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Victoria Aarons
Jewish American literature has a long and rich history in American letters. Stemming from a well‐established oral and written tradition, Jewish storytelling is deeply rooted in the culture, the rituals, and the traditions of Jewish life and practice. Well before the arrival of the largest wave of European Jewish immigrants to the United States, a rich Jewish literary tradition – both scriptural and secular – flourished as an expression of cultural adaptation, collective consciousness, and communal identity. In general, Jewish literature might be thought of as a literature of exile, a diasporic literature exhibiting a preoccupation with displacement, movement, adaptation, and self‐reinvention. For Jews, place has always been intertwined with identity and memory, with the defining characteristics of what it means to be a Jew in the midst of fluctuating social, cultural, and political conditions. At the center of the exilic movement of the Jews throughout history, storytelling – narratives of survival, renewal, and endurance – has reflected developments in Jewish life and thought. As Nobel Laureate Jewish American novelist Saul Bellow once put it, there is great “power in a story. It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual.” As Bellow explains, for the generation of Eastern European Jews who relocated in America between the 1880s and World War I, in particular, “daily life without stories would have been inconceivable” (Bellow 1963: 10–11). During this period, considered the third and largest wave of Jewish immigration into the United States, close to two million Jews, primarily Ashkenazic, Yiddish‐speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, arrived in America, settling in its large, urban centers. While there is a significant body of Jewish literary production prior to this period, the decades between 1914 and the opening years of the twenty‐first century reveal an explosion of literary creativity by the Jews who arrived in the United States and by their American‐born descendants. The trajectory of Jewish literature during this period reflects the evolution and shifting landscape of Jewish culture and thought throughout this turbulent and transformative epoch in twentieth‐century American and world history. This chapter will selectively point to some of the major figures and movements that mark this vast and variable period, identifying the changes, influences, and character of Jewish American literature as it both responds to and shapes American and Jewish life and thought throughout the twentieth and into the twenty‐first century.
The Immigrant Experience
The years between 1881 and 1914 witnessed a major wave of Jewish immigration into the United States. During this period, one‐third of Eastern European Jews fled their European homelands and came to America, settling primarily in large metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, making their home in these burgeoning commercial urban centers (Howe 1976: xix). This period marks the major exodus of Jews from their European homelands. By 1920, two million Jews had immigrated to America. Who were these immigrants, and what propelled them to come to the United States in such large numbers?
The massive influx of Eastern European Jews who came to America in the period between 1881 and World War I came primarily from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine. The Jewish populations in these regions had, for centuries, survived precariously, subjected throughout history to conditions of persecution and discrimination. While certain historical moments and regions were less perilous and more accepting than others, the continued existence of Jewish life was uncertain at best. The majority of Jews through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries lived in shtetlach, small villages located on the outskirts of major European cities throughout the Pale of Settlement, those regions of tzarist Russia in which Jews were legally authorized to live. Jews were subjected to anti‐Semitic legislation, pogroms, hostility from non‐Jews, and increasingly unstable, threatening conditions. America posed for these diasporic, unstable populations the promise of a possible future free from persecution and marginalization. Thus the years surrounding the close of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century saw a major movement to the United States and the promise of freedom to live, work, and prosper without social limitation, censure, or a perpetually threatened existence. Most of the Eastern European immigrants of this period arrived and remained in major cosmopolitan centers, such as New York, settling in the crowded neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side.
These Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States, mainly Ashkenazim (Jews from Central and Eastern Europe), brought with them the defining language and culture of Yiddish, the mame‐loshn, or mother tongue, spoken by Jews of these regions. As Jules Chametzky and others have pointed out, “The European Jewish world was polyglot. Most Jews had some facility in at least three languages. They spoke Yiddish…they read and prayed in Hebrew, loshn‐koydesh, the holy tongue of their religion and law; and they could converse with their Gentile neighbors in the native Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, or German, depending on the region they inhabited” (Chametzky et al. 2001: 111). The multilingualism of this population is important, not least because it was one of the contributing factors in the relatively accelerated assimilation into American culture. This habitual multilingualism produces an ongoing dialogue among the languages of the past, thus sustaining the languages that both shaped a worldview and fostered assimilation. Significantly, moreover, Yiddishkeit, the culture of Yiddish‐speaking, Ashkenazic Jews, was a distinguishing and abiding feature of the literature of the Jewish immigrants of this progressive period of immigration and settlement, helping shape urban American life and culture in the early part of the twentieth century. As Lori Harrison‐Kahan suggests, “the Yiddish‐inflected immigrant dialect […] had become the hallmark of Jewish urban realism” (Harrison‐Kahan 2015: 20). The influence of Yiddish on American popular culture continues meaningfully to this day.
