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FEMINISM, JEWISH HISTORY, AND THE HOLOCAUST IN REBECCA GOLDSTEIN'S MIND-BOD Y PROBLEM" Emily Miller Budick The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (ComemporaryJewryv.17 1996) Like much Jewish feminist fiction, Rebecca Goldstem 's Mind-Body Problem dramatizes the female protagonist's liberation from patriarchy as, initially at leas~ a release from Judaism as well. However, the heroine, Renee Feuer, very quickly discovers the sexism of the secular world. She alaofinds that the Holocaust imposes a certain reproductive responsibility on the Jewish women that is not purely a biological function, but has to do with the essence of what it means to carry on a tradition. In many ways, Rebecca Goldstein's Mind-Body Problem is typical of contemporary feminist fiction. In the protagonist's own voice, it narrates a woman's emergence from the intellectual, psychological and emotional constraints of patriarchy into personal fieedom and autonomy. As Jewish feminist fiction, the journey proceeds fTom a restrictive Judaism, with its clearly defined gender roles and masculini~ biases, into the university world of secular humAni.~m.However, contrary to the protagonist Renee Feuer's expectations, and our own perhaps, Renee does not discover female h~a'ation in the world of the university. Rather, she finds the rein~tltution of patriarchy on other, even more restrictive and less benevolent terms. Furthermore, the world of secular humanism robs her of one of the most important features of her self-identity: her Jewishness. Her Jewishness, she discovers, is not simply one more element among many in her mul6-faceted personality. Rather, in some way, it defines Renee, quintessential]y, as a person and (more startling, perhaps) as a woman. Her knowledge of herself as Jew, which produces for the reader a new understanding not only of the Jewish woman but of Jewish history itself, proceeds for Renee from her confrontation ~ a very slxcific recent event in that history: the Holocaust. As for many American Jewish writers, for Goldstein the Holocaust serves a pivotal function in the construction of Jewish identity, both as that identity is defined traditionally by Orthodox Judaism and as it has evolved in the United States toward a more secular, assimilated form of selfdefinition, which, for want of a better term, we might call "Jewishness." Although many Jews were akeady resident in the United States before Worm War II, the dislocations ocxasioned by the European catastrophe further increased the population. At the same time, it strengthened the
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American commtmity's resolve to function as an identifiable people within the multicultural complex of the United States. Furthermore, the post-War years coincided with the enormous influx o f Jews into the American universities and into professional life in general, an upward mobility in which Jewish women, at a delay of only a couple of decades, began to join Jewish me~ in their full integration into American life. Indeed, the entrance of American Jews into the upper echelons of American society can be said to have been facilitated specifically by the same war that heightened the Jewish community's consciousness of Jewish vulnerability and thus consolidated their group identity. The (3. I. Bill launched the careers of many second-generation American Jews, while the .~,a,~n indecotoumess of anti-Semitism farther insured their security within American society. Yet the Holocaust, especially as it entered general American consciousness in the context of the Six-Day War in Israel, in which, once again, an entire Jewish population seemed threatenedwith extermination, remained a warning as to what assimilation might not protect again~. Thus, alongside a recommitment to Jewish identity, the Holocaust generated a movement toward a more generalized committment to the pro9tection of human rights, specifically within the area of race relations in the United States, but extending, as well, into the rights of women, within both secular and Jewish society. Just as the racial basis of Nazi genocide contributed to American Jewry's investment in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s, so certain features of the Holocaust may well have had their effect on post.War thinicln~ about gender. An overwhelming, and sometimes neglected, feature of the Holocaust is that the Nazis were willing to exterminate women and children without differentiation alongside the more traditional male vicrim~ of military or political conflict. The Nazis did not intend, as in the conventional homo-social policies of war, merely to wipe out male compe6lo~ for power (which characterizes the Nazi murder of partisans and resisters, even female resisters). Rather, they sought to annihilate an entire contemporary population and, beyond that, the possibility of any rebirth of the population later on. In this light, Jewish women might well experience themselves as the particular victim~ of Nazism, an experience that might increase their sense of obligation geared toward procreation, and might, in turn, complicate (though also, possa"oly, enrich) their femini.~n To bring more Jewish lives into the world, especially after the Nazi period, subverted the agenda of anti-Semitism and extermination. However, this specifically female form of subversion also remscribed an age-old gender role (both within JndAi~ and in society at large). It might, therefore, act to reimmerse the Jewish woman within the traditions of disenfranchisement ~om which she might well, especially in the modern world, wish to seek her liberation.
