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Imagining Jewishness |
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 by Monica Osborne, May 21, 2007 |
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In his review of Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases, William Deresiewicz says of the state of American Judaism:
My own experience tells me that American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity. To the usual self-contempt of the liberal middle class is added the feeling that genuine Jewish life is always elsewhere: in Israel or the shtetl, among the immigrant generation or the ultra-Orthodox. Jewish culture as lived by the non-Orthodox tends to feel bland and thin even to its practitioners--the last, worn coins of a princely inheritance. (To those who have fled Orthodox backgrounds, like Englander and myself, that very different milieu tends to feel, for all its traditionalism, spiritually dead.) The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.
These comments come in the context of Deresiewicz's remarks on the state of Jewish American literature, namely that the work of newer, younger Jewish American writers has little to do with Jewish experience. Or, if it does explore Jewishness in some form, it is someone else's Jewishness, so to speak.
The seeming omission of Jewish authenticity from the work of these contemporary writers, Deresiewicz seems to suggest, is a casualty of Jews' successful assimilation into mainstream American culture. Jews and Jewishness are no longer exotic enough to warrant writing from one's own personal and cultural experience. And so we have this phenomenon of Jewish writers reaching back into the experiences of their grandparents or others to whom they are not even related -- searching for a use-able past because the present is . . . not useful? 
Wake Me Up: The Jewish American Novel
The question, however, is whether this is actually a problem -- do such novels betray a loss of Jewish identity or experience as a result of assimilation? Or, through efforts to access Jewish culture and heritage through the eyes of others, do they demonstrate that Jewishness is not lost in assimilation? Of Chabon's novel Deresiewicz writes:
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is about no Jews who have ever lived, but it is one of the best novels in English about what it means to be a Jew, and how it feels.
But,
the book is so good not despite taking place in an imaginary world but because of it. Chabon has gotten into trouble before when he's tried to re-create a historical situation he hasn't experienced himself. Kavalier & Clay, which lists more than forty consulted sources in its "author's note," never succeeds in making its world seem more than secondhand. This is obviously a minority view--the book was a huge bestseller--but never for one minute did I believe its characters were fully real. The materials may all have been there, painstakingly assembled, but as with the golem who appears in its pages, the magic formula was missing that would quicken them to life.
Deresiewicz is not impressed with Englander's writing at all, though he finds numerous strengths in his new novel -- the problem is that, for Deresiewicz, there is nothing particularly "Jewish" about the novel.
I half wonder why Englander felt the need to make his characters Jewish at all, especially since, given their estrangement from both the Jewish community and Jewish tradition, there's so very little that's Jewish about them. As for Chabon, it is telling that the rich complexity of Jewish meanings he manages to develop in an invented Jewish Alaska he has not thus far shown any faith in being able to locate in contemporary Jewish America. His novel is a stunning act of imagination, but it underscores all too clearly the extent to which American Jewish experience, insofar as it possesses the kind of density necessary for it to function as a substrate for fiction, is receding, precisely, into the realm of the imaginary.
This is frighteningly bleak. But while Deresiewicz has written an amazing review essay, in his mention of numerous contemporary Jewish writers he omits authors like Pearl Abraham, Allegra Goodman, and others who do in fact write specifically about the Jewish experience, from their own experience.
I don't think Deresiewicz's gloomy predictions about the state of Jewish American literature are wrong (though they do scream Irving Howe, who, in 1976, falsely predicted the impending death of Jewish American literature) -- but if there are fewer Jewish writers penning about their own Jewish experiences, there are now also far fewer scholars and professors who are working and writing in the field of Jewish American literature.
It feels like a dying discipline, which also does not bode well for the future of Jewish American literature -- if there are no critics to critique, and overall there are far fewer people who actually read books, the future of literature by American Jews is little more than, as Deresiewicz suggests, a golem that will never be awakened to life.
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Monica is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature at UCLA, where she has taught Jewish American Fiction and a course on the ethics of Holocaust representation. She has written for Studies in American Jewish Literature, Tikkun, |
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Anonymous
can we please please not spend our precious collective energy wringing our hands at the impending death of [insert jewish concern here]? it's such a waste. no, of course jewish lit today isnt the exact same stuff as it was ten, twenty, forty, sixty, a hundred years ago. but nor should it be. Deresiewicz piece really blows. i swear, it sometimes seems that the "Bemoan Waning _____ Among American Jews" writing is a genre unto itself.
--daniel b
Anonymous
Thanks for blogging about this...I missed it and I'm glad to see it.
I do think Deresiewicz's view is bleak, and I can understand the previous commentor's reticence to discuss the next predicted demise of the Jews, but there is something very true, and not too depressing, in his overall statement.
There is a tendency among those who present the Jewish community to the larger world to stress every type of Jew except their own. We look to Israelis, Ethiopians, Russian Immigrants, Holocaust survivors and others as the signatures of our people, without showing any real interest in reflecting the largest, most influential group of Jews in the world: middle class, suburban, ashkenazi, reform or conservative Americans.*
There is no problem with acknowledging Jewish diversity, but I think American Jews some times lean towards diversity because we are, as Deresiewicz suggests, bored with themselves.
Power, wealth and comfort are not interesting, but Art and History demand a focus on who we Jews really are…imagine if the Jews of 19th c. Berlin, Hamburg and other elite, established, relatively integrated and comfortable German Jews found themselves too dull to bother reflecting and documenting?
Basically, for every exotic Ethiopian or Brazilian Jew, we should include the typical, banal American Jew as a vibrant and key part of the community.
*I know there are a few more Jews in Israel than the US, but it is also far more diverse that the US community, so above group is the biggest chunk of Jews in the world.
Elisa
there's a great chris rock bit (redundant, i know) about how there's no such thing as "the african american experience". to paraphrase: "if i go live in alaska and run sled dogs and live in an igloo, that's an african american experience, because i am an african american!"
the same goes for any notion of "the jewish american experience", i think, as it implies a singular experience, one way of existing in America as a Jew in the twenty-first century. which is a weird, unhappy, bigoted fantasy. arguably.
"the jewish novel", as it has been known, is quite certainly a dying animal (unintentional roth allusion!), because "the jewish experience" no longer exists (if it ever did). this does not mean, however, that there are not wonderful books being written by jews, about jewish issues. and by non-jews about jewish issues. and by jews about non-jewish issues. there is "a jewish experience" on display left and right in literature right now. and not a single one is "the jewish experience."
to ignore that is to focus on a very narrow sample of work, and, not at all incidentally, to be a poor reader of fiction, which should never strive to present answers; only ask questions.
Deresiewicz seems to tip his cards somewhat in his acknowledgment that in life-after-Orthodoxy, nothing's really "jewish"...
Anonymous
The Jewish novel is a dying animal not because the Jewish experience is disappearing, but because the novel is dying as a form. Novels work well in societies that have few media. They are a quaint literary anachronism: we have too many varied types of media, too little time, and lack the attention spans necessary to engage novels as a literary form.
Elisa
people said photography was the death of painting. people said movies were the death of photography. people said television was the death of film. people say a lot of things. different art media simply change to reflect changing society/culture, and very rarely does that happen in predictable ways.
at the radcliffe publishing course in the summer of 2000, all the publishing folk were a-twitter with the end of books as we know them and were convinced, en masse, that e-books would, shortly, take over the world. i have yet to see someone on a beach or curled up in bed with an e-book.
literacy, i hope we can all agree, is valuable in general. and as long as we can read, there will be long-form written stories (aka novels) telling us about how we live and who we are.
p.s. if you scratch the cool, calculated surface of every critic who sounds the novel's death knell, you will very often find an aspiring novelist.
portnoy
I'm not saying the novel is dead, but that it's dying, dying much in the same way that, let's say, opera has been dying for the last 75 or so years. It's long drawn out and, if you like it, you don't really notice it's happening.
I hope you're not accusing me of being an aspiring novelist. I'm very post-literate.
Elisa
this is a long, drawn out way of saying, basically, that you're not a fan of opera.
portnoy
In fact, I do like opera. I even like some novels. But a quality short story beats the pants off a novel every time.
Elisa
that's what i like to hear!
Anonymous
I must say that to simply assert that there are so many ways of being Jewish is such a cliche. Yes, there are so many ways, but wouldn't they include Jewish expereinces? What is a Jewish experience? It's not a trick question; to be sure, it should be obvious. The fact of the matter is that Jewish experience is becoming less and less pronounced in novels, short stories and film. Yes, several scholars bemoan this, and rightfully so. We must not forget that Jewish literature is based on Jewish culture and Jewish experience. If the former and latter become indistinguishable from American culture, then Jewish literature goes out the window. Face the facts, being Jewish can not live on ironic or smatterings of Jewishness in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Meet the Fokkers and so on. The anti-essentialist, I'm Jewish and different is beginning to wear thin. Yes there are many expressions of Jewishness, and I don't think there should be a monolithic expression of it. But Judaism has yet to express Jewishness with a real diifference. Hebe magazine tries to do so, and so has a movie like the Hebrew Hammer, but, ultimately, David Itzkovitz, who has recently written on this topic in You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern America (Rutgers UP, 2006), finds this difference also suspect. I agree with him. Secular Jews, if they take Jewish identity seriously, and not as some ironic joke, need to take this seriously; otherwise, there will be problems for this project.