Queering the Jewish Family Novel: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich

In Salzmann’s Außer sich, in contrast, an expansive retelling of the lives of the protagonist’s great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents is juxtaposed with two other plot strands that, at first glance, appear to be quite unrelated to Jewish identity, Jewish memory, and Jewish solidarity. Certainly, the novel’s central concern with its protagonist Ali’s transition from woman to man, on the one hand, and, on the other, with protest and repression in Turkey challenges the reader to find connections and even coherence across the text.

Three narratives are presented in Außer sich, therefore. First, there is a relatively conventional focus on great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents in the Soviet Union and then in Germany, following the family’s migration in the early 1990s. Unlike Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther and Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, however, the novel is not concerned with integrating the Soviet Jewish experience of the Holocaust into German and German Jewish memory culture—although there are several brief mentions of the genocide—but largely with the protagonist’s reconstruction of Soviet antisemitism, persecution, and repression before, during, and after the war; belief in socialism and disillusionment; and the prejudice the family encounters in Germany, including, for example, familiar scenes of bullying at school. In this strand, which is woven through the other two narratives, Ali is frequently positioned as a listener, reshaper, and narrator of stories passed down by now deceased ancestors or solicited from living relatives. Second, there is a subtle exploration of the patriarchal structure of the family, the imposition and internalization of gender identities, and Ali’s emergence as trans, including their attempts to account to parents and grandparents for their changed voice and face. Third, Ali tells the story of their apparent transformation into Anton. This relates to Ali’s twin brother, their intense and even incestuous relationship; Anton’s flight to Istanbul and Ali’s search for him in that city; their merging into a single person; and (both) their involvement with various trans, non-conformist, and dissident characters caught up in anti-government protests centered on Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park. In 2013, this square was the focal point for environmental and political opposition to the authoritarian regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At the close of the novel, moreover, the state’s violent suppression of these protests appears to be conflated with the attempted coup of July 2016 by elements of the Turkish military.

Each of these narratives is analyzed in greater depth in what follows, including how they interconnect. In essence, the argument will be that Ali/Anton’s narration of family history creates an affective connection to what their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents endured in the Soviet Union and Germany while also creating a space for Ali/Anton’s queering of this Jewish story—a rearticulation of diasporic Jewishness beyond the nation, gender conventions, and even ethnicity. This act of listening, retelling, and redefining Jewish family history then initiates Ali/Anton’s attempts to relate their own trans story—a metaphor for a fluid permeability with others, or a boundless cosmopolitanism—and to insert it back into the “Jewish canon.” Finally, in tracing Anton’s concurrent, coinciding experience of Istanbul and the (con)fusion of the twins into a single persona, Ali hints at the limits of their efforts, through their queering of Jewish family history, to redefine solidarity with others. Notwithstanding the seeming disparateness and even disconnectedness of its three plot strands, therefore, what Außer sich actually presents is both the radically utopian potential of Jewish worldliness and the persistence of privilege that inhibits its full realization.

Chronologically, Ali’s Russian Jewish narrative starts with their great-grandfather Schura, although his story is only actually told following an account of Schura and Etinka’s daughter Emma (Ali’s grandmother) and her husband Daniil. (Daniil’s family history is also related, as will be discussed shortly.) Schura presents Ali with a ten-page folder just before his death, which motivates the composition of the family history that is dispersed throughout the novel. Ali doesn’t know why they—using the gender-neutral pronoun—began to bring together texts and images from the past or “warum ich angefangen habe, mich als mich zu denken, zu sprechen, sogar zu schreiben”1Salzmann, Außer sich, 142. Hereafter AS. (why I began to think me as me, speak, and even write), but they do know that their simultaneous emergence as family biographer and as an “I” began at the time they received this folder, or after their return from Istanbul. Schura’s “Mappe” (folder; AS, 142), “Aufzeichnungen” (records; AS, 157), or diary (AS, 181) make it possible for Ali to sketch their great-grandparents courtship at medical school in the 1930s; Schura’s service as a doctor in the war years (AS, 158); Soviet propaganda in the 1950s lionizing and possibly inventing his and Etinka’s medical accomplishments during the fight against the Nazis (AS, 145; 164–66); his dismissal in Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges (AS, 153, 156); and his stubborn faith in socialism (AS, 166). In Germany, until his death, Schura’s speech is curtailed by dementia, though this does not inhibit the clarity of his writing.

Two elements stand out as especially significant in Schura’s story. First, he wanted to be an actor, playwright, and set designer rather than a doctor but his father insisted that he forgo a place at the arts academy, although he continued to write plays during his medical training, especially when pining for Etinka (AS, 151–55). For Schura’s father, acting was a disreputable profession and even too “Jewish,” as summed up in the Yiddish “balagula,” an itinerant who travels between villages hawking his wares. (The peddler was a stereotypical Jewish profession in medieval Europe.)2See Deutsch, “Hawkers and Peddlers.” Ironically, Schura was in any case already well on his way to becoming properly Russian, or at least to playing a properly Jewish role in Russian society—his Yiddish was too rudimentary to argue with his father and so he signed up for medical school (AS, 152–53). Performance, writing, and Jewishness are associated with one another as marginal and even shameful and must be given up in favor of integration. Second, and suggesting resistance to this suppression of Jewish identity, Ali relates how Schura had managed to engage Etinka by speaking a few words of Yiddish to her, as they both checked for their names on a list of exam candidates. (Etinka came top; he was second.) Knowing that this display of ethnic and especially Jewish belonging was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, they begin their relationship in a mode of subversive excitement (AS, 148–50).

