A Non-Jewish Jewish Worldliness?: Olga Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn
Of course, another possible implication of the suggestion that there was perhaps no need for Ali to re-queer Jewish genealogy—and no need to go to Istanbul to become open to their own and others’ otherness—might be that the pragmatic solidarity they practice in Germany does not actually require Jewishness in the first place. Or, to frame it differently, if Jewishness is a metaphor for universalism, then might it eventually transcend itself, revealing its traces only through citation? In a note at the end of the novel, Salzmann claims that its title is taken from the literary magazine freitext and adds that this borrowing corresponds to the Jewish tradition of passing down names through the generations. (Salzmann co-edited freitext for twelve years.) Here, Jewish motifs may function as prompts rather than as fundamental markers of identity.
In an interview with Der Standard in early 2022, Salzmann’s fellow Soviet-born author Katja Petrowskaja is even more explicit about the relatively indirect influence in her work of Jewish faith, thought, and culture:
“Meine Texte stellen vielleicht einen Versuch dar, mithilfe der Erinnerung etwas zu ‘reparieren.’ Es gibt diese jüdische Idee von ‘Tikkun Olam,’ von einer Reparatur der Welt. Ich weiß nicht viel über das Jüdische, aber das sagt mir etwas.”1Petrowskaja, “‘Wie sonst möchten Sie Putin aufhalten?’”
(My texts may represent an attempt to “repair” something with the help of memory. There is this Jewish idea of “Tikkun Olam,” of a repair of the world. I don’t know much about Jewish things, but that speaks to me.)
Jewishness, understood in this way, may be little more than an injunction to engage in solidarity with others and to do good in the world. In Vielleicht Esther, the narrator struggles to balance Jewish particularism with Jewish universalism. In Petrowskaja’s recent public positions, it seems—including in this interview in response to the wave of refugees arriving from her native Ukraine after the Russian invasion—the author frames Jewishness more decisively as a moral imperative requiring little if any actual Jewish content.
We return, then, to historian and prominent Jewish voice Michael Wolffsohn’s prognosis of “a community of Jews without Judaism.”2Michael Wolffsohn, “Jews in Divided Germany,” 28. In chapter 2, it was argued that a Jewish sensibility—even a Jewish worldliness—might exist despite the absence of religious faith, halachic credentials, or a deep connection to Jewish culture. For non-believing Jews or Jews with “only” a Jewish father or a single Jewish grandparent, seemingly, Holocaust memory can underwrite a principled and universalistic solidarity in the present day. In this chapter, the focus has been on Jewish self-positioning beyond Holocaust memory, and on contrasting articulations of Jewish worldliness emerging from a less emphatic fixation on that particularly Jewish historical trauma—Channah’s embrace of popular culture and Ali’s allusions to Jewish queerness as a generalized metaphor for marginalization, persecution, and solidarity with others. Finally, we turn to Olga Grjasnowa’s 2020 novel Der verlorene Sohn to explore what happens when a text’s Jewishness is so diffuse—beyond faith, halachic debates, and any direct thematization of Holocaust memory and family trauma—that it is not clear whether it is Jewish at all. Grjasnowa’s account of the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus in the mid-­nineteenth century and the taking-hostage of a Muslim prince may exemplify a “non-Jewish Jewish worldliness.” As will be discussed, this term draws on Polish-born philosopher’s Isaac Deutscher’s typology of the “non-Jewish Jew.”
From Grjasnowa’s début novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians love birch trees; 2012), to Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe (The legal haziness of a marriage; 2014) to Gott ist nicht schüchtern (God is not shy; 2017), her third, it is possible to discern an increasing sublimation of overtly Jewish themes—the Holocaust, Israel/Palestine, and Jewish identity—into a universalistic concern with human rights, specifically the rights of people fleeing conflict and persecution. Jewish characters, correspondingly, become ever less central and, in Gott, they disappear entirely, as the author turns to the civil war in Syria and the arrival of several million refugees to Europe in 2015. Instead, sporadic but strategically placed citations of the Jewish past and especially the Holocaust remind of where prejudice has led in the past and imply an imperative to intervene today.3See Taberner, “Possibilities” and “Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism.” All three novels, it can be argued, are motivated by a sense of Jewish purpose (Sutcliffe), to communicate the plight of others and to mobilize on their behalf. They also suggest a certain self-effacement, as Jewish identity—and Jewish suffering—frame but do not dominate the discussion.
Grjasnowa’s fourth novel appears at first glance to be an unambiguously Russian novel, without any immediately obvious references to Jewish history or Jewish identity. In Der verlorene Sohn, then, Grjasnowa retells the story of the Muslim warrior and leader Imam Shamil, who in the mid-nineteenth century led resistance to the Russian Empire in the North Caucasus and slowed its conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan by twenty-five years. (The author follows Moshe Gammer’s Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, from 1994, which is acknowledged among the Russian, German, and English sources listed at the end of the novel.)4Gammer, Muslim Resistance to The Tsar. Through stylistic and thematic allusions to well-known works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy, Der verlorene Sohn invokes the significance of Shamil for what Rebecca Gould calls the “imaginative history of Russian colonialism,”5Gould, “Imam Shamil,” 118. including Soviet vacillation between lionizing him as an anti-imperialist hero and fearing him as a radical Islamicist6See Gammer, “Shamil in Soviet Historiography” and Creuzberger, “Freedom Fighter.” and the fraught relationship today between Moscow and the autonomous republics. The novel knowingly replicates the Russian literary tradition’s romanticization of the Caucasus and the Muslim “other”—with descriptions of awe-inspiring nature and exotic local customs—while also drawing out the critique of Russian imperialism that is also often at least implicit in the texts it invokes.7See Layton, Russian Literature and Empire. More generally, allusions to Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, the poet Tyutchev, and Lermontov suggest contemporary but also present-day debates on “Russianness,” Russia’s European orientation, and universal values.8I am grateful to Dr. Miriam Wray for drawing my attention to these references and their potential meaning as well as to possible links to German Romanticism.
Most immediately, therefore, Der verlorene Sohn tells a Russian story, replete with references to Russian history and Russian literature and with parallels between Tsar Nicholas I’s expansionist ambitions and President Putin’s imperial habitus today. The narrative is prefaced with an epigraph (first in Russian, then translated into German) quoting Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and one of the architects of the response to the Chechnya insurgency: “Wir wollten immer das Beste, doch es kam wie immer.” (We always wanted the best, but it turned out like always.) At the same time, more global issues are also at stake that resonate beyond the Russian context. First, the narrative focus on Shamil’s twelve-year-old son, Jamulludin, who is taken hostage by the Tsar’s forces and then becomes part of elite society in St. Petersburg, invokes contemporary debates on the potential for Muslim immigrants to integrate. Second, the novel’s discreet framing of prejudice against Muslims in terms of Enlightenment discourses on Jewish emancipation intimates the presence of a non-Jewish Jew as storyteller.
On the one hand, Jamulludin’s Russian hosts bestow a gracious generosity on the stranger in their midst, assuring his safety, attending to his comfort, and facilitating his entry into society. (It might almost be forgotten that they had been responsible for his uprooting.) Jamalludin’s education is provided by Tsar Nicholas, he attends balls, operas, and receptions at the Winter Palace with the progeny of the Russian aristocracy, and he is betrothed to Lisa, sister of his friend Alexej Olenin and the daughter of a former president of the Imperial Academy of Arts and of the Imperial Public Library, and a privy counsellor. On the other hand, however, acceptance is conditional. Jamalludin is admired for his mastery of languages but this means that he must suppress his native Avar.9Grjasnowa, Sohn, 119; 290. Hereafter S. Similarly, he is the object of great curiosity and even erotic fascination. The oldest sister of the family that he is placed with on his arrival barely speaks to him but, on his final night in her home, crawls into his bed to lie next to him (S, 119). At the academy, a fellow cadet, Dimitri, obsessively strokes his dark hair (S, 78–79). Jamalludin is “ein angesehener Gast” (respected guest) but he knows that he can never truly belong: “Er würde eben niemals zu diesem Land dazugehören. Er war nicht gut genug, nicht russisch genug.” (He would never belong in this land. He was not good enough, not Russian enough; S, 161.) At a ball, he dances with the empress, in a display of virtuosity intended to show that “sein Platz genau hier war.” (That his place was exactly here; S, 132.) The stranger’s need to impress merely confirms his lack of belonging, of course.
