Success does not erase visible and linguistic marks of Jewish difference

Evidence

Oscar is eventually employed by a Jewish architect. Meyer Lewis employs him, trains him, and slowly makes him over into a image of himself: “In my dreams I often slit Meyer’s bulbous throat and danced with naked feet in the pools of his hot blood… . I began to hate his hybrid South African Yiddisher tongue, his sharp contemptuous eyes… . Meyer was short and stocky” (24–25). Language and physicality defines the “real” Jew in the tale. Meyer, like Oscar, is a successful Jew. Yet he is still marked by his linguistic and physical difference. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the pass-for-white theme and the broader reading on how bodily/linguistic markers frustrate attempts at assimilation — parallels the soundscape work on how accent marks belonging. — connects to: Jewish social alienation differed from class alienation in being inescapable across generations — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 17