Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

2. “The Language of Dollars”: Multilingualism and the Claims of English in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

Introduction This essay assumes that, in two significant and related domains— American literary history on the one hand and Holocaust writing on the other—the position of English is contested, uncertain, and undergoing transformation. In American letters, scholars have noted the almost exclusive attention given to English-language writing in recent accounts of literary history, and they have attempted to redress this predicament by attending to American literature written in languages other than English . According to this view, works written in America in Spanish, French Creole, Chinese, Norwegian, and Yiddish, among others, are crucial to include in the canon of American literature.1 While those who propose this revision assert that works in English should remain integral to this canon, the precise cultural position of English is left unclear; one cannot take for granted that English is the language that essentially represents American literature.2 46 2 “The Language of Dollars” Multilingualism and the Claims of English in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust alan rosen Writing on the Holocaust, in contrast, conventionally positions English on the margins: few would presume that English, a primary language of neither victim nor persecutor, is a language essential to representing the Holocaust. And indeed, during the war years and in their aftermath, the bulk of writing on the Holocaust was in Yiddish, Hebrew , German, and other continental European tongues.3 When claims were made for a language or languages appropriate to responding to these events, English was rarely if ever deemed a front-runner.4 Yet in the past few decades writing on the Holocaust has turned with increasing frequency to English, such that, in most types5 of literary production , the majority of material on the Holocaust has come to appear in English. Moreover, parallel to this escalating production of material in English, claims have even been advanced that English is the preferred language in which to write about the Holocaust.6 These two tendencies, then, pull in contrary directions. In the first case, English, formerly entrenched as the primary tongue of America, has been deposed from a singular position of authority; in the second case, English, an outsider to the Holocaust and the responses to it, has been conscripted as a central language. As if to compensate for a reversal in fortunes, English has been recruited to tend to the Holocaust at the same time that its preeminent stature in American letters has been challenged. Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, an English-language text that incorporates intensive multilingual concerns, simultaneously anticipates , engages, and contravenes both trends.7 Drawing on a variety of languages, Eliach and her students at Brooklyn College interviewed Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from approximately 1974 to 1981; Eliach then translated, edited, and rewrote the material of the interviews into a “unified form” of eighty-nine tales. She arranged the tales in four sections, with the first three sections narrating events that took place during the Holocaust, the final section those occurring in its aftermath. Most of the tales are set in Poland, Russia, Germany, and Austria, with a smaller number in the last section taking place in postwar America. Though the interviews were conducted in multiple languages, Eliach rendered the tales derived from the interviews exclusively in English. Although Eliach’s project progresses from a multilingual universe to a monolingual one, I will argue that, by making explicit its foundational ties to multilingual traditions even while enshrining an English-only “The Language of Dollars” 47 narrative, Hasidic Tales anticipates the present critique of an English monolingualism. And, while seeming to acquiesce in the current trend by writing in English about the Holocaust, Hasidic Tales stages scenes of linguistic exchange in the tales that interrogate the status of English and incorporate its unstable position into the representation of the Holocaust. More Than Nine Languages In the foreword to Hasidic Tales, Eliach makes multilingualism a key programmatic feature. “The original interviews [on which the tales are based],” she writes, “were conducted in more than nine languages and numerous dialects.”8 While Eliach never fully explicates the significance of the multilingual basis, the multiplicity of languages appears to authorize the tales, positing a kind of primal linguistic verisimilitude to counteract the dislocated venue (America) and language (English) in which the tales have ultimately been rendered. In other words, given that America lies at such a geographic and cultural distance from the setting in which...