Cops, Robbers, and Anarcho-terrorists: Crime and Magical Realism’s Jewish Question

Summary

This essay considers the novels of two Israelis, The Zigzag Kid (1994, Eng. trans., 1997) by David Grossman and Four Mothers (1996, Eng. trans., 1999) by Shifra Horn, and four by American Jews: Leviathan (1992) by Paul Auster, Bee Season (2000) by Myla Goldberg, The Escape Artist (1997) by Judith Katz, and The Isaac Quartet (orig. 1974; most recent compilation, 2002) by Jerome Charyn. My aims in this essay are threefold: first, to call attention to the fact that there are a number of contemporary Jewish authors who may be understood and appreciated through the lens of magical realism. Although the genre is typically associated with the steamier climes of Latin America, magical realism nevertheless thrives on the streets of Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, and even Jewish suburbia which is found in most medium-to-large cities in the United States. Second, I wish to situate the above-mentioned self-consciously Jewish novels in the realm of magical realism, and, third, to explore how the notion of Jewish criminality – intertwined with magical realism – unsettles the discourses of respectability which intersect each of these works. Jews in the modern, western, world (including Israel) are for the most part predictable and conventional members of the societies of which they are a part. These novels to be considered are worth exploring because they imagine Jews as straying (or being led astray) from their typical roles, and the approaches of the respective authors afford a different take on Jewish characters and situations than most ‘realistic’ Jewish fiction, such as in the novels of Philip Roth and A.B. Yehoshua. Despite the fact that at least two of the authors, Paul Auster and David Grossman, are well-known to the general public and consistently received as serious writers, subject to intense scholarly scrutiny, one finds little – if any – critical comment that touches upon the authors’ engagement with magical realism. That is, there is scant reflection of the requirement that readers must suspend belief in notions such as cause and effect, the universality of time, the force of gravity, and the accidental nature of coincidence – and assume that inexplicable and irrational forces, taking on a life of their own, animate the unfolding events.