Foreign Bodies:

The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History

Reviewed by: Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays, and: Inevitable Exiles: Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jewish Existence in a Gentile Society, and: Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature Sanford Pinsker Gloria L. Cronin and L. H. Goldman , eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1989. 328 pp. $25.00. Vera Emuna Kielsky . Inevitable Exiles: Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jewish Existence in a Gentile Society. New York: Lang, 1989. 219 pp. $38.85. S. Lillian Kremer . Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. 392 pp. $29.95 cloth; pb. $14.95. Although the excitement that once swirled around American-Jewish fiction has diminished considerably, it is unlikely that either Jewish writers, or their critics, are likely to fall silent soon. If those who greeted Bellow and Malamud at the beginning of their great careers now talk soberly about acculturation closing the book on American-Jewish letters, others insist that a whole range of subjects—for [End Page 247] example, the Holocaust, Israel, even the nature of Jewishness itself—are now open for serious discussion. Moreover, as Gloria L. Cronin and L. H. Goldman's recent gathering of Bellow criticism would have it, there are "waves" of Bellow criticism. After a thumbnail survey of the ten book-length studies that appeared during the 1980s (including everything from a reductive study of "Bellow's treatment of women" to an effort to paint Bellow as a thorough-going nihilist), the editors put the issue before them this way: What we notice in these books is that they all move beyond Bellow's humanism to the particulars that go into making Bellow the kind of author he is. It is this interest in specific areas of concentration, as well as the courage to be distinctive, that make this second wave so much more interesting. This present volume of essays, coming as it does at the end of the 1980's, rounds out the picture of the new topics of investigation undertaken by critics during this decade of renewed critical interest in Bellow. The topics are even more distinctive, more provocative, and more exciting. No doubt some readers will claim Missouri as their stomping grounds and respond to such self-serving puffery with the "We'll see about that!" it clearly deserves. They will not be entirely wrong, for Saul Bellow in the 1980s is hardly the distinctive, provocative, or exciting collection its editors advertise. On the other hand, its eighteen essays represent a fair sampling of what academic critics thought and said about Bellow during the last decade. By contrast, Inevitable Exiles: Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jewish Existence in a Gentile Society is as predictable, and as padded, as its title. If there was a time when Jewish intellectuals made much of their alienation, their marginality, their disconnectedness, now critics such as Kielsky fairly crow about their normative piety: Just as the Jews are traditionally obligated to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt from generation to generation (the Passover Haggadah) for it should not be forgotten, they have the moral commitment to explain the inexplicable—to tell the story of the Holocaust—again and again, for it should never be repeated. Jewish tradition calls for forgiveness but not for forgetfulness. Whether they experienced the Nazi genocide personally or not, all Jews are in a sense survivors of the Holocaust. For her [Ozick], what separates Jews from Gentiles is this history, their Martyrdom. And nowhere are they more pious, more in awe, than when they write about Cynthia Ozick. Unfortunately, what too often gets lost in the process is the magic, the imaginative fire, and perhaps most of all, the tensions that give her fictions such power. By contrast, S. Lillian Kremer's Witness Through the Imagination is an admirable blending of Jewish learning and close reading. Sensitive to the arguments that would deny the very possibility of "Holocaust literature"—and particularly a literature written by those who did not experience the Shoah first-hand—and yet firmly committed to making...

Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination

Practically each word in the title of this chapter has been challenged by thinkers who would mark its fictitious stamp by placing it in quotation marks. Cynthia Ozick is not alone in rejecting the category of “Jewish writer” on the grounds that there is “no Jewish literature ,” only writing “on Jewish themes” (Klingenstein, “In Life I Am Not Free,” 49). Given the contradiction between a Nazi propensity to essentialize Jewish traits so as to eradicate the Jewish people and the permeability of Jewish identity, Ozick's proviso remains an important one. Actually, though, the term “Jewish” remains more porous than the words “American” and “women.” For a majority of readers would probably agree that Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Mary Gordon, and Jorie Graham are American women artists (although exactly who Americans are and what constitutes womanhood has certainly been disputed); however, do these authors' Jewish-born relatives make them Jewish American women writers, if (as in these cases) such progenitors alienated themselves from their families, converted, or promoted assimilation in their offspring? Perhaps, as Ozick suggests, the crucial factor that must influence any response to such an inquiry is the extent to which each author concentrates her creative energies on Jewish familial, psychological, ethical, historical, or spiritual issues in her work. Yet the secondariness of women in Judaism – whether it is defined in terms of religious practices or beliefs, Yiddish or Hebrew cultures, Zionism, a commitment to the book or to social justice, ethnic jokes – has transformed Judaism from a background or a theme to a question for women artists. “I've been a problem within a problem,” Adrienne Rich has explained, “'the Jewish Question,' 'the Woman Question' – who the questioner? Who is supposed to answer?” ( What Is Found There , 23).

Turning the Jamesian Novel Upside Down Sanford Pinsker (bio) Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 272 pages. $26) Cynthia Ozick can now count herself among the few contemporary American writers formed by the aesthetics of high modernism. In her eighties Ozick has kept the faith as waves of postmodernism challenged (or is it threatened?) everything once held [End Page xlii] dear: the supremacy of art over ideology, the careful attention to craft, and, perhaps most of all, the cultivation of a sensibility on which, in James's words, "nothing is lost." She also had to deal with the downside of James's snobbery and his thinly veiled anti-Semitism. To side with high art was, for Ozick, not to ignore aspects of a given artist's biography, whether he be Henry James or T. S. Eliot, but to value the work despite the artist. Ozick has documented the assets and liabilities of her long stint as an acolyte of the Master. She claims that decades of diligent work went into a long never-published Jamesian novel and that she read (and reread) James's The Ambassadors during the writing of her first published novel, Trust (1966). Most reviewers agreed that Trust is too Jamesian. As someone who has read the book in its entirety (three times no less), I concur: Trust is largely inert and almost unreadable. By contrast Foreign Bodies works on every level that James felt important. As with Trust, the novel is closely modeled on The Ambassadors, albeit with the novel's international theme turned consciously upside down. The plot both echoes and inverts Lambert Strether's rescue mission to Paris in ways that turn Foreign Bodies into a "photographic negative" (Ozick's words) of The Ambassadors. This is true enough, but to capture the novel's playful dimension I prefer to invoke the spirit of Moishe Kapoyer, the Yiddish comic figure whose name translates as "Moses Upside-Down." Why so? Because in James's novel, the whole point of Strether's initiation is that he came to Europe to scoff and stayed to pray. Foreign Bodies throws that venerable equation into question. Ozick's novel opens during the summer of 1952 as its protagonist, a schoolteacher named Bea Nightingale, describes the Paris she encounters on a rescue mission to save her bohemian nephew, Julian, and to return him to America and her brother, Marvin. Given the oppressive heat, what Paris badly needs—and lacks—is air-conditioning: "At that time there were foreigners all over Paris, suffering together with the native population, wiping the trickling sweat from their collarbones, complaining equally of feeling suffocated; but otherwise they had nothing in common with the Parisians or, for that matter, with one another." Bea soon finds herself caught uncomfortably between two worlds: she does not fit into the thin culture of young American writers "besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein," nor is she part of the postwar influx of those who "wore Europe's tattoo." Bea Nightingale belongs to neither group and, as such, the question about whether "to Bea or not to Bea" is both witty and entirely open. She could, of course, count herelf as "one of that ludicrously recognizable breed of middle-aged teachers [Bea is forty-eight] who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe," but Bea is in Paris as an envoy, an ambassador sent by her wealthy brother, Marvin. She sends her reports—a mixture of truths and half-truths—by post. Foreign Bodies is awash in irony, wit, and a certain amount of hard-won wisdom. As a teacher in New York City Bea [End Page xliii] Nightingale changed her last name from its original Nachtingale because it would roll off students' lips more easily; by contrast her thoroughly assimilated brother, Marvin, retains the original European spelling. In an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood, he lives in a palatial house once owned by a silent-movie star—all of which gives Bea, who travels there, yet another chance to level upon him much the same withering criticism she had earlier heaped on Paris. Among the more important loose ends...

