Isaac Bashevis Singer Research Articles

Serge Liberman. A story.

A portrait of Serge Liberman, as I knew him, drawing parallels between his work as a physician and writer. As a storyteller Serge drew on many sources. My focus here is on his roots, as an emigrant, and as a doctor who practiced in immigrant neighbourhoods, Carlton and Brunswick. He wrote in the tradition of earlier Melbourne based immigrant Yiddish writers, Pinchas Goldhar and Bergner, exploring similar themes of displacement, exile and longing. He drew also on older traditions of Yiddish literature, writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Serge was more forgiving of human foibles, less judgemental, a documenter of symptoms, both in the consulting room, and at the writer’s desk. Here, I pay tribute to him, as one storyteller to another, in the form of a story about Serge, the storyteller, and friend.

In Job Dulder’s Balances: Petr Guber and Russian-Polish-Jewish Relations during World War I

Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.

When dreams become nightmares: a comparative study of Enemies, a love story and The reader

This thesis makes a comparative study of two internationally acclaimed texts of Holocaust literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a love story and Bernhard Schlink’s The reader. Special attention will be given to the sociopsychological world of Jews and Germans in the post-Holocaust era, namely the Jews’ collective anxiety and the Germans’ collective shame. While doing so, we will call into focus the traumatic symptoms of the two female protagonists Masha and Hanna respectively, and treat the widespread skepticism towards traditional religions and moral philosophy. The questions of how to reconcile the past and the present and how to face the future constitute the thematic core of the texts in case. Both texts reflect the historical catastrophe and reveal the scarred human psyche. They work to offer illuminating insights into the great complexity of human nature. The two texts are a compelling reminder that religious, political and cultural enmities and conflicts may result in irreparable individual and collective trauma, thus necessitating negotiation, dialogue and cooperation between different cultural groups in order to make constructive (rather than destructive) cultural choices.

Subjects in Question: Jewish Storytelling as Counterethnography

This article proposes a view of Jewish storytelling according to which the meaning of a given Jewish story should be sought in its implicit representation of the fantasies, desires, psychic conflicts, and self-idealizations of a specific set of readers or listeners. The unique role of Jewish storytellers, according to this theory, is to identify and re-present the quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies their audience have as Jews. That is, these are quandaries, anxieties, and fantasies bound up with an individual Jew's sense of himself or herself as a Jew. In order to make this argument, I draw a distinction between two models of Jewish storytelling: an ethnographic model, which conceives of stories as reflection of some underlying, largely coherent cultural ethos, and a counterethnographic model, according to which stories expose prevailing self-conceptions and fantasies of specific Jewish audiences. The first model is elaborated through a reading of a widely disseminated Hasidic story about a rebbe who saves the community by telling a story about a lost ritual in the forest. The second model is elaborated through a reading of Nathan's parable to King David in 2 Samuel about the rich man and the ewe lamb. Examples of this audience-based, counterethnographic mode of reading are adduced from stories by Isaac Babel, Grace Paley, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In these stories, three modern Jewish types—the heedless gangster, the woman whose life force bursts all decorum, the resolute returnee to Orthodoxy—are read as wish fulfillments of modern Jewish readers.

In Praise of Vulgarity: On Yiddish in Isaac Bashevis Singer's “Di makhsheyfeh”

This article is an attempt to understand Isaac Bashevis Singer's blatant preoccupation in his stories with offensive and outrageous characters and actions that can simply be defined as vulgar. It is best exemplified in stories that depict a recurring theme in his fiction: the expulsion of the female outcast from and by her patriarchal community. Even though the vulgar characteristics of these female outcasts were construed by several Yiddish-speaking intellectuals as an assault both on Jewish women and on Yiddish language and culture, Singer's stories utilize their vulgar style and crude content as a direct attack on the Jewish Maskilim and their twentieth-century successors. This essay discusses his short story "Di makhsheyfeh" ("The Witch") from a feminist perspective, specifically in accordance with Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject, in order to address Bella Zilberstein (the witch) as an allegorical affirmation of the same vulgar qualities that were projected upon Yiddish since the formation of the Haskalah movement in the eighteenth century. In identifying Yiddish as an abject source of shame on behalf of modernized Jews, Singer deliberately creates an "ugly" story about an "ugly" character. "Di makhsheyfeh" and its outright vulgarity will therefore be discussed both as a critique of the self-destructing delusion of modern Jews in their assimilatory ambitions, and as a celebration of Yiddish folklore characteristics, a passionate embrace of its irrational and "disgraceful" virtues.

