Jewish Writers Research Articles

A Jewish Construction of a Catholic Hero: David Levi's "A Pio IX"

Along with liberals and patriots, many Italian Jews rejoiced on June 16, 1846, when Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti was elected Pope Pius IX. They expected the new Pope to reform the Papal State and to favor Italy’s unification, the goal of the Risorgimento national movement. Italian Jews suffered from a lack of civil rights, to different degrees within each Italian State. Therefore, they saw the Risorgimento as an opportunity to overthrow the regimes ruling on the different Italian regions and consequently as a way to achieve full civil emancipation. Italian Jewish intellectuals built a rich narrative on their support for Risorgimento. Part of this narrative is the poem “A Pio IX” (To Pius IX), composed by the Jewish writer David Levi (1816–1898) in 1846 to honor Pio Nono. This paper presents an analysis of Levi’s poem on a number of levels: historically, it provides further literary evidence of the Jews’ desire to praise Pope Pius IX and of their support for Risorgimento; concerning its content, it investigates Levi’s striking use, along with the more secular symbolism of the Enlightenment, of Catholic and Christological symbolism.

‘Vienna Is Different: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Sicle to the Present

‘Vienna Is Different: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Sicle to the Present

Une approche exotique de la littérature russe juive

Since the emergence of a Russian- Jewish literature in the 1 860s, a great many debates have opposed the supporters of the existence of such a literature and others who, at best, considered that those books written in Russian by Jewish writers were of insufficient quality and could not be regarded as genuine literature, especially when compared to the "great" works of Russian literarure. The adoption of an exotic approach consists in considering Jewish-Russian literature as a triangular territory whose three apexes are the reader, the time and the society he or she lives in, and the Jewish world as a cultural entity. Those studies which use ethnic origin to determine whether a writer belongs to the Jewish-Russian literary tradition are not very convincing. Neither is the language used a satisfactory criterion. So, what remains is, as some American scholars advocate, to regard each text as an authentically exotic territory so as to discover to what extent it contains elements of Jewish culture. Studying the inner workings of these texts is rather like undertaking an expedition in an unfamiliar, exotic country.

The Jewish Vaccine against Mimetic Desire: A Girardian Exploration of a Sabbath Ritual

The Jewish Vaccine against Mimetic DesireA Girardian Exploration of a Sabbath Ritual Vanessa Avery (bio) In Violence and the Sacred (henceforth, V&S), Rene Girard remarks that when we think of siblings, we often think of affectionate relationships.1 He then proposes, however, that the stories that have come down to us through mythology and sacred scriptures often tell us otherwise. Warring siblings are embedded deeply in history, religion, and literature: Girard lists Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland as just a few examples of the fraternal rivalry in our collective consciousness. We might add the biblical Isaac and Ishmael and Joseph and his brothers to this list. The rivalries are so pervasive that Girard declares: “the theme itself is a form of violence.”2 In both V&S and I See Satan Fall like Lightning (I See Satan), Girard demonstrates how the biblical voice is groundbreaking in its exposure of mimesis and the sacrificial mechanism. Alongside this assertion, in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Things Hidden), Girard states: think it is possible to show that the texts of the Gospels manage to achieve what the Old Testament leaves incomplete. These texts therefore serve as an extension of [End Page 19] the Judaic bible, bringing to completion an enterprise that the Judaic bible did not take far enough, as Christian tradition has always maintained.3 The Hebrew Scriptures, however, are the writings of a religious community in their nascent state. They are the ideas and prescriptions that were only later to be formed into what we now call rabbinic Judaism. Jesus and the New Testament writers had the benefit of knowing these scriptures, and it is important to look at the Jewish writings that developed alongside the writing down of the New Testament as both Judaism and Christianity were maturing. The two religions were mutually influencing each other in this nascent stage, and this can be seen in many of the theological ideas that they were generating.4 Using both the Tanakh and the early rabbinic midrash, I will demonstrate in this essay that, contra Girard, ancient Judaism did indeed “reveal,” address, and even attempt to provide an antidote for mimetic rivalry. I will demonstrate this specifically through an analysis of Genesis 48, in which Jacob blesses his grandchildren Ephraim and Manasseh, and its corresponding ritual of the Birkat Ha-Banim (“Blessing of the Children”).5 Particularly because they are a sibling pair in the Book of Genesis, two sons of Joseph, the brothers Ephraim and Manasseh, are deserving of a Girardian analysis, although Girard does not offer one. These brothers are blessed by their grandfather, Jacob, as 2 of the future 12 tribes of Israel. But despite their historical import, these brothers play a very minor narrative role in Genesis. Indeed, after Jacob blesses them, the book ends (possibly because there is no conflict to drive the tale!). Ephraim and Manasseh are the only peaceful brothers we encounter in Genesis, and it may be no coincidence that they arrive on the scene at the tail end of this book; they do not engage in the mimetic competition of the brothers that came before them. Did Girard overlook this absence of rivalry? This, I assert, is precisely why this story is of Girardian import and needs to be addressed. Perhaps not coincidentally, these brothers also occupy a central role in Jewish ritual: Jews bless their children every week on the Sabbath, asking that God make their sons “like Ephraim and Manasseh.” This ritual, I propose, is the weekly Jewish vaccine used to keep mimetic inclinations in check. The structure of the Book of Genesis invites such a conclusion; the rabbinic explanations of Ephraim and Manasseh and the purpose of the Sabbath underscore it (as I will demonstrate). My ultimate goal is to determine to what extent this text and its ritual can really be effective in releasing humans from the sacrificial mentality. I will examine how it operates, on one hand, as sustenance for Jewish identity in particular; and, on the other hand, how it is intended to operate universally for the transformation of...

Carlos M. Grünberg's Circumcision of the Tongue

Carlos M. Grünberg's Circumcision of the Tongue Alan Astro (bio) Neo-Sephardim Seeking to naturalize their place in a former dominion of the Inquisition, in the first half of the twentieth century several Argentinean Jewish writers—Ashkenazi immigrants or sons of immigrants—began unearthing the vestiges of a Jewish presence in Spanish texts dating from before the expulsion of 1492. This strategy has occasionally earned them the label "neo-Sephardim," a concept promoted within Latin American Jewish studies by one of the field's founding scholars, Judith Laikin Elkin.1 These "neo-Sephardim" styled themselves as continuers of such Jewish or converso literary forbearers as Santob de Carrión, Fernando de Rojas, or even Miguel de Cervantes.2 The writer in this category best-known to English speakers is Alberto Gerchunoff, whose 1910 novel Los gauchos judíos [The Jewish Gauchos], a paean to Jewish agricultural settlement on the pampas, has become a veritable classic of Argentinean literature. Another writer who could be called neo-Sephardic is the poet Carlos M. Grünberg.3 Biographical Overview The son of an immigrant watchmaker from Jaffa, hailing from a Russian Jewish family long established in Palestine, Carlos M. Grünberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1903.4 Holding degrees in the humanities and in law, he made a living as a literature teacher and as a jurist. Though he collaborated on a treatise on estate law in 1930, Grünberg's greatest passions were poetry and Jewish rights, which he combined in a way that few writers in non-Jewish languages have managed. He began publishing works in the art pour l'art vein favored by the Buenos Aires literary group "Florida," far from the socially-committed writing employed by the contemporaneous "Boedo" circle of Argentine authors. Grünberg's work has received little public notoriety, despite the praise given him by no less a figure than Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinean master penned an enthusiastic preface to Grünberg's 1940 poetic volume Mester de [End Page 1] judería [Jewry's Art], the title of which plays upon the names of two medieval Spanish literary genres: the mester de clerecía [clergy's or scholar's art] and the mester de juglaría [minstrel's art.]5 The title suggests a desire to stake out a Jewish presence within the Spanish language and, by extension, in Argentinean society. Praise for the freedom granted Jews there abounds in the book, as do warnings of residual anti-Semitism gathering new strength from political developments in Europe at the time. In 1946, Grünberg published Narración de la Pascua, a version of the Passover Haggadah. The title, a literal rendering of Haggadah shel Pesach, reflects the unique status of the work as a modern, nearly verbatim translation of the Seder ceremonial; the major concession to Spanish usage is the addition of the verb "to be," which is lacking in the Hebrew present tense. The reproduction of Hebrew word-order in Spanish partakes of the neo-Sephardic texture of Grünberg's work by mirroring the language of Torah study in medieval Spain. In this same decade, Grünberg fulfilled another career wish, to become a diplomat, a wish stymied no doubt by the anti-Semitic and generally anti-progressive atmosphere reigning in the Argentinean Ministry of Foreign Relations. In 1948, the newly created State of Israel named Grünberg the liaison officer to the Argentine government, which had abstained from the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine. His efforts led to the establishment of relations between the two countries a year later. Though Grünberg continually published poems and essays, another volume of his work did not appear until 1965. Its title, Junto a un río de Babel [By a River of Babel], ironically echoes the biblical injunction not to forget Jerusalem, for the twin Zions in the author's life—Argentina and Israel—had shown themselves to be flawed, and recent Jewish history all too catastrophic. Some poems—"Ultratumba," "Testamento," "Codicilio," "Inmortalidad" ["Beyond the Grave," "Last Will," "Codicil," "Immortality"]—prefigure all too clearly the author's death three years later, in Buenos Aires. Onomastics The...

