Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

By Karen Grumberg

“Makes a persuasive argument” that gothic ideas “play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics.” —Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity

Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history.

Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253042279

Book preview

HEBREW GOTHIC

JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Editor

HEBREW GOTHIC

History and the Poetics of Persecution

Karen Grumberg

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2019 by Karen Grumberg

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-04225-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-04226-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04229-3 (ebook)

123452322212019

For Astrid Leah, Daniel Per,

and Øystein

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction: Gothic Matters

Part 1A Spectralized Past

1Always Already Gothic: S. Y. Agnon’s European Tales of Terror

2Maternal Macabre: Feminine Subjectivity at the Edge of the Shtetl in Dvora Baron and Ya’akov Shteinberg

3After the Nightmare of the Holocaust: Gothic Temporalities in Leah Goldberg and Edgar Allan Poe

Part 2Haunted Nation

4Dark Jerusalem: Amos Oz’s Anxious Literary Cartography between 1948 and 1967

5Historiographic Perversions: Echoes of Otranto in A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani

6A Séance for the Self: Memory, Nonmemory, and the Reorientation of History in Almog Behar and Toni Morrison

Coda: Here Are Our Monsters: Hebrew Horror from the Political to Pop

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOR THE BETTER PART OF A DECADE, VARIOUS interlocutors have reacted to the ideas in this study with enthusiasm and encouragement. This book would not have come into being without their open-mindedness, collegiality, and generosity of spirit. I am especially grateful to Adriana X. Jacobs, whose perceptive comments were instrumental as I wrote and revised the manuscript. I feel exceedingly fortunate to have had such an engaged reader. Blake Atwood, Maya Barzilai, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Sheila Jelen, Neta Stahl, and Ilana Szobel read and commented on the manuscript or on drafts of particular chapters. Their insights and suggestions were invaluable in clarifying and refining my ideas. At various junctures, I have benefited from the comments of other colleagues, including Marc Caplan, Rebecca Hopkins, Lital Levy, Jerome Singerman, and Melissa Weininger. As I navigated the terrain of gothic studies, Carol Margaret Davison, Catherine Spooner, and Sara Wasson, all of whose work leaves its imprint throughout this study, extended a warm welcome.

Many others have responded to my work with curiosity and interest, recommending texts, questioning points, and expressing support. I am indebted to those who provided feedback on my work in progress at annual meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, the Modern Language Association, the National Association for Professors of Hebrew, and the International Gothic Association, as well as at symposia and colloquia, including All That Gothic at the University of Łódź, Poland; the Gruss Colloquium at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania on Jews Beyond Reason; and Gothic Trespass: Borders, Bodies, Texts at the University of Texas at Austin.

I wish to thank my friends and colleagues in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at UT, who have helped nurture an intellectually stimulating and supportive environment. I reserve deep gratitude for UT’s remarkable Hebrew and Judaica librarian, Uri Kolodney, for whom no text is too rare, too geographically distant, or too difficult to locate. His instinct, skills, and perseverance have unearthed gems. Special thanks to my dear friends Na’ama Pat-El and Esther Raizen, who, over the years, have offered their wisdom, steadfast support, and patient guidance through various grammatical and historical nuances of the Hebrew language. I am grateful to Leonor Diaz, whose perspicacity and warmth put everything into proper perspective. My students, both graduates and undergraduates, have allowed me to indulge my love of the gothic and provided a forum for discussing the ideas informing this book. I owe much to my editors at Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen and Paige Rasmussen, for seeing this project through to its completion with astuteness and integrity.

This book could not have been completed without the support of several fellowships, including the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, which allowed for a leave in the early stages of research; a Humanities Research Award from UT’s College of Liberal Arts, which offered three years of support; and a College Research Fellowship from UT’s College of Liberal Arts, which provided leave in the final stages of writing.

