Smell and memory as Jewish archives: the case of Russian Jewish writers

Abstract

The paper analyses the complex dynamics of the rejection of ‘Jewish smells’ as markers of Jewish corporeality in the context of stereotypes constructed by Russian culture. It addresses the conflicting desire to cherish and yet reject the smells of childhood as an important repository of memory in autobiographical prose by Russian Jewish writers. It theorizes the notion of smell as a Jewish archive in the context of inter-generational knowledge, displacement, space and time. How can the most ethereal of all sensations serve as an archive? How do we pass on this type of knowledge-inducing mechanism to future generations? And how do writers negotiate their national/ethnic identities on the basis of this form of remembering?

Keywords:

• Proustian memory
• smell
• Jewish identity
• museum

Notes

1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1981), 1: 24.

2. M.A. Conway et al., “A Cross-cultural Investigation of Autobiographical Memory,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36 (2005): 739–49; A.E. Bernstein, “The Contributions of Marcel Proust to Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 33, no. 1 (2005): 137–48.

3. See Julia Kristeva, “Proust: In Search of Identity,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 140–55.

4. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklarung (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1969).

5. See Jay Geller, “The Aromatics of Jewish Difference; or Benjamin’s Allegory of Aura,” in Jews and Other Differences, ed. Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 203–56.

6. John P. Aggleton and Louise Waskett, “The Ability of Odours to Serve as State-dependent Cues for Real-World Memories: Can Viking Smells Aid the Recall of Viking Experiences?,” British Journal of Psychology 90 (1999): 1.

7. Ibid., 3.

8. Ibid., 3.

9. See http://www.thejewishmuseumorg/touch/verbal (accessed January 2, 2011).

10. See Sander L. Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

11. H. Heine [G. Geine], “Bakherakhskii ravvin. Fragment,” Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1958), 7: 121–132, 124. My translation.

12. Semen Tsenkhenshtein, “Avtobiografiia pravoslavnogo evreia. S prilozheniem,” in V.V. Rozanov, “Iudaizm,” in Taina Izrailia, ed. F.V. Boikova (St Petersburg: Sofiia, 1993), 105–228.

13. On anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in Russia see Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

14. Rozanov, “Iudaizm,” 163.

15. On Babel’s Jewish identity see Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alice Nakhnimovsky, Russian Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Raziner, Markish (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

16. On the mythology around the Odessa Jewish identity see Jarrod Tanny, City of Rouges and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of old Odessa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).

17. Isaak Babel, “Awakening,” trans. Anthony Wixley, International Literature 3 (1935): 40.

18. Isaak Babel, “My First Goose,” trans. R. MacAndrew, in A Modern Russian Reader, ed. R. Hingley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 246.

19. On the stereotype of the small male Jew’s body see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

20. Before his death Rozanov asked for this book to be destroyed. He notably asked the Jews for forgiveness. Sadly, the book is used by the Black Hundreds in post-Soviet Russia for anti-Semitic propaganda. See Henrietta Mondry, Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2010).

21. See a discussion in Leonid Katsis, Osip Mandel’shtam: muskus iudeistva (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 2002).

22. Osip Mandel’shtam, Shum vremeni (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1990), 37.

23. V.V. Rozanov, “Oboniatel’noe i osiazatel’noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi,” in Sakharna (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 276–414.

24. For a discussion of smell in the hierarchy of senses in European philosophy in application to Jews see Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmation and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

25. Aleksandr Gol’dshtein, Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 25.

26. Ibid., 9.

27. Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009).

28. See Sigmund Freud, “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams,” in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 235–50.

29. http:/www.artinfo/com/news/story/36551 (accessed January 3, 2011).