Jewish American Writers Research Articles

American Hebrew literature: writing Jewish national identity in the United States

Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals to a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expres sions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of those immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Weingrad presents a counter-history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite their adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, writers such as Mordecai Manuel Noah, Shimon Halkin, and Gabriel Preil sought to express a Jewish cultural nationalism through literature. Weingrad explores Hebrew literature in the United States from the emergence of a group of writers connected with the Hebraist movement in the early twentieth century to the present. Radically expanding and challenging our conceptions of American and Jewish identities in literature, the author offers wide-ranging cultural analysis and thoughtful readings of key works. American Hebrew Literature restores a lost piece of the canvas of Hebrew literature in the twenti eth century and invites readers to reimagine Jewish-American writers of our own time.

Judaism, Jewishness, and the Universal Symbols of Identity: Re-Sacralizing the Star of David and the Color Yellow

The purpose of this paper is to analyze socially constructed symbols of Jewish American identity that are produced by members of an elite intelligentsia: two groups of Jewish American authors who write short stories. Our discussion takes issues of identity formation in the Jewish American context and asks what processes act on the formation of a specific Jewish American group identity over time. It identifies the kinds of events that are incorporated into identity formation and institutional practices within the Jewish American community that offer a special way to understand issues of victimization. As evidence of how this process works, this study uses a random sample of 100 short stories written between 1946 and 1995 by Jewish American authors. Intended for consumption by Jewish American readers, these stories describe daily life within the Jewish American community and with surprising regularity bring issues of victimization into the imagined experience of readers. Their presentation of issues of Jewish American identity provides an easily accessible window, making visible the community's concerns through time. Perhaps more significantly, an analysis of a random sample of these stories allows identification of the strategies used to create ethnic identity when describing daily experiences. More specifically, this study examines how Jewish American short story writers present the Holocaust, victimization, and anti-Semitism as part of the processes of identity formation within the Jewish American community across three time periods: 1946-1956, 1957-1972, and 1973-1995. For many decades there has been an ongoing discussion and a certain amount of tension in the Jewish American community regarding what it means to be Jewish

The H(e)art of the Matter: Modernist Theatrical Liberalism in Pal Joey

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, first- and second-generation American Jewish writers and composers working in popular entertainment largely resisted the modernist despair so fashionable among many of their contemporaries, choosing instead to devote themselves to an optimistic set of truths promised by American liberalism and expressed in the theatre. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, the lingering Great Depression, rising anti-Semitism, fascism, and the Second World War led to the hollowing out of many of the ideals of the immigrant generation and their children. A number of Jewish writers, many of whom had made their reputations defining and celebrating an ideology defined in this essay as theatrical liberalism, began to echo their modernist contemporaries. Just as modernist poets and novelists experimented with form in order to raise questions about truth, so modernist writers of popular plays and movies used the heavily formulaic nature of their genres to shock audiences into questioning the assumptions of theatrical liberalism upon which these popular forms relied. This essay explores how Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1940 musical Pal Joey uses the popular genre of the backstage musical to raise questions about the viability of theatrical liberalism in an era plagued by fascism, Nazism, and war.

Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature Ranen Omer-Sherman Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African American and Jewish-American Literature, by Catherine Rottenberg. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2008. 180 pp. $50.00. Performing Americanness is the kind of unprecedented, richly comparative study that significantly changes the nature of the conversation by cogently presenting how African-American and Jewish-American writers of the early twentieth century narrated the critical categories of identity that enlivened their era. Rottenberg begins with the important premise that both minority literary traditions experienced vital transformations at roughly the same moment; aware of their inherent liminality, writers from both backgrounds strategically created a place for themselves within American letters analogous to the struggle of each group to accommodate itself in American society as a whole. The seminal novels addressed in Rottenberg's six lean and lively chapters include classics of the Harlem Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen's [End Page 210] novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), alongside representative texts of the early Jewish-American literary canon: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and others. In my courses on the dynamic of "Passing" in twentieth-century American literature I was long ago struck by the glaring fact that both Johnson's and Cahan's troubled protagonists conclude their narrative journeys by expressing regret for having somehow failed to keep faith with their own better natures. Rottenberg is the first writer I have come across to successfully delineate the implications of that shared narrative dynamic, and she does so in ways that greatly complicate the notion of the individual's "authenticity" or "essence" while also raising important questions about each group's collective identity. And of course such an analysis is fully warranted; after all, during the period that Rottenberg examines, Jewishness was still mediated within a racial discourse of identity, not only by others but by Jews themselves. Thus, she argues that the conclusions of both Autobiography and Rise of David Levinsky alert readers to "the coercive aspect of race identification, and the punishments meted out to subjects who attempt to identify differently" (p. 118). Rottenberg seeks to transcend the well-worn paradigm of reading early Jewish American works as struggles with assimilation by aligning them with the performative/reiterative nature of passing narratives. In this context she adroitly draws on Judith Butler's groundbreaking work on social identity and performativity: "performativity, as the most efficacious form of positive power, tends to reinforce the hegemonic order and upholds existing hierarchal power relations. Reiteration produces the illusion of an identifiable and stable referent for regulatory ideals" (p. 28). Butler's theoretical paradigm exposes the inevitable dissonance between normative roles and actual social behavior or lived experience. Hence, Rottenberg is excited by the premise that the novels she discusses each "dramatize a certain moral imperative—the necessity of ensuring that, at any given historical moment, there are always many possible, socially sanctioned, and thus normative ways of performing Americanness" (p. 15). Precisely because hegemonic order requires the reiteration of racial codes for its survival, avenues for potentially subversive variation open up with exactly the same frequency. Deeply engaged with the critical stakes over whether Larsen's Passing, a milestone in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, should be read as an argument for passing as a subversive cultural strategy or one that merely serves the individual's separate survival, Rottenberg posits that its two female protagonists each dramatize the "regulatory ideals that circulate and operate in the service of particular relations of power" (p. 35) and, even more significantly, reveal how in the dominant culture, "though whiteness is privileged [End Page 211] over and against blackness . . . the very repetition and circulation of different, and, at times contradictory, racial norms create the possibility of subversion" (p. 50). Similarly, Yezierska's fiction, while exposing the rigidity of American class structures of the 1920s (which bear roughly similar regulatory ideals to the racial norms critiqued in the racial novel of passing), present...

Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing Marc Caplan Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing. By Steven J. Zipperstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 274 pp + xiv. Cloth $ 27.50. ISBN 0300126492. Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-1956), was the most minor of the major Jewish American writers, the most private of 20th century public intellectuals. His greatest work consists of unpublished letters and journal entries. From the beginning [End Page 71] of his brief career he has always inspired a personal response from his admirers; when his one published novel, Passage from Home, appeared in 1946, it drew uniquely heartfelt reviews from otherwise Olympian-voiced readers such as Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Rosenfeld's childhood friend Saul Bellow. Fifty-three years after his death from heart failure, Rosenfeld has inspired another emotional, loving, and remarkably intimate portrait from one of contemporary America's leading historians, Stanford Professor Steven Zipperstein. Rosenfeld's Lives represents a remarkable departure in Zipperstein's career, as well as in the possibilities for literary biography, and in both respects it is a triumph that, like the book's subject, cuts across disciplines, intellectual affiliations, and the boundaries between public and private. The result is an insightful portrait of a neglected personality and the circumstances under which he lived, worked, and perished. For members of his own generation, with varying degrees of affection and contempt, Rosenfeld became the posthumous symbol of lost, failed promise. He died too young and left a desk drawer full of unfinished projects. Yet as Zipperstein's portrait demonstrates for a reader having already achieved Rosenfeld's years—and then some—his legacy seems far less disappointing: a (good) novel at 28, roughly 15 short stories published in as many years, and hundreds of essays and book reviews: hardly the resume of an idle or undisciplined mind; more, in fact, than the now canonical Walter Benjamin could claim at a similar juncture in his truncated life, and more, as well, than nearly any public intellectual under the age of 40 (and then some) in the present moment. Indeed, when reviewing the possible candidates in a foreseeably abortive search for someone to fill Rosenfeld's role, one recognizes immediately that there is no one in American culture today who can claim command of ideas and the art of narrative to the degree that Rosenfeld aspired. One can write novels, or practice journalism, or maybe, most desperately, compete for tenure at a university, but certainly not do all three, and probably not succeed at even two. From the vantage point of the current generation, which has arguably experienced the longest adolescence and apprenticeship in history, the era into which Rosenfeld came of age was nearly unique in the expectations placed on its youth, and the standards—most of them unreasonable—to which those young people, Rosenfeld paramount among them, held themselves. Is the essay that Rosenfeld salvaged from an unfinished book on Gandhi any less impressive than whole books published by his contemporaries, but mostly unread or appreciated today only by reputation? Perhaps in the current age of electronically induced graphomania—blogs, web journals, Facebook, and Twitter—Rosenfeld's combination of reticence and impatience can acquire the appearance of discretion? Like Jorge Luis Borges, Rosenfeld recognized that a fascinating book review is preferable to an unreadable book. And if now he is known more for the books he didn't write than the two or three posthumous volumes he did, is his intellectual integrity and engagement with the world around him less admirable as a result? One should not overstate comparisons between Rosenfeld and Benjamin or Borges, neither of whom would have indulged, even in a private letter, an [End Page 72] image as careless and cavalier as "long furry tubes like vulvas or subways" (34). Much of what remained in Rosenfeld's desk drawer clearly should have, and though the same could be said of the published writing of many of his contemporaries, nonetheless these figures created a discourse and culture to which Rosenfeld, outside of Zipperstein's biography, will always remain a footnote. Zipperstein himself ponders this fate...