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The moment one adds the Holocaust to the discussion of femini~qtn and JudRi.qm, a certain caution must be introduced, especially when discussing a work of fiction, which, by virtue of its capacity to aestheticize, and, thereby, distance and accommodate the unaocommodatable horror of the catastrophe, already o~upies a severely compromised position in Holocaust studies. In the first instance, it is not difficult, and perhaps it is even useful, to imagine anti-Semitism and sexism as close relatives in the history of oppression, and associate them as well with other travesties of human history, such as American racial slavery. In fact, as I have already suggested, the American Jewish community made just this association between racism and anti-SemitisTn, In such a view of human history, one could collect evidence of the ways in which hegemonio power (whether racially, religiously, genderedly, or nationalistically consolidated) has always tended to "other" and exclude those who did not replicate the dominant culture. Thus women, like Jews, may beth be margivalized, even oppressed, in order that the dominant group be able to maintain not only its political authority but its self-definition which serves to legitimize its control over other groups or segments of the population. In the process of social self-legitimi7atiOIL literary texts provide particularly powerful and subtle instrtmaents of conservation and control, since they tend to reflect and reenforce the status quo. However, such tendencies toward the analogical consolida_n_'onof forms of oppression may have to be resisted in order for a clear view of the specific qualifies and ambiences of intolerance to emerge. Such seems to me especially the case with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Indeed, my interest in the Holocaust as a feature in the construction of contemporary American culture evolved out of a prior project on the mutual textual oenslmctious of African and Jewish American identity, which brought into focus for me the ways in which African and Jewish Americans, perceiving their own c,ommmities through analogies to another eommmlity's history, distorted each others realities and entered into competition with one another for cultural materials. As Laurence Thomas (1993) has argued, the Holocaust and slavery are utterly different phenomena, and blurring their differences distorts the special horror of each. Slavery was intended to preserve African Americans as a commodity within the domain of white culture. The Holocaust was intended to exterminate the Jews, even again~ such profit motive as might have cautioned a different exploitation of the Jewish population. RecoLmi7in5 such vastly different intentions within two of Western culture's most heinous crimes might go a long way to stemming what has erupted recently as open competition between American Blacks and American Jews concerning their people's respective histories of persecution. More importantly, it permits as to identify exactly what charac-
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terized each catastrophe and to understand, thereby, the implications of each for its victims. For ,~rnilar reasons, ~ must distinguish both racism and anti-Semitism from sexism. While black and Jewish men and women undoubtedly experienced slavery and the Holocaust differently, producmg different narratives concerning these events, black people were not enslaved, and Jews were not exterminated, because they were women. Indeed, in the case of the potential analogy between sexism and the Holocaust, we might say that the difference to be acknowledged is double. Not only was gender not a factor in the decision to exterminate Jews, bat, like slavery, sexism aimed at a general subordination and maintenance of one group for the benefit of the interests of another, not its annihilation. If onty for the sake of clarity, it is necessary to distinguish among the travesties of human history. More to the point of femini.qt Holocaust literature, however, r e c e d i n g the differences between sexism and the Holocaust may yield two important consequences. First, it may suggest the existence of two equally legitimate, bet essentially different kinds of Holocaust narratives (whether male or female authored): those that, even if some of the local details are gendered, primarily focus on the non-gender specific aspects of the catastrophe, and are, for this reason, more or less in" ~ l e from male narratives; and those that discover in the female experience a different way of conceptualizing the Holocaust, which may throw into prominence features of the catastrophe that, for one reason or another, r~edr in male-authored texts. In some simple, obvious, way, which does not need extensive arguing, only the full variety of Holocaust narratives, by children and adults, survivors and non-saavivors, Jews and non-Jews, within the ghettos and cities and within the camps, can tell the