Abstract
If magical realism has come to be understood as “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world,”1 what can be said about the recent efflorescence of narrative magic in contemporary Jewish American fiction? Surely American Jews— largely middle-class, culturally assimilated metropolitans— inhabit a different geopolitical position from that of magic realism’s practitioners in the “third,” decolonizing world, and surely history has granted them a dissimilar imaginative legacy. What possible relationship, then, could the rise of magic in this lively body of contemporary fiction have to postcolonial experience, aesthetics, or textuality?
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Notes
Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–7.
Wendy B. Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 169–70.
On this dynamic in post-1960s African American fiction, especially Toni Morrison’s Beloved, see Caroline Rody, The Daughter’s Return: African American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21–26.
Wen-chin Ouyang, “Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (Woodbridge, England: Tamesis/Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 15.
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 151.
Alfred J. López, Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 143.
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 235.
Howard Schwartz, Elijah’s Violin and Other Jewish Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 12. On this subject, see Tamara Kaye Sellman, “Jewish Magical Realism: Writing to Tell the Tale,” Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, accessed August 14, 2012, http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/nonficSellmanJewishMR.html.
Chava Turniansky, “On the Sources of Isaac Bashevis-Singer’s Der sotn in Goray,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer: His Work and His World, ed. Hugh Denman (Boston: Brill, 2002), 247.
Tracy Mishkin, “Magical Realism in the Short Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 22 (2003): 1–10.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, author’s note to The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), viii.
Bilhah Rubinstein, “Narrative Constructs in the Works of Yitzkhok Bashevis-Zinger and their Relationship to Kabbalah,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer: His Work and His World, ed. Hugh Denman (Boston: Brill, 2002), 265–66, 270.
Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 64.
Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi,” in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (New York: Dutton, 1983), 1–37.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.
Issac Deutscher, “The Jewish Tragedy and the Historian,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 164.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, “The Book of the Destruction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 322.
Saul Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 32. For Geoffrey Hartman, “What threatens the mimetic is, to put it bluntly, the infinity of evil glimpsed by our generation, perhaps beyond other generations” (329). Friedlander adds that the Holocaust “could well be inaccessible to all attempts at a significant representation and interpretation … In Walter Benjamin’s terms, we may possibly be facing an unredeemable past” (Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution,’” 35). That “unredeemable” quality poses a particular challenge to fictional plot in particular, not only because the Holocaust, as Hartman writes, “challenges the credibility of redemptive thinking” (Hartman 326), but also because, in its utter subjugation of individuality to the cause of murdering a “corporate collectivity (any and all Jews everywhere) [it] abrogates the individualized ‘agency that shapes literary plot”
(Susan Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], 8,
citing Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 147).
In Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), a memoir of his search to learn the truth about the murder of his relatives under the Nazis, when the author at last believes he is standing on the exact spot where two of them were shot, he writes, “I knew that I was standing in the place where they had died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me, no matter now gripping the story that may be told about them. There is so much that will always be impossible to know, but we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story, for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies. There will be time enough for that, once I and everyone who ever knew everyone who ever knew them dies; since as we know, everything, in the end, gets lost” (502).
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pal-grave, 1986), and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Palgrave, 1991).
David Grossman, See Under: Love (London: Vintage, 1999), 180; In the now-famous story Grossman’s novel retells, Bruno Schulz was shot on the street of his native Drohobycz, Poland, when he went out to buy a loaf of bread on November 19, 1942, by an SS officer, Karl Gunther, who was the rival of Schulz’s own Nazi employer, SS Officer Felix Landau. Afterward, “Gunther … went to Landau and said, ‘I killed your Jew.’ To which Landau replied, ‘In that case, I will now kill your Jew’” (Grossman 101).
Joseph Skibell, A Blessing on the Moon (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1997).
Andrew W. M. Beierle, “Making Sense of the World,” Emory Magazine 75, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/fall99/skibell.html.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2002).
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Bard-Avon, 1971), 11.
David. G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 44, 57.
See Caroline Rody, The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). And on magical realism in African American and Caribbean women’s fictions, see Rody, The Daughter’s Return, 64–67.
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© 2013 Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
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Rody, C. (2013). Jewish Post-Holocaust Fiction and the Magical Realist Turn. In: Di Iorio Sandín, L., Perez, R. (eds) Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329240_3
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