Review

Reviewed by: African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism Rachel Leah Jablon African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism. By Alicia A. Kent. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. x + 230 pp. $68.95. Alicia A. Kent examines six novels of the early twentieth century through the lenses of modernity and Modernism in African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism. While Kent considers "modernity" to be the advent of technology and industry represented by significant migrations, intercultural interactions, and artistic experimentation, she names "Modernism" as the specific cultural movement that responded to such changes (163n1). Her main argument is that those artists previously thought to provide an "antithesis" to the Modernist movement (4)—those who seem to conform to conventional artistic forms and narratives rather than resist them—are actually quite modern in their own right. She claims, "African, Native, and Jewish American writers confronted a crisis of representation parallel to that of the Modernist writers, and, also like the Modernists, they envisioned art as a response to the fragmentation of the modern world" (17). Even though most scholars, according to Kent, may understand that these three communities wanted to conform rather than experiment, their art takes the shape of novels that appropriate and challenge the genre's status quo and should thus be considered Modernist in its own way. Buttressed by a thorough introduction and a relatively meager conclusion, five chapters on African, Native, and Jewish American literatures—all published between 1901 and 1937—offer exegeses of six novels Kent believes are paradigmatic of both the period and the respective ethnic American communities they primarily portray. Discussions of Charles Chestnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God comprise the chapter on African American literature, Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded the chapter on Native American literature, and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers the chapter on Jewish American literature. These texts, according to Kent, "reshaped modernism" by blending and blurring cultures, languages, genres, literature and anthropology, rural and urban sensibilities, and gender roles (25). In fact, gender would seem to be of importance to Kent, considering that women authored three of the six novels in Kent's discussion. Unfortunately, because Kent's project surrounds the writers' choices to employ a literary form usually thought to alienate the members of their respective ethnic American communities, she does not address the significance of the authors' gender [End Page 227] (7). Yes, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Cogewea, and Bread Givers do epitomize Kent's argument that Modernism is not necessarily indicative of a chasm between the present and the past and that, perhaps counterintuitively, it is an acknowledgement of the past's inescapability. Yet another reason for considering these texts together could be that their female authors took especial advantage of the opportunities afforded them by modernity. For example, Kent reports that Yezierska "benefited from Modernist experimentation" because it validated her desire to write about Jewish immigrant women (147), but she does not expound on the alternative, which would be Yezierska being silenced by the normative chauvinism of the time. Central to Kent's work is Michael T. Taussig's redefinition of "mimesis." Kent's interests do not necessarily lie in the understanding that mimesis is "realism's attempt to represent a direct imitation of reality in writing" but in "the human tendency to imitate and be like the Other in situations of cross-cultural contact" (47). Each of the six novels depicts such mimetic behaviors of its characters—the protagonists all, in some way, attempt to embody their societies' ideals—ranging from adopting a particular vocabulary to performing certain work. Yet, ironically, Kent does not apply this concept to women writing novels, as one might expect. She writes that the six authors "offer alternative portraits [of their compatriots] that countered the dehumanizing, static images that were portrayed" in mainstream art forms (21). If Hurston, Mourning Dove, and Yezierska felt the need to represent women as sophisticated, sentient beings (as they do in their novels), perhaps...

The H(e)art of the Matter: Modernist Theatrical Liberalism in <i>Pal Joey</i>

Abstract Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, first- and second-generation American Jewish writers and composers working in popular entertainment largely resisted the modernist despair so fashionable among many of their contemporaries, choosing instead to devote themselves to an optimistic set of truths promised by American liberalism and expressed in the theatre. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, the lingering Great Depression, rising anti-Semitism, fascism, and the Second World War led to the hollowing out of many of the ideals of the immigrant generation and their children. A number of Jewish writers, many of whom had made their reputations defining and celebrating an ideology defined in this essay as theatrical liberalism, began to echo their modernist contemporaries. Just as modernist poets and novelists experimented with form in order to raise questions about truth, so modernist writers of popular plays and movies used the heavily formulaic nature of their genres to shock audiences into questio...

Encyclopedia of Jewish-American literature

Jewish-American writing holds an essential place in America's literary tradition, and Jewish-American writers have flourished in many genres, including fiction, drama, poetry, and more. Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature examines hundreds of these authors and works, focusing on those that are part of the high school and college curriculum, as well as the historically significant and contemporary.The coverage includes: The Adventures of Augie March; Dorothy Parker; Chaim Potok; Ragtime; Philip Roth; Isaac Bashevis Singer; Susan Sontag; Elie Wiesel; and more.

Multilingual America: language and the making of American literature

Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald's book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be translated and incorporated into a national literary history. He uses case studies to analyse the most important kinds of linguistic encounters, such as those between Europeans and Native Americans, those between slaveholders and African slaves, and those between immigrants and American citizens. This ambitious, engaging book is an important contribution to the study of American literature, history and culture.

Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (review)

Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (review)

Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience David Lyle Solomon (bio) Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience. By Julius Novick. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 189 pp. Central to Julius Novick's grand discussion of American Jewish drama are the questions that every American Jewish writer, indeed every American Jew, faces: "How Jewish? How American? And what does it mean to be Jewish, to be American, anyway?" (4). By examining a large number of plays by American Jewish playwrights that are of Jewish content, Novick's Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience traces how these playwrights have responded to these questions within the context of the world in which they are writing. The playwright is situated as a conduit of his or her people, presenting "widespread reality and not just private concern" (7). In doing so, the American Jewish playwright is given the same status as the American Jewish novelist, a status that few have afforded American Jewish playwrights, in spite of the fact that "[t]he American theater has not lacked for dramatists who are Jewish" (1). Considering the disproportionate participation of Jews in American theater, on stage, behind the stage—and as audience members, it is somewhat ironic, somewhat expected, that a survey of American Jewish drama has rarely been classified as such. Although the range of works discussed is vast, Beyond the Golden Door should not be taken as an all-inclusive registry of American Jewish plays; Novick "makes no claim to be encyclopedic" (7). Instead, Novick's Beyond the Golden Door considers how plays of Jewish content have dramatized American Jewish experiences as they negotiate both sides of the hyphenated identity. Although these experiences are particular to Jews, they are—just as significant—universal to all Americans. Writes Novick, "We all live in the tension between what we came from and what we have come to; we are faced with the challenge of making some accommodation between them" (5). American Jewish drama taps into [End Page 130] these universal American experiences while staging concerns that are at their core particularly Jewish. Novick narrates quickly through the outline of each play and the breadth of works discussed is impressive. Readers unfamiliar with the range of texts will still find themselves in deft hands: his prose is approachable, his analysis stimulating, his research thoughtful. After a short introduction, Novick's ten chapters are constructed somewhat chronologically, somewhat thematically. In his first chapter, he offers close readings of classic early twentieth-century plays such as Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (an important first text to discuss, albeit ironic given that its playwright was British), Aaron Hoffman's Welcome Stranger, and Samson Raphaelson's The Jazz Singer. Here, Novick identifies how generational dynamics and shifting attitudes towards Americanization have affected how Jews have constructed their identities in America. Succeeding chapters in Beyond the Golden Door trace how these dynamics develop throughout the twentieth century in works by Elmer Rice, Gertrude Berg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, Alfred Uhry, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tony Kushner, among others. While still paying attention to generational concerns and assimilation, he also discusses how regional experiences and/or gender dynamics have shaped Jewish experiences in America. His chapters on Arthur Miller and Neil Simon are particularly exciting because he is able to trace the changing views regarding the presentation of explicitly Jewish characters and themes throughout their lengthy careers. Novick also includes a chapter on the musical, especially appropriate for a book on American Jewish theater, although his chapter is limited to Fiddler on the Roof, and two lesser-known musicals, Rags and Falsettos. All three musicals are unquestionably overt in their presentation of Jewish experiences, but the latter two seem somewhat arbitrary in their selection, considering the sheer enormity of musicals by Jewish writers and composers that have responded to questions of Jewishness through obvious or not-so-obvious portrayals. While Beyond the Golden Door mostly focuses upon the plays as they appear on the page, the dynamics of their performances on the stage is largely absent in Novick's discussion. To the student of...

