The undesired: on nudniks in Jewish American fiction

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet, while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish American Literature
• Philip Roth
• Bernard Malamud
• Julia Kristeva
• “Ostjuden” Jews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Noam Gil teaches in the English and American Studies Department at Tel Aviv University. He is a current Dan David post-doctoral scholar in Israel and last year’s post-doctoral scholar and lecturer at the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley.

Notes

1 I, of course, borrow here from Jean Paul Sartre’s characterization, in his Anti Semite and Jew (originally published in 1946), of the Jew as “the one whom others consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must begin” (69).

2 If applied to women in Yiddish, the word nudnik, נודניק, should be translated as נודניקע (nudnike). Even though it would be more accurate, linguistically at least, to use nudnike in referring to women nudniks, it will be more appropriate to take advantage here of the English language as gender neutral to avoid this Yiddish distinction.

3 In her Gender Trouble, Butler claims that:

The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the contours of the subject … [it is an] ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness. (1990, 133)

4 The translation from the Yiddish original is my own.

5 The translation from the Hebrew original is my own.

6 The parasitic element in Kafka’s poetics is a recurring theme in several published studies. See, for example, 106–130).

7 See, for example, Gil (2015).

8 There are more: Mathilda Margulis in “Dos Nokhkrimenish” (“Caricature”), Bessie Popkin in “Der Shlisel” (“The Key”), Dora and Ytta in “Di Tsvey Shvester” (“A Tale of Two Sisters”), Yehida in “Yahid un Yechida” (“Jachid and Jechidah”), even Rachele in Der Sotn in Goray.

9 Beck, Evelyn Torton. http://lilith.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/v06i00_1979-07_smaller.pdf.

10 See, for example, Gil (2017).

11 “Schnorrer” is a Yiddish term meaning a beggar or an individual who lives at the expense of others.

12 Throughout his career Roth has voiced his admiration of Kafka as a crucial source of inspiration. Aside from his “Kafkaesque” novels (The Breast, 1972, is perhaps the most explicit example here), he later wrote another short story about Kafka’s imagined survival of the Holocaust and his life in post-Holocaust American in Reading Myself and Others (1975). On Roth and Kafka, see, for example, Roth Pierpont (2013), 89–92.

13 Roth addressed his relationship with Malamud in his moving eulogy on Malamud in The New York Times, “Pictures of Malamud,” after he died in 1986.