The Tongue Set Free

This is an interesting time in which to contemplate the place of Jewish culture in American life. Jews represent about 2% of the American population, and yet a secretary of state’s discovery of her Jewish birth and a vice presidential candidate’s Jewish observance have made the history and religious vocabulary of the Jews instant global news. Today, Jews are almost bewildered by the extent to which they have been accepted--indeed, embraced--by this country.

For Jewish writers, however, and for their critics, America has been not only promised land but exile. There are those who believe that the greatest American Jewish writing is in the past: When Jews are no longer marginalized outsiders--immigrants or children of immigrants--they become American writers with nothing distinctly Jewish to say.

Others are convinced that America’s hospitality has paradoxically severed Jews from authentic engagement with their own literary sources. They speculate that only when writers are in fluid discourse with Jewish texts in their original languages--Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) or Judeo-Arabic--can they contribute imaginatively as Jews to American letters.

And then there are those who posit that America is an imaginative construct invented, at least in part, by Jews.

What is Jewish writing? The editors of “Jewish American Literature” decline to answer narrowly that perennially perplexing question. Instead, they choose to “expand the question of identity to encompass . . . fiction, poetry, drama, memoir and autobiography, commentary, letters, speeches, monologues, song lyrics, humor, translations and visual narratives created by authors who admit, address, embrace and contest their Jewish identity, whether religious, historical, ethnic, psychological, political, cultural, textual or linguistic.”

Such capaciousness heralds an exuberance of voices. In the 350 years spanned by this volume, we hear from Emma Lazarus, an aristocrat born in 1849 whose Sephardic ancestors arrived in New Netherland before the American Revolution. Like an Edith Wharton heroine, she wintered in New York City and spent her summers in Newport, R.I. Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” was inscribed in 1903 on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming immigrants to 20th-century America.

Here is Horace Kallen, who invented the term “cultural pluralism,” disputing as early as 1915 the ideal of the “melting pot” by arguing that democracy requires ethnicity. And here is Gabriel Preil, an exile by choice as a Hebrew poet in America (“I am not in New York”).

The editors’ generosity to their subject makes it possible to include gender, genres and languages (in translation) that have been ill-represented in collections with a more mandarin definition of Jewish writing. This is an anthology in which women’s voices are not a novelty or condiment. Because the book is organized largely by chronology of the authors’ birth years, the contribution of women seems refreshingly natural and entirely justified. Similarly, Jewish writers who wrote in Yiddish, such as A. Leyeles (Aaron Glanz), live in arresting comparison with those who wrote in English, such as Gertrude Stein.

Although each selection has its rewards, the editors’ celebration of Jewish expression results in an equivocal answer to the question of art. Some of the work they have included is magisterial or electric with linguistic vitality. Other choices--such as excerpts from “A Bintl Briv,” letters to the editor of the Yiddish daily Forverts by immigrants seeking help in a new world--are important historically, and yet they lack the imaginative resonance that would compel a reader to return, to read them again for the passion or punch of particular words uniquely arranged.

Of the writing that is memorable, Tess Slesinger’s “Missis Flanders,” her 1932 portrait of a couple after the woman’s abortion, commands immediate authority.

“ ‘Home you go!’ Miss Kane, nodding, in her white nurse’s dress, stood for a moment--she would catch a breath of air--in the hospital door; ‘and thank you again for the stockings, you needn’t have bothered’--drew a sharp breath and turning, dismissed Missis Flinders from the hospital, smiling, dismissed her forever from her mind.”

Then there is the startling originality of “White Chalah,” named for the braided bread baked for the Sabbath. Lamed Shapiro’s 1915 story in Yiddish, translated by Norbert Guterman, depicts a Russian pogrom from a mute Gentile perpetrator’s point of view:

“A white figure stepped between. Rage made Vasil dizzy and scalded his throat. He tugged at the white figure with one hand. A long strip tore from the dress and hung at the hem. His eyes were dazzled, almost blinded. Half a breast, a beautiful shoulder, a full, rounded hip--everything dazzling white and soft, like white chalah. Damn it--these Jews are made of white chalah! A searing flame leaped through his body, his arm flew up like a spring and shot into the gaping dress. . . .

“White chalah has the taste of a firm juicy orange. Warm and hot, and the more one sucks it the more burning the thirst. Sharp and thick, and strangely spiced. . . .

“Pillars of smoke and pillars of flame rose to the sky from the entire city. Beautiful was the fire on the great altar. The cries of the victims--long-drawn-out, endless cries--were sweet in the ears of a god as eternal as the Eternal God. And the tender parts, the thighs and breasts, were the portion of the priest.”

The prurient sensuality of the murderer’s mind set against the final paragraph’s citations from the rigorous biblical sections on the laws of temple priesthood and animal sacrifices is masterful Jewish writing, both linguistically and theologically, in its critique of a God who could allow the smoke of his burning people to ascend to heaven.

The anthology effects a reunion with stories one recalls as potent and reads again with astonishment, such as Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” The narrator, imagining himself as he watches a movie of his parents’ deciding to marry and their subsequent argument, disrupts the audience by standing up and shouting, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

The tale ends with a parody of parental reproach and a coda that contains in its last lines all the lyric desolation of youth.

“But the usher has seized my arm and is dragging me away, and as he does so, he says: ‘. . . You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do, you can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find out soon enough, everything you do matters too much,’ and he said that dragging me through the lobby of the theatre into the cold light, and I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.”

The collection is also an encounter with strong work that should be better known, particularly the poems of women writing in Yiddish, thrice obscure. “The Circus Lady” is Celia Dropkin’s tactile, suggestive poem, translated from the Yiddish by Kathryn Hellerstein:

I am a circus lady

And dance among the daggers

Set in the arena

With their points erect.

My swaying, lissome body

Avoids a death-by-falling,

Touching, barely touching the dagger blades.

One of the most sophisticated offerings is “Memento Mori,” a poem by Moshe-Leyb Halpern. The editors present us with two translations--the first by Hellerstein and Benjamin Harshav, the second by John Hollander--typeset alongside the poem in its original Yiddish and in an English transliteration. A 1,222-page anthology cannot provide such a dwelling place for every writer, but it is gratifying to linger on this double-page spread, comparing translations and attempting to hear the rhythm of the original.

Given the power of such artists, I wish the editors’ notes balanced their celebration of the authors’ diverse representations of Jewish American lives with an equal devotion to the authors’ sustenance from and debate with Jewish and American letters.

Listen, for example, to Cynthia Ozick in conversation with her predecessor, Emma Lazarus. Lazarus’ Statue entreats:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Nearly a century later, Ozick invokes the Statue of Liberty sardonically in the mind of Edelshtein, a beleaguered Yiddish poet in her story, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Edelshtein writes to a young woman he has just met, pleading with her to become his translator. “Who will redeem you?” he asks of Yiddish at the close of the letter. “What act of salvation will restore you? All you can hope for, you tattered, you withered, is translation in America!”

The echo of Lazarus’ “your tired, your poor” in “you tattered, you withered” turns Lazarus’ empathy into a kaddish. For Yiddish immigrants, America is a refuge; for the Yiddish language, it is death.

In another example, the editors’ comments about the Jewish life of Louis Zukofsky obscure his accomplishment as a Jewish poet. In their biographical remarks, the editors mention that he “would move away from religious observance” of his childhood and that his admiration for Ezra Pound was undiminished by Pound’s anti-Semitism. Given Zukofsky’s seeming assimilation, I was unprepared for the marvelous interpolation, in the excerpt from “Poem beginning ‘The,’ ” of allusions to Western music and to Yiddish folk song; to Yehoash, the Yiddish poet and to Shakespeare.

The editors have created two thematic sections that interrupt the book’s chronological organization. A slight selection of Jewish humor includes only Groucho Marx, Woody Allen and “A Scattering of Contemporary and Perennial Jewish Jokes.” What would Leo Rosten, Max Apple and many others in this book who make us laugh think of the distinction?

On the other hand, “The Golden Age of the Broadway Song” is inspired. Oscar Hammerstein II’s words on the page of a Norton anthology serve as their own interpretation of the Jewish experience in America:

Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi,

Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be.

What does he care if de world’s got troubles?

What does he care if de land ain’t free?

They also sent me back hundreds of pages to “Lynching,” a graphic depiction of a Southern black man’s murder published in 1919 by Yehoash--the same Yiddish poet invoked by Zukofsky. And to another Yiddish poet, Berish Vaynshteyn (Berish Weinstein), whose 1936 poem, “Lynching,” explicitly links the murderous consequences of American racism to Nazi anti-Semitism.

If there is a single element that persists across the work chosen by the editors of authors writing from the 1930s until today, it is the presence of the Holocaust in the imaginations of such different writers--those who endured it, those who found refuge in America but lost their families because of it, those who inherited it through their parents’ experience and memory and those born into American prosperity and optimism who are nonetheless obsessed by it.

A recent study of Jewish identity in the New York metropolitan area by social psychologist Bethamie Horowitz uncovered an intriguing commentary on our era: From the most indifferent Jews to the most engaged, those she surveyed named “remembering the Holocaust” as one of the most important components of their Jewishness. (“Supporting the state of Israel” was far less significant.)

I am adamantly opposed to what has been called the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history, a narrative of tragedy and suffering--and now assimilation--that is either horrifying or impoverished. And yet we are unquestionably living, and reading, at a cultural moment in which Horowitz’s sociological observation is borne out by the literary choices of the editors. Of the 22 writers in the final chronological section, “Wandering and Return: Literature Since 1983,” Irena Klepfisz was a hidden child in Poland, and Miriam Israel Moses, Art Spiegelman and Melvin Bukiet are children of Shoah survivors whose relationship to the Holocaust is a central preoccupation.

An anthology is in its nature opinionated and time-bound. The voices that speak most clearly to us may not have been as resonant a half century ago and may be silenced again by 2050. Inevitably, the reader--like the editors--will find some voices more persuasive than others. Perhaps it is the relationship of Yiddish to the Shoah that explains in part why the extraordinary narrative of the Jews in this collection becomes dominated imaginatively by the Holocaust, even as the editors acknowledge the risk--that such memorializing emphasizes the Jews as victims at the expense of lauding their persistent, influential and flourishing culture.

The Yiddish poets cry out from these pages with piercing grief. Writing in America, many deployed their language as modernists, adopting new landscapes and subjects, as well as avant-garde forms. Then those who lived long enough watched their childhoods burn across the ocean, a third of the world’s Jews--including not only their parents and siblings but millions of their potential readers--murdered in six years, and their language doomed to virtual extinction as English became the lingua franca of America’s Jews and indeed of nearly everyone. After the war, how could they write again of Kentucky vistas or of plums? Now the supple language that had once encompassed the universe was conscripted in the service of mourning and remembrance. As Irving Howe noted in “World of Our Fathers,” much of the work of the Yiddish poets became a lament for a lost language and a lost world.

The conversation among poets and between languages, the tension between acculturation and distinctiveness and, above all, the poignant paradox of translation--which offers the dead a tincture of immortality by asking them to forsake their original tongues--come together brilliantly in the epilogue of the book, “Jews Translating Jews.”

Thus, the anthology closes not with the work of the youngest writer, Allegra Goodman, but with a section of poetry that Jewish American writers have chosen to render into English. (Throughout the collection, we can also read acclaimed writers such as Hollander, Adrienne Rich, Ozick and Saul Bellow as they translate the work of Mani Leyb, Anna Margolin, H. Leyvik and I.B. Singer.)

The introductory essay to this section views translation as a redemptive act, especially if “the translator is an American Jew and the other language is Hebrew or Yiddish or, indeed, any tongue spoken elsewhere by Jews.” And yet, of the 16 poems in this bravura close, spanning nearly 100 years of writing, almost half are about the Holocaust. The section becomes an ode to elegy; its introduction ends with the words of Walter Benjamin, who died because of the Shoah: “Translation kindles from the endless renewal of languages as they grow to the messianic end of their history.”

Even as Jews acculturate so successfully that many fear they will disappear, they are marking the greatest catastrophe to befall them by writing about it, making films about it and commissioning monuments and museums across the country.

In “Wandering and Return,” the editors take note of the growing awareness and impact of the Holocaust. Surprisingly, they describe the phenomenon of religious return but not the intensifying interest in Jewish texts and literacy that has resulted in an explosion of Jewish studies departments in American universities and a return by adults to Jewish sources--even if the texts are in translation. This movement “back to the sources” is powerfully shaping the priorities and sensibility of the American Jewish community.

The editors may not recognize this phenomenon, but they have allowed us to listen to prophetic writers who do. Living in New Orleans, Ephraim Lisitzky, a Hebrew poet, wrote an autobiography in 1949 that included these observations, translated by Moshe Kohn, Jacob Sloan and Gershon Gelbart:

“In the years I have lived in America, I have witnessed the continuing growth of a flourishing Jewish community, a community destined to exert a decisive influence on the rest of the Jewish Diaspora. No less substantial is bound to be its share in the upbuilding of Erets Yisrael [Israel] through the contributions of its wealth and energy.

“True, this amazing growth has been mainly in the material sense. Yet material growth is not unrelated to spiritual growth. Those same vital forces, so creative in the material sphere, are equally effective in the realm of the spirit, and to foster this creative process is the great mission of Jewish education in this country. A great and difficult task indeed, but wholly within the bounds of possibility. . . .”

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The work in “Jewish American Literature” is rich enough that even a reader with a more austere definition of Jewish writing than the editors’ will find many jewels. The pleasure they afford us is heightened by juxtaposition. Consider “Hush,” a poem by Leyb, born in 1883 in the Ukraine, in contrast with a song by another immigrant, Irving Berlin, born in 1888 in Russia.

Translated by Marie Syrkin, Leyb’s 1914 poem speaks with spare beauty of Jews’ messianic hope, still unfulfilled:

Hush and hush--no sound be heard.

Bow in grief but say no word.

Black as pain and white as death,

Hush and hush and hold your breath.

Heard by none and seen by none

Out of the dark night will he,

Riding on a snow-white steed,

To our house come quietly.

Then recall this lyric by Berlin that also alludes to a messiah, cited in the introduction to the section on Broadway song:

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas

Just like the ones I used to know.

It is “just” that makes the line so delicious to any reader who quickens at the words “Jewish American.” Like the ones we knew in the shtetls of Berlin’s homeland, when on Dec. 25 we quaked in fear of our neighbors from behind our barred front doors? Like the ones we knew in tropical Islamic Morocco or in Yemen?

Let us salute Jewish literary imagination.