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the nation-building project, nor can they be found in the claiming of
a homeland. Rather, he realizes “[His] homeland is in [his] hat. It’s
in [his] ex-wife’s tote bag” (368); that is, his homeland is not
ordained by God in accordance with the covenant of Jewish election.
His homeland is the result of his marriage with a woman whom he
sometimes thinks he can fully understand and whom he sometimes
considers to be a total stranger. There are too many disruptive
contingencies which make it impossible for him to manage his
marriage with Bina; nor are there clear guidelines to assist him in
shaping their impossible life together. Their life together as a
married couple is similar to the covenantal relationship between the
Jews and God, as “Every couple’s life is structured around a set of
shared and often nonsensical rules and patterns that they would
never admit to an outsider” (Santner, 2001: 120). Landsman can
only find his way home when he is willing to engage with everyday
life, to tackle those contingent, random, unruly, aspects of his
relations and interact with his intimate but also strange others.
It is this willingness to accept mastery as delusional and
contingency as the “norm” of life that allows Landsman, at the end
of the novel, to embrace the marriage plot, obeying an inner voice
that tells him to demand and even enact a new kind of justice, one
that affirms not the supremacy of either Jewish exceptionalism or
American exceptionalism, but the exceptionality of the singular and
the contingent. In re-bonding with his estranged wife, Landsman
exits the statist form of the creaturely condition. What Landsman
realizes is that, once he learns to suspend the law, once he breaks the
structure of identification
—
nationalist, religious, or ethnic, he
encounters the “something within himself”
—
or the miraculous
potentialities
—
that frees him from the crippling entanglements of
guilt, of having fallen short of expectations.
At the end of the novel, Landsman is finally free from the
burden of nationalism, even though the terrorist conspiracy still
looms ahead and he is still stateless. Nevertheless he gains a “home”
bounded by his renewed faith in love and language. Even though