Embodied Differences: The Jew’s Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture 9781644694862

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Embodied Differences

The Jew’s Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture

Embodied Differences

The Jew’s Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture HENRIETTA MONDRY

Boston 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mondry, Henrietta, author. Title: Embodied differences : the Jew's body and materiality in Russian literature and culture / Henrietta Mondry. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031324 (print) | LCCN 2020031325 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694855 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694862 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694879 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature--History and criticism. | Jews in literature. | Jews in popular culture. | Human body in literature. | Body image in literature. | Jews--Russia--Social conditions. Classification: LCC PG2988.J4 M66 2020 (print) | LCC PG2988.J4 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/3529924--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031324 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031325 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Kryon Publishing Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Publisher by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To my family

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

ix xi

Part One—The Other Body and Spaces For Matter

1

Chapter One: Locating Historically the Jew’s Body between Display and Transformation Chapter Two: The Power of Meat: Defining Ethnicity and Masculinity in Gogol Chapter Three: Valued Bodies and Spaces: Cross-Religious Encounters in Dostoevsky Chapter Four: Intimate Spaces: The Modern Jewess in the Boudoir in Chekhov and Bely Chapter Five: Animal Advocacy and Ritual Murder Trials Chapter Six: Aphids and Other Undesirables: The Predatory Jew versus Soviet Art Chapter Seven: Abject Bodies: Tactility, Dissection and Body Rites in Postmodernist Fiction

2 24 37 55 73 91 98

Part Two—Re/Active Embodiments and a Sense of Things

113

Chapter Eight: Women Writers Inventing Exotic Origins Chapter Nine: Strange Ancestors in the House and Basement Chapter Ten: On Feeding the Family: Constructing Jewishness through Nurture Chapter Eleven: Materiality of Smell and the Cultural Constructs of Memory

116 127 146 166

Chapter Twelve: “An Edible Chronotope”: in Search of Jewish Heritage Food Conclusion: The Power of Bodies and Senses that Matter Bibliography Index

184 203 214 235

A Note on Transliteration

I

n translating Russian, I have used the Library of Congress system, except for personal names commonly appearing in English, such as “Leo Tolstoy” or “Alexander Nevsky.” In bibliographical references, however, I have used the conventional transliteration of personal names.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. The photograph from An-sky’s expedition of the Jewish shoemaker who, in An-sky’s words, looks like Nicholas II. Figure 2. Photographs of people and artefacts from An-sky’s ethnographic expedition were inserted in Iosif Utkin’s poem The Tale of Red-Headed Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925) to provide an historical context to Jewish life before the October Revolution, when Jews suffered from pogroms. Figure 3. Photographs from An-sky’s expedition in Iosif Utkin’s The Tale of RedHeaded Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925), inserted among illustrations which depict working Jews in interaction with materials of their work. Figures 4 and 5. Two illustrations from Iosif Utkin’s The Tale of Red-Headed Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925), which depict the rejection of circumcision by parents in the 1920s. Drawings by K. Rotov. Figure 5. This illustration is to the protagonist’s words: “Enough blood, respected rabbi!”. The shape of the knife and the statement evoke the nexus between the ritual of circumcision and the blood libel. Figure 6. Pinya’s greedy interaction with the bottle of gold sand in the film Iskateli shchast′ia (Seekers of Happiness). 1936. Figure 7. “Spectacled” Jewish engineer David Margulies (actor Sergei Iursky) at the construction of the Iron and Steel Works in Magnitogorsk (1930s). Still

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List of Illustrations

from the film adaptation of Kataev’s Time, Forward! Dir. Mikhail Shveitser. Mosfilm, 1965. Figure 8. New muscular masculinities resulting from the interaction with reinforced concrete in the Magnitogorsk plant. Still from the film adaptation of Kataev’s Time, Forward! Dir. Mikhail Shveitser. Mosfilm, 1965. Figure 9. Caricature of the bearded Jew in the satirical magazine Budil′nik (Alarm clock), 1868. The text: “Leave him, this is not nice.—It is not a big deal that I beat the Yid.—Nobody forbids to beat a Yid, but these days it is done silently, not in public.” Notably, prisoners jokingly threaten to beat Isai Bumshtein in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. This drawing suggests the change in discourse about the Jews’ presence in public spaces. Figure 10. Caricature of the Jew as “a two-legged spider” on the front page of Budil′nik, 1874. The Jew trades alcohol and catches simple Russians in his web. The text of the dialogue: “You are a robber and a murderer and you should be wiped from the face of the earth.” The Jew replies: “You are lying. Cheating in business is not forbidden, which means that I am innocent.” Chekhov uses the theme of the Jewish trade in alcohol in his short story “Mire.” He started publishing in Budil′nik from 1881. Figures 11 and 12. Pamphlets Ritual slaughter, based on Vasily Rozanov’s The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of the Jews to Blood, published in Paris, 1929 and in Shanghai, 1933. Figure 13. Illustration in Trofim Kychko, Iudaizm bez prikras (Judaism without Embellishments), Kyiv: Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1963. “Abraham stretched forth his hand.” The drawing creates a nexus between human and animal slaughter. Figure 14. Page from the cookery book Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (The Book on Tasty and Healthy Food), 1939, placing Jewish pastries on the margin under the title “Vostochnye sladosti” (Eastern Sweets).

Introduction

The purpose in all this is to heal the body. . . . The soul needs to rest and to do what relaxes the senses, such as looking at beautiful decorations and objects, so that weariness is removed from it. —Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed (2: 25)

O

ne of the posters exhibited in the entrance hall of my school was a famous line from Anton Chekhov: “A HUMAN BEING HAS TO BE PERFECT: THE FACE, THE CLOTHES, THE SOUL, THE THOUGHTS” ("В ЧЕЛОВЕКЕ ВСЕ ДОЛЖНО БЫТЬ ПРЕКРАСНО: И ЛИЦО, И ОДЕЖДА, И ДУША, И МЫСЛИ").1 As a slogan, this line from Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (1898) was decontextualized. Only later did I learn that the line belongs to the protagonist Dr Astrov. For a physician it was a strange phrase to coin—medical doctors by profession are the healers of the human body and, perhaps, the mind, but not shapers of souls or designers of clothing. This list of requirements for a holistically beautiful (prekrasnyi) human presents a paradox of dis/embodied corporeality due to the implied presence of the absent body. The pragmatics of the slogan suggest a relationality between the inner world and the choice of material objects. On one hand, in terms of “the order of things,” the positioning of clothes before the soul challenges the hierarchical privileging of spirit over matter.2 On the other, the body here functions as the absent referent of difference.3 In view of this I ask: whose corporeality, “soul” and correlated tastes and senses does the dominant culture recognize as not Prekrasnyi in this line is sometimes translated as “entirely beautiful.” Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Russian into English are my own. 2 I use this concept as a construct of created categories, defined in Michel Foucault, The Order of Thing: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002). 3 In Uncle Vanya, Astrov is critical of a young and idle woman whom he finds physically attractive. Anton Chekhov, “Diadia Vania,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1956), 303. 1

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entirely beautiful? The riddle of Chekhov’s line-turned-slogan motivates my current project—to explore the constructs of the embodied Other in relation to the material world.

The Focus of My Project: The Body and Materiality My enquiry interrogates the dynamic between body politics and the politics of materiality. The notion of the Other, especially the Jewish Other, is central to my investigation. I analyze the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. I examine the employment of physical characteristics, embodied practices, and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired.4 It is the real and perceived workings of the body in relation to the material world, which are an important overarching theme in this investigation. Most examples in the book deal with the function of corporeality and materiality in the creation of an essentialized alterity in the discourse of the normative (Russian, European, Christian) subject, as well as in reactive responses to such contrasts by Russian Jewish writers and personalities who act from a minoritarian position within the dominant culture. As I have established in my previous book, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since the 1880s (2009), the corporeality of Jews came

4 Senses as cultural constructs in Russian culture are investigated in Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, eds., Russian History through the Senses from 1700 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). For an exploration of the representation of embodied senses in Soviet films (1917–1940) see Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018). While these important studies explore representations of senses and sensations in Russian culture of some ethnic minorities and colonized nationalities, they do not deal with the theme of Jewish materialities. Murav’s study addresses issues of the role of objects in the history of the everyday in Russian Jewish literature. Harriet Murav, Music from the Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011). Boym studies the role of objects in the construct of byt in Russian literature. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994). Oushakine notes that for modernist Victor Shklovsky things are a force that can “generate” a “version of the human being.” Serguei Oushakine, “Shklovsky and Things, or Why Tolstoy’s Sofa Should Matter,” in Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy, ed. Slav Gratchev and Howard Mancing (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 95.

Introduction

to typify physical and ontological difference.5 With the advent of racialist thinking, Jews became exemplars of difference against which biological and cultural Russianness often defined itself.6 My present project has two main intertwining strands; while it studies representations of the Jew’s body, it also focuses on the role ascribed to the interrelations between the embodied subject and the physical world.7 The project thus frames the body in its sensory and material interactions. I show that the subject and his or her sensory needs and experiences as well as material objects have been used as taxonomic classifiers of normative or nonstandard ways of being. My approach is grounded in the thinking that accepts the mutability of the body based on its interactions with other matter.8 This approach offers an innovative way both to investigate embodiments and to discover complex ideological dynamics in the representations of the body. This paradigm challenges “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy of humans,” placing human participation into the domain of shared materiality.9 Using this approach affords new and more nuanced interpretations of the literary canon and of less known and less studied cultural material. I draw on recent studies which are concerned with understanding the ways individuals and groups are constituted in and through the things they use, as well as the way objects, individuals, and groups interact with them. Such an approach uses the material world not only as an embodiment of values but also 5 Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009). 6 Brooks shows that, in pictorial representations, “the magazines drew on the range of European stereotypes of Jews, from ambitious plutocrats and grasping dishonest peddlers to degenerate figures whose very physiognomy seemed to threaten public health.” Jefferey Brooks, “The Russian Nation Imagined: The Peoples of Russia as Seen in Popular Imagery, 1860s–1890s,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 3 (2010): 546. 7 Among the work on the Jew’s body of special significance for my study are Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), which shows that the body became the site of biological difference in Western European discourses, and Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (New York: Fordham UP, 2018), which extends the study of the Jew’s body in literature into human-animal relations and speciesism. Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010) addresses constructs of Jewish corporeality in Russian traditional culture and modern literature. Livak maintains that in the nineteenth century “the trope of Jewish religious immutability morphs into its new secular guise of ethnocultural immutability” (Livak, The Jewish Persona, 3). My study focuses on the intersections in the embodied “immutability.” 8 This approach is grounded in a wider posthumanist paradigm. On aspects of posthumanism in Russian thought and literature see Colleen McQuilen and Julia Vaingurt, eds., The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018). 9 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2010), xv.

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as “lending shape and meaning, affordances and constraints, to social relationships.”10 My investigation pays attention to how Jews as individuals and groups are given “shape and meaning” through embodied interactions in Russian literature and culture. In “How to Talk about the Body” theorist Bruno Latour elucidates that, philosophically, to be a body is to be a body in articulation with other objects, spaces, subjects, and technologies.11  Latour maintains that this approach allows one to avoid talking about an essence, or a substance (what the body is by nature), but rather to view the body as “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements.”12 Responding to the notion of the body as “an interface,” my book includes representations of the Jewish subject’s interactions with other humans, non-human animals and products of material culture in multiple manifestations of embodied life. However, while Latour’s approach to affected embodiments aims to negate biological stability, there is, as I show in the following chapters, the potential for politics of discrimination in approaches to (un)shared materiality. Chosen examples demonstrate that, like the essentialized body, embodied interactions can be given positive or negative meanings and be employed to privilege or discriminate against individuals and collectives. Representations and cultural inscriptions are active in the constitution of the body. Through the corporeal choices which humans make as well through sensorial perceptions and desires, matter is often used as an indicator of ontological and biological differences or similarities. In examining views on Jewish corporeality, my book both responds to and adds to “the corporeal turn” in literary and cultural studies.13 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has characterized this turn as work which “finds new ways to think about texts as a social, corporeal and material practice.”14 10 Materialities can be used for nationalist and ideological agendas. See Genevieve Zubrzycki, “Matter and Meaning: A Cultural Sociology of Nationalism,” in National Matters: Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism, ed. Genevieve Zubrzycki (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017), 1–20, esp. 5. Also see Anna Lavis and Karin Eli, “Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment,” A Journal of Media and Culture 9, no. 1 (2016): 1–10. 11 Bruno Latour,  “How to Talk about the Body: the Normative Dimensions of Science Studies,” Body and Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 205–229. 12 Ibid., 206. 13 See a discussion on the corporeal turn in Jewish studies in Sharon Gillerman, “More that Skin Deep: Histories of Modern Jewish Body,” Jewish Quarterly 95, no. 3 (2005): 470–478. 14 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Corporeal Turn,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 3 (2005): 450. I will discuss “edible chronotope” in Chapter Eleven.

Introduction

Kirshenblatt observes that not only has the Jew’s body been “perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain.”15 My book examines both positive and biased perceptions and representations of the body that “lived differently” by being brought into interaction with similar and dissimilar material cultures. It combines the study of body politics with relational embodiments often manifested in the quotidian domain. In her book on Russian Jewish literature written in Yiddish and Russian after the Bolshevik Revolution, Harriet Murav addressed the role of Jewish homes, bodies and objects as sites of connections between history and the everyday. According to Murav, literary work enfolds history into the quotidian, and the spaces and objects of the quotidian. She notes that material objects, food, and the interior passages of the home “receive the imprint of (imagined) histories, both personal and political.”16 My study articulates and examines the politics of embodied interactions by both Russian and Soviet authors who express the views of a dominant Russian culture or who negotiate their Jewish alterities. Russian Jewish authors writing in Russian for Russian-speaking audiences typically engage with their “Jewishness” through themes dealing with the everyday. These themes are imbricated in societal politics and cultural discourses, driven by changing ideologies and epistemes.17 15 Ibid., 453. 16 Murav, Music from the Speeding Train, 248. 17 I am reluctant to classify writers according to their “Jewish origins,” but use the expressions “Russian Jewish” or “Soviet Jewish” writers in the context of their self-identified engagement with Jewish themes in their work. All the “Jewish” writers I analyze position themselves first as writers working in the Russian language for Russian-language readers. Russian nationalist writers have essentialized writers along their ethnicity, claiming that non-Russians cannot write “Russian literature.” Given the complexity of classifications, I prefer to work with notions such as identity and engagement with Jewish themes, which are fluid and heterogenous, rather than static and monolithic. See a relevant discussion in Maxim Shrayer, Russian Poet, Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 1–19. Among cases of the essentialization of Jewish writers in relation to Russian literature is Kornei Chukovskii’s “Jews in Russian Literature” (1908), which proclaimed that Jews cannot understand Russian writers, and that one had to descend from people born in the tenth century in Russia in order to belong to Russian literature and culture. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Joseph Brodsky is not in the full command of the Russian language, labelling him as a poet with “inborn cosmopolitanism.” See A. I. Solzhenitsyn, “Brodskii—izbrannye stikhi,” Novyi mir 12 (1999): 14. On polemics around Chukovskii’s article see Evgeniia Ivanova, “Polemika o evreiakh v russkoi literature,” in her Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii: Istoriia

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The Body Enmeshed in Matter Michel Foucault has elucidated that, as the result of newly emerging fields of knowledge dedicated to the empirical study of human life in modernity, a new empirical episteme emerged. It proposed to define human beings through physical traits—identifying human thought and action with embodied processes rather than through the freedom from such material forces.18 This epistemic shift coincided with the rise of racialist thinking when, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the definition of racial difference came to form a popular belief system.19 The new ideology of racism declared that moral and intellectual as well as physical traits were biologically determined, and presented “race” as the most significant determinant of man’s past, present and future.20 Emergent museum displays and ethnographic exhibitions created analogies between the exhibited bodies and material objects. As Bill Brown demonstrated in his study of the representation of materiality in literature, A Sense of Things (2003), such analogies between people and objects brought together humans and things and contributed to the conceptualization of the Other as belonging to the domain of the material. Such narratives migrated to literature, especially the realist literature starting from the nineteenth century, where writers often devoted themselves “to exploring the slippage of fluctuation between the physical and metaphysical referent.”21 My book deals with this issue of slippage between “the physical and metaphysical referent” in the construct of the Jew’s body as illustrated in the work of both Russian and Russian Jewish writers but most typically developed by nineteenth-century writers and historians, including Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Solovyov. In

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vzaimootnoshenii v tekstakh i kommentariiakh ( Jerusalem: Mosty kul′tury, 2005), 109–208. On contemporary Russian writers of “Jewish origins” see Rozalina Ryvkina, “Russkie pisateli evreiskoi natsional′nosti—kul′turnyi fenomen,” in her Kak zhivut evrei v Rossii: Sotsiologicheskii analiz peremen (Moscow: Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2005), 108–117. “Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, and individual and collective welfare.” Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 142. In this new episteme, “The human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 342. Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1978), 14. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 142.

Introduction

Dostoevsky’s and Solovyov’s thinking, the body is imbricated in religious and utopic eschatology.22 From a perspective of embodied differences, the essentialization of the body was linked to the wider domain of religious and cultural practices.23 With this essentialization came also the construction of abject Otherness. Practices such as animal slaughter and dietary differences were viewed as non-normative in the eyes of the dominant culture. The most extreme prejudiced interpretation of Jews’ senses and somatic needs found its manifestation in blood libel discourse, which culminated in the Beilis Affair (1911–1913) when Mendel Beilis, a Kiev Jew, was framed and accused of sadistically killing a teenage Christian boy for ritual purposes. The latest scholarly work on ritual murder accusations in the Russian Empire delineates the change in late modernity from a religious to a material and physiological basis of such accusations.24 My project addresses this shift in combination with the question of the treatment of animals, including kosher animal slaughter and ritual killing. In this latter instance, the new rhetoric masqueraded as animal advocacy and was used for political ends. This strategy was employed in the controversial essayistic writing of Vasily Rozanov before the Bolshevik Revolution and is recycled in contemporary Russian popular culture and the conspiracist novels of Aleksandr Prokhanov. My study is informed by the approach which takes into account the symbiotic dynamic, embodied in the notion of the “material-semiotic.”25 I consider physical properties of both the body and matter, as well as the symbolism with which culture assigns them. Jane Bennett in her influential Vibrant Matter (2010) suggests that, while it is important to “follow the trail of human power to expose social hegemonies,” there is “public value” too in the exploration of “thingy power,” the material agency of natural bodies and artefacts.26 My 22 Maria Diemling and Giuseppe Veltri, eds., The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society and Jewish Identity in Renaissance and Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2009) show that there is a close link between attitudes shaped by religious beliefs and the understanding of physical experience. 23 Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthumanism: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Fordham: Fordham UP, 2018). 24 Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg, eds., Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017). 25 This term is used by Donna Haraway, “Modest Witness,” in her Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (London: Routledge, 1997). See also eadem, Manifestly Haraway (Minnesota: Minneapolis UP, 2016). 26 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), xiii.

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book responds to this challenge in its study of manifestations of power relations through embodied materialities by showing that materiality also embeds fictional constructions.27 Thinking on the notion of the material-semiotic in opposition to the essentialism, Olesen and Markussen have observed that there is always political motivation in the field of tension between what is material and figurative in things. This tension, however, “will remain hidden for those who do not look for the semiotics in material reality, and who do not look out for the materiality of semiotic figurations.”28 The notion of “political motivation” in the interplay between the material and the symbolic in things is central to my project.29 Among the employments of objects, my book examines the role of those objects which function as memorabilia in the embodied cultural and subjective memory of Jewish writers in their negotiations of Jewish identity. Objects often encode names, biographies, memories, and histories, deepening their significance. Additionally, objects evoke memories through visceral interactions. The situatedness of the body and objects influences the qualities we ascribe to them. Bodies and objects function in space and time. In my analysis, I use Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere to investigate the tension between the self and the other. The body and objects are always marked in the spaces within the semiosphere. The Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope is also helpful in thinking about the role of situatedness as various chronotopes reveal the material-discursive features of the time-space intersection.30 Additionally, the chronotope has been extended into the domain of such materialities as food, 27 Recent scholarly work on materiality in culture notes that Karl Marx’s stand against the fetishism of commodities contributed to the degrading attitude towards material objects. Examples in my book show that ascribing fetishist value to materialities can lead to dangerous political implications in the case of the construct of the Jew’s body. See Isobel Armstrong, “Bodily Things and Thingy Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary,” in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012), 17–45. 28 Finn Olesen and Randi Markussen, “Working with Material Things: From Essentialism to Material-Semiotic Analysis of Sociotechnical Practice,” in Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects, ed. Alan Costall and Ole Dreier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 192. 29 On culture-specific politics of the affective materialities see Patricia Spyer, “The Body, Materiality and the Senses,” in The Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley et al. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006), 125–129. 30 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 84–258.

Introduction

and the coined notion of the “edible chronotope” is productive in investigating the material and the symbolic in sensory interactions.31 In the following chapters I demonstrate that topics related to embodied forms of identification, including food, nutrition, and related gustatory, olfactory, and tactile senses, play an important part in the constructs of the body. I explore both Jewish and non-Jewish authors’ engagement with the topics of food, foodways, and ethnic cuisine in relation to embodied practices and cultural knowledge. The ideological silencing of recipes and prejudiced attitudes towards the smells and tastes of the cooking of Others are important components of this thematic domain. As Judith Farquhar explains, “Food makes human form— it directly produces bodies and lives, kin groups and communities, economic systems and ideologies, while being produced in its turn by these formations.”32 I have selected characteristic primary sources which thematize or problematize representations of the Jew’s body and surrounding materialities. Such examples form discursive formations defined by overlapping and interacting narratives in literature, museum displays, and fields which traditionally distinguish themselves from general discourse, such as science or religious doctrine. Examples in my book demonstrate ways in which body and materiality discourses share an ideological domain with overlapping categories. There are intersections between categories of race, gender, and sexuality, for example, which can further intersect in various combinations with discriminatory notions of animality, speciesism, and carnism. Intersectionality refers to the ways in which numerous forms of stereotyping and bias are linked; in its interrelation with a range of materialities, the construct of the Jew’s body is often exemplary of such intersecting and overlapping embodied domains.33 I group the material into chapters focusing on particular problematics across a broad variety of cultural endeavour. Because domains have blurred borders, various themes symptomatically intersect, and while I keep my discussion focused on a particular thematic cluster, the porous nature of these themes reverberates through the book. This approach to categories is marked by intersections and 31 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Foreword,” in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), xi. 32 Judith Farquhar, “Food, Eating, and the Good Life,” in The Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley et al. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006). 146. 33 On intersectionality in analysis see Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class and Gender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010).

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overlapping domains, a complicated network of criss-crossing similarities.34 It is the porosity of the various domains which unifies my book. My approach is interdisciplinary, bridging high and popular culture. While I use mainly literary sources, I also turn to museum practices, scientific and philosophical writing as well as to social media and traditional material culture, such as foodways, to present a more encompassing depiction of my topic. The selected examples come from the literary canon, including writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky and the modernist texts of Anton Chekhov, Vasily Rozanov, Isaac Babel, Andrei Bely, Osip Mandelshtam and the biographical writing of Leon Trotsky; fiction of popular contemporary women writers, such as Marina Paley, Inna Lesovaya, Dina Rubina, Ludmila Ulitskaya, and Margarita Khemlin; postmodernist texts of Prokhanov and award-winning writers Aleksandr Goldshtein and Yuri Karabchievsky as well as authors of internet blogs and interlocuters in ethnographic expeditions. Notably, many of the contemporary writers, such as Paley, Rubina, Lesovaya, Goldshtein, and Karabchievsky, have embarked on the path of emigration/immigration. Some left post-Soviet Russia to settle abroad, some returned, but all write for Russian-speaking audiences and receive literary awards and prizes in Russia, post-Soviet independent states, and further abroad. Some of their work was written in the Soviet period, some after the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, some could be published only under Glasnost.

The Structure of the Book The book is divided into two parts.35 Part One groups texts by non-Jewish Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet writers who engage with the topic of the Jew’s body and materiality from the position of the dominant culture. Part Two assembles texts written by Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Jewish authors who express their Jewish subjectivities through the themes of the body and embodied relations with Jewish material culture, including cooking, eating, feeding, and, importantly, recollecting through physical entities. Within this structure, Chapter One gives a historical overview of the imbrication of the Jew’s body in relation to embodied religious practices, 34 On fuzzy domains see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 35 The structure of this book reflects the view that the concept of the Jew’s body is often (but not always) constructed through the reciprocal influence of Jewish and non-Jewish cultural ideas and ideals. See Gillerman, “More than Skin Deep.”

Introduction

material culture, and senses from the nineteenth century, starting from the historical and anthropological views of Stepan Eshevsky and Vladimir Solovyov and advancing to the present. Chapter Two studies the representation of ethnic differences via divergent dietary practices between Jews, crypto-Jews, and Cossacks in the writing of Nikolai Gogol. The examples used reveal the formative role of meat-eating scenes in the construction of the normative dominant male subject and alterity. Chapter Three examines two Jewish characters in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Notes from the House of the Dead with respect to their expressed value of life. I read the character of the enigmatic Jewish fireman, who attempts to prevent a suicide, and that of Isai Bumshtein, as expressions of Dostoevsky’s interest in Judaic concepts of the value of the human body in relation to the author’s eschatological aspirations. Chapter Four explores the construct of the physical spaces of private dwellings of Jewish female characters in Anton Chekhov’s “Mire” (1886) and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), and analyzes the writers’ choices of racialized sensory markers of physical spaces such as smell, olfaction, tactility, perception of music and voice. All these markers signify the Jewess’s space as representative of psychological and physical traits regarded as biologically determined. Turning to the writing of Vasily Rozanov in Chapter Five, I examine the conflation of animal and human sacrifice as tactics to demonize material practices of Jews and other minorities which culminated in the two ritual murder trials in the last decades of the Russian Empire, the Beilis Affair and the Multan Case. I argue that Rozanov’s use of animal advocacy is politically motivated. Chapter Six explores the theme of Jewish infiltration into the art scene and their corrupting influence on Russian material culture and Russian body politic in Ivan Shevtsov’s infamous novel The Aphid. Chapter Seven analyzes the reemergence of the theme of the pathologized tactile attitude of Jews to other material beings in the postmodernist writing of Aleksandr Prokhanov. I demonstrate that Prokhanov’s conspiracist narratives use the stereotype of Jews’ perverse senses in order to establish a contrast with Russian men’s normative behavior. Prokhanov uses elements of fantasy literature to disseminate phantasmagorical scenarios of blood-dependent Jewish men and women, synthesizing disparate historical and literary characters as well as borrowings from the Russian tradition of blood libel mythology. In Part Two, Chapter Eight studies the reactive writing of Jewish women writers of the Perestroika and post-Soviet periods. I examine Marina Paley and Dina Rubina’s strategies of representation of their female relatives and argue that these writers invent purposefully alternative exotic ethnicities for female

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members of their families. This strategy of turning to the exotic serves to subvert the literary stereotypes of Jewish women’s physicality. In Chapter Nine I turn to Babel and Paley’s fictional autobiographical narratives to investigate commonalities and divergencies in their framing of the generation of grandparents and great-grandparents in terms of discourses of degeneration and the medicalization of Jews. Both writers represent their ancestors’ eccentricities in relation to surrounding materialities. Chapter Ten focuses on the role of food in nurturing children as a point of difference between cultural perceptions of Self and the ethnic and cultural Other. I address the topic of feeding and providing for the family, focusing on biographical writing from Trotsky’s My Life and Babel’s stories to the works of contemporary writers Paley, Lesovaya, Karabchievsky, and Goldshtein. I demonstrate that their heterogenous views are gender-specific and grounded in the historical period. Chapter Eleven raises the question of culture-specific notions of materiality of smell, smell-memory, and olfaction. Referencing the concept of Proustian memory, I argue that olfaction-induced memory serves as a powerful yet controversial mechanism in Jewish experience. I demonstrate how Jewish writers (from Mandelshtam to Margarita Khemlin) use the smells of food and items of memorabilia as a means to construct their ethnocultural identities. Chapter Twelve examines the role of the transmission of culinary traditions in the formation of Jewish identity and the silencing of Jewish recipes in Soviet cookery books. I view the politics of heritage food as an important component of embodied knowledge and material culture. I make closing remarks in the conclusion where I summarize the main discursive practices and formations employed in the representation of the Jew’s body in terms of relational corporeality, ontology, and materiality.

Part One The Other Body and Spaces for Matter

CHAPTER ONE

Locating Historically the Jew’s Body between Display and Transformation . . . so should I, created in the divine image and likeness, take care of my body! —Leviticus Rabbah 34:3

T

his chapter provides an historical overview of the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to materialities in order to identify diachronically emergent themes and strategies. It identifies chronologies of the main cultural and historical trends in the enmeshment of the Jewish corporeality in physical surroundings and material culture from late modernity. As such, it is a foundational chapter, since the themes identified here resonate in the book, showing complexities of cultural continuities and responses to the constructs across multidisciplinary discourses and practices.

Emerging out of Displays: The Jew’s Body and Imbricated Materialities Russian thinkers of late modernity contributed to the conceptualization of the Jews’ physicality in their interaction with the physical world.1 One of the most influential Russian philosophers of the end of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) saw materialism as a defining feature of the Jewish

1 Mogilner gives a nuanced account of the concepts of nationality, confession, ethnicity and race in the anthropological characterizations of the physical typology of peoples in the Russian Empire in modernity. Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

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people.2 In “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros” (“Jewishness and the Christian Question,” 1884) Solovyov writes about “extreme materialism (in the widest sense of the word)” as “a characteristic feature” of the Jews:3 A sensuous character of the Jewish worldview became symbolically expressed even in their system of writing, in this alphabet which is limited only to the consonants, which are the body of words, while the spirit of words, expressed in vowels, is omitted altogether or marked by dots or small dashes. The materialism in the everyday life of the Jews and the prevalence of a utilitarian and mercenary character of their activities are well known, starting from the times when they were depicted on the ancient Egyptian vessels and including the advent of money exchanges in contemporary Europe.4

Of relevance to this investigation is Solovyov’s stress on the special importance of the material life of the body. He notes that Jewish laws regarding the purity of the body illustrate their respect for physical matter because it was created by God: The religious materialism of the Jews forces them to pay attention to material nature, but not in order to serve it, but in order to serve God through it. They had to separate the clean from the unclean, the holy from the depraved in order to turn it into a temple of the Highest Being. The idea of holy corporeality [sviataia telesnost′] occupies a more important place in the life of Israel than in other peoples. A large part of the Mosaic laws relates to differences between the clean and the unclean and about purity. One can say that the whole religious history of the Jews was directed towards preparing not only holy souls but also holy bodies [sviatye tela] for the God of Israel.5

Solovyov creates a notion of “holy corporeality,” which he uses to explain the paradox of the coexistence of spiritual religiosity and the alleged materiality 2 On Solovyov’s views on Judaism see a chapter in Brian Horowitz, The Russian-Jewish Tradition: Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017). 3 Vladimir Solov′ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” in Taina Izrailia, ed. V. Boikova (St. Petersburg: Sofiia, 1993), 31–80. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 45. Emphasis in the original.

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of the Jewish worldview as manifested in their everyday life. Solovyov is concerned with the notion of the unity of the physical and metaphysical body, which helps him to explain why Jesus Christ was born among the Jews. Yet, in spite of Solovyov’s respect for Judaism and Jewry, his reflections on the alleged materiality and materialism of Jewish people fed into the stereotypes of Jews found in late modernity. Apart from the widely spread stereotype of the Jews as commercial entrepreneurs, Solovyov touches upon the wider domain of Jewish and Judaic embodied practices. His notion of “holy corporeality” explicitly relates to the practices of bodily hygiene, dietary laws, cooking methods and the preparation of food. As examples in this book show, religious practices and rituals linked to materiality are often employed in the discourse of Othering. Cultural practices are understood as permanent and unchangeable and as signifiers of difference. The tint of (quasi) racialism is found even when the authors—from writers to biological scientists—profess to take a class approach to Jews’ materiality. This conceptualization of Jewry, which combines phylogenetic arguments with issues of class, is pronounced in the writing of Nikolai Berdiaev (1874– 1948), one of Russia’s academic philosophers of modernism. In his Meaning of History (1923), Berdiaev argued that Jewish religious thought is linked to their continuous concern for material and physical wellbeing. Writing as an emigré in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, he maintained that the socialism of Karl Marx is rooted in his Jewish origins. Moreover, Berdiaev explained Marx’s interest in the material conditions of humanity by Judaism’s alleged mission to build paradise on Earth: “The Jewish quest for earthly bliss is manifested in socialism.”6 Berdiaev juxtaposed Judaism with Christianity, arguing that while Christianity focuses on the immortality of the soul, Judaism concerns itself with the immortality of the body. Importantly, Berdiaev promotes a notion of embodied Judaism and Jewishness which he then uses to explain Jews’ alleged patterns of behavior and lifestyle. Berdiaev denigrates the world of materiality and draws boundaries that define the Other in racialized terms (referring to Jews as “the Jewish race”7). Within the history of European philosophical thinking about Jewish difference based on notions of corporeality, both Solovyov and Berdiaev, I suggest, follow the tradition of Augustine who in his Tractatus adversus Judaeos repeated the New Testament charge against the Jews: “Behold Israel according to the 6 N. Berdiaev, “Sud′ba evreistva,” in Taina Izrailia, ed. V. Boikova (St. Petersburg: Sofiia, 1993), 311. 7 Ibid.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

flesh” (I Cor. 10:18). Augustine’s tract was often evoked by European intellectuals in discourses about the Jew’s body.8 Writing on the European tradition regarding the Jewish body and embodied practices, Eilberg-Schwartz observes in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective: “This overabundance of the embodiment was evident in their carnal tradition as well, a tradition with overtly concrete modes of thought, embodied in ritual practices, and focusing too much on matters of the flesh.”9 As professionally trained philosophers, both Solovyov and Berdiaev followed this European framing of Jewish corporeality. Of note is the fact that Solovyov writes about chuvstvennyi, the sensuous character of the “Jewish worldview,” thus stressing the specific sense- and sensuality-based nature of Jewish physicality in relation with the outside world.10 This notion of Jewish materiality received new currency in the European thinking of the nineteenth century, when Ludwig Feuerbach, Richard Wagner, and Karl Marx notoriously characterized Judaism and the Jewish worldview as driven by commercialism and materialism, defining Jews as people who “have remained in the bondage of the senses.”11 Even the Jewish attitude to food was singled out by Feuerbach as a negative marker of Judaic and Jewish beliefs and praxis. In his hierarchical description of the “theoretical senses,” Feuerbach declared in his influential The Essence of Christianity: “The Israelites, contrary [to the Greeks], opened to nature only the gastric sense; their taste for nature lay only in the palate; their consciousness to God in eating manna.”12 Solovyov’s description of artefacts, such as antique Egyptian vessels in the British museum, is similarly symptomatic of this reading of Jewish embeddedness in the material world. Importantly, his reference to the depiction of Jews’ bodies on ancient vessels typologically creates a domain within the intersection of the corporeal and the material world of things. This simultaneous enmeshment of the body within the domain of the subject and that of the object was For a discussion of Augustinian reading of Jews see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 9 Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “Introduction,” in his People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), 9. In his exploration of the tradition of viewing Jews as the “people of the body,” Eilberg-Schwartz formulated a paradox around the embodied differences. Jews were told that they were inadequately embodied since their bodies had inherent and self-inflicted defects which made them inferior to other kind of peoples. Yet, on the other hand, Jews were accused of being too embodied. 10 Solov′ev, “Evreistvo,” 38. 11 Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 26. 12 Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity (London: Truebner and Co., 1881), 136. 8

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present in nineteenth-century renditions of embodiment, and, according to Katharina Boehm in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2012), was expressed in scientific and literary writing, as well as in popular culture.13 In Solovyov’s case, both the vessels and the bodies depicted on them function as material survivors of the ancient world. As a trope, the corporeal tandem creates a chronotopic dis/continuity which invites the reader to think about the biological links between ancient Hebrews and contemporary Jewry. During late modernity, official discourse and museum practice came to apply different ontological status to different bodies. According to Kate Hill’s study of the displays in the British Museum, the bodies of others, “distant in time and space, were objects of enquiry, part of the material world that was separate from the viewer of the collection.”14 The rise of such disciplines as ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology in the nineteenth century contributed to establishing causal relationships between groups of people and their material culture. Field studies and explicated theories by representatives of the dominant culture defined alternative groups by their physical differences and cultural and religious practices, including cultural objects. Artefacts such as clothing, accoutrements, utensils, and ritual objects were studied on a par with everyday practices in food preparation and religious rituals, all of which came to define the difference of the object of study from the dominant culture. Exhibits in museums in the West and in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century typically displayed “native” or ethnic groups surrounded by objects of their labor or depicting them in everyday activities.15 Such displays constructed notions of a primitive Otherness that was frozen in time. In the Russian Empire, with its multi-ethnic population, ethnographers and anthropologists sometimes followed the blueprint of racialized western science.16 The founding figure of Russian racial anthropology, Stepan Vasilievich Eshevsky (1829–1865), followed the classification of races established by 13 Katharina Boehm, “Introduction: Bodies and Things,” in Bodies and Things in NineteenthCentury Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012), 1–17. 14 Kate Hill, “Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Museums,” in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012), 158. 15 On the stratifying strategy of exhibits of Jewish ethnographic material in the United States and England at the end of the nineteenth century see Barbara Kirshenblatt, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 16 Tolz notes that the arguments used by Russian intellectuals who engaged with the concept of race must be placed within the context of pan-European debates. Vera Tolz, “Discourse of Race in Imperial Russia (1830-1914),” in The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations, ed. Nicholas Bancel et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), 130–144.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

founding figures of western racial sciences such as Johann Blumenbach and Arthur de Gobineau. In his influential “O znachenii ras v istorii” (On the Significance of Races in History, 1862) he wrote on the unchangeability of races in history, choosing Jews to demonstrate this point: Among the Jews one meets today on the streets of London, one can recognize from the first glance the direct descendants of the people whose visual images you have observed on the tomb of the Egyptian pharaohs held in the collection of the British Museum.17

Eshevsky thus uses the representation of Jews on archaeological artefacts to support this notion of the immutability of the Jew’s body. Placed in the British Museum, it constitutes part of a display of still-life; as such, by association with contemporary Jews in London, it also helps to create a narrative of continuity between ancient people and their descendants. The object of material culture here serves as physical proof of the allegedly permanent physicality of the people depicted on the object. In this case, the physical matter of the material object confirms the stable materiality of the body of the Other. This body operates within a wider domain of material practices construed as equally frozen in time. This attitude is exemplified by the title of Rozanov’s infamous book, Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of the Jews to Blood (1913–1914), which presented contemporary Jews as driven by such “base” senses as touch and smell—imbricating senses into racialized taxonomies. Over the following chapters I will address the reverberations of Rozanovian ideas in literature and culture to the present day. Jewish intelligentsia and professional societies responded to these discursive formations. The ethnographic readings of the famous expeditions sponsored by the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society and led by S. An-sky during 1912–1914 in Volynia, Podolia, and Kiev Provinces present a challenging paradox in the construct of the Jew’s body and material culture. On the one hand, following the tenets of anthropology of the time, the expedition took photographs of Jewish people for the series called “Anthropological types.” On the other, the photographs present evidence of the lack of any unified typology in the physiognomy and features of the Jewish people of these provinces. The photographs taken by Solomon Iudovin during the expeditions moved beyond the normative ethnographic photography of the early twentieth century. Typical 17 S. V. Eshevskii, “O znachenii ras v istorii,” in Russkaia rasovaia teoriia do 1917 goda, ed. V. B. Avdeev (Moscow: Feri, 2004), 13.

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ethnographic photographs of this time resembled exhibits displayed at museums, in which the living subjects appeared to resemble museum mannequins. In contrast, the human “types” and realities represented in the photographs taken during the expeditions in the Pale “often lack the Jewish exoticism for which learned gentlemen with cameras left the capital and headed for the provinces.”18

Figure 1. The photograph from An-sky’s expedition of the Jewish shoemaker who, in An-sky’s words, looks like Nicholas II. 18 Solomon Iudovin became a celebrated master of Soviet graphic art. See Aleksandr Ivanov. “The Making of a Young Photographer,” In Avrutin, Eugene et al., eds., Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2009), 31.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

The photographs show children with blond and dark hair, straight and curly hair, light and dark eyes. The only unifying features are their shabby clothes which testify to social and class rather than anthropological classification. The most striking negation of the very notion of “racial” typology is expressed by An-sky’s personal inscription on the photograph of a local Jewish artisan: “the shoemaker looks like Nicholas II.”19 This inscription ironically refutes the idea of Jewish people as an anthropological entity and challenges the whole scientific enterprise of such studies. The expeditions’ success was in their collections of artefacts, items of clothing, manuscripts and books, thus preserving these valuable items of Jewish material culture. Symptomatically, these items were exhibited in the first Jewish Museum in St. Petersburg in 1914. The aim of this exhibition was the same as that of the expeditions: to preserve the cultural heritage of the people who were undergoing rapid social changes as an ethnic group in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The exhibits were intended to stimulate an interest in Jewish culture among assimilated and acculturated urban Jews. As such, the expeditions and the museum exhibits challenged the whole notion of the permanence and immutability of the Jew’s body and his and her interaction with the material world. When items of traditional culture, especially items of ritual significance in Judaism, are exhibited in museums, they can get imbricated in body politics. Items which are instrumental in the ritual of circumcision form one such example. In an informing account of the history of expositions of Biblical antiquities from late modernity to the mid-twentieth century, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett refers to the description of an ornate silver knife and cup used during the Judaic ceremony of circumcision. These artefacts were displayed in the International Exposition in Atlanta, 1898. The accompanying note included a passage from Genesis 10–12, as well as an explanation that circumcision is universally practiced not only by Jewish people but also by Muslims and people of Africa and Oceania, among others. In refuting the idea that this practice was uniquely Judaic, the narrative set out to challenge the stereotype of “the abject Jew.” The aesthetic appeal and the high quality of the craftsmanship of the knife, its placement amongst a group of other silver objects, including a silver spice box for Sabbath, signalled civilization rather than primitiveness.

19 “Sapozhnik pokhozh na Nikolaia II.” Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 54. Also see online “Evrei na fotografiiakh ekpeditsii Anskogo,” Moi shtetl, http://myshtetl.org/articls/jews_volyn.html, accessed January 21, 2020.

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As a result of the change in the nationalities policy in the Soviet Union, which was repressing alleged forms of nationalism, the first Jewish museum in St. Petersburg was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1929 and its objects and archives distributed amongst various institutions in the USSR. Subsequently, some of this material disappeared entirely (often lost during the Second World War), with the remainder scattered throughout depositories and private collections in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Israel, and the United States. The destiny of the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society archives and collections remained virtually unknown for decades and only recently is being researched in an attempt to reassemble the surviving material.20 With its fluctuating policies towards different nationalities, the Soviet era before the Second World War presents a characteristic example of the ideological employment of Jewish material culture by the state. The interrelation between Jews and material culture became part of the Soviet response to Nazi Germany’s antisemitic propaganda related to Jews’ lack of creativity and their production of so-called degenerate art. In 1939, an exhibition entitled “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was opened at the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad. Curated by a newly established Jewish Section within the museum, it covered the years 1881 to 1939 and included the Jewish experience of the October Revolution. It incorporated the narrative of the Pale of Settlement and demonstrated that former Jewish petty bourgeois were transformed into workers and peasants. As Deborah Yalen has shown, curators were particularly conscious of the need to disprove racist claims that Jews lacked cultural creativity.21 The museum director described the exhibition’s efforts to collect artefacts that would “expose at the very root the fabrication of antisemitic ‘researchers’ about the incapacity of the Jewish people for great creativity and cultural craftsmanship.” The rich treasures of Jewish folk art and culture, he argued, “expose at the very root the claims of fascist cannibals that the Jewish people lack any aptitude for great art and craftsmanship.”22 Pre-Revolutionary cultural production was invoked as proof of Jews’ contributions to both a distinctly Jewish and a universal world culture. Importantly, the evidence 20 Aleksandr Ivanov, “An-sky’s lost archives,” Yerusha (2015), https://yerusha.eu/case-studies/skys-lost-archives/, accessed December 22, 2019. 21 Deborah Yalen, “The Shtetl in the Museum: Representing Jews in the Eras of Stalin and Putin,” East European Jewish Affairs 45, nos. 2/3 (2015): 147–189. 22 Evrei v tsarskoi Rossii i v SSSR: Kratkii putevoditel′ po vystavke (Leningrad: Izdanie Gosudarstvennogo muzeia etnografiii, 1939), 9. Quoted in Yalen, “The Shtetl in the Museum,” 187. On paradoxes of Jewish ethnography and politics see A. Kilcher and G. Safran, "Introduction," in their Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016), 1-21.

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assembled included the socially conscious literature of Yiddish writers as well as the work of Jewish painters and sculptors. Significantly, as Yalen notes, this message would be “completely reversed in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the advent of the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign.”23 Echoes of this racist narrative about Jewish people’s lack of good taste in art are found in Russian literary works of pre-Revolutionary modernism and, even more disturbingly, in the late 1950s, as will be discussed in some of the following chapters. They are also evident during Khrushchev’s attack on abstract art in the 1960s. In 2012, the new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center was opened in Moscow, an event described as inconceivable in the Soviet era.24 It can be argued that the realization of the implications of notions such as “Jewish specificity” prompted the use of “Tolerance Center” as part of its title. Historically, as this title suggests, museums and ethnographic collections contributed to intolerance towards the bodies, senses and material culture of the displayed subjects/objects. Contemporary museum exhibits have shifted from artefacts towards visitor experiences which “involve an engagement of the senses, emotions and imagination.”25 It is this multi-sensory aspect of modern museums which provides us with an opportunity to analyze relevant intersections between the literary imagination and new multimedia sites of dis/embodied personal and collective memory. Contemporary experiments in museums include reproductions of smells of the past. In a scientific experiment run in the Jorvik Viking Centre in York in 1999 groups of participants were exposed to various sensory cues which were supposed to recreate the atmosphere of a tenth-century Viking city. In addition to providing sights and sounds, the museum also provided a number of evocative smells to aid the completeness of the Viking “experience.” The experiment proved that “odours have the ability to serve as state-dependent cues for realworld memories,” which included smells of the fish market, apples, and beef which were identified as either neutral or pleasant.26 This notion of “real-world memories” as defined by scientists is of particular significance in application to the theme of Jewish embodiments. In the case of Jewish subjects, smells are often perceived not only as “real-world memories” but also as recollections of 23 Yalen, “The Shtetl in the Museum,” 188. 24 Olga Gershenson, “The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow: Judaism for the Masses,” East European Jewish Affairs 45, nos. 2/3 (2015): 158–173. 25 Kirshenblatt, Destination Culture, 138. 26 John P. Aggleton and Louise Waskett, “The Ability of Odours to Serve as State-Dependent Cues for Real-World Memories: Can Viking Smells Aid the Recall of Viking Experiences?,” British Journal of Psychology 90 (1999): 1–7.

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stereotypes of the special smell of the Jew’s body, linked to the historic demonisation of Jewish corporeality. This deployment of an olfactory experience in a museum was recently echoed by the newly refurbished Jewish Museum in London. The museum’s identity is based on Jewish emigration to the United Kingdom. Its holdings and exhibits cover diverse Jewish émigré communities, including those from Russia and Eastern Europe, and its position on archiving smells is relevant to my focus on smell-memory in Russian and Russian Jewish cultural discourse (discussed here in chapter eleven). Among its exhibits, the museum has a typical Jewish immigrant kitchen from which “the smell of chicken soup wafts across the museum.”27 Visitors who are blind or partially sighted are offered a “touch tour” which also includes the experience of smelling various spices. Unlike the Viking Centre, there are no repellent smells “available” to visitors and the personal area, which in the Viking museum is represented by a toilet. In this Jewish museum the cultural experience of smells and olfaction does not include any exposure to unpleasant smells. In the new Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow, the 2012 interactive exhibition “Shtetl: A Jewish Town” did not have any exhibits or installations related to smell and olfaction. Contrary to the experiments in the Viking Museum and the Jewish Museum in London, the multi-sensory experiences were limited to photographs of a cheder ( Jewish primary school) and recitations of prayers which were translated from Hebrew into Russian, thus stressing the importance of the written text in Jewish culture. The audio installation “Voices of the Shtetl” comprised stories told by residents of Volynia recorded in 2006–2008.28 By touching a button, visitors could see images of virtual apples at a marketplace and challah breads on the Sabbath table, but there were no smell-producing technologies. This multimedia exhibition avoided reproducing the smells and tastes of the shtetl, relying instead on the more privileged senses of seeing and hearing. The sensory experience, however, was available in the part of the museum devoted to Biblical history. In this space, droplets of water were sprinkled on audiences to signify the Flood.29 Anthropologically, odorless water is a neutral fluid devoid of smells; additionally, sprinkled on visitors, it could hardly evoke or produce specifically “Jewish” memories. 27 See the information on the museum website, http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/touch/ verbal, accessed January 2, 2018. 28 See a description of the exhibition in Yalen, “The Shtetl in the Museum.” 29 For a critical appraisal of the Museum see Gershenson, “The Jewish Museum.”

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Figure 2. Photographs of people and artefacts from An-sky’s ethnographic expedition were inserted in Iosif Utkin’s poem The Tale of Red-Headed Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925) to provide an historical context to Jewish life before the October Revolution, when Jews suffered from pogroms.

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Figure 3. Photographs from An-sky’s expedition in Iosif Utkin’s The Tale of Red-Headed Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925), inserted among illustrations which depict working Jews in interaction with materials of their work.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

From display to transformation in the Soviet era Ritual artefacts used in religious ceremonies did not find a place in ethnographic exhibits in the Soviet era. Circumcision as a ritual was one of the practices under attack in the early Soviet period as part of the state policy against all forms of religious expression. The visual representations of circumcision in the 1920s and 1930s consisted of caricatures of mohels (ritual circumcisers) with the knife typically depicted as indistinguishable from a large meat-cutting knife. Illustrations to the 1926 edition of Iosif Utkin’s long poem The Tale of Red-Headed Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925) contain an image of the mohel who holds a big knife that has no resemblance in size and shape to the knives used in real-life circumcisions.

Figures 4 and 5. Two illustrations from Iosif Utkin’s The Tale of RedHeaded Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh (1925), which depict the rejection of circumcision by parents in the 1920s. Drawings by K. Rotov.

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Figure 5. This illustration is to the protagonist’s words: “Enough blood, respected rabbi!”. The shape of the knife and the statement evoke the nexus between the ritual of circumcision and the blood libel. Notably, some of these caricatures were published in the journals aimed at Jewish readers, such as Der Apikoyres (The Atheist). While the caricatures exploited the stereotype of Jewish rituals as archaic, the aim was to change the Jew’s body of the past, to reform it physically in all its material practices,

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

in line with the homologizing discourse of the new construction of the Soviet man.30 Strikingly, the caricature of the mohel and kosher butcher in the Jewish journal Der Apikoyres (1934) reiterates the antisemitic pictorial stereotypes of the Jew, exaggerating such staple caricatures of the Jew’s body as hooked nose and racialized bulbous lips.31 This portrayal replicates the visual stereotype which was the product of the hostile culture, and presents an intriguing case. Within the wider discourse of bodily transformation in the Soviet 1930s, this caricature implies that, by attaching the Jew’s body to the traditional past, that body remains untransformed. This is a utopian approach. It suggests that, by engaging with the new materiality and performing new material practices, including eating non-kosher meat, the physical and mental transformation of the Jew will be finally possible. In the 1930s, the new visual medium of the cinema similarly used physical stereotypes of the Jew’s body. Characteristic of the new trends in cinema was the emphasis on the reformatory power of the senses. As explained by Emma Widdis in Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling and Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (2017), the Soviet cinematic project was utopian not only because it was driven by the notion of the possibility to change the way the Soviet subject experienced the physical world, but also because film as a medium was expected to have such a transformational effect on the viewer’s material senses. The impact of this project, I propose, had a specific application to the representation of Jewish corporeality in Soviet films. Notably, the iconic propaganda film Seekers of Happiness (1936), set in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, exploits the negative stereotype of the physically puny Jewish man.32 Symptomatically, the physically small Jew, called Pinya, comes from Poland, which suggests that he had not been influenced by the new socialist society. His interaction with his new geophysical surroundings is shown to be driven by the well-worn tropes of greed and rapaciousness, manifested in his illicit search for gold sand. The camera shows Pinya’s face covered with sweat, his grabbing hands holding a bottle full of gold; the embodied assemblage involving the 30 Literary work authored by Soviet Jewish writers created grotesque descriptions of both instruments and men who performed circumcision in the 1920s and 1930s. See a discussion in Murav, Music from the Speeding Train, esp. 74–78 and 292–293. 31 See Der Apikoyres 3 (1934), 17. 32 See a discussion of this film in Mondry, Exemplary Bodies, 142–145. Anna Shternshis discusses this film’s perception by the Jewish audiences of Pinya’s generation in Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006). For Jews in Soviet films see Miron Chernenko, Kinematograficheskaia istoriia sovetskogo evreistva, 1934–1941 (Moscow: Evreiskoe nasledie, 2001).

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“yellow metal” represents an unreformed past. In new modernist artistic understandings of the senses, the haptic and the tactile were re-evaluated to be viewed as a means to signify social transformations expressed by changes in perception.33 In this framework, Pinya’s interaction with the gold sand can be viewed as a failed social transformation. Ironically, Pinya mistook false gold sand for the real precious mineral. This frames his actions as grotesquely compulsive, driven by a fetishist attraction to the shiny material. Arrested for his attempt to cross the country’s border, Pinya epitomizes the old world of the Jewish Pale in all its material and sensory manifestations. The new Jew of the Soviet discourse of the 1930s is exemplified by the character of the forward-thinking engineer David Margulies in Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932). Margulies is an expert in concrete-mixing machines, which homogenize sand or gravel with water and which also use metal to enforce its stability. During this time, concrete was the material of choice in fashionable visions of modernity and was additionally associated with masculinity.34 While Kataev gives Margulies stereotypical Jewish markers—“big-nosed, spectacled, and short”—he also implies that Margulies’s interaction with concrete has a two-way effect.35 The machines transform separate materials into vibrant matter; this process and the emergent material in turn affect Margulies who, as a member of the larger, multi-ethnic collective, becomes part of the homogenized Soviet nation. This interaction with materials such as gold and concrete by two Jewish characters—Pinya and Margulies—illustrates the politics of the material-semiotic interface. While Jane Bennett's influential concept of “vibrant matter” acknowledges the agentive power of objects and elements, including atoms, it has been argued that materials exhibit vibrance in different ways. Social constructs, we are told, should not be ignored “in pursuit of finding out the contingencies of vibrancy.”36 Pinya’s interaction with the (false) gold sand particles is presented in a mode which deprives the matter of its vibrancy because he acts as an illicit proprietor of what should belong to the collective. Had the gold sand been discovered by the rightful owners, working for the Soviet State, it would have become vibrant matter helping to bring progress and improvement to the 33 On the history of the haptic in modernism see Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2013). 34 On the trope “flesh to metal and masculinity” see Rolf Hellebust, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003). 35 V. Kataev, Vremia, vpered! (Cheliabinsk: Ural′skoe izdatel′stvo, 1979), 27. 36 Nadia Bartolini, “The Politics of Vibrant Matter: Consistency, Containment and the Concrete of the Mussolini’s Bunker,” Journal of Material Culture 20, no. 2 (2015): 192.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

country. The false gold sand in Pinya’s hands is a materiality comprising separate particles, signalling separation rather than amalgamation. Contrary to this material-semiotic interrelationship, the concrete in Kataev’s Time, Forward! is mixed in machines which increase production and aid the construction of the socialist state. The fluidity of materials corresponds to the fluidity of “the politics of vibrant matter”, the latter being a social construct.37 Social cultural issues are thus embedded through the processing of the emergent material form. Gold particles tarnish and are tarnished through the dual interaction with Pinya, presenting a graphic example of the link between body politics and the politics of materialities in application to the Jew’s body: interaction with gold effeminizes, while concrete adds masculinity to “the short” Jews.

Figure 6. Pinya’s greedy interaction with the bottle of gold sand in the film Iskateli shchast′ia (Seekers of Happiness). 1936. 37 On concrete as vibrant matter in modernism see Bartolini, “The politics of Vibrant Matter.”

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Figure 7. “Spectacled” Jewish engineer David Margulies (actor Sergei Iursky) at the construction of the Iron and Steel Works in Magnitogorsk (1930s). Still from the film adaptation of Kataev’s Time, Forward! Dir. Mikhail Shveitser. Mosfilm, 1965.

Figure 8. New muscular masculinities resulting from the interaction with reinforced concrete in the Magnitogorsk plant. Still from the film adaptation of Kataev’s Time, Forward! Dir. Mikhail Shveitser. Mosfilm, 1965.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

In terms of body politics and politics of other materialities, the body of the Jew was often the object of biological and medical scientific investigations in the early Soviet era. This discourse imbricated traditional material culture, such as food, with questions of health and the physical wellbeing of the Jewish population. The cultural and political quest to transform men and women into physically strong and active constructors of a radiant future had special implications for Jews. In response to questions posed by biological and medical discourses of Jews’ specificity in the Soviet period, assimilated and acculturated Russian and Jewish medical professionals of the 1920s–1930s had to deal with the inherited racialized tenets of their disciplines. It has been pointed out that the approach by medical professionals to the specificity of Jews as a people was complex, informed as it was by racialist scientific and social discourses. In her study of Jewish “medical materialism” and “the politics of Jewish biological normalisation,” Marina Mogilner describes the position of Jewish biologists, medical doctors and health hygienists who contributed to the collective project through the publication of the edited volumes Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev (The Problems of the Biology and Pathology of the Jews) in the 1920s–1930s.38 Mogilner concludes that there was a continuity between Soviet Jewish scientists’ views and earlier, turn-of-the-century racialist discourses on the Jewish physical and mental constitution: With all of its emphasis on Jewish specificity, the project of Jewish national normalization as a “race” was typical of the European modernity of the time, which expressed itself in ideas and practices such as social engineering, the medicalization of political and social issues, the narcissism of minor (national) differences, a new aesthetics of physical strength, and a focus on the national body. . . .39

The politics of food was strongly relevant for Jewish experiences in the twentieth century. Within pre-Revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, traditional Jewish cooking, especially the set of activities surrounding kosher animal slaughter, was ideologized (kosher in particular was conflated with cruelty to animals). Beginning in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, as elucidated by Anna Shternshis in Soviet and Kosher (2006), traditional Jewish cooking was an 38 Marina Mogilner, “Toward a History of Russian-Jewish ‘Medical Materialism’: Russian Jewish Physicians and the Politics of Jewish Biological Normalisation,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 70–106. 39 Ibid., 95.

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object of persecution due to its association with religious festivities. In Soviet times, Jews were often stereotyped as having better access to better produce on account of the deprivation of the rest of the Soviet citizens. At the same time, Stalin’s policy of food abundance created a cult of protein-rich foods—from the 1930s, meat became central to the construction of Soviet tastes.40 Some Soviet writers created and exploited the stereotypes of gluttonous and indulgent Jews. Valentin Ivanov’s novel The Yellow Metal (1956) presents an example of a conflation of greed and uncontrollable haptic lust for food and precious metals. In this novel, greed for rich dishes forms a nexus with the greed for other materialities, notably gold. Jewish characters are presented as not being in control of their drives and are thus assigned racialized meaning in their interaction with the physical world. The drives are pathologized and medicalized, using statements such as “Brodkin’s body was flabby and fat from bad metabolism.”41 The non-normative excessive desires become a feature of pathology of the Jew’s body which could not be reformed by the constructivist efforts of the Soviet socialist society. Food shortages, especially the scarcity of meat, were among the most prominent factors in public discontent during the later Soviet era. In the 1980s, Soviet nutritionists appealed to consumers, stating that “obtaining enough complete protein of animal origins was a very acute problem in the whole world, including the USSR.”42 At the same time, access to meat delicacies became “a stable marker of one’s social standing.”43 Having informed Soviet consumer tastes with a strong meat-privileging discourse, the regime created a need for, and an ideal of, “eating well,” which in the end it could not satisfy. Among those who were now excluded from the carnistic subject were the very people who were made to believe in the material and symbolic value of meat. A striking recent illustration of the politicized discourse of rich food and meat, involving the juxtaposition of Jewish and Russian practices, is found in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of Russian Jewry, Dvesti let vmeste, 1795–1995 (Two Hundred Years Together, 1795–1995), published in 2001. In writing about 40 Anton Masterovoi, “Engineering Tastes: Food and the Senses,” in Russian History through the Senses, ed. Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 176–190. 41 V. Ivanov, Zheltyi metall (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1956), 99. On the history of publication of Ivanov’s novel see Nikolai Mitrokhin, “Evrei, gruziny, kulaki i zoloto strany Sovetov,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 80, no. 4 (2007): 195–220. For a discussion of the novel see Mondry, Exemplary Bodies, 132–145. 42 Masterovoi, “Engineering Tastes,” 179. 43 Nataliia Lebina, “Plius destalinizatsiia vsei edy,” Teoriia mody 21, no. 3 (2011): 234.