Finally, the personal reverberations effected by the labyrinthine process of writing a book deserve special acknowledgment. My parents, Simi and Alex, and my parents-in-law, Grethe and Hans Gunnar, have accompanied this project with love and encouragement over the years. My husband, Øystein, has shared all the moments of exhilaration and frustration that have attended my research. He is a true partner in life, as he has proved in part by his willingness to spend many an evening by my side watching Penny Dreadful. Our children, Astrid Leah and Daniel Per, were born and have grown alongside this book. They are my wondrous progeny; they make everything possible.

An earlier version of chapter 3 was originally published as Gothic Temporalities and Insecure Sanctuaries in Lea Goldberg’s ‘The Lady of the Castle’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death,’ in Comparative Literature 68, no. 4: 408–26. Copyright 2016, University of Oregon. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press (www.dukepress.edu).

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

IN TRANSLITERATING H EBREW TERMS IN THIS BOOK , I follow the recommendations of the Library of Congress Romanization Table for Hebrew, with minor modifications to enhance readability. I retain diacritic marks only in the ḥet and dispense with the final he ( he sofit ) in most cases, with a few specific exceptions (such as in agunah and Haskalah ) to accord with publication conventions. For proper names, I defer to the preferred or conventional English spelling, designating ḥet only to provide clarification regarding texts that have not been translated to English. For example, referring to Ḥana in Ya’akov Shteinberg’s story, which has not been translated, I retain the subscript dot beneath the H to distinguish between ḥet and he , while in other references to the name Hana, I dispense with the dot. Throughout, I cite English translations when available but modify when necessary; these modifications are noted and refer to the Hebrew original. In these cases, and for texts that have not been translated to English, the translations from Hebrew are mine.

HEBREW GOTHIC

INTRODUCTION

Gothic Matters

HOW DOES FICTION FACTOR INTO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF the past? Literature might challenge long-held assumptions of historical truth, offering other stories to displace or complement them; or it might, more radically, expose historical narrative as itself constructed. To varying degrees, literature can contaminate the purity of history. Alon Hilu’s Hebrew novel Ah˙uzat Dajani ( The House of Rajani , 2008) opens with a preface that claims its historical basis: This book is based on the letters and personal diaries of H˙ayim Margaliyot-Kalvarisky (agronomist, member of the First Aliya, 1868–1947), kept in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem. The author explains that he has chosen to retain the language of these documents, the authentic Hebrew of the late nineteenth century, and to translate and publish alongside them the Arabic journal entries of Salah˙ Dajani, a Palestinian Arab. ¹ Kalvarisky is an actual historical figure; the preface heightens the sense of historical veracity through the use of explanatory footnotes, absent from the novel itself. Subsequent Hebrew printings of the novel as well as its English translation, published in 2010, end with an author’s note clarifying that "The House of Rajani is absolutely a work of fiction and is not based on any so-called ‘diaries.’ The House of Rajani is in no way or form a historical document. It is a work of fiction." ² The overwrought and repetitive author’s note and the replacement of the historical surnames with fictional ones were consequences of a scandal and legal row that ensued upon the novel’s publication. Kalvarisky’s family accused Hilu of tarnishing their forebear’s reputation, while critics from the right and left found fault with his representation of the history of the Zionist narrative. ³

The tension between history and fiction that has come to define the novel calls to mind a novel published 250 years earlier, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, considered the first gothic novel. Published in 1764 under the pseudonym William Marshal, Otranto opens with a preface claiming the historical authenticity of the text, supposedly discovered in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England and translated by Marshal from the purest Italian.⁴ Walpole revealed himself as the author and the work as fiction in the preface to the second edition in 1765, only after the purportedly historical document had been favorably received. This conceit of the discovered manuscript has, over time, become one of the favored conventions of the gothic mode. It is a formal manifestation of one of the foremost preoccupations of the gothic: the tension between counterfeit and authenticity, artifice and truth, fictions and histories.

