Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (43 page)

But it would be wrong to read the dybbuk solely as an ambivalent sym- bol of female empowerment; the possessed woman is a slippery figure, facing the world as romantic rebel and sexual victim both. From this second per- spective, Leah is less an embodiment of the fathers who betroth their children to each other earlier, and with more passion than is customary, than of the mothers, invisible, never consulted, whose bodies are the silent tokens of ex- change, the symbolic property that enables their husbands to forge their bond.
28
In a grotesque parody of the traditional use of women’s bodies as con- duits for male kinship, Leah’s possessed body becomes the site for a meeting of two men, the occasion for their conversation beyond the limits of time and

death. As Carol Clover argues is the case for the American possession movies of the 1970s and 1980s,
The Dybbuk
stages a female drama behind which lurks an unacknowledged male homoerotic crisis.
29
The excesses of Leah’s predicament function not only as a “cover” for her father’s suppressed trauma and as an opportunity for its resolution; the voice that issues from her body is the symptom that speaks the Jewish man’s hysterical truth.

Ansky’s dybbuk, then, is both the culmination of the Haskalah program to heterosexualize Ashkenaz and its subversive shadow, its monster double. If heterosexual romance turns out to be, in Ansky’s work, an ambivalent proj- ect, it is not because Jews are unsuited for romance, as the Haskalah critique would have it. Romance becomes grotesque in
The Dybbuk
for a reason that ultimately indicts the Enlightenment itself: because eroticism shorn of its tra- ditional connections, ripped from its generational and communal context, is a stillborn child. Eroticism, for Ansky’s post-Haskalah generation, is the en- gine that propels Jewish continuity as much as the link between individual lovers. From this perspective the dybbuk is a product neither of the past nor of the present but rather of the violently disrupted connection between them.
The Dybbuk,
then, hinges not only on the mystical-erotic link between parents and children but even more crucially on the radical break that severs it. If the bond between Sender and Nissen ultimately destroys their children, it is not because their pledge ignores the wishes of their children but because their children are stopped from carrying it through. Sender’s failure to re- member his friend and their pledge—and his own younger self—drives this fated love underground, only to resurface in the terrifying form of possession. Thus the exorcism of the dybbuk cannot proceed before Sender is subjected to a trial that serves as a theater (within the theater) of memory. But Sender’s love for his friend has never been exactly forgotten, neither in the children who reenact it nor even by himself. In the scene in which Sender is led to re- member his half-forgotten pledge, it emerges that his greedy negotiations with prospective bridegrooms were no more than a defense against the at- tractions of his daughter’s suitor. When Nissen asks, through the mouthpiece of Reb Shimshon, why Sender had never inquired who Chonen’s father was and where he was from (normal behavior for a Jewish host, even one without

a marriageable daughter), Sender answers:

sender:
I don’t know . . . I don’t remember . . . but I swear, I was always drawn to the boy as a son-in-law! That was why I put such difficult con- ditions on prospective matches that no one could ever meet them. That was how three matches fell through. But the last time the family agreed to everything.

reb shimshon:
Nissen ben Rivke says that deep in your heart you recognized his son and were therefore afraid to ask him about his family. You wanted someone who could give your daughter a rich and comfortable life.
30

For the Haskalah romance, economics underwrites the arranged-marriage system and deafens traditional Jewish parents to the demands of erotic free- dom. By contrast, Ansky takes the conventional opposition between money and love and complicates it: Sender’s halting response suggests that he drove a hard bargain for his daughter not because—or not only because—he want- ed a son-in-law wealthier than Chonen but precisely because he was attempt- ed to shield himself from being drawn to the boy. In this case, at least, finan- cial wheelings and dealings are no more than a pathetic defense against the demands of memory and love—the love of his daughter for the yeshiva boy who eats at their table, Sender’s love for the friend of his youth, and his at- traction to the young man who is the son of his beloved Nissen. If Sender sab- otages his daughter’s erotic desires, it is not because he doesn’t understand them but rather because he cannot acknowledge that he shares them.

In the court scene between Nissen’s spirit and Sender that is a necessary prelude to the exorcism ritual, memory is at center stage. Here, it is not the possessed woman who is on trial (she is not even present for this scene), but Sender, for whom the trial serves simultaneously as an indictment of his fail- ure of memory and an exposure of what has been forgotten. In the radical logic of Ansky’s modernist rewriting of the Haskalah romance, the heterosex- ual union remains unconsummated (except through demonic possession) be- cause the homoerotic bond has been forgotten—or repressed; and the present is stifled and corrupted by the erasure of a past that continues to shape and haunt it.