CHAPTER ONE    Locating Historically the Jew’s Body

the rights of Jews to land ownership in rural Russia in the 1890s, Solzhenitsyn singles out the case of Leon Trotsky’s family, the Bronshteins, as a Jewish family involved in agriculture. Solzhenitsyn elaborates on one particular episode on the farm mentioned in Trotsky’s autobiography My Life (1930), in which he describes the situation of their temporary farm workers suffering from kurinaia slepota—a condition of poor night vision resulting from the lack of fatty acids in the diet. In his detailed description of the incident, Trotsky frames it as characteristic for the whole southern region. Solzhenitsyn, however, uses only a small fraction from Trotsky’s narrative in a subtle manipulation of the theme. In Solzhenitsyn’s rendition, it is the non-benevolent attitude of the Jewish masters towards their non-Jewish seasonal workers which is responsible for the illness. He claims that the Bronshteins caused the workers’ illness by not including meat in their diet. He juxtaposes this situation with the case of his own grandfather in the Kuban region who allegedly provided his workers with meat three times a day.44 Solzhenitsyn stipulates that this practice took place on his grandfather’s farm during the three summer months. This latter detail calls into question his claim—according to Russian Orthodox dietary laws regarding the summer miasoed, meat could only be consumed during the period from mid-July to mid-August, between the Petrov and Uspensky fasts.45 The rest of the summer fell into the time of abstention from meat. Solzhenitsyn’s partiality reveals his use of food issues for biopolitical arguments. As will be demonstrated in many examples in this book, including Trotsky’s own account of the episode in chapter ten, the politics of food is complex, diverse, and multilayered. In what follows I reveal the cultural negotiations, ruptures and continuities in engagements with this porous thematic domain of the Jew’s body, senses and materialities.

44 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste, 1795–1995 (Moscow: Russkii put′, 2001), 297. 45 “Miasoed,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar′ Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 27 (St. Petersburg: AO “Brokgauz-Efron,” 1907), 156.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Power of Meat: Defining Ethnicity and Masculinity in Gogol Meat cannot be procured without slaughter. —Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows.1

F

ood is culture-specific, functioning as a distinguishing mark of all societies. As with any cultural construct connected to the regulation of the body, food is related to the political field of power relations. Across cultures the sharing of meals holds deep religious and spiritual significance. For Judaism and Christianity, religious food practices serve as a means of distinction. Historically, sharing food between Christians and Jews was discouraged by both religions. Judaic dietary laws state which types of food are permitted for consumption, but they also separate Jews from Gentiles because they “make sharing of meals much more difficult.”2 Notably, the function of such rules, Diemling asserts, is to “set clear boundaries and strengthen the identity of a minority.”3 The religious authorities feared sharing meals; they were wary of the function of communal meals and food-sharing in affirming kinship, because this leads to a loss of control and power within the community. In Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol’s (1809–1852) texts present a telling illustration of the use of the bonding power of communal meals for 1 Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism (Newburyport, MA: Conari Press, 2010). 2 Maria Diemling, “‘As the Jews Like to Eat Garlic’: Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Food in Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon et al. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), 216. 3 Ibid.

CHAPTER TWO    The Power of Meat

his Christian protagonists vis-à-vis the non-participating Jewish and cryptoJewish characters. Gogol was the first of the nineteenth-century writers to refer to the Talmud in connection with the dietary differences between Jews and Slavs. This chapter examines examples from Gogol’s writing which use the politics of differences in eating to construct the overlapping domains of religion, ethnicity, and gender differences. In these cases, food and eating become instruments of self-definition and separation from the Other. The examples concern the formative role of eating meat in the construction of the normative collective subject and alterity. Collective meals bond the participants and are typically performed as rituals. Most instances include eating or abstaining from pork or the meat of the wild pig as the main marker of ethnicity. Notions of kinship and power relations are central to the episodes which include Jewish and crypto-Jewish orientalized characters. With its focus on intersections between ethnicity and foodways, this chapter is strategically situated to create a basis for ensuing discussions throughout the book.

The Ideology of Carnism: Derrida’s Eating Well and Carol Adam’s “Overlapping Absent Referent” As Jacques Derrida suggested in Eating Well, meat is central to the cultural construction of hegemonic discourse. Derrida is interested in both the real and the symbolic meaning of eating meat as a form of ingesting and incorporation which, he notes, has nothing to do with the nutritional value of animal proteins. He coins terms such as “carno-phallogocentrism” and “carnivorous virility” and explains that eating meat is part of the “schema” which “installs the virile figure at the determining centre of the subject.”4 For Derrida, the question of what constitutes practices and ideas about “eating well” is part of a wider biopolitics, including the question of the regulatory role of the authority. He ascribes major significance to the function of eating in the social history of humanity, as is summed up in this formulation: “And in all differences, ruptures and wars (one might even say wars of religion) ‘eating well’ is at stake.”5 Derrida’s emphasis on the centrality of difference and communality in matters of eating is pertinent for my investigation. 4 Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113–114. 5 Ibid., 115.

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Carol J. Adams’s association of virility and meat-eating as well as the notion of “the overlapping absent referent” (consisting mostly of animals, women and gendered Others in a particular culture) advanced in The Sexual Politics of Meat is also relevant to my inquiry.6 In “Derrida and the Sexual Politics of Meat” (2017),7 Adams and Matthew Calarco elaborate on the meaning of “the overlapping absent referent” in relation to Derrida’s phallologocentrism. They stress that the referents become objectified by culture and excluded from the dominant subject. In line with Derrida’s notion of the open structure of the object in “eating well,” I propose that Adams’s “overlapping absent referents” can be extended to imbricate any objectified subalterns who are viewed as less human, subhuman or unhuman. Moreover, recent empirical studies in the ideology of carnism show that individuals high in “social dominance” syndrome eat meat and hunt animals in order to assert their dominance over animals and, significantly, over groups of Others who do not engage in the same practices.8 Of particular relevance for my focus are the findings in this study which show that “carnistic domination was related to symbolic racism and sexism.”9 Taking these research findings into account, I focus on the politics of representation of (pork) meat-eating practices which thematize hegemony, community formation, and group-fraternity by the exclusion of the ostracized minoritarian Other. In Gogol’s stories this overlapping Other is the Jew and the crypto-Jewish orientalized gendered and sexed “monster,” whose dietary regime affiliates him with the dietary laws outlined in Leviticus. In referencing Leviticus, I follow the lead of noted anthropologist Mary Douglas who states in her study Leviticus as Literature (1999) that scholars have to reintegrate the Leviticus into the Hebrew Bible in their analysis of related topics.

Masculine Cossacks, Vegetarian Orientals and Pork-Selling Jews Nikolai Gogol’s personal interest in gastronomy, foodstuffs, and physiological digestion of food was significant.10 Additionally, in his work he often depicted 6 Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 7 Carol J. Adams and Matthew Calarco, “Derrida and the Sexual Politics of Meat,” in Meat Culture, ed. Annie Potts (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 31–53. 8 Christopher Monteiro et al., “The Carnism Inventory: Measuring the Ideology of Eating Animals,” Appetite 113 (2017): 51–62. 9 Ibid., 51. 10 Gogol’s relationship with food was complex because he suffered from indigestion and was constantly looking for remedies. See Darra Goldstein, “Feasting and Fasting with Gogol,”

CHAPTER TWO    The Power of Meat

eating as an expression of the Slavs’ excessive attitude to food, which he viewed as a “sin of flesh.”11 Moreover, his ethnic origins in Ukraine and his subsequent relocation to St. Petersburg made him especially aware of cultural differences in food. Gogol used specific food, especially meat, subversively to reveal its role as a marker of ethnic and religious differences often intersecting with issues of gender.12 This particular categorization of food finds its elaboration in his three stories, “A Terrible Vengeance” (1832), “Taras Bulba” (1835) and “Viy” (1835). Significantly, all are set in Ukraine and reflect the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of that place. The stories are populated by Ukrainian Cossacks, Catholic Poles, Muslims, and episodic Jews. Orthodox Christian Cossacks fight against Catholic Poles, Muslim Turks, and Crimean Tartars, providing Gogol with an opportunity to depict religious and ethnic differences. The Cossacks’ professional warrior occupation represents exemplary masculinity as opposed to effeminate Poles and grotesquely portrayed Jews. As scholars have noted, out of those Russian writers who tried to represent Jewish characters in “the age of realism,”13 Gogol had the greatest knowledge of Jewish life because he was a native of the area within the Pale of Settlement.14 Whilst he depicted Jews in a grotesque key, he also supplied his Russian readers with a list of ethnographical terms as an addendum to his stories. This list, with its Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish words and description of customs, reflects Gogol’s broad ethnographic knowledge.15 The examples from his texts illustrate what was constructed through the dominant discourse of Christian and Cossack versus Muslim and Jewish eating practices. Gogol links food and Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature ( June 2008). Gogol’s indigestion led him to believe in a strange idea that his own stomach was “upsidedown.” See Simon Karlinsky. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976). On Gogol’s ideas about food and digestive organs as ‘matter’ in relation to Neoplatonic dualisms see Michal Oklot, Phantasms of Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009). 11 Ronald LeBlanc. Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009). 12 Rosenshield has demonstrated that the Jew in Gogol’s stories functions as the Other in relation to Cossacks who are strongly gendered in their comradery. See Gary Rosenshield, The Ridiculous Jew (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008). 13 Elena Katz, Neither with Them nor without Them: The Russian Writer and the Jew in the Age of Realism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2008). 14 Amelia Glaser, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2012). Glaser also mentions the role of Jews in Gogol’s depiction of Ukraine’s markets. 15 N. V. Gogol′, “Malorossiiskie slova, vstrechaiushchiesia v ‘Vecherakh na khutore bliz Dikan′ki’ i ‘Mirgorode,’” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Vol′f, 1913), 326–328.

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eating, as in Adams’s schema, to notions of virility and masculinity as well as to ethnicity. His authorial attitude to these constructs, I contend, was critical, and his texts show signs of the subversion of norms generated by the dominant culture.

Pork-Eating Feasts and “Yid Noodles”: A Monster among the Cossacks “A Terrible Vengeance” is set in Ukraine at the time of its struggle for independence from Polish domination and its fights with its southern neighbors, Turks and Crimean Tartars. In the midst of this political turmoil the private life of the Ukrainian Cossack, a small warlord Danilo, is undergoing a drama in his fight with the dark forces. The demonic forces are represented by the long-estranged father of Danilo’s beautiful wife Katerina. The father turns out to be an evil sorcerer, a changeling who is involved in a political plot to betray Ukrainians to the Poles. The driving force behind the sorcerer’s actions is his incestuous desire for his own daughter Katerina, whom he has not seen since he left Ukraine for his wanderings in foreign lands. In order to define the sorcerer as an alien un-Christian, Gogol uses a range of material markers: his clothing, ornaments, and personal weapons all have a distinctly orientalized character. While all of these markers arouse Danilo’s suspicion that this stranger to Cossack life is a sorcerer, it is the old man’s tastes in food and drink that confirm him as an alien: “I don’t like these dumplings!” said the father, laying down his spoon after eating a little. “There is no flavour in them!” “I know you like Jewish noodles better,” thought Danilo. “Why do you say there is no flavour in the dumplings, father-in-law? . . . And there is no need to despise them: it is a Christian dish! All holy people and godly saints have eaten dumplings.” Not a word from the father. Danilo, too, said no more. They served roast boar with cabbage and plums. “I don’t like pork,” said Katerina’s father, picking out a spoonful of cabbage. “Why don’t you like pork?” said Danilo. “It’s only Turks and Jews who won’t eat pork.” The father frowned more angrily than ever.

CHAPTER TWO    The Power of Meat He ate nothing but some baked cereal pudding with milk over it, and instead of vodka drank some black liquid from a bottle he took out of his bosom.16

Not partaking in the communal group meal with the Cossacks makes Katerina’s father stand out as an outsider. He is shown to be less masculine than the Cossacks and culturally different. His preference for soft dishes such as gruel with milk separates him from the Cossacks who prefer to eat solid dishes, especially meat. In terms of ethnic differences, Turkish or Muslim traditions are conflated in Danilo’s understanding of dietary preferences with Jewish customs—both become markers of the overlapping non-Christian Other. Gogol endows Danilo with the basic knowledge of Judaic and Muslim dietary laws, since the prohibition against pork is part of kosher and halal. In addition to being staple identifiers of the sorcerer as a non-Christian, they also mark him as an enemy of Orthodox Christians. To separate the Christian and the non-Christian, the Cossack Danilo labels certain food as Jewish. He describes noodles as Jewish food, zhidovskaia lapsha (“Yid noodles”), which he juxtaposes with Christian food like dumplings. The man who prefers noodles to these Ukrainian Christian pork-based foods has spent time living among Turks, and functions as Other in this orientalist fantasy.17 The Russian word for noodles, lapsha or lokshen in Yiddish, is a word of Turkic origin. It came to Russia during the times of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, and features already in the canonical sixteenth-century Russian Orthodox family set of rules, Domostroi. In labelling noodles “Jewish,” I propose, Gogol uses his authorial irony to indicate Danilo’s political categorisation of food. The story uses noodles as an embodied metaphor for the alien world, against which the Cossack warlord fights on the southern borders of the Russian Empire. Additionally, this space is mythologized as an encompassing Orient with converging Jews and Muslims in line with the imagined past geographies of the region.18 16 N. V. Gogol, “A Terrible Vengeance,” in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Leonard Kent, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 147. 17 Smith in her study of the history of food in nineteenth-century Russia observes that Russians treated food eaten by national minorities, such as Muslim Tatars or animist Votiaks, as inferior in taste and quality. There is no reference to food eaten by Jews in her study. Alison Smith, Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (Dekalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2008). 18 On the myths of Israelites and Ishmaelites in the southern steppes see Leonid Chekin, “The Godless Ishmaelites: The Image of the Steppe in Eleventh-Thirteenth-Century Rus,” Russian History 19, nos. 1–4 (1992): 9–28.

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There is another notable aspect in the intersection between ethnicity, religion and gender in the domain of eating, and it has to do with the construct of the monstrous. Posthumanist thinking addresses the conflation of gender and race stereotypes with embodied “monstrosity.”19 The old Cossack sorcerer is depicted as both a moral and physical monster. Not only does he transgress codes of sexual prohibitions on incest, but his whole corporeal composition makes him a figure of indefinite and therefore monstrous nature. Notably, in terms of the divide between the normative human and non-human nature, the old Cossack is a Cossack and a sorcerer at the same time. In addition, he resembles and can behave like a wolf. Gogol, I suggest, utilizes the function of the monster in nineteenthcentury Romantic literature to challenge the norms of the dominant culture. The old sorcerer’s transformations are depicted in line with folk beliefs claiming that such changes take place at the site of Orthodox icons. It is the icons that expose him as a sorcerer, yet the description of his appearance contains markers of his composite human-animal corporeality. This appearance, I propose, goes beyond the interpretation of him as linked to the devil (Merezhkovsky), or the devil conflated with the Jew.20 The following description reveals all the markers that relate to what is considered to be ugly, freaky, and monstrous in a human: . . . the Cossack’s face completely changed: his nose grew longer and twisted to one side, his rolling eyes turned from brown to green, his lip turned blue, his chin quivered and grew pointed like a spear, a tusk peered out of his mouth, a hump appeared behind his head, and the Cossack turned into an old man. . . . And, hissing and clacking his teeth like a wolf, the strange old man vanished.21

While it is tempting to interpret this “strange old man” as a werewolf, his vegetarianism and eating habits clearly do not correspond to the carnivorous and blood-thirsty nature typical of this mythical beast.22 Gogol, I propose, 19 Pramod Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 82–87. See especially Nayar’s discussion on Monster Theory. 20 Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 154. Livak sees similarity in physical features of Gogol’s Jews and Satan. On the devil in Gogol see Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Gogol′ i chert (Moscow: Scorpion, 1906). 21 Gogol, “A Terrible Vengeance,” 136. 22 On subversive role of human-animal transformation in literature see Ann-Sofie Loenngren, Following the Animal: Power, Agency, and Human-Animal Transformations in Modern Northern-European Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

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creates a figure with subversive potential, one that challenges various dividing and regulatory prohibitions erected by the dominant culture. The prohibition against father-daughter incest and the ideals of the Dnieper Cossacks’ carnivorous masculinity are cultural constructs, and Gogol in his complex way knits the narrative which paradoxically both affirms and destabilizes cultural norms.23 Gogol’s own sexual orientation—he never married or had a woman partner—and his registered love for noodles and spaghetti which he skilfully cooked, serve as biographical reminders that he invested his embodied personhood into this overlapping domain of the subaltern. The non-normative monster-human-animal figure provided Gogol with an opportunity to problematize the prevailing ideals of masculinity. It is possible that Gogol’s orientalist strategy functions in this story as a device to masquerade his personal anxieties vis-à-vis the power of the patriarchal masculinity of a carno-phallologocentric subject. Gogol’s use of orientalist imagery in the figure of wizard fits Edward Said’s schema of projection and identification, especially in terms of the wizard’s non-normative sexual desires and Gogol’s own “sinful” homoerotic leanings.24 In the first radical reinterpretation of Gogol in the twentieth century, Vasily Rozanov perceptively showed Gogol as a complicated and subversive personality: “Gogol resembles the sorcerer from ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ walking around in Turkish attire in spite of his Cossack origins.”25 The old Cossack wizard is a sinner and one of Gogol’s most enigmatic figures, yet it is the very strangeness of this wizard that makes him akin to those of Gogol’s characters with whom he has a special affinity. It is about such strange characters that he wrote in his Mertvye dushi (The Dead Souls, 1842), “I am destined by the mysterious power to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes.”26 Perhaps there is a lot of the “strange” old Cossack figure in Gogol himself, rather more than of the warlord Cossack Danilo.

23 Freud argues that “respect” for incest “is a cultural demand made by society.” Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin Books, 1991), vol. 7, 148. 24 See Edward Said, Orientalism (NY: Pantheon Books, 1978). On Gogol’s closet homosexuality see Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), and Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982). 25 V. V. Rozanov, “Zagadki Gogolia,” in his O pisatel′stve i pisateliakh. Sobranie sochinenii, ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 336. 26 N. V. Gogol′, Mertvye dushi (Moscow: Khudozhstvennaia literatura, 1980), 154.

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Taras Bulba’s Feast, the Power of Slaughtered Animals and the Talmudic Jew In “Taras Bulba” the opening scene describes a feast, which is a setting for the story’s underlying theme of group identity. To celebrate the return of his sons from their studies in Kiev, the Zaporozhian Cossack Taras orders his wife to prepare the table. The food items that he orders are symptomatic of an identity that combines ethnicity and masculinity: Don’t give us pancakes [pampushki], honey buns [medoviki], poppy seed cakes [makovniki], and other such dainties [pundiki]; bring us a whole sheep, serve a goat and forty-year-old mead! And don’t forget moonshine, not fancy moonshine with raisins and flavoring, but pure frothy moonshine that hops and heaves like it’s crazy.27

Alice Nakhimovsky (2006) has noted the intersection of ethnicity and gender in the choice of food in Taras’s menu: The foods that Taras finds unsuitable are sweet foods, cut-up foods, mixed foods, and foods made with flour. To his soldier’s mind, these are complex, feminine foods; and while he doesn’t note the fact, both the proscribed foods and their manner of preparation fall to the Jewish end of the Slavic food repertory. None of the foods that he requests are foods associated with Jews—who in Russian culture were always seen as un-masculine. The same is true of the alcohol.28

There is, I suggest, another important layer of meaning in this choice of dishes, one related to ethnic, religious and gender differences. It relates to the image of “whole” animals, as evident in the order for “a whole sheep” and a goat. Gogol’s choice of words here is deliberately ambiguous. It indicates that the animals have to be slaughtered—the expression tashchi vsego barana literally means “drag the whole sheep.” The subtext, I propose, relates to the killing of animals involved in the consumption of meat. It also suggests that the feast is a form of ritual which ideologically unifies the group of males. By ordering a whole sheep and a goat, Taras Bulba implies that these animals have to be 27 Idem, “Taras Bul′ba,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Vol′f, 1913), 237–288. 28 Alice Nakhimovsky. “You Are What They Ate: Russian Jews Reclaim Their Foodways,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no. 1 (2006), 66.

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slaughtered and cooked, rather than simply procured as ready-to-eat meat. Importantly, in “A Terrible Vengeance” it was the wild boar that marked the food around which the group of male Cossacks congregated. The wild boar had to be hunted down and killed in order to become meat. Both scenes relate to Derrida’s notion of virile authority embodied in carnivorous practices. In “Eating Well” he writes that “the virile strength of the adult male, the father, husband, or brother (the canon of friendship [. . . that] privileges the fraternal schema)”29 involves accepting animal sacrifice and eating flesh. In this feasting scene, the meat of a killed animal is imbricated, I propose, with questions of ethics which intersect with constructs of ethnicity and masculinity, and which become the axis of the location of power. While these male-bonding scenes depict the role of eating in intra-ethnic fraternity rituals and in separation from the Other, in reality cross-ethnic contacts could and did take place. Contacts between Jews and Christians in Ukraine took place in the realm of trade. Gogol describes such contacts humorously, drawing on the differences in dietary laws. To denote the dissimilarity, he uses the common motif of prohibition to eat pork as emblematic of ethno-religious variances. In his macabre story “Viy,” this pork-eating motif becomes a comic episode, in contrast to the supernatural thread which drives the plot. The story shows how the life of a Christian seminarian is affected by the seductive but supernatural beauty of a young woman. The plot is an elaboration of a Ukrainian folktale motif but it is also used to show the dangers of material contact with the supranatural. In this context, Gogol includes a scene describing the earthly needs of young Christian scholars whose healthy appetites for food cannot be satisfied by the meagre diet of the seminary. In this domain of foodways, Gogol introduces a Jewish tavern-keeper whose inn is frequented by the seminarians. Importantly, Gogol “introduces the Talmud to the Russian reader”30 in an episode dealing with dietary differences: “A Yid brought from under the skirt of his coat a few pork sausages and putting them on the table turned his back at once from this fruit forbidden by the Talmud.”31 The scene satirizes Jews’ economic activities but in doing so also stresses their differences as an ethnic and religious group.32 At the same time, it describes 29 Derrida, “Eating Well,” 114. 30 Katz, Neither with Them nor without Them, 53. 31 N. V. Gogol′, “Vii,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Vol′f, 1913), 294. 32 In Poland Jewish tavern keepers sometimes kept pigs for their non-Jewish clients. See Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York: Oxford UP, 2013).

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contact between the two peoples with its potential for the exchange of ideas and foodstuffs. Of note here is the conflation of ethnicity and gender evidenced in the effeminized shape of the Jew’s coat. The traditional Jewish male costume was a distinguishing ethnic marker of Jews in Poland and the south-western provinces of the Russian Empire and starting in the 1830s the issue of dress became the target of new regulatory degrees.33 The government-formed Jewish Committee in 1840 issued a set of laws pertaining to Jewish clothing, including the recommendation to shorten the male coat. Significantly, Gogol spends time in his tale to note that the seminarians’ long gowns come down lower than their feet,34 suggesting that their coats are similarly gendered. This accentuated similarity in clothing can serve as an invitation to the reader to reflect not only on the differences but also on the similarities between Christians and Jews. The earthly tavern where the contact takes place may be a domain of materiality, but within this domain the Jew is still identified through the observance of the traditional practices and Talmudic laws which are designed to keep the body and soul pure and holy. The seminarians, in contrast, are only too ready to succumb to the temptations of the flesh. There are no indications in the story that the meat-eating seminarians follow the Christian Orthodox laws of Lent, including the required abstention from eating meat on Fridays and Ash Wednesday.35 This omission is meaningful. In terms of observance of religious codes, the seminarians’ gluttony compromises their piety, while the Jew keeps in line with the codes of his religion. This episode involving the pork-trading Jew has another, deeper meaning in relation to the carno-phallologentric schema, a meaning related to Derrida’s notion of carnivorous virility. In describing the scene when the Jew takes the pork sausages out from under his coat, Gogol uses the words neskol′ko kolbas iz svininy or “forbidden fruit.”36 This has overt sexual connotations. Not only does Gogol use his favorite device of parallelism to link the sausages with something that men hide under the coats, he also describes the sausages as “forbidden fruit,” a subversive reference to both the pork and the shape in which it comes. To call the sausage a forbidden fruit is to evoke male sex in a homosocial context and, by proxy, the set of Judaic prohibitions related to food and 33 See a discussion in Eugene Avrutin, Jews and the Empirical State: Identification Policy in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), 38–52. 34 Gogol′, “Vii,” 289. 35 On Eastern Orthodox codes and canons gathered in Trebnik see T. N. Tereshchenko, Bogosluzheniia i treby (Moscow: Dar, 2014).  36 Gogol′, “Vii,” 294.

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sexual behavior. These Judaic laws are grouped in the Book of Leviticus and include the prohibition of male-male sexual contact (Leviticus 18:22). There is clearly more at stake here than a group of seminarians eating sausages and having good time collectively. Gogol, I suggest, draws together into a thematic cluster regulatory laws from the Holiness Code.37 While pork-eating Christian seminarians demonstrate their Derridean “carnivorous virility,” Gogol subverts their masculinity through his hints of other carnal activities. The Jew thus comes out as somebody who observes not only the dietary laws but also the laws which regulate other bodily practices. Gogol’s persona uses this scene to provide comic relief from the pressures imposed by the phallocentric patriarchy. Perhaps it is the author himself who is the “overlapping absent referent” in this burlesque scene. Gogol’s extreme fasting in the final years of his life to atone for the sins of the flesh makes this supposition plausible.

Not a Ridiculous Jew Gogol’s stories employ food as a signifier of Otherness. While he treats comically the petty stereotypes of Jewish, crypto-Jewish and Muslim practices of not eating pork, he subversively chooses meat as a locus of major differences and a location of power. While Gogol’s stories embed the eating scenes in a particular historical and geographical locale, his aim is to expose and ridicule dominant normative practices while skilfully concealing his own sympathies and anxieties. He constructs differences between Christian men and Jews/ orientalized crypto-Jews/Muslims/monsters to define and subvert normative hegemony. He also reflects on historical realia in multiethnic spaces: Ukraine’s liberation from Polish domination; the Jewish Pale of Settlement; and border raids by Turks and Tartars. These historical contexts are characterized by the rise of nationalism and attention to ethnic, religious and cultural divergences. Gogol’s own minoritarian subjectivity is covertly expressed in his ironical attitude to the Cossack ideals of masculinity. 38 Perhaps embodied differences and divergent cultural practices allowed Gogol to negotiate his own latent alterity. 37 Gogol’s knowledge of Leviticus is evident in the character Kostanzhogolo from Dead Souls who uses the words derived from the book of Leviticus. See M. Vaiskopf, “Imperial Mythology and Negative Landscape in Dead Souls,” in Gogol: Exploring Absence, ed. Sven Spicker (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 101–112. 38 In his articles on Gogol Rozanov stresses Gogol’s ethnic difference and calls him un-Christian (nekhrist′). See Henrietta Mondry, Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature (Bloomington: Slavica, 2010), 61–79.

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The food laws of Leviticus function as a present and absent overlapping referent, with the Jew’s body as one such referent in the body politics of “eating well.” The material symbolic domain combines embodied practices related to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Gogol’s references to “Yid noodles,” “forbidden fruit,” a “Yid,” and “the Talmud” can be seen as manifestations of what Vladimir Nabokov identifies as Gogol’s use of “sudden focal shifts” in narrative. Nabokov notes that this method “simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning with the sudden shift.”39 I suggest that Gogol’s strategy is to make the reader reflect on a hidden, secret and serious meaning in these episodes. Among his serious insights is his undeniable interest in matters pertaining to cultural and religious regulations related to the body. Gogol started a tradition of comical portrayal of Jewish characters often framed as “the ridiculous Jew” in Russian literature.40 However, this comic format is in itself a device of complex poetics based on concealment and trickery, designed to hide and guard anxieties and uncertainties. Among Russian writers of the next generation, Dostoevsky employed this Gogolian mode of depicting “ridiculous Jews.” In the next chapter I identify thematic similarities between the two writers’ representations of Jewish characters in relation to the secular and religious aspects of the body.

39 Vladimir Nabokov, “Nikolai Gogol. ‘The Overcoat,’” in his Lectures on Russian Literature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 54. 40 Rosenshield, The Ridiculous Jew.

CHAPTER THREE

Valued Bodies and Spaces: Cross-Religious Encounters in Dostoevsky Of all religions, Judaism counts the fewest suicides. —Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897)

F

or religious thinkers and writers, the human body is an interface between the physical and the metaphysical, while in the Judeo-Christian tradition the body has complex ontological value. In this context, Vladimir Solovyov’s notion of the “holy corporeality” in his evaluation of the Judaic attitude to the body has deep eschatological meaning.1 It suggests that the body and not only the soul can be treated as fit for immortality and resurrection.2 As such, this notion characterizes the core interest of Solovyov’s contemporary Russian religious thinkers in Judaic and Christian conceptualization of the value of the physical body.3 Among these thinkers was Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1880), whose writing demonstrates his preoccupation with the issues of immortality and eschatology. Notably, Dostoevsky and Solovyov had conversations about the corporeal immortality suggesting that Dostoevsky’s interest in the afterlife is centered around the physical resurrection of the body.4 Significantly, his

See my discussion on “holy corporeality” [sviataia telesnost′] and “holy bodies” [sviatye tela] in chapter one. 2 For Solovyov “holy corporeality” explains why Jews are God’s “chosen people”. See “Evreistvo,” 44–45. 3 For a detailed overview of Russian Christian thinkers’ interest in Judaism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Dominic Rublin, Holy Russia, Sacred Israel: JewishRussian Encounters in Russian Religious Thought (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010). 4 F. M. Dostoevskii, “N. P. Petersonu,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh [hereafter PSS] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990), vol. 30, 14–16. 1

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interest was not limited to the New Testament but also included an attentive reading of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). In Dostoevsky’s most eschatological novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder Zosima promotes love for earthly life, so revealing a respect for the life of the material body of humans, animals and plants that was in sharp contrast to the ascetic beliefs of many of the monastery’s orthodox monks. Most of Zosima’s favourite inspirational stories come from the Old Testament.5 To accept the material life as God-given means to erase binarism between spirit and matter, and to treat the body with the utmost respect. In this chapter I explore the material and ontological value of the human body in Dostoevsky’s writing and the role which his interest in Judaism plays in his conceptualisation of the ( Jew’s) body and related physical spaces. Dostoevsky formulated his opinions on the political, economic, and social dimensions of the “Jewish Question” in his journalistic essays in the Diary of a Writer in 1877 and in his personal correspondence.6 His fiction, on the other hand, has only one developed Jewish character, Isai Fomich Bumshtein in Notes from the House of the Dead. This character has attracted considerable scholarly attention, mainly within the typology of the “ridiculous Jew,” which Dostoevsky borrowed from Gogol’s portrayal of Jews.7 Among the episodic characters in his fiction, the Jewish fireman in Crime and Punishment is the most enigmatic and the least commented on. The first part of this chapter unravels the riddle around the meaning of the Jewish fireman who tries to prevent Svidrigailov from suicide in Crime and Punishment. Following this I turn to Isai Bumshtein from Notes from the House of the Dead as another example of Dostoevsky’s interest in attitudes towards the material body in Judaism. While the Jewish fireman attempts to prevent Svidrigailov from committing suicide and is aware of the right place to die, Bumshtein knows that looking after the body is as important as praying for Jews’ return to Jerusalem as the truly right place for the Jewish people. Both protagonists are characterized as life-affirming, thus sharing Dostoevsky’s emphasis on the value of life. I read his conceptualization of the material body and spaces against the backdrop of his utopic messianism.

5 For Shrayer the Jewish question in Dostoevsky relates to religious domain, and should be called “the Judaic question.” See Maxim Shrayer. “Dostoevsky, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 274. 6 On the topic of Jewry in Dostoevsky see David Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews (Austin: Texas UP, 1981); Katz, Neither with Them, nor without Them. 7 Rosenshield, The Ridiculous Jew, 131.

CHAPTER THREE    Valued Bodies and Spaces

I. Metaphysical Suicide in Crime and Punishment and the Body There is one act of human will that stops life voluntarily—the act of suicide. While the Scriptures are not specific about the prohibition of suicide, institutional Christianity of modernity considered suicide as a sin. The logic of this is based on the notion of life as governed by God. Yet in actualizing Christianity’s overall asceticism and privileging of spirit over matter, the act of suicide is complex. Suicide can be viewed as a manifestation of hatred of one’s own body. In Crime and Punishment (1866/67) Dostoevsky confronts the problem of suicide through the context of dealing with one’s own materiality. Svidrigailov’s suicide is both an eschatological and a material(ist) act, an act of self-destruction of the physical self by a non-believer. While the suicide episode is saturated with subtextual complexities, for this discussion I place it in relation to the status of the body: it is an enigmatic Jew in the city of St. Petersburg who has the knowledge of the value of the material and ontological body. In this scene, Christianity, Judaism, and pagan Hellenism are brought together in order, I propose, to invite the reader to ponder on the riddles of the value of human life in its material form. Irina Paperno’s study Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (1997) argues that 1860s–1880s’ culture used suicide as “laboratory for the investigation of crucial philosophical and social problems.”8 Among these problems the most pressing are those related to the immortality of the soul and the connection between the individual and God. The sociologist Jack Douglas in The Social Meaning of Suicide (1967) similarly describes the understanding of suicide as “a means of transforming the soul from this world to the other world.”9 These issues are particularly relevant to Dostoevsky’s suicide scene under investigation. While most of the discussion about this suicide centers around the immortality of the soul, I investigate the implications of the immortality of both the soul and the body. This reading takes into account the fact that, during Dostoevsky’s life, suicide was officially considered a crime and a sin

8 Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 2; see her description of the “suicide epidemic” in Russia. See also Ian Lilly, “Imperial Petersburg, Suicide and Russian Literature,” Slavonic and East European Review 72, no. 3 (1994): 402–423. 9 Jack Douglas, The Social Meaning of Suicide (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967), 284. For a view that Dostoevsky was concerned with the immortality of the soul in his dealings with suicide, see John Desmond, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2019). 

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by the Orthodox Church,10 so giving added significance to the author’s choice of a Jewish fireman, rather than a Christian, to attempt to prevent suicide.11

The Phantom Jew Trying to Prevent the Suicide Dostoevsky was critical of suicide.12 In his theodicy, suffering and endurance were necessary conditions of human existence and an important underpinning of Russian Orthodox Christianity.13 Significantly, it was Job from the Old Testament who epitomized for him the resilience and complex understanding of suffering without losing faith in God’s justice.14 In terms of the wider historical and literary context, in the Victorian era in Britain, Job was also used as an “antidote” to the glorification of heroic suicide by pagan philosophers and heroes.15 While the rhetoric around the suffering of suicide victims was Christian, it was also ambivalent, grounded as it was in Christian notions of compassion and suffering and yet informed by the view of suicide as a sin.16 While the Judaic presence in this discourse is motivated by continuity with Christianity’s standing on suicide—and is Christianized to suit the contemporary trends in attitudes to suicide—in assigning his Jewish character in Crime 10 Suicide was prohibited both under canon law and Church regulations in Russia. See Susan Morrissey, “Suicide,” in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. Deborah Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 131–139. For a broader context see Susan Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012). 11 Shklovsky tried to find a parallel to the scene in Goethe’s treatment of suicide by Werther. Viktor Shklovskii, Za i protiv (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1957), 220. Katz notes that Ivanits’s idea that the Jewish fireman represents the Devil, which Christians are supposed to see before suicide, does not work, because the phantom tries to save Svidrigailov. See Katz, Neither with Them, Nor without Them. 12 Yet in the 1840s and 1850s Dostoevsky mentioned twice in his correspondence that he could throw himself into the river from the bridge out of desperation. N. N. Shneidman, Dostoevsky and Suicide (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1984), 11. 13 Nikolai Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Paris: YMCA, 1968). 14 Grossman uses Dostoevsky’s long fascination with the story of Job as example of his respectful attitude to Judaic thinking. Leonid Grossman, Ispoved′ odnogo evreia (Moscow: Podkova, 1999), 175. 15 On suicide in the realist novel see Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); and Barbara Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988). 16 Discussions were often linked to the issue of “temporary insanity” which allowed the church to conduct Christian burial; this reflected the conceptualisation of suicide as sin and/or crime. See Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England, 263–311, Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 45–73.

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and Punishment a salvific role, Dostoevsky enacted a significant departure from the literary conventions of the period. In this novel, a bridge in St. Petersburg leads Svidrigailov to the place of encounter with a phantom-like Jew, who guards the gate marking the blurred border between the city topography and the surreal world of hallucination. In this space Svidrigailov kills himself in front of the Jew. The gate in my reading becomes a liminal space of connection and separation of physical and metaphysical spheres.17 The Jewish character’s attempts to prevent the Russian hero from suicide can be viewed as a manifestation of his religious knowledge.18 The ethical act challenges the negative stereotypes of Jews. The eschatologicalmaterial interface in the novel is valorized by the plot: the suicidal Svidrigailov is implicated in a suspected murder, making him a criminal and a sinner. The encounter with the Jew in time and space relates to Bakhtin’s chronotope of threshold. The time-space of the encounter in front of the closed gate aligns with Bakhtin’s characterization of the “threshold” chronotope in the European novel, as the moment of a major break in a character’s life, symbolic of epiphany and resurrection.19 In this novel, the symbolism of space within the internal dynamic of these chronotopes unveils the meaning of this cross-religious encounter before the suicide: Svidrigailov’s encounter with the Jew reveals the emblematic meaning of the place of suicide—in this case, the topography of St. Petersburg with both its real and metaphorical associations. The Jew whom Svidrigailov encounters is a bizarre vision: he is described as a fireman dressed in a uniform with an Achilles helmet on his head. Elena Katz suggests that while the probability of a Jew being employed in the profession of fireman in the St. Petersburg of the mid-1860s was small, it nevertheless should not be ruled out. She stresses that from 1837 there was a soldiers’ synagogue in St. Petersburg.20 The Jewish fireman’s presence on the street of St. Petersburg can be both real and symbolic. The carefully orchestrated theatricality of his attire, in combination with his Yiddish-accented speech, creates an uncanny combination of the Judaic and Hellenic. The words he addresses 17 In Eliade, going through gates are symbolic of traversing “difficult passages” leading to the other world. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 482–486. 18 A study of the attitude of Christians and Jews to suicide shows that Jews especially find suicide unacceptable in religious terms. See George Domino et al., “Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Suicide,” Journal of Religion and Health 20, no. 3 (1981): 201–207. 19 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 248. 20 See a discussion in Katz, Neither with Them, Nor without Them, 166–167.

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to Svidrigailov in an attempt to stop the suicide, while cryptic, reveal both the realistic and the mystical nature of his presence:21 Bah! He thought, “Here is a place, why go on to Petrovsky Island? Here, at least, I’ll have an official witness.” He almost smiled at this thought and turned into [S′′ezhin]skaya Street. A large building stood at this spot with a watchtower. With a shoulder leaning against the massive closed gates of the building, a little man was standing, wrapped in a grey soldier’s coat and wearing a copper helmet on his head. He cast a drowsy, cold, sidelong glance in the direction of the approaching Svidrigailov. His face wore that look of eternal peevish dejection that is so sourly imprinted on all the faces of the Jewish tribe without exception. Both of them, Svidrigailov and Achilles, scrutinized each other in silence for some time. At last, it struck Achilles as odd for a man not drunk to be standing three steps from him, staring and not saying a word. “Vat is it, vat is it, now, you vant here?” he muttered, without stirring or changing his position. “Why, nothing brother, good morning,” Svidrigailov answered. “Dzis is not dze place.” “I am going to foreign parts, brother.” “To foreign parts?” “To America.” “America?” Svidrigailov took out his revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows. “Vat, vat you’re doing, dzis is no place for such prenks [pranks].” “And why, tell me, this is not the place?” “Vai, because dzis is not dze place.” “Well, brother, it’s all the same. It’s a good place; if anybody asks you, just say he said he was on his way to America.” He pressed the revolver to his right temple. “No, not here, dzis is not dze place here!” cried Achilles, rousing himself, the pupils of his eyes growing wider and wider. Svidrigailov pulled the trigger.22 21 Dostoevsky discussed cases of suicide in religious terms and saw them as acts of rejection of belief in the immortality of the soul. See his essay “O samoubiistve i vysokomerii,” in PSS, vol. 24, 52–55. 22 F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, vol. 6, 394.

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The notion of space and foreign lands in this meeting point of ethnicities and cultures holds some hidden significance. The collage of cultures which includes Hebraic, Hellenic, and Yiddish in the concrete topography of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg mixes the real and the symbolic, creating a complex symbiosis which commentators have found challenging to decipher.23 On the one hand, the notion of the geo-political “place” relates to the reforms of the 1860s and the passing of a new law in 1861 that allowed Jews with university degrees and wealthy merchants and financiers to live in cities outside the Pale. Dostoevsky the journalist welcomed this change as it was expedient for him at the time to establish a reputation as a writer who followed the route of progress.24 In guarding an official building, the fireman in the uniform represents law and order and, in Joseph Frank’s words, fulfils his “civic duty.”25 It is in this capacity that Svidrigailov first chooses him as an official witness to his act. While the preoccupation of the Jewish character with place in this context is historically motivated and realistic, the representation of the scene is surreal and calls for a careful rereading.26

Who is the Jewish Fireman in the Helmet of Achilles? Russian Jewish philosopher Aaron Shteinberg suggested that in this scene Svidrigailov meets the Wandering Jew (the “Eternal Jew” in Russian), the phantom-like figure that represents the eternity of the Jew in the European imagination. As such, he teaches Svidrigailov that “this is not the place to die or rebel against ‘the law’ of life and its immutability.”27 Svidrigailov rejects the route of remorse and, by shooting himself, deprives himself of salvation.28 The Jew’s protestations about the inappropriateness of this place to die can 23 Paperno’s study does not deal with this character. 24 As editor of Vremia, Dostoevsky established a liberal reputation and supported the liberation of Jews. Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews, 32–48. 25 See Joseph Frank, “Foreword,” in Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews. 26 Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky After Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Realism (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005). As a phantom, the Jew in front of the closed gates to the locked house can be read as the very embodiment of Freudian uncanny, the “un-homely,” the projection of the unconscious. On “uncanny” in Dostoevsky’s “The Double” see Michelle Zvedeniuk, “Doubling, Dividing and Interchanging of the Self: The ‘Uncanny’ Subjectivity in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Double,’” Linguistics and Literature 10, no. 2 (2002): 104–124; Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, 335–376. 27 A. Z. Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” Versty 3 (1928): 104. 28 Shneidman, Dostoevsky and Suicide, suggests that this suicide is a warning to those who live outside the Christian principles of the Russian Church.

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be interpreted as an assertion that he has a higher knowledge of where is the right place to die. For a Jew, this place is the promised land—a theme which Dostoevsky reflected on in his autobiographical The Notes from the House of the Dead. Notably, in Crime and Punishment Jerusalem is mentioned. In Tatyana Kasatkina’s interpretation, it signifies salvation as associated with Raskolnikov’s redemption, in contrast to the pagan antiquity emblematized by Svidrigailov’s heathen lifestyle.29 This binarism, she suggests, is expressed in the city’s topography: when Raskolnikov attempts to confess his sin publicly, the crowd mockingly calls his behavior a preparatory act before his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Svidrigailov’s paganism is further emblematized by the name of the hotel in which he stays: Adrianapolis. While for Kasatkina Jerusalem in the context of this religious juxtaposition is emblematic of the “metaphysical essence” of Christianity, I suggest that it additionally valorizes the Judaic subtext problematized in the figure of the Jew/Achilles. By emphasizing the comical connotations (referring to the puny Jew as “Achilles”), Dostoevsky signals that while the Jew might not have the appearance of the ancient Greek hero, he epitomizes something far more profound.30 While the puny Jew might be not as heroic as Achilles, he appears to know something important which puts him above the Greek hero, and this knowledge, in the context of Svidrigailov’s decision to end his life, relates to the afterlife. As the Wandering/Eternal Jew, the bizarre-looking Jew is immortal, something that the Ancient Greek warrior was not. Indeed, in Ancient Greek mythology Achilles was mortal because of a flaw—the weak spot in his foot, proverbially known as Achilles’s heel. Moreover, in Homer’s Odyssey, Achilles’s spirit in the Land of the Dead famously complains that he would rather be a slave but alive than the greatest of the dead (11:489–490). The combination of the Hellenic and the Hebraic clearly presents more than a comic device.31 It can imply both religious synthesis and juxtaposition if taken in relation to the famous statement of St. Paul that in Christianity, “There is no Greek or Jew.” In this respect it evokes the archetypal symbolism of borders and border-crossing between religions, ethnicities, and cultures, 29 T. A. Kasatkina, “Po povodu suzhdenii ob antisemitizme Dostoevskogo,” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul'tura 22 (2007): 413-436. 30 On the stereotype of a puny Jew in Russian literature see Mondry. Exemplary Bodies. 31 Joseph Frank notes in his “Foreword,” ix–xv, ix, that “Matthew Arnold might have been pleased by this combination of the Hebraic and the Hellenic,” but does not develop this point. On Frank’s account of Dostoevsky’s attitudes to the Jews see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 302.

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albeit under the umbrella of Christianity.32 Svidrigailov’s salutation of the Jew/Achilles as “brother” three times in this passage signifies this notion of brotherhood both ironically and seriously.33 The Jew/Achilles construct has echoes of Dostoevsky’s ideal of universal brotherhood which resonates throughout all his writing in the paradoxes of his polyphonic poetics. Yet this Jewish-Hellenic character speaks with an unmistakably Jewish voice. This may imply that, while Homer might have made a large contribution to European culture and civilisation, the Judeo-Christian tradition gave humanity the spiritual foundations for life and the afterlife.34 The Jew in this novel, I suggest, protests against the suicide because, like Job in the Old Testament, he did not lose his faith in God. The eschatological-material interface in Svidrigailov’s encounter with Jew/ Achilles is evidenced by the “Notebooks” to the novel, in which Svidrigailov maintains that a person in an unhealthy psychological state “can come into contact with phantoms and other worlds [drugie miry].”35 In this context, the space that the Jew guards as gate-keeper is from “other worlds” and has the metaphysical symbolism of the threshold chronotope. The actual place is “a house with a watchtower,” but it is also a zone of conflicting views between him and Svidrigailov.36 The deliberate authorial tactics blur the border between the real city topography and the product of imagination.37 It is known that the watchtower was part of a real building in St. Petersburg.38 Yet the tall watchtower in the novel can be viewed as an evocation of the imagery of the Tower of Babel. 32 On the idea that the nineteenth-century European culture had as its goal “the dialectical overcoming of the difference between Jew and Greek,” see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism (New York: Norton, 2013), 420. 33 In 1861 Dostoevsky stated that Homer’s worldview exemplified the ideal of “eternal harmony.” Dostoevskii, “G-n G-ov i vopros ob iskusstve,” in PSS, vol. 18, 97. See also T. Mal′chukova, “Dostoevskii i Gomer,” in Novye aspekty v izuchenii Dostoevskogo (Petrozavodsk: Petrozavodskii universitet, 1994), 3–36. 34 Lev Shestov in his Athens and Jerusalem maintains that Dostoevsky’s position in regard to the question of free will and the knowledge of truth was oppositional to dominant Greek Aristotelian dialectics and was programmatically based on Scriptures. Lev Shestov, Afiny i Ierusalim, (Paris: YMCA, 1951), 196–197. 35 Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 7, 165. 36 Kasatkina, “Po povodu suzhdenii,” 425, suggests that the space can denote entry to hell, considering that the tower is associated with fire. 37 The actual watchtowers in St. Petersburg were built during the nineteenth century, and architecturally they competed in shape and height with ecclesiastical buildings, such as churches and cathedrals. N. P. Antsyferov, Dusha Peterburga (Paris: YMCA, 1978), 139. 38 A. G. Dostoevskaia identified it as a building in S′′ezhinskaia Street. See L. P. Grossman, Seminarii po Dostoevskomu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1922), 58.

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Read as a Biblical allusion, the tower connotes separation and unity of people and cultures, so corresponding to the emblematics of the composite image of the Jew Achilles.39 The Jew’s static posture in front of the gate leading to this “tower” is evocative of permanency and eternity. In the context of Dostoevsky’s mythologization of St. Petersburg as a fantastic place that can evaporate as fog, the space that the Jew Achilles guards can be imagined as the liminal space demarcating the border between life and afterlife, this and “other worlds.” 40 Dostoevsky resorted to the literary tradition of comic representations of the Jew, concealing his serious anxieties around questions which his protagonists famously called “accursed”: whether there is God and immortality.41 It can be further argued that the hybridity of the construct helps Dostoevsky secure various possibilities in the domain of beliefs in afterlife. David Goldstein maintained that no matter how grotesque the form in which this phantom appears, “his ghostlike presence represents an eerie challenge to the messianic role of the Russian people that Dostoevsky would like to pre-empt for them.”42

The Eschatological-Material Threshold of the Burial Place in “The Jewish Question” In 1877, in his later years, Dostoevsky the journalist defended himself against accusations of disseminating anti-Jewish views in a series of articles on “The Jewish Question” in Diary of a Writer. One subchapter had the subtitle “But Long Live Brotherhood!” and was followed by another called “Funeral of ‘the Universal Man,’” in which Dostoevsky retold a story narrated to him by his Jewish correspondent. It describes the funeral of a righteous man, a German Christian doctor who used to help the poor Jews of Minsk, and at whose funeral rabbis said prayers alongside priests of various Christian denominations. Dostoevsky notes that, as the location of multi-ethnic encounters between 39 The word kalancha, used in the novel for the watchtower, was originally applied in Russian to the defence towers of fortresses. Kalancha is from kale, of Turkic origin, referring to Turkish watchtowers near Azov from seventeenth century. See “Kalancha,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar′ Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 20 (St. Petersburg: AO “Brokgauz-Efron,” 1890), 455. 40 Dostoevsky described St. Petersburg as a space that can evaporate in The Adolescent (Antsyferov. Dusha Peterburga, 146). On the atmosphere in St. Petersburg before Svidrigailov’s suicide see Sergei Belov, Peterburg Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2002). 41 These questions are asked in The Brothers Karamazov. For Judaism and Dostoevsky in the context of Levinas’s ethics see Val Vinokur, The Trace of Judaism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008), 35–60. 42 Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews, 54.

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Jews, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians and Poles, Minsk was a right place to start the movement to conquer “prejudice”43 and to stand as an example of the “brotherhood” of nationalities.44 Fittingly for my focus he states that this funeral already had in it the beginnings of the resolution of the Jewish question. The Jewish-Christian encounters at the funeral have a markedly eschatological orientation. It can be argued that the story attracted Dostoevsky not only as a positive example of interfaith and intercultural encounters, but also because of the symbolism of the burial. The cemetery is a liminal space, and burial, being a symbolic threshold between this and the other worlds, is a rite of passage associated with transition.45 As such, it echoes the chronotopic encounter between Svidrigailov and the Jew in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s emotive description of the funeral scene focuses on the place next to the grave, the space emblematic of the border and the entry into a different domain. Significantly, it is this space that becomes in Dostoevsky’s description a space of inter-religious reconciliation and even unification: “The pastor and the rabbi were united in the mutual love, they almost embraced each other above this grave, in the full view of Christians and Jews.”46 The grave and Christian cemetery become sanctified by the rabbi and this must have had a special significance for Dostoevsky’s interest in the resurrection of matter. With all Dostoevsky’s concern about the immortality of the soul, his complex utopian eschatology leaned towards imagining paradise on earth, “earthly Jerusalem,” so departing from the Russian Orthodox Church’s teachings of paradise as “heavenly Jerusalem.”47 Perhaps he shared with the phantom Jewfireman the view that there is the right place to die. In Shteinberg’s formulation of 1928, Dostoevsky’s “Palestine had to become Russia so that Russia could become Palestine. . . . Dostoevsky leads Russian chiliasm.”48

43 Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 25, 92. 44 Ibid., 90. Harriet Murav argues that Dostoevsky made use of concepts of the natural sciences “when it came to the questions of nations and people.” Harriet Murav, “Jews, Race and Biology,” in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. Deborah Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 129. 45 On cemetery, see anthropological study by Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1960). 46 Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 25, 92. 47 K. N. Leont′ev, O romanakh gr. L. N. Tolstogo (reprinted edition, Providence: Brown UP, 1968), 89. On Dostoevsky’s political interests in the Holy Land see Konstantin Mochul′skii, Dostoevskii. Zhizn′ i tvorchestvo (Paris: YMCA, 1980). 48 Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” 107.

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Dostoevsky’s desire to understand the material body in life and death motivates him to create one of the most enigmatic Jewish characters in Russian literature. His representation of the Jewish fireman shows a complex novelistic conceptualisation of Jewishness and Judaism that goes beyond the political stereotypes of the 1870s period.49 In 1878 Dostoevsky stated that in his conversations with Solovyov they often imagined the physical composition of human bodies after the resurrection: “I declare that here both me and Solovyov believe in the real, literal and personal resurrection, and that it will take place here on the earth.”50 His depiction of the phantom Jew and his longing for the geographical Holy Land and Jerusalem show that he was thinking about the afterlife of the physical body long before he discussed it with Solovyov.51 Additionally, I suggest that by making his Jewish character protest against the suicide, Dostoevsky expressed an attitude that was later formulated by Durkheim in his famous Le Suicide (1897). This study of the sociology of suicide at the end the nineteenth century using statistical data from the 1860s onwards, argued that the relatively small proportion of suicides among Jews could be explained by Jewish communities having to practice “greater morality.”52 While Durkheim stresses that the Bible contains no law forbidding man to kill himself, he admits that “the very nature of Jewish beliefs must contribute largely to this immunity” to suicide.53 For Durkheim, central to Jewish society is the recognition of “preservation of values”, necessary to save the 49 As far as a view of Jewish commercialism in late modernity is concerned, there is a link between Dostoevsky’s own accumulation of wealth and capitalist materialism. As a writer whose financial well-being was entirely dependent on the volume of publications, Dostoevsky had a lot in common with “other” class and racial contenders for their place in society. Vernon argues that nineteenth-century novelists were peculiarly obsessed with money. John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), esp. 33–34. 50 Dostoevskii, “N. P. Petersonu,” 15. Dostoevsky’s letter is addressed to Nikolai Fedorov’s disciple, Peterson, who conveyed to Dostoevsky Fedorov’s thoughts regarding physical resurrection. 51 Kornblatt and Rosenshield state that both writers’ views on the Jews were utopic. “For Solovyov the last word of the Jews will mark the final incarnation, the perfect spiritualization of matter, the achievement of bogochelovechestvo.” Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Gary Rosenshield, “Vladimir Solovyov: Confronting Dostoevsky on the Jewish and Christian Questions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 1 (2000): 75. Shrayer discusses the significance of the return to Jerusalem in The Brothers Karamazov and suggests that Solovyov was influenced by Dostoevsky’s quest for religious reconciliation. Shrayer, “Dostoevsky, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov.” 52 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1952), 56. 53 Ibid., 160.

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community and the faith, and the “existence of certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory.”54 Dostoevsky’s Jewish fireman might be a phantom-like figure, but he shares the Durkheimian notion of the sense of moral obligation.

II. Preparing Pure Bodies after Crimes and Punishments: Not a Ridiculous Jew in the Notes from the House of the Dead The Solovyovian notion of the “holy corporeality” of the Jews is rooted in Dostoevsky and Solovyov’s shared, complicated and “multidirectional” interest in Jewry and Judaism.55 It is quite plausible that Dostoevsky gained some anthropological knowledge of Jewish laws and customs in prison via his contact with real-life Jewish (apostate) inmate, Isai Bumstehel. Scholars have noted that Dostoevsky’s descriptions of Isai Fomich Bumshtein’s Judaic rituals in the Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead) could be based on his observation of Bumstehel performing the rituals in prison.56 In Notes from the House of the Dead the narrator admits that he used to ask Bumshtein frequent questions about Jewish religious practices.57 Many aspects of Bumshtein’s behavior relate to laws and rituals aimed at keeping the body “pure”: his keeping Sabbath, the praying rituals, and religious ceremonial attire all point to Dostoevsky the narrator having acquired some knowledge of the ritual aspects around the body in Judaism.58 Dostoevsky’s narrator dwells on Isai’s interpretation of the importance of the performative aspect of prayer, with its overt expressions of bliss and delight, as a prerequisite for the longawaited return to Jerusalem. The narrator calls this expression of joy zamyslovatoe pravilo zakona (“a delicate rule of the law”), thus showing his understanding 54 Ibid., 170. 55 Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” 100. 56 Goldstein and Elena Katz suggest that Isai Bumshtein is based on the real-life character. Also see a discussion in Felix Ingold, Dostojewskij und das Judentum (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1981). On the history of Jewish converts see Ellie Schainker, Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017). 57 McReynolds asserts that Isai’s preparations for Sabbath “emphasize form and ritual to the exclusion of living spirit,” which is paralleled by the description of the non-pious prayers of Russian Christians. See Susan McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008), 113. 58 Dostoevsky had contacts with Jews following his term in prison in the army in Semipalatinsk. In particular, he befriended a young Jewish cantonist, N. F. Katz. See S. Belov, F. M. Dostoevskii v zabytykh i neizvestnykh vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (St. Petersburg: Andreev i synov ′ia, 1993).

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that laws have to be interpreted in order to reveal their meaning.59 Importantly, it is in response to frequent inquisitive questions from the narrator that Isai Fomich explains the significance of the return to Jerusalem. While the narrator indicates that Isai Fomich takes his literary genealogy from Gogol’s “ridiculous Jews,” specifically Yankel from “Taras Bulba,” Isai Fomich Bumshtein is the most engaging Jewish personage in Dostoevsky’s writing. The reference to Gogol’s Yankel can be interpreted as Dostoevsky’s strategy to separate the two streams in the composition of this character: one with a genealogy in the literary tradition; the other concealing and revealing Dostoevsky’s investment of deeper meaning. These two strains are evident in the narrator’s first introductory description of Isai: Our Jew was generally liked, although everyone laughed at him. We only had one, and even now I cannot think of him without laughing. Whenever I looked at him I thought of the Jew Yankel, whom Gogol describes in his Taras Bulba, and who, when undressed and ready to go to bed with his Jewess in a sort of cupboard, resembled a fowl; but Isai Fomich Bumshtein and a plucked fowl were as like one another as two drops of water. He was already of a certain age—about fifty—small, feeble, cunning, and, at the same time, very stupid, bold, and boastful, though a horrible coward. His face was covered with wrinkles, his forehead and cheeks were scarred from the burning he had received in the pillory. I never understood how he had been able to support the sixty strokes he received.60

The first paragraph clearly marks the narrator’s perception of Isai through the prism of literary tradition of depicting the Jew’s body. The second one, however, signals a serious reason for the interest in the Jew’s body, which is linked to its resilience and ability to survive. In the first paragraph Isai Fomich is termed as “our Jew” to denote the collective stereotype, the second paragraph has an individualized comment which indicates personalized authorial curiosity regarding the vitality of the puny Jew. Isai Fomich presents for the narrator an exemplar of the Jew’s body put under attentive study and observation. One

59 F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma, in PSS, vol. 14, 95. 60 Ibid., 95.

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aspect of this special curiosity relates to the notion of the Jew’s attitude to his own body. The most riveting example of Dostoevsky’s depiction of Jewish concerns for “pure bodies” is found in his account of a special ointment to erase scars on the skin given by the Jewish community to Isai Fomich Bumshtein: He carried hidden on his person a medical prescription which had been given to him by other Jews immediately after his exposure in the pillory. Thanks to the ointment prescribed, the scars were to disappear in less than a fortnight. He had been afraid to use it in the prison and was waiting for the expiration of his twelve years (after which he would become a colonist) in order to utilize his famous remedy.61

The desire to erase the ugly marks is implicitly linked to the respect for the original condition of the body given by the creator. Moreover, the effect of the miraculous ointment can be read as a metaphor for the miracle of revival achieved, albeit by scientific methods that are not commonly known. The quest to return to the human form in its likeness to the creator before it was disfigured by dehumanizing procedures of branding and corporal punishment has distinct material-eschatological connotations. The skin of the body can be read as a site of material-metaphysical interface. In terms of Solovyov’s notion of “holy corporeality,” I find it fitting that Dostoevsky makes Isai Bumshtein his focus-character in the episode depicting prisoners washing in the bathhouse. In Solovyov’s formulation, Jewish people cared for their bodies and “the whole religious history of the Jews was directed towards preparing not only holy souls but also holy bodies for the God of Israel.”62 The famous episode in The Notes from the House of the Dead has the title: “Isai Fomich. The bathhouse. Baklushin’s story.”63 The scene concentrates on Isai’s exuberant delight at being thoroughly washed and steamed. Puny and tiny, Isai shows more tenacity in the bathhouse than any other prisoner. Additionally, Dostoevsky mentions that out of the two bathhouses in the town, it is the one operated by a Jew that is used by the town’s aristocracy (the prisoners are taken to the second bathhouse, which is cheap and dirty). This 61 Ibid. 62 Solov′ev, “Evreistvo,” 45. 63 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma, 92–104.

