Playing on John Crowe Ransom’s iconic “Criticism Inc.,” my dissertation, New Criticism Int.: The Close Reader in the U.S., Brazil and Israel, reveals the as yet unexplored global circulation of the North American theory of New Criticism, and its influence on international reading practices, literary production, and national identity construction. The dissertation follows the theory as it travels from North America to Brazil and Israel, where New Criticism combines with regional trends to provoke a radical institutional and cultural change. This new map provides a fresh model for understanding close reading, New Criticism’s key practice, which remains the prevailing method of critical reading taught in American institutions and abroad. The New Critics, it is usually assumed, believed that close reading involved a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a detached reader who contemplates the text but takes no part in constructing its meaning. New Criticism Int. demonstrates by contrast that the New Critics viewed the reader as an active participant in the creation of the text as an autonomous object. Specifically, they posited the reader’s mental work of attention as what allows the text to maintain its illusion of independence from the consumer. Consequently, the New Critics were highly invested in disciplining their readers into attention, and developed a sophisticated theory of the reader’s mind, which my study unpacks. Against this backdrop, close reading emerges as a pedagogical tool, which—though initially designed to serve aesthetic goals—was frequently deployed by the New Critics to serve political purposes, such as contouring the reader’s national identity. In other instances, the manipulation of attention was marshaled to open up ethical potentials, cultivating the reader’s receptivity to alterity.

My dissertation further demonstrates the vital role New Criticism played in the rise of experimental modernist literary forms and in processes of canonization within the U.S., Brazil and Israel. Though the New Critics presented close reading as suitable for any literary text, this method was in effect devised to fit specific works, which these thinkers deemed conducive to attention and therefore helped canonize. Such is the case, for example, with the oeuvre of William Faulkner in the North American context. On the other hand, New Criticism also generated literary counter-reactions to the imperative of attentive reading in the form of satires that mock the close reader, or literary texts fashioned to incite inattentive readerly modes. In this vein, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector exhausts her readers into distraction, and the Israeli Yehuda Amichai concatenates his metaphors to disturb a linear line of thought. New Criticism Int. thus offers a new international genealogy of New Criticism, and links it to global dynamics of literary production.

This dissertation argues for a new model of continuity - offered by the Jewish travel narrative form - to explain the appearance of race and racism in the literary history of Ashkenazi Jews. The ascendance of emigration in its heyday invigorated a new social order that derived its legitimacy from entirely different ways of conceptualizing Jewish identity - from a structured, territorialized Yiddishkay t of rabbinic authority, ritual observance, and the vernacular to a more ethereal Ashkenazi individuality embedded in the colonial and racial contingencies of the Atlantic world.

The first part of this study examines the first Yiddish adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Vilna,1868), retitled Slavery or Serfdom, by Isaac Meir Dik. I show how the author’s rereading of rabbinic slave laws transformed Stowe’s sentimental novel of Christian abolitionism into a travel report about the ethical superiority of Jewish over Christian slaveholding practices, and thus the socio-political benefit of Jewish emigration to the United States. During the 19th century Yiddish, in contrast to Hebrew, offered a stylistically pliant medium for Atlantic and racial language to be disseminated to all segments of Jewish society. The second part of the dissertation traces the development of Lithuanian Yiddish in Southern Africa in triangulated contexts of race, travel and intertextuality. I focus on the development of Yiddish literary modernism, which first appears in the midst of the South African War (1898-1902) and culminates in the reappearance of Yiddish as a language of white resistance in the Apartheid era. I analyze biblical and rabbinic intertextuality in the Yiddish literature of Southern Africa, including in texts narrated from the point of view of black Africans.

By reassessing the travel form, I argue that the literature of “Black-Jewish Relations” ought not to be understood as the objective assessment of interracial contact between Jews and African-Americans, but rather an imagined and imaginative construct, internal to modern Jewish literature and culture, and rooted in the global dynamics of Jewish modernization.

