I
started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US,
UK, or Australian television or
read most books,
I sympathised
with the hero.
This
was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because
the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality
or
sad circumstances.
Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This
is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief
protagonist as being someone who requires that level of
audience support in our society. Because
I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many
stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a
story as a hero.
My
personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the
character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the
audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also
culturally)
only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often
young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have,
myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage
illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back
and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone
around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall
into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?
I
knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero
took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the
validity of that
narrative
path.
Given
that the hero was seldom
from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a
privilege to that hero (normally, as
I said, white
and male and quite young but
in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and
who had a British or US accent)
that I never give
myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the
hero’s path and cheered him along.
The
hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of
related kinds. The
stories use similar beats
and plot points. The
main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not
from particular English-speaking countries.
This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference
to
start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes –
I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I
automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this
was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered
the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean
heroes rather than American or British) opened
that choice up to me.
Right
now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes
Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have
structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those
structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and
about the same time I started watching K-drama) I
saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that,
historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent
part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place
or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of
years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before.
There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews
in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back
those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring
European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish
history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a
single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I
saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also,
that hate rested
comfortably
on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I
also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in
the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big
exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be
protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to
suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way
we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m
Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary
to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole
range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated
fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails
and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The
Wizardry of Jewish Women
– I was living the history at that point.
It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others
to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday. This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for
the non-fiction book here (with a
few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you.
Fiction
writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this
and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I
needed to know why all this was so and
what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of
an entire forest ,I
had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with
popular history.
I
went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine
University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.
What
did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the
patterns others see
or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for
instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the
past, or
that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we
have and whose past it actually reveals.
For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay
at the heart of how a
given historian might
interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is
on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether
this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and
religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about
“history
of the
Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian
culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the
Rhineland.”
Other
historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the
simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had
access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities
were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But
what of Jewish farmers? What of those working
in
trade or
craft who traveled to
other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews
who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an
everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us
most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records
of
customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?
What
I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge
is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to
see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives.
The
concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing
the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.
Inherent
in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from
seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are
shared. Who
we know matters to
how we share culture and how we live our lives now,
but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume
is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not
available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we
look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we
can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more
boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and
only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more
like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.
Christian-based
sources are
those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They
influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The
fact that only a part of society had been explained is
missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for
instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but
still remained close to Charlemagne?
Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a
particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin
sources can ignore. It’s
a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and
great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and
great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they
do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.
In
some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the
Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall
stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we
cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story
of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is
the story of that place and time.
To
return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story,
but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other
kinds of stories.
What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very
curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see
history.Once
upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian
conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements
of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were
explained in detail. The
participants
were then
given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core
elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major
heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked
off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of
Arthur as told by Mallory.
Quietly,
I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of
Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s
examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s
journey.This
is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular
memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it
into popular story.
It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish
history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that
standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life
might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or
historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of
historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told
differently, in other words. Our
most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of
victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts
about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.
When
friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking
at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been
invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish
history
for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to
challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view
of TV heroes.
And
so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look
for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of
why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank
you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.
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