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detail is significant in its establishment of a link between Jews and hygiene. Daniel Goodman elucidates that washing is one of the anthropological principles in the Judaic tradition, based on the understanding that one has to take care of God’s creations: God is the true owner of the human body and a command to care for the body is divine.64 In Leviticus Rabbah 34:3 sage Hillel explicitly based the practice of regular bathing on this anthropological premise of the Hebrew Bible.65 Whether we presume that Dostoevsky discussed the issue of cleaning the body with the real-life inmate Bumstehel or suggest that he reflected on the divine commands of the Old Testament, I follow the advice of Mary Douglas in her Leviticus as Literature to reintegrate Leviticus into our study of themes related to the topics of religion. Dostoevsky evokes the eschatological connotations of the bathhouse scene in the Notes from the House of the Dead by comparing the heat to that of an inferno, described by the word peklo, and characterized by descriptions of the scarred and branded bodies of the prisoners. Implicit in this episode are important questions: will these bodies have a chance to enter the gates of paradise? And will the scars disappear in the next life? But most strikingly, it is the Jewish community that can obtain the formula for the remedy which erases the physical scars and restores the body. This detail signals not only Dostoevsky’s interest in transformation of matter but also an idea that Jews have some special knowledge in this sphere. A secular explanation regarding Isai Fomich’s wish to remove the ugly scars from his body has an implicit reference to ethos of the Hebrew Bible. Isai tells the narrator that he needs his skin to look smooth because he wants to get married after leaving prison. In wanting to marry, Isai Fomich follows the themes of the Old Testament relating to family and progeny. Both Dostoevsky’s letters and Elder Zosima’s teachings refer lovingly to what was Dostoevsky’s favourite book from his childhood, “One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments.” In The Brothers Karamazov, Zosima appeals to the monastery elders to read to illiterate Russians folk stories about Abraham and Sarah, about Isaac and Rebekah, as well as about the beautiful Esther and the arrogant Vashti. The choice of these stories refers to the embodied lives of passionate characters through which the Bible can be perceived as a living and breathing narrative. Zosima’s quest 64 Daniel Goodman, “God as Owner of the Human Body,” Kashrut and Jewish Food Ethics, ed. Shmuly Yanklowitz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019). The standard legal Hebrew text Shulchan Arukh deals with regulations of the body. 65 See the discussion in Goodman, “God as Owner of the Human Body,” 104–106.

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Figure 9. Caricature of the bearded Jew in the satirical magazine Budil′nik (Alarm clock), 1868. The text: “Leave him, this is not nice.— It is not a big deal that I beat the Yid.—Nobody forbids to beat a Yid, but these days it is done silently, not in public.” Notably, prisoners jokingly threaten to beat Isai Bumshtein in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. This drawing suggests the change in discourse about the Jews’ presence in public spaces.

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is to educate people spiritually and to teach them to love embodied life, thus divorcing them from the asceticism of the Church fathers. Zosima’s appeal has been interpreted in eschatological terms.66 Isai’s concern about his body in this life (and “after”), brings together material and symbolic dimensions of corporeality. Dostoevsky uses stylistics of the depictions of the “ridiculous Jews” borrowed from Gogol, often employing “sudden focal shift” and “secret” messages to convey more serious matter.67 Dostoevsky changes from the comical to the serious in his descriptions of the Jew fireman with his Yiddish accent and with Isai who, it must be stressed, he describes as his best friend in the prison barracks. Like Gogol, Dostoevsky raises profound questions in his depiction of (not such) ridiculous Jews. Fittingly, as in the case of Gogol, these questions also deal with the issue of treating the body with respect and in line with Judaic laws. As a material-semiotic interface, the Jew’s body encapsulates both writers’ anxieties about the body in time and space.

66 Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 127. 67 Nabokov, “Nikolai Gogol. ‘The Overcoat,’” 54–61.

CHAPTER FOUR

Intimate Spaces: The Modern Jewess in the Boudoir in Chekhov and Bely Do not call her heavenly and do not take her away from the earth. . . . —Anton Chekhov, “Mire” (1886)

T

owards the end of the nineteenth century, fears of racial contamination went parallel with fears around degeneration and rising anxieties concerning the shifting power relationships between the sexes. In this social and ideological context emerged the stereotype of dangerous women, including the image of the sexually predatory Jewess.1 This new figure was formed by changing epistemes which found expression in medicalized and scientific explanations of behavior and character.2 This chapter focuses on the construct of embodied racialized spaces of interaction with the Jewess in Anton Chekhov’s “Mire” (1886) and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913). My aims are two-fold: to identify the markers of racialization of the Jewish woman in her private house and to demonstrate how this material-semiotic sphere relates to the politics of spaces allocated to Jews in the Russian Empire.

1 Sander L. Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” in The Jew In the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 97–120. 2 For the Jewess in Russian romanticism, see Mikhail Vaiskopf, “Sem′ia bez uroda. Obraz evreia v literature russkogo romantizma,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 27 (1997): 76–99. On the belle juive see Efraim Sicher, A Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of Conversion Narrative (Langham: Lexington Books, 2017). On the exotic femme fatale in Russian modernism see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

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Both Chekhov (1860–1904) and Bely (1880–1934) had studied racial (pseudo)scientific material at Moscow University: Chekhov as a medical doctor and Bely as anthropologist and ethnographer.3 Both were familiar with the popular culture’s stereotypes.4 Their choices of racialized markers of space include smell, tactility, and the sounds of music and voice—all of which delineate the Jewess’s space as representative of biologically determined psychological and physical traits. Furniture, wallpaper, paintings, items of clothing and even an all-Russian samovar create an aura that is distinctly racialized. These markers signify the Jewess’s racial difference that renders her house physically repellent and/or attractive to the Russian male. The intimate space is a zone where desire and attraction are repressed or gratified by physical contact involving multiple senses. While the Jewess’s body and her boudoir create a microcosm of racial difference, the emancipated Jewish women characters in these stories achieve a degree of social mobility which allows their entry into larger spaces outside the confines of their homes and beyond “the pale.” In both instances, the writers’ fears of the emancipated Jewish feminine are expressed in the woman’s professional activities which threaten to destabilize the Russian Empire and its patriarchal notions of the semiotics of “home.” In thinking about the material-semiotic interface in the context of these two texts, I use Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere. Scholars have used this term to refer to the racialization of spaces in literature, in particular spaces with enclaves of foreign populations.5 According to Lotman, within such a space it is possible for communicative processes “and the creation of new information” to be realized.6 Lotman stresses that he modelled his idea of the semiosphere on the notion of the biosphere.7 He explains that the biosphere is a space filled with living matter, functioning as a series of interrelations of living organisms to create a meaningful totality. 3 On Bely’s readings in racial anthropology see Henrietta Mondry, “Petersburg and Contemporary Racial Thought,” in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, ed. Leonid Livak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 124–137. On Chekhov’s knowledge of racial medical literature see Mondry, Exemplary Bodies, 41–63. 4 In his chapter “Of Chekhov and Garlic,” Livak writes of “the consistent function of ‘the Jews’ in his imagination as a marker for a wide range of phenomena.” See Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in The European Imagination (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 234. 5 Jesus Lopez-Pelaez, “‘Race’ and the Construction of English National Identity,” Studies in Philology 106, no. 1 (2009): 32–51. 6 Juri Lotman, “On the semiosphere,” Sign Systems Studies 31, no. 1 (2005): 207. 7 Lotman borrowed the notion from Vernadsky. Biosphere is often used in the context of cosmism, while Lotman uses it as a domain filled with biological life.

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Figure 10. Caricature of the Jew as “a two-legged spider” on the front page of Budil′nik, 1874. The Jew trades alcohol and catches simple Russians in his web. The text of the dialogue: “You are a robber and a murderer and you should be wiped from the face of the earth.” The Jew replies: “You are lying. Cheating in business is not forbidden, which means that I am innocent.” Chekhov uses the theme of the Jewish trade in alcohol in his short story “Mire.” He started publishing in Budil′nik from 1881.

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Another notion, that of the boundary or periphery of the semiosphere, appears to be productive for the interpretation of racialized spaces. Lotman defines the boundary as a space of higher semiotic dynamism. It can demarcate “the outer limits of a first-person form,” separating a space characterized as “my own,” “ours,” “cultured,” and “safe” from that considered as “their space,” “other,” “primitive,” “hostile,” and ultimately “marked”. The center, on the contrary, is a zone of weak cultural exchange. This notion of the boundary is relevant for the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, which can be viewed as a boundary that forms a semiosphere, with contact between different cultures. To parallel the limited mobility of Jews both in Chekhov’s “Mire” and Bely’s Petersburg, Jewish houses are situated on the periphery. They are isolated topographically and symbolically from the center with borders that are clearly demarcated: in the former, Susanna’s house and the territory of the alcohol refinery factory are surrounded by a fence. In the latter, Zoya’s house is situated on Vasilievsky Island in the St. Petersburg archipelago. Yet the borders are porous, open to non-Jewish visitors involved in embodied interactions with the Jewish women and surrounding materialities, so giving these spaces a level of heterogeneity.

“Mire”: Susanna’s Den Entry to Susanna’s estate is defined by the symbolism of color and smell. Chekhov contrasts the whiteness of the Russian officer’s uniform and Russia’s iconic birches with the dirty and smoke-blackened outer buildings of the factory. The strong smell of fusel oil is a sensory marker of the estate. Together with the factory sign “M. E. Rotshtein and children,” all these indicators signify the space as Jewish, evoking economic stereotypes of Jews who were increasingly held responsible for contributing to the nation’s alcoholism.8 It also creates an aura of contrast between the clean and the unclean, both physically and morally. Officer Sokolsky’s pathway into Susanna’s house is symbolic. He enters the house by way of an old staircase and is met by an older maid who announces that madam is not well and is not receiving visitors. The staircase and the guardian maid evoke the symbolism of “the difficult passage” as elucidated by Mircea Eliade.9 The staircase as a perilous and paradoxical space functions in 8 9

Yiddish writer and journalist Semen Frugg noted in his review of “Mire” that Chekhov contributed to this stereotype. S. Frugg, “Literaturnaia letopis′. V korchme i v buduare,” Voskhod (October 1889): 21–37. Mircea Eliade, “The Bridge and the ‘Difficult Passage,’” in his Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 482–486.

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mythological thinking as a rite of passage which the hero has to cross in order to enter an unknown and dangerous space. The passage is dangerous because it sometimes connotes a situation from which there is no escape. Often too the hero is confronted by a monster, in this case represented by the unfriendly older woman. This combination of the symbolic and the material succeeds in racializing the space of the Jewess’s habitat. Sokolsky is able to see Susanna. After being ushered through six rooms and a corridor—yet another rite of passage—he finds himself, much to his amazement, in Susanna’s bedroom where he is struck by the abundance of blossoming plants and the sweetish, “heavily sickening smell of jasmine.”10 Within this interior, the plants and singing birds create a biosphere of nature. At the same time, the exotic house plants and colorful birds generate a sub-tropical semiosphere reminiscent of the primordial garden of Eden. Through this material-symbolic link, Susanna’s abode functions both as an allusion to the fall and as a link with southern geographical regions. In the context of the quasi-geographical zone, the strong smell of flowers can be read as a marker of the exotic locale, evoking notions of sex and sensuality. Chekhov’s description echoes contemporaneous medical views which linked race with sexuality and the sense of smell. Such ideas were disseminated by well-known Austro-German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who lectured in Russia from 1876—at the time when Chekhov was a medical student. In his influential Psychopatia Sexualis (1886), Krafft-Ebing maintained that the strength of sexual desire “varies both in individuals and races” and that race, climate, and heredity were important factors in sexual drive.11 Ebing’s Psychopatia Sexualis describes the use of the smell of flowers for sexual excitation, referencing the Biblical Song of Songs as an example to illustrate his point. Ebing also suggests that there is the connection between the ethnicity and psychological and physiological workings of the body: Odours of flowers often occasion pleasurable sensual feelings, and when one remembers the passage in the “Song of Solomon”—“and my hands drooped with myrrh and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh upon the handles of the lock”—one finds that it did not escape Solomon’s observation.12 10 A. P. Chekhov, “Tina,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955), 475. 11 R. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopatia Sexualis (London: F. J. Rebman, 1894), 24. 12 Ibid., 26.

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The smell of flowering jasmine in Susanna’s bedroom becomes an important signifier, which is repeated six times in the text. As the story progresses, the smell of the flower becomes the smell of her embodied materiality. The odor is sexualized, emanating at it does from Susanna’s bed linen and the shoes that are kept under the bed. The protagonist is at first repelled by the sickening somatic impact of the smell that causes his head to spin and affects his throat. Yet, in spite of the first physiologically repulsive effect, the odor begins to have an intoxicating power over him. As his attraction to Susanna grows, almost against his own will, the smell, perceived as her individual, personal smell, begins to haunt him. The process is in line with Krafft-Ebing’s psycho-physiological explanation that desires “become accentuated by organic sensations which are pleasurable”: “Owing to the close relations which exist between the sexual instinct and the olfactory sense, it is to be presumed that the sexual and olfactory centers lie close together in the cerebral cortex.”13 In Chekhov’s story, the racialized smell is sexed because it serves the function of a female scent designed by nature to attract males. Chekhov was a Darwinian and in this trope the smell has a distinct biological meaning pertaining to sexual selection. In Susanna’s house, the racialized smell of the indoor space and her bodily aroma homologize sex and race as biological phenomena. Both the smell and the body have a narcotic effect on the Russian male guests as they develop a psychosomatic dependence driving their need to return to Susanna’s place. The smell here is depicted not as an objective category but as a biological phenomenon which has different effects on male and female species. Susanna observes that her Russian women visitors often comment that her house smells of garlic. As Leonid Livak has demonstrated, Chekhov often uses the smell of garlic as a popular stereotype of the Jew common across European cultures,14 but here, I suggest, he employs this smell ironically.15 While the smell of garlic coming from a Jewish place serves as a racial marker, Chekhov uses it also to ridicule the low level of education of Russian women. This gendered nuance is important because Susanna herself finds Russian women boring and dull. Chekhov’s narrator clearly enjoys this juxtaposition, providing evidence that Russian men are fascinated by Susanna’s wit and vivacity.16 Since various 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Livak, The Jewish Persona, 237-240. 15 See a discussion in Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham UP, 2011), 273. 16 On Susanna’s gender orientation see Mondry, Exemplary Bodies, 53–54.

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gendered protagonists perceive the smell differently, smell becomes not only a biological but a cultural category. The materiality of Susanna’s place has another important racial marker— that of dishonest business practices. Sokolsky’s first visit to Susanna was motivated by business: he came to collect a debt on behalf of his cousin. Susanna’s recently deceased father owed two and a half thousand roubles to Sokolsky’s cousin, and Sokolsky brings with him the document pertaining to this transaction. In a highly risqué scene, Susanna snatches the official paper out of Sokolsky’s hands. The fight brings their bodies into close physical contact and the excitement of this performance becomes a foreground for Sokolsky’s overnight stay at Susanna’s house. While there is no description of any intimate encounters, the fact that Sokolsky stays at her residence makes it clear that he spent the night enjoying her favors. In this episode, the racialized space includes within its semiosphere the overtones of the economic stereotype of a greedy and unscrupulous Jewess who does not shy away from seducing a man in order to avoid paying a debt. This model of behavior is stereotyped through repetition: when Sokolsky’s cousin Kryukov decides to visit Susanna personally to make her return the borrowed money, he too does not return home that night. Susanna’s place is thus a site where racial stereotypes of sexuality and gender meet with stereotypes of dishonorable business ethics. At the same time, the repetition of events, such as two male heroes attempting and failing to conquer this contested space, give it the characteristics of an enchanted place, in which the symbolic and the material intersect in the representation of the Jewess’s house. The treachery and trickery of Susanna’s house is further symbolized by the painting in her drawing room. Sokolsky describes it as the only true Jewish item among the room’s furnishings and decorations. The large picture depicts the meeting of Jacob and Esau. Savely Senderovich has noted that the plot of the painting belongs not to Jewish but to Christian hermeneutics.17 As such, it emblematizes the fulfilment of Christianity’s quest to be recognized as superior to Judaism. In the Jacob and Esau story, the first-born Esau was tricked out of his lawful place by his brother Jacob. Senderovich sees in this the possibility of an inter-religious dialogue, important for Chekhov at the time because he was considering the possibility of a permanent relationship with his Jewish woman 17 Savelii Senderovich, “O chekhovskoi glubine, ili Iudofobskii rasskaz Chekhova v svete iudaisticheskoii ekzegezy,” in Avtor i tekst, ed V. M. Markovich and Wolf Schmid (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii universitet, 1996), 306–340.

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friend Efros, providing she converted to the Russian Orthodox faith. As Helen Tolstoy and Gabriella Safran have noted, this extra-textual background is relevant for understanding Chekhov’s attitude towards inter-religious marriages,18 but the relevance of the Biblical story can also be seen as a means to racialize Susanna’s living space. The painting’s plot can be seen as a metaphor for the events taking place in Susanna’s home. Like Jacob, she tricked both Sokolsky and his cousin Kryukov and deprived them both of what by law belonged to them: the official signed certificate of credit. She did it by pleasing their senses and satisfying their appetites—a parallel to Jacob feeding his father with his favorite meal. The construct of Jews as people of the body functions as a metaphoric link between the plot of the painting and the story. Moreover, the narrative of the painting—the meeting of two brothers locked in rivalry—ironically mirrors the end of the story when the two cousins (“secondary brothers” in Russian) meet unexpectedly at Susanna’s place. This embarrassing encounter reveals that they are both morally compromised in relation to their respective families. The painting of the Biblical story completes the process of racialization by adding a religious dimension to the biological and economic essence of the Jewess. The objects in Susanna’s domestic space form a distinctively charged biosphere of habitat. Untidy jasmine-smelling bed sheets and private underwear in the bedroom, jasmine-smelling slippers which “peep out” from under the bed,19 scattered books with bookmarks, stale cigarette-ends, empty caramel wrappers—all create a biological and semiotic atmosphere of a racialized, sexed, and gendered space. The untidiness and the lack of interest in domesticity and order are markers of behavior and attitude, revealing a preference for intellectual pursuit (manifested in reading), gender inversion (through smoking), and the sensualized taste for sweets. All these create an interface between the senses, matter, and the body, at the same time as they carry strong symbolic connotations. The space as a particular biological habitat is further reinforced by the presence of birds. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirrup and flutter against the window-panes, contributing to the atmosphere of a zoological domain. Creeping plants acquire zoomorphic dimensions, their unstoppable growth functioning as a metaphor for the persistent invasion of space. 18 Helen Tolstoy, “From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886–1887,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 590–600; Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000). 19 Chekhov, “Tina,” 476.

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The bedroom metonymically becomes the place of sexual excess governed by biological drives that spill over the confined territory. Susanna’s accoutrement is another important feature of the material and the symbolic. Her tight black dress and expensive silk gown serve as manifestations of the interaction between the embodied senses and materialities. While the tight dress, in Chekhov’s description, shows her tiny waist, the gown’s fabric carries important tactile connotations. As explained by Mark Smith in his Sensing the Past, clothing in history was not solely visual; it was also tactile by definition, suggesting something important about the wearer’s skin or about his or her financial or social standing.20 Silk, in particular, is a fabric which historically was subjected to sumptuary laws, and this applied to Jewish women’s dress in the Russian Empire.21 More important for this focus is the cultural trope according to which dress and costume could be racially essentialized as an expression of the tastes and character of a particular ethnic group. The way silk fabric touches the skin denotes sensuality; it evokes a caressing sensation that can be assigned an explanatory meaning in relation to the wearer. Mark Smith notes that clothes are related to hapticity which is part of “the politics of clothing.”22 He explains that certain coarse cloths had democratic appeal at the end of the nineteenth century and states that it is important to appreciate how fabric “was understood to either caress or rub the skin of the wearer by spectators.”23 Susanna’s silk gown clearly caresses her skin, thus stressing its sensual relationality with the physical world. In the Introduction, I have elaborated on the passage from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in which the author reveals his view of clothing as an expression of the inner human being, something that has to be beautiful in a holistically beautiful individual. His detailing of Susanna’s clothing must be seen against the backdrop of this aphoristic formulation. The importance which Chekhov ascribed to the physical properties of the fabric were recorded by his contemporaries, who evaluated Chekhov’s preference of the fabric called liustrin as a purposeful staging of his image.24 Chekhov’s choice of this coarser fabric as 20 Mark Smith, Sensing the Past (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007). 21 According to the comprehensive sartorial laws issued by the Jewish Committee in Russia in 1840, Jewish women were allowed to wear silk dresses only on Saturdays, and the silk had to be of lower quality. See Avrutin, Jews and the Empirical State: Identification Policy in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), 41–42. 22 Smith, Sensing the Past, 107. 23 Ibid. 24 On Chekhov’s style in dress see semiotic reading by Boris Christa, “Costume and Communication in The Cherry Orchard,” Essays in Poetics 30 (2005): 34–50. Ivan Bunin

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well as the strict cut of the costume reflects his desire to present himself as belonging to the working intelligentsia, rather than to the idle classes. Viewed in terms of the history of sensory meaning, Chekhov’s choice of fabric relates to the phenomenological interaction between the skin and the material— Susanna’s choice of silk thus serves as a material and semiotic expression of her Jewishness. The story ends with Kryukov leaving Susanna’s house and hearing the following words of a Russian love-song sung in a bass voice: “Do not call her heavenly and do not take her away from the earth. . . .”25 This line epitomizes the characterization of the Jewess as earthly, while the male voice and music complete the sensual and seductive atmosphere of her place.26 The role of the piano in the house also has symbolic connotations, which add to the semiosphere of the house as a brothel. Research on brothels in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century shows that the piano was the only instrument officially allowed in “the public houses” (publichnye doma), as the brothels were called.27 The piano music, the song, and the singing voice create a material-semiotic interface, thus becoming a vital element of the semiosphere.28 Susanna’s racialized house embodies transgressive sexuality and emancipated gender that threaten the order of patriarchy epitomized by the idea of a proper home. Yet, paradoxically, the Russian men who become addicted to her place have fled the boredom and ordered life of their own upper-class homes. The men are influenced by the visual, audial, and tactile sensations and become relationally engaged with the materiality of smell. The world of physical objects thus becomes agentive in this microcosmos of Jewish physicality. Susanna’s seductive home fits into a larger typology of fin-de-siècle fears of racialized seedy places such as brothels and opium dens. Susanna’s Chinese silk gown can be read metaphorically as a marker of the dangers posed by the Orient. Susanna herself is described as a “psychopath,” “nervous,” with a sickly

25 26 27 28

reflected on Chekhov’s costume. See I. A. Bunin, “O Chekhove,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 146–221. Chekhov, “Tina,” 492. On sensuality in “Mire” see Joseph Conrad, “Sensuality in Chekhov’s Prose,” Slavic and East European Journal 24, no. 2 (1980): 103–117. Svetlana Malysheva, “Professionalki”, “arfistki”, “liubitel′nitsy”: Publichnye doma i prostitutki v Kazani vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX veka (Kazan′: Kazanskii universitet, 2014), 42–43. Atmospheres can be given essentializing meaning. On affective atmosphere of music see Friedland Riedel and Juha Torvinen, Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds (London: Routledge, 2019).

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pale complexion and anaemically pale gums.29 Living in a house permeated by the smell of medicine used by her deceased father, she embodies elements of physical degeneration racialized by fin-de-siècle culture.30 As such she poses the danger of contamination spilling over the boundaries of her estate. The contaminating effects of her odor cannot be erased, as is shown in the case of Sokolsky’s white uniform which continues to carry the smell of jasmine even after it is returned from the laundry at his cousin’s house. It is this notably sickly aroma that somatically and psychologically drives him and his cousin to return to Susanna’s house. From a phenomenological perspective, the smell and its perceiver become united. The physical and moral contamination of the non-Jewish space has already taken place. The object (the jacket) becomes ideationally and materially agentive and asserts its power on Sokolsky. Although demarcated by borders, Susanna’s space has a contagious impact on the surrounding territories, strikingly epitomized by the unstoppable smell of fumes from the manufacture of alcohol and the microbiology of habitat. Moreover, being emancipated and wealthy, Susanna is on the cusp of crossing the boundaries assigned to her by the Empire’s Pale of Settlement. She falls out of the narrative of assimilation and religious conversion, which was typical for representations of Jewesses in earlier nineteenth-century writing.31 While the converted reformed Jewess is chaste in this earlier typology, Susanna stands for a new model of Jewess—dangerously sexed, racialized, and threatening the dominant body politic.32 In visiting the church, her transgression of boundaries becomes even more dangerous—rather than desirable—in the eyes of the dominant culture. The complex semiosphere of the space functions as a microcosm consisting of cultural constructs of racial difference, underpinned by physical categories. This semiosphere frames the racial discourse through the employment of the materiality of “mire” (swamp) with its slimy, absorbing, and all-consuming physical properties.

29 Chekhov, “Tina,” 480. 30 Livak views the theme of degeneration in “Mire” as the beginning of Russian modernism. Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2018, 23–24. 31 On this typology in European writing see Sicher, A Jew’s Daughter, 15–30. 32 On parallels between Chekhov’s own social mobility and that of his contemporary Russian Jewry see Henrietta Mondry [Genrietta Mondri], “Predislovie: Tema ‘Chekhov i evrei’ s pozitsii sovremennosti,” in Mark Ural′skii, Chekhov i evrei (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000), 1–10. Uralsky presents an interesting study of Chekhov’s relations with Jewish personalities.

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A Jewess on the Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg In Bely’s novel Petersburg the material-semiotic dynamic of racialized space is complicated by the characters’ crypto-Jewishness. While Chekhov’s text describes Susanna as a Jewess (evreika), Zoya’s Jewishness is conveyed only via signifiers of materiality and cultural codes. These markers in turn form part of the larger racial bio- and semiosphere of the novel. Zoya’s surname Fleish combines material and symbolic meanings. Not only does it indicate her carnality by association with “flesh,” but it also suggests the special role which the mythology of kosher meat occupies in the construct of Jewish difference. Written during the Beilis Affair, the novel is saturated with historical allusions. The constructs of race are a driving mechanism of the narrative, which envisions the historical fate of Russia as determined by the battle of races. Set in 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution and Russia’s defeat in the RussoJapanese War, the novel views Russia’s past, present and future from the vantage point of race. Russia is presented as a battleground of Aryan and Asian races; Jews as Semites are conflated with other Asian races, all of whom are seen in terms characteristic of Yellow Peril discourse.33 Bely’s heroes inherit a latent quest to destroy Russia via an admixture of Asian blood. While Bely uses terms such as Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian and Turanian, he presents his characters’ ethnicities as mixed. This approach is in line with Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s racialist Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) which was translated into Russian in part in 1908.34 Chamberlain maintained that contemporary Jewry inherits Semitic and also Indo-European and Turanian biological origins. In Bely’s novel the main revolutionary activist, Lippanchenko is presented as a crypto-Jew, modelled on an historic political personality, Evno Azef (1869–1918). Azef was a double-dealing conspirator valued for his analytical mind both by the Social Revolutionary Party and top-ranking police officials alike.35 When his duplicitous role was discovered, antisemitic opinion evaluated his behavior and character traits as typically Jewish.36 Within the racialized spaces of the novel, one of the places where Lippanchenko feels at home is Zoya’s house. Called a dacha to denote its architectural simplicity and rural setting, the house is situated on Vasilievsky 33 On race in Petersburg see Mondry, “Petersburg and Contemporary Racial Thought.” 34 Bely probably knew about Chamberlain’s ideas from Emil Metner. See Ilona Svetlikova, “Kant-semit i Kant-ariets u Belogo,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 93 (2008): 62–98. 35 V. P. Chernov, Pered burei (New York: n.p., 1953), 180. 36 V. V. Rozanov. Sakharna (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 21, 120.

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Island, a suburb in St. Petersburg separated from the mainland by water. As such, according to Lotman’s model, its situation on the periphery of the physical city and also on the boundary of the semiosphere of the Imperial town makes it a space of higher semiotic dynamism. Through its association with the terrorist Lippanchenko, Zoya’s place becomes central to Russia’s politics. Strikingly, the bedroom becomes the site of a political assassination when a Russian member of a terrorist group murders Lippanchenko in revenge for his betrayal of the cause. This extraordinary subplot can be viewed as the transformation of the image of the Orient from seductive to dangerous occurring in European discourses of the time. In his study of parallel prejudices against Jews and Chinese as “Yellow Peril,” Daniel Renshaw stresses that internationally “the transformation of the Orient from a source of contempt and illicit pleasure to a potential contemporary or future threat was intensified by the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War.”37 Zoya’s bedroom is emblematic of this transformation. In this political and racial drama, Zoya’s house is constructed as a racialized space. As in the case of Susanna’s house, Jewish physicality and the material-semiotic space create a symbiotic interface. Just as Susanna’s place was marked by the excessive smells of fragrant flowers and medicine, Zoya’s house also establishes a nexus between bodily odors and the physical environment. Within this space, smell and olfaction are pathologized. Zoya carries a peculiar smell and her room has a heavy aroma, a mixture of perfume and the bad smell of decaying teeth, as presented in both racialized and medicalized terms: “Some creatures have a very sad quality: bad smell in their mouths.”38 This suggestive sentence implies that Zoya is a “creature” (sushchestvo), an image further racialized by the notion of the smell of the Jew, foetor Judaicus. Jay Geller has demonstrated that a particularly foul smell was attributed to Jews not only in folk beliefs but also in medical literature at the end of the nineteenth century.39 Geller notes that the most celebrated modern disseminator of the foetor Judaicus was Arthur Schopenhauer. This has special implications to the case of Bely who was influenced by Schopenhauer’s The World as the Will and

37 Daniel Renshaw, “Prejudice and Paranoia: a Comparative Study of Antisemitism and Sinophobia in Turn-of-the-Century Britain,” Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 1 (2016): 44. 38 A. Belyi, Peterburg (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 272. 39 Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: the Cultural Construction of the Other,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from An Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 243–282.

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Representation.40 Schopenhauer evokes the foetor Judaicus in his discussion of the difference between animals and humans. While he is critical of the Judaic presumption of their superiority over the animal kingdom, he reduces Jews to animal-like status because they smell and are driven by the smell. As Geller notes, by ascribing odorousness to Jews, Schopenhauer expels them from the confines of civilized humanity. In the scene describing Zoya’s house, it is tellingly a Russian man, Aleksandr Ivanovich, who detects her smell and moves away from her to escape the smell coming from her mouth. In Bely’s treatment, the scent of the Jewess acquires characteristics which evoke fears of the feminine. The bad-smelling mouth with dental problems can be read as an allusion to vagina dentata, thus giving an additional mythopoetic layer to the representation of a Jewish woman as a monster.41 Via this trope, her body becomes aligned with the symbolism of a house on an archaic level. Semiotically and physically, the womb-house is a paradoxical place of escape but also a place of danger (where men get saved in a quasi-womb but also ingested).42 Bely’s depiction of the domain of smell is elaborate. He shows that, in order to get rid of the smell, Zoya constantly uses a perfume pulverizer. The bad smell in this description becomes part of her essence and it is implied that no amount of perfume can erase it. It is shown to be like a disease, a permanent marker of a Jew’s body which is sexualized in both the popular and scientific imagination of modernity. Another aspect of Zoya’s use of perfume is her attitude to smell as fetish. Through this motif, Zoya’s space bears parallels with Susanna’s place of residence and the racialization of space through psychopathology. Bely worked on this novel during 1911–1913, the years of the Beilis Affair, and most likely he read Vasily Rozanov’s articles on the olfactory and tactile nature of the Jew’s body as manifestations of atavism (discussed here in detail in the next chapter). Through such historical allusions and physical materialities, Zoya’s space is racialized as a microcosm of smell that is both emitted and inhaled. Zoya’s sensory interaction with the physical surroundings is pathologized via her excessive and obsessive use of perfume and, additionally, her haptic needs, as she is shown to compulsively grab and touch the pulverizer. The sense of 40 Bely read Schopenhauer in 1896. See Elizabeth Kosakowska, On the Crossroads of Science, Philosophy, and Literature: Andrey Bely’s Petersburg (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013). 41 On the vagina dentata in modernism see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siecle Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). 42 On the mythology of the womb-house see Joost Van Baak, The House in Russian Literature: A Mythopoetic Exploration (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).

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olfaction is thus complimented by another supposedly base sense, the sense of tactility. In the hierarchy of senses, this sense occupies a lower level and serves as a marker of Zoya’s belonging to primitive “races.”43 Symptomatically, items of decoration in Zoya’s place also serve to racialize this space. While in Susanna’s house a painting becomes part of the material semiotics of Jewish and Christian differences, in Zoya’s house the all-Russian samovar, a cultural icon of the Russian body, soul, and domesticity, embodies differences. Zoya has not one but two samovars, and she uses them in accordance with two functions. One, predictably greasy, samovar she uses on a daily basis; the other, shiny and clean, stands on the shelf and is used when she receives guests. This seemingly ordinary use of a utensil symbolizes more than the petty stereotype of an untidy and undomesticated Jewess. In Russian literature, the samovar is often used as an anthropomorphic trope of a man’s body.44 With its semiotic and structural likeness to the human body, the two samovars in Zoya’s place can similarly be viewed as a trope of the Russian and Jewish body, with the Jewish samovar/body being soiled by excessive touching and the Russian one emblematizing cleanliness. While in Susanna’s house it is Russian men who sing romances to emphasize Susanna’s earthly sensuality, in Zoya’s home crypto-Jewish and Asiatic men produce music and sing songs as distinctly racialized markers. Bely’s descriptions of the musical performances of Lippanchenko and the crypto-Jewish conspirator Shishnarfe echo Richard Wagner’s theorizing in his “Judaism in Music” (1869).45 The house becomes a physical space filled with what Wagner and Bely viewed as Semitic music with specific somatic manifestations of racial difference in voice and sounds. Bely was interested in Wagner’s views and expressed his criticism of Semitic versus Aryan music in his article “Stamped Culture” (1909).46 There is evidence in Petersburg that Bely borrowed directly 43 For the use of the haptic as a marker of sexuality and difference in literature of European modernism see Garrington, Haptic Modernism. 44 See Henrietta Mondry, “‘At the Samovar Me and My Masha’: Tea, Samovar and Human Body—Exploring Shape and Substance in Literature and Culture,” Zeitschrift fur Slavischer Philologie 73, no. 2 (2017): 255–283. 45 For a discussion of Wagner’s position regarding Jewish music see Bland, The Artless Jew, 26–30. 46 Mikhail Bezrodnyi, “O ‘iudoboiazni’ Andreia Belogo,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 28 (1997), 100–125. See also Magnus Ljunggren, “Peterburg—an Anti-Semitic Novel,” in his Twelve Essays on Andrej Belyj’s Peterburg (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2009), 63–72; Monika Spivak, “‘Buldukov il′ Bul′doizer . . . razberis′!’: Antisemitizm,” in her Andrei Belyi. Mistik i sovetskii pisatel′ (Moscow: RGGU, 2006), 324–334.

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from Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.”47 This is apparent in the description of Lippanchenko’s excessively sweet singing and guitar-playing in his rendition of a Russian song and in sweetish voice of Shishnarfe. To the Russian ear of Aleksandr Ivanovich, the singing and voice of the Jewish protagonists are somatically repellent. Here, the voice and singing style become markers of race as defined by artistic taste as well as the physical apparatus which produces the sounds. Wagner’s essay linked Jewish language and phonetic articulation to their alleged inability to sing in a manner appealing to Europeans: By far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech; and this is the essential point at which to sound the Jewish influence upon Music. . . . Very naturally, in Song—the most vivid and most indisputable expression of personal emotion—the peculiarity of the Jewish nature attains for us its climax of distastefulness; and on any natural hypothesis, we might hold the Jew adapted for every sphere of art, excepting that whose basis lies in Song.48

Bely encodes aspects of Wagner’s racial musicology in the singing and violin playing of both his non-Aryan protagonists, leaving the antisemitic subtext as an identifier of his crypto-Jewish characters. Wagner’s contribution to racial theories is well noted by scholarship, and his criticism of the sounds produced by Jews contributed to the racialization of the Jew’s body, whose organs he described as physiologically different from Aryans’ and therefore responsible for producing different sounds.49 Within the context of the synthesis of race and politics in Bely’s symbolist novel, the racialization of Zoya’s space receives its apogee in a highly politicized scene describing a politically driven murder. This scene brings together race and political terrorism. The crypto-Jew Lippanchenko is murdered by Russian nationalist Andrei Ivanovich for his conspiratorial double-dealings. While the murder is motivated politically, it is also symbolically racial. Strikingly, Lippanchenko is attacked by the Russian patriot in Zoya’s bedroom. In this way, the author uses the racialized space of Zoya’s house on the island as a 47 Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” in his Prose Works. The Theatre, trans. W. A. Ellis, vol. 3 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1894), 79–100. 48 Ibid., 80. 49 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991).

CHAPTER FOUR    Intimate Spaces

microcosm of the political situation in Russia in the 1910s. Permeated with racial stereotypes, it becomes a playground of terrorist activities mixed with politicized antisemitism and ethnic hatred. Importantly, it is a Russian man who turns the Jewess’s bedroom into a site of the pogrom-style murder.

The Politics of Biological Space within the Semiosphere Both Chekhov and Bely racialized Jewish women’s spaces by creating an intersection between race, gender and sexuality. Both used notions borrowed from scientific and popular discourse on racial difference and pathology. Within these spaces, objects become racialized through differences that are understood not only culturally but also relationally, in terms of phenomenological perspective, corporeality, and materiality. As such the spaces function both as an overlapping domain of the biological life and the semiosphere inside the physical boundaries of the larger semiosphere. In addition, both places reflect individual authorial agendas as well as the political and historical context. Chekhov’s story was written five years after the first violent anti-Jewish mass pogroms of 1881, and reflected one of the most popular accusations made against the Jews—that they contribute to the alcoholism of the Russian people. His racialization of the Jewish woman’s space is achieved by a combination of constructs of gender, sexuality and economic stereotypes. To create the marked space, he combines a mythopoetic layer with the historical context. His character’s place also reflects his personal attitude towards the “home,” described by Joost van Baak as ambivalent. “Home” and the house in his writing can be places of boredom and ordinariness, of debilitating routine.50 The fantasy of Susanna’s house was clearly as alluring and frightening to him as it was for his Russian male protagonists. While Chekhov possibly sublimated his own complex attraction to a Jewish woman, he participated in the cultural construction of the turn-of-the-century-Jewess. In Bely’s novel Russia’s political situation is embedded in the racialism of the “Yellow Peril” and political antisemitism, which had accelerated since Chekhov’s time. Yet in his racialized depiction of sexed and gendered Jewish spaces, Bely used the same set of cultural stereotypes as Chekhov to which he added his own advanced racialism as it developed in the 1910s. Both writers depicted Jewish places as boundary spaces on the level of mythopoetic imagination, physical location, and politics, mediated by embodied materialities. 50 Van Baak, The House in Russian Literature.

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In Lotman, the boundary’s important function in the semiosphere relates to it being “the area of accelerated semiotic processes, which always flow more actively on the periphery of a cultural environment, seeking to affix them to core structures, with a view to displacing them.”51 Those who live on the boundary belong to two worlds, and can operate as interpreters between cultures. Lotman notes that in the nineteenth century, the “destructive zone”52 on the outskirts of a town lay in direct contrast with the town center, which embodied the dominant social structure. Outskirts could be a part of a town and yet belonging to a place that destroys the town. The Jewess’s spaces embody bio-semiotic difference within the larger physical semiosphere of the Russian town and Empire. Susanna’s racialized and sexed boudoir threatens to encroach into and contaminate the Russian body politic. Her vodka trade further contributes to the degeneration of the Russian nation. Zoya’s place is a site of racial degeneration where political terrorism subverts the very foundations of the Russian Empire. Having originated in the Pale of Settlement, these Jewish characters, while still functioning on the periphery, nevertheless carry out their subversive deeds. The Pale itself can be viewed as a physical and symbolic border of the semiosphere that hosted and developed a racial group constantly threatening to subvert the borders and the dominant power. The Jewish protagonists settle in a territorial periphery, which coincides with the boundary of physical and material-cultural space, the space that threatens to subvert the “deified world”53 situated at the center of culture and the Empire. The next chapter will examine the culmination of racial anthropological thinking during the two main ritual murder accusations in the last decades of the Russian Empire.

51 Lotman, “On the semiosphere,” 212. 52 Ibid., 211. 53 Ibid.

CHAPTER FIVE

Animal Advocacy and Ritual Murder Trials Let them eat our ordinary meat from our slaughterhouses. —Vasily Rozanov, “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle” (1913)

A

nimal advocacy in modern European history is a complex ideological domain often related to embodied practices and beliefs. Kindness to animals in high modernity became “an index of civilization” and rhetorically it often defined the barbarian others by their alleged brutality to animals.1 Among those who were singled out in the discourse of animal cruelty at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were Jews, Asians and working classes. Kosher animal slaughter was one of the main contributing factors to the Jews being drawn into anti-cruelty discussions. In Russia, the most striking cases of animal advocacy and contemporary Jewry occurred during the Beilis Affair, 1911–1913, when ritual animal slaughter was viewed as representative of human ritual murder. Earlier, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a similar link was made in the Multan Case, 1894–1895, when a group of Udmurts was accused of human ritual murder. In both cases, academic ethnographers and anthropologists testified at court, arguing the connection between ritual animal and human sacrifices. The most influential set of texts encapsulating the tripartite link between animal advocacy and animal and human sacrifices for ritual purposes are presented in Vasily Rozanov’s writing, especially his The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews towards Blood, which included an article “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle”. While this book consists of articles which he published during the Beilis Affair, Rozanov (1856–1919) 1 Kathleen Kete, “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), 26.

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started writing on issues of animal cruelty earlier, in 1902–1903, and in these essays his approach to Judaic and Muslim practices was positive. The dialectics in his texts present the trajectory of racialization and politicization of animal advocacy in relation to Jews and other minorities of the Russian Empire. This is especially achieved through the representation of animal slaughter and animal and human sacrifice as rudimentary practices of primitive nationalities. Rozanov’s articles written between 1902 and 1913 address the topic of abuse and slaughter of domesticated animals. These articles use ethnocultural and religious examples as arguments. The first two articles, written in 1902 and 1903, are typologically linked by not being grounded in the political context, yet all three articles theorize on the subject of blood as a physical and metaphysical substance. Notably, the idea of the sacred nature of human and animal blood is central to Rozanov’s animal advocacy in all the articles. While he accepts the Biblical notion of the sacredness of blood and uses it to construct an argument for animal advocacy, he creates two distinct cases around this notion: in the first case, blood is sacred in both humans and animals and therefore humans should spare animals; in the second case, he condemns the alleged use of blood for rituals as an abominable act. This last formulation is entangled in the historical context of the blood libel trial of the Jew Beilis and, covertly, in the blood libel trial of a group of animistic minority people, the Votiaks (or Udmurts), in the Multan Case.2 I proceed by interrogating the structure and the workings of these interwoven notions of supposed similarities between animal and human blood, animal slaughter and the function of blood in human and animal sacrifices. My special focus is on the role ascribed to ethnic and religious differences in this intersecting subtheme of animal advocacy. I conclude by showing that Rozanov used religious and ethnographic sources selectively and manipulatively.3 When Rozanov’s approach becomes grounded in racialist thinking, it becomes prejudiced. His conflation of animal and human sacrifice uses antisemitic mythology intertwined with phylogenetic concepts of ethno-religious groups.4 2 On parallels in the two trials see Marina Mogilner, “Human Sacrifice in the Name of a Nation,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, ed. Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017), 130–150. 3 On the theme of blood lust in Rozanov in the context of modernism see Harriet Murav, “The Predatory Jew and Russian Vitalism: Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Babel,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, ed. Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017), 151–171. 4 Alan Dundes, “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion,” in The Blood Libel Legend: A Case Book of

CHAPTER FIVE    Animal Advocacy and Ritual Murder Trials

Animal Advocacy in 1902 and 1903: Religious and Ethnic Tolerance The two articles “O sostradanii k zhivotnym” (“On Compassion to Animals,” 1902) and “O milosti k zhivotnym” (“On Mercy to Animals,” 1903) are written as responses to letters to the conservative newspaper Novoe vremia (New Times). The letters contain eyewitness descriptions of animal abuse. Rozanov starts “On Compassion to Animals” with a description of everyday scenes in which Russian people interfered in incidents of cruel treatment of horses by carriage drivers.5 He places his discussion within the theme of the Russian national character and notes that such cases show that “the Russian heart” is “embryonically kind.”6 Yet in reality, Russian people have a long way to go to develop these beginnings, since in their everyday life they demonstrate “horrific” cruelty to animals.7 Rozanov quotes a letter describing the cruel treatment of cats by an enterprising cat-catcher in Viatka region, who collects them from nearby villages and kills them for their skins. Significantly for the ensuing discussion, he notes that while it would be impractical to stop all the commercial enterprises related to animals, it is necessary to stop what he terms the “barbaric way”8 of killing animals. Demonstrating his interest in the practice of animal slaughter, Rozanov recommends as a normative way of killing cats a technique used in the slaughter of cattle—piercing the brain with a long awl, which results in an immediate death with little pain. While he states that he feels uncomfortable writing about this, this way of killing animals, he claims, would alleviate their suffering. Rozanov calls on the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals to create a set of laws in relation to animal slaughter and to ensure the laws are implemented in practice. His appeal reflects the reality of the gap between the RSPA’s anti-cruelty laws and the procedures for processing these Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 336–376. On the Beilis Affair in the context of Russian thought see L. Katsis, Krovavyj navet i russkaia mysl′ (Moscow: Mosty kul′tury, 2006). On legal aspects and popular beliefs on blood libel see Robert Weinberg, “Connecting the Dots: Jewish Mysticism, Ritual Murder and the Trial of Mendel Beilis,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, ed. Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017), 172–184. 5 V. V. Rozanov, “O sostradanii k zhivotnym,” in his Okolo tserkovnykh sten (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 318–320. 6 Ibid., 318. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

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violations in early 1900s.9 However, his discussion of the method of animal slaughter will resurface in his 1913 article in the context of the ritual slaughter of animals where he will use it to more complex political ends. In his 1902 article Rozanov turns to the Bible, using Eden as an example of peaceful coexistence with animals. References to the Bible are a characteristic feature of Rozanov’s writing, and in this article he notes that it is telling for animal advocacy that God accepted the sacrifice from Abel, who was a shepherd, but rejected the gift from Cain the vegetable farmer (ogorodnik).10 This latter point is important in relation to Rozanov’s later views on animal sacrifice which he will address in the context of the blood libel case in 1913. At this stage, taken in its own right, his point about the difference between animal and vegetable sacrifices in the Bible draws attention to a theme which has found academic attention. Of note are recent scholarly observations that the Bible has a vegetarian ideal as suggested in Genesis 1:29–30 with both humans and animals originally created as herbivorous.11 Brumberg-Kraus (2005) interprets the differences in Abel and Cain’s occupations as the Bible’s preference for balance and as a caution against extremes. Rozanov does not go into a detailed discussion of vegetarian versus carnivorous dietary practices, but rather uses the point to note that animal sacrifice has strong religious connotations. In his next essay, “On Mercy to Animals,” Rozanov responds to letters describing cruelty to animals in central Russia.12 A letter in Novoe vremia from May 21, 1903, narrates the skinning of live dogs and horses on an industrialized scale in a Russian village in the Chernigov region. According to the author of the report, the villagers invented a special cage with a narrow corridor equipped to skin dogs alive. The letter also describes the method 9 On the RSPA see Amy Nelson, “The Body of the Beast: Animal Protection and Anticruelty Legislation in Imperial Russia,” in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History, ed. Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 95–112. 10 Rozanov, “O sostradanii k zhivotnym,” 320. 11 Genesis 1 suggests that humans and animals were originally created as vegetarians: “. . . to everything that has the breath of life I have given every green plant for food” (Genesis 1:29– 30). On difference with the Noahide commandments in Genesis 9 see Jonathan BrumbergKraus, “Does God Care What We Eat? Jewish Theologies of Food and Reverence for Life,” in Food in Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon et al. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), 119–132. On contemporary Jewish responses to kashrut and animal slaughter see Maria Diemling, “The Politics of Food: Kashrut, Food Choices and Social Justice,” Jewish Culture and History 16, no. 2 (2015): 178–195. 12 The article was first published in Novyi put′ 6 (1903). V. V. Rozanov, “O milosti k zhivotnym,” in his Okolo tserkovnykh sten (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 212–213.

CHAPTER FIVE    Animal Advocacy and Ritual Murder Trials

for skinning horses alive, which involves cutting the animal’s skin in a few places and folding it outward, then pegging the skin to a special holder and subsequently whipping the horse so that by its own efforts it gets out of its skin. The skinless dogs and horses are left to die because the workmen do not bother to kill them. Of special relevance for my discussion is the fact that these acts of barbarity are committed by ethnic Russians. Having incorporated this extract from the letter into his article, Rozanov quotes a passage from another letter to the newspaper. This second letter, very different in tone, describes a new benevolent attitude towards working animals in Crimea. The people decided to allow the animals to rest on Sundays in order to allow them to recover from hard work.13 Rozanov interprets the kind attitudes in Crimea as the result of the influence of Judaic and Muslim traditions among the local Karaites and Tatars, and refers to the practice described in the Hebrew Bible of granting domesticated animals a rest day on the Sabbath on a par with humans. He formulates the view that European cultures lost this understanding of “consanguity” (edinokrovnost′) between humans and animals.14 This loss led in turn to a loss of respect for human lives, as manifested in murder, suicide and the seemingly continuous death toll from war and political unrest. Of note here is Rozanov’s employment of non-Russian and non-Christian cultural and religious practices to educate his Russian readers. In this same article he also describes the kindness to street dogs seen in Istanbul as another example of respect for animals shown by a non-Christian, Islamic culture. These alternative cultural attitudes are juxtaposed to the cruelty shown by Russian people towards animals. Rozanov places the roots of Russian cruelty to animals within the secularisation of Russian society and the somatophobic tendencies among his contemporaries. The notion of (self-)hatred of animal nature by humans is one of the prevailing ideas in Rozanov’s writing. He maintained that Christianity during its history destroyed respect for the living body, dualistically separating it from the elevated spirit. Importantly, Rozanov brings blood into the discussion, stating that “excluding blood from the medium of communication of a human with God (ancient victims) extinguished in humans the sense of the 13 The letters to the editor appeared in Novoe vremia, May 21, 1903, no. 9773; fragments were reprinted in Novyi put′. One letter had the title “Vopiiushchee varvarstvo”—it was written by V. Timorev and described the practice of skinning dogs and horses alive in the village of Tuligolovy in the Chernigov region. Another letter was entitled “Otdykh dlia zhivotnykh” and described the event in the Tavricheskoe region in Staryi Krym. 14 Rozanov, “O milosti k zhivotnym,” 172.

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transcendental character of blood and of life, first this quality of animal blood and then of human blood” (emphasis in the original).15 Rozanov italicizes the notions that he finds important, such as the transcendental nature of blood and the use of blood in animal sacrifice which, according to him, increase the understanding of the value of life. Blood becomes synonymous with life itself and is endowed with a sacred character. In this context, Rozanov uses “blood” as a substance and construct which helps him to create a parallelism between humans and animals. His aim is twofold: to promote animal advocacy; and to initiate the reevaluation of the status of the body in contemporary society. He uses animal advocacy to reform what he presents as Russian Christian culture’s body politics. Of special importance is Rozanov’s statement on the role of “the orgiastic beginnings”16 of alternative cultures. He explains that Judaic Karaites and Muslim Turks have not lost this orgiastic ideal and that this in turn explains their respectful treatment of animals. By “orgiastic” Rozanov means sacral and ceremonial, that which gets enacted in a ritual. He uses this concept to show that contemporary Russian society’s loss of this sacred attitude to animals is the key to animal abuse. In his search for alternative, non-Christian attitudes to animals, he refers to ancient cultures. He quotes the cult of the pagan demigod Pan in the Hellenic world as well as the Judaic rule of allowing animals to rest on the Sabbath, stressing that in both cases animals took part in religious holidays. This notion of human and animal rites/rights will acquire a negative meaning when Rozanov applies it to his interpretation of the link between human and animal sacrifice in 1913, when he uses the notion of the orgiastic character of rituals for his phylogenetic explanations of contemporary cases of alleged animal and human sacrifice. Most of Rozanov’s “revelations”17 from these two articles and his work in the early 1900s resurface in his article written during the Beilis blood libel affair, but here they are used to demonize the supposed ritual killing of animals. In this new historical context, the questions of humane animal slaughter and the use of blood for ritual purposes are situated in the discourse of ethnic difference and used to promote religious and ethnic intolerance.

15 Ibid., 212. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

CHAPTER FIVE    Animal Advocacy and Ritual Murder Trials

The Beilis Affair and Ritual Animal Slaughter In a dramatic change of attitude towards examples of animal advocacy in the Hebrew Bible, Rozanov demonizes supposedly Judaic and other non-Christian practices and beliefs in the article “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota” (“Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle,” 1913), written during the Beilis trial. In this article, Rozanov calls for the prohibition of all ethnic and religious practices of animal slaughter and the adoption of Russian practices as normative: “Let them eat our ordinary meat from our slaughterhouses.”18 Rozanov uses the circumstances of the Beilis trial to link the ritual killing of animals and humans. In order to frame Mendel Beilis for the ritual murder of the Christian boy Andrei Yushchinsky, the real killers pierced the boy’s body and drained it of blood, so staging the murder as ritual slaughter. The murder took place before Easter, the time when Christ’s Passion was easily evoked. The timeframe is also symbolic in relation to the Judaic Passover in view of the common superstition that matzot, unleavened bread baked for Passover, contained Christian blood.19 In his article “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle,” Rozanov made the connection between kosher animal slaughter and ritual human sacrifice on the basis of Jews’ supposed anomalous attitude to blood. Rozanov’s interpretation addresses the conspiracist notion of Jews allegedly concealing from Gentiles the sacred meaning of blood. Rozanov suggests that it is Jews who have to stop their isolationist body politic by abandoning what he terms their “fetishist attitude to blood.”20 He maintains that this attitude is embodied in the kosher slaughter of animals, a practice they have to stop. Notably, Rozanov does not write about the processing of meat as part of making it kosher but concentrates on the alleged inhumane side of the killing of the animals. He calls the practice sadistic and explains the Russian people’s belief in blood libel as a result of them having supposedly witnessed the procedure of kosher animal slaughter. In the draining of the animal’s blood, he states, lies the key to the blood libel. Moreover, Rozanov argues that the presence of Jewish religious authorities during animal slaughter adds to the Christians’ view of the ritualistic underpinning of the procedure. He creates a nexus between the material and symbolic meanings of animal slaughter, making a ground for the conflation of animal and human sacrifice. Rozanov’s take on the issue is 18 V. V. Rozanov, “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota,” in his Sakharna (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 307. 19 A. S. Tager, Delo Beilisa i tsarskaia Rossiia (Moscow: Sovetskoe zakonodatel′stvo, 1933). 20 Rozanov, “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota,” 307.

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political: while he suggests that Russian society is open to accepting Jews and erasing the borders of the Pale of Settlement, he also states the terms and conditions for this absorption. The Jews themselves have to dismantle the borders by abandoning their practices in the realm of food. In this article, Rozanov describes his notion of the “fetishism of blood” in Judaism as a remnant of paganism. This differs from the views expressed in his earlier work in which he maintained that the ban on ingesting blood in Judaism is explained by the fact that it contains the secret of life. Blood fascinates Rozanov, as both a material and spiritual substance, because it is relevant to his general project of reforming Christianity’s ascetic somatophobia. To see the unity of spirit and matter in the life of the human body was Rozanov’s self-proclaimed mission, and he often turned to non-Christian religions to show that such a unity is possible.21 Rozanov looked to pagan religions of antiquity and Judaism in his search for alternative concepts to what he saw as Christianity’s dualisms. In addition to his articles on animal advocacy written in 1902 and 1903, his other 1902 article, “Lermontov’s ‘Demon’ and his Ancient Relatives,” suggests that blood is a unity of matter and spirit. Moreover, he writes positively about the sacred meaning of blood in animal sacrifice rituals: Through the blood of a [animal] sacrifice a human being is linked with God. What is blood? Running life, animate, productive, silent, and creative. All the organs of the body are created from the material of blood, and the blood of an animal (its sum total) is, as it were, the vapour of its form, its very shape, transparent, spirit-forming. To select an intermediary between God and oneself, a messenger of blood, is to represent and feel God not in the abstract, but as something with the blood life, and consequently akin to a human being.22

A similar interpretation of blood as a substance which unites in its materiality human-animal-god(s) is found in his essay “Judaism” (1903). Here, Rozanov uses blood in polemics against the dualism of Descartes, according to which the corporeal is opposed to the spiritual. Rozanov elaborates on the

21 Henrietta Mondry, Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature (Bloomington: Slavica, 2010). 22 V. V. Rozanov, “‘Demon’ Lermontova i ego drevnie rodichi,” in his O pisatel′stve i pisateliakh. Sobranie sochinenii, ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 98.

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interpretation of blood in the Talmud and the Hebrew Bible and defines it as a single substance of both the animal and the divine.23 In contrast to the polemical tone of “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle” written in the context of the Beilis Affair, Rozanov’s earlier works, including the two articles on animal advocacy, suggest that the materiality of blood is endowed with a spiritual value. Notably, this is the principal underpinning of kosher laws which forbid the ingestion of blood for this very reason, because it is believed to contain a holy essence.24 While Rozanov was aware of this notion, he used it to different ends at different times. In the early 1900s, the notion of the unity of matter and spirit, life and souls in the blood of the living helped him to promote his idée fixe, that Christianity has to become less ascetic in order to survive as a religion. He used this self-proclaimed mission in order to reform contemporary Russian society which he regarded as under the influence of atheistic trends. In the highly politicized period of 1911–1913, when the Beilis Affair coincided with the assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin by the “Jew” Bogrov (who, ironically, came from a family of converts to Christianity), Rozanov intentionally misrepresented the Judaic prohibition against consuming blood. His aim at this historical juncture was to unite Russian Christian society to differentiate it from politicized Jews trying to subvert the foundations of the Russian Empire and the ruling Orthodox Church. He used his interpretations of blood and sacrifice as polemical acts, both demonstrating and mobilizing the power of superstition. The second theme, that of animal slaughter and meat-eating, also relates to the notions of separation, difference and unity. Rozanov does not suggest a vegetarian alternative to eating meat, but rather concentrates on the two different ways of slaughtering animals.25 He defends the Russian method, “our slaughter of cattle”26 on the grounds that it is free from torture because each animal is made unconscious by a blow to the head, and suggests that Jews should start eating meat from regular butcheries.

