Given the long and complicated history of Jewish-Christian difference, there is something unsettling about the proposition that it all started with a dispute about the accuracy of translation. The chief point of contention is, of course, what constitutes “the Bible,” which entered history as a translated text.
Known as the Septuagint, the formative part of Christian Scriptures that Christian readers call the “Old Testament” is a Greek translation of Hebrew writings that also make up what Jewish readers refer to as the Tanakh, an acronym that stands for the twenty-four books comprising the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch (Heb. humash), the Prophets (Heb. neviim), and the Writings (Heb. ktuvim). Even the name of this collection presents a translation problem, which ecumenical English speakers elide by referring to the Tanakh as the “Hebrew Bible”—a misleading neologism that implies the Bible (no adjective) occupies some kind of extralinguistic space beyond the need for translation or interpretation.
Indeed, until Christian scholarship discovered the Hebrew text in the sixteenth century, the fact that the Christian Bible, read exclusively in Latin and Greek for more than a millennium, began life as a translation produced by Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria between the third and the first century BC lay far below the surface of Christian consciousness.11xOn the Jewish origins of the Septuagint, see Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009). Most medieval Christians assumed that the Hebrew Scriptures—or what “passed” for Scripture among the Jews—was a Jewish corruption (a bad translation, we might say) of what they knew as the Old Testament. For all the earnest efforts of Christian Hebraists to inform their readers of the contrary, I suspect that many modern Christians still think so.
The most famous and maybe the most momentous theological difference attendant on reading Hebrew literature in Greek is the translation of Isaiah 7.14, which every Christian Bible, relying on the Septuagint, reads as a prophecy of the virgin birth: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’” (KJV). In Hebrew, the same verse reads: “Assuredly, my Sovereign will give you a sign nonetheless! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him God-is-with-us” (JPS 2023; translation slightly altered). Jewish Greek speakers in Alexandria translated “young woman” (Heb. ’almah) as “virgin” (Gr. parthenos) because in Greek the two words are synonymous; Biblical Hebrew has another word for “virgin” (Heb. btulah). What this semantic slippage says about the cultural difference between Greek and Jewish views of women, I will not venture to expound. But there is no question that this minor case of native mistranslation was, to put it mildly, consequential. And it is only one of many instances in the long history of the highly fraught relationship between Christians and Jews where matters of translation did not remain merely academic.22xSee Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Bridge Over Troubled Waters
In our own postmodern global village, we are content to slide over such chasms and assume that everything of significance is pretty much translatable, or, to put it another way, that anything worth saying can be said in English. The implicit claim that language can be made to mean what we want it to mean—a position put forth with brisk efficiency by Humpty Dumpty to a baffled, but eminently reasonable, Alice—is the reason many Jews and Christians now regularly invoke the adjective “Judeo-Christian” in reference to “our” (i.e., “Western,” another misleading adjective that would require a week to unpack) culture, values, morals, etc. The dash suspended between “Judeo,” which, to complicate things even further, is not the same thing as “Jewish,” and “Christian” is like a thin coating of ice resting on top of deep water; it looks solid enough, until you try walking on it. Whether a bridge can be suspended over the differences between the language of Jewishness and the language of Christianity is an altogether murky proposition. We may be better off taking the long way around.
From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) into a (higher) Christian register. The Jewish insistence on reading “the Bible” in Hebrew every week, in synagogue, to congregations whose first language was (and is) probably not the language of the patriarchs but the language of their non-Jewish neighbors, is a performance of otherness. We can see what is at stake in this attachment to the original when we appreciate the difference between reading Hebrew texts in Greek—from right to left—and reading the Bible as a Greek text, from left to right. From the perspective of the former, the Alexandrian translation of ’almah as parthenos provides a Jewish textual source for the Christian myth of the virgin birth. From the perspective of the latter, the same translation turns the Tanakh (a set of texts) into the Bible (a book).
Christian readers who read ’almah as parthenos locate in this translation a proof text for the argument that the Bible constitutes a single narrative with a sad Jewish beginning and a happy Christian ending, a form imitated by countless European and American novels and turned into a near-universal cultural staple by Hollywood; Jewish film moguls propagated it among the gentiles no less zealously than the early Christians who were, of course, all Jews. Christians read an Old Testament prophet in anticipation of the birth of the New Testament Messiah and the creation of the world in Genesis in light of the new beginning of the world, inaugurated by the arrival of the logos in the flesh, which is the principal subject of the Gospel of John. This approach implies that to understand the Bible, one would be well-advised to read it from cover to cover in order to enact the seamless passage from the obscurities of Jewishness to the revelation of Christianity.
