Yiddish Stories Research Articles

The Anxiety of Tradition: Unrealized Weddings in Berdichevsky’s Yiddish Stories

Abstract The trilingual author Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921) is widely known as a literary modernist and a rebel against Jewish socio-religious conventions. Yet he also developed an original dialectical way of thinking about Jewish tradition. Berdichevsky’s theory of tradition is partly elaborated in his undeservedly obscure Yiddish stories. In order to reconstruct this theory, we undertake a typology and thematic analysis of their signature literary trope: the unrealized wedding.

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar Roberta Klimt (bio) David Hadar. Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. Bloomsbury, 2020. 216 pp. $103.50 hardback; $25.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. "let us start reading novels as paratexts for the author's identity," David Hadar exhorts us in his Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature (4). Lest this sound riskily unliterary, or appear to be simply biography by another name, Hadar also clarifies that he intends "identity" in a particular sense: that is, as "public identity," "what people know and feel about [writers], whether it is true or not" (2). The idea of this book, as informed by the sociologist Erving Goffman's work on "social identity and personal identity," is to read literary texts and their paratexts as contributing to the construction of the author's public identity, which itself is a complex of networks that demands to be read as a text in its own right. And this is where Hadar's other key term comes in, since it is his contention that an author's affiliations—that is, their relationships of chosen association, as opposed to filiation, which is strictly familial—are crucial to determining their public identity. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) opens Hadar's book and haunts its pages as a prime example of a story of affiliation written by an author who, in more and less subtle ways, sought (and sometimes sought to avoid) affiliation with other authors in shaping his public identity. In pursuit of an authorial identity, the young writer Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer's protagonist, quite openly, and as Hadar suggests, "rather frantic[ally]" (24), attempts to affiliate with the older writer he admires: E.I. Lonoff. Using Roth as his starting point and touchstone, Hadar explores the techniques of affiliation employed by several other Jewish American authors, including Nicole Krauss, whom he reads especially sensitively. His sociological approach presents a new view of inter-authorial relationships as they are constructed both within and around the literary works themselves and pays attention to the role of the emotions and imaginations of writers and readers in constructing and construing those relationships. [End Page 88] In a particularly persuasive section, "Jewish American Literary Networks beyond English," Hadar offers "a history of the changing ways of identifying as a Jew and the different ways to be a Jewish writer" (61) in America. For early twentieth-century Jewish American authors such as Abraham Cahan, who also edited the Yiddish magazine Forverts (The Forward), there was a more pressing need to affiliate with fellow American authors than to shore up what Hadar calls their already "quite secure Jewish credentials" (66). This would change for second- and third-generation Jewish Americans; Hadar makes a particular study of Irving Howe, who co-edited the first American anthology of Yiddish literature, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, in 1954, and became somewhat of a gatekeeper to the kingdom of Jewish American literature. Having initially admired Roth and assumed he was "working in the tradition of Jewish self-criticism and satire," Howe famously recanted this in his essay "Philip Roth Reconsidered," where he accuses Roth of having "a thin personal culture." Hadar finds it revealing that, in his dismissal of Roth as insufficiently related to Yiddish and Jewish American forebears like Isaac Bashevis Singer or Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, Howe omits to mention Roth's undeniable affiliation with Franz Kafka—thereby denying Roth his strategy of "identification and connection with secular Jewish writers who write in non-Jewish European languages." (For this same reason, Hadar ventures, when Roth met I.B. Singer, he spent most of the time asking him about the Jews who wrote in Polish, not Yiddish.) That Roth nevertheless succeeds in achieving this more secular, vernacular form of affiliation is, Hadar says, "the victory of the writer over the critic" (75). In his third chapter, "The Jewish Writer as an Old Man," Hadar moves from Roth's Exit Ghost (2007), which he reads as paradigmatic of so-called "late style," to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005), a novel that, though written by a thirtyone-year-old woman, nonetheless manages...