Performance—singing, acting, writing—is a key motif throughout Ali’s narration of family history. Etinka, for instance, would have liked to have been a singer, according to her daughter Emma (AS, 182). Emma is described as a “zartes Geschöpf” (delicate creature), who reads poetry, plays piano, does theater, and looks at herself for hours in the mirror (AS, 175–76), and she and her husband Daniil conduct their courtship through passionate conversations on the films of Grigory Alexandrovich Alexandrov and the poetry of Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov (AS, 184–85). (Alexandrov was a favorite of Stalin and Nekrasov was known for his empathetic depictions of Russian peasantry and political liberalism.) Similarly, Ali’s father Kostja enrolled in the Music Academy and appears to have had some talent (AS, 84). In Istanbul, Ali sings Soviet war songs with Katho, also known as Katharina and Katüscha, in the club that will be the locus of their social life (AS, 44). In an underground theater in the same city Ali also imagines encountering their lost brother Anton and, for the first time, seems to merge with him to become Ali/Anton (AS, 34–36). And, of course, Ali is also a storyteller, and—thus the novel’s literary conceit—the composer of the text itself (AS, 144).

On the one hand, performance is associated with Jewishness, invoking stereotypes of Jewish inauthenticity, “passing,” inconstancy, and the failure to integrate into respectable bourgeois society. On the other hand, as will be discussed shortly, performance also relates to the construction of gender, and to the construction of nation—and to the queering of these categories. Throughout the novel, allusions to the practice of placing singing birds into small cages, in which they are concealed by a cloth, and inviting men to pay to enjoy their melodies most immediately relates to the sexual abuse that Katho suffers at the hands of strangers (AS, 123–25; 364–65). However, the image of entrapment and exploitation also serves more generally as a metaphor for the fate of those whose performances stand out as different, even—or perhaps especially—when this difference exerts an exotic appeal for the majority.

Ali’s father Kostja, who enrolled in the Music Academy but ends up working shifts in the VW factory following the family’s migration to Germany (AS, 245), is a drunk, a wife-beater, and an all-round failure. This is a different kind of performance, therefore—a performance of angry, resentful, and vicious masculinity. On the one hand, Kostja’s violence toward his wife reenacts the violence he suffered as a child—he was abused by an uncle (AS, 69)—and even the antisemitic violence meted out to his parents in their village (AS, 66). On the other hand, Kostja’s disappointment with life and consequent aggressiveness are a result of his own shortcomings. At the time he was introduced to his future wife Valja, he was in love with a Schickse, a non-Jewish girl, but was incapable of going against the prejudices of both sets of parents (AS, 70–72). In Germany, he struggles to make a new life, is Jewish only when he discovers he can have time off from work on the Sabbath (AS, 244), and hankers for Russia but allows himself to be ripped off when he tries to sell the apartment in Moscow he has inherited (AS, 254–56). Kostja moves in with a Jewish woman, Vika, perhaps because her name reminds him of Valja, but he longs for the wife who left him and for the children he hardly sees (AS, 251–53). He remains a drunk, leaving frequent abusive messages on Ali’s answering machine (AS, 237) and turning up inebriated for divorce proceedings. In court, he doesn’t have an interpreter so Ali in effect falsifies what is being said to him in order to mitigate his rage (AS, 242–44). Later, it is suggested that Kostja killed himself and that Ali believes their transition was to blame (AS, 254). Anton confirms that their father threw himself off a balcony, which Anton believes is an embarrassing way to die (AS, 296–97).

What is striking about Ali’s recounting of Kostja’s story—part tragedy, part his own doing—is its lack of judgment, even though Ali is directly impacted. Instead of hurt or even anger, there is texture and complexity, as Ali relates Kostja’s biography of family abuse and its reenactment through the generations, antisemitic prejudice, gender roles, and migration. Ali offers a nuanced account of how social and cultural norms shape individual predilections, without excusing Kostja but also without condemning him. Notwithstanding their difficult relationship, in fact, Ali returns to Kostja time and again, adding new layers of insight and allowing him to become knowable, as a person who existed before Ali and separately from Ali and whose life story intersects with moments of world-historical significance.

The same is true for Kostja’s wife Valja, Ali’s mother. Valja’s parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space, seeking to conceal her Jewish heritage—futilely, given that her surname is Pinkenzon—and to signal her parents’ socialist convictions (AS, 58). Despite her “ordentliche sozialistische Frisur” (proper socialist hairstyle), “gerade Nase” (straight nose), and love of Tolstoy and Achmatowa (AS, 59), however, Valja cannot avoid the wrath of her heavy-drinking first husband Ivan, “ein echter russischer Mann” (a proper Russian man) and a violent antisemite (AS, 59–64). (Drinking and wife beating are not just gentile pastimes, though. Ali’s great-grandmother, Valja’s grandmother Etinka, was also abused by her husband; AS, 64.) Following her divorce, Valja is sent to Moscow to meet Kostja (AS, 65). Notwithstanding that they are cousins, they are encouraged to begin a relationship, to overcome the shame of Valja’s failed marriage and to wrestle Kostja away from the Schickse he is in love with (AS, 70–71). They sleep together, Valja falls pregnant with Ali and Anton, nearly miscarries in hospital, is beaten by her future mother-in-law, and discovers too late that Kostja too is a drinker (AS, 73–83). A short while after her arrival in Germany, Valja divorces him and secures a well-paid job as a doctor (AS, 248).

In relating Valja’s story, however, Ali complicates any simplistic notion that it can ever be possible to straightforwardly “know” other people, even within the family. Ali pictures Valja pregnant, in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and hopes to recall the sensation, from inside the womb, of the mother-to-be’s shallow breathing. “Aber das kann ich heute nicht wissen” (but I can’t know that today; AS, 86), Ali concedes, and can only conclude, in relation to this episode and others from Valja’s life: “ich kann mich an nichts festhalten, ich weiß, das wurde mir erzählt, aber anders.” (I can’t be sure of anything, I know, that was told to me, but differently; AS, 86.) Once again in a Jewish family novel, parents and children are unable to connect across their different historical experiences, and the past is a burden. Later, this distance is dramatically emphasized, as Ali seems to depict the actual conversation with Valja that underpins their understanding of the mother’s past—this is Valja’s original narration of her own life, “aber anders” (but differently). As Valja relates her childhood, unhappy marriage, and divorce, therefore, Ali appears to float in the air, as if in a dissociative state, and hovers above observing their own corporeal self and their mother in discussion (AS, 257–75). There is a gulf between them, it seems. Ali can narrate family history, or rather a version of what has been told to them, but this may not help them to move forward.

Just as Ali cannot comprehend Valja’s experience of Soviet drudgery, domestic violence, and migration, so is Valja unable to grasp Ali’s transition. Throughout the novel, Valja consistently fails, or refuses to acknowledge, Ali’s physical transformation as a result of taking testosterone—neither the child’s desire to dress as a boy and have short hair (AS, 90–91), nor the adult’s preference for men’s clothes (AS, 94–95), deepening voice (AS, 343), facial hair (AS, 261), and changes in physiognomy (AS, 90). During their conversation, however, Ali’s “I” leaves their own body, becomes external to the self—Außer sich/besides oneself—and finds some comfort in this psychological detachment (AS, 263). This is an “andere Perspektive” (another perspective) that permits a novel view of the room they are sitting in but most likely also of their different histories, their relationship, and Ali’s self-understanding (AS, 265). Ali begins to picture a different body and a different, longed-for self—that is, to become an “Er” (he). There is a great deal that still does not make sense, and Ali cannot yet imagine the self as a coherent “I,” or, in Russian, an Я (AS, 274). But there is hope in reimagining the past and the people who inhabit it differently: “Ich erdenke mir neue Personen, wie ich mir alte zusammensetze.” (I imagine new people, just like I piece together previous people; AS, 275.) And there is hope in waiting for things to be different, “Denn was ist warten sonst als eine Hoffnung.” (For what is waiting other than hope; AS, 275.)

This “andere Perspektive” is implicit throughout Ali’s narration, as they describe, deconstruct, and finally queer nation and gender. Russianness, then, is linked to normative expressions of heterosexual femininity and masculinity, for example in the Soviet films from which Valja learns how to be in love and even how to kiss (AS, 59) and in her first husband’s drinking habits: “Wenn er nicht trinkt und heult, ist er entweder eine Schwuchtel oder ein Jid.” (If he is not drinking or sobbing, he’s either a gay or a Yid; AS, 61.) Valja is pushed and pulled by Kostja’s mother, her mother-in-law, when trying on her wedding dress—her body is insufficiently appealing, it seems (AS, 75). Ali, in turn, is scolded as a “Lesbe” (lesbian) by aunts for failing to behave as a girl (AS, 36–37), and by Valja on account of her short hair (AS, 91; 116). When Ali presents their passport at the Turkish border, the official struggles to match the photo to the person standing in front of him, on account of the transformation in Ali’s physical appearance (AS, 15). Gender identity and national belonging are intimately linked—and policed. And the same is true of ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and national belonging. Ali’s paternal grandmother was taunted in her village—“Schau die Judensau, wie sie läuft, wie eine Schwuchtel” (look at the Jewish pig, how she walks, like a gay; AS, 66)—and Kostja, in Germany, hopes to show that he is properly Russian (and not a Jew) by mocking his friend Wowtschik’s “Schwuchtelmusik” (gay music; AS, 239). Toward the end of the novel, as Ali narrates as Anton, Anton returns to Russia and is beaten up by childhood friends as, once again, a “Judensau und Schwuchtel” (Jewish pig and a gay; AS, 283). As the American scholar Sander Gilman argues, in nationalist discourses being Jewish has long been associated with being sexually deviant and therefore incapable of “belonging.”3See Gilman, The Jew’s Body.

Ali’s great-grandparents’, grandparents’, and parents’ repression of their proclivity to act, sing, or write poetry—their erasure of their Jewish otherness for the sake of becoming “properly” Russian—contrasts with the exuberantly gender-bending performances that Ali encounters in Istanbul, including the Russian trans man called Katho; the half Romanian, half-Hungarian Aglaja, who dresses as a male clown; and the drag artist Verka Serduchka (the invention of comedian, actor, and singer Andriy Mykhailovych Danylko, who represented Ukraine at the 2007 Eurovision finals). At the same time, these performances also prompt Ali to imagine the queerness that once was, in their Russian Jewish family too. Ali pictures how they might stand with Katho on the banks of the Bosporus and conjure up “Vorfahren, die so waren wie sie” (ancestors who were like them):

These queer Jewish stories have been repressed. Yet traces, hints, intimations of them may persist in the accounts that Ali does receive through the generations. Kostja, for example, continues to sing despite his father’s injunction that performance is “too Jewish.” Elsewhere, there may be a suggestion of homoerotic attraction in the boxing training that Ali’s maternal grandfather Daniil undertakes with a friend at university. His boxing partner, a middleweight to his lightweight, beats him to a pulp but they continue to spar, go drinking, and confide in one another for three years: “Sie erzählten sich Dinge, die sie niemandem sonst erzählten.” (They told each other things that they told no one else; AS, 198.) More obviously, Kostja more than once ends up in an intimate drunken embrace with his best friend Wowa, including after they have been listening to the cross-dressing artist Verka Serduchka (AS, 238–39).

