Ashkenazi borders

Jewish existence in Eastern Europe took shape over the course of the migrations that form the “Ashkenazi” territory (after a name borrowed from the Bible), beginning with the medieval settlements in the Rhine valley of Jewish communities come from France and northern Italy, which developed a specific culture, a fusion language, Yiddish,¹ and a way of life structured by religious ritual and the observance of the Law. The derekh-ha-shas, the “way of the Talmud,” governs exchanges with the surrounding population and the survival of the group along two constantly dialectical directions: constant economic, political, and linguistic encroachments with the outside, and the perpetuation of the specificity of the traditional way of life that maintains the cohesion of religious life and of the values of yiddishkeyt. The constitution of the Jewish small town, the shtetl, ensures the continuity of practices across transformations and migrations, in constant connection with historical changes, but in a situation of relative cultural and religious autonomy, particularly from the time of the Polish settlement, as early as the thirteenth century. The status of the Jews was then guaranteed by royal charters and by the economic flourishing of the communities. The partitions of Poland, in the seventeenth century, redistribute the political and demographic map of Ashkenazi Europe, with the distribution of a part of the population — essentially in Galicia — within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, while Russia, long closed to Jewish settlement, also finds itself allotted a substantial Jewish population, settled on the lands of the former Kingdom of Poland, in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, where a movement of colonization took place on the part of small, initially very isolated settlements. These mutations progressively constitute a specific culture, which flourishes even as the Western communities tend to dissolve and to lose their visibility, together with the living practice of the Yiddish language, as early as the eighteenth century.²

The notion of border, within this global framework, is essential, because it manifests very concretely the political changes and the redistribution of powers, of statuses, of linguistic usages, of policies specific to minorities. The status of the Galician Jews encompassed within the Habsburg Empire is thus settled by the obtaining of civic rights as early as 1867, even as the Galician Jewish population settled in Poland, on the other side of the border, is subject to the successive “regulations” of tsarist policy, until the aftermath of the First World War, which redistributes the map, with the birth of new nations and the revolutionary changes in Russia. It is only in this period that the Jews of Poland, of Russia, of Ukraine find themselves granted full civic rights, which moreover in no way guarantees their security, amid the extremely troubled political situations then prevailing in Eastern Europe. But this notion of border is at the same time relative, in view of the cultural and religious continuities that govern Jewish life from within, in connection with the adoption of a homogeneous language despite its numerous dialectal differences and the multiple exchanges that structure diasporic life across the borders, including the new Ashkenazi settlements abroad, whether in the Americas, in Palestine, or in the European capitals. Despite great disparities of situations, of usages, of customs, and even of the physical appearance of its members, Ashkenazi culture still declines itself as transnational on the eve of the Second World War, which is going to deal it a fatal blow.

Yiddish literature, from its birth until the end of the medieval period, constantly played with borders, as is attested, among other things, by the sixteenth-century work of Elie Bahur Levita, a Hebraist grammarian come from Germany to Italy, where Hebrew printing was then flourishing: his taking up of chivalric themes in the Bove-Bukh (1541) is combined with a certain Judaization of courtly motifs and of Christian imagery, as well as with the invention of a new versification in Yiddish modeled on the Italian ottava rima. This work, at once original and syncretic, is one of the first examples (and one of the most successful) of the secularization of ancient literature in the vernacular language.

