Jewish Identity in Selected Short Stories by Nathan Englander

Diplomarbeit

Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Vorgelegt von Lennart OSCHGAN

Am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachterin: Assoz. Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Ulla Kriebernegg

Graz, 2021

Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...... 1

2 Identity and Cultural Studies ...... 2

2.1 Discourse and Subjects ...... 2

2.2 Identity ...... 5

3 Jewish American Identity ...... 11

3.1 “American” Identity ...... 11

3.2 Jewish Identity ...... 13

3.3 Jewish American Literature ...... 28

3.4 Nathan Englander ...... 34

4 Analysis ...... 38

4.1 Reb Kringle ...... 38

4.2 The Gilgul of Park Avenue ...... 43

4.3 Peep Show ...... 53

4.4 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank ...... 60

5 Conclusion ...... 66

6 Works Cited ...... 68

1 Introduction

For more than two decades now, the US-American writer Nathan Englander has allowed readers accessible insights into the sensitivities, imaginaries, and peculiarities of a wide repertoire of mostly Jewish characters, whether they be Orthodox, secular, or in-between, US- centered or elsewhere, in the past or in the present. Throughout his oeuvre, Englander expresses a deep understanding of human nature that reverberates through his stories but is never obscured by topics perhaps unfamiliar to the reader. The American author, who has grown up as a so-called Orthodox Jew in New York, time after time challenges tropes of more than just Jewish identity and reveals fault lines within communities, but also – and more frequently – within the characters themselves. This is particularly apparent in his short story collections, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), where Englander posits peculiar questions about contemporary Jewish identity. In this thesis, I disassemble and evaluate these conundrums of identity that Englander recounts based on a number of selected short stories from these collections. What is it that constitutes their identity as Jewish? Or rather, how does Englander construct their identities within his stories?

The first short story, “Reb Kringle,” entails the identity conflict of a heavily bearded Rabbi who works as a mall Santa during the holiday season. Reb Itzik’s cultural (or religious?) values are threatened by a situation brought forth by capitalistic assimilation. Secondly, in “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” Englander imagines a WASP-y middle-aged man who realizes, out of the blue, that he is and always has been Jewish. His surroundings are forced to react to the transformation and his newly assumed identity is challenged. Thirdly, in “Peep Show,” a secular Jew who married out of the community and changed his name to a less Jewish-sounding name visits a live peep show only to find his rabbis from teenage years, Jewish mother, Christian wife, and therapist to appear to challenge his decisions and values. Finally, the titular story of the second collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” features two married couples meeting up, one based in the US, the other living in Jerusalem. They talk, drink, get high, discuss Judaism and the Shoah and eventually play a game of “Who Will Hide Me?” (in the event of another Holocaust). Differences between the secular US and the “ascended” Orthodox couple as well as different kinds of Judaism become apparent while the longstanding couples ask each other crucial questions that test their emotional limits.

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The analysis of these short stories builds on theoretical concepts that I discuss in the first two chapters. The first chapter critically explores some ideas from the various disciplines that coalesced into the wider field of Cultural Studies in relation to my approaches to a study of Jewish identity. While this thesis assumes that the reader has some general knowledge about theories of postmodernism, politics of representation and cultural theories, it explores concepts such as discourse, (split) subjects, and identity in more detail as they underpin the foundation of this work. I elaborate on this in the first theoretical chapter. The second chapter explores concepts of identity, especially the Jewish identities that are central to Englander’s work. It interrogates the history and culture of these identities, both specifically within the United States as well as more generally. This part includes subchapters on general Jewish identity, Jewish history in the US, Jewish American literature as well as a subchapter focused on the pertinent author Nathan Englander, his personal history and attitudes. These chapters provide information on the cultural matrix that informs and locates within itself the oeuvre of Nathan Englander.

2 Identity and Cultural Studies

Due to its high degrees of cultural verisimilitude, the literary work of Nathan Englander affects discourses, offers and influences subject positions as well as an examination of identity itself, whilst it is likewise influenced by them. Therefore, this chapter examines the relevant cultural studies concepts essential for the analysis of his work in relation to these cultural studies concepts.

2.1 Discourse and Subjects

Chris Weedon subsumes the ways in which the French thinker Michel Foucault conceived discourses as

ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways

2 of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the “nature” of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. (“Feminist Practice” 108)

By “‘nature’ of the body,” Weedon refers to how a body is interpreted – for example, the stereotypes associated with a long “Jewish” nose. In discourses, the negotiation of meaning itself as well as the production of meaning take place. In Foucault’s model, there is nothing outside of discourses. Consequently, (true) agency is left in a precarious position, as it exists within the binding framework of the discourse.

Foucault argues that these “discourses produce subjects within relations of power that potentially or actually involve resistance” (Weedon, Identity and Culture 18). For instance, a contemporary Jewish woman’s subject position or identity may be produced through discourses about her (non-)adherence to her religion, the Shoah, womanhood, womanhood in Judaism, anti-Semitism, the state of Israel, Jewish and Non-Jewish literature, psychology, politics, and many other factors. She may take up certain positions within this discourse, which may reinforce certain viewpoints and/or resist others – and therefore, be shaped by them, being under the influence of power. In Foucault’s view, power relations are not specifically directed by some definite potentate, but by similar factors as those which Jacques Lacan subsumes as the Symbolic Order – society, narratives, institutions, etc. (Johnston) that (re-)produce discourses and thereby meaning and knowledge.

Indeed, Foucault argues that it is not subjects themselves, but discourse that creates knowledge or meaning. After all, subjects themselves are produced within and by discourses of a certain time, of certain (sub-)cultures. Stuart Hall explains that subjects are “not able to take meaning until they have identified with those positions which the discourse constructed, subjected themselves to its rules, and hence become the subjects of its power/knowledge” (“The Work” 40). He further attests that “[subjects]/we [as readers or viewers] must locate themselves/ourselves in the position from which the discourse makes most sense, and thus become its ‘subjects’ by ‘subjecting’ ourselves to its meanings, power and regulation” (40).

Ergo, to return to our earlier example, the Jewish woman is hardly the author of her subject position or identity within a specific discourse. She is subject to the discourse’s meanings, power and regulation. However, independent agency may still play a part: Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré describe subject positions as such:

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Once having taken up a particular position as one's own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, storylines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned. At least a possibility of notional choice is inevitably involved because there are many and contradictory discursive practices that each person could engage in. (46)

Foucault himself explains that there “are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to [their] own identity by a conscience or self- knowledge” (781). This means that subjects submit themselves to others’ judgement and are hailed as occupying a certain subject position within a certain discourse by their surroundings, which does have a bearing on their own self-understanding – they position themselves and are positioned, becoming “subject” (as in an agent) and object (something is being done to them). This hailing and the subject’s response to the hail, their acceptance of “being the one being hailed,” is a process of identification. Louis Althusser called this process interpellation.

The individual is hailed, and responds with an identification through which [they are] a subject in a double sense. [They become] both the agent of the ideology in question and subjected to it. This process of identification, Althusser argues, inserts individuals into ideologies and ideological practices that, when they work well, are lived as if they were obvious and natural. In Althusser’s theorization, a range of what he terms “Ideological State Apparatuses” such as religion, education, the family, the law, politics, culture and the media produce the ideologies within which we assume identities and become subjects. (Weedon, Identity and Culture 6)

In Althusser’s theory, the “Symbolic Order” becomes “Ideological State Apparatuses.” Subjects may recognize themselves in ideologies put forth by the Ideological State Apparatus institutions. The Apparatuses offer subjects categories in which they can recognize and locate themselves, which, thus speaks Althusser, produces subjects which reproduce existing ideology structures. According to Lacan, whose work Althusser based his subject theory on, these theorized subjects are split, meaning that the subject (“I”) who acts in concreto or to be precise, speaks, is distinct from the subject assumed in thought (Weedon, Identity and Culture 12). The split manifests in more ways though: Psychoanalyst literary theorist Mark Bracher contends that

The “I” that I think about never coincides completely with the “I” that does the thinking; the urges and characteristics that I take to be mine never exhaust or even adequately represent the forces that constitute my being and drive my thought and action forces, moreover, that are themselves conflictual and self- contradictory. (113)

This “divide” takes account for the unconscious which by definition the subject is unaware of, which makes the notion of a unified self even more untenable.

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Bracher argues that this split or divided subject “is operative in all of the various ways in which we fail to identify ourselves, grasp ourselves, or coincide with ourselves” (113). This “non- totality” of the self leads to identity conflicts or identity confusion, based on this dual nature of the self because individuals gather assumptions about themselves that may contradict each other. This happens as a person switches modes of thinking for different discourses and assumes diverse subject positions (Davies & Harre 58), taking up different identities. Chris Weedon attests that one way to understand identity categories is to understand them as “attempts to mask this gap between the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken1. It is a gap that individuals constantly attempt to cover over” (Identity and Culture 12). But what – also in relation to the “subjectivity” discussed above – is identity?

2.2 Identity

Identity, from Latin idem (“same”), means sameness – we identify with what is similar to us, what is a part of us – or what we are parts of. This sameness implies the existence of otherness. German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, in the dialectic of the Master and the Slave, locates this otherness of someone or something (“a consciousness”) existing outside of oneself within the self itself – another is needed to recognize oneself, to constitute each other (2018, 107, 175)2. This dialectic approach creates a synthesis of the one with the other within one’s own self (and within the other’s). Ferdinand de Saussure located the importance of difference in language itself. He argues that meaning depends on opposite relationships – such as black and white (Hall, “The Spectacle” 224). In this example, “white” is defined by what it is not, as it is not “black.” However, binary oppositions such as these are often loaded in some way and imbalanced. While with black and white one could at least argue that one absorbs light and one reflects light, for centuries, black was negatively connotated in Western society – among others, black magic, black market, and as a result of racist theories, “black” people, lend themselves as examples. An opposition such as this that “creates meaning” is shaped by culture and history – and, as Jacques Derrida argued, influenced by power (Hall, “The Spectacle” 225). The anthropological approach to this is less

1 Respectively, assumed in thought. 2 “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”

5 binary than this, but also based on difference – “the argument here is that culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system” (226). Another approach, the psychoanalytic one, amounts to the Hegelian “other,” a self- consciousness needed to constitute the own self-consciousness. Freud, and later Lacan, argue similarly and additionally emphasize the “Other’s” influence on sexual identity (Hall, “The Spectacle” 227). Freud famously focused on the mother as an object of desire for a young male, and ultimate identification with the father (and the respective opposites for a woman in this binary depiction), but Lacan argues that identification happens due to misrecognition, which he illustrates in his model of the Mirror Stage. An infant, in its frustrating helplessness, feels incomplete. Seemingly unified, powerful beings bustling around them, it seeks to be like them and desires an (imagined) harmony. As the toddler recognizes itself in the mirror, it misrecognizes the reflection image as a whole, unified being, usually assisted by a caretaker who points out that the image is the infant. However, according to Lacan, this image represents a false promise of wholeness and being in control, a fiction which humans chase their whole life. Thus, argues Lacan, the child falsely recognizes itself as a self-determined being, when in fact its ego constitutes merely a vessel for the intentions of greater others like parents, the “Big Other” society, etc. and is shaped by those entities’ ascriptions. Lacan elaborates that others may serve as mirrors throughout life to (mis-)recognize oneself in (Johnston). This incomplete subject appears to be at the root of identity confusion and phenomena such as cognitive dissonances that lead to conflicts, for example in “Reb Kringle” and “Peep Show.”

As discourses hail subjects, those subjects may recognize themselves and take up subject positions, and although socially constructed by the “Big Other” society and/or discourses and their diverse signifiers, they act out their sense of self – their subjectivity. The positions the subjects take up form their identities, which, congruent with the above discourse about misrecognitions and split subjects, may even conflict with other identities. The identities taken up may be subject to change, chosen by the unconscious, but, perhaps most importantly, exist in relation to other identities. The above was focused on why subjects take up identities, what identity means and how it is based on difference, but what are identities?

At their most basic, they are about who or what we identify with. Of course, there are several “categories” of identity one can more or less identify with. They may be based on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, health, profession, or other personal experience or

6 idiosyncrasy. Kathryn Woodward argues that “some differences are marked, but in the process some differences may be obscured; for example, the assertion of national identity may omit class and gender differences” (“Concepts” 12). Ergo, when inspecting identities, it is important to work intersectionally to grasp a more complete picture. Although the golden thread of this thesis remains Jewish identity, the additional categories influence individuals and individual characters and need to be considered.

If identities exist in relation to other identities, they are marked by difference. Sociology founder Émile Durkheim stresses the importance of classificatory systems that “are affirmed in speech and ritual” (Woodward, “Concepts” 29). He utilized the concepts of the “sacred” and the “profane” to make a point about difference: The sacred is put on a pedestal, set apart, and imbued with continuous meaning. This is an action, a performance of a specific identity that is (re-)produced by this “affirmation” of meaning. Durkheim applied this line of thinking to religion, but cultures or subcultures and by extension the identities they create, work much in the same way. Some “metalheads” might elevate black leather jackets or bass-heavy music to be sacred while nationalists might frame some century-old battle and its remembrance as constitutive to their identity, as specially set apart. Others, like the character Mark in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” might put purity of religion and/or blood on a sacred identity pedestal, but I will elaborate on that below.

Groups, such as the metal music enthusiasts or any adherents of a nation, form “imagined communities.” Historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson argues that such communities are “imagined because the members [...] will never know most of their fellow- members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). However, that is not to say that the imaginations which hold the groups together are per se false or empty. Anderson describes that these communities are invariably mentally constructed as having a basis in egalitarian membership, notwithstanding that de facto power imbalances exist (7), e.g. my Austrian nationality is supposed to make me equal to any other Austrian when matters of nationalism are concerned. This alludes to a supposed camaraderie based on an imagined nation which in turn is based on many sociocultural and historical markers such as levels of politeness, certain traditions and rituals or the previously mentioned example of the historic battle or the memory associated with it.

7 Similar to the remembrance of a battle as a constitutive element of an imagined community, the discourses about the individual iterations of identity categories have developed historically. Paul Gilroy, historian and theorist of racism, observes that “the ‘raw materials’ from which identity is produced may be inherited from the past but they are also worked on, creatively or positively, reluctantly and bitterly, in the present” (304). Stuart Hall elaborately refers to the culturally constructed identity as

A matter of “becoming” as well as “being.” It belongs to the future as much as the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past. (Hall, “Cultural Identity” 225)

Indeed, theoreticians such as Hall consider identities to be fluid and subject to change. The late cultural theorist Hall mentions essentialism: the notion that there are fixed, primordial features inherently present in entities. When applied to people, these conceptions are tremendously dangerous and ripe with stereotypes as well as generalizations. And they cannot be true, because not all women, Jews, poor, obese, teachers, fathers, etc. are “like that.” Longhurst et al. agree that these ideas become “especially pernicious when they postulate the presence of essential characteristics as a matter of biology and genetic inheritance” (121). It is not daring to claim that there is no hypokeimenon, no essential specific substance, that survived as-is in, for example, “German-speakers” in the last thousand years, because all matters of cultural construction have changed at least in some way, even if there are similarities. Racist or ethno- centric or classist thinking accompanies notions of essentialism and ostensibly leads to the supposed ideal of an ethnostate with single unifying traits for everyone, which is an outrageous goal, not only because such a “sameness” can never be completely achieved.

Even outside of ethnostates, in the liberal democracies of the West, cultural differences and difference of appearance also often appear to be sources of friction and transformation. What is different and does not fit in the favored classificatory system is observed warily or even with hostility. In her analysis Purity and Danger, in which British anthropologist Mary Douglas concerns herself with the symbolism of being “unclean” in a system of order, she remarks that what does not fit inside contravenes a system of order (36). However, these “unorderly” entities, “recognisably out of place” (161), threaten the closed circuit of order. Stuart Hall

8 remarks that symbolic boundaries maintain the uniqueness of cultures which can be disturbed by the pollution of norms and codes of the respective unique culture (Hall, “The Spectacle” 226). Therefore, that which escapes original frames of reference often appears as a threat. Douglas claimed that “Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained” (41). Applied to cultures and/or nations, this means that either they must change to include and accommodate what is different or that they expel or at least exclude the different to remain the same.

As a consequence of this dilemma, people usually suffer, as Kath Woodward pointed out: “If a group is symbolically marked as enemy or taboo, that will have real effects because the group will be socially excluded and materially disadvantaged” (“Concepts” 12). If some categories of people are marginalized like that, only present from afar, “othering” and essentializing notions can more easily be produced – after all, the ostracized group hardly has any influence on how they are portrayed and cannot get close enough to others to convince them that they are possibly not how they are represented. In this marginalized state, they cannot refute the ascription to be naturally so. By drawing on essentialism and due to the disadvantages affecting the marginalized, stereotypes arise. As mentioned above, classificatory systems may help organize meaning – and indeed, type people of similar and clearly identifiable characteristics together. But stereotypes take this practice over the top: They “reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them” (Hall, “The Spectacle” 247). Through these easily accessible stereotypes, power and control are exerted symbolically. People are veritably trapped by stereotypes: those who attribute the stereotypes as well as those who are subjected to them, as discursive power subjects everyone. Often, the marginalized themselves are forced to reproduce stereotypes that were forced onto them: For example, the “money- grubbing” Jew from the Christian Middle Ages had few opportunities to shake off the stereotype as they were only allowed to participate in a few sectors, such as banking, thereby, if they were successful, this perpetuated the stereotype.

Historian George Mosse points out another inconsistency of (nationalistic) stereotypes around the turn of the 20th century as he highlighted that while an imagined form of masculinity was considered the ideal then, women were often viewed as keepers of moral order, but at the same time also idealized as frivolous inane creatures (Nationalism and Sexuality, 17). Hall explains this paradox as follows: “This logic depends on representation working at two different levels at the same time: a conscious and overt level, and an unconscious or suppressed level” (Hall,

9 “The Spectacle” 252). Applied to stereotypes against Jews, for instance, anti-Semites portray them as lowly, unworthy sub-human devils, yet at the same time fear their supposedly extreme power. These stereotypes have informed and have been informed by deeply ingrained fantasies, bordering on fetishistic fears. In the psychoanalytic view, “fetishism involves the substitution of an ‘object’ for some dangerous and powerful but forbidden force” (Hall, “The Spectacle” 256). Of course, people can be “objects” of fetishism too, as frequently happens to trans, black, or Jewish people, among others. Although this is often rooted in sexuality, it does not have to be, as long as it contains disavowal, through which “a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied” (257). Even though the fetishization of black men (as unable to control their lust and as aggressive) appeared more visible, something similar happened to Jews: In the 19th and early 20th century, racist ideologues ascribed Jews a lack of sexual control and lewdness; Hitler described this as “Jews waiting to catch Aryan girls” (Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality 134). Even though these forms of anti-Semitism have become less explicitly dehumanizing, like many minority-labelled groups, Jews are still fetishized: For example, female Jews appear to be sought after by so-called “bagel-chasers,” which might be more flattering than explicit dehumanization on first sight, but is still anti-Semitic and others Jews, differentiates them from a notion of being “normal” (Katz).

