Grunwald, the Jewish lawyer who preserves his pride and wisdom without illusions, even when abused and battered. In The Lost Europeans (1958), Litvinoff also imagined what it was like to go back to Berlin after the war. The son of a formerly wealthy banker, Martin Stone, who came to England as a refugee and was educated there, cannot make peace with Germany and feels hostile to everything he sees when he visits Berlin. He cannot dismiss the spectres of murdered relatives or family members pushed into suicide. The memories of Kristallnacht ended his childhood innocence. Compensation for lost family assets does not bring reconciliation, yet, despite his disgust for the German Jews, such as his uncle Hugo, who hungrily devour Berlin’s hedonistic lifestyle as if there is no tomorrow, he succumbs to his lonely misery and picks up an East German woman, Karin, who has been gang raped by Russian soldiers. They fall in love, as if passion and pity could erase their traumatic stories, but the ensuing scandal leads to the death of Martin’s neighbour, a Holocaust survivor, in his Berlin lodgings and Martin has to search his conscience. He finally realises that he could not bring Karin home to his bitter, bereaved father in Swiss Cottage or introduce her to German Jewish refugees. Even if Aryan women had saved their Jewish husbands and Jews

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were marrying German women, she could not pass in Golders Green. Hugo Krantz’s own attempt to work through the past is no less tormented, and a search for his former lover, an SS officer thought killed in the Soviet liberation of Budapest, gets him into trouble. There is no healing, yet Germany maintains its corrupting, seductive grip on the survivors and refugees. Rudolf Nassauer (1924–96) was born in Frankfurt and, like the fictional Martin Stone, came to England, where he was educated, after Kristallnacht. Nassauer married Bernice Rubens in 1947, and the couple befriended a number of European émigrés in the intellectual circles of Hampstead, among them Elias Canetti. Nassauer’s study of the mind of a perpetrator, The Hooligan (1960), became a cult novel. In his novel Reparations (1981), Nassauer exacts literary and moral reparations by describing wealthy Jewish bankers in Frankfurt from their dispossession under the Nazis to their heirs’ vengeful dispossession of the Germans after the war in property rackets and in Machiavellian funding of the BaaderMeinhof gang. Tobias, like the author a German Jewish refugee who grew up in England, comes to understand his own origins and identity with the revelations of Bergen-Belsen after the war. His violent rage derives from both a thirst for retribution and a sadomasochistic longing that dates back to the foreboding of Nazi terror from 1931 onward, when the family watched with fascination the cruelty of which they themselves were the victims. England has nothing to hold him, and he breaks with his wife to be sucked up by Germany. The battle for reparations is a merciless demand for restitution of the Jews’ prewar social standing and for the recovery of a Proustian lost time (another kind of restitution). Only when they feel they have sufficiently exorcised the past do Tobias and his cousin Julius leave Germany. Coming to terms with the past in these novels entails working through personal guilt, and Jewish identity weighs heavily as an inescapable existential fact. Even those who did not personally experience the Holocaust know that the same could have happened in Britain had the Nazi plans for invasion succeeded; prejudice and racism lie just beneath the surface, even in middle-class suburbia (as Litvinoff shows in The Man Next Door, 1968).

The Jewish Family Romance after the End of the Jewish Family The postwar Anglo-Jewish novel continued a long-standing tradition of the Jewish family saga which is generally critical of the community and Judaism, but it increasingly turned back to the persistence of antisemitism and proposed survival as the raison d’être of the diaspora (Bermant’s The Patriarch, 1981; Rubens’ Brothers, 1983); this was also reflected in a renewed interest in Jewish history, as in Rubens’ discovery of the Dönmeh, the secret Jews of Turkey, descendants of the seventeenth-century false messiah Shabtai Zvi, who tell his story in Kingdom Come (1989), or Elaine Feinstein’s novel about Shabtai Zvi, The Shadow Master (1978). Antisemitism determined the existence and identity of the closet or unaffiliated Jew, as Rubens suggests in a fantasised re-enactment of the Dreyfus affair in contemporary Britain in I, Dreyfus (1999). Postwar Anglo-Jewish novelists were uneasily ambivalent about Israel, and rarely dealt directly with events in the Middle East, exceptions being Lionel Davidson’s A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) and The Sun Chemist (1976), and Bernice Rubens’ The Sergeant’s Tale (2003), based on the Irgun’s hanging of two British sergeants in 1947 in retaliation for the execution of Jewish terrorists (though Rubens turns the episode into a parable of a secret Jew’s conflicting emotions and divided loyalties).



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In the absence of a strong Jewish readership, the postwar Anglo-Jewish novelists of the ‘new wave’ were judged on their merits by the British literary and intellectual establishment of their day. They were no longer marginal writers, but they remained on the edge of the Jewish community or distant from it. In contrast to the confidence after the Second World War, expressed stridently in William Goldman’s collection ‘. . . In England and in English’ (1947), the enormity of the destruction of European Jewry came to matter not just as a reminder that it could happen here, in England (something that Paul frets about in The Limits of Love), but also as a memory of Jewish culture and cultural identity that has to be preserved. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Britain’s integration into Europe and the fading of English insularity into multiculturalism, it was no longer embarrassing or problematic to do the ‘Jewish’ thing. One could, as Raphael does in the conclusion to his memoir A Spoilt Boy (2003), breathe easily with a transatlantic pedigree and an Oxbridge degree, defiantly Jewish but ignorant of Judaism, exploring in fiction all possibilities and professing different beliefs or none. In the last two instalments of the trilogy which began with The Glittering Prizes, Fame and Fortune (2007) and Final Demands (2010), Raphael’s fictional alter ego, the successful novelist Adam Morris, nevertheless remains fundamentally equivocal about his Jewishness. The disintegrating Jewish family received its mourning rites in Rubens’ Set on Edge and Spring Sonata, as well as in Bermant’s The Last Supper (1973). A movie, Suzie Gold (2004), also rehearsed the plot of the young woman rebelling against the north-west London Jewish family through a liaison with a gentile. However, in The Innocents (2012), Francesca Segal showed that the constraining bounds of Jewish north-west London could provide a comforting lifebelt for a new generation tempted by hedonism and intermarriage. Based on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), Segal’s debut novel pits a nice Jewish boy engaged to his childhood sweetheart, a nice Jewish girl from Hampstead, against the seductions of his fiancée’s cousin, a model thrown out of Columbia University who is the subject of gossip and disgrace. Not that the community is religious; indeed, after the sexual revolution, the Jewish family tends towards tolerance and liberality. But far stronger than conformism, the force of communal censure preserves and guards family, tradition and love.

14 JEWISH ÉMIGRÉ AND REFUGEE WRITERS IN BRITAIN David Herman

Introduction

I

n 1960 Brian Glanville wrote an essay on ‘The Anglo-Jewish Writer’ in Encounter. What was striking about the new generation of Anglo-Jewish writers, he argued, was ‘their scarcity, and their relative lack of distinction’. There was something else: ‘They don’t, on the whole, write about English Jews’ (1960: 62). Glanville went on to contrast the state of Anglo-Jewish writing with the new wave of American Jewish writers emerging in the late 1950s, arguing that in all these ways Anglo-Jewish writers fell behind their American counterparts. There is one curious oversight in Glanville’s essay. All the Anglo-Jewish writers he mentions – Wolf Mankowitz, Peter Shaffer, Louis Golding, Gerald Kersh, Willy Goldman, Alexander Baron and Marghanita Laski – were born in Britain. More particularly, they were born between the 1890s and the 1920s. They were born, in other words, before the wave of Jewish refugees and émigrés who transformed British culture in the mid-twentieth century. This extraordinary generation included a number of major European Jewish writers: Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig, Emeric Pressburger, Arthur Koestler, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and many more. These were joined, after the Second World War, by two more groups, some born in Europe (including George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Tom Stoppard, George Gömöri, George Szirtes, Janina Bauman, Judith Kerr and Eva Hoffman) and others born outside Europe (Dan Jacobson, Ronald Harwood and Antony Sher, born in South Africa, Frederic Raphael and Ruth Fainlight, born in the United States, and Moris Farhi, born in Turkey). Two things are immediately apparent from this list. First, the quality of these writers. Their achievements dwarfed those of their British-born contemporaries. They included a Nobel Prize winner in Canetti, a Booker Prize winner in Prawer Jhabvala, and Academy Award winners like Prawer Jhabvala, Raphael, Stoppard and Harwood.1 Stefan Zweig was at one point ‘the most translated writer in the world’ (Zweig 2009: 346), Judith Kerr’s books have sold over five million copies and Arthur Koestler, for many years a household name, is best known for Darkness at Noon, which in the 1990s was ranked by a distinguished panel of writers and intellectuals as the eighth best novel of the twentieth century (Cesarani 1998: vii).



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Secondly, they are impossible to categorise as a group. As writers they include playwrights like Harwood and Stoppard; screenwriters like Pressburger, Lukas Heller, Prawer Jhabvala, Lajos Biro and George Tabori; poets like Szirtes, Gömöri, Max HerrmannNeisse, Itzik Manger and Karen Gershon; novelists like Dan Jacobson, Frederic Raphael and Eva Figes; essayists and writer-critics like Koestler, Steiner and Josipovici. Many came to Britain as refugees in the 1930s but others came in the 1950s and later. Janina Bauman did not arrive in Britain until 1971 and Eva Hoffman not until 1993. Some came as children and wrote famous accounts of a child’s experience of exile, like Judith Kerr, others as students and many more as adults. Most stayed but some moved on. Stefan Zweig arrived in London in 1934 but left for New York in 1940 and died in Brazil in 1942. Itzik Manger came in 1940 but left for New York (and later Israel) in 1951. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala came as a child, but left for India in 1951 and then moved on to New York in 1975. Lukas Heller and George Tabori both went on to successful screenwriting careers in Hollywood. Some like Pressburger and Koestler left but then returned. Even as Jews they were different, though the vast majority were secular rather than religious. Dan Jacobson first came to Britain to be a teacher at a Jewish school in London. Within less than a year he was asked to leave, according to his autobiography, because ‘parents had complained’ that his teaching was in breach of the tenets of orthodox Judaism and he was consequently dismissed (Jacobson 1985: 114–15). A. N. Stencl and Itzik Manger were both Yiddish poets from eastern Europe. Josipovici and Farhi were brought up in the Middle East, Josipovici in postwar Egypt and Farhi in Turkey. Stoppard, Pressburger and Prawer Jhabvala, by contrast, are hardly thought of as Jewish writers at all and all found fame creating unforgettably English characters like Clive Candy (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943), Squadron Leader Peter David Carter (A Matter of Life and Death, 1946), Thomasina and Septimus in Arcadia (1993) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1966). And perhaps the biggest difference of all: some found fame and recognition as writers; Stoppard was knighted and awarded the Order of Merit. Others were less successful, their careers haunted by failure. They never learned to write in English or came too late to start again. The German poet Max Herrmann-Neisse was already in his late forties when he landed at Dover on 19 September 1933. ‘[H]ere it is a quite different world,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘an unfamiliar, closed world, with absolutely no connection to mine’ (qtd in Dove 2000: 75). His work was unknown in Britain and has never been translated into English. Alfred Kerr was one of the great theatre critics and essayists of Weimar Germany but he was almost 70 when he came to Britain, too late to start a new career in a foreign language. His daughter, Judith, later remembered him ‘in his poky room with his typewriter that kept going wrong and his writings that no one wanted to publish, in a country whose language he did not speak’ (Kerr 1995: 561). As a rule, the younger they came, the more quickly (and fluently) they learned English. The older they were, the harder it was to rebuild broken careers. Certain key factors recur which kept some marginalised. First, crucially, there was the question of language. It is no coincidence that Jewish writers who came from Englishspeaking countries such as South Africa and the United States were more likely to succeed in Britain. For those from the Continent it was a harder struggle. Some, like Alfred Kerr and Max Herrmann-Neisse, failed to learn English. Erich Fried, an Austrian poet born in Vienna, always wrote in German and remained little known in Britain despite living there for fifty years. Others, like the poets A. N. Stencl and Itzik Manger, wrote only in

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Yiddish. They were rarely translated and, if they were, it was in small literary magazines like The Jewish Quarterly, which from its beginning in 1953 championed Yiddish poetry. ‘I am doomed to remain a Yiddish scribe!’, Manger used to say. ‘No one is as lonely as a Yiddish poet’ (qtd in Herman 1975: 89). Women writers found it harder to gain recognition. Many, like Gabriele Tergit, Janina Bauman, Ida Ibbotson, Anna Gmeyner, Veza Canetti, Lotte Kramer, Karen Gershon and Gerda Mayer, struggled to enter the mainstream. Some, like Bauman and Gmeyner, were later rediscovered by small independent publishers. Others, like Canetti, Bauman and initially Kerr, were overshadowed by their better-known husbands. Geography too played a part. East European writers found it harder to make a name for themselves, especially during the Cold War: Manger from Bukovina, the Czech poet Mayer, Bauman and Stencl from Poland, Hungarians like Gömöri, Szirtes and Tabori. British literary culture has always had a hierarchy, with the great powers France, Germany, Russia and America at the top; the smaller the country, the further east, the harder it was to be taken seriously. Since 1989 central and eastern European literature has emerged from the deep freeze of the Cold War. This was too late for many of the Jewish refugee writers of the mid-twentieth century. Poets fared less well than novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. Gömöri, Gershon, Theodor Kramer, Herrmann-Neisse, Lotte Kramer, Mayer, Manger and Stencl – all are barely known. With the exceptions of George Szirtes, Michael Hamburger and Ruth Fainlight, this group of poets never found a place in British literary culture. Theodor Kramer, an Austrian poet, came to Britain in 1939, already in his forties, and worked as a college librarian in Guildford before returning to Vienna in 1957. He died there the following year. Kurt Schwitters, best known for his art, was also a poet. He lived in almost total obscurity in the Lake District for the last years of his life. Those who passed through or did not stay made little impact. Lukas Heller is well known in the United States for his Hollywood screenplays (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962; Hush . . . Hush Sweet Charlotte, 1965; The Dirty Dozen, 1967), but in Britain is now perhaps best known as the father of the novelist Zoe Heller. Ernst Toller and Stefan Zweig were in Britain only briefly before crossing the Atlantic and committing suicide. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was barely in Britain for a decade before leaving for India and then New York. She is best known for writing the Merchant–Ivory films, beautiful evocations of Englishness, rather than as a Jewish writer. Itzik Manger left for New York in 1951, leaving barely a trace. Many Jewish refugee writers were not only displaced and forced to write in a new language but lost loved ones during the Second World War. Janina Bauman’s father and uncle were both killed by Soviet troops in the Katyn massacre, her great-aunt Eugenia from Berlin died in a German concentration camp before the war and her great-aunt Bella starved to death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her uncle Stefan died and her grandmother Viera disappeared in the Warsaw Uprising. George Clare’s parents both died at Auschwitz. The grandparents of the German novelist Eva Figes were murdered by the Nazis. Erich Fried’s father was tortured by the Nazis and died from his injuries. The parents of the poet Karen Gershon died in a Nazi camp in Riga. She only learned of their deaths after the war. ‘It was’, according to her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘a blow from which she never recovered’ (Rothenberg 2010). The father of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala committed suicide in 1948 after hearing of the death of over forty friends and relatives in the camps. Arthur Koestler’s uncle Otto drowned himself ‘when the reign of Hitler became



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intolerable’ (Koestler 1952: 28); aunt Rose, his mother’s sister, Rose’s daughter, cousin Margit, and Margit’s children Kaetie and Georgy were all killed at Auschwitz. All four of Tom Stoppard’s grandparents and three aunts died in the Holocaust and his father died when the ship in which he was escaping from Singapore was bombed by the Japanese. Thomas Wiseman’s father died at Buchenwald. Some managed to flourish despite such loss, others never escaped these shadows. In her childhood memoir, Judith Kerr recalls seeing a figure in the doorway: The figure at the door was old and quite bald and there was a curious lopsided look about the head which had a scar running down one side. It [sic] was dressed in a kind of shift and as Anna looked at it, it moved one hand in a vague gesture of silence or farewell. Like a ghost, thought Anna, but the eyes that stared back at her were human. (1995: 444–5) Uncle Victor, the reader has already been told, had survived a German concentration camp. He is one of the many ghostly figures who haunt the Jewish refugee writers. Then there were those who achieved fame and recognition in Britain but then declined and were almost forgotten. Emeric Pressburger, famous for his collaboration with director Michael Powell, and the writer Stefan Zweig were both well known in their heyday and then lapsed into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in recent years. Arthur Koestler, whose masterpiece Darkness at Noon sold more than half a million copies in France in two years after the war, is now increasingly regarded as a Cold War dinosaur or, worse, as a serial abuser of women (Cesarani 1998: 551–65). Few won early fame and continued to receive acclaim throughout their careers.

Four Generations of Émigrés and Refugees There were four generations of Jewish émigré and refugee writers. The first generation includes those born between the late nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. The oldest were Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), Lajos Biro (1880–1948), Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Max Herrmann-Neisse (1886–1941). It is worth noting that two failed to make any impression in Britain and died during the 1940s, and Zweig committed suicide during the war. Only Biro had a long, sustained career in Britain, from 1932 when he arrived from Hollywood until his death in 1948, during which he was a screenwriter, head of the script department and executive director of Alexander Korda’s London Films. Then there were a number of slightly younger central and eastern European writers born in the 1890s, including the German-born writers Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982) and Richard Friedenthal (1896–1979), the Yiddish poet A. N. Stencl (1897–1983) and the Austrian writers Veza Canetti (1897–1963) and Theodor Kramer (1897–1958). Others born before the First World War include the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger, born in Czernowitz (1901–69); the German writer Fred Uhlman (1901–85); the Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger (1902–88); the Austrian writers Anna Gmeyner (1902–91) and Hilde Spiel (1911–90); Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest (1905–83); Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria (1905–94), who had come to Manchester as a child in 1911, but then returned to Europe following his father’s death in 1913, and returned as a refugee in January 1939; the Jewish Hungarian playwright and theatre director George Tabori (1914–2007); and the literary journalists Miron Grindea (1909–85), who in 1941 founded the long-lasting literary journal Adam International Review (1941–85), and Jacob Sonntag (1905–84), the founding

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editor of The Jewish Quarterly (1953– ). Both Grindea and Sonntag were from eastern Europe: Grindea from Romania, Sonntag from Bukovina, in what is now the Ukraine. These writers came to Britain in their late twenties, thirties and forties, many of them already well-established literary figures, and it is hardly surprising that this generation includes some of the biggest names of the great Jewish literary exodus. Many were already well known when they arrived. Stefan Zweig was at the height of his career when he first settled in London in 1934 (he left Salzburg for good in 1937). His biography Joseph Fouché: Bildnis eines politischen Menschen (1929) sold 50,000 copies in a year. Marie Antoinette: Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters (1932) was the best-selling Christmas title in Germany in 1932 and sold 50,000 copies by January 1933. Arthur Koestler came to Britain in November 1940. Two books of his had already appeared in English: Spanish Testament (1937), published by the Left Book Club, his account of his experiences in Spain during the Civil War, and his first novel, The Gladiators (1939). Soon after he arrived Darkness at Noon appeared, and in 1941 he wrote his first work in English, Scum of the Earth, his account of the fall of France and his time in a French concentration camp. By the end of 1941 Koestler had already written two major works of reportage and two novels. He quickly laid the foundations for a substantial literary career in Britain. Like Koestler, Emeric Pressburger had left his native Hungary for Germany and then France before coming to Britain in 1935. In Berlin he had already written or co-written nine films and he worked on five more films in Paris. Nevertheless, despite this experience, ‘it was harder than he had anticipated to gain a foothold in British cinema, and it was almost two years before he gained his first British screen credit’ (MacDonald 1994: 122). But in 1938, soon after his first British screenplay, he met the producer Alexander Korda and the British film director Michael Powell. In 1939 he and Powell made their first film together, the beginning of an extraordinary collaboration which included masterpieces like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). The odd one out of this group is Elias Canetti. He was almost completely unknown when he arrived in Britain. His masterpiece, Die Blendung (1935), was not translated as Auto da Fé until 1946 and most of his best-known work did not appear in English until the 1970s and 1980s.2 It was not until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981 that Canetti was more widely recognised. The second generation of European Jewish refugee and émigré writers was significantly younger. Born between the wars, this generation included George Clare (1920–2009), best known for his memoir, Last Waltz in Vienna (1981); the Viennese poet Erich Fried (1921– 88); the German poets Karen Gershon (1923–93) and Lotte Kramer (1923– ), both of whom came to Britain with the Kindertransport; the German children’s writer Judith Kerr (1923– ); the German poet Michael Hamburger (1924–2007); Eva Ibbotson (1925–2010), the daughter of Anna Gmeyner; the German-born novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927– ); the Czech poet Gerda Mayer (1927– ); the German screenwriter Lukas Heller (1930–88); the Austrian-born author Thomas Wiseman (1931– ); the German writer Eva Figes (1932– ); the German poet Michael Horovitz (1935– ); and the Czechborn playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler (1937– ). Although they came to Britain as children or students and therefore found it easier to learn English, surprisingly few became famous, and the best-known writers are both the least Jewish and the most English. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, with



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a Polish father and a German mother. She came to Britain as a refugee in 1939 and was educated at Hendon County School and Queen Mary College. In 1951 she moved to India, where she lived until 1975 when she moved to New York. So her first published novels (To Whom She Will, 1955; Nature of Passion, 1956; Esmond in India, 1957; The Householder, 1960; and Get Ready for the Battle, 1962) were all written in India, as were her first screenplays (The Householder, 1963; and Shakespeare Wallah, 1965). And yet the films she made in collaboration with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant that made her name became a byword for a genteel kind of Englishness: adaptations of Henry James (The Europeans, 1979; The Bostonians, 1984; The Golden Bowl, 2000), E. M. Forster (A Room With a View, 1985; Howards End, 1992) and their masterpiece, Kazuo Ishiguro’s country house novel, The Remains of the Day (1993), with its oblique references to appeasement and the treatment of German Jewish refugees trying to find work as domestic servants. Born in Berlin in 1923, Judith Kerr was the daughter of the German theatre critic and essayist Alfred Kerr, and came to Britain with her family in 1936. She is best known for her autobiographical trilogy, Out of the Hitler Time: One Family’s Story (1994), which includes the enormously popular When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), and for the seventeen Mog books written since 1970, beginning with Mog the Forgetful Cat, about a cat living with the quintessentially English Thomas family. Finally, Tom Stoppard came to Britain as a child after the war. Born in Zlin in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he travelled to Singapore with his parents and brother in March 1939. Only when he was in his mid-fifties did Stoppard learn of his Jewish origins and that all his grandparents and three aunts had died in concentration camps. His father was killed during the Japanese invasion of Singapore and in 1945 his mother married a British major, Kenneth Stoppard, and they settled in Britain soon after. Despite his Czech Jewish origins and his childhood experiences in Singapore and India, Stoppard’s best-known work is as quintessentially English as Kerr’s Mog books or Prawer Jhabvala’s film scripts: screenplays about Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Love, 1998) and English schoolchildren (Empire of the Sun, 1987; The Golden Compass, 2005) and plays about characters from Hamlet (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966), Regency England (Arcadia, 1993) and the Cambridge Classics don and poet, A. E. Housman (The Invention of Love, 1997). There is, however, another very different way of reading Stoppard. Side by side with these apparently English works are plays set in Soviet psychiatric prisons (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 1977), First World War Zurich, with a cast of outsiders and exiles (Travesties, 1974), and a trilogy of plays about Russian nineteenth-century exiles (The Coast of Utopia, 2002). One recurring theme in his work is how lives can end up differently, most obviously in his most famous play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, or plays and screenplays about characters in disguise (Shakespeare in Love), who seem to be one thing but turn out to be quite another, or plays in which characters move from one place (or time) to another (Indian Ink, 1995; Arcadia; The Invention of Love). The third generation is the hardest to classify. These are Jewish emigrants who came to Britain as adults after the war. They fall into two groups: first, Jews who had already been displaced as refugees during the war, Jews who were fleeing communist eastern Europe and Jews from the Middle East. They include the writer and critic George Steiner (1929– ), born in Paris, who was forced to flee to America in 1940 and then arrived in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar after the war; the writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici (1940– ), born in Nice after the fall of France, who was brought up in Egypt and came to Britain in 1956 as a schoolboy and then a student at Oxford; the Hungarian poets George Szirtes (1948– )

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and George Gömöri (1934– ), who both came to Britain in 1956, fleeing the suppression of the Hungarian uprising; and the Turkish-born writer Moris Farhi (1935– ), who came to Britain in 1954. Other members of this generation who came later to Britain include the Polish writers Janina Bauman (1926–2010) and Eva Hoffman (1945– ). The second group is made up of Jewish writers from English-speaking South Africa and North America, including the South Africans Dan Jacobson (1929– ), the playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (1934– , né Horwitz) and the actor-writer-artist Antony Sher (1949– ), who all came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s; the American-born Frederic Raphael (1931– ) and Ruth Fainlight (1931– ), who both came to Britain after the war; and the Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (1931–2001), who lived in Britain between 1954 and 1972 and is still best known for his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). Finally, there is the fourth generation: Jewish writers born in Britain who are the children or grandchildren of émigrés and refugees. These include Lisa Appignanesi (1946– ), author of the memoir Losing the Dead (1999); Anne Karpf (1950– ), author of The War  After: Living With the Holocaust (1996); the children’s writer Anthony Horowitz (1956– ); Kate Figes (1957– ), daughter of Eva Figes; Ben Elton (1959– ); Matthew Kneale (1960– ), son of Judith Kerr and author of the novel English Passengers (2000); Esther Freud (1963– ), daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and best known for her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky (1992); Edmund de Waal (1964– ), potter and author of The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010); David Baddiel (1964– ); Zoe Heller (1965– ), daughter of Lukas Heller and author of Notes on a Scandal (2003); and the daughter of the architect Berthold Lubetkin, Louise Kehoe, author of In This Dark House (1995). What stands out about this generation is how many of them have engaged, through novels or especially memoirs, with their parents’ and grandparents’ experience as refugees and victims of Nazi persecution. This generation has been drawn to the experience of the Holocaust more than the earlier generations, primarily because they came of age during the 1990s and 2000s when the Holocaust had taken off as a subject in British culture in a way that was very different from the silence that dominated British and American literature during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Readings These very different writers, most of whom came to Britain in the mid-twentieth century, found different ways of finding a voice and of engaging with the key experiences of their lives – displacement and loss. Some addressed these subjects directly. George Steiner, both as a critic and writer, was among the first British intellectuals to discuss the Holocaust as central to twentieth-century culture. His book Anno Domini: Three Stories (1964) and his controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), in which Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of the Second World War and bring him back to face justice, are his most explicit attempts to deal with the Holocaust. Janina Bauman and Judith Kerr wrote powerful memoirs about their experiences in wartime Poland and as a child refugee from Germany, respectively. George Clare and Stefan Zweig wrote eloquent memoirs of prewar Vienna and of being forced into exile. Arthur Koestler wrote some of the most powerful accounts of fascism and communism, in a mix of reportage and memoir (see especially Spanish Testament, 1937; Darkness at Noon, 1940; Scum of the Earth, 1941; his novel, Arrival and Departure, 1943; and some of the essays in The Yogi and the Commissar, 1945, in particular, ‘Scum of the Earth



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– 1942’ and ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’). Take this opening paragraph from his article on the French concentration camp at Le Vernet in 1942, republished in The Yogi and the Commissar: From time to time just as, after many a year, one hears bits of news and gossip from one’s old school, bits of news and gossip reach me from my old concentration camp. It is one of the most distinguished camps of the good old Continent and those of us who survived it wear the old school tie in the shape of some scar on the body, or an ulcer in the stomach or at least a solid anxiety neurosis. (1945b: 85) Or this early passage in his essay ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’ (1944): There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting. (1945c: 94) Karen Gershon, Gerda Mayer and Lotte Kramer, who all came to Britain on the Kindertransport, wrote dark poems about bereavement and guilt. Among Gershon’s most powerful poems are ‘The Children’s Exodus’, ‘I Was Not There’ (‘Both my parents died in camps / I was not there to comfort them / I was not there they were alone’; 1990: 7) and ‘Race’ (which ends: ‘Like every living Jew I have / in imagination seen / the gas-chamber the mass-grave / the unknown body which was mine / and found in every German face / behind the mask the mark of Cain / I will not make their thoughts my own / by hating people for their race’; 35). Lotte Kramer’s poems include ‘Bilingual’ and ‘Exodus’, which ends: ‘As in this last century / The crowded trains / Taking us away from home / Became our baby baskets / Rattling to foreign parts / Our exodus from death’ (2011: 283). These memoirs, novels, short stories and poems engage directly and explicitly with different aspects of the Holocaust: displacement, survivors’ guilt, loss, murder, attempts to explain how these events came about. There is another kind of writing, however, produced by other Jewish refugees and émigrés which deals with similar subjects more covertly. Meanings are hidden, implicit. Let me take a number of images, passages and themes which must stand for a larger body of work. One recurring image is that of the doorway. In his memoir Errata (1997), George Steiner describes calling on the Oxford don Humphrey House. Steiner is a young graduate student at Oxford and he wants a response from House to a prize-winning essay Steiner has written. On his Victorian lectern lay the handsomely printed text of my Chancellor’s English Essay Prize. I waited, I ached for some allusion to it. It came when I was already at the door [my emphasis]. ‘Ah yes, yes, your pamphlet. A touch dazzling, wouldn’t you say?’ (Steiner 1997: 128–9) Or let’s re-read that passage from Judith Kerr about Uncle Victor, the ghostly concentration camp survivor, standing in the ‘half-open’ door. The setting could hardly be more different: the rooms of an Oxford don on the one hand, and a small North London home on the other. These encounters are so full of drama, it is easy to miss one particular image: the very un-dramatic image of ‘the half-open door’. It was an image that haunted a generation of refugees and exiles. On their way in or on their way out? Or neither? Perhaps just there, never quite welcome inside. What is this image doing? What does it tell us about the experience of being a refugee, of not fitting in, and of writing a life story about exile?

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Steiner’s whole experience of British culture is captured in this phrase. Unlike others – Isaiah Berlin, say – he never quite made it through the door. Then there are the subterranean meanings of the screenplays of Emeric Pressburger. His films with Michael Powell are usually seen as quintessentially English. One thinks of David Niven as the very English airman, quoting Raleigh and Marvell, in A Matter of Life and Death, or Roger Livesey as General Clive Candy, quoting Conan Doyle with his army superior in Colonel Blimp, or Dennis Price playing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ on the organ in Canterbury Cathedral at the climax of A Canterbury Tale (1944), or Esmond Knight quoting Chaucer, over shots of the fields of Kent, at the beginning of the same film. These were, writes Pressburger’s longtime collaborator Michael Powell, ‘films that spoke for England’ (1992: 237). And some critics, such as Raymond Durgnat, have seen the films as full of ‘“High Tory” morals’, in love with tradition, rural and pastoral communities, with an almost mystical sense of British landscape and history (1978: 66). But there is another sense in which these films are curiously un-English. The films are full of English county squires and Scottish lairds, of generals from clubs in Piccadilly and pilots with stiff upper lips. But they are also full of spies and fugitives, people trying to escape or cross borders. This is obviously true of the early war films: The Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940) are both about German spies in Britain, and The 49th Parallel (1941) is about Germans in Canada, all versions of the enemy within. In One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), a British aircrew are trapped in Nazi-occupied Holland and try to get back to Britain. But it is true of the later films also. Many of these are about the encounter between the English and outsiders, whether foreign or not. In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Clive Candy spends much of the film abroad. He has just come home from South Africa, fighting in the Boer War, and soon goes to Berlin (1902), travels the world hunting (1902–14) and then fights in Flanders (1914–18). Apart from a brief moment after the First World War, he then travels with his wife, and then alone after her death, until 1939. In fact, there are only a few moments in the film when he is in England. But is he ever at home? This quintessential Englishman, from Harrow and the army, has no home to speak of. His home for much of the film is his club, and his home at Cadogan Place is destroyed by bombs near the end of the film. His emptiness is, in part, a result of a sense of homelessness. Candy has no home and at crucial moments in the film is completely alone, with no parents, no children and no wife, and at the end of the film his only friend is Theo, a German refugee, also with no home and no family (his wife is dead and his children are loyal Nazis). That other quintessential Englishman, the Marvell-quoting airman in A Matter of Life and Death, Peter Carter, is also strangely homeless. His mother lives in London and he was at Oxford before the war, but in the film he is either in the air, in the sea, on the beach, in hospital, at the American base in a stately home, or is staying with the local doctor. We also see him in the Other World, of course, and he moves between the two worlds in the film, never at home in either. There is only one character in the whole film whom we see in his own home, and he gets killed quite early on. There is a dark side to the film, beside the lighter fantasy and humour, and part of this is the uneasiness to do with having no home or roots. This anxiety about Englishness, homelessness, loss and belonging runs through Pressburger’s screenplays. It is not helpful to see them as quintessentially English films, or to see their concerns with tradition, with the English countryside and with communities, as a simple assertion of ‘Tory’ values. There is always a tension, always an unease. The



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films, even at their most ‘English’, are not about Englishness or belonging in some straightforward sense. They are about how difficult it is to be at home or to belong. But at least various options exist. One option that does not exist in any of these films is to be Jewish. Pressburger was fascinated by questions of cultural and national identity but he could not bring himself to write about Jews and Jewishness, or about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Or at least not in his films (although there was one attempt to write a film about Weizmann which ran aground for lack of money in the early 1950s). A very different work is Janina Bauman’s memoir Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – A Young Girl’s Story (2006), first published as Winter in the Morning (1986). On the surface it seems to be a straightforward memoir, but towards the end it becomes more and more complicated. In Chapter Nine, Bauman describes her return to Warsaw in the spring of 1945: ‘We had nowhere to go’, she writes (2006: 249). This seems a simple assertion of fact, a question of geography. She returns to Warsaw but soon moves on again ‘towards the unknown’ (253). She goes back to the countryside where she enrols at a local school. She is tormented by feeling an outsider: ‘I belonged neither here nor there. A foreign body, a stranger. An unwelcome stranger’ (254). She still has one more adventure. ‘Soon we were walking along an abandoned railway track that ran to nowhere [that word again] through a thick forest . . . I felt as though we were alone in the whole world’ (255). She encounters a Soviet soldier but manages to escape. ‘I lifted myself from the ground. Struggling to overcome a new wave of terror, I plunged back into the dark forest on my lonely way home’ (258). ‘I know this story is unclear’, she writes (258). ‘After the liberation it all suddenly got muddled up. The Nazis were gone, the pattern was shattered. The Poles and the Jewish wrecks were left on their own in their devastated country . . . So I lived in total confusion’ (259). She has returned again to Warsaw and then: One day, while wandering through the ruins, I found myself by chance in front of the house where, ten months earlier, we had stopped for a while to wash and dress ourselves before leaving Warsaw. To my great surprise, it remained as it had been – only halfruined. The once shattered windowpanes of the salvaged wing had been replaced with fresh plywood boards . . . Here, ‘under the rubble of a half-ruined room’, she had buried her manuscripts, just after the Warsaw Uprising: ‘And here they were, all my exercise books and loose sheets covered with my untidy handwriting, hidden safely in a hole in the floor, under a few bricks. Many years later I was to lose them again’ (260–1). Bauman does not belong anywhere, certainly not in postwar antisemitic Catholic Poland where she is an outsider (‘an unwelcome stranger’). Her Jewish world has been destroyed (‘we had nowhere to go’). And she cannot make sense of this. ‘The story is unclear’, ‘muddled up’, ‘the patterns have shattered’. Everywhere the language is of ruins and desolation, ‘a half-ruined room’ in a ‘half-ruined’ building. But it is not just Warsaw that is in ruins. Bauman herself and her narrative are all broken up, in fragments. And yet, like the doorway where the door is never fully closed but one is never entirely inside the room, so these ruins are always only ‘half-ruined’. Just as she, and a whole generation of refugee and émigré writers, were ‘half-ruined’, trying desperately to make sense of experiences of loss and devastation, sometimes overtly, at other times through silences and absences. What is extraordinary is the achievement. From this dislocation and loss, a tremendous body of work emerged: screenplays and poems, plays and novels, essays and memoirs. It is one of the enduring achievements of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish literature.

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Notes 1. Lajos Biro and Emeric Pressburger were both nominated for Academy Awards. 2. Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (1960; translated as Crowds and Power, 1962), Der andere Prozess (1969; translated as Kafka’s Other Trial, 1974) and his autobiographical tetralogy: Die gerettete Zunge (1977; translated as The Tongue Set Free, 1979), Die Fackel im Ohr (1980; translated as The Torch in My Ear, 1982), Das Augenspiel (1985; translated as The Play of the Eyes, 1990) and Das Geheimherz der Uhr: Aufzeichnungen (1987; translated as The Secret Heart of the Clock, 1989).

15 JEWISH EXILE IN ENGLISHNESS: EVA TUCKER AND NATASHA SOLOMONS Phyllis Lassner

A

lthough the multicultural study of women writers has been a growth i­ ndustry since the rise of feminist studies in the 1970s, and British Jewish Studies is now a firmly established field, British Jewish women writers have remained on the margins of both.1 Anthologies and studies of women’s writing do not identify British Jewish women authors within their own multifaceted contexts and those devoted to British Jewish writing do not differentiate women authors according to their gendered constructions.2 And yet the proliferation of British Jewish women writers since the Second World War invites focus on their distinctive contributions to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and to British Jewish cultural history and production. Among many others, writers such as Bernice Rubens, Linda Grant and Naomi Alderman share the ongoing concerns of Jewish male writers, but with a gendered difference. Rubens, Grant and Alderman emphasise women’s unease with male-constituted definitions of British Jewish identity and, in response, dramatise women’s gendered otherness in relation to the vicissitudes of British Jewish constructions of masculinity. Their plots contrast men’s and women’s struggles with acculturation to British social culture, women’s relation to Jewish religious observance, diverse meanings of diaspora and the relevance of Zionism to women’s lives and perspectives. While British Jewish women writers share concerns about women’s lives and representations with non-Jewish women writers, their fiction is invariably and indelibly marked by Jewish history, memory and consciousness. For example, in the writings of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner, Julia Pascal, Diane Samuels and Elaine Feinstein, anguished attempts to represent Holocaust survivors and memorialise the victims have led to narrative experiments that entangle the present in the Holocaust past.3 Even in the flush of economic prosperity and personal fulfilment, the marks of the Jewish refugee experience in Britain remain indelible in their writing. Eva Tucker’s autobiographical novels Berlin Mosaic (2005) and Becoming English (2009),4 and Natasha Solomons’ novels Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (2010) and The Novel in the Viola (2011), continue the imaginative exploration of the modern Jewish refugee experience in Britain and add complexity to the nation’s multicultural literary landscape.5 Eva Tucker emigrated with her mother to Britain from Berlin in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Natasha Solomons is the granddaughter of German Jewish refugees who, with her one-year-old mother, fled to Britain in 1937.

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Unlike the British postcolonial tradition established by writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, the stories of Jewish emigration to Britain do not originate in two centuries of British colonial domination. Rather they begin with centuries of anxious coexistence, migration and then exodus from the empires of central and eastern Europe and their pogroms and poverty. For German Jews, citizenship and acculturation could not ameliorate the most toxic form of antisemitism when Hitler’s punitive Nuremberg Laws climaxed with Kristallnacht, the state-sponsored and organised pogrom that presaged the Jews’ doomed fate in Europe. This climactic moment drove 90 per cent of German Jews to seek escape from incarceration, deportations and slaughter. Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons redefine what it means to be postcolonial writers in their stories of escape from the centre of one imperial power to another, where, instead of oppression, rescue and a complex process of adaptation and acculturation awaited them. These stories are not shaped by a postcolonial search for economic opportunity and recognition of a multicultural British identity. Unlike British subjects of colour, Jewish refugees in the 1930s experienced a process of integration into British social culture that was not fraught with racial discrimination. Instead they were accepted with suspicion as a different kind of ‘other’, one that both transcended racial categories and combined them with mythic constructions of atavistic Jewish rituals and practices to produce an ambivalent welcome. Assuming the moral high ground, British officials and the general population could congratulate themselves on their active opposition to Nazism by admitting Jewish refugees, but politically inflected cultural complications encouraged suspicions about the refugees’ marked differences, including their European languages, dress and eating habits. A draconian effect was the internment of German Jewish boys and men as suspected fifth columnists.6 Regardless of the degree or type of their own Jewish identification, having emigrated from Germany marked them as enemy aliens. As Eva Tucker describes her mother’s experience in London: ‘In one neighborhood where there were a lot of German refugees, a petition was sent to the council complaining of the influx of so many “­foreigners”’ (Gorb 2009). Many refugees came from strongly identified but highly acculturated Jewish families who felt themselves to be German first and Jewish in a variety of expressive forms, but mostly following Reform practices, attending synagogue only on the High Holidays, while many identified as secular Jews.7 When they attended school in Britain, Jewish children suffered the taunts of classmates who were rarely prepared by their teachers and parents to accept the refugees sympathetically. Instead, the exiled children were often teased and even bullied for their heavily accented English, foreign clothing and misgivings about tea with milk and beans on toast. Although most foster families, Jewish and non-Jewish, treated the refugee children with kindness and provided care to the best of their economic and emotional abilities, the children’s cultural differences often created a social divide. It was a time when childhood emotional needs were most often considered a minor disorder, treatable through training for citizenship in a civilised world. That the children suffered immeasurable emotional dislocation and loss of primary loving care was not part of the diagnosis. Like those children on the Kindertransport, Eva Tucker is a first-generation refugee. However, unlike most of the children who never saw their parents again, Tucker, like Natasha Solomons’ mother, came with a parent. As the daughter of a refugee, Solomons is second generation. Their different relationships and responses to British Jewish identity formation and assimilation produce different fictional designs while representing similar patterns of refugee experience. Unlike most Kindertransport and other refugee memoirs,



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these fictions privilege and integrate interpretation and reflections on memory rather than narrating the struggle to represent claims for the authenticity of memory.8 As a result, their foundations in personal history and memory lead to markedly different representations of family history. Tucker’s Becoming English, which follows Berlin Mosaic both in publication date and chronology of experience, depicts the complicated relationship of a mother, Ruth, and daughter, Laura, as they experience life in England. Their non-Jewish husband and father ‘will not abandon the country he loves’, and her Jewish grandfather ‘said he was much too old to change countries . . . no one would touch him’ (Tucker 2009: 1). Just as the older members of this Jewish family are left behind, along with European Jewish culture, so this novel relegates them to the past. Using the past tense to indicate that ‘he was German first, Jewish second’ suggests that the confidence Jews felt in their German assimilation has become a memory trace, without continuity, without a future (1). The novel leaves the acculturated Jewish past behind and narrates the story of Ruth and Laura in the present tense, connoting an open-ended present and future. The confident Jewish past and formation of a family history and memory constitute the subject of Tucker’s 2005 novel, Berlin Mosaic. Its panoramic coverage of four generations from 1891 to 1939 in Berlin is narrated in the past tense, creating a temporal and spatial statement of its own as Jewish Berlin contracts in space and time runs out for its residents. Most will be killed and the survivors will be exiled. Despite differences in narrative and temporal forms, the overall structure of this novel, of Becoming English and of Natasha Solomons’ novels recalls Joseph Frank’s formulation of ‘The Spatial Form of Modern Literature’ (1945: 221). As the Jewish space of Berlin contracts, the spatial form of the Third Reich, its racialist, antisemitic mantra of Lebensraum, overtakes the land and the novel and destroys the past.9 Like Frank’s analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Berlin Mosaic is an epic that gives readers a picture of Jewish Berlin ‘as a whole’, recreating its ‘sights and sounds, the people and places’ to achieve a ‘unified impact’, a ‘sense of simultaneous activity’, including all the characters’ gendered relations to one another and all the events which enter their consciousness (Frank 1945: 233, 234). The distinct historical and cultural difference between 1904 Dublin and 1933 Berlin is that, instead of possessing their city ‘as a birthright’, Jewish Berliners are denied this (234). Frank’s examination of the literary values that define ‘the human’ ultimately focuses on the role of the ‘Wandering Jew in modern fiction’ who typifies ‘l’homme moyen sensuel, not only of our own time but through all history’, and in the case of Joyce, choosing ‘the figure of a Wandering Jew, vainly trying to integrate himself with a culture to which he is essentially alien’ (442). In accord with the literary critical values of his day, Frank constructs the Jew as ‘merely a magnification of the predicament of modern man himself, bewildered and homeless in a mechanical wilderness of his own creation’ (442).10 As Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons demonstrate, what is omitted in this 1945 universalising formulation is the immediate history that gave devastatingly specific meanings to the Wandering Jew as men and women, and to so many deaths in a mechanised Nazi ‘wilderness’.11 The very opening of Berlin Mosaic signals a narrative tension between Jewish contributions to German culture and science and the torments of individual Jewish lives that invokes the underlying instability of a confident Jewish community. At one moment in 1891 in Upper Silesia, issues about love and marriage, Jewish genealogy and family relations, scientific fallibility and the roles of religious faith and doubt come into play. It is a moment of crisis; even the fecundity conventionally associated with nature is paralysed as ‘the fir trees stood motionless in the heavy September heat’ while a young woman bleeds to

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death in childbirth (Tucker 2005: 1). So begins the novel’s focus on a time and place that portends the brutal end of life in Germany for even its most assimilated Jews. That ominous sign of a denatured space also intrudes on the present at the opening of Becoming English when Laura and her mother Ruth arrive in Somerset, in the heart of that green and pleasant land, while ‘a fierce February wind whistles through the trees’ (Tucker 2009: 1). While the two novels are written separately, each with its distinct narrative style and setting, there is a convergence. In Berlin Mosaic, the threatening German Jewish space portends a grim future and in Becoming English, the space of rescue cannot escape the past. As Berlin Mosaic develops, dramatising how each generation progresses towards greater integration into German society and culture, it also shows how unresolved family conflicts reflect the Jews’ unstable place in Germany. Michael Moorcock summarises these conflicts: ‘Tucker investigates the compromises and accommodations made by ordinary people. Is conversion to Christianity and marrying a non-Jew “pretending”? In retrospect are such actions a kind of betrayal? These are the hard questions those touched by the phenomenon known as “Holocaust guilt” often ask themselves’ (2005). In addition to its plotting, the novel alludes to these questions by using only the characters’ first names, omitting distinctively Jewish family names as well as signs of conversion and intermarriage. The contributions of extended family members to German culture do not mitigate the omnipresent perils of thinking they belong. Despite their material prosperity as reward, these contributions to European enlightenment will be proof, for the Nazis, of Jewish decadence and their status as untermenschen (subhuman). The novel’s brevity, 154 pages, encapsulates German Jewish achievements and perils in its spatial frame by having four generations of Jews represent social, intellectual and economic debates of their time, some of which provide the Nazis’ ideological basis for destabilising the Jews. The ‘mosaic’ of the title is borne out by this structure. One achievement of this panoramic narrative is its condensed form, which intensifies the sense of the German Jews’ cultural and political turbulence. The panorama also reveals that while most of the male characters adapt to change, the women absorb the cost by being consigned to unchanging domestic roles. The women are caught in old-fashioned fictional and social historical plots as they must sacrifice love and careers and are denied self-expression and determination. They are entrapped in a traditional continuity that, with ongoing assimilation and secular scepticism, becomes increasingly divorced from religious faith or practice, but adheres to a social vision that excludes women from the public spaces that constitute modernity. In every generation women are required to fulfil domestic responsibilities that have worn out and even killed other women. The only space for rebellion or self-expression is total confinement – madness or superfluity. The pattern begins when in 1891 Laetitia feels compelled to fulfil her promise to her dying sister and marry her widowed brother-in-law and raise the motherless infant and two other daughters. To do this she must abandon her lover and her acting career. Thinking she can retain her independence Laetitia marries Oskar provided that ‘she could be his wife in name only’, but she cannot avoid the conjugal rights he asserts and bears his child (Tucker 2005: 3). Representing the logical extreme of women’s oppression in this novel, Laetitia’s unhappiness finally erupts in rage at Oskar when he takes away her only outlet for self-expression, her notebook. In retaliation she beats him with a poker, a desperate act that consigns her to a lunatic asylum from which she is released only decades later. The outlines of this plot are repeated in each succeeding generation, regardless of the family’s social and cultural progress. Their variations only confirm the primary theme: women are punished by the



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restraining order of upper middle-class German Jewish society for the transgression of nonconformity regardless of an increasingly secularised Jewish society, defining itself through integration into modern Berlin. Halfway through the novel this conflict both intensifies and becomes irrelevant when the narration of Hitler’s ascent to power begins. The lessons of German defeat in the First World War are buried, as illustrated by a Nazi protest that shuts the theatre showing the film based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The horrific spaces of the Great War, the open spaces of Weimar democracy and the openminded books representing the German Enlightenment are demolished and burned by Nazi fury. Jewish space in German culture is erased by the Nuremberg Laws and the places signifying their social and economic achievements are vandalised by Brownshirt violence. The Jews’ time and place in Germany are over, replaced by the flow of the Jews’ blood and their displacement. The meanings of place and space converge as Nazi ideology, policies and practices subsume the individual identities that define place and the shared allegiances and affiliations that construct a collective space.12 It is the communist nonJewish Hugo, Ruth’s husband and Laura’s father and the man who stays behind because he loves his country, who is the novel’s first witness to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish tirade: ‘Wake up Germany! Death to the Jews! Blood must flow! Smash the goddamned Jews’ Republic!’ (Tucker 2005: 90). The rest of the novel, with the exception of a present-day epilogue, dramatises the intensification of Nazi persecution from 1933 to 1939, the characters’ responses, and links to memories that now seem prescient. Hannah ‘wanted to go back home . . . where she could forget about being Jewish. But she was part of this family for whom things were going so badly. Had it all begun with Magda’s death? Even years before that, with her mother’s lashing out at Oskar? Those were entirely private affairs . . .’ (132). But as the novel compresses past and present, it also correlates private with public spaces. As with the first half, expressed thoughts and dialogue represent political responses; the narrator’s voice is effaced. Thoughts are marked as such with no free indirect discourse or other experimental representation of characters’ interior lives, consciousness or unconscious. While this method is easily attributed to realist conventions, targeting a middlebrow audience, the novel’s compressed form suggests a different kind of experiment. Bringing together the array of characters affected in so many different spaces and forms by the Third Reich heightens the sense of peril awaiting Hitler’s mosaic of victims as well as the intensity of Jewish and non-Jewish responses. Tucker’s multivalent construction of the extensive spaces signifying Jewish acculturation achieves coherence through the extended family’s conjoined helplessness. Even as they try to help each other endure the endless variety of Nazi persecutions, they must ultimately fail. Berlin becomes a judenrein space, leaving some to wander but most to perish. The novel’s ‘Epilogue: 1990’ assures us that even forty years after leaving Berlin, in Laura’s very ‘English’ identity and consciousness, ‘[t]he past is always present’ (Tucker 2005: 151). The epilogue is occasioned by the visit of the widowed Laura and her daughters to the East German village of her father’s birth and to Bonn, where her Jewish relatives live. The encounters with long-lost family are prefaced by a mosaic of Laura’s fantasies, each of which rescues her father and grandmother, as though a vision of flying ‘out, like in a Chagall painting’ where ‘[n]othing is impossible’ will assuage the anxiety of confronting the traces of actual horrors (151). However, each fantasy ends with the narrator-director’s declaration, ‘Cut’, suggesting that a scene is finished but that editing will ultimately stitch

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together the narrative disruptions (151). Here ‘Cut’ also refers to a succession of fantasies, each implying that the past and its perilous spaces are indeed severed from the present, where Laura is free to travel between her adopted Britain and Germany with no restrictions, quotas or visas. These ‘unreal rescue scenarios’ are also cut off, left hanging in narrative space because they cannot undo or explain the disjunction between the horrific reality in which her father and grandmother perished and Laura’s escape (151). As Becoming English dramatises, the past both haunts her story and is edited by it. Tucker’s novel Becoming English narrates a different fate for another character named Laura. Here, Laura absorbs the past into the life and character she must construct as a refugee in England. And yet the past disappears in the process of her assimilation. As in Berlin Mosaic, we never learn the family’s last name. Only in an interview did Tucker reveal that ‘I never pretended to be anything I wasn’t but I didn’t want it to obtrude. My name then? Steinicke – a hard one to hide’ (Gorb 2009). The entire novel is narrated in the present tense, continuing that of Berlin Mosaic’s opening and epilogue, but beginning when Laura and her mother Ruth arrive in England. While there is no room for fantasy in her daily confrontations with an alien social culture, the dashed wish to rescue is encrusted in the formation of her character, forging an indelible bridge to Berlin. Every step of her adaptation is marked with a reminder of Berlin, from comparing English and German pronunciation to being reminded that being Jewish relegates her to a space in the national culture tentatively within but also beyond its borders. Like all other Jewish refugees, Laura is given A Helpful Guide for Every Refugee distributed by the Jewish Board of Deputies. Each stipulation is designed to encourage invisibility, with interdictions against criticising government regulations, dressing ‘conspicuously’ and speaking German ‘too loudly in the street’ (Tucker 2009: 9). Instructions for acculturation are grudging: ‘remember the English attach great importance to modesty; understatement in speech rather than overstatement’ (9). The novel charts Laura’s eager, thorny but ultimately successful adoption of Englishness; unlike her status in antisemitic Germany as a mischling, ‘in England she can grow whole’ (4). In contrast, the public and self-determining space afforded Laura’s mother in England as a German Jewish refugee is as constricted as it was in progressive Weimar Germany. Becoming whole has never been an option for her. Having never adapted to any prescribed behaviour, as a wife, mother, or now as refugee housemaid, Ruth chooses to retain her fragmented character and identity. While her fractured English reflects her response to the refugee guide, its substance could easily apply to her condition in the Anglo-Jewish community: ‘Ze English Jews tell us how we have to behave. Zey sink ve give zem a bad name!’ (9). Interestingly, Laura’s attitude towards her mother is just as critical. As the focalised subject of the novel, Laura’s character represents a complex range of responses to all her experiences, and different counter-voices show Laura’s misconceptions as well as the often inscrutable nature of the English social culture she encounters. In the case of Laura’s relationship with her mother, however, a different narrative complexity emerges. From Laura’s perspective, Ruth consistently defies her role as nurturing mother. As her character is represented in Berlin Mosaic, Ruth is an unfaithful wife, unwilling mother and self-absorbed woman. Exacerbating her discontent, the constraints and loneliness of exile drive her recklessness, which leads, for example, to Laura having to contend with a succession of her rather dicey men friends who repel and frighten the girl, as she and the narrator attest: ‘What kind of mother dishes up naked men for breakfast?’ (94). Ruth’s frustrations also impede Laura’s ambitions as she discourages Laura’s plans ‘to try for Oxbridge . . .



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saying that Laura has to realize they are refugees; going to university is out of the question and besides, a daughter belongs with her mother in these difficult times’ (56). As evinced in many Kindertransport memoirs, the first part of this statement echoes the message so many young refugees heard from foster families and various social agencies in charge of their welfare (see Lassner 2009). It is the second half that betrays Ruth’s narrative history of self-centredness and that from Laura’s perspective confirms her mother’s responsibility for an ongoing conflicted relationship. And yet within the context of so many refugee memoirs and stories of difficult adaptations to British society,13 the narrative construction of this relationship is particularly revealing. As Tucker has confirmed, the novel’s representation of Laura’s responses should leave no doubt about Ruth’s maternal shortcomings: ‘She was economical with the truth. She was very sparkly and charming but her love didn’t feel real, and at crucial moments she wasn’t there’ (Gorb 2009). But the complaint goes further, impugning the mother’s resistance to British social culture: ‘And she remained German’, as we see throughout the novel as her German accent overwhelms her attempts at English (Gorb 2009). Coupled with its often insensitive content, Ruth’s fractured English also overtakes the development of her character. Where the novel is conventionally realistic in its linear form and material descriptions, its complicated mother–daughter relationship offers a critical perspective on that of Laura and the narrator as arbiters of Ruth’s humanity. Because the object of Laura’s complaint is also a refugee woman who can find no comfortable space in her rescuer nation, it complicates her daughter’s position as the novel’s focalising subject. Set in opposition to her mother’s resistance, Laura’s intense desire produces a successful assimilation and happiness with the man she loves, all of which is reinforced at the end of the novel by the memory of her grandparents’ and her father’s love and support: ‘She does not dwell too graphically on their terrible deaths: if time is circular, and perhaps it is, then their moments of full life are equally valid’ (Tucker 2009: 115). Like her loving memory, the second half of this sentence sustains Laura’s well-being and reconfigures the horrific reality of her grandparents’ and father’s deaths. Similarly, the ending resolves Laura’s painful experience with her mother, who is now domesticated as ‘[q]uite a character’ with a ‘ghastly’ accent (110). If Laura’s story progresses linearly, her mother’s wandering among exilic spaces, including her narrative space, is edited by her daughter’s story. From a different perspective, Ruth’s plight is illuminated by another exile, the Russian Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky: If one would assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy. Because of his previous incarnation, he is capable of appreciating the social and material advantages of democracy far more intensely than its natives are. Yet for precisely the same reason (whose main byproduct is the linguistic barrier) he finds himself totally unable to play any meaningful role in his new society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with physical safety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take. (Brodsky 1988: 20) As her title indicates, Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman offers a gently satiric perspective on German Jewish exile in Britain.14 The novel’s cover, festooned with flowering trees and border, within which a young man and woman face in different directions, signifies an affectionate portrait of her grandparents’ contrasting reactions to their refugee experience. Unlike Tucker’s portrait of Ruth, Solomons explores Sadie Rosenblum’s responses to the English language as a

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metonym for the liminal refugee position, robbed of her own cultural identity and faced with ambivalent acceptance: Sadie couldn’t help feeling that the English language was deliberately designed to confound outsiders. She refused to speak another word to [Jack] in that verdammt tongue . . ., and since he would not chat in German, they sulked side by side in silence . . . [Jack], insisted that they spoke only English (something in that cursed pamphlet for sure) but . . . her disjointed newcomer’s tongue transformed him into a stranger. He looked the same, but the easy intimacies were lost. He’d already changed his name. He was Jakob when she fell in love with him . . . , but when a clerk wrote down ‘Jak’ on his British visa, he took it as a sign. (Solomons 2010a: 8) Jack’s enthusiastic embrace of Englishness is opposed to Sadie’s sorrowful resistance and, critically for both, to a representation of Englishness as resistant to the incursion of refugees who are resented for their inability to acculturate, and for trying. The novel charts Jack’s progress through the Guide as ‘a recipe for happiness’ and Sadie’s attempts to cling to mementos of her past, ‘illicit German chatter’ and Jewish traditions, while their daughter Elizabeth crosses the divide at Cambridge University (5, 8). Sadie’s integration remains confined to the comfortably insular Jewish spaces of London as the Rosenblums migrate from the East End to the Finchley Road. But when Jack decides he ‘would have to be English enough for the both of them’, his desires and the novel’s spatial form roam far afield, from a realist urban setting to the mythic Hardy country, Dorset (20). Jack’s economic prosperity seems to take him far along the path of integration, but it soon becomes clear that the promise of integration is an illusion. He is on safe ground so long as he restricts his assimilation to buying a Savile Row suit and a Jaguar, but when he aims for the sine qua non of belonging, the golf club, this only confirms the antisemitic view of the Jew’s venality, with which he is confronted when he offers free carpets in return for membership: ‘Think they can buy their way in anywhere, don’t they?’ (28). After rejections by every golf club to which he applies, Jack buys a property in Dorset that, despite its ‘feral’ state, reminds him of illustrations in ‘fairy tales’ and on which he will build his own club and, as a bona fide Englishman, host ‘the Wessex Cup’ (36, 35). Signalling the novel’s more broadly based concern with integration into British culture, its satire of the refugee experience is plotted with suggestive recollections of another literary send-up, Stella Gibbons’ 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm. Particularly evident are the Rosenblums’ encounters with rural village culture, including the feared folkloric Dorset woolly-pig, a ‘noble beast of strength and savagery’, and the edgy resistance and wiliness of the men, expressed in a pastiche of local dialect and body language – ‘“This man has thieved my boys. For ’is feckin’ golfin’ course.” Flecks of spittle caught in the corners of his mouth’ (54). Like Gibbons, Solomons parodies ‘popular regional writers’ such as Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb as well as ‘clichéd Gothic melodrama’ (Hammill 2007: 156). Faye Hammill’s positioning of Gibbons’ novel ‘in relation to cultural hierarchy’, lampooning ‘various trends’ (153), can easily be adapted to Solomons’ novel which not only satirises the refugee experience but the genre of refugee memoir and fiction. As most studies of refugee writing attest, the painful experience of loss, exile and integration must be taken seriously. In addition to advancing historical, social and psychological knowledge of the experience, this writing performs memorialising and collectively affirming functions and reaffirms the humanness of its subjects.15 The affection with which Mr Rosenblum’s List treats its Jewish refugees supports these functions but neither sacralises their pain nor



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renders it unique and irrevocable. Instead, the novel mediates the painful experience of encountering British antisemitic social culture through the activism of the Dorset villagers. Like the Gothic ploy of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ perpetrated by Cold Comfort Farm’s Aunt Ada Doom, Solomons’ Dorset villagers domesticate the suspicious foreigners, ‘Mr and Mrs Rose-in-Bloom’, by Anglicising their name and by deploying the legend of the vicious woolly-pig (Hammill 2007: 161; Solomons 2010a: 50). Once they recognise that Jack’s dream golf course is being sabotaged by the same local gentry who exploit them, they join forces with the strangers, defeat the antisemitic and hierarchical local social culture, and rewrite the Jewish refugee plot. In reflecting ‘on its own status’, Mr Rosenblum’s List uses the dream of assimilation and the myth of an authentic English culture to demystify each other and to challenge differences between refugee writing that is taken as authentic testimony and that which is deemed middlebrow entertainment (Hammill 2007: 155).16 Solomons’ 2011 novel The Novel in the Viola imagines the refugee story as a country house romance with plot elements reminiscent of classic fiction and Second World War films. The Dunkirk rescue by little boats and the intrepid spirit of the Britons recall Mrs Miniver (1942) while the protagonist’s dream of an ancestral manor destroyed by fire is inherited from Jane Eyre (1847) and then Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). But this novel neither parodies the genres it cites nor satirises the struggle for a refugee’s assimilation. Instead, as its lyrical descriptions of the Dorset coast indicate, the novel romanticises them. Rather than travelling from London’s Jewish spaces to buy a piece of England’s legendary heartland, the protagonist’s entire refugee experience begins and ends at Tyneford, a Dorset manor house where she rises from the refugee woman’s prescribed ‘unglamorous fate’ as a housemaid to become doyenne of the manor (Solomons 2011: 5).17 As opposed to antisemitic gentry, 19-year-old Elise Landau is saved by a sympathetic squire, Mr Rivers (the name recalls Jane Eyre’s erstwhile saviour-suitor), who sponsors her, tries to save her parents, allows his heir to marry her, and when Kit is killed in the war, marries her himself. Blending the lines of religious, class and national identities, this relationship is reinforced, not by folkloric magic, but by the wise and empathetic counsel offered by the manor staff and local fishermen. Although the Holocaust looms in the background, guaranteeing ‘that things would not turn out for the best’, the war creates productive changes, including the end of anachronistic hierarchies and for Elise, now assimilated Alice, the end of wandering and acceptance of Jews as ordinary humanity (10). Although the novel’s structure is chronological, Elise’s first-person narration reflects on the difficulty of reconciling non-linear memories with dreams of the past and present realities: ‘Memories do not exist along a timeline. In my mind everything happens at once’ (12). This treatment of memory also suggests a reflection on the phenomenon of researching and imagining the Holocaust and refugee past and its impact on its heirs.18 Elise was ‘inspired’ by Solomons’ great-aunt Gabi Landau, who escaped the Holocaust ‘by becoming a “mother’s help” for an English family during the late 1930s’ (390). The spatial form of memory in this novel is compressed into the objects that represent centuries of Jewish contributions to the creative arts and their immediate destruction. What is described as a ‘small, coffin-shaped case’ holds the viola Elise carries from Vienna to England that conceals a carbon copy of her father’s last novel (354). A mnemonic trigger for Elise and an object of the novel’s suspense, the hidden novel turns out to be blank pages, exposed only when she hears of her parents’ deaths in the ghetto in which they had been incarcerated. As with Eva Tucker’s Becoming English, this novel ends with a return, this time to Vienna, but here there is no surviving family. Instead, Solomons memorialises and revivifies

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Austria’s destroyed Jewish culture by concluding with Elise’s niece performing the world premiere of ‘The Novel in the Viola: concerto in D minor for Viola and Orchestra’ (384). Including a written score, the piece is described as ‘a song of a white page’, commemorating what has been lost and celebrating the Jewish culture that will continue. Like Tucker’s Becoming English, The Novel in the Viola is concerned with assimilation into British culture and enacts it through the characterisation of its protagonists. When Mr Rivers asks Elise to stay behind while he attempts to negotiate her parents’ escape with British and German officials, her [f]rustration bloomed into anger. ‘Because I’m a Jew. I am so tired of it. It’s all I am anymore and I don’t even know what it means. I eat pork and I hate God. But that’s all I am to them. And to you, Mr Rivers. Elise mustn’t marry Kit because she’s a bloody Jew.’ (203) Elise’s angry rejection of Jewish religious belief and practices and projection of antisemitism onto the noble Mr Rivers are of course canards, revealing her acute disjunction in exile from a comfortably assimilated identity. The novel’s conclusion, however, rescues her from this displacement. Dreaming of a bucolic Tyneford House, Elise replaces the European past with her first summer at the manor where she can be ‘Elise again’ while ‘Alice rests and everybody lives’ (388). Her reconciliation fantasy rescues her lost family while ‘her white and smooth’ hands affirm her assimilation to Englishness (388). While Solomons could have reflected on the family ghosts that haunt Elise and both novels, her Author’s Note to The Novel in the Viola offers a requiem to the ‘ghost village’ of Tyneham, the inspiration for her Dorset setting (389). Because this idyll and Elise’s are illusions, they also direct attention to a historical reality that punctures them. Elise’s successful exile is the narrative armature that protects her against anxieties about the failure of assimilation in Nazi-occupied Europe. As the blank pages of her father’s novel attest, the costs of her assimilation in Britain include the erasure of Jewish identity and its relation to Jewish culture. These anxieties about Jewish discontinuity, present throughout Eva Tucker’s novels as well as Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List, raise the perennial question of what it means to be a Jewish writer in Britain, confronting the back story of the refugee experience, seeking audiences within and beyond the Jewish communities, and asserting Jewish difference as well as the ordinary humanity of Jewish characters. The novels studied here claim a place for the Jewish refugee in British literary history by joining the haunting memories of lost European homes and families to the ghosts of Britain’s cultural past.

Notes   1. Although my claim for British Jewish Studies may seem to be contradicted by the questioning title of the recent collection, Whatever Happened to British Jewish Studies?, its eighteen essays confidently discussing a broad range of subjects and its three sections on research resources only prove my point; see Ewence and Kushner (2012).   2. See, for example, Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (2007), and the way women writers are included but not distinguished in gendered terms in the otherwise comprehensive studies by David Brauner (2001) and Peter Lawson (2006), in Bryan Cheyette’s anthology, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland (1998), and in Whatever Happened to British Jewish Studies?   3. Studies of these writers include the recent Anita Brookner cluster of three essays in Tulsa



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Studies in Women’s Literature; Cheyette’s Muriel Spark (2000) and my chapter on Spark in Colonial Strangers (2004); my book Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust (2009); Peter Lawson’s work on Elaine Feinstein; and the collection edited by Ulrike Behlau and Bernhard Reitz (2004).  4. Eva Tucker has published stories in London Magazine; her 1966 novel Contact depicts a lesbian relationship within a conventional marriage while her 1969 novel Drowning concerns a gay man’s conflicted homosexual identity.   5. Bryan Cheyette notes the ‘crippling disruption’ represented in the refugee writing of Eva Figes that ‘contrasts starkly’ with Britain’s postwar ‘need for historical continuity’ and ‘an overly cautious and narrow English literary culture’ (1998b: i). As Tucker and Solomons show, the conventions that constitute English literary culture also facilitate writing the refugee experience.   6. For this history see Wasserstein (1979) and London (2000).   7. For discussion of Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld’s controversial efforts on behalf of orthodox children, see Fast (2011) and Shatzkes (2002).   8. See, for example, differences between the confident certainty with which Eva Figes’ memoir Little Eden (1978) represents her refugee experience and the persistent self-doubt of Karen Gershon’s A Tempered Wind (2010).   9. It may very well be a coincidence, but Frank published his seminal work, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, in 1945, and while he never alludes to a modernity that includes Nazism, by the end of the war, when the boundaries of European nations had been redrawn, space had accumulated many new political meanings. 10. W. J. T. Mitchell (1980) interpreted Frank’s essay as pointing to a widespread reading experience at any time. 11. For studies of the Holocaust, Nazi gender theory and its consequences for the suffering of men and women, see, for example, Baer and Goldenberg (2003). 12. Henri Lefebvre argues that space is socially and culturally constructed and also a product of a specific historical ‘moment’ (1991: 15). Although obviously related, place has different resonances than space for human geographers, its significance created more by individual imagination and a product of experience. 13. See, for example, Gershon (2010), Gissing (1988) and Harris and Oppenheimer (2000). 14. The protagonists are based on Solomons’ grandparents, Paul and Margot Shields, who bought a holiday cottage in Ibberton, Dorset with German compensation money; Gorb (2009). Edmund Gordon finds that while the novel contains ‘whimsical elements’, it is ‘at heart, a subtle and moving examination of the dilemma faced by immigrants to modern Britain’ (2010). 15. Historians include Marion Berghahn (2007), Louise London (2000) and Walter Laqueur (2004). 16. Kristin Bluemel’s theory of intermodernism proposes many fictional categories, including the middlebrow, that are not addressed in modernist studies because they have the ‘“wrong” sex, class, or colonial status . . . they remain on the margins of celebrated literary groups . . . When intermodernists experiment with style or form . . . their narratives are still within a recognizably realist tradition’ (2004: 5). 17. The Jewish woman refugee as housemaid has become a trope of recent Second World War fictions and films, judging the moral fibre of the upper-class employer, including Lord Darlington in Kazuo Ishigiro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and the recent updated BBC mini-series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–75; 2010– ). See Anna Scott’s review (2011), comparing the novel to a Mills and Boon romance. 18. The research on Holocaust memory transmission is vast, but not on the memory of refugee experiences, especially in Britain. For the latter, see Kushner (2001).

16 JEWISH, HALF-JEWISH, JEW-ISH: NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH JEWISH LITERATURE Ruth Gilbert Being Jewish . . . it’s complicated, isn’t it? (Sanger 2009: 163) Genes, shmenes. (Lichtenstein 2007: 221)

F

or British Jewish writers of the immediate postwar generation, Jewishness was sometimes troubling, perhaps even burdensome, but it was generally familiar, close and known. For younger British Jews, connections to their Jewish identities have, in many cases, become increasingly diluted and potentially insecure. With this in mind, the following discussion focuses on a sample of fictional and non-fictional contemporary British Jewish writing to suggest that there has been a subtle shift in the ways in which Jewishness is figured in terms of self-identification over recent decades. Where once British Jews articulated anxieties about how they belonged in relation to their Britishness, now they are equally, or even more, likely to express uncertainty about how they belong in relation to Jewishness. In contemporary British Jewish writing, identifications based on concepts such as ‘Jewishness’ and ‘half-Jewishness’ are explored as sources of tension, but they are also terms that are increasingly open to interrogation. Indeed, rather than focusing on fixed, full or diminishingly proportional notions of ‘Jewishness’, a reading of contemporary British Jewish writing might suggest instead that a conceptualisation of ‘Jew-ishness’ offers a fluid, yet meaningful way in which to negotiate current Jewish identities within the progressively decentred conditions of twenty-first-century Britain.1

‘Half-open doors’: Whole and Half-Jewish Identities In a 2005 Jewish Quarterly article entitled ‘On Not Being Jewish Enough’, the artist Jonathan Leaman articulated a hesitant identification with Jewishness. His mother was born into a long-established line of English Jews and his father was non-Jewish. He begins his reflection on how Jewishness has informed his artistic practice with the somewhat mischievous claim: ‘I am not Jewish, and this is a line or two on the kind of Jew I am not’ (Leaman 2005: 49). Leaman avoids the nostalgic tone that infuses some other recent explorations of Jewish identity, but Jewishness is for him also located in the past not the present.2 ‘Jews were archival notes’, he says, ‘and nothing seemed further from myself.’



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He explains that his mother’s Jewishness was ‘an enlightened, liberal and watered-down Judaism, the more so for not sharing the motifs of exile, transit and extinction’. Leaman recognises that the effect that this rather mild form of Jewishness had on him was of a nebulous and diffuse nature: Jewish boys were let off assembly – I wasn’t Jewish enough for that. We ate matzos and hot-cross buns, cold fried fish and sausages – Jewishness was a distant echo of smoked cod’s roe, winks and disembodied shadows happening through other people’s half-open doors. (51) It is an evocative description. The Jewish writer today often inherits such a legacy, while not necessarily having any really immediate connection to what seem to be authentic Jewish experiences. In many ways Leaman’s ‘not-Jewishness’ is the flip-side to other, more emotionally charged journeys of self-discovery. The Jewish past, for third-, fourth- and fifth-generation British Jews, is often made up of echoes, winks and shadows. Like the smell of yesterday’s chicken soup, it pervades the atmosphere in subtle ways. This is not to say that all Jews today feel entirely connected to their Britishness or entirely disconnected from their Jewishness. Clearly this is not the case. What I am suggesting is that while some lingering sense of exclusion might still exist, it is increasingly likely to be developed in response to and alongside a range of other differences. Tamar Yellin, who was born in Britain but has parental roots in Poland and Jerusalem, situates herself as an eternal outsider. Yellin explores these themes in her story ‘Kafka in Brontëland’, a tale in which a Jewish woman living alone in a Yorkshire village becomes fascinated by an enigmatic stranger of uncertain origins whom the locals call Kafka. ‘Kafka the outcast, Kafka the Jew’, the narrator comments (2006: 14). By the end of the story she has found a way to belong. From the Irish backgrounds of some village families to the half-Jewish shop owner and the South-East Asians who live down the valley, this is, Yellin suggests, a landscape populated by Kafkas. Towards the end of the Jewish Quarterly article in which she reflected on these issues of belonging and identification, Yellin notes that her sense of her own Jewishness had been further complicated by the recent discovery that her great-grandmother was in fact an Irish Catholic (Yellin 2007). So, what we see here is not just that the Yorkshire community is ethnically and culturally mixed but that plurality exists within the genealogy of most identities, including Jewishness. Many Jews in contemporary Britain have mixed backgrounds and increasingly they will create more diverse new families; contemporary forms of identification are becoming inevitably more diffuse. How Jewishness evolves within such a context is yet to be seen. But for some writers, Jewishness is connected to identity and creativity in ways that are figurative as well as literal and embodied. Jewishness is in this way a trope, signifying a collective history that has been marked by dispossession, but also a more current sense of identities that are provisional, partial and performative. In the same 2007 issue of the Jewish Quarterly to which Yellin contributed, Adam Thirlwell wrote a piece entitled ‘On Writing Half-Jewishly’. In this, Thirlwell takes up the idea of Jewishness as a trope. He reflects on Jewishness ‘as a motif for placelessness’, and argues, in what is really a modernist gesture, that exile is the root of literary writing. Thirlwell goes on to explain on a more personal level why this is particularly meaningful to him: ‘Perhaps’, he acknowledges, ‘this is a belief of mine which is intimately related to the fact that, although my mother is Jewish, I still feel half-Jewish. I can be sensitive, therefore, to overly stringent demarcations’ (2007: 4). One can detect here some defensiveness about

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identification. However, Thirlwell resolves his own sensitivities by pronouncing that ‘like me, the Jewish is always half-Jewish’ (4). This idea that ‘Jewish is always half-Jewish’ is provocative. While themes of not belonging are clearly central to much Jewish writing, Thirlwell’s claim effectively dismisses the idea that there could ever be a wholly Jewish identity. To the extent that all identities are, arguably, provisional, constructed and contingent this might be the case. However, there is a danger that Thirlwell’s contention threatens to dispose of any meaningful sense of what it is to be Jewish and this proposition is not entirely playful. The implications of such a manoeuvre are explored in Andrew Sanger’s novel The J-Word (2009) and in Mark Glanville’s memoir The Goldberg Variations (2004), texts which both reflect on the problematic potential of inchoate identities. The protagonist of The J-Word, Simon, is a middle-aged man in the throes of an identity crisis. He is the son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother (and, therefore, according to Jewish tradition, not Jewish himself). After marrying a Jewish woman, Simon has fathered a Jewish son, but he comes to question where exactly he belongs in this Jewish family. The question pivots on how Jewishness itself is conceptualised. Encountering a woman who seems to epitomise all the qualities of the gentile world but who turns out to be ‘a bit’ Jewish on her mother’s side, Simon’s father, Jack, maintains: ‘All Jews are equally Jewish. There are no half Jews. There are no proportions or fractions or half-measures in Judaism’ (Sanger 2009: 173). However, for Simon, who is on the wrong side of this certainty principle, identity is far less clearly defined. His crisis is predicated on a sense of ontological incompleteness that becomes progressively more critical after watching a documentary about Auschwitz. ‘If I had been murdered in the Holocaust’, he thinks, ‘I would be Jewish. But alive, I am not Jewish’ (152). Sanger’s novel suggests that it is this knowledge of a simultaneously doubled and divided identity that comes to rupture Simon’s sense of self. He sees himself as an outsider, a potential victim of the Nazis (whatever his status within Jewish law); but he also feels excluded from the Jewishness that, for him, is the quintessence of all other excluded identities. Describing his increasingly fractured sense of subjectivity and his ensuing psychological collapse, he explains: ‘It was like being two people who are both angry – with each other. Or two half people, a half-Jew and a half-non-Jew. The whole being less than the sum of the parts. Because I consist only of fragments’ (246). The work of the novel is to present the possibility of repair to this shattered self. Danny, Simon’s son, will find a new way in which to be Jewish. Drawing from the mathematical motif that runs through the novel, and echoing his grandfather’s belief in whole identities, he reflects that Jewishness is ultimately based on indivisibility: Jewish people are sort of like a country, which, even if you take the country away and try to smash it up and throw its people all over the world and kill millions of them, nothing changes, they still stay the same, and can’t be broken up. So Jews are like a prime number. And a prime letter. And a prime word. (328) Both grandson and grandfather understand Jewishness as fundamentally unbreakable and, as the narrative progresses, Simon finds a way in which to reconcile his split sense of self. Although suspicious about religious faith, he nevertheless achieves a resolution through connecting to collective Jewish ritual. Attending his first synagogue service, ‘he shivered with recognition’:



Jewish, Half-Jewish, Jew-Ish 213 It seemed to him that each congregation of Jews at their Sabbath services around the globe on that day, listening to the unchanging proclamation in untranslated words of prehistory, were joined in some larger congregation, Jews of every time and place, all of that most hated and despised and enduring tribe. . . . he could almost feel the sand beneath his feet, and the desert sun. (319)

It is a curious moment that suggests an ineffable quality to Jewishness. Jewishness here is presented as an intrinsic and enduring tribal condition. All Jews, such a formulation suggests, however disconnected, disenchanted or lost they might be, can somehow return to an essential condition of Jewishness. In this way, Sanger’s novel, which suggests that half-Jewishness, even in today’s Britain, might be bad for the psyche, presents a moment of healing. So it is that Simon, an atheistic, intellectual Londoner, experiences the comfort of connection and even feels the distant warmth of an autochthonous beginning in the Middle Eastern ‘desert sun’. He also, through making this connection to Jewishness, finds a way in which to be English. As he explains: ‘I used to feel that I was half Jewish and half English. Two halves that didn’t add up to a whole anything. Now I feel both fully Jewish and fully English’ (337). The resolution offered here is both strained and strange. It suggests an idealistic conclusion, in which belonging can be achieved, but it also presents an oddly restrictive and somewhat disheartening view of identity within contemporary British culture. Mark Glanville’s memoir tackles some related issues through autobiographical exploration. It opens with the line: ‘[H]appy the man who can celebrate his diversity’ (Glanville 2004: 1). He continues, using strikingly similar terms to Sanger’s fictional character Simon, by presenting himself as embodying a condition of violent internal division: ‘For a large part of my own life’, he explains, ‘the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me’ (1). As with Simon, Glanville’s father is Jewish, but his mother, born of a German Jewish father and a gentile mother, is technically not Jewish. Thus, according to the oft-cited orthodox principle, Glanville is not Jewish. His clever, charming and dominant father teases Glanville about this identity glitch throughout his formative years. So, for example, he tells the young Glanville that at least he will not have to contend with antisemitism. The exchange that follows signals a complex set of identifications: ‘What do you mean?’, he asks his father: ‘Well you don’t look Jewish.’ ‘Of course I do.’ ‘Darling, you don’t.’ Mum’s sweet tone heightened the provocation. ‘You should be grateful for that’, Dad continued. ‘For what? I’m not going to hide. They can all know I’m Jewish as far as I’m concerned.’ ‘But, my dear, you’re not Jewish.’ ‘What do you mean? Of course I am.’ ‘By Jewish law you’re not. . .’ ‘Seventy-five per cent of my blood is Jewish. It’s what I am.’ ‘The wrong seventy-five per cent, schmendrick!’ (37) His father’s final word, which both draws from and claims a Yiddish lexicon, plays Jewishness as a trump card in this generational power struggle. Much of the narrative circles around this snag in identification. As it charts Glanville’s

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youthful attachment to football hooliganism, his unsatisfactory relationships with women, his time at Oxford and his developing career as an opera singer, the memoir demonstrates a profound sense of disconnection and a concurrently strong desire to belong to something, even if that is a violent gang of Manchester United supporters. When, later in life, the confused Glanville discusses his identity with a mixed-heritage girlfriend, she asks him: ‘What do you feel you are yourself?’ He replies: ‘Jewish. One hundred per cent’ (142). So, the ‘seventy-five per cent’ that he had claimed in arguing with his father has been adjusted to the full one hundred. Again, a mathematical imperative surfaces as a way in which to think about degrees of belonging. But then, admitting that this is not technically the case, Glanville adds: ‘it makes me feel very rootless’ (142); and this rootlessness is presented as a dangerously ungrounded condition. As Howard Jacobson notes in Roots Schmoots (1993), for the immediate postwar generation, ‘the problem of how it felt not to feel Jewish’ was not the cause of pain that it would later become. The priority for his generation was to become English. ‘Roots we didn’t think about’, he notes, ‘tendrils we needed. You don’t look down when you’re climbing’ (1993: 2). For subsequent generations of British Jews the predominant imagery is perhaps not so much of climbing, of looking upwards, but rather a perception of skimming, without any secure foundations, across the surface of a series of possible selves. So, for someone such as Glanville, who has been brought up with a confused awareness of simultaneously being and not being Jewish, the desire to belong becomes acute. He begins a process of reconciliation when he attends a synagogue memorial service for his first singing teacher, Mark Raphael. Again, like Simon in Sanger’s novel, he describes a powerful sense of reintegration as he enters the synagogue: Despite Dad’s daily reminders of our provenance, albeit accompanied with caveats that we weren’t thoroughbreds, I’d never actually been inside a synagogue before . . . So I went with very mixed feelings, excited at the prospect of entering a shul for the first time . . . I certainly nurtured no expectation of returning to the fold. (Glanville 2004: 223) The experience is, in fact, transformative: ‘As I walked into the temple itself’, he recalls, ‘I experienced a wonderful inner tranquillity’; adding: ‘I felt an almost physical sensation of belonging’ (224). This sense of belonging is completed when he falls in love with a Jewish woman, whom he recognises as his ‘perfect woman’ (234), and he begins to attend a Reform synagogue. As he sings in the synagogue he experiences a hitherto unknown sense of fulfilment. When the synagogue warden, the shammas, compliments him, Glanville is overwhelmed, recalling that ‘[t]ears came into my eyes on finally receiving the acceptance I’d so longed for without, until now, ever really knowing from whom it was I’d sought it’ (246). To complete this circle of belonging it turns out that the shammas, who is the same age as Glanville and shares a number of physical characteristics, is also a keen football fan. For Glanville, the connection is healing. Earlier in the memoir he had quoted some lines from the poetry of Paul Celan whose idea of pneuma he finds profoundly moving. ‘The breath of Celan’s Jewishness’, he explains, is ‘an essence, like music, that couldn’t be caught, and codified in law or defined by race.’ And, in a powerful statement on identity he announces: ‘I wasn’t a racial or a religious Jew. I was a pneumatic Jew’ (247). In some respects it is as good a definition as any. Jewishness, as numerous studies suggest, is a slippery and perhaps indefinable term. Glanville’s somewhat mystical redefinition is open to question but it makes sense for him, and of him. For both Simon in fiction



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and Glanville in memoir the idea of a half-Jewish identity does not work. They both instead seek ways in which to become differently whole, rather than fatally incomplete, Jews. Returning now to the heated debate that followed Thirlwell’s declaration of halfJewishness in the Jewish Quarterly, I want to explore what else might be in play in such a formulation.

‘Multicultural Heaven’? Jews and Other Others Cynthia Ozick responded to Thirlwell’s article in the Jewish Quarterly with outrage.3 Interestingly, Ozick attacked Thirlwell for what she perceived as a particularly British brand of Jewish self-consciousness which resulted in what she termed, the ‘ahistorical lukewarmness’ of his essay. ‘The . . . hallmark of Jewishness’, she argues, ‘lies precisely in its distinction-making: the knowledge, the bold assertion . . . that one thing is not another thing . . . that people are born wholes, not halves. And that the purpose of seeing distinction is to make choices’ (2008: 5). Partly this is a clash between a US and British perspective, a matter again of confidence in asserting the existence of what could be termed a ‘Jewish sensibility’, or as Ozick puts it elsewhere, a ‘substratum that is recognizably Jewish’ (Lyndon and Paskin 1996: 3). So, an American writer, such as Nessa Rapoport, can talk about ‘the possibility of a literature whose spine and sinews would not be simply Jewish experience, but Jewish materials and Jewish dreams’, and another American writer, Robert Lasson, can define himself as ‘a gastrointestinal Jew’ (Lyndon and Paskin 1996: 2). These are explicit, definite and gutsy identifications against which Thirlwell’s ‘half-Jewishness’ might well look irresponsibly timid and even Glanville’s pneumatic Jewish essentialism might seem altogether less robust. This conflict perhaps also signifies a generational shift in perception. Put simply, Ozick, born in New York to immigrant parents in 1928, and Thirlwell, who was born in North London in 1978 in comfortable and privileged circumstances, have distinctly different experiences of Jewishness. Thirlwell’s approach to identity is formed by a postmodern sense of subjectivity in flux. One could argue that perhaps Thirlwell’s generation is generally far more comfortable with not quite belonging. Whereas some writers in their forties and fifties, such as Sanger and Glanville, might have a more fraught sense of wanting to belong, other younger writers are possibly less attached to a singular or even dual sense of defining identity. Increasingly, British Jewishness is being understood as an evolving series of identifications. For some younger writers, there is undoubtedly still an interest in understanding oneself in relation to a collective Jewish history, but, as the twenty-first century unfolds, British Jewishness is increasingly figured as a matrix of connections that form ever more imbricated ways of belonging. The following part of this discussion focuses on the ways in which some recent British Jewish writers explore these possibilities. Thirlwell’s character Moshe, in Politics (2006), typifies a loose and uncommitted form of Jewishness. ‘This was partly’, the narrator explains, ‘because only his father was Jewish. It was also because his father was not a very Jewish Jew’ (75). So here we have a self-consciously tepid Jewishness that, having been passed down the paternal rather than maternal line, amounts to an inflection, rather than a summation of identity. Despite bearing a name that connotes a pronounced connection to Jewishness, Moshe is not ‘a serious Jewish boy’ (75): he cannot locate Israel on a map, he is not circumcised, and although he owns a 1996 Union of Jewish Students Haggadah (which includes an essay by the Chief Rabbi, ‘Why Be Jewish?’), he is not concerned about the future of the Jewish people. Moshe thus provides

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an insight into the parameters of the contemporary condition. ‘Occasionally’, the narrator tells us: Moshe enjoyed being overtly Jewish. Sometimes he felt loyal. But he was not inclined to worry about his nation. He did not worry about his Jewishness . . . Sometimes he felt loyal. But, more often, he did not. He did not understand allegiance. (76) Jewishness, for this disconnected generation, is one root among many. So, although in crisis Moshe finds himself feeling fondly towards the Hasidim in Hatton Garden and drawn to the Kosher Knosherie, he is not so much a pneumatic Jew as a rather breezy one. He allows Jewishness to pass over him in small, mostly unruffling, moments. Politics, which treats Jewishness not as an essence but as a constituent element within a range of identities, also places Jewishness within a wider context of multiculturalism. Thirlwell situates Moshe in the north-west London suburb of Edgware, a place that has a markedly Jewish population evidenced, among other things, by the ‘ten-foot high menorah for Chanukah’ that is erected each year outside the tube station (250). But this is not all there is to celebrate about ‘the odd variety of happiness’ that Edgware evokes (250). The narrator explains that: On Saturday nights, when Shabbat is over, a collection of Jewish boys and girls congregate with black and Asian boys and girls outside McDonald’s. They sell each other drugs. Sometimes, to pass the time, they get on the tube to Golders Green and stand outside Golders Green station. Then they come back to Edgware station. Edgware is multicultural heaven. (250–1) Here the youth of Edgware are united in shared aimlessness as different ethnic and racial groups exist easily alongside each other. The Jewish boys and girls, like the black and Asian boys and girls, are, it is suggested, all engaged in the same meaningless looping journeys, travelling but going nowhere. It is a mordantly postmodern kind of equality, located within a ‘dismal, quiet, lovable and kitsch’ suburban environment (251). Sander Gilman has argued that ‘the figure of the Jew, defined within the world of fiction, is a key to the understanding of the very nature of the multicultural society represented in it’ (2006: 146). In this context, Gilman reads Hanif Kureishi’s 1997 short story ‘We’re Not Jews’ as an example of the way in which the Jew functions as a ‘litmus test to define a particularly multicultural world’ (147). The story, which is set in the 1960s, focuses on an encounter between an English woman, who has married a Pakistani man, her son and their teddy boy neighbours. As mother and son are verbally abused the mother responds with the statement: ‘We’re not Jews’ (Kureishi 1997: 45). It is a strange and seemingly disconnected response. However, as the story explores the complexities of exclusion, and the strategies of displacement and disavowal that they invoke, it makes more sense. Kureishi paints a bleak picture of race and class in 1960s Britain, but this historical context is important to note. While it is evident that racial and religious tensions clearly exist still in contemporary Britain, more recent representations, set in the present, have tended to approach the relationship between Jews and other minority groups by presenting unlikely hybridisations, reversals and renegotiations of identity. Such explorations often form the basis for comic encounters. So, to take a mainstream example, the British film The Infidel (2010) uses the stock narrative convention of swapped identities to explore the intersecting identities of British Jews and British Muslims. The film, which presents some astute moments of observation, arrives at a rather unchallenging but upbeat conclusion. It



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suggests that beneath all the obvious dissimilarities and deep-rooted animosities, Jews and Muslims are not essentially so different after all. Thus the pain underlying Kureishi’s story becomes reconfigured, in a mainstream comic mode, as a thing of the past. There is then, in some recent representation, a cheerful embrace of diverse and hybridised forms of Jewishness. In these figurations, the angst described by Sanger and Glanville comes to seem unnecessarily morose. As issues of divisibility and indivisibility become re-envisioned as a celebration of multiplicity, we see some playful explorations of the ways in which Jewishness becomes deployed as a component of fused rather than confused identities. So, for example, Olivia Lichtenstein, in Mrs Zhivago of Queens Park (2007), introduces the character of Abraham ‘Abe’ Green, a six-foot Rastafarian Jewish deli owner, who is studying to be a rabbi and whose speech is littered with ‘Oy Veys’ and ‘ai yai yais’ (221). His ancestry, it is explained, is derived from the Portuguese-Spanish colonisers of sixteenth-century Jamaica. As he rolls a joint, he discusses the impact of this hybridised identity in enthusiastic terms: Genes, shmenes, they’re complementary, two halves that make a perfect whole: Rasta grass to give you an appetite, Jewish food to feed your munchies. Yin and Yang, you should pardon the expression. The Rastafarian Jew is the most highly evolved human being on the planet. (221) So, in this formulation, a character such as Sanger’s divided Simon, who has felt himself to be ‘two halves that didn’t add up to a whole anything’, is reconfigured as ‘a perfect whole’. Perhaps beyond the obvious stylistic and tonal differences in these novels, the difference in terms of their representation of identity is that the gentile half of Simon is figured as a rather blank, English non-self, whereas Abe, the Rastafarian Jew, merges two equally, if stereotypically, vibrant parts. Abe is an incidental character in a light-hearted novel, but, as I have argued elsewhere, Lichtenstein’s text exposes a seam of anxiety about Chloe Zhivago’s lack of connection to her Jewishness, and this Rastafarian Jew in some ways answers such unease.4 He is more than the sum of his parts. Olivia Lichtenstein’s characterisation of hybridity is then brief and celebratory. Jake Wallis Simons’ The Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew (2005), in the style of Salman Rushdie, presents a more experimental literary text that tackles both the seriousness and the absurdity that underpins identification. In particular he draws out the comic pathos of bizarre and mismatched combinations through the character of Rabbi Chod, a Tibetan Jew who presents himself as a reincarnation of Moses and gathers followers to his lost tribe of Israel. Chod, who runs his synagogue from a pet shop in Golders Green, feels unfairly marginalised by the more conventional Tibetan immigrant community, the Anglo-Jewish population and the British authorities. In essence, he wants to belong. Identities here are not so much hybridised as thrown into collision and the character is created with considerable comic brio. Chod’s pet shop/office/synagogue is a muddled hotchpotch of religious and cultural signification and contains the detritus of many years and many cultures. As the narrator explains: ‘The entire room had an uncanny, discordant atmosphere. Everywhere I looked, Jewish symbols had been self-consciously positioned within an otherwise Tibetan environment, with a hint of Englishness of course’ (Simons 2005: 32). The effect of such juxtaposition is comical but also disconcerting. It is a desperate and overdetermined attempt to merge cultural identities, but it ends up marking the gaps between them. The ludicrous implausibility of Chod’s endeavour is apparent, but this drive towards

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conjunction, with Jewishness functioning as a factor within ever more complex and compounded identities, is, as we have seen, a serious and recurring theme in other recent writing. These texts, in strikingly different ways, suggest that there is an interactive loop in which Jewishness alters the conditions around it and is itself altered by a range of other differences. Some of these figurations are idealistic, or somewhat simplistic, but they signal an openness to reconfiguration, however absurd or awkward that might be. Certainly, some leading contemporary British Jewish writers are approaching such issues with nuanced awareness. So we see, for example, in Naomi Alderman’s astutely observed short story ‘Other People’s Gods’ (2009), an impulse to engage with difference from the Jewish perspective. Reuben Bloom, the thoroughly Jewish optician who is the protagonist of the story, has led a ‘blameless life’ in Hendon (15). However, when he sees a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha on a market stall, he buys it, brings it home and is changed by it. With implicit reference to her novel Disobedience (2006), Alderman presents here another fable about disobedience, in this case the worshipping of idols, which suggests that Jewishness cannot remain impervious to the influences around it within the diverse conditions of contemporary Britain. In White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith famously articulated what has come to be seen as the millennial Zeitgeist of British multiculturalism.5 In exploring variations on themes of hybridised identities she introduces the Chalfens, an upper middle-class, liberal, halfJewish family. A passage extracted from Joyce Chalfen’s book on cross-fertilisation explains that: Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination. (Smith 2001: 309) For many British Jews today, this pseudo-horticultural paean to cross-fertilisation might be the reality of the situation, as Jews increasingly marry out and parent children who are Jewish in different ways to previous generations of British Jews. In an article for the Guardian, Jake Wallis Simons discussed his own British Jewish identification in such terms. He was born to a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father and his early childhood was broadly secular in nature. When his parents divorced, and his mother became more orthodox, Simons became more fully identified with Jewishness but less secure in terms of Britishness. He describes how as orthodox young Jews, even in the 1980s, he and his brother ‘felt profoundly alienated from the Britain that surrounded us’ (Simons 2010). Yet, through a process of shifting identification, he has in adult life become detached from orthodox Judaism and, like many other contemporary British Jews, he has gone on to create a different type of family. ‘I have three children now’, he explains, and my partner is not Jewish – or at least, her father is Jewish but not her mother, which is unacceptable from the orthodox perspective. What is missing for people such as me, who have found the dominant cultures of their birth untenable, is a coherent group mythology, shared traditions and a sense of belonging . . . As a parent it is my duty to acknowledge that the strands that weave the tapestry of our identities are not singular, but multiple. Simons’ acknowledgement of loss in relation to a coherent ‘sense of belonging’ is important. For many Jews in contemporary Britain, feelings of disconnection can be complex and



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troubling and this is undoubtedly a theme that has informed much recent British Jewish writing. But, as Simons also notes, for the next generation, multiplicity is a progressively more defining aspect of identification. How Jewishness endures as a meaningful and distinctive identity in this context is the focus of anxiety for some, but not all, elements of the Anglo-Jewish population in Britain today. As Jews increasingly marry out and parent children who experience Jewishness in diverse ways, the answer to the Chief Rabbi’s question of 1994 – ‘will we have Jewish grandchildren?’ (Sacks 1994) – is difficult to answer. Perhaps such a question can only really be addressed, in a stereotypically Jewish manner, by reframing it as another question; asking, instead, what does ‘Jewish’ mean?

Jew-ish, Jew-ish-ish . . . Some years ago the British Jewish atheist Jonathan Miller described himself as ‘Jew-ish’. He has been asked to explain this ever since. In an interview with Mark Lawson at Jewish Book Week in 2009 Miller articulated a cheerfully disconnected sense of Jewishness, describing his father as a ‘Jewish amphibian’ and himself as only really ‘a Jew for antisemites’ (Miller 2009). Jewishness for him is neither something to be denied, nor an identity to be claimed. In this sense all identities are equally meaningful and meaningless. They are not, for Miller, a matter for angst or stringent definition and he adds that as well as Jew-ish, he might also say that he is ‘Brit-ish’. Neither identification is comprehensive or defining. In ‘Not Jewish but Jew-ish’, a 2009 Guardian article, Jonathan Margolis develops the theme: We are those cop-out, fair-weather Jews that ‘real’ Jews despise more than they do antisemites: the secular, cultural Jews, the amoral majority, the ones who want to have their bagel and eat it. The ones who, with their marrying out, their going to the pub on Yom Kippur and to the football on Saturdays, and – God forbid – with their ambivalent view of the Middle East, are doing Hitler’s work for him and conspiring in the erosion of the already disappearing UK Jewish community – currently about 250,000 and counting, downwards. (Margolis 2009) In admitting to this apparently compromised Jewish identity, Margolis effectively claims the contemporary ground. He continues by acknowledging that his form of ‘fair-weather’ Jewishness has undoubtedly impacted on the Jewishness of his offspring and, by implication, the declining Anglo-Jewish population: So has being merely Jew-ish rather than a proper Jew, marrying a woman who was halfJewish, half-Methodist, and eating non-kosher food these five decades thwarted my children’s option to be Jews, and by doing so played its part in the slow decline of Britain’s Jewish population? In an odd way, it hasn’t entirely. (Margolis 2009) He goes on to outline the ways in which each of his three children is finding new ways to connect to Jewishness through relationships, work and political engagement, and he ends with the thought that ‘all this activity by our Jew-ish-ish children seems to suggest our particular Jew-ish line might limp on for a while yet, rather than collapse in an apathetic heap’. His grandchildren might not be Jewish but they will, he thinks, be Jew-ish-ish. Or perhaps that should be Jew-ish-ish-ish? So, in the end, neither anxieties about diminishing identities nor blasé celebrations of cultural plurality quite describe the contemporary situation for British Jews. Jewishness

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still exists; it has a distinct history and particular flavour in British life. But, increasingly, it exists alongside a range of other differences in the form of Jew-ishness. However, in focusing on the ways in which identities are increasingly connected and overlapping, we might also need to attend to the interstices that exist between Jewishness and other identities. In her 2002 novel The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith’s hero is Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese-Jewish hero born and bred in North London. Following Lenny Bruce’s example, Tandem compiles a potentially endless compendium that sets out to divide the world into that which is deemed to be Jewish and that which is (in these terms) ‘Goyish’. So, for example, in the category of office items the stapler is clearly Jewish while the paper-clip and mouse-mat are goyish (Smith 2003: 90). Tandem is of course, as his name suggests, the embodiment of hybridised, multiple, postmodern subjectivity, and his list points to the ludicrous and futile nature of trying to fix and itemise identities. And yet, however risible the project is, it is also somehow compelling. While in many ways the contemporary mode celebrates the dissolution of certainties, we also seem to crave distinction. Peculiarity is appealing. As readers we might be left wondering, despite our better judgement, if there is, after all, something more Jewish about a stapler than a paper-clip? In twenty-first-century Britain, Jewishness is one difference among many. Contemporary British Jewish writers highlight the desire to identify the particularity of their difference, while acknowledging that such difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to change, re-signification and reinterpretation. In this context, Jewishness is an evolving term. Perhaps then ‘Jew-ishness’ is not just a rhetorical trope. It might turn out to be the way forward.

Notes 1. For an extended discussion of these issues see Gilbert (2013). 2. For illustrations of, and challenges to, such nostalgia, see, for example, Howard Jacobson, Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993), Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room (1999) and Natasha Solomons, Mr Rosenblum’s List (2010). 3. The debate was developed further by Gabriel Josipovici who framed it in terms of a contest between realism and postmodernity; see Josipovici (2008: 70–2). These issues were also the focus of a Jewish Book Week (2010) discussion, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Jews on the Edge’, between Thirlwell and Will Self on 28 February 2010. 4. See Gilbert (2013: 128–9). 5. For readings of Smith’s White Teeth and The Autograph Man in terms of hybridity and multiculturalism, see Sicher and Weinhouse (2013: 98–101).

17 LIFE WRITING AND THE EAST END Devorah Baum

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. (Benjamin 1969: 93)

The Lost Letter

B

aum, my family name, means ‘tree’ in German, probably because my ancestors worked in forestry. When my great-uncle Jack was five his father, Henoch, who was then in Poland running an unsuccessful grocery shop, sent his sister to Warsaw to ask the owner of a new timber mill if he could be the forest manager. She returned with a letter of recommendation that so excited Henoch he ran into a neighbour’s house to show it to them. Jack’s memoir describes what happened next: ‘In a flash that letter disappeared . . . Nobody knows how the letter vanished, it was a complete mystery’ (Bourne 2005: 6–7). What’s more, the timber merchant ‘was a very superstitious person and said that once the letter was lost it was a sign that the job was not for my father’ (7). Undimmed in his memory, the loss of the letter was also a sign for Jack: if his father could lose such a golden opportunity, then he must indeed be a loser – a total schlemiel – a man who not only brought home nothing but losses to feed his children with, but whose fervent Hasidism had turned him into an impractical dreamer: like the superstitious timber merchant, Henoch was also inclined to believe in the divinity of signs. So it is not hard to understand why Jack, who was sent out as a young boy to fend for himself alone on workfloors across central Europe, might have felt a certain resentment towards a father who had schooled him in the ways of religion rather than any profession. Nonetheless, when reading about my great-grandfather Henoch, whose memory also comes down to me via my grandfather Isidor’s memoir, I cannot help romanticising him into the kind of Yiddish anti-hero one encounters in so many Hasidic tales, or in the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is, after all, hard to ignore the fact that, had it not been for Henoch’s lost letter, the Baum family would have most likely remained in Poland rather than trying their luck in England. Only one cousin in Europe survived the war. If Henoch had not lost that letter, I doubt that I would have been born.

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About Anecdotes In a private note to herself probably not intended for publication, Elizabeth Gaskell, in the process of writing her biography of Charlotte Brontë, remarked ‘if you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ (qtd in Lee 2008: 2). An anecdote, from an-ekdotos (not-published) and ek-didonai (given out), refers to something given away, something not intended for publication. Coming to us thus off-the-record, the anecdote is especially valuable for the life writer, suggests Hermione Lee, because, unlike official documents, it offers us a glimpse of ‘a real body, a physical life’ (3). The anecdote about Henoch’s lost letter is a case in point: by losing the official letter, Henoch simultaneously gave away a kind of secret about himself that has become, in my family’s memoirs, the real story: what might have been a conventional moment of career advancement was placed at risk of the accidental, and when accidents happen, as every Freudian knows, something significant is revealed about the personality – something that gets masked by the logical fulfilment of one’s aims. This, indeed, may be the ultimate aim of our aims: to cover up the character of our real personalities. Seeking greater intimacy with the objects of their fascination, the reader of a biography has a special interest in the unplotted, contingent events of a life; those things that tend to get lost at the moment of death when the life seems suddenly smoothed over. Like James, Freud shared a distrust of biographies that looked to make too neat a narrative sense out of the fractious, contradictory and enigmatic evidence of a human life. But if Gaskell is correct in her inference that the reader of a biography prefers incongruous anecdotes to overarching explanations, biography as a genre may be closer to the psychoanalytic view than Freud seems to have imagined. The psychoanalyst looks for evidence within our dreams and fantasies, obsessions and fascinations – those hidden aspects of the soul to which the biographer may not have such direct access; however, if she loves her reader, she will certainly be on the lookout for tell-tale signs. It is in the spirit of psychoanalysis also that historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi turns to anecdotal evidence about Freud in a controversial book, Freud’s Moses (1991), purporting to unmask psychoanalysis as an off-the-record account of Jewish history. In an earlier work, Zakhor (1982), Yerushalmi had already claimed that Jewish history differs from other forms of historical discourse because of its highly subjective approach to the past as a form of collective remembering. Historical events, no matter how obscure, are thus imbued with a kind of cosmic or spiritual significance; what is remembered is a sign awaiting interpretation whose meaning the future promises to reveal. Given their shared emphasis on memory, on attention to detail, on the significance of ‘accidents’ and on the practice of interpretation, there is, says Yerushalmi, an important analogy to be drawn between Jewish historiography as he understands it, and the dominant motifs of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, for Yerushalmi, is a quintessentially Jewish approach to telling stories about our lives.

Living Off-the-Record The fact that both my grandfather Isidor and his older brother Jack wrote memoirs that have been circulated within my family, and the fact that my husband’s mother, Lisa Appignanesi, has also written a fascinating memoir about her mother, Hena Borenstein, may suggest that I am unusually well-resourced as an inheritor of life stories. Diasporic lives



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tend to make for compelling reading: real-life tales of survival against the odds. Yet the prolific state of Jewish life writing is more probably attributable to another feature of the diasporic experience, for diasporic lives, because of their mobility, are particularly prone to get lost (often deliberately) from the record books. When he first went to London, for example, Henoch vanished like the letter: no one knew where he had disappeared to until he eventually sent word in the form of another letter inviting his family to join him in a tiny room in London’s East End. In his family memoir, Jacob’s Gift, Jonathan Freedland recalls a ‘family tree project’ at his junior school: Each of us had to trace our ancestors back as far as we could. Boys with names like Lowe, Sutherland and Blyth returned with hefty, parchment-style scrolls – unfurling forebears whose lives were etched on church records stored since medieval times in villages in Suffolk or Cornwall. One boy had gone all the way back to 1066 . . . I held a single sheet of A4 paper bearing the names of my great-grandparents and the – estimated – date of 1880. That was as far back as I could go; for the oldest generation the place names, ­surnames and dates were all guesses. (2006: 14) The image of the family tree is of people with roots, making my own foreign-sounding surname, Baum/Tree, so obviously unrooted to English soil, rather ironic. ‘Trees have roots; Jews have legs’, said Isaac Deutscher, rendering conventional forms of identification unreliable (qtd in Garrett 2003: 9). It is this lacuna that stimulated Freedland’s own efforts to fill in the historical gaps by bestowing on his firstborn son the ‘gift’ of a family memoir – ‘I hope that Jacob may find in here what I did not have that day at school when we were told to draw a family tree’ (2006: 382) – just as it has encouraged a remarkably large number of Jewish life writers who fear that, unlike Lowe, Sutherland and Blyth, their lives might otherwise leave no archival mark or trace.

All in the Name Jews are partly at risk of disappearing from public records because they are forever changing their names. Having come from Poland to England, my grandfather Isidor retained his surname Baum but Anglicised its phonetic pronunciation to the more English sounding ‘Borm’, having already replaced his Yiddish first name Sucher with Isidor en route to London. His older brother Jack changed both his first and last names, preferring to ­jettison Baum altogether by taking on the more English ‘Bourne’. Jewish names get changed repeatedly in the diaspora for reasons of survival, assimilation, social and professional advancement, and because such instincts for self-preservation invariably involve shades of self-loathing. In a memoir of his East End childhood, Emanuel Litvinoff recollects how ‘miserably ashamed’ (2008: 174) he was when hearing Yiddish voices in the street. In Losing the Dead (1999), Lisa Appignanesi recalls her mother’s efforts to mask her Jewish identity in wartime Poland by relying on her natural blonde hair and blousiness and a series of assumed gentile names, knowing that ‘[a] slip of the Aryan mask to reveal the Jew beneath would mean death’ (137). But these ‘aliases’ do more than merely mask her identity: they ‘are not altogether easy to shed’ (97). This psychological drama may even have had something to do with what brought my husband’s Jewish mother into an early marriage with his Italian Catholic father:

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In retrospect, given the family’s buried internal dynamic, that underground war between shame and self-hatred, the choice of a Gentile was probably – all matters of love and romance aside – the inevitable course. One had to break free from these stories, even if their traces were so deeply imprinted they would mark any others one could live. Finding a name which was as distant as possible from all the permutations of my parents’ was a manner of signalling a break. (67) Changing her name from Borenstein to Appignanesi thus constituted a vital ‘break’ between her mother’s wartime story and her own postwar existence. And yet, paradoxically, since her married name was also assumed as a kind of alias to protect her from the implicit danger of being a Borenstein, in the very attempt to escape from her mother’s identity by defecting from their shared name she was also, effectively, repeating her mother’s own survival strategy. How does one escape a history of escape? Jewish immigrants striving to assimilate have tended to feel both insecure about their place in society and fearful lest their assumed names and identities might be unmasked as those of imposters. The word ‘imposter’ ultimately assails the shifty figure of the ‘Caretaker’ in Harold Pinter’s 1960 play by the same name (2000: 116), who finds himself thus accused by the brother-landlords in whose home he has briefly been entertained by the possibility of work and lodgings before his invitation is rescinded. Described by Iain Sinclair as a ‘ghetto playlet’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 75), there is certainly something of the tenuous character of Jewish existence in the body of Pinter’s Davies. Claiming that his ‘papers’ are in Sidcup, Davies insists that ‘[t]hey prove who I am! I can’t move without them papers’, and explains that, ‘I changed my name! Years ago. I been going around under an assumed name! That’s not my real name!’ (Pinter 2000: 24). Mac Davies, if that is his ‘real name’, has been going under the assumed name of Bernard Jenkins. Throughout the play, and particularly when asked for references, Davies maintains that if he could only get to his official documents in Sidcup then the question of his identity would be settled. Of course, since neither Jenkins nor Davies are Jewish names, my own reading of Pinter’s play as drawing on something of the ghetto Jewish experience, and on Pinter’s own ‘roots’ in the Jewish East End, implicates me in the suspicious power-play of barely civil interrogation and unmasking exposed and expressed by the work itself. The Caretaker brought on to the 1960s stage elements of the paranoia surrounding postwar immigration and mixing-up of identities – anxieties that have also been, in more recent years, crossed over by an opposing postwar trend among the children of immigrant parents. A younger generation of British Jews (and similar currents exist within other immigrant communities) have frequently sought to recover their parents’ or grandparents’ abandoned Jewish names, often alongside a return to the abandoned orthodox religion. When her Jewish grandfather died, for example, artist Rachel Lichtenstein ‘panicked, realising that with him was buried the key to my heritage’, so she ‘reclaimed by deed poll the surname Lichtenstein’ and became a tour guide to the Jewish East End (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 19). This marked the beginning of a spiritual quest described in her shared book with Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room (1999), in which she obsessively pursues her investigations from the East End to Israel and Poland, and enters into a serious flirtation with the possibility of orthodox conversion. I can identify with this story. Both my brother and I have chosen to pronounce our surname ‘Baum’ the German way, going against our parents’ Anglicised ‘Borm’ (although neither of us have gone so far as to call ourselves ‘Boym’, the Yiddish pronunciation), and when I was a teenager I also made the decision to



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go public with my more private, off-the-record identity by insisting that the Hebrew name I was called in synagogue and by family members and friends, Devorah, should be adopted by those who called me Deborah. This also coincided, for an extended period, with my increased levels of religious observance.

Dreamers of the Ghetto Pinter’s widow, the biographer Antonia Fraser, quotes her husband insisting that ‘The Caretaker is not about a man looking for his identity, it’s about a man looking for a home’ (2010: 196). A home, that is to say, in England. Pinter had himself been raised in the Jewish East End. Once, when Pinter was revisiting the scenes of his childhood with Fraser, she claims to have been ‘over-excited’ and had ‘the impression of something very green and garden-like’, as if the East End were a lost Eden, only to be reprimanded by Pinter when lunching at Blooms: ‘You don’t understand. It was a terribly depressing place’ (118). By all accounts, life in the Jewish East End was terribly depressing, riven with extreme poverty, cramped and unhygienic living conditions, regular outbursts of antisemitism, some of which (the obligatory heckles of ‘Christ Killers!’, ‘Go back to Palestine!’, ‘Where are your horns?’, etc.) could be handled more easily than others, such as the confrontation with Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in 1936 known as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. The majority of autobiographical and family memoirs I have read of life in the Jewish East End include details of hand-to-mouth living, regular confrontations, gruelling workshop labour, child labour, the constant threat of unemployment, forays into thievery and humiliating dependence on charitable hand-outs; and then, of course, came the Second World War and the London Blitz. Why, then, was it necessary for Pinter to remind Fraser that those few overpopulated streets comprising the Jewish East End did not, in the first half of the twentieth century, constitute England’s most green and pleasant land? Certainly it has been the case that with the development of an East End heritage industry there has been an unmistakeable, and for some critics regrettable, strain of nostalgia. Artist Rachel Garfield (whose own striking work has sometimes sought to demystify this same legacy) attributes the current vogue for collective memory and its associated identity politics to a post-Holocaust turn away from social responsibility and a corresponding shift in the allegiance of British Jews from liberal to more conservative forms of political positioning. This, she believes, marks the dangerous underbelly of nostalgia: a failure to acknowledge what is happening, and to whom, right now. In particular, Garfield takes aim at the romanticised East End described in Rodinsky’s Room: ‘Both authors of this book write of the Jewish East End as if there were no longer any Jews, or as a golden moment of the ghetto Jew before annihilation and dispersal’ (2006: 100). Yet what the romance of the Jewish East End seems above all to reawaken are fond memories of Jewish communists and anarchists: the East End as a time of radicalism. It is not only conservatives, after all, who seek inspiration in the past. Many young British Jews today have left their families in the north-west suburbs of London and headed back to the increasingly gentrified boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets (to trendy Shoreditch, Stoke Newington and Mile End). Some years ago I was invited by a Jewish anarchist group called ‘Jewdas’ to give a midnight lecture on Derrida at an East End squat-party celebrating the Jewish festival of Purim and spent an unforgettable hour addressing a dark room full of drug-addled ravers in fancy dress, all straining to catch some philosophy above the drum ’n’ bass rebounding off the walls below. ‘Jewdas’ do not lack a sense of irony. They recognise

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the difference between their own struggles (as the privileged children of bourgeois parents) and those of their grandparents. Yet their nostalgic turn seems to be a genuine attempt to create alternative forms of collective memory and belonging to stem the tide of upward mobility. The last email flyer I received from ‘Jewdas’ advertised an upcoming cabaret evening at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club (another site recently recolonised by hipsters) spoofing an election for the unelected position of the Chief Rabbi of British Jews. So it is something of an irony that the East End whose dismal conditions turned its denizens into dreamers with dreams of getting out of the East End, or transforming it, should have given rise in succeeding generations of Jewish dreamers to dreams of returning and reconstructing the East End as a lost paradise. The term ‘Dreamers of the Ghetto’ belongs to another famous East End writer: Israel Zangwill. Following the success of his fictional representations of East End lives in Children of the Ghetto (1892), Zangwill went on to write portraits of figures who had emerged and dreamed their way out of the European ghettos; men such as Baruch Spinoza and Heinrich Heine (Zangwill 1898). His phrase is apt. In just about every Jewish memoir I have read, somebody in the family is described as a dreamer, including my great-grandfather Henoch, continually teased over his unrealistic optimism. ‘We were all dreamers’, writes Emanuel Litvinoff, ‘each convinced it was his destiny to grow rich, or famous, or change the world into a marvellous place of freedom and justice. No wonder so many of us were haunted by bitterness, failure, despair’ (2008: 1). Not all the ghetto dreamers failed to accomplish what they had dared to imagine. Andrew Miller’s family memoir, The Earl of Petticoat Lane (2007), tells of how his grandfather Henry, initially described as ‘only a dreamer’, later became a highly enterprising businessman whose intense striving took him, as the memoir’s subtitle summarises, ‘from an East End childhood to a West End life’. Miller’s own speculations regarding the reasons for his grandfather’s success address one of the great enigmas about Jews among certain other immigrant communities: Perhaps he didn’t see the obstacles ranged against his progress quite so clearly as did the indigenous poor. Or perhaps he saw them more clearly and saw that they were less Himalayan than they appeared to those unable to see around the edges of their English lives. (Miller 2007: 112) Hence the Jewish joke: Q: What’s the difference between a tailor and a psychiatrist? A: A generation. Like many others from the same background, Miller’s grandparents ‘lived, in a way, outside of the fabled class system’ (299). Their case may therefore be illustrative of how and why the diasporic mobility of Jewish lives has made this group virtually synonymous with the middle classes, or with the social mobility that so often appears, and may well be, insurmountable to those for whom class is a group identity that has been more or less naturalised (especially in England). But while he may have eluded the class system, ‘Henry was for most of his life in thrall to class, obsessed with ascending through the system’s echelons’ (300). No matter how far he advanced, he still felt that there was nowhere he truly belonged, no class that would comfortably accommodate him. Jewish and middle-class identities are similarly uncertain, and often seem ‘put on’: everyone is aspirational, looking for their place, looking over their shoulder, and afraid of being unmasked as imposters, as parvenus, as fakes. Their shared conditions of social mobility thus seem to have interpellated these



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two sets into the same affective registers: one speaks of both Jewish and middle-class guilt, of Jewish and middle-class insecurity, of Jewish and middle-class self-loathing. Then again, not all Jews have enjoyed Henry’s successes. Bernard Kops’s memoir, The World is a Wedding: From East End to Soho (2008), tells a very different story whose subtitle parodies the stereotypical social ascent from east to west. Kops’s youthful dreams, of bohemia rather than suburbia, saw him come very close to death and ruination among Soho’s ‘poets and dreamers’ (2008: 176). He spent years as a destitute drug addict, mixing with the criminal underworld, sent off to an asylum, and regularly contemplating suicide. When he does return to the East End after a spell away it is only to attend a drug-fuelled orgy. In some ways Kops’s memoir tells the salutary story to which we are more accustomed regarding what may lie in store for those who come from conditions of deprivation. Indeed, what is most surprising about Kops’s memoir of his life as a ‘Yiddisher boy’ is that it should be so surprising. In other cases, what very often occasioned the dreamers’ ‘bitterness, failure and despair’ was the transformation of the dream into reality. Perhaps the most famous of all modern dreams turned realities – a reality whose manifestly nightmarish aspects would be hard today to deny, even by its most ardent supporters – is Zionism. Many dreamers in Europe’s ghettos dreamed of transcending the ghetto with a state of their own. My grandfather Isidor’s memoir recalls his youthful participation in the East End’s first Zionist youth club, ‘Zeire Zion’, in Houndsditch. His father was strongly opposed, but that did not deter Izzy: To have had the opportunity from the age of 15/16 to play a microscopic part in the Zionist movement and to have lived to see the fulfilment of a dream is heartfelt and is not vouchsafed to many. (Baum 1983: 70) Yet those Zionist dreamers who, unlike my grandfather, actually made it to ‘Zion’ usually returned much less dreamily. Freedland’s memoir includes a portrait of his father’s greatuncle Nat Mindel, a British soldier in British Mandate Palestine who dreamed of being a British citizen and a Jewish Zionist at the same time, but who was disappointed by British distrust of his dual loyalties and the refusal to properly compensate him for his national service. Meanwhile, Freedland’s mother, Sara Hocherman, was born in 1936 in Petach Tikva to a religious Zionist father who forced his wife and children to move from Britain to Palestine, where they endured poverty, sickness and near starvation while he spent his time studying ‘in his real home: the yeshiva’. ‘Was he a dreamer’, asks Freedland, or ‘was he just lazy?’ (2006: 141). In the end Sara’s mother returned in desperation to the preferred penury of England with her two children and without her husband. Another of Freedland’s ancestors, his great-uncle Mick Mindel, became an East End celebrity after daring ‘to say no to the King of Israel’ (189), namely David Ben-Gurion, who had come to the East End to solicit Mick’s help as ‘the leader of the Jewish proletariat in this country’. ‘[T]here is no future here’, Ben-Gurion told Mick: ‘You must tell those who follow you, Jewish workers, that their destiny is in Palestine’ (185). That Mick had turned down this request because he believed in a different dream to Zionism – communism – meant that in ‘Communist circles, he was a hero’ (189), having already earned himself a reputation as a political organiser, and as the lover of another East End star, Sara Wesker, a trouser machinist who led a strike action in 1926. Communism, even more than Zionism, is a constant motif of most East End memoirs. My great-uncle Jack was attracted to communism and claims to have started a factory strike in the Russian revolution of 1905 when he was only 11 years old. It was at the tender age

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of 11 that Emanuel Litvinoff also recalls ‘drifting into Communism’, and the lessons of his youth leader: Once he asked the Jewish children to put up their hands. Nearly all of us did so. ‘In the Soviet Union’, Comrade Bill remarked with a kindly smile, ‘anti-Semitism has been abolished’. He went on to explain that the toiling Jewish masses were being exploited by rich Jewish capitalists who would sell their grandmothers for gold. But not to worry. After the Revolution there would be no Jews left, only workers. (2008: 98) Communist prejudice towards Jews was later reaffirmed as news slowly got through of Stalin’s antisemitic purges in Russia. Mick Mindel’s growing sense of disillusionment had begun earlier, however, when, following the heartening demonstration of communist support for their Jewish comrades at the Battle of Cable Street, the British Communist Party did not speak out against the pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Mick’s disillusionment is paraphrased by Freedland as an unhappy suspicion: ‘Maybe the only people who would ever truly care about the safety of Jews were not the brotherhood of man but Jews’ (2006: 194). Mick nonetheless stayed true to the fight for workers, immigrants and the poor, even if the reality was no match for the dream. His story of idealism and disillusionment could have been taken straight out of Arnold Wesker’s play Chicken Soup with Barley (1956) in its depiction of an East End Jewish family for whom membership of the Communist Party involves as much devotion as any religion, and for whom loss of faith in the Party is just as terrible as it would be in a God. So Litvinoff’s description of ghetto dreamers haunted by bitterness, failure and despair could include both Freedland’s portrait of Nat Mindel (disillusioned because he sensed the British could not trust him as a true patriot if he was also a Zionist Jew) and his portrait of Mick Mindel (forced to confront a rupture between his Jewish identity and the British Communist Party). In both these cases the dream that has really been upended is the one that Pinter places at the heart of his menacing play about a man ‘looking for a home’. Even Miller’s grandfather, the man whose dreams of social mobility came spectacularly true, and who had grown ‘into one of those instinctive conservatives that immigrant families often produce, alongside their radicals and egalitarians’ (Miller 2007: 242), did not fulfil all his ambitions. While he would officially ‘admit no tension or contradiction between being a Jew and being an absolute Englishman’ (181), Henry had been able to advance only so far and had not, for instance, been thought a suitable candidate for the Harpenden Bowling Club, which excluded him. Moreover, it was Litvinoff’s own despair over England as a home for the Jews that fuelled his personal crisis during the Struma episode, when an old cargo boat carrying nearly 800 Jewish men, women and children fleeing persecution in Europe in 1941 was denied entry into Palestine by the British and later torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. This, for Litvinoff, turned the British into ‘Hitler’s accomplices’: ‘Never again would I be able to think of myself as an Englishman, or face uncertainty about my identity’ (2008: 183). As such, many of these memoirs are both critiques and continuations of the original East End dreams and dreamers. Running very much against the spirit of Litvinoff’s Comrade Bill promising a future without Jews, Freedland concludes his family memoir by affirming the commitment to social justice inherited from Mick Mindel, claiming his place ‘on the left . . . as a peculiarly Jewish obligation’ (2006: 322), while simultaneously carrying forward the complex dual loyalty of Nat Mindel. Like Nat, Freedland dreams of being both Jewish and British at the same time: ‘I want to take part in British society, but I don’t want to disappear’ (308).



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Disappearing Acts When the adult Litvinoff returns to the East End he finds there a mark of his younger self: his initials ‘E.L.’ carved into wood. Yet the East End, says Sinclair, is not the place Litvinoff remembers: ‘It can only be the same if he becomes what he was, unburdened of what he now knows’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 65). This marking of initials in the manner of lovers confessing their trysts to the barks of trees is nonetheless an eloquent metaphor for the canon – if one can speak of such – of Jewish life writing. A diasporic population whose relation to place is so tenuous, and so often short-lived, makes of each autobiographical work something akin to Litvinoff’s early engraving: a scratched out declaration that ‘I was here’ or ‘we were there’. This, too, is the sense to be made of Freedland’s closing declaration that he wants to take part in British society without his Jewishness disappearing. His memoir may itself be an attempt to write the Jewish experience into the landscape, history and memory of Britain. That a book should be the vehicle of this Jewish ‘participation’ in British society is a complicating factor, however, for the proverbial image of Jews as ‘people of the Book’ has usually viewed ‘the Book’, more than any territory, as the true home of people with legs rather than roots. There is, moreover, another context for the anxiety about disappearance that threads through so many of these memoirs, for the East End was also the site of shtetl life in England – that lost Yiddish world and civilisation once so populous in Europe, but which came to a sudden and definite end during the Second World War. It is one of the war’s most terrible ironies, in fact, that this urban English shtetl shared in the fate of its European neighbours when the final V2 bomb that Hitler’s air force dropped on London landed on the Jewish East End, taking with it 120 Jewish lives, including Freedland’s grandmother, and more or less obliterating the Jewish way of life there too. So it is against the larger backdrop of the European genocide that each disappearing feature or vanishing sign of Jewish life in the East End has been more and more zealously mourned. In 2012, for example, my father enlisted me to sign an online petition to save the building that housed Mother Levy’s Nursing Home in Spitalfields, the place where my father was born alongside the likes of Arnold Wesker, Alma Cogan and Lionel Bart. Born into East End poverty, my father’s story follows the Anglo-Jewish narrative of upward mobility through the English education system, army conscription and a career as a GP in the nascent NHS. But my father also feels some of the nostalgia for the Jewish East End usually ascribed to those who did not live through it first time round. Then again, the Baums’ East End romance began the moment they arrived in London in 1913 and moved into 100 Sidney Street just two years after the Sidney Street siege, into the very room where Peter the Painter had been trapped and possibly perished. Sidney Street, writes Sinclair, using language that Garfield considers dangerously nostalgic, ‘will always be police helmets, rain capes, soldiers lying full length on the cobbles . . .’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 84). And yet it was precisely because the Sidney Street siege was already being mythologised, even as it happened, that the sight of tourists visiting his London address led my young grandfather to relish his occupancy of ‘a place of notoriety’ (Baum 1983: 47). So it would be a mistake to imagine the East End mythos a recent phenomenon. As Miller reminds us, in 1902 the American writer Jack London hailed a horse-drawn cab and asked to be taken to the East End, baffling the driver: ‘It reflects the East End’s existence more as a vague, mythic region of poverty, resilience and lawlessness than as an identifiable place – a sort of cramped, urban version of the American West’ (2007: 89).

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The campaign to save Mother Levy’s failed. I do not know if there were campaigns to save Bloom’s restaurant, or the Kosher Luncheon Club, or to keep up services in the various synagogues; if there were, they too have failed. Yet you can still go on a tour of the Jewish East End to see where these places once thrived. East End mythology yields a palimpsest of immigrant life in the capital, with successive generations of immigrants coming from different parts of the world for different reasons, and continuing to dominate the same sprawl of streets at different points in time: wherever there are dreamers there are ghosts and there are memories. As such, Lichtenstein’s search for a mysterious Hasid by the name of David Rodinsky – a man supposed to have disappeared from his tiny garret room above the Princelet Street synagogue in Whitechapel – may be less blind to the vanishing world of the old East End than Garfield suspects. Contending that the disappearance of this synagogue’s ‘caretaker’ had already been prophesied by Pinter, Sinclair has located an anecdotal story within the Pinter family archives hinting at how Pinter himself may have had his own artistic imagination fired up by the sudden disappearance of a family member, his Uncle Judah: ‘He simply moved out of his room, he’d gone . . . I’ve been looking for him all my life and I’ve never found him’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 76). Early on in her search Lichtenstein spied ‘the costume of a Hasidic Jew’ and ‘ran out into the street after him . . . he had disappeared’ (49). Was this simply a postmodern, post-Holocaust apparition, or does Lichtenstein’s ‘ghost hunt’ engage something older still? (The Hasid in his peculiar sixteenth-century dress was, after all, unrooted to the present tense no less in the first half of the twentieth century than the second.) Litvinoff’s memoir likewise recalls a desperate time in his youth when he was forced to queue for free food: ‘I was distracted by the appearance of a fellow with the broad-brimmed black hat and glossy coat of a Polish Chassid . . . his coming rocked my heart like a dark ancestral wind’ (2008: 118). Litvinoff had only ever known the London ghetto he lived in, and yet even there, it seemed, there was another ghetto of the imagination: ‘The Chassid lurked in the ghetto of my mind’ (119). Resisting nostalgia by claiming the past as a ‘depressing place’ only conjures up another dream of lost authenticity and another East End romance. From the very beginning, says Yerushalmi, Jewish identity was always about looking back and looking within: remembering (Yerushalmi 1982).

Interior Spaces Sinclair regards Lichtenstein’s search for the missing Hasid as a journey more inwards than outwards: the dream-space of the East End becoming a projection screen both of her own psyche and the spirit of her time. Rodinsky, he says, had become a Zeitgeist figure on the back of Patrick Wright’s London Review of Books piece about the discovery of his unoccupied lodgings in 1987. Henceforward Rodinsky was ‘a man who had become a room’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 67): The room was detached from its physical and temporal base and turned into a cabinet of curiosities. And Rachel became its keeper. She was the caretaker in absentia. Her task was to tell the story in which she now had the central part. To uncover the mystery of David Rodinsky by laying bare her own obsession with his life and work. (79) Refraining from psychoanalytic speculations, Sinclair prefers to represent Lichtenstein’s obsessional mirroring of her subject (her ‘transference’) within a different framework of interpretation: ‘Rodinsky, the idea of Rodinsky, had become a dybbuk. The soul of a dead person who enters the body of a living human and directs their conduct’ (83).



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Towards the end of her book Lichtenstein concedes that her Hasid’s life was probably ‘grim and lonely’ (301). So she does know she is romanticising David Rodinsky, yet still chooses to trust in the mystical representation of history, becoming an interpreter of signs and a believer in providence rather than coincidence. When a rebbe in Jerusalem tells her ‘[t]his man, Rodinsky, his neshama, his soul, is connected to yours’ (129) she receives this news as blessing and affirmation. When her son is born she calls him David. And such psychological dramas affect Sinclair too, who is much too subtle an interpreter to imagine himself a detached ambler through other people’s lives. Sinclair accompanies Lichtenstein on her ‘furious pursuit’ of David Rodinsky in hot pursuit of another David, and another ‘detective story unravelling the mysteries of a life without evidence’ (137), that of Emanuel Litvinoff’s notorious brother, David, anecdotes about whom continue to circulate among veterans of the old East End; all unpublished, all contradictory, all off-the-record: ‘David, having no books to his credit, had to take his chances’ (136). It is very much to Sinclair’s credit that he dedicates so many of his own books to those anecdotal characters and stories excluded from the nation’s collective memory and archives. ‘The official map of the culture, at any time, would always fail to include vital features’, he writes. ‘Too many good writers were left out of the canon. This was particularly true of East London proletarian novelists’ (139). Sinclair’s creative allegiances thus stand in stark contrast to the ‘live art’ manifestation in a former East End synagogue that provoked Lichtenstein’s ‘moneychangers-in-the-temple scale’ reaction when observing an audience of hipsters watch on as two young women ‘systematically destroyed books of record of the vanished community’ (79). The destruction of books of record can agitate what Derrida terms ‘archive fever’, whether the destruction has been enacted by book-burning fascists, art provocateurs, or has resulted from the rather more quotidian iniquities of forgetting or neglect. In Archive Fever (En mal d’archive), Derrida identifies the desire for the archive as a passion bordering on a pathology: an irrepressible desire to return to the origin (arkhé) (Derrida 1997). As such, archive fever is a kind of homesickness infecting those who live, or feel themselves to live, in exile. Consider, for example, Lichtenstein’s description of Rodinsky’s room: ‘junk filled all the space that was not consumed by books’ (Lichtenstein and Sinclair 2000: 95). The room archives its occupant’s archive fever. But archive fever is also a contagion. What had been Rodinsky’s ‘fever’ – the obsessive collection of facts and artefacts – becomes Lichtenstein’s ‘fever’ as she obsessively collects facts and artefacts about Rodinsky. Freud suffered from archive fever too, as evidenced by the artefacts filling his study in the archive about Freud that has become the Freud Museum in Hampstead, his London home and the place of his exile from the destruction taking place in Europe.1 The Freud Museum is also the place where Derrida first delivered his paper on ‘archive fever’ in response to Yerushalmi’s books, Freud’s Moses and Zakhor. In a manner not dissimilar to Garfield’s criticism of the exclusive and excluding remembrances of Rodinsky’s Room, Derrida calls attention to the exclusive and exclusionary nature of Yerushalmi’s claims about Jewish history (since Yerushalmi seems to identify both memory and the future as specifically Jewish ideas or traits). Linking the injustice of this claim to the question of the archive, Derrida notes that without such an exclusive and excluding claim there would, in effect, be no archive, for the archive does not maintain an indifferent relationship to history: every archive will have its inclusive and exclusive criteria. Every archive, in other words, is simultaneously an index of what it remembers and a clue or a sign to what it forgets. It is a very Freudian point. It was in a late work, ‘Beyond

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the Pleasure Principle’, that Freud announced the existence of a death-drive whose relentlessly destructive instincts seek to lay waste to every archive and every attempt at conservation (Freud 1991). This discovery came late, said Freud, because the death-drive leaves no trace: it obliterates its history by operating in silence, leaving neither archive nor proof of having been at all. ‘I remember my own defensive attitude’, admits Freud, ‘when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it’ (qtd in Derrida 1997: 10). Since the project of the death-drive is to annihilate memory and eradicate the archive, Freud, then, accomplishes a remarkable feat with this late discovery: he archives the unarchivable. There would be no need to remember were there not also the desire to forget, and to forget in such a way that we do not even know that anything has been forgotten. Thus Lichtenstein, the zealous crusader who halts the destruction of books of record in a disused synagogue, represents the subject of her own book inhabiting a room consumed by books, and concludes her feverish pursuit of Rodinsky – the vanished Hasid whom she has brought back to life – by saying the Kaddish at his graveside, laying him, or his ghost, to rest. Archive fever destroys as it preserves, just as, in the psychoanalytic encounter, one strives to remember in order to be less beholden to one’s memories; in order to forget.

The Facts The archive is an institution for the preservation and collection of facts retrieved or saved from the past. But there is something hard and unforgiving about facts. In Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld’s autobiography, The Story of a Life (2004), he remarks: Whenever you speak about those days, you are gripped by a sense of how unbelievable it all is. You relate it, but you don’t believe this thing actually happened to you. This is one of the most shameful feelings I know. (181) There is, then, a kind of shame, perhaps most typically related to the inassimilable content of traumatic experience, but which may also relate to all experience insofar as one seeks to share one’s experiences with others, that follows on from the sense that there may be something unbelievable or artificial about one’s words even when one is telling the truth. To convey his own experiences truthfully, therefore, Appelfeld has generally favoured the imaginative landscapes of fiction. Appelfeld is not alone. In The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), American Jewish author Philip Roth presents his own life story. It would be difficult to think of another writer who has so seriously muddied the waters for readers wanting to know the absolute difference between fact and fiction. But if Roth’s protagonists are regularly taken or mistaken for off-the-record versions of himself, his on-the-record autobiography presents the same problem in reverse. The book concludes with an epilogue penned by Nathan Zuckerman, the American Jewish author who features as the protagonist of a number of Roth novels and the character who has been most frequently identified as Roth’s own alter ego. Zuckerman’s criticism of his author’s self-rendering is withering: ‘I just cannot trust you as a memoirist the way I trust you as a novelist because, as I’ve said, to tell what you tell best is forbidden to you here by a decorous, citizenly filial conscience’ (2007b: 172). Autobiography, Zuckerman continues, is ‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms’ (172), and he accuses Roth of deceiving his readers by omitting details of his time in psychoanalysis (‘I wonder why’; 169), surmising that ‘[t]he truth is that the facts are much



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more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up’ (166). This may be why Lichtenstein, notwithstanding her occasional concession to the ‘grim and lonely’ facts, prefers to trust in the fantasy life of her imagination when pursuing her subject. Life writing seems a kind of midway genre between fact and fiction. Both Jonathan Freedland and Andrew Miller have chosen to cut their teeth on a family memoir as a bridge between their successful careers as journalists (for The Guardian and The Economist respectively) and their more recent departures as novelists, as if they were first compelled to clear the cobwebs from the family attic to chase away those ghosts crowding out their own imaginations. Speaking of attics, in Roth’s first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979), the young Nathan meets an attractive young woman called Amy Bellette and fantasises that her name is an alias for the most famous of all Jewish life writers (or all life writers), Anne Frank, who, as Nathan imagines, miraculously survived the war and is living in America under a pseudonym. If Zuckerman is Roth’s alter ego then Anne Frank is Zuckerman’s. A projection screen for his own frustrations as a writer, in Zuckerman’s imagination Anne Frank has discovered in America that she can only be the most famous twentieth-century Jewish writer (or the most celebrated Jewish writer after Moses) if she is dead – ghosted. Living Jewish writers telling stories of the present are no longer wanted after Auschwitz. Anne learns this when she goes to see the Broadway production of her Diary staged, with its concluding line (her words, taken out of context), ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart’ (Frank 1997: 332). What Roth’s novel deftly illustrates is how Anne Frank functions as a fantasy figure, less in Zuckerman’s imagination than in the imagination of that Broadway audience shedding tears for an innocent girl, a child victim. Anne’s story had been edited and universalised for Broadway, much as the diary itself had been edited, prior to its initial publication, by Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who sought to censor evidence of his daughter’s aggressive or destructive instincts (particularly towards her mother) and of her burgeoning sexuality. For Zuckerman, however, Anne is an ally: another Jewish writer whose voice gets muffled by disapproving elders demanding her ‘decorous, citizenly filial conscience’. The last entry of Anne’s diary before it abruptly ends is actually a meditation on Anne’s own character as ‘split in two’ (Frank 1997: 334). The light and cheerful Anne people know is shadowed, she writes, by another Anne, ‘my own secret’ (334). This second Anne is hiding from the rest of her family, even within the claustrophobic confinement of their shared hiding place. She cannot appear in public for ‘she shuts up like a clam the moment she’s called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she’s disappeared’ (335). The real Anne only ‘takes the stage when I’m alone’ (335) and has just one confidante – Kitty, her diary. Anne’s life writing is thus an effort to discover and recover the subject who keeps disappearing: herself. Unlike Anne on Broadway, this Anne ends her diary by ‘trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world’ (336; ellipsis Frank’s own).

The Attic Derived from the Attica region of ancient Greece, the English word ‘attic’ creates a semantic link between the upper chamber of the house and the very notion of history or antiquity, resonating with the more vernacular sense of an attic as that hidden part of the

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family home storing memories we may prefer to forget, and hanging ominously above our heads, as if threatening at all times to cave in on us. For a diasporic people, Jews do not, on the whole, travel light. Most of my family are hoarders, suffering, by degrees, from archive fever and overstuffed attics. But the attic is not only a storehouse of the Jewish past, it is an inescapable part of the past: both hiding place and place of confinement. It is hardly surprising, then, that the most celebrated escapologist of the modern age, a man who could get himself out of all manner of tight spaces, was the immigrant son of a failed rabbi whose first disappearing act was to change his name from Erik Weisz to Harry Houdini. Houdini took the quintessentially diasporic body – the diasporic life story par excellence – and turned it into the all-American art of entertainment. Noting the coincidence of Houdini’s appearance on the world stage at around the same time as that of the earliest psychoanalysts, Adam Phillips interprets escapology as ‘the art of courting ­accidents’ (2001: 39). Houdini, he writes, was a man losing and refinding some room, a man shrinking his space and then recovering his expansiveness. A man compulsively re-inventing, and re-enacting his own confinement . . . A man who escaped for money. (47) Houdini also suffered from archive fever. An obsessive book collector, collecting works relating not only to his own specialism, magic, but tomes of Judaic law sacred to his father, it was not, thinks Phillips, ‘only the actual death of his father, but the death, or possible disappearance of his father’s cultural life – his father’s tradition, his father’s personal past – that haunted Houdini’ (90). This ‘fact’ encapsulates the enigma of Houdini’s personality for Phillips. A faithful husband, a loyal son and a traditionalist who maintained the family archives, he was simultaneously anarchic – a risk-taking, death-defying magician and daredevil. Houdini was thus at once a conserver and protector of the law (the police were often his co-conspirators) and a subversive who revealed the glaring inadequacies of ‘authorities’ looking to lock him up, pin him down or contain him. As such, it is possible to conjecture that when audiences came to marvel at Houdini escaping and surviving his own bondages and entrapments, they may also have been witnessing something else: the secret – shown but never shared – of how Jews have likewise been able to survive and grow old in history.

Family Ties Houdini’s archive fever suggests to Phillips that his escapology was not driven by a wish to escape his family: Escaping was what he did outside the family and in many ways for the (economic) well-being of that extended family. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get away from his parents, but that like many immigrants of his generation, he didn’t want to. His impulse was to conserve and protect; and though he was always working on new stunts, those stunts showed above all that he could preserve himself in adversity. The stunts would change, but he wouldn’t. (Phillips 2001: 86) Though a much less profitable risk-taker than Houdini, Bernard Kops also attributes his survival of adversity and his own death-drive to his family:



Life Writing and the East End 235 I realised how much Jews needed the family. It was our security . . . The family, the natural order in the midst of chaos, the tent in the desert, affirmed that life was beautiful because it was. (2008: 68)

So Kops’s family kept him safe, yet he did sometimes dream of escaping them, much as Anne Frank, hiding in the attic with her family, dreamed of a freedom involving ‘no other people in the world’. Tasked with safeguarding the family’s history, the Jewish life writer must work within the double-bind of its conservative and progressive poles. Thus while Freedland’s family memoir affirms left-wing politics, these are presented as a ‘Jewish obligation’ to be passed on to his son. Miller’s memoir, on the other hand, although ostensibly the tale of an ‘instinctive conservative’, is told by an admiring grandson more seduced by the romance of the narrative than its moral or political orientations. Such opposing but inseparable movements are nothing new to the story. There has always been, in Jewish religion, both a written and oral tradition, and both halakhic (legal) and midrashic (creative) modes of interpretation. Midrash is the archive of those off-the-record rabbinic stories derived from imaginative engagements with the biblical texts; an exegetical method for keeping the Torah contemporary and the place where, for generations, religious Jews have safeguarded, between the lines of scripture, secret versions of their own life stories. Analysing the dynamic interplay between narrative and law within this religious framework, the biblical and midrashic scholar Avivah Zornberg has identified an intergenerational division of labour within Jewish storytelling: The grandparent teaches a Torah of . . . personal experience, of oscillation, reversals, suspense, insufficiency. Unlike the parent who transmits what has been handed down, generation to generation, the grandparent, across a gap, dares to tell a narrative of danger. (2009: 379) It’s the age-old story: the parent strives to transmit the law while the grandparent reveals how often the law, for the sake of the story and its continuation, has been broken.

What of the Lost Letter? Perhaps my interest in Freud and Derrida involves an unconscious wish to redeem my great-grandfather’s reputation as an accident-prone dreamer and loser of letters, for while Freud reveals the import of both accidents and dreams, Derrida maintains that ‘a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and since this belongs to its structure, it can be said that it never really arrives there’ (1997: 191). Since all letters are open to interpretation, the message, the meaning and the delivery of a letter can never be assured, even when the letter is held, as a fact, within the archive. As such, documentary evidence may have less value for the interpreter than the memory of its disappearance. What gets displaced for Freud is a sign of the unconscious workings of the mind and the hidden life story of the subject. For Derrida, on the other hand, the letter that goes astray inspires the messianic conception of a history that can have no closure, for the future will always remain open before the memory of all those letters, and all those lives, that have not – yet – been accounted for.

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Note 1. Significantly, Freud, who was fleeing Nazism when he went into exile, chose to bring his collectibles along with him, some of which can be seen on display in vitrines in the Freud Museum, rendering barren his old quarters, the Freud Museum in Vienna. Freud’s collection includes Japanese figurines called netsuke whose role in potter Edmund de Waal’s family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) – a complex and profoundly moving story about the fate of a twentieth-century Jewish family – is that of the inheritance whose hidden aspects de Waal traces by searching for and thus creating his own family’s archives, all the while pondering the symbolic attachment to such ‘objects’ for a diasporic people constantly on the move.

18 ‘ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE’: ISRAEL IN BRITISH JEWISH FICTION, PRE-LEBANON1 Axel Stähler

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ith his potentially explosive suggestion that ‘Israel exists only poetically, in the imaginations of those who cannot adequately describe themselves without it’, the British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson did not mean to challenge Israel’s right to exist (2010b: 22). Originating in the debate about his controversial Booker Prize winning novel The Finkler Question (2010), the writer’s claim was rather intended to emphasise the variability of the semantic potential associated with ‘Israel’ as a subjective ‘poetical’ construct and as a touchstone for the construction of identities. The suggestion is that Israel has been turned into an abstract concept, an abbreviation for, and a transnational marker of, Jewishness, which has enormous impact on the construction of Jewish identities far beyond its contested borders – not least in Britain. Clearly, Jacobson’s provocative statement needs to be contextualised in terms of the polarised reception of his novel in which he explores the impact of, and response to, Israel in relation to the perceived proliferation of antisemitism in contemporary Britain. Jacobson’s concern prompts him to ask ‘whether loathing of Israel would spill into loathing of Jews . . . and whether a new Kristallnacht was in the offing’ (22). Israel, it seems, has become an active catalyst for anti-Zionist and antisemitic emotions; and England, in the words of Jacobson, has ‘turned into an uncustomarily frightening place for Jews’. Not so much in the sense of physical attacks, but with the proliferation of ‘intellectual violence’ and ‘anti-Zionist rhetoric’ which Jacobson describes as profoundly upsetting ‘in its inflatedness and fervour – a rhapsodic hyperbole growing more and more detached from any conceivable reality’ (22). Of troubling topicality as Operation Protective Edge (2014) continues to polarise the response to Israel’s need for security, Jacobson’s recent example is eerily reminiscent of earlier discussions about Israel. Naturally, the parameters of the debate have changed significantly over the course of the last six or seven decades since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, mostly in response to and contingent on historical events. Yet Israel has nevertheless remained a semantically highly charged and contested place which has indeed provoked the production, and has itself been the product, of conflicting narratives. These narratives inevitably have helped British Jewish writers, such as Jacobson, to negotiate their position in relation not only to the far-away land of their imagination (or that of others), but also to the Jewish experience in Britain. As such their trajectory is in

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stark contrast to earlier narratives in English literature, mostly of a non-Jewish provenance, which frequently construed Palestine as the Holy Land and substituted for its geographical and political manifestation a spiritual topography. While notions like these may have been confined largely to the ‘eccentric margins’ of the cultural imagination in Britain, Eitan Bar-Yosef nevertheless traces the dream of building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, as well as the ways in which this vision influenced the encounter with the actual Jerusalem, from John Bunyan to the British conquest of the city in 1917. Indeed, he suggests that the ‘internalization of the twin biblical images – “Promised Land” and “Chosen People” – offered the English, collectively and as individuals, a way of understanding their place in the world’ (2005: 29). Eventually, the metaphorical appropriation of the ‘Holy Land’, in both domestic and imperial contexts, caused the literal, geographical Holy Land itself to be eclipsed in the English cultural imagination. With the harsh reality of the British Mandate for Palestine (1918/22–48), the spiritual perception of the Holy Land was seriously challenged, if not shattered. Indeed, by the time the Mandate was referred back to the United Nations in 1947, one would have expected the British to have been thoroughly disabused of the notion of the picturesque oriental country of biblical provenance, which nevertheless lingered on. Even before ratification of the Mandate in 1922, increasingly violent encounters between Arabs and (mostly) newly immigrated Jews emerged as manifestations of rivalling nationalisms in the face of what effectively was British colonial rule. They were soon to escalate even further with the repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe. Drawn further and further into the trilateral conflict which, in the end, required a military presence in the ‘Holy Land’ that surpassed even that on the whole of the Indian subcontinent (Pappe 2004: 121), the British army, administration and Palestine police became targets for Jewish paramilitary organisations such as the Irgun and LEHI. The 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel and in particular the execution of two British sergeants in 1947 by the Irgun provoked serious antisemitic riots in Britain. Indicative not least of the apologetic and self-effacing attitude of British Jews who were intent on assimilation and integration, a conscious effort was immediately made to obliterate the events ‘from national and Jewish collective (if not individual) memory’ (Kushner 1998: 194–5). This process of ‘deliberate amnesia’ (194) reveals at the same time the emergence of a recurrent pattern that continues to affect the literary engagement with Israel – the particular sensitivity towards the actions of Jews in the distant Land of Israel and their impact on constructions of Jewish identities in Britain.

Before Statehood When Palestine entered the Jewish literary imagination in postwar Britain, it did so with a bang which echoed with the blast of the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946. Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment was published simultaneously in London and New York in October 1946 – after the bombing but before the execution of the two sergeants in July of the following year. The topical novel must predominantly be understood as a political intervention. It is not only a document of the internal Jewish debate on the Zionist project in Palestine but was conceived also as a vehicle for influencing public opinion in Britain and America at a time when the fate of the Jewish homeland was in the balance. Accredited to the London Times, Koestler went to Palestine in January 1945. On the



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suggestion of Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organisation, and on behalf of the Anglo-Palestine Committee of which both were members, the writer sought to broker negotiations between the moderate Haganah and its elite unit, the Palmach, on the one side and the more militant Irgun and LEHI on the other. The reconciliation of the antagonistic Jewish factions would have been crucial to reaching an agreement also with Britain and the Arabs. While his political mission must be considered to have failed, Koestler nevertheless remained in Palestine until August 1945 and continued his research for the novel he was already planning to write with the aim of reaching a broad readership. Thieves in the Night indeed quickly proved to be a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, though it also generated much controversy (Buckard 2004: 228). Set exclusively in Mandate Palestine between October 1937 and the publication of the notorious MacDonald White Paper in May 1939 which further restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, Koestler’s novel commences with the nocturnal establishment of the kibbutz Ezra’s Tower with the help of an older settlement. At the end of the novel another kibbutz is established, now under the aegis of Ezra’s Tower. Initially cynical and sceptical, Koestler’s protagonist, Joseph, joins both operations. However, the overly self-analytical and self-hating British half-Jew, who, when up in Oxford, experienced a humiliating (if banal) form of antisemitism, gradually comes to recognise the necessity of the violent intervention of Jewish militants in response to Arab terror and British prejudice in Palestine. Joseph’s self-searching character, equally English and Jewish, is clearly meant to offer British readers a model of identification even while it encourages an understanding of the other and critically interrogates notions of Britishness and of British colonial policy in Palestine. This pattern, minus the critical impulse, is mirrored to some extent in the American journalist Matthews whose initially reluctant appreciation of the Zionist project and eventual passionate endorsement of the Jewish cause fulfils a similar function with regard to the novel’s American readership. ‘Those are some guys’, the stereotypically blunt American enthuses about the kibbutzniks: ‘They’re a new type. They’ve quit being Jews and become Hebrews’ (Koestler 1946: 219). Yet the facile propagandistic claim originating in the Zionist ideology of the ‘New Jew’ is challenged by Joseph’s cynicism. To him ‘the heritage of the ghetto’ (257) is all-pervasive in the refugees flocking to the country and has infected the yishuv. Nor does the very fact that the sabras, the Jews born in the Land, appear to him as the exact opposite of the diaspora Jews assuage Joseph’s scepticism: ‘Their parents were the most cosmopolitan race of the earth – they are provincial and chauvinistic. Their parents were sensitive bundles of nerves with awkward bodies – their nerves are whip-cords and their bodies those of a horde of Hebrew Tarzans roaming in the hills of Galilee’ (150). Neither of these extreme manifestations of Jewishness appears to be desirable. To illustrate the dilemma, Joseph elaborates a compelling metaphor: They call us the salt of the earth – but if you heap all the salt on one plate it doesn’t make a palatable dish. Sometimes I think that the Dead Sea is the perfect symbol for us. It is the only big inland lake under sea level, stagnant, with no outlet, much denser than normal water with its concentrated minerals and biting alkaloids; over-salted, over-spiced, saturated . . . (258) To the suggestion that ‘a lot of useful chemicals’ are extracted from the Dead Sea, he retorts with trenchant scepticism: ‘Oh – quite. Marx and Freud and Einstein and so on. They are

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the crystallised products of the brine. But for all that the water doesn’t get more palatable . . .’ (258). The saline metaphor may have been suggested to Koestler by the memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs. In Orientations (1937), the former military governor of Jerusalem (1917–20) and civil governor of Jerusalem and Judea (1920–26) had noted about Tel Aviv: If you dislike Jews – if you do not actively like them – stand clear of Tel Aviv. They will say the Jews are the salt of the earth; you will reply that you cannot dine off salt. The concentration of Judaism, body, mind and soul can indeed be overpowering. I make bold to confess that I did like Tel Aviv, and that I would not willingly go near Palestine without a glimpse of its pulsating energy. (Storrs 1943: 427) Even while it suggests in a rhetorically convoluted figure the author’s philosemitism, the acknowledgement of Storrs’ liking for Tel Aviv paradoxically appears to be at the same time an articulation of what Lara Trubowitz has recently designated as British civil antisemitism (2012: 1–2). As such, it is not only another example of the perfidious allosemitism identified by Zygmunt Bauman (1998) but, more specifically, an indication also of the fraught British perception of the Jewish other. Indeed, the ambivalence inscribed into Storrs’ observation is also captured in Koestler’s novel and is, in fact, skilfully exploited by the writer with the aim of deconstructing stereotypes and of redirecting the readers’ sympathy towards the Jews. Part of this narrative strategy is the association of particular views with specific British characters who are either discredited or whose attitude is tied to their social class and thus invalidated for the class-conscious majority to which the novel was meant to appeal. The wife of Assistant District Commissioner Newton, for instance, is ‘what they call at home the lower middle class, and what in the colonies becomes the ruling class. It is a kind of Pygmalion-miracle which is automatically performed each time a P. & O. liner passes Gibraltar. The whole Empire is a kind of glorified suburbia’ (Koestler 1946: 56). Mrs Newton’s contrasting perception of Jews and Arabs originates in her own colonial upbringing in India (Roonah) and concentrates on their respective positions in the triangular constellation of the colonial encounter in Palestine. She draws reassurance from the observation that at least with those Arabs one knew where one stood; they were natives and knew their place. Their notables were polite and dignified, the mob picturesque and obsequious. If occasionally they did some rioting or shooting that was only natural, for what else could one expect from them? (43) The Jews in Palestine, however, do not correspond to Mrs Newton’s colonialist conception of the natives; they defy categorisation: But the Jews were different. They had no notables and no dignity and they were not picturesque. Instead of being grateful to the British for letting them in, they behaved as if the country belonged to them . . . Good heavens, if they dared to behave like this in Roonah! . . . The trouble of course was that they were white – white natives, who has ever heard of such a thing? (43) The disorientating paradox encapsulated in the oxymoron of the ‘white natives’ is explored further by Joseph in his diary:



‘Almost too good to be true’ 241 That’s one of the reasons why the English like them and loathe us. We keep on demonstrating our loyalty to them, and the Arabs keep on double-crossing them. But the point is that the English don’t for a minute expect the Arabs not to double-cross them; it’s part of the game. They have an old and subtle tradition of dealing with Natives; they are attracted and amused by them, they exploit them as a matter of course and expect to be stabbed by them as soon as they turn their back, as an equal matter of course. Whereas with us they don’t know where they are. They regard us not as Natives but as Foreigners, and that is quite a different matter. There is no superiority complex without an inferiority complex; and while the native appeals mainly to the first, the foreigner appeals mainly to the second. Our protestations of loyalty make us only the more suspect. (86)

Joseph’s understanding of the British mind-set originates in his own education and the English half of his hyphenated identity, that which is neither native nor foreigner. As such he embodies in the terms of postcolonial theory the gaze of the other, the menace of mimicry and hybridity. Mimicry is considered by Homi Bhabha an ambivalent strategy not only of colonial knowledge and power but also of resistance (1994b: 86); its subversive potential derives from the challenge it poses to essentialist conceptions of identity, because ‘the observer becomes the observed and “partial” representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence’ (89). Hybridity is similarly disconcerting because it is bi-directional (Bhabha 1994c: 116) and levels the symmetries and dualities of self and other by synthesising the disparate identities of coloniser and colonised subject through an irreversible reciprocity: ‘The display of hybridity – its peculiar “replication” – terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’ (115). Yet at the same time Koestler’s protagonist lacks wholeness and the security of an unchallenged identity, a quandary which is illustrated when, after a violent demonstration in Jerusalem, he is searched at gunpoint by two British policemen. In response to his ‘careful drawl’ the nervous policemen relax and one of them apologises for his rough treatment: ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘We are under orders, and thought you were a . . .’ He looked doubtfully first into Joseph’s face, then at his clothes. Accent and appearance did not fit and the man looked somewhat puzzled. ‘. . . a Jew?’ Joseph asked him helpfully. The policeman became even more confused. ‘It’s all right, sir, we were only acting according to instructions,’ he said. (Koestler 1946: 327) The punchline of the short exchange is delivered by Joseph when he triumphantly insists: ‘But I am a Jew,’ Joseph said, childishly enjoying himself. ‘Good night, officer.’ ‘Good night, sir,’ said the constable, completely taken aback. (327) The short episode conveys another instance of the menacing mimicry in which the hybrid protagonist of Koestler’s novel is not only able to engage but which is, literally, his second nature. It is no less the product of the colonial encounter than the confusion of the colonisers when confronted with an instance of almost perfect mimicry. Yet Joseph’s reflection on the incident is also significant. He realises: ‘when all was said he had only got away with being of the Race by the fact that he was not entirely of it . . . He suddenly stopped grinning’ (327). In the wake of this realisation he not only emerges

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once again as the confused and hybrid product of the colonial encounter, in Palestine and in Britain, but extrapolates his experience and his emotional reaction to Jewish existence in the diaspora in general and to the different experiences of Jews in East and West in particular: It struck him that, hypocrisy apart, this was the real reason why the Race was persecuted in the East but tolerated in the West. They were tolerated to the extent that their substance became diluted. No normal people could endure the undiluted substance – that extreme and exposed condition of life which had crystallised in it. (327) The representation of the British perception of both Arabs and Jews is crucial to an understanding of the novel’s constructions not only of Jewishness but also of Britishness. Koestler’s novel emphasises the constructed character of the British perception of both Arabs and Jews and thus deconstructs it in a way which involves the reader in the process. When Assistant Chief Commissioner Gordon-Smith takes in a scene of Jerusalem street life from the high window of his office, what he sees is a picturesque tableau that gratifies his aesthetic sensibilities but that, as is the nature of the picturesque, is enjoyed from afar and is, moreover, detached from the present and set in the distinctly religious context of an imagined and artistically mediated medieval pilgrimage to the Holy Land: a dusty and smelly but extremely attractive medley of donkeys, camels, and Arabs in all kinds of attire, which, despite the noisy cries of lemonade vendors, the roar of the cracked gramophone on the terrace of the near-by Arab coffee-house, the occasional tinkling of sheep-bells and the constant hooting of motor-cars, had a strangely dreamlike quality, as if a scene from a medieval etching, illustrating a pilgrim’s tale, had come to life. (193) The passage is illustrative of the metaphorical appropriation of the ‘Holy Land’ observed by Bar-Yosef in the British cultural imagination even in the very land itself and to the exclusion of its other, non-biblical, reality. Tel Aviv obviously has no place in the Holy Land. It is neither biblical nor sufficiently oriental to satisfy British expectations. Instead, if it enters the British imagination at all, it requires the ‘active’ liking of the Jews, as in Storrs’ account. Alternatively, it appears to be of a menacingly hybrid character, as emerges from Lady Gordon-Smith’s recollection: She had only been to Tel Aviv once, and the dreadful architecture of the Hebrew town, its broiling streets lined with lemonade shops, teeming with a sweaty, noisy crowd, had made her feel that she had fallen into a semitic ant-heap. She loved to walk through the Arab shuks, though they were even more crowded and smelly; but then, they were the Orient – whereas Tel Aviv was only a Mediterranean East End, a cross between Whitechapel and Monte Carlo. (207) Koestler’s description is perceptive and revealing, not least because it anticipates postcolonial concerns with orientalism and colonial mimicry. The reference to the East End, with its high concentration of mostly eastern European Jewish immigrants, emphasises the perceived alien and menacing character of these boroughs in London even while it confirms notions of the internal colonisation of the Jews in Britain. At the same time, the implication is that Tel Aviv is infused with the same characteristics, merely transplanted to the new Mediterranean setting and a product, ultimately, of the diaspora. Indeed, in the novel,



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the exploration of the semantic potential of Tel Aviv is a means for Koestler to interrogate further the vexing question of identity. Implicitly echoing Lady Gordon-Smith and returning to his saline metaphor, Joseph laments that Tel Aviv ‘has become a town of refugees – the saltiest stratum of the Dead Sea’ (258); in contrast to which he defines the new sabra generation, if no less negatively, as the other extreme: ‘No salt at all. No intellectual passion, no sensitivity’ (258). Tel Aviv, once the epitome of the new beginning of the Jews to Joseph, has lost its innocence and its development provokes his ambivalent response. The Jewish city turns into a metaphor of Jewish existence. Its different architectural strata, which reflect successive waves of immigration, become the symbol of the incongruence of the immigrants and the increasing influence of the diaspora-Jewish element, and with it of the city’s hypersalination of which its architecture appears to be a symptom: This was the newest quarter of the town, built since the recent immigration from Germany and Central Europe had started, and the stucco-idyll of the older parts had been defeated by the aggressive cubism of the functional style. The houses here looked like rows of battleships in concrete; they had flat oval terraces with parapets jutting out like conning towers, and they all seemed to shoot at each other. The streets had no skyline and no perspective; the eye jumped restlessly along the jagged, disconnected contours without ever coming to rest. (255) Yet for Joseph it is less the buildings and the people they house that are characteristic of the young Jewish city than the Jewish workers who breathe its pioneer spirit into it. For him, Tel Aviv is, ultimately, a social space rather than an architectural one which is, however, already consigned to the (recent) past: ‘Ah, those were the good old times, the legendary days of ten years ago!’ (255). In the narrated present, towards the end of the 1930s, Joseph sees Tel Aviv caught up in a process of degeneration which ultimately produces only revulsion in him. Tel Aviv and its ‘jostling vitality’ (253) have degenerated into a place of cheap luxury. Everything that was authentic of the pioneer spirit which initially was the defining feature of the Jewish city has been adulterated with second- and third-hand alien influences. The pioneer spirit appears to survive only in the kibbutzim. The Galilee, about to be rebuilt as the product of the Zionist project, is semanticised in the novel as the more auspicious alternative to Tel Aviv. Here too Joseph does not hold back with his criticism. Yet the communal experiment, apostrophised in the novel’s subtitle and of which Thieves in the Night purports to be a chronicle, emerges as authentically Hebrew and – if only on a small scale and despite all social tensions within the community – as the only viable solution not only to the Jewish problem but also to the social question. While obviously a propagandistic text, Thieves in the Night is nevertheless a carefully construed and powerful narrative which is notable in particular for the pattern of anticolonial resistance it establishes as a form of writing back. As such it anticipates postcolonial concerns and, more specifically, the application of the colonial/postcolonial paradigm to the Jewish experience. Indeed, though a more sustained literary engagement with the Jewish state was to surface only much later in British Jewish fiction, most of the recurrent issues are already prefigured in Koestler’s novel, and Thieves in the Night is arguably a seminal text. Palestine, soon to be Israel, emerges from the novel as a place which, in the words of Joseph, ‘had the lure of an exotic country, the fascination of a romantic revival and the appeal of a social utopia, all in one’ (76). Yet it is exposed in the conclusion of

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the very same sentence, and foreshadowing Jacobson’s notion of the poetical existence of Israel, as a construct – as ‘almost too good to be true’ (76).

