Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

The Future of Jewish American Literature: Notes from a Recovering Snob

Recent Works on Jewish American Modernism Sarah Ponichtera Stephen Fredman . A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001. 216 pp. Hana Wirth-Nesher . Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224 pp. Maeera Shreiber . Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007. 278 pp. Ranen Omer-Sherman . Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature. Brandeis University Press, 2002. 341 pp. The last few years have seen a renewal of interest in Jewish American modernism, a field that offers new ways to explore the Jewish experience in the United States. Though often lacking the presumed authenticity and connection to tradition characteristic of the first wave of immigrants, Jewish American modernists provide a window onto the Jewish community's mature and informed engagement with American culture. The majority of Jewish American writing in English was influenced by modernism for chronological reasons: by the time the vast immigrant waves of the 1880s had produced a generation of American-educated, financially secure, native speakers of English in the 1920s, modernism was on the rise in the United States. Even while influencing [End Page 116] Jewish American writers, however, the movement also opened itself to their influence. Proclaiming the obsolescence of traditional aesthetic modes and calling for a rethinking of the methods and aims of literature, modernism allowed American Jews to take an active role in shaping American literature. Modernism and Jewish culture share a number of proclivities: the experience of exile; a focus on scholarship; an international awareness, particularly reflected in the knowledge of foreign languages; an interest in linguistic play; and a concern with the proper role of the aesthetic in social life. Jewish American modernists, like other minority groups, often had a double consciousness with reference to these terms, and one can observe slippages between the modernist and Jewish understandings of these in their work. Louis Zukofsky, for example, the protégé of Ezra Pound, includes excerpts of Yiddish lullabies, images from Abraham Goldfaden's play Shulamis, and Yehoash's poetry in his first Imagist work, "Poem Beginning 'The'" (1927). Zukofsky thus engages in the modernist technique of employing multilingualism to bring a taste of the strange and incomprehensible to poetry, with the twist that far from being a foreign language, that which he includes is actually his own first language, in snatches remembered from his childhood. In this way, Zukofsky uses the modernist attraction to the foreign to integrate the Jewish experience into mainstream American literature. Recent critical works often draw on a theme such as language or exile, shared between American Jews and modernist thought, to structure a deeper exploration of Jewish American modernism. Two of the most notable of these works focus on the development of a particularly Jewish American language. Stephen Fredman seeks to recast our understanding of the Objectivists as Jewish poets whose Jewish consciousness made a material difference to their modernist aesthetic. Hana Wirth-Nesher establishes that the Jewish aspect of an English-language work can often be traced to an echo of a Jewish language in the text, based on her innovative reading of the paradigmatic Jewish American modernist Henry Roth, among others. Two other writers focus on the question of exile, and on how Jewish American writers conceptualized homeland and Diaspora. Maeera Shreiber investigates the role of exile in giving rise to poetry and prayer, and demonstrates how Jewish American poetry sustains a sense of estrangement in the face of pressure to subsume alienation in allegiance to a homeland. Ranen [End Page 117] Omer-Sherman looks at Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American poetry, and argues that this tension sheds important light on the development of a Jewish American aesthetic. Although the latter two writers do not concentrate specifically on modernism, their analyses of exile and poetry as particularly liberating forces owes much to modernist thought. Integrating their focus on communal and individual identity into the discussion of Jewish American modernism has the potential of yielding very fruitful results. Stephen Fredman's A Menorah for Athena (2001) argues compellingly for the importance of seeing Charles Reznikoff's work...