It would be tempting to read certain “classic” texts of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature — at a time when Ashkenazi culture had shifted to Eastern Europe — in the light of this notion of the volatilization of borders. In The Travels of Benjamin the Third, by Mendele Moykher Sforim (1836–1917),³ the cultural borrowings are multiple, from the reference to the famous medieval Judeo-Spanish explorer, Benjamin of Tudela, to Cervantes’s illustrious pair, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, reproduced comically by the two principal characters of the tale. But the grating parody of the narrative ultimately describes a journey that fits within the pocket handkerchief of the mythical small towns of the author’s literary universe, between Glupsk (Folly, Ignorance) and Tuneyadevka (Parasitism), archetypal fictional places of oppressed Jewish existence in the “Pale of Settlement.” Likewise, in the work of Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), the fever of travel draws typified characters to the encounter with the vast world, as in the American journey of Menahem-Mendl,⁴ the luftmensch who lives by his wits and synthesizes an inventive and whimsical Jewish poverty, or Motl,⁵ the cantor’s son, who, driven with his family from the small town where the pogroms rage, finally arrives in America, after having crossed a good part of Europe and stayed in London, finding everywhere the same Jewish quarter, and concluding accordingly that New York is, in the end, merely another Kasrilevke (likewise from the prototypical name of the Jewish town that is the setting of most of the author’s tales). The specificity of collective life in Yiddish of course nourishes the illusion of continuity of these humorous characters, but the narrative irony sets itself to bringing to light the sense of autarky that protects them from the awareness of their vulnerability. The “imaginary” rootedness (even though underpinned by the longevity of the diasporic experience) in a language, a frame of references, beliefs of one’s own, is put into perspective, relativized, but ultimately also explored in its creative potentialities by these bittersweet tales of “small-town” life. But political reality takes it upon itself to call the “dreamers of the ghetto” to order, and it is at the border, precisely, that unscrupulous smugglers rob Motl’s family, leaving them without resources and without passports! Yiddish literature, essentially realistic at bottom, and born of a specific situation of minority status and oppression, cannot, in the end, ignore borders. The period in which it constitutes itself in its modern and secularized form — the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the interwar period — represents, for Ashkenazi Judaism, a veritable maelstrom of centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, of joint struggles for emancipation and for the maintenance of cultural autonomy, of multiple commitments to political, religious, and intellectual movements. One observes at the same time a hardening of borders of every kind that enclose (and sometimes strangle) collective life, as well as groundswell movements that shift the limits, the definitions, the identities, drawing with them powerful tendencies toward universality as toward the maintenance of singularities. The Jewish writers, historians, and artists of Central and Eastern Europe make themselves the sounding board of these shock waves, and it is not surprising to find, from the pen of Kafka, a Jewish writer of Prague writing in German, a definition of literature as an “assault on the borders.”⁶ The notion of “minor literature”⁷ that he forged, and whose meaning still resounds down to us, brings precisely to the fore this centrality of the political in the inspiration of writers who live in the great supranational empires of before the First World War. At the same time, this “assault on the borders” also shifts the borders of one’s own, the edges of identity, the relation to language (to languages), the territorializations (or the deterritorializations) of lived experience and of thought. From this effort to shift the borders, indeed to abolish them, or from this powerlessness to circumvent or deny them, there results in the literary works — beyond the concrete evocation of the always underlying historical situations — a propensity toward the fantastic, toward the uncanny, toward that characteristic form of “reactivity” of the mental or textual fabric in the face of the rupture of the watertight dikes between spaces, times, identities. War in particular, but also what accompanies it — the pogroms, the civil war, the displacements of population, the constitution of new national tracings through the modification of borders and the acquisition of brand-“new” nationalities often felt as “foreign” — all these elements, which, according to Freud, are at the origin of that sense of the “uncanny”⁸ that seizes Europe at war, are widely evoked by the fiction, in Yiddish or in European languages, that Jewish authors employ. Besides Kafka, whose entire work aims at displacement, at the exploration of the borders of without and within, Joseph Roth rendered, in The Radetzky March (La Marche de Radetzky),⁹ all the muffled anguish emanating from this interstitial zone, which separates and unites, distances and brings near, can be crossed or remain obstinately hermetic. The border zone described in The Radetzky March is inspired by Roth’s native town in Galicia, Brody, where the various minorities of the Empire — Ukrainians, Poles, Jews — are subordinated to the Austrian imperial administration. For the District Captain von Trotta the entire space is the prolongation of the Hofburg Castle, just as the portrait of the Emperor and the Radetzky March are omnipresent and recall the allegiance to power. In relation to this at once concentric and hierarchical model, the border zone introduces a space of disturbance, of interruption, of mystery, but also of dread. Situated at the confines of the Empire, in a region of marshes where it is easy to lose oneself, peopled with red-haired Jews descended from the Khazars and with Ukrainian peasants closer in language to the Russian Cossacks, on the other side of the border, than to imperial officials or German soldiers, the border is seen at the outset as a place of communication and of passage: the soldiers are invited to cross it during the Cossack festivals, and the Russian officers do the same, “in their yellow-gray coats with heavy gold and silver epaulettes, with, in all weathers, their shimmering rubber overshoes on their gleaming boots.”¹⁰ The consumption of alcohol is common to all; yet the Cossacks evoke an image of otherness, almost animal in the evocation of the fusion between men and horses that characterizes the equestrian games. The border is at once a place of encounter and of potential confrontation, through the spectacle of the jousts in which difference is staged.

