Boundaries of Jewish Identity

3. Jewish Character? - Stereotype and Identity in Fiction from Israel by Aharon Appelfeld and Sayed Kashua

43 3 Jewish Character? stereotype and identity in fiction from israel by aharon appelfeld and sayed Kashua naoMi B. soKoLoff In a story called “Transformation” (1968), celebrated Hebrew author and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld imagines characters at the far edges of Jewish identity.1 His protagonists, a man and a woman on the run during the Nazi era, undergo a sudden, Kafkaesque metamorphosis . Taking refuge in a forest, they become unrecognizable as Jews, turn into peasants in appearance, and meld into nature.This tale can usefully be read in tandem with another story, from a later era, that similarly features a startling metamorphosis as it explores vexed boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. The story’s author, Sayed Kashua, is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who has published widely in the Hebrew press, and in “Herzl Disappears at Midnight” (2005) he imagines a young man who awakes each morning as a Jew and each night becomes an Arab.2 These two texts invite comparison, despite their significant thematic and artistic differences, for both carry their protagonists back and forth across ethnic lines to embody non-Jews and Jews and thereby pose the question of what those boundaries demarcate. What are the differences between Jews and others? What constitutes Jewishness, and what are its limits? Does something of it remain after the metamorphoses these characters endure? In both stories, the deployment of stereotype is one of the primary narrative techniques that the authors engage as they wrestle with such questions. Stereotyping depends on and stipulates rigid identity boundaries, yet fiction can use it to richly and creatively address issues of shifting self-definition. Here it serves as a productive tool of representation that contributes to Kashua’s and Appelfeld’s explorations of Jewish characters and Jewish character. 44 naoMi B. soKoLoff To be sure, stereotype has suffered a bad reputation. Countless literary and cultural studies have dismissed it as essentialist and reductive or condemned it as downright racist. Some scholars, however, have begun to weary of the stereotyping of stereotype as “always bad, simplistic idiotic, and rigid.”3 The salient question, they say, is how literature has appropriated stereotype and how writers use it. Do authors endorse stereotypes, parody them, flaunt them defiantly, or otherwise transform them when addressing a particular audience?4 Has the writer struggled with the problem of how to represent groups and how to use markers of identity or simply reinscribed negative clichés? Recognizing that stereotypes are always “already heard”—that is, they are received ideas that have been repeated and rehearsed many times previously—literary investigations have shifted to a model of intertextuality. A variety of studies consider how stereotypes flow and circulate and what their protean instability reveals about those who perpetrate them.5 Critics advocate asking not if any particular generalization about a collective population is true or plausible but whether such generalizations are endorsed (and by whom) and to what line of previous texts and statements they relate. Furthermore, there has been a call for more literary analysis that is audience-oriented and pragmatic.6 We might ask, what is the reception accorded to the use of stereotype in literature? Does this material have an impact socially? There is no doubt that the images promoted in literature have played a crucial role over many centuries in shaping cultural identities, fostering ethnic awareness, and even spurring nationalist movements. Therefore, it is important to assess not only how writers deploy stereotype but also how their work functions for and is received by their readership. In the stories I discuss, Kashua and Appelfeld turn to stereotypes in a way that does not simply reinscribe denigrating images or renounce them but rather forces the reader to confront a conflict—between a world of limitless possibility and one where familiar typologies foreclose a choice about identity. The primary quality the stories share is that each combines two kinds of characterization. Starting with a mode of narration that fosters open-endedness, uncertainty of motive, and complexity of character, each text then switches to a reliance on stereotype that shuts down complexity. Rigid, pejorative imagery, Jewish Character? 45 contrasting with the richness of narrative possibility, produces central tensions that animate each story. The result is oscillating interpretations ; one demarcates and reconfirms schematic, inflexible boundaries of identity, while the other circumvents, disrupts, or transforms such boundaries in significant ways. Appelfeld puzzles over perplexities of Jewish identity in an...