Hilu’s novel expresses this preoccupation not only in the liberties it takes with history but also more generally in the author’s intentional participation in and emulation of the gothic tradition. When he was asked, in a 2010 interview, to name the best books on Israel and Palestine in art, he listed a novel by the revered Hebrew Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon, two historical accounts of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), a mainstay of British gothic literature. When asked to explain what Radcliffe’s novel has to do with Israel and Palestine, he recalled facing similar skepticism from his editor when he approached him with the idea of writing a gothic novel set in Palestine: But it’s always sunny there! Despite its climate, though, Palestine can be gothic, he explains, because of traces of old empires dating back several millennia. The gothicism of Dajani is deliberate and strategic: I decided I wanted my book to be gothic, which meant it would involve supernatural events, ghosts, murder in the night—all the motifs of gothic novels. He cites Hamlet (also admired by Walpole) and Udolpho as important influences: If you Google gothic you can find the name Ann Radcliffe and this is one of her most famous books. So I summarized it and made a list of the gothic motifs I would like to include in my book, like events taking place at night and a raven.⁵

This facile presentation of the gothic notwithstanding, Hilu clearly is aware that there is something behind this catalogue of aesthetic conventions. He invokes them in the service of Dajani’s position as part of a new trend in Israel to be critical of the way we tell our history, which he associates with the Israeli New Historians. But this so-called trend is not new. The revisionist historians Hilu cites and with whom he explicitly aligns himself had been at work for nearly three decades when Dajani was published, and even if they were a minority, authors such as S. Yizhar had been critically engaging with the official Israeli narrative since the birth of the state. Nor is Hilu by any means the first Hebrew author to turn to the gothic to express these historical and historiographic modifications. To the contrary, though up to now unacknowledged, the gothic has played a role in the development of modern Hebrew literature at least since the fin de siècle, not as a curiosity on the sidelines of the Hebrew literary landscape but as a constitutive force.

Why the gothic? What does this mode—notoriously difficult to define adequately, seemingly incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine, and frequently dismissed as a popular and even vulgar mode—contribute to Hebrew literature? Particularly given the antisemitism lurking in British gothic literature, why would Jewish authors of Hebrew turn to the gothic? Hebrew Gothic responds to these questions by locating the gothic within modern Hebrew literary discourses engaged with history, historiography, and collective identities and putting these works in conversation with key British and American gothic texts and theoretical paradigms. Hebrew authors’ appeal to the gothic mode, I argue, shapes the literary engagement with the Jewish past. As such, the gothic helps authors revise the dynamics of powerlessness and victimization associated with the Jewish conception of history, central in contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric. In their appropriation and revision of particular gothic themes and devices, the Hebrew works included in this study, which span from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first, offer unconventional approaches to power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence. As this study shows, the Hebrew adaptation of the gothic adds a new dimension to the mode writ large. The very devices that inscribed the Jew as the cursed wanderer who threatened the moral and social order in European gothic literature were taken up by Jewish authors of Hebrew to subvert such paradigms. Significantly, as the object of the gothic became its author and its agent, he or she did not necessarily reassign villainy to the non-Jewish other but rather used the gothic to critically examine the collective Jewish self.

The gothic is widely regarded as having been inaugurated by the publication of Walpole’s Otranto. Its popularity gave rise to other texts that, like Otranto, used imagery and devices that have become the conventions of the gothic: ghosts, vampires, and vulnerable heroines occupy foreboding castles and navigate subterranean labyrinths, eliciting the reader’s suspense and terror. Primarily between the 1760s and the 1820s, Walpole, Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and others associated with first wave Gothics produced gothic works that shocked the English public with their violence, excess, transgressions, and explained or unexplained supernatural events—but, as numerous studies have shown, their narratives are never detached from the social and political milieu in which they were produced.⁶ The gothic not only provided a paradigm through which to express the violence and fear in Britain; it also made an important contribution to a discourse, just beginning to take shape, on national identity, by producing an apparatus of monstrosity to account for alterity within and beyond the borders of Protestant England.⁷ American gothic, too, contends with the shadows and specters of those eradicated and suppressed from the national sensibility that they threatened.⁸ As we shall see, certain gothic elements have been instrumental in the Zionist imagination. This book’s primary concern is with the fundamental tasks performed by the gothic in these works: the reconceptualization of the past and the development of new, alternative historiographies. These tasks, in turn, encompass the gothic engagement with and against the national endeavor, a phenomenon that informs my analysis particularly in the second half of this study.