Lin Shu, Author of the Quixote

essay China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their innermost fantasies. He who speaks of China speaks of himself. – Simon Leys Lin Shu, Author of the Quixote by Mikaël Gómez Guthart A lthough you may never have heard of the name Lin Shu, it should be featured in every book of literary history. This self-taught scholar originated from the region of Fujian in southwest China. An heir to the Qing Dynasty—the last to have reigned over the Chinese empire—he was a painter, calligraphist, novelist, author of novellas, poet, essayist, and translator . In the late nineteenth century he penned the first literary translations to adorn the shelves of Chinese libraries; indeed, up to then Chinese tradition had relied on commentaries of ancient Chinese texts, not imports. Hence, Lin Shu greatly contributed to making exotic authors and their works accessible to a large number of Chinese readers. He promoted writers from England initially, then from France, the US, Sweden, and Germany , although he did not speak nor read any language other than his own. An assistant translator who knew the source language—at least in theory—would first read the texts to him, orally interpreting into Mandarin A monument to Don Quixote in Tandil, Argentina. Photo: Carlos Barengo/Pixabay WORLDLIT.ORG 35 the written foreign words. According to his finest—and rather few—exegetes, Lin Shu would then rewrite the tale in classic Mandarin, as true to the original piece as possible. That is to say, he favored the story narrative over its melody, pace, and style. Lin Shu was blessed with an extraordinary skill in that he could read any language through the eyes of another person. With the help of nineteen successive assistants he translated or, more accurately, rewrote close to two hundred classics of Western literature by Balzac, Shakespeare , Dumas father and son, Tolstoy, Dickens, Goethe, Stevenson, Ibsen, Montesquieu, Hugo, Chekhov, and Loti, among others. Some of his adaptations even became true best-sellers in early twentieth-century China, such as The Lady of the Camellias, renamed The Legacy of the Parisian Lady of the Camellias. More fascinating and mysterious still, fifty or so of his unpublished translations are said to stem from texts whose authors and source languages remain a mystery to this day. Masterpieces of which we know nothing are among these lost manuscripts. Books often travel off the beaten tracks and along forking paths to cross frontiers and surge in unpredictable places. The history of literature, and even of writing , abounds in such examples. Young Isaac Bashevis Singer, who translated Knut Hamsun, Romain Rolland, and Gabriele d’Annunzio into Yiddish, seemingly had no knowledge whatsoever of Norwegian, French, or Italian. He based his works on German translations found in prewar Poland. Similarly, in Argentina, Witold Gombrowicz rewrote his own Ferdydurke into Spanish with the help of Virgilio Piñera and Humberto Rodríguez Tomeu, two Cuban writers who had never heard a single word of Polish in their lives; he went on to translate this version into French with help from a professor at the Alliance Française in Buenos Aires. The first French edition of Ferdydurke was published by Maurice Nadeau in 1958. In 1921 Lin Shu tried his hand at the Quixote from an English translation dating back to 1885. His assistant, Chen Jialin, who had attended university in England as part of his higher studies, appeared competent to read the story to Lin Shu. But, as it turned out, he interspersed his version of the tale with invented dialogue and shortened it by many chapters, including the book’s famed prologue; in total, 285 pages that formed the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece were missing —a fact somewhat reminiscent of the secret initiative of a certain Pierre Menard who, according to Jorge Luis Borges, aspired to rewrite the first opus of the Quixote. This Biography of the Crazed Knight (or The Life of the Bewitched Knight, depending on the translation) was published in 1922 in Shanghai, stronghold of the Chinese book industry, then nicknamed the “Paris of the Orient” owing to its publishers, printers, and literary...

The undesired: on nudniks in Jewish American fiction

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet, while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.

Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud

Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud

The Other Religion of Isaac Bashevis Singer

This essay analyses the later fiction of Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer through the prism of his vegetarianism. Singer figured his adoption of a vegetarian diet in 1962 as a kind of conversion, pronouncing it a “religion” that was central to his being. Here I outline Singer's vegetarian philosophy, and argue that it was the underlying ethical precept in the fiction written after the conversion. I demonstrate the way in which that ethic informs the presentation of both Judaism and women in Singer's later writings. The piece concludes with the suggestion that this vegetarian ethic was the mainspring of the critique of humanism found in Singer's final novels.

Zu satzfinaler Subjektposition, Unakkusativität und C-Domäne im Jiddischen

The article examines structures of Yiddish clauses in which the kernel verb contains only one NP. The thematic role of an accessible NP is patient/theme, whereas the agent-NP remains vacant. It is assumed that a direct object of the type “X efent Y” (‘X opens Y’) and an accessible NP of the type “exists Y” appear in Yiddish in the clause-final position as a focalized subject. The study combines minimalist investigations and the cartographic approach, especially with regard to CP and IP/TP structures proposed in Rizzi (1997, 2004) and Belletti (1999) among others, and adopts the concept of functional topic/focus projections in the syntax of Yiddish. Investigations reveal possibilities of case assignment and feature checking in lower projection areas as well as the correlation between the topic projection of the C-domain and the clause-internal focus projection. A mechanism is assumed to combine precisely clause-final focalized subjects, unaccusatives and the C-domain including the following alternatives: (i) unmarked adverbials (PPs), (ii) expletive es and (iii) verb fronting. The analyzed structures have been observed in texts of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1931), Isaac Leib Peretz, (ed. 1920) and Fishl Bimko (1921) as well as in Yiddish daily newspaper Forverts.

Rereading Beruriah through the Lens of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl

In this article I offer a new reading of Beruriah, sparked by my reading of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy. Notwithstanding the differences in time and literary genre, Singer's invention of a twentieth-century version of Beruriah, and the sorrowful ending he creates, prompt us to reread Beruriah as a rabbinic attempt to question the male/female binary and its limitations. In the wake of third-wave feminism, which sees women as now having the choices that Beruriah seems, on some level, to have embraced, this article offers a new feminist reading that builds and expands upon scholarly insights of the past. We have become accustomed to thinking of Beruriah as proof that women became Torah scholars in antiquity, and of medieval commentators such as Rashi as men who sought to call attention to the dangers of women studying Torah. This article proposes that there is more to learn from Beruriah and her husband Rabbi Meir, not to mention Yentl and her study partner, Avigdor.

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

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.

The Holocaust Survivor in the City: A Literary Disorientation

By discussing two literary texts by immigrants from Europe in America, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story (1966) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fuck America ( Bronskys Gestandnis , 1980), the essays examines theHolocaust survivors’ gradual subversion of pre-determined national, religious, and communal identities. In each of the texts, the urban environment has a double and seemingly contradictory effect on the survivors’ lives: it is an obstacle but also an opportunity. The multiplying sounds, languages, faces, and buildings seem at first to be a threat to the protagonists’ existence but later on provide the means for their radical liberation. As an eternal outsider, the survivor’s past experience correlatesand is constantly juxtaposed to his current urban life. This juxtaposition creates a desire for anonymity, as an immediate reaction to the identity which was foisted upon each protagonist during the war in Europe. Singer’s Herman Broder and Hilsenrath’s Jakob Bronsky are literary models that offer, in their grim life stories, a new set of human relationships, personal behavioral characteristics, and private day to day procedures that correlate to the deviant city’s schizoid features. My discussion of the novelsrelies on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life . De Certeau’s observations regarding the ordinary mundane procedures that constitute the urban “pedestrian” text illuminate the way in whichtheprotagonists’ stories incorporate, rather than ignore or resolve, their contradictory, fragmentary, and unsystematic components.

Between Indifference and the Regimes of Truth. An Essay on Fundamentalism, Tolerance and Hypocrisy

There are two basic positions where tolerance as political strategy and moral viewpoint is rejected or made redundant. We are hostile to tolerance when we hold that we are defending an objective truth—religious or secular—which should also be defended and maintained by means of political and legal power. And tolerance become superfluous also when the affirmation of plurality becomes total, and tolerance identical to a vive la difference. As recent developments in my own country—the Netherlands—have demonstrated, the political outcome of this last position is remarkably enough not necessarily an all-inclusive relativistic tolerance. It may just as well be one of intolerance towards ‘believers’ of all kinds, in short: tolerance becomes polemical and belligerent. Turning to religious fundamentalism or ultra-orthodoxy could then become a possible (extreme) reaction to this relativistic and subjectivist position, as demonstrated in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Penitent. Between these two positions of hostility or indifference towards tolerance, we can situate that democratic attitude which may rightly be called ‘tolerance’. As ethical position, the tolerant citizen accepts the democratic disjunction between my (private) truth and the symmetrical justice between citizens. As political strategy, a tolerant democratic regime is based upon a political act of exclusion of what I will here call ‘political fundamentalism’.

LỬA – DỤC TÌNH TRONG TRUYỆN NGẮN ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

LỬA – DỤC TÌNH TRONG TRUYỆN NGẮN ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Jidysz – angielski – polski. Problemy przekładu i pamięci

The article presents selected translations of Yiddish literature into English, focusing on the influence of translator’s choices on forming the topography and realities of life in Poland before the Second World War. Elements related to material culture and multilingual quality of represented world are often eliminated or simplified. One of the main problems for translators, who usually do not know Polish, are Polish words and expressions, which are frequent in Yiddish literature written by authors of Polish extraction. Additional problems occur when Polish is used as intermediary between Yiddish and Polish. A reader who knows Eastern European realities receives an image of reality, which has been purposefully modified to facilitate reception in America, so that represented reality turns out to be more alien and exotic than in direct translation from Yiddish into Polish. This phenomenon occurs not only in fiction, but also in documentary texts, e.g. in the memorial books, which have been popular in Poland recently, and which are often translated from English intermediary texts. All this leads to important discrepancies and tensions between reality as it is imagined, remembered, and documented. Examples presented in the article come from texts by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shalom Asch, and the Zgierz memorial book.

Erotic Perfectionism in Jewish Rationalist Philosophy

AbstractIt is a view commonly held that within the Jewish rationalist tradition epitomized by Baruch Spinoza the snares of erotic love are something that a rational person would actively seek to avoid. But is love a thing for fools? Is this truly the view of Spinoza and the rationalist tradition in medieval Jewish philosophy that he inherited, or can we find a way to conceive of erotic love that accords with the life of reason? In this article I will attempt to answer these questions within the context of an analysis of Isaac Bashevis Singer's “The Spinoza of Market Street” and by considering the erotic perfectionist ethic as it is expressed primarily in Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions and Spinoza's Ethics. I will show that the significant points of convergence and divergence between these two thinkers serve to illuminate our thinking about erotic perfectionism. Both Saadia and Spinoza are careful, systematic Jewish thinkers developing ethical theories in which reason plays a pronounced role in cultivating a virtuous life. Consequently, like other ethicists for whom the virtues are key, both Saadia and Spinoza are intent on expressing the ideal human conduct of the moral exemplar. In just what way does erotic love fit into the ideal human life?

Religious and Legal Particularism and Universality

Assuming that law and religion are present in all human societies and that in all human societies law and religion are deeply intertwined and interdependent, this essay uses Isaac Bashevis Singer’s account of his father’s rabbinical court in interwar Poland to explore the particularity, universality, and multiply inter-related nature of these two ubiquitous cultural forms. Singer’s father’s court is at once singularly the product of a distinctive modern iteration of Jewish rabbinic law and Hasidic pietism and a synecdoche for law and religion writ large; Singer’s elegiac tales celebrate the specificity of this time and place while offering the cultural coherence and flexibility of the law enacted there as a model for human justice.

One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile by Alicia Borinsky

One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile by Alicia Borinsky Trinity University Press, 2011. 223 pages Alicia Borinsky's paternal grandmother arrived in Argentina in 1919, escaping the pogroms in Russia. Along with the family images in her grandmother's apartment, which spoke of genealogies, the young Alicia was particularly captivated by large, gleaming silver samovar on the living-room sideboard. The samovar conjured up in the young girl's imagination of heroic flights from persecution, of past wealth, of closed Jewish communities in other lands. Her father, who adapted to life in the city of Buenos Aires with amused irony, was still drawn three times week to his mother's living room: He went for the tea poured from the samovar, the homemade jellies, Russian stories (3). But for Alicia Borinsky came the awareness that these of homeland and exile were just that, stories, tales: understood the message of the samovar. It stood silently on the sideboard warning me not to trust her. Exile, I learned very early on, was about telling (3-4). How then to tell story that might make sense of these displacements? For several pages of her introductory chapter, it seems Borinsky might be opting for memoir in the style, say, of the Mexican writer Margo Glantz's The Family Tree (1981). Or, more politically, that she might be contributing to contemporary Argentine memory debates--by Hugo Vezzetti, Elizabeth Jelin, and others--that look to analyze the massacres that took place under recent Argentine in the light of studies of the Holocaust. There are references to Borinsky's maternal grandfather who arrived in Argentina in 1934 and later sent for his children. Borinsky s mother was the last family member to make it out of Poland in 1936, while others remained and were killed: learned only recently that all the Jews of their town, Slonim, perished (4). Her grandfather exhorted her to study and learn languages, as both way both to broaden her horizons and also potential passport to flee persecution. Borinsky states that his advice was prophetic when, as young adult, she left Argentina to escape its bloody dictatorships (7). But she soon rejects autobiography as her storytelling mode, even though traces of the first person remain throughout her text and reappear, most significantly, halfway through the study, when she describes her move from Buenos Aires to New York. The movement between Buenos Aires and Europe, in particular Paris, informs many Argentine travel accounts from the nineteenth century to the present. Borinsky traces different personal journey, from Buenos Aires to the East Coast of the United States, in which New York replaces Paris as the site of cultural dynamism, exile, and migration stories. Throughout her book, Borinsky inserts modest autobiographical references that speak to productive relationship with many of the writers she considers: here is someone who knows the dining table habits and literary preferences of the Argentine writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; who can describe the grain of Borges's voice; who can be told by the exile Cuban writer, Reinaldo Arenas, that her early study of his work, published in 1974, helped him to break out of isolation in Cuba and find receptive international audience. Critical theory plays an even smaller part in Borinsky's account than does direct autobiography. Other authors might feel tempted to offer meta-theoretical account of the nature of exile in cultural texts. But at least two of Borkinsky's chosen writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Vladimir Nabokov, warn against such an approach, for they depict theories that are found to be incomplete. Singer's scholars grapple with thoughts that do not help them organize their lives (117), while the US campus of Nabokov's Pnin offers a circuit of lectures and foreign culture discussions . …

