The Narrative of Persecution

I

The touchstone and point of departure of narratives of persecution, as of most narratives of catastrophe, is a violated state of equilibrium. Persecution is a disruption of the regular movement of history and the norms and ceremonies of any given social body or state of mind. In a passage from his major post World War I novel A Guest for the Night (published 1939), anticipating World War II and the Holocaust, S. Y Agnon describes this transition from normalcy to the insecure, frightened state of the victim of a historic catastrophe in the following terms:

I wanted to ask about her children, but I said to myself: I will not ask, in case —heaven forbid —they are dead. Since the war overwhelmed us you do not know whether your friend is alive, and if he is alive whether his life is worth living. The good years have passed when you used to ask about a man and they would tell you: He has had a wedding in his house, he has had a circumcision in his house, his grand-son has celebrated bar mitzvah, his son-in-law is adding a third storey to his house. Thou art righteous, O Lord and Thy judgments are upright. The sufferings Thou hast sent to Israel, Thou alone knowest whether they are for good or for ill.

(1968: 231)

Agnon confronts the potentially idyllic normative narrative of bourgeois and Jewish life with the real state of affairs after the catastrophe: the narrative of normalcy is disrupted by the crisis of war and persecution (see also Shaked 1989: 137-46).

In narratives of persecution the time is out of joint and life does not run according to the major stages of human development. The narratives have two permanent actants: the persecutor (singular or plural) as victimizer and the persecuted (singular or plural) as victim. The struggle between them creates diverse typologies of persecution, but basically it is a conflict between the powerful and the weak. The moral evaluation of the two sides is not uniform: in the pairing of policeman and criminal, the conflict is sometimes presented not as resistance to criminal persecution, but, on the contrary, as cruel and unjustified persecution of an innocent victim (e.g., Jean Valjean in Hugo's Les Miserables) by the police. In some instances the same plot could be interpreted by different witnesses in opposite ways. The roles of cat and mouse can be seen as reversed. Obviously, the diversity of staged interpretations of, say, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, in different times, under different social circumstances, and by different directors is a good example. The archetypes of Cain and Ahasuerus, criminals or victims of their sins and refugees, are reinterpreted positively in Byron's tragedy and in Stephan Heym's novel, respectively. This, however, is only one aspect of the potential diversity in the understanding of the relationship between the persecuted and the persecutor.

II

One major spokesman for the persecuted was, of course, Franz Kafka, who bestowed a metaphysical dimension on the narrative of persecution and immigration. The plots of The Trial and The Castle are those of uprooting and persecution by the irrational powers of the Uncanny. The persecuted are helpless victims of the demoniac anonymous forces whose possible real referents are totalitarian regimes.¹

Narratives of persecution most often display intertextual connections to a canonical mastertext; they reconstitute the topos of persecution on the basis of patterns, schemes, genres, and myths that are "always already there" (Rimmon-Kenan 15). The present is illuminated by the light of the past: from within the present crisis one discovers a hidden power in the past and its potential for affecting the future.

The ambiguity of the persecution topos emerges in the following passage from the 1890 short story "Shem and Japhet on the Train" by one of the major Hebrew and Yiddish authors of the late nineteenth century, Shalom Yakov Abramovits (1838-1917), who wrote under the pen-name of Mendele Mokher Seforim. The story starts with a group of Jews in a train station trying to board the train —a scene...