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Jewish Identity and Multilingualism in Rafael Seligmann’s Fiction

Rafael Seligmann is undoubtedly one of the most prominent Jewish writers in contemporary Germany. His first novel Rubinsteins Versteigerung caused a scandal when it was finally published in 1989, after the manuscript had been rejected by several publishers, for the novel depicts the Jewish community of postwar Germany in a highly unconventional way. Because of this it has been subject to harsh criticism.1 Seligmann’s representation of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany is of great interest, however, for it contrasts with a trend towards well-intentioned, but all too patronising portrayals of Jews in postwar German fiction, which Ruth Klüger has pointed out.2 The tensions Seligmann negotiates are clearly familiar from novels and essays concerning the Jewish family in the age of assimilation that preceded the Shoah. His novels might, therefore, be understood as a revival of a long-standing German-Jewish literary tradition.3 In the following article, I explore the representation of Jewish identity with a particular focus on Seligmann’s language, a distinctive feature of which is the incorporation of a significant number of Yiddish and Hebrew words into the German-language text. I examine the complex relationship between language and identity by focusing on Seligmann’s first two novels, Rubinsteins Versteigerung4 and Die