Part I
Introduction
1
Introduction â Jewish literature(s) in English?
Anglophone Jewish writing and the âloquationâ1 of culture
Axel StÀhler
Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the emergent, or new, literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as hyphenated, as American-, Anglo-, Australian-, Canadian-, Irish- or South African-Jewish, etc., and in the minds of some it has simply been equated with Jewish-American literature.2 Of course, the definition of what âJewish literatureâ is proves to be notoriously difficult (see, for example, Wirth-Nesher 1994a,b: 3; Siegel 1997:17â22; Budick 2001:2â3), and to enquire into the nature of a âJewish literature in Englishâ initially may seem of secondary importance. Yet, English is nowadays spoken by the majority of Jews living outside Israel (Rubinstein 1996:2â5) and is the language also of a number of âreturneeâ writers in Israel. Next to Hebrew and the ever-retreating Yiddish, English has thus become the major language of contemporary Jewish literary production; it has even been suggested that Israeli authors writing in Hebrew âhave the [translated] English version in mind from the start, because there lie international fame and hefty advancesâ (Green 2001:95).3
But is there really anything like a transnational Jewish literature in English? Or, in view of different production contexts, should we speak rather of Anglophone Jewish literature-s, or, in deference to tradition and convention, of âhyphenatedâ Jewish literatures, after all? Or, is the question posed in the title of this introduction rendered purely academic by an (allegedly) âvanishing diasporaâ (Wasserstein 1996) and âvanishing Jewsâ (Dershowitz 1996)?
To anticipate the suggestion advanced by this collection: It appears that the earlier assessment should indeed be revised and that the Anglophone segment of Jewish literature constitutes, to some extent, a discrete, if widely diverse, body of literary achievement. One reason for this assumption is, quite obviously, the use of English as a common vernacular and as a language of literary expression in the Anglophone diaspora. This is compounded, with regard to its manifold and often divergent constructions which are admittedly vague, by the notion of âJewishnessâ. A third reason is that there are a number of cultural affinities not only between the English-speaking countries but also between the Jewish communities living in these countries.
Recent research by the historian W.D. Rubinstein suggests that despite âconsiderable differences in both the Jewish communities of each of the English-speaking countries and, still more, in the national histories and institutions of each countryâ, the similarities are âmore significant stillâ (1996:7). As the most important common features, Rubinstein notes the comparatively late establishment of Jewish communities in the English-speaking world since the latter half of the seventeenth century and the fact that these communities for centuries remained very small; that in the wake of the Reformation religious intolerance was focused on dissenting Christian beliefs rather than on the Jewish creed; that the Anglophone world has a tradition of philo-Semitism and of liberalism, pluralism and democracy; and that neither the countries of the Anglophone diaspora nor their Jewish communities experienced any significant breaks with the past (7â13). From this, Rubinstein concludes that, contrary to the widely held view of the paradigmatic quality of the Jewish experience in pre-Holocaust Germany, the English-speaking world provides an âappropriate matrix for Jewish historyâ (1). In Rubinsteinâs argument, the role of English as a language is accorded particular significance (19â21). âThese factsâ, he suggests, âhave clearly enhanced the nexus between Jewry and English as a vernacular, increasing both the importance of English-speaking Jewry per se and the centrality of English to Jewish communications, as with the communications among all other groupsâ (21). Yet âthe implications of this linguistic transformationâ, Rubinstein continues, âremain only partly explored, if at allâ (5).
Indeed, as pointed out above, Anglophone Jewish writing has not yet been considered as a coherent system of literary utterance and has, as such, not yet been subjected to the scrutiny of scholars of literary or cultural history. It is the purpose of this collection to address this lack and to initiate the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the new English literatures. A suggestion concomitant with this is that Anglophone Jewish literature, itself variously situated within cultural contact zones of a âpostcolonialâ character, reveals some analogies to postcolonial literature, and that the two not only engage productively in processes of mutual stimulation but that this also indicates the useful interchangeability of the respective tools of critical enquiry.4
The importance of writing in English: Cynthia Ozick and the âNew Yiddishâ
âImaginative writersâ, said Cynthia Ozick in an address to an Israeli audience at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth in 1970, âare compelled to swim in the medium of culture; literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it. Consequentlyâ, she continued, âthere are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile cultureâ (1970; 1983:167â8).5 A bold statement, one may think, and one that seems uncomfortably close, perhaps, to bygone anti-Semitic claims of the lack of Jewish creative genius. In 1903 Adolf Bartels, of infamous memory and notorious for his attempts to write an anti-Semitic history of German literature, declared: âThe greater a Jewish poet is, the more obvious is, of course, his Jewishness; mediocre talents and indistinct personalities may hide their Jewishness the longest.â (105)6 Bartels was interested in the identification of âJewishnessâ primarily with a view to eradicating it from German literature because he considered it to be a distorting and detrimental influence. Yet, although he felt confident that his racial theory as such was reliable enough for this purpose, he deemed himself hampered because, as he put it, âthe Jewish poet and writer is husbanding, of course, with our German elements of poesyâ (104). In her lecture, first published as âAmerica: Toward Yavnehâ (1970), Ozick seems to turn the same argument on its head, when she suggests that American culture, especially what she calls the religion of Art, deflects the Jewish fiction writer from his Jewishness. For, âif the religion of Artâ, she says, âis to dominate imaginative literature entirely, and I believe it will in America for a very long time, can he [the Jewish fiction writer] stay out of American literature?â Her answer is simple: âIf he wants to stay Jewish, I think he will have to. Even as a writer, especially as a writer, he will have to acknowledge exileâ (1970; 1983:165). That is, Jewish writers will have to acknowledge their otherness and shape their literature accordingly.