Memories (out) of place: Franco-Judeo-Algerian autobiographical writing, 1995–2010

This article examines the construction of memory through relation to lost Jewish places and spaces in Algeria in recent French-language autobiographical writing of Albert Bensoussan, Alice Cherki, Annie Cohen, Jean Cohen, Attica Guedj, Benjamin Stora and Daniel Timsit. Published between 1995 and 2010, these works represent a duel interrogation of memory through evocation of place: first, remembering the ways Jews carved out space for themselves at home, at school, in spaces of leisure and sacred spaces, second, where Jews situate themselves given the lack of Jewish presence in Algeria today, and the ways the community gets forgotten in its present-day exile in France and Israel. Jewish writers retrospectively relocate themselves to Algeria in an effort to maintain their position in between Algerian Muslims and pieds-noirs, forever attached to both, but reducible to neither.

Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948

In 1948 five books about World War II dominated the New York Times best-seller list; all were written by Jews and made Jewish soldiers their central protagonists. This essay focuses on the Jewish war novels of 1948 and their critical reception. Jewish writers argued in their novels that the Holocaust was a central, rather than an ancillary, aspect of the war experience. Other themes that Jewish war novelists took up included a focus on endemic antisemitism and racism in the military and the infusion of intellectualism into the figure of the ideal soldier-hero. Jewish authors wrote about the war in unique ways, and since their novels were best-sellers, they had a direct impact upon how postwar Americans understood the war effort.

Symposium: Jewishness, Pedagogy, and Multi-Ethnic Literature

For this special issue of MELUS, we asked four scholars to reflect briefly on their experiences of integrating the study of Jews and Jewishness into ethnic and American literature classes. In the responses that follow, they address pedagogical strategies they have used to teach Jewish American texts, authors, and ideas as part of a multi-ethnic curriculum as well as intellectual and institutional challenges posed by the incorporation of Jewishness into such courses. We hope this symposium spurs further conversations about how Jewish texts and contexts--and the rich debates they engender about identity and the nation, representation and marginalization, and cultural traditions and literary aesthetics--can shape the future study and teaching of American and ethnic American literature. --Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert Vitalizing the Still New World Elisa New Harvard University It is the beginning of December in Cambridge. Those students in my nineteenth-century American survey not yet suffering from an acute respiratory illness, seasonal affective disorder, or the aftereffects of the rugby season; those not facing impending graduate school deadlines; those who are still with me (having soldiered through Cooper and been converted by Stowe, having fallen in love either with Isabel Archer or Huck Finn, though usually not both)--these students now face, for their pains: Naturalism. As if the wind off the Charles weren't enough, Dreiser's Hurstwood turns on the gas. Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger (1916) lets bad things happen to good people. Frank Norris's McTeague murders his wife Trina in the kindergarten, the murder only a little more horrific than Trina's loss of her fingers to blood poisoning (the combined result of McTeague's violent and abusive chompings and the poisonous paint Trina uses to decorate Noah's Ark animals). Even students behind in the reading do get to see excerpts of Stroheim's Greed (1924), in which an undressed, ecstatic Trina rolls in a bed full of money. But they of course miss the connection the novel McTeague (1899) makes between Trina's quenchless desire for money and the twisted avarice of the book's Jewish character, the repellant Zerkow. If Zerkow is a singularly anti-Semitic character, it is also true that his vices, like Trina's and Mac's, are genetic, determined, and ineluctable. Just as American literature slips out of the grip of Calvin's Providence, it is ambushed by Darwin's and Spenser's. By the late nineteenth century marriage is a struggle of the fittest and the passions of youth are dangerous. frontier is closed; the city is corrupt; government is a machine. Gold reigns supreme. In Week 11 of my syllabus, the New World seems very old indeed. And then, in Week 12, comes Abraham Cahan. Cahan's Lower East Side of tenements and sweatshops is no less dirty and squalid than McTeague's San Francisco, but for all their struggles, Cahan's characters live again in a New World to which they bring wit and gusto, resourcefulness and, most of all, youth. Dancing, flirting, dating, meeting, and breaking up--Cahan's characters inhabit a modern New York, a young person's city, a place of possibility. Yes, shallow Yekl believes too completely that clothes make the man. Yes, he pins far too much faith on his command of slang and sports jargon, his dancing ability, and his robust physique. But as a single man in the city, unconstrained by parents or traditions, Yekl, who renames himself Jake, has a chance to seize what destiny his own gifts and cunning command. Even Jake's spurned wife, Gitl, rebounds from his rejection of her, finding not only a new husband to take Jake's place, but a smarter one, too. Turns out, Cahan shows us, in another story, The Imported Bridegroom, that brains are sexy. Turns out, the twentieth century's first major Jewish writer tells us, America still has some thinking, and waltzing, to do. …

