Alternative Histories—Alternative Identities? Jewishness and the (Al)lure of “What if . . . ?”

Abstract

In this article, I explore negotiations of alternative Jewish identities as a response to the Holocaust in two alternative histories by the Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch. Both engage in very different ways with the destruction of a physical Yiddishland in central and eastern Europe and explore notions of Jewish guilt and the projection of Jewish identities into the future. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon explores the imaginary persistence of Yiddish language and culture in a Yiddishland that, after a mitigated Holocaust, has been transferred to Alaska. The Yiddishland in Zelitch’s Judenstaat (2016) is divested of its Yiddishness. Jewish statehood after the Holocaust is conceived in her novel in retributive guilt and relies upon a potent imaginary of Jewish Germanness which, extends to culture, language, and territory in an illusory continuation of a mythical Ashkenaz and eventually ends in the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty.