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.”

(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’.

Cross Scripts: Inscribing Hebrew into Jewish American Literature

Most Jewish immigrants to America during the early 20th century arrived speaking Yiddish or Ladino and using Hebrew and Aramaic for liturgical purposes. When subsequent generations abandoned the first two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic were retained, used primarily for liturgy and rites of passage. Jewish American writers have often inserted Hebrew into their English texts by either reproducing the original alphabet or transliterating into Latin letters. This essay focuses on diverse strategies for representing liturgical Hebrew with an emphasis on the poetic, thematic, and sociolinguistic aspects of these expressions of both home and the foreign. Hebrew transliteration is discussed for its literary (rather than phonetic) rendering, for its multilingual creative contact with the other languages and cultures of each narrative. Among the authors whose works are discussed are Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, Achy Obejas, and Gary Shteyngart.

Rising from the Gutter

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.