reading

Introduction

J. J. Steinfeld: Considering the Writer

SANDRA SINGER

in Kafka’s texts […] “the language of the old empire offices and the language of national minorities are constantly at war […] listen to it—surpassing the threshold of normal hearing, we begin to ‘see’ these sounds-gestures; the words begin to scream, squeak, cry, whisper and mutter, binding us with the invisible threads of mimetic resonance … to the inner dimension of catastrophic space. Indeed, these threads of fear transform us as readers into others, […] and we become those creatures on the surface of our skin.”

—Valerii Podoroga, “The Phenomenon of Auschwitz,” qtd. in Buck-Morss

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” developed in a reading of Franz Kafka’s variegated fiction. I use their term to describe the layered formation of Steinfeld’s career that began with his publishing short fiction concerning the impact of the Holocaust. His personal relationship to the Holocaust is through his parents’ experience as Polish Jews surviving in Nazi-occupied World War II Europe—his father in hiding and his mother incarcerated in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Accordingly his fiction can be interpreted as initially explicitly and later subtly depicting historical and second generation trauma.

The importance of Holocaust memory permeates Steinfeld’s work. The son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors Leon and Esther, Steinfeld was born after World War II in 1946 in a Displaced Persons Camp in Munich. An only child, before coming to Prince Edward Island he lived and studied in the northwestern U.S. and Ontario. His Master’s thesis (Trent University 1978), titled “The Clash of Cultures, the Collision of Gods: a Study of Missionary, Police and Indian Affairs Officials’ Attitudes towards Indians in the North West Territory, 1870-1900,” reveals his deep-seeded, wide interest in revisiting historical injustice. Steinfeld abandoned his PhD in History at the University of Ottawa in 1980 after completing his comprehensive exams. He arrived in Charlottetown shortly thereafter with an intention to pursue creative writing, rather than academic ways of scrutiny; he has since lived on the Island.

Characterized by imaginary journeying, Steinfeld’s early fiction, such as the story collections The Apostate’s Tattoo (1983) and Forms of Captivity and Escape (1988), foreground the experience of Holocaust survivors and second generation family members traumatized by living with those directly impacted by the World War II genocide. Therapist and trauma theorist Laura S. Brown sees important rewards from exploring transmitted affect and how “post-traumatic symptoms can be intergenerational” (Brown 108). Her claim is reinforced by Melvin Jules Bukiet in his introductory comments to Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (2002). In his introductory remarks, Bukiet makes the point that no one knows the impact of the survivors’ experiences better than their children (14). These children populate Steinfeld’s early story collections up to Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993).

The author note in Smaro Kamboureli’s anthology, Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literatures in English (2007), introduces a typical early Steinfeld second generation Holocaust-themed story, “Ida Solomon’s Play,” from his Forms of Captivity and Escape. “Ida Solomon’s Play” appears amongst other postwar Canadian Jewish examples, such as A.M. Klein and Irving Layton’s poetry, in Making a Difference. Kamboureli quotes Steinfeld while stating, “[a]lthough his imagination […] ‘is attracted to many themes,’ it is ‘the effect of the Holocaust on subsequent generations … that is most personal and dominant’ in his work” (158). In the story, a forty-one-year-old second generation daughter writes a play in which she nightly performs in theatre the eight stages of her mother Ida Solomon’s life from age sixteen in 1937 through her Auschwitz confinement to eventual suicide after the war at age fifty-six in 1977. After the one-woman performance of her mother’s life, the actress wanders a city including its back street bars dressed “in the costume I wear in the last scene, […] when Ida releases her hold, [which] allows the past to triumph” (160).

“Ida Solomon’s Play” distinguishes between the experience of different generations of Jews when the focalizing figure, the theatrical daughter, goes to a bar—still made up from her evening performance, including her make-up drawn tattoo—and is confronted by an actual survivor who rolls up his sleeve to reveal his authentic concentration camp tattoo. Her dissociative state ends with the revelation of “Ida […] disappear[ing].” The daughter “embraced the old man and searched for Ida” (164). The ending of the story includes the unnamed first-person narrator’s stating the importance for her of personally remembering her mother, which is also her way of fostering communal commemoration:

I no longer want to be my mother in the play, to go through the eight stages of her life that I selected in some madly punishing and creative attempt to make sense of the past, to counteract my guilt, to justify remaining alive. I want the play to end, but I cannot under any circumstances allow my mother to die and remain lost to me, not again, never again. (164)

The familiar anti-genocide refrain, “never again,” accentuates what is at stake even on an individual level in forgetting the Nazi Final Solution; for the daughter of failing to remember her mother’s inestimable loss that is signified in the play by her mother’s progression from “the dancing, joyous teenager to the wailing, sad woman seeking a solitary death” (159).