But anyone who knows anything about how Jews read the Tanakh knows that they do not read it from cover to cover. When Jews refer to the “book of the torah” (Heb. sefer torah), they do not mean the Hebrew Bible but the actual scroll of the Torah (the five books of Moses) from which the weekly synagogue portion is read.33xSee Elsie Stern, “Concepts of Scripture in the Synagogue Service,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Benjamin D. Sommer (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012), 15–30. While the Torah is read all the way through in the course of the lectionary year, the “Prophets” section of the Tanakh is read selectively (and not from a scroll). Some of the “Writings” are read annually on festivals (Esther on Purim, Lamentations on the Ninth of Av, Ruth on Shavuot), some are integrated into the liturgy (Psalms), and some are never read publicly at all (Proverbs and Job).
One of the curious byproducts of this difference in reading habits is that many diligent Christian Bible readers have read Chronicles, a book cheerfully ignored by most Jewish readers of the Tanakh unless they happen also to be Biblical scholars (a profession which, not surprisingly, has attracted many fewer Jews than Christians). Moreover, the rabbinic interpretive dictum that “there is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in the Torah”—that the meaning attached to individual verses cannot be reduced to their diegetic significance—militates against the notion that the significance of the Tanakh derives from its narrative order, to which Christian readers are very attached.44xThere are multiple rabbinic sources for the principle that “there is no earlier or later in the Torah.” For a survey of its history in classical Jewish exegesis, see Isaac Gottlieb, Order as Meaning: Chronology, Sequence, and Juxtaposition in the Bible (Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, 2024). Unlike the Bible, torah is, as we might say, all middle, a “teaching” without a beginning and without end; this is true in another way as well, since where Christian exegesis positions the (one and only) Holy Bible, rabbinic textuality speaks of two kinds of Torah, Written and Oral, the first complete and whole, the second open-ended and infinite.55xThe literature on the rabbinic idea of a Written and an Oral Torah is enormous. For an introduction to the basic concept, see Steven Fraade, “Concepts of Scripture in Rabbinic Judaism: Oral Torah and Written Torah,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture, 31–46. What this difference shows is that the conception of form (how we read) is inseparable from the reception of content (what we are reading); and even if we grant the proposition that it is possible to render Hebrew words into Greek ones, it remains far less certain whether form can be translated at all.
The Autobiographical Pact
To pursue this question a bit further, I want to leave behind the biblical sublime and turn to a more familiar and more popular form of writing that appears to have been successfully assimilated into Jewish reading and writing habits—the autobiography. One way to account for this development is to treat it as a single data point, a reflection of the wide-ranging adaptability of autobiographical writing. I cannot say for certain that autobiographies are now being written in every language spoken on the planet, but I am pretty sure they have been read in all of them. This, of course, is also true of the novel, but novel writing seems to have developed more organically, in tandem with native traditions of prose storytelling, which may explain why novels in translation are so easily domesticated; the history of the novel, like the history of drama for much the same reasons, has many beginnings in many different languages. The same is not true of autobiography, which entered global literature as a text in translation, specifically in the French of Rousseau’s Confessions, first published in 1782–1786, four years after its author’s death. Thus, unlike the modern history of the novel, the modern history of autobiography has only one beginning.66xOn the immediate appeal of Rousseau’s Confessions, see the classic essay by Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1984), 215–256.
Within a little more than a century following the publication of Confessions, Jews, along with everyone else, were writing autobiographies in every language, including Hebrew.77xOn the Jewish reception of Confessions, see Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). But the interesting question that the twentieth-century explosion of autobiographical writing by Jews raises is not when or even why Jews first began to write autobiographies. Jews, like all people, are eminently capable of learning and using multiple languages, which means they can, in principle, navigate any literary tradition. From the perspective of the translation problem, the question is whether the proliferation of autobiographies written by Jews now makes it necessary for us to speak of a new form of Jewish expression called “Jewish autobiography,” alongside of and in conversation with other forms of writing that comprise Jewish textuality. In other words, is autobiography translatable into the language of Jewishness?
