Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
I know
you don't love us
We are not like the others
We have swum through too many streams
people who rest and people who wander
Have a totally different face.
I know you don't love us
But let us come to rest
Then we shall have the same face.
Georg Mannheimer, “Lieder Eines Jude”I've got to keep on moving,
blues falling down like hail.
and the day keeps worrying me,
there's a hellhound on my trail.
Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on my Trail”The preceding chapters' asymmetries all function as variations on a central theme. In this last full chapter, I exchange literary Blacks and Jews for two other kinds: cinematic ones, and the entities enmeshed in the accidental allegory called blackjewishrelations. As a medium of symbolic exchange rather than a natural state of affairs, perhaps the latter is no more than the literaturizing component of human relations writ large on the plane of cultural identity; or perhaps it is what is meant by cultural identity itself, the transpersonalization and enlargement of the self, back-lit by the postmodern. But given the kathartic pressure commonly brought to bear on such exchange, together with the outsized dimensions it must bear in cinema and “real life” – precisely not the novel – the resulting ghostly coefficient seems all the more apposite at the seam where Life itself conjures Art outside the strictly literary.
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