Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination

Negotiating Spaces and Identities

Efraim Sicher

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000539097
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Jewish Studies

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model.

The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture.

At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

1 All You Need Is Love?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229582-2

Romancing Marriage

Before embarking on a discussion in this chapter of how erotic love shaped modern and postmodern Jewish novels, I want to briefly consider the transformation of the marriage plot, beginning with romantic and maskilic responses and changes in Jewish social life in Eastern Europe and in America. The secular religion of love shaped the modern novel, which viewed romantic love as the objective of life.¹ In fact, as Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz argues, romantic love, in its connection of the private sphere of emotions with the public sphere of politics and economics, brought out the contradictions of capitalism. Instead of exchange on the basis of self-interest and mutual economic benefit, erotic relationships were based on individual empathy and irrational passion, which undermined the social order. Yet by the twentieth century, courtship in European societies was devolving from a regulatory practice to attraction based on natural feeling.² Romantic love was elevated to iconic status in late capitalism, marketed as a cultural commodity that blurred dream and reality in its unattainable ideals.³ The eroticized images of women in Shakespeare’s Sonnets come across today as stale in a world where love is commodified and marketed in novels and films; Erich Segal’s 1970 Love Story is just one example of a modern commercialized version of the Romeo and Juliet plot, which we will meet in stories of love across faith and ethnicity in Chapter 3, but which do not work out in postmodern novels.

The marriage plot in the nineteenth-century Jewish novel played out pressures to conform to communal models of endogamy and bourgeois domesticity. German Jewish author Fanny Lewald’s novel Jenny (1843) showed romance thriving among thoroughly assimilated German Jews, but warned that conversion and intermarriage did not lead to a happy ending. In the 1850s, German Jewish authors tried their hand, without spectacular success, at writing romances for a Jewish public that was avidly reading the Bildungsroman as well as Eugène Sue and Alexander Dumas. They used the conventions of middlebrow fiction in an attempt to win their readers’ hearts over to Judaism, with little criticism of the promise that marriage within the faith secured eternal love and ensured bourgeois domesticity, although they accommodated such new ideas of marriage as love and companionship.⁴ In Britain, too, Grace Anguilar and other middle-class Jewesses were writing their own literary romances to counter the missionary narrative of Christian-Jewish love in conversion novels and were domesticating desire to conform to current ideas of a woman’s domestic virtue and duty.⁵

Naomi Seidman has related the changes in courtship and marriage patterns among east European Jews to secularization and modernization, under the influence of the erotic love that replaced the marriage plot in romantic novels and poetry.⁶ As Seidman shows, Haskalah novels, beginning with Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsion (1853; The Love of Zion, 2006), which reworked the love of Amnon and Tamar in biblical Hebrew against the setting of ancient Israel, adopted the conventions of romantic literature but voiced present-day concerns about the role of love in marriage in the critique of traditional Jewish society.⁷ Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye stands bewildered at the loves of “modern children,” yet matchmaking did not (and does not to this day) necessarily rule out romantic attachments which fitted in with communal conventions and social expectations. The majority clung to their traditional way of life in the shtetlekh of the Pale of Settlement until they were torn from it by emigration to the United States, the communist revolution, and the Holocaust. The Jewish religion in the meantime gradually came to an accommodation with modernity in a range of responses (from Moses Mendelssohn or Reform Judaism to the Modern Orthodoxy of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch). It was, as Seidman emphasizes, a gradual process of transformation rather than rupture.⁸ The point nevertheless remains valid that east and central European Jews were discovering modern love in secular literature, particularly German romantic poetry, which was highly prized as a mark of humanist culture and offered alternate models of romantic relationships.⁹

In America, where Jews immigrated en masse after 1881, there was nothing to stop Jews participating and themselves promoting the American way of life. Seidman puts it in terms of falling in love with the American concept of romantic love as the “embodiment of the political-erotic freedoms” of their new country, in which they were equal, consensual citizens.¹⁰ Indeed, Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (1908) gave the name to the aspiration for integration of the teeming masses of newcomers and performed the ideal union of Jew and Christian, who put behind them ancestral enmities and prejudices in romantic love.¹¹ In Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), these immigrants shed their distinctive east European Jewish dress, their beards, and wigs and abandoned the religious restrictions that hindered their full assimilation. Yekl/Jake also abandoned his wife for a more modern woman. Cahan’s column Bintel Brif in the socialist Forverts, for example, aired issues of sexuality and romantic love that revealed the inroads of Western secular values. Yet, in reality intermarriage rates at this time were quite low and the bulk of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants did not so quickly forget all their traditions. The mass immigration to America of young singles nevertheless changed perceptions of love and marriage, and the traditional patterns of courtship, often through the mediation of a matchmaker, yielded to the pressures of American life and the drive for financial stability and for upward social mobility.¹² The challenge of love in secular America is reflected in the popular “Tagebukh fun an alter medl, oder der kamf kegen freye libe” (“Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Struggle against Free Love”) by Miriam Karpilove, a frank discussion of female sexuality which ran in the New York Yiddish newspaper Varhayt in 1916 and 1917 before coming out in book form. These are the woes of modern love which pitted the temptations of sexual desire against financial stability and family life, but also set the risks of being left an Old Maid against the prospect of an unhappy marriage.

