Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (review)

Abstract

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller BudickIn this richly textured scholarly work, Emily Miller Budick probes relations between Jewish- and African-Americans expressed in modern literature. As a former American, a religious Jew living in Israel, Budick believes she stands outside of conundrum of African-American -- Jewish-American relationship at an ideologically informed critical distance (p. 6) and, therefore, can tease out aspects of relationship are taken for granted by engaged participants. Her work is particularly plangent because she implies much of Jewish-American ethnic writing reveals a to consolidate ethnic identity within Jewish community itself (p. 12), a fact is in dramatic contrast to African-American community whose careful course of cultural preservation and separateness...succeeded in transforming our idea of America (p. 6).Budick's intention is to illuminate ethnic identities of African- and Jewish-Americans by examining their mutual construction of identity in literature. However, what lifts Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation from a merely literary discussion is her insistence an implicit comparison between Jewish-American identity and that other national identity proved for many Jews (the of this study included) irresistible...the state of Israel (p. 150).For Budick, difficulties Jewish-Americans face in constructing an identity in this pluralist society are epitomized by Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, novel provides paradigm for Budick's literary critique. Malamud's novel ends with two tenants of same house, both writers (one black and one Jewish), killing each other in a violent and horrible way. Unlike other critics who explicate obvious confrontation, Budick chooses to examine Malamud's treatment of Jewish material in novel to illustrate the failure of American Jews to consolidate an American identity preserves Jewish content (p. 13). The most of major modern Jewish-American writers, Malamud, Budick argues, not only resisted being labeled a Jewish American writer (p. 13) but in his use of universalizing metaphor of Jew sufferer, subordinates Jewish identity to Christian theological tradition. This metaphor, men Jews and all Jews Christs (p. 15), underpins inability of Malamud's Jewish character, Harry Lesser, to move out of building in which he is a tenant and to finish book which Lesser has been working for many years. In Budick's reading, Lesser faces a sterile future because of his identity confusion: the problem Malamud's Tenants and other texts stand behind it raise is whether universalism includes or excludes, expresses or denies, different ethnic groups it would subsume (p. 52).Lurking behind this novel, Budick claims, is socio-cultural dialogue between Jewish- and African-Americans about who should have cultural dominance in America, a debate informed both Malamud's authorial intentions and critical reaction to novel. The history of exchange begins in media res with angry response of Ralph Ellison and other African-American intellectuals to assumption of cultural hegemony by Jewish-American critics, a response triggered by Irving Howe's declaration Richard Wright was quintessential black writer (p. 21). Ellison argued Howe, although claiming position of outsider, ultimately supported existing white power structure and that, while Jewish-Americans identified with oppression of blacks, Jewish relationship to white American culture was substantially different from of African-Americans. Ultimately dialogue became fiercer (Norman Podhoretz and Stanley Edgar Hyman became entangled) because, Ellison and others felt, white Americans (which included Jewish-Americans) do not have problems with African-Americans speaking on margins but with African-Americans as central players in American culture game (p. …