Sholem Aleichem Research Articles

Coming to America: The Reception of Sepharad and Ashkenaz in America

WHETHER EXCEPTIONAL OR NOT, American Jewish history is full of extraordinary moments, personalities, and motifs. The relatively late arrival of European Jewish historians to this realization, Salo Baron excepting, cannot and should not obscure the richness of the Jewish experience in the United States. It is to the credit of the towering figure of twentieth-century American Jewish historiography, Jacob Rader Marcus, that a vast array of source materials has been available to generations of researchers, who have drawn on them to convey that richness with ever-expanding nuance and sophistication.One of the characteristic features of Marcus's worldview, his four-part periodization of American Jewish history, has not necessarily stood the test of time. In 1958, Marcus delivered his presidential address to the American Jewish Historical Society in which he identified the following periods of American Jewish life: (1) the Sephardic Age (1654-1840); (2) the German Age (1841-1920); (3) the (concurrent) Eastern European Age (1852-1920); and (4) the American Age (1920- ). It was the last that spawned ''a homo novus, the American Jew''-fully at home in his country and assimilated into its cultural norms.There is an upward, teleological arc to this narrative that rises from the travails of immigration to the security of America, as well as from the varieties of cultural difference to the prospect of social compatibility with the American world. Marcus's scheme implies a unidirectional process of cultural reformation in two regards: in temporal terms, each phase effectively superseded the preceding one; and spatially, arrival in America, especially by the final phase, meant that lingering native cultures would soon wane.Recent scholarship has agitated for a more dynamic understanding of the social field in which Jews in the United States have operated. This scholarship has expanded and rethought the borders of Jewish cultural activity, arguing that the vectors move in multiple directions-not only from Europe or the Middle East to America but in the other direction as well. In recognition of the vitality of research in the field, this issue of JQR is devoted to differing facets of the American Jewish experience. The essays collected here, some from recognized experts in American Jewish history and others from those better known in other areas of scholarship, demonstrate that the creation of an American homo novus was not simply-or at all-a matter of leaving behind old cultural traces but rather a case of the often uneasy coexistence of competing cultural sensibilities into the twentieth century.The first essay, Aviva Ben-Ur's ''Kabbalistic Pharmacopoeia,'' does the service of expanding our angle of historical vision from the United States per se to the Atlantic at large. Ben-Ur follows the career of a fascinating book held in the Katz Center library, Ta'alumot h. okhmah. Composed over the course of 150 years in multiple languages and countries, the text is a repository of medical, folk, and culinary practices, with a persistent kabbalistic theme overall. It contains remedies, receipts, and transport documents revealing a journey that crisscrossed the Americas (and Europe) and reminds us that the commonly denominated ''America''- that is, the United States-was part of a much larger cultural ecosystem.The next essay, Ber Kotlerman's ''Going through the Seven Circles of Hell,'' shifts our focus back to U.S. shores and to one of the most prominent forms of American culture: film. The allure of film for American Jews, and recent immigrants among them in the early twentieth century, is well known. Far less well known is the allure of film for the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, who was, an earlier biographer noted, ''a big admirer and trembling worshiper of the cinema.'' This passion even prompted Sholem Aleichem to try his hand at writing a script in 1915 in Yiddish, which he brought with him to America in the hope of having it produced. …

A Woman's Word: Sholem Aleichem's “Genz”

Sholem Aleichem's Genz (Geese; 1902) is the monologue of Basia, a trader of geese, who unfolds before her silent listener—a man, apparently a writer—the hardships of her vocation. It is not the gem that she promises to tell, but rather a twisted account with countless detours and digressions. Neither is it, however, a stream of associations generated by a loquacious woman's unruly tongue. The monologue, exuberant until it becomes ferocious, is a farce of fictional storytelling, of literature as a refined and edifying endeavor: a grotesque performance poking fun at the writer-listener, whose bookish language and concepts of the proper have never brushed against the realities of everyday life. Postponing her promised story in order to deliver what appears as a heap of petty anecdotes and guff, Basia produces in her monologue something of her reality—of the suspensions that govern Jewish women's lives and of the compromised language of those who are enmeshed in the web of worldly affairs. Genz, the raging and vengeful soliloquy, is an attempt to subvert gender hierarchies as they manifest themselves in language by a woman who recognizes her irrevocable exclusion from the sources of symbolic capital.