Sexual, conspiratorial, or whatever fantasy is projected onto Jews, they shape and influence their representation – but Jews (and others) have continuously worked to “re-fix” these meanings and representation. Hall calls these attempts to change meaning “trans-coding.” Identities, and by extension representations, stereotypes, and the meanings they all depend upon are “produced, consumed and regulated within culture” (Woodward, “Introduction” 2), that is, by actors within society, therefore, among others, authors of literature. One of these sources of production, consummation and regulation is the oeuvre of Nathan Englander, which offers positions concerned with being Jewish, or more specifically, relates to/revisits images of the Orthodox Jewish community in the United States. Before looking more closely at the relevant short stories mentioned in the introduction, the following chapter attempts to explore discourses and constructions surrounding the identities in question.

10 3 Jewish American Identity

3.1 “American” Identity

In the first chapter, it was established that identity is a matter that involves history, culture and power. The identities in question in this paper are “Jewish American,” or in some cases “Orthodox Jewish American” identities as manifested in selected short stories by Nathan Englander. As appears to be the case with all “hyphenated identities”3 in the US, Jewish Americans in all their varying forms, shapes, and characteristics are often considered special, apart from the prototypical, socio-culturally constructed idea of an “American.”4 The “Enlightenment” concept of race has pervaded US-American history long before the Colonies gained independence from Great Britain. It served oppressors well as it offered them a “scientific” justification to divide the exploited masses along the lines of their melanin levels, which led to monstrous injustices toward untold numbers of humans. The consequences and continuations of these ideas are clearly still palpable today and impact millions of US- Americans every day.

Although this idea has been increasingly challenged in recent years, the “default American” was and still often is a so-called white person. Numerically, “whites” still represent the majority of US citizens and have dominated other American identities ever since the inception of the United States. However, the dominant population group in the US does not consist of merely any whites, but instead, as Ashley Jardina attests, “the dominant culture in the United States is not merely white; it is Anglo-Protestant” (106). Sonia Kruks explicates a more intersectional view and includes more identity categories in her description of a “dominance of the ideas of a hegemonic white, male, upper-class, and heterosexual elite” (80). This “guiding culture” enables its adherents to enjoy vast influence across US-American society, and historically has allowed them to see themselves as the standard, as the prototypical default (Jardina 22). While this view has been diminishing recently – which in itself has created a massive backlash – “white America” is still mainstream, and Jews and other minorities have been positioned by and have positioned themselves in relation to “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” or WASPs, or rather to the discourse surrounding WASP dominance. However, in general, most other whites

3 The various style guide may have omitted hyphens, which may be a good step, but no panacea. 4 Throughout the thesis, I will use the anti-imperialistic term “US-American” when it appears sensible.

11 enjoy privileges relative to less “prototypically American” groups like Asians, Latinx or black people. This has not always been the case; Karen Brodkin points out that autochthonous Europeans who are considered “white” today were considered inherently inferior in the US in the 19th century and that the same was true for Jews (26). Brodkin also argues that Europeans started to be racialized in the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with the Irish, as “old-stock” Americans viewed them as biologically inferior, which then was extended to other “European races,” a view that was carried by the dominant WASPs (27f). These oppositions between “whites” culminated in the 19th and the 20th century, when eugenics and associated theories were not taboo yet (28), and “un-American” pseudo-hostile identities like German Americans were shunned and obscured, especially during World War I. War-time President Wilson (in)famously remarked that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him, carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic when he gets ready” (“During”). This “erasure” of identity markers – German culture and language were virtually eliminated from the public eye during this time (“During”) – was perpetrated again and again in the US, most notably against the enslaved Africans. Indeed, while the non-Anglo-Saxon “whites” began to be included in the racialized “white” markers after World War II, which included Jews, “the federal government did its level best to shut and double-seal the postwar window of opportunity in African Americans’ faces” (Brodkin 50).

In the second half of the 20th century, suppressed identities began to become more visible in US-American discourse. The endeavor to make these suppressed identities visible is sometimes called Identity Politics, a term that has become a linguistic and cultural bundle laden with meanings. However, the core ideas originally governing identity politics, according to Sonia Kruks, are as follows:

(1) There still exist significant differences of social status and experience (such as those of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality) that have for too long been obscured by the dominance of the ideas of a hegemonic white, male, upper-class, and heterosexual elite. Under the guise of claiming that there exists a universal human condition, this elite has constructed accounts of reality that serve its own ends. (2) Those groups whose identities have previously been subjugated by this elite should now be privileged as sources of both epistemological and moral authority. (3) Implicit in the first two claims, access to truth and the authority to make moral and political judgments are not universal but are always relative to who one is. (4) To “unmask” or “deconstruct” privileged, universalist readings of reality and make possible the expression of their own identity and truth by the previously silenced and subjugated is not only a valid form of political action, but the most important form of political action today. (5) Such a politics of unmasking privilege and enabling the subjugated to "come to voice" urgently needs to be conducted also internally to feminism and other radical movements. (80)

Among other aspects, the universal human condition constructed by the elite refers to the notion of “colorblindness” which initially appear to make equal, yet actually seeks to obscure

12 difference. However, identity politics seeks to establish equal rights (in regards to access to truth and authority) and “respect for oneself as different” (Kruks 85). These ideas (and conservative opposition to them) have taken root in the US and provide a front in the cultural conflicts happening there, and in other parts of the world like Europe due to the cultural dominance of the US. Although usually not at the forefront within these conflicts, Jewish Americans exist alongside other (formerly5) hyphenated Americans. The importance of identity politics provides the area of tension Jewish identity exists in in the US. But what is that, Jewish identity in the US? I will try to approach this question using two topical quotations.

3.2 Jewish Identity

“What the hell is this business of being a Jew?”—people losing sons, losing limbs, losing this, losing that, in the act of answering. “What is a Jew in the first place?” It’s a question that’s always had to be answered: the sound “Jew” was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said “Djoo,” pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning of what hasn’t stopped since. (Roth 145)

[T]he essential conflict of the Judaism of the Diaspora, scattered among the Gentiles, that is, the goyim, torn between their divine vocation and the daily misery of existence; and still another, even more general, which is inherent in the human condition, since man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. The Jewish people, after the dispersion, have lived this conflict for a long time and dolorously, and have drawn from it, side by side with its wisdom, also its laughter, which in fact is missing in the Bible and the Prophets. (Levi 9)

The heated questions posed by Philip Roth’s literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman predictably do not have a simple answer. Etymologically, the English word Jew comes from biblical Judah (Yehudah and Yehudim – those of Judah), supposed Israelitic patriarch Jacob’s fourth son, connected to the Hebrew term for thanking or praising, through Greek, Latin and Old French juiu. Originally it referred to a nation (the Kingdom of Judah), but around the time of the first exile (to Babylon), it came to denote an entire ethnic group – all descendants of Jacob’s sons. Once this exile ended, it was cemented as that: The human voice said and pointed, as evidenced by similar Greek and Roman usage of their versions of the term (Gilad). However, Zuckerman’s questions point to two further points: First, the question itself is a constituting identify factor within Jewish thought and literature. Second, it appears to be impossible to arrive at a definitive, essentialist answer.

5 Some groups actually still prefer the hyphen.

13 Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi describes human and especially Jewish identity in a way reminiscent of the idea of non-totality of the self presented in the first chapter – contradicting, mismatched parts make up the whole, the centaur, an incoherent creature of chaos that is not one nor the other. He mentions traits that sometimes appear as cornerstones of Jewish history: religious vocation, daily misery, but also wisdom and laughter that stems from the formers’ interplay. This, ornately, describes an idea of life in the diaspora, the “scattering across,” which was a process that lasted many centuries, starting with the first exile to Babylon – which at its end saw some Jews remain in Babylonian diaspora voluntarily. In fact, the diaspora included voluntary relocation to, for example, Hellenistic states, but also forceful enslavement under the Roman Empire, and eventually, the Jewish population of Palestine dwindled due to massacres and displacements under Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ayyubid, and Mamluk rule. As a consequence, Jews have found new lives in new lands where they left their imprints, and some converted to Christianity or later Islam or were converted forcefully. However, many Jews preserved their identity and connection to the ancient homeland and Jerusalem itself, “scattered among the Gentiles,” through what Gabi Sheffer calls “Jewish ethno-religious-nationalism” (431). Sheffer argues that “after the first destruction of Jerusalem [in 586 BC] and for many centuries thereafter, diasporic Jews regarded Jerusalem as the historical, actual, and then the imagined capital of the Jewish nation” (431). As an imagined homeland, Jerusalem was a “center” that, together with other particularities, seemed to hold disparate communities together although these Jews were émigrés in societies which usually incentivized assimilation. Literature scholar Professor Roberta Rosenberg points out that “[b]y separating communal identity from land acquisition, Jews are able to maintain a sense of group particularity without the domination of the Other, thereby substituting cultural collaboration for confrontation.” (110) It can be argued that one of these cultural collaborations is “Jewish humor,” the laughter that is missing “in the Bible and the Prophets.” Sarah Blacher Cohen noted that the (more traditional) Jewish humor of modernity was “born out of the vast discrepancy between what was to be the ‘chosen people’s’ glorious destiny and their desperate straits” (1), similar to the conflict Levi mentions – the conflict between divinity and dust.

Owing to the widespread diaspora, also called galut (“exile”), the cultural bundle called “Judaism” offers various subcategories for subjects to align themselves with as numerous iterations of what constitutes being “Jewish” have developed, an ever-ongoing process that has produced intricate and varied rituals, customs, and beliefs, that may be categorized into larger groups by different aspects. Firstly, one could consider national-cultural-historical background

14 and distinguish the Ashkenazim, the “German” and Eastern-European Jews, the Sephardim, the “Spanish” Jews who, following their expulsion in 1492 either left their mark as crypto-Jews on the Iberian Peninsula or emigrated to Italy or into the Turko-Arabic world to merge with their fellow Jews there, the Beta Israel, who may have lived in Ethiopia for over 1500 years, and many others such as the Mizrahim or the Mountain Jews. Secondly, one could look at the various denominations that sprouted from the original religion: From the Rabbinic mainstream, Orthodox Judaism and its subcategories like Ultra-Orthodox Haredim (“those who tremble in awe at the word of God”) or their subsect Hasidim (“pietists”) or Modern Orthodoxy and many more, to liberal Reform Judaism or non-Rabbinic communities such as the Karaites’ or the Samaritans’, the myriad variations appear to be staggering. Finally, Judaism can be purely secular, and people identifying as Jews may not adhere to the religion at all or to others instead, like the Jubu (Jewish Buddhist) present in the syncretically enabling “melting pot” of the United States of America.

Of course, because Jews do not define themselves just by “being Jews,” their identities might be influenced by other factors – such as their gender, their sexuality, or, among others, their nationality, which might be relatively separate from their identity as Jews, but might also overlap and/or interplay intersectionally with their identities as Jews. For example, it might be worth considering, like Sylvia Barack Fishman indicates, that the negative stereotypical portrayal or erasure of Jewish women in movies like Woodie Allen’s Annie Hall or books like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint influences Jewish American women’s identity (Double or Nothing? 106f). Additionally, sexuality remains a divisive topic and reveals distinctions in religious movements – some Jewish denominations ordain women and gay men, others include all gay and transgender people, while others are much more traditional, i.e. exclusive. The last point, nationality, presents a complex issue in regard to the exile, especially after the creation of the State of Israel, as Jews are sometimes viewed with suspicion due to an alleged “dual loyalty,” or even proclaimed fifth columnists, as is even the case for Zionist Jews in the US today sometimes, which, in some people’s minds at least, radiates to other US-American Jews. For much of Jewish history, the lost biblical homeland presented a unifying factor for Jewish identity, which did help Jews maintain their particular identity without the need for a national territory. Many North American Jews do move to the state of Israel, according to Nefesh B’Nefesh, the Israeli nonprofit immigration organization focused on the Anglosphere, more than 3,000 US-Americans and Canadians per year (Luxner). However, some, like Nathan Englander, live there for a while and then return: The author made Aliyah, “ascended” to living

15 in Israel in 1996, while lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians still seemed more conceivable, and returned to the US during the Second Intifada in 2001, when he “committed” yerida, “descended” back into exile (“N.E. Opens Up”). Yerida used to be heavily stigmatized within Israeli society, but this stigma has diminished greatly over the years (Harris 52) as the nationalist pressure usually experienced within an Israeli environment increasingly subsided (46), but might flare up again due to the recurrent conflicts in the region.

While Israel cannot be forgotten when talking about Jewish identity and literature worldwide, the focus here lies on US-American Jewish identity. This essentially means Ashkenazi Jews, who make up the vast majority of US-American Jews, which produces an even greater disparity than in Israel, where they just make up about half of the population, but still represent the dominant group. However, other groups and subgroups and their cultural traditions brought to the US can be distinguished – and those influenced each other to a degree. Hana Wirth-Nasher and Michael P. Kramer summarize the history of Jewish immigration into the US as such:

The history of the Jews in [the continents of] America is not linear. It unfolds as successive, largely discrete waves of immigration – roughly speaking, Spanish-Portuguese6 (1654–1830), German (1830– 1880), East European (1880–1924), and post-Holocaust (1940 to the present) – and different tales of accommodation and resistance. Each wave of immigrants brought along, besides a common but abstract sense of peoplehood, its own cultural baggage – e.g. its own language (Ladino, German, Yiddish), its own religious and cultural traditions (Sephardi, Reform, Hassidic, and Misnagdic), its own particular collective memories (expulsion, emancipation, pogroms) – and each produced a literature reflecting both its distinct heritage and its peculiar experience of acculturation. (“Introduction” 3)

At the time of its creation, the United States provided something truly unique, an interesting offer for Jews: While in the monarchies of Europe, Jews were at best tolerated and at worst killed or expelled, in the nascent republic, they were granted actual, unalienable rights, a stance confirmed by then-President Washington himself in 1790 in response to (Sephardic) Jewish leader Moses Saixas: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights” (Schappes 80). And although the United States continued to deny these rights to their main source of physical labor, slaves, Jews were, at least nominally, equals. Michael P. Kramer argues that the Jews were given “a new, secular narrative” (“Beginnings and Ends”), where they would not be exiles anymore – in fact, this offered a subject position where Jews could be hailed as Americans and not lose their identity. At the time, even in the relatively tolerant

6 In the territory of the Thirteen Colonies, Ashkenazim were present too and outnumbered Sephardis by the mid- eighteenth century, although the Sephardim themselves and their rite retained more influence then. (Libo 107)

16 Ottoman Empire, Jews were Dhimmis, which legally set them apart from other Ottoman subjects; in the US, they enjoyed full legal equality. Of course, anti-Semitism has still existed over the centuries and manifested again and again, like when General Ulysses S. Grant issued the order to expel the Jews from his controlled territory during the US Civil War, which was quickly overturned7, and most recently when right-wing terrorists attacked synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, but never to the degree of (governmentally sanctioned) pogroms, (actual) expulsions, dispossession or forced conversion, which, among other factors, made the US a land of opportunity, also for Jews.

This freedom and opportunity initially led to a syncretism of Jewish thought with US-American (relatively) liberal ideology. According to Susannah Heschel, “[i]n the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish thinkers spoke of America as the great hope for the future of Judaism because its democratic principles embodied the true moral sense essence of Judaism” (31). At this time in history, many US-American Jews opposed the (secular) ideology of Zionism, especially those of the Reform Movement8: “The Jews are not a nation but a religious community […] America is our Zion. Here, in the home of religious liberty, we have aided in founding this new Zion” (Sarna, “Converts” 189). Much before the Jewish Reform leaders at the time, “Protestant thinkers, well before the colonial period, had identified the New Land with the Bible, and themselves with Israel” (Heschel 31). These WASP (and usually Puritan) theologians were, like most Christians used to be, eschatologist millenarists, and expected the Jews to fulfil certain destinies before the Christian apocalypse and were fascinated by them (Kramer, “Beginnings and Ends” 16f), which might have helped the Jews find acceptance.

The great immigration waves led to changes within the Jewish community itself. With the rising number of German and Eastern European Ashkenazim, they started dominating US Jewry (Schoenberg), which led to some grievances among the numerically eclipsed Sephardim. With the great influx, new (imported) religious movements started to flourish, such as Reform Judaism or the Conservative Movement. The former, nowadays the largest Jewish denomination in the US, according to a comprehensive study done by the Pew Research Center in 2013 (Lugo et al., 10), was conceptualized as a way to reconcile Jewish faith with the modern world. Among other innovations, Reform Judaism did away with strict dietary laws, viewing

7 For a close look at the odd historical issue, see Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews. 8 This changed after the establishment of the state of Israel.

