Jewish American Writers Research Articles

Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature Todd Hoffman Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, edited by Emily Miller Budick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 288 pp. $71.50. This important addition to SUNY Press’s Modern Jewish Literature and Culture series is a collection of thirteen essays by such notable scholars as Gershon Shaked, Wolfgang Iser, and novelist A. B. Yehoshua, among others. This anthology reads like an encyclo pedia of American and Hebrew-Israeli writers and their position in the contemporary history of Jewish writers in general. It is both a fine compilation of incisive analyses of cultural and historical influences on the shaping of American and Israeli Jewish identity and also a useful and thorough introduction to this particular field: namely, the debate [End Page 162] over what constitutes “Jewish” writing or writers. The general claim of this book is that despite what Emily Budick calls the “disinclination of writers and intellectuals from the world’s two major communities of Jews to relate seriously to the experience of the other,” this very disinclination “tells us as much about processes of Jewish self- definition . . . as the narratives themselves.” Furthermore, the historical conditions that gave rise to both American and Israeli conceptions of Jewish identity run along parallel lines: both literary traditions tend to construct narratives of Jewish identity upon secular grounds, exclusive of Judaism; both share commonalities in their early Zionist orientations and the subsequent separation from “Old World” values as immigrant groups slowly assimilated into a new culture; both were influenced by the Holocaust and the formation of Israel in 1948; and lastly, both have a “shared commitment to doing in the world” (Budick’s italics) and have a keen sense of one’s ethical responsibility and engagement with political issues. This anthology constructs “a dialogue” between these seemingly disparate groups who share a common culture and attempts a reconfiguration of the possible points of coordination in their literary output which would disclose an identifying category of Jewish writing and identity. The organization of the essays is effective, beginning with a comprehensive examination of the overall periods of Jewish writing in America and Israel, moving on to a discussion of the various methods of appropriating specifically Jewish “cultural goods” in order to reconstruct a secular Jewish identity in a new homeland, progressing to a series of critiques of conservative accounts of Jewish history and language use, and finally ending with a discussion of the role of the critic in facilitating the dialogue of what it means to be a Jew. Eliezer Schweid’s thorough and convincing account of the role of Zionism in the formation of a nationalist Hebrew-Israeli identity in his essay “The Construction and Deconstruction of Jewish Zionist Identity” nicely pairs with Shaked’s own more sweeping examination of the role of historical conditions in the continually evolving formation of Israeli literary themes (“Contemporary Israeli Literature and the Subject of Fiction: From Nationhood to the Self”). Both critics provide an encyclopedic account of the various authors involved on this grand historical stage, succinctly yet lucidly discussing each author’s subtle permutations in their respective delineations of Jewish identity. This nicely juxtaposes with Morris Dickstein’s account of the general trends in Jewish-American fiction, in his equally comprehensive essay entitled “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer.” Because these general accounts of the last one hundred years or so of literature in America and Israel (or pre-Israel) can only provide a gloss of the major issues, two essays are provided that examine specific authors as emblematic of these trends. H. M. Daleski’s “Philip Roth’s To Jerusalem and Back” and Ruth Wisse’s “The Yiddish and the Hebrew Writers Head for Home” outline Roth, S.Y. Agnon, and Jacob Glatstein’s personal literary journeys and transformations as microcosms of the greater cultural trends in Jewish identity formation. [End Page 163] The compilation also provides interesting analyses of how specific cultural functions in religious or communal Jewish life were adopted for literary purposes in order to search for new grounds of establishing Jewish identity. Particularly fascinating is Hana Wirth-Nesher’s “Magnified...

Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard; Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled

Book Review| March 01 2003 Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard; Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled By Siobhan Senier. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2001. xvi, 256 pp.$29.95.By Andrew Furman. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press. 2000. ix, 214 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95. Michael P. Kramer Michael P. Kramer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2003) 75 (1): 210–211. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-210 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael P. Kramer; Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard; Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled. American Literature 1 March 2003; 75 (1): 210–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-210 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled

Furman explores the ambivalent relationship between multiculturalists and contemporary Jewish American literature and advocates a more inclusive and intellectually valid form than is currently practiced. He also offers a historical overview of Jewish American fiction to situate the contemporary writers in the continuum of Jewish American literary history. Engaging and accessible, Furman's work -- the most comprehensive book of its kind -- invokes the current themes and concerns of this generation: the viability of adopting an Orthodox or Hasidic life amid a secular America, a renewed interest in the vibrant Yiddish world of pre-Holocaust Europe, Israel, Jewish Feminism, and the Holocaust as perceived by the children of survivors. These themes have replaced the those of alienation and marginality, which have preoccupied the novelists of the golden age of Jewish American writing.

From Where Our New Song Rises: Jewish American Poetry in the Century Past: An Introduction

From Where Our New Song Rises: Jewish American Poetry in the Century Past An Introduction Elizabeth Klein (bio) The essays in this special issue of Shofar, with one exception, focus on Jewish American poetry in the twentieth century, exploring its development and perhaps suggesting where it may go in the new century. The poems in a section entitled “A Scroll of Contemporary Poems” are the work of living poets. The work of two of them—Helen Degen Cohen and Michael Heller—is illuminated by essays in the journal, while another—Norman Finkelstein—has also contributed the concluding review-essay. This issue offers just a taste of what has become one of the richest veins of American contemporary literature, a literature in which ethnic writers of many back grounds continue to create astounding bodies of work available to all readers of English. Jewish American poetry has its roots in Yiddish immigrant poetry like that examined by Merle Bachman in her essay. Many poets were affected by the same forces set loose by World War I and evidenced in the work of the only non-American poets to be discussed: Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Uri Zvi Grinberg, the subjects of Avi Matalon’s essay. In the period before the Holocaust, American poets, modernists like the young Charles Reznikoff, were often conflicted about their identities, a subject Robert Manaster has explored in his analysis of Reznikoff’s Jerusalem the Golden. Even a poet like Louis Zukofsky, deeply influenced by Objectivist American poets including the antisemitic Ezra Pound, and generally disinterested in Jewish themes, found it impossible to be indifferent to issues of Jewish identity after the Holocaust, as Mark Scroggins observes in his essay. Helen Degen Cohen’s powerful post-Holocaust poetry is examined by Miriam Dean-Otting in an essay which makes reference to, among others, poems published for the first time in this issue of Shofar. Burt Kimmelman looks at the work of three contemporary poets, Enid Dame, Michael Heller, and Nikki Stiller. Not only is Heller’s work included in the poetry section but, additionally, Heller discusses his memoir Living Root in a conversation with Kimmelman following the essay. Norman Finkelstein looks at two new books by long-established contemporary poets, Allen Grossman and Harvey Shapiro, in his essay “How To Books.” While this issue provides an excellent introduction to the subject of Jewish American poetry, there are some topics these essays ignore that I hope will be examined [End Page 1] in future issues of Shofar. Religious themes are represented here by the midrashic poems of Bonnie Lyons, “How to Resist Temptation,” by Linda Zisquit, and a section of Norman Finkelstein’s longer work “Passing Over.” The journal might welcome a study of the work of poets like Anthony Hecht and Marge Piercy, whose poems, with the work of other contemporary poets, are frequently included as liturgy in prayer books and hagadot of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements. Examinations of family relationships and life cycle events, as seen in Stephen P. Schneider’s “The Expectant Father” and Linda Zisquit’s “Orphan,” inform much late twentieth-century Jewish- American poetry. The influence of the past, particularly the Holocaust, on the thinking of contemporary Jews is a topic explored in Daniel R. Schwarz’s “Utz” and Benjamin Friedlander’s “Against the Tide,” while the effect of Israel and Israeli writing on Jewish American writers is represented here by William George Wallis’s poem “Fathers.” Work of Joseph Lease, Stephen Paul Miller, and Hugh Seidman are additional examples suggesting the thematic breadth and formal richness of Jewish American poetry. Missing in this issue of Shofar is an exploration of the enormous influence of Jewish American women poets on American poetry generally. Among the most impor tant poets in American literature, Maxine Kumin, a former Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, has explored with great poignancy the importance of her heritage on the one hand, and her skeptical and feminist arguments with Judaism on the other. Linda Pastan, whose brilliant poems about the ambiguous qualities of family life fill her volumes, regularly explores religious questions. Chana Bloch, Louise Glück, Shirley Kaufman, Alicia Sorkin Ostriker, and Myra Sklarew are just a...

Paradise Park (review)

