Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.