Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe by Andrea Reiter Lucille Cairns

Author:Andrea Reiter, Lucille Cairns [Andrea Reiter, Lucille Cairns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138305373
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Notable examples are Clive Sinclair’s Blood Libels (London: Allison & Busby, 1985) and Cosmetic Effects (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) and Simon Louvish’s Avram Blok novels, The Therapy of Avram Blok (London: Heinemann, 1985), City of Blok (London: Collins, 1988), The Last Trump of Avram Blok (London: Collins, 1990), and The Days of Miracles and Wonders (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997).

2. The most important novels developing this perspective are Jonathan Wilson’s The Hiding Room (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995) and A Palestine Affair (New York: Pantheon, 2003), the first two parts of a projected trilogy, and Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times (London: Granta, 2000); Bernice Rubens’s The Sergeants’ Tale (London: Little, Brown, 2003) also engages with the postcolonial paradigm, but comes to a different conclusion. For a discussion of the significance of this development, see Axel Stähler, “Metonymies of Jewish Postcoloniality: The British Mandate for Palestine and Israel in Contemporary British Jewish Fiction,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 16, no. 1 (2009): 27–40.

3. Such a development is indicated, for instance, by David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes (London: Little, Brown, 2004), Giles Coren’s Winkler (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience (London: Penguin, 2006), Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), and Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad (London: Picador, 2007).

4. See Ruth Gilbert, “Contemporary British-Jewish Writing: From Apology to Attitude,” Literature Compass 5 (2008): 394–406 and her forthcoming study on Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) as well as Bryan Cheyette, “Englishness and Extraterritoriality: British-Jewish Writing and Diaspora Culture,” Literary Strategies. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 21–39.

5. For the apologetic strain in secular British Jewish writing from its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Bryan Cheyette, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland. An Anthology, ed. Bryan Cheyette (London: Halban, 1998), xiii–lxxi, xxxiv.

6. See, for instance, Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes, Coren’s Winkler, Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights, Alderman’s Disobedience, and Mendelson’s When We Were Bad.

7. Robert McCrum, “McCrum on: Clive Sinclair,” The Observer, December 15, 1996, 18.

8. Ibid.

9. Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, was published in 1983 (London: Chatto & Windus); his Who’s Sorry Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) and Kalooki Nights (2006) were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. There were other Jewish writers who were awarded the Booker Prize, such as Bernice Rubens (1970), Nadine Gordimer (1974), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) and Anita Brookner (1984); but with the exception of Rubens’s The Elected Member, none of the prize-winning novels had any overtly ‘Jewish’ subject matter.

10. Gerald Jacobs, “A Victory We Can Take Pride In,” The Jewish Chronicle Online, October 14, 2010, http://www.thejc.com/print/39337 (accessed June 16, 2011).

11. McCrum, “Clive Sinclair,” 18.

12. In Germany, in what appears to be an infelicitous coincidence, the mini-series was aired as Gelobtes Land, less than three weeks after Günter Grass’s contentious poem, “Was gesagt werden muss,” was published simultaneously in Süddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica and El País on April 4, 2012.

13. Quoted in Marcus Dysch, “TV’s Broken Promise. The Experts: This Series Set Out Deliberately to Demonise Israel,” The Jewish Chronicle, March 4, 2011, 3.

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