Reviewed by: Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Writing Wendy Zierler (bio) Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Writing. Edited by Lois E. Rubin. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 260 pp. There was a time, not long ago, when the American Jewish literary canon was a decidedly male corpus and histories of American Jewish literature, as sketched by mainly male literary scholars, included nary a woman. In those days, the field of Jewish American literary studies was unabashedly dominated by studies of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Occasionally one might stumble upon a reference to Mary Antin, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, or Cynthia Ozick, but these were rare, exceptional sightings.1 Much has changed since those times. In the late 70s and 80s, under the influence of feminist literary and historical studies, scholars began to write about such forgotten Jewish women writers as Anzia Yezierska, Edna Ferber, Jo Sinclair, and Tess Slesinger. Story and poetry anthologies such as Julia Wolf Mazow's The Woman Who Lost Her Names: Selected Writings of American Jewish Women (1980), Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz's The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1989) and Joyce Antler's America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers (1990) brought new attention to Jewish women's writing in America, while critical works such as Diane Lichtenstein's Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (1992), Ann R. Shapiro's Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994) and Harold Bloom's Jewish Women Fiction Writers (1998) began to sketch out an alternative female Jewish tradition. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published in 2001 and edited by a team of two men (Jules Chametzky and John Felstiner) and two women (Hilene Flanzbaum and [End Page 105] Kathryn Hellerstein), offered perhaps the most tangible evidence of this paradigm shift in that thirty-six of the featured writers are women. Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Writing, an anthology of essays on Jewish American women's writing, edited by Lois Rubin, is a recent addition to a now-blossoming field. In her introduction Rubin presents the volume as "the first to focus on what it is to be a woman and a Jew and how the two identities interact—at times supporting each other and at times acting in opposition" (9). To make this point, she contrasts her book with a previous anthology of essays about Jewish American women writers: Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers (1997), edited by Jay Halio and Ben Siegel, which focused on the ways in which Jewishness has shaped the work of Jewish American women writers, but not on the "confluence of Jewish and female identity" (10). Rubin's assertions regarding the firstness of her anthology are both well-founded and incorrect. In their introduction to Daughters of Valor, Halio and Siegel announce their strong feelings that "however vital gender may be in current criticism, it is not of the utmost importance"2 —a quizzical assertion, given their decision to edit an anthology of essays exclusively about woman writers. This editorial dismissal of the significance of gender notwithstanding, Daughters of Valor is filled with provocative essays that reckon with questions of Jewishness as well as femaleness, some by authors such as S. Lillian Kremer, Gloria Cronin, and Victoria Aarons, who contributed to Rubin's volume as well. Indeed, there is a striking similarity to these two books, beginning with but not limited to the fact that they were both published by University of Delaware Press. Each begins with an essay about Cynthia Ozick and includes essays about Anne Roiphe and Allegra Goodman. Both volumes demonstrate openness to postmodern critical approaches, though few of the authors delve deeply into matters of feminist theory. Both volumes include essays that deal with the ambivalent relationship that many feminist Jewish American women writers have had with their Judaism. One mark of a field's development is a certain measure of redundancy: we know that a writer's work or an issue...

Identity Recruitment and the "American Writer":Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse, and Biographical Criticism Josh Lambert (bio) Placing an author into the category of "the American writer" is the kind of simple biographical criticism regularly practiced without much self-consciousness, not only by book prize committees and journalists, but equally by literary scholars as they construct syllabi, edit journals, and subtitle books. Other categorizations, especially when they associate a writer with a minority or historically disempowered group—for example, "African American writer," "Chicano writer," "Jewish writer"—can cause controversy and consternation when imposed by critics. It is telling about the relative appeal of such labels that authors regularly respond to what they perceive as constraining categorizations imposed by critics with the assertion of their place within what they understand to be the broader category of the American writer. Famously, for example, in his 1959 essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," James Baldwin remarked that he "wanted to prevent [himself] from becoming . . . merely a Negro writer," preferring the taxonomic company of "American writers." When Victor Martinez won a National Book Award in 1996 for his debut novel, he noted that he "wanted to be an [End Page 23] American writer, not just a Chicano writer" (qtd. in Sneider). Philip Roth has consistently rejected his categorization as a "Jewish writer." For example, in 2005, when a journalist asked him whether or not he accepted being labeled "an American-Jewish writer," he replied no, that he considers himself "an American. . . . America is first and foremost" (Roth, "It"). Why do these and other authors reject the categories of "Negro writer," "Chicano writer," and "Jewish writer" in the first place?1 One answer can be found in Amy Hungerford's study of the relation between persons and texts in postwar American literature, The Holocaust of Texts. Hungerford contextualizes such minority categorizations, specifically the one rejected by Roth, within what she diagnoses as a pernicious tendency in "[p]ostwar criticism and literary theory . . . to imagine the literary text as if it bore significant characteristics of persons" (4) and, more specifically, to accept the notion of a "text that can bear cultural identity" (5). Hungerford objects to the idea of an identity-bearing text in part because she understands it as having the potential to make "the individual subordinate to . . . coercive group identities" (123). She reads Saul Bellow as struggling against the threat posed by the "forces of identity recruitment" (147)—those parochial literary critics eager to impose reified, "coercive" ethnic identities onto authors—by "publicly resist[ing] attempts to categorize him as a Jewish-American writer" (146). Similarly, Roth's most frequently quoted quip on the subject—"I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew" ("Jewish Intellectual" 35)—resonates with Hungerford's emphatic distinction between persons and texts, particularly her "vision of the writer distinct from the writing he or she produces" (150). Roth's statement, spoken at a symposium in Israel in 1963, presents his acknowledged ethnicity and his authorial vocation as distinct, independent nouns, not as an inexorably linked adjective and noun. [End Page 24] Critiquing oversimplified notions about the relations between authors and their texts, as Hungerford does, is certainly valuable. Common practice though it may be, to regard a text as ethnically or racially Jewish is self-evidently absurd, and the same can be said for parallel constructions that impute race, sexual orientation, gender, or other qualities of persons to pages full of words.2 Moreover, as Hungerford notes, "two of the most powerful twentieth-century critical movements, New Criticism and deconstruction," have devoted considerable effort "to limit[ing] and critiqu[ing] the relationship between persons and texts" implied in such formulations (4). The most famous proclamations of such limits were W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author," though those essays were hardly unique in endeavoring to render "the question of meaning . . . rigorously divorced from questions of biography and intention," as Stanley Fish has phrased it (10). It would be a mistake, however, to think that by agreeing not to discuss Baldwin, Martinez, Roth, Bellow, or any other novelist...

In the years of cultural and political ferment following World War II, a new generation of Jewish- American writers and thinkers arose to make an indelible mark on American culture. Commentary was their magazine; the place where they and other politically sympathetic intellectualsHannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and many othersshared new work, explored ideas, and argued with each other. Founded by the offspring of immigrants, Commentary began life as a voice for the marginalized and a feisty advocate for civil rights and economic justice. But just as American culture moved in its direction, it beganinexplicably to someto veer right, becoming the voice of neoconservativism and defender of the powerful. This lively history, based on unprecedented access to the magazines archives and dozens of original interviews, provocatively explains that shift while recreating the atmosphere of some of the most exciting decades in American intellectual life.

