Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969

4. Recognition and Effacement in Lore Segal’s Her First American

4 Recognition and Effacement in Lore Segal’s Her First American Protocol Near the beginning of Lore Segal’s Her First American, Carter Bayoux, a middle-aged, depressive African American journalist and erstwhile diplomat sends the novel’s heroine, Ilka Weissnix, a telegram announcing his basic life philosophy: “PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING BY NATURAL HUMAN FEELING” (41).1 The telegram illustrates Carter’s sincere cynicism, the oxymoronic attitude attending political processes of give and take, whether local or national, in D.C. or the UN, during the novel’s present time of the 1950s or our own moment. Carter would know. Covering the United Nations for the fictional newspaper The Harlem Herald in the 1950s, Carter is a witness to and an occasional participant in the most hotly contested debates at the UN Commission on Human Rights, including the NAACP’s petition to the UN to investigate rights abuses in Mississippi and Alabama, the polarizing debates on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, the 110 Chapter 4 mediation of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, and African decolonization throughout the decade. Protocol may guide the give and take in order to curtail the otherwise seething hostility, racism, and political hegemony that attends these affairs, but protocol also has its obvious costs, as Carter ’s odd formulation reveals: “PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING....” The repetition signals how protocol requires “not living” as the price for participating in bare-knuckle politics, while a different sort of lifelessness is protocol’s grim reward—Carter’s election to the league of the few, the cosmopolitan black men who circulate in elite intellectual circles, cut off from the wider reality of black life in the United States. Carter’s urbanity and his deployment of protocol in nearly all situations smoothes his passage through a rough environment, where it otherwise may be hard to be an intellectual black man who is not drawn into either the compromises of middle-class domestic life or the rough battles for civil rights and social recognition in the United States. Carter’s protocol amounts to an anti-politics, and despite his rage over racism and his drunken meditations on white hegemony, his refusal to engage with political others, as a man of politics, traps him in an economy of feeling and beyond the economies of political power. Likewise, Her First American is an urbane novel, traveling an equally smooth path through tempestuous times and places. Though it invokes topics of slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, Israel, and American anti-Semitism, it bears neither anger, nor resentment, nor guilt, somehow side-stepping what we’ve come to expect as the “natural human feeling” of Jewish American literature. In this way the novel too is set in a raw political moment in American Jewish life: During the decades when Jewish Americans were beginning to settle on a vocabulary for talking about the Holocaust and when liberalism was being tested against other forms of political recognition, Segal’s characters suffer for lack of political rights and social recognition, yet evade all avenues for pursuing either remedy. A recurring motif of Her First American is “interruption.” The novel’s closing lines note a gathering of black cultural nationalists eulogizing Carter , pausing just briefly when “Ilka interrupted” with her own humanizing homage. This tableau, with the Jewish voice interrupting without necessarily altering the discourse, may characterize the novel as a whole and, as I have been arguing, describes the work of several of the texts examined in this book. This book is about literature that intervenes in discourses of race Recognition and Effacement 111 and rights and exposes their basic premises and implications. In the 1970s and again in the 1980s, as social identities are reified and social policies legislated and as a new regime of race and rights displaces the old, new orders of cynicism, exploitation, and social hierarchy emerge in social policy and discourse. In the second half of this book, I examine literature’s interruption of that emerging consensus. Though Her First American obviously narrates the mutual attention and suspicion between African Americans and American Jews after the Second World War, the novel’s insights extend to the very heart of the political and philosophical paradoxes inhering in concepts of “rights” and “recognition.” Though often operating in tandem, these two concepts suggest very different ways of securing public status and social...