The Hebrew plays, stories, and novels analyzed in Hebrew Gothic revise gothic literary conventions to reinterpret elements of the Jewish past and their place in the present. More specifically, their authors summon the gothic for several reasons: to engage with a particular historical event that continues to haunt the Jewish Israeli sensibility, such as the Holocaust or the wars of 1948 and 1967; to modify a historiographic practice, such as the conceptualization of the Eastern European Jewish past or the revisionist Israeli histories that emerged in the 1980s; or to confront historiographic injustice, as in the erasure of the Arab Jewish past in Zionist Israel. My main point of entry to the gothic in Hebrew literature, then, is history, broadly defined to include representations of a hostile but seductive past, the reconfiguration of temporality and the mechanics of time, and fragile narratives of family and nation. The literary expression of this confrontation with history is shaped through a poetics of persecution, which itself is based on adaptations of specific gothic conventions. Inscribing the ongoing revision of the categories of victim and oppressor and exposing them as historically unstable and ambivalent, this poetics forces us to reevaluate assumptions about political power and powerlessness in the past and the present. The implicit or overt violence exhumed by the formal, thematic, and aesthetic appropriation of the gothic, as well as the shifting dynamics of victim and persecutor it engenders, are at the heart of my investigation.

The Para-site of History

As a field, gothic studies spans a broad spectrum, temporally and geographically as well as in terms of its critical and theoretical focal points. Centered in the United Kingdom, it is supported by a robust scholarly society, the International Gothic Association (founded in 1991), and a biannual academic journal, Gothic Studies (first published in 1999). Centers of gothic studies and related graduate degree programs can be found throughout the United Kingdom. Since the 1990s, which saw an efflorescence in research of the gothic, the field has nourished its own expanding boundaries and is well established in the Anglophone world, including Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Though in the American academy the gothic tends to be subsumed under other literary categories, individual American scholars have contributed prolifically to gothic studies.⁹

This global network helps renew, invigorate, and sustain the field’s multilingual, transnational, and interdisciplinary nature. Studies of gothic from the perspective of feminism, postcolonial studies, queer studies, new historicism, and cultural studies have built on a broad body of scholarship on British and American gothic literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating the mode’s elasticity and wide applicability beyond its original context.¹⁰ Scholars specializing in literature produced from Canada to the Caribbean to Japan have drawn on the gothic as a framework to articulate new modes of thinking. More recently, globalgothic has emerged as the identification of gothic themes and devices with global trends in market capitalism and technology.¹¹ The turn of the millennium saw a global proliferation of literature and film that contribute to the ever-evolving phenomenon known as contemporary gothic, which indicates the malleability of the historical and territorial features that made earlier gothic texts gothic. This elasticity is a primary attribute of contemporary gothic as well as its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors. Broadly speaking, the gothic, like its subjects, is defined partly by the constant flux of its own generic, geographic, temporal, and linguistic boundaries, a necessary trait for its continued adaptation beyond its original time and place.

This adaptability, however, is the same feature that makes the gothic so difficult to pin down. Despite certain tendencies and conventions associated with gothic fiction, one would be hard-pressed to settle on a definition of the gothic. Even the designation of its basic category—is it a genre, a mode, an aesthetic?—is contested. The first task at hand, then, is to explain what I mean by gothic. Clearly, the gothic is more than the sum of its familiar conventions: the presence of a ghost does not, in itself, make a text gothic, and gothic texts do not all contain ghosts. The broad issue at stake in gothic texts is the contamination, disruption, or transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries. Unsettling notions of national identity and of historical narrative, the gothic reveals the fear and anxiety at the heart of these seemingly fixed entities and forces a reassessment of the present and future. Not all texts that deal with the past or its unstable narratives, however, are gothic. Unlike other narrative modes or approaches that engage with these themes, the gothic produces a particular atmosphere and mood that prioritize the terror they evoke, creating a dynamic of victimization that feeds this terror. Gothic conventions and devices matter because they literalize the horrific nature of the past. In other words, it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic.

In gothic subject and form alike, one of the mode’s chief characteristics is readily evident: its signification of instability. As David Punter puts it, the gothic encompasses an "awareness of mutability, an understanding of the ways in which history itself, and certainly narratives of history, are not stable."¹² Instead of stability, there is only distortion—slips of the tongue, tricks of the eye, which ensure that what we see is always haunted by something else, by that which has not quite been seen, in history or in text.¹³ The gothic itself is subject to the same mutability of what it represents, with its repertoire of lost, misread, miscommunicated, or misunderstood texts, indicating the attempt to validate that which cannot be validated, the self-sufficiency, the autonomy of a textuality that is always ruined beyond repair.¹⁴ The instability of the gothic is a function of narrative, both at the level of the text itself and in a broader historical sense: a dominant story gives way to those that have been stifled, clamoring to be told. As such, diverse cultural, historic, and geographic contextualizations of the gothic have led to its interpretation, in Carol Margaret Davison’s words, as the site of a multiplicity of discourses whose authors do not share a single coherent world-view.¹⁵ Simply put, suggests Punter, in dealing with terror, Gothic deals with the unadmitted, a preoccupation that makes gothic "a mode—perhaps the mode—of unofficial history.¹⁶ British imperialism and American slavery, for example, sustained glossy narratives of cultural and economic success at horrific cost to those whose stories were unacknowledged. The threatened exposure of these histories, long buried, provokes the dread associated with the gothic. Besides functioning as a repository of suppressed historical narratives, the gothic, asserts Markman Ellis, is itself a theory of history: a mode for the apprehension and consumption of history.¹⁷ Through dark, irrational, and excessive plots, it offers a critique of the Enlightenment construction of history as a linear account."¹⁸

Building on this foundation, much gothic criticism has come to identify its engagement with history as one of its most consequential features. Born of fissures in the facade of social or political stability, the gothic provides an idiom for the literary articulation of and response to these moments of rupture and a distinct aesthetic expression for the historiographic revisions they invite. As such, as we have already seen, history itself often becomes a subject of or in gothic texts. The relationship of the gothic to history is threefold. It is evident in the gothic’s representation and thematization of the past; in its theorization of history, time, and historiography; and in the specific historical circumstances of its own production, which are often subject to the same occlusion they thematize. I locate the gothic in Hebrew literary texts at this intersection of history as the subject of gothic fiction and gothic fiction as a history in and of itself. For the Hebrew authors in this study—S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, Ya’akov Shteinberg, Leah Goldberg, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Almog Behar—cultural anxieties regarding the development of Hebrew culture inform a reflection on the role and representation of the past.

Though both contemporary gothic fiction and its classic textual predecessors can seem removed from the real world of politics, history, and social issues, they both work to challenge not reality itself but the well-lit, seemingly stable and coherent narratives that lay a claim on the real. Conceptualizing the gothic as a para-site, in Punter’s words, can help us envision the relation between gothic fiction and the narratives from which it so decisively departs: the gothic "perversion of other forms . . . serves to demonstrate precisely the inescapability of the perverse in the very ground of being."¹⁹ As a para-site, the gothic is not only compatible with but also necessary for the functioning of the real world: The parasite supports the host as much as vice versa, as the pragmatic daylight world survives only in its infolding of the spectral world of desire.²⁰ The terror of the gothic is in its confrontation with darkness, not as a fantastic force with no bearing on our lives but as a force that is constitutive of our world. Urging nothing less than the reevaluation of reality itself, the gothic, observes Punter, "demands that we reject the narrative of cultural cleansing and engage instead with a textual and psychic chiaroscuro where plain sight is continually menaced by flickerings from other worlds."²¹ The sanitized present gives way to a past of inconvenient truths, moldering secrets, and buried transgressions.

