PART THREE
DIASPORA NEGOTIATIONS
Charter 9
Scattered Seeds
A Dialogue of Diasporas
Michael Galchinsky
American Jewish intellectuals have tended to assert that their diaspora is "exceptional." The prevailing view has been that because of the relatively scarce amount of anti-Semitism American Jews experience and the wide range of cultural and economic opportunities available to them, they function outside the traditional narratives of diaspora through which, for two thousand years, European Jews have interpreted their existence. This deeply held conviction is, however, only partially accurate. While the American Jewish diaspora is indeed exceptional in Jewish history, its exceptionalism is not merely a result of economic opportunity and freedom from anti-Semitism but is primarily a result of the historically and structurally unique relationship of the American diaspora to the land of Israel.
Moreover, its exceptionalism in Jewish history by no means implies that the American Jewish diaspora is exceptional in world history. By regarding their diaspora as unique and therefore incomparable, American Jews have neglected to participate in cross-cultural conversations to which they might make valuable contributions. They have enhanced their reputation among other diasporic groups as inward-looking and isolationist. They have alienated themselves from Jewish history as well as from potentially crucial resources, information, and support. And they have hampered their efforts to forge a constructive relationship with the state of Israel.
Perhaps the most significant cross-cultural conversation from which American Jews' ideology of exceptionalism has deprived them is that which
is now taking place among cultural critics who call themselves "postcolonial theorists," that is, theorists of the massive population shifts that have resulted from the dismantling of the various colonial powers. Until recently the proposition that Jews might engage in dialogue with postcolonial theorists might have seemed absurd to all but the most native American Jews. After all, such theorists have generally understood "Jews" as members of the white power structure in the United States, "Zionism" as an expression of Western imperialism, and "Israel" (especially after the Six-Day War) as an American imperial proxy and colonialist entity. Rejecting each of these assertions as limited or distorted, Jews have considered themselves outsiders to postcolonial models, just as postcolonial theorists have considered Jews outsiders to their theories.
But recent postcolonial theorists have begun to reevaluate and diverge from this initial analysis, offering American Jews a potentially constructive new direction. First, these theorists have begun to recognize that the entities to be resisted are not monolithically comprised of "people of color" hegemonically dominated by "whites" (although no doubt this is primarily the case). Postcolonialism's studies of "white" communities like the Irish or Australians suggest that whiteness is complicated and needs to be analyzed rather than merely asserted.[1]
Arjun Appadurai, "The Heart of Whiteness," Callaloo 16 (Fall 1993): 796-807 (special issue on postcolonial discourse). Multiculturalists who have begun to analyze whiteness include Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), who includes chapters on Irish and Jews; Peter McLaren, "White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism," in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 45-75; and Ruth Frankenburg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
A desire to subvert forms of identity politics like nationalism and imperialism has led these theorists to reject the simplistic identity politics often favored by other strands of multiculturalism. They realize that the global phenomena they seek to interpret cannot be explained according to any theories of racial "essences."Second, while earlier theorists saw Jews at best as pawns or victims of the nation-state and at worst as among its most heinous exploiters, the recent theorists have begun to understand Jews' history and theories of diaspora as crucial to postcolonialism's attempts to subvert identity politics of all kinds, especially nationalism and imperialism. The postcolonial adaptations of the concept "diaspora" emphasize the transnational, hybrid, and fluid communities created by both forced and voluntary migratory flows and suggest that in the era of decolonization these diasporic communities can be subversive of the brutally homogenizing ideologies and practices of nations and empires. They argue that the multiplying number of diasporas whose members pour information, funds, and affection back and forth across national boundary lines works to unsettle nations' ongoing attempts at "imagining communities" that are self-contained and nonporous.[2]
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
Although recent postcolonial theories have much to recommend them, they need to be criticized for unduly minimizing the suffering that is the
frequent companion of diaspora, making unconvincing claims for the privileged visionary potential of diaspora intellectuals, and decontextualizing the ideology of nationalism. Moreover, as a comparison with the traditional Jewish narrative of diaspora articulated in Deuteronomy and subsequent prophetic and rabbinic literature will suggest, the postcolonial theorists have overstated the potential of the "diasporas" to subvert nationalism and imperialism and they have understated its potential to subvert the diasporans themselves.
Nevertheless, the theories of postcolonialists may serve a crucial function for American Jews in enabling them to articulate a new and necessary kind of self-understanding. By engaging in systematic comparisons of their condition with the analogous conditions of postcolonial diasporas, American Jews may be able both to learn from and to contribute to dialogues of inordinate importance in a time of global population shifts and the thrilling but frightening restructuring of nations.
Postcolonialism's Discourse of Diaspora
Since a dialogue can only be established after all the participants have heard and understood one another's positions, I will begin by attempting to ascertain the shape of the postcolonial discourse of diaspora, both in its general outlines and with particular attention to its potential benefits and limitations for an American Jewish audience.
The news that the term diaspora has become an important analytical tool for those engaged in describing various postcolonial situations has permeated many levels of public discourse, academic and otherwise. In the spring of 1991 Khachig Tölölyan of the Zoryan Institute for Armenian Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, edited the first edition of a new interdisciplinary journal entitled Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies . A short list of groups to whom various writers in the journal have since applied the term diaspora includes Irish, Native Americans, Cubans, Eritreans, Kurds, Palestinians, Sikhs, Tibetans, Lithuanians, Turks, Nigerians, Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Iranians, Franco-Maghrebians, Mexicans, and under certain conditions women.[3]
Cf. Susan Koshy, "The Geography of Female Subjectivity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora," Diaspora 3 (Spring 1994): 69-84; and Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 693-725. Although highly esteemed, Diaspora was discontinued in 1996 by Oxford University Press and Tölölyan is now searching for a new press for his journal. See Rick Perlstein, "On the Road," Lingua Franca 6 (March/April 1996): 27.
The term has even metaphorically been applied to "the novel" as a literary form.[4]Artemis Leontis, "The Diaspora of the Novel," Diaspora 2 (Spring 1992): 131-147.
The beautifully designed coffee-table book The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas by French Marxist historians Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau appeared in French in 1991 and in English in 1995 and presents asimilarly diverse list.[5]
Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, trans. A. M. Berrett (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).
Other journals, such as Callaloo, Public Culture , and Contemporary Sociology have since begun paying attention to "diaspora" and "diasporic groups."[6]John Lie, "From International Migration to Transnational Diaspora," Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 24 (July 1995): 303-306.
Theorists as diverse as Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Boyarin, Arjun Appadurai, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Benedict Anderson have put the concept in play.[7]Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Arjun Appadurai, "The Heart of Whiteness"; Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Benedict Anderson, "Exodus," Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 314-327; also cf. Werner Sollors, "Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity" in Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
The October 1995 edition of the MLA Job Information List advertised for the first time a number of positions in various areas of "diaspora studies."Although postcolonial theorists have increasingly employed the concept "diaspora," they have disagreed with one another about what the term actually means and how it is to be employed. "There is no ambiguity about the term diaspora ," Chaliand and Rageau claim, "when it is used in relation to the Jewish people" (a problematic statement, as we shall see below). But they admit that once the term is "applied" to other groups, "it becomes immediately apparent how difficult it is in many cases to find a definition that makes a clear distinction between a migration and a diaspora, or between a minority and a diaspora."[8]
Chaliand and Rageau, Atlas, xiii.
While social scientists like Chaliand and Rageau attempt to use diaspora as a descriptive term to identify the populations to be studied, other theorists have not been interested in the term merely for its descriptive capacities.Rather, as John Lie points out in his review of the journal Diaspora in Contemporary Sociology , for most theorists the term has been a central concept in their prescriptive attempt to recast certain traditional sociological narratives for polemical purposes. In particular, the theorists Lie considers are attempting to revise the narrative of "international migration" and replace it with a narrative of "transnational diaspora." The traditional narrative imagined migration as immigration, that is, as a unidirectional move from one well-defined national territory to another. This type of move "entails a radical, and in many cases a singular, break from the old country to the new nation." Migrants are "uprooted" and "shorn of premigration networks, cultures, and belongings." The "melting pot" assimilates them by permanently removing what is unique to them. While they may retain a sentimental attachment to the old world, eventually they construct new networks in the new world and cease to consider return a serious possibility.
But theorists in the journal Diaspora and elsewhere have been attempting to describe a different trajectory than unidirectional international immigration: a trajectory of multidirectional transnational migratory flows. A transnational community maintains its networks in the old world and continues to exchange information, political support, contractual obligations, funding, and perhaps above all affection with members of its ethnic or
religious group in the old world. In Lie's words, "Multiple, circular, and return migrations, rather than a singular great journey from one sedentary space to another, occur across transnational spaces."[9]
Lie, "From International Migration to Transnational Diaspora," 304.
The technologies of the fax, overnight express, email, and other outgrowths of the information age have made it increasingly possible for migrants to maintain living and not merely nostalgic connections with those they've left behind.[10]Benedict Anderson, "Exodus," Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 314-327.
The "homeland" is not understood to be a unified field but, as Purnima Mankeker suggests in her attempt to "subvert the binaries of homeland and diaspora," a place that is not "a comfortable, stable, inherited, and familiar space, but instead … an imaginative, politically charged space where the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice, as well as a vision of radical transformation." According to many of the writers in Diaspora , this new narrative entails an altered attitude toward both the old world and the new. The new diasporans' mobility and the fact that they occupy experiential "border zones" engender in them multiple allegiances and resistance to the homogenizing impulses and seemingly impermeable boundaries of the nation-state.[11]Purnima Mankeker, "Reflections on Diasporic Identities: A Prolegomenon to an Analysis of Political Bifocality," Diaspora 3 (Winter 1994): 349-371 (quote on p. 364).
Perhaps the desire to transgress boundaries is nowhere more apparent than in the writing of the editor of Diaspora himself. Recognizing from the outset that "the term [diaspora] once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion," Tölölyan argues in the journal's opening article, "The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface," that the term now "shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community. This is the vocabulary of transnationalisms." (Note the slipperiness between "migration" and "diaspora" that worried Rageau and Chaliand.) In this enlarged conceptual domain, "diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment" because "they embody the question of borders, which is at the heart of any adequate definition of the Others of the nation-state. The latter always imagines and represents itself as a land, a territory, a place that functions as the site of homogeneity, equilibrium, integration." But this imagined homogeneity is disrupted by the existence of diasporas. According to Tölölyan, in fact, the increased visibility of diasporas is the ground condition for an entirely new vision: "The vision of a homogeneous nation is now being replaced by a vision of the world as a 'space' continually reshaped by forces … whose varying intersections in real estate constitute every 'place' as a heterogeneous and disequilibriated site of … negotiated identity and affect."[12]
Khachig Tölölyan, "The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (Spring 1991): 4, 5, 6. See also his "Note from the Editor" in Diaspora 3 (Winter 1994).
As a social formation that forces nationstatesto recognize the limitations of their harmonious and unitary self-perception, diaspora is potentially subversive.
Diaspora's insertion of "disequilibrium" into the nation-state might not be possible except that diaspora forces an awareness of "hybridity" and "impurity" into the public discourse. Many postcolonial theorists seem to share a vision of diaspora as a state of hybridity and impurity (although not every theorist uses the terms to mean the same things) as against an empire or nation-state that is ideologically concerned to promote homogeneity and purity. The Columbia University author of Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, argues that "American identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed the battle within it is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unifed one. This opposition implies two different perspectives, two historiographies, one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and often nomadic." The burden of his favored "nomadic" criticism is to demonstrate that "cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure." As a literary critic, he argues that even literary artifacts presumed free from relations to hegemonic power are complicit in articulating imperialist ideology and pivot on the relation of the nation-state with its colonial others. His conclusion is that because of their "hybridity"—their inclusion of both domestic and colonial elements—these works "irradiate and interfere with apparently stable and impermeable categories founded on genre, periodization, nationality, or style, those categories presuming that the West and its culture are largely independent of other cultures, and of the worldly pursuits of power." They are "far from being fixed and pure."[13]
Said, Culture and Imperialism, XXV, 14, 111-112.
In this view, because diasporans do not share the homogenizing impulse of the nation, they (or at least some of them) are able to attain a powerful critical perspective. When Said analyzes works by writers like Cesaire, Fanon, Rushdie, and Yeats who have themselves experienced colonialism, he suggests that they resist imperialism by making visible the hybridity that the nationalist or imperialist rhetorics seek to efface. Their strategy for promoting this alternative vision is "to live as migrants do," for
liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance … to the … ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages.[14]
Ibid., 331-332.
Said recognizes that this vision of the intellectual nomad, the diasporic critic, minimizes the misery of refugees in order to call attention to what
he sees as their privileged critical position. Yet he insists that only by so conceiving of themselves can politically engaged postcolonial theorists "distill and articulate the predicaments that disfigure modernity—mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigrations." For Said, as for many postcolonial theorists, the "hybrid counter-energies" that can resist imperialist hegemony may only be annexed by an "exilic" or diasporic consciousness.[15]
Ibid., 332-333, 335.
Claims for the subversive hybridity of diaspora and the critical potential of disaporans are also made by Paul Gilroy, an Anglo-African scholar at the University of London, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness . Focusing on a trans-Atlantic black social and intellectual formation that he calls the "black Atlantic," he demonstrates the hybridity and creative impurity of the thought and art that results from the encounter of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Anglo-African cultures both with each other's artistic and intellectual heritage and with the nonblack European and American artistic and intellectual traditions. He does so in order to argue that a fluid black diaspora culture traverses back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. For Gilroy, diaspora is valuable as a concept "lodged between the local and the global" that offers "an alternative to the nationalist focus which dominates cultural criticism." For, like Said, he believes that nationalist ideology is injuriously monolithic, and that since the concept of diaspora by definition cannot be co-opted by a single nationalism, it can function as a crucial part of a subversive cultural criticism and politics.[16]
Paul Gihoy, Black Atlantic, 6.
Gilroy is aware (as some other postcolonial theorists are not) of the "dangers of idealism and pastoralisation associated with this concept," aware that the condition of diaspora is often misery. But he asserts that even the suffering of diasporans "has a special redemptive power, not for themselves alone but for humanity as a whole." By making visible the terror at the heart of modern rationality and modern social formations like the institution of slavery, the suffering of diasporans can force nations to acknowledge and repent of their brutality. Like Said, Gilroy believes that "what was initially felt to be a curse—the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile—gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world become more likely."[17]
Ibid., 81, 208, 111.
These privileged perceptions do not, however, seem available to every diasporan but only to exilic intellectuals. Like Said, then, Gilroy sees "diaspora" as a privileged and clear-sighted "position" from which engaged intellectuals might mount effective resistance against imperial power.There is room here for criticism of the developing postcolonial model.
Undoubtedly, postcolonial theorists' conception of the exiled intellectual as harbinger of liberation has its attractions, but these critics seem at times to claim more for themselves than responsible comparative analysis might legitimately permit. Any theory that tries to take account of phenomena (like colonialism and imperialism) that have been dispersed throughout the globe and across many centuries must articulate explicitly the conditions under which comparative analysis might legitimately take place as well as the limits beyond which such analysis cannot go. But Said's and Gilroy's almost generic understanding of the exile as visionary sometimes prevents them from acknowledging the boundaries on whatever vision the exile might produce. Ironically, such vision without boundaries is precisely the nationalist and imperialist dream that postcolonialists reject: they are in danger here of "using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house," a procedure that can only succeed by reproducing the forms of oppression it seeks to subvert.[18]
Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), 98-101.
Moreover, as Benedict Anderson points out in his 1994 essay "Exodus," diaspora is not always subversive of nationalism. In fact, the condition of diaspora may inspire nationalist sentiment. He agrees with the other theorists that "nomadism" has the potential for subversion of nationalism, and he sees the Jonathan Pollard trial as a case in point, arguing that "the resentful spy was understood [by Jewish Americans] as representing a transnational ethnicity." He asks appreciatively, "What else could so subversively blur American and Israeli citizenship?" Yet Anderson is not as sanguine about the necessity of the nomad's subversive character as other postcolonial theorists. On the contrary, he suggests that "the rise of nationalist movements and their variable culminations in successful nationstates" can be accounted for as "a project for coming home from exile, for the resolution of hybridity, for a positive printed from a negative in the darkroom of political struggle." Nationalism is not necessarily expunged during periods of exile; indeed, it can be inspired by the experience. He quotes John Dalberg-Acton who writes that "exile is the nursery of nationality."[19]
Anderson, "Exodus," 325, 319, 315.
Exile can be described as the progenitor of the violence of nationalism and colonialism as well as the motive for subverting the nation or empire. Anderson's corrective is necessary so that the idealization of diaspora does not obscure the ambiguity of its relations with state power.Even Anderson's corrective, however, might itself need a corrective before it can be useful to American Jews. For like the other theorists, Anderson continues to privilege diaspora over nation-statehood almost reflexively, as if diaspora communities were a priori more ethical than other types of "imagined communities," in particular, the nation-state. If this
decontextualized interpretation of the relative ethics of diaspora and nation-statehood were applied uncritically to Jewish history, then diaspora would appear to have been Jewish history's grandest contribution to world history, while the formation and continuing existence of Israel as a nation-state would seem to be, at best, a highly unethical moment in Jewish history, a moment that obviously needs to be subverted. This decontextualized understanding of the emergence of Israel as a nation-state is not a view that many American Jews will accept, although the critique of Israeli nationalism voiced by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin in a recent essay (to be discussed below) is an exception.[20]
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora."
Still, despite its somewhat incoherent efforts to find a generalizable definition for "diaspora," its overly sanguine conception of the exiled intellectual's vision, its insufficient appreciation for diasporans' suffering, and its rather ossified ethical compass, the postcolonial discourse of diaspora may have much to offer Jews. For one thing, postcolonialism may serve as a catalyst for alliance building between Jews and groups from whom they have been estranged. Gilroy, in particular, acknowledges black intellectuals' debt to Jewish history, and he extends an invitation to Jews and blacks to engage in specific comparative analyses of their respective diasporas. He hopes that the links that would be revealed by such analyses "might contribute to a better political relationship between Jews and blacks at some future distant point." In fact, he initiates such a comparative analysis himself by tracing the influence of modern political Zionism in the nineteenth century on such black liberation projects as the establishment of Liberia and by tracing the consequences for black/Jewish relations of the movement within black thought from gospel singers' identification with the slaves in the Exodus narrative to pan-Africanists' identification with the Egyptian pharaohs. Beyond making specific comparisons of moments in black and Jewish history, he measures the two communities' respective theories of diaspora, recognizing that they are not completely commensurate. He argues that while they share "the notion of a return to the point of origin" and "the condition of exile, [or] forced separation from the homeland," they also diverge in terms of the attitudes toward diaspora they prescribe for their respective exiled communities. Specifically, unlike Jewish culture, black Atlantic culture has developed strategies for relating to a diaspora that is a permanent condition and something other than a curse.[21]
Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 206, 205-212, 208. See also William Safran, "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return," Diaspora 1 (Spring 1991): 83-99.
Without engaging in comparative analysis of the kind for which Gilroy and other postcolonial theorists appeal, there is no way to gauge whether any of the strategies developed by other groups might be useful for American Jews.[22]For an interesting case of cross-cultural dialogue between Jews and Tibetan culture, see Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist Inaia (San Francisco: Harper San Brancisco, 1994).
Traditional Jews' Narrative of Diaspora
Perhaps there is no need to look outside of Jewish history and intellectual tradition for theories of diaspora. Perhaps postcolonial theory has only repeated what Jews already know from their own experience. By investigating the traditional Jewish narratives of diaspora—biblical, prophetic, and rabbinic—I will show that postcolonialism is actually proposing quite a different way of understanding diaspora than that embedded in traditional Jewish narratives. Perhaps the traditional narrative and the postcolonial discourse can each make visible what is missing in the other's approach.
In justifying their invocation of the concept "diaspora," a number of postcolonial commentators have noted that the term was first used in the Septuagint, the Egyptian Jews' translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek around 250 B.C.E. The literal English translation of diaspora, "to be scattered" (like seeds), shows that the translators were filial to the original Hebrew term from Deuteronomy 28:64, v'hefitz'cha ("you will be scattered"). But this is as far as most postcolonial commentators' interest in philology takes them.[23]
Cf. Stefan Helmreich, "Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora," Diaspora 2 (Fall 1992): 243-249. All biblical translations are taken from Tanakh (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).
Satisfied that the term originates in Jewish literature, many then abstract it from its original context as well as its subsequent history in Jewish literature and philosophy. In doing so, they alter its meaning substantially, without explicitly recording their adaptations.Note, to begin with, that the language of the term diaspora , Greek, is an indicator of the very condition the term describes. The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek would not have been necessary had Jews not already been scattered throughout the Greek (and subsequently Roman) empires—that is, had they not already been "colonials," exiles forced to live within imperial domains. Was their exile the vital and subversive existence predicted by postcolonial theory? Before we can fully appreciate the answer, we must be aware that there was already another predictive theory—or better, predictive narrative —in whose light the Hellenized Jews themselves must have understood their existence. This narrative was first articulated in the very Deuteronomic text from which the term diaspora was derived. For in Jewish history, the Diaspora is not a theoretical concept in a "discourse" but a historical condition that can only be understood as part of a narrative containing a particular and cyclical sequence of events.
"Diaspora" is first introduced in the Deuteronomic narrative when Moses, nearing his own death, recounts the history of the people of Israel to a new generation. All those who had been liberated from Egypt with
him, save two, are dead. In an attempt to inspire this new free-born generation of Israelites, Moses describes the manifold blessings that will accrue to the people if they uphold the Covenant—pledged at Sinai by their parents—after they have crossed the Jordan and taken the land of Canaan by military force. These blessings will benefit the people if they "obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all His [sic ] commandments" (Deut. 28:1). But if they are forgetful, neglectful, or rebellious, and do not "obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all His commandments and laws" (Deut. 28:15), they will be cursed—the most extreme of the curses being "diaspora." Thus, diaspora makes its first appearance as the divine punishment for breach of contract.
Such a breach proves to have devastating consequences. For the text predicts that "the Lord will scatter you [v'hefitz'cha ] among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, whom neither you nor your ancestors have experienced" (Deut. 28:64). In diaspora Jews shall be made to commit the Bible's ultimate transgression, idolatory, and Deuteronomy goes on to foretell the profound political and spiritual degradation that scattered Jews will experience:
Yet even among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest. The Lord will give you an anguished heart and eyes that pine and a despondent spirit. The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival. In the morning you shall say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening you shall say, "If only it were morning!"—because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see. The Lord will send you back to Egypt in galleys, by a route which I told you you should not see again. There you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but none will buy. (Deut. 28:65-68)
Moses' curse is the first of many elaborations in biblical, prophetic, and rabbinic literature of the narrative of Israel's transgression against God and subsequent exile from blessing. While the term diaspora seems to have a potentially positive connotation—the notion that, like seeds, those once scattered can take root and continue to thrive amid foreign flora—this meaning is increasingly foreclosed in prophetic literature by the replacement of the term t'futsoth (scatterings, "diaspora") with the more strongly negative term galut (exile). As the above passage suggests and Arnold Eisen has shown in detail, the Deuteronomist conceives the condition of diaspora to have both political and metaphysical dimensions. On a political level, diaspora reminds Jews that property and security are gifts from God
that can be taken away. On a metaphysical level, diaspora represents expulsion from nurturance, alienation from nature, and estrangement from God, others, even onself—from all potential sources of blessing. The Deuteronomist depicts the time of diaspora as Jews' bleakest hour: they are trapped in a condition of political and spiritual homelessness, in the aftermath of a glorious past, in a present full of danger and discontent, with only dread for a future.[24]
Arnold M. Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Also see Eisen's article "Exile" in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 219-225.
Thus the attitude envisioned by the first use of the term diaspora is alienation from home and hopelessness in the present host land.While the vision of alienation in this text is profound, there is a promise hidden in the Deuteronomic narrative that is exploited by subsequent prophetic and rabbinic tradition: Jews might be able to seek redemption from diaspora, if they atone for their many transgressions against God.[25]
Eisen, Galut, 33.
If they pass their time of trial through acts of atonement, Jews can expect a "return" to and fulfillment of the Deuteronomic blessings. In contrast to Gilroy's understanding of the automatic redemption brought about by diasporic suffering, the traditional Jewish narrative understands diasporic suffering as only potentially redemptive. It may be redemptive only if Jews respond to it with the proper action, known as teshuvah , often translated as "repentance" or "return." Appropriate teshuvah has been interpreted variously in Jewish history as prayer, social justice work, mysticism, national liberation struggle, or most frequently the multitude of daily acts defined in the halakhah, the Jewish code of daily ritual observance. The mere fact of suffering, without an appropriate active response, does not guarantee redemption. This appears to be a difference between traditional Jewish thought and that emanating from the black diaspora, the latter of which has been influenced by Christian interpretations of suffering and redemption.According to the prophets, if Jews do respond appropriately, the "scattered seeds" will be "ingathered," the Jews restored to their homeland in Zion, and peace and prosperity will reign once more. The metaphysical and political alienations will cease. As Anderson suspected, the pain of diaspora does generate an intense longing to return to the "homeland" (although not necessarily a homeland defined in "nationalist" terms). For the prophets, however, the homeland is understood not merely as a geographic source, nor merely as a source and origin of cultural integrity and authenticity, but as a sacred source that represents the promise and proof of God's continuous care over the obedient covenanted community.
The cyclical narrative of Jewish history in which the concept "diaspora" is embedded might be schematized, then, as follows: Prosperity-Transgression-Diaspora-Repentance-Redemption. From this vantage point,
the term seems to have little in common with its homonym in postcolonial discourse. The premodern rabbis would have been able to make little sense of the postcolonial theorists' idealistic vision of diaspora as a "border zone" or "mestiza" consciousness redolent of vital impurities.[26]
The term mestiza has been put most prominently to use in Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.
In the Mishnah and Gemara, they repeatedly sought to demarcate the "pure" from the "polluted," through systems of halakhic regulations such as kashrut , or the family purity laws. They did so in order to create what Eisen calls "an order of Torah" outside of the Land through which it would be possible to ensure Jewish cultural survival in the midst of pressures to convert and assimilate. Indeed, the halakhic system gained such centrality that medieval diasporic Jews, unlike the prophets, only infrequently expressed political aspirations to return to the homeland: for centuries the desire to return to the homeland meant primarily a metaphysical desire for wholeness. In this way the Land remained a "center of aspiration" but was on the "periphery [of] actual existence."[27]Eisen, Galut, 51.
This is one of the reasons that for 1,800 years nationalist ideology was generally not a product of exile.[28]Another reason for arguing that nationalist ideology was not a product of exile is that in complex ways such an ideology is historically tied to the rise of capitalism. See Anderson, Imagined Communities.
Nor does the traditional narrative conceive of the condition of diaspora as inherently subversive of the systems of power in the midst of which the scattered must survive. If anything, the rabbis' interpretation of diaspora as a punishment made them rule warily when questions of obedience to the imperial Greco-Roman, Christian, or Ottoman rulers arose, to avoid bringing further harm to their vulnerable communities. While they succeeded in re-creating Jewish time outside of the Land, they were not always able to fend off threats to their security—the Jews were perhaps "subverted" more often than their hosts. This evidence of the limitations of diaspora's subversive potential may not be welcome to postcolonial theorists, but for medieval Jews (or later for Soviet or Ethiopian Jews), for whom "migrant consciousness" was not merely an intellectual exercise, the curse of exile remained potent.
It is perhaps instructive, however, that neither the postcolonial discourse nor the traditional Jewish narrative proves fully accurate, at least when applied to the Hellenized Jews. While the existence of the Greek term diaspora indicates that the Deuteronomic curse did to some degree come true—Jews had to read even their sacred text in the language of the dominant power—the fact that a translation of the Hebrew Bible came into being at all suggests that living in "diaspora" was not quite as alienating as the Deuteronomic curse predicted. Life within the Greek and Roman empires must have been precarious for Jews: tributes were exacted from them and they were prohibited at various times from sacrificing at the
Temple (while it still stood) or from praying in their synagogues after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E. Some were forced into slavery, others displaced from their homes. Still others, like the Maccabees, the zealots at Masada, and Bar Kokhba, lost their lives in resistance. But that at least some Jews were able to read their sacred text (if only in translation) meant that at least some of them were not being made to "serve other gods, wood and stone." A community that could produce such a translation was probably not as powerless as the Deuteronomic narrative had foretold.[29]
I do not go as far as Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., "On Being Jewish and Greek in the Modern Moment," Diaspora 3 (Fall 1994): 199-220, who traces the impact of Jews on Hellenism and reverses the standard view that Hellenism triumphed over Hebraism. See also David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1987).
But neither was it as powerfully subversive as the postcolonial theory would imply. Ultimately, it would take a proliferating imperialistic ideology with aspirations for global domination—post-Pauline Christianity—to "subvert" (convert) the Roman Empire.American Jews' Exceptional Diaspora
While the traditional Jewish narrative may be useful in calling attention to an excess of idealism in postcolonial discourse, postcolonial discourse may in turn be useful in calling attention to an excess of exceptionalism in American Jews' attitude toward diaspora. Here, therefore, we must attempt to engage three parties in dialogue at once.
Twentieth-century American Jewish intellectuals have generally resisted many of the elements of the traditional Jewish narrative. In particular, they have rejected the equation of the United States with galut (exile) and the state of Israel with Zion. These intellectuals, for the most part not traditionalists, have been unwilling to see their diaspora as a divine punishment for their transgressions. Moreover, while they have conceded that Israel is the Jewish cultural center in the second half of the twentieth century, they have resisted the notion that Israel is the spiritual center. They have not seen Israel as the "homeland" in the metaphysical sense, rejecting the notion that the Land is a sacred source of wholeness.
The conclusion Arnold Eisen reaches on completing his survey of twentieth-century American Jewish thought is that a rather Kaplanian consensus has been reached: "America is not home, yet neither is Israel. The latter is the Center and is certainly not exile, but neither can the former be compared to any previous diaspora. 'America is different.' Nor should its rich Jewish resources be underestimated. The two communities [are] interdependent."[30]
Eisen, Galut, 156-180.
I hope to show that this ideological consensus is, however, only partially accurate and has some quite negative consequences.As a result of their exceptionalism, American Jews are isolated from other cultural groups in the United States and alienated from all but a sentimentalized Jewish history. How has this model come into being? And how can it be overcome?
America's "difference" is usually justified by pointing to the relative absence of systematic persecution and concomitantly to the many freedoms American Jews enjoy. Since the colonial period, American Jewish intellectuals have maintained that this New Jerusalem (as the Puritans called it) was a place of promise—a Promised Land—unlike any other. The Jews' embrace of the basic benignity of the Bill of Rights has perhaps most recently been exemplified in Lynne Sharon Schwartz's short story "The Opiate of the People," in which David the Russian Jewish immigrant memorizes the Constitution in order to be more American than Americans themselves.[31]
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "The Opiate of the People," in Joyce Antler, ed., America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 233-251.
An attitude toward their condition that includes trust in the United States, trust that the United States is not galut but a hothouse nurturing self-expression and experimentation, pervades American Jewish theology and literature.In the United States experimental theologies have come into being ranging from reform to reconstructionism to Heschelian awe to renewal to feminism. These theologies have consistently deemphasized the role of the land of Israel as "center" and have interpreted terms such as land and aliyah (ascent to the land of Israel) in ways that divest them of any literal implication. Early advocates of reform called for the decentralization of Judaism: they called their prayer sites "temples," the lower-case t signifying that genuine Jewish spirituality could occur outside the land in which the Temple had been located. Mordecai Kaplan's reconstructionist vision of Judaism as a religious civilization emphasized the mutual interdependence of the state of Israel and the American diaspora. The state of Israel would "provide an essential source of inspiration" for Jews in the diaspora. For its part, the American diaspora, free of the moral hypocrisies engendered by the state's attempt to balance democracy and Jewish power, free of the state's stark polarization between secular and devout Jews, would be able to maintain a vital spirituality that would in turn be a crucial resource for Israelis.[32]
Jack J. Cohen, "Reflections on Kaplan's Zionism," in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer, eds., The American Judaism of Modccai Kaplan, 401-414 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). In the same volume, see also Mel Scult, "Kaplan's Reinterpretation of the Bible," 312-313. See also Eisen, Galut, 159.
While Abraham Joshua Heschel's Israel: An Echo of Eternity saw the formation of the state of Israel as a crucial moment in Jewish history, he tended to invoke "Israel" as a holy state of being to which one aspires rather than a territory to which one returns. Similarly, he tended to speak of aliyah as the ascent to the holiness of "Israel," wherever one may happen to be living.[33]Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). See also Eisen, Galut, 169-172.
Arthur Waskow's vision of Jewish renewal is focused on revivifying the holiday cycle and gainingan environmental appreciation for land—any land—rather than on geographical aliyah .[34]
Arthur Waskow, Seasons of Our Joy: A Celebration of Modern Jewish Renewal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982).
Judith Plaskow's feminist Judaism defines the term "Israel" not as a geographical place but metaphorically as "the nature of Jewish community and the Jewish people" and she calls on Judaism to realize an "Israel" that fully includes women.[35]Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 75. Eisen, Galut, 159, 172.
While Israeli Zionists have consistently negated the function of the diaspora in the aftermath of the formation of the state, American Jewish theologians have just as consistently maintained the importance of the continuing existence of Jewish communities outside Ha-aretz (the Land), communities understood not as cursed but as blessed with opportunities for spiritual creativity. There is no need to look abroad for Zion when Zion is right here—or more accurately, when Zion is right now , a time rather than a place, an experience rather than a territory, to be reached through the practice of a particular kind of attention, or kavanah .In contrast to this vision of America as heimisch —familiar, secure, and creative—the state of Israel has seemed to many American Jews what Freud would have called unheimliche , unfamiliar.[36]
Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur, ed. Hrsg. von Klaus Wagenbach (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1963).
While the traditional narrative of diaspora functioned to unite scattered Jews from diverse locations in a common dream of return, the realization of that dream by the ingathering of Israel's hundred diasporas has had the ironic effect of producing an awareness of Jews' heterogeneity. For many American Jews, for whom Jews appear fairly homogeneous—Ashkenazic, white—the hundred diasporas call attention to Israel's diversity and unfamiliarity. For many American Jews, then, this heterogeneity is another indication (alongside Israel's continuing national insecurity and economic deprivation) that Israel is not Zion, that Israeli nationhood is not the fulfillment of a sacred promise but the partial, haphazard, sometimes elating and sometimes distorting realization of generations of Jewish dreams and nightmares.Even the familiar Western aspects of the modern Israeli state, like its parliamentary structure and principle of majority rule, can produce an awareness of Israel's distance from the traditional vision of Zion, for if the state is comprised in part of political and cultural institutions transplanted to the Land from galut , then the center begins to seem less distinct from the periphery after all. These "impurities" attendant on Israel's realization must conflict with the prophetic promise of a return to wholeness and the rabbinic vision of spiritual purity. When Philip Roth's Portnoy makes his brief and catastrophic sojourn to the Land, the state appears exotic, dangerous, even emasculating.[37]
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969).
American Jews may still "sing the songs of Zion in a strange land," but they do so with the consciousness that the land in which they sing is not so strange and the land of which they sing is not so familiar.If American Jewish writers have longed to return to any Zion, it is not to Jerusalem but to Bialystok. For many the Old World is the American Jewish homeland. To be sure, it is an imaginary homeland, not remembered in its particularities, a homeland sentimentalized as a quaint and timeless place of Jewish wholeness, a seamless Yiddishkeit. The important differences between German and Russian Jewish immigrants—and between Jews from Galicia and Warsaw, for that matter—have been replaced by a pan-Ashkenazi "American" Jewish identity. American Jews are alienated from the reality of this homeland more even than from the Israeli nation-state, separated by a distance of anguish that cannot even be imagined, much less traversed. The desire to return to the Old World has gained a certain tragic pathos in the work of writers like I. B. Singer, Jacob Glatstein, Cynthia Ozick, and Art Spiegelman, whose writing tries to bridge the gap between a New World we inhabit and an Old World to which, because of the Holocaust, we cannot return.[38]
Cf. I. B. Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972); Jacob Glatstein, Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, trans. and ed. Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987); Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Art Spiegelman, Maus I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), and Maus II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
Short story writer Steve Stern has taken this desire to make contact with the Old World in a more nostalgic direction in his collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. He creates a shtetl in Memphis, Tennessee, a shtetl in which no pogroms ever occur and all the Jews are Americans. He brings the sentimentalized version of the Old World to us.[39]Steve Stern, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
Alienated from both "homelands," American Jews have felt they had no choice but to create an existence unlike any their forebears ever knew. Because of their ideology of exceptionalism, they have not, for the most part, looked to other eras of stability and promise in diaspora Jewish history for aid in understanding their situation. In consequence they suffer an emotional and intellectual distance from Israel, the Old World, and the rest of Jewish history. For this reason, American Jews' commitment to the promise of America simultaneously affirms the solidity and the fragility of their freedom. The triumphalism that since 1948 has seemed endemic to certain kinds of American Jewish thinking about the relation of the "periphery" to the "center" hides what might be called an anxiety of the lack of influence.[40]
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). See Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 203-205, for a counterexample.
In less defensive moments, what American Jews celebrate as their freedom from the dictates of tradition, they also lament as the loss of their continuity with the past.What makes American Jews since 1948 truly exceptional is not in any case the absence of anti-Semitism or the economic or cultural opportunity provided by the Golden Land. The "lachrymose" view of Jewish history to the contrary, there have been many such eras. Rather, American Jews' exceptionalism rests on two startlingly new facts of Jewish history: that they are among the first Jews in two thousand years to have had the option to literalize the notion of "return" and that for the most part they
have chosen not to be "gathered in." Along with other poststatehood diasporic Jews, American Jews are faced with two questions that their ancestors never had to confront: What sort of attitude is appropriate toward a "Zion" that has been realized as a nation-state? and What does it mean to desire to continue living outside of that "Zion"?
The range and limitations of recent American Jewish attempts to answer these questions can be seen in a comparison of an essay by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," with Philip Roth's "confession," Operation Shylock , both from 1993. The Boyarins' essay takes the triumphalism in certain versions of American Jewish thought and postcolonialism to an extreme. The Boyarins idealize the condition of diaspora and seem to oppose the formation and continuing existence of Israel as a nation-state. In a rather too certain fashion their essay elevates wilderness over Canaan, wandering over settlement, diaspora over statehood, and genealogy (that is, biologically determined "kinship" or "race") over geographical territory. The Boyarins want to "propose a privileging of Diaspora" and to argue that "Diaspora, not monotheism, may be the most important contribution that Judaism has to make to the world." They identify with what they describe (wrongly, in my view) as "a prophetic discourse of preference for 'exile' over rootedness in the Land."[41]
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 693-725. A preference for exile could be found later in rabbinic literature but rarely in the prophetic literature. Cf. Jer. 15:7, Ezek. 22:15-16 and Hos. 9:17, in each of which exile is seen as a punishment for Israel's transgression against God.
They seem to support a race-based—or, as they say, "ethnocentric"—definition of Jewish community, as long as that community does not "seek domination over others." And they describe this ethnocentricity as a proposal endorsed by "the Rabbis," that is, by ancient diasporic Jewish teachers.How to ensure that one's ethnocentricity does not devolve into dominance over others? Simply by acting like the members of the Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox sect that in its mission statement denies "any desire to exploit the local population in order to attain statehood." Like the Neturei Karta, other Jews need to divest themselves of any attachment to land and power. In the Boyarins' assessment, Jews who divest are in the position to be perpetual exiles, subversive of all state power formations because they always call attention to hybridity in power's midst. They are in the position to be morally pure.
But the Boyarins' call to divestment is curiously contradictory. On the one hand, their theory seems determined to idealize the diasporic condition and to minimize the tragic suffering the Rabbis (and all the other diasporic Jews) also experienced and recorded. On the other hand, while downplaying Jewish suffering, the Boyarins' theory places supreme importance on Palestinians' suffering, without recognizing any of the Zionists'
claims as legitimate. The Boyarins claim that only by living in the "wilderness"—in perpetual exile—can Jews maintain moral purity. But the Boyarins also position themselves as postcolonial theorists interested in impurity and hybridity. On the one hand, they want to "privilege Diaspora," but on the other they want to privilege a sect for whom Diaspora is nothing less than a punishment for sin. As their mission statement says, the members of Neturei Karta "repeat constantly in our prayers, 'since we sinned, we were therefore exiled from our land.'" How can diaspora be plausibly construed as both a positive position and a curse at the same time? (And is it really a greater "privilege" to be in a state of sin than in a Jewish state?) Finally, the Boyarins appear to position themselves as politically engaged critics, but they champion a form of political behavior that can only be seen as utopian in the most unconstructive sense. They apparently wish to restrict Jews to the role of Cain or Ahasuerus, the legendary wandering Jews. Their call to divestment is not a solution to the challenges of Jewish power—it is an evasion of the question.
A more satisfactory and more nuanced—although still incomplete—attempt to articulate an American Jewish relationship to the nation-state is Philip Roth's doppelgänger novel, Operation Shylock. Yet even Roth's more complex vision cannot dispense with the negative consequences of American Jews' exceptionalism. Roth conjures up a second Philip Roth, a fraud pretending to be him in order to gain support for a theory called "Diasporism." The theory is that Zionism is dead, that the state of Israel will either be the physical or moral death of the Jews, and that the Ashkenazim who once fled Europe for Israel need now to return to Europe and resettle there. In Israel, according to a Palestinian nationalist with whom the fraud sympathizes, Jews have merely built themselves "a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it."[42]
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: Random House, 1993), 126.
