Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt Anna Elena Torres Saul Noam Zaritt. Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. A Yiddish speaker recently recounted exactly where he was on the night in 1978 when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize: at a pub in the Bronx, watching a fistfight erupt between Bashevis's proud devotees and the disgruntled supporters of Chaim Grade, who considered him to be the more Nobel-worthy writer. These Yiddish readers took a more pugnacious approach to settling the questions posed in Saul Noam Zaritt's monograph Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody: Who should become the [End Page 462] literary representative of Yiddish in English, and who will decide? Does English translation permit more than one breakout Yiddish star? Zaritt examines the reception history, translational process, vernacularity, and "institutional ambitions" of Yiddish literature in the United States, asking: "What does it mean to write for the world and not just the global market? What world, whose world?" (9). Bashevis's Nobel Prize, then, signified a moment of dignified recognition for Yiddish on the stage of the "world" even as it sparked fights in the "vernacular" space of the bar. Jewish American Writing and World Literature aims to bring together analysis from the fields of Yiddish studies, American studies, and translation studies. Zaritt defines his key term vernacularity as "the condition of a localized language practice that is ethnically or racially inflected under an imperial gaze" (3). Zaritt's project concerns institutional and market frames, rather than internationalist, transnational, mobile, or diasporic models. He adds the Jewish words oylem, olam, and velt to discourses of "world" literature, with each term offering a different shade of communality. Absent from this corpus of vocabulary of "the world" are such concepts as tsiber or publikum, "community" or "public," which might hail ideals of social solidarity (the approach taken by Amelia Glaser's "passwords" in Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, 2020). Zaritt's protagonists are the scandalous novelist and playwright Sholem Asch; the modernist poet and critic Jacob Glatstein; and Nobel awardees Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The broad title "Jewish American Writing" belies its narrow demographic: all four of Zaritt's subjects are Ashkenazic men who lived for significant periods in New York City around mid-century. Zaritt describes their careers as "self-serving," departing from earlier proletarian generations' ideals of writing for "the masses." He argues, "In defining translation as both fantasy and failure, I contend that no figure in this book finds a homecoming in the world, in the US, or in any Jewish community" (22). Yet any subjects of comparison remain unnamed: What twentieth-century writer became "at home" in this world? Zaritt compellingly takes up questions of the temporality of translation and adaptation throughout. The first chapter, "A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature," discusses Asch's varied use of the ẓaddik figure as a signifier of Jewish history: "In searching for a usable past to counteract the crises of modernity, writers turned to the ecstatic religious experience of the zaddik either as a secular critique of religious life or as a counterpoint to the disappointments of Enlightenment rationalism" (56). The third chapter, "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature," examines the "hauntology" of his prose: "As a literature of and for ghosts, Bashevis's work of the 1940s celebrates its vernacular marginality while refusing to imagine any future for Yiddish culture" (106). The fourth chapter, "Between Heaven and Earth: Saul Bellow and the Dialectics of World Literature," posits: "Bellow's literary style translates and aestheticizes the language of an immigrant past to produce a new American English that balances descent into the vernacular with a reach for sublime metaphor" (130). Taken together, these sections thematize the processes of translation, folk adaptation, popular reception, and market circulation. The second chapter, "A World Literature To-Come: Jacob Glatstein's Vernacular Modernism," is the book's center. Zaritt maps the rich...