The Yiddish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Eastern Europe, which marks the beginning of secular Jewish fiction, provided the backdrop and traditions that informed the early writing of the immigrant. The literature of this period shows the defining influences of the three major Eastern European Yiddish writers of the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah, the movement toward secular intellectualism by Jews in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These writers are the Russian‐born Mendele Mocher Sforim, the pseudonym of Sholom Abramovitz (1836–1917), considered the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature; Polish‐born Isaac Leib Peretz (1851–1915); and Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), pseudonym of Russian‐born Sholom Rabinowitz, the most widely known and the only one of the three to settle in the United States. Their corpus included a wide variety of genres and forms, including short stories, satires, plays, memoirs, and novels. These three writers established the foundations of modern, secular Yiddish literature. The pseudonym Sholem Aleichem, which means “peace be with you,” a fundamental Hebrew greeting expressing consanguinity and intimacy, suggests a purposeful familiarity and connection with the world of Eastern European Jewish life.
Sholem Aleichem’s continuing influence on Jewish American writers – the voices of his first‐person narrators, ordinary people who express the pleasures and the confusions of their lives – can be found in American culture to this day. Sholem Aleichem’s most well‐known character‐narrator is Teyve, the dairyman, whose stories reflect the changing world of the shtetl as more of the young population depart for the larger world beyond the confines of traditional Jewish life in the Pale. Another of Sholem Aleichem’s notable characters is the comically indefatigable luftmensch (with his head in the clouds) Menahem‐Mendl, whose voice guides the reader through the epistolary collection, The Adventures of Menahem‐Mendl (1909), and whose concluding letter to his wife reflects the unpredictable optimism and volatility of the impending passage to America. In a postscript to his final letter, Menahem‐Mendl assures his wife, with invigorated, hopeful confidence,
My dearest wife, I am going to America! […] Why America all of a sudden? Because they say that in America life is good for Jews […] [T]hey are considered the cream of the lot in America! Everybody assures me that in America I’ll make good, please God – and they mean, good. Everyone is going to America these days because there is nothing to do here. Absolutely nothing. All business is finished. Well, if everybody is going, why shouldn’t I go too? What have I got to lose?
(Sholem Aleichem 1979: 221)
The answer to Menahem‐Mendl’s rhetorical question, “What have I got to lose?” is, paradoxically, both nothing and everything, an implicit acknowledgment of the perils, tensions, ambivalences, and ambiguities in leaving one world for the hoped‐for embrace of another. The literature of the immigrant reveals the tensions poised by the uneasy balance of loss and gain, past and future, displacement and expansion, insider and outsider as those tensions produce simultaneous security and insecurity. As the eponymous narrator of the emblematic immigrant novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), written by Abraham Cahan (born in Belarus in 1860 and emigrated to the United States in 1881, where he died in 1951), admits at the novel’s close: “My past and my present do not comport well” (Cahan 1960: 530).
A vast array of literary genres – poetry, fiction, and semi‐autobiographical works – was produced during this early period of Jewish American writing. As Priscilla Wald suggests, “The literature of Yiddish New York tells the story of the memories and movements of people for whom family and place, however uncertain, nonetheless formed the basis of the identities that they were asked to build anew” (Wald 2003: 67). Nostalgic reinvention and forward movement marks this period, emerging in voiced longing and anticipation. The literature of Cahan and other immigrant writers of his time characteristically express emotional and spiritual loss as well as an abiding sense of difference, of existing on the margins, despite external measures of economic success and social ascendency. David Levinsky’s opening frame sets the theme for his first‐person narrative of success and self‐reinvention, the rise of the impoverished, dislocated immigrant:
Sometimes, when I think of my past […] the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America – in 1885 – with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak‐and‐suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.
(Cahan 1960: 3)
The paradox between the outward and internal disposition of the central character reveals in this passage and in this literature the wealth of possibilities in the newly appropriated land but also the emotional cost of such a venture.
Such tensions, posed with ironic self‐awareness, typify turn‐of‐the‐century immigrant literature as the characters and narrators – often semi‐autobiographical – attempt to negotiate their newly fashioned lives against the landscape of America, tensions between old world and new, tradition and change, self and other, insider and outsider. Some of the notable immigrant writers of this time include Mary Antin, who arrived as a child from Russia and whose most well‐known work, The Promised Land, was published in 1912; poet and short story writer Lamed Shapiro, originally from Ukraine, who settled in the United States in 1911, where he published a collection of pogrom stories, most notably “White Challah” (published in the collection The Jewish State [1919]); and the Poland‐born, Yiddish novelist, short story writer, and playwright Sholem Asch (1880–1957), who immigrated to the United States in 1914 and whose novels include Mottke the Thief (1916), Uncle Moses (1918), a novel of immigrant life, and East River (1946), a novel set in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century. Another well‐known and significant writer of the period is Anzia Yezierska (c. 1885–1970), who immigrated to New York from Russia in 1898 when she was in her teens, relocating with her family in New York’s Lower East Side, the setting of much of her fiction. Writing about immigrant life, Yezierska’s works include the short story collections Hungry Hearts (1920) and Children of Loneliness (1923), the novel Salome of the Tenements (1923), and the fictionalized autobiography Bread Givers (1925).
Yezierska’s narrators echo many of the same ambivalences articulated by Cahan’s protagonist David Levinsky about the trajectory of upwardly mobile life for the immigrant. The autobiographical narrator in Yezierska’s short story “America and I” (originally appearing in Children of Loneliness [1923]), for example, describes her expectations for her new country: “America! From the other end of the earth from where I came, America was a land of living hope, woven of dreams, aflame with longing and desire” (Yezierska 1990: 72). Her narrative measures her sojourn from initial unease and alienation to a growing sense of belonging in shaping her newly constructed identity as well as the world she now inhabits: “I saw America – a big idea – a deathless hope – a world still in the making […] And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America” (Yezierska 1990: 82). Despite the rewards of the narrator’s hopeful optimism and increased sense of belonging, as she acknowledges, “Great chances have come to me. But in my heart is always a deep sadness” (Yezierska 1990: 82). This push/pull of the past as it intervenes and mediates future perspectives and possibilities created for these early Jewish American writers is, as Michael P. Kramer suggests, “a conceptual bind, looking backward to Jewish origins and forward to American vistas,” a kind of double vision, an emergence into one world ever conscious of one’s inheritance (Kramer 2003: 15).
One of the most important novels written in America by an immigrant is Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), a remarkable story of arriving on the shores of the United States through Ellis Island. Roth’s version of the immigrant experience, however, contrasts darkly with the hopefulness of much of Yezierska’s and Cahan’s work. Roth (1906–1995), an immigrant from Galicia, arrived in Brownsville as a young child in 1907, accompanied by his mother, where they joined Roth’s father, who had preceded their arrival. Later the family settled in New York’s Lower East Side. Call It Sleep, loosely based on Roth’s experience growing up in a multilingual family of disaffected immigrants forever estranged in the new world, provides a devastating chronicle of alienation and disenchantment as witnessed through the eyes of a young boy, David Schearl, coming of age at the turn of the century on the threatening and disorienting streets of the Lower East Side. The novel’s prologue sets up the tension for the plot’s unfolding as the young child and his mother, on board the steamship Peter Stuyvesant, dock at Ellis Island in the year 1907, a year that saw the arrival of throngs of European immigrants to the United States. For David and his mother the arrival proves ominous, as foreshadowed by the looming, massive figure of the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of freedom and refuge for the disinherited, rising from the New York harbor, “her features […] charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane […] the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light – the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty” (Roth 1991: 14). The portentous opening scene of Roth’s epic novel presages the misery that will follow this immigrant family into the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side and their continuing estrangement and impoverished emotional, spiritual, and socioeconomic condition. Roth paints a decidedly different picture of the immigrant’s status from that of either Yezierska’s work or Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky. Taken together, these two vastly differing perspectives, one optimistically expansive, the other pessimistically claustrophobic, reflect the dichotomous insider/outsider position of the immigrant and provide a representative view of the anxieties and sense of difference at the core of the promise of a future unhampered by the past. This literature raises important and enduring questions about assimilation and its limits. It at once chronicles and measures longing and loss, the vagaries and fortuities of striving, and the accidents of fortune.
Probably the most well‐known Polish Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), came to the United States in 1935, where he produced most of his influential work. Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 for his fiction, Singer was a spokesperson for Yiddish writing in America. He regularly wrote pieces for the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), an important newspaper directed at a Jewish American and Yiddish‐reading audience. A prolific writer, some of his most notable works include the novels Satan in Goray (1935), The Family Moskat (1950), The Spinoza of Market Street (1963), and Enemies, A Love Story (1972), as well as a number of short story collections, including Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957) and A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974), a recipient of the National Book Award. His novels and short stories span the historical movement from Jewish life in the shtetlach (e.g. “Gimpel the Fool”) through the cultural disruption and breakdown of those traditional Jewish communities (e.g. “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” and “Son From America”) to life for Jews in America (e.g. “The Little Shoemakers”).