Steinfeld criticism and some of the parochial awards he’s won commend this early writing whose central concern is Holocaust memory. Arguably winning prizes such as the Toronto Jewish Congress Book Committee Creative Writing Award in 1990 (now the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards) contributed to and reinforced his being identified as a Jewish Holocaust writer, as did contributor to this collection Michael Greenstein’s entry on Steinfeld in S. Lillian Kremer’s two-volume Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work (2003).

His literary output since arriving on the Island attests to his acquired Charlottetown home being a productive location for him to pursue his preoccupation with observing humans, both on and off the Island, from a distance through writing that has a strong historicist bias. According to Greenstein, PEI provides closer geographical proximity to Steinfeld’s German birthplace than larger Canadian or American urban centres permit. Greenstein conveys contrasting worldviews precisely situated in time and place when he muses that Steinfeld lives and writes prolifically in Charlottetown because it allows him to be in touch with his European roots: “Prince Edward Island [is] Steinfeld’s current ‘home’ where very few Jews live. This eastern Canadian province on the Atlantic Ocean keeps him in touch with his past on the other side of the ocean” (1223). In Steinfeld’s poem, “Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be”— chosen to represent PEI in the national 2006 CBC Radio Poetry Face-off—the speaker, looking out a Charlottetown home’s front window, sees “history near and far.” Steinfeld observes, “‘Displaced and misplaced, I have a place, sort of, and it’s the Island’” (Kamboureli 158).

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This essay collection strives to work against “[t]he tendency to read multicultural literature through the racial or ethnic labels affixed to its authors [that] more often than not reinforces stereotypical images of the authors themselves and of their cultural communities” (Kamboureli xx-xxi). Analysis of previous commentary on Steinfeld’s work highlights the context of its literary reception, which by placing his corpus within the niche of post-Holocaust writing has accordingly afforded it proscribed attention.¹ While Steinfeld publishes widely in prose and poetry on a variety of themes, and his one-act and full-length plays are performed, commentary has focused primarily on the early short story writing about Jewish Holocaust experience. Embracing Steinfeld’s varied writing in relationship to Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of Kafka’s output as “minor literature,” construed in relationship to various larger shaping forces, proves instructive. All the contributors to this collection situate Steinfeld’s production beyond the confines of post-Holocaust writing impacting Jewish identity to more wide-ranging literary criticism, including global authors, world literature and recent theorists.

I use Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary on Kafka’s writing, specifically his being Jewish within the Austro-Hungarian complex, in a consideration of Steinfeld’s oeuvre:

The problem of expression is staked out by Kafka […] in relation to those literatures that are considered minor, for example, the Jewish literature of Warsaw and Prague […]. Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible—the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise. (16)

Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, about a salesman transforming into an insect, was written in the context of the Jewish Austro-Hungarian pre-World War I experience of entrapment. It resonates today as an originary model for science fiction film and fictional stories about schizoid behaviour. Kafka’s novella, The Castle, similar to The Metamorphosis, addresses Jewish experience, in this case of trying to enter positions of power in pre-World War I Austro-Hungary, yet its theme of bureaucratization with its machinations and frustrations took on more universal meaning after World War II. J. J. Steinfeld identifies Kafka as a literary influence. Contributors here assume that, like Kafka’s work, Steinfeld’s has extensive applications and divergent themes beyond its typical framing, pigeonholed as Jewish Canadian, Holocaust, multicultural fiction.

Deleuze and Guattari define a “minor literature” as “that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). They identify three features of the writing: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (18). Accordingly, Canadian national and Atlantic regional cultures bear linguistically and generically on “minor literature” in which sociocultural milieu is more than background for individual protagonists or an author; rather, her or his relation to that context imbricates the work at the level of “individual” and “political” expression. Steinfeld strives to make his “collective assemblage of enunciation”—representing the voices of varied constituencies—culturally impacting while advancing his ethical purpose, learning from history.

In Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community, Frank Bialystok holds that “the Holocaust did not become effectively incorporated into Canadian culture until the period between 1973 and 1985” (Muller 15), the period during which Steinfeld’s first stories gained recognition. During this time frame, “the Holocaust would be seen by Canadian Jews as a ground for their ethnic identity” (19). But Steinfeld’s second generation contribution to the 1980s global flourish of Holocaust literatures is also his missive to best-selling Canadian literature that highlights heroic colonial tales of Canadian Confederation or the frontier—celebrating respectively, for instance, the settler hinterland of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island Anne of Green Gables or the opening up of the Canadian West in Pierre Berton’s The Last Spike.

Occasionally and in the story I consider in the epilogue, Steinfeld’s “mordant, sardonic humour” (Clarke) employs the absurd example of Anne of Green Gables. A fictional figure from children’s literature made into an Island folk legend, her imaginary home has become the Island tourist destination. A feature of Steinfeld’s recent work—especially his poetry—is his working the logic encoded in dialectical binaries, such as those that contrast the soul-renewing comfort of PEI’s Anne with the postmodern fractured existence (without firm foundation or secure relationships) associated with PEI’s tourist trade. Within Deleuze and Guattari’s schema of asymmetrical cultural formation, Steinfeld’s corpus contributes a distinctly Jewish second generation Holocaust survivor voice within politically charged Atlantic Canadian regional literatures that emerged within and against Canadian literatures. Thus the full breadth of Steinfeld’s writing should be grasped as contributing to Atlantic Canadian regional literatures that bear a relationship to the dominant discourses of Canadian literature.

As instanced by his references to Anne of Green Gables, Steinfeld’s more recent writing is parodic or satiric, in a manner similar to the various satiric Atlantic Canadian cultural examples it draws upon and reworks. Often Steinfeld’s characters experience PEI tourism seen through the lens of Holocaust memory or conveyed by a narrator’s intertextual allusions to world literature. Working against the often too divisive logic of binaries,² his writing blurs distinctions between Atlantic Canadian literature and Canadian literature, Canadian literature and world literature, or Holocaust writing and other literature. Binaries productively reimagined as multiplicities within a larger Deleuzian “assemblage” encourage nuanced, historically contextualized interpretation.

My epilogue to this collection analyzes the short story “Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown” (2000), which provides an example of Steinfeld’s switching back and forth between literary canons. Some of the essays included here revisit Steinfeld’s early corpus in new ways; and the volume gives equal weighting to Steinfeld’s post-2000 literary works, including poetry and plays. Threads of historical experience and related history of ideas bind these interpretive essays that reveal the intertextual breadth of Steinfeld’s career.

***

J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works opens with his own musings in answer to a series of questions posed by me about his writing career and its literary reception. The initial questions and his responses focus on issues grasped through reading his 2015 story collection, Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell; the subsequent questions concern topics from biography to a consideration of themes and characters in his writing. The interview, the most sustained response to questions about his literary practice on record, offers a window into Steinfeld’s process and motivation for writing. Interestingly, he chooses to answer some queries through direct quotation from his fiction and poetry, including one original poem, “Words Bleeding into Incomprehension,” crafted in response to my final question about his “sense of the audience for [his] writing.”

Reflecting the approach of a current reader of Steinfeld’s early short fiction, Raina L. Shults’s “In His Mother’s Image: Analysis of Second Generation Sons in Short Stories by J. J. Steinfeld” interprets three canonical Steinfeld stories through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Investigating the relationship between a concentration camp survivor mother and her son in the stories—“Dancing at the Club Holocaust,” “Baruch’s Undying Love” and “The Apostate’s Tattoo”—Shults theorizes two Lacanian “mirror phases” that the male characters negotiate in order to approximate psychological wellbeing in the world. Accordingly, the characters first have a classic “mirror stage” experience whereby they recognize themselves as separate from their mother. In the second experience, “the trauma of their mother’s Holocaust experience creates the potential for these characters to experience the Real and jouissance […]. [T]he Second Generation son experiences this jouissance only once he has wholly lost himself in his mother’s Holocaust past and begins to see himself in his mother’s image.”

