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Lorrie Moore Collection“A Little Ethnic Kink Is Always Good to See”: Jewish Performance Anxiety and Anti-passing in the Fiction of Lorrie Moore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2012

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which the performance of Jewish identity (in the sense both of representing Jewish characters and of writing about those characters’ conscious and unconscious renditions of their Jewishness) is a particular concern (in both senses of the word) for Lorrie Moore. Tracing Moore's representations of Jewishness over the course of her career, from the early story “The Jewish Hunter” through to her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, I argue that it is characterized by (borrowing a phrase from Moore herself) “performance anxiety,” an anxiety that manifests itself in awkward comedy and that can be read both in biographical terms and as an oblique commentary on, or reworking of, the passing narrative, which I call “anti-passing.” Just as passing narratives complicate conventional ethno-racial definitions so Moore's anti-passing narratives, by representing Jews who represent themselves as other to themselves, as well as to WASP America, destabilize the category of Jewishness and, by implication, deconstruct the very notion of ethnic categorization.

Type
Lorrie Moore Collection
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Lorrie Moore, “Chop Suey Xmas,” New Yorker, 22 Dec. 1997, 87.

2 Beattie (punning on “BT,” the abbreviation for British Telecom) was a Jewish mother played by Lipman, a comedienne and actress, in a long-running television advertising campaign during the 1980s. In one campaign with the tag line “Keeping in touch” she is depicted addressing a photograph of her son, reproaching him sardonically for not ringing her (“You've got a phobia … You're telephobic”). Then there is a cut to the son leaving a message on her answering machine, after which Beattie is seen talking once more to the photograph: “It's a pleasure to hear your voice [Pause.] A little more often wouldn't hurt.”

3 Madeleine Pontritter in Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964) and Maureen Tarnopol in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man (1974) are typical examples.

4 See Kelly, Alison, Understanding Lorrie Moore (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 111–16Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

5 Harrison-Kahan, Lori, “Passing for White, Passing for Jewish: Mixed Race Identity in Danzy Senna and Rebecca Walker,” MELUS, 30, 1 (Spring 2005), 1948, 21, 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

6 Lorrie Moore, “The Wrath of Athena,” review of Philip Roth, The Human Stain, New York Times Book Review, 7 May 2000, 7–8, 7.

7 I would like here to acknowledge the helpful suggestions made by Heidi MacPherson, and by the anonymous reader of this piece, particularly in terms of clarifying the issues identified in this paragraph.

8 Moore, Lorrie, Self-Help (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 51, 52; 145; 34Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

9 Moore, Lorrie, Like Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)Google Scholar, 116, hereafter cited parethentically in the text.

10 See Stephen J. Whitfield, “Unathletic Department,” in Jack Kugelmass, ed., Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 51–71.

11 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 11, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

12 Moore, Lorrie, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (London: Faber and Faber, 1995)Google Scholar, 28, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

13 The connections between Hepburn and Frank go further than Daniel's remark might suggest. Born in the same year as Frank, Hepburn also spent time as a child in the Netherlands during the German occupation, was always fascinated by her and was reputedly asked by Otto Frank to play her in the film version of the Diary released in 1959, an offer she declined because she felt that she was too old to play the young Anne convincingly.

14 The Deportation Monument is a memorial to those Jews deported from Paris to concentration and death camps during the Second World War.

15 Moore, Lorrie, Birds of America (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 154Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

16 See Freedman, Jonathan, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia Press, 2007), 3993Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

17 One of the staples of early Church-sponsored anti-Semitism was to claim that the Jewish male body was effeminate, as manifested in the myth of Jewish male menstruation. See Gilman, Sander, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2006), 122–24Google Scholar.

18 Moore, Lorrie, “Debarking,” New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2003, available at www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222fi_fiction, 115, 1Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

19 Moore, Lorrie, A Gate at the Stairs (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 9, 8Google Scholar, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

20 She fails to dissuade her husband from leaving the boy by the roadside on a motorway. Initially intended to be a temporary punishment for his persistent misbehaviour in the back of the car, the incident becomes a tragedy when the boy runs out into traffic and is killed.

21 Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977), available at www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a/annie-hall-script-screenplay-woody.html. At one point the protagonist of Allen's film, Alvy Singer, complains to his friend, Rob, that, after “having lunch with some guys from NBC,” one of them (the symbolically named Tom Christie, replied to his enquiry “Did you eat yet or what?” with an anti-Semitic jibe: “‘No, didchoo?’ Not, did you, didchoo eat? Jew? No, not did you eat, but Jew eat? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?”

22 Of course, the historical Jesus was unequivocally Jewish, but seen retrospectively, in terms of a Christianity conceived both as the fulfilment and rejection of Judaism, his Jewishness is often effectively erased.

23 Helena de Bertodano, “Lorrie Moore interview,” The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/6256085/Lorrie-Moore-interview.html), accessed Dec. 2010. For example, Helena de Bertodano writes, “In her new novel – ‘her most powerful yet’, according to the New York Times – a central theme explores the experience of a white couple from a Midwestern college town who are in the process of adopting an African-American child. Moore and her ex-husband adopted their son, Benjamin (who is African-American), and the acuteness of some of the observations seems to be drawn from experience.”

24 Lorrie Moore, “A Pondered Life” (review of two biographies of Eudora Welty and four new editions of her work), New York Review of Books, 21 Sept. 2006, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/19299.

25 Lorrie Moore, “Home Truths” (review of John Updike, The Early Stories 1953–1975), New York Review of Books, 20 November, 2003, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/nov/20/home-truths. In a review of a volume of John Updike's early short stories, Moore wrote that “Philip Larkin once said that novels are about others; poems are about oneself. One can imagine a short story falling somewhere in between.”

27 See Hollinger, David A., Post-ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 8Google Scholar.