Is American Literature Parochial?

26 worldliteraturetoday.org Is American Literature Parochial? Ilan Stavans American exceptionalism makes us believe we are extraordinary. Consequently, we trust our literature is outstanding as well. Truth is, we are as narrow as everyone else, and our literature showcases it. I have no intention of rehearsing yet another diatribe against the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee in Stockholm, which, as is well known in US publishing circles, hasn’t awarded its prize in literature to an American writer since 1993. A few years back, Horace Engdahl, a member of the academy, justified the rejection by stating—famously—that Americans are “too isolated, too insular,” and that we “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature .” Expectedly, the response from our quarters was fast and furious: the Nobel in literature, the most outspoken decried, has become irrelevant . How else to explain the fact that obscure European honorees keep on being chosen while brilliant craftsmen like John Updike and Philip Roth are ignored? One of the literati was even quoted as offering to “send Engdahl a list” of American writers worth reading. We may wish to rationalize the rejection in a number of ways. We could pretend, for instance, that we don’t care a bit since the Nobel is only about sales, whereas good literature is . . . well, about being good. Or we could argue that it is dangerous to align the Nobel, and literature in general, across national lines. Think of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who got it in 1978. Is he an American writer? Singer was a refugee from Poland who came to the United States when he was already thirty and who wrote most of his work not in English but in Yiddish. How about Joseph Brodsky, who was born in Russia—or better, he was born into the Russian language? The only true country a writer can claim is the language in which he writes. In any case, the Nobel is supposed to celebrate individual talent, not nationality, which in and of itself is an amphibious concept. Ever heard of Pearl Buck, the American Nobelist of 1938? Well, Buck wasn’t an American through and through. She lived almost her entire life, up until the publication of her enduring novel The Good Earth, in China. At least two new biographies of Buck have been published in the past decade, and several of her books remain in print and widely read. But the Chinese have a stronger claim on her than we do. To fashion her as an American to boost the Nobel list smells of utilitarianism. In addition, the Nobel committee in those days was still laboring under the edict of Nobel’s will about “idealist” literature. Now take Jorge Luis Borges, who unquestionably should have received essay photo© maXximages.com July–August 2013 • 27 There is actually no such thing as “the American writer”; instead, there are infinite ways of being a writer in America. the prize, especially given that no Argentine has ever been selected. Yet his reputation, mind you, is intact without it; and I’m not sure Borges would have liked to have been awarded the Nobel because he was an Argentine, since the adjective made him uncomfortable. All this to say that good literature is never good by committee. Of course, generalizations are always dangerous : Engdahl’s argument that American literature is “too isolated, too insular,” that it is reluctant to “participate in the big dialogue of literature,” are broad strokes that make him look like a baseball player trying to hit a fastball in the dark. Could these arguments begin to encompass the diversity of American literature? How about looking beyond the realm of American fiction to poets such as Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, and Robert Pinsky, all of whom have been active translators and very open to extraterritorial influences? Even if we stay with fiction, the same claim could be made about the provincialism of Orhan Pamuk, Mo Yan, Herta Müller, José Saramago, and almost any other recent Nobel laureate. Naguib Mahfouz focused only on Egypt, Imre Kertész on Hungary, and so on. The trick, obviously, is to understand the tension between the local and...