17 them as products of their time and not relevant anymore, they started to recognize persons of Jewish descent as Jewish even if their mother is not, called their places of worship temples instead of synagogues – also to express that they did not long to return to Israel anymore, having found their home, and nowadays have women and LGBTIQ* rabbis (“History”). The latter, the Conservative Jews, have tried to find a middle ground between integrating and keeping traditions intact since their conception. Ergo, they follow halakha (Jewish religious law, lit. “the way”), keep track of matrilinear Jewish descent, follow the dietary rules and somewhat oppose intermarriage to non-Jews. They received an influx by newly immigrated Jews when the rather Orthodox wave of Eastern European Jews emigrated to the US – who did not embrace the liberal Reform Judaism at all and wanted to stuck to their values (“Conservative Judaism”). Nowadays, Conservative Jews are still the second largest Jewish denomination (Lugo et al., 10), but their numbers are increasingly dwindling. In recent years, they have become more open to interfaith marriages and gay (male) rabbis, which might have put more traditional followers off (“Conservative Judaism”). These disappointed might find a place within the third-largest, but fast-growing group – which is not a distinct group with a unified structure such as the Reform and Conservative Jews, but a bundle of groups – the Orthodox. That label started as an ascription by others, namely, the more liberal Jews who gave up on obligatory rituals and halakhic laws and mocked the “backward” Jews, but eventually the term became a proud traditionalist self-designation (“Orthodox Judaism”). The Haredim, the so-called Ultra-Orthodox, are the most numerous Orthodox sub-group in the US. Haredi men are the easily recognizable bearded Jews with black hats and coats, while the women modestly repress their “female attributes” with wigs and long skirts. What quite literally sets the Ultra-Orthodox apart is their utter refusal of integration and contact to gentiles and non- Haredi Jews. Each Haredi community has their own yeshivot (education institutions), organizations and synagogues to keep “it” in the community (Weiss). An important subsect of the Haredim are the pietist Hasidim, who greatly focus on Torah, like many of the other Haredim (who are also called Litvishe or Misnagdim or Yeshivishe in opposition to the Hasidim), as well as Kabbalistic mysteries. Some of them are isolationist, but the well-known subgroup Chabad, also known as Lubavitcher Hasidic Movement, try to “missionize” non- Orthodox Jews away from their “ungodly ways” back to their interpretation of “true” Judaism, and enjoy great influence around the world (“Hasidic Movement”). Additionally, the Modern Orthodox, who are quite traditionalist but more integrative than the Haredim, make up about a third of the Orthodox Jews in the US (“Orthodox Judaism”). The groups described here are just the major groups in the US today and more varieties exist. Nathan Englander himself grew up

18 in an unspecified Orthodox community and later became secular. His work focuses on many kinds of Jews, who always have to be kept in mind in relation to the others. The Jewish subworlds appear as a fascinating culture full of individual groups pulling one way or the other or groups being pulled by others or by discourse surrounding integration, assimilation – or anti- Semitism.

Jonathan D. Sarna attests that although anti-Semitism existed in the US as it did in most parts of the world, Jews in the United States fought back much more than their European brethren. No matter what “Americans” thought of them, they counted themselves as equal. Influential reform rabbi of the 19th century Isaac Meyer Wise boasted to be very irritating and combative instead of just bearing the abuse like many European Jews did (Sarna, “American Anti- Semitism” 124). The US-American Constitution and its inherent religious pluralism have shielded Jews in a very inclusive way (125), which made it easier for Jews to be US-American and for their compatriots to identify Jews as US-American. However, anti-Semitism still remained in the mainstream and peaked in the first half of the 20th century, when Jews started to take up more official positions, integrate more closely (122f), and increasingly shaped culture and identity, among others, by establishing terms such as “the Melting Pot” (Gleason, 485). In response to this opening of society for certain (white, non-Protestant) minorities, high- prestige universities, colleges, and even hospitals and private clubs as well as other establishments implemented Jewish quotas to safeguard white Protestants (Diner, The Jews 116). However, the ever-present anti-Semitism was about to greatly diminish and come to be viewed as “un-American” soon. Jeffrey C. Alexander describes that

during the 1930s, in the context of the Nazi persecution of German Jews, [...] there emerged in the United States a historically unprecedented attack on antisemitism. It was not that Christians suddenly felt genuine affection for, or identification with, those whom they had vilified for countless centuries as the killers of Christ. It was that the logic of symbolic association had dramatically and fatefully changed. Nazism was increasingly viewed as the vile enemy […], and the most hated enemies of Nazism were the Jews. (42)

During this time, the phrase “Judeo-Christian tradition” started to be used in today’s sense, as the culmination of Western democracy, according to Mark Silk, Professor of Religion at Trinity College (65f). When the US entered World War II, the close attachment of Jews to “American” narratives intensified further, as historian Edward S. Shapiro delineates:

The war had diminished any conflict [Jews] might have perceived between their identities as Americans and as Jews. […] The war saw the merging Jewish and American fates. Nazi Germany was the greatest

19 enemy of both Jewry and the United States. […] Anti-Semitism was no longer merely one of many American prejudices. Since anti-Semitism was the key element in the ideology of Nazi Germany, the American anti-Semite was in effect allying himself with America’s mortal foe. To Jews of the postwar era, their longstanding claim that anti-Semitism was un-American appeared more convincing than ever. (16)

Aside from later associations of Jews with Communism, Anti-Semitism stopped being “mainstream” then – and was mostly left to the loose coalition of right-wing groups that today consists of white supremacists, anti-government insurrectionists, Christian fundamentalists, manosphere adherents, Confederate revisionists, and other reactionaries that make up the American far right – instead, the focus of prejudice and inclusion was transferred to “non- white” minorities. However, since the right-wing fringe groups have recently received a boost by those Republicans who try to score cheap political points by dangerously swimming in their wake, things have gotten more heated. Former president Trump’s reliance on these agents appears to have encouraged individuals clearly influenced by these groups to take atrocious actions. His refusal to distance himself from them, and actions of his orbit, for example, congresswoman’s Marjorie Taylor Green’s comment about Jewish space lasers starting wildfires, have put the alarmingly xenophobic, but also anti-Semitic underbelly of the US into the international and national spotlight again. However, Jews see themselves as less of victims of discrimination than several American “others,” such as black people, Muslims or the LGBTIQ* community, according to the Pew Research study mentioned above (Lugo et al., 15). Yet, according to the study in 2013, about 43% of Jews thought they face a lot of discrimination (105), which may have substantially risen in subsequent years.

Which values make up “Jewish” identity in the United States today according to Jews themselves? The officials at the Pew Research Center study surveyed Americans who consider themselves Jewish in 2013 and also asked whether being Jewish was a matter of ancestry, culture, or religion. Six in ten consider ancestry and/or having grown up in the culture to be essential, and 1 in 4 add being religious to this combination, while only 15% consider it a matter of being purely religious (Lugo et al., 54). When asked whether certain attributes were essential to being Jewish, just rather few considered eating Jewish foods (14%) and following halakha (19%) to be as such. Just 29% consider it essential to be part of a Jewish community, while roughly half find intellectual curiosity to be central to these “people of the Book.” 42% emphasize a certain sense of humor as centrally Jewish, while just a bit more (43%) consider caring about Israel essential. More than half (56%) see it as a central contemporary Jewish tenet to work for justice and equality, while 69% see leading an ethical life as Jewish obligation.

20 Interestingly, most Jews questioned (94%) consider being Jewish compatible with breaking the Sabbath and a substantial number (89%) regard it as acceptable to be a Jew and to strongly criticize Israel. 68% deem being a Jew as well as an atheist compatible, while 34% think a Jew can believe in Jesus Christ as savior and remain a Jew (Lugo et al., 57f). However, the most essential unifying notion of being Jewish appears to be “Remembering the Holocaust” – 73% agree on this (Lugo et al., 57). It follows that among US-American Jews “orthodox values” have fallen relatively out of fashion while less religious, rather secular, but not always entirely, cultural markers have become more of a common denominator.

Chief among these common denominators appears to be the horrible crime sometimes called the Holocaust that caused massive cultural trauma: The Shoah9, or at least remembrance of the Shoah appears to have become a central identity-establishing event for Jews.10 Sander L. Gilman, who invokes the center-periphery model of Diaspora studies, proposes that the Jewish “center” transferred from Jerusalem/the imagined home of Israel to the Shoah, which accordingly moved other notions and sources of identification to a new “periphery” (6). However, especially in an American contest, today’s centrality of the Shoah has not always been present: For the first two decades after World War II, the American Jewish community might not have focused on the Shoah much. Historian Peter Novick, for instance, relates that Jewish leaders rejected a proposal for a Holocaust memorial in New York in the late 1940s, and highlights that they did not want to memorialize their victimhood at that point (qtd. in Alexander 214). This view has been vehemently contested by Hasia R. Diner: She points out various sources that testify to the fact that “the Jews of the United States created works of liturgy, pageantry, drama, imaginative literature, sermons, pedagogical material, graphic arts, and scholarship to describe the catastrophe that had so recently engulfed their people” (“Before” 84f). For example, she points out that Jewish American writer’s Leon Uris’ bestseller novel Exodus (1958) prominently features concentration camp memories (90) and that A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954) by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg was dedicated to the murdered Jews in Europe (89). Yet, Deborah Lipstadt describes that while some commemorations happened, they “were generally attended only by survivors” (“America”

9 Outside of quotes and unless it makes sense not to, I use the term Shoah, partly because it is a Hebrew term chosen by Jews, partly because the term Holocaust has been used before the Nazi industrial slaughter to refer to massacres, partly because it is sometimes broadened to include other Nazi victims such as homosexuals and Romani people, and partly because the term has been appropriated and relativized to refer to other violations. 10 As well as to the (Western) world as a whole and in particular Germans, which is, for instance, criticized by contemporary Jewish intellectuals such as Max Czollek.

21 195), as outsiders felt like they were intruding. It appears as sensible to assume a synthesis of the views to have taken place, where solidarity with the Shoah victims was common among Jews and commemoration was growing tentatively. Furthermore, due to the non-homogenous nature of groups, different members might just estimate the commemoration differently. Diner admits that “postwar American Jews had to create a culture of commemoration from scratch” (“Before” 84), which, compared to commemoration today, must seem miniscule.

According to Julian Levinson, the previously mentioned Greenberg and Howe collection of Yiddish stories was part of a broader “re-celebration” of Yiddish, which had increasingly ceased to be spoken among 2nd and 3rd generation Jewish immigrants, but started to be seen as a unifying Jewish symbol, building toward a common US-American Jewish identity:

The American Jewish community, haunted by the Holocaust and dispossessed of the language of its forbears, was transforming into a self-conscious subculture defined through a connection to an ‘imagined’ Jewish community—imagined both in Benedict Anderson’s sense of a community defined more by the idea of commonality than by direct experience, and in the literary sense of a community whose self-understanding derives from the stories it tells about itself. (173)

In wider American society, the post-war boom had little space for processing painful events that happened far away to non-Americans, and even some protagonists of the US war narrative, the G.I.s who saw the horrors of extermination camps, were rather discouraged from discussing awful negative topics like that (Lipstadt, “America” 197). Instead, a general trend appears to have emerged to put a positive spin on the Holocaust, even turning The Diary of Anne Frank into a Broadway production (1955) with scant markers of Jewish identity, but lots of “can-do” attitude and hope (197). Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld argues that through the book, stage and film versions, “more Americans are familiar with Anne Frank's story than with any other single narrative of the war years” (52), yet stresses that these are Americanized versions that overshadow Frank’s Jewishness and conceal any depiction of Nazi crime (52f). According to Rosenfeld, the wider US-American public engaged with the Shoah as “a terrible event, yes, but ultimately not tragic or depressing; an experience shadowed by the specter of a cruel death but at the same time not without the ability to inspire, console, uplift” (53). As a society, the US were not about to do the grief work Jewish groups were practicing already, which comes as no surprise considering how many people in the US cannot engage with their racist and genocidal history even today. Hence, the production of cultural artifacts that do address these issues and their consequences and reach consumers who would not ordinarily engage with them is so important.

22 Another factor that diminished focus on the Shoah was West Germany being bolstered up as a bulwark against the “red menace,” so there was no particular desire by those in power to promote an engagement with the recent past, fearing subversive demoralization (Lipstadt, “America” 198f). The anti-communism of the post-war era did not turn outwards, but inwards too, in the form of McCarthyism, and official Jewish organizations did their utmost to distance themselves from actual Jewish communists in the US to not fall victim to Cold War paranoia sentiments (201f). The trial and execution of the couple Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union, especially created an atmosphere of fear among older Jews who got to know the harsher sense of difference before the US nominally became anti-anti-Semitic (Brodkin 9). At this time, “being a Jew meant being [...] not really political but Democrat, pro-union, antimanagement, and secular in the way one saw the world” (9), which seemed rather suspicious in the eyes of conservatives watchdogs.

However, the 1960s brought a reversal, and the Shoah started to gather a lot of attention in American public life through various means. For instance, the English translation of later Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s book Night (1960) about his concentration camp experiences was very visible (Diner, The Jews 342). Also, in 1960, Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, and in 1962, the man guilty of co-organizing the industrial murder of six million Jews was hanged. British historian David Cesarani notes that “thanks to the trial, awareness of the genocidal assault against the Jews was conveyed to corners of the United States where it had never been paid more than momentary attention” (335). The trial was covered extensively by media and Hannah Arendt’s coverage especially created a stir among Jews and US-American intellectuals (Lipstadt, “America” 205f). Her criticism of Jewish leaders in Nazi Eastern Europe who were in the difficult position of collaborating with their oppressors (Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial 125), criticism of Israel as well as aspects of the trial (124), and her portrayal of Eichmann as a detached functionary, the famous “banality of evil,” did not sit well with Jewish circles (Lipstadt, “America” 206; Cesarani 349f) and an US-American public that had coded Nazis as an absolute, monstrous evil (Alexander 39). Diner notes that Eichmann’s trial, along with non- Jewish politicians beginning to participate in Holocaust commemoration, facilitated the public and central notion of US-American “Holocaust discourse,” as they “further opened up the floodgate” (The Jews 264).

Eventually, in the late 1960s, the water of awareness really began to flow, when a new Jewish consciousness, a “pride,” emerged, and memory became increasingly important. Tresa Grauer

23 describes this change in attitude firstly happening during a time of the more general nationwide rise of what is sometimes called identity politics, as in, recognition and empowerment not as universalist human per se, but as a member of a specific group and all that entails (270f; Kruks, 85). Secondly, she links it to the Jewish religious renewal movement Havurah, which was an egalitarian, pacifist and transdenominational, but highly ritualistic and mystic “New Age Judaism” that enabled more Jews to embrace their spiritual side as well as heavily influenced the Reform and Conservative Jewish congregations (Sarna, American Judaism 319-322), and thirdly, to the “Jewish” victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 (Grauer 271). Against the backdrop of the Eichmann trial, increasing criticism of the Catholic Church’s (in-)action during World War II, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, “Holocaust” awareness was high among Jews when the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors started to intensify (Sarna, American Judaism 333f). Additionally, the status of Israel concerned Jews of all denominations, which united them quite strongly (Diner, The Jews 324). She asserts that

The image of a victorious Israel facing a seemingly unending chain of crises helped enable American Jews to talk openly about Jewish identity, concerns, and interests. They hid less often behind the veil of universalistic rhetoric, although their commitment to general causes did not diminish. Rather, they felt emboldened to highlight the Jewish element of their agenda, even as they advocated for and with others. (323)

The overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War emboldened US-American Jews to speak more openly and confidently about the Holocaust – however, the admiration toward Israel revealed faultlines soon, due to “the realities of the occupation, Palestinian demands for independence, and the devastating Yom Kippur war” (Heschel 43). Nonetheless, by then, the Shoah was already a distinct part of American Jewish discourse, as “The Holocaust,” which became the popular term in the Sixties (Sarna, American Judaism 334). The newfound confidence might be well-exemplified by the Bitburg controversy, when survivor Elie Wiesel criticized Ronald Reagan’s visit of a military graveyard containing the remains, among others, of SS soldiers. According to Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld, this event marked the steadily growing moral strength and confidence survivors came to enjoy in public discourse (66).

Along with the focus on the Shoah and Israel among American Jews, feminism as well as an increase in spirituality emerged as major themes Jews engaged with in the latter part of the last century (Sarna, American Judaism 338). In the Seventies, the first women rabbis were ordained in the Reform and Reconstructionist denominations, while the Conservatives somewhat reluctantly followed in the Eighties (342). And although most Orthodox Jewish groups

24 absolutely refuse to ordain anyone other than traditional male rabbis according to halakha, (second wave) feminist efforts have left their mark on US-American Orthodoxy as well. For instance, Orthodox women received more and more education, leading to equal lengths of Judaic education among women and men, which eventually opened the door for the acceptance of female (Modern) Orthodox Talmudic students who were now able to interpret Jewish law for the first time (344). Ergo, family units are (in some cases) changing, for example in Hasidic communities: Traditionally, the man would devote his time to Talmudic study, while the woman would work an “appropriate” job to support him (Morris). But now, an Orthodox couple (of some denominations) might decide to switch the traditional roles, as happens in Englander’s novel kaddish.com without any fuss. While the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have embraced genders other than the traditional binary and the Conservatives at least allow for divergent sexual orientations, most Orthodox (official) stances strictly reject LGBTIQ* persons, often citing halakhic reasons, yet many rabbis condemn discrimination (“Stances”). According to Diner, the (manifold) Orthodox communities are split along political lines where the relatively more leftish Modern Orthodox have sought to cautiously integrate with the outside world, criticized by the right “Yeshiva World” who have doubled down on strict traditional adherence (The Jews 311f). Yet, exceptions exist, such as Orthodox rabbis coming out as gay, but those (and their actions) are condemned by more stringent officials, also those of the Modern Orthodox persuasion (“Stances”).

Anticipated by the various Havurah manifestations and “how-to-self-Jew” works such as The Jewish Catalog (1973), the religious renewal mentioned above, i.e. the focus on spirituality and smaller worship circles, began to spread across the denominations from the Seventies onwards (Sarna, American Judaism 323f). To many post-war children, previous, more traditional religious worship seemed too formal, not participatory enough, so worship became more focused toward the self and the family unit rather than toward a larger group in a synagogue or a temple (324). While worship turned inward, numerous Reform Jews re-adopted more traditional Jewish customs and traditions (324f), as did Conservatives (325f). Within the latter, the younger members came to be more observant than their immediate predecessors (326). The other denominations’ general return to religious observation was grist for the mills of the Orthodox as they felt vindicated – in fact, those Orthodox groups who accepted outsiders saw an influx of non-Orthodox Jews returning or simply joining their congregations (326). Additionally, the Haredim became more confident in their outward representation, as they increasingly began to wear their skullcaps in non-religious situations, to officially give their

25 children traditional names, and to gather in rather public religious celebrations (327). Heshel adds that the increase in religious observance “brought with it a new valorization of physical expressions of Jewishness and, concomitantly, of the Jewish body” (41). However, while Jewish bodies became more and more visible and more observant in their religious practice, assimilation of Jews into wider society and intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews exploded (Sarna, American Judaism 324).

