From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking by Dan Miron (review)

Miron’s is a failed, brilliant book. On the one hand, at well over five hundred pages (with notes), it comes across as a data dump, perhaps, before anything else, the occasionally bitter, at times frantic, and often unedited efforts of a monumental scholar to make sure he’s been understood (and to settle some old scores). On the other hand, anyone who thinks at all about Jewish literature, anyone dedicated at all to theorizing this category we too easily call Jewish literature, should be glad to have Miron’s text. It is one of the rare works that actually aims to think—let alone succeeds in thinking—critically about the field. If intelligent Jewish literary study is going to have a future, surely Miron’s book will be part of its archive.

One of the frustrating things about the book, I think, is that it aims to accomplish two discrete tasks that, surprisingly I guess, don’t necessarily support each other. It offers at once a history of Jewish literary criticism and a critique of Jewish literary history. Though the theory of Jewish literature Miron proposes—which replaces, as his title suggests, a metaphorics of continuity with one of contiguity—is supposed to serve as the interlock between these two tasks, the book gets awfully ungainly at times. One might want to venture that Miron, emphasizing the spatial over the temporal, has written an untimely book, as this frequently—and anachronistically—looks like the kind of encyclopedic treatise I thought we weren’t supposed to be writing anymore. I write this with tongue in cheek of course, but the fact remains that a much shorter and more focused monograph could have more successfully served the polemical heart of this book. I don’t want to devalue the important historical work Miron accomplishes here; I only want to point out that the reader constantly has to recalibrate as the book cycles repeatedly, and not always smoothly, between historiography and theorization. I’m going to concentrate here on the theory bit rather than on the history bit because there’s more at stake in it, I think, for a field such as Jewish literary study that seems right now—at least in the American academy—to be poised at a significant tipping point between a reactionary historicism and a really interesting critical future. But that’s also just how I roll, and I certainly don’t want to dissuade potential readers from exploring the fantastically rich history of Jewish literary criticism Miron provides.

Miron’s book is organized around the correct presumption that any properly critical consideration of Jewish literature qua Jewish must begin in a twinned theorization of Jewish identity and of the Jewishness of Jewish literature. First, the book advocates thinking about the totality of Jewish literature as more an irregular assemblage contingently cobbled together than a coherent unity persisting over time. (Incidentally, Miron is decidedly dialectical here. We see this in even the first few pages of the prologue, where he begins by describing the conflict between Hebraists and Yiddishists about the authentic linguistic home of Jewish writing: this conflict is overcome in the more general and critical question of whether a specific and definable brand of Jewish writing existed outside the boundaries of Jewish languages; and then the yet more fundamental question of whether there’s an essence in Jewish writing; and then finally, back at the particular space where he started, the newly formulated, and now self-consciously political, critical question of whether the problems that occupied Hebrew and Yiddish literary scholars before the Israeli era deserve to be salvaged from oblivion and rendered once again an integral part of the theoretical literary agenda of the twenty-first century.) Challenging the institutional hegemony exercised by the concept of a canon of Jewish literature, a tradition that, structured arboreally, unifies all properly “Jewish” writing by way of an understanding of time as...