Recent Works on Jewish American Modernism

Recent Works on Jewish American Modernism Sarah Ponichtera Stephen Fredman . A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001. 216 pp. Hana Wirth-Nesher . Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224 pp. Maeera Shreiber . Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007. 278 pp. Ranen Omer-Sherman . Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature. Brandeis University Press, 2002. 341 pp. The last few years have seen a renewal of interest in Jewish American modernism, a field that offers new ways to explore the Jewish experience in the United States. Though often lacking the presumed authenticity and connection to tradition characteristic of the first wave of immigrants, Jewish American modernists provide a window onto the Jewish community's mature and informed engagement with American culture. The majority of Jewish American writing in English was influenced by modernism for chronological reasons: by the time the vast immigrant waves of the 1880s had produced a generation of American-educated, financially secure, native speakers of English in the 1920s, modernism was on the rise in the United States. Even while influencing [End Page 116] Jewish American writers, however, the movement also opened itself to their influence. Proclaiming the obsolescence of traditional aesthetic modes and calling for a rethinking of the methods and aims of literature, modernism allowed American Jews to take an active role in shaping American literature. Modernism and Jewish culture share a number of proclivities: the experience of exile; a focus on scholarship; an international awareness, particularly reflected in the knowledge of foreign languages; an interest in linguistic play; and a concern with the proper role of the aesthetic in social life. Jewish American modernists, like other minority groups, often had a double consciousness with reference to these terms, and one can observe slippages between the modernist and Jewish understandings of these in their work. Louis Zukofsky, for example, the protégé of Ezra Pound, includes excerpts of Yiddish lullabies, images from Abraham Goldfaden's play Shulamis, and Yehoash's poetry in his first Imagist work, "Poem Beginning 'The'" (1927). Zukofsky thus engages in the modernist technique of employing multilingualism to bring a taste of the strange and incomprehensible to poetry, with the twist that far from being a foreign language, that which he includes is actually his own first language, in snatches remembered from his childhood. In this way, Zukofsky uses the modernist attraction to the foreign to integrate the Jewish experience into mainstream American literature. Recent critical works often draw on a theme such as language or exile, shared between American Jews and modernist thought, to structure a deeper exploration of Jewish American modernism. Two of the most notable of these works focus on the development of a particularly Jewish American language. Stephen Fredman seeks to recast our understanding of the Objectivists as Jewish poets whose Jewish consciousness made a material difference to their modernist aesthetic. Hana Wirth-Nesher establishes that the Jewish aspect of an English-language work can often be traced to an echo of a Jewish language in the text, based on her innovative reading of the paradigmatic Jewish American modernist Henry Roth, among others. Two other writers focus on the question of exile, and on how Jewish American writers conceptualized homeland and Diaspora. Maeera Shreiber investigates the role of exile in giving rise to poetry and prayer, and demonstrates how Jewish American poetry sustains a sense of estrangement in the face of pressure to subsume alienation in allegiance to a homeland. Ranen [End Page 117] Omer-Sherman looks at Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American poetry, and argues that this tension sheds important light on the development of a Jewish American aesthetic. Although the latter two writers do not concentrate specifically on modernism, their analyses of exile and poetry as particularly liberating forces owes much to modernist thought. Integrating their focus on communal and individual identity into the discussion of Jewish American modernism has the potential of yielding very fruitful results. Stephen Fredman's A Menorah for Athena (2001) argues compellingly for the importance of seeing Charles Reznikoff's work...