whole story of the Holocaust. Therefore, without female-authored texts the entirety of the Holocaust experience cannot be broached. Moreover, and far more crucially, genderfocused representations of the Holocaust (whether by men or women) may also yield new insights or, at least, bring into prominence aspects of the experience that may tend to be lost in the myriad of issues that the Holocaust raises, including those issues that do not pertain exclusively to the Jews. Given the overwhelming genocidal impulse that defines the Holocaust, and the paucity of its survivors, both male- and female-focused narratives will likely concur with each other m many of their features. Nonetheless, narratives, whether by men or by women, that dwell on the relationship between female reproductive capacity and Nazism's genocidal intention may bring into focus just that aspect of men's and women's shared experience of the Holocaust that most quintessentiaUy defines the uniqueness of the Hole-
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canst: its aspiration to ~nnlhilate absolutely, and without possibility of reverse, the entire Jewish population of the world, present and furore. At the same time, and just as importantly, acknowledging the difference between, ce the one hand, female disenfranchisement both within society at large and within Jewish society, m particular, and, on the other hand, the non-gender-specific, millenial-long threat of Jewish an~llilation, which nonetheless always bore a special relationship to the woman's body, may F~ovideterms for a female redefinition of and reconciliation with Judaism. However Jewish women would like to define themselves within or in opposition to traditional Juda~n, for millenia Jewish women have been defined by others (and treated accordingly) first as Jews and only secondarily, and with far less severe consequences, as women. AntiSemitism, whether traditional or genocidal, and Jewish patriarchialism are hardly comparable phenomena. Moreover, anti-Semitism may actually account for and even justify, at least within historical context, aspects of J~i~m's patriarchalism. In thinking about a specifically female issue such as mothmttood and female reproductive capacity (subjects, which, I suggest, are at the center of Goldstein's novel), we may well have to consider the ways in which traditional anti-Semitism augmented an already "'natural" pressure on women to "be fruitful and multiply" (Goldstein 1984: 35). Here again the female experience may not so much change our understanding of historical anti-Senfitism as bring into view a heretofore unrealized dimension of it, which also serves to distinguish the Jewish experience fio~ the experiences of other peoples. For example, black and Jewish women likely feared equally for their children's survival, and, therefore, suffered certain pangs of doubt concerning bringing new hmnan beings into the world. Nonetheless, reproduction within the terms of enslavement directly and immediately served the enslaving power by prodecing new slaves for the master (not only were slave women raped but forced breeding among slaves was also common). Reproduction within Jewish history, however, in and of itself enacted defiance and resistance, at least until the Nazi period, and even then, though in somewhat different form. The lraditienal anti-Semite would eliminate Jews, even if only in terms of their religious self-definition of themselves (through conversion). Therefore, to bring new Jewish life into the world was to defy anti-Semitism and defeat its ends. Even in the Nazi period, when the objective became the literal elimination of the Jews, producing a child, or saving one, became forms of resistance that directly addressed Nazi intentions. It is in order to evoke the position of the child within genocidal purposes and the ways in which bearing and saving children then become direct responses to these intentions that The Mind-Body Problem is haunted by unborn children: those of Noam's mother, whom he recalls "sitting at our
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kitchen table, crying" over her many "miscarriages" (p. 45), then, more poiL,nantly, lliose of Renee's sister-in-law Tzippy, who is similarly unable to bring her pregnancies to term (p. 65); and finally Renee's own desire to become a mother, a desire which is swit~, and brutally, brushed aside by N o w , and more obliquely, though no less painfully, dismissed by her lover, Dan Korper. This idea of the unborn children is fraught with implication in relation to post-Holocaust Jewish life. The horror of the brutal, torturous, extermination of European Jewry oontain~qwithin it the annihilation as well of the unborn generations, who haunt contemporary Jewish life as powerfidly asthe ghosts ofthe six million dead. Noam's mother and Tzippy evoke a feature of Renee's condition as well. As a contemporary Jewish woman, Renee inherits the loss of the unborn millions, who were never ~nceived, never came to term. And this torment of the child who is not, as the book
