Passing

When is literature Jewish?

By Adam Kirsch

Jewish American Literature:
A NORTON ANTHOLOGY Edited by Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum,
and Kathryn Hellerstein. W.W. Norton, 1219 pages, $39.95.

Almost every writer in this new Norton anthology is haunted by its title. Is there such a thing as a distinctive Jewish-American literature? Perhaps the bleakest answer comes from Cynthia Ozick, in her bitterly comic story “Envy: or, Yiddish in America.” “Edelshtein,” the story begins, “ . . . was a ravenous reader of novels by writers ‘of’ — he said this with a snarl — ‘Jewish extraction.’ He found them puerile, vicious, pitiable, ignorant, contemptible, above all stupid. . . . They were reviewed and praised, and meanwhile they were considered Jews, and knew nothing.”

Ozick, of course, is herself one of those writers of Jewish extraction, and Edelshtein’s attack might easily apply to her — as well as to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, an d the other famous names that populate this anthology. For one of the motions that the collection documents is the long, painful separation of American Jews from their ancestral culture — a separation that took place naturally, because of assimilation, and unnaturally, because of the Holocaust. The first Jewish generation to make its mark on American letters, in the 1930s and ’40s, comprised the children of the great wave of immigration that created modern American Jewry. These writers had no direct memory of the old country; either they were born in America, like Schwartz, or they came here in their infancy, like Bellow. What they retained of Yiddish, or Orthodox practice, soon fell away. Later generations, their children and grandchildren, inherited next to nothing of traditional Judaism.

As a result, the 20th-century writers in this book are condemned to mourn a culture they cannot even forget, because they never knew it to begin with. Norman Mailer, represented here by an uncharacteristic essay on Chassidic folktales, voices the common feeling of loss: “I would never say I was not a Jew, but I looked to take no strength from the fact. What Hebrew I learned was set out to atrophy. . . . In college, it came over me like a poor man’s rich fever that I had less connection to the past than anyone I knew.” And when a Jewish writer does desire to assume her inheritance, she finds, like the poet Jacqueline Osherow, that she is restricted to fantasy:

I want to write a poem in Yiddish

and not any poem, but the poem

I am longing to write. . . .

though, of course, it’s not the sort of poem

that relies on such trivialities, as,

for example, my knowing how to speak

its language. . . .

But at the same time, the Norton anthology demonstrates that this nostalgia is possible only at a comparatively late stage of the Jewish-American experience — it is the bitter aftertaste of successful assimilation. The earlier writers in the volume are drawn in precisely the opposite direction, toward America and its promise of freedom and tolerance. The sermon preached by Isaac Mayer Wise on the Fourth of July in 1858 goes so far as to claim that “the American revolution and the American republic are, politically spoken, the ultimate results of the biblical theories, clad in a form to suit modern society,” and that “next to the Passover feast, the Fourth of July is the greatest.” And it was a Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, who gave the Statue of Liberty its patriotic blazon; the “world-wide welcome” of her poem “The New Colossus” is, rst of all, a hoped-for welcome to the Jews.

As the anthology shows, there was only one brief period when the competing tugs of assimilation and nostalgia, Americanness and Jewishness, were fruitfully balanced. This was the half-century, from about 1900 to 1950, when Yiddish literature flourished in America. Perhaps “flourished” is too strong a word: even at its height Yiddish was the language of a small minority, and New York was never more than a satellite of Vilna and Warsaw, the homes of Yiddish culture. But it is precisely that sense of international connection that makes American Yiddish writers unique among American Jewish writers: they were not carrying forward half the destiny of Judaism, to keep or lose forever. They were part of a tradition, ineluctably Jewish by the very language they wrote, yet able to introduce American forms and impressions into that ancient medium. Most of the Yiddish poetry included in the Norton book, like almost all poetry in translation, does not come across with much of its original power. But there are some interesting exceptions: Celia Dropkin, for instance, who came to America in 1912, at the age of 25. There is something reminiscent of Plath in her violent, sexually charged lyrics:

I am a circus lady

And dance among the daggers

Set in the arena

With their points erect.

My swaying, lissome body

Avoids a death-by-falling,

Touching, barely touching the dagger blades.

The few pieces here by Dropkin and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Chaim Grade — not to mention Bellow and Malamud and Mailer and Roth — only begin to indicate the variety and intensity of Jewish writing in America. And the book’s special sections on the Broadway song and Jewish humor, though admirable in intention, are far too short to give any idea of Jews’ enormous contribution to American popular culture. Let’s hope The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature serves not as an end to exploration but as a beginning.