Sarah Schulman’s Empathy, Ties that Bind, and the Possibilities of the Stranger

In her novel Empathy (1992), Sarah Schulman imagines what it means to be caught between the assimilation of Ashkenazi Jewish Americans and the otherness of Eastern Europe. Schulman’s protagonist Anna O. traverses many landscapes and, unlike other characters in the novel that work to transcend their stranger identity, Anna O. makes a new life for herself through negotiating what I will call a liminal identity. For Schulman, the task of illuminating the stranger condition that her main character inhabits is a tricky one. While characters of earlier Jewish American texts by writers such as Anzia Yezierska were readily understood as strangers working towards ‘becoming American’, it is implicitly accepted that Anna O., living in queer 1990s New York City, is already a completely assimilated American. Schulman uses a variety of narrative strategies that culminate in a somewhat messy palimpsest attempting to convey the nuanced experience of the stranger. The resulting textual fragmentation removes any stable point of reference so that scholars and readers of Empathy must reconstruct various narrative elements in trying to make sense of Anna O.’s world. One is left to consult volumes of critical work that hardly get to the heart of Anna O.’s Jewish queer experience, to piece them together into a patchwork that may, by its end, accomplish the task of excavating Schulman’s postmodern stranger. In this article I argue that inhabiting the position of the stranger allows Anna O. the possibility of creating some sort of coexistence between, and cohabitation of, her queer and Jewish identities. In this way, Schulman constructs the stranger as a subject position replete with possibility rather than as a liability that must be shed in order to acculturate onself to American life.