Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000S

Chapter 9 The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000s “Arabs proudly smell of themselves, Jews already lost their smell in contrast to their olive-skinned neighbors, they are ashamed of their formerly strong sweat glands and hope to become similar to other nations sunk in sterility” Alexander Goldstein. 2001.1 Alexander Goldstein (Aleksandr Gol’dshtein) (1957–2006) is writer of complex postmodernist prose that appeals to a high-brow Russian-speaking readership both in Russia and in the Diaspora. He won major literary prizes — the Antibooker and Malyi Booker in 1997 and the prestigious Andrei Belyi award in 2001. As a representative of the younger generation of Russian Jewish writers, he belongs to the group of the Russian intellectuals of Jewish descent who did not have a particular interest in Jewish antiquities or in aspects of Yiddishkeit. Goldstein was born in Tallin, the capital of Estonia. He lived for thirty years in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he attended school and graduated from university.2 In 1990 he immigrated to Israel as a consequence of the political instability and ethnic tensions brought about by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.3 He died in Tel Aviv from lung cancer. Goldstein’s fragile health was part of his construct of the self-reflecting authorial subject of his two important books: Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Parting with Narcissus [1997]) and Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Aspects of Spiritual Marriage [2001])4 for which he won the Andrei Belyi award.5 This award is given specifically to achievements in Russian prose, and in developing and advancing the potential of the Russian literary language. The essays in Aspects of Spiritual Marriage attest to his interest in Roman and Greek antiquity, Egyptology, intellectual 208208 The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel history, and the history of philosophy and religion from Kundera, Lacan and Confucius to Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This scope and breadth of knowledge is typical of a Russian (Jewish) representative of his generation and attests to the quest to embrace foreign cultures intellectually. This quest was how his generation compensated for their lack of ability to travel outside the Soviet Union as the country’s borders were sealed for the majority of the intelligentsia, especially for those of Jewish descent. The desire to embrace knowledge about all that was non-Russian or non-Slavic was also a result of an aversion to the Russocentrism of the monocultural package of information parceled out by official Soviet culture. Despite the openly antisemitic policy of this official Soviet culture, there is no evidence in Goldstein’s essays of a desire to acquire knowledge about Jewish culture during his years in the Soviet Union, and the Jewish theme is not present at all in his work during this pre-emigration period. With his arrival in Israel and his exposure to a different form of Jewish life as represented there he began to experience a new interest in things Jewish. Goldstein’s work provides an interesting insight into the construction of one’s own identity on the basis of a postmodernist assemblage of various pieces of academic, anthropological, and linguistic knowledge relating to aspects of Jewishness. There are no allusions to religious Jewish sources in Goldstein’s works written in Israel, no academically catalogued cultural practices or linguistic associations. Although his postmodernist prose is saturated with literary quotations without quotation marks (clearly aimed at the sophisticated reader), allusions, and cross-references to a wide range of multicultural sources, this rich fabric of references tellingly neglects any important mention of Jewish history and culture. It is precisely this lack that provokes interest, and in what follows presents an attempt to identify those points, topics and issues that Goldstein problematizes in order to construct his own multilayered identity in Israel. While maintaining the focus of this investigation — the theme of the Jew’s body — the present chapter will demonstrate Goldstein’s choice of topics that helped him to create boundaries between his own physical and ontological body and the bodies of various ethnic, class, and gender Others that he refers to in his essays. In the essay “1990,” included in Aspects of Spiritual Marriage, Goldstein is explicit about why he left Russia: ethnic tensions between Azeris and Armenians caused many people of other ethnicities, including Jews, to fear for their safety. Jews know from their historical experience and collective memories that any form of violence can grow into anti-Jewish pogroms, hence his friends’ and his own decision to leave for Israel. In another essay, “On Literary Immigration,” Goldstein writes about the need to acknowledge a new 209209 Chapter 9 cultural phenomenon in recent Russian literary culture — the emergence of a literature that is written in the Russian language yet is not Russian literature as such. He refers to the development of English-language literature written by Indians, which is viewed as a separate brand of literature. He maintains that this new literature, written in Russian but in places geographically and territorially outside Russia, can only enrich Russian literature. Coming from a writer who writes in Russian and who receives Russian literary awards but who lives in Israel, this suggestion testifies to the realization of a new phenomenon taking place globally and from which Russian culture is not immune. In this way Goldstein declares himself an author whose new linguistic and geo-political experiences link him with various international authors writing in the language of the former Soviet Empire, but having a more complicated national identity. It can be argued that this identity is formed by “blending” — a concept advanced by the cognitivists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner — and Goldstein’s work can be viewed as an example of this phenomenon, characterized by its authors as a marker of our times.6 Fauconnier and Turner write about “conceptual blending,” the merging of episodes taken from any historical moment in time, any geographical locus in space, any personality, real or dreamed, contemporary or belonging to past epochs, and it is the merging of these various components that forms the individual identities of our contemporaries. It is from this breadth of topics, changes of times and locations and diversities of cultural paradigms that Goldstein weaves his narratives, thereby testifying to the viability of the concept of blending in the formation of contemporary identities. Certainly in Goldstein’s essays the main subject is his own self-referential authorial persona. His first main work has a telling title — Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Parting with Narcissus) — and clearly reveals the main object of the writer’s interest as his own Self. Goldstein freely takes material from the historical past of any nation or culture that may help him to express his thoughts at any given moment. He then combines these fragments with any aspect of his own current experience. From this combination there emerges the construct of his own identity. For this construct, the concept of the Jew’s body is a building block. The title of Goldstein’s second book, Aspects of Spiritual Marriage, attests to the author’s confidence that “aspects” are more tangible than the whole, and it is on the aspects of the Jew’s body that the present chapter will concentrate. In the case of Goldstein, his own Jewish body stands as an example of the concept of blending as a way of constructing identity. Psychological introjection, identification with people and what Foucannier and Turner call “non-people” — imaginary people, including real historical 210 The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel figures whom the subject did not know personally, literary characters and characters taken from folk wisdom — are all blended to produce this body. What is particularly interesting in the case of Goldstein’s construction and self-perception of his own body is its metathetical mode. He endows himself with various features of the Jew’s body that have been created by various hostile cultures, and reverses the evaluation of this body. The physical, physiological and psychological features of his body become the object of his narcissistic pride. He constructs a special kind of Self, different from the class and racial Other and uses his body as the site of this difference. If, as seen in most of the works analyzed so far, being small, and sickly, and having a low libido and indefinite gender characteristics are regarded as negative and derogative markers of the Jewish male, then, in the case of Goldstein, all these features become positive attributes of his special Self. They become aspects of the body that the author exhibits to his reader, who is then prompted to admire it on the basis of its well-calculated and deliberately selected representation. His texts demonstrate that Goldstein calculatingly chose the most flattering light in which to exhibit his own body — he is both a stage director and a voyeur, a photographer and a writer, making sure that the advertised model leaves the best impression on the reader/viewer. It is no accident that the cover of Aspects of Spiritual Marriage features the picture of an eye — the author is a voyeur of his own body, as is the reader, and the descriptions of scenes from the

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