Luke 2:22, Leviticus 12, and Parturient Impurity

Abstract In Luke 2:22 Luke attributes parturient impurity to both Mary and Jesus (and/or Joseph). Interpreters have often concluded that this verse demonstrates that Luke misunderstands the levitical legislation pertaining to childbirth impurity (Leviticus 12), which discusses only the impurity of the new mother. This article argues that, despite the apparent contradiction between Leviticus 12 and Luke 2, Luke has not misunderstood Jewish conceptions of impurity after birth. Not only is it possible to conclude that Leviticus 12 implicitly ascribes impurity to the newborn child, but some Second Temple Jewish writers, such as the authors of Jubilees and 4Q265, also believed that the newborn child suffered the same manner of impurity as the new mother. Luke’s gospel, therefore, demonstrates familiarity with contemporary Jewish purity beliefs and practices.

<i>Lokschen</i> and Isaac Rosenfeld's Jewish American Voice

Lokschen and Isaac Rosenfeld's Jewish American Voice Hana Wirth-Nesher In Isaac Rosenfeld's superb and complex story "The World of the Ceiling," a young Jewish intellectual, much like the author, finds himself aiming for an unhindered life of the mind while hampered by a mundane material world. "I was a very serious young man," writes the narrator, "interested only in philosophy and politics, with a way of wrinkling my face in thought which I had copied from a portrait of Hegel. I had no girlfriends, no frivolities; I had a Weltanschauung" (Shechner 367). Although he is well aware of the social snobberies and vices of the philosophers he emulates, he admits that he would prefer to pretend that the life of the mind, in his terms "the world of the ceiling," is an alternative for a man of his refined sensibility. When he tires of philosophizing indoors, he also has the extraordinary gift of being able to step out into the gritty New York streets and "walk right into a drift of snow in nineteenth century Russia" (368) as if he inhabited the landscape of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Dressed as a muzhik, he hears the jingle of a troika, and is witness to a heroic revolutionary act carried out by a "violently beautiful" Slavic woman "with dreadful black eyes and black hair" (369). Swept into the drama of youthful protest, he folds incendiary leaflets inside his coat, while a Cossack whip whistles over his head, only to discover that he has run into the side of a New York city laundry truck whose driver, "the Cossack," shouts, "Hey! Yu wanna get kilt?" (369). Forced to return to America, he writes, "It seems to me that I am in St. Petersburg, in a foreign city, in a foreign time, and the signs on the street and the shop windows, in large [End Page 109] English letters, Undertaker, Malted Milk, are in Russian, and in the old Russian, of the days of Nicholas" (370). It is not surprising that a young leftist Jewish intellectual of the 1950s would find nineteenth-century Russia as portrayed by its great novelists more alluring than the "ugly, narrow, crowded street in which we live, full of smoke and noise" (370). We also understand that German Enlightenment philosophy valorizing the spirit would appeal to the secular aspirations of a young Jewish writer, even if Hegel saw the Jew's insistence on corporeality as his eternal barrier to genuine engagement with the life of the mind. The romantic Cyrillic alphabet gives way to the lowly American English words, italicized as foreign to a Jewish intellectual, just as muzhik and troika are foreign, but more sympathetic than malted milk. The narrator, after all, has a weltanschauung, the sign of his continuing life on the ceiling. With these selected non-English words, Rosenfeld has pinpointed his speaker's location: first-generation American condescending to his immediate environment and longing for an idealized world of kultur. In short, his character has been set up for the inevitable fall enabled by the introduction of two other languages in this story, Yiddish and Chinese. He may sneer at the shop window ads in English, but given that his literary ambitions depend on his originality in English, he also sneers at would-be Americans who cannot master the language. Despite the fact that the Chinese launderer, with the Americanized name of George Lee, has "yet to speak an intelligible word of English" (370), he plans to use him to flaunt esoteric knowledge to his friends. The popularity of inexpensive Chinese food among Jewish Americans is legendary, and cleverly satirized several years later in Roth's "Defender of the Faith" when a telltale eggroll blows the cover of a Jewish soldier whose leave was granted to attend a Passover seder. Wanting to impress his friends by ordering an authentic Chinese dish rather than faux chop suey, the narrator of "The World of the Ceiling" asks George to write "real Chinese dishes" in Chinese characters on a slip of paper that he eventually hands to the waiter in Chinatown, dismissing the others at the table as "tourists." With visions of "ten-thousand-year-old...

Albert-Reiner Glaap (with assistance from Michael Heinze and Neil johnston) Jewish Facets of Contemporary Canadian Drama

ALBERT-REINER GLAAP (with assistance from Michael Heinze and Neil Johnstone) Jewish Facets of Contemporary Canadian Drama. Reflections: Literatures in English outside Britain and the USA. Vol. 18. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008. 183pp. is an encouraging development that today 105,000 Jews live in Germany again. [...] Jewish life has again become an integral part of our culture, and most people do not merely accept but greatly appreciate (1). In Jewish Facets of Contemporary Canadian Drama Albert-Reiner Glaap, emeritus professor of English at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, expands his academic oeuvre on the subject of Canadian and continues to advocate for Canadian plays on German stages. Yet, rather than an anthology of or a book of critical essays, Jewish Facets of Contemporary Canadian Drama is largely composed of overviews of a number of Canadian plays. The book is intended as an introduction of Canadian playwrights whose works are selected for their depictions of Jewish characters or themes, such as those that (even indirectly) invoke the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. It puts the spotlight on a specific sector of English-language Canadian drama: plays written by (primarily) Jewish authors that deal explicitly or obliquely with Judaism. Glaap has said in the past that a childhood event (witnessing the 1938 Night of Broken Glass) galvanized a life-long curiosity about Jewish culture. While this book may be similar in structure to his Voices from Canada (2003), it occupies a more personal position because it permits Glaap to home in on his particular appreciation of Jewish life and his celebration of its struggle, diversity and growth in both Canada and Germany. Through this book he identifies facets of Jewish thought that may be found within the polyphony of contemporary Canadian drama (8). Through artist statements drawn from a questionnaire sent to over twenty playwrights, and information obtained through personal interviews (previously unpublished) conducted by Professor Glaap in Canada with at least half of that number, each playwright, in his or her own words, help[s the reader] to gain an insight into Jewish facets of Canadian playwriting (9). The questionnaire asks the authors to position themselves as Canadians, and in relation to Jewish culture and religion in Canada. Dr. Glaap does not assess the plays mentioned, but filters his analysis of the works through the playwrights' personal negotiations with identity. Jewish Facets of Contemporary Canadian Drama contains information on 28 contemporary playwrights, including three of non-Jewish descent. Short essays on Jewish and Yiddish theatre in Canada by Judith Rudakoff and Dr. Glaap, respectively, establish a history and contextual background. Glaap also makes special note of Jewish playwrights in the 1970s and 1980s before turning to the 25 contemporary Jewish writers, among them Diana Flacks, David Gow, Mark Leiren-Young, Adam Pettle, Jason Sherman, Theresa Tova, and Irene N.Watts. Each playwright is introduced alphabetically with a brief biography followed by the playwrights' answers to the questionnaire (where applicable). These responses highlight the diversity of religious, social, and political thought found within this group of authors despite their being selected based on a specific theme. An overview of the playwrights' selected works then offers detailed descriptions of their plays that deal with Jewish themes or characters. This overview synthesizes the artists' answers to questions of Jewish identity with the themes found in their creative works. Finally, a list of plays by each author concludes their individual sections. An insert of Dr. Glaap's questionnaire accompanies the book. …

The Holocaust for Beginners: Yankev Glatshteyn's <i>Emil un Karl</i> and Other Wartime Works for Young American Yiddish Readers

Once a topic thought inappropriate for children, the Holocaust is now presented to them in a proliferation of undertakings: state-mandated educational programs beginning in elementary school, special exhibitions for young visitors in Holocaust museums, and the burgeoning genre of children's Holocaust literature, which now boasts hundreds of titles. (1) Long before Holocaust education was widely endorsed for young people, childhood had begun to figure strategically in the form of young protagonists in major works of Holocaust literature such as H. G. Adler's novel Panorama (1968), Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) (1959), and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965). (2) More recently, literary works engage childhood through provocative use of the idioms of storytelling for the young; for example, David Grossman's 1986 novel Ayen erekh: ahavah (See Under. Love) evokes children's literature, while Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) employs the juvenile genre of comics. The disparity between childhood, conceived as the age of innocence, and genocide, understood as the fundamental collapse of civil society, is a productive opening for the creation of avant-garde literary works on the Holocaust, including the occasional work of fiction for young readers, such as Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2005). A remarkable precedent for this confluence of the Holocaust, the sensibility of the child, and the literary avant-garde can be found in works written in the early 1940s by one of the leading modernist American Yiddish poets of the twentieth century, Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), especially his novel Emil un Karl (Emil and Karl) (1940). Written for young adult readers, Emil un Karl was published in New York only months after World War II had begun and more than a year before the United States entered the conflict. A pioneering work of Holocaust fiction, the novel comes from the pen of a major Jewish writer who achieved considerable acclaim for his postwar poetry on the Holocaust. And yet, the novel has merited only a passing reference in most Glatshteyn scholarship. (3) Emil un Karl and two shorter pieces on the Holocaust that Glatshteyn wrote for young readers during the war years are noteworthy on several counts. As early examples of Holocaust literature, these works engage an event that not only had yet to be given this name (or its Yiddish equivalent, khurbn) but also was still unfolding as these works were written and published, in contrast with postwar writing on the Holocaust. This distinction is especially telling with regard to the preponderance of children's literature on the subject. This literature has been written well after a master narrative of the Holocaust as a discrete historical event was established--a narrative distinct from the history of European anti-Semitism, the Nazi era, or World War II. Indeed, in America the Holocaust was not secured as a prominent fixture of the national moral landscape until several decades after the war. Moreover, as the Nazi-led mass murder of Europe's Jews, Roma, and other civilian populations took place far from the United States and bore no direct connection to the lives of most of its citizens, the Holocaust has been valued here as a paradigmatic event as well as a subject of importance in its own right. In this capacity, the Holocaust informs American public discussions of other genocides, both earlier (for example, of American Indians) and later (such as the ethnic cleansing operations in the Balkans), as well as an array of morally challenging issues, including the abortion rights debate, the AIDS pandemic, the nuclear arms race, animal rights, and world hunger. Glatshteyn's writings on the Holocaust for young readers are revealing as among the first attempts to engage Americans in this remote event of unrivaled enormity. The works are also noteworthy as some of Glatshteyn's earliest efforts to address the Holocaust, which loomed large in his postwar career as a poet, essayist, and editor. …

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera (review)