23 Idem, “Iudaizm,” in Taina Izrailia, ed. V. F. Boikov (St. Petersburg: Sofiia, 1993), 105–227. 24 Numerous interpretations of the prohibition to eat blood (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:14) suggest that “one, blood is part of humans and animals that is intrinsically sacred and two, that the animal is like us.” Brumberg-Kraus, “Does God Care What We Eat?,” 120. 25 As a reader of the Talmud, Rozanov would have come across interpretations of the vegetarian ideal in the Bible contained in Genesis 1:29–30. 26 Rozanov, “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota,” 307.

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On the Link between Animal and Human Sacrifice among Ethnic Votiaks and the Jews Rozanov ends his article “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle” with a radical call to introduce a state law forbidding “all ritual attitudes to blood in the Russian Empire.”27 He states that “Russia is not obliged to recognize by law the crudest remnants of paganism (blood fetishism, “blood-fetish”).28 It is clear that Rozanov writes not only about the practice of the ritual slaughter of animals but also, implicitly, about the alleged ritual killings of humans practiced by the minorities of the Empire. His readers were familiar with the ritual murder trial of a group of Votiaks that took place in 1892–1894. A group of nine animist Votiaks, a Finnic-Ugric minority, were falsely convicted of killing and draining the blood of a Russian man, Konon Matiunin, whose decapitated body was found on a village road.29 The trial in the Multan Case was a kangaroo court with some of the Votiaks forced under torture to admit their guilt. Of special note is the fact that the main man accused of performing the dismemberment of the corpse was a butcher.30 The condition of the corpse was such that, supposedly, only he could have done the killing. The others accused included a man who had the status of a shaman in the village and who owned a shelter used by his clan as a place for animal sacrifices. As Robert Gerasi has demonstrated, during the trial the prosecution relied on ethnographic expertise to show that the Votiaks continued to engage in primitive rituals.31 Descriptions of Votiak sacrifices of live animals on special occasions included the pagan priest cutting the animals, collecting and drinking the blood, removing the head and internal organs, and reciting prayers. Notably, many of these features, such as the presence of religious authorities and the cutting of the animals to drain the blood, correspond to Rozanov’s description of kosher animal slaughter in his article. 27 Nelson mentions that in 1912 the Moscow chapter of the RSPA “imploded in factional struggle . . . fuelled by anti-Semitism” but does not contextualize the issue. See “The Body of the Beast,” 109. 28 Rozanov, “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota,” 309. 29 On perceived parallels in the primitivism of the Jews and Siberian minorities see Gabriella Safran, “Jews as Siberian Narrative: Primitivism and S. An-sky’s Dybbuk,” Modernizm/ Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 635–653. 30 Alison Smith notes that the Orthodox clergy did not object to animal slaughter among minorities such as the Votiaks, but objected to the mixing of pagan and Christian customs in ritual meals. The general attitude was that “the tribes had to be Russified.” Smith, Recipes for Russia, 83. 31 Robert Gerasi, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001).

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The focus on alleged blood-drinking parallels Rozanov’s point about the role of blood in religious ceremonies. Importantly for the purpose of this discussion, Russian ethnographer Ivan Smirnov, who was called to testify at the trial, used the Votiak practice of ritual animal slaughter as evidence of human sacrifice. A professor of history at Kazan University and the author of ethnographic works on the Finnic peoples of the Volga region, he previously “carelessly muddled the distinction between the past and the present” in his 1890 book The Votiaks.32 During the trial, he stated that the indictment’s description of the corpse “shows the full picture of a sacrifice.”33 Moreover, the prosecutor in his speech to the court, December 10, 1894, referred to the supposed Jewish ritual sacrifice of children to argue the plausibility of the motive in the Votiaks’ murder. He also made a connection to the sacrificial slaughter of animals, saying that a bull had been sacrificed in the shelter of one of the accused Votiaks. This allowed him to conclude: “And it is not far from a bull to a human victim.”34 The Multan Case had a wide resonance in the Russian press, with the democratic newspapers exposing the injustices of the trial and seeing it as the worst excess of the national-ethnic chauvinism promulgated by the tsarist regime.35 The Votiaks were acquitted only the third time around by the Governing Senate, Russia’s supreme court. In spite of the fact that in 1896 a Russian man confessed to the murder of the victim in the Multan Case, this closure was never widely publicized. It is symptomatic that the Multan Case was revived during the Beilis Affair and used in court as proof of the existence of ritual murder among the non-Russian Orthodox peoples.36

Racialism and the Discourse of the Primitive Ethnic Peoples and Their Rituals Historians have noted that there were unifying motives in the Multan Case and the Beilis Affair. Both created a religious stir about animist religions and 32 33 34 35

Ibid., 205. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 200. As a democratic writer, Korolenko covered both the Votiak case and the Beilis Affair. See V. G. Korolenko, “Multanskoe zhertvoprinoshenie,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955), 348–369; idem, “K voprosu o ritual′nykh ubiistvakh,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Petrograd: Marks, 1914), 261–279. 36 See the discussion in Henrietta Mondry [Genrietta Mondri], Pisateli-narodniki i evrei (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005), 145–146.

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Judaism in Russia in order to justify a change in policy towards non-Christian religions. Both were politically convenient because they deflected attention from political dissent and social unrest: the famine in Russia in 1892 and the rise of revolutionary activities culminating in the assassination of Stolypin in 1911.37 Both cases underscored the supposed barbarity of non-Christian ethnic groups.38 Rozanov and Smirnov used quasi-evolutionist taxonomies emphasizing the differences between advanced and primitive peoples. Smirnov spoke of the survival of traditional practices among the Votiaks as a marker of their backwardness which, in turn, was viewed phylogenetically. Rozanov drew a connection between the material and the symbolic via a construct of the atavistic nature of the Jew’s body. In his other article related to the Beilis Affair (in The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews to Blood), he writes of the surviving “atavistic cells” in the brains of the Jews.39 These hereditary cells contain “unconscious and instinctive reminiscences” from “the sacred times of the Old Testament.”40 Rozanov argues that atavism could explain the Jews’ desire to enact the mystical tragedies of the old times, “the sacred times of the Old Testament.”41 His aim in alluding to non-Christian ethnic groups of the Russian Empire is twofold: to suggest a link between Judaic and pagan practices; and to allege a connection between the kosher slaughter of animals and other rituals of animal slaughter and the ritual murder of humans. In a recent study “From Sacrifice to the Slaughterhouse” (2014), Annette Yoshiko Reed demonstrates that, at the end of the nineteenth century, ethnographers and cultural evolutionists contributed to the conflation of animal slaughter and animal sacrifice. It became methodologically acceptable to use both synchronic and diachronic approaches to explain differences “between and within modern societies” and to “mine non-Western cultures for ‘survivals’ from the past, whether as ‘primitive practices’ to regulate, or as a ‘window onto the past’ to study.”42 Rozanov’s construct of the similarity of human and animal 37 Weinberg’s study shows that the Government did not stop the spread of antisemitic accusations during the Beilis Affair. Robert Weinberg, Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014). 38 Mogilner, “Human Sacrifice.” 39 V. V. Rozanov, “Napominaniia po telefonu,” in his Sakharna (Respublika: Moscow, 1998), 337. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “From Sacrifice to the Slaughterhouse: Ancient and Modern Approaches to Meat, Animals, and Civilization,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26 (2014): 120.

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blood grounded in the context of the survival of “primitive practices” allows for the further homology between human and animal sacrifice. His approach echoes the opinions expressed by ethnographers and anthropologists at both the Beilis Affair and the Multan Case.43 This approach makes diachronic comparisons between contemporary peoples and the past and makes synchronic links between Jews and the animistic Finnic-Ugric Votiaks. During the Beilis trial the officially appointed expert Ivan Sikorsky, Professor of Anthropology at Kiev University, stated that “Jews . . . cannot by their own effort purge themselves from the archaic vice of cannibalism.”44 Sikorsky’s opinion, in turn, was similar to the logic of Professor Ivan Smirnov’s testimony at the Multan Trial when he also argued for the survival of the primitive cannibalistic past as expressed in animal sacrifice and, by implication, human sacrifice.45 In an authoritative study explaining animal sacrifice, anthropologist Jonathan Smith states that there is “no ‘evidence’ for the primitivity of animal sacrifice,” rather, it is part of a “highly developed exchange (or display) ideology”:46 Animal sacrifice appears to be, universally, the ritual killing of a domesticated animal by agrarian or pastoral societies. . . . As best as I can judge, sacrifice is not a primitive element in culture. Sacrifice is a component of secondary and tertiary cultures. It is, primarily, a product of “civilisation.”47

Smith notes that the sacrifice of the domestic animal is different from the hunt, which has a bearing on the way the sacrifice was imagined by the agrarian and pastoralist societies. These latter societies mythologized the hunt and this “reinterpretation . . . has allowed the scholarly fantasy that ritual is the affair 43 I. Smirnov was influenced by the Russian translation of cultural evolutionist E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture which promoted the concept of the “survival” of primitive practices in rites and customs in contemporary nineteenth-century societies. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: Murray, 1873). 44 Ivan Sikorskii, “Ekspertiza po delu ob ubiistve Andriushi Iushchinskogo,” in Russkaia rasovaia teoriia do 1917-go goda, ed. V. Avdeev (Moscow: Feri, 2004), 325–336. 45 Not all Russian experts supported the ritual murder claims. The forensic psychiatrist Vladimir Serbskii criticized Sikorsky for violating norms of scientific inquiry. See Weinberg, Blood Libel, 109. 46 Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Domestication of Sacrifice,” in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987), 197. 47 Ibid.

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of the tremendum rather than a quite ordinary mode of human social labor. It has allowed the notion that ritual—and therefore religion—is somewhat grounded in ‘brute fact’ rather than in the work and imagination and intellection in culture.”48 Rozanov and his contemporary ethnographers’ decision to ground the discussion in the context of atavistic and primitive peoples allowed them to see in animal slaughter and animal sacrifice the tremendum, the mystery and fear of something great. They explained this mystery not only through cultural beliefs but also phylogenetically. Regarding the conflation of animal and human sacrifice and other modes of the ritual killing of people, Smith notes that they are “too readily homologised.”49 He states that “the evidence for these practices is less certain than for animal sacrifice—often being more illustrative of intercultural polemics than cultural facts.”50 In Rozanov’s case, his construct of the “consanguity” of human and animal blood led to the conflation of the symbolic and the material in blood. This further allowed him to conflate animal ritual slaughter and the killing of humans. In the Multan Case, the prosecutor and the academic expert similarly homologized animal sacrifice and the ritual killing of humans.

The Dialectic of Animal Slaughter and Ritual Sacrifice Rozanov’s animal advocacy in his first two articles in the 1900s contained pleas to end cruelty in the commercial slaughter of animals. It contained alternative cultural examples of the humane treatment of animals, including cases of respect for, and tolerance of, animals in other geographical spaces such as Crimea and Turkey. He also used examples from the Hebrew Bible to demonstrate the respect which Ancient Israelites had towards animals. These alternative cultures are notably non-Christian. Rozanov employed different cultural and religious attitudes in juxtaposition to the practices found among his fellow Russians. His focus on ethno-religious differences served the purpose of comparing and educating contemporary Russian society. At the same time, these generalizations about ethno-religious beliefs and practices became a method of judgment. In the heated political atmosphere of the Beilis Affair anthropologists, ethnographers, and medical doctors were asked to present their expert

48 Ibid., 198. 49 Ibid., 197. 50 Ibid.

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opinion on the existence of blood libel in court.51 In the context of this racialist discourse, based on supposedly scientific and academic knowledge, Rozanov turned to his ideas of the 1900s, centered on the notion of the transcendental character of human and animal blood. However, instead of using his notion of animal sacrifice as means of bridging the gap between humans, animals and God(s),52 he turned it into a tool for the demonization of ethno-religious groups. In publishing the article in the right-wing Novoe vremia, he gave it an added obscurantist political meaning. In this last article “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle,” Rozanov’s employment of animal advocacy is racialized. In the context of using animals and animal slaughter in nationalistic and racialized discourse, Jacqueline Dalziell and Dinesh Wadiwel have noted that in debates over who kills “their” animals the “right way” we are left with the tacit acceptance of the fact that animals do not require saving in general, but they require saving from “non-white others.”53 Rozanov and Russian academic ethnographers and anthropologists homologized the killing of animals and humans in order to present ethnic and religious Others and their practices as inherently “abhorrent.” The animal suffering discourse was positioned to generate racial, ethnic and cultural boundaries and not to erase them. Rozanov’s taxonomies such as “our meat,” “our slaughter houses,” and “our way of slaughter”54 produce a concept of civilized cultures juxtaposed against barbaric and atavistic ones. These primitive cultural practices, Rozanov claims in his article of 1913, have no place in “sublime monotheism” (vozvyshennyi monoteizm).55 This use of the notion of disembodied “sublime monotheism” demonstrates privileging of the abstract over the materiality of life. In order to achieve his political ends,

51 On the history of anthropology in Russia and ritual murder see Mogilner, Homo Imperii. On the Beilis Affair in legal history see Harriet Murav, “The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial and the Culture of Apocalypse,” Cardoso Studies in Law and Literature 12, no. 2 (2000): 243–263. 52 On Rozanov’s tripartite notion of God-human-animal see Henrietta Mondry, “Beyond the Boundary: Vasily Rozanov and the Animal Body,” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 4 (1999): 651–673. 53 Jacqueline Dalziell and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, “Live Exports, Animal Advocacy, Race and ‘Animal Nationalism,’” in Meat Culture, ed. Annie Potts (Amsterdam: Brill, 2017), 85. 54 Rozanov, “K prekrashcheniiu ritual′nogo ubiistva skota,” 307. 55 Ibid., 309. Rozanov is most likely quoting Chaadaev’s Philosophical letters, where Chaadaev writes about vozvyshennyi monoteizm in his appraisal of Moses as a great historical figure inspired by the divine call. Petr Chaadaev, Filosoficheskie pis′ma (Moscow: Direkt-Media, 2016), 197.

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Rozanov temporarily forsakes his own philosophical program which elsewhere rehabilitated pantheism by showing its spiritual side.56 In the Apocalypse of Our Times (1918–1919), written before his death from the Sergiev Monastery, Rozanov asked for all his articles written during the Beilis Affair to be burned. He asked the Jewish community for forgiveness and stated that he did not wish to repeat the titles of his works of 1913–1914, suggesting that he was fully aware of their offensive and propagandistic character. He continued to write positively about what he perceived as the Judaic understanding of blood as part of the holistic cosmogony in which all humans and animals had souls. The animal soul, he wrote, had nothing to do with the Christian spiritus et mens (spirit and mind), the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, or the Kantian moral imperative.57 If we exclude his article on ritual animal slaughter of 1913, we will find a genuine plea for animal advocacy in his writing. Rozanov’s call to end kosher animal slaughter predates the Third Reich’s decreeing such a law in April 1933 as part of its anti-Jewish campaign. Animal protection laws in Nazi Germany used the mythology which linked animal torture and blood libel. As Kathleen Kete notes in her “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe,” “The image of the kosher butcher practising a private, bloody orgiastic rite was much like the image of the vivisector, as viewing of the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew makes clear.”58 Ironically, after the vivisection of animals was abolished, it was restored with certain restrictions, so making apparent the political goals of the Third Reich’s animal protection campaign. As has been pointed out recently, to introduce laws against kosher animal slaughter means de facto to subterfuge it for sacrifice and so legalize the whole complex of prejudiced beliefs around this method of the slaughter of domestic animals.59

56 Rozanov’s self-proclaimed mission was to find spirituality in pagan beliefs preceding Christianity. See Mondry, Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature, 8–9. 57 V. V. Rozanov, Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (Moscow: Respublika, 2000), 96. 58 Kete, “Animals and Ideology,” 29. 59 For a discussion on legal matters and cultural practices of animal slaughter in Europe today see Gerhard van der Schyff, “Ritual Slaughter and Religious Freedom in a Multilevel Europe,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 3, no. 1 (2014): 76–102. On the rhetoric of animal suffering in Jewish sources see Dov Linzer, “Animal Suffering and the Rhetoric of Value and Halakha,” Kashrut and Jewish Food Ethics, ed. Shmuly Yanklowitz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019).

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Strikingly, Rozanov’s articles with their tendentious animal advocacy saw a historical revival in the rise of fascist ideology.60 His articles on animal slaughter and ritual murder were reproduced after his death in spite of his direction that they be burned. Tellingly, it was the Russian right-wing émigré press in Paris in 1929 and the Russian Fascist Organisation of the Far East in Shanghai in 1933 that republished his article on the ritual slaughter of cattle. Both brochures were entitled “Zhertvennyi uboi” (“Ritual Slaughter”) with the subtitle “(What I saw) from V. V. Rozanov’s book The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews to Blood” in an intentional conflation of animal slaughter and the ritual killing of humans.61 An edition of The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews to Blood was also published in Sweden in 1934. The proximity of these dates of publication and the Nazi animal protection laws of 1933 is self-evident. The use of animal advocacy for political propaganda was a common feature of the laws of 1933 and the republication of Rozanov’s articles as political pamphlets were clearly opportunistic. While his work was forbidden for publication in the Soviet Union, currently in Russia various internet sites quote passages from his article “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle” as slogans against alleged sadistic animal slaughter practiced by both Jews and Muslims in the Russian Federation.62 Such sites continue to use animal advocacy as a blueprint for the demonization of alternative ethnicities and religions. The next two chapters address the reemergence of the discourse of human-animal correlation, first as a biological semiotic interface in the Soviet novel by Ivan Shevtsov, and then in recycling of the theme of Jews’ abject attitudes to blood, dissection, and slaughter in the phantasmagoria of contemporary conspiracist fiction.

60 Sax notes that Nazi animal protection laws introduced in 1933 were inspirationally humane yet overtly antisemitic. By a special decree of 1933 Jews were forbidden to have pets, which implied Jews’ cruelty towards animals. Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000). 61 Zhertvennyi uboi (chto mne sluchilos′ uvidet′). Iz knigi Vas. Vas. Rozanova “Oboniatel′noe i osiazatel′noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi” (Paris: Izdatel′stvo “Doloi zlo,” 1929; Shanghai: Izdatel′stvo D. V. Otdela Rossiiskoi fashistskoi partii, 1933). 62 Svetlana Volkova, “Kak iudei poluchaiut koshernoe miaso” (2015), https://sofya1444. livejournal.com/3803649.html, accessed May 14, 2018; Sergei Fomin, “Tarkovskie. Zhertvoprinoshenie” (2015), https://sergey-v-fomin.livejournal.com/125876.html, accessed May 14, 2018.

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Figures 11 and 12. Pamphlets Ritual slaughter, based on Vasily Rozanov’s The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of the Jews to Blood, published in Paris, 1929 and in Shanghai, 1933.

Figure 13. Illustration in Trofim Kychko, Iudaizm bez prikras (Judaism without Embellishments), Kyiv: Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1963. “Abraham stretched forth his hand.” The drawing creates a nexus between human and animal slaughter.

CHAPTER SIX

Aphids and Other Undesirables: The Predatory Jew versus Soviet Art

W

hile the censored and politically attuned Soviet literature in the period of developed socialism largely avoided negative ethnic stereotypes, the theme of the Jew’s body and its relations with the physical world could be a notable exception at pivotal times.1 From the 1950s, Ivan Shevtsov (1920–2013) disseminated the image of the sexually predatory Jewish woman and carnal male Jew.2 His writing is one of the most graphic representations of Jewish corporeality in the later Soviet era. The trope of predatory Jews negatively affecting the Russian body politic has been propagated by Shevtsov’s infamous novel Tlia (Aphid) from the 1950s to the present. Aphid (1952, 1964) was republished in 2014 and is today available online, under the title Tlia. Antisionistskii roman (Aphid: Anti-Zionist Novel), published by the Russkoe soprotivlenie (Russian resistance).3 As is encoded in the title of the novel, Jewish characters are depicted within a discriminatory biological discourse. Shevtsov’s novel positions Jewish characters at an intersection of race, gender and animality. These are conceptualized as biological and ideological categories. Some of the references to the theme of blood reveal the author’s incorporation of the quasi-Rozanovian mythology of Jews’ non-normative attraction to blood. The novel’s title allegorically emphasizes the connection 1 See Jakub Blum and Vera Rich, The Image of the Jew in Soviet Literature: The Post-Stalin Period (London: Institute for Jewish Affairs, 1984). 2 I have addressed the images of sexed and pathologized Jewish men and women in Shevtsov’s novels of the 1970s in Exemplary Bodies, 152–164. 3 Ivan Shevtsov, Tlia. Antisionistskii roman, https://knigogid.ru/books/798896-tlyaantisionistskiy-roman/toread, accessed January 10, 2020.

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between parasitic humans and animal species. Aphids as a biological species are considered to be destructive from an anthropocentric point of view because they feed on “healthy” plants. However, Shevtsov’s allegory goes further than the English translation of the word tlia suggests. He uses an epigraph which extends the meaning of tlia to include a host of associations. He quotes descriptions of the noun as well as its verbal forms from the nineteenthcentury Dictionary of the Russian Language by Vladimir Dal′. The Dictionary explains that the meanings of tlia include “lice” and the related verb tlit′ means “to destroy, to ruin, to let rot, to exterminate.”4 Shevtsov also quotes a saying: “The morals are destroyed [tliat′sia] by depravity.”5 In his epigraph the author covers a wide range of destructive activities performed by biological tlia and its counterparts, the Jewish characters in the novel. Speciesism functions in society like racism, in that it promotes the privileging of one species over another.6 The image of aphids and lice and their physiological functioning as a species create a material-semiotic link with the Jew’s alleged relationships with the physical world.7 The novel’s plot enmeshes the Jewish body in material culture: the Jewish women characters in the book succeed in both seducing Russian painters and sculptors and influencing intellectually the ideological foundations of art. Jewish men are similarly involved in this strategy, orchestrating their daughters’ marriages to Russian men and disseminating their formalist ideas and ideals, thus subverting the Soviet socialist art. In turning to the question of Jewish tastes and their corrupting influences in art, Shevtsov echoes themes of Bely’s novel Petersburg. Aphid, however, is historically grounded in the ideological trends in the Soviet art scene of the 1950s and 1960s.

Khrushchev’s Outrage against Abstract Art and the History of Aphid The novel Aphid has a turbulent history of publication. While it was first accepted for publication before Stalin’s death, at the height of the antiCosmopolitan campaign directed against Jews, it was banned after Stalin’s death in 1953 when it no longer fitted the politically orchestrated campaign. Since then, it has been republished during times of ideological change, most 4 Ivan Shevtsov, Tlia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1964), 5. 5 Ibid. 6 Peter Singer famously made this connection in his Animal Liberation (New York: Harper Collins, 1975). 7 On Jews as vermin and insects see Geller, Bestiarium Iudaicum.

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notably after Nikita Khrushchev’s curbing of the Thaw and his ousting in 1964. The novel continues to be published by patriotic and nationalistic alliances. In 1964 it was published as a roman-pamflet—“the novel-pamphlet”—leading an attack on the new aesthetic trends in painting and sculpture. Jewish artists and art critics were shown as propagators of abstract art which was in opposition to the principles of Soviet socialist realism. The word “thaw” features in the novel, showing that Shevtsov had updated the text since its first version in the 1950s. The promotional blurb in this 1964 edition states that the novelpamphlet echoes the recent decision of the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to put a stop to the bourgeois tendencies of Soviet art. This development was the result of Khrushchev’s infamous outrage at the Manezh art exhibition in Moscow in December 1962.8 While his outrage was ostensibly a reaction to abstract art and its rejection of the principles of socialist realism, it was also covertly antisemitic as many of the non-conformist artists were Jewish. Strikingly, Khrushchev attacked not only the sculptures and paintings in the exhibition; he also made derogatory remarks about Western music. He described jazz as “cacophonic,” thus making an ideological attack on an artform that originated in the West. Some of Khrushchev’s remarks were overtly racist and homophobic. As the music of African Americans, jazz, he stated, could have no appeal to the Soviet people, while he accused representations of the body as seen in the Manezh paintings and sculptures of having homoerotic connotations. Of special relevance for the focus of my discussion is the fact that Khrushchev spoke about the “feelings” of repulsion and disgust which such art evokes, thus framing the discussion from an embodied perspective. The phonogram of Khrushchev’s comments includes aggressive statements declaring that there is no place in the Soviet Union for the participating artists and that they are free to leave the country and move to the West.9 Symptomatically, Khrushchev’s discourse creates a nexus between the embodied perception of art through the senses and feelings, and the body politics of the Other. For him, artists who perceive 8 The young artists whose works were exhibited at the Manezh exhibition were part of the group Novaia real′nost′ (New Reality). On the political consequences of this exhibition see Elena Kornetchuk, “From the 1917 Revolution to Khrushchev’s Thaw,” in Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956–1986, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 36–41. 9 On the phonogram of Khrushchev’s attack on December 2, 1962 see Vladimir Tol′ts, “Dekabr′ 62. Manezh. 50 let spustia,” Radio Svoboda (December 1, 2012), https://www.svoboda.org/a/24786334.html, accessed January 16, 2020.

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and feel differently form a foreign body within the Soviet Union and for that reason can leave the country as the ultimate aliens. Khrushchev’s references to the cacophonic music and abstract art are reflected in the 1964 version of Shevtsov’s novel, which conveys the overall tone of intolerance towards the embodied Other (ethnic, gendered, and sexualized). Shevtsov followed the official ideological debates in the newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia, where the campaign against formalism and abstract art was raging at the time. He was also part of the inner circle of patriotic Russian writers and artists, and was familiar with the ideological and political undercurrents pervading intellectual groups. By calling his novel a “pamphlet,” he declared his ideological affiliation, making clear that his literary characters concealed real-life personalities.10

The Soviet Jewess in the Arty Drawing Room In Aphid, Shevtsov presents a Jewish woman called Lina who plays a destructive role in the professional life of a talented Russian artist. Symptomatically, when Lina first appears the narrator ironically observes that he was tempted to describe her entry as that of a flea. From here, the species imagery becomes more graphic, alluding to blood-sucking types that, in turn, evoke the rich cultural mythology surrounding Jews’ materiality. Lina’s physical appearance is typified by a range of distinctive features: she is of delicate build with dark hair and a porcelain-like face, yet her fragile appearance is deceptive. While she acts as an innocent “soul,” her plan is to marry the talented Russian painter Pchelkin and so climb the necessary social ladder. Significantly, most of the Russian men can resist her charms—the fact that Pchelkin falls for Lina affirms his weakness. This motif implies an intertextual typology with Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, in which the all-Russian Aleksandr Ivanovich does not find Zoya attractive. In Aphid, “proper” Russian men who are as patriotic as Andrei Bely’s protagonist do not succumb to the charms of Jewish women. Lina’s name, the narrator suggests, can be an abbreviation of Magdalina (Russian for Magdalena). This link between the Jewish woman and the Biblical sinner creates a line of hereditary continuity between ancient women of “bad character” and contemporary Jewish women. The fact that Lina has a bad influence on the painter suggests that Jews have a destructive influence on Russian art. Lina even authors an article in which she defends 10 V. V. Abashev, “Iazykom kvartirnoi skloki: desakralizatsiia Sovetskogo iskusstva v romane I. Shevtsova Tlia,” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta (2017): 1–9.

CHAPTER SIX    Aphids and Other Undesirables

abstract art and asks her husband to sign it. The article is published in a central newspaper which allows the dissemination of these damaging ideas among Soviet people. The other Jewish women in the novel also contribute to the corruption of Russian artists’ tastes in art. With seductive foreign names such as Diana and Vicky, they take part in sophisticated conversations about the trends in visual art. Diana, the daughter of a famous art critic, influences the Russian artists who visit her father’s apartment. While Lina has a porcelain-white complexion, Diana is “olive-skinned” [smuglianka].11 Both descriptions use skin color as a marker of ethnic differences, while, at the same time, amplifying the Jewish women’s attractiveness. Shevtsov’s description of Diana evokes the behavior of a seductive coquette in the boudoir, famously explored by Chekhov in Mire. Like Chekhov’s Susanna, she reclines on a velvet sofa wearing a bodyhugging gown made of fine jersey fabric. Shevtsov uses the sensuous qualities of such fabrics, as velvet and jersey to characterize Diana’s sensuous nature. Like Susanna, she is smart and intelligent, and engages in clever conversations with the male visitors. Thin and languid, she is also opiniated, epitomizing a tantalizing lure and ability to debauch [rastlit′] Russian male artists. While in Chekhov and Bely’s writing Susanna and Zoya live and function on the periphery, in Shevtsov’s novel Lina and Diana have moved into the geographical and intellectual center. Situated in Moscow they are part of fashionable and influential circles, where they propagate subversive ideas and tastes in Soviet material culture. Symptomatically, the conversation in the apartment in Moscow veers towards reproductions of American abstract paintings. One such painting represents the war through a shapeless red bloodlike spot. While a patriotic Russian artist defends Socialist realism in its depictions of the battlefields, the Jewish protagonists admire the painting with the red mark. In the ensuing discussion, the red shape is said to represent symbolist methodology. In this way, Shevtsov covertly uses the symbolism of blood for his own purposes—to evoke associations between Jews and their liking of blood. The epigraph helps the reader to make this connection. Significantly, the non-Jewish artists are appalled by the shapeless red spot on the canvas. This affective reaction attests to the embodied differences between the Jews and the Russians.

11 Shevtsov, Tlia, 75.

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Jews Destroying and Subverting Russian Material Culture Shevtsov thus uses this scene to comment on the particular tastes of Jews in relation to art, which are biologically and socially essentialized. While he opposes art, which does not conform to the principles of socialist realism, his rhetoric is reminiscent of Nazi narratives of degenerate Jewish art. His attacks on Jewish tastes in art include polemics around contemporary music. His patriotic Russian protagonists do not appreciate “cacophonic” sounds of music. This wording echoes Khrushchev’s discourse at the Manezh. The motif also looks back to Andrei Bely’s attacks on the “Semitic music,” which Bely had explained in phylogenetic terms, as I showed in an earlier discussion in this book. While Bely conducted this discussion in the pre-Soviet period, Shevtsov presents his discourse in the post-Holocaust era at a time when Wagnerian views on music have been seen as a contributing factor to the Nazi attack on “degenerate” Jewish music. The historical context of Shevtsov’s polemics is linked to the renewed attacks on formalism in art and literature in the early 1960s which marked the end of the Thaw. In this context, Shevtsov creates a veiled satire on the famous Russian Jewish writer and influential personality, Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967).12 Ehrenburg was the author of the celebrated story “The Thaw” (1955), which gave name to the period of new ideological freedom after Stalin’s death in 1953. In this story, Ehrenburg raises the issue of ideological limitations in Soviet art, depicting a character who accuses his more talented rival artist of formalism. In Aphid, Shevtsov caricatures Ehrenburg in the fictional character Barselonsky (formed from the word Barcelona). Barselonsky, a powerful Jewish artist who has lived in France, is presented as a propagator of formalism in art, a painter with a cosmopolitan background whose tastes are distinctly different from those of ethnically Russian artists of proletarian roots. Barselonsky is indifferent to the notions of patriotism and class in art, and his high status among the Soviet cultural elites makes him a dangerous propagator of subversive views. This pastiche exemplifies Shevtsov’s exploitation of society’s anxieties around political infiltration by charismatic Jewish intellectuals. Notably, Jewish intellectuals’ tastes in art are essentialized as divergent and alien. In line with the message of Khrushchev’s declarations at the Manezh exhibition, Shevtsov conflates deviating tastes in art with embodied differences. In the different versions 12 On Ehrenburg’s life and work in the context of his privileged status in the Soviet Union see Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

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of his novel he exploits two historical contexts: the 1950s’ version is aligned to the campaign against cosmopolitans; the 1960s’ version is grounded in the retrograde tendencies against new art and the curbing of the liberalism of the historical Thaw. Shevtsov’s novel overtly disseminates the view that Jews have a corrupting influence on Russian tastes in art, and propagandistically promotes the postThaw Soviet narrative that aligns Jewish personalities with decadent avantgarde tendencies in culture, visual art and music. Moreover, his narrative plot builds on the perceived link between the Jewish corruption of Soviet art and the Russian body politic. In Shevtsov’s work Jews become a collective alien body in Russia. The fact that the novel is promoted in contemporary Russia by the rightwing patriotic groups attests to the longevity of cultural constructs of embodied differences and dangers ascribed to these divergencies by the dominant culture. Such texts have become part of the canon of stereotypes of the Jews and they coexist with and feed into postmodern conspiracist plots investigated in the next chapter.

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Abject Bodies: Tactility, Dissection and Body Rites in Postmodernist Fiction The power of the Golden calf will be destroyed by pure Blood. Blood unites while faith separates. —A. Ivanov-Sukharevsky, “My Faith is Russism” (1997).1

T

he most stable mythology surrounding the Jew’s non-normative interaction with the physical world relates to the blood-related rituals. It is this mythology that is employed in contemporary conspiracist narratives. This chapter explores the (re)emergence of the theme of dissection and tactility as ritual performances involving the senses of touch and olfaction through the context of ethnicity and gender in the work of Alexander Prokhanov (b. 1938). Prokhanov’s numerous literary awards reflect his popularity across the broad social spectra of Russian society: from culture-consuming laymen to the cultural élites.2 His novels Gospodin Geksogen (Mr. Hexogen, 2001) and Teplokhod “Iosif Brodskii” (The Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky,” 2006) juxtapose rituals of dissection committed by Jewish men and women, on one hand, and Russian men, on the other.3 The Jewish characters typically perform dissections of A. Ivanov-Sukharevskii, “Moia vera rusizm,” Era Rossii 1 (1997): 3–10. His 2002 novel Gospodin Geksogen (Mr. Hexogen) won that year’s National Best Seller competition. He also won the prestigious literary Bunin Prize in 2009, the aim of which is “to revive the best traditions of Russian national literature.” See “Obladatelem Buninskoi premii stal Aleksandr Prokhanov,” Kommersant, October 23, 2009, 1. 3 Edmund Griffiths, Alexander Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2007). Rosalind Marsh describes Mr. Hexogen as a “new political novel.” Rosalind Marsh, Literature, History and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia, 1991–2006 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 335. See also Marina Aptekman, “Kabbalah, Judeo-Masonic Myth, and Post-Soviet 1 2

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human bodies while the Russian characters dissect bodies of animals which were hunted in male-bonding gatherings.4 In application to the mythology around Jewish rituals, Laurence Hoffman stresses that each event must be appraised in its specific cultural context.5 Current context differs from the blood libel narratives of the Beilis Affair explored earlier in this book. Writing about the role of blood-related mythology in the promulgation of antisemitism in contemporary Europe, Robert Fine observes that rituals inform the stereotypes of the Other and, despite “the phantasmagorical representations of the other,” help to identify the enemy and divide society into distinct camps.6 This notion of phantasmagorical representation is particularly relevant in the case of Prokhanov’s fiction which includes elements of fantasy literature. As is the case with most constructs relating to stereotypes of race and ethnicity, pathological attitudes toward the body intersect with constructs of deviancy in gender and sexuality. The lust for blood and bodily mutilations, for example, has been interpreted as manifestations of a pathological drive to achieve sexual gratification.7 It is this theme of mutilation, dissection and vivisection that Prokhanov exploits in his novels, using inflections of the Literary Discourse: From Political Tool to Virtual Parody,” The Russian Review 64, no. 4 (2006): 657–681; Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov,” The Russian Review 69 (2010): 477–503; Eliot Borenstein, “Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia,” Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 3 (2004): 462–483. On the return of the interest in the undead see Aleksandr Etkind, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (2009): 631–658. 4 Robert N. McCauley, “Philosophical Naturalism and the Cognitive Approach to Ritual,” in Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin Schillbrack (New York: Routledge, 2004), 251–272. 5 Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Menzel notes that the occult has always been used for purposes ranging from the benignly spiritual to the totalitarian or fascist. Birgit Menzel, The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (Munich: Otto Sagner. 2011). See also Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Political Implications of the Early TwentiethCentury Occult Revival,” in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 379–418; Holly DeNio Stephens, “The Occult in Russia Today,” in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 357–378; Mikhail Epshtein, Na granitsakh kul′tur. Rossiiskoe— Amerikanskoe—Sovetskoe (New York: Slovo, 1995). 6 Robert Fine, “Fighting with Phantoms: A Contribution to the Debate on anti-Semitism in Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (2009): 478. 7 Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Dover Publications, 1993).

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“Ripper” trope in the behavior of Jewish men and women.8 Commenting on scenes depicting blood in Russian literature, Olga Matich suggests that such scenes can serve as a “displaced sexual subtext.” She demonstrates that dissected body parts are “rhetorically poised on the cusp between naturalist and decadent writing,” and that “the streaming blood, while naturalistic” is used as a “tainted fetish object.”9 In his fiction, Prokhanov juxtaposes the pathological need for dissection and the sense of touch among Jews with the tactility of Russian men. He also uses the notion of the special unity of, and by, blood among members of the Russian ethnos.10

A Jewish Witch as the She-Ripper: Sadistic Inner Organ Divination The conspiracy plot in the novel The Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky” involves an American and Jewish plan to sabotage the strength of the Russian nation. Their scheme threatens the body politic of the Russian ethnicity as it targets the genetic composition of the Russian people. The novel focuses on the biological human body which, at the same time, has a mystical meaning, serving as the seat of special knowledge. The human body is thus endowed with both material and mystical value in line with the neo-paganist tendencies in the occult revival discourse. Within his postmodernist phantasmagoria, in which ethnic Jews perform dissections and abortions, Prokhanov creates a Jewish female character attempting through advanced divination rites to access the secret information carried by the chief protagonist, the patriotic Esaul. In the divination ritual, the woman uses her “magic” hands to perform a literal penetration into the Russian man’s body. The witch’s name, Tolstova-Katz, indicates her Jewish origins and bears a veiled allusion to the well-known contemporary woman writer Tatyana Tolstaya. Tolstaya’s democratic political position and partly Jewish origins are mixed in this collage. The figure of a Jewish witch of political orientation brings together a number of narratives related to the figure of the Jewish 8 In the BBC documentary “Jack the Ripper—the First Serial Killer” (2006), dir. Dan Oliver, a forensic psychologist from New Scotland Yard, Laura Richards, dispels the myth that Jack the Ripper had the knowledge of animal or human anatomy and argues that he could not have been a butcher or medic, as has been previously believed. On the role of the media in the promulgation of racial stereotypes in the case of Jack the Ripper see John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racial Politics and Media (New York: Routledge, 1998). 9 Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 40–41. Matich shows that Tolstoy and Rozanov used vivisection and blood to denote pathology. 10 See a discussion in Henrietta Mondry, “Blood Rituals and Ethnicity in Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Fiction,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 27, nos. 1–2 (2013): 1–34.

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women in the European imagination. As somebody who is capable of cutting into the body of a politically important personality, she evokes the narrative of the two Jewish women, Judith and Salome, who, in the Biblical tradition, are implicated in murders of important men. These are much-revisited narratives implicating Jewish women in politically motivated murders carried out in a particularly gruesome way. The motif of the Jewess involved in the high politics of the state through bloody murder has received in late modernity a new, sexualized dimension. Judiths and Salomes function in literature and visual arts as the intersection between the dangers of political betrayal and voyeuristically exploitative carnal excess.11 Both are phallic women, and Tolstova-Katz’s phallic hands which penetrate the body of the Russian male character link her with these transhistorical prototypical constructs of the Jewess.12 In line with the kaleidoscopic ménages employed by postmodernist reworkings of the old narratives, Prokhanov’s Tolstova-Katz embodies a number of intersecting and complementary narratives. As such, she also functions as a female variant of Jack the Ripper—a possibility which has been recently explored in Western popular culture on the grounds that a strong woman with some knowledge of anatomy could have committed the murders in Whitechapel.13 Supporting this narrative in terms of the logistics of the crime is the sudden disappearance of the perpetrator from the crime scene— as a woman who knew the victims personally, the Ripper could have easily blended into the crowd. The description of the ritual penetration performed by Tolstova-Katz brings together into a single collage the techniques of the Ripper and those of divination operations. The first attempt to find the secret “plan” hidden inside Esaul’s body involves Tolstova-Katz using her constantly metamorphizing hands that she hides inside her own body. The scene makes explicit the sexed connotations of the act: The transparent hand penetrated into Esaul’s sexual private parts. Carefully rubbing his testicles with her fingers, her hand rumpled the prostate gland to make the secret-containing particle eject with the white semen. Esaul was trying to stop an approaching sensual spasm 11 See Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 386–401. 12 On Salome and Judith as phallic women in Christian interpretative tradition see Ann-Jill Levine, “A Jewess more and/or Less,” in Judaism since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (London: Routledge, 1997), 145–158. 13 “Was Jack the Ripper a Woman?,” History.Com Staff (August 15, 2012), https://www.history.com/news/was-jack-the-ripper-a-woman, accessed February 25, 2019.

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The second attempt similarly involves the use of hands for haptic pleasure in the magic search inside Esaul’s body: She unbuttoned Esaul’s shirt and opened his muscular chest covered by dark hair. She touched and caressed his chest, blowing tenderly on it; her warm breath penetrated the body. She put her hands together as if for the prayer and made a line in the middle of his chest. Then suddenly she sharply entered the chest with her hands. She pushed her hands deeper and deeper, opening the chest widely. . . . The scarlet inner organs became seen as well as the pellicle, which looked like a mother-of-pearl.15

Tolstova-Katz reaches with her fingers right under the heart of Esaul, but her search for the hidden secret is unsuccessful. Once she touches a small “bead” (businka), which is hiding the secret code, she receives a mighty shock. The shock is both material and mystical because it is generated by “galactic forces.”16 These scenes bring together intersecting multilayered narratives. One most graphic narrative is the fairy tale motif of the struggle between dark and light forces. The dark forces are equated with Jews: the ripping apart of the victim’s body, the tactile pleasure and blood-dripping hands of the dissecting subject are overtly evocative of the Ripper’s acts. Another layer serves a voyeuristic and pornographic function, so building on the representations of Salome’s dances or the visual images of Judith holding the head of Holofernes. The difference to the last narrative, however, lies in the fact that it is a Russian man’s body that is presented as handsome and physically seductive, while the Jewish witch is shown as physically repulsive. She does, however, have the ability to create the allusion of a physically seductive woman. One such guise is that of the olive-skinned beauty from the Scriptures, the Queen of Sheba. In this guise, Prokhanov narrates, the Jewish witch attempts to seduce Esaul. As voyeuristically erotic as the description of the exotic beauty is, Tolstova-Katz does not succeed in seducing Esaul because he is protected by a superior higher power. 14 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Teplokhod “Iosif Brodskii” (Ekaterinburg: Ul′tra. Kul′tura, 2006), 209. 15 Ibid., 211. 16 Ibid., 212.

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Prokhanov evokes the theme of Jewish women lusting for gentile men because of the imagined lack of sexual potency of Jewish men. This motif coexisted in the European imagination with the notion of the carnality of the Jews. In Freud’s famous interpretation, European men projected the fear of castration on to Jewish men because they associated circumcision with castration.17 Importantly, Freud saw in this fear the psychological roots of antisemitism. The body of the Russian man, Esaul, has special mystical value, serving as the living seat of a superior power which guards and protects the Russian nation and its genetic and political future. Within this typology, the Russian body is the microcosm connected with the Universe and cosmic powers. This magico-eschatological connection, I propose, functions as a motif which mirrors the idea of the Jews as the chosen people. It is for this reason that Prokhanov calls Esaul’s secret-concealing body “the holy of holies” (sviataia sviatykh), so evoking Old Testament vocabulary.18 On the level of the novel’s conspiracist plot, the battle between Esaul and Tolstova-Katz acquires a historical underpinning. Esaul is a self-confessed Jew-hater who views Russia’s destiny as endangered by Jews. A Don Cossack, he remembers the plight of the Don farmers in the 1930s who suffered from Soviet collectivisation. In Esaul’s recollections of his childhood, Jewish political activists are the main perpetrators in the devastation of the Cossack communities. It is this “historical” memory that both drives his patriotic zeal and makes the Jewish woman biologically repulsive.

Touching, Dissecting, Rubbing and Borrowing Fluids: the Perverted Senses of Trotsky’s Jewish Great-Grandson In The Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky” Prokhanov’s choice of name for the main conspirator, Slovozaitsev, is highly suggestive. The name alludes to the famous contemporary fashion designer, Slava Zaitsev. In selecting a dress designer’s name for the conspirator, Prokhanov reveals his dislike for an industry which stands for the shallow materiality of post-Soviet society. In the novel, Slovozaitsev is depicted as a crypto-Jew whose real name is Saul Zaisman. A 17 “The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root [Wurzel] of anti-Semitism.” Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10, 36. For an interpretation of implications for race and gender see Jay Geller, “The Godfather of Psychoanalysis: Circumcision, Antisemitism, Homosexuality, and Freud’s ‘Fighting Jew,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (1999): 355–385. 18 Prokhanov, Teplokhod, 213.

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scientist by profession, he happens to be Leon Trotsky’s great-grandson, born in the United States, who came to Russia on a special conspiratorial mission to physically resurrect Trotsky’s body, which has been secretly buried in Russia by the Trotskyites.19 In this novel, Stalin has ordered Trotsky’s assassination because he knows that Trotsky holds the scientific secret of the genome that can change the genetic code of the nation. Stalin’s struggle against Trotsky is thus the struggle against a Trotskyite/Jewish conspiracy to change the genetic nature of the Russian people. Trotsky’s literal resurrection has now become possible as a result of Slovozaitsev’s scientific discoveries; it is the mission of the Russian patriots to prevent him from doing this. Slovozaitsev is portrayed as a vivisectionist with pathological tendencies, one of a new generation of Jew who infuses his scientific knowledge with sadistic drives. In one macabre scene he uses human blood for the purposes of self-rejuvenation. This episode evokes the idea of a special power of blood, his act of rejuvenation revealing an uncanny resemblance to ritual murder: He took out a small scalpel. He forcefully inserted it into the woman’s chest. Blood burst out, but he skillfully pressed the artery and the blood stopped. He pressed the scalpel and pulled it out. The tissue opened and in the long cutting there became visible tenderly pink, breathing lungs, a big and dark heart, bluish stomach, and smooth, raspberry-colored liver. . . . He pulled the bubbling bag of lungs, which was tender-pink in color like mother-of-pearls. . . . He took out the pulsating heart with its arteries. He put it into the plastic bag which he then hung on the string. . . . Thus, in a few minutes there were liver, kidneys, spleen, gall bladder, and pancreas hanging on the string. All the woman’s organs hung in various plastic bags.20

Having performed this disembowelment, Slovozaitsev packs all the organs neatly away. He then inserts his own body into the body of the young woman, now empty of intestines but full of “black blood,” and rubs his genitals against the womb—the only inner organ that he has left inside. This act has a reviving effect on his body: he receives life “impulses” from “the molecules” and blood 19 Etkind identifies the motif of the return of historical personalities of the Stalin era as monsters in post-Soviet fiction as “magic historicism.” Etkind, “Stories of the Undead,” 631. 20 Prokhanov, Teplokhod, 420–421.

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of the woman’s body. He is also sexually aroused by his contact with the bloodfilled womb against which he rubs his “underdeveloped testicles” and “embryonic” penis.21 On completion of the act, he washes off the woman’s blood in a shower, and puts the original organs back into her body. After this, he uses an electronic tool to heal the cut wounds and conceal his operation. The woman wakes up, unaware of the procedure that has been performed on her. This ritual is a provocative invocation of the Jack the Ripper myth, albeit reworked in the stylistics of contemporary pop culture. Whereas Jack the Ripper was alleged to be a kosher butcher whose method of disembowelment of women’s bodies reflected his professional occupation,22 Slovozaitsev’s sadistic act bears the signature of his profession as a scientist. A contemporary version of Jack the Ripper, he has the technologically advanced equipment which enables him to conceal his crime. While Jack the Ripper cut out women’s organs and derived sexual gratification from this ritual, Slovozaitsev gets the same pleasure from his ritual. The implication is that, having achieved social integration into society, today’s Jack the Ripper no longer looks for his victims in the dark streets of poor suburbs infested by immigrants, but rather in the élite circles to which he belongs. Nevertheless, it is the same basic sadistic instincts that drove the Ripper which unmistakably continue to manifest themselves in Slovozaitsev’s act.23 The fact that Prokhanov describes the dissected woman’s body with what appears to be voyeuristic pleasure shows his skilful manipulation of the power of the text to involve the senses. He stimulates the reader’s engrossment in this voyeuristic process by describing organs in a seductive way: tender-pink, mother-of-pearl, raspberry-colored—these are epithets often given to food items and, as such, stimulate the “appetite.” While Slovozaitsev receives sexual gratification from his act, Prokhanov manipulates his readers to observe the orgy. As the author, he exploits both the voyeuristic desires of his readers and the resulting feeling of guilt which leads to the need to project their fantasies on to the “racial” Other. In another conspiratorial and sado-scientific experiment, Slovozaitsev aborts a Russian woman’s child because he knows that the embryo contains a mystical power to revitalize the Russian people. To evoke the pathological 21 Ibid., 421. 22 Carol Davidson, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (London: Palgrave, 2004). 23 Rank describes Jack the Ripper’s sadism in the context of theorizing the trauma of birth and the desire to return to the womb. Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Dover Publications, 1993).

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dimensions of the experiment, Prokhanov makes Slovozaitsev mince the embryo and use the bloody mash in his rejuvenation sessions. This act brings together pathological attitudes to blood and tactility, blurring the boundaries between scientific experimentation and arcane rites. It also parallels the European blood libel mythology related to Jews using Christian children’s blood for ritual purposes. These imagined plots vary, from using blood for baking matzot to the gruesome placing of a victim into a wooden barrel with needles and nails to create a pulp from a child’s body.24 Elaborating on this mythology, Prokhanov introduces the motif of injecting fluid into the body in a form of arcane rejuvenation procedure. Injected rather than ingested, the bloody mass has to be handled, so presenting an image of a haptic Jew who is simultaneously primitive and scientifically advanced.

Constructing Normative Tactility in Blood-Related Rituals of Russian Men While Prokhanov’s Jewish protagonists satisfy their pathological needs through human bodies, his Russian men engage in hunting and animaleating rites. These are performed as quasi-pagan animistic rituals. In Mr. Hexogen Prokhanov uses a hunting scene involving the butchering of a killed animal followed by a feast to demonstrate the bonding rites of Federal Security Service (FSB) conspirators. One of the men is shown to experience a pleasurable olfactory sensation from the smell of fresh animal blood. The fact that the Russian protagonist experiences this olfactory response from the blood of an animal, rather than the blood of a human, serves as a boundary demarcating the Jewish reaction to blood from the Russian reaction. This establishes a hierarchy privileging the healthy primitivism of the Russian man above the pathological archaic nature of Jews. The hunting scene is depicted as an authentic Russian hunt. It takes place in a landscape which glorifies Russian nature, while the Russian method of preparing the animal for cooking adds to the scene’s ethnic character. Read against the blood-dripping hands of the Jewish protagonists, the scene serves as an antithesis to the Jews’ unhealthy attitude to blood: Russian men do not intake animal blood; rather, they rinse their hands of any “ichor and mucus” (sukrov′ 24 For this belief and pictorial representations in Poland and Ukraine see Magda Teter, “The Sandomierz Paintings of Ritual Murder as Lieux De Memoire,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, ed. Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017), 253–277.

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i sliz′)25 after completing their preparation of the animals’ body. While in The Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky” Slovozaitsev acts out his pathological impulses on a woman’s body, in Mr. Hexogen the Russian protagonists sublimate their sexual desires and touch the inner organs of the hunted animal, the she-elk. The two scenes in the two novels create a parallelism and function as intertexts which define a polemical dimension of the theme of blood, olfaction, and tactility. Prokhanov’s protagonists in the FSB group in Mr. Hexogen claim that, having studied the way in which Jews function by reading the Hebrew Bible and analyzing their political behavior, they are now in control of the situation. Moreover, they have strategically adopted the Jews’ methods. In this reasoning the dual nature of the relationship with the Other manifests itself through the processes of projection and appropriation. What is being appropriated, however, is in fact the returned projection, the return of the phantom fantasized by the subject himself.26

The Political Implications of Ethnic Senses Prokhanov uses human senses, such as olfaction and tactility, to denote ethnic differences. This categorisation of senses, I propose, is incorporated into his revival of neo-paganism.27 In terms of hierarchies of senses, olfaction and tactility occupy a lower level on the scale and are often used as markers of primitive cultures. Yet, in the case of Prokhanov, this very primitivity becomes a matter of taxonomy. The primitivism of the Jews is given pathological connotations while the primitivism of the Slavs is seen as a link to an historical past which is celebrated. In the formulation of Sander Gilman, in European discourses of modernity touch became the sense associated “with the irrational, with the direct, unreflected, physically proximate comprehension of the world.”28 In Laura Gowing’s formulation, a politics of touch translates into hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity. Those in positions of power, such 25 Aleksandr Prokhanov, Gospodin Geksogen (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 146. 26 See a discussion of the mechanism of projection in Alan Dundes, “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion,” in The Blood Libel Legend: A Case Book of Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 336–376. 27 On the notion of different blood types in Jews and Russians in contemporary antisemitic discourse see Vadim Rossman, Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2002). 28 Sander Gilman, Goethe’s Touch: Touching, Sexuality, and Seeing (New Orleans: Graduate School of Tulane University, 1988).

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as scientists and medical doctors, have the freedom to touch others, including women, both in public and in private.29 In Prokhanov’s fiction, Tolstova-Katz and Slovozaitsev’s acts of touching are shown as abuse of their professional power. In rubbing himself against the organs of a woman, Slovozaitsev enacts a mix of primitive impulses and performance of power directed against a Russian woman. He uses his professional power as a scientist to perform an act which combines medical dissection and sexual exploitation. His touching and rubbing also relate to discourses around pollution and infection, which function as an interface between the material and the symbolic. Contrary to this pathologizing imagery, the Russian haptic primitivism in the scenes of animal hunt and dissection is appraised positively because it is seen to contribute to the collective good of Russian ethnicity.30

The Jew’s Body in the Abject Performance of Resurrection In The Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky” one of Slovozaitsev’s most striking rituals is aimed at the resurrection of his dead ancestor, Leon Trotsky. As a selfproclaimed Fedorovian, Prokhanov believes in the power of science to achieve immortality.31 Nikolai Fedorov famously maintained that the generations of the dead can be revived by scientific efforts. Fittingly for the wider content of this book, it is a Jewish scientist and magician who attempts to perform the resurrection of the historical personalities. Slovozaitsev’s ritual combines the latest laser technology with an obscene ritualistic performance, including masturbation and the sprinkling of his semen on to the grave of his greatgrandfather. The act of attempted resurrection takes place in a cemetery. This is strikingly in keeping with the Fedorovian belief in the possibility of scientifically reviving molecules of past generations buried in the ground.32 The setting thus becomes an interface between the material and the symbolic. The haptic act of masturbation can be viewed as a pastiche in its use of 29 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003). 30 Widdis shows that after the October Revolution art productions involved complex relationships between condemnation and fascination with primitive senses, especially with the sense of touch because it was inseparable from making objects which were devoid of commercialism. Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017). 31 Prokhanov’s essayistic writing is full of patriotic slogans praising Russian scientific achievements, and his editorials in the newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) often contain utopian futurity. 32 Fedorov explained Russian people’s special care of ancestral graves by their belief in physical resurrection. N. N. Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela (Moscow: Mysl′, 1982).

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quasi-theological allusions to the theme of wasting “the seed.”33 Notably, the seed is not wasted because it can help to achieve an act of rebirth, or the second coming of his famous ancestor. Appropriately for Prokhanov’s ideological stance, Slovozaitsev’s attempt fails because the powers of prayers recited by a Russian monk prove stronger than those of the Jewish scientist-wizard. This motif of eschatological rivalry between Jews and a Christian Orthodox monk can be interpreted as a postmodernist transhistorical reworking of the theme of uncertainty around the place and understanding of resurrection, started by Dostoevsky. As discussed in chapter three, Dostoevsky was moved by a real-life scene in a cemetery in Minsk in which Christian priests and Jewish rabbis recited prayers. Prokhanov’s cemetery scene is a far cry from the pathos of Dostoevsky’s narrative “But Long live Brotherhood!” about the “Jewish question” in the Diary of the Writer.34 The “but” in Dostoevsky’s title, however, signals an ambivalence that is paralleled by the liminality of the graveyard. Prokhanov’s approach to the topic in the cemetery scene may be odious, but it reveals ongoing anxieties around the life and afterlife of the body of the Christian Self and the Jewish Other. Scholars of fantasy literature have demonstrated that these texts are dependent on realistic literature, in that they are based on the reader’s ability to recognize a commonly accepted world.35 Prokhanov’s readers will have no difficulty in recognizing motifs and images borrowed from the Russian literary canon. At the same time, fantasy literature does not require the logic expected in realistic texts. Contemporary fantasy texts often involve a quest of some kind. In most instances, this implies a physical quest, but it is also a symbolic one, directed inwards in the search for meaning and identity. In line with conventions of fantasy literature, Prokhanov’s Russian protagonists are on a mission to save the Russian nation within its (imagined) physical parameters. But protagonists in fantasy texts are confronted not only with the ugliest parts of the world but also with the deepest, ugliest part of their selves.36 I have maintained that the construct of the Jew is a material-semiotic formation, often a projection of 33 The Biblical story of Onan who interrupts his coitus and wastes his seed on the ground has been a subject of theological discussions across religions. 34 As indicated in chapter three, the title of the subchapter “No da zdravstvuet bratstvo!” is in the discussion of the “Jewish Question.” F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877 god, in PSS, vol. 25, 86–88. 35 T. E. Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality (New York: Macmillan Press, 1982). 36 Kath Filmer, Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth-Century Fantasy Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992).

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inner anxieties of the writing subject. In some cases, writing and self-searching help the writer to overcome inner “demons”, albeit in a fragmented way. This process of overcoming is intended to be simultaneously transposed to the readers of fantasy texts, as they too are encouraged to confront their inner selves. Prokhanov’s fiction, however, is further complicated in its adherence to conspiracist fiction. Current empirical studies on “narrative persuasion”, or the impact of narratives on beliefs and attitudes, reveal a correlation between former beliefs and the impact of new conspiracy plots.37 An individual’s prior knowledge and attitudes influence the processing of a narrative. The construct of the Jew in modern Russian history and culture, for example, is strongly linked to conspiracist narratives of the past, most famously epitomized by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903, 1911). In Soviet times, the Jewish conspiracy plot culminated in the Stalin-sponsored “The Doctors’ Plot” (1952), when mainly Jewish medical professionals were accused of spying for the West and systematically sabotaging the health of Soviet patients. The fabricated plot was described by historians as “intelligence phantasmagoria,” but it finds its reflection in Prokhanov’s texts where it is enmeshed with popular post-Soviet beliefs in Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.38 The Jewish-American subplot, as well as Slovozaitsev’s profession, are overt references to these conspiracist narratives.

***** Like the Wandering Jew himself, the Jew’s body appears in the macabre tales of Gogol, as a phantom Jewish Achilles in the urban Gothic in Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, among the carnival masks of the Semitic Asiatic conspirators in Bely’s St. Petersburg and, finally, in the Moscow cemetery in Prokhanov’s novel. It emerges and reemerges in recycled mythology and politics of blood libel and cruelty to animals, as well as among the vodka distilleries aimed to weaken the Russian nation. Simultaneously gendered and transgendered, this body seduces and threatens to contaminate the Russian ethnos. It is both historical and transhistorical. When it appears as a Jewess, it embodies biologically the lineage of phallic yet seductive women—Salomes, Judiths, 37 See Kenzo Nera et al., “‘These are Just Stories, Mulder’. Exposure to Conspiracist Fiction does not Produce Narrative Persuasion,” Frontiers of Psychology, May 23, 2018, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00684/full. 38 See Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London: John Murray, 2004), 235; and Keith Livers, Conspiracy Cultures: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2020).