The Jews, for their part, are evoked in an ambiguous way, as often in Roth, with a wealth of directly observed detail, such as those inventories of their hand-to-mouth activities and of the products in which they trade, but also with fantastic connotations, which make of these robust smugglers and these clever merchants phantom-like beings, essentially attached to survival, but ultimately far closer to death than to life. It is through their intermediary that goods pass, often contraband, sometimes even human, like those Russian deserters who slip across fraudulently or those small-town girls conveyed toward the Argentine brothels. This theme is moreover often present likewise in Yiddish literature.

The border interrupts the Empire, even if it remains attached to its immense body and if it is gridded by the mediators of power, soldiers or imperial officials. This intermediate zone, propitious to all crossings, essentially porous, is also a place associated with transgression, by way of the festival, of drunkenness, of gambling, of prostitution. The aristocratic festivals of the Polish count, the local lord, are evoked with images of profusion and of a luxury of another age, figuring the exceptional, the rupture of bearings, the loss of orientation. In this place evoking a world about to be swept away by war (“It was the time when the great lords of Vienna and Saint Petersburg were beginning to prepare the world war. The people of the border felt it coming earlier than the others”¹¹), the experience of depersonalization, of the loss of identity, of doubling, is going to be lived by that representative par excellence of monarchical loyalty, the District Captain von Trotta. The journey to the border, in the middle of the novel’s action, fixes the place of revelation, of prophetic clear-sightedness: the border, an observation post directed toward the other (the neighbor, but also the potential enemy), allows one fleetingly to see inward, to unmask the illusion and the false consciousness: “The night wind sobered the District Captain, but a vague dread still inhabited his heart. He saw the world foundering, and it was his own world.”¹² From then on, the connotations bound to the place unmask death behind the appearance of life or of pleasure: “all the events of daily life suddenly took on a menacing and incomprehensible meaning.”¹³ The meaning of this menace is finally borne out in the masterly last pages of the novel, when war at last breaks out, announced by the flights of crows, the proclamation of the Emperor posted at the border post in all the languages of the Empire, the funereal chants of the Jews who accompany the levy of the soldiers, the “rumble of the bells” and the “floods of people [who] poured out of the little town, [and] surged into the broad street leading to the station.”¹⁴ The evocation of the declaration of war and of the first skirmishes, seen from the Austrian side in Roth, seems to complete, mirror-fashion, the texts in Russian or in Yiddish that we can read on the same event in Dubnow or An-sky. On each side the same scenes of reprisals by the central power against its population are evoked, in which ethnic heterogeneity fosters suspicions of treason in favor of the enemy. Roth signals the same attitude on each side of the border: “It was said that the Cossacks had invaded their own country”; then “The war of the Austrian army began with courts-martial,”¹⁵ before evoking the atrocities perpetrated against the Ukrainians of the Austrian Empire. Dubnow, in his Story of a Jewish Soldier, a kind of historical fiction written as a counterpoint to the historian’s work, describes the same situation on the Russian side, but this time evoking the reprisals against the Jews, driven from the border zones, pushed onto the roads by the Cossack battalions, taken hostage or executed on the grounds of treason, subjected to military pogroms and to exactions.¹⁶

