Leaving Other People Alone: Diaspora, Zionism, and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction

by Aaron Kreuter

Overview

Leaving Other People Alone reads contemporary North American Jewish fiction about Israel/Palestine through an anti-Zionist lens. Aaron Kreuter argues that since Jewish diasporic fiction played a major role in establishing the centroperipheral relationship between Israel and the diaspora, it therefore also has the potential to challenge, trouble, and ultimately rework this relationship. Kreuter suggests that any fictional work that concerns itself with Israel/Palestine and Zionism comes with heightened responsibilities, primarily to make narrative space for the Palestinian worldview, the dispossessed Other of the Zionist project. In engaging prose, the book features a wide range of scholarship and new, compelling readings of texts by Theodor Herzl, Leon Uris, Philip Roth, Ayelet Tsabari, and David Bezmozgis. Throughout, Kreuter develops his concept of diasporic heteroglossia, which is fiction’s unique ability to contain multiple voices that resist and write back against national centres. This work makes an important and original contribution to Jewish studies, diaspora studies, and world literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772126945
Publisher:	University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	12/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Aaron Kreuter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Comparative Study in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. He is the author of Arguments for Lawn Chairs; You and Me, Belonging; and Shifting Baseline Syndrome, which was nominated for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry in 2022. He lives in Toronto.

Table of Contents

ix Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Playing Jewish Geography 1 | Philip Goes to Israel 27 Jewish Justice, Diasporism, Palestinian Voices, and Zionist Self-Censorship in Operation Shylock 2 | Herzl Meets Uris 77 Altneuland and Exodus in Diasporic Comparison 3 | Arab Jews, Polycentric Diasporas, Porous Borders 131 Israel/Palestine in the Short Fiction of Ayelet Tsabari 4 | “The Jewish Semitone” 189 Zionism and the Soviet Jewish Diaspora in The Betrayers Conclusion 237 Diasporic Heteroglossia, Second Cousins, Learning to Be Each Other’s Guests Notes 243 Works Cited 277 Index 293

Editorial Reviews

Aaron Kreuter incorporates a wide range of scholarly work and historically contextualizes the spaces under discussion. Leaving Other People Alone is an important book. Brett Ashley Kaplan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Leaving Other People Alone, is without a doubt, the most morally imaginative and critically compelling exploration of the Jewish literary soul to come along in many years. Through eloquent and genuinely exciting close readings, Kreuter offers brilliant new approaches to considering indigeneity, diasporic identities and related forms of conflicted belonging. His highly original formulation of "diasporic heteroglossia," a bold conceptual approach to the ethics of repudiating territorialism, offers the kind of rare paradigm that truly transforms the conversation and will likely provoke and inspire scholars in Jewish Studies and well beyond for years to come. Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Amos Oz: Legacy of a Writer
One of the key questions Aaron Krueter asks in Leaving Other People Alone is what the books and authors studied reveal about the relationship between the Jewish diaspora, Israel, Zionism, and the ethical potential of diaspora. Isabelle Hesse, University of Sydney

From the Publisher