At a provocatively titled 2009 MLA roundtable, Josh Lambert and Benjamin Schreier were among those to ask and respond to the question, “Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?” As Lambert, the panel’s organizer, noted at the time, American Jewish literary and cultural productions are often overshadowed by the study of Holocaust literature, while Jewish American literature has fallen outside the scope of American ethnic studies. Their books continue that discussion’s focus on what kind of future Jewish American literary studies might be able to forge for itself. While Lambert errs on the side of the term now preferred in Jewish studies—American Jewish literature—both works read their subject as a subset of American literature, the Jewish American literature Schreier pointedly insists on.Schreier’s The Impossible Jew argues against a historicist Jewish American literary scholarship shaped by essentialist assumptions about American Jewish history and identity. The old regime “cannot do much more than illustrate a historical narrative that the critic already takes for granted as an object of scholarly desire” (45)—that is, a stable, coherent Jewish American subject. In his first chapter, proposing an approach he calls “critical semitism” (57), Schreier suggests that, far from attesting to a stable concept of Jewish American selfhood or history, “‘Jewish’ literary texts destabilize and displace what ‘Jewish’ might possibly refer to” (56). A “critical semitism” would “examine how and where and why ‘Jewish’ accrues reference and exerts a power to organize and administer the production of meaning or how and where and why referents accrue Jewish identification” (57).The readings that follow show how “Jewish literature can help us understand how we structure our thinking about Jews” (18). Abraham Cahan’s “The Imported Bridegroom” (1898) reveals that, from its origins, Jewish American fiction presents “an emergent, desired . . . spectral Jew” (72) rather than a “positivist” historical or social representation. Chapter 3 turns to criticism itself, arguing against “identitarian clichés” (105) in the narrative of the New York intellectuals and Jewish American political affiliation more generally (immigrant socialism to mid-century liberalism, into a post-1967 Zionism/neoconservatism) by attending to the American Jewish Congress’s 1944 “Under Forty” symposium of emerging Jewish literary voices. Here, he briefly raises Muriel Rukeyser as a key, problematic figure but leaves readers to wonder—or perhaps themselves explore—how, as a woman, an LGBT writer, and a poet, she might contribute to a renewed critical examination of a field that, even here, remains the otherwise exclusive domain of straight male novelists. (It’s Schreier’s stated design to reread “established texts” [19].)Compelling readings of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1987) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) show how American Jews continue to construct Jewish Americans and Jewish American literature. For Schreier, Roth’s primary significance is his articulation of “central characters [who] do not know how to describe themselves as Jews” (154); far from being an autobiographical Roth stand-in or guide to the sociology of American Jewry, Nathan Zuckerman “represents himself as a Jew by desiring a Jewish identification that seeks legitimacy in the future rather than by indicating actual evidence of a Jewish identity that finds legitimacy in the past” (158). Turning to Foer’s 9/11 novel, Schreier reveals how this practice expresses itself in readers and critics who have created a Jewish American novel from a work devoid of Jewish characters or content; “the book’s Jewishness is dependent on our desire to find it there” (212)—precisely what makes any work Jewish.Lambert’s Unclean Lips demonstrates that a self-critical Jewish American literary scholarship that does not take essentialist readings for granted doesn’t need to resemble Schreier’s approach. Indeed, even while offering his own brief against essentializing, identity-driven readings of Jewish writers, Lambert presents a historically informed account of the role of American Jews in twentieth-century debates surrounding obscenity. Jews, he makes clear from the outset, were not drawn into debates over free speech and obscenity for “Jewish” reasons (whether for the sake of liberty, provocation, or the old anti-Semitic canard of Jews’ inherent obscenity), but found themselves embroiled in it by historical circumstance. Such contingency, however, should not prevent us from asking “how, then, can Jewishness be productively understood as relevant to the interventions of individual Americans in 20th-century debates about obscenity?” (10). Lambert’s readings force Jewish American literary scholarship to consider works by non-Jewish authors (in particular, Theodore Dreiser’s 1919 play, The Hand of the Potter) and ranges outside of the Jewish American canon to include Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot (1974). He realigns better-known works, reading Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) alongside later graphic novels and situating Philip Roth’s career in the context of Jewish involvement in the