Within some Jews there exists “a long-standing fear that Jews in America are doomed to assimilate, that they simply cannot survive in an environment of religious freedom and church- state separation” (Sarna, “American Judaism” 137). As mentioned above, starting from the Seventies, worship turned inward and was increasingly detached from synagogues and temples in wider Jewish circles. This freedom as well as the more general freedom to perhaps leave Judaism behind altogether offered by life in the US has led many Jews to question whether Judaism’s future existence can be assured (137). US-American sociologist Egon Mayer11, who compares statistical data regarding Jewish intermarriage to Gentiles between the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) of 1970 and the corresponding survey of 1990, remarks that intermarriage rates “nearly doubled […] from the end of the fifties to the midsixties (sic), and nearly tripled from the midsixties (sic) to the early seventies” (271). That amounts to roughly 8 percent of the Jewish married population in 1970 married to a Gentile, which rose to 28% in 1990, while another 4% intermarried Gentiles converted to Judaism (276f). These developments pushed the less halakhically exact denominations, especially the Reform Movement, who clearly recognized that intermarriage was on the rise, to facilitate conversion for spouses and even for any willing converts (Mayer, 272-274).

Fishman notes that to many US-American Jews, who are disproportionally well-educated, the notion to pursue marriage within the cultural group as well as condemning intermarriage may appear racist and un-American (“Relatively Speaking” 303). Additionally, the idea of a Jewish nation or the notion of a distinctive people in the racial sense makes many non-Orthodox US- American Jews feel uneasy (305). However, more traditionally-inclined, tendentially older people wonder whether their grandchildren will still be Jewish (317) as numerous intermarried couples “mix” their traditions: “The great majority of mixed-marrieds incorporate substantial Christian celebrations into their family life” (309). Indeed, the Pew Report of 2013 indicates

11 Mayer was born on the so-called “Kastner train” and thereby closely escaped the Holocaust.

26 that just a fifth of Jews married to a gentile raise their children as Jews while merely a fourth raise their children partly Jewish (Lugo et al., 9). However, there are some indications that intermarriage brings quite a few non-Jewish spouses into the Jewish fold: The older (1990) NJPS datasets indicate a trend toward growth of the absolute number of spouses converting to Judaism, which at least compensates for some “apostasy” away from official denominations (qtd. in Mayer 280f).

Contrary to the more liberally-inclined US-American Jews, many Orthodox, and especially the stricter Haredi Jews, have adapted to US-American Society with the polar opposite of assimilation: isolation. The 1990 NJPS indicates that the trend toward rising intermarriage rates actually started to reverse for the entirety of the Orthodox between 1985 and 1990 (qtd. in Mayer 280). However, as mentioned above, there is a split between Orthodox communities along liberal and conservative lines: While Modern Orthodoxy appears to be more open to intermarital conversion, considering, for instance, the conversion of Ivanka Trump, Haredi Orthodox seems to remain much more closed off and insular. According to Lubavitcher Rabbi Eliezer Shemtov, the marriage of a Jewish man, as that appears to be the standard decider in his worldview, to a non-Jewish woman, is not only forbidden, but not even possible, as Jewish marriage is presented as a divine reunion of two parts of a soul unit belonging together (“On Intermarriage”). In order to achieve this reunion, many Haredim enter arranged marriages set up by professional matchmakers. Although Lubavitcher Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe emphasizes that these are not forced marriages (“Arranged”), expectations from family members and their community – often the only community these spouses-to-be know – may pressure young people into an oppressive, sexually abusive and loveless structure, as was the case with a young woman sociologist Lynn Davidman spoke to (167).

However, regardless of whether assimilation, conversion, or isolation are employed, the US- American Jewish population appeared to be declining steadily. The 2000-2001 NJPS shows lower birthrates than needed to replenish the existing population as well as an increasingly old Jewry (Kotler-Berkovitz et al., viii). Yet, the most recent American Jewish Population Estimates report by Saxe et al. at Brandeis University puts the number of American Jews at 7.6 million (2), which might indicate a growth compared to Pew’s estimate based on 2011’s numbers at 6.7 (5), but it remains difficult to tell exactly, as the official census does not ask for religious affiliation, which leaves estimates as the only option. The spike might also be a

27 manifestation of baby boomers, which indicates a possible decrease after their demise. Jonathan Sarna observes that time and time again, Jews have adapted to challenging circumstances or re-found their faith (“American Judaism” 140), so the reports of impending Jewish disappearance might be exaggerated. Indeed, “it may still be possible for the current ‘vanishing’ generation of American Jews to be succeeded by another ‘vanishing’ generation, and then still another” (154), and so on.

3.3 Jewish American Literature

There are Jews who are classified or classify themselves by certain categories, discourses or symbols, but it appears impossible to find a universally accepted, essential definition of what a Jew is. Yet, there is an overarching imagined community and various sub-communities that claim membership to being Jewish, in an international, but specifically in a US-American context as well. US-American Jewish history and its themes, tentatively discussed above, have shaped and been shaped by a corresponding culture. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi even elevates the artistic production above academic history, when speaking about the Shoah: “I have no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the historian's anvil, but in the novelist's crucible” (98). Similarly, Jewish writers have helped to construct a Jewish American culture as well as the US-American culture itself. In the following I will give a brief outline of Jewish American literature which is by no means exhaustive, in some areas tragically incomplete, yet the overview is necessary to understand Englander’s oeuvre and it also paved the way for Englander himself.

An essential answer to define what is and is not Jewish American literature appears to be as difficult to arrive at as with the definition of being a Jew. Wirth-Nesher argues that “there is no consensus nor is it likely that there ever will be one about defining the subject under study.” (3) For example, one of the first Jewish men who rose to prominence as a playwright in the U.S., Mordecai Noah, mostly wrote melodramas lacking any Jewish subject matter, as did his peers at the time (“United States Literature” 278). Does his being Jewish make his melodramas Jewish American literature on ethnologically determined basis alone? Wirth-Nesher relates other opinions, such as a Jewishness of literature characterized by themes, (3) one measured by religiosity or one based on being written in a Jewish language, (4) all of which can be called

28 into question in one way or another. Additionally, Wirth-Nesher mentions “a profound consciousness of Jewish history” (5) as a possible marker of Jewish literature.

The late US-American literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman elaborates a bundle of theses associated with Jewish imagination: Firstly, a dependency on (sacred) text, where the text is not always unified and stratified, allowing for divergence of opinion, which enables freedom within the Jewish writing tradition, yet restricts it by being centered ultimately in God (459f). Here, heavyweight author Cynthia Ozick agrees with Hartman, as she considers only those texts as “centrally Jewish” that are rooted in Jewish liturgy (28). Secondly, there is an importance placed upon remembrance and a tendency toward willingly or unwillingly standing in the tradition of older texts that seeps into secular thinking as well (Hartman, 461f). Thirdly, Hartman asserts the fear of desecrating God’s name by creating literature: If new texts stand in the tradition of older texts, they could technically be commentary to the holy scriptures, giving the holy words new referents, thereby possibly acting blasphemously (462f). Fourthly, bypassing the strict fear of profanation, Hartman characterizes a distinctive, usually self- deprecating Jewish humor12 that often is aimed at ridiculing and thereby equalizing uneven power relations (464). Finally, Hartman emphasizes a caution of messianic and apocalyptic narratives all too present in Christian thought tradition, where there is a higher focus on scripture and its exegesis than on a redeemer figure, where the exegesis communicatively interrelates (465f).

We also have to remember that Jewish literature does not exist in a vacuum and that other actors influence its protagonists and interdependencies between wider literature categories, such as “US-American” literature and wider culture, exist. For instance, the “forgotten” first female Jewish author Cora Wilburn, recently rediscovered by Jonathan Sarna, was a Spiritualist for some time and engaged heavily with the wider US-American phenomenon, before being considered a “Jewish” writer later (Sarna, “The Forgetting” 77). According to Levinson, the Sephardic poet Emma Lazarus, who immortalized herself as the author of the Statue of Liberty’s inscription sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883), wrote “poems in an Emersonian way” (3). Then, with the influx of Ashkenazi immigrants, new decidedly “immigrant voices” entered the stage. Levinson lists Mary Antin, the immigrant author from the Pale of Settlement, who

12 The Jewish humor that is inferred here is usually the specific Yiddish/Eastern European Ashkenazim “shtetl” humor tradition, although it totum pro parte ignores, for instance, Sephardic tradition.

29 “internalizes the language of Transcendentalism” (3). He next focuses on Anzia Yezierska, Antin’s contemporary, who distinctively wrote about the immigrant worker experience yet uses callbacks to Puritan John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”13 (98) and delved into the anarcha- feminism of Emma Goldman and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (95). This list of interdependencies between “Jewish American” and “other” US- American literature could be continued forever. Arguably, many works could be categorized interchangeably, and the Jewish contribution to US-American culture itself appears enormous.

The apparently timeless anxiety of assimilation and subsequent disappearance of Jewry actualized by the influx of more orthodox Ashkenazim in the United States found expression in literary works. Similarly to Antin and Yezierska, immigrant socialist Abraham Cahan wrote about immigrant experiences, with (publication) help and recognition by the influential (gentile) novelist William Dean Howells (“United States Literature,” 279). In his seminal classic The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the previously mentioned problematic nature of assimilation in conflict with tradition plays a central role (Cronin & Berger, xvii).

The immigrant experience is closely linked with life in poverty, and the second-generation immigrant writers raised speaking English gave literary expression to their experience growing up in the United States. According to the late professor emeritus Milton Henry Hindus, foreign- born immigrant writers displayed a somewhat thankful and positive attitude toward the US, while many second-generation Jewish writers appear more accusatory toward and alienated by their birth country, and (at least in part) mechanically reiterated Communist tropes in the Twenties and Thirties (“United States Literature,” 281). Out of the many “proletarian” writers of this time such as Michael Gold, some Jewish writers stand out: For instance, Hindus characterizes Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep (1930) almost as art for art’s sake, although of course it remains a testimony of the social conditions faced by immigrants growing up in New York slums (281). Additionally, Nathanael West, who did not write about Jewish topics as much as others, stands out as an early iteration of a Jewish writer who covered the more generalized feeling of alienation in wider US-American society, often humorously, and employed fantastical elements in contrast to the more naturalism-inclined proletarian writers (281).

13 From the sermon “A Model of Christian Clarity” (1630).

30 In the period leading up to the Nazi party’s advent to power in Germany, and in the face of the “exploded” numbers of Jewish immigrants who lived primarily on the East Coast, anti- Semitism increased in wider US-American society, as well as in its literary cycles, shared by the likes of Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or even the Jewish lyricist Gertrude Stein (279). However, as Nazi Germany was increasingly coded as the enemy, Nazi sympathizers began to retract, such as Thomas Wolfe, who wrote a scathing report about his mid-1930s travel to the Reich (279f).

After World War II, Jewish G.I.s returned home, McCarthyism rose on the cusp of the Cold War, and a third generation of immigrant Jewish writers came of intellectual age. According to literary critic Hillel Halkin, these writers tended to be college-educated, not only born in the US, but raised by those born in the US, away from the ghetto, coming from more middle-class homes (“United States Literature,” 282). They felt increasingly alienated by wider US- American society, the preceding second generation, and its “vulgar materialism” (282). Interestingly, as the particularly “Jewish” sense of alienation spread to the general US- American individual, “the Jew” became “a genuine culture hero of the times” (282), albeit a mocking and ironic one. According to Halkin, the alienation Jews experienced likely stems from the vestigial feeling of being in exile as well as the paranoid philistine hostility of McCarthyism many US-American intellectuals struggled with (282). According to Cronin and Berger, the post-war writers, such as, Saul Bellow, Alan Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, Philip Roth, or the bestseller author Leon Uris, “wrote with extraordinary passion” (xixf) about

themes of anti-Semitism in the workplace, Jewish social life, intellectual life in America’s universities, religious crisis, assimilation, the Jewish humanistic legacy, the disappearance of Yiddishkeit, political disillusionment, retreat into the private realm, consumerism, McCarthyism, black/Jewish race relations, and a host of related topics. (xx)

Halkin describes the similarities between three novelist giants’ protagonists, Bellow’s Herzog from the eponymous novel (1964), Malamud’s Levin from A New Life (1962) and Roth’s Portnoy from Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), as he notes their similarity to the shlemiel character, as they are unlucky underdogs who fight the society they cannot adjust to with ironic humor, fail harshly, but get back on their feet (282). These representations would go on to be highly influential, for instance, for Woody Allen, whose shlemiel characters have become iconic on

31 the big screen, and have shaped a certain image of Jewish men associated with shlemiel features.

The social changes culminating in the Sixties and Seventies also had repercussions in the Jewish American literary world. Women writers, such as the much-decorated Jewish- American-focused Cynthia Ozick or the influential feminist critic and writer Susan Sontag entered the literary stage. Furthermore, as has been discussed before, addressing the Shoah became a central topic in these years. Some Jewish writing about the Shoah emphasizes the totality, according to Adorno, the “caesura” or “collapse of civilization,” the incisive cut of a clearly distinct before and after, such as some works by Bellow, Malamud, and Roth (Cronin and Berger, xxii).

These writers have been very influential on later generations of writers, as have writers such as Ozick and Chaim Potok, who, in the words of Ozick herself, produced texts that are definitively “centrally Jewish” (28), that is, focused on the liturgical elements of Jewish religion, or at least alluding to them (28). Sylvia Barack Fishman noted that writers like Potok “pioneered the extensive exploration of Jewish spirituality in American fiction” (“American Fiction” 36) while Ozick and others “developed and intensified the treatment of these issues” (36).

Andrew Furman describes the time from the Seventies onwards as “bear market years for Jewish American fiction” (177), a recession (in influential writers stepping onto the public stage with success) possibly brought about by the overwhelming presence of “giants” such as the three writers mentioned above and Cynthia Ozick (177). Furman argues that in a titanic fashion, they “largely devoured” (177) their immediate successors in the Seventies. However, Furman also notes that from the Eighties onward, a “literary renaissance” (177) led to the emergence of writers such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon or Nathan Englander.

At the beginning of the Nineties, Fishman notes that the emerging generation of writers often draws from the great pool of the inner side of Jewish life (“American Fiction” 39). It appears like these Jewish authors focus less on earlier “immigrant Jews vs. alien society” conflicts but turn inward, confident to do so. Fishman notes that earlier literature represented Orthodox Jews as “cranky old men or force-feeding mothers and aunts” (39), while the authors emerging in the Nineties present the more traditional, religious side of (some) Jews’ life in a more complex fashion. Subsequently, Lewis Fried describes contemporary US Jewish literature as

32

a colloquy between an America in process and a Judaism in change. This literature expresses the interplay amongst self, community, and heritages. This body of letters is also a dialogue with theology in large, and theologies in small, whether found in text, or in a determined seeking for engagement with God. Often, American-Jewish literature presents these complex relationships as the comportment of a Jewish ethic with the American present: the belief that justice and compassion transcend the mores and self- interest of the historical moment. The strong relay between Jewish existence, culture, and God is self- reflective, and communally defining. (“United States Literature,” 284)

The literature negotiating the dialogue that constitutes itself and with it Jewish American identity, has changed massively from its beginnings. Fried suggests that the immigrant “exotic” Yiddishkeit has become complementary to a national US “identity,” while Yiddishkeit itself has changed too, as it has become more egalitarian, more “democratic, pluralistic, and diversifying” (285). This, however, does not mean that the rich tradition that Yiddishkeit is suffused with has “assimilated,” as it remains, just as the previously mentioned younger Jews who consider marriage restricted to the community as “un-American” do not cease being Jews because of that.

According to Fried, current authors take “Judaism and Jewishness as the inescapable context of life [where] such a framework embraces both continuity and an imagined unity” (284). In many cases, Jewish writers are far removed from any personal immigrant experience14, and instead focus on other topics that stir debate: “the assertions that Zionism is the end of Diaspora; that the Holocaust demands a new understanding of surety, theology, and politics; and that America is not simply a new chapter of Diaspora, but a new beginning in which Jewish text in a borrowed tongue redefines the Jewish past and opens up a unique future” (284). While new and old notions of an “American Zion” are indeed entertained, the alienation of Jewish people in the US has naturally not been forgotten by contemporary authors and their works are suffused with that remembrance (285), and rightly so, considering the recent flare in anti- Semitic attacks. The past is, however, alive in text, and based on Jewish authors’ works, Fried claims that “the shtetl is now textualized” (286), alive in written form. He also cites historic nostalgia as warding “off an uncertain future by creating a haven of memory” (286). In this context, Hartman evokes Walter Benjamin’s concept of hope in Judaism, and describes a ruined past that contains the freeing lights of hope in the now (456). Fried claims that Jewish authors have largely abandoned sadness over lost worlds outside of the US (“United States Literature,” 286), and instead question whether they are able to represent the Shoah within fiction, or

14 Although there are notable exceptions, such as the Soviet-born Gary Shteyngart.

33 whether it is possible to do so at all (286). Additionally, Cynthia Ozick might have been right with her assessment about “centrally Jewish” texts, as some contemporary authors “return to biblical and rabbinic text” (285), explore those texts and incorporate them in their writing, exemplifying a return to tradition. Some texts and other cultural artifacts describe the escape from the too traditional, too Orthodox, and often oppressive Jewish life and in so doing, attract the interest of not only Jews, but a wider audience. For instance, US author Deborah Feldman’s 2012 bestseller Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots aroused great interest and was adapted into a miniseries. Other former memoirists like Shulem Deen also attract attention and condemn Hasidic upbringing. Nathan Englander has a different, less clear- cut approach, which might also stem from a less extreme, yet Orthodox upbringing. In the following subchapter, I will give a brief overview of Englander’s literary work and views.

3.4 Nathan Englander

Englander, who proclaims himself an atheist, to be secular, but to also be deeply religious at the same time (Englander, “The Internet”), brilliantly entered the literary stage in 1999 with his short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. This collection contains stories about Soviet writers awaiting their end in Stalinist purges, about a Jewish circus troupe evading Nazi capture, about the normalization of terror in Israel, and, for the most part, curious stories about Orthodox Jewish life in oftentimes isolated US-American communes. Of these, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” and “Reb Kringle” receive special consideration and are investigated further below.

