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78 4 Dancing at Two Weddings Mazel between Exile and Diaspora Murray Baumgarten CITY AND SHTETL My essay is informed by a question: why have the Jews and modern Jewish writers persisted in their love affair with city life? The folk proverb “die Stadtluft macht frei” [the city air liberates] suggests one kind of explanation. Episodes ranging from the Book of Esther—“The city of Shushan was perplexed ”—to scenes and works from the contemporary Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar, the Israeli A. B. Yehoshua, and the North Americans Saul Bellow , Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and Rebecca Goldstein reinforce the claim.1 But our fascination has not been limited to cities and, especially in recent years, has extended to its geographical and cultural opposite, the shtetl. Several recent works, including Eva Hoffman’s The Shtetl and Allen Hoffman’s Small Worlds, have focused on that smaller world, perhaps in response to its utter destruction by the Nazis, perhaps also in the effort to find a way to respond to the suburbanization of modern life, in particular American Jewish life, and the simultaneous increasing secularism and piety of its Jewish urban villagers. The contrast between city and suburb could be analyzed historically, relegating the city-centered fictions to an older generation and seeing in the new suburban-centered novels the wave of the future. Although such a typology is, at present, speculative, it is clear that we are at a moment of change in the literary and social history of Jewish writing. Here, Rebecca Goldstein’s work is particularly important. It encompasses both suburban and urban worlds, as well as that of the shtetl, as it explores their meanings and points us to a fuller understanding not only of the sociological but also the literary, political , and (even) spiritual dimensions of our contemporary situation. What is striking about Mazel, published in 1995, is the powerful dialogue between shtetl, suburb, and city around which it is constructed. Mazel recapitulates many of the themes of Goldstein’s earlier work, especially her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), and her collection of stories, Strange Attractors (1993), in which the central characters ofMazel first appear. In this novel, suburb, shtetl, and city illuminate an abiding concern of Jewish life, the relation of exile and diaspora.Mazel is in part a response to the suburban appropriation of some of the central values of the shtetl. However, the shtetl is a world obsessed by the dislocation of exile, while the city provides the chance to construct an empowering diasporic homeland within the larger condition of differing ranges of Jewish powerlessness and the suburb, though similar to the shtetl, partakes of both conditions,2 for her central characters are caught in dancing at two weddings, unable to abandon either world. Living in shtetl, suburb, and city, they are marked by the political, sociological, spiritual, and cultural values of each and thus enact the full range of modern Jewish life. They are caught between exile and diaspora. People change their names as they change their places in this novel; yet their new identities do not allow them to relinquish the old. Instead of fitting in because of their new identities, they become outsiders in a different way. Personalities, situations, and events are doubled. Some figures take on the life histories of dead siblings and elaborate their narratives as their own. These doubled lives echo the worlds of gothic fiction and an interspersed realist narrative, and these mixed genres of modernist fiction are reinforced by classical Jewish forms, including chasidic parable, talmudic dialectic, and fables approaching the brevity and continuing resonance of biblical narrative. Some characters seem at times to partake of a second soul, as if the Shekhinah had awarded them its Sabbath gift permanently and thus taken them out of the condition of exile. Though they are worldlessluftmenschen , they are also seekers of the way. Time plays tricks on us in Mazel. Scenes years apart merge into each other; events that changed the lives of grandparents are relived by grandchildren; the future becomes past and the past, present. The reader joins the characters in this process of decentering. Neither past nor present is anchored to a central scene or figure or place; instead, experiences flow into each other. Ratherthantheindividualistcharacteroftherealisticnovel,weencounter a different literary mode. Mazel lacks the narrative challenge thrown at the reader by a Bellow novel and the strategy of entrapment in the seemingly autobiographical narrative characteristic of Philip Roth’s fictions. Rebecca Goldstein’s novel invites...

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