movements for birth control and contraception, allowing him to argue for the importance of the underdiscussed early novel Letting Go (1962) and offer a highly original analysis of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).Approaching the intersection of these texts and figures with obscenity debates through “four complementary lenses” (21)—opposition to sexual anti-Semitism, the pursuit of cultural capital in modernist publishing, anxieties about reproduction, and concerns about modesty—Lambert’s chapters offer arguments that reflect both on Jews as Jews intervening in obscenity debates, and on how to understand the stakes of these interventions within a broader American cultural and legal history. In his excellent fourth chapter, for instance, Lambert pushes back against Stanley Fish and Judith Butler, arguing that we need distinct terms for governmental censorship (which operates through political power) and nongovernmental censorship (operating through a group’s internal decisions). American Yiddish modernism avoided government intervention: censors didn’t read Yiddish, so otherwise obscene writing could skate through where “obscene” English—or images—could not. Precisely because of this freedom, “the Yiddish-language cultural sphere roiled with arguments about what constituted acceptable literature” just as intensely as English-language critics argued over the works of D. H. Lawrence (152). In a tsnies, or modesty, imposed by authors, publishers, critics, and readers, Lambert finds, in a case study oriented around a specifically Jewish language, a way of theorizing obscenity debates in the United States after the 1966 Memoirs v. Massachusetts Supreme Court decision clarified protection for literature against such charges.Schreier and Lambert each offer their scholarship as models for thinking and writing about American ethnic literature—Lambert’s paradigm for how “religious, ethnic, and racial affiliations influence authors, publishers, lawyers, and pornographers as they engage with obscenity” (21) can be abstracted to other subjects, while Schreier seeks to place Jewish American literary study at the forefront of a critique of identity and identity formation in literary and cultural studies. The sticking point, of course, remains: are Jews “ethnic” Americans? In literary culture, at least, Lambert and Schreier insist that they are, or at least can be seen so, whether because of the historically distinct, if at times contingent, experiences of Jews as American outsiders or (as Schreier might say) simply because Jewish Americans have desired and constructed this role for themselves, and in many cases continue to do so.

The early Jewish American apocalyptic verse of Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, Miguel de Barrios, and Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna provides an important starting point for the history of Jewish American poetry. By beginning Jewish American literature with these poets, I aim to accomplish three important goals: (1) to more accurately reflect Jewish American literature's diversity; (2) to denaturalize the concept of America; and (3) to remind readers that literary history need not be teleological, even when the poets themselves dreamt of a final telos—the messiah. After summarizing the main tenets of early Jewish American messianism, I show how this messianism impacted Aboab's, de Barrios's, and Laguna's content, genre, and style. Messianism, I argue, affects the poets' desire to write from and of America and their understanding of poetry's goal. Messianism provided a means by which each poet made sense of temporal and spatial ruptures and placed those ruptures in the larger narrative of Jewish (American) history. Throughout my explication of each of these poets' works, I highlight their relationship to later Jewish American literary history by taking note of the unintentional echoes between early and later Jewish American poets. I draw out these parallels in order to argue for a new understanding of literary history that is just as interested in drift, variation, and fragmentation as it is interested in expectancy, reinforcement, and cohesion. Correlation, not causation, is the narrative thread of this new literary history.

In the new millennium, Jewish American literature is rarely taught within its own tradition in America's English departments. This bibliographical essay provides a scholar's gateway map replete with headnotes and introductory explanations of the primary divisions and subdivisions of the relevant academic traditions of Jews writing in America. Accordingly, it covers Jews in American history; anthologies; encyclopedias; bibliographies; periodicals; Hebrew, Sephardic, and Yiddish traditions; Holocaust materials; Jewish American poetry, drama, fiction, memoirs, women writers, gay and lesbian writers, comic books, graphic novels, humor, folklore, and literary theory. It also delineates all major periods in Jewish literary production such as Yiddish theater, immigrant literature, early twentieth-century fiction, the so-called Jewish Decades (1950–70), Holocaust literature, the Jewish American literary resurgence (1980–present), and the New York literary resurgence (2000–present).

