From the issue dated September 17, 2004
|
|
Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish-American Literature
Twenty-seven years ago, in a now-famous introduction to Jewish-American Stories, Irving Howe offered a gloomy prediction about Jewish-American literary expression. A year after his elegiac 1976 chronicle of the migration of East European Jews to America, World of Our Fathers, Howe announced the apparent exhaustion of a once-flourishing Jewish-American fiction. The sheer absorptive power of "Americanization" would distance later writers, Howe argued, from the shaping crucible of the immigrant experience. "Nostalgia, return, hatred, nausea, affection, guilt -- all these are among the familiar, urgent feelings which memories of immigrant streets, tenements and (most of all) families can stir up in the American Jewish writers," he wrote. In the wake of inevitable memory loss ("America makes one forget everything," cautioned the advice columnist for the Yiddish Daily Forward in 1908), Howe asked if there would remain "a thick enough sediment of felt life to enable a new outburst of writing about American Jews." Would we again see the genre looking as robust as it did in the 1930s, with Henry Roth's harrowing immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, or in the 1950s, with the arrival of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and the young Philip Roth? Howe was not optimistic. Surveying the contemporary literary scene in the 1970s, he found relatively little in what he termed the "post-immigrant Jewish experience" for the imagination to draw on; indeed "its usability for the making of fictions" seemed virtually over. A generation later, however, his prediction -- now dubbed the "Howe Doctrine" by students of Jewish-American literature -- seems to have been dead wrong. Rather than chanting the mourner's kaddish over the presumed demise of Jewish-American fiction, in the past few years we have witnessed a Jewish literary flowering by a rising generation of writers who have made, in Morris Dickstein's description, "their Jewish fantasies, feelings, and experiences absolutely central to their work." Dickstein mentions Steve Stern and Allegra Goodman, but the characterization also applies to Ehud Havazelet, Nathan Englander, and Jonathan Safran Foer. As part of what Dickstein calls "the new wave" of Jewish writing, there now exists a serious body of literature (and scholarship) by children of the Holocaust, later-generation "survivors" who continue to grapple with embers of "postmemory," the term Marianne Hirsch applies to the traumas of family history visited, however indirectly, upon the victims' surviving sons and daughters. These writers include Melvin Jules Bukiet, Thane Rosenbaum, Eva Hoffman, and, most brilliantly, Art Spiegelman. There is, in addition, a cohort of writers and filmmakers, some raised within the bounded world of Jewish orthodoxy, who explore the claims of religious faith, fascinated by the clarifying power of undoubting belief. These artists include Pearl Abraham, Pearl Gluck, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Dara Horn, and Tova Mirvis (see especially her just-published novel, The Outside World). Unswerving in his convictions about the inevitable trajectory of Jewish assimilation (subsequently borne out, statistically at least, by sociological data on high rates of intermarriage, religious affiliation and observance, etc.), Howe did not anticipate the array of unexpected return to the marrow of Jewishness that has come to mark the beginning of a new century. Young contemporary writers are returning to memory (as in Foer's critically acclaimed 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated); to orthodoxy; to earlier, often comic, traditions of Yiddish writing; above all, to a host of return engagements with the labyrinth of Jewish identity itself. "I am in-between and unsettled," remarks Nathan Englander, among the more heralded members of the revival. His fluid sense of Jewish identity captures perfectly the exhilarating moment of contemporary self-consciousness. Howe assumed, incorrectly, that the historic 20th-century story of migration was almost complete, at least the Jewish portion of it. Of course what Howe could not have predicted, or perhaps have imagined (he died in 1992, at the age of 72), is a postcolonial world shaped by constant movement and upheaval, of orbiting families (to borrow the title of a Bharati Mukherjee story), unsettling their "host" nations' fixed identities. Howe was also skeptical about the emphasis on multiculturalism and identity politics in academe; above all, he was dismayed by what he called the "turn" to ethnicity, the mania over "roots" in American society that his own best-selling study of Jewish life on the Lower East Side helped, ironically, to legitimate. (See, in this regard, his stringent cautionary pieces, 1977's "The Limits of Ethnicity" and 1986's "Immigrant Chic.") Yet, in identifying immigrant experience as the energizing source for the literary imagination, the Howe Doctrine appears to have anticipated the emergence of a remarkable cohort of new immigrant writers from the former Soviet Union who are in creative dialogue with the traditions of Jewish immigrant literature even as they transform our expectations. Still in their early 30s, Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Riverhead Books, 2002), Lara Vapnyar (There Are Jews in My House, Pantheon Books, 2003), and David Bezmozgis (Natasha and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004) transcribe in startling new ways the immigrant families' ordeal of transition, the familiar struggle to decode an often bewildering, disorienting new environment. Confirming the sociological-aesthetic assumptions of the Howe Doctrine, Shteyngart, Vapnyar, and Bezmozgis represent a fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing. To rehash the old immigrant narrative," groans Shteyngart, regarding his vexed relation to literary history, "What a job, eh? Who would want it?" Rather than feeling weighed down by literary giants like Bellow and Malamud, in his award-winning The Russian Debutante's Handbook Shteyngart mischievously liberates the American immigrant story, reversing the canonical narrative's Old World to New World journey of rebirth and transformation -- as in, say, the fiction of Anzia Yezierska or memoirs by Mary Antin). Instead Shteyngart sends his alienated alter-ego hero, Vladimir Girshkin, back to Eastern Europe, to the popular destination city of a very Prague-like "Prava," the new playground of a spoiled ex-pat generation seeking the pleasures of easy nostalgia and quick fixes (monetary and sexual). "The whole point of coming to the Old World," explains a would-be poet who knows no poetry, "is to chuck the baggage of the new." Vladimir, too, would like to chuck his cultural burdens, would like, above all, to overcome the mythic expectations of American success (what Shteyngart calls "the old immigrant narrative"), but his endlessly ironic sensibility prevents any easy deliverance. In her implicitly rebuking example, Vladimir's mother projects the boundless energy of the "alpha immigrant." As explained by Girshkin's nostalgia-obsessed father, "emigrating to this country, leaving one's hut, one's yurt, one's Soviet-era high-rise requires an ambition, a madness, a stubbornness, a stamina." In dissent, Vladimir chooses the role of an inertia-ridden "beta" immigrant son, a "failurchka," in his alpha mother's endearing nickname. Seeking redemption, a new life in the Old World, Girshkin arrives in Prava as a self-styled "Vladimir the Repatriate, in this case signifying a homecoming, a foreknowledge, a making amends with history. ... Back to the part of the world where the Girshkins were first called Girshkins!" In the end Vladimir remains unsettled, like his creator, neither at home in the Old World nor at ease in the New. In various interviews Shteyngart speaks of the empowering disjunctions that accompany New World displacement, his "Zelig-like" condition, relishing "a constant state of movement, of migration." The allusion to Woody Allen's chameleon man of the fluid 1920s seems apt; indeed, reading Shteyngart's work for the first time, the novelist Chang-rae Lee (whose now-canonical Native Speaker also plays with the traditions and tropes of the immigrant novel) recognized that Shteyngart's antic mode of comedy and wicked satire, channeled through the anti-hero Girshkin, seemed "as if Woody Allen had been an immigrant." Yet Shteyngart remains deeply conscious of his multiple positions as "ex-Soviet, Russo-Judeo-American immigrant writer," a situation, he confesses, that "is not all borscht and laughter for me." Along with his haunted alter ego he remains attuned to those "wispy force fields of desire and history that enfold Manhattan, a simple result of the number of foreigners that inhabit the island and cannot express themselves in their true language at any given moment." Despite feeling adrift in the Americas, Shteyngart ultimately celebrates his marginal relation to the shape-shifting potential of the American landscape. The Russian Debutante's Handbook speaks on behalf of those who (like his literary forebear, Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm, schlemiel anti-hero of Seize the Day, drowning in the material 1950s) continue to resist the alpha-immigrant success narrative. At the same time, Shteyngart's soulful hero imagines becoming the father of a New World son "free of the fear and madness of Valdimir's Eastern lands. ... An American in America." In sharp contrast to Shteyngart's extravagant comic imagination, the stories collected in Lara Vapnyar's There Are Jews in My House and David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories are more subdued, modest in their rich evocation of the emotional strains that afflict immigrant families in the wake of migration. Unlike Shteyngart and Bezmozgis, who emigrated as children, Vapnyar arrived in New York as a young woman, in 1994, with virtually no English; she learned to speak and write by watching television and reading romances. As a result, her subtle stories, told mostly from the perspective of an attentive child, succeed via indirection. They achieve a certain power through intimation, by what remains unspoken. In the process they also convey the excitement of discovery, the enchanting power of linguistic newness, as the narrator remarks of the young immigrant girl in Vapnyar's recent story "Broccoli" (in The New Yorker, January 5, 2004): "She was still learning English, and every new expression seemed to her exciting and rich with meaning." In this respect she could be a sister to the early-20th-century immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska, marveling at her own emerging linguistic condition: "And every new word made me see new American things with American eyes. I felt like a Columbus, finding new worlds through every new word." While most of the quiet, delicate stories in There Are Jews in My House are