Reviewed by: Paradise Park Daryn Glassbrook Paradise Park, by Allegra Goodman. New York: The Dial Press, 2001. 360 pp. $24.95. Paradise Park, Allegra Goodman’s second novel, is a darker, more panoramic rewrite of her story “Onionskin,” which was included in the 1998 Delta paperback edition of her first story collection, Total Immersion. In “Onionskin,” Goodman had abandoned the present-tense, third-person omniscient narration of her other stories for a double- voiced epistolary mode. “Onionskin” purports to be a letter from Sharon, a continuing ed. student at the University of Hawaii, addressed to her comparative religion professor. In trying to explain why she stormed out of Dr. Friedell’s ponderous lecture on Augustine, Sharon tells him of her lifelong personal journey in search of spiritual enlightenment; she hopes that Friedell will accept the letter as her final research paper. [End Page 166] Sharon’s narrative voice was a funny, fresh-sounding middle-class vernacular that allowed Goodman the freedom to comment indirectly on the metaphysical crisis of postmodern MultiAmerica. Though Goodman identifies herself as a Jewish American writer, her comic fictions are more broadly concerned with the lingering traces of religiosity and cultural memory in our secular, distracted era. For Paradise Park, Goodman once again narrates in Sharon’s voice. The first half of the novel recasts the major scenes of Sharon’s adult life leading up to the confrontation with Dr. Friedell. In 1974, as a twenty-year-old college dropout, she meets an older graduate student named Gary while folk dancing with a club at MIT. She follows Gary to Hawaii, where he plans to save indigenous bird species from extinction. But Gary’s wanderlust is too strong, and he abandons her. Left to her own resources, Sharon struggles through a series of failed relationships, service jobs, and religious conversions, until she is prompted by a friend to return to college. At about the same time, she receives a postcard from Gary, postmarked from Jerusalem, expressing his wish for a reconciliation. Sharon begins corresponding with him and learns that he has become a born-again Jew and is studying at the Torah Or Institute. Through their letters, Sharon is persuaded that the newly spiritual Gary is her bashert; she leaves UH in the middle of her second semester with the intention of joining him at Torah Or. But Gary’s orthodoxy and the mundane reality of Israel disillusion her. When she learns via telegram that the cat she has left with her roommates in Hawaii has contracted feline AIDS, Sharon decides to return home. This is the point at which she drafts her letter to Friedell, which she submits as the final paper for his course (a variant text of the “Onionskin” letter appears in chapter 14). Unfortunately, her submission earns her an F. “This is not a research paper,” Friedell calmly explains. Sharon’s encounters in the second half of Paradise Park seem to follow much the same pattern: surprise reunions, failed relationships, and transient conversions follow one after the other. However, we gradually realize that Sharon has matured, and that her choices seem more determined. Sharon has accumulated strong habits of meditation, atonement, and transcendental vision from her various religious excursions. With new resolve, she faces down the narcissistic parents from whom she had been estranged since adolescence (in “Onionskin,” Sharon’s father is dead). She elopes with a scandalized ex-Hasidic pianist named Mikhail, a mensch with a gentle and poetic nature; by the end of the novel, Sharon bears witness to her redemption, with a new baby, a new career, and a new home. Benign readers of Goodman will recognize the terse lyricism, unobtrusive erudition, and incisive satire that are the trademarks of her fiction (the description of the electroplated roach business in Hawaii is a delight). And as she did with Elizabeth Shulman and Renée Melish in Kaaterskill Falls, Goodman emphasizes Sharon’s curiosity and pleasure in her body and physical surroundings. This is a shrewd [End Page 167] rhetorical move, considering the frequent neglect, suspicion, and punishment of the female in canonical Jewish literature and liturgy. Yet Goodman breaks new ground with Paradise Park; it is the most sexually...

"O, My Shehena, who shall live in your tent?": Gender, Diaspora, and the Ambivalence of Return in E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women

I open the following analysis of Jewish feminism and literary diasporism with these quotations because they suggest a discursive, cultural, and ideological field within which can be situated the emergence of Jewish feminism and its articulation in E. M. Broner's 1978 novel, A Weave of Woman. 3 Specifically, both the novel and the movement are ultimately skeptical of homecomings. 4 Prior to Philip Roth, American Jewish writers had little to say about the subject of Zionism and the Jewish State. Besides the early- to mid-twentieth century contributions of novelists and polemicists such as Maurice Samuel and Ludwig Lewisohn, the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty left a surprising sense of indifference in its wake. But for Broner, writing in the 1970s, the reality of Israel reinforced her sense that, whereas the Jewish woman had been subject to the same dislocations and exiles that have afflicted the Jewish people as a whole, she had also been subject to a ruptured identity that is all her own. For Broner, the challenge was to imagine a bold vision of a woman's spiritual, political, and cultural relation to the reconstructed homeland in ways that would shake up the status quo and complacent forms of Jewish identity. In a larger [End Page 96] sense, Weave reflects a crucial shift that took place in the lives of many Jewish American women during the 1970s, the time period during which it was written. Jewish women had been reading classic texts of the feminist movement such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful, all available and widely read by 1970. 5 Although Firestone, Morgan, and Friedan were all Jews who identified the "socially constructed differences between the sexes as a mode of social control," 6 none reflected on the significance of what they learned for Judaism or the Jewish community. However, by the early 1970s other feminists had begun to take the argument into the Jewish arena. By 1974 articles analyzing the ostensibly patriarchal nature of Judaism began to appear. A group called Ezrat Nashim issued a call to the Conservative Movement to count women in the minyan (the quarum of ten Jews required for worship) and to ordain women as rabbis. The Jewish Feminist Organization held two successful conferences in New York City. 7 Weave is a novel that warrants our attention not only because it captures this exciting ferment unlike any other Jewish American novel or because its reflection of a nascent feminism may offer nostalgic pleasures, but because of its unique expression of dwelling-in- displacement. I will argue that the true achievement of Broner's richly ironic novel is its imagined Zion, understood as an elusive landscape shaped by impossibly conflicting traditions, texts, and desires that fail to satiate the dreams of its internal exiles.

