Cultural appropriation, shtetl-style

There’s been a fascinating discussion all weekend over at Mark’s that began when he posted a lengthy excerpt from James Wood’s most critical review of Nicole Krauss’s THE HISTORY OF LOVE. Wood contended that the book ultimately fell down because it relied too much on schmaltz and sentimentality:

Krauss

fervently believes that Gursky is Jewish. But he is not Jewish. He is a

literary idea of Jewish. He is the pampered notion, the precious dream,

of his overdetermined literary parentage, all the Singer and Babel that

Krauss has been reading. Gursky looks out of the window: ‘Maybe I was

contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and

you’ll get a Spinoza.’ No one talks like this in real life, unless they

are impersonating an idea of how people talk in Singer’s tales.

Interestingly, the novel often registers its uncertainty in such

passages, wobbling between claiming its over-explicit Jewishness and

wanting to disown, or at least to ironise, that Jewishness. The book

tries to be knowing about the Jewishness it is most earnestly in thrall

to.

This

is minstrelsy, pure and simple; it is an insult to Jewishness (the test

of the insult is to imagine it written by a gentile; or imagine an

equivalent piece of nonsense about an octogenarian African American –

tap-dancing, say, or hysterically singing along to Marvin Gaye –

written by a white writer). It is difficult to know where to begin.

First, like almost everything Gursky does or wants to do or tells us he

has done, it seems deeply untrue: the old man danced until dawn, did

he? Until his feet were raw and bloody? And dawn found him lying

prostrate on the floor? Yeah, yeah. Then there is the characteristic

arc of the passage, as it guns for its target of sentiment – that

incredible ‘L’chaim’ that closes the paragraph. And then there is the

desperate groundlessness of the writing, as on the one hand it bathes

in its overwrought ethnicity and on the other seems to want to cleanse

itself by turning that self-indulgence into awkward self-parody, into

something out of Fiddler on the Roof.

Repeatedly,

the reader comes to the end of passages in this book and intones to

himself (in Alma-ish block capitals): I DON’T BELIEVE YOU. In life,

alas, one’s uncle never does wistfully hang over one’s bed at three in

the morning with a single charming question. But in a made-for-TV film

this is exactly what happens. I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me

that Alma’s mother was at Oxford, where her tutor ‘slept under a pile

of papers’, since it’s rather hard to sleep under a pile of papers; the

image is something out of Harry Potter – or, if one is being

charitable, Dickens. And I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me about

Alma’s trip to Israel for her Bat Mitzvah, where her grandparents,

Bubbe and Zeyde, look after her. At the Dead Sea, Bubbe appraises Alma:

‘You don’t have a bosom? Vat happened?’ At the Wailing Wall,

grandmother and granddaughter place their prayers in the cracks of the

bricks. Alma’s prayer, she tells us, is addressed to her late father.

Once her grandmother has walked away, Alma sneaks a glance at her

prayer: ‘Baruch Hashem, I and my husband should live to see tomorrow

and that my Alma should grow up to be blessed with health and happiness

and what would be so terrible some nice breasts.’ Bubbe is no more real

than anyone else in this book, merely a coarse version of fat Auntie

Bobka in Babel’s Odessa stories. (Also, wouldn’t her prayer be in

Hebrew or Yiddish, languages incomprehensible to Alma? Why, then, this

stagey, absurdly ‘Jewish’ English?)

Most of the comments deal with the review’s take on sentimentality in fiction, but what interests me more is whether anyone can judge the so-called Jewishness of various forms of fiction, and whether Wood is correct in his belief that THE HISTORY OF LOVE amounts to little more than minstrelsy. My thoughts after the jump.

I must preface this by saying that I haven’t read THE HISTORY OF LOVE; I’m sure I’ll get around to it, but this is more of a general discussion of informed writing versus ersatz, so to speak.

