Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

Conclusion

Conclusion In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat Sarah Kofman demonstrated, perhaps to her own profound dismay, that she had a singular gift to do two things she held to be philosophically impossible: first, to articulate a highly idiosyncratic “selfhood”; and secondly, to do so in a narrative form she believed to be untenable after Auschwitz. Both these claims were, as I hope this study documents and demonstrates, incorrect. However fashionable and oft repeated, the notion that autobiographical narrative, philosophical analysis, or poetry were impossible “after Auschwitz” was never philosophically serious, and—although this argument may not seem directly relevant to the bulk of this book—I firmly believe that the counterEnlightenment analysis upon which it is based has served to mute, rather than advance, our ability to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, just as the overarching Heideggerrian thesis behind it has served vastly to distort our collective understanding of, and indebtedness to, the values whose destruction, rather than reification, led to Auschwitz.1 Be that far larger argument as it may, I do not think it credible to maintain that Sarah Kofman, as well as Josephus Flavius, Asher of Reichshofen, Glikl of Hameln, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Osip Mandelstam, or Stefan Zweig failed to present to us, through their autobiographies, a keen sense of their selfhoods, even as those can and must be distinguished from the facts of their life-stories. As I hope I have demonstrated, although we can no longer read these autobiographies, or any others, as veridical depictions of their authors’ lives and times, these texts can still yield great profit to the historian, illuminating not only the search for selfhood in discrete historical contexts, but the culturally specific and thus highly historically 175 informative and repercussive articulations of the quest for self-fashioning in changing temporal, geographical, and ideational contexts.2 Indeed, I hope that my argument demonstrates, contrary to many postmodernist claims, that a conceptually and contextually rigorous analysis of autobiographical texts can yield insights into historical processes that lie “outside the text,” clearly demarcating the boundaries between the fictive and the historical domains and the ongoing validity of the historian’s quest for truth. For reasons which I laid bare in the introduction to this book, I do not for a moment believe that the problems we encountered in reading and analyzing the particular texts we have studied here are in any sense unique to the Jews, or to something called “Jewish autobiography.”Whether written in Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, or French, or any other language, the dynamics of writing about one’s self are, I believe, essentially the same, even as the cultural contours and rhetorical contexts of doing so are infinitely variable. In a profound sense, I hope not so much to have “reclaimed” Mandelstam, Zweig, and Kofman for “Jewish history” but to have demonstrated, as I have tried to do in all my other books, that the all but canonical boundary between Jewish and a presumptive “general ” history is a fictive artifact that obscures sound historical analysis. In the end, I hope that this small volume adds an important dimension to the ongoing debate about the boundaries between history and memory that have so concerned historians and theorists for the last several decades, and that was so productively initiated in regard to Jewish history by Yosef Yerushalmi in 1982, in his famous book in this series.3 As Andreas Huyssen has recently put it, after so much “intense public and academic discussions of the uses and abuses of memory, many feel that the topic has been exhausted. Memory fatigue has set in.”4 I hope that shifting the analysis from collective memory to individual memories—and hence from one presumed Jewish history and collective memory to many Jewish histories and memories—serves to sharpen our understanding of this so complex and fascinating issue. The basic lesson of this volume is that from all that we have collectively learned from literary theory and the neuroscience of memory about human beings’ all too fragile recollection of their pasts and its transmission through language and narrative, we— 176 conclusion as historians or quite simply as readers—can no longer read autobiographies as factual first-person accounts. And yet, at the same time, we can continue to read with great profit, as well as much pleasure, such fascinating and engaging autobiographies as Josephus’s Vita, Asher of Reichshofen...