Osterbrot or Matzo? Translation, Transubstantiation, and Temporality in Joseph Roth's Hiob

Marc Caplan Osterbrot or Matzo? Translation, Transubstantiation, and Temporality in Joseph Roth’s Hiob “Before the stations of the mountain of desolation, Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow, Now at this birth season of decease, Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word, Grant Israel’s consolation To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.” T.S. Eliot, “A Song for Simeon” (1928) In his invaluable biography, David Bronsen (1981 [1975], 599) relates that Joseph Roth’s last words, murmured at the end of May 1939 in a Paris hospital where he lay dying of bronchial pneumonia and suffering from delirium tremens, were spoken to a French nurse who was unable to understand German. For a writer of such famously contradictory religious and political convictions – a Galician Jew with a passionate fondness for Catholic ritual,1 a radical, anti-nationalist pacifist with nostalgia for the Habsburg monarchy, a great and well-regarded journalist with inexhaustible energy for writing fiction (and spinning fictions about himself) – it is emblematic that his final confession, and the deity to which it was addressed, should remain a mystery. That the essence of this riddle should be found not only in the confusion over his multiple ideological affiliations, but also in his use of German at a moment of exile, suggests that the one stable identification in his professional career, with the German language, in fact contributes to the blurring of his social commitments by confining their multilingual resonances to a single language, and by locating their cosmopolitan mobility in a single territory with which they never comfortably or exclusively coincided. 1 Bronsen (1981 [1975], 600–601) relates the contradictory testimony of a half-dozen intimate witnesses regarding Roth’s religious affiliations, from Jews who had themselves converted to Catholicism such as Jean Jabès and Pauline Kulka – who claimed that Roth’s enthusiasm toward Catholicism coincided with their own – to Soma Morgenstern, who indicated that Roth swore to having never been baptized. It would probably be most prudent to conclude that Roth’s friends saw in his religious identifications a mirror of their own, and Roth was content to encourage these perceptions. Wilhelm von Sternburg’s more recent Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (2010, 484) essentially corroborates Bronsen’s account. DOI 10.1515/YEJLS-2015-0010 Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 148 Marc Caplan The elusiveness of Roth’s final utterance provides a cautionary but suggestive lesson for the reading of his published writing, even when considering its most celebrated instances. In particular, his novel Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes (1930) ostensibly offers the most straightforward fictional dramatization of the traditional Eastern European Jewish world to which he was born, yet not only does a critical examination of the work reveal the ambiguities of its descriptions, it also underscores the role of the German language in magnifying the work’s complex cultivation of paradox and ambiguity. Often paired with Radetzkymarsch (1932) to demarcate the break in Roth’s career between the generally topical, urban novels of the 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic and the more consciously romantic, mythopoetic, seemingly nostalgic fiction of the 1930s, in several respects Hiob stands as a schematic complement to the novel Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (1934); as the latter novel depicts a brutish Russian peasant’s journey from New York back to the border town of Koropta in pursuit of moral redemption at the behest of a gypsy fortuneteller, Hiob describes a pious Jewish householder, Mendel Singer, who travels from the Czarist Pale of Settlement to New York City. Over the course of the novel, structured loosely but deliberately to resemble the Biblical Book of Job,2 Mendel abandons his youngest, severely handicapped son Menuchim – in anachronistically contemporary terms one would likely diagnose him with profound autism – in the shtetl and loses his two older sons, Jonas and Schemarjah, the latter known in America as “Sam,” to the vicissitudes of World War I. Mendel’s wife Deborah dies of grief following Schemarjah/Sam’s death, and his daughter Mirjam succumbs to mental illness. At the end of the novel, however, Mendel’s sufferings are apparently redeemed when Menuchim, having adopted the name Alexej Kossak, arrives in New York and reveals himself to Mendel during a Passover Seder, now miraculously cured and a successful composer. Although Mendel’s trajectory from the traditional world into urban modernity reflects Roth’s own journey, the author situates the novel in the Czarist Pale of Settlement and New York City: two settings similar to his native Galicia and the metropolises of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris where he resided throughout 2 In his article “Wie jüdisch ist ein jüdisch-deutscher Roman? Über Joseph Roths Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes,” the late Gershon Shaked offers a comprehensive summary of the parallels between this work and its Biblical prototype (Shaked 1986, 287–288). The following cited passages from Shaked’s article will be, for better or worse, my own translations. A more recent, and thorough, discussion of the correspondence between Roth’s novel and the Book of Job can be found in Oberhänsli-Widmer (2003, 205–226). In addition to its perceptive discussion of the novel, this essay also features a comprehensive bibliography of German criticism on Roth. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 149 his adult life, but in geographic, political, and “socio-semiotic” terms3 fundamentally distinct from his own itinerary. The complexity of his project in transposing a straightforward, semi-autobiographical story4 into a fable of suffering and redemption can be located in the incongruous proximity, the negative identification, of one locale, language, and landscape with the other; Hiob in this respect can be read as a species of allegory, in which its analogies depend on their disjunctions rather than their continuities. Linguistically, these disjunctions manifest themselves in an unannounced conflict between the narrator’s German and his characters’ Yiddish. Thus, in the guise of presenting a nostalgic reverie of his native culture for a Western reader, Roth reiterates a conventional cultural hierarchy in which written, literary German supplants spoken, colloquial Yiddish, while at the same time relegating the German-language reader to the status of an interloper on the native culture for whom Yiddish can be evoked but never actually used.5 For example, in the scene depicting Mirjam’s mental breakdown, Roth describes the arrival of a doctor by writing, with deceptive simplicity, “The doctor came. He was a German. He could talk with Mendel.” (Roth 1982a, 156; Roth 1982b [1931], 158)6 The difference between Yiddish and German is effaced in the novel, so that that the “original” language of the characters’ thoughts and speech is never quoted or represented directly, but written over by the text’s actual German: this novel, like any number 3 The concept of the Soziosemiotik is fundamental to Shaked’s interpretation of the novel (Shaked 1986, 283), and I am of necessity adopting and adapting it here to my own purposes. 4 Bronsen, indeed, underscores the identification that Roth – who when writing the novel was only 35 years old – made between himself and his protagonist: writing to his in-laws about his wife Friedl’s mental collapse, the crisis that according to Bronsen parallels and motivates the genesis of the novel, he states, “I travel with a heavy heart, like an old Jew” (Bronsen 1981 [1975], 384; translations from this biography are my own). Years later Rudolf Leonhard similarly recalled Roth saying “I’m an old Jew, one with a mentally ill wife” (Bronsen 1981 [1975], 385). Bronsen in turn states, “Yet following the publication of Hiob the book remained for the author to a remarkable extent connected with the medical situation” of Roth’s wife (Bronsen 1981 [1975], 385), not only for the thematic connection between Friedl’s case and Mirjam’s breakdown, but also because Roth counted on the book’s success to finance his wife’s treatment. 5 It’s unclear in fact how much Yiddish Roth himself actually knew. By the 1890s the majority of the large Jewish community in Brody would have spoken German primarily, particularly middle class and relatively modern Jews such as Roth’s own family. Nonetheless, Brody was just over the border from the Czarist Pale of Settlement – where at the time well over 90% of the Jewish population spoke Yiddish as a primary language – and trade among Jews across the border was a pervasive fact of economic and cultural life. At the very least one can assume Roth’s passive knowledge of Yiddish, but in this regard his friend Joseph Gottfarstein offers a telling comment: “Er sprach nicht sehr gut, aber er bat mich Jiddisch mit ihm zu redden.” (Lunzer 2008, 176–177) 6 My translations may of necessity depart from the published version. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 150 Marc Caplan of immigrant and post-colonial narratives, functions as a kind of palimpsest, a translation for which a native-language original version never existed. This strategy in fact sets each language against the other with respect to discourse in the novel, subordinating both to a rhetorical sleight of hand that excludes the reader from complete access to either.7 To account for the ways in which the German language assumes a simultaneously territorializing and dislocating role in the novel, one should consider a remark Roth makes a few years later, when he was already an exile from the German-speaking world. In his “Preface to the New Edition” (1937) of the travelogue Juden auf Wanderschaft – which along with Hiob constitutes the most intensive and sympathetic account of East European Jewish culture in his oeuvre – Roth writes, “Many years ago, when I wrote this book [1926]…there was no acute problem affecting the Jews of Western Europe. What mattered then was to persuade the Jews and non-Jews of Western Europe to grasp the tragedy of the Eastern Jews – and especially in the land of unlimited opportunity, by which of course I meant not America but Germany.” (Roth 1985, 75; Roth 2001, 121) The juxtaposition of Germany with America offers more than one clue toward an interpretation of Roth’s decision to set Hiob (partly) in New York. If Germany substitutes for America, in the context of the 1930s, as both a promised land and a paradise lost, then Mendel’s journey from the Pale of Settlement to the US becomes an epic refiguring of Roth’s own migration from Brody on the Austrian border of the Czarist Empire, to Berlin. Similarly, when Roth writes in his travelogue of Berlin’s status in the culture of East European migrants, he states, “No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin voluntarily. Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?” (Roth 1985, 47; Roth 2001, 68). Mendel Singer’s reluctance to travel to America, otherwise anomalous with respect to the desperation of so many European Jews trying to emigrate after the US closed its borders to them in the 1920s, resonates with Roth’s own ambivalence toward the German metropolis and the modernity it signified. 7 This strategy, in fact, contrasts pointedly with the status of English in the novel. For example, Roth writes ironically of Mendel’s efforts to acclimate himself to New York, “Ja, er war beinahe heimisch in Amerika! Er wußte bereits, daß old chap auf amerikanisch Vater hieß und old fool Mutter, oder umgekehrt.” (Roth 1982a, 123; Roth 1982b [1931], 123) It is noteworthy that the English words “old chap” and “old fool” are neither set off in the text from the German, nor are they correctly translated! Presumably Roth understood their correct usage and expected German readers would as well – granting them more credit in their knowledge of English than he would their knowledge of Yiddish, and playing his readers’ sophistication against Mendel’s ostensible naïveté. Significantly, Dorothy Thompson’s translation effaces these ironies by substituting “old man” for “old chap” and “old lady” for “old fool.” By extension, Matthias Richter offers an astute discussion of the status of Russian words in the novel as well as a useful schematic interpretation of English, Russian, and Yiddish in the novel as a whole (1995, 317–319). Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 151 Hiob is therefore a book written in the German language, but against what Roth perceives as the bankruptcy of Jewish abandonment of tradition in pursuit of German modernity. If one recognizes Mendel’s emigration to America as parallel to Roth’s journey to Berlin (via Vienna), then Roth’s address of a common readership in both Hiob and Juden auf Wanderschaft becomes comprehensible: Germany must be the “land of unlimited opportunity” for Western Jews, because who else but German Jews would Roth be addressing with a critique of German modernity written in German?8 The role of German, historically the language of assimilationist enlightenment for East European Jews, is crucial to the polemic that Roth suggests in both books. The German language is the means by which the collision of one space and temporality with another occurs; the optimistic, arguably fantastic conclusion of Hiob signifies not the implication that Mendel has found a home in America, in spite of the providential nature of his experience there, but a nearly spectral reconciliation of his present with the past. Indeed, Mendel at the end of the novel remains as nostalgic for his abandoned home in the Pale of Settlement as Roth would grow for the vanished dual-monarchy of his youth. Menuchim in this respect doesn’t so much appear at the end of the novel as he is conjured by Mendel’s desire. In the legendary terms of the novel’s symbol-system, his return to the novel recalls as much the Golem of Prague – created out of the hopes and fears of a newly modern, urban Jewish culture – as the prophet Elijah of the Passover Seder. Given both its dramatic significance to the narrative and its idiosyncratic linguistic usage, Roth’s descriptions of Passover at the novel’s conclusion offer an interpretive key to the narrative as a whole. Dorothy Thompson renders a crucial passage by writing, “People were preparing for Easter, and in all the houses Mendel helped. He ran the plane over the wooden table-tops to rid them of the profane remains of food accumulated during the year. He placed in the white partitions of the show-windows the cylindrical packages in which the layers of Passover bread were wrapped in bright red paper” (Roth 1982b [1931], 183–184). But just as Thompson follows Roth’s strange reference to the season as “Easter” [Ostern] rather than Passover [Passah], the narrator similarly refers to “Passover 8 As Michael Hofmann writes of Kafka, “It is German that made possible his effects and set his limits.” (2008, xiv) In just this sense, Roth’s equation of modernity, as both an object of desire and a rejected ideal, with the German language is a consequence of his own peripheral status as a product, like Kafka, of the furthest margins of the German-speaking world. Though one of the most popular German-language writers of his day – a conspicuous contrast, in this respect, to Kafka – Roth could only experience German culture as an outsider, and this position provides the perspective for both his disparagement of German culture as well as his almost indiscriminately nostalgic reveries toward the vanished social orders of Eastern Europe. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 152 Marc Caplan bread” in fact as “Easter bread” [Osterbrot] (Roth 1982a, 181), overlooking a readily available, non-sectarian term for the concept, ungesäuertes Brot [unleavened bread].9 Despite the novel’s insistence on Mendel’s unmediated connection to Jewish tradition – although following his personal tragedies he abandons strict adherence to ritual, he never considers religious conversion, and in outer appearance he remains an orthodox Jew from the shtetl – in semantic terms it is unclear whether the holiday at which the novel’s denouement occurs is Easter or Passover.10 As Gershon Shaked notes, Osterbrot is Roth’s neologism (Shaked, 283), and given the uses to which the Passover story has been put in Christian symbolism, this substitution implies that matzo functions here as a communion wafer, the means by which Mendel’s “dead” son is conjured back to life.11 In socio-semiotic terms, therefore, Osterbrot doesn’t translate – in etymological terms “carry over” – the term matzo, it writes over the Jewish concept with a German coinage, so that the original term is effaced in the new linguistic context. In Shaked’s interpretation it is necessary to recognize the Jewish reference system working through Roth’s German, for example when the narrator stresses repeatedly that Mendel is “a teacher” [Lehrer] to evoke the Yiddish concept of a melamed, both an elementary instructor of Jewish texts, but also colloquially a luckless, foolish, implicitly impotent pauper. In semantic terms, Lehrer is the only available translation into standard German of the term melamed, but in a semiotic sense the two words convey opposite connotations of knowledge and prestige. Thus, Roth isn’t translating Yiddish for his German readers, but transubstantiating it to create a discourse in which neither the absent Yiddish nor the present 9 As Matthias Richter perceptively notes, by contrast, when Roth as a journalist wishes to describe Jewish customs and ritual objects – in Juden auf Wanderschaft, for example – he does so explicitly and precisely. (Richter 1995, 316) 10 Roth’s semantic superimposition of “Easter” onto “Passover” connects with a common linguistic slippage between the two holidays. By way of comparison, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem hinges the comic denouement of his story “Iber a hitl” [On Account of a Hat] on the confusion between the two holidays when translating from Yiddish to Russian and Ukrainian (Aleichem 1942, 243–254; Aleichem 1956, 3–11). Even if one entertains the likelihood, or at least the possibility, that Roth similarly intends this terminological confusion ironically, his version is nowhere near as funny as Sholem Aleichem’s! 11 Ross Benjamin’s more recent, and excellent, translation of Hiob offers a single footnote at this point in the narrative, suggesting “Perhaps to avoid terms that would be unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers of his time, Roth refers to the Jewish Passover feast, Pesach, by the name of the Christian holiday Easter […] celebrated at the same time of year and calls matzoh […] ‘Easter bread’.” (Roth 2010, 171) As one might say in an American-inflected Yiddish, such apologetics seem a bit farfetched! Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 153 German can be understood divorced from one another.12 In this way, the contradictory implications of the novel’s metaphorical language can resonate without resolution, so that more than one interpretation can be deduced from any rhetorical gesture, and no hermeneutic conclusion can take precedence over another; to borrow a (theoretically contested) term from musicology, Hiob is a polytonal narrative,13 in which the mythopoetic discourse of the novel clashes continuously with an ethnographic impulse toward verisimilitude. For want of a formula, one might suggest that Roth the novelist is constantly at odds in Hiob with Roth the journalist – though even a casual encounter with his feuilletons indicates that the same tensions persist in that body of work as well. As Shaked notes, the cosmology of timing the narrative’s climax at Passover lends the novel an unmistakably messianic gloss: “Menuchim’s appearance in the family room during the celebration of Easter [Osterfestes] is a clear allusion to the coming of the Messiah. He does this in fact at the very instant after the Jewish custom of awaiting the Prophet Elijah, the precursor and herald of the Messiah.” (Shaked 1986, 289)14 This messianic insinuation takes a particularly, though not 12 It is worth recalling in this context a contrast that Ritchie Robertson makes between Hiob and a genre of “Ghetto fiction” within nineteenth century German-Jewish belles lettres: “Jewish terms and customs [in Ghetto fiction] are presented as curious survivals from the past and reassuringly explained by a German translation in brackets, thus ‘Barmizwe’ [Einsegnung] or ‘Marshallik’ [Spaßmacher].” (1991, 188) This, it may be noted, is precisely the strategy that Roth does not pursue in presenting Eastern European Jewish culture to a German readership, instead preferring to allow the dissonance between the German signifier and the Yiddish signified to resonate within the narrative. Unlike Ghetto fiction, for Roth it is not the assimilability of the Ostjuden and their language, but their foreignness from Western norms that is essential to their appeal. His linguistic strategies likewise emphasize not the compatibility of translation (Osterbrot = matzo) but the incomprehensibility of his superimpositions; the disconnection of trying to render East European Jewish life directly into German – and, by extension, the English of New York or any other language – lies at the heart of his rhetorical strategies. 13 It is perhaps worth digressing briefly to describe in detail the source for my usage of “polytonality,” which in any event I hope to elaborate on in the context of Yiddish modernism contemporaneous to Roth’s writing: at an orchestral concert recently I was reacquainted with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka (1911). I was struck in this performance not only by the famous “Petrushka chord” at the beginning of the second part (C against F#), but primarily by the way in which different folk melodies in the last part collide with one another as part of the fairground tableau. Stravinsky, like his contemporary Béla Bartók, shares with Roth and the Yiddish modernists the legacy of an East European folk heritage in which disparate linguistic, sonic, and thematic elements co-exist without harmonization or homogenization. The ability of these artists to tap into this heritage bespeaks the anticipatory modernism of these non-modern folk cultures, as well as the recourse of the artists themselves to a discourse of myth. 14 Of course, at the same time that Menuchim’s “resurrection” at the end of the novel calls to mind his (never very sublimated) status as a putative Christ figure, his strategy of disguising Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 154 Marc Caplan exclusively, Christological turn when Menuchim/Alexej convinces Mendel to violate a religious commandment in public for the first time, by riding in an automobile on a holy day. Roth’s usage here again is noteworthy: “Der Sohn bereitete ihm das Bad, kleidete ihn an, setzte ihn in den Wagen” (Roth 1982a, 214; Roth1982b [1931], 217); not specifically Mendel’s son, but the son bids the father to abandon Jewish law for a new, apparently more benign dispensation.15 Mendel, for his part, readily acquiesces to the son’s prompting by declaring of the Lord, “He is so great that our badness seems very small.” (Roth 1982a, 209; Roth 1982b [1931], 211) Though still acknowledging that riding in a car on the first day of Passover constitutes a sin, it is now a negligible one, so that if Mendel’s worldview remains unmistakably Jewish, it is nonetheless compatible with whatever authority – whether Christian, modern, or artistic – that Menuchim/Alexej has summoned when prompting the transgression. As becomes apparent in a broader consideration of the novel’s treatment of Jewishness, this adaptability signifies both the ethical preoccupations and the potential subversiveness at the narrative’s core. Indeed, the apparently Christological motif in the novel begins in the first chapter, when Deborah beseeches a rabbi in the shtetl Kluczýsk for a blessing to heal Menuchim. In his pronouncement the rabbi performs the role of a Hasidic rebbe, but also a Christian prophet: “There will not be many like him in Israel. Pain will make him wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong. His eyes will see far and deep. His ears will be clear and full of echoes. His mouth will be silent, but when he opens his lips they will announce good tidings [Gutes künden]. Have no fear, and go home!” (Roth 1982a, 19; Roth 1982b [1931], 15)16 Both in the proclamation of Menuchim’s moral strength in physical weakness and Mendel’s subsequent, if reluctant, decision to abandon him in the shtetl, Roth creates a series of associations, from a Christian implication that Jews received the revelation of Jesus’s divinity but rejected it, to an inversion of Friedrich himself and adopting a non-Jewish name to re-enter the family dynamic as a stranger resembles the narrative of Joseph, who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, but then reveals himself to them, and later his father, as Pharaoh’s Viceroy when he delivers them from famine in Canaan at the end of the Book of Genesis (see Shaked 1986, 289). Through these references Menuchim reframes both the Judaic origins of the Passover story and its Christological conclusion or “completion.” 15 Even the seemingly naturalistic details of Menuchim/Alexej bathing, dressing, and setting his father in a car can be seen in a messianic light as the anointing and parading of the Savior through the streets of (a new) Jerusalem to usher in the millennial era. 16 The proclamation of “good tidings” [Gutes künden] in particular resonates with the language of the New Testament. For example, in Luther’s translation of Luke 1:19: “Der Engel antwortete und sprach zu ihm: Ich bin Gabriel, der vor Gott steht, und bin gesandt, mit dir zu reden, daß ich dir solches verkündigte.” Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 155 Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as the valorization of Jewish weakness over pagan strength,17 to a rebuke of the migration from the shtetl to the city and from the East to the West. Each of these implications remains implicit within the narrative as a whole, but the allegorical significance of one remains juxtaposed against the others, so that an interpretation of the novel must proceed analogically, rather than exegetically. For if Menuchim functions in the narrative as a Christ figure, he does so only in grotesque or parodic terms.18 In this respect Roth writes, “Menuchim did not die; he lived, a mighty cripple. From now on, Deborah’s womb was dry and barren. Menuchim was the last deformed fruit of her body.” (Roth 1982a, 24; Roth 1982b [1931], 20) Deborah, similarly, had functioned prior to the onset of Menuchim’s infirmity as a parodic earth mother. Thus, when nursing her youngest son in Mendel’s schoolroom, the narrator notes, “White, swollen, and colossal, her breast flowed from her open blouse and drew the glances of the boys irresistibly. All present seemed to suckle at Deborah.” (Roth 1982a, 11; Roth 1982b [1931], 7) Roth reiterates this association when, following a venerable East European Jewish tradition, Deborah goes to the cemetery to appeal for heavenly intercession on behalf of Menuchim: “She sought after the dead who might intercede for her, called upon her parents, upon Menuchim’s grandfather, after whom the child had been named, then upon the ancestors of the Jews, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, upon the bones of Moses, and finally upon the Matriarchs [die Erzmütter].”19 17 One finds a similarly paradoxical formulation of a Jewish ethical mission to the world in a 1929 feuilleton, “Betrachtung an der Klagemauer” (translated simply as “Wailing Wall”): “It takes, I thought, a truly divine love to choose this people. There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing, the hardest law and the most