5. Into the mainstream

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
International Literature ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Isaac Babel ◽  
Bruno Schulz

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the early twenty-first century, rotating around the concept of aterritoriality to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres to the present day. At the center are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature does not have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Film Scripts ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Introduction” explores the appellation “People of the Book” as it pertains to the Jews, arguing that, theologically as well as culturally, Jews depend on books to exist. The work of Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges is invoked to introduce the concept of aterritoriality. Modern Jewish literature does not have a specific address and is written in multiple languages. There is a connection between Hasidism, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israeli literature, and the work of Jewish writers in other diasporas. Jewish literature should also include graphic novels, film scripts, television shows, and other textual manifestations.

Introduction: American Jewish Writing Today

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Naomi Sokoloff
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Allegra Goodman ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Thane Rosenbaum ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Exciting Time ◽  
Michael Chabon

This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

Versions of Immobility: The Contemporary American Writer and the Jewish Tradition

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 78-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Urban Problems

The “Jewishness” of recent American fiction has already been well explored. But discussion of the work of Jewish writers tends to be retrospective: it leads back to the shtetl and the shlemiel without considering how “Americanised” Jewish forms and themes have become. Clearly, recent authors such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are indebted to a fund of “Jewish experience”. But their novels are “American”, far more concerned with twentieth-century urban problems than with the enclosed life of the traditional Jewish community. This essay therefore attempts to assess how far “Jewish” localised material has been translated into specifically “American” terms.

scholarly journals A Place of Pretense and Escapism: The Coffeehouse in Early 20th Century Budapest Jewish Literature

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Mari Rethelyi
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Jewish Writers

In Budapest, going to the coffeehouiennese Café and Fin-De-Siecle Cultuse was the quintessential urban habit. The coffeehouse, a Judaized urban space, although devoid of any religious overtones, was Jewish in that most of the owners and significant majority of the intellectual clientele were Jewish—secular and non-affiliated—but Jewish. The writers’ Jewishness was not a confessed faith or identity, but a lens on the experience of life that stemmed from their origins, whether they were affiliated with a Jewish institution or not, and whether they identified as Jews or not. The coffeehouse enabled Jews to create and participate in the culture that replaced traditional ethnic and religious affiliations. The new secular urban Jew needed a place to express and practice this new identity, and going to the coffeehouse was an important part of that identity. Hungarian Jewish literature centered in Budapest contains a significant amount of material on the coffeehouse. Literature provided a non-constrained and unfiltered venue for the secular Jewish urban intellectuals to voice freely and directly their opinions on Jewish life at the time. In the article I examine what the Jewish writers of the early 20th century wrote about Budapest’s coffeehouses and how their experience of them is connected to their being Jewish.

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