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Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy A BETTER PLACE TO BE UNHAPPY Identity in Gary Shteyngart’s immigrant fiction Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- Promotor: en Letterkunde: Nederlands – prof. dr. Philippe Codde August 2011 Engels” by Thomas Joos Acknowledgments In the acknowledgments of his latest novel, Gary Shteyngart says that “writing a book is real hard and lonely, let me tell you.” I don’t mean to steal his thunder, nor to underestimate the efforts required to write a novel comparable to his fiction, but writing a thesis on his books has been equally hard and lonely. Especially in the summertime. Let me tell you. Therefore, I would like to thank a number of people for helping me out or reminding me, once in a while, that I was still alive. First and foremost, my thanks go to my promotor prof. dr. Philippe Codde for his valuable feedback and for introducing me to Jewish American fiction in the first place. Also, I want to thank my parents, my brother Dieter and sister Eveline for supporting me, knowingly or unknowingly, from this world or another, at times when my motivation reached rock bottom. Finally, a big thank you to my closest friends, who made this 4-year trip at Ghent University definitely worthwile. Thomas Joos Ghent, August 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................. 1 PART ONE ............................................................................................................................... 7 I. GARY SHTEYNGART...................................................................................................... 7 II. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE........... 11 1. Historical Overview ..................................................................................................... 11 2. 21 st -Century Jewish American Fiction......................................................................... 16 2.1 Postmemory ............................................................................................................ 18 2.2 Postmigration ......................................................................................................... 21 III. POSTMIGRATION AND IDENTITY.......................................................................... 24 1. The Geography of the Planet: Immigration Patterns.................................................... 24 2. The Geography of the Mind: Identity Politics ............................................................. 27 3. Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature................................................ 29 PART TWO ............................................................................................................................ 33 IV. IDENTITY PERMUTATIONS IN THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE’S HANDBOOK ..... 33 1. The Ambiguity of Jewish Identity................................................................................ 33 1.1 Shteyngart’s ethnic shtick ...................................................................................... 33 1.2 The schlemiel as the tragic, ironic hero in exile .................................................... 38 2. National Identity and Multiculturalism in the USA..................................................... 48 2.1 Dialectics of assimilation ....................................................................................... 49 2.2 Irony and the immigrant experience ...................................................................... 51 2.3 Meta-criticism in the postmigration framework ..................................................... 53 V. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE OF ABSURDISTAN ............................................................. 57 1. The National Shtick ...................................................................................................... 58 2. Postmigration Identity Permutations............................................................................ 63 3. Political Implications.................................................................................................... 71 3.1 All war is socio-economic ...................................................................................... 71 3.2 The ethnoreligious reflex ........................................................................................ 74 VI. THE END OF IDENTITY IN SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY ............................... 78 1. The Existential, Political and Cultural Crisis............................................................... 79 2. The Struggle for Identity.............................................................................................. 82 2.1 Jewish identity ........................................................................................................ 82 2.2 Traumatic identity .................................................................................................. 85 3. Postmigration as a Political Pastiche............................................................................ 87 4. Identity in Literature..................................................................................................... 91 FINAL COMMENTS .......................................................................................................... 96 WORKS CITED................................................................................................................. 101 INTRODUCTION The Jewish American paradox In 2006, Adam Rovner published an article in which he briefly evaluates the contemporary status and the recent history of the Jewish American novel and its reception.1 Central to his inspiring discussion is a paradox that opposes two conflicting socio-literary tendencies with regard to Jewish American literature. On the one hand, Rovner brings to mind the successful and thorough process of cultural assimilation in which Jewish immigrants have been involved over the course of the 20 th century “since Jewish immigration peaked in 1907.” 2 This process of assimilation has often been perceived as a threat to the survival of American Jewry and prompted a lot of panicky reactions. In 1984, Stephen J. Whitfield warned that “both as a percentage and as sheer numbers, American Jewry has been declining of late, a tendency that shows every sign of continuing.” 3 Similar concerns were also phrased in the controversial 1990 National Jewish Population Survey.4 Naturally, this evolution led many literary critics and scholars to believe that the Jewish American novel would decline accordingly. One of them was the prominent social and literary critic Irving Howe. Already in 1977, Howe claimed that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning out of materials and memories.” 5 Howe’s outlook is straightforward: the sociocultural position of American Jewry could only be more and more described in terms of (successful) assimilation and integration. Hence, literary representation of that specific Jewish American expierence was bound to disappear as well, or at least bound to disband in an ‘all-American’ corpus of mainstream literature. Howe was not the only critic who (prematurely) mourned the extinction of Jewish American fiction. Rovner points out that prominent scholars like Ruth Wisse and Leslie Fiedler “have been far les conciliatory than Howe” 6 in their predictions. Fiedler even decisively concluded that “the Jewish-American novel is over and done with, a part of history rather than a living literature.” 7 1 Adam Rovner, “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic.” AJS Review 30:2 (2006): 313 – 324 2 Rovner, 314 3 Stephen J. Whitfield, Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden: Archon Books, 1984), xi 4 Conclusions of the survey can be retrieved at http://www.jewishdatabank.org/NJPS1990.asp 5 Howe in Rovner, 315 6 Rovner, 315 7 Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: Godine, 1991), 117 1 Needless to say, history has proven Howe and his contemporaries at least partially wrong: the Jewish American novel is not past its high point. Even more, throughout the last two decades, it has managed to become a highly popular and burgeoning literary field in contemporary American writing. Derek Parker Royal elaborately disproves all attempts to finalize the Jewish American literary tradition in his 2004 article “Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative.” 8 He distinguishes a promising Jewish American literary revival taking shape from the 1990s onwards, as “the centrifugal spin of assimilation gives way to a more centripetal pull toward ethnic definition.”9 This renewed attention for Jewish identity and culture shows itself (a.o.) in the work of Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein and Michael Chabon. Other writers of this ‘new wave’, among which Art Spiegelman, Thane Rosenbaum, Eva Hoffman and Melvin Jules Bukiet, explicitly draw upon the Holocaust to assert Jewish identity and introduce the trauma-related matter of so-called “second-generation witnessing” to the Holocaust in literature. 10 The Holocaust also takes up an important role in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer, to whom Royal only briefly refers. Foer can best be considered a prominent exponent of yet another generation of Jewish American writers,

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