It was only in diaspora that Jews could thrive morally. True, anti-Semitism was a distinct problem for European Jews, but much has changed in Europe since the Holocaust, and residual anti-Semitism may be dealt with through the creation of a twelve-step group with chapters in every European city to be called Anti-Semites Anonymous (A-S.A.).The "real" Philip Roth distances himself from this prankster's theory, sometimes calling it absurd and monomaniacal, other times merely pointing to its "exaggerations." In the fiction of this confession, he sets out to defeat the other Philip Roth—whom he renames Moishe Pipik ("Moses Bellybutton" in Yiddish) so as to satirize the trivializing impulse behind this imaginary reverse Exodus. (As Roth says, Pipikism is "the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes
everything, superficializes everything—our suffering as Jews not excluded.")[43]
Ibid., 389.
As part of his attempt to defeat Pipik, Roth goes to work for the Mossad, posing as an agent of Palestinian nationalism in order to identify "other" Jewish anti-Zionists. By working on behalf of Israel's national security, Roth gives evidence for the Mossad agent Smilesburger's contention that "Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service"—shades of Pollard! At one level, then, the "real" Philip Roth seems to suggest that Pipik's Diasporism is nonsense, that Jews' suffering in diaspora (especially during the Holocaust) and the continued existence of anti-Semitism in Europe justifies the necessity of the Jewish state, and that American Jews like himself should organize their life choices around the state's needs. Israel is the center.But this is only one of many levels of analysis in a novel that takes Paul Gilroy's notion of "double consciousness" to new extremes. Ironically, the most ruthlessly honest figure in the book is the character who is paid to distribute disinformation, the Mossad agent, Smilesburger. He admits that the occupation and in some sense even the foundation of the state itself have been the occasions for Jews' moral degeneration. As he says:
What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status.
Statehood has thus not only been a grievous violation of the "indigenous people" but a violation of Jews' own vision of themselves. The center cannot hold. Perhaps then the periphery may have more to recommend it after all. But lest we draw that conclusion, Smilesburger goes on to assure Roth that even diaspora Jews have been morally defiled by the existence of the state, for self-righteous and sanctimonious American Jews have impugned the memory of the Holocaust by invoking it to justify the "imperialist, colonialist theft that was the state of Israel." They have also supported Israel's oppression of Palestinians through their monetary donations and their exertion of political pressure on Israel's behalf. Between diaspora and the state, it seems there is no right. Smilesburger's honest justification for his own actions on behalf of the state is "I did what I did to you because I did what
I did to you"—in other words, European Jews could not have done anything else if they were to survive. Yet this necessity does not absolve them of responsibility for their oppression of Palestinians.[44]
Ibid., 349-350, 351.
While Roth undermines the attempt of his anti-Moses to lead a reverse Exodus to Europe and complicates any easy identification with the state of Israel, he never really questions the legitimacy of the American Jewish diaspora. Instead, toward the end of the novel it begins to appear that he has introduced such an absurd version of "Diasporism" in the plot about Moishe Pipik so that by comparison his own version of diasporism will seem more palatable. Not that he recommends a reverse Exodus to America, but he nevertheless does make a claim for the ongoing validity of American Jewish settlement and cultural expression. True, American Jews are still hypocrites for invoking the Holocaust to support an oppressive state. But they cannot be accused of living with the false consciousness imputed to all diaspora Jews by Israeli Zionism. America is different from Europe, and its relative lack of anti-Semitism lends diasporism a more solid credibility than Moishe Pipik's version. No need for an A-S.A. in the U.S.A. While Roth avoids suggesting a Pipikist moral triumphalism for American Jews, he also avoids advocating a mass transfer of American Jews to Israel.
For himself, having had his Israeli adventure (and having milked Demjanjuk's trial, Leon Klinghoffer's death, and the intifada for a novel), Philip Roth returns to New York. The final chapter of Operation Shylock takes place in a New York delicatessen that becomes a metonym for the American Jewish diaspora. In a novel whose parodic structure eschews realism, the detailed and nostalgic description of this restaurant and the memories and reflections it inspires are remarkable:
[The store] served breakfast and lunch on a dozen formica-topped tables in a room adjacent to the bagel and bialy counter and that looked as though, years back, when someone got the bright idea to "modernize," the attempt at redecoration had been sensibly curtailed halfway through. … In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy … silky slices of precious lox … at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did— … wafting up from behind the showcase … the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life.[45]
Ibid., 378-379.
Here Roth expresses a nostalgic secular vision of the American diaspora at
its creative best, insisting that this diaspora is "more than likely" the true descendant of the culture of the "common folk," whose "ancient" preservative arts hold the secret of Jewish self-preservation. He revels in the material reality—the lavishly imagined smells, flavors, and textures, almost, one could say, the heimisch quality—of this evidence of continuing links between the American Jewish culture and Jewish cultures past. After all, this "humble" store is only half modernized—the other half still belongs to the medieval Jewish world. Roth seems to suggest that American Jews are the ancestral standard-bearers of an expressive tradition that reaches back at least a thousand years. He seems to relate the American Jewish diaspora to eastern European Jewish history. Has he abandoned exceptionalism?
Surely not, for Roth represents Yiddish folk culture in the timeless, quaint, homogeneous, and sentimental vein. His delicatessen epiphany may appear to relate American Jews to history, but it is in fact antihistorical since it represents Jews in an unchanging (and inaccurate) still-life portrait. He replaces history with nostalgia. In this way, he enables American Jews to see themselves both as filial to their ancestors and as utterly unique. He satisfies their felt need for at least the illusion of historical continuity while maintaining their exceptionalism.
But this criticism needs to be tempered with one important qualification: while Roth insists that Yiddishkeit in America is heimisch , he is equally insistent that America itself is not home. Rather, Roth goes on to say that these stores with their "satisfying folk cuisine" bear "the stamp of provisional homeliness."[46]
Ibid., 379.
Roth may appear to suggest that gefilte fish is the only homeland, but even that great expression of Jewish continuity and culinary art can only ever aspire to a rough approximation of "homeliness." For, like the four-letter name of God, home itself is a food whose flavor Jews have definitively forgotten and for which they nevertheless are destined to continue to yearn forever—even in America. American Jews may not be "strangers" in their land in quite the same sense as their European forebears were strangers in theirs, but they are still singing the songs of longing for the wholeness and purity of Zion. And even if they rename the desired wholeness "hybridity" and the desired purity "impurity," their yearning will remain—only partially satisfied, forever deferred. America is not the Promised Land, Roth implies, because no land ever will be.But because the United States supports the material marks of Jews' "provisional homeliness," Roth believes it is a valid social location for Jewish dwelling and indwelling. The United States serves more easily as provisional homeland for Roth than Israel, precisely because it has enabled the expression of the preservative folkish values of the Old World. Just as Roth
is committed to his friend the Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, he is committed to the necessity of Jewish statehood—but he is not anxious about his own cultural or moral inferiority to Israelis, for he belongs to a venerable and proudly nonelite lineage.
Roth's claim for the ancient, secular, and folkish legitimacy of the American Jewish diaspora depends on his abandonment of the traditional categories through which Jews have understood the term diaspora —clearly the old narrative that interprets diaspora as a curse and Israel as sacred and whole will not suffice. But Roth cannot make any general claims for the validity of his alternative vision. Instead, he must construct his narrative as a "confession," a highly personal account of the shenanigans of an exceptional man. He is acutely aware that there is no Sanhedrin or Babylonian Academy or Beit Din that might validate his confession for all American Jews. This atomized individual, with his alienation from any but a sentimentalized antihistory and his isolation from contemporary non-Jewish communities, seems to exemplify the negative consequences of American Jewish exceptionalism, even at its best.
A Dialogic Framework for the American Jewish
Diaspora
Perhaps it is precisely on this question of American Jews' exceptionalism, however, that postcolonial theory has something of value to contribute. If, rather than gauging their experience relative to the traditional Jewish narrative of diaspora (and its traditional procedures of adjudication), American Jews began to see their experience within the framework of transnational migrations, they might discover that they are not so exceptional after all. They might find analogs for their vision in other diasporic communities.
For it appears that in the late twentieth century diaspora is a condition for which Jews have not been uniquely chosen. Mexican Americans in California, Cuban Americans in Miami, and Irish Americans in Boston are having analogous, if not precisely similar, experiences. While postcolonial theorists have overstated the subversive character of these social formations, these critics have been able to articulate a different vision of diaspora from that expressed in the traditional Jewish narrative. Given the American Jews' unprecedented attempt to remain in existence side by side with an existing Jewish state, elements of this alternative vision may be
of more use to them at present than the traditional narrative. For post-colonialism has described a diasporic consciousness not based on a hierarchical distinction between center and periphery, nor on a coding of the homeland as whole and sacred as against the cursed and fragmented diaspora. The diaspora's relationship to the homeland is not imagined as a sinful community's repentant desire for a prior sacred place but as a living and ongoing exchange of information, financial and political support, contractual obligations, and above all affection. These communities do not regard violation of the relationship as a sin against the sacred but as a transgression against kinship, friendship, and contract. The ideal form of the relationship they work toward is interdependence, mutual support, and respect. The homeland (like the diaspora itself) is recognized as "impure," a site of hybridity and struggle, and it is not held up to the unforgiving standard of moral exemplarity. But the diasporans do have the right and the responsibility, as engaged yet distant participant-observers, to criticize the homeland if it participates in oppression and to pressure it to cease.
American Jews stand to gain much by adapting this vision to their peculiar needs. By carrying out comparative analyses, Jews may discover practical strategies for supporting Israel as well as models for emotional attitudes toward it appropriate to the statehood era, which is exceptional in Jewish history. Arnold Eisen, for one, rejects the possibility that Jews might learn from the experience of others, for he says that "the attempt to come home …—not merely to achieve liberation from a colonialist oppressor, not merely to regain lands conquered by a neighboring state, but to come home, in a sense defined by three thousand years of reflection—precludes essential likeness to other developing nations."[47]
Eisen, Galut, 143-144.
But Eisen's conclusion is too hastily drawn, for he makes this rather sweeping, inward-looking, and isolationist statement without attempting any comparative analyses in his book. He forgets one of the most important insights to have emerged from postcolonialism—that wisdom has the character of a great diaspora, its seeds scattered throughout all the nations, and it is our task to search for its fruits in all the niches where they grow.Not only will American Jews be able to draw from the ongoing dialogues, they will also be able to enrich these dialogues with information and ideas emerging from their own histories and experiences. Even this brief survey of American Jewish writers has added further evidence to support Benedict Anderson's contention that diasporans do not necessarily desire to subvert nationalisms: while these writers have qualified their support for American and Israeli forms of nationalism with awareness of the
brutal potentials of nations, they have in the main taken stances of support toward nations that enable the development and flourishing of Jewish cultures. In the case of Israel in particular, the writers' qualified support poses an implicit challenge to many postcolonialists' assumption that to desire "subversion" in every case is necessarily the only ethically defensible stance.
What further contributions American Jews might make to these discussions remain to be seen. I have tried to show that by ceasing to regard their condition as exceptional and by taking up the challenge to engage in comparative analysis Jews (and other groups for whom thriving in diaspora is a central preoccupation) will make significant gains in information exchange and cross-cultural understanding. If the American Jewish community is to thrive in what has been called "the time of nations"—which is necessarily also the time of diasporas—its members will need to draw from and confront their own histories and traditions as well as the histories and traditions of their partners in dialogue.
Chapter 10
Language as Homeland in Jewish-American Literature
Hana Wirth-Nesher
The first official statement made by the president of the United States after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination ended with two words in Hebrew, "Shalom Haver," delivered with a southern drawl. At the state funeral several days later Bill Clinton repeated those words along with the last few lines of the Kaddish—"v'hoo ya'asah shalom aleinu v'al kol Yisrael v'imroo amen"—the foreign sounds produced with effort and in sharp contrast to the ease with which the emotions were expressed. As many journalists have noted, Bill Clinton is the first American president completely at ease among Jews, a man who studied among them at Yale and at Oxford, who relies on them as advisers and trusted friends. But more relevant for the topic of Jewish-American identity is the fact that vast numbers of liberal Jews, particularly in his generation and into the next, are comfortable with him. At the same time that the rainbow coalition and the multiculturalism that it expresses has posed problems for Jewish communal identity, Clinton has made significant numbers of Jews feel at home in America as never before. When he uttered those two familiar Hebrew words, he was addressing this Jewish-American community as much if not more than he was addressing Israelis. The WASP president from Arkansas was speaking their language. A Jewish speechwriter had undoubtedly transliterated those lines of the Kaddish into phonetic English so that the president could read them. Every Jew who had even minimal Hebrew school training or exposure to Jewish ritual would have understood them. In this respect, American Jews are part of a long tradition of bilingualism and even multilingualism.
Knowledge of languages other than the one in which the Jewish community lived has always characterized Jewish civilization, and the Hebrew alphabet has always been a central feature of Jewish life, as it forms the Hebrew language itself, Aramaic, Yiddish, and Ladino. In Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature published in America in 1941 (in Yiddish), Shmuel Niger made the case for bilingualism as a continuous feature of Jewish civilization from biblical times, "Take an old Jewish book—take the Bible, the most famous of all books—and you will see that one language has never been enough for the Jewish people."[1]
Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, translated from the Yiddish by Joshua Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990), 11.
Baal-Makhshoves had already made this argument in eastern Europe at the turn of the century.[2]Baal-Makhshoves [Israel Isidore Elyashev], "Tsvey shprkhen: Ein eyntsiker literatur," Petrograder Tageblatt (Petrograd, 1918). Translated by Hana Wirth-Nesher in What Is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994).
But today this multilingual tradition has taken on new meaning, as American multiculturalists require recognizable signs of difference other than that of religion to qualify a group for membership. As neither race nor country of origin are viable options for American Jews, they have turned increasingly toward language, toward the foreignness of the Hebrew alphabet to underscore their difference. What part does language play in the self-definition of Jews in multicultural America? In a discussion of this subject, two factors play critical roles: the status of the author in terms of immigration and the date of the publication, more specifically whether a work was written before or after the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel and before or after the near annihilation of Yiddish and the revitalization of Hebrew.English: The New Promised Land
From the turn of the twentieth century until the Second World War, the bulk of Jewish-American literature was written by immigrants or the children of immigrants for whom Yiddish was the mother tongue and English an acquired language as well as their passport to acculturation in America. In works by authors such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth, the writer would often weave Yiddish or Hebrew words into the novel accompanied by a variety of strategies for translating the phrases into English for non-Jewish readers. As the drive to assimilate was paramount, writers withheld nothing from their American audiences, translating not only the words but also the rituals and customs into equivalences that their gentile readers could immediately grasp. Unlike the highlighting of foreignness and difference that characterizes some contemporary works, accessibility was crucial for immigrant
writers, who sought poetic strategies to make the Old World accessible to the New. For this reason, it is startling to occasionally come across a reference where the author stubbornly refuses to translate in order not to jeopardize his or her full acceptance into American society. In Mary Antin's reminiscences about her various names and nicknames as a girl in the Pale, she wrote in The Promised Land: "A variety of nicknames, mostly suggested by my physical peculiarities, were bestowed on me from time to time by my fond or foolish relatives. My uncle Berl, for example, gave me the name of 'Zukrochene Flum,' which I am not going to translate because it is not complimentary." (The translation is "a slovenly prune," although "flum" could also refer to a "flame" and thus be a further embarrassment to the writer's modesty.)[3]
Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912; reprint, Salem: Ayer Company, 1987), 67.
Antin affectionately reconstructs the multilingual Old World, including her Hebrew lessons: "What I thought I do not remember; I only know that I loved the sound of the words, the full, dense, solid sound of them."[4]Ibid., 113.
As for her other languages, she recalls, "I have no words to describe the pride with which my sister and I crossed the threshold of Isaiah the scribe … who could teach Yiddish and Russian and, some said, even German."[5]Ibid., 117.
But her paean to English is most representative of assimilationist yearnings in 1912 when the melting pot still dominated American thought:I shall never have a better opportunity to make public declaration of my love for the English language. … It seems to me that in any other language happiness is not so sweet, logic is not so clear. I am not sure that I could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought about them in un-English words. I could almost say that my conviction of immortality is bound up with the English of its promise.[6]
Ibid., 208.
Not all immigrant writers were as ardent about the displacement of Yiddish by English, but for many there was almost an erotic attachment to the latter as it embodied their desires to be made over by their new country. In Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917, Levinsky's affair with Dora is characterized by her passion for English refinement and their mutual striving for linguistic perfection. "Sometimes, when I mispronounced an English word with which she happened to be familiar, or uttered an English phrase in my Talmudic singsong, she would mock me gloatingly. On one such occasion I felt the sting of her triumph so keenly that I hastened to lower her crest by pointing out that she had said 'nice' where 'nicely' was in order."[7]
Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917; reprint, New York: Harper Books, 1960), 254.
Dora is the nurturing Jewish mother in every respect but one: her merciless exploitation of her daughter as English tutor for herself. When the child Lucy pleads to be relievedof her reading lesson, her mother's obsession takes over. Dora commands "Read!" and then Dora "went on, with grim composure, hitting her on the shoulder. 'I don't want to! I want to go downstairs,' Lucy sobbed, defiantly. 'Read!' And once more she hit her."[8]
Ibid., 253.
Even in a novel as conflicted about Americanization as Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers , in which the college-educated heroine eventually marries the boy next door from the Old World and their home is overshadowed by her patriarchal father's chants in Hebrew, the courtship scene intertwines desire for English and sexual desire as the body is roused to produce consonants without debasing traces of other languages. At the very moment that the Yiddish-speaking immigrant girl-turned-English-teacher shamefully slips back into the vernacular in the classroom—"The birds sing-gg"—Prince Charming and future husband enters in the form of Hugo Seelig, principal and landsman, in time to rescue the damsel in distress. "The next moment he was close beside me, the tips of his cool fingers on my throat. 'Keep those muscles still until you have stopped. Now say it again,' he commanded, and I turned pupil myself and pronounced the word correctly."[9]
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Persea, 1925), 272.
The passion for assimilation that characterized the literature of immigrants earlier in the century contrasts sharply with the recognition in later generations that translation entails loss. Compare Mary Antin's unequivocal embrace of English in 1912 with Cynthia Ozick's resigned embrace of 1976.
They are English words. I have no other language. Since my slave-ancestors left off building the Pyramids to wander in the wilderness of Sinai, they have spoken a handful of generally obscure languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, twelfth-century French perhaps, Yiddish for a thousand years. Since the coming forth from Egypt five millennia ago, mine is the first generation to think and speak and write wholly in English. To say that I have been thoroughly assimilated into English would of course be the grossest understatement—what is the English language (and its poetry) if not my passion, my blood, my life? … Still, though English is my everything, now and then I feel cramped by it. I have come to it with notions it is too parochial to recognize. … English is a Christian language. When I write English, I live in Christendom.[10]
Cynthia Ozick, "Preface," Bloodshed and Other Novellas (New York: Knopf, 1976), 9.
Henry Roth had already reached this conclusion in Call It Sleep in 1934 where his child protagonist David Shearl journeys from Yiddish to English and thus from Hebrew to Christian symbology and hermeneutics. Although David thinks of himself as the kid in the Passover liturgy and although he seeks the God of the book of Isaiah in Jewish scriptures, he is perceived by America's masses as a Christ figure. At the end of the
novel, in his semiconscious state, the English language speaks through him and it kills the kid who is reborn as Christ.[11]
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991).
The Judaic liturgical references, when translated into their English equivalents, are infused with Christian theology. Ozick's Yiddish writer Edelstein makes this point forcefully in "Envy—or, Yiddish in America": "Please remember that when a goy from Columbus, Ohio, says 'Elijah the Prophet' he's not talking about Eliohu hanovi . Eliohu is one of us, a folkmensch , running around in secondhand clothes. Theirs is God knows what. The same biblical figure, with exactly the same history, once he puts on a name from King James, COMES OUT A DIFFERENT PERSON ."[12]Cynthia Ozick, "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (New York: Schocken, 1976), 82.