Salvage Poetics in <em>See Under: Love</em>: Momik, Mottel and a Yiddish Post-Vernacular in Israeli Literature

David Grossman’s Hebrew novel, See Under: Love (1986) serves as a model for how Yiddish functions as a post-vernacular language in modern Hebrew literature. While many readers have noticed the skill with which Grossman mimetically represents the Yiddish-inflected Hebrew of some characters in See Under: Love, Grossman mostly sidesteps Yiddish as an actual language within his novel. The focus here is on how Grossman approximates Yiddish through two primary models of salvage poetics, a term I have coined to refer to the ways in which iconic literary styles and or specific literary texts are mobilized by contemporary post-Holocaust communities in order to approximate a world in the aftermath of its destruction. Salvage poetics become evident in Grossman’s deployment of Sholem Aleichem’s Motel Paysie dem ḥazen’s as well as in his representation of Anshel Wasserman’s “Children of the Heart” stories where a pre-vernacular, literary, European-based Hebrew is employed in order to invoke an East European Yiddish-speaking milieu.

Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing

This essay seeks to demonstrate how the spoken language became a central feature of modern Yiddish literature. This vocal strain was used at first to replace otherworldly with enlightened discourse, esoteric book culture with colloquial style, hackneyed phraseology with straight talk, and Hasidic speech with parody. Not until 1864–66, however, did the new orality enter its second phase, when the Hebrew writer Shalom-Yankev Abramovitsh fashioned an autonomous Yiddish-speaking voice and manipulated the Jewish textual tradition at will. Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz further developed the new orality by introducing gendered speech and professional argot, creating in turn a Yiddish of the common man, woman, and child and a Yiddish Sublime. In the next phase, two verbal artists, Eliezer Shteynbarg and Itzik Manger, perfected a single, minor speech genre that was performable, accessible, and sophisticated at the same time. Shteynbarg's Mesholim (Fables; 1932) and Manger's Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems; 1935) created a sovereign space for spoken Yiddish where all communication occurred in the mother tongue. Even while the oral-based writings of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz were enjoying extraordinary popularity in the major urban centers of North America, new dialects of spoken and written Yiddish came into being there: this new vocal strain ranged from Yiddish humor magazines to the Yiddish American polyphony of Jacob Glatstein's Yidishtaytshn (Yiddishmeanings; 1937). After the destruction of European Jewry, Glatstein, Yitskhok Bashevis Singer, and Aaron Zeitlin made the monologue into a vehicle of inner-cultural dialogue. As if to compensate for the ever-dwindling number of Yiddish speakers, professional actors, notably Hertz Grossbard, turned the written-as-spoken classics of modern Yiddish literature into performance art, so as to capture and commemorate the language. The representation of speech in modern Yiddish writing was not ethnography but the replacement of the old with a new orality, and it happened in five phases. By the final, post-Holocaust phase, the vocal strain moved from the periphery to the center of Yiddish literary culture, becoming “Jewspeak,” an essential expression of the once-living folk.

Conceptions of Time and History in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Train Stories

