Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature

This chapter offers an account of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translation practices, from the beginning of his career in interwar Poland to his rise to fame in the postwar period. Like Asch, Bashevis agreed to various forms of essentialization, approximation, and even erasure in order to embed Yiddish within the institution of world literature, declaring his sense of security in US culture while announcing worldly ambitions. Bashevis at times courted the image of the “last Yiddish writer,” self-mythologizing as a paradigmatic Jewish storyteller in order to propose the universalization of Yiddish through translation. Yet, like Glatstein, he remained conscious of the impossibilities of such a task, despite his own strict authorial control over the translation process. This chapter tracks that uncertainty in a series of pseudo-autobiographical short stories written in the 1960s and ’70s, in which Bashevis encounters the ghosts of a vernacular past hovering at the foundation of his work.

Epilogue

The Epilogue offers a reflection on the possible “elsewheres” of Jewish American writing, looking for further articulations of Glatstein’s non-institutional world literature to-come in the writing of Anna Margolin and Grace Paley. Margolin in Yiddish and Paley in English rarely expected recognition from patriarchal institutions, yet they were writers who depended on the translational modes of modern literature as part of their writerly practices. They inscribe in their work a futurity that is beholden to Jewish vernacularity while searching for new vocabularies for personal and collective redemption. Reading the politics of “tiptoed waiting” in Margolin’s final published poem and parsing the genealogy of justice in Paley’s writing, this chapter considers what it means to inhabit a world literature to-come grounded in a practice of vernacular listening.

A World Literature To-Come

This chapter outlines the Yiddish American writer Jacob Glatstein’s understanding of world literature, which rejected conventional modes of translation and was increasingly suspicious of Euro-American institutions of literary value. Glatstein repeatedly critiqued other Yiddish writers, including Asch, who, he believed, wrote for translation rather than as part of what Glatstein found to be a more valuable, even more worldly, vernacular project. Modeled on aspects of Anglo-American and global modernism yet fiercely loyal to Yiddish vernacular creativity, Glatstein proposed a world literature to-come, in which capitulation to market demands would be deferred in favor of a particularism shared across seemingly peripheral literary cultures. The chapter traces Glatstein’s belief in the inherent worldliness of Yiddish writing—despite or even because of its obscurity—from the 1930s to the postwar period, in his literary criticism, poetry, and fiction.

Between Heaven and Earth

This chapter examines Saul Bellow’s use of Jewish vernacularity within his world-writing project. Focusing on the 1960s and ’70s, the height of his fame, the chapter analyzes how Bellow embeds his characters in post-immigrant Chicago, yet also active within global networks—and all while still longing, dialectically, for the universal. To reflect this dialectic, Bellow created a style that translates and aestheticizes Yiddish and immigrant colloquialisms. The result is writing characterized by obsessive, exhausting acts of compensation in which Bellow’s narrator must balance descent into Jewish vernacularity with a reach for sublime metaphor. Bellow’s attempts to translate Jewishness without abandoning the vernacular lead to an underdetermined attachment to Jewishness, producing, paradoxically, a parochial world literature—writing that hinges on the possibility of the local as a site of transcendence. But this locality remains untranslatable, such that instead of arriving at the universal Bellow is left with a set of uncertainties.

A Monolingual World Literature

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. Asch’s fame in the interwar period, in Europe and then in the US, in Yiddish and in translation, relied on his belief in the possibility for reconciliation between Jews and Christians, especially through the creation of a unified redemptive literary institution. Focusing on his novels Three Cities and Salvation, the chapter posits that Asch is a model for a monolingual world literature, which may be written in multiple languages but whose texts seek to employ a mutually translatable universal vocabulary. This chapter counters this faith in translation by reading vernacular incongruity back into Asch’s texts, revealing a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s critical terminology, including discussions of how to define world literature and its relationships with Jewish American writing. The chapter views world literature as a normative institution of cultural value, a construct of Euro-American modernity that systematizes literature through a global imaginary linked to notions of empire and colonialization. The terms “American” and “Jewish” could, at first, name certain knowable enclaves within this larger network. However, on closer examination, these terms are revealed to be fractured things that at times implicate writers within the world-making project of world literature and at other times lead them to advocate for its disavowal. In proposing a multidirectional reading practice, the book takes up the undecidability of translation and the cultural uncertainty of Yiddish in the US as ways to account for the shifting locations of vernacular Jewish culture.