Any attempt to address this question (and I do not propose to do anything more than that, because to answer it would require a book of its own) involves thinking about the difference between autobiography and other kinds of first-person prose writing, since this is the class to which autobiography belongs. It should be said that this difference is not obvious; there is no systematic way of distinguishing an autobiography from a novel pretending to be an autobiography. The most successful attempt to enforce the generic distinction between the former and the latter belongs to Philippe Lejeune, a French scholar who, more than anyone, has brought the specificity of autobiography to bear on the study of literary genre. In his Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), Lejeune famously insisted on the essential characteristic of autobiography to presume on what he called an “autobiographical pact,” an implicit agreement between author and reader to treat the first-person voice in the text as identical with that of the real-life author whose name appears beneath the title and whose authority underwrites the truth of the “life” that the text recounts.88xFor a selection of Lejeune’s seminal writings on autobiography, see Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Let us take the case of Jane Eyre (1847). This book, which everyone reads as a novel, explicitly calls itself an autobiography. In Lejeune’s reading, however, Jane Eyre cannot be read as an autobiography, because the narrator, Jane Eyre, is not the same person as her creator, the writer of Jane Eyre, a historical person called Charlotte Brontë, whose life can be documented and whose name now appears under the title of her novel. In such a case, the reader would conclude that the use of the designation “autobiography” in the subtitle is a reference to the author’s imaginative recourse to the conventions of autobiography in the composition of Jane Eyre. It is not the real-life Charlotte Brontë who is the autobiographical narrator and the subject of Jane Eyre but its title character, whose “life” was invented by Charlotte Brontë and presented to the public in that guise. According to the terms of the “autobiographical pact,” a novel that recounts the life of its protagonist in the first person may thus be defined as an autobiography of a nonexistent person. Literary history is full of such imaginary lives: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850).
In the background of the “autobiographical pact,” which insists on drawing a hard line between fictional and nonfictional “lives,” hovers the issue of readerly trust. The “pact” assumes the relationship between the reader and the writer rests on an expectation of truthfulness. Unless the writer explicitly alerts readers to the fact that they are reading fiction, readers will take the author’s sincerity for granted. Even in cases where such qualifications are plainly in evidence—as they are in all three of the examples listed above—most readers will identify the first-person voice of the narrator with that of the author and routinely attribute the opinions and ideas, if not the experiences, of Crusoe and Gulliver to Defoe and Swift, respectively, just as they attribute Jane Eyre’s feelings and desires to her author, even though the book itself gives them no reason to do so. In fact, the voice of Charlotte Brontë herself is dispersed among all the characters in her novel.
If Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” works, it does so because it relies on the trust that readers seem intuitively to place in the first-person voice. But is this trust really all that intuitive? Why should readers so readily assent to the terms of the “autobiographical pact,” even though their faith in the sincerity of authors is so frequently tested by narrators who expose themselves as self-serving liars? Autobiographical writing, not least as it is practiced by Rousseau and his followers, is peculiarly prone both to extravagant claims of authenticity and to the proliferation of unreliable authors who flagrantly violate the “autobiographical pact” and upset the normative expectations of readers.
The Limits of Confession
What Lejeune does not say is that both the good faith of (most) readers and the bad faith of (some) authors belong to the Christian language game that treats confession as a sacrament and privileges first-person testimony as singularly probative.99xSee Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1990). This is why the reading public responds to the exposure of an autobiography as a work of fiction with outrage and a sense of violation, as was the case with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995). Wilkomirski’s act of literary impersonation has even been pathologized into a “syndrome.”1010xSee Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom: eingebildete Erinnerungen, oder, von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein, ed. Irene Diekmann and Julius H. Schoeps (Zurich, Switzerland: Pendo, 2002). Whatever we may say about the appeal to the “autobiographical pact” on the part of an increasing number of Jewish authors, the implicitly Christian genre of autobiography—by which I mean, the way that first-person writing is read—presents a problem for the language of Jewishness. For literature, this problem has proven to be very productive.
Without fetishizing origins, I don’t think I am running the risk of controversy by linking our general assumption that first-person “confessional” statements can and ought to be truthful to the role that the practice of confessing has in Christianity. Indeed, Rousseau himself took his title (and much else) from the paradigmatic Christian Confessions of Augustine.1111xSee Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to St. Augustine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).Moreover, the modern emphasis on authenticity, which privileges the first-person voice, is rooted in the conventions of “spiritual autobiography,” a genre that developed within the devotional framework of seventeenth-century Puritanism.1212xJohn Bunyan, Grace Abounding With Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998). From here, it is a short step to the extraordinary weight placed on confessions in modern Western jurisprudence. Only in 1966 did the Supreme Court see fit to institute legal protection against the patent abuse of confessional evidence. It is amazing to consider that legislation at the highest level of American jurisprudence was needed to rule out the truth of confessions extracted by force; apparently, the assumption of their probative value was otherwise impervious to doubt. Arguably, the sacramental status that Christianity assigned to confession helped to prolong the life of judicially sanctioned recourse to torture. In Jewish jurisprudence and Jewish liturgy, it is otherwise.