Literature representing the immigrant experience in America was written not only by immigrants themselves but by American‐born Jews, such as Edna Ferber (1885–1968) and Fannie Hurst (1889–1968), who situate their protagonists in an immigrant milieu, and others who look back to that tenuous moment in personal history with both nostalgic longing and amazement at the magnitude of such up‐rootedness and transplantation. The literature responding to the enormous upheaval of the immigrant experience extends well beyond the early years of the twentieth century. American‐born poet, short story writer, and one of the Partisan Review writers and intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966), the son of Romanian Jews, ironically and apologetically points out, in the short story “America! America!” his character’s inescapable distance from the fundamental cultural and personal rupture that immigration represented in his parents’ lives. Schwartz’s short stories speak to both the connection between immigrant parents and their American‐born children and their unavoidable separation. Abashed by his own shortcomings and failure to imagine vividly enough the upheaval in the lives of his parents and their immigrant neighbors and friends, Schwartz’s protagonist comes to acknowledge his own limitations in the wake of the enormous upheaval of his parents’ lives: “Shenandoah tried to imagine their arrival in the new world and their first impression of the city of New York. But he knew that his imagination failed him, for nothing in his own experience was comparable to the great displacement of body and mind which their coming to America must have been” (Schwartz 1978: 27). Schwartz’s American‐born protagonist, however, comes to realize that “[h]is separation was actual enough but there existed also an unbreakable unity […] [T]he life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered” (Schwartz 1978: 32). Schwartz’s protagonist carries with him the weight of the immigrant experience in a transmuted form; the anxieties only displace themselves in different ways.
Schwartz’s character Shenandoah Fish (as well as the narrator of Schwartz’s famous story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”) represents the ambivalent response engendered by the first‐generation American‐born children in relation to their immigrant parents, a generation of young American Jews that recognizes its debt to the past and, at the same time, its determination to forge a distinct identity unhampered by otherness and difference. As one of Grace Paley’s (1922–2007) characters will ask of another in “The Immigrant Story,” “Isn’t it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person’s sorrow?” (Paley 1974: 171). American‐born Jewish writers, well beyond the initial period of immigration, return to the immigrant experience in an attempt to lay the foundations for their own anxieties about place, identity, and memory, preoccupations that reemerge in Jewish American literature to the present day. America is the landscape against which these recurring antagonisms, confusions, and tensions are negotiated, a contradictory place of security and vulnerability. Harkening back to Henry Roth’s description of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of hope and fear in the 1934 immigrant novel Call It Sleep, one of contemporary novelist Thane Rosenbaum’s (1960–) characters ironically will exclaim, “America, a fake land. Nothing here is what it seems. They show you a statue of a lady holding a lamp when you first arrive. What does that tell you: Look where you’re going” (Rosenbaum 1996b: 132).
Post‐World War II Writers
The postwar period ushered in the golden age of Jewish American literature. The three major literary figures of this time, novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, are credited with developing the Jewish American literary canon, having created a new presence in Jewish American letters, shaping and responding to an increasing Jewish social, cultural, and intellectual ethos in American life and thought. These three writers brought to life a decidedly Jewish American protagonist and a newly emergent Jewish voice that came to define American letters and influence American writers for over half a century, an influence that continues to this day. No longer on the fringes of American society, the voices that emerge in the literature of this period reflect the ascending position of acculturated, upwardly mobile Jewish Americans, voices that speak to the possibilities of self‐invention, cultural centrality, and identification with America as “home.” As the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s groundbreaking work The Adventures of Augie March (1953), recipient of the National Book Award for Fiction, self‐confidently declares in the novel’s opening lines: “I am an American, Chicago born […] and go at things as I have taught myself, free‐style, and will make the record in my own way” (Bellow 1953: 3). The voice and posture of this new American defines the possibilities for self‐fashioning in the wake of the war, at a time when America is redefining its own identity as it moves into the second half of the twentieth century. Postwar Jewish American literature focuses on the assertion of the authorial self at a transitional moment in American history, and the literature produced moves from the cultural margins of the immigrant experience to mainstream literary culture and cultural life. The literary and cultural voice of mainstream America is, in the decade following the war, significantly formed by the flourishing of Jewish American writers. These three formative writers construct distinct portraits of Jewish life in America that reflect on the diverse backgrounds and stages of Jewish American history. While Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are generally considered to represent the birth of a new Jewish American ethos, each approaches Jewish American life from diverse perspectives and literary styles.
