Passages of Belonging: Interpreting Jewish Literatures

246 Pages·2019·1.816 MB·English

by  Carola Hilfrich (editor), Natasha Gordinsky (editor), Susanne Zepp (editor)

Passages of Belonging
Perspectives on Jewish
Texts and Contexts
Edited by
Vivian Liska
Editorial Board
Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber,
Moshe Halbertal, Christine Hayes, Moshe Idel, Samuel Moyn,
Ada Rapoport-Albert, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman, Bernd Witte
Volume 7
Passages of
Belonging
Interpreting Jewish Literatures
Edited by
Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky and Susanne Zepp
Supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel
Science Foundation (grant No. 1798/12)
ISBN 978-3-11-043861-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-052551-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-052349-2
ISSN 2199-6962
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965712
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
Cover image: Svetlana Boym
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, Susanne Zepp
Introduction   1
Part I 
Hélène Cixous / Translated by Eric Prenowitz
Ail! – Il ne faut pas le dire – / Oy! – You Mustn’t Say That –   8
Carola Hilfrich
The Depository of Zugehör: Ail! and the Soundscape of Belonging   48
Cécile Wajsbrot / Translated by Susanne Zepp
Vous trouverez ce livre … / You’ll find this book …   54
Stephanie Bung
“Vous trouverez ce livre ...” – Cécile Wajsbrot and the Art of Belonging   58
Alex Epstein / Translated by Becka Mara McKay
תינמרג חרזמ הניסרח ,התיבה ךרד ירוציק / Shortcuts Home; East German China   66
Natasha Gordinsky
Smuggled Belongings: Alex Epstein’s Fiction of Immigration   68
Almog Behar / Translated by Vivian Eden
דוּהיַ-לְאַ ןמִ אנַאַ / Ana min al-yahoud – I’m one of the Jews   74
Yael Kenan
“The Same Words, Perhaps a Bit More Broken”: Multiple Belongings in Almog
Behar’s “Ana Min al-Yahoud”   90
Part II 
Ruth Ginsburg
French Scholem, or: Scholem’s Purloined Letter   107
VI   Contents
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Belonging Destabilized: Anton Shammas’s Arabesques   126
Vivian Liska
Derrida’s Appurtenances: A Footnote on Language and Belonging   138
Susanne Zepp
De-essentialized Belonging: Poetics of the Self in Joyce Mansour
and Clarice Lispector   150
Anastasia Telaak
Form and Language: Alejandra Pizarnik’s Spatial Poetics of
Un/Belonging   169
Sonja Dickow
Architectures of Absence: Nicole Krauss’s Novel Great House   194
Part III 
Masha Gessen
Introduction to Svetlana Boym’s “Remembering Forgetting”   211
Svetlana Boym
Remembering Forgetting. Tale of a Refugee Camp   214
Sasha Senderovich
Svetlana Boym Remembers Forgetting   234
Notes on Contributors   236
Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, Susanne Zepp
Introduction
This volume collects contributions from members of the research group “Fields
of Belonging: Interpreting Jewish literatures,” founded in 2010 at the Simon
Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig.
We were keen to initiate an encounter between writers and scholars in order to
think about questions of belonging in Jewish literatures beyond the confines of
identitary essentialism – be it an essentialism of belonging, Jewishness, or lit-
erariness. Building on existing endeavors in the general Humanities (Bell 1996,
Bhabha 1994, Butler & Spivak 2007, Diner 2011, Fortier 1999, Freestone and Liu
2016, Hall 1992, Harvey 1996, hooks 2008, Leon 2009, Massey 1991, Probyn 1996,
Rogoff 2000), we looked at belonging and sense of place in non-identitary terms
such as movement, transformation, emergence, displacement, and transgres-
sion – in short: in terms of passages. This approach was sustained by recent
research in Jewish Studies of space and place (e.g., Boym 2001, Mann 2012) as
well as by spatial studies of Jewish literatures (DeKoven Ezrahi 2000, Hever 2015,
Miron 2010, Newton 2005, Pinsker 2010).
However, while these studies engage mainly with the classical canon of
Jewish literatures in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and German, we sought to encom-
pass these together with the outer and more contemporary reaches of the modern
Jewish canon, including texts from North Africa, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, and
France. In this context, passages appear less as intermediary stages between
departure and return and more as situations that suspend any teleological ori-
entation. In this sense, we take passages not only to include movement in space
(such as from one place to another) and elapsing in time (as represented in and
by literature), but also to encompass a theoretical tool for literary interpretation.
Such passages are no longer metaphors or merely representations; rather, they
are highly concrete situations, experiences, and forces, as in Bakhtin’s seminal
definition of the chronotope: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and tem-
poral indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time,
as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space
becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.
This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic
chronotope” (Bakhtin 1981, 84).
Over the years, our joint discussions produced a ripple effect in the respective
works of all participants, as well as among them. The collaboration of writers
and literary scholars made us aware that, while scholarly theorizations of pas-
sages of belonging must be rigorous, the literary work challenges us to remain
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110525519-001
2   Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, Susanne Zepp
on the move with our theorizations. Each of the contributions to this volume
meets these challenges in its own right, while all the texts reflect how deeply our
lives and work are affected by what is called a post-monolingual condition (Levy
and Schachter 2015, Yeldiz 2012). For us, this condition was made concrete by
thinking it in the multiple passages – linguistic, geographic, generic, cultural,
historical – of Jewish and literary belonging.
The volume opens with a literary section that presents works in different
genres by four contemporary writers and translations and critical commentar-
ies of these works. Taken together, these contributions suggest that we think
of belonging in terms of dispossession and movement, the vulnerabilities of
owing and owning, and the charged spatiality of enactments of such vulner-
abilities.
Hélène Cixous’s Ail! – Il ne faut pas le dire – / Oy! – You Mustn’t Say That –
sets the stage for such literary thinking. It is a play for two characters, the octoge-
narian sisters Selma and Jenny Meyer, cast in a Godotian scene “on their return
from Osnabrück,” their native city in Germany, and preparing a Leberhäckele “in
the kitchen, Paris.” Bickering over the basics of their umlauted Jewish family
dish, they are negotiating their place in an economy of the unsayable and the
position in language on which it depends. Their kitchen talk unfurls onto the
soundscape of a revenant and repudiated, native language, namely, allemand, or
“German” in French. In this soundscape, the scene of belonging plays out in an
unheard-of, “ailiterated” mode, as Carola Hilfrich suggests in her commentary.
She shows how the play’s acoustic territory forms a sonic discourse on belonging
that is “equally feverish, energetic, and participatory,” focusing interpretation on
the aural lexicon and range of the soundscape.
In her poem “Vous trouverez ce livre… / You Will Find This Book…,” Cécile
Wajsbrot reminds us of the difficulty of escaping class, violence, and other adver-
sities as either obstacles to or markers of belonging. The “book” she writes about
is an embodiment of the exigencies of the sense of place as it connects with family
histories and histories of dispossession. At the same time, her poem provides
social commentary and, in fact, establishes the conditions for a negotiation of
both belonging and class. Thus, it serves as a reminder that the politics of poetry
resides in its centrality to the construction of a political person. Stephanie Bung
unravels these intricacies from a philological perspective while emphasizing the
sense of “belonging” as “ownership.” In focusing on the poem’s expressive voice
as an embodiment of radically different experiences of owing and owning, her
commentary draws attention to the potential of poetic language to rethink domi-
nant paradigms of belonging.
The first of Alex Epstein’s micro-stories, originally published in Hebrew and
entitled “Shortcuts Home,” consists of four sentences, each of which imagines
Introduction   3
and performs another conundrum of belonging and homeliness, while the
second deals with the economy of family and cultural possessions through “a
little tale of immigration.” Natasha Gordinsky explores how these micro-stories
resist the trope of homecoming and undermine a totalizing narrative of immi-
gration as a single and linear story. She argues that Epstein’s texts epitomize, in
their fragmented form, a (post-)Soviet Jewish mode of belonging, constituted by
a persistent negotiation between fiction and history.
Almog Behar’s “Ana Min Al Yahoud” stages the scene of identification that
regulates belonging through language and nation. Shifting between Arabic and
Hebrew, his story challenges the pervasively monolingual understanding of
Israeli literature, and advances a view of literary belonging as both multiple and
conflicted. Yael Kenan’s commentary on the story focuses on the bodily and mne-
monic aspects of the Arabic tongue that dwells so prominently in the protago-
nist’s Hebrew in/of the story. She suggests that we understand the title utterance,
and its reverberations in the text, as an ethical shibboleth or a linguistic site for
negotiating conflicting cultural identities. Her reading significantly complicates
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literatures by demonstrating how Behar’s
hybrid language serves as a poetic and political tool for bringing together the
collective and individual.
The contributions in the second section expand this critical perspective to
other works of Jewish modernity and contemporaneity.
Ruth Ginsburg’s “French Scholem” discusses the double dispossession of
language reflected in Gershom Scholem’s writings, exposing the complex dynamics
of loss between his “Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache” in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig
in 1926 and a later, unpublished note from his archives, entitled “Sprache.” Offering
the first, and a breathtakingly close, reading of Scholem’s “Bekenntnis” in the
context of its original language rather than its highly influential mis/translation
into French, Ginsburg establishes a seminal claim on linguistic dispossession and
appropriation in Scholem’s work, and sheds new light on the history and politics of
its translation and circulation.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, in “Belonging Destabilized,” presents a literary
analysis of the “radical political vision” of civic belonging that underlies Anton
Shammas’s novel Arabesques, originally published in Hebrew in 1986, and read
here in translation. Focusing on the structural intricacy of the novel, its alter-
nating voices and treatment of time, place, language, and self as fundamentally
othered, she calls attention to how Shammas’s vision “bridges” opposed narra-
tives within the body of Hebrew Literature. For Rimmon-Kenan, this bridging of
the work of literary imagination suggests an alternate modality of complicity with
the novel, in which the reader may come to “long to belong to [the] co-existence”
that it envisions.
4   Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, Susanne Zepp
In “Derrida’s Appurtenances,” Vivian Liska scrutinizes the function of
this synonym for “belonging” in Jacques Derrida’s thought on li ngu i stic
depropriation, focusing on his extended footnote on Jewish belonging
across the Ashkenazi-Sephardi and the literary-philosophical divides in
Monolingualism of the Other; Or the Prosthesis of Origin, originally published
in French in 1996. Liska argues compellingly that this footnote is the most
radical and intimate moment of Derrida’s monolingual performance. The
textual “appurtenance,” she suggests, allows him to reassert repressed, with-
drawn, and rejected appartenances or belongings at another level of negoti-
ation. Concomitantly and paradoxically, it reveals the original choreography
of his own speaking on linguistic belonging and ownership in his listening
to the voices of others.
Susanne Zepp’s “De-essentialized Belonging” examines the strategies
by which the polylingual and multicultural writings of Clarice Lispector and
Joyce Mansour de-essentialize belonging. Zepp argues that both authors trans-
form different aspects of belonging, whether their own or that of others, into
complex aesthetic forms which, in their many variations and transformations,
challenge the concept of the natural possession of a given language and,
by extension, the concept of identity. The lieu of these transformations, in
Mansour’s writings, is the poetic speaker, while, in Lispector’s prose, it is to
be found in her experiments with first-person narratives. Zepp suggests that
we understand their major formal i nnovations as aesthetic comments on the
complexities of belonging.
Anastasia Telaak’s contribution links the specificity of the poetic form
to the spatial, philosophical, and linguistic dynamics of “un/belonging” in
Alejandra Pizarnik’s oeuvre. She portrays Pizarnik as one of the most uncon-
ventional voices in the literary (post-)modern era and situates her in the
context of the multiple traditions and discourses that intertwine in her oeuvre,
including Argentinean avant-garde literature, German Romanticism, French
symbolism, surrealism, (post-)structuralist thought, and Jewish tradition. Her
approach suggests a reading of Pizarnik’s oeuvre as a simultaneous reconstruc-
tion and deconstruction of paradigmatic spatio-temporal constellations in
Jewish history.
Sonja Dickow’s essay explores the multiple layers, sites, and scales of an
“architecture of absence” in the plot and poetics of Nicole Krauss’s novel Great
House (2010). Focusing on its inanimate protagonist, a gigantic writing desk,
as witness to the chaos and violence of modern Jewish history, she reveals
an aesthetics of loss and potentiality centered on the novel’s figurations of
absence. Her analysis zooms out to the eponymous “Great House” of Jewish
literary tradition after the destruction of the Second Temple to take account