The train had a remarkable and meaningful role in the process of modernization and secularization within European Jewish society during the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, this central role is reflected in the literature of the period, in what I would like to call “the train genre.” This essay examines the role of the train in three works by prominent Jewish writers: S.Y. Abramovitsh's “Shem ve-Yefet ba-agala” [“Shem and Japheth on the Train”], Sholem Aleichem's Di ayznbangeshikhtes [The Railroad Stories], and Shmuel Yosef Agnon's “Bi-kronin shel rakevet” [“In the Railroad Car”]. All three writers use the train to represent a common experience in pre-World War I Eastern Europe. However, Agnon, who published his story decades later, assumed that his audience would be unfamiliar with this experience and even with the language of his protagonists. This distance both in time and in language suggests that Agnon's story should be read as a retrospective look at the experience with which the earlier works deal. The essay traces the transformations of the train as a symbol of modernity and shows how Agnon uses a different mechanism to reconstruct the symbolic role of the train against the collective post-World War II memory that had come to associate it with the Holocaust. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” provides a theoretical tool that captures the unique characteristics of the use of time and temporality in the Jewish train genre. The speeding train and the interior of the railcars symbolize the conflict between dynamic changes and timeless space. These stories reflect the ambivalence that Jews felt toward the rapid changes of modernity and their dilemma about whether to take part in this process or to remain outside of it. Moreover, the theme of the train allowed Jewish writers to counter old and new understandings of causality and historical processes. These changes were represented both in the narrative content and in the structure of these works.

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon (review)

WONDER OF WONDERS: A CULTURA L HISTORY OF FIDDLER ON THE ROOF By Alisa Solomon. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. 448 pp.This year marks the 50th anniversary of the phenomenon that is Fiddler on the Roof. Since its first Broadway production in 1964, Fiddler has seen dozens of iterations, several of which are the subject of Alisa Solomon's new book, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. In it she traces the cultural history of Tevye and his daughters from the original Yiddish stories by Sholem Aleichem, to the making of the musical directed by Jerome Robbins, to the 1971 movie staring the Israeli Chiam Topol in the role of Tevye, stopping along the way to discuss a more contemporary amateur production in Poland, as well as the racially and ethnically fraught 1968 Brownsville, Brooklyn performance starring black and Hispanic middle school students. Solomon uses these productions to demonstrate how Tevye the milkman became a cultural icon and why Fiddler on the Roof has managed to speak to disparate communities in the throes of cultural transition.What weaves Solomon's chapters together is her well-articulated idea that the musical is not only a story about adaptation and survival, but also that the show itself is a beacon of the adaptive process. Solomon explains, for example, that while the escapist approach taken up by the Broadway musical offered a postwar audience a palatable and relatable Jewishness, the 1971 film, in the wake of changes taking place in America that demanded direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues, was made to focus on the violence of the story and evoke the imagery and emotions connected with the Holocaust. What is more, Solomon shows that Fiddler's staying power and world-wide popularity has as much to do with its universal themes-generational conflict, communal cohesion and breakdown, tradition-as it does its catchy tunes. She devotes two chapters to foreign productions: the Hebrew-language production which starred Topol for several years, whose robust, sabra-infused performance, Solomon asserts, allowed an Israeli audience to view the once disdained Eastern European Jewish past of persecution with respect, while still maintaining national pride; and an open air production in Poland, which treated the musical as both a Jewish historical document and as a vehicle that would allow Poles to address and commemorate their absent Jewish communities.At times, especially in the early chapters of the book, which are stuffed with behind-the-scenes details culled from various interviews, letters, and memoirs, Solomon tends to mythologize the making of the Broadway musical itself, in much the same way that the Broadway musical helped to mythologize the Eastern European shtetl. …

Rolling in Dust: Maurice Schwartz's Tevye (1939) And Its Ambiguities

The American Yiddish film Tevye (1939), produced, directed, written by and starring Maurice Schwartz, has been discussed solely in relation to its source—Sholem Aleichem's famed cycle of stories—and the history of its adaptations. Moving from the question of adaptation to that of intertextuality and cultural continuity, this essay argues that the film ought to be recognized as a seminally subversive work and a contradictory visual text, whose indebtedness to the Yiddish classic is surpassed by its internal complexity. Positioning the film within the network of intersecting influences, cinematic, theatrical, and literary, the essay shows that in Tevye , the patriarchal character becomes the platform for a turning point in the Jewish intellectual psyche on the eve of the Holocaust, marked by a sense of tortured ambivalence toward the traditional Jewish world to which American Yiddish artists and intellectuals felt compelled to return. By suggesting that the film was a response to Yankev Glatstein's seminal poem, "Good Night, World," the essay begins to (re)construct the engagement between Yiddish cinema and literature and their formation of a new historical moment out of the mixture of intellectual and artistic anxieties.