That said, Nicole Krauss is (as we all know by now thanks to the collective drumbeating of the media) married to Jonathan Safran Foer, and both share a similar writing sensibility as well as influences. And though I did like EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED overall, it also drove me nuts that Foer proudly declared that he didn’t do a lick of research for the portions of the book set in this fantasy shtetl.

On the one hand, I admired that he could get away with making things up so boldly and still have some semblance of approximation. But what if he’d actually been steeped in any sort of tradition? What if he’d done the reading, hung out at YIVO or interviewed those who had lived in such conditions (or whose parents or grandparents did) and really understood what it was like to be in the midst of such squalor, where the threat of pogroms loomed large every day of their lives?

And then there was the one question that in the three years since the book was published, not one person has actually asked Foer: if the aborted search for his grandmother was the impetus for the book, why did he not use his fame and success to go look for her in earnest? Or was it just a cheap trick, a form of sleight of hand that got people to fawn all over him but not to ask the tough questions?

As you can tell, this has bothered me, because it seems to indicate that Foer much preferred the fantasy version of his creation than whatever the reality turned out to be. All well and good, but who’s to say there isn’t a better story in the true version?

To pull things back and focus once again on Wood’s opinion, I’m of two minds: first, that he’s making a very dangerous claim in questioning whether Krauss has the “right” to write as she did, whether her work is only an approximation of Jewishness instead of the real thing. Using Isaac Bashevis Singer as an example of literary Jewishness makes me laugh aloud; on both an anecdotal and more organized level, Singer inspired scorn and outright outrage. Why? Among the Yiddishists, he was seen as an inferior version of his older brother, I.J. Singer, whose work was never translated into English at the same frequency. And among the more religious, he was seen as vulgar (or prost, a Yiddish word that’s difficult to translate but fabulous nonetheless) a man who corrupted his Jewish upbringing by only illuminating the seamy side in his fiction, one which may or may not have existed except in Singer’s upper and (especially) lower brains. Similar opinions abound about Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen, although to somewhat lesser degrees.

But at the same time, he’s right: Krauss herself has said in interviews that her upbringing was minimal at best, and that she had little connection to her religion. If anything, her connections as seen through her work seem more cultural or family-based. All well and good, but it means there are a lot of holes, and wide-open at that. It may well lead to a similar effect that produced FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, a musical which I have not been able to listen to properly for years. Why? Because it’s fake. It dumbed down the relentless, black-humored depression that permeated Sholom Aleichem’s work into a never-ending stream of stereotypical Jewish jokes. And what was a heart-wrenching source of conflict in the stories — Chava’s marriage to a non-Jew — was watered down into almost an afterthought in the musical. The irony is that the musical works far better in Yiddish, where “Tradition” becomes the more elemental “Die Torah”. Instead of the distant, jokey feel, the Yiddish version seems to live and breathe the shtetl life.

And I think that’s ultimately the problem Wood points out, that in his mind, THE HISTORY OF LOVE doesn’t live and breathe the Judaism it wants to comment on. Ersatz-ness is hardly unusual; all one has to do is listen to bad Klezmer music after bad Klezmer music. What distinguishes it from the good, even the great? The latter knew their history. They spent hundreds of hours listening to old recordings, poring through the reedy 78s for those specks of spectacular talent who played the Old Country music as it was meant to be played (even speeded up to fit the maximum three minutes per side.) They read their source material, even interviewed musicians. All of this filtered down into their playing and infused it with obligatory passion and fervor but also generations of knowledge and learning.

I suppose this subject is close to my heart because of the realization some time ago that this was the path I would take in my own writing. In other words, that my raison d’etre is to “write Jewish.” Why? It’s the world I know, one rife with conflicts — external and especially internal — and complexities that I could spend the rest of my life exploring and still never get wholly right. It’s so key to know not only your own history, but those of people who preceded you. To know what the traditions were before you were born so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and force others to reinvent along with you.

It goes for religion, it goes for writing. Why settle for ersatz?