set in a drab post-Soviet society haunted by the Chernobyl disaster and feelings of unspeakable loss and uncompleted mourning, one story conveys the palpable excitement of linguistic and, it appears, romantic discovery. In "Mistress," the only story set in America, in the Russian-Jewish immigrant enclave of Brooklyn, Vapnyar distills a family drama reminiscent of the "sweatshop romances" of immigrant writers like Abraham Cahan and Yezierska. "Mistress" describes the relationship between a grandfather and grandson, each strangely speechless in the New World, each yearning to find a voice that fits it. Back in the old country, Misha communicated instinctively with his beloved grandfather. "Little Misha didn't try to grasp the meaning of his words. They just reached him along with other noises: the rustle of a tree, a bird's squawk, a nasty scrape of gravel as he ran his sandal-clad toes through it. It was the sound of the grandfather's voice that was important to him." In their cramped existence in Little Odessa, however, the grandfather remains "immobile." Only after he starts taking English lessons does the grandfather begin to recover his Old World energy and his voice. As Misha discovers, indirectly, the agent of his grandfather's newfound loquacity is a woman, a fellow immigrant he has met in English-language school, "with a gray braid and an amber brooch ... his and the grandfather's secret." At the end of "Mistress" we witness a scene of powerful verbal release, a flood of New World emotion no longer under repression. Misha "talked nonstop, breathlessly, sputtering, chuckling in excitement, interrupting one story to tell the next." The grandfather, now "focused on Misha," now alive to the world, keeps repeating "Imagine!" in response to the grandson's chatter. In Vapnyar's adopted lexicon, the word registers as both exclamation and injunction. Old and new generations bond through mutual discovery, sharing untold revelations. An even more evocative rendering may be found in Bezmozgis's series of linked stories about a fiercely protective and loving Jewish family who fled Latvia for a new life in the émigré Russian Jewish enclaves of Toronto. (Bezmozgis left Riga with his family in 1980 and settled in Canada.) Narrated chronologically by young Mark Berman, the stories in Natasha capture the often bewildering landscape, along with the psychic strains, of immigrant experience. In contrast to Shteyngart's playful troping of the mythic American immigrant success narrative, the family Berman (would-be "Baltic aristocrats," in their son's knowing eyes) huddles together, in anxiety and hope, desperately grasping at any promise of social-material "connection" in their dream of moving up in the world, "one respectable block away from the Russian swarm." Like so many immigrant sons, from the very beginning Bezmozgis's Mark is conscious of his default status as the family's cultural translator, the necessary mediator between baffled family and alien linguistic territory. In the daily ritual of going off to first grade ("with our house key hanging from a brown shoelace around my neck") and coming home "bearing the germs of a new vocabulary," Mark feels the weight of family need and expectation. And as he grows older, Mark also gains an intimation of the menacing totalitarian world the family left behind, in Soviet-controlled Riga, along with an altered sense of his relation to another repressed past, the meaning of Jewish memory and history, now slowly dislodged in the freer atmosphere of Canada. In apparent dialogue with the traditions of Jewish-American literature, Bezmozgis follows Mark's journey into a complicated consciousness of filiality. But unlike, say, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), about a tormented immigrant father bent by paranoia and humiliation, who takes out his rage by savagely beating his son, Bezmozgis's fictional father, Roman Berman, manages to survive his New World indignities through strength of character and unconditional love. In the wrenching story "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," the father seeks "to improve his chances" by bringing his Mark along to meet a local rabbi, "supposed to be particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews," hoping that the presence of his bright Canadian son, able to speak rudimentary Hebrew and sing "Jerusalem of Gold," will somehow help the father realize his dreams. "Seated across the table from the rabbi," Mark observes, "my father wrestled language and dignity to express need. I sat silently beside him, looking appropriately forlorn. I was sufficiently aware of our predicament to feel the various permutations of shame: shame for my father, shame for my shame, and even shame for the rabbi, who seemed to be a decent guy." Of course scenes of filial shame may be found throughout immigrant expression, Jewish and non-Jewish. Rather than flight or separation (the memorable response to filial shame in Yezierska, Isaac Rosenfeld, and, in his memoir A Margin of Hope, Irving Howe himself), what distinguishes Bezmozgis's Mark is his profound empathy, his desire to see past the father's humiliation. As the comic quest for "connections" unfolds, the Bermans find themselves hosted by an orthopedist's family, parvenus who have invited the greenhorns in bad faith, in order to hear tear-jerking testimony from (they presume) "refuseniks" about the execrable fate of Jews living in the oppressive Soviet Union. "If it wasn't too personal," Dr. Kornblum "wanted to know how bad it really was." Grasping at any opportunity, "my mother hesitated a moment and then admitted that we had not been refuseniks. She knew some refuseniks, and we were almost refuseniks, but we were not refuseniks." Such comic moments, born of desperation, fill this story about a family's doomed effort to impress the hypocritical Jewish bourgeoisie living in "fully detached" material splendor. In the end, the son is witness to another scene of humiliating exposure, another kind of self-indulgent use by the shady Kornblums. Caught massaging Mrs. Kornblum's neck in the master bathroom ("She said it was wonderful, my father was a magician, if only she could bottle his hands and sell them."), the father, chagrined, alone with his son, sits helplessly on the bed, beneath "a large family portrait taken for Kornblum's daughter's bat mitzvah," struggling to explain. "He said, Tell me, what am I supposed to do? Then he got up, took my hand, and we went back downstairs." For Bezmozgis, there are no easy responses to the father's embarrassment. What are helpless fathers supposed to do in order to achieve a life, a livelihood, in an unforgiving new world? In Natasha, achieving dignity involves an altered way of perceiving, really of feeling, the world, of approaching what might be called a secular version of rachmones, the Yiddish term for compassion. Compassion takes many forms in Bezmozgis's stories. We glimpse it in "The Second Strongest Man," in the father's deep feeling for his former protégé, the over-the-hill weight lifter Sergei Federenko. Federenko, in Toronto for an international competition, is helpless and angry after his loss of champion status, and his presence among the Bermans a reminder of premigration terrors. We sense it in "Choynski," about Mark's desire to honor the memory of Joe Choynski, once "America's first great fighting Jew," but at the end of his career "no longer the man he used to be." And we witness a form of compassion in "Natasha," when the older narrator, living "a subterranean life" of adolescent rebellion in his parents' dark basement, reading Kafka, selling drugs, and getting stoned, brooding about his torrid affair with and humiliating rejection by his émigré cousin Natasha, begins to see his own chaotic world through her eyes, beyond illusion, through what Mark terms, somewhat abstractly, "the opposite perspective." Above all, we are moved, with the narrator, by the application of rachmones in Bezmozgis's powerful final story, "Minyan." If the unsavory Kornblums offer only empty compassion over the indignities of Soviet Jews, in "Minyan" an older Mark Berman gains a lesson in Jewish mercy through the example of the older generation, now retired in rent-controlled, high-rise comfort. "Minyan" chronicles the subterranean intrigue involved in maintaining the minyan of 10 Jewish men necessary to hold a prayer service (it is, after all, an Orthodox congregation) for the building's basement synagogue. Potential renters have to go through the elderly Zalman, who has the ear of the building's manager, and convince him of their spiritual commitment. In relating this story, Mark confesses a powerful connection to the world of his widowed grandfather, who already lives in the building: "Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history." How, I wonder, would Irving Howe have responded to that confession of a grandson's nostalgia for his grandfather's nostalgia? At the height of the "ethnic revival" of the late 1970s and '80s Howe remained annoyed, in his words "a little irritated [by] the upsurge of nostalgia I detect among a good many young people for the immigrant world to which I was already a latecomer, and of which they barely know." Yet in Bezmozgis's deeply empathic imagination, the voice of Jewish compassion feels earned, transforming a potentially breezy emotion ("unearned nostalgia," in Howe's dismissive phrase) into an act of generational rededication. What does it mean to be a Jewish son (or grandson) in the fiercely loving world of the Bermans, unsettled in their Canadian exile? For Bezmozgis the answer seems to be in performing acts of memory and compassion as a way of salving the pain of immigrant indignity. In this respect, Bezmozgis's debut in Natasha offers a powerful answer to Howe's pointed questions, asked of an emerging cohort of Jewish-American writers almost 30 years ago: "Does it [the Jewish-American experience] form the very marrow of their being? Does it provide images of conflict, memories of exaltation and suffering, such as enable the creating of stories?" To judge from the stunning achievement of the "new" immigrant writers, the answer appears to be a resounding Yes. Their unanticipated presence both fulfills and confounds the strictures of the Howe Doctrine. If Howe couldn't see beyond his own biography, he nevertheless understood the profound literary potential of the immigrant experience: upheaval, transition, adjustment, the nostalgic impulse of looking back, the intoxicating dream of imagining a future. In the end, the immigrant narrative may well provide the most enabling, creative source for those writers seeking to engage the New World -- any New World. Donald Weber is a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His book Haunted by the New World: Jewish American Culture From Cahan to 'The Goldbergs' is scheduled to be published by Indiana University Press next year. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 4, Page B8 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education