Re-envisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora by Efraim Sicher

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-envisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora by Efraim Sicher Eli Lederhendler Efraim Sicher, Re-envisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2021. vi + 242 pp. What might the reader anticipate upon encountering Re-envisioning Jewish Identities? The title cues us in, from the outset, that an ongoing process is at stake; that this process is subjective (“re-envisioning” implicates a beholding eye); and that the matrix or object of the process is something inherently imprecise — a set of linked signifiers that are pluralized: “identities.” We are also informed that the scope of the survey will be trans-national, assuming an indefinite sphere of discourse that is mindful of Jewish matters and that is shared (or divided, depending on one’s point of view) within a semantic geo-cultural space: “Israel and the Diaspora.” Each element alluded to in the title is up for grabs, a web of slippery terms and assertions. The reader will be curious to know how the author aims to clear the chaotic foreground enough for us to “see” what he sees in this multi-layered agenda. Sicher has written a deeply contemplative tour d’horizon, the first part of which is presented in the volume under review here. (The second part appears in another new book with the intriguing title, Post-Modern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination, Routledge, 2022). It is, perhaps, due to the separate publication of this initial part that a host of questions are raised for discussion in Re-envisioning Jewish Identities but relatively few conclusions are proffered. Rather, Sicher – who has written extensively on many of the core issues in contemporary Jewish literature — takes the complex discursive issues alluded to above and carefully delineates and references them throughout a series of close readings. The result is at once a meditation on what, if anything, constitutes Jewish literature in our time, and a complaint against the erosion of narrative coherence in the post-modern imagination. The groundwork is set in the first chapter which undertakes a parallel reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Meir Shalev’s Yonah vana’ar (2006; A Pigeon and a Boy, 2007). The discussion revolves, predictably, around the deconstruction of two national narratives of violence and (re)birth, as portrayed and re-envisioned via the troubled lives and conflicted loves of the protagonists. Shalev, like Rushdie before him (an influence that is evoked rather than demonstrated), reflects upon the implacable determining force of the nation in the lives of the novel’s characters. The violent birth in the collective background is related to the undermining of childhood and autonomous selfhood; yet, cunningly, the opposite dynamic is also clearly at stake. In both novels, the decoding of the individual is a decoding of the nation. The narrative impulse in both cases, Efraim Sicher argues, is to detach individuals from their respective national sagas; yet, the result, he claims, is the weakening and even relinquishing of the power of narrative as such — a default byproduct of post-modernism. It is only in the opening passage of the next chapter that Sicher sums up for the reader what, in his view, ties the discussion in the Shalev/Rushdie chapter [End Page 176] to the title and theme of the book: “Shalev rereads the identity of the Jewish nation through his revision of the bible and of history” (23, emphasis added). The substance of this insight is that literary inversions of canonical myths are a way of “perform[ing] identification” (7), despite the fact that they render the past “unstable and untrustworthy” (13). The second chapter, “Sephardism: Alternate Histories of the Americas,” moves us out of the national births of 1947–1948 and into a discussion about writing against the grain of Eurocentric literary traditions. The book thus segues from the quest for individuality against the force of national myths and tragic national dysfunction to a discussion of a counter-myth, the anti-nation, so to speak, in the form of exilic, diasporized, hybridized, nomadic, and subaltern identity paradigms. This is illustrated in the quest to recapture and account for the...