Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature

Abstract

This essay examines the convergence of Jewish American writing and world literature, aiming to rethink modern Jewish writing unhinged from nationalist historiographies and embedded in global networks. The work of Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer in particular presents an opportunity to follow how Jewish American writers confront concepts of the “world” or the “global” in their writing, often with a measure of undecidability. Even as acceptance within the institutions and markets of world literature offers a sense of security, traces of untranslatability haunt their work: Bellow’s desire to become a world figure was complicated by his staging of a translated and indeterminate Jewish sensibility; Bashevis used translation to insert Yiddish into a universalized literature, but in so doing exposed world literature to Yiddish’s ghosts. By foregrounding the translational modes of US literature and modern Jewish writing, this article challenges scholarship to move beyond localist and nationalist reading strategies. Even so, translation does not immediately lead to seamless circulation within world literature (as a concept, network, or institution); rather, Jewish American writing, in its multiple allegiances and linguistic uncertainty, forms a supplement to world literature, an undecidable practice that simultaneously longs for the world and demonstrates its impossibilities.