Wandering Jews

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	• Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Contraversions: Critical Studies in ... Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi University of California Press, 2000 - 370 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Wandering Jews

In recent years, a seemingly endless variety of poetic and political signifiers have been invoked in attempts to describe the experiences of dispossession, minorities, and regions: border, creolization, transculturation, transnationalism, hybridity. These spatial/historical paradigms are often at the crux of cultural debates in much the way that W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness would have once occupied center stage. At the top of the list ranks diaspora (and frequently the somewhat elusive diasporic) which is the focus of journals such as Diaspora and Transition as well as a wide range of academic periodicals that have devoted special issues to the theme. But in one way or another, these permutations and mutations of diaspora can be traced to a late nineteenth-century movement among Jewish historiographers, who sought ways to account for the Jews' persistence over the long span of centuries in a variety of lands that were not their homeland. Unfortunately, the rapidly increasing ways that "diaspora" has been appropriated, has led to an unfortunate increase in intellectual fuzziness and rhetorical imprecision to which even the rigorous field of Jewish Studies is far from immune. Fortunately for the latter, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi's ambitious new study offers both theoretical rigor and innovation, taking the critique of literary Homecoming to a more sophisticated discursive space that will raise essential questions for future investigations of many of the poets and writers considered here. Although Jewish diasporism has often been a focus of Jewish literary analysis, nothing like this book has ever been attempted. Offering a wealth of original translations of abundant prooftexts, rich biographical and literary detail, Ezrahi has produced a consistently lively and erudite work. Divided into two major sections, "Jewish Journeys" and "Jewish Geographies" this book examines the tension between "Jewish story and territory" (139). Ezrahi's touchstone, Yehuda Halevi's "Songs of Zion" provides the essential metaphors of displacement, desire, voyage, and Return that guide her provocative readings. For Ezrahi, the essential terms that haunt the Jewish literary imagination to our own age were embedded in the Kabbalistic texts of Halevi's medieval contemporaries where the theosophical orientation shifts "from a geographical locus to the mobile body of the Jew, leading to later Kabbalistic and eventually Hassidic notions of individual salvation and symbolic rather than concrete connections with a sacred center" (49). In her shrewd analysis of the "diasporic journey" encoded here, Ezrahi is keenly attentive to the creative polarizations that continually reverberate between the metaphorizing and concretizing forms of narrative. For Ezrahi, the diasporic Jew imaginatively transforms the theological dynamic of deferral into profoundly skeptical visions of incomplete pilgrimages and mimetic culture. Ezrahi sees in the Jewish writer's faithful occupation of mimetic, rather than original space, a profound struggle against "contemporary complacencies" as well as "utopian desires" (53) that pose the true dangers to the Jewish spirit: "Herzl's 'if you will it, it is not a dream,' the emblem of the Zionist emergence from the 'dream-state' of the aggadically minded, reflects a cultural challenge of the highest order... 'will,' the fuel that empowers the imagination, is meant eventually to supersede it" (91). In contrast, Ezrahi makes a compelling case for a surprising continuum in the Jewish narrative journey and her study constitutes an ingathering of a highly disparate group of writers whose works (modernist and postmodern alike) nonetheless share a certain primordial trajectory: the literary "decoding of Jewish fate" invariably culminates in a "basic, primordial exilic pattern" in which "the topos of the journey to the Holy Land [is] a tale of the endlessly deferred end" (194). Ezrahi's readings of the spiritual and intellectual struggles encoded in Pagis and Celan's post-Shoah responses to the disenchanted universe are particularly stirring. For instance, in the latter's doomed search for a redemptive encounter with "an Other who has not come" Ezrahi notices the exile's mimicry of the "Zionist intoxication with a return to the primordial self" but finds that such recovery invariably reverts to "the legendary geography of the aimless and endlessly proliferating Jewish journey" (151). Also of note is Ezrahi's analysis of the Israeli poet and medieval scholar Dan Pagis's late works. In the latter's deeply wounded poetics of fragments she discovers "unfathomable depths poised at the borders of language...enigmatic signals sent directly to the reader" (176). Zion remains unattainable destiny rather than the place of arrival. There are also impressive readings of a number of novels by the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, some of which are still unavailable in English translation. Of particular note is the author's fascinating "Epilogue," an iconoclastic and evocative meditation on the competing claims of nationalism and what the author regards as the truly sacred. No future study of canonical Jewish literature will be sufficient without reference to this luminous study.-Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish-American Literature

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Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return."
Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem.
In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination-in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.

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