New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

He that applieth himself to fear God, And setteth his mind upon Law Most High, He searcheth out wisdom all ancients, And is occupied with prophets old. - The Wisdom Ben Sira The popular and academic successes Jewish writers in 1950s and 60s led John Updike - in what now seems high comedy - to a sustained fret over popularity things ethnic in American literature.(1) While Updike's paranoia about his unmarketable ethnicity has abated, predominance and importance Jewish writers certainly have not. Even as I was writing this essay, Philip Roth won P.E.N./Faulkner award for 1993. By almost any standard, achievement Jewish-American artists denotes a success that parallels general prominence Jewish-Americans in American life. Still, for Cynthia Ozick that very success marks a more profound failure. In her estimation, Jewish-American authors have too often bought literary success at price an internal colonialism, or - to use a more Ozickian term - at price an idolatry by which they eschew that which is historically Jewish in favor ephemera Jewish ethnicity. While Jewish writers maintain an ethnic exoticism that is currently attractive to an American audience, in Ozick's view they have lost a full-blown Jewish identity: To be a Jew is to be old in history, but not only that; to be a Jew is to be a member a distinct civilization expressed through an oceanic culture in possession a group essential concepts and a multitude texts and attitudes elucidating those concepts. Next to density such a condition - or possibility - how gossamer are stories those writers of Jewish extraction whose characters are pale indifferent echoes whatever lies at hand.... (Metaphor 224) In conflict between descent and consent outlined by Werner Sollors, Ozick is dismayed that, in her estimation, Jewish-American writers have eschewed descent - density Jewish civilization and memory - for easy currency consent which enables success in American mainstream. For Ozick, success Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, and even Saul Bellow, marks failure specifically Jewish religious and ethical ideals and loss Jewish memory as an effective cultural force in present(.2) The centrality Jewish historical memory to Ozick's imagination suggests her commitment to central traditions Jewish religious thought and practice.(3) Wielding an iconoclastic club against Oedipalizing literary history practiced by Harold Bloom, Ozick affirms that [Jewish liturgy] posits recapturing without revision precursor's stance and strength when it iterates God, and God our fathers, God Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nearly every congeries Jewish thought is utterly set against idea displacing precursor. Torah includes meanings tradition and transmittal together. (Ardor 194) Thus, Elaine Kauvar is right to assert that for Ozick the principle continuity overwhelmingly takes precedence over desire to create new forms... (xii). However, such desire for continuity is as much a problem as it is a resource. If memory is at root Jewish life, contemporary cultural developments have threatened continuity that memory. Jewish memory, in Ozick's estimation, has faced a number threats in contemporary culture, not least which is threat assimilation. Ozick's sense Jewish cultural crisis motivates her work as she attempts to recreate collective memories through fiction. In balance this essay, I will analyze ways in which Ozick addresses threat assimilation as she forges a fiction that is at once contemporary and memorial, in keeping with history Jewish religious practice. Guarding against assimilation, to some extent, has been a constitutive feature Jewish religious imagination since Moses - as is evidenced by Biblical injunctions against worshipping idols and against intermarriage. …

The present paper focuses on Trust , Cynthia Ozick’s first novel. In my reading, the text epitomizes a significant transition, in the novelist’s career, from the “Jamesian idea” to the “Jewish idea”. The “Jamesian idea” can be traced back to what Ozick calls her “youthful intoxication” with James’s work, i.e. an idolatrous worship of his prose, which led her to an unnatural isolation from life in pursuit of a literary achievement that would emulate the Master’s legendary prowess. Ozick saw her mistake when, having decided to educate herself on Jewish theology and philosophy, she became familiar with Leo Baeck’s work. His essay Romantic Religion started her on a path that she would go on to pursue throughout her long career: the exploration of Jewish theology in literary form. Written during the aforementioned self-study period, Trust is characterized by two dimensions: a conspicuous intertextual dialogue with James’s prose, and an equally noticeable emphasis on Jewish themes. In that respect, the novel shows Ozick’s evolution from an “American” writer to a “Jewish writer”.

