Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (42 page)

Even more striking, though, is the play’s exploration of the inextricability of tradition and modernity as a sexual dialectic, one based on the symbiosis of ho- moerotic and heteroerotic love.
17
The Dybbuk
presents not one, but two pairs of lovers—the two men whose bond has the force of fate and the young boy and girl who reenact the love of their fathers. The heterosexual love affair/possession is at stage center, but the key to understanding its otherworldly power lies in the homoerotic friendship that refuses to remain relegated to the past or to the background. In
The Dybbuk
homosexual and heterosexual love are mutually de- pendent and, as a combined system, act as the very engine of the social order rather than operating at its margins. Jewish romance, then, is for Ansky, as Abramovitsh, “different from those of other people”; it is this difference that ex- plains the unwillingness of the father, in the prologue, to equate the tale he is about to tell his daughter with her conception of heterosexual love.

Ansky, of course, was not the first Jewish writer to contrast the traditional and modern sexual order, nor even to explore the nature of the bonds between

traditional men. Just as Chonen and Leah are cousins to the modernizing cou- ple of Haskalah romance, Sender and Nissen, their fathers, have precursors in Abramovitsh’s satires as well as in the earlier literature of the
misnagdim,
the op- ponents of the Hasidic movement. As David Biale writes, misnagdic literature took aim at Hasidic men who left their wives and children for weeks on end to visit the Zaddik’s court (Ansky, significantly, presents the oath between the young men as having taken place at the Zaddik’s court during the High Holy Days, the occasion of a Hasid’s longest absence from home); when men affili- ated themselves with the Hasidic movement, the wife “bewailed the husband of her youth, who had left her like a widow, and her sons cried that they had been left as orphans.”
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The misnagdim, Biale continues,

did not believe that the abandonment of wife and children served any holy purpose; to the contrary, they believed that the extreme asceticism was a cover for erotic abandon, just as the mystical doctrine of intercourse with the Shekhina was a mask for licentious behaviour in the court of the zaddik. The author of the Anti-Hasidic
Shever Poshim
claims that when the Hasidim gather at Amdur on the fast of the ninth of Av, they would sleep together in the attic, use filthy language, and sing love songs all night. This homosexual innuendo was connected to the intense male fel- lowship of the Hasidic court.
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Ansky’s description of Sender and Nissen’s relationship emphasizes their profound attachment and implies that it blossomed in their wives’ absence; nevertheless, it is not “homosexual innuendo,” since there is no trace of crit- icism in the play’s presentation of this bond. On the contrary,
The Dybbuk
re- sists the suggestion that the homoerotic bond that propels the narrative is a deviant one; where misnagdic and Haskalah polemics saw hasidic male fel- lowship as a threat to the fabric of Jewish family life, Ansky presents the love of Sender and Nissen as natural, true, and even fruitful. Just as he rescues the idea of arranged marriage from the very teeth of the Haskalah critique, so too does he valorize its corollary—the “intense male fellowship” of the yeshiva and Hasidic court—as contributing to Jewish continuity rather than its dis- ruption. In the “trial” between the two friends that precedes the exorcism rit- ual, Nissen’s ghost, speaking through the rabbi, reminds his old friend of their bond, a friendship that begins in the sexually segregated yeshiva, maintains its force and influence through their own near-simultaneous marriages (no wives are mentioned in this phrase) and into the marriage, far in the future, of the children resulting from their own unions:

reb shimshon:
Sender ben Henya! The holy dead man Nissen claims that in your youth you were friends in one yeshiva and your souls were joined together in true friendship. You both were married in the same week [“Ir hot beyde in eyn vokh chasene gehat”]. After that, when you met at the Rebbe’s court for the High Holy Days, you pledged that if your wives should conceive, and one would bear a boy and the other a girl, you two would be joined in marriage.
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The last phrase, “vet ir zikh
miskhatn
zein,” is a relatively rare usage, which stands midway between “vet ir hasene haben” (you would get married) and “vet ir vern machatonim” (you would become in-laws—itself a vastly more pro- found kinship term in traditional Ashkenaz than in modern, secular culture). The young men are described as soulmates, but the proliferation of reflexive constructions in the passage, the references to the life cycle, the use of the phys- ical term for an oath (
tkias kaf
, or handshake) all work to suggest that the bond between Nissen and Sender is a physically, sexually, and biologically produc- tive one. The concluding phrase
miskhatn zein
strengthens the already implic- it suggestion that Nissen and Sender pledge their children to each in order to forge the most intimate, quasi-marital connection two men could attain in their society. And this connection, far from being sterile or deviant, is chan- neled through the sanctioned routes of Jewish marital and reproductive bonds. Ansky was able to celebrate the homoeroticism of Ashkenazic marriage by reconfiguring Haskalah narratives that described an older generation, moti- vated by concerns about money and prestige, forging kinship connections through their adolescent sons and daughters (Abramovitsh’s 1868
The Fathers and the Sons
is a classic of this genre). While Sender’s betrothal of Leah to a rich young man participates in the conventions of this narrative, his earlier pledge to Nissen most assuredly does not—Sender and Nissen, far from being the enemies of young love, are its champions and symbols, pledging their children to each other in the first flush of their respective marriages.
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Thus the oath between Sender and Nissen to marry their children to each other is less an extreme case of the Haskalah’s representation of arranged marriage than its polar opposite—the victory of young love over practical considera- tion. By setting this pledge among such young men and overtly sexualizing their contract, Ansky recasts the generational opposition as a suppressed par- allelism, in which the fathers and children are, quite literally, kindred spirits,

expressing the same impulses in only apparently dissimilar ways.

In contrast with
The Dybbuk
’s valorization of the bond between the two men, the relationship between their son and daughter is described in more

psychologically ambiguous terms. Where Sender and Nissen see the way to an emotional and physical union, the heterosexual bond between their two chil- dren remains unconsummated (except through the unnatural act of demon- ic—and transgendered—possession), grotesque, sterile. We might usefully compare the passage describing the love between Sender and Nissen, deploy- ing the grammatical and semantic markers of regeneration, with the moving lament of Leah in the play’s final scene:

leah:
Turn to me, my groom, my husband. I will carry you in my heart, and in the still of the night you will come to me in my dreams and together we will rock our unborn babies to sleep. We will sew little shirts for them and sing them sweet songs:

Hushabye my babies,

Without clothes, without a bed. Unborn children, never mine. Lost forever, lost in time.
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Leah’s lullaby to the unborn children she is bearing suggests the conse- quences of suppressing the operations of love, but it also recasts the “natural” processes of heterosexual sex and of human reproduction—pregnancy, birth, and parenting—as uncanny images of death. However, it is the central image of the play, the dybbuk, that is the most striking expression of an ambivalent heterosexuality. The figure of the man-woman, penetrated by and pregnant with her dead male lover and their unborn children and speaking his words through her mouth, is both the fruition and the destruction of the bond be- tween the two men. That is, the possessed Leah represents the ultimate con- summation of the two men’s pledge, joined as she is with her betrothed for all eternity. At the same time, she is the nightmarish opposite of the biological union and regeneration the two men had hoped for, pregnant only with death. In this play, then, it is the heterosexual couple that is barren, who can come together only through unnatural channels.

The dybbuk is an overdetermined figure—indeed, it is a figure
for
overde- termination and ambivalence—mediating between life and death, male and female, the transcendent and the deformed, victimization and empowerment. It should be no surprise, then, that this figure should open itself up to diver- gent and even paradoxical interpretations. (Ansky’s play, moreover, allows for both the traditional supernatural understanding of the possession and a nat- uralizing psychosexual one, since directors traditionally have avoided special effects in depicting the possession and have Leah speak in a deepened, “mas-

culine” version of her own voice.) How then can we understand
The Dybbuk
’s unsettling perspective on heterosexual love? It is clear that Chonen’s posses- sion of Leah is meant to represent—if only from the point of view of the lovers—the ultimate romantic gesture, a union of their souls in the absence of any possibility for earthly marriage. At the same time, the dybbuk is a mon- strous literalization of Genesis 2:24—“Hence a man . . . clings to his wife so that they become one flesh”—producing an incoherently gendered creature whom the community must violently expel. The dybbuk both transcends physical passion and caricatures it, reproducing the gestures of heterosexuali- ty—penetration and union, pregnancy and birth—in a form that appears, at one and the same time, as the most spiritually exalted expression of love and as its most grossly carnal disfigurement.