Essential for Jamalludin’s integration is his gradual abandonment—or at least concealment—of his Islamic faith. When he first encounters Russian soldiers, he is shocked by their copious consumption of alcohol (S, 30). Likewise, he is irritated when he sees a woman with uncovered hair (S, 39), and he is puzzled when he sees a Russian officer gambling: “dass dieser so schamlos seinen Lästern frönte und fern von Gott war.” (That he so shamelessly indulged his sins and was so distant from God; S, 45.) Once Jamalludin becomes an officer himself, however, he too devotes himself to “Frauen, Alkohol, dem Kartenspiel und lärmenden Spaziergängen durch die schlafende Hauptstadt.” (Women, alcohol, cards, and noisy rampages through the sleeping city; S, 134.) He even visits a brothel with his comrades, although in the midst of his ecstasy he still knows that the prostitute’s passion is “eingespielt” (performed; S, 137). Jamalludin is also playing a part, at least to a degree. He still prays, albeit only in his room and never five times a day (S, 94–95), but he will never be fully accepted. On occasion, the anti-Muslim prejudice he endures is obvious, for example when a tutor at the Academy seats him at the back of the class, despite his strong grades (S, 75), or when a young woman at court presses him to accept Jesus (S, 111–12). (He refers her to the Koran.) More often than not, though, the mechanisms of exclusion are more subtle. Jamalludin’s betrothal to Lisa is welcomed by her family, well-known liberals who admit the famous anarchist Bakunin into their house (S, 190). Yet it is presumed, or rather expected, that he will allow himself to be baptized (S, 195–96, 205, 222), and Nicholas I imposes a lengthy engagement of two years and posts him to Warsaw (S, 215). Before the wedding can take place, Jamalludin is exchanged for the two Georgian princesses and returns to Dagestan. This is a homeland he barely knows and where, once again, he is destined to be an outsider.
Frequent references to the debates among the Russian ruling class on the abolition of serfdom (S, 152–53), the place of women in society (S, 186), and liberal, revolutionary, and anarchist alternatives to despotism—including Bakunin, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin—confirm the philosophical backdrop for the novel, notably the question of whether and how far Russia should open up to progressive ideas and to the West.10See Gordon, “The Russian Enlightenment.” Indeed, the novel cites the scientific, philosophical, and literary innovations of the European Enlightenment more generally, for example Humboldt’s expeditions in the New World (S, 101). Pervading the entire narrative is a distinctly Kantian interest in the nature of reason, political authority, and public discourse.
A significant dimension to the discourse about Enlightenment in Russia—as elsewhere in Europe, including Germany—concerned the emancipation of the Jews. Following the first partition of Poland in 1772 and then the second and third partitions of 1793 and 1795, when far greater numbers of Jews came under the control of the Russian Empire, Jews were permitted to reside only in the Pale of Settlement, that is, modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and parts of Latvia, and western areas of what is now the Russian Federation. Their rights were severely restricted, and even more so by Nicholas I after he came to the throne in 1825.11See Polonsky, “Nicholas I and the Jews of Russia” and Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, especially “Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, I,” 189–201. Nicholas, in fact, was widely despised for his forced conscription of young Jewish boys—an episode that features in Sohn, as discussed shortly—and for his efforts to bring Jewish education under secular control, that is, to subject it to the interests of the Russian state.12See Edwards, “Nicholas I and Jewish Education.” At the same time, however, the Tsar’s determination to carry out the administrative reform of his empire and disagreements among his advisors may have sowed the seeds for an eventual improvement in conditions for Jews in Russia and across its empire later in the nineteenth century.13See Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews.
Adam Sutcliffe argues that from the seventeenth century “the question of the status of Judaism and of Jews was a key site of intellectual contestation, confusion and debate” within discussions of Enlightenment across Europe, including in Russia. Turgenev’s antisemitic short story “The Jew” is directly referenced in the novel (S, 172), as discussed below, but Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and other Russian writers generally thought of as progressive were also profoundly ambivalent about Jews and Jewish emancipation.14See Katz, Neither With Them, Nor Without Them. In fact, Sutcliffe continues, “the complexities clustered around Judaism are of central importance for a general understanding of the Enlightenment itself.”15Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 5; 6. Jews, then, presented a “troublesome limit case.”16See Sutcliffe, “Judaism and the Politics of Enlightenment.” To what extent could Jewish particularism be allowed, and to what extent could centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice be set aside in favor of tolerance and universal values?17See Robertson, The “Jewish Question” and Mendes-Flohr, “The Emancipation of European Jewry.”
Mentions of Jews in Der Sohn are infrequent, reflecting the general trend in Grjasnowa’s work toward a focus on universal themes: state persecution, migration and forced displacement, and solidarity and privilege. Yet as a “troublesome limit case,” Jews frame the novel’s broader presentation of prejudice, including even among those who profess a commitment to Enlightenment values and to the liberalization of Russian society. Most obviously, incidences of direct persecution of Jews, or of discrimination or disdain, make explicit the pervasive bias—and even hostility—that infuses Russian attitudes toward all those who are perceived as inferior. Further to this, however, Jamalludin’s witnessing of overt antisemitism, including the horrific treatment of Jewish boys recruited into the Tsar’s army, sensitizes him to the limits of Russian tolerance more generally, in relation to his own treatment as a Muslim, but also to the treatment of serfs and women. Finally—and only to be inferred—the mobilization of these “Jewish moments” within the narrative may suggest a Jewish ethics. The unobtrusive, discreet manner in which this Jewish purpose is articulated within the text points to the presence of a non-Jewish Jew as narrator.
Dislike of Jews is normalized among the Russian elites. Members of the imperial court, including the empress, display their “Abscheu” (disgust; S, 111), a cadet at the military academy known for selling treats at inflated prices is nicknamed Itzig (S, 140), a derogatory name for Jews, and the Tsar barely attempts to conceal his contempt for the British Jewish financier and philanthropist Moses Montefiore, when he visits to plead for an improvement in the treatment of Russian Jews (S, 141–45). (The wider significance of these five pages will be discussed shortly.) These explicitly voiced examples of antisemitism reveal the truth of polite discourse, namely the prejudice toward those considered not to belong that is never far from the surface.
Jamulladin gradually becomes aware that, as a Muslim, he too is subject to prejudice and that discrimination is more generally a defining characteristic of Russian society. This realization seems to begin when he witnesses a column of Jewish boys being force-marched toward St. Petersburg. Jamalludin is shocked both by the adolescents’ pitiful appearance and the callous indifference of their guards. The Jewish boys have been taken from their parents, are afflicted by hunger and hypothermia, and are destined to be conscripted (S, 167). Prior to this episode, which takes place during a military excursion, Jamalludin had appeared not to notice the ways he is excluded, even though they were obvious to the reader, of course. Most immediately, this episode of Jewish suffering prompts introspection, as Jamalludin reflects on what would happen to the children of his homeland if the Russian Empire were to defeat his father (S, 168) and thinks back to his own forced removal: “Mitleid mit sich selbst. Bilder der jüdischen Jungen ließen ihn nicht mehr los und die seiner Abreise aus Akhulgo kamen wieder hoch.” (Sympathy with himself. The images of the Jewish boys would not leave him be and images of his own departure from Akhulgo came flooding back; S, 172.) More generally, however, he is repulsed by the abject cynicism of his fellow officers. When Alexej, the scion of his future wife’s supposedly liberal family, and Kasparow, another officer, conduct an innuendo-laden conversation with some local hunters, Jamalludin demands answers:
“Gibt es denn viele Juden in der Gegend?,” fragte Kasparow.
“Nicht mehr.” Die Jäger lachten.
“Und woran liegt das?,” fragte Jamalludin und nun war es Alexej, der ihm einen besorgten Blick zuwarf.
Pjotr räusperte sich: “Zum einen, wie Sie sicher wissen dürfen sich Juden in dieser Gegend nicht niederlassen . . .”
“Zum anderen?,” fragte Jamalludin.
“Zum andern,” sagte Nikolai und seine Augen leuchteten, als er sprach: “Zum anderen gab es heute ein kleines Volksfest.”
[“Are there lots of Jews in the area, then,” Kasparow asked.
“Not any more.” The hunters laughed.
“Why not?,” Jamalludin asked and now it was Alexej who threw him a worried look.
Pjotr cleared his throat. “For one, as you will know Jews are not allowed to settle in this area . . .”
“And what else?,” Jamalludin asked.
“Well,” Nikolai said and his eyes lit up, as he spoke: “Today there was a little folk festival.” S, 171]
The intimation of a pogrom is all too obvious, as is the repellant mix of conspiratorial half-acknowledgments and malice. Jamalludin loses his temper when Alexej, with great relish, recounts Turgenev’s antisemitic short story “The Jew” (1847), throwing his plate against the wall and walking away, ashamed of his friend and of everything around him (S, 172).
Antisemitism is positioned as the foundational prejudice, as it were, a format for oppression in Imperial Russia more generally: “Der Zar entschied über jede Kleinigkeit der öffentlichen Ordnung, selbst das Rauchen auf der Straße hatte er verboten und graue Hüte, die ihn aus irgendwelchen Gründen an Juden erinnerten.” (The Tsar decided every little thing in public life, even smoking on the street and grey hats, which for some reason reminded him of Jews; S, 242.) Two days after his meeting with Montefiore, and following an invitation from his loyal Jewish subjects, Nicholas I arrives late at the temporary synagogue in St. Petersburg (Jews were still not officially permitted to live outside the Pale of Settlement) and storms out on account of what he views as the depravity of Jewish rituals (S, 145–46). Linking calls to emancipate the Jews with his duty as Tsar to resist dangerously liberal ideas arriving from France, Nicholas I instructs Jamalludin: “Mach dir nichts aus den Juden.” (Have nothing to do with Jews; S, 146.) If the Jews were tolerated, it is implied, then all the other forms of exclusion underpinning Russian society would also be thrown into question.
Subsequently, Jamalludin becomes conscious that, even among the liberal elites, freedom only ever exists in the abstract. Even as they celebrate the “Freiheit des Geistes” (freedom of the intellect) and criticize the authoritarianism of the Tsar (S, 188), Lisa’s mother and father continue to beat their servants—their children protest, but weakly, “damit sich an der Ordnung der Dinge bloß nichts änderte.” (So that nothing actually changed in the order of things; S, 222.) Lisa’s parents, moreover, invite the anarchist thinker Bakunin into their home—where he no doubt repeats his thoughts on women’s emancipation—and appear to tolerate their daughter’s attachment to the novels of the proto-feminist George Sand (S, 185). Yet they will not allow her to travel to Göttingen to study. With Lisa, Jamalludin suddenly grasps that women might hope for the same things he desires—rights (S, 186–87). He also has sympathy with the prisoners that fill the Tsar’s jails—activists circulating emancipatory ideas from France—because he too knows what it means to be confined, unable to speak freely, and forbidden to return home (S, 242). In time, he begins to develop an understanding of universal rights: liberty and freedom of expression: “Dieses Land war ein gläsernes Gefängnis—die Polizeispitzel waren überall, Briefe wurden aufgebrochen, gelesen.” (This country was a glass prison—police informers were everywhere, letters were opened, read; S, 242.) If Kant defines Enlightenment as man’s [sic] emergence out of self-incurred immaturity then this is the journey that Jamalludin has embarked on, as he deploys his innate reason to grasp the general principles that ought to apply equally to all human beings.
The encounter with anti-Jewish prejudice, therefore, seems to prompt Jamalludin’s growing awareness of intolerance as an indispensable pillar of Russian society. At the same time, it can be argued that the novel as a whole is infused by the Jewish experience, albeit in a highly allusive fashion. A reference early in the text to the use of forced labor in the construction of St. Petersburg—including those who died “an der Erschöpfung, der Kälte, dem Hunger, Skorbut oder Ruhr” (of exhaustion, cold, hunger, scurvy, dysentery; S, 50)—reminds of the Nazi camps in which Jews (and others) were worked to death, just as the later scene featuring the Jewish boys anticipates the death marches at the end of the war. More generally, of course, the narrator’s focus on trauma, memory, and solidarity may suggest a Jewish ethics of care, as was the case in Grjasnowa’s previous novels. In Der Russe, for example, Mascha’s retelling of her grandmother’s flight from the Nazis frames her own, formerly repressed memory of the bloody clashes between ethnic Armenians and Azeris that she witnessed as a child in 1992 and, ultimately, her empathy with Palestinians.18See Skolnik, “Jewish Writing.”
Jews are the central focus for the five pages of Der verlorene Sohn that recount the (real-life) visit of Moses Montefiore to Russia in March 1846. In St. Petersburg, Montefiore met with Nicholas I, the Tsar’s Minister of National Enlightenment, and Jewish delegations from across the Pale of Settlement. In Russia, as elsewhere on his international travels, he asked that Jews be granted rights while also urging his coreligionists to learn the vernacular language and engage with the majority culture.19See Green, Moses Montefiore. A religiously observant Jew, Montefiore embodies the only overtly Jewish positionality in the novel, defining Jewish emancipation as just as urgent as the end of hostility toward Muslims or the introduction of equal rights for women and serfs.20After his death, Montefiore was revered by diaspora Jews for his intercessions with local rulers. After the Holocaust, however, his “emancipation politics” was seen by many as suspect—a naïve belief that Jews could ever be accepted and that persecution would end. At the same time—as Jamalludin discovers—integration, or even assimilation, offers no guarantee that prejudice will abate and discrimination cease.
Yet the key character in this brief episode is actually Montefiore’s private secretary, Louis Loewe. The real Loewe was an accomplished linguist from Silesia who learned Arabic dialects and local languages during extensive travels throughout the Middle East, a translator of interfaith dialogues, and a writer of treatises on cultural artifacts as well as of a dictionary of the Circassian language (widely spoken in Jamalludin’s region). Inserted between the Tsar’s abrupt dismissal of Montefiore’s entreaties and his disparaging of the St. Petersburg Jewish community at the Synagogue, accordingly, comes a conversation between Jamalludin and Loewe, a demonstration of Loewe’s intercultural expertise. He addresses Jamalludin first in Circassian, then in the Damascus and Palestinian dialects of Arabic before trying the classical version, and finally English, a language that is now more familiar to the young Muslim than the idiom of the Koran. Through his switching between languages and his eagerness to learn about Dagestan, including its architecture and Avar grammar (S, 142–44), Loewe clearly reprises the traditional Jewish role as a “middleman minority,”21See Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. that is, as intermediaries who facilitate trade, finance, and cultural and intellectual exchange, often operating between dominant elites and subordinate groups.22See Schama, Belonging. Here, however, a more specific articulation of Jewish purpose is also implied—as a bridge between the particular and the universal.
Loewe’s presence articulates a more discreet Jewish perspective, consequently, as translator, mediator, and even curator of other people’s worlds. This is a universalistic perspective that ultimately elides its own original Jewishness—contrasting with the partiality of Montefiore, who intercedes as a Jew on behalf of Jews. It might even be argued, in fact, that it is the perspective adopted by the novel’s unnamed third-person narrator. Just as Loewe translates between idioms and cultures, so does the narrator transmit exchanges originally in Russian, French, German, English, and languages from across the Caucasus, along with anthropological insights. (The bibliography at the end of the text lists the sources for the author’s and thus the narrator’s learning.) Likewise, just as Loewe appears in the novel as an agent of Jewish purpose, advancing the cause of cosmopolitanism, so can the narrator be understood to be the instrument through which Jewish experience is curated as a stimulus for Jamalludin—and the reader—to grasp the universal significance of his story for debates on prejudice, empathy, and rights. Certainly, the novel’s episodic structure lends credence to this notion of narratorial curation. A succession of encounters prompts the young protagonist to develop greater moral understanding, including horrific vistas of Jewish suffering that appear especially, or even expressly, intended to accelerate his emotional and intellectual growth.
The narrator is not identified as a Jew. Indeed, the reader might assume that he or she is an insider—a Russian and a Christian—since this is the convention of the socially-engaged nineteenth-century Russian novel on which Sohn is modeled, with its unadorned prose, attention to detail, occasional throwbacks to Romanticism, and focus on the hypocrisy of the Russian nobility.23See Freeborn, “The Nineteenth Century: The Age of Realism.” Yet the fact that the novel also includes a subtle critique of the blind spots of the tradition it draws on—the mention of Turgenev’s antisemitic “The Jew” and the anti-Jewish slurs used by the liberal elites who consume Gogol, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky—suggests a certain detachment. This does not mean that the narrator must be Jewish. Non-Jews too have sometimes broken ranks to expose antisemitism among enlightened elites. But it is suggestive at least, and what is at stake here is not the narrator as a real (or even imagined) person but whether the narration can be argued to embody a Jewish ethics.
In an essay of 1958, published ten years later in 1968, the Polish-born philosopher Isaac Deutscher coined the phrase “non-Jewish Jew” to describe Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, intellectuals and activists for progressive and revolutionary causes who left behind their particularistic origins and engaged in the world on behalf of humanity as a whole. For Deutscher, this transgression against the core tenets of Judaism is itself quintessentially Jewish: “The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.”24Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” 26. Hereafter NJJ. Deutscher too was a heretic who rejected orthodoxy of any kind and spoke out in solidarity with the marginalized and the persecuted: as an adolescent he rejected his Orthodox upbringing; in his twenties he joined the Polish Communist Party but was expelled in 1932; after he moved to Britain in 1939, he was briefly interned as a potential subversive; in 1965, he took part in the first “teach-in” at Berkeley; and he was also fiercely critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land after the Six-Day War in 1967.25See Horowitz, ed., Isaac Deutscher. Notwithstanding his transcendence of his origins, however, Deutscher located his activism firmly in the Jewish experience—dwelling on the “borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures” and “in society and yet not of it” (NJJ, 27)—and in his understanding of Jewish values as universalistic. Deutscher’s is a vision of Jewish worldliness, correspondingly, that is diasporic, self-transcendent, and displays solidarity with others: “I hope, therefore, that, together with other nations, the Jews will ultimately become aware—or, regain the awareness—of the inadequacy of the nation-state and that they will find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who have gone beyond Jewry has left us—the message of universal human emancipation” (NJJ, 41).
Deutscher is directly cited in Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern, when the unnamed narrator inserts an epigraph into her account of the two protagonists’ flight from the civil war in Syria: “Someone in a Cambridge common room asked the self-designated ‘non-Jewish Jew’ and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher about his roots: ‘Trees have roots,’ he shot back scornfully, ‘Jews have legs.’”26Grjasnowa, Gott, 137. In Sohn, a brief mention of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (author of The Little Virtues; originally Le piccole virtù, 1962) provides further evidence for a Jewish universalism that is rooted not in religious observance but in a general sense of a Jewish ethics. Ginzburg is quoted in a second epigraph at the start of the novel, praising parents’ care for their children, most likely to sensitize the reader to the story of human suffering—a Muslim child torn from its parents—that lies behind the military and political machinations that will be described in the novel. Ginzburg was born into a Jewish family in 1916 (her mother was Catholic). During the war, she was harassed by the fascists, and her Jewish husband was tortured and killed.27Grjasnowa also references Ginzburg, including her experience of flight, in a discussion about the theatrical version of Gott ist nicht schüchtern (online transcript no longer accessible). The Little Virtues is a collection of essays, a number of which reflect on the author’s wartime experiences and all of which circle around the question of belonging. In the 1980s, Ginzburg became politically active in the Italian communist movement and later, having quit the Party, as an independent leftist deputy. Her conversion to Catholicism surprised many, however her engagement on behalf of oppressed minorities, including the Palestinians, was always underpinned by her own experience of persecution and frequently referenced the Holocaust and Jewish suffering more generally. Literary biographer Nadia Castronuova describes this as “Jewishness as moral identity.”28See Castronuova, Natalia Ginzburg.
In Grjasnowa’s Sohn, it can be surmised, a non-Jewish Jewish narrator articulates a non-Jewish Jewish worldliness that largely bypasses faith, alludes to Jewish thought and culture tangentially, and cites the Holocaust only indirectly, as a basis for its commitment to universal human rights. For those Jews for whom religious conformity, the Holocaust, and Israel are indispensable to Jewish identity, this may seem challenging, even heretical, although many will also follow the injunction of tikkun olam. For those for whom Jewishness is just one aspect of an instinctively progressive, globally-engaged self-positioning, it may be a more appealing version of the future of Judaism, in Germany and perhaps everywhere.
 
1     Petrowskaja, “‘Wie sonst möchten Sie Putin aufhalten?’” »
2     Michael Wolffsohn, “Jews in Divided Germany,” 28. »
3     See Taberner, “Possibilities” and “Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism.” »
4     Gammer, Muslim Resistance to The Tsar»
5     Gould, “Imam Shamil,” 118. »
6     See Gammer, “Shamil in Soviet Historiography” and Creuzberger, “Freedom Fighter.” »
7     See Layton, Russian Literature and Empire»
8     I am grateful to Dr. Miriam Wray for drawing my attention to these references and their potential meaning as well as to possible links to German Romanticism. »
9     Grjasnowa, Sohn, 119; 290. Hereafter S»
10     See Gordon, “The Russian Enlightenment.” »
11     See Polonsky, “Nicholas I and the Jews of Russia” and Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, especially “Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, I,” 189–201. »
12     See Edwards, “Nicholas I and Jewish Education.” »
13     See Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews»
14     See Katz, Neither With Them, Nor Without Them»
15     Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 5; 6. »
16     See Sutcliffe, “Judaism and the Politics of Enlightenment.” »
17     See Robertson, The “Jewish Question” and Mendes-Flohr, “The Emancipation of European Jewry.” »
18     See Skolnik, “Jewish Writing.” »
19     See Green, Moses Montefiore»
20     After his death, Montefiore was revered by diaspora Jews for his intercessions with local rulers. After the Holocaust, however, his “emancipation politics” was seen by many as suspect—a naïve belief that Jews could ever be accepted and that persecution would end. »
21     See Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations»
22     See Schama, Belonging»
23     See Freeborn, “The Nineteenth Century: The Age of Realism.” »
24     Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” 26. Hereafter NJJ»
25     See Horowitz, ed., Isaac Deutscher»
26     Grjasnowa, Gott, 137. »
27     Grjasnowa also references Ginzburg, including her experience of flight, in a discussion about the theatrical version of Gott ist nicht schüchtern (online transcript no longer accessible). »
28     See Castronuova, Natalia Ginzburg»