The Singing Fire

Jews are not especially prominent in neo-Victorian fiction and film.  Occasionally, they're the leads (the 1998 film The Governess).  More often, they're supporting characters (Byatt's The Children's Book) or just part of the urban scenery (Palliser's The Quincunx). Lilian Nattel's multiplot The Singing Fire, then, is something of a departure for the genre.  It follows the careers of two immigrant women, both of whom have run away from what seem like (or are) insupportable lives: Nehama, from Plotsk, the youngest daughter of a tailor, who runs away to London seeking a better destiny for herself than an arranged marriage; the wealthy Emilia, from Minsk, escaping the terrors of her abusive father (and the impending dangers of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy), who also runs to London in search of comfort and safety.  London, of course, turns out to be anything but safe.  But the dangers arise not just from the predators who prey on innocent foreign girls, but also from pressures on Jewish culture.   Although the characters here rarely have direct contact with politics or earth-shattering events, problems trickle down to them--debates over the "Jewish Question," for example, or the belief that Jack the Ripper was a Jew from the East End.  Characters debate the propriety of speaking "the Jargon," Yiddish.  And some upper-class Jews press for total assimilation, others seek to negotiate between the older traditions and English social expectations, and still others resist the call to submerge their Jewishness. 

The Singing Fire combines Biblical allusions and Jewish folklore with magical realism, fairy tales, and, yes, plots borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction.  To take the last first, Emilia's and Nehama's plots are skewed versions of Pride and Prejudice and Oliver Twist, both referenced explicitly in the text.   Oliver Twist is especially important in Emilia's case: she reinvents herself as first an orphan, and then a Gentile orphan, but ultimately cannot conceal her Jewish identity--rather like Oliver and his ineradicable gentility.  (There are other Dickensian overtones, like the opening paragraphs and their evocation of a "smoky," fog-heavy Whitechapel [1].) At the same time, both characters' romance plots rework Pride and Prejudice, whether in terms of potential unsuitability (Nehama had been forced into prostitution, the full facts of which she conceals from her eventual husband, Nathan) or of religious identity and prejudice (Emilia's husband, Jacob, initially chooses her because he thinks she's a Gentile).  And, yet again, Emilia and Nehama's journeys through working- and upper-middle-class London society rewrite the story of Ruth, who "left her mother's house for a strange country with strange customs and took them on as her own" (83).  As Emilia's mother, psychologically unable to leave the house, tells the story, Ruth the Moabite abandons her origins (associated with the mother) for her new life--but in the Bible, Ruth is actually following her beloved mother-in-law, Naomi, and the new "customs" in question are Jewish.  This tension between the Biblical narrative and Mrs. Rosenberg's retelling works itself out both in Nehama's very limited accomodations with English culture and Emilia's far more insistent attempts to assimilate--attempts which temporarily lead her to abandon not just her biological mother, whose nineteenth-century hysteria prevents her from fleeing her nightmarish husband, but also her "mother" Israel.  She is, in effect, doubly self-orphaned.

Overall, though, these are romance plots, but romance plots which return to the common concerns of both Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction when it comes to women's "careers."  The novel resists the Cinderella resolutions that characterize some neo-Victorian novels--in fact, whatever their initial travails, both Emilia and Nehama wind up in the same class where they started.  Nehama's experience in England launches her into a prostitute narrative, in which she is victimized, in short order, by a Jewish crook, police, doctors, and the otherwise unnamed Squire--her pimp.  Her sole comfort resides in female solidarity with Sally, a Catholic prostitute, and then Minnie, the working-class Jewish woman who spontaneously engineers her rescue.  Once rehabilitated, she marries Nathan, who only vaguely understands what her previous life was like.  Nehama's upward mobility, however, remains limited; the daughter of a tailor marries one, and the two of them eke out a relatively comfortable but nevertheless precarious existence.  Emilia, meanwhile, abandons her illegitimate daughter to Nehama, then launches herself back into the upper middle classes by taking a job as a shop girl.  When it came to Victorian anxieties about female sexuality, shop girls were just a few steps above prostitutes when it came to erotic danger; between her job  and her illicit pregnancy, Emilia is as problematic a marriage prospect as Nehama.  In a Victorian novel, both marriage plots would constitute cultural nightmares of the worst order, with "fallen women" illicitly transforming themselves into would-be virtuous wives and mothers.  (Dickens and Collins only allow for such rehabilitation outside of England.) And in some neo-Victorian novels, Nehama's and Emilia's sexual experience, whether abusive or not, would ground some sort of individualist, liberatory politics.   Here, though, the boundary between performance and reality turns out to be permeable, so that Emilia, Grandfather Zalkin's "good yokhelta," can turn out after all to be his "good yiddina" (287).  And the two women aspire not to individual freedom per se, but rather to comfortably settled domestic lives. 

This emphasis on women performing their roles is part and parcel of the novel's structure: the book is divided into acts and features frequent outings to the Yiddish theater, with appearances by the legendary actor Jacob Adler.  In part, the theater miniaturizes the immigrant experience.  "No one in the world loved theater more than Londoners," the narrator tells us, "and among them none more than the Jews.  When they came to the free land, the old made a match with the new, and a butcher from home who changed his name to Smith built the Yiddish theater" (3).  Jews are Londoners, but they are also of their own culture; a Jew takes one of the most anonymous English names possible, yet holds on to his distinctive language.  Immigration and acculturation have their own romances, producing what may be, in the end, a rather awkward marriage.  In fact, as both a space and a venue for imagination, the theater frequently turns out to be problematic.  Emilia is seduced at the opera, and her mother undergoes a crucial mental breakdown there.  Nehama hears Jacob Adler giving voice to the sufferings of "the poor, the lost, the defeated" (88), only to suffer yet another miscarriage; later, in an echo of Villette, the crowd at the Yiddish theater, caught up in a historical drama, turns "an effect of stagecraft" (124) into a blaze, resulting in a panicked stampede that kills several people.  And even at the end, when Nehama's (and  Emilia's) shy daughter Gittel-Sarah finally finds her public singing voice--a moment that would normally signal feminist self-discovery--she does it in a bar in front of the horrifying Squire, inadvertently running the risk of repeating her mother's victimization.  Imagination and performance turn out to be consistently liberating and dangerous, self-fulfilling and deadly.  

Englishness turns out to be one of the most dangerous performances of all.  Nehama is at her most English as a prostitute, but shows little interest in English culture per se once she escapes.  Although she enjoys reading English fiction, England for her primarily represents economic opportunity--even if she and her husband do agree that "a woman in the free land didn't need to wear a wig" (118), one of her few appropriations from her new surroundings.  The East End Jews are generally uninterested in the Gentile world outside, except insofar as it impinges on them (as in the Jack the Ripper case), and Nehama believes in the grand literary potential of Yiddish.  By contrast, middle- and upper-class Jewish society takes thorough-going assimilation as its mantra.  As Mrs. Zalkind explains to Emilia, "[h]er sons were born in the East End, but you would see no sign of it in their demeanor now.  They were British through and through, as she often told them" (155).  The not-so-implicit Jewish anti-Semitism at work here finds its fullest manifestation in the Jewish Board of Guardians, funded by "middle-class Anglo-Jews whose hearts went out to the oppressed in Russia and recoiled from them in East London" (186), and the Jews' Free School, where students are warned by the headmaster that their parents' Polish origin "will defile you if you allow it" (209).  Above all, students at the Jews' Free School are warned not to speak Yiddish, a prejudice Emilia shares.  But at a Free School commemoration, her husband Jacob articulates the novel's critique of such suppression: "'Where else than here, among you, my friends, should I confess that, despite my entire loyalty to this, the country of my birth and my grandfather's refuge, I sometimes have un-English yearnings?'" (312)  Rather like Nehama and Gittel-Sarah, whose dreams never fully turn into reality, Jacob finds that his call for a truly Anglo-Jewish identity meets with little sympathy--indeed, he never manages to finish his speech.  Nevertheless, this moment solidifies Emilia's decision to reveal her secret, and suggests that the English Jew and the Jewish immigrant may be able to shape a future that might join Englishness and Jewishness without swamping one by the other.

But this secret could not be revealed without the intervention of the novel's two ghosts, Nehama's grandmother and the first Mrs. Rosenberg.  Visible to Nehama, Emilia, and occasionally others as well, the two ghosts memorialize both Jewish suffering and Jewish strength. As the narrator explains, "earth is for people, and the mother of a people has to go with them [...] And though her grandchildren would speak a different mother tongue and have customs unknowable to her, they would also rise from the graveyard for the sake of their children, so that they would not be abandoned in their exile" (3).  Although the standard-issue reason for haunting is unfinished business, these ghosts choose to haunt their descendants (or affiliates) so that the "business" of Judaism may never be finished.  Far from demanding vengeance or seeking to repeat long-ago crimes, these ghosts (especially the grandmother) offer practical advice and pointed interventions, as long as Nehama and Emilia are willing to listen.  The Jewish past is a nurturing mother, even when, as in the case of the first Mrs. Rosenberg, she is an adoptive mother (just as Nehama adopts Gittel-Sarah).   But these mothers are also ferocious protectors who would protect their daughters "[e]ven from the next world," as Nehama promises Gittel-Sarah (316).    Even though the novel's men carry most of Judaism's public burden, it is ultimately its women whose passionate energy maintains its essence.