Et in Ashkenazia ego: Utopias of the Holocaust?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article interrogates examples of alternative histories in contemporary British Jewish writing which redraw and reinterpret the topography of the Holocaust. More specifically, it explores the tensions which arise in Clive Sinclair’s short story ‘Ashkenazia’ (1980) and Dan Jacobson’s novel The God-Fearer (1992) between notions of a Jewish heterotopia, the re-inscription of historical topographies, and the imaginary of the Holocaust. Set in an imaginary Jewish state, which is mapped onto the pre-existing Jewish topography of the loosely defined Ashkenaz of historical reality, both texts unfold alternative histories which, though imagined, nevertheless cannot un-think the historical occurrence of the Holocaust.