Exile in Global Literature and Culture

Homes Found and Lost

Asher Z. Milbauer, James Sutton, Asher Z. Milbauer, James Sutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000070019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditate upon the painful journeys—geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological—brought about due to exilic rupture, loss, and dislocation. Yet exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker's formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, and the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and tests) the premise that exile's deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms.

1
Exile and Return in Jewish Teaching and Tradition

David Patterson

In one way or another, nearly every Jewish observance of a holy day is tied to issues of exile and dwelling. A dwelling place is most fundamentally defined by the table where food is arranged for family and guests; that is the true Shulchan Arukh, the “ordered table,” prepared for sharing bread with another and for affirming the relationship with the Holy One. Thus, dwelling is associated with eating, that is, with offering others something to eat. Indeed, the Talmudic sages remind us that, since the destruction of the Temple, the table where we sit with guests in our home and offer others something to eat takes the place of the altar (Chagigah 27a). The Temple itself is known as a house or home: the Temple Mount is the Har HaBayit or the “Mount of the Dwelling Place.”

Similarly, the Fast of Tisha B’Av, held in remembrance of the destruction of the Dwelling Place on the Har HaBayit, is an expression of the loss of an altar that defines a dwelling place. The destruction of the First Temple was followed by the Babylonian Exile, and the destruction of the Second Temple led to the current exile, the Diaspora. If the condition of exile is expressed through fasts, it is because exile is a certain kind of hunger. Fasts, moreover, are often part of a process of purification that may, in turn, enable us to initiate a movement of return to the dwelling place. Because the Jewish people are currently in exile, the matter of how we understand that condition is of particular importance to any movement of return. How, then, does Jewish thought, as informed by the Hebrew language, regard the condition of exile?

Inasmuch as a home is characterized by human relation, exile is a condition of isolation. Or better: it is a state of being lost in isolation, infinitely distant from both the holy and the human. And what comprises that distance? According to the Hasidic master Yehiel Michal of Zlotchov, it is the ani or “ego” (Buber, Tales of the Hasidim 149). Lost in the illusion of our ani, we cry out in the “lamentation” or aniyah that announces our exile: “Where do we go from here?”—anah? Our entrenchment in our ani is our sorrow and our lamentation, our aniyah. Underlying our cry of anah—“Where to?”—is the fear that there is no place to go. Waiting for a message that does not come, we do not live: we merely hope to live. We do not dwell: we languish. And we know that it is not good.

One understands why Martin Buber declares that “ ‘Good’ is the movement in the direction of home” (Buber, Between Man and Man 78). Life is the movement in the direction of home, which is a movement toward the “source” or the “origin,” toward what in Hebrew is called the makor. Which direction is the direction homeward? Inward. And upward. Hence, we do not “go” to our homeland Israel; no, we “ascend,” alah, to Israel, and within Israel we “ascend” to Jerusalem—not simply because it is nestled among the Judean hills but because it is the soul’s source of life. Jewish thought, therefore, views the spiritual death that is exile as a disconnection, and not as a fallen condition. The key to overcoming that exile lies in the mitzvah, or “commandment,” which is derived from the Aramaic word tzavta, meaning “connection.” And yet even in exile the very longing for a connection announces the connection. For the reality of the Holy One is manifest in our infinite longing for holiness from the depths of a reeling unreality. This means even in exile there is revelation. Or perhaps better: only in exile there is revelation.

Exile and Revelation

The Revelation at Mount Sinai took place not in the Holy Land, but bamidbar, “in the wilderness.” It cannot be otherwise. Inasmuch as the Holy Land is itself part of the Revelation, there is no revelation in the Holy Land; only in the wilderness of our exile is revelation an issue. For in the midst of the “wilderness,” of the midbar, arises the davar, the “word,” that we seek. To be sure, another meaning of midbar is “speech.” Just as there is no speech without silence, there is no word without a wilderness, no davar without midbar.

