"There a Damp Sky Thunders its Cough": On Two New Literary Monographs

When I first read Karen Grumberg's manuscript, images of armed men marching in the streets of an American town chanting anti-Semitic slogans and wearing swastikas featured on TV screens and in the daily newspapers. Back then, it seemed impossible to separate the terror resulting from the reemergence of a dark past – which, as Grumberg points out, is one of the prominent characteristics of the gothic – from her discussion of the gothic elements figuring in modern Hebrew writing. Little did I know that when I would read it again for this review, I would be thinking about Grumberg's argument on the gothic with a very different set of images associated with the terror of the past. Similarly, Sunny Yudkoff's book gains now, more than a year into a global pandemic, a new and very concrete meaning. Terms such as 'quarantine', 'infectious disease', and 'death rates' reemerge from the distant past and become part of our daily lexicon. This rethinking of anxieties long gone make these two books uniquely relevant to the collective moment we are living in, but it also ensures their lasting relevance in future eras when today's angsts will reemerge in the literature of our successors.

Hebrew Gothic and Tubercular Capital invite us, each in its own way, to consider and re-consider how we view the terror of the past. Both authors set out to explore the paradox of a fascination with a certain experience that involves angst and pain – the gothic in Grumberg's case and tuberculosis in Yudkoff's – and to follow the ways in which this powerful paradox influenced the modern Jewish literary world. It is tempting and, in fact, fairly common in our field, to write on these works and writers of the past from a revisionist perspective that subordinates the interpretation of the works to the scholar's critical ideology. Often, this leads to historicizing which is not grounded in history. Furthermore, this kind of scholarship often limits the inquiry to a narrow perspective. Missing in the energy spent on the attempts to fit a work or a writer into a certain pre-determined theory, are the unique features of the work and the world of its creator.

What I appreciate most in these two excellent books is that they absolutely avoid this temptation. This is not to say that they do not rely on a theoretical framework. Grumberg's study adopts two theoretical orientations: theories of spectrality, known as the "spectral turn", and affect theory. She contends that affect theory is surprisingly missing from the critical discussion of the gothic and while only one chapter in her book deals with it directly, affect theory thoroughly informs her book. Grumberg uses it with great sophistication in her interpretations, offering a fresh mode of critical thinking about the gothic. As to the "spectral turn", she is aware of its risks, embodied in two opposing trends: on the one hand of being too broad in its universal conceptualization (she brings forth Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx as an example), and on the other hand of confining spectrality to the elucidation of specific historical events and experiences of haunting and ghosts. She submits to neither, using spectrality as a conceptual framework that allows her to situate her work "within the broader, transnational interest in ghosts and haunting" (11) and to re-conceptualize the powerlessness and victimization that have come to define the Jewish self-conception and to govern contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

In Yudkoff's case, the concept of "tubercular capital", which stands at the center of her study, derives from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, according to which, in various fields of production, including the arts, different producers and players consecrate a work as producing value. She is interested in the identification of "the value-driven superstructure that...