BOOK REVIEW Androgyny and Beyond Arthur Weshow He, She and It by Marge Pietcy. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, 446 pp. began to read science fiction when I was twelve years old, just a few months after the atomic bomb de- stroyed Hiroshima, and I?ve never stopped. It wasn?t gee-whiz gadgets that attracted me; it was the dark visions and the rainbow cloudbursts of imagined social transformation, dystopian and utopian. My commit- ment to healing the world has been shaped as much by science fiction as by Isaiah, Marx, or Buber. All that time I have been waiting for Marge Piercy?s new book. Not quite consciously waiting, you understand. Not even in my dreams could I have created this book, but in my heart and hz'shkes, I?ve been waiting. Nu, what is so delicious? First of all, it?s Jewish science fiction. Not just casually Jewish, but rooted in the sar- donic Jewish mysticism of the Kab- balah and the profoundly Jewish spiritual wrestle about what social jus- tice means in a world where the Mes- siah is ever-coming, ever-vanishing. And it?s feminist Jewish science fic- tion. The story of the Golem of Prague is at the heart of Piercy?s tale, but the Golem takes a different form when his tale is told by a woman, Mall-rah, one of Piercy?s heroines. The communitarian ethos of the ltibbutz is the air that Piercy?s story breathes, but the kibbutz is a different place when it is transformed by a feminist politics and culture. Piercy?s kibbutz arises not in Israel but on the surviving hills of what we know as Boston. Surviving because much of the American coastline has been inundated by a new Flood, a surge of ocean from the melted ice caps, the result of global warming. It?s Arthur Washow is the author of Seasons of OurJoy and Godwrestling, and the director of The Shalom Center; which war/er to invoke Jew: in thought and action to prevent environmental disaster: 72 the mid?twenty-first century, and a lot we take for granted is gone. The United States, for instance. It collapsed, like the-?-what was it?? Soviet Union. The world is ruled by sev- eral gigantic corporations that have di- vided it into feudal fiefdoms. There are a few free cities, and the free Jewish town of Tikva (Hope) is one of them. The Middle East has also Van- ished. Not just a government or two, a sovereignty or two, but the entire re- gion, oil fields and fig trees and moun- tain goats and peoples. It?s the Black Zone now, an empty blotch on the map.Jerusalem is a wilderness of fused green glass, the thermonuclear casualty that set off a totally ruinous bio-chem- ical-nuclear war. It turns out that there may be secret survivors?is anybody as stubborn and tenacious as Israelis and Palestinians? As women? But that?s a thread for you to follow when you read the book. Piercy does give us some gee-whiz gadgets: computer networks deft enough to create planetary virtual re~ aljties, through which the corporations can struggle to invade Til-(Va, through which Tikva can struggle to defend it- self, and through which people who explore them can transform them- selves?and die. And cyborgs?cyber- netic organisms, fusions of computer programming and biology, real live quasi-humans, with intelligence for sure, and maybe, just maybe, with free will. Or maybe not. Can a cyborg be a citizen and vote in the town meeting of Tiltva? Can a cyborg be a Jew and count in a mz'nyan? And here is the neat and pow- erful question posed by Piercy?s fusion of feminism with science fiction: Who or what is a creature that is pro- grammed with both a woman?s and a man's mentality? Can a spiritual an- drogyne be a human? Or is the real question whether anyone who is not androgynous can be fully human? Piercy's androgynous cyborg may be the only fully human creature in the world. His name?in outward anatomy this cyborg is fully male, though inwardly also the He/She/It of the titlc-??is Yod, the name of the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (This model was the tenth in a series of at- tempts to build a useful cyborg) But Yod is also the first letter of God?s name, which is sometimes written as Yod-Yod. And it is close to the Yid that in Yiddish is the generic word for Jew. Note the wonderful linguistic prob- lems that Piercy introduces. Yod is the newest model of a cyborg, like the lat- est car, clearly an invention, a machine. Yet Yod has overtones of the ultra-hu- man, much more fully in the Divine Image than anyone since the original Adam, who was made in Our Image, said God, in the Image of God, male and female, androgynous as God is an- drogynousnovel of ideas, but not only of ideas. By introducing a being who is both male and female, both hu- man and machine, Piercy has jiggled and joggled the relationships of all the characters. Not only the ideas, but the people, are delicious. They make love, they get jealous, they fight for custody of their children and for control of their creations, they rebel against their bosses and comply with the rules, they take risks and die and go half~mad with grief. The book is told from the alter- nating standpoints of Malltah, a tough and gentle grandmother who is sex- ually alive and technologically in- genious, and Shira, her bright and frightened granddaughter who is re- learning her way toward love and a sense of her own power in the world. It is Malkah who has made sure that Yod has a full womanly as well as manly programming, and who searches for some way to tell him of his own ancestors. (Notice how Jewish is this desire: Tell it to your child on that day, says the Passover Haggada.) But who, or what, is the ancestor of a cyborg? Malkah decides it is the Golem of medieval Prague, that doomed subhero to whom, in Jewish legend, the great Rabbi Judah Loew gave life and a mission to protect the Jewish people from pogroms. The story enters Yod?s consciousness at a level quite different from computer programming, a level that involves what seems to be free will; and after hearing the story, Yod assumes the tri- umph and tragedy of carrying the Golem?s being to a higher level. This transmutation of the Golem story becomes a metaphor for Piercy?s own work. If the Golem is Yod?s an- cestor, then the Golem story is ances- tor to Picrcy's novel. Piercy in effect both locates the Golem story as a kind of early Jewish science fiction, and places her own work in the stream of mythic Judaism. The Golem story operates at a philosophical-existential level as well as at a social-political level. Philosoph- ically, it puts the human race in the role of Creator God?shaping a quasi-hu- man creature as God shapes humans in the divine image. By confronting our thoughts and feelings about the quasi- human Golern, we face, in a profound way, the question of what it means to be human. Are we merely robots pro- grammed by the universe, by billions of years of chemical and biological and social evolution? Do we somehow replicate within us the grandeur of that process? Are we free and sacred, or are we mere blind products of that blind production? Piercy?s book, with its Golem beyond the Golem, its quasi- human who may even be ultra-human, poses an even sharper question. Do we, facing Yod, feel admiration? Fear? Disgust? Love? Laughter? How, then, do we look to the infinite, ironic of all the universe? For powerless medieval Jews, the story of the Golem served as a wish-ful- fillment fantasy of a world in which Jews could defend themselves. Simi- larlyfantasy of a world where women can shape society. Such works can become more than a wistful fantasy; they can serve a politi- cal purpose, pointing the way toward action. e, She and It provides that in- spiration; along with the rest of Piercy?s fiction and poetry, this novel is a con- stant encouragement toward the repair and healing of the world. In the past fif- teen years, a number of such works have emerged from the feminist ferment, so many that Marleen Barr, the critic and scholar of science fiction, has suggested that they constitute a new kind of writ- ing that she calls feminist fabulations. Piercy has worked in this genre be- fore: Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), written before the Weatherpeople ex- isted, imagined the joy and the disas- ter that the emergence of a million such people Would bring upon America. And ?70mm at End of Time (1976) spoke from the standpoint of 3 Chi- cana who is experiencing three worlds simultaneously: the oppressive present in a New York mental hospital, a glo- rious feminist future, and a nightmar- ish ultra-male?fascist future. What is new about He, Site and It is the organic fusion of these themes with a Jewish consciousness that is both cul- rural and spiritual. I say organic because Piercy does not just plunk down the Jewish and the feminist alongside each other. Her depiction is more complex. Pz'ercy?r poems and needs cetebrate the most intimate matters of bedroom, kite/yea and workplace?places t/aat embody and give rise to the repair and beating 0f the pabtz?c woria?. See it this way: If her novel were a photograph, feminism and Jewish re- newal would not only be seen side by side, but could be cut apart to create two separate photographs. But the kind of image that comes to a reader?s as it takes in Piercy's work is more like a hologram than a photograph. In every section of a hologram, in- formation is encoded about the entire picture. If you cut up a hologram, each part can replicate the whole. What you see will be a fuzzier image, since some information is lost; but the missing ele- ments will consist of fine detail through- out, rather than a section in its entirety. In Piercy?s picture, we do not simply see feministJudaism over here andJew- ish spiritual renewal over there. Femi- nism has suffused the new spirituality, and the new spiritUality has suffused feminism. And this is true about the wider 50ciety as well as its Jewish rni~ crocosm. Tikva?s feminism is presented as the sort of feminism that would speak not only to Jews but also to Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, or secularists; not only to women but also to men. Why? Because Tiltva?s feminism has been infused with an earthy spirituality that has itself been infused with femi- nism. The very fact of Tiltva?s Jewish specificity is seen as earthy and rooted rather than imperial and ethereal. The Jewish concern for what is intimate, communal, practical, celebratory, now enriched by feminism, beckons to the larger society to create its own earthy, rooted, feminist spiritualities. In Piercy?s science fiction, the utopias and dyspepsias exist alongside each other; they are, indeed, intertwined. It is the computerized corporate feudal- ism of the global-warming world that has given rise to Tikva. This is perhaps more like a messianic than a utopian vi- sion, for Messiah is always in flow: As the dreadful danger changes, it gives rise to a transformative alternative. 80 her worlds are neither prettified nor merely apocalyptic. Always, there is both the Flood and the Ark, both a need for change and space for change. In this sense, Piercy?s approach re- calls the rwo?sided mission of Jere- miah: to uproot and tear down, to build and to plant. But she tries to in- spirit the building and planting in a way that Jeremiah and most writers of science fiction do not: she speaks in the idiom of everyday life. Her poems and novels celebrate the most intimate matters of bedroom and kitchen and workplace. She knows that these pri- vate places both embody in the present and give rise in the future to tile/em: oiam, the repair and healing of the public world. That is why this novel of ideas is also a novel of relationships, bodies, and people. i What effect does this have upon readers? In most science fiction and in most prophetic writing, the life expe- rience of the readers is deeply distant from the lives of the actors in the story; but not in Piercy?s work. Her char- acters are recognizably human, not ?Wonder Women with magic bullet-de- flecting bracelets or prophets fortified by God?s walls of brass and iron. Piercy lets her readers see people like themselves, who can make change happen, so her readers can come to see themselves as agents of change. It is precisely when Piercy?s work is at its earthiest that it is the most polit- ical. If politics is the process by which people are moved to change society, REVIEWS 73 then Piercy?s approach lets her reach out with a loving political touch to those who read her work. Many readers of the 19905 will rec- ognize in this approach the feminist teaching that the personal is political. But Piercy?s vision is more communal, and less individual than most feminist thought has taken the personal to be. In this way, Piercy?s world echoes the history of Jewish life during much of the last two thousand years, the ghetto life of a shared communal practice in the private, everyday spheres of home and neighborhood. She acknowledges that world with her free Jewish town of Tikva and her tale-within-a-tale of the ghetto of Prague. - But just as Yod the cyborg is the Golem-with-a-difference, so Tikva is the ghetto-with-a-difference. For the ghettos of the Middle Ages had no hope of transforming the world. That ancientJewish vision, the prophetic vi- sion, had been turned inward: in the face of Rome, the Church, Islam, it is hopeless for us to change the world; let us build a decent society of our own, within the ghetto walls. But Tikva sees itself as a ghetto with a mission, a part of a world struggle, not only vulnera- ble to the feudal corporations, but challenging them as well. How can Piercy dare to see a tiny Jewish in such a bold light? I think it is because her Jewishness and her feminism fuse into a new vision. The Jews are too few to shake the world; women are many. Women are too diffuse and too diverse to make a counter-community; Jews know how. Counting noses on the face of the earth, the Jews are just about the tiniest imag- inable community with a transforma- tive vision; women could be the largest. But they cannot transform the earth alone, and they cannot transform it if they work alone, as individuals. Piercy is saying that Women must create communities of women and men in conscious connection with the earth, communities that are intimate and par- ticipatory, that so thoroughly share an approach to work, sexuality, money, and spirituality that they can stand to- gether against the powers that be. The struggle to heal the world may well take generations, Piercy warns, during which time even more of the world may be deeply wounded. An an- cient Jewish wisdom for a wider hu- man future. 74 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6 New THE. PRESS IiHiitirs(ram Historyul'ilit'Stplianiic litpnicnte of Spain compresses a wealth of information into one volume with authority, intelligence, and lucidity. It deserves the widest possible audience.? ?Yoscf Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University THE JEWS or SPAIN A History of the Sephardic Experience Jane S. Gerber Sephardic jewry forms one of the two main streams ofjewish historical life. Historian jane Gerber traces the Sephardic experience for the ?rst time from its ancient beginnings in Roman Iberia to the present day, showing howJews created a distinctive civilization in Spain that was both Jewish and secular long before the Age of Emancipation. ?[Wisse?s] analysis of the and olitical sources of anti-jewish hostility is as ormidable as it is provocative and deserves the most serious reflection.? -Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Indiana University 11? IANI NOT FOR MYSELF. .. The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews Ruth R. WISSB For over a century, Jews have been a driving force behind the spread of liberalism. In tracing thejewish romance with liberalism, Wisse explores the many contradictions of Jewish politics. In particular, she shows how and why anti-Semitism became the century?s most successful ideology, and reveals what liberals would have to do to prevent it from once again achieving its goal. WITH FRIENDS hib??g ?If Matti Golan?s hard-felt confession concerning the nature of relations between Israeli and Diasporajews serves to encourage both groups to rethink their relations, the pain it causes will have served a good end.? ?Natan Sharansky MTH FRIENDS LIKE YOU ?that Israelis Really Think About American Jews iVIatti Golan At a time of growing tension between Israel and the United States, journalist and writer Matti Golan gives vent to grievances that have long simmered beneath the surface of cordial relations. Written in the form of a dialogue between an Israeli and an American jew, Golan writes to clear the air by confronting us with what Israelis really think, but rarely say. about their American cousins. -MATTI GOLAN- mm'MMu' r'z'H: At bookstores now or call 1-800-323-7445 to place your credit card order THE FREE PRESS A Division of Macmillan, Inc. PP