Modernist Ancientness and the Hebraic Body in Melting-Pot U.S.

• In Event: Bodies in Translation

Abstract

This paper studies the representation of “passing” experiences in U.S. Hebrew literature of the mass migration era. Specifically, I examine L. A. Arieli’s novella “Diary of a Lonely Man, or How I Became an Anti-Semite” (1928). In it, Arieli depicts an immigrant protagonist who passes as a descendent of Irish rather than Eastern-European Jewish immigrants through acculturated speech. Yet although the events take place in English, Arieli narrates them in Hebrew—a minor language of reading but not as yet a vernacular—to thematize the pathological effects of ethnic prejudice. I argue that by narrating the events in a Hebrew “translation,” Arieli consciously mimics a dated, rabbinic register of Hebrew, to reveal how the figure of the Jew is timed. Grappling with what Sharon B. Oster has termed the Protestant “Hebraic Myth,” a myth that rendered the Jew “a figure out of time,” Arieli’s protagonist views the Jewish body itself as an obsolete Hebrew liturgical text—a shameful, ancient residue that is foreign to the U.S. modernity and whose cultural Otherness raises endless exegetical investigations. In doing so, Arieli develops a temporal means of rethinking nativist ideologies of linguistic and national purism. He reclaims the ancientness associated with Hebrew to reimagine the location of the Jew within the U.S. modernity. Ultimately, Arieli repurposes the mimetic challenges of Hebrew as a non-vernacular language, directing it toward a translational manifestation of a manifold national belonging.

Author

• Danny Luzon, University of Haifa, Department of English Language & Literature