Saul Bellow (1915–2005), one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, helped create the modernist voice of the alienated, introspective, self‐absorbed individual given to meditative soliloquies about the condition of humanity. The recipient of numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction (1954, 1965, 1971), the Pulitzer Prize (1976), the National Medal of Arts (1988), the National Book Foundation’s lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (1990), and the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature (1976), Bellow distinguished himself throughout his prolific literary career as a writer of deep perspicacity, philosophical inclination, and social commentary, all of which were fostered by his close, career‐long association with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Moreover, the trajectory of Bellow’s writing measures the changing social and political conditions, patterns, and preoccupations of American culture at a turbulent period in its history. Bellow’s fiction reflects some of the century’s major events and corresponding attitudes: the urban experience of ethnic diversity and of an ascending, influential Jewish middle class within it; the conflicting ideological impacts of Marxism and modernism; the tensions between highbrow and popular culture; the domestic effects of the Vietnam War; the rapidly changing views on issues of gender and race; the persisting conditions of anti‐Semitism; and the delayed impact in America of the Holocaust. Bellow’s protagonists, largely city dwellers, speak the language of Jewish urban America. Their speech captures the spirit, animation, and challenge of postwar life. His novels, in particular, produce the ways in which his characters, always of an intellectual disposition, think about and articulate the complex cultural and intellectual landscape they inhabit.
Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), novelist and short story writer, is generally considered a masterful craftsman and stylist. The American Jewish novelist Cynthia Ozick, in a tribute to Malamud upon his death, described him as “the very writer who had brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention,” a writer who “shaped our English into startling new configurations” (Ozick 2001: 26). Unlike Bellow’s educated, usually prosperous, and established intellectual soliloquists, Malamud’s characters typically are ordinary Jews – grocers, marriage‐brokers, struggling families – existing precariously on the margins of America. His fiction, especially the short stories that reflect on Jewish life, is habitually shaped by animated, Yiddish‐inflected dialogue and vivid characterizations in recreating the immigrant experience in America and its generational aftermath. Malamud is also something of a fabulist, peopling his stories with talking horses, chimpanzees, and Jewbirds. In the tradition of Sholem Aleichem’s kleyne mentshelekh mit kleyne hasoges (little people with little ideas), who narrate the struggles and confusions of their lives, Malamud’s ordinary, suffering Jews routinely insist on the basic Jewish ethic of rachmones – mercy and compassion toward others – in the face of a hostile, threatening world. As his paradigmatic character Morris Bober (in the novel The Assistant [1957]), acknowledges, “I suffer for you … you suffer for me” (Malamud 2003: 125). Jewish suffering, for Malamud, is a metonym for universal human suffering.
With the 1959 publication of the novella Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, and later with his controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the Newark, New Jersey‐born Philip Roth (1933–2018) became a celebrated and influential Jewish American author situating himself at the center of American life and thought. As Roth stated in a 1981 interview, America “is the place I know best in the world. It’s the only place I know in the world. My consciousness and my language were shaped by America. I’m an American writer in ways that a plumber isn’t an American plumber or a miner an American miner or a cardiologist an American cardiologist. Rather, what the heart is to the cardiologist, the coal to the miner, the kitchen sink to the plumber, America is to me” (Finkielkraut 1981: 128). Despite Roth’s insistence on his identification with America, his characters constantly question their identities, their motivations, and their established sense of place among the goyim (non‐Jews). His novels and short stories, written over a lengthy and abundant literary career, comically, parodically, and ironically construct characters in the continual process of reinventing themselves, creating “counterlives,” alternative and competing selves (e.g. the novel The Counterlife [1986]). Roth’s characters are typically caught up in the fantasy of being other than who they are. As his famous, recurring character Nathan Zuckerman explains, “one invents one’s meanings, along with impersonating one’s selves” (Roth 1988: 370). Engaged in the art of impersonation and comically revealing its foibles, Roth’s characters routinely are invested in and preoccupied with self‐fashioning.
While Bellow, Malamud, and Roth constitute the three most influential figures of the post‐World War II period of Jewish American writing, a host of other Jewish American novelists emerge during this fluid period, including J.D. Salinger (1919–2010), Grace Paley, Joseph Heller (1923–1999), Herbert Gold (1924–), Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Cynthia Ozick (1928–), Chaim Potok (1929–2002), and E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015), writers who contributed to the growing Jewish cultural and social presence in the United States. The primary landscape of this literature is urban America; the dramatic action – often consisting of meditations, soliloquies, dramatic monologues, and fluid dialogue alongside street dust‐ups, romantic misfires, and general ethnic collision – takes place against the backdrop of the teeming, boisterous, major cities of an America in‐the‐making, an environment that has both taken in and given birth to an array of immigrants and their American‐born children. The dramatic backdrop against which the protagonists of the literature of the postwar period play out their self‐inventing lives is, as Bellow writes, “the carnival of the street” (Bellow 1956: 74). As far back as the immigrants’ fascination with America, its urban centers have provided fertile scenes for the exchange of ideas and cultural nuances and postures in the energetic merging and separating of factions, the emergence of antagonisms and alliances, and an often ironic assessment of personalities and fashions.