Shoah Survivors and the Second Generation in American Jewish Writing: Bernard Malamud, Rebecca Goldstein, Thane Rosenbaum

This quotation from Thane Rosenbaum's first novel, Second Hand Smoke, is one of the bleakest and most compelling literary depictions of the impact of the Shoah on children of survivors. Thane Rosenbaum, who was born in New York in 1960, is the only surviving child of Holocaust survivors. In his book Rosenbaum elucidates how the so-called second hand experiences of the Holocaust may constitute a lasting legacy handed down from one generation to the next, a legacy which can almost destroy the recipient's own life. The book's focus on young American Jews' encounter with Holocaust survivors stands in line with other recent American Jewish writers' thematization of issues related to

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (review)

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller BudickIn this richly textured scholarly work, Emily Miller Budick probes relations between Jewish- and African-Americans expressed in modern literature. As a former American, a religious Jew living in Israel, Budick believes she stands outside of conundrum of African-American -- Jewish-American relationship at an ideologically informed critical distance (p. 6) and, therefore, can tease out aspects of relationship are taken for granted by engaged participants. Her work is particularly plangent because she implies much of Jewish-American ethnic writing reveals a to consolidate ethnic identity within Jewish community itself (p. 12), a fact is in dramatic contrast to African-American community whose careful course of cultural preservation and separateness...succeeded in transforming our idea of America (p. 6).Budick's intention is to illuminate ethnic identities of African- and Jewish-Americans by examining their mutual construction of identity in literature. However, what lifts Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation from a merely literary discussion is her insistence an implicit comparison between Jewish-American identity and that other national identity proved for many Jews (the of this study included) irresistible...the state of Israel (p. 150).For Budick, difficulties Jewish-Americans face in constructing an identity in this pluralist society are epitomized by Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, novel provides paradigm for Budick's literary critique. Malamud's novel ends with two tenants of same house, both writers (one black and one Jewish), killing each other in a violent and horrible way. Unlike other critics who explicate obvious confrontation, Budick chooses to examine Malamud's treatment of Jewish material in novel to illustrate the failure of American Jews to consolidate an American identity preserves Jewish content (p. 13). The most of major modern Jewish-American writers, Malamud, Budick argues, not only resisted being labeled a Jewish American writer (p. 13) but in his use of universalizing metaphor of Jew sufferer, subordinates Jewish identity to Christian theological tradition. This metaphor, men Jews and all Jews Christs (p. 15), underpins inability of Malamud's Jewish character, Harry Lesser, to move out of building in which he is a tenant and to finish book which Lesser has been working for many years. In Budick's reading, Lesser faces a sterile future because of his identity confusion: the problem Malamud's Tenants and other texts stand behind it raise is whether universalism includes or excludes, expresses or denies, different ethnic groups it would subsume (p. 52).Lurking behind this novel, Budick claims, is socio-cultural dialogue between Jewish- and African-Americans about who should have cultural dominance in America, a debate informed both Malamud's authorial intentions and critical reaction to novel. The history of exchange begins in media res with angry response of Ralph Ellison and other African-American intellectuals to assumption of cultural hegemony by Jewish-American critics, a response triggered by Irving Howe's declaration Richard Wright was quintessential black writer (p. 21). Ellison argued Howe, although claiming position of outsider, ultimately supported existing white power structure and that, while Jewish-Americans identified with oppression of blacks, Jewish relationship to white American culture was substantially different from of African-Americans. Ultimately dialogue became fiercer (Norman Podhoretz and Stanley Edgar Hyman became entangled) because, Ellison and others felt, white Americans (which included Jewish-Americans) do not have problems with African-Americans speaking on margins but with African-Americans as central players in American culture game (p. …

Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (review)

Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled. By Andrew Furman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 214 pp.

Contemporary Jewish American writers and the multicultural dilemma: the return of the exiled

Contemporary Jewish American writers and the multicultural dilemma: the return of the exiled

The Jewishness of American Culture

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,

Mingling Past and Present on the Lower East Side: Three Recent Views

Lower East Side Memories. A Jewish Place in America. By Hasia R. Diner. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii + 219 pp. Remembering the Lower East Side. American Jewish Reflections. Edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. vii + 291 pp. Selling the Lower East Side. Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. By Christopher Mele. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. xvi + 361 pp. Mingling Past and Present on the Lower East Side: Three Recent Views Eli Lederhendler American Jewish (and some well-known non-Jewish) writers, memoirists, scholars, photographers, religious leaders, and artists of every type have lavished more attention on the lives (real or fictional) of the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan than on any other part of the American Jewish experience. This surfeit of East Side lore came, in time, to represent the ethnocultural signature of American Jewry, as Hasia Diner argues in her book, Lower East Side Memories: "No other ethnic group in America, with the exception of the African-American construction of Harlem, has so thoroughly understood, imagined, and represented itself through a particular chunk of space." 1 Yet, as Diner also points out, a comprehensive history of the Lower East Side in the era of mass East European Jewish immigration to America has yet to be written. 2 This is all the more surprising--and disappointing--considering the long-established and still-accumulating body of historical and ethnographical literature on such topics as Jewish immigrant politics, religion, demography, gender relations, public health, journalistic and literary output, ethnic cultural and social institutions, and criminality. Regrettably, that major lacuna may not be filled any time soon. If the crop of writing under review here is at all indicative of a trend, the latest [End Page 231] generation of Lower East Side scholars is interested primarily in what those mean streets represent in today's cultural, civic, political, and ethnic discourse, rather than in documenting the past per se. Both Diner's aforementioned work and the book that she has co-edited with Jeffrey Shandler and Beth Wenger, Remembering the Lower East Side, expand on a point already made several years ago by Beth Wenger, in her perceptive and fluent essay, "Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side." 3 In that article, Wenger discussed the ways in which Jews have fostered a retrospective notion of the Lower East Side as a shrine to a lost Jewish cultural authenticity in America. Diner's monograph, in particular, builds very directly upon Wenger's argument. The concern with representation, not history, may explain why, in the space of two entire volumes devoted to the Jewish East Side, there is precisely one footnote with a direct reference to a Yiddish-language source. 4 Such aloofness from primary historical data is methodologically plausible only in a discussion that rarely conveys any unmediated information about the history of the Jewish East Side, but seeks rather to indicate the distance that American Jews have traversed since then, and considers how that distance is reflected in the latter-day symbolic construction of the old immigrant turf. Capturing the inner workings of sociocultural processes in our own day is, of course, a significant and fascinating task in its own right, and the authors represented in the three recent books under review here do this, for the most part, very admirably. Some of these authors, however, seem less than completely at ease with the notion that history may be regarded solely as "representation," more readily understood as the study of a posteriori social constructions than as an examination of an actual past. One example is Moses Rischin, whose brief but eloquent contribution to Remembering the Lower East Side concludes by issuing a historiographical challenge that he hopes may yet animate a new generation of scholars: "Equipped with freshly honed linguistic, cultural, and intellectual skills, refined and developed in a singularly propitious climate for the...

The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar (review)

The Collected Stories of Moacyr ScliarScliar is one of the most comprehensively in Latin America. Although he is well known to connoisseurs of the short story in a continental tradition that has produced figures of international stature like Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Cortazar, he is, like most Brazilian writers, not widely read either by other Latin Americans (because of the differences between the Portuguese of Brazil and the Spanish of the majority of Latin America) or even in English, a language into which there are many superb translations of Brazilian literature: Brazilian literature is extensively translated into English, but not extensively read or discussed, at least to judge by conventional literary forums. The result is that Brazilian literature, which has some truly great writers (Brazil's nineteenth-century novelist Machado de Assis is easily of the stature of any European writer of the period) is marginalized within Latin American literature and marginalized in American literary circles in the same way that all Latin American literature is. This becomes even truer when it is a matter of a subaltern writer like Scliar, whose subalternity in this case is his commitment to Jewish culture defined in the broadest terms possible. Although Latin America has major Jewish cultural centers (Buenos Aires being the largest; S...o Paulo being one of the most dynamic and prosperous; Mexico City being one of the most assimilated), virtually no Latin American Jewish writer has entered the mainstream of American consciousness (or European, for that matter). Borges wrote about his probable Jewish roots and wrote many stories based on Jewish themes, particularly the Cabala, but Borges is not usually identified as a Jewish writer.The Jewish Latin America series, directed by Ivan Stavans of Amherst College, and published by the University of New Mexico Press, is a brilliant project designed to correct the lack of access to Latin American writers of Jewish descent whose works concern themselves with Jewish themes. Stavans has made superb choices for inclusion in the series, the translations are first-rate, and his articulate and urbane (and often highly personalized) introductions establish clear reading parameters for each text.The Scliar collection is one of the most important in the series, not only because of the comprehensiveness of the representation (five-hundred pages consisting of one hundred stories drawn from a half-dozen collections -- about one third of Scliar's total number of short story collections -- spread out over three decades), but also because of the sheer scope of Scliar's fictional enterprise.Scliar is very much a representative of many of the most sophisticated and noteworthy Jewish writers of Latin America. He is deeply imbued with secular Jewish culture (although he laments never having learned Yiddish, which is still spoken in many Latin American communities): although he is not a religious Jew (few Latin American Jewish writers are, as Latin American Jewry tends to be divided in a pronounced way between conservative and orthodox Jews and secular Jews, with little of a reform middle-ground), Scliar is profoundly familiar with Jewish history, with the richness of Jewish heritage, custom, and ritualistic observance. Scliar is often bitingly critical of the rigidities of Jewish law and of the intransigence of the debates involving compliance, assimilation, and interfaith relations, but his writing turns on a sensitivity to the abiding meanings of Jewish lore and custom. …

