CAN LANGUAGE provide a home for Jews in the diaspora? The idea of a people bound together in galut (exile) by the power of God's written covenant fostered the feeling of a Jewish community in no specific place. As long as the people held on to the Book, they were sure to be in God's company anywhere. Redemption through return to the Holy Land was a project indefinitely deferred and always conditional upon the keeping of Torah and the high moral demands involved in obeying God's words and commandments. Such a rabbinic vision of a portable Jewish home centred on the text is at once challenged and reactivated in a post- Holocaust era, especially as interpreted by writers in the precarious condition of having been abandoned by God, ‘unhoused’ in the world, yet probing the possibility of being ‘at home in the word’.

For the displaced writer, language becomes a means to establish connections, gloss over discontinuities, and reclaim lost topographies, but also to proclaim disaffiliation, accentuate dissonances, and expose irretrievable losses. As Theodor Adorno put it, ‘for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live’, but ‘in the end, the writer is not allowed to live in his writing’ (Adorno 1951: 38–9). Adorno's language was, of course, German, the language of Nazism, which only aggravated his sense of estrangement from a mother tongue manipulated for the exercise of power, discrimination, and murder. Thus being unhoused in one's language becomes for Adorno a critical gesture against nationalisms, mother tongues, and coercive systems of identification. Adorno has come to epitomize the nomadic intellectual, who opposes the politically dangerous discourse of ‘roots’ and ‘grounds’ with an ethics of ‘rootlessness’ and permanent movement. This quasi-heroic figure conflates with the long-standing image of the Jews as the quintessential homeless wanderers, producing a compound character: the Jewish post-Holocaust diasporic writer.

The idealized post-Holocaust image of the Jews as master-movers between tongues, morally invested with the survivor's authority to counteract the violence implied in oppressive discourses, has gained currency in contemporary thought.