An Embarrassment of RISHES: Malice/Permission in Contemporary Jewish American Literature

• In Event: Jewish Respectability Politics

Abstract

In a 2010 interview with the NEW YORK TIMES, Yiddishist and director Michael Wex describes an interesting lexical difficulty he encountered in bringing Yiddish plays to life on the modern stage: “[W]hen I tried to explain to a Yiddish ham-actor that the word he needed to say was RISHES, which means “malice, wickedness,” not RISHUS, which means “permission,” he told me to get lost: since he’d never heard the former, it simply didn’t exist.” Yet despite Wex’s frustrations, this paper will argue that this lexical and homophonic slippage is the key to understanding how the concept of RISHES operates as a uniquely Jewish form of respectability politics. For example, when in 1930s Austria Ruth Kluger’s aunt scolds her by saying, “Jewish children who have bad manners cause RISHES” (20), she is not merely evoking the specter of antisemitic malice, she is evincing a PERMISSION STRUCTURE FOR MALICE created by Ruth’s uncouth behavior. RISHES is therefore neither malice nor permission alone, but rather MALICE THAT HAS PERMISSION, permission ostensibly created by certain unacceptable Jewish behaviors. Thus defined, my paper will sketch the evolving responses to, internalization of, and rebellion against the concept of RISHES in post-Holocaust American Jewish literature. I will begin by looking at Philip Roth’s debut novella GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1959), in which Neil Klugman’s fear of RISHES undergirds a recognizably paralyzing ethnic and class anxiety. Then, jumping forward, I will contrast Roth’s early take with Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, which demonstrates an innate understanding of the Jewish respectability politics evoked by the term, and, in a sense, rejects it by openly embracing it. By hyperbolizing the very mannerisms that Roth’s protagonist fears, Chabon attempts to exorcise RISHES from the 21st century Jewish-American subconscious.

Author

• Naomi Sarah Taub, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign