Complete article at: http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=320
Wed, February 6th 2008 - 30th Shvat, 5768 -- 
On Writing Half-Jewishly
by Adam Thirlwell
Adam Thirlwell | Winter 2007 - Number 208
In my new book, Miss Herbert, I tell the story of the novelist Ettore Schmitz, whose pen name was Italo Svevo. Schmitz, or Svevo, was Jewish. But his Jewishness was not, perhaps, so important as his city. He was born and lived in Trieste: part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which spoke its own Italian dialect, Tergesteo. James Joyce, Svevo’s English teacher, called this city Europiccola. And this was Svevo’s identity: he was Triestine, not Jewish. Jewishness, after all, could happen to anybody: ‘“It isn’t race which makes a Jew,” said Svevo sadly, “it’s life!”’ Just as Franz Kafka, who was Jewish, and Czech, and wrote in German, wrote to himself in his diary: ‘What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.’
[ ... ]
‘The very term “émigré author”’, wrote Vladimir Nabokov in 1940, ‘sounds somewhat tautological. Any genuine writer emigrates into his art and abides there.’ And twenty-five years later, in 1966, he would develop this position of non-alignment: ‘I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The writer’s art is his real passport.’ And so at the end of Miss Herbert, I reproduced a passport which Saul Steinberg – who was Jewish, and had emigrated from Romania to Italy, and from Italy to America – made for Nabokov and his wife Vera. Like Vladimir, Vera Nabokov was a Russian emigrée. But she was also Jewish. That is why the Nabokovs did not settle in Paris in the 1930s, having left Russia for Berlin, and Berlin for Paris. The Nazis made them carry on to America. And so Saul Steinberg’s passport is a simulacrum of a passport: it represents the essence of passportness: with its italic handwriting and smudged stamps, its curlicues and countersigns, it demonstrates the absurdity of politics, the grandiloquent façade of borders and of nations. It is a grand joke at the expense of the homogenous style of history, reserving its secret praise for this passport’s opposite: the true and ideal passport which is a personal and universal, half-Jewish style.
Adam Thirlwell will be appearing at Jewish Book Week in conversation with Zadie Smith: In Praise of Diasporas, Sunday 2 March 2008 at 5.00 pm