402 / 142
402
E
UR
A
MERICA
historical narratives, there is still room for small-scale redemption,
as long as the “what if” scenario is activated and the momentum of
thinking otherwise is maintained. It is, this paper argues, Chabon’s
effort to articulate, within the inevitability of the historical given,
the “what if,” that constitutes the main interest of Chabon’s
counterfactual fiction.
In other words, Chabon’s
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
is
different from Roth’s
The Plot Against America
, for the latter
channels its energies into imagining the probable persecution of
Jewish Americans once the ideologies of American exceptionalism
escalate and clash with American Jewish exceptionalism,
5
whereas
the former focuses on those Jews who have not acquired American
citizenship and, therefore, are “exceptional” simply because they
live in a state of exception, being “stateless” individuals unclaimed
by any nation-state. As such, Chabon’s
The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union
poses a question that Roth’s
The Plot Against America
does
not raise: Is the nation-state indispensable for securing Jews security,
happiness, and freedom? What options are available to a people that
finds itself in a state of displacement, exiled both from home and the
body politic, as disposable life? Is it possible for a large social group
to survive this state of statelessness and then go beyond this status
of diasporic aporia, to simply “live on,”
6
without the trappings of
5
American exceptionalism, especially its contemporary variant that construes and
justifies U.S. imperialism as an indispensable measure to preserve world peace, is
not the same thing as Jewish exceptionalism, especially its Zionist version that
construes the Jews as the “chosen people” (
Alam, 2010: 9)
and justifies Palestine
as their sole and God-given birthright. Similarly, Jewish exceptionalism also bears
scanty resemblance to Jewish American exceptionalism, which simply means, as
aptly captured in the title of Seymour Martin Lipset’s classical essay from 1991, “A
Unique People in an Exceptional Country”; that is, America’s exceptional
hospitality towards Jews provides fertile ground for the exceptional talents and
intelligence of Jews to flower and thrive. For many Jewish Americans, so
Christopher Buck writes, “American exceptionalism is coefficient with America’s
ability to preserve and promote Jewish exceptionalism” (2015: 125).
6
I’m here referring to Derrida’s notion of “living on,” as neither an issue of an
individual’s survival nor as an articulation of an identity, but as an event, both lived