Secularization certainly did not begin in godless America, but by the 1920s, Jews were encountering sex in American popular culture.¹³ The New Woman and the flapper helped change ideas about sexuality against the background of improvement in women’s legal and socioeconomic status which allowed them more independence and social mobility. Let us not forget that Sigmund Freud and modern psychology altered understanding of sexuality, and sexuality became increasingly central to personal identity, consequently also to fiction. Modernist representations of the erotic drive in the human psyche varied from the religious truth released by the sexual instinct in D. H. Lawrence to the erotic charge sex has for Henry Miller.¹⁴ By the end of the twentieth century, the discourse about love that centered on the heart and revolved around morals and virtue turned into a discourse about sexuality, centered on the genitalia and geared to desire.

Despite a conservative social norm and strict obscenity laws, sex was plainly visible in American culture in the early twentieth century. When Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) was performed on Broadway in 1925, the director and actors were indicted for obscenity. Although perhaps not typical of Jewish American immigrant women writers, a thoroughly modern sexuality is embraced in Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1925), where the female protagonist runs after a handsome Gentile whom she marries—not happily, it turns out. Even more explicit than her contemporaries writing in Warsaw or New York, Celia Dropkin shocked New York with her erotic Yiddish love poetry.¹⁵ In fact, although Polish rabbis bemoaned the dangers of Sabbath desecration and profanity in secular America, east European Jewish culture was no less attuned to the erotic appeal of modernism, whether in Bergelson’s Yiddish, Bruno Schulz’s Polish, or Isaak Babel’s Russian. Yisroel Rabon’s Der gas (1928; The Street, 1985) illustrates the raw sensuality and despair characteristic of the interwar years when sex and sexuality were openly discussed by sexologists and on the pages of the Polish-language Jewish women’s magazine Ewa: Tygodnik. Before he came to the United States in 1935, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote sentimental pulp fiction (shund) in the Warsaw press as well as translating erotic novels and modernist classics; after the Holocaust, he used graphic eroticism to explore demonic forces as a response to the evil that had engulfed east European Jewry, though he remained ambivalent about the source of creativity and sexuality in the sitra akhra.¹⁶

For American Jews, the availability of sexual partners from other ethnic groups, in particular the socioeconomic pull beyond the restrictions of the Jewish home, accentuated the wish to efface outsider status in White America and deepened the estrangement from Judaism. In the postmodern age, however, there is hardly any need to convert or disguise one’s Jewishness to integrate into Western society. Civic rights for American and European Jews are today ensured and taken for granted. Jewish difference itself can be interesting, exotic, even sexy…which partly explains why intermarriage rates are at an all-time high outside Israel.¹⁷ After the Holocaust, intermarriage was seen as an assurance that racism was a thing of the past, but also that Jews had put their particularism and exclusivity behind them, an ambiguous attitude that finds the Jews’ opposition to marrying Gentiles unacceptable in a liberal democratic society.¹⁸

The unspoken (and occasionally spoken) message is that we all need to get over outdated religious bigotry. Indeed, omnia vincit amor beckons Jews to overcome all exclusionary practices or ethnic and religious barriers and join humanity in bed. The Romeo and Juliet plot of romantic comedies drives home the message that once Cupid has shot his bow, ethnic, religious, and blood ties cannot part lovers. This is a familiar story, from the assimilationist message of early cinema’s Romance of a Jewess (USA, 1908) and the comic plot of Irish-Jewish romance in Abie’s Irish Rose (1922) and its film adaptations through the CBS sitcom series Bridget Loves Bernie (1972) or the Charlton Comics’ title Just Married (1973–74). Recent multicultural versions include Love Is Thicker Than Water (UK, 2016), in which a Welsh student and a Jewess find love despite different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and Maxime Giroux’s film Félix and Meira (Canada, 2014), in which, against the background of Montreal’s culture wars, a devout Hasidic woman leaves her community in an adulterous affair with a French Canadian single man who has had a difficult relationship with his family, again persuading us that love bridges the cultural, ethnic, and religious divide (though only when Meira takes off her modest clothing and at the price of the destruction of her marriage).¹⁹ This supposedly liberating message that interfaith relationships overcome ethnic and religious difference conforms to the standard narrative in popular culture that sex brings freedom and fulfillment. We are supposed to agree that freedom is having fun, and if one is not having fun, then one is somehow not free. As G. K. Chesterton famously remarked on the new amorality, “free love” i...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 All You Need Is Love?
• 2 From Auschwitz to Yavneh
• 3 Body and Nation
• 4 Transgression and Return
• 5 Destroying Israel
• 6 The Afterlife of Love
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index