Translingual Identities

Translingual Identities features on its cover a painting by the German Swiss artist Paul Klee: a human head with facial features in asymmetrical geometrical shapes. Fragmented and ambivalent, with peeling colors, the painting may symbolize “old age” (hence the title, Senecio) yet reflect a children's way of representing the world. Himself multilingual with multiple talents, for music, teaching, studying antiquity and ideography, to name just a few, Klee famously broke traditions, schools, and borders, traveled, and experimented with surrealism, cubism, and expressionism. It has been speculated that Senecio may be Klee's self-portrait, symbolizing his life and art on thresholds, in the existential and creative liminal space.The visual image of asymmetric hybridity sets the stage and the tone for Tamar Steinitz's analysis of two “translingual” writers, Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind, in yet another book contributing to the growing scholarship on “translingual literature” (the term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000])—literature written in a nonnative language or in more than in one language. The two writers in question are indeed comparable, as they share the historical and geopolitical context (World War II and the postwar years), Jewishness, and the so-called mother tongue (German), yet could be placed, in the author's view, at two opposite ends of the language–self continuum. This dichotomy of translingualism as a loss, resulting from mental fragmentation and “schizophrenia” (Lind), and translingualism as an opportunity, the effect of the multilingual and creative “back-and-forth” (Heym), is Steinitz's thesis. The book painstakingly develops this bipolar view of two writers through an ingenious analysis of their major texts, with psychoanalytic theory dominating her critical landscape (mostly in Lind's case).In the first chapter, Steinitz tackles Jakov Lind's translingual autobiography Counting My Steps and two other volumes of his autobiographical trilogy written in English, which trace back the writer's multiple impersonations during his survival in Amsterdam, where he had been sent from Vienna on Kindertransport after the Anschluss. In a series of shape-shifting episodes in Nazi-occupied Holland, then in the “lion's mouth” in Germany, and during the subsequent exodus to Palestine, Lind becomes not just a double- but a multiple-face Janus, changing names, languages, and identities from Heinz Landwirth to Jan Overbeek to Jakov Chaklan to Jakov Lind, until he eventually settles in London in the postwar years and starts writing in English.Here and in the rest of her analysis of Lind's writing and his language choice, Steinitz makes close parallels between the childhood trauma/abandonment by his mother and by his wet nurse Mitzi, the role of his father symbolizing fatherland Austria on the one hand and the “paradise lost” of his childhood, war survival, and the relationship with his languages (Austrian German, Dutch, Hebrew, and English) on the other. Fusing the writer's personal trauma with war and Jewish survival, Steinitz applies Freud's and Firenczi's theories of traumatic split of the ego resulting in neurosis and even in schizophrenia and makes a case for Lind's disintegrating mind, later turned into imaginative prose.Conversely, in chapter 2, Stefan Heym's novel Crusaders is characterized as “the archetypal ideological war novel” (echoing Soviet socialist realism), with the writer's personal story on the backdrop, featuring his position as a translingual transcultural mediator” (67). Heym had fled to the United States during the war and served in the U.S. Army, writing propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts. Drawing on the Bakhtinian principle of dialogism and heteroglossia, Steinitz discusses the narrative and characters representing the doubling of Heym's perspective, as a German and an American. During the rise of McCarthyism, Heym, deeply disappointed in American ideals, fled the United States and settled in the German Democratic Republic, a puppet state of the Soviet empire, where he continued his quest for truth and social meaning, writing in German.This ideological position of the writer (and language[s]) in society is the focus of chapter 3, where Steinitz examines two satirical works: Lind's Travels to the Enu and Heym's The King David Report. This is the section of the book that allows the author to deepen her juxtaposition of the two writers, as she describes Lind's imagination going burlesque, wild, and caricaturesque—in my view, more reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's humorous fantasy world than of Louis Wolfson's hallucinatory polyglotism (see Le Schizo et Les Langues [Paris: Gallimard, 1970]). Steinitz insists that Lind's identity is ruptured by the tearing of language from thought, signifier from signified, and that he is shipwrecked on his own (Enu) island, a collapsed Tower of Babel, where German is tainted by Nazism, people talk in incomprehensible idiolects, and speaking English is called “speaking strange.”While Lind's position is interpreted as escapism into an incoherent fantasy world, Heym, on the other end of the spectrum, now in GDR, criticizes the totalitarian regime after a period of exaltation and becomes a dissident, writing Aesopian tales in English on biblical or medieval themes, self-translates, or writes intermittently in both languages. Analyzing his self-translation process, Steinitz shows how, with the help of his bilingual creativity, he holds the scepter of the written word as a weapon for social change and characterizes him as a writer ideologist, akin to a revolutionary.Although the issue is beyond the scope of Steinitz's book, it is unclear to this reviewer, having experienced firsthand the “socialist paradise,” how Heym was able to avoid trouble with the Stasi, was allowed to publish (in any language) and to travel to the West. A more realistic and careful look into Heym's “double motion” across the symbolic and real boarders could beneficially mitigate the book's prevailing idealization/demonization paradigm.In her final chapter, Steinitz extends her bipolar view of the two writers, as they account for their Jewish identities (Lind's novel The Inventor and Heym's The Wandering Jew), examining the concept of “original exile” and the legend of the Wandering Jew. Here, the discussion of Lind's “doubling disintegration” reaches more layers of psychoanalytic theorizing, from Freud's theory of “the uncanny” and of doppelgangers to Lacan's “mirroring.” While Lind's futile Zionism transforms into personal redemption, Heym's doubling in The Wandering Jew serves as a form of mediation between good and evil, Jesus Christ and Lucifer, dogmatic communism and dogmatic Christianity. The fallen angel Ahasverus—the Wandering Jew—appears in his novel as a non-Jewish Jew and an eternal revolutionary, another reincarnation of man-between who, like Heym himself and his protagonists, is an unwavering “Crusader.” Even though Lind's and Heym's Dasein led them to diametrically different creative modalities, their translingual imagination, whether of deterritorialized wandering or of territorialized socialist paradise, appears to be part of one paradigm—that of creative utopias.While I certainly acknowledge the superb quality and depth of Steinitz's analysis, I would like to warn against the reductionist nature of depicting multilingual creativity as either/or, loss/gain, and especially as schizophrenia, which, in the absence of a spectrum, could be easily projected to all literary translingualism. If Lind and Heym had been placed in the context of other translingual writers (writing in German and English, or surviving the war, or being Jewish), then the extremes of the binary analysis may not have been so jarring.Theorizing language and identity, the study of multilingualism points to endless individual differences, personal trajectories, and variations in language emotionality and language choice in myriad combinations of loss and gain and inside/outside perspectives (see, e.g., Aneta Pavlenko, Emotions and Multilingualism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]). As a more holistic view of the “multilingual subject” is entering the scholarly debate, it calls to question the primacy of the native language (Claire Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]) and the Freudian model of linguistic childhood (Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue [New York: Fordham University Press, 2012]). Even so, while psychoanalysts point to a possible psychic split in bilinguals (Jacqueline Amati-Mehler et al., The Babel of the Unconscious [Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993]), they caution against using the clinical term of schizophrenia (although the writer, Jakov Lind, used that term about himself) and emphasize that the split experienced by bilinguals may not be seen as a traditional “defensive detachment” but a way to heal and recover “by adopting a cultural and emotional context not mortgaged by archaic conflicts” and by creating “new passages, albeit at the cost of deep and painful splittings, with valid and structured introjections” (Amati-Mehler et al., 71)

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