renders it, and, I think, as it exists in reality as well, has particular implications for women. Therefore, the book also invokes, first in order to turn aside, later m order to r as a choice having to do with the relation between female sexuality and motherhood, the particular rituals attached to female reproductivity within Jewish tradition: the laws of nidah. The figure of ritual i,-.~rsion plays a crucial role in Goldstein's novel. As it appears initially in the text, it signals a specifically body-oriented form of female oppression within the system of Orthodoxy. Therefore, Renee scoffs at the mikveh when she decides, as a college student, to parody the ritual by going to the mikveh before engaging in sexual intercourse with her similarly lapsed boyfriend, an impulse toward irreverence which she repeats in her decision to tell this story later on to her adulterous lover, Dan. However, as the figure emerges toward the end of the novel, and as Renee reco~iTes the degree to which liberation, neither of the body nor of the mind can proceed in the absence of what we might imagine as the liberalion ofthe soul, ritual im,~rsion comes to confers upon women something like the covenantal status that oiroumcision confer on men, as through their sexual relationship, aimed at reproduction, men and women may enter together, as equals, into the continuity of Jewish history. Indeed, as Renee begins to take a somewhat frivolous, cosmetic interest in her body, we are invited to consider whether the laws of nidah are only, or primarily, rituals enacted by women for men, or whether they do not represent a sacred space of female concern with her own body. Reaee's ultimate break with Jewish tradition, and her final liberation as secular, sexual woman occurs in her act of adulterous sexual intercourse during the period of menstruation proscribed by Jewish law. "And when we finally parted," she explains, "and I saw my blood on his body, I felt clean" (Goldstein 1983: 254). Within the secular, philosophical world that the
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novel presents, the mlnd-body problem constitutes for Renee the primary tension that she must resolve. This problem, she realizes, has correlatives wilhin Jewish tradition as well. Therefore, for a woman to take con~ol over her body is for her to take control over herself in the largest sense, especially given the ways m which various conventions within patriarchal society (like the laws of nidah) may have evolved in response to what men perceived as the woman's physiological deficiencies. From the very be~nningof her experiences in the secular world, Renee's rebellion ag~in~ her Orthodox past has taken the form of sexual promiscuity. However, m the opposition between Judaism and secular humanism, whatever the tensions between mind and body, mind and body consfiiute a single dyad of the purely human opposing what religion proposes in their stead, within the realm of the divine, namely: the soul. Breaking both with her Jewishness and general social convention as well, the msrried Renee gives herself mind and body to Dan Korper, and, for a time, receives much the same from him However, Renee cannot help fslling in love with her lover, and when she does so, she discovers that for Dan she is nothing more than a "good lay" (Goldstein 1983: 263) endowed with an equally good brain. Some element has fallen out of the terms of her liberation, and her femini~ in order that it be somethingmore than mindless, childish reaction and reistance, must contain a content and an integrity, a philosophy or a theology, of its own. If for men the ritually constructed bodily sign of their Jewishness is ~a~unc'~on, for women, as Goldstein presents the case, it is the turning of the menstrual cycle toward Jewish temporality, which is to say (like Roth's circumcised male penis in the climax of his 1986 The Counterlife), toward the purposes of Jewish history and procreation. For Renee, the higher authority to be served by mind and body both is neither God nor Jewish law. Rather it is human, Jewish, history, where such history cannot exist except in the physical t~'production of the Jewish people. For this reason the conversation between Dan and Renee immediately preceding the scene of her ultimate sexual liberation concerns this history, '~their history," as Dan calls it, despite the fact that he is him~lf a Jew, born in a Irausit camp in 1947, to Holocaust survivor parents. "'Their history? Their historyT' Renee exclaims; "You would have been gassed along with the rest of them. You're just like the evil son in the Passover Seder service [who] asks, 'What's all this to you?' dissocating hlm~lf from the proceedings." "Sounds intelligent to me. What's the answer he gets?" %Ie's told that all this is because of what the Lord God did for us when he took us out of the and of Egypt. For us, and not for him, because had he been there he wouldn't have been saved."