How a Samovar Helped Me Theorize Latin American Jewish Writing

Samovars can be used for brewing more than tea. My essay proposes a theory of Latin American Jewish literature through part serious, part playful commentary on Eduardo Stilman's story, "El samovar de plata" (The Silver Samovar). I suggest that Latin American Jewish Studies forge stronger links with Jewish and Holocaust studies, focus on broad cultural fields, and become multigenerational and multilingual. I call for a pluralization of our discipline to achieve a kaleidosopic diversity within an enveloping oneness.

Breaking the Silences: Jewish-American Women Writing the Holocaust

Abstract This article focuses on a detailed reading of three short stories from the 1980s (Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl', Rebecca Goldstein's 'The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish', and Leslea Newman's 'A Letter to Harvey Milk'), and argues that the recent profusion of short fiction by American-Jewish women, much of it dealing with the Holocaust, represents a breaking of two silences: the taboo imposed on American-Jewish women writers by the canonical dominance of male figures such as Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, and the absence in their fiction of the Holocaust. It suggests that there is in these short stories an ambivalent aesthetic of Holocaust fiction at work: that is to say, a desire to give a voice to wartime Jewish suffering, and the fear that to do so will inevitably involve aestheticizing, and therefore profaning, that suffering. This manifests itself in these stories in an unresolved tension between speech and silence. Literature is often a matter of response to the challenge of the literature that went before. Work by women swings not only on this pendulum, as most writing does; it swings on a second pendulum, within the first. Women reply to what is expected of them as women -- complying if they are compliant, rebelling if they are not. (Norma Rosen).[1] The greatest paradox forms about the Holocaust, it seems to me, for novelists, in the tension between writing and not writing about it. If the writer treats the subject, the risk is that it may be falsified, trivialized. Even a 'successful' treatment of the subject risks an aestheticizing or a false ordering of it, since whatever is expressed in art conveys the impression that it, too, is subject to the laws of composition. Yet not to write means omitting the central event of the twentieth century. (Norma Rosen)[2] One of the most striking developments in post-war American fiction has been the emergence of a number of male Jewish-American novelists as mainstream, even canonical figures. In the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud all have entries; among contemporary American-Jewish women only Grace Paley rates a mention. The gender imbalance is even greater in Tony Hilfer's Longman Guide to post-1940 American fiction in which Bellow, Roth, Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller are all given individual consideration, whereas Cynthia Ozick's is the lone female Jewish entry. When Martin Amis observes, 'The twentieth-century novel belongs to [. . .] Jewish-Americans',[3] it is these male writers he is referring to, rather than their female counterparts: Anzia Yezierska, Hortense Calisher, Tillie Olsen, Ozick, and Paley. Leaving aside his personal enthusiasm, amounting almost to discipleship, for the work of Bellow, and the question of whether his aesthetic values are underpinned by peculiarly male sensibilities, there is undeniably a generic, if not a gender, bias operating here. Although he has himself written a collection of short stories, for Amis (and indeed for most of the still predominantly male academic establishment) it is the novel that is the index of greatness in fiction. This immediately loads the dice against women fiction writers, who have often been, and still are, drawn to the short story form.[4] When it comes to Jewish-American women writers, certainly, the three most influential figures, Ozick, Paley, and Olsen, are all best known for their work in this genre. Moreover, in the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion of writing, most of it in the form of short stories, by American-Jewish women.[5] If it was once possible to speak of Jewish-American fiction and mean male Jewish-American fiction, it should be so no longer. While Bellow and Mailer are still writing and Philip Roth continues to go from strength to strength, many of the old guard (Singer, Malamud, Heller, Stanley Elkin) are now dead, and among the younger generation it is women writers (most of whom have made their names writing short stories) who are leading the way. …

Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing

Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing

The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas , and: Cláper (review)

Claper, by Alicia FreilichTo most Americans the republics south of the Rio Grande are the stuff of benign neglect. Only the occasional sweep of illegal aliens, the momentary drug bust, the quick vacation on some tropical beach may briefly lift our eyelids as we tsk-tsk our bemusement at those underdeveloped folk. Generally, we don't really care. The world conducts its serious economic and cultural business in New York, or London, or Tokyo, or Singapore. Who cares about a bunch of vilde chayes on the pampa plains? Where are the pampas, anyway?I use vilde chayes intentionally, since Jews are by and large no better informed than their fellow Americans. The Jewish world runs on a U.S.-Israel axis, with Europe included because it's where our grandparents came from and where the Holocaust occurred. But Latin America? Ah, yes, what about those Nazis in Argentina?Happily, change is in the air. Academe, at least, has discovered not only that there are Jews in Latin America, but that they are vibrant, creative, with something to say to other Jews and culture-makers. In departments of history, sociology, cultural studies, and Latin American and Brazilian literatures a new discipline is emerging: Latin American Jewish Studies. (Jewish Studies has been slow to recognize the newcomer.) A confluence of fortunate -- and less fortunate -- circumstances has put LAJS on the map, with literature often leading the way.Why now? Writers in Latin America are today asserting their Jewishness, however problematically. This wasn't always so. Until recently, Latin American Jewish intellectuals were often immigrants outside the mainstream or native-born Jews whose concerns had little or nothing to do with Judaism. Argentina's Alberto Gerchunoff was an early exception; that is why his book has been reprinted.Harsh dictatorships in the seventies served as a painful impetus for change. Young Latin American Jews identified with progressive and democratic forces found themselves under a double siege -- as Argentines, Chileans, Brazilians, or Uruguayans, and as Jews. Repression and exile led many to reconsider their Jewishness as a paradigm of suffering and resistance and as a source of cultural memory and pride. The result was an outpouring of Latin American Jewish creativity: organizations, journals, conferences, publishing houses, fiction, critical works. Democracy's return intensified the awakening.The Jerusalem-based Association of Jewish Writers in Spanish and Portuguese currently serves as the intellectual address for a network of authors living in Latin America, Spain, France, Israel, and the United States. It publishes Noaj, an important literary journal whose name echoes with biblical intimations of catastrophe, survival, and rebirth. The association has sponsored heady writers' symposia in Buenos Aires, S...o Paulo, Miami, and Jerusalem, and calmer scholarly events with AMILAT, the Israeli Society for Latin American Jewish Studies.In Buenos Aires, Argentine-Jewish intellectuals are spearheading the publication of novels, story collections, and anthologies. They are reediting books by previous generations of Latin-American Jewish authors who wrote in Yiddish, Portuguese, and Spanish, creating their ancestors even as they look to the future. Marcos Aguinis, Ricardo Feierstein, Gererdo Mario Goloboff, Alicia Steimberg, and Elihau Toker are some of those identified with the new activism, which has spilled over into Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela.A corresponding surge of interest has overtaken the North, spurred by the decadeold Latin American Jewish Studies Association. LAJSA members are teaching courses in Latin American Jewish history and literature at major U.S. universities, correcting the prejudiced, homogenizing picture of "Latin Americanness." (Are Freilich, Gerchunoff, or Aizenberg Hispanic names? …

Special Issue on Philip Roth

Long before he received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel American Pastoral, Roth was recognized as among the best novelists writing in English today. Where hitherto he had been bracketed with Bernard Malamud and Saul BeUow as one of America's leading Jewish American writers, the ethnic qualifier may now certainly be dropped. Not that Roth has stopped concerning himself with Jewish issues. In his latest novels his characters' Jewishness is still very much in evidence. But what Roth writes about them has more to do with their being Americans than being Jews. Perhaps that is one reason why the American Jewish estabhshment has ceased taking potshots at him. Another, possibly more important, reason may lie in the fact that American Jews have finally come of age as fully accepted in American culture. This more secure position has little need for the kinds of defensiveness that occasioned the attacks on Roth. Jewish Americans have arrived; they are now very much a part of mainstream America, as readers of Shofar hardly need telling. American Jews, such as those Roth now writes about, may be more or less - less rather than more, perhaps - aware of their Jewishness, but they are not as preoccupied by their ethnic origins as, say, Alexander Portnoy was in Portnoy 's Complaint. The essays in this special issue mostly focus on the later novels. Of course, the earlier work cannot be ignored, and it is not. Comparisons with what Roth did and what he is doing now are very much to the point. Many of the articles therefore refer usefully to the earlier fiction, showing how the later novels compare or contrast with it, or at times build on it, as Deborah Shostak's essay does, for example, in Philip Roth's Fictions of Self-Exposure. On the other hand, a salient feature of Roth's recent writing is his continuing tendency to experiment. He seems to approach each new book as a challenge to explore the frontiers of fiction and to find new and different ways of treating relationships among biography, autobiography, and fiction. This collection begins, however, at the beginning - with an extended analysis of one of Roth's best short stories, the Fanatic. In her essay, Victoria Aarons investigates Roth's registry of Jewish consciousness in the conflict that arises in Eli Peck, a successful young lawyer living in the mythical New York suburb of Woodenton. His friends commission Eli, an assimilated Jew, to rid the town of the newly arrived yeshiva that threatens to disrupt the harmony established between the town's resident Jews and their WASP neighbors. Aarons shows that as Eli becomes obsessed with these parvenus, his obsession is shared by Roth's narrative voice as well. Eli's eventual inability to carry out his commission and his volte face - his assumption of Leo Tzuref s identity by putting on his Hasidic dress - reveals one modern American Jew's attempt to resolve the dilemma posed by assimilationism and the need to reclaim one's identity as something rooted in history. Few, if any, of Roth's later characters resolve their conflicts similarly, though many of them grapple with it, one way or another. Eli's obsession is prelude to a major theme that runs throughout Roth's fiction and that takes many forms: the nature of the self and the problem of self-identity. This theme is by no means unique in modern fiction; Gabe Wallach in Letting Go (1962) is not the first young man to set out in quest of self-discovery. But in this and increasingly in his later fiction Roth gives the theme some interesting twists as he introduces elements of his own autobiography into his novels. In Zuckerman Unbound (1985), he presents the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, whom he had introduced in My Life as a Man (1974) and in The Ghost Writer (1984), as a kind of facsimile of himself - the author of a notorious novel called Carnovsky that seems very much in substance and reputation like Roth's Portnoy 's Complaint. But as Deborah Shostak argues, Roth is here playing with autobiography, making the most of anticipated reader inclinations to interpret factually what is presented fictionally. …

