Translingual Identities: Language and Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind by Tamar Steinitz (review)

Translingual Identities features on its cover a painting by the German Swiss artist Paul Klee: a human head with facial features in asymmetrical geometrical shapes. Fragmented and ambivalent, with peeling colors, the painting may symbolize “old age” (hence the title, Senecio) yet reflect a children’s way of representing the world. Himself multilingual with multiple talents, for music, teaching, studying antiquity and ideography, to name just a few, Klee famously broke traditions, schools, and borders, traveled, and experimented with surrealism, cubism, and expressionism. It has been speculated that Senecio may be Klee’s self-portrait, symbolizing his life and art on thresholds, in the existential and creative liminal space.

The visual image of asymmetric hybridity sets the stage and the tone for Tamar Steinitz’s analysis of two “translingual” writers, Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind, in yet another book contributing to the growing scholarship on “translingual literature” (the term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000])—literature written in a nonnative language or in more than in one language. The two writers in question are indeed comparable, as they share the historical and geopolitical context (World War II and the postwar years), Jewishness, and the so-called mother tongue (German), yet could be placed, in the author’s view, at two opposite ends of the language–self continuum. This dichotomy of translingualism as a loss, resulting from mental fragmentation and “schizophrenia” (Lind), and translingualism as an opportunity, the effect of the multilingual and creative “back-and-forth” (Heym), is Steinitz’s thesis. The book painstakingly develops this bipolar view of two writers through an ingenious analysis of their major texts, with psychoanalytic theory dominating her critical landscape (mostly in Lind’s case).

In the first chapter, Steinitz tackles Jakov Lind’s translingual autobiography Counting My Steps and two other volumes of his autobiographical trilogy written in English, which trace back the writer’s multiple impersonations during his survival in Amsterdam, where he had been sent from Vienna on Kindertransport after the Anschluss. In a series of shape-shifting episodes in Nazi-occupied Holland, then in the “lion’s mouth” in Germany, and during the subsequent exodus to Palestine, Lind becomes not just a double- but a multiple-face Janus, changing names, languages, and identities from Heinz Landwirth to Jan Overbeek to Jakov Chaklan to Jakov Lind, until he eventually settles in London in the postwar years and starts writing in English.

Here and in the rest of her analysis of Lind’s writing and his language choice, Steinitz makes close parallels between the childhood trauma/abandonment by his mother and by his wet nurse Mitzi, the role of his father symbolizing fatherland Austria on the one hand and the “paradise lost” of his childhood, war survival, and the relationship with his languages (Austrian German, Dutch, Hebrew, and English) on the other. Fusing the writer’s personal trauma with war and Jewish survival, Steinitz applies Freud’s and Firenczi’s theories of traumatic split of the ego resulting in neurosis and even in schizophrenia and makes a case for Lind’s disintegrating mind, later turned into imaginative prose.

Conversely, in chapter 2, Stefan Heym’s novel Crusaders is characterized as “the archetypal ideological war novel” (echoing Soviet socialist realism), with the writer’s personal story on the backdrop, featuring his position as a translingual transcultural mediator” (67). Heym had fled to the United States during the war and served in the U.S. Army, writing propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts. Drawing on the Bakhtinian principle of dialogism and heteroglossia, Steinitz discusses the narrative and characters representing the doubling of Heym’s perspective, as a German and an American. During the rise of McCarthyism, Heym, deeply disappointed in American ideals, fled the United States and settled in the German Democratic Republic, a puppet state of the Soviet empire, where he continued his quest for truth and social meaning, writing...