Translating into America
As these writers have observed, translation has the effect of Christianizing both Yiddish and Hebrew or of transforming a folkmensch , a character rooted in a civilization that does not compartmentalize religion within the totality of its way of life, into only a religious persona. Whereas Jewish-American immigrant writers chronicled the shift from old language to new, the children of immigrants translated and reinvented Jewish literature to accommodate it to American culture. An extraordinary moment in this transition to American English occurs in Saul Bellow's translation in 1953 of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimpel Tam" into "Gimpel the Fool," a literary occasion involving the only two Jewish-American Nobel laureates. In the Yiddish story an outcast in his village is repeatedly tricked and ridiculed by his neighbors, a fate to which he is resigned. The rational, empirical world has no hold on Gimpel, whose gullibility makes him a saintly fool and whose love for his children overrides his pride at being the town's much taunted failure. Hence the aptness of the word tam which in Yiddish (and Hebrew) may mean "innocent" or "simpleton" as well as "fool." Finally, Gimpel's wife's deathbed confession that she has deceived him all along and that his children are not his drives him to the devil, who incites him to do evil. In a godless universe that is only a "thick mire," Satan urges him to take revenge on the town by defiling the loaves of bread in the bakery so that his deceivers eat filth. But Gimpel chooses to believe, nevertheless, for "the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies" and that what may appear to be outside of human possibility "before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere."[13]
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool," trans. Saul Bellow, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), 413.
In translating this story originally written for an audience well versed in Jewish tradition but now aimed for a Partisan Review readership removed from Judaic texts and sources, Bellow retained only seven Yiddish words in his translation: golem, mezzuzah, chalah, kreplach, schnorrer, dybbuk , and Tishe B'av . With the exception of the last term, Tishe B'av, a fast day commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of a two-thousand-year exile, the other terms had already seeped into the American Jewish lexicon, in part through familiarity with literary works about dybbuks and golems and in part through popular culture, culinary and otherwise. Retaining words such as chalah underscored the quaint ethnic character of the story while also providing a few "authentic" markers of the lost culture. Actual liturgical references, however, no matter how common, were converted into American equivalents. And this is where the cross-cultural plot thickens. For in the English translation of "Gimpel" Bellow translated the well-known Hebrew prayer for the dead, "El molei rachamin," into the Christian "God'a Mercy," a shift that transformed Gimpel's eastern European setting into Southern Baptist terrain.
In the case of Bellow's translation of "Gimpel," not only did he transform Hebrew liturgy into Christian parlance, he also omitted any phrase that either parodied the Jewish religion or, more to the point, ridiculed Christianity. In defense of Gimpel's gullibility in the face of persistent mockery from the townspeople, particularly when he refuses to doubt his paternity of the child born to Elka seventeen weeks after their as yet unconsummated marriage, Gimpel appeals to the mass gullibility of Christians: "ver veyst? ot zogt men dokh as s'yoyzl hot in gantsn keyn tatn nisht gehat" (Who knows? They say that Jesus'l didn't have any father at all). This somewhat coarse and demeaning reference to Jesus (the diminutive "yoysl") could be offensive to Christians, and although, according to Bellow, it was the volume's editor Eliezer Greenberg who deleted it when he read the story aloud to him, neither Singer nor Bellow had it reinstated in reprintings of the text.[14]
Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 22. Bellow did not translate the story from the printed text but rather from listening to Greenberg's reading it aloud to him; the translation was completed in one session. I am grateful to Ruth Wisse for drawing my attention to this fact and for sharing with me her unpublished essay "The Repression of Aggression: Translation of Yiddish into English."
Even in the decade of the timid emergence of Jewish-American literature in the shadow of the Holocaust, this was a risk that neither Singer, nor Greenberg, nor Bellow wanted to take.In Bellow's novella Seize the Day , published only three years later (also in Partisan Review ), there is only one non-English rupture, and it is precisely that same prayer for the dead as recalled by Tommy Wilhelm in connection with his visit to his mother's gravesite. "At the cemetery Wilhelm had paid a man to say a prayer for her. He was among the tombs and he wanted to be tipped for the El molei rachamin [sp. sic ]. 'Thou God of
Mercy,' Wilhelm thought that meant. B'gan Aden —in Paradise. Singing, they drew it out. B'gan Ay-den ."[15]
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (New York: Penguin, 1956), 86.
In other words, what was erased in the English translation of the Yiddish story reappears in Bellow's American story set in New York, the tale of another man who is a failure in his community, who is gullible, tricked, and repeatedly deceived. This is not simply a matter of influence, of Singer's story bearing down on Bellow's; it is an intertextual referent that places Bellow's work in relation to both Hebrew and Yiddish as purveyors of a lost civilization, the Jewish world annihilated in the Holocaust. It is apt that the only non-English in Bellow's text is a prayer for the dead.[16]For an extensive analysis of the relationship between these two texts, see my essay "'Who's He When He's at Home?' Saul Bellow's Translations," in New Essays on Seize the Day, ed. Michael Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
In the translation from "Gimpel" into Seize the Day , the Yiddish all but disappears and the religious phrase El Molei Rachamim is reinstated (with a more dignified translation—"Thou God of Mercy") as Jewish civilization loses its bilingual dimension and is transformed in America into Judaism. Bellow's text "remembers" the prayer but in an entirely different context. It remembers what it needs in order to exist in its new cultural landscape, an America dedicated to melting away ethnicity and retaining only religion.
Language as Difference
Bellow's literature of the 1950s both contributes to and critiques the metamorphosis of Jewish culture into Judaism, the third great religion in America. Transforming Jewishness into Judaism served both Jewish and Christian America. For Jews eager to assimilate and to "make it," the shift from urban immigrant neighborhoods where Yiddish coexisted along with English to suburbia and religious affiliation marked by liturgical Hebrew meant acceptance in American culture. As a religion, Judaism becomes a private matter, and the Enlightenment paradigm of the Jew at home and the citizen in the street finds its pristine expression in America just as these Enlightenment principles are bankrupted in Europe, after the genocide of the Jews on racial and not religious grounds. In America of the 1950s Jews could carve out a comfortable place for themselves in the American landscape as white European children of immigrants who practiced Judaism.
Simultaneous with the Jews settling in as mainstream Americans in the 1960s, the melting pot was superseded by the ethnicity movement that paved the way for contemporary multiculturalism. The anxiety and vulnerability
experienced by the American Jewish community just prior to the Six-Day War and the vicarious pride in Israel's victory brought about a renewed identification with a people, with a Jewish identity that religion alone could not satisfy. But ethnic identity for Jews in America has been fraught with complications and contradictions. The Old World was never simply one place—a Greek island, a village in Sicily, the shores of Galway. It was more than a score of host countries and as many mother tongues. In order to accommodate themselves to the ethnic revival, Jews needed more than ethnic foods and customs; they needed to create a homogeneous monolingual home, a mother tongue, and this was achieved in part by the reconstruction of a Yiddish shtetl past in cultural work such as Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers , Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog's Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (with an introduction by Margaret Mead), Singer's stories and books, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof , to name only a few examples.[17]
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken, 1952).
American Jewish ethnicity, however, deviated from the white ethnic "norm" in that there was no home country to which one could return, nor was there a living language that represented the language of one's grandparents. The eastern European world that had been annihilated in the Holocaust was replaced by another thriving Jewish civilization, Israel, a nation-state whose language was unknown to American Jews (except as liturgy). As a result, American Jewry has found itself in limbo between a homogenized mythical reconstruction of a Yiddish folkloristic world that has no manifestation in contemporary life and a Zionist socialist homeland that elicits allegiance at some level but also remains alien in language, terrain, climate, and to some extent ideology. No one has expressed this in literature more dramatically than Philip Roth whose doppelgänger plots have encompassed both the European Old and Middle Eastern Old/New Worlds. In "Eli, the Fanatic" Eli's secret sharer is a religious Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Holocaust survivor with whom he has no common language, only a common collective history. The legacy that Eli chooses to pass on to his son in the form of the black gaberdine, traditional garb of ultra-Orthodox Jewry, is one of mute darkness and suffering, not an alternative way of life that encompasses language. Years later Roth's Portnoy will find himself emasculated when he returns "home" to the alien beaches of Tel Aviv. In Roth's tour de force, The Counterlife , Nathan Zuckerman floats free between the extreme options of Zionist nationalist Hebraic culture and British Christian assimilation. He will choose to circumcise his son in an act that inscribes membership in a collective without any accompanying ritual, language, or collective memories that would give the act itself meaning beyond difference for its own sake.[18]Philip Roth, "Eli the Fanatic," in Goodbye, Columbus (New York: Bantam Books, 1973); Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986); Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).
During the past few decades Hebrew and Yiddish in Jewish-American literature have both increasingly served as signifiers of difference in a cultural landscape that legitimizes and even requires difference. Two almost antithetical approaches can be found in the works of Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley, who both aim at a split audience while representing "other" languages in radically different ways. Ozick's manifesto is particularism, the self-conscious invocation of motifs from Jewish language, liturgy, and intertextuality, at times expressed in a high modernist, even Jamesian style. She is an intellectual writer, attuned to the cultural significance of German, Greek, Latin, French, Polish, and other languages in the formation of Jewish collective memory and Jewish art as well as to the place of Hebrew incantation, Yiddish folk song, Holocaust memoir, and recurring motifs such as the golem or the tree of life.[19]
For a discussion of multilingualism in Ozick's novella The Shawl, see my essay "The Languages of Memory: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl," in Multilingual America, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
In her Puttermesser stories she is almost alone among Jewish-American writers in clearing a space on the English printed page for the word HaShem (the Holy Name) printed in the Hebrew alphabet. Ozick aims for a reification of Hebrew within the English text which will transform the English into a language suitable for the expression of Jewish experience despite what she identifies as its inherent Christianity.The very cadence and rhythms of Paley's writing, in contrast, betray the presence of Yiddish without reproducing the language itself on the printed page. Whereas Ozick insists on the bold presence of the other languages, Paley forges a new language, an English imbued with Jewish-American cadence and tone. When Shirley Abramowitz's mother in "The Loudest Voice" says "In the grave it will be quiet," the inverted syntax conveys the Yiddish source language. No translation follows as Paley's style and themes form a new ethnic voice that slips comfortably into pluralistic, multicultural America. When the child kneels at the side of her bed making "a little church of my hands" and reciting "Hear, O Israel …" it is not the Shema but the sound of a prayer already transformed into a staple of American Judaism.[20]
Grace Paley, "The Loudest Voice," in The Little Disturbances of Man (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959); reprinted in Jewish-American Stories, ed. Irving Howe (New York: New American Library, 1977), 470.
Paley writes from a universalist concept of America that humorously ridicules Shirley for her naive yoking of Jewish and Christian religious practice but simultaneously applauds her spirit of accommodation.For a younger generation of Jewish-American writers today, Yiddish is linked with memories of grandparents but has faded as a significant presence. An occasional nuh or feh peppers the speech of immigrant characters, and by now in many works these are markers of Holocaust survivor characters.[21]
For a good example of the persistence of Yiddish see Leslea Newman, "A Letter to Harvey Milk," in America and I, ed. Joyce Antler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
The few exceptions are either those whose grandparents played a major role in their upbringing, such as the case of Max Apple, a baby boomer fluent in Yiddish who chronicles his relationship with his grandfatherin Roommates , or writers who are the product of an Orthodox religious upbringing, such as Rebecca Goldstein, whose Mind-Body Problem is sprinkled with Yiddishisms (mainly Hebrew words with Yiddish pronunciations): yaytzah harah, neshuma, bris, chazzanes, shayva broches, averah, ayshes chayil , and shadchan , to name only a few. Non-Hebraic Yiddish words are also associated with religious practice, as flayshig and milchik, davening, sheitel , or gute voch . Goldstein's protagonist searches for a universal language that will free her from her traditional Orthodox world, a search that leads her to Western philosophy and to mathematics. Small wonder that her husband Himmel's fame rests on his discovery of numbers termed "supernaturals." But neither of these two spheres frees her from either her Jewish past or her body's demands. Her book ends with a humanistic affirmation that combines Kant's ethical imperative and the memory of her father's chanting of the Kol Nidrei service: "On Rosh Hashanah their destiny is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, how many shall pass away and how many shall be brought into existence, who shall live and who shall die." Her character's response to this chant serves as the motto of many of the Jewish-American writers of her generation: "Long after I ceased believing in these words, the sound of them has caused my spine to tingle and my eyes to tear."[22]
Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel (New York: Penguin, 1983), 274.
For contemporary Jewish-American writers intent on preserving some linguistic sign of difference, it is the sound of either Hebrew or Yiddish and in some cases the sight of the Hebrew alphabet that infiltrates their English texts. Alice Kaplan's French Lessons is an interesting case in point, as her passion for French seems to be brought about by her family's rapid shift from Yiddish to impeccable English: "My family had made the transition from diaspora Yiddish to American English in a quick generation. You couldn't hear the shadow of an accent, unless my grandmother was around."[23]
Alice Kaplan, French Lessons: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 9.
Since the languages from her grandmother's past—Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew—"came up like bile," the only strategy left to the granddaughter to perpetuate the tradition of bilingualism was to turn to another language. "Today I am a French teacher. I think about my Nanny, sliding from Hebrew to English to Yiddish. … 'Il n'y avais pas de suite dans ses idees': There was no connection between her ideas. Why does that sentence come to me in French, out of the blue? … It's not like my grandmother's switching, but it feels disturbed." After recounting her odyssey toward the French language and culture and her disturbing obsession with Céline, she recognizes that "I'm not writing only about French anymore. French is the mark of something that happened to me, that made me shift into another language."[24]Ibid., 201.
Unlike Hispanic Americans or Native Americans whose "other" language aspires to legitimacy, whose bilingualism is perceived by many as a threat to English monolingualism in the United States, American Jews for the most part are not actually bilingual with either Hebrew or Yiddish, and certainly they do not seek its legitimacy as an American language. Yet it would be inaccurate to relegate Hebrew to a liturgical language, such as Latin for Catholics, for two simple reasons: Hebrew has always infused diasporic Jewish existence far beyond the limited area of prayer, and since the establishment of the state of Israel Hebrew has become the living language of a Jewish nation, of a homeland. Most American Jews who choose to identify as such are in the paradoxical situation of acquiring two alphabets as children, English at school and Hebrew after school, and of acquiring some familiarity with the sight and sound of another language that connects them with a collective past beyond the bounds of the United States but that also remains alien. Perhaps where Hebrew is understood least it is reified the most, taking on some transcendence or authenticating aura. This strange phenomenon can be illustrated best by the example of the Kaddish with which I began and with which I would like to conclude.
Aleph, Bet, Kaddish
For most American Jews today ethnic difference surfaces at landmark occasions in their lives: at circumcision and naming ceremonies at which they take on a second, Hebrew name; at bar and bat mitzvah where they recite prayers and read from Hebrew scripture; at weddings where part of the rites may still be recited in Hebrew; and at funerals, where they hear the recitation of the Kaddish, a prayer largely in Aramaic characterized by an abundance of praise and glorification of God and an expression of hope for the establishment of peace. The practice of mourners reciting the Kaddish goes back to the thirteenth century, and it is this prayer that seems to have become inscribed into the collective identity of American Jews. It is ironic that the generation writing under the sign of cultural difference and aiming to renew its Jewish identity has focused so heavily on a prayer that marks death.
In 1960 Allen Ginsberg published his poem "Kaddish" dedicated to his mother, Naomi. More of the poem is given over to a Whitmanesque catalog of hers and society's ills and to raging indictments of capitalism
as Moloch than to praise of God. Yet it adopts the meter and sound of the Kaddish long before the transliterated second line of the prayer appears on the page, in midchant, the first line taken for granted: "Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed."[25]
Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems: 1947-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 212.
The Hebrew prayer blends in with the other sounds in Ginsberg's 1960s America, with the Buddhist Book of Answers and the evangelist's "God Is Love." "I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph / the rhythm, the rhythm."[26]Ibid., 209.
Exactly one generation later, in 1980, Johanna Kaplan satirizes the displacement of the traditional Kaddish by the poetry of the Beats and the displacement of traditional Judaism by American culture. In the last chapter of her novel O My America! the narrator describes the memorial service of Ezra Slavin, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Leftist writer, and intellectual, which takes place in a library in midtown Manhattan. After the eulogies by family and friends, one of his former students reads Pablo Neruda's poem "For Everyone," followed by a song performed by the guitarist who introduced the deceased at an antiwar rally in 1965. Familiar to his audience and to Kaplan's readers as Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)," the words are taken from the book of Ecclesiastes. Just as he repeats the last line without guitar accompaniment, "And a time to every purpose under heaven," presumably the conclusion of the service, Slavin's estranged son Jonathan unexpectedly takes the microphone and "gulps out, 'I'm going to read the Kaddish.'" "Oh! Allen Ginsberg! What a wonderful idea !" whispers one of the assembled. "I saw him on the street the other day, and I really didn't think he looked at all well."[27]
Johanna Kaplan, O My America! (orig. ed., Harper and Row, 1980; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 282.
Jonathan's recitation appears in full in the text, a complete transliterated Kaddish in italics, and it stuns the listeners. "How could you and Dave possibly have allowed something so-so barbaric! " charges one of his friends. "It's a prayer , dear," assures another.Recited in part, in full, with errors, or only alluded to, the Kaddish becomes a recurrent sign of collective memory and Jewish identity, a religious text turned marker of ethnic origin. In Roommates Max Apple whispers "Yisgadal, v'yisgadash [sic ]," unable to go on until he hears his grandfather's Yiddish words. "'Shtark zich!' I told myself, and I did … my voice steadied, and I made no mistakes. By the last stanza everyone could hear."[28]
Max Apple, Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (New York: Warner Books, 1994), 210. There are many other examples of the Kaddish in Jewish-American literature which I do not have the time to discuss in this essay, among them Charles Reznikoff's poem by that name, Woody Allen's short story entitled "No Kaddish for Weinstein," and E.M. Broner, Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal.
Robin Hirsch's memoir Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski ends at his father's gravesite, the new rabbi admitting, "Ladies and gentlemen, I didn't know Herbert Hirsch …" into which the son splices the words "Yiskadal [sic ] v'yiskadash."[29]Robin Hirsch, Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 292.
In the memoir The Color of Water , AfricanAmerican writer James McBride's recent tribute to his white Jewish mother who converted to Christianity, he recalls the custom among pious Jews of reciting the Kaddish for a child who left the faith. "I realized then that whoever had said kaddish for Mommy—the Jewish prayer of mourning, the declaration of death, the ritual that absolves them of responsibility for the child's fate—had done the right thing, because Mommy was truly gone from their world."[30]
James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 222.
This uncapitalized kaddish whose words are already forgotten along with its alphabet is a stark representation of assimilation into Christian America.In almost all cases the Kaddish appears in transliteration, perhaps because publishers' policies and budgets don't allow for the printing of the Hebrew alphabet, perhaps because the mere introduction of a foreign language into a text already estranges the reader somewhat and authors fear alienating readers altogether with unfamiliar script, perhaps because the authors know that even Jewish readers may not be able to recognize the Hebrew whereas the sound of the transliterated prayer still has the power to remind and to stir. In light of the tendency to transliterate, when the Hebrew alphabet does appear on the page in an English text it is all the more dramatic, as is the case of Ozick's printing of HaShem mentioned earlier. I want to conclude with two powerful instances of such typographical ruptures of untranslated Hebrew, the first in Art Spiegelman's cartoon narrative Maus and the other in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America .
The child of Holocaust survivors, Spiegelman is haunted by languages other than English, as the German Maus in the title testifies along with the heavily accented English of his father, Vladek, narrating his life story to his son. There are only two instances of Hebrew print in the book, neither one translated into English. The first takes place early in the war when Valdek is imprisoned and he recounts: "Every day we prayed. … I was very religious, and it wasn't else to do."[31]
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 54.
Right above the drawing of three mice in prayer shawls in a concentration camp are the Hebrew words from the daily prayer service: "Mah tovo O'holechah, Ya'akov, mishkenotecha Israel" (How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel). The painfully ironic juxtaposition of place and language in this frame is available only to the reader literate in Hebrew. In the second instance the actual words of the Kaddish are inserted into the text in what is itself an insert in Maus , the section entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," originally published separately, which narrates Art's reaction to his mother's suicide when he was twenty. The words of the prayer are divided between two frames that show Art and his father in front of his mother's coffin,but it is his father who recites the prayer, whereas Art recites from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Recalling that "I was pretty spaced out in those days," he chooses to document the Kaddish even though he is not the one speaking it.[32]
Ibid., 102.