JUDAISM SINCE GENDER: A REVIEW ESSAY

�� In the short story “The Woman Who Lost Her Names” by contemporary American Jewish writer Nessa Rapoport, the heroine’s power of naming is taken from her.1 Her own name goes through a permutation — from Sarah to Sally — in order, her kindergarten teacher said, that she be better integrated into public school. The distant cousin from Jerusalem whom she eventually marries, a seventh-generation Halevi, takes on the pen name Peniel and calls Sarah by her middle name, Yosefah. Finally, after two sons, a daughter is born. Sarah , at last in the land of Israel, longs to name her daughter Ayelet Hashachar, the dawn star, but her husband argues that the child must be named Dina, after his late mother-in-law. “But Dina was raped!” Sarah/Sally/Yosefah protests. The story ends as she sits in the women’s balcony in the synagogue, waiting to hear what her husband will name their daughter.

Polish Nobel Prize Winners in Literature: Are They Really Polish?

In October of 1996, after she had received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wislawa Szymborska was hailed by certain Swedish newspapers as the fifth winner of this Prize. This was a surprise for many readers, since Szymborska was supposed to be the fourth winner -- after Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Wladyslaw Reymont (1924) and Milosz (1980). Curiously, Szymborska's name followed that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, according to the Encarta encyclopedia was a Polish-born American who wrote in the Yiddish language [and] drew heavily on his background, and on the stories of Jewish and medieval European folklore [...]. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in literature for an 'impassioned narrative art' that is rooted in Polish-Jewish There is another interesting example of such a cross-cultural controversy concerning Polish Nobel Prize Winnners. A poem by Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize Winner, was included in The Best American Poetry 1999, edited by Robert Bly (Scribner 1999). The poem was written in Polish, published originally in Poland in Milosz's collection of poems and essays Piesek przydrozny (Roadside dog, 1997) and reprinted two years later by The Partisan Review in a translation made by the author in collaboration with Robert Hass. In Poland no one doubts that Milosz is a writer, a political exile who left Poland in 1951 to live in France and later in the United States. However, as far as the publisher of this anthology is concerned, the works of this poet rather belong to American literature. In a long biographical note, Milosz's connection is mentioned only once: [After World War II he] joined the diplomatic service. As a naturalized American citizen and a retired professor of the University of C alifornia at Berkeley, Milosz is described as an American poet. Indeed, it might be said that Singer is a Jewish-American writer, who was born and lived in Poland and his works were much influenced by his background and that Milosz is a Polish-American writer born in Lithuania into a Polish-Lithuanian family. However, on the official list of the Nobel Committee, both writers are mentioned as American laureates, possibly because they had American citizenship. These two cases suggest that it may be problematic define categorically who is in fact a Polish Nobel Prize winner in literature. What is the decisive factor? The writer's native language? The language of the work? Citizenship? Country of origin? Country of residence, or the culture which has a fundamental influence on his or her works? Is Singer--as a writer--Polish, Jewish, or American? Is Milosz Polish, Lithuanian, or American? Singer's and Milosz's Nobel Prizes were completely unexpected in Poland because both writers were relatively unknown in their native country. In the sixties and seventies, when Singer's works were gaining popularity in America and Europe, they were still unknown in Poland because of the anti-Semitic censorship of the Communist government. When Milosz received the Prize, in Poland all his works were banned for political reasons. The debate about who belongs to the list of Nobel Prize winners in literature may lead to a discussion about what constitutes culture. …