Alongside the dybbuk’s paradoxical unification of the spiritual and the fleshly—and not unrelated to it—is its conflation of male and female in a sin- gle body. In the dybbuk heterosexual passion, taken to its radical extreme, produces a kind of drag, in which a man wears not women’s clothing but her very body. Heterosexuality, in this extreme form of drag, reveals its own in- ternal contradictions: the fantasy of physical union rests on the illusion of nat- ural, stable gender differences and hierarchies, a structure Judith Butler has called “the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.”
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When these gen- der differences collapse, even through romantic merging, heterosexuality is transformed into its suppressed other. It is in the wedding scene at the heart of the play, at the very moment when Chonen has entered Leah’s body and merged with her, that their passion expresses itself in a series of homosexual gestures. Thus the nuptial blessings come close to sanctifying the union of one bridegroom with another (clothed in his bride’s body); the community is saved from this circumstance by the spectacle of Leah rejecting the man who is about to become her husband by declaring—in a “mannish” voice—her love for her “intended bride”:

leah (looking wild, she speaks not in her own voice but in a masculine one):
Ah-ah! You have buried me and I have returned to my intended bride and will not leave her!
24

The collapse of proper gender identities in this wedding scene, as bizarre and idiosyncratic as the circumstances leading to it may appear, nevertheless has roots in Haskalah critiques of Jewish marriage. In its negative-satirical mode (as opposed to its positive-romantic mode), the Haskalah presented traditional Jewish husbands and wives as negative images of their proper, i.e., European, counterparts, satirizing Jewish weddings in which terrifi and passive young

men were led to their abrasive wives and mothers-in-law like sheep to the slaughter.
25
Following this satirical tradition,
The Dybbuk
stages a Jewish wed- ding in which the wide-eyed groom whimpers “Ikh hob moyre . . . mer far alts forcht ich zich far ir . . . far der besulah” (“I’m afraid—most of all I’m terrifi of her—the girl”), and in which his fears turn out to be thoroughly justifi
26

Nineteenth-century gender satire (Abramovitsh’s cross-dressing character in
Benjamin the Third
, for example) emerged from the gap between the tra- ditional sexual order the Enlighteners rejected and the bourgeois European one they emulated. Ansky’s post-Haskalah drag is more profoundly ambiva- lent, including in its implicit critique not only the “wrong” couple, Menashe and Leah, but also the “right” couple, Leah and Chonen—not only tradi- tional marriage, that is, but also the union of true lovers that is the ideal of heteronormative modernity. It is Chonen, after all—more than Menashe— who becomes, in his passionate possession of the woman he loves, truly “fem- inized” in a way that is both captivating and revolting. And Leah speaks in an inappropriately masculine voice not only as the traditional Jewish woman but also as the avatar of a new era in heterosexual relations. The new heterosexu- ality, it would seem, cannot guarantee proper Jewish masculinity and femi- ninity any more than the old sexual order could. When the Rebbe asks the strange hybrid creature—Chonen/Leah—the woman’s body with the male voice—what or whom it is: he-she-it answers: “Ikh bin fun di, vus haben gezukht neye vegn” (“I am one of those who searched out new ways”).
27
In this resonant phrase Ansky makes the fullest use of the conflation in tradi- tional thought between the new and the forbidden, the modern and the dan- gerous. The dybbuk, then, is a figure drawn from the deepest recesses of Jew- ish folk belief, but it is also a figure for what is most dangerous and terrifying in the horizons opening before the traditional world: the dybbuk, in other words, is a New Woman, a woman who rejects one bridegroom and incorpo- rates another, speaking with the voice and rebellious authority of the mascu- line other.