Alternative Histories – Alternative Identities? Jewishness and the (Al)lure of “What if…?”

Stähler, Axel (2022). Alternative Histories – Alternative Identities? Jewishness and the (Al)lure of “What if…?” (In Press). Journal of Jewish identities Johns Hopkins University Press

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In this article, I explore negotiations of alternative Jewish identities as a response to the Holocaust in two alternative histories by the Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch. Both engage in very different ways with the destruction of a physical Yiddishland in central and eastern Europe and explore notions of Jewish guilt and the projection of Jewish identities into the future. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon explores the imaginary persistence of Yiddish language and culture in a Yiddishland that, after a mitigated Holocaust, has been transferred to Alaska. The Yiddishland in Zelitch’s Judenstaat (2016) is divested of its Yiddishness. Jewish statehood after the Holocaust is conceived in her novel in retributive guilt and relies upon a potent imaginary of Jewish Germanness which extends to culture, language, and territory in an illusory continuation of a mythical Ashkenaz and eventually ends in the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures
UniBE Contributor:	Stähler, Axel
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures
ISSN:	1946-2522
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Language:	English
Submitter:	Axel Stähler
Date Deposited:	02 Nov 2022 15:46
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 16:27
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/174316