The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

The Stakes in Holocaust Representation: On Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Despite its unalterable march into past history, the Holocaust remains an object of fascination to contemporary novelists and filmmakers as well as to the public. Along with works that are recognized as enduring masterpieces (Lanzmann's Sboah, David Grossman's See Under: Love, Kertesz's Fatelessness), this fascination has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of films and novels that deserve to be forgotten quickly. In the wide terrain between these two extremes, one finds a small number of works that have enjoyed worldwide success even while provoking passionate critical debates: what some viewers or readers consider as an important artistic achievement, others consider as a piece of commercial marketing with no artistic merit, or maybe even as an insult to civilized values. Jonathan Littell's 2006 novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), featuring a former Nazi as first-person narrator, was extolled by some extremely distinguished critics and received two major literary prizes in France before becoming an international publishing phenomenon, but it was also trashed by other, equally distinguished readers. Similarly divided opinions greeted Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1994), Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), and most recently Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Such contested works--we could call them crisis works or weathervanes--point to unresolved ethical and aesthetic issues concerning representations of the Holocaust. can or should be shown or told in a work of art dealing with a historic event that has been called unrepresentable? Even more importantly, what can or should not be shown or told? When Schindler's List first came out, a number of commentators--foremost among them Claude Lanzmann--expressed outrage at the sequence where a group of women deported to Auschwitz are shown naked, entering a room that looks as if it could be a gas chamber. Such a representation is, according to Lanzmann, positively obscene--not to be shown. (1) By showing it, Lanzmann contended, Spielberg had committed both an artistic sin of bad taste and a grave ethical lapse, even if the room in question turned out to be an actual shower room, not a gas chamber. If the question raised by Schindler's List was What can be shown? then the question raised by Benigni's Life Is Beautiful was How should it be shown? Negative criticisms of that film emphasized its unrealistic way of depicting the concentration camp where Guido and his son are imprisoned: the camp looked too manicured, not at all like the real thing. And whoever heard of a Jewish inmate who succeeded in keeping his young child hidden for weeks or months in a Nazi concentration camp? Such criticisms focused on the criterion of historical authenticity--and once again, the issue was both ethical and aesthetic. Those who criticized this aspect of the film maintained that it is ethically reprehensible to go against historical facts in representing the Holocaust. The other, related theoretical issue concerned humor: Was humor, and the comic in general, an acceptable mode for treating this most serious subject? Those who defended Benigni's film declared not only that the artistic imagination must brook no limits, including that of factuality, but that comedy could be a powerful means of expression, even about the Holocaust. The eminent specialist of Holocaust literature Sidra Ezrahi argued that since Benigni presented the film from the start as a fable, it should be interpreted as a comic counterfactual story, a kind of Purimspiel that presented a meliorative version of history and that should not be interpreted with dead-minded literalism. Ezrahi saw in Benigni's film--as well as in several other comic representations of the Shoah, such as Radu Mihaileanu's film Train of Life (also from 1997) or Jurek Becker's novel Jakob the Liar (1969)--a continuation of the tradition of Jewish humor that one finds in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, for example. …

A pragmatic and idiomatic Yiddish substrate of Modern Hebrew: insights from translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye

The article addresses the socio-linguistics and the socio-cultural process of the way in which the Yiddish pragmatic and idiomatic substrate has become increasingly visible in Modern Israeli Hebrew speech and literature. It does so by comparing two translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye der milchiker : that of Y. D. Berkovich (1959), and the new translation by D. Miron The complete Tevye the dairyman (2009). Miron aims to bridge the language and culture gap between the Modern Hebrew reader and the current, highly-literary authorized translation by Berkovich. My main thesis is that Miron's success in bringing the text closer to the Hebrew reader is the result of the fact that Modern Hebrew, especially colloquial Hebrew, is soaked with Yiddish utterances and echoes some traits of Yiddish folk discourse. The article thus sheds light on the complex twofold pragmatic and idiomatic aspects of the contact between the two languages.

