Encyclopedia of American Studies

Jewish American Literature

Jewish American literature moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture, as the concerns of minority and ethnic communities became an intrinsic part of America's self-definition. Jewish American literature's concerns for the individual in a mass society, communal ethics over individual choice, an appeal to metaphysical forces, and the cycles of persecution and self-affirmation, comedy and tragedy, have been recognized as themes that confront the universal as well as the American condition. Although Jews had been living in America since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the periods of immigration during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a blossoming of writing that can be described as the birth of Jewish American literature. The German Jewish community had emerged in New York as a social force in the second half of the nineteenth century, yet its efforts were concentrated on infiltrating the medical, legal, and civic professions. The novelist and journalist Ludwig Lewisohn and the poet Emma Lazarus were among the chief beneficiaries of its bourgeois social and educational status. Lazarus's poem The New Colossus (1885) was carved into the base of the Statue of Liberty and serves as a permanent reminder of the years when America opened its shores to several million refugees and economic immigrants. Particularly for Jews escaping the Eastern European pogroms, America emerged as the crucible of previously unimagined freedoms of expression and movement.

Despite the presence of the German Jewish community, literary pursuits became the province of their Eastern European counterparts. Continuing the tradition of Yiddish literature from the Old World and the effects of the Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement, Jewish writers began to fuse their literary tradition with America's modernist vitality. Concerned with the dislocation of the Old World self in the urban New World, literature written by Jewish immigrants managed to describe a variety of American life greatly distanced from the refined Europeanized salons, familiar through the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, or the pastoral elegies of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. America had to redefine itself for the modern age, and immigrant culture guaranteed a richness of material to suit literary invention.

Victorian novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill had, by 1906, come to describe America as a "melting-pot" (The Melting Pot), which would sublimate any ethnic differences into an American amalgam. The question of assimilation, which Zangwill raised, absorbed academic debate for much of the twentieth century and provided the stimulus for much of the fiction and criticism produced by American writers of Jewish heritage.

Prior to Zangwill's proclamation one of the first great Jewish American literary figures had ventured his own fictional ideas on the matter. Abraham Cahan was the editor of the largest and most influential daily Yiddish newspaper, Der Forverts (the Forward). In 1896 he published Yekl and in 1898 The Imported Bridegroom, two short stories directly addressing assimilation. His masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), was one of the first full-length novels written in English to attempt a fictional biography of an immigrant from naive childhood to compromised adulthood. Cahan explicitly creates a world in which self-conflict is inevitable. The Talmudic student becomes the garment trade entrepreneur yet regrets the departure from his roots: "My past and my present do not comport well." The opportunities of the New World outweighed the demands of an Old World whose principles no longer seemed relevant yet provoked a wistful nostalgia.

Other authors echoed Cahan's picture of ambivalence during the period. Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland in 1885, the daughter of a Talmudic scholar. After moving to America she published a variety of short stories, winning prizes and a contract with Hollywood. Her novel The Bread Givers (1925) is a thinly veiled autobiography and evokes the smells, squalor, and sexism of New York City's Lower East Side tenement ghetto. With the advent of the Depression in the 1930s, the proletarian novel became a recognized fictional addition to the burgeoning modernist literary movement being introduced to America by its Europeanized expatriates, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, John Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Jean Toomer's Cane transported the new ideas into epic American literary landscapes. The immigrant poverty typical to Jewish American homes in the first quarter of the twentieth century represented the proletarian archetype, and the montage experiments of James Joyce's Ulysses were vividly fused with the extreme social conditions in one of the great works of Jewish American fiction, Call It Sleep (1934), written by Henry Roth. The story follows David Schearl from the age of six to eight, the two key years of his infancy, his love of a protective Jewish home with its lyrical Yiddish, and the gentile street represented by the figures of his mother and father. Schearl picks his way through Hebrew school and the urban streets beyond his own neighborhood searching to understand the harsh contradictions that surround him. The tour de force final chapter follows a stream of consciousness structure to the epiphanic moment of the young protagonist's discovery of the human condition.