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"And you, poor dear, are wondering whether you too would have been left unredeemed in the land of the strangers." "Oh, there's no question. I'm an adulteress, in a class with the murderers and idolaters" (Goldstein 1983: 253). It is Dan who pronounces Renee "kosher" within the world of pagan hedonism: "ifs allkosher.., it's all okay. Bodies and sex and blood. Bloody sex, sexy blood." But her "eyes . . . oozing tears, [her] womb blood," Renee's body, even at the height of her sexual ecstacy, betrays a knowledge O~t her mind has not yet grasped: that her liberation may be as much the end of something as the be~n" ning (Goldstein 1983: 253). When, therefore, in her final sexual encounter with Dan, tears again begin to flow, Renee begins to understand what this end might possibly be (Goldstein 1983: 263). Renee and Dan will never bring the womb's blood to bear upon "their" history, the history of a people decimated by the Holocaust. It is in terms of the novel's argument concerning sexuality, the woman's body, procreativity, and the Holocaust that the particular mode of Renee's liberation, her sexual intercourse during menstruation, imposes on us its force of insight. It also explains why Renee's reconciliation with her Jewishness, signalled, in the book, by her invocation of the Kol Nidre and Nihilah prayers on the final pages of her story, is achieved through her return to her husband Noam. Renee's withdrawal from adultery is simultaneously her return to Judaism, or, more precisely, to Jewish history. For this reason, Noam is the book's figure for the archetypical Jew, which the book presents in a very particular way: the Jew as biologically, genetically, racially defined. Like so many of the American Jews represented in the book (including Dan), Noam is "amazingly ignorant of things Jewish" (Goldstein 1983:34). He has not even been ritually circumcised or Bar Mitzvah (p. 216), Nonetheless, "shabby and Semitic... his beard rabbinically fidl (p. 24)," and looking like he's "shuclclin~' when he gets excited (pp. 38; 250), Noam embodies "genetic... tribal inheritance "(p. 38), what Roth calls at the end of The Counterlife the "Jew without Jews, without Jn,hisant wi0mut Zioni.~rn~without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple" (Roth 1986:324). For Goldstein (as for Roth, for that matter) the biological or racial, as opposed to religions or oult~al definition of the Jew, goes to the essence of an historical, reproductively-base& redefinition of Judaism. However, biological or racial definitions are hardly simple and problem-free, especially in post-Holocaust Jewish history, and even more especially in America, with its history of slavery and racism. Therefore, m order to understand what Goldstein means by her redefinition, we must examine the other equally odd, but even less salacious way, in which Noam represents
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the Jew, which ~ exposes the racist potential of racial definitions: Noam as Jewish genius. One must proceed cautiously here, since Goldstein's novel, which is alternately outrageously comic and heart-rendingly poignant, does not mount arguments, either concerning feminism or Jewish identity or the Holocaust. In fact, like most works of American Jewish fiction, the Holocaust is not directly represented in the novel. Rather, its consequences for contemporary Jewish life are drsmatized, and even these emerge only obliquely, within the other contexts and agendas that generate the novel. Like most works of literature, The Mind-Body Problem puts into play forces and tensions and teases out of them their starding repercussions. A particular intersection between American Jewry and the academy circulates largely uuremarked in this satire of American academic life : the disproportionate representation within universities of Jews, this feature of American Jewish life having specific ori~ns, as I have already suggested, in World War II. Being Jewish in the contemporary world would seem to have a lot to do with studying or teaching at Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and Caltech, as if the Jewish self-redefinition after the War had to do with the Jew, not as Jew, but as intellectual. Goldstein here is invoking a largely unstated assumption of contemporary Jewish life: For Renee, and for the Jewishly unidentified academic lmninaries with whom she interacts, Jewishness is largely synonymous with an idea of "genius." Therefore, to realize one's genius is by some strange logic to express one's Jewish identity. Indeed, this argument sweeps backward historically with distinctly disturbing implications to suggest that the European catastrophe was especially lragic because it annihilated so gibed a group of individuals. Did the Jewish people need grounds such as these to justify