Reviewed by: Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice ed. by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, and: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. Victoria Aarons Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman. University of Virginia Press, 2019. 352 pp. The New Jewish American Literary Studies. Edited by Victoria Aarons. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 242 pp. Since the publication of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001) and Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), the field of American Jewish literature has changed dramatically not only in terms of how it is defined but also in methods used for interpreting that new diversity. Enter these recent essay collections. In Caribbean Jewish Crossings, editors Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman shed light on Jewish life in the Caribbean through an analysis of literature from this region by and about Jews. The essays deliberately cross disciplinary borders, borrowing from history, art, and anthropology. In contrast, The New Jewish American Literary Studies as edited by Victoria Aarons takes a more theory-driven approach and self-consciously engages in a philosophical discussion of the goals and methods used in literary analysis. The different strategies speak to a more fundamental split in comparative literature and cultural studies. While both approaches are equally valid, Caribbean Jewish Crossings may prove more useful for those outside of literature departments. It is also the more radical in its implicit challenge to US-centered interpretations of "Americanness." The essays included in Caribbean Jewish Crossings take a broad approach to defining Jewish American literature. First, there is the location of the Caribbean itself. A key shift in Jewish American literary studies since 2001 has been a change in how "America" is understood. Caribbean Jewish Crossings rethinks both "America" and the methods used for interpreting that diversity. Prior to 1825, the largest Jewish communities in the Americas were all in the Caribbean, and for the first time, Caribbean Jewish Crossings provides an overview of what Caribbean Jews have contributed to American literary studies. Second, the volume sidesteps policing who or what is a Jew by embracing authors of Jewish [End Page 285] descent—regardless of their halachic status--as a way of thinking about Jewishness in the Caribbean as inherently cross-cultural. Third, and equally important, the volume balances analysis of writings by Jewish-descended people from the Caribbean with those by non-Jewish Caribbean authors who "have a long tradition of weaving together African and Diasporic narratives and, in the process, have identified or forged cultural and historical connections between them" (2). Methodologically, the volume is also interested in "critical ambivalences" as it moves between the vocabularies of Jewish and Caribbean studies (4). This ambivalence reflects the scholars' refusal to position Jews as solely victims or solely oppressors. This tactic is crucial, as it allows the essays to address both the impact of slavery and the Holocaust on Caribbean Jewish literature without privileging one over the other. In all of these arenas, the book functions as a case study of how scholars can rethink Jewish American literary history by thinking about American Jews—and American Jewish studies--as part of an intertwined, transnational nexus. Caribbean Jewish Crossings is divided into four sections. "The Emergence of Caribbean Jewish Literary Culture" begins in the second half of the eighteenth century in Suriname with an analysis of David Nassy's Essai historique (1788) by Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger. This essay points to the way that the volume willingly engages questions of how the definition of "literature" has changed across the centuries. "Revisiting the Inquisition and the Sephardic Caribbean" focuses on the inquisition, providing important ideas for how the Caribbean literature stands at the crossroads of Europe as well as North and South America. "Colonialism and Caribbean Holocaust Memory" uses writing both by and about Jews to decenter the Holocaust as a Jewish study by looking at how Jewish and Black diasporas intertwine. Compellingly, "Contemporary Voices: Narrative and Poetry" consists of a brief selection of contemporary literature by writers from a wide geographic range, including works translated from Dutch. The drawbacks...

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Saul Noam Zaritt (bio) The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. By Benjamin Schreier. Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 228 pp. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature begins with a startling claim: "Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything" (1). The claim is startling because by traditional metrics—say, number of books and articles published per year—the field is healthy. Yet one of Schreier's central claims is that despite this activity, there has been little debate on the terms of Jewish American literary study. While in other fields there is repeated theorization of concepts like ethnicity and race, there is something of a silence around "Jewishness" in Jewish American literature. Schreier argues that the coherence of "Jewishness" is often taken for granted, observing how critics, from the postwar to the present, view Jewish American writing as directly reflecting a recognizable and legible Jewish population. This Schreier calls the field's "ethnological" foundation, in which a descriptive, ethnographic mode of literary study [End Page 99] precedes and precludes critical analysis. He identifies how critics circle around the idea of "breakthrough," in which a group of writers (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and others) is seen as emerging out of immigrant origins to arrive in the American mainstream, becoming representative figures of Jewish American history. The Jewishness of these writers is taken as a given, their writing automatically cohering within a narrative of Jewish American arrival that often turns on ideas of model minorities and on the uninterrogated convergence of Ashkenazi Jewishness and whiteness. Schreier calls this "autoethnography" nationalist, "ancillary" to a normalized and self-evident "historical record of Jews in America" (9). This leads, for Schreier, to a dangerous insiderism, in which Jewish intellectuals labor in service of a closed cultural system rather than interrogate the grounds of discourse. Schreier demands instead a shift from "an analysis of Jews" to an analysis of "discourses about Jews" (10). In Chapter 1, Schreier tracks how "breakthrough" came to dominate the field, outlining the field's "ambivalent foundation" and contested relationship with multiculturalism (39). He notes how institutionalizing the mythologized success of Jewish American assimilation distanced the field from the critical approaches of ethnic studies; at the same time, the mainstreaming of Jewish difference threatened the cherished exceptionalism of Jewish culture. This resulted, paradoxically, in the ghettoization of Jewish American literary study at the moment of its "emergence." Chapter 2 extends this critique to the instrumentalization of Yiddish literature within this narrative: "The Yiddish literary past was repurposed … as that manifestation of Jewish cultural heritage that could become a nostalgic object of identification for American Jews, the consumption and capitalization of which promised the affective reproduction of Jewish American identity" (74). Concentrating on Irving Howe's anthologies, Schreier shows how Yiddish was ossified through "ideological capture" to support the idea of "breakthrough" (78). Chapter 3 considers the concept of ethnicity, analyzing Cynthia Ozick's criticism to show how Jewish ethnic identity became a "fulcrum on which the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate" (161). The project of Jewish identity comes to "normalize an ethnologically representational historicism as the authoritative way of thinking about Jewish American writing" (124). Schreier maps this "history of Jewish American literary history" onto the work of a string of literary critics—Leslie Fiedler, Howe, Ruth Wisse, Ozick, and many others. His approach is stridently polemical, revealing how critics produced a normative Jewish population "whose history is the duty … of Jewish studies intellectuals to uncover, archive, and narrate" (170). From Ozick's trouble with multiculturalism to Wisse's [End Page 100] nationalism, Schreier takes a measure of joy in assaulting these thinkers, often leaving the topic of a given chapter well behind in order to pursue a line of critique. Schreier's text brims with aggression, repeatedly answering the challenge of the book's opening sentence. But what does this aggression ultimately do...

This book begins with a silence. While Jewish American fiction has long been recognized as a fit subject for critical inquiry, Jewish American poetry has largely been overlooked. Recently, a few books have started to redress this silence, focusing on some specific Jewish American poets. However, even as these studies begin to identify specific individuals as "Jewish American poets," the field must be theorized so that we might understand this fascinating occlusion. Poetic forms need to be identified; and the material difference of Jewish cultural practice must be taken into account. Taking a broad view of the subject, Singing in a Strange Land asks: How does being Jewish-in-America affect poetic production? And how does poetry help shape Jewish American identity? Beginning with a historical inquiry into the status of Jewish poetry as a marginalized kind of writing, and moving on to detailed analyses of poets including Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Louis Zukofsky, Louise Glück, George Oppen, and Allen Grossman, Singing in a Strange Land helps us think about the ways in which displacement, exile, mourning, gender, and prayer contribute to the shaping of the Jewish American imagination and its poetic production.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Cyrillic Cycles:

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Reviewed by: Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 by Dean J. Franco Jennifer Glaser (bio) Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969. By Dean J. Franco. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. xixi + 239239. Rightly or wrongly, the study of Jewish American literature has often been criticized for its conservatism, particularly its allergy to theory and its sometimes overtly celebratory character. (A friend once joked that he wanted to write a book about Jewish American literature that didn't seem like it was merely a treasury of Bubbe's favorite recipes.) In recent years, the field of Jewish American literary studies has been struggling to find a new, more expansive identity and vernacular. Dean Franco's recently published Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 marks an important step in carving out the ramparts of the field and providing a portal into wider discourses that have often resisted connection with American Jewish literary studies. At the center of Franco's volume is a canny argument: Jewish American literature—particularly Jewish American literature published from the 1970s onward—is uniquely positioned to exemplify, expose, and, sometimes, challenge the very basis of identity as it has been understood in a post-civil rights, increasingly global U.S. The book is loosely organized into two sections, one devoted to the ways in which Jewish American authors "explore the dilemma of the moral, ethical, or political conflicts that occur when individuals are also members of social groups" and the other "about global occasions for recognition and recognition's failure and the future of global recognition" (8). Also central to the book are [End Page 327] "literary accounts of diversity and multiculturalism and theorizations of civil and human rights" (21). As Franco makes clear from his persuasive opening reading of Saul Bellow's infamous Mr. Sammler's Planet, he is deeply engaged in a deconstructive literary project that challenges binary thinking or simplistic argument in all of its forms. He is particularly persuasive in his critique of the simplistic polar oppositions embraced by thinkers on both the right and the left when approaching Bellow. Throughout Race, Rights, and Recognition, he challenges received narratives of all kinds. His reading of the underrated Her First American, a novel by Lore Segal, uses Segal's autobiography to complicate and destabilize fixed notions of race and identity. His appraisal of Cynthia Ozick returns the politically vexed writer and intellectual to her rightful position as a radical critic of self and other in American culture. His analysis of Tony Kushner's avowedly global Homebody/ Kabul places the valences of cultural Jewishness into conversation with the wider discourse of human rights. Franco's close readings are fresh and complex, but the most radical aspect of his book is the way in which these readings offer an implicit critique of what we might call literary essentialism—the conflation of writer and text at the heart of much literary criticism, particularly much of the criticism devoted to "ethnic" writers. Race, Rights, and Recognition also does a magisterial job of making clear just how central Jewishness (as a symbolic entity) is to making sense of the shifting sands of race and ethnicity in the U.S. while avoiding viewing Jewish American literature through the narrow lens of intra-group "generational conflict." One of the most important contributions Franco's book makes is bringing Jewish American literature into conversation with theory. His use of political philosophy to open up the literature he studies is particularly deft. At times, however, the theory weighs too heavily on the analysis in Race, Rights, and Recognition. Overdetermined concepts such as "proximity" and "culture" are gestured at, but never fully unpacked or integrated into a larger animating argument. Franco's choice of 1969 to frame the book also seems arbitrary at times. While it makes good narrative sense to frame his analysis historically, his overall argument is not well-served by this crisis model of literary and social history. To give but one example, while Mr. Sammler's Planet was published in 1969, it was written before then (as Franco acknowledges) and much of it surrounds Sammler's role during the Six Day War...

HANA WIRTH-NESHER'S CALL IT ENGLISH: THE LANGUAGES OF JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE, PRINCETON: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006 JAIME CLELAND What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember, wrote historian Marcus Lee Hansen, whose 1938 formulation of the generation gap, now popularly known as Hansen's law, finds new expression in Hana Wirth-Nesher's book Call It English. In her explication of some of the major landmarks of twentieth-century Jewish American literature, Wirth-Nesher traces the evolving attitudes of immigrants and their descendants toward language. The humblest European shtetl dweller would have been conversant in, at minimum, Yiddish for home life; Hebrew for prayer and study; and Polish, Russian, or another language in which to communicate, when necessary, with the Gentile majority. In the United States, however, the richness of this multilingualism seemed to pale beside the promises of English. While the jealously guarded purity of majority languages in Europe served to reinforce the difference between Gentiles and Jews, similar efforts in the United States proved abortive, and much Jewish American life came to be conducted in English exclusively. But while immigrants and their children might be eager to repudiate Yiddish, the marker of immigrant difference, and even Hebrew, a religious language in a secular society, their grandchildren continue to be haunted by the phantom languages of the past, as Wirth-Nesher demonstrates. Fluent, idiomatic