Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (41 page)

The Ghost of Queer Loves Past: Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz

NAOMI SEIDMAN

In dedicating his 1888 novel
Stempenyu
to S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Ale- ichem quotes a letter he received from the older writer advising him against trying his hand at the novel form. Playing on the double meaning of the Yid- dish word
roman
to signify both novel and love affair, Abramovitsh declared that “if there are romances [
romanen
] in the life of our people, they are en- tirely different from those of other people. One must understand this and write entirely differently.”
1
Abramovitsh took his own advice to heart. In an ironic passage introducing his autobiographical novel, he described his hesi- tations about writing his life story, given the inherent unsuitability of Jewish experience to literary expression:

Neither I nor my ancestors ever amazed the world with our deeds. We weren’t dukes, or strategists, or warriors. We never made love to charm- ing young women; we never wrestled like billy-goats with other men or served as seconds in duels; and we never learned how to waltz with young maidens at balls. . . . In short, all the material that could entice a read- er—is lacking among us. Instead we have the
cheyder
and the
rebbe
, matchmakers and brides and grooms, old people and babies, wives and children.
2

Of course, Abramovitsh’s irony in this passage cuts both ways, parodying the clichés of the popular European novel as much as satirizing the lack of glamour in the Ashkenazic way of life. Nevertheless, just beneath the surface of his lament is a more serious reservation about Jewish culture, one he shared with other thinkers of the Eastern European Haskalah (Jewish Enlighten- ment), the movement Abramovitsh was affiliated with in the first decades of his literary career. The Haskalah bitterly attacked the “medieval” practice of

early, arranged marriages, which corrupted Jewish sexuality and burdened young people with children before they could learn a profession, see the world, or fall in love.
3
With romance so central to the European literary imag- ination, Jewish writers who aspired to join the European literary arena might well be stymied; their world, as Abramovitsh complained, lacked the very raw material they might use for writing novels.

Sholem Aleichem acknowledged Abramovitsh’s warning, but he wrote his novel anyway. In
Stempenyu
, subtitled “A Yiddish Novel” (or, to translate oth- erwise, “A Jewish Romance”) Sholem Aleichem looked for the “entirely dif- ferent” romances of Jewish life in the bohemian counterculture of traveling klezmer musicians, discovering the suppressed eroticism of traditional Ashke- naz at its margins. Later, in the Tevye stories, Sholem Aleichem updated a fa- miliar Haskalah plot, finding romance in the struggles of a modernizing younger generation against their elders.
4
Other nineteenth-century Jewish writers who shared the perception that passionate love was foreign to tradi- tional Jewish culture tried different approaches. The Hebrew novelist Abra- ham Mapu, for instance, sidestepped it altogether by setting his 1853
Ahavat Tsiyon
(The Love of Zion) in the time of the prophet Isaiah, when sexually vital Jewish men and women were presumably still to be found.

Abramovitsh himself, after early attempts at Hebrew romantic fiction, had taken the complementary tack of writing Yiddish satire, finding his dis- tinctive voice in ridiculing traditional Jewish failures to live up to European gender ideals and exposing what Dan Miron has called “the callous dehu- manization of sex and marriage in [traditional] Jewish life.”
5
His 1878
The Travels of Benjamin the Third
presents a “Jewish Don Quixote,” as the Polish translation was called, in which Quixote and Sancho Panza are ragged Jewish luftmenschen from a backwoods shtetl in search of the legendary Lost Tribes. The men relate to each other in a caricature of traditional Jewish marriage: one dreams while the other—cross-dressed to avoid being recognized by his wife, who is in hot pursuit of him—provides the food for both of them.
6
In the Jewish world, Abramovitsh’s parody implies, the knights are all married and the dragons they fear most are their domineering wives; but the fact that these men are married does not make them, in the Europeanized view of the author, “proper” men—not only do husbands fail to play the appropriate role of provider and head of the house, but their most profound attachments are with other men. It is in novels like
Benjamin the Third
, which satirize tradi- tional Jewish men as ludicrous homosexuals, that the Haskalah critique most clearly shows its homophobic face.

