Finding Home in Babel: Transnationalism, Translation, and Languages of Identity by Justine M. Pas A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture) in The University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anita Norich, Co-Chair Associate Professor Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Co-Chair Professor Deborah Dash Moore Professor Todd M. Endelman Associate Professor Tiya A. Miles © Justine M. Pas 2008 Dla Babci i Dziadzia z podziekowaniem For my Grandparents with gratitude ii Acknowledgements This project could not have been completed without the generous support of many people. They are proof that the American Dream is a collective enterprise. My first thanks go to my family in Poland: my grandparents Maria and Stanislaw, my sister Natalia, my niece Emilia, my aunt and uncle Anata and Zenek, my cousin Wojtek, and, of course, my mother Basia in California. I would not be the person I am today without them. I am grateful for the encouragement and feedback of my dissertation committee: co- chairs Anita Norich and Magdalena Zaborowska, and members Todd Endelman, Deborah Dash-Moore, and Tiya Miles. This project took root in Magda’s Immigrant Narrative seminar with a paper on Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation. Magda has been a model scholar for me. She has always encouraged me and her friendship has gotten me through some of the most difficult times of my graduate school career. She read each page of this manuscript with the utmost care, offering comments, feedback, and editing advice with untiring patience and understanding. Magda and her son Cazmir embraced me as part of their family–Dziekuje! I took my first graduate seminar in Jewish American literature with Anita; I immediately realized how much I could learn from her insight and keen eye for the historical and social contexts of literary texts. Throughout the last six years, iii her house has been my home time and again, a place where she and her daughter Sara have always made me feel welcomed–A sheynem dank! Both Magda and Anita helped me with the research and the writing of this project; throughout it all they were generous with their time and advice, guiding me through the steps of this difficult process. During more than four years of my graduate school career, I have had the privilege of working with a group of outstanding women on the innovative and exciting Global Feminisms Project: Abby Stewart, Liz Cole, Jayati Lal, Wang Zheng, and Kristin McGuire. From them, I learned about feminist activism, oral histories, and the politics of translation. Many thanks to my colleagues and friends at the University of Michigan for keeping me sane: Alice Weinreb (my insanely smart friend who edited parts of this manuscript), Deidre Wheaton and Rachel Peterson (my fellow travelers), Aimee Germain and Laura Krinock (my ‘L-crew’), and Danya Keene (my neighborly friend). And to Louis Cicciarelli whose creative and inspirational editing helped me to complete this project. Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the American Culture Program: Evelyn Alsultany, Matthew Briones, Kristin Hass, Catherine Daligga, Rabia Belt, Jessi Gan, Tayana Hardin, and Kiara Vigil. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the administrative staff of the American Culture Program for their untiring efforts on behalf of graduate students, and especially to Marlene Moore, who always found time for me. iv A heartfelt thanks to Jadwiga Maurer and Irena Klepfisz for patiently answering my many questions. Their works and words continue to inspire me. I would also like to thank Jadwiga Maurer’s friends who met with me in Poland: Regina Renz, Stanislaw Obirek, Jerzy Daniel, and Basia Predygier. I was first introduced to the field of immigration studies at California State University, Fullerton, where I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in American Studies. Pamela Steinle, whose course on American Character motivated me to seek a degree in American Studies, continues to be my close friend/sister, mentor, and reader. Some years ago, Pam insisted that, despite my immigrant misgivings, I was good enough to pursue a Ph.D. She was right. I will always be grateful for her unwavering faith in me. Thanks also to Leila Zenderland and John Ibson, who helped to get me here. Thank you, as well, to my friends and adopted family in California: Suzanne (the bestest friend a girl could have), and Leo & Quinn (my model relationship). This project would not have been possible without the financial support of various units at the University of Michigan: the Program in American Culture, Marshall Weinberg and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Center for the Education of Women, the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar. Funding was also provided by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. v I dedicate this dissertation to my grandparents. My babcia Maria, whose personality I have gladly inherited, has raised two generations of children, and is in the process of helping to bring up her great-grand daughter, Emilia. I will be happy if I have half of her strength, energy, and wisdom when I reach the beautifully ripe age of 82. The loss of my dziadziu Stanislaw in March of 2007 is irreparable. He was our pillar of strength, good humor, and patience. We will always miss him. vi Preface In Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “The Battle of Grunwald,” an American soldier mistakenly shoots a Jewish woman who lives in a Displaced Persons camp in allied occupied Germany. The narrator of Borowski’s story remains nonplussed by the event. He nonchalantly explains the situation to an American officer, who is frantically trying to find out what happened, in these words: “Nothing. Nothing happened at all. You just shot a girl from our camp. Germans shot at us for six years, now you shoot at us, what’s the difference?” This scene in Wybor Opowiadan (Selections), the 1959 Polish-language collection of Borowski’s stories is a stunning depiction of murder: so soon after the end of World War II and in a place intended to offer safety and shelter to Holocaust survivors, Borowski’s narrator offers a parallel between the allied liberators and Nazi perpetrators. On the surface, Borowski’s narrator seems to ascribe the crime to a case of mistaken identity: the soldier is not trained to recognize the young woman as a displaced person he is supposed to protect, while she does not recognize the soldier as her protector. On a deeper level, however, this tragic encounter has everything to do with multiple languages and the politics of cross-cultural communication. In U.S.-occupied Germany, the Jewish survivors and the American soldiers rarely interact; they don’t speak the same language. There is also a clearly uneven power relationship between them that the narrator of Borowski’s stories captures perfectly. The Jewish displaced vii persons, the survivors of Nazi atrocities, continue to be the captives in the camp that is now overseen by U.S. guards with guns. Barbara Vedder, the translator of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967) in which “The Battle of Grunwald” does not appear, explains that this edition was intended to contain only those stories that were directly related to Borowski’s survival of Nazi concentration camps.1 Vedder’s politic explanation notwithstanding, this collection will forever be haunted for me by that excluded story, which was, in fact, so clearly inspired by Borowski’s concentration camp experiences. “The Battle of Grunwald” was perhaps deemed irrelevant for another, less obvious reason: in its all too uncomfortable parallels between German perpetrators and American liberators, it all too painfully disturbs conventional notions of Allied liberation, justice, and peace. Most importantly for my project, it extends the discussions of survivors’ lives beyond 1945 and the end of World War II.2 Borowski’s story invites us to think about the many postwar displacements experienced by European Jews. As a student in the Program in American Culture whose interdisciplinary training fine-tuned my reading of social and historical contexts in literature, I immediately wanted to read beyond the ending of Borowski’s story; to learn more about those survivors who made their lives in the U.S. following World War II. As a student and teacher of American literature, I wanted to read their stories to see what they themselves had to say about their new lives here, and what lessons their experiences 1 Please see the preface to This Way, London: Cape, 1967. 2 For discussions of survivors’ lives in DP camps in Germany in the first few years after the war, please see Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007; Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. viii could provide for us today. In the process, I found that relatively little has been said about Holocaust survivors as newcomers to this country, or as people who had to live in and negotiate the daily complexities of cultural and linguistic translation.3 It seemed that by the end of the 20th Century, survivors were talked about in the popular media as if their homes, if not always here, were meant to be here. One of the most interesting illustrations of this ‘assimilation’ of survivors into the American ethos of democratic freedom is Jeffrey Shandlers’ While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (1999). Shandler found, for instance, that for the first twenty or so years after the war, survivors were rarely the subject of media representations and that when they were, the coverage focused on their new and happy lives in their adopted country.