The Dybbuk
, then, joins an archaeology of Jewish eros with an erotics of Jewish communality and continuity, creating modernist theater by thematiz- ing and transcending the disruptions of modernity. For a play that explores the mutual pressures of the past and the present, it is appropriate that Sender and Nissen’s bond should have been forgotten and remembered anew in every generation after the play’s premiere. The homoeroticism Ansky sunk below the surface of his play emerged most visibly first in the 1937 film version of
The Dybbuk
, directed by Michal Waszinski, which highlights and visualizes the relationship between Sender and Nissen in an added prologue (one that is very nearly the opposite of the heterosexualizing prologue Ansky omitted). Eve Sicular describes the prologue as a “rhapsodic cinematic presentation of same-sex bonding,” one of the few in Yiddish film that evidences “little trace of homophobia.”
31
While the play describes Chonen singing the Song of

Songs to Leah, Waszinski also shows Sender singing it to Nissen—the lines he sings are those spoken by the Shulamite, the poem’s female voice—cutting away to reaction shots of Nissen’s rapturous face. And Alisa Solomon credits Tony Kushner’s 1995 staging of the work for having

levitated [the homoeroticism] to the surface, and provided a feminist per- spective for balance. . . . Kushner interpolates a feminist point of view by letting the first act’s layabout scholars debate women’s exclusion from the synagogue floor as part of their Talmudic banter, and by having the trem- bling groom arranged for the lovelorn Leah declare how pleased he is to thank God, in daily morning prayers, that he was not born a woman. Thus the sin of Leah’s father that provokes the Dybbuk’s possession of her

. . . extends to include a critique of treating women as chattel.
32

The Dybbuk
, then, has had a long and strange afterlife, in which the re- pressed has returned over and over again. In these belated incarnations the play not only brings to life the homoeroticism of Jewish tradition (as Ansky saw it), it also serves to ground modern Jewish homoeroticism in a rich, if ambivalently remembered, tradition. In placing memory at center stage and at the heart of our passions, Ansky also suggests that our search for roots—for forgotten fathers—is another form of our search for true love, in all the vari- eties that love has been imagined.

The Dybbuk
is a profoundly pessimistic work, and no wonder—the play was written in the shadow of the wartime devastation of Galicia, scene of Ansky’s expeditions, and completed amidst the political chaos of the postwar years. Nevertheless, it emerges from the hopeful insight that the physical ex- istence of the Jewish people is dependent on the knowledge of who one’s daughter’s suitor is, on where the guest at one’s table has come from—in other words, on the power of narrative as a mode of cultural continuity. Eros, in this vision, transcends individual choice; it is the force that impels fathers to seek a foothold in the unknown terrain of the future and moves their children to discover themselves in the dark mirror of the Jewish past.

Notes

1. Sholem Aleichem (S. Rabinovitsh),
   Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem
   (New York, 1918), 11:123. The full text of Abramovitsh’s letter is included in
   Dos Mendele bukh
   , ed. Y. D. Berkovitsh (New York, 1926), 191. Ken Frieden, in his
   Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz
   (Albany, 1995), 136–137, discusses the signifi- cance of Sholem Aleichem’s addition of the words “in the life of our people” where Abramovitsh had written “among our people.” Sholem Aleichem, according to Frieden,
   

   thus turned Abramovitsh’s rejection of the possibility of Yiddish romantic fiction into a mere warning that such literary attempts at dealing with romance in Jewish life must be differently conceptualized.
   

2. S. Y. Abramovitsh,
   Bayamim hahem
   [In Those Days], in
   Kol kitve Mendele Mokher Sforim
   (Tel Aviv, 1958), 259. It’s worth noting how Abramovitsh juxtaposes, in this cata- logue, combat between men with courtship of women, an acknowledgment of the Euro- pean linking of male agonistics and the wooing (or conquering) of women as comple- mentary activities.
   

3. David Biale summarizes the Haskalah sense that “traditional Jewish adolescence, and particularly premature marriage, created sexual dysfunction.” Biale,
   Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America
   (New York, 1992), 150.
   

4. Biale suggests that the conventions dictated by the rabbinic elite were, in fact, con- siderably looser in other segments of Ashkenazic culture. See
   Eros and the Jews
   , 82–84 and 169–170. Biale describes various attempts similar to that of Sholem Aleichem in
   Stem- penyu
   to harness traditional folklore to modern sexual ideologies; he examines this impulse in writers like Micha Yosef Berdichevsky and S. Y. Ansky, the subject of this paper: “‘
   The Dybbuk
   ’ takes the traditional Haskalah form of a conflict between romantic love and the traditional
   shidduch
   , but Ansky creates an alliance between popular Jewish culture and modern values against a repressive establishment,” (169).
   