The border, from a place of communication and of passage, becomes the spot where the most visible turbulences of a redoubled and internalized violence concentrate. Within the “hydra of war,” Dubnow as well as An-sky designate the concretions of the specific hatred against the Jews, the focalizations of the rumor that finds a ready-made culprit, when incomprehension and fear accompany the sense of catastrophe and the rupture of civilizational bonds. Just as chaos, in Roth, expresses itself through the metaphor of the storm, in the two Russian authors — engaged in the defense of Jewish culture and in aid to populations in distress — the allegory of anti-Jewish hatred resorts to classic metaphors: the “serpent” of Judeophobic calumny then connotes the poisoned atmosphere prevailing in Poland, exciting a creeping antisemitism on the occasion of the upheavals that seize the places of combat. The forced exodus of half a million Jews driven from the border zones delivers a defenseless population to mass violence. Dubnow sees in it a paroxysm of the “war against the Jews” waged since the 1880s by the tsarist regime. An-sky, traveling through the combat zones in Galicia, while he also describes the result of the confrontations with the Austrian armies — the fires, the material destruction, the shell attacks, the disarray of the civilian population, and the terrible wounds of war — also dwells quite particularly on the pogroms perpetrated by the Cossack battalions.¹⁷ A few years later, during the Polish-Bolshevik conflict of 1920, Isaac Babel, a press correspondent in the Red Cavalry, describes the crossing of the border and the contrast between the orders of the Bolshevik command, putting forward Soviet morality, and the atmosphere of raid and of violence prevailing in the Cossack regiment.¹⁸ The crossing of the border is from then on assimilated to a form of license that delivers a territory and its population to terror and to the unleashing of the most savage instincts. As if the crossing were assimilated to a form of transgression, operating the inhuman metamorphosis.

In Israel Joshua Singer, one finds rather similar statements, within the great historical frescoes contemporary with Roth’s novels. In Yoshe Kalb, which dates from 1932, the year of The Radetzky March, the beginning of the novel’s second part evokes the border zone between Poland and Russia, by narrative means and ethnographic details quite close to Roth’s novel.¹⁹ The two authors moreover have in common the activity of journalists, the one for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the other for the Forverts (the New York Yiddish daily), and travel through Poland, Galicia, and Russia at approximately the same time, between 1924 and 1927. The documentary precision no doubt comes from this journalistic activity, in parallel with the novelistic writing. The motley atmosphere of the annual fair in Singer evokes the ethnic mixture and the diversity of occupations of the different social groups:

“Czech jugglers, monkeys perched on their shoulders, Gypsies with kettles and copper pots, famished Ruthenians, mountain folk of the Carpathians, tinkers covering thousands of kilometers each year, going from village to village, from farm to farm, mending the broken pottery — silent, they all advanced, painfully, along the road. Sometimes they raised a hand toward the carts full of Galician Jews in hats and long dusty caftans who crossed the border at full speed, laden with silks and wools, and they begged…”²⁰.

In Singer too, at the outset, the border represents this place of mixing, of passage, of gathering. Far from separating the various populations, it incites mixture, rapprochement, the bringing to the fore of differences within exchanges that are complementary and ritualized by time and by usage. In The Brothers Ashkenazi, which appeared in 1936 in the United States, the novel’s incipit signals the arrival of the German weavers who are going to found the city of Lodz, soon joined by the Jews and the Polish workforce. The ethnic diversity particular to the industrial capital of Poland is at the center of the fresco, and the economic activity of the city is put in relation with the multiple ties that are woven on the commercial plane, in particular toward the immense Russian market. The war of 1914, evoked at the end of the novel, here again introduces the rupture of this veritable “web” of relations knotted by a capitalism that overflows the borders. The interruption of exchanges between Poland and Russia pushes Max Ashkenazi, one of the principal characters, to relocate his factories occupied by the Germans to the Russian side, until the coming of the Revolution, which sends him to languish in the jails of the Cheka. When his brother Jacob finally succeeds in getting him out of prison, the return journey toward independent Poland leads them to the border post of Lapy, where the Polish policemen indulge in savage exactions against the “Jews and Bolsheviks.” Taking up a journalistic notation present in one of Singer’s articles, underscoring the poisoned atmosphere of the Polish trains, the narration indicates the absurdity of the feeling of homeland in the context of the atavistic antisemitism exacerbated by war and revolution: “In this train rolling toward Poland, between Minsk and Lapy, the Ashkenazi brothers had every opportunity to find themselves ‘at home.’ The closer they drew to the Polish border, the bolder the Polish travelers grew; a blind hatred invaded the atmosphere, threats and insults sprang up from everywhere.”²¹ Jacob, who refuses to dance “Jewish-style” before the Polish officer, is shot down on the spot, while Max, the “king of Lodz,” whirls about clumsily before his torturers and saves his life. The end of the novel evokes the immense churning brought about by the “Great War,” modifying the borders, overflowing them through the incessant influx of demobilized soldiers, returning to newly constituted “homelands”:

