Embodied Differences: The Jew’s Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture by Henrietta Mondry (review)

Reviewed by: Embodied Differences: The Jew's Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture by Henrietta Mondry Marat Grinberg Embodied Differences: The Jew's Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture. By Henrietta Mondry. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. 268 pages. 103. 00 (cloth). The presence and portrayal of Jews in Russian literature is a complicated and thorny subject. Many, if not most, of the sporadic Jewish characters found on the pages of nineteenth century Russian classics are either gross stereotypes and caricatures or patronizing stock figures. The picture changes somewhat in the twentieth century with the influx of Jews into Russian culture and literature, but remains very limited due to the politics of assimilation and acculturation, on the one hand, and the pressures of Soviet censorship, on the other. In her new innovative study, Embodied Differences: The Jew's Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture, Henrietta Mondry tackles these issues head on, examining texts from the nineteenth century to the post-Soviet period. The result is a rich and provocative study that provides fresh and often unexpected insights into constructions of Jewishness in Russia. Mondry's emphasis is on the Jew's body and how that body exists and functions in relation to the material universe surrounding it. In thinking about the familiar dichotomy between the corporeal (body) and the spiritual (soul), she asks, "whose corporeality, 'soul' and correlated tastes and senses does the dominant culture recognize as not entirely beautiful? " (xi-xii). In other words, what are "the constructs of the embodied Other in relation to the material world" (xii). For Mondry, in the Russian context—and she is absolutely right in claiming this— the "embodied Other" is the Jew, whose "corporeality, " "body politics and the politics of materiality. . . came to typify physical and ontological difference" (xii–xiii). In this respect, one should add, the Jewish body in the Russian imagination is comparable to the African American body in the American imagination. Furthermore, the model of body/materiality allows Mondry to productively question "'the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy of humans, ' placing human participation into the End Page 138 domain of shared materiality. " Indeed, "this approach affords new and more nuanced interpretations of the literary canon and of less known and less studied cultural material" (xiii). Mondry's interpretations are not always entirely convincing, but always thought-provoking, learned, and intricate. A case in point are the readings provided in the book's first part, which is devoted most prominently to the canonical works of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov. While acknowledging the negativity of the Jewish characters in Gogol and Dostoevsky, Mondry pushes against received wisdom. She argues that "Gogol used specific food, especially meat, subversively to reveal its role as a marker of ethnic and religious differences often intersecting with issues of gender" (27). To her, this is especially evident in Gogol's grotesque and macabre stories from the Dykanka cycle which rework motifs from Ukrainian folklore. Gogol presents Jewish food as the embodiment of Jewishness and sets it against Christian cuisine, which contains, in turn, the essence of Christianity. Lenny Bruce, who famously spoke about some foods being intrinsically Jewish and some intrinsically "goyish" in the American context, was doing something similar. Yet, if in his case, the subversive Jewish intent behind these culinary classifications is obvious and potent, the subversion, which Mondry locates in Gogol, is questionable. For her, via the Jewish figures, clothes, and food, Gogol "challenges the notions of the dominant culture. . . to problematize the prevailing ideals of masculinity" and identifies with "the subaltern" (30–31). Mondry is certainly right about the destabilizing nature of Gogol's aesthetics, "based on concealment and trickery, " (36) but whether it extends to the portrayals of Jews, who are deeply cartoonish at best and devilish at worst, remains doubtful. Mondry also discusses the symbolism of Jewish food and bodies in Taras Bulba, Gogol's short historical epic about the Ukrainian Cossacks. It should be noted that this novel is one of the most virulent antisemitic texts in the Russian canon. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a prominent journalist and future Zionist leader, pinpointed its End Page 139 anti-Jewish spirit and the. . .