difficult mission: to sow love on earth, and to reap hatred.” (Roth 1996, 85–86; Roth 2003 [1986], 47) 18 This inverted, parodic reformulation of the Passion narrative – not the Spirit made flesh but rags and sawdust made spirit – is another similarity between Petrushka and the novel! The potential for parody is an implication that Matthias Richter seems to overlook in his apparently indignant reading of Menuchim’s “resurrection” at the Passover Seder: “Die ganze Szene is insgeheim christlich unterfüttert; skandalöserweise, könnte man sagen, aber für einen nichtjüdischen, christlichen Leser dadurch um so näher.” (Richter 1995, 316) 19 Dorothy Thompson’s translation in fact misreads the plural Erzmütter, matriarchs, as a singular Erzmutter, “earth mother,” or “Mother Eve” (as she puts it). Although she is to be faulted for the error in transcription, her understanding of the passage’s implications remains defensible. Ross Benjamin (Roth 2010, 18), it may be noted, nonetheless offers a more accurate translation. In keeping with the syncretic and transubstantive tendencies in Roth’s rhetoric, however, though Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 156 Marc Caplan (Roth 1982, 17; Roth 1982 b, 13) At the end of this appeal to the realm of the dead, she arrives at a pantheistic femininity. And although the cosmology of these associations suggests the chthonic potential for rebirth within death – a process interrupted by Menuchim’s illness, which deprives Deborah of her primal fecundity – such resurrection in the novel is only fulfilled in New York City, not the shtetl. Miracles in this narrative can only be foretold in the traditional and Jewish domain of Eastern Europe, but actually occur on the modern and religiously syncretic Lower East Side, which for Roth more than his invented characters functions as a realm of fantasy and illusion.20 Roth assembles a broad cluster of associations around the spatial polarities of New York and the shtetl in Hiob: New York is fantastical but modern, a city of human vitality and technological progress – the urban setting par excellence for conventional realism – yet a locale that for him could only be purely imaginary;21 Mendel’s hometown Zuchnow, by contrast, is a domain of death and suffering, where Jobian rhetoric resonates with a culture in which the Hebrew Bible remains the primary measure for understanding, interpreting, and assimilating experience. These contrasts, however, are by no means static. Rather, Roth establishes them in order to suggest a spectrum against which his characters’ trajectory acquires meaning. In this respect, it is their ability to traverse the geographical and metaphysical distance between the shtetl and Manhattan that is significant. Thus Roth writes, “One travelled to Dubno with Sameshkin’s wagon; one traveled to Moscow by railway; but in order to get to America one travelled not only with a ship but with documents. And in order to get these one had to go to Dubno.” (Roth 1982a, 77; Roth 1982b [1931], 77) The journey from shtetl to empire to world encompasses three temporalities via three conveyances, yet it constitutes itself as Deborah invokes and embodies a seemingly pagan spirit of eternal motherhood, at the same time she also inhabits the specifically Jewish archetype of the Matriarch Rachel: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children; she refuseth to be comforted for her children, because they were not.” (Jeremiah 31:14) 20 In just this respect, Bronsen quotes Dora Landau’s criticism of the novel: “I found the first part excellent, but not the second. New York seems artificial there, as if filmed in a studio. I said this to him and he answered without contradicting, ‘It may be.’ But he explained to me explicitly that he wouldn’t have been able to write the second part without drinking almost incessantly” (Bronsen 1981 [1975], 389). 21 As my friend and colleague Eléonore Veillet has suggested to me, although New York is the fictive setting of urban modernity in the novel, it also functions as a substitute setting for Roth’s polemic against the urban modernity of Berlin; in this respect it is both fantastic and realistic in equal measure. Although one might wonder whether Roth could have set a similarly fanciful narrative in Berlin, it is worth considering how seldom he set fiction of any kind in Berlin, particularly in the latter decade of his career. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 157 a continuum rather than a dislocation. More than a faith in a specific metaphysical system or religious credo, therefore, the novel commits itself to a humanistic faith in the connectivity among places, cultures, and people, in which the marginal figure of the East European shtetl Jew circulates, and is circulated, at the heart of modern civilization. In these humanistic, implicitly pantheistic terms Roth’s perspective corresponds with the daughter Mirjam’s promiscuous desire for non-Jewish soldiers, which compels Mendel and Deborah to join Schemarjah/Sam in America, even if it means abandoning Menuchim. Like Deborah, Mirjam’s attractiveness derives its force from the Slavic landscape, hence the ubiquity of her liaisons in fields or forests. Mirjam in this aspect of the narrative complements Deborah’s function as “matriarch” by serving as a parody of the Virgin Mary; according to medieval Jewish legends still circulating in the East European yeshivas of Roth’s day – and echoed, coincidentally, by Monty Python’s Life of Brian – Jesus was conceived illegitimately by Mary and a Roman soldier.22 This inversion of Mary through Mirjam both subverts the ostensibly Catholic symbolism of Roth’s narrative and also suggests that precisely this promiscuity characterizes youth, mobility, and modernity. Menuchim in his turn enacts these values as a transfigured savior when he reappears as Alexej at the novel’s end. Thus, though the novel deliberately trespasses over the boundaries of religious decorum, drawing in equal measure from Christian and Jewish motifs but also inverting their traditional values, it is only through the “playful” rhetorical strategies of irony, parody, and burlesque that the earnestness of Roth’s humanistic, inclusive, and compassionate moral vision can effectively complement the novel’s sentimentalizing rhetoric without detracting or undermining the descriptive power or aesthetic pleasures of the his writing. It is significant in this respect that Roth’s most overtly religious novel is also his most erotic: the superimposition of spiritual love with sensuous love is yet another element of the work’s pervasive syncretism. Ultimately Hiob is no more a religious or an erotic tale than it is a Jewish or Christian one; it is all of these, but also none of them, completely. The boundlessness of Mirjam’s sexual desire consequently seems motivated more by a will to escape parental constraints – an inversion of the son’s redemption of the father, but also a schematic contrast to Deborah’s sexless marriage with Mendel (Oberhänsli-Widmer 2003, 220) – than attraction to the Cossacks who receive her affections: “Mirjam hummed the text of the song, of which she only knew the first two verses: I have fallen in love with 22 For all the information one could presumably wish on these medieval parodies, see Schäfer, Meerson, and Deutsch 2011. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 158 Marc Caplan you, because of your beauty. A whole company sang that song to her! A hundred men sang to her! In an hour she would meet one of them, or maybe two. Sometimes, even, three came.” (Roth 1982a, 98; Roth 1982b [1931], 98) As with Deborah’s primordial fecundity and Menuchim/Alexej’s putative messianism, Mirjam’s promiscuity, though connected like Deborah’s fecundity to the landscape insofar as her liaisons with the soldiers always take place out of doors, is abstracted and aestheticized as part of a more pervasive parodic strategy. The soldiers appeal to her less than the song they sing in her presence, and the sex she engages with them seems correspondingly anonymous, compulsive, and joyless. It is nonetheless significant that at least in Mendel’s opinion Mirjam’s subsequent insanity is not apparently a consequence of her overindulgence in the shtetl, but occurs in the context of her sudden, ostensible abstinence in America. As he states, “She could not live without men. She has gone mad.” (Roth 1982a, 156; Roth 1982b [1931], 158) What had been an organic feature of her life in Eastern Europe, a habit that connected her intrinsically to the landscape there, becomes pathological in New York, an inversion of the fantastic fate of Menuchim/Alexej’s half-Jewish, half-Russian destiny as his family’s sacrificial lamb and eventual deliverer. The status of language is implicitly connected to the discourse characterizing Mirjam,23 in that the doctor whose German is supposedly interchangeable with Mendel’s Yiddish – a linguistic promiscuity devoid of the erotic danger conveyed by Mirjam’s intimacy with the Other, yet ultimately an additional parallel to the cultural and sexual intermingling on which the novel is predicated – diagnoses her condition, drawing upon an explicitly German, if Latinderived, vocabulary of morbid sexuality: “Your daughter is very ill. There are lots of such cases now; the war…and the misery in the world – it’s a bad time. Medicine doesn’t yet know how to heal this illness […] We physicians call it ‘degenerative psychosis’ […] But it can also appear as an illness which we 23 Indeed, the connection between language and madness becomes explicit when Mirjam tells Mendel, at the onset of her delirium, “Mit Mister Glück habe ich geschlafen, ha, mit Mister Glück! Glück ist mein Glück, Mac ist mein Mac. Mendel Singer gefällt mir auch und wenn du willst – Da hielt die Krankenschwester Mirjam die Hand vor den Mund, und Mirjam verstummte.” (Roth 1982a, 156; Roth 1982b [1931], 158) The wordplay between the name Glück and the concept Glück [“happiness” in both Yiddish and German] reduces the signifier and the signified to an empty repetition of sound. This wordplay offers the only evidence that Mirjam articulates her breakdown in Yiddish rather than English. It is all the more meaningful that at the moment when Mirjam appears to be on the verge of stating an incestuous desire toward her father – in their familial language – the nurse covers her mouth and Mirjam falls silent. In equal measure the connection between Yiddish as the intimate language of the Jewish family, the association of Yiddish with a “mad” or disordered German, and its repression as a language of obscenity are indicative of the status of Yiddish for the novel as a whole. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 159 physicians call dementia praecox – but even the name is uncertain.” (Roth 1982a, 159; Roth 1982b [1931], 161) That the name for Mirjam’s condition should be uncertain comes as little surprise, since almost every name in the novel is uncertain; Schemarjah is Sam, Menuchim is Alexej, and Mendel is Job! The pervasive ambiguity of language signifies the precariousness of the family’s experience, as much as Roth’s own circumstance. Mirjam’s downfall occurs, then, not as a result of her uncontrollable erotic nature, but because of modernity’s demand that she repress what had been unconscious, almost animal-like, in the “primal” shtetl. For Roth, the ultimate continuity between Deborah’s mythologized fertility and Mirjam’s pervasive sexuality illustrates, like the ambivalently fraternal embraces of Mendel and the peasant Sameshkin (Roth 1982a, 93; Roth 1982b [1931], 92–93), the embeddedness of Jews in Eastern Europe.24 Both peasants and Jews serve a broader contrast in the novel against the hyper-civilized alienation and sequestration of Western modernity, which Roth, in equal measure, cultivated, embodied, and despised. And yet, thanks to the circulation of the Singer family, the presence of East European Jews – particularly the Russian-Jewish fusion that Menuchim/Alexej signifies at the novel’s end – might serve to redeem not just the old order of Jewish tradition, but the new regime of urban modernity as well. The rhetorical means for this renewal, connected to the discourse of circulation that binds the shtetl to the metropolis, is a superimposition of Kluczýsk onto the Lower East Side: “But this America was no new world. There were more Jews here than in Kluczýsk, it was really a larger Kluczýsk […] The windows opened into a dark court in which cats, rats, and children romped and scuffled […].” (Roth 1982a, 126; Roth 1982b [1931], 126) In this strategy, Roth follows the lead of American Yiddish writers when describing Jews in New York. Unlike these Yiddish authors, however, both the Russian shtetl and Manhattan for him are not represented spaces, but imagined ones. 24 One might compare the complementary relationship between Deborah and Mirjam with the schematic feminine symbolism in the poetry of Roth’s Yiddish-language contemporary Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937). In the latter’s idyll Raysn (“Belorussia,” 1922; like Hiob, written in Berlin) the only two female figures are the poet’s grandmother, who gives birth to 18 sons, and a non-Jewish woman, Nastasia, whose erotic appeal is intertwined with the grandmother’s death. For Kulbak, apparently, Nastasia’s sexuality signifies the danger of the Other, a threat to Jewish continuity. For Roth, by contrast, these feminine archetypes – which, as Helen Chambers demonstrates, are essentially the only varieties of female characters to be found in Roth’s fiction – the complementarity of these characters reiterates the ultimate compatibility of Jews with their (lost) East European home (Chambers 1991, 107–127). Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 160 Marc Caplan The pertinence of this distinction becomes clear, perhaps, when one considers the poetics of Roth’s depictions. When describing the Singer family’s arrival in New York harbor, for example, Roth writes, “‘Now,’ said a Jew who had made the trip twice to Mendel Singer, ‘we shall see the Statue of Liberty…. In her right hand she holds a torch. And the best of all is that this torch burns in the night, and yet is never burnt up. Because it’s only electric light. That’s the kind of trick they can do in America!’” (Roth 1982a, 114; Roth 1982b [1931], 114) Roth improves upon Kafka’s now famous image of the Statue of Liberty bearing a sword by refiguring it as a Burning Bush; just as Kafka re-imagines an icon as a myth, Roth makes of the same image a Biblical allusion. Its luminescence becomes a consequence of cosmology and technology at the same time, and the superimposition of one onto the other signifies Roth’s modernism. Moreover, the tale of the Statue’s glory is already legendary because it is conveyed to Mendel by a fellow-traveler who has made the ocean crossing two times: the Statue of Liberty, and by extension perhaps all of America, functions for Roth literally as a “twice-told tale.”25 With similar simultaneity, the “men in uniform” patrolling Ellis Island “looked somewhat like gendarmes and somewhat like angels. Those must be the American Cossacks, thought Mendel […].” (Roth 1982a, 114; Roth 1982b [1931], 115) The juxtapositions of angel and Cossack, American and Russian, in fact prefigure exactly the contradictory reconfiguration of Menuchim/Alexej as Jewish and Russian, artist figure and Christ figure, just as they suggest that the metropolis at which they stand guard functions not as a historical space but a hybrid combination of proliferating temporalities – the shtetl past and the American future – that draw their mythical strength from their status as extra-European, non-contemporaneous territories. To precisely the same purpose Schemarjah/Sam himself appears in Roth’s description as equal parts Jewish and American: “They saw Schemarjah and Sam at the same time; as though Sam were superimposed on Schemarjah, a transparent Sam.” (Roth 1982a, 115; Roth 1982b [1931], 115) Given his status as a sacrificial victim, itself an essential component of mythical thought 25 Even before arriving in the New World, Mendel and Deborah’s first encounter with America, courtesy of the American Mac’s delivery of a letter to them from Schemarjah/Sam, becomes an exercise in miscomprehension and untranslatability, but also a mythical substitution achieved through Biblical allusion: “The audience strained themselves to listen to Mac’s account, hoping that they would catch a single, tiny intelligible syllable out of the storm of words and their hearts leaped at the word Ararat which sounded strangely familiar to them although he had changed it dismayingly and rolled it out with a dangerous and terrible rumble.” (Roth 1982a, 65; Roth 1982b [1931], 64) If Eastern Europe for Mac has acquired significance because of its proximity to the landing point of Noah’s ark, America for the Singers is figured in this disjointed exchange as the site of the next dramatic event in the Book of Genesis: the tower of Babel. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 161 and representation, Schemarjah/Sam’s over-enthusiastic identification with American nationalism, which leads to his death in World War I, identifies him in Jewish mystical terms as the precursor Messiah, or the Messiah of the House of Joseph, to Menuchim/Alexej’s Messiah of the House of David.26 As a patriarchal figure, not only with respect to his paternal role in the Singer family but also as an embodiment of the Hebrew Bible’s religiosity, Mendel pronounces judgment on his son’s seduction by a rival father figure: “America is a real fatherland, indeed, but a death-dealing fatherland. What was life, with us, is death here. The son, who at home was called Schemarjah, here was called Sam. You are buried in America. Deborah, and I, too, will be buried in America.” (Roth 1982a, 154; Roth 1982b [1931], 156–57)27 Roth’s anti-Americanism here seems predicated not just on Mendel’s sense of estrangement and homesickness for Russia, but also on Schemarjah/Sam’s dangerous sense of identification with the new fatherland; Schemarjah/Sam’s love for America kills him – even though technically he has died in Europe, fighting a European war. Roth resists American nationalism not because it is American but because it is nationalistic, and the identification of Jews with a specific territory – distinct, however obscurely, from their identification with the Slavic landscape in the sense that nature is distinct from nationhood – whether in Germany, America, or especially Palestine, poses the greatest threat to what Roth identifies as Jewish values and the Jewish contribution to humanity.28 26 For more on the relationship between these two messianic figures see, of course, Scholem 1971, 1–36. To reiterate the connection between Roth and Moyshe Kulbak – a connection I hope to elaborate upon in a forthcoming book project – the theme of a parodic sacrificial messiah motivates the latter’s first prose narrative, “Meshiekh ben-Efrayim” [Messiah of the House of Joseph, 1924]. 