This dissertation traces throughout the history of modern Hebrew literature a fantasy of disengagement with systems of action and thought that are predicated on ideologies of achievement, oppositionality, or productivism. Through readings that range from the stories of Uri Nissan Gnessin in the first decade of the twentieth century to the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein in the 1980s, my project recovers the workings of a largely unacknowledged poetics of tacit refusal that operates at the heart of a predominantly strong, conflictual, and essentially opinionated cultural imaginary. Following the late work of Roland Barthes, I call this poetics “the desire for the neutral”—the desire to rid oneself of the burden of paradigms, to baffle any demand to occupy a predetermined position. This project thus traces a fantasmatic trajectory that often goes completely unnoticed in conventional critical and historiographical accounts. Taken together, the chapters of this dissertation argue for the persistence in modern Hebrew literature of a shared desire for the neutral, conceptualized neither as a fixed discursive position nor as a stance of direct resistance (which only reinstitutes the oppositional structure)—but rather as a category of historicized strategies of non-compliance, an ethos of minimal action that outplays the very logic of the paradigm.

Chapter 1 explores the emergence of the figure of the failed writer in Gnessin’s “Sideways” (1905) and in Elisheva’s Side-Streets (1929) as a fantasy of non-participation against the coercive discourse of imperative collectivist writing at that period. These narratives of failure, I argue, manifest not a self-deprecating anxiety but rather an affirmative “desire to retire” from the overdetermined task of the Hebrew writer. Chapter 2 focuses on the claim for a “freedom not to write” in Aharon Megged’s The Living on the Dead (1965). Through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality (in which any potentiality is always also impotentiality), I read this trope as indicative of what I describe as the potential unconscious of Israeli literature: a radical fantasy of retaining a state of literary and political impotentiality—and thus, ultimately, of potentializing given political realities. Chapter 3 examines the pedagogy of nuance in the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Responding to the crisis of Yiddish literature in Israel, Birstein’s fiction, I argue, teaches an activism of nuance—an ethics and politics of action that, against historical conditions that hinder one’s ability to act, consists in minimal, often nearly inconsequential yet nonetheless insistent tiny bits of difference.

This dissertation inquires into the question of collectivity in texts written in and about Israel/Palestine from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In light of the current crisis in the configuration of both Israeli and Palestinian national collectivities, it explores the articulation of non-national collective formations in literary and cinematic texts. I read these texts not as sealed works that represent historically realized collectivities, but as creative projects whose very language and modalities speculatively constitute potential collectivities. Rejecting the progression of teleological history ruled by actualized facts, these projects compose a textual counter-history of Israel/Palestine. I therefore propose reading them outside of the national and state-centered paradigm that governs most political and cultural inquiries into Israel/Palestine, and suggest instead that they amount to an anti-colonial trajectory. The Hebrew and French texts discussed in the dissertation challenge their own fixed political positioning within the colonial matrix and offer a critique of European political dictates and artistic forms.

In Chapter One, I discuss S. Yizhar's constant return to the events of the 1948 war and his refusal to move beyond it and narrate post-1948 sovereign, statist time; I consider the different literary procedures he employs throughout his work to potentially (re)constitute - after the establishment of the Israeli state - a pre-1948, non-national collective formation in Israel/Palestine. I then move, in Chapter Two, to follow the revolutionary collective enunciation fashioned by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga-Vertov collective, a group of politically-active filmmakers formed in 1968. I investigate the collectivity they attempted to develop together with Palestinian fighters in 1969-1970, the project's collapse after what is known as Black September, and finally its reflective afterlife in the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs. Chapter Three delves into the texts Jean Genet dedicated to the Palestinian struggle in the 1970s and -80s. I discuss how, in addressing his writing to a non-historical Palestinian collectivity which by then had already disappeared, Genet defies the boundaries of liberal politics of representation, and calls for a different notion of a gestural, "scripted" anti-colonial struggle. In Chapter Four I read contemporary Hebrew writer Haviva Pedaya's liturgical piyyut poetry, and ascertain how it may generate an oppositional history of Hebrew letters formulated from and towards Oriental collectivities, as a challenge to the modernist and secularist underpinnings of "modern Hebrew literature." Taken together, the projects I study recast Israel/Palestine as a political space in which both Palestinian and Jewish collectivities potentially emerge as anti-colonial, exilic, Eastern ones, formed in struggle and embedded in text.

