Each of the three novels discussed in this chapter are transgressive in one way or another. Altaras’s titos brille, then, emphasizes reconciliation with the non-Jewish German majority even as it seems to suggest that the secular and avowedly liberal Judaism that it espouses is superior to both the Orthodox tradition of the survivors who refounded the community after 1945 and the “Russians” who arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union and whose Jewish commitment—and even provenance—is suspect. Most scandalous of all, Altaras’s literary alter ego seems to suggest that her Sephardic, yekke heritage embodies a greater degree of continuity with the largely assimilated, even patriotic Judaism that existed in Germany before the genocide. In Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, in contrast, it is a Soviet-born protagonist who claims to be the more authentic German Jew, once he has internalized the commemorative practices of his adopted country, and indeed expanded their scope. The transgression in this novel is Arthur’s assumption of the role—formerly reserved to the established community—of custodian of Holocaust memory. Finally, Stein’s heretically fanciful Rabbi Löw rewrites halachic principles to assert a modern Orthodox Judaism defined not by descent but by self-ascription and devotion and even suggests that this unashamedly performative Jewishness might be a more genuine expression of Jewish identity than the established community.
Transgression, in summary, is the means by which Jewish protagonists position themselves in relation to other Jews. (Their self-positioning in relation to the non-Jewish majority is generally less pointed—ironic affection in titos brille; a relatively conventional critique of German hypocrisy in Sterndeutung; and a melancholic reverence for the German and German Jewish literary tradition in Rabbi Löw.) It is through challenges to established hierarchies, religious and cultural norms, and ways of relating to the majority, therefore, that the recent pluralization of Jewish life in Germany is negotiated. On the one hand, German-born Jews of the second and third generations assert their prior “belonging” as members of the established community while also referencing Jewish traditions and geographies that had previously been marginalized and even broadening the definition of who counts as a Jew. On the other hand, newcomers from the former Soviet Union seek integration into the existing memory culture while also insisting upon the salience of their history, and especially their proximity to the Holocaust. Indeed, Holocaust memory is the focal point of this mediation of plural Jewish identities in all three novels—whether expanding its scope to include the Sephardic experience in the Balkans, or the Holocaust by bullets in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, or the flight of Soviet Jews to Central Asia, or even suggesting that faith and religious ritual and practice might be more essential than commemorating the genocide.
Transgression, of course, is also evidence of a fixation—the protagonists of titos brille, Sterndeutung, and Rabbi Löw disrupt the norms of the established community because they want to claim a role, even a leading role, within it. Self-positioning might seem parochial, then, suggesting a maneuvering for acceptance, status, or advantage in relation to a specific social and political context rather than, say, a more visionary, globally engaged enterprise to rearticulate Jewish values or what interventions Jews could or should make in issues that do not directly concern them, but which resonate with their historical experience. In Sterndeutung, Arthur shies away from engaging with the genocide in Rwanda and with the burning of asylum hostels in Solingen, as discussed above (S, 209; 124). In titos brille, when violence breaks out in the West Bank between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, Adriana’s first instinct is to worry about the security around Berlin’s Jewish institutions, including her sons’ school, and not to ponder the potential rights and wrongs of the decades-old conflict in the Middle East (tb, 209). And in Rabbi Löw, there is almost no mention of the world beyond the Jewish esotericism and German framing narrative that the text fabulates for its reader.
Chapter 2 examines three novels that focus more specifically on the tension between an inwardly-focused identity—fixated on demarcation, integration, and self-assertion—and a more worldly self-positioning that draws on the Jewish past to mobilize on behalf of others. In Mirna Funk’s Winternähe (Near winter; 2015), Kat Kaufmann’s Superposition (2015), and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther; 2014), it is argued, the centuries-old debate on Jewish particularism versus Jewish universalism is rehearsed once again. In each novel, there is ambivalence about whether solidarity with others comes at the cost of Jewish specificity, especially when this specificity has only just been recovered, by the Soviet-born leads of Superposition and Vielleicht Esther, or is at risk of being relativized in current cultural and political discourses on Israel, as Funk’s Lola sees it. How much detail from family history is required to confirm Jewish identity? To what extent does the generality of the Jewish experience make it possible to connect to—and even form alliances with—others?