As so often in recent German Jewish writing, it is a third-generation narrator’s relationship with grandparents that initiates and even structures a rearticulation of identity. Indeed, for all that it innovates new themes and even ways of narrating, Salzmann’s Außer sich is still recognizably part of a canon that also includes, say, Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin and Funk’s Winternähe. It is through their extensive renarration of the childhood wartime experiences of Emma and Daniil, and of how they migrated to Germany many decades later, that Ali is able to imagine a connection across the generations, therefore, and a familial intimacy within which queerness, long repressed for the sake of “integration,” can once again be recognized, acknowledged, and even loved. (The norm-enforcing authority of parents is skipped over.) This re-queering of Jewish family history is rooted in the shared experience of trauma—albeit trauma of very different kinds—and, as we shall see, it is the basis for Ali’s solidarity with national, sexual, ethnic, and political minorities in Istanbul. As discussed below, this involves another form of queering, that is, of the narrative’s chronology.

Death is ever-present in the story that Ali narrates about her grandparents, drawing on what they tell her of their lives during and after the war. (At the start of their account of Emma and Daniil, Ali is still a “she.”) Emma—the daughter of Schura and Etinka—almost died as a newborn (AS, 162–63); her maternal grandfather was wounded after he threw himself on her to protect her from a bullet fired by invading German troops; and she nearly died during a citywide food-poisoning scandal for which Schura, a senior doctor and public health official, would have been executed if he had not already been dismissed during the anti-Jewish purge that followed Stalin’s death (AS, 170). Emma, it is suggested, was “von Anfang an dem Tod geweiht” (destined for death from the beginning; AS, 175). Of course, this predestination for death is true in a more general sense. Emma was a Jewish child, born during the German invasion and who grew up in the Soviet Union during the vicious antisemitism of the 1950s. In Daniil’s story, references to the Holocaust—and to fortuitous survival—are more explicit. An aunt, Astra, married a German in 1932 and then emigrated to Kazakhstan, bringing her parents in 1940/41. In this way, she “verhinderte das Bekannte” (prevented what is known): “Und so lebte wohl dieser Zweig der Familie glücklich fern der Schrecken der Schoah.” (And so this branch of the family probably lived happily far removed from the horrors of the Shoah; AS, 185–86.) On his mother’s side of the family, all of Daniil’s aunts and uncles—Orthodox Jews in Bucharest—made it to Palestine and were spared the war and the subsequent postwar communist dictatorship: “Alle wurden vom Krieg verschont und von der Partei. Clara nicht.” (All were spared the war and the Party, except Clara; AS, 186.) Daniil’s mother Clara, in fact, is rescued from the Germans by Communist Party colleagues sent by her husband Boris but later endures Soviet repression. Daniil too suffers discrimination at the hands of the Soviet authorities, who deny a school diploma to someone with the surname Pinkenzon and refuse to admit him to university in Lviv or Moscow (AS, 194–95). (He eventually resumes the Jewish faith that his father had abandoned for communism, and in old age he emigrates to Germany, of all places; AS, 184–85.) Finally, and making clear that the Holocaust killed Soviet Jews too, there is the story of Musja Pinkenzon, Daniil’s second cousin, who was shot by an SS officer when Jews were being assembled for deportation. Apparently—so Daniil’s father Boris claimed—the boy had played the Internationale on his violin whereupon the German emptied a magazine of ammunition into his body (AS, 194). It is likely that the heroic aspect of this account is apocryphal, of course, reflecting Boris’s own unthinking commitment to the Party.

This narration and re-narration of trauma generates empathy across the generations, it seems, rooted in a common, though very different experience of precarious existence. Indeed, the grandparent’s willingness to reach out and speak of themselves creates an opportunity and even an obligation for Ali to reveal who they are and to become knowable. Emma and Daniil have been so far ignorant of Ali’s life—“und das war meine Schuld” (and that was my fault; AS, 209)—but now things have changed:

To the extent that Ali’s queering—or re-queering—of Jewish identity comes after their return from Istanbul, it can be thought to depend on the solidarity they have experienced in the Turkish city. In this understanding of Ali’s narrative, correspondingly, the affection, mutual support, and even love Ali develops with transsexuals, ethnic minorities, and political protesters instills the confidence to be open to narrating their transition for their grandparents and to belonging to their Jewish family once again. Yet the two narratives in fact interweave throughout the novel and often even mirror each other. Indeed, it is surely just as possible that the “relational subjectivity” that Bühler-Dietrich identifies in Ali’s interactions in Istanbul—including the “ambiguous and emergent identities and belongings” (Roca Lizarazu)4See Roca Lizarazu, “‘Integration.’” See also Roca Lizarazu, “Ec-static Existences.”; the “alternative we, an alliance of outsiders” (Balling),5See Balling, “Intimate Associations.”and the “alternative ontologies beyond the binary” (Albé)6See Albé, “Becoming Queer.”—is itself preceded by the openness to the world that, Ali’s account suggests, characterized Jewishness before it was made to be “straight.” In a nutshell, Ali’s experience in Istanbul prompts them to re-queer Jewish family history, but this is only possible because traces of that queerness still remain—and these traces, it can be speculated, are what positioned Ali as able to respond to cosmopolitan encounter in the first place.

