seekingferret | (no subject)

It Could Lead to Dancing by Sonia Gollance

Full disclosure, I am friends with the author. But even fuller disclosure, I am friends with the author because

freeradical42 said "I have a friend who's writing a book about Jewish mixed dancing and modernity, you two should be friends." So any bias I have as a result of our friendship is totally subsumed in the deeper bias I have because I'm obsessed with this topic. It was also delightful that multiple friends from other social circles messaged me to say "Hey, have you heard of this book? You might want to check it out."

But I still did not expect to have so many feelings in an academic book about literature.

The book is a survey of literature, primarily German and Yiddish language but also some English language, depicting Jews dancing in the 19th century. This is also a dramatic period in Ashkenazic Jewish history, as the period of Jewish Emancipation across most of Europe, the Haskalah and the rise of Reform Judaism and secular Jewish culture, the start of a mass migration to America, etc... Topics I have revisited on this journal again and again, we needn't rehash now. By studying the way mixed dancing (dancing between the sexes, dancing between Jews and non-Jews, dancing between the poor and the rich) was written about in that time period, the book tries to analyze the ways in which Jews negotiated the unsettlingly ambiguous nature of the transition to modernity.

It theorizes the dance floor as a 'space', which is a jargony way of saying, I think, that the dance floor is a physical location that has a set of canonical/tropey rules governing how people write about it. There are four dance floor spaces the book analyzes in separate chapters- the tavern dance floor, the ballroom dance floor, the wedding dance floor, and the (almost exclusively American) dance hall dance floor. Each has its own rules and protocols and each has its own anxieties and opportunities that are seized upon in literature.

So for example the book describes the wedding dance setting as the setting most constrained by religious regulation, because rather than simply being subject in absentia to the rules issued by Rabbis and other religious authorities, the religious authorities were often present as guests and witnesses and able to exert their authority directly. That doesn't mean, though, that in literature the wedding dance was the most traditional, but rather that as a literary device, representing mixed dancing at a wedding would feel the most thrillingly transgressive to readers. One of the books written about has a dramatic final scene in which an arranged bride's non-Jewish lover violently forces his way onto the wedding dance floor in order to dance with his true love- she dies in his arms of heartbreak. In contrast, the tavern dance setting is a setting outside the eye of religious authorities, where Jewish tavernkeepers serving a mostly non-Jewish clientele were frequently represented in literature as being unable to expose their children to the Jewish education that would serve as a counterbalance against the allures of the secular world- often represented through dancing. Tavern dance scenes are often part of stories about people drifting away from the Jewish people, sometimes willingly and sometimes unwillingly- the dancing represents unsanctioned connection, physical and otherwise.

The book emphasizes the physicality of dancing- it was seen as an opportunity for men to demonstrate their masculinity through feats of athleticism and grace- and how that worked to confer power on women, who had at least some ability to choose their dance partners. In a sharp contrast in a society where arranged marriage was the norm, mixed dancing became a tool that potentially enabled marriage for love. But it also became a mechanism that various writers saw as leading people astray, luring them away from appropriate partners and in some cases dooming them to poverty or unhappiness or suicide. It's not for nothing, the book notes, that European folklore is full of stories of fairies or demons enchanting people to dance to their death. The very appearance of forming an attachment that leads to joy, on the dance floor, may be ephemeral, unable to sustain itself off the dance floor. This can be because the dance floor is a mixing ground, throwing together people whose backgrounds are fundamentally incompatible. There are reasons why it was dangerous for Jews to have too much contact with non-Jews, and reasons why the social intercourse of men and women was seen as a dangerous import from the world of the non-Jews.

In one of my favorite passages from the book's introduction, an adventure in late 18th century Bohemia is described. The Jews were forbidden to have public dances because Politics and Anti-Semitism and maybe fear of Revolution, but they secretly organized a Purim Ball because JEWISH FOOTLOOSE and you can't stop kids from dancing, and then the police raided the ball and it was a major scandal and they arrested the Rabbi and did I mention JEWISH FOOTLOOSE? I am kind of overflowing with desire to see the movie of this.

These uncertainties about mixed dancing- when is it appropriate to reach out and broaden your horizons, when is it valuable to seek the fellowship of one's own community- are the daily struggles of Modern Orthodoxy, and It Could Lead to Dancing, among all the other things it does, was really good at creating a framework for thinking about those balances. Also, I really miss dancing with other people and I hope I start to get opportunities again.

It's also really good at doing close reading of literature, and I am filled with a list of books that I desperately want to read now, some of which actually are, excitingly, available in English translation.

Anyway, I can't give a reasoned review of this book but I loved it.