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and the naked women like Susanna. The Jew’s paradoxically stable and flexible physical features are epitomized in the concept of the Wandering Jew itself, dubbed in Russian the Eternal Jew (Vechnyi zhid). In my readings, this construct often relates to the eternal riddle of the body itself, that of life/death/afterlife and the competition around knowing “the secret.” A part of this secret was imagined by Vladimir Solovyov as “holy corporeality” and by Dostoevsky as a rejuvenating ointment with a formula known to the Jewish community. Prokhanov’s conspiracy plots rework and incorporate elements of previous narratives, making his readers respond to the cultural signs, motifs and images.39 At the same time, they lay a foundation for further recycling and responses, which come from writers of different cultural backgrounds, including those positioned on the receiving end. It is for this reason that Prokhanov’s fantasy images of the Jew’s body in the interactions with the physical world are a fitting (dis)closure of the material covered in part one as well as a transition to the discussions in part two.

39 For a reworking of the vampire myth in current Eurasian discourses see Dina Khapaeva, “The Gothic Future of Eurasia,” Russian Literature 106 (2019): 79–108.

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t was stated in the Introduction that the quotidian becomes the sphere in which Russian/Soviet Jewish writers reflect on their selfhoods. Regarding acculturation and assimilation, writers develop complex and paradoxical relationships with the microcosm of the home and the macrocosm of the dominant culture. It is for this reason that most of the examples in part two of this book relate to the domain of the family home with its affective intergenerational communications, interactions and practices. The conflict between traditional embodiments and new societal developments was particularly pronounced in the years of dramatic change brought about by the October Revolution. These changes attracted the young people who desired to join the new society that promised equality between the various nationalities of the Russian Empire. With the traditional beliefs and practices under attack, some of the new Soviet Jewish writing emerging in the 1920s and 1930s had an overt propagandistic character. This writing was driven by the grand narrative of transformation. The quest to change the old way of life manifested itself in an urgent desire to change the physical constitution of the “old” body of the Pale, a body which in itself presented an interface of the material-semiotic. Under the old regime, this body had been kept within the geo-economic bounds, weakened by the limitations imposed by the Russian Empire. Jews who desired and promoted transformation both absorbed and reacted to the stereotypes constructed by the dominant culture. With the changing socialist ethos and the pathos of the new dawn, the younger generation of Jews wanted to join the new community of Soviet men and women. This involved a requirement to change the body, to forge it into a new substance. In the case of men, this new body had to stop bearing the mark of circumcision in order to differentiate itself from the “Jew’s body.” Men and women began to enter professions that would supposedly change their bodies and minds through interactions with new materialities in new geographical spaces. Writers and film-makers coined powerful images which articulated and promoted this transformation. In chapter one, I gave examples of these narratives of transformation through interactions with reinforced concrete at the construction plant in Magnitogorsk (Time, Forward!) and the involvement in agricultural collective farms in new settlements in Birobidzhan (Seekers of Happiness). Across genders, this new body had to eat new foods, foods no longer governed by kosher laws. Dietary habits also had to change to better align with the concerted efforts of state-employed health professionals as well as the improved economic conditions. Yet the formation and the conceptualizing of the Self does not happen in isolation from the

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family and immediate community. The shaping of the Self is inevitably linked to embodied relations with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, as well as the emotional attachments to food, objects, and spaces, all of which form human subjectivities phenomenologically. In the material under examination in part two of this book, I concentrate on a kind of writing which does not position itself as a propagator of the official mainstream discourse. Rather, it reflects subjectively on the complex embodied interactions in the narratives which lend themselves to inward-looking conversations: fictional biographies, autobiographies, essays and stories which position lifetime events within (real and imagined) historical contexts. Written from divergent authorial or historical perspectives, some of the works examined here evaluate sceptically the pathos of the earlier, ideologically motivated works. While these examples do address mutability and change, they do not belong to the utopian discourse of transformation. Instead, the writers of these works position the authorial self in relation to lived experiences and learned knowledge pertaining to “the Jew’s body.” This perception is distilled through themes related to everyday contact with family members, sensed memories and visceral interactions with family relics and memorabilia. In this writing, the body is linked to physical reality and cultural constructs through smell, touch, olfaction, taste, cooking methods, feeding and the acquisition of cultural knowledge and know-how in an embodied manner. This body learns about differences and subjectivities not only phenomenologically but also through cultural discourse and epistemes. As such, it is a reactive body. It reacts to discursive formations and their numerous intersections, including that between ethnicity and gender. To present a balanced and encompassing picture, I provide in this second part of the book a platform for contemporary women writers who react, construct and reconstruct their identities through themes which crisscross and correlate with the narratives of their male counterparts. The works of these writers, both female and male, distil histories through the domain of the family, ancestral genealogies (invented or researched), the visceral perception of private spaces and the transmission of tastes in creative interactions with cultural formations.

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Women Writers Inventing Exotic Origins “Then perhaps you are of Moorish blood—or—” I stopped, not venturing to add “a Jewess.” “Oh come! You must see I’m a Gypsy!” —Prosper Mérimée, “Carmen” (1845)1 “You do not look Jewish at all. You look Italian. Or even more like a Spanish woman.” —Inna Lesovaya, A Bessarabian Romance (2008)

E

xamples in part one established that the intersection between gender and ethnicity is one of the stable discursive formations. The construct of the Jewess in Chekhov, Belyi, Shevtsov, and Prokhanov showed Jewish women who use their sexuality, presenting a danger to non-Jewish men. The Glasnost era, with its rise of heterogenous discourses, was characterized by a strong presence of women writers, many of whom wrote on matters of body politics. Women responded strongly to the problem of inequality in gender and for the first time openly addressed formerly truncated or tabooed topics.2 Sovietborn Jewish women writers, such as Marina Paley (b. 1955) and Dina Rubina (b. 1953), embraced the opportunity to discuss issues concerning the Jewish Self through the discourse of the body.3 Both Paley and Rubina belong to a generation of Soviet women who achieved their social mobility through tertiary education and professional 1 Prosper Mérimée, “Carmen,” in Carmen and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), 1–340. 2 For an overview of literature of this period see Mikhail Krutikov, “Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” in Jewish Life after the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman, Musya Glants, and Marshall I. Goldman (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003), 257–274. 3 In 2011 Marina Paley received the Russian Prize for literature written outside of the Russian Federation instituted in order to promote the Russian language.

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degrees. Rubina was trained as a piano teacher and Paley as a medical doctor. Both fall into the category of educated, intellectually vocal women which is in itself a stable component of the construct of the undomesticated and threatening Jewess. As such, they embody and depict in their fictional autobiographical writings “a heuristic model” of the Jewess which, in Ann-Jill Levine’s formulation, “cannot be fully controlled or domesticated.”4 Paley and Rubina’s stories have one common feature: in their depiction of women relatives both writers are interested in discovering or inventing non-Jewish lineages. These alternative ethnicities are often rooted in the tradition of the exotic, intersecting with Orientalism. Within this tradition, the writers evoke Gypsy, Spanish, and Italian ethnicities, at times alluding to well-known literary personages associated in European culture with the exotic. I view this preoccupation with the theme of the Other as represented by exotic women as part of a strategy to respond to the construct of the Jewess and to overcome the effects of essentialized cultural stereotypes. Paley and Rubina’s works both react to real historic and cultural phenomena while also subverting the typology imbricated in the stereotypes of the Jewess. In addressing the ailing body in pain, interactions with substances (such as tobacco), crossdressing and the transgression of geographical boundaries and ethnic groups, Paley and Rubina’s stories expose the limitations of biological stereotypes of the woman’s body.

A Jewish Cabiria: Rewriting the Sexed Body and Paley’s Pure Self Paley’s story “Cabiria from the Obvodny Canal” (1990) was one of the first autobiographical literary works to address the theme of the Jewish women in contemporary society. In “Cabiria” Paley tells the story of the family of her aunt, and especially her cousin Raimonda. Paley depicts all the members of her aunt’s family in humorous terms, but her humor often builds on stereotypes of Jewish materiality. She explains her family’s peculiarities by the fact that they are Jewish, so suggesting “genes” are a factor in determining their behavior. When describing her aunt’s passion for changing apartments, Paley uses witticisms such as “in her boiled the ancient spirit of the nomadic tribes of the desert” and “in her boiled the spirit of the nomadic people of the desert.”5 4 Ann-Jill Levine, “A Jewess more and/or Less,” 155. 5 Marina Palei, “Kabiriia s Obvodnogo kanala,” in her Long Distance ili slavianskii aktsent (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 158–159.

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When she describes her aunt’s wish that her daughter Raimonda, or Mon′ka for short, divorce her husband, she writes, “Ancient like the desert itch to exchange and swap things motivated her to break the alliance between Raimonda and her husband Rybny.”6 These references to the Jews as “the people of the desert” suggest—albeit humorously—that, 4,000 years on, Jews are still driven by subterranean forces, and the need to change places and exchange items is part of their genetic code. Paley uses allusions to Jewish origins as a determining factor in behavior: “[I]t is impossible to go against genes,” she writes (protiv genov ne popresh′).7 On the one hand, Paley amuses her readers by circulating this notion of a particularly Jewish type of behavior which she presents as genetically determined. Yet this is only one side of her narrative strategy. The other implication of her statements subverts the phylogenetic content through the very concept of “the people of the desert” which suggests a certain ethnic heterogeneity of the inhabitants of the deserts, which could include Arabs and non-Semitic peoples. This paradoxical blurring of borders and concurrent references to genetic determinism reveals the fluctuation in Paley’s subjectivity in relation to her own identity. This vacillation is evident in the story’s conflicting messages. Mon′ka’s death at the end of the story redeems her behavior and marks a sharp turn from the burlesque to the tragic. However, Paley continues to keep a distance between her and her cousin, suggesting that her authorial critical gaze wants to separate herself from the workings of “the genes.” From the beginning of the narrative Paley positions herself as markedly different from her cousin. Although Mon′ka is ten years older than Paley, Paley makes sure to mention that she has always been an adult in contrast to the immature behavior of her cousin. In describing a photograph taken when she was four and Mon′ka fourteen, she maintains that in this photograph she looks like “a rational old woman” while Mon′ka looks like an adventurous and sexed young woman: Here is the photograph. Mon’ka is fourteen years old, and I am four. We stand against a snow-covered fir tree in the house of granddad and grandmother. Mon’ka has a wide forehead, dimples in her cheeks, and her eyes are openly mischievous [shel′movatye] or, to be more precise, already quite whoring [bludlivye]. I am half her height and already resemble a clever, strict, and uncompromising old woman.8 6 7 8

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 143.

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An oversexed nature is Mon′ka’s main characteristic. Her life has been lived in pursuit of carnal pleasures and she meets a violent death as a result of a beating by a lover. In her narration of the story of Mon′ka’s sex life, Paley chooses to call her “Cabiria.” This name alludes to Federico Fellini’s iconic film Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), shown in the Soviet Union under the Russian title Nochi Kabirii. In dealing with the question of female prostitution, Fellini’s film reinstated the image of the prostitute as an exotic woman, a quintessential Mediterranean woman with a passionate temperament, so asserting a connection between ethnicity and sexuality. Fellini’s Cabiria loves sex and is driven by her need for men’s love and affection.9 The sharp change in tone in the story occurs in the medicalized descriptions of Mon’ka’s illness and death. Paley finishes her novella of the life and death of Mon′ka with an imagined conversation that she has with her after her death. Paley maintains that Mon′ka in the afterlife still longs for her physical body because her soul is not happy in the “sterile fields.”10 The soul looks down on Earth with nostalgia. Is Paley being ironic vis-a-vis the stereotypes of the seductive Jewess? I suggest that Paley certainly rewrites the narrative of the sexually exploitative Jewess. Mon′ka is framed as a tragic character who ends up in trouble when her Russian lovers act in a brutal fashion. In her pursuit of love, she is a victim of a number of aggressive and abusive men. In line with the behavior of Fellini’s character, Cabiria, Mon′ka acts as a child of nature driven by sexual instinct and the desire for happiness. Like Cabiria, she is exploited by her lovers, clearly, lacking the calculating characteristics of the predatory Jewish women invented by Chekhov and Ivan Shevtsov. In the writing of these two authors Jewish women lust for Russian partners. Paley, in contrast, subverts the desirability of such encounters by exposing Russian men as boorish and violent. In her descriptions of female hospital wards, Paley brings Mon′ka’s ailing body and the bodies of many Russian women into close proximity. As a trained medical doctor, Paley shows her expertise in her descriptions of Mon′ka’s condition and her rapidly deteriorating body. Scholars studying the representations of pain have observed that physical pain, unlike other state of consciousness, has no referential content—pain, writes Elaine

Jeffrey Anderson, Nights of Cabiria, http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com, accessed March 22, 2014. 10 Palei, “Kabiriia,” 214. 9

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Scarry, more than other phenomenon, “resists objectification.”11 This approach to the understanding and representation of pain focuses on the atomistic model of individual human beings in terms of their unique interior. Following this logic, Mon′ka’s body-in-pain cannot continue to typify a racialized body. In Paley’s story, the female flesh, touched by illness and signs of deterioration, is concurrently individualized and de-individualized through pain and suffering. Positioned in the ward alongside other patients in the overcrowded hospital in Leningrad, Mon′ka’s body becomes part of the deethnicized collective. Paley’s descriptions of the diseased female body equalize these ailing women and divorce the suffering woman’s body from pornographic display. She refuses to invite a voyeuristic male gaze to define the woman’s body. In describing the disintegration of matter, Paley overcomes the ethnic stereotypes of the Jew’s body.

Employing the Exotic: Imagining the Gypsy Ancestry in Paley and Rubina A common feature of Paley and Dina Rubina’s narratives about their greatgrandmothers is their focus on alternative ethnicities. In both cases the writers turn to the Roma Gypsies. While Paley uses literary protagonist Carmen from Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella, Rubina describes a real-life person of Gypsy origin. Her story “Tsyganka” (“The Gypsy Woman,” 2008) explores the family legend that one of her great-grandmothers was a Gypsy.12 Such variations on “family romances,” both imaginary and real, allow writers to create narratives that serve a liberating function in terms of the cultural narrative of the Jewish woman’s body. Roma Gypsies have been orientalized by European and Russian imagination and used to provide the educated classes with the opportunity to masquerade and refashion identity. They also served as an imagined escape from the strictures of bourgeois culture. In the case of Russian Jewish women writers, the images of Gypsy women as their great-grandmothers allow them to destabilize stereotypes of Jewishness.

11 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 5. 12 Dina Rubina, “Tsyganka,” in her Tsyganka. Rasskazy (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008), 71–90.

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Tobacco-Smoking Great-Grandmother as Carmen In the autobiographical tale “Pominovenie” (“Remembrance,” 1987), Paley writes that when she started to read world literature, she began to imagine her great-grandmother (prababka) as a Carmen. This link with the fantasy world of fiction is indicative of what Freud describes as “family romances” in his 1909 essay with the same title.13 I use Freudian notion of “the family romances” in a number of instances in the book, notably in application to the fantasies of Jewish protagonists related to alternative ancestries. In this essay Freud maintains that children often imagine that they are of a different family linage due to some secret events in the past of their ancestors. This normally happens because children are not happy in the family to which they belong. Paley’s authorial persona in “Remembrance” makes it abundantly clear that she was unhappy growing up in the ancestral home. In this context Paley explains that she associated her great-grandmother with Carmen because, as a young woman, she used to work at a tobacco factory and also because she was a heavy smoker. The choice of the Roma Gypsy woman can also be explained by convergences in the history of Jews and Roma people as extraterritorial ethnic groups whose presence in Europe has always embodied the Other.14 Romantic literature conflated images of Gypsy and Jewish women on whom both male and female writers projected their orientalist fantasies.15 Carmen, who is dangerously attractive, embodies one of the best-known exotic images. Paley’s pivot towards Carmen, and not to any other Gypsy literary protagonist, can be seen as a strategic move. Mérimée’s novella “Carmen” notably conflates the physical appearances of Jews, Gypsies, and Moors as seen in the quotation in the epigraph of this chapter. This conflation creates a quasi-racial typology but subverts it at the same time. The implication of Carmen being taken for a Jewess or Moorish woman negates the notion of a physical typology of ethnicities. Mérimée was an ethnographer and in the last chapter, which functions as coda in “Carmen,” he assumed a scholarly voice in stating that, in real life, Gypsy women were family-orientated and faithful to their husbands. This compositional structure and narrative strategy allowed 13 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7, 221–225. 14 For a discussion of Jews and Gypsies as a parallel group see Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within and The Other Without,” Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence Silberstein and Robert Cohen (New York: New York UP, 1994), 424–450. 15 Debora Epstein Nord makes this point in Gypsies and the British Imagination (New York: Columbia UP, 2006).

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Mérimée to separate the world of Romantic literary imagination from a real-life situation. His novella, however, became one of the most influential constructs of exotic deviant women. The link between Paley’s great-grandmother and her work at the tobacco factory—as well as her smoking habit—is highly suggestive. Tobacco is at the interface of the material and symbolic in relation to feminine deviancy. Significantly, tactility (involved in making cigars and cigarettes), smell and olfaction are the contributing components of sensualized practices. In Mérimée’s “Carmen,” her strong smells and her smoking habit are viewed as both alluring and inappropriate by the gentleman from France: In her hair she wore a great bunch of jasmine—a flower which, at night, exudes a most intoxicating perfume. . . . I threw my cigar away at once. She appreciated this mark of courtesy, essentially French, and hastened to inform me that she was very fond of the smell of tobacco, and that she even smoked herself, when she could get very mild papelitos.16

The image of Carmen in the original story is sexed, her physicality constructed in line with devices of the exotic. The eroticized presence of the smell of jasmine was a cultural trope of aggressive female sexuality—among others, Chekhov used it to create the intoxicating biosphere of Susanna’s bedroom in “Mire.” Notably, there are cigarette-ends scattered in Susanna’s bedroom. Similarly, in Russian Romantic writing, it was “harlots” who smoked tobacco.17 The actual act of imbibing tobacco relates not only to the history of tobacco in culture but also to the history of the senses. According to Tricia Starks' “The Taste, Smell and Semiotics of Cigarettes,” tobacco impacts the body individually, affecting the saliva, journeying through the brain, and travelling into the lungs.18 Smoking is thus a personalized experience through which the subject asserts his or her individual relationship with the matter and its accompanying sensations. Smoking is also a sensory performance. The smoker creates an identity through consumption of a product that becomes a part of the body and its presentation. This emphasis on individual freedom is relevant 16 Mérimée, “Carmen,” 17. 17 Igor′ Pil′shchikov, “Harlots, Wine and Chibouks: Tobacco Smoking as a Cultural Signifier in the Age of Pushkin,” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 73, no. 2 (2017), 285–330. 18 Tricia Starks, “The Taste, Smell, and Semiotics of Cigarettes,” Russian History through the Senses (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 97–116.

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for Carmen, and has wider implications for Paley’s allusion to the novella. Importantly, the cigarette held explicit connections of liberation among literary figures in nineteenth-century Russia.19 The composition of the product itself became material manifestation of intangible concepts, such as liberty and cosmopolitanism. Moreover, smoking and tasting tobacco in Russia functioned as a link with the exotic Orient from which most of the tobacco was imported. The tobacco motif further enriches the role of the exotic in Paley’s story. The function of the exotic in literature and art is heterogenous and, as a variant of Orientalism, can be used less pejoratively than was implied in Said’s original formulation, especially when the author of the exotic is a woman writer. This latter detail is important and has been put forward by feminist scholars such as Reina Lewis in Gendered Orientalism. In Mérimée’s novella Carmen transgresses numerous boundaries: those of marriage, by having lovers; of geographical frontiers, by smuggling; of classes, by frequenting bandits, officers, and English gentlemen.20 Importantly, she transgresses the construct of race itself. The instability of race in Mérimée’s novella is further suggested in her performance of alternative ethnicities. When she changes from a Gypsy dress to a European one, she passes for a noble Spanish lady. Paley’s fantasy of her great-grandmother as Carmen helps her (perhaps especially as a young girl) and her female readers to escape the prejudices of the Jewess’s physicality. In terms of the history of the senses, smelling of and imbibing tobacco becomes an intergenerational liberating act which shifts attention from ‘race’ to gender.

Real-Life Romance: A Happy Marriage of Jews and Gypsies in Rubina’s “Tsyganka” Dina Rubina’s story “The Gypsy Woman” was written almost twenty years after Paley’s novella and, importantly, after Rubina had left Russia and settled in Israel. Her autobiographical persona writes from a vantage point which separated her in time and space from Russia. The story centers around Rubina’s increasing, if still fragmentary, insight into her great-great-grandmother who was a Roma Gypsy from Ukraine. In terms of Freudian “family romances”, Rubina’s narrative presents a real-life romance, telling the story of her great-great-grandfather’s infatuation with an alien woman. Her great-great-grandfather is Jewish and the 19 Konstantine Klioutchkine, “I Smoke therefore I Think,” Tobacco in Russian History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009) 3–101. 20 See a discussion of the exotic in “Carmen” in Peter Cogman, Merimee, Colomba and Carmen (London: Grant and Cutler, 1992).

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woman is Gypsy; the event takes place near Poltava, in the Pale of Settlement. The narrative is built on an adventure plot: the man meets a strikingly beautiful Roma woman in the tavern and forgets to turn up for his own wedding to a Jewish bride. When he finally does turn up at his parents’ house, he carries his new Gypsy wife on his arms into the parental home. In spite of their ethnic and religious differences, the couple live peacefully for many years and bear children, some of whom look like the wife, some like the father. In the real-life situation in the Russian Empire, Jews and Gypsies were sometimes conflated by the local population, as ethnographic evidence attests.21 Yet Rubina’s narrative breaks this homology, stating that all her Jewish relatives were freckled and blue-eyed—typical, she attests, of Ukrainian Jews. The Gypsy woman was dark-skinned, had hazel eyes and curly black hair. This description can be equated with Mérimée’s description of Carmen and, as such, fails to denote ethnicity. Rubina is typifying the features of Ukrainian Jews as indistinguishable from the generic description of the local population. She uses this strategy to challenge the notion of the immutability of the Jew’s body and the purity of any kind of ethnicity: if Jews and Slavs look alike, then markers such as the color of skin, eyes and hair fail to make up taxonomies. Moreover, when Rubina’s mother recollects what her Gypsy great-grandmother looked like in her old age, she describes her as “an ordinary old Jewish woman” with “a hooked nose,” who spoke Yiddish. This description ironically negates the stereotype of the Jew’s body and shows that the body of the ethnic Other can be assigned with conflated typological features of difference. The strategy is to reduce ad absurdum staple markers of the Jew’s (or the Gypsy’s) body. Notably, in Rubina’s expressed interest in physical features and family resemblances, she turns to the photographs. In one scene she finds a forgotten photograph when sorting out family heirlooms before emigrating to Israel. The photograph is not of the Gypsy ancestor herself but of her descendants. A later scene in Israel describes the conversation about family stories related to the Gypsy great-great-grandmother, while simultaneously discussing such markers of alleged ethnic origins of the photographed relatives as color of eyes, hair and skin, as well as structure of hair. The shared stories involve the topics of behavior and individual leanings that might have been “inherited” from the exotic great-great-grandmother. Scholarly studies devoted to the way we read family photographs suggest that the photographic family archive allows us to subjectively experience a past that is not our own but which we appropriate by the 21 Olga Belova, Etnokul′turnye stereotipy v slavianskoi narodnoi traditsii (Moscow: Indrik, 2005).

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means of memory and fiction. Teodora Cosman proposes that there are two types of memory involved in reading family photographs: autobiographical and genealogical.22 The autobiographical memory functions as time travel, and photographs become instruments of time travel through the regressive reading of the photographic archive. Importantly, this subjective time exceeds the author’s own biography. The genealogical layer of memory manifests itself in reading family photographs by appropriating family memory, transmitted from generation to generation. The reading of family photographs includes interpretation of the stories contained in the photographic album. Rubina’s project can be viewed as an autobiographical and genealogical fiction in which family photographs participate in a “memory game” wherein each viewer is invited to find herself or himself.23 In her case, reading family photographs establishes a balance between universal and individual, hereditary and mutable, collective and subjective. Additionally, an element of fantasy is part of any autobiographical endeavour and it is present in Rubina’s story. The process of viewing photographs evokes episodic memories and builds temporary rather than permanent alliances thus subverting grand all-encompassing narratives.24 In thematizing the notion of hereditary characteristics Rubina writes not only about the physical resemblance to her Gypsy ancestor, but also about the mysterious aura of being protected by supranatural powers. In this context, Rubina engages with the theme of Roma Gypsies’ knowledge of the arcane and clairvoyance without reducing it to prejudice. Nor does she consider it to be a form of deception and charlatanism. Rubina believes that there is a deep mystical connection between her and the guarding spirit of her Gypsy great-great-grandmother. By creating her subjective beliefs through the interconnectivity of family members, Rubina shifts the focus from ethnic to family ties, while also challenging notions of orthodoxy and purity in religion and ethnicity. She celebrates the connectivity between women of different generations and, in her interest in hereditary characteristics from ethnically diverse ancestors, invalidates the notion of a stable linear phylogenetic typology.25 22 Teodora Cosman, “The Metaphors of Photography and the Metaphors of Memory,” Philobiblon 17, no. 1 (2012): 269–291. 23 Ibid. 24 On episodic memory see Endel Tulving, “Origins of Autonoiesis in Episodic Memory,” in The Nature of Remembering, ed. Henry L. Roediger et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 17–34. 25 A search for the historical past in an embodied way is typical of Rubina’s concepts of being Jewish. On ethnicity in her poetics see Ella Shafranskaia, Mifopoetika “etnokul′turnogo teksta”

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The role of the exotic and local color is to jolt us out of our conventional attitudes and assumptions. As a form of Orientalism, the exotic I have analyzed as it is applied by women writers is gendered. As elucidated by Reina Lewis in Gendered Orientalism, women authors often give an alternative grid of difference of the exotic Other/Self and produce counter-hegemonic discourse or subaltern voices which destabilize assumptions about racial and ethnic characteristics.26 Similarly, the employment of the exotic allows Paley and Rubina to question codes of representation in the dominant culture. Both women writers respond to the stereotypes of the Jew’s body, male and female, as created by the literary canon and the provocative literature of their time and popular culture. Yet there are differences in their association/dissociation with their women relatives. Paley’s texts express tension between the internalization of stereotypes and the need to deal with those constructs. Paley’s texts often reveal her desire to keep an authorial distance from members of her family, while Rubina’s stories consciously emphasize and often ironically hyperbolize embodied familial and transgenerational links. The decades which separate Paley’s writing from Rubina’s work have imprinted on the authorial position of both of these women writers, with Paley’s work exhibiting the complexities of conforming to the dominant cultural stereotypes and concealing the authorial position. The fact that Rubina’s work is written in post-Soviet diasporic space is reflected in her overt embracement of the difficult issues of ethnocultural identity. Paley and Rubina’s works were written for different audiences, with Rubina addressing global Russian-speaking readers and Paley having to negotiate a niche for the expression of Jewish women’s themes in the last years of the Soviet Union, when Glasnost free speech reforms made dissemination of antisemitic stereotypes of embodied differences possible. In the next chapter I continue exploring strategies of dealing with unusual family members. Paley’s writing presents more relevant material on this topic.

v russkoi proze Diny Rubinoi (Moscow: URSS, 2007). 26 Reina Lewis, Gendered Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

CHAPTER NINE

Strange Ancestors in the House and Basement A famous Viennese professor of endocrinology, Pineles, himself a Jew, told me once: “I have arrived to the conclusion that the Jew Lombroso was wrong in claiming a strong connection between genius and crime. It is genius and degeneration which is the theme of today and the conclusion of our century.” —V. M. Kogan-Iasny, “Pathology of the Endocrine System among the Jews” (1930)1

W

hen the dominant culture treats the ethnic origins of a child or a teenager with prejudice, at a time when the self wants to belong to the normative culture, the subject can withdraw into to the world of the dream. When Marina Paley found refuge in the world of literature, she discovered the writing of another Jew, Isaak Babel (1894–1940). In Paley’s novella “Remembrance” (1987), while describing her plight in the ancestral house of her grandfather, she refers to Isaac Babel’s story “V podvale” (“In the Basement,” 1929/1930). In this story she considers Babel’s character’s description of his plight as an adolescent in Odessa with an embarrassing uncle and grandfather. For both Babel’s protagonist and Paley, the humiliation is caused by what can be perceived as specifically Jewish eccentricities of their ancestors, the kind of specificity which is impossible to hide because of its embodied and performed difference. While the (quasi)autobiographical narratives express trauma caused by embarrassment, they also provide a chronological framing. Paley describes her ancestors who were born in the Pale of Settlement at the time when Babel’s ancestral characters lived in the Pale. This symmetry is intentional in the case of Paley because it helps her to construct the typology in the characteristics of her 1 V. M. Kogan-Iasnyi, “Patologiia endokrinnoi sistemy u evreev,” in Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev, ed. V. I. Binshtok et al., vol. 3, part 1 (Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo Istorikoetnograficheskogo obshchestva, 1930), 3.

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ancestors. For my purpose, Paley’s intertextual allusion is useful because it helps to demonstrate the differences in approach to Jewish ancestry in this writing. Babel’s story expresses an understanding of the subjective eccentricities of his protagonist’s family as connected to class and not just ethnicity, while Paley’s novella often views peculiarities as ethnic markers. I examine these writers’ representations of aged family members and surrounding materialities. Both Babel and Paley ascribe specific meanings to objects belonging to old people, using these items as material and semiotic signifiers. In evaluating issues of ancestral eccentricity, I take into account prevailing medicalized discourses on declassed Jewry—a social group which finds its reflection in Babel and Paley’s stories. To explain the psychological typology in dealing with embarrassing ancestors, I once again use Sigmund Freud’s essay “Family Romances” from his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, so demonstrating the need by both writers to negotiate their belonging to, and separation from, ancestors and ancestral places. Both Babel and Paley describe their perception of ancestors at a time when they were teenagers, and, in line with Freud’s model, absorbed in reading fictional stories. Both writers represent the theme of the ancestral home and unusual family members through a dual temporal lens—the view of an adult and a child.

Babel’s “In the Basement”: Performing Jewish Madness “In the Basement,” a story from the Odessa Stories cycle, Babel-the-narrator (from now on referred to as Babel) recollects an episode from his teens when, as a twelve-year-old, he ended up in an embarrassing situation. This story is about the cause of that humiliation and the dramatic outcome. While overtly the humiliation is caused by the histrionic behavior of his (fictional) old Uncle Simon-Volf and grandfather, Levi-Itskhok, the real cause of this dramatic event is of Babel’s own doing.2 The cause has a dual structure: young Babel’s inability to accept his family for who they are; and his invention of false information in relation to two family members, his grandfather and uncle. The comical effect of the story results from a staged scenario gone wrong, as awkward relatives unexpectedly make their dramatic appearance to reveal the truth about Babel’s fictional family. Babel starts the story with an admission that he was a 2 Before his arrest, Babel planned to republish this story under a new cycle of autobiographical stories. See Efraim Sicher, “Isaak Babel’s ‘Odessa Tales’: Inventing Lost Time, Reshaping Memory,” The Russian Review 77, no. 1 (2018): 65–87.

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“deceitful boy” [lzhivyi mal′chik].3 His tendency to lie and fantasize made him invent extraordinary stories and thus earn popularity among the other boys at school. Among those impressed by his elaborations was the son of a wealthy Odessa merchant and bank director, Mark Borgman. Babel ends up being invited to Borgman’s summer house where he experiences the bourgeois luxury as epitomized by the manicured garden and bejeweled guests. The description of the setting and its inhabitants is ironic, told through the voice of an adult narrator, yet the teenage boy is deeply impressed by these obvious manifestations of power and money. The episode at the luxurious dacha is followed by a contrasting episode in Babel’s basement apartment. These two locales exist as worlds apart. While the dacha represents the cosmopolitan world epitomized by the director of the bank reading the Manchester Guardian and communicating in English rather than Russian, Babel’s uncle’s apartment is a microcosm of Jewishness. This basement apartment contains his grandfather’s treasures including “grammars of every language under the sun and the sixty-six volumes of the Talmud.”4 It is to this apartment that the rich boy, Mark Borgman, pays a reciprocal visit on a Sunday. In preparation for this visit young Babel makes arrangements for his uncle and grandfather to be away. Importantly, the male relatives are not the only problem which the young (fictional) Babel has to confront. If Mark was to meet his relatives, Babel would be revealed as a liar, as he had invented stories about his grandfather and uncle’s international travels and even his grandfather’s heroic military career. It is important that the adventures which he ascribes to his uncle and grandfather echo his own dreams about travel to far-off lands. Notably, the dreams appear after his visit to the Borgmans and can be seen to mimic the banker’s lifestyle. Babel’s invention of unifying scenarios for himself and his fictional male relatives serve as a strategy not only to separate himself from them but also to connect him more closely. Freud’s “Family Romances” addresses the situation in which children imagine themselves being born of different, more powerful and glamorous parents. This may happen when children decide that other parents are in some respects preferable to their own. Babel’s case is both similar and different from the mechanisms in “Family Romances.”5 He lives in the house of his uncle Isaac Babel, “In the Basement,” Odessa Stories, trans. Boris Dralyuk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), 55. 4 Ibid., 162. 5 Freud’s study identifies adolescence as the age when children start fantasizing about different parents. Freud identifies reading as an important factor which boosts such fantasies. 3

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and grandfather—his actual parents are never mentioned in the story. This absence allows for the fantasy of a family romance: absent parents could be of higher social status than his uncle, or they could even be of different origin. The void can be filled by unlimited possibilities. It has to be remembered that this story is also about a young boy’s creativity and rich imagination. The difference from Freud’s romances lies in young Babel’s invention of adventurous life stories not only for himself but also for his grandfather and uncle. This attests to the desire to glorify his lineage without necessarily separating himself from the family. There is a marked difference between the perception of his family by Babel the teenager, the character of this autobiographical story, and that of Babel the narrator. Babel’s authorial persona is not embarrassed by his eccentric relatives; the adult author Babel has overcome the trauma of belonging to a particular Jewish family. This pride in being unusual rather than typical comes as the result of overcoming the neurosis of Freudian family romances. This sense of pride, rather than shame, in belonging to a Jewish family is overtly expressed in the story: Here it must be said that my people weren’t exactly your typical Jewish family. Our clan had its share of drunks, we seduced generals’ daughters and abandoned them at the border, and our grandfather forged signatures and composed blackmailing letters for deserted wives.6

This motif of similarity with family members may not be cognizant to the fictional Babel as a boy, but it certainly is something cherished by Babel the narrator. Babel achieves this continuity in showing parallel behavior between the boy and his relatives without the boy perceiving these likenesses at the time of the traumatic event. The story reaches denouement with the unexpected appearance of the drunken uncle followed by the performance of the grandfather. Significantly, the dramatic scene has three actors performing simultaneously: the drunken Uncle Simon-Volf screaming obscenities, the young protagonist trying to cover this noise by reciting passages from Shakespeare’s drama, and grandfather playing the violin in order to divert Borgman’s attention from

6

This is applicable to Babel who admits in this story that his “deceitfulness” was the result of fantasy stimulated by reading. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 221–225. Babel, “In the Basement,” 160.

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the drunken uncle’s shouts. These are the tragicomic descriptions of the uncle and grandfather’s theatrics: “You are pulling the glue out of me!” My uncle shouted in his thunderous voice. “You are pulling the glue out of me so you can stuff your wolfish mouths. . . . I’ve lost my soul to work. I have got nothing left to work with—got no hands, got no legs. . . . You’ve hung the stone around my neck—a stone around my neck!” . . . And then my lunatic of a grandfather decided to come to my rescue. He escaped from the Apelkhots, crept up to our window, and started sawing at the fiddle, evidently to keep passersby from overhearing Simon-Volf ’s blue streak. Borgman glanced out of the ground-level window and drew back in horror. My poor grandfather had wrenched his blue petrified lips into a grimace. He wore a dented top hat, a black quilted robe with bone buttons, and ragged boots on his elephantine legs. His tobacco-stained beard hung in wisps that fluttered through the window.7

In this scene all three performances are homogenous; the boy does not realize that his own declamation of Shakespeare mimicked the performances of his relatives and that it had an equally frightening effect on Borgman. Borgman flees from the apartment, having never witnessed such odd behavior. Young Babel is clearly an equal voice in this polyphonic mad chorus, orchestrated by Babel-the-writer in order to show continuities rather than differences between the three generations. The expressive details in the description of the grandfather’s appearance are supposed to contribute to the frightening effect. The grimacing, petrified blue lips is a feature of an old face, but it is difficult to see what is specifically Jewish about it. The details of his attire serve as a function to express ethnicity, and the combination of sartorial items and accoutrement questionably help to complete the portrait of an old Jew. The black padded coat and the top-hat are items of a traditional Jewish costume, but it is the untidiness of the appearance which contributes to the abject effect. The poor old Jewish man’s attire denotes his financial circumstances. While the young Babel finds his appearance embarrassing, there is no evidence in the depiction of the old man that Babel the narrator is ashamed of his grandfather. It is the combination of physical appearance and the eccentric 7

Ibid., 165.

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behavior which is the object of Babel’s gaze. The question to ponder is whether this eccentricity is hereditary and, if yes, what are the consequences? The story ends with the short nervous breakdown of young Babel. The form which it takes may explain Babel’s framing of the hereditary. In the final scene following the flight of Borgman young Babel throws himself into a tub of cold water. Under the water he experiences momentary bliss, after which he breaks into tears. His grandfather rescues him, pulling him out with his weak hands. This cathartic moment carries a number of implications in relation to the family’s eccentricities. As an act of quasi-suicide, it can be approached as a form of protest. As an act of cleansing, it has both material and semiotic implications: the boy effectively washes off the perceived aura of madness which permeates the basement. Yet this episode can also be viewed as intentionally performative. The ambivalence of the act, I propose, is intentional and, whether authentic or theatrical, denotes continuity in patterns of behavior. Madness can be acted out or it can be real, but both hereditary and acquired models of behavior in this microcosm converge. Babel the narrator shows his understanding of the dual structure of what can be termed as Jewish madness. “In the Basement” reflects the discourse of degeneration which had a powerful presence in Babel’s time and was perceived by Jewish contemporaries as a call to become proactive in shedding off the negative consequences of the life in the ghetto. In particular, Max Nordau called for a new generation of muscular Jews (1898), Jews who would differ from the psychologically and physically weak Jews of the European ghettoes and the Pale.8 When Babel wrote his story in the late 1920s, the notion of particular Jewish biology and pathology was an accepted medical view. As noted in chapter one, the question of degeneration and nervous illnesses of the Jewish population was debated in connection with the etiology of many illnesses. The 1926 collection Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev (The Problems of the Biology and Pathology of the Jews) addressed the issue of “a physical degradation bordering on degeneration” of Jews which need to be studied and changed.9 Fittingly, it was mainly the Jews 8

Nordau used this expression in his speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. Notably, in Degeneration (1892) Nordau used biology as an example against phylogenetic arguments, stating that “a morbid variation does not subsist and propagate itself.” See Max Nordau, “Degeneration,” in The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1990, ed. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 13–17. 9 V. I. Binshtok, “O zadachakh nauchnykh sbornikov ‘Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev,’” in Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev, ed. V. I. Binshtok et al., vol. 1 (Leningrad: Prakticheskaia meditsina, 1926), 3.

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of Odessa, Minsk, and other places of the former Pale that were the object of the study. A wide range of studies were conducted, varying from anthropometric measurements to studies of endocrine systems to give statistical data which would show typical somatic and psychological characteristics of Jews. Some of the comparative studies conducted, including measurements, showed similarities and differences between Jews and non-Jews living in the same area. This discourse was sensitive to the racialization of Jews—most researchers were of Jewish origin themselves. Results of the research between 1924 and 1930 were used to try to explain the smaller physical build of Jews and their predisposition to nervousness by outside factors as well as by hereditary nature. The tendency in most cases, however, was to treat the racialization of hereditary features with caution. Most sociological and medical studies admitted that the current day situation with its prevailing poverty and depravation among Jews was a consequence of the injustices and limitations of pre-Revolutionary times. These conclusions paradoxically coexisted with claims about the hardiness and biological immunity of “the Jewish organism.”10 One article speculated that the high prevalence of protein in the Jewish diet may be the reason for the survival of the people in spite of harsh circumstances. The same article, however, claimed that the nervous system of the Jews was their weakest spot [uiazvimoe mesto].11

From the Bizarre Objects to the Freedom of Production in the Basement I propose that Babel searches for different, not necessarily phylogenetic etiologies of his fictional uncle’s behavior. Uncle Simon-Volf’s impassioned statements about not having hands and legs was more than the idiosyncratic lament of a drunken Jew. While there is no information about the exact job he had to do in order to feed the hungry mouths of his family, it is clear that the job had had a crippling effect on his body and “soul.” His cry has implicit Marxist connotations related to the alienating role of labor under capitalism. The relationship between the object of labor and the worker becomes estranged in Marx’s scheme. SimonWolf’s reference to the family’s hungry wolfish mouths echoes the ideas in Marx’s “Estranged Labour” (1844), in which he describes the difference in attitude to work between animal and human species. According to Marx, “An animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sid10 Ibid. 11 Kogan-Iasnyi, “Patologiia endokrinnoi sistemy u evreev,” 4.

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edly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.”12 Marx writes that in free labor people can produce objects of aesthetic beauty rather just bare necessities. Where the labor is forced, the working man is forced to produce in order to meet immediate physical needs, such as hunger and shelter. Simon-Volf, in comparing his family’s hungry mouths to those of animals, implies that he is forced to labor for basic needs rather than for the objects of beauty. Such objects have a special appeal to the uncle, as is evidenced by his collection of bits of furniture. It is these objects which are the cause of the erupted scandal, because his wife Bobka strongly objects to having more furniture brought into the small apartment. The objects themselves are both functional and have aesthetic appeal; at the same time they are pretentious and contribute to the grotesqueness of the episode. They consist of a coat hanger made from deer antlers and a red chest with brackets shaped like lions’ maws. These bizarre objects, I propose, serve a dual purpose in the story. On the one hand, they are kitschy in the context of modernist aesthetics of the 1920s when the story was written. On the other, they fit the description of objects in Marx’s elaboration of man’s making objects out of organic material found in nature. According to Marx, man uses nature not only for making objects for basic needs, but also for making objects in accordance with “the laws of beauty.” It has to be noted that Babel mentions the political effect of Karl Marx’s ideas on the workers in Odessa in his first and early writing on Odessa, Listki ob Odesse (Notes on Odessa, 1918).13 It is thus quite plausible that real-life “Simon-Volf ” was familiar with the rhetoric of class inequalities and labor production in 1900s. The comical utterances of the uncle about the stone around his neck can be viewed as an expression of revolt against the pressures to labor without freedom. I suggest that it is this contrasting combination of the Jewish stylistics of the uncle’s cries and the expressions of 12 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.html, accessed March 15, 2019. 13 I. Babel′, Listki ob Odesse, in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 48–58. Among contemporary literary critics Voronsky wrote about Marx’s fetishism of things in application to Mayakovsky’s poetry. Aleksandr Voronskii, “Maiakovskii,” in his Literaturnye portrety v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 351–400.

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class consciousness that creates a comic narrative effect. The scene, however, leads to the nervous breakdown of the young Babel and has to be taken seriously. The implications of this episode relate to the historical context of degeneration and the discourse of reforming Jews in the Soviet 1920s. The uncle’s social protest leads to a possible conclusion that the “Simon-Volfs” of the Pale can become reformed and work for the good of a bigger collective. Moreover, the potential for transformation fits the changes in the myth of Odessa as the city which transforms from the old to the Soviet in the 1920s.14 In line with this materialist historical dialectic thinking, the aesthetic tastes of the Jews from the Pale can be developed to the standards of the new era. They might see beauty in ornate things now, but their desire for such adornments is a mimetic desire. Moreover, perhaps it is the very un-Jewish character of the coat hanger, made out of hunted animal horns, that makes this object both strange and appealing to the Jewish eccentric. Fittingly, in Babel’s personal notes in his Diary of 1920, antlers are a feature of the old house belonging to an aristocratic Polish family: “antlers, light antique plafond, remains of antlers.”15 In his Diary entries, Babel is cataloguing objects which are characteristic of a house of aristocracy. In “In the Basement,” the uncle invests these strange objects with subjectivity and, through his creativity and imagination, meaning. This obliquely links him with the young Babel character who is also driven by the mimetic desire to have things which he has seen at the house of the wealthy Borgmans. Within the time/space of the basement, Babel and his uncle aspire for better lives. Like Babel himself, the Jews from the basements of the Pale want to shake off the strangling “stones around their necks”—a trope for the repressive old world. It is the generation of the young Babel, however, that will succeed in joining the new world.16 14 Babel participated in the discourse of the transformation of “old Odessa” to a Marxist city. See Jarrod Tanny, City of Rouges and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011). 15 I. Babel′, Dnevnik 1920 goda, in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 288. 16 Babel’s writing expresses both detachment and loyalty to the old Jewish world. See discussions in Alice Nakhimovsky, Russian Jewish Literature and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992); Efraim Sicher, Babel in Context: A Study in Cultural Identity (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012). Harriet Murav gives a nuanced interpretation of Babel’s attitude to Jewish themes in Music from the Speeding Train, 44–47, 92–95. On Babel’s identity in his notes see Mark Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), esp. 264–279. On challenges in researching Babel’s biography see Patricia Blake, “Researching Babel’s Biography: Adventures and Misadventures,” in The Enigma of Isaac

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In his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel notably said that writers have “to help to achieve victory of the new, Bolshevik taste [novogo bol′shevistskogo vkusa] in the country.”17 This statement indicates that he believed in the change of aesthetic tastes by changing the environment. Importantly, the conversation was not about the tastes of Jews, but of the whole country. In line with the politically correct rhetoric of the day, Babel used the expression “engineers of souls”18 to describe Soviet writers. He also used the technical term, “resistance of the material” [soprotivlenie materiala],19 to denote the power of inertia. Evidently, he saw the task of changing “the soul” as being easier than changing the matter.

“Pominovenie”: the Jewish House near Leningrad and its Curious Inhabitants Paley uses autobiographical narrative to address what she conceives as the Jewish essence of her family members. In “Remembrance” (1987) she avoids using the words “Jew” and “Jewish” in descriptions of her Jewish relatives. As noted in the previous chapter, the novella reflects the situation of the early years of Glasnost, when writers probed the boundaries of freedom of expression and the stringencies of censorship. The reader recognizes that Paley and her family are Jewish through events in the history of the family as well as features typified as Jewish. The reader learns that her grandfather is Jewish because Paley mentions that he was born in the Pale of Settlement.20 Paley describes the inhabitants of the house [dom] where she was born and explains that she could not like the house because it stood for something archaic that needed to be destroyed in order to give a fresh start to something Babel: Biography, History, Context, ed. Gregory Freidin (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 3–16. Livak writes of Babel’s alter ego in his biographical fiction. Livak, The Jewish Persona. 17 I. Babel′, “Rech′ na pervom vsesoiuznom s′′ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 37. His speech was first published in an article “Sodeistvovat′ pobede bol'shevistskogo vkusa,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 24, 1934. 18 Babel′, “Rech′,” 38. 19 Ibid., 35. 20 The status of her own ethnic alterity is defined by her Russian women neighbors in the communal apartment in Leningrad. On gender issues in communal living in women’s prose see Tat′iana Rovenskaia, “Arkhetip doma v novoi zhenskoi proze, ili Kommunal′noe zhitie i kommunal′nye tela,” Inoi vzgliad 3 (2001): 24–26. On politics of ethnicity in communal living see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as Communal Apartment,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–452.

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new. At the same time, Paley’s persona positions herself as inseparable from the house. She explains that she had to withdraw into a world of reading books in order to escape the atmosphere of the house—something that formed her character and psychological make up. She evaluates the family life in the house, stressing her own subjectivity as someone who did not belong to the place and its inhabitants. The generational gap between her and her family members is wide: she describes her grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandmother who died at the age of ninety-nine—the same great-grandmother whom Paley imagined as Carmen in her adolescent years. This generational gap provides Paley with an opportunity to treat her family members as people who were formed by a different historical era. She revisits her perceptions of the family as a child, and her current vantage point allows her to reevaluate and repent the misdeeds of the young age. The narrative is sometimes apologetic and absolving, with Paley trying to explain some of her former silly acts. She states that only now does she feel her link to the house with all her “senses.”21 Her past mistreatment of her great-grandmother, for instance, she explains by external influences. Paley notes that she acquired certain attitudes from “the specifics of the time: something heard on TV, on the radio, or absorbed from the general atmosphere.”22 This observation is telling for the focus of my investigation because it highlights the role of discursive formations in the construct of Jews’ material spaces. While Paley particularly associates the personality of the house’s main master, her grandfather, with the world of different era and culture, her reminiscences of her great-grandmother and grandmother play an important part in her reflections on selfhood in relation to the rest of the family.

Things Fall Apart: The Lack of Skills of the Jewish Male Hysteric Paley describes her grandfather as a hysterical man whom she used to fear as a child because of his unprovoked outbursts of anger. She explains her grandfather’s strange behavior as the result of the crippling mental and physical effects of being born in the Pale of Settlement. She intertwines products of biased discourse with real-life phenomena. Her conceptualization of the normative is

21 Marina Palei, “Pominovenie,” in her Long Distance, ili slavianskii aktsent (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 12. 22 Ibid., 42.

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based on borrowings from literary culture, which can be seen in the following description: My grandfather did not have any skills. This is not to say that he did not work in the past. . . . But then he retired. And here he was confronted by a huge amount of free time. Well, this was not the kind of idleness of, say, Bunin’s ancestors, who, when living at the time of “gentry’s dismantlement,” nevertheless managed to preserve strength, nobility, a carefree attitude and remained “wonderfully gifted in an easy and diverse way.” At the core of my grandfather’s idleness was the incapability of a person whose ancestry was degenerating in the Pale of Settlement, and which combined everlasting fear and weakness of the spirit.23

Paley thus establishes a taxonomy of differences in the lack of skill not only between classes but also between ethnic groups. According to the logic in operation, while the Russian gentry were able to compensate for their lack of skills and purposelessness because of their high spiritual development, these same features in Jews were the result of so-called “degeneration.” Paley’s medicalization of the psychological make-up of her grandfather is informed by the discourse of the Jewish specificity. Her description of his idleness makes him akin to the déclassé Jews which early Soviet medical science singled out as “exemplary organisms.” At that time, the task was to change the habits of Jewish people by teaching them skills which would help them become integrated into the working culture of Soviet society. The 1930 collection of The Problems of the Biology and Pathology of the Jews stresses the need to reform Jews through work: The aim of this research is to study the relationship between the state of health of the déclassé Jewish population and its ability to contribute to the work output. This approach is correct not only from the point of view of social hygiene, but also from the point of view of a class understanding of social health issues. In the Soviet Union the principal class is proletariat, and Soviet social hygiene has to develop measures which will help to build socialism.24 23 Ibid., 22. 24 S. R. Dikhtiar, “Deklassirovannoe evreistvo g. Minska,” in Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev, ed. V. I. Binshtok et al., vol. 3, part 2 (Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo Istoriko-etnograficheskogo obshchestva, 1930), 5.

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Paley’s evaluation of her grandfather as lacking any skills in the context of the discourse of reforming Jews has definite phylogenetic connotations. It shows that, despite the efforts of the Soviet society, her grandfather has not been able to overcome his inherited characteristics. This implies that Jews are unable to change in response to changing circumstances. In narrating her grandfather’s history, Paley finds it important to mention that he had fought in the Second World War. Yet surprisingly, in her otherwise eager psychological analysis of her grandfather’s non-normative behavior she does not write on the traumatic effect of being a soldier in the fighting army. In order to typify her grandfather as a distinctly Jewish exemplar, Paley mentions Babel’s story, “In the Basement.” This reference is indicative of her search for the typology of the physically and mentally unstable Jew. Paley quotes Babel’s description of the grandfather with “his blue petrified lips” to encapsulate her own grandfather’s histrionics. In her understanding, this image grotesquely typifies the déclassé Jew in the Pale in the 1910s. By establishing uncritically and anachronistically a link between real-life characters and literary protagonists, Paley promulgates the discursive formation of a psychologically unstable and hysterical Jewish man. Paley’s grandfather could not be the contemporary of the grandfather in “In the Basement,” but he could be born in the Pale in the 1910s. By emphasizing the grandfather’s lack of skills and his inability to perform physical labor, she incorporates another construct related to the Jew’s non-productive interaction with the physical world. Paley’s grandfather appears as an unreformed anomaly, unaffected by some fifty years of life experience in Soviet society. Paley shows him as a dysfunctional head of the family and house-owner. The house is full of bits of wood, panels, and other objects that Paley’s grandfather is incapable of turning into something constructive. The gradual degradation of the house is presented by Paley as the result not only of social circumstances of the Pale, but largely of the hereditary characteristics of her grandfather. Notably, in her depiction of her grandfather’s eccentricities, Paley is not only searching for a comic representation but also for quasi-genetic characteristics.

The Jewish Baba Yaga: Smell, Prayer Books and Burial Shrouds In Paley’s descriptions, her great-grandmother, also from the former Pale, embodies somatic and cultural differences. In the previous chapter I analyzed Paley’s adolescent fantasy of her great-grandmother as Carmen. Yet Paley also uses numerous semiotic and material markers which signify her

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great-grandmother’s Jewishness. Rather than using the words “Jew” or “Jewish” in her descriptions, she uses alternative codes to reveal Jewishness to her readers. Paley’s task is thus paradoxical, as she attempts both to reveal and to conceal, leaving it to the reader to decipher her code. The old woman’s body and her material belongings create an interface between the material and the symbolic. This same great-grandmother whom Paley imagined as Carmen in her teens was, in the writer’s childhood imagination, the witch of Russian fairytales: I remember her [the great-grandmother] as frightfully ugly, exactly like a Baba Yaga, and in my childhood, I was not sure that she was not a Baba Yaga. Usually the great-grandmother [prababka] spent her time leaning against the kitchen oven and looking how others were eating. . . . The great-grandmother spent whole days standing in this position with the eternal expression of blunt sorrow, and at the end of her enormous and frightful nose with developed nostrils there was hanging a misty drop. . . . I was afraid to go inside her room even when I already grew up: it was a Baba Yaga’s room, after all, and I saw how my hunchbacked great-grandmother stood there and smoked. . . . Her room was extraordinary in all ways. The most extraordinary thing about it was the smell: the sinister and inextinguishable smell of extreme old age, when this old age already develops into a supernatural evil power [nechistaia sila].25

Paley’s visions of her prababka as a Baba Yaga is a disturbing collage of the motifs from the fairytales and stereotypes of the Jew’s corporeal differences. In his foundational study on the Baba Yaga in Russian and Slav folklore, the authoritative nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer Aleksandr Potebnia notes that, in the stable fairytale motif of the Baba Yaga eating small children, her persona is in some variants interchangeable with cannibalizing Jews.26 Potebnia states that this variant relates to the widespread superstition that Jews steal and eat Christian children. Paley’s portrayal of her great-grandmother seems to allude to this tradition. In portraying the house and its inhabitants through the perception of her childhood self, Paley employs the imagery of a child. Of all the creatures of Russian folklore, the Baba Yaga is the most 25 Palei, “Pominovenie,” 41. 26 A. A. Potebnia, “Baba Iaga,” in his Simvol i mif v narodnoi kul′ture (Moscow: Labirint, 2000), 157–220.

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frightening for young children, due to her cannibalistic tendencies. While in Paley’s recollection the great-grandmother is the victim of Paley’s pranks, the association of the old woman with the Baba Yaga evokes disconcerting associations. In terms of the markers of the Jew’s body, the shape of the great-grandmother’s nose, which is described as hooked, is a principal sign of the Jew’s embodied difference in European imagination. Her “developed nostrils”27 is yet another physical feature assigned with racial meaning and a sign of the alleged visibility of the Jew in Diaspora. Sander Gilman writes about debates around “nostrility” as “the sign of the racial cohesion of the Jews.”28 He demonstrates how this visual stereotype of the Jewish body led to the interest, beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, in rhinoplasty among Jewish doctors and patients. In spite of statistical evidence showing that the so-called Jewish nose is not an attribute of Jewish people, this stereotype is firmly seated in culture and is the most commonly used racialized marker of Jewishness. The meaning of the Jewish nose aesthetically translates into ugliness, and the reason for having nose-changing plastic surgery is to become more aesthetically acceptable, to conform to the ideals of beauty as constructed by a dominant culture.29 Often the reason for correcting the so-called Jewish nose into a more acceptable shape is motivated by the desire to pass for a non-Jew. Fittingly, Paley viewed her prababka as exemplarily ugly. The manifestations of that ugliness are such markers of crypto-Jewishness as the hooked nose, the hunched back, and the bad odors—almost a complete set of the stereotypes of the Jew.30 The perceived smell of a Jew—the foetor Judaicus—links the Jew to the Devil who was also believed to have a putrid smell. And indeed, Paley identifies the smell of the Jewish woman’s body as a sign of her belonging to the supernatural world—an image which makes her part of the Demonic underworld. This image openly links the Jew with the world of supernatural powers, the nechistaia sila (“unclean force”). Paley’s phobia of the old woman’s body includes the material objects associated with her great-grandmother. When Paley confesses that she used to 27 Palei, “Pominovenie,” 41. 28 Sander Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories and Identities (London: Palgrave, 2003), 197. 29 Idem, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998). 30 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: the Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1943).

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attack the prababka, she describes one particularly significant episode in which she tears apart her great-grandmother’s prayer book. Paley describes the sound of her prababka reading from her prayer book as a “terrible mutter.”31 This characterization of the voice and the language as “terrible” expresses embodied aversion to the spoken language of the Other. Notably, Paley does not specify the language of the prayer. This is in line with her deliberate omission of words such as “Jewish,” “Hebrew,” and “Judaism.” Instead, she describes the book as having been written in “ancient language.”32 The vagueness of this statement attests to more than the concerns around censorship in the Soviet Union, as the story was published in the period of the Glasnost reforms. Paley concludes her reminiscences of her great-grandmother with the following statement: “The old members of my family were to me, as it probably is the case with all young children, creatures of a different race, who came from a different planet.”33 It appears that Paley conceals her uneasiness around ethnic differences behind the cliché of generational differences. Her story shows a lack of interest in the traditional relics of the family. Her detached attitude to the objects surrounding her great-grandmother is symptomatic, given that the narrative identifies the current-day authorial vantage point as the late 1980s. While the pathos of her narrative position is to reevaluate her former attitudes and behavior, there is no evidence of any new interest to fill the gaps in the ethnocultural knowledge. There is no information about the fate of the old prayer books or the old brass candlestick which the old woman used when praying. All these objects which are usually passed from generation to generation and which carry a sensory and memory-inducing physicality are absent in her reflections of the past. This indicates that Paley’s reminiscences are driven by the impulse to forget rather than to recollect the physical world of the house. The physical objects and their relationality with their owners would not heal Paley’s trauma of Jewishness. Just as she expresses the wish for the house to fall apart, she also, I suggest, wishes for the disappearance of all the objects within it. Paley’s final description of her great-grandmother’s death in the house epitomizes both her lack of interest in Jewish artefacts and the reason for this disinterest. Paley notes that when her great-grandmother died, grandfather ordered “some kind of white fabric and a coffin.”34 This expression, “some kind of white fabric” [kakoi-to belyi material], attests to the highly intentional 31 Palei, “Pominovenie,” 43. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 53. 34 Ibid., 51.

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indifference of the author. The so-called white fabric has strong cultural religious meaning as an object of Judaic material culture used in shrouding the body after it is cleaned and prepared for burial. It would be, perhaps, too easy to explain the lack of information about the ceremonial character of this white fabric as the result of censorship constraints. Such an omission could have been rectified in the second edition of the story, which was published in 2000. The dismissive tone in referring to the Judaic burial cloth as “some kind of fabric” testifies to the lack of desire to learn more about the Jewish body and the customs related to its materiality in preparation for the afterlife. This indifference cannot be explained by Paley’s general overt somatophobia, which is a trademark of her writing, as was discussed in relation to her story “Cabiria from the Obvodny Canal.” The difference, however, can be explained by the phobia around the Jew’s body and relational materialities.

