Changing Places in Doron Rabinovici’s Andernorts

Often themselves the children of Holocaust survivors, the second generation of Jewish-identified writers and film-makers, who began to come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explore the same question with which Jean Améry (b. 1912), a Holocaust survivor, titled his essay “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?” The essay, which Améry wrote in 1966 about his own persecution, torture, and exile, expresses his deep and constant sense of homelessness. He concludes his essay with the sentence: “[Der Mensch] braucht viel Heimat, mehr jedenfalls, als eine Welt von Beheimateten, deren ganzer Spaß ein kosmopolitischer Ferienspaß ist, sich träumen läßt” (101). His and other such first-generation concerns with place continue to evolve in the work of second-generation Jewish-identified writers and film-makers in Germany and Austria.

Sander Gilman observes in a recent article on Jewish multiculturalism: “Among Jewish authors, there has been an anxiety about the meanings associated with place, for good or for ill, since the Holocaust” (191). Indeed, Barbara Honigmann (b. 1949) maps her parents’ and her literary and geographical coordinates by locating her European Jewish identity in four novels: Roman von einem Kinde (1986), Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991), Damals, dann und danach (1999), and Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004). The “Vienna films” of Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952)—Wien Retour: Franz West (1985), Die papierene Brücke (1987), and Nach Jerusalem (1990)—retrieve and reconfigure Jewish space for a second generation living in Central Europe and Israel. Shuttling back and forth between continents, protagonists in novels by Anna Mitgutsch (b. 1948), Haus der Kindheit (2000) and Familienfest (2003), represent variants of a transnational Jewish consciousness, while Vladmir Vertlib (b. 1966) situates his Mehrfachidentitäten in a “Zwischenwelt” (Vertlib, Spiegel 59) in his two novels of emigration and exile, Abschiebung (1995) and Zwischenstationen (1999).

Prominent also among these writers and film-makers of the second generation is the Israeli-born Austrian Doron Rabinovici (b. 1961), whose most recent novel, Andernorts (2010), deals with questions of place for Jews who spread their lives between Austria and Israel. Written as an identity puzzle solved – but not finally resolved – by the end of the novel, Andernorts belongs to an evolving cluster of essays and literary works concerned with identifying, informing, and reuniting the generations of Holocaust survivors. As the title Andernorts suggests, Rabinovici questions the meaning of “place” in the lives of post-Holocaust Jews. Andernorts is in fact the third novel in his series of novels to take up Jewish-identified questions of place. Following a brief review of his first two novels of place and their critical reception, I will focus on the riddling manner in which Rabinovici gradually spells out his evolving sense of place in Andernorts.

Specifically Jewish questions of place figure prominently in his two earlier novels, Suche nach M. (1997) and Ohnehin (2004). Rabinovici calls Suche nach M. a “Kaleidoskop der Erinnerung und der Schuld” (“‘Ich habe nicht das Gefühl’” 18), which he patterns from scattered transgenerational memories of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, tracing their impress on contemporary Jewish identity. He centres these memories of victimhood and resistance in Vienna. Vivian Liska discusses Vienna’s layered topography in her comparison of Rabinovici’s Papirnik, Suche nach M., and Ohnehin to the Vienna novels of Robert Schindel and Robert Menasse. Rabinovici’s fiction evokes both places of survival and sites of murder – Viennese landmarks that remind Jews living in post-war Vienna of Austria’s ambivalence towards its involvement in the deadly discrimination before the Anschluss and during the Holocaust (Liska 5–6). Francis Sharp and Maria-Regina Kecht also examine Ohnehin in terms of its topographical focus. They examine how Rabinovici showcases Vienna’s Naschmarkt,an intercultural hub of exchange that serves as the prototypical space of alterity (Kecht 1) deep within the metropolis. Matthias Beilein provides the most thorough analysis of Rabinovici’s poetics of place in Suche nach M. and Ohnehin, identifying both novels, together with those of Schindel and Menasse, as “Groß-stadtliteratur” (134). Beilein echoes Rabinovici in naming the Naschmarkt the central Viennese “transitory locale.” As Beilein...