My dissertation, Translational Encounters: Modernism, Jewishness and Translation in Literatures of the Mass Migration Period, studies strategies of literary representation developed by early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant authors in response to pressures of assimilation and language effacement. I triangulate authors who have traditionally been read within different, monolingual literary historiographies: Lamed Shapiro (Yiddish), Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth (American English), and L. A. Arieli (Hebrew). This new historiographical map traces how multilingual authors who wrote in various languages designed in their works strategies of translation to utilize the modernist project’s destabilization of the national language. I argue that in order to make a repressed minor language into a vital agent within a national culture that demanded its effacement, these authors designed an openended narrative oscillation between “original” and “translation.” They designed a new, linguistic paradigm to envision an American self that is always in the making.

My dissertation examines one of the most intricate genres undertaken by Jewish immigrant authors, which I term “the translational novel.” These are works which read as a translation, insofar as the linguistic situation in the fictional world is mediated for the reader by another language. As a result, much of the thematic “drama” in these texts is shifted from the represented world to the very act of its linguistic mediation. A few recent studies investigated this technique in different contexts, e.g. Adriana X. Jacobs’ Strange Cocktail (2018) and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015). What seem to have been missing, however, are first, an adequate account of contemporaneous literatures in several languages, and second, a study of this device’s particular response to the modernist crisis of representation. Translational Encounters addresses this lacuna by uncovering the aesthetic potentiality of such translational encounters in narrative form. I consider Jewish immigrant authors’ design of a translational mode of narration (for example, Lamed Shapiro narrates in Yiddish events that take place in English), contending that these authors draw on the place of translation outside the “nameable,” that is the social grammars of meaning and their construction of legible national and linguistic subjects. For these authors, I argue, translational narration is a distinctly modernist technique for responding to a crisis of expression and social fragmentation, a means to participate in modernism’s destabilization of language without giving up linguistic particularity.

The first chapter reaches beyond modernism to explore the vital role of translation in the American Yiddish theater’s audacious reworkings of Shakespeare, under the parodic dictum, as the legend has it, “translated and improved.” It also studies the afterlife of this late-nineteenth-century practice, by examining works by Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley. Specifically, I look at various works which Judaize, Yiddishize and queer Shakespearean characters in order to subvert the notion of a national literary inheritance. These works, I suggest, employ translation as a means to envision non-reproductive modes of familial and literary kinship. Finally, the chapter also includes an analysis of “Shakespeare The Second” (Shekspir der tsveyter 1920) by the prolific Yiddish shund playwright Hershel Kalmanowitz, a play which I discovered in a full manuscript form in the American Jewish Archives, and which has not been studied before. Turning to explicit engagements with modernist style, the next chapters examine works in three languages. In my second chapter, I explore a literary debate between two American Yiddish authors – Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) and Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971) – regarding James Joyce’s technique of stream of consciousness. I show that American Yiddish authors resolved their contested ideas about Jewishness by projecting them onto their ideas on Joycean abstraction of time, interiority and language. I argue that Shapiro utilizes the encounter between the Yiddish language and the American locale to complicate the modernist “universalist” turn inward. His translational representation of a Yiddish-inflected consciousness is attuned to both linguistic particularity and multilingual potentiality.

