In Poland, or Elsewhere: Cartographies of Central European Anti-Ecumene in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The King of the Fields and Dan Jacobson’s The God-Fearer

The paper compares how Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The King of the Fields and Dan Jacobson’s The God-Fearer re-configure and re-map Central Europe – Poland in particular. By closely studying how Singer and Jacobson modify spatial, temporal and historical configurations of their distant homeland, the essay attempts to reconstruct the books’ similar yet different imaginaries of the region and its traumatic history. The paper acknowledges the influence that Singer (as well as other Polish and Central European writers) had on Jacobson’s rendition of his fictional ‘middle Europe’. It focuses on the transformation of the Central European ‘ecumene’ (‘home world’) into an ‘anti-ecumene’, namely an unhomely world which is the ecumene’s opposite (The King of the Fields) and double (The God-Fearer). Jacobson’s novel distortedly mirrors and fuses not one but two homes: Central Europe and South Africa. Ultimately, it transcends its role as Central Europe’s opposite and South Africa’s double and becomes a site of a new transnational, trans-geographical, and trans-historical ecumene understood as a community of subjects implicated in the world history of oppression and violence.