Translingual Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind

摘要

Persuasively embedding her reflections within current debates about translingualism, transnational literatures and the challenging insights of contemporary post-colonial studies, Tamar Steinitz compares and contrasts two Jewish writers, Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind, who felt compelled by the circumstances of exile to abandon their native German in favour of a foreign language, English. For both writers, exile entailed a change of identity, but they differed radically in the ways this impacted on their lives and works. Bora in Chemnitz in 1913, Helmut Flieg fled to Prague in 1933 where he adopted the name Stefan Heym in order to protect himself and his family in Germany. He was never to relinquish this new identity, even after moving first to the USA in 1935, where he became an American citizen and fought in the Second World War as a decorated GI, before renouncing his citizenship as a response to McCarthyism and moving in 1952 to the German Democratic Republic. By contrast, Jakov Lind's identity would never achieve the same stability and rootedness. He began life as Heinz Landwirth in Vienna in 1927, but in 1938 found a precarious refuge in Amsterdam where he assumed a new identity as the Dutch labourer Jan Gerrit Overbeek. In 1945 he again switched identity, becoming the Palestinian-born Jew Jakov Chaklan in order to sidestep immigration restrictions to Palestine. His return to Europe in 1950 brought yet another change when he turned himself into the professional writer Jakov Lind. Initially choosing to write in German, he produced works of surreal and grotesque humour dealing with Nazism and its legacy. Partly because of the often dismissively critical reception of these works in Germany and Austria but not least on account of his growing unease at writing in the language of the Nazis, Lind added again to his 'series of reinventions of the self (22), this time not only turning away from Nazism and the Holocaust as his main subject matter, but also, and importantly, abandoning German for good in favour of English. This final and radical change of identity, representing the attempt to recreate himself as a cosmopolitan writer attached to no single nation or country, proved no less fragile than those which preceded it, culminating in works which demonstrate an inability to express the sense of loss and abandonment he had experienced or indeed to express emotions altogether. Unlike Heym's works, moreover, they also failed to attract a wide readership.