Englander has blossomed as a novelist with three works over his literary career. The first, The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), depicts the devastating struggle of a Jewish family against an all-powerful bureaucracy during the Argentina’s “Dirty War,” when up to 30,000 people and proportionally many Jews were “disappeared” by the military junta. Ever since spending a few months in Argentina in the 90s, Englander has been entranced by the multifaceted country: “A lot of elements fascinated me: there were Nazis, a military government, Jewish gauchos— everything I could want, all the irony I need.” Englander’s second novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017), is a captivating narrative of Israel and Palestine, of the tragically fruitless peace efforts in the 2000s as well as a fast-paced spy novel that wildly switches in space, time,

34 and perspective. Finally, in Kaddish.com (2019) Englander conceives a “cultural Jew” who, upon the death of his father, outsources his role as the one supposed to say the “kaddish,” the praise of God traditionally said after a loved one’s dead. Years later, the man, turned extremely religious, engages in a hunt to take back his duties. Suffice it to say, as a proper analysis of these novels would go much beyond the scope of this thesis, Englander’s topics, themes, cleverness, and general way of writing swell to epic proportions within them.

Englander’s second short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), largely continues themes and topics of his first collection and arguably improves upon it. The award-winning title also contains the eponymous story which will be elaborated upon below as well as other short stories that capture aspects of Jewish Orthodox life in the US, such as juvenile fights against local anti-Semites or an intermarried Jew’s psychoanalytically driven meltdown of self-knowledge in “Peep Show.” In the other short stories, retirees resurrect disturbing practices from concentration camps at a US-American summer camp, the marks of the Shoah drive a man to harsh “normalized” brutality in the Israeli conflict with Egypt, widely branched family histories are explored in an unusual format, and “the author” and “the reader” step out of their (relatively) implicit roles and enter the narrative stage explicitly. Furthermore, an ambivalent piece about the occupation of the West Bank in Palestine invokes difficult questions about oppressor and oppressed.

Many of Englander’s stories about Orthodox Jewish life spring from his having grown up in an Orthodox community in West Hempstead on Long Island. In a NYT article, Mel Gussow relates how, until college, Englander was in “Yeshiva world,” that is, educated in Orthodox institutions, and lived a relatively isolated and religious life. At yeshiva high school, an attentive teacher introduced Englander to Camus and Freud and encouraged him to write, which may have led him to the liberal arts education he pursued at Binghamton University in New York (Gussow). In an Atlantic Monthly interview, Englander himself discloses: “I had no idea that you could spend your life writing fiction, that this was actually an option. Coming from my background, I didn't think it was permissible. I couldn’t believe anyone would support such a notion” (“Facts and Fiction”).15 Intensifying his training to be a writer, Englander went on to the creative writing workshop MA program at the University of Iowa (“N.E. Interview”),

15 This interview is located on a third-party site without reference to interviewer and source, but further investigation suggests that it must originate from the provided source.

35 where he was told that he had a Yiddish rhythm in his writing, by his own admission a leftover from his Jewish education, instilled by his “old-school rabbis” (“N.E. Assimilating”).

The Jewish education and of course Jewish culture stayed with him, yet Englander relinquished his religious background – or did he? Englander asserts that after 19 years of being staunchly religious – and even quite zealous at that (“Facts and Fiction”), he “deconverted” when he visited Israel at 19, where he was stunned to find “deeply secular atheistic Jews that [he] could identify with” (“N.E. Assimilating”). Although technically, Englander grew up in the multicultural United States, he had only ever lived in a world that had no room for anything like cultural Judaism (“N.E. Opens”). In these new modes of being Jewish, Englander felt right at home. Yet, he always remains somewhat ambiguous about his beliefs – rightfully so, as it is a rather private topic – and makes humorous statements such as “If it weren’t for fear of God’s instantaneous and violent retribution, I'd declare myself an atheist” (“Facts and Fiction”). These days, he refers to himself as “radically secular” yet also religious: “I will literally be like, eating a cheeseburger on Yom Kippur and that won’t bother me a bit, but I’ll be afraid that I haven’t tithed on a harvest year” (“The Internet”).16 As an atheist – which he does sometimes label himself as (“N.E. Opens”) – he appears to be a specifically Jewish atheist.

Be that as it may, Englander appears to have found an ersatz religion in writing. He characterizes it (as well as reading) as a holy act, he describes the ritualistic sitting down at a special place in order to work the writing process as an “obligation to the story” (“N.E. Interview”), like a commandment from a higher power. He does attribute the holiness of books, whether reading or writing them, at least partly to the way he was raised, as one of the “people of the book” (“N.E. Interview”). Englander’s writing is also heavily influenced by his Jewish Orthodox raising and education, evidenced by the “Yiddish rhythm” mentioned above. He believes that the Jewish “thinking” he was educated in was rather beneficial to writing (“N.E. Opens”) and he also credits his being “raised in a world of story” (“N.E. Interview”) as a reason for his reverence of writing and reading.

Notwithstanding the influence his upbringing had on his writing, like the three giants Bellow, Malamud and Roth, who each rejected the “Jewish writer” label at one point (Cronin & Berger, vii), Englander has expressed reluctance to discuss the “Jewishness” of his oeuvre. Englander,

16 This ambivalent thought led to kaddish.com.

36 a fourth or fifth generation US-American, does not want to let himself be categorized “as some sort of qualified American” (“N.E. Examines”), a hyphenated American writer. He emphasized: “All my characters are Jewish, all their concerns are Jewish, all the food is Jewish, and so on. That’s fine. But this idea that I’m supposed to engage with my own work as if its other […] is, to me, pretty strange” (“N.E. Examines”). Despite the “Jewish concerns” that dominate Englander’s works, they have a universalist approach and ask “questions of history and memory and moral conundrum” (“N.E. Examines”). Englander appears to refuse too stringent representations of identity politics and to embrace universalist ideas, at least when it comes to writer identities. He pointedly remarks the discrepancy between classifying Toni Morrison as an African American writer and not calling John Updike a Christian American or Anglo-Saxon American and claims that this kind of categorization – in regard to “writer ownership” – runs contrary to his notion of the USA (“N.E. Examines”).

With his stories, he has a similarly universalist approach, and rejects literature that only works for a specific group of readers. Englander underlines that if a work of art cannot be accessible to everyone, it does not work as art (“Translating God”). When he studied at the writer’s workshop in Iowa, he felt out of place writing about what he knows – that is, Orthodox Jews – but eventually, he came to understand and accept that focus as his voice (“N.E. Examines”). Englander explains that his stories focusing on a clearly distinctive group of people, yet still staying accessible is exactly the point: “That’s the beauty of reading, that’s why it’s subversive, because it just crosses time and space and culture” (“The Internet”).

In some of his works, Englander attempts to access the very present Jewish topic of the Shoah. Having no direct relation to victims, he shares the cultural bond of the Jewish community. The rabbis at yeshiva school presented the Shoah as the “genocide and the historical nightmare” (“N.E. | Interview”) it was. However, not as the singularity it is sometimes represented as, but as an event that could easily happen again. This led Englander and his sister to imagine who would hide them in that event as children, a very tangible imagining that goes beyond the experience of many others (“N.E. Assimilating”). Based on his education and “Holocaust discourse,” Englander is fascinated by questions of “memory making,” remembrance ownership (“N.E. | Interview”), and the indoctrination that is based on this remembrance (“Translating God”).

37 Englander explores his fascinations when he conceives tales set within frameworks with high degrees of cultural verisimilitude, i.e., the stories are believable within the conception of the real world. They are, however, rooted in a special world, which often is the Jewish Orthodox world.

4 Analysis

In the following, I analyze Englander’s short stories “Reb Kringle,” “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” “Peep Show,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” The first two short stories, “Reb Kringle” and “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” are from his collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, the latter two, “Peep Show” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

4.1 Reb Kringle

This first short story starts out with Buna Michla, the protagonist Rabbi Itzik’s wife, who tentatively enters the women’s section of the couple’s shul, their small synagogue, separated by a mechitza (“partition”), as she calls for her husband. The mechitza, which can be any kind of partition, such as a glass screen or a curtain or separate floors, has grown to become a feature unique to Orthodox synagogues as a side effect of more stringent Orthodoxy and as a result of halakhic and legal battles (Joseph). Itzik, installing a new light bulb in the supposedly “eternal light,” the ner tamid, tries to ignore Buna Michla, because what she has planned for him is something he would rather evade. However, the ner tamid, also called the fire of sacrifices upon which in earlier times animal sacrifices would be offered (Olitzky), might symbolically already allude to a different sacrifice Rabbi Itzik is going to have to make: Buna Michla reminds the corpulent and white-bearded Itzik that he will have to work as a mall Santa to maintain the shul.

38 Quite transparently, this story points to the conflict between traditional Orthodox life and consumer culture. Buna Michla urges Itzik to think of the children, who apparently derive a kind of pleasure and sense of wonder from Santa Claus, to which Itzik brusquely retorts: “‘I should worry over the children? These are my children, all of them, that I should worry over them and their greed?’” (141) Itzik appears to abhor the goyishe (“gentile”) consumer culture. Yet, he too, is a subject under capitalism: In order to maintain the synagogue, he has to work the unwanted job. At the shul, “‘there are thirty-one people who pray [there] three times a day’” (141), according to the siddur (“order”), the Jewish book of set daily prayers (“Siddur”). The devout thirty-three come for the long morning prayer, where they thank YHWH, receive blessings, and ask for them, usually wearing the square tefillin on their heads, and in the afternoon and evening they come again for somewhat shorter services (Rabin). Englander mentions these congregants in passing to give Itzik a stake in the matter, to press him into the unwanted duty. The relatively small number of congregants also suggests that the shul is not exactly affluent.

Itzik attempts to evade his responsibility by claiming the job to be a sin: “‘You haven’t seen, Buna. […] Not since the time of Noah has the world seen such boundless greed’” (143). However, Buna Michla is having none of it. The couple appears fundamentalist in their belief, yet, to Itzik’s chagrin, the mall Santa job does not explicitly breach Jewish law, as Buna Michla reminds her husband: “‘Do they make you work on Shabbos?’ she said. ‘Do they force you to go around with your head uncovered or deny you proper respect?’” (144). The rabbi is forced to acknowledge what has been evident all along, as “every year it was the same argument and every year he lost” (142).

Begrudgingly, he produces the satin box which contains the Santa costume, hidden away deep within “a narrow dead end of storage space. It was the farthest place from anything” (142). Under sciatic pains, the “heavy man, big in the belly” (142), Itzik feels for the box:

What he was looking for was recognizable by feel. The box he needed was fancy, not like the kind one brings home from the alley behind the supermarket, the sides advertising cereals and toilet paper, boxes living already a second life. This one had a top to it, the kind that could be lifted off, like a hatbox but square. This box felt smooth to the touch, overlaid with satin. When his fingers brushed against it he knew. (143)

Itzik cannot see the box because the eternal lightbulb’s light does not properly reach the “forbidden” part of the room.

39 Finally, Itzik is virtually pushed out of the door by Buna Michla and, in “caftan and coat and lifting the satin box” (143), he rides the subway to the dreaded department store still in proper religious attire. Upon arrival, Itzik lets himself fall into despair again. He misses the man who in years past had opened the service elevator to Itzik’s workplace, instead of the familiar Ramirez, a new man greets Reb Kringle – a bad omen. The man states the obvious and re- ascribes an identification for Itzik: “‘You that Rabbi Santa.’” (144) The man appears dumbfounded.

“Damn,” he said. “I thought they were shitting me. That you was a myth.” “I exist, yes, for real,” Reb Itzik said. “Seems so,” the man said. He began to pull the gate closed behind Reb Itzik and hesitated midway. “Don’t you want to go in through the chimney?” [...] “Such jokes my friend Ramirez got tired of making when you were still too small to reach the buttons.” (145)

It is not sure whether the man makes a dated joke or an anti-Semitic jape with his comment, but the encounter with the man is just the beginning of Itzik’s plight, and he knows it. Transformed from the subject position of (ultra-)Orthodox rabbi to the performer playing the children-entertaining Kris Kringle, one if not the symbol of US-centric consumer culture, Englander describes Itzik’s “realm,” which further emphasizes the emptiness of the event, with a touch of US-style militarism:

The room itself was decked with flashing lights and fake trees, hollow gifts with colored bows and giant paper candy canes that all the curious children ventured to lick, one germy tongue after another. There were elves posted on each side of Itzik; one—a humorless, muscular midget—wore a pair of combat boots that gave him the look of elf-at-arms. His companion might have been a twin. He wore black high- tops but had the same vigilant paramilitary demeanor. (145)

The ”show” commences as Itzik quickly finds his feet in the role as benevolent king of the elves and he prides himself as a worldly Jew who has not “crossed the Royal Hills bridge into Manhattan” (145) for the first time in his life. Although he still struggles to wish someone “Merry Christmas,” Itzik embraces the somewhat terrifyingly panoptic function of Father Christmas as he asks the children whether they have been good (146). After hours of labor that saw Itzik’s pants being soaked in excited children’s urine as well as “a little Nazi [who] had pulled out a pair of safety scissors and gone after his beard” (146), the key element of the story develops:

A young boy with curls, clearly upset, arrives on Itzik’s lap. Itzik inquires about the boy’s mother’s whereabouts – “she’s getting her face done” (147). At this point it becomes clear that

40 Itzik uses colloquialisms such as “nu” or “boychik,” as his Jewish elements burst through the Santa persona. The boy curtly utters his list of demands: He asks for a “Mountain bike, […] Force Five Action Figures” (147) as well as a good many fictional video games, but then he holds out. Eventually, the boy confesses under tears that he wants “a menorah” (147). Itzik, flabbergasted, gets too loud when he inquires about that wish. A rush of words escapes the boy:

“I’m Jewish, not Christian. My new father says we’re having a real Christmas and a tree, and not any candles at all—which isn’t fair because my last father let me have a menorah and he wasn’t Jewish.” And the tears started running along with his nose. “Why won’t this new daddy let you light candles?” “Because he says there’s not going to be Chanukah this year.” (148)

Itzik is taken aback as the boy cries again. He tries to mend the situation and volunteers to bring the boy a menorah, but the child explains that his family is going to Vermont for Christmas, to attend the stepfather’s parents’ church service. This sends Itzik over the edge. In a Hulk-like fashion, he rises and holds the boy under his arm: “‘Church,’ he said, his voice booming. ‘Church and no Chanukah!’ [he] yelled” (148). From this point onwards, the situation completely escalates: Itzik decides that even Buna Michla would understand the blasphemous character of “the job and the costume and the laughter” (149), so – after a wild scream brought on by his sciatica – he calls for the boy’s mother and father all the while holding the boy up in the air. The child escapes and calls his mother on a cell phone, which makes Itzik self-aware and causes him to feel shame in addition to anger. The crowd, mostly small children accompanied by parents, is shocked – and Itzik understands that he has “crossed the boundaries of propriety” (149). Already beyond saving, he pulls off his Santa Hat to reveal a skullcap and yells “[This] is not a job fit for a Jew” (149). At this point, the reader learns that the store employs Itzik out of fear of being sued for minority discrimination – other difficult candidates such as Punjabi Santa are listed. In response to this revelation, a woman faints in shock and tears down parts of the decoration with her, and to regain control of the situation, security elves seize Itzik and take him away.

In a makeshift “prison cell” storeroom, Itzik is berated by a security elf until “chief Santa” arrives, the absolutely un-Santa-like woman who presumably manages the department store. She hands him a check and verbally “cashiers” Reb Santa: “You are a disgrace to the profession! And as far as we, and all of our one-hundred-and-six satellite stores are concerned, you are no longer Santa Claus.” However, Itzik feels like the chief Santa does not have the authority to revoke his status, nor does he himself: “The only one who could make such a

41 decision was Buna Michla herself, and she had said that Itzik would finish out the year. This was the truth” (151). Besides, he was “the man in the red suit—the only one in [the store’s] employ with a real belly, the only one whose beard does not drip glue” (151), therefore, “Santa until the end of the season, whether he lost his throne or not” (152) – as if he did not get his job back, Buna Michla will make him clean the shul in his costume.

Against the backdrop of the more obvious difficulty of reconciling the Orthodox identity with the (very) capitalist icon service job in a shopping mall, the theme of this story appears to be rebellion, or at least attempts to rebel. Not against Buna Michla, of course, who (humorously) occupies a god-like or even higher position, but against the constraints that make not only Itzik, but also the Jewish boy repress their identities which then burst out forcefully. It is made apparent that the “sacred” Chanukkah tradition is polluted, “profaned,” not exactly by the X- mas capitalism, but by this specific iteration of intermarriage keeping away the intermarried’s child, a halakhically sound Jew, from their beloved tradition – just as feared by proponents of keeping Jews separate. To an Orthodox rabbi such as Itzik, the insult must be immeasurable when considering how loaded the issue is, how much it is connotated with assimilation and eventual disappearance.

Interestingly, the story runs somewhat parallel to the original story of Chanukkah: In the second century BC, Israel, and with it, the Second Temple, was occupied by the forces of the Hellenized Seleucid Empire. Shortly after succeeding to the Seleucid throne, Antiochus IV, who titled himself epiphanes (“God Manifest”) and was called epimames (“The Madman”), proceeded to extend his influence in occupied Palestine by installing loyal subjects in leading positions such as High Priest – which resulted in multiple rebellions by the rebellious Jewish populace (P. Steinberg). After two of these, he outlawed Judaism, had the Temple plundered and a statue of Zeus placed in the sacred building (P. Steinberg). However, in 164 BC, Jewish insurgents re-captured and rededicated the temple, which was followed by eight days of celebration – the inspiration for future Chanukkah celebrations (“Hanukkah 101”). Like Itzik, “righteous Jews” rose up against idol worship – in Ancient times, against Greek occupiers, in contemporary New York, against the capitalist mainstream cult of the mainstream society. This is an example of the multilayered Jewish storytelling mentioned by Hartman, which intertextually connects newer texts to older texts and traditions.

42 Itzik is at the center of the conflict, as an actor that becomes quite literally a “subject” of the “Christmas cult,” but breaks out of his chains as his primary subject position is threatened by the detested, but necessary temporary one that cannot be occupied in opposition to the stronger one anymore, so that identity is asserted. Ultimately, a revolt is an affirmation of a position that appears marginalized – the margin of tolerability is reached as Itzik’s Orthodox identity cannot be assimilated into US-American society. However, as the ending indicates, the margins will be renegotiated, as they have always been throughout Jewish American history. Similar to Itzik refusing or simply not being able to stop “being Santa,” whatever change might occur in the margins, “Jewishness” will remain in people willing to rise up for themselves. In Itzik, this Jewishness manifests in an act of rebellion and the rabbi is portrayed as a strong, stubborn, and whole person – as Englander does with his diverse cast of Jewish characters.