A protagonist of early Steinfeld literary criticism, Michael Greenstein like Raina L. Shults pursues psychological issues through character study, not biography. Greenstein’s “Kafka’s Call: Fugue States and Fractured Chronotopes in J. J. Steinfeld’s Fiction” describes dissociative fugue states as innate to the characters’ reckoning with the Holocaust. Greenstein further attributes time-shifting chronotopes, such as Steinfeld’s intertextual allusions to Kafka, that allow him to intertextually engage the world before the Holocaust. By discussing writing from 1983-2014, especially three stories from A Glass Shard and Memory (2010), in some sense Greenstein updates his earlier criticism of Steinfeld that was appropriately more precisely focussed on Holocaust representation within Steinfeld’s short fiction. Viewing Steinfeld’s career holistically, Greenstein appreciates how “Steinfeld’s post-Holocaust characters experience ‘misshapenness’ when entering fugue states caused by a breakdown of stable frames of time and space.” Moving between the time-space of World War II and contemporary North America, Steinfeld’s “narratives form intriguing circuits of connection and disconnection.”

Creating the 1980s Charlottetown, PEI chronotope, Richard Lemm’s “Upsetting the Cradle: J. J. Steinfeld’s Tragicomic Truth-teller in Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation” draws the cultural landscape of the Island at the time of Steinfeld’s arrival. Indeed, a “sign of the nascent PEI literary renaissance” was “writers from away [such as Steinfeld] choosing to write about PEI and Islanders.” Considering Steinfeld’s first novel Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (1987), Lemm recognizes some of its cultural themes, especially its impatience with the pastoral myth of Prince Edward Island along with the corresponding cultivation of Island tourist icon, Anne of Green Gables. Lemm claims that Steinfeld was “ahead of his time” by including amongst the motley cast of characters a cross-dresser and a wannabe “Indian.” Furthermore his investigation of the writer protagonist “Our Hero” suggests a Steinfeldian perspective on the writing process and reception. Not least, Richard Lemm, who shared in the Island Atlantic cultural “renaissance” with J. J. Steinfeld, describes him as an active participant in literary and art circles of the time that included Frank Ledwell, John Smith, Milton Acorn, Réshard Gool and Hilda Woolnough.

In a reading of Steinfeld’s second novel, Word Burials (2009), another Islander, Mark Sampson, explores intertextual influences of Beckett, Kafka, J.G. Ballard and Stephen King. Sampson highlights similarities and differences between the writers’ sense of history. By comparison, “Situational Exposition: Elisions and Inclusions in J. J. Steinfeld’s Word Burials” demonstrates Steinfeld’s strong historicist bias, even in the later fiction that is discursive and less mimetically realistic. Sampson concludes: “The Holocaust is conjured through art by embracing the absurdist examples set by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. This is why Steinfeld does what he does, over and over again, as if trapped in some Kafkaesque loop. The trap is his escape.”

Considering further “Elisions and Inclusions”— between Steinfeld’s texts and between his work and that of others, Ellen S. Jaffe’s exposition foregrounds adaptation from story to play and from text to production. During her experience of producing two of Steinfeld’s plays: The Golden Age of Monsters, or, My Father Gave Me Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem for My Twentieth Birthday (2002) and The Finest Performance of the Greatest Actor of the Yiddish Theatre (2009), she gleaned features of the transformation of story into performative presence through theatrical events. The first play is based on three stories: “My Father Gave Me Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem for My Twentieth Birthday” (1999), “Inflatable Dolls” (2000), and “The Golden Age of Monsters” (1984, 2010); the second on “The Hearing of Memory’s Voice” (1993). In “From Page to Stage, or Several Characters in Search of a Genre,” Jaffe holds, “we are changed because of cathartically and empathically experiencing the play, an experience which can linger and keep working long after the curtain falls.”

My “Permutations of the Body: Ekphrasis in J. J. Steinfeld’s Short Fiction and Poetry” investigates another form of intertextuality—between image and text—of tattoos historically, and more recently, and their transcription in narrative. In his interview with me in this collection, Steinfeld draws out the power of the image of his mother’s concentration camp tattoo. His comments made in 2016 come decades after his early impactful stories of tattooed Holocaust survivors, and my consideration of a range of his writing foregrounds tattoos as the central image amongst others in his opus of bodies marked by events. Along a spectrum from concentration camp to everyday tattoos and from physical challenges to chosen posthumanist enhancements, marked bodies communicate the psychobiography of Steinfeld’s characters.

George Elliott Clarke considers Steinfeld’s disclosure of the importance of the tattoo in his essay, “The Holocaust Witness as Absurdist: J. J. Steinfeld’s Ironic Ire.” Interpreting Steinfeld’s autobiographical poetry, Clarke probes “the connection of the individual [Steinfeld’s personal history] to a political immediacy” through his post-Holocaust writing (Deleuze and Guattari 18). Using theoretical framing by Gavriel Rosenfeld, Marianne Hirsch and Walter Benn Michaels, Clarke defines Steinfeld’s moralist ethic—of “monomaniac [literary] commitment” to post-Holocaust representation—as post-colonial.

Shane Neilson, in “Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: On J. J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds,” interprets Steinfeld’s recent autobiographical poetry as well. He considers trauma theory and time in a comparison of Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (2014) to poetry by German-language Jewish Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. Bucking the trend in trauma studies to speak psychologically of transgenerational memory by working chemical and mathematics-derived models, Neilson compares writing by Celan, who survived the Holocaust, to that by J. J. Steinfeld, whose parents survived. Through a strategy of revealing intertextual comparison such as Sampson and Clarke pursue, Neilson distinguishes between Celan’s negational “first-order” and Steinfeld’s enabling “second-order” positions.

“[W]ords duel with the dread of silence” (64) for the “second-order” witness in the poem, “The Word Inexorable,” from Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds. In this theatrical poem, “a Yiddish-speaking tailor […] / […] who used the word inexorable” represents “incongruity” to one of the speakers. The focalizing voice, “a displaced soul / thirsty for something past,” is more comfortable with unfamiliar intersections created by a litany of “screech[ing] […] comment.” Representative of Steinfeld’s protagonists and his writing style, the speaker embraces inherited forms and their history, and the potential that emerges through their combination.

Notes

1.For evidence of the evolving academic attention to his fiction, see Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1997) 75-79; Michael Greenstein, “J. J. Steinfeld”; Karin Beeler, Tattoos, Desire and Violence: Marks of Resistance in Literature, Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006) 131-37; Sandra Singer, “Acting Out Justice in J. J. Steinfeld’s ‘Courtroom Dramas,’” Canadian Ethnic Studies 41.1-2 (2009): 155-72; Daniel Muller, “Heartbeats of Madness Overheard: History, Remembrance and Second-Generation Identity in J. J. Steinfeld’s Post-Holocaust Fiction”; and Raina L. Shults, “In His Mother’s Image: A Lacanian Analysis of Second Generation Sons in the Short Stories of J. J. Steinfeld and Lev Raphael,” MA thesis, Vanderbilt University, 2014. All of the writing listed here focuses on second generation perspectives on Holocaust themes in Steinfeld’s fiction.

2.See Jean-François Lyotard on totalitarianism and dialectical binary logic: “We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience […]. Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (46).

Works Cited

Berton, Pierre. The Last Spike: the Great Railway, 1881-1885. 1971. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2001.

Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 100-12.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002.

Bukiet, Melvin Jules, ed. Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. New York: Norton, 2002.

Clarke, George Elliott. “P.E.I.’s Steinfeld Dredges Dreams.” Sunday Herald [Halifax, NS], March 25, 2001, C6.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Greenstein, Michael. “J. J. Steinfeld.” Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Ed. S. Lillian Kremer. New York: Routledge, 2003. 2:1221-24.

Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literatures in English. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2007.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 38-46.

Montgomery, L. M. 1908. Anne of Green Gables. New York: Scholastic, 2001.

Muller, Daniel. “Heartbeats of Madness Overheard: History, Remembrance and Second-Generation Identity in J. J. Steinfeld’s Post-Holocaust Fiction.” MA thesis. University of Groningen, 2014.

Steinfeld, J. J. “Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be.” 2006 Poetry Face-off. 2006 by CBC Audio. CD.

_____. “Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown.” Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown. Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau, 2000. 13-40.

_____. The Apostate’s Tattoo. Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1983.

_____. “The Clash of Cultures, the Collision of Gods: a Study of Missionary, Police and Indian Affairs Officials’ Attitudes towards Indians in the North West Territory, 1870-1900.” MA thesis, Trent University, 1978.

_____. Dancing at the Club Holocaust. Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1993.

_____. Forms of Captivity and Escape. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown, 1988.

_____. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds. Victoria, BC: Ekstasis, 2014.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

J. J. Steinfeld: Considering the Writer