Transmitted Holocaust Trauma: A Matter of Myth and Fairy Tales?

This essay will examine the concept of third-generation trauma after the Holocaust and the ways in which Jewish American novelists seek to access, recreate and artistically represent (or 're-present') such a traumatic past that is by definition inaccessible. A striking feature in the novels by the latest generation of Jewish American writers – notably the work of Jonathan Safran Foer and Judy Budnitz – is the almost obsessive return to mythology and fairy tales in the literary recreation of their grandparents' era. My essay will argue that this is due to a commonality of purpose that characterizes and drives both mythology and fairy tales on the one hand, and the third generation's imaginative, postmemorial approach to the past on the other hand.

Exiles on main street: Jewish American writers and American literary culture

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Breathing Free in the New World: Transcendentalism and the Jewish Soul 1. Songs of a Semite: Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History 2. Ecstasies of the Credulous: Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl Part 2. Battling the Nativists: Mystics, Prophets, and Rebels in Interwar America 3. Pilgrim to a Forgotten Shrine: Ludwig Lewisohn and the Recovery of the Inner Jew 4. Modernist Flasks, Jewish Wine: Waldo Frank and the Immanence of God 5. Cinderella's Dybbuk: Anzia Yezierska as the Voice of Generations Part 3. Yiddish Interlude 6. From Heine to Whitman: The Yiddish Poets Come to America Part 4. Orating in New Yorkese: The Languages of Jewishness in Postwar America 7. My Private Orthodoxy: Alfred Kazin's Romantic Judaism 8. The Jewish Writer Flies at Twilight: Irving Howe and the Recovery of Yiddishkayt Conclusion Notes Index

Social semiotics and memory in contemporary Jewish American fiction

Despite being largely influenced by Israeli literature, contemporary Jewish American writers rarely draw upon Sephardic culture. This indicates a detachment from questions like the political ones Israeli writers emphasize, and points towards a tendency tofocus on the search for identity in a new country. The aim of this paper is to take a semiotic approach in examining this phenomenon from the standpoint of the Hebraism of American culture. I will take into account concepts of social semiotics to expand the analysis of discursive praxis, focusing also on extra and pre-textual elements. This will ultimately lead us to matters of memory, immigration, filiation and search for a national and cultural identity, which, in turn, must be seen from a historical viewpoint that cannot be set apart from discourse analysis itself.

Auschwitz (review)