The return of Menachem Mendel: Sholem Aleichem as a political commentator

The article analyses historical, political and ideological aspects of Sholem Aleichem's collection of political feuilletons, Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom (Menachem Mendel. The second volume). The feuilletons were published in the newspaper Haynt (Today) in Warsaw in 1913. They were written as correspondence between the famous personages of Sholem Aleichem's prose, Menachem Mendel and his wife Sheyne Sheyndl. Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom presents a wide panoramic view of the political and everyday life of Russian Jewry on the eve of the First World War. Sholem Aleichem described many aspects and events of world, and of Russian and Russian-Jewish politics, among them the Balkan Wars, the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna, Jewish emigration, the Jewish question in the imperial Russian State Duma, expulsion of Jews from villages in the Russian Empire, the territorialist movement and the struggle between Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1913, Russian Jews were, on the one hand, an oppressed minority locked in the Pale of Settlement, but on the other a real subject of Russian and world politics, involved with political parties and civil movements, newspapers, leaders, congresses and the like. Within Sholem Aleichem's final half-fictional half-journalistic work a complicated collective portrait of Russian Jews emerges.

On Dunn’s <em>The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz</em>: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post‐War Britain

On Dunn's The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain. By Anthony J. Dunn. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2013. 266 pp., ISBN 978-0-85303-865-8 (hc). US $75.95.In a recent edition of the New Yorker (December 17, 2012), John Lahr writes a review of the recent revival of Clifford Odets's 1937 play Golden Boy, on the New York stage. The review can be read as Lahr's call for the reappraisal of Odets's position in the canon of twentieth-century American playwrights. Now, in the UK, we have Anthony Dunn's The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz, which attempts much the same thing for its subject in relation to postwar London writing. Wolf Mankowitz, like Odets, was Jewish, affiliated with the Left, and took a foray-in his case more than a foray-into the world of popular entertainment. From the mid-1950s to early 1960s-the peak of his career-Mankowitz steered a remarkably successful course between art and showbiz. As he put it, he looked up and down Piccadilly . . . stopping for material at the slightly heart-warm townships between O'Henry and Damon Runyan in the Far West and Sholem Aleichem in the Far (197).So who was Wolf Mankowitz? For many of his generation, this boy wonder from the wrong side of the tracks (namely, the environs of Fashion Street, Commercial Street, and Brick Lane) came to epitomize the London Jewish writer-impresario. In his heyday Mankowitz enjoyed enormous success with his novellas, plays, films, and TV dramas. Most famous perhaps was Mankowitz's evocation of a modern-day London shtetl, encompassing both the Jewish East End (The Bespoke Overcoat) and the Jewish West End (Expresso Bongo). All of the regulars were there: the nebbish, the mensch, the shmendrick, the shmuck, the fershtinkener, the gonif, the zaydeh, the shneider, the shiksa. Here was a world of tailors, wrestlers, crooked antique dealers, promoters, strippers-all with heaps of salt beef and pickle. He also wrote the initial draftof the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and contributed to the spoof version of Casino Royale (1967).It is interesting to contrast the writing of Mankowitz with that of another London Jewish writer, one also associated with the Royal Court at the time, Arnold Wesker. Like the prewar Odets, Wesker depicts a Jewish London defined by social realism. Mankowitz belongs to an altogether different tradition-that of the Jewish spieler. This is the narrative world of the parable, the myth, the UK equivalent of the Borscht Belt comic writers working on the other side of the Atlantic at the same time. Many of them went on to Hollywood careers, and so did Mankowitz, if not too successfully. Typical of his cross-Atlantic hits was a lifeless adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess (Anthony Asquith, 1960) with Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers.His lack of success in Hollywood, however, should not detract from his UK success, which was considerable: TV and stage productions with Orson Welles (including a West End production of Moby Dick-Rehearsed), co-productions at the Royal Court (including Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera), a hit screen adaptation of his book, A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed, 1955), an Oscarwinning short film adaptation of his play, The Bespoke Overcoat ( Jack Clayton, 1956), and a hit screen adaptation of his musical, Expresso Bongo (Val Guest, 1959). …