Once again, difference starts with translation. Unlike the Latinate “confession,” which is etymologically linked to “avowal and admission” (of a crime, a debt, or a fault), the Hebrew counterpart, vidui, is related to a root that means “to ascertain,” or “to confirm” and “to verify.” Related to the same semantic cluster, the modern Hebrew word vadaah refers to an axiom in geometry. None of these associations applies to what we mean when we use the word “confession” because none of them necessarily involves speaking in the first person. One may ascertain, verify, or confirm information on the basis (for example) of documents. Geometrical axioms are as far away from confessional avowals as one can imagine.
It is more helpful, in this context, to think of vidui less as a “confession” and more as a species of verification that involves attesting to one’s actions in propria persona, speaking, as it were, as one’s own representative, based on the knowledge that one has about oneself. Rabbinic law takes the limits of verification seriously. It operates on a normative assumption that self-representation—testimony given on one’s own behalf—is not to be trusted, because people are not, as it were, sufficiently detached from themselves to attest confidently to their own behavior.
Confession therefore enjoys no privileged status in Jewish law. On the contrary, rabbinic jurisprudence is highly suspicious of confessions given in evidence of wrongdoing either in a juridical or a devotional context. Anticipating the Miranda decision by a thousand years, the Talmudic principle that “no man may render himself an evil person” served to exclude confessions from testimony in criminal cases.1313xIrene Merker Rosenberg and Yale L. Rosenberg, “In the Beginning: The Talmudic Rule Against Self-Incrimination,” New York University Law Review 63, no. 5 (1988): 955–1050. See also Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus, “The Talmudic Rule Against Self-Incrimination and the American Exclusionary Rule,” NYLS Journal of International and Comparative Law 21 (2002): 205–227. Although rabbinic penitential practice requires admission of guilt as part of the process of repentance, amendment of behavior still constitutes the ultimate test of sincerity.1414xThe classic rabbinic example of a person who has transgressed and confesses but does not “amend” is in TB Ta’anit 16a. See also Maimonides, Mishneh-torah, “Repentance,” 2.3. On the Day of Atonement, Jewish congregations regularly make public “confession” on behalf of all Israel and for all the transgressions of which any member of the community might conceivably have been guilty. This means that on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Jewish men and women find themselves confessing to things of which they are perfectly innocent. From a Christian perspective, this kind of thing is no less grievous a sin than failing to confess to things of which one is, in fact, guilty, because it involves the violation of confessional trust between priest and penitent. For Jews, collective confession is a covenantal obligation imposed on the community. Following the poet of Psalms, the rabbis left the vagaries of individual conscience to God.1515xFor an example, see Psalm 139.
What operates in the Jewish suspicion of confession is a kind of epistemological modesty, an unwillingness to examine other minds too closely. One might speculate that this reserve about the human capacity for self-disclosure involves a recognition of the difference between truthfulness and truth: A confession may not be trusted, not because people deliberately set out to lie about themselves but because they are liable, with perfect sincerity, to misrepresent themselves as both too good and too bad. Notably, the rabbinic injunction focuses on self-inculpation, as if public “rendering [oneself] an evil person” is a pleasure to be resisted. This curiously counterintuitive position seems to anticipate the kind of psychological temptation that besets the protagonists in the novels of Dostoevsky, but it may be easier to understand it as an expression of rabbinic opposition to the doctrine of original sin and to the emotional appeal of a confidential, perfectly transparent relationship with the human son of God (and his loving, all-forgiving mother).
It is the Christian language of “confession” that probably inhibited Jewish experiments with autobiographical truth-telling. A Jewish confession might well have been considered a contradiction in terms. Indeed, one well-known medieval polemical text, in treating the connection between the absence of the sacrament of “confession” in Judaism and the Christian charge that Jews are liars, eschewed a Hebrew translation of the word entirely and instead made use of the German Beichte.1616xDavid Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 223–224. Clearly, in referring to “confession,” Christians meant one thing; when Jews referred to vidui, they meant something else. But to translate “confession” as vidui did not only involve a misrepresentation of the latter. The rabbinic meaning of vidui pointed to the limitations of the confessional ideal as a model for all human communication that was woven into the fabric of Christianity.