“Thousands, tens of thousands of demobilized soldiers crossed the country in packed trains, clinging to the running boards, perched on the roof, on their way home to Ukraine, to Crimea, to Podolia, to Volhynia, or to White Russia… The only ones lacking a homeland to return to were the Jews.”²².

The topos of the Jewish soldier appears frequently in the texts of the period. Dubnow makes it the center of his short tale written in Russian during the war, a form of fictionalization midway between historicity, fictive autobiography, and militant didacticism. Sholem Asch also devotes a short tale to this motif.²³ An-sky, as an ethnographer, analyzes the popular print that recurs frequently in the texts of the period — that of the two Jewish soldiers, one belonging to one of the camps, the second to the other, engaged in a deadly bayonet grapple and dying with the Shema Israel on their lips, ultimately identifying themselves as “brothers” against the nationalism that has set them one against the other. Dubnow uses this largely mythological theme in part, situating in his tale a pathetic scene of confrontation between the Austrian Jew and the Russian Jew on the battlefield. An-sky, for his part, exhibits the “legendary” nature of this tale, which recurs frequently among the multiple myths that war gives rise to among peoples in arms. Israel Joshua Singer in turn takes up the motif in a more political way in The Brothers Ashkenazi, through the secondary figure of Felix Feldblum, an assimilated Jew, a socialist and a Polish patriot who enlists alongside Piłsudski’s legion (Kuczinski in the novel). From the outset, the text underscores the “invisible border” that separates “this stooped man with black eyes and graying curls from those blond, jovial, snub-nosed Slavs who seemed born to wear the uniform.”²⁴ Singer deliberately uses the cultural stereotypes in order permanently to resemanticize, throughout the novel, this “invisible barrier” that is at the origin of the founding myth of the multicultural city, whose first founders (the German weavers) forbid the Jews access before being overwhelmed by their commercial ardor, which blows apart the barriers of exclusion through economic success and prosperity. It is the same recourse to massive means of symbolization that leads him to evoke the pathetic figure of Felix Feldblum, in the blue uniform of the Polish Legion, amid the bereaved Jewish crowd come to gather over the victims of the Lemberg pogrom, perpetrated by the Legion in November 1918.

Singer, like Joseph Roth in Hotel Savoy or The Radetzky March, suggests in effect that the birth of the new Europe — the one that is going to build the conditions of still other and far more destructive conflicts — is congruent with the notion of the stateless person, the figure par excellence of modernity, replacing the model of relative cohabitation of minorities within the framework of the vast multinational empires. As if the destruction of the old borders and their recomposition according to new criteria, inspired by national particularisms, were accompanied by their metaphorical reverse and by the emblematic foregrounding of the figure of the stateless person. This observation, laconic and historical in I. J. Singer, takes on a markedly more metaphorical turn in Roth, ultimately encompassing all the nostalgia for the “world of yesterday” in novels nonetheless devoted to social criticism and to the depiction of modernity. In Hotel Savoy, it is the naturalized image of the rain, incessant and gray, that accompanies and renders the return of the prisoners of war and the demobilized soldiers.

“One of them has a dog that he carries in his arms, and his mess tin clinks at every step against his hip. I know that he will take the dog home; his native land is in the south, at Agram or Sarajevo, he will faithfully bring his dog back to his hut. His wife sleeps with another, his children no longer recognize the one they believed dead — he has become other, and only the dog knows him, a dog, a stateless thing.”²⁵.