Whereas my first two chapters study attempts to place Yiddish vis a vis a presumed universal literature, my third chapter turns to Anzia Yezierska’s design of an aesthetic language that is distinctly American. Specifically, I study All I Could Never Be (1932), a novel which is a fictionalized account of Yezierska’s work as a translator with the Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his 1918 ethnographic study of Polish immigrants. As I show, Yezierska designs a novel that reads as both an original and a translation, tracing in the oscillation between the two a means to effect Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of a fluid American self. In shaping an incessant motion between source and target languages, the novel undoes a unidirectional idea of origin, stressing how each new translation changes the original. While Yezierska unsettles English to advance cultural pluralism, the Hebrew author L. A. Arieli posits that psychic tensions of acculturation can be elucidated only through a non-vernacular minor language. My fourth chapter considers Arieli’s Hebrew novel Diary of a Lonely Man, or How I Became an Anti-Semite (1928), focusing on the crucial role of language in thematizing psychic tensions of ethnic passing. Arieli depicts a second-generation Eastern-European Jewish immigrant who can “pass” as a descendent of Irish (rather than Jewish) immigrants through acculturated speech. Yet although the events take place in English, Arieli narrates them in Hebrew, in order to thematize the pathological effect of ethnic prejudice. Arieli parodically mimics a dated, rabbinic Hebrew register, in order to reveal his protagonist’s view of the Jewish body as a Hebrew liturgical text – a “shameful” obsolete residue whose cultural Otherness raises endless exegetic investigations by the Anglo-dominated surroundings.

In my concluding chapter, I look at Henry Roth’s belated attempt to revisit the decayed Yiddish world of his childhood in his English writing. I show that Roth forms a distinct post-Joycean temporal and linguistic aesthetics that does not retreat from “history” but rather seeks to convey the historical decay of the Yiddish world of his childhood without accepting it under the determinism of a historical “fate.” Specifically, he incorporates numerous manuscripts and diaries into the finished work. This manuscript temporality, I argue, harbors a liberating hesitative time of authorial revision, before past events crystalize on the page into a “fated” death of Yiddish. Similarly, Roth employs Yiddish words as speculative agents that could disrupt the features and boundaries of monolingual American literature in the present.

In studying the intersection of translation, aesthetic form, and ideas on migration and citizenship, my project not only recovers a poetics whose political implications resonate in our own time. It also offers a new, transnational historiography of modernist, American, and modern Jewish literatures alike. By triangulating Hebrew, Yiddish, and American literary works that have not yet been put in substantial conversation, I invite us to rethink what (multilingual) Jewish (as well as American) literature is and the ways in which its historiography should be conceived.

“Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature examines the intertwined worlds of Yiddish modernist writing and anarchist politics and culture. Bringing together original historical research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish avant-garde poetry by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Peretz Markish, Yankev Glatshteyn, and others, I show that the development of anarchist modernism was both a transnational literary trend and a complex worldview. My research draws from hitherto unread material in international archives to document the world of the Yiddish anarchist press and assess the scope of its literary influence. The dissertation’s theoretical framework is informed by diaspora studies, gender studies, and translation theory, to which I introduce anarchist diasporism as a new term. Originating in ancient Greek, anarchism refers to a constellation of anti-statist and anti-capitalist aspirations: imagining and working towards a world without borders, an ethics of consensus, bodily autonomy, and escape from the temporal strictures of wage labor. Anarchist diasporism describes the anti-statism of stateless peoples based upon their specific relationship to time and territory, and links the theoretical insights of diaspora studies with the historical study of anarchism. Rather than producing an aspiration to statehood, immigration and deportation often informed a rejection of nationalism and a reconsideration of the meaning of diaspora. The scope of this dissertation includes writers who personally identified as anarchists, such as Anna Margolin, Yosef Luden, and Alexander Harkavy; and those like Soviet anti-Fascist poet Peretz Markish, who absorbed anarchist thought and aesthetics and were celebrated by anarchist readerships.

Chapter One, “Genealogies of Stateless Anti-Statism,” documents how Yiddish anarchists claimed Jewish genealogies and interpreted diaspora. Historicizing this anti-teleological worldview provides a foundation for studying anarchist diasporism in Yiddish poetry, through such literary practices as bending time and imagining history before, after and beyond the state—imaginative gestures already present in Jewish anarchist theory. I translate and examine histories by Saul Yanovsky, Rabbi Yankev Meir Zalkind, Yosef Luden, and Yosef Cohen—each of whom edited a Yiddish anarchist newspaper—and the anarcha-feminism of Dr. Katherina Yevzerov and Emma Goldman. Zalkind and Luden most deeply engage with Torah and Talmud (Zalkind’s translations made talmudic labor law accessible for workers); Yanovsky and Cohen draw from the vagaries of Jewish history; and Yevzerov and Goldman confront patriarchal power.