While the postwar writers made a place for a distinctly Jewish voice against a landscape that both shaped and was shaped by their collective presence, the literature of this period continues to grapple with issues of identity and place, with the balance between insider and outsider, belonging and difference. Novelist Cynthia Ozick, for example, comments on her paradoxical position as “a third‐generation American Jew (though the first to have been native‐born) perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal” (Ozick 1983: 152). Ozick, like other Jewish American writers of her generation, is a writer of contradictions. This is a generation of writers whose place in their country of origin was secure and, at the same time, still something of an anomaly. Yet, against the reigning cultural ethos at any given time or place, as one of Grace Paley’s protagonists will insist, “My voice was certainly the loudest” (Paley 1959: 63). These are writers who made a place for Jewish American writing, one that secured its future, despite critic Irving Howe’s famous prediction that Jewish American literature, in the second half of the twentieth century, has “probably moved past its high point,” having found “its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approache[d] disintegration” (Howe 1977: 16, 3). The waning of the immigrant experience and the felt sense of Yiddishkeit, Howe cautioned, signaled in the Jewish American imagination “a depletion of resources, a thinning‐out of materials and memories” that make the stuff of fiction (Howe 1977: 16).
Literary Responses to the Holocaust
It was not until the publication, in 1961, of Edward Lewis Wallant’s acclaimed novel The Pawnbroker that an acknowledgment of the deeply defining impact of the Holocaust was ushered into the American literary consciousness. There was, immediately after 1945, the year that marks the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps, an understandable hiatus, a period in which the weight of the devastation of the Third Reich on European and world Jewry was made known and absorbed. Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, a novel of a physically and psychologically shattered survivor’s experiences in the concentration camps, revealed in nightmarish flashbacks of dream sequences, emerged on the American literary scene, as S. Lillian Kremer suggests, “at a time and for an audience that had not yet taken the Holocaust into its consciousness” (Kremer 2003: 1,284). Wallant’s groundbreaking novel confronts the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor who must negotiate his memories of loss and devastation in the midst of urban American dissipation and misery. Set in New York’s Harlem, The Pawnbroker reimagines the Holocaust as the final measure of possible human suffering.
In the years directly following the war, American Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Chaim Potok approached, if tentatively, the menacing anti‐Semitism that hovered in the aftermath of the Nazi era. Bellow’s novel The Victim (1947), published only two years after the liberation of the camps, has, as its backdrop, anxieties about American anti‐Semitism and the uneasiness of Jews in the wake of the war. The Victim is a darkly haunting story of one lone Jewish man’s singularly debilitating confrontation with his worst fears in the Manhattan of the late 1940s. In Bellow’s novel, the presence of the Holocaust becomes a defining rupture in the very existence, not only of European Jewry, but in the disturbingly real conditions of life for American Jews. Set far from the ruins of the Nazi devastation, the Holocaust comes to haunt the postwar America of Bellow’s harrowing novel, in which New York City is transformed into a disorienting world of phobic apprehension for its central character. In a gesture of displacement, Bellow re‐forms New York into a virtual Holocaust landscape of imminent danger and entrapment. In Bellow’s novel, the specter of the Holocaust indirectly transforms the cityscape. Against an urban landscape of smoldering factory chimneys and rumbling trains, the world of the Holocaust exists in the immediacy of the protagonist’s experience.
In post‐Holocaust Jewish American literature, a duality of indirection and immediacy highlights the difficulties of representing atrocity. Philip Roth’s short story “Eli, the Fanatic” (1957), set in suburban Woodenton, New York, has at its center the fear on the part of assimilated American Jews of the reaction of the non‐Jewish community to the unwelcome presence of European refugees, survivors of the Holocaust. The Jews of Woodenton coexist with their gentile neighbors in a kind of uneasy tolerance that requires an “adjustment,” relinquishing “some of their more extreme practices in order not to threaten or offend the other,” including the construction of a Yeshiva to house the orphaned children and survivors of the Holocaust (Roth 1966: 262). The literary approach to the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period can be understood as a response to whether the Holocaust can or should be written about, indeed, whether it can even be approximated from a perspective other than that of direct witness. This ambivalence has inscribed itself deeply in Jewish American literature and has been a matter of long‐standing debate. For Jewish American writers, in particular, writers who were spared the Nazi genocide, the Holocaust continues to be an uneasy subject. And thus for Jewish American writers, Holocaust writing asks of itself whether such events can be imagined into works of fiction. At the same time, the Holocaust, as literary subject, has continued to be a central focus in the writing of American Jews to the present day. Jewish American writers, although increasingly distanced from the immediacy of events, return to the Holocaust as a point of departure for writing about Jewish American experience, writers whose fiction is motivated by a preoccupation with Holocaust memory and the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the children and grandchildren of survivors, the “second‐” and “third‐” generation Holocaust writers.