Newly arrived in Istanbul, Ali meets Katho in a club, and they strike up a conversation, connected by the Russian language, and perhaps even by nostalgia for shared cultural references and places (AS, 50). (Katho’s nickname Katüscha recalls a Soviet-era song celebrating victory in the Great Patriotic War and a multiple launch rocket system; AS, 40.) This familiarity, rooted in national belonging, is challenged, however, by the sex they have together. Initially, gender conformity is confirmed by Ali’s gaze upon Katho’s body, which is clearly marked as female. (In this moment, Katho is referred to as Katharina.) Then Katho confesses that she is not a she but rather a he (AS, 45–46). Unsure how to respond, Ali goes into the bathroom, avoiding Katho’s kiss, and tries to reflect on what this revelation means. Her skin itches—here, Ali has female pronouns—as she tries to negotiate the tension between her desire for female bodies and what Katho has revealed about his actual identity. The next day, they walk to the park and Katho tells Ali about the hormones he is taking, and how the beard he is growing will soon disqualify him from his job as a female dancer (AS, 49). Later, Ali assists Katho with injecting testosterone while listening to—and re-narrating—the story he tells about his Ukrainian childhood, his father, prostituting himself, taking part in a political protest at which Aglaja is injured (more of this character shortly), and encountering Anton (though he is not named) (AS, 125–36). Katho also appears elsewhere in the text, as Aglaja’s lover, the victim of an assault (AS, 231), and an increasing irritation to Ali as their relationship becomes ever more transactional (AS, 244–51). Ali imagines their wedding—with dead and living relatives present—and settling into bourgeois conformity (AS, 350), but this fantasy—or parody—is shattered when Katho steals Ali’s passport (AS, 261).

Notwithstanding this betrayal, Ali learns to be open to Katho’s experience. At the same time, Katho also impacts on Ali, by re-narrating Ali’s life, as it were. After Katho relates his story, he then asks about Ali’s life. Ali surmises how their great-grandparents might have met in Odessa, and then pictures Ali and Katho—in the present day—flicking through black and white photographs of this past. This is the moment when Ali first imagines a queer Russian Jewish genealogy, within this album of family photos, including uncles with shaved legs and aunts with fingerwave haircuts and black lipstick (AS, 136; already cited). Ali walks to the Bosporus, imagines Odessa across the Black Sea, thinks back to Schura’s “Mappe” (folder) and begins to re-narrate—and then queer—Russian Jewish family history (AS, 140–42). Later, Ali starts to take testosterone and to undergo their own transition.

Ali’s openness to queerness in Istanbul, queering of Russian Jewish family history, and transition, are facilitated by two further characters. The first is uncle Cemal, who is not an actual uncle but the relative of a friend from Berlin, Elyas. (There are a number of real uncles, including the uncle who sexually abuses Kostja and Valja’s uncle Mischa, whom Ali seems to have been close to; AS, 92–93. Many characters also talk about their fathers, including Cemal; AS, 22.) In this way, the novel presents—and challenges—different models of masculinity. Cemal is a lawyer who defends dissidents against the Turkish state, including one of the founding members of the militant Kurdish Workers Party, Abdullah Öcalan, and Cemal had also spent eight months in prison (AS, 20–22). From that time onwards, his mother has refused to speak to him. Her piety—including now wearing a veil—reflects the growing divide in Turkish society between Islamization and secularism (AS, 21–22). Cemal looks after Ali when they faint on arrival at the airport (AS, 17), offers comfort following Valja’s rejection (AS, 344), and supports Ali’s transition into Anton (AS, 265). These gestures of kindness toward a person who arrived as a stranger suggest a different model of family and, ultimately, solidarity, based on empathy and care for others rather than bloodlines.

The second character is Aglaja. Described as a mermaid in the dramatis personae that stands at the front of the novel, Aglaja is also an accordion-playing clown who features in both Ali’s and Anton’s narrative. She sleeps with Ali, Anton, and also with Katho, whom she helps with his transition (AS, 127). Above all, Aglaja connects the personal and the political, that is, the underground clubs that Ali frequents and the anti-regime demonstrations that are taking place across Istanbul. In an episode that is related by Ali (AS, 131–33) and then again by Ali-as-Anton, Aglaja is struck by a canister fired by security forces, containing tear gas, as they clear Taksim Gezi Park. She is injured, rescued—apparently by Anton (AS, 317–19)—and becomes the face of the resistance movement to President Erdoğan’s government (AS, 317). Born in a circus, traveling the world without a home of her own, exploited as a child, abused and then abandoned by her father, an epileptic, and a foreigner (AS, 322–30), Aglaja embodies disadvantage, marginalization, and otherness itself, as well as political mobilization in solidarity with the oppressed. Her story, in fact, echoes elements of Ali’s family narrative, including incidental details such as looking after relatives suffering from diabetes (AS, 66, 240; 326), and her quintessential displacement may even function as a cipher for Jewishness.

Thus far, the focus has been on Ali’s retelling of the lives of great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents and on the protagonist’s account of their experience of solidarity with transvestites, transexuals, and protesters in Istanbul. In essence, the argument is that Ali’s re-queering of Russian Jewish genealogies as worldly—as unbounded by arbitrary categories of nation, sexual identity, and ethnicity—is motivated by, but perhaps also predicts, the emancipatory potential identified by Bühler-Dietrich, Roca Lizarazu, Balling, Albé, and others, and that Ali’s re-narration of Jewish family history and of the start of their transition are therefore inextricably intertwined, for all that this initially appears unlikely.

The third strand of Ali’s narrative, however, generally overlooked by scholars, introduces a more dissonant tone. Indeed, the story of Ali’s brother Anton, and of how Ali becomes Anton, is a story of abuse, incest, and Ali-become-Anton’s internalization of patterns of male violence and the denigration of those perceived as less “white.” Even as Außer sich articulates a progressive vision of a re-queered Jewish worldliness, therefore, it also cautions against the presumption that long-established prejudices and assertions of relative privilege will simply fall away. As discussed below, this is an important nuance to Salzmann’s own real-life engagement as an author-activist—along with the poet and polemicist Max Czollek—in advocating for solidarity across ethnic and sexual minorities.

Anton’s story is designated as Part Two (“Zwei”) of the novel and is ostensibly narrated by Ali’s twin or by Ali-become-Anton. This narrative strand is framed at its start by Ali’s confession of a propensity to fabulate: “Ich erdenke mir neue Personen, wie ich mir alte zusammensetze” (I imagine new people, just like I piece together previous people; AS, 275, as previously cited), and at its end by a more explicit admission that there is an element of invention in Ali’s—or Ali/Anton’s—depiction of Anton’s activities after he lands in Istanbul: “so wie ich mir Antons Leben zusammengedacht hatte.” (Just as I conjured up Anton’s life; AS, 364.) At the same time, the story of Anton builds upon details about his childhood and migration to Germany as an adolescent already revealed earlier in the novel. The reader already knows, for example, that Anton once wore a dress of Ali’s (AS, 36), that he taught her to read aged three (AS, 99), and that they were inseparable (AS, 99). Following the family’s resettlement in Germany—described in an episode that echoes other Russian Jewish “arrival narratives” (Biendarra)7See Biendarra, “Cultural Dichotomies.”—Anton and Ali live for a time in an asylum-seekers’ hostel. Anton takes up skateboarding, the twins suffer bullying at school, and, significantly, it is Anton who declares to their tormentors that he is not a Russian but a Jew: “Ich bin Jude.” (I am a Jew; AS, 106.) After Ali and Anton are beaten up by their German classmates, there is a first hint of incest, as if their scandalous intimacy is motivated by discrimination and exclusion: “Ihre Münder standen offen. Erst als Anton Ali küsste, fing sie an zu weinen.” (Their mouths gaped open. Once Anton kissed Ali she began to cry; AS, 107.) They examine each other’s changing bodies in bed together and wear each other’s clothes; Ali is jealous when Anton kisses his first girlfriend; and Anton strikes their father to defend his sister (AS, 122–24). The suggestion that the hostility of others provokes an incest-like codependency among immigrant Jews is also present in Kaufmann’s Superposition, notably in Izy’s relationship with Timur.

The consummation as adults of the twin’s incestuous relationship is what drives Anton to flee to Istanbul, from where he sends the postcard—without any information about his precise whereabouts—that causes Ali to follow and try to find him (AS, 23; 87). (In a mirroring of narrative strands that is typical of the text, it is an allusive memory of their sex that prompts Ali, once in Istanbul, to return to Russia and Germany in order to queer Russian Jewish family history; AS, 139–42.) In Part Two, Anton describes how they kissed, how he discovered his sister’s bandaged breasts—her transition was just beginning—how Ali penetrated his anus with her finger, how they fellated one another, and how she orgasmed (AS, 300–302). Following their sex as siblings, as twins, and even (in Ali’s mind) as the same person, Anton craves genuine otherness, that is, to experience what it is like to be in the world. “‘Ich habe meine Sachen gepackt,’” he says: “‘und wollte irgendwohin, ich glaube, ich wollte sehen, wie weit ich komme.’” (I packed my things and wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, I think I wanted to see how far I could get; AS, 303.) It is as if the twins’ distinctly unworldly love pushes Anton to seek difference beyond the introversion—particularism—of his Russian Jewish family: “‘Ich wollte irgendwo sein, wo ich nichts wusste und nichts verstand und die Sprache nicht konnte und die paar Freunde, die meine Sprache sprechen, würden still sein. Das Geld reichte bis Istanbul.’” (I wanted to be somewhere where I knew nothing and understood nothing and wasn’t able to speak the language and the few friends who spoke my language would be quiet. The money got me as far as Istanbul; AS, 303.)

Following his arrival in Istanbul, Anton moves into a squat with Barış, whose father is a high-ranking officer in the Turkish army and who has run away from home (AS, 291–22), and he hangs out with the young men who congregate in front of the synagogue, and with sex workers (AS, 293–95). Later, he sleeps with Mervan, whose father canceled his German passport while he was attending a family wedding in Istanbul, leaving him as a reluctant Turk but “eigentlich Armenier” (actually an Armenian; AS, 334), and befriends Nour, a refugee from the civil war in Syria who resists arrest for theft because he fears a repeat of the torture he endured in his home country, and is deported (AS, 334–36). And he grows close to Aglaja, whom he rescued when she was struck by the gas canister at Taksim Gezi Park (AS, 317–19). Anton and Aglaja become lovers and he enters her world of queers, transvestites, and transsexuals, including Katho (AS, 330–31). Katho/Katharina/Katüscha, of course, is familiar to the reader from earlier in the novel, though as Ali’s love interest. Anton’s account of his time in Turkey, in fact, is the mirror of Ali’s, or perhaps more accurately an alternative narration of Ali’s experience as Anton. Just arrived in Istanbul, Ali is taken to a local theater by a friend of Cemal’s, glimpses her (pre-transition) reflection in a chandelier, and then imagines Anton sitting next to her, smiling at her “in exakter Spiegelung zurück” (in an exact reflection; AS, 35). Later, in a club with Katho, she sees Anton’s face in the mirror above the bar and believes it is hers: “Sah sie Antons Gesicht, das ihr Gesicht war.” (She saw Anton’s face, that was her face; AS, 226.) Anton too catches sight of his twin walking in the street (AS, 296), and—mirroring Ali’s narration of the same episode—he imagines that he sees her at the protest at which Aglaja is injured. Anton, however, cannot confront their intimacy and so he flees (AS, 320–21). This fracturing of their oneness may have been predicted, in truth, in the earlier episode in the theater. A piece of crystal falls from the chandelier in which their faces appeared to be reflected side by side but also “verzerrt” (distorted; AS, 35).

Anton seems to embody the self-actualization that is denied to Ali, at least before his sister completes her transition into a “he”: “Stelle mir das Leben meines Bruders vor, stelle mir vor, er würde all das tun, wozu ich nicht in der Lage gewesen bin, sehe ich ihn als einen, der hinauszieht in die Welt, weil er den Mut besitzt, der mir immer gefehlt hat.” (I imagine my brother’s life, he would do everything that I am not in the position to do, I see him as someone who sets off out into the world, because he has the courage that I have always lacked; AS, 275.) Anton travels, has sex with men and women, and engages with otherness. Anton’s Jewishness is not foregrounded in his Istanbul narrative, but the reader will likely remember his assertion as a newly arrived migrant in Germany: “Ich bin Jude” (I am a Jew; AS, 106) and surmise that this marginalized identity underpins his embrace of the ethnic and sexual minorities that he encounters in Turkey. Certainly, Anton’s queerness—Jewish or not—predisposes him to live among the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the persecuted, and to engage in acts of solidarity with the young people protesting against the Turkish state. Wrapping a shawl around his face, he runs into a fog of tear gas fired by the massed ranks of police and is appalled that his current lover, İlay, fails to stand by his side (AS, 314–16).

Yet almost as soon as Ali begins to take testosterone, they wonder whether to become Anton inevitably means to adopt male privilege. It is not the change in voice and appearance or even the pain of the injections that is concerning for Ali, but the possibility “dass ich jetzt, wo ich ein Sohn war, werden würde wie mein Vater.” (That, as a son, I would now become like my father; AS, 236.) Kostja was a wife beater, just like Valja’s first husband, the Russian antisemite Ivan. Other instances of male violence include Kostja’s own father, who regularly hit Kostja’s mother (AS, 81); Valja’s grandfather, who beat her grandmother Etinka (AS, 64); the schoolboys who assaulted Ali and Anton (AS, 106); Daniil’s brutal, homoerotic sparring with his university friend (AS, 198); an attack on the trans man Katho (AS, 231); and the man who thrashed Anton when he intervened to stop him grabbing Aglaja’s bottom (AS, 336). It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that Ali-as-Anton also lashes out at Aglaja after they become lovers. Male violence mirrors state violence. Following his friend Nour’s brutal deportation by the authorities, Anton finds that he can no longer tolerate Aglaja’s sex with other men. He desires to marry her, to “regularize” their relationship, and is offended when she assumes his proposal is intended to facilitate her emigration to the West (AS, 337–40). As significant, his assault follows his retelling of his story (AS, 340). Anton, it seems, needs a woman to suffer in order to assuage his tale of failed masculinity, just like the men in his family before him.

Anton’s privilege is not only male privilege, however. His desire to go out into the world—to become worldly—is realized not through making himself authentically known to others but through deception and even mimicry. He fakes interest in Barış’s lamentations about his father in order to secure a place in the squat (AS, 291–92); he pretends to flirt with the men who come on to him in bars while stealing their wallets (AS, 303); and he plays the part of “exotic Turk” for an elderly German visitor whom he pleasures and then robs (AS, 306). Subsequently, he polishes tourists’ shoes while narrating—fabricating—family life in his impoverished village in rural Turkey (AS, 307). He also allows himself to be picked up by İlay, a greying, middle-aged, bourgeois artist in denial about his sexuality, and mixes the roles of lover and male escort during a short vacation to the Aegean Sea (AS, 308–16). In effect, Anton abrogates to himself the experiences and stories of others, including the most marginalized groups. Moreover, even though he is a migrant, a queer, and a Jew, Anton can “pass as white.” He cites a Russian proverb that his mother used to say to him when he was a child: “Ich wollte mir wie ein Weißer vorkommen” (I wanted to appear to myself as a white man), alluding to being in a position to enjoy luxury and social status but also, most likely, to concealing the family’s Jewish origins. Now—in the world—Anton is finally able to actually “be white”:8There is a discussion, of course, of whether Jews are “white.” See Gilman, “The Jewish Nose.” “Und hier war ich. Ich war raus, ich war weit weg [. . .] und trug ein weißes Hemd.” (And here I was. I was out, I was far away and wearing a white shirt.) He frequents the hotel terrace in the evenings and gazes over the Bosporus, the famous Blue Mosque, and the city’s slums, just like a rich Western tourist. This is where he picks up the elderly German man, although his earnings are taken off him by the barman, who tells him to beat it (AS, 305–6). For all that he lives among the dispossessed and the displaced, Anton is not the same as them. For this reason, his mimicry seems opportunistic, even exploitative.