4.2 The Gilgul of Park Avenue

This short story begins ab ovo with Charles Luger’s unexplained realization that he holds a Jewish soul within himself. It is the driving force behind the story and all the characters merely react to it, it is the catalyst, or as Goethe might have put it, the “unerhörte Begebenheit” (“unheard of event”), that initiates this story that ponders questions of identity and personal fulfilment.

At the beginning, Charles, a WASPy financial analyst, rides a New York cab, but all of a sudden, everything changes: The accompanying circumstances may appear ostensibly incidental to a first-time reader, however, they hold deep cultural meaning: “The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won’t shock the system with its arrival. It was then, three stars visible in the Manhattan sky and a new day fallen, that Charles Morton Luger17 understood he was the bearer of a Jewish soul” (109). Although Englander partially reveals the vehicle of the metaphor of the daybreak as a new beginning for Charles, there is more to the three stars in the Manhattan sky. Three stars appearing in the sky usually mark the beginning of the end of Shabbat, havdalah, literally “separation,” a ceremony meant to formally end Judaism’s day of rest. Some believe that Jewish people are given an extra soul during Sabbath, to be given back to YHWH at Havdalah (Silverman). Although we are not told whether Charles

17 The Luger P08 is a pistol commonly associated with Nazi Germany.

43 rides the cab on Sabbath, the entanglement between Havdalah’s extra soul and Charles’ realization does not appear to be a coincidence within the story. “Charles Luger knew, as he knew anything at all, that there was a Yiddishe neshama functioning inside” (109). Neshama is the Hebrew word for “breath,” but also for “soul,” or at least for a part of the soul, a circumstance which will be explored later on. This “breath” in the form of elohai neshama (“my God, the soul,” the beginning words of a longer prayer) is, according to the Talmud, part of the traditional morning prayer, prescribed in the siddur (Elliot). This allusion to the morning prayer represents another connection to daybreak or a new beginning.

“[Charles] looked out the window at Park Avenue, a Jew looking out at the world. Colors no brighter or darker, though he was, he admitted, already searching for someone with a beanie, a landsman who might look his way, wink, confirm what he already knew” (109f). Immediately, Charles looks for familiarity, for community. Interestingly, he scans the world outside for a “landsman,” not a fellow believer – and thereby already implements the not always clear-cut, rather entangled relationship between Jewish nation and religion into his being.

Upon arriving at home, an outwardly unchanged man but new inside, Charles begins to realize some measure of what his newfound faith demands of him: “Half an hour Jewish and already he felt obliged. He knew there were dietary laws, milk and meat forbidden to touch, but he didn’t know if chicken was considered meat and didn’t dare ask [his wife] Sue and chance a confrontation, not until he’d formulated a plan” (111). Although chicken may be an inherently kosher animal to eat, it is not likely to have been slaughtered in the specific way called for by kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws (“Kosher Food”). However, Charles adapts quickly and readily. “And so, a Marrano in modern times, Charles ate his chicken like a gentile – all the while a Jew in his heart” (111). Marrano is used to refer to the hidden, syncretized Jews in Spain in the context of the era of the Spanish Inquisition, when those Jews that remained within Spain ostensibly converted to Catholicism, yet kept certain Jewish practices. Charles, being in his heart, a Jew, is unshaken in his belief. The heart, the lev, represents the inner side of the self, the spirit, as well as the seat of volition and intellectual decision (Kohler et al.). Therefore, Charles’ change is absolute. The distinction from the gentile, the non-believer, already becomes apparent, and Charles starts a process of othering, to distance himself from his former self.

Charles appears unable to get on with his revelation on his own, and looks for guidance. “He’d call Dr. Birnbaum, his psychologist, in the morning. Or maybe he’d find a rabbi. Who better to

44 guide him in such matters?” (111) Looking for guidance, as the areligious would perhaps have sought within the psychologist, the new convert seeks the help of a rabbi – a fitting move. The (Jewish) importance of spiritual guidance and general life advisory cannot be overstated and is referred to in various life accounts as well as fictional work. For example, in Englander’s short story from the same collection, “The Twenty-seventh Man,” the eponymous twenty-seventh man devises a short tale in which a Jew notices the sun to have vanished only to immediately seek out the local rabbi for advice about the phenomenon (21f). However, the seeking of guidance at a rabbi’s is usually reserved for “real” Jewish people, as in real and fictional figures that hold within themselves the unshakeable certainty of Jewish identity, not for those who suddenly realize a new aspect of their identity. But does Charles not feel the same certainty?

As was established earlier, there are very real mechanisms and offers to convert and to become Jewish. Although Judaism is not exactly a missionary religion, there are mechanisms for converting gentiles with no discernable Jewish background – at least outside of Israel. Some rabbis, such as Rabbi Allen Maller, consider the souls of converts to have witnessed the divine revelation at Sinai and therefore, these souls have been Jewish all along. Charles finds a rabbi of a similar mindset when he calls a somewhat dubious “Royal Hills Mystical Jewish Reclamation Center” (111) – “‘For all gilgulim, cases of possible reincarnation or recovered memory, please call Rabbi Zalman Meintz at the following number’” (112). The Hebrew term for reincarnation is gilgul, the “rolling” of the soul to another body, although there is also a similar concept called 'ibbur. While this “rolling” gives indications about the perceived geometric form of the soul, neither gilgul nor 'ibbur are unilaterally accepted beliefs in Judaism.

However, gilgul as well as 'ibbur are deeply entwined with the epitome of Jewish Mysticism, the Kabbalah (L. Jacobs), and matters of centuries-old controversy. Moshe Hallamish, contends in his comprehensive introductory work on the Kabbalah, in which he refers to various (contradictory) Kabbalistic scholars throughout the centuries, that the soul may be made up of many parts, one of which is the neshama mentioned above (261). He goes on to relate that this neshama might refer to the power or ability to enter the presence of God (262), that the neshama might only enter mature people above a certain age or maturity (263), that at the time of a man's18 death, the neshama may begin a new life as it is not bound to a single human's body (271), and that a neshama signifies an “extra soul” that is carried for a certain life period (292).

18 It literally says man in the source.

45 The Kabbalistic scholars’ opinions on the transmigration of souls range from gilgul as a sort of punishment for past sins (290) to soul exchange between two living parties due to opening of hearts (294) to parts of Moses being distributed among all Jews (290). To complicate things further, some separate the soul into at least five parts, all with different qualities (262). Although it would be possible to delve into the rabbit hole of the Kabbalah, the above is meant to exemplify that various concepts and opinions coexist - just with all the different flavors of Judaism present in the world. The “extra soul” aspect represents the one most relevant for this short story, giving precedence to the occurrence as well as again linking the story to tradition and older text.

The Rabbi Zalman Meintz holds answers for Charles. His name may be allusion to the fabled wise king and prophet Solomon or to the highly influential 18th century Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, a Kabbalist scholar, or to the founder of the Chabad Hasidim Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Either way, the traditional name form indicates a Haredi, “ultra-Orthodox” persuasion. This appears confirmed when Charles meets the man – the attire of the rabbi is described as looking like a stereotypical Haredi man: “like a real Jew: long black beard, black suit, black hat at his side, and a nice big caricaturish nose, like Fagin’s but friendlier” (113). He also sports sidelocks (129). This stereotypical attire and look reassure Charles – and by its inclusion, Englander slightly brushes the discourse on Jewish looks: Traditionally negatively associated with racial profiling and/or Nazism, the discourse on Jewish looks has developed significantly. Historian and Jewish Studies scholar Susan A. Glenn ascertains that “from the 1970s to the present, […] the idea of ‘Jewish looks’ reemerged in Jewish public discourse as a key signifier of ethnic authenticity” (67). This happened in conjunction with or rather as a result of the identity politics ideas discussed in chapter 2.

Before giving Charles answers, Zalman asks questions: “‘First history,’ […] ‘your mother’s not Jewish?’ ‘No, no one. Ever. Not that I know’” (115). Zalman is getting at matrilineal descent: As Susan A. Glenn puts it, “Jews have historically defined the question of who is a Jew on the basis of ‘blood logic’” (65). According to halakha, you can only be Jewish without formal conversion if you can claim matrilineal descent from a Jewish mother, although a very small minority, namely Karaite Jews, deny this and put the “bloodline” on the father’s side. And Reform Judaism proclaims just having one Jewish parent regardless of gender to be a prerequisite for being a “proper” Jew. Zalman, who is later revealed to have found Jewish religion at his lowest point and to have never formally converted (116), is of a different mindset.

46

“No, no. That’s exactly the point. Jew, non-Jew, doesn’t matter. The body doesn’t matter. It is the soul itself that is Jewish.” [... ] “This is also possible,” Rabbi Zalman said. “It may be only that your soul was at Sinai. Maybe an Egyptian slave that came along. But once the soul witnessed the miracles at Sinai, accepted there the word, well, it became a Jewish soul. Do you believe in the soul, Mr. Luger?” (115)

Again, the notion of the soul is taken up. In addition to the extra soul mentioned before, reincarnation, or metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, is one of the central themes of the short story – the gilgul is right in the title. Zalman even claims to have lived nine Jewish lives before the current one.

Another important aspect of Jewish tradition appears to be learning and studying – the pictures of young boys with payot, the typically unshaven sideburns, going to a US Torah school or to a yeshiva come to mind. Charles does not go to a yeshiva, but instead home-schools himself with a little help by his rabbi. “Zalman gave him books, The Chosen, A Hedge of Roses, and a copy of The Code of Jewish Law” (115). These titles give an insight about what the author thinks constitutes essentials – or rather, about what the author thinks a “rabbi” like Zalman would perceive as very Jewish.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok appears as an interesting choice. One of its conflicts is the struggle between tradition and modernity. The acclaimed author Chaim Potok, who was a rabbi, relates the story of two young boys’ friendship, one of which does not want to become a rabbi like his father wishes him to, intermingling the societal transitional conflict with a generational one. A central question of the book appears to be what it means to be Jewish in the modern world, and to what degree.

A Hedge of Roses by Rabbi Norman Lamm is a very influential guide to Orthodox Jewish married life and is concerned with things such as ritual purity in marriage. Jewish law dictates that a man should not have sex with an impure woman, or niddah, as in, allegedly impure due to menstruation. Cultural anthropologist Jonah Steinberg notes that while earlier Rabbinic texts demonized menstruation as a “source of pervasive danger” (12) and the menstruating women as a creature to be shunned (11), more modern works like A Hedge of Roses emphasize the companionship and attraction created by refraining from sexual activity (16), and the rights and mutual respect brought by following the rules on niddah (19). However, this appears to be quite problematic as well, as “the ‘rights’ in question are most often presented as the reward of

47 the woman, whereas the need for restraint is pinned upon the man” (20). This makes the more modern exegesis still highly questionable from a feminist standpoint.

The Code of Jewish Law, the shulchan aruch (“set table”), plus its commentaries, is the most important code of Jewish law, arranged by Early modern period Sephardic Jew Joseph Caro. While tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, contains laws, but not many specifics, and the Talmud contains an excess of specifics and different viewpoints, the shulchan aruch streamlines and ultimately makes Jewish rules more accessible (J. Jacobs).

Thus equipped, learned in some ways of his newfound faith, Charles seeks out Zalman again and again:

“And how do you feel?” “Content.” Charles leaned back in his swivel chair, his arms dangling over the sides. “Jewish and content. Excited. Still excited. The whole thing’s ludicrous. I was one thing and now I’m another. But neither holds any real meaning. It’s only that when I discovered I was Jewish, I think I also discovered God.” “Like Abraham,” Zalman said, with a worshipful look at the ceiling. “Now it’s time to smash some idols.” (119)

Zalman goes so far as to put Charles’ sudden conversion in line with the tradition on Abraham. According to the Book of Genesis, the patriarch Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldees,” a Mesopotamian country, possibly Sumerian city-state Ur, where his father and himself used to follow the society’s mainstream idol/moon worshippers before God revealed himself to the patriarch and commanded him to leave his old faith and country behind and to go found Israel. Although there is a certain delusional grandeur in Zalman’s comparison, it is apt: Like Charles, Abraham suddenly, “out of nowhere,” changed and left his old world behind. Charles’ whole epiphany is described similarly later on: “He closed his eyes and thought back to his first night away from home, sleeping on a mattress next to his cousin’s bed. He was four or five, and his cousin, older, slept with the bedroom door shut tight, not even a crack of light from the hallway. It was the closest to this experience, the closest he could remember to losing and gaining a world” (125). Of course, many a religious revelation can be compared by using a simile such as this, but the emphasized parallel appears to be striking – this pre-Promethean first night alone in the world as the revelation that supposedly came to religious patriarchs like Abraham in the form of YHWH.

48 Another spark of identity literally described as “Jewish” is pointed out in Charles’ first conversation with Zalman: “‘Then it’s possible? That it’s true?’ ‘Already so Jewish’—Zalman laughed—‘asking questions you’ve already answered’” (114). In fact, asking questions already answered beforehand plays an important role in Judaism, for example, when celebrating Passover. Traditionally, during seder, the youngest child able to do so asks the biblical Four Questions and is answered. However, the importance of asking questions without preset answers in Judaism cannot be overstated. As the late Rabbi and British Lord Jonathan Sacks contends: “In teaching its children to ask and keep asking, Judaism honored what Maimonides19 called the ‘active intellect’ and saw it as the gift of God.”

In addition to the education, Zalman gives Charles a command: Charles must tell his wife Sue, from whom he concealed his new identity, about it. Sue cannot fathom her husband’s conversion when he finally tells her: “‘What you’re really trying to tell me is: Honey, I’m having a nervous breakdown and this is the best way to tell you. Correct? […] “If it’s not a nervous breakdown, I want to know if you feel like you’re clinically insane’” (118). After the first admission of his new faith, Sue tries to ignore Charles’ religious actions which she appears to perceive as strange “lifestyle choices.” However, when their dinner together involves non- kosher food, Sue’s frustration explodes into a marital argument. Charles tries to alleviate the situation:

“Honestly, I think you’re threatened. So I want you to know. I still love you. You’re still my wife. This should make you happy for me. I’ve found God.” “Exactly the problem. You didn’t find our God. I’d have been good about it if you found our God—or even a less demanding one. A deity less queer. […] Today the cheese is gone. You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?” (121)

The Jewish God is an unusual, alien deity here. Sue “others” Charles’ new-found faith – although this appears to be a reaction to the alienation between the two caused by Charles’ epiphany in the first place, having taken the completely unsuspecting Sue by surprise, apparently hurting her. She begrudgingly accepts Charles’ Jewishness, but then negotiates the degree of his Jewishness. “‘Well, if you have to be Jewish, why so Jewish?’ Why not like the Browns in six-K? Their kid goes to Haverford. Why,’ she said, closing her eyes and pressing two fingers to her temple, ‘why do people who find religion always have to be so goddamn extreme?’” (122) This conjures the idea of “assimilated” Jews, “Westjuden,” who themselves

19 Moses ben Maimon, also known as Rambam was a medieval scholar, philosopher and physician to Sultan Saladin.

49 often discriminated against more Orthodox Jewish immigrants, but it also calls for a supposed ideal present in many secular Jewish people in, for instance and especially, the United States, who are rather invisible. Similar to many universities and colleges, the Quaker-founded Haverford college used to have quotas for minority (white) students in the years leading up to World War II as well – as George Mosse, for instance, experienced himself: The émigré historian was one of three or four Jews at Haverford in 1939 (Confronting History 119). Of course, today Haverford has a proportionally high number of Jewish undergrads, but it still appears to have had a very WASP-y connotation among the middle-aged characters in the 1999 book.

Initially, Sue interprets Charles’ behavior as something that can be determined by choice and is offended by it – but here, a Kabbalistic concept of soul and intellect takes hold: Within this framework, they are separate entities. Moshe Hallamish outlines this line of thought as such:

The intellect […] is seen as a physical organ, and its ability and trustworthiness is therefore limited. The certainty of intellectual perception is incomplete. The soul draws from its source, and by grace of that continuous connection, like an umbilical cord, sublime truths reach the soul worthy of them. (255)

It appears that the short story or at least characters within the short story are influenced by this idea of a “sublime” and elusive godly source within the soul.

Charles’ abiding by newfound his faith does not exactly delight Sue, but she begrudgingly makes some allowances such as kosher food. After Zalman learns this, the enthusiastic rabbi seeks to coopt her entirely and wants her to delve into Charles’ identity wholesale: “‘Kosher food.’ A knee-slapper, a big laugh. ‘The first step. Doesn’t sound anything but positive to me. By any chance, has she gone to the ritual bath yet?’” (124) The mikveh, the ritual bath, requires for Orthodox Jewish women to undergo a ritual cleansing within a synagogue – after menstruation and childbirth, as without the ritual bath, they are supposedly unclean after those occurrences – or to have the status of niddah, as elaborated upon above.

However, Zalman appears to be miscalculating as Sue is having none of it. She continues to belittle or deny Charles’ religious practices. After Charles steals their more secular Jewish neighbors’ mezuzah, she sarcastically remarks: “You think anyone but me will believe your cockamamie story? Oh, I’m not a Nazi, Mrs. Fraiman, just a middle-aged man who woke up a Jew” (127). When the culmination of the short story is set up, a dinner with the couple, Charles’

50 therapist, and Zalman, she goes “Good, bring him. Maybe they have a double open at Bellevue” (127), further insinuating insanity.