We might consider Jewish American Holocaust writing in terms of three major trends or movements, loosely distinguished temporally but, more important, positioned in relation to the event and to those who survived it and relocated to the United States. The initial response to the Holocaust from the period directly following the war into the 1980s saw a number of attempts to represent and calculate the enormity of the events. Some examples of literary works that grapple to one extent or another with the Holocaust during this period include Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and The Bellarosa Connection (1989); Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961); Philip Roth’s short story “Eli, the Fanatic” (1957) and novel The Counterlife (1986); Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (1967); Bernard Malamud’s short stories “The Lady of the Lake” (1958) and “The German Refugee” (1963); and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl: A Story and a Novella (1989).
American Jews continue to write well into the twenty‐first century about the Holocaust within the context of Jewish cultural identity. Second‐generation Holocaust writers create tropes of memory and a personalized narrative voice that refuses to cloak the realities of the Holocaust in metaphors of evasion or restraint, but that nonetheless places those memories in the diverse social venues in which Jews in America live. From the 1990s into the opening decade of the new millennium, there is an increase of writing on the Holocaust by Jewish American writers of the “second generation,” both the children of survivors as well as those of the same generational position whose preoccupation with the Holocaust becomes a distinguishing feature of their work. These writers, although separated from the Holocaust spatially, temporally, and experientially, express an obligation to bear witness to the events of the Holocaust, a borrowed legacy, an “unwanted inheritance,” as second‐generation writer Thane Rosenbaum suggests, but one encoded in the lives of children of survivors, “a part of the DNA” (Rosenbaum 1996a: 63). Against lives eclipsed by the horrors of Jewish history, in drawing from collective, imagined memory, the second‐generation writers bear witness to the atrocities of the past, paying homage to those who perished as well as those who survived. These are voices who capture and penetrate the growing sense of loss and the fear of the failure of memory, writers whose narratives, as Alan Berger suggests, “bear the indelible imprint of the Shoah’s cultural, psychic, and theological legacy” (Berger 1997: 7).
Whether narrowly defined as direct descendants of Holocaust survivors or broadly as those writing Holocaust fiction since the 1990s, second‐generation writers – Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Bukiet, Ehud Havazelet, Art Spiegelman, Anne Michaels, and Aryeh Lev Stollman, for example – see themselves as writing within the shadow of the Holocaust, a legacy that generates in them a second generation of loss. For these writers, inherited memory becomes the master trope, the recurring narrative figure by which they can “remember” the Holocaust imaginatively through the lens of survivors’ stories and testimonies, and their own abiding sense of tragic loss. Such writers, through a variety of literary forms, attempt to articulate the horrors experienced by the victims of the Holocaust. Revealed in these narratives is the desire not only to communicate the conditions under which Holocaust victims suffered, but also to suggest the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust has come to shape their own identities. Some of the recurring patterns exhibited in this literature include anxieties about anti‐Semitism in contemporary America, inherited, post‐Holocaust Jewish identity, including historical and theological questions of suffering, guilt in living a life seemingly free from the horrors experienced by one’s parents, and the fear of silence. The second generation, as Sara R. Horowitz notes, “bears witness for the witness,” their work a response to inherited, collected memory, research, and imagination, as well as to the psychological tensions of post‐Holocaust Jewish identity (Horowitz 1997: 4).
The current wave of Holocaust writing in America – the third generation – speaks to the ways in which that singular, defining event continues to capture the imagination of contemporary Jewish American writers who have come of literary age at a time that will mark the end of direct survivor testimony. These are writers for whom stories of the Holocaust have been transmitted, in many ways, haphazardly, tangentially conveyed through strategies of mediation: stories and memories reconstructed and reimagined through research and interviews. The third‐generation literature often consists of narratives of return and recovery, narratives that revisit the places of traumatic origin. Here writers return – both literally and figuratively – to the sites of catastrophe and often to pre‐Holocaust worlds in an attempt to recreate lives that were so tragically lost. These are quest narratives, the writer/narrator constructed as the literary sleuth trying to unearth the story of an individual family’s history against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The third‐generation writers, in writing against a contemporary landscape of post‐apocalyptic apprehension and anxiety, capture and penetrate the growing sense of loss and the fear of the failure of memory, writers whose novels, short stories, and memoirs carry the Holocaust into the twenty‐first century and suggest the future of Holocaust writing for extended generations.
