Anglophone Jewish Literature

Axel Stähler, Axel Stähler

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134121410
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Colecciones literarias de Oriente Medio

Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the new literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as 'hyphenated' and has therefore not yet been subjected as such to the scrutiny of scholars of literary or cultural history.

The collection of essays addresses this lack and initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the New English Literatures. Without attempting to impose what would seem to be a misguided conceptual unity on the many-facetted field of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book is based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Alert to the productive friction between these discourses, which it aims to elicit, it confronts Jewish literary studies with postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and other contemporary theoretical frameworks.

Featuring contributions from among the best-known scholars in the fields of British and American Jewish literature, including Bryan Cheyette and Emily Miller Budick, this collection transcends borders of both nations and academic disciplines and takes into account cultural and historical affinities and differences of the Anglophone diaspora which have contributed to the formation and development of the English-language segment of Jewish literature.

Part I
Introduction

1
Introduction – Jewish literature(s) in English?

Anglophone Jewish writing and the ‘loquation’¹ of culture

Axel Stähler

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 ‘Jewish literature’ is proves to be notoriously difficult (see, for example, Wirth-Nesher 1994a,b: 3; Siegel 1997:17–22; Budick 2001:2–3), and to enquire into the nature of a ‘Jewish literature in English’ initially may seem of secondary importance. Yet, English is nowadays spoken by the majority of Jews living outside Israel (Rubinstein 1996:2–5) and is the language also of a number of ‘returnee’ 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 ‘have the [translated] English version in mind from the start, because there lie international fame and hefty advances’ (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 ‘hyphenated’ Jewish literatures, after all? Or, is the question posed in the title of this introduction rendered purely academic by an (allegedly) ‘vanishing diaspora’ (Wasserstein 1996) and ‘vanishing Jews’ (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 ‘Jewishness’. 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 ‘considerable differences in both the Jewish communities of each of the English-speaking countries and, still more, in the national histories and institutions of each country’, the similarities are ‘more significant still’ (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 (7–13). 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 ‘appropriate matrix for Jewish history’ (1). In Rubinstein’s argument, the role of English as a language is accorded particular significance (19–21). ‘These facts’, he suggests, ‘have 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 groups’ (21). Yet ‘the implications of this linguistic transformation’, Rubinstein continues, ‘remain only partly explored, if at all’ (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 ‘postcolonial’ 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 ‘New Yiddish’

‘Imaginative writers’, said Cynthia Ozick in an address to an Israeli audience at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth in 1970, ‘are compelled to swim in the medium of culture; literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it. Consequently’, she continued, ‘there are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile culture’ (1970; 1983:167–8).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: ‘The greater a Jewish poet is, the more obvious is, of course, his Jewishness; mediocre talents and indistinct personalities may hide their Jewishness the longest.’ (105)⁶ Bartels was interested in the identification of ‘Jewishness’ 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, ‘the Jewish poet and writer is husbanding, of course, with our German elements of poesy’ (104). In her lecture, first published as ‘America: Toward Yavneh’ (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, ‘if the religion of Art’, she says, ‘is 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?’ Her answer is simple: ‘If he wants to stay Jewish, I think he will have to. Even as a writer, especially as a writer, he will have to acknowledge exile’ (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) – surveys confirm this number for the 1990s.⁸ Ozick envisaged English as a New Yiddish to become a ‘vessel’ of the ‘Jewish vision’, a language, as she said, ‘for our need, our possibility, our overwhelming idea’ (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 ‘centrally Jewish’, by which she meant that it was to touch on the liturgical. ‘Obviously’, as she went on to explain,

this does not refer only to prayer. It refers to a type of literature and to a type of perception. There is a critical difference between liturgy and a poem. Liturgy is in command of the reciprocal moral imagination rather than of the isolated lyrical imagination. [...] Liturgy is also a poem, but it is meant not to have only a private voice. Liturgy has a choral voice, a communal voice: the echo of the voice of the Lord of History. Poetry shuns judgment and memory and seizes the moment. In all of history the literature that has lasted for Jews has been liturgical. The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

(169)

As a literary mode on which to model the new liturgical, and ‘centrally Jewish’, literature Ozick suggests the Aggadah, which, as she explains, ‘comprises the storytelling, imaginative elements in Talmud’ (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 ‘dispraise of Diaspora’ (156),⁹ motivated by her revulsion against ‘Western Civilization’ (156) and its encroachment on ‘Jewishness’, 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:

[F]or the moment our two parts, Diaspora Israel and Jerusalem Israel, have between us the responsibility of a double reconstruction – the healers, the health-bringers, the safekeepers in Jerusalem; the Aggadists, the makers of literature, just now gathering strength in America.

(173)

Although she hastens to add that ‘this is not to deny culture-making to the Land of Israel’ (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:

We can give ourselves over entirely to Gentile culture and be lost to history, becoming a vestige nation without a literature; or we can do what we have never before dared to do in a Diaspora language: make it our own, our own necessary instrument, understanding ourselves in it while being understood by everyone who cares to listen or read. [...] From being envious apes we can become masters of our own civilization – and let those who want to call this ‘re-ghettoization’, or similar pejoratives, look to their own destiny.

(177)

Of course, Ozick’s proposal has found its detractors (see, for example, Wisse 1976), and by the time she included her essay under its new title ‘Toward a New Yiddish’ in her collection Art & Ardor in 1983, Ozick herself said that she no longer believed ‘that 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 – i.e. the Judaization of a single language used by large populations of Jews’ (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 ‘contact zone’ 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 Rubinstein’s 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 ‘New Yiddish’. Furthermore, they seem to be pertinent even now, with regard to questions of Jewish ‘postcoloniality’ no less than in view of the question posed in the title of this collection – 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 ‘infiltration’ 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 ...