An Imaginary Ararat: Jewish Bodies and Jewish Homelands in Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York

In Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture, the historian Jeffrey Shandler analyzes the circulation of Yiddish as cultural currency in an era when the Jewish mother tongue has become largely "postvernacular." As Shandler sees it, despite the plummeting numbers of native Yiddish speakers subsequent to the Holocaust and the decimation of European Jewry to which it gave rise, the language of the shtetl has maintained a vibrant existence and profound importance in Jewish identity and self-fashioning. The decline of Yiddish as a medium for daily communication correlates with the increase in the language's importance on "its secondary, or meta-level of signification--the symbolic value invested in the language apart from the semantic value of any given utterance in it" (4). This reliance on the "symbolic value" of the language as an organizing principle of Jewish life long after its vernacular heyday emerges in a number of ways, according to Shandler. Most notably, it proves a symbolic structure around which diasporic Jews can cohere in the post-war world. Those who wish to maintain ties to Yiddish in spite of the destruction of its Eastern and Central European speakers do so by creating an imaginary linguistic community, a space Shandler elegantly calls "Yiddishland." A play on Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities," Shandler's Yiddishland is a space more fictive than real, yet profoundly meaningful for those who opt to live within its smudged geographical and emotional boundaries. For contemporary Jewish American authors in search of a new topography for Jewish identity, the concept of such a space is a particularly resonant, if conflicted, one. In fact, in order to explain his idea of a postvernacular Yiddishland, Shandler points to a 1997 piece by Jewish American novelist Michael Chabon entitled "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts," published first in the Library of Congress magazine Civilization and later in the more popular publication Harper's. (1) In this article, Chabon composes a mournful paean to the nostalgic guidebook Say it in Yiddish, a post-World War II dictionary of common Yiddish phrases that imagines an impossible land where the mameloshen or "mother tongue" is spoken on every street corner and in every citizen's home. According to Shandler, not only does Chabon's essay fail to take into account the continuing power of Yiddish as a spoken language in ultra-Orthodox and other extant Jewish communities, it also refuses to see the true importance of this "guidebook to a land of ghosts"--namely that it allows Jews to "conjure a homeland for Yiddish, with its implications of indigenousness, territoriality, and even sovereignty" (Shandler 33). Throughout history Yiddish has been a language associated with marginality and the transient condition of the archetypical Wandering Jew, yet in its postvernacular mode Yiddish finally has found a resting place in the imagination of a host of Jews bent on resuscitating the language and world of their antecedents. (2) What Shandler does not specifically state, but what is particularly important about the Yiddishland he outlines in his critique of Chabon, is that in contrast to Israel--the other "imagined" homeland for the Jews--Yiddishland provides a space for secular diasporic Jews uncomfortable with grounding their Jewish identity on the land mapped out by the Zionist project in the Middle East. Ironically, although Shandler criticizes Chabon's piece in order to undergird his assertions about the importance of Yiddish in the post-war Jewish imaginary, he does not fully explore the illustrations that accompany Chabon's ode to a dead language. In both Civilization and Harper's, Chabon's article is accompanied by the intricate drawings of Ben Katchor. In contrast to Chabon's text, Katchor's images of an ersatz home for Yiddish and Yiddish speakers--complete with Hebrew-lettered factories and cinemas, telephone booths and ferry boats--participate in the creation of a Yiddishland much like the one Shandler invokes in his exploration of Say it in Yiddish. …