Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

ABSTRACT

This essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• postmemory
• queer
• André Aciman
• Jewish
• classicism
• homosexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Frederick Roden is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he is affiliate faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Judaic Studies. At the Stamford Campus of UConn, he coordinates the English and Judaic Studies programs. His first book Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Palgrave) concerned the role of religious history in the articulation of modern homosexual categories. His second monograph Recovering Jewishness: Modern Identities Reclaimed (Praeger), focused on the diversity and hybridity of modern Jewish identity in the West, covering topics such as liberal Judaism, Holocaust studies, conversion, and intermarriage. He is the editor of the volumes Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies and Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities (Ashgate) and co-editor of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (Palgrave). He also co-edited an edition/translation of Marc-André Raffalovich’s 1896 sexological work Uranism and Unisexuality (Palgrave) and wrote a commentary to the medieval Christian theologian Julian of Norwich, Love’s Trinity (Liturgical Press). He holds a PhD in English Literature from New York University.

Notes

1. I refer the reader to my 2016 monograph Recovering Jewishness: Modern Identities Reclaimed (Santa Barbara(CA): Praeger). See also my 2009 edited volume Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities (Burlington (VT): Ashgate).

2. Edelman is controversial given his work's focus on white, western, bourgeois gay men. For a broader view of “queer time,” see Elizabeth Freeman’s 2007 guest-edited GLQ 13.2-3 (May), a special issue on “Queer Temporalities” and Jose Esteban Munoz’s 2009 Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press). Compare also Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s 2018 Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry (Albany: SUNY Press) which brings Yerushalmi in dialogue with Carolyn Dinshaw’s ideas of non-contemporaneous contemporaneity. 

3. See the classic 2003 Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, eds. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press).

4. Attributed to Hillel the Elder (c.110 BCE-10 CE): “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?” Pirkei Avot 1:14. https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1.14?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en Accessed 12 November 2018.

5. See Ruth Franklin’s (2010) discussion of the authenticity of the art of Holocaust literature. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press).