The confrontation staged by the gothic between the past and the present to disinter obscured narratives of family and nation has created the perception that the gothic is, at heart, a subversive form. This is often the case, as many studies on postcolonial, postnational, or queer gothic can attest. Yet the motives behind such exhumations and their consequences vary from text to text. As Sara Wasson reminds us, eighteenth-century Gothic regularly tames subversion into an enlightenment narrative, ending by re-asserting conventional family structures and the power of modernity to vanquish the ghosts of the past.²² In other words, the gothic can be claimed by no single political or ideological project but can be appropriated to serve either conservative or progressive ends. The authors in this study demonstrate this pliability of the gothic. Though they are all subject to a degree of ambivalence regarding their personal subjectivity or their national identity, urged by different motivations and circumstances to engage with the past, they all call on the gothic to do so. Some use it to express anxiety at the dissipation of an enlightenment narrative, while others expose the violence of this narrative’s suppression of others.

The authors and texts included in this study are intended to reflect the pervasiveness of the mode in Hebrew literature and its adaptability to a wide spectrum of ideological concerns. I do not propose that these authors be designated gothic, but, more modestly, that their adaptation of gothic elements be acknowledged as a significant feature of their literary repertoire and of the Hebrew literary landscape. I have chosen to include these authors, a sampling of those who call on gothic aesthetics and thematic preoccupations in Hebrew, for several reasons. Though they are not all canonical authors, they have all left an indelible mark on Hebrew literature, and thus their use of gothic cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, coincidental, or anomalous to the concerns of Hebrew culture more broadly. The texts at hand span a good part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with the earliest story, by Agnon, published in 1916 (but probably composed in prior versions as early as 1906 or 1907), and the latest, by Almog Behar, published in 2005. They all engage, in some way, with the past and its representation: the first half of the study focuses on the use of the gothic to grapple with the European Jewish past, while the second half is concerned with Israeli history.

This study does not aspire to an exhaustive survey or complete history of Hebrew gothic literature with a distinct starting point, a particular instigating event, or a unified and homogeneous ideological purpose.²³ Nor is it primarily interested in making a claim of direct influence. Though, being educated and well read, the authors in this study almost certainly read European gothic texts in their English or German originals or in Hebrew translation, I have not tried to unearth such encounters. I do not contend that A. B. Yehoshua read The Castle of Otranto and decided to emulate it (though Hilu does engage in this prototypically gothic process of imitation and fakery). Rather, I analyze a number of case studies to ask, What does the gothic activate in these Hebrew authors’ visions and revisions of the past? Hebrew Gothic confronts this and other questions I have posed to investigate how Hebrew literature’s gothic expressions of and about history are effected by an ambivalent poetics of persecution. As such, the gothic helps Hebrew authors respond to and represent formative moments of historical rupture. Contrary to the perception of it as external to the concerns of Hebrew writing, a misconception I will address in the individual chapters, the gothic has—since the revival of modern Hebrew literature—been intimately intertwined with it. Exposing this intimacy and questioning the boundaries separating the Jewish from the non-Jewish is one of the main aims of this book.

At the outset, I want to emphasize that certain demonic or supernatural figures that are associated primarily with the Jewish and, particularly, the Yiddish folk tradition, such as the dybbuk and the golem, are not included in this study. Their fantastic nature suggests an affinity to the gothic mode that is unsurprising, given the European setting that nurtured them for centuries.²⁴ What interests me in this study, however, is the way Hebrew authors engage with figures, themes, and imagery supposedly outside the Jewish repertoire, exposing the artifice of perceived divisions between the Jewish and the non-Jewish.²⁵ The gothic in the Hebrew works I examine is in dialogue with the themes borne of Christian European gothic—a literary tradition associated with reactionary politics and antisemitism as much as with subversive ideologies. Moreover, this study focuses on Hebrew, a language whose narrative of resurrection can itself be conceptualized in gothic terms. The authors who chose to write in Hebrew in the early decades of the century were Europeans who had to renounce Europe’s culture and languages in allegiance to the Zionist project. Hebrew, as such, encompasses both an acknowledgment of the diasporic Jewish powerlessness that instigated Zionism and a resolve to attain political power through nationalism and the resurrection of a dead tongue.²⁶