The Pale-Skinned Grandmother and a Freudian Family Romance Matters of biological difference underpin Paley’s conceptualization of her grandfather’s ancestral line and she continues her strategy of concealing and revealing in the choices she makes in her descriptions of her maternal grandmother. But while the stereotypes which Paley attaches to her grandfather and his mother reflect the internalization of negative stereotypes, her image of her grandmother is shown with much affection. This grandmother is portrayed as the opposite to her despotic and mad husband and the main victim of his histrionics. She is also a buffer between him and Paley as she protects the young Paley from the theatrics performed by her grandfather. Paley’s depiction of the physical features of her favorite grandmother is indicative of her anxieties around the Jew’s body. The description of her grandmother’s skin is symptomatic of Paley’s preoccupation with physical features that denote racialized biological differences. She often describes her grandmother’s skin as “very fair and noble” and “sensitive in contrast with her origins.”35 Not only the color of the skin but its texture, too, is imagined as unusual for a woman of her “origins.” Paley also mentions that her grandmother was the prettiest child in the family. Especially significant is the fact that her grandmother sometimes reminisced about “a handsome Red Army commissar”36 who expressed an interest in her when she was young. The handsome commissar 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Ibid., 62.

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was implicitly not Jewish. This subplot in Paley’s fantasy vis-à-vis her grandmother’s origins is akin to Freud’s “family romances.” Such a fantasy opens a possibility that the enigmatic Red Army commissar was the real father of Paley’s mother. Fittingly, Paley mentions that her mother describes herself as a “mutant”. There are also no descriptions of her mother’s appearance in the text. Moreover, Paley states that she looks like her mother and has always felt herself to be of an “inexplicably different breed” [neob′′iasnimoe chuzherodstvo].37 Paley ends “Remembrance” with a description of the death of her favorite grandmother caused by gangrene as a result of an infection which spread from a scratch on her tender skin. Paley points out the irony in her grandmother’s death: the skin of which she was so proud led to her demise. For Paley, the skin is also a locus of biological difference. Within racial discourses, skin has been conceptualized as the most prominent marker of racial difference—in color, texture, and structure it has been viewed as stable proof of racial immutability. It is telling, therefore, that Paley ends the story of her ancestral house with a description of her grandmother’s death caused by a skin disease. Paley notes that, on her deathbed, her grandmother said that she lived somebody else’s life. This statement serves as further evidence of Paley’s dream of a “family romance.” Paley’s tactic of concealing and unmasking her Jewish identity entails more than the uncertainties of open self-expression during Glasnost era. Her story is a telling example of the choices made in relation to the acquisition of knowledge through her lived experience within the Jewish house. Her lack of engagement in daily interactions between family members is a powerful example of the internalization of hostile attitudes inherent in the dominant society. Despite her reassessment of the mistakes in her past attitudes, Paley’s narrative presents a case of self-perception based on seeing oneself through the eyes of the hostile Other. Paley’s authorial position is in contrast with Babel-the-narrator in “In the Basement.” While Babel structures his story on parallelisms and homogenies between his alter ego and his eccentric relatives, Paley estranges herself from the old inhabitants of the house. While Babel’s young alter ego proudly shows his friend the old volumes of the Talmud, Paley as a child tears apart the old Hebrew prayer-books. While Babel was optimistically looking forward to joining the new world order, Paley remains withdrawn into her “internal

37 Ibid., 22.

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immigration.”38 While Babel addresses the discourses of Jewish “specificity” in relation to differences between social classes, Paley often uncritically resorts to phylogenetic arguments. While Babel’s narrator has overcome the stage of “family romances,” Paley’s authorial persona remains confined to this imagined universe of alternative familial lineages. Tellingly, in embracing the stereotypes of the Jew’s body, she is unable to appreciate the irony of Babel’s story. Writing from the two temporal vantage points—Babel at the dawn of the new Soviet world and Paley in the last years of the Soviet state, these writers show the formative role of both literature and environment on the construct of the (non) material Self in relation to the Other.

38 Ibid., 28.

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CHAPTER TEN

On Feeding the Family: Constructing Jewishness through Nurture My kindly grandmother . . . was forever wanting people to eat something. She kept asking, “Pokushali? Pokushali?” (Have you eaten?)—the only Russian word that she knew. —Osip Mandelshtam, “Judaic Chaos” (1925)1

D

escriptions of childhood in fictional and non-fictional biographical accounts by Soviet Jewish authors often contain stories of being fed well by their older family members. These recollections frequently put emphasis on the role ascribed to feeding children as a characteristic feature of Jewish families. Taking care of children and grandchildren by mothers, aunties and grandmothers is construed as more than an expression of love and care.2 Providing nourishment is seen not only as a function to sustain life but also as an activity which defines a specifically Jewish way to nurture and protect children. Many writers link this special nutritional effort to the harsh historical conditions endured by Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Feeding and food are often seen as a contributing factor to the very survival of the Jewish people, who had to endure not only poverty but also persecution and pogroms. Psychologist Marc Kaminsky observes in his essay on self-formation in modern Jewish culture that after pogroms “children would mysteriously sicken and die.” He notes that the ever-present social chaos was linked with “disintegration anxiety,” and argues that east European Jews living under these conditions developed a stronger 1 Osip Mandelshtam, “Judaic Chaos,” in his The Noise of Time, trans. Clarence Brown (London: Quartet Books, 1988). 2 On the culture-specific role of food in inter-generational relations see Irina Perianova, The Polyphony of Food (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012).

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sense of responsibility towards family and community.3 Isaac Babel’s stories respond to this pre-Revolutionary historical cultural context. Various literary examples show how the trope of being able to feed children well becomes a marker of difference between Jews and Others in later Soviet discourses. While this heightened interest in “feeding well” can be seen as a reflection of the historical situation, defined by a period of endemic food shortages, this notion of difference stems from and contributes to an ethnic stereotype. Of note are the overlapping themes addressed by those authors who were born before the October Revolution and contemporary writers. While being able to feed children well is a question of economic and social privilege, it is at the same time a question of priorities. Examples in this chapter show a wide range of attitudes towards feeding, including elements of class consciousness, problematic essentialism, gender roles, apologetics and the celebration of traditional values. What unites most of these representations is the understanding that feeding family members can become a politicized issue. I use the notion of “feeding well” to echo Derrida’s concept of “eating well”, highlighting it as a cultural construct related to biopolitics and linking the material and semiotic. When the early Soviet medical doctors and scientists conducted their research on the biology and pathology of Jews in the 1920s, they paid attention to the relationship between food and nutrition and the specific physical conditions of the Jews from the former Pale. Their work distinguished between various social classes of Jewish people. Endocrinologist V. M. Kogan-Iasny, in his article “Patologiia endokrinnoi sistemy u evreev” (“Pathology of the Endocrine System among the Jews,” 1930), states that the Jewish diet is characterized by high protein intake among the so-called “Jewish bourgeois” as opposed to the nutrition of the proletarian Jews who are often emaciated.4 While he notes that protein consumption is beneficial for humans, he concludes the article by stating that high animal protein intake is both the cause of illnesses and the reason for the survival of Jewish people. This conclusion attests to the general opinion that it took a special effort for the Jews of the Pale of Settlement to survive the unfavourable conditions. At the same time, Kogan-Yasny notes that it is well-known that wealthy Jews often eat excessively, which leads to their being overweight. This latter observation serves as evidence of the existence of a stereotype which identifies Jews as having an indulgent attitude towards food. 3 Marc Kaminsky, “Discourse and Self-Formation: The Concept of Mentsh in Modern Yiddish Culture,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 54, no. 4 (1994): 305. 4 Kogan-Iasnyi, “Patologiia endokrinnoi sistemy u evreev,” 3.

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Feeding the Family and the Other: Leon Trotsky’s Class-Conscious Take on Nutrition Leon Trotsky’s biography, My Life (1929), reflects his interest in nutrition and chronologically coincides with the research conducted on the Jews of the former Pale at the time. Trotsky describes his childhood years on an agricultural farm leased in the 1880s by his father in southern Russia. Within this depiction of his childhood, his evaluation of aspects of nourishment reflects the wider framing of this issue by the biological and medical research undertaken on Jewry in the late 1920s and exemplified by articles in the volumes Problems of the Biology and Pathology among the Jews. This framing, scientific and objectivist, programmatically emphasizes the role of social environment, occasionally referencing the issue of ethnic difference. On the very first page of his autobiography, Trotsky provides a class-conscious account of the way he and his siblings were treated by his parents and articulates the issues of feeding their hired laborers. Trotsky characterizes this childhood as “the greyish childhood of a lower-middle-class family,” and notes that his parents’ “every muscle was strained, every thought was set on work.”5 This routine left little time for children and there is no mention of any special efforts made by his family to feed their children. Trotsky states that, of the eight children born to his parents, only four survived. While he assures the reader they never starved, there is no mention of abundance. The farm produce is mentioned only in connection with his parents’ working activities: “the land, the cattle, the poultry, the mill took all my parents’ time; there was none left for us.”6 Writing his narrative from an ideologically defined position as a revolutionary, Trotsky describes two episodes which suggest that the family was fed better than the employees. Both episodes emphasize social inequalities; one describes ethnic tensions. In the latter, Trotsky explains how, as a child, he was made uneasy when the workers teased him about the differences in food. In this scene, ethnic tension is imbricated in issues of class antagonism: “What a Mohammedan you are!” the young steward would cry enviously. . . .

5 6

Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1960), 1. Ibid., 17.

CHAPTER TEN    On Feeding the Family This red-haired Afanasy and black-haired Mutuzok were my persecutors. If I chanced to come in while the gruel or the porridge was being handed around, they would cry laughingly: “Come on, Lyova, and have dinner with us!” or, “Why don’t you ask your mother for a bit of chicken for us, Lyova?”. I would feel embarrassed and go out without answering.7

While Trotsky’s reminiscence shows his concern for social inequalities around issues of food and nutrition, it also reveals how the conversation around food relates to ethno-religious differences. The word “Mahommedan” is used by the peasants to denote this ethnic Other, as is their comment about chicken. While the worker’s comment designates chicken as luxury food, the remark additionally typifies it as the stereotypical construct of Jewish food. There is evidence in Trotsky’s memoir that chicken was luxury food. The only other time that chicken is mentioned is in connection with the arrival of a Polish lady landowner who has come for lunch. The menu consists of chicken and dumplings with cherry filling [vareniki]—a typical dish in the Ukraine and southern Russia. Yet the laborer’s identification of chicken as an ethnic food is telling. In the context of the history of Jewish food in eastern Europe, the choice of chicken is not accidental. Elliott Horowitz, in his article on the history of Jewish cuisine in the Pale, observes that many Jewish recipes for cooking poultry used the flesh of the fowl as the equivalent to pork in non-Jewish cooking.8 The workers’ reference to chicken as a Jewish food in this episode connotes a prejudice which goes beyond social differences. Young Trotsky’s embarrassment in the face of his “persecutors” indicates that his humiliation was caused not only by class differences around the issues of diet but also by ethnic Othering. The second episode in My Life deals with the nutritional value of food from a position of distinct class-consciousness. It has strong political meaning and tells the story of Trotsky’s mother’s nephew writing an article for the local newspaper on the poor health of the seasonal workers on the farm. Their condition was called “night-blindness” [kurinaia slepota] and was considered the result of poor nutrition. Trotsky explains that, when the local regional

7 Ibid., 25. 8 Elliott Horowitz, “Remembering the Fish and Making a Tsimmes: Jewish Food, Jewish Identity, and Jewish Memory,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 1 (2014): 57–79.

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government [Zemstvo] inspector conducted an investigation, he found that the seasonal workers’ conditions were average for the province. Trotsky writes: The inspector concluded that the sickness was due to a lack of fat in the diet, and that it is common all over the province, as the laborers were fed in the same manner everywhere, and sometimes even worse.9

A striking feature of Trotsky’s description of the nutritional aspect of the employer-employee relationship is the fact that it was his mother’s nephew, a young, politically active Jewish student from Odessa, who had written about the workers’ conditions to the newspaper. This episode thus reflects the radicalization of the younger generation. Trotsky’s own response to the differences in nutrition and care similarly articulates his political position. At the same time, he objectively explains that many of the seasonal workers came from afar and travelled by foot sometimes for a month while eating only stale bread. This detail points to the wider picture suggesting that the etiology of their condition is found in the general state of poverty in the province. As explained in chapter one, Solzhenitsyn applied a biopolitical lens to this episode from Trotsky’s My Life: in his history of the Russian Jewry (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002) Solzhenitsyn claims that his Russian grandfather’s family fed their laborers meat three time a day during the summer. In his rewriting of this episode, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the different attitudes towards the Russian and Slav workers by Jewish and Russian employers, so building on the mythology of Jewish economic exploitation of the local population.10 Trotsky takes an objectivist Marxist approach to the question of nutrition and caregiving; for him, the relationship between parents and children is determined by the same schema as the relationship between employers and employees—a relationship based on economic reality. While it is implied that, as employers, his parents could afford to feed their children better than the toiling workers, Trotsky does not provide any details about being spoiled by his parents. When he was sent to town to stay with his aunt and start school, the supply of produce consisted of wheat flour, barley flour, buckwheat, and 9 Trotsky, My Life, 25. 10 Populist Engelgardt stressed in his notes about rural Russia in the 1880s that meat was eaten only by landlords, while peasants ate bread and porridge. See A. N. Engel′gardt, Iz derevni. 12 pisem. 1872–1887 (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo sel′skokhoziaistvennoi literatury, 1956), 203.

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millet.11 The precision of this list of foodstuffs typifies Trotsky’s Marxist attitude to economics. There are no ethnic markers in the relationships between parents and children in his depiction of the family. Importantly, as a socialist and internationalist, Trotsky describes being offended as a class and ethnic Other in the episode with the two workers. For him, in his adult years, the question of “feeding well” ideologically should belong to the sphere of class differences rather than ethnic considerations. His decision to join the revolutionary movement was strongly motivated by the internationalist drive to bring an end not only to class injustices but also to ethnic and race prejudice. In My Life he states that many childhood experiences “laid the foundation of my attitude to society today.”12

Isaac Babel’s Fictional Grandmother and Feeding Auntie Bobka Isaac Babel’s fictional biographical accounts of being fed as a young boy exhibit common features with Trotsky’s narrative. They also demonstrate similarities with the general views expressed in the medical literature of the time regarding class differences among the Jews of the former Pale. Yet, unlike in Trotsky’s autobiography, Babel’s fictional biographical accounts pay tribute to the culture-specific, emotive aspects of family members feeding their children. His early story, “Childhood. At Grandmother’s” (1915–1916), reveals an ambivalent attitude towards his fictional grandmother’s nurturing approach to feeding her grandson. There are two memorable scenes revolving around eating. While the first one focuses on the hearty composition of the meal, the second introduces an aspect of class differences. The first scene describes the teenage boy’s healthy appetite: The table had already been set for me. Grandmother sat in the corner. I ate. We didn’t say a word. The door was locked. We were alone. There was cold gefilte fish for dinner with horseradish (a dish worth embracing Judaism for), a rich and delicious soup, roasted meat with onions, salad, compote, coffee, pie, and apples. I ate everything. I was a dreamer, it is true, but a dreamer with a hearty appetite. Grandmother cleared away the dishes.13 11 Ibid., 37. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Isaac Babel, “At Grandmother’s,” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 48.

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Following this episode, the grandmother expresses her ambitions for her grandson’s bright future as she implores him to study in order to be competitive in a tough world. While the grandmother cannot read or write Russian, she attentively listens to the protagonist’s homework in preparation for class. She does her best to be helpful in order to support the young boy’s future. Caring for his nutrition is the main contribution that an old woman in her situation can make. However, the discontinuity between the generations is expressed in her disturbing outburst directed at the servant maid: Dishes clatter in the kitchen. Grandmother goes there. We’re going to have supper. I hear her angry, metallic voice. She is shouting at the maid. I feel strange and troubled. Just a short while ago she had been breathing peace and sorrow. The maid snaps back at her. Grandmother’s unbearably shrill voice rings out in an uncontrollable rage—“Get out of here, you dreck! I’m the mistress here. You are destroying my property. Get out of here!” We eat our dinner without talking. We eat our fill, abundantly and long. Grandmother’s transparent eyes are staring immovably—what they are staring at, I do not know.14

This earlier story was written in the pre-Revolutionary historical context and displays a teenager’s uneasiness about the demonstration of power in social hierarchies. For young protagonist, his grandmother and the atmosphere of her house have a constricting effect and the narrative shows his latent desire to leave the confinement of this nurturing place. Babel’s later story, “In the Basement,” was written almost fifteen years later, in 1930. It shows a different attitude towards the role of food as a form of nurturing in the Jewish family. Food in this story has emotional and psychological dimensions. This is evident in his description of Aunt Bobka’s preparations for the visit of the rich boy Mark, which, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, had a special relevance in the life of the young protagonist: Aunt Bobka was proud that the bank manager’s son considered me a friend. She felt this friendship was the start of a great career, and so she made our guest a strudel with jam and a poppy seed pie. The whole heart of our tribe—a heart that had borne up heroically throughout long struggle—was baked into those pastries.15 14 Ibid., 52. 15 Babel, “In the Basement,” 160.

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According to this description, the heart of the tribe is in its women’s baking, and it is because of this care that the tribal heart has survived all its struggles. “The basement” might be a modest place, but it provides nourishment not only for the body but for the soul. This desire to survive is a marker of strength and fitness rather than decline. Jewish food becomes both the remedy and the spiritual support for the survival of the people. This story was written by a much older and wiser Babel who had witnessed – and described in The Red Cavalry (1926)—the physical annihilation of Jewish communities in Russia’s western regions, including Poland.16 In “In the Basement,” Babel insists that the heroic long struggle of the Jews did not kill their heart and soul, and his narrator celebrates the stoic contribution of Jewish women to the survival of the people. Babel’s texts show his appreciation of the complex dynamic of feeding children, and his understanding of nurture as meeting not only the physical needs of his protagonist but also his psychological welfare. If there are features of Jewish particularism in feeding children well, it is inseparable from the history of the persecuted people.

Later Soviet Writing: Marina Paley on her Grandmother’s Feeding Instinct In “Remembrance,” Paley’s grandmother’s favorite pastime is cooking and feeding members of her family. Characteristically, Paley theorizes this nurturing act in phylogenetic terms. She views her grandmother’s need to cook and feed others as an instinct and a marker of her Jewishness but without, as is typical for Paley’s texts, using the word “Jewish” itself: Why is it that all her life she was burdened by this fear that her children will remain hungry? . . . Where did this blind fear come from? Fear which was like a blind instinct and which forced her to feed, feed and feed the open mouths of children? . . . Most likely, this was a manifestation of a simple and shameless necessity to survive—to survive physically at whatever cost—to survive zoologically as a tribe. This survival strategy was developed through centuries and penetrated blood and bone.17

16 Sicher, Babel in Context. 17 Palei, “Pominovenie,” 34.

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Paley presents Jews as a people who have been persecuted and deprived of basic living conditions and who have developed a distinctive attitude towards nutrition as a defense mechanism. This notion of a special attitude towards food among Jews is partly a manifestation of common stereotypes found in literature and Soviet reality. A relevant antecedent in literature is Osip Mandelshtam’s statement that his Jewish grandmother knew only one Russian word, pokushat′ (“eat”), and that she constantly asked her family members whether they have eaten—“Pokushali?”18 Mandelshtam wrote about this topic in his fictional biographical essay in The Noise of Time (1925) in which he reminisces about his pre-Revolutionary childhood. In his case, he describes a visit to his grandparents in Riga whom he had never met before, who did not speak Russian and with whom he had little in common culturally. In Paley’s case, she describes interaction with the grandmother over many years until she reaches young adulthood. In her context of uniform Soviet living conditions, the notion that Jews ate better than “ordinary” people had strong negative connotations. Paley is aware of the later Soviet negative stereotypes suggesting that Jewish people enjoyed better foodstuffs than their non-Jewish neighbors. With this is mind, she makes a caveat in her conceptualization of her grandmother’s feeding instinct. She extends the grandmother’s pleasure in feeding others to all visitors, not just to members of her immediate family. Paley corrects herself by making this observation: “By the way, my grandmother also liked to feed the neighbors’ children, and the children of house tenants—all sorts of children, as long as they liked eating. (So my theory of the “need to survive” is not totally suitable to explain her soul).”19 The use of the word “soul” is telling in the context of materiality. Paley attempts to both affirm and challenge the notion that Jews have a particular attitude to food by ascribing it with special value. Feeding can thus be both an “instinct” and a manifestation of the “soul.” Paley’s afterthought is indicative of her realization that she is disseminating stereotypes. This afterthought attempts to demonstrate that feeding and food can have not only corporeal but also emotional meaning. Her grandmother’s sensibility towards “all sorts of children,” rather than Jewish children, is used as a device to deracialize the topic of instinct. Earlier, when feeding was framed as a Darwinian drive for survival, it had a physiological meaning which had little to do with “the soul.” 18 Osip Mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1990). 19 Palei, “Pominovenie,” 36.

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While the theme of food and feeding occupies a large place in Paley’s reminiscences about her favorite grandmother, there is a telling gap in her coverage of this topic—an absence of any concrete descriptions of dishes. This void is significant because it excludes culture-specific identifiers. Were the dishes cooked typically Jewish? There is only one description of a kind of food that could signify as culture-specific, yet it is not described as Jewish. The dishes are mentioned in relation to the grandmother’s cooking for the wedding of her stepson many years earlier. Readers would recognize the food as Jewish only if they are familiar with the Russian Jewish cuisine. The Jewish origins of the dishes are concealed under Russian names: stuffed pike (rather than gefilte fish), jellied beef (goviazhii studen′ rather than colloquial kholodets), liver pâté, chopped herring, chickens stuffed with crackling, golden-brown strudel—all these Ashkenazi dishes are given neutral Russian names.20 While Paley claims that she is allied with the house through her “senses,” there is no aroma coming from the dishes. To fill the gap, Paley remarks that, in contrast to the festive table prepared in olden days by her grandmother, her own son was brought up with limited gastronomic knowledge. Her choice of wording is suggestive, as she uses a metaphor to describe varieties of fish as “nationalities”: “My own child knows the difference between meat and fish but does not know any differences between various ‘nationalities’ of fish.”21 The word “nationalities” in inverted commas is a veiled allusion to national cuisine, but the word Jewish is not present. The sense of olfaction is preserved for descriptions of negative odors in the house – this in itself is symptomatic of Paley’s attitude to the materiality of the family house. In analyzing the place of Jewish heritage food in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, Alice Nakhimovsky states that “the post-Soviet Jewish cookery books are very serious, and in a way impersonal: there is not a single reference to families or place or past life; there’s not a single joke. Many refer in their introductions to loss and the difficulty of rediscovery. All have great difficulty with kashruth [kosher laws].”22 Paley’s attitude to her grandmother’s cooking in part explains this absence of generational continuities.

20 Ibid., 34. 21 Ibid. 22 Nakhimovsky, “You Are What They Ate,” 63.

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The Object of Envy: the Superior Jewish Diet in Yuri Karabchievsky’s Bildungsroman Among Paley’s contemporary writers, the award-winning novelist and essayist Yuri Karabchievsky (1938–1992) addressed the theme of Jewish people’s alleged better access to foodstuffs in the Soviet era. His novel Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera (The Life of Alexander Zilber) was written in the 1970s but was published for the first time in the journal Druzhba narodov (Friendship of Nations) in 1990.23 The bildungsroman contains numerous accounts of petty antisemitism, including episodes in which food becomes central to the stereotype of crafty and dishonest Jews who eat better than their neighbors. In scenes indicative of everyday life, his mother and stepfather eat their meals behind closed doors in a communal apartment, making sure that their Russian neighbors do not know what is on their table. Their meals consist of staples such as borshch and boiled potatoes. Delicacies appear on the table only on special occasions, when they entertain guests and friends of the family. On these occasions, the meals include traditional Jewish dishes. In a telling episode, Karabchievsky describes a scene on a train in which a plain-speaking Russian man confronts the protagonist’s mother on the subject of Jews’ having more food than the rest of the Soviet people. The man points to the holiday luggage, which consists of a number of bundles, and remarks that, unlike Russians, Jews manage to obtain produce. The episode demonstrates the popular stereotype of Jews in the decades after the Second World War, which was based on the idea that many Jewish people were involved in trade rather than proletarian labor. The food sector and the distribution of produce to shops were rumored to be dominated by Jews who were perceived as trading illicitly, so creating shortages of food supplies. Statistical data in relation to the employment of Soviet Jews in the state system of trade and retail shows a decrease in the number of Jewish workers involved in the trade professions in the USSR from 1930s to 1989.24 Numbers fell sharply from 1939 to 1959 and decreased even more radically from the 1960s onwards. This trend was the result of the professionalization and upward social mobility of Soviet Jews during this time. This social demographic, however, did not dispel the stereotype.

23 Iurii Karabchievskii, Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera, Druzhba narodov 6 (1990): 22–85. 24 Viacheslav Konstantinov, Evreiskoe naselenie byvshego SSSR v XX veke: sotsio-demograficheskii analiz ( Jerusalem: Lira, 2007).

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The episode on the train illustrates this popular misconception and also reflects another stereotype: that Jews are greedily fixated on food. This theme further intersects with the notion of criminality—in Karabchievsky’s novel, the stepfather is arrested on the charge of illicit trading. However, he is released because, according to Karabchievsky’s protagonist-narrator, he does not divulge any information and subsequently there is not enough evidence to convict him. Importantly, the narrator also comments that his stepfather did not betray anybody from his circle. It is this stoic behavior, he insists, that made his stepfather a respected person among his friends and coworkers. This suggests that the stepfather was involved in some kind of petty machinations. Karabchievsky portrays the stepfather through a double lens: his own authorial evaluation does not conflate with the perception of the teenage protagonist. Notably, it is the young protagonist who is ashamed of all the markers of Jewishness inscribed on his stepfather’s body. The young Zilber is embarrassed by the man’s strong Yiddish accent, which stands out in Moscow as a marker of a Jew from the provinces.25 This attitude shows the formative role which the antisemitic environment has on the perceptions of Jewishness among young people growing up in Jewish families in the post-war Soviet Union. In line with the typology of the bildungsroman, the mature protagonist casts a different evaluative gaze on his stepfather from a different vantage point in time.26 In The Life of Alexander Zilber, food issues are central to the animosities between Zilber and his stepfather who perpetually reminds his teenage stepson that, as the head of the family, he takes risks in order to obtain the income necessary to provide a living for the family. The trauma around food is complex, and it involves all members of the family: the stepfather, Alexander Zilber, and his mother. All three are affected by the pressure to make a living in the harsh environment. Significantly, there is an imbricated gender issue in the pressures which are put on a Jewish man who is supposed to be a good provider.27 It is for this reason that Zilber’s beautiful mother has married this man. Having lost 25 For a discussion of antisemitic markers of the stepfather see Murav, Music from the Speeding Train, 297–300. 26 Characteristic for ethnic bildungsroman is the ethnic protagonist’s inability to perceive conflict as purely personal, because on many occasions this conflict is connected to questions of ethnic identity. These narratives typically express the struggles of those whose race or ethnicity renders them unacceptable to the dominant society. See a discussion in Martin Japtok, Growing up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 27 See Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Britlinger, and Irina Glushchenko, Seasoned Socialism: Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2019). Topics in

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her husband in the Second World War, she and her son have to find a way to survive, and this means having access to food. Zilber’s mother has to negotiate the tensions and it is clear that, for her, being married to a man who can support the family is a compromise. The novel’s plot gives an honest and nuanced account of the topic of feeding the family by exposing the multiple hardships of growing up in the Soviet Union with its unprovoked manifestations of everyday antisemitism. The novel raises the issue of unrealistic pressures on men as providers. In Babel’s “In the Basement,” this pressure manifests itself in an outburst by the eccentric Uncle Simon-Volf, who cracks under the pressure of providing for the “hungry mouths.” In the Soviet reality after the Second World War, as Karabchievsky’s novel attests, such a commitment leads to small illegalities which, incidentally, further contribute to the stereotype of scheming Jews. The pressures on Jewish men to support their families economically can be viewed as part of the gender roles in traditional Jewish communities. Because of his Jewish education, Babel would have been aware of this aspect of Jewish family life. As explained by Judaic scholar Jonathan Boyarin in his essay “The Gender of the Angel,” for a Jewish man to live in line with the Torah means to look after the well-being of his family and children.28 Boyarin’s anthropological essay references his own life, which is dictated by the Judaic teachings and his personal situation as a father who has to provide for his children. He elaborates on the meaning of the Torah’s commandment to “choose life”: “I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and your seed” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Boyarin writes that the Torah is not just a list of prescriptive actions for the future. In his interpretation, “It subsumes the demand of appropriate responses to the contingent situation, especially some situations, including children.” It is for this reason that the nurturing which takes place in the basement apartment in Babel’s story is represented by the aunt and uncle, both of whom fulfil their gendered roles. In Karabchievsky’s novel both the mother and the stepfather do their best to provide for the family and take care of the young Zilber. The outbursts of the frustrated Jewish men in Babel and Karabchievsky demonstrate a more complex side of nurturing and “feeding well,” one that can serve as a subject of serious and non-biased discussion rather than being stereotyped as an obsession with food. Psychologist Marc Kaminsky uses the this volume include women’s emancipation and the provision (mainly by men) of prestigious foodstuffs, but do not deal with ethnocultural differences. 28 Jonathan Boyarin, “The Gender of the Angel,” in Judaism since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (London: Routledge. 1997), 70.

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concept of the “familial self ” in his approach to cultural differences which guide the notion of responsibility and commitment within families across diverse societies and communities. Theoretically, “the familial self ” in relationcentered cultures encompasses several suborganizations, and a constant affective exchange with other family members is one such strong component. Kaminsky bases his study on work with Jewish communities belonging to “the cultural household” of Jews from Eastern Europe. According to Kaminsky, when discussing gender roles in Ashkenazi secular culture it is important to consider that the concept of a responsible and ethical individual, mentsh, while applicable to both genders, has special implications to the construct of the Jewish man’s gender. The notion of mentsh “exalts an ethics of the household, of the extended family, of the sphere of the domestic,” and, from the purview of the masculinist ideals of the alien cultures in which [Ashkenazi] Jews lived,” Jewish men were viewed as feminized. This created pressure on secular Jewish men causing reactive behavior.29 The outbursts of Babel and Karabchievsky’s male characters should be seen within a complex socio-cultural and psychological dynamic, which includes divergent ideals of “the familial self,” with “feeding well” being one such ideal.

Gender and Ethnicity in Nurture: Inna Lesovaya’s Stories of the Small-Town Families Women writers’ attitudes to cooking are historically gendered and reflect the ideals of the role of women within the family. The dominant Soviet discourse moved women out of the kitchen, a move that affected the processes of acculturation and assimilation of Jewish women.30 The generational gap in the different approaches to the role of nurturing relates not only to the processes of de-ethnicization, as was seen in the case of Paley’s writing, but also to the historical formations of gender roles. Deborah Yalen’s research on the early official Soviet rhetoric of the involvement of the Jewish women in the productive collective labor shows the gap between the discourse and the real situation in the small market towns in the former Pale of Settlement in Ukraine and Belorussia. She argues that the traditional cultural value of Jewish women’s work in the 29 Kaminsky, “Discourse and Self-Formation,” 293–295. Kaminsky grew up in Bronx in a family of Jews from Ukraine. 30 On the reinvention of family in the Soviet Union see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).

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shtetl (to enable men to conduct their religious duties) did not “translate into new concepts of labor” in the Soviet State.31 In spite of the rhetoric of involving Jewish women in productive collective work, before the Second World War women were less likely than men to receive job skills training in small market towns. Yuri Slezkine observes that on the eve of the Second World War more than 1,300,000 Jews were living in big cities that were closed to them before the Revolution. More than one million of them were first-generation migrants in their new places of residence outside the former Pale of Settlement.32 Their new social mobility was often expressed by the rejection of the traditional values of the previous generation. The stories of Inna Lesovaya (b. 1947) describe inter-generational relationships in Jewish families in small towns in Soviet Ukraine and Moldova.33 These stories typically depict extended Jewish families and the breakup of the traditional family, not only as a result of the political and societal upheavals, but also because of the changes in attitudes towards family as an institution. The longing for freedom through assimilation is a common factor in the disintegration of the patriarchal Jewish family in Lesovaya’s stories. Men divorce their wives and leave for educated professional women and new places of residence—a motif, which indicates a change of attitudes to traditional gender roles. As noted by Harriet Murav, in Lesovaya’s stories “inter-generational animosity also gets expressed in the description of food.”34 The stories illustrate a wide spectrum of attitudes towards cooking and feeding, which comprise and enmesh with ethnocultural tradition and social changes. The story “Ia liubliu, konechno, vsekh” (“I love everybody, of course,” 1996) encapsulates this cluster of difference and change. It involves a portrayal of a Jewish woman called Musya who is shown most of the time in the process of cooking for festive family events. In this story, set after the Second World War, the Jewish women who did not have a chance to develop through education or a vocational profession belong to an old world constrained by the limiting ideal of nurturing the family. In this theme, Lesovaya’s story intersects with Paley’s notion of feeding as an integral part of Jewish life in the small towns of the former Pale. Like Marina Paley, Lesovaya belongs to the educated 31 Deborah Yalen, “The Toiling Froy and the Speculating Yidene: Discourses of Female Productivization in the Soviet Shtetl,” Jewish History 33 (2020): 197. 32 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004). 33 Lesovaya’s novel Bessarabskii romans describes a case of social mobility of a heroine who becomes an actress in the Yiddish theatre in Moscow in the 1930s. 34 Murav, Music from the Speeding Train, 278.

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strata of successful professional women, and she often casts a critical gaze at the generation of Jewish women who did not liberate themselves from the confines of traditional gender roles.35 Lesovaya’s attitude to nurturing and cooking is articulated most explicitly in a number of disconcerting scenes involving Auntie Musya’s food preparation. On the one hand, Musya is shown to have an exaggerated interest in food produce and cooking; her life revolves around the nurturing of family members through food. On the other hand, Lesovaya’s imagery evokes a sense of unease in relation to the process of cooking. This is achieved by creating parallels between the anthropomorphized vegetables and poultry and the female body, which in turn raise the themes of procreation, nurture and women’s bodies. The two such scenes frame her narrative. In the story’s first cooking scene, Musya pulls the seeds out of a pumpkin. This seemingly trivial process has important material-semiotic dimension: “Musya’s hand enters deeply into the paunch [briukho] of the pumpkin and pulls out the white seeds disgustingly enmeshed in the rusty birth mucus.”36 The choice of a pumpkin is intentionally provocative as it signifies a set of intersecting themes. Firstly, there is nothing specifically ethnically Jewish about pumpkin, rather it stands for a plain and staple food eaten widely. But while not representing any ethnic markers, the pumpkin is gendered and sexed, echoing folkloric representations of the reproductive female body. Lesovaya capitalizes on the covert meaning of this anthropomorphic image while also linking it with the notion of nurture. In her story, the vegetable symbolizes the two biological and cultural roles assigned to the woman’s body: to give birth and to feed the family. In her imagery, the inner organs of the pumpkin are made to look abject, evoking the image of an aborted embryo or a baby helped out of the womb. The author’s position is expressed in epithets such as “disgusting” and is meant to convey a critical attitude towards the reduction of life to biological functions. The episode functions as an intersection between cooking, childbirth, and nurture. The last cooking scene in the story makes the topic of gender inequality even more graphic. Musya is cooking festive duck, which she stuffs with raisins, apples, and chopped liver. In this scene, she passes on her knowledge of 35 Jewish education and employment patterns were less segregated by gender than among other nationalities of the Soviet Union in the 1960s–1990s, the time when Paley and Lesovaya were educated. On statistics see Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). 36 Inna Lesovaia, “Ia liubliu, konechno, vsekh,” in her Dama sdavala v bagazh . . . (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2003), 99.

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cooking to her niece, but at the same time she discusses gender roles and what they mean for the women. She describes how women in the family suffered physically at childbirth and during breastfeeding, and also reminisces about the hardships and loss of relatives during the Second World War and the Holocaust. “All evil,” she says, “comes from men.” This judgement is based on her concept of aggressive masculinity which brings suffering to women through war as well as in childbirth, feeding children, raising them, and losing them. Lesovaya is a professional artist, and she uses vivid images to help the reader visualize the objects and food which she describes. Strikingly, Musya’s narrative is presented in parallel with the manual process of stuffing the ducks, so serving as an important interface between the material and symbolic: Musya puts the stuffing into the widely stretched cavity of the duck [chrevo]. —Look, Lilya, here I tear off the skin from the flesh and put in more stuffing. Contrary to Lilya’s expectations, the ducks expand wider and their skins do not break. Musya raises the duck’s body high, nurses it, and tosses it like a baby. The oven door closes behind the two roasting trays.37

This carefully crafted scene evokes parallelism between human and animal bodies. Musya performs acts that homologize cooking and child-rearing. There is nothing particularly “ethnic” about the food or food preparation. Rather, the imagery focuses on the gendered and sexed body of the marginalized Others. This parallelism demonstrates the taxonomies involved in the construct of the subaltern—women, farm animals, and children. Intersections between speciesism, gender and sexism widen the semantic field and invite readers to reflect on the construct of the “victim.”38 This use of the body as the reification of the Other is a well-noted mechanism, most famously articulated in Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat.39 Adams' notion that animals that we eat function as “overlapping absent referent,” which represents women, is strikingly applicable to Lesovaya’s narrative. Even raising the question of male aggression and wars 37 Lesovaia, “Ia liubliu, konechno, vsekh,” 170. 38 On the empirical study on the psychology of speciesism and parallels with biases towards human groups see Kristof Dhont et al., “The Psychology of Speciesism,” in Why We Love and Exploit Animals, ed. Kristof Dhont and Gordon Hodson (London: Routledge, 2019), 30–52. 39 Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat.

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in conjunction with ‘meat culture’ corresponds to Adams' notion of the societal privileging of meat and her advocacy of pacifism. Lesovaya’s take, however, has double irony, because Musya’s manipulations of the duck’s body replicate carnism and reification of the gendered and subaltern Other. Lesovaya’s choice of pumpkin and duck helps her to move away from the topic of ethnic food and shift her attention to issues of gender roles. She problematizes the topic of nurture and cooking not only as part of traditional Jewish culture but also as a social phenomenon. Nature, nurture and family roles thus become a question of women’s position in society. This strategy helps Lesovaya to subvert the stereotypes of the Jewish woman’s body and her interaction with the material world. Musya’s preparation of traditional Jewish dishes such as kishke, a stuffed sausage type dish, may please the old grandfather, but the younger generation, including her nephew, resent being patronized by feeding.40 Lesovaya both retains and problematizes Babel’s notion of putting the “heart of the tribe” into the feeding of the family. Like Babel, Lesovaya imbricates the construct and practice of feeding in the history of victimhood of Jews. Additionally, she approaches the provision of food as a gendered issue. The intergenerational issues in the extended family can be viewed in parallel with the inter-generational dialogue between Lesovaya and Babel. Lesovaya’s approach to feeding presents a dialectics of continuity and change and challenges the notion of Jewish communities as frozen in time.

The Non-Apologetic Attitude of Aleksandr Goldshtein in PostSoviet Writing in Israel In the post-Soviet 1990s some Jewish writers relocated to Israel. This change of cultural and geographical realia led to the emergence of a new set of differences in relation to Jewish identity, self-perception and relationality within the new material environment. These differences no longer juxtaposed the dominant Russian culture with that of the Jewish ethnic minority; rather, they were concentrated within the new dominant society and its norms. Aleksandr Goldshtein (1957–2006) belongs to the generation of younger writers who continued to write in Russian and articulate the new émigré experience in 40 On individual choice of food and affective memories see sociological study by Nick Fox and Pam Alldred, “The Materiality of Memory: Affects, Remembering and Food Decisions,” Cultural Sociology 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–17.

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terms of the many differences between Russified and Europeanized Jews and Israelis. The desire to retain European Jewish identity is expressed, as seen in his novel Aspects of Spiritual Matrimony, in his quest to retain certain aspects of life, including physical tastes and food preferences. His memory of being carefully nurtured by his family focuses on dishes with high calorific content and luxurious texture: When in my childhood I was ill with respiratory problems, I was given to eat gogol-mogol which I stirred with a silver-plated spoon adorned by a little monkey who helped my parents tell stories about various animals (how can I forget the fear which my parents experienced when I ran a temperature . . .). It is truly surprising how many people from European countries—judging by the map, they belong to Europe—were not fed with gogol-mogol by their doting parent.41

Goldshtein’s provocatively narcissistic stance celebrates nurture as part of the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition which he juxtaposes to his perception of the dominant Israeli culture with its machoistic ideals. He contextualizes this tradition of nurture within the wider Ashkenazi culture, which includes academic achievement and intellectual pursuit.42 For Goldshtein, the famous Soviet chess grandmaster and eighth World Chess Champion Mikhail Tal (1936– 1992) epitomizes this culture of achievement. Known for his virtuoso combinatorial style, Tal was born with a physical impairment: two fingers on his right hand were fused. As a sickly child, he was nurtured by his doting mother; this similarity with Goldshtein’s own childhood must have had a special meaning for the author. Babel and Goldshtein’s narratives (as well as Mikhail Tal’s real-life story) reveal certain features of continuity between their families’ nurturing dispositions and their fictional selves. Babel and Goldshtein acknowledge the importance of being nurtured in the development of a particular, culture-specific 41 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 21–22. 42 Krutikov suggests that Goldshtein has special attraction to Levantine diasporic communities in Israel. Mikhail Krutikov, “Evreiskaia pamiat′ i ‘parasovetskii’ khronotop. Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Oleg Iur′ev, Aleksandr Il′ichevskii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 127, no. 3 (2014), https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/127_ nlo_3_2014/.

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ideal of an individual. While Babel ironically was attracted to the ideals of virile masculinity in the Red Cavalry, he did not stop writing about the material, emotional, and spiritual investment in the efforts of Jewish families to feed their children. While Trotsky leans towards an objectivist approach, Karabchievsky entangles the issues around providing for one’s family with harsh Soviet social reality and gender roles. He problematizes the pressures put on men to be good providers by showing that their activities can overstep the rules of law. In raising the issue of the burdens put on husbands and fathers, Karabchievsky’s bildungsroman evokes dialogical continuities with Babel’s “In the Basement” and the outcries of the eccentric uncle in relation to the obligations to make a living in order to feed the family. For men (as well as for women), the fulfilment of these duties often involves discipline and self-sacrifice. This pattern in turn is imbricated with the gender roles and “the familial self ” in traditional communities. Trotsky, Paley and Karabchievsky’s narratives reflect their awareness of the often-envious gaze of the class and ethnic Other aimed at Jewish families. Moreover, these stories attest to the continuity in the pre-Revolutionary and Soviet attitudes to the alleged particularism of Jewish families. Lesovaia’s stories problematize the role of feeding in terms of gender issues, so shifting the attention from ethnic stereotypes to the destabilizing aspects of gender roles within the family. The narratives of “feeding well” thus become a complex material-semiotic interface in the writing of Soviet authors who address their Jewish identity and alterity. Often responding to the constructs of the dominant culture, interest in this theme shows that food and feeding not only “make human form” but also produce communities and ideologies, while in turn being produced by these same formations.43 The next two chapters continue the exploration of culture-specific aspects of inter-generational knowledge and experience in relation to traditional materialities, including food.

43 Farquhar, “Food, Eating, and the Good Life,” 146.

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Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory. —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913).1

E

xamples in this book have demonstrated that, among the various senses and manifestations of corporeality, smell and olfaction occupy a special place in the construct of the Jew’s body. This chapter addresses the complex dynamics of smells as markers of alleged Jewish essence and the quest to appreciate ethnocultural smells as an important repository of memory by Russian Jewish writers. I investigate the notion of smell as a Jewish cultural seat of memory in the context of intergenerational knowledge by examining the ways in which writers, such as Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelshtam, Aleksandr Goldshtein, Ludmila Ulitskaya, and Margarita Khemlin, negotiate their identities and subjectivities on the basis of the embodied reactions to smell. Scientific experiments show that it is possible to improve autobiographical memory by being exposed to various smells of the past.2 Smells from childhood can serve as cues to recollections and revelations of otherwise forgotten 1 Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1981), 24. 2 A. Conway et al., “A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Autobiographical Memory,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36 (2005): 739–749. I have addressed this topic in a wider European context in Henrietta Mondry, “Smell and Memory as Jewish Archives: the Case of Russian Jewish Intellectuals,” Jewish Culture and History 15, nos. 1–2 (2014): 43–54.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

events and places. The olfactory sphere in Jewish experiences is problematics because for centuries, Jews in Europe were perceived as embodiments of unpleasant odors. In Proustian mode, odors are “drops of essence,” constructs of Jewish corporeality. Proust’s own anxiety around his partly Jewish origins has been identified as a factor in his interest in smell-memory.3 Moreover, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno developed their hermeneutic of antisemitism on the notion of smell, olfaction, and the construct of Jewishness in modernity.4 The embodied smell thus has a set of overlapping domains: the construct of the essentialized smell of the Jewish body and physical spaces (as seen in the earlier examples); Jews’ reactions to the hostile construct; and the mnemonic recollection of smells which generate spontaneous responses. The historical reality of Jewish experience often renders the individual body inseparable from the collective body of the Jewish people. This is the result of the construct of the Jewish body and embodied practices both by non-Jews and by the self-conscious Jewish subject.5

The Smell of Onions and Gefilte Fish in Isaac Babel’s Stories Babel addressed the role of smell as an antisemitic construct of the Jew’s body. His celebrated “Istoriia moei golubiatni” (“The Story of My Dovecote,” 1925) describes the pogrom in Nikolaev in 1905 and has a striking expression of biological hatred of Jews by a local woman: “It is their seed that needs to be destroyed, . . . I hate their seed and their stinking males.”6 The Russian woman suggests it is not enough to destroy Jews’ homes and loot their belongings, Julia Kristeva, “Marcel Proust in Search of Identity,” in The Jew in the Text, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, 140–155. On the role of smell in works of Jewish intellectuals see Jay Geller, “The Aromatics of Jewish Difference; or Benjamin’s Allegory of Aura,” in Jews and Other Differences, ed. Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997), 203–256. 4 For Horkheimer and Adorno the “bad” smell is something that is despised and evokes a despising reaction, yet the schema of olfaction has a mimetic function. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1972). 5 Rozanov in “Judaism” (1903) refers to the depiction of olfaction and smell in the biography of the nineteenth-century Jewish convert to Christianity, S. Tseichenshtein, who is critical of Jewish hygiene. See Rozanov. “Iudaizm,” 105–228. Semen Tseichenshtein, “Avtobiografiia pravoslavnogo evreia. S prilozheniem talmudicheskikh rasskazov,” RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), f. 419, op. 1, ed. khr. 810. On the history of Jewish converts in Russia see Ellie Schainker, Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016). 6 "Семя ихнее разорить надо, . . . семя ихнее я не могу навидеть и мужчин их вонючих." Isaak Babel′, “Istoriia moei golubiatni,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 162. 3

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events that occur in the narrative time of the pogrom. Rather, she believes the whole biological Jewish “breed,” as defined by its supposedly odious smell, needs to be destroyed. Babel’s portrayal of the hatred of the smell of the Other contains an element of hidden irony—the Russian woman’s ability to identify the Other through olfaction degrades her to the level of a primitive biological species that does not rise above the use of senses as a means of survival. The woman’s reaction of repulsion is akin to the schema developed by Horkheimer and Adorno: “Anyone who seeks out ‘bad’ smells, in order to destroy them, may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalized pleasure in the experience. The civilized man ‘disinfects’ the forbidden impulse by his unconditional identification with the authority which prohibited it; in this way the action is made acceptable. . . . This is the schema of the anti-Semitic reaction.”7 Babel’s works address the dynamics of smell associated with embodied practices. While there are numerous references to the aromas and tastes of Jewish food in Babel’s stories, I have chosen an example which relates to the smell-memory as well as the sense of disgust evoked among non-Jews by the smells of Jewish cooking. The example epitomizes the subjectivities of sensed perceptions in combination with smell as a cultural antisemitic construct. The example comes from the unfinished story “Evreika” (“Jewess,” 1934), and while it is not known why Babel did not finish this story, it is plausible that it was the result of self-censorship before his arrest and subsequent execution in 1940. The manuscript has survived in a private archive, and was published for the first time in Russia in 1988 during Glasnost. The third-person narrative tells the story of an old Jewish woman who leaves the Pale for Moscow in order to settle down with her son. The son is a Civil War hero and a member of the new Soviet élite, and yet even he finds it difficult to adjust to the new prestigious surroundings. They live in a communal apartment in Moscow, and the manuscript breaks off at the episode that describes cultural differences of smell and olfaction. Notably, the awkward situation arises when their neighbor takes offense at the smell of the old Jewish woman’s cooking: The old woman was timid, frightened, and quiet like a mouse, yet there was a sense of true passion in her peppered gefilte fish. It was because of this fish that the atmosphere started growing tense at the Ostozhenka apartment. One neighbor, a woman professor, said that 7

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 184.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory the apartment is completely overcome by the stench [provonialsia]. And really with the arrival of the Erlikhs the smells of garlic and fried onions could be already felt in the entrance hall.8

Noted Babel scholar Gregory Freidin speculates that the completed manuscript could have been lost forever in the incinerators of the Lubianka prison.9 It is riveting to think that the survived part of the manuscript ends with the depiction of apparently abominable Jewish smells in a Soviet apartment. It is quite clear from this episode that the smell of onions and garlic remains a stable identifier of Jewishness and Judeophobia.10 The smell functions both as a subjective sensation and a cultural construct, depending on the perceiver. While the narrator objectifies the smell of fried onions and garlic, the neighbor’s verb provoniat′sia, to be filled by stench, carries a complex material- semiotic meaning. While revealing a fear of pollution and contamination by Jewish smells, it also has phenomenological connotations in that provoniat′sia signifies both the emission and the perception and absorption of odor. For the old Jewish woman, the taste and smell of gefilte fish have different connotations. The process of cooking this festive Jewish dish is highly haptic in its nature. It involves cutting the flesh of the fish, mincing it and mixing it with onions (and/or garlic), raw eggs, salt, and spices, then carefully stuffing the space beneath the fish skin. Because everything is done by hand, the tactile and olfactory senses are both enlisted—the smell of onions, for example, stays on the fingers for a long time. Babel’s emphasis on the role of black pepper in this episode is indicative of yet another intersection between the material and the symbolic. While black pepper is a costly spice which adds character to the dish, it also signifies, in Babel’s wording, woman’s “passion” [strast′]. Gefilte fish is a special dish in the culture of the Ashkenazi Jewry of the former Pale; as a festive dish, it is served on Sabbath or religious holidays when it is lovingly prepared for family gathered around the table. Central to this dish is the idea of the monogamous traditional family, with its accent on children and procreation. The old woman’s passion and her preparation of this dish are covertly united 8 I. Babel′, “Evreika.” God za godom. Literaturnyi ezhegodnik 4 (1988): 306. 9 Gregory Freidin, “Isaak Babel,” in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Strade (New York: Scribners, 1990), 1885–1914. 10 Livak writes that the smell of onions and garlic in this episode is a sign of otherness, while the episode “speaks volumes about the unremitted tension between his [Babel’s] filial past and the stigma attached to it in the majority culture where he makes his home.” Livak, The Jewish Persona, 320.

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in an act of reminiscence of her former, happier days as a young woman and wife. The smells and tactility in the making of the dish bring back memories and sensations of her own personal history as well as the collective archive of Jewish women of her generation. In reproducing the actual dish and engaging with its smells, these women can partake in the individual and shared experience of their material-cultural selves. The destruction of the full version of Babel’s unfinished manuscript is a cultural loss from the collective archive also belonging to the next generations of Jews. Babel’s stories are often saturated with the smells of Jewish cooking which had for him a complex and contradictory nostalgic value. His much-quoted sentence on gefilte fish being “a dish worth embracing Judaism for” (“At Grandmother’s”) is used today on Russian-language internet sites giving the recipe for the dish itself or advertising Jewish restaurants. The quote alludes to the cultural continuities in the embodied memories of the taste of the dish. The example from “The Jewess,” however, shows that the smell of the dish and its reception also have implications for the Jewish sensory archive. This is in sharp contrast with the Viking museum’s description of the smell of the “fish market” as neutral or pleasant, discussed in chapter one. Clearly, the process of ‘other cooking’ can make the dish an object of disgust. Babel’s stories also describe the smells of the streets and fish markets of Odessa. These smells are not neutral. Again, the smell of onions becomes a powerful trope for a complex dynamic of Othering and belonging. In Babel’s description of adolescence in Odessa, his authorial persona wants to dissociate himself from “Jewish destiny” as embodied in the space which reeked of onions: “The heavy waves breaking against the sea wall separated me further and further from our home, redolent with onion and Jewish destiny.”11 Yet, according to the memoirs of his partner who described Babel’s private life in Moscow in the 1930s, one of Babel’s favorite dishes was fried onions on a slice of bread—a dish which he often cooked.12 Personal memoirs are an important repository of cultural material knowledge and, when correlated with fictional writing, help us to recreate a fuller history of materiality. For Babel, the desire to overcome the smell of poverty and the enclosed spaces of the Pale was as important as to cherish the smell-memories of his old Odessa. 11 Isaak Babel′, “Probuzhdenie,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 198. 12 Antonina Pirozhkova, “Sem′ let s Babelem,” in Isaak Babel′, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 357–560.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

Osip Mandelshtam’s “Musk” of Judaism Mandelshtam (1891–1938) is one of the Jewish writers who left the most memorable reflections on smell-memory in Judaism. He recollects his childhood Jewish archive of embodied knowledge as he encountered it in his grandparents’ home in Riga. This recollection is part of the book Shum vremeni (The Noise of Time), a title which programmatically emphasizes the sensory aspects of memory. In the essay “Knizhnyi shkaf ” (“Bookcase”) in The Noise of Time, Mandelshtam singles out a bookshelf in his grandparents’ apartment containing old books in leather jackets, many of them written in German.13 This collection is representative of the German Jewish identity of his father’s side of the family, with books by leading figures of Jewish enlightenment including Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine. Both these authors considered acculturation as a way forward for European Jewry. In addition to the works by these authors, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud are part of this home archive. This suggests the centrality of printed matter for the transmission of knowledge but, in a new approach to the theme of the home archive, Mandelshtam also addresses its sensory character. The leather book jackets emanate a sensory form of knowledge: tactile and olfactory. The old and cracked leather has a distinct feel to the touch, and the smells of aged organic material—leather and paper—add an olfactory aspect to the corporeal experience of acquiring knowledge from generations past. The combination of the tactile and the olfactory is a strong pointer to Russian modernity’s perception of Jews, and a construct which finds its most powerful formulation, as we have seen, in Rozanov’s The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews to Blood. It has been noted that this is certainly the case in application to Mandelshtam’s perception of his own Jewishness.14 Most commentators maintain that his attitude to Judaism and his Jewishness was typical for a Russian intellectual of his time who wanted to break away from his Jewish roots but who continued to think of Judaism and Jewish subjectivity till the end of his life. In his essay in The Noise of Time, Mandelshtam negotiates Judaism and Ashkenazi Jewishness in an unmistakably Proustian mode. As in Proustian memory, the inhaled aromas bring back the past but, in addition, the past is framed as a collective experience of the Jewish nation. Like Proust’s “drops of 13 In Mandelshtam, objects emanate aura, which resembles Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura. See Evgenii Pavlov, Shok pamiati: avtobiograficheskaia poetika Val′tera Ben′iamina i Osipa Mandel′shtama (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005). 14 Leonid Katsis, Osip Mandel′shtam: muskus iudeistva (Moscow: Mosty kul′tury, 2002).

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essences,” Mandelshtam writes about the “droplets of musk” (kroshka muskusa) of Judaism, thus valorizing the sensory perceptions of memories: As a droplet of musk permeates the whole house, a tiny influence of Judaism overflows the whole life. O, what a strong smell it is! How could I not notice that in true Jewish homes it smells differently than in Aryan homes? And it is not only the kitchen that smells, but also people, things and clothes.15

The Jewish versus Aryan dichotomy has deliberately provocative meaning. Does this passage reinforce the racial concept of the Jewish body? Indeed, if there is such a phenomenon as the “strong smell of Judaism,” how different is it from the notion of “Jewish smell”? In the context of this chapter, Mandelshtam’s example illustrates a set of issues: he theorizes smell-memory as cultural knowledge; and he views such memory as a culture-specific Jewish phenomenon. I propose that for Mandelshtam, the concepts of different senses are categories which have to be considered diachronically and in terms of religious and philosophical difference. He understands that, in the case of Judaism, the senses must be categorized and ranked not in line with modern post-Darwinian hierarchies but as part of the tradition of Judaic thought.16 While Darwinian thinking pushed smell, taste and touch to the bottom of the evolutionary scale, this was not the case in premodern thinking. Scholars studying the senses in Judaism have noted that renowned Judaic philosopher Maimonides notably did not differentiate between the senses in their importance to heal both body and soul.17 He maintained that all senses have aesthetic value and all can be medicinally useful. In The Guide for the Perplexed (1190), Maimonides maintains that a person might benefit from well-seasoned and tasty dishes, or by listening to music or by strolling in gardens and experiencing beautiful buildings. This list equalizes the value of different sensory experiences. The sense of olfaction and the purpose of smell together with the other senses have a positive effect on somatic and emotional life. Each of these senses was deemed capable of preparing the mind for philosophical thought. 15 Mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni, 150. 16 On Mandelshtam’s interest in premodern Judaic thought see Mikhail Epshtein, “Judaic Spiritual Traditions in the Poetry of Pasternak and Mandelshtam,” Symposium 52, no. 4 (1999): 205–231. 17 See a discussion of senses in Judaism and European traditions in Bland, The Artless Jew, 25–79.

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In view of Mandelshtam’s erudite knowledge, I prefer to interpret Mandelshtam’s trope of “droplets of musk” and the “strong smell of Judaism” as an affirmation of the multi-sensory aspect of Jewish memories, spaces and private archives. The enclosed space of his grandparents’ apartment can be interpreted as a quasi-museum space. With its interior filled with old objects and pieces of ritual clothing, including his grandfather’s prayer shawl, this space would have a specific odor. In fact, in The Noise of Time, Mandelshtam remembers it as “a sweetish Jewish smell” (pritornyi evreiskii zapakh).18 Anthropologists studying museum spaces have noted that contemporary museums, as air-conditioned spaces, not only remove the smells of exhibits but also eliminate the bodily odors of visitors. However, historically this has not always been the case. European museums in the nineteenth century, including the British Museum, allowed visitors to touch and hold artefacts in order to give visitors the satisfaction of intimate encounters.19 It is plausible to suggest that Mandelshtam viewed his grandparents’ apartment as such a space of multisensory engagement, where people and things are in a relational dynamic, and where smell and texture, olfaction and the sense of touch contribute to a holistic intergenerational encounter. Human odors of the apartment/museum space were an intrinsic part of a space permeated with the materiality of the private Judaic “relics.” For me, Mandelshtam’s interplay between the notion of “musk” and Judaism infers that Judaism must be embodied, and that the history of the construct of the Jew’s body is an indelible part of the history of the Jewry.

Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Repulsive and Spiritualized Smells The 2013 story “March 1953” by award-winning writer Ludmila Ulitskaya (b. 1943) provides an example of the personal anxiety caused by the corporeal smells of Jewish spaces. Significantly, the story’s plot relates to the intergenerational contact between an adolescent girl and her great-grandfather and grandmother. The girl’s embodied perceptions of the smells of her ancestors are enmeshed in the subjective somatophobia characteristic of puberty. Eleven-year-old Lily goes through this stage of physical change as manifested in the normal markers of puberty such as pimples and unwanted hair. Yet the Jewish theme is key to the girl’s perception of the smells of her older relatives. 18 Pritornyi can be translated as saccharine sweet or sickly sweet. 19 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

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Lily is especially close to her ninety-one-year-old great-grandfather Aaron. He tells her stories of the Biblical past which she imagines as being part of Aaron’s own family history. The old man often holds the phylacteries containing the old paper in his hands. In Lily’s specifically gendered angst against her own corporeality, she finds comfort in the close contact with the old man’s body: “Only by snuggling up to her great-grandfather, who smelled of camphor and old paper, could she be delivered from the malaise that tormented her.”20 The smells of camphor and paper present a paradoxical dis/embodied corporeality. While the smell of camphor oil has a sanitary aura, appropriate for the ailing man’s condition, the smell of old paper is metonymically associated with the great-grandfather’s religious texts written in Hebrew. The smell of old paper, I propose, becomes a meeting point of Biblical scriptures and matter which, in turn, is elevated because of the inscribed content. Through this religious association, the smell of paper is spiritualized as the result of its content. Notably, there are no sensory descriptions of either the old paper or the body which smells of old paper. As the result of this void, both smells are neutralized and paradoxically disembodied. This detail, in my interpretation, expresses Ulitskaya’s personal position regarding Judaism and Jewishness.21 Born to a Jewish family, she converted to Christianity in the late Soviet era, and her invention of a Jew’s body which smells of old paper can be seen as a rewriting of the Jew’s body. It appears that she is interested not in embodied Judaism with its corporeal practices, but in the written religious sources which can have value both for Judaism and Christianity. Hebrew religious writing is Christianized if seen in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the metonymic link between the old paper with its undescribed smell spiritualizes Aaron by proxy. In Ulitskaya’s strategy, Aaron smells of old paper because he incarnates the spiritualized matter.22 In contrast to the paper smell of Aaron, Lily’s short and stocky Jewish grandmother Bella Zinovievna embodies the more intimate smells of the 20 Ludmila Ulitskaia, “March 1953,” in Voices of the Diaspora: Jewish Women Writing in Contemporary Europe, ed. Thomas Nolden and Francis Molino (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 59. 21 On Ulitskaya’s conversion to Christianity see Maxim Shrayer, “Ludmila Ulitskaya,” in An Anthology of Jewish Russian Literature, vol. 2: 1953–2001, ed. Maxim Shrayer (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 1103–1105. 22 On the symbolic level, it is significant that Aaron is a saint in the Russian Orthodox tradition. As a prophet from the Old Testament, he is Christianized because he is mentioned in the New Testament.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

body. Strikingly, it is her smells which triggers Lily’s reaction of repulsion. Lily longs for “a pure place” free from bodily odors, and she perceives the female smells of her grandmother as particularly unpleasant.23 She is disgusted by the pillows on the sofa because of “the soapy smell of Red Moscow, Grandmother’s favorite perfume, with its indecent suggestion of underwear.” Lily wants to escape into a place where “there would be neither perfume, nor pain, nor this unsettling sense of shame that she could not understand.”24 While Lily’s sense of shame relates to her physiological sexual development, her disgust is induced by olfaction triggered by the association of perfumed smells with bodily odors. There is nothing specifically Jewish about the smell of the ubiquitous Soviet perfume Red Moscow. For Lily, this smell is subjective. The fact that it is associated with her Jewish grandmother implies more than loathing of the woman’s body. Key to Lily’s physiological/ psychological reaction of disgust is the suggestion that the scent of the perfume conceals the smell of the bodily discharges of the old Jewish woman. For Lily, Grandmother Bella epitomizes the body viewed through the prism of the dominant culture as typically Jewish. Lily is bullied at school as a Jew, and her loathing of her own body and the body of the old Jewish woman can be seen as the result of being branded biologically different. Adolescent physiological changes and harassment by a schoolboy lead to her state of frustration, and the smell of the old Jewish woman’s belongings inspires feelings of repulsion and rejection of the ( Jewish) feminine essence while also blending her own body with that of her grandmother. Although treating other women as abject can be viewed as a result of a misogynist culture, as elucidated famously by Julia Kristeva, in this particular space the soft pillows carry a raced, gendered, and sexed scent, becoming the depository of the Jew’s specific corporeality.25 Ulitskaya’s story divides smells into neutral and noble, impure and corporeally intimate, as exemplified by such objects as the old paper and the pillows on the sofa. The Jew’s corporeal smells are the site where cultural constructs and material reactions meet. When Ulitskaya writes that Lily’s “soul protested blindly against all these impure things” she, perhaps, conceals her own

23 Ulitskaia, “March 1953,” 59. 24 Ibid., 71. 25 Kristeva’s models are applicable to Ulitskaya’s wider preoccupation with the corporeal. See a discussion in Elizabet Skomp and Benjamin Sutcliffe, Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), esp. 50–59. On abjection see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

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uneasiness related to the construct of smell and embodied Jewishness.26 It is perhaps for this reason that Aaron tells Lily stories not only about the heroes of the Old Testament, but also of the “the virgin maidens.”27 It is perhaps this kind of “purity” which Lily seeks, echoing Ulitskaya’s own biographical turn to Christianity. The smells in the Jewish apartment in “March 1953” are different from “the musk of Judaism” in the apartment of Mandelshtam’s grandparents. In Ulitskaya’s story, it is not clear what will happen to the leather phylacteries and bits of old paper hidden in them after the death of the great-grandfather. It is also not clear what kind of reaction the smell of the perfume Red Moscow will cause in Lily’s future vis-à-vis her ( Jewish) personhood. The story ends with Lily’s first menstrual blood marking her coming of age at the same time as her great-grandfather’s death.28 With her repulsion towards a particular set of smells, Lily will probably carry the memories of the stories told by the quasi-Old-Testament Hebrew ancestor Aaron, but will try to truncate the embodied reactions associated with Jewish grandmother Bella Zinovievna. Perhaps the wisdom of Ulitskaya’s controversial story is contained in the idea that even neutral smells, such as that of Red Moscow perfume, can become the sites of Jewish memory and intergenerational relations.

Aleksandr Goldshtein’s Proud Smells One of the most provocative reevaluative responses to the construct of the alleged specificity of Jewish olfaction and smell can be found in the works of Aleksandr Goldshtein. Significantly, as discussed in the previous chapter, this reassessment became possible as a result of this writer’s immigrant experience in Israel. Goldshtein’s postmodern essays are informed by contemporary theorizing of the body as a site of cultural and material knowledge. He defines his own Jewish Ashkenazi self in Israel against what he terms “Maghribic” Jewish culture. He maintains provocatively that Israel has destroyed most of the achievements of European Jewish culture, and chooses smell and olfaction to represent this culture. The erasure of culinary traditions, as seen by him in the 26 Ulitskaia, “March 1953,” 71. 27 Ibid., 59. 28 Stalin died in March 1953 and this event put a stop to the anti-Jewish purges of the “Doctors’ Plot.” It also serves as a symbolic beginning of a new period in the history of the country.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

replacement of gefilte fish with the rough falafel, is a symbol of this disappearance of cultural knowledge: The Jewish essence here is cheaply given away, it lowers itself for the sake of things which should be treated as a bogey but which here have become an ideal. Sweet and sour meat stews, gefilte fish, chopped herring with boiled eggs and onions, honey biscuits—all this the conciliators (the majority of the Israeli-born Ashkenazim) forsake for the Maghrib pita dough which bloats stomachs with its rough filling made of chickpeas.29

Goldshtein’s choice of the word “essence” to describe Jewish cultural practices is a calculated strategy. He views the aromas and smells of Ashkenazi food as a core ingredient of this culture. Israeli Jews, he maintains, abandoned their diasporic European roots via the rejection of this corporeal “essence.”30 This image implies that Jews in Israel, through their reactive behavior towards anti-Jewish stereotypes, erased all those aspects of embodied European Jewish material culture. According to Goldshtein, the internalization of the stereotypes of Jewish smells and olfaction is one key component of this reactive cultural knowledge: Arabs proudly smell of themselves. Jews already have lost their smell in contrast to their olive-skinned neighbors. They are ashamed of their formerly strong sweat glands and hope to become similar to other nations sunk in sterility. Only [religious] Jews of the Mea Shearim suburb still have strong smells.31

“Formerly strong sweat glands” is a powerful pointer to the construct of the Jewish body. Not only does it reference the constructs of the distinctive, often sensualized and sexualized smells of Jews and Jewish spaces, but it also refers to the construct of the odious smell of Jews. In Goldshtein’s text, the reference to “formerly strong sweat glands” is a call for self-liberation. He wants to reclaim the Jew’s body and its (self-)perception from the effects of a history of prejudice. The body is a depository of material cultural knowledge with the ability to activate memories through its own multi-sensory abilities. Yet these memories, 29 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 25. 30 Ibid. 31 Gol′dshtein, Aspekty, 9.

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which include textual representations and constructs that also inform receptions and perceptions of material smells, are historically often traumatic and dramatic. It is not accidental that Goldshtein turns to the smells of the body in Israel as the space where the Jew can afford not to be ashamed of his/her own physicality. Goldshtein’s image of the religious Jews from the Mea Shearim alludes to more than the mythology surrounding the alleged smell of the Jew’s body. The religious community practices Judaism in all its cultural forms, including material culture. Their “body” is a living archive of knowledge. As such, it is not a passive depository: in order to activate this archive, the body has to perform the culture by living it. This reasoning rethinks the concept of the Jewish body. Goldshtein’s essay suggests that, with the erasure of elements of knowledge traditionally conveyed through practice and performance, the whole body of knowledge will disappear. The body is thus a depository of knowledge in its own right, a form of knowledge which needs to be passed on to future generations. Once the smells disappear, the Proustian memory can no longer function. It is not in vain that an immigrant experience taught Goldshtein to turn to the notion of smell-memory. With no material possessions to bring over to the new land, he resorts to the sense-induced memory of smell but cannot find any familiar smells in his new surroundings. The body of the Jewish immigrant from Russia is the only archive, even in the land of Israel. It remains non-perceptive to new smells as these do not activate cherished real-life knowledge.

Margarita Khemlin’s Memory-Inducing Brown Suitcase A contemporary Russian Jewish woman writer, Margarita Khemlin (1960– 2015) articulates the special role which smells and tactility play in the restoration of memories of the past. She populates her fiction with various items that encapsulate the lived past and evoke memory. She even brings a brown suitcase full of old items to her public talks to reading audiences. Her stories and novels address traumatic events experienced by Jews in difficult historical periods of the Soviet history from the 1930s to the 1980s.32 While Khemlin’s Jewish characters are programmatically ordinary people, their lives are full of trauma often linked to the specific histories of Jews from small towns in Soviet Ukraine. Khemlin deals with the mnemonic aspects of material interaction with objects 32 For an overview of Khemlin’s stories see Lidiia Khesed, “The Story of a Generation,” Russian Studies in Literature 48, no. 4 (2012): 34–42.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

both in her writing and in her engagement with listeners. The objects which she carries in the suitcase come from her childhood home or attics in her friends’ apartments and summer dachas as well as from flea markets. Additionally, in its reference to the fictional suitcase from her novel Klotsvog (2013), her own suitcase also serves as an interface between the material and semiotic.33 In this novel, the suitcase belongs to Holocaust survivor Fima, whose wife and children were killed in the massacre of the Jews of Kiev in Baby Yar in 1941. Fima keeps items of clothing and his children’s toys in the storeroom under the apartment block. It is here, in this storeroom, where he hides after a nervous breakdown triggered by the trauma of viscerally induced recollection of the tragic death of his family. When struck by this sudden regressive madness, he loses the brown suitcase with his now useless passport and banknotes. The loss of passport indicates that personal identity is formed not by documents but by embodied memories and experiences. Fittingly, Khemlin deals not only with the mnemonic aspects of objects but also with the ability of smell and taste to evoke memories. The smell of cooked garlic in Fima’s apartment in Kiev during the 1952 anti-Jewish campaign called The Doctors’ Plot triggers two reactions from the Jewish protagonists. Fima’s new wife, Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, warns that the smell will waft out of the apartment and expose them as the Jews. Her reaction references the antisemitic stereotype of the essentialized smell of garlic as an identifier of Jews among hostile non-Jews. It also suggests the permanency of the stereotype of “Jewish smells.” Fima’s reaction is more mnemonic, as he recollects that his first wife—the victim of the Baby Yar massacre—also used garlic in her cooking. For him, the smell of garlic produces a paradoxical reaction, based on the embodied experience of gustatory sensations and the trauma of the loss of his beloved wife. Khemlin shows cultural and historical continuity in both the embodied and the constructed perception of smell. Additionally, the scene alludes to the garlic-smelling apartment in Babel’s “Evreika,” thus valorizing the continuities in the representation and perception of smells by Jews as the essentialized Other. During an interview on the central Moscow TV channel Kul′tura in 2013, Khemlin explained the importance of tactile and olfactory interaction with objects in her writing and in real life.34 The senses of olfaction and tactility 33 Margarita Khemlin, “Klotsvog,” in her Pro Ionu (Moscow: Act, 2013), 5–233. 34 Margarita Khemlin, “Ia ne ozhidala, chto moi geroi zhivye,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h-zN0b5rcUs, accessed August 10, 2019.

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generated by the textures and smells of various items in the brown suitcase, she stated, help members of the audiences to recognize the main prevailing character of the past historical decades in which they lived. For Khemlin, this process, I propose, serves as a way to help her readers both to evoke the past and to become better attuned to the role of visceral perception and the representation of reality. In the interview, Khemlin maintains that she is intrigued by the mechanism of forgetting trauma which, she believes, never goes away but remains latent in the human body. The sense of smell often triggers these traumatic emotions and, tragically, can lead to withdrawal from family and society. Her approach, I propose, synthesizes elements of the popularized Freudian notion of the return of repressed memory with those of Proustian memory, and it is the latter quality of her writing which sets her apart from post-Soviet writers who problematize the intertwining of history and personal trauma.35 It is this realization of the agentive power of objects to reactivate past memories which explains the final scene in the novel Klotsvog in which the woman protagonist burns all the objects in her Jewish family house in a bonfire. The scene suggests that, in order to erase the mnemonic trauma-inducing power of things and smells, one has to annihilate the material past. The importance and the ability of smell-memory to evoke contradictory emotions and reactions is a universal phenomenon; it is this phenomenological relational reality that effectively breaks the dualisms between Jews and non-Jews. I suggest that, in engaging her reader-audiences in tactile and olfactory interactions with objects from her suitcase, Khemlin demonstrates the subjective and universal nature of feeling and evoking the past through things. At the same time, she uses smells and olfaction as chronotopic devices. By asking participants to open old bottles of Soviet perfume she encourages them to relive the experiences of the past, thus emphasizing the collective qualities of memory-induced olfaction. I have argued that Jewish historical experiences are both collective and subjective, and that these experiences are based on the acquisition of visceral knowledge as well as knowledge from written and oral discourses. These sets of knowledge make the question of smell-memory culturally sensitive. In Harvey Molotch’s opinion (2003), memorabilia help us to deal with existential chaos and maintain a tangible sense of social reality. This, he argues, is a universal phenomenon.36 Through 35 Etkind, “Stories of the Undead.” 36 Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes from: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (London: Routledge, 2003).

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interactions with the items in her brown suitcase, Margarita Khemlin sets out to teach about the universal value of smell-memory without erasing the value of subjective experiences. This practical engagement helps to deessentialize the notion of racialized embodiment, while her fictional writing dramatizes instances of Jewish traumatic experiences which are imbricated in social history. Most importantly, Khemlin’s performative interactions demonstrate the value of embodied knowledge which, in turn, potentially helps to overcome the exclusionary hierarchies between matter and spirit, senses and intellect— the kinds of hierarchies that have been used in the construct of the Jew’s body and connected materialities.

The Material-Cultural Smell and the Exhibition of Mandelshtam’s Memorabilia in the Jewish Museum in Moscow In the same way that reading constructs individual and collective memories, memories of smells can evoke a diverse range of Jewish history. Proustian memory is based not only on the smell-induced recollection of things sweet; it also covers the whole range of human emotions. As noted in chapter one, the Viking museum experiment, based on the recreation of various smells of the past, reveals that all the participants found the pungent “rubbish acrid” smell offensive. While the collectivity of this reaction to foul smell implies its universality, the reaction to smells is also a cultural construct. Freud famously argued that all barriers of disgust are the product of a civilizing upbringing.37 Today, many museums and libraries have begun to present private collections as multi-sensory experiments. Some exhibitions even experiment with atomizers to give visitors the opportunity to create their own smells. Sets of cultural knowledge, including memoirs, are stored in public and private collections as archives, and museums increasingly appeal to the public to share their “stories” of past generations. These stories inevitably incorporate Proustian smell-memories. Oral and printed sources often reflect multisensory experiences and are in a complex relationship with one another, echoing as they do the complex relationships between those private and public spaces that contain memorabilia. The title of the recent exhibition marking the eightieth anniversary of Mandelshtam’s death in the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance 37 Geller argues that for Freud “smell signifies what is rejected, animality and sexuality, as well as what was never consciously perceived: the memory of prehistory.” Geller, “The Aromatics of Jewish Difference,” 225. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 21 (London: Penguin Books, 1961).

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in Moscow, “Longing for the World Culture: A Poet’s Bookcase” (2018–2019), is taken from the previously discussed chapter in his The Noise of Time called “The Bookcase.”38 The exhibition displayed manuscripts and a few old books from Mandelshtam’s personal collection saved by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelshtam. The books absorbed many smells through situatedness and touch for eighty years after Mandelshtam’s death. Notably, in order to save the books and manuscripts, his widow had to keep them in such unlikely containers as cooking pots covered by lids. The paper must have absorbed the smells and aromas of cooking, so giving the manuscripts an additional, holistic quality of paradoxical smells which incorporate the history of the everyday with intellectual history. It is these embodied aspects of the books and manuscripts that we should treasure as a collective experience. The exhibition displayed books from Mandelshtam’s bookcase under glass. Understanding the importance of sensory aspects of memorabilia, Aleksandr Gordon in his description of the exhibition noted that “the books contained the warmth of his [Mandelshtam’s] hands.”39 To this we must add that the books absorbed the residue and smells of (multiethnic) spaces and hands of many generations who handled them before and after Mandelshtam. This particular exhibition did not experiment with smells and their role in memories. While it is impossible to recreate the smells of the apartment of Mandelshtam’s grandparents in Riga, the original site of the bookcase, I wonder whether, for educational purposes, the exhibition should have allowed the visitors to experiment with the recreation of smells on the basis of Mandelshtam’s descriptions in The Noise of Time. Such an experiment would show that the materiality and sensory cues of objects is a subjective phenomenon which, paradoxically, relates to constructs of collective identities. We cannot control the actual composition of “real-life” smells which we pass on to future generations via archives and collections. Margarita Khemlin’s brave practice of using the smell of items as a travelling archive for her generation has time-limits, because the matter, including the composition of perfume, changes. But we can pass on the knowledge of reactions to certain smells at various times in history. Russian Jewish authors problematize the notion of the objective intergenerational perception of smell or taste. Mandelshtam as a child did not like “the sweetish Jewish smell” of the apartment of his unfamil38 “Toska po mirovoi kul′ture. Knizhnyi shkaf poeta,” http://www.museum.ru/N71494, accessed February 12, 2019. The exhibition was curated by Leonid Katsis. 39 Aleksandr Gordon, “Kak sokhranialas′ rech′,” Novaia gazeta, February 8, 2019.

CHAPTER ELEVEN    Materiality of Smell and The Cultural Constructs of Memory

iar grandparents. His recollection of their sweet treats serves as a reminder of material-cultural subjectivities: “But I did not like the old people’s spicy dainties. I did not like that bitter almond taste.”40 My next and final chapter is dedicated to the story of one such sweet and spicy Jewish dainty, teiglach.

40 Mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni, 86. The “bitter almond taste” is an intersection of material and semiotic, as bitter almonds is a trope of personal and collective destiny. Mandel in the surname “Mandelshtam” is “almond” in German and Yiddish.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

“An Edible Chronotope”: In Search of Jewish Heritage Food When the kugel rises in a Jewish woman’s stove it is said that a hot angel has baked a kugel for her. —Yehuda Elzet, Jewish Cooking (1920)

I

n this final chapter I bring together main thematic threads of the material covered in the book through the story of the traditional Jewish dessert, teiglach. Teiglach, a sweet pastry, is one of the most enigmatic dishes of the East European Jewish cuisine and it has a reputation for being extremely difficult to make. The story of teiglach serves as a productive study of the dis/continuity of knowledge and the cultural meaning of heritage foodways among (former) Russian and Soviet Jews in both their places of origin and in diaspora.1 While narrating the researched story of teiglach, I position myself as a participant in the history of this Jewish materiality. Importantly, the story of teiglach allows me to break the binaries of embodied difference and demonstrate commonalities resultant from interactions between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Given the multiplicity of viewpoints on Jewish cooking made by the writers in this book—including Aleksandr Goldshtein’s remarks about the disappearance of traditional Ashkenazi dishes in Israel, Inna Lesovaya’s gendered exploration of cooking know-how, Isaac Babel’s pastries baked “with soul” and Marina Paley’s lack of interest in the acquisition of knowledge from her 1 On retention of cuisine traditions by Jews from the Soviet Union in the United States see Eve Jochanowitz, “The Culinary Landscapes of Russian-Jewish New York,” in Jewish Topographies, ed. Julian Brauch et al. (London: Ashgate, 2008), 293–309. On the recreation of Jewish recipes by later generations in diaspora see Elliott Horowitz, “Remembering the Fish and Making a Tsimmes: Jewish Food, Jewish Identity, Jewish Memory,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 1 (2014): 57–79. 

CHAPTER TWELVE    “An Edible Chronotope”

grandmother’s generation—I investigate here the history of teiglach from a cultural and embodied perspective.2 I demonstrate the main historical reasons for the generational discontinuity in passing on the knowledge related to this dish, namely the erasure of community groups and the frequent dislocations between the two World Wars,3 the massive loss of lives in the Holocaust as well as the ideologically motivated silencing of Jewish recipes in Soviet cookbooks. In addition, having identified and examined the void, I attempt to recreate possibly lost cultural beliefs underpinning the making of teiglach in relation to both Jewish and East Slav beliefs around women and dough-making. As Hasia Diner has observed, “[Food] in Judaic tradition stood at the very center of the sacred zone,” and one of my aims here is to find a place for teiglach in this zone.4 This sacred meaning has further relevance to the notion of “holy corporeality” which, as I have demonstrated, fascinated Russian religious thinkers such as Solovyov and Dostoevsky. Heritage food is akin to what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett terms an “edible chronotope” in its ability to contain and embody memories of places across space and time: . . . food experiences form edible chronotopes (sensory space-time convergences). The capacity of food to hold time, place, and memory is valued all the more in an era of hypermobility, when it can seem like everything is available all the time. Those sensory space-time convergences underlie social bonding when foods are shared that work mnemonically fusing the past, the present and the future as well as places which may be far away.5

The search for a workable recipe for teiglach takes place today in diverse places: Russia, the former Soviet Republics, Israel, the United States—the 2 On transfer of embodied knowledge related to food and cooking practice see Michael Carolan, Embodied Food Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). On emotional significance of food in the context of ethnic identity see Julie Locher et al., “Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey into the Social and Emotional Significance of Food,” Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 13, no. 4 (2005): 273–297. 3 Alice Nakhimovsky, “Public and the Private in the Kitchen: Eating Jewish in the Soviet State,” in Food in Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon et al. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), 149–168. 4 Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002). 5 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Foreword,” xi.

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main countries of the Russian and Soviet Diaspora.6 The very materiality of teiglach is mythologized via the nostalgia for lost origins. Recently, a memoir mentioned teiglach in connection with the disappearance of cultural knowledge surrounding the meaning of this dish.7 The search for the right recipe of this heritage dish demonstrates a quest for a whole complex of cultural understanding, including traditional beliefs. Alice Nakhimovsky’s 2006 study of the food eaten by (ex-)Soviet Jews concludes that Jewish dishes became empty labels because their religious meaning had been lost, and because the composition of the dish itself has become Russified. In the case of teiglach, she cites one émigré informant reminiscing in 2002 that in Soviet times her aunt used to bring teiglach to family celebrations, but she did not connect this dish to the Judaic New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The fact that Jews had these family events and transported such a complicated dish across town is, in Nakhimovsky’s view, “testimony that something very important was at stake.”8 This “something very important” is the quest to retain and revive traditional culture, which was under political attack from early Soviet times.9 Simultaneously, the systematic Russification of Jewish food names obliterated the ethnic origins of these dishes.10

Blank Spots in Soviet Cookbooks The main cookbooks of the Soviet era date back to the mid-1930s when the Soviet masses were for the first time encouraged to “desire and expect luxurious 6 In their humorous book on Russian recipes in the United States, Vail′ and Genis do not include Jewish dishes as such, but note the variations on chicken soup between Russian and Jewish practices. Petr Vail′, Aleksandr Genis, Russkaia kukhnia v izgnanii (Los Angeles: Almanac, 1987). 7 Leonid Gorelik, Istoriia nad nami prolilas′ (Moscow: Gelikom, 2015). 8 Nakhimovsky, “You Are what They Ate,” 158. 9 Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), 3. Shternshis’s interviews established that the subject of food was the most frequent topic of conversation about Jewish identity among the Jews describing their lives between 1920s and 1950s. See Anna Shternshis, “Salo on Challah: Soviet Jews’ Experiences in the 1920s–1950s,” in Jews and Their Foodways, ed. Anat Helman ( Jerusalem: Oxford UP, 2015), 10–27. In Music from the Speeding Train, Murav has demonstrated that the interruption of inter-generational knowledge in food preparation has been a feature in Jewish Yiddish literature in post-Revolutionary Russia, especially in the works written in the post-Holocaust period. 10 See a discussion in Gennady Estraikh, “Soviet Jewish Foodways,” in Global Jewish Foodways: A History, ed. Hasia Diner and Simone Cinotto (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2018), 115–138.

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tastes worthy of a great and prosperous nation.”11 The ideological underpinning of this campaign was to showcase the achievements of the Socialist planned economy. The pinnacle of the 1930s campaign was the publication of the cookbook Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (The Book on Tasty and Healthy Food) in 1939. Notably, the same year saw publication of 50 bliud evreiskoi kukhni (50 Dishes of Jewish Cooking), which turned out to be the last Jewish cookery book to appear in the Soviet Union till 1990.12 This thin volume came out in 5,000 copies and included culinary adaptations which erased the religious connotations of traditional dishes.13 The book was no match to the luxuriously produced The Book on Tasty and Healthy Food. With a preface by Anastas Mikoian, Commissar of the Food Industry, The Book on Tasty and Healthy Food includes dishes of the various ethnic groups and nationalities of the Soviet Union. Most of the Jewish desserts and baked dishes were grouped under the subtitle “Vostochnye sladosti” (“Eastern sweets”).14 At the bottom of a drawing depicting various sweets, the caption denotes “Eastern sweets: rakhat-lukum, Jewish pretzels, teiglach, chukhchul,” thus grouping Jewish, Turkish, and Crimean sweets. The book has more groupings of “Eastern sweets.” These include Jewish pastries such as zukerlekach, kichlach, nuss broit, kamishbroit, mandelbrot, and strudel, which are not specified as Jewish. Notably, the descriptions of Eastern sweets mention some basic ingredients but no precise measurements and no cooking instructions. This is in sharp contrast to other dishes printed on the center of the page, such as Russian pancakes or rye biscuits, all of which have exact amounts of ingredients as well as the methods of cooking. While it is possible to follow instructions for Russian dishes, the Jewish ones cannot be recreated from their descriptions. Their position on the right or left borders of the pages both graphically and semiotically denotes marginality. Given that there are no cooking methods for these “Eastern sweets,” to mention teiglach is particularly pointless as it is notoriously difficult to make, requiring a strict adherence to instructions. These sweet dishes deftly disappeared from 11 Anton Masterovoy, “Engineering Tastes: Food and Senses,” in Russian History through the Senses from 1700 to the Present, ed. Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 168. 12 A. B. Gutchina et al., eds., 50 bliud evreiskoi kukhni (Moscow: Gostorgizdat, 1939), 29. 13 Geist observes that in 50 bliud evreiskoi kukhni “the recipe for matzo ball soup does not contain any matzo.” See Edward Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik: Anastas Mikoian and the Making of The Book about Delicious and Healthy Food”. The Russian Review 71, no. 2 (2012): 304. 14 E. L. Khudiakov, ed., Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (Moscow: Pishchepromizdat, 1939), 240, 282, 283.

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Figure 14. Page from the cookery book Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (The Book on Tasty and Healthy Food), 1939, placing Jewish pastries on the margin under the title “Vostochnye sladosti” (Eastern Sweets). the pages of the cookbook’s second edition, which came out in 1952, the year before Stalin’s death and in the middle of the Anti-Cosmopolitan campaign.15 Cookery books from the Brezhnev era (1965–1985) reflected the rise of Russian nationalism and a more general interest in traditional foods.16 While this tendency in the emergent food culture was echoed in the dissemination of recipes of dishes of various nationalities of the Soviet Union, Jewish dishes remained conspicuously absent from the cookbooks of this late Soviet era. The first Jewish cookbooks, as well as the establishment of public Jewish eateries, appeared only in the aftermath of Perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ex-Soviet Jews created their own eating culture in their new places of migration and at home, reflecting a complex presence and absence of traditional dishes. Teiglach remains a dish characterized by the search to fill the lacuna resulting from such historical and ideological circumstances. 15 Anya von Bremzen rightly notes the disappearance of Jewish dishes (as well as other ethnic foods such as Kalmyk tea) from the 1952 edition of the cookbook, linking it to Stalin’s campaign against nationalism and rootless cosmopolitans. Anya von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: Memoir of Food and Loving (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 31; idem, “The Great Stalinist Bake-Off—Russia’s Kitchen Table,” The Guardian, October 10, 2013, 1. 16 Adrienne K. Jacobs, The Many Flavours of Socialism: Modernity and Tradition in Late Soviet Food Culture, 1965–1985 (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2015).

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At Home and Away The newly invented recipes which one finds today on internet sites and in cookery books typify the discontinuity in the passing on of this embodied knowledge about cooking.17 The recipes of the so-called “honey-balls” (medovye shariki) found on Russian-language internet sites from various places in Russia and Ukraine consist of fried dough-balls over which honey syrup is poured. These balls are poor relations to the desired teiglach made by the archetypal grandmothers. Simplified often for utilitarian purposes, these recipes avoid the complicated steps and processes which are at the core of the cultural and anthropological value of the old recipe. This situation is similar to the recipes in post-Soviet Jewish cookbooks which, in Nakhimovsky’s analysis,18 show that Jews in Russia today do not have any knowledge of Jewish cooking, because the recipes were not passed down from one generation to the next. She states that even the tone of contemporary Russian Jewish cookbooks is cold and clinical, with no mention of personal knowledge or information learned from relatives. The sanitized character of this discourse follows the style of Soviet cookbooks issued by medical and health professionals who stressed the importance of health and hygiene in cooking. It is for this reason that the woman author of one current internet site notes that she read the recipe for teiglach in 1990 in the first Jewish cookbook that appeared as a result of the Perestroika reforms, the sixty-four-page-long 120 bliud evreiskoi kukhni (120 Dishes of Jewish Cooking), published in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.19 The woman notes that she was then eleven years old and was mesmerized by the mysteriously sounding names of the Jewish dishes, including teiglach. The book, with its short entries, clearly did not teach her how to make teiglach. Rather, she learned the methodology during a visit to her grandmother the year before, in 1989. Symptomatically, her grandmother lived in Briansk in western Russia—the place of the former 17 Recipes of teiglach that I have tested recommend mixing about seven egg yolks with a cup of vegetable oil and flour into a workable mass, which is then kneaded into a long plait of three strings and cut into 1½ inch (4 cm) pieces. These must be put into a boiling syrup consisting of a mixture of honey, sugar syrup, and ginger and kept boiling at a high temperature for some twenty minutes. The lid of the saucepan must be tightly closed. Once boiled, the pieces of dough should rise into twisted buns. Put on to a wooden board one by one, so they do not stick to each other, they can then be decorated with crushed nuts or raisins. This recipe comes from a South African Jewish cookery book, authored by women who are descended from Jewish communities in Lithuania and Latvia and who came to South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gertrude Harvey Cohen et al., eds., The New International Goodwill Recipe Book, seventh edition ( Johannesburg: WIZO, 1995). 18 Nakhimovsky, “You Are what They Ate.” 19 M. Girshovich, 120 bliud evreiskoi kukhni (Tallinn: Iana, 1990).

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Pale. Another notable feature of the recipe is its vagueness. It was more of a narrative: “Well, take approximately three or four eggs . . .”—and focussed on the steps and methods of preparation rather than the exact amounts of ingredients. The telling of a story in teaching how to go about making the dish is key to the story of teiglach. Notably, the woman calls herself “granddaughter” [vnuchka] on the internet recipe site; the site itself is called Nasha semeinaia evreiskaia kukhnia (Our Family Jewish Cuisine).20 The fact that these generations of mothers are omitted from many recent Jewish cookbooks attests to Nakhimovsky’s claim that “mother’s kitchen is assumed to be inauthentic.”21 Current Russian language internet food discussion sites in Israel, the former Soviet Union and the United States bear witness to the amount of interest in learning how to prepare teiglach, and the difficulty in finding a recipe that works. Significantly, as one woman comments, searching on the Hebrewlanguage internet she still did not find a recipe. This is clearly a common problem, revealing the lack of cultural continuity between the old and new worlds. The generation of Latvian, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian Jews who knew how to make it was either wiped out or assimilated into the dominant nonEast European trends of Israel. The East European traditional dishes that have survived are those that are easier to make, have no complicated method and no “secret” involved in the cooking.22 The internet note written by a Russian Jewish émigré in Israel says: It dawned on me that I have never come across teiglach in Israel. I started googling on the Hebrew internet and practically did not find anything related to it, no memories. Imberlach, lekach, kugel— there are plenty of those, as many as you wish and in many versions, but teiglach is not mentioned. I then phoned my friend who is about sixty years old, of Polish-Russian extraction, she is the fourth generation in Israel. I asked her whether she knows. It turned out that yes, of course she remembers, because her father cooked it, but has not seen it since then (some fifty years ago). In English there are lots of recipes and mentions, in the book of my favourite author Claudia Roden there is, naturally, a recipe, but almost nothing in Hebrew.23 20 Nasha semeinaia kukhnia, https://vnu4ka.livejournal.com/585803.html, accessed May 15, 2018. 21 Nakhimovsky, “Public and the Private in the Kitchen,” 61. 22 Jacinthe Bessiere, “Local Development and Heritage: Traditional Food and Cuisine as Tourist Attraction in Rural Areas,” Sociologia Ruralis 38, no. 1 (1998): 21. 23 http://rozik1965.livejournal.com/60753.html, accessed April 1, 2017.

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The fact that the recipe is not frequently found in the Hebrew language marks the discontinuity in cuisines between Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and a Maghribian-based contemporary Israeli cuisine. Currently, immigrants from the former Soviet Union form the largest single migrant group in Israel and account for approximately fifteen percent of the Israeli population. Most members of this group are of Ashkenazi descent. While their Sovietized tastes find consumer satisfaction in Israel, as the result of the market response to their needs, the quest for teiglach could not be met in this country. Aleksandr Goldshtein, as noted in the previous chapter, reflected on this loss of East European Ashkenazi cuisine with its honey biscuits in favour of more popular Maghribian dishes. While the food scene in Israel has changed from traditional Israeli foods and cuisine as a result of the mass emigration of Soviet Jews in the early 1990s, heritage food such as teiglach did not survive this transition. This is due to the generational discontinuity among the Jews from the former Soviet Union and the whole complex of factors which formed modern Israeli cuisine. Both Goldshtein and the author of the narrative on the internet site identify an important trend in the politics of foods, cuisine and foodways in Israel. Yael Raviv in her book Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (2015) describes the role of food in Israeli nation-building. Food was used “not to recreate a longed-for past but to forge new connections, using food as a tool for building a nation,” as “a tool to remake the Jewish figure, to aid the construction of an identity that is different from the diasporic Jewish image.”24 The search for a teiglach recipe and the quest for heritage food among Ashkenazi Jews of the former Soviet Union in Israel today, I propose, testifies that the search is linked not only to remembering the real homeland but also remembering an imaginary past. Raviv states that cookbooks and food-related websites in Israel reflect the changes in the proportion of immigrants to the established population. The case of teiglach, however, is a notable exception because it is a site for the search for knowledge underpinned, I suggest, by the lost cultural narrative of beliefs associated with the making of the dish. Another notable aspect to the search for teiglach among Russian speakers in Israel and Diaspora is found in the quoted searcher’s reference to the English language cookbook by Claudia Roden. However, the irony of this reference to Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to Vilna to the Present Day (1997) in connection with the teiglach recipe is that there is evidence that this recipe does not actually work. Under the rubric “Adventures 24 Yael Raviv, Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2015), 3.

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in The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden” (2010), an American blogger describes scrupulously following Roden’s ingredients and method, only to end up with a clump of hard sticky balls rather than the expected raised and light delicacy.25 Could it be that, because Roden was born in Cairo and did not participate in the family tradition of culinary knowledge, her teiglach recipe does not work? It appears even an anthropologist like Roden, writing up a recipe from bookish sources, cannot recreate that which is lost in culture. While her book has “Vilna” in the title, the teiglach recipes from this Lithuanian town are intrinsically linked to the fate of Lithuanian Jewry, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. However, the know-how did survive in countries of diaspora such as South Africa, where most Jewish migrants came at the beginning of the twentieth century. Given the complicated and disrupted history of Jews from the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, the places of origin of traditional foods have become “sites of nonmemory” themselves,26 in search of cultural traditions including heritage foods. Roden’s visit to present-day Vilnius in search of local Jewish cuisine falls into the wider category of the re-ethnification of Jewish life in post-Holocaust and post-Soviet geographies. The irony of Vilnius positioning itself today as a tourist destination for Jews from western countries in search of their cultural heritage manifests itself in the importation of food recipes, as well as in the Yiddish language courses and klezmer music from the West where they have survived.27 A signifying feature of teiglach recipes and the discussions on various Russian-language food internet sites in Russia and Ukraine is the uncertainty concerning the ingredients and method of cooking. Even those who claim to have their grandmother’s recipe often admit that they forgot to mention one or another important ingredient, including honey. Some claim that the dough has to be deep-fried before being boiled in honey; others say that it has to be baked in the oven; and some will say that they distinctly remember that the dough was cooked in the syrup, without being fried or baked first. Of special importance is that most of these recipes omit a very important ingredient—ginger— which adds to the dish’s exotic “Eastern” flavor. Its twisted shape of a knot, a mini-challah, is also remembered only by some; most suggest the shape of little balls cooked in honey syrup. The recipe is a site of lost memory and, at the same 25 “Adventures in The Book of Jewish food by Claudia Roden,” http://open.salon.com/blog/ rivi1/2010/10/26/day_77_in_which_i_make_teiglachb, accessed March 1, 2018. 26 Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 557. 27 On reconstruction of communal life see Zvi Gitelman, “Introduction,” in Jewish Life After the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003), 2.

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time, mystery. The lost knowledge and principles, I propose, relate to the rising and growing of a dough that does not contain yeast or a sour base. It may also relate to beliefs linked to ginger. As with many spices from the Orient, ginger in Europe was not only a marker of refinement. Its aroma was also believed to be a breath wafted from paradise over the human world. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his authoritative study of the history of spices and stimulants, Tastes of Paradise, describes the belief that ginger and cinnamon were carried down the Nile, which had carried them straight from paradise.28 While the disappearance of ginger from teiglach recipes relates to the wider history of trade and migration, the history of ginger in Europe is also a history of the interactions of Jews with various cultures through the centuries.

The Loss of Grandmother’s Tales Concerning Teiglach One of the defining features of teiglach recipes on the Russian language internet is the frequent reference to “Grandmother’s recipe” [retsept babushki]. In some cases, these recipes tell the stories of how grandmother cooked the dish. Marat Baskin’s book Little Culinary Stories (Kulinarnye rasskaziki), available on the internet in conjunction with the project “Autograf,” reveals the quest to connect culturally with the heritage of the past via the taste of traditional dishes. The book’s epigraph programmatically suggests this quest: These are not just little culinary stories—this is about the memory of our parents, grandfathers and grandmothers. This is the memory of the heart. This is the taste of time. The taste of our uneasy common shtetl childhood.29

Of note is the reference to “the common shtetl childhood” which reflects the imaginary cultural link with the subculture of a place that no longer exists.30 Today there are no shtetls in Belarus; places of Jewish settlements were wiped out during the Nazi occupation. Nor does Baskin’s own childhood fit historically into the time of the shtetls. Baskin’s desire to preserve the recipes and create a link across time and space is akin to the notion of an edible 28 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 6. 29 Marat Baskin, Kulinarnye rasskaziki, 44–46, http://www.i-autograph.com/book/i12a56u3646526b241-7e824f5fc9, accessed March 8, 2018. 30 On ethnic cuisine as a reconstruction of common past see Pierre Van den Berghe, “Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 7, no. 3 (1984): 386–397.

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chronotope. It wants to recreate the experience of the times while at the same time pointing to an uneasy past, referencing the collective history of the Jews who lived on the territory of the former Pale. As such, this edible chronotope relates to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope as a “breaking point” in characters’ lives leading to dramatic changes.31 In this culinary story, the teiglach chronotope conflates with the chronotope of catastrophe in history, the time-space of “the breaking point” in the history of the Jews of Russia’s western regions which affected the whole population of people of various ages. Baskin’s book includes a recipe for teiglach which is narrated as a short three-page story describing how his grandmother went about cooking the dish. While his story describes the making of the dish, it does not give its cultural meaning. Instead, the story tells of his grandmother’s actual cooking of the dish and her own way of tasting it when the dish was ready. Sadly, without any information about the meaning of teiglach, the author does not pass on any of the beliefs underpinning the dish and its preparation. Instead, the story presents a narrative of the Jewish grandmother’s culinary skills which led to a high demand for her teiglach among Jews and Belarusians alike for wedding celebrations in Krasnopolie. As such, the narrative also functions as a story of cultural interaction and assimilation. The recipe attests to this cultural adaptation: the teiglach here are cooked as small honey balls that are shaped flat on a wet board and cut into squares like biscuits. While there are many possible explanations for why his grandmother would improvise and adjust the original recipe in this context,32 her recipe and the story testify to the gap in the cultural continuum of this evasive dish. Stories around failed attempts to make teiglach also reference the special value associated with a grandmother’s recipe and the passing down of such knowledge. Teiglach is the subject of the humorous story “Istoriia No. 76046” (“Story No. 76046,” 2004) in the Russian-language internet journal in the United States, Anekdoty iz Rossii (Anecdotes from Russia), written by a Russian Jewish émigré.33 The author describes his wife’s failed attempt to make teiglach and notes that the culinary disaster was due to the fact that she lied in saying that she had used her grandmother’s recipe. In fact, she took the recipe from a calendar of Jewish cooking, as she did with other recipes attributed to her 31 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” 32 To make individual teiglach as one-size lightly textured balls that do not sink or become hard is risky, especially when an order is big as would be in the case of wedding. 33 “Istoriia No. 76046,” Anekdoty iz Rossii, https://www.anekdot.ru/id/76046/, accessed March 1, 2018.

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grandmother. The centrality of the grandmother figure in this satirical story is notable, as it explains the awareness of the importance of the transfer of skills between generations. While the imaginary grandmother’s recipes worked in some cases, they fittingly did not work in the case of teiglach. The reason for the failure is that a written recipe alone is not sufficient in the preparation of this complex dish without having the method and knowledge. In this case, a Russian Jewish family in the United States expresses its nostalgia for its roots through the desire to make this famous but notoriously enigmatic dish. The hard, unchewable balls which stick to the teeth embody the challenge of teiglach-making and the hard facts about the lack of transmission of this embodied knowledge. The lack of holistic knowledge remains a defining feature of the recipes of teiglach even when, as in some cases, recipes are passed on by grandmothers. Typically, those who display the recipes on their sites have grandmothers who were born quite late in the twentieth century and belong to the generation of assimilated Jews. This generation of present-day grandmothers were affected by the results of cultural discontinuity. For me, the simplified and drastically adjusted nature of these recipes testify to this discontinuity. They typically suggest frying bits of dough or baking them, rather than boiling the dough in the style of boiled bagels—a method that unites the making of teiglach and bagels. There is another reason for the quest to ascribe these recipes to grandmothers, and this has to do with the search for a story behind teiglach. This layer of meaning relates to fundamental imaginary structures of eating. With a gap in the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge, including recipes and cooking methods, a whole cultural base of belief systems becomes erased. The case of teiglach presents one such powerful illustration. In what follows, I will attempt to reconstruct some aspects of the belief complex that could underpin the mystery of teiglach.

Reconstructing Beliefs around Making teiglach Because teiglach is made by boiling knotted dough in hot syrup, its quality depends entirely on the pastry expanding into a light airy product. If the dough collapses, it turns into a hard, inedible stone-like ball. Its preparation therefore has a ceremonial, ritual-like character. I was told by elderly women in Riga in the 1960s that when teiglach is cooked the doors and windows of the kitchen have to be tightly closed, as must the lid of the saucepan. Nobody is allowed to talk, presumably because talking interferes with the flow of air in the room.

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Indeed, no noise is allowed in the kitchen, presumably because any sound has a physical effect on the air and the stove and interrupts the even-heating process. One can detect, I suggest, echoes of superstitions in the folk beliefs surrounded the cooking of teiglach, some of them possibly shared with East Slav beliefs.34 The rising and collapsing of dough in bread-making is associated with a set of rules and superstitions. Teiglach dough is kneaded into a mini-challah form. Although it is not baked, in this regard there are parallels with bread-making. In East Slav belief systems, bread and bread-baking are linked to a complex of animistic beliefs—the rising of the dough in particular is associated with the spirits of ancestors. The stove was a place through which communication with these spirits was possible, as their spirits moved up through the chimney.35 The house spirit, the domovoi, who normally was full of pranks, also lived near the stove. These beliefs could have influenced Jewish superstitions in the Pale of Settlement. Additionally, the rising and baking of bread in East Slav beliefs were linked to the idea of childbirth and the evil eye.36 In a striking but common ritual, prematurely born or sickly babies were wrapped in dough and placed in a warmish stove [pech′] in an act that homologizes the rising of dough and the development and second birth of humans.37 The process of baking to the right conditions and the rejuvenation of human beings is conflated in this ritual. Importantly, in Hasidic tradition the baking of dishes that rise, such as Sabbath kugel, is linked to the domain of spiritual blessing and here the stove is a place of divine action.38 In his ethnographic study of Jewish foods in Eastern Europe, Yiddishe Maykholim, Yehuda Elzet describes a folkloric belief that relates to this process of rising: “When the kugel rises in a Jewish woman’s stove it is said that a hot angel has baked a kugel for her.”39 The holy intervention of “a hot angel” 34 The Rothsteins’ comparative study of proverbs about food shows that Slavs and Jews ate the same staple food. Halina Rothstein and Robert Rothstein, “Food in Yiddish and Slavic Folk Culture: A Comparative/Contrastive View,” in Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon (Omaha: Creighton UP, 1998), 305–328. 35 Snejana Tempest, “Stovelore in Russian Folklife,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997), 1–14. 36 Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Beliefs (London: Routledge. 2015), 47. 37 V. N. Arshinov, “O narodnom lechenii v Kazanskom uezde,” in Sbornik svedenii dlia izucheniia byta krest′ianskogo naseleniia Rossii, ed. N. Kharuzin (Moscow: Izvestiia Imperatorskogo obshchestva liubitelei estestvoznaniia, 1889), 10–12. 38 Allan Nadler, “Holy Kugel: The Sanctification of Ashkenazic Ethnic Foods in Hasidism,” in Food in Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon et al. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), 193–214. 39 Yehuda Elzet, Yiddishe Maykholim (Warsaw: Lewin Epstein Press, 1920), 35.

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creates a mystical link between the risen dish and the divine, a link that might well be applicable to the rising of teiglach. Recent ethnographic material collected during a 2011–2012 survey in Latgale, the region in Latvia with the largest Jewish population before the Holocaust, attests that there is a “secret” linked to the making of teiglach.40 The following conversation was recorded, in which the informant was a non-Jewish woman married to a Jewish man living in Latgale. She reminisces of the time when they invited a Jewish pastry chef to cook teiglach for a special festive occasion. Of crucial importance is the fact that the chef had lived in Latgale before the Soviet occupation and before the Holocaust: Informant 1: It is necessary that there is no wind while cooking teiglach. The pot has to be tightly closed because they [teiglach] are afraid of the draught. . . . We had invited an old pastry master. . . . I was standing next to him and kept watching while he was working. And when they [teiglach] were put together, he made me leave the kitchen! I kept thinking: “How odd! He expelled me from my own kitchen!” . . . Teiglach are very sensitive to the draught. They collapse into small things. Interviewer: Do you mean they shrink or dry out? Informant: No, they do not dry out. They just become like this . . .41

This ethnographic information suggests that the presence of a non-Jewish woman at the crucial moment when the dough had to rise presented a difficulty for the Jewish pastry chef. The woman repeats the set of customs around the cooking of the dish, but she is not aware of the cultural belief systems underlying these customs. This raises the issue of prohibitions: the chef was clearly not prepared to risk the collapse of the dough by undertaking a special, quasi-mystical process in the presence of the outsider. Judaic beliefs do allude to a spiritual aspect to dough-making. The last Lubavitcher rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, suggested that kneading or mixing two distinct materials into a single dough signifies the unity of matter

40 Iu. Andreeva, M. Viatchina, “Koshernyi stol i khazer: pishchevye praktiki evreev v predstavlenii neevreiskikh zhitelei Latgalii,” in Utrachennoe sosedstvo, Evrei v kul′turnoi pamiati zhitelei Latgalii. Materialy ekspeditsii 2011–2012 gg., ed. S. Amosova (Moscow: Avi Chai Foundation, 2013), 218–245. 41 Ibid., 238.

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and spirit, human and God.42 This interpretation is particularly relevant for this case study due to the Lubavitchers’ geographical and cultural roots in the Pale in Western Russia.43 This link between childbirth, fertility, and the rising and baking of dough with the spiritual world is a shared feature of folk beliefs. Both East Slav and Ashkenazi beliefs may shed light on the rituals and superstitions surrounding the making of teiglach and the set of prohibitions that emerged around the cooking of this food. On a practical level, it is quite clear that ingredients such as eggs, honey, and ginger were expensive, and to cook such a luxurious dish was for this reason a big responsibility. The preparation of the dish only on special occasions could also have contributed to tension. The fear of “the evil one” interfering in the rising of the dough also makes a plausible explanation. But what did the Jewish women themselves believe in? What were they afraid of? This layer of teiglach-making is lost in time. What we have today are scatterings of remembrances about how to behave during the cooking of teiglach: to walk quietly, to keep the lid tight, to have it covered with the cloth—all of which should help the teiglach “grow.”44 While I was fortunate enough to hear the stories around the cooking of teiglach, I was not actually taught how to make it. I tasted teiglach made by Latvian Jewish women who survived the Holocaust, but I was too young for them to pass on their knowledge. What I do have is the memory which feeds my imagination. This is in keeping with the general impossibility of the full restoration of the embodied histories of the material culture of Russian Jewry.45 As Jacinthe Bessiere notes in her work on heritage food: The transmission of culinary know-how is, furthermore, not what it used to be. There is a frittering away of skills. The daughter or granddaughter no longer inherits secret family recipes. Modern home 42 See a discussion in Tamar El-Or, “Temple in Your Kitchen: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Ritual as a Public Ceremony,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan et al. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2011), 271–294. 43 Notably, the Judaic ritual of challah-making relates to the notion of bread as containing elements of holiness. In a recently described ceremony of challah-baking in Israel, a well-risen and well-baked challah was believed to have brought fertility to a childless couple. Ibid. 280. 44 On “growth” of dough see a description with the recipe in Russian, https://www.liveinternet.ru/users/paro-sh/post149525120, accessed August 1, 2019. 45 Zipperstein’s observation that historians’ trips to the places of former Jewish communities in Eastern Europe can “inspire a familiarity with . . . food” needs to be viewed in terms of the imagination rather than as restoration of knowledge. Steven Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: Washington UP, 1999), 96.

CHAPTER TWELVE    “An Edible Chronotope” cooking goes beyond the traditional family dishes, in turn creating nostalgia for the food eaten in one’s childhood and adolescence. Newly-found aspirations translate this nostalgia into the desire to go back to culinary roots, as if this were a return to the beginning. It is as if eating were a quest for nutrimental truth, an essence hidden within a dish.46

It is the essence hidden within the dish that perhaps holds the key to the mystery of teiglach, both its production and the appeal it holds for contemporary Jews descended from those of the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union. Is it possible that the women insisted that the lid, the kitchen windows and the doors had to be hermetically tight whilst teiglach was cooking because they believed that it did have an essence, a spirit, a ruach? And, if so, were they guarding against the flowing away of this ruach into the outer spaces, or were they guarding what remained inside, rather than outside, the pot? In this reading, the dough becomes a kind of living organism that, in order to grow, develop and mature, must find life and its own essence. In the words of Bessiere, we treat heritage food as holding nutritional truth and a hidden essence, but my own search for the traditional teiglach recipe is motivated mainly by the sense of loss of cultural memory of what constitutes the hidden essence of this dish. While I realize that there could and should be regional variants in teiglach, as well as variants dependent on the financial circumstances of the makers, the fact that there is not one quintessential traditional teiglach suggests to me that what has been lost is the unifying essence of the variants and versions of teiglach cooked in the various regions of the former Pale of Settlement. The loss inadvertently challenges the fantasy of disembodied knowledge and immutability of materialities.

The Paradoxes of “Ephemeral Objects” as Heritage Food Those searching for contemporary teiglach recipes express nostalgia in various ways, one of which is to define their individual and collective selves at home and away, in the old and the new worlds. Discussions of food in a historical context often relate to the complexity of studying what Barbara Wheaton calls “ephemeral objects,” even in application to stable culinary traditions (such as French

46 Bessiere, “Local Development and Heritage,” 31.

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cuisine).47 The story of teiglach as well as the composition of the dish typify this notion of the culinary ephemeral object. At the same time, teiglach is a perfect edible chronotope because, in Bakhtinian terms, any chronotope related to “the breaking point” is “part of the great all-embracing chronotope of mystery.”48 Moreover, teiglach epitomizes the trope of “embodied food politics.”49 Historical, political, and ideological factors all had an impact on the generational dis/continuity in the domain of teiglach’s foodways. In countries such as South Africa, where Ashkenazi Jewish mass immigration from Russia took place before World War One and before the formation of Soviet Union, old world recipes have survived, passed down orally, through practice and in cookbooks from one generation to the next. Places of origin played an important role in this transmission of knowledge, with the majority of Jews coming from Lithuania and Latvia—parts of the Russian Empire where shtetl life persisted until the beginning of the Second World War. Latvia and Lithuania became parts of the Soviet Union later than other places of habitation of Soviet Jewry and were subjected to ideological silencing later in the twentieth century. Remaining Holocaust survivors from these places were able to pass on their intergenerational knowledge. Moreover, these communities could “use the transitory and repetitive act of eating as a medium for the more enduring act of remembering.”50 On the other hand, teiglach recipes on current internet sites in places which became part of the Soviet Union early in the twentieth century after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution bear witness to the discontinuity resulting from ideological policies as well as tragic historical events. The trajectory of migration played an important role in the processes of foodways. The improvised and deconstructed teiglach recipes displayed today on various Russian and English language internet sites serve as a testimony to the search for, and the gaps in, embodied cultural continuity.51

47 Barbara Wheaton, Savouring The Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 12. 48 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 249. 49 Michael Carolan, Embodied Food Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 50 David Sutton, Remembrance of Repast: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 2. 51 Gershenson and Shneer demonstrate that today post-Soviet and ex-Soviet Jews form a transnational community, and the use of blogs and internet sites is an important common

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***** In the context of this book, teiglach is the type of food construed by Vladimir Solovyov as the embodiment of Jewish practices that linked matter with the spirit, thus symbolizing both “holy corporeality” and what he termed the “sensuous character of the Jewish worldview.”52 Teiglach is also the kind of food which Gogol’s Taras Bulba dismisses as dainties, honey pundiki, and which Osip Mandelshtam calls “spicy dainties” of the old Jewish people—prianye starikovskie lakomstva.53 For Taras and Mandelshtam, such delicacies have an alien taste; they signify separation and estrangement from the materialities of Other culture. Such tastes were lost for Mandelshtam in the noise of his time, while they retained a sense of nostalgia for Isaac Babel. It also is the kind of food which caused gendered reactions from some Soviet-born Jewish women writers alienated by choice or circumstances from their grandmothers’ cooking. The noise of our own time is marked by the search for recipes and methods which people of the older generation used in the past but, sadly, did not always have the opportunity to pass on to future generations. For me personally, teiglach is an edible chronotope also because it converges time/space with the young Mandelshtam—like him, I tasted the “spicy dainty” for the first time in Riga, albeit more than half a century later. Yet, different cultural and historical backgrounds bring different sensory reactions, and for me, teiglach became the epitome of Jewish delicacies. This variance in perception proves that food “has a relational character and may be a vehicle of cultural and psychological manipulation.”54 For me and for many of my contemporaries globally, teiglach is the edible chronotope for bonding and affinity. Noted food scholar Darra Goldstein has observed that food historians should uncover not only recipes but also “physical and sensual properties of food.”55 Eating teiglach allows me and many others to celebrate an embodied spiritual connection with Jewish material culture and folk mysticism. ground for the construct of Jewish identity. Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (2011): 103–113. 52 Solov′ev, “Evreistvo,” 38. 53 Mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni, 86. 54 Irina Perianova, The Polyphony of Food: Food through the Prism of Maslow’s Pyramid (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 4. 55 Darra Goldstein, review of A. Smith, Recipes for Russia, Journal of World History 24, no. 1 (2010): 778.

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Conclusion The Power of Bodies and Senses that Matter

I

n Isaak Babel’s story “Karl-Yankel” (1931), in a captivating scene set during a trial pertaining to the practice of circumcision in the Soviet era, the circumcised baby boy cries in hunger. The boy’s Jewish mother is so weak and fatigued that she faints. In this moment of crisis, a Kyrgyz woman volunteers to breastfeed the baby. The scene’s implicit symbolism is amplified by the improbable presence of a working-class Kyrgyz woman in Odessa in the 1920s. The transfer of her milk into the body of the circumcised Jewish baby is more than symbolic; rather, it functions as a material-semiotic transformation of the archaic into the modern.1 The circumcised Jewish boy embodies the slippage between physical and metaphysical referents. Marked by circumcision, he is believed to have entered into a covenant with God which promises a metaphysical future; fed by the milk of a proletarian Kyrgyz woman, he will become an active creator of his own future, a new man who no longer needs the patronage of God. Karl-Yankel’s body is a meeting point of history and literary constructs. While “Karl” in the boy’s name ironically suggests a tribute to Karl Marx, 1

Vladimir Khazan suggests that the Kyrgyz woman may be related to Vsevolod Ivanov’s story “Dite” (“Child,” 1921), where a Kyrgyz woman is forced to breast-feed a “white” Christian baby and abandon her own child. While Ivanov’s story shows a case of racial hatred of Russian men towards the local population, Babel demonstrates the woman’s spontaneous reaction without prejudice. See Vladimir Khazan, Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh ( Jerusalem: Mosty kul′tury, 2001), 224–228.

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“Yankel,” also ironically, evokes literary characters from Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” and Dostoevsky’s allusion to Gogol’s Jew Yankel in his depiction of Isai Bumshtein. However, as a common Jewish name, Yankel signals the inevitability of following a collective destiny, which can, albeit questionably, be avoided by taking the Marxist path. The story ends with the narrator’s whisper: “I can’t believe that you, Karl-Yankel, won’t be happier than me. . . .”2 The profound meaning of the closing sentence expresses Babel’s belief and disbelief in the possibility of societal transformation, when the Jewish (or Kyrgyz) body will no longer be judged by inscribed differences. The episode encapsulates the conclusion of this book—that the inscribed and described body of the Other is an exemplary material-semiotic interface which simultaneously attracts and struggles to escape essentializing. I have demonstrated that Russian anthropologists and philosophers of late modernity, often following the racial views of their Western counterparts, created a phylogenetic link between contemporary and ancient Jews.3 Symptomatically, in order to understand and categorize the typological nature of Jewish people, they drew visual evidence from physical artefacts dating back to ancient times. Both Stepan Eshevsky and Vladimir Solovyov used items from Ancient Egypt excavated during archaeological expeditions to support their assertions about Jews and embodied Judaism. The artefacts, specifically vases and objects from pharaohs’ tombs, were displayed at the British Museum. The alleged Jews’ bodies inscribed on the artefacts were viewed as samples of physical features and shapes frozen in time. The perceived similarity between these ancient bodies and those of contemporary Jews served as proof of the stability of racial types. This physical stability, in turn, was translated into declarations of the unchangeable psychological and mental character of the Jewish people. The process of conflating the material and ontological status of the Jew’s body is particularly evident in Solovyov’s notion of the “holy corporeality” of the body in Judaism. Contrary to the imagined “Jew’s body” as frozen in time, the ethnographic expeditions of the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society in the Pale of Settlement in 1912–1914, as well as the displays at the Jewish Museum in St. Petersburg in 1914, aimed to present Jews as contemporary people with 2 Isaak Babel′, “Karl-Iankel′,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 150. 3 I have demonstrated the influences of Marx, Feuerbach, Richard Wagner, von Krafft-Ebing, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and E. B. Tylor, among others, on Russian constructs of Jews and embodied Judaism.

