The Jewishness of American Culture

Abstract

In his collected essays on literature and identity, Fiedler on the Roof (1991), Leslie Fiedler recounts the various escape routes he took in his flight from the urban ethnic values of his upbringing. Seeking to identify himself with authentically culture, he gravitated first toward the elite goyish critical establishment of literary High Modernism immersing himself in the work of Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, (though he is probably better known for his iconoclastic interpretations of Twain and Melville). A critical engagement with such figures promised, as Fiedler puts it, that Jew like himself could establish credentials as a full-fledged, up-todate citizen of the Republic of Letters. At the same time, however, he was drawn to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Later he turned his attention to pop authors favored by ordinary Americans: Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Margaret Mitchell. But rather than undercutting his sense of ethnic identification, lighting out for the territory of American letters only served to reinforce it. For no matter how far afield my new range of interests had taken me, writes Fiedler, I continued to write, willy-nilly, from point of view, as Jew.1 But what does it mean to write American literary criticism from a point of view? Ironically what may be most about Fiedler's point of view is the way his iconoclastic essays challenge the very concept of bounded ethnic and religious cultures and identities: the Jewish Consciousness of [James] Joyce, the Christian-Ness of the Writer, and the idea that the Yiddish speaking emigre novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer is not Jewish-American writer but an American-Jewish writer.2 Such playful, but deeply serious efforts to defamiliarize and break apart categories like Jewish, American, and culture have long history,