Roth, who never recognized any homeland other than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or S. Zweig, suffocating within the narrow limits of postwar Austria, are certainly those “representatives of the world of culture,” always at the border of several worlds and several languages, who characterize the cosmopolitan culture of before 1914, especially in a Jewish context.²⁶ An author such as Isroel Rabon, born into a proletarian milieu, in Balut, the working-class ghetto of Lodz, nonetheless expresses in Yiddish an analogous malaise, in a more brutal way and with expressionist images at once full of horror and of the grotesque, in his novel The Street (La Rue), a return-from-war novel that appeared in 1928.²⁷ The demobilized Jewish soldier who wanders the streets of Lodz is indeed himself too that “stateless person” who no longer recognizes himself in a world that excludes him and wants to forget. The encounters with other marginal figures throughout his nightmarish wandering in the urban labyrinth constantly summon up tales that, one final time, shift the borders, from one country to another (as far as China!), before the earth and the snow definitively engulf the character at the end of the novel. He too, as in Roth, has become “other,” and shows the displacements of the inner borders, over the course of the transgressive experiences that are recounted, by himself or by others: tales of combat, of confrontation with the inhuman, of metamorphoses, of grotesque games that borrow from illusion and from madness their capacity to push back the limits and bring to the surface the obscure world of desires and drives.

Isaac Babel and Lamed Shapiro, the first in Russian and the second in Yiddish, are also among those who set in parallel the historical, geographical, and political upheavals and the displacement of the inner borders, by way of the experience of transgression and of the crossing of limits. Within tales traversed by migrations, exoduses, displacements of entire masses of population on the occasion of war and pogroms, the two authors set themselves above all to describing the constitution of new subjectivities — ambiguous, split, sometimes monstrous, always ambivalent — like that “man with the cross” in Shapiro, who during the pogrom finds himself sometimes on the side of the victims and sometimes on the side of the pogromists. The end of the tale sees him leave for the United States, “reborn” on contact with the ocean and the prairie, which speak in several languages and authorize resilience.²⁸ Or like the narrator of Red Cavalry, Lyutov, in Babel, who, to get himself accepted by the Cossacks, must give proof of his callousness by managing to integrate himself into the group through play and theater (My First Goose) without succeeding in growing accustomed to the spectacle of violence, ultimately refusing to take part in it.²⁹ If Shapiro, who is in the United States when he writes his pogrom stories, gives free rein to a transgressive fictional imagination, Isaac Babel, who was himself a witness to the events, shows rather the difficulty there is in shifting the borders prescribed by culture, even amid the reigning inhumanity. His character remains at bottom a Jewish intellectual, a “four-eyes” incapable of assimilating himself to the primitive world of the Cossacks, even if Babel creates other characters accomplishing this crossing of the borders unto sacrifice, like Ilya, the rabbi’s son, who dies for the Revolution.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, through his emigration to the United States and his long literary career, succeeds for his part in transcending and rendering the collective destiny, working, thanks to fiction, at the very level of the deadly rigor of the borders. It is he who constitutes that great “after Auschwitz” body of work that gathers and transmutes the innumerable threads of Ashkenazi history. In the largely autobiographical short story The Son,³⁰ the narrator evokes his wait for the boat come from Israel that docks at the port of New York, with, on board, his son, whom he has not seen for twenty years. The narrator’s gaze dwells first on this sort of hybrid Babel, gathering together the survivors of the Ashkenazi world who have rebuilt displaced lives, within borders themselves modified by history. The shifting of the cultural limits and the displacement of identities characterizes first the objective, almost sociological description of that particular place that is the New York port, where the very notion of border seems to dilute itself to the measure of the American melting pot:

“The women of New York fanned themselves, all spoke at once in a strident voice, and drank Coca-Cola or ate chocolates. There was in their gaze something solid, hard, that was not Jewish. One had difficulty believing that barely a few years earlier their brothers and sisters of Europe had been sent to the slaughterhouse. Young and modern Orthodox Jews, a small skullcap perched like a plaster in their thick hair, spoke very loudly in English and exchanged pleasantries with girls whose conduct and clothing betrayed not the slightest religious concern. Even the rabbis were different; they resembled neither my father nor my grandfather.”³¹.

This impression of displacement that accompanies the migration of collective identities refers at once to the past and to the present, underscoring the irreversible character of history and the incessant reconstitution of the limits, the barriers, the automatisms that constitute identity, but also the incessant battering blows of subjectivity, ceaselessly rearranging its own borders, working them at the mercy of the events that daily life provokes. The wait for the son sends the narrator back to the past, to the time before the Shoah, to the norms that constituted his being according to the traditional models — his father, his mother, his grandfather. The disturbance that seizes him corresponds well, once again, to the sense of the uncanny that arises with the return of a repressed past, tinged with remorse and guilt:

“This arrival of my son in America brought me back to a period of my life that I already believed belonged to eternity. He emerged from my past like a ghost. He had no place in my present home, nor in the circle of my friends. I had no room for him, no bed, no money, no time. Like this boat that flew the blue-and-white flag stamped with the Star of David, he constituted a strange mixture of past and present. He had written to me that he no longer spoke any of the languages of his childhood — Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Turkish — but only Hebrew. So that I knew in advance, given the little Hebrew I had gleaned from the Pentateuch and the Talmud, that I would not be able to have a conversation with him. Instead of speaking with my son, I would hesitate and would be obliged to look for my words in the dictionary.”³².

The borders here are multiple — between the generations, the spaces, the languages — through the intimate splitting itself: “I might just as well have been a ghost.” To this feeling of exile, which the narrator is moreover going to realize is a trait he has in common with his son (“he had the careless, untidy bearing of a young man without a home, who has spent years in foreign places, who has suffered and who has aged too soon”³³), there responds the literary gesture, this work of the borders, this arrangement of the limit that aims to find the universal within the singular and the idiosyncratic:

“I armed myself with patience and with that resignation that is always in me, ready to immunize me against failures and to make me renounce the slightest desire I might have to free myself from the limits that are mine. I observed each passenger carefully, divining his character and his personality from his general bearing and his clothing. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that each face revealed its secrets to me and that I knew exactly how each brain functioned.”³⁴.

Against the radical pessimism in the face of the inanity of rebuilding a world from “new borders” in the aftermath of the Shoah (“All the passengers had something in common: the fatigue of the long voyage across the Ocean, the nervousness and the lack of assurance of people who arrive in a new country. The eyes of them all expressed the same disappointment: ‘This is America?’ The young girl with a number tattooed on her arm shook her head in anger. The world was a gigantic Auschwitz”³⁵), a faint recourse — what Kafka would perhaps call hope — comes to light, coming from a world at the limit of the past and of the elsewhere, which finds its place only in literature and within language: “One passenger spoke a sort of dialect that was neither German nor Yiddish, but a jargon such as one found in the novels of old. And how strange it was that the people come to wait for him were capable of chatting in the same language!”³⁶.

To be sure, the harsh borders of historical experience are only displaced, transferred elsewhere: the son, who has spent three years in the Israeli army, comes out of a “cruel war,” and, before the spectacle of New York, remains silent, thinking of the war and of its dangers. And so he reveals himself particularly apt to hear the “moral” that the Singerian narrator, as is his habit, takes it upon himself to distill as a rampart against the threat of an invasion of death into life, in which the borders of the real would disappear into the contourless space of anguish: “I said to him: nothing happens by accident. If one is destined to live, one must stay alive. It is destiny that wills it…”³⁷. A moral, in the end, more Stoic than fatalistic, despite appearances and the personal myths once more summoned with humor, at the tale’s close.

Shifting and infinitely displaceable, the border is that place where the awareness of reality comes to the surface, through the confrontation with the other, outside oneself or within oneself, which grounds identity in relation to the intimate gaping void and to that of death. Literature, which lodges on this essentially fragile edge, pulls now toward life, now toward death, like the human collectivities that constantly work to cross the borders, to surpass them, to reconstitute them, dreaming of their abolition and subject to their limits. If a world without border is possible, it is first within literature that it can be thought, even if the singularity and the voice of literature — like the strange Kafkaesque creatures or the Singerian ghosts — like to dwell at the borders in order to continue imagining their disappearance.

Notes