While Call It Sleep and Levinsky remain the classic Jewish American texts of the period, the tradition of composing immigrant narratives through child protagonists was taken up in the 1930s by Daniel Fuchs in his Williamsburg trilogy. This differed from previous offerings by concentrating on the efforts of the teenage and young adult children of immigrants to escape the suffocating Depression-era suburban ghetto of their parental homes. Among the last of these explorations into their own lives by the children of immigrants is What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg. Following its brazen hero from tenement slum grifter to Hollywood mogul, the novel articulated Schulberg's own story and that of his contemporaries, such as Ben Hecht, who moved uncertainly into an environment that compromised their heritage and swallowed their literary pretensions. While some Jewish American writers transferred their talents to the screen, others turned to short fiction. Delmore Schwartz continued Fuchs's examination of the generation gap, adding a comic touch to tragic episodes that became the hallmark of the Jewish American short story at this time, as written by Jerome Weidman, Meyer Levin, Michael Seide, Charles Angoff, Paul Goodman, Jo Sinclair, Alexander Klein, and others now largely forgotten by contemporary readers.

These writers began to publish short stories throughout the 1930s and 1940s in the numerous magazines and journals that emerged when a newly literate Jewish readership sought material that spoke to their memories and experiences. The first generation born to immigrants in America received access to public education that transformed their material possibilities. In New York City, City College became the incubator for many of the most significant American academics, literary critics, and political and social commentators of the second half of the twentieth century. In its intense and overcrowded debating rooms and lecture halls, Sidney Hook, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leslie Fiedler, Nathan Glazer, and other Jewish American intellectual luminaries sowed the seeds of their influential careers and often radical political associations. Following their graduations, numerous Jewish American publications were launched, including Commentary, Dissent, the Menorah Journal, Common Ground, Opinion, Jewish Life, and Partisan Review, offering political polemic and literary criticism side by side. There developed a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish American writer and critic, each of whom relied on the other for material and exposure. This relationship has proved vital for the sustenance of new writers and established careers and has been the foundation of much of the success of Jewish American literature.

Despite its overwhelming quality, Jewish American literature remained a marginal force in the nation's literary development until after World War II. With the destruction of prewar formalized sensibilities, a new literary language and structure had to be found. Jewish American writers were in the vanguard of this campaign. Of the war novels that emerged, perhaps the best known is Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948). Born in New Jersey in 1923 to Jewish parents, Mailer spent his early years in Brooklyn, New York, before graduating from Harvard. Instrumental in the development of the Village Voice, New York's alternative newspaper, Mailer's novels, including Barbary Shore (1952), The Deer Park (1957), An American Dream (1965), and The Executioner's Song (1977) are characterized by their epic size and political tone. While he has examined the American experience, Mailer has notably excluded any discussion of Jewish identity.

On the contrary, Saul Bellow, a literary contemporary of Mailer's, has built his entire career on the nature of Jewish American identity. Both writers are consumed by the clash between personal ethics and material success, but where Mailer favors the political, Bellow chooses the philosophical, constantly digressing from the narrative to extemporize on the meaning of life. Born in Canada in 1915 to strictly religious Jews, Bellow moved to Chicago as a child, where he later set his first novel, The Dangling Man (1944). An existential tract heavily influenced by the narratives of Sartre and Camus, Bellow's protagonist assesses humankind's status and his own responsibilities. This heavy humanist tone is the mark of Bellow's fiction: despite the comic narratives, it lurks in the background acting as constant reminder of the central purpose of the novel. Seize the Day (1956), a novella that vividly and poignantly portrays the collapse of the individual in the face of capitalist advance, was preceded by The Adventures of Augie March (1953), an expansive work that follows the hero through a series of picaresque incidents. In his major work, Herzog (1964), Bellow provides his most memorable portrait of a Jewish protagonist (agonized by marital failure, professional misconduct, and social alienation), interjecting imagined letters to great figures, alive or dead, into the narrative. Herzog, one of the great books about postmodern intellectual anxiety, put Bellow in the front ranks of American literature. His receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1976 was the apotheosis of Jewish American literature. Bellow had realized that the status of the Jew in America had changed from immigrant to modern archetype, forced by circumstance into an existential self-definition that was not solely religious, political, or ethnic but had universal application.

Bellow, whose first language was Yiddish, introduced another great figure of Jewish literature to an American audience by translating one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish short stories, "Gimpel the Fool," into English and publishing it in Commentary in 1953. Already an established writer in Warsaw by the time of his emigration to America in 1938, Singer, whose older brother Joshua Israel also published several well-received novels, wrote for the Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts (the Forward) under a series of pseudonyms. His many assumed identities are characteristic of a deeply complex and ambivalent man, whose status in Jewish American literature is often disputed. In Fiedler on the Roof (1991) critic Leslie Fiedler differentiated between the terms American Jewish and Jewish American literature, declaring Singer to be the only exponent of the latter variety on the grounds that he is concerned primarily with Jewish matters and with being a perennial outsider, not with the American experience, with which the former is concerned. Always writing in Yiddish but supervising the translation of his many novels and short stories, Singer creates stories of the East European shtetl, including The Family Moskat (1950), Satan in Goray (1955), The Slave (1962), and the New York urban ghetto in such novels as Enemies: A Love Story (1972), Meshugah (1994), and Shadows on the Hudson (1998), the latter two published posthumously. In both settings, the plot usually centers on passion and lust, contradictory behavior, arguments between the human and the divine, the demands of family, and magic-realist narratives. His stories set in America adhere to Fiedler's description, populated by survivors and their children who meet only others like themselves while the other communities in New York are ignored. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, an undoubted gesture toward Yiddish literature since the Academy noted his Polish Jewish roots in its declaration. His own contribution to American letters cannot, therefore, be entirely registered, but his influence on Jewish American literature is profound, regardless of whether it is apposite to add him to that canon.

While Bellow echoed Singer's philosophical ruminations, Bernard Malamud applied Jewish storytelling techniques to a variety of American settings. His first novel, The Natural (1952), was uncharacteristically about baseball, but his second novel, The Assistant (1957), set the tone for his oeuvre. Focusing on Jewish-gentile relationships, The Assistant won numerous awards and Malamud repeated the formula in A New Life (1961), The Tenants (1971), and Dubin's Lives (1979). Malamud's short stories evoke traditional Jewish sentiment, mores, and magic-realism reminiscent of the great Yiddish authors, most memorably in "The Jewbird," in which a speaking bird claiming to be Jewish raises prescient questions about the nature of Jewish identity in American secularism.

A slightly younger writer, Philip Roth, asked similar questions in his first collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was with the publication of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a comic novel that examines the relationship between Jewish families and sex, that he became a household name. Accused of self-hatred but praised for the urgency of his prose, Roth used his infamy as the subject of a succession of novels, including The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), that feature his protagonist alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. Roth has mined a seam of violent relations: Jewish-gentile; gender; sexual; Diaspora-Israel; and the "American dream." The latter formed the core of Pulitzer Prize�winning American Pastoral (1996), which signaled a shift from self-oriented writing toward a transhistorical commentary on the American condition. Accused of misogyny but nearer misanthropy, Roth's literary nihilism placed him in the pantheon of twentieth-century American writers, yet he maintains a position perhaps too controversial to receive the coveted acclaim that the more muted Bellow was granted.

While Singer, Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are considered to be the premier Jewish American authors, a number of other Jewish authors were forging a path in the 1960s and 1970s. Most notable are those who have come to be described as the "black humorists", including Joseph Heller, Bruce Jay Friedman, Stanley Elkin, and Wallace Markfield. While these writers continued the tradition of counterpointing Jewish-gentile relations, a breed of authors began to concentrate on the internal struggles within the Jewish community. In particular, Chaim Potok explored the clash between Hasidism and modern Orthodoxy in America, and Cynthia Ozick analyzed the divisions between the Orthodox and Reform movements. Ozick's intensely philosophical prose became the catalyst for a host of younger writers (Allegra Goodman, Steve Stern, Melvin Jules Buckiet, Rebecca Goldstein, Max Apple, and Nathan Englander), whose material continues the established traditions of Jewish American literature but adds strong religious references and dilemmas, certain to appeal only to a smaller audience. This trend echoes the fragmentation of American literature along postcolonial lines, encouraging particularist voices from confident minorities in a country more comfortable with difference.

Alexander Gordon

Bibliography

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