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

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

When examining the relationship between black bodies and the weather in IN THE WAKE: ON BLACKNESS AND BEING, Christina Sharpe notes, "In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies" (106). While Sharpe astutely excavates the complicated relationship of marginalized peoples to climate, there remains a distinct lack of scholarship on how Jewish bodies relate to climate. Specifically, our intervention analyzes the connections and fractures between Jewishness and the aquatic. Jewish entanglements with water merit more attention, and our panel aims to address this gap in the scholarship through a focus on water and transgression. Looking to the metaphorical and ideological facets of water as leaky, erosive, and porous, we will explore new Jewish ecologies that take form in these elemental spaces. The Jewish mythical, literary, and memoiristic body are all variously in contact with water by choice or by command, serving to place Jewishness and individual Jewish beings within a theoretical framework that sticks to the physical body, covered in tiny droplets that reveal the myriad faces of Jewish transgression. Proceeding chronologically on the basis of the primary texts’ publication, Jacob Hermant’s paper looks at drowning in Sholem Aleichem and Franz Kafka to uncover a Jewish image of water that tracks a deadly countermotion to the conventional connection between water and Jewish life; Caleb Sher’s paper reads leakiness as a metaphor for pedagogical modernization in Abraham Golomb’s narrative account of a boyhood memory catching tadpoles in the shtetl pond; and Marissa Herzig’s paper draws on feminist posthumanist scholarship and biblical imagery to examine how two contemporary Jewish fantasy authors craft nonhuman aquatic worlds as feminist spaces of agency. Our panel takes a multilinguistic and transtemporal approach to the status of the aquatic in Jewish literature. Just as water erodes terrestrial formations, our research undermines accepted traditions and truths, crafting aquatic countertraditions that rethink representations of Jewish transgression.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Individual Presentations

• Un-Living Water: Drowning in Sholem Aleichem and Franz Kafka - Jacob Hermant, University of Toronto

• Of Fish, Frogs, and Boyhood: Leaky Pedagogy in Abraham Golomb’s VI FUN A FISH IZ A FROSH GEVORN (How a Fish Becomes a Frog) - Caleb Sher, University of Toronto

• Transgressive Tides: The Feminine Aquatic in Contemporary Jewish Fantasy - Marissa Herzig, University of Toronto