Throughout Maus the reported speech of the Jews during the war is rendered in normative English despite the fact that they were actually shifting between German, Polish, and Yiddish, whereas Art's father's English is heavily accented. This strategy emphasizes the perspective of young Art, American Jew and child of survivors, who feels the lingering effects of the Holocaust on his own life in his father's behavior toward him and his mother. The inadequacy of his father's English to articulate the horrors of his wartime experiences comes to signify the inadequacy of language altogether to convey suffering. In a work in which all of the nations speak a language rendered in the Latin alphabet (even the occasional word in German), it is all the more striking when an untranslated and illegible type surfaces on the page, as if to perversely validate the epigraph to Maus , a quotation from Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human." What could be comforting because it is familiar to Jewish readers, the Hebrew print on the page, has often been perceived in Western culture as alien and menacing.[33]
See Sander Gilman's extensive work on language and Jewish self-definition in both Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) and "The Jewish Voice," in The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Tony Kushner's play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches , is a multicultural play par excellence. Not only does the play present characters who are WASP, Italian American, African American, Jewish American, Mormon, Eskimo, gay, and straight, but actors cross lines by playing more than one role; one actor plays both rabbi and Mormon, another both Eskimo and Mormon. Yet the work bears Kushner's Jewish-American identity primarily through uncanny eruptions of Yiddish and Hebrew. The play opens with a rabbi in prayer shawl at the funeral rites of the grandmother of Louis Ironson, Sarah Ironson, a Russian-Jewish immigrant whom the rabbi calls "the last of the Mohicans." Encompassing a dizzying array of America's problems, including the ozone layer as one of the last frontiers, religious fundamentalism, racism, and government corruption, the play focuses on the plight of a gay AIDS patient named Prior Walter, a descendant of Mayflower WASPs and Louis Ironson's lover. Louis's New York Jewish upbringing accounts for the few obligatory Yiddish phrases, among them a Yiddish translation from King Lear about the ingratitude of children and Louis's recalling that his grandmother once heard Emma Goldman give a speech in Yiddish. All of this lends weight to Yiddish as a defining feature of Louis's ethnicity, his claim to significant difference. But midway through the play Hebrew displaces Yiddish as
Prior's Italian American nurse involuntarily begins to chant excerpts from Hebrew prayers for the dead which have a kabbalistic resonance: "I think that shochen bamromim hamtzeh menucho nechono al kanfey haschino." "What?" asks Prior, and she continues with "Bemaalos k'doshim ut'horim kezohar harokeea mazhirim …"[34]
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part 1: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 98.
Spoken in an automatic trance, unintelligible to both speaker and listener, and never translated for the audience, the lines describe Prior's soul departing the earth on the wings of the Shekhina (the Divine Presence, which in kabbalah is described as a feminine principle). When the nurse takes her leave of Prior, the stage directions magnify the transcendence of this moment by Hebrew erupting literally on the set. "Suddenly there is an astonishing blaze of light, a huge chord sounded by a gigantic choir, and a great book with steep pages mounted atop a molten-red pillar pops up from the stage floor. The book opens; there is a large Aleph inscribed on its pages, which bursts into flames."[35]Ibid., 99.
As the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the "aleph" holds a special place in Jewish tradition. According to one view of the revelation at Mount Sinai, all that the children of Israel heard of the divine voice was the letter aleph with which in the Hebrew text the First Commandment begins, "anokhi," "I." The kabbalists have always regarded the aleph as the spiritual root of all of the other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet.[36]
Gershom Sholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 30.
Moreover, the monotheistic credo, the Shema, ends with the affirmation that "the Lord is One," thereby emphasizing the word ekhod , which begins with an aleph as well. It is the first letter of the first creature into whom God breathed life, Adam, and it is the letter whose erasure from the word emet saps the golem of life, renders him met , dead.This mystical letter, prior to all others and source of all articulate sound, is revealed to the American Adam named Prior shortly before the ghosts of his ancestors Prior 1 and Prior 2 assemble at his bedside to await his departure from earth, to await what Prior 1 calls "Ha-adam, Ha-gadol," the redemption. At the play's end the Hebrew words uttered by his nurse are literalized on stage; after a blare of triumphant music and light turning several brilliant hues ("God Almighty …," whispers Prior, "very Steven Spielberg"), a terrifying crash precedes an angel's descent into the room right above his bed as the book with its blazing aleph rises from the floor. What is this image doing in a play by a Jewish playwright in which a gay dying WASP is surrounded by a Jew, a Mormon, an African American, an Italian American as well as the ghosts of English ancestors? By signifying the anticipated redemption of AIDS victims in what is
depicted as a homophobic America, the aleph enlists Jewish sources on the side of transcendence. And by being prior to Prior, it relocates Judaism at the very center of Judeo-Christian America, as it was for the Puritans for whom Hebrew constituted their prior claim to Christianity against the Latin of Catholicism. Prior 1, his thirteenth-century ancestor, is heard chanting words from the kabbalah such as Zefirot and Olam hayichud in contrast with the contemporary Prior who sings lyrics from My Fair Lady , a Lerner and Lowe musical. Prior's observation that the arrival of the angel is very Steven Spielberg momentarily shifts the tone of the scene from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the content to the special effects. The inscribed aleph is indeed just that, a special effect, a foreign letter that gives the play a Jewish ethnic marker while simultaneously recognizing that marker as being at the very core of some fundamental American discourse that subsumes all ethnic difference. The aleph is a theatrical special effect that can be claimed by all.
In the sequel to Millenium Approaches , entitled Perestroika , Louis is asked to recite "the Jewish prayer for the dead" for Roy Cohn, lawyer and power broker who has just died of AIDS. "The Kaddish?" he asks the Gentile who made the request. "That's the one. Hit it." But Louis insists, "I probably know less of the Kaddish than you do," a point he proves by beginning the Kaddish and quickly swerving into the Kiddush and the Shema.[37]
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part 2: Perestroika. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 125.
A ghost comes to his rescue, softly coaching him through the entire Kaddish—it is none other than the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, presumably also an Angel of America, another victim of prejudice in a premulticultural America. (In an earlier scene Ethel sings "Tumbalalaike" to Roy Cohn in Yiddish.) America's deepest problems and wounds are articulated in this play by means of kitsch and camp. Predictable American-Jewish ethnic markers such as the Kaddish and Hebrew letters such as aleph are paraded before the viewer in that spirit of self-conscious theatricality.When Bill Clinton recited the last line of the Kaddish it was not only as a sign of respect for Israel's fallen leader and a reminder of his pursuit of peace (the last line is a prayer for peace), it was also for the benefit of American Jews, for in one gesture he recognized both the separateness of their language linked as it is to a spiritual homeland and America's own link to that prior civilization. Even a cursory glance at Jewish-American literature over the past century demonstrates that bilingualism, or at the very least diglossia, has always been one of its features, whether it was on a trajectory toward English mastery or on an opposite path toward recovery of ethnic difference and non-English customs, as is the
case today. Diverse strategies for representing the cultural space between languages have yielded diverse and rich works of literature by writers such as Henry Roth, Abraham Cahan, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Charles Reznikoff, to name only a few. These authors have drawn on both Yiddish and Hebrew as resonant signs of a Jewish textual and linguistic tradition of which they are a part. In recent years, as Jewish writers are further removed from both immigration and religious practice, their knowledge of these languages fades precisely at a time when multiculturalism requires clear markers of difference and language can provide those markers.[38]
Uri Nir, "Avant Garde with Bagel" (in Hebrew), Ha'aretz, newspaper, August 30, 1996, pp. 42-44.
At its extreme, the Hebrew alphabet has been inscribed onto the body as tattoo, recently documented on the cover of the provocative San Francisco magazine Davka . The recurring motif of the Kaddish ritual in contemporary writing, an extraordinary act of artistic compression, affirms linguistic otherness as part of American Jewish identity. For those who can understand its words, its use as a sign of renewal is apt, for the Kaddish is itself an affirmation of God's glory, of hope for God's kingdom on earth. But for those who hear its sound alone, perhaps it remains a prayer for the dead. In either case, insofar as readers, in the solitary and quiet act of reading, whisper in their hearts the congregational response "brich hoo," it may also be a sign of community.Chapter II
Modernism and Exile
A View from the Margins
Michael Gluzman
I would like to thank Chana Kronfeld as well as the editors of this book for helpful criticisms and suggestions.
The terms exile and diaspora have become fashionable tokens in much postmodern and multicultural theory. In his "Imperialism/Nationalism" Seamus Deane succinctly summarizes the postmodernist view of exile: "[Exile] can lead from belonging nowhere to becoming at home everywhere, a migrant condition that owes something to the old Enlightenment ideal of the Citizen of the World, but also owes much to the contemporary belief that there is an essential virtue and gain in escaping the singularity of one culture into the multiplicity of all, or of all that are available. In such a turn we witness a rejection of nationalism brought to an apparently liberating extreme."[1]
Seamus Deane, "Imperialism/Nationalism," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 367.
This view of exile as privilege has its roots in modernist celebrations of exile. High modernists such as Joyce and Pound repeatedly emphasized the intellectual advantages of being away from home, presenting exile as a vehicle for individuality, freedom, and resistance. As Deane notes, modernist writers' "distance from and disaffection with their home territories has almost always been understood as a paradigmatic refusal of the writer to surrender his or her radical freedom to the demands of an oppressive state or system."[2]Ibid.
In critical constructions of modernism and exile Jews often occupy a pivotal position. There are, of course, at least two reasons for the Jews' centrality in discussions of modernism and exile. First, Jews have historically been perceived as the paradigmatic diaspora people. Second, modernist Jewish thinkers and writers like Auerbach and Adorno, Celan and Kafka, played a key role in directing critical attention to the ways in which exile yields intellectual freedom and creative power. Given these facts, it
is perhaps no wonder that the Wandering Jew has often been invoked as a standing symbol of modernism and modernity.
The three-way correlation between modernism, exile, and Jewishness is brought into focus in David Carroll's introduction to Jean-François Lyotard's Heidegger and "the jews." Referring to Lyotard's citation of "Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Celan," Carroll argues that "these are ultimately 'the jews' we all have to read and even in some sense to become, 'the jews' we always already are but have forgotten we are."[3]
Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews," trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxiv. For a critique of Lyotard's universalization of "the jew," see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 693-725.
To be sure, in a number of ways these Jewish writers need to be read as exemplary modernists. As such, Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan are indeed not only Jews by origin but also by "fate": they all suffered the burden of homelessness and exile.What we witness here is a common, albeit tacit, double conflation of modernism and exile, of exile and Jewishness. While these conflations are partially grounded in historical facts, it would be grossly inaccurate to assume that all Jewish modernists advocated exile or found it intellectually liberating. In fact, modernist Hebrew writers resisted the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation. Their resistance calls into question the very privileging of exile in contemporary theory; it also calls into question the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist.
Against the backdrop of Anglocentric or Eurocentric views of the modernist canon, the modernist Hebrew canon stands out as somewhat of an oddity. Although Hebrew modernism was often simultaneous with and closely affiliated to European modernisms and although many of its practitioners lived and wrote in the capitals of international modernism, it does not fit neatly into the categories of central modernisms. One way to illustrate the historical specificity of the modernist Hebrew canon is to contrast its rejection of exile as a literary ideology with the glorification of exile and extra-territoriality among high modernists. In what follows I read Hebrew modernism's "Negation of Exile" (shlilat ha-gola ) as a counternarrative that problematizes and disrupts Eurocentric and Anglocentric constructions of both "home" and "exile." The negation of exile in Hebrew modernism should be viewed, I argue, as an inverted mirror image of the celebration of exile in the writings of Anglo-American and European writers.
The negation of exile in Hebrew modernism involves a striking reversal of the home-exile binary. The "exile" described in modernist Hebrew texts is Europe, the place where the vast majority of Hebrew writers were born and reared; the "home" these writers embrace is Palestine, a new land they continuously portray as unbearably hot, foreign, and forsaken.
Yet the desire for a national sense of place and identity that is untroubled—as well as the pressures of the canon to fulfill that desire—compels Hebrew modernists to repress or palliate their sense of exile at "home" in Palestine. Thus, although they are torn between continents, between homes, and between languages, modernist Hebrew writers often "deny" the difficulties inherent in their homecoming. Torn between their Europeanness and their newly fashioned "indigenousness" in Palestine, they developed a particular way of seeing the home/exile dichotomy.
Referring to Adorno's view that "it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home," Edward Said notes that "to follow Adorno is to stand away from 'home' in order to look at it with the exile's detachment."[4]
Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile," in altogether Elsewhere, ed. Marc Robinson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 147.
By contrasting different views of exile—by slapping them one against the other—I aim to contextualize and historicize various exilic conditions as well as various canonical representations of exile. I aim, in other words, to look at exile with a sense of critical detachment: both from outside in and from inside out.Exile as Home
The oft-quoted words of Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have long come to emblematize the dominant modernist view of exile as offering unique possibilities for resistance and freedom: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can … using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning."[5]
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Vintage, 1973), 246-247.
Exile and freedom become in Stephen Dedalus's formulation almost synonymous. Exile turns out to be not only a mode of life but also a form of art that, together with silence and cunning, allows for individuality and resistance. Dedalus's words on silence, exile, and cunning are the background against which Joyce's own exile should be viewed. Exile, for Joyce, is not decreed from above; it is a creative choice, a modernist form of resistance which should be cherished and cultivated. Thus Richard Ellman observes that "whenever [Joyce's] relations with his native land were in danger of improving, he was to find a new incident to solidify his intransigence and to reaffirm the rightness of his voluntary absence."[6]Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 113.
Constantly renewing the quarrel with his homeland was a way to remain—both physically and emotionally—in exile.The idea that exile is indeed a form of freedom is similarly expressed in Maurice Blanchot's description of Franz Kafka. Describing Kafka as one of those who were "excluded from Canaan," Blanchot sees in Kafka a new sense of elsewhereness. The "error of infinite migration" is for Blanchot nothing less than "the origin of a new freedom."[7]
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 982), 70, 71.
Joyce and Blanchot were not alone in promulgating exile. Ezra Pound argued that the American genius could not develop in the cultural "Dark Ages" of the United States; it could flourish only in London or Paris. He asserted that "if you have any vital interest in art you sooner or later leave the country."[8]
Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909-1965 (New York: New Directions, 1973), 122.
And Gertrude Stein argued that "Americans needed Paris because they could not be artists, they could be dentists at home." In What Are Masterpieces ? Stein articulated her position as an expatriate writer: "I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half that made what I made."[9]Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces? (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1970), 62.
In Paris France Stein added: "After all, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but is really there."[10]Gertrude Stein, Paris France (New York: Liveright, 1970).
Stein's words posit exile as a precondition for writing. Although the words "have to have" make exile mandatory for writing, it is noteworthy that the exile Stein describes is one of choice. In Stein's writing exile is in fact a choice, a privileged position, something to be desired; it is a modernist accomplishment, a token of internationalism, an asset rather than a liability. This view is repeatedly expressed in discourses on high modernists. Thus Delmore Schwartz's characterization of T. S. Eliot as an "international hero"[11]Delmore Schwartz cited in Susan Stanford Friedman, "Exile in the American Grain: H.D.'s Diaspora," in Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 89.
whose experiences and words transcended the limits of the national typifies a modernist stance that views exile as a form of resistance to nationalist ideology.The advent of modernism has come to be perceived as so inextricably entangled with exile that major critics like George Steiner, Raymond Williams, and Hugh Kenner describe exile almost as a necessary condition for membership in international modernism. In George Steiner's words, modernism is an art of "extra-territoriality," whose proponents are poets "unhoused and wanderers across languages,"[12]
George Steiner cited in Malcolm Bradbury, "A Nonhomemade World: European and American Modernism," in Modernist Culture in America, ed. Daniel Joseph Singal (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991), 36.
For Steiner, then, exile is the defining characteristic of modernism at large. Describing the "endless border-crossing … [that] worked to naturalize the thesis of the non-natural status of language," Raymond Williams notes, in "When Was Modernism?": "Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York took on a new silhouette as the eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for art made by the restlessly mobile emigré or exile, the internationallyanti-bourgeois artist. From Apollinaire to Joyce to Beckett and Ionesco, writers were continuously moving to Paris, Vienna and Berlin, meeting there exiles from the Revolution coming the other way, bringing with them the manifestoes of post-revolutionary formation."[13]
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 34.
The "restlessly mobile emigré or exile" is, in Williams's view, the new era's protagonist. Continuously moving across borders, creating—through migration—a new international culture, these exiles are emblems of a new, modern world.In his seminal essay "The Making of the Modernist Canon" Hugh Kenner advances the idea of modernism-as-exile even further. The exclusion of key modernist figures such as Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner from his construction of "International Modernism" is explained as follows: "The absence of Wallace Stevens from the canon I use has somehow been made to seem notorious. I account for it by his inassimilability into the only story that I find has adequate explanatory power: a story of capitals, from which he was absent. Like Virginia Woolf of Bloomsbury or Faulkner of Oxford, he seems a voice from a province, quirkily enabled by the International Modernism of which he was never a part, no more than they."[14]
Hugh Kenner, "The Making of the Modernist Canon," in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 373.
The exclusion of Virginia Woolf from the canon ("She is not part of International Modernism; she is an English novelist of manners, writing village gossip from a village called Bloomsbury for her English readers")[15]
Ibid., 371.
demonstrates that the narrative Kenner advances is one of exile. It was not enough to be in a European capital, as was Woolf. One had to choose a European city in which one was not at home. Moreover, by arguing that "International Modernism was the work of Irishmen and Americans," although the cities of modernism were in fact London and Paris, Kenner tacitly suggests that the prerequisite for membership in "International Modernism" is exile.Inasmuch as exile turned into an emblem of modernism, the "Jew" was increasingly perceived as a prototypically modernist figure.[16]
For an interesting conflation of Jewish textuality, extra-territoriality, and modernity, see George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," in Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4-25.
Mary McCarthy argues in "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés" that the "Wandering Jew … is the archetypal exile, sentenced to trail about the earth until the second coming."[17]Mary McCarthy, "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés," in Altogether Elsewhere, ed. Marc Robinson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 49.
It is precisely this commonplace that turns the Jew into an emblem of modernity itself. We have already seen how David Carroll, following Lyotard, turns "the jew" into a generic term that represents all forms of otherness, a critical maneuver that turns the readers of "real" Jews into allegorical "jews." We have similarly seen how Blanchot turns Kafka's Jewishness into a modernist quality of homelessness. In the same vein Marina Tsvetayeva writes, in a poem intended for Osip Mandelstam, that "All poets are Jews,"[18]Marina Tsvetayeva, Selected Poems, trans. Elaine Feinstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 3.
and H. D.(Hilda Doolittle) draws a parallel between the Jews' wandering and the fate of her Moravian ancestors, who used the term diaspora to name their own homelessness.[19]
Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 267.
While modernists like Pound, Joyce, H. D., Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald often saw "the Jew" as the emblem of both modernism and exile—and in many ways understood their own works as "Jewish"[20]
Bryan Cheyette argues further that "the Jew" became a standing symbol of modernism. Tracing the abundance of "semitic representations" in modernist texts, Cheyette argues that "the acceptance, within a modernist aesthetics, of the impossibility of fully 'knowing' anything, made 'the Jew' an ideal objective correlative for this lack of absolute knowledge. There is, in short, a coincidence of interest between 'the Jew' as an unstable cultural signifier and a modernist style which refuses to be reduced to a settled narrative." Cheyette also believes that it is precisely this congruence between "Jewishness" and modernism that produced T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism: "It was Eliot's repressed fear of being Judaized that resulted in an extreme racialization of 'the Jew' in his 1920 Poems." See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 267.
—actual Jews did not quite fit the model. For while European high modernists turned the wandering Jew into an emblem or allegory of the human condition (Joyce's Bloom is a salient example), modernist Hebrew writers were enthusiastic participants in the project of bringing the wandering Jew back home. Hebrew writers resisted the view of exile as a "kind of literary privilege."[21]The words are those of Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi. See "Our Homeland, the Text ... Our Text the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination," Michigan Quarterly Review 31, no. 4 (1992): 468.
Moreover, they resisted the view of exile as an "inherently Jewish vocation."[22]Ibid. Edmond Jabe's words—"Gradually I realized that the Jew's real place is the book"—exemplify the view of exile as an "inherently Jewish vocation."
The "negation of exile" (shlilat ha-gola ) thus became a dominant theme or topos in Hebrew modernism. So while Marina Tsvetayeva wrote that "all poets are Jews" and Joyce "Judaized" Ulysses, Hebrew modernists were working to distance themselves from traditional Jewishness, from the "error of infinite migration."The Negation of Exile
In 1925 Saul Tchernikhovsky, second only to Hayyim Nahman Bialik in the premodernist generation of Hebrew writers who first became active in Odessa of the 1890s, published a long poem entitled "A Man Is Nothing But …" The poem celebrates the speaker's emotional attachment to his native Ukraine: "Man is nothing but a little plot of land, / Man is nothing but the image of his native landscape." The poem's celebration of the Ukraine as the speaker's homeland is striking in its deviance from the accepted norms of Hebrew poetry of the day. Unlike Bialik, the designated national poet who described Europe in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 as the antithesis of home ("The whole earth is a slaughtering block to me"), Tchernikhovsky evokes the Ukraine as a beloved homeland.
Tchernikhovsky's life embodies the Jewish experience of exile. Born in a village in the border region between Crimea and the Ukraine, he was forced to study medicine in Heidelberg and Lausanne because of restrictions against the admission of Jewish students to Russian universities. After graduating, he returned to Russia but left again for Germany in 1922, for he suspected that there was no future for Hebrew writers in the Soviet
Union. He attempted unsuccessfully to get a medical position in Palestine, the delay resulting in his residence in Germany for nine years. In 1931 he emigrated to Palestine where he resided until his death in 1943. The Poem "A Man Is Nothing But …," which was written in Germany, positions the speaker as the wandering Jew who is relegated to eternal exile. But surprisingly enough Tchernikhovsky celebrates his own exile. Despite the speaker's elegiac tone (the speaker does lament his inability to reach the "Southern Sea"), he does not present exile in negative terms. Unable to ignore the negation of exile in Hebrew letters, he underscores the marginality of his own position:
And my poem is alien, my poem is stranger to the heart of my nation
All alone it appeared and all alone it shall leave
With no one to receive it and with no word
Like the screech of the lonely eagle, a wild screech.
And like that wind, which will wander eternally,
I wandered from sea to sea all the days of my life.
And when I wanted to reach the Southern Sea
Mountains blocked my way … where should I build my nest?
More wide open space and more roads, where is my walking stick—I shall go …[23]
Saul Tchernikhovsky, Collected Poems (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1950), 469.
Tchernikhovsky's words are interesting precisely because he markedly and painfully recognizes that the image of the wandering Jew, an image he fully identifies with, has run out of vogue in modern Hebrew letters. The wandering Jew, the emblem of Jewish life in the diaspora, is portrayed in Hebrew texts in extremely negative terms. In most Zionist texts Zionism is continuously portrayed as the cure while exile is identified as the disease. Zionist denunciations of exile were clear and unequivocal. Thus Ben Zion Dinaburg writes in an essay entitled "The Zionist Ideology and Its Principles": "The principle underlying the Zionist conception of Jewish reality was—the Negation of Exile. This negation is the first principle of Zionist ideology. Jewish misfortune has but a single name: exile (galut ). Exile embodied all the [Jewish people's] disasters and calamities, persecutions and suffering."[24]
Ben Zion Dinaburg, "The Zionist Ideology and Its Principles," in A Collection of Hebrew Essays (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1945), 552. Explicating the negation of exile in Zionist ideology, Anita Shapira argues: "The concept Negation of Exile was one of the dominant components in Labor ideology in Palestine. A revolutionary movement's need to repudiate everything that had preceded it, to burn bridges to the past in order to gather together the necessary psychological strength for a revolutionary shift, was expressed in the total rejection of Jewish pattern of life in the Diaspora." See Anita Shapira, Land and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 321.
Against the background of Dinaburg's words, Tchernikhovsky's embrace of the "exilic" Ukraine—and his identification with the wandering Jew—is startlingly iconoclastic. The extent of Tchernikhovsky's deviance from the ideological norms of Hebrew literature becomes clear when we read the uncompromising denouncements of Jewish life in the diaspora. A popular poem by Avigdor Hameiri may be a convenient starting point. Hameiri, a Hungarian-born poet who servedin the Hungarian army during World War I (he was taken captive by the Russians and sent to a POW camp in Siberia), emigrated to Palestine in 1921. The following dialogue between mother and son brings to light the ideological and geographical rift between two generations:
A mother writes with the tear of her eye
To my good son in Jerusalem
Your father is dead, your mother is ill
Come home to the diaspora …
Come home to spring,
Come home beloved son.
Come!
And the son replies:
The pioneer writes with the tear of his eye
It is 1924 in Jerusalem.
Forgive me my sick Mother
I will not return to the diaspora.
If you truly love me,
come here and embrace me.
I shall be a wanderer no more,
I shall not move from here forever.
I will not move, I will not move.
No![25]Hameiri's popular poem is cited in Amos Elon, The Israelis (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1971), 128.
Note that from a Zionist perspective the mother's appeal to the son to "come home to the diaspora" is an outright oxymoron. Since "diaspora" and "home" are flagrantly contradictory the son cannot but flatly reject the mother's plea. Moreover, Hameiri rhymes the words "diaspora" (gola ) and "ill" (chola ), a rhyme that strengthens the association, prevalent in Zionist ideology, of exile and sickness.
Hameiri's bluntness was not exceptional. The Hebrew poets who took part in the nation building process were eager participants in the cultural war against exile. The most influential Hebrew modernist was the poet Avraham Shlonsky, who was born in Plotov (Ukraine) in 1900. At age thirteen he was sent off by his father to study in Palestine. The outbreak of World War I found him on a visit to Russia, where he was forced to stay through the crucial years of the Revolution and the war. In 1922 he emigrated to Palestine and soon became the leading proponent of the "New" in Hebrew letters. Like other modernist Hebrew poets, Shlonsky was well versed in European culture, and his poetry exhibits a close affinity for and affiliation with the poetics of Russian poets like Alexander
Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky. But while Shlonsky's experimentalism and wild imagery—as well as his iconoclastic rejection of tradition—are couched in and modeled after European examples, his blunt rejection of exile sets him apart from the European poets he follows. The poetics of newness advanced by Russian futurism, including the extended use of neologism, is used by Shlonsky for political means. He advances a utopian Zionist agenda of newness which calls for a new society, a new language, and a new homeland. That the new is couched in the rhetoric of return (to productivity, to Hebrew, to Palestine) renders the utopia just and attainable. Shlonsky, who was once characterized as "the poet of the Zionist revolution," identifies wholeheartedly with the Zionist rejection of exile. Addressing both his comrades and the homeland ("Listen brethren / and listen [my] homeland"), Shlonsky describes in "March" the marked differences between home and exile, past and present:
hurray
climb the mountain!
yesterdays have darkened
we shall look at the morrow.
how do the eagle's wings tire?
indeed we burned,
we burned the bridge
who is trying to pull us back to yesterday?
…..
we've
all of us
known
that we came
from a settled land to a forsaken place
that this is the wasteland
and that hunger and
malaria awaited us.
and in spite of it all
we do believe
and we shall believe
that we will rise
even if we fall time and again.
straighten your gaze,
raise your voice:
who errs to step right?
left!
left!
left![26]"March," in Avraham Shlonsky, Collected Poems, Vol. 1 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1954), 302.
Although the playful inventiveness of Shlonsky's Hebrew is lost in translation, the ideological identification with the negation of exile remains fully visible. It is noteworthy that Europe is not even mentioned in Shlonsky's poem. The speaker, whose tone of voice is couched in a revolutionary European context, ignores Europe altogether, identifying it only indirectly as "a populated land." Europe is present in the poem only through negation, representing an undesired past. Shlonsky's route in "March" leads him toward a leftist, socialist vision that is shaped by the Russian Revolution; this vision is imbricated here with a nationalist-cum-modernist thrust that in turn leads Shlonsky away from Europe. Although Shlonsky presents Palestine as a forsaken place (erets nidachat ) and as wasteland, he celebrates it as home and homeland, expressing undiminished confidence in the imminent success of the Zionist project.
As this example clearly shows, Shlonsky is aware of the harsh conditions in Palestine (hunger, malaria); if Europe looms large in the background as a "populated land" it is only as an emblem of the past. It is noteworthy that Shlonsky does not deny the difficulties inherent in leaving Europe and immigrating to Palestine, but he accepts the difficulties with great enthusiasm, as he writes in "Metropolis":
I have loved you my comrades
Among the thorns of the tsabar [prickly pear]
in eagle-clutches of parched-rocky heat;
in rebellion and in peace
let us extend our necks:
Blessed be He who places his heavy yoke on us.
Amen.
Selah.[27]"Metropolis" in Avraham Shlonsky, Collected Poems (in Hebrew).
In Shlonsky's view the newly arrived pioneers cannot but accept the hardship in Palestine wholeheartedly. The modernist desire to negate the past (Pound's famous exhortation "TO MAKE IT NEW " comes to mind as a salient slogan) expresses itself in Shlonsky's poem as the negation of Europe. When Shlonsky claims to have burned the bridge (to Europe, to the past) and refuses to be pushed back to yesterday, he identifies exile as a chronotope that enmeshes time (past) and place (Europe). Zionism, for Shlonsky, is first and foremost a modernist ideology. Thus he claims: "In my opinion, every good translation [into Hebrew] as every good [original] poem is Zionism." And thus the rebuilding of the land and the writing of modernist Hebrew poetry are perceived by Shlonsky as synonymous. Consider, for example, the quasi-religious description of the Zionist rebuilding of the land in his famous poem "Amal" (Toil):
My country wraps itself in light as in a prayer shawl
Houses stand out like phylacteries
And like phylactery straps, the roads that hands have paved glide
down."[28]"Toil," in ibid.
Note that in Hebrew the word batim , which is translated above as "houses," is also the word for stanzas. Thus the modernist/Zionist poem's stanzas and the newly built houses are synonymous. Consequently the poet is a full participant in the Zionist project, a "road-building bard in Israel."
In his diary Shlonsky writes about the relation of Zionism to modernist Hebrew poetry:
What does the sense of a homeland, the fact of a homeland [i.e., Palestine], bestow on our culture …? It allows an emancipation from the … always-Jewish, only-Jewish—that is from the external and the limiting and bragging all at once. … It is no coincidence that in the Diaspora, our literature—our art—was specific, and hence Naturalistic , since nothing natural, taken for granted, existent and safe (that is a homeland, a state) gave us a sense of self, nor did it safeguard our particular characteristics,—and hence our culture became … a substitute for a homeland, for a state. … It had to preserve … everything that was Jewish and only Jewish. …
In Palestine, I do not need to be only Jewish, always Jewish in order to be a Jew. In Palestine, I can, I must be a man, first of all a human being, for Jewishness is anyway automatic within the territorial, social and political structures of the homeland. For what does a homeland mean to a people if not a sense of taken-for-grantedness. It saves a national group from [chauvinistic] nationalism, and it is the only possibility to base a culture on humanism. It is no coincidence that Hebrew literature in Palestine is mostly of this kind: modern, relevant —in its thematics, its mentality, its desires (and also perhaps in its chances) to take off from a national moment into the international horizon, just as an aeroplane takes off from an airport.[29]
Avraham Shlonsky, Notes from the Diary (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1981), 59.
For Shlonsky, Zionism and the emergence of a Jewish homeland are modernist catalysts that bring about the demise of naturalism. Shlonsky equates exile and naturalism just as he links the return to Palestine with modernism. The very possibility of internationalism, which is crucial for Shlonsky as well as for many other modernists, is based on the existence of a homeland, metonymically figured through the "airport." As this passage clearly indicates, Shlonsky is not insensitive to the allure of modernist internationalism as a means of resisting "[chauvinistic] nationalism" (leumanut ). But he acknowledges that in order to resist or criticize the nation-state structure one must first have a state. The following anecdote, told by Palestinian poet Machmud Darwish, may serve to illustrate
Shlonsky's position: "Jean Genet once said that a homeland is a stupid idea, except for those who still don't have one. The Spanish poet Goitisolo then replied: "What about when they get one?" And Genet replied, "Let them throw it out the window."[30]
Machmud Darwish, "Exile Is So Strong within Me, I Might Bring It to the Land" (in Hebrew), Chadarim (1996), p. 176.
When Shlonsky argues that he wants "to take off from a national moment into the international horizon," he says, in fact, that people have to have a homeland in order to "throw it out the window."Shlonsky's view of Hebrew modernism is expressed more fully in a historical account of the emergence of a "new poetry" in Palestine. Here too he equates Zionism and modernism: "A new poetry could have arisen only as a result of its identification with a vision, with the beginning [bereshit ] of a new society which is socialist in its form and nationalist in its content."[31]
Avraham Shlonsky, Selected Critical Writing (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1960), 56.
Shlonsky's account of the new Hebrew poetry of which he was part is revealing enough to be worth quoting at some length:This Hebrew poetry … was chronologically and essentially the logical offspring of the Third Aliya [immigration wave] in all its manifestations. For better or for worse, its doubts and its achievements—it is the voice and reflection of this glorious story of this Aliya . It cannot be located outside this climate, outside the joy of the storming settlers [mista'arim ], "bare-hearted and labor-driven" of this period. … The sites are well known: The Road and the Gilboa, the tent and the commune, Ein-Charod and Beit-Alfa, and Rachad Camp. … Only in this way, through such an identification with a vision, with the beginning of a different society, "socialist in form and nationalist in content," could a new poetry arise. … And so a party of poets came together, who together built the stanzas ["batim "—stanzas but also houses] of the new poem. Each one with his particular temperament, but always bearing the collective trait of this newness. [These poets'] roots in the country's landscape are deeper, and the personal biography, of almost all of them, is already that of total identification with the public of Erets Israel , whose main essence and glory is the camp of the pioneers.[32]
Ibid., 57.
On reading Shlonsky's account of the emergence of Hebrew modernism it becomes unequivocally clear that he identifies Hebrew modernism with the rejection of exile. In identifying the new Hebrew poetry with the writers of the Third Aliya (immigration wave), Shlonsky strictly confines the borders of Hebrew modernism. Delineating clear temporal, geographical, and ideological borderlines to contain the story of Hebrew modernism, mappings like these exclude from the canon writers who did not emigrate to Erets Israel (like Lensky), a nativist poet who was born in Erets Israel (Esther Raab), and writers who were not politically committed to Zionism (like Fogel).
The story Shlonsky recounts here, perhaps unexpectedly, is one of migration. Not unlike Kenner, Williams, or Steiner, he identifies migration as the only concept that has explanatory power. But as the examples adduced here clearly show, Shlonsky perceives the emigration of Hebrew writers from Europe to Palestine not as exile but rather as a late return, as homecoming. Thus the modernist Hebrew canon, which cannot be separated from the Zionist nation-building process, can be said to have worked to change the premodernist norm of exile. As one critic asserted in 1928, "Only someone who is completely blind could fail to see the mutual influence that exists between Zionism and Hebrew literature, [they] arise and succeed together just as they fall and fail together, and God forgive some of our friends, who stubbornly subscribe to the idiocy that Hebrew literature can be built on the basis of a-Zionism or even anti-Zionism."[33]
Moshe Kleinman, Characters and Levels: Notes on the History and Evolution of the New Hebrew Literature (in Hebrew) (Paris: Voltaire Press, 1928), 208.
While Kenner excludes writers such as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Wallace Stevens from the canon of international modernism because they did not live in exile, Hebrew poets who chose to remain in the diaspora or who did not fully negate the concept of exile were excluded from the modernist Hebrew canon or were marginalized by its center. That the exile in which these marginalized Hebrew writers remained included some of the major sites of international modernism is one of the curious ironies of literary history. And while exile seemed like a modernist stance or accomplishment to many European or American writers, most Hebrew writers perceived it as essentially premodern , something that needs to be abolished altogether.Home as Exile
To fully understand a culture one must attend not only to dominant voices but also to the voices that have been silenced, cast out, expelled, or excluded. Although the negation of exile turned out to be the dominant ideology of Hebrew letters, it would be grossly inaccurate to imply that other poetic/ideological positions did not find expression in the textual field we name Hebrew modernism. Indeed almost all Hebrew poets were devout Zionists; but some did voice ambivalence toward or disappointment regarding the "home" they found in Palestine. Since Hebrew criticism demanded full identification with Zionism, poets who continuously expressed ambivalence toward the Zionist project were often rendered minor. Consider, for example, the
poetic/political ambivalence of Noach Shtern. Shtern, who was born in Lithuania in 1912, emigrated to Ottawa when he was seventeen; two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study English literature at Harvard. After graduating, Shtern was offered a scholarship at Columbia University but he decided to emigrate to Palestine. He arrived in Palestine in 1935 but was never at home in his new homeland of choice. Engulfed in ambivalence he describes the orange groves, the emblem of the new land:
The smell of the heavy oranges
comes to give pleasure and to torture
to nurture and strangle as witness
to the life in this homeland.[34]Noach Shtern, Amid Fogs (in Hebrew) (Tel aviv: Hakibuts Hameuchad, 1973), 100.
Another poet who continuously described Palestine as a disappointing homeland is Alexander Penn. Penn, a Russian-born poet, who was, while still in Russia, a friend of Vladimir Mayakovsky, wrote poems in both Russian and Hebrew. Constantly torn between the USSR and Palestine, Penn wrote in 1929 a poem entitled "A New Homeland." This new homeland he describes in astonishingly negative terms:
Without faith and direction
I walk
your sun in my throat—bronzed heartburn.
And all the energy of my soul
You eradicate instantly,
You so-called New Homeland.[35]"A New Homeland," in Alexander Penn, Nights without Roof (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hameuchad, 1985), 54.
But the most intricate—and ambivalent—poetic rendition of Jewish "homelessness" is to be found in the poetry of Leah Goldberg, who continuously questioned and problematized the notions of home and exile. Unlike Shtern or Penn, who were considered marginal, Goldberg was a leading poet in Shlonsky's coterie. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, and educated at the universities of Kovno, Bonn, and Berlin, Goldberg was thoroughly familiar with Russian and German literature; she attained native or near-native fluency in many European languages, including Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Although Goldberg's mastery of Russian was far superior to her knowledge of Hebrew, she decided to write poetry in Hebrew and began doing so at age ten. One of her first poems, entitled "exile," reads:
How difficult the word how many memories
of hatred and slavery
and because of it we had shed so many tears:
exile
and yet, I'll rejoice in the fields of exile
which are filled with oats and flax
the hot day and the cool evening
and the dead silence of night
the pale spring and the melting snow
the season which is neither summer nor autumn
when, in the garden, by some miracle
the green turns to gold.[36]Leah Goldberg, "exile," in Tuvya Ruebner, Leah Goldberg: A Monograph (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1980), 10.
The poem's shift from an ideological negation of exile to an unabashed celebration of the exilic landscape is striking. Goldberg focuses here and elsewhere on the gap or rift between ideology and experience. She begins with a textbook rejection of exile only to find out that the negated site is beautifully familiar. Moreover, a close scrutiny of the text reveals that exile for her, at least here, is clearly textual. It is presented as a "difficult word," a concept in Jewish collective memory ("memories of hatred and slavery") rather than as a concrete experience or fact of life. The speaker's shift from the "difficult word" to the happiness aroused by the fields is undoubtedly surprising. As Goldberg's literary career progressed, however, she became increasingly aware of the problematics of "home" and "exile" and thus gave expression to a particularly complex positionality.
With Goldberg, home is often a function of distance and nostalgia, a place always-already beyond one's grasp and longed for. In a cycle entitled "From the Songs of Zion" Goldberg acknowledges—and indeed problematizes—the relationship between poet and land, immigrant and home. The cycle's first section, entitled "Night," reads:
Does the golden tongue of a bell quiver in the uppermost heaven?
Did a drop of dew fall on the top of the tall cypress tree?
Sing to us of the Songs of Zion!
How shall we sing the song of Zion in Zion's land
And we have not even begun to hear.[37]"From the Songs of Zion," in Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 2 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1970), 219.
Goldberg's poetry becomes increasingly wary of the expectation that Hebrew poetry should be politically committed to Zionism in general and to the negation of exile in particular. The poem echoes the words of the exiles in Psalms 137 who resist their captors' demand that they sing the songs of Zion. Exile, for them, is a state that negates the very possibility of singing. The allusion to Psalms 137, the ur-text on exile in the Jewish
tradition, cannot pass unnoticed by Goldberg's readership. Before considering the meaning of Goldberg's iconoclastic allusion, let us look at Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's reading of the biblical passage:
The theme of exile and homecoming is as old as literature itself, becoming, in its most radical modern readings, virtually synonymous with the literary process. At the source of a long intertextual journey, the 137th Psalm is the canonic moment that generates the poetic vocabulary of exile: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept as we remembered Zion." The pleonastic "there" in the first and third verses calls attention to itself by its very redundancy; syntactically superfluous, "there" defines exile as the place that is elsewhere. Being elsewhere is the pre-text for poetry.[38]
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Our Homeland, the Text ... Our Text the Homeland," 465.
Note, however, that the biblical passage presents exile as antithetical to poetry. It is interesting that Goldberg expresses the biblical idea that exile negates the possibility for poetry while she is in Palestine. Unlike the exiles in Babylon, she is, in fact, at "home" in the ever-longed-for Zion. This is, no doubt, a bold reversal of the biblical theme. A question of purpose imposes itself: Why can't the speaker in the poem sing "of the Songs of Zion"? Attempting to listen to the land's unheard voices, Goldberg acknowledges her inability to capture poetically the sounds of this unfamiliar homeland.
In "Tel Aviv 1935" Goldberg describes the arrival of a group of immigrants to Tel Aviv in terms of exile and estrangement:
And the knapsacks of the travelers
walked down the streets
And the language of a foreign land
Was plunged into the hot day
like the cold blade of a knife.[39]"Tel Aviv 1935," in Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 3 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1970), 14.
Although the poem is clearly about her own immigration to Palestine (she arrived in Jaffa in 1935), Goldberg describes her "homecoming" in strikingly impersonal terms. The experience is collective rather than personal, and the process as a whole is dehumanizing, for the immigrants in the poem turn from subjects into walking knapsacks. As we read these lines, it becomes clear that Goldberg problematizes the notion of "homecoming." Goldberg's double position, simultaneously insider and outsider in both Europe and Palestine, is expressed in the poem through the speaker's visual perspective. The "detached" modernist eye that looks at the "walking knapsacks" from afar seems to be standing on a roof in Tel Aviv. Goldberg describes the immigrants' arrival to a new land as if she is not implicated in the picture she portrays. By looking at a group of immigrants (of
which she is part) from outside, with no apparent trace of involvement, she gives succinct expression to her sense of detachment from herself as well as from the collective. Goldberg's double perspective informs the poem in many different ways. For example, one disturbing question remains unsolved: Which is the foreign language that is "plunged into the hot day"? Is it the immigrants' Russian or is it the natives' Hebrew? What, in other words, constitutes the "foreign" in the pregnant moment of homecoming? The question remains unresolved. Moreover, as Goldberg arrives in Palestine, a moment of Jewish wish fulfillment, she instantly thematizes her emotional and spiritual longing for her hometown's architecture, figured through a church at the end of the poem.
In another poem Goldberg's double positionality becomes even more explicit as she acknowledges her sense of "elsewhereness."
Here I'll not hear the cuckoo's voice,
Here the tree will not wear a snowy hat
But in the shadow of these pines
My entire childhood is revived.
The sound of the conifers: once upon a time …
Homeland I'll name the snowy planes,
The greenish ice which chains the stream
The language of poetry in a foreign land
Perhaps only the passing birds know—
as they dangle between earth and sky—
this pain of the two homelands.
With you, I was planted twice
With you, pines, I grew,
With my roots in two different landscapes.[40]Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 2 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1970), 14.
While Gertrude Stein views the simultaneous affiliation to two countries as a liberating privilege and as a double presence, Goldberg experiences this double affiliation as a tormenting lack or absence. A simple sense of home is untenable for Goldberg, for she perceives her two homelands as mutually exclusive. Having "roots in two different landscapes" is by no means liberating for Goldberg. While contemporary theory advances the idea "that there is an essential virtue and gain in escaping the singularity of one culture into the multiplicity of all, or of all that are available."[41]
Seamus Deane, "Imperialism/Nationalism," 367.
Goldberg stresses her inability to feel fully at home in either of her homelands. The multiplicity is experienced as loss. When Goldberg says "I was planted twice," she brings into focus her sense of having been uprooted. Exploring her double positionality, she defines "homeland" in terms ofthe landscapes she feels close to, as well as in terms of her closeness to texts: thus Russian poetry always remains a homeland.
In 1940 Goldberg expressed herself more fully on the question of exile: "Or perhaps, perhaps only now we have learned to feel that the essence of poetry is not in the combination of harmonies, but in the terrible anxiety which the human heart feels before death, in the human longing for tranquillity and a homeland—which are always beyond our reach?"[42]
Cited in A. B. Yoffe, Leah Goldberg: An Appreciation of the Poet and Her Work (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Reshafim, 1994), 6.
The question mark at the end of this passage tells the entire story, for the desired homeland is always out of reach. Goldberg's sense of "homelessness"—her having two homelands—could grant her entry into constructions of modernism that valorize the exilic condition. But within Hebrew letters, the position Goldberg held vis-à-vis exile was considered "ex-centric." Consider, for example, Abraham Blat's assessment of her poetry: "Leah Goldberg is a humanist poet. This is her great strength and this is her weakness because her national and social uprootedness left her lonely with her single poem, the love poem (alongside her nature poems). … Although we relish great humanist lyrical poetry, we cannot ignore the absence of a specifically Israeli color in her poetry."[43]Abraham Blat, In Writers' Path (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Menora, 1967), 107.
Blat's description of Goldberg's social and national uprootedness is clearly indicative of the limited range of valued literary topics at a specific historical moment. Reading Goldberg's poetry as excessively personal, he gives succinct expression to a collective literary expectation that poetry participate in the nation-building process. Thus A. B. Yoffe writes: "In 1940 Goldberg's second volume of poetry had been published. It was, undoubtedly, a big step forward in comparison to her first book. The poems became not only less personal and more objective, but the poet exhibited a desire to conquer the landscape of Erets Israel ."[44]See A. B. Yoffe, Leah Goldberg, 241.
But the most revealing attack on Goldberg's poems has been advanced by the critic Y. Saaroni, who complains, on reading Goldberg's first book, that "it is hard to believe that this poet lives in our day, in a modern city … and not in a medieval monastery, in a dark and solitary chamber. It seems as if she arranges an exile for herself, flapping in the prison of loneliness without finding the gate that would allow her to get out to the wide world."[45]
See ibid., 228.
Condemning Goldberg's detachment from the "here and now," Saaroni describes Goldberg as uprooted, as too European; in his view, she is too attached not only to Europe but also to Christianity. Culturally and emotionally immersed in the Old World—wrapped up in an exile of choice—she is viewed as not committed enough to either Judaism or Zionism. As these critical remarks suggest, Goldberg's somewhat ambivalent relation to Palestine as homeland is denounced as irresolute. Her overtlonging for the European landscapes of her childhood and her close affiliation with European culture are perceived as evidence of her lack of commitment to the emerging national culture. Although a famous poet who is part of a hegemonic coterie, Goldberg gradually became a liminal figure, an acknowledged poet who was rendered marginal.
Exilic Conditions
By calling into question the Eurocentric/Western view of exile as freedom and by pointing to the ways in which Hebrew writers disrupt the home-exile dichotomy, I do not mean to negate or dismiss the view of modernism as exile. What I want is to reuse the concept of exile in ways that will not gloss over the differences between various exilic conditions.
By juxtaposing two different canons, two opposing views of modernism and exile, I wanted to advance a distinction between various kinds of exile. Taking a step in this direction, Mary McCarthy has already suggested a three-way distinction between exiles, refugees, and expatriates. "Classically," she writes, "exile was a punishment decreed from above, like the original sentence of banishment of Adam and Eve."[46]
Mary McCarthy, "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés," in Altogether Elsewhere, 50.
The expatriate, in her view, is the opposite of the exile: "His main aim is never to go back to his native land, or, failing that, to stay away as long as possible. His departure is wholly voluntary. An exile can be of any nationality, but an expatriate is generally English or American."[47]Ibid., 51.
Without limiting the expatriate's nationality, I wish to re-deploy McCarthy's important set of distinctions. It is obvious by now that Gertrude Stein's exile was very different from Goldberg's. My sense is that despite the tension between Paris and Oakland, Stein knew where home was—at least in the sense of knowing what she was working against ("what made her" in her terms). Despite the "internationalism" of her literary salon, she was an American writing in English. Paris was a privilege, a perspective that allowed her to transcend national limits. When Stein writes "writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really," she expresses her sense of belonging to America. American expatriates like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller also had a very clear sense of where home really was. As Mary McCarthy notes, "When the dollar dropped in value during the thirties, after the crash, the American, by and large, went swiftly home, proving that even
those who like Malcolm Cowley (author of a book called Exile's Return ) had imagined themselves to be exiles were only expatriates."[48]
Ibid., 52.
Exile for Goldberg was something entirely different. To begin with, exile was forced on her as a child, for her family fell victim to the expulsion of Jewish families from Lithuania at the outbreak of World War I. Goldberg described her return to Lithuania in 1919 in her autobiographical novel Ve'hu Ha-or (And That Is the Light); in 1938 she retells the traumatic experience. The passage is revealing enough to be quoted in its entirety:
I remember it well: the end of September or the beginning of October, 1919. The days were very cold. The fields were very barren. A stabbing, nasty wind was blowing. At a distance shots were heard. A crossroads. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Lithuania. Most of the column had already crossed the border. We were stopped. Father was arrested and everyday they threatened to execute him. His shoes were yellowish-reddish and the Lithuanian troops announced that such shoes were a clear sign of belonging to the Communist party. … One day the hope glimmered that we would be allowed to continue our journey. Mother went to beg the officers for mercy. I remained to watch over the suitcases. Alone. In the field. It was very cold. A few "fingers" in my gloves were missing. My hands were freezing. No one was around. Barren fields. Every once in a while soldiers passed by. They didn't touch me. Continued on their way. Many hours passed and it started getting dark. My feet also froze. A terrible fear emerged from the fields. And I didn't cry. I wasn't afraid of wild animals. I was afraid of human beings and from the absence of human beings in the surrounding. I was already eight years old, and I knew that evil comes from man and from desertion. My feet froze and my head was burning. Later it became clear that I had high fever. Over thirty-nine degrees. Rubella. Once the stars had been turned on in the sky my mother appeared—found me alone in a field at a crossroads. Sitting and watching over the suitcases. I still remember from the thread of those days: a huge, transient wooden hut that was built in the fields. Babies were crying. Mothers wept at night. Tortured men wept as well. Someone rebuked. The column did not move from that spot. For ten days nothing, nothing has come into my mouth except for water, and once every three days—a tiny slice of bread. I do not recall the distress of hunger, nor the dread. I mainly remember a wide field and cornflowers among the aging spikes. And I still remember a well at the edge of the village, and a day after the rain. A little greenish frog leaped out of the well. I sat on a big stone and spoke to it. Who knows what I said to it but [life] was almost good. I don't remember the distress of hunger.[49]
Cited in A. B. Yoffe, Leah Goldberg, 17-18.
Edward Said has already noted that "exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience."[50]
Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile," 137.
And indeed, against the backgroundof Blanchot's construction of exile as freedom or against the background of Stein's privileged exile in Paris, Goldberg's description is troubling and disruptive. Goldberg's description fractures the immateriality of allegorical readings of both Jewishness and exile. Moreover, it throws into some question the whole privileging of exile in modern literature and theory. However disturbing the description is (it definitely explains the appeal of Zionism for Goldberg) one must not forget that Goldberg did not feel fully at home in Palestine either. Although Goldberg identifies herself as Zionist, it is noteworthy that in her homeland of choice she felt uprooted from her Europeanness, from the landscapes of her childhood. The only option left for Goldberg was to thematize her ever-growing sense of uprootedness. From a constantly problematized positionality, Goldberg was able to question and rewrite the home-exile binary. But her perspective—although typically, even prototypically modernist—has rendered her minor in the Hebrew canon, a canon whose constellations of inside/outside, home/exile are diametrically opposed to the constellations Kenner posits for international modernism. Writers like Goldberg, who refused to fully participate in the construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation, were gradually rendered minor. In a modernist movement that celebrated Jewish nationalism, the "cosmopolitan," exilic, anationalist constructions of "elsewhereness" were construed as violations of social and poetic codes.
Chapter 12
Fag-Hags and Bu-Jews
Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vicarious Identity
Naomi Seidman
The question of how Jews as a group fit into American multiculturalism is a vexed enough one. But Jews participate in the multiculture not only as Jews, that is, not only from within a group identity or politics. Jewish academics and activists have stood on various multicultural fronts by virtue of their commitment to progressive causes, but they have done so more commonly as feminists, as historians and critics, as leftists than as Jews. For these Jewish participants, multiculturalism has created its own set of complications: multicultural practice invites the proud articulation of ethnic or racial identity, but it does so as part of the political program of increasing the visibility of minorities and struggling to reverse discrimination. Not so long ago Jews might still have comfortably marched under the double banner of multiculturalism—the celebration of diversity and the struggle for group self-determination. But given the implicit link between these two agendas, on the one hand, and the horrors of modern history, on the other, Jewish insistence on representation in the multiculture is inevitably interpreted as a bid for the status of victim. Many progressive Jews who might be attracted to the invitation to identify their "subject position" are nevertheless reluctant to do so for fear of appearing to make a claim that, given American Jewish success, might well seem like special pleading.
The traces of this dilemma are everywhere, but they are particularly close to the surface in feminism and gender studies, where strong multicultural currents and the ubiquity of Jewish participants often combine to uncomfortable effect. The peculiarities of the dilemma I have outlined,
with its contradictory demands to articulate and keep silent, require a reading of the footnotes and parentheses of recent texts. Thus, in Bodies That Matters , for instance, Judith Butler takes issue with bell hooks' critique of the documentary filmmaker Jenny Livingston (Paris Is Burning ) as a woman who "does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness 'represents' blackness."[1]
bell hooks, "Is Paris Burning?" Z, June 1991, p. 61. Quoted in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge Press, 1993), 133-134.
Butler insists on adding a qualification to hooks' description of the filmmaker as white: "Livingston is a white lesbian (in other contexts called 'a Jewish lesbian from Yale,' an interpellation which also implicates this author [Butler] in its sweep)."[2]Butler, Bodies That Matter, 133.
Butler challenges hooks' critique of Livingston by arguing that the filmmaker, as a lesbian, "maintains some kind of identificatory bond with the gay men in [Paris Is Burning ]"; but Livingston's Jewishness plays no part in qualifying her whiteness, except in a parentheses that is never expanded into an argument. The form of this qualification, the parentheses, is crucial here. Butler strikes the precise note she needs, one that will assert a shade of difference in the characterization of Livingston—and herself—as white, but without making an overt political claim for the significance of that difference; in contrast, she does argue for the significance of Livingston's "lesbian gaze." If anything, the additional attribution "from Yale" suggests that however Jewishness may complicate one's identity, this complication is not one that involves exclusion from the Ivy League. Jewishness, then, only parenthetically qualifies whiteness.Just such a scene of ambivalent avowal of Jewishness occurs in a passage by the feminist critic Nancy Miller. Acknowledging the political pressure to situate herself within her own work and more specifically to "fracture the simplified profile of straight white woman," Miller records her desire to place herself in a work she was writing "as a Jew."[3]
Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), 95. Quoted in Laura Levitt, "Rethinking Jewish Feminist Identity/ies: What Difference Can Feminist Theory Make," in Interpreting Judaism in a Post-modern Age, edited by Steven Kepnes (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 368.
The attempt fails, Miller confesses, because "I have not found a way to assume that rhetoric of identity (although I am both, I cannot lay claim to 'Jewish feminist'): it is not a ground of action for me in the world, nor the guarantee of my politics—my writing."[4]Miller, Getting Personal, 97, in Levitt, "Rethinking Jewish Feminist Identity/ies," 369.
What is striking about Miller's parenthetical (dis)avowal is her sense that however strongly she theoretically supports the grounding of discourse in a specific and contingent "subject position," saying that she is who she says she is cannot in good faith be counted as such a grounding. Jewish feminist identity, that is, either does not have or has lost the power of "fracturing the simplified profile of straight white woman," and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. Laura Levitt, in a critique of Miller's position, rightly charges Miller with "making 'Jewish feminist' into a single absolute term" and argues that Miller "does not allow for instability" or "contradictions within theseidentities," since she first reifies and then rejects what Jewish feminism might mean.[5]
Levitt, "Rethinking Jewish Feminist Identity/ies," 370.
What this analysis fails to take into account, though, is that Miller is utterly uninterested in constructing a postmodern, multicultural definition of Jewishness or Jewish feminism. It is precisely her rejection of these categories as meaningful which would have to be included in any definition of Jewish feminist that could conceivably encompass Miller's position. And that is a more difficult proposition.We do not have a vocabulary to describe the Jewishness of Butler, Miller, or (in an example I will discuss later in this piece) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Yet it seems to me that there is something about their similar positions in the multiculture that is particularly Jewish, not only in the passages where they discuss their Jewishness but even—perhaps especially—in their reluctance to do so. By its nature, a stance like Miller's evades categorization as Jewish; it is not illuminated by such concepts as "hyphenated" identity. The Jewish claim in the passages I quoted above occurs only parenthetically or under erasure, as it were. It is nevertheless true that Miller's stance can, paradoxically, be described as Jewish, exposing its "Jewishness" not only in the repudiation of Jewish particularism but also in the adoption and championing of another marginality. For each of the writers I analyze here is known as a theorist of some other "difference" than the Jewish one. Miller writes about third world women's literature, Judith Butler has analyzed the subversive potential of drag, and Sedgwick's most powerful work focuses on homosexual men. It is no accident that a film like the recent Zebrahead (1992) portrays a Jewish adolescent in the role of would-be African American or that Woody Allen's Zelig (1983) wryly describes its protagonist as a Jewish man who "is able to transform himself into a Negro or an Indian." Just as important to multiculturalism as spokespersons for Jewish identity, it seems to me, is this subterranean tradition of Zeligs and Zebraheads, parenthetical Jews and identifiers with an "other" identity.
It may be perverse to claim as Jewish a stance distinguished precisely by its reluctance to make this claim for itself. If I do so, it is first of all on historical rather than polemical or apologetic grounds. The prevalence of Jewish participation in "other" political struggles has been explained through the discourse of pathology as false-consciousness or assimilation; it has been defended through the apologetic discourse of Jewish altruism and sympathy for the underdog. I prefer to trace the route by which Jews have started down what would seem to be such a difficult road. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that however oblique or opaque the desires that drive vicarious identifications may seem, they are no less operative
for that. My analysis here is an attempt to locate what I see as a budding but hidden tradition of Jewish vicarious identification and render its submerged desires transparent. As I see it, the parenthetical Jews I discuss in this essay are as logical and coherent an expression of contemporary Jewish identity—given both Jewish history and the demands of American multiculturalism—as more straightforwardly identified Jews.
If indeed one can point to the coherence of a Jewish politics of the vicarious, this coherence is a sign of both the persistence and the dialectical transformation of what Hannah Arendt and Isaac Deutscher identified as a "hidden tradition" of secular Jewish experience. In her 1944 essay "The Jew as Pariah," Arendt traced the importance of Jewish thinkers in a number of fields to the status of the Jews as a "pariah people" who, like poets and revolutionaries, could never be quite at home in the world. For the Jews of Germany in particular, the promise of equality held out by emancipation turned out to be both treacherous and ambiguous; but the very conditions that kept Jews from growing comfortable in the majority culture also granted them a critical perspective closed to those inside it. The "pariah Jew," who had abandoned Jewish practice or community and was marginalized in the majority culture, revolutionized disparate cultural arenas; nevertheless, Arendt wrote, connections could be drawn between these isolated figures over time, since "for over a hundred years the same basic conditions have obtained and evoked the same basic reaction."[6]
Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition," in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (1944; New York: Grove Press, 1978, 68).
For Arendt, Jews had no choice about their outsider status; the only options for Jews were to become social-climbing parvenus—submerging their Jewishness (whatever that happened to be) in exchange for the hollow promise of social acceptance—or conscious pariahs, participants in a proud, subterranean form of modern Jewish experience.In his famous essay of 1958 Isaac Deutscher described and championed a similar modern phenomenon in "the non-Jewish Jew," a Jew who had no particular ties to the Jewish community or religion, no Jewish "consciousness," even, but who could be nonetheless identified as a distinct product of Jewish history, as a Jewish "type." Deutscher distanced himself from the racialism of nationalists, as had Arendt before him. What was important in creating this kind of Jew wasn't the content of Judaism or racial characteristics but the position of Jews outside their own religion, on the one hand, and on the sidelines of various European cultures, on the other. Living on the margins of Christian society, Deutscher argued, granted Jews an epistemological advantage, the ability to view systems of belief with a skepticism history had made a Jewish characteristic. Thus, a marginal Jew like Marx "rose above German philosophy, French socialism,
and English political economy; he absorbed what was best in each of these trends and transcended the limitations of each." Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud had in common "that the very conditions in which they lived and worked did not allow them to reconcile themselves to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited and induced them to strive for a universal Weltanschauung ."[7]
Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew," in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1958; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, 30).
Arendt and Deutscher drew different conclusions from examining much the same material. For Arendt, the utter failure of German-Jewish coexistence pointed in the direction of (a far from mainstream) Zionism, since it was Jewish "worldlessness" that had rendered their position so precarious.[9]
Arendt's argument is developed in her section on anti-Semitism, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951).
Deutscher felt otherwise: Since it was the Jewish position outside what was "nationally or religiously limited" which had created the conditions for the radical universalism of the non-Jewish Jew, Deutscher lamented the Jewish embrace of the nation-state in his own time, just when this form of political organization had begun to decline. Deutscher ends his essay with the rousing hope that Jews will "ultimately become aware—or regain the awareness—of the inadequacy of the nation state and find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who have gone beyond Jewry has left us—the message of universal human emancipation."[8]Ibid., 41.
Deutscher, of course, turned out to be hugely wrong. The ringing universalist note on which Deutscher ends dates his essay unmistakably. Things have gone, for Jews among others, in the direction of the particularism Jews were supposed to be especially brilliant at abandoning. Even Deutscher's Zionist critique is rarely echoed precisely in his terms: the leftist problem with the Jewish "nation-state" is not that Jews ought to be citizens of the world rather than citizens of the Middle East but rather that this case of Jewish particularism happens to have intruded on prior claims whose particularism no "non-Jewish Jew" would dream of deprecating. So what would Deutscher make of the Jews beyond Jewishness who populate the multiculture? Where do these Jewish energies go, when progressive thought walks under the banner of cultural diversity? Back to a Jewish particularism now invested with the postmodern glamour of ethnic identity? Well, yes, for some Jews, though even that return is complicated by a contemporary self-consciousness and a politics of comparison, one effect of the historical Jewish embrace of the universalist position. What lies beyond Deutscher's non-Jewish Jew, however, is just as likely to be a multicultural particularism refracted through the traditional Jewish universalist prism (if traditional can be applied to the belated construct Deutscher describes) to land elsewhere, as it were. Thus, what I
call a Jewish politics of vicarious identity emerged from conditions as basically Jewish as those Arendt unearths for the conscious pariah.
The dissolution of a politics of universalism in which Jews could participate was complicated by the fact that this universalism was, from one point of view, an expanded form of Jewish particularism. It has often been noted that Jews were more passionately committed to the Enlightenment than any other group because they had the most to gain from the adoption of its principles of tolerance. As the sociologist Gordon Lafer remarks, Jewish universalist credos gained the dominance they did because, for periods preceding our own, they lived in easy harmony with Jewish particularist interests. Thus, "while Jews were commonly excluded from educational and social organizations, efforts to advance their own career opportunities meshed seamlessly with the more general struggle for the triumph of meritocracy over chauvinism; and later, when Jews were victims of Nazism, the struggle against fascist anti-Semitism could easily be understood as part of the larger struggle against all assertions of national superiority."[10]
Gordon Lafer, "Universalism and Particularism in Jewish Law: Making Sense of Political Loyalties," in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 180.
The tradition of Jewish universalism was then threatened in two directions: by the unraveling of what Lafer calls the "easy marriage between liberal universalism and Jewish particularism" which followed on the Jewish rise out of the working class, and by the more general dissolution of liberal universalist institutions. By this logic, then, American Jews were invited to pursue a particularist politics at precisely the period of Jewish entry into the mainstream, the moment, that is, when Jewish particularism could no longer be confused with a wider ethical commitment.It would be wrong, then, to see Jews who participate in such numbers in non-Jewish particularist struggles as direct heirs of Arendt's and Deutscher's subterranean Jewish tradition. When American Jewish scholars speak of Jewish marginality, as often as not they are borrowing from Europe and the European past. (Thus, a scholar of French Jewry like Elaine Marks sets out her own "subject position" by speaking of "the belonging sickness" she and others "seem to share with Jacques Derrida.")[11]
Elaine Marks, The Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 151.
The American-Jewish position cannot be easily explained, however, by recourse to models set up in very different European contexts. Jews, in Arendt's and Deutscher's essays, are the privileged models for marginality; thus, Jewish experience is a metonym for both oppression and revolution which is easily carried into more general struggles. For American Jews, this entire cultural perception has both receded in historical immediacy and solidified into a banal rhetoric of ethnic pride; the spread of this Jewish self-definition, that is, has roughly coincided with its obsolescence. In contemporary American-Jewish culture Arendt's "hidden tradition" has notso much ended as become (as has been said of modernism) both dominant and dead. And as this hidden tradition increasingly becomes an open secret, its dialectical continuation is driven further underground. There are many routes out of this dissonance, but one of them has certainly been to retain in some form the legacy of Jewish marginality while seeking its "truer" expression in particularist, non-Jewish models. The price has been, for some, the awkwardness of championing particularisms while avoiding one's own, or, alternatively, to feel one's self-identification as a Jew as somehow in bad faith.
However untidily American-Jewish experience fits the multicultural paradigm, the problematics of Jewish participation is at the very heart of its development. If the founding moment of American multiculturalism is in the shift from the liberalism of the civil rights movement to the identity politics of Black Power in the mid- to late 1960s, then multiculturalism, from the beginning, signaled the expulsion of Jews from a comfortable home on the left. More than that, African American experience, as Michael Rogin points out, indirectly provided both the Jewish blackface vaudevillian and the civil rights worker with a path toward integration, a way to be white in a society where African Americans, not Jews, were the dominant Other.[12]
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
No wonder multiculturalism and the Jews has so often turned out to be a traumatic conjunction. For the Jews, particularism began not in a return to ethnic celebration but in a radical dislocation of what had become a not-so-hidden tradition of Jewish universalist secularism. The Jewish civil rights worker, after the expulsion of whites from the movement, has been an ambivalent and overdetermined figure, a figure made superfluous in the first surge of black nationalism and whose reincarnation has haunted the political scene since then. The Jewish pariah, in the multiculture, leads a shadowy political existence untouched by a rhetoric of pride. What distinguishes the Jew in the multiculture from Deutscher's Jewish universalist is an unstable translatability run amok. Where "the [Jewish] jazz singer Americanized himself through blackface,"[13]Ibid., 147.
the Jewish would-be participant secures herself/himself a place in the multiculture through a different kind of blackface, lifting a marginality wholesale from elsewhere and making it serve other (and Other) interests.To compound the Jewish/multicultural problem, what prevented the widespread Jewish adoption of Jewish ethnic particularism was, in a way, Jewishness itself, in the form of the tradition of universalism that came closest to articulating modern Jewish hopes and pride. Rodger Kamenetz, in trying to account for the prevalence of American Jews in Western Buddhist
circles, has suggested a similar etiology for Jewish rejection of Jewish practice. Kamenetz addresses the tendency of secular Jews to be more open to other religions than their own, acknowledging that "the Hasidim represented everything [Allen] Ginsberg's family had run screaming from for two generations."[14]
Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 241.
But Kamenetz's most powerful insight is his recognition that the rejection of one kind of Jewish tradition is also, from another perspective, another kind of Jewish tradition: "I began to suspect that Jewish identity, as it has evolved in the West today, could be a real barrier to encountering the depths of Judaism. In other words, being Jewish could keep you from being a Jew."[15]Ibid., 156.
Kamenetz's analysis is directed to secular Jewish interest in non-Jewish religious traditions, but the same could be said for the rejection of the politics of Jewish particularism by a certain portion of this group. In the absence of a particularist Jewish political affiliation that could also satisfy the progressive universalist agenda with which Jewish politics has been historically linked, adopting the particularist position of another group paradoxically becomes a distinctively Jewish act.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1990 Epistemology of the Closet is the most revealing text I have found on the phenomenon I am tracing here. Sedgwick's classic work of queer theory focuses not so much on the political contexts and consequences of homosexual self-disclosure—though these are always at hand—as on the play of knowledge and identity across the charged borders of the "coming-out" scene. Gay coming out, for Sedgwick, is primarily an epistemological drama, in which all participants are necessarily implicated and which threatens all identities in a heterosexist culture. It is important for Sedgwick to argue that she is speaking specifically of the gay dramas of self-disclosure; other such scenes leave the identities of the participants intact. The book begins with Sedgwick's attempt to contain the discursive spread of the model of the closet to other forms of self-concealment/disclosure—for which Jewish identity rapidly becomes the privileged example. Sedgwick enlists Racine's reworking of the Esther story (which plays an important part in her discussion of Proust, the subject of her final chapter) as a counterexample of the gay closet, although she acknowledges that it is only a particular, and literary, construction of the Jewish coming-out narrative.
The telling moment comes at the very end of Sedwick's analysis of how gay and Jewish identities differ, an analysis that includes the claim that there is no uncertainty in either Esther's or Ahasuerus' identities to complicate the matter of disclosure. Ahasuerus will not wonder whether he too is really a Jew, while Esther, as Sedgwick argues, "knows who her people are." Unlike gay people, "Esther has intact and to hand the identity
and history and commitments she was brought up in."[16]
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 72.
It is only at the end of her argument that Sedgwick extends her claims beyond the Racinian view of the Bible to that of contemporary Jewish culture and her own Jewish origins. The last point of comparison Sedgwick draws between Jewish and gay identity is that "Esther's avowal occurs within and perpetuates a coherent system of gender subordination." The passage, with the crucial parenthetical closet (by contrast, gay identity is not parenthetical), is worth citing in its entirety:Esther the Jew is introduced onto this scene [of Vashti's gender insubordination] as a salvific ideal of female submissiveness, her single moment of risk with the king given point by her customary pliancy. (Even today, Jewish little girls are educated in gender roles—fondness for being looked at, fearlessness in defense of "their people," non-solidarity with their sex—through masquerading as Queen Esther at Purim; I have a snapshot of myself at about five, barefoot in the pretty "Queen Esther" dress my grandmother made [white satin, gold spangles], making a careful eyes-down toe-pointed curtsey at [presumably] my father, who is manifest in the picture only as the flashgun that hurls my shadow, pillaring up tall and black, over the dwarfed sofa onto the wall behind me.) … If the story of Esther reflects a firm Jewish choice of a minority politics based on a conservative reinscription of gender roles, however, such a choice has never been able to be made intelligibly by gay people in a modern culture (although there have been repeated attempts at making it, especially by men). Instead, both within and outside of homosexual-rights movements, the contradictory understandings of same-sex bondings and desire and of male and female gay identity have crossed and recrossed the definitional lines of gender identity with such disruptive frequency that the concepts "minority" and "gender" themselves have lost a good deal of their categorizing (although certainly not of their performative) force.[17]
Ibid., 82.
As a coming-out scene, this is remarkably complex and fiercely beautiful. It appears as the very last of the catalog of ways in which Jewish identity is not as radical or disruptive as gay identity. The catalog, we should recall, begins by positing Jewish identity as one in a list of other ethnic and other identities potentially comparable to gay identities; by the end of the argument, however, Jewish identity has become the sole point of comparison. Thus, while only the coming-out scene in the passage I quoted is actually in parentheses, the entire progression of the argument contributes to what could be called the parenthetizing of Jewish identity, first as one among other possible substitutions for gay experience, then as an inaccurate analogy to gay experience, and finally, as (incidentally) something very close to the opposite of gay experience. Putting Jewish identity in parentheses, then, is apparently very important business.
Making her Jewish identity parenthetical thus has implications for Sedgwick's subject position not only as Jew but also as theorist of homosexual culture. It is this aspect of her work that the "Jewish choice of a minority politics based on a conservative reinscription of gender roles" both threatens and opposes. In Sedgwick's reading of Esther's relation with the Persian king, Jewish identity reveals itself as the political counterweight to feminist and gay identity. Esther's avowal of her Jewishness never disrupts her status as pliant wife to Ahasuerus and faithful cousin to Mordechai. Sedgwick's coming out as a (Jew) neatly reverses Esther's: while Esther's coming out as a Jew leaves both the gender and ethnic order intact, Sedgwick's presentation and disavowal of her own image as a nice Jewish girl turn niceness, Jewishness, and girlishness into transparently fictional theater.
Ethnicity, then, can also be a kind of drag, an inversion that says "appearance is an illusion."[18]
Esther Newton, "Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America," as quoted in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), 137.
But if that is true, then Sedgwick's own performance of a Jew pretending to be a Jew gives the lie to the solidity of Jewish identity. As Judith Butler describes it, "[Drag] reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency ."[19]Butler, Gender Trouble, 137. Emphasis in the original.
If Eve in the guise of Queen Esther is in drag, masquerading in a dress sewn for her by her grandmother, hamming it up with a curtsey, her image preserved only in a half-reliable vortex of memory and aggressive technology, then so is Queen Esther, in all of her various manifestations. Extrapolating from Butler's theorem that "gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy" leads to only one possible conclusion: both Eve-Esther and Queen Esther are simulacra, (Jewish) drag queens. The parentheses that communicate that Jewishness can sometimes be inessential do not separate Eve's ethnic identity from Esther's to the extent that Sedgwick seems to think: what else is Esther's avowal than a carefully crafted performance, in the Bible, in Racine, and in Sedgwick's own representation? It's no coincidence, after all, that Purim is the holiday in which both gender and ethnic roles are subjected to parodic subversion and revelers are enjoined to drink until they can no longer tell the difference between the villain Haman and Mordechai the Jew.Something of this blurriness appears already in the semidisclosure that is the name of the author of Epistemology of the Closet . Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick invites the traditional guessing game of Jew/not-Jew, in which the American "non-Jewish Jew" is the prototypical subject. Kosofsky Sedgwick
might signify a Jewish name, either her own or, more old-fashionedly, her mother's, covered and legally superseded by one with a Mayflower stamp—the absent e after the g looks particularly British to my eye. If the name doesn't come from the man who wielded the Jewish "flashgun," then it must belong to a presumably non-Jewish husband. How does this man, whose non-Jewish name leaves a larger patriarchal shadow than her father's does, fit into her story of repudiating a heterosexist ethnic affiliation in the name of the higher identifications of feminism and homosexuality? Does Sedgwick's signature strengthen or weaken the connection between her and Ahasuerus's wife? I don't pose these questions to find out their answers, but rather to point out that there is a double tension in this coming-out scene: Sedgwick simultaneously does and does not come out as Jewish and, less explicitly, she almost but doesn't quite come out as not-heterosexual. Whatever else you can say about this scene, it hardly involves a simple, "non-disruptive" identity.
Sedgwick's parenthetical and ambivalent Jewish self-presentation is itself the strongest argument against the stability of Jewish identity and the relative straightforwardness of the Jewish coming-out scene. To make such an argument, though, is to risk trivializing the gay closet by falling into the trap Sedgwick is trying to avoid: making Jewish experience the model for all marginality. My intention in shifting the focus of Sedgwick's discussion from the gay closet to her Jewish self-disclosure is not to insist that, despite Sedgwick's argument, Jewish identity is as painful, as meaningful, as difficult as gay identity. The parenthesis is not a closet, and Sedgwick's parenthetical disclosure is intended to register precisely that point. My interest in highlighting Sedgwick's affirmation-by-negation is not to claim, where she does not, that her Jewish identity is important or coherent in some way she is unwilling to acknowledge. The extent of my ambition here is to register the pattern and subtlety of such a parenthetical Jewish identity alongside that of Nancy K. Miller's parenthetical refusal to claim the status of "Jewish feminist" and to read this grammar within the "hidden tradition" of postmodern (Jewish) identity. To remove the parentheses, to insist unequivocally on the Jewishness of such a position as Sedgwick's, is to be deaf to the political desire that motivates and shapes it.
There is one other moment in Epistemology of the Closet when Sedgwick speaks of these desires and how they contribute to her work in gay theory. Describing herself as a woman and, "in some regimes, a Jew," Sedgwick meditates on how this multiple identity contributes to her "ability to keep generating ideas about 'the closet'": "May it not be influenced by the fact that my own relation, as a woman, to gay male discourse and
gay men echoes most with the pre-Stonewall gay self-definition of (say) the 1950s?—something, that is, whose names, where they exist at all, are still so exotically coarse and demeaning as to challenge recognition, never mind acknowledgment, leaving, in the stigma-impregnated space of refused recognition, sometimes also a stimulating ether of the unnamed, the lived experiment."[20]
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 63.
This is as close as Sedgwick comes to articulating her "subject position" as heterosexual woman who is also a pioneering queer theorist. Her affinity for the close then derives from her operating from within a still unbreached "stigma-impregnated space of refused recognition." It would be useful to set these two moments of self-disclosure together: the one an identification of who one is "by birth and history" through a mechanism of disavowal, the other a confession that one has impossibly, unreciprocally embraced the desire of the Other. Sedgwick is right then. It is not the Jew who resembles the homosexual. The figures who turn out to be the most similar, at least in her own oblique self-disclosures, are the (Jew) and the fag-hag, the heterosexual woman who loves gay men. If the parenthetical Jew and the heterosexual queer theorist—and it's no accident that they should be one and the same—are connected by an impulse to vacate what would necessarily be a conservative politics of self-interest, the radical movements they join are not so radical that they can embrace this move. The culture that easily champions hybridity and marginality still wraps the (Jewish) fag-hag in the stigma of arrested desire and incoherent identity.Among the range of homophobic insults, we might note, "fag-hag" has been particularly resistant to reclamation. Cassell's Queer Companion , for instance, defines "faggot" as a "slang term for a gay man. Originally pejorative, the word has been adopted by gay men to describe themselves"; the entry for "fag hag" is far more tentative and ambivalent: "Slang term for a heterosexual woman who spends the majority of her time with gay men. Used pejoratively, the term can indicate the misogyny that exists within gay male communities, and the mistrust of women's motives in wanting to socialize with gay men. However, the term can show the understanding that can exist between gay men and straight women."[21]
William Stuart, Cassell's Queer Companion (New York: Cassell Press, 1995), 58.
There is still almost no context in which "fag-hag" is not a dirty word, code for a figure who provokes both derision and pity. It isn't immediately clear why this should be, given the unpredictable friendships and alliances recorded in the stereotype. Yet "fag-hag" names no emancipatory movement, no transcendence of stigma or pathology. Even the diagnoses of her condition fail to reach intelligibility: the fag-hag is both masochist and narcissist, parasite and self-hater. The fag-hag is a category
mistake, a structural deviation. What resists the incorporation of the fag-hag in a liberatory political discourse is, from this point of view, the ambiguity of her position. In a queer culture that unites sexual realization with political liberation, the woman whose sexual satisfaction seems at odds with her social investments opens herself to the contradictory diagnoses and rehabilitative interventions. Within the cult of identity, it is the fag-hag's love that dare not speak its name.
It is the position of the fag-hag in queer culture, I would argue, that is the best analog to a certain characteristically Jewish position in the multiculture, although I can think of no comparable insult that would encode the absurdity and impropriety of this Jewish stance. In a culture that equates the battle for representation and rights with political progressivism, the Jew who resists a straightforward identity politics in exchange for participation in the struggle of "someone else" opens herself up to the charges of assimilationism, self-hatred, and parasitism. The very absence of any apparent ethnic self-interest becomes cause for suspicion, revealing itself as the symptom of an apparently Jewish pathology. In an environment that celebrates marginality, the Jewish politics of the vicarious is a marginal position that has yet to find its champion.
Yet if the drag-queen is the subversive who demystifies the "natural" coherence of sex, gender, and sexual orientation, the fag-hag is the marginal figure who demystifies the equally naturalist assumptions of contemporary queer culture: that social investments will embody sexual orientation, that sexual orientation is predictive of political affiliation, and that all of these can find a unified mode of satisfaction. The drag-queen thus primarily threatens gender conservatives; the fag-hag threatens both the gender order and the emancipatory vision of its overthrow. If I am right that Jews like Miller and Sedgwick are the fag-hags of the multiculture, then their unintelligible identity politics throws the multicultural vision into anxious question.
It is no accident, then, that the founding queer theorist is (not really) Jewish (and not really gay). Like Al Jolson, who put on blackface to sing to his Jewish mother, the Jew beyond even the non-Jewish Jew requires and solicits other faces in order to see her own. If Jacques Lacan is right, the self is always grasped externally, through the mirror of the Other. The time is past when we could confidently grade the authenticity and depth of a Jewish identity, as if ethnicity were not always constituted within the laws of performance and intelligibility. There is no Jewishness that avoids the logic of specularity, that has found a "natural" unity of past and present, politics and identity. But such unity is always an illusion. If we are to
imagine a progressive politics capable of exceeding the limitations of a reifying multiculturalism, this identity-that-is-not-one may be a good place to start.
I do not mean to suggest that Jewish advocacy for non-Jewish causes is necessarily radical in itself. Michael Rogin's analysis of Jewish participation in civil rights culture as, to some degree, a continuation of immigrant Jewish blackface should warn us of the deeply conservative potential of soliciting other faces in order to see your own. Political and ethnic drag is a luxury unavailable to all ethnicities in America, we should remember; blackface was the very tool, in Rogin's argument, by which Jews transformed themselves into white Americans.[22]
Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 73-112.
The Jewish adoption of marginal identities in an attempt to participate in the multiculture is not in the final analysis different enough from the jazz singer's blackface. There is something, even for unaffiliated Jews, in multiculturalism's demand for the identification of one's position as a subject; tactfully bracketing one's Jewish identity in the presence of "real" marginality can lead, as it does in Sedgwick, to an unconsciousness of how even this bracketed Jewishness shapes who we are.But there is no easy way out of Jewish political drag either. The straight road of Jewish self-identification in the multiculture is only apparently so. Without coalition partners with similar goals, without a sense that one's particularist struggle contributes significantly to a greater American good, Jewish group participation in the multiculture becomes itself a form of charade, a mimicking of other, probably more crucial American struggles. jews may be postmodern models of fractured identities, demystifying the apparent unities of self and politics, social position, and political desire. But multiculturalism has more pressing interests than the demystification of identity. In either case then, whether as (Jews) or as Jews, we are at best only stepchildren of the multiculture. But that will have to be enough.