The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris (review)

What does it mean to dehyphenate? Theoretical considerations of the hyphen figure significantly in diaspora studies. Hyphens, the main argument runs, occupy the epistemological position of a particularity diametrically opposed to the perceived stable, unified, and universal position of the genre. A surplus of meaning is concentrated in hyphens, rendering them volatile, hybrid, yet-to-be. But, as logic would dictate, the instability of the hyphen also posits the purity and stability of the referents that stand on its sides. Thus, the hyphenated term German-Jewish inevitably presupposes two distinct, unified, and originary categories: German and Jewish. By removing the hyphen, Leslie Morris's book The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture Outside the Margins seeks therefore to counter the rigidity, national and cultural, that the hyphen as border paradoxically bestows on the German and the Jewish, pointing instead at the permeability of these now-deterritorialized spaces.

The Translated Jew sets out to expand the notion of Jewish and particularly German Jewish text post-1945 by unmooring the category "from the strictures of a national literature that has, of necessity, needed to delineate its borders" (6). Removing the national borders, like the hyphen, indicates a new relation between Jewish text and space. Just as Jewish text exceeds the confines of a "national literature," Jewish space transcends any grounded notion of place. This allows Morris to present Jewish text/space and Jewishness more generally as multidirectional, decentered, in a permanent state of translation, or, in other words, as diasporic. Linking the diasporic with Jewishness, Morris perpetuates a familiar argument informing a range of works, from the numerous studies of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin—Morris cites Jonathan Boyarin's Thinking in Jewish (1996) in her introduction—to Judith Butler's Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) and the concept of self-departure it advances. Parting Ways (not cited by Morris) employs the same view of translation that animates The Translated Jew. Emphasizing the fissure opened up by translation as a complete departure from original grounds ("ceding ground") serves Butler's inquiry into the possibility of thinking about Jewish sources on the "other" without succumbing to a hegemonic privileging of Jewishness as the authentic origin of the ethical. Morris's notion of translation, likewise, departs from origins and genealogies (though not always from a notion of Jewishness as an ethical origin). Her readings of works by self-translators such as Raymond Federman and Rose Ausländer precludes any notion of an original work, just as her discussions of the quotational projects of Robert Fitterman, Heimrad Bäcker, and Anne Blonstein highlight the collapse of the borders that separate original from appropriated materials. Another long overdue border collapse is that between disciplines. Morris manages it well in discussions that link literature with visual, digital, and body art, as in her practice of "reading tangentially" a variety of contiguous works that seem unrelated from a traditional perspective (her discussion of banality and repetition in Warhol and Ausländer is one example). Breaking free from the authoritative grip of origins and authenticity enables an "aesthetic of uncertainty" (33), a critical response to a post-Holocaust literary and artistic discourse that has tended to monumentalize Auschwitz as another kind of grounded referent.

Eschewing centers, Morris looks to the marginal, the non-canonical, to locate a notion of German Jewish that is liberated from German-Jewish genealogies. The permeability that a deterritorialized view of German Jewish facilitates allows for Morris's curation of a diasporic non-canon of German Jewish works by authors and artists whose nationalities (French, British, and most of all American) would otherwise prevent their admittance to the traditional German-Jewish category. The same rationale informs Morris's fascination with superimposed German (/) Jewish spaces merging between traces of Jewish life and the German history of the German Democratic Republic, and her reading of works by German writers such as W. G. Sebald as Jewish text.

The claim that "German...