Hebrew Gothic

History and the Poetics of Persecution

Karen Grumberg

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253042279
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire juive

"Makes a persuasive argument" that gothic ideas "play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics." —Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

PART 1

A SPECTRALIZED PAST

1

ALWAYS ALREADY GOTHIC

S. Y. Agnon’s European Tales of Terror

IN 1916, A GERMAN LITERARY ANTHOLOGY ENTITLED TREUE (Fidelity) was published and presented as a Passover gift to Jewish soldiers serving on the German front during World War I. The anthology included works by the foremost Hebrew and Yiddish authors of the day, but it is perhaps best remembered today for cementing the importance of the renowned Hebrew author S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) in the discerning German Jewish intellectual milieu.¹ Printed as a preface to Agnon’s contributions to the volume and, more broadly, as an introduction of Agnon to a German audience was an admiring letter from Martin Buber to the editor, Leo Herrmann. In his letter, Buber prophetically asserts that Agnon’s “vocation is to be the poet and chronicler of Jewish life; of that life which is dying and changing today, but also of the other life, still unknown, that is growing.”² Buber’s enthusiastic public endorsement of Agnon helped establish his reputation as a leading Hebrew literary figure whose writing mediates not only between Europe and Palestine but also between fiction and history. Treue included German translations of two stories by Agnon: “Aliyat neshama” (Ascent of the soul), about an untimely death brought about by Hassidic fervor for the coming of the Messiah; and “Meḥolat ha-mavet” (“The Dance of Death”), a gothic story involving the kidnapping of an innocent maiden and ghosts rising from their graves for a midnight dance.³

Almost three decades later, another wartime literary anthology, this time in Hebrew, hosted fiction by Agnon. Titled Ba-sa’ar (In the storm) and described as a literary response to the horrific news from Europe, it was published in 1943 by the Union of Hebrew Authors (Agudat ha-sofrim ha-ivriyim) and included contributions from the most highly regarded authors and poets of the time, such as Leah Goldberg. Whereas Treue was distributed to Jewish soldiers on the German front in 1916, Ba-sa’ar was produced for the Hebrew Brigade, Jewish soldiers from the Yishuv who volunteered to fight with the British Army during World War II, and was small enough “to fit into their kit bags.”⁴ The story that Agnon chose to submit to the collection, “Ha-adonit ve-ha-rokhel” (“The Lady and the Peddler”), was not an obvious candidate for the explicitly political endeavor, rooted in contemporary events, undertaken by the Union of Hebrew Authors in Ba-sa’ar. Like “The Dance of Death,” it is a gothic story, complete with a foreboding forest, a bloody dagger, and a murderous vampire.

Agnon’s contribution to Ba-sa’ar departs from the others, and more generally from literature produced, translated, and consumed in the Yishuv during the war.⁵ As Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notes, Hebrew authors at that time subscribed to a “mandate to reenter history as acting [subjects]” through “revisionist symbols that invert the archetypes of martyrdom.”⁶ She points to the poetry in Ba-sa’ar as exemplifying the call for “heroic acts of revenge.”⁷ Agnon diverges from these poetic tendencies, offering no semblance of valor in “The Lady and the Peddler.” If heroism, revenge, and defiance were seen by his contemporaries as paving the way to reenter history and assert a Jewish presence in the here and now, then Agnon’s characters challenge the binary logic undergirding heroism and cowardice and offer a different historical orientation in the face of violence and war—one that is not linear but cyclical, not liberated from the past but perpetually revisited by it. This engagement with history is the first indication of a shared sensibility with gothic fiction, in which, as Catherine Spooner puts it, the “past chokes the present, prevents progress and the march towards personal or social enlightenment.”⁸

Furthermore, Agnon’s choice to respond to contemporary violence through narratives set in the distant and unspecified past complements his consistent borrowing from the themes and imagery of European gothic. Deeming the gothic a literary mode devoid of literary prestige, many readers of Agnon have tended to disparage its role in his oeuvre. For Agnon as for its most enduring eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practitioners, however, the gothic not only provides an alluring aesthetic but also allows for serious social and historical commentaries. This point is lost if we dismiss the pervasive, persistent, deep-seated gothic sensibility in his fiction as the awkward birth pangs of an author destined for greatness. Agnon without the gothic would not be Agnon.

In this chapter, I argue that taking Agnon’s gothicism seriously sheds new light on his engagement with the Jewish past, which has been conceptualized primarily in terms of loss and memorial. Agnon’s unconventional figuration of key themes at the intersection of Jewishness and the gothic, blood and wandering, in “The Dance of Death” and “The Lady and the Peddler” suggests a disconcertingly active past that invades and affects the Jewish present. The gothic evocation of fear, anxiety, and persecution structures these stories’ vision of a restless past and links it to an uneasy present. Even as the past shapes the present, the stories themselves shape the past, as evidenced by Agnon’s appropriation of familiar antisemitic tropes. By exposing the affinity of the gothic to the Jewish experience, Agnon recalibrates the dynamics between Christian and Jew, fiction and history, and, in particular, the past and the present. Though in the popular Hebrew imagination his fiction is associated, sometimes nostalgically and sometimes ironically, with an irrevocably lost Eastern European Jewish world, Agnon’s gothic stories bring us face-to-face with a violent history that refuses to retire into the grave.

