Hebrew Gothic

Karen Grumberg

Description

Sinister tales written since the early 20th 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.

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction. Gothic Matters

Part I. A Spectralized Past

1. Always Already Gothic: S. Y. Agnon's European Tales of Terror

2. Maternal Macabre: Feminine Subjectivity at the Edge of the Shtetl in Dvora Baron and Ya'akov Shteinberg

3. After the Nightmare of the Holocaust: Gothic Temporalities in Leah Goldberg and Edgar Allan Poe

Part II. Haunted Nation

4. Dark Jerusalem: Amos Oz's Anxious Literary Cartography between 1948 and 1967

5. Historiographic Perversions: Echoes of Otranto in A. B. Yehoshua's Mr. Mani

6. A Séance for the Self: Memory, Nonmemory, and the Reorientation of History in Almog Behar and Toni Morrison

Coda. "Here Are Our Monsters": Hebrew Horror from the Political to Pop

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Jews
• Jewish studies
• Literary criticism
• 20th century
• Hebrew language
• Jew
• Gothic
• Hébreu

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253042279
• Langue: English

Extrait

HEBREW GOTHIC
JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Editor
HEBREW GOTHIC
History and the Poetics of Persecution
Karen Grumberg
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Karen Grumberg
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04225-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-04226-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04229-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
For Astrid Leah, Daniel Per,
and ystein
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction: Gothic Matters
Part 1 A Spectralized Past
1 Always Already Gothic: S. Y. Agnon s European Tales of Terror
2 Maternal Macabre: Feminine Subjectivity at the Edge of the Shtetl in Dvora Baron and Ya akov Shteinberg
3 After the Nightmare of the Holocaust: Gothic Temporalities in Leah Goldberg and Edgar Allan Poe
Part 2 Haunted Nation
4 Dark Jerusalem: Amos Oz s Anxious Literary Cartography between 1948 and 1967
5 Historiographic Perversions: Echoes of Otranto in A. B. Yehoshua s Mr. Mani
6 A S ance for the Self: Memory, Nonmemory, and the Reorientation of History in Almog Behar and Toni Morrison
Coda: Here Are Our Monsters : Hebrew Horror from the Political to Pop

Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
F OR THE BETTER PART OF A DECADE, VARIOUS interlocutors have reacted to the ideas in this study with enthusiasm and encouragement. This book would not have come into being without their open-mindedness, collegiality, and generosity of spirit. I am especially grateful to Adriana X. Jacobs, whose perceptive comments were instrumental as I wrote and revised the manuscript. I feel exceedingly fortunate to have had such an engaged reader. Blake Atwood, Maya Barzilai, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Sheila Jelen, Neta Stahl, and Ilana Szobel read and commented on the manuscript or on drafts of particular chapters. Their insights and suggestions were invaluable in clarifying and refining my ideas. At various junctures, I have benefited from the comments of other colleagues, including Marc Caplan, Rebecca Hopkins, Lital Levy, Jerome Singerman, and Melissa Weininger. As I navigated the terrain of gothic studies, Carol Margaret Davison, Catherine Spooner, and Sara Wasson, all of whose work leaves its imprint throughout this study, extended a warm welcome.
Many others have responded to my work with curiosity and interest, recommending texts, questioning points, and expressing support. I am indebted to those who provided feedback on my work in progress at annual meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, the Modern Language Association, the National Association for Professors of Hebrew, and the International Gothic Association, as well as at symposia and colloquia, including All That Gothic at the University of d , Poland; the Gruss Colloquium at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania on Jews Beyond Reason ; and Gothic Trespass: Borders, Bodies, Texts at the University of Texas at Austin.
I wish to thank my friends and colleagues in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at UT, who have helped nurture an intellectually stimulating and supportive environment. I reserve deep gratitude for UT s remarkable Hebrew and Judaica librarian, Uri Kolodney, for whom no text is too rare, too geographically distant, or too difficult to locate. His instinct, skills, and perseverance have unearthed gems. Special thanks to my dear friends Na ama Pat-El and Esther Raizen, who, over the years, have offered their wisdom, steadfast support, and patient guidance through various grammatical and historical nuances of the Hebrew language. I am grateful to Leonor Diaz, whose perspicacity and warmth put everything into proper perspective. My students, both graduates and undergraduates, have allowed me to indulge my love of the gothic and provided a forum for discussing the ideas informing this book. I owe much to my editors at Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen and Paige Rasmussen, for seeing this project through to its completion with astuteness and integrity.
This book could not have been completed without the support of several fellowships, including the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, which allowed for a leave in the early stages of research; a Humanities Research Award from UT s College of Liberal Arts, which offered three years of support; and a College Research Fellowship from UT s College of Liberal Arts, which provided leave in the final stages of writing.
Finally, the personal reverberations effected by the labyrinthine process of writing a book deserve special acknowledgment. My parents, Simi and Alex, and my parents-in-law, Grethe and Hans Gunnar, have accompanied this project with love and encouragement over the years. My husband, ystein, has shared all the moments of exhilaration and frustration that have attended my research. He is a true partner in life, as he has proved in part by his willingness to spend many an evening by my side watching Penny Dreadful . Our children, Astrid Leah and Daniel Per, were born and have grown alongside this book. They are my wondrous progeny; they make everything possible.