Magic apples and talking frogs: fairy tales in the Mayse-bukh

Among the surviving collections of Yiddish stories from the early modern period, the Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories) is the best known. During the same time, Italian collections of novelle and fiabe di magia (stories of magic) were printed in Italian and translated into other European languages, enjoying wide popularity. In this article I wish to demonstrate how the editio princeps of Mayse-bukh (Basel, 1602), some of its stories already in circulation in Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts, included fairy tales that were read as such. Readers turned to the ‘Book of Stories’ that offered not only didactic and moral teachings and rabbinic exempla , but also the enchantment offered by a recognizible fictional dimension.

Introduction

Introduction Sheila E. Jelen I first met Alan Mintz when I was looking at graduate programs in Hebrew literature. It was 1993, and he was teaching at Brandeis. We met for lunch in the faculty dining room, where Alan impressed me with his soft-spoken intensity. I was very young, very concerned at that meeting that my soup might be hiding non-kosher chicken in its murky depths, yet Alan patiently asked all the right questions of me—questions that helped shore up my confidence. In the end, I chose not to go to Brandeis, but Alan remained a presence in my life as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. He moved to JTS soon after our first encounter, and I went off to Berkeley, but our paths crossed again and again. Most fortuitously, when I interviewed for my first job at the University of Maryland, I learned that Alan had preceded me there. Throughout my years in training, both as a graduate student and as a young faculty member, Alan sat me down time and again to share his wisdom on how to balance participation in others' projects with a focus on my own, how to make the most of my limited time for scholarship in the years during which I was raising young children and teaching new courses. Alan's writings opened up the field of Hebrew autobiography for me, helping me to conceptualize its relationship to modern Hebrew narrative. He taught me about Hebrew writers in America, something few others were teaching at that time. Through it all, Alan taught me to be unafraid as an American within a field of mostly Israeli scholars. [End Page 387] One of the most important things I learned from Alan was that it might be possible for me to find new things to write about within the field of Holocaust criticism from my unique perspective as a scholar of Hebrew literature. I had, for many years, found that my most inspired teaching was on the subject of Holocaust literature, but I hesitated to build my career on it. My first book, on Devorah Baron, circled around and around the issue of her traumatic sense that she had abandoned the world of her mothers in Eastern Europe before its violent end and participated in its demise by moving to Erets Yisraʾel. Her stories never addressed the Holocaust directly, apart from a few oblique references to the evil that befell the community of which she wrote, but I couldn't help remarking in my work on Baron that her stories grappled with the Holocaust in a way that was yet to be named and analyzed. I have since come to call that dynamic "salvage poetics," a poetics that straddles the ethnographic and the literary, that deals with loss through attempts to salvage what remains of the destroyed culture. What does all this have to do with Alan? On several occasions when passing through town, Alan stayed with my family in Maryland for Shabbat. On one particular occasion—I remember it was winter because Alan thought he had left a favorite hat and scarf at my house, which I never did find—as we were walking home from synagogue, Alan and I got into a conversation about my latest project. For years, I had been inching closer and closer to my understanding of salvage poetics, theorizing the ethnographic role of allusions to iconic Yiddish stories in modern Israeli novels as a means of salvaging Eastern European culture for Israelis. Alan suggested that I consider writing about the Holocaust in Hebrew literature instead of skirting the issue. It was on that walk, I believe, that the notion of a salvage poetics was born. A few years after that conversation, in 2012, I saw a notice in The New York Times that Alan had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on S. Y. Agnon. The description of Alan's project as it appears on the Guggenheim website reads as follows: The research project for which he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship focuses on the late work of S. Y. Agnon, the great Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate in literature. Between the end...

SOUTH AFRICAN WRITINGS OF MORRIS HOFFMAN: BETWEEN YIDDISH AND HEBREW

Morris Hoffman (1885-1940), who was born in a Latvian township and emigrated to South Africa in 1906, was a brilliant example of the Eastern European Jewish maskil writing with equal fluency in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He published poetry and prose in South African Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals. His long Yiddish poem under the title Afrikaner epopeyen (African epics) was considered to be the best Yiddish poetry written in South Africa. In 1939, a selection of his Yiddish stories under the title Unter afrikaner zun (Under the African sun) was prepared for publishing in De Aar, Cape Province (which is now in the Northern Cape Province), and published after his death in 1951 in Johannesburg. The Hebrew version of the stories was published in Israel in 1949 under the title Taḥat shmey afrikah (Under the skies of Africa). The article deals with certain differences between the versions using the example of one of the bilingual stories. The comparison between the versions illuminates Hoffman’s reflections on the relations between Jews and Afrikaners with a rather new perspective which underlines their religious background

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. …

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

Jiddisch: Geschichte und Kultur einer Weltsprache (review)

Jiddisch: Geschichte und Kultur einer Weltsprache, by Marion Aptroot and Roland Gruschka. Beck'sche Reihe 1621. Munich: CH. Beck, 2010. 192 pp. $15.90. While Yiddish may have endured more than its share of popularizing by nonexperts like Leo Rosten a generation ago (Joys of Yiddish, 1968) and Neal Karlen (The Story of Yiddish, 2008) more recently, the interested Anglophone reader is nonetheless well supplied with a variety of types of expert and competent introductions to the character, history and structure of the Yiddish language, ranging from Max Weinreich's masterful multivolume History of the Yiddish Language (Yidd., 1973; Engl. 2008), to Solomon Birnbaums Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (1979), to Neil Jacobs' meticulous Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (2005) - all three for linguists - and Dovid Katz's more popularly accessible Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2004), all written by scholarly experts who are thoroughly conversant with both the language itself and the broad range of scholarship in the vat ious relevant fields of research. While rhere may be fewer book-length surveys of Yiddish in other languages, there are nonetheless some very useful ones, such as Jean Baumgartens Le yiddish (1990) and Eva Geller s Jidyszijczyk Zydow polskich (1994). German, like English, has had its share of popularizing books that often make experts cringe. The book under review here, by Marion Aptroot (Professor of Yiddish at the Universitat Dusseldorf) and Roland Gruschka, immediately and clearly sets itself apart from all that ilk and provides German readers with a thorough and expert general introduction to the history and character of the Yiddish language. While aiming for a lay audience, the authors construct their subject neither as a prompt for quasi-vaudeville-esque jesting nor nostalgic mame-loshn sentimentality, but rather as an object of scholarly research to be made accessible to a general readership. They make copious use of literary examples throughout the book (transcribed using an idiosyncratic, Germanized system, and ttanslated into idiomatic German), but indicate already at the outset that their purpose is a survey of Yiddish language - not literary - history. In nine brief chapters (each with a very short and idiosyncratic list of further readings at the end of the book), organized generally chronologically, the linguistic and cultural history of Yiddish is unfolded from its beginnings a thousand years ago in Central Europe to the scattered Hasidic communities of the twenty-first century, where - alone - the language still thrives as a community language. …

Dazed and Confused: Lamed Shapiro’s American Stories

Lamed Shapiro ( 1 8781 948) is most widely known as the author of groundbreaking Yiddish short stories about pogroms, including the 1909 tale that made him famous, Cross.1 Shapiro's pogrom stories were revolutionary for a number of reasons. Foremost, at the turn of the century, they offered extremely graphic portraits of violence unlike anything that had been seen before. The tales challenged the notion that Jews become ennobled sufferers from their trauma, and that by undergoing it they are transformed into better people. Instead his stories suggest that brutality causes the victim to become more violent and debased. Also, his writings employed extremely lyrical, spare, and beautiful language to convey the events, and by so doing, they turned the trauma of the pogrom into the material of high art. Yet although these tales read as explicit and true renditions of antiJewish violence, Shapiro in fact never experienced a pogrom firsthand; these Yiddish stories were composed in the United States after he had emigrated in 1905 with his mother to seek employment and to make a clean break from the Ukrainian shtetl of his childhood.

Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory Christopher D. Johnson Stanley Cavell . Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. 584 pp. Contemplating the "silence or dismay" that greeted his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and "being told that what I was publishing was inherently private, even secret," Stanley Cavell in this luminous, moving autobiography recalls a remark he tentatively attributes to Gertrude Stein: "I write for friends and strangers" (444). But Stein, in The Making of Americans, actually writes: "I am writing for myself and strangers" (289). That Cavell slightly misremembers is telling, since the task he sets himself here, which he has dedicated a lifetime of writing and teaching to accomplishing, is to describe the "perpetually contested relation of public and private" (203), whether this occurs in philosophy, literature, or film. Cavell writes for "friends" who share or at least understand his conviction that thinking must respond to how people ordinarily use language to describe themselves, their relations, and their world. But in these unstintingly generous, eloquent pages, he invites "strangers," too, to consider how his experience of growing up, finding a vocation, and, now, growing older might afford some moral knowledge if not also aesthetic delight. The epistemological modesty of Cavell's title points to a recurrent, perhaps even the central theme of this autobiography: the difficulty of staking a claim, of being what Emerson calls a representative man. Toward the end of these Excerpts, Cavell writes: "The claim to represent philosophy is unverifiable not because one lacks knowledge, but because in philosophizing one must not claim to know what others do not know or cannot know by bethinking themselves" (500). More concretely, the crux of these many pages is the saying why and how Cavell was finally able to find his philosophical voice in The Claim of Reason (1979), especially in its fourth part, where he decisively breaks with the expectations of professional philosophy as it was then practiced in this country, where, in short, he finds his characteristic way of reconciling the claims that philosophy and literature (or any aesthetic activity) have made on him since adolescence. That Cavell casts this tale of "academic nomadism" in the light of the "picaresque" (342) speaks to his impatience with disciplinary boundaries, to his scorn for what Aby Warburg dubbed the "Grenzwächertum" (border surveillance) of those who would police such artificial divisions. But this surprising gesture also raises the question, central to the form and substance of his memoir, of the style one adopts to think and write, a style that, as he observes, has confounded some readers even as it has instructed others to think anew questions that have long troubled philosophy. Thus Cavell's penultimate chapter rehearses charges that his writing is marred by "eccentricities" (504) and "intractable oddness" (517) not so much to argue with critics, but rather to affirm that his writing responds to his "perception" of the many contours which philosophical skepticism assumes: ". . . I can see that my incessant perception, or imagination of the claim for acknowledgment comes from a [End Page 1147] perception of a world bent on denial, interest in the world withdrawn to the point of chronic boredom, lost in lovelessness" (514). Put another way, the Emersonian balance Cavell pursues in his essays on Shakespearean tragedy, Disowning Knowledge, between "intuition" and "tuition" (4), the former rooted in experience as much as philosophical reflection, the latter coincident with teaching and writing, helps him acknowledge the tragedy of skepticism and find ways to lessen its baleful effects. Autobiography has long been such a way for Cavell. In the 1994 essay, "Philosophy and Arrogation of the Voice," he commented on the "massive, insistent arrogance" of "philosophical autobiographies" such as Thoreau's Walden and Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and wondered what "claiming his inheritance" (39) of these and other voices might mean. Little Did I Know further endeavors to understand this "inheritance." But other voices here means initially those of his family: that of his mother, who, with her musical talent and silent suffering, strikes the deepest, warmest chord in these memoirs; his father's, which tells superb Yiddish stories, but cannot...

Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States. By Ari Y. Kelman. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xviii, 279 pp. $39.95, ISBN 9780-520-25573-9.)