their fight to exist? Do they now? Noam, then, is, in the first instance, the Jew as Jewish "genius." In fact, Ronee's own reasons for marrying Noam have to do with his incredible intellectual capacities. And her ostensible reason for telling her story is to answer the question she's "often asked [,] what it's like to be married to a genius" (Goldstein 1983:5). Renee's finally falling m love with her husband when his genius is no more marks the moment when Renee discovers that what "matters" is not a person's particular mteUectual gifts, but the simple fact of his or her existence. "People don't need justifications," Renee tells Noam; "They're people. Thafs enough" (p. 267); and she repeats this wisdom twice more in the final chapter of the book. The discovery that people matter coincides with, and can be taken as a statement os her acceptance of her own Jewishness. The other question that Renee is as frequently asked as what it is like being married to a genius, and that she as frequently answers in the course of her narrative (for the sake of
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Jews and non-Jews alike), is what it is like being a Jew. For Goldstem, in the world of post-Holocaust American Jewish assimilation, Jewishness has nothing to do with chosenness or specialness, with Jewish genius or what Goldstein calls the "genius gene" (pp. 45, 267). It has rather to do with Jewish genes in the most ordinary, uuremarkable, biologically human sense of the word. Nonetheless, the deep idea of Jewish survival that is at stake here is marred by the fantasy ofmofl~'ing the genius gene. Txying to understand his mother's deep sadness, Noam surmi~s that "she thought probably that all the babies would have been mathematically gifted, that either she or my father was carrying something in their genes." Similarly, Renee indulges in her own'~fantasy of mothering a child with the geuius-gene" (pp. 267, 179). Goldstein ~LLqnAI~the misstep implicit in the idea of the "genius gene" when she has Renee meet a crippled dwarf and a woman whose face has been irreparablydamaged, inthesynagogueinBudapest: two Holocaust survivors who represent, not (like Dan or Noam) Jewish genius, but Jewish disfigurement and deformity. Such waning of powers (whether physical or intellectual or both) is what Noam him~lf will come to represent by the end of the book. Jews matter, Renee comes to understand, because they are people. They are neither to be celebrated, nor exterminated, for reasons of their supposed chosenness or specialness. Renee's realization that "we all count m precisely the same way," which, she realizes, is the view not from the limited inside of our hlmlan subjectivities, but from some external and, therefore, ungraspable perspective (like God's), marks her return to a secular theology of Jewish history. Such return does not have to with ritual and law, with the "inscription" of our human destinies in the divine book of life as on Rosh Hashanah and Yore Kippur (p. 273). Rather it has to do with an idea ofthe divine as mscn~oedin the "soul's own blood" (p. 273) and as perpetuated by the human mteroonrse of human beings populating a human world. The menstrual blood, which signals Renee's ultimate liberation from Jewish taboos and also her childlessness, and the bloody flow following miscamage, bo~ Noam's mother's and Renee's sister-m-law's, return to the text in this idea ofbloed as signalling that Jewish continuity and survival are largely biological matters, and that they are specifically dependent on the WOlnan'Sbody. Noam's fantasy in Vienna, that he is the reincarnation of a Jewish childgenius kiIled by the Nazis, locates what is for Noam the "extraordinary" fact that his "Jewishness is essential tO [his] identity" (Goldstein 1983:110). For Goldstem, this is not an extraordinary fact, but one of the most very ordinary. Therefore, Noam's fantasy plays out as something of a Frendian romance. Noam has never accepted his "extraordinarily ordinary" parents as his
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parents (p. 44). "It baffled me how they could be so different from me until I figt~ed out the answer." This answer he imagines he discovers in Vienna is his rather fantastic origins not in the trite biological fact of his birth to the Flimmels, but in his direct, let us say supernatural, incarnation of a line of genius quite outside the laws ofhuman genetics (p. 100). This line of genius to Noam's own discovery in mathematics, the supematurals. It corresp~ds as well to an idea of the Jewish people as a part of a supernatural as opposed to a natural universe. The novel offers a different reading of Jewish continuity. Earlier the text had also dealt, in relation to Noam, with the "passing on" or "transmigration" of Jewish souls (p. 38). In Vienna, this transmigration takes on aspects of the supernatural. In the earlier episode, however, it has to do with the most prosaic of human endeavors- his assimilated Jewish parents naming him for his "paternal grandfather, who was kiUod in a pogaan (1). 