English was the desire of new immigrants like those Wirth-Nesher discusses in the book's early chapters; a status symbol in itself, it also seemed to offer access to wealth, prestige, and everything the Golden had to offer. Strong command of written English earned autobiographer Mary Antin accolades from no less than President Theodore Roosevelt, who considered her a great American; the flawless literary English displayed in The Promised Land (1912) was a convincing argument to readers that assimilation of immigrants was possible and desirable. Yet such a performance could be convincing only in writing. The persistent Yiddish inflections in her speech meant that Antin required a venue where she could efface her accent, her earlier languages, and anything else that could potentially confuse or insult a Gentile audience. In contrast, Abraham Cahan's success with his novel Yekl (1896), under the mentorship of literary realism proponent William Dean Howells, rested not on Cahan's own fluency, but on his depiction of regional accents. Yekl may rename himself Jake, but his inability to pronounce that name is only one of the indications that his dreams of assimilation are in fact delusions. Thus, Cahan may seem to have been accepted only provisionally, to the margins rather than the mainstream. Yet his relationship with Howells is more complex: Howells, for Cahan, functions as a gatekeeper to the American literary market, yet Cahan, for Howells, possesses the capital associated with Europe. In the context of American English, each may envy the other. By the middle of the century, as second-generation American Saul Bellow began his career, the Jewish American reading public was fluent in English, and this, coupled with greater general-audience awareness of the basics of Jewish religion and culture, meant that Bellow should have been able to write with confidence. But while Jewish Americans may have been admitted to the mainstream, much work was required to keep them there. It was not until the 1970s, Wirth-Nesher suggests, that Bellow was able to outgrow his role as cultural mediator (105), an ambassador to the Gentiles whose job was to portray Judaism not only as nonthreatening, not only as equally valuable, but as cut from the same cloth as Christianity. This privileging of English went hand in hand with a repudiation of Yiddish, or mame-loshen (literally mother tongue), whose speakers tended not to pass the language down to their American children. …

Book Review

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, edited by Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 296 pp. $24.99. As the People of the Book, Jews have always left literary footprints wherever they have resided, and nowhere is this more evident than in the United States, which has offered them educational opportunity and freedom from oppression. In the last century in particular, Jewish writers of all genres-poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay-have not just revealed Jewish experience, but have shaped American culture and tastes. How this has happened, the consequences for both Jewish and American culture, is partially addressed in the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Unfortunately, editors Wirth-Nesher and Kramer have chosen to present Jewish American literature as an incoherent coherence of fourteen disconnected essays of variable merit. As a guide for students and the general reader, the Cambridge Companion fills several important functions: illuminating previously neglected areas, providing essential historical and literary data, and suggesting new topics for research. Thus, Michael Kramer's essay explores the roots of Judaism in America and its inevitable break with the European rabbinic tradition, beginning with 19th-century writers such as Gershom Seixas, Mordecai Noah, and Isaac Mayer Wise, who encouraged the integration of Jews in America. In an essay on Eastern European immigrants Priscilla Wald effectively surveys the writings of Israel Zangwill, Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska, as well as other lesser known figures of the period. Her analysis of Yezierska's works is extensive and particularly insightful. David Roskies' delightful journey through Yiddish-American writing includes valuable analyses of works by Morris Rosenfeld, Sholem Asch, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. An essay by Ruth Wisse recalls the post-World War II Jewish American literary renaissance with references to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, concluding with a provocative analysis of Roth's The Human Stain. Unfortunately, the essay gives short shrift to Malamud's work, reflecting Wisse's continued bias which first appeared in The Modern Jewish Canon. A similar problem occurs in Emily Budick's piece on American Holocaust literature, which reveals breadth and depth but also bias, resulting in a distortion, for example, of Ozick's The Shawl and in randomly mixing major with minor authors and including non-Holocaust issues and victims. However, while these essays have the virtue of being comprehensible and informative, others are seriously flawed and should have been omitted. A chapter on Jewish American writers on the left posits the obvious thesis that some oppressed Eastern European Jews became communists and during the cold war were fired and blacklisted. While supplying an abundance of names of forgotten writers, the author dismisses New York intellectuals such as Trilling, Rahv, Fiedler, Howe, Rosenfeld, Podhoretz, who began on the left but became moderate or even conservative in their views. In Alan Wald's attempt to reassess Jewish American literature and place leftist writings at center stage, he offers little support or explanation for the literature's value other than its demonization and need for rediscovery. …