From Statehood to the Lebanon War An early example of the impact Koestler’s novel had is David Marcus’s To Next Year in Jerusalem (1954). That both writers were outsiders in England is certainly no coincidence. Koestler was an émigré;2 Marcus was from the periphery, from Ireland. And though he took up residence in the metropolitan centre in the very year in which his novel was published – at a time when so many Jewish writers gravitated from the outer reaches of the Anglophone diaspora to London – it was not in order to establish himself as a writer. Instead, Marcus worked in insurance in London until his return to Ireland in 1967 and did not publish another novel until his retirement in 1986. To Next Year in Jerusalem is of interest not only because it accentuates the silence of the Jewish writers from the British metropolis on the topic of Israel but also because Marcus explicitly refers in his own novel to Thieves in the Night and elaborates on the Irish example evoked among others by Koestler as a model for organised and successful anticolonial resistance (Koestler 1946: 326). To Next Year in Jerusalem is set between September and December 1947 in a little town in County Cork. Jonathan, its protagonist, keenly experiences the ‘spiritual schizophrenia’ of an impossible double identity as both Irish and Jewish (Marcus 1954: 40). Like Joseph, he displays symptoms of Jewish self-hatred and eventually becomes the victim of antisemitic sentiments which arise, significantly, from the repercussions of the colonial confrontation in Palestine (275). As an Irish writer, Marcus had no qualms about making explicit what in the metropolitan centre of England was effaced by the ‘deliberate amnesia’ described by Tony Kushner. He nevertheless is careful to explain the existence of Irish antisemitism with the ramifications of the violent colonial encounter imposed on both the Jews in Palestine and on the Irish. In fact, emulating Koestler, he elaborates the parallel between the violent and ultimately successful anticolonial struggle in Ireland and the final phase of the heroic conflict in Palestine. In the novel it is mainly the reading of Koestler’s Thieves in the Night and the wisdom of a Catholic priest which help Jonathan to resolve his personal dilemma and which finally make him decide to go to Palestine in aid of the anticolonial effort and in order to heal his ‘spiritual schizophrenia’ (40). Once again, the parallel to the Irish struggle for independence is implicitly evoked, yet Father Jim’s ‘honest’ opinion must be considered highly ambivalent. The priest’s insistence on Jewish alterity, though well-meant, is almost indistinguishable from antisemitic attempts to consign the Jews to their conveniently distant oriental homeland: I look forward to your departure because I know that to you Palestine is home. Not merely in the physical sense – much deeper than that; the home not only which you will inhabit but which will also inhabit you. I know that kind of home, Jonathan; that’s why I’m glad for you. (297) The ambivalence of this suggestion remains unchallenged in Marcus’s novel. Reference to Koestler’s Thieves in the Night is similarly uncritical and in fact even elides the layers of criticism inscribed into the earlier novel. Thieves in the Night was banned in Ireland in accordance with the newly revised 1929 Censorship of Publications Act shortly after its publication. The very fact that Jonathan



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reads Koestler’s novel is therefore construed as an act of defiance in To Next Year in Jerusalem, which is encouraged by Father Jim. The forbidden book, given to him by the priest, duly excites Jonathan’s imagination. He is ‘fascinated by the strangeness of a modern Jewish novel about Palestine’ (175), but it is in particular the ‘unusual appeal of the ­characters – the old pioneers and the new, eager settlers set against the picturesque Arabs of the neighbouring town – the spirit of comradeship and fearlessness of the group, the bald yet not uncomfortable vitality of the dialogue [which] all combined to make him feel chained down’ in Ireland, and the novel instils in him ‘a painful hunger to be away and at work in such a place’ (175). Any doubts about the progress of the Zionist project in Palestine are ultimately dispelled with reference to Thieves in the Night. Marcus was to return to the analogy between the British Mandate and British colonial rule in Ireland in his next novel, A Land Not Theirs, published after his retirement in 1986. Yet the later novel, set in Ireland in 1920 after the deployment of the notorious Black and Tans and owing much to Wolf Mankowitz’s short play The Hebrew Lesson (1978), intriguingly suggests the reversal of the analogy by representing the Zionist project and the anticolonial Jewish resistance in Palestine as an inspiration for the Irish fight for independence. At a time when literary engagements with Israel tended to endorse criticism of its hardline policies following the Lebanon War of 1982, this appears to be an almost revisionist insistence on the anticolonial origins of the conflict and it is certainly problematic that the novel, like Marcus’s previous one, very much simplifies the Palestinian perspective. Oddly, the period of the British Mandate, of such significance to the eventual establishment of the state of Israel and predominant in Koestler’s and Marcus’s narratives, was to attract the interest of other Jewish writers in Britain only much later. In the 1950s, perhaps still in unacknowledged deference to the ‘deliberate amnesia’ invoked by Kushner, literary engagement with Israel remained rather cursory and the new state was mostly construed as a parallel universe which served to highlight, by contrast, the shortcomings of the AngloJewish diaspora. Reviewing the position of British Jewish writers in the larger context of English literature and its recent trends as well as in relation to the Anglo-Jewish community, Brian Glanville had conducted in December 1958 and January 1959 an interview series with his own, younger generation of Jewish writers in Britain for the London Jewish Chronicle. It emerged that these writers felt alienated from the Jewish community in England, that they did not see themselves in a continuous Anglo-Jewish literary tradition and that they had serious misgivings about latent British antisemitism. Bernard Kops admitted: ‘I have no sense of security in this country, although I love it; no feeling that it can’t happen here, it can’t happen to me, because I know it can’ (1959: 17). The poet Dannie Abse anticipated that the ‘potential threat will sooner or later be translated into an active, aggressive antisemitism’ (1959: 19). He emphasised: ‘We say it can’t happen here, but we have seen it happen elsewhere – and we have had race riots lately’ (19). The reference is not to the 1947 riots, but to the Notting Hill riots of August and September 1958. At this stage, however, the apprehension of antisemitic sentiments and, indeed, riots had not yet been tied to the perception of the state of Israel. On the contrary, after the violent confrontation in the Mandate period, the new state had emerged as an ally in the Suez crisis of 1956 and British-Israeli relations were at their warmest. Kops nevertheless added: ‘I thought, there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to run, I’d be one of the first, as a writer and as a Jew; where can I go? Suddenly it came to me, there’s always Israel; there one can

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fight with one’s back to one’s own wall. I can think of no better place to die fighting than Israel’ (1959: 17). The writer’s Byronesque romanticism was countered in the same interview series by the more critical stance maintained by Peter Shaffer and Alexander Baron. The former, demonstrating a clear awareness of the historical dimension of the confrontation in Israel, observed that ‘the dilemma at the very heart of its existence is tragic’, because there is ‘not a conflict between right and wrong but between right and right’ (Shaffer 1958: 13). The latter professed to be ‘very disturbed by Israeli nationalism’ and criticised the fact that ‘we’re expected to be extra-mural patriots of Israel, uncritically approving of all that the Israeli Government may do’ (Baron 1959: 17). A few years later, in 1963, Baron’s response to the question of what the impact of Israel was on his own work was unequivocal: ‘None’, he insisted, yet he conceded: I am myself deeply interested in Israel. I have painful hopes for it and, I may add, no small fears. But I’ve tried to show that a writer lives in a world, a vision, that is not of his conscious creating, and so far – I can’t say what will happen in the future – the fact of Israel hasn’t entered into my writer’s imaginative world. (1963a: 10) Nor was it to do so in the future. Frederic Raphael replied even more concisely, if perhaps also somewhat cryptically: ‘Nil. I want to go there of course, but my work . . . No. How inadequate it is!’ (1964: 8). Glanville himself, for a while a very visible figure in Anglo-Jewish literature who had achieved much notoriety with the characterisation in his 1958 novel The Bankrupts of the Jewish community in north-west London as materialist and devoid of inner values,3 likewise asserted: ‘I regard the foundation of Israel as the most moving and deeply significant event in my life, but I don’t think it has a direct effect on my work. Nor have I yet been there; I am content to know that it exists’ (1964: 5). And yet it was precisely in The Bankrupts that the writer made use of Israel in a very different way from Koestler and Marcus. While Efraim Sicher blandly observes that ‘[t]he availability of a Jewish homeland for the committed Jew in Glanville’s The Bankrupts does little more than emphasize, as if further emphasis was needed, the vacuity of North-West London, whose armchair Zionists are mortally shocked if their children should think of settling there’ (1985: 165), it seems to me that this is not only significant in itself, but that there are additional aspects to Israel’s presence, or indeed its absence, in the novel that are worth exploring. Thus it is of more than passing interest that the opinions of Glanville’s protagonist, Bernard Carter, anticipate or echo many of the sentiments articulated in the interview series conducted by the author. Among the circle of young and aspiring Jewish writers these would, presumably, have been widely disseminated and that they resurface in Glanville’s novel should therefore not be too surprising: It’s the idea of Israel that’s really important . . . It’s important to us. It symbolizes something; an achievement; and it means that there’ll always be somewhere to go . . . I like to know it’s there. It shows we’ve still got something left in us; we aren’t altogether decadent. (Glanville 1958: 77–8) What is perhaps most striking about this notion and the writers’ opinions that it reflects is not only that Israel is reduced to an ‘idea’, once more anticipating Jacobson’s notion of its poetical existence, but the triteness of this particular ‘idea’ of Israel conjured up in the novel. It is that of a corrective to the Anglo-Jewish diaspora and of a hypothetical



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sanctuary. As such Israel serves mainly as a foil against which the decay of Jewish life in Britain may be measured and which demonstrates that where ‘Anglo-Jewry is played out . . . Israel is only beginning’ (218). The vitality associated with the new state and the hopeful potential attached to it are moreover juxtaposed with the tacit acknowledgement of subliminal anxieties about future antisemitic outrages. In a surprising turn, this profound angst, which emphasises the perceived fragility of Jewish existence in Britain, is supported with a portentous comparison to Germany: ‘The Jews in Germany thought they were Germans. They were much more German than you and I are English’ (77). Israel is consequently invoked as a refuge in response to the recurrence of the ominous ‘it’ which haunts the interviews with Kops and Abse, an ‘it’ which seemed possible not only to the writers of this generation but has, once again, been summoned much more recently by Jacobson in his thoughts on anti-Zionism. Like Koestler’s Joseph, Bernard, through whose perspective Israel is introduced as a topic in The Bankrupts, is overly self-analytical, aware of an encroaching British antisemitism and, even more significantly, of his own difference – be it imagined or real. Warned by a friend that he is ‘building Israel into a sort of panacea’ and that he is ‘bound to be disappointed, whatever it’s like’, he is admonished that he will ‘blame it for not putting things right for [him] that are simply wrong with [himself]’ (176). His lover Rosemary, on the other hand, with her Aryan looks and her desire to escape the claustrophobic constraints of Jewish north-west London, fears that Israel is no more than an extension of the stifling world of her parents: Living at home, she had visualized it, half consciously, as a wider projection of her family and society, enlarged to national size, so there could be no escape at all. She had drawn away from the attitudes struck automatically by her parents when Israel was mentioned or involved, treating it almost as an extension of themselves, perpetually right, invariably sinned against; those Arabs, that Bevin, those anti-Semites in the Government; those Jewish M.P.s who went against their own people over the Suez business. It was the same emotional wallow, only greater, an ocean instead of a trough – she could visualize the country as nothing else. (208) Both their attitudes are ultimately revealed to be projections in relation to Jewish integration into British society and to integration of the individual of a younger generation into the British Jewish community, respectively. As such they anticipate, once again, Jacobson’s notion of Israel as a poetical construct. This may also be the reason why Glanville’s novel, like To Next Year in Jerusalem, remains set exclusively in England, mostly in London, even though Bernard, who has been offered a lectureship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, leaves for a trial period in Israel. In his reports home, he enthuses: ‘Israel has made up its mind it is going to be a country where Jews can do anything – where they’re farmers and chimney sweeps and policemen and even gangsters instead of only tailors and lawyers and doctors and above all, businessmen’ (221). The letter conveys the writer’s clichéd and uncritical enthusiasm but, purporting to come from Israel, also appears to lend authority to his reflections on the normalisation of Jewish existence. Once again, these observations are elaborated with geographical semantisations. As in Thieves in the Night, but without any of the earlier novel’s critical impetus, it is Tel Aviv and the kibbutzim in particular which are imbued with paradigmatic meaning. Tel Aviv is

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new and loud and vulgar and vigorous, especially after Jerusalem – and I like it very much. Everybody’s very kind and very tense – but not in the way European Jews are tense. They’re on edge because they’re afraid that there’s going to be another war, but they’re wonderfully confident that they would win it. You’d like them. They come from everywhere on earth, but they’re all full of a tremendous, creative vitality, and you know that they’re really fighting for something and they can’t possibly fail to succeed. (217) The kibbutzim are idealised and explicitly predicated on an imaginary: ‘It’s what you’d imagine it to be; dedicated and almost Biblical’ (220) and ‘[a]bove all, you get the same sense of purpose one felt in Tel Aviv’ (221). Yet Bernard – giving literary substance to, and at the same time challenging, Kops’s facile heroic imaginings – is killed in an Arab attack on the kibbutz he visits. Considering the young British Jew’s quest for vitality, this is certainly an ironic twist and one which potentially invites a symbolic reading of The Bankrupts: is it necessary for the British diaspora Jew – as it is for Uncle Melech, the embodiment of the diaspora paradigm, in the Canadian Jewish writer A. M. Klein’s novel The Second Scroll (1951) – to die a sacrificial death which signifies the end of the diaspora and, at least in the earlier novel, a new, almost messianic, beginning? Because in the end, Israel, for Rosemary and for the novel, is a projection into the future too. It is the place where her child, and Bernard’s, will grow up. It is not for her own comfort that she eventually decides to go to Israel ‘for good’ and to live on a kibbutz – and, to tell the truth, it is hard imagining her working the land: ‘It’s because of the baby’ (236). As Bernard writes in one of his letters about the children of the ‘neurotic Europeans’ on the kibbutz, completely lacking Koestler’s critical perspective: ‘[they] are delightful, real farmer’s boys and girls without any of that nervous precociousness that makes Jewish children so maddeningly attractive and pathetic, elsewhere’ (220). They are ‘New Jews’ and the hoped-for product of the Land of Israel. The somewhat utopian and simplistic orientation towards the future that determines Glanville’s representation of Israel not only elides the tensions of the recent past. It is also a stereotype of Zionist discourse that is reflected in different ways in Koestler’s and Marcus’s novels and that surfaces also in Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). Here, however, it is contrasted with the perception of the Land of Israel as the ‘Holy Land’ of biblical description. The propensity of the Israeli guides to show the visitor ‘the cement factories and pipe-lines of Israel instead of the shrines’ (Spark 1965: 13) emerges as an indicator of the fierce determination to redefine the land. Indeed: ‘Through the length and breadth of the country the Israelis treated facts like antibiotic shots, injecting them into the visitor like diligent medical officers’ (17). Yet to Spark’s protagonist this is tiring because, as she insists: ‘I’m really interested essentially in the Holy Land’ (20). And although the point is later made in the novel by an Israeli journalist that ‘Israel is for a Jew also the Holy Land’ (193), this is not Spark’s concern. The writer, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was of Jewish extraction but the engagement with Jewish concerns in her fiction is mostly oblique, and Spark converted to Catholicism in 1954. This decision is reflected in The Mandelbaum Gate, which focuses searchingly on the identity crisis of a ‘Gentile Jewess, neither one thing nor another’ (48) and which is set, in stark contrast to Glanville’s novel, entirely in the Holy Land – on both sides of the liminal space of the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem in the year of the Eichmann trial, 1961.4 At the time, the gate was the only place of heavily restricted interchange between



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Israel and Jordan. In the novel, it emerges as a pivot around which everything revolves. At the same time it is a separator of mentalities: of Israeli and Arab, but also of a rational mind-set and of dream-like, feverish and hallucinatory experiences and liberations; of the loss of memory and of its slow and perplexing return. Altogether, paradoxes and apparent contradictions are central to the novel. Intriguingly, it is the ‘Holy Land’ – and, ironically, the divided city of Jerusalem – which offers the torn character of Barbara Vaughan, who is a partial alter ego of the author, the reconciliation of opposites: For the first time since her arrival in the Middle East she felt all of a piece; Gentile and Jewess, Vaughan and Aaronson; she had caught some of Freddy’s madness, having recognized by his manner in the car, as they careered across Jerusalem, that he had regained some lost or forgotten elements in his nature and was now, at last, for some reason, flowering in the full irrational norm of the stock she also derived from: unselfquestioning hierarchists, anarchistic imperialists, blood-sporting zoophiles, sceptical believers – the whole paradoxical lark that had secured, among their bones, the sane life for the dead generations of British Islanders. She had caught a bit of Freddy’s madness and for the first time in this Holy Land, felt all of a piece, a Gentile Jewess, a private-judging Catholic, a shy adventuress. (173) The character of Freddy Hamilton, British to the core and caught not so much in contradictions but in conformity, experiences a similar liberation in the shape of the ‘madness’ that comes over him. It is both the trigger and the product of a transgressive act which the ‘Holy Land’ seems to engender and which is symbolised by passage through the Mandelbaum Gate. Early in the novel, Freddy observes that ‘[t]he intensity at the Gate was quite absurd’: They dramatized everything. Why did people have to go to extremes, why couldn’t they be moderate? . . . You couldn’t tell the difference sometimes [between Arabs and Jews]. Some of them had extremely dark skins, almost jetters. Why couldn’t people be ­moderate? (5) Freddy’s colonial stereotyping of the ‘natives’ – of both Arabs and Jews, almost indistinguishable to him – as immoderate and his linking this perception to racist colour coding betrays his deeply rooted colonialist conditioning. In fact, ‘[e]very place east of Europe or west of the Atlantic Ocean was more or less one of the colonies to Freddy’ (173). This evokes another dichotomy which is not, however, fully resolved in the novel and which reflects on fissures in perceptions of Britishness during the ongoing process of decolonisation. As Freddy observes: ‘Oh well, you know, we’re foreigners here now. One inclines to forget that. British to them means something different from British to us, I’m afraid’ (27). In the novel, the loss of colonial power and the attempt to reconcile the perception of British identities with this development reflect also on notions of the ‘Holy Land’. This has devolved into the antagonistic political entities of Israel and Jordan, a process which suggests in an almost schizophrenic split the disengagement of the Land, or at least of its Israeli half, from its nostalgically historicising and spiritualising perception. Correspondingly, Barbara is chided by an Israeli friend for her reluctance to attend the Eichmann trial: ‘You can follow the history of the Jews in the Bible without visiting the historical spots’, he maintains: ‘This trial is part of the history of the Jews’ (185). Eventually, Barbara does indeed fall under the spell of the trial, but it only reinforces her resolve to visit the holy places despite the danger she faces as a (half-)Jew in Jordan.

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At the same time the historical continuum evoked here is echoed, if negatively, in the recognition by an Arab Israeli that even after independence he ‘was an inferior citizen still; the Jews had only replaced the British’ (104). Yet Spark simultaneously suggests notions also of the internal colonisation of the Jews in Britain. This emerges from the way in which Barbara is initially perceived by Freddy and is indicated similarly by her previous experiences in England. Overall, The Mandelbaum Gate offers a merry-go-round of identities inflected by different manifestations of the colonial encounter which, in Barbara’s case, lets Spark anticipate the notion of the ‘category error’ invoked much later by Linda Grant in The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel (2006), which is a spirited attempt to grapple with the contradictions of Jewish existence in Israel and the diaspora, and particularly those of the British Jew, ‘a category error’, as the author describes herself (5). In the final paragraph of Spark’s novel, before Freddy leaves for Israel, he walks round Old Jerusalem, on the Jordanian side, and significantly, before he ends up at the Mandelbaum Gate, ‘hardly a gate at all, but a piece of street between Jerusalem and Jerusalem’, he ambles ‘past the gates of historic meaning, sealed and barred against Israel – the Zion Gate, Dung Gate, Jaffa Gate, New Gate’ (Spark 1965: 330). The implication is that modern Israel itself is barred from historic meaning and it should perhaps not come as a surprise that in Spark’s novel, too, Tel Aviv, the modern Jewish city incongruously imposed on the Holy Land, is a conspicuous absence. The Mandelbaum Gate nevertheless challenges some of its own assumptions. Most importantly, it emphasises, like Koestler’s novel, the constructed character of the ‘Holy Land’ and links it to the impact and the perpetuation of the colonial appropriation of the Land, which has taken root both in the mind and, literally, on a small yet pervasive scale, in physical reality. Spark elaborates this with a striking horticultural diversion when she describes the garden of friends of Freddy’s which has become a refuge for him. The English couple’s place in Jerusalem, just over on the Jordanian side, is said to have ‘a delightful English atmosphere’ (48). The garden is ‘planted with numerous wild flowers and herbs of the Holy Land’ picked up by the lady of the house ‘on her rambles’ (49). Little tickets identify their provenance entirely in relation to biblical sites: ‘Gethsemane, Mount of Olives, Valley of Jehosephat, Siloam, Jericho, Bethlehem’ (50). Significantly, it emerges that none of the plants are actually indigenous and that they are in fact transplants from England. ‘Their seeds had been brought to Palestine and sown’, as Freddy suspects, ‘by a conspiracy of the English Spinster under the Mandate’ (53). The humorous tone does not entirely obscure the seriousness of the observation, in particular because Barbara is guilty of a similar practice on Mount Carmel. Much later, in The Hiding Room (1995), Jonathan Wilson, a British-born Jewish novelist who now lives in the US, was to pick up the horticultural motif again. Outwardly being stripped of his Englishness, the former military chaplain Rabbi Mendoza nevertheless remains both British and Jewish and, even after living in Jerusalem for fifty years, his hybridity is symbolised by his garden: ‘Tried to make it English’, he explains: Hollyhocks over here, snapdragons, geraniums, the roses, of course. But I inherited a pomegranate tree from the previous owner – it’s there, behind the lavender bush – and that put everything out of kilter. (Wilson 1995: 258) Outside England it is not possible to hang on to an uncontaminated Englishness.5 As Mendoza elaborates, the encounter with the other results in an imbalance in which inheres a dangerous transformative potential:



‘Almost too good to be true’ 251 You can’t hold on . . . The heat and light come first, then the scents and smells. The brain gets flooded. You start to stagger. Sounds like an old story, doesn’t it? The colonialist abroad going under. But I’m not talking about ‘pesky flies’ and all that nonsense. I’m talking about an intensity of feeling that the place transmits. It reaches a level, you know, where it has the power to transform. There’s a reason why religion has such a hold here. (258)

Wilson’s novel here reads almost like a commentary on Spark’s, or a further elaboration. And as such it draws attention to the potential of the earlier novel to interrogate issues of identity which sets it apart from most of its contemporaries. Indeed, Gerda Charles in The Crossing Point (1960), Frederic Raphael in The Limits of Love (1960) and Chaim Bermant in Jericho Sleep Alone (1964) also made extended reference to the embattled new state, but only superficially. Altogether, the so-called ‘new wave’ of Jewish writing in Britain did not produce any further significant literary engagement with Israel. In fact, as Sicher observes, ‘the portrayal of the modern state of Israel, whether passionately for or against, with all its challenges of identity and survival has attracted not Jewish but Gentile writers’ – of whom he names Lynne Reid Banks and, perhaps controversially, as the preceding discussion would suggest, Muriel Spark (1985: 166).6

Zion’s Fiction and Alternative Visions On the very eve of the Six Day War in June 1967, more than thirty London-based Jewish authors signed an open letter to The Sunday Times to voice their anxiety about Israel’s precarious position – among them Kops and Abse as well as Baron, despite his misgivings about his underhand recruitment to the Israeli cause; but not, conspicuously, Brian Glanville (Abse et al. 1967). Considering the dearth of literary engagements with Israel, this public act of solidarity rather confirms the earlier pattern of a personal interest coinciding with a particular reluctance to commit to a serious engagement with the new state in literature. British Jewish fiction of the period up to the war of 1967 nevertheless articulates finely nuanced responses to historical events and processes involving Israel which are at the same time insolubly tied to negotiations of British Jewish identities. Paradoxically, this is evidenced also by the conspicuous silence on Israel which initially followed the publication of Arthur Koestler’s seminal Thieves in the Night and which is emphasised also by the determined assertion of the Jewish anticolonial struggle in the Irish Jewish writer David Marcus’s To Next Year in Jerusalem. Yet both Koestler and Marcus were outsiders. Jewish writers from the British metropolis appear to have colluded at least tacitly in the effort to elide the memory of the colonial confrontation in Palestine and its repercussions in Britain. This changed only with the ‘new wave’ of Jewish writing in the late 1950s. The Suez crisis had seen Britain and Israel become unlikely allies and the emergence of Israel as a topic in its wake seems not to be coincidental. Not only was the repressed memory of the earlier confrontation now superseded but Israel had also been confirmed in its heroic endeavour and transformative potential. Yet the literary response to Israel was still determined by what appears to be a split between the author persona and their literary engagement on one side and their personal view on Israel on the other. Although these writers openly acknowledged fears of an increasing British antisemitism and Israel was perceived as a hypothetical refuge, only a few of them addressed their anxieties and hopes,

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articulated elsewhere, in their fiction. Brian Glanville’s The Bankrupts, if simplistic in its perception of Israel, is perhaps the most interesting of these because it suggests a layered response to the Jewish presence in Britain and the specifics of the Anglo-Jewish community which is criticised as degenerate and stifling. None of these early novels entirely escapes the reiteration of Zionist tropes. Paradoxically, Koestler’s is the only one which, despite being explicitly didactic, offers a perceptive and wide-ranging critical debate of the issues – perhaps because of his protagonist’s compulsion to see both sides, as does Rubashov in Koestler’s earlier, highly acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon (1940). It was only with Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate that an alternative vision of Israel was introduced which critically interrogated inscriptions of the land as either modern or as the ‘Holy Land’. The shift in perception heralded by this novel, whose author’s residual Jewishness was frequently disregarded or denied, was to continue – even though, intriguingly, there appears to be no sustained literary engagement with the victorious Six Day War which amplified previous fissures in the affirmative perception of Israel, nor with the potentially disastrous Yom Kippur War of 1973. It was only the first Lebanon War of 1982 which radically changed the urgency of the literary response to Israel.7

Notes 1. Parts of this chapter are based on some of my earlier publications; see Stähler (2009a; 2013). 2. For Jewish émigré writers in Britain, see David Herman’s contribution to this volume. 3. For a reading of this novel in the context of the ‘new wave’ of British Jewish writing, see Efraim Sicher’s contribution to this volume. 4. For a perceptive analysis of the novel in relation also to Spark’s other works, see Cheyette (2013: esp. 142–8). 5. Of course, a bi-directional hybridisation is effected also in Britain; see Bhabha (1994c: 113–15) and Young (1995: 26–8). 6. For a more comprehensive reading of Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate and a discussion of the writer in relation to her Jewishness, see also Beate Neumeier’s contribution to this volume. 7. For a discussion of the literary engagement of British Jewish writers with Israel after 1982, see Chapter 19 in this volume.

19 THE WRITING ON THE WALL: ISRAEL IN BRITISH JEWISH FICTION, POST-LEBANON1 Axel Stähler

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he creation of the state of Israel in 1948 had enormous impact on the lives of Jews all over the world. Yet in Britain, after a history of increasingly violent clashes between Jewish independence fighters and the British administration during the Mandate for Palestine (1918/22–48), a sustained literary engagement with the new state was slow to materialise. With a few notable exceptions – outsiders, such as the émigré writer Arthur Koestler or the Irish Jewish writer David Marcus – British Jewish writers mostly chose to ignore in their fiction the momentous historical development. It was not before the emergence of the so-called ‘new wave’ of British Jewish literature in the late 1950s that some writers, such as Brian Glanville in his novel The Bankrupts (1958), responded to the new reality. The representation of Israel in these texts was mostly used to censure the alleged materialism and moral vacuity of the Anglo-Jewish community. The image that was conveyed of the new state was idealising and indebted to Zionist ideology and in this sense reflected the wide-ranging support of Israel in the very community these writers set out to challenge and whose sincerity they questioned. After the Six Day War of 1967 the perception of Israel became increasingly polarised in Britain. Israeli occupation of the captured territories gave rise to the resurgence of antiZionism (Julius 2010: 547) and to the denunciation of Israel’s policies as imperialist and colonialist (Alderman 1992: 341). While the Anglo-Jewish community generally continued to support Israel (Alderman 1992: 342), dissent became more vocal and eventually led to the emergence of what Anthony Julius has controversially called ‘the contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist’ (2010: 546). Yet the impact of Israel on the (self-)perception of what it meant to be Jewish in Britain – and, more specifically, on literary negotiations of British Jewish identities – reasserted itself most forcefully after the first Lebanon War of 1982 in which, for the first time, Israel engaged in what many considered a war of aggression (Gilbert 1999: 504). This, and especially the massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila perpetrated by the Christian Phalange but unhindered by the IDF (Gilbert 1999: 509–10), raised the question of Israel’s moral integrity and of the implicit culpability of Jews all over the world. The first Intifada (1987–93) and the heavy-handed Israeli response it elicited added significantly to the widespread unease.

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Post-Lebanon As in 1967, when they rallied in support of Israel (see Abse et al. 1967), British Jewish writers once again sought a public platform to articulate their concerns in solidarity – this time, however, their concerns were not for but about Israel. In the Jewish Chronicle, more than sixty writers and academics published on 12 February 1988 a call to ‘Jews for a Just Israel’ in which they claimed that the Israeli presence in the occupied territories had a ‘divisive and corrosive effect on Israeli society’ and pleaded for a revival of the spirit of the Camp David Accords (Abse et al. 1988: 4). Among the signatories was Clive Sinclair, who translated his criticism of Israel early on into his fiction along with his fears of a resurgent British antisemitism. Described by one reviewer as ‘a novel of unusual ambition, both as politics and as fantasy’ (Remnick 1986: 7), Sinclair’s second novel, Blood Libels (1985), sketches a paranoid and hypochondriac, yet uncannily perceptive, response to the Lebanon War. In the manner of Salman Rushdie’s magic realist novel Midnight’s Children (1981), the narrator, his birth coinciding with that of the state of Israel, experiences the external strife within his own body and irrationally traces the outbreak of hostilities to his own actions. In his next novel, Cosmetic Effects (1989), similarly paranoid and hypochondriac, obsessed with bodily malfunction and (self-)betrayal, Sinclair returned not only to the topic of Israel’s transgression but also to the exploration of his narrator’s guilt complex. Indeed, in this novel, Sinclair’s preoccupation with the body is carried even further, although the battleground between mind and body is externalised here in what effectively turns into a split not only of Jonah Isaacson’s personality but, quite literally, of his body. Drugged at an illicit tryst before travelling to Israel, the arm of the unsuspecting lecturer in film studies is deliberately broken and an explosive device hidden in the plaster cast which is eventually detonated when he meets the Israeli Minister of Defence – in real life Ariel Sharon, who was responsible for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and whom Sinclair had already targeted in Blood Libels. With the blast, Jonah loses not only his arm but also his memory. The slow (re-)acquisition of historical facts, rather than of his memory, allows him a new, distanced perspective on the past. In this he is aided in hospital by the horribly mutilated figure of Gidi whose burnt face is a featureless mask and who explains: Israelis are veterans, . . . Europeans are survivors. That’s what I believed, until 1982, when I also became a survivor . . . in 1982 . . . our Minister of Defence . . . had a big plan. He wanted to invade the Lebanon. And I was one of the faceless Israelis he sent to do the job. We hit that accursed land like a storm. And people in countries I have never heard of took one look at me and my buddies and began to hate us because, in their eyes, we were nothing but cogs in the world’s most efficient fighting machine. (Sinclair 1990: 99) Cosmetic Effects thus not only reflects the shift in perception of Israel from without but also from within and continues to elaborate, as had Blood Libels, on fears of a putsch: Four times the army, our latter-day golem, saved Israel – in ’48, ’56, ’67 and ’73 – but in ’82 it was on the rampage, answerable to no one but its master in the Cabinet. Some of us began to fear his next command. We could see the day when we would be turned, despite our better judgement, upon the body politic we had been trained to protect. (100)



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In the newly amnesiac Jonah this provokes confusion: ‘What could have happened between ’73 and ’82 to turn a nation of heroes into a brute bent upon self-destruction?’ (100). If the novel provides an answer to the question, and it is doubtful that it does, it is an oblique and despondent one: ‘just as the elephant’s tusks have led to its near extinction’, so ‘the settlements designated to make Israel invulnerable may put an end to it altogether’ (71); and so the golem of the army turns, like its mythical predecessor designed to protect the Jewish community, into an unstoppable force of (self-)destruction. Gidi’s facelessness is a graphic illustration of the writer’s literal use of metaphors, reminiscent once again of Rushdie. More importantly, this occurs also with Jonah’s severed hand which assumes a life of its own – a nod likewise to René Magritte’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (1963) and to the ‘Thing’ in The Addams Family TV series (1964–66), as well as Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘La main’ (1883) and the ‘vengeance de sauvage’ it fantastically exacts (1974: 1119); but it is also an allusion to the biblical book of Daniel: Therefore he sent the hand that wrote the inscription. ‘This is the inscription that was written: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. ‘Here is what these words mean: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’ (Daniel 5:24–8 NIV) Returned from Israel, Jonah and the other guests at a wedding witness the disembodied hand writing Tekel on the wall (Sinclair 1990: 195). However, a photograph taken at the occasion presents the ‘cruel illusion’ that Jonah ‘is whole again’ and that it is, in fact, he who is responsible for the unsettling graffiti (200). The desire for this illusory wholeness is actually what drives the rampant hand. Even severed from his body, it still seeks to be with Jonah, to warn him of things to come and, indeed, it craves his love. Visiting him at night, the severed limb tries to masturbate him and, after its groping attempts have been frustrated by its previous owner, it enters into a conversation with Jonah: ‘Please,’ it writes, ‘don’t refer to me as you.’ ‘What else should I call you?’ I ask. ‘Call me Ishmael,’ comes the reply, ‘or, better yet, us.’ This answer gives me the willies. ‘What do you want of me?’ I cry, wondering if any other amputee has been haunted and hounded to this extent by their phantom limb. By way of reply it writes but a single word with a heavy hand, ‘Love.’ (177) The recurrent reference to the biblical Ishmael in Cosmetic Effects is augmented here by the famous opening sentence from Moby Dick (1851) and accordingly spins further not only the associations of severed limbs but also of blind vindictive anger and its destructive potential, as well as of the subjectivity of perception as they are explored in Herman Melville’s novel. Allusion to the giant whale moreover reflects on the first name of Sinclair’s narrator and protagonist, Jonah, who at the fateful illicit tryst watches James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and then, under the influence of the drug administered to him, becomes ‘a monster dreamed up by [his] own desires’ (35). The deftly interwoven strands of meaning evoking the monster created from purloined limbs and linking it with the runaway prophet of doom and the obsessive peg-legged Captain Ahab, whose name alludes to the biblical King of Israel associated with idol worship, murder and the unlawful usurpation of land, demonstrate the metaphorical density of the novel which defies any attempts at condensing its byzantine plot into a

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coherent summary – a very palpable reminder of the novel’s insight that ‘so long as there is pluralism, a proliferation of stories and interpretations, then the future won’t be fascistic’ (45).2 At the same time, however, the novel seems to suggest that there is no escape from the old stories and their power: ‘myth binds more strongly than kinship’, Jonah recognises, and ‘ink is thicker than blood’ (245). The very title of the novel is a pun on the illusory and soothing effects of make-up and of making things up, of telling stories. And it is not only biblical narratives which insinuate themselves into Cosmetic Effects; other iconic narratives from different contexts and in different media also intrude, such as Hamlet and the Western. Indeed, another of the novel’s pluralistic narrative strands is the metaphor of the stagecoach which further elaborates on the analogy between Israel and the American frontier already suggested in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night (1946), when the American journalist Matthews provokes in a Zionist official the thought that what the Jews attempt in Palestine is ‘something more fantastic and difficult than their [i.e. the Americans’] famous conquest of the West’ (Koestler 1946: 40). In Sinclair’s novel, the film project of The Six Pointed Star seeks to impose the narrative pattern and the deceptive ‘cosmetic’ effects of the Western on Israeli history and initiates a debate on reality, representation and illusion. Its director, Lewis Falcon, is the (fictional) director also of the (similarly fictional) film Deadwood Stage – homage to John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and the famous ‘Deadwood Stage’ song in David Butler’s Calamity Jane (1953).3 The objective of the production, supported among others by the hawkish Defence Minister, is the creation of an analogous myth for Israel. Jonah’s flight with El Al from London to Israel to join the project is compared to the stagecoach: ‘We have crossed an invisible boundary up here and have become Israel in miniature, just as the stagecoach may be said to represent America in Lewis Falcon’s film’ (Sinclair 1990: 44). In fact, emphasising the constructed character of Israel, its ‘poetic’ existence, as Howard Jacobson described it (2010b: 22), Falcon recognises: ‘Your Israel, like my America, is a state of mind’ (Sinclair 1990: 61). Sinclair returns to the analogy with the stagecoach when a bus is hijacked in Israel by four Arab terrorists, inserting also the guilt felt by the narrator whose rampant left arm has become both an actor in the confrontation, throwing the first stone in the Intifada (211), and a metaphor for the severed limb that represents Ishmael, the forgotten or unacknowledged son of Abraham and traditionally considered the progenitor of the Arabs. The four terrorists, known as the Sons of Ishmael, carry silver chains with ‘crude representations of the human arm beaten out of tin’ (160). In the novel, the Sons of Ishmael and their (self-) sacrificial terrorist challenge are associated with the biblical narrative of the akedah, the Sacrifice of Isaac (see Genesis 22:1–15). They are like mirror images of the narrator, whose second name, Isaacson, mirrors theirs as descendants of Abraham’s other son. The terrorists’ act of (self-)sacrifice is ultimately the desperate attempt to re-inscribe the Ishmaelites into the biblical narrative and into post-biblical reality. More specifically, the severed limb, as was indicated already with its forlorn plea for love, symbolises the self-perpetuating and potentially fatal misunderstanding between the sons of Ishmael and those of Isaac. Thus, mistaking for one last time the intentions of his peripatetic left hand when it makes off with the pen which conceals another detonator, Jonah viciously stabs it with a bread knife. The end, though the novel does not quite go there, will be another blast which, this time, will surely also do for Jonah. In ‘The Iceman Cometh’ (1996) – one of Sinclair’s short stories, whose title alludes to Eugene O’Neill’s play (1946) about facing one’s delusions – no more male children are born in Israel: nature rebels against the sacrifice of its progeny and the delusion of those



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sending their offspring into unjust wars. It may therefore be no coincidence that Jonah’s newborn, delivered at the end of Cosmetic Effects, is a girl and that her father’s gaze is directed to the Vale of Hinnom, ‘formerly Gehenna, also known as hell. Why hell? . . . Because it was there, in ancient times, that heathens sacrificed their children to the local deities’ (246). Yet the lesson of the akedah, the rejection of human sacrifice and the great humane gesture of the Jewish deity, has been forgotten. So when Jonah is confronted with the rhetorical question if anything has changed, the answer is: ‘Of course it fucking hasn’t! If you want my opinion we’re turning the whole of this country into one big Gehenna.’ And he is urged: Do yourself a favour, Jonah, take your beautiful new daughter, take your lovely wife, and run back to England as quickly as you can. Then forget all about us! You’ve had amnesia once, get it again. Just forget us! (246) Nor is it a coincidence that the girl is born with a mark on her forehead. The implicit reference is to the fratricide of biblical narrative condemned forever to be shunned by the company of men and to roam the earth in solitude (see Genesis 4:10) – the Promised Land once again to be lost to future generations for the slaying of the unacknowledged brother.

The Colonial/Postcolonial Paradigm The Lebanon War was instrumental in initiating the so-called post-Zionism debates and the Israeli ‘new’ historiography which subjected geographical and ideological definitions of Jewish identity to alternative, pluralistic and conflictual patterns of interpretation such as Sinclair’s. In its wake the literary debate gained in significance and urgency, too. In Britain, the escalation of events in the Middle East ultimately led to the saturation of public discourse with the convergence of anti-Zionist and antisemitic stereotypes whose proliferation to some extent appears to be the result of the perceived need to take a position in the conflict. At the same time, the new paradigm opened up new pathways of engaging with both Israel and the negotiation of British Jewish identities. A particular strain of the literary engagement with Israel – already evident in Koestler and, if slightly differently, in David Marcus’s To Next Year in Jerusalem (1954) – was the emergence of the colonial/postcolonial paradigm, a new paradigm for explaining the alleged deficiency of British Jewish identities and for introducing concepts of postcolonial theory, such as mimicry and hybridity, to an understanding of the Jewish experience. Significantly, like the emergence of the so-called ‘new wave’ of British Jewish writing which needs to be seen in context with the developing multicultural society in Britain in the 1950s, the adoption of the postcolonial paradigm reflects wider trends in the postcolonial world and the engagement with postcolonial literature which seeks to reappropriate the history of the colonised subject. This is indicated, for instance, by Sinclair’s indebtedness to Rushdie. Yet, correspondingly, a ‘postcolonial’ and highly (self-)critical paradigm for Jewish identities both in Britain and in Israel has also been developed from the historical encounter of Britons and Jews in Mandate Palestine which allows the silenced past of the Mandate period to be revisited. In When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), though highly ambivalent towards Zionist self-fashioning and Israeli political expediency, Linda Grant articulates a Jewish claim to postcoloniality by overtly suggesting that British Jews have been subject to British antisemitism and an internal colonisation. Grant’s novel explores in postmodern fashion the

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identity conflict of a young British Jewish woman in Mandate Palestine during the crucial years immediately before the establishment of the state of Israel and traces the disappointment of the Zionist dream to the present when she revisits the Land. Drawing on contemporary documents and echoing the problems of distinguishing between Arabs and Jews experienced by Freddy Hamilton in Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Grant has one of her British officials in late 1940s Palestine say: ‘Jews, Arabs, in the end, they’re all wogs. I don’t care about either lot’ (Grant 2000: 110). Another, condescendingly and true to stereotype, affirms: ‘We have a responsibility towards the coloured races’ (109), which provokes Grant’s Jewish protagonist Evelyn Sert, involved with the armed anticolonial resistance and currently posing as the English Priscilla Jones, to ask: ‘Are the Jews coloured?’ (109). Her own unquestioned presence in the circle of lemonade-quaffing Brits is answer enough, really, and suggests once again the subversive potential of the colonised subject’s mimicry. Indeed, the high-handed colonial attitude, presuming clear-cut, essentialist distinctions between the self and the other, is disappointed in the novel. In a textbook demonstration of postcolonial theory, Grant explores the postcoloniality of her Jewish characters with respect to conceptions of mimicry and hybridity. The ‘panoptic’ aspect of mimicry, for instance, derived by Homi Bhabha (1994b: 89) from Foucault, is described also by Evelyn from her own experience in England: What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? I felt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be exactly the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was me that understood, the spy in their midst. (Grant 2000: 27) Later in the novel, in Palestine, it is this very mimicry which allows Evelyn to engage ‘undercover’ in active resistance against the quasi-colonial power. However, to Evelyn herself – as for the protagonist of Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night – the hybridity of which her seemingly effortless mimicry is a sign is deeply unsettling: When I’m with the British and they treat me as if I’m British I feel British, not a Jew at all. If I have a passport in the name of this Priscilla Jones, who’s to say I’m someone else, apart from myself? I mean if I suffered from some form of amnesia and forgot completely that I was Evelyn Sert who would I be then? (140) In England Evelyn experienced herself as alienated and fragmented and as the helpless victim of internal colonisation. The futility of engaging the English on their own ‘territory’ is expressed quite succinctly in Grant’s novel – again exemplifying postcolonial theories (see Cheyette 1996: 21–2) – when Evelyn remembers her childhood in the following terms: ‘I was a Jewish child in a country where, unlike America, there was no contribution I could make to the forging of the national identity. It was fixed already, centuries ago’ (Grant 2000: 12). It is, however, not only that Evelyn feels herself to be excluded from the national English identity. The internal colonisation she labours under manifests itself also in the appropriation and reinterpretation of the cultural production of the colonised and in the suppression of their history. ‘In Scripture’, Evelyn recalls, they showed us pictures of the Holy Land. All we saw were churches and the Via Dolorosa and the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked on the water. A teacher who had been there described Bethlehem to us. She regarded Palestine as a British affair, thought



The Writing on the Wall 259 the place was hers and not mine. The King James Version of the Bible, she said, was a triumph of English literature. (15)

The British appropriation of Palestine under the Mandate of the League of Nations and the Christian appropriation of the Bible – especially its ‘translation’ into English literature (see Bhabha 1994c: 108) – are represented here as acts of colonial aggression. By subsequently asking her teacher whether she also visited Tel Aviv, the first ‘Jewish’ city but a place which holds ‘nothing of any interest’ to the teacher and therefore does not exist on her mental map of the ‘Holy Land’ (Grant 2000: 15), Evelyn surreptitiously lays claim to Palestine as a Jewish land. And indeed, although this is later revealed to be a fallacy in Grant’s novel, the one place where Evelyn seems to be able to actively contribute to the forging of her own as well as a Jewish national identity is Palestine immediately prior to the foundation of the Jewish state: ‘I had come to the place where there was, mercifully, no past and in which it was the duty and destiny of everyone to make the future, each for himself and for his country’ (74). When she first comes to Tel Aviv, Evelyn enthuses: ‘I had seen nothing like this before, how could I have done, as a citizen of an old country?’ (71). Indeed, captivated by the modernist Bauhaus architecture of the ‘White City’, its ‘cleansing’ aesthetics suggests to her the uncompromising orientation towards the future which promises to heal her fragmentation (72). Reiterating central tropes of Zionist discourse, Tel Aviv, the city built on empty sand, becomes in Grant’s novel a symbol of modernity and is turned into a metaphor for autonomous Jewish existence informed by this very modernity to which it simultaneously gives shape. Yet returning to Tel Aviv after fifty years, Evelyn cannot find the ‘White City’ any more. In response to her anxious question – ‘Where is the white city?’ – she is told: ‘It turned brown . . . A matter in part of poor maintenance but also corrosion from the salt air. The law that protected the tenants was a disaster for the buildings’ (241). The fault, it is suggested, was in the ideology, even though Evelyn’s interlocutor insists: ‘It was a correct idea, of course, but it had consequences which we did not foresee’ (241). The same critique is extended by implication also to the ideologies of modernism and Zionism. Their premises are exalted as the products of an honourable idealism, but their failure has been demonstrated by history. Accordingly, Grant is at pains to show that the past cannot be ignored and that it is always a part of the present and the future. Like the modernist Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, which is corroded from the inside, the Jewish state has fallen short of the ideals it promised. ‘[D]o you not understand that you are doing exactly the same thing as the British?’, one character asks and goes on to elaborate: ‘Colonialism assumed that it was bringing enlightenment to benighted peoples. You Zionists took exactly the same attitude to the Arab population, and of course to the Jews from North Africa and the East who followed. Your ideas are inherently colonial’ (253). And yet When I Lived in Modern Times ends on a hopeful note: some of the buildings are in the process of being restored ‘and they stand out like a sore thumb in the brilliance of their whiteness’ (254). There is hope, then, also for a renewed Israel.

Promise and Disappointment Bernice Rubens’ last novel, The Sergeants’ Tale (2003), writes another Tekel: Israel is found wanting – and particularly so for British Jews. A similar trajectory of rejecting Palestine and

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re-evaluating England, while nevertheless ‘writing back to antisemitism’ in Britain (Sicher and Weinhouse 2013: 191), had been followed already by Jeremy Gavron in his The Book of Israel (2002). The title of the novel, which ‘recreates the history of a family within which is contained the history of a people’ (Wesker 2002), does not refer to the Land or State of Israel but to the name of one of its protagonists and alludes to the People of Israel. In his sweeping family saga, Gavron deliberately ignores the period of the Mandate. In the relevant years, between 1920 and 1929, the focus of his narrative is rather on South Africa (2002: 117–58), which is contrasted with Palestine and the escalation of violence between Arabs and Jews: ‘This is the Promised Land. This land [i.e. South Africa]. No one’s going to murder people in their beds here’ (158). Facing a clearly defined ‘racial’ other, the South African Jews in Gavron’s novel consider themselves as white and readily adopt the concomitant colonial privileges and attitudes:4 ‘The Kaffirs are happy that the white people are here to employ them, to run the country, to build up this land’ (158) – in implicit contrast to the Arabs who react by force of arms to the Jewish immigration to and colonisation of Palestine. In the early years of the Second World War, the letters home of Eli (179–89), born in Britain and deployed as a British soldier in Palestine, convey a similarly bleak outlook on a Jewish Palestine: ‘As to my “threatening” as you call it to move you out to Palestine after the war’, he writes to his wife, ‘I never said any such thing. I merely wrote that it is a beautiful place and I would love to travel around it in better times with you’ (184). Again it is the dangers inherent in the place which make it unsuitable for a longer sojourn: ‘I would never make you and the children come to a dangerous place’ (184). Besides, it is not only the present in Palestine which appears unsafe to Eli but also its future: ‘I am fully aware that things are not likely to be easy here when the war ends. As it happens I can tell you that I am not so enamoured of this place as you seem to think’ (184). The reason for his disenchantment is that he has been infected with a parasite. Arguably, this suggests a parallel to the (alleged) colonial appropriation of Palestine through Zionism: the non-indigenous ‘white’ Jews, such as Eli, have not adapted to the conditions on the ground and appear to be alien to the land. Eli accordingly concludes: ‘I will not be sorry to leave Palestine as I expect to do soon’ (184). Alternatively, in contrast to life in ‘uncivilised’ Palestine which emerges in Eli’s imagination as the other to his evolving imaginary of England’s green and pleasant land, Eli rather yearns for England and, more specifically, for London: In truth I am thoroughly fed up with this whole part of the world with its heat and dust and people grabbing you all the time as you walk down the street. I long to come home to you and the children and England. Being away has made me appreciate what an attractive country it is and I can’t wait to see its green fields again even if it is raining and misty. London also, with its curious mixture of good and bad, has got me and I doubt if I would like to live elsewhere. (184) Palestine is no longer even mentioned here as a place of future significance. It is fully subsumed, and rejected, under the generalising label of ‘elsewhere’. England is home, unequivocally – and as such it emerges also in The Sergeants’ Tale. Rubens’ novel narrates the long-repressed (hi)story of two British sergeants hanged in 1947 by the militant Irgun. Though making one of them a half-Jew, the writer focuses less on identity conflicts in her novel than on dual loyalties, and although she chose the colonial encounter in Mandate Palestine as her subject and may thus superficially seem



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to support claims to Jewish postcoloniality, Jewish colonial and postcolonial subjects are consigned exclusively to Palestine and, later, Israel. Internal colonisation of the Jews in Britain, addressed quite explicitly in Grant’s novel and arguably also a subject of Rubens’ own I, Dreyfus (1999), is denied in The Sergeants’ Tale. Well aware of the colonial confrontation in Palestine, David Millar – one of the sergeants in Rubens’ novel and contrary to historical fact a half-Jew – longs for the days of his childhood in England which he remembers as ‘a time when there were no choices to be made, when one faith lived beside another in equal harmony’ (Rubens 2003: 81). A similar perception informs also his memories of Seder celebrations with his mother and grandmother who – ‘as did most Jews in the Diaspora’ – used to express their longing for Jerusalem each year in the words of the Pesach Haggadah: ‘Next year in Jerusalem’. David reflects: ‘But few of them meant it literally. For most it was a spiritual metaphor’ (101). On another level this impression is confirmed when the narrator – from a distance of more than fifty years – tells the reader towards the end of the novel that his own father left ‘the promised land’ which ‘for the most part had failed to keep its promises’ in 1977 and chose the diaspora in Britain instead (215). Israel, it is implied, has failed and cannot serve as the real object of the spiritual longing articulated through the well-known formula from the Haggadah. In contrast, the diaspora – especially in Britain – seems to be revalued: as a place which, in the past as well as in the present, kept and keeps its promise. It is only the unmediated colonial confrontation in Palestine which makes David Millar aware of a conflict of loyalties which before then did not exist for him at all: He thought of home and of the separate faiths in which he had been raised. There had never been a conflict between them, and loyalty was freely given to both. Until Palestine. Concealing his Jewishness was close to denying it. And failing to report Hannah was a defection of sorts. So what about his own loyalty? (35) Here, without being made explicit by the author, a significant mixing of categories is manifest. On the one hand, with a view to Britain, Jewishness is obviously understood as an exclusively religious category, as one of many possible and harmonising ‘denominations’. There is no trace here of notions of a hegemonic Englishness as in Grant’s novel and most of the others discussed in this chapter. In Palestine, on the other hand, Jewishness signifies primarily national or ethnic affiliation, although Judaism is not necessarily excluded. This geographical allocation of different characteristics of Jewishness opens up for David a way out of his dilemma. For although in Palestine, as an undercover agent of British military intelligence, he may not divulge his Jewish descent, his conflict of loyalties is at no time a conflict of identities and he manages to find a solution for it precisely because he is so sure of his Jewish identity: Never in his life had he been so sure of who and what he was. Ambiguity was not his problem. It was a puzzle for others like the army Intelligence Board. He was a Jew, by Jewish law and Jewish disposition. And as a Jew, he would marry Hannah and make his home in Palestine. (83) Still, although he never seeks to deny his Jewish descent, Palestine exerts a particular effect on him by making him focus on his Jewishness. Thus, while for most diaspora Jews, as the novel suggests, the formula of the Seder celebration is significant only as a spiritual metaphor, David realises that for him it expresses a true longing. His death at the hands of the anticolonial resistance and, indeed, the father of the woman he wants to marry is

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bitterly ironic. It does not, however, reflect so much on the situation in Britain. Rather, as Bryan Cheyette points out, Rubens in effect limits herself to ‘the liberal truism, repeated more than once here, that the terrorist activities of the Irgun have come full circle with the current intifada’ (2003: 22). Published after 9/11 in 2003, just about a year prior to the author’s death, Rubens’ insistence on what may appear to be an imagined harmonious integration of Jews into British society may be meant quite simply to be a plea for the integration of the stranger of different faith into a new British society, and may thus also be intended to alleviate the increasing islamophobia that followed the destruction of the World Trade Center. Indeed, as Maleiha Malik argued in the Guardian with reference not to Jewish terrorism in Palestine but rather to the anarchism and bolshevism associated with immigrant Jews in the early years of the twentieth century, ‘despite important differences, the treatment of British Jews provides an illuminating comparison with contemporary anti-Muslim racism’ (2007). In the light of Malik’s suggestions, Rubens may have been writing precisely against a stigmatisation of this sort. Even so, The Sergeants’ Tale is in many ways a disappointing text after the author’s much more poignant I, Dreyfus. In this novel, her eponymous protagonist is wrongly accused of murder and – like his historical namesake, the French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus – is the victim of antisemitic stereotyping and intrigue, even if ‘the English are known to be of a polite persuasion and their anti-Semitism is of the most courteous kind’ (Rubens 2000: 9). The impact of the situation in the Middle East is once again acknowledged to be crucial. The imprisoned Dreyfus reflects: from my point of view, there is rarely any good news coming out of that area. And by good news I mean that which is on my side. The side of Israel. After all that has happened to me I could surely be on no other side. Not that that side is always in the right. I am appalled by some of the wrongs that it perpetrates. But I want Israel to survive, otherwise those who accused me will, in some roundabout way, be vindicated. (38) Like Sam Finkler in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (2010) more than a decade after him, Dreyfus is very much aware of the moral ambiguity of Israeli policy. But he also draws the connection between criticism of Israel and the rise of antisemitism in Britain of which he himself is a victim: My trial and its unjust verdict coincided with a fearful Israeli attack on the West Bank, in which many Palestinians, some of them children, were maimed and killed. The newspapers rightly condemned it; there were demonstrations in the streets. But others got on the wagon, and all those inbred, inborn, engrained anti-Semites suddenly found a new word for their hate. That word was anti-Zionism, and that translation made their Jewhate respectable. And I was the spark. The name Dreyfus was the dynamo. (38) It is precisely this dynamic of the interplay of anti-Zionism and antisemitism which is interrogated in Jacobson’s novel. Its title obviously alludes to the so-called Jewish Question of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to which the cynically termed Final Solution was the response of the Nazis. But by referring specifically to Finkler, his name substituted by his friend Treslove for all things Jewish, as a particular type of Jew – as the self-hating enemy-from-within type – the question has become one of the confrontation with Israel and its impact on Jewish life in Britain. Rather than a considered ethical choice,



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it is the ‘intellectual violence’ (2010b: 22) experienced by Jacobson which appears to force many Jews into a defensive position by association. In his novel, it is Sam Finkler who, paradoxically, by seeking to dissociate himself from Jewry, reasserts his Jewishness in response to the Finkler Question. ‘Have you forgotten that you don’t like Jews?’, his ethnically non-Jewish but converted wife upbraids him: You shun the company of Jews. You have publicly proclaimed yourself disgusted by Jews because they throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God. And now because a few mediocre half-household-name Jews have decided to come out and agree with you, you’re mad for them. Was that all it ever needed? Would you have been the goodest of all good Jewish boys if only the other Jewish boys had loved you earlier? I don’t get it. It makes no sense. Becoming an enthusiastic Jew again in order to turn on Judaism. (Jacobson 2010a: 115) Finkler’s almost hysterical urge to proclaim his shame at Israel’s actions in response to and in anticipation of antisemitic stereotypes differs very much from the visceral suffering of anxiety and guilt that wracks Sinclair’s narrators. The Finkler Question is also much less nightmarish than Blood Libels or Cosmetic Effects. The England in which Jacobson’s novel is set is less extraterritorial, less magical and more realistic. It is the England of our own day. But for all that, it is not necessarily any less frightening. The hypochondria and paranoia that characterise the experience of reality of Sinclair’s narrators are ascribed in The Finkler Question to the non-Jewish Julian Treslove, who ‘was a man who saw things coming’ (3), who ‘was framed for calamity and sadness but was always somewhere else when either struck’ (5). Treslove is defined by a vague absence and an allpervading sense of loss (47): ‘His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot’ (10). Treslove is a born impersonator, indistinct and chameleon-like, ‘a lookalike for everybody and nobody’ (10). Surely, his natural mimicry is meant to invoke age-old antisemitic stereotypes of the obsequious Jew aping his hosts; nor is his resemblance in particular to Jewish celebrities a coincidence (72). When Treslove seems to have been taken for a Jew by a female mugger, this not only sharpens his perception of the proliferation of antisemitic incidents but initiates his quest for a Jewish identity. The few indistinct words he believes her to have said to him, and which in a long process of reasoning and interpretation he retrospectively identifies as neither ‘Your jewels’, ‘You’re Jules’ nor ‘You Jule’ but as ‘You Ju!’ (32–3), do indeed turn him into a Jew by association and by inclination who, ironically, ‘was more them than they were, felt more for them and what they stood for than they, as far [as] he could see, were capable of feeling for themselves’ (265). In the novel, Treslove occupies an indeterminate middle ground between two Jewish extremes embodied by his former classmate Sam Finkler and their erstwhile teacher, Libor Sevcik. The latter, a Czech Jewish refugee of an older generation who survived the war, is an ardent supporter of Israel, though his position is identified by Treslove as what he has heard ‘described as the lifeboat position’: ‘No, I’ve never been there and don’t ever want to go there’, he says, ‘but even at my age the time might not be far away when I have nowhere else to go. That is history’s lesson’ (25). Finkler, in contrast, does not even ‘allow himself to use the word Israel at all. There was no Israel, there was only Palestine . . . Israelis, however, there had to be, to distinguish the doers from the done-to’ (25). Indeed, Finkler becomes

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one of the founding members of ‘ASHamed Jews’, a group who, in Treslove’s incredulous words, are ‘Ashamed as Jews of a country of which they are not citizens. . .?’ (120). Jacobson observed in an interview: ‘I feel much less defined by Israel than most antiZionist Jews are defined by Israel. They are defined by their anti-Zionism’ (2010c: 15). His novel nevertheless posits the insidious pervasiveness of hoary antisemitic stereotypes as both hetero- and auto-stereotypes no less than their inescapability. Thus, Treslove is exhorted by Libor: ‘We’re all anti-Semites. We have no choice. You. Me. Everyone’ (Jacobson 2010a: 249). Yet the fact that Jacobson’s novel ends with Finkler’s immersion in the ‘all-embracing’ Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead which is in fact an exaltation of the divinity, paradoxically strikes an optimistic note. There are ‘no limits’ to Finkler’s mourning (307). Yet mourning is the prerequisite for working through and, ultimately, for reconciliation. And while Jacobson insisted that his novel was not primarily a satire, but rather ‘a bleak tale of love and loyalty and the loss of both’ (2010b: 22), this return of sorts of the prodigal son tinges the bleakness with a ray of hope.

Foregoing Extraterritoriality or Insoluble Ties? Since the first decade of the new millennium, a number of mostly younger British Jewish writers – such as David Baddiel, Giles Coren, Naomi Alderman and Charlotte Mendelson – have increasingly turned their attention to Britain, and away from Israel or the diaspora. In fact, as suggested by Ruth Gilbert (2008; 2013), the extraterritoriality identified by Bryan Cheyette (1996) as a distinctive feature of British Jewish writing of the last three decades of the twentieth century seems to have been superseded by a renewed focus on the particulars of British Jewish life. Affirmative, rather than apologetic,5 much of recent British Jewish literature challenges traditional and frequently ossified markers of Jewishness, especially ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘Judaism’, and offers potentially contentious readings of British and Jewish constructions of the past and the present. Obviously, these developments need to be considered in the larger context of British Jewish cultural creativity and should not be rendered in terms of absolutes. Nevertheless, the inward gaze appears to indicate a trend which, at a time when Israel has become increasingly entrenched in the wake of global criticism of its policies, may reflect the search for detachment, the desire to remain aloof from the political and ethical dilemma in which Israel has become embroiled and to reject moral liability by association. It may, however, also signal a process of normalisation, the overcoming of the compulsion to feel culpable and, instead, to view the Middle East conflict as one among many, as an Israeli concern and not a Jewish one. As such the current silence on Israel in British Jewish writing – if it can even be called that – is of a significantly different character from that of the early period of statehood. This was rather hushed and responded to anxieties of potential antisemitic outrages arising from the direct colonial encounter in Mandate Palestine and its ramifications in Britain.6 With the notable exception of Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night, most of the earlier texts engaging with Israel uncritically endorse Zionist ideology. Ultimately, it was the Lebanon War of 1982 that not only tipped the balance but also generated an alternative paradigm of conflictual narratives that engage critically with the moral integrity of Israel’s policies and the liability by association of Jews in the diaspora. Clive Sinclair’s hysterical and macabre nightmare scenarios elaborate an immediate response to the Lebanon War that challenges not only the political expediency of Israeli politics but also its sanity. The post-Zionism debates in the wake of the Lebanon War inflected also the emergence of a new pattern of



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understanding Israeli and in particular British diaspora-Jewish identities within the parameters set by postcolonial theories. Tying Israeli transgression to the established colonial/ postcolonial paradigm that at the same time offers an explanation of the exigencies of the diaspora as a form of internal colonisation, the most comprehensive and explicit example of this trend is Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times. In this novel, as in Koestler’s Thieves in the Night and Glanville’s The Bankrupts, the semantic potential of Tel Aviv is explored in relation to Zionist tropes that construe the first Jewish city as a marker of hope and futurity, a hope that is disappointed in both Koestler’s novel and When I Lived in Modern Times. The latter, however, attributes to the restoration of the White City the promise of a new hope, while in Thieves in the Night this promise was tied to the pioneer spirit, with the kibbutz movement as its ‘white’ hope. Significantly, Koestler’s novel was written from a minimal historical distance to the events it describes while Grant’s postmodern text, as she has her narrator observe, has the benefit of hindsight (2000: 3, 166). The same benefit of hindsight has Bernice Rubens despair of any hope for Israel in The Sergeants’ Tale. Her narrative, similar to Jeremy Gavron’s in The Book of Israel, rejects Israel as a land of promise; yet in contrast to Gavron, who acknowledges London’s ‘curious mixture of good and bad’ (2002: 184), Rubens substitutes for Israel’s promise the roseate view of a harmoniously multicultural and multi-denominational Britain. This, in turn, is challenged no less by Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question than by the recent strand of confrontationally affirmative Jewish writing in Britain since the first decade of the millennium. Yet Jacobson’s novel also countermands this trend of normalisation, if in a manner very different from that of Rubens. Most importantly, his novel resuscitates anxieties of British antisemitism in relation to the perceived moral integrity of the state of Israel. In doing so he confirms the trajectory of British Jewish literary engagement with Israel sketched in this and in the previous chapter. With his claim that ‘Israel exists only poetically, in the imaginations of those who cannot adequately describe themselves without it’ (2010b: 22) he moreover finds a formula for this engagement whose validity is substantiated in retrospect by the texts discussed. Whether Israel will indeed be written out of British Jewish writing in the future, as some recent texts seem to suggest, remains to be seen. The impact of such a vanishing act on Israel would in all likelihood be negligible. Whether the impact of Israel on the British and British Jewish imagination will ever be sufficiently negligible to allow such a retreat in the long term is another matter entirely.

Notes 1. Parts of this chapter are based on some of my earlier publications; see Stähler (2009a; 2009b; 2013). 2. The explicit mention of the haunting of the phantom limb may moreover be meant to allude to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s phantom theory of the psychic concealment of a devastating parental trauma which continues to ‘haunt’ future generations (1994: 177–86). This would then suggest the incipient generation and future transmission of a transgenerational trauma and potentially damaging ‘parental’ ties between Israel and Isaac, between Isaac and his hand (the sons of Ishmael), and between Isaac and the daughter that is born to him at the end of the novel. 3. Other possible allusions are, for instance, William Berke’s Overland to Deadwood (1942) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Texas Stagecoach (1940); the latter also directed The Falcon in San Francisco

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(1945), a mystery rather than a Western, which nevertheless, together with the prolific Western director’s surname, may account for the naming of Lewis Falcon in Cosmetic Effects. 4. For the historical background to negotiations of Jewish ‘whiteness’ in South Africa, see the contributions by Linda Weinhouse and Claudia Braude in this volume. 5. For the apologetic strain in secular British Jewish writing from its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Cheyette (1998b: xxxiv). 6. For further detail, see Chapter 18 in this volume.

20 BRITISH JEWISH HOLOCAUST FICTION Sue Vice

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ontemporary British Jewish fiction about the Holocaust responds to two ­different imperatives. The first is the role of the Holocaust in relation to British Jewish identity and self-conception, while the second is the changing view of the Holocaust within Britain itself. Furthermore, it has proved hard to reconcile the British national myth about the Second World War, of successful and heroic battle against moral evil both overseas and on the home front, with the murder of European Jews which Britain was not able to prevent. These two narratives have been described as an instance of ‘rival memory work’ (Kushner 2013: 52). The notion of rivalry is internalised in the examples of ‘British-Jewish’ Holocaust fiction that I will discuss, with the result that the two adjectives, although hyphenated, are likely to be at odds. Even the best-known examples of Holocaust fiction by British writers do not represent any link with Britain itself: the former Nazi protagonist of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) ends his days in the US, and his The Zone of Interest (2014) is set in Nazi-occupied Poland; D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) takes place in Vienna and Ukraine, while the events of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992) occur in France. Among British Jewish authors of Holocaust fiction, either a similar displacement occurs – Lisa Appignanesi’s The Memory Man (2004) concerns the return of survivor Bruno Lind from the US to his childhood home in Vienna – or it takes the form of refugee fiction set in Britain against a distant Holocaust backdrop, as in Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) and Eva Tucker’s Becoming English (2009). As a story of rescue, the prewar Kindertransport mission, which resulted in the journey to Britain of almost 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe, integrates to some extent the contradictory wartime narratives of British heroism and Jewish death. Since it encapsulates both exceptional rescue and abrupt deracination, the Kindertransport experience has had a protean fictional function. It appears in British novels concerned with exile and colonialism (Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood, 1997), with memory and loss (Anita Brookner’s Latecomers, 1988; W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, 2001; Jane Gardam’s The Flight of Maidens, 2000), as well as romance (Jake Wallis Simons’ The English German Girl, 2011). David Baddiel’s novel The Secret Purposes (2004), which I discuss below, is about British wartime policies towards Jews and refugees from Nazism, in this case the wholesale internment of ‘enemy aliens’, which are less worthy of British self-congratulation and less readily acknowledged, either in the national myth of the war or in fiction. The same is true of

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the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands, about which controversy persists over the extent to which the islanders collaborated with or resisted the Nazis, and the deportation of three Jewish women from the islands to their deaths in Europe. Apart from genre fiction which acknowledges a culture of secrecy but does not focus on the occupation’s victims of ‘racial’ or slave-labour policy, the subject has been avoided by British novelists.1 The final two decades of the twentieth century saw greater efforts in British public life to acknowledge Holocaust history, ranging from its inclusion in the National Curriculum for schools to the foundation of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition and the institution of an official Holocaust Memorial Day. It is against this background that more recent fiction has attempted to bring the narratives of British and Jewish wartime history together, either in the form of historical reconstruction or as a strand of self-definition. The novels of this kind that I will discuss here are Jeremy Dyson’s What Happens Now (2006), Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006) and David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes, each of which adopts what could be called a postmemorial perspective on the events of the Holocaust. None is set in Nazi-occupied Europe, and events are seen in retrospect or at the remove of internment in Britain rather than imprisonment in a Nazi camp. All three are at least as much about Britishness and British Jewishness as they are about the Holocaust itself.

Bystander or Victim? What Happens Now Jeremy Dyson’s What Happens Now has been described as a Bildungsroman, and the aspect of its plot that concerns the memory of the Holocaust seen simply as an example of its protagonist Alistair Black’s confidence-denting teenage experiences (O’Grady 2006). Yet the Holocaust is more integral to the narrative than such a view suggests. This is clear from the novel’s title, with its echo of Primo Levi’s 1986 novel If Not Now, When?, about a Jewish partisan in wartime Byelorussia, a title that itself draws on the rabbinical advocacy of committed action.2 In ironic contrast to Levi’s resister, Alistair is a bystander. Dyson’s novel is set in 1981, when the 15-year-old Leeds schoolboy Alistair is offered a part in a children’s television play about the war. These events are interleaved with Alistair’s life some eighteen years later, as he tries to atone for what he sees as his failure to prevent a tragedy in 1981. Alistair’s experience of living away from home in London while the television play is filmed ostensibly centres on his secret love for his co-actor Alice and his friendship with the older Steve, but it is the action of the play itself that underlies the events of the novel. Entitled A Candle in the Darkness, the play is a dramatised version of a Holocaust diary about life in hiding. Alistair plays Marcel, the younger brother of the Romanian diarist Leila Vinteuil, whose Jewish family hid from the Nazis in a cellar until they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz. Although Alistair recalls a film version of Leila’s diary and not ‘really liking’ its protagonist, about whom ‘there had been a hint of the goody-goody’, he concludes by wishing that more of her diary had survived to be read (Dyson 2006: 48, 212). Along with Leila and her family in the cellar is ‘another boy’, someone ‘older’ who was ‘her boyfriend or something’ (48). Leila’s story is clearly an instance of the ‘refiguring’ of Anne Frank’s (Horowitz 2012: 215), whose attic hiding place was shared with her father Otto’s business partner Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste and their son Peter, who did indeed become Anne’s ‘boyfriend or something’. Although she later distanced herself from him, Anne confided in her diary about Peter on 22 March 1944: ‘it is getting more and more



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wonderful here. I believe, Kitty, that we may have a real love in the Secret Annexe’ (Frank 1999: 184). In the version of Anne Frank’s diary that we encounter in What Happens Now, the alteration of family relations, including the transformation of Anne’s older sister Margot into Marcel, Leila’s younger brother, reflects not only its fictionalisation in this new context, but is a disturbing parallel for Alistair’s relationship with Alice, who plays Leila. While Alistair imagines that Alice views him merely fraternally, as if he really is Marcel, it is the older Steve, in a bleak version of the other boy in the Vinteuls’ cellar, who forcibly makes his relationship with her sexual. The conceit of the play-within-a-novel enables us to see Alistair’s growing inability to distinguish fiction from reality, past from present. He takes on the guise of Leila’s brother in almost literal terms, and the wardrobe-manager is delighted that the other boy’s outfit ‘fits you perfectly’, as she puts it (62). Alistair’s costume, consisting of ‘a large yellow star’ pinned to the left side of a thick grey coat and a ‘small brown cap’, makes him think, of his reflection in the mirror: ‘He looked like somebody else, but somebody he knew or somebody he’d seen.’ The posture Alistair then ‘impulsively’ assumes allows the reader to recognise this ‘somebody’, although the text itself withholds identification: ‘he held [out] both his arms, bending them at the elbows, palms flat and outwards as if to say don’t shoot’ (62). Alistair thus sees himself, as if in a ‘tableau’, mimicking the infamous photograph of a small boy being arrested by the SS during the Warsaw Uprising of 1943.3 Dressed in this guise, Alistair undergoes a drama exercise in which the other cast members hurl antisemitic abuse at him in an apparent effort to make him experience Marcel’s suffering first-hand. It is as if the dressing-up and drama exercises for the play represented in Dyson’s novel are instances of an involuntary and historicised method-acting, in which Alistair finds himself taking on a Holocaust victim’s affective world. His reproduction, albeit without naming them, of the emblematic Holocaust figures of Anne Frank and the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto is a way of bringing the Holocaust into the present. Equally, it is one that threatens to subordinate the details of the historical event to Alistair’s teenage concerns. As Dominick LaCapra has argued, it can be dangerous to confuse the existential trauma of growing up with that of history (1998: 46–8), yet Alistair takes such confusion a step further in allowing the Holocaust to stand in for his personal demons. However, What Happens Now is conscious of this danger. The novel’s setting in the world of a play allows for the boundaries between fiction and reality, acted and actual experience, to become blurred. For instance, the enacting of antisemitic abuse appears real to Alistair because Steve ‘seemed serious in his intent’, while even Alice’s face looked ‘impassive’ (63). Although everyone is horrified at the conclusion of the drama exercise to learn that Alistair himself is Jewish, Declan, the play’s director, welcomes this extra verisimilitude: ‘Remember that feeling, kid. Take it inside.’ The ‘inside’ that Declan refers to is both ‘that cellar in Cluj’ and Alastair’s own interiority, as if the two were one: real Jewishness equates to real suffering, and its fullest expression occurs during the Holocaust. It is as if Jews themselves are consigned to the past, as suggested by the cast’s surprise that Alistair identifies himself as one. He likens this to having a disease, as if the phrase ‘I’m Jewish’ is the same as saying ‘I’ve got leukaemia’ (65). Yet an even more complex identification than Alistair’s with the victims of the Holocaust takes place in What Happens Now. It is Alice whom Alistair views as the victim, not himself, and he is unable to save her from her fate. The filming of the television play A Candle in the Darkness concludes with another instance in which acting out a Holocaust narrative makes the boundaries between fact and fiction seem uncertain, as if the events

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cannot be contained by contemporary make-believe. This is a scene not represented in either Leila’s or Anne Frank’s diaries, that of the discovery of the hiding place and the inhabitants’ violent arrest by the Nazis. The fact that this scene is played for real is signalled by the absence of real or fictional personal names for the arresting officers, whose role and title are one: ‘Alistair felt himself grabbed roughly by the soldiers. This wasn’t what they’d rehearsed. This wasn’t in the script’ (230). This occasion, unlike the one in which Alistair underwent antisemitic abuse, is not followed by the restitution of present-day reality and apology, but by the proleptic revelation of a real trauma: while Alistair fears that Alice will see him crying, there is ‘something worse. Alice struggling. Alice struggling to free herself from the thick hands that gripped her. And him held tight, unable to stop it’ (231). While this might sound as if it is a description of Alistair’s horrified glance backwards at the fate of Leila and the victims of the Holocaust, whose destiny in the world of the play seems predetermined, it is rather a flashforward to what will happen to Alice. While Leila underwent the trauma of betrayal and discovery – Alistair recalls ‘the Nazis battering down the door at the end. The violence of it’ in the film version (48) – Alice undergoes an act of sexual violence at the hands of Steve, which Alistair is unable to prevent. Sitting outside Steve’s house on that occasion and wishing for the presence of a policeman, as the protective, British version of the wartime ‘soldiers’, Alistair imagines the reaction of such a figure: ‘the policeman would ask what he was doing there and why he wasn’t in there saving her’ (268). It is as if we are no longer in the realm of history but of the unconscious, the absent policeman standing in for Alistair’s uncertain superego. In What Happens Now, the Holocaust provides a template for the ethical dilemmas of the present day. Yet it is hard to match these dilemmas exactly to the historical ones, particularly since Leila’s story is presented so sparsely. It is Alistair, a British Jewish teenager acting the role of a boy who was killed at Auschwitz, who comes to view himself as culpable. In later life, both Alice and Alistair are haunted by Leila’s fate, and her experience provides the imagery with which they separately approach the memory of Alice’s rape. Alice’s post-traumatic stress takes the form of a dream about entering a cellar, ‘made to live in or hide in until life was safe again’, a refuge that turns malign as she fears becoming one of its inhabitants: ‘She was to become one of them. A desiccated, barely moving thing’ (288). Alice’s experience of acting the role of Leila, in a set described by Declan as an expressionist ‘nightmare brought to life’ (211), has been transformed into a Holocaust-inflected dream of being buried alive, and a wish to deny identification with Holocaust victims. In adult life Alistair also tries to revisit the cellar where Leila and her family hid, not in a dream but by journeying to Cluj. Yet Alistair’s revisitation ends tragically: during the train journey through Romania, his attempt to come to the aid of another young woman, who, it turns out on this occasion, was not in any danger at all, results in his own death. Only posthumously can the ‘negative determinism’4 of Alistair’s historical heritage and inaction be transcended so that he can help Alice. She is saved when he appears in her cellarnightmare: ‘There was a crack from above – a huge explosive bang. Shards of wood fell on her . . . [Alistair’s] hand stretched down. It reached for hers’ (307). This moment echoes and redeems the earlier moment in which the denouement of A Candle Burning in the Darkness turned too real for the actors, as the shift in naming from ‘Marcel’ to ‘Alistair’ suggests: There was a tremendous crash from above. Marcel watched Father’s face contort with shock, then looked up himself. Shards of wood fell to the ground . . . Alistair struggled in the [soldier’s] thick arms, which held him in a firm and horrible grip. (230)



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We see here a reversal: the play’s rendition of Leila’s being discovered, the prelude to her death, is turned into Alistair pulling Alice back into life, while Alistair’s helping hand replaces the soldier’s deathly grip. As a counter to the overwhelming effect of Holocaust consciousness on Alistair’s ethical life, it is his memory that brings Alice out of the ‘encrypted’ recall represented by Leila’s cellar (see Abraham and Torok 1994: 135). She is able to discard her own as well as a historical past. The novel’s title accomplishes its own reversal in turn. The television series in which A Candle Burning in the Darkness appears is called Then and Now: in this novel, we read only about ‘now’, the present moment.

Victim or Perpetrator? Kalooki Nights In What Happens Now, the connection between the Holocaust and British Jewish life is represented implicitly in terms of a division between the European past and British present. By contrast, in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights, the relationship between wartime genocide and Britishness constitutes the book’s overt concern. Although the narrator, Mancunian cartoonist Max Glickman, is admonished by his mother to the effect that ‘[t]he only camp you ever went to was Butlins’, he also recalls making contingency plans with his childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, for the ‘Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky’ (Jacobson 2006: 472, 19). Such a conviction resounds with historical bathos. Yet it turns out that the effects of the Holocaust do reside in unexpectedly close proximity to Max’s Crumpsall home. Confounding further LaCapra’s caveat against confusing developmental with historical trauma, the pubertal boys Max and Manny acquire detailed knowledge of the Holocaust and sexual difference at the same time and from the same source, Lord Russell of Liverpool’s salacious account The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes. Although he claims that he ‘would rather not have been aroused by it’ (81), Max’s first sight of a female body comes from a photograph in Lord Russell’s book showing ‘naked Jewish women . . . running across the prison yard while the German guards, some with their hands in the pockets of their uniforms, look on’ (80). Alistair Black in What Happens Now may have recognised a likeness between the photograph of the boy being arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto and his own mirror-image, but Max is uncomfortably identified here with the photographer and spectators of this scene, all of whom are Nazis. As the historian Tony Kushner argues of The Scourge of the Swastika, its mid-1950s view represents the events of what would come to be called the Holocaust ‘through the prism of atrocity’, illustrated with graphic images of what he calls ‘a pornography of violence’ (2013: 59). The photograph Kushner cites that ‘most gratuitously’ (59) falls into this category is just the one that Max looks at. It is this notion of the Holocaust as a series of individual acts of pathological cruelty, rather than as state-sponsored and bureaucratically organised genocide, that informs Max’s conception of it in Kalooki Nights, and underlies his propensity to personalise its implications. In his professional life as a cartoonist, Max reverses the power relation of the wartime photograph of Jewish women in an expression of his ‘masochistic fantasies’ (Rowland 2013: 130). These take the form of elaborate scenarios featuring the Nazis’ ‘leading lady’ (Jacobson 2006: 97), Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek, Karl-Otto Koch. Yet the power relation is reversed only in terms of gender, not ‘race’, in a way that follows Max’s view of his own present-day experience. This Holocaust scenario lays bare the dynamics of Max’s romantic relationships, almost all of which are conducted with gentile women whose anti- or philosemitism echoes in miniature the attitude of

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Max’s fictionalised Koch. As Max puts it, it is his ‘Schicksal’ to be a ‘shikseh-loving Yiddler’ (82–4), the alliteration establishing a link between Nazi, or certainly German, notions of destiny or determinism5 and the allure of non-Jewish women. However, Jewish women are not exempt from such imputations. Max marvels at the existence of the Jewish namesakes, Ilse Cohen and Irma Grose, who play kalooki with his mother and whose first and second names ‘mirror’ those of the Nazis Ilse Koch and Irma Grese – the latter a warden at several camps, including Bergen-Belsen – and dismisses the idea that such repetition is a coincidence (96). In one of Max’s scenarios, the camp inmate Mendel, an artist like his creator, gazes in fascination at Koch, whose outfit, a ‘casual but smart’ dress suitable for ‘shopping or striding’, reminds him of one worn by his mother: [Frau Koch] must know its effect on men of education and conscience. Later she will wear the same dress before the American Military Tribunals in Dachau. Not that Mendel will ever know anything about that. (106) This dramatisation depends, like all the Holocaust-related material in this novel and in Dyson’s, on documentary evidence, and the dress, decorated with ‘a lozenge pattern . . . like involuted diamonds’, is visible in actual photographs of Koch on trial in Dachau.6 The role of the dress in that legal setting, chosen by Koch perhaps to reassure the prosecutors of her unthreatening femininity,7 is transformed by Mendel into a sign of sexual potency. In Mendel’s fantasy, Koch is the object of the gaze, as the Jewish women in Lord Russell’s photograph were, but otherwise all the power is hers, and it is the spectator who is doomed: Mendel will not live to see his persecutor’s trial. Max’s comparison of Koch with his mother might seem to domesticate and render harmless a murderous figure who took part in genocidal killing, but in fact it works the other way round, to suggest that all women are alike, at once ‘seductive and repellent’ (Rowland 2013: 135). As Max asserts, bringing Lenny Bruce’s list of ‘Jewish versus Goyish’ binaries to its logical conclusion (Bruce 1967: 41–2), ‘women are Christians, men are Jews’ (Jacobson 2006: 378). At the novel’s end, Max describes in terms of cartoon panels the death of Ilse Koch on the London Underground, not only witnessed but brought about by a former camp inmate (see Krigstein 1955), whose lack of a name suggests that Mendel and Max have merged into a single persona. Yet it is less important that this death occurs in Britain than that the scenario of Koch’s death summons up a likeness to the film producer with whom Max has just had lunch, Francine Bryson-Smith. The latter’s rebuttal of Max’s accusations of antisemitism – ‘You’re raving . . . I don’t hate Jews’ (Jacobson 2006: 457–8) – is subsequently imagined issuing from Koch’s mouth (463). It is as if only a woman’s death can quash Max’s uncomfortable question to himself, couched in terms of the notion of an antisemite’s ‘fetor anti-judaicus’: ‘Had I nosed her out and liked it, whatever I smelt?’ (454). The indefinite personal pronoun ‘her’ refers ostensibly to Francine, but also expands its reference to include Ilse. Such an insistence on gender commonality overriding differences of morality, nationality, religion, historical moment and fictionality means that Francine’s ‘Englishness’ (455) is, for Max, only a falsely reassuring disguise. As was the case for Alistair in What Happens Now, the ethical implications of Holocaust history in Kalooki Nights seem to reach their apotheosis in the conduct of contemporary sexual relationships. Max may not be a Holocaust victim but he sees himself as the victim of femininity. He imagines one of his mothers-in-law taking ‘the annotated English countrywomen’s Letters of Heinrich Himmler’ to read in bed (83), and shocks his wife Chloë by



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calling out to her mother, in implicit invocation of Ilse Koch, ‘[o]ff up the little wooden hill to Buchenwald, are we?’ Max describes himself as a ‘caricaturist’ (153), and Jacobson’s novel is, like Dyson’s, conscious of its own black-and-white devices. Alternately ‘excoriating’ and ‘shielding’ his people (95), Max darts between the twin poles of a dialectic of antisemitism, as his magnum opus Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, a cartoon history of the Jews, reveals. ‘We are a self-defeating, self-disgusted, self-eviscerating people’, he asserts, ‘but we couldn’t have got there without outside help’ (166). Yet this binary structure, of Jew and gentile creating and depending upon each other, is always inflected and disrupted by Max’s unacknowledged association of women with perpetration and, by extension, Nazism. Such a fascination with Ilse Koch and her ‘voyeuristic value’ (Brown 2013: 76) is not limited to Max, since she has been widely invoked as a psychic or literary trope rather than a historical figure. While Susannah Heschel argues that Nazi women such as Koch and Grese were viewed as ‘deviant’ after the war in order to preserve the notional ‘innocence’ of the generality of German womanhood (2004: 302), Max is not alone in seeing their crimes as definitional of femininity itself.8 Max’s friend Manny’s contemporary re-enactment of Holocaust atrocities in Manchester takes a different form, centred less on personal than historical affront, one born of a crazed incredulity at the Nazis’ actions. Manny kills his parents, and both Max and the reader learn of this parricide from Max’s mother: ‘Channa and Selick have been found dead.’ ‘Christ!’ ‘In their beds, Max. They think gassed.’ ‘Gassed!’ ‘I know.’ (Jacobson 2006: 49) Max adds that ‘gassed’ is ‘one of those words’ made ‘unholy just as ground is made unholy’, and, in response to this observation, the critic John Mullan (2010) praises this exchange for its ‘seriously funny’ engagement with the post-Holocaust tainting of language. But Max’s distanced, British perspective, that of someone ‘born safely, at a lucky time’ (Jacobson 2006: 5), transforms even this linguistic truism, one that has been asserted elsewhere by such writers as George Steiner (1979: 143). Of Max’s list of ‘unholy’ words – ‘gassed, camp, extermination, concentration, experiment, march, train, rally, German’ – only half were neutral in the first place. It is rather that the word ‘gassed’ is transferred from its Holocaust context to a British one, not as an empty signifier given malign meaning, but as an action repeated in the present. In the conversation with his mother, Max’s shocked repetition of the word ‘Gassed!’, which acts as an expletive in echoing his earlier ‘Christ!’, is met with Mrs Glickman’s acknowledgement, not so much of the horror of the murder itself, but of the transplantation of the act of gassing: ‘I know.’ One of the unifying threads of Kalooki Nights is Max’s quest to uncover Manny’s motive for the murder of his parents, and, having dismissed such possible reasons as resentment at the stultifying orthodox life in which they brought him up or jealousy of his brother’s relationship with the non-Jewish Dorothy, he concludes simply that Manny was overly ‘engrossed in the history of the Holocaust’ (Jacobson 2006: 59). The latter’s actions were inspired by the wartime example of ‘the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist George Renno’, who said at trial when questioned about the gassings he had undertaken at Schloss Hartheim that ‘[t]urning on the tap . . . was no big deal’ (59, 437). Here, Max goes against his own observation about words becoming ‘unholy’ by association, since a new word is

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needed for Renno’s singular avocation: to this end, he splices together ‘euthanasist’ and ‘enthusiast’. Manny’s ‘research’ determined that, on the contrary, ‘turning the tap on was a big deal’ (61), a statement which led to a verdict of ‘mental impairment’ at his trial. This too is an uncanny echo of a 1973 legal judgement on Renno himself, when charges against him were dismissed on the grounds of ill-health, although he lived until the age of 90, nearly a quarter-century more. Kalooki Nights’ mixture of diegetic and extra-diegetic echoes of Renno’s career in the person of Manny Washinsky presents an overdetermined view of British Jewish responses to the Holocaust. On the one hand, as Max puts it of himself and his peers: ‘[b]y any of the usual definitions of the word victim, of course, I wasn’t one’ (5); on the other, the very contemplation of the Holocaust has brought Manny to the certainty that ‘whatever had happened once could happen again’ (440). Ironically, that conviction turns out to be self-fulfilling, as if Manny is even more subject to ‘negative determinism’ than Alistair in What Happens Now.

A British Haven? The Secret Purposes David Baddiel’s novel The Secret Purposes differs from Dyson’s and Jacobson’s in making its documentary origins explicit in a variety of ways, and acknowledges them overtly in a postscript that describes the novel as a ‘collage of fact and fiction’ (Baddiel 2004: 407). Not only does its plot concern a specific historical episode, that of the wartime internment of ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man, but various narrative functions are taken up by interpolated historical documents. Such a hybrid form exists to subject the myths of British tolerance and righteousness to scrutiny, enacting, as Eva Figes describes it in a review, ‘an attack on British smugness’ (2004). The arrival of the novel’s protagonist, Isaac Fabian, in Britain from Königsberg is not described but shown, by means of transitions between different kinds of text such as maps and historical documents. The apparently paratextual division in the novel between its first two parts conveys the fact of Isaac’s emigration: while Part One is prefaced by a map of Königsberg in 1934, Part Two starts with one of Cambridge in 1940. At first sight, it appears that this is a means of contrasting the two locations. While Isaac’s father, Rabbi Isidore Fabian, is refused the right to cross any of Königsberg’s five bridges, all of those in the British city offer free access to his son. However, a warning against such a stark moral contrast is present in the form of an inserted document, which opens Part Two and stands in for narrative comment. This is a verbatim version of the Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee leaflet, issued by the ‘German Jewish Aid Committee, London 1939’. Among its other implicit manoeuvres, the leaflet establishes national differences between Jewish identities: ‘Do not spread the poison of “it’s bound to come in your country”. The British Jew greatly objects to the planting of this craven thought’ (Baddiel 2004: 28). The literary potential of this thoroughly dialogic document, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, has been recognised elsewhere, such that, like the historical figures of Anne Frank and Ilse Koch, it has transcended its archival status to become a literary trope. The Guidance signifies a British Jewish version of just the kind of monocultural restriction the refugees had fled. The document appears in Eva Tucker’s novel Becoming English, where its discourse prompts protest from Ruth, the protagonist Laura’s mother. Ruth’s imperfect English reveals Laura’s sympathy with the leaflet’s admonitions: Ruth tells Laura about a pamphlet she has been given called A Helpful Guide for Every Refugee, published by British Jews. There are lots of things refugees must and must not



British Jewish Holocaust Fiction 275 do: don’t speak German too loudly in the street . . . ‘Ze English Jews tell us how to behave. Zey sink we give zem a bad name!’ Ruth says. (Tucker 2009: 9)

It is as if we hear Ruth ‘speak German loudly’ in the text itself, and we are aware of her daughter’s disapproval. The leaflet is also invoked in the subtitle of Natasha Solomons’ novel Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (2010). The eponymous protagonist Jack Rosenblum annotates the leaflet while he is briefly in detention as a ‘Class B’ enemy alien, answering back to its monoglot strictures: SPEND YOUR TIME IMMEDIATELY IN LEARNING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ITS PRONUNCIATION. Have done so, but it is not so easy. Even English lessons do not assist. Cursed German accent IMPOSSIBLE to lose. (Solomons 2010a: 10) In distinction to Ruth in Becoming English, Jack Rosenblum’s dialogue with the Guidance is, ironically, couched in perfect English. In The Secret Purposes, the incorporation of the Guidance leaflet is the first sign of the novel’s ambivalent attitude to Britishness and the notion of Britain as a safe haven for Jewish refugees. During the war, an émigré friend of Isaac’s wife Lulu warns her against seeming ‘too English’ lest she is considered a spy (Baddiel 2004: 98), and observes that she has heard ‘more thoughtless anti-Jew comments’ in Britain than she ever did in Germany, leading her to conclude: ‘The only difference is that, here, they come wrapped in a gentlemanly distaste for doing anything about it’ (103). By contrast, it seems to be uncomplicated praise from Isaac, when he has become a citizen, that he ruminates fondly on the ‘sweet stability’ of life in Britain (368). Yet both utterances allude to a notion of British inaction rather than ethical superiority, what Isaac thinks of as the ‘laziness’ of a ‘revolution-free democracy’ in which even the working people are generally ‘unbothered’ (325). However, as Figes (2004) observes, it is a gentile British woman, June Murray, a translator at the Ministry of Information, who is, unexpectedly in this novel about Jewish refugees, the novel’s hero. June seems to be placed in this role because of her objective viewpoint – she freely chooses to enter the Isle of Man internment camp and to conduct interviews with its inmates – but also perhaps because her perspective is, in Rear-Admiral Holloway’s tendentious phrase to Isaac’s wife Lulu, ‘straightforwardly British’ (Baddiel 2004: 103). She is neither an interned ‘alien’ nor a Jew, with the uncomfortable implication that we are more likely to trust her. June is shocked by a Ministry of Information memorandum arguing for ‘the sparing use of any horror’ in antiGerman propaganda, ‘which must deal with the treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews’ (64). Her disbelief at what we are assured in the postscript is ‘a genuine document’ rendered ‘verbatim’ (405) is signalled by the use of italics. Such documentary evidence betrays the British antisemitism that entails blindness to the true nature of Nazi policy. June, with symbolic exceptionalism, is disappointed by the tame nature of the interviews she conducts with internees, which were ‘not bad enough’; in order to amend the Ministry’s propaganda leaflet, she needs ‘corroboration of far greater atrocities’ (173). Only foreknowledge of the Holocaust, in other words, can shock the British authorities out of their complacency. Yet the reality of Isaac’s escape, and the substantial difference between wartime Britain and Germany, is made apparent by another interleaving of the documentary and the literary. While Part Three of The Secret Purposes opens with a map of the Isle of Man and its internment camps in 1940, Part Four is prefaced with a map of O´swiecim in 2000.

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Although this is a postwar map of the town and not the camp of Auschwitz, it offers another implicit opposition, this time between internment and extermination. Such a contrast is also present more subliminally, in a series of images from refugee life in wartime Britain, behind which is visible a shadow version of what existence might have been like for these refugees in Nazi-occupied Europe. This technique serves as a reminder to the reader that, imperfect though British attitudes to Jewish refugees may be, they are not those of Nazi Germany. These images rely on a version of Max Glickman’s notion of ‘unholy’ words in Kalooki Nights: in retrospect, neutral details have become imbued with particular historical meaning. At a pre-Christmas dance in The Secret Purposes, June takes up her role of vicarious witness as husbands are reunited with their wives after months of separation: She watched, as husband found wife, and wife found husband; she felt the squeeze of each embrace, and the amazement of each kiss; she saw the unbelieving, joyous recognition, the mutual, infinite smiling, the outstretched arms. (294) While this is a gently humorous moment – the couples at the party are too busy talking to dance, let alone drink – it also accomplishes something akin to the reversed narration of Martin Amis’s novel about a Nazi doctor, Time’s Arrow. In the rewound world of Amis’s novel, the spectacle of families being separated on the ramp at Auschwitz has the specious look of their being brought together. Here, ‘the menfolk’ are reunited with their families, as the narrator, even more detached from the action than June is in The Secret Purposes, observes: As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. (Amis 1991: 132) While Time’s Arrow allows us to understand the horror of selection at Auschwitz by showing it in reverse, the joyful reunions in The Secret Purposes equally conjure up their opposite: the likelihood of permanent separation and loss of family in Nazi Germany. The same effect occurs explicitly when Isaac is arrested for his role in the attempted assassination of a Nazi internee: ‘for a moment, in his fear and self-loathing, Isaac forgot which country he was in, and thought they were going to be shot, there and then’ (Baddiel 2004: 324). Other instances remain unremarked. When June recognises Isaac ‘immediately’ due to his striped garb, it is on account of a pyjama top and not a camp uniform (334); and Isaac’s having to run ‘two thousand yards’ when late for the assassination attempt is narrated in terms of such physical effort – ‘thinking of only one thing, running, and how much he wanted to stop doing it . . . feeling each foot hit the ground’ (320–1) – that it can only remind the reader of what it is not, for instance Elie Wiesel’s description of the death march that he underwent from Auschwitz to Buchenwald: ‘I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically, I was dragging with me this skeletal body that weighed so much. If only I could have got rid of it!’ (1978: 97). This defamiliarising technique on the part of Baddiel’s novel relies on the reader’s retrospective viewpoint, to recognise the enormities hinted at by the more mundane details of British life. Knowledge of what Isaac has left behind in coming to wartime Britain is called upon in differing ways: to remind the reader of what he is not undergoing, as I have argued, but also, at least at first, to offer a backshadowing view of official blindness to the coming extermination.9 Isaac’s own uncanny premonition of genocide is revealed belatedly, when he thinks back in 2000 to the interview he granted June Murray on the Isle of Man in 1939. At that



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time he, unlike almost any other contemporary commentator or witness, including the Nazis themselves, predicted the advent of industrialised genocide. His witnessing a chaotic massacre at Sachsenhausen in 1938 led him to imagine the development of ‘something far more systematic . . . new ways of killing, quicker, more efficient, less messy’ (Baddiel 2004: 394–6). Yet Isaac was not imprisoned in Sachsenhausen; his story was invented in order to please June: ‘It was all true. But it was also all lies’ (398). As Isaac concludes, ‘all he had done was say the most unbelievable things he could think of: who knew that they would turn out to be true?’ (399). Both determinism and critical backshadowing are abandoned here, and even the British authorities are let off the hook in what turns out to be the ­representation of Britain as a safe haven after all.

Conclusion British Jewish Holocaust fiction is not usually acknowledged as a category in its own right. Very few of the novels analysed in canonical works of literary criticism about Holocaust fiction are by British writers.10 This is partly because much British Jewish Holocaust fiction adheres to the reality of Britain’s relation to the events of the Holocaust, ‘on the edges of history’,11 rather than placing its narratives in Nazi-occupied Europe, as some recent American Jewish fiction has done, or imagining the occupation of Britain itself.12 The absence of British Jewish Holocaust fiction from the critical record means that representations of refugee, postmemorial and third-generation experience of this kind has not been fully considered. In all three of the novels I have discussed here, Britishness and Jewishness inter-animate each other and lead to a range of post-Holocaust psychic conflicts. It is Britain’s ‘bystander’ role in the Holocaust that produces the same formation in Alistair’s story in What Happens Now; Max in Kalooki Nights cannot quite view himself as a Jewish victim of history, so projects perpetration on to the women in his life; while Isaac’s story in The Secret Purposes is one of ambivalent emergence from prejudicial internment to citizenship, complicated by an inevitably retrospective knowledge of the Holocaust. In each case, the implication is that the events of the Holocaust haunt British Jewish subjects even in the twenty-first century, and exploration of such unforgettability is placed alongside the threat that such present-day preoccupation may turn into banality or self-pity. It is partly to guard against such a degradation that all three texts turn to the documentary record to shore up their narratives, incorporating the imagery of life in hiding, in ghettos and camps into their British plots. These novels do not exhibit Holocaust envy or ‘fantasies of witnessing’,13 but varied and significant meditations on the relationship between British and Jewish wartime history.

Notes   1. See Mary Horlock, The Book of Lies (2012) and Tim Binding, Island Madness (1998). Libby Cone’s novel War on the Margins (2009), which does focus on the islands’ implementation of the Nazis’ racial policies, and Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2009), which does not, are both written from North American perspectives.   2. The original phrase by Rabbi Hillel appears in the Mishnah.   3. See Raskin (2004) on this image from the Stroop Report.   4. Jeremy Dyson, quoted in Peled (2006).

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  5. The word appears, for instance, in the ‘Treblinka song’ as rendered by the former Nazi Franz Suchomel in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985): ‘Das unser Schicksal ist’ (it [Treblinka] is our destiny).   6. See United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Image Archive (no date).   7. See Rowland (2013: 135) on Hanna’s formal trial outfit in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1995), its resemblance to a uniform destroying any sympathy for her in court.   8. See Rowland (2013) and Brown (2013) for analyses of the literary and filmic afterlives of Nazi women.   9. See Bernstein (2004). Bernstein’s examples of backshadowing concern instances in which Holocaust victims are implicitly reproached for not anticipating what seems with hindsight to have been inevitable; in The Secret Purposes, it is, rather, the British government that is thus reproached. 10. No British writer is mentioned in Langer (1975), Rosenfeld (1980), Rothberg (2000) or Schwarz (1999). Several critics discuss only Martin Amis and/or D. M. Thomas, for instance, Adams (2012), Vice (2000), Young (1988) and, very briefly, Eaglestone (2008) and Horowitz (1997). Sicher (2005) acknowledges more recent British authors such as Rachel Seiffert, although of these only Lisa Appignanesi and Eva Hoffman take a Jewish perspective; Franklin (2011) cites Anne Karpf and Eva Hoffman, but only their non-fictional work. 11. Interview with Natasha Solomons (2010b). 12. Some of Erika Dreifus’s stories in Quiet Americans (2011) and Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge (2011) are set in Nazi-occupied Europe, while Robert Harris, in Fatherland (1992), represents a vision of Nazi-occupied Britain, and C. J. Sansom, in Dominion (2012), a counterfactual world in which Britain is a Nazi satellite following surrender in 1940. 13. The phrase is Gary Weissmann’s, from his Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (2004).

21 READING MATTERS: ‘MARGINAL’ BRITISH JEWISH WRITERS Beate Neumeier Jewish writers in Britain have been made to feel distinctly uncomfortable with their Jewishness. To succeed in the wider culture authors such as Harold Pinter and Anita Brookner have had to write out virtually any refence to their Jewishness . . . What is it about Englishness that is so deforming? (Cheyette 1995: 22–3) It is no coincidence that unlike their American counterparts, the best Jewish writers in Britain . . . have until recently created few Jewish characters or addressed explicitly Jewish subject matter. (Cheyette 2008: 92)

F

or more than two decades, scholars such as Bryan Cheyette, Tony Kushner, David Brauner and Ruth Gilbert have addressed the marginalisation or near-invisibility of British Jewish writing, particularly in comparison with the prospering and highly visible profile of American Jewish writing (‘this “normative” Britishness contrasts starkly with the mobility and Protean nature of American culture’; Cheyette 2010a: 8). Repeatedly it has been pointed out that in spite of the ‘difference in the size of the respective communities’ (Brauner 2001: 19) there is a significant number of Jewish writers in contemporary Britain, including novelists such as Anita Brookner, Eva Figes, Bernice Rubens and Clive Sinclair, poets such as Elaine Feinstein and Ruth Fainlight, and a host of playwrights from Bernard Kops and Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Anthony and Peter Shaffer, to Stephen Poliakoff, Michelene Wandor, Julia Pascal and Diane Samuels (see Brauner 2001). However, few of these had been predominantly perceived as Jewish writers until the ‘rise of British-Jewish literature’ in the 1990s, when – as Bryan Cheyette has argued – the increasing plurality of cultures and the acknowledgement of diversity in Britain started to replace notions of ‘normative’ or ‘monolithic Englishness’ (Cheyette 1995: 23) in favour of difference and plurivocality. This cultural shift has encouraged both the literary thematisation and critical reception of Jewishness discernible in the works of a younger generation of writers such as Linda Grant and Rachel Lichtenstein, Jonathan Leaman and Tamar Yellin (see Cheyette 2010a; Gilbert 2010; 2013), but – according to Cheyette – it also encouraged established authors such as Anita Brookner to finally make ‘explicit the Jewishness of her characters’ (Cheyette 1995: 26). References to the Holocaust in these authors’ works relate this rise of British Jewish writing to a significant moment in the collective memory in postwar European societies, characterised by an increased effort to keep memories alive through

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writing and archiving at a time when individual memories of witnesses are gradually disappearing. This intensified memory work is not only apparent in the generation of Holocaust survivors but also extends to the second and third generations whose texts display the persistence of trauma and continue to address the interrelation of memory and a sense of (un)belonging. While Bryan Cheyette has pursued the links between the rise of British Jewish and postcolonial literatures to register ‘an alternative Englishness from the margins’ (2008: 110), Ruth Gilbert more sceptically cautions that ‘whilst celebrating the vibrancy of British-Jewish culture at present, we might also have to acknowledge the ambivalent attitudes towards Jewishness which are deeply engrained within British culture’ (2010: 268). Moreover, Gilbert warns that ‘perhaps, some would suggest, it was a little premature to hail a new wave of British-Jewish writing based on the emergence of a handful of potentially invigorating writers’ (2013: 9). This debate raises questions about the definition of Jewishness and Jewish writing as well as questions about diaspora. Debra Shostak’s essay on ‘marginal’ American Jewish writers in this volume summarises the complex issues involved in defining features of Jewish writing in terms of authorial identity, subject matter and reading. In the context of British Jewish writing, the very existence of which has been a topic of debate for such a long time, these questions take on a particular urgency. In the following, I would like to focus on two very different though equally acclaimed women writers in Britain of the second half of the twentieth century, Anita Brookner and Muriel Spark, neither of whom is commonly perceived as a Jewish writer. At the same time, recent re-readings of their works are part of a gradual recognition of their place in the history of British Jewish writing. Claire Tylee’s definition of British Jewish women’s writing of the twentieth century ‘as both a reaction against “overweening Englishness” as well as a contribution to multicultural British literature and to the international Jewish collective’ (2006b: 11) seems to apply to the work of both writers, the professed religious non-believer Brookner and the Catholic convert Spark. Although Spark – in contrast to Brookner – is not included in Tylee’s essay collection, works by both writers share the features which are attributed to the British Jewish writers covered in the book: ‘their participation in the Jewish custom of retelling the past and inserting themselves into that communal history of Jewish persecution’ and their contribution ‘to the consistent overall picture of prejudice, persecution, diaspora, and exile, and to the central themes of identity, alienation, and assimilation that are typical of Jewish writers’ (16). While the apparent differences between Brookner and Spark prevent reductive classifications, their common concerns allow us to draw connections and to read their work as contributing to a diversified British Jewish culture.

Exile and the Desire for Belonging: Anita Brookner Born in 1928, Anita Brookner was a renowned art historian and academic before she became a prolific fiction writer in her early fifties. Although the autobiographical links to aspects of her main characters with regard to their educational and professional careers have repeatedly been pointed out, their Jewish background has remained fairly unnoticed for a long time (‘Few of her readers are aware of her Jewish background’; Kerbel 2010b: 104) and has only gradually received attention in criticism (see Kerbel 1998; Sylvester 2001; Malcolm 2002; Usandizaga 2006). This is all the more surprising since Brookner’s



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interview statements about her Polish Jewish family background seem to suggest close connections between her life in a family of ‘strangers in England’ (Haffenden 1985: 61) and the continuous focus on exiledom in her novels (‘I know intimately what it’s like to be lonely, perceptive, an observer’; Brookner qtd in Kenyon 1988: 154; ‘I think my parents’ lives were blighted – and in some sense mine is too – largely by this fact of being outside the natural order, being strangers in England, not quite understanding what was happening and being done to them . . . I feel I’ve cut loose and gone out into the storm, but basically I’m still one of them’; Haffenden 1985: 60–1, 66). In contrast to Bryan Cheyette’s assumption that Brookner ‘had to write out virtually any reference’ (1995: 22–3) to her Jewishness, Sorrel Kerbel has drawn attention to matters of reading and to an apparent lack of recognition of Brookner as a Jewish writer by critics because of her preference of ‘discretion to disclosure’ (1998: 43–54; 2010: 105). More recently, Aránzazu Usandizaga has argued that ‘Jewish culture plays a central role both in her characters’ destinies and in Brookner’s artistic purposes’, albeit in ‘disguised and oblique ways’ (2006: 110). The lack of reflection on Jewishness in Brookner’s work up until the 1990s thus may not primarily be caused by the alleged reticence of the writer on the subject of her Jewishness, but may reveal signs of a specific British culture of reading. The change of perspective occasioned by the emergence of postcolonialism and the turn to memory culture allows for a re-reading of Brookner’s work as a precise analysis of the situation of Jewish immigrants and their descendants within a normative British society. Throughout her work Brookner focuses on the lives of children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants and their experiences of not belonging transferred from generation to generation. This is already apparent in her first novel. A Start in Life (1981; American title, The Debut), a retrospective rendering of the middle-aged female protagonist’s life, shaped by the unhappy marriage between a desperately assimilating immigrant father and an uncomprehending English mother. After a doomed attempt to escape and find belonging outside the country, the heroine’s return to England to take care of her parents and her eventual settling into a lonely academic life mark a melancholic acceptance of remaining a permanent outsider. In Brookner’s novels this sense of cultural displacement connected to a fleeting hope of belonging, which inevitably proves to be futile, is significantly located within an educated, financially secure, bourgeois domestic setting, which ironically seems to provide the preconditions for an acceptance into Englishness. In Brookner’s second novel, Providence (1982), the heroine’s sense of exile and her illusionary dream of belonging are epitomised from the start by her efforts to hide her maternal French-Polish family background: ‘Kitty was difficult to place . . . When asked about her background Kitty usually simplified . . . And indeed no one had ever faulted her on grounds of Englishness’ (Brookner 1985: 5). Her dream of marrying into Englishness through a union with a well-situated history scholar from an old established family, Maurice Bishop, however, remains unfulfilled: ‘she knew that she was not indispensable to him . . . she was not even necessary’ (23). In the novel the unthinking self-centredness with which he uses and then discards the heroine (without even being aware of it) is based upon a firm belief in belonging to ‘a privileged species’ (Fendler 1992: 50) favoured by providence. This self-assertive exclusive Englishness (‘as if God’s native tongue were English’; Brookner 1985: 27), which contrasts with Kitty’s lack of belief and diffidence, thus significantly connects English Protestantism with class-consciousness and a ‘carelessness’ (159) about others who do not belong ‘to the club’. In this context, Brookner’s statement about an ambivalence between attraction and

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repulsion regarding ‘careless people’ in her interview with John Haffenden evokes intertextual echoes beyond the immediate British context which allude to the (post)colonial transatlantic repercussions of Englishness: ‘I’m very envious of careless people. It’s about not being able to be like them . . . Their moral status ceases to be relevant, which is the desolating aspect’ (Haffenden 1985: 61). The futile yearning of Brookner’s outsiders recalls that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby to belong to the ‘careless’ upper class of the American East Coast (Fitzgerald 1953: 180). In contrast to the dramatic end of Fitzgerald’s hero, however, Brookner’s protagonists are condemned to exist as passively waiting perennial exiles, as in her 1987 novel A Friend from England: ‘I felt as if I had traversed miles of hostile territory, and I noticed in myself that peculiar deadness that comes with a recognition of defeat . . . I foresaw a future in which I would always eat too early, the first guest in empty restaurants’ (Brookner 1987: 203). The sense of exiledom among descendants of Jewish immigrants in an uninviting British environment remains at the centre of Brookner’s fiction. In fact, ‘most of her heroines and heroes are the children or grandchildren of central European Jewish exiles’ (Usandizaga 2006: 110). However, it is only with Brookner’s novel Latecomers (1988) and her later work, A Family Romance (1993), that Jewishness is finally recognised as a theme by readers and critics (see Bryan Cheyette: ‘With even Anita Brookner making explicit the Jewishness of her characters . . . the future seems full of promise for British-Jewish writing’; 1995: 26). Latecomers in particular, about two ageing male protagonists who survive the Holocaust because of the British rescue mission of the Kindertransport, is often read as an exception within the author’s work, the one text which ‘calls for a reassessment of Brookner’s writing and its place in Jewish literature’ (Malcolm 2002: 11). Yet Brookner applies the same techniques of allusion and omission in Latecomers that had shaped her previous work. The novel continues to explore ‘the self-censoring of a Jewish past’ (88) necessitated by an uninterested English culture. This time, however, the images of the past, which are evoked in the text, are connected to the Holocaust. This renders the reader’s evasion of the issues at stake impossible and disallows universalisation. Thus Latecomers initiated a necessary re-reading of Brookner’s work as a whole. The two main characters in the novel, Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich, ‘share a Jewish background, child refugee beginnings in London, secret use of a forbidden language (German), tortured boarding-school days, orphaning, a successful business partnership, and an intimate lifelong friendship’ (Brookner 1989: 88). Although both are financially well off with families of their own, they are haunted by a painful sense of not belonging and alienation within their English environment. Brookner foregrounds both characters’ irredeemable isolation, but contrasts their decisively different responses to the childhood trauma. While Fibich cannot let go of haunting memories, Hartmann has chosen to forget in order to ‘construct his happiness’ (8). From the very start Brookner reveals the fragility of this construction, and the ultimate futility of the effort ‘to screen out the undesirable, the inadvertent’ (7), by emphasising its inevitable nightly return. Brookner foregrounds the inadequacy of rationalisation and sedation as strategies to cope with trauma, when the memories which Hartmann ‘had consigned to the dust, or to that repository that can only be approached in dreams’ force him to take ‘a sedative every night’ to ensure ‘untroubled sleep’ (7). The description of Hartmann as ‘ruthless in dispensing with the past’ (8) curiously echoes the ruthlessness of the representatives of Englishness, to whom he attempts to belong, in Brookner’s earlier novels. At the same time Brookner traces Hartmann’s



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inescapably returning speculations about a past which his parents had to live through after his departure. He did not remember, because he had never witnessed the event, his elegant parents, dressed for some fête-champêtre, being hoisted, slightly puzzled, on to farm carts, but behaving with good grace, thinking this part of the entertainment. They were driven off, never to be seen again, but how could he know that? How could one remember absence? (7–8) Hartmann’s conscious efforts ‘to fill the void’ (8) by emulating a distanced Englishness are thus effectively countered by painful visions of scenarios he has never seen. In contrast to Hartmann’s conscious denial of the past, Fibich feels tied to this past by haunting memories and images, the most unsettling of which is only revealed towards the end of the novel. This ‘last vision of his fainting mother and his father, bent to succour her’ (201) at the train station when Fibich was put on the Kindertransport, which surfaces during his journey to Berlin, finally enables him to face the guilt of the survivor: ‘how much was he to blame for any of this? . . . His adult self . . . knew that all children blame themselves. . .’ (201). This journey into the past (‘so like a symbolic birth that he laughed’; 200) is supposed to redeem his sense of restlessness and homesickness (191). Significantly, however, it is only the later recall of this image of the past, when he witnesses a woman fainting at Heathrow airport on his return to England, which allows Fibich to eventually express his sense of guilt, if only in a whisper that no one responds to: ‘I should have gone back . . . I should not have left. I should have got off the train’ (215). Fibich’s impending breakdown after this confession at lunch in a London hotel dining room is averted by Hartmann ushering him out of the restaurant. Hartmann’s handling of this scene seems not only a sign of his care but also of his attempt not to cause a disturbance among the guests, emphasised in his awareness of ‘a momentary cessation of activity, a collective holding of breath’ (216), and can thus be read as another ironical commentary on a detached Englishness characterised by a desire not to be concerned. Consequently, for Hartmann, who clings to this hardwon detached Englishness, the traumatic past does not surface in overwhelming images, but merely in remembering the names of the housekeeper and the nurse of his childhood: ‘“I was thinking of a housekeeper we had,” he said. “In Munich. Her name was Frau Dimke. I have just remembered it. And my nurse was Frau Zarzicki”’ (222). Towards the end of the novel Hartmann and Fibich have reached – within limits – a more personal way of communicating about the past: He would talk to Fibich of the early days in England, and indeed Fibich was now able to reminisce with him, although discussions of what had gone before were still out of bounds. And yet, Hartmann thought, later we may even come to talk of that, of those matters, of what must have happened. (231) Despite the persistence and acceptance of Fibich’s sense of homelessness (‘as if this place were eternally elsewhere’; 220) and restlessness, which cannot be redeemed but ‘would be with him to the end’ (191), the journey into the past has enabled him to leave ‘this little memoir’ (236) to his son ‘to give him roots, a family, an inheritance’ (191). As Brookner moves closer to the historical past looming in the background of her texts, her vision seems less pessimistic. In Latecomers the recognition of the necessity to remember and to keep the past alive for future generations leads to a narrativisation in the memoir as the only way of providing a sense of belonging for future generations. At the same time

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the novel foregrounds the mechanisms of denial and exclusion within the wider culture, which remains detached and unmoved. Brookner stresses the lasting tension between the survivors’ gratitude towards the (host) country, which took them in (‘I wanted in particular to tell you what a good life it has been’; 237), and the fact that they were ‘left in the charge of strangers who, though tolerably well disposed, were uninvolved, uninterested. They had grown up, therefore, without true instruction, without the saws and homilies, the customs and idiosyncrasies, that, for children, constitute a philosophy’ (126). Rather than representing an exception in Brookner’s body of work, Latecomers continues the writer’s exploration of a life of exile within British culture. Brookner’s preference for what critics have called ‘faint echoes of Jewishness’ (Sylvester 2001: 57) accurately reflects her protagonists’ predicament in a context informed by a pervasive ‘normative Englishness’, sometimes ironically embodied in unresponsive heroes, such as Maurice Bishop in Providence. That critics did not perceive Jewishness as an issue in her novels up to the mid-1990s thus ironically echoes this situation and confirms her findings. The attentive reader will detect various indicators of the protagonists’ Jewish immigrant family histories in Germany, Austria or Poland in connection to differences with regard to language and religion (see Usandizaga 2006). The feeling of being exiled is heightened in Brookner’s novels because of the protagonists’ religious uprootedness, and their refusal to accept Christianity as an entrance into British culture. This seems connected to Brookner’s own religious scepticism: ‘I wish I could accept the whole thing – it would make one terribly cheerful, and give one a stake in the country, as it were – but I can’t. I am a lapsed Jew – if such a thing were conceivable, but it isn’t’ (Haffenden 1985: 67). The pervasive theme of cultural displacement and unbelonging in Brookner’s novels is always connected to the legacy of the past, either in terms of the second generation taking on responsibility for parents and their unspoken traumatic histories of migration and alienation (as in A Start in Life), or in terms of the immigrant generation’s coming to terms with their own traumatic past and its impact on future generations (as in Latecomers). Brookner’s strategy of allusion and omission leaves traces to be followed by the reader to recognise the predicament of exile in an uninterested wider culture. A close reading of the novels reveals that, rather than universalising this predicament of exile, Brookner always insists upon the specificity of Jewish history while allowing her readers to make ­connections across differences.

Exile and the Desire for Difference: Muriel Spark Like Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark began her publishing career with non-fiction before she became an extremely prolific novelist. Neither is customarily regarded as a Jewish writer, although they repeatedly discussed their Jewish background in interviews. The theme of exile, of living in between cultures, pervades the work of both. At the same time their lives and writing are strikingly different. Brookner’s novels, in which difference is experienced as pain, accompanied by an – albeit futile – desire for belonging, mostly remain bound to a British, or even more specifically, a London context. By contrast, Spark’s texts present difference as uniqueness, connected to a desire to reinvent oneself in order to (literally and metaphorically) move on. Born in 1918, Spark grew up in Edinburgh with a Lithuanian Jewish and Scottish Presbyterian family background. She left her place of birth, which had ‘bred within [her] the conditions of exiledom’, at the age of 19, ‘moving from exile into exile’ (Stannard



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2010: 2), from southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to London, New York and Rome, until she settled down in the early 1970s to a permanent residence in Tuscany where she lived until her death. Her years in Africa, where she moved to get married in 1937, were marred by an unsettling life with a violent, mentally unstable husband. After her divorce in 1940 and return to England in 1944, her son, who was born in 1938, was mainly brought up by her parents in Edinburgh, while Spark struggled to make a life and career as a literary critic and writer of biographies. Aspects of her own life inform Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957), which addresses her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954, contributing to her being claimed as a Catholic writer. However, Spark always refused simplified categorisations both in her life and her work, and instead relentlessly insisted upon difference and diversity. Throughout her work, Spark takes up various literary modes and genres to explore notions of exile, difference and identity. Rather than focusing on the pain of suffering from difference in connection to a desire for belonging, Spark continuously emphasises the desire for and the difficulties of retaining difference against restrictive definitions of belonging (‘She belonged nowhere, was determined to belong nowhere and to no one’; Stannard 2010: 2). In her short story ‘The Gentile Jewesses’ (1963) and the subsequent novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) these issues are most explicitly connected to notions of Jewishness. ‘The Gentile Jewesses’ explores the interrelation of memory, identity and difference by drawing on the writer’s own life. The title refers to the narrator, her mother and most importantly her grandmother, who first claimed the term (‘I’m a Gentile Jewess’; Spark 2001: 312). In the story this self-assertive refusal to be framed by either/or positions appears as a matrilineal source of strength, illustrated in a series of diverse episodes of the grandmother’s victorious handling of a potential mad killer, who threatened her in her Watford shop, or of her resolute fight in support of the Suffragette movement. Juxtaposing playful and threatening episodes, Spark explores the constructedness of identity on a variety of levels, alluding to its individual and collective, personal and political implications. She makes fun of the desire for categorisation and its inevitable failure to do justice to the complexities of life, while drawing attention to its inescapable epistemological foundation. Spark foregrounds the fictionalising mechanisms of (post)memory, as her narrator confesses her difficulty in distinguishing between images and scenes conjured up by storytelling and actual experience, between witnessing and hearsay. From different angles Spark thematises the postmodern trope of the inseparability of fact and fiction in connection to the difficulty in perceiving and enduring differences. The short story ends in an – albeit ironical – emphasis on plurality and difference as well as on the necessity of making choices: My mother carries everywhere in her handbag a small locket containing a picture of Christ crowned with thorns. She keeps on one table a rather fine Buddha . . . One way and another all the gods are served in my mother’s household although she holds only one belief and that is in the Almighty . . . To them [her parents] it was no great shock when I turned Catholic, since with Roman Catholics too, it all boils down to the Almighty in the end. (316) In this context the public debate concerning the family’s religious affiliation and the increasing estrangement between Spark and her son Robin, which lasted until her death in 2006, gains literary-critical importance. While her orthodox Jewish son attempted to

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affirm the family’s predominantly Jewish roots, Spark ‘resented the rewriting of her familial background which she believe[d] to be plural and varied and which includes Christian as well as Jewish antecedents’ (Cheyette 2004: 138). The media coverage of the debate in 1998 accurately captured the public desire to categorise as well as related prejudices, for instance in headlines about an enforced outing of Spark’s supposedly carefully hidden Jewish background (138–9). Throughout her career Spark was confronted with reductive readings of her life and work. In criticism, the desire to categorise, as well as Spark’s resistance to it, is apparent in the varied and sometimes contradictory labels of her as Catholic, social realist, satirical, experimental or postmodern writer. The critics’ preference for unilateral readings thus ironically proves the urgency of the pervasive concern with difference in Spark’s writing. Consequently, the resistance to restricting categorisations and the insistence on difference and plurality, which is addressed playfully in the short story ‘The Gentile Jewesses’, turns into a matter of life and death in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), ‘her only novel to contextualize broadly her Gentile-Jewish background, although it is alluded to in many of her other works’ (Cheyette 2013: 142). Set in Jerusalem in 1961 at the time of the Adolf Eichmann trial, the novel traces the difficult journey of Barbara Vaughan, ‘the half-Jew turned Catholic’ (Spark 1980: 22), from Britain to Israel and Jordan to visit her archaeologist fiancé at Qumran. The Mandelbaum Gate as the crossing-point between the Israeli and Jordanian parts of Jerusalem functions as a literal and symbolic intersection of the personal, religious and political levels of the story. Ascriptions of fixed identities in connection to false assumptions, misjudgements and prejudices gain a particular meaning in this deadly border zone, though they are rendered with Sparkian ironic detachment. The reader is introduced to Barbara Vaughan from the point of view of the British diplomat Freddy Hamilton, whose initial assumptions about her prove to be utterly wrong, when the alleged British spinster declares herself to be half-Jewish, Roman Catholic, and engaged to be married to a divorced non-Catholic on the condition that the Church will annul his previous marriage. Freddy’s clichéd and prejudiced mis-identification of her is further ironised through his antisemitic response to her self-description: ‘he now noticed the Jewishness of her appearance, something dark and intense’ (13). The second chapter, tellingly entitled ‘Barbara Vaughan’s Identity’, sets out to contrast false ascriptions of identity with the protagonist’s attempts at explaining her individual difference. At the same time she has to concede the inevitable interference of the pattern-making operations of the human mind (‘the human mind was bound in duty to continuous acts of definition’; 24). Barbara’s selfassertive phrase ‘I am who I am’ (23) is thus immediately followed by the self-conscious acknowledgement of its biblical origin: ‘Barbara had already begun to reflect that “I am who I am” was a bit large seeing it was the answer that Moses got from the burning bush on Mount Sinai when he asked God to describe himself’ (24). Admitting to the inadequacy of the human mind, ‘Barbara knew then that the essential thing about herself remained unspoken, uncategorized, unlocated’ (24). Faced with the Israeli tour guide’s questions about her identity as a gentile or a Jew, Barbara attempts to explain the inadequacy of either/or solutions. However, her insistence on being a gentile Jew and her emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual (34) are ironically countered by the guide’s reminder of the importance of identification in the political context of a divided Jerusalem. Calling herself a half-Jew here might ‘only risk an argument, but there you might get shot’ (35). In the personal context the romantic relations between Barbara and the archaeologist Harry, with whom she shares ‘the outcast status’ (39) of defying simplified categorisations,



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is explored for its potential to express the inexplicability of identity: ‘She was not an English spinster merely, but also a half-Jew, and was drawn to the equivalent quality in him that quite escaped both the unspoken definition “Englishman of lower-class origin” and the spoken one “red-brick genius”’ (38). However, Spark again ironically foregrounds the impossibility of breaking out of categorical thinking and modes of representation when her narrator resorts to the clichéd notion of the undefinability of love: ‘She felt herself to be in love with Harry Clegg in an entirely exclusive form as yet unrealized in human experience. It made nonsense of the rules’ (37). Foregrounding the inescapability of the discursive web, Spark focuses on the dilemma and potential of identity between performativity and performance, to take up Judith Butler’s terms (see Butler 1990). In the course of events, Barbara, who is suspected of being an Israeli spy in Jordan, is rescued with the help of assumed identities when she passes through the Mandelbaum Gate into Israel ‘dressed in a black nun’s habit’ together with ‘an Arab Franciscan friar in a brown habit’ (Spark 1980: 323). Moreover, she is able finally to get married to Harry with the Church’s consent, using his forged birth certificate (originally intended by her jealous friend to prevent this marriage). Significantly, however, this only happens after her decision to break free from religious prescriptions and to ‘marry him outside the church’ (314). The acknowledgement of a fundamental scriptedness does not preclude but rather calls for agency. For Spark’s heroine, the successful performance of alternative identities by using and confounding categories proves to be a matter of life and death. The description of the Eichmann trial in the novel traces the dehumanising power of the suppression of difference to its most extreme limits in the ‘Nazi doctrine of expunging racial difference’ (Cheyette 2013: 142). Barbara recognises ‘the desperate heart of the trial’ in the unbearable tension between Eichmann’s testimony and the unrepresentability of the Holocaust: ‘the actual discourse was a dead mechanical tick, while its subject, the massacre, was living’ (Spark 1980: 187). Consequently, Spark’s intertextual references to the nouveau roman and to Beckett leave the horror of the Nazi atrocities as a necessary absence in the text. Placed at the novel’s centre, the Holocaust paradoxically remains radically outside, resisting inclusion into the storyline. Throughout her work Spark thematised the unrelenting tensions between the inevitable restrictiveness of ordering principles and the insistence on an inexpressible uniqueness of life beyond structural designs. In a highly diverse body of texts she traced this dilemma with regard to its personal, political, religious and epistemological implications in a playful way, at the same time pointing out its destructive and potentially deadly consequences. The resistance to being scripted (see Piette 2010), which is expressed in Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, in the protagonist’s protests against being written ‘into a convenient slick plot’ (1957: 104), turns into the protagonist’s planning of her own murder in The Driver’s Seat (1970). The correlative attempt at scripting the lives of others is explored in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), while in Aiding and Abetting (2000) the main characters are caught in a process of constant self-reinvention, climaxing in a scene of tribal cannibalism, which can be read as a deadly end or as a grotesque form of multiplying identity. The novel’s outrageously improbable plotting draws attention to its fictionality, as a farcical reminder that identity in Spark’s world always remains bound to a script. However, despite Spark’s obvious postmodern affiliations, the consistent focus on the inextricable entanglement of life and fiction is not an expression of postmodern relativism. Rather, Spark’s vision seems to express a deep concern about the human predicament and its traumatic core. Bryan Cheyette has linked Spark’s aversion to a literature of suffering

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to her personal ‘trauma of Africa’ (2013: 116–60). As Spark pointed out in her autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992), ‘it was in Africa that I learned to cope with life. It was there that I learned to keep in mind . . . the essentials of our human destiny . . . and to put in a peripheral place the personal sorrows, frights and horrors’ (Spark 2009: 119). Spark does not want to weave trauma ‘seamlessly into art’ (Cheyette 2000: 6), but insists on its necessary absence. In her autobiography the suffering and the pain have to remain unspoken behind the laconic statement: ‘I got seriously frightened’ (Spark 2009: 130). Instead, Spark chooses to focus on resistance to the threat of being forced into prescribed role patterns, stifling or potentially deadly destinies, even if the metaphorical as well as literal attempts to reinvent oneself might easily turn into another form of restrictive patterning or even delusion of omnipotence, most frighteningly that of a destructive manipulatory power over others, most ironically that of the writer’s authority over the text. That which escapes categorisation, that which exceeds the web of representation at the heart of Spark’s writing, can be read in terms of the negative absence of trauma, or the Lacanian unmediated real, but is also always connected to an unrepresentable and inextinguishable uniqueness of the individual. Despite her scepticism about institutionalised religion, apparent in her satirical treatment of religious hypocrisy as in The Abbess of Crewe (1974), this indestructible belief in the singularity of the self seems to be the basis of Spark’s personal religious understanding. The God-like ‘I am who I am’ of the protagonist in The Mandelbaum Gate always harks back to the humble and sometimes desperate ‘who am I?’ uttered on other occasions in the novel (Spark 1980: 38). The impossible resolution to this question is bound to Spark’s insistence on the possibility of the gentile Jew, who cannot be reduced to an either/or, but is always a both/and exceeding its parts.

Difference and Belonging: Anita Brookner and Muriel Spark Despite their strikingly different work, Anita Brookner and Muriel Spark share a concern with notions of exile, difference and belonging, which they approach from almost complementary angles. While Brookner gives expression to a futile desire for belonging, Spark foregrounds a desire for difference and its complex implications. While the protagonists of Brookner’s novels Providence and Latecomers avoid drawing attention to their Jewishness within British culture, Spark’s protagonist in The Mandelbaum Gate insists on her gentile Jewishness. At the same time similarities in the works of both writers emerge, as Brookner’s self-conscious protagonists as well as Spark’s self-assertive main characters equally stand in opposition to normative environments. Both writers throughout their work draw attention to the restrictions imposed upon the individual within wider social contexts. Brookner’s novels foreground the mechanisms of exclusion, on which a normative Englishness is based, while Spark’s fiction explores normative societies as part of her continuous interest in the pattern-making human mind. Brookner’s emphasis on the futility of the desire to belong ‘to the club’ is thus closely linked to Spark’s concern with the futility of the desire to escape the scriptedness of reality. Both writers continuously interrogate the reasons, implications and consequences of the difficulty of embracing difference. The history of the critical reception and evaluation of both writers illustrates the preference for unilateral readings and categorisations and thus ironically reflects this shared concern with notions of difference and identity, diversity and normativity. It is precisely through this insistence on difference as a source of alienation and celebration that both writers have contributed important texts to British Jewish culture.

22 JEWISH WRITING IN CANADA Ira Nadel

There was never a golden age of Jewish Canadian literature. Only a handful of excellent novels, stories, poems, strewn across the years. Mordecai Richler was not a literary movement, he was one particular writer. (Fagan 2004)

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his salvo from the Canadian novelist Cary Fagan combines history with criticism, challenging more orthodox presentations of the development of Canadian Jewish writing. Discounting the early work of writers such as A. M. Klein, Henry Kreisel, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler and Norman Levine, Fagan asserts the absence of a tradition. He is both right and wrong; right if he imagines a period similar to that of modern American Jewish writers such as Bellow, Malamud and Roth, and wrong if he believes there is no vibrant history of Canadian Jewish writing, as this discussion of novelists in particular will show. But a distinction between American and Canadian Jewish literary traditions must first be noted. For America, the so-called golden era began with second-generation American writers, almost all of whom were born in the US. This is the generation that succeeded immigrant writers such as Abraham Cahan, author of The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), perhaps the quintessential immigrant novel, and Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep (1934) is arguably the prototypical novel combining a narrative of assimilation into the new world with an exploration of the psychological development of childhood and adolescence. Canadian Jewish novelists have been, until recently, first generation, generally born in Europe and themselves immigrants. A consequence of this generational difference is the predominance of the myth of return in Canadian Jewish fiction and its virtual absence in its American counterpart. Canadian Jewish novelists provide a reading of Jewish life in North America that contradicts the better-known crisis of assimilation and identity found in American Jewish novelists. Many of the heroes in Canadian Jewish novels make actual pilgrimages to Israel; American heroes tend not to, and if they do, the visits are traumatic, as shown by Alexander Portnoy at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) or Sorella Fonstein confronting Billy Rose in Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection (1989). Furthermore, American Jewish writers generally ­concentrate on the problems of integrating a Jewish self in a non-Jewish society. For Canadian writers it is the reverse: a longing to return to a core Judaism defined by

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pre-Holocaust and then Holocaust Europe emerges as the central theme. The reassertion of a Jewish past and homeland is an immediate need for the Canadian Jewish writer, most notably in the first generation of novelists, as seen in work by A. M. Klein, Henry Kreisel, Mordecai Richler, Adele Wiseman and Norman Levine. ‘It is perfectly true that “Jewish Writers in America” (a repulsive category!) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry’, Saul Bellow wrote to Cynthia Ozick in 1987 (Bellow 2010: 438). Canadian writers did not. The language of return and the sense of loss is especially present in the representation of the Mecca of twentieth-century Canadian Jewish life and writing, Montreal. A. M. Klein’s poem ‘Autobiographical’ states this most clearly as he transforms the city into a ‘fabled city’ that ‘stands in Space’s vapours and Time’s haze’ (Klein 1974: 273). In a letter to the writer A. J. M. Smith written in 1951, Klein explains that his intention in writing his novel The Second Scroll (1951) was to provide ‘a conspectus of my pilgrimage to the Holy City, some heirloom to attest to the fact that I had been part of a generation that had seen the Return’ (Klein 1975: 12). The very idea of a second scroll re-telling the saga of the Jews itself embodies the concept of the return. The history of contemporary Canadian Jewish fiction might be said to begin with Klein’s The Second Scroll, interestingly not about Jews in Canada but in Israel. Born in Ratno, Ukraine, Klein moved to Montreal with his parents when he was three or four. After studying at McGill, Klein became a lawyer as well as a poet and journalist who began to receive attention with his 1944 mock epic satirising Hitler and the Nazis, The Hitleriad. In 1948 he received a Governor General’s Award in poetry for The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, work that focused on Quebec. In 1949 Klein visited Israel for the Canadian Jewish Chronicle and returned to write about it not in a poem or a report but in an experimental novel. He saw fiction as the best means to convey the traditional yet modern values of his journey, through the search of the protagonist, a young Canadian, for his elusive Uncle Melech. Reflecting the influence of Joyce, the Torah and the Talmud, Klein shaped the novel into a series of five chapters, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, each corresponding to one of the five books of the Pentateuch. In the Talmudic tradition, several glosses further the ideas of each book at the end of the novel. Klein’s novel parallels the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt, with the modern Jewish immigration to Israel after the war substituting for the original story. In the actual writing, Klein sustains a rabbinic style: for example, when the protagonist walks through the Arch of Titus in Rome near the end of the novel, he studies the bas relief of the destruction of the Temple, noting that the trumpets out of the stone ‘sounded, not as aforetime the sound of jubilee, but the broken murmur, the shvarim, the tragic triad of wandering and suffering and exile’ (1969: 86). Here, Klein unites religion, tragedy and history through sculpture in the city that was anathema to Judaism. But his religiously infused prose would be challenged by younger writers seeking a more direct and less biblical form of expression. The elusive search for Melech Davidson, a Holocaust survivor who drifts to Rome and then Casablanca before immigrating to Israel, is the external plot. But just as the narrator is about to encounter his mercurial uncle, a group of Arabs murder him, leaving the end of the novel open: was he a martyr to the Jewish nation or a false messiah whose heroic status was inflated by his nephew’s eagerness to meet him? The poems, liturgy, playlet and meditative essay on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that end the novel – appropriately labelled Gloss Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Dalid and Hai – complete the book.



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The experimental form yet traditional shape of the novel probably contributed to the lack of attention it received. Its publication in New York by Knopf did not help – Klein could find no Canadian publisher eager to take the risk – but its later publication in paperback in the New Canadian Library series ensured its importance in the development of Canadian modernism. Importantly, it reversed the immigrant narrative: unlike more traditional stories such as The Sacrifice (1956) by Adele Wiseman about immigrants coming to Canada, The Second Scroll stressed a Canadian’s encounter with Israel. It would take several generations of writers, however, to absorb this reversal and technique. Another novel similar to The Second Scroll in its reverse of the immigrant story with a return to Europe from Canada is Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man (1948). Born in Vienna, Kreisel fled with his family to England in 1938. Interned there as an ‘enemy alien’ because he was a German-speaking refugee, he was soon sent to Canada to internment camps in New Brunswick and Quebec. There he began to learn English and was released in 1941 when he began studying at the University of Toronto. Completing a PhD, he became a professor of comparative literature at the University of Alberta and then Vice President Academic. The Rich Man tells the story of a Canadian immigrant who returns to Vienna in 1935 as the storm clouds of Nazism begin to form. The protagonist attempts to pass himself off as a wealthy designer but he is, in fact, only a trouser presser in a Toronto factory. Intensifying the irony is that when the hero meets those suffering from political oppression who desperately seek his aid, he cannot help them. He leaves in self-disgrace with only a painting to show for his efforts at rescue. The humiliation and impending horror is almost overwhelming for him. A second novel, The Betrayal (1964), reverses the journey yet again, taking a European to Canada during the war. Ironically, the hero is unable to recognise how his efforts to be a disengaged observer mean eliminating his sense of guilt about the past. He turns away from his immediate past to fasten on an uncertain future. Exile, Kreisel’s theme, also appears in his short stories, notably ‘The Travelling Nude’ and ‘Hasidic Song’, together with ‘The Almost Meeting’ – his best-known story – collected in The Almost Meeting and Other Stories (1981). The story narrates an encounter that never occurs between a young writer and his literary idol, probably based on A. M. Klein. This fable announces a literary legacy that forever remains interrupted and incomplete. ‘The Prairie: A State of Mind’ (1968) was an important critical essay by Kreisel on the understanding of western Canadian writing. Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice presents a more conventional story of immigrant life in Canada as an orthodox Jewish family moves to Winnipeg. The death in Europe of the hero’s two sons, Moses and Jacob, however, leaves a lasting and disturbing mark. A third and surviving son, Isaac, fathers a Canadian-born Moses who surprisingly does not turn away from his inherited past but unites with it through love for his grandfather, who has murdered a woman and sits out his life in an asylum. This acceptance and love outlines the possibility of renewal and hope in a future where Jewish life and social practice might coexist. The focus on Abraham, the father and an orthodox Jew with old world values, confronts a life defined by chaos and tragedy in the new world. Grounded in biblical myths, the novel rewrites the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac and skilfully reconciles traditional Jewish myth and modern secular experience in Canada. The Jewish voice of Montreal, that of Mordecai Richler, began to emerge from London in 1954, and found distinct expression through satire. From his adopted home in England, Richler wrote about Montreal with a vengeance, or at least with the ambition to overturn

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the sentimental voice of a preceding generation of Jewish, often Yiddish, writers. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) transformed the mythical quest of return into a new desire to stake a claim – literally – in Canada. The novel is about determination combined with ambition converted into the quest for land. As Duddy’s grandfather famously repeats, ‘a man without land is nobody’ (Richler 2001: 50). In the narrative of this quest, Richler portrays the rich immigrant life of Montreal Jews in the St Urbain Street neighbourhood, where signs frequently proclaim ‘JESUS SAVES in English and Yiddish’ (11). This is the world of Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder, the upstart 15-year-old cigarette-smoking Duddy and the seemingly hapless French Canadians, unprepared for the aggressive behaviour of this new generation of Jews. Duddy is a transitional character, the son of a taxi driver, Max, and the brother of Lennie, a medical student. Through his mischievous behaviour, he fights for recognition but knows that he will only gain respect through ownership, ownership of land. Written in the slang of the time – ‘’Ixnay. He’s not gonna be a sawbones. Duddy’s a dope like me’ his father explains to a fellow taxi driver – the book revels in the vibrant life of a grasping, Montreal Jewish underclass, eager to make it even if, as the teacher MacPherson remarks, they walk around with a chip on their shoulder (21, 34). Duddy teaches his pals how to steal, smoke and make out with girls. He’s a street-wise Holden Caulfield. The Second World War is the backdrop for Duddy and his shenanigans, a momzer who thinks nothing of igniting St Urbain Street during a blackout to frighten the civil defence unit of the Canadian Provost Corps into believing they are under attack. But business and money become his fixation, beginning with stamps, moving up to comic books and then selling stolen hockey sticks. Crafty and thin, Duddy soon pursues greater goals in an effort to be a somebody, not a nobody. Richler’s novel overturned the conventional portraits of Jewish and even Canadian life. His hero was crass, ambitious, candid and unafraid. In an earlier generation, the young men wore hats and spoke Yiddish. In Duddy’s, they smoke and curse. But to gain his lakefront property in the Laurentians, Duddy needs grit to back up his ambition, and Richler shows this through Duddy’s conniving behaviour balanced by his over-the-top self-confidence. With his girlfriend Yvette and his epileptic associate Virgil, he pursues the property for a hotel and a children’s camp through a suspect film company that begins to make barmitzvah films. His ups and downs, however, only alienate others rather than ingratiating him with them. But as the Boy Wonder falls, Duddy rises, although that, too, is temporary. And in a desperate search for funds to gain the deeds to the land he has optioned, he turns to deception and malfeasance. Ironically, at the end Duddy learns that his grandfather believes more strongly in morality than land. Duddy, the swindler, shames him. In this and in later novels like St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Joshua Then and Now (1980) and Barney’s Version (1997), Richler stamped Canadian Jewish writing as comic, outlandish and ruthless. Norman Levine, who also left Canada for England, was more critical and detached. In novels such as The Angled Road (1952) and From a Seaside Town (1970), he maintains the persistent theme of Canadian Jewish writing of the 1970s: identity, told in From a Seaside Town through the story of a Canadian Jew who struggles to make a living in an English seaside town as a travel writer. Having spent a lifetime attempting to submerge his past, the hero discovers that he belongs nowhere. This leads to self-scrutiny and the writing of a book of ‘confessions’. The Ontario-born Matt Cohen turned to more experimental fictions in Columbus and the Fat Lady (1972) and Café Le Dog (1983) but reached back into Jewish



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life through the historical novel The Spanish Doctor (1984), which deals with interfaith strife in medieval Spain. These writers, Richler, Levine and Cohen, form a second generation of Jewish novelists. But a new generation and a new style have superseded them. This group favours a more experimental prose style and risk-taking forms, less rhetorical and rabbinical. History for them is more immediate. Satire is no longer the point but form, as these writers seek new methods to convey their concerns. And although the new style is less artificial and imitative, the structure may revert back to liturgical models. Robert Majzels’ Apikoros Sleuth (2004) best illustrates this. Majzels is a novelist, playwright, poet and translator, born in Montreal, and in this, his third novel, he offers a murder mystery in the form of a Talmudic inquiry. In Apikoros Sleuth, Majzels’ private eye negotiates between the ‘I’ of solipsism and the ‘Thou’ of ethics as he investigates a tenement murder. But this hardly conveys the flexibility with form that the novel represents. Interlacing a dual narrative – one text literally surrounds the other, formatted to look like a page of the Talmud – Majzels mixes a narrative, with marginal commentary surrounding a more philosophical central text. While the outside text opening the novel questions what is a tenement, the inside text interrogates the nature of art, beginning with ‘Story? Who would tell it? There are some who say, a story is a fiction, a mistake. We add and subtract and expound . . . a story teaches an exaggeration’ (Majzels 2004: 1b). These inquiries anchor the external narrative which explores a murder. But every page visually echoes – in layout and format – a page of the Talmud with Hebrew passages added to lend visual authenticity to the work. Language, as in much of the work of more recent Canadian Jewish writers, becomes the focus: the challenge is not only what voice to tell the story in but in what language? With its Joycean puns, neologisms and vertical, horizontal and marginal lines in Hebrew, Aramaic, English, French, Chinese and Greek, the novel’s columnar construction enacts its model text, the Talmud.1 As Apikoros Sleuth unfolds, it literally loses its centre on the page and drifts into itself, unanchored so that angles and overlaps actually prevent a complete reading (11b, 12a). Such disorientation matches the conflicting or even absent narratives (see chapters 16 and 17, virtually blank pages). A passage late in the work summarises much of its verbal impact: ‘He broke the language. Or tried to. Who wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds us so much terror? It was a gift. Of tongues’ (45a). In the work, a tenement holds tenants and tractates within its twenty-two storeys. The phenomenology of double elevators and staircases within a chapter entitled ‘Halakhah for the Messiah’ intensifies the complexity of the hypertextual work. But without discernible characters or plot, the reader has to readjust to different strategies of reading that call attention to details of typography. Majzels’ kabbalistic shape-shifting focuses on the act of reading as the reader becomes the sleuth tracking the murder of narrative in a maze of semitics, semiotics and semi-optics, trying to understand the story. This experimentation reflects the new engagement evident in the work of what might be identified as a third generation of Canadian writers, maturing in the 1990s and encompassing new immigrants as well as Canadian-born authors. Three of the most important are David Albahari (b. 1948), Anne Michaels (b. 1958) and David Bezmozgis (b. 1973). Each of them has widened the canvas of Canadian Jewish writing by incorporating the recent Jewish past into their personal experiences in fiction that departs from its predecessors. The Serbian-born Canadian David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer (2004) is a powerful

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Holocaust narrative relating to the extermination of the majority of Serbia’s Jews in the summer of 1942. Albahari, like Michaels and Bezmozgis, brings a European perspective to the shape of Canadian Jewish writing. He has published nine collections of short stories and eleven novels in Serbian, including two works translated into English: Leeches (a novel, 2005) and Shadows (short stories, 2006). In a 2008 interview, Albahari explained his Serbian/Canadian identity, observing that the language in which I write defines me as a Serbian writer, but the fact that I live in Canada, in a multicultural country that accepts the possibility of creating in all languages, makes me a Canadian writer. I accept that duality because it’s a reflection of my reality, as well as my readiness to accept an occasional feeling of confusion about [my] identity. (180) Götz and Meyer focuses, again, on return. The narrator investigates a mechanised method of death favoured by the Nazis, a hermetically sealed truck used for exterminations. In Yugoslavia, this extermination was principally carried out by two soldiers named Götz and Meyer. The narrator, a school teacher, recreates the lives of the soldiers at the same time as he questions his obsession with their actions. Duplicating his earlier fears, the school bus on which the narrator and his students travel becomes that hermetically sealed vehicle. The ghosts of the past overwhelm them and Belgrade’s lost souls appear to return as the students leave the bus shaken, exhausting the narrator psychologically and physically. Albahari’s detached style conveys a wry humour, an irony that is initially surprising but a welcome envelope for the horrific content. The vision of Götz and Meyer just doing their job and the portrait of their desensitised souls makes the narrator’s discovery of his own obsession all the more powerful. Although he writes and publishes in Serbian and then has his work translated, Albahari is representative of the new scope of Canadian Jewish writing. Anticipating Albahari were a number of earlier immigrant writers, for example Naim Kattan, Iraqi-born, who emigrated to Canada in 1954 and wrote Farewell Babylon (1976) and Paris Interlude (1979); and Michel Solomon (b. 1919 in Romania), widely known in Quebec for his memoirs Magadan (1971) and Mon Calvaire roumain (1976), as well as his novel, Eden retrouvée (1980). After 1945, in fact, a set of exiled writers found their voice and place in Canada, a practice that indirectly strengthened Canadian Jewish writing. Three examples are the Czech Josef Skvorecky, the South Asian Rohinton Mistry and the Trinidadian Dionne Brand. What they and the new group of younger Jewish writers share is the realisation that Canada is less a country than a construct, but a valuable one and one that is open to being reshaped (Begamudré 1992: 9). But for Majzels, Albahari, Kattan and others, characters need to learn an old language (often Hebrew) to grasp a new world. Majzels’ destabilising text literally demonstrates on every page the necessary exchange between the old language and the new. Learning the new language, most often English, actually becomes the focus of the most recent fiction by Canadian Jewish writers, strongly evident in the internationally successful Fugitive Pieces (1996) by the Toronto-born poet/novelist Anne Michaels. In her narrative about the Polish war orphan Jakob Beer, literally pulled from the mud of a ruin and educated by a Greek archaeologist, Athos Roussos, first in Greece and then Toronto, the study of language becomes the study of culture – just as learning the history of navigation is learning the history of the earth. The two also learn each other’s language:



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‘a little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English. We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes’ (Michaels 2006: 21). At the same time Jakob renews his study of Hebrew, Athos stressing the need to know an ancient language to understand the present. Every day he tells Jakob that ‘[i]t is your future you are remembering’. Jakob also learns Greek which appears on the page ‘like a twisting twin of Hebrew’ (21). Learning his new language – Greek – is for Jakob transformative and liberating: Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. (22) Self-discovery is part of knowing a new language in this novel of remembering. Jakob himself is history, emerging like a bog man from the ruins of Biskupin, an ancient site in Poland, having survived the murder of his family, and being rescued by Athos and taken to the island of Zakynthos. Fugitive Pieces, with its title referring to Athos and Jakob, as well as all other refugees seeking protection in a new and different world, points in two directions at once: to the past and the future. The book itself is in part Jakob’s journal, recovered, we learn in the final section of the novel, from his house in Idhra. Athos’s stories of myth, history, navigation, science and poetry preserve the past and prepare Jakob for a new future. ‘I was transfixed by the way time buckled, met itself in pleats and folds’ Jakob remarks as he learns both the history of humans and of the earth (30). Even Antarctica forms part of his education, which takes place against a backdrop of the marauding German soldiers who periodically threaten and deport the Jews of Zakynthos. As the novel progresses, the theme of Judaism expands, the narrator providing a history of the Jews of the island who originated from Constantinople, Crete, Corfu and Italy but, because of the war, have had to hide all signs of Jewish life – siddurs, tallith, candlesticks – while they themselves vanish ‘into the hills, where they wait like coral; half flesh, half stone’ (40). Contrasting with the story of Jakob’s rescue and survival are the deaths of the Jews of Zakynthos and Europe (45–6). However, in September 1944 the Germans abandon the island and Jakob’s world enlarges. With breadth of vision, Michaels paints an energising portrait of survival, citing the Zohar (‘All visible things will be born again invisible’), while intensifying her narrative of ‘catastrophe and slow accumulation’ (48). Athos himself becomes the embodiment of a saviour because he is ‘an expert in buried and abandoned places’ (49). Hints of Toronto life creep into early sections of the novel so that the reader can anticipate what is to come, the result of ‘invisible paths’ that cross each other (51). The novel becomes a kind of archaeological dig as Athos and the narrator search for Jakob’s past, which is a constant re-telling of death and survival. Echoing this is a description of the German control of Athens which is followed by communist rule at the end of the occupation. But Toronto soon takes over, partly because a member of an Antarctic expedition, familiar with Athos, establishes a new department of geography at the University of Toronto and invites him to teach there. He and Jakob emigrate in the early 1950s. Beginning with the ‘The Way Station’ section, Toronto supplants Zakynthos as the centre of the story. And now English, Jakob’s new food, overwhelms him: ‘I shoved it into

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my mouth, hungry for it’; although it also brings forgetfulness: ‘with each mouthful the past was further silenced’ (92). In Toronto, far from Greece and the war, Jakob tries ‘to bury images, cover them over with Greek and English words’, but the past, in the form of the ghosts of his parents and sister, returns to haunt him (93). Even Toronto becomes an archaeological site as Athos reveals its geological history to Jakob. But again, it is language that dominates: Athos and Jakob invent stories and then puns and then poetry, Jakob experimenting with lines without verbs or using only slang (100). And soon he discovers that English could protect him because it was ‘an alphabet without memory’ (101). But while Jakob grapples with the present, Athos deals with the past, writing a memoir about the Nazis’ abuse of archaeology so as to fabricate a past, especially in their destruction of the artefacts of Biskupin where he rescued Jakob (104). The bursts of prose in short sections, occasionally only a paragraph or page long, give a sense of urgency to the story and the life of the characters. Jakob’s later profession of translator and then poet matches the themes of the novel which translates past cultures (Greek, Polish, Hebrew) into a Canadian present with the hope of restoring order ‘by naming’ (111). But the death of Athos shatters the pattern of Jakob’s world as he learns of his mentor’s past, not only in Greece but Vienna and Cambridge (114). The next section of the work is set in 1968: Jakob is now married to Alex, whom he met in a music library. But history and memory intrude again and the remainder of the novel wraps itself around the fate of Jakob as implied by the destiny of others: ‘In Birkenau, a woman carried the faces of her husband and daughter, torn from a photograph, under her tongue so their images wouldn’t be taken from her. If only everything could fit under the tongue’, Jakob writes (139). What obsesses him is the split second of death and the tableau of ‘perpetrator, victim, witness’ (140). And he realises that one can ‘never trust biographies. Too many events in a man’s life are invisible’ (141). Language, objects and death are the themes that shadow Fugitive Pieces and prompt Jakob to return to Greece. A sentence midway through the novel expresses much of the work’s encounter with the contrasting worlds of Poland, Greece and Canada: ‘There are places that claim you and places that warn you away’ (157). Jakob, separated from Alex, leaves Toronto to live on the island of Idhra, surviving through translating and making yearly visits to Canada where, after eighteen years of being on his own, he meets and marries Michaela, a museum administrator, a curator of objects and time as was Athos. Adding to a new self-understanding is the discovery that ‘it’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know’ (161). Part II of the novel begins after Jakob has married Michaela. A character named Ben now narrates the story, set firmly in Toronto. The new narrator admires Jakob’s poems, studies the ideas of Athos concerning weather and history and reads Athos’s reissued Bearing False Witness, his account of the Nazi remaking of archaeology and history (210– 13). And, echoing The Second Scroll, we learn that ‘the memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow’, while ‘the search for facts . . . amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by’. Biography is an incomplete art and in telling a life, ‘the importance not of what’s extant, but of what’s disappeared’ is key (213, 222). The narrator, the son of survivors and now a university professor, prepares to write a book on weather and war drawn from Athos’s ideas (234–5). At the end of the novel, he visits Idhra to retrieve Jakob’s notebooks, lost and then discovered, the notebooks that form the first part of the story. We also learn that in Greece Ben has been with another woman, Petra, who leaves him before he departs and returns to his wife in Canada, notebooks in hand.



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Jakob, we recall from the disclosure made on the first page of the novel, had been killed by a car in Athens in 1993. The oblique narration and densely metaphorical style of Fugitive Pieces create a challenging work that excavates the past, its form equal to its subject: the almost punishing dynamic of memory, specifically of the Holocaust, expressed in what Michaels calls ‘vertical time’, an archaeological/geological term (55, 257). Images and fragments of memory indirectly express feelings as the reader confronts the consequences of trauma. Michaels spent five years on research and preparation before she began to write the book, explaining that [i]t takes time for meaning to be extracted from facts, and for connections to find their way. And then to imagine – as much as possible – below the conscious and unconscious analysis, below conscience, past any sort of personal defence or agenda (again, whether philosophical, psychological, political, emotional) to a place of undefended thought and feeling. (Michaels 2009) ‘When I began writing Fugitive Pieces’, she added, ‘I did not believe it possible that the illumination of grief is also the soul of hope. The last line of Fugitive Pieces led me into a new novel, The Winter Vault, which is, among other things, an inquiry into forgiveness between two people.’ These themes transcend previous descriptions or definitions of Canadian Jewish writing and underscore why Fugitive Pieces became an international success, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction, among other awards. The power of language – ‘a single letter was a matter of life and death’ Michaels writes of the dangers of writing graffiti during the Nazi occupation of Zakynthos (2006: 78) – also describes the work of David Bezmozgis. In his short stories, he treats the challenge of new words with equal doses of comedy and despair. In ‘Tapka’, from his debut collection Natasha and Other Stories (2004), the narrator’s mother becomes the ‘expert’ who nightly reviews her English lessons at George Brown City College in Toronto with her husband and their neighbours. In ‘Roman Berman, Massage Therapist’, the son prepares flyers for his father’s new business as masseur, translating his parent’s Russian into alluring English phrases: ‘Best New Therapeutic Massage Office!’ or ‘Roman Berman, Soviet Olympic coach and refugee from Communist regime, Provides Quality Therapeutic Massage Service!’ This last is a response to his mother’s emphasis on empathy and guilt to generate customers (Bezmozgis 2004b: 27). The style is dry and understated. Language is the subject, but not in all of Bezmozgis’s stories. In ‘An Animal to the Memory’, the subject is Israel, the Holocaust and survival in new lands, expanded in his 2014 work, The Betrayers. In ‘An Animal to the Memory’ from Natasha and Other Stories, the issue is Hebrew, an old language in a new land, and the reaction of the Duddy-like hero to various adolescent challenges, especially during Holocaust Remembrance Day at his Hebrew school: when tripped and bullied by others, he attacks. A melee follows and after some calm, the school’s rabbi insults him by saying that ‘a Nazi wouldn’t do here what you did today’ (Bezmozgis 2004c: 76). In the story, the young protagonist is tested and finally understands what it means to be a Jew. ‘Natasha’, the title story of the collection, records the adjustment of a 14-year-old teenager to Toronto through the eyes of a dope-dealing, 16-year-old Jewish narrator, Berman. His supplier, Rufus, takes a liking to Natasha, who is intense, Berman explaining that ‘she’s Russian. We’re born intense’ (Bezmozgis 2004d: 90). When asked by the dealer what Russia is really like, Natasha answers ‘Russia is shit but people enjoy themselves’ (90).

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Most days, the narrator entertains Natasha by teaching her how to get high; she in turn teaches him about sex and her early career in pornographic movies. All of this is reported in a neutral, straight-faced, comic manner, the narrator realising that ‘for everything I knew, I knew almost nothing’ (93). This was a world – Russia – where, when Natasha’s mother found out what she was doing, she complained that if she was going to be a whore, ‘she could at least help out with the rent’ (97). The unexpected ending mixes suburban Toronto life with Russian irony, suburban surprise with uncertain love. The Free World, Bezmozgis’s 2011 novel, is similarly international in scope. ‘Natasha’ was set in 1979 and after; The Free World opens in 1978 with three generations of the Russian Krasnansky family, newly freed Soviet Jews. This is a family saga about the old communist and Red Army veteran, Samuil; his elder son Karl, eager for freedom; Alec, his younger son, something of a playboy; and Alec’s wife, Polina. Their six months in Rome set the stage for what will be an unbalanced life in the West, where stories from their Russian past provide the energy and urgency to face their future. Life in Rome, they discover, is both liberating and conflicting. In this work, the act of remembering summons both people and places from a past that Samuil, in particular, does not want to lose even when there are thoughts and threats of death (2011b: 194–203). Here, Bezmozgis broadens his sense of history through vividly rendered postwar Latvia. In the dual narrative of The Free World – life in the past and life in the Italian present – Bezmozgis exhibits the new breadth and focus of Canadian Jewish writing. Similar, perhaps, to the scope of Klein in The Second Scroll with the narrator pursuing the elusive Uncle Melech in Israel, or sections of St. Urbain’s Horseman by Richler with Jake in Israel searching for his cousin Joey (the Horseman) who has become his ‘moral editor’ (1971: 311), Bezmozgis reverses the quest: here, those who leave the old world focus on the new but with similar challenges and disappointments. Canada appears only in the closing pages and as a promise rather than as a place. Departure is of greater psychological and political importance than arrival for these writers, a shift from, and yet an oblique return to, their predecessors. But Bezmozgis’s claim is not so much to be a Canadian novelist nor even a Jewish writer but a writer who is Jewish, entrapped by eastern Europe, who happens to live in Canada. This is nowhere more evident than in his Israeli-centred novel, The Betrayers. The story is of a disgraced Israeli cabinet minister, Baruch Kotler, who has fled the country with a young female aide, Leora, after being exposed in the press following his critical vote opposing the government’s removal of settlers. The hero and his mistress travel to Crimea which he had visited as a child. In Yalta, Kotler unexpectedly encounters another betrayer: his Moscow room-mate of some forty years before who was a KGB informant. His denunciation of Kotler had meant exile to the Gulag for thirteen years. Bezmozgis alternates between Kotler’s distress at having to leave Israel and shock at meeting his betrayer, and the thoughts of the informant, Vladimir Tankilevich, who eventually reveals why he betrayed Kotler. Tankilevich has also decided to terminate a strange bargain that has ensured his survival in Crimea: in order to receive support from the Hesed, the Russian Jewish Agency, he had agreed to travel six hours every Shabbat for ten years to form a minyan at a decaying synagogue in Simferopol. But now, simultaneous with Kotler’s surprise appearance, Tankilevich wants to end the arrangement which has offered him both security and protection, the price he had to pay for his betrayal. These intersecting stories pit the past against the present, the disgraced Kotler, a political celebrity in Israel, against the hidden and deceptive Tankilevich, living under



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a pseudonym in Yalta. The events seem at first improbable, but as Kotler understands, the beauty of life is ‘when it departed from sense’ (Bezmozgis 2014a: 38). In a spare style mixing irony with affection, Bezmozgis explores the theme of return which dominates Canadian Jewish writing, but from a Russian and Israeli perspective. However, subsuming the Canadian, Israeli and even Russian outlook is the spiritual desire for an even greater return: the perpetual Jewish quest to return to Zion. Bezmozgis tests this concept, inverting the dominant trope of Judaism, the ingathering of the exiles, by showing Kotler’s attempt to leave Israel for Crimea, reinforced by an account of a Russian at the Simferopol synagogue who also returned to Russia after several unhappy years in Israel. A set of unexpected scenes provide dramatic tension in the novel: Tankilevich in a supermarket encountering an antisemitic Russian; Kotler calling his 18-year-old daughter Dafna from Yalta and her chastisement of his ‘elopement’; Tankilevich’s inexplicable breaking of all the dishes in the apartment he and Kotler shared in Moscow the day before he denounced him. From such moments, Bezmozgis creates psychological suspense as Kotler realises his mistake in leaving Israel and Tankilevich becomes paranoid that he will be identified as a former KGB informant (95–6). His fear is palpable. When Kotler finally confronts Tankilevich, Bezmozgis ironically entitles the meeting ‘Reunion’. And in the midst of this personal encounter, the Israeli government orders the army (including Kotler’s resistant son) to dismantle several settlements. Israeli politics, Russian secrets and an uncertain romance entangle Kotler before he and Tankilevich ‘confess’ to each other, each explaining the pressures that forced the other to make the choices they did. Kotler does not blame Tankilevich for what he did once he learns the full story, but neither can he absolve him (172–4). At the end of the novel, Kotler and Leora decide to return to Israel, but with a new realisation that their affair is over. On the flight back from Kiev to Tel Aviv, described as an airborne ‘shtetl’ of mixed Jews, the narrator remarks that ‘it was a model of coexistence as it may never have been and as it had failed to become’ (224). The irony summarises much of the personal and political hope and conflict in the novel which extends not only Bezmozgis’s range but the themes of Canadian Jewish writing. The current energy of Canadian Jewish writing emanates from its new, mostly immigrant generation of writers, which is part of a larger movement in Canadian writing. Today, the most vibrant work is being produced by Canadian writers such as Shyam Selvadurai (Sri Lankan, author of The Hungry Ghosts, 2013), M. G. Vassanji (Kenyan, author of The Magic of Saida, 2012) and Rawi Hage (Lebanese, author of De Niro’s Game, 2006). This transnationalism also characterises the writing of Canadian Jewish authors, writers who maintain the challenging duality outlined by Richler in Joshua Then and Now (1980) where the hero’s awkward moral and physical posture defines the position of the Canadian Jew: Canadian-born, he sometimes felt as if he were condemned to lope slant-shouldered through this world that confused him. One shoulder sloping downward groaning under the weight of his Jewish heritage . . . the other thrust heavenwards, yearning for an inheritance, any inheritance weightier than the construction of a transcontinental railway, a reputation for honest trading, good skiing conditions. (1980a: 190–1) This is the dilemma of Canadian Jewish writing at this moment, solved by looking back on history rather than forward into the future. In a way, this is a return to the beginnings of Jewish writing in Canada, which originated with a series of immigrant, mostly Yiddish-speaking writers, who only slowly integrated with their new land.2 But perhaps

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the next phase might go a step further, expanding the mythic possibilities of Canadian Jewish fiction to create ‘a planet of the Jews’ as seen in such American examples as Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007: 101).

Notes 1. Acknowledging the challenges of printing such a text, the editors note the centuries’-old format of a central sacred text with marginal commentary and additional glosses but the need for constant typographic adjustments because of the narrow columns. Yet every page is ‘the same depth, although the number of words is different in each section of text’. Furthermore, the formal symmetry of the text between facing pages allows the book to be experienced as spreads rather than single pages (Majzels 2004: 56a). 2. The so-called ‘internationalism’ of Yiddish literature in Canada began in 1912 with the Yiddish-Hebrew author Reuben Brainin (1862–1939), editor of the Montreal Yiddish daily Kanader Adler. That pattern continued with the influx of Holocaust survivors, including famous writers such as Melech Ravitch (1893–1976) and Rochl Korn (1898–1982).

23 SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH WRITERS Linda Weinhouse

Troubled by the division between Afrikaners and English, an army colonel decided to try a little experiment. Going into the mess hall one day, he barked ‘All right, I want all the Afrikaners on the left-hand side of the room, all the Englishmen on the right.’ . . . and soon there were two groups of men in the mess . . . except for one lone man standing in the middle. ‘And what are you?’ the colonel demanded. ‘A South African, sir.’ ‘Very good. That’s the answer I’ve been waiting for. What is your name, soldier?’ ‘Yossi Greenbaum, sir.’ (Eprile 2004a: 154)

T

his Second World War anecdote appears in Tony Eprile’s 2004 novel, The Persistence of Memory, and demonstrates the ambiguous status of the Jew, who is situated not only between Afrikaners and Englishmen, but between all the rigidly defined racial divisions in South African society, including the most significant one of all, between all whites and all blacks. As Gideon Shimoni has shown, the Jewish community in South Africa throughout the years of apartheid was characterised by the desire to fit into white South African society, which meant that as a community it did not officially oppose apartheid laws; and yet a disproportionate number of ‘deviant’ Jewish individuals were active in the anti-apartheid movement (2003: 6–11, 73–94). The Jews’ status as ‘white’, however, was not assured, and their fears of exclusion were exacerbated by the Nazi sympathies of the Nationalist Party during the Second World War. Milton Shain demonstrates that antisemitism existed in South Africa long before 1930 and that anti-Jewish manifestations were related to consistent and widely shared Jewish stereotypes deeply embedded in the South African experience (1994: 3–4). Indeed, ‘many of these immigrant Jews were regarded as unassimilable into European South African society and consequently not “white”’ (Braude 2001b: xviiii). Moreover, social, cultural and political Jewish institutions evolved in response to the community’s anxiety about their ability to assimilate. After the war, however, when the Nationalists’ pro-Nazi ideology changed and Jews were included in white South Africa, Jews responded by seeking invisibility and by seeking to de-emphasise and suppress the memory of Afrikaner antisemitism (xliv). Many South African writers, particularly during apartheid, judged their fellow Jews by

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their attitudes towards racism, criticising those who did not denounce it. Some Jewish authors, such as Dan Jacobson, recall in their writing discrimination, the Holocaust and an acute consciousness of their status as Jews. At the same time some traces of racial stereotyping, often of their fellow Jews, can be found in their work. In the post-apartheid era, representatives of the Jewish community have been engaged in reviewing and re-evaluating their attitudes, as Jews, towards the apartheid regime. Jewish writers have responded in a variety of ways; some, such as Nadine Gordimer, depict contemporary expressions of Jewish separatism as a variant on the ethnic and racial divisions that would be better overcome in the rebuilding of the nation. Others, such as Eprile, who particularly engages with the question of the suppression of memory in post-apartheid South Africa, have explored the ambivalent, and often alienated, position of Jews in South African society. Others, such as Damon Galgut, show racial divisions still persisting in the ‘new’ South Africa, and give little evidence of the writer’s own ethnic or religious origins. The topography of the works of Galgut and, in his later work, Jacobson is often some desolate and remote part of South Africa. In these scarcely populated areas, the Jews have disappeared.

Sarah Gertrude Millin Sarah Gertrude Millin was born on 19 March 1889 in Lithuania, like so many South African Jews, and her family settled on the banks of the Vaal River in the Kimberley area where her father opened a trading store. Today she stands out in relation to other Jewish South African writers due to her denunciation of the evils of miscegenation, a dominant theme in her work, especially in her best-known novel, God’s Stepchildren (1924). In that novel, Millin declares that among the children of parents of mixed race ‘[i]nevitably the point would be reached where a solid barrier of unreceptivity would hinder all further mental progress’ (63). She sees those she calls ‘half-castes’ as permanently and essentially, not politically, disadvantaged: They had become by the time the twentieth century had thrust away the nineteenth . . . a nation . . . In the Cape Colony they had political and industrial, if not social, opportunities, but they barely availed themselves of them. They achieved nothing of any consequence. (228) Recent interpretations of Millin’s work see her anxiety regarding miscegenation as a screen for the widespread concern in the Jewish community regarding their status as whites, perhaps because the scorn she heaps upon mixed-race people is tempered in her treatment of blacks, whom she sees as more dignified and ‘pure’ (227). Despite, or more likely because of, his white appearance, Barry, the protagonist of God’s Stepchildren, dreaded that some white person would feel that he ‘was not as he was, and searching discover why . . . Sometimes he even wanted to say right out and have done with it: “Look here, I must tell you. I am not really white”’ (227). Significantly, when Elmira, Barry’s mother, whose looks are racially ambiguous, has the opportunity to attend school with whites, in order to cement her own status, she ridicules, along with her other schoolmates, ‘one little girl because her father was in prison, another little girl because her father was a butcher, and a few more little girls because they were Jewish – . . .’ (139). Braude notes that in Millin’s story ‘Esther’s Daughter’ (1957), the black servant, Alita, is secure in her racial identity even though she lacks the privileges of the coloured maid, Esther. Esther’s daughter is white and marries a white man but to do so she must renounce her



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mother. The narrator understands Esther’s rejection of Alita, for she is not ‘so safe about her colour that there could be no question of equality between her and Alita’ (Millin 2001: 46). Braude explains that Jews feared that if they had been classified as ‘non-European’ or as other than ‘white’ they would have been subjected to the same antisemitism in South Africa that they had experienced in the countries from which they had emigrated. As we have mentioned, at this time a significant number of Afrikaner politicians were active Nazi sympathisers, so the Jews had reason to feel insecure (Braude 2001b: xxxiii). In the novel The Coming of the Lord (1928), Millin deals directly with the status of Jews as outsiders in South African society. Old Nathan, the father of the protagonist, his son Saul who becomes a doctor and aligns himself with the one black doctor, Tetyana, is said from the outset to ‘have no part . . . in the social life of Gibeon’ where he lives (Millin 1928: 4). Saul believes himself to be apart and inferior to his Afrikaner neighbours because of his ‘mental arrogance’ (55). Duerden, the Afrikaner, for his part ‘had the same feeling about Saul that the poor whites had about the native doctor, Tetyana; he credited him, because he was alien, with mysterious power’ (84). As for Tetyana, when Saul proffers friendship, he ‘would have preferred if it had not been a Jew, for a Jew had not the same standing as another European of his own kind’ (108). Moreover, it is clear from Millin’s non-fictional study of South African society in the 1920s, in which she discusses South African history and considers the ways and lifestyles of the peoples of South Africa, that she was aware and discomfited by what she perceived as the widespread antisemitism in South African life, though her statements always seem to imply that the Jew is both the cause and victim. She writes: The trouble with the Jew is that he does not fade into the landscape; and it is not only his trouble, it is also his tragedy. He is different, and in certain respects he wishes to be different, but in other respects he is different against his will; and he suffers . . . ‘the dislike of the unlike.’ (1926: 177) She maintains that the Jews’ success breeds antisemitism. She writes that the poor Jewish peddlers who first came to South Africa were well-liked, but once the Jews became successful they began to irritate their hosts (179–80). In this manner, though she depicts Jews as successful and those of mixed race as failures, her analysis of the discrimination experienced by the Jews is based, like her characterisation of coloureds in South Africa, on an idea of their essential nature and their own actions.

