Queer Yiddish/Heritable Yiddish: The Biological and the Bodily in Irena Klepfisz’s Bilingual Poetry

• In Event: Jewish Queer Woman Bodies and (New) Materialities of Reproduction

Abstract

Irena Klepfisz’s bilingual Yiddish-English poetry has often been viewed as a part of Queer Yiddishkeit, a cluster of creative and critical activity that draws a symbolic, political connection between queer culture and Yiddish culture. Most obviously, this is because of her work’s thematic engagement with queerness and because of its bilingual composition, in Yiddish and English. As a theoretical concept, Queer Yiddishkeit is not only a subversive, descriptive comparison, but is also a future-oriented prescription to see alternatives to biological reproduction for the future of Yiddish. Queer Yiddishkeit seeks to imagine alternate models of inheritance and cultural reproduction for Yiddish. It is this element of Queer Yiddishkeit—the investment in alternate forms of inheritance, and (non)biological reproduction—that will be the focus in my study of Klepfisz’s poetry. Rather than suggesting that Klepfisz’s poetry imagines an alternative to the biological, I argue that her work absorbs and recasts the biological in order to weave connections between bodies, language, and history. Klepfisz’s poetry is able to think through biology in order to establish alternate modes of inheritance and cultural continuity.
Klepfisz’s poetry cycle, “Etleche verter oyf mame loshn/A Few Words in the Mother Tongue,” crowns Yididsh as a “mother tongue,” even though for many of her readers it is an unknown language. This tension positions Yiddish as a not-yet-tapped internal resource, connection, or knowledge. I argue that this is akin to other times when Yiddish has been imagined as a piece of cultural material that is transmittable through biological inheritance, rather than through instruction. This paper will consider the ramifications of placing Yiddish as an unknown, “un-thinking” known. If language is a kind of knowledge that can reside in the body, then we must challenge assumptions about cognition, agency, and the body, as the New Materialists urge us to do. These poems emphasize the importance of Jewish women’s bodies for an imagined Yiddish future. Yet these bodies’ productivity can be independent of heteronormative reproduction. By looking at how Klepfiscz’s poems make use of the biological, including the biologistic concept of “mother tongue,” this paper will offer a chance negotiate “heritable Yiddish” and Queer Yiddishkeit.

Author

• Dory Amalia Fox, University of Michigan