Qui Parle?

Perhaps one lesson to be learned in the Age of Trump is that a particular individual can be very dangerous. Donald Trump is difficult to categorize: He is not a typical billionaire, a typical Republican, a typical populist, or a typical neo-Nazi. He has, for example, been labeled anti-Semitic, but no president in recent memory has had so many Jewish advisers and cabinet members, beginning with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Hence efforts to discredit him have been especially tricky: one can call him any name in the book, but this cat seems to have more than nine lives.

A belief in the individual—in difference—is currently taboo; indeed, it is suspect today to differentiate the human from the animal or, for that matter, from the life of growing plants. It is a convenient myth, but only a myth: its adherents have set themselves proudly against Trumpism, neoliberalism—the whole apparatus of the current regime. As for me, I proudly embrace my individuality. Qui parle? I speak as a white Jewish cisgender woman of eighty-five. I was married for over sixty years and am now a widow with two daughters and three grandchildren. My ideas have been shaped by my age and gender but even more by my identity as an Austrian refugee from Hitler in 1938. The Nazi occupation of Vienna literally transformed my then six-year-old life: my family lost everything, left everything behind, and began a new life in the United States. I grew up fairly poor in a small apartment and attended public school in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. I remember badly wanting figure skates, but we couldn't afford them: I remember that the pair I wanted as a teenager cost $17.95. I won a full scholarship to the Fieldston School (Ethical Culture) but was constantly aware of my poverty vis-à-vis the other students. Later I was a Jewish student at the Catholic University of America. I chose Catholic U as the best university in the Washington area, where I was living with my husband, who was at that time a fellow in cardiology at Georgetown University—another Catholic institution. He and I had many jokes about the quirks of religious institutions, but we also found our mentors kind and supportive.

Qui parle? When I speak German, I evidently sound like a good little girl; I know no scatological words, no erotic slang, and Austrians are amused by my old-fashioned speech constructions. When I speak French, I feel very sophisticated, and when I try Italian (I know only a little), I feel warm and energetic. My American speech is tinged with the slight remnant of the Bronx accent: I say "draugh" for drawer. My Viennese background is a big part of my identity; indeed, as I get older I find myself identifying with Europeans more than with Americans. My refugee habits have stuck: I feel that one gets through life by problem solving, optimism, and the assertion of one's rights; I am not easily cowed. So as a critic I have always followed my own star and avoided coteries and cults that strike me as anathema.

My identity has been shaped by the concentric circles in which I travel: my childhood self, my marriage to a physician, my life as a wife and mother, my passage through various institutions that have shaped me. Qui parle? My unique self, unlike all others, even my two daughters or my mother. Posthumanism? I don't believe in it for a moment. I observe my three grandchildren, now in their twenties, and note how unique each one is. Yes, there are shared attitudes, customs, beliefs, but when was that not the case? I believe in what Marcel Duchamp so aptly called the infrathin: the smallest possible distinction between two actions, two images, two words. I speak as a woman, a white person, a nonpracticing Jew, an elderly person, an upper-middle-class person, a US citizen, a Euro-Californian, a mother, a one-time victim, a professor, a writer, a member of the chattering classes, but first...