Theorizing Hebrew Gothic: The Spectral Turn and Affect Theory

Having summoned the image of Hebrew’s resurrection, I want to turn for a moment to the contemporary era to address two theoretical orientations that inform this study. The first is the far-reaching and influential cultural theory phenomenon known as the spectral turn. The spectral turn refers to growing scholarly interest, since the 1990s, in interdisciplinary engagements with ghosts and haunting. Its defining concept, spectrality, posits the haunting ghost as a conceptual metaphor primarily (but not solely) concerned with elucidating issues of memory and history.²⁷ Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), though by no means the first work to invoke the ghost as a metaphor, is considered to have sparked the spectral turn in cultural criticism. In this text, Derrida revises ontology to arrive at the concept of hauntology, which acknowledges the prominence of haunting in being itself: It is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time.²⁸ Taking aim at what he sees as Marx’s impulse to exorcise necessary ghosts in the name of revolution, Derrida promotes a universalizing conceptualization of haunting in the name of ethics and justice vis-à-vis the other, urging an acceptance of and cohabitation with specters. Critics of this broad notion of spectrality have argued for a more historically specific understanding of ghosts and haunting.²⁹ These two modes of interpretation—general and broadly ontological, on the one hand, or historically determined by specific events and experiences, on the other—continue to inform spectrality.

The question of whether we ought to consider the metaphor of the ghost to be general or specific is accompanied by another: that of the specter’s purpose. Tracing two models of ghostly interaction, Colin Davis characterizes Derrida’s paradigm as one in which we speak with specters not so that they will divulge their secrets but rather to open us up to the experience of secrecy as such and thus ensure respect for otherness.³⁰ By contrast, Davis notes, the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who wrote about haunting in the context of transgenerational trauma, argue that the ghost’s return neither clarifies mysteries nor restores justice. For them, the phantom is a liar; its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and safeguard its own secret.³¹ Psychoanalysis is necessary to air the secret and exorcize the ghost, a goal at odds with Derrida’s famous exhortation "to learn to live with ghosts."³²

What is the relationship of spectrality to the gothic? The spectral turn coincided with what María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, among others, characterize as a surge in gothic scholarship since the 1990s; the ghost has become a key generic marker in gothic studies. Yet as they point out, the ghost appears in other literary modes, such as magical realism; it pre-dates the eighteenth-century heyday of British gothic literature; and it is just one of the fear-inducing conventions of the gothic. As such, they insist that by no means all ghosts are Gothic and that each haunting should be read on its own terms.³³ Just as the gothic cannot contain the ghost, so can spectrality not encompass the gothic. Decrying the spectralization of the Gothic, Roger Luckhurst critiques spectrality as an overdetermined cultural concept, wielded by critics to legitimize broad generalizations.³⁴ No concept, no self-identity, no text, no writing that is not haunted, he laments.³⁵ The application of Derrida’s universalist hauntology in gothic literary criticism has led, argues Luckhurst, to a meta-Gothic discourse that is not adequately attentive to the specific historical and political contexts of gothic texts.³⁶ The gothic and spectrality, then, are far from equivalents—while they do frequently impinge on each other, each also has its own (after)life to live, as Pilar Blanco and Peeren assert.³⁷

In this study, spectrality provides a conceptual framework that allows me to situate my inquiry within a broader, transnational interest in ghosts and haunting. Several concepts that have emerged to dominate the discourse of haunting in literary criticism are relevant to this study: the idea of spectralized modernity and the haunted city;³⁸ the ghost’s disruption of historical narrative and chronology and its exposure of alternative narratives; the specter’s spectatorship and invisibility; its relation to repressed secrets; and the notion of ghostly inheritance. The literary gothic, while also concerned with these matters, expands the scope of inquiry while remaining attentive to its particularities. Allowing for an engagement with specific histories and their narratives, constellations of political and social circumstances, and textual encounters with other gothic figures, themes, and experiences beyond spectrality, the gothic designates the tenor of these texts. Haunting is one among many modes of confronting the past.