An Anti-Confessional “Confession”
Until the nineteenth century, long after print had broken the rabbinic monopoly on Jewish writing, Jews did not write autobiographies. There is a very small number of what scholarship now calls “ego-documents,” but they do not fit the established confessional norm. The only one to have attracted any serious scholarly interest was written by a seventeenth-century woman for her children, and even though it recounts the principal events of her life, it is closer in style to an ethical will than to an autobiography.1717xGlikl: Memoirs, 1691–1719, ed. Chava Turniansky, trans. Sara Friedman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2019).
Significantly, prior to the last third of the nineteenth century, no Jewish writer described an autobiographical text as a “confession.” The only premodern Jewish “confessions” we have survive in the files of the Inquisition, and they were written (or dictated) by Jewish converts, at the command of a Christian tribunal.1818xInquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, ed. and trans. Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). When a Jewish confessional autobiography did appear, in 1876, in Hebrew, under the title Errors of Youth, it produced a minor sensation. Its author, M.L. Lilienblum, was a Talmudic prodigy who grew up in the northwest provinces of the Russian Empire, an area known as the “Lithuanian Jerusalem.” In 1871, Lilienblum came to the port city of Odessa, the capital of New Russia, where he embarked on his vocation as a Jewish writer in all three languages read and spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish. Errors of Youth made his reputation. After its publication, Lilienblum rose to public prominence as the cofounder of the “Lovers of Zion” movement, the first Jewish organization dedicated to the work of national renaissance. Errors of Youth remains his best-known work, chiefly on account of its genre.
Although scholars routinely treat Errors of Youth as the modern Jewish breakthrough into autobiography, its normative status as the first faithful Jewish “translation” of confession à la Rousseau cannot be taken for granted. What is supposed to be a paradigmatic Jewish “confession” reads like a Jewish anti-confessional parody designed to subvert the terms of the “autobiographical pact.” Not only does the text persistently undermine the reader’s faith in the narrator’s representation of his own life story; but it also intimates that to cultivate the reader’s distrust in the narrator serves the author’s critical purpose. In other words, the author’s attitude to the narrator is not merely that of a detached observer (the way it might be in a novel) but that of his most determined skeptic. This skepticism also extends to the ideas the narrator defends and embodies—including, most importantly, the basic idea of “confession” as a secure repository of truth. Lilienblum’s anti-confessional argument is a Jewish polemic against the translatability of a formative Christian genre.
To read Errors of Youth as an autobiography—to read it as the work of its narrator rather than of its author—is to ignore the Jewish language in which it is written. In referring to its Jewish language, I do not mean, merely, the fact that it is written in Hebrew; Errors of Youth plays by the rules of a complex Jewish language game in which “Hebrew” does not designate a single language but a variety of different linguistic registers. The text “speaks” in the languages of the Tanakh, of rabbinic jurisprudence, of medieval Jewish philosophy, of nineteenth-century Jewish poetry.
Moreover, the text speaks these languages with a Yiddish accent and the Aramaic inflection of the traditional Jewish study house (Heb. beit-midrash), the locus of rabbinic textuality and the institution where Lilienblum learned to read and write. Although the narrator of Errors of Youth has the privilege of the same education and appears to command the same linguistic resources as the author—he is constantly referring to the enormous number of books that he has digested—the text shows that he does not really understand what he has read. In every encounter with a Jewish text (both marked and unmarked), the narrator makes a mistake. His interpretations are revealed as self-serving, contradictory, and incoherent. Very often the texts that are integrated into his narrative have more revealing things to say about his motives than what he himself has to say. In nearly every verbal duel in which he attempts to dispatch a Jewish text as absurd, irrational, and irrelevant, the text gets the better of him. In this way, Jewish intertextuality represents the narrator’s Jewish subconscious, which, in a vain attempt to own all the truth about himself, he disowns.
But Jewish textuality refuses to be summarily rejected. The language from which the narrator of Errors of Youth vainly attempts to liberate himself ends up speaking him. And it is in the intertext, marshaled with great care and consummate skill, that the reader detects the hand of the author. By confronting the reader with evidence of the narrator’s inability to control the textual languages that he is speaking, Lilienblum shows that the confessional narrator has no authority over what he says. Speaking for himself alone, the confessing subject ends up saying nothing that a discerning reader can take seriously.
