Anonymity and Jewishness as forms of alienation: Israel Rabon’s The Street

Abstract

Anonymity and Jewishness as Forms of Alienation: Israel Rabon’s The Street The article discusses Israel Rabon’s novel The Street (1985), which was originally published in Yiddish in 1928. The novel is set in post-World War I Łódź, Poland and narrates a series of events, whose central figure is an anonymous narrator – a discharged war veteran who aimlessly drifts through life. The textual absence of personal information situates the narrator in a communal void, which parallels his alienation not only from the society, but from the world at large. The heart of the narrator’s account is the blight of post-war society, which is corrupted by the trauma of war. Rabon’s protagonist is representative of the fate of many Polish people who tried to restore their lives in the struggling Polish economy, which was destroyed by the war. The experience of war is presented as responsible for shattering their dreams and thwarting their prospects of a comfortable life. The discordance between the protagonist’s far-fetched expectations and the grim post-war reality highlights his sense of alienation, not only from the world around, but also from his inner self. Jewishness is another factor which provides a form of detachment, and which informs the protagonist’s position against the social fabric of the post-war Polish society. He is presented as an assimilated Jew whose religiosity has largely been eroded. No longer part of ancestral culture, nor fully accepted by Polish society, he is shown as suffering from double alienation. The Street is not an ethnicspecific depiction of the East-European Jewish community, but a general story about the post-war world as characterized by the pervading sense of alienation.

Keywords

• yiddish literature
• jewishness
• post-wwi poland
• alienation
• anonymity