)HPLQLQLW\DQG$VVLPLODWRU\'HVLUHLQ-RVHSK5RWK .DWMD*DUORII 0)60RGHUQ)LFWLRQ6WXGLHV9ROXPH1XPEHU6XPPHUSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV '2, KWWSVGRLRUJPIV )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by Reed College (15 Oct 2016 00:19 GMT) 354 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth f FEMININITY AND ASSIMILATORY DESIRE IN JOSEPH ROTH Katja Garloff Joseph Roth wrote his most interesting reflections on Jewish assimilation at a turning point in his life and career. Living in the economic and political turmoil of the Berlin of the late 1920s, Roth turned away from left-wing political engagement to a more conservative stance and nostalgia for the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Around the same time, the Galician-born author described with new interest and intensity the Eastern European Jewish world from which he himself came, although he never made his geographical origins a central moment of his own identity. In works such as Hiob (1930) and Der Leviathan (1940), Roth uses the journey of Jews from Eastern to Western Europe and to America as a figure of Jewish assimilation, understood mostly negatively as a process of disintegration and corruption. This reversal of the traditional valences of East and West is part and parcel of a broader trend in German Jewish modernism. Whereas the East was seen as the backward and primitive other of the enlightened and emancipated West through most of the nineteenth century, the fin de siècle rediscovered Eastern culture as an alternative to a modern civilization perceived as overly rationalist, mechanistic, and materialistic. By the same token, Eastern European Jews were no longer perceived as an embarrassing reminder of Judaism's difference from modern Western culture, but as the embodiment of an authenticity purportedly lost in the process of emancipation and acculturation. What Roth adds to this familiar narrative is the notion of a peculiar Jewish Wandertrieb, an apparently inexplicable drive toward the West. MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 51 number 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. Garloff 355 In his lengthy 1925 essay Juden auf Wanderschaft, Roth describes the affect involved in Jewish migration as follows: Viele wandern aus Trieb und ohne recht zu wissen, warum. Sie folgen einem unbestimmten Ruf der Fremde oder dem bestimmten eines arrivierten Verwandten, der Lust, die Welt zu sehen und der angeblichen Enge der Heimat zu entfliehen, dem Willen, zu wirken und ihre Kräfte gelten zu lassen. (Werke 2: 831; emphasis added) Many are wanderers by instinct, not really knowing why. They follow a vague call from elsewhere or a specific one from some relocated relative, the desire to see something of the world and escape the supposed constraints of home, the will to work and make something of themselves. (Wandering Jews 10–11; emphasis added) In this essay I ask what it means to ascribe a drive dimension to a social process such as assimilation. My focus will be on a motif in Roth's writing that captures this drivenness in the most succinct way: the sensual attraction to the non-Jewish world, especially on the part of Jewish women. In Hiob, the excessive desire of the protagonist's daughter for Gentile men is presented as the main motor behind a process of assimilation that results in social and moral malaise. And in Juden auf Wanderschaft Roth writes with obvious sarcasm: Ich habe ein jiddisches Theater in Paris besucht. . . . Die jungen jüdischen Frauen sprachen nur Französisch. Sie waren pariserisch elegant. Sie waren schön. Sie sahen aus wie Frauen aus Marseille. Sie sind pariserisch begabt. Sie sind kokett und kühl. Sie sind leicht und sachlich. Sie sind treu wie die Pariserinnen. Die Assimilation eines Volkes beginnt immer bei den Frauen. (Werke 2: 874) In Paris I visited the Yiddish Theater . . . The young Jewish women spoke only French. They were as elegant as Parisiennes. They were beautiful. One might have taken them for women from Marseilles. They have Parisian gifts. They are cool and flirtatious. They are gay and matter-offact. They are as faithful as Parisian women. The assimilation of a people always begins with the women. (Wandering Jews 84–85) To associate assimilation—that is, the adoption of the language, appearance, and customs of the non-Jewish surrounding—with femi- 356 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth ninity had long been a tendency in German Jewish literature and culture. During Romanticism a number of well-known Jewish salonnières came to emblematize the openness of Jewish women to secular Western culture at a time when their place in Jewish religion and culture was less clearly defined than that of male Jews.1 Nineteenth-century texts such as Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacharach (1840) perpetuated and eroticized this image of Jewish women as agents of assimilation. Set just before 1492, the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain after centuries of relative religious tolerance, this fragment of a novel invites the reader to reflect upon the fragility of Jewish emancipation.2 It relates the escape of the Rabbi of Bacharach and his wife from a pogrom after being framed for blood libel. As the couple enters the city of Frankfurt, the Rabbi's wife indulges with obvious pleasure in the sights of colorful store displays, a procession of whores, and a Catholic ritual. The Rabbi, who is aware of the connection between these spectacles and the violence the couple just suffered, repeatedly admonishes his wife to close her eyes. Yet Heine ultimately leaves open the question of which is the more appropriate reaction to the temptations of their surrounding, Sarah's pleasure or her husband's indictment of it. Sarah's attraction to Christian cultural and religious spectacles seems to be a legitimate source of pleasure as long as it is attended by an awareness of the political vulnerability of the Jewish minority. In contrast to Heine's provocatively undecided view, Roth presents the desires of Jewish women as one of the major causes of the social and moral decline of Eastern European Jewry. This link between femininity and assimilation is characteristic of his ambivalent view of modernity, which ranges from blunt expressions of misogyny to a critique of instrumental reason reminiscent of the Frankfurt School.3 Roth's tendency to figure the negative aspects of modernity through images of either hyperrational or excessively sensual women can be read as an attempt to project his own anxieties onto female figures. These anxieties had their roots in the shifting cultural imagery of Jews and Judaism around the turn of the century. Whereas the notion of Jewish women as agents of assimilation prevailed in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century saw a proliferation of images of the effeminate male Jew.4 This stereotyping occurred in the wake of a modern, racial antisemitism that specifically targeted assimilated Jews. In his 1903 Sex and Character, Otto Weininger notoriously construed an analogy between Jews and women, depicting both as lacking a strong self and susceptible to external influence. Recent cultural and intellectual historians have argued that the influence of this construction cannot be overstated, that much of modern German and Austrian Jewish culture can indeed be under- Garloff 357 stood as a reaction to the threat of emasculation arising from modern antisemitism. Male Jewish intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Max Nordau attempted to dispel the image of the effeminate Jew by emphasizing the masculine character of Judaism and by projecting the characteristics attributed to Jews onto women.5 In what follows I will argue that Roth's Hiob both exemplifies and complicates this projection mechanism. The novel depicts Jewish assimilation as driven by excessive erotic desires that are frequently gendered female. What does it mean to eroticize the social process of assimilation in this way? Drawing on the post-Freudian psychoanalytic concept of mimetic desire, I first show that Roth avoids the potential biologistic implications of sexual metaphors and instead allows the reader to glimpse the historical forces that shape his characters' fate. He accomplishes this by presenting the minority's quasierotic attraction to the majority culture not as a blind instinct but as a psychical affect by which individuals negotiate social pressures. I then trace the ways that the female figures in Hiob come to embody the most disastrous effects of assimilatory desire. Roth elaborates the presumed connection between assimilation and femininity into a complex constellation of erotic desires in which the Jewish drive toward the non-Jewish world appears to be suicidal. To the extent that he blames the corrosive effects of assimilation on Jewish women and arrives at happy endings only by marginalizing his female characters, Roth indeed partakes in the misogynist trends of his time. But since he never dislodges transgressive assimilatory desire from the center of narrative, he sustains a fundamental ambiguity (and ambivalence) about the causes and effects of assimilation. This ambiguity, I will suggest, makes his work a potential resource for Daniel Boyarin and other contemporary scholars who are engaged in rethinking the interrelations between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. Often regarded as the climax of his work and at the same time his most "Jewish" novel, Roth's Hiob is a critique of Jewish assimilation in the venerable cloak of theodicy, a search for a new answer to the old question "Why do I suffer?" Roth's modern Job is Mendel Singer, a poor Bible teacher from a small village who witnesses the gradual disintegration of his family and their traditional ways of living first in Russia and then, after the family's emigration, in America. Mendel's older sons stand for different forms of assimilation: Jonas becomes a Russian soldier who drinks vodka and sleeps with nonJewish women, and Shemariah a successful American businessman who calls himself "Sam" and avoids all identification with Jews and 358 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth Judaism. Mendel's daughter Miriam establishes her own ties to the non-Jewish environment as a promiscuous lover of soldiers from a nearby garrison—whom her father calls "Cossacks"—and other nonJewish men, an experience that gradually drives her into madness. Only Menuchim, the youngest son, is depicted in more positive terms. Born an epileptic, he is left behind as the family emigrates from Russia to America, later healed and adopted by a Gentile doctor, and finally comes to America as a famous composer, where he brings spiritual redemption to Mendel. As Gershon Shaked has noted, Menuchim's story introduces an alternative model of assimilation that harks back to the biblical figure of Joseph; like Joseph, Menuchim suffers abandonment and maltreatment by his jealous siblings but is rescued and raised by non-Jews.6 The rescue theme is hinted at early on in the image of Menuchim swinging in a basket of braided reeds, which associates the crippled young boy with Moses, another biblical figure who was miraculously rescued by a non-Jew and later on rescued his own people. The "Joseph" story, which tells of Menuchim's success among the Gentiles, counterbalances the "Job" story, which relates Mendel's suffering as a result of the assimilatory desire of the rest of his family. Right at the beginning of the novel, a disparity arises between Mendel's calm happiness and his wife's discontent. Mendel's contentment with their modest circumstances contrasts with Deborah's envy of the wealthy, an instantiation of the desire for "more" that throughout the novel is characterized as female, excessive, and curiously undefined: "Sie war ein Weib, manchmal ritt sie der Teufel. Sie schielte nach dem Besitz Wohlhabender und neidete Kaufleuten den Gewinn" (Werke 5: 4) ("She was a woman; sometimes she seemed possessed. She looked askance at the possessions of the well-to-do and envied merchants their profits" [Job 5]). Significantly, the object of Deborah's envy is not so much a distinct object or sum of money, but the merchants' profit, that is the surplus money generated in the trading of commodities. Deborah's envy is a prime example of mimetic desire, which forms in the apperception of the desire of others. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has argued that Freud described but never extensively conceptualized the role of mimetic identifications in the constitution of human subjectivity (Freudian Subject 28).7 Because Freud clung to a Cartesian concept of the human subject, he could not fully acknowledge the degree to which human desires are not predetermined but formed after the model of others. Borch-Jacobson emphasizes that mimetic desire aims at the establishment of a subjective identity rather than the possession of an object, or more precisely, that such desire precedes and continues to confound the split between subject and object. To be sure, these Garloff 359 ideas cannot simply be "applied" to the literary characters in Hiob. The novel's deliberately formulaic style and lack of psychological depth precludes such an analysis of individual development. Furthermore, Borch-Jacobsen is concerned with the analysis of human desire as such, whereas Roth depicts the desires that drive a specific social process. Yet the concept of "mimetic desire" captures some of the peculiarities of assimilatory desire in Roth, including the indeterminacy of its origins, its lack of a clearly defined object, and its entwinement with social violence.8 Characteristic of the narrative ambiguity that makes it difficult to pinpoint the origins of assimilation is the scene that marks, at least in Deborah's mind, the beginning of the family's ordeal. She remembers how one day when she was pregnant with Menuchim, she and Miriam passed by a church during the arrival of a duchess and came to witness a glamorous spectacle. When Miriam impulsively ran into the church, Deborah quickly followed her, apparently in an attempt to rescue her daughter from this idolatrous environment. But the text suggests that the mother, who dashed into the church "hinein in den goldenen Glanz, in den vollen Gesang, in das Brausen der Orgel" (Werke 5: 17) ("into the midst of the golden shining, the full-voiced music, the organ's roar" [Job 26]), was just as infatuated with the lights and music of the church as her daughter. Since then, Deborah has been convinced that she carries a misfortune in her womb. The line that introduces the scene of remembrance—"Vielleicht brauchen Segen eine längere Zeit zu ihrer Erfüllung als Flüche" (Werke 5: 16) ("Perhaps blessings need a longer time for their fulfillment than curses" [Job 25])—suggests that Menuchim's illness might be God's punishment for the transgressive desires of both Miriam and Deborah. The text's ambiguity stems at least in part from the unclear function of such references to divine intervention. Here and in other places, the use of free indirect style and interior monologue raises the question of whether the narrator or one of the characters believes in such intervention. Extended interior monologues serve to introduce different points of views and offer different explanations for the family's problems, for instance, when Mendel holds the lack of desire in his marriage and the corrupting influence of America responsible for the disintegration of his life. The church scene and the novel at large are marked by a tension between literary realism and the style of a biblical legend.9 Mendel is modeled on the biblical Job. Although he is neither rich nor respected to begin with, Mendel suffers losses and similar to those of Job. The repeated use of the word Plage (agony, plague), with its religious pathos and allusion to Job's ordeals, situates the story within such a religious framework. Yet the word also describes phenomena 360 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth of thoroughly worldly character, such as Mendel's poverty and hard labor, his children's obligation to watch their sick brother, and the older sons' attempts to evade military service. The scant but significant historical references in the text create further ambiguities regarding the efficacy of individual human agency. Most importantly, the First World War comes to frame the story of suffering and redemption after the family's arrival in New York. The beginning of the war marks the turn for the worse—Shemariah is killed in action, Deborah dies of grief, Miriam becomes psychotic, and Mendel forswears his belief in God—and its end the beginning of redemption, as Mendel discovers Menuchim's song. Throughout the novel, the family's fate is construable either as a divine punishment for assimilation or as the result of social and political developments that are beyond their control. The death of Shemariah, who was bitterly opposed to military service in Russia but joined the American army out of patriotism for his new fatherland, can be seen either as a manifestation of the brutality of modern war or as a punishment for his departure from traditional Jewish ways. In Roth's Hiob, the theme of the biblical book of Job, the inexplicably cruel fate of the righteous man, translates into a narrative indeterminacy regarding the origins of Jewish assimilation. Roth's belief in the existence of assimilatory desire, understood as one instantiation of mimetic desire, explains why the traditional communities described in his writings are never truly self-contained and separate from their surroundings—and why the reader can never pinpoint the moment when tradition begins to fall apart. Roth's novella Der Leviathan, which appeared posthumously in 1940, provides another example of this. Piczenik, a Jewish coral merchant from Eastern Europe, is infatuated with the objects of his trade and their place of origin, a quasi-erotic obsession that gradually steers him away from traditional Jewish ways. His love for the corals gets increasingly out of control, inducing him to accompany a seaman to a badly reputed tavern frequented by prostitutes, to embark on a journey to the port of Odessa, and to trade in artificial corals sold by a newly arrived competitor. The most telling instance of mimetic desire in this story is Piczenik's wish to see the ocean, which first arises during his visit to the tavern. The dark red liquor he consumes there has the same color as his hair, which in another passage is linked to his transgression of Jewish laws, creating a color symbolism that compounds the difficulty of deciding whether Piczenik is influenced by external or internal forces. This ambiguity is brought to a head in an emphatic description of how Piczenik's desire to go to Odessa comes from and returns to his own heart, the "Geburtsort" (birthplace) of his wish: Garloff 361 Knapp zwei Tage vor der Abreise des Matrosen tauchte plötzlich in dem Korallenhändler der Wunsch auf, den jungen Komrower nach Odessa zu begleiten. Solch ein Wunsch kommt plötzlich, ein gewöhnlicher Blitz ist nichts dagegen, und er trifft genau den Ort, von dem er gekommen ist, nämlich das menschliche Herz. Er schlägt sozusagen in seinem eigenen Geburtsort ein. Also war auch der Wunsch Nissen Piczeniks. Und es ist kein weiter Weg von solch einem Wunsch bis zu seinem Entschluß. (Werke 6: 559) Just two days before the sailor's departure, there surfaced in the coral merchant the wish to accompany young Komrower to Odessa. A wish like that arrives suddenly, lightning is slow by comparison, and it hits the very place from where it sprang, which is to say the human heart. If you like, it strikes its own birthplace. Such was Nissen Piczenik's wish. And from such a wish to its resolution is only a short distance. (Collected Stories 262; trans. modified)10 In this passage, there is an interesting ambiguity surrounding the possessive pronoun preceding "Entschluß" (resolution): "seinem" (its) could refer either to Piczenik or to the wish, in which case the wish would determine its own realization. This ambiguity underscores the idea of auto-affection, that is, of a desire generated from within the self. However, a few lines below, an odd passage describes how Piczenik feels legitimated by the horrified reaction of his wife to his decision: "Mit ihren wirren, spärlichen Haaren, ohne Perücke, gelbliche Reste des Schlafs in den Augenwinkeln, erschien sie ihm fremd und sogar feindlich. Ihr Aussehn, ihre Überraschung, ihr Schrecken schienen seinen Entschluß, den er selbst noch für einen tollkühnen gehalten hatte, vollends zu rechtfertigen" (Werke 6: 559–60). ("Without her wig on, her thin hair in disarray and yellow crusts of sleep in the corners of her eyes, she looked unfamiliar, even hostile to him. Her appearance, her alarm, her consternation all confirmed him in a decision that even to him had seemed rash" [Collected Stories 263]). The fact that the looks of his wife and her horrified reaction vindicate Piczenik's decision to leave home shows how much this decision hinges upon affective contact with others. This depiction of a wish as both originating inside the subject and depending upon outside forces blurs the boundary between self and other. Indeed, the repulsion felt by Piczenik in view of his wife can be read as an instance of hate, which Borch-Jacobsen considers a prime example of those "sympathetic" or mimetic phenomena in which others affect the self in un- 362 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth controllable ways. In contrast to self-touching through auto-affection, hate is a form of relating to others: "Hate wants to get its hands on the other, it wants to touch even when it wants to destroy" (BorchJacobsen, Emotional Tie 10). Similarly, Piczenik's vehement self-distancing from his wife shows just how much he needs her to give his own impulses a direction. The concept of mimetic desire emphasizes the social dimension of desire, the fact that it does not develop in a vacuum but in the apperception of the desire of others. Tellingly, in Hiob, the scene in which Deborah purportedly attempts to rescue Miriam from the temptations of the majority culture includes representatives of its most powerful social institutions, the church and the nobility. The few descriptions of Jonas's and Shemariah's assimilatory desire, however brief and formulaic they are, further illustrate the interplay between human desires and larger social forces. One important scene takes place after Jonas and Shemariah have been enlisted to military service, something they, like most Jews of their hometown, had desperately tried to avoid. In the train back home, Jonas looks out of the window and sees peasant women passing by. When he suddenly pronounces "'Ich möchte ein Bauer sein. . . . ich möchte betrunken sein und mit den Mädchen da schlafen'" (Werke 5: 20) ("I would really like to be a peasant. . . . I'd like to get drunk and sleep with the girls" [Job 31]), he imitates the desires of the drunken peasants in his train compartment, whom he just observed hailing peasant girls in colorful clothes. Shemariah's desire to become rich and live in the city has a similar outside source in picture postcards: "'Die Bahnen fahren mitten durch die Straßen, alle Läden sind so groß wie bei uns die Gendarmerie-Kaserne, und die Schaufenster sind noch größer. Ich habe Ansichtskarten gesehen'" (Werke 5: 20) ("The trams run in the middle of the street, all the stores are as big as our gendarmerie barracks, and the show windows are even bigger. I've seen picture postcards" [Job 31]). Though we do not know how Shemariah got hold of these postcards, their mentioning conjures up the idea of desires instilled through the postal dissemination of images. Someone who sends a postcard expresses his or her enjoyment of the pictured place, and it is such an implied message—"I wish you were here"—that generates Shemariah's desire to live in a city. The fact that the older sons' desire to assimilate takes shape during the time of their conscription is itself significant. Roth deemed military conscription an undesirable byproduct of Jewish emancipation and once called Eastern European Jews "das militärfeindlichste Volk der Welt" (Werke 2: 879) ("the most antimilitaristic people in the world" [Wandering Jews 93]). Of course, the idea that Jews are incapable of the national loyalty demanded by military life has been Garloff 363 a staple of modern antisemitic discourse from the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus affair in France to the 1916 Judenzählung in the German army, and one might argue that Roth unwittingly reproduces this stereotype here. Yet he also had good reasons for singling out military service as an area of conflict between Christians and Jews. Because traditional anti-Judaism did not disappear with emancipation but was replaced by racial and political antisemitism, Jews in the army had reasons to fear the hostility of Gentile officers and soldiers. Moreover, the observance of Jewish religious laws is particularly difficult in the army, whose rules and demands are difficult to reconcile with religious practices such as daily prayers, kosher food, etc. Jonas's announcement after the scene with the peasants that he really looks forward to becoming a soldier shows that he not only accepts the injunction to join the military but also becomes emotionally invested in this institution of power and oppression. Shemariah's assimilation similarly reflects both choice and coercion. His journey to America, which transforms him into a successful businessman who calls himself "Sam," begins as a flight from military service but ultimately fulfills his desire for an urban and cosmopolitan lifestyle. If there is a pervasive ambiguity regarding the forces that drive the process of assimilation, there is an undeniable tendency to focus its problems on Mendel's daughter, Miriam. Nothing contributes more to the decline of the family than Miriam's erotic desire for Cossacks and, after the family's emigration, for American men. The discovery that Miriam is going out with a Cossack convinces Mendel of the necessity of emigrating to America, a step that propels the family to the next stage of misery. As Ritchie Robertson has noted in "Roth's Hiob," Miriam is a pathological version of the literary stereotype of la belle juive, an eroticized image that has distinct implications of violence and sadism. Jean Paul Sartre sums this up in his Anti-Semite and Jew: "There is in the words 'a beautiful Jewess' a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words 'beautiful Rumanian,' 'beautiful Greek,' or 'beautiful American,' for example. This phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The 'beautiful Jewess' is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village" (48).11 It is no coincidence that Sartre specifically mentions the Cossacks, the incarnation of anti-Jewish violence ever since a Cossack leader in 1648–49 commanded the killing of 350,000 Jews during an insurrection in Ukraine. In Hiob, the Cossacks are called a terror and their danger is conveyed metaphorically in a description of one of Miriam's 364 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth lovers: "seine Küsse knatterten wie Schüsse durch den Abend" (Werke 5: 62) ("His kisses resounded like shots through the evening" [Job 100]). Miriam's attraction to Cossacks epitomizes a masochistic yet curiously undefined desire behind the process of assimilation. One important scene depicts her as a young girl walking through the streets of the town, meeting the lascivious gazes of the officers and becoming increasingly addicted to these gazes. This passage shows how her desire awakens in response to the desires of the Cossacks and highlights the violence involved in this process: Nichts anderes nahm sie von ihren Jägern zur Kenntnis, als was sie durch die äußeren Tore der Sinne gerade nachschicken konnte: ein silbernes Klirren und Rasseln von Sporen und Wehr, einen verwehenden Duft von Pomade und Rasierseife, einen knalligen Schimmer von goldenen Knöpfen, silbernen Borten und blutroten Riemen aus Juchten. Es war wenig, es war genug. Gleich hinter den äußeren Toren ihrer Sinne lauerte die Neugier in Miriam, die Schwester der Jugend, die Künderin der Lust. . . . An den Straßenecken hielt sie ein und warf Blicke zurück, Lockspeise den Jägern. Es waren Miriams einzige Genüsse. (Werke 5: 18) She noticed nothing about her pursuers except the impression they made upon her outer senses: a silver clinking and rustling of spurs and arms, a pervasive smell of pomade and shaving soap, a fulminating gleam of gold buttons, silver braid, and bright-red reins of Russian leather. It was little, it was enough. Just behind the outer portal of her senses curiosity lurked in Miriam, curiosity which is the sister of youth and the awakener of desire. . . . At the street corner she would stop and cast a glance backward, baiting her huntsmen. It was Miriam's only pleasure. (Job 27–28) This passage focuses on aural, olfactory, and vague visual impressions, such as the gleam of the uniform buttons, none of which brings the Cossacks into view as visual objects with clear contours. These powerful yet diffuse sense perceptions anticipate Miriam's undifferentiating sexual promiscuity, which is presented as her real problem, rather than her desire for non-Jewish men per se. Miriam's erratic choice of men culminates in her affair with the director of her brother's American company, whose name is Glück. In contrast to Mac, Miriam's steady American boyfriend who is unambiguously char- Garloff 365 acterized as a Gentile, Glück's religion and national origin remain a point of guessing.12 This descriptive vagueness underscores his function as the embodiment of contingency. His name, which in German can mean either "happiness" or "luck," draws attention to the principle of chance involved in Miriam's search for happiness. After Mac's return from the war, Miriam, already under the influence of degenerative psychosis, unwittingly puns upon her lover's name when she exclaims: "Ich liebe Mac, der da steht, aber ich habe ihn betrogen. Mit Mister Glück habe ich geschlafen, ja, mit Mister Glück! Glück ist mein Glück, Mac ist mein Mac" (Werke 5: 97) ("I love Mac—there he stands—but I have deceived him. I slept with Mr. Glueck. Yes, with Mr. Glueck. Glueck is my Glueck, Mac is my Mac" [Job 158; trans. modified]). The proliferation of the word "Glück" in this passage highlights the character of Miriam's desire, its lack of a clearly defined object. Whereas her assimilating brothers have relatively concrete ideas about what they want to achieve—Jonas wants to have liquor and women, Shemariah money and success—Miriam does not want to have a specific thing, person, or even experience. She simply wants to have more. Miriam's eroticism is inherently insatiable and cannot be contained in a fixed image. What drives her toward her non-Jewish environment is a mimetic, contagious, suggested desire similar to Deborah's envy. Miriam's literary portrayal in Hiob serves to focus this form of desire on a single, female figure. The novel as a whole can be read as an attempt to contain the disastrous effects of assimilatory desire through narrative emplotment—in the end, Deborah is dead and Miriam closed away in an asylum for the mentally ill—and visual framing. At two important junctures, the descriptions of a mirror image and a photograph serve to objectify Deborah's body and deprive her of agency. In the first scene, Deborah gets up early in the morning, inspects her naked body in a mirror, and soberly realizes how much she has aged. Suddenly she turns around to find one of Mendel's eyes open while he himself is sound asleep. This eye that stares at her with a coldness that mirrors her own recalls a camera lens.13 While Deborah stands in front of the mirror without a trace of affect, the eye is said to be "neugierig" (Werke 5: 14) (curious). Since curiosity in this novel is associated with desire—Miriam's curiosity is the first sign of her attraction to non-Jewish men—the scene illustrates the usurpation of human feelings by a nonhuman eye. The second scene of visual framing at the very end of the book undoes this usurpation, but only for Mendel. Looking at a photo of Menuchim's wife and their children, Mendel recognizes Deborah's features in the little girl's face and recuperates his loving feelings for his wife as he remembers past nights of love.14 Whereas the mirror scene displaces curiosity from human 366 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth beings to a technical apparatus, the photography scene restores the capacity to desire to Mendel, who now beholds a technological product rather than embodies a piece of technological equipment. And while the dead Deborah remains forever incapable of desire, Mendel transmutes back from a dead apparatus into a human being who is capable of emotions. This scene is symptomatic of the novel's overall tendency to redirect the mimetic desire, which confounds the distinction between subject and object, and to attach it to appropriate objects. Significantly, the scene reestablishes the possibility of human agency by en-gendering the male as subject and the female as object. However, such strategies of containment never quite work in Hiob. Rather, transgressive desire haunts the narrative all through its miraculous ending, when Menuchim visits America as a famous composer and reconciles his father with his fate. For this happy ending paradoxically hinges upon contact with the femininity and assimilatory desire held responsible for Mendel's fate to begin with. After Menuchim has revealed his true identity, his father remembers the words of a "wonder rabbi" ("Wunderrabbi") whom Deborah had visited while still in Russia and who had predicted Menuchim's future recovery: "'Der Schmerz wird ihn weise machen, die Häßlichkeit gütig, die Bitternis milde und die Krankheit stark.' Deborah hat es gesagt" (Werke 5: 130) ("'Pain will make him wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong!' Deborah had said it" [Job 209]). What is striking in this repetition of the earlier prophecy is the omission of the rabbi, whose words are now attributed to Deborah. This shift takes on even greater significance when we consider that Deborah is the name of the only female prophet known in the Bible. While Mendel's affectionate reminiscences of Deborah after her death are a conventional idealization of a dead woman, less conventional are the transgressive desires her memory inspires in Mendel. He feels, for instance, "ein merkwürdiges und auch verbotenes Verlangen" (Werke 5: 134) ("a curious and forbidden desire" [Job 218]) to take off his hat and let the sun shine on his bare head, which for an Orthodox Jew means to disregard a religious custom, if not to break a religious law. An even more striking sign of the persistence of transgressive desire is the name under which Menuchim arrives in America, Alexis Kossak. The surname emphasizes the connection between Menuchim and his dead mother, whose maiden name was "Kossak," and his mad sister, whose main character trait is her desire for Cossacks.15 We do not know when and why Menuchim adopted the name since the details of his life in Russia after the family's departure to America remain obscure. The first account of his youth is marked by omis- Garloff 367 sions and changes because he still tries to conceal his true identity, and the second breaks off rather abruptly before he gets to the details of his life in a Gentile home. His comportment in New York, where he participates in the Passover but speaks little Yiddish and drives on the Sabbath, makes it also difficult to place him clearly in the traditional or the assimilated camp. However, we do know that "Alexis Kossak" is a pen name and as such expresses Menuchim's self-chosen artistic identity. Roth highlights this act of identification when he has Menuchim, upon his arrival in America, four times in a row referred to as "dieser Kossak" (Werke 5: 119–20) ("this Kossak" [Job, 193–94]). The shift from Miriam's insatiable desire for Cossacks to Menuchim's symbolic identification with them preserves, in the midst of redemption from suffering, the very desire held responsible for suffering to begin with. Roth thus mitigates the destructiveness of assimilatory desire in Hiob by juxtaposing two different narratives of assimilation that hark back to biblical models and by invoking the redemptive power of the Job story in the novel's abrupt, miraculous ending. In Der Leviathan, he achieves a similar effect by reinterpreting transgressive erotic desire as a form of messianic hope. In this novella, women are objects rather than subjects of such a desire. The corals, the pretty girls who tie them into necklaces, and the prostitutes in the tavern constitute a series of erotic substitutes that illustrates Piczenik's social and moral decline. The representation of his drift from traditional Judaism as an unleashing of erotic energy sexualizes a social process while casting the feminine in the stereotypical role of the seductive other. However, like Hiob, Der Leviathan reintegrates assimilatory desire by situating it in a Jewish tradition that it at the same time boldly reinterprets. As Shaked notes, the ocean that is the ultimate object of Piczenik's longing and cause of his death is something quite un-Jewish ("Kulturangst" 282). This observation is supported by Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft, where the ocean is cast as the main obstacle on the way to America, inspiring fear of disorientation and doubts about the possibility of the resurrection of the dead and their gathering in the Promised Land after the coming of the Messiah (Werke 2: 882; Wandering Jews 97–98). In Der Leviathan, the ocean inspires idolatrous behavior in Piczenik, including his fascination with the stamps on letters from his suppliers and his receptivity to seductive images in the tavern. However, while Piczenik's longing for the ocean is an expression of his inner distance from Jewish life, it is also a form of messianic hope. Piczenik feels homesick for the ocean, which he has never seen but still intuitively knows as the "Heimat der Korallen" (Werke 6: 551) ("home of the corals" [Collected Stories 255]). If the ocean is seen as blocking eschatological 368 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth thinking in Juden auf Wanderschaft, in Der Leviathan it figures as the known-unknown that refuels hopes for messianic redemption. The death Piczenik suffers in the ocean turns out to be a state of messianic expectation rather than an absolute end: "Möge er dort in Frieden ruhn neben dem Leviathan bis zur Ankunft des Messias" (Werke 6: 574) ("May he rest in peace beside the Leviathan until the coming of the Messiah" [Collected Stories 276]).16 I began this essay with the question of whether modern German Jewish culture can be understood as a reaction to the proliferation of images of the effeminate Jew at the turn of the century—of whether this culture is driven by the attempt to dispel such images by distancing Jewishness from femininity. Roth's tendency to blame the destruction of tradition on Jewish women is certainly indicative of such an effort to "remasculate" Judaism. As I have shown, in Roth both Jewish men and Jewish women are propelled toward the nonJewish world by the force of a quasi-erotic desire, but it is in Jewish women that this desire becomes especially uncontrollable and destructive. However, I have also shown that Roth's peculiar eroticization of a social process is more complex and interesting than his reliance on gender stereotypes suggests. Assimilatory desire emerges in his work as a drive in the psychoanalytic sense, that is, not a blind natural force but a form of energy that attaches itself to symbolic forms and by which the individual responds to social demands. This idea has its analog in a literary style that infuses archetypal (biblical) configurations with modernist indeterminacy, which makes it difficult to gauge the degree of agency possessed by his literary characters. In thus complicating the link between femininity and assimilatory desire, Roth offers evidence for the theses of Daniel Boyarin, who has taken the projection theory into a different direction. In Unheroic Conduct, Boyarin argues that in a culture that stereotyped Jews as effeminate, male Jews who wished to assimilate needed to pass as men before they could pass as Germans. For Boyarin, the resulting social pressure explains the masculinist and homophobic strains in the thought of such influential figures as Freud and Herzl. But beyond this he claims that the image of the effeminate Jewish man is not a cliché but based in reality, that the cultural ideal of the gentle "bookish" male truly exists in Jewish tradition, and that this ideal is not a mere reactive formation to political oppression but an authentic product of Jewish self-fashioning. Boyarin identifies the Eastern European Jewish ideal of the Mentsh and his characteristic of Edelkayt, or nobility, as one of the manifestations of this ideal. Garloff 369 Both Roth and Boyarin valorize the diasporic existence that is associated with femininity: Boyarin openly, by arguing that traditional Jewish diaspora culture furnishes alternatives to Western masculinism, including "effeminate" resistance strategies such as trickery and evasion; Roth ambivalently, by giving his narratives about the destructive effects of assimilatory desire and the Jewish Wandertrieb an unexpected redemptive twist. In both writers, the critique of assimilation gives way to a concept of Jewish diaspora culture as always-already entwined with the majority culture. If Boyarin emphasizes the culturally productive tension of separation and entanglement in the diaspora, Roth identifies cosmopolitanism as a traditional Jewish value and a healthy antidote against rising nationalism in the world. He thus concludes an article from 1934 titled "Der Segen des ewigen Juden: Zur Diskussion" by saying, "Das Wandern ist kein Fluch, sondern ein Segen" (Werke 3: 532) (Wandering is not a curse but a blessing).17 In Deleuze's and Guattari's terms, Roth's critique of the deterritorializing effect of Jewish assimilation generates images of a group held to be innately hybrid and deterritorialized. Stylistically, he accomplishes this shift through a modernist transformation of the Joseph legend, which Boyarin, too, cites as a prime example of Jewish empowerment in the diaspora. Roth's allusions to the Joseph legend in Hiob do not anchor the novel in a stable frame of reference but rather reduce the biblical myth to a few evocative signals interspersed in the story of Menuchim's rise to a star of the culture industry. This descriptive reduction allows Roth to avoid a clear verdict on assimilation and to hover in between tradition and modernity. The figure of the traditional Eastern European Jew who is always-already attracted to non-Jewish culture is his contribution to the modernist archive of Jewish identities. Notes I wish to thank Jonathan Skolnik and Üker Gökberk for their perceptive comments on an earlier version of this article. Portions of this article were presented at the 2002 Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference and at the 2003 Modern Language Association Convention. I would like to thank the respective audiences for their stimulating discussion. 1. On this gender dynamic of assimilation, see Hyman 10–49. Hyman emphasizes that the relocation of religion in the domestic sphere during the nineteenth century reversed this gender dynamic. It now fell upon Jewish women to keep traditional rituals and create Jewish homes while their husbands increasingly absented themselves from 370 Femininity and Assimalitory Desire in Joseph Roth synagogues and pursued assimilation in the economic and political spheres. For further qualifications of the notion of Jewish women as primary agents of assimilation, see Lowenstein (esp. 162–76) and Kaplan. 2. For a fine reading of Heine's text, see Krobb's "Mach die Augen zu, schöne Sara." 3. On Roth's critique of modernity, which shares positions with both conservative Kulturkritik and the Frankfurt School, see Frey and Eggers. See also Roth's journalistic writings from the early Weimar Republic in Werke, volume 1: "Jazzband" (543–47), "Wolkenkratzer" (765–67), "Radiophon" (780–82), "Nachruf auf den lieben Leser" (854–57), "Berliner Saisonbericht" (898–900), and "Die Toten ohne Namen" (914–16). On the representation of women in Roth's work, see Chambers. 4. For an account of the history of the image of the feminized Jew, see Robertson's "Historicizing Weininger." 5. See Berkowitz 99–118, Gilman 60–103, and Boyarin 189–312. In her recent study on modern German Jewish writers, Fuchs implicitly puts Roth's work into a series of such projections. 6. In "Wie jüdisch ist ein jüdisch-deutscher Roman?" Shaked observes that the biblical stories are parodied and transposed into an ironic mode—Menuchim's success, for instance, is the work of humans rather than God—and argues that the "Jewishness" of the book consists in its reference to Jewish socio-semiotics, which include certain names, terms, and Jewish legends. 7. René Girard developed the concept of mimetic desire earlier and in slightly different terms in his Violence and the Sacred (145–49). On the aim of mimetic desire to become the other, see also Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel (esp. 83). 8. Among the critics who have read the family's fate as the result of a preexisting will or desire to assimilate are Robertson ("Roth's Hiob") and Hüppauf. Fuchs similarly concludes "that the abjection articulated in this novel is not caused by the experience of migration but by the erosion of the symbolic order from within" (178). I prefer the term of mimetic desire to abjection because it better accounts for the undecidability between psychical desires and social forces in Hiob. 9. On Roth's modernist transformation of myths and legends, see Magris and Robertson ("Roth's Hiob"). Magris argues that Hiob is a nostalgic book that can hail the world of Jewish tradition only because it abstracts and reduces it to a set of symbols. Robertson sees the use of abstraction in the text as a vehicle of modernization: Hiob mobilizes and changes narrative elements of a traditional German Jewish genre, the nostalgic strain of ghetto fiction. Like earlier ghetto fiction, it incorporates positive images of Jewish domesticity and religious ritual to contend against the negative stereotypes of Jews in German culture, yet it does so in a modernist manner, relying on theatrical means to create a reality effect. Garloff 371 10. In a couple of instances in this essay, I have modified the standard English translation. 11. On the stereotype of the beautiful Jewess in German literature, see Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin. 12. "Glück" and related forms such as "Glick," "Glickhaus," etc. are listed in Jewish Family Names and Their Origins (283). 13. On Roth's critique of film and photography as the quintessential media of modernity and vehicles of alienation, see Frey 68–88. 14. For Fuchs, this scene epitomizes the novel's attempt to appropriate and control the female, abject other through "sentimental reverie" (121). I argue that it is mimetic desire rather than the female body that is at stake here, and that the means of control is objectification rather than abjection. Whereas abjection draws a boundary between the pure and the impure, objectification reestablishes the boundary between subject and object. 15. "Kozack" and "Kozak" are listed in Jewish Family Names and Their Origins as diminutives of koza (goat) (Czech, Pol., Russ.) (426). The fact that a typical Jewish surname is here identical with that of the Ukrainian soldiers captures one of the paradoxes of Jewish life in Europe: the very names that signal the integration of Jews into the non–Jewish society are also signs of their lack of integration. 16. I therefore disagree with Shaked that the image of America in Der Leviathan differs from that in Hiob in that it emblematizes suicide rather than the chance for a new beginning ("Kulturangst" 295). Rather, America figures in both texts as the destination of a journey that brings to the fore a redemptive potential of otherwise self–destructive assimilatory desire. 17. On Roth's identification of the image of wandering Jew and the myth of the supranational Habsburg empire, see Traverso (esp. 65–80) and Timms. On Roth's view of Zionism as an assimilation to modern Western ideas, see his Juden auf Wanderschaft in Werke, volume 1 (esp. 13, 17, 19). Works Cited Berkowitz, Michael. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect. Trans. Douglas Brick et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. ———. The Freudian Subject. Trans. Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. 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Jewish Family Names and Their Origins: An Etymological Dictionary. Ed. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer and Eva H. Guggenheimer. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Pub., 1992. Hüppauf, Bernd. "Joseph Roth: Hiob Der Mythos des Skeptikers." Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer. Königstein im Taunus, Ger.: Athenäum, 1985. 309–25. Hyman, Paula E. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995. Kaplan, Marion. "Tradition and Transition: The Acculturation, Assimilation and Integration of Jews in Imperial Germany: A Gender Analysis." Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 27 (1982): 3–35. "Koza." Jewish Family Names and Their Origins: An Etymological Dictionary. Ed. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer and Eva H. Guggenheimer. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Pub., 1992. Krobb, Florian. Die schöne Jüdin: Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Tübingen, Ger.: Niemeyer, 1993. ———. "'Mach die Augen zu, schöne Sara': Zur Gestaltung der jüdischen Assimilationsproblematik in Heines Der Rabbi von Bacherach." German Life and Letters 47.2 (1994): 167–80. Lowenstein, Steven M. The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–1830. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Magris, Claudio. "Der ostjüdische Odysseus: Roth zwischen Kaisertum und Golus." Joseph Roth und die Tradition: Aufsatz- und Materialiensammlung. Ed. David Bronsen. Darmstadt, Ger.: Agora Verlag, 1975. 181–226. Robertson, Ritchie. "Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew." Modernity, Culture and "the Jew." Ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 23–39. ———. "Roth's Hiob and the Traditions of Ghetto Fiction." Co-Existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Ed. Helen Chambers. Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1991. 184–200. Garloff 373 Roth, Joseph. Job. Trans. Dorothy Thompson. Woodstock, NY: Overlook P, 2003. ———. The Collected Stories. Trans. Michael Hofmann. New York: Norton, 2002. ———. The Wandering Jews. Trans. Michael Hofmann. New York: Norton, 2001. ———. Werke. 6 vols. Ed. Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert. Cologne, Ger.: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1989–91. Sartre, Jean Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. George J. Becker. New York: Schocken, 1965. Shaked, Gershon. "Kulturangst und die Sehnsucht nach dem dem Tode: Joseph Roths 'Der Leviathan'—die intertextuelle Mythisierung der Kleinstadtgeschichte." Joseph Roth: Interpretation—Kritik— Rezeption. Ed. Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert. Stuttgart, Ger.: Stauffenburg, 1990. 279–98. ———. "Wie jüdisch ist ein jüdisch-deutscher Roman? Über Joseph Roths Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes." Juden in der deutschen Literatur: Ein deutsch-israelisches Symposium. Ed. Stéphane Moses and Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt am Main, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1986. 281–92. Timms, Edward. "Joseph Roths Antisemitismuskritik und die jüdische Identitätsproblematik." Joseph Roth: Der Sieg über die Zeit: Londoner Symposium. Ed. Alexander Stillmark. Stuttgart, Ger.: Heinz, 1996. 18–30. Traverso, Enzo. The Jews and Germany: From the "Judeo-German Symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz. Trans. Daniel Weissbort. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.