Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003 The Relevance of the Past: B e t w e e n C o n s t r u c t i o n a n d D e b t Max Pensky B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Let me begin this by juxtaposing two quotes. The first comes from Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, wherein the protagonist, anovelist named Philip Roth, discovers that his identity has been stolen by “Philip Roth,” now busy in Israel giving interviews in which he advocates his new political movement, “diasporism.” Diasporism’s aim: the mass repatriation of Israeli Jews back to their original towns and settlements in Eastern and Central Europe. “Roth” describes his vision of the moment of Jewish Return in language that fuses the Biblical promise and the modern media spectacular: You know what will happen in Warsaw, at the railway station, when the first trainload of Jews returns? There will be crowds to welcome them. People will be jubilant. People will be in tears. They will be shouting “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!” The spectade will be transmitted by television throughout the world.And what ahistoric day for Europe, for Jewry, for all mankind when the cattle cars that transported Jews to death camps are transformed by the Diasporist movement into decent, comfortable railway carriages carrying Jews by the tens of thousands back to their native cities and towns.Ahistoric day for human memory, for human justice, and for atonement too. In those train stations where the crowds gather to weep and sing and celebrate, where people fell to their knees in Christian prayer at the feet of their Jewish brethren, only there and then will the consdencecleansing of Europe begin. (Roth 45) In the second quote, Ruth Ellen Gruber, apopular commentator on the vicissitudes of Jewish cultural life in Europe, observes the odd sort of Jewish “now staged in the capitals of Eastern and Central Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. With the transition to affee-market economy, history itself is transformed into the commodity form, quite liter¬ ally: r e t u r n Kiosks, shops, and postcards sport imagery ranging from candlesticks and tombstones to caricatures of Franz Kafka. There are painted wooden carv¬ ings of hook-nosed, bearded Jews for sale in Poland and Golem statuettes and sidelocked Jewish puppets for sale in Prague. In the ancient ghetto of Venice, shop windows sparkle with brightly colored miniature Jews of 1 I N T E R T E X T S 1 3 2 hand-blown Murano glass. In Krakow aUkrainian band at one “Jewishstyle ” cafe dresses up in Hasidic attire and plays Yiddish tunes for patrons sipping chicken soup and kosher vodka, while local travel agencies take visi¬ tors on “Schindler’s List” and other Jewish tours, and a“Jewish” gallery has been known to display, among other things, antique Jewish clothing— including men’s ritually fringed undergarments. (Gruber 6) As away of introducing the arguments of this paper, it’s useful to reflect for amoment on the complex range of reactions to these quotations, espe¬ cially in their relation to one another. Roth’s novel brilliantly and mercilessly targets the tension between two modes of reflection on the history of the Jews in Europe, modes that one would have thought to be utterly incompat¬ ible but prove, at least in the literary subjunctive, to be on quite intimate terms with one another. What makes “Philip Roth’”s diasporist fantasy at once poignant and perverse is not just its utter impossibility, its unseemly flaunting of its own fictionality. It is the emotional realism that attaches to the fantasized event. Desperate for atonement, the descendants of the perpe¬ trators cry that their Jews are back, repeating in distant form the wound— regarding others as “their Jews” and hence interchangeable with people who are dead and gone—^with the same formula by which they declare it healed. The repetition of trauma implicit in the event of return, though, cannot in the end entirely hide from view the...