Reviewed by: Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 by Dean J. Franco Stella Setka Dean J. Franco. Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. vii + 239 pp. Dean J. Franco’s latest book explores the works of contemporary Jewish authors who engage the themes of group-based rights and recognition. Through careful close readings of texts that speak to ongoing debates about race, rights, and liberalism, Franco recalibrates our understanding of familiar Jewish American authors such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Allegra Goodman by juxtaposing them with names perhaps less familiar in the context of this type of literary analysis: Lore Segal, Harriet Rochlin, Tony Kushner, and Gary Shteyngart. Franco asserts that in engaging contentious debates like the problem of multiculturalism, these authors “take us right to the edge of what can be thought and said” when addressing political claims for group-based rights and recognition (4). “In so doing,” he continues, “they test the ethical bases for the claims of multiculturalism. . . . [and] help us think productively about our current crises of [End Page 882] global rights and recognition.” Franco cogently articulates the paradox that confronts these writers, which is the fact that the concepts of individuality and multiculturalism are essentially at odds; indeed, as he shows, multiculturalism in its most basic incarnation represents a radical call for group-based recognition at the expense of the individual. Franco’s examination of how this paradox is addressed in contemporary Jewish texts provides a new—and necessary—focus on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of the issue of race and the rise of multicultural philosophies and policies in the United States. Although the Jewish writers addressed in Franco’s study engage the same themes of group-based rights and recognition that are commonly examined by African American, Native American, and Latino authors, they are wary of adopting or promoting some semblance of a group identity. This hesitance is demonstrated by the fact that they generally tend to deploy postmodern literary strategies as a means of distancing themselves from—and therefore avoiding the sin of presuming to speak for—the broader Jewish American public. Caught between the ideologies of liberalism on the one hand and radical multiculturalism on the other, the Jewish writers included in Franco’s book often seek to occupy a middle ground fraught with competing impulses: “sympathy for an ethical basis for human recognition” versus “criticism of recognition’s expedient circuit into normative politics—the politics of naming groups, claiming rights, and shaming the perceived antagonists of social equality” (4). Franco’s text is divided into two parts. The first, titled “Pluralism, Race, and Religion,” examines texts that address the “dilemma of the moral, ethical, or political conflict that occur when individuals are also members of social groups” (8). Focused on the works of Roth, Ozick, and Goodman, this section examines cultural divisions. The second section, “Recognition, Rights, and Responsibility,” “extends the topic on civil rights and race to the international dimension of human rights and social recognition” (23). The chapters in this section highlight the works of Segal, Kushner, and Shteyngart, and, in Franco’s own words, “offer ways of overcoming those divisions” addressed in the first half of the book (21). Also central to the book are “two major topics, less divisible according to section”: 1) literary accounts of diversity and multiculturalism, and 2) theorizations of human and civil rights. As if the roadmap of sections and subthemes wasn’t enough, Franco suggests yet another metric by which to read the book, directing readers interested in Jewishness and diversity in America to read chapters 2, 3, and 4 and encouraging those who might be drawn to “focused critiques and theorizations of discourses of civil and human rights” to refer to chapters 1, 5, and 6. The thoroughness of the book’s directives bespeaks the author’s efforts to guide [End Page 883] the reader as carefully as possible and will likely be appreciated by scholars seeking to engage with specific subthemes. Throughout his study, Franco adopts a deconstructive methodology, one that challenges the tendency toward binarism and takes to task the reductive thinking that arises...

In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement

Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels, edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. $42.50. 206 pp. Telling the Little Secrets« Jewish Writing Since the 1980s, by Janet Handler Burstein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 207 pp. $45.00. Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Writing, edited by Lois E. Rubin. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 260 pp. $46.50. Lost Tribet Jewish Fiction from the Edge, edited by Paul Zaktzewski. New York: HarperCollins/ Perennial, 2003. 548 pp. $14.95. Contemporary Jewish writing has taken striking new directions in the past twenty-five years, and recent excellent analytical works help pinpoint what distinguishes these new works. Reading these lively observations along with the writing itself helps as readers to enter into the dialogue. Collections of essays edited by Jay Halio, Ben Siegel, and Lois Rubin, a single-authored but wide-ranging volume by Janet Handler Burstein, and an anthology of recent short fiction edited by Paul Zakrzewski, evoke poet Getald Manley Hopkins' moving, Praise be to God for dappled things. What makes the new writing different is that it is emphatically not all of a piece. Jewish writing over the past two decades is characterized by an unprecedented diversity of tone, voice, and background. Graphic novels, becoming increasingly popular, are by their very nature episodic, with visible cellular boundaries, but even in prose fiction today pastiche prevails, quilting together dissonant experiences, revealing the seams and fault lines, and sometimes shining a spotlight on them. Much of the celebrated Jewish writing of the mid-twentieth century was obsessed with the alternately painful and hilarious process of assimilation. The big three - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and especially the young Philip Roth - were the best sociologists one could ask for. In Roth's early writing, the characteristics of (the Jews) and them (the Christians who owned America) were clearly conflicting but could be easily contrasted since each seemed firmly in place. Goodbye, Columbus and Elie the Fanatic (1959), for example, painted the assimilatory hunger of Jews in broad but dazzlingly accurate strokes, and Portnoy's Complaint (1968) farcically captured a moment in time when Jews were both inside and outside culture but were still acutely aware of what values and behaviors lay on either side of that binary dividing line. Today, that excruciating awareness of us and them, and the hunger for assimilation that goes with it, are all but gone - except for first and second generation Jews from the former Soviet Union, like Gary Shteyngart, who bemoans that he must rehash the old immigrant narrative and admits, We may very well be the last immigrant Jews in this country who have a foot in both worlds. And yet, despite ribald overt echoes of early Roth, the fiction of Shteyngart and his cohort differs from Jewish fiction of half a century ago because today's immigranrs seem less motivated by blandness. They want desperately to succeed, but they do not measure success by their ability to disappear into the smooth, sweet wotld that Roth would later subversively call the American pastoral. Instead, their visions of success are themselves jaggedly dissonant, as Shteyngart details: ... I left for my parents' Long Island estate. The Abramov manse was a nice, goofy, immigrant's house - mock Tudor wedded to Dutch colonial with some Moorish influences thrown in as if to announce that the owners were unencumbered by modesty or shame, who could damn well do as they pleased with their private property. (Losf Tribe, pp. 49-55) The estate he describes is light-years away from the Patimkin mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, or from Portnoy's description of the lace curtains of football-playing real Americans, with their nicely combed hair, deep voices, perfect grammar, and blond, tulip-like daughters. …

