Literary Mappings of the Jewish City: Other Languages, Other Terrains

And before them, rising on her high pedestal west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and his mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.

—HENRY ROTH, Call it Sleep

Yosef Shabi, vice-principal of the Techiya elementary school, stepped carefully to the edge of the dried riverbed, leather briefcase in hand, and looked out over the rocky slope. Not a living soul could be seen among the greenish-yellow bushes, blocks of stone and cement and sewage pipes spitting turbid water. In the riverbed a trickle of foul sewage ran slowly among the mounds of rubbish and rotting car parts. Beyond, through the cover of dense haze enveloping the neighborhood, people moved like shadows on the bridge over the dead river.

—SHIMON BALLAS, Tel Aviv East

The scene quoted above from Henry Roth's novel set in New York suggests the paradox of migration: the promise of life in "the Golden Land" is brutally shadowed, ironically, by the very figure of freedom and prosperity. As Roth's young David moves out of the home and into the streets, out of Yiddish and into English, he is haunted by his parents' secrets, and seeks the violent redemption that is the novel's exhilarating, modernist climax. Roth's account of Jewish life in lower Manhattan remains both seminal and iconoclastic, a singular achievement within American literature and a natural epigraph for a special volume on Jewish writing about the city. Yet New York resides in the present collection by default only, the "illness" for which nostalgic recollection of the East European shtetl is the cure and, incidentally perhaps, as the location where Prooftexts is edited.

Shimon Ballas's trilogy Tel Aviv East makes for an instructive counterpoint, and will help delineate the parameters of these alternative literary mappings of the Jewish city. Ballas's narrative begins in a ma'abara and continues largely in south Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighborhood, following the fortunes of Iraqi Jewish immigrants, whose acculturation, too, is marked by disappointment, violence, and linguistic hybridity. Yosef Shabi and his family face the condition of exile in a new homeland, as a dispossessed, sociological minority within the Ashkenazi-dominated institutions of the Zionist state. In contrast to canonical, triumphant images of Tel Aviv, Ballas offers an alternative account, "the first Hebrew city" viewed from its cultural and economic margins, a landscape of neglect and despair.

This special issue of Prooftexts, "Literary Mappings of the Jewish City: Other Languages, Other Terrains," offers a sustained, but by no means exhaustive treatment of Jewish literary depictions of the modern city. Many of the authors discussed herein engage themes emerging from Roth and Ballas: indeed, the story of Jewish urban experience in the twentieth century is often one of trauma, migration, and loss. Yet the city has also been the actual and proverbial home of Jewish cultural life in this same period, the backdrop against which generations of Jews and Jewish families have lived, loved, and prospered. As a group, moreover, these articles provide an introduction to a central focus of Jewish cultural studies: the relation between Jews and space. Space has become an influential critical concept in recent years, dating primarily from the work of Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu, who together introduced the idea of space as a product of history, as both revealed and shaped by human forces over the course of time. The experience of space is thus inextricably connected to the experience of time, and to the narrative representation of history. While literary depictions of urban life may indeed date back to the biblical Babel, the relation between place and identity has become increasingly important in...