Un-Living Water: Drowning in Sholem Aleichem and Franz Kafka

• In Event: Drowning, Leaking, Flowing: Images of the Aquatic in Jewish Literature

Abstract

In Jewish tradition, water often represents life and origin – it symbolizes hospitality and love for Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, and it has a purifying function in the form of the Mikveh. The Tanakh even refers to this latter example as מים חיים: living water (Vayikra 15:13). However, there are also noticably tragic invocations. God drowns the entire world, save for Noah and his family, and the very sea that splits to rescue the Israelites crashes down and kills an untold number of Egyptians. In this paper, I will engage in a comparative reading of two prominent moments in modern Jewish literature to uncover a Jewish narrative of water that refuses conventional answers of holiness or purity by focusing on the act of drowning, troubling traditional functions and status of violence, guilt, and sacrality (Benjamin 1920/21, 1934; Bruce 2006, 2013). In Sholem Aleichem’s “Shprintze,” Tevye the Dairyman’s fourth daughter, Shprintze, falls deeply in love with Ahronchik, a rich and kind young man, but she drowns herself after Ahronchik’s cruel uncle refuses the pair’s marriage. Franz Kafka’s “The Judgement,” often read as mirroring the Yom Kippur liturgy (e.g. Steinberg 1962), upends its description of Georg and his elderly father when the father rises with unprecedented strength, knowledge, and control over his son’s entire life, culminating in the fulfilled imperative “I sentence you to death by drowning!” These twin deaths challenge the intimate Jewish lineage of water and underline a tragic and lethal narrative submerged right below the surface. Rather than using the image and force of water to highlight characters’ own bold or productive transgressions, in these moments of drowning Sholem Aleichem and Kafka suggest a failure; either of modern romance, matchmaking, and family or of more fundamental commandments. These failures stand against the selectively positive religious memory and symbolism of the Jewish tradition. This counternarrative of water warns that we must acknowledge and address these conflicting textual traditions for the sake of Jewish life, for מים חיים, or risk a modern Jewish death of stagnancy and drowning in the current of an ever-evolving religious and cultural code.

Author

• Jacob Hermant, University of Toronto