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Magic, diaspora, and klezbian desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.586776

1470-1308

Emma Parker,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Abstract This essay examines the ways in which magic articulates the traumatic effects and transformative potential of migration in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist, a novel that constructs a woman-centred and queer counter-history of the Jewish diaspora. It proposes that Katz employs the motif of vanishing tricks to explore the relationship between the trauma of migration and non-normative sexualities. Further, drawing on Terry Castle's observation that, historically, lesbianism has appeared in culture only ‘as an absence, as chimera or amor impossibilia’ and Gayatri Gopinath's observation that non-normative genders and same-sex desire are rendered inconceivable by conventional models of diaspora, it argues that the conjuring and escapology practised by the novel's two female protagonists represent a radical desire to achieve the impossible. Katz's cross-dressed magician and her assistant, who escapes the ‘white slave trade’, achieve this when they shatter the illusion of heteronormativity and take the mutually exclusive binary categories of gender to vanishing point. The novel also reconceives home and history from a post-Zionist, queer perspective. Elaborating on Jonathan Freedman's assertion that klezmer music represents the queer, the diasporic, and the Jewish, the essay thus proposes that The Escape Artist celebrates the subversive possibilities of a specifically ‘klezbian’ subjectivity and desire. Keywords: MagicdiasporaJewishlesbianklezmertransvestismhistoryqueer fiction Notes Lionel Tiger's observation that magicians, like mediums, flourish whenever society feels powerless or overwhelmed suggests that these texts may be a response to the crisis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anxiety that defines post-9/11 culture. However, Chabon's novel predates 9/11, suggesting that there is no single explanation for the appeal of magic. Given that Randi avers that war and periods of economic uncertainty ‘have always been good for the magic business’, it seems likely that more representations of magicians may appear in response to the current economic crisis. See Molly O'Neill, ‘As life's questions get harder, magic casts a wider spell’, The New York Times, 13 June 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/13/us/as-life-s-questions-get-harder-magic-casts-a-wider-spell.html (accessed 4 October 2009). Harry Houdini, The Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008; first published in 1920). Katz was nominated for a Lambda Award for her first novel Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound (New York: Firebrand, 1992). Judith Katz, The Escape Artist (New York: Firebrand, 1997), p. 237. Published the same year as The Escape Artist, Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997) also features a lesbian magician. Set in California, it tells the story of Sabine, a magician's assistant who, following the death of her partner, Parsifal, takes up magic and falls in love with his sister, Kitty. Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2009) is regarded as the classic tale of Jewish migration to the States, but this story has been told many times, even from a woman-centred perspective, as in Marge Piercy's Sex Wars (London: Piatkus, 2005), and from a lesbian perspective, as in Elana Dykewomon's Beyond the Pale (London: Onlywomen Press, 2000; first published in 1997). Published the same year as The Escape Artist, Dykewomon's novel follows two Jewish women who journey from a Russian shtetl to New York's Lower East Side. See Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 73. For further details of the Isle of Klezbos, see Eve Sicular, ‘Outing the Archives: From the Celluloid Closet to the Isle of Klezbos’ in David Shneer and Carvyn Aviv (eds), Queer Jews (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 199–214. Jana Evans Braziel notes that most studies of queer diasporas focus on queer diasporic communities in the USA. See Diaspora: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 109. Reflecting this, David Eng's Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) and Martin Manalansan's Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), two books that have played a key part in the emergence of queer diaspora studies, both focus on queer men in the States. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 148, 152. Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), p. 1. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 5. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 2. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 122. Mangan, p. 9. Felman and Laub, p. 63. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 71, emphasis added. Victoria Aarons, A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 10. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), pp. 121, 153. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 5. Rebecca Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 4. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 4. Ibid., pp. 7–8, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 46. Picon took the part of the eponymous hero in the stage play Yenkele (1922–1925), a role that she performed on and off from the age of 15 to 80. Picon also cross-dressed in the Yiddish films Ost und West (1923), and Yidl Mitn Fidl (1937), in which she plays a girl who dresses as a boy so that she can travel around the country as a musician in a klezmer band. See Joanne Green, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/picon-molly (accessed 15 July 2009). Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 153. Castle, pp. 30–31. Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘Zeitl and Rickel’ in The Séance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1968), p. 111. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 17. Gopinath, p. 11. Meg Wesling, ‘Why queer diaspora?’, Feminist Review, 90.1 (2008), pp. 30–47 (33). Manuel Guzmán, ‘Pa’ la Escuelita con Mucho Cuida'o y or la Orillita': A Journey Through the Contested Terrains of the Nation and Sexual Orientation' in Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds), Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 209–230. Gopinath, p. 19. For a discussion of how ‘the homophobic discourse of impossibility promotes and structures’ the articulation of lesbian desire in American fiction, see Valerie Rohy, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 1. This is not the only Jewish stereotype Katz undermines. For example, debunking the myth that Jews are particularly adept with money, Tutsik wants to be a ‘respectable businessman’ but is a ‘financial failure’ (p. 186). Also, while Tutsik conforms to the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish man, Marek Fishbein subverts it. In contrast to Tutsik, who is ‘clean’ (p. 16), Fishbein is ‘filthy’ (p. 139), and where Tutsik is ‘tidy and immaculate’ (p. 69), Fishbein is a ‘slob’ (p. 156), a ‘mess of a man’ (p. 69). Mangan, p. 162. Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 7. Beckman, p. 6. Wesling, pp. 34–35. Gopinath, p. 14. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of Lublin, trans. Elaine Gottlieb and Joseph Singer (London: Penguin, 1979; first published in 1960), p. 11. Ibid., p. 40. Evelyn Torton Beck, ‘I. B. Singer's Misogyny’ in Evelyn Torton Beck (ed.), Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1982), pp. 243–249 (244). Mark Spilka, ‘Empathy with the Devil: Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Dead Pleasures of Misogyny’, Novel: A Forum for Fiction, 31.3 (Summer 1998), pp. 430–444 (437). Beck, p. 247. Spilka, p. 433. Ibid. p. 432. Del LaGrace Volcano and Judith Halberstam, The Drag King Book (London: Serpent's Tail, 1999). Sholom Asch, The God of Vengeance (Boston: The Stratford Company, 1918). Alpert, p. 125. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 79. Adam Philips, Houdini's Box: On the Arts of Escape (London: Faber, 2001). Gopinath, p. 3. Eliezer Schweid, ‘The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches’ in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds), Essential Papers on Zionism (London: Continuum, 1995), pp. 133–160. Lawrence Schimel, ‘Diaspora, Sweet Diaspora: Queer Culture Parallels to Post-Zionist Jewish Identity’ in Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel (eds), Pomosexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality (San Francisco: Cleis, 1997), pp. 163–173. Butler, who describes herself as ‘a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest’, identifies as post-Zionist. See Regina Michalik, ‘Interview with Judith Butler’ and Judith Butler, ‘No, it's not anti-Semitic’, London Review of Books, 25.16, 21 August 2003, pp. 19–21, http://www.lolapress.org/elec2/artenglish/butl_e.htm (accessed 10 March 2011). Bob Cant (ed.), Invented Identities? Lesbians and Gays Talk about Migration (London: Cassell, 1997), pp. 2–3. Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘“Coming home”: queer migrations and multiple evocations of home’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001), pp. 405–424 (409). Ibid., pp. 405, 409, 414. A ‘man's item shall not be on a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman's garment; whoever does such a thing is an abhorrence unto Adonai’ (Deuteronomy 22.5). Gopinath, p. 174. Naomi Scheman, ‘Jewish Lesbian Writing: A Review Essay’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 7.4 (Fall 1992), pp. 186–194 (187). Katz, backcover. Freedman, p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 90. Gopinath, p. 21. Sarah Waters, ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Meagher's The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’, Women: A Cultural Review, 7.2 (1996), pp. 176–188 (176). Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘Hanka’ in Passions and Other Stories (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 7–25 (12). Isaac Bashevis Singer, Scum (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). Sholom Aleichem, ‘The Man from Buenos Aires’ in Tevye's Daughters, trans Frances Butwin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), pp. 128–140. Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Racquel Liberman (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 17. Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 31. Bravmann, pp. 97, 113. Laura Doan and Sarah Waters, ‘Making up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’ in David Alderson and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 12–28 (24). See Siddharth Ashok Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 25. Wesling, p. 40. Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, trans Thomas Colchie (New York: Knopf, 1979; first published in 1976) features a queer man, Molina, imprisoned for ‘perversion’ during the ‘Dirty War’. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's ‘Dirty War’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 11. Joan Nestle, ‘How a “Liberationist” Fem Understands Being a Queer Jew, or How Taking Advice From a Prophet, Even a Jewish One, Is (Un)transformative’ in David Shneer and Carvyn Aviv (eds), Queer Jews (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 23–26 (24). Mangan, p. vx. Ibid.