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a living culture. The photographs of Jewish people, their artefacts, and their engagement with tools of their professions revealed the notion of a Jewish physical “type” as a construct. Current trends in museology show a growing willingness to encourage visitors to engage their senses. This process serves to challenge stereotypes of the racialized body. Allowing visitors to create their own smells, tastes and other ways of feeling “the past” can personalize the act of recollection as based on subjective, rather than homogenous materiality.4 Russian literary imagination incorporated elements of the construct of the Jew’s material and ontological body, as well as the Jew’s alleged specific interaction with materialities. Solovyov’s older contemporary, Dostoevsky, also conceptualized the Jew’s body as the union of the material and ontological. His phantom Jewish fireman in Crime and Punishment is an embodied variant of the Wandering Jew, depicted as both eternally unchanged and unchangeable. Dostoevsky’s version of this construct was underpinned by the notion of the material stability of the Jew’s body in history. While Dostoevsky’s later non-fictional political writing was influenced by the view that contemporary Jewry was agentive in spreading capitalist ideals, his Jewish fireman possesses the ultimate knowledge—the knowledge of the right place to die and, by implication, to resurrect. It is for this reason that he tries to stop Svidrigailov from committing suicide. Dostoevsky invests this Jewish character with his own quest for a physical utopia on Earth. Fittingly, in his sociological tract Suicide, Émile Durkheim singled out Judaism as religion which “counts the fewest suicides,” stating that the collective life of contemporary Jewry was an important factor in “preservation values.”5 I have claimed that both the Jewish fireman in Crime and Punishment and Isai Fomich Bumshtein in Notes from the House of the Dead epitomize the quest to preserve life. Isai’s particular care of his body is exemplified by the medical prescription for the special scar-removing ointment supplied by the Jewish community in the colony. This detail encapsulates the respect and care for the material body in Judaism. Both the Jewish fireman and Bumshtein express and conceal Dostoevsky’s most riveting desire for corporeal “literal and personal resurrection [that] will take place here on earth.”6 Modernists Anton Chekhov and Andrei Bely both made their contribution to the formation of the stereotype of the shallow and greedy Jewess who was incapable of rising above the materiality of life. The Jewess’s alleged sensuality 4 The Center of Olfactory Art in the New York Museum of Art and Design was open in 2011. 5 Durkheim, Suicide, 170. 6 Dostoevskii, “N. P. Petersonu,” 15.

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in the work of these two writers is different from the orientalized creations of Romanticism. Their sensuality was given new dimensions borrowed from the medical and anthropological discourses which pathologized and essentialized both physical needs and desires. Chekhov’s medical background and Bely’s knowledge of racial theories had an impact on their depictions of the alleged specificity of the Jewess’s biological senses and sensibilities, including sexed olfaction and tactile needs. While older stereotypes of the rapacious nature of Jews were underpinned by the notions of material greed, the new typology introduces the notions of an uncontrollable need for haptic interactions with material objects. Objects in literature acquire meaning through their relational interaction with the Jew’s body. This in turn creates its own system of semiotics and a specific biological aura associated with Jewish spaces. In Bely’s Petersburg there are two samovars in Zoya Fleish’s apartment: one is unused and serves a decorative function; the other, well-used, is soiled by the touch of greasy hands, thus creating a semiotic-material contrast between the Russian and the Jewish body. Things and living matter in Chekhov’s Mire similarly acquire racialized meaning through their situatedness and interaction with Susanna. Plants, birds, the silk gown and the piano enter into phenomenological relation with humans by means of their physical qualities and through the human senses of hearing, touch and olfaction. The modernist writing of Isaac Babel often enters into ironic dialogue with the dominant culture. In the story “In the Basement,” recently acquired pieces of furniture receive new meaning with their relocation from wealthy non-Jewish houses into the basement apartment of the poor Jewish family. By resituating a coathanger made from deer antlers, Babel makes the object strange in the basement apartment. The defamiliarized object symbolizes differences in the interaction with the physical world, since traditionally Jewish men did not assert their masculinity by hunting and displaying trophies of killed animals. Yet the desire to possess such an object testifies to the mimetic character of interaction with the dominant culture. This desire shows that human interaction with objects is a cultural construct and should not be essentialized. Preferences for certain foodstuffs is an integral part of the construct and representation of the body. Gogol was one of the first Russian language writers to refer to the Talmud and, as I have argued, he grouped regulations and prohibitions related to sexuality and dietary laws into thematic sets. This enigmatic nineteenth-century writer invests his seemingly negative or ridiculous Jewish and crypto-Jewish characters with his own secret desires related to the

Conclusion

corporeal. Embodied senses such as tastes in food and sexual desire carry subversive meaning in his work and simultaneously obscure and expose authorial preferences. Starting from Gogol’s writing, food, dietary and culinary practices become one of the most stable markers of materiality defining the subaltern, including Jews, Muslims and, in later years, animist minorities of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. The material praxis becomes conceptualized not only as a proof of difference but also as a symptom of deviance and pathology. Differences in dietary practices are frequently centered around eating meat. Meat-eating becomes a marker of masculinity and an attribute of the power of the dominant normative male which, I have suggested, is in line with Derrida’s schema of the carno-phallogocentric subject. Carol Adams’s feminist notion of the “overlapping absent referent”7 is productive in its application to the conflated orientalized Others, including the crypto-Jewish wizard in Gogol’s “Terrible Vengeance.” The politics of carnism plays a significant role in the construct of the body. Gogol’s writings present (crypto-)Jews as people who shy away from meat diets. Later, politicized constructs of Jews depict them as having pathological leanings towards raw flesh (Vasily Rozanov and Aleksandr Prokhanov). Prokhanov uses carnism in his contemporary fiction to construct a brand of Russian masculinity as opposed to the Jews’ physicality. I have proposed that his brand of carnism can be viewed as an expression of “social dominance orientation.” Recent sociological studies have demonstrated that “carnistic domination was related to symbolic racism and sexism.”8 Prokhanov’s writing exemplifies this view: his Russian males assert their masculinity and nationalism through eating the meat of animals they have killed in a hunt, thus creating an intersection of dominance in social hierarchies, gender, and ethnicity. In some cases, animal advocacy becomes a tool to define ethnic differences and to instil hierarchies between religions and ethnicities. In these instances, the calculated politics of animal rights are used to assert the moral supremacy of Christianity and European civilization and/or, as in the case of Vasily Rozanov, to selectively use Judaism, Islam, and animistic religions to help his project to revitalize contemporary Russian society. In his defence of animals, Rozanov manipulatively switches from posthuman thinking to hierarchical models, depending on the political agendas. In literature as well as in the 7 Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat. 8 Christopher Monteiro et al., “The Carnism Inventory: Measuring the Ideology of Eating Animals,” Appetite 113 (2017): 53.

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opinions of ethnographers and anthropologists during the ritual murder trials (the Multan Case and the Beilis Affair), a connection is made between ritual animal slaughter and animal suffering. Often there is an implicit acceptance of the fact that animals do not require saving in general, but require being saved from sadistic “non-white” Others. In such cases, animal suffering discourse is instrumental in the conflation of drives to harm animals and to harm humans. These drives are explicated phylogenetically as the alleged survival of primitive instincts among certain ethnic groups. During the late Soviet era, Ivan Shevtsov, the writer of ultra-nationalist orientation, uses the discourse of animality to portray the Jews’ relationships with the world. Shevtsov’s use of speciesism parallels racism. The material and semiotic come together in the use of animal species, such as aphids and fleas, to explain how Jews function in society and in the material world. Defining the discourse of species, contemporary scholar Cary Wolfe has famously noted that such a discourse is habitually reduced to a site onto which real and determinative cultural forces are projected. This field is always manipulated in the service of “other ends.”9 Shevtsov’s Jewish women with their foreign names not only seduce Russian men, but they also specifically corrupt Soviet Russian material culture. The Jews’ degenerate Westernized tastes subvert the principles of the Socialist realist visual canon. Jewish women act in tandem with Jewish art critics and artists as part of a conspiracy to change the aesthetic tastes and ethical values of Soviet artists and the people. The theme of decadent music finds its reflection in Shevtsov’s novel and is represented by a group of crypto-Jewish composers producing “cacophonic sounds.” This theme reflects the ideological purging that took place in the Soviet art scene before and after the Thaw. In terms of continuities in culture, it echoes Andrei Bely’s attack on Jewish tastes in music. Bely embraced Wagner’s racist notion of the inadequacies of so-called Semitic music. In Petersburg, Bely linked this with the Jew’s body. In his descriptions of Jewish and crypto-Jewish characters engaging in song and music-making, both the sounds of the music and that of the human voice became corporeal markers of “race.” Like Bely, Shevtsov is bothered by the ability of Jews to change their appearance in what is portrayed as acts of deceit. While religious writers such as Solovyov and Dostoevsky regarded the Jew’s body as permanent, Bely and Shevtsov framed it within a capacity for change, so making it more dangerous for non-Jews. 9

Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003).

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Post-Soviet postmodernist literary collages and palimpsests of Prokhanov’s fiction create a phantasmagoria of borrowings from previous epochs and ideological formations, crossing different spaces and cultures to align Jack the Ripper and the vampiric “phallic Jewish women” such as Judith and Salome with noted contemporary historical personages. This writing recycles the most stable antisemitic formations, including the blood libel, and employs the notions of atavism and rudimentary drives to characterize non-normative relations between the Jewish subject and other materialities. When Russian Jewish writers deinscribe differences, they enter into complex interrelations with cultural discourses and popular formations. Their writing is often reactive, displaying subjective and heterogenous responses. The writers who reflect on their Jewishness in their texts thematize the body and Jewish spaces from their personal, phenomenologically experienced interaction with the physical world. While Jewish writers are often gripped by the atmosphere of native spaces via effect of smell, touch, or power radiated by objects, they are capable of coming out of these temporary embodied attunements.10 This is contrary to the atmospheres given to Jewish spaces in the works of Chekhov, Bely, and Shevtsov where the non-Jewish visitors fall permanently under the effects of these spaces. Jewish writers might rewrite the stereotypes, so challenging the project of constructing differences of the Other, but they also demonstrate the power of introjection of the construct of the Jew’s body and spaces. It is noteworthy that Osip Mandelshtam does not hesitate to use the notion of “Aryan homes” to define phenomenologically Jewish places as spaces of difference. As a historical formation, his use of “Aryan” predates the Holocaust and is fundamentally different from the depictions of the Jew’s body by postmodernist writer Aleksandr Goldshtein in his work written in Israel. Goldshtein’s quest for the reevaluation and celebration of Jewish corporeality and material culture must be viewed in the context of recent academic theorizing of the body, which he embraces in his provocative essays positioned to reassert ethnicity in all its manifest sensory performativity. Hence his provocative notion of “proud smells” of religious Jews and Arabs in Israel. Mandelshtam’s Jewish material objects in the Jewish (non “Aryan”) home have multi-sensorial dimensions; the space is filled with smells coming from the 10 The atmosphere as ambient space is distinct from our corporeal attunement to it. Current thinking on the atmosphere suggests that humans are capable of resisting atmospheres. Writing about politics of affect, Brian Massumi notes that affect cannot be fixed; it has dynamic openness. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

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kitchen as well as from “things and clothes.”11 His image of old books in their leather covers becomes the seat of material and semiotic continuity in culture, individualized and personalized by the participants of this culture. Touched by many hands and passed from one generation to the other, the books become material objects infused with human residue. In her examination of the sensory aspects of book collections, Victoria Mills observes that “nostalgia provoked by book-love . . . is productive and paradoxically forward-looking, reaching out to the hands that will touch books in the future, to future sympathies and tendencies.”12 This nostalgia is both corporeal and cultural and is situated within the articulation of the body and history. The 2019 exhibition of old books from Mandelshtam’s personal collection held in the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow was named after his essay “The Bookcase”—“Longing for the World Culture: A Poet’s Bookcase.”13 While the books had been lovingly preserved by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, they also linked the body and the senses of touch and olfaction with multiple histories, from his grandfather’s generation to those personalities of various ethnocultural backgrounds who saved the books through the difficult times of the Soviet era. In contrast to the appreciation of the material-semiotic value of books, Marina Paley’s description of her great-grandmother’s bookcase with its old Hebrew prayer books presents little value for the writer. The books are old and worn by human touch, but it is the relational dynamic which makes them different from the old books in Mandelshtam’s father’s bookcase or Babel’s grandfather’s volumes of the Talmud in the basement apartment. While Babel and Mandelshtam value the books’ content and material aura, the young Paley tears the books apart. A selfproclaimed product of Soviet atheist education, Paley in her school years treats the family prayer books as religious trash which needs to be destroyed. Ludmila Ulitskaya disembodies Jewish religious objects, such as the old leather phylacteries and explores somatophobic gendered subjectivities in relation to smells of things belonging to older family members. Margarita Khemlin’s fiction, on the other hand, and her performative engagements with the audiences in which she uses old items from her brown suitcase celebrate the olfactory and tactile interaction with the world of things. This helps her 11 Mandel′shtam, Shum vremeni, 150. 12 Victoria Mills, “Books in my Hands,” in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012), 137. 13 “Toska po mirovoi kul′ture. Knizhnyi shkaf poeta,” http://www.museum.ru/N71494, accessed February 12, 2019.

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readers to conceptualize the value of intergenerational knowledge, much of which is acquired tacitly. The Jewish protagonists in her fiction have psychologically complex relations with the objects of Jewish material culture, most of which have outlived their former owners who perished in the Holocaust. Collecting Jewish artefacts—old prayer books, books in Yiddish, mezuzahs, Sabbath candlesticks, menorahs—is a task that connects materially and spiritually with the people who used these items. These objects become not only sites of memory and the private archives of knowledge, but also what Walter Benjamin famously called a way to redeem the oppressed ancestors of past generations.14 However, collecting and interacting with these artefacts come with a price, not only because, in Soviet times, such objects were used as evidence of Zionist activities, but also because they trigger mechanisms of trauma and alienation. Babel, Mandelshtam, Goldshtein, and Lesovaya’s explorations of the sensory aspects of food and national cuisine must be seen within the context of the complex enmeshment of material culture with politics.15 The history of Ashkenazi cuisine in the Soviet Union proves that heritage food is an integral part of body politics. Interruptions in the passing on of culinary knowledge have dire consequences for cultural beliefs embedded in corporeal acts and sensations. I have claimed that cooking methods and grandmother’s stories are performative acts which bridge the Jewish woman’s corporeality within the world of Jewish folk mysticism and spirituality. The loss of embodied knowhow leads to the loss of cultural knowledge, as is evidenced by the findings of a recent ethnographic expedition in Latvia as well as by internet discussions globally, in which descendants of Jews from the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union retain their search for “grandmother’s recipes.” Such heritage foods become “edible chronotopes,”16 or sensory space-time convergences which allow imagined and real generational connectivity via the senses, sensations and embodied performances of cooking. Literary works provide examples of the specific role ascribed to food by authors who negotiate their Jewish belongings and estrangements.

14 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 260. 15 Boym writes that Mandelshtam defended domestic objects at the time of the campaign “Down with Domestic Trash.” Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 158–159. 16 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Foreword,” xi.

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I have coined the term “feeding well,” echoing Derrida’s notion of “eating well”, in order to underscore the political implications of the material-semiotic interface in this notion. “Feeding well” always implies “feeding differently” and as such is a component of biopolitics. Solzhenitsyn’s biased rendition of “feeding differently” makes the politics of this concept abundantly clear in his history of Russian-Jewish interactions, Two Hundred Years Together. Notably, the autobiographical writing of Leon Trotsky shows that food can have a divisive role—while his own objectivist stance on “feeding differently” is underpinned by a Marxist class approach, he reflects on the role of food in ethnic antagonism. Trotsky, Marina Paley, and Yuri Karabchievsky’s narratives reflect the often-envious gaze of the hostile observer upon Jewish families. Moreover, their stories about the role of food and feeding the family attest to the continuity in pre-Revolutionary and Soviet attitudes towards the particularism of Jewish families. “Feeding well” has special gender implications for both women and men. In literary texts gender issues are problematized from the perspective of male writers addressing themes related to the material wellbeing of the family. Babel and Karabchievsky explore the consequences of the traditional expectations of Jewish men to provide for the family; they show that gender roles, when lived in accordance with traditional tenets, may have a taxing effect on the Jewish men in given historical situations. These texts address profound themes related to the anthropological notion of the familial self, which includes the obligations to provide for children. These nuances help to explain the duties and priorities of Jewish men, so challenging the hostile stereotype of the materialist Jew-provider of the Soviet bytovoi antisemitizm, “the everyday antisemitism.” Knowledge of Jewish traditions and the Torah was tabooed in the Soviet Union. Erasure of such knowledge leads to the lack of ability to confront stereotypes which, in turn, leads to the internalization of hostile clichés by those who have been stereotyped. The diverging expectations of the familial self between the minority and the majority cultures expose the dynamics at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Representations and constructs of Jewish spaces are an embodied domain. This is a paradoxical space. The Jew’s body is situated on the peripheral margins, characterized by the strong dynamism between integration, rejection, and negotiation of differences. Positioned in the sphere, often imagined as biologically different, the Jew’s body semiotically is bound to historical narratives. Its imagined past exercises power by means of alleged hereditary drives while, contrarily, the loss of embodied knowledge negates the phylogenetic arguments,

Conclusion

because it shows mutability and the fluidity of affected being. Jewish writers’ reflections on change and loss of embodied practices and tacit knowledge is a powerful antidote to the dominant discourse’s re/articulation of the operational differences of Jews’ corporeality. While the current material and sensory focus in the humanities and social sciences acknowledges that the human body performs the mediating function between things and the material world, characteristic examples from Russian literature and culture show that the power of matter and things has special implications for the Jew’s body.

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Index A

Abashev, V. V., 94n10 Adams, Carol J., 26, 28, 162, 207 Sexual Politics of Meat, The, 26, 162, 207n7 Adorno, Theodor, 167-168 Affect, affective, affected, xiv,18, 33, 119, 143, 213 Politics of, 209n10 Reaction, 91, 95 Aggleton, John P., 11n26 Alldred, Pam, 163n40 Altshuler, Mordechai, 161n35 Anderson, Jeffrey, 119n9 Anderson, Olive, 40n15-16 Andreeva, Iu, 197n40 Animal Advocacy (rights), xvii, xxi, 73-91, 207-208 Blood, 74, 78, 87, 106 Hunting (hunted), 107-108, 135 Sacrifice, 33, 73-76, 78-80, 82-87 Slaughter, xvii, 21, 24, 73-76, 77-79, 81-84, 86-90, 208 An-sky, S., 7-9, 10n20, 13-14, 82n29 Antisemitism, 71, 99, 103, 156, 158, 167, 212 Apikoyres, Der (The Atheist), 16-17 Aptekman, Marina, 98n3 Apter, T. E., 109n35 Armstrong, Isobel, xviiin27 Arnold, Matthew, 44n31 Arshinov, V. N., Art, 10-11, 70, 91-97, 208 Abstract, 92-96 Degenerate, 10, 96 Soviet, 8, 91-97, 208 Ashkenazi, 176, 191, 200 Dishes (food), 155, 169, 177, 184, 191, 211 Culture (tradition), 164, 198 Secular culture, 159, 169

Assimilation (assimilated), 9, 21, 65, 114, 159160, 190, 194-195 Augustine, 4-5 Tractatus adversus Judaeos, 4 Avrutin, Eugene, xviin24, 8n18, 9n19, 34n33, 63n21 Azef, Evno, 66

B

Babel, Isaac, xx, xxii, 127-136, 139, 144-145, 147, 151-153, 158-159, 163-170, 179, 184, 201, 203-204, 206, 210-212 “Childhood. At Grandmother’s,” 151152, 170 Diary of 1920, 135 “In the Basement” (V podvale), 127-135, 139, 144-145, 152-153, 158, 165, 206 “Jewess” (Evreika), 168-169, 179 “Karl-Yankel,” 203-204 Notes on Odessa (Listki ob Odesse), 134 Red Cavalry, The, 153, 165 “Story of My Dovecote” (Istoriia moei golubiatni), 167 Baby Yar, 179 Bakhtin, M. M., xviii, 41, 194, 200 Baking, 153, 195-196, 198 Bread, challah, 196, 198n43 Matzot, 106 Bartolini, Nadia, 18n36, 19n37 Bartov, Omer, 192n26 Baskin, Marat, 193-194 Little Culinary Stories (Kulinarnye rasskaziki), 193 Beilis, Mendel, xvii, 74, 75n4, 78-79, 81 Beilis Affair, xvii, xxi, 66, 68, 73, 75n4, 78-79, 83-86, 87n51, 88, 99, 208 Belarus, Belorussia, 10, 159, 193-194 Belov, Sergei, 46n40, 49n58 Belova, Olga, 124n21

Bely, Andrei, xx-xxi, 55-56, 58, 66-71, 92, 94, 96, 110, 116, 205-206, 208-209 Petersburg, xxi, 55, 66-70, 92, 94, 206, 208 Benjamin, Walter, 167n3, 171n13, 211 Bennett, Jane, xvii, 18 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, xvii Berdiaev, Nikolai, 4-5, 40n13 Meaning of History, 4 Berger, Michele T., xixn33 Bessiere, Jacinthe, 190n22, 198-199 Bezrodnyi, Mukhail, 69n46 Binshtok, V. I., 132n9 Biopolitics, 23, 25, 147, 150, 212 Biosphere, 56, 59, 62, 122 Blake, Patricia, 135n16 Bland, Kalman, 5n11, 69n45, 172n17 Blood libel, xvii, xxi, 74, 75n4, 76, 78-79, 87-88, 99, 106-107, 110, 209 Blum, Jacub, 91n1 Blumenbach, Johann, 7 Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan, 76, 81n24 Body Immortality, resurrection, 4, 37, 104, 109 Material, physical, 48, 54, 92, 100, 115, 119-120, 178, 205 Metaphysical, ontological, 4, 39, 205 Politics, 9, 19, 21, 36, 65, 72, 78-79, 91, 93, 97, 100, 116, 211 Purity, cleaning, 3, 52, 54, 124 Racialized, 70, 120, 172, 205 Woman’s, female, 105, 107, 117, 120, 126, 140-141, 161, 163, 175 Boehm, Katharina, 6 Bogrov, Dmitry, 81 Bolshevik Revolution, 1917, xv, xvii, 4, 160, 200 Borenstein, Eliot, 99n3 Boyarin, Daniel, 5n8, 167n3 Boyarin, Jonathan, 121n14, 158, 167n3 Bremzen, Anya von, 188n15 Brent, Jonathan, 110n38 Brezhnev, L.I., 188 Britlinger, Angela, 157n27 Bronshtein, 23, see also Trotsky, Leon Brooks, Jefferey, xiiin6 Brown, Bill, xvi Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, A, xvi Brown, Clarence, 146n1 Brodsky, Joseph, xvn17, 98

Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan, 76, 81n24 Budil’nik (Alram Clock), 53, 57 Bumstehel, Isai, 49, 52

C

Calarco, Matthew, 26 Carnism, xix, 22, 25-26, 163, 207 Carolan, Michael, 185n2, 200n49 Cemetery, burial, 46-47, 108-110, 139, 143 Chaadaev, Petr, 87n55 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 66, 204n3 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 66 Chekhov, Anton, xi-xii, xx-xxi, 55-66, 71, 95, 116, 119, 122, 205-206, 209 “Mire,” xxi, 55-69, 71-72, 95, 122, 206 Uncle Vanya, xi, 63 Chekin, Leonid, 29n18 Chernenko, Miron, 17n32 Chernov, V. P., 66n.35 Christa, Boris, 63n24 Chronotope, xviii, 41, 194, 200 Edible, xivn14, xix, 184-185, 194, 200201, 211 Threshold, 41, 45 Chukovskii, Kornei, xvn17 Circumcision, 9, 15-16, 17n30, 103, 114, 203 Classen, Constance, 173n19 Clothes, clothing, xi, 6, 9, 28, 56, 63, 172, 179, 210 Jewish, 34 Ritual, burial, 143, 173 Cogman, Peter, 123n20 Conrad, Joseph, 64n26 Conspiracist, conspiracy, 66, 69-70, Notion of Jews, 79, 104, 110, 208 Novel, plot, fiction, xvii, xxi, 89, 97, 100, 103-106, 110-111 Conway, A., 166n2 Cookbooks, 200, Israeli, 191 Post-Soviet Jewish, 188-190 Soviet, 185-189 Cooking, 106, 153, 159-163 Grandmother’s, 155, 194, 201, 211 Instructions, methods of, 187-188, 190, 192, 195, 197-198, 211 Jewish, xx, 4, 21, 115, 149, 168-170, 179, 184, 187, 189, 194 Non-Jewish, 149 Of Others, xix, 170 Cosman, Teodora, 125

Costume, 63-64 Jewish male, 34, 131 Crimea, Crimean, 77, 86 Sweets, 187 Tartars, 27-28, 77 Crypto-Jews ( Jewishness), xxi, 25-26, 35, 66, 69-70, 103, 141, 206-208

Silk, 63n21 Druzhba narodov (Friendship of Nations), 156 Dundes, Alan, 74n4, 107n26 Durkheim, Emile, 37, 48-49, 205 Suicide, Le, 48 Dynner, Glenn, 33n32

D

E

Dal’, Vladimir, 92 Dictionary of the Russian Language, 92 Dalziell, Jacqueline, 87 Davidson, Carol, 105n22 DeNio Stephens, Holly, 99n5 Derrida, Jacques, 25-26, 33-34, 147, 207, 212 Eating Well, 25, 33, 212 Descartes, René, 80 Desmond, John, 39n9 Deutsch Kornblatt, Judith, 48n51 Diemling, Maria, xviin22, 24, 76n11 Diet, dietary, 23, 149-150 Differences, xvii, 25, 33 Laws, 4, 23, 29 Judaic laws, 24, 26, 29, 35 Jewish, 133, 147, 156, 206 Practices, preferences, xxi, 29, 76, 114, 207 Dijkstra, Bram, 68n41, 101n11 Dikhtiar, S. R., 138n24 Diner, Hasia, 185 Dhont, Kristof, 162n38 “Doctor’s Plot, The,” 110, 176n28, 179 Domino, George, 41n18 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xvi-xvii, xx-xxi, 36-54, 109-111, 185, 204-205, 208 Adolescent, The (Podrostok), 46n40 Brothers Karamazov, The, 38, 46n41, 48n51, 52 Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), xxi, 38-44, 47, 205 Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelia), 38, 46, 109 Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma), xxi, 38, 44, 49-53, 205 Douglas, Jack, 39 Social Meaning of Suicide, The, 39 Douglas, Mary, 26, 52 Leviticus As Literature, 26, 52 Dress, 34, 63, 123 Women’s, 63

Edible chronotope, see Chronotope Ehrenburg, Ilya, 96 Thaw, The, 96 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, 5 Eli, Karin, xivn10 Eliade, Mircea, 41n17, 58 Ellis, Christin, xviin23 Ellis, W. A., 70n47 El-Or, Tamar, 198n42 Elzet, Yehuda, 184, 196 Yiddishe Maykholim, 196 Engelgardt, A. N., 150n10 Epshtein, Mikhail, 99n5, 172n16 Epstein Nord, Deborah, 121n15 Eschatology (eschatological), xvii, xxi, 37-39, 41, 45-47, 51-52, 54, 103, 109 Eshevsky, Stepan V., xxi, 6-7, 204 Estraikh, Gennady, 186n10 Eternal Jew, 111, see also Wandering Jew Eternal Jew, The, 88 Ethnic, ethnicity, xxi, xvn17, 2n1, 24-25, 28, 30, 36, 43-44, 59, 66, 75, 89, 99-100, 107108, 117-121, 123-125, 128, 131, 136n20, 157n26, 207, 209 and gender, 24, 30, 32-33, 34, 98, 115116, 159-160, 207, 212 Cuisine, food, xix, 149, 163, 186, 193n30 Differences, xxi, 27, 29, 32, 35, 74, 78, 95, 107, 124, 142, 148, 207 Hatred, 71, 212 Markers, see Markers ethnic “Other,” 124, 149, 165 Stereotypes, 120, 147, 165 Ethnography (ethnographic), 6, 27, 73-74, 82-87, 121, 124 140, 208 Collections, 10-11 Exhibitions, xvi, 6n15, 15 Expeditions, xx, 7-8, 13, 204, 211 Photography, 7-8 Study, 196-197 Etkind, Aleksandr, 99n3, 104n19, 180n35

Exotic, xxi-xxii, 8, 59, 116-117, 102, 120-126, 192 Femme fatal, women, 2, 116, 119, 122

F

“Familial self,” 159, 165, 212 Family, 52, 114-115, 117, 125, 128, 132, 137, 139, 148-151, 155, 159 Converts, 81, 174 Genealogy, 115, 120-121, 126, 145, 174 Jewish, 23, 130, 136, 146, 152, 157, 159160, 165, 174, 180, 186, 195, 206, 212 Providing for, xxii, 133-134, 146-147, 157, 165, 212 Relics, memorabilia, xxii, 115, 124-125, 142, 210 Romances, 120-121, 123, 128-130, 143145 Farquhar, Judith, xix, 165n43 Fedorov, Nikolai, 48n50, 108 Feeding, nurture, xx, xxii, 62, 115, 160, 163, 165 Children, 146, 151, 153, 162 Family, 146-154, 157-161, 163-165, 212 “Others,” 153-154, 212 “Feeding well”, 151, 158-159, 165, 212 Fellini, Federico, 119 Nights of Cabiria, 119 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 5, 204n3 Essence of Christianity, The, 5 Filmer, Kath, 109n36 Fine, Robert, 99 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 159n30 Foetor Judaicus (smell of a Jew), 67-68, 141 Fomin, Sergei, 89n62 Food, xv, xviii-xix, xxii, 21-36, 80, 105, 114115, 146-149, 152-158, 161-163, 165, 190-191, 201, 207, 211 Heritage, xxii, 155, 184-186, 191-192, 198-199, 211-212 Jewish, 168, 186, 191-192, 196 Attitude to, 5, 27, 147, 152, 154, 158 Politics of, 23, 29, 76n11, 191, 200 Preparation, 6, 161-162 Foodways, xx, 25, 33, 184, 191, 200 Foucault, Michel, xin2, xvi Fox, Nick, 163n40 Frank, Joseph, 43, 44n31 Freidin, Gregory, 169 Freud, Sigmund, 31n23, 43n26, 103, 121, 123, 128-130, 144, 180-181

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 31n23, 128, 130n5 “Family Romances,” 121, 128-129 Frugg, Semen, 58n8

G

Gabriel, John, 100n8 Garlic, 60, 169, 179 Garrington, Abbie, 18n33, 69n43 Gates, Barbara, 40n15 Gefilte fish, 151, 155, 167-170, 177 Geist, Edward, 187n13 Geller, Jay, xiiin7, 60n15, 67-68, 92n7, 103n17, 167n3, 181n37, Gender, gendered, xix, 27n12, 30, 32, 34, 36, 60-62, 71, 91, 98, 107, 110, 114-116, 123, 126, 136n20, 157, 163, 201, 207, 210, 212 and sexuality, 61-62, 64, 71, 94, 99, 161162, 175 Differences, 25-27, 32 Role(s), 147, 158-163, 165, 212 Genis, Aleksandr, 186n6 Gennep, Arnold von, 47n45 Gerasi, Robert, 82 Gershenson, Olga, 11n24, 12n29, 200n51, 201n51 Gillerman, Sharon, xivn13, xxn35 Gilman, Sander L., xiiin7, 55n1, 70n49, 107, 141 Girshovich, M., 189n19 120 bliud evreiskoi kukhni, 189 Gitelman, Zvi, 116n2, 192n27 Glaser, Amelia, 27n14 Glasnost, xx, 116, 126, 136, 142, 144, 168 Glatzer Rozenthal, Bernice, 99n5 Glushchenko, Irina, 157n27 Gobineau, Arthur de, 7 Gogol, Nikolai, xvi, xx-xxi, 24-36, 38, 50, 54, 110, 201, 204, 206-207 Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi), 31, 35n37 “Taras Bulba,” 27, 32, 50, 201, 204 “Terrible Vengeance, The” (Strashnaia mest’), 27-31, 33, 207 “Viy,” 27, 33 Goldshtein, Aleksandr, xx, xxii, 163-164, 166, 176-178, 184, 191, 209, 211 Aspects of Spiritual Matrimony, 164 Goldstein, Darra, 26n10, 201 Goldstein, David, 38n6, 43n24-25, 46, 49n56 Goodman, Daniel, 52 Gordon, Aleksandr, 182 Gorelik, Leonid, 186n7

Gowing, Laura, 107, 108n29 Griffiths, Edmund, 98n3 Grossman, Leonid, 40n14, 45n38 Gutchina, A. B., 187n12 50 Dishes of Jewish Cooking (50 bliud evreiskoi kukhni), 187 Guidroz, Kathleen, xixn33 Gypsy, 116-117 Ancestry, 120-125

H

Haraway, Donna, xviin25 Harvey Cohen, Gertrude, 189n17 Hebrew(s), 142, 176 Ancient, 6 Bible, 26, 38, 52, 77, 79, 81, 86, 107, 171 Language, 12, 190-191 Prayer-books, texts 144, 174, 210 Heine, Heinrich, 171 Hellebust, Rolf, 18n34 Heritage, Cultural, 9, 192-193 Food, see Food, heritage Hill, Kate, 6 Hillel, 52 Hoffman, Laurence, 99 Holocaust, 96, 162, 179, 185, 192, 197-198, 200, 209, 211 Homer, 44-45 Odyssey, 44 Horkheimer, Max, 167-168 Horowitz, Brian, 3n2 Horowitz, Elliott, 149, 184n1 Human-animal, xiii, xiiin7, 80, 89 Corporeality, 30 Figure, monster, 31 -God, 80, 87n52 Hunt, Hunting, 26, 33, 85, 99, 106-108, 206207

I

Immutability, 43, 144, 199 Jew’s body, 7, 9, 124 Religious, xiiin7 Ingold, Felix, 49n56 Intersection(s), xiii, xiiin7, xix, 5, 11, 25, 33, 74, 99, 101-102, 115-117, 161-162, 169, 183n40, 207, 212 Race, gender, religion, sexuality, xix, 30, 32, 71, 91, 116, 207, 212 Israel, 10, 185, 123-124, 163, 176-178, 184185, 190-191, 209

God of, 51 People, 3-5, 29, 86, 164, 177-178 Iudovin, Solomon, 7, 8n18 Ivanits, Linda, 40n11, 196n36 Ivanov, Aleksandr, 8n18, 10n20 Ivanov, Valentin, 22 Yellow Metal, The, 22 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 203n1 Ivanov-Sukharevsky, A., 98 Ivanova, Evgeniia, xvn17 Izvestiia, 94

J

Jack the Ripper, 100n8, 101, 105, 209 Jacobs, Adrienne K., 188n16 Jacobson, David, 193n28 Japtok, Martin, 157n26 Jerusalem, 38, 44, 47-50 Jewish, xiv, xxi, 4-5, 10, 21, 48, 95-98, 109-111, 132-133, 150-154, 181, 191-192 Body, 5, 69, 92, 141 143, 163, 167, 172, 177-178, 205 Characters in literature, 22, 24, 27, 33-36, 38, 40-41, 43, 48-51, 70, 72, 91-92, 95, 98, 106, 121, 178-179, 205-207, 211 Female, woman, xxi, 55-56, 58, 61, 63-66, 68, 71, 91, 94-95, 98, 100-103, 116-117, 119-120, 121, 124, 126, 141, 153, 159-163, 168-170, 175, 196, 198, 201, 208-209, 211 Communities, 12, 163, 48, 51-52, 88, 111, 153, 158-159, 163, 198n45, 205 Corporeality, xiiin7, xiv, 2, 5, 12, 17, 91, 167, 209, 211 Family, 23, 130, 146, 152, 157-158, 160, 165, 174, 195, 206, 212 House, home, spaces, xv, 58, 71, 136, 144, 172-173, 176-177, 180, 193, 206, 209, 212 Identity, xviii, xxii, 144, 163-165, 171 Material culture, xx, 5, 9-11, 142, 177, 184, 201, 209-2111 Origins, ancestry, xvn17, xvin17, 4, 100, 118, 128, 133, 136, 155, 167-168, 171 People, 3-4, 7, 9-10, 38, 138, 146-147, 154-156, 167, 201, 204-205 Question, 38, 46-47, 60, 109 Religious thought, beliefs, objects, practices, rituals, 3-5, 16, 48-49, 79, 83, 99, 164, 185, 196, 201, 210, 212

Smell, 169, 172-173, 176-177, 179, 182 Victimhood history, traumatic experiences, 163, 130, 178-181 Writers (Russian, Soviet), xii, xv-xvi, xviii-xx, 17n30, 96, 114, 146, 163, 166, 171, 178, 182, 201, 209, 212 Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance, 11-12, 181, 210 Jewish Museum in London, 12 Jewish Museum in St. Petersburg, 9-10, 204 Jochanowitz, Eve, 184n1 Jones, Malcolm, 43n26, 54n66 Joy, Melanie, 24 Judaism, 3n2, 4-5, 9, 37-39, 48-49, 61, 80, 84, 142, 151, 170-174, 178, 204-205, 207 and Christianity, 4, 24, 174 In music, 69-70

K

Kaminsky, Marc, 146, 147n3, 158-159 Kant, Emmanuel, 66n34, 88 Karabchievsky, Yuri, xx, xxii, 156, 165, 212, Life of Alexander Zilber, The (Zhizn’ Aleksandra Zil’bera), 156-157 Karlinsky, Simon, 27n10, 31n24 Kasatkina, Tatyana, 44, 45n36 Kataev, Valentin, 18-20 Time, Forward! (Vremia Vpered!), 18-20 Katsis, L., 75n4, 171n14, 182n38 Katz, Elena, 27n13, 33n30, 38n6, 40n11, 41, 49n56 Katz, N F., 49n58 Kete, Kathleen, 73n1, 88 Khapaeva, Dina, 111n39 Khazan, Vladimir, 203n1 Khemlin, Margarita, xx, xxii, 166, 178-182, 210 Klotsvog, 179-180 Khesed, Lidiia, 178n32 Khrushchev, Nikita, 11, 92-94, 96 Khudiakov, E. L., 187n14 Book on Tasty and Healthy Food, The (Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche), 187-188 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, xiv-xv, xixn31, 6n15, 9, 11n25, 185, 211n16 Klioutchkine, Konstantine, 123n19 Kogan-Yasny (Iasnyi), V. M., 127, 133n11, 147 Konstantinov, Viacheslav, 156n24 Kornetchuk, Elena, 93n8 Korolenko, V. G., 83n35

Kosakowska, Elizabeth, 68n40 Kosher (kashruth), 17, 21, 29, 66, 79, 105, 155 Animal slaughter, xvii, 21, 73, 79, 82, 84, 88 Laws, 81, 114, 155 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 59-60, 204n3 Psychopatia Sexualis, 59 Kristeva, Julia, 167n3, 175 Krutikov, Mikhail, 116n2, 164n42 Kychko, Trofim, 90 Judaism without Embellishment, 90

L

Lakhtikova, Anastasiia, 157n27 Latour, Bruno, xiv Latgale, 197 Latvia, Latvian, 189n17, 190, 197-198, 200, 211 Lavis, Anna, xivn10 Lebina, Nataliia, 22n43 LeBlanc, Ronald, 27n11 Leont’ev, K. N., 47n47 Lesovaya, Inna, xx, xxii, 116, 159-163, 184, 211 Bessarabskii romans, 160n33 “I love everybody, of course” (Ia liubliu, konechno, vsekh), 160 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46n41 Levine, Ann-Jill, 101n12, 117 Leviticus Rabbah, 2, 52 Lewis, Reina, 123, 126 Gendered Orientalism, 123, 126 Lilly, Ian, 39n8 Linzer, Dov, 88n59 Lithuania, Lithuanian(s), 47, 189n17, 190, 192, 200 Livak, Leonid, xiiin7, 30n20, 56n4, 60, 65n30, 136n16, 169n10 Livers, Keith, 99n3 Ljunggren, Magnus, 69n46 Locher, Julie, 185n2 Loenngren, Anne-Sofie, 30n22 Lopez-Pelaez, Jesus, 56n5 Lotman, Yuri, xviii, 56, 58, 67, 72

M

Maghribic, Maghribian Dishes, 177, 191 Jewish culture, 176 Maimonides, Moses, xi, 172 Guide for the Perplexed, The, 172 Mal’chukova, T., 45n33

Malysheva, Svetlana, 64n27 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, 182, 210 Mandelshtam, Osip, xx, xii, 146, 154, 166, 171-173, 176, 181-182, 201, 209-211 “Judaic Chaos” (Khaos iudeiskii), 146 Noise of Time, The (Shum vremeni), 154, 171, 173, 182 “Bookcase, The,” 171, 182 Manezh art exhibition, 93, 96 Marker(s), xxi, 5, 22, 28-30, 55-56, 59-62, 64, 66, 68, 84, 107, 124, 141, 144, 147, 153, 173, 193, 207-208 Antisemitic, 157n25 Ethnic (of ethnicity), 25, 27, 34, 95, 124, 125, 151, 161 Jew, of Jewishness, 18, 124, 141, 153, 157, 166 Material, 28, 66, 139, 207 Racial, of racialization, 55-56, 60-61, 69-70, 144, 208 Sensory, xxi, 58 Markussen, Randi, xviii Marsh, Rosalind, 98n3 Marx, Karl, xviiin27, 4-5, 133-134, 150, 203204, 212 Masculinity, 18-19, 24, 27-28, 31, 35, 162, 165, 206-207 Ethnicity and, 32-33 Cossaks’, 31, 35 Massumi, Brian, 209n10 Masterovoy, Anton, 22n40, 187n11 Material culture, xiv-xv, xx-xxii, 6-7, 11, 21, 178, 211 Jewish, see Jewish material culture Russian, xxi, 96-97, 208 Soviet, 95, 208 Material-semiotic, xvii-xviii, 18-19, 54-56, 64, 66-67, 69, 92, 109, 114, 147, 161, 165, 169, 179, 183n40, 203-204, 206, 208, 210, 212 Materiality, xiii-xiv, xvi, xxii, 3-4, 17, 19, 34, 39, 71, 87, 103, 154-155 166, 170, 182, 205, 207 Body and, xii, xix-xx, 7, 60, 143 Jewish, Jew’s, 4-5, 66, 94, 117, 143, 184 of blood, 80-81 of place, 61, 173 of smell, xxii, 60, 64-65, 166 Shared, xiii-xiv Matich, Olga, 55n2, 100 McCauley, Robert N., 99n4 McReynolds, Susan, 49n57

Meat, 22-27, 29-35, 73, 79, 87, 150-151, 155, 162-163, 177 Culture, 163 Eating, xxi, 25-26, 29, 32-34, 81, 207 Kosher (non), 17, 66, 79 Pork, 25-26, 28-29, 33-35, 149 Memory, 11, 103, 125, 163, 166-184, 178, 180 185, 192-193, 198, 211 Autobiographical, 125, 166 Cultural, xviii, 176, 199 Proustian, xxii, 167, 171, 178, 180-181 Sensory aspects of, 171, 178 Smell (olfaction), xxii, 12, 166-183 Men, 68, 103, 114, 116 Jewish, xxi, 35, 69, 91n2, 92, 98, 100, 103, 158-160, 206, 212 Provider, 158, 165, 212 Russian, 35, 60, 64, 69, 92, 94, 100, 106, 119, 203n1, 208 Mendelssohn, Moses, 171 Menzel, Birgit, 99n5 Merezhkovsky, Dmitrii, 30 Mérimée, Prosper, 116, 120-124 “Carmen,” 116, 120-124 Mikoian, Anastas, 187 Mills, Victoria, 210 Minsk, 46-47, 109, 133 Mitrokhin, Nikolai, 22n41 Mochul’skii, Konstantin, 47n47 Mogilner, Marina, 2n1, 21, 74n2, 84n38, 87n51 Molotch Harvey, 180 Mondry, Henrietta, xiiin5, 17n32, 22n41, 35n38, 44n30, 56n3, 60n16, 65n32, 66n33, 69n44, 80n21, 83n36, 87n52, 88n56, 100n10, 166n2 Monteiro, Christopher, 26n8, 207n8 Morrissey, Susan, 40n10 Moscow, 11-12, 93, 95, 110, 157, 168, 170, 179, 181-182, 210 Moscow University, 56 Moscow Yiddish Theater, 160 Multan Case, xxi, 73-74, 82-83, 85-86, 208 Murav, Harriet, xiin4, xv, 17n30, 47n44, 74n3, 87n51, 135n16, 157n25, 160, 186n9 Music, xxi, 56, 64, 69, 96-97, 172, 192, 208 Aryan, 69 Cacophonic, 93-94, 96, 208 Jewish, 69-70, 96, 208 Semitic, 69, 96, 208

N

Nabokov, Vladimir, 36, 54n67

Nadler, Allan, 196n38 Nakhimovsky, Alice, 32, 135n16, 155, 185n3, 186, 189-190 Naumov, Vladimir, 110n38 Nationalism, 10, 35, 188, 207 Nayar, Pramod, 30n19 Nazi Animal protection laws, 89 Germany, 10, 88 Occupation, 193 on degenerate Jewish art, music 96 Nelson, Amy, 76n9, 82n27 Nera, Kenzo, 110n37 New Testament, 4, 38, 52, 174n22 Nicholas II, 8-9 Nirenberg, David, 45n32 Nordau, Max, 132 Novoe Vremia (New Times), 75-76, 77n13, 87

O

Objects, xviii, 18, 62, 134-135, 142, 179, 182 and body, xiv-xv, xviii, 204 Cultural, ritual, 6, 9, 11, 173, 204, 206, 209-211 Ephemeral, 199 Material, xi, xiii, xv-xvi, 62, 71, 115, 128, 141-142, 204, 209-210 Power of, 18, 180, 209 in literature, xiin4, 206 October Revolution (Bolshevik, Russian), xv, xvii, 4, 10, 13, 108n30, 114, 147, 160, 200 Odessa, 127-129, 133-135, 150, 170, 203 Oklot, Michal, 27n10 Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), 38, 40, 45, 52, 84, 103, 174n22, 176 Olesen, Finn, xviii Olfaction, olfactory, xix, xxi-xxii, 7, 12, 60, 67-69, 98, 106-107, 115, 122, 155, 166169, 171-173, 175-177, 179-180, 206, 210 Oriental(ism), 26, 28-29, 31, 35, 64, 67, 117, 121, 123, 126, 193 “Other(s), The,” xii, xvi, xix, xxii, 4, 7, 25-26, 27n12, 29, 33, 58, 87, 93-94, 99, 105, 107, 109, 117, 121, 124, 126, 142, 144-145, 151, 162-163, 168, 179, 201, 204, 207209 Oushakine, Serguei, xiin4

P

Pale of Settlement ( Jewish Pale), 8, 10, 18, 27, 35, 43, 56, 58, 65, 72, 80, 114, 124, 127,

132-133, 135-139, 146-148, 151, 159160, 168-170, 190, 194, 196, 198-199, 204 Paley (Palei), Marina, xx-xxii, 116-123, 126128, 136-145, 153-156, 159-160, 165, 184, 210, 212 “Cabiria from the Obvodny Canal,” 117119, 143 “Remembrance” (Pominovenie), 121, 127, 136-137, 140-142, 146, 153154 Paperno, Irina, 39, 40n16, 43n23 Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 39 Pavlov, Evgenii, 171n13 Perianova, Irina, 146n2, 201n54 Peterson, N P., 37n4, 48n50 Phylogenetic, 4, 74, 78, 84, 86, 96, 118, 125, 132n8, 133, 139, 145, 153, 204, 208, 212 Pil’shchikov, Igor’, 122n17 Pirozhkova, Antonina, 170n12 Poland, 17, 33n32, 34, 106n24, 153 Poltava, 124 Potebnia, Aleksandr, 140 Pravda, 94 Problems of the Biology and Pathology of the Jews, The (Voprosy biologii I patologii evreev), 21, 132, 138 Prokhanov, Aleksandr, xvii, xx-xxi, 98-111, 116, 207, 209 Mr. Hexogen (Gospodin Geksogen), 98, 106-107 Cruise Liner “Joseph Brodsky” (Teplokhod “Iosif Brodskii”), 98, 100-104, 107-108 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 110 Proust, Marcel, 166-167, 171, see also Memory, Proustian Remembrance of Things Past, 166

R

Race, racial, xvi, xix, 2n1, 4, 6-7, 21, 59-60, 66, 69-71, 87, 91, 99, 103n17, 123, 126, 141, 175, 204, 208 Contamination, 55 Differences, xvi, 56, 65, 69, 71, 144 Sciences, theories, 7, 56, 206 Stereotypes, marker, prejudice, 9, 30, 61, 71, 100n8, 151, 204 Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, 31n24 Rank, Otto, 99n7, 105n23 Raviv, Yael, 191

Falafel Nation: Cuisine and Making of National Identity in Israel, 191 Renshaw, Daniel, 67 Recipes, 188-190, 192-193, 195, 198-201 Grandmother’s, 195, 211 Jewish, xxii, 149, 184n1, 185 Of teiglach, 189n17, 192-193, 195, 199200 Rich, Vera, 91n1 Riedel, Friedland, 64n28 Riga, 154, 171, 182, 195, 201 Rite(s), 78, 98, 106 Animal-eating, 106 Divination, 100 Of passage, 47, 59 Orgiastic, 88 Ritual murder, xvii, xxi, 72-90, 104, 106n24, 208 Roden, Claudia, 190-192 Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to Vilna to the Present Day, The, 191-192 Rosenshield, Gary, 27n12, 36n40, 38n7, 48n51 Rosh Hashanah, 186 Rossman, Vadim, 107n27 Rothstein, Halina, 196n34 Rothstein, Robert, 196n34 Rotov, K., 15 Rovenskaia, Tat’iana, 136n20 Rozanov, Vasily, xvii, xx-xxi, 7, 31, 35n38, 68, 73-84, 86-91, 100n9, 167n5, 171, 207 Apocalypse of Our Time, 88 “Judaism,” 80, 167n5 “Lermontov’s “Demon” and his Ancient Relatives,” 80 Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of the Jews to Blood, The, 7, 73, 84, 89-90, 171 “On Compassion to Animals,” 75, 76n10 “On Mercy to Animals,” 75-76, 77n14 “Towards the End of Ritual Slaughter of Cattle,” 73, 79, 81-82, 87, 89 Rubenstein, Joshua, 96n12 Rubina, Dina, xx-xxi, 116-117, 120, 123-126 “Gypsy Woman, The” (Tsyganka), 120, 123-126 Rublin, Dominic, 37n3 Russia, Post-Soviet, xx, 185 Pre-Revolutionary, 11, 21, 66-67, 71, 84 Soviet (USSR), xx, 10, 21, 119, 192, 207208 Tsarist, 10, 23, 123

Russian Culture, xii-xiii, xv, xvii, xxi, 32, 96-97, 163 Empire, xvii, xxi, 6, 29, 34, 55-56, 58, 63, 72, 74, 81-82, 84, 124, 114, 192, 199-200, 207, 211 Folklore, 140 Jewish Writers, authors, xv-xvi, xx, 114, 166, 178, 182, 209 Literature, xvn17, xvi, 24-36, 39, 48-58, 66, 69, 100, 109, 122, 213 Orthodox Church, Christians, faith, 23, 27, 29-30, 34, 40, 47, 62, 81-83, 109, 174n22 Revolution, see October Revolution Thinkers, philosophers, 2-4, 6n16, 37-48, 75n4, 171 Ryvkina, Rozalina, xvin17

S

Sacrifice, 81, 84-85, 88 Animal, 33, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84-87 Human, xxi, 73-74, 78-79, 82-83, 85-86 Ritual, 83, 86 Safran, Gabriella, 62, 82n29 Said, Edward, 31 Sax, Boria, 89n60 Scarry, Elaine, 120 Schainker, Ellie, 49n56, 167n5 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 193 Tastes of Paradise, 193 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 197 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 67-68 World as the Will and Representation, 67-68 Schyff, Gerhard von der, 88n59 Second World War, 10, 139, 156, 158, 160, 162, 200 Seekers of Happiness, 17, 19, 114 Semiosphere, xviii, 56, 58-59, 61, 64-67, 71-72 Senderovich, Savely, 61 Sensuality, 5, 59, 63, 69, 205-206 Serbskii, Vladimir, 85n45 Sexism, 162 Sexuality, xix, 36, 59, 61, 64, 69n43, 71, 99, 116, 119, 122, 128, 181n37, 206 Shafranskaia, Ella, 125n25 Shestov, Lev, 45n34 Shevtsov, Ivan, xxi, 91-97, 116, 119, 208-209 Aphid (Tlia), xxi, 89, 91-92, 94-96, 208 Shklovsky, Viktor, xiin4, 40n11 Shneer, David, 200n51, 201n51

Shneidman, N. N., 40n12, 43n28 Shrayer, Maxim, xvn17, 38n5, 48n51, 174n21 Shteinberg, Aaron, 43, 47, 49n55 Shternshis, Anna, 17n32, 21, 186n9 Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 21, 186n9 Shveitser, Mikhail, 20 Sicher, Efraim, 55n2, 65n31, 128n2, 135n16, 153n16 Sikorsky, Ivan, 85 Singer, Peter, 92n6 Skomp, Elizabet, 175n25 Slezkine, Yuri, 136n20, 159n30, 160 Smell(s), xix, xxi-xxii, 7, 11-12, 56, 58-62, 64-65, 67-68, 106, 115, 122, 139-141, 166-182, 205, 209-210 Smell-memory, xxii, 12, 167-168, 170-172, 178, 180-181 Smirnov, Ivan, 83-85 Votiaks, The, 83 Smith, Alison, 29n17, 82n30, 201n55 Smith, Jonathan, 85-86 Smith, Mark, 63 Sensing the Past, 63 Social, xiv, xx, 9, 21, 55, 94-98, 105, 138-139, 145-149, 165, 180-181, 207 Changes, transformations, 9, 18, 160 Dominance, standing, 26, 63, 130, 147, 207 Issues, problems, reality, 21, 39, 84, 135, 139, 149, 180 Mobility, ladder, 56, 65n32, 94, 116, 156, 160 Relationship, structure, classes, xiv, 72, 98, 105, 145, 147-149, 152, 181, 207 Socialism, socialist society, 4, 17, 19, 22, 91, 138 Socialist, Realism, art, 93, 95-96, 208 Solovyov, Vladimir, xvi-xvii, xxi, 2-6, 37, 48-49, 51, 111, 185, 201, 204-205, 208 “Jewishness and the Christian Question” (Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros), 3 Solzhenitsyn, A. I., xvn17, 22-23, 150, 212 Two hundred Years Together (Dvesti let vmeste), 22, 150, 212 South Africa, 189n17, 192, 200 Soviet Union, xx, 10, 21, 89, 93-94, 96n12, 119, 126, 138, 142, 157-158, 159n30, 161n35, 184n1, 187-188, 190-192, 199200, 207, 211-212, see also Russia Soviet

Space(s), xviii, xxi, 35, 38, 41-47, 55-62, 65-72, 115, 137, 167, 173, 182, 209 Jewish, 71, 173, 177, 206, 209, 212 Liminal, boundary, 41, 46-47, 58, 67, 71-72 Racialized, 58-59, 61, 66-70 Time, xviii, 41, 54, 123, 135, 185, 193194, 201, 211 Spivak, Monika, 69n46 Spyer, Patricia, xviiin29 Stalin, Iosif, 10n21, 22, 92, 96, 104, 110, 176n28, 188 Starks, Tricia, xiin4, 122 Steinberg, Mark, 135n16 Stolypin, Petr, 81, 84 Suicide, xxi, 37-43, 45, 48, 77, 205 Sutcliffe, Benjamin, 175n25 Sutton, David, 200n50 Svetlikova, Ilona, 66n34

T

Tactility, tactile, xxi, 7, 18, 56, 63-64, 68-69, 98, 100, 102, 106-107, 122, 170-171, 178180, 206, 210 Senses, xix, 64, 69, 100, 169, 179 Tager, A. S., 79n19 Tal, Mikhail, 164 Talmud, Talmudic, 25, 32-34, 36, 81, 129, 144, 171, 206, 210 Tanny, Jarrod, 135n14 Tartars, 27-28, 35 Taste(s), Art, aesthetic, 11, 22, 63, 70, 92, 95-97, 115, 135-136, 191, 208 Food, palate, xi, xix, 5, 12, 22, 28, 62, 115, 164, 166, 168-170, 172, 179, 182183, 186, 191, 193, 201, 205, 207 Teiglach, 183-201 Tempest, Snejana, 196n35 Tereshchenko, T. N., 34n35 Teter, Magda, 106n24 Thaw, 96 Third Reich, 88 Tolstaya, Tatyana, 100 Tolstoy, Helen, 62 Tolstoy, Leo, 100n9 Tol’ts, Vladimir, 93n9 Tolz, Vera, 6n16 Torvinen, Juha, 64n28 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 141n30 Transformation, discourse of, 2, 15-18, 52, 67, 114-115, 135, 203-204

Trotsky, Leon, xx, xxii, 23 103-104, 108, 148151, 165, 212, see also Bronshtein My Life, xxii, 23, 148-151 Tseichenshtein, Semen, 167n5 Tulving, Endel, 125n24 Turkey, 86 Turks, Turkish, 27-29, 31, 35, 78, 187 Tylor, E. B., 85n43, 204n3

U

Ukraine, 10, 27-28, 33, 35, 106n24, 123, 149, 159-160, 178, 189, 192 Ulitskaya, Ludmila, xx, 166, 173-176, 210 “March 1953,” 173-176 United States, 6n15, 10, 104, 184n1, 185, 186n6, 190, 194-195 Uralsky, Mark, 65n.32 Utkin, Iosif, 13-15 Tale of the Red-Headed Motele, 13-15

V

Vail’, Petr, 186n6 Vaiskopf, M., 35n37, 55n2 Van Baak, Joost, 68n42, 71 Van den Berghe, Pierre, 193n30 Vernadsky, Vladimir I., 56n7 Vernon, John, 48n49 Viatchina, N., 197n40 Vinokur, Val, 46n41 Voice, xxi, 64, 45, 69-70, 208 Music and, xxi, 56, 64, 69-70, 208 Volkova, Svetlana, 89n62 Voronskii, Aleksandr, 134n13 Votiaks, 29, 74, 82-85

W

Wadiwel, Dinesh, 87 Wagner, Richard, 5, 69-70, 96, 204n3, 208 “Judaism in Music,” 69-70 Wandering Jew, 43, 110-111, 205, see also Eternal Jew Waskett, Louise, 11n26 Weinberg, Robert, xviin24, 75n4, 84n37, 85n45 Wheaton, Barbara, 199, 200n47 Widdis, Emma, xiin4, 17, 108n30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxn34 Wolfe, Cary, xiiin9, 208 Women, 21, 114-117, 119-120, 125, 153, 160162 Dangerous, seductive, 55, 110, 119, 122, 208

Jewish, xxi, 56, 58, 63n21, 92, 94-95, 98, 100-101, 103, 116-117, 120-121, 153, 159-161, 170, 198, 208 Phallic, 101, 110, 209 Writers, xx-xxi, 116-123, 126, 159, 201

Y

Yalen, Deborah, 10-11, 12n28, 159, 160n31 “Yellow Peril,” 66-67, 71 Yiddish, xv, 43, 124, 192, 211 Accent, 41, 54, 157 Writers, 10, 58n8, 186n9 Yoshiko Reed, Annette, 84

Z

Zavtra (Tomorrow), 108n31 Zaitsev, Slava, 103 Zipperstein, Steven, 198n45 Zubrzycki, Genevieve, xivn10 Zvedeniuk, Michelle, 43n26