Paradoxically, Ali’s fabulation of how they became Anton may be the most concrete of the stories they tell in Außer sich. On the one hand, then, Ali’s juxtaposition of Jewish family history with sexual and ethnic otherness in Istanbul presents a re-queered Jewish solidarity as a vision for the future, but this remains, for the time being, an abstraction. On the other hand, Ali-as-Anton’s story suggests, albeit indirectly, the actually existing structural and ideological barriers to creating alliances between minorities, including in Germany. It might even be argued that a concern with Russian-speaking Jews’ relative privilege today—quite different to the direct danger great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents endured during the Nazi and Soviet periods—is what constitutes the underlying coherence of Ali’s narration. Like other recent novels by Soviet-born writers, therefore, Außer sich relates the experience of arrival, hostile German bureaucracy, prejudice, and first steps toward becoming established—in a reportage of more than ten pages, in fact (AS, 100–111). Yet Ali and Anton are (now) German, and they are white. Ali uses a German passport to enter Turkey (AS, 15) and is angry when Katho steals it (AS, 261), and Anton considers selling his (AS, 307).

Here, and by way of concluding our reading of Salzmann’s extraordinarily complex and multivalent novel, it is worth mentioning one final character, whose interactions with Ali perhaps provide the most likely model for how solidarity between Soviet-born Jews and other minorities can work, in Germany, in the present day, and founded on a kind of queerness that is perhaps less performed and thereby more authentically radical than what Ali experiences in Istanbul. The son of Turkish migrants who arrived in West Germany as guest workers in the 1960s, Elyas exists at the margins of each of Ali’s narratives (and of German society more broadly) and yet is also somehow foundational to all of them—Elyas introduces Ali to uncle Cemal in Istanbul, and thus ensures that Ali will be cared for; he accompanies Ali through their renarration of Jewish family history; and, crucially, he phones Ali in the final pages of the novel, as military helicopters swoop low during the coup of 2016, and directs his friend to safety. Ali thanks Elyas for his love over the years (AS, 357–58) and returns to Cemal’s apartment. Cemal embraces his adopted niece-nephew and, in the closing lines, offers tea—çay, a traditional Turkish drink associated with hospitality toward strangers (AS, 365).9Çay is listed by UNESCO as a part of Turkey’s (and Azerbaijan’s) intangible heritage. See: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/culture-of-ay-tea-a-symbol-of-identity-hospitality-and-social-interaction-01685. Last accessed July 25, 2024.

At the beginning of the novel, Ali reports that Ali and Elyas grew up together, as it were—or rather grew together, that is, approached one another without necessarily becoming one: “So was wie aufgewachsen [. . .] oder eher zusammengewachsen” (grew up together, as it were, or rather grew together; AS, 17). Ali, in fact, is a “she” when they first meet at a party in Berlin. They are both appalled by the parody of queerness in the other guests’ neon tops, pink muscle shorts, powdered hair, and glittery lips (AS 211), but are also unable to grasp the affinity they feel. It cannot be sexual desire, as their needs are so “unterschiedlich” (different; AS, 213)—he is a gay Turkish man, she is a Russian Jewish pre-­transition transexual who sleeps with women. Shortly afterwards, however, they move in together, occasionally have sex, but are not a couple (AS, 214–16). A few months later, Ali departs for Istanbul.

What Ali and Elyas develop is an ethics of mutual care that acknowledges the differences that persist, even as they draw near to one another. Each remains authentically queer in their own particular way, unlike the performances they witness at the party in Berlin and, it might be inferred, that Ali observes in Istanbul. Nor does their intimacy, including their periodic sex, imply possession, or the subsuming of one into the other. Again, this is not the case for Ali’s relationship with Katho in Istanbul and it is the absolute opposite of Ali’s incestuous merging with Anton, which in any case ends up with Ali/Anton’s reproduction of white male privilege. Elyas struggles to accept Ali’s transition and seeks to return them from Turkey to Germany (AS, 222–25) but he nonetheless remains supportive throughout and, as already described, phones to lead Ali to safety at the moment when help is most needed.

Even before Ali travels to Istanbul, and even before they renarrate Jewish family history (or whichever comes first), therefore, it seems that Ali already lives an authentically queer, or re-queered, Jewish solidarity, in alliance with their gay, Muslim friend Elyas. This is Jewish worldliness as praxis—rather than as something to be theorized—involving the careful negotiation of difference and concrete interventions in social, political, and cultural discourses. This, of course, is precisely what the novel’s author Sasha Marianna Salzmann exemplifies in their work at the Maxim Gorki Theater, as artistic director and then writer in residence, working primarily with playwrights with a migration background,10See Landry, “Rethinking Migration.” and their collaboration with Max Czollek on building coalitions across ethnic and sexual minorities to challenge concepts of integration and “majority culture.”11See Roca Lizarazu, “‘Integration.’” The same emphasis on action with and in support of others typifies Salzmann’s essays and interviews since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and, as will be discussed in the conclusion, following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s response. In summary, Ali perhaps never needed to renarrate family history and never needed to travel to Istanbul. At least some Jews in Germany, it can be argued, are already living a version of Jewish identity that insists on its fundamental—original—queerness as a metaphor for universalism and global solidarity.