In 1970, Ozick suggested as a solution to this problem the creation of a new liturgical or aggadic literature in New Yiddish.7 The New Yiddish was to be English, because in 1970 about 50 per cent of all Jews had English as their mother tongue (170) â surveys confirm this number for the 1990s.8 Ozick envisaged English as a New Yiddish to become a âvesselâ of the âJewish visionâ, a language, as she said, âfor our need, our possibility, our overwhelming ideaâ (176). Of the new Jewish literature which was to find expression in the medium of the New Yiddish, Ozick demanded that it was to be âcentrally Jewishâ, by which she meant that it was to touch on the liturgical. âObviouslyâ, as she went on to explain,
As a literary mode on which to model the new liturgical, and âcentrally Jewishâ, literature Ozick suggests the Aggadah, which, as she explains, âcomprises the storytelling, imaginative elements in Talmudâ (173). The Talmud, of course, is, somewhat simplified, an extensive rabbinical commentary to the Mishna, the teachings of the oral Torah, which in conjunction with the written Torah to a large degree defines Jewishness in a religious sense.
Thus, although she set out in âdispraise of Diasporaâ (156),9 motivated by her revulsion against âWestern Civilizationâ (156) and its encroachment on âJewishnessâ, Ozick perceives the creation of a new Jewish literature in the New Yiddish to give meaning to Jewish diaspora existence and even to act a necessary part in Jewish reconstruction after the Shoah:
Although she hastens to add that âthis is not to deny culture-making to the Land of Israelâ (173), it is the Anglophone diaspora, and more specifically America, she looks to for progress towards a metaphorical Yavneh. Yavneh was the little town in ancient Palestine, where a rabbinical academy was established after the destruction of the Second Temple and where parts of the Talmud were compiled. And thus she concludes:
Of course, Ozickâs proposal has found its detractors (see, for example, Wisse 1976), and by the time she included her essay under its new title âToward a New Yiddishâ in her collection Art & Ardor in 1983, Ozick herself said that she no longer believed âthat the project of fashioning a Diaspora literary culture, in the broadest belles-let-tres sense, can be answered by any theory of an indispensable language â i.e. the Judaization of a single language used by large populations of Jewsâ (152).10
Jewish literary production in non-Jewish languages
And yet, Ozick was not, of course, the first to pose the question of the language of Jewish literary production in exile, nor was, or is, the Anglophone diaspora the only âcontact zoneâ in which it became pertinent. For Ozick, the Shoah and the havoc it wrought are significant factors in the phrasing of her proposal, compounded by the fact that the Ingathering of the Exiles has largely passed by America. Yet, before the ascendancy of the Anglophone Jewish diaspora and before the Shoah, in the German-speaking countries a similar issue had been negotiated. Indeed, it seems to me that Rubinsteinâs claim that the Anglophone diaspora provides an adequate matrix for the Jewish experience needs to be qualified to some extent because, at least in some respects, the German precedent in turn may be seen as a matrix for the matrix, and I would argue that the debate about German as a language of Jewish literary production, engaged in (at times) quite fiercely by both German and Jewish intellectuals for several decades, is of some interest in the context of this volume.
For one, the arguments put forward then are echoed in the more recent debate about the âNew Yiddishâ. Furthermore, they seem to be pertinent even now, with regard to questions of Jewish âpostcolonialityâ no less than in view of the question posed in the title of this collection â despite the obvious differences in the cultural contexts of the here and now and the there and then, when Yiddish and (the emerging) Ivrit were contenders for a Jewish national language. A comparative exposition, I suggest, may well enhance our sensibility for the question whether there are Jewish literature(s) in English, and it may contribute to an approximation of the phenomenon discussed in the individual chapters of this book.
Earlier, I quoted from Adolf Bartels, whose essay on the alleged Jewish âinfiltrationâ of German literature appeared in 1903. His was only one of a number of texts addressing the question of Jewish cultural production in the German-speaking countries around the turn of the century. And it was not only from the outside that the nature and the properties of Jewish cultural production in the exilic contact zones were discussed but also from within. Especially in Zionist discourse attempts were being ...