37)." Noam's naming is only one of several such examples in the novel: Renee herself, we are told, was named for her grandmother, who died in the Holocaust, while the baby finally born to Tzippy is named after Renee's father (p. 172). Jews, Renee explains to Noam, name their children, specifically after the dead and not after the riving, in order "to keep their memory alive. Pve known people," she continues, "who actually had a child because there was aname they wanted to pass on "(p. 37). What the naming of Jews for their deceased ancestors brings to the surface, which is trashed by Noam's self-aggrandizing theory of the reproduction of Jewish genius without benefit of mortal and prosaic Jewish flesh, is procreativity as a form of biological memory, as a committedness to the hnmAnness of our origws in s ~ l r acts ofb-m+m sexual intercourse. Noam is correct that Jewishness is important, essential, to his identity, as it is to Renee's and Dan Korper's. However, such importance is because Jewishness is biological, genetic, familial, and historical, not because it is supernatural. The Holocaust did not aim, like earlier episodes in the history of antiSemitism, at the conversion of the Jews. It did not threaten, as in contemp(m~ America for example, the assimilation of the Jews. Rather, it attempted their literal extetmhafion, as flesh and blood. To survive Nazism, 9 erefore, the Jews must do more than take back their tradition. They must literally take back their lives, their bodies, not (as Renee and Dan would do) in order to declare the flesh kosher (though this is a part of it), but in order to restore ordinary Jewish human beings to history itself. In his own version of his autobiography, Noam is the Jewish soul as Jewish genius. In the novel's version, in which, according to Renee, "Noam really has survived his own death (p. 271)," he is a "stranger with [a] genius's memories (p. 271)." So is Renee, though her memories are not of a former state of her own genius but rather of Jewish history, tradition, and
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religion as themselves forms of genius. In the same way, the Jewish people itself might be thought of as strangers with geninses's memories, a people which has survived its own death in the concentration camps of Western civilization. Noam will have to get past these memories as supernaturals to accept his strangeness to the world and the necessity it imposes on him to forge his continuity with the human family to which he belongs. In similar fashion, Renee will ouly recover from her "soul-sickness" (p. 268) when she re~.~iilitS hersel~ not to Jewishness as the divine or supernatural, or as the embodiment of a particular theology, or as human genius, but to Jewishness as what she has inherited and must pass on. So, too, according to the logic of the book, must the Jewish people also take upon itself the injunction to get on with the ordinary business of ordinary human life and be fruitful and multiply. Doing so does not mean, for women, the return to some lesser status within the commmfity. As Noam falls from his genius into everyday human mortality and rejoins the world of the unchosen, he and Renee come to occupy positions, not only of equality (which, on Renee's mattering map, they always in any event occupied), but of mutual necessity. Only together can they construct a new world. Only together can they keep human history going. Indeed, as the example of the Holocaust looms large in the background of this text, we come to realize that such is the way it has always been in the Jewish world, whatever we may tell ourselves to the contrary. Survival for the Jews has never been a straightforward matter of cultural cohesion, dependent on male institutions of higher learning and religious observance, si~,nified by circumcision and the inheritance of names. Rather it has always represented a much more elemental struggle to reproduce and to stay alive. In this struggle, women have contributed at least as much as men, and, despite the catastrophe that quite pmposively exterminated women alongside men, and both alongside their children (both born and unborn), together they have succeeded in keeping the Jewish people, and thereby Jewish history, alive.
NOTES "Version of paper &livered at the emual meetings of the Assozialion for Jewish Studies, Boston, December, 1995.
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REFERENCES
Goldstein, Rebecca. 1983. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Dell Publishing. Roth, Philip. 1986. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Thomas, I.amrenc,r 1993. Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
