Jewish American Literature since 1945

An Introduction

Stephen Wade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136596490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

Jewish American writing is an exciting and controversial genre within post-war literature. Jewish American Literature since 1945 offers a student guide to the major writers, their key works, and their cultural and philosophical backgrounds. The theoretical underpinnings of the literature--including the postmodern, the masternarrative and metafiction--are also introduced in an accessible form. The themes, issues and philosophies of key writers such as Saul Bellow, Erica Jong, Arthur Miller, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are inter-related, and wider literary and historical topics are explained.

1

The Historical and Literary Foundations: Pre-1945

Before approaching the study of the main writers in the postwar years, there are several essential factors to consider. Many are concerned with Jewish identity in the New World and with new forms of self-awareness and social aspirations, and many are specifically aesthetic and literary. What will emerge in this chapter is the extremely complex nature of the American Diaspora: the dispersal of Jewish people from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuies. In 1881 almost three million Jews left Russia. Between 1881 and 1914 almost two million Jews arrived in America.

There had always been exodus in Jewish history, of course, from the first flight into Egypt, led by Moses. But the emigration to America of the Russian Jews in the Pale of Settlement (an area of Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea) was globally significant in the chronicle of the demography of Jewish experience. Irving Howe expresses it in this way:

The year 1881 marks a turning point in the history of the Jews as decisive as that of 70 AD, when Titus’s legions burned the Temple at Jerusalem, or 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the expulsion from Spain.¹

The notion of shifting settlement, impermanence and separateness is basic to an understanding of the literature of Jewish America. The immigrant duality is fundamental here. This sense of being reborn into a new world, with possibilities of taking on a radically different selfhood, is something which underlies most of the writing under scrutiny here. The immigrants came from Russian towns and villages in the Pale – Shtetls – and life there had meant victimisation, repression and brutality. The Russian pogroms after the assassination of Alexander II had been the immediate cause of emigration. The new Csar, Alexander III, reintroduced the tyranny of earlier times. Laws prevented Jews from owning land or from making any social or career progress in Russia. In 1891 Jewish expulsions from the major cities began, and 1903 the massacre of Kishinev took place, in which 49 people were killed and over 500 injured and maimed. In 1904 of 30,000 Jewish workers, one-sixth were imprisoned or sent to Siberia.

All these social and economic pressures meant that emigration was the best option – particularly for the young. Many who went to America were skilled, literate and ambitious. In the period from 1899 to 1909, 69.8 per cent were in the age-band 14–44. Of the skilled workers, 60 per cent were in the clothing trade.² They came to New York in their hundreds of thousands, being processed in Ellis Island, and then left to flood the Lower East Side, struggling for existence in any way they could. Some had relatives, of course; many spent time in Settlement Houses run by Jewish charitable organisations. Huge numbers started street-trading after the acquisition of a cart for the peddling trade.

The total experience of immigration and propulsion into a new life naturally provokes some enquiries into the traumas and challenges involved, as these are clearly integral to the writing from the first Jewish-American writers. It needs to be said that the leaving of their Russian, Hungarian or Romanian homelands was itself a deeply emotional experience. It could be seen as failure, an admittance of defeat at the hands of the invidious state and anti-Semitism; it was often approved of by mothers but not by fathers, as the father in the family would expect the son to carry on the tradition of Talmud study and tradition in which the man was central. But it was also a thrill, a genuine opportunity to take on a new identity.

There had been a trickle of Jews going to America ever since the known five Jews who sailed with Columbus in 1492. German Jews had settled there before this East European influx, and there had already been a schism: a Reform version of Judaism had been established, and there was a defined, circumscribed Judaic culture and sense of community in particular areas. There were clearly discernible differences between the two groups. The Germans had moved from pushcarts to established urban capitalism and suburban living; they placed no value on Yiddish, whereas the East Europeans cultivated that language and had a folk-literature which played a part in their self-awareness and cultural sense. It was a case of the contented capitalists living alongside the urban proletariat and the former taking on the role of philanthropists and charity-organisers.

The Varieties of Jewishness in the New World

In a sense, the Hebraic world-view, as in the Old Testament, had been a fundamental element in the American social and ideological fabric since the Puritan settlers, but this was little more than a distant order of theoretical principles when it came to considering the revolutionary social changes brought about by this wave of immigrants who were to be new Americans. There were clearly going to be gradations of Jewishness in American society which were to be increasingly complex as the long but inevitable process of assimilation went on. If the settlement was going to be in some ways ‘the essentially American conflict between history and desire’³ then exactly what versions of ‘history’ were to be relevant and, in fact, influential on the new Americans’ progress into their new identities?

To answer this question, it is necessary to reflect on the possible varieties of Jewishness in such a society. First, as Nathan Glaser has pointed out, there is the aspect of Judaism which makes it a discrete element, a nation-religion in a context in which the idea of a religion linking with a national ideology has disappeared. It is an ethnic phenomenon, but transferable to any culture, with degrees of assimilation of various intensities:

As against the Christian churches – and even the non-Christian religions like Islam and Buddhism, which have some adherents in the United States –Judaism is tied up organically with a specific people, indeed a nation. The tie is so intimate that the word ‘Jew’ in common usage refers ambiguously both to an adherent of the religion of Judaism and to a member of the Jewish people.⁴

In other words, we must begin by considering the idea of Jewishness as either a religious or as a racial feature. Glaser points out that the secular Jewishness which functions on the idea of a social good divorced from a creed and from ritualised religious practice has been expressed in America partly through the Jewish Centre – a social institution owing its origins largely to the Settlement Houses for immigrants. These centres cultivate a version of Jewishness which is secular but promulgating a moral purpose and an agenda of social cohesion.

But the central versions of ‘being Jewish’ are increasingly defined by an existence within rupture, divorce from the past, compromise with a new society and above all, by cultural and aesthetic action rather than by religious practice. As commentators have often pointed out, a Lutheran can be Norwegian or Polish, but a Jew is always Jewish and a member of a certain specific nationhood. A clear example would be in Turkey, where Jews have settled since the expulsion from Spain, and lived as Turks in the social and civic sense, but as Jews in the religious sense.

Of course, the Jewish-American writers also reflect other kinds of diversity. There are Jews who follow particular varieties of the faith, such as the Hassidim of Crown Heights, who follow the dress-code and ethics of their eighteenth-century founder (they have their author in Chaim Potok); the Yiddish-English bilingual culture with literary and artistic definitions of Jewish life, and the degrees of assimilation noticeable in the newer generations of writers. But in the first decades of the twentieth century, what were the most powerful influences on the writing that emerged from this new proletarian class?

As there were so many potential versions of ‘being Jewish’, and also an option to lose all Jewishness and reject the past and its concomitant belief-systems, the literary expressions of a whole diversity of subject-matter becomes quite complex. But there are some dominant concerns which persist and return in the decades since 1945. The heart of this is in the question of assimilation as opposed to Jewishness as an aesthetic principle – a part-bohemian way of life with residual moral structures and artistic impulses which notably appropriate the American nature and thematic material.

The people who wanted to be American while retaining elements of Judaism had the Reform movement. ‘We must accept, at least in some degree, the characterisation of nineteenth century reform as a religion of economically-comfortable Jews who wanted to be accepted by the non-Jewish world.’⁵ This statement hints at a remarkable split which is crucial in denning differences: first, the more established and largely capitalist Jews had a literary taste and tradition which is in contra-distinction to the new arrivals from Eastern Europe. The new urban Jews existing by peddling or sweatshop work in and around the tenements had a different basis for their narratives and artistic discourses about themselves.

First, they had a Yiddish literature, either in the established writings of Sholom Aleichem and Mendele Sforim, or in the bellettrist journalism and documentary fiction of Abraham Cahan and the Jewish Daily Forward. The setting the new Americans found themselves in was not a Shtetl but a city –they were adopting an urban consciousness and living by means of self-determination wherever possible. In terms of their writing, intellectual debate and bohemian life, there were several factors in Jewish tradition that formed these established priorities. The idea of Jewish men being scholars and thinkers, annotating and debating Talmud was long established, and study was given a high priority in their culture. The idea of a Luftmensch (someone who lived apparently on air) was related to the ‘poor scholar’ and poet stereotype. In other words, it was considered admirable to have book-learning. The mix of journalism, philosophy and religious teaching clearly gave rise to a new Yiddish literature of the sweatshops and tenements:

Morris Winchevsky (1856–1932) sometimes called the grandfather of Yiddish literature in America … Joseph Boshover (1973–1915), David Edelstadt (1866–1892), Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923) and dozens of less talented poets, mostly shop-workers themselves, created a working class literature that voiced the indignation and the pathos of their fellow ‘slaves of the machine’.⁶

This clearly shows what a schism existed between the sophisticated tastes of the assimilated Jews of a previous generation and the working class in the cities. The poor Jews had a literature initially based on parables, Talmud stories and Biblical traditions, but the secular literature had arrived.

There is a work of particular merit and insight into the new community which gives a detailed picture of the New York community of the Lower East Side in the early years after the immigration from Eastern Europe. This is Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), in which we have articles and sketches (done by Jacob Epstein) of the inhabitants of this area, ranging from scholars to traders. In a chapter called ‘Four Poets’ we have some valuable information on the proletarian literature which made the bedrock of such writers as Yezierska and Cahan (studied in Chapter 2). The poets are Eliakim Zunser, a wedding bard; Menahem Dolitski, a backward-looking, ethnic poet; Morris Rosenfeld ‘The Sweatshop Poet’ and Abraham Wald, a socialist ideologue.

It is clear that the spectrum of interests and subjects provided by these four writers enlightens the nature of the period and the writing very well: the range covers conservative sentimentalism, modern commentary and bardic, social-function poetry. What they illustrate is the nature of a literature embedded in the simplicity of a defined, ethnic colony, a sub-culture in the process of re-formation. Of the four, it is Wald who shows the dilemma of the writer who meets the challenge of modernity from a position in which antipathetic cultural values have been long established, yet the desire to write in a contemporary way about urgent issues is given to him by America:

‘Before I came to America,’ he said, ‘I thought it would not be as interesting as Russia, and when I got here I saw that I was right. America seemed all worked out to me, as if mighty things had already been done.’⁷

On the other hand, a wealthy young Jewish girl called Rose Pastor was writing a column for the Tageblatt newspaper and dabbling in verses. This gives us two other vitally important issues for future developments in Jewish-American writing: the place of women writers and the class differences:

She read constantly … Bookishness was considered dangerous for Jewish girls … who were supposed to study the womanly arts of housekeeping … She had also begun to write poetry. Her verse was light and airy and simple, much influenced by Emily Dickinson. In one poem, called “My Prayer” she wrote:

Some pray to marry the man they love,

My prayer will somewhat vary:

I humbly pray to Heaven above

That I love the man I marry.⁸

This contrast is not only a vivid insight into the polari...