The second chapter, “‘Language is Migrant’: The Multilingual Language Politics of Alexander Harkavy, Emma Goldman, and the Anarchist Press,” examines a few case studies of language politics in Jewish anarchism—a movement which, unlike Bundism and Zionism, did not articulate a single ideology of language. Renowned for his contributions to the field of linguistics, Alexander Harkavy also developed a philosophy of language evolution informed by his anarchist worldview. I examine the language politics of two legal cases: Emma Goldman’s trial for lecturing bilingually on birth control, and the Supreme Court free speech case Jacob Abrams vs United States, which deported the editors of Frayhayt for their seditious bilingual broadsides. I discuss the close relationship between two English-language journals, A. Berkman and Goldman’s Mother Earth and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review.

Chapter Three, “The Anarchism of Time: Comparative Temporalities in Yiddish and English Sacco-Vanzetti Poems,” examines the presence and persistence of anarcho-syndicalism in Yiddish poetry. Beginning with the Proletarian (Svetshop) poets Morris Rosenfeld and Yosef Bovshover, I discuss the role of the anarchist press in the development of immigrant social worlds. I examine the poetics and political valences of temporality in svetshop poetry, particularly their utopian futurities and critique of capitalist time. Two archetypal elements of Proletarian poetry—alternative temporality and imagery of garment workers’ tools—were reinvented by Modernist poets in their responses to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Through repetition and kaleidoscopic montage, the poetic structures of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Yankev Glatshteyn embody alternative temporalities beyond the linear and punitive temporality of the state.

Chapter Four, “With An Undone Shirt (Mit a tseshpilyet hemd): Anarchist Temporality and Embodiment in Peretz Markish’s Poema Der fertsikyeriker man,” analyzes Markish’s brash early work and selections from his hitherto-untranslated masterpiece Der fertsikyeriker man (The Man of Forty), a book-length poema that was rescued hours before his arrest by the Soviet Secret Police and smuggled out of Russia. I examine how anarchist themes circulated through his work, including revolutionary temporality, antimilitarism, visions of nature without borders, and representations of the autonomous body. Despite the Soviet Union’s brutal surveillance and persecution of Yiddish writers, Markish defiantly used the Jewishly-marked vocabulary which Soviet language reform campaigns had attempted to purge. I consider anarchist responses to Markish’s poetry in the contemporaneous newspaper Arbeter Fraynd (Worker’s Friend), which claimed him “as much our comrade as our poet.”

The Coda points to possible future dialogues with other fields (such as postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diaspora Studies, and Comparative Literature) and connections to contemporary diasporic movements building democracy without the state.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the multiplicities of Jewish diasporic thought and expands the body of world Modernist literature available in translation.

This dissertation examines Yiddish literature (1500-1950) as an alternative, even transgressive, vehicle for the transmission of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic interpretation. In biblical works for popular audiences—which included women, children, and even non-Jews—Yiddish enjoyed a relative freedom from literary and doctrinal regulation. Through this freedom to improvise on the biblical canon, I argue, early Yiddish literature discloses hermeneutic and poetic practices inadmissible in contemporary Hebrew literature: humanist textual criticism, ambiguous or subversive midrash, the vivid portrayal of non-Jewish subjectivities. By reading this cultural palimpsest as a single multilingual and transnational history, I access those unsanctioned and clandestine practices in Jewish biblical transmission suppressed in the Hebrew sources.

At the same time, the material evidence offered by my work with early Yiddish and Hebrew books sheds light on the entanglement of religious authority and textual transmission. Recent scholarly attention has focused on the social history of the printing house (in contrast to the printing press) as the site of an evolving textual culture in the early modern period. With the emergence of this industry, Jewish exegetes relied, perhaps for the first time, on a professional class of textual stewards—printers, correctors, pressmen and censors—for the reproduction and dissemination of their work. These print professionals often represented a diverse (and at times ambiguous) range of religious confessions: rabbis thus entrusted their religious writings to humanist master-printers, and baptized Jews worked as copyists, correctors, and censors of Hebrew books. Rather than segregating material practices of print from the religious stakes of textual transmission, the dissertation interprets early modern Yiddish literature as the dynamic confluence of rabbinic exegetical poetics and emergent cultures of print.

In three textual case studies, I investigate this encounter and its literary incarnations in Yiddish over the course of the modern period. In the first chapter, “Shmuel Bukh and Early Modern Mouvance,” I excavate an exemplary instance of the interaction of rabbinic intertextuality and humanist print in the Old Yiddish biblical epic, Shmuel Bukh, as it was textually destabilized in the collaborative, culturally diverse printing houses of the Italian Renaissance. I argue that those houses and their competitive marketing of humanist textual practice were the model for the dominant Jewish printing house in sixteenth century Poland, Cracow's Prostitz press. The Cracow editions of Shmuel Bukh (1578, 1593) reflect a revision of rabbinic exegetical tradition in favor of humanist textual criticism. The introduction of these secular editorial practices came to reshape the transmission of Yiddish biblical genres in Eastern

Europe.

The second chapter, “Dialogue, Drama and the Survival of Midrash,” continues this line of inquiry by tracing the descent of vernacular renderings of the Scroll of Esther in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the Prostitz press and its experiments in Yiddish prose genres, such as Di Lange Megile (1589), vernacular prose reiterations of the Scroll of Esther depart from the protocols of midrashic transmission employed by their historical predecessors, medieval compendia. As editorial practices modernize over the course of the seventeenth century, Yiddish renditions of the Esther story reclaim a classical midrashic hermeneutics as a means of declaring their own intertextuality. As a result, retelling Scroll of Esther becomes an ambiguous ritual opportunity, permitting for experimental oral and textual exercises such as the Purim play. The Akhashveyrosh-shpil (1697) represents the zenith

of this proliferation of textual, dramatic, and liturgical re-imaginings of the Esther story.

The third chapter, “Itzik Manger and the Historical Imagination,” examines the ways in which modernist poet Itzik Manger crafted his claims to poetic and exegetical authority based on surviving witnesses to these early modern Yiddish genres. In his poetry, balladic retellings of biblical narrative occasion the use of traditional editorial and paratextual gestures, drawn from Yiddish early print. Similarly, Manger's literary-historiographical essays retrieve and romanticize early modern textual stewardship as the guarantor of literary and historical continuity with the biblical, rabbinic and folk-cultural past. The legacy of early modern textual transformation thus surfaces in literary modernism as a formal and intellectual opportunity to lay claim to the authority and autonomy of the early modern editor.

Abstract

Retrospectivity as an Ethical Stance:

Revisiting the Zionist Dream in Israeli Fiction and Film

by

Hanna Tzuker Seltzer

Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union

in Jewish Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair

My dissertation engages with Israeli works of fiction and film whose plots return to the period from the pre-state Yishuv in Palestine till the first years of Israeli statehood. Through close reading and analysis of narrative strategies and cinematic techniques, I explore the ways in which this retrospective gaze presents an ethical critique of the Zionist enterprise. These works reexamine essential notions in Zionist ideology such as the ideal of the New Jew, the negation of the diaspora (shlilat ha-galut), the treatment of Middle-Eastern Jews, and the fate of the Palestinians. I argue that only through retrospective narration is it possible for these Israeli writers and filmmakers to propose a nuanced ethical critique that both depicts the experience of daily life in those heady ideological days and offers a historical reassessment of the values of that era. Throughout this dissertation, my theoretical framework remains grounded in narratology, as well as in conceptions of intertextuality as a bilateral cultural practice.

Part I of my dissertation is dedicated to S. Yizhar’s autobiographical novel Preliminaries (1992). The novel tells the story of a Jewish family that settles in Palestine during the period of the Yishuv, the New Jewish Settlement in the 1920s, and is narrated through the dual perspective of the youngest child in the family and of the adult some sixty years later. The co-existence of the two narrators enables the complex message of the novel; it places the events in their human and historical context, and yet, through the point of view of the adult narrator, also acknowledges the short-sighted conception of the New Jew in a New Land. My narratological analysis reveals the complex point of view of the narrator, whose child-like position defamiliarizes and literalizes key concepts, while his retrospective position as an adult simultaneously approves of and

2

criticizes them. The intertextuality in Preliminaries serves as a critique of ideology while also revealing the return of the repressed Jewish cultural echo chamber of Talmud and Torah study.

In Part II I focus on the novel Infiltration by Yehoshua Kenaz (1986). It takes place in 1955 and depicts an IDF platoon whose soldiers have minor disabilities and are therefore deemed unfit for combat and subjected to their commanders’ contempt and abuse. The soldiers internalize the disdain they encounter and perceive themselves and their fellow platoon soldiers as defective and unworthy. Like Preliminaries, Infiltration is an autobiographical novel which employs a dual lens: that of the soldier narrator who tells of the events at the time they occur, and that of the adult narrator, who returns to these events 30 years later. I analyze the narratological articulations of the soldiers’ subjectification and loss of agency inherent in their submission to ideology. I show that the novel illustrates with exceptional precision all the features of interpellation discussed by Althusser. Intertextually, Infiltration models the death-like experience of the abject soldiers on Dante’s Inferno, while echoing Ben-Gurion’s account of the Israeli military experience as a purgatory of sorts.

In the epilogue to this dissertation, I examine the films Kedma (2002) by Amos Gitai and Homeland (2008) by Dani Rosenberg, whose cinematic projects enhance the retrospective point of view as a condition for ethical critique. Although different in plot and stylistics, both films tell the story of Holocaust survivors who immigrate to Palestine during the 1948 war and are recruited into the Israeli military. Gitai and Rosenberg give presence to the Palestinians and their catastrophe, the Nakba: In Kedma, this is done through their testimonials, while in Homeland it is done through an emphasis on their haunting absence. The two filmmakers produce an analogy between the Jewish refugees and the Palestinian refugees, portraying the experiences of loss and disaster as a common ground for both. Acknowledging the Palestinians’ catastrophe indeed requires the Israeli audience to admit responsibility; yet the very recognition of the tragic connection between the two peoples, with the return of one people from exile creating the exile of the other, opens up a channel for communication and future reconciliation. I show how Kedma’s radical intertextuality, by incorporating citations from the works of Palestinian writers Ghassan Kanafani and Tawfiq Zayyad, gives voice and presence to the Palestinian experience. I also argue that modeling Homeland on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot constructs the absurdity of mobilizing Holocaust survivors to the war against Palestinians. Both films—like the two novels—portray the catastrophic consequences of erasing Jewish and Palestinian cultural memory.

This dissertation explores the connections between Ashkenazi Jewish relationships to place and revolutionary politics in Central and Eastern Europe in modernist Yiddish literature in the first half of the twentieth century. I investigate the Yiddish concept of “do’ikayt” (“hereness”), which is used to describe practices of political organizing and cultural activism among Yiddishists and Jewish socialists especially during the interwar period. Do’ikayt meant an investment in the long history of Jews in the territories of Europe, an investment in Ashkenazi culture, in Yiddish, and in the possibility of continued Jewish life in places like Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus in the aftermath of World War One and the revolutions in the Russian Empire. I argue that there is a strong trend of do’ikayt in Yiddish literature of this period, which entails representation of “lived Jewish space,” local history, culture, and language, as well as a political commitment to the improvement of Jewish and non-Jewish life in those spaces, often aligned with revolutionary socialist politics. Through close readings of works by Izi Kharik and Moyshe Kulbak, I further argue that it is not only (or not even especially) in realist or naturalist genres of literature that we find this poetics of do’ikayt, but rather in works of modernist literature. Formal experimentation, and an aesthetics of abstraction and fragmentation, especially, become these authors’ modes for representing the tensions between building connections to history and culture, on the one hand, and the drive for revolutionary change on the other. Chapter One explores the concept of “do’ikayt” in political and historical contexts. I discuss works by Chaim Zhitlowsky and Sh. An-sky as examples of political do’ikayt in the contexts of early socialist and territorialist politics, and I read An-sky’s novella In shtrom as an early example of the trend of literary do’ikayt. The second chapter focuses on Izi Kharik’s poema (a long form narrative poem), “Minsker Blotes” (“Minsk Mud”), about the experiences of the pre-revolutionary period and the revolutionary period in a poor Jewish neighborhood of Minsk. I include a complete translation of “Minsk Mud” in the appendix to the dissertation, the first time the poema has been translated into English. In the third chapter I explore Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia as a framework for these modernist representations of place and use it to read the poetics of do’ikayt in Moyshe Kulbak’s novel, Zelmenyaner (The Zelmenyaners), about a large multi-generational Jewish family living through Sovietization in Minsk in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the final chapter I begin to investigate what a modernist poetics of do’ikayt might look like outside of Yiddish literature, taking the example of Alfred Döblin’s writings about Berlin and his travels in Poland.

My dissertation argues for a joint literary historiography of Yiddish and Spanish texts within Jewish Argentine literature. I situate my work within the existing (and marginalized) corpora of literary criticism for Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish, which have historically remained isolated from each other. I propose a bilingual Yiddish/Spanish canon for Jewish Argentine literature that is self-critical from its inception. I choose “origins,” “others,” and “afterlives” both as thematic and symbolic markers within the literature that I study, but also as phrases that shape a literary canon itself. By considering the figurative, translational, and intertextual strategies that are used complicate these phrases, I destabilize any easy or singular understanding of what it means to represent Jewish-Argentine literature and its communities.Establishing an originary, foundational, or first presence is paramount to the authority of literary canons and their claims to representation. My dissertation begins with a study of the so-called originary works of Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish respectively: The celebrated (and critiqued) Los Gauchos Judíos (1910) and the forgotten Yiddish-language memoir of Mordechai Alpersohn (an agricultural colonist; first volume published in 1922). I revisit these works, which have never been studied comparatively, and discuss the contested nature of beginnings themselves. I suggest that Gerchunoff’s translations, misquotations, and anachronisms yield an intertextual collage that fictionalizes Jewish-Argentine life on the pampas; close reading thus renders the erasure that the work performs in order to be first. In the Yiddish memoir, I show that Alpersohn and his fellow agricultural colonists use the act of translation to domesticate what is foreign to them. “Home” for the colonists is the Jewish discursive universe (described by Benjamin Harshav in The Meaning of Yiddish) that contains so many other exiles within it. In fact, it is the oppositional constructs of “home” and “exile” themselves that wander in both of these works, which in turn contests the premise of autochthonous literature itself and the category of a foundational or first work. The next chapter of my dissertation examines “Others;” in particular, the literary treatment of the figure of the prostitute in the Yiddish play “Ibergus” by Leyb Malakh and the book of poems Versos de Una … by the pseudonymous Clara Beter (both works were published in 1926). In both works, the prostitute asserts that she belongs at once to everyone and to no one, and this condition makes her an excellent metaphor for metaphor itself. The prostitute is employed both as a metaphor for other phenomena, and also shrouded in figurative language. This dual use of prostituion as a source and target metaphor reveals a complex and ever-shifting terrain upon which supposedly stable identity categories are built. I use the word “prostitute” instead of “sex worker” to reinforce the degree to which these works deal with their characters as tropes, but I also identify the way that prostitutes weave in and out of positions of limited agency. The last chapter of my dissertation examines the notion of literary afterlives in Yiddish literature, especially in the Argentina-focused volumes of the Musterverk fun Der Yidisher Literatur (Model Works of Yiddish Literature, 1957¬–1984) edited by Shmuel Rollanski. I discuss the work of three different writers featured in the Musterverk—namely, Avrom Moshkovitsh, Nahon Millertski, and Mimi Pinzón. I consider the way that excerption, translation, biographical discussion, and criticism all have a profound influence on our reception of both the pieces and the authors themselves. Critical sources rely heavily on figurative language to evoke supposedly literal ends and afterlives, and the critical sources themselves participate in shaping the end and afterlives of their subjects.