The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

Afterword

Afterword ! Eva Hoffman The history of exile—understood in its broadest sense as longterm displacement from one’s native region—is by now very long and informatively varied. In its strongest form, exile refers to forcible expulsion, to leaving your country or place of habitation under duress. But as we scan the vast panorama of collective and individual migrations, we can see that there are shades of exile, occurring within widely differing political and social conditions and for an almost ingenious array of reasons, ranging from sheer state oppression to economic deprivation. The circumstances surrounding individual migration, and the wider context in which it takes place, can have enormous practical and psychic repercussions , reflected in the various designations we use for those who leave one country for another. There are refugees, émigrés, emigrants , and expatriates—terms that point to distinct kinds of social , but also sociopsychological experience, including, crucially, different degrees of personal choice. Historically, too, the symbolic meaning and, therefore, the inward experience of exile has gone through many permutations. In medieval Europe, where an individual’s identity was defined by one’s place and role in a specific society, exile from a village Afterword | 235 or a city-state was the worst punishment that could be inflicted, amounting to a sort of psychic death. For religious Jews living in the Diaspora, on the other hand, it was the countries in which they actually lived that were seen as sites of symbolic exile; the spiritual center and home toward which they were imaginatively oriented was located in a territory, at once allegorical and geographic , called Jerusalem, or Israel. The essays in this richly revealing and valuable collection are reports from a late stage and distinct kind of exile, one marked by stark dramas, and quiet ambiguities. Of course, as these personal and subtle statements show, each emigrant story, and trajectory, is unique and filled with its particular details of difficulty and success, private sorrow and unexpected satisfactions. And yet, for all the divergences of their experiences, the emigrants whose biographies are considered here share some central dimensions of identity and of history: They are writers and they are Jews; and, with the exception of Geoffrey Hartman, they all emigrated from the Soviet sphere during the period of the Cold War. How do these salient facts affect their lived experience of cultural and political transplantation? It is part of the essays’ interest that their authors give us insight into the personal vicissitudes that have fed their writing; and that they give full and truthful voice to the multiple and sometimes contradictory elements of their experience. None of them diminishes the difficulties or the anguish of displacement; but all of them attest to the gains that accrue in the process. To begin on the other side of the geographical divide: none of the writers included here was precisely forced to leave—but none of them left, precisely, voluntarily. They left because of political pressures; because the countries of the Soviet bloc in the postwar decades were materially uncomfortable and politically stifling places to live; because, as Jews, they were targets of ordinary anti-Semitism and official prejudice; because, as writers 236 | Eva Hoffman (for those whose literary careers began before emigration), they were subject to covert and overt censorship. It is perhaps moot, in such circumstances, to speak of entirely free choice. Moreover, although history reversed their assumption, for the emigrants of that era, Jewish or non-Jewish, there seemed to be no possibility of return. By deciding to emigrate, they in effect chose exile, with its aura of finality, its sense that departure was irrevocable. This awareness undoubtedly intensified the sense of rupture and loss attendant on all migration. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Bronislava Volková speak eloquently about the primary, human losses they suffered on leaving their countries: the acute pain of separation from parents, friends, and playmates; from people who understood their history and sometimes shared it (“Suddenly; every memory becomes as sharp as a knife,” writes Volková); the loss of cherished possessions, documents, professional credentials. It can be seen in retrospect that the period of the Cold War produced quite extreme forms of displacement. The Iron Curtain created a bipolar world, of radical divisions and chiaroscuro contrasts, of enormous and artificial distances, out of all proportion to actual geography. On the economic, political, and social levels, East and West became each other’s antipodes, differing...