'The jews,' 'Ragtime' and the politics of silence

The novel 'Ragtime' by E.L. Doctorow provides an allegory related to Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of 'the jews,' as a term for the unrepresentable, that which stands outside the symbolic order and becomes the unconscious. The character Tateh in 'Ragtime,' is a Jew who undergoes assimilation by suppressing his Jewishness, represented by his treatment of his wife Mameh, whom he drives away and then mourns as if dead. Tateh's assimilation illustrates the evasion of difference through the politics of forgetting.