Jewish American Literature Research Articles

:Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature

:<i>Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature</i>

Philip Roth and "My American Gang"

Philip Roth and "My American Gang" Gustavo Sánchez Canales (bio) What does it mean to be a roth scholar in spain? to answer this question, I refer to "my American gang," a term I use among my university colleagues in Spain when I discuss my research. Obviously, this name is inspired by Roth's 1971 satirical novel about President Richard Nixon. However, I hasten to clarify that the similarities between both "gangs" begin and end in the title. Here, I reference my American gang to tell the story of how international scholarly collaborations have advanced Roth Studies, and I reference my work in the context of these collaborations as an example of the archive we have built collectively, internationally, to further an understanding of Roth's work around the globe. I should begin by saying that Jewish American literature has been at the core of my personal interests since the 1989-1990 academic year, a time when I was about to finish English Philology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). I had a professor of English and American Literature named Cándido Pérez Gállego who was one of the very few teachers who analyzed the works of writers like Henry Roth and Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick, among others. Thanks to him, not only did I then start to delve into their fiction, but it was also clear to me that I would write my dissertation on Bellow. However, I soon realized that exploring the works of such a complex novelist entailed a lot of research in several areas. Bellow's complexity is somehow reflected in the title of my dissertation—"Literary, Philosophical and Religious Influences on Saul Bellow's Novels"—which I defended in June 2001, and obtained cum laude. (My postdoctoral research focused on Bellow.) I do not think I can be accused of revealing a state secret if I say that twenty years ago—let alone during the late 1980s—Jewish American literature was not a "hot topic" in Spain. Despite this—or perhaps because of this—I was determined to publish part of my research in Spain. After all, if Pérez Gállego had succeeded in instilling in me a love for this literature, why could I not try something similar in other forums at a national level? In 2003, Isabel Durán (UCM) and [End Page 95] José Antonio Gurpegui (Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid), as editors of their online Historia crítica de la literatura norteamericana, invited me to contribute an essay for their issue "La tradición judía," which was published the following year. In this essay I examine first- and second-generation writers such as Malamud, Roth, and Bellow. The publication of my first Bellow papers in the early 2000s motivated me to focus part of my research on Bellow. Among others, I would like to highlight "Saul Bellow as a Novelist of Ideas: A Forum" (2016)—a special issue co-edited with fellow Roth Society member, Victoria Aarons—which appeared in Partial Answers (Johns Hopkins UP-The Hebrew University of Jerusalem). There were two other contributions: "A Tale of Two Cities," published in Saul Bellow Journal exactly one decade after "Life, Death" and "Bellow's Cityscapes" included in The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (2017). In both cases, Victoria Aarons, to whom I am deeply grateful for inviting me to participate, was editor. Chronologically speaking, Bernard Malamud is the second writer to whom I am greatly indebted. My first Malamud essays date from 2006. Specifically, "Bernard Malamud's Russian Background" came out in the Spanish journal Mundo eslavo. Two years before, I had been invited to contribute a book chapter ("Racial Tension, Rage and Destruction in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants") for a Festschrift that also appeared in 2006. This special volume was meant to be a tribute to Angela Downing, at the time a recently retired professor from the Department of English Philology (UCM), the same department where I had been working for years. As in the case of "La tradición judía," I thought this Festschrift could be a good venue for continuing to promote Jewish American Studies...

Trauma, Diasporic Consciousness, and Ethics in Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark

Dislocation, expatriation, and the attendant loss of homeland are concerns at the heart of Jewish literature. The dialectical relationship between identity and the sense of homeland informing the Jewish diasporic consciousness, in particular, has often culminated in nostalgic depictions of Israel in post-war American Jewish literature. In focusing on such a literary representation, this essay unravels the multidimensionality of diasporic Jewish identity. Critically analyzing Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017), it evaluates the trauma of exile and the psychic dilemma of third-generation American Jewish writers. The novelist brings about a confluence of nostos and nostalgia in Forest Dark. In evoking the visceral sense of loss, dislocation, and a painful yearning for the lost homeland, the author succeeds in tracing the lives of two protagonists, Jules Epstein, a retired New York lawyer, and Nicole, a Jewish American novelist struggling with a deep marital crisis. The text foregrounds the theme of self-discovery exemplified in the homecoming of its two central characters. Following his parents’ death and haunted by the anguish and horror of the Shoah, Jules unmoors himself from his current life and flies to Tel Aviv on a whim. Nicole, who suffers from creative blockage on account of her failing marriage, undertakes the trip to Tel Aviv hoping to recover from her soul-sickness, as it were. If Jules and Nicole do not cross paths, it still remains that their Jewish identities stem from the originary tragedy of the Holocaust. Although removed from the horrific sights and scenes of the tragic event, intergenerational trauma resonates with certain aspects of the diasporic Jewish existence. Using theoretical interventions of memory studies and the Freudian concept of Unheimlich or the uncanny, this essay explores the ethical implications that undergird Nicole Krauss’s diasporic depiction of Israel.