Dan Jacobson Dan Jacobson was born in South Africa in 1929 and left to live in England in 1954, where he had a successful career as a professor of English at University College London. Most of his early work, as well as some of his later work such as Heshel’s Kingdom (1998), based on his journey to discover his ancestors in Latvia and Lithuania, and The Electronic Elephant: A Southern African Journey (1994), tracing his journey on the North Road in southern Africa, is informed by his life growing up as a Jew in South Africa. Jacobson’s parents were not particularly religious, but his father insisted that the children attend Hebrew lessons and the synagogue as an assertion of identity as the Nazi madness swept across Europe. The Beginners (1966), which explores three generations of a Jewish immigrant family living in South Africa, suggests that Jacobson endorsed his mother’s liberal values and universal approach to human problems, in contrast to his father’s more parochial views. When the

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protagonist, Joel Glickman, decides to go to Israel to work on a kibbutz, which Jacobson also did for a year, his mother says she is against it because he is putting himself in danger for nothing: I’m tired of the Jews, I’m not interested in them, or in the country they’ve got or they haven’t got, or in the religion they’ve got or haven’t got, in the race they belong to or don’t belong to, or any of the other things that are supposed to make them so special . . . (Jacobson 1966: 239) Jacobson’s writing shows a tension between universal and Jewish concerns in the wake of the Holocaust, and in the particular South African context the essence of this conflict is a Jewish one. Joel tells a non-Jewish woman he wishes to marry: You’re a Gentile . . . so your problems are your own in a way that mine aren’t mine. Jews are always forced to generalize about their problems because they never know just how much is Jewish in them . . . and how much is common, ordinary human, necessary. (431) When, in the same month as the declaration of independence of the state of Israel, the Afrikaner Nationalists come into power in South Africa, it validates Joel’s decision to leave the country, in which he feels he has ‘never uttered a single, clear word’. Like Jacobson, Joel leaves first for Israel and then later for England, as an escape from the ‘­haphazard ­disorder and fortuitousness of the country of his birth’ towards which he feels estrangement, pity, guilt, fear, contempt, roused at one time or another by every group in it – the blacks, the Coloureds, the Indians, the Afrikaners, the English, the anxious prospering Jews . . . held together only by their needs and greeds, with no other shared ties of history, culture, kinship, loyalty or even human sympathy. (237) The novel portrays the peculiar perspective and position of Jews in South Africa, like Eprile’s Yossi Greenbaum, between the English and the Afrikaners. Though other groups of non-whites are referred to, it is without recognition of their patrimony and history. Joel, for instance, lists the blacks in the above quotation as having come to the country in a ‘haphazard’ fashion ‘without shared ties of history or culture’. Moreover, when Joel’s younger brother David is subjected to a harrowing hazing experience enacted by the ‘Assassination Committee’, he muses on ‘whether it was by accident or by design that the members of the Assass consisted of an Englishman, an Afrikaner and a Jew – a little microcosm, as it were, of white South Africa. Thus there could be no question of there being any “racialism” in what was done to the freshmen’ (216). He does not seem to even consider the blacks, whose only role is to be waiters at the school, as relevant to this experience. It is indicative of both the differences between the authors and of the changed face of South Africa that, when Nadine Gordimer includes two hazing incidents in her novel No Time Like the Present (2012), one takes place at the upscale, suburban, all-boys, formerly allwhite school that the son of the protagonists, a white Jewish father and a black mother, has chosen to attend; and another is perpetrated by white university students in the Free State who force the black university cleaners to eat from a pot of stew into which one of the students has urinated. Jacobson’s works set in South Africa that depict relationships between white masters and black servants are frankly critical of the system that fails to treat the blacks as human beings. Nonetheless, this humanitarian viewpoint is ultimately shown to be irrelevant or



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ineffectual. In two novellas, The Trap (1955) and A Dance in the Sun (1956), the black servants are betrayed and exploited when they try to better themselves. In The Trap, Willem, who collaborates with a white shop owner by stealing cattle from his Baas, is ultimately deceived by the shop owner and beaten by his master and handed over to the police. Another servant on the farm, Setole, with whom the narrator’s sympathies clearly lie, might have revealed the secret to van Schoor, the owner, but he is wrongly dismissed by him when he is accused of homosexuality by Willem, who fears discovery. In A Dance in the Sun, the protagonists, two young English men, are hitching rides to Cape Town when, having taken shelter with an Afrikaner couple in a village in the karoo, they become embroiled in a family drama. When they discover that the sister of the black man, Joseph, who has been haunting the farm, was abandoned by the Afrikaner wife’s brother who left her pregnant, they undertake the task of achieving some kind of justice for him. Their intervention is shown to be a struggle with their consciences and a moral victory, but it proves useless. In a final ironic twist, Joseph rejects their offers of assistance. In his widely anthologised short story ‘The Zulu and the Zeide’ (1959), Jacobson suggests that there might be a natural affinity between Jews and blacks. A young Zulu, Paulus, is hired by a Jewish family to look after their senile father. Jacobson writes of the touching connection that evolves between the old man and his carer, despite their racist environment: The young bearded Zulu and the old bearded Jew from Lithuania walked together in the streets of the town that was strange to them both . . . Neither Paulus nor old man Grossman were aware that when they crossed a street hand-in hand . . . there were white men who averted their eyes from the sight of this degradation, which could come upon a man when he was senile and dependent. (Jacobson 1959: 24–5) When the old man dies, his son Harry dismisses Paulus, but first he must return his savings, which had been entrusted to him at the start of the young man’s employment. It is at this point that the assertion of sympathy or understanding between blacks and Jews breaks down, for Harry cannot conceive of why Paulus even has savings, and he is confounded when he learns that Paulus is saving to bring his family to town. Once again, Jacobson reveals the unbridgeable gap between white and black South Africans, regardless of whether those whites are Jews or not, unless the white man happens to be old, senile and dependent. In his autobiographical essay ‘My Jewish Childhood’ (2000), Jacobson’s description of growing up Jewish in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s corroborates a prevailing attitude of well-meaning ineffectuality while he bitterly remembers the endemic antisemitism of the time: [G]rowing up Jewish, I believe, encouraged many of us to feel a quasi-instinctive sympathy with other despised and unjustly treated racial groups in South Africa . . . In the overwhelming majority, the members of the Jewish community accepted this ­dispensation . . . Yet . . . of the Jewish boys in my school . . . I never heard them using violent and abusive language against people of darker skin that was common coin . . . the fact remains that . . . the bad thing that probably embraces all others, was the antiSemitism – of a violent kind and of epidemic proportions that was abroad during my boyhood. (40–1) Jacobson’s South African narratives do not admit the possibility of a violent, revolutionary resolution to the breach between black and white that is the result of the country’s

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racist policies, which we will see in the work of Nadine Gordimer. However, there are passages in his work in which Jacobson speaks of the landscape of his country that anticipate the work of the contemporary writer Damon Galgut, who writes of South African protagonists who travel, usually solo, through barren and disquieting scenes in South Africa and other countries. In 1994, in The Electronic Elephant. A Southern African Journey, Jacobson wrote about a return trip he took through South Africa, following the North Road. Dirk Klopper reveals that the alienation Jacobson experiences in his native land is not only the result of changes in language and culture, but also of the absence of Jews: ‘Not only has the country become an unhomely place for him, but also for his kind: English speaking, white, Jewish’ (2005: 463). Jacobson’s first five novels all focused on South Africa, and his narratives are written from the perspective of those, Jews and others like them, who are situated as outsiders in South African society. He then went on to have a long and illustrious career in England as a writer and professor, and his later works concentrate more on moral issues affecting all of humanity. Still, even in his later work, he writes on biblical themes, as in The Rape of Tamar (1985) and The Story of Stories. The Chosen People and its God (1982). In the mid1990s Jacobson turned to non-fiction, yet, as we have mentioned, The Electronic Elephant, which is about his travels back to South Africa, emphasises the changes in the land and the culture since his childhood. The persistence of Jacobson’s interest in his heritage as a South African and a Jew is evident as well in Heshel’s Kingdom, about his travels to Lithuania, the origin of a vast number of Jews who immigrated to South Africa, to learn more about the life of his grandfather and the fate of Lithuanian Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Nadine Gordimer To isolate Nadine Gordimer’s comments regarding her Jewish background, her depictions of Jewish characters and her treatment of Jewish themes is to hazard a distortion of her contribution to South African literature and of her lifelong literary opposition to apartheid, which can be documented by even a brief summary of her major novels. For example, The Lying Days (1953) records the rise of the Nationalists and the young white protagonist’s first steps outside the racially divided colonial world of her childhood; World of Strangers (1958) takes place at the end of a period when it seemed that blacks and whites together might be able to effect change and demonstrates the widening gap between them; The Late Bourgeois World (1966) depicts South Africa in the wake of Sharpeville and points to the ambiguities and complexities of fighting the system; Burger’s Daughter (1979) chronicles the effect of a legacy of revolution on the protagonist and the movement of whites from the centre to the periphery of the radical struggle to end apartheid; The Sport of Nature (1987) has a Jewish protagonist, but she abandons all remnants of her Jewish background and becomes the wife of the black leader of an unnamed, newly independent African country. In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Gordimer turned to the state of South Africa following the official end of apartheid: the legacy of violence catches up with white liberals in The House Gun (1998); in an unconventional escape from the legacy of racism, the white, privileged female protagonist emigrates to a poor, unspecified Muslim country in The Pickup (2001); and formerly illegal, intimate black/white relationships are examined in No Time Like the Present (2012). In an early interview of 1965, Gordimer fully articulated, at length, what was and what would continue to be her primary focus as a South African writer. She told Alan Ross:



South African Jewish Writers 309 A white South African, brought up on the soft side of the colour-bar, I have gone through the whole packaged-deal evolution that situation has to offer – unquestioning acceptance of the superiority of my white skin . . . questioning of these attitudes as I grew up and read and experienced . . . and finally, re-birth as a human being among other human beings, with all this means in the face of the discrimination that sorts them into colours and races. Whether I like it or not, this has been the crucial experience of my life . . . I have no religion, no political dogma . . . except my conviction that the colour-bar is wrong and utterly indefensible. (Ross 1990: 34–5)

According to Michael Wade, ‘[a]ny exploration of the Jewish theme in Nadine Gordimer’s writing, especially her novels, is an exploration of the absent, the unwritten, the repressed’ (1993: 155). Although Wade is correct in that Gordimer depicts Jewish characters who, especially in their attempts to identify with the black liberation movement, reject or discard their Jewish background, or characters who claim that their Jewish background is simply irrelevant, there is evidence of Gordimer’s attitudes towards her own Jewish background, her father’s early life as a Jewish immigrant in South Africa, and disturbing examples of Gordimer’s attitude towards Jewish ritual and recognisably Jewish individuals. Paradoxically, while Gordimer does not repress her Jewishness, she rejects its importance and she takes pains to do so openly and repeatedly. For example, when she was asked to talk about what it was like to be a young Jewish girl in the 1950s, she replied: ‘Well, I am not such a good person to talk to about that, because I never had much sense of identity with the Jewish community’ (Junction Avenue Theatre Company 1990: 247). And when she was questioned about whether being Jewish facilitated her awakening to the racism of her society, she said: No, as a child, I didn’t see the connection between anti-Semitism and the racism in South Africa because I was not raised in the Jewish tradition but rather as an agnostic. Yet my father had, during his childhood, suffered from a form of apartheid. But he never drew the parallel between the two situations. (Servan-Schreiber 1990: 117) Gordimer’s most extensive and most ambivalent comments about Jewishness and her Jewish background are to be found in her essays and comments upon her father’s life, and in the fictional characters who resemble him. Gordimer’s father, Isidore, was one of twelve children; at the age of 13, he was sent out from Latvia to South Africa to live with an uncle. Gordimer’s mother came from an assimilated Jewish family; she associated with the Protestant women in the mine community of Gordimer’s youth, and was hostile to all organised religion (Ettin 1993: 29). In an interview with Jannika Hurwitt, Gordimer relates this information about her father, and states that ‘he went through the whole Jewish pogrom syndrome’ (Hurwitt 1990: 130). Most significantly, she harshly criticises those shopkeepers who, like her father, embraced the mores of white supremacy out of their own sense of inadequacy: I would walk up past these stores, and I would see the shopkeepers coming out, themselves rather bewildered, immigrants who knew the language slightly, or who’d learnt it imperfectly, both English and Afrikaans, and who felt alien. Then their customers were . . . people who had come to a country they didn’t know – right, they were black and this was Africa, but it was a very different part of Africa . . . the storekeeper and his customer understood each other very badly. The storekeepers, feeling on a rather low level of society themselves . . . tended to act out their frustrations on their customers, to treat

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them roughly, and regard them as savages . . . So the relationships tended to be rough, people shouting at each other, and I noticed this as a child. (Bragg 1990: 75) Gordimer’s essay in The New Yorker, entitled ‘My Father Leaves Home’, is extremely important to any understanding of her attitude towards her father and Judaism. For example, she denounces her father because ‘he shouted at the black man on the other side of the counter who swept the floor and ran errands, and he threw the man’s weekly pay grudgingly at him. I saw there was someone my father had made afraid of him’ (1990: 43). She also explains the source of her feelings of disdain towards her father and, implicitly, towards Judaism: If the phylacteries and skullcap were kept somewhere, we children never saw them. He went fasting to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement, and each year, on the anniversaries of the deaths in that village of the old people whom the wife and children had never seen, he went again to light a candle. Feeble flame: who were they? In the quarrels between husband and wife, she derided them as ignorant and dirty . . . ‘You slept like animals round a stove, stinking of garlic; you bathed once a week.’ We children knew how low it was to be unwashed. And whipped into anger, he knew the lowest category of all in her country, this country: You speak to me as if I were a kaffir. (43) Gordimer maintains the stance of an outsider, a spectator, towards her father and the legacy he carries. Perhaps Gordimer’s view of herself as a ‘spectator’ partially explains her negative descriptions of immigrant Jews in her fiction, but they are still shocking, especially since Gordimer is so opposed to any form of racism. In her early and most autobiographical novel, The Lying Days (1953), the gentile protagonist, Helen Shaw, shares many aspects of Gordimer’s own journey towards becoming ‘a human being among other human beings’ (Ross 1990: 33). The Jews in the novel are all described in stereotypical fashion, and most of them are depicted as ugly and, at times, not even human. Through Helen’s eyes, we see her Jewish friend Joel Aaron’s father, who owns a ‘Jew store’ (Gordimer 1953: 18) at the mine, as ‘a short ugly man’ (19), his wife having ‘puffy hands with hardened flesh growing up round . . . unkempt nails . . . Her body in a cheap silk dress . . . the body of Jewish women from certain parts of Europe, the swollen doll’s body’ (115); her own movements were ‘like a horse’ (116) and the old man at the Aarons’ home has ‘the face of an old dog’ (150). Helen’s reaction to Joel’s family is to feel ‘outside of them’, ‘embarrassed’ and ‘frightened’ (115–16). She even says that her reaction to Joel, her fellow university student, who stereotypically introduces her to the life of the mind, is like ‘the fascination I had felt in the faces of Indian waiters serving food in Durban hotels’ (119). She never seriously considers Joel as a boyfriend, despite his obvious affection for her, because she says she seeks ‘the tall, fair-haired boys who could clown over beer bottles and flirt with me in the permissive code of gentlemen of my own blood’ (122). She de-sexes him and admits: ‘the fact that he was a Jew gave him a position of peculiar if wary privilege, like a eunuch’ (181). Although a major theme of the novel is Helen’s awakening to the racism of her society, this concept of ‘blood’, as she applies it to Jews, is never rejected in the novel. In fact, Jews are consistently defined in antithesis to healthy sexuality, cleanliness and wholesomeness. The Lying Days is not Gordimer’s only work with such negative depictions of Jews. In her short story ‘Defeated’ (1952), the gentile protagonist befriends Miriam, a Jewish girl, whose mother, Mrs Saiyetovitz, is once again described as ‘ugly . . . Ugly with the blunt



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ugliness of a toad’ (1992b: 12); her father is shown as ‘lurking’ in his store ‘like a beast in his lair’ (14); and Miriam’s acceptance of her surroundings is compared to ‘someone sitting in a swarm of ants; and letting them swarm, letting them crawl all over and about her’ (13). John Saiyetovitz is clearly based on Gordimer’s own father, for she says that ‘when he was trading with the natives, strange blasts of power seemed to blow up in his soul’ and that he ‘treated the natives honestly, but with bad grace. He forced them to feel their ignorance, their inadequacy and their submission to the white man’s world of money. He spiritually maltreated them, and bitterly drove his nail into the coffin of their confidence’ (15). The Saiyetovitzes are finally defeated, as the title suggests, when Miriam marries, leaves and rejects them. Her rejection of her parents is a surprising echo of a similar rejection of her coloured mother on the part of Esther in Millin’s story, ‘Esther’s Daughter’. Two of Gordimer’s novels, A Sport of Nature (1987) and No Time Like the Present (2012), nevertheless have Jewish protagonists who are portrayed positively, after having escaped, overcome or rejected their Jewish background through an identification with black liberation. Early on in A Sport of Nature, Hillela attempts to assimilate into South African culture. She uses her middle name, Kim, in order to attend Anglican services with the other girls in her school, and she fantasises that her mother’s Portuguese lover was really her father. Yet even Hillela’s aunt, Olga, the one who makes some attempt to keep up Jewish traditions, takes her to have her hair straightened, an act reminiscent of Rose’s nose job in ‘A Third Presence’ (1964). Her other aunt, Pauline, who, unlike the more bourgeois Olga, is committed to liberal causes to improve the lot of blacks, rejects Jewish traditions and mores. In describing Hillela’s absent mother and her sister Ruthie’s life, she recalls: there were family dinners on Friday night, the cake sales for Zionist funds . . . the same old parties – weddings, barmitzvas; those tribal Jews don’t know what it is to enjoy themselves spontaneously. (Gordimer 1987: 58) Hillela, however, becomes radically distant from these tame attempts on the part of her aunts to obscure or reject their roots. The aunts lose all contact with her as she becomes an exile from South Africa, a migrant in Turkey, Tamarisk and Accra. She becomes an ambassador’s mistress, then the second wife of a black cadre in the movement for Pan-African liberation and eventually, after his murder, the wife of the leader of a newly independent African nation. Even in this novel, however, there are traces of the negative depictions of Jews we have seen in Gordimer’s earlier works. For example, as Pauline grows older, the narrator relates that she ‘lifted her head, two streaks of grey, now at the hair-line, like Mosaic horns’ (217). Another issue in the context of Gordimer’s relationship to Jewishness, as noted by Andrew Vogel Ettin in his discussion of A Sport of Nature, is Gordimer’s uncharacteristic factual errors regarding Judaism (1993: 166). For example, Gordimer refers to Olga’s Friday night meals as a ‘seder’, a term used exclusively to refer to the ceremonial meal on Passover (1987: 65). In No Time Like the Present – which takes place in the new South Africa after apartheid and in which the main characters are an interracial couple, veterans of the struggle, Jabu, who is black, and Steven Reed, whose mother is Jewish – a similar lapse occurs. Steven’s brother, Jonathan, invites them to the barmitzvah of his son. Steven views the celebration as inexplicable, since they had no religion growing up apart from their circumcision, a condition which is obsessively mentioned in the novel and which is described as ‘some atavistic whim’ of his mother’s (Gordimer 2012: 235). The barmitzvah takes place in

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a synagogue which is explicitly labelled orthodox, despite the fact that men and women are sitting together, which they would not do in an orthodox synagogue (45). Gordimer describes Jonathan’s gesture towards his Jewishness as one of the unexpected results of the end of apartheid, which its opponents thought would end categorisation by race or ethnicity. Jonathan, instead, tells Steven: ‘It isn’t enough to be black or white, finish and klaar, the way it was, in the bad old days’ (43). Our sympathy for Jonathan and his non-Jewish wife, Brenda, is forestalled, since Gordimer makes it clear that they would have nothing to do with Steven during the ‘bad old days’ when he was on the run from the authorities, though they, like so many other whites suffering from amnesia, now assert that they were ‘not personally involved’ in the bad years ‘except in being white’ (241). Steven refers to the celebration as ‘Jonathan’s farce’ and their return home afterwards as going back home to ‘reality’ (51–2). Moreover, during the barmitzvah, Jabu overhears Brenda speculating about her brother-in-law’s sexual relationship with his black wife in rather vulgar terms when she is in the ladies’ room talking to a white, presumably Jewish, friend. In addition, Jonathan and Brenda prepare their son and themselves for emigration, an option that Steven and Jabu consider themselves for a time in the face of the corruption of the government and the growing violence caused by economic inequality and immigration, but which they, virtuously, ultimately reject. Steven makes the decision not to go abroad, but, in spite of their equality and history in the movement, Jabu’s unique ability to rise above Brenda’s insults and to appreciate others’ customs sets her above the other characters in the novel, and particularly the Jewish women, whose bodies are once again, though in a new way, deplored. Steven recognises Jabu’s superiority to them, to him and, in her history, to any but exterminated Jews or Arab Palestinians. Like Hillela, Steven’s redemption comes only through the identification with Jabu’s people.

Newer Voices The new Jewish writers in South Africa began writing in the 1980s, when the regime was most oppressive in reaction to the rapid crumbling of apartheid, and continued writing into the 1990s and beyond, reflecting its end and aftermath. According to Margaret Lenta, when in the 1990s Jewish writers moved ‘beyond solidarity’ to other subjects, ‘it seemed unlikely that they would focus strongly on the Jewish community, aging and diminishing in the period’ (2007: 163). Their widespread and apparent detachment from their ethnic roots may lie not only in the changing demographics of the South African community, but in post-apartheid politics and the pressure to become part of a ‘postcolonial state and national reconstruction’ (173). For instance, Albie Sachs, himself a child of Lithuanian immigrants, in his memoir The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990), described a multi-racial ideal for the new South Africa and postulated that the end of apartheid signalled the end of the importance of differences between races and ethnic groups. Nonetheless, this embrace of the new South African identity is not a wholly comfortable one for all contemporary Jewish writers. The ANC’s ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric and legitimization of Hamas’ (Kirchick 2012: 13) represents a shift away from Mandela who, though he was critical of Israel, had respect for Judaism and comradeship with the Jews arrested with him in 1963 and those who later supported him. These developments, combined with the memory of historical antisemitism in South Africa’s past, informs some of the work of the younger writers. The controlling metaphor in Tony Eprile’s aptly titled novel The Persistence of Memory (2004) is the perfect, preternatural memory of the Jewish protagonist, Paul Sweetbread,



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in the land of ‘national dysmnesia’ (2004a: 63). His coming-of-age story is replete with a grandfather who greets the victory of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, the pro-NaziOssewabandwag, with the words: ‘Zis is not for us a celebration’ (44). His Afrikaner friend in the army tells him: ‘All you Jews are Englishmen’ (164), and he expresses his ostracism in the South African army, the ‘weermag’, by comparing it to the Wehrmacht (176). After the collapse of apartheid, Paul testifies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding his participation in the massacre of retreating People’s Liberation troops, whose disarmament has already been brokered by the UN, ordered by his commanding officer Captain Lyddie. His ability to totally recall the events is an analogue for the charge of the commission. Yet to underscore the limitations of the ability of the commission and postapartheid South Africa to confront the past, his testimony is discredited by his psychiatrist who claims that Paul’s discovery of his father’s post-suicide body as a child caused him to have ‘delusions of memory’ (259). In Eprile’s novel, we can discern traces of many of the concerns of earlier South African Jewish writers. As in Jacobson, the novel is informed by the history of Jewish immigration to South Africa; Paul is a product of his family’s memory of his father and grandfather whose histories are included. According to Eprile, exiles tend to hold on to their memories very tenaciously . . . The people who stay wind up rearranging their memories, rather the way we might rearrange the furniture in a lived-in house . . . I try to explore different ways that we store – and, invariably distort – our memories. (Eprile 2004b: n. p.) Like Gordimer in No Time Like the Present, Eprile notes the move towards ethnic and religious assertiveness taking place in South Africa today, despite the official move away from identity politics. Towards the end of The Persistence of Memory, Paul considers changing his name or, as he says, ‘returning to my roots – it’s all the rage among my coevals to Hebraicize – and Saul Schwartbart has a nice dignified sound to it. I could be my own great-grandfather’ (Eprile 2004a: 217). However, Eprile confers a sense of historical consciousness upon his protagonist that Jonathan and Brenda lack. As Paul remarks: ‘who is Paul Sweetbread? A nice Jewish Christian boy, a liberal soldier in the army, a lousy good South African, a ware Zuid-Afrikaner Englishman? Can such a person even exist?’ (219). In A Time of Angels (2003), set on Long Street in Cape Town and imbued with magical realism, Patricia Schonstein explores the lives and memories of a segment of the less known Italian Jewish community in South Africa. The novel centres on the friendship and rivalry between Primo Verona and Pasquale Benvenuto, who are both in love with Primo’s wife Beatrice. In this novel, in which Primo takes in and develops a relationship with Lucifer, it is significant that Schonstein postulates that the hero’s knowledge that evil ‘was a more powerful energy than good, that good was a mere butterfly in the face of the storm’ stems from his childhood memories of his father and aunt who ‘by day . . . led composed and seemingly contented lives’ while ‘at night they were each confronted by recurring grotesque imagery stamped upon their psyches’ as a result of the Nazi Holocaust (2003a: 23). Despite the fact that Schonstein serves up her story of sexual jealousy, murder and magic with long passages on Italian food and the activities of the prostitutes on Long Street, her novel deals more directly with the Holocaust than those of any of the other South African Jewish writers we have explored here. But, although the novel bases its treatment of the Holocaust on the historical experience of Italian Jews, Schonstein applies the lessons of the Holocaust to other histories, even those beyond the human. As she writes: ‘I constantly

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question why genocide, ethnocide, fratricide, and war recur; why no lessons are learned from history; not content to kill our own species, we destroy others and plunder the natural resources of the earth’ (2003b: 11). In the novel, she speaks of Primo’s and Pasquale’s South African military service in Angola in much the same terms as she spoke of Primo’s family’s Holocaust experiences. As she says: ‘As adolescents, just out of school, they had been conscripted to the army and served together in Angola, where they were exposed to the frank horror of war. Here their innocence was shattered . . . They would carry these markings for the rest of their lives’ (Schonstein 2003a: 31–2). Schonstein’s setting of Long Street and her comments about this neighbourhood reveal, as did Jacobson in The Electronic Elephant, the disappearance of Jews from this previously Jewish landscape in the post-apartheid era. The Italian Jews are a dominant presence in the novel, which she says was based on her experiences living on Long Street in 1976. In 1994, when she returns there, ‘the cobbler, the general dealer, the dairy, the brothels, the health shop, the delicatessen, and the Muslim greengrocer had all gone’ (Schonstein 2003b: 7), and in their place are refugees who she learns had all fled ‘destabilization, poverty, dictatorship, or economic ruin in countries such as Mozambique, Angola, Congo, Senegal, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia’ (7). Unlike Jacobson, however, Schonstein seems to embrace the change, remarking that these new inhabitants had come because ‘Nelson Mandela had made it a place of new life, goodwill, stability and opportunity’ (8). David Cohen’s explicitly entitled novel People Who Have Stolen From Me: Rough Justice in the New South Africa (2004) is also centred on a street, Jules Street in Johannesburg, where Jews no longer live but where some still maintain businesses in the face of the constant crime wave throughout the city in the post-apartheid era. His protagonists, Harry and Jack, who are business partners and brothers-in-law, are said to ‘welcome the democracy that defines the new South Africa, in every way an improvement on the old . . . except one; crime’ (Cohen 2004: 16). This is in the face of gangs of criminals who ‘raid their shop and cart off their merchandise in the dead of night’, the changing demographic that now means ‘one in five of their customers is failing to fulfill payment obligations’ and the ‘secret stealing from within, by some of their own trusted managers’ (16). Cohen evokes the former glory of Jules Street, like Schonstein’s Long Street, as well as the resolve of the novel’s Jewish store owners to stay and do business: Once there were eleven furniture shops situated along the length of Jules Street, but now there are only three . . . Harry and Jack’s customer base swung dramatically from fellow white businessmen fled north over the Parktown ridge to the wealthy white suburbs beyond . . . Harry and Jack stayed put. (19) Lionel Slier, writing about the changing Jewish demographics of Johannesburg in the South African Jewish Report (2010), confirms Cohen’s fictional account. According to Slier, estimates of the number of Jews still living in Johannesburg range from 40,000 to 48,000, most in the north-eastern suburbs, having migrated from areas such as Kensington in the east and Mayfair in the west. In the area around Doornfontein, where the Jews first settled, Yiddish is no longer spoken and popular Jewish eastern European delicacies can no longer be found (Slier 2010: 27). Although Cohen’s characters, black and white, are static throughout the novel, he does give the white Jewish ones, and to a sketchier extent the others, each a history. Harry’s life is characterised by his experience of the antisemitism, particularly during the Second World War, that we have seen depicted many times in the novels of South African Jewish



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writers. Cohen writes that the influence of the South African Nazi party ‘reached right into the school, where numerous teachers – including Harry’s rugby coach – were members. The word Jood – Afrikaans for Jew – was regarded as an insult . . . and Harry was subject to antiSemitic invective on a daily basis from teachers and pupils alike’ (2004: 52). According to the novel, Jack Rubin, unlike the many immigrants from Lithuania who appear in the works of South African Jewish writers, ‘can trace his family history on Jules Street back to 1911, the year his grandfather . . . emigrated from the Hungarian section of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, Palestine’ (85). Cohen briefly traces the Rubin family’s progress in the burgeoning Johannesburg of the early twentieth century, whose progenitor began as a grocer on Jules Street, and remarks that, of the many immigrants to the city, a surprising number, 10 per cent of the white census as early as 1890, described themselves as Jewish (87). As the title of the novel indicates, the main subject is the crime that has become endemic to Johannesburg. Although Cohen’s characters’ attempts to understand the changes in their society are fairly conventional, the fact that they are the victims not only of economically desperate blacks, but also of more privileged ones and of their own white, Jewish relations does add a certain complexity to the situation. Nonetheless, Cohen implies that in the new South Africa economic inequities have contributed to an overall environment of crime that infects even those with access to legal avenues for advancement. Obi, who works for Harry and Jack, repossessing furniture from clients who are behind in their payments, states: ‘the new South Africa is same as the old. We blacks are still expected to make a living out of nothing’ (118). It may seem surprising, given the fact that neither Harry nor Jack are ever seen observing Jewish customs or holidays, that they resort to asking the rabbi how to resolve their issues with Ronny without turning him over to the authorities. This manouevre may perhaps be seen as consistent with the present Johannesburg’s Jewish turn towards increased identification with the community and the community’s reliance on their own community-based surveillance groups for security in the face of rising crime (Anonymous 2013: 5). In many ways, Damon Galgut, who was born in Pretoria in 1963, has a similar background to those of the other writers represented here: I don’t know too much about our family tree. On my mother’s side, the family came out from England about three generations back. On my father’s side, we’re from Lithuania, part of the Jewish Diaspora before the Second World War. The Galguts who stayed in Eastern Europe were all wiped out, I think. However, there is an odd thread to this story, because it seems we’re descended from somebody with a different surname (Richman or Reichman) who followed his half-brothers out to South Africa and changed his name to Galgut in order to link himself to them. (Galgut 2006) Nonetheless, Galgut is a prime example of contemporary South African writers, who, as Lenta claims, take it for granted that their subject matter must be South African and secular and who are detached from their ethnic roots. Lenta writes that Galgut’s work raises the question of ‘whether Jewishness, in the sense which it had in the early decades of the twentieth century, is ceasing to matter in this postcolonial state’ (2007: 172).

Conclusion: Travelling the Landscape Many of the writers we have surveyed here have written about their relationship to the African landscape, as we have seen in Jacobson’s description of the isolated house on the

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karoo in Dance of the Sun and his travel memoir, The Electronic Elephant, in which he notes not only the vast, empty areas through which he travels but also the absence of Jews from areas they previously inhabited. Gordimer has also speculated about the significance of the landscape that surrounded her as a child and that of the other African landscapes she only explored as an adult. Galgut’s In a Strange Room, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2010, chronicles how Damon, who is both author and character, travels from Greece to various countries in Africa, to India and to Switzerland. Galgut describes the ways in which through travel he can achieve distance both from his own identity and from the conflicts and history of his native country. In an interview, he has said: Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You’re not part of the society you’re passing through. It was a way for me to remain a South African without having to feel answerable to the usual set of South African questions, which I can tell you often feels, in a literary sense, very tedious indeed. Traveling, in general, disorients. (Tepper 2010) The narrator mentions events in South Africa but, since he has travelled, he can see that in some ways post-apartheid South Africa is not yet very different, and he is also alienated from the events in his home country. He states that upon his arrival back in South Africa ‘[e]verything has changed . . . The white government has capitulated, power has succumbed and altered shape. But at the level on which life is lived nothing looks very ­different . . . I am home now, I have come home. But he feels that he is only passing through’ (Galgut 2010: 29). Travel gives him the perspective of a spectator, and the storytelling alternates between two perspectives; sometimes it is told in the first person and sometimes in the third person, often in the same paragraph and sometimes in the same sentence. The narrator confirms this duality below in a passage that, as in Gordimer, describes the ­landscape as unreal: He watches, but what he sees isn’t real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through. Maybe horror is felt more easily from home. This is both a redemption and an affliction, he doesn’t carry any abstract moral burdens, but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room. (28) These flyblown and featureless rooms reflect Damon’s escape in travel from his own specific identity and history. Referring to himself, wandering in Zimbabwe ‘for no particular reason’, he says: ‘His life is unweighted and centreless, so that he feels he could blow away at any time’ (85). Damon encounters a number of other travellers and journeys with them in the course of the three stories of which In a Strange Room is comprised, but all of these relationships end either in loss or death. In a recorded interview he gave on the BBC to discuss his novel The Good Doctor, written seven years before In a Strange Room in 2003 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, Galgut admits that there is a subversive, homoerotic aspect to the relationship between the two male doctors in the novel, Frank Eloff, the narrator, and the idealistic Laurence Waters, who joins him where he works in a disused, crumbling hospital located in one of South Africa’s former homelands. Galgut explains, however, that nothing ever happens between the two of them and that unspoken feelings and unrealised



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interactions are far more interesting to him than any literary explorations of gay relationships. The encounters of the traveller in In a Strange Room with other men, Reiner and Jerome, likewise remain unfulfilled, and his attempts to save the life of his friend Anna end in her suicide, a sense of futility and displaced grief. In a line from the beginning of The Good Doctor, Frank tells Laurence, who believes that the ‘politics’ that have plagued South Africa’s history no longer matter: ‘The past has only just happened. It’s not past yet’ (Galgut 2003: 6). The significance of memory to the new South Africa and the ramifications of what its citizens choose to remember is a major theme for many of these post-apartheid South African writers. For the other contemporary South African Jewish writers discussed here, memories of their past in the old South Africa are inextricably linked to the legacy of the Jewish immigrant experience, the Holocaust and their own experiences growing up Jewish in an environment that was often hostile to Jews. Galgut is preoccupied with the ways in which we revise our memories and become estranged from our former selves. The protagonist of In a Strange Room reflects upon his younger self: ‘Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching’ (Galgut 2010: 17). In two other novels, The Quarry (2004) and The Imposter (2008), Galgut explores this duality in terms of identity. In The Quarry, a minister picks up a fugitive hitchhiker, who murders him and assumes his identity. In The Imposter, Galgut explores the contemporary problems of post-apartheid South Africa, particularly organised crime’s involvement with government corruption. Although the main character, Adam Napier, who retreats to a lonely house in the karoo to write, as Galgut did himself, is most clearly the imposter of the title since he takes on the role assigned to him by a childhood friend whom he does not remember at all, many of the other characters are shown to be imposters of one sort or another. Even in his most autobiographical work, Small Circle of Beings (1988), based on his experience of childhood cancer, Galgut distances himself by telling the story of a sick child from the point of view of the mother. Unlike Jacobson, Galgut does not lament the missing Jews in the vast, desolate landscapes he traverses where his travellers fail to ‘connect properly’ but, as Galgut writes: ‘In this state travel isn’t celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself’ (2010: 85). There is a vast distance from Millin’s insecurity as a Jew expressed through her obsession with the taint of ‘the other’ in God’s Stepchildren and Jacobson’s memories of alienation as a young Jew growing up in South Africa in the shadow of the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s to Nadine Gordimer, who was photographed alongside Nelson Mandela, both with raised fists, in a review of her book Life Times. Stories 1952–2007 in the Guardian, and Galgut’s sparse narratives featuring characters of indistinct cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Before and during apartheid, South African Jewish writers felt the separations institutionalised in their country, keenly and as Jews. During the years of struggle against the government, for a writer such as Gordimer, a member of the ANC, Judaism was either unimportant in light of the struggle or a symptom of reactionary attitudes of separateness and clannishness. For some contemporary Jewish writers, such as Tony Eprile, the compelling issues of truth and reconciliation are still viewed through Jewish, though assimilated and secular eyes. For others, such as Damon Galgut, the barren scenes and bleak landscapes in the novels may allude to the present period of South African history which has lost some of its variety to assimilation and emigration, but they more probably evoke a setting in which moral dilemmas are totally divorced from issues of ethnic or religious identities.

24 REPAIRING CRACKED HEIRLOOMS: SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH LITERARY MEMORY OF LITHUANIA AND LATVIA Claudia B. Braude

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n a posthumously published seminal piece on Jewish identity in the writing of Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, Michael Wade, anti-apartheid revolutionary and literature scholar, draws attention to ‘the absence of the Jewish dimension’ (1993: 162) in her work. ‘Any exploration of the Jewish theme in . . . Gordimer’s writing, especially her novels, is an exploration of the absent, the unwritten, the repressed’ (155). Commenting on A Sport of Nature (1987), Wade notes that the Jewish men in Gordimer’s novel, including the eastern European immigrant father, ‘are written out of the significant action’, a ‘familiar’ elision in Gordimer’s work generally (165). ‘And what of grandfather Hillel, for whom Hillela, the wild gene, the sport of nature, is named?’ asks Wade: Where is the man himself, bearer of the greatest name in the Jewish moral tradition, whose famous aphorism: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?’ constitutes both framework and ironic comment on Hillela’s course through life. (166) When Sasha, Hillela’s imprisoned activist cousin, mentions their great-grandfather Hillel, ‘the passage’, says Wade, ‘suggests that Sasha . . . has no notion at all of the historical resonance of his cousin’s name, no idea at all of Jewish experience having its own historical and ethical framework’ (166). Wade interprets the insouciant attitude to and ignorance of Jewish history and tradition, and the underlying absence in Gordimer, as ‘an escape from a ghost haunting the author’ (162). The ghost Wade has in mind is related to Gordimer’s eastern European immigrant father: Hillel is Gordimer’s father’s generation; he bore a name of the greatest moral significance, a tradition which produced that significance. Why didn’t he (metonymy for his whole generation of Jewish immigrants) transmit any of these matters to his spiritually needy offspring? (166) The question of what, in the complex fabric of racialised colonial and apartheid South African society, a generation of eastern European, predominantly Lithuanian as well as Latvian and Russian Jewish immigrants transmitted to their South African-born offspring



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is crucial. Also crucial is how this transmission, including its absence, is represented in South African Jewish fiction written in English. Since the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and apartheid, reimagining and remembering historical connections between the geographically removed countries, and most particularly between South Africa and Lithuania, has significantly increased, rendering visible the absences and silences.

Denis Hirson: The Remembering Subject The life of Denis Hirson (b. 1951) and his post-apartheid writing exploring his secondgeneration South African childhood and early years embody the geographical and psychic intergenerational movements of South African Jewish literary memory. Hirson was born in England to South African parents who returned to South Africa when he was two; his grandparents were among the approximately 40,000 eastern European Jews who migrated to South Africa between 1880 and 1914 (Mendelsohn and Shain 2008: 34). While most of these immigrants came from Lithuania, Hirson’s paternal grandparents came, in the first decade of the twentieth century, from close to Riga, capital of the neighbouring Baltic country of Latvia (Hirson 1995: 17). Originating from close to Minsk in Russia (Hirson 2006: 163), his maternal grandparents moved to then Palestine where Hirson’s mother, Yael, was born (163), before re-emigrating to South Africa during the depression years (Hirson 1995: 337–8). By the time of Hirson’s birth, they had permanently returned to Israel. In 1964, shortly before Hirson’s barmitzvah, his father, Baruch Hirson, a Trotskyist who actively opposed the white supremacist apartheid state, was arrested for his involvement in the African Resistance Movement, the underground movement that engaged in acts of sabotage against apartheid state infrastructure (of which Wade was also a member; Hirson 1991: 67). Detained in solitary confinement for three months before being imprisoned for nine years, he was instantly exiled from Hirson’s life. Three days after Baruch’s release in 1973, the Hirson family left South Africa. Hirson went to Paris where, working as a writer, actor and translator, he found the requisite ‘disorientation of strangeness’ (Hirson 2006: 74) to heal the South African trauma, ‘empty[ing] [him]self of the weight and tension of the past’ (73). Looking back a decade later, Hirson’s desire to reconnect with South Africa, which involved a difficult writing process (132), resulted in The House Next Door to Africa (1986) which rendered Johannesburg once more Hirson’s diasporic ‘way-station’, along with Riga, Minsk, Cambridge, London, Petach Tikva and Jerusalem (Hirson 2006: 134). However, memory of South Africa only truly came to Hirson in 2001 in the mournful wake of Baruch’s death in 1999. It was triggered when he read Georges Perec’s Je me souviens (1998; I Remember) (Hirson 2006: 134), in particular Perec’s inventory of sentences beginning ‘I remember’ which celebrates his postwar return to Paris, aged 10, from the ‘free zone’ where he was sent in 1942 (Hirson 2006: 142) and the city’s subsequent normalisation (Hirson 2004: 134).

Georges Perec Piecing together ‘something of my own cracked heirlooms, South African, European, Jewish’ (Hirson 2006: 17), Hirson meditates in White Scars on literature, loss and memory regained by describing his relationship to Perec as well as to other writers and their

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concerns – Ambrose Reeves’ Shooting at Sharpeville (1960), a banned record of the March 1960 massacre of sixty-nine unarmed civilians by the apartheid police, which countered the silence about the political reality in the country that was manufactured through apartheid state censorship; Breyten Breytenbach’s and Raymond Carver’s poetry; and Gordimer’s relationship to her Jewishness. Hirson was profoundly affected by Perec’s method of eliciting ‘small, impalpable feeling[s] of nostalgia’ (2006: 141) by recording ‘the lighter collective mental souvenirs of a whole generation’ (139), the ‘little pieces of the everyday, things which . . . all people of the same age saw, lived through, shared, and . . . were forgotten’ (139). Je me souviens ‘reached into me . . . strongly after my father’s death’, says Hirson (149), opening the sluice gates to his past: ‘My memory was like a tree that had been shaken by some great disturbance, and the sky was filled with wheeling birds’ (138). Perec’s ‘rhythmic structure but dispersed content’ (149), ‘a pattern that seemed to reflect the syntax of memory itself’ (Hirson 2004: 134), offered Hirson a way of writing autobiographical fragments and poems about his freshly remembered life in South Africa: ‘The brevity of his notation, the way he . . . darted from the surface of one memory to the next, now seemed an ideal way to mark out, in pointillist fashion . . . the tiny, inter-meshed, resurfacing co-ordinates of a gone world’ (Hirson 2006: 138). Developing his own collection of shared memories in I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (2004) and We Walk Straight (2005), Hirson invited his readers into a collective South African world of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Writing subsequently about Souviens, Hirson notes that ‘Perec’s own personal memories . . . seem to barely feature’ (2006: 139). Comparing the personal memories contained in Perec’s semi-fictional and semi-autobiographical W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975; W or the Memory of Childhood), which he completed simultaneously with working on Souviens, Hirson notes that the elements Perec recorded in Souviens ‘are generally so impersonal that they might not qualify as “memories” at all’ (139). Indeed, Perec remembered nothing of the first ten years of his life, before 1946: It remains inconceivable that I should have not one memory of rue Vilin where I must nonetheless have spent most of the seven (or six) first years of my life: I underline the words ‘Not one’, meaning not one memory of place, not one memory of any face. (Perec qtd in Hirson 2006: 142) Hirson understands that Perec’s amnesia is the consequence of the war and the Holocaust: When he does try to recall events such as the . . . obligation to wear the yellow star, the memories are so painful that he finds he has done mental surgery on himself to render them benign. He writes as if he has been affected by a form of partial amnesia. (142) Surviving Nazism, Perec ‘gives as his deepest reason for writing, his parents’ death in the Second World War’ (15) (his father died in the army a week before the Franco-German armistice; his mother was murdered in Auschwitz; Hirson 2004: 134), ‘and the need to affirm his own life against their disappearance’ (Hirson 2006: 15): I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, shadow in the midst of their shadows, body close to their bodies; I write because they left within me the indelible mark whose trace is writing: their memory is dead to writing; writing is the memory of their death and the affirmation of my life. (Perec qtd in Hirson 2006: 143)



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Strikingly for Hirson, despite Perec’s writerly philosophy, Souviens’ light, nostalgiaevoking, collective post-1946 memory ‘barely touch[es] on the Second World War, during which Perec lost most of his immediate family’ (2004: 134), and does not mention the central absence of his parents’ disappearance or anything associated with Jewishness and its mortal consequences (2006: 143). ‘Referring to events from before this time in Je me Souviens would have meant crossing back over into a deeply traumatic zone of experience’, Hirson comments (141). In contrast to the American Joe Brainard, whose mnemonic method Perec borrowed and who, in the early 1970s, transgressed silencing taboos surrounding homosexuality to frankly represent his male sexual encounters, Perec ‘buried his own identity’ (Hirson 2004: 135). Concealing as much as it reveals (Hirson 2006: 145), Perec’s book of memory is, for Hirson, even more profoundly a book of forgetting. Discerning within it ‘a powerful element of self-abnegation’, Hirson concludes that Souviens represents not simply the celebration of Perec’s integration into the normality of postwar France but the price he pays for this integration (145). Hirson does not mistake this self-abnegation and amnesiac concealment for a vacuous silence. Instead, he discerns a close relationship between Perec’s utilisation of the first person singular ‘je’ as ‘a front for the . . . shared “nous”, the “we” that had to be painstakingly pieced together after the wartime experience’ (147) and the experience and knowledge of the Holocaust that is explicitly absent from the surface of the text. Thus, Hirson reads Souviens as remaining essentially informed by Perec’s Jewish experience of the war, including the traumatic impact of his parents’ permanent disappearance. Hirson hears within the ‘descriptive lightness’ (147) of Perec’s fragments both ‘a distant echo’ (146) of the altered textual meaning of the first-person singular contained in ‘the writing that came out of the concentration camps’ (147), in which the use of the first-person singular ‘loses its individual substance’ (146), as well as ‘a deep trace’ (147) of the reality of the circumstances in which the individual was crushed ‘by the levelling pressures of constantly depersonalising, life-threatening degradation’ (146). For Hirson, Perec’s selfabnegation is characterised by ‘the tension between remembering and forgetting, between ­unmentionable personal loss and relief at the buoyancy of the post-war years’ (2004: 134).

Echoing Trace The deeper significance of Perec in Hirson’s writing is contained precisely in his recognition of this echoing trace. Reflecting on his compulsive relationship to Perec’s writing in mourning the loss of his father, Hirson recognises that it was partly Perec’s conflict between remembering and forgetting that drew him to Souviens (2004: 134). Without comparing their experiences, Hirson understands that Perec enabled the delineation of a tension between memory and amnesia in his own writerly enterprise, as well as the central void fuelling his own writing which was created within himself by his father’s disappearance from his childhood. Hirson describes leaving the Pretoria Local Police Station after his first visit, aged 16, to Baruch, then in his third year of incarceration: Behind us in the rear-view mirror . . . the road narrows to a prison corridor that my father walks down with his back to us. The road of absence, ultimately swallowed in a darkness which I, despite myself, push away from my life, since this darkness is a kind of death. My father, source of love for me, political struggler against a regime of death,

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becomes a long-term inmate in a place the regime reserves for its living dead. (2006: 96–7) This central absence remained unarticulated in the oppressive normalcy of white suburban apartheid life, shrouding Hirson in silence (26): Not once to any schoolmate or outside the walls of my family by blood of invention can I render [my father’s] absence present in words, he is an unnamed space to them, a shame and a fear, off the map of what they can hear. (31) The painful ‘territory of silence’ (26) Hirson occupied robbed him of his voice too: ‘My father is in jail / His silence fits my silence / like a glove. / I cannot hear my own voice’ (23). Searching, as a writer, for his voice, Hirson breaks the layered intergenerational silences within himself, his family and broader society. This search is precisely the subject of White Scars. Together with Perec’s pointillist methodology that enabled him both to access the lost Johannesburg of his early life and delineate the central absence and silences in his internal world, Hirson explores his fascination with the poetry of Breytenbach (which he translated from Afrikaans to English as a way to engage South Africa; Hirson 2006: 74),1 and of Carver (another poet finding language to replace silences connected to a disturbed relationship with his father). And he explores Reeves’ Shooting at Sharpeville to which, of all Baruch’s books whose material presence substituted for his absence, Hirson was most strongly drawn. A careful reading of White Scars and the significance in it of Sharpeville suggests that Perec provided Hirson with something additional, namely a crucial key to uncovering the even more deeply entrenched silence surrounding his parents’ and grandparents’ eastern European backgrounds. Read in relation to his elaboration of Perec’s significance in mourning the death of his father, Hirson wittingly and unwittingly provides a theoretical framework for discerning the deeply concealed mnemonic impact of the losses associated with eastern Europe that inform significant parts of South African Anglophone Jewish fiction.

Voices from Underground In White Scars, Hirson describes having returned repeatedly and obsessively in his father’s absence (2006: 31) to Sharpeville, ‘as one returns to the crack in a door because there is something one must know yet fears to find out’ (26). Ignoring the book’s text (26), he was only interested in the black-and-white-photographs of the unfolding massacre, ‘[t]he fallen [lying] in the stubble field, on the sand roads of the township, ungainly volumes of flesh with bullet holes in their backs, belly down in their own blood’ (25). Mimicking the external political silence about Sharpeville, Hirson’s wordless grief for his ‘living dead’ father found expression in images of others rendered doubly silent, posthumously censored by the perpetrators of their murders. Deeply attuned by his father’s imprisonment to hearing voices buried by the apartheid state, Hirson was among the few white South Africans for whom ‘the massacre went on speaking from underground’ (34); who could hear, says Hirson, quoting Ingrid de Kok’s poem ‘Our Sharpeville’ (1987), ‘the dead, buried in voices that reached even to my gate’ (Hirson 2006: 34). ‘Could this possibly have happened so recently, and so close to home?’, the young Hirson wonders to himself (16). For someone whose immigrant grandparents from Czarist Russia and Latvia had



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themselves escaped, respectively, a history of pogroms and the almost certain massacre of any remaining family members, the implicit comparison contained within the question is charged with deep personal significance: ‘My mother’s mother had lost much of her immediate family to a combination of Germans and anti-Semitic Russians’ (119) (Stalin had exiled Hirson’s great-grandfather to Siberia), and ‘in Lithuania and Latvia, only five per cent of their number, that is one in twenty Jews living there at the time of the German invasion during the Second World War, were still alive four years later’ (62–3). Relying here on South African-born writer Dan Jacobson’s (belated) memoir of his family’s Lithuanian trajectory Heshel’s Kingdom (1998) (Hirson 2005: 63 n. 1), Hirson is not entirely accurate. While the horrifying statistic is true for Lithuania, the Latvian situation was even more dire: by the time the Red Army re-entered Latvia in 1944, ending the war there, only a few hundred of the 70,000 Jews who had been in Latvia when the Germans invaded the Baltic states in June 1941 had survived the massacres perpetrated by detachments of German Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and their Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries. Jews in rural towns had been slaughtered in spontaneous and organised massacres; 24,000 Riga Jews were shot dead in the Bikernieki woods outside the city on two days at the end of 1941 (Cesarani 2009). Had Hirson’s grandparents not ‘saved their skins’ by previously fleeing eastern Europe, ‘then I myself would never have been conceived’ (Hirson 2006: 63), he says, implicitly relating his obsession with Sharpeville to the Latvian massacres that are the shadow events in his family’s background. Hirson does not himself suggest that as a child he consciously associated the Sharpeville photographs with the genocidal destruction of his family’s homes of origin. The political events in South Africa were shocking and all-consuming enough in and of themselves. Also, the family’s eastern European Jewish background was only scantly discussed. While his mother ‘occasionally’ gave Hirson ‘an inkling of her family’s Russian past’ with which she strongly identified (163), she would ‘trail off into a silence deeper than snow’ (164). For Baruch, whose Trotskyist political commitment was rooted ‘in the political wounding of the present’ (163–4), any relationship to Russia ‘seemed to have nothing to do with our family history’, says Hirson, ‘strenuously cut . . . off’ from the fact that, inter alia, both his parents ‘came from outside Riga’. ‘I do not remember actually asking my father where his family was from’ (162). ‘My past, of which I have been told next to nothing by anyone in my family . . . is still a foreign country to me’, he says, even as an adult (62).

Jewishness If Jewishness was, for his mother, ‘hidden in an egg of silence’, for his father it ‘was a burning coal that could not be held in the palm of the hand’ (Hirson 2006: 164). Baruch actively cauterised his Jewish background from his identity. In his autobiography, Revolutions in My Life (1995), while begrudgingly acknowledging his Jewishness as ‘a residue harking back to some past that helped mark out the trajectory along which I journeyed’ (Hirson 1995: 97), Baruch emphatically characterised it as a Jewishness ‘that denied many of its attributes’ (97). For example, subsequent to his Trotskyist turn away from Zionism, he rendered his intense leadership and involvement in the Zionist socialist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, as the product not of his ideology but his interest in dancing.2 Baruch, says Hirson, would have ‘firmly if not furiously rejected’ (2006: 119) any suggestion that his engagement with the world ‘had the least connection with his Jewishness’ (119).

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However, in the context of his discussion of the tension between memory and forgetting in Perec’s Souviens, Hirson represents Baruch’s life and political commitment as similarly characterised by a powerful concealing self-abnegation and mental self-surgery; by a loss of memory of his Jewishness that continued nonetheless to leave a deep trace on his life. Thus, Hirson suggests Baruch’s buried Jewishness was the basis of his opposition to apartheid. Sensitivity to injustice came to us out of an awareness of what was happening to blacks under apartheid, but also out of our Jewish background, the one we had some difficulty bringing into the foreground . . . Somewhere between the backs and the fronts of our minds, the shadows of these events went sliding, all the more substantial since they remained unspoken . . . (119) Here, too, Hirson heals the wounds of the past by breaking from the intergenerational silence to restore memory, representing the atmosphere of his Johannesburg childhood as having necessarily been coloured by the family’s eastern European Jewish background. Describing a time when more than 15 per cent of South African Jews spoke Yiddish (Sherman 1984: 155), which was his mother’s first language and the medium of communication with her parents, his memory of a childhood family outing to the Johannesburg Zoo includes not just the elephant ride, but (his paternal) ‘Granny Lily and Aunty Essie . . . arrang[ing] themselves on the bench, tak[ing] out their knitting, and conspir[ing] softly in a language that sounds like English, but turns into Yiddish if I come too close’ (Hirson 1986: 12–13). As a child, the Jewish past was not such a foreign country to Hirson after all. Hirson describes Yiddish as an ‘echo’ of the eastern European past, ‘a language of invisible history’, ‘of uprooting, of trembling and trauma’ (2006: 62). Spoken by people who resided in ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ (124), it was, he says, the ‘language of survivors’, ‘the music of survival’ (62).

Yiddish Considered ‘a small but important international centre of Yiddish creativity’ (Sherman 1984: 154), South Africa’s Yiddish literary circle produced a disproportionately significant body of literature which amplifies the echoing trace of eastern Europe that was difficult, in Baruch’s political world and Hirson’s childhood, to bring to the foreground. Yiddish poet Chaya Fedler (1898–1953) is one South African literary voice of the valley of the shadow of death whose poetry explicitly strikes the notes that Hirson continues to hear as the music of survival.3 Arriving in Johannesburg in 1926 from the Lithuanian town of Zhager on the Latvian border, she was, as she wrote in her poem ‘A Dream’, ‘the family’s sole survivor / Everyone else perished in the storm’ (1954: 58; translated by her daughter Rachel Abramowitz, unpublished, 27). Author of the volumes Shtile gezangen (1951; Silent Songs) and Bleter-fal (1954; Falling Leaves, published posthumously), Fedler published poems in Dorem Afrike (South Africa), the monthly publication of the South African Yiddish Cultural Federation. (From 1955 to 1970, Dorem Afrike was edited by David Wolpe [1912–2006], Yiddish poet and editor, survivor of the Kovno Ghetto and Dachau, and the quintessential voice of this valley.) Fedler’s home in Mayfair, a working-class, strongly Jewish suburb of Johannesburg, was a social centre for recent and more established immigrants (Fedler 1969: 93). Maintaining close contact with and continuing to support people in Zhager, including her parents, she was a founding member in 1935 of the Society of Zhagerer Landsleit which assisted



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Zhagerites in South Africa and Lithuania (111). As the situation there deteriorated, Fedler and her husband Solomon were inundated with pleas from her sister and many others for assistance in immigrating to South Africa (96). They were helpless. In the 1930s, perceiving Jews as a threat to the economic advancement of the Afrikaner nation, Afrikaner nationalists had become overtly antisemitic and pro-Nazi. Reigniting popular colonial perceptions of Jews, particularly eastern European immigrants, as non-European and unassimilable into white society, South Africa’s doors were closed, first to eastern European and later to German Jewish immigration. The Fedlers’ and others’ desperation was exacerbated by the comprehensive silence following Germany’s invasion of Lithuania. ‘Then we lost contact with overseas and we were in suspense’, Solomon understates (Fedler 1969: 111). South Africa was flooded with antisemitic propaganda from Germany (Furlong 1991: 26), and Johannesburg’s streets were filled with Afrikaans antisemitic posters. D. F. Malan, leader of the opposition ‘Purified’ National Party (NP), declared that ‘the Jewish problem . . . hangs like a dark cloud over South Africa’ (qtd in Furlong 1991: 68). Having previously opposed Jewish immigration, he voted against supporting the Allies in the war against Germany. (South Africa voted to join the war by a slender vote of 80 to 67.) Malan declared that ‘perhaps eighty to eighty-five per cent of the New Order (National Socialism) has been taken up in the Nationalist Party programme, which the Party will carry out in letter and in spirit when it comes to power’ (qtd in Mzimela 1980: 104). Unaware that on 1 October 1941 almost all their friends and family in Zhager had been murdered and anticipating eventual resumption of contact, members of the Zhager Society had continued their activities throughout the war (Fedler 1969: 111). But the Fedlers, together with the South African Lithuanian Jewish community generally, definitively learned the fate of family and friends when, in 1947, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry (1914–2003), the only rabbi in Lithuania who survived the devastation, visited family in Johannesburg. Oshry testified publicly to South African Jewry about what he had personally experienced in the Kovno Ghetto, and what, after liberation, he had subsequently witnessed and recorded when he had travelled across Lithuania documenting the genocide (Oshry 1951; 1995). Recalling the visit of a rabbi, necessarily Oshry, to his Lithuanian-born parents’ synagogue in Johannesburg, towards the end of his life theatre director Barney Simon (1932–95) described the community’s collective grief and trauma. Then in his teens, Simon was greatly influenced by the sight of his parents among the Lithuanian Jews in the synagogue weeping on hearing the description of the slaughter of Jews (Simon 1997: 120): One day a little rebbe came to the shul. I didn’t know who he was. I remember him being very small and he had a reddish beard. He got on the podium and started to talk, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was talking in a fast Yiddish and the whole synagogue, which was this synagogue of landslayt, began to rock and wail, and he was describing the slaughter of the Lithuanian Jews by the Lithuanian goyim [gentiles], not even by the Nazis. From what I understood afterward and in years later, he was describing the slaughter of the Jews in the Vilna ghetto. He was describing bayoneting and rapes and beheadings and God knows what and I will never forget looking up in the middle of all this chaos in the synagogue – that terrible wail – and seeing my mother beating herself . . . That is something that has always remained with me. (121)

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Oshry also published a series of articles in the South African Jewish Times (edited by Lithuanian immigrant Leon Feldberg, 1904–79), in which he described, among other things, the destruction of Zhager: There were 600 Jewish families in old and new Zager before the war. As soon as the Germans entered Zager, they established a concentration camp in old Zager where Jews were sent from the neighbouring towns. 8000 slave labourers were assembled there, many of whom were subsequently tortured to death . . . On the eve of Yom Kippur, 1941, all the Jews were taken out of town and executed. After liberation a non-Jewish eyewitness told me that the Jewish community of Zager, headed by their two Rabbis, marched proudly to their death singing Kol Nidrei. (Oshry 1947: 5) ‘They were led to the municipal Nariskis Park, where they were all shot to death’, Oshry records elsewhere (1995: 291).

Tombstone Fedler responded to the overwhelming grief about the brutal end of Zhager’s Jewish community by writing poetry. Itself an act of comfort (it ‘passes the time and suppresses the pain for the people I so miss’, she said in ‘My Life’, a poem written to her children; 1954: 90, translated by Rachel Abramowitz, unpublished, 46), poetry served as a mournful substitute for writing letters to her murdered parents and others: ‘No longer have I brothers or a sister / There is no one to write to / This takes its place / . . . / Expressions of my grief / The contents are shrouded in mournful black / There is no other way / Sorrow fills my soul’, she wrote in ‘My Reason for Writing’ (1; 1). Writing in Johannesburg and separated by fate and geographical distance from the people and place she loved, Fedler, in her poem ‘My Home’, erects a symbolic tombstone memorialising the Zhager massacre and its victims: At night quite often Surrounded by a sleeping world . . . I bury my head deep in the pillow I am back in my long-ago home . . . Oh where are the Jews that lived here once My memory takes me to the park where they now lie buried This is where the martyrs lie No engraved headstone to mark the spot No one even left to shed a tear In this once beautiful park the wailing grass and age-old trees Rustle at night and whisper loudly Only the leaves display their sorrow Moving to and fro as if Kaddish they are saying . . . Now my sister, brothers, Father, Mother Lie buried together in one large mass grave I am too far away to visit



Repairing Cracked Heirlooms 327 To weep for you or bring you flowers . . . Your memory always will burn in my heart. (1953: 27)

Burning with bodily memory and unable to contain the physical sorrow, Fedler became seriously ill in 1949 and died in 1953, eleven days after ‘My Home’ was published in the Afrikaner Yidishe Tsaytung (African Jewish Newspaper), a weekly Yiddish newspaper (Sherman 1994: 52) read by immigrants like Hirson’s grandparents.

Apartheid As they, Fedler and other grief-stricken South African Jews had been newly absorbing knowledge of the Holocaust in Europe, and specifically the near-total annihilation of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry, they were confronted, in 1948, by the electoral success of Malan’s National Party. Horrified, Jews feared the introduction of state-sponsored, Naziinspired policies. The NP, however, sufficiently muted its antisemitic rhetoric for Malan to include Jews in his definition of pluralistic white South African society. This acceptance of Jews as ‘white’ was accompanied by a profound and reciprocal suppression of Afrikaner nationalist and Jewish memory. Post-Nuremberg, promoting apartheid’s respectability within the international community necessitated public amnesia of the Nazi influence on Afrikaner nationalism. The NP did not want to be reminded of its links with the Third Reich and, relieved not to be reminded that they had previously been perceived as nonEuropean, South African Jews newly living under apartheid suppressed the memory of their fear and vulnerability. Across the political spectrum, Jews in racialised apartheid South Africa sought invisibility. The establishment Jewish community pursued seamless integration into white society; and Jews like Baruch, actively opposing apartheid and pursuing a non-racial society in which everyone would be integrated irrespective of race, obscured their Jewish identity in their rejection of all expressions of ethnicity (Braude 2001b: ix–lxxvi). In both cases, memory of the traumatic knowledge of events in Lithuania and Latvia was enduringly suppressed and distorted, forming largely unspoken historiographical and cultural shadows sliding around in the mind.

Nadine Gordimer and Rose Zwi: Parents from Zhager Nowhere in South African Jewish Anglophone fiction is this distorted memory and accompanying shadow effect more emblematic than in the writing of Gordimer, whose father, like Fedler, came from Zhager. In White Scars, Hirson discusses Gordimer’s representation of Jewishness in her 1991 short story ‘My Father Leaves Home’ (Gordimer 1991b: 57–66), in which the autobiographical narrator visits an unspecified eastern European country from where her father had emigrated to South Africa. (Hirson incorrectly states that ‘Gordimer’s father came from a village outside Riga, in Latvia, not Lithuania’; 2006: 174 n. 93.) As I have discussed elsewhere (Braude 2001b: xxvii–xxxiii; 2010), the children in the story silence their father’s past. They do not speak his language, they do not accompany him to synagogue on Yom Kippur, they know nothing about the family he left behind, nor even the name of his village: ‘I didn’t ask him about his village. He never told me; or I didn’t listen’, says the narrator (Gordimer 1991b: 66). Aspects of the story are reminiscent of details Gordimer

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recounts from her own childhood: ‘My father’s background was never discussed. It was indeed despised. My sister and I were brought up to think that these poor things sitting in some village in Russia [his family] were not even worth thinking about’ (1997: 109). Noting that she ‘push[es] away her father’, that ‘everything about him, including his Jewishness, is diminished in her mind’ (Hirson 2006: 174), Hirson, writing fifteen years after Wade, characterises Gordimer’s dismissal of the relevance of her Jewishness as ‘surprisingly flat for a writer with a fine sense of the multiplicity and inner tensions of her characters’ (173). ‘Dig[ging] the heels of her self more deeply into South Africa, distancing herself from her ancestral story’ (175), Gordimer’s fiction, he claims, ‘throws light on Black, Afrikaner and Briton, immigrant settlers of all kinds but almost never her own’ (176). Absent from Gordimer is any reference to the destruction of her father’s hometown, to the massacre of Zhager’s Jewish community, and to memorialisation of Lithuanian Jewry. She fails to develop the narrative juxtaposition of the lives of two brothers – one, like her own father, whose emigration to South Africa protected him from the death by genocide of the brother he left behind – contained in her incomplete, unpublished attempt at a first novel (Clingman 1986: 25). Written before 1946, the novel opens during the Second World War with the narrator’s father, an eastern European immigrant in South Africa, learning about ‘the death of his brother, and the latter’s entire family, at the hands of the Germans in Poland’ (26). This omission is especially glaring when compared with the writing career of the South African novelist Rose Zwi (b. 1928), another child of immigrants from Zhager. Zwi’s parents emigrated initially to Mexico, where Zwi was born, before moving to South Africa. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Zwi (who had emigrated to Israel before returning to South Africa, and ultimately re-emigrated to Australia), extensively explored the South African/ Zhager connection and significance in three related autobiographical novels, Another Year in Africa (1980), The Inverted Pyramid (1984) and Exiles (1987). And, as soon as it became possible to travel to the former Soviet Union, Zwi went to Lithuania, documenting this journey in her family memoir Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997). In Another Year in Africa, Zwi explores the autobiographical protagonist Ruth’s childhood with her Lithuanian parents in prewar and wartime ‘Mayfontein’, a fictitious combination of Johannesburg’s two working-class, predominantly Jewish suburbs of Mayfair and Doornfontein, scenes of Zwi’s actual childhood. Ruth’s childhood is filled with images of life in the shtetl Ragaza, the fictional name an inversion of the actual Zhager of Zwi’s parents’ home: There were photographs of picnics in Lithuanian woods. Of the village choir, of the river. There was also a street scene in Ragaza, a broad sandy road with little wooden houses under shingled roofs; a horse and cart in the distance and an occasional tree growing in a garden. (1980: 23) Ruth’s childhood was filled, also, with postmemory, the term used by feminist cultural historian Marianne Hirsch to describe ‘the secondary, belated quality’ of her own relationship ‘with times and places [in her parents’ Czernowitz] that’, says Hirsch, ‘I had never experienced or seen, but which are vivid enough that I feel as though I remember them’: Mediated by the stories, images and behaviours among which I grew up, [postmemory] never added up to a complete picture or linear tale. Its power to overshadow my own



Repairing Cracked Heirlooms 329 memories derives from the layers – both positive and negative – that have been passed down to me unintegrated, conflicting, fragmented, dispersed. (2010: 9)

‘[S]o immersed had [Ruth] been in the past of her parents – the sights, tastes, and smells of their shtetl; its language, tales, sorrows, and songs – that it seemed more real to her than her own culture’, observes Zwi (1984: 16). Along with the nostalgia, Ruth shared her parents’ traumatic memories of their experiences during the First World War, when the Russian forces expelled the Jews of Zhager to the Ukraine. As the child of emigrant parents, Ruth (and Zwi’s) consciousness was ‘burdened with . . . tragedy and persecution, with memories that weren’t even hers’, comments the fictional Berka, an established immigrant neighbour in Another Year in Africa (Zwi 1980: 11). ‘Growing up among immigrants whose songs and stories were steeped in nostalgia for “der heim”, Lithuania inevitably became my “home” as well. But their stories were not only of forests and fields, sledge rides and strawberry picking’, says Zwi herself of her parents in Last Walk: When my parents spoke about the time ven men hot unz arausgeshikt, when we were deported, I experienced the trauma of exile with them: the clank of the cattle trucks in the long journey through the steppes; the heat, the hunger, the thirst; the crush, the fear of an unknown destination. Box cars have never lost their horror for me. (1997: 7) The traumatic First World War stories were soon replaced in the autobiographical Ruth’s childhood and youth with the knowledge of and silence about what, in 1941, befell the family remaining in Lithuania. ‘Soon after the war [my father] had received a letter from his sister-in-law, the only surviving member of his family in Lithuania. My hand refuses to write . . . whole village driven to the park . . . mass grave . . . dead thrown in with the dying . . . Only I . . .’, Zwi writes (1984: 17). ‘He had never really recovered from the heart attack he suffered soon afterwards. I should have died with them, he said’ (18). Together with her father, Zwi actively inhabited the space of juxtaposition of their lives, survivors in Johannesburg, with those of the family brutally murdered in Zhager. Through Ruth, her autobiographical protagonist in The Inverted Pyramid and Exile, Zwi represents her adolescent and young adult search for meaning in the face of historical calamity and personal despair, including joining the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement of which Baruch Hirson had been a leader, and subsequently deciding to live in Israel. In Last Walk, writing about her post-Cold War visits to Lithuania, Zwi records connecting with her surviving aunt and first cousin, filling in the silences of her childhood, including the larger history of Zwi’s parents’ emigration from Lithuania, early immigrant life in South Africa, and her father’s shattering guilt-stricken grief at the events that had befallen the family he had left behind. He died, like Fedler, of a broken heart, misdiagnosed, says Zwi, as a coronary (1997: 5). In stark contrast to Zwi, Gordimer entirely circumnavigates this traumatic zone of Jewish experience and postmemory. Ignoring this background for nearly half a century, she elevates the resulting silence to the anti-racist, anti-apartheid principle of dismissing ethnicity. In 2001, responding to Family Sayings (1989), Natalia Ginzburg’s autobiographical exploration of the assimilated Jewish Ginzburg family, Gordimer reveals the mutually exclusive and gratuitous binary opposition discursively established between exploration of her Jewishness and anti-racism: ‘I begin to see that, involved as I was in the clamour of racism and anti-racism, I did not hear that other voice whose significance I’ve never pursued’ (2010: 591).

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Hirson, informed by his reading of Perec, and consistent with his description of Baruch, discerns in Gordimer’s political commitment and ‘fiercely rational humanism’ (2006: 176) both ‘a kind of amnesia’ and ‘an act of abnegation involving a deep uprooting of the self’ (174). ‘Is this the first generation Jewish South African who must draw a veil across her own past to truly enter the present?’, he asks (176), suggesting with the question that Gordimer’s self-abnegation is not simply the celebration of leftist Jewish invisibility in the context of non-racism but, again reminiscent of Perec, the price in South Africa of this form of social integration. Not mistaking Gordimer’s self-abnegation and amnesiac concealment for empty silence but as being characterised, rather, by a now-familiar tension between memory and forgetting, Hirson represents Gordimer’s life and work as remaining essentially informed, like Perec’s, by a deep trace of her Jewishness. ‘In “My Father Leaves Home”, the narrator, with a story not unlike Gordimer’s own, has a horror of oppression that is directly linked to the story of her Jewish father’, he says (173). Associating Gordimer’s anti-racism with her father’s silenced eastern European background, as he had previously associated Baruch’s political commitment with the silenced shadow story of eastern Europe, Hirson again excavates the concealed voices from underground.

Transmission of Affect The near-total silence about her father’s eastern European background in Gordimer’s fiction reveals the extent to which South African Jewish memory of the Baltic massacres, distorted in the racialised political context of Afrikaner Christian Nationalist rule, was suppressed and buried. In this context, it is not surprising, perhaps, that the Lithuanian and Latvian massacres and their South African memorialisation were not explicit topics of discussion within Hirson’s second-generational childhood hearing and linguistic comprehension. Regardless of this, the significant and enduring impact of having been surrounded by an extended family of Yiddish-speaking Latvian immigrants in the wake of the Holocaust is intimated in Hirson’s representation of his relationship to Yiddish. While he writes in English and does not himself speak the ‘music of survival’ that is Yiddish, it nonetheless remains, he says, a ‘part of my past’, neither ‘a foreign language’ nor one ‘that can be avowed’. Rather, it is ‘a vibration I know while the words remain outside my reach’ (2006: 62). Hinting at the memory alongside the forgetting, and at the deep trace of voices that continue to be heard within the silence, Hirson claims within himself a bodily knowledge, residing in a realm beyond the conscious reach of language, of the silenced, trembling eastern European background. In the process, he intimates that, like Zwi, he too experiences postmemory; and, consequently, intimates further that he was exposed to and affected by his relatives’ and others’ trauma. Hirson’s postmemory is not identical to Zwi’s, however. Zwi, a first-generation emigrant from Lithuania, grew up hearing explicit memories; twenty years later, the second-generation Hirson hears only their suppressed silence. Hirson’s claim of a bodily knowledge of Yiddish and its trembling past intimates that he, the remembering subject, wheeling birds flying from his shaken memory tree, was never in fact energetically self-contained but that, on the contrary, he was receptive to the affect, including the grief, of others around him. Social-political feminist theorist Teresa Brennan described this process as the transmission of affect in which ‘the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another’ (2004: 3), where ‘the “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the



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individual’ (1). Transmitted by eastern European immigrants to their South African-born offspring, this is the ghost to which Wade refers. Against this background, Hirson’s silent obsession with the photos of the Sharpeville massacre can be read not only as an echo of the external political silence about apartheid police brutality and as an expression of his grief for the loss of his father, but also as an echo of the even deeper, ghostly Jewish silence about the Latvian and Lithuanian catastrophes. Notwithstanding the silence, the buried voices of the Baltic massacres and the mournful atmosphere surrounding them, like those of Sharpeville, went on being transmitted, continuing to reach Hirson’s gate. Hirson’s obsession with Reeves’ Sharpeville can thus be read, in significant part, as the product of a transmission of (Yiddish) affect. Hirson’s representation of his writerly journey to break the collective silences that layered his South African Jewish childhood adds up to more than both the mental souvenir of his generation and the description and healing of his personal cracked heirlooms. In the process, Hirson helps to diagnose the condition of South African Jews of predominantly eastern European descent living intergenerationally with the suppressed knowledge and underground memory of the Baltic genocide. Read together with Wade, Hirson helps to delineate the central literary absences formed in reaction to the destruction of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry, and to map the literary contours of silence and articulation in the fictional landscape written in English by South African Jewish writers. As is clear from the cursory juxtaposition of poems written in Yiddish by Fedler with the sustained and celebrated writing in English by Gordimer, critical comparison between South African Yiddish and English writing would add a new and significant dimension to South African literary history and post-apartheid literary criticism, as well as to representations of the destruction and the posthumous legacy in South Africa of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry.

Notes 1. Breyten Breytenbach included thirteen of Hirson’s translations in Memoirs of an Albino Terrorist (1984). 2. ‘My move [to becoming a Zionist] was not overtly due to political interest or consciousness. It was, if anything, an unthinking response to a phone call inviting me . . . to a party organised by the Zionist movement. There would be food and there would be a dance. Would I come? A party was not to be sniffed at, especially if there was to be dancing . . . Of course I said I would come’ (Hirson 1995: 88–9). 3. David Fram (1903–88) is another; see Fram (1931; 1947a and 1947b); Frankel (2013).

25 AUSTRALIAN JEWISH FICTION: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Serge Liberman

Introduction and Apologia

A

bibliographer is an obsessive creature, the bibliophile equivalent of the hoarder; as the latter cannot dispose of a single item in his possession, neither can the bibliographer omit one author or title that may have a bearing on his task. Hence, the agony of deciding in an essay such as this on Australian Jewish literature whom to include and whom to omit, thereby making friends or enemies as a consequence. As a non-academic aficionado of books who has become a bibliographer of Australasian Judaica by chance, instead of adopting any analytical or interpretive approach to the subject, I prefer here to present a kaleidoscopic survey and guide to the Jewish prose writers of Australia, while focusing particularly upon those who deal with Jewish themes, having in mind both the general reader and the scholar who may some day find here the basis for further comprehensive and/or comparative literary exploration. And let it be noted that there is much room available for such a study. Apart from an occasional press or minor journal article or an unpublished university graduate essay on some aspect of Australian Jewish literature, there has with three exceptions been relatively little written on the wider theme (see Morera de la Vall 1992, Hart 1996 and Freadman 2007). Oddly, two of these exceptions (Morera de la Vall and Hart) have been doctoral theses written not by Australian but by overseas scholars. Valuable though they are, these studies share two basic flaws. First, being unpublished, they are not readily available outside academia and, secondly, while Morera de la Vall’s study ranges most widely across the field, Hart’s limits itself to a juxtaposition of Australian Holocaust writings with those of Canada and South Africa, both focusing primarily upon a certain canon of writers to the detriment and effacement of the many others who have through their works depicted Australian Jewish life in its multifarious dimensions as they have evolved as the nation approaches 230 years since its settlement. The third, a published volume by Australian Richard Freadman, focuses specifically on autobiographical writings. Many of these authors have several strings to their literary bows. They may, at the same time, be novelists, short story writers, playwrights, children’s writers and poets. Their themes and imaginations, too, extend widely. However, for the purposes of this chapter I will focus on those writers and works that address Jewish themes, while also



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acknowledging the work of authors with a more substantial broader-ranging oeuvre behind them. With the exception of fictionalised (auto)biographies I will not discuss life writing here. As Australia has acquired a swell of pre- and postwar Jewish migrants, there has been, over the past twenty years, a surge of memoir writing in keeping with the principle: ‘And thou shalt tell thy children!’ Even to begin to do them justice would require a substantive essay of its own. These memoirs are all included and annotated in Serge Liberman’s Bibliography (2011) while a number of them are accorded fuller treatment in Richard Freadman’s This Crazy Thing a Life (2007). Australia, originally home to some 300,000 indigenous Aboriginal people, was claimed by Britain in 1788 in large part as a penal colony, its First Fleet of eleven ships bringing 1,056 white settlers which included 778 convicts, of whom an estimated 8–14 were Jews. Today, more than 225 years later, its distinctively multinational polyglot population numbers around 22,000,000, of whom 500,000 are indigenous and about 110,000 are Jews. To attain this figure, averaging an increase of nearly 100,000 persons per year, the nation has grown from the outset largely through continuous migration, predominantly from England, central Europe and later, eastern Europe, while, with the lifting of restrictive immigration policies and a committed governmental adoption since the 1970s of a liberal policy of multiculturalism, migrants have been admitted increasingly from Asia and more recently from Middle Eastern countries. These figures have been paralleled by a comparable increase in the number of Jews, which has consistently hovered around 0.4–0.5 per cent of the nation’s total population. Throughout the nineteenth century, these Jews were dispersed between the major coastal cities and the more inland regional towns, with major waves arriving during the 1850s gold rushes, from Poland and Russia in the 1880s and 1890s and from Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, while the post-Second World War migration of Jewish refugees was, per capita, second only to that into Israel. In the context of this chapter, what these details serve to explain is why Solomon Stedman, a writer and editor of the Australian Jewish Forum in the 1940s, bemoaned the fact that nineteenth-century Australian Jewry had failed to produce any worthwhile Jewish literature. In retrospect, although it may be a cause for regret, it is hardly surprising. For one thing, these Jews, as already noted, mostly from England, were integrated without ­discrimination – unlike the Chinese immigrants of the 1850s, for example – as citizens who took a respected part in all aspects of civic, commercial, political, cultural and professional life centred in the main around the synagogue; while, secondly, the overall pool – or so-called critical mass – of Jews from which Jewish writers and an audience could be drawn was not conducive to specifically Jewish creativity. Hence, those who did write looked to general themes of broader public appeal. For the sake of clarity, I will divide Australian Jewish writers into one of three historically defined categories: (1) writers who were resident in Australia before 1939; (2) writers who lived through 1939 to 1945 in Europe and later migrated to Australia; and (3) a younger generation of writers who were either Australian-born or postwar immigrants, this group being in turn subdivided into those who have engaged with the Holocaust in their work and those who have dealt with other issues of Jewish import. As few writers are exclusively monothematic, their other works, where appropriate, will be dealt with under their one entry.

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Pre-1939 The writer credited with having been the first native-born novelist was John George Lang (b. New South Wales, Australia, 1816–64), a lawyer who was the grandson of a Jewish convict, John Harris, who, upon receiving a pardon, became one of the colony’s first policemen. Lang himself, on account of parental intermarriage, cannot be deemed to have been Jewish. Nonetheless, one is reluctant to omit him from this narrative, if only for reasons of sentiment and because the detective in his novel The Forger’s Wife (1855) is thought to have been modelled upon a contemporary, Israel Chapman, himself a Jewish convict who became the colony’s first police detective. Other Jewish writers followed sporadically thereafter, but overall there was little of Jewishness in their work, although Julie Blitz in the 1890s did write serialised melodramatic tales for a Jewish newspaper, though her novels were devoid of Jewish content (Rubinstein 1991: 439). In the vanguard of genuinely Jewish writing was Nathan Spielvogel (1874– 1956), born in regional Ballarat, a gold rush town in central Victoria, who bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spielvogel was a teacher, headmaster, itinerant bushman, community historian, local travelogue writer and the author of a collection of stories, Selected Tales of Nathan Spielvogel (1956). The Jewishness that he evokes is wholly open, warm and traditional and deals with social life in a small community peopled by sympathetic individuals. To offer but one example: in his ‘Mr Bronstein Learns his Lesson’, a rural German Jewish shopkeeper tries to attract custom by stressing his German background above his Jewishness. With the arrival of the First World War, however, local racism raises its head, not against his Jewishness, but on account of his being German, which leads him to be investigated as a German spy; this in turn sees him take refuge in the very Jewishness that he was at pains to underplay – an ironic reversal of the more common tendency in times of crisis. A contemporaneous writer, Solomon Stedman (b. Irkutsk, Siberia, 1894–1979), who had lived in Manchuria and in Brisbane before settling in Sydney, published a substantial series of stories on Jewish themes set in these places in The Bulletin, the Australian Jewish Forum and Sydney’s Great Synagogue Journal, between the 1920s and 1970s, but no single collection of them has yet appeared. At the forefront of the next generation of Australian Jewish writers were two women from Melbourne. Yetta Rothberg (b. Melbourne, 1919–2007), in her novella Thousands of Years through the Eyes of a Child (1980), tells of the daughter of an immigrant family of six children in what had become an iconic inner Melbournian suburb – Carlton – relating her life through a succession of personal milestones and experiences against a continuum of the family’s progressive disintegration. From those same Carlton streets where many Jews, in the main from Poland, Russia and Palestine, settled in the interwar years, Jean Holkner (b. Perth, 1926–2004), in her Taking the Chook and Other Traumas of Growing Up (1987), recalls with humour experiences relating to such ‘traumas’ as falling in love, the narrator’s short-lived musical career, living in an intimate Jewish milieu, negotiating through Christmas celebrations at her school and her two-left-handed tribulations in attempting to find a first job. In a subsequent young person’s novel, Aviva Gold (1992), she tells of a girl’s attempts to deal with her family’s uprooting from her safe Melbourne home to live in Palestine in 1935 to fulfil her father’s obsession with the Holy Land, from which Holkner’s own family had come – one of the few literary instances where Palestine or Israel features at all prominently in this nation’s literature.