Via delle Botteghe Oscure is a short, broad street in the historical center of Rome, connecting Largo di Torre Argentina with the Capitol. Its name bears witness to the ancient presence of several dark workshops, whose foundations can still be seen in the deeper layers of the street's thick palimpsest. The learned tourists know that the street is culturally significant for at least three reasons: the Crypta Balbi, a branch of the National Museum, showing the structures of a Roman theater, some medieval houses, a Renaissance nunnery, and an eighteenth-century church; the reddish façade of the palace that, for over 40 years, was the head office of the Italian Communist Party; and the imposing Palazzo Caetani, built between 1554 and 1570 for the noble family Mattei and later purchased by the Caetani as their major Roman residence.The Caetani were one of the most distinguished families in Rome, especially from the time in the late thirteenth century when Benedetto Caetani became Pope Boniface VIII—the fierce adversary of Philip the Fair, king of France, and Dante (Inferno XIX:52–57). Members of his family held prestigious positions through the centuries, contributing to the political and cultural history of Rome. In 1911, Roffredo Caetani, Prince of Bassiano and last Duke of Sermoneta, a notable musician, met Marguerite Chapin, a rich young lady from Connecticut, who was in Paris to study singing. The two married and, in the truest Jamesian style, established themselves first in Versailles and, finally, in Rome. An energetic and strong-willed personality, Marguerite decided to invest her energies and money in promoting young writers, discovering still unpublished poets, and collecting paintings of lesser-known artists. In Paris she founded and directed the literary magazine Commerce (1924–32), which, among other merits, introduced to the public the first excerpts of Joyce's Ulysses. She eventually settled in Rome where, early in World War II, she had to face the tragedy of the loss of her son Camillo. In part as a reaction to such grief, though already in her late sixties, the Princess founded a second magazine. It was named after the street along which the family palace was located and the site of its editorial office: Botteghe Oscure (1948–60). Caetani paid generously to all her authors, regardless of their limited fame.The extraordinary figure of Marguerite Caetani stands at the center of this recent volume by Cristina Giorcelli, longtime chair of American Studies at the University of Roma III. Giorcelli focuses on the relationships among Caetani, the literature of her native country, and the Italian cultural milieu in a period that, with reference to the history of cinema but also in a broader sense, has been defined as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” The contribution of Botteghe Oscure and of her patroness, a real cosmopolitan cultural mediator, to other European literatures (Italian, French, German) has been duly investigated by distinguished authors, but there is no doubt that the research carried on by Giorcelli had the task of analyzing the most important side of the subject. The amount of materials taken into account is impressive: letters from the correspondence of the Princess and her friends/authors/protégés, public and private documents from the Caetani archives, interviews, newspapers articles, reviews, notebooks, and the like. Giorcelli, however, never falls victim to the quantity, clearly distinguishing and stressing the quality of the various voices in the polyphonic choir. Her exceptional expertise in the field of Anglo-American poetry enables her to offer the reader, through the lenses of Marguerite and her magazine, a complete picture of the various personalities, major and minor writers, literary critics, translators, and men and women of letters involved in the debates that made that period so fascinating. Though, as Giorcelli points out, Italy was, in those years, by and large still unprepared to understand the full range of such a meaningful cultural “invasion.”Caetani published, above all, poets but also novelists and playwrights. The volume is therefore divided into chapters pertaining to the different genres, including the category of translators and interdisciplinary artists. The chapter devoted to poets proves, for obvious reasons, unique in its richness and perceptiveness. Most opportunely, Giorcelli chose to shed light on the Princess's merits and successes, more than on her shortcomings or failures. At the same time, she avoided the danger of writing an extended eulogy, so there are also chapters that list the names of poets who were not included in the 25 issues of Botteghe Oscure, often providing convincing proposals of interpretation for their absence. But the number and level of those who were published