CANR
WORK TITLE: Judenstaat
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1963
WEBSITE: https://simonezelitch.com/
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 217
https://simonezelitch.com/about-me/ * http://www.ccp.edu/college-catalog/college-faculty-staff/full-time-faculty-visiting-lecturers-instructional-aides#Z
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1963 in Philadelphia, PA; married Doug Bucholz (a professor); children: one stepdaughter.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, B.A.; University of Michigan, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, creative writing instructor; University of Veszprem, Hungary, Peace Corps teacher, 1991-92; Community College of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, instructor and director of poets and writers series; University of the Arts, teacher; University of Pennsylvania College of General Studies, teacher.
AWARDS:Hopwood Award, University of Michigan, for The Confession of Jack Straw; University of the Arts Venture Fund grant; Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowship; Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers Prize, National Foundation of Jewish Culture, 2000, for Louisa; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, 2010.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
The Confession of Jack Straw and Louisa
Simone Zelitch’s historical novel The Confession of Jack Straw is a story of a failed fourteenth-century English peasant revolt as told through Jack Straw’s confession on the eve of his execution. There was, in fact, a real Straw figure, Michael Row, whose confession was purportedly written down by clergy before his head was displayed on London Bridge. Zelitch adds to what is known and creates a tale that includes Straw’s crippled sister Jenny and John Ball, the latter a parson who takes Straw on as an apprentice and teaches him to read. When Ball is imprisoned, Straw petitions the lords, leads a group of peasants to Rochester Castle in an attempt to free him, and then continues on to London. More supporters join the peasants, who are loyal to King Richard and blame his uncle John for their plight. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that “the Middle Ages are rendered not on silver platters or thrones but on the dusty roads and straw beds of peasants, who are given center stage here, not limited to comic relief.” Choice‘s J. Sudrann wrote that the author’s skill “not only enables her to walk this tightrope between fact and fiction without faltering but also to link the triumph and betrayal of these peasants.”
Zelitch’s second novel, Louisa, is a reworking of the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi. Before writing it, Zelitch spent two years with the Peace Corps, teaching in Hungary. There she visited the sites of former Jewish communities, as well as cemeteries and the ruins of synagogues. She also traveled to Israel where she spoke to people old enough to have experienced World War II and remember the years following it. She also spoke with historians and found museums filled with artifacts that helped her construct the period about which she would be writing.
Reviewing Louisa in the Washington Post Book World, Judith Bolton-Fasman wrote that “while there are parallel stories throughout, most obviously between Louisa and Ruth and Nora and Naomi, there is also plenty of room for the kind of narrative elaboration offered by midrash or interpretative stories. And Louisa is in many ways an extended midrash with imaginative riffs on memory.”
Nora, the narrator, is a bitter, chain-smoking survivor of the Nazi extermination of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and Louisa is her twenty-two-year-old Christian German daughter-in-law who insists on accompanying her to Israel after its creation in 1949. Earlier in her life Nora had been briefly married to a man who abandoned her and who was the father of her son, Gabor. Louisa is sixteen years old when she becomes infatuated with Gabor, a composer who takes advantage of her and plans to use their marriage as a way to escape persecution. When the Nazis invade Budapest, Gabor is killed, and Louisa hides Nora, saving her life. Nora allows Louisa to cling to her only because of that debt. Nora has only one living relative, her cousin Bela, with whom she had a very close relationship and secretly loves. Bela immigrated to British Palestine in 1920, and Nora is hopeful that they will be reunited when she reaches Israel. When she does find Bela, she learns that his life has been no more fulfilling than hers. “Zelitch’s narrative teases with emotional puzzles and surprises with unexpected developments,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. “She shows virtuosic skill with background and atmosphere.”
David Sacks wrote in a New York Times Book Review article that “the flashbacks to the teenage couple’s Budapest romance are among the book’s best scenes—cruel yet hilarious. . . . Of all the novel’s successes, the portrait of Louisa steals the show. Deftly, the author conveys the eerie tenacity and resourcefulness that lie behind her deceptively timid manner. . . . In her foolishness over Gabor or in the Israeli refugee camp where she’s taunted by German-hating survivors, Louisa seems a complete victim. Yet, like others of history’s persecuted, she endures and triumphs.” Louisa learns Hebrew and converts, becoming even more dedicated in her faith than the other immigrants. Sacks compared Louisa to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Family Moskat and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and said that “remarkably, Zelitch’s book holds its own, thanks to a satisfying plot, vivid characters, a tart narrative voice, and a bold conceit. . . . While often poignant, the storytelling avoids melodrama, self-righteousness, and graphic horror—all the pitfalls of Holocaust fiction. Instead, suspense, surprising revelations, and dry humor enliven the mix. The result is a wonderfully bittersweet work that broods on loss even as it affirms human resilience, connection, and a faith in providence.”
Booklist‘s Michelle Kaske wrote, “Zelitch’s talent shines in this well-paced epic novel.” “Readers may appreciate the historical and political events surrounding the story,” said Cathleen A. Towey in Library Journal. In the Philadelphia City Paper online, Kelly McQuain wrote that Nora’s “tales loop back through time, saturated with the weight of the past. Often, her personal spin obscures objective reality—and that’s when the novel becomes an act of imagination as much as memory. Nora describes events she couldn’t possibly have been privy to, but she works her words like smoke breathed into just-blown glass: impossibility lessens to improbability, which in turn swirls into something exquisite and new—a lie more precious than truth. The force and utter conviction of Nora’s take on events drives the book forward, while her prickly demeanor soon proves to be a mask.”
Moses in Sinai and Waveland
A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Moses in Sinai a “dark follow-up” to Louisa, “a literary impression of the biblical hero Moses, painting his life as one continuous horror.” As in the traditional story of Moses, the baby is put in the river after Pharaoh orders the deaths of Jewish male children. In this version, however, the baby’s father weighs him down with a stone in his mouth, hoping that he will drown swiftly and silently. Moses’s sister Miriam, a witch, spirits him to Pharaoh’s insane daughter, who gives him a live coal to suck on, leaving the child disfigured and with a speech impediment. She treats the child like a pet, then loves him as a man; when he learns he is not Egyptian and begins to question the slavery of the Jews, Moses deserts her to lead the Hebrews to Sinai. Moses’s brother Aaron, a homosexual high priest in the temple of Seth, helps him rally the people, but these Hebrews are content using magic, worshiping idols, and being slaves. Melanie C. Duncan wrote in Library Journal that the Moses of Moses in Sinai “appears predominantly as a madman, almost a cultlike figure destined to lead disbelieving tribes of slaves into the wilderness to freedom.” Kaske maintained that fans of biblical fiction “will enjoy this book.”