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Where Rothberg and Holkner were children in Carlton, Pinchas Goldhar (b. Lodz, 1901–47) came to Australia as a 27-year-old immigrant, and went on to assume a seminal place in Australian Jewish letters. Goldhar was a Yiddish writer, a number of whose stories have now been translated into English in assorted publications, though apart from a slender booklet containing two of his pieces ‘Drummond Street’ and ‘Newcomers’, no full collection has yet appeared. He quickly became a pioneer of Yiddish writing and journalism in Melbourne, translated the short works of selected Australian writers to acquaint fellow immigrants with mainstream culture and wrote of Australian Jewish life in the 1930s and 1940s as he perceived it. His lyrical word-sketch ‘Drummond Street’ reflects Carlton Jewry in its states of flux, portraying a street which was vibrant and echoed to the sounds of many spoken languages, where Jewish shops and small clothing factories were opened, where Jews worked hard and noisily and saved penny upon penny through good times and bad. But otherwise he was a thoroughgoing pessimist. Where he wished to preserve a tight, communal Jewish life, he saw his people drifting away. In ‘The Last Minyan’, set in a country town, Jews hired to take part in a minyan go on strike, demanding more pay for their services; ‘The Funeral’ tells of the burial of a European Jew conducted by an Anglicised rabbi with a clerical collar; while in ‘The Pioneer’, a young Jew wants fellow Jews to sink their roots in Australia’s rural soil but he is increasingly abandoned by them as they depart for the cities – in the end he turns to a gentile Irish girl who, he feels, is the only person who genuinely understands him. In Goldhar’s view, Jewishness as he describes it is doomed. However, had he lived beyond his 46 years, Goldhar would have seen how, from the late 1940s onwards, with much-increased postwar migration, Carlton, Melbourne, Sydney and Australia at large came to life again, as Jews, albeit with sad eyes and suffering faces, wandered down those same streets wearing suits smelling of mothballs, greeted each other with the traditional ‘Shalom Aleichem’, pried into each other’s livelihoods and lauded the Golden Land, Australia. This homely intimate Jewish communal phase lasted into the 1980s, by which time most of its Jews had either gone the way of all flesh or, with increased prosperity, moved to other more upmarket suburban climes. Something of the perpetual motion of Carlton is captured in The Heart Is Where the Hurt Is (1966) by fourth-generation Australian Harry Marks (b. Melbourne, 1922–77), in which a young Jewish girl whose parents have been captured in Germany by the Nazis is sent to stay with relatives in Melbourne, there confronting difficulties with schooling, awakening adolescence, antisemitism and first love. As he writes: Fondly, [Sophie] thinks of the Carlton days when they first came to Melbourne. ‘Little Jerusalem’, Gentiles used to call it, before the great exodus to St. Kilda. Hard, sad days, touched with many happinesses. Days already memories. But alive! So alive! People everywhere. Always someone to talk to. Streets vibrating with talk. Day and night. There was time to talk, whatever else had to be done. Over fences and cast-iron gates, in shops, out of shops, sitting at windows or on ribbon-like verandahs . . . The trickle became a stream, a stream that has never ended. And whether the newcomers surged from the boats into the arms of excited friends and relatives, or stepped ashore unnoticed, all had the sickening moment of doubt, of standing at the edge of an abyss of no return. (Marks 1966: 31) In a second book, published posthumously, Unicorn among the Wattles (1979), Marks sets his narrative in the First World War, telling of a Jewish English soldier and an Australian companion who fight together for the Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps),

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highlighting the ethic of mateship that binds them, mateship being a highly valued Australian ethic that embodies equality, loyalty and friendship; the book closes with the Jewish soldier at war’s end settling in Melbourne. Carlton again is the setting of Light and Shadow (English translation 1963) by another Yiddish writer, Herz Bergner (b. Radimno, Poland, 1907–70), who arrived in Australia in 1938. Encompassing three generations of an immigrant Jewish family, Bergner casts a sharp light upon the different ways in which the older generations and their three children adapt to the new land and the tensions and compromises that have to be made in maintaining the religion and traditions of the Fathers in the face of challenging confrontations with the inescapable, here-and-now, pluralistic social, political and cultural realities and diverting distractions of Australian life. An earlier novel, the prize-winning Between Sky and Sea (1946), also translated from Yiddish – another novel and a further five collections of stories in Yiddish by Bergner await translation – is set on the high seas. More tightly written, intense and tragic, it depicts graphically a freighter of Jews fleeing Poland in search of refuge during the Second World War, only to be denied entry everywhere, the outcome being their wholesale death when the ship sinks in mid-ocean. Judah Waten (b. Odessa, 1911–85) came to Australia with his parents when he was two and became recognised as the nation’s first ethnic writer. He was the third in the triumvirate that included Pinchas Goldhar and Herz Bergner through their having been mutually supportive writers, social realists and politically left-leaning. He remained a committed communist to the end. In the same vein as Bergner’s Light and Shadow, his Alien Son (1952), The Unbending (1954), So Far No Further (1971) and particularly Distant Land (1964) variously portray immigrant families wrestling with issues relating to migration and adaptation, the struggle to make a living while preserving the Yiddish and Russian culture brought from home, and the subsequent shedding of their inhibiting Russian past for Australia’s freedoms and social mobility, which permitted their full entry into its politics and eased the way, especially for the young, for inter-ethnic relationships such as that of the Jewish girl and Catholic Italian boy in So Far No Further. Where Waten differs substantially from Goldhar and Bergner is in his greater optimism, pathos, humour and light. A little-known if not forgotten name is that of Benjamin Newman Jubal (b. Horodenko, Poland, 1901–61), a one-time actor and stage producer trained by Max Reinhardt, who arrived in Australia from Vienna in 1938. His book The Smile of Hershale Handle (1947), a collection of vignettes and satires that features visionaries, madmen, artists, golems, heretics and thieves, is variously ironic, whimsical, sad, tragic and bitter, particularly over the violence of the world – a book that, in sum, exhibits a pathos and sensitivity and that, given its date of publication, is probably the earliest Jewish work written in Australia with the Holocaust as a significant part of its backdrop. However, placing the mantle of prophecy upon one of his characters, a poet, Jubal is sufficiently hopeful to write touchingly: In the coming world there shall be no interests. In the coming world there shall be no sovereign states and no frontiers. The world shall be a great and free one – sky, earth and water. It shall belong to everybody. All shall be equal. All shall have the same opportunities. And shall have the same. Then – shall be no more war. (1947: 105) Stan Marks (b. London, 1929), who came to Australia at the age of two, was a journalist and public relations officer. His God Gave You One Face (1964) also deals with the legacy of the Holocaust, telling of a Jewish woman’s recognition of a former guard in a concentration



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camp where she had been an inmate and where several of her relatives died. After a heated exchange, he plunges to his death down the staircase of her home and the woman is put on trial for manslaughter, giving rise to issues such as the ever-taxing dilemmas of moral and legal justice, forgiveness versus retribution and individual versus collective guilt. A lighter, more comical book is Is She Fair Dinkum? The New Aussie Wife (1967), a humorous narrative of an Australian Jew who marries a Viennese woman who speaks no English, is bewildered by the local customs, mores and jargon but who can nonetheless make her presence well felt. Extending the range of themes of Australian writing thus far presented are the works of Alan Collins (b. Sydney, 1928–2008). His first book, Troubles: Tsorres (1983), contains a pot-pourri of twenty-one stories, variously serious and humorously anecdotal, some presaging the major issues that were to inform his trilogy The Boys from Bondi (1987), Going Home (1993) and Joshua (1995). Apart from tales of a Jewish boy brought for cleansing before the church, Jewish atheists seeking to escape from the observances of their creed, and other, more fanciful stories that touch upon dybbuks and suggestions of reincarnation bordering on the surreal, the main thrust of the stories and the novels is grounded very physically in growing up during the Depression and in postwar Sydney. Collins’ trilogy features encounters with antisemitism and the schism between the superior ‘aristocratic’ Jews who had settled in Australia in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth-century eastern European arrivals; the challenge of making his way as an orphan raised in a children’s home with refugee children during Hitler’s rise to power; the period that saw the transformation of Palestine into the Jewish State in 1947–8 and the ensuing conflicts between Arab and Jew, moving on to 1967 with the Vietnam War at its height; all this as the protagonist continually seeks a clear and comfortable individual identity. In considerable part different again from other Australian Jewish writings is the work of poet, short-story writer and scholar Fay Zwicky (née Rosefield, Melbourne, 1933) who, in her poetry collections Isaac Babel’s Fiddle (1975) and Kaddish (1982) and through her stories in Hostages (1983), variously explores her Jewish heritage, autobiographical experiences and sense of alienation, writing too about her Russian grandfather whose cultural displacement in Australia was to save him from the Holocaust, and delivering an elegy for her father who drowned without the Kaddish being recited for him. Her Kaddish volume, in particular, which is based in part upon the Hebrew memorial prayer for the dead, blends the religious and poetic rituals of both the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish traditions. Her more recent work The Gatekeeper’s Wife (1999), which deals with the loss of her husband, reflects upon the lighting of the memorial candle and likens his death to the loss of Zion. Also laced with religious motifs, but more intimately directed towards God in the personal questioning and petitioning Hasidic way, have been the slender, woodcutillustrated poetry volumes of one-time genealogist and ordained Habad rabbi Shmuel Gorr (b. Melbourne, 1931, d. Jerusalem 1988), reputedly descended from a long line of rabbis including the Maharal Rabbi Loew of Prague. Among these titles are The End of Days (1968), Mono-Poems Series (1967), No Haloes (1968) and Something Happened at Lubavitch (1968). Writing in a wholly secular vein was Morris Lurie (b. Melbourne, 1938–2014), a prolific, vigorous and often mordant novelist, short-story writer and author of children’s books and reportage. Among his strongest works are two allied comic novels, Rappaport (1967) and Rappaport’s Revenge (1973), which recount the adventures of a Melbourne antique dealer and his friend; his zestful and serio-comic collections Running Nicely

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and Other Stories (1979) and Two Brothers Running (1990) – the first set in Europe and England uncovering human tensions, frailties and people’s tragicomic existences, the latter, a narrative in which two brothers who live opposite lives come together through a succession of bizarre incidents; Flying Home (1978), a more self-contained work about a blocked painter who, escaping a loveless family, travels across Europe in search of a place that he can truly call home, at the end of which he finally lands with relatives in Israel; and Whole Life: An Autobiography (1991), which, in distinct contrast to the zaniness of much of his other work, throbs with the pain, anger and sorrow of family dysfunction at its most extreme. Two further fictions dealing with Australian Jewish life are Maurie Rosner’s The Bell Tolls for Thee and Other Stories (2002), nostalgic stories of life in 1940s’ and 1950s’ Australia, telling of a boy eager to become the great Aussie bloke, yet walking to synagogue every Shabbat morning while selling the communist paper Tribune on Sundays; and Mordecai MacCobber: The Story of a Scotch Jew in Australia: His Many Successes and More Dismal Failures (fourth edition, 1946) by Abraham Samuel Gordon (b. Riga, c. 1865–1936), an amusing collation of diverse extracts from the author’s posthumous papers, newspapers, official documents and private family records.

Post-Second World War Refugee Writers Inevitably, because Australia became home to a large contingent of immigrants who lived though the war years abroad, the Holocaust features substantially, although not exclusively, in their creative works. However, in the actual count, their fiction and poetry may not be as abundant as one may expect. In the main, their writings have been directed towards full-length autobiographies written independently or under the aegis of Melbourne- and Sydney-based guided programmes aimed precisely at recording their experiences – hence, as previously explained, falling outside this survey. Having stated this, we will begin this section with two authors who lived through this period in Europe and who stand alone as near-anomalies in the central thematic mainstream of Jewish creativity. Gedaliah Shaiak (b. Lowicz, Poland, 1905–83) was a Yiddish writer, journalist and editor who had lived in London and Poland, volunteered for the Polish Army in 1939 and made his way to the Middle East where he eventually worked as a correspondent during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. He arrived in Melbourne soon after, where he returned to journalism and became the Australian historian of the Lowicz Yizkor-book. The anomaly here lies in the fact that, unlike all other Australian works, his novel Force and Defiance (1982), translated from his Yiddish Der Opgot in Feier (1977), is an old-school historical saga set in seventeenth-century Poland of a Jew in the service of a feudal lord subjected to the machinations of a priest. Wholly different in yet another way and more contemporary is Reported Missing (1979) by Lilian Barnea (b. Warsaw, 1932). Unique among local writings in being set squarely in Israel, it tells of a woman’s brief affair with a younger man who is mobilised into the Israeli army during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and does not return, presumed missing. Apart from two stories, ‘My Grandfather’ and ‘A Man’ (in Keesing 1978) about a Polish Jew in wartime Warsaw who returns under a Polish identity to his non-Jewish wife for refuge, no other works by this author can be traced. Where many writers remain in their lives and in their writings contentedly fixed in one place, David Martin (né Ludwig Detsinyi, Hungary, 1915–97) was a peripatetic man who



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lived in Holland, Palestine, Spain during its Civil War, London and India before arriving in Australia in 1949. A prolific novelist, short-story writer, children’s writer, poet and correspondent, he had been a one-time communist but later became an internationalist in outlook with wide human sympathies, who wrote of people and children of diverse ethnicities. His most celebrated novel, Where a Man Belongs (1969), recounts a physical and spiritual journey undertaken by a former German Jew and a solitary Australian bookkeeper with little in common, the one returning to his past, the other looking towards a possible happier future with a loving compatible wife. A fine companion to Martin’s fiction writings is his autobiographical My Strange Friend (1991). Of the writers who were personally involved with the Holocaust, the most eminent are Jacob Rosenberg, Moshe Ajzenbud and Maria Lewitt. Jacob Rosenberg (b. Lodz, 1922– 2008) was deported to Auschwitz where he lost his entire family and was liberated in 1945. He migrated to Melbourne in 1948 where he became a major Yiddish and English-language poet, short-story writer and war memoirist. His Lives and Embers (2003), a collection of stories and vignettes, like his poetry books My Father’s Silence (1994), Twilight Whisper (1997) and Behind the Moon (2000), draws on his experiences, reflecting upon humanity and culture, suffering and survival, migration and exile, remembrance and redemption. Through his stories of captivity in ghettos and camps, deeply inspired by the midrashic tradition of biblical interpretation, he explores the limits of humanity through scripture, history and folklore. His memoirs, East of Time (2005) and its sequel Sunrise West (2007), possess the same qualities and an added lyricism. His last book, The Hollow Tree (2009), is a fable of a man who, having lost family, friends, loves and home through war, becomes a modern Odysseus in search of a personal Ithaca. Another established Yiddish writer who immigrated after the war is Moshe Ajzenbud (b. Niesvizsh, Poland, 1920) whose The Commissar Took Care (translated 1986) records a young man’s escape from his hometown and subsequent wartime adversities and endurance in a number of labour camps and prison camps following the Red Army’s takeover of eastern Poland, leading to his postwar reunion with his family in Uzbekistan. Like Rosenberg, Maria Lewitt (b. Lodz, 1924) wrote two sequential books, Come Spring (1980) and No Snow in December (1985). These are novelistic accounts of her Second World War observations and of her survival in Warsaw as an adolescent on the run. In hiding on false papers, the family were saved by their ‘Aryan’ looks until they were liberated by the Russians. The sequel describes her migration with her husband to Paris and then to Melbourne in 1949, where she is confronted by strange and desolate landscapes, suspicion of ‘reffos’ (refugees), language barriers and exploitation. Her initial difficulties are leavened by kindly empathic Australians whose virtues lead to a celebratory acceptance of her new adoptive home. To these we would add Zatt izz Apples, Sir (1986) by Janka Abrami (b. Poland, 1921– 93), a novel of a Polish Jewish family that arrives in Melbourne from Israel and begins to blend into the Australian way of life; Josef Nowak’s (né Sal Alba, Poland, 1922) The Sacrifice (1990), set initially in Second World War Russia and then in Melbourne, which relates a friendship between a German and a Jew, and offers an interpretation of the Holocaust by a Jewish Buddhist monk; Ian Lustig’s (b. Poland, 1930) Echoes of the Wind (1995), which tells of a Second World War survivor and successful businessman who, consumed by hatred for Germans, is obsessed by revenge; Kurt von Trojan’s (b. Austria, 1937) Mars in Scorpio (1990), which portrays the narrator’s falling under the spell of Adolf Hitler, only to discover that his mother is Jewish, which causes the Nazi and the Jew embedded

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within him to wrestle even after he migrates to Australia; Harry Rosenberg’s The Leica and Other Stories (1994), which offers a fictionalised memoir of a Polish Jew deported to Siberia during the Second World War by the Soviets; Laura Lange’s (a.k.a. Liesl Lowy) Collision Course (1995), which describes a young Jewish woman’s early search for love, passion and security in her youth in Nazi Germany and, later, in Australia; and Ivan Arije Singer’s (b. Hungary, 1935) Trees and People and Fifty Other Stories (2002), which records anecdotes of the Second World War, gentile saviours of Jews and assorted people set in Australia, Poland, Hungary and Israel.

Post-Second World War Generation Holocaust Materials An interesting development in Australian Jewish letters is the adoption of the Holocaust theme in its diverse variations into their poetry and prose by younger writers who had no personally lived experience of it. This, as indicated in the preceding section, need not be surprising. Australia’s substantial survivor influx, the evolution of its Jewish high school network and university Jewish Studies faculties, public education programmes, Jewish museums, press, bookshops, imported films and commemorations and sporadic eruptions of antisemitism repeatedly evoke references to the Holocaust, notwithstanding the successful economic and social integration of Australia’s contemporary Jewish community. These cannot but impact upon Australia’s younger Jews. Among the most prominent of these is Lily Brett (b. Germany, 1946) whose novels and poetry, whether set in Melbourne, Poland or New York, are dominated by the Holocaust. In her novel Just Like That (1994), the protagonist, a daughter of survivors, is a professional obituary writer who escapes Melbourne for New York but cannot escape the reminders of who she is and where she has come from. In Things Could be Worse (1990), Brett explores memory and forgetting and issues of conflict and reconciliation arising from her protagonists’ experiences of the Holocaust; in Too Many Men (1999), she writes of a visit back to Poland with her survivor-father to confront the past, following this with a sequel, You Gotta Have Balls (2005), in which she and her 87-year-old father seek further meaning and purpose in their lives through new ventures and enterprises. Her several volumes of poetry – for example, The Auschwitz Poems (1986), After the War (1990) and Poland and other Poems (2001) – further explore the horrors of war, the miracle of survival and the affirmation of life despite the scars left upon both the survivors and their children. Born in Poland in 1939 and arriving in Australia in 1948, journalist, biographer and novelist Diane Armstrong, in her novel Winter Journey (2006), based on an incident from 1941, tells of a forensic dentist who travels sixty years later to take part in an investigation of a rural village whose inhabitants herded around 1,000 of its Jews into a barn and burned them alive. Her assignment leads her into the heart of a bitter divided communal struggle which further evolves into a personally challenging retrospective of her own past. A later novel, Nocturne (2009), focuses initially upon a teenage girl who dreams of heroism and romance. But when war breaks out, illusions recede into the past as she meets an activist in the Polish underground and airman who flies bombers for the RAF, while, left in occupied Warsaw, in a setting of confusion, cruelty, betrayal and testing of humanity, she is forced into its ghetto where she becomes involved in the uprising. In the writings of Serge Liberman (b. Fergana, Uzbekistan, 1942), who arrived in Australia as an 8-year-old boy, the previously mentioned suburbs of St Kilda and Carlton



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also come frequently to the fore in diverse narratives – St Kilda having been where he lived and Carlton where he worked as a family doctor for many years – as does the Holocaust in his six collections of stories. Having himself, as the saying goes, ‘never been in Treblinka’, he shies away from the camps, ghettos and deportations. In these stories, his characters are instead fictionalised renderings of postwar Jews, his own Polish-born family included, whose personal, family and social lives, experiences, personalities and beliefs have been shaped by the war endurances. Through them – most evident in his On Firmer Shores (1981), Voices from the Corner (1999) and Where I Stand (2008) – he explores the trials of their pasts, their tribulations of exile, followed by those of migration and adjustment in a new land; questions God’s seeming absence, silence and/or indifference to the Holocaust and to evil more widely; illustrates the distancing and conflicts between parents and children to the point of alienation, the tractions of assimilation and intermarriage; seeks meaning and purpose in a dysfunctional world; and, to the commonly debated agencies of free will and determinism at play in all events, adds a third ingredient, that of chance, so ubiquitous in every aspect of people’s lives, actions, beliefs, fortunes and misfortunes – chance having played decisive roles in surviving or succumbing to the war. A further novel also squarely set in Carlton is Scraps of Heaven (2004) by Arnold Zable (b. New Zealand, 1947), a recording of reminiscences of his childhood, youth and friendships. He grew up when Carlton was still a densely Jewish residential suburb, with its shuls, Jewish cemetery, Yiddish cultural centre, library and theatre, peopled by Jews and Italians living cheek by jowl, the Jews ‘celebrating survival’ even as they live with stories of horror that they cannot stop re-telling. Among his other ‘Jewish’ novels are Jewels and Ashes (1991), an account of a journey of discovery to his parents’ old world of Europe with his ancestral ‘ghosts’, forever lost through the Holocaust; Café Scheherazade (2001), set in seaside St Kilda, also a densely Jewish suburb, which tells of the survivor owners of the café from Vilna, its clientele and their stories and of the restaurant’s eastern European cuisine; and The Fig Tree (2004), in which Zable relates the stories of Greek villagers who journeyed to and from Australia, of Jews lost in the Holocaust and now living in the postwar diaspora, and of Jewish actors and writers who have found new audiences in their adoptive country. The Holocaust retains its fascination for the second generation, as reflected in Yvonne Fein’s (b. Melbourne, 1963) novel April Fool (2001), a crime story about the daughter of Holocaust survivors and undercover hunter of Nazi war criminals who finds herself involved in a nationwide conspiracy. A wholly different kind of book, based on fact, The Torn Rabbi (2008) is an account of a charismatic American Hasidic rabbi in Melbourne who draws towards himself young people captured by his music and kabbalistic tales as he abuses a number of women in his thrall. Other variants on the Holocaust and related themes include Dancing with the Hurricane (2004) by Leon Silver (b. Shanghai, 1941) about a brash and successful businessman who is led by events to examine his life through an autobiographical recalling of his family’s flight through Danzig, Israel and Shanghai to Australia where he struggles to find his identity; Rachel’s Chance (1987), an autobiographical novel by Peter Kohn (b. Melbourne, 1955) of a Viennese Jewish family who also escaped in 1938 for Shanghai before moving to Israel and then Australia in 1958, the narrative carried forward through its sequel View from a Sandcastle (1998) about an immigrant boy in 1960s’ Melbourne confronted by insecurity, racism and the obstacles to the way of acceptance; Samovar (1996) by Ramona Koval (b. Melbourne, 1954), a tale of a woman visited by her family ‘ghosts’ reaching back to

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Poland’s wartime past in dialogues shot through with pain and with questions about how to continue living with a tangible purpose; Suzy Zail’s The Wrong Boy (2012), a fictitious story about a piano-playing 15-year-old Jewish girl sent to Auschwitz with her Hungarian parents who falls in love with the son of the German camp commander; Joan Zawatzky’s The Third Generation (2012), a narrative of a married Jewish woman kept ignorant of her parental background who, during an affair with a non-Jewish lover with a background history of his own, is prompted to gain an understanding of her own heritage so as to pass on to her children what also belongs to them; and Shira Nayman’s (b. South Africa) collection of stories Awake in the Dark (2006), which tells of the Holocaust, parent–child relations, faith and the impact of history upon people. General Andrea Goldsmith (b. Melbourne, 1960), a fifth-generation Australian, is the author of seven novels. Rich in ideas and characterisation, they tell of contemporary life in all its diversity through narratives of ambition, love, family, art, music, relationships and Australian Jewish identity, this last subject being the theme of her essay ‘Talmudic Excursions’ (Goldsmith 1996: 50–3). Her most acclaimed work, The Prosperous Thief (2002), although technically about the Holocaust, traverses seventy years from the 1930s onwards and deals with questions of survival, memory and identity, explored through the cultured, educated descendants of a family, the Lewins, in England and America and an impoverished German thief, for whom the war has been a godsend, who steals the family’s Jewish identity and builds a happy and comfortable life in Australia. His confrontation with the true members of the family leads to explorations of the consequences of cataclysmic events, the burdens of history, its legacy through memory and whether knowing the truth of the experiences of others can in any way change one’s own values. Elliot Perlman (b. Melbourne, 1964), a barrister, is an increasingly prominent writer whose first three books, Three Dollars (1998), Seven Types of Ambiguity (2005) and The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming (2006), embody social critiques dealing, inter alia, with lawyers, material strivings, male–female relationships, corporate betrayals, vagaries of desire, alienation, gambling and adult children. His most recent novel, of a wholly different order, The Street Sweeper (2011), juxtaposes the connections between an elderly Jewish Auschwitz survivor and patient, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and an Australian historian at Columbia University. A novel that spans a horrific past and present, it is an exploration of alienation and connectedness that, among other issues, reflects upon the exercise of humanity when ethical choices are few, people’s ­responsibilities to others and how anyone may legitimately judge those others. Catherine Hoffmann (b. Hungary, 1948), who migrated as a refugee with her parents after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, has, after two novels written in the 1980s, recently published her major work, the Lia Mendez trilogy – Of Exile and Yearning (2009), Across the Burning (2010) and Taking Wing (2011). This is a three-generation epic of the Mendez-Kremzier and Heiman families as they negotiate the central European conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century from the eve of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s decline during the First World War through Hungary’s Nazi occupation during the Second World War and its subsequent communist takeover, culminating in the remaking of the main protagonists’ lives in Australia. Another immigrant writer who arrived in Australia in 1988 after having lived in



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England, Israel and South Africa is Rose Zwi (b. Mexico, 1928), the author of seven books. In the main, these are set in countries where she has herself lived and deal variously with immigrants living in Israel, east European shtetl Jews who escaped pogroms to settle in South Africa and with apartheid and the persecution of the black population and the protest movement there. A non-fiction work, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997), stems from research she undertook into the destruction of the Jews of Lithuania. Other writers of note are Sandra Goldbloom (b. 1943), author of The Book of Rachel (1998), about a woman’s obsessive attempt to create a perfect family life through the force of her love and concern, which leads instead to alienation, defeat and a necessary process of healing; Alan Gold (b. Leicester, England, 1945), author of a succession of thrillers most often associated with modern and ancient history and politics and Judaism; Dick Gross (b. Melbourne, 1954), whose Jesus, Judas and Mordy Ben Ruben (2005) is an iconoclastic satire of the last days of Jesus as seen through the eyes of an agnostic Temple priest around 73 ce who writes his own gospel to correct those of preceding writers; Deborah Miller (née Masel, Melbourne, 1957–2011), a writer and educator with a special interest in Jewish mysticism whose The Company of Words (1998) is a novel of a man’s confrontation with his imminent death, coupled with explorations into God and how best to live one’s life; Raphael Sackville (b. Melbourne, 1957, now living in Israel) who, in his Legacy of Gold (1989), set during the raw and rough 1840s Australian gold rush, tells of a religious Jew’s dogged battles against the challenges that would thwart his will to live by the Torah; and Sarah Ebenor (pseudonym of Bronwen Lichtenstein, b. New Zealand) who, having married into Melbourne’s Hasidic community, fictionalised the experience in The Mazel Tov (1987) and published a collection of stories Touching Sweet (1988) before returning to New Zealand. To these, one would add Mireille Juchau (b. Sydney, 1969) in whose Burning In (2007) an artist/photographer leaves Australia to escape her increasingly dependent ageing survivor mother and to make her name abroad, only to become a voluntary prisoner to a new lover in New York; Tangea Tansley, whose A Break in the Chain: The Early Kozminskys (2011) is a novel based on three generations of the eminent Melbourne Kozminsky jewellery, coin and curio family who arrived in colonial Victoria during the gold rushes in 1856 from Prussia, a narrative containing ambivalences about Jewish identity and family estrangement; Susan Varga’s Headlong (2009), an exploration of a woman’s attempts to cope with her bereft suicidal mother’s grief over her father’s death, coupled with the breakdown of family relationships set against the backdrop of issues relating to euthanasia, the Holocaust, contemporary war and refugees seeking asylum; Renata Singer (b. Poland), whose The Front of a Family: A Tale of Two Sisters (2001) tells of two sisters who survived the Second World War, the story elaborated with themes of love, war, family, fidelity and intimacy; Terri-Ann White’s Finding Theodore and Brina (2001), which describes her search, through stories, recollections, impressions and observations, for her midnineteenth-century Australian ancestors who came from London to Perth, her great-greatgrandfather having been a convict and her great-great-grandmother an unmarried woman on supported passage; and Moses Aaron (b. Calcutta, 1944) whose eleven stories in The Eye of Paradise (1998) are gleaned from his grandmother’s Indian-Jewish ancestry, while his Elijah Greenface (2000) is a novel about the unexpected friendship that develops between a 17-year-old boy who turns to delinquency when his Vietnam veteran father commits suicide and a one-time Auschwitz prisoner.

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Children’s Literature This essay would be incomplete without including writings for young readers. As is the case in all such works everywhere, the greater number are illustrated primers, adventure stories, jolly fantasies, detective fictions, tales of magic and spells, and contests between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. For advanced readers, there are more challenging confrontations with reallife situations, among them bullying, child abuse, unplanned pregnancies, emotionally disturbed children, family breakdowns, friendship and alienation, courage in the face of adversity and the plight of refugees. Unlike the work of the adult-audience writers dealt with thus far, their overall engagement with Jewish themes is not as diverse or intense, but there are indications that these may also swell in time. In his extensive output of humorous and thoughtful novels for young readers, four books by Morris Gleitzman (b. England, 1953) are pertinent. These constitute a tetralogy entitled Once (2006), Then (2008), Now (2010) and After (2012), about a Jewish boy who comes to understand that the Nazis want to kill him and other Jews, which leads him and his brother to journey through Poland to survive. Continuing his adventures through the war, he is challenged to salvage hope when he has lost almost everything, including his parents, and to reconcile hatred and healing. Also set during the Second World War is Let Me Whisper You My Story (2010) by Moya Simons, which tells of a German Jewish girl who, when her family is taken away, survives on her father’s instructions by maintaining silence throughout the war. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The First Book of Samuel (1995) describes the threat to her young protagonist’s close relationship with his survivor grandfather when the boy’s father plans to move the family from Australia to America. Susanne Gervay (b. Sydney), in her Next Stop the Moon (1995), set in the 1960s, tells of a daughter of Second World War refugees whose father is perpetually haunted by Hitler and has given up speaking to God any more. On a less pervasively sombre but still notably serious note, Robyn Bavati’s Dancing in the Dark (2010) tells of a Jewish girl who aspires to dance but is forbidden by her strictly religious parents to take ballet lessons. This leads her to dance in secret, thereby keeping her two worlds apart and, at a deeper level, questioning everything that she has until then believed. A reader could be forgiven for assuming that Australian Jewish writers’ books for young people are rather bleak. However, apart from the titles sifted specifically for their Jewish content, as intimated above, their works have been profuse, broad in range and cheerful and have attracted a solid following among younger readers at large. Other young persons’ writers who, collectively, account for some 280 books in the genre are Goldie Alexander, Medina Bat-Ami, June Epstein, June Factor, Anna Fienberg, Nicki Greenberg, Odo Hirsch, Danny Katz, Ricky Mainzer and Esther Takac.

Coda Through these authors, Jewish writing in Australia has introduced into its literature the Holocaust and narratives of wartime experiences, survival, wandering and immigration and the concomitant issues of adaptation, acculturation, assimilation and intergenerational conflict between survivors and their children – the ones inextricably bound by personal experiences, memories, values and traditions, and the others increasingly influenced by contemporary Australian mass culture, politics and values and aspirations of their own



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in the Australian milieu. Although, coinciding with the rise to power of the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s across Europe, there were antisemitic public individuals, government ministers and right-wing organisations in Australia, these were seldom widespread, mainstream or threatening to the community. In many respects, for example their ready acceptance into the Australian community at large, the canvassing at an early point for establishing a Jewish state in the Kimberleys, postwar Jewish immigration and statehood in Palestine, Jews have throughout their sojourn in Australia had a significant number of active champions in politics, the Church, journalism and civil rights advocates (Liberman 1986). This is reflected in the escalating numbers of Jewish writers and creative works particularly in the postwar era, in their acceptance into mainstream Australian literature and in the pervasively positive tenor of the Australia-based content of their work.

26 ‘MIGRANT’ JEWISH WRITERS IN THE ANGLOPHONE DIASPORA Sandra Singer

A lot of it Irish . . . Jewish too. The immigrant experience. All of us are sort of lost and looking for a way to go back home. So we go back home in books, stories. (McCann 2009)

T

he traditional notion of diaspora is Jewish – invoking the dissemination of a people forced from a biblical, ancestral homeland. Every Shabbat, the reminder of this undesired exodus is invoked in prayer when the doors of the Ark are opened and a request is made to rebuild the Temple walls of Jerusalem: ‘tivneh chomot Yerushalayim’. For nearly two millennia after the Fall of the Second Temple, the scattered Jewish diaspora established new names and communities, while knowing the home ‘back then, back there’ in biblical Israel was gone. Migration and exile precede diaspora. Jewish migrant literature has often embedded historical themes. Jewish writing that engages with foundational histories crucially results in ‘subjectivities which straddle the divide between past and present’ (Cho 2007: 20) and thereby often reveals traumatic loss. The ‘foundational role of traumatic dislocation’ – characterising diasporic formation (20) as a ‘condition of subjectivity’ (14; emphasis in original) and putting forth the need for recursion – is written into the Prayer Book. Accordingly, ‘one becomes diasporic through a complex process of memory and emergence’ (21; emphasis in original) into subjectivity within and between communities. Women’s Studies professor Anh Hua, whose interests include migration, race and trauma, proposes that diasporic consciousness may derive from ‘the collective memory and trauma involved in . . . dispersion’ (2005: 193). Yet, in the twentieth century especially, postcolonial and cosmopolitan authors extended the biblical notion of diasporic scattering to include dislocation based on various, widely divergent conditions, from being a survivor of genocide to actively participating as a global postmodern business consumer. In this poststructuralist understanding, identity is fluid and ‘becom[ing] diasporic’ results from contradictory contributing factors. While no originary state of existence can be identified on the basis of which to clone or predetermine diasporic subject formation, stories are recognised as having a shaping influence. In existence and fiction, especially from the twentieth century and beyond, the exiled figure comes into being bearing particular ‘contingencies of long histories of displacements



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and genealogies of dispossession’ (Cho 2007: 14). Rose Zwi’s parents were Jewish exiles from Lithuania. Jewish fiction such as Zwi’s, emphasising the recent South African immigrant experience, identifies flux within assembled diasporic communities and between them. She was born in Mexico in 1928 and has lived in England, Israel and South Africa, where she has spent most of her life; currently she resides in Australia. Her range of movement through cultures, languages and hemispheres is an apt example of the way migration gives new shape to enduring memories. These strong recurring memories are similar to long-lasting fabric; in one case, a ‘garment of memory and guilt’ hangs, she explains, on the frame of the pogroms, sewn for the protagonist of Zwi’s story ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’, Anna Bronstein, by her father, a tailor by trade. In the title story of Zwi’s collection Speak the Truth, Laughing (2002), the internally focalised figure Anna takes possession of a heritage from her mother of ‘bittere gelechter, ironic laughter’ (2).

Migrant Rose Zwi: Flight or Fight? While Anna and her grown-up son Adam are both runners, she recognises the importance of flight, as did her father when he ‘fled the pogrom[s]’ (Zwi 2002: 1), but also of knowing when to remain in a place situated in time. She advises Adam to fly to safety from potential harm while on National Service duty but, as a result of her own struggles and those of her extended family, she accepts her father’s insight that ‘[t]here’s a time to stop running’ (1). Part of her finally settling in among the fraught, complex racial politics in South Africa involves taking in the experience of the geopolitical space of the city where she lives and also of the black townships, and thereby comparing the respective law enforcement and prisons for whites and blacks under the Riotous Assemblies Act (passed in 1956). Although her ‘parents’ heritage of laughter and despair had immobilized her [thus far] politically’ (2), she now attends illegal (under the RAA) mixed-race political ­demonstrations – even in the townships. Anna expects that she will remain on the ‘periphery of history, unable either to redeem the past or influence the future’ (17). Yet in this story, first published in 1988, the year Zwi continued her migratory way by moving to Australia, the narrator proleptically signals thoroughgoing change coming between socioculturally and ethnically defined groups on account of township black Africans winning their struggle against apartheid. Unlike Zwi herself, her fictional character stays in South Africa where she ponders her future alone, now that her husband has remarried and her son is in exile; she imagines the necessity of her ultimately having to make a choice between rallying in support of the blacks once they rise up, or calling in the authorities to protect herself ‘when the flames leap across the townships into our [whites’] cool green suburbs’ (17). Theorists sometimes contrast old and new models of diasporic formation by foregrounding the impact on memory of forced migrations or exile, such as Zwi’s parents experienced from Lithuania, or voluntary migrations, such as Zwi herself has chosen. Class privilege bolsters contemporary transnational mobility which is characterised by the possibility of return. But, notwithstanding whether, from among other compelling social, political or economic motivations, movement is by choice or not, for most arrivals to a strange new sociocultural location pressures of displacement manifest themselves in unwitting memory of and sometimes in renewed, if fleeting, nostalgia for the past. Past remembrance includes both longing for lost loved ones – such as Anna’s husband Simon’s cousin and her father’s ‘family [who were] massacred by the Nazis’ (2) – and remembrance of tragedy (sometimes,

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as in these instances, at the same time). Such nostalgic and painful memories make up Anna’s transgenerational postmemory. Postmemory, according to Marianne Hirsch, is the process by which one conceivably ‘remembers’ one’s parents’ or others’ past. Querying diasporic positioning in relation to an original place they have not experienced, and incorporating Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s exploration of diasporic longing, Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur ask: what happens when one cannot or does not want to look back for political or economic reasons? What happens when future generations do not know how to look back, or . . . if looking back means looking back to a place within the United States [or another Western country] where they spent their childhood and not to some primordial beginning in the home country? (2003: 9; emphasis in original) Anna draws upon ‘imaginary homelands and places of birth and origins as well as [offering] an antidote to . . . struggles of the present’ (Agnew 2005b: 10), such as within the timeframe of the story that Anna finds herself writing from within the primordial darkness of a dank cell in a South African city jail. Thriving since the 1990s (though largely underpinned by Freud’s early twentiethcentury psychoanalytic theory), Trauma Studies includes Marianne Hirsch’s and others’ Holocaust-derived work. Trauma Studies foregrounds the way remembrance may be involuntary for those impacted by loss, until the painful past is worked through, often in creative practices such as fiction writing from a position of safety. Those who ‘had wounds of memory inflicted on them consequent to horrific dislocations and dispossessions [including the experience of Russian pogroms and the Holocaust that figured in establishing Anna’s mother’s moral equilibrium in Zwi’s title story] may find travels to the past an involuntary, albeit necessary, journey to come to terms with their present selves’ (Agnew 2005b: 10). The generally Jewish focus on memory and learning encouraged by her father had ‘equipped Anna with an acute historical sense’ (Zwi 2002: 2). Trauma Studies is motivated by a number of contributing factors, such as the desire to draw a listener (such as Anna) to witness accurate and effective testimony representing the traumatic event, so as to thereby memorialise that experience and loss. Claude Lanzmann, for example, has explained his reasons for making the 1985 film Shoah during many interviews, including those quoted at the end of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony (1992). Lanzmann says he wanted his film to probe the incomprehensible events, the impossibility of the Holocaust. Creative activities are considered one means for psychological reintegration and healing from the ruptures trauma causes.1 Diaspora and Trauma Studies bear productively together in subjective remembering of genocide that fosters the relationship between past, present and future existence, especially by subsequent generations of the trauma. In Zwi’s transgenerational trauma fiction, the past interpolates the present. Anna’s diasporic identity is impacted by the disjunctive tragedy that befell her family in an eastern European shtetl; yet the event is nonetheless accessible to her only through postmemory, even though her parents’ past is so deeply felt that the ‘memory and guilt [of their survival] could only be torn off with [her] flesh’ (Zwi 2002: 2). Zwi’s story describes Anna, in her currently divisive roles, such as being divorced and the mother of an expatriate son, crafting calm cohesion through the letters she composes in her head or on paper, but does not send to her son. Observations addressed to him reveal both Anna’s fear of and attachment to Zwi’s longstanding home, South Africa.



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The narrative discourse of history composed in the form of a mother’s reportage, through a monologue to her son, is a potentially therapeutic model. Without her disclosing traumatic memories of resistance, arrest and imprisonment in some manner, the experience may remain as an unwitting, but nonetheless controlling, mental imprint, since trauma manifests itself powerfully if symptomatically and belatedly. Remarking on the ‘inherent latency within the experience itself [perhaps at the time not recognised as devastating]’, Cathy Caruth argues that conflict-ridden events that were not registered as traumatic when they happened may be productively expressed through creative practices such as fiction writing (1996: 17). While access to the actual unmediated traumatising event is psychologically rebuffed, often some time afterwards memory offers up personal registers of the past, which intermittently surface unannounced within the present. Displacement narratives, such as those Anna learns especially from her father, may be unconsciously repressed or seemingly forgotten, but when they recur in the everyday present they demand witness that may potentially garner ethical attention that invites historical redress. The merging of traumatic histories between communities occurs in ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’ when Anna recalls an incident from her childhood of a black man being victimised in the street. It is this incident that triggers her father’s recollection, then consideration, of flight or fight, in the light of his retrospective account of the pogroms shared with Anna. In this connection of transmitted affect, Laura Brown sees importance in Trauma Studies recently exploring how ‘post-traumatic symptoms can be intergenerational’ (1995: 108). Zwi’s postmemory narrative elides differences between histories, not all of which the narrator has experienced directly. Accordingly, a story ostensibly about living with the past within South African apartheid, ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’, weaves into prominence an exploration of the lived consequences of the Russian pogroms and the European Holocaust. Thus the story underscores the necessary and ethical ‘persistence of [South African] colonialism’s intersections with questions of [postwar] immigration and citizenship’ (Cho 2007: 13), in order to avoid ‘shoring up . . . colonialism’ (25) in the newcomer role. New potential and hence hopefulness abounds when memory involves such ‘an act of remembering that . . . create[s] new understandings of both the past and the present’ (Agnew 2005b: 8).2 In Zwi’s fiction, memory of the past shapes politicised ethical choices in the new circumstances after immigration.3 Having already experienced racism firsthand, Anna’s father sees in South Africa under apartheid no ‘goldine medina . . . golden land . . . Not for us and not for the schwartze [blacks]’ (Zwi 2002: 1). The lived experience of displacement is accentuated in the forward-and-backward turns Anna’s experience with racism conjures. Also, double or multiple vision necessarily results from assuming various, changeable subject positions. In Lily Cho’s theorised model of migrant movement, when moving onwards one is necessarily drawn back; this backward tension remains as one casts oneself and vestiges of one’s past proleptically into the future. In one way or another, the impact of specific events is conveyed through transmitted memory and affect to other current members within a subculture of the mainstream society, and then to subsequent generations of the migrant family in the newly shaped diasporic community. Even silenced or inaccessible family history is shared obliquely in affective legacies such as Anna’s learned sense of the sustaining importance of ironic laughter. Cho would be in agreement with Anna’s stance, and warns against any exclusive ‘perpetual return to a narrative of wounding and victimization’ (2007: 20), since, in her model of the rotating glance

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backwards while moving forwards, the results for migrant subjectivities and subsequent generations need not be only negative: ‘diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self – homeland, memory, loss – even as they turn on or away from them’ (15).

Hybridity and the Diasporic Citizen: Putting Down Roots in Windsor, Canada Zwi’s short experience living in Israel may attest to her ambivalence over seeking refuge in the invented homeland for contemporary, postwar Jews. Asymmetrically, in relationship to Israel, the context of living ‘away from home’ in South Africa and currently in Australia may be perceived pejoratively as having temporary residence or willingly, if not eagerly, assimilating. The postcolonial context of Zwi’s Africa advances the related notion of double-­ consciousness, more familiarly known from Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory as hybridity. Especially children of displaced, dispossessed, diasporic and migrant parents experience the ‘double-gaze of here/home’ that ‘skeptical[ly] resist[s] . . . the signified references of here and home’ when they are construed as dichotomous (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 9). Of course migrancy does not necessarily imply being diasporic. Further, without the baggage of the past, Anna’s father’s comparison between migrant Jews and South African blacks leads her to different contemporary conclusions that he may not have anticipated, and towards her politicisation. In her monologue, Anna finds herself at ‘home’ by taking up a discursive position through writing letters representing her lived relationship to an inherited past, though it is not a history chosen by herself but rather one thrust upon her parents. Subsequent generations, such as Anna relative to the pogroms or the Holocaust, grasp traumatic legacies of elsewhere by re-emplotting their own experience of existential ­displacement – in Anna’s case, through the letters she writes but does not send to Adam. Arguably, Zwi uses writing her own stories of migrants who share a formal and thematic similarity to the revelatory structure of trauma testimonies to ‘griev[e] for losses which cannot always be [otherwise] articulated’ than through literature (Cho 2007: 15). Through melancholic narrativisation of one’s parents’ losses, or one’s own in a previous place in time, the migrant’s (often traumatic) past is relayed into the present, and configured anew. According to Hayden White (1978: 81–100), Laurie Vickroy (2002) and Suzette Henke (1998), through the act of writing one may configure oneself in relation to creative, integrative wholeness that escapes oneself and one’s community in everyday existence. This chapter concerning work by migrant Jewish writers in the Anglophone diaspora – including Zwi, but also Aryeh Lev Stollman, among others – investigates such a notion of invented, hybridised ‘homeliness’. The epigraph to Stollman’s The Far Euphrates (1997) cites Proverbs 24:3–4 – ‘Through wisdom a home is built, and by understanding it is established, and by knowledge are the rooms filled with all precious and pleasant riches.’ Currently home is metaphoric now that the Jewish nostalgia for return to an original birthplace such as Poland or Russia has waned, largely as a result of dispossession after the Second World War. Also there are other non-European, Sephardi Jewish authors who cannot for additional, historical reasons return home, or else choose not to return. In Stollman’s The Far Euphrates there remains the opportunity for the characters to instead ‘go back home . . . in books, stories’ (McCann 2009). In addition to McCann’s framing of return as an immigrant position shared between the Irish and the Jews, Stollman’s fictional



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journey ‘home’ towards ontological freedom embraces language and moving religious references specific to Jewry. His wonderfully lyrical novel is set mostly around Windsor, Canada. There a Torontoborn rabbi whose father’s early life was disrupted by the Second World War is raising his only son Alexander with his wife Sarah. Their main professional and especially personal support is from the also displaced cantor Bernard Seidengarn and his wife Berenice, and the cantor’s sister Hannalore (who we learn is biologically a man). Bernard and Hannalore grew up in Strasbourg, France. Through the Bildungsroman, Alexander finds his ontological bearings in relation to the past, a history that includes knowledge that was disclosed to him by Berenice when he was a child of ten on a day trip with her along the Welland Canal bypass for Niagara Falls. Alexander learned that his neighbour the cantor and the cantor’s twin sister had been subject to Josef Mengele’s experiments. Late in the novel we are told what Alexander learned in his youth – that Hannalore, in the course of Mengele’s Auschwitz experiments on twins, had been castrated. Using the form of an autodiegetic memoir, the narrator retrospectively interprets clues from his childhood steeped in his parents’ largely undisclosed past that were opaque to him as a child. Yet early in the novel the reader is reassured with promises that mystery surrounding the apparently odd child Alexander and his family will later become clear to Alexander himself and thus to the reader. For example, reflecting on the correlation between his mother Sarah’s neurosis over childbearing and Bernard’s and Berenice’s Holocaust testimony which explains their inability to conceive a child, Alexander writes: ‘At some point, the cause unknown to me then, my mother’s worry [over her failed pregnancies and the family’s future] began to consume her’ (Stollman 1997: 4). Stollman’s family background includes two generations of rabbis, his father Samuel (born in Detroit) and his father’s father (a diasporic Russian Jew, Isaac, who immigrated to Detroit, across the Detroit river from Windsor, Canada). The Far Euphrates is informed by Stollman’s growing up within his father’s rabbinate at the Shaar Hashomayim Orthodox Congregation in Windsor. Importantly, biblical teaching, Jewish custom and Hebrew language involving fictional focal characters all take place at a Windsor shul. When Alexander’s father dies suddenly in Iraq on a mission to recover material for a book documenting his great-grandfather’s travels from Frankfurt at the turn of the twentieth century as tutor to the exiled prince of Persia, his body is returned to Windsor, at which point the novel reinforces the Jewish custom enshrined in language and ritual with which it begins. The story starts with Alexander’s mother actively supporting his multilingual education in English, German and Hebrew by baking ‘sugar cookies in the shapes of those transmuting and buoyant letters [Hebrew] that drifted down to us from the seafaring Phoenicians’ (Stollman 1997: 3). At the end, at his father’s funeral, Alexander ‘spoke in th[is] language of earliest times’, saying the mourner’s Kaddish: ‘I said all the words, with their constellations of letters . . . which is our home . . . what choice . . . remained for me . . . but to bless God’s Holy Name forevermore’ (206). Thus the book ends with the letters mastered in childhood imaginatively evoking the figures Alexander has lost proximity to, mostly through death throughout the novel, but whose memory sustains him: ‘the letters . . . assembled themselves not only into my father, but into the Cantor, Hannalore, Marla [his friend, who dies of an incurable disease], even into Berenice, . . . and into my mother’ (206). Rounding out the novel, comprising a Jewish cultural and spiritual ethos, ‘bless God’s Holy Name forevermore’ are its final words.

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The American Jewish Postmodern Diaspora, Looking Forward within Suburbia Alexander shapes his own sense of ontological homeliness. Constructing such a space necessitates further conceptual room beyond Windsor, the place into which he was born, and the place in which he resides at the end of the novel, McGill University in Montreal, ‘not far from the Outremont neighbourhood where Berenice had grown up’ (Stollman 1997: 199). Leading British cultural theorist and novelist John Berger (McCann 2006) politicised the implications of the self-knowledge that could distance Alexander from his roots – through learning a further language, for example: ‘proper French, though with an accent like the [separatist] Quebecois, like Berenice’ (Stollman 1997: 200). The result of Alexander’s growing up among such historically marked individuals leads him to continue the migratory journeying of his great-grandfather, and to arrive at a conclusion that bears a perspectival relationship to Berger’s identifying himself after 9/11 as being ‘a patriot of elsewhere’.4 Named after his paternal great-grandfather, Alexander’s Hebrew name is Aryeh Alexander ben Shelomo. He attributes the richness of his family’s past, presenting ‘differing, contradictory opinions’, to his ‘borrowed and duplicated name’ (114). Jewish comix-artist Art Spiegelman also proffers the notion of home as a reviewed, necessarily changeable destination: that is, a space and time distinct from place understood in relation to one’s presumed origins including the nation state, but also honouring the sense of appropriate and earned arrival privileges that Alexander’s Bildungsroman implies. He successfully negotiated his fraught childhood by ‘playing silently by [him]self, contemplating the endless darkness of space and my luminous, celestial name’ (Stollman 1997: 139). In In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) Spiegelman laments the lost opportunity for reconciliation in the years after 9/11, on account of the ‘squandered chances to bring the community of nations together’ (10). For Swedish-born Spiegelman (of Polish Jewish parents), this new ‘community’ or home would be larger in scope, vision and promise than his own family’s current location in New York, or his parents’ former place in Europe, including their time of dislocation during the Holocaust. While it is unclear at the end of The Far Euphrates where exactly Alexander will live, it is stated unequivocally that his ontological frame of reference includes God, his Canadian-born parents and the assimilated Canadians among whom he was reared.5 The various examples above show that migrant Anglophone Jewish writing now fits within discussions of the often self-contradictory historical influences shaping primarily diasporic postwar Jewish subject formation. British-born, Israeli-educated, now American writer and professor Jonathan Wilson’s absurdist collection of stories An Ambulance Is on the Way (2005) conveys the sense of mixed heritage where history does not present any unidirectional force, but rather is visited among other contributing factors to subjectivity. Wilson’s corpus demonstrates a multiplicity of influences, from the Holocaust and the Haganah in Israel, to the painter Marc Chagall. The narrator of Wilson’s title story ‘An Ambulance Is on the Way’ occupies a nondescript but familiar eastern Massachusetts suburb on the day of Princess Diana’s 1997 funeral. References to Diana’s funeral abound throughout (2005: 79–80, 81, 83, 84–5). This absurdist tale is set in the narrator’s ‘fat lost-cat suburb, a place where everybody I knew was recovering from something: the rocks and hard places of modern life’ (87) – divorces, sickness, deaths, literal and figurative bankruptcies, ‘alcoholism, drug abuse, . . . in the adolescent precincts of broken hearts and the side effects of Ecstasy’ (87).



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History, in the form of references to the Holocaust, is mentioned on many occasions as memory that is ‘silence[d] and neglect[ed]’ (74), or forgotten by those living ‘impervious[ly]’ (75) in United States suburbs, or by the narrator’s mother enduring ‘Alzheimer’s in the muddling middle stage . . . her short-term memory box . . . empty’ (72). Facts are absurdly indistinguishable in the narrator’s mind: when in conversation his cousin Deirdre, whom he runs into in the street, mentions ‘Die weisse Engel’, he explains, ‘I didn’t know if she was thinking about the Holocaust [in reference to Dr Mengele] or the size of her ass’ (93). Barthes’s postwar 1957 compendium, Mythologies, illustrates the way wide-ranging experiences can be viewed as indistinct from one another when wrapped in the cloak of mundane consumer sameness. The narrator’s puzzling over Deirdre’s comment demonstrates that, for him, Holocaust testimony is blasé, repetitive, mythic and ordinary at the same time. Memory of the Shoah seems to have less original performativity than the soap detergents that the narrator effuses over in his domestic life, wherein he ‘had developed an enthusiasm for laundry’ (79). With agility he observes and scrutinises, ‘separating, tough decisions about what constitutes dark, choice of cleansing agent (I always went with clear), adjustments to length of wash, different cycles of drying, the efficacy of finish guard, folding’ (79). In Roland Barthes’s ‘Soap-powders and Detergents’ (1977: 36–8), cleansers assume similar anthropomorphic powers of ‘agen[cy]’. The narrator considers the conventionality and presumed inefficacy of his father’s distant cousin’s 2,000 ‘fat pages’ (Wilson 2005: 78) Holocaust memoir, entitled Without Hope: Willy’s manuscript was poorly written in broken English. The story, or some version of it, had been told before, ten thousand times: Great-Uncle Velvel hobbling down the Aryan streets at dawn in his mud-spattered bespoke overcoat. The Nazis chasing with knives sharpened for his side locks, behind them baying dogs, then guns, then chimneys. (77) ‘Fast forward [from the Holocaust] to 1997’ (77), when the meaning of an email comment – ‘Whew!... No thanks!’ – sent to the narrator from a friend in Hawaii remains unclear to him (87); the remark is later repeated in the story (96), thus creating syntactic and semantic effluence. As discussed below, his wife uses these mysterious words to him in a second instance in the story when they make love. Meaning is unknown or open to interpretation, unlike the stilted literalness of his cousin’s memoir, which the narrator deconstructs, even though he forwards it on his cousin’s behalf to an unlikely publisher. While Hayden White recommended disinvestment in traumatic affect through therapeutic re-emplotment (1978: 86–7), the pervasive ordinariness of Wilson’s nonplussed consumer America in its coolness resists affect altogether. Here his Jewishness consists of ‘ethnic affiliation and [having a] comfortable median spot in the class system’ (Wilson 2005: 82). Though ‘An Ambulance Is on the Way’ invokes Yiddishkeit, the closest it gets to the shul- and community-building ethos of the prayer spoken when the doors of the Ark are opened on Shabbat or the Kaddish Alexander says at his father’s funeral in The Far Euphrates is mention of the misallocated JNF (Jewish National Fund) collection. The funds have not ‘gone to help plant cypress saplings in the scorching desert [as promotional fliers might suggest] but down into the rich earth that lined the pockets of executive fat cats’ (83–4). Ironically the narrator spends much of his day searching for a lost suburban cat ‘WHITE PAWS AND CHEST’ (85; capitalisation in original), which doesn’t materialise for him, though he discovers at least one of the meanings of the repeated not

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initially specified comment in the story, mentioned above, when his wife says ‘Whew!... No thanks!’ (96) to the prospect of conceiving a third child with him. By including historical memory without implying any traumatic affect for the narrator, and by recommending American counter-memory in the plan not to further increase the mishpachah (Jewish extended family or tribe), Wilson’s sardonic excess frees the past from defining the present or prescribing the future. Wilson’s tone is discordant with the more conventional ‘mournful tune . . . in a black-and-white documentary about Eastern Europe’ (Wilson 2005: 65) that characterises Alexander’s childhood in Stollman’s evocative coming-of-age story. Wilson’s narrator’s steadfast comfort in American diasporic Jewish suburbia also resists any obvious disposition to self-reflexivity or chance of politicisation on the basis of the past, which Rose Zwi’s protagonist’s lessons learned imply. While Jewish history, particularly through reference to the Holocaust, casts its shadow over all these stories, Wilson’s example shows the shadow retreating now that most of the survivors (including the narrator’s father) have died. In the migrants’ stories, multidirectional memory is deployed that is as rich and varied as the characters’ subjectivities and their contexts. Trauma Studies – which drew its ethical agency largely from Holocaust remembrance and study – seems to settle on the sense of a fragmented, though potentially coherent, subject. Wilson’s story suggests ironically that these nostalgic notions of individual and society within diaspora discussions are themselves conjectural or even fictional, and moreover inadequate for describing the lively complexity of some contemporary Western migrant individuals, especially for depicting Jews newly configured as suburban, postmodern American consumers.

Notes 1. See the conclusion to Schlant (1999), where she discusses debates about building memorials and counter-memorials to the Holocaust in Germany. See also Vickroy (2002), Henke (1998; especially the introduction and conclusion) and Caruth (1995). Caruth was instrumental in the inaugural Trauma Studies group at Yale University, where Roger Luckhurst says the ‘ethical turn’ from philosophical deconstruction to historically accentuated Trauma Studies occurred (2006; 2008). 2. Though having different implications, for Hua forgetting can also be transformative: ‘Forgetting is more active than we think. Forgetting is an act, a creative invention, a performance, a selective loss’ (2005: 198). Forgetting would be symptomatic within the model of Freudian Trauma Studies; alternatively, forgetting may suggest that the events were not so traumatising, and were thus readily emplotted, as Hayden White says, finally on the level with other events not having any special import or consequence (1978: 86–7). 3. Israeli-born, Irish Jewish sociologist and fiction writer Ronit Lentin’s more explicitly historicised and theorised work addresses gender, race and militarisation. She is recognised for her attention to issues of ethics and race concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For her further correlation between Irish and Israeli colonial gender politics, see, for example, Lentin (2009). 4. McCann writes about Berger in his ‘Everything in This Country Must’ interview (2006): ‘My favourite British-born writer of all time – the great John Berger – happens to have an Irish soul and lives in the south of France. He says he’s a citizen – no – a patriot of elsewhere. Isn’t that wonderful? A patriot of elsewhere!’ 5. Incidentally, Aryeh Lev Stollman lives in New York City where he works as an interventional neuroradiologist when not writing. His father, Samuel S. Stollman, an English professor at the University of Windsor from 1966 to 1988 and rabbi at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue from 1949 to 1977, died in Israel in 2007.

27 JEWISH NOVELS OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Emily Robins Sharpe

Introduction: Jews at War

W

hen Francisco Franco and his fascist army invaded Spain in 1936, the resulting war seemed, at first, to be of little consequence for the rest of the world. Spain was then a newly democratic nation: the Second Spanish Republic had been established in 1931 and had implemented a series of equalising reforms. To the rest of the world, Franco’s attempted overthrow of the democratic government appeared to be the difficult growing pains of a small European backwater in a state of political and social flux. Governments and leaders overwhelmingly opted for non-intervention, a stance that became a tacit ­endorsement of Franco’s fascist forces. It is now abundantly clear that Franco was not operating alone, nor was Spain’s civil war at all isolated from the rest of Europe or the world. Before his invasion, Franco had been exiled to the Spanish region of Morocco – the same country he had helped to colonise in a series of vicious, bloody incursions. Many powerful Spanish groups, including the monarchy and the Catholic Church, supported his subsequent invasion of Spain. He also had the financial and military backing of fascist Italy and Portugal, Nazi Germany, and the so-called Army of Africa – Moroccan soldiers compelled to fight through the false promise of eventual decolonisation. In the hope of countering fascism’s threat, a leftist coalition took up arms in support of the Spanish Republican government. This Popular Front coalition was not organised by any single government. Rather, it brought together communists, anarchists, Trotskyists and other parties and factions, who volunteered to fight Franco’s assault on Spanish democracy. Over 35,000 volunteers from fifty-three countries converged on the troubled country. Many went despite their governments’ explicit prohibition, with passports marked ‘not valid for travel to Spain’. They worked as soldiers, medics, ambulance drivers and journalists. Impelled by the belief in transnational solidarity, they understood the Spanish conflict not as an aberration or a localised war, but rather as evidence of the rapid escalation of European violence in the wake of the First World War. For these volunteers, the war in Spain was directly related to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia the previous year and to mounting antisemitic policies and violence in eastern Europe. Democratic Spain was only weakly supported by the USSR and Mexico, and

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many feared that if unchecked the war in Spain would spread beyond the country’s borders. Many of the international volunteers who went to Spain were Jewish, predominantly Ashkenazi Jews. Around one-quarter of the volunteer soldiers were Jewish – up to 10,000 individuals. Jewish volunteers came from across Europe. Between one-quarter and one-half of the American, Canadian and British volunteers were Jewish, often recent immigrants to those countries who had fled the violent antisemitism of Europe only to encounter xenophobic attitudes and policies in these new countries. In addition, Jewish, Muslim and Christian volunteers from Mandate Palestine enlisted; many – but by no means all – of them were members of the Communist Party, and a few had been banished from Palestine by the British for their communist ties.1 Other early Jewish volunteers were athletes who had been in Barcelona to compete in the 1936 People’s Olympics when the war broke out. So many volunteers were of Ashkenazi heritage that Yiddish often became the volunteers’ lingua franca: one gentile American nurse, Fredericka Martin, commented that upon her arrival in Spain she soon learned Yiddish so as to better communicate with her fellow medical volunteers (no date). In 1937, a year after the war began, the International Brigades created a Yiddish-speaking battalion within the Polish Dombrowski Brigade, composed almost exclusively of Jewish volunteers. Although the Naftali Botwin Company – named for a Polish communist labour activist and martyr – is rarely mentioned in histories of the Spanish Civil War, it was an especially symbolic part of the international effort, bringing together Jews from across Europe, along with Palestinian Arabs and anti-fascist Europeans. While not all Jewish volunteers served in the Communist Party-organised International Brigades, the Botwin Company remains a testament to Jewish men and women’s integral roles in opposing fascism in Spain.2

Jews Representing War Among the Jewish volunteers were many writers, including Ted Allan, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Koestler, Edwin Rolfe and Muriel Rukeyser. Jewish involvement on the left was also not limited to the battlefronts of Spain. Jewish authors wrote about – and continue to write about – the Spanish Civil War, creating a dispersed literary canon of texts by and about Jews from around the world. These literary works largely depict the conflict as a crucial juncture to advocate for diasporic Jewish belonging in their countries of birth or immigration. Many non-Jewish authors, too, emphasise transnational, multi-ethnic and interfaith coalitions. Together, these literary representations depict transnational Jewish participation as a brave, last-ditch attempt to stave off another world war, a precocious resistance movement to Nazism’s mounting threat. Such depictions of Jewish involvement use the trope of diasporic identity and transnational volunteerism to reconfigure the markers of national belonging, imagining a broadened conception of national community in which Jews played a foundational, rather than marginal role. Yet there are contradictory motivations at the core of Jewish representations of the Spanish Civil War. On the one hand, worldwide participation in another country’s civil war (by individuals fleeing antisemitism elsewhere) was fuelled by strong anti-nationalist sentiment intensified by fascist patriotism in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. On the other hand, literature by supporters of the democratic Spanish Republic paradoxically emphasised the benefits of national belonging by representing national citizenship as a broad, flexible, inclusive category that is ethically constituted. In other words, this literary



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concept of national identity was premised upon action, and not birth country, gender, race or religion. Fictional representations of Jewish volunteers demonstrate the stakes of religious and ethnic diversity for the leftists’ simultaneous fight to reconceive the nature of political and national affiliations while struggling to end fascism.3 While this chapter focuses specifically on Anglophone Jewish novels, I want to first briefly suggest the scope of Anglophone writings about the Spanish Civil War by those with personal or familial connections to Judaism. Texts about the war in every genre attest to the conflict’s key role in representations of global Jewish political involvement.4 The artistic output of Jewish writers and artists constitutes an integral part of the Spanish Civil War canon in poetry, prose and dramatic forms. Poets who witnessed the war firsthand include Muriel Rukeyser, Edwin Rolfe and Stephen Spender. And from afar, the war played – and continues to play – an important role in the work of poets such as Louis Dudek, A. M. Klein, Sol Funaroff, Miriam Waddington, Leonard Cohen and Seymour Mayne.5 Cohen also represents the war in his song ‘The Traitor’ (1979), which vividly imagines the downfall of a Republican soldier. For many writers, the Spanish Civil War seems to have inspired a modal shift. For instance, the British Jewish writer Leonard Woolf published The Hotel in 1939, a play about the war that not only stands out from his predominantly non-fiction output, but also provides a fascinating counterpoint to his wife Virginia’s defiantly pacifist Spanish Civil War treatise, Three Guineas (1938). And in addition to her journalistic coverage of the war, the American writer Martha Gellhorn (whose father and maternal grandfather were Jewish) also published a short story, ‘About Shorty’ (1950), and a novella, Till Death Do Us Part (1958), both of which relate to the conflict. Others were spurred by the war to begin writing more seriously. The memoir Cheetham to Cordova (1984) recounts British volunteer Maurice Levine’s time in the International Brigades. The African American writer and anthropologist Eslanda Goode Robeson visited Spain with her husband, the actor and musician Paul Robeson, who performed for the troops around the country (including Yiddish songs for the Jewish volunteers). Goode Robeson, a descendant of Sephardic Jews, wrote ‘Journey into Spain’ (1952) about her interactions with the African American soldiers in the International Brigades. Indeed, many of the writers whose fiction I will discuss in greater detail also wrote memoirs about their time in Spain during and after the war, including Alvah Bessie, William Herrick and Mordecai Richler.6 Finally, Jewish representations of the Spanish Civil War were not limited to literature. Some of the most enduring images of the fight came from Jewish photographers and filmmakers. Lillian Hellman worked with Joris Ivens, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos on the propaganda film The Spanish Earth (1937). Alvah Bessie collaborated on España otra vez (Spain Again) (1969), which memorialised the Spanish cause after the war’s difficult end. Significantly, the Spanish Civil War was the first to be documented by handheld cameras. Photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David ‘Chim’ Seymour were eastern European Jews who adopted gentile pseudonyms and worked as war journalists for worldwide news outlets, including Vu, Life and the Illustrated London News. Their images – especially Capa’s ‘The Falling Soldier’ (1937) – helped shape the world’s view of the conflict.7

Fictions of War Jewish Anglophone fiction about the Spanish Civil War is a male-dominated category, one also dominated by North American authors. Spanish Civil War novels by Ted Allan,

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Alvah Bessie and William Herrick – all of them former volunteers – and by Chaim Potok, Charles Yale Harrison and Mordecai Richler vacillate between championing and downplaying Jewish participation in Spain. Despite strong ties to North America, these works paint a complicated picture of the relationship between religion, national identity and leftist politics. Some represent the horrors and glories of the battlefront, while others avoid Spanish locations entirely, instead showcasing the war’s transnational implications. They also range in attitude towards the conflict from Harrison’s absurdist satire of leftist unity, to Potok’s feminist conflation of local and global home fronts, to Allan’s earnest evocations of multicultural North American solidarity. Together, the novels I will discuss demonstrate the multiple, multifaceted resonances of Spain’s civil war – how each author’s justifications for his involvement interlace an overriding commitment to anti-fascism with concerns over cosmopolitan sympathy, transnational cooperation, political corruption and personal heartbreak. While many volunteers and writers downplayed, denied or repudiated their connections to Judaism, a comparative analysis of Jewish characters and topics in their fictional texts is a useful way to consider the shared themes that run through the Spanish Civil War literary canon. In Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left, Cary Nelson proposes a ‘choral paradigm’ (2001: 187) for reading American poetry about the Spanish Civil War. He argues for the collectiveness of the canon, in which writers both purposely and inadvertently respond to Spanish Civil War poetry from around the world, focusing on specific topics such as the fall of Madrid and the murder of Federico García Lorca. Such a context is also a useful frame for considering Jewish fiction about the Spanish Civil War. Here, I will highlight varying approaches to depicting Jewish participation in the war to argue that these novels – like the poetry Nelson presents – speak to each other by adumbrating a message about the significance of Jewish anti-fascist activism in Spain. That is, regardless of the extent of each author’s acceptance and embrace of his Jewishness and Judaism, each novel wrestles with the intersection of Jewish leftist political investment and national affiliation. Authors’ religious identities may vary, but their fixation on balancing religious identity with political commitments and national affiliations does not. One important intersection between religious, political and national identities occurs around the question of Jewish masculinity. Each novel grapples with the ways in which Jewish men – frequently stereotyped in the wider culture as effeminate and passive – can fulfil and surpass the expectations of manliness implicit in combat narratives, leftist propaganda and patriotic citizenship. In a chapter entitled ‘Tough Jews in the Spanish Civil War’ in his Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (2007), Alan M. Wald argues that the Spanish Civil War provided an occasion for Jewish Americans to convince both fellow volunteers at the front and Americans back home of Jewish men’s valour. Jewish authors wrote fictionalised accounts that ‘challenge the popular idea that twentieth-century Jewish American culture primarily carries forward the “ethic of mentshlekhkayt”’ (Wald 2007: 44) – that is, the notion that American Jewish culture is constituted by honourable yet physically passive men. Wald explains that in their Spanish Civil War narratives, veterans Milton Wolff, Bessie and Herrick use Jewish protagonists ‘backed by the authority of the Popular Front, who bludgeon and in some cases kill’ (44).8 Extending Wald’s work on 1930s anti-fascism and American Jewish identity to my examination of North American Jewish literature reveals the stakes of inclusivity and masculinity more broadly, as Jewish writers sought to write themselves into hostile societies. Canadian literature about the war more frequently ventriloquises Jewish masculinity



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and power; Jewish and gentile Canadian authors both use gentile protagonists to comment upon Jewish volunteers’ courage. By employing existing tropes of masculinity and colonial authority, North American authors write new parts for non-gentile immigrants and other minorities as archetypes of masculinity and, therefore, as equal citizens. In addition to the violent forms of masculinity that Wald identifies, many North American novels make a point of noting the high-ranking positions held by Jewish characters or take pains to emphasise their Jewish characters’ sexual prowess. These novels fit Jewish characters into an existing category of normative white male heterosexuality by yoking heterosexual romantic exploits and skill in battle. Novels by Ted Allan and William Herrick present realist visions of wartime experience that interlace battlefront bravery and romantic dalliance. Ultimately, both novels suggest that for truly dedicated leftists, the Spanish cause always trumps individual romantic relationships. Canadian author Allan’s only novel, This Time a Better Earth, was published shortly after he returned to Canada from Spain in 1939. Allan was born Alan Herman into a working-class Montreal family. In Spain, he volunteered with the Canadian MackenziePapineau Battalion of the International Brigades. His novel follows a typical war romance plot between a volunteer soldier and a fictionalised version of the war photographer Gerda Taro. Allan himself was with Taro when she was killed in a bombing, and in his fictional version he represents both Taro and his male protagonist as gentiles, leaving their reallife counterparts’ Jewish affiliations unacknowledged. The character based on Taro – a German photographer named Lisa – worries over rising Nazism in her home country, but is more immediately concerned with documenting the Spanish struggle. Allan’s male protagonist, a Toronto man with the unimpeachably gentile name Bob Curtis, claims a sort of North American everyman status, declaring at one point: ‘My so-called youth is almost a general biography of the youth of America – my background, that is’ (Allan 1939: 142). The novel features a few Jewish characters, the most well-developed of them a volunteer from Brooklyn named Milty Schwartz, who eventually ascends to the role of sergeant over a group of North American International Brigades soldiers. The novel is, in many ways, as much an assimilation narrative for Milty as it is a failed romance for Bob. While Bob must suffer the trauma of witnessing Lisa’s death in order to reorient him to his duties on the Spanish battlefield, Milty must leave aside everything that the novel problematically constructs as too ethnic – his Yiddishised English, his unceasing vaudevillian humour, his voracious appetite for food and drink, his obsession with Spanish prostitutes – in order to prove his worth as a soldier. In other words, the overtly Jewish counterpoint to Allan’s covertly Jewish love story figures the loss of a lover as equivalent to the loss of supposedly Jewish characteristics. The author’s own tacit Jewishness (the name ‘Allan’ was an adopted pseudonym) frames both Bob and Milty’s wartime exploits as contributions to a secular, masculine ideal, one that remains implicitly Jewish by virtue of its urban workingclass roots. Still, Allan’s novel unrelentingly supports the Spanish Republicans and the ­international volunteers who joined them. Allan’s positive attitude towards the cause, the war and Jewish assimilation contrasts sharply with William Herrick’s Hermanos! (1969), a cynical, unsentimental view of the war. Herrick, an American novelist and former Spanish Civil War volunteer, represents the war in horrific detail, from the wounds and injuries sustained by poorly trained volunteers to the Communist Party’s aggressive duplicity. Writing decades after Allan, Herrick has the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight and an awareness of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact, as well as the Communist Party’s active suppression of dissent.9 Herrick’s

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protagonist, Jake Starr, is a first-generation American who works his way up in the party until he is sent to Spain. Upon his arrival there, he begins an affair with a fellow volunteer, even as the party endeavours to keep them apart. She eventually flees to France. Jake remains in Spain, increasingly determined ‘to fight for freedom’ (Herrick 1969: 330) as he awakens to the fissures within the Popular Front’s leftist coalition, and especially the Communist Party’s violent suppression of other parties and betrayal of the partisans. Unlike Allan’s protagonist, who finds personal freedom on the battlefield, Jake Starr is soon killed by another volunteer in retaliation for his illicit affair. Like Allan, Herrick based many characters on actual volunteers. And among the many soldier characters, he also includes a wide variety of Jews, from Jake, a hard-line activist called ‘the voice and the hand’ of the party in Spain, to the cruel higher-up Vlanoc, to Mack Berg, a Harvard graduate, to Eaman O’Hara Levy, ‘who spoke Yiddish with a brogue, having been born and bred in Dublin’ (70). Elsewhere, the novel refers to Yiddish as ‘the esperanto [sic] of the International Brigades’ (186). Yet, despite Herrick’s acknowledgement of transnational Jewish participation – and of a diversity of Jews, many of whom affiliated with anarchist and other left-wing groups outside the Communist Party – the novel’s overwhelming sentiment towards the Spanish cause is cynical, suggesting that many foreign participants were duped by the International Brigades’ message of equality into misplaced support for the Communist Party.10 Notably, Herrick contrasts Jake’s political savvy and strong leadership with the failures of an African American volunteer named Cromwell Webster (probably based on the Spanish Civil War volunteer Oliver Law, the first African American to ascend to the role of commander over American soldiers, who died in battle). Cromwell’s mistakes cause unnecessary casualties among the volunteers and eventually lead to his own murder. Where Allan’s protagonist finds an ideal international community in the International Brigades and happily works alongside the multi-ethnic, polyglot group of volunteers, Herrick’s novel suggests that this multicultural image meant compromised standards as the International Brigades promoted under-prepared minorities and endangered all involved for the sake of international sympathy. Given their common setting and plot, the distinctions between the cosmopolitan optimism of This Time a Better Earth and the political cynicism of Hermanos! are particularly striking. While Herrick’s and Allan’s novels both represent the violent realities of wartime and the instrumental roles played by brave Jewish men, they diverge in representing Jewish identities. Jake Starr remembers his Jewish roots; Bob Curtis and Lisa Kammerer retain gentile identities within the novel, but might be perceived as Jewish by a readership aware of Lisa’s connections to Gerda Taro and the author’s own Jewish roots. In both cases, the narratives connect Jewish rights in North America and eastern Europe and the need to prove Jewish masculinity as an entry into full American or Canadian citizenship – ­especially in the context of worsening Nazi violence.11

Combat Comedies In contrast to these novels’ emphasis on the masculinist domain of the front lines, Spanish Civil War fiction by Charles Yale Harrison and Mordecai Richler subverts easy distinctions between the home front and the battlefront by parodying wartime sincerity. While both Harrison and Richler recognise the Spanish cause’s importance – nationally and internationally – their novels disparage the equation of military bravery with gentile masculinity as a standard by which to judge Jewish assimilation. Harrison’s and Richler’s novels suggest



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the pitfalls inherent in seeking mainstream acceptance by hewing to conventional standards of manly courage. Both novels examine volunteers’ motivations in fighting in Spain, but their implicit critique is of mainstream North American society and its assimilationist, frequently antisemitic expectations of Jewish men. Harrison’s 1938 novel parodies the earnestness that characterises so much politically committed Anglophone writing about the war. Meet Me On the Barricades is both an outgrowth of and a departure from Harrison’s pessimistic First World War novel Generals Die in Bed (1930). This earlier, gruesome depiction of the uneven risks shouldered during wartime – generals die in their beds, while soldiers die on the battlefield – has more in common with later Spanish Civil War novels by Herrick and Bessie, and with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). The Spanish Civil War novel Meet Me On the Barricades, however, marks a stylistic shift for Harrison in which he trades the realist descriptions of trench warfare for a satirical, surreal depiction of the comforts of North American armchair leftism. Harrison’s growing pessimism towards organised politics echoes throughout his Spanish Civil War novel. Harrison was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. After serving in the First World War, he worked as a journalist and writer, including a short-lived stint at the New Masses – a far-left magazine closely linked to the American Communist Party – which ended in a falling out with Michael Gold. Gold, an American Jewish writer known primarily for his proletarian fiction and activist journalism, appears as a character in Meet Me On the Barricades, as do a number of modernist writers including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The protagonist, P. Herbert Simpson, is an overfed oboist from New York City. His heart condition parallels his weak political convictions, and he remains happily oblivious to the racism and sexism that underpin his desire to volunteer in Spain. Simpson imagines a fantastical adventure leading soldiers into battle as Captain Pedro Simpson, pillaging, visiting brothels and wearing a handsome uniform. He is confident in his sympathy with the Spanish cause, but cannot extend his sympathy to those without white skin: the narrator explains that ‘[t]he war in China, however, did not greatly move [Simpson], for while he could easily picture himself as a Spaniard or a German, he simply refused to imagine himself as a Chinese’ (Harrison 1938: 15). Simpson eventually dies in bed, his heart pushed past its limit by his fervid imaginings of battlefront bravery. The novel’s title ultimately underscores Simpson’s constant failures, implicating the international ­community’s many defeats. While Harrison’s novel satirises the investments that some had in the Spanish cause, Mordecai Richler’s novels lampoon subsequent generations’ erasure of these political stakes. Richler punctures the left’s supposed political unity and multicultural anti-fascism by examining later misconceptions about the Spanish Civil War. In his first published novel, The Acrobats (1954), reprinted the following year with the title Wicked We Love, Francoist Spain is a barren place where expatriates and tourists unsuccessfully hide from past experiences of antisemitism, sexual abuse and other violent trauma. This early text introduces Richler’s satirical critique of Hemingway and all that For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) connotes about American masculinity and disinterested international participation.12 The Acrobats begins with Canadian protagonist André’s explanation that he has come to Spain ‘to study life in its entirety. One day I hope to write a book about it. You know, like that Who Do the Bells Toll For’ (Richler 2002: 10). Richler sets up a series of unhappy relationships: the loveless marriage between an American Jew and his gentile wife; the romantic struggles of her brother Derek, an International Brigades veteran and closeted homosexual, and his Spanish lover; and the complicated relationship between

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a Canadian expat and his Spanish girlfriend, a prostitute pregnant with a Nazi’s child. Derek is haunted by memories of the homophobic beatings he endured as an International Brigades soldier, while his memories of his lover’s ‘dark body’ (129) suggest his orientalised view of Spanish difference. The American couple constantly argue over the husband’s inability to pass as a gentile, even as his attempt to do so has cut him off from the rest of his family. Barney’s family sat shiva for him after he married outside the faith, but this personal expulsion does not mitigate his continual identification – in private, at least – as a Jew. The novel ironises the distance between Spain’s imagined future as a place where democracy and internationalism could flourish, and the realities of fascist rule as experienced and misunderstood by Spaniards and internationals alike. Richler returns to the Spanish Civil War in his 1980 novel Joshua Then and Now, which takes a more humorous perspective on Spain’s enduring place in the North American Jewish imaginary. The eponymous protagonist of the novel is obsessed with the Spanish Civil War he was born too late to fight in. While growing up in Montreal, Joshua dreamed of living out a Hemingway-esque love scene set in Spain: [H]e never necked with a girl without wondering, if never daring to ask, O Riva Mandelbaum, O Hanna Steinberg, ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ ‘Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please.’ ‘No. I have thy hand. Thy hand is enough.’ (Richler 1980b: 115; italics in original) By imagining his protagonist in a semitic version of Robert Jordan’s Spanish seduction, Richler concedes the appeal of Hemingway’s hypermasculine gentile protagonist at the same time that he mocks its investment in its own gentile gentility. The Hemingway-hero’s appeal continues into Joshua’s adulthood. Later in the novel, Joshua’s friend Seymour reflects: ‘I wanted to fight on the Ebro. Come back with a wound, maybe. Nothing serious’; not like Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Richler writes: ‘But enough so that people would point me out even now. Sure he’s in knitwear, but you know that limp, he got it in Spain’ (178). Richler demonstrates that the Spanish struggle was an important cause for Canadian Jewish men, not only as a political call-to-arms, but as an opportunity to break away from their exoticised role as physically stigmatised, socially ghettoised objects of scorn and attraction. However, the novel does not critique this motivation to fight in the Spanish Civil War so much as it criticises the dominant culture against which it is a reaction. Joshua Then and Now interrogates Anglo-American masculinity, Canadian religious intolerance and antisemitic stereotypes of male effeminacy that compel violence and war as a route into the mainstream. Joshua’s longing to be a genuine hero of the International Brigades throws into sharp relief the society that produces such an ideal. With Joshua’s recognition of the problematic nature of his Spanish fixation, he commits to remaining in Montreal, choosing his local community – and especially family – over an imagined transnational collective. By relentlessly, explicitly inserting Jewish Canadians into a historical moment when religious affiliations were often occluded, Richler critiques the broader canon of masculinist Spanish Civil War novels.

Women at War Expanding on Richler’s critique of Spanish Civil War literature’s tendency to gender the battlefront and home front, two American novels, Chaim Potok’s 1985 novel Davita’s Harp and William Herrick’s 1983 novel Kill Memory, deviate from the narrative perspective



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adopted by most Spanish Civil War texts written by men. Instead, Potok and Herrick present the war from women’s perspectives – Potok, through the eyes of a young American girl, and Herrick, in his final fictional representation of the war, through a former nurse’s reminiscences. Potok’s novel stands apart not only from most Jewish Spanish Civil War fiction, but also from his own oeuvre, for its female narrator. Davita tries to follow the war’s events through her father’s journalistic dispatches from Spain. Potok links Davita’s inherited radical politics to her subsequent religious rebellion: although raised to be an anti-religious Marxist, Davita eventually returns to the orthodox Judaism of her mother’s family, but she does so in an innovatively feminist way. She insists on saying Kaddish for her father after he is killed in the Spanish conflict. Where so many masculinist Jewish novels of the Spanish Civil War undermine women’s increasingly equal roles in the Spanish army and medical services, Potok’s narrative instead subtly translates the liberties of leftist egalitarianism into an American Jewish context. Before leaving for Europe, Davita’s father explains to her: ‘I don’t want fascism in my own country, and the place to stop it is Spain’ (Potok 1985: 150). His death in the Guernica bombings forces Davita’s mother to relive her own escape from Russian pogroms before Davita’s birth, calling up memories of a family left without any men alive. The implicit comparison, for Potok’s protagonist, is between women’s roles in Europe under both fascism and democracy, and women’s roles in the United States within both secular and orthodox populations. As the child of an upper-class gentile father and a lapsed Jewish mother, Davita develops a unique social mobility. She is able to join multiple communities while still maintaining her critical perspective on each. Davita’s Harp not only emphasises the presence of Jewish volunteers in Spain, but also foregrounds the war’s consequences for a single American Jewish family as well as for European Jews at the outbreak of the Second World War. In Potok’s later novel Old Men at Midnight (2001) Davita returns, again capable of great social mobility and able to elicit confidences from various characters traumatised by global upheaval. Like Davita’s Harp, the representation of war in Herrick’s Kill Memory is mediated, but the latter does so through the narrator’s flashbacks, rather than through received dispatches from Spain.13 Herrick reconfigures his earlier representations of transnational leftist involvement to recount a single day in the life of the protagonist Elizabeth – ‘Boishke’ in Yiddish – an erstwhile Stalinist and former Spanish Civil War nurse, now a retiree living in Paris. Like Davita, Boishke’s heritage gives her social mobility. She identifies as ‘[h]alf Magyar, half Jew’ (Herrick 1983: 16), and describes how she was saved from the Holocaust by her antisemitic father who preferred her atheism to her sister and mother’s devout Judaism. Boishke’s constant social movement – not only between Jews and gentiles, but also in her role as a spy during the war – contrasts with the tightly regimented life she lives later on in life. As an old woman, Boishke meticulously organises her days, contemplating each movement and visit, planning each meal and expenditure. Within this strict routine, she reflects on her time nursing a wounded American volunteer and insinuating herself into the upper communist echelons; even years after the conflict, she worries that she is still in danger.14 Where Davita’s social mobility suggests a hopeful future and an increasingly egalitarian, progressive Judaism, Herrick’s heroine’s social mobility leads only to a postponement of her death. Boishke finally commits suicide, having escaped the Nazi gas chambers that killed her mother and sister and the Stalinist purges that killed her father, and endeavouring to

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avoid the same politically motivated murder that she suspects awaits her. Before this, she comments: ‘I am deracinated. I became an internationalist, loved all peoples, undertook their salvation, ended up nothing’ (59). Her conclusion – that she ‘ended up nothing’ – inverts the hopeful tone of so much Spanish Civil War literature, in which a character begins as nothing within his own country and, by embracing his deracination, becomes a part of a political and social movement greater than himself. Herrick’s female protagonist critiques the misguided politics and motivations that inspired some to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, highlighting instead the dangers of naively believing that chosen affiliations will protect one against ethnic and religiously motivated violence.

Conclusion: The War’s Jewish Legacy As Boishke’s lasting fear of retaliation testifies, even decades after the war’s conclusion the Spanish Civil War remained a significant marker of national, religious, gender and political authenticity. As in Kill Memory, Alvah Bessie’s The Un-Americans (1957) represents a continuum of Jewish and gentile masculinities and uses flashbacks to question the political convictions and national implications of foreign participation. The Un-Americans recounts two intertwined narratives of American Spanish Civil War volunteers on trial before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Bessie was a prolific American writer and filmmaker, and former Spanish Civil War volunteer. As one of the Hollywood Ten, he was blacklisted and spent ten months in prison for refusing to name names to HUAC. In his novel, two men who once travelled to Spain, one gentile and one Jew, are called to testify. Francis Xavier Lang, a wealthy playwright, complies with the committee and walks free. Ben Blau, a Jewish journalist, is imprisoned after repeatedly evading questions about Lang’s and others’ political leanings. Once in prison, Ben is attacked and nearly killed by another Jewish prisoner who is disgusted by the former’s communist affiliations. The Un-Americans was only one of Bessie’s many texts dedicated to chronicling the war and its aftermath.15 While his earlier works – especially the memoir Men in Battle (1939) – explicitly connect Spanish Civil War participation with the need to prove masculinity, this later novel is significant for exploring the implications of that thesis. Bessie criticises those who would bow to American anti-communist fervour; but save this sort of principled stand he undercuts any easy alignment of masculinity with Spanish Civil War volunteering. Both Ben and Francis ruin their romantic relationships; neither necessarily distinguishes himself for battlefront bravery. Ultimately, Ben asserts his worth by protecting other leftists against an anti-communist witch hunt. In narrating a history of American leftism at home and abroad, The Un-Americans ultimately challenges its titular category, reframing the intersection of patriotism and transnational leftism. Bessie’s ambivalent conclusion echoes the Spanish Civil War’s disastrous outcome and its global repercussions. In 1939 the Republican government ordered the withdrawal of their international troops in the hope of compelling a similar withdrawal on the other side. The manoeuvre failed: Franco captured Madrid and declared himself dictator of Spain, maintaining this position until his death in 1975. Thousands of international volunteers were sent to displaced person camps in France; some were allowed to return to their home countries, but others found themselves once again stateless. Many would shortly be called upon to fight with the Allies. Even after the Second World War made clear just how prescient these so-called premature anti-fascists had been about European fascism’s looming



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threat, former volunteers were often persecuted for years and blacklisted, like Bessie, for their leftist politics and activism. In their political investments and historical commentaries, Jewish writings about the Spanish Civil War vary greatly – as greatly as the diverse motivations that brought Jewish volunteers to Spain, or the wide range of Jewish religious and ethnic affiliation these volunteers and writers acknowledged. The Spanish Civil War novels I have discussed are not easily assimilated into a chronological trajectory reflecting changes in mainstream social acceptance of Jews, or to a related arc of Jewish political involvement and social activism in North America. Rather, Jewish novels about the Spanish cause since the late 1930s share with the wider North American Spanish Civil War canon a fixation on how global and national events impact the individual. Yet the novels I have discussed bring a marginalised, non-national perspective to bear on these global and national events, insistently confronting the conceptual borders of national affiliation so central to the discourse of war. Novels by Ted Allan, Alvah Bessie, Charles Yale Harrison, William Herrick, Chaim Potok and Mordecai Richler share a desire to reconcile transnational affiliation with a broadened conception of national identity. In fighting and writing ‘for your liberty and ours’, as the Botwin Company’s motto put it, Jewish volunteers and authors struggled for inclusion and inclusivity, as well as for ideological ideals.