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar (review)

Reviewed by: Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar Naomi Taub (bio) Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. By David Hadar. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ix + 216 pp. "How do we know what we know about authors?" David Hadar asks at the start of Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. "My answer," he quickly supplies, "is that we know them through the networks in which they are a node" (2). He then sets about mapping the networks of some of the best-known contemporary Jewish American authors, explicating their identity work and deconstructing their public identities in both text and paratext. In this, Hadar chooses his interlocutors effectively—they include the sociologists Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour, as well as cultural theorists Mark McGurl, Dan Miron, Harold Bloom, and Edward Said—though he omits voices like Marianne Hirsch, whose concepts of filiative and affiliative postmemory are intimately related [End Page 413] to his theoretical base. The bulk of Affiliated Identities is dedicated to Philip Roth, both the affiliations and public identity Roth crafted for himself as well as those others have projected onto him. Working through many of Roth's texts, Hadar produces a comprehensive catalog of Roth's literary network. As thorough as Hadar's treatment of Roth's public identity may be, his early chapters fail to tap the rich vein of political and cultural histories of post-World War II Jewish America. He often seems curiously incurious about the public itself, about the broader context in which this identity work was performed. In discussing The Counterlife, for example, Hadar asserts that when Zuckerman's brother absconds to the West Bank, "the family setting makes Zuckerman face issues (Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) that otherwise would not enter his consciousness with any real force" (25). The Counterlife, however, takes place mere weeks after the Camp David Accords, a moment when, as many historians have demonstrated, these issues had a great deal of "real force" in the Jewish American psyche. Such an oversight matters precisely because part of the project's stated intention is to deconstruct Roth's engagement with the American Jewish public sphere, which, both in 1978, the year in which the novel is set, as well as in 1986, the year in which the novel was published, devoted plenty of attention to Israel/Palestine. The more relevant (and perhaps more interesting) question would be why Roth needed to, or at least decided to, mediate his commentary on such an exigent issue by filtering it through a familial conflict. Indeed, the most engaging parts of Affiliated Identities come when Hadar makes a point of bringing in historico-political context. His review of how the Israeli reception of Jewish American texts evolved along with attitudes toward Zionism offers several cogent insights. He also effectively critiques the persistence of the masculinist framing of the Diaspora/Zion binary and renders an intriguing portrait of how the characterization of Israelis in Jewish American literature shifted around the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet while his network theory of Jewishness is helpful, Hadar's approach is often strained to the point of breaking when he attends to non-Jewish authors. The prime example is the chapter on Israeli Palestinian author Sayed Kashua, whom Hadar accuses of "us[ing] Roth to be Jewish and not Jewish at the same time," thereby "[a]ligning and misaligning himself with Roth" as part of a "longterm project of marking himself as… deserving the attentive reading that goes along with the literary authority he seeks" (153). For a non-Jewish author, neither the desire to be legible to a Jewish audience nor identifying with a Jewish author necessarily translates into a desire to be or to be seen as Jewish, and [End Page 414] the political implications of such a claim are more or less unexplored. What's more, Hadar's linguistic and referential choices seem to imply throughout that Kashua has committed some kind of crime: for example, he refers to Kashua's column on meeting Roth as "misprision," a deceitful or treacherous act often meant to cover up knowledge of a felony. The sole example of ethnic passing in Israel...

An Interpretation of A Study of Jewishness Cynthia Ozick

A Study of Jewishness in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction (2021) is a masterpiece of Chinese research circles on Cynthia Ozick, and the latest contribution made by Chinese scholars to the study of American Jewish literature. This book presents an exhaustive overview of Cynthia Ozick’s studies at home and abroad, with emphasis on the Jewishness in Ozick’s fiction and it follows the principles of Ethical Literary Criticism in analyzing how Ozick inherits and develops the Jewishness in American Jewish fiction and its literary presentation. The author’s ‘Midrash’ of Cynthia Ozick shows great international perspective and nuanced understanding and empathy. There are three impressive features of the book Firstly, it is rich in materials with a large number of first-hand foreign research materials, and its content is decorous. The monograph is a comprehensive, systematic, and cutting-edge research in this field, which starts a new situation in the study of Ozick; Secondly, it focuses on Jewishness and its artistic expression in Ozick’s fiction by combining historical, cultural, and theoretical research with textual analysis, revealing the rich connotation and internal unity of the works, and demonstrating the researchers’ profound and thorough understanding of the research object. Thirdly, it features dialectical thinking. It dialectically analyzes writers and works from multiple perspectives such as feminist criticism new historicism criticism, postmodern narrative research, and cultural research, and makes horizontal and vertical comparisons in the historical context. The monograph demonstrates well the author’s penetrating dialectical thinking.

An Interpretation of A Study of Jewishness Cynthia Ozick

A Study of Jewishness in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction (2021) is a masterpiece of Chinese research circles on Cynthia Ozick, and the latest contribution made by Chinese scholars to the study of American Jewish literature. This book presents an exhaustive overview of Cynthia Ozick’s studies at home and abroad, with emphasis on the Jewishness in Ozick’s fiction and it follows the principles of Ethical Literary Criticism in analyzing how Ozick inherits and develops the Jewishness in American Jewish fiction and its literary presentation. The author’s ‘Midrash’ of Cynthia Ozick shows great international perspective and nuanced understanding and empathy. There are three impressive features of the book Firstly, it is rich in materials with a large number of first-hand foreign research materials, and its content is decorous. The monograph is a comprehensive, systematic, and cutting-edge research in this field, which starts a new situation in the study of Ozick; Secondly, it focuses on Jewishness and its artistic expression in Ozick’s fiction by combining historical, cultural, and theoretical research with textual analysis, revealing the rich connotation and internal unity of the works, and demonstrating the researchers’ profound and thorough understanding of the research object. Thirdly, it features dialectical thinking. It dialectically analyzes writers and works from multiple perspectives such as feminist criticism new historicism criticism, postmodern narrative research, and cultural research, and makes horizontal and vertical comparisons in the historical context. The monograph demonstrates well the author’s penetrating dialectical thinking.

Midge: A Women of Her Time, but Also of Our Own?

Abstract Does The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have antecedents in American Jewish literature? The Sherman-Palladino creation has been compared with the work of comedians Joan Rivers and Jean Carroll, but novelist Herman Wouk’s 1955 character, Marjorie Morningstar, offers another compelling source of inspiration that sheds light on what makes Maisel true to her midcentury moment, and how the character is more of a twenty-first-century creation.

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Anzia Yezierska and the Identity Crisis in Jewish-American Literature

Abstract Religious and racial identities are being reconceived as responses to cultural environments. Many Jews continue to hold conflicting ideas about their identity. We will trace the realities and challenges of being Jewish in the USA through Anzia Yezierska’s “The Lost Beautifulness.” The short story demonstrates the failure of Americanization and the need for a hybrid identity for Jewish-American immigrants to solve their identity crisis in the American context. The main character uses the white paint for the kitchen as a symbolic path towards assimilating American concepts of whiteness, cleanliness, and beauty, apparently making her equal to and accepted by the American mainstream middle and upper-class population.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Rachel Rubinstein Benjamin Schreier. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 224 pp. Benjamin Schreier's The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature announces its ambitions with a book cover modeled on that of Philip Roth's iconic Portnoy's Complaint. Determinedly provocative, polemical, and pugilistic, Schreier's manifesto continues his efforts in 2015's The Impossible Jew to unsettle the fundamental dependence of Jewish American literary study on "the representational capacities of the word 'Jewish'" (7). Schreier, Yiddish for "screamer," is the longtime editor of the superb journal Studies in American Jewish Literature (for which, full disclosure, I serve as the book review editor); there is no one better positioned than he to diagnose and comment upon the current state of our field. Schreier's introduction and first chapter lay out his metacritical approach to Jewish American literary study: that identity should be understood as an epistemological rather than ontological category; that Jewish American literary study needs to release itself from the expectation that it reflect Jewish American historical reality and indeed declare "independence from history"; that Jewish studies is the analysis "not of Jews, but about how we know about Jews"; and that the organization of the "new" Jewish studies around terms like "identity," "ethnicity," and "culture" has in fact resulted in the field's isolation and exceptionalist "insiderism." The book's central chapters lay out the postwar literary "breakthrough" narrative that has fundamentally shaped the sense of Jewish American literary history, focusing on its point of origin with Irving Howe's use of Yiddish in his literary anthologies, and then on its "fall," or at least a limit case of Jewish textuality: Cynthia Ozick's critique of John Updike's Bech stories in the 1990s as inauthentic "passing" narratives. Schreier writes that the Roth, Bellow, and Malamud "emergence" narrative is "perversely restaged" over and over again as the "formation scene" of the Jewish American literary field, as scholars repeatedly attempt "to prove the field's proper institutional place and professional legitimacy" (40). But the provocation of Rise and Fall inheres less in Schreier's assertions than in his style. Commingling high theory with an aggressive, jocular familiarity, what was described by one reviewer as scabrous and funny in The Impossible Jew feels more bitter, competitive, and personal here. Portnoy's Complaint provides more than just the cover design; unwittingly Schreier seems to re-enact the gendered, familial psychodrama of the novel. Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, for whom Schreier reserves his most acrid invective, take turns as the vilified Sophie Portnoy; a number of female colleagues are the book's Hannah Portnoys, the overlooked sister Alex both depends upon and condescends to; and finally Alana Newhouse serves as the abused Monkey. (Or perhaps Newhouse is Brenda Patimkin, imported from another fiction, since Schreier devotes a two-page footnote to a scorching denunciation of Newhouse for her inability to adequately theorize her own nose job—or maybe for having had a nose job and not feeling [End Page 209] bad about it.) Finally, Michael Kramer, to whom the book is dedicated and who, in his acknowledgements, Schreier frets will not "endorse" it, is clearly his Dr. Spielvogel. I will confess that I am one of those scholars—mostly women—mentioned by Schreier as doing Jewish American literary studies wrong. While I am in the company of scholars I admire, I find myself gazing sadly across a mystifying chasm of methodological purity at a much smaller cohort of scholars I admire equally and who, according to Schreier, are getting it right. It is not just that Schreier praises a handful of only male scholars, and singles out primarily women for doing the kind of identitarian, "biologistic," or nationalist literary work he despises (which he identifies even in the work of scholars who critically interrogate such terms) or that when he does insult men he does so in considerably gentler terms than he does women. It is that his blind spots end up limiting his...