Working at the intersection of ethnic studies, media studies, American history, and cultural studies, Ari Y. Kelman, in his carefully documented history of Yiddish-language radio tells an entertaining story of change, negotiation, and double meanings—much like the story of Yiddish itself. Kelman shows that a phenomenon apparently relevant to a few, in this case non-English broadcasts that never reached beyond limited communities, can illustrate a wider historical context. Through his chronological account of Yiddish radio from the 1920s through the 1960s, we learn much about the changing patterns of Jewish immigration, the history of local urban radio stations, the role of stations and advertisers in creating “acoustic communities,” the generational shifts of cultural tastes, and the attitudes of regulators toward foreign-language radio and, by extension, toward immigration and assimilation both within and without Jewish communities. Yiddish radio managed many complex issues in serving an audience more or less bilingual, more or less interested in assimilation to the dominant English-language culture, and differing in geographical origin, religious observation, and commitment to Yiddish. The constraints of the radio business model, based as it was on selling airtime to advertisers seeking the largest possible audiences, relegated Yiddish radio to local stations in immigrant urban centers—which stations it often shared with other language programming. Radio regulators, having ruled that radio must broadcast in the “public interest,” were suspicious of foreign-language programming because its targeting of a niche audience undermined their goal that radio serve the broadest public possible, and so they required programming that promoted “Americanization.” They worried that this Americanization was undermined by commercialism, that is, the stations' reliance on local community advertisers—a rich irony considering that commercialism is exactly what made American broadcasting American.

From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (review)

Reviewed by: From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture Amelia Glaser From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Matthew Hoffman. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 304. $60.00 (cloth). Exactly a century ago a particularly heated debate filled the pages of the American Yiddish journal, Dos Naye Lebn. The discussion was at once age-old and shockingly modern: does the crucifixion have anything to offer Jewish literature? The loudest voices in the 1909 “cross-question” (tseylem-frage) belonged to Chaim Zhitlovsky, who liked the idea of Yiddish literature embracing universal themes, and S. Ansky, who called for authentically Jewish imagery. In his excellent literary study, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew Hoffman suggests that this kind of conflict cut to the heart of much larger questions facing Jews at the turn of the twentieth century: “On what basis does Jewishness now rest? How can one be both Jewish and Western at the same time? What elements of Jewish tradition are still valid?” (62) Hoffman examines Jewish writers’ and artists’ fascination with Jesus from the nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) through the Holocaust. Of particular interest to Hoffman is the modernist Christ. The 1909 debate took place in an American journal, but the Yiddish stories that sparked it, Sholem Asch’s “In a Carnival Night” (“In a Karnival Nakht”) and L. Shapiro’s “The Cross” (“Der Tseylem”), are tales of European antisemitism. Shapiro’s protagonist is a pogrom survivor whose forehead has been scarred with two slashes in the shape of a cross. Once bearing the cruciform mark of Cain, he is compelled to seek his own scapegoat. He finds one in a non- Jewish woman—a fellow revolutionary and the object of his desire. He rapes and murders her. The more ecumenical Sholem Asch portrays a sympathetic Jesus. Set in medieval Rome, “In a Carnival Night” depicts a mob during the Catholic carnival hunting a Jewish martyr. Jesus descends from his cross in solidarity with the city’s Jewish population. The story foreshadowed Asch’s later Jesus trilogy, a logorrheic Yiddish retelling of various aspects of the New Testament that stirred rumors Asch had converted to Catholicism. The Jewish modernist Christ could represent either the ultimate evil or the potential for salvation. Hoffman contends: “These works, with their combination of cosmopolitan universalism, Jewish martyrology, symbolic syncretism, and occasional anti-Christian polemical stridency, reflect the paradoxical currents that informed Jewish modernism in general: a tension between old and new, Jewish and Christian, particular and universal, secular and religious, personal and national” (119). Indeed the cross, a ubiquitous but taboo religious symbol, was a sharp tool in the hands of the Jewish modernist, be it as a means of exposing the hypocrisy of Christian antagonists, or as a brazen reclamation of a Jewish Jesus. Of course, the cross was also an ironic symbol for non-Jewish modernists mocking or mourning the inefficacy of Christianity in the face of war. Take the ambiguous ending to Alexander Blok’s 1918 “The Twelve,” in which twelve Red Army-men march: “Behind them, a hungry dog . . . Before them, Jesus Christ.” Throughout the twentieth century Yiddish and Hebrew writers including H. Leyvik, Uri Tsvi Grinberg, and Peretz Markish, as well as a number of Jewish visual artists, the most famous being Mark Chagall, portrayed Jesus in their work. Christian iconography, whether presented with irony, empathy, blasphemy, or animosity, offered Jewish readers a willfully estranged symbol for suffering. The violence in Eastern Europe that increased because of the First World War and the Russian revolution haunted Yiddish writers, even those in the United States. Moyshe Leyb Halpern, in his 1916 poem, “A Nakht,” writes: “Blood drips from my hands and feet . . . and all around the cross, / My tormenters strike up a grim dance.” (150) Uri Tsvi Grinberg’s “Uri Tsvi [End Page 818] Before the Cross” (“Uri Tsvi Farn Tseylem,” 1922) was printed in the shape of a cross. Hoffman observes, “Through the use of such ‘self-crucifixion’ imagery, the poetic speaker expresses his personal sense of torment and alienation, a theme that recurred in the...

Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories: An Anthology

<i>Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories: An Anthology</i>

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

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish

Tevye on King Street: Charleston and the Translation of Sholem Aleichem

In June 1946, barely a year after the end of the war in Europe, Crown Publishers in New York printed a collection of twenty-seven stories translated from the Yiddish of Sholem book was called Old Country. By mid-summer 1946 Old Country was on New York Times bestseller list where it remained through Sep tember. It was reviewed widely, by Ben Hecht in New York Times, Irving Howe in Partisan Review, and Robert Warshow in Nation. During the summer of the Nuremburg trials, no reviewer could resist the association of these recent translations with a memorial for what Maurice Samuel had already called World of Sholom Times decorated Hecht's review of Old Country with one of Marc Chagall's pre-war lithographs of the shtetl above their caption—not his: The Vanished World of Sholom Aleichem. Ten years later when Irving Howe dedicated his ground-breaking Treasury of Yiddish Stories To the Six Million, nearly half of his selections of Sholem Aleichem came from Old Country.z

Shining and shadow: an anthology of early Yiddish stories from the Lower East Side

Shining and shadow: an anthology of early Yiddish stories from the Lower East Side

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (review)

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (review)

Words on fire: the unfinished story of Yiddish

Words on fire: the unfinished story of Yiddish

Legacy of rage: Jewish masculinity, violence, and culture

In books, television programs, and films, Jewish men are often depicted as erudite, comedic, malleable, and non-threatening - somewhere between Clark Kent and the early Woody Allen. Yet as Warren Rosenberg shows in this illuminating study, this widespread cultural image is not only overly simplistic, it is at odds with a legacy of Jewish male violence that goes back to the first chapters of Genesis when Cain slew Abel. From Biblical depictions of heroic wariors like King David to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem (a fierce man of clay created by Cabalistic magic) to the fictional Alexander Portnoy, Jewish ideas of manhood reflect a simultaneous resistance and attraction to violence. According to Rosenberg, it is an ambivalence shaped by millennia of oppression as well as by the clash of Western ideas of masculinity with Eastern European rabbirical injunctions against violent action. The result has been not only gender confusion, but a suppressed rage evident in a broad range of texts created by Jewish men, from nineteenth-century Yiddish stories to contemporary Hollywood films. Isaac Babel, Henry Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, David Mamet, Barry Levinson, and Steven Spielberg are just some of the writers and filmmakers whose lives and works are marked by this legacy of rage. Yet if the need to affirm masculinity through violence remains an unacknowledged aspect of Jewish male identity, Rosenberg argues, it is not a historical inevitability. As the work of Cynthia Ozick and Tony Kushner suggests, it is possible to construct new ideas of Jewish manhood by exposing the hidden fallacies of the old.