The Schlemiel and the Messianic in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark

Abstract

Viewing the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel as a journey from catastrophe to redemption suggests the satisfying fulfillment and moral clarity of good triumphing over evil and hopes fulfilled that mark messianic dreams. 1 Yet two authors living three generations after these monumental events speak to a different vision. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017) testify to a different Jewish existential reality that does not fit into the triumphal narrative. The geographic compass in both novels may point to Israel, but the moral compass tells another story about the loss of the emotional binaries and moral clarity of the Shoah-to-State-of-Israel narrative and the loss of these two touchstones as defining essences for Jewish identity. Both novels use parody and the comedic archetype of the schlemiel to express their rejection of the triumphal narrative and assert the existential Jewish historical narrative of perpetual ambiguity and liminality, the narrative of Jews who find themselves perpetually in troubled waters. I the papers concerning my great-grandparents, along a bag from museum gift shop. bag my I’ll as Adam and Eve fatally overlooked the Tree of Life. Go on overlooking it, even while we can’t live without the faith that it is there, always within us, its branches reach-ing upward and its leaves unfurling in the light. In this sense, the threshold between Paradise and this world may be illusory, and we may never have really left Paradise, Kafka suggested. In this sense, we might be there without knowing it even now.