ABSTRACT
Forgetting, like remembering, can be a collaborative effort, and may even be compounded rather than alleviated by the recuperative effort of translation. The above passage is from Saul Bellow’s famous translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, ‘Gimpel the Fool’.1 It is in this text, which has become something of a classic in modern Jewish literature, that Gimpel and his bride, the ‘virgin’ Elka, stand under the canopy while the ‘master of revels makes a “God ’a mercy” in memory of the bride’s parents’.2 The distance between ‘God ’a mercy’ and El maleh rahamim is, it seems, the terrain that Gimpel tam must cross in order to enter the pages of Partisan Review and become naturalized on American soil. The year is 1953. Can it be said now, over forty years later, that the deterritorialized ‘God ’a mercy’ —Gimpel in a Baptist church, as it wereserved as a marker or way-station until readers would be ready once again to hear El maleh rahamim under the huppah? Or is this displacement, like Gimpel’s forgetting the prooftext from Pirkei Avot, symptomatic of a more endemic condition-a kind of collective Alzheimer’s-in relation to which there could be dramatic acts of compensation but no recovery? There was, in any case, as much cover-up as exposure in Bellow’s ‘Gimpel’. The translation that launched Bashevis Singer’s American career made the text available without making it transparent, so obscuring many of the original signs as to render them all but irretrievable.3 The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States had been followed, within one generation, by a cultural amnesia that is manifested in the displacement of Jewish territories and texts.