Waveland is set during the civil rights turbulence of the mid-1960s. The novel is named for the small Mississippi town where northern activists, many of them white and many Jewish, gathered to take part in grass-roots voter registration drives and related civil-rights endeavors. The protagonist is Beth Fine, a student at Swarthmore who is recruited by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee at just the right moment in her life, when she wants desperately to do something to make a difference. After she heads south, the novel focuses on the friction between whites and blacks in the movement and in the towns they travel to. It also explores the differing motivations of the volunteers and differences in the overall philosophies of organizers of the movement, with some wanting to focus on short-term goals, others wanting to effect widespread societal change. In the course of events, Beth has a biracial child, and the novel provides a retrospective view of events as Beth and the father later attend their daughter’s graduation from Stanford.
Linda Mather, writing on the Peace Corps Web site, was left dissatisfied with Waveland, arguing that the motivations of the characters, especially Beth, were unclear and that the connection between the actions of Beth and others and the historical framework was flimsy. Mather concluded: “The reader is left wanting to take [Beth] by the shoulders and shake her.” Holly Cara Price, however, writing for the Huffington Post, offered a more positive assessment of the novel, writing: “Zelitch vividly brings the 1964 southern summer to life and perfectly captures what it is to be young, and brash, and uncaring of any consequence.” Price added that the author’s “prose is absolutely delicious.”
Judenstaat
The startling premise of Judenstaat is that in the wake of the atrocities of World War II, a Jewish state was created not in Palestine but in Saxony, a region east of Berlin, Germany, on the border of Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The Jewish state was created in Germany by so-called Righteous Gentile Germans who wanted to atone for the Holocaust by providing reparations for Europe’s surviving Jews, and provide them with a homeland. The state’s citizens, however, live in uneasy circumstances. Many people, including anti-Semitic Saxons, hope that the state fails. “Cosmopolitans” in the cities have no interest in anything beyond narrow self-interest. The “black hats,” or ultra-Orthodox Jews, segregate themselves and resist the laws imposed on them by the larger socialist state. Meanwhile, fascists from Germany and Russia pose an ongoing threat, which had led to the creation of a wall surrounding the state but that is now in the process of being dismantled. The story is set in 1988, when Judit Klemmer, a research librarian, is given the task of making a documentary film in celebration of the anniversary of the state’s founding and as a way of boosting national pride. But as Judit investigates her nation’s history, she begins to uncover a web of lies and evasions about the past. She learns of the mysterious disappearance of one of the nation’s founders. Then she receives a note—”They lied about the murder”—prompting her to investigate the murder of her husband, a Saxon orchestra conductor who was killed four years earlier, if in fact that is who the note is referring to. As she conducts her investigation, she finds herself harassed by agents of the state, and she comes to understand that the identity of the enemies of the state are difficult to identify. Ultimately, she comes to question the myths surrounding the founding of the nation as she recognizes that large numbers of people have disappeared and many official lies have been foisted on the citizens.
Judenstaat was widely reviewed and widely admired. Michael Alec Rose, in a review for BookPage, called the novel “page-turning” and praised the author for the “uncanny precision with which she has deftly transformed the threads of actual events into the stunning new fabric of her novel.” Booklist‘s Sarah Johnston commented that “character motivations are sometimes murky” yet felt that the author provides a “meticulous portrait” of her fictional country. A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded by calling the novel “a philosophically resonant tale about the shaping, and force, of collective memory.” Martin Green, writing on the Jewish Book Council Web site, found the novel to be “provocative,” one that “raises some profound questions about the cost of the Zionist enterprise.” In a review for Forward, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld called the novel “absorbing” and observed: “Judenstaat is cleverly plotted. The book imaginatively conveys its story not merely through prose, but also through found documents, descriptions of film clips and transcribed audio snippets. Zelitch is to be particularly commended for avoiding the interminable exposition that is the bane of so many works of alternate history.” A reviewer for the Reading the End Web site concluded that Zelitch “resists easy answers in this book, which offers no tidy solutions but only questions upon questions upon questions.” In a review for Tor.com, Liz Bourke remarked: “Judenstaat is not an ordinary genre novel: It rejects entirely the usual conventions of the field in favour of a meditation on memory and amnesia, nation-building and atrocity, colonisation and collective revenge.” Bourke went on to note: “Its argument is an ambitious one, about identity and about the politicisation of various kinds of truth, for as Judith discovers, Judenstaat is founded not just as a response to atrocity, but has an atrocity of its own as one of its founding acts.” Finally, Molly Odintz, in a review for the Mystery People Web site, enthused: “Simone Zelitch’s novel Judenstaat is one of those rare fictional works that has content truly representative of the complexities of history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August, 2000, Michelle Kaske, review of Louisa, p. 2118; December 1, 2001, Michelle Kaske, review of Moses in Sinai, p. 632; May 15, 2016, Sarah Johnston, review of Judenstaat, p. 25.
Choice, December, 1991, J. Sudrann, review of The Confession of Jack Straw, p. 598.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1991, review ofThe Confession of Jack Straw, p. 436; April 15, 2016, review of Judenstaat.
Library Journal, August, 2000, Cathleen A. Towey, review of Louisa, p. 164; February 1, 2002, Melanie C. Duncan, review of Moses in Sinai, p. 82.
New York Times Book Review, November 19, 2000, David Sacks, review of Louisa, p. 71; January 27, 2002, Scott Beale, review of Louisa, p. 24.
Publishers Weekly, July 24, 2000, review of Louisa, p. 66; November 5, 2001, review of Moses in Sinai, p. 41.
Washington Post Book World, October 15, 2000, Judith Bolton-Fasman, review of Louisa, p. 6.
BookPage, July, 2016, Michael Alec Rose, review of Judenstaat, p. 24.
ONLINE
Bookreporter.com, http:// www.bookreporter.com/ (October 13, 2000), “Simone Zelitch” (interview).
Community College of Philadelphia, http://path.ccp.edu/ (May 5, 2017), faculty profile.
Forward, http://forward.com/ (August 3, 2016), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, review of Judenstaat.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (September 10, 2015), Holly Cara Price, review of Waveland.
Jewish Book Council, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (May 5, 2017), Martin Green, review of Judenstaat.
Mystery People, https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/ (August 10, 2016), Molly Odintz, review of Judenstaat.
National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/ (May 5, 2017), author statement.
Peace Corps, http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/ (June 15, 2016), Linda Mather, review of Waveland.
Peace Corps Writers Web site, http://peacecorpswriters.org/ (January, 2000), Simone Zelitch, “The Ashtray; or, How I Wrote Louisa ” (interview).
Philadelphia City Paper Online http://www.citypaper.net/ (October 5, 2000), Kelly McQuain, “Rethinking Ruth” (interview).*
Reading the End, http://readingtheend.com/ (December 12, 2016).
Simon Zelitch Home Page, https://simonezelitch.com/ (May 5, 2017).
Tor.com, http://www.tor.com/ (June 30, 2016), Liz Bourke, review of Judenstaat.*
About Me
Growing up in Philadelphia, I first became interested in historical fiction when I attended the Jewish Day School, Akiba Hebrew Academy, and was exposed to Midrash, a form of scriptural commentary that retold familiar stories by elaborating on the lives of marginal characters or adding new dimensions to familiar figures. My novel, Moses in Sinai, continued that tradition, using Arabian Nights-style storytelling to subvert familiar figures such as Moses, Miriam and Aaron.
I have never stopped being fascinated by people or events that are written out of history. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, I majored, informally, in “failed revolutions,” and my interest in Medieval history and literature led to a fellowship to England. I was nineteen when I started my first novel, The Confession of Jack Straw which recounted a 14th Century peasant uprising from the peasants’ point of view. The novel, revised at the University of Michigan, won a Hopwood Award and was published by Black Heron Press in 1991, the same press that later published Moses in Sinai.
After five years as a Visiting Lecturer at Southern Illinois University, I joined the Peace Corps in 1991 and spent two years teaching in Hungary, where I began my novel, Louisa, a modern adaptation of the biblical Book of Ruth. Louisa is narrated by a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who emigrates to Israel in 1949, accompanied by her German, non-Jewish daughter-in-law. On returning to Philadelphia, I continued my research through a grant from the University of the Arts Venture Fund and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, returning to Hungary and traveling to Israel, where much of that novel takes place.
Louisa was published by Penguin-Putnam in 2001. It received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus, and received praise from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. The novel received the Goldberg Prize for Emerging Jewish Fiction. As a result of the publicity generated by Louisa, I was asked to include a piece for The Lost Tribe Anthology and invited to write Hanukah stories for National Public Radio. Two of the stories were included in the NPR broadcast and one was featured in the published anthology Hanukah Lights. I married my husband, Doug Buchholz the same year that Louisa was accepted for publication.
Louisa is only available “new” as a Kindle book or through Print on Demand. On the other hand, Black Heron Press has kept Jack Straw and Moses in Sinai in print. Why do we write and go on writing? Yes, I want my work read, and yes, I still believe in a vetting process and reviews. At the same time, in the years since Louisa’s publication, the world has changed and will go on changing.
sncc1My novel Waveland. which follows the story of a wayward, brave and troubled Freedom Summer volunteer, has just been released by a press that is a response to this Brave New World, The Head and the Hand, a “craft publisher” that is defiantly locavore, attentive to detail, and adept at social media. Their books are gorgeous, and they may well be the future of publishing.
My imaginary country has a flag: it's made from the uniform of a Holocaust survivor.
My imaginary country has a flag: it’s made from the uniform of a Holocaust survivor.
At the same time, I will admit to being gratified to learn that a recent manuscript was accepted by Tor, an old-school publisher of Science Fiction. I recieved a a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction on the basis of a chapter of this very strange novel, Judenstaat, an alternative history which owes something to George Orwell and Philip K. Dick. Judenstaat considers the consequences of a Jewish state established in Germany. Even novels about invented history require research, and Judenstaat led me to study Yiddish in Vilna, as well as to travel to former East Germany and once again, to Israel, where I took a careful look at how difficult history was presented and erased in monuments and museums across both countries. I completed that book during residences at Yaddo, the Edward Albee Barn, and I-Park.
Since my return to Philadelphia, I have taught at Community College of Philadelphia where I established a Creative Writing Certificate Program and Coordinate their English Degree. I have also taught at the University of the Arts and the University of Pennsylvania’s College of General Studies where I designed a six-week course on Writing and Researching Historical Fiction. My novels have been taught at colleges throughout the country, most notably at the University of Miami, where Moses in Sinai is assigned reading in a class called “Bad Jews.”
Simone Zelitch
2010 Prose
Author's Statement
My phone call from the NEA came less than a week after I'd completed the first readable draft of Judenstaat. So much time had passed since I submitted my application that I'd literally forgotten what I'd sent: an early version of the first few chapters. Certainly, the most significant impact of this fellowship is the vote of confidence it gives to my very strange novel. I have been struggling with Judenstaat for nearly five years, and only a handful of people had read the chapters I'd submitted. I'm grateful that I had the good sense to offer the panel rough, new work, as it means that the fellowship was awarded not on the basis of what I've already done, but where I'm going.
In the past few years, much of my energy has gone into teaching at a community college, and building a creative writing program. Once, I dreamt that I told a group of hostile students that I hadn't marked their papers because I was finishing a chapter of my novel, and the students laughed maniacally and shouted, "You're not a writer! You're a teacher." Of course, I'm both, but it's often difficult to say as much to students who have good reason to demand my full attention. Essentially, the NEA has given me the resources to focus on revising and enriching Judenstaat through revision and further research in Germany and elsewhere (yes, alternative histories do require real research), and it has also given me permission to insist that writing is an urgent business, with its own set of obligations. That, in itself, is a valuable lesson for my students.
Simone Zelitch, is the author of three novels, The Confession of Jack Straw (Black Heron Press, 1991), Moses in Sinai (Black Heron Press, 2001), and Louisa (G. P. Putnum's & Sons, 2000), which was the recipient of the Goldberg Prize in Emerging Jewish Fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe Anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hannukah Lights. Recent honors include residencies at the Edward Albee Barn and I-Park. A former Peace Corps volunteer, she has taught in Hungary, and at Southern Illinois University, the University of the Art,s and the University of Pennsylvania College of General Studies. She is Associate Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, where she directs the Certificate Program in Creative Writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Doug Buchholz and his daughter Jane.
Simone Zelitch, (szelitch@ccp.edu) is the author of three novels, including Louisa. Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe Anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hannukah Lights. Recent honors include a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant in Fiction, and residencies at the Edward Albee Barn and I-Park. She has taught in Michigan, Illinois, Hungary and at the University of Pennsylvania, and directs the Certificate Program in Creative Writing at the Community College of Philadelphia.
Judenstaat
Michael Alec Rose
(July 2016): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
JUDENSTAAT
By Simone Zelitch
Tor
$25.99, 320 pages
ISBN 9780765382962
eBook available
ALTERNATE HISTORY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Imagine a people beleaguered by enemies throughout the ages, and at last murdered by the millions, in the heart of the civilized world. Imagine that this catastrophe leads directly to a political solution for the survivors: a sovereign state, an ingathering of the displaced remnant, in a land full of historical resonance for this wandering people. Imagine that this new Jewish state is founded on a combination of the visionary socialist idealism of its founders and the opportunistic cynicism of the world's superpowers. Finally, imagine that its founding is possible only through the displacement of the region's non-Jewish population, with tragic and ongoing consequences.
Sound familiar? It had better! It is the universally known and endlessly argued story of Judenstaat, the wonder of the postwar era, the Jewish state founded in 1948 on lands formerly known as Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia ... or did I mean to say Israel, founded on lands formerly known as Palestine?
The glory of Simone Zelitch's page-turning alternate history is the uncanny precision with which she has deftly transformed the threads of actual events into the stunning new fabric of her novel. The verisimilitude of the tale grows in the telling: It is a Jewish historian who is our heroine, her self-appointed task to uncover the troubling facts of Judenstaat's founding. Her mission is fueled by the murder of her husband, a Saxon who knew too much, adding a mystery element to this compelling story. From the very beginning--Abraham, Jacob, David--it has always been the leaders with uneasy consciences who have kept the flame of Jewish ethics alive. Despite its status as fiction, Judenstaat is now an indispensable text in that history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rose, Michael Alec. "Judenstaat." BookPage, July 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456480892&it=r&asid=e205efd0ac95c9fa653fcd58fd50b10b. Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456480892
Judenstaat
Sarah Johnston
112.18 (May 15, 2016): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Judenstaat. By Simone Zelitch. June 2016.320p. Tor, $25.99 (9780765382962).
"The very place we faced our death is where we'll build our lives." Imagine that a Jewish state was established in 1948, not in Israel but rather in Saxony, both as reparation for Jews after the Holocaust and to hold Germany in check. Award-winning novelist Zelitch (Waveland, 2015) takes this daring idea and runs with it, presenting a meticulous portrait of the fictional country of Judenstaat over four decades, beginning with its founding and subsequent Soviet occupation. In 1987, in this alternative history, Judit Klemmer, a Jewish archivist at the National Museum in Dresden, is crafting a fortieth-anniversary documentary when questions are raised about her Saxon husband's murder three years earlier. Her discoveries bring to light a devastating cover-up. Character motivations are sometimes murky, and although Judenstaat's story has a logical flow, it takes a while to piece it together (peeking at the chronology at the end will help). Zelitch's tale invites discussion of the politics of national identity, and it's also fascinating to see how the historical divergence of the premise illuminates people's cultural and religious values.--Sarah Johnson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Johnston, Sarah. "Judenstaat." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913591&it=r&asid=4693fea96c42946c870c036e1d20248e. Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453913591
Zelitch, Simone: JUDENSTAAT
(Apr. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Zelitch, Simone JUDENSTAAT Tor (Adult Fiction) $25.99 6, 21 ISBN: 978-0-7653-8296-2
A determined archivist struggles to find truth. In the "what if" genre of historical fiction, Zelitch (Waveland, 2015, etc.) imagines a postwar Jewish state not in Israel but in Saxony, east of Berlin, on the border of Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Created in 1948, Judenstaat is celebrating its 40th anniversary by making a documentary film to shore up national pride. In charge of research is librarian Judit Klemmer, a young woman frustrated by lies and evasions as she tries to "make sense of things that everybody knew, and no one would acknowledge....For forty years," she thinks, "our country has been buried alive." Intended as a "national project of reparation and even retribution for the Holocaust," Judenstaat was supported by "Righteous Gentile" Germans. But it has existed uneasily among many who would prefer to see it fail: anti-Semitic Saxons, who "denied any Jewish claim to the land"; cynical Cosmopolitans, loyal only to themselves; angry fundamentalist Jews known as black-hats; and fascists from Germany and Russia. Judenstaat was so vulnerable that it began surrounded by a wall, which now is being taken down. Judit's mother is not alone in feeling fearful: "We have so many enemies," she tells Judit, "and isn't that all the more reason to secure our borders?" But Judit realizes that the state's enemies cannot easily be identified. Her own husband, a Saxon orchestra conductor, was slain, and Judit does not know who killed him, nor if he really is dead. She's haunted by a ghost who leaves her an unsettling message: "They lied about the murder." Whose murder? she wonders. So many have died; so many disappeared; so many lies have been presented as truth. Enmeshed in the past, Judit grapples with questions of justice, revenge, and trust. A philosophically resonant tale about the shaping, and force, of collective memory.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Zelitch, Simone: JUDENSTAAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449241040&it=r&asid=6b562ba18278f4e7e677ae0a3c29495c. Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449241040
Judenstaat
Simone Zelitch
Tor Books 2016
320 Pages $25.99
ISBN: 978-0765382962
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Martin Green
Simone Zelitch’s fiction—Judenstaat is her fifth novel—ranges over wide swaths of history, from Moses and the Exodus (Moses in Sinai), medieval rebellion (The Confession of Jack Straw), post-Holocaust survivors in Israel (Louisa), and the American civil rights movement (Waveland). Most of her work, she notes on her website, is rooted in Midrash and thus does not adhere literally to verifiable historical fact (where we know it); rather, her characters and situations build on the known or the traditional view to strive for new meanings and interpretation. In Judenstaat, she presents a Midrash on the meaning of Jewish identity and nationalistic aspiration in the wake of the Holocaust by putting forth an alternative history of the Jewish State called for in Herzl’s late-nineteenth century pamphlet of the same title. The twist here is that the Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust—or the Churban, as the characters in the novel refer to it—is not in Eretz Yisrael but in the East German state of Saxony, which the survivors of the camps have seized with the help of Soviet troops.
Zelitch’s protagonist is Judit Ginsberg Klemmer, an archivist-filmmaker working at the National Library in Judenstaat’s capital of Dresden. Forty years after the “liberation” and the founding of the state, Judit is tasked with making a commemorative film, just as the world outside Judenstaat is changing and its role in it is likewise undergoing a metamorphosis. Judit’s work is also shadowed by a personal tragedy and the two strands of the national and personal come together in what becomes her quest for understanding of the deeper roots of Judenstaat’s founding.
Alternate history has long roots in science fiction and has recently attracted more mainstream authors. Zelitch claims affiliation with Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi alternate post-World-War-II historical novel The Man in the High Castle (the basis of Amazon’s recent streaming series), in which Japan and Germany conquer and divide the United States, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which a fascist-leaning Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States in 1940 and makes life difficult for American Jews. Also relevant is Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which rests on a similar premise to Zelitch’s novel (the Jewish post-Holocaust homeland is not Israel but the region around Sitka, Alaska!) and also involves a genre plot (two Jewish policemen investigate a series of murders).
The success or failure of such ventures into “what-if” fictions is based on the credibility of the details and the frisson of recognition the reader feels when confronted with the distorting mirror of these alternate worlds. Zelitch provides many moments of such responses. One detail that can be disclosed without unduly spoiling the plot for prospective readers is the presence in Judenstaat of a large minority population of “black hats,” ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, who have their own neighborhood and operate outside the laws of the socialist-dominated Judenstaat. Zelitch sketches in details of the state’s founding and development and alludes to its past political disputes and disruptions without bogging the plot down in copious exposition (an appendix provides a timeline). This allusiveness makes Judit’s quest for understanding more dramatically real as the reader tries to piece together what happened in the founding years along with her. On the negative side, aspects of the central mystery Judit tries to unravel remain somewhat unresolved by the novel’s end.
The novel’s allusions to “real-world” events outside of Judenstaat raise interesting questions about the contingent nature of history. In the novel, set in the 1980s, the Soviet Union, Judenstaat’s erstwhile protector, is on the verge of Perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev puts in a cameo appearance. Would history develop along lines that lead directly to today’s world if such a profound change as the founding of Israel were erased, or if, indeed, a Jewish state had replaced the East German Democratic Republic?
Zelitch does not sacrifice her characters in favor of the ideas of the novel. While Judit herself is a somewhat passive character (questers generally tend to be blank spaces in novels of this type), she is surrounded by a number of colorful figures that Zelitch brings to life with skill. Highly memorable are Judit’s mother, Leonora, a Holocaust survivor, and Judit’s former history professor, a Hannah Arendt-like chain-smoking polymath. The dominant figure in the novel, Judenstaat’s founder, Leopold Stein, is not present for much of the novel, having disappeared years ago; but his words and ideas and his blurry images in old films that Judit discovers bring him to the forefront.
Like Ari Shavit’s recent book about the founding of Israel, My Promised Land, Zelitch’s Judenstaat raises some profound questions about the cost of the Zionist enterprise. Shavit struggles to understand the implication for modern Israel of the layers of denial and violence involved in its founding, such as the massacre of Palestinians in what became Lod, the neighborhood of Ben Gurion Airport. In Judenstaat, Judit finds similar questions haunting her work, but the reader is left to wonder what the future implications will be of her discoveries, as Judenstaat stands on the brink of a new era. Zelitch succeeds admirably in raising, if not fully answering, such questions in this provocative novel.
After the Holocaust, A Jewish State in Saxony
Gavriel D. RosenfeldAugust 3, 2016Tor Publishers
Judenstaat
By Simone Zelitch
Tor Books, 320 pages, $12.99
Counterfactual history has never been more popular in American culture. The success of Amazon Prime’s recent hit series “The Man in the High Castle” (based on Philip K. Dick’s famous novel about the Nazis winning World War II) and the Hulu series “11.22.63” (based on Stephen King’s best-selling novel about John F. Kennedy not being assassinated) vividly illustrates how a historical “What if?” grips the popular imagination.
Among the topics that have garnered recent attention, one of the more intriguing involves the possibility that a Jewish state might not have taken shape in Israel. Adam Rovner’s recent historical study, “In the Shadow of Zion,” showed how Jews could have established a state in Angola, Suriname and Madagascar. Michael Chabon’s novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” imagined a Jewish territorial home being established in 1940 in Alaska. And historian Walter Laqueur’s essay “Disraelia” speculated that a Jewish polity might have emerged a century earlier in history — in 1848 — in the form of a Jewish-Arab-Kurdish federation ruled from the joint capitals of Mosul and Tel Aviv. These scenarios have sparked controversy by being expressed not as a past possibility but rather as a future one. Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s film trilogy, “And Europe Will Be Stunned,” made headlines for provocatively exploring the possibility of Jews returning to Poland, while anti-Zionists such as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Helen Thomas sparked outrage around the same time by calling for Israel’s Jews to “return to their homelands” in Central and Eastern Europe.
This frenzy of speculation provides the larger context for understanding the significance of Simone Zelitch’s absorbing new novel, “Judenstaat.” The novel’s premise is startlingly original. Rather than being established in British-ruled Palestine, the Jewish state is established in 1948 in the former German state of Saxony — then part of the Soviet zone of occupation. The notion of a Jewish state being established after the Holocaust in the land of the perpetrators is counterintuitive in the extreme. And so it is to Zelitch’s credit that she does not allow readers much time to question its plausibility. Instead, she effectively sweeps up readers into a historical murder mystery involving an array of well-developed characters pursuing competing agendas in a world that is both strange and familiar.
Author: Simone Zelitch
Courtesy of Simone Zelitch
Author: Simone Zelitch
Set in the late 1980s, the novel focuses on the struggles of its protagonist, Judit Klemmer (née Ginsburg), to come to grips with her country’s past while simultaneously dealing with personal tragedy. An employee of Judenstaat’s National Museum, in Dresden, Klemmer has been tasked with producing a documentary film for the 40th anniversary of the state’s founding. At the same time, she continues to cope with the emotional trauma of her husband Hans Klemmer’s murder four years earlier.
Zelitch deftly weaves the personal and political, taking her time in revealing the tragic ways in which the fates of Judenstaat’s Jewish citizens are intertwined with those of their Saxon neighbors. Judenstaat, as portrayed in the novel, is highly divided. Politically, the state is split between nationalistic Bundists, led by the Munich-born Leopold Stein, and more universalistically oriented “cosmopolitans,” led by the (now-exiled) Stephen Weiss. Socially, there are deep religious splits between secular Jews and Hasidim as well as between proponents of the German and Yiddish languages. And there are deep divisions between Jews and Saxons. Although the latter are mostly expelled into Germany at the end of World War II, some continue to live in Judenstaat, one of the more important — prior to his murder — being Klemmer’s husband, Hans.
Klemmer is a loyal Bundist and largely accepts the regime’s official version of the state’s history. But the loss of her husband and the occurrence of several mysterious encounters early in the novel prompt her to critically examine Judenstaat’s founding myths and uncover unsettling truths.
Without divulging major spoilers, these truths generally involve the morally questionable relationship between Judenstaat’s founding father, Stein, and the Soviet Union — a relationship that places the Jewish state in the service of the Communist Bloc for the next 40 years and leads it to undertake questionable policies, such as sending troops to help crush the “fascist-led” Prague Spring in 1968. As the novel unfolds, Klemmer finds increasingly disturbing evidence of Judenstaat’s morally flawed foundation and debates whether to bring it to the public’s attention by incorporating it into her documentary. This is an especially vexing decision, due to the fact that her country in the late 1980s is pursuing a more open relationship to the world under the reformist Prime Minister Sokolov, who is working with the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, on behalf of Glasnost. Klemmer’s ultimate decision provides the novel with its dramatic climax and its satisfyingly ambiguous conclusion.
“Judenstaat” can profitably be read at face value as a tale about Germans and Jews after the Holocaust, but at a deeper level it is an allegory about the current relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
Throughout the novel, readers can easily substitute Palestinians for Saxons and interpret the counterfactual experiences of the latter as symbolizing the real historical experiences of the former. At times, the interchangeability is explicit, as when Klemmer recalls a graduate school debate on the respective merits of “the Jewish Narrative” and “the Saxon Narrative” about the demolition of Saxon homes to make way for archaeological excavations seeking Jewish artifacts to bolster claims to an Ashkenazic presence in Saxony. In the process, “Judenstaat” engages in the ongoing debate between Zionists and post-Zionists about how to regard Israeli history and memory.
Readers may disagree about whether the narrative reflects a counterfactual indictment or defense of Israeli history. On the one hand, much of the novel reads as a thinly veiled critique of present-day Israeli policy. For example, Judenstaat erects a “protective rampart” surrounding the country in the 1950s to protect it from Saxon infiltrators, just as the Israeli government erected a “security fence” to fend off Palestinian attackers. Judenstaat is further portrayed as an internationally isolated state with a powerful security apparatus (known as the “Stasi”) that has embraced nationalism over universalism. On the other hand, by portraying a European-based Jewish state in critical terms, the novel rejects present-day claims that Jews would be better off in Europe than in the Middle East. “Judenstaat” suggests that the creation of a Jewish state was bound to displace another group wherever it was established.
“Judenstaat” is cleverly plotted. The book imaginatively conveys its story not merely through prose, but also through found documents, descriptions of film clips and transcribed audio snippets. Zelitch is to be particularly commended for avoiding the interminable exposition that is the bane of so many works of alternate history.
At the same time, however, this important virtue of the novel is also its chief liability. Zelitch is overly parsimonious in establishing the plausibility of her novel’s core counterfactual premise. By neglecting to explain how, for instance, the Soviet Union is able to bring about the creation of a Jewish state in Saxony after 1945, she dilutes some of her tale’s believability. The same is true of her failure to explain why the “experiment” that England and the Zionist movement pursued in Palestine met with failure. Finally, some readers may question the likelihood of a Bundist-run state being founded by a secular German Jew in postwar Germany (Bundism having been largely an Eastern European phenomenon).
Had Zelitch wrestled more directly with these important issues, “Judenstaat” would be a stronger work of alternate history. Yet it remains an engrossing tale. Readers willing to suspend their disbelief about the origins of Zelitch’s alternate world will appreciate the provocative questions “Judenstaat” raises about the world of today.
Gavriel Rosenfeld’s new edited book, “What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism,” will be published in September by Cambridge University Press.
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/346091/after-the-holocaust-a-jewish-state-in-saxony/
09/10/2015 05:23 pm ET | Updated Sep 10, 2016
Book Review: Waveland by Simone Zelitch
By Holly Cara Price
Since the recent publication of Simone Zelitch’s fourth novel, Waveland (The Head and the Hand Press), there have been such a spate of racist and violent events in this country that one could be forgiven for believing we are still somehow mired in the hate and horror of the early 1960’s. It actually causes this book to be all the more relevant and worth reading in these strangely polarizing times.
2015-09-09-1441820266-7769985-wavelandcover.JPG
Waveland, named for the town in Mississippi where activists gathered in 1964 to discuss the future of “the Movement,” is the skillfully researched tale of a young woman who drives her rickety car down South to throw in with other young whites who earnestly aimed to change the status quo of this country. History tells that almost a thousand Northern college students traveled to Mississippi that year to help out in local communities as needed and register voters.
“Once there was a girl who did everything wrong,” the book begins. Some time in the future, Beth is telling her daughter Tamara about the time she participated in a 1963 wade-in to desegregate a public pool near her Philadelphia home. The police arrested all the black demonstrators and left her, the only white person to join them, behind. “Back then, Beth Fine, age twenty, was always, relentlessly occupied. It was as though if she let herself stop moving, something terrible would happen. Everything about her in those days was marked by acute anxiety: buggy hazel eyes, frizzy red hair, a chin wrinkly with concentration. She would storm into rooms, or back into furniture. There wasn’t a door she wouldn’t slam. In those days, if a gesture wasn’t emphatic, it seemed, to her, half-hearted, and force was a form of honesty.”
Beth is recruited at Swarthmore by SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) for the Mississippi Summer Project. Like many of her generation, and especially at that time, she’s just been waiting for the right moment to come along so she can begin her real life. The recruiter fires her up with his speech: “We are David facing Goliath. We are Gideon’s army, outnumbered, and you all have to be our trumpet. We may not have watches, but we know what time it is. That’s why we all say Freedom Now. Not someday. Now! Hear me, brothers. Freedom!”
Zelitch vividly brings the 1964 southern summer to life and perfectly captures what it is to be young, and brash, and uncaring of any consequence: “They were on the world’s edge. Like Beth, they took delight in not being afraid. Soon they would be afraid, not just of sheriffs, unmarked cars, and jail cells, or of the federal government. Fatally, they would be afraid of each other. They would think of the times when they could make open challenges this easily, and they would not believe those times existed. The old bond between them would break, maybe because it had to, maybe because they’d planned, from the start, to make themselves obsolete, maybe because only so many people can fit into a room, and no one wants to shut the door.” Her prose is absolutely delicious.
Amazingly, for such a fertile and deeply painful time in our history, there is not a lot of fiction based exclusively on the events of Freedom Summer, making Waveland stand out all the more. Writer Rosellen Brown, author of two books that are based on those events (Civil Wars; Half a Heart) praises Zeltch’s work thus: “In a variety of voices, Simone Zelitch has caught the complexity, the satisfaction, and the contradictions of those urgent times, and she’s quite remarkably given us more than a little of the generations before and after. Brave actions have consequences and this moving novel does honor to those who bore them.”
The writer asks that you track this book down in brick and mortar bookstores or via Small Press Distribution rather than via Amazon.
Review: Judenstaat, Simone Zelitch
In Simone Zelitch’s book Judenstaat (Tor, 2016), no Jewish state was created in territory that had once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Instead, Judenstaat was created in Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Forty years later, documentary filmmaker Judit Klemmer is creating a film about the state’s creation, while she is haunted by memories of her husband Hans, a Saxon conductor shot years ago as he conducted the National Symphony for the first time. When Judit receives a note saying simply They lied about the murder, she is plunged into a world of conflicting histories and conspiracy.
Judenstaat
So before I dive into talking about Judenstaat, let me say up front that I do not know much of anything about Israel and Palestine. One of these days I am going to have enough time to really dig deep into what’s going on over there, and at that time I will form an opinion, and hopefully it will be a non-stupid opinion. For now, I don’t know enough about it to speak intelligently, and I therefore cannot say anything about how (or even if, frankly) Judenstaat‘s reality speaks to that of our own world.
I also do not have more than a high-schooler’s grasp on World War II history. As I was finishing this book, there was a whole uproar on Twitter over a dude who was equating USSR treatment of Jews to Nazi treatment of Jews. Soviet anti-Semitism comes up in this book, and here again, I simply don’t have the historical background knowledge to be able to say whether Zelitch does a good job of treating real-world history in this work of alternate history. So if you have views about this in relation to Judenstaat, and you feel like popping into the comments and telling me about them, I’d love you to do that.
(Because this is fundamentally who I am as a person, I went hunting for some further background information and added some books to my intimidating nonfiction TBR list. That list is very long however. My quest to know everything will last me many years.)
That very long disclaimer is to say that I can only speak to Judenstaat insofar as it is kind of a murder mystery and very much a book about what nations permit their people to remember. And on those fronts, I think that it succeeds admirably. As Judit uncovers more footage from her country’s past, she realizes more and more that the tidy version of history in which she has always believed, the narrative of her country’s creation and the values on which it claims to be founded, is flawed and incomplete. Did I find this to be terrifyingly relevant as our country awaits the presidency of a bigoted demagogue with no experience in government who got elected anyway because white America doesn’t believe in equality nearly as much as we say we do? Yes, okay? Yes, I super did.
(I am finding all my books to be terrifyingly relevant lately. Selection bias or apophenia? YOU DECIDE.)
Zelitch sensibly doesn’t subject us to too many visits from the Exposition Fairy, which was great for the murder mystery but not so good for my poor brain as I tried to figure out Judit’s country timeline and what the official history was versus what she was discovering as she made her film. If you are planning to read Judenstaat, I recommend carving out some time to sit down and really get into it. Even knowing that I’d missed some details, though, this was a really terrific read. I kept thinking of all the countries where history that doesn’t fit tidily into a linear narrative of progress towards shared national values is discarded and discredited. Like: We shouldn’t be able to talk about our country’s founding, or the liberal idea of ourselves as “a nation of immigrants,” without addressing the fact that these ideas are predicated on the violent destruction of American Indians.
Or like (if you want to look at something a bit farther away): I read Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News earlier this year, which talked about (among other things) the fact that Paul Kagame — the hero who ended the Rwandan genocide — also invaded Congo and carried out mass atrocities against Hutu refugees in that country. In Rwanda, Sundaram reports, you can never talk about that. You can talk about how Kagame saved the country. You can talk about the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsis. History that doesn’t fit into that narrative isn’t welcome.
Judenstaat teaches Judit (and reminds us) that history is never so simple. Nobody can hold power and keep their hands clean. We need to have heroes, but even more (argues the book, and I argue it, too), we need to know the truth about them. We need to speak — shout! — the truth about their failures so that we can avoid repeating them. Even saying that is probably a simplification of Zelitch’s message: She resists easy answers in this book, which offers no tidy solutions but only questions upon questions upon questions.
So. You know. My favorite kind of thing. YMMV.
“Everyone Believes in Justice. What Else is There to Believe In?” Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch
Liz Bourke
Thu Jun 30, 2016 3:00pm 1 comment Favorite This
If I had ever read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I suspect Simone Zelitch’s Judenstaat might bear comparison. They are both, after all, novels about a Jewish Nation That Never Was—although Chabon’s locates itself in Alaska, while Zelitch’s can be found in a Saxony separated from reconstructed post-war East Germany, and home now to a Jewish state whose official business is all conducted through German. But I’ve never actually read more than descriptions and reviews of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, so I’ll have to take Judenstaat solely on its own merits.
Zelitch is a prize-winning author of Jewish fiction: her previous novel, Louisa, won the Goldberg Prize. I’m an Irish atheist whose knowledge of Jewish history and culture is limited to a couple of college courses and some reading. There are nuances here, and probably culturally contingent conversations and references, that I’m bound to miss. With that caveat—
This is a very peculiar book.
The year is 1988. Forty years prior, Judenstaat was officially created, bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. It has hardened its borders with the outside world—built walls around itself—and relegated the indigenous “Saxons” to a second-class status, a second-class status shared by Jews who have removed themselves from the mainstream of their society, who are to “normal” Judenstaat “not like us.”
Judith Klemmer is a documentary-maker and a historian. She’s also a widow, grieving her husband, Hans. Hans was the first Saxon ever appointed as conductor of the National Symphony. Now Judith has been charged with making a documentary about the history of Judenstaat, and the direction it is taking, as the fortieth anniversary of its establishment approaches. In the room where she does her work, she sees, constantly, the silent ghost of her dead husband. When, in the course of cutting the documentary, she encounters footage that presents a controversial picture of one of Judenstaat’s founders, and then gets a note—left by an intruder to her workroom—which reads They lied about the murder, she finds herself drawn to investigate both the footage, and what really happened to her husband.
A more ordinary genre novel would use these elements to tell, most likely, a story part thriller and part supernatural quest, in which Judith takes up the mantle of hero to answer the wrongs of the past. But Judenstaat is not an ordinary genre novel: It rejects entirely the usual conventions of the field in favour of a meditation on memory and amnesia, nation-building and atrocity, colonisation and collective revenge. It is not a straightforward book, and it’s not a comfortable work, and I’m not entirely sure it manages to become more than the sum of its disparate parts. But its argument is an ambitious one, about identity and about the politicisation of various kinds of truth, for as Judith discovers, Judenstaat is founded not just as a response to atrocity, but has an atrocity of its own as one of its founding acts.
It is impossible to read Judenstaat and not see its counterfactual history as one in dialogue with the actual history of Israel and the occupation of Palestine, as much as it is in dialogue with the nature of Jewishness, with the post-war settlement, with the politics of nationhood and the 20th century. But the ways in which Judenstaat engages with the history of the actual Jewish state are not, perhaps, always what one might expect.
I don’t like Judenstaat. That’s not to say it isn’t well-written: As alternate history, it is extremely well-drawn and plausible; and Judith, as a character, is believable and frequently compelling. But as a novel, it offers no response to atrocity but complicity or a refusal to see: It believes in ghosts but not in justice. And so I leave it, having been by turns impressed, baffled, entertained, disappointed, and not a little irritated.
It’s not a book for me. Because I believe in working for the idea of justice—underpinned by mercy. And I don’t quite know what to feel about a novel whose conclusion appears to reject the idea that justice is worth striving for.
Book Review
MysteryPeople Review: JUDENSTAAT by Simone Zelitch
August 10, 2016 mysterypeopleblogLeave a comment
9780765382962– Post by Molly Odintz
I’ll admit it, I’ve been on a bit of an alternative history kick this year. Rather than continue watching the TV adaptation, I finally read The Man in the High Castle, and earlier this year, I read and raved about A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar’s brilliant send-off of Hitler as a disenfranchised German refugee working as a private detective in a world where Communists, rather than Fascists, win the German elections of 1933. Then I picked up Simone Zelitch’s Judenstaat, a brilliant and complex merging of the strange histories of Israel, East Germany, and Birodbidjan (Stalin’s bizarre attempt at a Soviet Jewish state).
Simone Zelitch’s novel Judenstaat is one of those rare fictional works that has content truly representative of the complexities of history. Many authors use history for inspiration; Zelitch feels the weight of history, its idiosyncrasies and its parallels. Even moreso, Zelitch understands the use of history. Judenstaat takes place in 1989, in an alternative history where post-WWII, the Soviet Union has created a Jewish state in the German region of Saxony, and therein allowed Jewish residents protection for their lives, but not their identity. Highly assimilated residents, terrified of being purged or sent to the east, have replaced continuation of culture with worship of the state. Those who wish to continue practicing Judaism traditionally are relegated to lumpenproletariat status and looked down upon in the novel as “blackhats.”
Historian Judit Klemmer, as the novel begins, continues work on a documentary of Judenstaat’s early days as the state’s 40th anniversary approaches. As she studies the state’s founding, including the mysterious disappearance of one of the state’s founders, she receives a mysterious note inspiring her to further investigate the murder of her husband, a talented Saxon conductor, a few years before. The more she looks into both her husband’s death and the birth of the state, the more she must elude state agents and question her own path. As Judit goes down the rabbit hole in pursuit of her husband’s killer, Judenstaat enters into murder mystery/espionage territory for one of the most multi-genre novels I’ve ever read.
As the novel follows Judit through her work and her quest, the reader becomes immersed in Zelitch’s complex re-imagining of history – every aspect of Zelitch’s alternative history is designed to be in conversation with real history, yet far enough removed to be more of a funhouse reflection; distorted, warped, and endlessly interpret-able. Those with a good knowledge of 20th century Jewish history will appreciate many of Zelitch’s references, such as the repurposed Jewish Bund installed as the puppet government of the Soviet Jewish state. For those wary of the historical bent to Zelitch’s novel, there’s still plenty of gripping content and beautiful writing to keep you fascinated, although I do recommend that anyone reading this book first read a bit about Birodbidjan, cause that is some weird history!
After reading Judenstaat, I’m planning to continue my alternative-histories-of-WWII-and-its-after-effects kick with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America. For those interested in additional works of alternative-history-cum-murder-mystery, check out Underground Airlines, by Ben Winters. For those looking for more novels to approach the traumas of history obliquely through visions of the past tailored to resonate with the present, try Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, a challenging and brilliant work, just released and already praised across the literary world. And for those who want their alternative history full of space lizards addicted to ginger, try out those Harry Turtledove books. What have you got to lose?
Waveland: One Woman’s Story of Freedom Summerwaveland-150
(Fiction)
Simone Zelitch (Hungary 1991–93)
The Head & The Hand Press
2015
224 pages
$18.00 (paperback)
Reviewed by Linda Mather
•
“Once there was a girl who did everything wrong.”
Waveland by Simone Zelitch starts with this sentence, which then sets the tone for the book.
Most of the novel is set around events in the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s including efforts to register black voters in Mississippi, to gain seats at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, to establish grass roots mobilization in Chicago. And much of that is common to most movements — the clash between the whites and blacks both in the organization of the movement as well as in the towns, the motivation of the volunteers (Beth notes that she didn’t join to type letters), to the philosophies of the organizers themselves (short term goals vs. changing society).
However, the setting seems artificial in the sense that probably other social movements could have also been used — protests for environmental causes, gay rights, and police violence. Similarly the fact that Beth is Jewish, albeit not practicing, also seems fortuitous rather than integral. Yes, she is an outsider both as a white and as a Jew . . . therefore?
All of which leads to the issue of who is Beth. If she is the girl who does everything wrong, what and why does she do so? She does causes problems in the movement — crashes her car, shoots someone, and ultimately has a biracial baby — but why? And her actions cause trouble for others. In fact, at one point, she wonders “if her presence was a liability.”
In terms of background, Beth has had a mentally ill mother, a father who loves her but doesn’t know how to show it, and an aunt who practices tough love. Is family destiny?
Her relationship with Ron, the black father of the baby, is based seemingly on sex. She quotes Pascal, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” That might work for Beth but for Ron? He remains unclear in his motivation. It isn’t until two thirds of the way into the book, that events are narrated from his point of view — including a meeting with his estranged father. Here too the historic events afford a frame — the FBI found his father before he did because of their efforts to find Ron, a draft dodger. His father, a restaurant owner, does not want to be involved with the FBI and therefore does not embrace Ron.
Beth and Ron in their own ways do raise their child (Tamara) and the end of the book finds them together attending her graduation from Stanford. The three of them take a nostalgic trip to Mississippi, but even here the last event is one that Ron and Tamara do not want to participate in.
Beth seemingly does not learn from this events. The last sentence of the book states “this was just who she was, and if she kept it up, she would ruin everything.”
The reader is left wanting to take her by the shoulders and shake her.