Displacements and the Jewish Question

Review Essays Displacements and the Jewish Question by Tania Oldenhage Temple University 185 Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, edited by Angelika Bammer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Un!versity Press, 1994. 286 pp. $14.95. . In her introduction to this volume, Angelika Bammer maps out the term "displacement" and guides readers through some discourses in which "displacement" is a central term. As she explains, first of all, displacement refers to the experience of millions of people who have been separated from their native culture "through physical dislocation ... or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture." The overwhelming numbers of migrants, refugees, and people affected by colonization suggest that displacement is "one of the most formative experiences of our century" (p. xi). In fact, displacement has been theorized as the universal experience and defining condition of (post)modernity. However, Bammer is wary about such a generalizing use of "displacement" that would turn everyone living today into a "displaced person"; she insists on differences and specificity. She hopes the essays in this volume"... chart the meaning of displacement in particular, concrete terms in order to more adequately grasp its multivalent complexity" (p. xiii). But "displacement" is also a central term within psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory. For both Freud and Derrida, displacement refers to a process, psychic or interpretive respectively, in which something is pushed aside that does not cease to be a source of trouble. Bammer wants to retain these theoretical resonances, but she also wants to link them back to that other notion of displacement: the histories and experiences of displaced persons and peoples. Understood this way, "displacement" becomes relevant to questions of cultural identity. Making "the relationship between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of cultural identity" (p. xiv) the focus of inquiry, the volume explores notions of identity, home, tradition, and/or community as they are constructed, negotiated, contested, and mobilized by individuals, groups, and nations. Alongside various contributions from postcolonial cultural studies, the volume includes a number of essays that raise questions of]ewishness in relation to "home," "family," "identity," and "displacements." Read 186 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 together, these essays interact with each other in tensive but productive ways. The book is divided into four sections. The first section is concerned with Power and Authorities of various kinds which forcibly determine the construction of identities across cultures. The next two sections are both designed to explore the contingent meanings and effects of notions like "home," "place," "the native," and, specifically, "Jewishness." Section two, "Relocating 'Home' and 'Community,'" includes Marianne Hirsch's essay, in which the complexities of displacements-both cultural dislocation and psychic process-are explored in compellingways. Hirsch thinks about her experience of geographical and cultural displacement by way of a critical interaction with Eva Hoffman's autobiography Lost in Translation. Both Hirsch and Hoffman come from the immediate postwar generation ofJews in Eastern Europe. Both of their families immigrated into North America to escape a hostile antisemitic environment. Thus they share similar histories of a "displaced girlhood." However, Hirsch resists the identification with Hoffman. Hirsch problematizes Hoffman's nostalgic construction of the lost European home as a paradise or a mythic place of origin. As Hirsch remembers it, home was never uncomplicated. The reality of her parents' struggle for survival during the Holocaust and their dislocation after the war was always part of Hirsch's childhood. Her childhood was determined through a number of geographical and linguistic displacements . As Hirsch moved with her family from Timisoara to Bucharest and then to Vienna, she acquired a number of language skills and accents. Her identity as a Jew is equally complex. It includes a history of persecution, a cultural legacy and a consciousness of being different all at the same time. "Jewishness is an ambiguous and complicated location: one in which I both am and am not at home" (po 79). Thus, Hirsch recognizes that multiple displacements have conditioned her home and her identity prior to that geographical move from Europe to the u.S. "Displacement" gains yet another meaning for Hirsch as it also refers to the transfer of psychic energy from one idea to another. Hirsch calls this displacement a strategy...