5. Dan Miron discusses this critique as ubiquitous in Abramovitsh’s work. In his 1869
   Fishke der Krumer
   (Fishke the Lame), Abramovitsh’s satire of pecuniary matchmaking prac- tices, a homosexual joke is again used to make the point, when a matchmaker’s farcical at- tempts to cement a marriage results in the matching of two boys. For a discussion of this theme and novel, see Miron,
   A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
   (New York, 1973), 298–299, n. 41.
   

6. The differences and tensions between non-Jewish modes of masculinity and the al- ternative modes that characterized Jewish gender orders are brilliantly explored in Daniel Boyarin’s
   Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man
   (Berkeley, CA, 1997). See also my own reading of Abramovitsh’s constructions of Jewish men as feminized in relation to non-Jewish men and to Jewish women in Naomi Seidman, “Theorizing Jewish Patriarchy
   in extremis
   ,” in
   Judaism Since Gender
   , ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York and London, 1997), 40–48.
   

7. The term
   possession
   only poorly captures the specificity of the Jewish concept of the dybbuk, which has its roots in the Lurianic doctrine of reincarnation and sin. See Gedalyah Nigal,
   “Dybbuk” Tales in Jewish Literature
   [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1994), 11–60.
   

8. The traditional context of the love story is emphasized by Ansky’s foregrounding of characters who would normally be relegated to the background, the
   batlonim
   (a contem- porary translation might be “slackers”) who spend all their time in the synagogue/study hall, while having the young lovers who are the protagonists exchange barely a word. The effect is to make the community a kind of collective protagonist and the lovers a foil for rendering the conflicts of this collective dramatically visible.
   

9. S. Ansky,
   Tsvishn tsvay veltn: Der dibuk
   , Twentieth-Century Yiddish Drama vol. 2 [Yiddish] (New York, 1977), 40. All translations are my own.
   

10. For a description of circumstances under which
    The Dybbuk
    was written and the complicated fortunes of Ansky’s manuscript in various languages and versions, see Shmuel Werses, “S. Ansky’s ‘
    Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn
    ’ (Der Dybbuk): A Textual History,” in
    Studies in Yiddish Literature and Folklore
    (Jerusalem, 1986), 99–185.
    

11. The Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger called
    The Dybbuk
    an “anthology of folk- lore.” Niger is quoted in Avraham Morevsky’s eyewitness account of one of Ansky’s liter- ary soirees in which he read drafts of his work to small groups of Jewish writers, “The Ini- tial Responses to S. Ansky’s Reading of
    The Dybbuk
    ,” in
    S. Ansky: Poetry, Novels, Theatre, Essays and Studies on the Jewish Literature,
    ed. Samuel Rollansky [Yiddish] (Buenos Aires, 1964), 269. Morevsky describes an evening with the playwright in Vilna sometime during February or March of 1919, when Ansky was close to a final draft of his work. Even Ansky’s Hebrew translator, the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, who was the playwright’s good friend and an active supporter of his ethnographic research, candidly admitted to Ansky that he considered
    The Dybbuk
    something less than a masterpiece: “I have the impression that, as a collector of folklore, you combed through all the garbage dumps. You picked out your little fragments of folklore and pieced together the remnants of all sorts of clothing into patches, and took those patches and sewed them together into a sort of crazy quilt.” Hayim Nahman Bialik,
    Offhand Remarks
    , vol. 1 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1935), 112–113, cited in Shmuel Werses, “The Textual Evolution of Ansky’s
    Between Two Worlds
    (The Dyb- buk),”
    Hasifrut
    3–4 (Summer, 1986), 156.
    

12. David Roskies, “Introduction,” in S. Ansky,
    The Dybbuk and Other Writings
    , ed. David Roskies (New York, 1992), xxvii. Roskies may be relying here on Nigal’s research, which details and categorizes dozens of recorded cases of possession. I would only qualify Roskies’s remarks by adding that possession has an undeniable sexual dimension, even if it generally lacks a romantic one. Thus, possessing spirits are overwhelmingly male while pos- sessed bodies tend to be female. Even the exceptions are telling: Nigal describes a male dyb- buk who possesses a man because he is angry that his wife remarried three days after his death and “since then, he no longer desired women!” Nigal, “‘Dybbuk’ Tales,” 36.
    

13. It is possible to read this failed elopement and homecoming as an analogue to Ansky’s own return to his Jewish “roots” after a long sojourn among the Russian folk.
    

14. For a reprint of the prologue, originally published in the Zionist Yiddish journal
    Earth and Freedom
    (1918), see Werses, “The Textual Evolution,” 189–190. Werses thanks the Yiddish scholar Avram Novershtern for drawing his attention to this prologue.
    

15. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 60.
    

16. Avram Efros is quoted in J. Hoberman,
    Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds
    (New York, 1991), 56.
    