Indeed, it is not a coincidence that those readers of Errors of Youth who accept the narrator as the authentic voice of the author, who presume the “autobiographical pact,” are tone-deaf to the intertextual chorus that comments ironically on every single one of his utterances. A Jewish reading of Errors of Youth (which is, in effect, an anti-confessional reading) requires expert knowledge of its Jewish language. Insofar as Jewish writers may be characterized as professionals at the Jewish language game, Errors of Youth is a supremely writerly text. Jewish writers were the readers best placed to understand what the author of Errors of Youth was doing and to seize on the importance of an anti-confessional Jewish text for the future of Jewish literature.
Nurtured on rabbinic suspicions of confessional testimony and on Jewish penitential technology that attached no sacramental or ritual value to self-dramatizing acts of “avowal,” Lilienblum rejected the translation of the “confessional” form, even as the publication of Errors of Youth opened the floodgates to Jewish autobiographical writing. But unlike most Jewish readers, Jewish writers proved immune to the narrative pathos of the confessional voice; they followed the critical path forged by Lilienblum. Following Lilienblum, they turned the unreliable narrator into a fixture, if not a particular specialty, of Jewish literature.
Lilienblum’s most astute early reader was S.N. Rabinovich (1859–1916), known more familiarly by the name of his vernacular persona “How do you do?” (Yid. sholem-aleichem), the author best known for Tevye the Dairyman, on which Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock based the 1964 American musical Fiddler on the Roof (there are no fiddlers in Rabinovich’s original). Rabinovich, who, like Lilienblum, was a virtuoso player of the Jewish language game, was also a master of the monologue, a “confessional” genre in which garrulous narrators prove expert at hoisting themselves with the petard of their own compulsive desire to tell everything about themselves. Perhaps Rabinovich’s finest and certainly his iconic creation, Tevye the dairyman is the most famous misquoter in modern fiction. Tevye, like nearly every other protagonist in Rabinovich’s fiction, always says more than he means.
Rabinovich, who was read not only in Yiddish (the language in which most of his work was originally written) but also in English and Russian, took Lilienblum’s anti-confessional ethos into the twentieth century. Lilienblum also had many admirers among Jewish modernists, including J.H. Brenner (1881–1921) and Isaac Babel (1894–1940), who similarly subjected their anti-confessional narrators to authorial skepticism.
But the true twentieth-century heir of M.L. Lilienblum was Philip Roth (1933–2018), who, I am guessing, never heard of Lilienblum, although he certainly knew the work of Rabinovich and Babel. Roth translated Lilienblum’s anti-confessional sensibility into English, and was immediately and decisively misread, which, in a country given to the Protestant confessional habit, was perhaps only to be expected.
Roth continually exploits the possibilities of deploying the first-person voice in a subversively anti-confessional mode. He is the only major American author with a writerly alter ego (Nathan Zuckerman) invented with the express purpose of averting any possible confusion between himself and his characters. The invention of Zuckerman is, among other things, Roth’s response to the complete misunderstanding of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which even its Jewish readers insisted on treating as a confession, proving thereby that their first language was more Christian than Jewish).1919xOn the reception of Portnoy’s Complaint, see Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
No one who has read Errors of Youth as it was written would ever have made such a mistake. In all the collective handwringing that greeted Portnoy’s Complaint, only Roth’s parents, two people who had the best reason in the world to know their son was not a pathetic, whiny, self-righteous, vain, sex-obsessed excuse for a human being but a smart, funny, and caring mensch (not to mention a proud Jew who loved and respected his mother and father), seemed to have been able to distinguish Alex Portnoy, the repellently hilarious first-person narrator of Portnoy’s Complaint, from his literary “begetter.” Philip (of Macedon), it will be remembered, was the father—not the twin brother—of Alexander (the Great).
It should have been obvious, and it would have been so to Lilienblum and Rabinovich, that Roth created Alex Portnoy, the Jewish American conqueror of the world, for the same reason Lilienblum created the narrator of Errors of Youth and Rabinovich created Tevye: to expose compulsive truth-telling (transposed, in Roth’s novel, to the twentieth-century confessional of the psychiatrist’s office) as a cover story (an alibi) for narcissism and personal entitlement, and to show that in translating vidui to mean “confession,” what Jewish readers risk losing is nothing less than themselves.
Written in English with a strong Jewish accent, Portnoy’s Complaint makes a powerful argument for the coherence of Jewishness as a form of life, a way of reading that resists translation. This is the same argument that Jews make every Shabbat morning, when they get together to read a text written in an unspoken language that retains the transcendent otherness of an untranslated holy tongue.