Notes   1. For an extensive discussion of changing attitudes towards these volunteers from the 1930s to the present, see Rein (2012).  2. The foregrounding of political, rather than religious, leanings complicates the process of quantifying and understanding Jewish participation. Not only did many volunteers adopt pseudonyms when they joined the effort in Spain, but many also concealed their Jewish connections. Since most governments around the world made travel to Spain illegal in the hope of sustaining a non-interventionist policy, some volunteers travelled on falsified passports. As Martin Sugarman explains: ‘Some went openly as Jews, others took aliases; some fought in the battalions of their country of birth, others with other national groups; some went via a third nation, others went direct to Spain; some were refugees from anti-Semitism or political oppression already, others went freely from the democracies’ (2000: 1).   3. Many motivations brought Jewish volunteers to Spain. Jews of all political affiliations volunteered, often obscuring or rejecting their religious ties in favour of their radical politics. In addition to solidarity with Spain, many were also fleeing discrimination in the countries where they lived: those who came to Spain from eastern Europe escaped pogroms, while those who came from North America and England – usually first-generation residents of those countries, with families from eastern Europe – found that the Great Depression coincided with increased antisemitic sentiments and government policies in the new world. Many were also financially motivated, hoping for at least a living wage in exchange for their wartime participation (far better, for instance, than the work camps where single unemployed men in Canada were sent to break rocks for pennies a day). Gerben Zaagsma thus cautions against ascribing the same motivations to all Jewish volunteers, or even treating Jewish volunteers as a single category: ‘the decision to go to Spain was frequently a mixture of political, social, economic and psychological factors . . . And there were some who sought adventure’ (2003: 85).   4. That is, even beyond more overtly political texts, such as the political writings of anarchist Russian-American Emma Goldman, and both Der Fraihaits-Kempfer (The Freedom Fighter) and Botwin, the Yiddish-language newsletters of the International Brigades. For more on multilingual Jewish writings about the Spanish Civil War, see Zaagsma (2003).

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  5. See Nelson (2002) and Vulpe and Albari (1995).   6. See Bessie, Men in Battle (1939) and Spain Again (1975); Herrick, Jumping the Line (2001); and Richler and Christopher, Images of Spain (1977).   7. See Young (2010).   8. See also Rosenberg (2001) and Breines (1990).   9. Zaagsma recounts how, in an interview with Life magazine upon his return to the US from Spain, Herrick was coached by a representative from the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to say that he went to Spain as a Jew fighting against fascism, rather than as a member of the Communist Party (2003: 89). 10. Wald notes that the novel ‘manages to dredge up virtually every horror story about the International Brigades that exists. Nonetheless, it is the only artistic effort by a Spanish Civil War veteran from the United States to forthrightly address the political complexities’ (2007: 35). 11. Additional Jewish Spanish Civil War novels set in Spain during the conflict include Milton Wolff’s Another Hill (1994) and Michael Blankfort’s The Brave and the Blind (1940). 12. As Bessie critiques the novel in The Un-Americans: ‘the shattering struggle of twenty-eight million people for survival and decency was subordinated to an endless episode in a sleeping bag, and the phrase “the earth moved” was quoted by bohemians and bourgeois with a leer on their faces’ (1957: 211–12). 13. Kill Memory is the last in Herrick’s loosely connected trilogy, with Shadows and Wolves (1980) and Love and Terror (1981). All three novels feature characters involved in the Spanish Civil War in some capacity, on both sides of the conflict. 14. According to his memoir, Jumping the Line (2001), Herrick based the character Boishke on a nurse with whom he had an affair while in Spain. After losing touch with her, he worried that she might have perished in the Holocaust. 15. He published a variety of works on Spain, including Men in Battle (1939), a biographical account, as well as an anthology, Heart of Spain (1952), and a memoir, Spain Again (1975). For an extensive discussion of Bessie’s writing career, see Dick (1989).

28 MOORISTAN AND PALIMPSTINE: JEWS, MOORS AND CHRISTIANS IN AMITAV GHOSH AND SALMAN RUSHDIE1 Shaul Bassi You are lucky to be out of British India at the present moment. Incident after incident, all due to propaganda, but we can’t lay our hands on the connecting thread . . . My personal opinion is, it’s the Jews. (Forster 2005: 293) Where Jewish was, Indian is. (Gilman 2006: 165) Whenever you worship The Absolute, may you remember all its Relatives. (Ezekiel 1989: 281)

H

ow is it that so many contemporary Indian authors have written about Jews? Can their perspectives help us rethink Jewish identities in the diaspora? If we look at the body of Indian writing in English, which has acquired an almost canonical status in an increasingly globalised literary scene, we find a rich, recurring Jewish thematic content. Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Meena Alexander – this list (which deliberately omits Indian writers who are Jewish, such as Nissim Ezekiel, the first Anglophone poet to engage with modernist poetics, Esther David and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)2 shows how the best-known contemporary Indian writers have often turned to the figure of the Jew to explore the postcolonial condition. This chapter tries to trace a map of the Indian–Jewish literary encounter, and to examine in more detail Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). These two texts present Jewish characters as exemplary negotiators of cultures who complicate the conceptual, historical, geographical and even ethnic/ racial frameworks in which Jews have been traditionally portrayed in Western literatures. It is worth noticing, as a premise, that these postcolonial writers have been more sympathetic to Jewish culture than postcolonial theorists, despite the fact that some of the key concepts in the field have distinct Jewish connotations (diaspora, memory, migration, racism, hybridity) and despite the contribution of Jewish thinkers to postcolonial theory (Albert Memmi, Jacques Derrida, Ella Shohat or Benita Perry). Jewish Studies, in turn, have not been very responsive, with some notable exceptions, to postcolonial theory.

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In their seminal book Orientalism and the Jews (2005), Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar elucidate a key issue: ‘Jews have been seen in the Western world variably and often concurrently as occidental and oriental’ (xiii).3 At the present moment in the main arenas of postcolonial reflection, Jews are perceived (and often perceive themselves) as too Western, too white, too middle class to be still considered a subaltern minority in need of a voice. Accordingly, it has become customary, from a postcolonial perspective, to pit minority cultures against a monolithic ‘Judeo-Christian’ Eurocentric episteme or, in a more specifically political outlook, to enrol the same configuration as the bastion of Western modernity against the pre-modern or anti-modern threat of Islam. In less sophisticated contexts, old antisemitic tropes are revamped in anti-globalisation slogans that praise the pristine authenticity of local cultures against the flattening power of Western capitalism and globalism. Needless to say, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the backdrop and the province of most of these misapprehensions. However, Aamir Mufti’s recent book Enlightenment in the Colony. The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007) has reframed this uneasy relationship, suggesting that there is a complex conceptual ‘connecting’ thread between the Jewish Question in Europe and the foundations of postcolonial India. His main thesis is that the elaborate discourse that emerged in Europe regarding the status of the Jews as a minority was ‘transformed’ into ‘a consideration of what the forms of particularity of the Muslims meant for the question of whether India was a nation’ (94). Mufti painstakingly qualifies his argument as he follows the loaded concepts of liberalism, modernity, secularisation and minority travel across continents and genres. Whatever their routes, he reminds us that their consequences are very much with us, and not only in the Middle East: the vocabulary of the Jewish Question is ubiquitously present in Muslim citizenship in post-Ayodhya India: urban Muslim ‘ghettos,’ the ‘disloyal’ Muslim, Muslim ‘separatism,’ minority ‘appeasement’ by the liberal state, even Muslim ‘gangsterism’ – these are some of the terms in which the Muslim question is posed and debated routinely in India today. (139) So Major Heaslop in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) may have been unwittingly prophetic: ‘it’s the Jews’. This truth is hard to take in many quarters. ‘We’re not Jews’ (1995) is the title of Hanif Kureishi’s short story that Sander Gilman borrowed for his illuminating essay on the Jewish body in multicultural literature, where he shows how defining oneself against the Jew is a recurrent strategy in contemporary texts dealing with emerging identities in the West (2006: 145–78). In the story it is a group of Muslim migrants to London at the end of the twentieth century who are keen to demonstrate to themselves that they have nothing in common, pace Mufti, with the Jews. Gilman persuasively shows how in many contemporary multicultural texts the Jew ‘is a key to understanding the very nature of the multicultural society represented’ and that ‘the core concepts that shape the image of the Jew are the age-old ones: the Jew as foreign and victim; the Jew as cosmopolitan and successful’ (2006: 171). Gilman goes even further when he writes in the same essay: ‘Where Jewish was, Indian is’ (165). Among the many subtle implications that he distils in this ingenious pun on Freud, Gilman seems to suggest that Indians are in a way supplanting Jews in an unwitting secular version of supersessionist theology. Where Christians have been arguing for centuries that they have replaced the Jews in the eyes of God, so Indian writers seem to appropriate the space and symbolic capital occupied by the Jews as the model for a new



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diasporic literature. The sociological analogies between Indians and Jews as two diasporas, two model minorities with a strong cultural-religious background, well-guarded boundaries, close-knit families that have met with social and economic success appear particularly clear in the North American context. Jonathan Freedman has studied the self-conscious affiliations of Asian American authors to American Jewish writing, epitomised by Bharati Mukherjee’s statement from the early 1980s: ‘The book I dream of updating, is no longer A Passage to India – it’s Call It Sleep’ (Mukherjee 1985: 3). I take a useful cue from Freedman when he observes that contemporary Jewish writers have a ‘tendency to isolate Jews from the American ethno-racial hurly-burly’ while ‘it is in contemporary writers of color – particularly people whose family of origin are from East and South Asia – who have turned to thinking about the relation between Asian diasporas and the Jewish ones in ways that are provocative for both’ (2003: 237). What is striking is that whereas even the most cutting-edge Jewish fiction has repressed or marginalised the darkest sides of the American Jewish experience in its rise to social respectability, these same problems have been instead foregrounded by Asian American writers so that their ‘revisionary example’ becomes relevant for ‘Jewish-Americans’ understanding of their own cultural situation at the current moment’ (250). In this complex literary play of filiations, affiliations and disaffiliations, I would like to explore what seem to me some more complex forms of identification between Indians and Jews. Identification can be notoriously an imperialistic and narcissistic act when it implies appropriating the other while losing nothing, but it can also be a daring psychic activity that destabilises and repositions the subject. Indeed, some theorists understand identification as a form of regressive nostalgia, while others view it as a means of achieving real psychological change. For Diane Fuss, in its simplest formulation, ‘identification is the detour through the other that defines a self’ (1995: 2). In this case I hypothesise that in many postcolonial texts the voyage towards the Indian self takes a detour through the Jewish other, often blurring or at least complicating the intimately Western distinction between self and other. We could usefully start from the master form of identification in postcolonial theory, mimicry, a form of imitation which subverts the original while copying it (Bhabha 1994b). The ur-scene of postcolonial mimicry is the opening page of V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967): I paid Mr Shylock three guineas a week for a tall, multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe. And for Mr Shylock, the recipient each week of fifteen times three guineas, the possessor of a mistress and of suits made of cloth so fine I felt I could eat it, I had nothing but admiration. I was not used to the social modes of London or to the physiognomy and complexions of the North, and I thought Mr Shylock looked distinguished, like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it. I knew of recent events in Europe; they tormented me; and although I was trying to live on seven pounds a week I offered Mr Shylock my fullest, silent compassion. (2001: 7) Homi Bhabha states that the mimic man is ‘the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English’ (1994b: 87). Reading Naipaul we can infer that for his protagonist Ralph Singh to be successfully Anglicised is emphatically to be Jewish. We find here a surprising condensation and manipulation of Jewish tropes:

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the use of irony; the theatricality of Jews often used as a charge against the Jews (Most 2004: 12–31); the Jew as mirror (Halpern 1997: 161–3); the room’s association with a coffin and a book, and its owner with money – and all these elements embodied in the archetypal Jew of Western literature, Shakespeare’s Shylock. But then an unexpected change of perspective occurs: what in the eyes of the West has always been the irreducible oriental other, in the postcolonial look is associated with northern Europe, the cradle of the ‘superior White race’, and with elegance (no more Jewish gabardines!), animating Ralph Singh’s Anglophilia. The following allusion to the Holocaust leaves it unclear whether Singh self-consciously identifies with the Jew as victim, with European guilt, or with the Jew’s successful emulation of and assimilation into British society. Antisemitic and philosemitic tropes are both mobilised here, yet what seems to be at work is an overcoming of allosemitism, the tendency to represent the Jew invariably as an Other, and a form of ambivalent identification (Bauman 1998). An American variation on the same theme can be found some two decades later in the autobiography of Meena Alexander, as the cosmopolitan poet is reflecting on her multiple dislocations walking the streets of Manhattan: My life was so torn up into bits and pieces of the actual that I depended on the poems, irruptions of the imaginary to make an internal history for me. I focused in on the silk banner outside the museum entrance. It had a sign advertising ‘The Golem in Jewish Art.’ The mud monster. Wasn’t that what the golem was? Mary Shelley’s monster came to mind, the creature made with bits and pieces of flesh and stapled together with Frankenstein’s miserable magic. I shut my eyes to cut out the ugliness of it, the grotesque joints, the stitches that showed, the split seams. (2003: 125) For the fragmented postcolonial subject to feel, at least for a moment, whole and at home in New York is made possible through an impromptu identification with the Golem, which in turn is associated with Frankenstein. In both Naipaul’s and Alexander’s use of Jewish myths (Shylock and the Golem) the figure functions as a mediator for the migrant’s final destination, the Western metropolis (London or New York), in a sort of Hegelian progression from east to west. In both Ghosh and Rushdie we find similar events in their respective earlier novels The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Satanic Verses (1988), where Jewish characters (all women, interestingly enough) act as intermediary figures between the Indian protagonists and the experience of migration. An exemplary scene in Rushdie is when the fully secularised and Anglicised Saladin Chamcha (another famous mimic man, a literary child of Naipaul’s Singh) resists the courtship of the Jewish Armenian Mimi Mamoulian, recalling the prejudices of his Indian Muslim education: ‘“You’re Jewish.” . . . “I was brought up to have views on Jews.” “So I’m Jewish,” . . . “You’re the one who’s circumcised. Nobody’s perfect”’ (1988: 60). So, you are Jewish even if you do not know it (as the punchline from the quintessential Jewish émigré Billy Wilder’s comic masterpiece Some Like It Hot certainly demonstrates). These tales of Indian assimilation have their specular image in another powerful contemporary text. In Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) the eponymous protagonist, a Jewish refugee, travels in the opposite direction, from west to east, fleeing Nazi Germany and seeking refuge and safety in India. Hugo Baumgartner is the most psychologically complex and engrossing Jewish character of contemporary Indian fiction, and yet his tragic death at the hands of a young German misfit many decades later makes him a symbol of exile and homelessness that belongs to a typical European tradition of Jewish outcasts.



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In Jewish culture the ‘detour’ to one’s identity often takes literally and figuratively the form of a journey, and as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi reminds us in her study of homecoming and exile in the modern Jewish imagination, ‘the simultaneous effacement of homelands in Europe and creation of a central Homeland in Palestine forms the primary metanarrative of modern Jewish culture’ (2000: 16). The implicit paradigm of the Jewish literary journey has been the epic of return to the Homeland with its anti-epic of wandering Jews in search of the Lost Tribes. The alternative destination is obviously North America, even though in recent years we find, both in North American Jewish and Israeli Hebrew literature, a journey back to post-Holocaust Europe, no longer perceived as exile but as lost home. All these returns are archaeological, eschatological and necrophoric: the journey’s goal can be either finding a grave for oneself in the Holy Land or the graves of one’s ancestors in Europe. Ezrahi points to the twin dangers of this geographical configuration: on the one hand, the (re-)territorialisation of the Jewish imagination risks a closure of narratives, the end of exile and of storytelling, and, on the other hand, the claim of absolute place for exilic imagination, privileging the story as the thing itself, makes of ‘nomadic writing’ the inherently Jewish vocation: ‘The danger of turning scrolls into sacraments by which to consecrate the soil is matched by the danger of dissociation, of dissolution, that has afflicted generations of emancipated Jewish Quixotes’ (Ezrahi 2000: 14). The working hypothesis here is that at the closing of the twentieth century Ghosh and Rushdie charted alternative Jewish routes that may have broader cultural implications for the creation of a more cosmopolitan consciousness. Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie take us in very different directions and detours, and posit an alternative geography. Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land is a generically hybrid text that has achieved an ‘already formidable canonical status’ in contemporary cultural theory (Desai 2004: 125). Following the postcolonial school of subaltern history, the ethnographer Ghosh seeks to reconstruct the story of a mysterious slave whose master was a twelfth-century Jewish merchant from Tunisia, Abraham Ben Yiju, who spent almost twenty years of his life in the Indian city of Mangalore. If Ghosh’s main preoccupation is to give voice to the Indian slave Bomma, who has been silenced by history, it is clear that, as John Thieme puts it, he also identifies with Ben Yiju, ‘a liminal merchant, who is the personification of Indian Ocean trade-routes that confound the East-West bifurcations of Orientalist cartographies . . . a cultural broker who moves unselfconsciously between supposedly discrete worlds, just as the writer himself points up analogous Indian–Egyptian connections in the contemporary Egyptian narrative’ (2004: 260). In fact, over half the book is devoted to an account of the narrator’s fieldwork in Egypt, where he is not the detached observer of classical Western ethnography, but a traveller whose analytical tools are often turned towards himself by Egyptian villagers, marvelling at the customs of a Hindu man who worships cows and is not circumcised (Srivastava 2001: 53). In this postmodern narrative recycling of non-fictional materials, Ghosh draws on several Jewish sources, primarily on the monumental scholarship of Shlomo Goitein on medieval Jews of the Mediterranean. Having found a mention of the slave in Goitein’s classic study of Jews and Arabs, Ghosh eventually delves into his original source, documents preserved in the famous Cairo Geniza. This long-buried treasure represents for Ghosh both an ideal archive that can yield traces of forgotten, subaltern subjectivities and an exemplary colonial story. The last document deposited in the Geniza is a divorce settlement drawn up in Bombay in 1875. The way in which documents ‘travelled’ from Cairo to Philadelphia, Cambridge and St Petersburg enables Ghosh both to indict the way in

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which Egyptian culture has too easily forgotten and alienated its own Jewish component and the way in which even Western Jewish scholars shared an orientalist and colonialist atttitude to their Middle Eastern ‘brothers’. For Ghosh the irony is at its most bitter in the Russian Karaite, Abraham Firkowitch, the ruthless collector who ‘salvages’ documents from Egyptian Jews and brings them back to Czarist Russia, or in the Sephardic Jew of Dutch origin who becomes Baron von Cattaoui of the Hapsburg Empire, or in the British Jew Elkan Adler, who describes the Jews of Cairo as ‘aborigines’ (1992: 85). Whatever the involvement of the Jews in the colonialist scramble for control of the past, it is in the political and cultural framework of the British Empire that 140,000 documents found their way to Western libraries. In his reconstruction, where speculation and wishful thinking are always struggling with historical accuracy, the novelist Ghosh is particularly keen to demonstrate how different cultures are intertwined and hybridise each other. The most striking form of Jewish identification for Ghosh is perhaps his ‘learning’ of a Jewish language. The letters of Ben Yiju which contain the scant information on the Indian slave are written in Judeo-Arabic (ignored in most discussions of Jewish languages), and once he has learned the Hebrew script, Ghosh discovers to his amazement that this twelfth-century language is not so distant from the colloquial Arabic he had learned in twentieth-century Egypt. For Ghosh, Ben Yiju’s long stay in India is an exceptional fact, but his eastward trips are ‘natural’, as are his travels and residence in Arab lands. ‘The Indian ocean and its trade routes and languages becomes a zone of imaginative release, which enables the ethnographer-historian to reconstitute the flexibility of the medieval as a critical perspective on the exclusive identities of modernity’ (Majeed 1995: 49). The crusades struck a lethal blow to this culturally fluid Mediterranean space, and European colonialism put an end to ‘the peaceful traditions of oceanic trade’ and ‘the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise’ (Ghosh 1992: 187, 288). Neelam Srivastava remarks that Ghosh is engaged in ‘[t]he search for an alternative history to the segregationist narratives that aim to elide this common past in order to promote the cause of religious separatism . . . for example the repression of a joint Arab and Jewish history in the Middle East in favor of a “geography of hate”’ (2001: 62). Unsurprisingly, for Ghosh the key trope is ‘partition’, the seminal trauma of the Indian nation and a central event in Mufti’s understanding of the importation of the Jewish Question to the Indian subcontinent. A crucial episode takes place when Ghosh discovers near the Egyptian village where he had been living the grave of a holy man still worshipped by Muslims and Jews alike. As he travels there for a festival, a suspicious police officer questions him on the reasons of his visit, and the connection between the present situation and the stories he had been trying to recover from oblivion are spelled out: ‘But you’re not Jewish or Israeli,’ he said. ‘You’re Indian – what connection could you have with the tomb of a Jewish holy man, here in Egypt?’ He was not trying to intimidate me; I could tell he was genuinely puzzled. He was so reasonable and intelligent, that for an instant I even thought of telling him the story of Bomma and Ben Yiju. But then it struck me, suddenly, that there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story – the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined stories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. Nothing remained in Egypt now to effectively challenge his disbelief: not a single one, for instance, of the documents of the



Mooristan and Palimpstine 373 Geniza. It was then that I began to realize how much success the partitioning of the past had achieved. (Ghosh 1992: 339–40)

Gaurav Desai, an otherwise sympathetic critic, has pointed to several things that In an Antique Land ‘forgets . . . in its desire to weave a nostalgic narrative’ (2004: 127), and argues that Ghosh plays down the level of intolerance preceding European colonialism, idealises the nature of the slave/master relationship, and celebrates the survival of popular religiosity as an antidote to the repressive nation state where it is Egyptian authority that allows Israeli pilgrims to visit the grave against the vocal protests of the Muslim residents during the second Intifada. Nevertheless, ‘[w]hat makes In An Antique Land such a powerful text for our own times is its insistence on a nostalgic optimism even as it recognizes the encroachment of an inevitable melancholia’ (140). Alternative geographies and re-territorialisations of the Jewish imagination are also found in Salman Rushdie, whose fictional journeys lead to real (but mythicised) places such as India and Andalusia, and allegorical imagined cultural spaces such as Moorusalem and Palimpstine. In many ways The Moor’s Last Sigh is the mirror image of In an Antique Land: Rushdie’s text picks up where Ghosh’s left off, since the world of his novel is the one ushered in by Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498, the event that signalled European dominion over the Indian Ocean and changed forever the commercial and cultural traffic of the east–west axis. Rushdie basks in the most contradictory and unpalatable aspects of that ‘Asia before Europe’ (Chaudhuri 1990) longed for by Ghosh and shows a contemporary, metropolitan India corrupted by nationalism-cum-fundamentalism and freewheeling capitalism, through the vicissitudes of a single character. The eponymous Moor of the novel is Moraes Zogoiby, who, in the tradition of Rushdie’s narratives since Midnight’s Children (1981), has a very twisted genealogy which reflects the complicated cultural composition of India as a whole. His mother is a Christian painter descended from da Gama himself; his father is Abraham Zogoiby, a Cochin Jew disowned by his mother (a lethal Yiddishe mama/Mother India figure) for his intermarriage, only to find that their bizarre family name betrays their descent from Boabdil el-Zogoiby (‘the unlucky’), the last Muslim ruler of Granada. The Moor is then an Indian who embodies in himself the three great traditions that coexisted in the Iberian peninsula before the expulsion of Muslims and Jews. As Stephen Baker puts it, Rushdie’s ‘fiction often seems predicated on the need continuously to revise and to reassemble narratives, absorbing and reworking an English and European cultural tradition while simultaneously engaging in a process of self-revision’ (2000: 48). In this particular case Rushdie absorbs and revisits what Michael Ragussis has termed the ‘ideological uses to which Spanish history was put in England’ as regards the representation of Jews (1995: 27; see also Sicher 2012). The religious conflicts of early modern Spain (and the figure of Boabdil himself) were utilised in English literature to condemn the intolerance of the Catholic Inquisition and to praise the liberality of nineteenth-century Protestant England, a place where Jews were ‘free’ to convert. Rushdie recasts this multi-religious Spain on Indian soil as a triumph of the impure, of the conjoining of disparate things, though never succumbing to facile assimilationist plots and always showing the ironies and the tragedies involved in all cultural alchemies. As in Ghosh, the cross-cultural mix that generates Moraes is made possible by trade, specifically the trade of pepper, of which Aurora da Gama’s family holds the monopoly, but also by miscegenation with Abraham Zogoiby, their employee. Aurora and Abraham fall in ‘pepper love’, and they quite literally spice their first sexual intercourse with pepper.

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Rushdie has been accused of accumulating cultural bits with the ‘untroubled textual playfulness of a consumer culture’ (Baker 2000: 43), but a convincing defence can be made that ‘the fragmentary structure of Rushdie’s novels is, of course, a mimetic device, reflecting (and not necessarily celebrating) other forms of fragmentation’ (50). Moraes, as a matter of fact, is far from satisfied with his hybrid identity: ‘I was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was – what’s the word these days? – atomised . . . a real Bombay mix’ (Rushdie 1995a: 104). Characteristically, at some point it turns out that he may not even be Abraham’s son after all, since his mother spent a mysterious night with no less than Pandit Nehru, the father of the Indian nation. The initial setting of the novel is Cochin, and Rushdie’s description of its Jewish community is the most realistic feature of a novel that abounds in hyperrealistic and surrealistic elements.4 ‘The wafting sadness of unmarried Jews across the water of Mattancherry’ (9) is an excellent example of the melancholia enveloping this millenary community which is dying out. Its focal point is the famous synagogue whose walls and floor are covered with Chinese tiles. For Rushdie this is another tribute to the trade of cultures, to their hybridity, but the tiles are also a symbol of the power of storytelling (a Rushdian leitmotiv) because the Moor and his mother (abandoned by the father) both read endless stories into these small decorated squares. If Rushdie cannot help chronicling the fading of an ancient community that deprives India of a small but significant tessera of its mosaic, he also celebrates its fabulative resources as an antidote against death. Another Rushdian topos is the father–son confrontation. Abraham Zogoiby, in a parodic distortion of the biblical story, leaves his own land and family in Cochin to create an empire of business and crime in Bombay and becomes the secret leader of the Muslim gangster underworld. After trafficking in cocaine (a parodic distortion of the pepper trade), he tries to strike his ultimate deal by selling nuclear weapons to Islamist terrorists. It is here that his son Moraes, understanding that Israel will be the obvious target, takes an unexpected ethical stand: Abraham became stone. He was ice, and flame. He was God in Paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. ‘I am a business person’, he said. ‘What there is to do, I do.’ YHWH. I am that I am. ‘To my astonishment,’ I told this shadow-Jehovah, this anti-Almighty, this black hole in the sky, my Daddyji, ‘excuse me, but I find that I’m a Jew.’ (336–7) At which the father retorts ‘You’ll be wanting a yarmulke now’ (341), pouring scorn on Cochin Jews. Reviewing the novel at a time when Rushdie was still under the Iranian fatwa, J. M. Coetzee commented: It is in this context, in which Rushdie’s personal life has been overtaken by an increasingly political conception of personal identity, that we should understand the moment when Moraes, moving beyond a by-now-familiar Rushdian celebration of bastardy, mongrelhood, and hybridity, rejects his ‘anti-Almighty’ father Abraham – a father ready to sacrifice him on the altar of his megalomaniac ambitions – and embraces a heritage that has hitherto meant nothing to him: ‘I find that I’m a Jew.’ For not only are Rushdie’s Jews (the Jews of Cochin, the Jews of Spain) powerless, dwindling communities; but to claim, voluntarily, the identity of a Jew, after the Holocaust, is to assert, however symbolically, solidarity with persecuted minorities worldwide. (2002: 178)



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Abraham’s delirium will spare Israel but not Bombay-Babylon, which will be destroyed. Escaping from this nightmarish escalation of Indian fundamentalism, ruthless capitalism and family betrayals, the Moor escapes to the fictional village of Benengeli, in the heart of Spanish Al-Andalus, to recover the paintings of his dead mother stolen by her rival, Vasco Miranda. This becomes a journey back to his multiple roots, a deliberate attempt at retrospective identification with the land of their coexistence: ‘I tried to imagine the landscape when our remote ancestors had been here’ (Rushdie 1995a: 388). Gil Anidjar has shown how Al-Andalus has always been an ‘eschatological’ place, a name which since Maimonides has encapsulated the sense of an ending (2002: 2). But Rushdie denies his character any consolatory homecoming: what the Moor discovers is a town of rampant consumerism, drunken expatriates and sleazy double-dealers. What he was looking for was an ideal Al-Andalus, the artistic dream of his own mother, the imaginary ‘Mooristan’ where, in Aurora’s words, ‘worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away . . . One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine’ (Rushdie 1995a: 371). The little Alhambra he finds is not a new ‘Moorusalem’ but the ugly house of Miranda, who imprisons the Moor and nearly kills him. The dream of coexistence cannot be fulfilled: as Joel Kuortti points out, Rushdie’s ‘celebration of hybridity is in no way sublime’ (1998: 188). On the contrary, for Rushdie (as for Ghosh), hybridity (a term which derives from racial theory) presupposes the mixing of discrete identities that were in fact far less polarised or racialised in the times narrativised by the two Indian authors. I concur with Coetzee’s wish ‘that Rushdie had pushed the story of Moraes as rediscovered Jew further’, as a way of addressing the question: ‘What does it mean in real-life terms, in India or in the world, to take a stand on a symbolic Jewishness?’ (2002: 178). Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us how allosemitism has always been characterised by proteophobia, the fear for what is formless and protean, what does not fit in the orderly structure of the world, what sits uneasily within set categories, what sends out contradictory signals about its conduct and ultimately blurs boundaries that should be fixed (1998: 144, 148). Bryan Cheyette has shown how in the tradition of English literature the protean Jew has precisely served the function of testing the boundaries of culture (1993: 12). In his postcolonial revision, Rushdie seems to embrace proteophilia, showing a Jew who is never entirely a Jew (except when a crucial ethical decision is called for), who keeps changing shape not because he is a Jew but because this is the extreme literalisation of the ­postcolonial/postmodern condition. We may try at this point to summarise the relevant analogies between Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh as a way to answer my initial questions. Contemporary Indian authors have written about Jews because they identify with a diasporic and cosmopolitan condition that certainly predates the postcolonial era. They also seem to find in Jewish identities a model of the negotiation of different languages and cultures on a transnational scale. Vice versa, the two texts under consideration may also help us rethink Jewish identities in the diaspora. Both Ghosh and Rushdie have risked situating the Jews in a truly global framework, in ways which radically depart from the ‘semitic discourse’ identified by Cheyette (1993: 12) and the stereotype of the feared cosmopolitan Jew recalled by Gilman (2006), feared and evoked by so many Western texts in their affirmation of the nation state and of Christian unity. In addition, unlike most contemporary Jewish writers, Rushdie and Ghosh are not embarrassed by ‘Shylock’s complex’ and do not shy away from putting material culture and capitalism at the centre of their Jewish narratives and casting

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Jewish traders as protagonists (Ghosh chooses a realistic approach, while Rushdie magnifies and literally explodes the stereotype of the Jewish tycoon in the hyperrealistic figure of Abraham Zogoiby). In terms of the geography of literature, putting on the map marginal Jewish communities without fetishising or romanticising them and describing Jewish routes that differ from the epic return to the Promised Land, the ‘discovery’ of the Golden Land and the melancholic pilgrimage to the sites of the Holocaust, Rushdie and Ghosh, adopting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, use Jewish plots as a means to ‘provincialize Europe’ (2008). They also crucially insist on the kinship, the proximity, the osmosis, the cultural and social exchange between Muslims and Jews, countering the violent separation from the Muslim cultural legacy that has proved traumatic for both Jewish and Indian national cultures. Writing around the 1492 anniversary and in the wake of the fatwa and his political exile from his former homeland India, Rushdie may be said to share a form of Jewish nostalgia for a world changed forever by the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the coeval beginning of European colonisation of India. Rushdie, as Coetzee noticed, wrote his book on the Jewish Moor at the time of the war in Bosnia, the last European territory where Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived together for several centuries (2002: 178). Ghosh, on the other hand, also points to the arrival of Vasco da Gama on the Malabar Coast as the event that marks the beginning of an era of European hegemony and less permeable cultural borders, bringing to a symbolic end what we may term, paraphrasing Zygmunt Bauman, the liquid pre-modernity (2000) figured in In an Antique Land. Yet in spite of the poignant ‘sense of an ending’ that permeates both texts, we can read in them that ‘reflective nostalgia’ which in Svetlana Boym’s definition is forward-looking, insofar as it ‘dwells on the ambivalence of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity’ (2001: 142). Neither idealised or allegorised in the name of spiritual commonality nor romanticised as the native semites with an organic connection to land, Rushdie and Ghosh’s Jews and Muslims interact in a profoundly historical, mundane sense with each other and with other groups. So these Indian authors join together what Europe has traditionally designed as its own constitutive others, respectively the Muslim ‘political enemy’ and the Jewish ‘theological enemy’ (Anidjar 2003: xi), and what the West is representing as the irreducible mutual enemies’ epitome of that clash of civilisations that occupies political discourse today. Ghosh, ending his novel at the outbreak of the first Gulf War, compares Egyptian migrant workers abandoning Iraq in the wake of the American invasion to the ancient Hebrews crossing the Red Sea. Curiously enough, in Rushdie’s later novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008), once more Jews and Moors are brought together under the auspices of Shakespeare: ‘The merchant, a bearded and ringleted Jew named Shalakh Cormorano, had had the coat specially made at the most famous tailor’s shop in Venice, known as Il Moro Invidioso because of the picture of a greeneyed Arab on the shingle over its door’ (19). There are two further methodological points that can be made in conclusion. The concept of ‘race’ – and indeed the word itself – emerged in the fifteenth century, and some historians identify the onset of colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of Spain in the name of limpieza de sangre as the seminal events of modern European racism (Taguieff 2001). Race is a word that has been endlessly deconstructed and reconfigured in the social sciences of English-speaking countries, especially the United States, but its continous application to multiple contexts creates a potentially very dangerous situation. Its use entraps us in taxonomies that take us back to the nineteenth century, lending weight to Paul Gilroy’s bold and largely unheeded proposition:



Mooristan and Palimpstine 377 However reluctant we may feel to take the step of renouncing ‘race’ as part of an attempt to bring political culture back to life, this course must be considered because it seems to represent the only ethical response to the conspicuous wrongs that raciologies continue to solicit and sanction. (2000: 41)

Finally, would it be too provocative to suggest that the two texts analysed here could be also taught as Jewish literature? Unlike Jewish history, as Gil Anidjar has remarked, Jewish literature remains an unruly, intractable category, largely ‘without institutional backing and, for the most part, untaught’, despite the fact that ‘there would appear to be nothing inherently less manageable about the diversity of Jewish literary texts than there is about other Jewish historical materials’ (2005: 77). The last few years have witnessed a growing tendency to regulate the field and, ironically, to bring it within certain disciplinary boundaries that are simultaneously called into question in literary studies. Jewish literature seems possessed by a desire for ‘normality’ and ‘canonicity’ (Wisse 2000) and keeps imposing on itself restrictions in the pursuit of a national, linguistic or aesthetic homogeneity, while the ongoing process of internationalisation of literature is showing the exhaustion of such parameters and aiming at a more cosmopolitan vision. A few years ago, Michael Kramer launched a provocative critique, claiming that all definitions of Jewish literature were overtly or covertly racial, having as their ultimate horizon the Jewish biological identity of its authors (2001: 287–321). His claims have been successfully challenged by a number of scholars,5 but the provocation was salutary because it revealed how for many critics it is still easier to concentrate on faint traces of residual Judaism in writers of Jewish descent than to explore the Jewish thematics of non-Jewish authors. It would be futile to claim that Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie are Jewish writers, but it may be less hazardous to speak of the ‘Jewish poetics’ of Ghosh and Rushdie and to include their texts in a Jewish literature course. Revisiting times and places that allowed the coexistence and contamination of cultures, and staging liminal Jewish identities in a trans-civilisational perspective, Rushdie and Ghosh remind us that the Jews are a ‘civilization’ in progress (Eisenstadt 1992), invite us to consider Jewish diasporas in their lesser known ramifications, in their negotiations with other diasporas and other cultures, challenging the East/West and the Jewish/Muslim divides, decentring, expanding, perhaps contributing to the process of ‘provincialization’ and decolonisation of the Western (and Jewish) literary imagination, complicating traditional perceptions of ‘race’ and colour in relation to Jews. Paraphrasing the lines of the Bombay Jewish poet Nissim Ezekiel quoted at the beginning, if we treasure the ‘absolute’ of the culture we belong to, let us not forget all its relatives.

Notes 1. Thanks to Andrea Most, Efraim Sicher, Linda Weinhouse, Bryan Cheyette, David Brauner and Axel Stähler for their precious comments. 2. The list, on the other hand, includes V. S. Naipaul as a member of the Indian diaspora in Trinidad. 3. See also, more recently, Cheyette (2013). 4. On my reservations against the term ‘magical realism’, see Bassi (1999). 5. See the several responses to Kramer’s essay in the same issue of Prooftexts 21.3 (2001): 322–49.

CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Aarons holds the position of O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She is the author of the books A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction (1996) and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (with Avinoam J. Patt and Mark Shechner; 2014). She is judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prize awarded each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. Her work has appeared in a variety of scholarly sources, and she is on the editorial board of a number of journals, including Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature and Women in Judaism. She is currently working on a book on third-generation Holocaust literary representation and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory. Shaul Bassi is associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare, postcolonial studies and Jewish studies. His recent publications include a critical edition of Othello (translated by Alessandro Serpieri; 2009), Visions of Venice in Shakespeare (with Laura Tosi; 2011), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (with Annalisa Oboe; 2011) and Essere qualcun altro: Ebrei postmoderni e postcoloniali (2011). Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare: Place, ‘Race’, and Politics is forthcoming in 2015 for Palgrave Macmillan. Devorah Baum is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is also attached to Southampton’s Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. Her research interests include continental philosophy (especially Derrida), psychoanalysis, faith and doubt, religious hermeneutics and postwar American literature. She is currently writing a monograph for Yale University Press entitled Feeling Jewish. Claudia B. Braude is an independent scholar and an honorary research fellow at the Helen Suzman Foundation. She edited Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World: Anthology



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of South African Jewish Writing (2001). Based in Cape Town, Braude is interested in the contemporary global implications of critical engagement with race, memory and identity in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. For the last two decades she has researched and archived South African Jewish history, including its Lithuanian legacy. David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading, where he teaches courses in contemporary American and British fiction, Holocaust literature and literature and ethnicity. He is the author of three books: Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (2001), Philip Roth (2007) and Contemporary American Fiction (2010). He has co-edited a special Lorrie Moore issue of The Journal of American Studies with Heidi MacPherson and his articles have appeared in a wide range of journals, including The Journal of American Studies, The Yearbook of English Studies, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Review, Canadian Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature and Philip Roth Studies. He is executive co-editor (with Debra Shostak) of Philip Roth Studies. Ruth Gilbert is Reader in English Literature at the University of Winchester. She has published a number of articles on contemporary British Jewish writing and is author of Writing Jewish: Contemporary British Jewish Literature (2013). David Gooblar is the author of The Major Phases of Philip Roth (2012). In addition to his work on Roth, he has written on Saul Bellow, Tobias Wolff and David Foster Wallace. He is the founder and proprietor of the Pedagogy Unbound website, and writes a teaching column of the same name for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae site. Rachel Harris is Assistant Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois. She is the author of An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014) and coeditor of Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012). She is the series editor for the Dalkey Archive Press Hebrew Literature in Translation Series, and is currently writing on women in Israeli cinema. Lori Harrison-Kahan is Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (2011). David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. He is the chief fiction reviewer for The Jewish Chronicle and writes regularly for The New Statesman, Prospect, Standpoint, Salmagundi, PN Review, The Jewish Quarterly and Jewish Renaissance and has also written for the Guardian and the Independent. Phyllis Lassner is Professor at Northwestern University and the author of books and articles on interwar and wartime women writers and Holocaust literature and film. Her recent publications include Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust (2009) and the co-edited volume, Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (with Lara Trubowitz; 2008). She created and is editor of the Northwestern University Press series ‘Cultural Expressions of World War II: Interwar Preludes, Responses, Memory’ and holds the International Diamond Jubilee Fellowship at the University of Southampton, UK.

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Contributors

Jennifer Lemberg teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, and serves as Assistant Director of the Holocaust Educators Network, a professional development organisation for faculty. She has published on graphic novels, American Indian literature and Jewish American Holocaust fiction, including a chapter in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrrative (2012), edited by Derek Parker Royal. Currently she is working on a co-edited volume of essays on using inquiry-based methods to teach about the Holocaust. Serge Liberman OAM was born in the Soviet Union in 1942. In 1951 he came to Australia where he worked as a medical practitioner for forty-five years. He has been literary editor or member of editorial committees of several literary and historical journals, has contributed to many publications and been included in anthologies in Australia and overseas. As author of six short-story collections, he has three times received the Alan Marshall Award for his books. In addition, he is the compiler of The Bibliography of Australasian Judaica (1987), the third updated and annotated edition of which was published in 2011. Sarah Lightman is researching a PhD on ‘The Drawn Wound – Hurting and Healing in Autobiographical Comics’ at the University of Glasgow and has contributed to many books, newspapers and journals, including The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures (2014), The Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma (2014) and Trauma Narratives and Herstory (2013), and she is a frequent contributor to Studies in Comics (Intellect Publishing). She is an award-winning fine artist, currently working on her autobiographical graphic novel The Book of Sarah (forthcoming 2016). She is director, with Nicola Streeten, of Laydeez do Comics, the UK’s only women-led monthly comic forum, now with branches worldwide. She is also a co-curator of Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women and editor of Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (2014). Catherine Morley is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction (2009) and Modern American Literature (2012). She has co-edited American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (2008) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009). She has published articles in journals such as Journal of American Studies, Review of International American Studies and Philip Roth Studies. Ira Nadel is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. His critical books include Joyce and the Jews (1996) and Modernism’s Second Act (2012). He has also published on Pound, Joyce, Stein and David Foster Wallace and is completing a critical biography of Philip Roth. Beate Neumeier is Professor of English at the University of Cologne. Her research is in gender, performance and postcolonial studies. She has published on English Renaissance drama as well as contemporary Anglophone drama, contemporary British Jewish literature and women’s writing. She is also the editor of the e-journal GenderForum and the database GenderInn. Her books include Jüdische Erfahrung in den Kulturen Großbritanniens und Nordamerikas nach 1945 (1998), Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary



Contributors 381

Women Writers in Britain (2001), Dichotonies: Gender and Music (2009), Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia (with Kay Schaffer; 2013) and Gothic Renaissance (with Elisabeth Bronfen; 2014). Monica Osborne is Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Pepperdine University. Her work in Jewish literary and cultural studies addresses issues including the ethics of representation, Midrash in a modern context, the Holocaust and humour in the context of the Holocaust and 9/11. Her work often draws from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and she is a co-founder of the North American Levinas Society. She is currently finalising a book manuscript (The Midrashic Impulse and the Literary Response to Trauma) and has written for Tikkun, The New Republic, The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Religion and Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Shofar, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, The Jewish Daily Forward and various edited collections. Before coming to Pepperdine, Osborne was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University where she teaches contemporary literature, trans-Atlantic modernism and theories of trauma and ethics. She is the author of Roth and Trauma (2011) and Falling After 9/11 (2014) and has edited Critical Insights: Philip Roth (2013) and Roth and Celebrity (2012). She is current president of the Philip Roth Society. Sasha Senderovich is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Russian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published on Russian Jewish writers Isaac Babel and David Bergelson, as well as the critical introduction and notes to the English translation (2013) of a Soviet Yiddish novel by Moyshe Kulbak, The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga (1929–35). Emily Robins Sharpe is assistant professor in the English Department and an affiliate faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and the Holocaust and Genocides Studies Department at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Her research and teaching interests include global modernisms, postcolonial theory, cosmopolitanism, Jewish literatures and the digital humanities. She is at work on a book manuscript examining global Anglophone responses to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which argues for the war as a formative juncture in transnational discourses of cosmopolitan nationalism. With Bart Vautour, she is co-director of ‘Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment’, a multi-phase project establishing a digital archive and print anthology of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Mark Shechner is Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. His books include After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination (1987), The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (1990) and Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth (2003). He is co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2014). Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature at the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio. The author of Philip Roth – Countertexts,

382

Contributors

Counterlives (2004) and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (2011), she publishes on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction and film. Shostak is executive co-editor, with David Brauner, of Philip Roth Studies. Efraim Sicher teaches English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His previous books include Beyond Marginality: Anglo-Jewish Literature after the Holocaust (1985), Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens (2003), The Holocaust Novel (2005), Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the ‘jew’ in Contemporary British Writing (with Linda Weinhouse; 2012) and (as editor) Race, Color, Identity: Discourses about the Jews in the 21st Century (2013). He is currently working on a research project on narratives of the Jew and his daughter. Sandra Singer is associate professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is the author of Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (2010). Her Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty is under contract with Palgrave. On Jewish fiction she has written primarily about Canadian author J. J. Steinfeld, in ‘Acting Out Justice in J. J. Steinfeld’s “Courtroom Dramas”’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, and elsewhere. Currently she is editing a collection, J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works, under contract with Guernica. She has contributed to Ariel, Postcolonial Text, Image & Narrative, and [sic]: a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, among others. Axel Stähler is Reader in Comparative Literature in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His research interests include the interface of postcolonial and Jewish studies, Jews and orientalism, Zionism and literature, and constructions of blackness and Jewishness. Among his recent publications are Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain (with Sue Vice; 2014), Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (with Ulrike Brunotte and Anna-Dorothea Ludewig; 2014), Jewish Magic Realism (2013), Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität: Das britische Palästinamandat in der anglophonen jüdischen Literatur (2009) and Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007). Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches and researches contemporary literature and film, including that of the Holocaust. Her most recent book is Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (2014). Linda Weinhouse is Professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County, Maryland. She has written widely on Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Anita Desai. She is the author, with Efraim Sicher, of Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the ‘jew’ in Contemporary British Writing (2012).

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index

INDEX

Names Aaron, Moses, 343 Abraham, Pearl, xiv, xvi, 76, 78 Abrami, Janka, 339 Abramowitz, Rachel, 324, 326 Abse, Dannie, 245, 247, 251 Acker, Kathy, 14, 105 Adler, Elkan, 372 Adorno, Theodor, 138, 140 Agamben, Giorgio, 154, 155 Ajzenbud, Moshe, 339 Akhitorskaya, Yelena, 103n2, 104n12 Albahari, David, xii, 295, 296 Albert, Elisa, 83 Alderman, Naomi, 199, 218, 264 Alexander, Goldie, 344 Alexander, Meena, 367, 370 Ali, Monica, 200 Allan, Ted (born Alan Herman), 356, 357, 359, 360, 365 Amis, Martin, 267, 276 Angress, Ruth K. (born Ruth Klüger), 141 Anidjar, Gil, 377 Anthony, Susan B., 30 Antin, Mary, 45, 46, 66, 67, 68, 75 Anton, Maggie, 86 Appelfeld, Aharon, 232 Appignanesi, Lisa, 194, 222, 224, 267, 278n10 Apple, Max, 105 Arendt, Hannah, 63n5, 185 Armstrong, Diane, 340 Asch, Sholem, 31n1 Attenberg, Jami, 15 Auerbach, John, xviii

Auslander, Shalom, 139 Austen, Jane, 23, 83 Auster, Paul, xiii, 12, 105, 162, 168–70 Ayer, A. J., 183 Babel, Isaac, xvi Baddiel, David, 9, 194, 264, 267, 268, 274–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121, 274 Banks, Lynne Reid, 251 Barnea, Lilian, 338 Baron, Aileen, 85 Baron, Alexander (pseudonym of Alec Bernstein), 176, 177–8, 188, 246, 251 Bart, Lionel, 229 Barth, John, 53 Barthes, Roland, 353 Bat-Ami, Medina, 344 Bauman, Janina, 188, 189, 190, 194, 197 Bauman, Zygmunt, 1, 240, 375 Bavati, Robyn, 344 Beauman, Ned, 15 Beckett, Samuel, 287 Bellow, Saul, xvi, 3, 8, 33, 34, 36, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 61, 63n5, 65, 105, 142, 144, 150, 291, 292 Bender, Aimee, 105 Ben-Gurion, David, 227 Berger, John, 352, 354n4 Bergner, Herz, 336 Berke, William, 265n3 Berkman, Marsha Lee, 105 Berlin, Isaiah, 196 Bermant, Chaim, 178, 186, 187, 251 Bernstein, Herman, 19

Bessie, Alvah, 357, 358, 361, 364, 365, 366n6, 366n12 Bezmozgis, David, xii, xviii, 7, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94–6, 97, 98, 103n4, 104n12, 295, 296, 299–301 Bhabha, Homi K., 241, 258, 350, 369 Binding, Tim, 277n1 Biro, Lajos, 189, 191, 198n1 Blanchot, Maurice, 2 Blankfort, Michael, 366n11 Blitz, Julie, 334 Bloom, Amy, 105 Blumenfeld, Simon, 175 Boabdil el-Zogoiby, 373 Bonert, Kenneth, xii Borowski, Tadeusz, 142 Brainard, Joe, 321 Brainin, Ruben, 302n2 Brand, Dionne, 296 Braude, Claudia B., 266n4, 304, 305 Brauner, David, 4, 11, 70, 143, 161, 168, 182, 279 Brett, Lily, 340 Breytenbach, Breyten, 320, 322, 331n1 Brezhnev, Leonid, 97 Brodkey, Harold, xvi, 105 Brodsky, Joseph, 205 Bronner, E. M., 89n6 Brontë, Charlotte, 222 Brookner, Anita, 12, 13, 199, 208n3, 267, 279, 280–4, 288 Brooks, Mel, 54 Brown, Judy, 87; see also Eshet Chayil Brown, Rosellen, 105 Bruce, Lenny, 54, 220, 272

416 Brudno, Ezra, 20 Bruriah, 89n5 Budnitz, Judy, 105 Bukiet, Melvin Jules, 145, 149, 150, 157, 158 Bunyan, John, 238 Burgess, Anthony, 49 Burns, Robert, 167 Burrows, Annie, 277n1 Busch, Frederick, 105 Bush, George W., 101, 104n14, 104n15 Butler, David, 256 Butler, Judith, 287 Cahan, Abraham, xvi, 19, 21, 26, 27, 31n1, 45, 46, 291 Calisher, Hortense, 105 Camberton, Roland (pseudonym of Henry Cohen), 176 Cameron, Michelle, 86 Canetti, Elias, 186, 188, 191, 192, 198n2 Canetti, Veza, 190, 191 Capa, Robert, 357 Carter, Jimmy, 143 Caruth, Cathy, 349, 354n1 Carver, Raymond, 139, 320, 322 Celan, Paul, 214 Chabon, Michael, 7, 105, 147, 159, 160, 302 Chagall, Marc, 203, 352 Charles, Gerda (born Edna Lipson), 179–80, 251 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 196 Cheyette, Bryan, 1, 2, 5, 262, 264, 279, 280, 281, 287, 375 Chopin, Kate, 23 Churchill, Winston, 117 Clare, George, 190, 192, 194 Coetzee, J. M., 374, 375 Cogan, Alma, 229 Cohen, David, 314–15 Cohen, Henry, 176; see also Camberton, Roland Cohen, Leonard, 357 Cohen, Matt, 294, 295 Collins, Alan, 337 Cone, Libby, 277n1 Coren, Giles, 264 David, Esther, 367 Davidson, Lionel, 185, 186 de Kok, Ingrid, 322 de Waal, Edmund, 194, 236n1 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 225, 231, 235, 367 Des Pres, Terrence, 142 Desai, Anita, xix, 367, 370 Deutscher, Isaac, xi, xiii, xiv, 223

index Diamant, Anita, 86 Dickens, Charles, xviii Doctorow, E. L., 15, 105 Donleavy, J. P., 53 Dos Passos, John, 357 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M., 163 Dreifus, Erika, 156, 157, 158, 278n12 Dreyfus, Alfred, 262 du Maurier, Daphne, 207 Dubosarsky, Ursula, 344 Dudek, Louis, 357 Dupee, F. W., 35 Durgnat, Raymond, 196 Dykewomon, Elana, 105 Dyson, Jeremy, 9, 268–71, 272, 273, 274, 277n4 Ebenor, Sarah (pseudonym of Lichtenstein, Bronwen), 343 Eichmann, Adolf, 287 Einstein, Albert, 239 Eisenberg, Deborah, 11, 105, 106, 115–18 Eisner, Will, 10, 11, 119, 120–1, 122–9, 130, 132, 136, 137 Eliot, T. S., 60, 175, 185 Elkin, Stanley, xvi, 8, 53, 54, 55, 57–9, 60, 63, 63n3 Elton, Ben, 194 Englander, Nathan, 105, 139, 140, 147, 159, 160 Ephron, Hallie, 85 Eprile, Tony, 303, 304, 306, 312, 313, 317 Epstein, Joseph, 105 Epstein, June, 344 Epstein, Leslie, 141 Eshet Chayil (pseudonym of Judy Brown), 87 Ezekiel, Nissim, 367, 377 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 140, 141, 371 Factor, June, 344 Fagan, Cary, 291 Fainlight, Ruth, 188, 190, 194, 279 Farhi, Moris, 188, 189, 194 Fedler, Chaya, 324–7, 329, 331 Fedler, Solomon, 325 Fein, Yvonne, 341 Feinberg, Leslie, 14 Feinstein, Elaine, 186, 199, 209n3, 279 Feldberg, Leon, 326 Feldman, Deborah, 87 Felman, Shoshana, 348 Ferber, Edna, xv, 6, 20, 21, 26, 30–1, 105

Fiedler, Leslie, xiii, 2, 12, 24, 44, 63n4, 162, 166 Fienberg, Anna, 344 Figes, Eva, 189, 190, 192, 194, 209n5, 209n8, 274, 275, 279 Figes, Kate, 194 Finkelstein, Norman, 170 Finkielkraut, Alain, xvii, 158 Firkowitch, Abraham, 372 Fishman, Boris, 103n2, 104n12 Fitzgerald, Scott F., 282 Flanzbaum, Hilene, 150 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 145, 153 Ford, Henry, 19 Ford, John, 256 Forster, E. M., 193, 368 Foucault, Michel, 258 Fram, David, 331n3 Franco, Francisco, 355, 364 Frank, Anne, 139, 140, 147, 233, 235, 268, 269, 270, 274 Frank, Joseph, 201 Frank, Otto, 233, 268 Fraser, Antonia, 225 Freadman, Richard, 332, 333 Freedland, Jonathan, 223, 227, 228, 229, 233, 235 Freedman, Jonathan, 369 Freud, Esther, 194 Freud, Lucian, 194 Freud, Sigmund, xiii, xvii, xix, 166, 222, 231, 232, 235, 236n1, 239, 354n2, 368 Fried, Erich, 189, 190, 192 Friedenthal, Richard, 191 Friedman, Bruce Jay, xvi, 8, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61–3, 63n7 Friedman, Isaac Kahn, 19 Friedman, Stanford, 14 Fuchs, Daniel, 31n1, 47 Funaroff, Sol, 357 Galgut, Damon, 304, 308, 315, 316, 317 García Lorca, Federico, 358 Gardam, Jane, 267 Garfield, Rachel, 225, 229, 230, 231 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 222 Gavron, Jeremy, 260, 265 Gellhorn, Martha, 357 George V, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, 177 Gershon, Karen, 189, 190, 192, 195, 209n8 Gervay, Susanne, 344 Ghosh, Amitav, xix, 14, 367, 370, 371–3, 375, 376 Gibbons, Stella, 206



index 417

Gilbert, Ruth, 264, 279, 280 Gillman, Nathaniel Isaiah, 19 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 23 Gilman, Sander L., xix, 216, 368, 375 Gilroy, Paul, 376 Ginsberg, Allen, xvii, 65 Ginzburg, Natalia, 329 Glanville, Brian, 175, 178, 188, 245, 246–8, 251, 252, 253, 265 Glanville, Mark, 212, 213–14, 215, 217 Glass, Montague, 20, 21 Gleitzman, Morris, 344 Gmeyner, Anna, 190, 191, 192 Gold, Alan, 343 Gold, Herbert, 8, 44, 47 Gold, Ivan, xvi Gold, Michael (also Mike), 31n1, 361 Goldberg, Myla, xiv, 80, 87, 109 Goldberg, Myra, 11, 105, 106, 109–12, 115, 118 Goldbloom, Sandra, 343 Goldhar, Pinchas, 335, 336 Golding, Louis, 188 Goldman, Emma, xv, 30, 365n4 Goldman, William (also Willy), 175, 187, 188 Goldsmith, Andrea, 342 Goldstein, Rebecca, xiv, 78, 81, 82, 88, 88n2, 105, 146 Gömöri, George, 188, 189, 190, 194 Goodman, Allegra, xiv, 78, 79, 80, 88n2, 88n3, 105 Goodman, Ivy, 105 Goodman, Paul, 14 Gordimer, Isidore, 309 Gordimer, Nadine, 304, 306, 308–12, 313, 316, 317, 318, 320, 327–8, 329, 330, 331 Gordon, Abraham Samuel, 338 Gorr, Rabbi Shmuel, 337 Grant, Linda, 199, 250, 257–9, 261, 265, 279 Greenberg, Nicki, 344 Grese, Irma, 272, 273 Grindea, Miron, 191, 192 Gross, Dick, 343

Harrison, Charles Yale, 358, 360, 361, 365 Hartman, Geoffrey, 138 Harwood, Ronald, 188, 189, 194 Havazelet, Ehud, 144, 145, 159 Hecht, Ben, 24 Heine, Heinrich, xiii, 226 Heller, Joseph, xvi, 8, 44, 47, 53, 54, 55–7, 58, 60, 63, 105 Heller, Lukas, 189, 190, 192, 194 Heller, Zoe, 190, 194 Hellman, Lillian, 356, 357 Hemingway, Ernest, xviii, 163, 357, 361 Herrick, William, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366n6, 366n9, 366n13, 366n14 Herrmann-Neisse, Max, 189, 190, 191 Hersey, John, 141 Hershman, Marcie, 105 Heschel, Susannah, 273 Hirsch, Marianne, 143, 144, 146, 328, 348 Hirsch, Odo, 344 Hirson, Baruch, 319, 321, 322, 323, 324, 327, 329, 330 Hirson, Denis, 13, 319, 320–4, 327, 328, 330, 331, 331n1 Hirson, Yael, 319 Hitler, Adolf, 68, 108, 141, 180, 190, 194, 200, 203, 219, 228, 229, 337, 339, 344 Hoffman, Eva, 145, 188, 189, 194, 278n10 Hoffmann, Catherine, 342 Holkner, Jean, 334, 335 Homer, 163 Horlock, Mary, 277n1 Horn, Dara, xiv, 80, 87 Horovitz, Michael, 192, 194 Houdini, Harry, 233 Houghteling, Sara, 146 House, Humphrey, 195 Housman, A. E., 193 Howe, Irving, xviii Howells, William Dean, 21 Hurst, Fanny, 20, 21, 105 Hurwitt, Jannika, 309

Hage, Rawi, xii, 301 Halfon, Eduardo, xii Halkin, Hillel, 162 Halper, Albert, 19, 20, 31 Hamburger, Michael, 190, 192 Hamsun, Knut, 169 Hapgood, Hutchins, 31n1 Harland, Henry, 31n1 Harris, Robert, 278n12

Ibbotson, Eva, 190, 192 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 193, 209n17 Ivens, Joris, 357 Ivory, James, 190, 193 Jackson, Senator Henry, 104n15 Jacobson, Dan, 188, 189, 194, 304, 305–8, 313, 314, 315, 317, 323

Jacobson, Howard, xix, 9, 214, 220n2, 237, 244, 246, 247, 256, 262–4, 265, 268, 271–4 James, Henry, 193, 222 Jeremiah (prophet), 163 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 3, 188, 189, 190, 192, 367 Jong, Erica, 105 Josipovici, Gabriel, 188, 189, 193, 220n3 Joyce, James, 2, 3, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42n3, 60, 163, 201, 292, 361 Jubal, Benjamin Newman, 336 Juchau, Mireille, 343 Kadish, Rachel, 105 Kafka, Franz, xvi, 58, 162, 169, 182, 183 Kahn, Sharon, 85 Kalman, Nadia, 92, 96–7, 98 Kalmar, Ivan D., 368 Kaplan, Johanna, 105 Karmel, Ilona, 141 Karpf, Anne, 194, 278n10 Kattan, Naim, xii, 296 Katz, Danny, 344 Katz, Judith, 14 Kaye/Kantorowitz, Melanie, 14 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 206 Kazin, Alfred, xvi Kehoe, Louise, 194 Kellerman, Faye, 85, 89n8 Kelly, Myra, 31n1 Kerbel, Sorrel, 281 Kerr, Alfred, 189, 191, 193 Kerr, Judith, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 267 Kersh, Gerald, 188 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 183 Kincaid, Jamaica, 14 King, Ruchama, xiv, xv, 80, 89n7 Kirschenbaum, Binnie, 105, 118n1 Klein, A. M., xii, 248, 291, 292, 293, 300, 357 Kneale, Matthew, 194 Knight, Esmond, 196 Koch, Ilse, 271, 272, 273, 274 Koch, Karl-Otto, 271 Koestler, Arthur, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 238, 239–44, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256, 257, 258, 264, 265, 356 Kohn, Peter, 341 Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 121 Konecky, Edith, 14, 105 Kops, Bernard, 176, 227, 234, 235, 245, 247, 251, 279

418 Korda, Alexander, 191, 192 Korn, Rochl, 302n2 Koval, Ramona, 341 Kramer, Lotte, 190, 192, 195 Kramer, Michael, 377 Kramer, Theodor, 190, 191 Krasikov, Sana, 103n2 Krauss, Nicole, 145, 146, 151, 152, 153 Kreisel, Henry, xii, 291, 292, 293 Kremer, S. Lilian, 142 Krich, Rochelle, 85 Kureishi, Hanif, 200, 216, 217, 368 Kushner (historian), Tony, 244, 245, 271, 279 Kushner (playwright), Tony, 10, 65, 66, 68, 72–3, 75 Kussy, Nathan, 20 Lacan, Jacques, 288 LaCapra, Dominick, 269, 271 Lagnado, Lucette, 14 Lang, John George, 334 Lange, Laura, 340; see also Lowy, Liesl Lanzmann, Claude, 278n5, 348 Laski, Marghanita, 188 Lasko-Gross, Melissa (also Miss), 10, 11, 120, 129–36, 137 Lasson, Robert, 215 Laub, Dori, 348 Law, Oliver, 360 Lawrence, D. H., 182 Lawson, Mark, 219 Leaman, Jonathan, 12, 210, 211, 279 Leavitt, David, 14 Lee, Hermione, 222 Leegant, Joan, 105 Lefebvre, Henri, 209n12 Lenin, Vladimir I., 93, 99 Lentin, Ronit, 354n3 Lessing, Bruno, 19 Levi, Primo, 69, 154, 155, 268 Levi, Rabbi Harry, 32n6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 72, 75 Levine, Laura, 85 Levine, Maurice, 357 Levine, Norman, 291, 292, 294, 295 Levy, Amy, 175 Levy, Andrea, 200 Lewis, Joseph H., 265n3 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 24, 66, 67, 68 Lewitt, Maria, 339 Liberman, Serge, 7, 333, 340 Lichtenstein, Bronwen, 343; see also Ebenor, Sarah Lichtenstein, Olivia, 217

index Lichtenstein, Rachel, 220n2, 224, 230, 231, 232, 233, 279 Lightman, Sarah, 10, 11 Lipchitz, Jacques, 125 Lipsett, E. R., 31n1 Lipson, Edna, 179; see also Charles, Gerda Litman, Ellen, 103n2, 104n12 Litvinoff, David, 231 Litvinoff, Emanuel, 176, 186, 223, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231 Livesey, Roger, 196 Loew, Rabbi Yehuda, 337; see also Maharal, the Loewenstein, Andrea Freud, 14 London, Jack, 229 Lowenberg, Bettie, xv, 6, 20, 21, 28, 30, 31 Lowy, Liesl, 340; see also Lange, Laura Lubetkin, Berthold, 194 Luckhurst, Roger, 354n1 Lumet, Sidney, 63n4 Lurie, Morris, 337 Luska, Sidney (pseudonym of Henry Harland), 31n1 Lustig, Ian, 339 Luxemburg, Rosa, xiii, xv Lyotard, Jean-François, xvi, 2 Maan Meyers (pseudonym of Annette and Martin Meyers), 85 McBride, James, 14 McCarthy, Mary, 63n5 McDonald, Dwight, 63n5 McEwan, Ian, 267 Magritte, René, 255 Maharal, the, 337; see also Loew, Rabbi Yehuda Mailer, Norman, xvii, 8, 15, 43, 47, 105 Maimonides, 375 Mainzer, Ricky, 344 Majzels, Robert, 295, 296 Malamud, Bernard, xiii, xvi, 8, 43, 47, 49, 50, 51, 105, 142, 291 Malan, D. F., 325, 327 Mandela, Nelson, 312, 314, 317 Mandelman, Avner, xii Manger, Itzig, 189, 190, 191 Mankowitz, Wolf, 176, 188, 245 Mann, Reva, 86 Marcus, David, 3, 244–5, 246, 248, 251, 253, 257 Marcuse, Ludwig, 179 Margolis, Jonathan, 219 Markfield, Wallace, xvi, 8, 53, 54, 55, 59–61, 63, 63n4, 63n5 Markovits, Anouk, xii, xv, 87

Markovits, Benjamin, 15 Marks, Harry, 335 Marks, Stan, 336 Martin, David, 338 Martin, Fredericka, 356 Marx, Karl, xiii, 179, 239 Matisse, Henri, 146 Maupassant, Guy de, 255 May, Elaine, 54 Mayer, Gerda, 190, 192, 195 Mayne, Seymour, 357 Melville, Herman, xviii, 163, 255 Memmi, Albert, 367 Mendele Mocher Sforim, 45 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 146, 151 Mendelson, Charlotte, 15, 264 Mengele, Josef, 351, 353 Merchant, Ismail, 190, 193 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 21, 22, 26, 27, 31n3, 31n4 Meyers, Annette, 85 Meyers, Martin, 85 Michaels, Anne, 295, 296–9 Michaels, Leonard, 105 Michelson, Miriam, xv, 6, 20, 21, 30, 31 Miller, Andrew, 226, 228, 229, 233, 235 Miller, Arthur, 8, 44 Miller, Deborah, 343 Miller, Jonathan, 219 Millin, Sarah Gertrude, 304–5, 311, 317 Mindel, Mick, 227, 228 Mindel, Nat, 227, 228 Mirvis, Tova, xiv, 80, 87, 88n3, 89n3 Mistry, Rohinton, 296 Moore, Rayanne, 85 Morris, Walter, 41 Morris, William, 176 Morrison, Toni, 144 Moscowitz, Faye, 105 Moses, 124, 125, 128, 130 Mosley, Sir Oswald, 176, 225 Mosley, Walter, 14 Mufti, Aamir, 368, 372 Mukherjee, Bharati, 367, 369 Nabokov, Vladimir, 53 Nachman of Bratslav, xvi Nahai, Gina, 14 Naipaul, V. S., 367, 369, 370, 377n2 Nassauer, Rudolf, 186 Nayman, Shira, 342 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 374 Newman, Lesléa, 14, 105 Nichols, Mike, 54 Nickerdown (pseudonym of Julius Wise), 21

Niven, David, 196 Noah, 124, 128 Nowak, Josef, 339 O’Neill, Eugene, 256 Olsen, Tillie, xiii, 12, 47, 105, 162, 164–5, 166 Oppenheim, James, 20 Ornitz, Samuel, 31n1 Orringer, Julie, 147, 153, 155, 158, 159, 278n12 Orwell, George, 361 Oshry, Rabbi Ephraim, 325, 326 Ozick, Cynthia, xii, 7, 8, 44, 47, 48, 76, 105, 140, 143, 150, 151, 152, 158, 215, 292, 302 Paley, Grace, 8, 11, 44, 47, 49, 50, 76, 105, 106–9, 115, 118, 118n3 Paretsky, Sara, 85 Parks, Rosa, 107 Pascal, Julia, 199, 279 Pearlman, Edith, 11, 105, 106, 112–15, 118 Pels, Auguste van, 268 Pels, Hermann van, 268 Pels, Peter van, 268–9 Penslar, Derek J., 368 Perec, Georges, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324, 330 Peretz, I. L., 45 Peretz, Y. A., xvi Perlman, Elliot, 342 Perry, Benita, 367 Peter the Painter (born Peter Piaktow), 229 Phillips, Caryl, 267 Picasso, Pablo, 163 Pick, Alison, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Piercy, Marge, 15, 105 Piesman, Marissa, 85 Pinochet, Augusto, 145, 152 Pinter, Harold, 176, 224, 225, 228, 230 Poliakoff, Stephen, 279 Potok, Chaim, 8, 44, 47, 358, 362, 363, 365 Powell, Michael, 191, 192, 196 Prager, Emily, xiii, 12, 162, 167–8 Pressburger, Emeric, 188, 189, 191, 196, 198n1 Price, Dennis, 196 Prose, Francine, 105 Pynchon, Thomas, 53 Rabbi Hillel, 277n2 Ragen, Naomi, xiv, 78, 83, 87, 89n4

index 419 Raphael, Frederic, 182–5, 187, 188, 189, 194, 246, 251 Raphael, Lev, 14 Raphael, Mark, 214 Rapoport, Nessa, 215 Rashi, 89n5 Ravitch, Melech, 302n2 Reagan, Ronald, 73, 102 Reed, Lou, 42n3 Reeves, Ambrose, 320, 322, 331 Reich, Tova, xiv, 78, 83, 88n3, 105 Reich, Wilhelm, xvii Reinhardt, Max, 336 Remarque, Erich Maria, 203 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 125 Renno, George, 273–4 Reyn, Irina, 103n2 Richler, Mordecai, 7, 194, 291, 292, 293, 294, 300, 301, 357, 358, 360, 361, 362, 365 Riis, Jacob, 31n1 Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 357 Robeson, Paul, 357 Roiphe, Anne, xiv, 78–9, 80, 81, 83, 87 Rolfe, Edwin, 356, 357 Rosen, Norma, 76, 77, 78, 115 Rosenbaum, Thane, 89n6, 145, 149, 150 Rosenberg, Harry, 340 Rosenberg, Isaac, 181 Rosenberg, Jacob, 339 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 138 Rosenfeld, Isaac, xvi, xvii, 3, 8, 19, 33, 34, 38–41, 60, 105 Rosner, Maurie, 338 Roth, Henry, xvi, 31n1, 45, 65, 68, 291 Roth, Herman, 64 Roth, Philip, xiii, xvi, 8, 10, 24, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 64–5, 66, 68, 69–72, 73, 75, 105, 139, 147, 161, 182, 232, 233, 291 Rothberg, Yetta, 334, 335 Rubens, Bernice, 181–2, 186, 187, 199, 259, 260, 261–2, 265, 279 Ruby, Jack, 54 Rukeyser, Muriel, 356, 357 Rumkowsky, Chaim, 141 Rushdie, Salman, xix, 14, 217, 254, 255, 257, 367, 370, 371, 373–5, 376 Russell, Edward (Lord Russell of Liverpool), 271, 272

Sachs, Albie, 312 Sackville, Raphael, 343 Said, Edward, 91 Salinger, J. D., xiii, 8, 12, 44, 105, 162, 165–7 Samuels, Diane, 199, 279 Sandor, Marjorie, 105 Sanger, Andrew, 212–13, 215, 217 Sansom, C. J., 278n12 Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg, 105, 146 Schlink, Bernhard, 278n7 Schonfeld, Rabbi Solomon, 209n7 Schonstein, Patricia, 313, 314 Schulman, Sarah, 14, 105 Schwartz, Delmore, xvi, 3, 8, 33, 34–8, 41, 46, 63n5 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, 105 Schwitters, Kurt, 190 Sciaky, Leon, 66 Sebald, W. G., xix, 267 Segal, Erich, 76 Segal, Francesca, 187 Segal, Lore, 105 Seide, Michael, xvi Seiffert, Rachel, 278n10 Self, Will, 15, 220n3 Selvadurai, Shyam, xii, 301 Seth, Vikram, 367 Setton, Ruth Knafo, 14 Seymour, David ‘Chim’, 357 Shabtai Zvi, 186 Shaffer, Anthony, 279 Shaffer, Mary Ann, 277n1 Shaffer, Peter, 188, 246, 279 Shaiak, Gedaliah, 338 Shain, Milton, 303 Shakespeare, William, 370, 376 Sharansky, Natan, 101, 102, 103n9, 104n14 Sharon, Ariel, 254 Sher, Anthony, 188, 194 Shklovsky, Victor, 91 Shohat, Ella, 367 Sholem Aleichem, xvi, 45, 96 Shrayer, Maxim, xii Shrayer-Petrov, David, xii Shteyngart, Gary, 92, 96, 97–9, 100–1, 102, 103n10, 104n12, 104n13 Shuster, Joe, 122 Sicher, Efraim, xvi, 5, 10, 145, 246, 251 Siegel, Jerry, 121 Siegel, Roz, 85 Silver, Leon, 341 Simons, Jake Wallis, 217–18, 219, 267 Simons, Moya, 343

420 Sinclair, Clive, 254–7, 263, 264, 279 Sinclair, Iain, 176, 220n2, 224, 229, 230, 231 Sinclair, Jo, 14, 105 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 45, 66, 67, 221 Singer, Ivan Arije, 340 Singer, Renata, 343 Skvorecky, Josef, 296 Smith, A. J. M., 292 Smith, Zadie, 200, 218, 220, 220n5 Snow, S. P., 175 Sofer, Dalia, 14 Sollors, Werner, 27, 161 Solomon, Michel, 296 Solomons, Natasha, 11, 12, 158, 199, 200, 201, 205–8, 209n5, 209n14, 220n2, 275, 278n11 Sonntag, Jacob, 191, 192 Sontag, Susan, 10, 65, 66, 68, 73–5 Spark, Muriel, 12, 13, 199, 209n3, 248–50, 251, 252, 252n6, 258, 280, 284–8 Spark, Robin, 285 Spender, Stephen, 357 Spiegelman, Art, 65, 142, 149, 352 Spiel, Hilde, 191 Spielvogel, Nathan, 334 Spinoza, Baruch, xiii, 226 Stalin, Josef, 183, 228, 323 Stanger-Ross, Ilana, xiv, 80 Stavans, Ilan, 2 Stedman, Solomon, 333, 334 Stein, Gertrude, 14, 65, 361 Steiner, Edward A., 20 Steiner, George, 10, 184, 188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 196, 273 Stencl, A. N., 189, 190, 191 Stevens, Serita, 85 Stoecker, Adolf, 68 Stollman, Aryeh Lev, 350–2, 354, 354n5 Stollnitz, Rabbi Henry S., 20 Stoppard, Kenneth, 193 Stoppard, Tom (born Tomáš Straüssler), 161, 162, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193 Storrs, Sir Ronald, 240, 242 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 28, 29 Straüssler, Tomáš, 192; see also Stoppard, Tom Styron, William, 143 Suchomel, Franz, 278n5 Szirtes, George, 188, 189, 190, 193

index Tabori, George, 189, 191 Takac, Esther, 344 Tansley, Tangea, 343 Taro, Gerda, 357, 359, 360 Tergit, Gabriele, 190, 191 Thirlwell, Adam, 211, 212, 215–16, 220n3 Thomas, D. M., 267 Toller, Ernst, 190 Trojan, Kurt von, 339 Trotsky, Leon, xiii Trubowitz, Lara, 240 Tsabarai, Ayelet, xii Tucker, Eva, 11, 12, 199, 200, 201–5, 207, 208, 209n4, 209n5, 267, 274 Uhlmann, Fred, 191 Ulinich, Anya, 92–4, 96, 98, 104n12 Uris, Leon, 93, 141 Valland, Rose, 146 Vapnyar, Lara, 103n2, 104n12, 105 Varga, Susan, 343 Vasco da Gama, 373 Vassanji, M. G., xii, 301 Waddington, Miriam, 357 Wade, Michael, 309, 318, 319, 328, 331 Wade, Stephen, 162 Waldman, Ayelet, 105 Walker, Rebecca, 14 Wallant, Edward Lewis, 8, 43, 142, 143, 144 Wandor, Michelene, 4, 279 Waten, Judah, 336 Webb, Mary, 206 Weizmann, Chaim, 197, 239 Wesker, Arnold, 175, 176, 228, 229, 279 Wesker, Sara, 227 West, Nathanael, xiii, 12, 162–4, 165 Whale, James, 255 Wharton, Edith, 23, 31n3, 187 White, Hayden, 350, 353, 354n2 White, Terri-Ann, 343 Wiesel, Elie, 69, 72, 141, 142, 149, 276 Wilder, Billy, 370 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 67 Wilson, Jonathan, 3, 15n2, 250, 251, 352–4 Wise, Julius, 21, 22; see also Nickerdown Wiseman, Adele, 291, 292, 293 Wiseman, Thomas, 191, 192

Wisse, Ruth, 45, 162 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 183 Wolf, Alice S., 23, 24 Wolf, Douglas, 59 Wolf, Emma, xv, 6, 20, 21, 22–7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32n5, 32n6 Wolfenstein, Martha, 31n1 Wolff, Milton, 358, 366n11 Wolfowitz, Paul, 104n15 Wolpe, David, 324 Woolf, Leonard, 357 Woolf, Virginia, 357 Wouk, Herman, 8, 44, 47 Yellin, Tamar, 211, 279 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 222, 230, 231 Yezierska, Anzia, xv, xvi, 19, 24, 26, 27, 45, 66, 67, 105 Zable, Arnold, 341 Zail, Suzy, 342 Zangwill, Israel, 21, 22, 26, 27, 32n5, 179, 226 Zawatzky, Joan, 342 Zimler, Richard, 14 Zweig, Stefan, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194 Zwi, Rose, 3, 15n2, 327, 328–9, 330, 343, 347–50, 354 Zwicky, Fay, 337

Subject 9/11 (terrorist attacks), 92, 100, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123, 147, 262, 352 abolitionism, 28 Aboriginals (Australian), 333 Academy Award, 188, 198n1 Accra, 311 acculturation, 46, 48, 66, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 344 Adam International Review (Budapest/London), 191 Africa, 3, 285, 288, 316, 350 African American literature, 26 African Americans, 31n4, 108, 111, 112, 142, 144, 342, 357, 360 African National Congress (ANC), 312, 317 African resistance movement, 319 Afrikaner, 13, 303, 305, 306, 307, 313, 325, 327, 328 Afrikaner Yidishe Tsaytung (Johannesburg), 327 AIDS, 10, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74 akedah, 256, 257; see also Sacrifice of Isaac

Alabama, 28 Alaska, 31, 147 alienation, 13, 33, 35, 36, 39, 183, 284, 304, 308, 316, 317, 337, 341, 342, 343, 344, 372 allosemitism, 240, 370, 375 alternate histories, 147, 159 America, xv, xvi, 20, 21, 22, 30, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 65, 72, 74, 87, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104n11, 111, 115, 116, 125, 141, 142, 143, 145, 157, 164, 166, 167, 190, 193, 233, 256, 258, 291, 342, 353 American Communist Party, 361 American dream, 62 American fiction, 8, 43, 47, 49, 53, 55, 166 gold rush (1849), 23, 30 graphic novelists, 119 Holocaust literature, 9, 44 literature, 5, 8, 21, 30, 43, 45, 52, 54, 57, 70, 105, 194 pop culture, 54, 61 American Jewess, The (Chicago/ New York), 23, 31n4 American Jewish authors, xvii, 8, 9, 65, 138, 139, 140, 144, 147: new wave of, 144; second-generation, 8 autobiography, 68 fiction, xv, xvii, 1, 4, 9, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31n2, 43, 44, 48, 49, 51, 140, 277: Holocaust, 9 identity, 44, 47, 49, 103n7, 171n1, 358 life writing, 64, 65, 67 literary tradition, 59, 66 literature, 5, 6, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 45, 47, 49, 80, 105, 358, 371 short story, 41, 106 women writers, 4, 11, 20, 28, 31, 77, 78, 81: fourthgeneration, xiv, xv, 11, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89n6; new wave of, 89n6; thirdgeneration, xiv, 11, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89n6 writers, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 65, 105, 128, 149, 162, 170, 188, 232, 280, 291, 369: firstgeneration, 46, 48; new wave of, 45, 144, 188; secondgeneration, 8, 47, 54, 291 writing, xvi, 6, 31n2, 44, 45, 47, 49, 68, 73, 76, 80, 279, 369

index 421 American Joint Distribution Committee, 112, 114 American Israelite (Cincinnati), 21 Americanisation, 46 of the Holocaust, 139 amnesia, 238, 244, 245, 255, 257, 258, 312, 320, 321, 327, 330 anarchism, 225, 234, 262, 355, 360, 365n4 Andalusia, Al-Andalus, 373, 375 Anglicanism, 183, 311 Anglo-Jewish literature, 12, 197, 245, 246 writers, 175, 188 writing, 175, 188 see also British Jewish Anglo-Palestine Committee, 239 Anglophilia, 370 Anglophone Jewish diaspora, xxn1, 4–5, 244, 346, 350 fiction, xi, xiv, 1, 3, 14, 31n1, 92, 96, 322, 327, 350, 357 literature, 5, 6 writers, 14, 367 writing, 352, 357 Angola, 314 angry young men, 10, 176, 177 Anne Frank Museum (Amsterdam), 139 Antarctica, 297 anti-apartheid, 318, 329 movement, 303 anticolonial resistance, 244, 243, 245, 251, 258, 261 anti-communism, 364 anti-fascism, 356, 358, 361, 364 anti-globalisation, 368 anti-racism, 329, 330 antisemitism, 10, 19, 22, 29, 65, 66, 68, 72, 74, 98, 99, 102, 108, 110, 116, 124, 147, 162, 163, 167, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 184, 186, 197, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 208, 213, 219, 225, 228, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 245, 247, 251, 254, 257, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275, 286, 301, 303, 305, 307, 312, 314, 325, 327, 335, 337, 340, 345, 355, 356, 361, 362, 363, 365n3, 368, 370 anti-Zionism, xiv, 237, 247, 253, 257, 262, 264 apartheid, 13, 303, 304, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 324, 327, 331, 343, 347, 349 appeasement policy, 193 Appleton, 30

Arabs, 96, 99, 238, 239, 240, 242, 245, 249, 258, 312, 337, 356 Arch of Titus (Rome), 292 architecture, 242, 243, 259; see also Bauhaus archive fever, 231, 232, 234 archive(s), 155, 156, 160, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236n1 Argonaut, The (San Francisco), 23 Army of Africa, 355 Ashkenazim, 45, 356 Asia, 3 Asian American writers, 369 assimilation, xiv, 6, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 46, 47, 48, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 110, 122, 142, 157, 158, 162, 179, 183, 185, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 223, 224, 238, 280, 281, 291, 303, 309, 311, 317, 329, 341, 344, 350, 352, 359, 360, 361, 365, 370, 373 Athens, 297, 299 Auschwitz, 69, 83, 110, 111, 138, 142, 145, 155, 169, 185, 190, 191, 212, 233, 268, 270, 276, 320, 339, 342, 343, 351 Australia, 3, 7, 95, 328, 332, 333, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 345, 347, 350 Australian gold rushes, 333, 343 Holocaust writing, 332 Yiddish writers, 335, 336, 338, 339 Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs), 335 Australian Jewish fiction, 1, 3, 7, 332 identity, 342 literature, 332 writers, 7, 15n2, 333, 334, 344 writing, 337, 344 Australian Jewish Forum (Sydney), 333, 334 Austria, 208, 284 Austro-Hungarian empire, 342 autobiographical writing, 3, 10, 11, 20, 28, 35, 45, 46, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 119, 123, 129, 136, 153, 166, 176, 189, 193, 194, 198n2, 199, 213, 225, 229, 232, 280, 288, 307, 310, 317, 320, 323, 328, 329; see also life writing; memoir(s) ba’al tshuva, 83, 87 ba’alat tshuva, 11, 78, 82, 84

422 Baader-Meinhof gang, 186 Ballarat, 334 Barcelona, 356 Bauhaus, 259; see also architecture Beats, the, 166 Belgrade, 296 belonging, 6, 41, 46, 196, 197, 206, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 218, 226, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 288, 356, 376 Bergen-Belsen, 183, 186, 272 Berlin, 69, 158, 187, 190, 192, 193, 199, 201, 203, 204, 283 Berlin Wall, 145, 187 Bethnal Green, 177 Bible, 86 King James Version, 259 Bikernieki woods (Riga), 323 Bildungsroman, 351, 352 Birkenau, 298 Biskupin, 297, 298 Black and Tans, 245 black liberation movement, 309 black–Jewish relations, 108, 112 Blitz (1940–41), 225 Bloom’s Restaurant (London), 230 Boer War (1902), 196 Bombay, 371, 374, 375, 377 Bonn, 203 Booker Prize, 181, 188, 237, 316 Boston, 129 Botwin (Tardienta), 365n4 Brazil, 189 Brisbane, 334 Britain, xii, xiii, 9, 175, 186, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 203, 205, 209n5, 209n18, 210, 211, 213, 216, 218, 219, 227, 229, 237, 238, 239, 242, 245, 247, 250, 251, 252, 253, 257, 260, 261, 262, 264, 267, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278n12, 279, 280, 333; see also United Kingdom British Army, 177, 238 British colonial policy in Palestine, 239 British Empire, 240, 372 British Jewish culture, 13, 280, 288 émigrés, 12 fiction, xix, 1, 9, 12, 13, 237, 243, 251, 253 Holocaust fiction, 9, 267, 277: third-generation, 277 identity, 199, 200, 251, 253, 257, 265, 267 women writers, 12, 199 women’s writing, 4

index writers, xiii, 208, 210, 215, 218, 220, 237, 245, 253, 254, 264 writing, 210, 219, 264, 265, 279, 280: new wave of, xvi, 10, 13, 175, 187, 251, 252n3, 253, 257 see also Anglo-Jewish British Jewish Studies, 12, 199, 208n1 British Mandate for Palestine (1918/22–1948), 238, 245, 259 Britishness, 9, 210, 211, 218, 239, 242, 249, 268, 271, 275, 277, 279 Brooklyn (New York), 31n1, 60, 359 Buchenwald, 191, 271, 273, 276 Budapest, 145, 147, 186, 191 Bukovina, 190, 192 Bulgaria, 191 Bulletin, The (Sydney), 334 Burning of the Books (1933), 203 Byelorussia, 268 Cable Street (London), Battle of (1936), 225, 228 Cairo, 371, 372 Cairo Geniza, 371, 372 California, 20, 22, 28, 30, 89n8, 163 Cambridge, 183, 184, 274, 298, 319, 371 Camp David Accords (1978), 254 Canada, xi, 3, 95, 103n3, 155, 196, 291, 292, 293, 294, 298, 301, 302n2, 332, 350, 351, 359, 365n3 Canadian Jewish authors, 359 fiction, 1, 302 literature, 7 writers, 292: second-generation, 295; third-generation, 295 writing, 291, 294, 296, 299, 300, 301 Canadian Jewish Chronicle (Montreal), 292 Cape Girardeau, 28 Cape Town, 313 capitalism, 117, 118, 179, 368, 373, 375 Caribbean, 5 Carlton (Melbourne), 334, 335, 336, 340, 341 Casablanca, 292 Catholic Church, 355 Catholicism, 29, 248, 285, 286, 373, 374

Censorship of Publications Act (Ireland; 1929, 1946), 244 Central Park (New York), 72 Channel Islands, 268 Chicago, 19, 20, 21, 28, 30, 33, 41, 47, 49, 92, 94, 164 children’s literature, 344 Chile, 145, 151 China, 100 Christian Phalange (Lebanon), 253 Christianity, 6, 21, 26, 27, 30, 180, 202, 284, 375 Christians, 20, 25, 29, 356, 368, 373 class, 31, 118, 121, 164, 166, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 203, 207, 209n16, 209n17, 216, 218, 226, 227, 240, 281, 282, 287, 294, 324, 328, 347, 353, 359, 363, 368 Cluj, 269, 270 Cochin, 374 Cold War, 92, 93, 94, 98, 101, 103n5, 190, 191 Cologne, 192 colonial/postcolonial paradigm, 257, 265 colonialism, 259, 267, 349, 372, 373 Columbia University, 187, 342 comics, 11, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 130, 134, 136, 137, 137n3, 294 Commentary (New York), 19, 53, 59, 60, 148n1 communism, 4, 90, 118, 164, 183, 193, 194, 203, 225, 227, 228, 336, 339, 355, 363, 364 Communist Party, 228, 356, 359, 360, 366n9 concentration camps, 8, 69, 108, 111, 114, 116, 139, 147, 149, 157, 158, 168, 190, 191, 192, 193, 321, 336, 339, 341 Congo, 314 Constantinople, 297 consumerism, 79, 96 Contra Costa County, 23 Control Commission for Germany – British Element, 184 conversion, 27, 84, 202, 224, 285 Corfu, 297 Cosmopolitan (New York), 19 cosmopolitan writers, 346 cosmopolitanism, 5, 14, 112, 117, 368, 375, 377 counter-memorials, 354n1 County Cork, 244 Crete, 297 Crimea, 300, 301

Crisis, The (New York), 31n4 Cuba, xii cubism, 125 Czechoslovakia, xii, 37, 95, 96, 155, 180, 193 Soviet invasion of (1968), 95 Czernowitz, 191, 328 Dachau, 157, 170, 183, 272, 324 Daily Crescent (Appleton), 30 Danzig, 341; see also Gdansk Dead Sea, 239, 243 decolonisation, 14, 249, 355, 377 de-Nazification, 184 deportation, 141, 200, 268, 341 Depression, the, 33, 120, 181, 337, 365n3 Der Fraihaits-Kempfer (Tardienta), 365n4 deracination, 267, 364 detective fiction, Jewish, 84, 85, 88, 147, 344 Detroit, 351 diaspora, xi, xii, xix, xxn1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 41, 124, 169, 183, 186, 199, 222, 223, 226, 229, 234, 236n1, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 250, 261, 264, 265, 280, 315, 319, 341, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 354, 356, 367, 369, 375, 377, 377n2 Diaspora Studies, 348 diasporism, 14 difference, 8, 13, 44, 46, 70, 200, 247, 279, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 362 cultural, 200, 201 gender, 12, 136, 199 generational, 291 Jewish, xiii, 12, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 46, 208, 218, 220, 247 racial, 287 religious, 24, 29 sexual, 271 disaffection, 11, 35, 120, 182 disaffiliation, 123, 369 disassociation, 183 disavowal, 216 disconnection, 37, 77, 83, 84, 154, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219 discontinuity, 67, 112, 208 discrimination, 81, 82, 107, 108, 177, 200, 304, 305, 309, 333, 365n3 dislocation, 12, 14, 45, 197, 200, 346, 348, 352, 370 Displaced Person camps, 364 Displaced Persons, 112, 113, 114

index 423 displacement, xix, 9, 14, 50, 67, 112, 113, 114, 117, 124, 145, 147, 149, 170, 190, 193, 194, 195, 203, 208, 216, 235, 267, 281, 284, 317, 337, 346, 347, 349, 350, 351, 364 dispossession, xix, 14, 186, 211, 347, 348, 350 Dissent (New York), 60 dissidence, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103n9 dissociation, 26, 263, 371 diversity, 6, 7, 13, 19, 21, 77, 78, 80, 213, 279, 285, 288, 342, 360, 377 ethnic, 112, 357 religious, 357 Dombrowski Brigade, 356 Dönmeh, 186 Doornfontein (Johannesburg), 314, 328 Dorem Afrike (South African Yiddish Cultural Federation), 324 Dorset, 206, 207, 208, 209n14 Dover, 189 Dreyfus affair (1894), 186 Dublin, 37, 201 Dunkirk, 207 dysfunction, 341 emotional, 178 family, 182, 338 psychological, 165 dystopia, 90, 100, 101, 102, 163 East Anglia, 175 East Asia, 369 East End (London), xvi, 20, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 206, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 242 Economist, The (London), 233 Edgware (London), 216 Edinburgh, 284, 285 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, 112 Egypt, xii, 93, 189, 193, 292, 371, 372 Eichmann trial (1961), 185, 248, 249, 286, 287 Einsatzgruppen, 323 empowerment female, xiv, 77, 80, 82, 85, 88 of liberal Judaism, 86 enemy aliens, 158 internment in Britain, 158, 200, 267, 274, 275, 293 Encounter (London), 188 England, 3, 4, 177, 185, 186, 187, 196, 201, 204, 207, 221, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 237, 238,

244, 247, 250, 258, 260, 263, 281, 283, 285, 293, 294, 305, 306, 308, 319, 333, 338, 342, 343, 347, 365n3, 373 Englishness, 177, 190, 193, 196, 197, 204, 206, 208, 217, 250, 261, 272, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 288 Enlightenment, the, 48, 202, 203 estrangement, 23, 33, 37, 41, 75, 79, 83, 87, 91, 169, 285, 306, 317, 343 Ethiopia, 355 ethnicity, 11 Europe, xi, 37, 48, 50, 68, 95, 112, 114, 116, 125, 139, 142, 145, 147, 151, 153, 184, 187, 188, 191, 209n9, 226, 227, 229, 231, 238, 267, 268, 276, 277, 278n12, 291, 292, 297, 305, 310, 327, 338, 349, 352, 355, 356, 363, 368, 370, 371, 373 central, 23, 112, 200, 221, 333 eastern, 4, 87, 112, 124, 130, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 200, 300, 318, 322, 324, 330, 333, 354, 360, 365n3 Nazi-occupied, 4, 9, 180, 185, 196, 208, 267, 268, 276, 277, 278n12 euthanasia, 273, 274, 343 Everybody’s (Philadelphia), 19 exile, xvii, xix, 5, 6, 14, 22, 38, 41, 42, 91, 147, 151, 169, 189, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 208, 211, 231, 236n1, 267, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 288, 292, 293, 296, 311, 323, 329, 339, 341, 346, 347, 370, 371, 376 exoticism, 21, 82, 180, 243, 362 Expulsion from Spain (1492), 376 extraterritoriality, 263, 264 fascism, 41, 70, 163, 168, 175, 177, 178, 194, 231, 355, 356, 357, 362, 363, 364, 366n9 fatwa, 374 feminism, xiv, xv, 11, 12, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 97, 106, 109, 136, 143, 167, 199, 328, 330, 358, 363 Feminist Studies, 199 Final Solution, 69, 116, 169, 262 Finchley (London), 182, 183 Finchley Road (London), 206 First World War, 19, 28, 31n1, 181, 191, 193, 196, 203, 329, 334, 335, 342, 355, 361

424 Flanders, 196 Florida, 143 Forward, The (New York), 81 France, 125, 151, 190, 192, 193, 267, 321, 351, 360, 364 Frankfurt (am Main), 186, 351 Freud Museum (London), 231, 236n1 Freud Museum (Vienna), 236n1 Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 366n9 frontier, 256 fundamentalism, 4, 129, 373, 375 Galilee, 239, 243 galut, xii Gaza, 95, 96 Gdansk, xviii; see also Danzig gender, xiv, 6, 11, 12, 21, 24, 30, 31, 76, 83, 107, 109, 112, 118, 120, 136, 143, 145, 199, 201, 208n2, 209n11, 271, 272, 354n3, 357, 362, 364 equality, 21 genocide, xvii, 10, 14, 48, 108, 116, 140, 147, 184, 229, 271, 276, 277, 314, 325, 328, 331, 346, 348; see also Holocaust German Jewish Aid Committee, 274 Germany, 3, 4, 28, 37, 68, 103n3, 112, 146, 157, 158, 185, 186, 190, 192, 194, 200, 202, 203, 204, 228, 247, 275, 276, 284, 325, 335, 340, 354n1, 355, 356, 370; see also Nazi Germany; Weimar Germany ghetto(s), 6, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 31n1, 142, 147, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 339, 341 fiction, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 31n2 literature, 26 tale, 19, 28, 30 globalisation, 4 globalism, 368 Golders Green (London), 176, 179, 183, 186, 216, 217 Golders Green novel, 10, 177 golem, 370 Governor General’s Award (Canada), 292 Granada, 373 graphic novel, 3, 10, 65, 104n12, 129, 132, 136, 137 American Jewish, 10 Great Synagogue Journal (Sydney), 334 Greece, 233, 296, 298

index Ground Zero (New York), 115 Guardian, The (London), 218, 219, 233, 262, 317 Guatemala, xii Guernica, 363 Guildford, 190 Gulag, 300 Gulf War (1990–91), 376 Hackney (London), 176, 177, 178, 225 Hackney Downs School, 176 Haganah, 239, 352 Haggadah, 261 Halakhah, xv, 81, 295 Hamburg, 113 Hampstead (London), 10, 177, 186, 231 Hampstead Garden Suburb (London), 179 Haredi, xv, 76, 87, Harlem (New York), 8, 43 Harrow, 196 Hashomer Hatzair, 323, 329 Hasidic tales, xvi Hasidim, 85, 89n8, 216, 230, 231, 232, 337, 341 Hasidism, 221, 343; see also Judaism; Haredi Haskalah, 89n8; see also Enlightenment Hatton Garden (London), 216 Hawaii, 30 Hebrew University (Jerusalem), 247 Hendon (London), 10, 176, 178, 218 Hendon County School, 193 Hesed (Russian Jewish Agency), 300 Hiroshima, 111, 112 historical fiction, 88 novel, 11, 30, 77, 80, 85, 86, 155, 295 Holland, 339 Hollywood, 163, 189, 190, 191 Hollywood Ten, 364 Holocaust, xiv, xvii, 8, 9, 10, 14, 43, 44, 45, 64, 67, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80, 83, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148n1, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 194, 195, 197, 199, 202, 207, 209n11, 209n18, 212, 225,

230, 238, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 279, 282, 287, 292, 296, 299, 304, 306, 313, 314, 317, 320, 321, 327, 330, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354n1, 363, 366n14, 370, 371, 374, 376 commemoration, 83, 143, 148n1 envy, 277 fiction, 9, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 158, 267, 277 literature, 69, 138, 143, 149, 159: American, 9, 44 memoirs, 64, 65, 353 memory, 138, 139, 140, 147, 150, 157, 168, 209n18 novel, 43 representation, 138, 139, 140, 167 survivors, 9, 14, 43, 64, 65, 69, 112, 114, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150–1, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168, 184, 185, 199, 232, 280, 292, 302n2, 324, 340, 342, 344, 354: secondgeneration, 144, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 159; second-generation writers, 9; third-generation survivors, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160; third-generation writers, 9 survivors’ guilt, 10, 195, 202, 283, 348 testimony, 147, 207, 351, 353 writing, 9, 149, 153, 159, 160, 332 see also genocide; Shoah Holocaust Memorial Day, 268 Holocaust Remembrance Day, 299 Holocaust Studies, 167 Holy Land, 238, 242, 248, 249, 250, 252, 258, 259, 334, 371 homeland, 5, 7, 66, 67, 161, 348, 350, 371 Jewish, 7, 238, 244, 246, 292, 346, 350, 371 homosexuality, 209n4, 307, 321, 361; see also sexuality Hong Kong, 167 Houndsditch (London), 227 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 364

humour, 63, 69, 136, 141, 196, 296, 334, 336, 359 black, xvi, 8, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62 Jewish, 54, 55 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 342 Hungary, 152, 154, 192, 340 Soviet invasion of (1956), 183 hybridity, xix, 5, 103n6, 112, 216, 217, 218, 220, 220n5, 241, 242, 250, 252n5, 257, 258, 350, 367, 372, 374, 375 Ibberton, 209n14 idealism, 37, 38, 41, 42, 64, 228, 259 identification, 164, 168, 170, 177, 181, 183, 200, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219, 223, 239, 269, 270, 286, 311, 312, 315, 362, 369, 370, 372, 375 self-, 98, 210 identity, identities, xiii, xvii, xix, 4, 5, 10, 13, 40, 44, 46, 48, 50, 65, 82, 84, 86, 91, 94, 111, 120, 121, 142, 144, 153, 156, 157, 158, 160, 168, 183, 184, 185, 186, 204, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 224, 225, 228, 241, 243, 244, 250, 251, 260, 261, 280, 285, 286, 287, 288, 294, 296, 305, 309, 312, 316, 317, 321, 323, 337, 338, 341, 342, 346, 371, 374, 375 American, 24, 44, 45 American Jewish, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 103n7, 121, 171n1, 358 Australian Jewish, 342 British, 200, 249 British Jewish, 199, 200, 251, 253, 257, 265, 267 Canadian, 296 collective, 112, 226 crisis, xviii, 212, 243, 291 cultural, 48, 67, 103n6, 187, 197, 206, 217 diasporic, 6, 348, 356 English, 203, 258 ethnic, 76, 89n6, 121, 161 female, 110 homosexual, 209n4 hybridised, 5, 217, 374 hyphenated, 241 immigrant, 26, 47 Jewish, xii, xiv, xviii, 27, 29, 30, 44, 48, 76, 82, 84, 89n6, 90, 92, 94, 129, 140, 155, 156, 161, 162, 168, 183, 185, 186,

index 425 187, 208, 210, 212, 215, 219, 223, 228, 230, 238, 244, 257, 258, 259, 261, 263, 318, 327, 342, 343, 367, 374, 375, 377 loss of, 176 national, 197, 258, 259, 357, 358, 365 Polish, 338 political, 358 postethnic, 5 racial, 304 religious, 25, 30, 358 self-, xiii, 91 South African, 312 white, 26 identity politics, 225, 313 Idhra, 297 illness, 10, 23, 34, 37, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81, 107 immigrant experience, xviii, 6, 14, 31, 45, 48, 100, 317, 346, 347 generation, 178, 284, 301 life, xviii, 46, 103n10, 230, 293, 294, 329 literature: Jewish, 46, 47 writers, 19, 22, 45, 46, 188, 291, 296, 301, 342 immigrants, xviii, 7, 19, 21, 31n1, 122, 169, 177, 209n14, 230, 234, 291, 293, 295, 309, 333, 338, 359 Caribbean, 177 Chinese, 333 Jewish, 7, 10, 13, 24, 30, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 76, 103n4, 110, 120, 175, 185, 224, 228, 230, 242, 243, 281, 282, 312, 315, 318, 319, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 335, 343, 356 South Asian, 176 immigration, 6, 20, 21, 45, 47, 66, 80, 97, 103n8, 113, 122, 224, 243, 284, 312, 333, 344, 349, 356 fiction, 28 Jewish, 93, 111, 239, 260, 292, 309, 313, 325, 345: to America, 21, 24, 45, 48, 51, 66, 76, 110, 111; to Australia, 338, 345; to Britain, 175, 224; to Palestine, 239, 242; to South Africa, 318, 325, 328, 347 Imperial War Museum (London), 268 India, xii, 3, 189, 190, 193, 316, 339, 367, 368, 370, 372, 373, 374

Indian writers, 367 Indiana, 156 Indiana University, xviii ingathering of the exiles, 301 Inquisition, the, 373 integration, 187, 200, 202, 203, 206, 214, 238, 247, 262, 321, 327, 330, 340 intergenerational conflict, 70, 78, 83, 84, 176, 178, 344 intermarriage, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32n8, 82, 140, 187, 202, 334, 341, 373 intermodernism, 209n16 internal colonisation, of Jews in Britain, 242, 250, 257, 258, 261, 265 International Brigades, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 365n4, 366n10 internationalisation, 377 internationalism, 302n2, 339, 362, 364 Intifada first (1987–93), 253, 256 second (2000–5), 373 intolerance, religious, 362, 373 Iran, xii, 4 Iraq, xii, 101, 351, 376 Iraq War (2003), 96, 101 Ireland, 14, 244, 245 Irgun, 186, 238, 239, 260 execution of British sergeants (1947), 186, 238, 260 Irish Jewish writers, 251, 253 writing, 3 Islam, 368 Islamism, 374 Islamophobia, 262 Isle of Man, 274, 275, 276 Israel biblical, 346 state of, xii, xiv, xv, xviii, xix, 3, 4, 13, 76, 80, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 104n11, 108, 118n2, 118n5, 139, 140, 147, 178, 183, 184, 186, 189, 215, 224, 227, 237, 238, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 261, 263, 264, 265, 291, 292, 300, 301, 306, 319, 333, 334, 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, 347, 350, 352, 354n5, 375 Israeli Hebrew literature, 371 new historiography, 257 Israeli Defence Force (IDF), 253

426 Israeli War of Independence (1948), 338 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 354n3, 368 Italy, 142, 297, 355, 356 Jamaica, 217 Japan, 112 Jerusalem, 145, 146, 211, 231, 238, 240, 241, 242, 248, 249, 250, 261, 286, 315, 319, 346 Jewish Agency, 95 Jewish Board of Deputies, 204 Jewish Book Week (London), 219, 220n3 Jewish Chautauqua Society, 32n6 Jewish émigré(s), 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103n10, 188, 191, 194, 195, 197, 275, 370 émigré writers, xvi, 3, 7, 12, 90, 91, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 103n2, 103n3, 103n5, 186, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 244, 252n2, 253 fiction: modern, 1, 2, 3, 6, 14, 30 identities see identity, identities immigration see immigration integration, 203, 206, 238, 247, 262, 327, 330, 340 migrant literature, 346, 352 migrant writers, 14, 346, 350 migrants, 5, 80, 93, 311, 333, 350 poetics, xiii, xix, 377 refugee writers, 3, 12, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 205, 209n8, 293, 338, 342 refugee writing, 206, 207, 209n5, 267 refugees, 12, 51, 90, 94, 112, 142, 146, 157, 158, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209n5, 209n17, 209n18, 239, 243, 263, 267, 274, 275, 276, 277, 282, 293, 297, 299, 333, 337, 339, 342, 343, 344, 365n2, 370 religious observance, xiii, xv, 3, 11, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 184, 199, 225, 337 self-hatred, 24, 178, 183, 239, 244 urban realism, 6, 20

index whiteness, 240, 266n4, 303–5, 306, 307, 325, 327 see also American Jewish; Anglo-Jewish; Australian Jewish; British Jewish; Canadian Jewish; Irish Jewish; South African Jewish Jewish Chronicle, The (London), 178, 245, 254 Jewish Messenger, The (New York), 22 Jewish National Fund (JNF), 353 Jewish Quarterly (London), 190, 192, 211, 215 Jewish question, 129, 262, 368, 372 Jewish Studies, 1, 4, 5, 367 Jewish Women’s Congress, 28 Jewishness, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 26, 27, 29, 30, 65, 72, 77, 85, 113, 121, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 180, 183, 187, 197, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 229, 237, 242, 252, 261, 263, 268, 277, 279, 281, 282, 284, 286, 288, 309, 312, 315, 321, 323, 324, 327, 328, 329, 330, 334, 358, 359, 375 British, 9, 10, 215 Jim Crow laws, 107 Johannesburg, 314, 315, 319, 322, 324, 325, 326, 329 Jordan, 249, 250, 287 Journal (Milwaukee), 30 Judaism, xiii, 2, 6, 10, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29, 48, 78, 85, 88, 89n8, 94, 119, 139, 142, 161, 178, 179, 180, 183, 186, 211, 212, 261, 264, 291, 292, 297, 301, 310, 311, 312, 317, 343, 357, 358, 377 conservative, 84 Haredi, xv, 76, 87 Hasidic, 89n8, 216, 221, 230, 231, 232, 343 liberal, 86 orthodox, 2, 11, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89n6, 110, 122, 134, 136, 137, 162, 179, 189, 218, 224, 273, 285, 312, 351, 363 progressive, 363 reform, 20, 23 traditional, 79 ultra-orthodox, 76, 80, 86, 87, 89n4, 89n8: Lubavitch, 89n8; Satmar, xv, 87, 89n8 Judea, 240 Judeo-Christian tradition, 167

Kaddish (Jewish prayer), 232, 264, 326, 351, 353, 363 Kalamazoo, 30 Kanader Adler (Montreal), 302n2 Katyn massacre (1940), 190 Kenya, xii Kenyon Review, The (Gambier), 109 Ketuvim, 33 KGB, 98, 99 kibbutz, kibbutzim, 178, 243, 247, 248, 265, 306 Kiev, 93, 301 Kimberley (South Africa), 304 Kimberley Plan (Australia), 7 Kimberleys (Australia), 345 Kindertransport, 146, 152, 155, 192, 195, 200, 205, 267, 282, 283 King David Hotel (Jerusalem), bombing of (1946), 238 Knopf (New York), 293 Koheleth, 33 Königsberg, 274 Kosher Luncheon Club (London), 230 Kovno ghetto, 324, 325 Kremlin, 179 Kristallnacht, 185, 186, 200 labour camps, 141, 153, 154, 339 Lake District, 190 Landsmanshaft, 148n1 language(s), 46, 111, 134, 136, 168, 185, 273, 295, 298, 299, 330, 347, 375 Afrikaans, 309, 315, 322, 325 Arabic, xi, 372 Aramaic, 295 Chinese, 295 English, xi, xii, xvii, xviii, 3, 6, 13, 20, 21, 91, 92, 97, 100, 101, 103n2, 139, 140, 141, 153, 179, 189, 192, 204, 205, 274, 295, 297, 298, 322, 324, 330, 331, 335, 339, 351, 367 French, xi, xii, 295, 352 German, xii, 69, 77, 141, 158, 189, 204, 205, 206, 351 Greek, 295, 297, 298 Hebrew, xi, 2, 11, 22, 25, 48, 77, 103n3, 115, 129, 132, 134, 136, 161, 243, 295, 296, 297, 298, 305, 351 Hungarian, xii, 77 Italian, xi Judeo-Arabic, 372 Persian, xi Polish, xi, 77, 298 Russian, xi, xii, 77, 93, 99

Serbian, xi, 296 Spanish, xi, xii, 151 Yiddish, xi, xii, 2, 3, 20, 26, 31n1, 45, 48, 51, 54, 60, 61, 77, 95, 96, 106, 147, 151, 161, 165, 190, 213, 223, 224, 294, 314, 324, 330, 331, 335, 339, 356, 360 Latvia, xii, xviii, 3, 13, 300, 305, 318, 319, 322, 323, 327, 331 Le Vernet, 195 League of Nations, 259 Lebanon, xii, 237, 253, 254 Lebanon War (1982), 244, 245, 252, 253, 254, 257, 264 Left Book Club, 192 LEHI, 238, 239 Life (New York), 357, 366n9 life writing, xvi, 3, 10, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 75, 136, 221, 223, 229, 233, 333; see also autobiographical writing; memoir(s) Lithuania, 3, 13, 125, 304, 305, 308, 315, 318, 319, 323, 327, 328, 329, 331, 343, 347 Liverpool, 180 Lodz ghetto, 141 London, 7, 21, 112, 114, 145, 158, 175, 189, 192, 196, 200, 207, 213, 223, 229, 238, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 256, 260, 265, 268, 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 319, 338, 339, 343, 368 East, 175, 176, 177, 231 North, 215, 220 North-west, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 216, 225 London Films, 191 London Magazine, The (London), 209n4 London Underground, 272 loss, 12, 152, 159, 194, 195, 196, 197, 206, 319, 348, 350 Lower East Side (Manhattan), 19, 47, 51, 120 Lowicz, 338 McClure’s (New York), 19 MacDonald White Paper (1939), 239 Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, 359 Madrid, 358, 364 magical realism, 313, 377n4 Majdanek, 110, 112, 271 Malawi, 314 Manchester, 191, 273 Manchuria, 334 Mangalore, 371

index 427 Manhattan (New York), 60, 100, 115, 116, 117, 120, 370 marxism, 183 masculinity, 141, 199, 362, 364 American, 361, 362 Jewish, 144, 199, 358, 359, 360, 364 Massachusetts, 352 massacre(s), xi, 253, 277, 287, 313, 323, 330, 331, 341; see also Bikernieki woods; Katyn massacre; Sabra; Sharpeville massacre; Shatila; Zhager massacre materialism, 10, 166, 175, 178, 179, 246, 253 Mayfair (Johannesburg), 324, 328 McGill University, 352 Melbourne, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341 memoir(s), xvi, xvii, 3, 10, 11, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 86, 88, 103n9, 104n12, 141, 142, 151, 169, 176, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 200, 205, 206, 209n8, 212, 213, 214, 215, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236n1, 240, 283, 296, 298, 312, 316, 323, 328, 333, 339, 340, 351, 353, 357, 364, 366n14, 366n15; see also autobiographical writing; life writing memorialisation, 139, 148n1, 169, 199, 206, 207, 326, 328, 330, 348, 357 memorials, 148n1, 354n1 memory, xvii, 3, 4, 12, 13, 43, 51, 64, 65, 67, 94, 98, 121, 129, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 164, 165, 168, 170, 187, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 209n18, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 235, 238, 249, 251, 254, 267, 268, 270, 271, 280, 281, 285, 297, 298, 299, 303, 304, 312, 313, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326, 327, 329, 330, 331, 340, 342, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 367 collective, 47, 52, 94, 138, 225, 226, 231, 276, 279, 346 counter-, 354 cultural, 138, 141

multidirectional, 14, 354 see also Holocaust memory; postmemory Memphis, 80 Menorah Journal, The (New York), 19, 32n6 messianism, 164, 165, 179 Mexico, xii, 3, 328, 347, 355 Michigan, 30 Middle East, 13, 98, 186, 189, 193, 213, 219, 257, 262, 264, 333, 338, 368, 372 Midrash, xvi, 86, 128, 129, 235, 339 Midstream (New York), 148n1 mid-West, 20, 30 migrants, 333, 349, 350, 354, 365, 370, 376 migration, 200, 284, 339, 346, 347, 367, 370 Mile End (London), 225 mimicry, 241, 242, 257, 258, 263, 369 minorities, xix, 7, 14, 20, 107, 112, 216, 359, 360, 368, 369, 374 Minsk, 319 miscegenation, 304, 373 Mishnah, 277n2 Mississippi River, 31 Missouri, 28, 29 Mitnagdim, 85, 89n8 modernism, 1, 36, 41, 60, 175, 259 secular, 88 modernists, 45 modernity, 1, 2, 11, 26, 41, 42, 259 Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56), 107 Montreal, 7, 292, 293, 294, 302n2, 352, 359, 361, 362 Morocco, 355 Moscow, 94, 102, 300, 301 Mossad, 99 Mother Levy’s Nursing Home (London), 229, 230 Mount Carmel, 250 Mount Sinai, 130 Mozambique, 314 multiculturalism, 45, 98, 187, 199, 200, 215, 216, 218, 220n5, 257, 265, 280, 296, 333, 358, 360, 361, 368 multilingualism, 3, 45, 68, 351, 365n4 Mumbai see Bombay Munich, 283 Munich agreement (1938), 37 Muselmann, 154

428 Muslims, 216, 217, 356, 368, 370, 372, 373, 376, 377 Naftali Botwin Brigade, 356, 365 Nariskis Park (Zhager), 326 National Book Award, 112 National Book Critics Circle Award, 112 National Curriculum for Schools (Britain), 268 National Lampoon (Cambridge, MA), 167 National Party (South Africa), 306, 313, 325, 327 National Socialism see Nazi, Nazis, Nazism National Yiddish Book Center, 171n2 nationalism, 373 Afrikaner, 325, 327, 330 natives, 97, 205, 240, 241, 249, 311 white, 240 Nazi, Nazis, Nazism, 9, 43, 48, 68, 111, 116, 125, 142, 146, 147, 155, 157, 158, 168, 169, 180, 184, 185, 186, 190, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 209n9, 212, 236n1, 262, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277, 277n1, 278n5, 278n8, 278n12, 287, 292, 293, 296, 298, 299, 303, 305, 308, 313, 315, 327, 320, 325, 335, 339, 341, 342, 344, 345, 347, 353, 356, 359, 360, 362, 363 gender theory, 209n11 Germany, 37, 228, 276, 340, 355, 370: see also Third Reich ideology, 143, 202, 203 propaganda, 68, 69 see also Europe, Nazi-occupied; National Socialism Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact (1939), 359 Nebraska, xii, 164 Nevada, 30 New Brunswick, 293 New England Review (Middlebury), 109 New Jersey, 69, 146 New Jew, the, 239, 248 New Masses, The (New York), 361 New Republic, The (New York), 41, 55, 104n12 New Woman, the, 20, 30

index New York city, 11, 19, 21, 28, 29, 38, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 60, 76, 80, 89n6, 100, 115, 116, 117, 125, 130, 142, 143, 145, 162, 165, 167, 189, 190, 193, 215, 238, 285, 293, 340, 343, 352, 354n5, 361, 370 upstate, 79, 89n8 New York Intellectuals, 8, 34, 60 New York Times, The (New York), 53, 59, 79, 81, 102 New York Times Book Review, The (New York), 31n3, 54 New Yorker, The (New York), 143, 310 New Zealand, 14, 343 Newark, 50, 51, 69, 169 Niagara Falls, 351 Nice, 193 nihilism, 164, 165 Nobel Prize, 188, 192 North America, 90, 92, 94, 103n3, 147, 194, 358, 360, 365, 365n3, 369, 371 nostalgia, 9, 10, 40, 77, 79, 86, 147, 166, 175, 177, 210, 220n2, 225, 226, 229, 230, 249, 320, 321, 329, 338, 347, 348, 350, 354, 369, 373, 376 Notting Hill Riots (1958), 245 nouveau roman, 287 Nuremberg Laws (1935), 200, 203, 307 occupy Wall Street protest movement, 104n13 Oedipus complex, xvii Old Testament, 33, 293 Ontario, 294 Operation Exodus (1990), 93; see also Soviet Jewry movement Operation Moses (1984), 118n2 Operation Protective Edge (2014), 237 Orange Prize for Fiction, 299 orientalism, 91, 97, 242, 362, 370, 371, 372; see also selforientalisation O´swiecim, 275 other, otherness, 44, 70, 72, 75, 199, 239, 241, 258, 260, 317, 369 Oxford, 193, 195, 196, 214 Pacific Heights, 23, 27 Palestine, 93, 115, 118n5, 183, 184, 185, 225, 227, 228, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 250, 251, 256, 258, 259,

260, 261, 262, 319, 333, 334, 337, 339, 345, 356, 371 Mandate period (1918/22–48), 181, 227, 239, 253, 257, 258, 260, 264, 356 Palestine police, 238 Palmach, 239 Paris, 125, 146, 147, 192, 193, 319, 363 Partisan Review (New York), 8, 35, 38, 59, 60, 63n5 passing, 26 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 115 Pentateuch, 292 Penthouse (London), 167 People’s Olympics (1936), 356 Perth, 343 Petach Tikva, 227, 319 phantom theory (Abraham and Torok), 265n2 Philadelphia, 361, 371 Philippines, 27 Philomath Club, 28 philosemitism, 271, 370 place, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51 Ploughshares (Boston), 109 pogroms, xi, 4, 111, 116, 200, 309, 323, 343, 347, 348, 349, 350, 363, 365n3 Poland, 47, 144, 145, 147, 151, 152, 190, 194, 197, 211, 221, 223, 224, 267, 284, 297, 298, 328, 333, 334, 336, 338, 339, 340, 342, 344, 350 Popular Front, 355, 358, 360 Portnoy complex, 182 Portugal, 355, 356 postcolonial condition, 367, 375 era, 375 literature, xix, 5, 200, 280, 369 migrants, 5 theories, 265, 350, 367, 369 theorists, 367 writers, 200, 346, 367 postcolonialism, 14, 281 postcoloniality, 243, 261, 315 post-Holocaust, 72, 103n7, 124, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151, 153, 169, 170, 176, 225, 230, 273, 277, 371 postmemory, 9, 144, 277, 285, 328, 329, 330, 348, 349 postmodern, 68, 168, 169, 215, 216, 220 condition, 375 postmodernism, 1, 14, 287 postmodernity, 1, 2, 5, 220n3, 354

post-trauma, post-traumatic, 124, 170, 270, 349; see also trauma post-traumatic stress, 270 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 144 post-Zionism, 257, 264 Prairie Bluff, 28 Prayer Book (Jewish), 346 Pretoria, 315, 321 Promised Land, the, 115, 257, 260, 376 Prooftexts (Bloomington), 68 Proszowice, 145 proteophilia, 375 proteophobia, 375 Protestantism, 281, 373 Prussia, 343 psychoanalysis, 10, 222 Pulitzer Prize, 44 Purim, 113, 114 Quebec, 47, 292, 293 Queen Mary College, 193 Qumran, 286 race, xix, 2, 13, 14, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32n10, 41, 68, 94, 108, 120, 143, 161, 165, 177, 195, 200, 201, 214, 216, 239, 241, 242, 245, 258, 260, 268, 271, 277n1, 287, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 327, 330, 346, 347, 354n3, 357, 367, 369, 370, 375, 376, 377 racial politics, 109, 347 theory, 375 violence, 31n4 racism, 108, 109, 176, 182, 186, 262, 304, 308, 309, 310, 329, 334, 341, 349, 361, 367, 376 radicalism, 20, 225 Royal Air Force (RAF), 340 Ratno, 292 realism, 21, 23, 33, 61, 164, 170, 180, 220n3 Red Army, 323, 339; see also Soviet Army Red Sea, 376 Red Tent Movement, 86 refugees, 314; see also Jewish refugees regionalism, 31 religion, xiii, 2, 11, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 46, 48, 77, 79, 84, 86, 87, 89n6, 94, 123, 129, 162, 165, 166, 176, 221, 224, 228, 235, 251, 272, 284, 288, 292, 306, 309, 311, 336, 357, 358

index 429 remembering, 50, 150, 185, 222, 230, 283, 297, 300, 317, 319, 321, 330, 348, 349 remembrance, 64, 143, 145, 168, 231, 299, 339, 347, 348, 354 Resistance, the, 146 return, 146, 291, 292, 296, 301 return (religious), 77 Rhodesia see Zimbabwe Riga, xviii, 95, 190, 319, 323, 327 Riotous Assembly Act (RAA; South Africa), 347 Romania, 192, 270 Rome, 94, 95, 285, 292, 300 Russia, xii, 47, 97, 98, 102, 162, 164, 165, 190, 228, 299, 300, 301, 319, 322, 323, 328, 333, 334, 339, 350, 372 Russian Revolution (1905), 164, 227 Rwanda, 147 Sabra (refugee camp), 253 sabras, 239, 243 Sachsenhausen, 277 Sacrifice of Isaac, 256, 293; see also akedah St John’s Wood (London), 180 St Kilda (Melbourne), 335, 340, 341 St Petersburg, 98, 371 Salzburg, 192 San Francisco, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 144 earthquake (1906), 30 Saturday Evening Post, The (Indianapolis), 19 schlemiel, 54 science fiction, 30 Second World War, 4, 8, 24, 43, 44, 47, 55, 95, 112, 153, 156, 157, 176, 184, 187, 188, 190, 194, 199, 207, 209n17, 225, 229, 260, 267, 294, 303, 314, 320, 321, 323, 328, 333, 336, 338, 339, 340, 342, 343, 344, 350, 351, 363, 364 secularisation, xiv, 76, 82, 368 secularism, secularity, xiv, xv, 2, 11, 34, 35, 46, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89n8, 121, 140, 155, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 189, 200, 202, 203, 218, 219, 266n5, 293, 315, 317, 337, 359, 363, 368, 370 self-orientalisation, 7, 91, 92, 93, 97, 101–2; see also orientalism Senegal, 314

Sephardim, 14, 21, 350, 357, 372 Serbia, xii, 296 Seven Arts, The (New York), 20 sexism, 106, 108, 361 sexuality, 176, 180, 233, 310, 359; see also homosexuality Shanghai, 341 Sharpeville, 308, 322, 331 Sharpeville massacre (1960), 322, 323, 331 Shatila (refugee camp), 253 Shoah, xii, xvii, 145, 353; see also Holocaust Shoreditch (London), 225 Short Hills, 50 shtetl, 77, 153, 229, 328, 343, 348 shul, 351, 353 Siberia, 323, 340 sickness, 70, 81, 164, 227, 362 Sidney Street (London), Siege of (1911), 176, 229 silence(s), 143–4, 169, 170, 182, 191, 194, 197, 206, 232, 244, 251, 257, 264, 298, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 331, 341, 344, 349, 353, 371 Simferopol, 300, 301 Simon & Schuster (New York), 55 Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture (Leipzig), 103n1 Singapore, 191 Japanese invasion of (1942), 193 Sistine Chapel (Vatican), 292 Sitka, 147 Six Day War (1967), 185, 251, 252, 253 Slade School of Art (London), 136 slavery, xvii, 108, 111, 112, 140, 144 Smart Set, The (New York), 20, 32n5 Sochi, 90 socialism, 41, 99, 175 Society of Zhager Landsleit, 324, 325 Somalia, 314 South Africa, xi, xii, 3, 13, 188, 189, 194, 196, 260, 266n4, 303, 304, 305, 306, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 343, 347, 348, 349, 350 Italian Jewish community, 313 post-apartheid, 3, 14, 304, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 319, 331

430 South African Jewish fiction, 1, 13, 319, 322, 327 first-generation, 330 writers, 303, 313, 314, 317, 331: second-generation, 319, 330 writing in Yiddish, 324 South African Jewish Times (Johannesburg), 326 South African Yiddish Cultural Federation, 324 South Asia, 5, 369 Soviet Army, 95; see also Red Army Soviet intelligentsia, 91 Soviet Jewry movement, 90, 94, 101, 103n7, 104n15; see also Operation Exodus Soviet Union, xvi, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103n3, 103n6, 103n9, 228, 319, 328; see also USSR Spain, 339, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 365n2, 365n3, 366n9, 366n11, 366n14, 366n15, 373, 376 Spanish Civil War (1936–39), 6, 192, 339, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 365n4, 366n13 Spanish Republic, the Second, 355 Spanish-American War (1898), 27 Spitalfields (London), 229 Sri Lanka, xii Stalinist purges, 363 Statue of Liberty (New York), 116 Stoke Newington (London), 225 Strasbourg, 351 Stroop Report (1943), 277n3 photo of boy (Warsaw ghetto), 184, 269 Struma incident (1941), 185, 228 Sudetenland, 37 Suez crisis (1956), 183, 184, 245, 251 suffragette movement, 285 Sunday Times, The (London), 251 superhero comics, 118, 121, 122, 123 survival, xv, xviii, 10, 50, 64, 65, 69, 79, 113, 122, 124, 151, 152, 155, 158, 186, 223, 224, 234, 251, 297, 299, 300, 324, 330, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 348, 366n12 Swiss Cottage (London), 185 Switzerland, 316 Sydney, 334, 335, 337, 338

index Tablet Magazine (New York), 104n12 Taiwan, 167 Tallinn, 90 Talmud, xv, 22, 85, 86, 89n5, 137, 146, 292, 295, 342 Tamarisk, 311 Tarzan, 239 Tel Aviv, 99, 240, 242–3, 247, 248, 250, 259, 265, 301; see also White City Temple Emanu-El (San Francisco), 23, 28 Temple (Second), 146, 292, 346 Ten Commandments, 124, 125 Ten Lost Tribes, 371 testimony, 147, 207, 287, 313, 348, 350, 351, 353 Texas, 31 Third Reich, 201, 203, 327; see also Nazi Germany Time Magazine (New York), 54 Times, The (London), 238 tolerance, 72, 73, 187, 274 Torah, xv, 128, 235, 292, 343 Toronto, 90, 92, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 359 Tower Hamlets (London), 225 traditionalism, religious, 88 transnational turn, 4 transnationalism, 5, 6, 301, 375 trauma, xvii, 12, 42, 67, 74, 75, 84, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 122, 123, 140, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 160, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 185, 232, 265n2, 269, 270, 271, 280, 282, 283, 284, 287, 288, 291, 299, 319, 321, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 334, 346, 348, 349, 350, 353, 354, 359, 361, 363, 372, 376 transmission of, 144, 150, 151, 153, 154, 209n18, 348 see also post-trauma, posttraumatic Trauma Studies, 348, 349, 354, 354n1, 354n2 Treblinka, 278n5 Trinidad, xii, 377n2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa), 313 Tunisia, 371 Turkey, 188, 189, 311 Tuscany, 285 Twin Towers, 115, 117, 118, 352; see also World Trade Center (New York)

Ukraine, xii, 47, 146, 147, 153, 192, 267, 292, 329 United Kingdom, 3; see also Britain United Nations, 238 United States Army, 157 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), 278n6 United States of America, xi, xii, xvi, xviii, 3, 4, 7, 19, 21, 30, 31, 31n1, 73, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103n3, 110, 112, 114, 116, 139, 140, 147, 148n2, 151, 153, 162, 167, 179, 188, 189, 190, 363, 366n9, 376 universalism, 30 University College London, 305 University of Alberta, 293 University of Toronto, 293 Upper Silesia, 201 USC Shoah Foundation, 147 USSR, 90, 93, 95, 101, 355; see also Soviet Union utopianism, 164, 165 Uzbekistan, 339 Venezuela, 100 victimisation, 168 Vienna, xii, 94, 95, 189, 190, 194, 207, 236n1, 267, 293, 298, 336 Vietnam, 145, 167 Vietnam War (1955/66–1975), xvii, 96, 140, 144, 337 veterans, 144, 343 Village, the (New York), 34 Vilna, 341 Vilna ghetto, 325 Vu (Paris), 357 Wales, 181 Wall Street Journal, The (New York), 101 Wandering Jew, 165, 201 War on Terror, 101 Warsaw, xviii, 64, 197, 221, 338, 339, 340 Warsaw ghetto, 141, 169, 184, 190, 271, 340 Warsaw ghetto uprising (1943), 141, 269, 190, 197 Weimar, 203 Weimar Germany, 189, 204 West Coast, xv, 6 western films, 256, 266n3 White City, 259, 265; see also Tel Aviv White House (Washington, DC), 101, 104n14



index 431

Whitechapel (London), 230 Wiesbaden, 28, 30 Williamsburg, 31n1, 87 Wimbledon (London), 183 Windsor (Canada), 350, 351, 352 Winnipeg, 293 Wisconsin, 20, 30 witness, witnessing, xvii, 12, 65, 111, 125, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 154, 169, 170, 298, 325, 326, 348, 349, 357, 359 women’s movement, 76 World Parliament on Religion, 28 World Trade Center (New York), 100, 115, 116, 262; see also Twin Towers Wyoming, 164 xenophobia, 176, 356 Yalta, 300, 301 Yiddish literature, 302n2, 324 writers, 31n1, 45, 96, 189–90, 191, 294, 301, 302n2, 324–7, 331, 335, 336, 338, 339 Yiddishe mama, 182, 373 Yiddishkeit, 45, 47, 164, 353 yishuv, 239 Yizker bukher, 148n1 Yom Kippur War (1973), 95, 252, 338 Yorkshire, 211 Yugoslavia, 296 Zakynthos, 297 Zambia, 314 Zen Buddhism, 167 Zhager, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329 Zhager massacre (1941), 326, 328 Zimbabwe, 285, 314, 316 Zion, xv, 301, 337 Zionism, xiii, 13, 96, 98, 99, 101, 161, 162, 185, 199, 226, 239, 243, 245, 248, 252, 253, 258, 259, 264, 265, 311, 323 Zionist Organisation, 239 Zlin, 193 Zurich, 193

Title ‘23 Pat O’Brien Movies’ (Friedman), 62 49th Parallel, The (Pressburger), 196 Abbess of Crewe, The (Spark) 288 ‘About Shorty’ (Gellhorn), 357

Absurdistan (Shteyngart), 97–9, 100, 103n10 Abyss, The (Kussy), 20 Acrobats, The (Richler), 361; see also Wicked We Love (Richler) Across the Burning (Hoffmann), 342 Acts of Faith (Segal), 76 Addams Family, The, 255 Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow), 49 After (Bukiet), 145 After (Gleitzman), 344 After the War (Brett), 340 After the War (Raphael), 184 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 187 Aiding and Abetting (Spark), 287 AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag), 10, 65, 74 Alien Song (Waten), 336 All Around Atlantis (Eisenberg), 115 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 203 Almost Meeting and Other Stories, The (Kreisel), 293 Almost Meeting, The’ (Kreisel), 293 Alpha and Omega (Rosenfeld), xvi, 38 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The (Chabon), 159 Ambulance Is on the Way, An (Wilson), 352 ‘Ambulance Is on the Way, An’ (Wilson), 352–4 ‘America and I’ (Yezierska), 46 ‘America! America!’ (Schwartz), 46 American in Search of a Way (Morris), 41 ‘Among the Witnesses’ (Elkin), 59 andere Prozess, Der (Canetti), 198n2 ‘And God Remembered Sarah 21:1’ (Lightman), 137 Angels in America (Kushner), 10, 65, 72–3 Angled Road, The (Levine), 294 ‘Anglo-Jewish Writer, The’ (Glanville, Brian), 188 ‘Animal to the Memory, An’ (Bezmozgis), 94–5, 299 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), 83 Anno Domini (Steiner), 194 Another Hill (Wolff), 366n11

Another Year in Africa (Zwi), 328, 329 Anya (Schaeffer), 146 Apikoros Sleuth (Majzels), 295 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (Richler), 194, 294 April Fool (Fein), 341 Arcadia (Stoppard), 189, 193 Archive Fever (Derrida), 231 Arrival and Departure (Koestler), 194 ‘Art of Hunger, The’ (Auster), 169 Assistant, The (Malamud), 51 Augenspiel, Das (Canetti), 198n2 Auschwitz Poems, The (Brett), 340 Austerlitz (Sebald), 267 Auto da Fé (Canetti), 192; see also Blendung, Die (Canetti) ‘Autobiographical’ (Klein), 292 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), 65 Autobiopsy (Rubens), 181 Autograph Man, The (Smith), 220, 220n5 Aviva Gold (Holkner), 334 Awake in the Dark (Nayman), 342 Bankrupts, The (Glanville, Brian), 178, 246–8, 252, 253, 265 Barney’s Version (Richler), 294 Baumgartner’s Bombay (Desai), xix, 370 Bearing the Body (Havazelet), 144, 159 Becoming English (Tucker), 199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 267, 274, 275 Bee Season (Goldberg, Myla), 109 Beginners, The (Jacobson, Dan), 305 Behind the Moon (Rosenberg), 339 Bell Tolls for Thee and Other Stories, The (Rosner), 338 Bellarosa Connection, The (Bellow), 150, 291 Beloved (Morrison), 144 Berlin Mosaic (Tucker), 199, 201–4 Bespoke Overcoat, The (Mankowitz), 176 Betrayal, The (Kreisel), 293 Betrayers, The (Bezmozgis), 104n12, 299, 300–1 Between Sea and Sky (Bergner), 336 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud), 231–2 Beyond these Walls (Bauman), 197 ‘Bilingual’ (Kramer), 195

432 Binocular Vision (Pearlman), 112 Birth of a Hero (Gold), 44 Birthday Party, The (Pinter), 176 Black Dogs (McEwan), 267 Black Humor (Friedman), 53, 57, 61 Black Narcissus (Pressburger), 192 Blendung, Die (Canetti), 192 Bleter-fal (Fedler), 324 Blood Libels (Sinclair, Clive), 254, 263 Book of Israel, The (Gavron), 260, 265 Book of Lies, The (Horlock), 277n1 Book of Rachel, The (Goldbloom), 343 Book of Sarah, The (Lightman), 129, 136 Bostonians, The (James/Jhabvala), 193 Boswell (Friedman), 57, 58 Boys from Bondi, The (Collins), 337 Brave and the Blind, The (Blankfort), 366n11 Bread Givers (Yezierska), xvi Break in the Chain, A (Tansley), 343 Brothers (Rubens), 186 ‘Bully’ (Lasko-Gross), 132 Burger’s Daughter (Gordimer), 308 Burning In (Juchau), 343 By the Waters of Whitechapel (Kops), 176 Bye, Bye, Braverman (Markfield/ Lumet), 63n4 Café Le Dog (Cohen), 294 Café Scheherazade (Zable), 341 Caine Mutiny, The (Wouk), 44 Calamity Jane (Butler), 256 Call It Sleep (Roth, Henry), xvi, 31n1, 45, 65, 291, 369 Canterbury Tale, A (Pressburger), 196 Caretaker, The (Pinter), 176, 224, 225 Case for Democracy, The (Sharansky), 104n14 Catch-22 (Heller, Joseph), 8, 44, 54, 55–7 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 44, 166 Cheetham to Cordova (Levine), 357 Chicken Soup with Barley (Wesker), 175, 228 ‘Child of the Ghetto, A’ (Zangwill), 26

index ‘Child Phychology’ (LaskoGross), 132 ‘Child Therapy’ (Lasko-Gross), 132 Children of Men (Lessing), 19 Children of the Ghetto (Zangwill), 21, 179, 226 ‘Children’s Exodus, The’ (Gershon), 195 Chosen People (Rubens), 181; see also Elected Member, The (Rubens) Chosen, The (Potok), 44 Cimarron (Ferber), 31 Circumstantial Affection (Gillman), 19 City of Glass (Auster), 169 Coast of Utopia (Stoppard), 193 ‘Coat, The’ (Pearlman), 112, 118n5 Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons), 206, 207 Collision Course (Lange), 340 Columbus and the Fat Lady (Cohen), 294 Come and Get It (Ferber), 31 Come Spring (Lewitt), 339 Comforters, The (Spark), 285, 287 Coming of the Lord, The (Millin), 305 Commissar Took Care, The (Ajzenbud), 339 Common Wilderness, The (Seide), xvi Company of Words, The (Miller), 343 ‘Conflict, The’ (Wolf), 32n5 Contact (Tucker), 209n4 Contraband (Pressburger), 196 Contract with God Trilogy, The (Eisner), 120 ‘Contract with God, A’ (Eisner), 11, 119, 120–1, 122–9, 130, 137 Contrite Hearts (Bernstein), 19 Cool Million, A (West), 163 Cosmetic Effects (Sinclair, Clive), 254–7, 263, 266n3 Cosmopolitans, The (Kalman), 96–7 Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (Elkin), 57, 58 ‘Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers’ (Elkin), 59 Crossing Point, The (Charles), 179, 251 Crowds and Power, 198n2; see also Masse und Macht (Canetti) Curriculum Vitae (Spark), 288

Dance in the Sun, A (Jacobson, Dan), 307, 316 Dancing in the Dark (Bavati), 344 Dancing with the Hurricane (Silver), 341 Dangling Man (Bellow), 43, 49 Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 188, 191, 192, 193, 252 Davita’s Harp (Potok), 362, 363 Dawn O’Hara (Ferber), 30 Day of the Locust, The (West), 163 De Niro’s Game (Hage), 301 ‘Dead, The’ (Joyce), 36, 37, 38 Death out of Season, A (Litvinoff), 176 Debut, The (Brookner), 281; see also Start in Life, A (Brookner) Deception (Roth), 70 ‘Defeated’ (Gordimer), 310 ‘Denny the Jew’ series (Lipsett), 31n1 Der andere Prozess (Canetti), 198n2 Der Opgot in Feier (Shaiak), 338; see also Force and Defiance (Shaiak) Destiny Waltz, The (Charles), 181 Diamond (Glanville, Brian) 178 Diary of a Young Girl, The (Frank), 269; see also Diary of Anne Frank, The (Frank) Diary of a Young Girl, The (Frank; Broadway musical), 233 Diary of Anne Frank, The (Frank), 139, 141; see also Diary of a Young Girl, The (Frank) Dinner with Stalin (ShrayerPetrov), xii Dirty Dozen, The (Heller, Lukas), 190 Disobedience (Alderman), 218 Dissent of Dominick Shapiro, The (Kops) 176 ‘Dissident President’ (Sharansky), 101 Distant Land (Waten), 336 Dominion (Sansom), 278n12 Dr. Rast (Oppenheim), 20 Dream Life of Balso Snell, The (West), 163 ‘Dream, A’ (Fedler), 324 Dreamer, The (Eisner), 128 Dreamers of the Ghetto (Zangwill), 26 Driver’s Seat, The (Spark), 287 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi), 154 Drowning (Tucker), 209n4

‘Drummond Street’ (Goldhar), 335 Dubliners (Joyce), 37 ‘Dumitru and Sigrid’ (Cahan), 31n1 Dwarfs, The (Pinter), 176 Earl of Petticoat Lane, The (Miller), 226 Earlsdon Way, The (Raphael), 182 East End, My Cradle (Goldman), 175 East of Time (Rosenberg), 339 Ecclesiastes, 33 Echoes of the Wind (Lustig), 339 Eden retrouvée (Solomon) 296 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 185 Elected Member, The (Rubens), 181, 182; see also Chosen People (Rubens) Electronic Elephant, The (Jacobson, Dan), 305, 308, 314, 315 Elijah Greenface (Aaron), 343 Elijah Visible (Rosenbaum), 145, 148n2 Empire of the Sun (Stoppard), 193 Enchantress of Florence, The (Rushdie), 376 End of Days, The (Gorr), 337 English German Girl, The (Simons), 267 English Passengers (Kneale), 194 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Paley), 106 Errata (Steiner), 195 Escape from ‘Special’ (LaskoGross), 129 Esmond in India (Jhabvala), 193 España otra vez (Camino) 357 Estate of Memory, An (Karmel), 141 ‘Esther’s Daughter’ (Millin), 304, 311 Europeans, The (James/Jhabvala), 193 Eve’s Tattoo (Prager), 167–8 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Stoppard), 193 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer), 145, 146, 153 Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew, The (Simons), 217–18 Exiles (Zwi) 328, 329 Exit Ghost (Roth, Philip), 139 Exodus (Uris), 93 Exodus, 93, 125, 292 ‘Exodus’ (Kramer), 195 Eye of Paradise (Aaron), 343

index 433 Faces of Terror (Litvinoff), 176 Fackel im Ohr, Die (Canetti), 198n2 Facts, The (Roth, Philip), 70, 232 Falcon in San Francisco, The (Lewis), 265n3 ‘Falling Soldier, The’ (Capa), 357 Fame and Fortune (Raphael), 187 Family Romance, A (Brookner), 282 Family Sayings (Ginzburg), 329 Fanny Herself (Ferber), 20, 30 Far Euphrates, The (Stollman), 350–2, 353 Far to Go (Pick), 155, 157 Farewell Babylon (Kattan), 296 Farewell to Salonica (Sciaky), 66 Fatherland (Harris), 278n12 Fear No Evil (Sharansky), 103n9 Fiddler on the Roof (Stein/Bock), 97 Fig Tree, The (Zable), 341 Final Demands (Raphael), 187 Final Solution, The (Chabon), 159 Financiers, The (Glanville, Brian), 179 Finding Theodore and Brina (White), 343 Finkler Question, The (Jacobson, Howard), 237, 262–4, 265 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 42n3 First Book of Samuel, The (Dubosarsky), 344 First Love and Other Stories (Brodkey), xvi ‘First Mind Fnck’ (Lasko-Gross), 134 Flight of Maidens, The (Gardam), 267 Flying Home (Lurie), 338 Focus (Miller), 44 ‘Foot in the Door, A’ (Friedman), 61 ‘For Esmé with Love and Squalor’ (Salinger), 166 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 361 ‘For Your Viewing Entertainment’ (Friedman), 61 Force and Defiance (Shaiak), 338; see also Der Opgot in Feier (Shaiak) Forger’s Wife, The (Lang), 334 Fragments (Wilkomirski), 67 Frankenstein (Shelley), 370 Frankenstein (Whale), 255 Franny and Zooey (Salinger), 166, 167 ‘Franny’ (Salinger), 167

Free World, The (Bezmozgis), 95, 96, 300 Freud’s Moses (Yerushalmi), 222, 231 Friend from England, A (Brookner), 282 From a Seaside Town (Levine), 294 From the City From the Plough (Baron), 176 Front of a Family, The (Singer), 343 Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 296–9 Fugitive, The (Brudno), 20 ‘Funeral, The’ (Goldhar), 335 Gatekeeper’s Wife, The (Zwicky), 337 Geheimherz der Uhr, Das (Canetti), 198n2 Generals Die in Bed (Harrison), 361 Genesis (Schwartz), 42n2 ‘Gentile Jewesses, The’ (Spark), 285, 286 gerettete Zunge, Die (Canetti), 198n2 Gerontion (Eliot), 185 Get Ready for the Battle (Jhabvala), 193 Ghost Writer, The (Roth, Philip), 139, 233 Giant (Ferber), 31 Gladiators, The (Koestler), 192 Glimpses of a Strange World (Stollnitz), 20 Glittering Prizes, The (Raphael), 184, 187 Go Tell the Lemming (Rubens), 181 God Gave You One Face (Marks), 336 God’s Stepchildren (Millin), 304, 317 Going Home (Collins), 337 Goldberg Variations, The (Glanville, Mark), 212, 213–15 Golden Bowl, The (James/ Jhabvala), 193 Golden Compass, The (Stoppard), 193 ‘Goldie: A Neurotic Woman’ (Kominsky-Crumb), 121 Golems of Gotham, The (Rosenbaum), 145 Good Doctor, The (Galgut), 316, 317 Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (Roth, Philip), 43, 49, 105

434 ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ (Roth, Philip), 50 Götz and Meyer (Albahari), 295–6 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 166, 282 Great House (Krauss), 145, 146, 151, 152, 153 ‘Gruswerk’s Sabbath, The’ (LaskoGross), 11, 120, 129–36, 137 Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The (Shaffer and Burrows), 277n1 ‘Hair’ (Goldberg, Myra), 11, 106, 109–12, 113, 116 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 256 Hamlet of Stepney Green, The (Kops), 176 ‘Hand That Fed Me, The’ (Rosenfeld), 38–41 Hare with Amber Eyes, The (de Waal), 194, 236n1 ‘Hasidic Song’ (Kreisel), 293 Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (Ornitz), 31n1 Headlong (Varga), 343 Heart Is Where the Hurt Is, The (Marks), 335 Heart of Spain (Bessie), 366n15 Hebrew Lesson, The (Mankowitz), 245 Heirs of Yesterday (Wolf), 22, 26–7, 30 Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee (German Jewish Aid Committee), 158, 204, 206, 274, 275 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), xvi, 34 ‘Henry Brooke, Jr.’ (Meyer), 31n4 Hermanos! (Herrick), 359, 360 Herzog (Bellow), 34, 65 Heshel’s Kingdom (Jacobson, Dan), 305, 308, 323 Hideous Kinky (Freud), 194 Hiding Room, The (Wilson), 250 History of Love, The (Krauss), 145, 151 Hitleriad, The (Klein), 292 Hollow Tree, The (Rosenberg), 339 Holocaust (Green/Chomsky), 143 Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 361 Home Sweet Home (Kops), 176 Homecoming, The (Pinter), 176 Honey (Wesker), 176 Hooligan, The (Nassauer), 186 Hope (Auslander), 139, 140 Hostages (Zwicky), 337 Hotel, The (Woolf), 357

index House Gun, The (Gordimer), 308 House Next Door to Africa, The (Hirson), 319 House of Cards (Wolf), 23 Householder, The (Jhabvala), 193 How This Night is Different (Albert), 83 Howards End (Forster/Jhabvala), 193 Howl (Ginsberg), 65 Human Kind, The (Baron), 176 Human Season, The (Wallant), 43 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow), 34 Hungry Ghosts (Selvadurai), 301 Hush (Brown), 87 Hush . . . Hush Sweet Charlotte (Heller, Lukas), 190 I Am Forbidden (Markovits), xii, xv, 87 I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (Hirson), 320 I Sent a Letter to My Love (Rubens), 181 ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ (Olsen), 165 ‘I Was Not There’ (Gershon), 195 I, Dreyfus (Rubens), 186, 261, 262 I’m Talking about Jerusalem (Wesker) 176 Ice Palace (Ferber), 31 Iceman Cometh, The (O’Neill), 256 ‘Iceman Cometh, The’ (Sinclair, Clive), 256 Idylls of the Gass (Wolfenstein), 31n1 ‘If Love Were All’ (Pearlman), 112 If Not Now, When? (Levi), 268 Illness as Metaphor (Sontag), 10, 65, 73–4 Illustrated London News (London), 357 Images of Spain (Richler and Christopher), 366n6 ‘Immigrant Story, The’ (Paley), 47 Imposter, The (Galgut), 317 In a Strange Room (Galgut), 316, 317 In an Antique Land (Ghosh), xix, 367, 371–3, 375 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (Schwartz), xvi, 34 ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ (Schwartz), 35 ‘. . . In England and in English’ (Goldman), 187 ‘In the Alley’ (Elkin), 59

In the Country of Last Things (Auster), 169 In the Courtyard of the Kabbalists (King), xv In the Gates of Israel (Bernstein), 19 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman), 352 In this Dark House (Kehoe), 194 Indian Ink (Stoppard), 193 Infidel, The (Appignanesi, Josh), 216 Innocents, The (Segal), 187 Invention of Love, The (Stoppard), 193 Invention of Solitude, The (Auster), 169, 170 Inverted Pyramid, The (Zwi), 328, 329 Invisible Bridge, The (Orringer), 147, 153, 154, 278n12 Irresistible Current, The (Lowenberg), 20, 28–30 Is She Fair Dinkum? (Marks), 337 Isaac Babel’s Fiddle (Zwicky), 337 Island Madness (Binding), 277n1 Jacob’s Gift (Freedland), 223 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 83, 207 Je me souviens (Perec), 319, 320, 321, 324 Jephte’s Daughter (Ragen), 87 Jericho Sleep Alone (Bermant), 178, 251 Jesus, Judas and Mordy Ben Ruben (Gross), 343 Jewboy (Blumenfeld) 175 Jewels and Ashes (Zable) 341 Jews Without Money (Gold, Mike), 31n1 Joseph Fouché (Zweig), 192 Joshua (Collins), 337 Joshua Then and Now (Richler), 7, 294, 301, 362 ‘Journey into Spain’ (Robeson), 357 Journey through a Small Planet (Litvinoff), 176 Joy of Life, The (Wolf), 22 Jumping the Line (Herrick), 366n14, 366n6 Just Around the Corner (Hurst), 20 Just Like That (Brett), 340 J-Word, The (Sanger), 212–13 Kaddish (Zwicky), 337 Kafka’s Other Trial (Canetti), 198n2; see also andere Prozess, Der (Canetti)

Kalooki Nights (Jacobson, Howard), 9, 268, 271–4, 276, 277 Katerskill Falls (Goodman), 79 Kid for Two Farthings, A (Mankowitz), 176 Kill Memory (Herrick), 362, 363, 364, 366n13 King Dido (Baron), 177 King of the Jews, The (Epstein), 141, 142 Kingdom Come (Rubens), 186 Ladies Auxiliary, The (Mirvis), 80, 83 ‘Lady of the Lake, The’ (Malamud), 142 Land Not Theirs, A (Marcus), 245 ‘Last Minyan, The’ (Goldhar), 335 ‘Last Mohican, The’ (Malamud), 142 Last Supper, The (Bermant), 187 Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (Zwi), 328, 329, 343 Last Waltz in Vienna (Clare), 192 Late Bourgeois World, The (Gordimer), 308 Latecomers (Brookner), 267, 282–4, 288 Later the Same Day (Paley), 106, 118n2 Le Juif imaginaire (Finkielkraut), xvii ‘Lebensraum’ (Dreifus), 157 Leeches (Albahari), 296 Legacy of Gold (Sackville), 343 Leica and Other Stories, The (Rosenberg), 340 Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (Ulinich), 104n12 Les Bijoux indiscrets (Magritte), 255 Let Me Whisper You My Story (Simons), 344 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (Pressburger), 189, 192, 196 Life Times (Gordimer), 317 Light and Shadow (Bergner), 363 Limits of Love, The (Raphael), 183, 187, 251 ‘Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device, The’ (Prager), 167 Lindmann (Raphael), 185 Little Disturbances of Man, The (Paley), 44, 106 Little Eden (Figes), 209n8 Little Failure (Shteyngart), 104n12 Little Women (Alcott), 83

index 435 Lives and Embers (Rosenberg), 339 Lives of the Poets (Doctorow), 105 Logical Girl, A (Charles), 180 Lolita (Nabokov), 167 Long Way to Shiloh, A (Davidson), 186 ‘Looking for Mr. Green’ (Bellow), 33, 36, 39 Losing the Dead (Appignanesi, Lisa), 194, 223 Lost in America (Singer), 66 Lost, The (Mendelsohn), 146, 151 Love and Terror (Herrick), 366n13 Lovingkindness (Roiphe), 78–9, 81, 83, 87 Lowicz Yizkor-book, 338 Lowlife, The (Baron), 177 Lucky Number, The (Friedman), 19 Lying Days, The (Gordimer), 308, 310 Madame Sousatzka (Rubens), 182 Magadan (Solomon), 296 Magic Barrel, The (Malamud), 105, 142 Magic of Saida, The (Vassanji), 301 ‘Main, la’ (Maupassant), 255 Make Me an Offer (Mankowitz), 176 Making Good Again (Davidson), 185 Man Next Door, The (Litvinoff), 186 ‘Man, A’ (Barnea), 338 Mandelbaum Gate, The (Spark), 248–50, 252, 252n6, 258, 285, 286–7, 288 Mannequin Girl, The (Litman), 104n12 Marie Antoinette (Zweig), 192 ‘Marriage by Proxy, A’ (Cahan), 31n1 Mars in Scorpio (Trojan), 339 Masse und Macht (Canetti), 198n2 Mate in Three (Rubens), 181 Matter of Life and Death, A (Pressburger), 189, 192, 196 Maus (Spiegelman), 65, 142, 150 Mazel (Goldstein), 82, 146 Mediator, The (Steiner), 20 Meet Me on the Barricades (Harrison), 361 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 21 Memoirs of an Albino Terrorist (Breytenbach), 331n1 Memory Man, The (Appignanesi, Lisa), 267

Men in Battle (Bessie), 364, 366n6, 366n15 Mess of Everything, A (LaskoGross), 129 ‘Message of the Non-Jewish Jew’ (Deutscher), xiii Messiah of Stockholm, The (Ozick), 7, 302 ‘Metamorphosis’ (Kafka), 182 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 254, 373 Mila 18 (Uris), 141 Millennium Approaches (Kushner), 72 Mimic Men, The (Naipaul), 369 Mind Body Problem, The (Goldstein), 81, 82 ‘Mishpocha’ (Dreifus), 156 Miss Lonelyhearts (West), 163–4 Moby Dick (Melville), 255 Mog the Forgetful Cat (Kerr), 193 Mon Calvaire roumain (Solomon), 296 Monastery (Halfon), xii Mono-Poems Series (Gorr), 337 Moon Palace (Auster), 169 Moor’s Last Sigh, The (Rushdie), xix, 367, 373–5 Mordecai MacCobber (Gordon), 338 Moses Breaking the Tablets (Rembrandt), 125 Mother and Child II (Lipchitz), 125 ‘Mr Bronstein Learns his Lesson’ (Spielvogel), 334 Mr Rosenblum’s List (Solomons), 158, 199, 205–7, 208, 220n2, 275 Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English (Solomons), 158; see also Mr Rosenblum’s List (Solomons) Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 142, 150 Mrs Miniver (Wyler), 207 Mrs Zhivago of Queens Park (Lichtenstein), 217 ‘My Father Leaves Home’ (Gordimer), 310, 327, 330 My Father’s Silence (Rosenberg), 339 ‘My Grandfather’ (Barnea), 338 My Holocaust (Reich), 83 ‘My Home’ (Fedler), 326, 327 ‘My Jewish Childhood’ (Jacobson, Dan), 307 ‘My Life’ (Fedler), 326 ‘My Reason for Writing’ (Fedler), 326 My Strange Friend (Martin), 339 Mythologies (Barthes), 353

436 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 43 Natasha and Other Stories (Bezmozgis), 299 ‘Natasha’ (Bezmozgis), 299–300 Nation’s Crime, A (Lowenberg), 20 Natural, The (Malamud), 43, 49 Nature of Blood, The (Phillips), 267 Nature of Passion (Jhabvala), 193 ‘New Year’s Eve’ (Schwartz), 35–8, 39, 41 New York Trilogy, The (Auster), 169 ‘Newcomers’ (Goldhar), 335 Next Stop the Moon (Gervay), 344 Night (Wiesel), 141 Nine Stories (Salinger), 105, 167 No Haloes (Gorr), 337 No Snow in December (Lewitt), 339 No Time Like the Present (Gordimer), 306, 308, 311, 313 Nocturne (Armstrong), 340 ‘Nose Job’ (Kominsky-Crumb), 121 ‘Not Jewish but Jew-ish’ (Margolis), 219 Notes on a Scandal (Heller, Zoe), 194 Novel in the Viola, The (Solomons), 199, 207–8 Now (Gleitzman), 344 Of Exile and Yearning (Hoffmann), 342 Old Men at Midnight (Potok), 363 ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’ (Koestler), 195 On Firmer Shores (Liberman), 341 ‘On Not Being English Enough’ (Leaman), 210 ‘On Writing Half-Jewishly’ (Thirlwell), 211 Once (Gleitzman), 344 One of Our Aircraft is Missing (Pressburger), 196 ‘One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye’ (Wolf), 23 Operation Shylock (Roth, Philip), 70 Oracle Night (Auster), 170 Orientations (Storrs), 240 ‘Other People’s Gods’ (Alderman), 218 Other Things Being Equal (Wolf), 22, 24–6, 27, 29, 30, 32n8 ‘Our Sharpeville’ (de Kok), 322

index Out of the Hitler Time (Kerr), 193 Overland to Deadwood (Berke), 265n3 Owl and Other Stories, The (Auerbach), xviii

Providence (Brookner), 281, 284, 288 Pur Coton (Markovits), xii ‘Purim Night’ (Pearlman), 11, 106, 112, 113–15, 118n5

Panic in a Suitcase (Akhitorskaya), 104n12 Paris Interlude (Kattan), 296 Passage from Home (Rosenfeld), xvi Passage to India, A (Forster), 368, 369 Passionate Past of Gloria Gaye, The (Kops), 176 Patriarch, The (Bermant), 186 Patrimony (Roth, Philip), 10, 64–5, 69–72, 75 Pawnbroker, The (Wallant), 8, 43, 142, 143 People on the Street, The (Grant), 250 People Who Have Stolen From Me (Cohen), 314–5 Perestroika (Kushner), 72 ‘Perfect Day for Bananafish, A’ (Salinger), 167 Persistence of Memory, The (Eprile), 303, 312, 313 Petropolis (Ulinich), 92–4 Pickup, The (Gordimer), 308 Pictures at an Exhibition (Houghteling), 145 ‘Pioneer, The’ (Goldhar), 335 Play of the Eyes, The (Canetti), 198n2; see also Augenspiel, Das (Canetti) Plot Against America, The (Roth, Philip), 147 Poland and Other Poems (Brett), 340 Polish Boxer, The (Halfon), xii Politics (Thirlwell), 215–16 Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., The (Steiner), 194 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth, Philip), xvi, 291 ‘Potash and Perlmutter’ series (Glass), 20 ‘Pot-Boiler, The’ (Wharton), 31n3 ‘Prairie: A State of Mind, The’ (Kreisel), 293 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The (Spark), 287 Prodigal in Love, A (Wolf), 23 Promised Land, The (Antin), 46, 66 Prosperous Thief, The (Goldsmith), 342

Quarry, The (Galgut), 317 Quiet Americans (Dreifus), 156, 157, 278n12 Rabbi’s Daughter, The (Mann), 86 ‘Race’ (Gershon), 195 Rachel’s Chance (Kohn), 341 Rain on the Pavements (Camberton), 176 Rape of Tamar, The (Jacobson, Dan) 308 Rappaport (Lurie), 337 Rappaport’s Revenge (Lurie), 337 Reader, The (Schlink), 278n7 Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, The (Perlman), 342 Rebecca (du Maurier), 207 Red Notebook, The (Auster), 105 Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Yezierska), 66 Red Shoes, The (Pressburger), 192 Red Tent, The (Diamant), 86 Refusenik (Bialis), 94 ‘Relative Deprivation’ (LaskoGross), 132 ‘Reluctant Bride, The’ (Lightman), 137 Remains of the Day, The (Ishiguro), 193, 209n17 Remains of the Day, The (Ishiguro/ Jhabvala), 193 Renegade and Other Stories, The (Wolfenstein), 31n1 Reparations (Nassauer), 186 Replacement Life, A (Fishman), 104n12 Reported Missing (Barnea), 338 Reuben Sachs (Levy), 175 Revolutions in My Life (Hirson), 323 Rich Man, The (Kreisel), 293 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan), xvi, 19, 46, 291 Rocking Chair and Other Poems, The (Klein), 292 Rodinsky’s Room (Lichtenstein and Sinclair, Iain), 220n2, 224, 225, 231 Roger Fishbite (Prager), 167 ‘Roman Berman, Massage Therapist’ (Bezmozgis), 90, 92, 299 Romance Reader, The (Abraham), 76

Room With a View, A (Forster/ Jhabvala), 193 Roots (Haley), 143 Roots (Wesker), 175, 176 Roots Schmoots (Jacobson, Howard), 214, 220n2 ‘Rosa’ (Ozick), 143, 151, 152 Rosalind (Goldberg), 109 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 193 Runaway Soul, The (Brodkey), xvi Running Nicely and Other Stories (Lurie), 337–8 Sacrifice of Tamar, The (Ragen), 87 Sacrifice, The (Nowak), 339 Sacrifice, The (Wiseman), 293 Salome of the Tenements (Yezierska), 24, 27 Samovar (Koval), 341 Sams in a Dry Season (Gold, Ivan), xvi San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco), 73 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), xix, 370 Saturday Wife, The (Ragen), 83 Scent of Pine, The (Vapnyar), 104n12 Scourge of the Swastika, The (Russell), 271 Scraps of Heaven (Zable), 341 ‘Scum of the Earth – 1942’ (Koestler), 194–5 Scum of the Earth (Koestler), 192, 194 Second Hand Smoke (Rosenbaum), 145, 146, 148n2, 150 Second Home, A (Glanville, Brian), 178 ‘Second Life of Holocaust Imagery, The’ (Rosen), 115 Second Scroll, The (Klein), 248, 292, 293, 298, 300 Secret Heart of the Clock, The (Canetti), 198n2; see also Geheimherz der Uhr, Das (Canetti) Secret Purposes, The (Baddiel), 9, 267, 268, 274–7, 278n9 Seize the Day (Bellow), 61 Selected Tales of Nathan Spielvogel (Spielvogel), 334 Sergeants’ Tale, The (Rubens), 186, 259, 260, 261–2, 265 Set on Edge (Rubens), 181, 187 Seven Blessings (King), xv Seven Types of Ambiguity (Perlman), 342

index 437 Seventh Beggar, The (Abraham), xvi Shadow Lines, The (Ghosh), 370 Shadow Master, The (Feinstein), 186 Shadows (Albahari), 296 Shadows and Wolves (Herrick), 366n13 Shakespeare in Love (Stoppard), 193 Shakespeare Wallah (Jhabvala), 193 Shawl, The (Ozick), 143, 144, 150, 151 Shenandoah (Schwartz), 42n2 Shira of Ashkenaz (Cameron), 86 Shoah (Lanzmann), 278n5, 348 ‘Shoe Pinches Mr. Samuels, The’ (Meyer), 31n4 Shooting at Sharpeville (Reeves), 320, 322, 323, 331 Show Boat (Ferber), 31 Shtile gezangen (Fedler), 324 Sick Friends (Gold, Ivan), xvi ‘Situation of the Jewish Writer, The’ (Rosenfeld), 41 Small Circle of Beings (Galgut), 317 Smile of Hershale Handle, The (Jubal), 336 So Big (Ferber), 31 So Far No Further (Waten), 336 ‘So Long’ (Albert), 84 ‘Soap-powders and Detergents’ (Barthes), 353 Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, The (Sachs), 312 Some Like it Hot (Wilder), 370 Something Happened at Lubavitch (Gorr), 337 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), 182 Sophie’s Choice (Styron), 143 Sotah (Ragen), 87 Spain Again (Bessie), 366n6, 366n15 Spanish Doctor, The (Cohen), 295 Spanish Earth, The (Ivens), 357 Spanish Testament (Koestler), 192, 194 Speak the Truth, Laughing (Zwi), 347 ‘Special’ (Lasko-Gross), 134 ‘Spirit, The’ (Eisner), 120, 122, 137 Spoilt Boy, A (Raphael), 187 Sport of Nature, A (Gordimer), 308, 311, 318 Spring Sonata (Rubens), 182, 187 Spy in Black, The (Pressburger), 196

St. Urbain’s Horseman (Richler), 294, 300 Stagecoach (Ford), 256 Start in Life, A (Brookner), 281, 284; see also Debut, The (Brookner) Stern (Friedman), 62 Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (Bukiet), 145 Story of a Life, The (Appelfeld), 232 Story of Stories, The (Jacobson, Dan) 308 Street Sweeper, The (Perlman), 342 Strip Jack Naked (Baron), 177 Sun Chemist, The (Davidson), 186 Sunrise West (Rosenberg), 339 Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart), 100–1, 104n13 Superman (Siegel and Shuster), 120, 121, 122 Suzie Gold (Cantor), 187 Taking the Chook and Other Traumas of Growing Up (Holkner), 334 Taking Wing (Hoffmann), 342 Tales of Grabowski (Auerbach), xviii ‘Talmudic Excursions’ (Goldsmith), 342 ‘Tapka’ (Bezmozgis), 299 ‘Teddy’ (Salinger), 167 ‘Tell Me a Riddle’ (Olsen), 165 Tempered Wind, A (Gershon), 209n8 Tenants, The (Malamud), 51 Tevye the Dairyman (Sholem Aleichem), 96 Texas Stagecoach (Lewis), 265n3 Then (Gleitzman), 344 Thieves in the Night (Koestler), 238, 239–44, 245, 247, 251, 256, 258, 264, 265 Things Could be Worse (Brett), 340 Third Generation, The (Zawatzky), 342 ‘Third Presence, A’ (Gordimer), 311 This Time a Better Earth (Allan), 359, 360 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Borowski), 142 Thousands of Years through the Eyes of a Child (Rothberg), 334 Three Dollars (Perlman), 342 Three Guineas (Woolf), 357 Till Death Do Us Part (Gellhorn), 357

438 Time of Angels (Schonstein), 313 Time’s Arrow (Amis), 267, 276 To an Early Grave (Markfield), 59–61, 63n4, 63n6 To Next Year in Jerusalem (Marcus), 3, 244–5, 247, 251, 257 ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’ (Zwi), 347, 349 To Whom She Will (Jhabvala), 193 Tongue Set Free, The (Canetti), 198n2; see also gerettete Zunge, Die (Canetti) Too Many Men (Brett), 340 Torch in My Ear, The (Canetti), 198n2; see also Fackel im Ohr, Die (Canetti) Torn Rabbi, The (Fein), 341 Touching Sweet (Ebenor), 343 ‘Traitor, The’ (Cohen), 357 Transactions in a Foreign Currency (Eisenberg), 115 Trap, The (Jacobson, Dan), 307 ‘Travelling Nude, The’ (Kreisel), 293 Travesties (Stoppard), 193 Trees and People and Fifty Other Stories (Singer), 340 Trilogy (Wesker), 175 Troubles: Tsorres (Collins), 337 True Voice, The (Charles), 180 Trust (Ozick), 44 ‘Tumblers, The’ (Englander), 159 Twilight of the Superheroes (Eisenberg), 115 ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ (Eisenberg), 11, 106, 115–18 Twilight Whisper (Rosenberg), 339 Two Brothers Running (Lurie), 337 Ulysses (Joyce), 2, 201 Un-Americans, The (Bessie), 364, 366n12 Unbending, The (Waten), 336 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 28 Under the 82nd Airborne (Eisenberg), 115 Unicorn among the Wattles (Marks), 335

index Unorthodox (Feldman), 87 Up Stream (Lewisohn), 66 Upstairs, Downstairs (BBC), 209n17 Victim, The (Bellow), 50 View from a Sandcastle (Kohn), 341 Visit from the Footbinder, A (Prager), 167 Voices from the Corner (Liberman), 341 Voices, The (Lowenberg), 21 W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec), 320 Walker in the City, A (Kazin), xvi Wall, The (Hersey), 141 War After, The (Karpf), 194 War on the Margins (Cone), 277n1 We Walk Straight (Hirson), 320 ‘We’re Not Jews’ (Kureishi), 216, 368 Werewolves in their Youth (Chabon), 105 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Heller, Lukas), 190 What Happens Now (Dyson), 9, 268–71, 272, 274, 277 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Englander), 139, 159 ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’ (Englander), 140, 147 ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (Carver), 139 When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Kerr), 193, 267 When I Lived in Modern Times (Grant), 257–9, 265 Where a Man Belongs (Martin), 339 Where I Stand (Liberman), 341 While the Messiah Tarries (Bukiet), 145 Whistling and Other Stories (Goldberg, Myra), 109 White Hotel, The (Thomas), 267

White Scars (Hirson), 319, 322 White Teeth (Smith), 218, 220n5 Whole Life (Lurie), 338 Wicked We Love (Richler), 361; see also Acrobats, The (Richler) Winter in the Morning (Bauman), 197; see also Beyond these Walls (Bauman) Winter Journey (Armstrong), 340 Winter Vault, The (Michaels), 299 With His Foot in His Mouth (Bellow), 105 With Hope, Farewell (Baron), 177 With the Best Intention (Lessing), 19 World is a Wedding, The (Kops), 176, 227 World of Strangers (Gordimer), 308 ‘Writing American Fiction’ (Roth, Philip), 47, 53 Wrong Boy, The (Zail), 342 Yekl (Cahan), 21 Yellow Journalist, A (Michelson), 30 Yes from No-Man’s Land (Kops), 176 ‘Yes, We Have No Ritchard’ (Friedman), 62 Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The (Chabon), 7, 147, 159, 302 Yogi and the Commissar, The (Koestler), 194, 195 Yonnondio (Olsen), 164–5 You Gotta Have Balls (Brett), 340 ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ (Paley), 11, 106–9, 111 Zakhor (Yerushalmi), 222, 231 Zatt izz Apples, Sir (Abrami), 339 ‘Zetland: By a Character Witness’ (Bellow), 34 Zohar, 297 Zone of Interest, The (Amis), 267 ‘Zooey’ (Salinger), 167 ‘Zulu and the Zeide, The’ (Jacobson, Dan), 307