Reviewed by: Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera Joseph A. Domino Fight for Your Long Day. By Alex Kudera. Atticus Books, Kensington, MD. 2010. While Alex Kudera’s novel, Fight for Your Long Day, highlights the grave socio-economic injustices of a corrupt academic system, it is much more than a preachy manifesto. Cyrus Duffelman’s struggles are that of any of the economically repressed. But when college professors earn Wal-mart wages, it highlights a shocking disconnect between the hollow political rhetoric of the importance of education and the true reality. Cyrus inhabits a world of increasing impoverishment. This is the landscape of essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. It would be a cliché to call him a modern day Everyman. Cyrus is a real person with frailties, insecurities, yet with conviction and seriousness about what he does. He does represent a growing class of academic paupers in particular and the growing dominance of menial wages everywhere in America in general whether the work is menial or not. And, yet, it’s not little enough. Menial wages, that is. Another sad irony is that the adjunct is no lifetime indentured servant, but rather an endangered species as institutions of higher learning contemplate “satellite hookups and TVs in every classroom . . . with the finest Indian universities teaching virtual classes long-distance . . . The fifteen grand a year they were paying the graduate student [or adjunct] has become fifteen hundred for a hungrier South Asian” (207–208). Cyrus is doubly invisible. No one “sees” him—just as the adjunct inequity is on almost no one’s radar—and because Cyrus wields no power or status, he hopes not to be seen. He continues on not in hope of reward or changing the system, but in adherence to his own personal code of conduct, and he is his own harshest critic. Professor Kudera’s social criticism emerges from Cyrus’s quality of life conditions. Between classes, he kills time sitting in a train station, passing for one of the homeless ensconced there. Cyrus alternates between “ogling the ripe melons” of student Allison Silverman while anticipating a late-night tryst with said melons and contemplating Jewish writers in the 1920s who could smell Hitler and Stalin in the air. Cyrus knows enough to ask what kind of smell is in the air now? In our current educational environment, knowledge isn’t important; it may even be a rotting corpse which is perhaps what Cyrus smells. Despite his external invisibility, his inner hamster [End Page 184] wheel is always turning. The time-worn expression “life of the mind” becomes the “life of the grind.” So, ultimately, Cyrus’s fight is for his own standards and integrity in the face of humiliation and futility, a daily quest for survival and the strength to endure. In our “anti-progressive” age, Cyrus is emblematic of a devolving system: the itinerant medieval scholar traveling from one fiefdom to the next in tatters, hoping for a meal or bauble. If only adjuncts read this book, they would nod and commiserate; as a work of fiction, strongly rooted in social criticism, the general public needs in on it, for one, the parents paying skyrocketing tuition costs, because they should know where the money is going. And it is certainly not in the pockets of the Cyrus Duffelmans of academia. Joseph A. Domino Palm Beach State College Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Targum of Lamentations (review)

The Targum of Lamentations. Translated, with a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes by Philip S. Alexander. [The Aramaic Bible, Vol. 17B.] (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. 2008. Pp. xvi, 224. $99.95. ISBN 978-0814-65864-2.) Targum Lamentations contains fewer than 2900 words across five chapters. Despite this brevity, Philip Alexander's thoughtful and thorough study begins with 100 pages of introduction followed by 100 pages of translation and commentary. The volume's centerpiece is, of course, the translation, on which the commentary and the introduction depend, and it accurately reflects the Aramaic's meaning with a high degree of precision. Alexander has an ear not only for the Aramaic's meaning but also for conveying that meaning in an English style that is literal while remaining clear and expressive. When nuances cannot be captured in the English, they appear in the notes. Alexander translates Targum Lamentations' Western recension, which provided the foundation for the later Yemenite recension, as recent scholarship has demonstrated. Unfortunately, he translates the unpublished manuscript Heb. 110 of Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale. The best available Western text to use with Alexander's translation is Urbinus Hebr. 1 from the Vatican Library, which appears in Christian Brady's The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations (Leiden, 2003), alongside Brady's own translation. Sperber 's readily available text (in volume 4a of The Bible in Aramaic [Leiden, 1968]) should be avoided, since it constitutes an idiosyncratic combination of a Yemenite manuscript with selections from Bomberg's second Rabbinic Bible. The commentary constitutes a model of the tradition-history approach to the analysis of Jewish texts and takes up most of the book's second half. Beginning with close attention to the lexical meaning of each word, Alexander then considers the interpretation conveyed through inner-scriptural exegesis (both in the Hebrew text and other Targums), which conveys nuances and connections of the Targum with the Hebrew Bible. Beyond that, Alexander's remarks range across comparisons with rabbinic literature; the Dead Sea Scrolls; other ancient translations such as the Septuagint, Peshitta, and Vulgate; as well as medieval Jewish writers such as Saadya Gaon. Comparison with the rabbinic midrash Lamentations Rabbah rightly receives most attention. The volume's critical introduction fulfills the same purpose as it does in the other Aramaic Bible volumes. But rather than slavishly reiterate previous scholarship, Alexander pushes the envelope, bringing in not only the best of the past but also putting together well-argued and solidly founded new proposals. Although he readily addresses textual, dating, and linguistic matters, Alexander's primary interests stand out in the explorations of the theological, liturgical, and literary character and context of Targum Lamentations; he believes, along with Brady, that it was composed as a single, unified work. …

The Signs of the Messiah ('Otot Hamashiach) and Jewish Apocalypticism

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