Book Review

Book Review

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar Roberta Klimt (bio) David Hadar. Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2020. 216 pp. $103.50 hardback; $25.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. "let us start reading novels as paratexts for the author's identity," David Hadar exhorts us in his Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature (4). Lest this sound riskily unliterary, or appear to be simply biography by another name, Hadar also clarifies that he intends "identity" in a particular sense: that is, as "public identity," "what people know and feel about [writers], whether it is true or not" (2). The idea of this book, as informed by the sociologist Erving Goffman's work on "social identity and personal identity," is to read literary texts and their paratexts as contributing to the construction of the author's public identity, which itself is a complex of networks that demands to be read as a text in its own right. And this is where Hadar's other key term comes in, since it is his contention that an author's affiliations—that is, their relationships of chosen association, as opposed to filiation, which is strictly familial—are crucial to determining their public identity. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) opens Hadar's book and haunts its pages as a prime example of a story of affiliation written by an author who, in more and less subtle ways, sought (and sometimes sought to avoid) affiliation with other authors in shaping his public identity. In pursuit of an authorial identity, the young writer Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer's protagonist, quite openly, and as Hadar suggests, "rather frantic[ally]" (24), attempts to affiliate with the older writer he admires: E.I. Lonoff. Using Roth as his starting point and touchstone, Hadar explores the techniques of affiliation employed by several other Jewish American authors, including Nicole Krauss, whom he reads especially sensitively. His sociological approach presents a new view of inter-authorial relationships as they are constructed both within and around the literary works themselves and pays attention to the role of the emotions and imaginations of writers and readers in constructing and construing those relationships. [End Page 88] In a particularly persuasive section, "Jewish American Literary Networks beyond English," Hadar offers "a history of the changing ways of identifying as a Jew and the different ways to be a Jewish writer" (61) in America. For early twentieth-century Jewish American authors such as Abraham Cahan, who also edited the Yiddish magazine Forverts (The Forward), there was a more pressing need to affiliate with fellow American authors than to shore up what Hadar calls their already "quite secure Jewish credentials" (66). This would change for second- and third-generation Jewish Americans; Hadar makes a particular study of Irving Howe, who co-edited the first American anthology of Yiddish literature, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, in 1954, and became somewhat of a gatekeeper to the kingdom of Jewish American literature. Having initially admired Roth and assumed he was "working in the tradition of Jewish self-criticism and satire," Howe famously recanted this in his essay "Philip Roth Reconsidered," where he accuses Roth of having "a thin personal culture." Hadar finds it revealing that, in his dismissal of Roth as insufficiently related to Yiddish and Jewish American forebears like Isaac Bashevis Singer or Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, Howe omits to mention Roth's undeniable affiliation with Franz Kafka—thereby denying Roth his strategy of "identification and connection with secular Jewish writers who write in non-Jewish European languages." (For this same reason, Hadar ventures, when Roth met I.B. Singer, he spent most of the time asking him about the Jews who wrote in Polish, not Yiddish.) That Roth nevertheless succeeds in achieving this more secular, vernacular form of affiliation is, Hadar says, "the victory of the writer over the critic" (75). In his third chapter, "The Jewish Writer as an Old Man," Hadar moves from Roth's Exit Ghost (2007), which he reads as paradigmatic of so-called "late style," to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005), a novel that, though written by a thirtyone-year-old woman, nonetheless manages...

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

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...

Teaching Jewish American Literature. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein

Teaching Jewish American Literature. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein

Jewish American Literature Against the World

Abstract By way of a brief genealogy of the Jewish American literary field and through the lens of recent attempts to imagine how comparative literature-based thinking about a concept of “world literature” can be critically productive for Jewish literary study, this article analyzes Jewish American literary studies’ prestige problem. Because it has persistently failed to theorize the intellectual and methodological assumptions underlying its practice, Jewish American literary study remains burdened by the essentialist implications of an ethnological historicism. This article ultimately argues that Jewish American literary study needs to take more seriously the possibilities offered by a materialist epistemology rather than the Jewish studies-based historicist ontology it has mostly taken for granted. “My hope is that a Jewish American epistemology can operate outside the penumbra of a tired and played-out concept of ethnicity—a term that unavoidably, if spectrally, posits a biologistic object at the heart of its historicist project—even as it might still claim the mantle of Jewish-y-ness.”

(English) Dreams Versus (Hebrew) Reality: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep as ‘Jewish-American Minor Literature’

Abstract This article examines Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a particular example of minor literature written in America while suggesting a new term: ‘Jewish-American minor literature’. It has been argued that Jewish-American literature is not minor literature in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms mainly due to the openness of American English to other ethnic languages such as Yiddish.1 However, this article shows that it is Hebrew, and not Yiddish, that functions as ‘minor language’ in the text—both as a language spoken by a minority and according to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, as it undermines the theme of linguistic assimilation governing the surface structure of the book. Yet this ‘subversive’ Hebrew is neither transcribed/transliterated in the text, nor is it referred to or talked about in the novel. Rather, it is ‘hidden’ behind the English lines of the book. In fact, it is the emerging of such ‘concealed’ Hebrew hollowing out the idea of Americanisation in the text that turns Call It Sleep into what I call ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.2 Inviting further research, this article may open the door for a new research field investigating (whether there are any) other appearances of covert Hebrew words in additional Jewish-American works written exclusively in English and whether these works too can be considered as ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.

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

Saul Noam Zaritt. <i>Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody</i>

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

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...

The Loss of Self and Identity Crisis in Jewish American Literature: The Case of Bernard Malamud’s The German Refugee

The search for identity and self-identity problems have been one of the pivotal themes for Jewish American authors. Prominent writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth explore American Jewish identity and address the questions of assimilation, the hardship of immigrant life, challenges of cultural acceptance, and finding purpose in life. In particular they are concerned with the self-identification and alienation of American Jewry. The given paper examines the problems of personality crisis and loss of identity portrayed in Bernard Malamud’s story “The German Refugee”. The psychological aspects of the main character’s personality are investigated, an attempt is made to analyze the factors that determined the crisis, which ultimately led him to suicide. The author also touches upon the topic of the post-Holocaust consciousness in Jewish American literature. Despite the fact that Malamud did not address the Holocaust theme in his works directly, he, like many post-war American fiction writers, was deeply impacted by it. The importance of Malamud's writing for Holocaust literature lies in his realistic portrayal of how the Shoah continues to affect survivors, refugees and those Jews who were not physically affected by it.

"Whither Roth Given Bailey"

"Whither Roth Given Bailey"1 Benjamin Schreier (bio) As a prefatory disclaimer, I should cop to seeing no reason to use my space here as an opportunity—that is, under a pretense to Olympian expertise—to summarize Philip Roth's career, provide an overview or appraisal of his literary output, and/or reprise some set of defining events of (or gossipy revelations about) his life. I take it as axiomatic—minority view though it may be—that scholarly reviews should tread elsewhere for their primary labor than the ground of synoptic recapitulation. And anyway, Bailey's biography has been/will be enough written about that other commentators can take that tack. Suffice it to say that I like Roth's work and perhaps more to the point find that the stance or positionality his books relentlessly adopt to be intellectually and ethically significant enough to be worth talking about. Moreover—again, in the interest of apologia more than anything else—I find the tension and indeed difference between Roth's literary work and the public circulation of his persona to be far more critically productive than aesthetically restrictive or morally adjudicatory. So there's that. I have rarely put much professional stock in biography; I don't find it intellectually stimulating, and I don't find the genre an important tool for the kind of literary thinking and scholarship I pursue. To be sure, I like the anecdotes—my favorite line in Bailey's book may be Roth's response to Irving Howe's tepid, pompous praise of Goodbye, Columbus and its critique of Jewish provinciality: "I figure fuck Howe anyway…It isn't my fault people aren't eating as much chopped liver as they used to" (172)—but publicly celebrating delight in wacky historical affect does not a vital intellectual program make. More generally, I consider literary biography as overly susceptible to serving an imperial form of thinking about literature, or as being a technology for refusing the imaginative agencies of writing (that is, as primarily something other than historical record) in the interest of an historical account-keeping of authors and works, a means to pursue a thinking about literature that's organized, fundamentally, by a historicist fetishism—biography being, at least in part, a proxy for literary history, a way of securing the figure of the author as a means to anchor what a scholar might want to say about literary works in [End Page 677] the presumptive socio/ethno/cultural bedrock of "history" (if not through the agency of authorial intention, then often enough through the bio-fantasy of authorship more generally). In fact, this imperial form of representative thinking is fully on display in the dominant modes of Jewish studies intellectuality, especially in the field's attitude toward literature. Jewish studies is a relentlessly and unapologetically historicist enterprise—and it has tended to approach Roth, and Jewish American literature more generally, as an historiographic instrument, signifying the sociological narrative of "breakthrough," the emergence of Jews out of the immigrant ghetto and into the mainstream of American social and cultural life. Certainly at the outset, but arguably throughout his career (albeit in different ways), Philip Roth functioned as a "shibboleth" for American Jews, as Bailey quotes David Boroff from 1963 (conspicuously from the same symposium—held in Israel—in which Roth would famously declare he was not a Jewish writer, but rather a writer who was a Jew), who were "given a choice: Leon Uris or Philip Roth" (220). Philip Roth—or actually, more accurately, "Philip Roth"—offered a way for Jewish community avatars (or would-be avatars) to gauge their own identification with "the" Jewish community. If early on the balance of Jewish American prestige may have tipped more toward the Uris side of the ledger, as the breakthrough narrative became hegemonic, it was certainly Roth's liberated, canny, cosmopolitan recuperation of Jewish affect that would prove to be representationally dominant. As Jewish studies consolidated as an academic field in the Viet Nam era, it transformed these insiderist protocols of Jewish community self-regard into a multidisciplinary analysis of Jewish experience, sublating establishmentarian Jewish clannishness. Its historicist approach to literature could thereby leverage Roth...