Jewish ghosts: haunting and hospitality in Shalom Auslander’s Hope

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Jewish ghost motif in Shalom Auslander’s novel, Hope (2012). In particular, it focuses on the Holocaust and its ongoing reverberations within Jewish consciousness The ghost that incites the narrative is Anne Frank, reimagined by Auslander as an aged revenant who is discovered in the attic of an upstate New York home. Drawing from the work of Stephen Frosh, Susan Shapiro, and Avery Gordon, my analysis looks at matters of refracted cultural memory, vicarious victimhood, intergenerational haunting, intertextuality, and the uncanny Jewish body.

KEYWORDS:

• Shalom Auslander
• Hope
• Jewish
• ghosts
• haunting
• Holocaust

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank James Jordan for his comments on an early draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Ruth Gilbert is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Winchester, UK. She is author of Writing Jewish: Contemporary British Jewish Literature (Palgrave, 2013).

Notes

1. Frosh, Hauntings, 2–3.

2. Ibid., 1.

3. Auslander, Hope. All further references will be within the text.

4. For an outline of vicarious victimhood see Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew.

5. Pilar Bianco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 2.

6. Ibid., 2.

7. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

8. For definitions and explorations see, amongst others, Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature; Gelbin, The Golem Returns; Gilbert, “The Jewish Gothic”; and Neugroschel, The Dybbuk.

9. Auslander includes a golem story in his collection, Beware of God. See, “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Supremey,” 177–94.

10. Shapiro, “The Jewish Uncanny,” 160.

11. Pinsker, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html. Accessed May 9, 2017.

12. Shapiro, “The Jewish Uncanny,” 166.

13. For more on the Jew’s body see Gilman, The Jew’s Body.

14. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi

15. Ibid., xvi.

16. http://folk.uib.no/hlils/TBLR-B/Benjamin-History.pdf. Accessed May 9, 2017.

17. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 57.

18. Sabina Spielrein was a patient of Carl Jung and, for a time, his lover. Although often marginalized in accounts of psychoanalytical history, Spielrein became a notable psychoanalyst and worked for a period with Freud. Along with her daughters, she died at the hands of the Nazis in 1941.

19. Derrida, Spectres of Marx.

20. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 58.

21. Hess quoted in Shapiro, “The Jewish Uncanny,” 160.

22. Ibid., xvi.

23. Derrida, Spectres of Marx.

24. Auslander has remarked that: ‘All the books that were important to me growing up and all the writers and comedians and essayists I admired, from Beckett to Lenny Bruce, were shit-stirrers and I think part of the job is frightening yourself’ (“Interview with Killian Fox”).

25. Most recently he has written the American television show Happyish, a mordant mediation on modern life which aired for one season in 2015.

26. Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament, 112, 7.

27. Ibid., 304.

28. Ibid., 306.

29. Auslander, Bookslut.

30. Auslander, Beware of God, 55–6.

31. Ibid., 60.

32. McLennan, Representations of Anne Frank, 15.

33. For comparative discussion of the two texts see Alderman, “Anne Frank and So On” and Pinsker, “Anne Frank.”

34. McLennan, Representations of Anne Frank, 182.

35. Ibid., 181.

36. Auslander, “Interview with Killian Fox.”

37. Ibid.

38. Interview with Simon Rocker, Jewish Chronicle, February 24, 2012.

39. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919.

40. Buse and Stott, Deconstruction, 9.

41. Freud, “Repression,” quoted from Buse and Stott, Deconstruction, 9.

42. Buse and Stott, Deconstruction, 12

43. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi.

44. Gutzkow quoted in Shapiro, “The Jewish Uncanny,” 9.

45. Ezekiel Bread is a health food made of sprouted grain.

46. Mclennan, Representations of Anne Frank, 192.

47. See pp. 44, 130, 154.

48. Derrida, Spectres of Marx.