I.J. Singer’s FAMILY CARNOVSKY and the Crisis of Jewish Visual Typology

• In Event: VISNSHAFT AF YIDDISH: Science in Translation

Abstract

This paper considers Yiddish imaginative engagements with typology as a biologically derived mode of seeing, through Israel Joshua Singer’s novel, DI MISHPOKHE KARNOVSKI/THE FAMILY CARNOVSKY (1943). The arc of this multi-generational novel is often characterized as a pattern of Jewish degeneration in Western Europe, culminating in the Antisemitic, race-science-espousing, German-nationalist grandson, and the entire family needing to flee Germany after the rise of Nazism. Yet in this paper I frame the novel’s developments as a crisis of biological knowledge, rather than as a crisis of Jewishness alone.

To do this, I contextualize the novel’s typological mode of description, and its narration of a typological process of seeing, within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century projects to reproduce (or produce) Jewish types through photography. Fitting within a rich critical history of race and visuality, the novel traffics in some of the most prominent tropes of Jewish typology, relating to abstraction, inaccessibility, and invisibility, precisely because of the ambiguity of Jewish physical distinctiveness within the text. Most notably, the novel’s grandson, Jegor is seen as a perplexing mix of German and Jewish types and becomes the most biologically determined figure in the novel. This paper explores why this figure’s uncertain categorization according to racial typology should ultimately unsettle other biological ideas, such as Mendelian inheritance and atavism.

The novel’s thick investments in typology and in biological knowledge make it challenging for the text to produce a coherent critique of typology. Instead, the narrative unraveling of German race science constitutes a crisis in meaning for the text as well as for the characters. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that THE FAMILY CARNOVSKY is an especially rich site for asking how, and to what end, modern science is translated into Yiddish literature, and into Jewish history and culture, in the twentieth century.

Author

• Dory Amalia Fox, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor