유대계 영문학의 분기점: 에이미 레비의 『루벤 삭스』를 중심으로

Abstract

Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, among her three novels published in her very short literary career, is the only one which intendedly tackles the “Anglo-Jewish question” set in a upper-middle class Jewish community in West London. As the first Jewish female student at Cambridge, Levy has an ambition for placing her poems and fictions in the great tradition of women’s literature, also in the tradition of Anglo-Jewish writing.BR As Britain had been regarded as a “sweet exile” for the wandering Jews of Europe since the re-establishment of Anglo-Jewish communities in the 17th century, Levy’s contemporary Jews were enjoying the status of ‘successful minority’ in Britain, especially after the Jewish Emancipation in 1858. However, there remained all the stereotypes of the Jewish, both anti- and pro-Semite, which polarized the Jewish characters in fiction into the innocent and the pious on the one hand, and the shrewd and the greedy, as the ones in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.BR Levy tries to portray Jewish people as they really are, with all their complexities and self-contradictions, without those apologetic or self-congratulatory attitudes of Jewish writers before her. In Reuben Sachs, Levy sneers at the snobbery and materialist culture among the Jewish middle class, through the unrequited love and inter-racial marriage of Judith Quixano. Levy switches focus from the successful career and the sudden death of a promising Reuben, to the frustration of Judith, a Jewish woman of intellect and dignity whom she sympathizes with.BR Reuben Sachs is not only a creative reworking of marriage plot which has been popularized since the rise of the novel itself, but also a very unique feminist fiction where all the problems of race, gender and class are entangled around the suffering of an attractive, but all too modest Jewish woman.