Reviewed by: Auschwitz Tim Cole (bio) Angela Morgan Cutler . Auschwitz. Ullapool, Scotland: Two Ravens Press, 2008. Paper £9.99. ISBN 1906120188. In part, Angela Morgan Cutler's Auschwitz is an example of a recent genre that combines Holocaust travelogue with family history. Like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, Cutler seeks to uncover the places where family members lived and died. This search begins in Auschwitz, but ends up taking in Budapest, where her husband's grandmother lived, and the Blagovshschina Forest near Minsk, where she died. The journey begun in Auschwitz ends in Berlin with its Holocaust memorial and Jewish museum. Throughout, Cutler is interested in asking questions not only of her husband En's family's past, but also of Holocaust representation and memory in the present. The latter is a fairly well trodden path, with little new in Cutler's meditations on Holocaust tourism, or the possibilities and impossibilities of writing about Auschwitz. More interesting is one family's journey to (re)connect in some way with the lives of an Austro-Hungarian Jewish couple incarcerated in the Maly Trostinec camp and murdered in a nearby forest. When they reach this forest, En digs a hole and buries stones with messages written on them by family members, as well as a treasured doll from childhood. It is in many ways the end of their quest, and a symbolic burial of sorts for the grandparents En never knew. Alongside this story of travelling back to the Holocaust past comes another aspect to this intriguing book. Throughout, the text is interspersed with verbatim e-mails. These reveal Cutler's discussions with a variety of friends, but in particular with the Jewish-American writer Raymond Federman, himself a Holocaust survivor, who was hidden in a closet in their Paris apartment by his mother just before the rest of his family was taken to Auschwitz. Federman's story interweaves with the family story Cutler pursues, but he also becomes a critical friend in the process of writing Auschwitz. What is striking for someone rooted in fairly traditional academic writing practice is the extent of self-reflection on the act of writing integrated in the text. In particular, there is much on the dilemmas thrown up by writing Auschwitz. In one e-mail exchange, Federman claims that, "you cannot write about Auschwitz in a normal organized controlled way – it has to be a mess – the writing must be as obscene as Auschwitz was/is" (41). Elsewhere Cutler suggests that, "the only way to write this, as always, is to write digressively" (103). The place for messiness and digression in writing of this past and present is explored throughout the book. Not only are more familiar pages of descriptive [End Page 143] travelogue interspersed with e-mail correspondence setting up those journeys or Federman's comments on life and writing, but passages of prose are also broken up with a précis of a recent dream – or rather nightmare – that Cutler had. Through a combination of experimental form and intense self-reflection on the struggle of writing, Cutler offers both a story of journeying to Auschwitz, Budapest, Minsk, and Berlin as well as her own story as a writer engaged in trying to make sense of her husband's family's past and her own present. Although some may find the degree of self-reflective questioning potentially tiring or self-indulgent, it does, I think, challenge the ways in which those of us who are academics writing the Holocaust craft our narratives. In particular, it suggests the possibilities of laying bare the process of research and writing more clearly, as well as a greater degree of self-reflection upon constructing narratives of this past. However whilst reading, Auschwitz does, given the intimacy of e-mail exchange, mean that we get to know Cutler and Federman as much as we do the Holocaust stories they reflect on, there is one person who, in some ways, is almost missing from the text. This is En, Cutler's Jewish husband, who is a child of survivors, although he "hates the term Second Generation Holocaust Survivor" (313). He is only given to us through Cutler's authorial voice...

The Task of Memory: American Jewish Writers and the Complexities of Transmission

^% he origin of a story is always an remarks I the narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel H Everything Js Illuminated.1 At the heart of the quest _for stories resides a perceived emptiness, a haunt ing sense of incompletion that needs to be filled. It's a motivating absence, so much so that one finds in the literature by American Jewish writers an urgency to recapture the very essence of those experiences transformed by time and perceptual as well as spatial distance. And while it may be, as Nadine Fresco suggests in Remembering the Unknown, that finally One remembers only that one remembers nothing, the desire to return to the origins of the story is undefeated by time or distance, or even by the memory's treacherous imagination.2 Such an impulse to transmit memory characterizes American Jewish literature, from its immigrant roots, to those post-World War II Jewish writers who made claims not only to a land but to an

Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the 1980s; Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity; Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the 1980s; Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity; Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writings since the 1980s (review)

Reviewed by: Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writings since the 1980s Monica Osborne Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writings since the 1980s, by Janet Burstein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 264 pp. $45.00. By now Irving Howe's dire prediction of the death of Jewish literature has undergone its own death. The outpouring of Jewish fiction in recent years has unquestionably proven Howe wrong. Janet Burstein's insightful and engaging new book, Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the 1980s, is yet another important undertaking in debunking Howe's premature epitaph for Jewish American fiction. Remarking on the proliferation of literature by American Jews throughout the past three decades, Burstein contextualizes this literary explosion as part of a more recent Jewish American impulse to reconnect with the Jewish legacy of exile and trauma. Identifying the manner in which contemporary culture responds to its losses, "reconstructs memory of the Jewish past. . . and moves on" is central to Burstein's project, and launches her exploration of what she calls the "new wave" of Jewish American writing and reconnecting with the past "without hope of reviving it" (pp. xiii, 6, 13). The term "new wave," however, which Burstein applies to Jewish American literature after 1980, unfairly ignores the nuanced differences of the past three decades of Jewish American writing—subtleties that have prompted some to break a century of Jewish American writing into four segments: immigrant, assimilationist, writing that returns to Jewish ritual and loss, and more recently writing that explores the experiences of new Jewish immigrants to America. While Burstein notes that the term was first used in 1995 by Andrew Furman and in 1997 by Morris Dickstein and Thane Rosenbaum in Tikkun to describe the work generated by Jewish American writers of the eighties and nineties, she seems to ignore the obvious: the "new wave" is no longer new. Much like the Jewish identity, it has "split at the root," to use Adrienne Rich's phrase, maturing into a thriving subgenre that has birthed a fourth wave [End Page 173] of Jewish American writing with Russian immigrant authors including Gary Shteyngart and Laura Vapnyar, whose work looks more like the immigrant writing of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth, with socialist undertones in place of an urge to retrieve the remnants of Jewish ritual—all of whom Burstein leaves out with the exception of a footnote on Shtyengart. Nonetheless, Burstein's sections on Thane Rosenbaum and Aryeh Lev Stollman are exceptionally well-written and offer carefully articulated analyses of both writers' work. Important is the concept of home as "the site of our most desperate struggles—a struggle first to receive nurture and care, then to achieve independence, and finally to assume responsibility." She notes that for Stollman's young Alexander (The Far Euphrates, 1998), distance and separation are "essential elements of what we imagine home to be" from the womb forward (p. 108). Though critical in nature, Burstein's writing is articulate and imaginative in many instances. Vibrant imagery and provocative metaphors flourish in her writing. In her vision of new Jewish American writing second-generation "survivors" "stand closer to that center of radical destruction—like the crater left by a bomb—in which our dead, and much of the culture they created, are lost" (p. 7); Philip Roth's work exposes the "fault lines along which individual character breaks down" (p. 15); a sense of self becomes "a grave in which the past lies buried" (p. 43); what is left after atrocity are "shining, lethal shards" (p. 75); and Jewish losses become a "mirrored chamber in which contemporary experience identifies its precursors" (p. 177). But despite her noteworthy flair for insightful imagery, the project feels unfinished. For such an ambitious undertaking—the subtitle is, after all, "American Jewish Writings since the 1980s"—her treatment of recent Jewish American fiction is cursory at best, a marginal treatment of a burgeoning American literary phenomenon. Burstein omits references to important Jewish American writers including E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, and Ehud Havazelet, and newer writers of acclaim such as Nathan Englander, Dara Horn, Nomi Eve, and Tova Mirvis. Though Burstein would not be the first to ban...

Miriam Three

Miriam Three Helen Papell (bio) Monarch butterfly, migrant alone, knows it must paddle the wind above collectors of killed wings to reach a promised bush beyond the Rio Grande. I name the butterfly Miriam Two because there must be a chromosome bequeathing this dream. Other species drift their days near the cocoon that cast them. They ask nothing of the wind. My grandmother watched fire explode her house in a shtetle and like Miriam One followed smoke west to a dream. [End Page 49] Someone else's grandmother follows this Monarch butterfly. I name her Miriam Three as she and her children walk the stones of the Rio Grande, the sands of the Chihuahan Desert while people who stuff butterflies into jars wait for them. Helen Papell Helen Papell became a midrashist in 1947 when she taught in a one-room school in the Missouri Ozarks and the students asked "what is a Jew?" She is a retired librarian, storyteller and puppeteer who now catalogs books, as a volunteer, for a Jewish feminist library. She has published in a number of journals, most recently Heartlodge, Jewish Women's Literary Journal, Poetica, and Sambatyon, and is included in the anthologies Eternally Eve, Jewish-American Writers, Sarah's Daughters Sing and Which Lilith? She has published two collections, Caretaker's Mask and Talking with Eve Leah Hagar and Miriam, and is now engrossed in what will be a long-poem or a chapbook tentatively titled Laughing with Sarah. Copyright © 2007 Bridges Association