Lokschen and Isaac Rosenfeld's Jewish American Voice

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

Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination Michael P. Kramer Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, by Nora L. Rubel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 207 pp. $24.50. In "The Observant Reader," her brief, polemical 2005 New York Times Book Review essay, Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty (1999), called several prominent Jewish American novelists to task for their "unflattering" portrayals of Orthodox Jews (and in particular of ultra-Orthodox Jews) and asked wistfully why there were so few positive religiously observant characters in contemporary Jewish fiction. Curiously, Nora Rubel mentions Shalit's essay only on the very last page of her slim monograph, though she engages the same phenomenon (more expansively, to be sure) and asks more or less the same question. Noting an upsurge in ultra-Orthodox characters in literature, film, and television since the mid-80s, and remarking that these mostly negative [End Page 158] portrayals coincide with the much-touted revival of observant Judaism in America (of which Shalit was a part), Rubel wonders at what seems to be the simultaneous attraction and revulsion of mainstream American Jewry toward the ultra-Orthodox, concluding that American Jews are deeply ambivalent about haredim—and about themselves. Beginning with a desultory sketch of ultra-Orthodoxy, Rubel follows with "a historical introduction to twentieth century Jewish American fiction and its engagement with Orthodoxy" (p. 20) in which she identifies three stages: first-generation fiction, in which Orthodoxy represents an imposing Old World; second generation writing, in which Orthodoxy's role is negligible, and the contemporary scene that is her major focus. She then proceeds to engage the primary texts of her study, organizing these too into three categories, each of which is allotted its own chapter. Each chapter is sprinkled with glimpses of numerous narratives (mostly novels and stories, but also a number of films and television shows) and assorted other documents (news accounts, opinion pieces, etc.) but centers on two selected works that serve as primary examples of the category. The first category comprises narratives in which ultra-Orthodoxy is questioned, focusing on Erich Segal's Acts of Faith (1992) and Pearl Abraham's The Romance Reader (1995), both apostasy narratives in which formerly haredi characters leave the fold. In the second, Orthodoxy is violently rejected: her choices here are Naomi Ragen's Sotah (1993) and Boaz Yakin's 1998 film, A Price Above Rubies, captivity narratives in which women find themselves imprisoned within the gothic, patriarchal world of the haredim. The third category consists of narratives in which more or less acculturated Jewish American parents are confronted with the haredization of their children. Her major examples: Anne Roiphe's Lovingkindness (1987) and Tova Mirvis's The Outside World (2004). Together, the chapters deliberately form (we are told) a trajectory of questioning, rejection, and coming to terms, underscoring the author's hope for eventual reconciliation, a hope belied by the chronology of the works examined. Rubel is to be commended for turning the spotlight on the ultra-Orthodox and for taking their place in the contemporary Jewish American imagination seriously. But those familiar with the contemporary haredi world or with previous works such as Sam Freedman's Jew vs. Jew will find here little that is new. To be sure, Rubel's contribution lies primarily in her literary focus, but it is hard to say what that focus adds: indeed, those acquainted with her primary materials will find little that is revelatory in Rubel's readings and may even find them reductive. Students of Jewish literary history may judge some of her generalizations imprecise and ill-advised: the lumping together, say, of Fiddler on the Roof, Sholem Aleichem, and I. B. Singer as sources of "storybook shtetl [End Page 159] images" (p. 24), or of Philip Roth, Herman Wouk, and Saul Bellow as writers who address "an already acculturated American Jewry encountering the alienation of the suburbs" (p. 31). Some may wonder why the author devotes a whole chapter to the gothic distortions of Sotah and Rubies, say, and ignores writers who treat contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy more benevolently, such as Risa Miller, Ruchama King...