At the dinner, the “unheard-of event” is the main course of contention. Both Sue and Charles bring their respective allies, the psychologist, who Charles stopped seeing after years of appointments and the “rabbi” he now visited instead. After the dinner in “oppressive silence” (130), the overtly friendly psychologist opens the discussion and emphasizes that he is not here to ascertain Charles’ mental state. Sue immediately attacks Charles over his excessively pious actions and Charles complains about her sabotaging his exercises of faith. As Charles uses Zalman as a conversational shield, Sue strikes them both: “He, Charley, is not even Jewish. And neither are you. One need not be polite to the insane” (131). When the psychologist tries to weigh in and ostensibly calm the situation, Zalman verbally attacks the man and his profession – which for the purposes of the story is pretty much the same as the psychologist is a relatively flat character. The rabbi characterizes the “atheist priests” (132) who just absolve people of their actions: “Shrinks always say it’s OK, so tell him it’s OK, tell her it’s OK, and then all will be better” (133). The doctor confidently denies Zalman’s accusation and steers the conversation toward Charles himself, interested in his former patient’s own admission about his change. Zalman answers for him: “‘Because of his soul, […] he’s always had this soul. His way of thinking has always been agreeable, it is only that now God let him know He wasn’t pleased with the way Charley was acting’” (133). Charles confirms this: “Now it’s time for me to do God-pleasing work” (133). The doctor suggests other outlets before Zalman interrupts for a last time and, while placing him about seven hundred years off the mark, the “rabbi” invokes Bulan, the fabled medieval king of the near eastern Khazars, who allegedly converted to Judaism after hearing out representatives of the three major Abrahamic faiths: “Thy words are convincing, yet they do not correspond to what I wish to find” (133). This means that while Charles can rationally see the worth of the doctor’s suggestions, it is exactly that, “living the life of the Orthodox Jew” (133) that fulfills him. Charles confirms this and claims that while he changed rituals and foods, he is still “the same man. Only that I feel peaceful, fulfilled” (133). Then the dinner conversation takes a turn that will end it: Sue, an areligious and somewhat private woman, slides off her seat and falls on her knees to pray, which finally makes Charles vaguely perceive the dimension of hurt that his wife appears to feel. Sue gives a harangue:

51 “You don’t seem to understand, Charles. Because you don’t want to. But I do not have any idea what to do.” […] “I will, Charley, be thinking and waiting. You can’t stop me from that. I’m going to hope and pray. I’ll even pray to your God, beg Him to make you forget Him. To cast you out.” […] It’s fair. More fair than you’ve been to me. You have an epiphany and want everyone else to have the same one.” (134)

Charles sits down on the floor opposite of Sue, and so, for the first time in the short story, he at least physically presents himself on the same level as his wife. He inquires: “What does that mean, Sue? What does it mean for me?” (135)

“It means that your moment of grace has passed. Real or not. […] I’m only letting you know that as much as you worry about staying in God’s favor, you should worry about staying in mine. It’s like taking a new lover, Charles. You’re as dizzy as a schoolgirl. But remember which one of us dropped into your life and which of us has been in for the long haul. I am going to try and stick it out. But let me warn you. As quick as God came into your life, I might one day be gone.” (135)

While the “guests” make ready to sneak out, Charles feels resentment in reaction to Sue’s words. From his perspective, he indeed has an “epiphany” and his wife begrudges it and thereby attacks what has become “sacred” to him – which conveniently leaves out that he kept it from her for a while then presented it as a fait accompli to the unsuspecting Sue. In fairness, the logic of the story does not give Charles too much choice in the matter: He does not convert because he suddenly thinks that it would be fashionable to adopt an identity and he does not do it to hurt Sue – because in the logic of Kabbalah and the story, there is no choice.

Similar to how psychologists and therapists nowadays separate emotion and thought, Kabbalistic conceptions of the soul separate different categories – such as ruach and neshama. While ruach is connected to emotions and neshama with the intellect, neshama is abstracted from human experience and thought and represents using intellect to comprehend one’s own relationship with God (Miller). As the short story starts, “Charles Luger knew, as he knew anything at all, that there was a Yiddishe neshama functioning inside” (109). There is no choice in the absoluteness – totality – of the statement, nor any intellectual choice for Charles whether to embrace or not to embrace his spiritual awakening, merely the neshama enabling him to understand and come to terms with a non-optional identity that lies outside his conscious decision-making power – in other words, the non-totality of the self overrules any deliberate agency. “He wanted her to understand that there had indeed been a change of magnitude, but that the mark it left was not great. The real difference was contained in his soul, after all” (137). Although the end of the short story is left somewhat open, it seems that after the big fight, tensions will be relieved and the couple might come to an understanding, having presented themselves to each other bare and anew. “He struggled to stand without judgment, to be only

52 for Sue, to be wholly seen, wanting her to love him changed” (137), that is, Charles wants acceptance by the most important “other” in his life.

But aside from this story-driving assertion to Charles’ “significant other,” how does Englander construct Charles’ Jewishness by ritual? Observations of faith performed by Charles are the Eighteen Benedictions (of which there are nineteen), donning a “prayer shawl and phylacteries” (122), “making ablutions” (121), also known as ritual washing, avoiding “shatnez, the mixing of linen and wool” (123), “ushering in the Sabbath” (125) by making a blessing and lighting candles on Friday, and keeping the Sabbath by refraining from using an elevator buttons or light switches (131). Furthermore, as mentioned above, he steals and kisses his more secular Jewish neighbors’ mezuzah (127), a case that contains specific Torah verses – the second part might be construed as religiously/culturally proper when ignoring the first.

Apparently, Charles’ Jewish identity is constituted by following rituals such as eating kosher, seeking Jewish community by looking for the “landsman” or seeking advice from the rabbi Zalman, by adhering to certain prayers, by learning about his faith and Jewish culture, by asking questions, by being put into traditions of Jewish forefathers such as Abraham, and by learning about conflicts and changes within Jewish communities or the rest of the world by reading books pertaining to the topic. One central tenet posited right from the beginning and throughout the story is, however, the overwhelming force of the Jewish soul, that, although inexplicably, in mysterious godly ways, simply awakens inside a gentile. In “soulless” Cultural Studies terms, Charles becomes the subject of a Jewish discourse as he subjects himself to its meanings, power and regulation – by learning and by experiencing (some) consequence of what it means to become Jewish. The depiction of Charles’ conversion – or his “rolling into” – as genuine suggests an inclusive motive on part of the author as he “trans-codes” the idea of a Jewish religion based on “blood logic” into a more inclusive variant, where Charles and the former addict Zalman might find sense and feel like they belong, even without formal conversion.

4.3 Peep Show

In “Peep Show,” an intermarried, rather secular Jew who married out of the community and changed his name to a less Jewish-sounding name visits a live peep show only to find his rabbis

53 from formative years, his Jewish mother, Christian wife, and therapist to appear to challenge his decisions and values. Thus, this short story takes the form of an introspective journey into the self.

The story sets off as the neatly dressed lawyer Allen Fein, Esq. makes his way to Manhattan’s enormous bus terminal Port Authority through 42nd street. He stubs his toe and this aberration from his usual mindless rhythm makes him more aware of the (in)famous street, now filled with Broadway theatres, yet formerly a red light district. Allen wonders where the “hucksters who used to stand outside promising Nirvana and shaken booty, forbidden acts and creamy thighs” (101) have gone. “So busy has Allen been with his own transformation that he’s missed the one going on around him” (101).

Indeed, “little Ari Feinberg had […] become Allen Fein, Esq.” (101). He took up a white English name in lieu of his Hebrew name Ari, which means “lion.” Allen is married to “a pregnant wife, a beautiful blond Gentile wife” (101), who has little to no idea about the Jewish traditions he had grown up with. Allen, who appears to consider himself a “well-respected man,” wonders whether behind all façade, 42nd Street is still as seedy as he remembers it? Then, a barker entices the well-assimilated lawyer with simple words: “Upstairs. Girls. Live girls inside” (102). “Twenty-five cents for a spherical miracle. New York’s only three-hundred-and- sixty-degree all-around stage” (102).

From then on, Allen is caught – and conflicted. His arousal, his fetish, depends on disavowal and on the extreme guilt he feels when he does the “forbidden.” He acquires five tokens and indulges in the peep show – he sits down in his booth, puts in his token, and, when the partition rises, sees four female sex workers as well as some other johns in their booths. The “one, who is, to Allen, beautiful” (103) entices him. Although “he had only wanted a peep” (105), he ends up holding his hands “against [the prostitute’s] wonderful skin, so warm, almost hot” (104). In Stuart Hall’s words, “a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied” (Hall, “The Spectacle” 257).

Allen disavows his voyeuristic fetish again and again: First, he trivializes his peep show visit, as he steps up to the man who sells the tokens and “smiles at the man as if the two are in on a joke, as if his visit is an understandable bit of mischief, the kind of thing he could tell Claire about. Yes, if he feels guilty enough, he’ll tell Claire he went inside” (102). Just before he

54 touches the attractive women’s breasts, he “is shaking again, as he did when he was a boy. And why shouldn’t he be? A loyal husband, who reaching out, touching, had always honored his vows” (104). In the preceding quote, the deeply ambivalent attitude towards sex that characterize Allen’s adolescent psychosexual development is already alluded to. After the “fondling of this woman” (105), when the partition shut down, Allen panics and “tells himself that [it] was an aberration, just like his coming up those stairs” (105). He hurriedly tries to come to terms with the anomalous experience, the sexual guilt, and realizes that “he’d gone up the stairs a loyal husband and lover, a working man on his way home to the burbs. And now, minutes later, a different man emerges: a violator of girls and wives and matrimonial bonds” (105). The forbidden action is followed by severe dysphoria – although all the while, Allen sports a ceaseless, throbbing erection. Thus aroused, “the deceit grows” (105), as Allen plans to use more tokens and to subsequently discharge into his pants, “to face Claire, soiled” (105). “He has already crossed the threshold and made his way inside” (106), therefore, it would not matter. He knows, “he would sacrifice it all if only that siren would stand up from her chair, take his hands, and guide them over her body once more” (106). However, he again tries to restrict his libido, he “will put in the token, but he will not touch” (106). One might suspect that this disavowal only serves to be broken again as there appears to exist an interdependency between shame and lust in Allen’s sexuality. “He will use up what he paid for, but the penance begins right now” (106).

However, from this point on, the short story is derailed quite a bit from the framework of believable fiction. Somewhat plausible explanations might be that what follows is a psychotic consequence of the mental short circuit Allen experiences due to guilt or a consequence of insufficient blood supply in the brain. Perhaps Englander just wanted to insert a little magical realism into his stories to explore the narrative potential a peep show offers based on psychoanalytic ideas. Be that as it may, it appears Allen’s subconscious summons the remaining appearances.

After Allen drops the second token, four rabbis from his old school, which must have been a yeshiva, appear in the same poses the sex workers appeared in in the “first show.” Allen is, to put it mildly, shocked, but oddly well-composed. “He has worked hard at breaking from their world and he doesn’t remember ever wanting it back” (107). Mann, a man of imposing, adipose stature, calls out to Allen: “‘Of me you don’t want a pinch?’ […] ‘Too hairy? Too Jewish to be touched by the big-shot lawyer? By Mr. Ari-Allen-Feinberg-Fein?’” (107) Allen declares his

55 intention not to touch, but Mann (and therefore, Allen’s subconscious) knows better: “‘Ari Feinberg isn’t satisfied. He never is.’ […] ‘But does he ever stay to finish? No, he always turns to run’” (107). Which Allen then tries to do, but Mann instructs his former pupil to “use a bit of sachel” (108), i.e. common sense, in order to realize that he will not get rid of the ghosts he called so easily, without them doing what they were there to do. The corpulent rabbi gets to the heart of the visitation:

“What, I should hold you up as an example? Say that Fein made the right choice when he decided it was easier to live without God? Congratulate you on changing your name so that the goyishe restaurant man doesn’t make you repeat your reservations? Fein, who goes to live in a town, where there are no troubles and no Jews, so his son will be able to play soccer carefree on Shabbos morning? […] What about the fact that [the yet-to-be-born child] won’t be a Jew?” (109)

Allen proclaims that he would be fine with the child not being a Jew, at which point another partition opens, which reveals Allen’s therapist/psychologist, “Dr. Springmire, […] scratching at his short secular beard” (109). This appearance at this point indicates that Allen is not “fine” with his child’s halakhic status, and indeed, probably with more aspects of himself and his life, as rabbi Mann asks Springmire whether “Fein” is fine with what he became, to which Springmire answers: “‘He will be’ […] ‘He has come a long way, and one day he will, […] adjust to the life he has made […] He is a very nice man’” (109). But Mann does not spare Allen:

“I’m here for that very reason. I want to know what makes a nice boy forget God. What makes a boy with a nice job and a nice life never question how he came to such comfort? What makes such a darling boy—with such a darling wife waiting for him at home—climb the stairs into a place like this to fondle a young girl who must sell her body to live?” (110)

Allen has a clear culprit in mind: the rabbi himself. He remembers “Mann’s classroom, and how the rabbi would bring a heavy fist down against his desk, condemning student after student for matters that surely could be settled only in the world to come” (110). He further reveals to have “learned the facts of life” from porn magazines his friend Benji Wernik found hidden by his father, a science teacher and the son of a respected rabbi from the old country. If such a respected man has hidden porn magazines, is he going to hell too as the rabbi preached? “What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?” (110) More Orthodox rabbis actually consider it forbidden to spill seed “needlessly,” as in not used for procreation (Isaacs).

56 At this point, it might be fruitful to investigate Jewish conceptions of afterlife. In fact, similarly to Christian theology, various notions of Jewish afterworlds have been conceptualized over the centuries. Theologian Rabbi Or Rose describes different, sometimes contradictory concepts in the Bible itself: Central older figures such as Moses or Abraham die and that appears to be the end of it; other sources refer to sheol, a somewhat shadowy place similar to Greek Hades where (all) the dead go to after death. Following the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian exile, subsequent military defeats and occupations, as well as the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of the Romans, Jewish religious leaders had trouble envisioning a better future in this life, which, coupled with Greek notions of a separation of soul and body winning influence, led to the conception of an afterlife where the good will be rewarded (Rose). However, while only the truly righteous immediately go to olam ha-ba, the world to come, other, more average people and the wicked go to gehinnom in this conception (Rose). Rose relates that some people consider gehinnom to be a fiery “hellish” place while others view it as a simpler place of reflection and repentance. (Chabad) Rabbi Aron Moss for example views it as a “Supernal Washing Machine” where our souls are deep-cleansed; provided we do not clean ourselves during life itself, to meliorate the bad we have done. Some kabbalists argue that before the soul goes to gehinnom, gilgul occurs (Hallamish 302), or that parts of the soul visit olam ha-ba and gehinnom in order to live with their images in mind (265).

Allen Fein’s afterlife education apparently consisted of a more “fire-and-brimstone” hell. “You painted for us the most beautiful picture of Heaven, Rabbi, then left us to discover we’d all end up in Hell. Some room—maybe if you’d left us some room” (110). The rabbi, enraged, reminds Allen of the Jewish virtue of asking questions, as stated by Jonathan Sacks earlier in this paper: “That is what intelligent people do. They don’t throw their religion away. They don’t turn into the sick people who first shook their faith” (111). Allen, his briefs almost soiled, sitting in a booth in a seedy establishment, claims that he is not sick and reminds the rabbi to not see everything in black and white but to appreciate the in-between. However, rabbi Mann is unimpressed, he is aware of shades of gray. Allen banishes the rabbi as he tells him “I left religion because of people like you” (111) – the rabbi, first angry and then very calm leaves with the words “If that’s what you want to tell yourself, then that’s what I wanted to know” (111).

With the rabbis gone, Allen has a moment of respite, but he knows that he needs to follow the rest of “penance” – “either you stay on [the path] or you stray into darkness: This is the choice

57 that [the rabbis] offer. And […] he half wishes he could live in their realm, where a man is religious or he is not, a good husband or bad” (111). It is especially telling that this mode of thinking, psychological Splitting, is exactly what Allen employs before the rabbis even appear – either the loyal husband or the violator of girls. Apparently, he projects his “bad” characteristic onto the (imagined) rabbis while the “real” rabbis in Allen’s youth might have unintentionally implanted this kind of thinking into Allen with their too traumatic tales of the torments of hell. Although Allen disavows the rabbis, he might in fact seek their absolution for his “sins.” As mentioned above, Allen has to go on through the path of the rabbis, otherwise they might appear in his garage or basement and haunt him there (112).

For the next peep, Allen spies an older woman’s leg, which first elates him, but then he realizes that it belongs to his mother, who sits next to his gentile wife Claire who wears only panties overshadowed by a pregnant belly. The men in the other booths, among them Benji Wernik, masturbate furiously. Allen’s mother directly addresses him: “‘Do you need some tissue, Ari? Did you remember to bring?’” (112) She goes on to explain to him that a mother of a teenage boy knows that that boy masturbates: “Underwear stiffer than starched, I scrubbed. Underwear that would shatter if you dropped them to the floor” (113). Allen, or the infantilized Ari, feels put on the defensive and even invokes other authorities like Mann or Springmire who “allowed” it, but his mother dismisses it, of course it is normal. “‘All I’m saying,’ his mother says, tucking the tissues back into place, ‘is to have some sense about it. Why ruin a good suit? Why ruin a good marriage’” (113). Claire, usually scorned by her, takes Allen’s mother’s hand and agrees. Allen is nonplussed – the dogmatically assertive mother argues for the scorned daughter-in-law. He has an epiphany before the partition goes down – “‘Is this what the rabbi means?’ he asks them. ‘Is this how people learn to deal?’” (113) By these questions, Allen might refer to his mother’s relenting, but also to his own synthesis of opposing positions experienced in the “mirror” of the peep shows.

For the final peep, for the precipice of freedom from this ordeal of “dealing,” Allen “is actually eager to find the rabbi and Dr. Springmire waiting for him, eager to show them both that he is resigned to coping in a situation from which he gladly would have run” (114). He appears to look for their validation, to show these “authority” figures what a good boy he has been. However, all he gets to see are the initial sex worker women bar the woman who enticed him so lasciviously. The second woman informs him that he is up, to which he immediately, with vigor, complies. “Allen is already taking off his jacket and undoing his shoes. He uses one shoe

58 to kick off the other, maybe for the first time since he was a boy in black Shabbos loafers, his father yelling at him not to break the backs” (114). His excitement as well as the (only) mention of his father are noteworthy here – they point to his childish enthusiasm, perhaps also to an overcoming of the (internal) father figure he chastises himself as. Allen sits on the stage naked, and looks towards one of the booths, a man inside, not Mann or his mother. “This he can handle. In this way, he can bend” (114). “He moves slowly and with an air of detachment. Just the right amount, he feels, befitting an object of desire” (115).