What does Agnon gain by summoning these ghosts of history, both literal and metaphorical? What does he disrupt by delineating Jewish history as gothic? One of the most productive critical approaches to the gothic situates it vis-à-vis national narratives and their need to maintain coherence through exclusion. As Teresa A. Goddu notes, the gothic’s restoration of repressed narratives “disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history.” At the same time as it discloses a haunting past as the source of the instability of national self-representation, she points out, it paradoxically “can also work to coalesce those narratives.”⁹ Agnon’s gothic, however, is not positioned politically; it addresses the past of the Jewish people rather than that of the Jewish (or Polish) state. Furthermore, the violence his stories expose is not intended to restore a marginalized or suppressed narrative. It is accessible not to the descendants of its perpetrators but to those of its victims: readers of Hebrew, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, were grappling with a relentlessly increasing barrage of anti-Jewish violence that would culminate in the most incomprehensible event in Jewish history. Agnon’s gothic, then, invites his Jewish readers to confront the violent past to better understand their brutal present—indeed, the gothic in Agnon unsettles the very boundary between the past and the present.

I begin with a discussion of Agnon’s gothic oeuvre and of the discomfort his gothicism has engendered among some critics. I then consider his historic vision, first in terms of his fiction’s relation to specific historical eras or events such as the Holocaust, and then through broader conceptualizations of the past. Moving to the two stories at hand, I examine their multiple modes of temporality and historicity as evidence of a restless past that intrudes on the present. The final two sections of this chapter closely read the motifs of wandering and blood in the stories to show how the gothic complements the Judaic and activates Agnon’s history not only temporally but also thematically and aesthetically.

In “The Dance of Death” and “The Lady and the Peddler,” the gothic shapes Agnon’s vision of Jewish history on several levels: in the emphasis on fear and anxiety as defining features of the Jewish presence in Europe; in the depiction of time as cyclical and the past as perpetually returning to and rupturing the present; in the thematization of these phenomena through supernatural figures; and, finally, in the portrayal of historic Jewish experiences in terms of certain key motifs that mediate between the gothic and the Judaic. The persistent gothic image of the past that accompanies Agnon’s modernism points to anxieties of the present and parallels similarly jarring encounters in gothic literature, in which, as Fred Botting notes, “gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values.”¹⁰ As the dreams of Zionism came ever closer to realization while blood flowed in the fields of Agnon’s lost world, the lines collapsed between the gothic and the modern, the past and the present, the dead and the living, creating fertile ground for these stories.

Agnon’s Jewish Gothic: Critical Repressions

Though doomed love, death, and violence are prominent themes in Agnon’s oeuvre, they are not the ones with which he is primarily correlated. As the inimitable master of the Hebrew language in all its forms, a practitioner of a densely nuanced and allusive poetics, and the gatekeeper of the Eastern European Jewish past, Agnon is imbued with a gravitas that precludes the thrills and chills associated with the gothic. As such, Miriam Roshwald’s denial of Agnon’s gothicism, though perhaps more explicit than most, is typical. “Agnon could have been compared with the nineteenth-century Gothic writers in England, notorious for their flair for mystery and terror set among medieval castles, ruins, and cemeteries,” she observes. “But the similarity is totally misleading. Ruins and cemeteries in Agnon’s writings are not settings for theatrical effects, but form an integral part of the scheme of the Jewish shtetl. Even though occasionally Agnon indulges his gnomish imagination in a ‘Gothic’ prank, ultimately it leads to a serious . . . purpose and not to a cathartic thrill.”¹¹ This evaluation is based on a misrepresentation of the gothic, which, as a vast body of criticism attests, amounts to more than the “theatrical effects” and “cathartic thrills” with which it is often disparagingly associated.

Numerous critics have acknowledged Agnon’s proclivity for the macabre and the supernatural, but most consider it a characteristic of the great author’s unrefined first steps. Gershon Shaked, for example, observes that “the sentimental foundation dominated” in Agnon’s early works.¹² These features, he argues, provided the counterpoint to the ironic distance that Agnon was developing and for which he would become famous; as the author matured, the poetics of “emotional excess,” associated with the “nonrealistic” (בלתי-ריאליסטי or לא-ריאליסטי) mode of some of his stories, diminished.¹³ Some critics invoke the term gothic to signal the triviality of characteristics associated predominantly with Agnon’s early style, while others eschew this term altogether in favor of the more serious romantic, a related term more acceptable for an author of Agnon’s stature.¹⁴ Shaked attributes the author’s “sentimental topics,” preoccupation with death, and “melodramatic style” primarily to the German and Scandinavian romantic traditions and to neoromanticism, read as antithetical to Judaic motifs.¹⁵ That Romanticism offers a more palatable framework for Agnon’s gothic writing is evident even in Arnold Band’s monograph on Agnon’s work, Nostalgia and Nightmare, one of the only studies to have recognized and meaningfully engaged with Agnon’s gothicism as an integral component of his poetics.¹⁶

The critical literature on Agnon attributes his gothic propensities, however they are designated, to two influences that were formative in Agnon’s education and background: European, especially German, secular literature by authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the Jewish mystical tradition. Though both these influences undoubtedly played a role in the development of Agnon’s gothic poetics, I am interested more in the tendencies with which they are associated in Agnon’s writing than in identifying their source. Moreover, this approach not only fails to differentiate between the gothic and Romanticism, resulting in the occlusion of significant forces in Agnon’s stories, but it also, as we see in Roshwald’s statement and in studies by Shaked and others, presumes an inherent antithesis between the concerns of secular European literature and those of a world governed by Jewish tradition.

The latter point speaks to one of the most popular critical orientations toward Agnon and his work: the author’s duality. This duality takes several frequently cited forms: Agnon’s works encompass both the realistic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction: Gothic Matters
• Part 1: A Spectralized Past
• Part 2: Haunted Nation
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author