Jewish American Literature Against the World

By way of a brief genealogy of the Jewish American literary field and through the lens of recent attempts to imagine how comparative literature-based thinking about a concept of “world literature” can be critically productive for Jewish literary study, this article analyzes Jewish American literary studies’ prestige problem. Because it has persistently failed to theorize the intellectual and methodological assumptions underlying its practice, Jewish American literary study remains burdened by the essentialist implications of an ethnological historicism. This article ultimately argues that Jewish American literary study needs to take more seriously the possibilities offered by a materialist epistemology rather than the Jewish studies-based historicist ontology it has mostly taken for granted. “My hope is that a Jewish American epistemology can operate outside the penumbra of a tired and played-out concept of ethnicity—a term that unavoidably, if spectrally, posits a biologistic object at the heart of its historicist project—even as it might still claim the mantle of Jewish-y-ness.”

The Object of Jewish American Literary History

This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

Epilogue

The epilogue shows how changes in the understanding of race between Sarah’s lifetime and that of her granddaughter Blanche Moses set the stage for the erasure of Sarah and Isaac’s African ancestry from family memory. The subsequent silence around Sarah and Isaac’s story reflects other losses in the larger story of American Judaism. Following World War II, the emerging field of Jewish American history struggled to place Jews in the ethno-racial landscape of the Americas, and the histories of non-white and multiracial Jews often went untold. Was it insecurity over their own whiteness that caused European-American Jewish historians to write Jews of color out of the story of American Judaism, or just that their own genealogies led them to create histories that mirrored their families’ experiences and self-understandings? The chapter ends by looking at how descendants of Sarah and Isaac today responded to the telling of their history.

(English) Dreams versus (Hebrew) Reality: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as ‘Jewish-American Minor Literature’

This article examines Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a particular example of minor literature written in America while suggesting a new term: ‘Jewish-American minor literature’. It has been argued that Jewish-American literature is not minor literature in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms mainly due to the openness of American English to other ethnic languages such as Yiddish.1 However, this article shows that it is Hebrew, and not Yiddish, that functions as ‘minor language’ in the text—both as a language spoken by a minority and according to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, as it undermines the theme of linguistic assimilation governing the surface structure of the book. Yet this ‘subversive’ Hebrew is neither transcribed/transliterated in the text, nor is it referred to or talked about in the novel. Rather, it is ‘hidden’ behind the English lines of the book. In fact, it is the emerging of such ‘concealed’ Hebrew hollowing out the idea of Americanisation in the text that turns Call It Sleep into what I call ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.2 Inviting further research, this article may open the door for a new research field investigating (whether there are any) other appearances of covert Hebrew words in additional Jewish-American works written exclusively in English and whether these works too can be considered as ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.

One Trauma, Two Narratives: Adamah versus Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day

In the three years after World War II, prominent Jewish organizations in the United States and in the Land of Israel made films aimed at promoting Zionist goals. The film Adamah (Helmar Lerski, 1948) was produced in the Land of Israel with the support of the Jewish-American volunteer women’s organization Hadassah. It tells the rehabilitation story of Benjamin, a Holocaust survivor in the Land of Israel. When the final version was sent to Hadassah for approval, the directorate felt that the American public would not relate to it. Hadassah altered the footage and distributed its own version entitled Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day (1949). This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the main differences between the two representations of trauma, which were taken from the same footage but shaped into two differing narratives. Based on studies in Zionism and a great deal of archival material, it shows how these films epitomized the differences in the perception of trauma and its representations between the Zionist organizations in the Land of Israel and the USA.