From continuity to contiguity: toward a new Jewish literary thinking

Dan Miron-widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures-begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

An Odessa Odyssey: Vladimir Jabotinsky‘sThe Five

Vladimir (later known as Ze'ev) Jabotinsky is remembered today largely for his Zionism, but in his younger years he had gained recognition for his literary career, which he never entirely abandoned. His final novel,The Five(1936), written in Russian long after he had left his native country, depicts Jewish life in his native Odessa at the beginning of the twentieth century. The novel contains two main narrative lines. One involves a paean to the Odessa of Jabotinsky's youth—to its vibrancy, its physical charms, and even its peculiar dialect of Russian. The other chronicles the decline of a family, through the fates of its five children, as well as of an entire way of life, in a manner reminiscent of that employed by Sholem Aleichem inTevye the Dairyman.The chief link between these outwardly disparate and even opposing lines is the semi-autobiographical narrator, a figure who has heretofore received less attention than deserved. In this analysis by Barry P. Scherr, the narrator appears not only to unify the fragmentary elements of the work but also, through his Zionism, to suggest a way out of the malaise that afflicted many of his contemporaries.

Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics by David Grossman, Jessica Cohen

3 I1 Even Gioia's insistence that i cool, without themodern term, is [ a very recent concept can be ques i tioned. He mentions Castiglione's [ The Courtier as perhaps a singular 1 anticipation of the cool, ignoring , or ignorant of Restoration Comedy 1 heroes of Etherege and Congreve or i Algernon Moncrieff or any number ' of characters, real and fictional, who i form thedandy tradition, which the [ reallyhip continued inodd ways. Ted Gioia maintains that irony , isdead or at least out of fashion,but 1 an ironistwill findplenty of targets i in a society so dedicated to the real 1 and authenticity that faking these i qualities becomes obligatory. [ Robert Murray Davis i University ofOklahoma I> David Grossman.Writing intheDark: i Essays on Literature and Politics. 1 Jessica Cohen, tr. New York. Picador i /Macmillan. 2009. 144 pages. $14.| isbn 978-0-312-42860-0 [ "Ever since knowing I would be i an author, I knew I would write , about the Holocaust," remembers 1 David Grossman. "I think these two convictions came tome at the same time."These comments by thenoted Israeli novelist, born in 1954 in Jeru salem, quickly blossom not only intoa prism specifically forviewing his own expansive, powerful novels such as See Under: Love and BeMy Knife but also into a meditation on the relationship between art and politics in general. Fundamental to Grossman's concern with the Holo caust is the attempt to understand what motivates "Others," and this effort includes painstakingly view ing himself in other historical set tings and personal circumstances. This leads the author to ask very difficult questions of himself, his country, and all of us. There have been almost as many artistic credos as there have been great artists over the centu ries,and many of thesedeclarations have made a claim for thepolitical relevance of literature. But Gross man's is one of themost poignant and unique that this reviewer has ever encountered. Moving from the Holocaust, through environmental issues and the nature ofmass media, to Israel's domestic and regional concerns, Grossman lays bare the = human fear of the unknown heart = and mind of the Other. He then E argues that literature aids under- = standing, and can aid the causes of = peace and justice, both by bringing = other cultures into focus and, more = importantly, by demanding that = readers revive their own individu- E ality,which is so overwhelmed and E cheapened in today'sworld ofmass E movements and mass consumption. E Ultimately, readers of good litera- = ture?and this, one hopes, includes = politicians?should take note of E how much attention and nurturing E writers must bestow on individual E characters tomake them succeed on = the page; this "mode of dedication E to the situation and to the people = trapped in it" dismantles stereo- = types and callous ignorance. = The texts in thisvolume include = a discussion of Grossman's youthE ful literary influences, especially E Sholem Aleichem and Bruno Schulz; = the importance ofwhat existed and E what happened "over there" (in E Europe) is omnipresent in Gross- = man's thought. Two of the essays E present a bold revisionist view of = Israeli history and politics. The final E selection is his talk at the Yitzhak E Rabin memorial rally in Jerusalem E in November 2006, when Grossman E powerfully put forth the idea of a = "peace of no choice" between the E Palestinians and Israelis. The com- = mon thread in all of Grossman's = discussions of Israeli society is the = specter of war that has overshad- E owed and undercut the region since E 1948.War has brought in towmil- E itarism and extremism and, with E them, lasting distortions of Israel's E cultural promise and identity. E This short but indispensable E collection of six essays is an erudite E and ethically compelling statement E of artistichumanism; Writing in the E ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Dark is crisplywritten, intellectually fruitful,and highly recommended indeed. John K. Cox North Dakota StateUniversity Mark Nowak. Coal Mountain Elemen tary. Ian Teh, photographer. Minneap olis. Coffee House (Consortium, distr.). 2009. 181 pages, ill. $20. isbn 978-1 56689-228-5 Howard Zinn's description ofMark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary as "a tribute to miners and...