27 As Sidney Rosenfeld, the pioneering figure of Roth criticism in English, suggests, Schemarjah/ Sam’s sacrificial destiny echoes a comment of the American parvenu (and parodic messiah) Henry Bloomfield in Roth’s early novel Hotel Savoy: “I am an Eastern Jew and, to us, home is above all where our dead lie. Had my father died in America, I could be perfectly at home in America. My son will be a full-blooded American, because I shall be buried there.” (Roth 2011, 135, Roth 2003 [1986], 107) Schemarjah/Sam’s death in a European war offers at once a refutation and affirmation of Bloomfield’s definition of an American-Jewish Heimat; America according to the metaphorical logic of the novel isn’t Mendel’s burial place, it’s Schemarjah/Sam’s. America’s attractiveness to the Ostjude, its promise of providing at last an enduring home, signifies its danger as a place for which these Jews are willing to die. In this sense America is both a space of fantastic vitality and ultimate doom (Rosenfeld 1973, 228). 28 Roth’s anti-Zionism, in particular, was a consistent and pronounced strain within his otherwise contradictory ideological affiliations – even at a point toward the end of his life when those other commitments had failed to offer a solution or salvation to the Jews of Europe. To cite just one example of this ideology, in which he equates, with a degree of historical justification, his own Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 162 Marc Caplan Indeed, as an ostensible embodiment of religious orthodoxy – an orthodoxy he will have to abandon if his son is to redeem him – Mendel rejects the identification with America and accordingly Roth depicts him as responding to the superimposition of Kluczýsk with New York, and the intermingling it underscores, with a complementary, reactive image of urban inferno: “All the smells united in a hot vapor, together with the noise which filled his ears and threatened to split his skull. Soon he no longer knew whether he was hearing, seeing, smelling. He went on smiling and nodding. America pressed down on him; America broke him; America shattered him. After a few minutes he became unconscious.” (Roth 1982a, 118; Roth 1982b [1931], 118–119) In keeping with the cosmological subtext of Roth’s modernism, however, this apocalyptic depiction presages Mendel’s symbolic death and resurrection as a cultural hybrid, thus suggesting an additional parody within Roth’s syncretic frame of reference.29 If Menuchim/Alexej is Jesus, then Mendel is not only the “Old Testament” paternal God, but also Lazarus. In terms of narrative structure, Mendel’s apocalyptic arrival in America ends the first half of the novel, with the second half devoted to his despairing acclimation to and eventual, sudden redemption in America. Fittingly, this division corresponds to the mythic rhythms of the novel, not the chronological pacing of the events it narrates. Rather, the passage of historical time is signified only in the second half, when a gap of several years appears to occur between Chapters X and XI, which advances the story to the eve of World War I, the only historical event that explicitly informs Roth’s evocation of the lost shtetl culture.30 The anti-Zionism with traditional religiosity, in Juden auf Wanderschaft he writes, “An orthodox hasid from the East will prefer a Christian to a Zionist. For the latter would change Judaism root and branch. His Jewish nation would be along the lines of a European state. The outcome might be a sovereign nation, but it wouldn’t have any Jews in it.” (Roth 1985, 25) Translated, impeccably, by Michael Hofmann as The Wandering Jews (Roth 2001, 31). In this passage, he suggests by a rhetorical bait-and-switch that his own attraction to Christianity remains compatible with Hasidic piety, or at least more so than Zionist nationalism! 29 This apocalyptic account of Mendel’s arrival in New York City moreover complements and contrasts with Menuchim/Alexej’s narration of the event that enables his discovery of speech: “Then one day I saw a great red and blue fire. I lay down on the floor. I crept to the door. Suddenly someone seemed to lift me up and push me. I was outside. People were standing on the other side of the street. ‘Fire!’ I cried.” (Roth 1982a, 212; Roth 1982b [1931], 215) The catastrophe that awakens his consciousness provides rectification for the catastrophe that had transplanted Mendel from the “timeless” shtetl to the historical city. In a sense, the same catastrophe and the same trauma affects them both, but in keeping with the Hasidic rabbi’s messianic prophecy regarding Menuchim, it is out of the apocalypse that he, and in turn Mendel, will be reborn. 30 As Delphine Bechtel writes, “With his great novel Job…Roth takes another step. He leaves definitively the observation of reality in order to embark on an atemporal tale anchored in the world of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe.” (Bechtel 2002, 193; the translation from the Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 163 intervening years are evoked impressionistically via the disconnection of Mendel’s thoughts from the topics of conversation among his children: “He dreamt of events at home, and things which he had only heard about in America: theatres, acrobats and dancers in red and gold, the President of the United States, the White House, the millionaire Vanderbilt, and ever and ever again – Menuchim.” (Roth 1982a, 138; Roth 1982b [1931], 139) Again, Roth superimposes Mendel’s imagined Yiddish with English, the language of American modernity and “the most beautiful language in world” (Roth 1982a, 138; Roth 1982b [1931], 139) for his children; in this contrast Roth illustrates the rupture not only between the father and his children, but also the protagonist from the space and time in which he finds himself. Though an immigrant, Mendel is depicted as an exile, and the redemption that Roth provides for him serves not to assimilate him to his new environment or its temporality, but to valorize his homelessness through a discourse of myth. An effective contrast to Roth’s use of history might be drawn with Walter Benjamin’s characterization, in his essay on the Storyteller, of time and its function in what he characterizes, against the modern novel, as the literary tale: “Never has a storyteller embedded his report deeper in natural history than [Johann Peter] Hebel manages to do in [his] chronology.” (Benjamin 1968, 95) Indeed, the historical events in Hiob do not embed Mendel’s experience in a natural history, they emphasize the absence of an organic connection between Mendel and the city; instead, his heart remains, inexplicably, in the shtetl, as Roth states, “And, nevertheless, mixed with his admiration for the future was a nostalgia for Russia, and it calmed and comforted him to think that, before the living had their triumph, he would be dead.” (Roth 1982a, 139; Roth 1982b [1931], 140) By 1930, Roth understood already that the twentieth century would destroy the utopian hopes that Mendel’s children, among others, had invested in this “triumph of the living.” Thus, the juxtaposition of an unwarranted optimism about the future with Mendel’s unmerited nostalgia – all nostalgias are unmerited, hence the discourse of sickness, -algia, applied to them31 – toward the Russian-Jewish past suggests a critique of both positions. Both Mendel and his children are unable to live in the present. They inhabit a contiguous space, but French, such as it is, is my own) One can only add to Bechtel’s briskly accurate characterization that “atemporality” fairly renders the first half of the novel. Once the Singers arrive in New York, however, they enter into a verifiable and urgently historical temporality. This arrival into history, in turn, becomes the source of nostalgia – hence the “resurrection” of Menuchim/Alexej, which simultaneously places Mendel in a past reborn as well as a new, millennial future. 31 For more on the (pseudo-)medical discourse surrounding nostalgia, see Boym (2001, 3–18). Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 164 Marc Caplan not a compatible temporality, and Roth’s modernist critique fills the void of an absent contemporaneity in the novel. By the novel’s end, nonetheless, Mendel reaches a sort of temporal impasse; he is physically in New York but mentally and spiritually back in the shtetl, an inversion of the traumatic superimpositions of one space on the other that he had endured when he arrived in America. As Roth writes: Before him lay the vast ocean. Once again he must cross it. The whole great sea waited for Mendel. All of Zuchnow and its surroundings waited for him: the barracks, the fir forest, the frogs in the swamp, and the crickets in the fields. If Menuchim were dead, he lay in the little cemetery and waited. And Mendel would lay himself down there, too. Before that he would enter Sameshkin’s yard, he would no longer be afraid of the dogs – give him a wolf from Zuchnow, and he would not fear. Careless of beetles and snakes, of toads and grasshoppers, he would be prepared to lie upon the naked earth. The church bells would sound for him, and remind him of the listening light in Menuchim’s foolish eyes (Roth 1982a, 187; Roth 1982b [1931], 189–190). Once again Roth illustrates the temporal contradictions of his narrative through Biblical allusion and myth. Mendel’s ocean crossing implicitly invokes the parting of the Red Sea, a reference that becomes plausible in the context of American immigrant literature, particularly among Jews, which habitually figured the United States as “the Promised Land,” and the arrival at Ellis Island similarly as the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea.32 At this point in the novel, the Promised Land for Mendel is not America, but Death – as both John Donne and Ernest Hemingway might suggest, the church bells sounding in his memory toll for him. And yet it is this chapter that reveals that Menuchim/Alexej has neither died nor waited for Mendel, but has changed himself from Jew to Cossack,33 paving the way via this transubstantiation for Mendel’s resurrection. 32 To offer two prominent, completely opposite, takes on this rhetoric, consider Mary Antin’s classic autobiography The Promised Land as a valorization of this discourse (Antin 1912). By way of satirical response, see Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse dem khazns [Motl, the Cantor Peyse’s Son], particularly Part II (1916), chapter 2, “Kries yam-suf” [The Parting of the Red Sea]. The linguistic contrast between a celebratory account of the Americanization process in English and a skeptical, parodic depiction in Yiddish is neither deterministic nor accidental. 33 In this sense Menuchim’s lost older brother Jonas foreshadows the younger son’s eventual triumph when he transforms himself from a Jew to a Cossack. Roth signals Mendel’s ambivalence toward this achievement when he writes, “For a long time now Mendel had heard nothing from his Cossack [Jonas], as he called him in secret – not without contempt, nor yet without pride.” (Roth 1982a, 103; Roth 1982b [1931], 103) Jonas is subsequently lost to the narrative because he has made his identification with the Russian State, just as Schemarjah/Sam’s fate is sealed when he identifies with America; both become in Mendel’s eyes, and Roth’s narration, anticipatory, failed Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 165 Despite the proliferation of metaphysical references throughout the novel, its implications are both earthy and worldly; the new life that Menuchim/Alexej grants his father brings not the death for which Mendel had longed, but a way of living in the world, uniting his presence in America with the life he had left behind, and connecting Mendel’s Jewishness with all that had been defined against it previously. For all the contradictions that Roth had cultivated in his own life, it is this sense of resolution – a harmonization that can only occur fictively – that eluded him. This too can be recognized as an implicit object of critique in the novel: despite the faintly patronizing tone of sympathy that the narrator lavishes on Mendel, the novel’s protagonist is far more Diasporic, mobile, and adaptive than Roth himself, who was unable to make the transatlantic voyage even at a point when it might have prolonged his life. In fact, this irony occurs not at Roth’s expense, but at the heart of the novel’s moral purpose, which is to illustrate that the Ostjude can be seen as a vanguard, simultaneously, of Christianity and modernity, each of which had presumed to have superseded the ostensibly primitive and parochial world of the shtetl. This in turn bespeaks the transitional position of the novel in Roth’s career, from the radical, cosmopolitan journalism of the 1920s to his later novels’ paradoxically conservative, nostalgic apologetics for the Habsburg monarchy. In this ultimate, characteristic paradox, Mendel Singer becomes the true pioneer who abandons the shtetl for American urban modernity, while “the Red Roth” remains the genuine traditionalist by virtue of his persistence in Europe among the ruins and memories of the vanished order. Nonetheless, as Bernd Hüppauf states, Roth’s “traditionalism” cannot and should not be viewed as a facile affiliation with reactionary politics, but must instead be viewed through the same lens of paradox as his fiction: “It is crucial to understand Roth’s change at the end of his leftist commitments not as leading to a new conservatism; his new position results rather in the attempt, beyond the truth claims of historical theories and political systems, to find a way back to the concrete and the particular. The root of his skepticism lies in early-bourgeois French humanism, at the center of which stand freedom and the self-determination of the individual.” (1985, 315)34 To Hüppauf’s reading of the novel as a figures for Menuchim’s apotheosis. What is perhaps at issue in the distinction among these brothers is the semantic difference between transformation, which suggests a fixed teleological destination, and transubstantiation, which enables Menuchim/Alexej both to become something new and remain as he had been. 34 Translations from the German are my own. By a “new conservatism,” Hüppauf refers to a trend during the years 1928–1930 when, according to Max Horkheimer and other commentators, German literature “rediscovered” values of Nation, Nature, and Belief following the post-War crisis. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 166 Marc Caplan skeptic’s return to myth, one might add that Hiob offers a mock-epic account of Mendel Singer’s departure from the “mythical” world of the shtetl into the modern, enlightened world of New York. In this sense the novel is a mock-epic not only because of Roth’s critical, modernist perspective on modernity itself, but also because the character of Mendel Singer, like other modernist mock-epic protagonists, is avowedly unheroic. Myth thus constitutes itself in the novel not through a validation of the old shtetl, but through the mock-Christian redemption of the father through the son. Perhaps, then, Roth’s nostalgia for the “old” Austria can be seen in a similarly oppositional manner, since paradox is ultimately the only lens through which such an ideological commitment might be said to make sense. Both Eastern Europe as a territory and the Austrian monarchy as an institution gain value for Roth – who had abandoned both in the assertion of his adulthood – only as relics, vestiges of an untenable and spectral world: the romanticization of either can be mobilized only via their status as superseded structures. The successive ambiguities created by the juxtaposition of these two defunct objects of desire can be understood through an appeal to political geography. Though Roth himself grew up in Brody, a town literally within kilometers of the Russian empire, he adapts for his own purposes an inherited distinction between the Russian Jews of the novel and his own affiliation with the Austrian empire. The passage in his fiction from Hiob to Radetzkymarch is therefore not only sequential but also complementary, insofar as Mendel Singer in the first novel could never conceive of an attachment to the “fatherland” as the panorama of characters in the latter do for the Habsburg monarchy. Indeed, many of the most prominent Austrian Jews of the late Habsburg era see their Austrian nationalism as incompatible with Jewishness – one thinks most pathologically of Otto Weininger, but also of Karl Kraus or Gustav Mahler, and ultimately of Theodor Herzl in either phase of his career as journalist and ideologue – and Roth’s gravitation to Austrian nationalism makes identification with Jewishness impossible.35 35 As Robert Wistrich schematizes the incompatibility of Jewishness, or any form of Otherness, with an Austrian identity: “[Adolf] Fischof put his finger on the central contradiction of the 1867 Constitution – that Austria-Hungary was a multinational State [Nationalitätenstaat] masquerading under liberal German hegemony as a national-state on the West European model.” (2006 [1989], 151) Roth’s nationalism in the 1930s manifests itself as an effort to accommodate a contradiction in Austrian politics that Fischof had already recognized in 1869. If such a contradiction had mandated that Austrian Jews during the late nineteenth century choose between a Jewish identity and an Austrian one, how much more hopeless would this choice be 70 years later, when either one of these affiliations would gain access, at best, to a phantom political culture? Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 167 It may be noted, however, that impossibility is an ideal ideological position for Roth, whose work is best summarized as a “co-existent contradiction,” as the title of a major retrospective of his career puts it, and so both Jewishness and Austrian nostalgia only become productive resources for his writing when they cease to exist as viable points of identification. He is attracted to both precisely because he sees them each as defunct relics of a more humane and accommodating world than the one to which he was consigned. In spite of the distance Roth establishes between Russia and his native Galicia or New York and the metropolises where he lived, he nevertheless identifies with Mendel Singer, even as Mendel represents for him a diametric inversion of every linguistic, political, territorial, and religious identification Roth himself had ever made. This identification only intensifies as Roth begins to resemble his prematurely aged and permanently homeless character at the end of their respective journeys; as David Bronsen writes, “There would be for him [Roth] no home, just as had been the case for Mendel Singer, the hero of his Job-novel.” (Bronsen 1981 [1975], 589) Like his character, Roth at the end of his career stood at the shore of an unbridgeable ocean, and the fact that this ocean was not physical or territorial but temporal made it all the more impassable for him. Yet this impasse was the location from which all his writing emerged. Thus, if philosophy for Novalis was really homesickness, “the urge to be at home everywhere,”36 the same might be said of literature for Roth. By way of a conclusion both premature for the complexity of Roth’s predicament, yet belated with respect to this discussion of it, one might consider the motif of transubstantiation in Hiob, and its impact on the depiction of language, culture, and time in the novel, as functioning ironically within the text. The reader in turn can extrapolate from the novel’s textual ironies a subsequently productive paradox for Roth’s career as a whole. “Inside” the novel, the force of the narrative tends not toward Christian supersession of Jewishness, but secularization; art is Menuchim’s new religion, not Christianity, and the art of fiction in turn provides the means for Roth to transubstantiate his perceptions into myth. In the broader context of Roth’s public writings, Jews have no need to “universalize” their 36 Novalis’s statement is found in Lukács (1971 [1920], 29). It may be noted that Lukács, like Roth, was a German-speaking Jew from the Austro-Hungarian empire, though significantly one who identified with the Hungarian cause that was anathema to Roth, and whose subsequent ideological career was a diametrically inverted complement to Roth’s own. It is nonetheless significant that Lukács apparently thought highly of Roth’s Radetzkymarsch! For Roth’s own take on the homelessness essential to Novalis, and Lukács’s, imagination, consider a comment in the 1920 feuilleton “Bei den Heimatlosen”: “All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love” (Roth 1996, 105; Roth 2003 [1986], 65). Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 168 Marc Caplan civilization via Christianity because for Roth Jews are already the most universal people prior to their contact with Christianity. Rather than using the Biblical text of Job to prefigure Jesus’s redemptive vision, as Christian exegetes had read the Hebrew Bible since the founding of the Church, Roth suggests via his juxtapositions that Christianity can be used as a key to uncovering the Jewishness of Biblical parable, and in this way Judaism can be considered the universal “church,” not because of its religious strictures, but because of its adherents’ status as wanderers and seekers.37 In such a religion Mendel Singer would indeed count, like Job, as a man “perfect and upright” [ish tam v’yosher], and Roth himself might serve as his High Priest.38 In Hiob, the true Christianity is thus to be found in and among Jews, a temporal impossibility as much as a theological one, but fully in keeping with a cosmopolitan anarchist’s longing for home in the romance of a vanished empire. Bibliography Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1912. Bechtel, Delphine. La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale 1897–1930: langue, littérature et construction nationale. Paris: Belin, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translation: Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Boym, Svetlana. “From Cured Soldiers to Incurable Romantics: Nostalgia and Progress,” The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001: 3–18. Bronsen, David. Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie. München: dtv, 1981 [1975]. 37 As Roth states in Betrachtung an der Klagemauer (Joseph Roth in Berlin, 86–87; What I Saw, 48): “It’s not that they fall away from the faith of their fathers – their faith falls away from them. Or it becomes sublimated in their descendents. It determines the way they think, act, and behave…. A Jew fulfills his ‘religious duties,’ even if he doesn’t fulfill them. Merely by being, he is religious. He is a Jew. Any other people would be required to affirm their ‘faith’ or their ‘nationality.’ The Jew’s affirmation is involuntary, automatic. He is marked, to the tenth generation. Wherever a Jew stops, a Wailing Wall goes up. Wherever a Jew settles down, a pogrom goes up…” (emphasis in original). 38 Earlier in his career Roth seemed to have found a model for this ideal in Walter Rathenau, at least after Rathenau’s martyrdom. As Roth writes in Besuch im Rathenau-Museum (1924), “His life is characterized by its attempt to bring together antiquity, Judaism, and early Christianity…. By day he [Rathenau] read and studied the New Testament. It lay beside his bed to fill him with its love. He was a Christian; you won’t find a better one” (Joseph Roth in Berlin, 222–23; What I Saw, 186). As with Roth himself, Rathenau’s attachment to Christianity only serves to call further attention to his Jewishness. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM Osterbrot or Matzo? 169 Chambers, Helen. “Predators or Victims? – Women in Joseph Roth’s Works.” Co-Existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Ed. Helen Chambers. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991. 107–127. Hüppauf, Bernd. “Joseph Roth: Hiob: Der Mythos des Skeptikers.” Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert. Eds. Gunter E. Grimm and HansPeter Bayerdörfer. Königstein/Ts: Athenäum, 1985. Hofmann, Michael. Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Kulbak, Moyshe. Raysn, Naye lider. Warsaw: Kulturlige, 1922. 27–47. Kulbak, Moyshe. Meshiekh ben-Efrayim un Montog. Buenos Aires: Dovid Lerman, 1950. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translation: Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971 [1920]. Lunzer, Heinz. Joseph Roth: Im Exil in Paris 1933 bis 1939. Vienna: Zirkular, 2008. Oberhänsli-Widmer, Gabrielle. Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne: Die Wirkungsgeschichte Hiobs in der jüdischen Literatur. Neukrichen-Vlyuyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2003. 205–226. Richter, Matthias. “Überspielte Distanz. Joseph Roth: Hiob (1930).” Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren in der deutschen Literatur (1750–1933). Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995. 317–319. Robertson, Ritchie. “Roth’s Hiob and the Traditions of Ghetto Fiction.” Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Ed. Helen Chambers. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991. Rosenfeld, Sidney. “The Chain of Generations: A Jewish Theme in Joseph Roth’s Novels.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 18:1 (1973): 227–231. Roth, Joseph. Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982a. Roth, Joseph. Job: The Story of a Simple Man. Translation: Dorothy Thompson. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1982b [1931] [1931]. Roth, Joseph. Juden auf Wanderschaft. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985. Roth, Joseph, “Betrachtung an der Klagemauer.” Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger. Ed. Michael Bienert. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996. 86–87. Roth, Joseph, “Bei den Heimatlosen.” Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger. Ed. Michael Bienert. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996. 105. Roth, Joseph. The Wandering Jews. Translation: Michael Hofmann. New York: Norton, 2001. Roth, Joseph. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933. Translation: Michael Hofmann. New York: Norton, 2003. Roth, Joseph. “Hotel Savoy.”Joseph Roth: Romane und Erzählungen. Frankfurt/M: Dörfler, 2011. Roth, Joseph. “Hotel Savoy.” Translation: John Hoare. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2003 [1986]. Roth, Joseph. Job: The Story of a Simple Man. Translation: Ross Benjamin. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2010. Schäfer, Peter, Meerson, Michael and Deutsch, Yaakov. Toledot Yeshu Revisited [The Life Story of Jesus Revisited].Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Scholem, Gershom. “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 1–36. Shaked, Gershon. “Wie jüdisch ist ein jüdisch-deutscher Roman? Über Joseph Roths Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes.” Juden in der deutschen Literatur: Ein deutsch-israelisches Symposium. Eds. Stéphane Mosès and Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986. 281–292. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM 170 Marc Caplan Sholem Aleichem. Motl Peyse dem khazns [Motl, the Cantor Peyse’s Son]. New York: Sholem Aleichem Folksfond, 1920. Sholem Aleichem. Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem. Vol. 5A, Fun Peysekh biz peysekh. New York: Forverts Oysgabe, 1942. Sholem Aleichem. Selected Stories of Sholem Aleichem. Translation: Isaac Rosenfeld. Ed. Alfred Kazin. New York: Random House, 1956. Sternburg, Wilhelm von. Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010. Wistrich, Robert. The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006 [1989]. Authenticated | a.marc.caplan@gmail.com author's copy Download Date | 8/7/15 2:42 PM