17. The problem of fi an adequate vocabulary for the relationship described in the play is a complex one. Are Sender and Nissen “homosexual”? If we mean by that “did they have sex?” then the question, of course, cannot be answered (though no one would think to question the “heterosexuality” of Leah and Chonen, however little the play tells us of their physical contact). The term
    homosocial
    is only marginally more accurate, since it fails to con- vey the degree to which Sender and Nissen desire a bond based on kinship and biology—a bond perhaps more crucial to traditional Ashkenaz than that generated by a sexual act. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses the phrase
    homosocial desire
    rather than
    homosociality
    to express her sense that the homosexual and homosocial must be brought into relation with each other: “To draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosex- ual—a continuum that, for men in our society, is radically disrupted,”
    Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
    (New York, 1985), 1–2. Luce Irigiray’s term for patri- archies in which the illusion of heterosexual romance covers up the strictly masculine nature of marital exchanges,
    hom(m)o-sexual
    , captures something of the traditional Jewish “exchange
    

    of women,” but it doesn’t account for a sexual order that uses heterosexuality not as an “alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relation to himself ” but as a conduit—barely mentioned, taken for granted—for the eroticized celebration of this relation,
    The Sex Which Is Not One
    , trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, 1985), 171. Sedgwick makes a point ar- guing that homophobia is a frequent—destructive—aspect of patriarchy, but not a
    necessary
    one, since there have been societies in which male dominance and an openness to at least some varieties of homosexual expression have coexisted (
    Between Men
    , 3–4).
    

18. Shever Poshim
    (p. 74a), quoted in Biale,
    Eros and the Jews
    , 147.
    

19. Biale,
    Eros and the Jews
    , 146.
    

20. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 51.
    

21. Given the centrality of gender to our own thinking, it’s worth stressing here that the Haskalah critique of arranged marriage had viewed not women but young people, “par- ticularly young boys,” as the principal victims of the practice. Haskalah autobiography is filled with rage against the premature subjection of adolescent boys to the sexual demands and social constraints of marriage; their wives, who were at least as young, drew less at- tention, since women rarely contributed to the genre. For a discussion of marriage, ado- lescence, and gender in Hebrew Haskalah autobiography, see Alan Mintz,
    Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography
    (Bloomington, 1989), 181–184. Because a feminist critique was less crucial to Haskalah reformism, Ansky was able to celebrate the custom of arranged marriage without addressing its erasure of female subjectivity.
    The Dybbuk
    certainly takes up the issue of gender, but it does so explicitly only when it turns from the fathers to their children, and from the homoerotic to the het- eroerotic; it is in this setting that the naturalness of heterosexuality and the gender roles that underwrite it are thrown into anxious question. Ira Konigsberg, in “The Only ‘I’ in the World: Religion, Psychoanalysis, and
    The Dybbuk
    ,”
    Cinema Journal
    36:4 (September 1997): 32–35, has a very different view of the absence of women than my own, psycho- analyzing the “odd parental situations of the lovers’ childhoods’ and the “missing mothers” as part of both the protagonists’ psychopathologies and the larger absence of the feminine in the Jewish religion. Thus, where I view Ansky’s playwriting as complicitous in effacing women’s roles in traditional Judaism, Konigsberg sees the work as thematizing and work- ing through this absence. I want to thank J. Hoberman for this reference.
    

22. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 59.
    

23. “As much as drag works to create a unified picture of ‘woman’ (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.
    In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency
    .” Judith Butler,
    Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
    (Lon- don and New York, 1990), 137.
    

24. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 37.
    

25. For a discussion of the Jewish Enlightenment critique of traditional women’s eco- nomic and social power and its attempts at the embourgeoisement and domestification of Jewish women, see Boyarin,
    Unheroic Conduct
    , 333–334. For an analysis of the ways in which resentment of women and arranged marriage could coincide, see Paula E. Hyman,
    Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women
    (Seattle, 1995), 60–62. As Hyman writes: “Because of the phenomenon of early marriage for the intellectually precocious male, women (both wives and mothers-in-law) figured in their stories as obstacles to self-realization and modernization. For young men raised in the
    

    traditional Jewish community and yearning to break free, women represented the burden of tradition and the familial obligations it imposed upon young boys before they had the opportunity to realize their dreams of intellectual growth” (61).
    

26. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 36. The 1937 film version underscores this dimension of the play by having the groom begin to recite the marriage oath in a high, wavering voice, much higher even than Leah’s “normal” voice.
    

27. Ansky,
    Der dibuk
    , 44.
    

28. Claude Levi-Strauss, in
    The Elementary Structures of Kinship
    (Boston, 1969), fa- mously describes the social organization of tribal society as dependent on the “exchange of women”: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners. . . . This remains true even when the girl’s feelings are taken into consideration, as, moreover, is usually the case. In ac- quiescing to the proposed union, she precipitates or allows the exchange to take place, she cannot alter its nature” (115).