An earlier version of chapter 3 was originally published as Gothic Temporalities and Insecure Sanctuaries in Lea Goldberg s The Lady of the Castle and Edgar Allan Poe s Masque of the Red Death, in Comparative Literature 68, no. 4: 408-26. Copyright 2016, University of Oregon. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press ( www.dukepress.edu ).
NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION
I N TRANSLITERATING H EBREW TERMS IN THIS BOOK , I follow the recommendations of the Library of Congress Romanization Table for Hebrew, with minor modifications to enhance readability. I retain diacritic marks only in the et and dispense with the final he ( he sofit ) in most cases, with a few specific exceptions (such as in agunah and Haskalah ) to accord with publication conventions. For proper names, I defer to the preferred or conventional English spelling, designating et only to provide clarification regarding texts that have not been translated to English. For example, referring to ana in Ya akov Shteinberg s story, which has not been translated, I retain the subscript dot beneath the H to distinguish between et and he , while in other references to the name Hana, I dispense with the dot. Throughout, I cite English translations when available but modify when necessary; these modifications are noted and refer to the Hebrew original. In these cases, and for texts that have not been translated to English, the translations from Hebrew are mine.
HEBREW GOTHIC
INTRODUCTION
Gothic Matters
H OW DOES FICTION FACTOR INTO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF the past? Literature might challenge long-held assumptions of historical truth, offering other stories to displace or complement them; or it might, more radically, expose historical narrative as itself constructed. To varying degrees, literature can contaminate the purity of history. Alon Hilu s Hebrew novel Ah uzat Dajani ( The House of Rajani , 2008) opens with a preface that claims its historical basis: This book is based on the letters and personal diaries of H ayim Margaliyot-Kalvarisky (agronomist, member of the First Aliya, 1868-1947), kept in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem. The author explains that he has chosen to retain the language of these documents, the authentic Hebrew of the late nineteenth century, and to translate and publish alongside them the Arabic journal entries of Salah Dajani, a Palestinian Arab. 1 Kalvarisky is an actual historical figure; the preface heightens the sense of historical veracity through the use of explanatory footnotes, absent from the novel itself. Subsequent Hebrew printings of the novel as well as its English translation, published in 2010, end with an author s note clarifying that The House of Rajani is absolutely a work of fiction and is not based on any so-called diaries. The House of Rajani is in no way or form a historical document. It is a work of fiction. 2 The overwrought and repetitive author s note and the replacement of the historical surnames with fictional ones were consequences of a scandal and legal row that ensued upon the novel s publication. Kalvarisky s family accused Hilu of tarnishing their forebear s reputation, while critics from the right and left found fault with his representation of the history of the Zionist narrative. 3
The tension between history and fiction that has come to define the novel calls to mind a novel published 250 years earlier, Horace Walpole s The Castle of Otranto , considered the first gothic novel. Published in 1764 under the pseudonym William Marshal, Otranto opens with a preface claiming the historical authenticity of the text, supposedly discovered in the library of an ancient catholic