suffice to justify the stature and impact of Caetani's operations. W. C. Williams, M. Moore, E. E. Cummings, W. Stevens, W. H. Auden, R. Lowell, K. Shapiro, R. Wilbur, W.S. Merwin, J. Merrill, R. Bly, R. Duncan, R. Jarrell, A. MacLeish, H. Nemerov, A. Rich, J. Wright, L. Zukovsky, P. Viereck, and R. P. Warren (to name just a few) appear as actors on a stage that had moments of friction but also had long periods and rich episodes of intellectual industry and genuine cultural promotion, resulting in a fruitful interaction between Italy and the United States. Moreover, she followed suggestions from friends and poets (Theodore Roethke, Paul Engle, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish) with unequal consistency; she was fully aware of what was happening in the history of contemporary U.S. literature, regularly having in mind what was published by Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, and similar literary enterprises.One of the more important issues that Giorcelli raises is the extent of Caetani's open mindedness. To begin with, this was, so to speak, more international than intranational; she was interested more in establishing a new canon of young writers than in a revision of the canon as such. Her journal mostly published authors belonging to mainstream literature, limiting the range of exploration of voices from literatures of minorities. The consequence was that, no matter how thick and rich the various issues were (some resembled a sizable book more than the fascicle of a literary journal), we do not find many Jewish American authors (Saul Bellow, Anthony Hecht, and Cynthia Ozick are notable exceptions), and even fewer African American writers. As far as Italian American literature is concerned, Botteghe Oscure did not host, for instance, John Ciardi, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, nor the novelists John Fante, Jerre Mangione, or Mario Puzo. But it included texts by such multiethnic poets as Harold James Enrico (1953, XII and 1957, XX), Richard F. Hugo (1956, XVII), and the Italian-Swiss novelist Niccolò Tucci (issues 1951, VIII and 1959, XXIV). And this happened when Enrico and Hugo were young and very little known, and Tucci still far from receiving the attention he would obtain later, above all in Italy. At the same time, Caetani proves perceptive in estimating the future role of such names as James Purdy, Donna Bowen, James Merrill (“accepted” by Botteghe Oscure after only the publication of First Poems; 1952, IX), and Robert Duncan. The poetry of Duncan appeared (1957, XIX and XX) as a promising novelty, not because—but in spite of—his association with Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance. Princess Caetani, as Giorcelli repeatedly stresses, was as a rule indifferent to “schools” of poetry and suspicious of theoretical literary manifestos.The impressive apparatus of endnotes gives Giorcelli the freedom to pursue intriguing byways and stimulating hypotheses concerning the intricate web of affiliations, correspondences, and interactions among editor, mentors, sponsors, and pupils. There are endnotes that read as miniature essays and deserve a special mention, such as the one in which Giorcelli documents her exchange of letters with Cynthia Ozick and the long note that prints and then discusses a previously unpublished text by William Carlos Williams on René Char (possibly an essay conceived as an introduction of the French poet to the American public). The genuinely comparatist point of view of the book points to a number of prospective developments of debates taken into account. The great, sometimes obsessive, interest of the Princess in Char—a characteristic of her temperament that in some cases risked putting an end to her friendship with distinguished poets and critics—surfaces here and there and often seems on the verge of promising another lengthy essay, dealing with the difficulties of Char's fortunes in the United States.Giorcelli's volume pays a fair, uncompromising tribute to a figure who played a major role in developing a substantial international, cosmopolitan network and to a literary journal whose fame and prestige remain strong on both sides of the Atlantic. The brilliant, and at the same time nostalgic, letter sent by Cynthia Ozick to Giorcelli confirms: “I have always felt it to be an honor and a joy to have been a part of the history of this legendary journal.” The volume also results in a fascinating dialogue, through time and distance, between two extraordinary women who devoted their entire lives to the promotion of literature, poetry in particular: on the one side, a generous and passionate dilettante; on the other, an impeccable critic who knows how to find her way through, and distinguish among, the heterogeneous but sure merits of a “monumental” figure.