Contemporary narratives that bear witness to the events of the Holocaust are in large part motivated by the haunting sense that, given the intervening years and competing events, Holocaust memory is imperiled. As we move further in time from the Holocaust, the writing by post‐Holocaust generations is an increasingly important way of filling in the gaps of understanding the legacy of the Holocaust and the ways in which this catastrophe has shaped modern history. The literature of the third generation – both direct descendants of survivors as well as those writing from a third‐generation position – shows the rich and fluid range of expression through which stories of the Holocaust continue to be transmitted: Julie Orringer’s epic work based on her Hungarian grandparents’ experiences under Nazi occupation, The Invisible Bridge (2010); Jonathan Safran Forer’s imaginative return to the Ukrainian village in which his grandfather lived, Everything Is Illuminated (2002); Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Great House (2010); Sarah Houghteling’s Pictures at the Exhibition; Joseph Skibell’s fantastical story A Blessing on the Moon (1997); Rachel Kadish’s novel From a Sealed Room (1998); Daniel Torday’s novel The Last Flight of Poxl West (2015); short story collections, such as Margot Singer’s The Pale of Settlement (2007) and Erika Dreifus’s Quiet Americans (2011); and memoirs, such as Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006); Andrea Simon’s Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002); and Sarah Wildman’s Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (2014).
The specter of the Holocaust thus shapes and condenses the anxieties of defining Jewish American identity from 1945 through the first two decades of the twenty‐first century. The modes of representation of Holocaust literature respond to the changing political and cultural climate over the course of the past 70 years. These forms of expression respond to differences in experience but also to differences in how traumatic memory is absorbed, recalled, and represented. Central to this genre of atrocity are critical issues of the representation of trauma, the blurring of boundaries between art and history, the destabilizing of generic definitions of fiction and non‐fiction, and the anxieties attendant on writing “history” through the form of vicarious memory.
The New Wave of Jewish American Writing in the Twenty‐first Century
The early decades of the twenty‐first century have witnessed the continued flourishing of Jewish American literature. The contemporary period, as in previous decades, has shown an enormously rich and varied production of genres and forms – novels, short stories, graphic novels, and memoirs – and thematic preoccupations and patterns among American Jewish writers. For the most part no longer grappling with issues of fractured or nascent identity‐formation, the current literature both reaches back into Jewish history and myth and also comments on the disposition of America in the early decades of the twenty‐first century. It would prove far too reductive to categorize these contemporary writers, and, to be sure, the predispositions and patterns that shape this literature overlap in interesting and complex ways. Contemporary Jewish American writing is not framed by a response to a particular event and narrative preoccupation in the same way in which the immigrant or postwar literature primarily was. No longer largely identity or place driven, the contemporary literature, nonetheless, looks back as it attempts to negotiate possible futures within an American landscape that far exceeds in so many ways its national borders. This post‐apocalyptic, post‐Holocaust, globally dispersed, media‐linked period might be characterized in the following ways: a return to Jewish history; a reckoning with the Holocaust; a focus on Israel; an integration of Jewish folklore, legend, and myth; the drama of family life; and an engagement with more proximate events and preoccupations of our time. It need not be said that no one writer mentioned here or elsewhere focuses on one singular aspect of Jewish or American culture. A host of writers have moved Jewish American literature in a variety of ways that describe and comment on the American and Jewish experience at this moment in history. Some of these writers stage their fiction in specifically Jewish terms; for others, Judaism is a given fact of life and remains in the background of the dramatic action of their fiction.
Some of the many Jewish American writers contributing to the ongoing and diverse commentary on life in the new millennium who are not mentioned above but should be recognized here include Michael Chabon, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, Joshua Henkin, Myla Goldberg, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Joan Leegant, Peter Orner, Edith Pearlman, Francine Prose, Tova Reich, Jonathan Rosen, Scott Nadelson, and Steve Stern, among the many others who have joined their voices to the extraordinary range of expression that constitutes Jewish American writing through two centuries. This is part of a contemporary trend that, as Amir Eshel proposes, “marks literature’s ability to raise, via engagement with the past, political and ethical dilemmas crucial for the human future” (Eshel 2013: 5). Perhaps one of the most notable features of this current wave of Jewish writers in America is a new diaspora. These writers, products of what might be considered a new movement, have grafted upon the American literary landscape the influences – the languages and cultures – of their originating countries in a wide range of provocative ways. These North American writers of the new diaspora come from around the globe: Russian/Soviet writers David Bezmozgis, Nadia Kalman, Maxim Shrayer, Gary Shteyngart, and Lara Vapnyar; South African writers Tony Eprile, Shira Nayman, and Kenneth Bonert; the Egyptian‐born André Aciman; French writer Anouk Markovits; and Iranian writers Dalia Sofer and Gina Nahai. These writers are “part of a larger global movement, and their literature reflects both their commonality with other cultures and their distinctive history,” all contributing to the diversity of Jewish expression in America (Aarons, Patt, and Shechner 2015: 3). Thus, contemporary writing by Jews in the America of the twenty‐first century is, once again, a polyglot, a multicultural connection of lives and stories that shape the era in which we live.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 22 (AMERICAN LITERATURE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH).