Feeling Jewish by Devorah Baum

Author:Devorah Baum
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300212440
Publisher: Yale University Press

What We’ve Locked Inside

Carver’s Mel dreams of being that most romantic of figures, a knight, but only, he admits, because the knight has armor to shield his face and protect his heart from injury. Englander’s Mark, sporting a black hat and a long beard that covers up most of his face like a mask, is likewise revealed by the end of this troubling story to be less a knight for the Jewish faith than a man in hiding. Indeed, Mark resembles Roth’s earlier portrait of a religious woman, Ronit, in his novel Operation Shylock. Ronit “looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inward-ness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation—a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish ‘abnormalities,’ those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.” Elsewhere Roth claims that what he most objects to are people who “hide the places where they’re split.”38

Both Englander’s Mark and Roth’s Ronit are versions of a familiar postwar Jewish type: the type who has sought to start anew by re-creating an image of the Jew as whole, undivided, self-contained, and living in that most mythical of ways, “exactly as our parents lived before the war.” Is this not fundamentalism in a nutshell? Denial of the past while purporting to be returning to it. Denial of a history in hiding by hiding the places where you’re split. The Jews who, in Roth, are the most engaging, on the other hand, preserve their doubleness, a doubleness in which neither side of the self-division is more real than the other, hence the inadequacy of the question so often asked by Roth’s readers and also asked repeatedly by Claire Bloom in her memoir of their time together: which is the real Philip Roth?

While the question of who is more real or authentic fails to recognize the peculiarities of self-division that make fantasy an integral part of reality, the unified self, by the same token, appears to Roth as a figure for the definitively unreal and inauthentic. We can see this logic at work, for instance, in I Married a Communist, the novel in which Roth (predictably) took revenge on Bloom for her memoir. Bloom’s fictional stand-in is the Hollywood actress Eve Frame. The name Eve, of course, belongs to the woman who has stood perennially accused of framing Adam after the collapse of his marriage to the demonic Lilith, and thus takes us right back to the beginning, to the place where we are all beginners, for, despite Adam’s wish to start anew with Eve, she proved no less the temptress, no less the femme fatale to the man who would go on to frame her. And yet here, rather tellingly, in his revenge novel on his second wife, Roth refers this age-old battle of the sexes to a different arena altogether, that of Jewishness.

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