The Hebrew word for “exile” is galut, a noun derived from the verb galah, meaning to “wander” or to “go into exile.” It also means to “discover” or to “reveal” and is a cognate of the noun gilui. As stated by Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, the true meaning of galut is hitgalut or “revelation,” so “that the glory of God’s kingdom [may] be revealed in every place” (Alter 86). Revelation is not just a word that we receive—it is a condition in which we live, the condition that makes life possible, inasmuch as it makes possible the movement homeward. To the extent that we are aware of our exiled condition, we come to a certain realization about the need to emerge from that condition: living in the galut, we do not simply live somewhere else—we live away from home. In that realization lie the seeds of redemption.

“What is the difference between golah and geulah, exile and redemption?” asks Rabbi Benjamin Blech. And he answers: “The letter alef of Anokhi, the One representing God” (Blech 213), who is the source of revelation—whose utterance of Anokhi, or “I” (Exodus 20:2)—the first utterance at Mount Sinai—is the Revelation. For geulah is formed by inserting the letter alef—the first letter in Anokhi and a signifier of the Holy One—into the midst of the word golah. Blind to our exile, we are deaf to the revelation that reverberates from within the depths of that exile, deaf to the davar in the midst of the midbar. In such a state the I-saying of the ego eclipses the divine I-saying, the Anokhi, of the Holy One. In this eclipse we slip into the most insidious exile, where our eyes grow so used to the dark that we no longer notice the darkness.

The paradigm for exile is, of course, the Egyptian Exile. Examining the Hebrew word for “Egypt,” Mitzraim, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz notes that it is a cognate of metzar, which means “narrowness” or “anguish.” Rabbi Steinsaltz says,

Egypt symbolizes narrow-mindedness. Ancient Egypt and its paganism are the model for the individual who fabricates an entire system to refute real knowledge. The system upholds its false reality in the face of Divine reality. Egypt is the prototype of a world that proclaims itself to be autonomous and announces that it owes nothing to others because it is self-sufficient.

(Steinsaltz, On Being Free 126)

On both a societal and a personal level, exile is the illusion of freedom and the dream of autonomy, a dream that characterizes our postmodern world, where anyone can be replaced by any other, and everyone is expendable. In this confusion the soul in exile is broken.

The Broken Soul

Exile is a pirtzah or a “breach” in our being. Hence, the phrase pirtzah shel galut, which is the “calamity of exile,” the calamity of a broken soul. The ramifications of this calamity become clear when we consider some additional meanings of paratz. This verb, for instance, can mean to “demolish,” as well as to “entreat,” to “beg,” or to “plead.” One who is cast into exile is demolished inasmuch as he or she is reduced to a state of begging; therefore, the Messiah, whom we keep in exile as long as we keep ourselves from Torah, is often disguised as a beggar.

In our own exile, however, a beggar’s rags are often disguised as three-piece suits. It is obvious enough that for one who is forced to wander in a wilderness, homeless and destitute, exile is indeed a calamity. What is not so obvious is the crushing nature of our spiritual exile, where we hold to our breast the very “viper”—the efeh, which is the efah or “nothingness”—that preys upon us. In this homelessness that passes for home, we enjoy an affluent life but are incapable of rejoicing. We weigh, measure, and count all that we have, and yet we are beggared by our abundance. Hence, the intricate connection between kesef and kosef, between “money” and “yearning.” As the two intersect in our confusion between being and having, we wake up one day to find that the world and the people around us have suddenly grown strange.

Here the first reaction of the soul broken by exile is often to rebel; exile is a realm of corruption, and the rebel insists on purity where purity is impossible. Here rebellion for the sake of the world turns into a vengeance against it; that is, when a person may become pritz or “violent”; pritz also means “tyrant” or “oppressor.” Here the exiled soul, the broken soul, dreams the dream of Western ontological thought, which is both totalizing and totalitarian. The exile that breaks the soul is precisely such a state of tyranny and of tyrannizing thought, which is the contrary of Jewish thought. For its highest aim, as modern history has shown, is to think the Holy One into exile and out of the picture, so that a counterfeit self may reign supreme in the dangerous illusion of its autonomy.

In the condition of exile, then, God’s authority and sanctity as revealed in Torah are in exile. The home of the people of Israel is not just the Land of Israel, although that thin strip of land is indeed its holy home and haven. Beyond the matter of geographical borders, however, Israel’s home is Torah, which is the Name of the Nameless One, as Nachmanides teaches (Nachmanides 1:112). In exile the letters of the Name unravel, until we lose our own name; they unravel because we have lost our own name, having changed our name into an Egyptian name. Assuming Egyptian names—identifying ourselves by Egyptian standards of prestige, popularity, and power—we slip into the desolation that characterizes exile.

Desolation

The Hebrew word for “desolation” is shemamah; it also means “horror.” The desolate horror of exile is not that there is so much evil in the world; on the contrary, the horror is that there is no evil in the world. Nor is there any good in the world; the world is simply there, mute, neutral, and indifferent. The desolation and horror of exile lie in this state of being empty of all value, all substance, all meaning. In exile there is a loss not only of one’s bearings but also of one’s sense of reality, of one’s senses as such. In exile we go mad.

Hence, we have another cognate of shamam, the adjective shimem, which means “crazy,” “demented,” or “insane.” How many times has any one of us looked upon the world and taken it to be insanity? The insanity of exile, like all insanity, lies in mistaking the unreal for the real, the darkness for light, desolation for abundance, good for evil, and evil for good. What is most insane about the exilic insanity is that it passes for the calm of normalcy, yet it is a calm haunted by an underlying panic. Thus, the horror and insanity, the shemamah and shimem, of exile seethe in a state of behalah, which is “fright,” “panic,” or “confusion.” This is where we collide with what modern philosophy calls “the absurd.”

The verb nivhal—to “be terrified” or “disturbed”—applies very well to this state of not-so-quiet desperation. In this state we are constantly bahul, that is, “worried” or “puzzled.” Another word for “worried” or “troubled” perfectly articulates this exilic condition. It is mutrad, which also means “banished,” from the verb tarad, meaning to “drive out” or “expel.” In exile we are mutrad and bahul, worried and banished, so we suffer lapses of memory, as when we turn around and cannot recall where all the years went because they went for naught. Unable to look back, we plunge headlong into emptiness, forever “in a hurry,” which is another meaning of bahul. Like Alice and the Red Queen, we frantically run in place, from place to place, just to stay in the same place. Following every fashion and fad, we pretend to be more than we are and in doing so become less and less. For in our hustling and bustling, we become estranged from ourselves, so a stranger gazes back at us from the unreal reflection in the mirror. And for a moment we are paralyzed.

If life is manifested through movement, exile is revea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Overreaching Arc of Exile
• 1 Exile and Return in Jewish Teaching and Tradition
• 2 Exile, Dislocation, and Roman Identity in the Age of Augustus
• 3 “I Am Not What I Am”: Considerations of Shakespearean Exile
• 4 The Problem of Exile for James Joyce
• 5 José Martí: Just Another Face in the Crowd
• 6 Exile as Metaphor and Memory: The Case of Salman Rushdie
• 7 The Reluctant Exile: Remembering the Exilic Legacy of the Hungarian Jewish Poet, Miklós Radnóti
• 8 Elie Wiesel: Writer as Witness to and in Exile
• 9 Exiled From the Mother Tongue: Russian Writers Abroad
• 10 The Exiled Language
• 11 Dreamers and Lifers: Exile Terminable and Interminable
• 12 Of Poetry, Place, and Personhood: Or the Exacting Resonances of Language
• 13 Landscapes and Geographies of Chilean Exile
• 14 On the State of Exile Studies: Past, Present, and Future
• 15 Traveling With My Selves
• 16 Mirages of Imaginary Exile
• 17 The Literature of Exile: Reading and Teaching
• 18 An Interview With Cuban-American Artist, Humberto Calzada: Exile, Nostalgia, and the Art of Memory
• Contributors’ Biographies
• Index