The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first “incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine” (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers’ engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography.
In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story “Ana min al-yahoud” (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that “it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic” (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature.
One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, “A Spectralized Past” and “Haunted Nation,” Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to “recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors,” assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the “gothic agunah” as both “excessively present” and “defiant” or resistant through her affect (85).
Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's “Lady of the Castle,” interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a “conflicted Zionism,” becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua, two canonical Hebrew writers who draw on Gothic themes and devices (crypts, labyrinths, transgressive fantasies, incest) to portray Israel as a whole and Jerusalem in particular as a haunted nation and city. In the chapter on Oz, Grumberg suggests that divided Jerusalem functions as a labyrinthine, claustrophobic space that conceals more than it reveals, eliciting paranoia and a desire to transgress political boundaries. In contradistinction to Walter Benjamin's male flaneur, Oz's Hana is, in this Gothic reading, a city walker who knows post-1948 Jerusalem all too well, recognizing its dark, chaotic forces, rather than celebrating its Zionist future.
Hebrew literature responded, Grumberg shows, to shifts in Israeli historiography of the 1948 war, which called into question official histories by drawing on sources from newly opened archives. Haunted by familial and national secrets, Yehoshua's and Behar's narratives unsettle readers, offering, in the novel Mr. Mani, “an unidealized Sephardic Jewish history” (201). Discussing motifs of haunting in Morrison and Behar, Grumberg underscores the need to retheorize the Gothic genre when the disempowered Others of past Gothic literature become the authors of Gothic texts (230). Those protagonists who have been written out of history use the Gothic mode to confront their own pasts, through a structure of transgenerational haunting of the Black or Arab Jewish subject who must contend with traumatic forgetfulness.
Owing to its broad temporal span, Hebrew Gothic reveals continuities between the pre- and post-1948 periods in Hebrew literature. Just as Gothic devices paved the way for a literary critique of Jewish-Christian relations in eastern Europe, so they later enabled a self-critical reflection on power and violence in Hebrew poststatehood literature. While this theoretically informed study puts Hebrew literature into conversation with the Gothic mode, it also offers probing close readings of both Hebrew- and English-language texts. If we consider these works as Gothic clocks in their own right, Grumberg delves into the intricacies of their narrative mechanisms, exposing the wheels, levers, and pins that make them tick. Hebrew Gothic ends with the claim that “the monsters are here to stay” (274). Rather than a thing of the past, Gothic ghosts and monstrous undead continue to haunt a variety of twenty-first-century Hebrew-language genre and media, meriting further scholarly attention and inviting future comparisons with Middle Eastern Arabic literature.