Read in this context,
The Dybbuk
, S. Y. Ansky’s acclaimed 1919 play, is a manifesto for a new age, rejecting the Haskalah diagnosis of traditional

Ashkenaz as a sexual wasteland awaiting the erotic fomentations of Enlight- enment and modernity. The play takes place entirely in a world steeped in re- ligious beliefs and practices; in a certain sense the traditional world is itself the protagonist—the
batlonim
, the synagogue habitués Ansky uses as a sort of Greek chorus, have more lines than the young lovers who are at the presumed center of the story, and the play stages an astonishingly diverse range of folk- loric motifs, from Hasidic discourse to betrothal and marital customs to an exorcism ritual in all its technical detail. At the same time, the play tells as grand and passionate a story of frustrated love as
Romeo and Juliet
or
Tristan and Isolde:
the young protagonists, an orphaned yeshiva boy named Chonen and the daughter of a wealthy family named Leah, fall in love and wish to marry, but Leah’s father Sender objects to the match, since he hopes to find a rich husband for his only daughter. The devastated Chonen dies in an attempt at using kabbalistic magic to win Leah, and she is betrothed to the man her father has chosen. But Chonen’s spirit possesses her under the very wedding canopy, and the marriage is called off.
7
The exorcism of Leah’s dybbuk—the possessing spirit—brings to light an astonishing circumstance—Sender and Chonen’s dead father had long ago, in their yeshiva days, promised their still unborn children to one another. Chonen’s possession of Leah, then, is mere- ly an expression of their parents’ desires, driven underground by the passage of time and the failures of memory. Chonen’s spirit is finally compelled to leave Leah’s body, but in the final scene her soul is joined in death with her intended bridegroom.

The play could easily be read as participating in the Haskalah critique of arranged marriages, in which young love represents the triumph of the new against the conservative forces of tradition. But in
The Dybbuk
these themes arise in a context apparently untouched by modernity (except, of course, the modernity of the playwright himself ).
8
The familiar Haskalah trope of a youthful initiation into Enlightenment literature is here recast: instead of reading Chernyshevsky or Pisarev or Hebrew grammars, as other rebellious yeshiva boys did, Chonen consults the medieval kabbalistic handbook
Sefer Raziel
. And in having Chonen argue with his friend that even “lust” can be holy, Ansky also implies the converse, that holiness can be erotic, and that this eroticism resides at the very heart of the traditional world:

chonen (approaches his friend, bends down to him, and speaks in a trembling voice):
Which sin is the most powerful of all? Which sin is the hardest to conquer? Is it not the sin of lust for a woman?

henekh (not raising his head):
Yes.

chonen:
And if this sin is cleansed in the heat of a great flame, does not the greatest uncleanness turn to highest holiness, to the Song of Songs? (Breathlessly.) The Song of Songs! “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair . . .”
9

It is not only Ansky’s characterization of the traditional world as rich in erotic potential that differs from that of his Haskalah predecessors. What dis- tinguishes Ansky’s world is also a new conception of modernity or, rather, of the relationship between modernity and tradition. Where the Haskalah saw it- self as providing a program to critique and reform the medieval ways of their fellow Jews, Ansky devoted his energies to rescuing—and constructing—a us- able past. Ansky was an ethnographer as well as playwright, the founder of modern Jewish ethnography, in fact, whose expeditions through Eastern Eu- rope (1912–1914) provided the material from which
The Dybbuk
is drawn.
10
But
The Dybbuk
is not simply the work of a cultural curator eager to fill his theatrical museum with bizarre Jewish folklore, as some early critics charged.
11
Ansky not only collected folklore, he transformed it into modernist—more specifically, Expressionist—theater. For Ansky, the folk were a repository of wisdom, the foundation for modern Jewish culture, and it was precisely there, rather than to European models, that a Jewish writer must look. The dybbuk itself is symbolic of his nationalist-modernist enterprise: a figure drawn from the recesses of the premodern occult who also testifies to the modern creed of the inalienability of romantic choice.
The Dybbuk
fuses superstition and ro- mance, erotic love and demonic possession. While Jewish literature records dozens of stories of possession, “no story before Ansky’s,” David Roskies writes, “had ever told of a dybbuk who was a lover in disguise.”
12

