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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 411
Palestine is brutally shattered by the military might of Arabic troops,
while their romance with Zionism, and the ideology of Jewish
exceptionalism it endorses, is ruthlessly disrupted. As they fail to
actualize their Jewish exceptionalism by attaching it to a divinely
ordained land, they can only sustain their romance with Jewish
exceptionalism by suturing their loss with other ideologies that can
better articulate their long-held notion of Jewish exceptionalism. It
is in this void, caught in between a broken romance, a deferred
dream, and an alternative dream or romance that is yet to be
invented, that the Alaskan Jews
—
both the first-wave and the
second-wave immigrants
—
find themselves trapped between two
losses: the loss of a grand dream that makes them exceptional, and
the failure to imagine an alternative dream to supplant the broken
one.
This strenuous work at articulating an ideology of Jewish
exceptionalism to suture the contradictions and ambivalence of the
Jewish experience of being always already excepted, first by the Nazi
Germany that has excepted them, then by the Arabs who have
destroyed their newly established nation, and finally by the U.S. that
has exiled them, throws them into a chronic state of melancholia.
Different groups react differently to their losses. The majority of
Jews simply resign themselves to their fate, trying to take for granted
the statelessness that is considered by some to be their diasporic
destiny, as they busy themselves either applying for permanent
residence in the States or seeking to move to another land.
Landsman’s Uncle Hertz chooses to go native,
a la mode
of Kurtz in
Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, and works single-handedly to
obtain Permanent Status for Alaskan Settlement. In other words,
other than those who resign to a fate as wandering Jews, many
Alaskan Jews choose to attach themselves to the fantasy of the
nation-state, believing that their problems would be solved either
through assimilation into the US or by the establishment of a Zionist
state in Palestine.
Exceptionalism and faith in Jewish redemption become strange