The second theoretical orientation that warrants discussion is affect theory. Though only one chapter (chap. 2) engages with affect theory in a sustained manner, considerations of affect inform my analyses throughout this study and are critical to the gothic more broadly. Affect theory, like spectrality, is identified with its own moment in cultural theory, the affective turn of the mid-1990s. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth have pointed out, though, no single theory of affect exists—nor should it. Rather, they suggest striving to maintain the multiplicity that informs our understanding of this concept: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds.³⁹ Defining affect entails navigating and disentangling a web of interrelated concepts, including emotion and feeling. While acknowledging that these concepts are closely related, numerous theorists have identified distinctions among them, pointing to differences in their formation, expression, and consequences (or lack thereof). Brian Massumi’s elucidation of affect is among the most influential: "L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act."⁴⁰ A bodily inscribed intensity, an experiential state, a potentially political positionality—though it is not difficult to see how the boundaries separating emotions, feelings, and affects might blur, Massumi’s emphasis on the body’s engagement with and expression of experience, and the complementary notion that these processes can catalyze or limit action, are central to affect theory.⁴¹

One might expect, given gothic literature’s obsession with intense experience, that the gothic would offer fertile ground for the exploration of affect. Gothic studies, however, is curiously devoid of sustained critical considerations of affect, save for a few exceptions. Pointing to the gothic as primarily structured so as to elicit particular responses in the reader, George E. Haggerty has identified gothic affect as central to, and even interchangeable with, gothic form. This affective structure is what allows the gothic to achieve its notoriously wide range of interpretive possibility—the mutability that Punter identifies.⁴² Jerrold E. Hogle has identified gothic affect as primordial fear made ‘sublime’ by safe fictional distancings from the ultimate threat of death. Hogle argues that the real is always enfolded within the exaggeration, hyperbole, and excess of the gothic, thus producing its affect, its pulling us back to safety as much as it draws us towards the fear it keeps arousing.⁴³ Xavier Aldana Reyes, lamenting that the purpose of the gothic—to scare, disturb, or disgust—has often been neglected, calls for a more thorough critical investigation of affect in gothic studies, one that prioritizes the gothic’s concern with readerly effect and immersion.⁴⁴ Bruno Lessard has written about affect-value, the commodification of gothic affect in film.⁴⁵

These studies all consider the affective consequences of the reader’s or viewer’s encounter with the gothic text. One of the ways the gothic works to frighten and distress its readers, though, is by depicting extremely affected characters: gothic victims are subjected to situations that elicit almost unbearably intense psychological, emotional, and physiological responses. With this in mind, my own considerations of affect, most prominent in chapter 2, shift the focus to the affective dynamics of the characters rather than of the readers. The two approaches, however, are inextricable: implicit in an investigation of character is the notion that the character’s affect bears consequences for the reader who encounters him or her. Divergent subjects notwithstanding, Hogle’s multilayered conceptualization of gothic affect—a manifestation of the tense coexistence of the real and the fake, proximity and distance, present and past—percolates this study.

Gothic in Hebrew Translation: A Brief Nonhistory

The Hebrew authors who call on the gothic do not do so in a vacuum. Those who immigrated to Palestine from Europe were, without exception, well read in European literature and had certainly encountered European gothic texts in their original language. In fact, this was the only way to access most of these texts, since scarcely any were translated to Hebrew until the 1980s. The Hebrew translation enterprise that thrived in Europe and Palestine in the early decades of the twentieth century was positioned as an arbiter of literary greatness; deciding which books to translate to Hebrew was a strategic act, calculated to enhance Hebrew literary culture and, finally, to legitimize the Zionist aspiration to be a nation among the nations.⁴⁶ Clearly, the translation of melodramatic tales of the supernatural did not accord with these goals. Walpole’s Otranto was not available in translation until 2014, but even more canonical gothic works, known beyond their affiliation with the gothic