That the conflicting and contradictory claims of modernity and tradition are at the heart of the play is made more evident by a recently discovered pro- logue to
The Dybbuk
that Ansky omitted from his final version. The prologue introduces the play through a dialogue between a traditional father and his re- bellious daughter, who has returned home despondent after a failed marriage that began with her elopement.
13
Hoping to find a bridge between herself and her father, she begs him to tell her whether, in his yeshiva days, he had known something of the love that drove her to leave home: “Father,” the daughter pleads, “you told me that when you were young you studied in a yeshiva, with hundreds of young boys. Can it be that none of them happened to fall in love? With a girl, you understand, with a girl.”
14
The father, who first denies the very possibility of such a happenstance, eventually recalls the story of a yeshiva stu- dent who became a dybbuk because he was disappointed in love; he hastens to

warn his daughter, though, that his story “has nothing to do with what you’re talking about.” The prologue ends with the first line of the play proper, turn- ing the reminiscing father into the narrator and the play itself into an extend- ed, and—as we shall see—ultimately ambiguous, response to his daughter’s question about the possibility of heterosexual romance in the traditional world. Framed in this way,
Between Two Worlds
(Ansky’s alternate title) promises to tell a story that unites the memories of the generation passing away with the hopes of the one that is taking its place. And the dybbuk, in its conflation of folk be- lief and sexual passion, is the Janus-faced figure that speaks to them both.

Within
The Dybbuk
’s fusion of romance and the occult lies an even more unexpected coupling. On the one hand, the play follows the predictable tra- jectory of one strand of Haskalah romance, in which a young couple struggles to marry against the wishes and mercenary expectations of their elders. Much of
The Dybbuk
is directly drawn from the conventions of this genre: the bour- geois father who ignores the wishes of his daughter, the poor yeshiva boy who boards at his table and falls in love with the rich girl, the father’s holding his daughter as prize for the highest bidder. Ansky’s early career as a foot soldier in the eastern European Haskalah would have acquainted him with myriad examples of this familiar plot, in which parents were cast as the enemy of young love and sexual freedom and arranged marriages stood for all that was stultifying and repressive in the traditional Jewish social order.

On the other hand,
The Dybbuk
lays this well-worn narrative structure over another, antithetical narrative tradition—that of the ramified set of folk beliefs about fated love, about marriages decreed in heaven, which can be summarized by the term
bashert
.
Bashert
means both “fated” and, as a noun, one’s “future spouse” or, more colloquially, “true love,” as in Leah’s last words to Chonen: “Ich bin baheft mit dir oyf eybik, meyn basherter” (I am joined with you forever, my fated one/my true love).
15
We should note that true love, in this traditional system of values, is at the furthest possible remove from free choice. The young couple’s love, it emerges, is an expression of the bonds of destiny and tradition—Leah and Chonen are meant to marry because their fathers had pledged them, before their birth, to each other, a pledge no less binding because one of the men has died and the other has apparently for- gotten the entire episode. As folkloric tradition claims is true in the case of every match (although it is usually God himself who acts as matchmaker), Chonen and Leah are destined for each other from their very conception, and the love that arises between them is no more than the inevitable expression of this foreordained decree.

Ansky’s superimposition of a Haskalah narrative of sexual rebellion over a layer of folkloric beliefs in the predestination of love is not in itself surpris-

ing—the combination of modernity and tradition is the very insignia of his literary generation of Yiddish post-Haskalah modernists. As the Russian- Jewish critic Abram Efros declared in his essay on Ansky’s folklore-collecting expedition: “Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism, and our youth; our second imprimatur is our orientation to our folk, our traditions, and our antiquity.”
16
While the older generation of Haskalah writers had em- ulated the European bourgeoisie and disparaged traditional Jewish society, the next generation of Yiddish writers embraced the international avant-garde and their Jewish roots simultaneously. Yiddish modernists like I. L. Peretz cre- ated powerful literature from their “discovery” of socialist impulses in, for in- stance, the Hasidic tale. What is remarkable about the juxtaposition of mod- ernism and traditionalism in the case of
The Dybbuk
is that Ansky took the two orientations at their greatest distance from each other and brought them together with maximum impact, combining a call for freedom from arranged marriage with an insistence on the real power of the ultimate arranged mar- riage—one decreed before the young couple have even been born. Thus, the love between the protagonists is motivated and determined by two apparent- ly contradictory notions—the belief that young people have the right to choose their mates, a notion that expressed and fueled Jewish secularization, and a belief in the mysteriously insistent demands of destiny and tradition. In Ansky’s conflation the mutual attraction of the young couple emerges simul- taneously from the depth of their erotic passion for each other and from the betrothal pledge sworn by their fathers. In a startling move, Ansky suggests that the two derivations—one instinctual and preconscious, the other histor- ical and traditional—are, in fact, one and the same.