'Go Argue with Today's Children': The Jewish Family in Sholem Aleichem and Vladimir Jabotinsky

'Go Argue with Today's Children': The Jewish Family in Sholem Aleichem and Vladimir Jabotinsky

Sholem Aleichem and the Politics of German Jewish Identity

Sholem Aleichem and the Politics of German Jewish Identity

Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity James Loeffler Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Columbia. 2008. Jews have long occupied a curious place in the collective imagination of American Studies. While scholars consistently invoke Jewish images and influences as defining elements of modern American culture, they all too frequently insist on viewing Jewish identity solely in terms of its relationship to the black-white racial dichotomy, ignoring its own unique fusion of ethnic, religious, and national dimensions. In Klezmer America, Jonathan Freedman's welcome new study, he confronts this problem directly and offers a solution in the form of an ambitious, impassioned call for a revival of the study of Jewish ethnicity in American culture. [End Page 152] Freedman makes his case through a virtuoso set of peregrinations through the works of writers such as Tony Kushner, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller, along with briefer, highly suggestive excursions into the Jewish-Latino, Jewish-Asian American, and even Jewish-Evangelical Christian nexuses in contemporary fiction. He selects music as his linking motif for these case studies, highlighting the hybrid, destabilizing force of klezmer music in contemporary Jewish and American culture. From its early modern East European folk origins, klezmer dramatically morphed in late twentieth-century America into a creative vehicle for a loose movement of musicians who frequently collapse the lines between high and low, black and white, Jewish and non-Jewish, synagogue and jazz club. Freedman sees this contemporary klezmer—multicultural and avant-garde, yet rooted in Jewish tradition—as a neat expression of Jewish-American creativity as a whole. It is one that substitutes postmodern "affinity" for more rigid notions of cultural ownership or national heritage, let alone the rigidity of race. Freedman's book is an enjoyable mixture of literary criticism and genuine cultural sleuthing into the Jewish-American past. Building on the work of the newer Jewish Cultural Studies, he convincingly demonstrates how, one way or another, Jewishness forms a crucial counterpoint to various kinds of American ethnic identity. Ironically, though, the reader in search of a deeper account of the music referred to in the book's title will come away frustrated by its casual, selective approach in this regard. Despite its present-day "relentless hybridity," for most of the twentieth century, American klezmer was neither a modernist cultural movement nor a multicultural mélange, but an immigrant ethnic folk music. Indeed, one of the enduring mysteries of Jewish-American cultural history is why this music failed to undergo the great mid-century cultural mainstreaming that took place for literature. Freedman does not ask, for instance, why Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish stories found new life as Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof, the ultimate symbol of post-Holocaust Jewish-American identity, yet most American Jews abandoned klezmer until the 1990s. So too is the story of this musical decline and reemergence a more complex tale than Freedman's politicized reading of it as the sound of "rootless cosmopolitanism," "queer diasporism," and "cultural syncretism." Rather than a progressive Jewish rejection of ethnic essentialism, klezmer's contemporary boom might just as easily be understood as a post-Civil Rights era re-ethnicization (and re-Europeanization) of Jewish identity at the very point when American urban ethnicity had seemingly reached its nadir. This criticism aside, Freedman's book offers scintillating readings of an impressive array of texts and a valuable, provocative challenge to scholars who reduce modern Jewish artists to cultural appropriators, wannabe blacks, or would-be WASPs. Most importantly, his convincing redeployment of the frame of Jewish ethnicity in studying American culture should inspire others to follow in his footsteps. James Loeffler University of Virginia Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association