This dreamlike episode might have many interpretations. As mentioned above, Allen’s subconscious might have summoned the unwanted peeps to bring to the surface the contradictions that plagued Allen’s sexual (and identity) development in order to resolve them. In fact, the peep characters mostly relieve Allen’s taught shame that underlie his voyeuristic fetishization and in the end, he even accepts himself as an object of desire. Perhaps the mother and wife appearing together in most sexual attire and making up in front of the onlooking Allen and the masturbating men is an expression of deeper Freudian desire or Allen associates them somehow – a wife taking care of him like a mother? Or is the man, naked on stage, a nod to the author himself, who sometimes presents his inner processes to a longing audience? Perhaps the ordeal, “the dealing” make Allen realize that he cannot erase the Jewish parts of his identity. His refusal to accept the black-and-white Splitting he attributes to the rabbis, “where a man is religious or he is not” (111) might point to the realization that he never “left religion because of people like [Rabbi Mann]” (111), but instead continues to practice his religion, his culture, in his own way. On another level, this episode might simply point to the significant imprints and feelings of guilt a person that leaves a tight-knit ideological community experiences, especially after being raised within it: Regardless of whether Allen changes his name, marries a gentile wife or even denies that he is a Jew, he might never be able to leave this big part of him behind, even if the rabbis do not appear in his garage. Like Englander, he might be atheist, but a specifically Jewish atheist and due to the “ethno-religious-nationalistic” triple’s less religious parts, Allen stays Jewish. These identity markers and the traces they left will follow him, and presumably, they will follow his child too, even if “it won’t be a Jew” (109) according to the rabbis’ “blood logic.” These interpretations might all point to deeper truths, but what outshines the others is the cleansing process that occurs within Allen. After the first peep, he begins to do penance. And similar to Rabbi Moss’ interpretation of gehinnom, Allen is “washed,” i.e. he reflects and comes to terms with his shame and misdeeds to consider himself a being worthy of being desired just as he is.

59 4.4 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

The captivating title is an allusion to much-echoed American author Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander also borrows a similar setting from Carver, namely, two couples meeting up, intoxicating, and sharing revelations. There are several intertextual links between the two, beginning from the first paragraph: In Carver’s story, it is a cardiologist lecturing the others – a right ascribed to him by virtue of being a cardiologist – while Englander’s equivalent character Mark (or Yerucham) lectures the other participants “on the Israeli occupation. Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem, and people from there think it gives them the right” (3). Although this provocative first paragraph appears to indicate a focus on the longest occupation in modern history (of the West Bank), the story is not about Israel so much as about differences between Orthodox and secular Jews, relationships, and the Shoah. However, before the topic changes to the Shoah and accompanying stories, Mark spouts various “right-wing” Israeli comments, as he expresses desire for (settlement) space (4), disputes Russian Jews’ Judaism as some of them cannot prove matrilineal descent (8) and disparages the Israelis of Ethiopian descent as they “just” converted (8) – his persuasions will come back later though.

In fact, Mark and Lauren, or Yerucham and Shoshana, as they now call themselves, are not only Jerusalemites, but fitting Mark’s political stance, they are ultra-Orthodox. Shoshana and the narrator’s wife, Deb, went to yeshiva together, all of their school years – “two young women living in New York on the edge of two worlds” (7). “They stayed best friends forever until [the narrator] married Deb and turned her secular, and soon after Lauren met Mark […] and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox” (4). To be more precise, the frum (“pious”) couple is of an unspecified Hasidic persuasion, although they are probably not with the more outreach- oriented Chabad (10). This means they observe various customs: For instance, they do not touch in public (3), observe kashrut fastidiously (11, 19), do not read fiction or “secular books” (21), and do not do “mixed dancing” (26f). Mark sports a rather long beard which complements his outfit that consists of a black suit and a big black hat (5), while Shoshana wears a sheitel, “a giant blond Marylin Monroe wig” (5) that covers her natural hair. On some gray areas like smoking marijuana (14) and using Facebook (19), they are not overly pious. Furthermore, they have ten children, as more Orthodox congregations take the mitzvah (“commandment”) to procreate and the prohibition to spill seed “without purpose” seriously (Isaacs). Thus, childfree

60 for once, the couple, especially Shoshana-Lauren, is very excited (7). They are in the US because Mark’s parents, who are Holocaust survivors, are getting old and cannot make the pilgrimage to Israel for Sukkot, so the younger visit the old instead (6). This might place the short story in autumn, if the Orthodox couple came to the US around this time as well, which is not entirely clear.

Shoshana-Lauren reconnected with Deb over Facebook after many years. Deb and the narrator live a “secular” life in South Florida (3), in an ample house with a massive pantry (27) – which to the Israel-habituated Mark represents “space upon space” (4). Deb entered “the other world” after New York Yeshiva and the couple appears to live a mostly “assimilated life” after twenty- two years of marriage. The narrator often pokes fun at the other couple’s Orthodoxy (3, 11, 20, 22, 31), which Deb playfully stops again and again. The couple professes that they do want to set a good example for their only son Trevor by not drinking in front of him – hiding their drug- abusing behavior (7f). Deb is somewhat obsessed with the Shoah and delighted about Mark’s parents being survivors. The narrator points out to their guests that “Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone” (8). He even proclaims: “‘It’s like she’s a survivor’s kid, my wife. It’s crazy, that education they give them. Her grandparents were all born in the Bronx, but it’s like, I don’t know. It’s like here we are twenty minutes from downtown Miami, but really it’s 1937 and we live on the edge of Berlin. It’s astounding’” (12).

Upon revelation of youthful indiscretion – the yeshiva girls Deb and Lauren having smoked cannabis in their teenage years – and the narrator’s reacting shocked about it, Deb (lovingly) ridicules her “big bad secular husband” (13) as “Mr. Liberal Open-Minded” (13) who, according to Deb, cannot fathom that his wife had “any history of haughtiness at all” (13). The narrator is not too embarrassed and after a laugh and the other couple’s confession to be heavy cannabis smokers, the mood is lightened. However, a fragile moment reveals fractures within the admittedly more than two decades long marriage: As the group begins to lust after a marijuana high, Deb reveals that Trevor keeps a stash of “pot” at home, which is news to the narrator who feels left out, betrayed (15), especially in combination with the first revelation. However, he feels inhibited to discuss the issue in the presence of the other couple. As they approach the cusp of “getting high,” the narrator cannot bear his frustration anymore and raises the issue. Deb, who has only known for a few days, planned to give their son a chance to resolve the issue with her alone, which the narrator objects to: “‘But he’s the son […] I’m the father.

61 Even if it’s a secret with him, it should be a double secret between me and you. I should always get to know---but pretend not to know---any secret with him.” […] “That’s how it goes, […] that’s how it’s always been. […] Hasn’t it?’” This is the first crucial question within the short story that does not get an answer because Deb, already severely high, starts to laugh about her being “messed up” (18). Deb explains where she found the marijuana and as the narrator begins to feel high too, the couple makes up and he “feels like we’re a team again” (18).

The South Florida couple’s son with the anglicized name Trevor appears to be a “typical” US middle class teenager who appears a bit spoiled and sleeps into the afternoon. Mark uses this fact as an opportunity to reminisce about his own lazy teenage days and calls Trev and probably his past self too, “Rumpleforeskin” (6), which appears a bit confrontative as this term sometimes connotes a penis without circumcision, i.e., not a real Jew. This might make sense as later Mark remarks that Trev “‘does not […] seem Jewish to me’” (21). Combined with the earlier epistemological discrepancy between the South Florida couple regarding their sons’ cannabis, this provides Mark with ample munition for an attack when the hasid initiates a “discussion,” or rather, an alternating depiction of strongly opposing views within Judaism:

“What I’m trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can’t build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.” “Wow, that’s offensive,” Deb says. “And close-minded. There is such a thing as Jewish culture. One can live a culturally rich life.” “Not if it’s supposed to be a Jewish life. Judaism is a religion. And with religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever- changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with glue.” (22)

Mark clearly spells out that he identifies the notion of the Shoah as the only cohesive element of “being Jewish,” as the “center” of certain kinds of Judaism, as a problem. As other aspects of Judaism that may have been more holistically binding move to the periphery, a condemnation of the “culture of commemoration” that has emerged in the US and other countries of the political West as an ersatz religion by the more zealous appears comprehensible. Additionally, Shoah commemoration is often not even a solely “Jewish” ritual, but often an identifying marker for Jews and non-Jews alike. Aside from the possibly viable characterization of Shoah commemoration being a “weak” identity-establishing factor “for generations,” this may also hint at a mindset that abhors perceived “weakness.”

62 Of course, Mark-Yerucham conveniently leaves out that religions change as well. Furthermore, Judaism, independent of any religious “truth,” is an older construction than the developments “modern” world, but still remains a construction, even if patched, mended and rebuilt for thousands of years, not to mention that Hasidism and its various subsects are relatively new manifestations of Jewish faith, world-historically. Mark goes on to argue that

“because in Israel we are sound, solid Jews […] we don’t need to […] busy ourselves with symbolic efforts to keep our memories in place. Because we live exactly as our parents lived before the war. And this serves us in all things, in our relationships, too, in our marriages and parenting.” (23)

This heavy generalization of Israel, which remains a multi-faceted society in spite of certain segregational elements, appears slightly preposterous. Yet, that view of the “solid Jew” is the imagined community the nationalistic Mark includes himself in – who himself grew up in the (relatively) more liberal United States. His imagined community needs the concept of an other or even an enemy – or rather, various enemies that threaten a supposed idealized order of things. That is why Mark interrelates Jews “straying” from the supposed Orthodox order he believes in with fantasies of annihilation. Following the above, controversial (or from another perspective, bigoted) opinions burst from Mark rapidly:

“‘Our concern […] is not the past Holocaust. It is the current one. The one that takes more than fifty percent of the Jews this generation. Our concern is intermarriage. It is the Holocaust that’s happening now. […] You need to worry that your son marries a Jew.’ ‘Oh my God,’ Deb says. ‘Oh my God. Are you calling intermarriage a Holocaust? You can’t really---I mean Shoshana. I mean, don’t…Are you really comparing?’ ‘You ask my feeling, that’s my feeling. But this, no, it does not exactly apply to you, except in the example you set for the boy. Because you’re Jewish, your son, he is as Jewish as me. No more, no less.’” (24)

The “Holocaust of intermarriage” is a frequent talking point for Orthodox and/or Zionists, for example, in 2019, Israel’s then-education minister Rafi Peretz caused a stir when he drew such an analogy (Kadari-Ovadia). Note that Mark speaks about “our concern,” perhaps referring to Shoshana-Lauren or even to all parties present, but more likely to his imagined “Jewish” community. Following Mark’s Jewish “blood logic,” Trevor is Jewish, after all, he comes from a “real marriage,” although he “does not […] seem Jewish” (21) to him. If Mark is of the mindset of those Orthodox forces that consider intermarriage not to be a real marriage anyway, and it appears likely he is, a possible intermarried child of Trevor’s will cease being Jewish. By inferring the Shoah, the ethno-religious-nationalist Mark alleges willful mass-destruction of Jewish life to the more liberal US Jews who marry who they want. In Mary Douglas’ terms,

63 Mark seeks to eradicate the unclean, unorderly hybrids from, as he appears to perceive it, his Judaism. However, to refer back to Jonathan Sarna’s assessment in an earlier chapter, a changing and more inclusive Jewish populace might not indicate a dwindling populace.

Deb halts Mark’s ramblings by calling him a “Born-Again Harry” (24), by which she likely alludes to the extreme zealotry often associated with those who “re-find” their religion – due the appellation, general hilarity ensues and the tipsy and high acquaintances make up. Eventually, they go dancing in the rain, which creates a feeling of elation in the narrator: “It is the most glorious, and silliest, and freest I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people come to visit our house” (26). After the dancing and the weed, the couples experience a surge in appetite, so they raid the massive pantry, which is not only “indeed large, and […] indeed stocked” (27), so well- stocked that the Orthodox guests wonder what the reason might be.

Then the crucial and somewhat eponymous point of the story is revealed: Deb is “‘always plotting our secret hiding place’” (28) in the event of a second Shoah. The narrator lays out Deb’s plan: “‘At the pantry, and a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you just sealed it all up---like put drywall at the entrance to the den---you’d never know’” (28). Then Shoshana remembers this obsession of Deb’s going back to their childhood and it is revealed that Deb has been playing the “Anne Frank game” or the “Righteous Gentile game” or “Who Will Hide Me?” for most of her life. “Anne Frank” in the title is metonymic for the Shoah, or rather, the “hiding Jews” aspect of the Shoah. As noted in an earlier chapter, the story of Anne Frank is one of if not the most widely spread cultural items that informed people living in the US about the Shoah. Hence, it comes as no surprise that it informs this fantasy. For Englander, it might not have been as much a fantasy, but a semi-real possibility, as the author “played” the “Righteous Gentile game” with his family, “raised with the idea of a looming second Holocaust” (“N.E. Stories”). The author pokes fun at his own youth by including utterances such as “it’s crazy, that education they give them” (12).

The couples talk about the game, and Mark decides that his Mormon friend in Israel would hide him (30). The US couple thinks that while her male neighbor would hide them, their wife would not (30f). Shoshana suggests that Deb and the narrator could play the game among themselves, imagine to be a goy and decide then. In a loving moment, after initial seriousness, Deb decides that the narrator would hide her and hugs him (31). Then the Orthodox play,

64 although Mark resists to fill the role of the Gentile: “‘But if I weren’t Jewish, I wouldn’t be me’” (31). Shoshana helps him imagine the three others as to-be-hidden Jews and then begins to have a long look at her husband, to really look at his essence as he puts his hand on hers. “And you can tell Shoshana is thinking of her kids, though that’s not part of the scenario. You can tell that she’s changed part of the imagining” (32). So, Shoshana devotes herself to the imagination of the “game,” and even imagines the admittedly bigger responsibility to harbor eleven people – and time passes. Eventually, Shoshana answers in the affirmative, “but to him it sounds as it does to us, so that he is now asking and asking. But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hide you?” (32) “Shoshana pulls back her hand” (32) and the story ends in an extremely awkward moment, where everybody present knows “that this wife believes her husband would not hide her” (32), but nobody knows how to move on.

But why does she believe Mark would not save her? Perhaps Englander makes a statement here: Perhaps Mark is not chosen as a savior because of his strictness. Mark appears to have easy answers – or at least quick criticisms – for complicated problems. The nationalistic and stringent Mark time and time again brushes against precisely the segregating character of the Nazi regime that enabled the perpetrators of the Shoah in the first place. For his conception of “the Jewish people,” there are strict rules that he would not compromise – he has clear conceptions of what is “pure” and what is “dirty.” He says that if he was not Jewish, he would not be himself – exactly. If one were to imagine the nationalistic fervor and strictness without any kind of Jewish identity markers attached, the leap toward imagining Mark at least as an informer in a nationalistic regime if not as a perpetrator appears not very far.

Perhaps the mention of the pilgrimage festival Sukkot hints at another dimension of this story. During the harvest festival in which Jews are supposed to temporarily shelter themselves in huts, “tabernacles,” the bestowment of Israel unto the Jews is commemorated by the “shaking” of four types of plant (“Sukkot 101”). According to the Vayikra Rabbah, an early exegesis of the Torah, these four types represent four types of people that all together make up the Jewish people: Those who are religious and do good, those who are religious but do no good, those who are not religious and do good as well as those who are not religious and also do no good (30:12). The religious attributions – two observant, two secular – certainly fits the four principal characters, and Mark might represent being religious yet also not doing good. However, all of them point to the many different manifestations of Judaism – the “good” and the “bad” as well as the “cultural/secular” and the “religious/traditional” being legitimate,

65 which might be an underlying meaning of this story, which, just as the stories before, might be influenced by an older text, referring back to those works that are “centrally Jewish.”

5 Conclusion

Itzik might have failed at doing his Santa job the way his corporate overlords/chief Santa lady intended, but the voluminous rabbi asserts his identity in a memorable fashion. For a moment, he appears to become an inexorable force as he is forced to rise up to “stand” with his compatriot “boychik” to “rise up” for Jewish rituals, tradition, and community. Officially, his Santa status is revoked – but neither Itzik nor his employers have the power to do so – and it is similar with his being Jewish. Even as he is forced to work the unwanted job, he stays “Reb Santa,” not simply Santa Claus, maintains his being Jewish. “Reb Kringle” resonates with the rebellion commemorated at Chanukkah.

Charles Luger also asserts his identity, albeit it is a newfound one. Humorously, he is characterized as somewhat overeager and nescient for the time being. However, the attempt to live “the life of the Orthodox Jew” is portrayed as sincere and never doubted on the extradiegetic level. Charles’ newfound identity amounts to rituals, learning, self-assertion, and questioning. The gilgul, the reincarnation, and the different parts of the soul touch upon Kabbalistic texts and traditions.

The situation is quite different in “Peep Show,” as Allen is haunted by the “ghosts” of his learning. With regard to Jewish identity, the story appears to say that although Allen left behind his Jewish environment, customs, and even name, he is still marked by his experience and plagued by the contradictions that arose in his mind, brought up by his having been raised in a religious environment. Allen’s future child not being a Jew in the halakhic sense, a stance represented by the rabbis, might not be definitive, but the “ethno-religious-nationalistic” bundle that is Judaism still holds Allen in his grip, whether Allen hides it or not – but he might be more content with his identity after being washed in “hell.”

The final short story contains the juxtaposition of two extremes of the spectrum of Jewish identity. The cultural, secular South Florida Jews, who in the eyes of the “other side” are too

66 lax, meet the “strict, suffocatingly austere” more Orthodox Israeli Jews. The Orthodox husband Mark fails the “Anne Frank game” and, albeit being a round character, is painted as a negative, nationalistic and excluding character. Yet, as the reference to Sukkot may indicate, he – and the others make up the wide array of Jewish identities that assemble under the umbrella of Judaism – even if he might refuse to acknowledge it.

All the short stories might share the recourses to texts and traditions that are “centrally Jewish.” The subject matter of the stories are peculiarities of Jewish identity and trans-code perceptions of Jewish life, and engage with Jewish issues in thoughtful ways, while still retaining an inclusive dimension in which self-assertion is the most important marker of who is or is not a Jew. Englander’s reflective writing functions as a riveting engagement with Jewish identity, which itself represents a marker of Jewish identity.

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