Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar

Abstract

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar Roberta Klimt (bio) David Hadar. Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2020. 216 pp. $103.50 hardback; $25.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. "let us start reading novels as paratexts for the author's identity," David Hadar exhorts us in his Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature (4). Lest this sound riskily unliterary, or appear to be simply biography by another name, Hadar also clarifies that he intends "identity" in a particular sense: that is, as "public identity," "what people know and feel about [writers], whether it is true or not" (2). The idea of this book, as informed by the sociologist Erving Goffman's work on "social identity and personal identity," is to read literary texts and their paratexts as contributing to the construction of the author's public identity, which itself is a complex of networks that demands to be read as a text in its own right. And this is where Hadar's other key term comes in, since it is his contention that an author's affiliations—that is, their relationships of chosen association, as opposed to filiation, which is strictly familial—are crucial to determining their public identity. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) opens Hadar's book and haunts its pages as a prime example of a story of affiliation written by an author who, in more and less subtle ways, sought (and sometimes sought to avoid) affiliation with other authors in shaping his public identity. In pursuit of an authorial identity, the young writer Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer's protagonist, quite openly, and as Hadar suggests, "rather frantic[ally]" (24), attempts to affiliate with the older writer he admires: E.I. Lonoff. Using Roth as his starting point and touchstone, Hadar explores the techniques of affiliation employed by several other Jewish American authors, including Nicole Krauss, whom he reads especially sensitively. His sociological approach presents a new view of inter-authorial relationships as they are constructed both within and around the literary works themselves and pays attention to the role of the emotions and imaginations of writers and readers in constructing and construing those relationships. [End Page 88] In a particularly persuasive section, "Jewish American Literary Networks beyond English," Hadar offers "a history of the changing ways of identifying as a Jew and the different ways to be a Jewish writer" (61) in America. For early twentieth-century Jewish American authors such as Abraham Cahan, who also edited the Yiddish magazine Forverts (The Forward), there was a more pressing need to affiliate with fellow American authors than to shore up what Hadar calls their already "quite secure Jewish credentials" (66). This would change for second- and third-generation Jewish Americans; Hadar makes a particular study of Irving Howe, who co-edited the first American anthology of Yiddish literature, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, in 1954, and became somewhat of a gatekeeper to the kingdom of Jewish American literature. Having initially admired Roth and assumed he was "working in the tradition of Jewish self-criticism and satire," Howe famously recanted this in his essay "Philip Roth Reconsidered," where he accuses Roth of having "a thin personal culture." Hadar finds it revealing that, in his dismissal of Roth as insufficiently related to Yiddish and Jewish American forebears like Isaac Bashevis Singer or Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, Howe omits to mention Roth's undeniable affiliation with Franz Kafka—thereby denying Roth his strategy of "identification and connection with secular Jewish writers who write in non-Jewish European languages." (For this same reason, Hadar ventures, when Roth met I.B. Singer, he spent most of the time asking him about the Jews who wrote in Polish, not Yiddish.) That Roth nevertheless succeeds in achieving this more secular, vernacular form of affiliation is, Hadar says, "the victory of the writer over the critic" (75). In his third chapter, "The Jewish Writer as an Old Man," Hadar moves from Roth's Exit Ghost (2007), which he reads as paradigmatic of so-called "late style," to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005), a novel that, though written by a thirtyone-year-old woman, nonetheless manages...