Days of futures past
Future scholars will one day ask why our contemporary novelists chose to write about the 21st-century Jewish condition from the perspective of alternative history.
Philip Roth launched the trend with The Plot Against America, which imagined a pre-World War II America ruled by Nazi sympathizers. Michael Chabon has written The Yiddish Policemen's Union, creating a Yiddish-speaking Jewish state in Alaska peopled in part by refugees from a failed Israel.
Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases, about a Jewish family during Argentina's "Dirty Little War," is not alternative history per se, but for the contrast between the world it depicts and the American-Jewish experience of the 1970s, it might as well be.
All three books are ruminations on Jewish powerlessness — written at a time when, one could argue, the Jews have never had so much power or material comfort. Israel may appear to be under siege, its people under a cloud of depression, but its military remains formidable, its stock market is booming, and its human capital is a constant source of invention. American Jewry is probably the most affluent and politically influential community of Jews in history. We're disproportionately represented in political office and among the educated class. If acceptance by the majority is an indication of power, then even the soaring rate of intermarriage is a sign of having arrived.
So why the anxiety? Why does Roth revisit Jewish history as if the anti-Semites had won, Roosevelt had lost, and America Firsters like Lindbergh had risen to power? Why does Chabon conjure up a world in which Israel doesn't make it, and the Jewish entity that does is as cold, dank, and exhausted as its Alaskan setting?
Part of the answer may lie in the needs of artistic invention, as William Deresiewicz recently argued in The Nation. Reviewing the new books by Chabon and Englander, Deresiewicz suggested that "American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity," and that the "most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring."
But it is telling that in translating Jews to another time and era, and even alternative universes, these novelists have also stripped them of their power.
Americans tend to remember the 1970s for its gas lines, discos, and leisure suits. Argentineans remember stories like that of the novel's protagonist, a ne'er-do-well Jew named Kaddish, whose teenage son Pato is taken away by a pack of gray-suited — what, police? soldiers? Under the military dictatorship, it was impossible to say for sure. At one moment, father and son are arguing as Jewish fathers and sons have argued for centuries. The next moment, careless curses like "I wish you were never born" become true before they can be taken back.
The search for Pato by Kaddish and his wife is an object lesson in a totalitarian state's pitilessness and cruelty. As Americans, we always like to think we have recourse — to police, to lawyers, perhaps to "embassy officials." The Argentina depicted in Englander's novel mocks these notions. Holocaust survivors always understood the ephemeral nature of freedom and self-determination. Englander's novel restores the shock of this understanding by setting his story in an era that is past, but not too distant, familiar, but not too familiar.
Chabon similarly restores the shock of what was lost in the Holocaust and what would have been lost had Israel not succeeded. In his novel, the remnants of Europe have washed up in Sitka, Alaska, where a begrudging United States has extended them a degree of sovereignty that, after 60 years, is soon to expire. The Jews in the novel are preparing to wander once again and are engaged in the familiar Jewish ritual of seeking visas, residency permits, and sponsorships in distant lands.
The mood is noir, as noir as it gets, and the sense of existential despair familiar from Raymond Chandler novels is as persistent as the miserable weather. In a refutation of the dayenu, the novel seems to say that if we had survived the Holocaust and Israel had not been born, then no, God, it would not have been enough.
Chabon's novel was born in the controversy surrounding an essay he wrote in 2002 about a Yiddish phrase book, written in 1958, that the author found in a used book store. Chabon called it "the saddest book that I own" and wondered for which country such a phrase book was ever intended. The essay, like the book, uses the tools of what-might-have-been to plumb the unbearable realization of what-was-and-was-lost.
But Chabon's essay also ends on a question that I felt myself asking after his novel, and after Englander's and Roth's: "Just what am I supposed to do with this book?" Their novels make you appreciate anew that the Nazis were vanquished, that Israel was victorious, that Jews found safe haven in America.
And now?
I think each book asks us all to engage in a similar exercise of alternative thinking. What would the world be like if we didn't live in fear of the state, if we were in control of our destinies, if we Jews wanted for little and had the opportunity to influence much?
And if that is the world we're living in — what excuses do we have for acting otherwise?
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