Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody 0198863713, 9780198863717

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: Jewish American World-Writing
1. A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature
2. A World Literature To-Come: Jacob Glatstein’s Vernacular Modernism
3. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature
4. Between Heaven and Earth: Saul Bellow and the Dialectics of World Literature
Epilogue: Anna Margolin, Grace Paley, and the Politics of Listening
Endnotes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

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Jewish American Writing and World Literature

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oxford studies in american literary history Gordon Hutner, Series Editor Family Money Jeffory A. Clymer America’s England Christopher Hanlon Writing the Rebellion Philip Gould Living Oil Stephanie LeMenager Antipodean America Paul Giles Making Noise, Making News Mary Chapman Territories of Empire Andy Doolen Propaganda 1776 Russ Castronovo Playing in the White Stephanie Li

The Moral Economies of American Authorship Susan M. Ryan After Critique Mitchum Huehls Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 Elizabeth Renker The Center of the World June Howard Unscripted America Sarah Rivett Forms of Dictatorship Jennifer Harford Vargas Anxieties of Experience Jeffrey Lawrence White Writers, Race Matters Gregory S. Jay

Literature in the Making Nancy Glazener

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity Ian Finseth

Surveyors of Customs Joel Pfister

The Puritan Cosmopolis Nan Goodman

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Jewish American Writing and World Literature maybe to millions, maybe to nobody Saul Noam Zaritt

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Saul Noam Zaritt 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943986 ISBN 978–0–19–886371–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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{ Acknowledgments } The writing of this book was made possible due to grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, the Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Arete Fellowship at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, and the Freed Research Fund at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. Excerpts from University of Chicago Papers by Saul Bellow are courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC, copyright VC 1976 by Saul Bellow. Portions of an earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in the article “The World Awaits Your Yiddish Word: Jacob Glatstein and the Problem of World Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature Vol. 34, no. 2, 2015, pages 175–203, ©2015 The Pennsylvania State University; this article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Sections from Chapters 3 and 4 were included in “Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature,” American Literary History Vol. 28, no. 3, pages 542–73. This article is used by permission of Oxford University Press. I feel fortunate to be able to say that a good amount of what follows is the result of sustained dialogue with teachers and colleagues in seminars and at conferences, in offices, bars, and cafes, in living rooms and dining rooms, and through various technologies digital or otherwise. For their generosity and insight I am grateful to Nasia Anam, Dina Berdichevsky, Svetlana Boym, Menachem Brinker, Leyzer Burko, Madeleine Cohen, Daniel Costello, David Damrosch, Jeremy Dauber, Morris Dickstein, Dean Franco, Luis Girón-Negrón, Rachelle Grossman, Stefanie Halpern, Adriana  X.  Jacobs, Raphael Koenig, Annette Lienau, Barbara Mann, Adam Zachary Newton, Avraham Novershtern, Allison Schachter, Benjamin Schreier, Marc Shell, Mariano Siskind, Samuel Spinner, Adam Stern, David Stern, Susan Suleiman, Karolina Szymaniak, Miriam Udel, Anna Wainwright, and Sunny Yudkoff. I am also thankful to my grandparents, parents, and brothers (and their families) for sustaining and cultivating a shared love of language—certainly something of our many conversations found its way into these pages. Jewish American Writing and World Literature was first a dissertation but is now a much different thing, and I have largely Gordon Hutner to thank for it.

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Acknowledgments

His demand for clarity—on the level of the sentence, paragraph, chapter, and book—was instrumental in the book’s reformulation. I also want to acknowledge the anonymous peer reviewers, whose critical insights helped me better articulate the ambitious claims of the book. I am grateful to Aimee Wright, Eleanor Capel-Smith, Christine Ranft, and Katie Bishop at Oxford University Press for their attentive editorial work. This project began somewhere in the two or three feet between the offices of David Roskies and Alan Mintz. They both share what Alan, of blessed memory, once called a “polemical enthusiasm,” a form of collegiality in which an interlocutor constantly challenges your ideas with the goal of extending the conversation rather than proving one thing or another. This polemicism has a warmth to it, doubling as an eager yet modest invitation to continue talking. My hope is that this book does just that. Finally, my infinite gratitude to my comrades Mihaela Pacurar, Miriam Pacurar, Eliška Pipšimaus, and Tsilke Dropkitten.

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{ Contents } Note on Transliteration and Translation Introduction: Jewish American World-Writing

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1. A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature

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2. A World Literature To-Come: Jacob Glatstein’s Vernacular Modernism

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3. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature

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4. Between Heaven and Earth: Saul Bellow and the Dialectics of World Literature

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Epilogue: Anna Margolin, Grace Paley, and the Politics of Listening

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Endnotes Works Cited Index

163 215 237

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{ Note on Transliteration and Translation} In transliterating Yiddish text I have generally utilized the system established by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. For proper names I have preserved conventional spellings that widely circulate in English-language scholarship rather than render them through the transliteration system (e.g. Sholem Asch rather than Sholem Ash). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

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Introduction jewish american world-writing Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody In an interview in 1963, when the Yiddish writer and future Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked what kind of audience he imagined for his work, he responded that “[w]riting Yiddish and thinking about readers would really ­destroy the writer completely. But happily I never think about such things. When I sit down to write I have a feeling that I’m talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody.”1 Bashevis makes these comments long after his immigration to the US from Poland in 1935, in the wake of the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life, and following the vast linguistic assimilation of Ashkenazi Jews in the US. Any Yiddish writer would be justified in feeling devastated by a question about audience in light of the rapid decline of Yiddish-speakers. Bashevis acknowledges this threat but quickly shifts perspective, directing his writing away from an exclusively Jewish and Yiddish-speaking collective to one less clearly defined. In his first major interview in English, just as he was beginning to find success in translation, Bashevis professes allegiance first and foremost to an expansively vague literary tradition that might protect him from the dark powers of actual readers. The specter of a dying language hovers over his work but instead of mourning any marginalization, Bashevis claims the position of the every-writer, maybe writing for no one and maybe writing for millions. Bashevis’s “maybe” delays both disaster in Yiddish and full redemption in English, leaving his writing in a kind of limbo. Bashevis does not know where to place his work: Was his writing primarily part of a Yiddish literature spread thin across the global diaspora of Yiddish speakers? Did he belong within a new category of “Jewish American literature,” a collection of immigrant and post-immigrant writers? Or should his ambitions be to transcend local and vernacular limitations, through translation, so as to reach all audiences simultaneously? Bashevis even entertains the possibility of writing for no one at all, forgotten by any reading public yet adhering to a universal aesthetic code and sheltered by an imagined institution of world literature. By viewing his work as directed both to millions of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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readers and to no one at all, he admits an uncertainty at the very foundation of his literary project. This uncertainty is the subject of this book, tracing how Bashevis and other Jewish American writers conceive of world literature and how they place themselves within its institutional boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Considering world literature as both a system of circulation and a cosmopolitan republic of shared literary value, I examine the various ways in which Jewish American writers meas­ ure themselves against the demand to write not just for a local, vernacular collective but for global markets, as part of imperial networks, and toward transnational ideals. This book explores a desire for the world: beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the fantasy of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. In outlining this desire, I read Jewish American writers’ inevitable failure to fully inhabit this fantasy, finding instead the ghosts of vernacularity that haunt their work and render full arrival in the world impossible. Jewish American Writing and World Literature focuses on four trajectories within a translational encounter with the institution of world literature through what I call “the American window.” The four central figures of the book—Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Saul Bellow—together could comprise a genealogy outlining the emergence of Jewish American writing from obscured immigrant beginnings to postwar fame and fortune, from the Yiddish of the Eastern European ghetto to the new American English of global empire. Indeed, much scholarship has been tempted to read Jewish American writing alongside a narrative of immigrant success and increasing cultural dominance. This book will evoke such a model while explicitly departing from it. Rather than a chronology or a history, an evolution or devolution, I present a series of overlapping studies of twentieth-century world-writing embedded in an American context, each writer exploring what it means to write in compliance with and defiance of the translational demands of world literature. Jewish American Writing and World Literature juxtaposes the desire for legibility with instances of compromise, erasure, and untranslatable vernacularity. By vernacularity I mean something other than a safe, knowable national origin. Following its Latin etymology verna, meaning a home-born slave, the vernacular inhabits a restricted and dangerous domestic space constantly in dialogue and in conflict with the dominant languages of empire. As the language of subjugated and often marginalized populations, the vernacular potentially draws one away from the certainty of official, state-sponsored discourse. Yet at the same time it remains tethered to the “maybe” of a translational space. After all, the vernacular is entrenched in the logic of empire: the vernacularization of European states in the early modern period occurred in the wake of an empire’s retreat and at the same time that European Orientalists “discovered” Eastern vernaculars through the process of colonization. Vernaculars can be literary languages in their own right

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with long traditions, yet they also remain tied to Euro-American structures of ­control. Beyond being simply dominated by English or other imperial languages, the vernacular is implicated within colonial networks and hierarchies of race and class. Vernacularity names the condition of a localized language practice that is ethnically or racially inflected under an imperial gaze.2 In keeping with this vernacular paradigm, Yiddish is a central crux of this book, as the everyday yet migratory language of Jewish Eastern Europe that is both barrier and passcode to the institution of world literature. In US culture, the use of Yiddish can signal marginalization and cultural obscurity, but it also has a complex afterlife in the mainstream and beyond. Yiddish holds a vernacular position in relation to an American English that projects both national authority and the status of a language of an old-new empire. Yiddish in the US has a fragmented relationship with English, repeatedly carving out its own domestic Jewish space while also signaling a desire to be part of the expansive logic of American empire. I follow how writers employ and manipulate this vernacularity, from Asch’s bestselling translated works to Glatstein’s intentional self-ghettoization, from Bashevis’s self-translation strategies to Saul Bellow’s canonized hybrid style. In these writers’ transactions with Jewish, American, and worldly vocabularies, they inhabit the doubled location of Yiddish as both translatable and untranslatable. In attending to the dynamics of vernacularity, my project joins scholarship seeking to blur the boundaries of the nation while also pointing to the limitations of the institution of world literature. The writers considered here develop complex relationships with Jewish textual traditions, contend with the politics of Jewish naming and ownership, confront stereotypes of Jewish otherness, and produce ­diverse histories of immigration and racial, ethnic, and religious difference. Their writing does not constitute a single, unified cultural entity, nor does it necessarily share the transcendental goals of national and transnational bodies, failing as it often does to meet the material demands of global networks of exchange and circulation. Jewish American Writing and World Literature reconsiders modern Jewish writing as unhinged from nationalist historiographies and yet never at home in the world either. Jewish literary confrontations, in Yiddish and in English, with the institution of world literature take place with a measure of undecidability, to use the Derridean term: to read texts against the grain of world literature is to defer arrival within universalized literary categories and instead foreground moments of impossible choice. Jewish American writing presents a series of translational convergences between and among incomplete ethnic, national, and global identities, and exposes the fractures of US, Jewish, and world literary formations. In this way, my analysis of Jewish American writing proceeds “in harness” with postcolonial and poststructural critiques of world literature, further deterritorializes US literature, and suggests critical approaches to Eurocentric and  Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. This book argues that Jewish American writing is a collection of texts both American and Jewish that do indeed strive for success on the global market and seek recognition as universal literary

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objects, even as they remain untranslatable, asking to be read against their own stated desires. The challenge is to read Jewish American writing in two directions simultaneously—to expose how writers are implicated within normative literary practices and to see how they also model strategies for thinking and writing otherwise. Asch’s idealistic faith in the redemptive possibilities of world literature persisted despite the growing conflict between his global ambitions and the foundation of his work in vernacular Jewish culture. Glatstein considered all Yiddish writers to be inherently world-writers yet refused to conform to the conventions and languages of the global market. Bashevis was continually aware of the ghosts that haunted his writing yet relentlessly seized upon the opportunities that translation afforded him. Bellow felt a deep attachment to the “potato love” of his immigrant family but still sought to dialectically transform that parochialism for a universal literary project. Each chapter examines the gap that translation opens up, where writers come face to face with the multiple potentialities of their writing and remain unable to choose. Consequently, they must write otherwise—without ­institutional stability yet holding out hope for new iterations of world literature: a monolingual world literature, a world literature to-come, a ghost world literature, a parochial world literature, and a literature of elsewhere. The first chapter is devoted to Asch because among Yiddish and Jewish American writers he was most aligned with the normative demands of the institution of world literature—as market, network, and transcendental republic. In this way the book opens by considering a proposed convergence of Yiddish and the language of empire while seizing on those moments when such translational strategies run up against untranslatability and the vernacular erasure inherent in the symbolization of Jewishness. Born in a shtetl in Poland in 1880 and a global literary celebrity by his death in 1957, Asch was a best-selling novelist, both in Yiddish and in translation into German, Polish, French, English, and several other languages. Asch’s fame often relied on his belief in the possibility of reconciliation between Jews and Christians through the creation of a single redemptive literary institution, a particularly urgent political stance in the interwar period. Focusing on the novels Three Cities and Salvation, I posit 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. Believing deeply in a shared Judeo-Christian civilization, Asch considered translation a difficult but necessary tool for this redemptive undertaking. Asch first saw Europe as the site of this project, and the translation of his work was initially meant to reach European audiences, in particular German ones. But during the course of writing and publishing his best-selling novels of the 1930s, he not only found unexpected success in US markets but also began to see US culture, in its increasingly global purview, as an emancipatory counter to the violent nationalism of Europe. The challenge of such a chapter is one that confronts any analysis of writing that actively courts legibility: Does Asch’s enthusiasm for convention (including resorting to typologies

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of Jewishness) render his work merely a transparent reflection of the normative Eurocentric and Anglocentric features of world literature? What does it mean to read the vernacular back into a text that sought out maximum legibility and supported a benevolent form of European dominance? I respond to these questions by tracking the ideological commitments behind Asch’s aesthetic choices while attending to the ambiguities still lingering in Asch’s interwar writing. In the two novels analyzed here, Asch attempts to create the possibility of a worldly Jewish saint, a zaddik modeled on his own self-image as someone who retains a connection to Jewish tradition while fighting, as celebrity and symbol, for the salvation of the entire world. At the same time, each text evinces a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments. I then turn to Glatstein’s opposite approach to world literature: rejecting conventional modes of translation and increasingly suspicious of universal and ecumenical aspirations, Glatstein wrote explicitly against the institutionalization of literature. Born in Lublin in 1896, Glatstein came the US in 1914 and soon after became a central figure in American Yiddish modernism, a movement largely ­illegible to contemporary English-language modernists. In his poetry, essays, and novels of the late 1930s, Glatstein repeatedly critiqued other Yiddish writers, ­including Asch, who, he believed, wrote for translation rather than as part of an ultimately more valuable, even more worldly, vernacular project. Such a strategy was of course somewhat self-serving. A celebrated writer and critic among Yiddish readers, Glatstein was nearly unknown to broader US audiences and did not appear to have a place in the institutional formations of world literature. Despite his reactionary stance in rejecting an institution that denies one entry, his example offers a compelling alternative, modeled on aspects of global modernism yet fiercely loyal to Yiddish vernacular creativity. In opposition to Asch, and in contrast to the various symbolizations of the Jew in contemporary Anglo-American modernism, Glatstein claims that the very untranslatability of Jewish vernacularity determines its value on the world stage. In his refusal to view literature as a form of ideological redemption and canonical stability, Glatstein imagines what I call a “world literature to-come,” deferring translation in favor of a moment when the vernacular will be celebrated without being erased. Glatstein’s nearly nationalist obscurantism is often compared to that of his ­contemporary, Bashevis, who was deeply devoted to the practice of translation. Bashevis began as a young naturalist in Warsaw in the 1920s, then shifted to an idiosyncratic historical realism in the ’30s and ’40s, and only became a literary celebrity in the US, upon his translation into English, in the ’50s and ’60s. The third chapter outlines this trajectory while registering the contradictions inherent in Bashevis’s pursuit of a balance between “nobody” and the “millions.” Like Asch, Bashevis agreed to various forms of essentialization, approximation, and even ­erasure in order to embed Yiddish within an institutional conception of literature, declaring his sense of security in US culture while announcing much higher ambitions. Bashevis at times courted the image of the “last Yiddish writer,” self-mythologizing

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as a paradigmatic Jewish storyteller in order to propose the universalization of Yiddish. Yet, like Glatstein, he remained conscious of the impossibilities of translation, despite his own strict authorial control over the process. Bashevis’s literary universe is always uncannily doubled, in language and in institutional alliance: Yiddish and English intersect with one another, the geographies of Poland and the US overlap, and his characters appear at home everywhere and nowhere. Thus I am drawn to a series of his autobiographical short stories, written and published in Yiddish and in English in the ’60s and ’70s, in which Bashevis encounters the ghosts of a vernacular past hovering at the foundation of his work. A hunchback demon in Miami Beach, Holocaust survivors in Montreal, and the living dead on the Lower East Side come together to form what I call “ghost world literature,” a mode of writing in which Bashevis’s worldly ambitions are clearly articulated even as ghosts of the vernacular past remain equally present. I then shift focus from writing in and out of Yiddish to Bellow’s manipulation of Jewish vernacularity in English, as part of his own world-writing project. Though he grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, Bellow wrote exclusively in English and went on to become one of the most celebrated US authors on the world stage. Focusing on the 1960s and ’70s, the years that marked the height of his fame, I examine how Bellow embeds his characters in a localized, post-immigrant Chicago experience, yet also active within global networks of capital and culture— and all the while still longing, dialectically, for the universal. As part of this dialectic, Bellow created a style that translates and aestheticizes Yiddish and immigrant colloquialisms to produce a new English. The result is writing characterized by obsessive, exhausting acts of compensation in which Bellow’s narrator constantly balances descent into the vernacular with a reach for sublime metaphor. Bellow attempts to translate Jewishness without abandoning the vernacular trace, and thereby dialectically escape a parochial limit to justify his universal ambitions. His inevitable, but underdetermined attachment to Jewishness as the condition for his writerly self runs up against an intimate rewriting of the American present and a deep longing for transcendence. This confluence produces, paradoxically, a parochial world literature—writing that hinges on the possibility of the local as a site of transcendence. In this way, this chapter brings the stakes of the encounter between Jewish American writing and the institution of world literature full circle. Even as one approaches the contemporary moment, there remains an urgency to world literature as an institutional formation that can contain and universalize any locality. World literature seems to smooth over difference and confirm one’s aesthetic and political achievements. This urgency, however, is also an obfuscating force, in which the vernacular is instrumentalized within a larger ideological apparatus. Rather than arriving at the systematization of all the world’s literature one is left, like Bellow, with a set of uncertainties. In an Epilogue I offer a final 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.

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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, I consider what it means to inhabit the space that Bashevis’s “maybe” opens up, a world literature to-come grounded in a practice of vernacular listening. Together these chapters offer models for understanding the double bind of Jewish American writing, in which Jewish vernacularity encounters the instabilities of world literature. This meeting is one of convergence and disjunction, in which each term of the encounter is fractured: each writer’s multivalent Jewishness—as vernacular origin, nationalist aspiration, or overdetermined ster­e­o­type—appears alongside the equally fraught categories of “America” and the “world.” The idea of world literature often promises to smooth over these fractures through translation and normalization. The task of this book is to expose the undecidability of this promise, tracking the entanglement of Jewish writing within a world-system and its simultaneous failure to write beyond Yiddish and beyond being named Jewish.

Jewish Worlds: an Exercise in Translation In interrogating the double bind of Jewish American writing this project must necessarily do work in a number of fields that overlap but are rarely considered together: world literature theory, US literature and American studies, and Jewish literary studies. What I propose in the following sections of this Introduction is a methodology that would bring these fields into dialogue rather than map one onto the other. That is, “worldliness” as a category does not exist as some abstraction above and beyond the terms “Jewish” or “American”; it is instead constituted by them. I argue that there is theoretical purchase to reimagining the Western conception of “the world” using Jewish vocabularies and that the idea of world literature is itself inflected by its intertwinement with American empire and its at­tend­ ant vernacular remainders. The study of Jewish American writing and its politics of translation, alongside postcolonial and ethnic literatures, thus offers an opportunity to show the vernacular in motion between the margins and centers of global literary production. Following this zigzagging requires rethinking Jewish difference and the ways it informs the contested terms of this project. I begin with the idea of the “world,” a concept that in both Western and Jewish traditions already contains within it the tension between millions and nobody that so preoccupies the writers I explore. What is a world and how does literature constitute it? Martin Heidegger turns the term into a verb, using “worlding” to refer to the way the work of art, conceptually, proposes its own world, a totality that is

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s­ elf-organizing and self-enclosing. By force of its creative energy the work establishes its own universe, a “world worlds.”3 At the same time however and parallel to art’s creative capacity to “world,” the work of art is entangled in other overlapping, sometimes competing worlds: the work of art, at least partially, reflects a concrete world of human history (this world, the natural world, the real world) and is limited by the means of production, historical contingencies, and cultural currents out of which the work emerges. For Eric Hayot, “world is thus both a philosophical concept and an example of that concept; a concept that is in the deepest possible way an instance of itself.”4 The “world” is hardly a stable thing in that it offers the possibility of a self-contained and orderly universe while also suggesting its own fragmentation.5 Despite this instability, the term “world” has been harnessed as a way to frame “this strange institution called literature,” to use Derrida’s locution.6 Those who employ world literature as an analytical tool often want to limit (or translate) literature’s “strangeness” by “worlding” it—containing it within a potentially knowable realm. David Damrosch speaks of identifying the “boundaries” of world literature; even if he qualifies this containment by demonstrating the boundaries’ flexibility on “multiple dimensions” according to individual preference and in ­reaction to “the shifting relations between world-wide capital flows,” he still characterizes world literature as “attainable in practice by actual readers, archivists, and editors alike.”7 Damrosch is one of many recent scholars whose conceptions seek to tame the unruly multidirectionality of literature within a world system, network, or ecology. “Worlding” would contain literature even as texts stubbornly exceed such bounds, even as their worlds do not cohere. The unruliness of the “world” can be further observed if we put the concept through the “strange” processes of translation. What follows is a translational ­exercise—between English, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish—that juxtaposes Jewish and non-Jewish terminologies in order to outline and challenge the idea of world literature, its institutions, and its norms. The word “world” is itself translational: the English word is from the German Welt, which combines the Latin vir with the Germanic alt to mean “the age of ­humanity.” Over time, this temporal designation gave way to a spatial one, as Welt came to refer to the space in which humanity exists. Welt thus produces a confluence of time and space, marking the capacity to measure history and memory within a knowable realm of human existence.8 As a modifier of “literature,” “world” could thus describe writing that reflects human history and its migrations across the planet. Such a definition of world literature though risks meaning very little at all; there is little here to distinguish it from simply “literature” on its own. All literature is necessarily of the world in the sense that it is determined by human existence over time. Still, there is a drive among scholars to think of “worldliness” as more than just a designation of existence: “Common to most definitions of world literature is a recognition that it is possible to delineate the concept of world literature as something more specific than the plenum of all the world’s literatures,

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for which the unmodified term ‘Literature’ already suffices.”9 This has led some to emphasize the connection between world literature and globalization—a text ­becomes “worldly” when it is observed moving through the networks of global capital, circulation becoming the determining structure of reading.10 This definition however still remains somewhat superficial, relying on a model in which a seemingly ubiquitous and self-automating external force sets the stage for artistic creativity. What might it mean to start from the act of writing itself—what does it mean to write for the world and not just the global market? What world, whose world? What does world add that is different than global? Translation into Hebrew proves instructive, pushing world literature toward a transcendental horizon of meaning rather than a materialist one. The Hebrew for world, olam, as found in the Bible, rarely if ever actually means the physical world. It denotes the long duration of existence, both human and divine, transcendent and mundane, future and past.11 The phrase brit olam means a divine covenant for all time; metey olam refers to those that have been long dead. Thus, olam designates a sense of continuity and perpetuity, referring alternately to the enduring presence of the divine or the irrevocable absence of the dead. The term only takes on the more widely known (and more modern) meaning of the physical world in post-biblical literature, predominantly in rabbinic discourse. There remains an uneasy convergence between an earlier metaphysical meaning and a new material, planetary definition, which produces another conflation of time and space: to live in this world, ba’olam haze, in a profane world of experience, and to strive to gain entrance into the messianic world-to-come, olam haba, the world of eternal transcendence.12 Thus, in Jewish tradition, from biblical to rabbinic sources, a person exists under the demands of opposing yet complementary “worlds”: human and divine, transient and eternal, circumscribed and boundless. A world literature of this type, a literature of the olam (sifrut olam in modern Hebrew), would designate a type of writing with particular staying power that reaches toward a messianic horizon, a literature marked by eternal and redemptive aspirations, not merely market expansion.13 Such indeed is the notion often incorporated into the most common definitions of world literature. One may see how foundational this concept is to the study of world literature in Maynard Mack’s preface to the 1956 edition of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces where he argues that works of world literature “lead us deeper into the meaning of a past age than other modes of writing do, because they convey its unformulated aspirations and intuitions as well as its  conscious theorems and ideals; and yet, being timeless, they have also an ­unmatched appeal to our own age.”14 In its most traditional sense, world literature designates writing that captures the past in a way that achieves universal status, as determined by Euro-American arbiters of cultural capital. Hence, the “masterpieces” of world literature are those that editors and critics deem able to withstand the tests of time and remain relevant today and into the future. Instead of describing the literatures of the globe, “world” produces a particular vision of the universal

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and its attendant Eurocentric hierarchies and cosmological orders. One of the most powerful representations of this ideal is the universal library, of which the anthology is a smaller articulation. World literature of this type comes to name a desire for structure, real or imagined, that could measure and contain the most lasting of literary creations, from the European metropole to the colonial margins. This utopian ideal is precisely how the Yiddish critic Shmuel Charney, in a 1929 essay, envisioned world literature, which he described as a “palace of glory.” Charney’s palace has two distinct chambers: the first is an exhibition hall for “temporary guests,” “rootless” writers who momentarily catch the attention of global audiences, writers whose works are destined to be forgotten and replaced by the next fad; by contrast, the second room is reserved for the great masters, who ­“recline in eternal splendor” due to their ability, according to Charney, to forgo the demands of the moment and dig so deeply into their “national roots” that they arrive, dialectically, at the very foundations of humanity. Charney explains that no authority can grant entrance into this part of the palace. It must be gained through the intrinsic power of a writer’s artistic achievement.15 Largely a polemic against what he considered cheap forms of best-selling, translatable literature and a protest against the near exclusion of Yiddish from the halls of international literary prestige, Charney imagines a narrative of universal literary achievement that is deeply embedded in Western thought. The universal library and the palace of world literature are images that produce a geography of national difference while also promising eternity. The structure of insider and outsider that motivates Charney’s essay reveals the Orientalism inhering in the idea of a transcendent world literature. For Aamir Mufti, the universal library is a conquering “agent” in the division, compartmentalization, and rationalization of the world. The possibility of “refinement” requires the mirror of a primitive other; and the idea of mapping implies an unknown exotic margin to be dominated and occupied by a colonial imagination of race and class.16 Charney’s protest thus doubles as an exposure of Yiddish’s marginalization within the logic of world literature. This logic has been present since the first deployments of the term: Goethe’s famous theorizations of Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century begin from his consumption of literature tied to a colonial imaginary—the translation and transmogrification of “Eastern” texts into European languages.17 Though Germany was hardly a colonial power and despite Goethe’s sometimes anti-imperialist stances, his invention of world literature brings with it a hierarchy that enacts empire beyond traditional apparatuses of state power. Thus, even as world literature comes to name the possibility of literary transcendence it also reinscribes matrices of control.18 As Derrida notes, to speak of literature means that one is already speaking in Latin and in the language of empire.19 On some level Charney knows that Yiddish literature, as the language of a subjugated and exoticized population, will never gain entrance to world literature’s palace of glory.

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What then has Hebrew provided us here, in the introduction of olam, of e­ ternity? Is the universal library necessarily a Hebrew library in addition to, say, a Latin, Greek, English, and French one, to the exclusion of Yiddish and other “marginal” languages? The universality tied to olam is likely somewhat different from its European incarnations, but they are also linked; thinking in olam helps point to the civilizational stakes of a world literature dominated by a constructed JudeoChristian tradition. The Western idea of eternity, with its utopian constraints and vernacular erasures, emerges partly out of biblical and rabbinic hermeneutics and entails the sanctification of texts as the sources of transcendental value. The idea of a canon of course is a project of Christian and Jewish world-making. To name the worldliness of a text, its olamiyut, would be to measure the confirmation or fulfillment of a Judeo-Christian promise of redemption. So far, this etymological exercise has led to a fairly familiar definition of world literature: beginning from Welt and translated into olam, world literature appears to describe the possibility of a higher order of literature, beyond national boundaries and local vernaculars yet contained by universal, Western categories of thought. Recourse to Hebrew does not exhaust the translational parameters of this book, however, and indeed something else happens when we turn our attention to a second Jewish vocabulary, Yiddish, a Germanic language whose origins date back to Jewish communities of Germanic lands in the Middle Ages. The language ­arguably reached its height after migrations to Eastern Europe and then as the dominant vernacular of the global diaspora of Ashkenazi Jewry. Yiddish is a fusion language written in Hebrew characters, its Germanic shell incorporating vocabulary and grammatical structures from Hebrew and Aramaic, along with Romance languages, Slavic languages, internationalisms, and other languages with which its speakers came into contact.20 The German Welt, in all of its meanings, is perfectly at home in Yiddish as velt. As a result of Yiddish’s multiple language components, a given concept may be covered by several words, in particular the doubling of a Germanic word with a Hebraic one. Thus, Yiddish has olam in addition to velt. As is common in such borrowings, a third horizon of meaning appears in the gap between the languages. In Yiddish, olam, pronounced in an Ashkenazi accent as oylem, retains all of its Hebrew meanings but also enjoys a supplementary one as audience or crowd, a usage close to the French, tout le monde.21 In Yiddish, designations of time and place, sacred and profane, this world and the next world, are constrained by the immediacy of an oylem. You, dear readers, are my oylem for however long you read this book. What would oylem literature look like? In this translation, many of the metaphysical and theological significations of world literature become secondary. Instead of marking a transcendental and boundless space, oylem limits world literature to a particular audience’s capacity to consume a text. The “world” of world literature is only as big as a text’s audience, as big as its oylem.22 Moreover, the very existence of this world depends on how long such an audience endures, if at all.

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World literature, in its Yiddish incarnation, cannot simply mean all of the world’s literatures throughout time nor can it measure a redemptive horizon of meaning and value. Literature of the oylem is a limited set of texts read by particular readers in a particular time and place. Echoing and responding to Charney’s essay, Glatstein offers this corrective to the idealistic stirrings of a universal world literature: “World-literature is not the huge, broad world; it’s a small empire unto itself, though it sounds so universal.”23 Oylem reminds us that, despite its cosmopolitan longings, world literature must also be evaluated in its most material conditions, as a function of local and global markets, as embedded in limited transnational networks, and entangled in the legacies of nationalism and empire. There is no single oylem, but a multitude of publics that determine the life and afterlife of a text. There is a constant struggle to determine in what worlds and in whose worlds a text belongs and how various worlds interrelate and overlap, if at all, in space and time. Each oylem has its set of rules and expectations, often articulated through divergent forms, languages, and vocabularies. In this way, literature of the oylem proposes a translational limit: the promise of a single organizing structure—the utopia of the universal library, the cohesive map of the world’s literatures—must encounter concrete empires of literary exchange and the untranslatables of vernacular communities. Nobody and the millions inevitably come to mirror and support one another, to return to Bashevis’s conundrum. Simultaneous to the world’s proposed status as a transcendental category, there persists underneath, in vernacular articulation, a world of human judgment and institutional action: a set of people in a room deciding whether to clap or not.

The Institution of World Literature The kinds of uncertainty and contingency that olam and oylem suggest are not widely embraced in contemporary accounts of the idea of world literature. More often, current theorizations cling to the promise of institutional stability. Employing the vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu surrounding structures of cultural capital, the majority of current scholarship on world literature turns on the possibility or even inevitability of a totalizing structure, whether as universal library or global system. In these formulations, which serve as methodological foils to my project, world literature becomes an explanatory force that renders legible an expanding network of texts and that sets the parameters for how these texts relate to one another. Throughout, I refer to this totalizing impulse, force, and body as the “institution of world literature.” By “institution” I mean a specter, an ephemeral body conjured by scholars, ­critics, writers, and readers that would guarantee stability and structure, what Roland Barthes calls “a form of the world” and a “rhetorical code.”24 Following Louis Althusser, an institution is both an imaginary force that dictates discourse and a concrete apparatus that enacts ideology.25 The institution of world literature

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is thus an attempt to construct an imagined, pluralist unity for a vast body of ­literatures while also naming the various activities that seek to bring that unity into being. This institution has a set of rules and laws; it has criteria for membership and a logic for circulation, its own rewards, contests, and prizes. The rubrics for these strictures are of course always changing: the fickle trends of the global market for the selling and distribution of books and the circulation of ideas; the reach of the institution extended through translation, through influence, through different kinds of markets and archives for literature; the shifting aesthetic codes dictated by those with cultural power. Each articulation of world literature brings about a different form of institutionalization. The institution of world literature persists as a desired structure that is variously mapped and projected onto a shifting collection of texts and networks. As a modern institution, world literature can be viewed as a gear in the machine of bourgeois modernity, participating in the global dissemination of nationalism, colonialism, and Orientalism. Dating such a conception to the eighteenth century, Mufti writes, “the emergence and modes of functioning of world literature, as the space of interaction between and articulation of ‘national’ or regional literatures, are elements in the much-wider historical process of the emergence of the modern, bourgeois state and its dissemination worldwide, under colonial and semi-colonial conditions, as the normative state-form of the modern era.”26 World literature is part of how Europe explains its own social structures and how these structures are imposed on the territories and populations it comes to control. Regardless of where one might be located on the map of world literature—“major,” “minor,” or otherwise—its institutional dictates have a say in how a writer might claim modern subjectivity. Glatstein is quoted as having said, likely at some point in the 1950s and ’60s, that “I have to be aware of Auden but Auden need never have heard of me.”27 As a seemingly obscure and mostly untranslated Yiddish poet living in the US, Glatstein could be considered marginal in the privileged and persecuted sense; he and his fellow Yiddish writers seemed to exist, in particular in terms of circulation, outside of any US or global capitalist purview. Even so, he felt compelled to come to terms with the dominant literary conventions of world literature as he saw them. W. H. Auden, as an Anglo-American representative of world literature, is a symbol of the institution that hovers over Glatstein, demanding that the Yiddish writer measure up to national and global standards. Regardless of whether his work would be read in translation or not, Glatstein was beholden to the institution of world literature in order to render his own writing legible as “literature.” This institutional formation, as a part of bourgeois modernity, is undoubtedly a patriarchal thing, shaped by the phallocentric desire for order. It is no surprise that even today the most cited studies of world literature are dominated by male writers and are often shaped by the ways in which these writers cling to the security that world literature promises.28 This study certainly suffers from the same limitation, since tracking Jewish American writers’ desire for the world means attending to those writers who could imagine themselves as legible to the institution of world

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literature. It would be foolish to contend that writers like Kadya Molodowsky in Yiddish or Cynthia Ozick in English did not participate in discourses surrounding the institution of world literature; indeed each appears throughout the following chapters. Yet both Molodowsky and Ozick often hesitated to place their work within the purview of world literature: Molodowsky’s concerns, especially following the Holocaust, almost always remained national in scope as she sought to consolidate and reenergize the remnants of Yiddish culture; Ozick repeatedly railed against the “paganism” of a literature for literature’s sake, opting instead for a Jewishly rooted moral imperative over and against any globalized or universalized structure. While the male writers that dominate this book share many of Molodowsky’s and Ozick’s seemingly parochial concerns, they do not shy away from imagining—even if only through some impossible, messianic intervention— joining the ranks of other men enshrined in the palace of world literature. Thus, even if Glatstein sees himself as unfairly marginalized, he can still think of himself as Auden’s equal—in gendered terms. In contrast, when Paley first began writing poetry and showed her work to Auden, her teacher at the New School at the time, he instructed her to write less like him and to find her own, gendered voice.29 As women, these writers were discouraged from recognizing themselves within a male genealogy of modern literature and thus sometimes found it difficult to envision world literature as a secure home for their writing. Paley’s writing has to happen elsewhere, in some other voice. More conservative writers like Molodowsky and Ozick compensate for this exclusion by doubling down on their commitment to other institutions—the Jewish people, Jewish morality—and in this way take certain masculinist stances against the world. The writers I consider in the Epilogue, Paley and Margolin, choose a different trajectory, retaining world literature as an important frame for their work but never its ultimate goal or institutional home. Their critique of world literature’s institutional stability begins from a measured consideration of its gendered hierarchies. Despite the repeated critique of its imperial and gendered hierarchies, the institution of world literature often appears in contemporary scholarship as an inevitability. Many theorists use the term primarily in descriptive ways, where world literature comes to name an empirical data set rather than an ideological formation. Accompanying the “transnational turn” in literary studies over the past thirty years, scholars have delineated, with various degrees of flexibility, an institutional structure for literature that could mirror the global structures (rationalized as either natural or brutal) of late capitalism.30 Emerging from Goethe’s and then Marx and Engels’ initial provocations, then spurred on by the world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, and echoing (and often critiquing) the politics of “one-worldedness,” new conceptualizations of world literature describe a series of systems meant to function as historical, contemporary, and utopian containers for the world’s literatures. They perceive a need to measure the consequences of transnational circulation with the conceptual goal, in Alain Badiou’s formulation, of seeing “the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market.”31

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One of the most influential of these projects is Franco Moretti’s “distant reading,” in which he suggests that all extant literature, known and as yet unknown, can be mapped within a “planetary system” and that through the accumulation of data, statistical analysis, and the division of labor among readers/critics/scholars, one can arrive at the various rules and laws that dictate global literary exchange. In this way, world literature becomes an empirical practice that locates literature within an observable global totality. Aspects of Moretti’s project have been energetically critiqued. Critics point to his theory’s reliance on native informants to produce data that would support the hegemonic position of the all-knowing comparativist; many question his assumption that one can identify discrete national entities in measurable distance from one another (conserving the “national” in “transnational”); others decry Moretti’s recourse, even after the accumulation of data, to paradigmatic texts and literary figures that function as national representatives within an overdetermined literary league of nations; and others challenge the dubious claim that the genre of the novel can and should be the dominant measure of literary exchange.32 Despite these reservations, Moretti’s positing of a global totality has remained foundational for the growing field of world literature theory. Scholars that follow Moretti continue to describe the uneven entanglements of literature with global capital, often incorporating critiques from postcolonialism and Marxism while producing models that rely on center–margin relations and the complexities that ensue. Fundamental to these models is an architecture of literary relations in which the institution of capital, and its self-automating and expansive qualities, is the central determining force.33 Not all theorists see global economic structures and the nation as the governing principles of the institution of world literature. For others it is literature’s perceived resistance to global homogenization and rejection of the nation-state that draw them to the concept. Often paired with Moretti’s work, Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters is viewed as a hopeful response to Moretti’s determinism. Though still an adherent to world-systems theory in that she views world literature as a space of fierce competition and exchange between cultures, Casanova also imagines the possibility of an alternative network to the dictates of state and market powers. For Casanova, world literature has its own cultural economy separate from political and economic realms; world literature is its own republic “with its own laws, its own history, its specific revolts and revolutions.”34 Though Casanova’s Eurocentric model (with Paris at its center) and her reliance on colonialist notions of the nation have been challenged, many theorists still share, if only implicitly, her conviction that literature constitutes an autonomous, variegated, alternative network. This alternative network though very quickly also becomes a normative institution, despite the best intensions of scholarship. Damrosch avoids explicitly outlining any larger organizing body in order to describe world literature as a method of reading across national boundaries and across languages. For Damrosch, world literature is an accounting of texts that circulate in a particular way, emerging out

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of their initial cultures and into new and foreign reading communities, “actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.”35 Damrosch though optimistically relies on the condition of translatability to produce his ­burgeoning networks of readers. The shared space of world literature is possible because of the linked literary systems that Damrosch assumes translation creates. Even while highlighting the creative rereadings and misreadings that translation enacts, Damrosch still needs a normative mechanism of cultural legibility to buttress his theory of cultural exchange.36 Alexander Beecroft’s theorization of the “ecology of world literature” presents a different but related model that also relies on an embedded institutional structure. Beecroft acknowledges literature’s multiple forms of collective attachment, from local to larger national horizons and then to cosmopolitan and global ones, but he seeks to contain each of these categories within a single, multifaceted “ecology,” grouping together overlapping and contiguous “biomes” within adaptive interpretive structures.37 The metaphor of “ecology” seems looser than an economy and more easily able to account for the kinds of hybrid literary formations Damrosch describes. But it still instantiates a hope for legibility and knowability. Even when taking into account its multiple constraints and translational boundaries, and its complex relations over time and space, Beecroft understands world literature as an organized ontological object. That is, world literature figures as a normative institution, even if that institution cannot always be named or located in a given place or time.38 Other theorists seize on this normative potential to further support the possibility of world literature as an alternative institution to the global market. Returning to Heideggerian conceptions of “worlding” and pushing the boundaries of Casanova’s work, Pheng Cheah pits the artistic act against the destructive forces of globalization. In this view, rather than representing the globalized present or ­critiquing it, world literature is a new anthological collective (with postcolonial literature as its leading paradigm) that performs a Derridean act of radical giftgiving to undo the competitive modes of global capitalism.39 Debjani Ganguly shares Cheah’s Heideggerian premise, focusing on the “global novel” as both a ­reflection of contemporary forms of globalization (especially post 1989) and a genre of humanist intervention that enacts a “global infrastructure of sympathy and witnessing of extreme human suffering” and operates “in their melancholic mode . . . as affective scripts that disturb such normalization” to evince a “humanitarian sensibility.”40 Together, Cheah and Ganguly argue for world literature, and the contemporary novel most of all, as the “infrastructure” for collective engagement, a “being-with of all peoples, groups, and individuals.”41 For both, this requires ­literature to be a normative force with specific strategies and forms, as in the ­required and valorized act of “witnessing” in Ganguly’s definition of the novel. Just as globalization is a force with institutional parameters (the global market most prominently), so too must world literature respond with equal normative and institutional force.

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A central apparatus of the institution of world literature, for theorists that follow both Moretti and Casanova, is the genre of the novel, in particular its “world-making” capacity. For Moretti, the novel figures as a “law” of legibility within his world system, an idea echoed by those scholars who take for granted the dominance of the global market.42 For Cheah and Ganguly the novel’s worldmaking resists global capitalism: the European invention enters global circulation, is modified in the colonial and postcolonial periphery, and returns, reinvigorated, as the measure of new institutional cohesion.43 Others challenge this sense of the novel as law or condition to present a more flexible account of literary exchange. Wai Chee Dimock sees the novel as part of a system of porous boundaries and nebulous kinships. Using the fractal as an organizing metaphor, Dimock offers a “comparative morphology” to describe the novel as a genre of constant mutability; in place of a law, Dimock searches for the novel’s “durable threads that bind ­together the world,” in “a thickening process, one that keeps a full, cumulative, and not necessarily unified record.”44 The systematization of literature on a global scale remains a desired, even if impossible, horizon, with the novel as its normative limit. The radical yet normative projects of Cheah, Ganguly, and Dimock encompass a possible collectivity, a “fullness,” that would defy destructive systems while constituting other more productive ones. Their optimism, even if qualified by various contingencies, reveals a desire for the very institutionalization that they otherwise seek to countermand. These optimistic, sometimes utopian, theories of world literature harken back to the roots of comparative literature as a discipline. By proposing a potentially independent and autonomous system, republic, or ecology for literature, they make a claim that is parallel to Harry Levin’s designation, in 1963, that “literature has always been an institution” that “may belong to society and yet be autonomous within its own limits.”45 For Levin, literature is both a response to the “environment” that surrounds it and a set of internally cohesive, if changing, conventions. Levin’s is a synthesizing project, in which the individual writer is embedded in the world while partaking in (and possibly escaping into) the world of literature. The possibility of a fortuitous meeting between the sociological strictures of literature (of and in the world) and the world-making tools of literature still animates contemporary theorizations of world literature. In imagining an institutional alternative to the imbalances of the global present, scholars seek to expand Levin’s account: they revise how literatures are grouped together transnationally, augment anthologies to include a greater diversity of writers by language and gender, take translation more into account, and redefine how texts circulate in different systems and networks. While varied, these theories all rely on the basic need to create and perpetuate an institutional formation. No matter how generous and flexible the boundaries of these systems are, no matter how quickly their rules can be rewritten, they espouse what Mariano Siskind has summarized as the “universalizing fantasies of world literature.”46 The transnational network and the universal library, the global market and the translational utopia, require that there linger

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somewhere in the background a potentially unifiable entity to organize all of this knowledge. The critique of this institutional fantasy is the starting point for the current study. Jewish American writing aspires toward this institutional stability and ­simultaneously is subject to its violence and vernacular erasure. In this way I share a premise similar to that of a scholar like Michael Allan, who explores how European frameworks of reading were imposed on colonial Egypt and “map[s] the normative force of world literature and the limits of the cosmopolitan sensibilities it implies.”47 Such an approach echoes Auerbach’s sense, already in 1952, that: We will have to accustom ourselves to the thought that only a single literary culture may survive in this homogenized world. It may even happen that, within a comparatively short period of time, only a limited number of literary languages will continue to exist, soon perhaps only one. If this were to come to pass, the idea of world literature would simultaneously be realized and destroyed.48

This postulation responds to the fear of world literature as a homogenizing institution, a reaction that points to the deficiencies of the term and seeks to redefine it in critical terms. I share this critique of institutionalization while simultaneously trying to understand how writers remain tied to its forms. In this way, I want to be wary of oppositional thinking that would force one to be “for” or “against” world literature. Allan’s approach negatively mirrors a project like Cheah’s: instead of a redemptive spirit animating peripheral literatures Allan offers a shadowy specter that haunts them. In both cases one finds an approach that pits East against West where it would be more accurate to account for their mutual entanglement. As Mufti emphasizes, the construction of modernity is bound up in the interplay of margins and centers, of the Occident with the Orient. In this way even the most marginal of writers is implicated in the consequences of modernity rather than acting solely as a redemptive subversion.49 Hayot explains that the act of worlding has a genealogy within European concepts of the universal; thus, the compulsion to write toward the world already implies participation in Western enactments of a global totality. To be modern is, figuratively, to be ­infected by worldliness.50 Thus, while I am critical of the institution of world ­literature throughout this project, I want to be conscious of the ways in which writers are repeatedly implicated in its construction. This requires adopting reading strategies that account for the uncomfortable simultaneity of the local and the global, the subaltern and the imperial, the particular and the universal. To counter such discomfort, world literature serves as a regulatory agent that enforces “a border regime, a system for the regulation of movement, rather than as a set of literary relations beyond or without borders. Put somewhat differently, we might say that the cultural sphere now generally identified as world literature, far from being a seamless and transversable space, has in fact been from the beginning a regime of enforced mobility and therefore immobility

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as well.”51 To read writers within and against world literature’s “border regime” means to follow both implication and resistance, mobility and immobility. A writer’s longing for world literature marks them as a part of the machine. The question then becomes what it might mean, in the most concrete sense, to enter the m ­ achine and to identify when it inevitably begins to malfunction, and to imagine what may remain after its ruin. This figurative ruin is where those who have attempted to think beyond the institution of world literature often begin, and it is where my thinking commences as well. Erich Auerbach initiated such a project with his answer to the charge of homogenization by calling for a return to the earth, “our philological home,” rather than recourse to the nation as the organizing structure of literary creativity.52 Following Auerbach, Gayatri Spivak, among others, suggests an approach that would avoid the totalizing methodologies of worlding and globalization through a critical turn to what she calls “planetarity.” As Spivak reports, to propose world literature as a scientific measure of networks and systems is to enter a kind of ­competition with the hard sciences and social sciences, a competition that “we have already lost, as one loses institutional competition.”53 “Globalization” is a term borrowed from a social scientific vocabulary that proposes systematization of the literary field around the measurement of capital; worldling is a philosophical term that is similarly invested in scientific discourse that must imagine a coherent totality. In contrast, to speak of planetarity is to imagine an elsewhere, underneath and beyond an institution. Spivak’s planetarity marks a persistent alterity that is not the opposite of the world or the globe, but rather performs an uncanny disjunction, an act of “overwriting the globe” that, echoing Freud’s unheimlich, presents the world as home and not-home.54 The planetary is above all untranslatable into the systems, networks, and ­institutions of global capital or world literature, since it groups texts together in a way that defers the full realization of a single coherent literary collectivity. Concepts like the globe and the world articulate a desire to map a literary field, based as they are on a logic of discovery that would name and place texts within an always d ­ eveloping hierarchy. In contrast, the parameters of planetarity remain purposely vague, for Spivak is interested in teleiopoesis (imaginative making at a distance) that makes something other than the globe or the world.55 Drawing on Derridian articulations of responsibility, Spivak imagines a planetary mode of reading that replaces multicultural pluralism with a turn to the grounds of artistic activity and the ethics of alterity. Writing the planet means taking responsibility, impossibly, for the other not as a foreign, oppositional (and therefore potentially knowable) node within a system or on a map, but as an intimate neighbor and fellow u ­ nknowable migrant. Such writers and texts are simultaneously at-home and not-at-home in the world; they move through global systems and may disappear into the planet, participating, however improbably, in a grounded collectivity.

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Homi Bhabha refers to this impossible coming-together as a form of “vernacular cosmopolitanism.” The vernacular names a space that evades institutional demands: [This is a space] that somehow stops short (not falls short) of the transcendent human universal, and for that very reason provides an ethical entitlement to, and enactment of, the sense of community. . . . A community that seeks to articulate itself at a “level of immediacy,” surviving in an interstitial zone of the indeterminate, between the private and the public, the family and civil society, always in danger of being peremptorily “nationalized,” or being considered an atavistic ­minoritarian voice. . . . Is it possible to be “culturally particularist” without ­becoming patriotic? Committed to the specificity of event and yet linked to a transhistorical memory and solidarity?56

Bhabha and Spivak are referring here to a particular postcolonial moment, after the perceived failures of anti-colonial revolutionary movements, the reinscription of neo-colonialist control, and the abject poverty of migrants and refugees whose numbers continue to rise. Bhabha tries to answer the paradoxical questions he asks by imagining a politics of the everyday that would foster “subterranean” communities as refuge for collectivities battered by state and global powers. Resisting the temptation to offer an oppositional alternative to nationalism and globalization, such communities would form a public space for care and solidarity, a kind of “subaltern secularism” in which “we may be free to follow our strange gods or pursue our much maligned monsters, as part of a collective and collaborative ‘ethics’ of choice.”57 Distinct from multicultural pluralism, Bhabha’s politics of the everyday imagines a community that is experiential rather than presupposed or prescribed. This public space is based not on similarity but “on the recognition of difference” and thereby must proceed with constant boundary-testing and collective responsibility for the consequences. The task of my project is to identify the possibility of such collectivities within and beyond Jewish American writing, even if (or especially when) the texts themselves ask to be read otherwise. I am interested in tracing the planetary in texts by Jewish American writers that have been implicated, willingly or not, in the institution of world literature. Even as a writer like Bashevis seeks out the millions and the promises of universalization, remnants of vernacularity within his work ­approach the alterity that Spivak and Bhabha describe. Glatstein’s paradoxical refusal of translation and claim to worldliness speak to both a desire for world literature and the possibility of an elsewhere for literature beyond such a limited institution. Accounting for these paradoxes requires reading in multiple directions—from the planetary to the institutional, from the global to the local and back again, and each in compliance with the other and each escaping the other—so that one can follow the simultaneous (and not necessarily compatible) scales of the literary act. Mufti suggests, “wherever English is or goes in the world, it is dogged by its various others.”58 To rephrase, wherever the institution of world literature extends its boundaries one can also find, as counterpoint and neighbor, its subterranean and untranslatable vernaculars.

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Translation, Undecidability, and the Monolingual Paradigm For many scholars, translation is the engine of world literature, transporting ­writers, texts, or entire national cultures across political and linguistic barriers. Many consider translation a world-making mechanism that both produces boundaries and transgresses them, and in so doing charts lines of connection between cultures. Taking this idea even further, Rebecca Walkowitz argues that translatability is the inevitable horizon of a literary work, referring predominantly to the contemporary novel. Walkowitz claims that many novels written today are “born translated,” embedded first in the circulatory and translational networks of a world literary system rather than being beholden to a national or vernacular origin. Walkowitz sees the condition of translatability, ultimately, as a constructive practice, observing that “translation puts pressure on the conceptual boundaries between one community and another and may spur the perception of new communities altogether.”59 By this definition, translation is necessary for the global proliferation of world literature’s institutional coherence. In contrast, in this study, translation is viewed as a deeply contingent and not necessarily productive process. For Mufti, translation when defined as part of a literary system is almost always a symptom of imperialism; Mufti points to the growing dominance of English as a “global literary vernacular” that enacts “a cultural system with global reach . . . an apparatus for the assimilation and domestication of diverse practices of writing (and life-worlds) on a world scale.”60 In her provocatively titled Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Emily Apter similarly offers a “deflationary gesture” by critiquing notions of translation as a unifying or domesticating practice to focus on mistranslation and failed translation, semantic dissonance and vernacular incongruity.61 This study follows Mufti’s and Apter’s models by observing how systems of translation shape a text and how the text simultaneously evades these systems. Such an approach is reflected in the term “untranslatable,” which simultaneously contains both the “translatable” and its negation, placing the literary act directly on the border between languages, between the millions and the nobody. Rather than enable circulation within a coherent structure, the act of translation points to the moment of transfer itself and to the ways in which arrival on either side of the border is deferred or ­rendered impossible. This moment of undecidability is my focus throughout. By undecidability I mean the deferral of arrival within transcendental or universalized categories, what Derrida refers to as a “double bind . . . between determined (semantic, ethical, political) poles, which are upon occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably singular.”62 For Derrida, to be undecided means to be confronted with clear “determined” structures of power that cannot be reconciled. The untranslatable text is claimed simultaneously by multiple readerships and languages and even by multiple genres, adhering to a vernacular collectivity and to the institution of world literature. The text reaches toward all of these competing “worlds” without

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being contained by any one of them and without settling on their synthesis. There remains always something of the text, a trace or a supplement in Derrida’s vocabulary, that overflows any systematization.63 For instance, all of the figures to be ­discussed in this book struggle with the novel, the “law” that motivates many ­theorizations of world literature; failing to translate their vernacular experiences into this genre, they turn instead to other intervening “rhetorical codes”—the short story, the modernist poem, and beyond, all of which have their own valences in American and European literary institutions. By attending to this struggle, I uncover each writer’s longing for legibility and its simultaneous impossibility. Thus, translation as it is defined here is a negotiation with the demands and fantasies of modernity, an undecidable response to what Yasemin Yildiz calls ­modernity’s “monolingual paradigm.”64 More than the seemingly mechanical act of rendering a text from one language into another, translation meets (or fails to meet) an institutional expectation that a text, and a whole culture, become identifiable within a coherent structure of exchange. This was the explicit goal of a figure like Asch, who saw the translation of his work from Yiddish into European languages as a way not only to garner fame but to bring about the redemption of the world. As will be explored in depth in Chapter 1, Asch longed to join the institution of world literature and support its universalist (and monolingual) aims so as to prove the importance of Jewish culture, beginning with the elevation of Yiddish as a European language and ending with the Judaization of Jesus. The failure of this project speaks to the contingencies of translation. Such a definition of translation also applies to those figures for whom translation, in the mechanical sense, does not appear to be central. Bellow is included so prominently in this study, even though he did not write in Yiddish and is often considered one of the most representative figures of US literature in English, ­because the horizon of expectations that governs his writing is translational. His main characters rise out of an immigrant culture with the goal of seizing hold of the universal. To achieve such a synthesis, Bellow’s fiction imposes a translational progression, from a vernacular Jewish origin to a legible “American” encounter with the national, the imperial, and the global. That this legibility remains out of reach is part of the faltering logic of translation. In defining translation as both fantasy and failure, I contend that no figure in this book finds a homecoming in the world, in the US, or in any Jewish community. In reading texts with and against the institution of world literature, I outline the ways in which the desire to be modern leads inevitably to inadequate translation. Even the invention of a modern culture entirely within a Jewish language like Yiddish still entails an intense and invasive translational practice.65 To theorize world literature as an institution is to track the process of a vernacular approaching the modern through translation in its many forms. Even if global audiences and markets ignore a text, the attempt (and failure) to incorporate the new ­vocabularies of modernity still signals a form of participation, partial or truncated, in the institution of world literature.66

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World-Writing and the Unsettling of America If the previous sections of this Introduction offered an initial delineation of the institution of world literature, landing finally on a translational and undecidable paradigm, then this section provides its first localized articulation, moving from the institution of world literature in general to its American window. What does it mean to imagine a text’s implication within the institution of world literature from the vantage point of the US as both a national and imperial entity? The idea of world literature certainly emerges out of a European temperament— from Herderian conceptions of the nation to the internationalizations of Goethe and Marx—and continues to have Eurocentric tendencies.67 Yet so much of the  institutionalization of world literature in the twentieth century is distinctly American. Despite anxieties over US nationalism and the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century, a discourse developed—from H.  L.  Mencken to Lionel Trilling—that encouraged US literature’s emergence out of its perceived parochial, even postcolonial status into a distinct national entity in the global realm. The first world literature courses were taught in US universities in the 1920s, and the idea of world literature soon became an essential component of liberal education in the US academy, especially in the postwar period and into the present.68 Despite these larger cultural trends, the discipline of American studies was slow to adopt its scholarship to the scales of world literature, limited as it was through much of the twentieth century by the strictures of US exceptionalism and, in literary studies, the provinciality of old historicism. In response to this belatedness, the last thirty years have seen a profound shift in American studies. Scholars of “the transnational turn” have developed models that show the US to be an imperial agent within a larger world system. Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture is widely cited as one of the most important studies to expose the intertwining of the domestic and the foreign, arguing that the idea of nationas-home is inextricable from the US’s status as empire. Scholarship in American studies now often begins from a critique of US culture as an articulation of imperial state power, showing how it is aligned or in competition with other forms of European hegemony in dominating colonial subjects.69 This anti-imperial approach is complemented by a second group of scholars who highlight the internal complexities of US literature that often overflow into broader global networks. Building on the rise of ethnic studies, these scholars ­emphasize the transnational, multilingual, and translational foundations that make up this thing called “American literature,” pushing the boundaries of Americanness to accommodate the voices of indigenous, African American, and immigrant and post-immigrant writers.70 Parallel to this de-provincializing of US culture, other studies focus on the place of US modernism within the larger map of global modernism, from rereading the cosmopolitanism of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound to revising the claimed localism (“in the American grain”) of figures like William Faulkner and William Carlos Williams.71 This scholarship has also turned to the

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ways in which racial difference and the imperial gaze helped shape the movement’s aesthetic and linguistic strategies, critiquing the nativism and racial masquerade of canonical figures while highlighting the vernacular yet transnational features of marginalized immigrant and African American modernisms.72 This opening of US modernism also includes a new focus on the importance of political and avantgarde movements for the circulation of literature, in particular the networks of international socialism.73 The diversity of methodologies presented in these studies is part of a larger, now entrenched critique of the US as a geographic or temporal unity, leading new scholarship to locate US literature beyond the nation. In 2017 alone two separate edited volumes were published surrounding the importance of the “transnational” in the study of US literature while a third in 2018 offered a portrait of American literature as world literature.74 In the Introduction to the latter volume, Jeffrey Di Leo urges an analysis of works that “escape the locality of colonial America and are  released into transnational social, political, economic, and literary zones of concern—zones that are much more fluid and difficult to contain than positions on the map of the United States.”75 Others complicate the term “transnational” (and its preservation of the nation as the basic unit of comparison) by employing concepts like “Hemispheric studies” and the “transpacific,” and through the “globalizing” of American studies.76 As a literature of colonialism, immigration, and imperialism as well as a literature tied to an invented national mythos in dialogue with European traditions, US literature has emerged as a site of geographic contestation. Paul Giles has called for “the global remapping of American literature” and its “deterritorialization,” pushing scholarship to describe “the uneven ways American literature has imaginatively mapped itself in relation to a global domain.”77 Giles argues that to “speak of American literary culture under the rubric of deterritorialization is thus not simply to encumber it within monolithic orders of globalization or imperialism but, rather, to think of it as a socially constructed, historically variable and experientially edgy phenomenon, whose valence lies in the tantalizing dialectic between an illusion of presence and the continual prospect of displacement.”78 For Giles, this means tracking the shifting boundaries of US culture across time, from colonial seclusion to contemporary globalization. Giles synthesizes post-cold war revisions of American sovereignty; American studies, as a comparative practice, is now invested in discovering new genealogies of US culture and a newly flexible and blurred image of “America.” Brian T. Edwards even argues that there can be a “detachment” between original American cultural objects and their later consumption elsewhere within the networks of globalization such that “that which might have an American origin ceases to be American; rather, its national origin is left behind as a trace, and as fragment it is propelled into the world.”79 As Dimock summarizes, these approaches collectively read the works of US literature as part of the world’s “analytic fabric,” a set of texts that cannot be contained by the nation but still form an intricate web. For Dimock, the goal is to view

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works of US literature as a “durable prism to what lies beyond the nation, and an  important counterpoint to the more recent examples of globalization in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. They remind us that this latest development is only one in a long line, one that must be seen in perspective against other, prior instances, suggesting more than one way to connect.”80 Taken together, recent theorizations of the “worlding” of US literature produce an image of a hegemonic, nationalist structure in need of geographic expansion and critical revision beyond its multicultural and multilingual formations. This requires a widening of one’s analytical stance so as to observe the specific configuration called “America” or the “US” within a broader frame and thus understand US literature as a networked thing. In such a conceptualization, US literature remains a coherent entity, or at the very least a potentially legible cultural structure, even in its complexity. It is precisely this coherence that, I urge, needs to be challenged. A danger inherent to many of the new configurations of US literature as transnational, global, or world literature is their reliance on a larger network of ­exchange that demands the identification of a point of origin, of a place on the map which may be called “America” even if that place is constantly shifting. This is precisely the allure of an institutional construct: its stability and flexibility allow for the continued legibility of the US in the world and in its histories. In such approaches, US literature becomes a window of sorts (or Dimock’s “durable prism”), a frame through which one can view the global flow of culture. The window may be cracked or shaded in one way or another, it may take different shapes or look out onto different landscapes; the frame itself, however, remains identifiable as one part of the larger house of literature. To follow Edwards’ formulation, an American cultural object may be reduced to a “trace” or a “fragment,” but, after careful investigation, it can still be named as “American.”81 This study aims to defer the act of naming so that the categorization “American” remains a horizon of meaning rather than an ontological condition. The writers considered here often want to be named one thing or another, to prove their Americanness over and above their Jewishness by announcing literary, linguistic, or political allegiances. This announcement reflects a vector of desire: they ­approach “America,” they pass through it, but they can never fully arrive. When Asch proclaims the US the new home of a Judeo-Christian civilization, when Bashevis rejects a Yiddish imaginary for an American reality, when Bellow grounds his ­literary universe in Chicago—they create the possibility of a homecoming even if such an event can never take place.82 The Jewishness of each writer, often as a function of language, produces a disjunction that demands attention. Reading this disjunction leads to the realization that there is too much that simply does not make it through the American window; or one comes to see that the window is not attached to any building at all. In this way, my study of Jewish American writing joins scholarship that ­“unsettles” US literature. More than take sides in an argument over canonicity, over who belongs in the house of US literature, new work in American studies should

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excavate the grounds of the American cultural landscape in order to critique the process through which Americanness comes into being. For Lisa Lowe, this means “intimately” reading narratives of Anglo-American liberalism alongside the ­assimilating and subjugating forms of colonialism. The result is a critical practice that constantly destabilizes the present such that any sense of a single American entity is diffused between deconstructed imperial forces and recovered subaltern actors.83 Similarly, Anna Brickhouse advocates for a turn to Native forms of knowledge, translation, and interpretation that “unsettle” the colonial regime and its ­afterlives.84 Jose David Saldivar names this the uncovering of a “trans-Americanity,” a kind of border work on an “untotalizable totality” which takes place “in the crucible of coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and modernity.”85 Joining these studies and others, Jewish American Writing and World Literature returns to the initial impulses of ethnic studies and echoes the insights of critical race theory and postcolonial studies in order to portray the US as a composite and crumbling thing. The study of Jewish American writing, in its linguistic disjunction and its simultaneous reach toward both America and the world, is part of this critical project.

Jewish American Worlds When US literature is named as Jewish, what happens? If Jewish American writing participates in the unsettling of US literature and forms a challenge to the institution of world literature (while paradoxically still constituting both), as I argue, then the name “Jewish” has to do a lot of work. In what follows, I explore some of the institutional purchase of “Jewishness” and formulate how the study of Jewish American writing and world literature can help produce a new critical mode for Jewish studies. When readers, publishers, critics, or writers label a text “Jewish,” either by dint of linguistic choice or by some other identitarian marker, they invite a host of overlapping discourses. Initially, there is an assumed legibility of that marker, a consensus surrounding how Jewish collectivities come into being and how they demarcate their boundaries in time and space.86 As Benjamin Schreier has shown, such legibility is hardly self-evident; those who make assumptions regarding who or what is Jewish reveal an ideological claim (sometimes violently enforced) on how to delimit a hoped-for Jewish totality, an internally cohesive and biologically determined grouping with clear insiders and outsiders.87 Meanwhile, the act of Jewish naming also implies a second set of discourses surrounding the convergence of Jewishness and worldliness. “Jewish” can connote the stereotype of the spectral other, particularly of Europe—the wandering Jew or a cabal of Jewish ­financiers; in both antisemitic and philosemitic terms, the Jew can figure as the modern, cosmopolitan subject. There is also a long tradition of Jewish responsibility for the world’s redemption, an ancient messianism that arguably has been translated into the modern period. George Steiner calls this a “summons to

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perfection” often linked, mythologically, to Jewish “world” thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Einstein and used as a way to explain the disproportionate participation of Jews in modernity’s radical movements.88 To be read as Jewish implies both a history of Jewish exclusivity (in theological, nationalist, or ethnocentric terms) and implication within cross-cultural exchanges, European social hierarchies, and utopian thinking. As noted in the Welt-world-olam-oylem discussion, there is both a confluence and disjunction between Western and Jewish vocabularies. Thus, Jewishness does not fit neatly next to the world, though the two terms often appear in some proximity. According to Cynthia Baker, the word Jew functions “on the one hand, as a malleable tool for constructing, testing, clarifying, and challenging ever-changing and ever-evolving cultural forms and analyses and, on the other, as a bedeviling and anxiety-provoking violation of all such forms, boundaries, and classifications.” On top of this, Baker continues, “Jew” has belatedly come to signal a longed-for modern national unity, leading her to conclude that “the name Jew defies all claims to proper possession or exclusive ownership.”89 To place “Jewish” alongside “American”—a term already in doubt for its imperial and nationalist appropriations—is to announce an especially fraught organizing terminology under the rubric of world literature. What then does it mean to associate such an explosive term with a particular literature? What can “Jewish literature” be, institutionally speaking, especially alongside the shifting imperial bodies of US literature and world literature? One way to avoid the now old question of “What is Jewish Literature?” is to insist on a subtle change in terminology, from the commonly used “Jewish American literature” to “Jewish American writing.”90 Jewish American literature evokes a particular institutionalization of Jewishness, a longed-for delineation of a coherent ­territory or measurable population now made identifiable within certain (flexible) boundaries and criteria. To name a body of writing a literature enacts a comparative relation between discrete national and linguistic unities. The term “Jewish American literature” proposes a knowable ethnic enclave within US literature and implicitly yields an immigrant-made-good history of writers who have arrived safely in US culture.91 Jewish American literature sits comfortably, at least in theory, next to African American literature, Asian American literature, and the like, and suggests a single narrative of the Jewish American experience, even if scholars who use the term deny such homogeneity and potential essentializing views of Jewishness.92 The term evinces an anthological impulse, the possibility of producing a continuous account, however multibranched and multilingual, of Jewish immigrant culture from the Mayflower to the present.93 The act of naming a group of texts “Jewish American literature” can assume a nationalist definition of Jewishness, delimiting a corpus that can then be inserted into US literature and then into some systematized hierarchy of the world’s literatures.94 The term Jewish American writing, in contrast, defers such institutionalization and better reflects the instability of its components. By underscoring the act of writing, related to but distinct from the institution of literature, I want to emphasize

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the sense that texts written by Jewish American writers constitute a collective in constant flux between making and unmaking. In this way, I refer to writing and reading practices that do not necessarily coalesce under a single institution with a particular relationship to Jewish languages, nationalism, religion, or ethnicity. Rather, I emphasize practices that form contiguous relationships with each other— Jewishness with Americanness, Yiddish with English—while also signaling departures and unbridgeable gaps.95 When Bellow claims that he wants nothing to do with a new canon of “Jewish American literature,” he effectively denies power to an institutional category he finds destructively parochial but which nonetheless continues to be attached to his literary legacy. Bashevis is undoubtedly one of the most important Jewish American writers of the postwar period, yet he is rarely grouped with the foundational figures of Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Paley, and Ozick; his Yiddish somehow renders him not American enough, or not exclusively American in the way that the others might be, making his institutional home rather vague. By attaching these practices and affiliations to the process of writing rather than to a single literature, one can attend to the ways that writers and texts move through and beyond institutions and redefine or obfuscate their Jewishness. This same uncertainty emerges when discussing the Yiddish language. One could think that choosing to write in Yiddish would make some of these issues easier to navigate. After all, Yiddish is a Jewish language tied to a particular population of speakers; Bashevis in some sense does not need “Jewish American literature” since he can be grouped under the more or less coherent category of Yiddish literature, an institution of its own right. Stereotyped as the dead (or dying) ­language of Eastern European Jewish culture, Yiddish is often assumed to be a profane, folksy vernacular tinged by nostalgia for a lost Jewish totality. While there is no denying the popularity and entrenched nature of this image of the language, Yiddish is more accurately a language of cultural dynamism, from its origins in the early modern period (if not before) and into the present. One of the language’s older names is taytsh, which initially means “German,” signaling how the language begins from an encounter between Jewish and non-Jewish society. Taytsh also came to mean “translation,” referring to the traditional pedagogical practice of rendering the Hebrew Bible into the German register of Yiddish to aid children first learning to read. So, just as Yiddish is a language of everyday life—the vernacular grounds of Jewish experience—it also marks a transcultural relationship. Yiddish is conditioned by a vernacular double bind, a language of uncertain locality embedded in the global politics of European languages.96 Focusing attention on Yiddish in the US intensifies the double bind by putting its linguistic instabilities in dialogue with US culture’s own anxieties about provinciality, empire, immigrant assimilation, and global commerce. My focus on Yiddish not only opens Jewish American writing to its multilingualism but, more importantly, allows scholarship to begin from vernacular disjunction rather than a hoped-for unification of Jewishness and Americanness.97 The study of “Jewish American literature” implicitly celebrates Jewish ownership

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of American English and is often dominated by the study of works in English.98 The very existence of the “Jewish American writer” as a type or category has a twentieth-century history, measuring the “sudden” proliferation of writers of “Jewish extraction” in English-language publications from Abraham Cahan in the 1890s to the dominant postwar figures and new literary celebrities like Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Michael Chabon. Being categorized as “Jewish American” can be seen as a distancing mechanism, a way to undercut the writer’s successful arrival in English and in America and highlight the experience of migration and cultural difference. I defer the question of success by never assuming that “American” must also mean “English.” By viewing Jewish American writing as unsettled by Yiddish, I begin from a place of undecidability among Jewishness, Americanness, and world literature. Indeed, Yiddish encourages the questioning of cultural ownership altogether.99 Vernacular disjunction is arguably the engine of Yiddish literature as a whole, and in the US in particular. More overtly than those writing only in English, Yiddish writers had to immediately come to terms with an explicit double bind. Writing modern literature in Yiddish in the US meant aligning oneself with a secular, Western institution with all of its hidden Christian sacralizations, universalist ambitions, and national and colonial fractures. At the same time writing in Yiddish answers a demand for a separate Jewish literary imaginary with all of its metaphysical and political longings, even as this vernacular community, this oylem, seemingly vanishes away. To borrow a term from Matthew Hart, what is required of the Yiddish writer is “synthetic vernacular writing” that “trouble[s] the border between vernacular self-ownership and the willful appropriation of languages that will be forever foreign.”100 Glatstein’s modernist disavowals of modernity are a cogent example of the kind of writing “on the border” that Yiddish demands.101 It would be tempting to place Glatstein and other untranslated Yiddish writers in a category separate from US literature in English, as if the US was an incidental, none too hospitable, and very temporary landing place for an entirely diasporic literature. But such an approach would miss the border-work that Yiddish writing in the US performs: I argue that even Yiddish writing unread by English readers should be viewed in its convergence and disjunction with US and world literature discourses.102 The US writer producing work in English and named as Jewish ­inherits, willingly or not, some of Yiddish’s impossible trajectory—the need and failure to write beyond Yiddish and beyond being named Jewish.

Jewish Literary Studies “In Harness” The study of Jewish American writing, and in particular its Yiddish contours, can help defer the project of institutionalization so endemic to Jewish Studies as a discipline and better reflect the undecidability of Jewishness in modernity. From its origins in the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums and to the present

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day, Jewish studies has been marked by a tendency toward an apologetics, an ­institutional desire to prove the comparative worth of Jewish discourse alongside dominant non-Jewish narratives. The justification for such a course of study has been the argument, or sometimes plea, that Jewishness be normalized as an integral part of Western civilization. Leopold Zunz, for instance, argued in the midnineteenth century that “by participating in the intellectual currents of the past and contemporary world, sharing its fights and sufferings, [Jewish literature] becomes, at the same time, a complementary element of general literature, albeit with its own organism that, understood by general laws, helps to understand the universal.”103 The intense study of the particularities of Jewish writing could only be justified if synthesized within a universal project. This tendency toward self-justification has followed Jewish studies throughout the twentieth century and even largely determines its place in the academy today. One paradigmatic example of this line of thinking can be found in Ruth Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon (2000) where she explains that her “conscious purpose was to strengthen [Western] civilization by reincorporating the Jews into a framework from which they had been artificially excluded.”104 Here one can read the sense of an injustice that must be countered with a forceful scholarly act. Feeling a part of the study of Western civilization but somehow excluded from it, Wisse implores scholars to demand readmission into the institution of world literature as a way to accrue cultural capital for Jewish literature—and by extension the Jewish people—within a global system of ideas, texts, and cultures. Wisse’s nationalist exhortation, however, doubles as a plea for admission, placing Jewish Studies firmly within or even subordinate to Euro-American categories of literary value.105 The project of normalizing Jewishness within a Western world-system is partly a reaction to prevailing stereotypes of Jewish otherness, which portray Jews as ­integral to global exchange yet inimical to European national and racial purity. With origins possibly in early Christianity and certainly in medieval Christendom, the Jew has been imagined as the new Cain, an obscured instability lurking at the heart of Western civilization. Europe conceives of Jewishness as “an inspiring or irritating exemplum” that facilitates the arrival of modernity and still remains ­inscrutable in the logic of the European nation-state.106 Traditional Jewish Studies scholarship counters such claims by rendering the Jewish body politic legible within European norms, attempting to remove the stain of otherness and produce, through scholarship, a religious, ethnic, or national identity structured just like any other. This nationalist strategy runs up against deeply embedded European typologies of the Jew, even as it also faces the internal diversity and incongruity of Jewish communities themselves. The histories, cultures, and languages of the Jews of North Africa, the Ottoman empire, and beyond do not easily cohere if at all; the divide between East and West even within European Jewry complicates the image of a single Jewish people. Not surprisingly, the discipline of philology and the institution of world literature have been and continue to be of crucial interest to Jewish Studies, where one can identify among diverse Jewish communities a shared

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i­nterest in text. Philology still dominates Jewish Studies even as new scholarship continually reveals fractures in the idea of a single Jewish literary tradition. The desire to place Jewish discourse within the network and logic of Europe remains central. Even new methodologies of the past thirty years that propose a shift away from nationalist approaches in favor of a focus on Jewish marginality are not immune to this institutional desire. Following the rise of ethnic studies in the US academy, scholars began to view Jewish culture as potentially separate from hegemonic ­cultural institutions or even as a subversive substratum. Scholarship in this vein constructs alternative canons that seek to undermine Jewish nationalism, undo the normalization of Jewish languages, and challenge the policing of the gendered Jewish body.107 In this theoretical and methodological shift, marginality is often (though not always) privileged, and the “modern Jewish literary complex” is governed not by an essentialization of Jewishness but rather by a shared minor politics across languages and geographies. Dan Miron asserts that such an orientation ­requires a departure from projections of continuity and instead the creation of contiguous matrices of Jewish literary production.108 Rather than a single “Jewish Literature,” scholarship now must tend to the multiplicities of Jewish writing that sometimes coalesce into systems or polysystems of literary creativity while just as  often fracturing into contested genealogies and fragile contingencies. These ­approaches complicate previously schematized literary histories by uncovering “peripheral modernisms” and a Jewish “alt-modern” in multiple languages and cultural contexts.109 Most recently, this approach can be found in Lital Levy and Allison Schachter’s theorizations of the convergence of Jewish literatures and world literature.110 Levy and Schachter construct a Jewish imaginary that encompasses both the “Eastern” and “Western” poles of Jewish literary creativity, constituting, in their formulation, a peripheral, transnational alternative to the dominant European market. Using Jewish literatures in their global dispersion as a test case, they argue for the “centrality of minor languages to discussions of transnational literary culture.”111 In voicing “a clear alternative to the dominant center–periphery paradigm,” they ­envision a parallel and potentially independent system of Jewish literatures in their plurality. The trouble with approaches that centralize marginality is that they perpetuate the binary between the particular and the universal, between the nation and the world, which they otherwise aim to critique. In privileging the minor, the normalizing center is indeed challenged but it is also then reproduced as a parallel space. The margins become the site of literary value and political praxis while Europe remains the de facto measure of literary capital. Echoing the work of Casanova, Cheah, and Ganguly, Levy and Schachter see Jewish literatures as “multilingual diasporic literary networks” that produce “anti-nationalist and culturally pluralist aesthetic practices.”112 But in advocating for a networked system of literary pluralism, they actually reaffirm the nation, even if fragmented, as the measure of cultural exchange. One can detect among studies of Jewish marginality a plea for

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inclusion, or even substitution, in which the peripheral is valued precisely for its ability to compensate for a lost center.113 While this attention to marginality reflects an important shift in Jewish literary thinking over the past decades, it risks essentializing Jewish writing as a separate, self-contained world, ultimately structurally similar to a knowable national collectivity to be categorized within the universal library of world literature. Granting Jewishness such legibility, ensconced and contained within the minor, denies the possibility of a writer in motion between and beyond the margins and centers of global literary production. The pretense to Jewish literatures as “non-universal”— Levy and Schachter claim that “Jewish writing is anything but universal”—misses how Jewish writing often contributes to the institutionalization of world literature that at other moments it would seek to undermine. This approach obfuscates the entanglement of modern Jewish writing with the centers of global literary capital and Eurocentric ideas of the universal. To relegate such contingencies to a major/ minor dichotomy is to reproduce a prescriptive model, no matter how pluralist or multilingual it claims to be.114 In contrast, I read Jewish writing through a double bind: writing implicated within local and global literary institutions of modernity and writing that supplements and upsets those same institutions. Focusing on a double bind requires a departure from ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism that animate recent theorizations of modern Jewish culture. These studies reluctantly cling to a knowable Jewish center, evincing a “politics that acknowledges the multifaceted nature of identity without abandoning the importance of identity altogether.”115 Too often current accounts of Jewish writing point to a plurality of Jewish literatures while still incorporating them into a single literary system. The double bind instead ­requires a critical vigilance, to hold the vernacular against the universal without collapsing one into the other toward some identitarian end. I explore the contingencies of modern Jewish writing as both constitutive of modernity and incommensurate with it. This approach is “nonfoundational” in that it reads Jewishness as never fully contained by a national or institutional body, while appearing as ­simultaneously parochial and cosmopolitan.116 “The new Jewish cultural studies” or “critical Jewish studies” articulate difference not as a category of exclusivity, isolation, or immunity but as the marker of an incomplete relation, a signal for further inquiry and engagement.117 To that end, Jewish literary studies must read both a text’s critique of normative limits and its participation in them.118 The encounter between Jewish American writing and the institution of world literature is an undecidable event, in which world literature appears as a series of limits and demands that cannot be met but also can never be transcended or avoided. This encounter is complicated by stereotypes of Jewish worldliness, the question of Jewish participation in European codes of universality, and the ­untranslatability of Jewish vernacularity alongside the homogenizing possibilities of global languages. To name this encounter “Jewish” is to point beyond a question of identity so that one can view Jewishness as a “heuristic,” a mode of reading that

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would “gain the flexibility of a process that moves through bodies, ideas, objects, and spaces.”119 Such an approach to the fluidity of Jewishness necessarily requires comparative reading strategies. Jewish American writing is by no means the only challenge to the institution of world literature and needs to be read in tandem with ideas of trans-Americanity and planetarity, and as part of a larger unsettling of America and the world. To be sure, the position of Jewishness is not identical to those ­occupied by postcolonial literatures (including ethnic literatures of the US). Jewishness can be perceived as foundational to Western civilization and just as often its battered subject; Jewish cultural activists are sometimes marginal, sometimes central, and sometimes located somewhere else entirely—with and alongside the West, with and alongside the subaltern. Jewish literary studies, when attuned to its double bind, can read across institutional divides, “at once an interruption and a sharing-at-the-boundary among its constituent parties and with its university others.”120 Thus, the study of modern Jewish writing cannot simply be integrated into critiques articulated in disciplines like comparative literature, critical race theory, diaspora studies, and postcolonialism. It must be what Adam Zachary Newton calls “interdiscursive” rather than interdisciplinary, enacting a conversation that would be self-critical while also displacing the hierarchies of disciplinarity that require the dominance of one disciplinary vocabulary over another.121 Such a ­privileging of discourse over discipline runs counter to the prevailing modes of scholarly discussion surrounding Jewish studies. For instance, Bryan Cheyette’s Diasporas of the Mind (2013) advocates for “metaphorical thinking” that would bring together the thought of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon such that Jewish and postcolonial writing could form two poles of a shared interdisciplinary ­critique; for Cheyette, stereotypes of the “Jewish mind” and the “black body” are “similar in their dissimilarity” and can be employed toward imaginative and multidimensional “crystallizations,” to use Arendt’s term. Cheyette’s goal is to “aim for universality without expunging historical specificity,” a kind of tempered universality where Jewish and postcolonial voices occupy a shared position.122 Cheyette aims “to locate Jewish history within general history” and decenter Jewish history as “unexceptional.”123 While I support the collaborative impulse that motivates Cheyette’s and others’ scholarship, I find that metaphorical and pluralist thinking misses the opportunities afforded by rigorous attention to the politics of difference. I argue that the discovery of similarity must be accompanied by the specter of contingency. That is, I agree that there are strong parallels between Jewish and postcolonial writing, but the two groupings of texts also meet through incongruence and impossibility, in which Jewish difference is not merely a “banister” to be negotiated but a condition for comparison and entanglement. Scholarship must acknowledge that Jewish difference is adjacent to, against, and complicit with systems of control and does not always allow for collation with other forms of difference. Rather than aiming for universality and its European trappings, my

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thinking lies closer to the practice of telepoeisis, to again use Derrida and Spivak’s term—imaginative making without guarantees, a collective practice that does not predetermine a fashion of knowing or a universal site of (inter)disciplinary arrival. I consider Jewish and postcolonial literary formations in solidarity with one another, “in harness” as fellow travelers, to use an image from a short-lived Yiddish socialist-modernist journal.124 In marking implication within an institution and its ruin, vernacular texts should not be simply grouped together and thereby made knowable and legible. Following Spivak, I argue that their meeting is more productive when one can dwell on the “singular,” that which is universalizable but never fully sublimated in the universal.125 As Natalie Melas has shown, texts from dominant European literatures and texts emerging out of colonial and postcolonial conditions meet in a way that is incommensurate; they do not together form a single picture of the world, nor do they present a situation of absolute difference. They come into relation over a ground of comparison that is common but not ­unified, forming equivalences that do not coalesce.126 These subterranean and ­untranslatable vernaculars relate to one another only partially and thereby defer the imposition of hierarchal systematization. Jewish literary studies and postcolonial readings of US literature occupy overlapping spaces that do not always align with each other or the institution of world literature.127 It is this partially shared space that I hesitate to name a “world literature ­to-come,” a literature of the oylem-habe. I am tempted to return to Charney’s 1929 fantasy of the palace of world literature with its various chambers and antechambers. Charney’s polemic is a hopeless protest: he finds fault not only with defective institutions of literary capital and their arbitrary measures of aesthetic value, but also, more pointedly, with Yiddish writers who grovel pathetically before indifferent gatekeepers. Yet moments of the essay remain paradoxically optimistic: [Entry into the palace of world literature] is also the inner wish of our literature, and its realization does not depend on the breadth of its “universal” motifs, nor on the worldliness of its forms, but on the spiritual depths it achieves, and on the life roots it reaches within our own folklife. The more it grows in our soil, where its seeds have been sowed and where its sap flows, the greater the ­possibility that it will dig down with its powerful roots to the foundation of the world.128

In proposing a measure of world literature that is internally yet still cosmically determined, Charney looks to sidestep the institutional constraints of literary circulation. For all of his critique, he harbors a rather striking fantasy: even though Yiddish’s appearance in the networks of world literature during this period was mostly as an ethnographic curiosity, he believed in the possibility or even inevitability of its imminent arrival. Charney’s conception appears dialectical in the ­tradition of Herder, seemingly arguing for the universality of Yiddish particularity.

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Still, Charney’s nationalist utopian claim does not have to be the actual consequence of one’s exploration of planetary roots. Literature’s home, according to Charney, is not the magnificent palace, the universal library, or the institution of world literature. It is in the earth, with its complex of burrowing roots, where one will find the unexpected invitation, and never grand entry, to a world literature to-come.

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A Monolingual World Literature sholem asch and the institutionalization of yiddish literature The Shtetl–World Vector The popular image of the shtetl, the overdetermined symbol of Eastern European Jewry, depends, at least in part, on a principle of distance. According to the mythos, the shtetl is a hermetically sealed Jewish space ensconced in its unchanging “traditions” and entirely removed from the larger world. That the nineteenth-century market town was actually embedded in the volatile and crumbling feudal economies of empire, was ethnically and religiously diverse with growing class divisions, was the site of complex linguistic interchange, and was being rapidly exposed to all the ideological and technological trappings of modernity—much of this is glossed over in repeated depictions of the shtetl as the seemingly eternal homeland of Ashkenazi Jewry. As a result, the shtetl and the modern world are commonly ­portrayed as polar opposites with a vast expanse extending between them. One of the motivations behind this bifurcation is that it allows both entities to become legible through their difference. Rather than imagining a messy and uncertain confluence, the mythology allows the shtetl and the modern world to appear as distinct and thus manageable entities. The project of modern Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in large part emerges as a bridge between the two, initially giving life to both and then pronouncing—triumphantly and with deep mourning—the victory of the new over the old. In its most conventional modes, modern Jewish writing of Eastern Europe has been understood as ushering in a shift in geography and a change in scale, from the small backwater town to the bustling metropolis, from Kutne to Warsaw, from the shtetl to the world.1 Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century ­constantly returned to this binary by creating texts that either critiqued the shtetl and its traditions or nostalgically romanticized a lost past. Both strategies produce a pronounced distance, constituted by memory, between writers and the object of their gaze. The act of writing modern literature situates the writer ­elsewhere, away from the shtetl where such a “worldly” task can be undertaken. Regardless of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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a­ esthetic or ideological orientation, managing this distance became one of the essential modes of modern Jewish writing, dramatized as the “tear in the heart” that was expected of any modern writer who left tradition behind.2 The narrative structure of Bildung—the process of overcoming the limits internal to the modern Jewish hero and those imposed from without—was mapped onto the geography of Eastern Europe, requiring both the abandonment of home and the difficult, if not impossible, arrival of the wounded and orphaned Jew in the modern metropolis.3 It is no wonder that the most canonical texts of the period in Hebrew and Yiddish, by the so-called klasiker, include recurring itinerant characters—from S. Y. Abramovitsh’s wandering book peddler to I. L. Peretz’s homeless ­intellectuals and Sholem Aleichem’s monologists. Something other than novelistic heroes, these are melancholic and iterative archetypes with an unbound nervous energy that drives them from the shtetl and into the world. Emigrating to the European metropolis was akin to leaping forward in time, from the barbaric past into the modern present. The impressive if frustrating ­accomplishment of many Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the early twentieth century is their ability to freeze this transformation precisely at the moment of transfer, such that their most compelling characters exist in a state of suspension—not yet out of the old world and not finding their footing in the new one either. Despite this sense of stasis, these characters confirm in their trajectory a desire for the new world. Their itinerancy is vectored. Even writers that came after the klasiker, who departed from them significantly in terms of style and ideology, often could not avoid this directionality, from the high modernism of David Bergelson’s trapped and melancholic shtetl intellectuals to the romance of a young Jewish maid with a Polish count in the most salacious of serialized pulp novels. The shtetl–world ­trajectory is so powerful because it fits the logic of world literature as an ­institution: compliance with European norms requires a reorientation toward Europe as center. In order to become a modern writer, in any language, one needs to undergo a shift in scale and direction, to emerge out of one’s marginality and find a legible position within a new hierarchy. There was however at least one writer who proposed a somewhat different ­directionality for his work, even if still informed by the nostalgia of some of his predecessors. In much of his work Sholem Asch proposes a possible meeting point between the shtetl and the world. Rather than lament and then traverse the vast distance between a Jewish origin and a European finish line, Asch imagined the possibility of the modern world overlapping, somehow, with his 1880 birthplace of Kutne (today’s Kutno) in Poland. In reflecting on Asch’s writing in 1930, writer and critic Arn Zeitlin would report that “it has become clear that the path from Kutne to the world is not that long. That which is Yiddish and that which is worldly do meet.”4 This may appear to be a strange proposal, especially given Asch’s own rather conventional itinerary. After a traditional upbringing in a Hasidic home, Asch’s literary aspirations took him to Warsaw where he joined Peretz’s growing

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literary court. His ambitions soon drove him to seek out contacts and translators from Berlin to St. Petersburg. His self-confidence was rewarded: his plays were produced to critical acclaim on the most important European stages; more than any other Yiddish writer, his fiction and dramatic works were translated into Polish, Russian, German, French, and English. By the interwar period he had become a household name in the leading humanist circles of central Europe, and he served an important international activist for the Joint Distribution Committee and the Yiddish PEN club, jet-setting from one cultural, political, or literary event to another in New York, London, Paris, Vienna, Tel Aviv, and beyond. By the 1930s, he all but expected to be awarded the Nobel Prize. His fame had enabled him to purchase a seaside villa in Nice (which he named Villa Sholem) where he could retreat from his active public life to devote himself, at least temporarily, to his ­literary craft. Nice is indeed a long way from Kutno. The range of subjects of Asch’s work also reflects this global route. He first gained attention after the 1903 publication of his novella A shtetl, which offered a glowing romanticization of Kutno through the portrayal of the simple piety of Asch’s father and the Hasidic community to which he belonged. But after ­publishing other stories surrounding the shtetl, some less romantic than others, Asch would go on to write about the broad swath of Jewish history: gritty portrayals of Jewish life in the large cities of Eastern Europe (including his play God of Vengeance about a brothel, a ­lesbian love affair between prostitutes, and the tragic betrayal of tradition); historical novellas about the Chmelnitsky massacres and Jewish life in renaissance Rome; a trilogy of novels following the 1917 Russian r­ evolution in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow; several books depicting i­mmigrant Jewish life in New York; a novel warning of the horrors of 1930s Germany and short stories praising new settlements in mandate Palestine; and ­finally, and most controversially, a series of biblical novels written in the last fifteen years of his life, beginning with the (very Jewish) life of Jesus and then portraits of Paul, Mary, Moses, and Isaiah. Taken together, Asch’s work appears to follow a startling path, beginning in the shtetl but ambitiously casting out across space and time. Indeed, Asch was ­particularly proud of his thematic range, chastising those critics who refused to ­acknowledge the scope of his writing or, worse, only praised his depictions of the shtetl: Every attempt of mine to crawl out of the shtetl and into the wide world has ­recently and even today been considered a suicidal betrayal of my talent. How many of my “good friends” have tried to convince me that my strength lies in the shtetl, how many times have they tried to cut off my wings whenever I have traversed over to something broader. It is not yet the time to reveal under what conditions I have written my books, which have made Yiddish known in the world.5

Asch describes his progression from the shtetl to the world by using stark biological metaphors: the Yiddish writer metamorphizes from a “crawling” worm of parochial seclusion to a soaring bird of world literature. Asch gloats that his emergence out of the shtetl made it possible for Yiddish literature to circulate globally.

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At the same time however, his arrival in the world came with certain conditions that always tied him to his distinctly Eastern European origin. Despite his proposed escape from the shtetl into the world, Asch’s fame during his lifetime cannot be separated from his status as a “cultural ambassador,” a native informant on Eastern European Jewish life for European and US audiences. As Zeitlin ­further explains: Asch has become the ambassador for the country [medine] of “Yiddish” in the world, almost the only representative [shaliekh] that Yiddish literature has sent into the world and which the world has accepted with confidence and honor [koved].6

In this passage Zeitlin makes heavy usage of the Hebraic element of Yiddish (medine, shaliekh, koved), rather than its Germanic components, in order to portray Asch as a distinctly rooted representative of the Jewish people on the global stage. Asch’s ability to translate Jewish particularity into universal terms earns him the status of ambassador. As writer and celebrity, Asch came to represent a ­national community, an arbiter of cultural capital against which other Yiddish and Jewish writers could be measured.7 Asch would readily admit the importance of such cultural diplomacy: “Yiddish literature has become the eye through which the Jewish people sees the world and has also become the window through which the outside world looks into the Jewish heart. Today it is the only tool for spreading ‘love of Israel’ among the nations of the world.”8 Asch saw Yiddish literature as more than a vehicle for national expression; it became for him the condition for Jewish participation in the institutional life of the world, as an educational tool and as the clearest and most powerful form of transnational communication ­available to Ashkenazi culture. For Asch, literature did not figure as an escape from one’s Jewish past; rather it represented the opportunity to make that past universally legible. Asch’s desire for the world thus required a very different relationship to the shtetl–world vector. If one were to ask anyone in the 1930s, ’40s, or even ’50s whom they would consider the most important Jewish (and not just Yiddish) writers in the world, they would have undoubtedly placed Asch at the top of the list. There were no other Jewish writers at the time that could even remotely approach his fame. Yet Asch’s writing did not properly preserve the distance from the shtetl that being a modern writer seemed to demand. How can Asch’s fame be explained, given that he did not seek to leave behind his parochial origins? Other figures of the period who were named as Jewish and were considered members of the institution of world literature were most often precisely those whose Jewishness ­appeared as a vague and ambiguous remnant, from Heinreich Heine to Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig. In contrast, Asch, as cultural ambassador, performed his Jewishness as the condition of his place on the world stage. What is it about Asch’s writing that allowed for such wide circulation and critical acclaim, even if fleeting? How did he write the convergence of the shtetl and the world?

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This chapter argues that Asch’s success depended on his being able to balance a range of institutional commitments. Asch was accused at various junctures of ­betraying his Jewishness for Christian universalism, of writing explicitly toward translation, and of dumbing down and sensationalizing his work to appeal to mass audiences. While there are aspects of these charges, among other similar allegations, that ring true, they are often exaggerated and, more importantly, do not ­account for the complexity of Asch’s writerly project. As a writer simultaneously devoted to the needs of the Yiddish reader, engaged with current trends of European literatures, and enthused by the circulation opportunities available to him in European and US markets, Asch had to manage throughout his career the demands of overlapping but also conflicting literary forces. Many of the betrayals and controversies surrounding Asch and his work could be attributed to a kind of institutional confusion—moments in which Asch’s various commitments did not line up with one another, despite his best intentions. The power of Asch as a model of world literature is his refusal to admit any confusion at all. Asch was completely devoted to the institution of world literature as the ultimate container for any and all literature of lasting value, an institution within which he very much believed he deserved a prominent place. Crucial to his conception of world literature was his sense that Yiddish could enter such an institution on equal footing, if not as a privileged voice, with the task of heralding the mission of a “Judeo-Christian” civilization. This chapter focuses on the apex of this line of thinking in Asch’s work during the 1920s and ’30s, when his belief in institutional power was at its highest and when he felt its influence was most needed to combat the rise of European fascism. That such a project did little to stem the tide of history and that Asch’s star soon faded in the postwar period should not cloud the aims of this chapter: to outline the most prominent convergence of Jewish writing and the institution of world literature. The conventionality of Asch’s approach is part of its importance— Asch’s desire for the world established a model of institutional alignment that ­dictated for other Yiddish writers the terms of Jewish world-writing.

The Jewish Street and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature The establishment of modern Yiddish literature has long been attributed, more or less, to the interventions of Sholem Aleichem, who in the 1880s endeavored to ­institute what he considered “proper” literary norms for Yiddish writing. This ­entailed both the elevation of newly invented literary heroes, like Abramovitsh, Yitzkhok Yoel Linketski, and Isaac Meir Dik, and the degradation of writers like Shomer (Nahum-Meir Shaykevitsh) whom Sholem Aleichem considered a writer of sensational pulp literature.9 Sholem Aleichem’s polemic, in one essay given the title “The Judgement of Shomer,” was about dictating coherent aesthetic measures for modern Yiddish literature and its new mass readership. Sholem Aleichem’s goal was no less than the normalization of Yiddish in compliance with the genres

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of European literature, in particular the transformation of the Yiddish novel from popular entertainment to educational tool and cultural monument in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism. Sholem Aleichem advocated for these norms in his own fiction, criticism, and ambitious publishing projects, but he had no real way of enforcing them. Besides the editing of his own irregularly published literary almanacs, he had few tools with which to entrench his influence among readers. Because of restrictions on Yiddish publishing in the Russian empire and due to the growing global dispersion of Yiddish speakers through migration, Sholem Aleichem’s programmatic statements remained mostly unheeded, as literary production was dictated ­primarily by the local demands of a diversity of Yiddish readers, from the modernized intellectual and the educated bourgeoisie to new urban classes.10 Yiddish ­literature was a fractured thing at the turn of the century: the publishing of pulp novels (later called shund-literatur or trash-literature) continued while Sholem Aleichem’s publishing schemes largely failed; meanwhile several new literary ­centers arose with different literary goals, including Peretz’s circle in Warsaw, a group of multilingual writers in Odessa, and young proletarian writers in New York to name just a few. At the turn of the century there was no concrete ­institutional body, governmental or otherwise, that could decide the terms of Yiddish literature. Even so, Sholem Aleichem’s efforts did eventually lead to certain institutional formations that at least partially followed his vision. Over the first half of the ­twentieth century, Yiddish literature expanded rapidly. The short-lived Kultur-lige in independent Ukraine, Soviet support of Yiddish cultural institutions in Minsk and Moscow, the establishment of YIVO (an institute for Yiddish scholarship) in Vilnius, Yiddish involvement in PEN international, and various other local and transnational institutions in the US, Latin America, and beyond—all of these ­interwar organizations constitute an attempt to bring about an institutional presence for Yiddish literature, though no single effort achieved enough authority to be able to speak exclusively in the name of the language. Even without an official all-encompassing apparatus, Yiddish still developed an institutional shape, at least in the imaginaries of its most prominent writers and activists.11 One could speak of Yiddish as more than a despised zhargon destined to disappear with Jewish ­assimilation, more than a language of vernacular convenience; as the language of an aspiring literature and culture, Yiddish was increasingly seen as the proper ­language of a national collective.12 Sholem Aleichem’s institutional desire, as bequeathed to the writers that ­followed him, relied on a particular idealization of the Yiddish masses, seeing Yiddish literature as that which could answer the needs of the “folk” and mirror its experiences. In this way, from its beginnings modern Yiddish literature depended on the idea of a public that was near-at-hand, a conception modeled on the small community of the shtetl. In place of official institutional frameworks or state ­apparatuses, Yiddish literature was idealized as a site of cultural intimacy. The

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pseu­do­nym Sholem Aleichem, which means, roughly, “how-do-you-do,” already speaks to the immediacy of the Yiddish text as that which takes place conversationally between the folk and the folk-writer.13 In contrast to the seemingly formal and theological prescriptions of Hebrew and its ties to rabbinic codes of ­knowledge and power, and in contrast to the languages of state power and imperial control, Yiddish was thought to be inherently attached to everyday experience, a ­distinction that was both gender and class based.14 Thus, it is not surprising that the eventual central forum for Yiddish writing was the daily Yiddish newspaper, which by the early twentieth century was a staple of Yiddish-speaking culture in both Eastern Europe and abroad. If there ever was a concrete and widespread institutional presence for Yiddish, it ­undoubtedly was the Yiddish press, which reflected intensely local urban ­concerns while also ­constituting a global network. Writers often published simultaneously in newspapers in Poland and the US; the Forverts in New York sent ­correspondents to Warsaw and Warsaw’s Haynt had correspondents in New York. Moreover, one of the press’s central concerns was reacting to world events that had some Jewish relevance to them, each newspaper commenting with their own ideological bent and purporting to speak for city and shtetl Jew alike. Especially in the interwar period, the Jewish urban enclave came to be considered the arbiter of Yiddish culture, even if a particular Yiddish reader did not in fact reside in any of the ­centers of Jewish urbanization.15 The Yiddish newspaper was the initial and most prominent i­nstitutional marker of what might be called “the Jewish street,” a local phenomenon and a global conglomeration articulated in intimate, ­collective terms.16

Dray shtet Between the Local and the Global Asch began writing in Yiddish just as the idea of Yiddish literature as an institution was coming into being at the turn of the century. He initially participated in the Peretz circle in Warsaw, joining other young writers like David Pinski, Avrom Reisen, Hersh David Nomberg, Peretz Hirschbein, Zalman Shneour, Isaac Meyer Weissenerg, and others. Following Peretz’s encouragement toward greater literary experimentation in concert with European trends, these young writers immediately began pushing the boundaries of Yiddish literature beyond the initial realist and folkloric genres championed by Sholem Aleichem and others. Even so, such experimentation was always contained within the bounds of the nascent Yiddish press. For instance, Asch’s A shtetl (1903) represented a sharp shift in literary ­sensibilities at the time. The triumvirate of Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz had mostly written scathing critiques of the shtetl, with moments of ­nostalgia only somewhat softening a dominant satiric gaze. In contrast, Asch’s ­novella, subtitled with the romantic label “poema,” is a work of unabashed ­romanticism, embedding an idealized shtetl harmoniously within a timeless

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Eastern European landscape. This much discussed dramatic intervention into the norms of Yiddish literature did not take place in some literary review and was not part of a new book market for elite readers. A shtetl was first published in the new Yiddish newspaper published in St. Petersburg Der fraynd and was serialized over a number of summer months. Literary innovation was tied, intimately, to a ­commercial enterprise intended to reach the masses. While Der fraynd was a newspaper conceived by the cultural elite, it was also beholden to a bottom line, a condition that Asch knew quite well. A shtetl made a splash in Yiddish literary discourse but it also met a growing need for nostalgia and sentimentality among urban Yiddish readers. Soon after this publication, Asch would go on to become one of the few professional Yiddish writers—meaning he was able to make his living from his fiction writing alone, as opposed to other writers who simultaneously worked in journalism or in other professions.17 Throughout his career, even with his later successes in translation, Asch depended on his work finding favor with the Jewish street.18 Even after moving on from the Warsaw circle and beginning his global trajectory, Asch remained at home in the Yiddish press, though that also meant coming to terms with the demands of its patrons. The most prominent of these in Asch’s literary career was Abraham Cahan, the editor-in-chief of the Forverts from 1903 to 1946. As early as 1908, Cahan chose Asch along with other celebrated Yiddish writers to produce serialized novels for the newspaper and thereby promote new standards for Yiddish fiction. As a committed socialist, a vociferous literary critic, and a fiction writer himself, Cahan saw literature as an  essential component in educating the masses toward higher ideological and aesthetic standards. In contrast to boiler plate and sensationalist romances, Cahan advocated for aesthetically cohesive and politically motivated realism.19 Cahan wanted to Europeanize Yiddish literature according to the standards of nineteenth-century realism as he understood them, mirroring Sholem Aleichem’s efforts from twenty years prior only now with an explicit socialist agenda. By publishing prominent Yiddish writers in weekly installments in the prestigious weekend edition of the newspaper, Cahan gained tremendous influence over the parameters of Yiddish fiction.20 Though he would complain about Asch’s tendency toward melodrama, over-­explanation, problematic historical fiction, and his characters’ long ideological musings, Cahan found that Asch’s work by and large fit into his project.21 Asch was immediately one of the newspaper’s most popular writers; nearly all of Asch’s s­ubsequent novels were published in the Forverts and then picked up by other Yiddish newspapers across the globe.22 This meant that Asch’s writing was directed first to the daily Yiddish reader, in its  global dispersion, rather than to a reader who would encounter his work in translation. As the central genre of the institution of Yiddish literature in its most publicfacing form, the serialized novel presented certain formal constraints: a novel had to be composed with chapters of a particular length that could fit into newspaper

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columns; the language and style had to be pitched at the level of a general reader. The structure also determined the thematic and ideological concerns of the ­writing. In order to help sell newspapers the serialized novel had to keep the ­interest of urban Yiddish readers and so had to hew close to what the writer ­imagined to be their concerns and fantasies. Asch repeatedly followed these ­expectations, whether through evocative shtetl nostalgia, naturalist depictions of contemporary urban life (often with a proletarian focus),23 or reimagining historical events through contemporary perspectives (in particular instances of Jewish martyrdom). Eschewing overt party ideologies, Asch folded into his novels either a return to Jewish collectivity, or, cathartically, the mourning of lost Jewish solidarity. Onkl Mozes (1917) follows the rise of a Jewish industrialist in early ­twentieth-century New York and his subsequent moral degradation in the face of ­capitalist temptation; his belated attempt to return to Jewish tradition at the end of his life meets with total failure as he dies utterly alone and full of remorse. The novel thus shares the anti-capitalist sentiments of many Yiddish readers but avoids any particular socialist position. The focus of the novel is on the possibility of Jewish collectivity and spirituality in US immigrant culture, closing on a tragic pessimism with which many readers likely identified. Asch’s most ambitious attempt to outline the collective moral and spiritual character of the Jewish street was his epic trilogy later titled Dray shtet (Three Cities). The three volumes of the novel, “Peterburg,” “Varshe,” and “Moskve” (St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow) were first published under the title Farn mabl (before the flood) in the Yiddish press between 1928 and 1931, simultaneously in the Forverts and Haynt. The novel follows the central character, Zachary Mirkin, as he leaves his assimilated home in St. Petersburg, joins Jewish proletarian life in Warsaw, and then participates in the violence of the 1917 Russian revolution in Moscow, the coming “flood” of the title. At first glance, the trilogy seems to be at some remove from the kind of cultural intimacy one would expect in the pages of the Yiddish press. In form, Asch adheres to the dictates of the historical novel, taking Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a model in creating an expansive fictional universe around a series of dramatic historical events.24 A work of this scale was meant to satisfy the demand, as old as modern Yiddish literature and constantly rearticulated by critics and readers, that Yiddish writers match the achievements of the European epic novel.25 Asch’s choice to depict the Bolshevik revolution, an event of global proportions rather than one more ­familiar to an exclusively Jewish audience, was welcomed by critics as a sign of the viability and contemporary urgency of the Yiddish novel. Franz Werfel, in praise of the trilogy after its translation into German, saw in Asch a “seer of the present,” an epic poet who, with almost prophetic authority, was able to perceive the ultimate truth of such an event through a Jewish lens. Surprisingly, Werfel even claims that “the farther [Asch] moves from Judaism, the more his soul grows in Biblical power.”26 In choosing the epic genre, Asch had taken a narrative of Jewish experience and given it a Western form; in the process, at least

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according to Werfel, Asch had succeeded in transcending his vernacular origins. Asch’s turn to the historical novel could be interpreted as a plea for entry into the ­institution of world literature by demonstrating the Yiddish writer’s capacity to play the European. A closer reading of the novel, though, reveals how important the Jewish street is to Asch’s literary practice, and how much the trappings of world literature are secondary to his particularist goals. The Russian revolution remains the epic frame of the novel, functioning as its inevitable apex and giving Asch ample ­opportunity to voice his anti-communist and anti-Soviet sentiments.27 However, the main character’s spiritual education is the novel’s engine, embedding a Bildungsroman within an epic form. Mirkin is born into the quagmire of status and money of St. Petersburg’s wealthy Jews, but in seeking to escape his father’s shadow he flees for the socialism of Warsaw’s Jewish activist culture. In Warsaw Mirkin searches for meaning by attaching himself to a politically engaged, secular family deeply connected to a tradition of Jewish ethics. For these Warsaw Jews, a nineteenth-century maskilic emphasis on Bildung has now metamorphosed into an imperative to educate new communities of Jewish labor. Mirkin then joins his new comrades and other Jewish Bolsheviks in the radical application of these principals during the 1917 revolution in Moscow. There Mirkin learns that the ideological absolutism of party life threatens his (and Asch’s) ­nascent humanism and the need for a rooted (rather than a radically new) collective project. The revolution appears as a false promise whose violent enactment clashes with Mirkin’s growing belief in localized Jewish experience. The arc of the novel frustrates the expected radicalization of Mirkin and instead privileges his spiritual transformation and ultimate return to a modern and secular Jewish faith. Mirkin’s transformation begins, magically, on a linguistic level. The reader first encounters Mirkin just out of law school clerking for a famous lawyer in St. Petersburg. While on the job he comes into contact with a poor old Jewish woman from the “settlements” (tkhum hamoyshav, the Pale of Settlement) who seeks the lawyer’s help in saving her son from penal servitude in Siberia, all while declaring her faith in divine justice and mercy. Naturally, she tells her heart-rending story to the lawyer in Yiddish, a language Mirkin has no knowledge of, having grown up in an assimilated Russian-speaking home. But the ­articulation of her suffering and her appeal to Jewish collectivity move him in miraculous ways: Mirkin had not expected that his encounter with the old Jewish woman [vayter provitsyeler froy, the distantly provincial woman] would make such a deep ­impression on him. Most remarkable of all, he had understood all that she said. How could that be explained? A hidden nerve seemed to have set to work, taking up her incomprehensible words and conducting them to his brain. Soon he had quite mastered the idiom. . . . Was it perhaps the elemental cry of the blind faith rooted in his people that moved him so deeply?28

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Mirkin miraculously learns Yiddish in mere minutes, apparently out of ­compassion but also in a moment of sudden self-discovery of a “hidden nerve.” Asch b ­ alances Mirkin’s sense of universal justice and morality with a growing national feeling, indicating that the two must exist in tandem. The faith Mirkin observes in the woman is rooted in her provinciality and yet at the same time evokes s­ omething elemental. Mirkin’s subsequent journey, constantly navigating between the poles of the national and the universal, is not nearly as miraculous or as ­instantaneous as this initial call to spiritual rebirth. The very opposite—Mirkin clumsily flits b ­ etween communal and ideological commitments, in ways that are often infantile and self-destructive, beholden as many Asch characters are to a rigid Oedipal conflict. To combat this immaturity, Asch sprinkles the novel with various idealized ­figures that guide Mirkin along his way and make explicit Asch’s own ideological concerns. For instance, Mirkin encounters at several critical moments in the novel an older man named Borekh Chomsky, an alternative father-figure from the shtetl who reminds Mirkin of Judaism’s powerful spiritual heritage. In the Yiddish, Chomsky’s monologues are peppered with Hebrew and Aramaic (foregrounding his connection to the Jewish literary tradition) that the Russian-speaking Mirkin somehow again magically understands:29 I’ve come to the certainty that there is finally a world order [seykhl-hayosher] that binds everything together. [. . .] Rise out of yourself, young man! Tear yourself free from the darkness of your own petty life; then you will see the great light, will feel the mighty pulse, the great heartbeat of the world [velt-harts]!30

Chomsky’s exhortation employs several rabbinic and kabbalistic terms: seykhlhayosher is the rabbinic concept of common sense and velt-harts refers to the Hassidic rabbi Nahman of Bratslav’s conception of the heart of the world.31 The literal renderings of these terms, as reflected in the German and English translations, would present a vision of humanist global engagement. Chomsky evokes such universalism while also calling Mirkin to return to a forgotten Jewish and Yiddish-speaking past; his vocabulary is both rooted and transcendental. Moments like these motivate Mirkin to leave behind assimilationist Petersburg and discover a translatable and universalizable Jewishness. These miraculous ­instances of ­linguistic cohesion speak to a hesitant belief in translatability: a secular Russian-speaking Jew could be made to understand, under the right spiritual and pedagogical circumstances, both the traditional and universal resonances of Jewish speech. There is both a malleability and specificity to the Yiddish of the Jewish street. The novel’s rhetoric of return to Jewish solidarity is confirmed in its final pages, when Mirkin abandons Moscow to return to Warsaw. There he finds the same progressive yet spiritually vibrant family he had abandoned at the end of the previous volume, in particular the young Helene who never left for the revolution and remained in Warsaw as a teacher. Mirkin and Helene’s sudden romantic union

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figures as a deus ex machina—especially as Mirkin can hardly be said to have fully resolved his psychological conflicts. Even so, Mirkin’s attraction to the everyday piety of this family fits into the dialectical structure of the novel and with Asch’s commitment to a local Jewish humanism. The final lines report Mirkin’s weighty conversation with Helene’s father, Hurvitz, also a teacher: “We need then to start from the beginning again!” Mirkin said. The teacher looked back at him. “Jumping over the tops of houses?” “No, giving of oneself daily, drop by drop, as she has,” he answered, turning red and gesturing toward Helene. He quickly corrected himself: “As you have, here.” The teacher laid his bony hand on Zachary’s—and was silent.32 Mirkin’s return to Warsaw is a rebirth, a chance to start again, not with ideological fervor—which would force one to jump across rooftops—but with a ritualized and grounded daily practice. The text is ambiguous as to the potential success of this new start, in particular in an independent but soon-to-be ultra-nationalist Poland. The teacher’s silence also speaks to a generational shift, as he seems to leave the talking to Mirkin. Still his physical embrace of Mirkin indicates a hard-earned intimacy. Combined with Mirkin’s union with Helene, the ending places the Jewish family and the Jewish street at the center of political and spiritual action. In this way, Asch’s novel firmly embraces Jewish institutional space, outside and against official state ideologies. Rejecting socialist institutions and critiquing capitalist and assimilationalist ambitions, Asch produces a novel that meets the Yiddish reader precisely where it lives and breathes. Though Asch had always been a popular writer, according to some critics it was this novel, and its focus on urban Jewish renewal, that rendered Asch a ­canonical figure for Yiddish literature. For Nachman Mayzel, this novel was a “great holiday for Yiddish literature” and that now Asch had become “the fullest expression of current Jewish creativity.”33 Though Asch continued to face various criticisms, by 1930 he had become a beloved and respected writer among the Yiddish literary elite.34 Before taking translation into account, Asch was already perceived to be a writer who could speak to and for the entirety of Yiddish culture. Mayzel would go on to claim that it was thanks to Asch that Yiddish had begun to find a place in world literature: “Yiddish literature is now a full sister in the great world literature family [in der groyser literarisher velt-mishpokhe], an equal member in the world-wide PEN club, and has a fine reputation in other organizations. And Sholem Asch has more than a small part in this general ­appreciation of Yiddish.”35 Though Yiddish literature was a sister rather than a full-fledged brother in the masculinist hierarchy of world literature, Yiddish had achieved, through Asch’s prestige, a status that had eluded it previously. Asch was embraced by Yiddish readers as a figure who understood the specificity of Jewish urban experience and yet could also act as a diplomat for Yiddish in the world.

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Institutional Confusion: Between the Jewish Street and the World Stage Despite its foundational role in his writing, Asch was not content to remain exclusively committed to Jewish urban experience. As the official representative of Yiddish at PEN congresses, Asch came to see his work as a bridge between the Jewish street and the world, in particular as a way to institutionalize Yiddish in line with European norms. In his congress and club meeting speeches from the 1920s and ’30s, each one dutifully reprinted in the Yiddish press, Asch consistently argued for the presence of Yiddish on the world stage, though always with direct connection to a grounded image of the Jewish folk: Literature does not come from the fingers nor does one think it up from one’s head. Literature is an instrument through which the folklife is expressed. And therefore, since Yiddish literature is a spark of Jewish folklife, it is thereby interesting for Jews and also for the outside world. The Jews recognize themselves, seeing their own souls as if in a mirror; the outside world sees things that they previously hardly knew, expanding their world-circle. If one reads a book of mine with interest it is not because I myself am interesting; rather the national-feeling [folksgefil] is interesting, which my book contains.36

Asch would go on in this 1932 speech to decry the ways in which Yiddish literature had been taken over by party ideology, criticizing younger socialist and modernist writers. More than advocating for any clear nationalist or political ideology, Asch was interested in producing, through the PEN congress, some kind of institutional stability for Yiddish literature. From his position as president of the PEN club, Asch would advocate for financial support systems for new writers, the establishment of official prizes, and the dispersion of book subventions. That Yiddish literature remained a newspaper culture rather than a book culture not only hurt Asch’s own bottom line but prevented its consolidation as an institutional force.37 Asch longed for the centralization of Yiddish literature in order to canonize the kind of collective solidarity he portrayed in Dray shtet. Lacking official governmental authority to unite them, Asch felt that Yiddish writers should form their own institution through PEN: Governments and peoples have long realized the important role that literature plays in the nation, and they contribute earnestly and regularly to its development and cultivation [. . .]. And with us? Where is the institution that will tend to it [literature]? It is left without a redeemer and without a relative, left ownerless in the wilderness [hefker], surrounded by the burnt grass of indifference, if not contempt.38

Despite Asch’s exhortations, the Yiddish PEN club would never gain the kind of influence he desired. He would continue to act as its symbolic leader throughout the 1930s and issue important proclamations, especially in reaction to the controversies surrounding the German delegation in 1933 and its refusal to condemn

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Nazi policies.39 For Asch, PEN represented the possibility of a home for Yiddish that would be globally recognized and legible within European codes of value without recourse to the trappings of state power. Asch remained intimately tied to the Jewish street, but he wanted to see that collective entity properly recognized in the international arena. Asch sought out this kind of status for his own writing as well, toeing a line between being devoted to Jewish particularity and proving his universal worth to non-Jewish publishers. In the critical reaction to his work in translation into European languages, especially in those reviews offered by his own friends, Asch did at times achieve such recognition, in Germany in particular.40 Stefan Zweig made comments to this effect during a celebration of Asch’s fiftieth birthday in Vienna: It is difficult to write in a provincial language that is read by only a few million people. But it is a great joy when a work in such a language storms into other world languages, because then the writer gives expression not only to his own soul but to a whole people. And this is what Sholem Asch has done for the young, not very well known, and not very well taken care of, Yiddish literature.41

Asch was perceived to be a writer who could represent all of Yiddish literature and also the entirety of Jewish civilization, thereby not only saving a seemingly ­neglected literature but also enriching the European canon. Critics felt his portrayals of Jewish life could “storm” into other languages and into other cultures; the ever-precarious Yiddish world would be saved by its transposition into global networks and worldly vocabularies. It is this promise of institutionalization within world literature that so attracted Asch. To be sure, this version of world literature was dominated by European centers of literary capital. Take for instance Zweig’s comment on the “young, and not very well known, and not very well taken care of, Yiddish literature.” That Yiddish literature, which can be dated to the fourteenth century, is actually not that young does not even occur to Zweig, who projects a primitivity onto Yiddish that would bolster the hegemony of German. The “belatedness” of Yiddish and its hierarchal subjugation is something that Asch willingly accepts as a condition of entry into the institution of world literature.42 The hope is that institutionalization can ­potentially erase this distance, under the equalizing power of the universal. In a speech Asch gave at the 1929 PEN congress he made this passionate plea: The culture of each people, no matter how small it might be, is the good of the entirety of humanity. Really there are no small or big peoples. Each nation is unique. These are long-held truths, rules, which life has hammered out. Language, and through it literature, is man’s most important good. In it one discovers, more than in any other aspect of human creativity, the face and the spiritual essence of the nation. Literature that is created in its language is not only for the given nation but also for other nations. The literatures of the nations are the veins through which nations come together and through which they embody one another. [. . .] All literatures of the world are one single organ, that serves the entirety of

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­ umanity. [. . .] Literature does away with borders and makes of our earth a ­collective h homeland. [. . .] One of the goals of the PEN-Club should be, in my opinion, the protection of powerless cultures from being swallowed up by the larger ones, or from being oppressed by the nations in which they reside. [. . .] Human culture is holy. In whatever corner of the earth it may be created, in whatever language it is expressed, it belongs to the entire world, to the entirety of humanity.43

In this speech Asch employs a dizzying mixture of metaphors, producing a rather jumbled account of the body of world literature. On the one hand, each literature has its own face as representative of the national body from which it emerges. On the other hand, each literature can be a conduit, a “vein,” through which nations communicate with one another, together forming the circulatory system of the global literary organ. Still, by the end of the speech, the literatures of the world have separated again, and one literature now has the capacity to swallow—or ­protect—another. Rather than a coherent vision of world literature and Yiddish’s place within it, Asch gives evidence of a kind of institutional confusion as represented by a jumble of body parts. Asch’s platitudes about an ideal, international body for literature are meant to echo an intellectual trend toward liberal humanism in the interwar period.44 Yet Asch is careful to acknowledge the marginalization of Yiddish and the need for its protection within the abusive hierarchies of European culture. Asch’s search for a “homeland,” a “holy” space, and a coherent body for Yiddish runs up against the realities of the institution of world literature. Moreover, Asch still emphasizes his loyalty to the Jewish street, tempering his celebration of the international arena with particular attention to the spiritual ­essence of the Jewish folk. Another instance of this institutional confusion can be found in the publication of Asch’s personal credo, a pseudo-philosophical pamphlet entitled Woran ich glaube in German (1932), “In vos ikh gloyb” in Yiddish (1932), and What I Believe in English (1941). The translational history of this text already shows the kind of boundary-crossing that Asch attempted in his writing and the incongruities that ensued. Asch undoubtedly initially composed this essay in Yiddish, as he did all of his work, and its original pages can be found in his archives. But it first appeared in print in German. The treatise, in its initial 78-page format, was meant for a ­general, popular audience, beginning with broad philosophical and theological reflections on time and space and ending with a gloss on the whole of human ­history—from biblical creation to the crises of modernity. In ambitiously devising a broad account of all of human existence, Asch ­implicitly argues for the institutionalization of Jewish vocabularies. Included in the credo’s premise is a dichotomy between the human desire for order and that which escapes order. Asch names this supplemental essence, which exceeds human cognition, as the divine. Asch argues that faith, as constitutive of humanity’s creative capacity beyond its limited physical senses, is the force that can bring balance to this dichotomy. Asch’s subsequent genealogy of this metaphysical practice begins with biblical and, crucially, Jewish precedents and then draws a straight line

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through Christian theology and the violent European past and present to arrive at the potentially redemptive Judeo-Christian future. The German text concludes that “[w]e all weave together one cloth—our world. And with our bodies part of creation, with our souls tied to the creator, we are all one whole.”45 Like his ­description of the PEN congress, Asch imagines a cohesive structure for human existence in which Jewish discourse features as a prominent and equal partner, combining both secular and religious forms of knowledge. This sentiment is also reflected in the composition of the text in Yiddish. Yiddish was often stereotyped as an anti-scientific and anti-philosophical language, lacking the requisite vocabulary and tonality for proper scholarly discourse. In investigating complex philosophical problems like “time,” “faith,” and “order” in Yiddish (with borrowings from German and extensive use of kabbalistic and halakhic terminology), Asch implicitly argues for the normalization of Yiddish. Asch demonstrates that one can speak of and toward the universal from the Jewish street. Even so, it was the German version that was published first, before a Yiddish version saw the light of day. The first chapter did appear in Yiddish some months afterward in the pages of Di tsukunft, a socialist literary journal in New York. This excerpt was accompanied by the following editorial footnote: “We print the Yiddish original of Asch’s ‘What I Believe’ (the German translation has already been published) though we do not agree with much that appears here. The searching and probing though are characteristic of the restless spirit of our great artist.”46 Further chapters in Yiddish were promised but were never published, perhaps due to later sections that speak in positive terms about the teachings of Jesus, a controversial topic that Asch would take up later in his career. Indeed, following the publishing of his novel on Jesus’s life, The Nazarene (1939), Asch returned to this philosophical treatise and greatly expanded its middle sections to better outline his claims about the intersection of Jewish and Christian theologies. This resulted in the English version, What I Believe (1941), translated from the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel. Completed at the start of World War II after Asch had moved to New York, this third version includes a coda that shifts the essay’s original Eurocentric orientation to focus his utopian longings on the US as a beacon of freedom and the new home of Judeo-Christian civilization. The publication history of this text reflects the complexity of Asch’s institutional longings. Asch’s belief in the redemptive possibility of the Judeo-Christian tradition—as he understood it—is in keeping with an imperial enlightenment project, a form of world-creating and world-encompassing knowledge. Asch’s ­attempt to approximate the vocabulary of this institutional formation in Yiddish indicates a compliance with what Yasemin Yildiz calls a “monolingual paradigm” and its distinct German genealogy in the thinking of Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.47 This tradition forms the foundation of “In vos ikh gloyb” and Asch offers his own contribution to it, in and out of Yiddish and into German. By monolingualism I mean the demand that a particular language, Yiddish in this case, meet the conceptual and terminological

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expectations of a European norm. Though Asch is writing in Yiddish, he wants his Yiddish to be recognized as modern and capable of speaking with Herder. At the same time, Asch begins his literary efforts from the Jewish street, such that this monolingual paradigm persists in tension with a multilingual reality—Yiddish is both in competition with German and at a radical disjunction from it. One could ask: what does the Jewish street care for Herder’s conception of the modern nation? Asch’s answer is to propose a convergence between Jewishness and a Christian universal—to speak toward the monolingual paradigm while placing Jewish ­vocabularies and systems of thought at its center. As if the tension between these two linguistic communities (Jewish and European) was not enough, Asch’s writing had still another institutional life in the US market. By 1933, Asch’s German publisher, Paul Zsolnay Verlag, stopped publishing work by Jewish writers and others now censored by the Nazi authorities. Asch was cut off from the literary market that could confirm his presence within the networks of world literature. Moreover, Asch’s faith in Europe as a grand monolingual ideal was greatly shaken by this development; the commercial networks of world literature were concrete articulations of the universal principles he advocated for in his PEN speeches. But even as this European transnationalism was falling apart, Asch was fortunate to find great success in the US during these same years. Dray shtet, translated as Three Cities became a bestseller in 1933. In his review of Three Cities, Louis Kronenberger of the New York Times called Asch “a great deal more than the finest of living Yiddish writers: she [sic] becomes a genuinely significant novelist for the whole world—a magnificent storyteller, a vivid and large-scale historian, an able interpreter.”48 Not only was Asch crowned as the best writer of all of Yiddish literature, he was viewed by American critics as a writer with an international pedigree. In Kronenberger’s estimation, Asch contributed to world literature by turning a European historical event into a universal narrative of human experience that could easily be understood by the US reader.49 Asch became a popular novelist in the US just as the US market began to expand to include not only immigrant writers but also, increasingly, international writers in translation.50 Due in part to a growing immigrant population, the US market began to reflect, during the first half of the twentieth century, the interests of an ethnically, religiously, and nationally diverse reading public, often in translation.51 Immigrant and post-immigrant writers like Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, Louis Golding, and others became bestsellers. Meanwhile Asch joined his friends Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig as the kind of internationally renowned figures that critics and publishers felt should interest US readers. Several new collections of translated “Jewish Literature” were published, with many Hebrew and Yiddish writers appearing in English for the first time.52 US literature was undergoing a process of cultural translation, in which writers figured as cultural ambassadors of a foreign culture even as they made claim to Americanness. During this period, US literature was becoming ­defined, at least in part, by its collection of accessible outsiders, its assembly of

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American ethnic modernisms.53 “To be American” did not mean conforming to a single national convention, but rather, paradoxically, to make one’s outsider status accessible and legible.54 The overall success of such literary performances of Jewishness and Americanness—those originally in English and those in translation— was uneven both commercially and aesthetically.55 It is also debatable who exactly the intended audience of these works was, whether they were meant for new ­assimilated Jewish audiences or for general, non-Jewish ones. Even so, it is important to note that just as Asch’s European fame was fading, conditions in the US were ripe for the proliferation of texts and writers explicitly named as Jewish. Asch’s focus on religious and ethnic particularity, if even with an ultimately universal goal, also matched a growing interest in religious fiction and the moral imagination in the US, especially as an answer to economic and cultural instability. To name just two examples of popular novels published around the same time: Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), a bestseller and later a Broadway play, followed a Chinese peasant’s attempt to find peace through a return to traditional roots; Margaret Ayers Barnes’s Years of Grace (1931) won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrait of a woman struggling to uphold middle-class morality in the face of its disintegration.56 In the wake of the stock market crash, critics and readers looked to US fiction to provide models of stability, both in foreign, exotic guises and in the local instantiation of the American mythos—the middle class. These novels and others helped construct a moral and religious imagination meant to counteract the perceived decadence and frivolity of the 1920s. In the face of crisis, novelists proposed a single character or family who would reject blind progress and ­instead strive to uphold a set of traditional, and nearly lost, values. Mirkin’s spiritual re-education in Three Cities follows a very similar path and its coinciding with this trend u ­ ndoubtedly contributed to Asch’s new popularity. The Nazarene and What I  Believe were extensions of this through-line in Asch’s work and ­cemented Asch’s status as world-writer at home in the US in ways Asch could never have anticipated. Dray shtet and “In vos ikh gloyb” stand as models for the kind of institutional confusion that haunts Asch’s literary career. For whom did the Yiddish author write? Asch saw a clear trajectory from his shtetl origins to the most universal of literary achievements. Asch was so certain of his path that in the first years of the 1930s he was hardly attentive to the growing disjunction between the Jewish street, a crumbling European ideal, and an uncertain American future. According to Asch’s secretary Shloyme Rozenberg, when Melville Minton, the president and head editor of the publishing house Putnam, came to visit Asch in Nice to talk about the sales of Three Cities and check on the progress of his next novel, Asch barely paid him any attention. Asch was entirely preoccupied with the harrowing political developments in Europe, shortening the editor’s visit to listen intently to the news on the radio.57 Though the US market was quickly becoming the biggest consumer of Asch’s work, Asch was focused on how his literary and political ­actions could influence the crises in Europe. In short, Asch continued to set his

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sights on the institutional parameters of world literature as he understood them: writing that began in Eastern Europe, pointed toward Western Europe, and then emerged on the world stage. In this way it can be claimed that Asch indeed saw his writing as “born translated” to use Rebecca Walkowitz’s phrase. He saw as the ­ultimate horizon of his work not its vernacular limitations but its universal aspirations to speak for and toward all of humanity. That no institution existed that could embody this idealism did not deter Asch but rather stirred him to write such an institution into existence.

The Psalms-Jew: Sainthood, Celebrity, and Translation At the height of Asch’s institutional confusion, he decided to return, in dialectical fashion, to the very foundation of his literary universe: the Eastern European shtetl. To be sure, this choice was not one he initially wanted to make. Asch admitted that he was still drawn to contemporary issues, initially planning a novel about a jobless young soldier in the aftermath of the war: “Just as the German Remarque had done, [. . .] I wanted to present the terrible problems of the day and provide an answer—but I had no clear answer to give.”58 Given the kind of trajectory that Mirkin had followed in Dray shtet though, the shtetl was a logical destination for Asch’s fiction, a kind of extension of Mirkin’s return to his Jewish roots. Still, it represented a dramatic shift in Asch’s writing as it had progressed over the previous two decades. Though Asch had first gained attention in the Yiddish literary world through his romanticization of the shtetl, he actually rarely wrote about it in the intervening twenty years. Committed as he was to the worlding of Yiddish literature, he sought out topics that he thought would launch Yiddish into the international arena, culminating in Dray shtet’s treatment of the Russian revolution.59 However, Dray shtet has a directionality that is the very opposite of this shtetl–world vector. The novel moves from the global arena of Moscow back to the Jewish streets of Warsaw, tracing an arc of return to a Jewish vernacular home. In his next novel, Asch sought to complete this dialectical process by finding redemption for the new world within the old one. To this end, Asch retains the structure of the Bildungsroman, repeating the previous novel’s narrative of spiritual education. But rather than spurring his hero toward a linear journey of rediscovery or escape, Asch proposes a convergence of the shtetl and the world. Asch’s next novel was titled in Yiddish Der tilim-yid, the Psalms-Jew, and is loosely based on the life of Yekhiel-Meyer Lipshits of Gostynin (1815–88), a prominent Hasidic rebbe who had lived briefly in Asch’s hometown of Kutno and had developed a following in the surrounding region. In an interview in the Forverts in anticipation of the novel’s serialization, Asch boasts of the legends surrounding “the gostininer,” in particular his reputation as a healer through the recitation of psalms. According to Asch, he was so revered that even non-Jews would bring

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their sick to him to seek his blessing. It is this connection with the non-Jewish world that especially caught Asch’s attention: The gostininer was one of the most wonderous figures that Jewish ethical life has brought into the world, and with his moral authority and ethical qualities this figure can be compared to the most wonderous and holy of figures of other ­nations, like the holy Francis of Assisi. [. . .] And while the whole world, the ­believers and the non-believers, honor the holy Francis, our holy figures are ­entirely forgotten.60

For the majority of the interview Asch describes in detail his approach to Hasidism, in particular his focus on its Polish branches rather than its more popular Ukrainian ones. He speaks in sentimental terms about the impetus to produce a “monument” to Eastern European Jewish life following the devastating pogroms of the 1920s. In this way Asch mirrors the nostalgia of his readers, promising them a work of commemoration in contrast to the more obvious political motives of his previous books. However, Asch’s focus on the gostininer’s relationship with nonJews and his reference to Francis of Assisi are not simply throwaway lines. While the novel has meticulous accounts of Hasidic courts, shtetl and village economics, and scholarly and Kabbalistic disputes, the central engine of the novel’s plot is the rebbe’s interactions with the non-Jewish world. The Hasidic rebbe functions as an answer to Mirkin’s search for a spiritually grounded yet worldly form of Jewish action. The gostininer is both a monument for vernacular Jewish consumption and a model, on the level of a Christian saint, for a universal, monolingual paradigm. It is this potential synthesis, the possibility of a zaddik-saint, that motivates my extended reading of this novel, a turning point in Asch’s work in which he attempts to resolve the institutional confusion surrounding his writing and his literary persona. Asch’s ambitions in this novel, and in much of his work in the following ­decades, depend on the possibility of translating between the zaddik and the saint as two fundamental terms in Asch’s cosmology. In Hasidism, zaddik is a title given to a charismatic rabbinic figure with direct connection to the divine and thereby ­capable of intervening on behalf of his followers, the Jewish people, or even the entire world. Ultimately, the zaddik’s task is both messianic and institutional: he performs a specific function within theological and eschatological constructs (or even is potentially the messiah himself) while also leading an earthly Hasidic court with its requisite economic and political functions.61 The zaddik is often paired uncomfortably by translators with the English “saint,” which conflates Jewish and Christian conceptions of piety and messianism. The term “saint” is connected with a process of canonization, in which a figure’s holiness is conferred through the institutional authority of the church. It is only after this status is granted posthumously that the historical figure takes up its power as an object of prayer and devotion capable of interceding in human affairs. To compare the zaddik with the saint is to imagine an equivalence between them not only in the

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heavenly realm but also in concrete political spheres. The Hasidic court and the church come to serve the same heavenly body. The zaddik was not a new figure for Asch or for Yiddish literature more broadly. Peretz and many of his followers depicted Hasidic rebbes like Reb Nahman of Bratslav and the Rebbe of Kotsk as both defenders of tradition and instigators of radical, even modern, change. Yiddish writers would alternately idealize the spir­it­ual strength of the zaddik or expose the character’s internal contradictions (and even make accusations of hypocrisy and corruption). In searching for a usable past to counteract the crises of modernity, writers turned to the ecstatic religious experience of the zaddik either as a secular critique of religious life or as a counterpoint to the disappointments of Enlightenment rationalism.62 For his part, Asch sided mostly with the idealization of the zaddik, including warm portraits of his own father as a zaddik-like figure in Reb Shloyme nogid (1913); such static romanticizations ran counter to his more critical accounts of contemporary Jewry, from Uncle Moses’s temptations to Mirkin’s vacillations. In his earlier work, the zaddik existed in perfect harmony with the spiritual and natural realms, in stark contrast to the imperfect ideologies and bleak urban realities of modernity.63 In Der tilim-yid Asch revisits and undoes the separation between the zaddik and the modern world. Rather than a static, romantic portrait of the zaddik, Asch offers a narrative of spiritual growth that at times transgresses the boundaries of Jewish tradition.64 Like any Bildungsroman, the novel’s opening sections are ­devoted to the young rebbe’s education, focusing in particular on the ways in which young Yekhiel resists the normative modes of Jewish learning. The book’s early chapters describe how the rigors of Talmudic logic elude Yekhiel and that he prefers to worship the divine through nature, labor, and the body—much to his f­ ather’s disappointment: “ ‘I’m afraid Rivke that you must have been thinking of some goy when you were carrying the child. He’s such a dunderhead, you would think he was descended from Esau,’ the father said more than once” (E8–9, Y17).65 Yekhiel’s body is rendered foreign and impure, his father referring to a common superstition regarding the connection between a pregnant mother’s thoughts and an unborn child’s character; as a result he is expelled from Jacob’s tent and ­banished to the crude physicality of Esau. In another instance, Yekhiel becomes frustrated by his inability to pray using a prayer book and instead performs handstands in the synagogue, to his father’s embarrassment (E17, Y27). Like many other Asch protagonists, Yekhiel is deeply connected to his mother, forming an attachment to her body deemed inappropriate by his father and by others in the community. He regularly labors for his mother, helping her sell goods in the market where he ­interacts with non-Jews. Eventually he even travels to the surrounding villages to trade with peasants and gains an appreciation for nature. Yekhiel’s education takes place outside the traditional classroom and in defiance of prescriptive texts; his confidence (or even overconfidence) in his instinctual and sensual connection to the divine places him in an exceptional position and in direct conflict with ­patriarchal authority.

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Yekhiel’s abnormal education leads him to think much more than he should about non-Jews, even to the point of showing concern over the fate of their souls. In one scene, Yekhiel is intrigued by the pomp and circumstance of a procession on a Christian holiday. Fearing a potential outburst of antisemitic rage, Yekhiel and his family hide behind closed doors for the procession to pass. Compelled by a sense of righteousness and compassion, Yekhiel peeks through the cracks at the marchers while chanting under his breath, “Turn [zayt aykh megayer, convert] quickly before the Messiah comes; then you’ll be like the Jews! Turn before it’s too late!” (Y37, E24). Yekhiel implores the non-Jews to convert to Judaism before the Day of Judgment, transforming his subjugation into a sense of Jewish superiority. In his enthusiasm, he accidentally opens the door and is exposed to the wrath of the crowd, though not before seeing the image of the crucifix with Jesus’s body crowned with the Hebrew letters yud, nun, resh, and yud (a transliteration of the Latin INRI, an acronym meaning “king of the Jews”). This strange convergence of familiar “holy letters” with what he is told is completely foreign, frightens him. Recognized by the crowd as one of the “Christ killers,” Yekhiel is whisked away and is lucky only to lose one of his side-curls in the skirmish. Even in moments of peril, Yekhiel’s interactions with non-Jews are opportunities for personal growth, compassion, and even transcultural identification, demonstrating Yekhiel’s ­ desire to reach out beyond his own community to enact a communion with the non-Jewish world. Such transgressive behavior though soon leads to exile: after his mother’s death Yekhiel is sent away from the shtetl to be a teacher of small children in the village, at a remove from the center of Jewish communal life. Still, he sees the rural Polish landscape as a holy place: “the great wide world [der breyter, groyser droysn] became [hot farbitn, literally replaced] God’s house for Yechiel” (Y176, E123). The outside world (droysn), in all of its romantic or even pagan majesty, becomes a substitute for the traditional sites of Jewish learning. It is here that he encounters the boundaries of Jewishness and continues to confront and commune with non-Jews. Yekhiel studies mysticism with a follower of Shabtai Zvi, whom at first Yekhiel admires and emulates but then rejects upon learning of his heretical teachings.66 Yekhiel befriends a poor and downtrodden Polish peasant who is drawn to Yekhiel’s humility and spiritual power when Yekhiel divines the peasant’s sinful desires and prevents him from actually committing sin—it is a non-Jew who is Yekhiel’s first Hasid. On the eve of his wedding, Yekhiel is brought to meet the Polish lord Wydaski who owns the village; Yekhiel’s growing power not only subdues the lord’s vicious hound but also inspires the old revolutionary to recall (but never fully enact) his once firmly held beliefs in political equality.67 Yekhiel’s spir­it­ual education pushes him outside the bounds of traditional Jewish life to seek out connection with the non-Jewish world as the ­ultimate recognition of his universal power. This recognition is not merely a form of translation from the Jewish cultural sphere into the Christian one, but

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a ­realization that Yekhiel already speaks in the single language of a universalized spirituality. The importance of this monolingualism is born out most explicitly in Yekhiel’s alias and Asch’s title for the book, the psalms-Jew. The tilim-yid, tilim-zoger (psalms-sayer), or baal-tilim (in Hebrew) was a fixture in the shtetl’s spiritual economy. When situations arose in which it was appropriate to recite psalms (in prayer for a sick family member’s recovery for instance), and one did not have time or the ability to recite them, the psalms-Jew could be hired to do this religious labor. This figure would come from a lower class within the shtetl society; the psalms-Jew was not a wealthy merchant or land-leaser and certainly not a venerated scholar. This was a person of limited education without the time or the ability to study the more ­demanding works of rabbinic literature.68 In choosing the tilimzoger, Asch demonstrated that he was interested in a deeply rooted depiction of Eastern European Jewish life. However, the Book of Psalms has the advantage of being a text that circulates beyond the shtetl; the psalms are central to both Jewish and Christian theology and practice. The choice of title assured the possibility that a specific Jewish religious experience could be translated into universal terms. Asch assumes that unlike conflicting historical and theological narratives b ­ urdened by ideological animosity, the psalms easily go back and forth between languages and contexts, from the mouths of Jews to the mouths of non-Jews, and still retain the same universal message. For Asch, the psalms constitute a shared literary heritage; when stripped of their interpretative histories, the verses potentially create a single community of believers and become the first works in a redemptive canon of world literature.69 This monolingual potentiality reaches its most dramatic articulation in the narrative apex of the novel. Following his full maturation as a zaddik (after family tragedy, years of exile, and trials stemming from his new fame), Yekhiel faces a final spiritual test, a closing battle with the local priest. The scene contains more than a pinch of melodrama: A Jewish maiden, Reyzl the horse dealer’s daughter, whose soul is wrapped up in Yekhiel’s due to his having previously prayed for her miraculous birth, falls in love with a non-Jewish Pole named Stepan. On the eve of her proposed marriage to a Yeshiva student, she is whisked away by Stepan on horseback to a convent where she intends to convert to Catholicism in order to marry Stepan. The battle over her soul immediately commences on the eve of the wedding, as both Yekhiel and the local Catholic priest spend the night praying that Reyzl will choose the right spiritual path. Both appeal ardently to God, each ­believing in the righteousness of his own cause but also slowly coming to admit the spiritual strength of his rival.70 Their prayers are structured identically as they both quote from the psalms to strengthen their cases, even concluding with the same verse: “Salvation is far from the wicked for they seek not thy statutes” from Psalms 119:155 (E303–307, Y439–41). Neither are willing to compromise, and meanwhile Reyzl, rather than give up one religion for another, jumps from the convent

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window to her death in the midst of a dream in which her Jewish family and Stepan’s non-Jewish family are magically reconciled to one another. The tragic episode is an indictment of the two religious figures who fail to realize the shared ground upon which they stand. Instead of seeing Reyzl’s universalizing love as an opportunity for unification and redemption, both spiritual ­leaders see her choice as a threat to their respective traditions. They prefer her death rather than see her commit to one side over the other, a conclusion that Yekhiel immediately regrets. It is only after several years of repentance that Yekhiel finally admits that his spiritual mission had been limited to only a small part of human existence and that just as he and the priest shared the psalms so too did they share responsibility for the world. During his death-bed sermon Yekhiel makes this ­pronouncement: Many ways lead to God, but the shortest and nearest way lies through His children. For when one cannot gain access to the King one tries to win the ear of the King’s son [ben-meylekh]. And God’s majesty [shkhine, the divine presence] dwells in all mankind, in every man who seeks Him. Therefore you must be careful to respect mankind. Every man who seeks God should be your brother, a­ ccording to the words of the holy Rabbi Mair: “A non-Jew who devotes his life to seeking God [toyre] should be revered as if he were a high priest [koyen-godl]!’  (E337, Y493)

This passage is a startling attempt by Asch to create a synthesis between two religious traditions and vocabularies. For the Yiddish reader, Asch couches Yekhiel’s universalizing message within rabbinic terminology. Yekhiel’s Yiddish speech is peppered with Hebrew and Aramaic and paraphrases popular aggadic stories of kings and the sons of kings. The final words quote from a passage repeated several times in the Talmud in which a non-Jew who studies the Torah is revered as if he were a high priest.71 For the Yiddish reader, reconciliation is portrayed as a fully rabbinic aspiration. In contrast, the translation into English, while retaining Yekhiel’s rabbinic rhetoric, leaves open the possibility for a more universal or even ecumenical reading. Beyond mention of the “King’s son” (a possible, but deniable, reference to Jesus), the word “Torah” is omitted from the translation, making it appear that Yekhiel is encouraging any pursuit of God’s ways rather than limited to Jewish textual study. The passage can be read in Yiddish as the nostalgic recreation of a traditional Jewish vernacular while English readers would have immediately recognized the universal (or possibly Christian) values embedded in the text. This kind of malleability is fundamental to the speech of the zaddik-saint. Yekhiel understands Jewishness as a spiritual heritage rooted in a specific cultural context, but he wants to remove the barriers that prevent its translatability. Eschewing a self-destructive battle with his Christian counterpart, Yekhiel ­employs a shared vocabulary meant to foster a new worldly community. The novel’s ending optimistically evokes the future of such a model, even after Yekhiel’s death. As the townspeople return home from Yekhiel’s funeral they find their way blocked by the construction of the railroad. They lament the arrival of modernity, concluding

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that it is unlikely that such a zaddik would ever be seen again. In this way they reconstitute the distance between the shtetl and the world, declaring that the opening of the shtetl to modernity would preclude the recurrence of such piety. However, the last words of the novel are spoken by a single optimistic, anonymous voice: “I am not afraid—each generation will see its own righteous man. For is it not written that the righteous man is the corner-stone of the world [der tsadek iz der yesod fun der velt]?”72 Asch refers here to Proverbs 10:25, “tsadik yesod olam,” a verse which can be translated in a number of ways. King James follows the most widespread meaning of olam by rendering the phrase as “the righteous is an everlasting foundation,” which is echoed in the famed Yiddish translation by the poet Yehoyesh—“der tsadek iz an eybiker gruntfest” and fits with the mystical tradition of the zaddik’s importance to humanity’s survival.73 However, when Asch translates the verse into Yiddish he renders olam as velt (world) to better emphasize the contemporary aims of the novel. Yekhiel’s influence is not limited to the theological realm; no matter how buried in Jewish tradition, his actions are meant to circulate beyond the Jewish community. Erasing the distance between vernacular specificity and the universal, Asch emphasizes how Yekhiel and his yet-to-be ­revealed heirs are active participants in the world—in the progression toward ­modernity and in humanity’s ultimate salvation. Needless to say, Asch likely saw himself as one of the psalms-Jew’s successors. Though he would never refer to himself as a zaddik or a saint, he certainly took upon himself the responsibility of being both cultural ambassador and world ­redeemer. As PEN representative and as a famed Yiddish writer, he was both head of the Hasidic court of Yiddish literature and a figure privileged and obligated to exert influence in the higher spheres of world literature and world politics. The train of modernity had arrived and a new zaddik, able to communicate with the non-Jewish world, had boarded in the first-class cabin. Reactions to Der tilim-yid in the Yiddish and English-language press bear out the ways in which Asch’s doubled self-fashioning was immediately recognized. Yiddish critics collectively praised Asch’s return to the shtetl and to the heartland of the people, while prominent figures like Shmuel Charney did not hesitate to call Der tilim-yid the very pinnacle of Asch’s literary career.74 There were those, including the leaders of YIVO, who called for Asch to be awarded the Nobel Prize, not for his universalist inclinations but for his epic portrait of the Jewish folk, answering a need for nostalgia during the mythical shtetl’s material decline.75 That the novel would end with the tense conflict between a Jewish zaddik and a Catholic priest was incidental to these readers. Though tragic, the closing scenes, rarely mentioned in reviews, confirmed for Yiddish critics the triumph of the Jewish community over its persecutors. Yiddish readers privileged the conservation (if not fetishization) of religious and cultural authenticity. In contrast, Asch’s English-language readers did not experience a nostalgic ­attraction to the shtetl. For these readers, the shtetl was a foreign location, a “ghetto world of a century ago” according to the New York Times review of the novel, now

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titled Salvation.76 The sense of distance allowed critics to focus more closely on the religious drama of the novel and identify its liberal aims. The critic Louis Kronenberger writes that for the main character Yekhiel “[i]t was not law or doctrine that set his life in motion, but a liberating and enveloping humanity.”77 The writer and critic John Cournos took this line of thinking even further in his review for The New York Sun: All that we know of religion is here, and clergymen of all denominations may delve into the contents of this book and borrow an idea or two for their profit; their sermons will gain for a little leavening administered by literary art, vital as life itself. Let them not take amiss that “Salvation” is a Jewish novel, even a quin­ tes­sen­tially Jewish novel; for here we have a demonstration of the truth that, at the core, great religions meet.78

For Cournos, the traditional Jewish values embedded in Salvation could be ­applied to any religious community. Kronenberger’s and Cournos’ readings of the novel, regardless of how limited their view of Jewishness may be, reflect a sense of marvel at an exotic Jewish universe while also reproducing Asch’s desire to bring together the zaddik and the world. Ludwig Lewisohn could without hesitation call Yekhiel “a saint for all the world.”79 The process of translation further reflected the divide between Yiddish and English-language responses to the novel and to Asch’s work more generally. In editions of his works in German, French, and English title pages often did not include the word Yiddish. Asch was even asked by publishers to reduce his first name to the single letter “S” to make his Jewishness less explicit. (He did not comply with this request.) Significantly, the majority of his novels were translated into English from the German translation rather than directly from the Yiddish. Dray shtet and Der tilim-yid were translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, the famous Scottish translators of Kafka whom Asch likely came to know when their paths crossed in Vienna.80 The translation of a translation often resulted in misinterpretations and awkward compensations; the first English edition of Der tilim-yid in 1934 had so many mistakes that Asch authorized a new translation in 1951 that attempted to right some of the more egregious errors. The most significant departure between the Yiddish original and the English translation, which was preserved in both editions, was the titles Der tilim-yid and Salvation. In a foreword to the second edition Asch explained: It remains to mention the fact that the original title of the book was “The Psalm Jew” and that it bears this title in those languages which possess an equivalent term. In English it would be meaningless, and Salvation expresses the character and idea of the book in a word that is common ground for Jew and Christian alike.81

In Asch’s mind, the specific function of the “psalms-Jew” within the universe of Eastern European Jewry could not be reproduced with a direct translation, at least not without burdening the English or German reader with extensive explanation.

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Claiming that “psalms Jew” would be meaningless in English is certainly an ­overstatement, but by dismissing the possibility of a more complex translation, Asch was able to employ a title that pointed more explicitly to the redemptive goals of the novel. The gap between the two titles was also reflected in the way the physical text was presented in the different languages. When the novel was serialized in the Yiddish press the title was printed in Hebrew lettering that echoed the fonts of the Hebrew prayer book.82 In contrast, the cover of the 1934 English version was dark black with the title printed in large bright yellow letters across the front and on the spine, evoking the gold lettering often found on the Gideon bible. Der tilim-yid is for the Jewish reader seeking a connection to a nearly lost Jewish past; Salvation appeals to those seeking out common ground in translation, with a distinctly Christian undertone.83 Yiddish critics routinely objected to these compromises between the Yiddish original and its translation, demanding that Asch show his loyalty first and foremost to a Yiddish collectivity. Asch’s answer to the specific charge of the omission of any mention of Yiddish from the title page was hardly a satisfying one, but ­reveals his reliance on celebrity as a form of translational compensation: The writer himself is already testimony of his language. To mention Yiddish would be to make it an exception, which would lessen his prestige and the language’s prestige. The Yiddish language does not need such a cheap advertisement. It is known throughout the world that Sholem Asch writes in Yiddish!84

Asch relied on his celebrity status to confirm the linguistic origin of his universalist views. The institutional status of Yiddish in world literature depended on his reputation. His name, Sholem Asch, could not be translated and could serve as a marker, in and of itself, of Yiddish and Yiddish civilization. Regarding the practice of translating into English from the German translation, Asch explained that it was simply a question of “mechanics (tekhnik) and has nothing to do with the prestige of Yiddish”—publishers had wanted to make sure that the translation would be completed by translators with proven literary chops in English and Asch agreed to their technical demands.85 What Asch means by “mechanics” here is unclear, as if translation was an entirely technical process, and his dismissiveness of any larger concern surrounding the language politics of translation speaks to his absolute belief in the convergence of Jewish and non-Jewish markers of institutional value. As Salvation vaulted the bestseller ranks, Asch was becoming a US writer—in material terms—and a US celebrity. Asch saw the novel and the success of subsequent works as evidence of the merging of his various reading communities. Ideally, the name Sholem Asch could mean the same thing in Yiddish, German, and English. In reality though, the divided reaction to Der tilim-yid/Salvation was the beginning of a dramatic break between Asch and the Yiddish literary establishment. As Asch pursued the zaddik-saint convergence further back in time in his biblical novels, Yiddish critics saw the proposed continuity between Yekhiel and Jesus as a

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threat to communal cohesion rather than a shared heritage with Europe and the US.86 Asch’s attempts to solve the institutional confusion of the 1930s ultimately led to his banishment from the imagined national institution of Yiddish literature. After the The Nazarene Asch was barred from the Forverts and was frequently and viciously attacked by its editor Abraham Cahan; he continued to publish in other Yiddish periodicals, but he had lost his prestigious position at the top of the most popular Yiddish newspaper. Translation also did not prove to be an adequate compensation for this loss: though he remained a well-regarded bestseller in English, he remained disappointed that he never achieved the ultimate institutional recognition of the Nobel Prize.87 Asch saw himself as the synthesis between Yiddish vernacularity and universal literary values, between Jewish and Christian vocabularies, but his actual place in the world, in the global market, and in the Jewish street was altogether different.

The Grounds of a World System Asch’s worldly ambitions were very much an anomaly among Yiddish writers of the period. Both admirers and critics saw Asch as exceptional, an icon more than a fellow writer. Every novel he published and every speech he gave had a different weight since it was assumed that Asch spoke on behalf of an invented yet longed for Jewish collectivity. Asch willingly and enthusiastically took on this responsibility. As cultural ambassador, Asch saw himself as the representative of a Yiddish institutional formation that had come to negotiate with the larger institution of world literature. To be sure, many Yiddish writers shared some of his idealistic positions. Many of those who participated in the literary circles surrounding the interwar journals Di literarishe bleter, Globus, or Inzikh also sought to shape modern Yiddish literature in the image of contemporary European literatures. Yiddish writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, expressed their desire to join global literary networks, from the wild apocalyptic expressionism of Di khalyastre to the bleak combination of impressionism and realism by Bergelson and I. J. Singer, from the symbolism of Di yunge to the socialism of Proletpen. But both populist and modernist writers were rarely able to reach audiences outside of the Yiddish-speaking world. Few if any would gain the kind of international circulation and popular reception that Asch achieved. Most, Yiddish authors wrote toward the world but from a self-determined marginalized position—speaking to and for a circumscribed and declining readership. Even if this marginalization developed adjacent to and even in concert with global literary trends, there were few Yiddish writers who imagined the explicit rapprochement between Jews and non-Jews that Asch did. Any chance of reconciliation seemed remote, more of a literary imaginary than an ­imminent possibility, especially in the face of the threats of violent nationalism, the perceived failures of international socialism, and the assimilation of Jewish immigrant

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­ opulations. In the 1930s, many Yiddish writers performed an opposite (though in p that sense structurally similar) retreat from the world stage, as will be explored more extensively in the next chapter. Rather than compete (or fail to compete) on the global stage, there was some solace in returning to the ghetto of the Yiddish vernacular home. Asch by contrast fervently believed in the absolute translatability between the zaddik and the saint, between the shtetl and the world. This was a belief based on the perceived coherence between Jewish and European (Christian) systems of thought and the possibility of a shared set of traditions. In What I Believe, Asch rejected any sense that Judaism was inferior to Christianity and even thought that trying to bargain one’s way into the good graces of Christian hegemony was a losing proposal. Rather, one needed to stand by one’s point, maintain one’s system, and at the same time make an earnest effort to find a way back to the common sources of both systems of faith. There is no necessity, either, for the one side to diminish the role of the other—there is glory for all—in the development of the moral values of mankind, or to maneuver for strategic advantage in the history of religion. Let them both stand firm upon their own ground.88

Though Asch was often accused of ecumenicalism and the blind acceptance of a banal universalism, his commitment to grounding his work in Jewish tradition was firm. Mirkin’s return to Warsaw and Yekhiel’s entrenchment in the shtetl are, for Asch, the conditions of Yiddish creativity. However, Asch does not see these as the ends of Yiddish culture. Together Mirkin and Yekhiel constitute a system of Jewish faith that can and must be combined with other systems of faith in order to achieve the glory he felt was destined for all of humanity. The question is whether such forms of dialectical thinking ultimately lead to the erosion of one’s vernacular grounding. Through his faith in translatability, does Asch lose hold of the vernacular as such? Asch took the logic of normalization and institutionalization to its furthest ends, arguing that the vernacular could only be granted its fullest value through its incorporation and implication within a larger system of human activity. This is why Asch found so surprising the Yiddish attacks on his work, for he saw his fiction as an answer to the nationalist demands for normalization instigated by none other than Sholem Aleichem and championed by Abraham Cahan himself. Asch assumes, like Charney, that the palace of world literature is the most secure home for Jewish vernacular expression. Admittedly, such a conception of world literature reveals Asch to be a proponent of an imperial logic—submitting to the rules and demands of a European system while joining its expansionist and colonial impulses. It was as if Asch encouraged the world to dominate Yiddish and dictate the terms of its survival. In this way, Asch represents some of the limits of the cultural ambassador model, in which the attempt to make the vernacular legible to the world renders its texts illegible to the vernacular reader. Fittingly, many of the objections to Asch’s

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writing begin at the level of the sentence and the word, with critics pointing to Asch’s errors in Yiddish grammar and syntax rather than necessarily challenging a novel’s larger thematic concerns.89 For the vernacular reader, the language itself, as the public articulation of the communal body, must be protected more than any ­resulting rhetorical constructions. For Asch in contrast, the legibility provided by the institution of world literature took precedence over language; Yiddish had value in so far as it provided Jewishness an address within the world republic of letters. This also explains why Asch’s fiction is often labeled as middlebrow. Not only did Asch seek to meet the needs of the mass Yiddish reader, he also sought to compensate for the potential illegibility of the vernacular origins of his work. The constant effort to overexplain and produce an unquestionable literary monument is meant to mitigate the disjunction of Jewish modernity. Marginality is not an option for Asch; the stakes—nothing less than the redemption of the world—are simply too high. Giving in to the demands of the institution of world literature as he understood them was for Asch the only way to even begin to write. As a consequence of this translational stance, Asch’s arrival within US markets and as a US writer is almost incidental. Asch sought out the institution of world literature wherever it appeared. Asch concludes What I Believe with this encomium: It is America, young and powerful, blossoming in the virginity of faith, which must become the leading spirit among the nations. It is America, the land which has taken me in, among so many other homeless ones, as a child of her own, which I would like to see as a “light to the gentiles,” leading the world back out of the night into the authority of the one and only God.90

This passage presents a sudden shift in the larger argument of the book; until this moment, the final sections of the text had been devoted almost entirely to larger philosophical reflections. Asch’s faith in the US as the savior of civilization is mostly tacked on to his European idealism from the early 1930s. The ethnic, cultural, and economic uncertainty of the US in the early twentieth century does not figure into Asch’s idealistic formulations. In writing toward a monolingual paradigm and in homogenizing the conditions of a Judeo-Christian civilization, the US becomes nothing less than the chosen people, the “light to the gentiles.” Rather than recognize the US as its own institutional formation, Asch immediately, and with great urgency, announces its synthesis with a larger cosmological project. As a final example of this institutional confusion and unseen disjunction one can look to Asch’s planned sequels to Der tilim-yid, which he never completed. In an interview he reports his intention to write a second volume that would describe the mercantile Jewish class of the nineteenth century as a foil to the Hasidic world described in Der tilim-yid; the third volume would concern subsequent generations that had left these traditional worlds behind for the promises of modernity: “They have come to live a new, individualized life, mixing with strangers. But living within them, secretly, is a unique Jewishness. In the assimilated [geshmadtn] grandson we sense the spirit of his grandfather and great-grandfather, the striving

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toward an ethical life, to sublimity, to ideals.”91 Asch does not hesitate to shift, in one short sentence, from a unique Jewish essence to the universality and sublimity of an ethical life. Asch’s task, as he saw it, was to reveal the Jewish secret at the heart of the universal. Asch was not always conscious of the consequences of such a revelation nor did he think of what it might mean to keep the vernacular a secret in the first place.

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A World Literature To-Come jacob glatstein’s vernacular modernism World Measures The Yiddish writer and critic Jacob Glatstein would often claim that “any worthwhile Yiddish writer thinks of himself [batrakht zikh] as part of the larger world literature [groyser velt-literatur], even if he is not translated into other languages.”1 At first glance this statement appears self-contradictory. In the model of world literature proposed by Sholem Asch, a writer’s place within world literature was contingent upon translational accommodations to the laws and rules of global literary exchange. In contrast, Glatstein claims that one’s worldly pedigree is determined reflexively—in order to become part of world literature writers merely think themselves into it, batrakhtn zikh, without recourse to translation and to traditional institutions of literary power. Glatstein was a writer deeply attached to the Yiddish language, often declaiming his preference for the “ghetto-life” (getolebn) over the pursuit of foreign approval. Though he was a central figure in Yiddish letters and Yiddish modernism from the 1920s to his death in 1971, Glatstein never received the international accolades of Asch or later Isaac Bashevis Singer; nor was his work extensively translated until late in his life and then posthumously. If his name is heard at all outside of Yiddish circles it is as a Holocaust poet in the postwar period, or more likely a bitter and marginal writer. From his retreat from the world in his 1938 poem, “A gute nakht velt” (“Good Night World”) to Cynthia Ozick’s portrayal of Glatstein as an envious and stubborn old man in her 1969 short story “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” Glatstein appears as a writer unable to reach out beyond the crumbling prison of Yiddish.2 And yet, Glatstein insisted on a “world-measure” (velt-mos) for his writing and for all of Yiddish literature, claiming that the writer who writes exclusively in Yiddish “is a link in the great chain of desire to find the purpose of humanity’s existence” while writers who write for the “translation-market lose their artistic and sometimes also their moral value.”3 Glatstein’s claims fly in the face of Asch’s entire project. Asch felt he had a moral obligation to write toward the “translation-market” and the monolingual ­paradigm Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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it implies, with the express purpose of bringing about the world’s redemption through a reconstructed Judeo-Christian tradition. The previous chapter followed the changing directionality of Asch’s work, from the shtetl to the world and back again, observing the consequences of Asch’s attempt to collapse these seemingly disparate spheres into one. At times Asch argued that the Jewish margin was actually at the center of the world’s redemption, while at others he acknowledged the need (and desire) to migrate from a marginal position into the secure ranks of world literature. By claiming that “Yiddish writers are already [mimeyle] world-writers,” Glatstein dismisses the power of higher legislative bodies and insists on the worldliness of his marginality.4 Glatstein imagines a convergence of Jewish American writing and the institution of world literature that appears more utopian than even Asch’s brazen idealism. Glatstein abandons any dialectical thinking; Yiddish writers are already world-writers, regardless of where they or their work might circulate. Glatstein asks: what if the very idea of a global trajectory were somehow abandoned or deferred? What becomes of marginal writers when they are no longer measured by the rhetorical codes of the center? If world literature is most often understood as a network of exchange that depends on the possibility of global coherence, what might it mean to insist, as Glatstein does, on one’s vernacular grounding as the measure of worldliness over and against the violence of institutional demands? In order to explore what Glatstein means by world-writing, this chapter focuses on the period of the 1930s in which Glatstein formulated a response to what he saw as the troubling intersection of world literature and literatures in Jewish languages. In writing across several genres (poetry, prose, and criticism), Glatstein rejects the expected routes to institutional recognition and instead advocates for a form of writing that marks the gap between one’s vernacular and the languages of empire. Rather than apologetically view Glatstein’s marginalization as an unfortunate oversight or see that marginalization as the essence of his status as a modernist Yiddish writer, I argue that the example of Glatstein can lead to a more dynamic model that portrays writers in motion between and beyond the margins and the centers of the institution of world literature. If scholarship is to move past a center–margin paradigm, beyond the game of determining who does or does not belong in the marketplace or in the canon, beyond the constrictions of a Eurocentric map of world literature, and beyond the limits of translational circulation—the figure of Glatstein may spark a new conversation. There is an inevitable tension between a writer’s adherence to canonized forms of literary expression (“global modernism” for instance) and the concrete institutional parameters that would recognize or ignore such acts of selfnaming. To label oneself a world-writer is to announce a relation—even if truncated— to a proposed system of cultural exchange. Yet, Glatstein finds a way out of this ­tension, highlighting both the authority of world literature and its undecidability. The Yiddish world-writer, in Glatstein’s estimation, cannot help but be a worldwriter, but by exposing the arbitrariness of such a designation, or even its potential (racialized) violence in an American context, Glatstein also delays its complete realization. Glatstein enacts a vernacular modernism that must contend with

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American nativism and antisemitism while also taking into account the ­symbolization of the figural Jew in global modernism. In clinging to his vernacular practice as a form of world-writing, Glatstein rejects a politics of marginality or compromise, deferring modes of translation that would mark his complicity in a literary institution he at times refers to as “Aryan.” Instead, he proposes a writing strategy both utopian and reclusive: a world literature to-come that would value Yiddish, among other vernaculars, precisely for its untranslatability.

Of Marginality, Vernacularity, and Modernism In contemporary scholarship, there is largely a consensus surrounding the marginality of Yiddish literature. Following Chana Kronfeld’s landmark study of Yiddish and Hebrew literatures “on the margins of modernism,” it is commonplace to begin any study of Yiddish literary production from the assumption that a given Yiddish writer was, in their own time, likely illegible or invisible to readers in dominant languages, and that today the writer continues to be ignored by scholars of broader literary fields.5 To be marginal, minor, or peripheral and Jewish according to these studies is to proceed under the mark of deterritorialization, part of a “diasporic cultural system, characterized by competing and overlapping linguistic norms” yet sharing “a common set of overlapping aesthetic practices and cultural identities.”6 Yiddish’s status as a fusion language immediately orients the Yiddish text toward a boundary rather than toward a center, reflecting the colonial condition of peripherality.7 From the margins, the Jewish writer can adopt a stance that is “inevitably comic and subversive” even while forming a part of the larger categories of the modern Jewish literary complex and world literature.8 New studies of modernism in Jewish languages not only explode the previously proposed homogeneity of Jewish writing but also argue for the inclusion of Jewish writing—in its incongruity yet still under the single name “Jewish”—within a system of global modernism. Thus, the marginality named in these studies is multidimensional, at times highlighting Jewish difference and at other times arguing for integration and legibility within larger networks of peripheral literatures. In other words, what marginality might mean for a Yiddish writer changes depending on the context, such that to call Glatstein marginal is a complex thing. Where does a margin begin and end? Is marginality measured by external factors like audience, critical reception, and circulation, or does it consist in ideological and aesthetic choices? And what happens when a writer pursues marginal strategies while also making an avowed claim to the canonical center? On top of all this, what exactly does the name “Jewish” mean—must Jewishness, as an ethnic or racial marker, necessarily imply a marginal position? The context of Glatstein’s literary career is an important place to begin answering these questions, especially in the US of the 1920s and ’30s where marking a text as “Jewish” could evoke a number of cultural discourses. In the first place, and in the most material sense, during this period Jewishness was becoming more prevalent in

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the US along with the rise of immigrant communities more generally. Ethnic and immigrant cultures of all kinds were beginning to expand the boundaries of US culture, often by highlighting their otherness.9 From vaudeville humor to the Harlem Renaissance, from The Jazz Singer to the popularity of Anzia Yezierska, there was an increasing convergence of cultural innovation and racial othering that found its way into the US mainstream. These performances of difference reflected the uneven ground of American identity: the outsider’s claim to Americanness was contingent upon a process of nativization and assimilation, a process which in turn required the rejection or modification of an essentialized origin—the invented “negro,” the proud native, or the greenhorn immigrant Jew. Narratives of belonging and passing projected the possible triumph of new democratic codes over one’s backward origins or even argued for the viability of new hybrid identities, as in Mary Antin’s praise of America in The Promised Land (1912) or Yezierska’s hopeful humanism as a reformed and now educated immigrant at the close of Bread Givers (1925).10 Outsiders paradoxically come to speak for all of US culture precisely in their capacity to transform their otherness. David Hollinger refers to the new prominence of Jewish figures within US culture and intellectual life in the 1920s and ’30s as the product of a “dialectic of ethnic diversity and cosmopolitanism.”11 The synthesis that comes of this dialectic is an improbable patriotism in which the ethnic writer escapes a primitive marginality and is permitted the task of “dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole American people,” per the critic Leslie Fiedler.12 A lingering racialization inevitably accompanies such teleological narratives of assimilation. The process of assimilation is unending in that it preserves within its rhetorical structure an inerasable racial origin. In their emphasis on the triumph over and against Jewish ethnic backwardness, writers like Yezierska and Antin reinforce an identitarian past that stands in contrast to a normative white European one. Thus, membership in the American family is always in tension with a recurrent othering, so much so that “nationality becomes an effect of racial identity” in Walter Benn Michaels formulation.13 Eric Lott has pushed this idea further to demonstrate the ways in which US cultural institutions rely on “blackness” as a way to maintain white cultural dominance; the failure of ethnic or racial integration is essential for the production of the stable white center.14 To be sure, the reliance on invented and mythologized others exposes the deep anxieties of the project of American identity. To confirm or recover the vernacular remainder would unsettle the idea of a single American imaginary—for both ethnic outsiders and the figures of white power. One response to the surfacing of these anxieties was the rise of nativist and antisemitic discourses. US antisemitism in the interwar years echoed European developments but also reflected local apprehension as to what it meant to be American. Publications like Henry Ford’s The International Jew in 1920 emphasized a Jewish “world-sense” as a threat to local US culture: The Jew’s history is one of wandering among all [nationalities]. Considering living individuals only, there is no race of people now upon the planet who have lived in

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so many places, among so many peoples as have the Jewish masses. They have a clearer world-sense than any other people, because the world has been their path. And they think in world terms more than any nationally cloistered people could. The Jew can be absolved if he does not enter into national loyalties and prejudices with the same intensity as the natives; the Jew has been for centuries a cosmopolitan.15

In this passage, Jewish collectivity is perceived to be at odds with local (and celebrated) forms of nationalism. For antisemitic thinkers in the US, the dispersed but racially unified Jewish people was out-of-sync with a supposedly threatened ­nationalist consciousness. A cosmopolitan “world-sense” enabled Jews to better take advantage of new global markets and technologies. But this modern adaptability was viewed as the wrong form of collective action in the global arena, and publications like Ford’s insisted that Jewish influence should be countered by the right form of nativist nationalism. Thus, the figural Jew serves as cosmopolitan foil to the local American patriot. In addition to spreading hatred against Jews and other ethnic outsiders, the anxious authors of this publication wanted to unify “true Americans” in building a cohesive nation inhabiting a single territory as a single race. The Jew, by contrast, was an uncomfortable inconsistency within the rhetoric of nationalism. The Ford publication often refers to this as “supra-nationalism,” a category of mystery: “The Jew is the world’s enigma. Poor in his masses, he yet controls the world’s finances. Scattered abroad without country or government, he yet presents a unity of race continuity which no other people has achieved.”16 The international Jew is a menace both marginal and all-powerful because it is claimed that he (and it is almost always a he) represents a global continuity that threatens the true world order of stable and landed nations.17 On its face, literature, and Anglo-American modernism more specifically, could offer a liberal, cosmopolitan answer to such violent nationalism and to the lingering forms of racialization that would plague the reception of Jewish American writing. The market success of writers like Asch could reflect a new Jewish American patriotism, in which writers dialectically employ their Jewishness to support the US as a liberal world power. More ambitiously, a writer like Asch could even demonstrate the ability to rise above national concerns entirely. As a celebrity, Asch could portray his Jewishness as simultaneously incidental and universalizable, such that his national and religious origins could be leveraged, among other writers of diverse identities, toward the world’s redemption. In modernism, where writers often eschew overt forms of patriotism and ­national representation, the anxiety of Jewish otherness could be diffused as part of a broader cosmopolitan project, giving it a redemptive function somewhat different than Asch’s humanism. The figural “Jew” was embraced by many modernist writers as the paradigmatic figure of modernity, a gesture that echoes Ford’s antisemitic mythologies but seemingly pushes them toward more constructive ends. European and US modernists often saw themselves as constituting a

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“­creative o ­ pposition” to nationalism, nativism, and fascism by embracing and universalizing “Jewish” modes of diaspora, exile, and alienation. The EnglishAmerican modernist W.H. Auden wrote as much in 1941 in a review of Kafka’s The Castle: In so far as the criticisms that are made of the Jews are just, they signify only this: that the reflective man, the wanderer, can never find it easy to have faith, but that if he loses it he is lost. What the contemporary anti-Semite sees in the Jew is an image of his own destiny, of which he is terrified; accordingly he tries to run to the same refuge, Race. With neither courage nor hope, he cannot listen to a voice which is equally Jewish and Christian: “There are many places of refuge, but only one place of salvation; yet the possibilities of salvation are as many as all the places of refuge.”18

In explicit rejection of the idea of the wandering Jew as a threat to white European patriarchal society, Auden articulates a shared Judeo-Christian credo, with the Jew as the quintessential modern man. In another essay he writes: As everybody knows, we live today in one world, but not everyone realizes that to live in one world is to live in a lonely world. [. . .] Like the Wandering Jew, each must go his way alone, every step of it, learning for himself by painful trial and shaming terror, and never resting long on any triumph, but soon proceeding to risk total defeat in some fresh and more difficult task.19

Auden’s sense of Jewishness is limited to mythological parameters, mirroring antisemitic discourses but folding them into a universalized understanding of modernity, producing what Neil Levi calls a “fantasy of Judaization.”20 Rather than view Jewish history or Jewish theology as foundational to Western civilization as a whole, as Asch did, Auden sees the “Jew” as an adoptable strategy for self-discovery in defiance of the dire conditions of modernity. The wandering Jew is a symbol of lonely perseverance that transcends its vernacular origin. Levi explains that the symbol of the Jew provides “a formal solution to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity . . . [T]he Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that enter a condition of chronic crisis in modernity.”21 The lonely, paradigmatic Jew is a model for a modernist’s self-marginalization yet also enables the writer’s universalization, in its most European of incarnations. In this way, Jewishness is central to modernism as that which can help constitute a new transnational aesthetic. The fantasy of Judaization coincides with modernism’s avoidance of nationalist ideologies and institutions and its proposed creation of a locally rooted yet cosmopolitan collective. Modernism depends on cultural specificity and even seeks out obscurity, while also pursuing, through symbolic figurations of marginality like the “wandering Jew,” transnational cooperation and legibility.22 As Marc Caplan argues, “modernism develops on the periphery in advance of the metropolis ­because modernism itself occupies a position of peripherality.”23 James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and others, whether translated or not, became models for a kind of writing

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that addresses “provincial” concerns while also contributing to the construction of a universal canon of modern literature.24 The major figures of American modernism— Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and even William Carlos Williams—also subscribed in one way or another to this dialectical orientation to the world, in which modernist cosmopolitanism is only possible through sustained attention to the vernacular. Williams’s writing “in the American grain”—a poetry that embodies “America” in the most material way possible—aims for autonomy and aesthetic wholeness, an act of worlding in the Heideggerian sense. The artistic production of what Williams calls “the American thing” makes America legible as an object of and for the world.25 The local culture that these writers document and/or invent becomes part of a synthetic literary creation that reflects both a lived (sometimes subaltern) reality and an invocation of a transnational community-to-come. Marginality—geographically, ethnically, or aesthetically inflected—is only an initial condition that is eventually discarded, through various modes of translation, in favor of a higher level of institutionalization and internationalization. To be sure, the adoption of marginal positions by canonical modernists is hardly a neutral act, as it involves the coopting of subaltern cultures toward aesthetically radical ends, from the figuration of Jewishness to the reinvention of seemingly lost vernaculars, the ventriloquism of black voices, and the Orientalist primitivizing of African and Asian cultures. Translations of vernacular cultures into paradigmatic aesthetic objects or the invention of mythologized others serve the modernist purpose of defamiliarizing and “making new” inherited traditions, producing what Michael North calls the “dialect of modernism.”26 Thus, the ­marginalized vernacular arrives in the metropole only once it is divorced from its origins in the periphery, reinvented within a dominant colonial language, and ­instrumentalized within new universal practices. What makes the transformation of Jewishness and other vernacular constructs doubly violent is that the vernacular itself is not a stable thing in the first place. Even before it is coopted by a writer in a dominant European language, the vernacular is already the subject of modernist experimentation by writers within the marginal communities. Thus, the vernacular is already translated before it arrives in another language—vernacular modernists feel they must make their language comply, at least partially, with the Western forms that define the modern. In order for the European center to coopt a mythologized peripheral culture that culture has to be made legible in the first place, at least partially. In this way, global modernism’s investment in the vernacular (in the margins and in the metropole) is often self-reflective. Writers have to be keenly aware of the ways in which literary language is constructed across cultures. Matthew Hart calls the resulting languages of modernism “synthetic vernaculars” that “trouble the border between vernacular self-ownership and the willful appropriation of languages that will be forever foreign.”27 That is, under the aesthetic manipulations of modernism, the vernacular is revealed to be synthetically manufactured rather than directly reflective of some authentic folk origin; modernist poetries “displace the vernacular even as they

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affirm it, revealing it as an uncanny site that includes, without being identical to, the cosmopolitan challenge of unifying the universal and the particular.”28 The cosmopolitan collectivities that global modernism proposes, with the “figural Jew” as one of its models, are thus more complex and contingent things than one would initially expect, taken up as they are with the malleability between the major and the minor, the periphery and the center. Labeling a modernist Yiddish poet “marginal” evokes a series of vernacular groundings and implications within normative literary networks. Even the most local of modernisms is bound up in the tension between the particular and the universal, between a grounded reality and the possibility of arriving elsewhere through a translational paradigm. A focus on this vernacular undecidability, of which Jewishness can be seen as one of its articulations, enables a broader and richer understanding of the institutional ­dynamics of modernism as a global formation. Unpacking this complexity by critiquing the Eurocentric focus of canonical modernism has been a central concern of contemporary modernist studies, under such new categories as “geomodernisms,” “planetary modernisms,” and “global modernism.”29 Envisioning a broader constellation of modernisms has led to a rereading of the seemingly “provincial” concerns of canonical figures; it has also enabled a reevaluation of the convergence of Western literary forms, local language practices, and new (colonial or semi-colonial) articulations of modernity. Rather than announce a grand synthesis of the particular and the universal, more often a “vernacular modernism” registers the contradiction at the very heart of its project, suspended between forms and genres, localities and globalities, the translatable and the untranslatable.30 The resulting parallel streams of modernism reveal a variegated field of writers and their sometimes subversive, sometimes complicit engagement with overlapping political and aesthetic formations.31 It is quickly becoming a consensus among scholarship that modernism has always been “global,” that “in local instances of modernism we will find the traces of world thinking and world imagining that both respond to specifically global pressures (colonialism, trade, war) and, taking up the important imaginative task of the aesthetic, anticipate into being the structures of feeling that will come to help make sense of and shape the world we live in.”32 A reading of Jewish vernacular modernisms, and Glatstein’s role in their articulation, is a vital part of this project.

Synthetic Modernism in Yiddish and the Problem of Taytsh What does the category of global modernism mean for the supposedly marginal modernist Yiddish poet? How does Glatstein’s Jewish vernacular modernism meet the demands of the world? At first glance, a modernism in Yiddish (or Hebrew for that matter) would appear to be doubly marginalized, burdened both by ­vernacular limitations and by an overdetermined relationship to the paradigmatic Jew. A Jewish synthetic vernacular is shot through with multiple vectors such that J­ ewish-language

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modernists must explicitly envision their work as invested in Jewish collective or nationalist goals (even if the term “Jewish” remains difficult to define) and as part of a larger global project, where Jewishness has a symbolic value over and above the realities of everyday Jewish life. For instance, when Jewish-language modernists ­examine the theme of alienation, they respond both to the actual alienating conditions of modern Jewish diasporic culture (the trials of Jewish inclusion in or exclusion from the nation-state, the crisis of the loss of tradition, the traumas of physical persecution, to name just a few) and to wider European symbolizations of modern alienation as paradigmatically Jewish.33 A Jewish-language modernism is compelled to confront its marginality while still situating itself in relation to the dominant center in which Jewishness has a particular function. Glatstein’s version of Yiddish modernism in the US, a movement and journal he formed with fellow writers called In zikh or “introspectovism,” was firmly in line with this doubled cultural consciousness. Glatstein came to the US as a teenager from Lublin, Poland, in 1914 and after a few years of acclimation soon joined the Yiddish literary circles of New York. In Eastern Europe, Glatstein had received both a traditional and secular education, with exposure to the new forms of Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe; but he also continued his cultural education once in the US, reading US and European literatures that circulated in and beyond Yiddish cultural spheres. Thus, Glatstein and his colleagues were certainly aware of an internal genealogy of Yiddish modernism—from the radical expressionists that came out of I. L. Peretz’s circle in Warsaw to the accomplishments of the neo-symbolists of Di yunge, In zikh’s immediate predecessors in the US and then contemporaries. But, as a younger group of writers as familiar with non-Jewish literatures as they were with Jewish ones, Glatstein and his fellow writers based their new project predominantly on Eliot and Pound’s Anglo-American model, in particular the strategies of imagism, with additions from certain German and Russian trends.34 One could argue that Yiddish modernism in the US is both another strand in the “American grain” of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost and also in line with new cosmopolitan horizons.35 The In zikh manifesto from 1920 reads: “The world exists and we are part of it. But for us, the world exists as it is mirrored in us, as it touches us. The world is a non-existent category, a lie, if it is not related to us. It becomes an actuality only in and through us.”36 In order to join a world movement, the writers of In zikh developed a kind of radical particularism, promoting “kaleidoscopic” introspection that endeavored to internalize the invasive aspects of the outside world. Their goal was the creation of a particularized poetic language that also gave expression to the generalized modern subject. Jewishness, in this model, became an ineluctable local frame of experience (rather than mythological or paradigmatic) and Yiddish its vernacular articulation. The manifesto continues, “A Jew will write about an Indian fertility temple and Japanese Shinto shrines as a Jew.”37 Glatstein and his colleagues willfully saw their own ­marginal status as an advantage to portraying the world in all of its diversity. By remaining radically attentive to their own context these writers felt they could produce a more accurate depiction of the entire world. Being Jewish and writing in Yiddish

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was not a tragic fate but rather an essential condition for access to a transnational community-to-come. For many of the writers of In zikh, participation in modernism’s “global particularism” could allow for Yiddish literature to remain faithful to a threatened culture while still gesturing toward larger, universal goals.38 Glatstein’s most radical articulation of this vernacular position came in his volume of poetry entitled Yidishtaytshn (1937), which explicitly thinks through the tension between an essentialized vernacular origin, the possibility of a synthetic Yiddish poetics, and the politics of translation. This tension is embedded in the book’s title, a neologism that makes use of an archaic name for the Yiddish language in order to demonstrate Yiddish’s plasticity. The term yidish-taytsh is one of the oldest names for the language, literally meaning “Jewish-German,” an early indication of the intimacy between Yiddish and its Germanic origins. Taytsh also designates an early pedagogical function of the language as a form of exegesis and/or translation of the more spiritually venerated Hebrew language. Taytsh refers to the traditional mode of learning in which students translate, by rote, biblical verses word-for-word from Hebrew into the Germanic register of Yiddish. This strategy was a Jewish child’s first exposure to Hebrew, and, since it represented the most basic Jewish knowledge, it became a confirmation of the vernacular status of Yiddish as the language, stereotypically, of women and children (though of course in reality the common language of most Eastern European Jews). Alternately called ivre-taytsh (“Hebrew-translation”), khumesh-taytsh (“Pentateuch-translation”), vayber-taytsh (“women-translation,” the name for the font in early modern texts that would distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew-Aramaic), or simply taytsh, the term came to stand for the entirety of the Yiddish language, in particular its subordinate status to Hebrew. In choosing a modification of yidish-taytsh as the title of the collection, Glatstein evokes this vernacular image while still restoring Yiddish to aesthetic dominance if not universal (modernist) achievement. Significantly, Glatstein erases the hyphen between the name “Jewish” (yidish) and the act of translation (taytsh); yidishtaytsh is a synthetic whole, in which translation becomes an inseparable property of the language. Glatstein then adds a nun to the end of the word, yidishtaytshn, which can give the neologism two different meanings. On the one hand, the nun pluralizes the term, indicating the flexibility of the language beyond one single form of exegesis or interpretation.39 Not only does Yiddish contain within it several languages (German, Hebrew, Aramaic, Romance and Slavic components) and their histories and traditions, it can also reflect the multiplicity of modern experience, beginning with Jewishness but by no means limited by it.40 There is not one single Yiddish language, but rather there are yidishtaytshn, a host of vernacular and interpretive modes to be explored within Glatstein’s collection of poems. On the other hand, the nun can also turn the word into a verb in the infinitive form. Yidishtaytshn would indicate the act of “yiddishtranslating,” as if the language, by its very existence, compels its speakers and readers to engage in a constant process of translation and reinterpretation. Barbara and Benjamin

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Harshav have translated the title of the book as “Exegyddish” when in fact “Exegyddishes” or “Exegyddishing” would have been more accurate.41 With this title Glatstein emphasizes the plasticity of Yiddish as both vernacular grounding and a tool for modernist experimentation. Taytsh is an indication of the most provincial of Jewish acts—naming the process of acquiring language in the bilingual condition of Jewish experience—but it is also an avenue towards a translational future. In this way, Glatstein appears to reject more normative and nationalist definitions of Yiddish, which would prefer to name the language “Jewish” in the same way a language could be named French or German. By fusing yidish to taytsh, Glatstein proposes a mode of writing that negotiates between a collection of languages that are both familiar and foreign, provincial and cosmopolitan, translatable and untranslatable, languages that in turn constitute multiple versions of the self embedded in and escaping from a Jewish collective. In refusing any redemptive synthesis—Yiddish remains plural or hovering in the infinitive—Glatstein also reacts to the sense of crisis in the language in the 1930s. During a 1934 visit to Poland to see his ailing mother before her death, Glatstein found Jewish life in Eastern Europe to be in an unbearable state of ruin; meanwhile the rapid linguistic assimilation of Jews in the US continued unabated. To turn to yidishtaytshn is to protest against Yiddish’s decline by concentrating on the language’s past foundations and future synthetic possibilities rather than its disastrous material present. Reflecting this strategy, the volume is full of neologisms and experimentations, from poems reenacting a child’s play with the sound particles of Yiddish to complex investigations of contemporary Jewish politics. Yet, at every turn, Glatstein remains self-reflective and critical of his synthetic practices, forcing his poetic idiom to confront a vernacular remainder rather than celebrate any universal synthesis. In one of Yidishtaytshn’s central poems, “Mir, di vortproletaryer” (We, the wordproletarians), Glatstein complains of the ways in which modern life, or perhaps modernism itself, has created a much too artificial poetic language: ‫באגריֿפן‬ ַ ‫גאנצע שיֿפן מיט‬ ‫ּפ‬ ַ ‫ס׳גייען ָא‬ ‫קלוגזײן‬ ַ ‫שווײגן און‬ ַ ‫ּפאנצערט מיט‬ ַ ‫בא‬ ַ ,‫און דו‬ .‫ווארט ֿפון מיין‬ ָ ‫וויקלסט ָאּפ‬ [ . . . ] ‫ּפלאנען‬ ַ ‫ערא‬ ָ ‫גאנצע‬ ַ ‫ ס׳ֿפליִ ען ָאּפ‬.‫לעטאריער‬ ַ ‫רטּפרא‬ ָ ‫ווא‬ ָ .‫רשטאנען‬ ַ ‫ֿפא‬ ַ ‫מיט‬ .‫ליבאבעס‬ ַ ‫סעזאמעס און ַא‬ ַ ‫ֿפארשּפענצערט מיט‬ ַ ‫האסט זיך‬ ָ ‫און דו‬ ?‫ ווי עס קרעכצן ָיאכן‬,‫הערסטו דען נישט‬ .‫שטאבעס‬ ַ ‫אײזערנע‬ ַ ‫דײנע ווערטער ליגן‬ ַ ‫אויף‬ .‫בראכן‬ ָ ‫ֿפארשעלט מיט‬ ַ ,‫ֿפארגרילץ‬ ַ ?‫דײנע געוויינער‬ ַ ‫ ווּו‬,‫דײנע געלעכטערס‬ ַ ‫ווּו‬ Loaded ships with ideo-glyphs Sail away. And you, armored in silence and wisdom,

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Unwrap word from sense. [. . .] Wordproletarian. Airplanes leave land Full of understands. And you in your vest of Sesames and Ali-Babas. Don’t you hear how yokes sigh? Iron girders lie on your words. Gnash them, curse them with disaster. Where are your laughters, where are your groans?42 In a rebuke of his own poetry as much as a critique of his fellow Yiddish and English-language writers, the speaker charges the modernist poet with having produced poetry of empty codes and meaningless forms. Ineluctably attached to the technocratic present, poetry becomes bound to a collection of limiting and cold structures—ironclad machines and empty recitals of “open sesame”—that prevent access to personal or collective feeling. Modernism is all too metallic with its airplanes and ships that protect an imprisoned self, isolated from an organic linguistic community. Words themselves become entirely artifice, divorced from the immediacy of sighs, laughter, and tears. Glatstein instead calls on the Yiddish writer to become a proletarian for the Yiddish language, which means writing toward collective experience rather than the self-limiting sphere of the individual. Even if the vernacular sources of Yiddish culture are now in their graves, the poet is still bound to a Yiddish divorced from its speakers. The introspectivist turns from the “I” to the once-living “we” even as it becomes an inanimate, synthetic thing: “s’zingen itst gantse kolektivn, / stratosfern, shtern, afile moyern, shteyner” “Now whole collectives sing, / Stratospheres, stars, even buildings, stones.” The labor of the Yiddish wordproletarian—his labor in the Marxist sense—is to ensure the possibility of vernacular expression even as the collective body disintegrates: ‫ווארט‬ ָ ‫שאטנס ֿפון‬ ָ ‫נאך ַאלץ די‬ ָ ‫דו זיצסט און זוכסט‬ .‫און רייניקסט דעם שימל ֿפון מיינען‬ .‫ס׳ווערן ווערטער טרויעריקער און ריינער‬ .‫רײן אין די ביינער‬ ַ ‫נאכט איז דיר ַא‬ ַ ‫רשאלטענע‬ ָ ‫ֿפא‬ ַ ‫די‬ Sit and seek the shadows of a word And scrape the mold of meanings. Words take on sadder and purer tones.  The cursed night has got into your bones.43 In order to overcome the alienation of mechanized poetic production and in order to achieve a materialist, intimate relationship with his own labor, the wordproletarian

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must scrape away the mold of modernist intervention from the authentic Yiddish idiom. This vocation echoes Eliot’s call “to purify the dialect of the tribe,” but reverses it to reject the professionalization and intellectualization of Yiddish.44 Yidishtaytshn enacts a search for the “shadows of a word” in order to refine Yiddish down to its vernacular particularities. But such a project has its dangers: to reduce one’s purview to a threatened and dying language exposes the poet to a core of despair and death. Though the wordproletarian works diligently, the “cursed night”—and not the revolutionary dawn—awaits him in the refrain that closes the poem. Paradoxically, the desire to excise modernist jargon from Yiddish poetry is ­articulated in modernist forms that highlight the poem’s synthetic and plastic properties: the poem is in free verse and rife with the neologisms of modernist wordplay. In this poem and throughout the collection, Glatstein indulges in ­modernist experimentation while at the same time suggesting that the poet should reject the cold syntheticism of modernism.45 As a result, Yidishtaytshn is perched on the boundary between vernacular speech and high modernism. An allegiance with an institutional formation called global modernism would allow his experimentation to be legible and even artistically valued; moreover, such creativity would seem to usher in a transition from a language embedded in folk origins to a veritable Yiddish to-come.46 However, a radically new Yiddish—a Yiddish that is both synthetic and rooted, a Yiddish beyond Yiddish and beyond translation—­ remains an unfulfilled fantasy in the volume, since the complete embrace of ­plasticity would also mean subjugation to the translational demands of modernism and the loss of immediacy with Yiddish itself. In this way, Glatstein performs ­marginality only to find it inadequate; simultaneously, Glatstein embraces the ­syntheticism of modernism only to long for the insularity of the vernacular. One could easily read the mythology of the paradigmatic Jew into this suspended state: lost between a local grounding and a cosmopolitan horizon, Glatstein’s wordproletarian is permanently homeless. Such a reading would universalize Glatstein’s approach as the very apotheosis of modernist rootlessness. But for Glatstein, Jewishness cannot be made symbolic in this way; his poetry does not instrumentalize Jewishness but instead treats it as the concrete vernacular of his literary project. His work is thus undecided, suspended in a marginal position that can never be universalized nor fully inhabited.

Yiddish and a Critique of World Literature Glatstein’s unease in his poetry regarding the forms and conventions of modernism was mirrored during this same period by his larger critique of the institution of world literature and the role of Jewish writing within it. With the appearance of Jewish and Yiddish writers on best-seller and book-of-the-month lists in the US during the 1930s, Glatstein wrote a series of essays in the journal Inzikh that

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­ enounced what he viewed as a politics of compromise, in which writers sought out d success in translation into English with little thought to the aesthetic and political consequences. One essay that stands out, by its title alone, is his 1935 piece “The March to the Goyim,” an acerbic account of the growing number of writers who looked to publish in English rather than in Yiddish.47 He describes this new trend as a disease: “suddenly, almost overnight, the desire to be saved from the Yiddish world has spread like an epidemic—there is total panic and alarm.”48 For Glatstein the escape into English was a medical disaster: because these writers had deemed writing in Yiddish to be a kind of handicap or defect, they thought that translation into English would be a cure. Glatstein argues that the attraction to cheap translation was the real malady. In declaring Yiddish a diseased body these writers had caught a parallel disease—the affliction of terrible translation. The best-selling Asch receives the brunt of Glatstein’s attack. Glatstein claims that Asch purposely limited the vocabulary of his writing in Yiddish in order to make the subsequent translation into German or English easier. Moreover he feels that Asch uses his influence as a globally renowned figure to promote his own writing and only rarely advocates for other Yiddish writers: “I even know of some writers who send their books to Asch thinking that maybe he will have pity on them and tell the goyim that they actually exist. But Asch also knows how to keep quiet, he can keep a secret; and it makes him feel just fine to look down upon his beloved but talentless people of Israel.”49 In the essay Glatstein also berates writers like Zishe Vaynper, Talush, and Harry Sackler, all of whom published books in English in 1935, for stooping to the lifeless “Esperanto” of translation for the sake of money or fame, neither of which these authors ultimately achieved.50 Glatstein views their work either as sentimentalized portrayals of Jewishness for acculturated audiences, or as dishonest rootless writing.51 Taking this argument to its extreme, Glatstein suggests that such bland universalism actually produces fascism.52 Indeed, he claims that the cure these writers had devised for their Jewishness would lead to more destruction and decay. The World Republic of Letters was no republic at all but rather a dictatorship of poor literary taste. In another essay written a year later, entitled “Jews in World Literature,” Glatstein considered a list of 700 “masters” of world literature compiled for the New York Times Book Fair of 1936.53 The twenty-two Jewish writers Glatstein found on the list disappointed him greatly, proving to him that Jewish writing had no place in US literature or on the world stage. Not only was twenty-two a minuscule number in his estimation, but those on the list were deemed by Glatstein to be writers of popular trash (shund) whose posturing would soon be forgotten by US and global audiences. Asch was the only Yiddish writer to appear on the list and, while I. J. Singer was invited to speak at the fair (due to the success that year of his novel The Brothers Ashkenazi), his name was omitted from the catalog.54 Yiddish writers of real aesthetic value did not make it into the purview of such lists, leading Glatstein to conclude that “world-literature is not the huge, broad world; it’s a

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small empire unto itself, though it sounds so universal.”55 The claim to “worldliness” really meant a demand for compliance with certain marketable (for the moment) literary forms and the erasure of national or ethnic particularity. Glatstein saw that the “world,” in its current institutional framework, was not ready for a work of genuine Jewish creativity and that any attempt to join this republic would result in a flat and worthless thing. Taken together, these essays articulate a harsh, and seemingly chauvinist, critique of any form of Jewish writing that did not appear first in a Jewish language for Jewish audiences. Instead, Glatstein advocates for a form of world-writing that takes place ­exclusively in the vernacular, a “national” art that avoids the fascist tendencies of nationalism: There is however a second system. There are those writers who chew themselves directly into the language in which they write . . . Such a writer is often harder to translate, he is too enmeshed in his own words; you need strange instruments to tear him out of his language, and you are left not with a translation but a kind of ­obstetrics—­he must be torn from his mother’s stomach . . . If you will, this second kind of art is national art. If you will, it is Proust, Joyce, Pushkin, Gogol, Sholem Aleichem, Bialik. The world has perhaps heard their names for some reason or ­another, but they have had no great luck in the world because as great writers they have sought their freedom in the narrowest discipline of their own language, measuring out words like pharmacists, working within the possibilities or limits of their own tongue. And what difference does it make if Pushkin, Bialik, or Joyce cannot be easily transposed into foreign languages, where it is impossible to ­capture the evaporating original scent of each word? Who cares if a great Albanian or a great Romanian poet remains unknown in Alaska? After all, what meaning can one claim for international ideals transmitted through literature in the light of a world literature that kept refining itself more and more until it produced Hitlerism and Mussolinism?56

Glatstein’s idea of world-writing seems to follow a dialectic: universal value through the national, especially when the national is defined in material and even biological terms. It is the writer who consumes his own language, who buries himself in the womb of his mother tongue, who is able to achieve greatness. This is not the violent and abstract expansionist nationalism of fascism but rather a devotion to the particular and the local, the way a word has meaning only through the lens of a specific community’s histories, triumphs, and catastrophes. Glatstein fetishizes the “original scent” of a language, the authenticity and untranslatability of a vernacular. The raw stuff of language becomes synthetic material to be manipulated by a great artist. Glatstein continues the medical metaphor, but instead of the threat of a foreign disease he focuses on the possibility of birth. Glatstein attempts to explain how the Yiddish body might escape the walls of the womb and be born into the world without producing a deformed universalism. This “system,” if one can call it that, is explicitly against circulation as a measure of value, eschewing a translational network that would connect Albania, Romania,

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and Alaska. Glatstein stunningly equates the translation-work of world literature with fascism, implying that the “refinements” of world literature are akin to the racist actions of the fascist state. The global force that would connect disparate cultures must employ an essentialist logic that shuns, if not persecutes, vernacular difference in order to produce a single, homogenous literature. Those who choose to join this network must submit to its demand for literary purity, and its crude form of translation erases vernacularity in order to further secure Euro-American linguistic dominance. Hitler and Mussolini’s world literature treats literatures in Jewish languages as racially impure and seeks to translate them out of existence. In keeping with the suspended vernacular modernism of Yidishtaytshn, Glatstein counters world-literature fascism by doubling down on his insistence on vernacular autonomy while still clinging to a future recognition of Yiddish outside of racialized hierarchies. Glatstein maintains that only an eminently particularist writer is worth anything on the world stage. He surprisingly dismisses the world reputations of Proust, Joyce, Gogol, and Pushkin, as if they were somehow obscure figures—“the world has perhaps heard their names.” Glatstein was surely aware that while these authors may not have appeared on best-seller lists they were still some of the most important writers for a global network of modernists.57 Glatstein does not hesitate to place Sholem Aleichem and H. N. Bialik in the same breath as these canonical writers, implying that the right kind of obstetrics would show that Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish and Bialik in Hebrew had excavated their own languages in such a way that their work could speak for Jewishness within the institution of world literature. Glatstein claims that the way to reach such an institution was not through the self-effacing act of translation. Rather, one joined the world through becoming part of a literary network that shared a set of traditions, genres, and some ultimate, if not paradoxical, worldview of particularism. In this way Glatstein shares the cosmopolitan longings of his fellow modernists, imagining the creation of some collective that would allow Sholem Aleichem and Proust to speak with the same authority and in their own languages. Glatstein paradoxically argues against his own marginality even while maintaining his illegibility, though it is meant to be an illegibility that he shares with all writers of any worth. Thus, Glatstein mourns his exclusion from the institution of world literature while admitting that its shared forms and conventions still constitute his ability to speak of and toward modernity. The question then becomes: to what community, cosmopolitan or vernacular or otherwise, does the Yiddish writer belong? How can the vernacular wordproletarian of Yidishtaytshn join the ranks of a literary international?

Of Ghettos and Deferred Arrivals The question of where exactly the Yiddish modernist belongs troubled Glatstein throughout the 1930s but especially following his trip to Eastern Europe in 1934, during which he was able to examine up close the intersection of Jewish writing,

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the politics of Jewish difference, and the crises of the global present. After witnessing the rise of Nazism and the decline of Jewish life in Eastern Europe following revolution, civil war, and violent nationalism, Glatstein increasingly focused on what it might mean to inhabit the ghetto of Jewish life even as a practitioner of global modernism. In an essay from 1938, following the ban on the publishing of works by Jews in Nazi Germany, Glatstein ironically welcomes these writers back to the “ghetto.” But this ghetto is actually, in Glatstein’s mind, a more expansive space than world literature: But when we talk about only living spiritually among ourselves, about the narrow walls of collective Jewish cultural life, about the fear of a Jewish collective folding in on itself, we have to remember that if Dickens had signified the world for the English, with his entire English particularity, then Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz had meant for us the ghetto. No matter how many translators we ­employed to speak to the “Aryan,” our classic Yiddish literature still meant a ­spiritual wall around our own life. But within this circumscribed space a language and artistic consciousness has bloomed. Our own warm Yiddish writer is more beloved to me, the literary ghetto-man [geto-mentsh], than the swollen biblical composition of a world-man [velt-mentsh] who yells “listen to my voice.”58

Glatstein seizes on the “ghetto-man” as a figure of organic, biological growth as opposed to the swollen but necessarily empty boasting of the “world-man.” The term “world-man” alludes to the “Übermensch” of Nazi ideology, with all of its racialized logic. While the ghetto-man will never be allowed to speak the “Aryan” languages of world literature, Glatstein still argues that his vernacular grounding has value. Again Glatstein equates a canonical figure of world literature, Charles Dickens, with the classic writers of Yiddish literature yet points to the differing fates of their particularities. One is destined to be named part of a “world” culture while the other is limited to a Jewish vernacular space. Finding this division to be arbitrarily enforced by the “Aryan” purveyors of world literature, Glatstein valorizes the ghetto instead of mourning or protesting it. Glatstein made his embrace of marginality and rejection of the world most explicit in the well-known and actually widely translated poem “A gute nakht velt,” “Good Night World.”59 In this poem, Glatstein belatedly disdains the modern world’s false promises of emancipation and universalization and retreats instead to the “ghetto” of Jewish life: ,‫ ברייטע וועלט‬,‫נאכט‬ ַ ‫ַא גוטע‬ .‫גרויסע שטינקענדיקע וועלט‬ .‫רהאק דעם טויער‬ ַ ‫ֿפא‬ ַ ‫נאר איך‬ ָ ,‫נישט דו‬ ,‫לאט‬ ַ ‫כא‬ ַ ‫לאנגען‬ ַ ‫מיט דעם‬ ,‫לאט‬ ַ ‫ געלער‬,‫ֿפײערדיקער‬ ַ ‫מיט דער‬ ,‫טראט‬ ָ ‫שטאלצן‬ ָ ‫מיט דעם‬ – ‫געבאט‬ ָ ‫מײן אייגענעם‬ ַ ‫אויף‬ .‫געטא‬ ָ ‫גיי איך צוריק אין‬

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Good night, wide world. Big, stinking world. Not you, but I, slam the gate. In my long robe, With my flaming, yellow patch, With my proud gait, At my own command— I return to the ghetto.60 The speaker in this poem excoriates secular modernity for the grotesque violence it enacts in the name of unfulfilled democratic ideals. Meanwhile the poet performs an autonomous return to the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe. The phrases “not you, but I” and “at my own command” enact a proud declaration of self-possession even as they admit, implicitly, that the world has also slammed the gate on Jews. Glatstein calls on Yiddish cultural activists to abandon the modern secular world for parochial Jewish traditions, idealized and criticized later in the poem as “humpbacked Jewish life,” tsehoykert yidish lebn. However, as Anita Norich points out, this poem is more of an “ambivalent farewell” than a strident rejection; the forms and rhythms of modernism, as part of the rhetorical codes of world literature, are inextricable as that which constitutes Glatstein’s text. Glatstein’s protest, as forceful as it is, can be understood as an articulation of its very uselessness.61 The poem repeats the double bind of “Mir, di vortproletaryer”: Glatstein attempts to reject a modernity that the poem itself inhabits and instantiates; at the same time, the poem describes an impossible return to a traditional past that Glatstein had abandoned at a young age and had no real intention of resuming. Following this poem, Glatstein did not stop being a modernist poet, nor did he suddenly become a religious Jew. It is worth, however, pushing beyond a reading of this poem that focuses on ambivalence or impossibility as its final gesture. The two worlds, the traditional and the modern, should not be limited to a false binary that the speaker and reader are caught between in some way. As a meditation on the very possibility of choice, the poem reaches beyond cultural hierarchies and points toward a paradoxical messianic hope, and not merely an ironic commentary on messianism. In the concluding lines of the poem, Glatstein expressly puts his faith in the act of waiting: ,‫כאטש ער ַזאמט זיך‬ ָ ‫האֿפן ַאז‬ ָ ‫האב‬ ָ ‫און איך‬ .‫ווארטן‬ ַ ‫מײן‬ ַ ‫ן־טאג־אויס‬ ָ ‫ג־אײ‬ ַ ‫טא‬ ָ ‫גייט אויף‬ ‫נאך רוישן גרינע בלעטער‬ ָ ‫ס׳וועלן‬ .‫רקווארטן‬ ַ ‫ֿפא‬ ַ ‫אויף אונדזער בוים דעם‬ [ . . . ] .‫דארף קיין טרייסט נישט‬ ַ ‫איך‬ .‫רקאלטנט ייִ דיש לעבן‬ ָ ‫ֿפא‬ ַ ,‫כ׳קוש דיך‬ .‫ס׳וויינט אין מיר די ֿפרייד ֿפון קומען‬

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And I believe that even though he tarries, Day after day rises my waiting. Surely, green leaves will rustle On our withered tree. I do not need consolation. [ . . . ] I kiss you, tangled Jewish life. It cries in me, the joy of coming. Here Glatstein rewrites the popular paraphrasing of Maimonides’ declaration of messianic faith (the twelfth of his thirteen principles): “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait day after day for his coming.” Glatstein subverts the reader’s expectation by replacing the messiah with the act of waiting itself: “day after day rises my waiting”—the act of waiting is the object of longing, while the figure of the messiah does not appear in the poem and is never expected either. Glatstein does not balance rejection of the world with belief in a redemptive Yiddish future; his speaker dreams of spring’s renewal without anticipating its actual realization. In the poem’s final line, the supposed joy of arrival in the ghetto is attached to the infinitive “kumen” (coming); one’s homecoming is an ongoing process rather than a static conclusion or a turning inward.62 In this way, both the rejection of the world and the embrace of the ghetto are never completed actions; arrival in the ghetto is also constantly deferred. In his most famous poem, in a poem that was fiercely debated immediately after its publication and for many years afterward, Glatstein refuses to locate Yiddish literature as either marginal or central, even as the speaker desperately calls for just such a stabilization. The poem complicates Glatstein’s apparent ­embrace of the ghetto-man and highlights the ambiguous relationship between Yiddish writers and “world” figures like Dickens. The world is to be rejected, in particular the world as dominated by the “Aryan,” but it is also never to be forgotten, since the world defines the literary as such. Glatstein wishes “good night” to the world and reaches out to embrace the ghetto, while remaining in the dark waiting for an answer that can never be articulated.

Homecomings at Twilight Glatstein’s initial embrace of the ghetto was one that was shared by many Yiddish writers of the period, a coordinated closing of the ranks in the face of dire existential threats. Notably, Yiddish periodicals even increased their activity in this period as if to out-print their declining readership. Many publications openly called for Jewish unity in defiance of the world, employing terms quite similar to those first articulated in Glatstein’s poem. Glatstein’s call for Yiddish solidarity seems to join a nationalist wave of renunciations that proclaimed that Yiddish has no place in the project of modernity and that cultural activists should come together in their

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defense of the ghetto.63 But as with the hesitation at the end of the poem, Glatstein still held on to some form of synthetic modernism despite such pronouncements. While others advocated a politics of national consolidation, Glatstein continued to defer any secure arrival in the ghetto of Jewish life, leaving open the possibility of arriving somewhere else entirely. The theme of deferral finds its most extensive exploration in Glatstein’s major prose works of this period, the Yash novels, two volumes of a proposed pseudoautobiographical trilogy recounting his 1934 trip to Poland. The books were meant to document the state of world Jewry through the eyes of an American Yiddish writer named Yash (a diminutive of Jacob/Yankev) traveling through Western Europe to his family in Eastern Europe and then back to his American home.64 The books are structured around various arrivals: the arrival in Lublin, the narrator’s birthplace, and return to the US, the narrator’s new home. That neither of these locations actually appears in the two books already speaks to a politics of waiting that motivated Glatstein as he approached this project. On the face of it, in writing novels about the politics of homecoming, Glatstein seems to follow the period’s larger trends. Narratives of immigrants returning to their countries of birth were popular in the US during in the 1930s, in both Yiddish and English. For Yiddish writers it was an opportunity to provide contemporary accounts, at times critical and at times nostalgic, of Eastern European and Soviet Jewish life for immigrant readers now long settled in the US. These were descriptions of the “ghetto life” that were meant either to reaffirm or deeply challenge the possibility of Jewish continuity. In the English-language market, the immigrant narrative was often an opportunity to reflect on one’s new American citizenship, meeting a critical need for a new reading public. Several accounts of immigrants’ visits to their homelands even became best-sellers. Louis Adamic’s memoir, The Native’s Return (1934) was a prominent model for Glatstein. The best-selling book describes Adamic’s travels (with Guggenheim funding) to Yugoslavia after nineteen years living in the US. Initially, Adamic admits his hesitation to return home, but he ultimately rallies to offer a fetishized ethnographic account of his homeland (including a photographic insert of the “natives” in traditional costume, an account of a raucous wedding, and the description of a dramatic meeting with Yugoslav royalty) while still celebrating his new American identity. The Native’s Return was the launch of Adamic’s successful career as a novelist and journalist, confirming his arrival in the US and revising, through ethnic othering, his own foreign origins. Glatstein’s journey followed a very different trajectory—without Guggenheim funding, without any royal welcome in Poland, and with his mother’s funeral instead of a wedding.65 Though perhaps meant originally to serve as a narrative of return to a new future for Yiddish in the US, the novels came to be modernist meditations on the Jewish ghetto in its international dispersion without any sense of arrival. The first novel, Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Out), focuses on the writer’s encounters with fellow travelers on his way to Eastern Europe by boat and then by

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train. In many of these conversations, the Yiddish language and the cultural codes of Jewishness serve as a shibboleth through which the narrator and his fellow Jewish passengers identify one another. Such code-sharing would seem to call into being a transnational Jewish body politic, suddenly constituted on the temporary site of the ship or train. However, beyond initial identification, the narrator hardly finds any sense of shared cultural vocabulary with his fellow Jews. The narrator comes upon a Dutch Jew concerned about the persecution of other European Jews but firmly committed to his identity as a Dutch citizen. He is proud of his assimilation into non-Jewish society, declaring Dutch Jews to be “Dutch citizens first and foremost, Jews only secondarily” (Y45, E30). The narrator’s and the Dutch Jew’s conversation is painfully circular: the narrator searches for a way to connect with his interlocutor while the Dutch Jew adamantly protects his distinctive European pedigree. The Dutch Jew even goes so far as to subtly hint to the narrator that Eastern European Jews should stay away from the Netherlands so as not to ruin the good reputation his ancestors had earned over the centuries. When the narrator provocatively asks the Dutch Jew why he does not convert to Christianity (Y49, E33) he equivocates, revealing his inability to reconcile his two national identities. The Dutch Jew and the narrator ultimately do not share a Jewish vernacular, as they turn to wholly separate redemptive horizons. The narrator’s interaction with the Dutch Jew is one of several such encounters: a Jewish boxer decries his failing boxing career while cursing “Jewish bastards” in his vulgar Americanized Yiddish; a Jew from Bogota laments his inability to find a kosher Jewish wife;66 a young Soviet Jew stands by the party line rather than answer the narrator’s call for Jewish solidarity;67 a Jewish American doctor shamelessly engages in self-aggrandizement; a disinterested Jewish artist at a café in Paris speaks nonchalantly about the death of Bialik. Such meetings do not result in any feeling of communal “ghetto” intimacy or in collective action toward some ­redemptive future. Instead, a sense of incommensurability is repeated in each conversation and characters speak past one another rather than communicate. While the narrator discovers a global Jewish network of sorts, that network is constantly fracturing.68 This fractured Jewish collectivity is mirrored by a set of equally fractured ­encounters with non-Jews, emphasizing the narrator’s struggle to find his place in a secular global network as well. The narrator’s first friend on the ship is a Danish man with the particular skill of bringing fellow travelers together and promoting the social life of the ship. The Dane’s story of his loss of Christian faith, his becoming a socialist, and his return to religion after the tragic death of his children ­creates an initial intimacy between the two. The Dane even calls the narrator ­affectionately “Gladdy,” a nickname of his own making derived from the author’s last name. The narrator refers to the Dane’s life story as “like some Hasidic tale, but with a Scandinavian twist and a whiff of salt air, joined to a death-fugue, rising and falling with the waves of the sea” (Y25, E16). Seemingly echoing Asch’s

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e­cumenicalism, their meeting on the boat enables a narrative that is both Scandinavian and Hasidic, a transcultural form of storytelling to mirror their transatlantic journey. The narrator even decides to write a poem about this moment of contact, but the result is something that “came out sounding specifically not Yiddish and too John Masefieldy” (s’iz aroysgekumen spetsifish nisht yidish un tsu Meyzfildish) (ibid.).69 The attempted merging of these two worlds brings about the erasure of Yiddish, producing a text that replaces the vernacular with a canonical, if not colonial, vocabulary. The narrator has several other long and substantive exchanges with non-Jewish passengers: an afternoon with the ship’s band in third class; a night of drinking, song, and ideology with a group of Soviet engineers and electrical technicians; a series of intimate conversations with a French teacher from Wisconsin; a heated debate with a xenophobic high school principal; train rides with liberal German and Polish nationalists. Ultimately, no matter how engaging these conversations are, they do not lead to lasting relationships. The narrator explains this sense of inevitable abandonment to a Polish traveler just moments before he arrives in Lublin: I told him how alone I felt, going home after eight, nine days of travel over sea and land—alone and abandoned. Along the way, I had engaged with all kinds of people, and now all had vanished, I would never see them again, not even in ­another twenty years. There would be no reunions. [. . .] It may be my own fault for being so self-centered, but it often seemed as if the people I met were escorting me home, and now they have abandoned me and left me to complete the journey on my own.  (Y235–6, E177)

The global network is explicitly temporary; it will have no continuity, no genealogy, and no roots. And this holds true for any kind of community that attempts to cross national boundaries, whether for the sake of a global Jewish collectivity or for any other kind of human grouping. The passengers join together on the boat for a series of engaging dialogues, which interests the narrator for a variety of aesthetic reasons. But these conversations will have no politics—a conversation may be about politics but the event of the conversation will have no praxis. In the end, the Yiddish modernist will remain alone, not able to establish a shared, collective vocabulary. The second volume, Ven Yash iz gekumen (When Yash Arrived), could have balanced the fractured temporality of world travel with a homecoming, as indicated by the title, to one’s family and birthplace in Poland. But the homecoming is conspicuously absent from the text. Though the first volume ends with the train arriving in Lublin, the second volume begins already some months later, as the narrator recovers in a nearby sanatorium just before his return trip to the US. The reunion with family and the death of the narrator’s mother are referred to only obliquely while the entire novel takes place in and around the sanatorium, a conceit that mirrors the temporary space of the boat in the first volume and echoes

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Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Just as Yash can find no lasting relationships in the sphere of geopolitics so too does Yash fail to find a home in the heart of Yiddishland. Glatstein underscores this imbalance by repeatedly drawing the narrative away from the autobiographical. The landscape of home, even in its decrepitude, demands that the narrator interweave into the text scattered personal memories, dreams, and stream-of-consciousness passages. However, these moments of self-reflection are often truncated, punctuated instead by the narrator’s account of several encounters with the voices of Eastern European Jewry, focusing primarily on two paradigmatic figures. The first interlocutor is an older man named Steinman, a figure whose ­impressive synthesis of folklore and modernity in writing, storytelling, and song falters with the character’s death in the novel’s final pages;70 the second is a young and naive prodigy brimming with literary and intellectual energy yet confined by the poverty and decline of Eastern Europe. For the narrator, the lingering vibrancy of these two figures is compromised by their being trapped in the physical and figurative sanatorium where they will never recover from their terminal diseases. Their synthetic vernaculars are threatened by an impending catastrophe that remains palpable throughout the book. Despite the narrator’s deep empathy for these characters, he never considers them comrades in the creation of a vibrant and contemporary Yiddish culture. He is not trapped in the same way that they are. While these characters remain imprisoned within a wall-less ghetto, the narrator, the hapless Yiddish writer, is able to escape and remain a world traveler, d ­ espite his being a secondary figure in the text.71 Only in the last sentences does the narrator reflect on his unique ability to return home to the US. His eyes fixate on his suitcases as he readies for departure: The pale light filtering through the window settled on the half-opened suitcases near my bed, leaving the rest of the room blurred and insubstantial. They were the starkest and most sharply defined objects in the room.  (Y304, E377)

While the majority of the novel witnesses the decay of Eastern European life, the final pages reveal that the writer has remained at a certain remove from the fates of his interlocutors. As much as he may sympathize with these figures of Yiddish creativity, his vision will return to the “most sharply defined objects in the room,” those instruments that allow for literal and figurative escape. By refusing to participate in a circumscribed totality of Yiddish creativity, the narrator is able to more easily imagine the transversal of geographic and cultural boundaries. Paradoxically, despite his dark premonitions about the foundations of Yiddish culture, Glatstein does imagine one Yiddish literary figure, the autobiographical narrator, who is able to move between and through borders—both those erected internally within Jewish discourse and those that delineate global networks. The Yiddish writer can still, potentially, escape, though it is never clear what his ultimate destination might be.

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Thus the two novels function as a strained answer to the stridency of Glatstein’s rejection of the world in “A gute nakht velt.” The retreat into vernacular collectivity remains an impossible thing: it is a site of disease and decay, scattered memory, and impossible futures. Glatstein cannot fathom Eastern Europe as an actual trajectory for his writerly self; he can only offer fractured self-expression in the midst of his travels, in suspended motion between unreachable destinations. Meanwhile, the non-Jewish global network remains a frightening specter of violence or, at best, a temporary interlocutor that readily abandons the Yiddish writer. Between these spheres, between the ghetto and the world, one can find only fleeting ­moments of connection, if any at all. Glatstein’s vernacular modernism produces partial relations that point in multiple directions without finally deciding on a single vector. Glatstein sees his writing in motion—his suitcases are packed—but it appears to have no final institutional home, or at least the moment of arrival is perpetually deferred. Glatstein’s politics of deferral stand in stark contrast to central figures of the period for whom a turn toward an explicitly nationalist (and never undecided) stance was deemed essential to the survival of Yiddish literature. Even in the face of disaster Glatstein postpones institutionalization while other Yiddish writers and cultural activists repeatedly argued for renewed institution building. It is worth lingering on one example, the writer Kadya Molodowsky, in order to better understand the radical undecidability of Glatstein’s approach in comparison with a more reactionary one. Though Molodowsky was a contemporary of Glatstein, her life and writing followed a trajectory more directly tied to Eastern Europe and thus more likely to be invested in its institutional models. After a childhood in a Belarussian shtetl, Molodowsky traveled across the war- and pogrom-torn cities of Eastern Europe during the interwar period before moving to the US only in 1935. Her literary career was launched in Warsaw where in the 1920s she became a prominent young writer and one of the few universally praised women. Molodowsky’s sense of Yiddish literature was thus intimately linked with the vibrancy (and poverty) of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and when Warsaw was still an undisputed center of Yiddish culture. This stands in contrast to Glatstein’s literary upbringing in New York’s mélange of immigrant cultures. Upon moving to the US in order to flee the imminent dangers that had ­encroached upon Poland, Molodowsky repeatedly sought to reproduce in some way the Yiddishland that had helped form her literary consciousness. With her founding of the literary journal Svive in 1943, Molodowsky announced that “a literature needs to be sovereign, it needs to live under its own light.”72 In the new journal’s opening pages Molodowsky argues that rather than surrender to disaster and assimilation and rather than be beholden to the generosity of other languages and cultures, Yiddish literature should work towards its own Jewish self-interest. Such a sentiment was clearly in solidarity with Glatstein’s renewed attention to the

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Jewish ghetto. In the opening essay Molodowsky even echoes Glatstein’s ­previous arguments in Inzikh by declaring that “when a literature starts shifting its position and cozying up to institutions then the people will run away from it.”73 By “institutions” Molodowsky means the kind of special pleading for charity that Yiddish writers were compelled to perform, either in compliance with non-Jewish literary powers or in having to rely on the whims of donors in order to publish their work. Like Glatstein, Molodowsky implores Yiddish writers to devote themselves wholly and entirely to their craft, excavating the language for its own sake rather than submit to external demands. Molodowsky contends that the true measure of Yiddish writing is to be found in its own vernacular achievement. However, by emphasizing the need for cultural “sovereignty,” Molodowsky ­departs from Glatstein’s more diffused line of thinking by proposing a process of institutionalization that would rival and counteract the institutions that threaten Yiddish. Molodowsky longs for an independent Yiddish literature with its own institutional coherence, bemoaning the absence of “a tribunal where a work’s value can be judged” and complaining of the lack Yiddish publishing houses for proper book circulation.74 In opposition to Glatstein’s lonely figure caught between incoherent worlds, Molodowsky envisions a front line of prophetic, even biblical figures who create, by force of their writing, a renewed reshus horabim, a united Jewish public sphere. The “svive” (environment or even ecology) she conjures in the title of the journal is not deferred as an impossible, self-destructive goal but rather presented as the ethical obligation of Yiddish writers. Molodowsky insists that Yiddish writers come together to build a public institution in and for Yiddish in order to collectively battle against cultural fragmentation. In a subsequent essay she asserts that the task of the writer is to describe the world “as it is or how he wants it to look.”75 The Yiddish writer must portray Yiddish culture as it is but is also obligated to write Yiddish out of its decline. That the position from which a Yiddish writer would make this forceful act was “hefker” (abandoned, ownerless), that Yiddish in the US was under assault was a condition Molodowsky was well aware of.76 By exhorting writers toward seizing Yiddish sovereignty in the face of crisis she calls for more robust, powerful acts of institutionalization. Unsurprisingly, Molodowsky’s models for public-facing literature were quite similar to Glatstein’s canon of world-writers. In these essays she refers to a collection of diverse figures—from Heine and Pushkin to Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim)—and praises their readiness to seek out conflict with their audiences, performing the task of prophetic castigation that risks banishment but also aims to fortify the collective. A non-Jewish writer like Pushkin is imagined to be the equal of contemporary Yiddish writers, not a competitor to be emulated. As a sovereign entity, Yiddish literature, in Molodowsky’s mind, has no reason to wait for the permission of some external legislative body or even for the permission of its readers. The opposite: this was a time to come with prophetic fury to bring about a new renaissance, against all odds and despite cultural contingencies.

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Echoing a Russian paradigm for national art, Molodowsky followed a path taken by dominant Hebrew writers of the period, many of whom were Molodowsky’s friends and translators (Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky). Eschewing Glatstein’s hesitations and deferrals, Molodowsky argues for a masculinist and militant position, a sharp departure from the gendered expectations often attached to her writing.77 Molodowsky sought to bring this new public sphere into being not only through the founding of the journal but also through her writing, notably in her 1941–2 novel Fun Lublin biz Nyu York: togbukh fun Rivke Zilberg (From Lublin to New York: The Diary of Rivkah Zilberg), which can be seen as a kind of answer to Glatstein’s unfinished trilogy. Serialized in the Morgn-zhurnal newspaper and then self-published as a book, the novel presents the first-person account of a young refugee’s trials of acculturation upon arrival in the US in the late 1930s. Molodowsky enacts the American “homecoming” left incomplete in Glatstein’s novels. To be sure, like Glatstein, Molodowsky still offers a searing critique of contemporary Jewish American culture, viciously parodying the frivolousness of young people who have lost their connection to any Jewish tradition, most notably in their forgotten or mangled Yiddish peppered with American slang. In contrast, the diarywriter, the titular Rivke, represents an alternative model, a character deeply grounded in the Lublin of her childhood, who mourns its current destruction and ultimately refuses to give in to the cheap pleasures of her new American life. Her Yiddish speech is tinged by new American realities, but she still holds on to her roots both linguistically and emotionally: her home is still Lublin even if she now finds herself in New York. “In an instant I’m more in Lublin than in New York,” she reports towards the end of the novel, even as she becomes engaged to one of her much-too-American suitors.78 This line of thinking, being both here and elsewhere, runs parallel to Molodowsky’s argument for a Yiddish literature that would reflect the realities of Jewish life in the US without abandoning national parameters. Despite its being “fargoyisht,” rendered “gentile” in some way, Jewish life in America still constituted, for Molodowsky, a sliver of Yiddishland that could be treated as continuous with the shtetl universe of Eastern Europe.79 The loss of the organic unity of one’s homeland is not to be ignored, but Molodowsky also wants to preserve the possibility of a Lublin appearing somehow in New York. In this way, Molodowsky tethers Yiddish writing, as Asch did before her, to the Jewish street, no matter how compromised that space might be. Molodowsky’s approach encapsulates the wave of reactionary nationalist sentiment among Yiddish writers of the 1930s and ’40s in a way that contrasts deeply with Glatstein’s placelessness and acts of deferral. To be sure, Molodowsky’s pres­ ent­ism and prophetic calls to action were more constructive than collective ­despair and nostalgia (or Bashevis’s insistence on anachronism, to be explored in the next chapter), and thus her reactionary stance was perhaps less bellicose than others. After all, Svive was meant to be a forum for contemporary literary debate

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rather than a gathering for mourning, lament, and acrimonious indictment. Consider the backlash in other publications against Asch’s novels about Christianity, in which a critic like Chaim Lieberman, who had recently returned to religious observance, denounced Asch as no less than a traitor to his people. Molodowsky’s writing and editorial work was more moderate in its demand for national unity, though no less serious in asserting the obligations of the Yiddish writer to Yiddish sovereignty. The problem with Molodowsky’s stance, as with the entire reactionary wave, is that investment in institutional legitimacy and cultural militancy reproduces the logic of Euro-American hierarchies. Molodowsky’s envisioned Yiddishland would ultimately have to seek acknowledgment for its sovereignty from the family of European nations. Glatstein certainly shared most if not all of Molodowsky’s concerns, and would even go on to support many of Molodowsky’s endeavors. Glatstein was indeed an active member of the Svive group, as an editor and as a frequent contributor. But he was never able to embrace Molodowsky’s capacity for institution-building with the same confidence. Glatstein’s attraction to vernacular fragmentation prevented him from fully endorsing an unequivocal call for Yiddish sovereignty, preferring the more complex model of the deferred ghetto over any prophetic vocation. Moreover, the world still figured not as a model to be rejected but as specter of some kind of literary futurity, even for the lonely Yiddish writer.

An Invitation to a World Literature To-Come What does it mean then to still make a claim, in suspended motion, to the status of a “world-writer”? In rejecting the institution of world literature and deferring arrival in some essentialized Jewish ghetto, Glatstein would seem to hover in an ambivalent state, launching a reactionary defense of Yiddish while still distancing himself from its apparent ruin. How can this space, seemingly marginal in the least constructive of ways, be the site of worldliness? What could be the right kind of obstetrics that would birth the Yiddish writer onto the global stage? It is only Glatstein’s parodic commentary, from his 1935 essay, that points to any ­possible answer: I imagine a great Yiddish writer somewhere in Minsk, Pinsk, Lodz, Lublin, or Chelm, and a great world-sage and world-translator in the middle of the crater of the Popocatépetl. Between the two there would be no contact except for “heart vibrations,” and suddenly the world-translator would knock on the low door of the lonely writer, bow his gentile, over-six-feet-tall figure, take off his top hat and fall to his feet: “Oh, greatest of great Israelite authors! The world awaits your Yiddish word!” With tears of joy the writer would fall into the arms of the worldtranslator and they would both sing “Oyd loy ovdo tikvoseynu,” our hope has not yet been lost.80

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For Glatstein, becoming a world-writer does not mean following a global trajectory. The Yiddish world-writer need not travel to one of the centers of transnational literary exchange—New York, London, Paris, or Moscow; better he should stay in Lublin, Glatstein’s hometown, or Chelm, the city of fools in Jewish folklore. The world-translator for his part can be found in Popocatépetl, a volcano in another global margin, Mexico. In lieu of an international exchange of letters fostered by a global network, their encounter begins mystically, and comically, through “heart vibrations.” Thereafter, rather than the Yiddish writer begging to be translated, it is the translator who makes pilgrimage to Eastern Europe, as if to a hidden saint. When the two finally meet, no translation actually takes place. The “goyish” figure takes off his top hat and exclaims that the world awaits the writer’s Yiddish word. If the Yiddish writer is going to appear on the world stage, he will speak in his own language rather than have it translated away. Their meeting is a celebration of Jewish languages: the two embrace and together sing in Hebrew “Oyd loy ovdo tikvoseynu,” a line from what was at the time a Zionist hymn, but which later would become the national anthem of the state of Israel. The recourse to Hebrew, with its messianic overtones, is comedic, as if the arrival of Yiddish on the world stage would be a sign of the world’s imminent redemption. Yiddish world-writing will be born out of a two-thousand-year-old hope that defies the racialized ­hierarchies of the “goyim” and imagines a vernacular performance beyond the reach of any institutional authority. In this passage, Glatstein proposes a deferred world literature, in which the very untranslatability of a text determines its place on the world stage. In this fantasy he rejects conventional translation: when translation remains an impossibility, or at the most contained within a Hebrew-Yiddish binary, then one is closer to a truly valuable literary object. As a result, for Glatstein world literature as a concept is something that needs to be perpetually deferred rather than mapped, canonized, and quantified into various periods or distinct trends. It is not an institution. Literature as a practice is beholden to a language’s most intimate and untranslatable articulations. Translation of such intimacies begins from a volcano, signaling the volatility and violence of the process. If translation is to happen at all its goal should be to give voice to the source language itself beyond any concern for legibility or communicability. In this way, translation is not a mechanical skill or the imposition of a foreign architecture of knowledge. Translation is above all a bowing—an invitation to wait for a language to speak. Glatstein’s method of translation seems to announce: come wait beside the text until we are able to hear and understand it. More than ambivalence or a constant tension between contradictory modes of writing, this passage recalls the deferred arrivals of Yidishtaytshn, “A gute nakht,” and the Yash novels. By turning translation into an invitation, Glatstein focuses on the moment in which the vernacular is not yet consumed by the homogeneity of globalization and before it is defensively sequestered within a hermetically sealed universe. Navigating between vernacular erasure and global compromise, Glatstein gestures toward an unanticipated world literature to-come:

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The time is not yet right for forcing on the world a great Jewish writer who writes in Yiddish. One thing is clear to me: the world will not be taken by force. The Jewish world-writer will actually arrive unexpectedly from those Yiddish-writing cadres that have toiled and labored entirely for Yiddish literature, without any other expectations.81

There is a confidence in Glatstein’s pronouncement that defies any sense of tragic uncertainty. For Glatstein, Yiddish writing is always prepared to take up its worldly value, regardless of its place within a circulatory network, in the US or abroad. In this way, Glatstein guards himself from potentially abandoning the vernacular in order to grovel before the translator and his institutional authority. Instead, Glatstein clings to an unanticipated futurity, in which Yiddish writers would be embraced on their own terms and in their own language. Glatstein’s messianic world literature echoes Jacques Derrida’s concept of “l’avenir,” an unpredictable “to-come” distinct from the knowable and calculable future.82 For Glatstein, as for Derrida, there is something inadequate about the measures and systems of literary knowledge that would limit creativity to its decipherable boundaries or enact, by force, its language hierarchies. In its illegibility within normative structures Yiddish already defies such categorization, and Glatstein’s work only heightens such illegibility by adding on top of everything his idiosyncratic and synthetic Yiddish to-come, his yidishtaytshn. Glatstein presents a model whose value lies in its conscious insistence on the impossibilities that circumscribe the literary act, underscoring the limitations of literature’s empires and its ghettos. The monolingual paradigms of Asch on the one hand and Molodowsky on the other are countered by a firm critique of normalizing global forces and a simultaneous evasion of fetishized marginality. To be sure, Glatstein’s insistence on a world literature to-come had unfortunate consequences. Despite being a central figure in Yiddish letters he had to watch as Asch and then Bashevis were given the stage to speak on behalf of Yiddish culture for the world. The work that Glatstein and his colleagues produced in the 1930s—some of the most innovative in the history of Yiddish literature and US modernism83— circulated almost entirely among an elite group of American Yiddish intellectuals and in satellite communities in Eastern Europe and South America. During the postwar period, Glatstein made more explicit overtures to the “ghetto,” joining Molodowsky and others by focusing much of his literary efforts on memorialization, theological protest, and then consolation while simplifying certain aspects of his prosody in order to produce a more national, rather than personal, poetic voice.84 From this reactionary position, Glatstein continued to harangue those Jewish writers who sought out the security of translation and the institution of world literature. For instance, in a rare article published in English, Glatstein lashed out at Bashevis for his “naked sadism,” his “distasteful blend of superstition and shoddy mysticism” aimed at the non-Jewish English-language reader.85 Glatstein saw Bashevis’s orientation toward the institution of world literature, to be examined closely in the next chapter, as a betrayal of the more authentic act of comfort and

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synthesis desperately needed by Yiddish readers. Similarly, he saw new Jewish writers in English like Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth as rootless and ultimately forgettable.86 It is this reactionary strand in his work that has led to Glatstein being portrayed as the ultimate bitter Yiddish poet. Thus, the Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, in her English-language short story “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” creates a less than flattering portrait of Glatstein and his desperate competition with a figure reminiscent of Bashevis. In the story, the lonely Yiddish poet, Edelstein, is pitted against the successful Yiddish writer Ostrover: “for Edelshtein Western Civilization was a sore point,”87 whereas Osterover’s “fame was American, national, international. They considered him a ‘modern.’ Ostrover was free of the prison of Yiddish! Out, out—he had burst out, he was in the world of reality.”88 Ozick sets up a dichotomy between the fiercely protective, proud, and yet ghettoized Yiddish poet and the “worldwide industry” of the translated Yiddish storyteller who embraces the demands of the American literary establishment and the institution of world literature. GlatsteinEdelshtein’s commitment to authentic Jewish speech rooted in Jewish history, ­despite the Yiddish poet’s impotence, becomes part of Ozick’s campaign for a “New Yiddish.”89 In the eyes of Ozick, Glatstein figures as a postwar survivalist railing against the vagaries of Jewish American acculturation.90 Ozick’s convenient binary allows her to offer her own Jewishly rooted writing as a redemptive answer to Glatstein’s decline. The marginalization of the Yiddish writer is actually beneficial for those who claim to take their place. Ozick’s approach though obfuscates the certainty with which Glatstein ­described his own paradoxically unstable writerly position. In the postwar period, despite his increasingly reactionary stance, Glatstein would continue to announce the world-potential of Yiddish writing: “There are no poets in the entire world more important than those in Yiddish poetry. To the extent that I am familiar with world poetry, Yiddish poetry has written one of the most important chapters.”91 He did not hesitate to call Yiddish a “world-language.”92 His views on translation softened during this period, not because he believed in a potential market for Yiddish, but because he was certain that Yiddish would be essential to any new form of Jewish creativity in non-Jewish languages.93 To make such an argument, without hesitation, in the 1950s, is to speak beyond networks of circulation and demand that literary value be measured by a different scale of the universal. One of the more often-quoted passages that would seem to contradict such a conclusion is this anecdote reported by Irving Howe: Yet he [Glatstein] too knew the realities well enough, once saying with a sardonic smile to the author of this book, “What does it mean to be a poet of an abandoned culture? It means that I have to be aware of Auden but Auden need never have heard of me.”94

On first glance, this seems to be a confirmation of Glatstein’s marginality, as Glatstein admits that his own writing must evince a connection with the canonical

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Anglo-American poet, even if his own presence within a US canon would be ­negligible if not non-existent. Yet at the same time the statement produces an equivalence between the two writers, implying a deferred future in which Auden would indeed come to know and recognize Glatstein’s literary achievements. One could also read this passage as Glatstein’s acknowledgement of his privileged position: Auden is a poet that needs to be heard, who is beholden to various institutional demands on his work, whereas Glatstein’s literary value begins precisely in his exemption from such limiting structures. The statement signals, on the one hand, Glatstein’s implication within a literary institution—he certainly feels compelled to recognize Auden’s value. On the other hand, Glatstein is permitted a secondary evasive maneuver—no one holds Glatstein accountable to the demands of the institution of world literature. The same can be said about Glatstein’s ­relationship to Jewish typologies: to be a Yiddish writer is to be inextricably linked to Jewish cultural traditions; yet, at the same time the fact that Yiddish culture has been “abandoned” gives Glatstein tremendous freedom to write beyond stereotypes toward a new typology of Yiddish. Glatstein’s position—moving between marginality and implication within literary hierarchies of US, Jewish, and world literatures—is in many ways parallel to other forms of ethnic writing. For instance, Asian American writers, as Josephine Nock-Hee Park has argued, write within and against US modernism, including its Orientalist appropriations. At the same time, Asian American writers can make use of “transpacific” alliances that link their work to literary traditions, networks, and movements that are both contemporary and long past, both “Eastern” and “Western,” here and elsewhere.95 What distinguishes Glatstein and other Yiddish writers from these ethnic positions is the condition of abandonment. That is, the Asian American writer can potentially write toward an acknowledged and active network that exists in multiple languages across multiple continents and governmental bodies; there is a circulatory potential and a desire, at least partially, for cultural coherence within a transnational network. In Glatstein’s case, in contrast, that network is explicitly truncated if not absent entirely—there is no Jewish body politic within which the Yiddish writer can be fully at home. In writing against and in the wake of disaster, the messianic trappings of Glatstein’s literary project become more pronounced. Following the loss of vernacular grounding, the Yiddish writer is forced to look for a literary collectivity that would be found after the network, elsewhere from the globe. Glatstein gestures toward a “worldly” horizon even as his work becomes less and less legible within any kind of network. Glatstein’s model for a world literature to-come, which begins and remains inside the ghetto of vernacular discourse, circumnavigates institutional demands and defers adherence to the centers of global and imperial power. To be sure, the ghetto is hardly a hermetically sealed space. The ghetto is potentially a site of selferasure where one encounters a constantly fracturing Jewish body politic. Moreover, its walls are constantly traversed by the unavoidable desire for transcultural exchange.96 Coming to terms with this desire is how Glatstein begins to

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imagine a messianic futurity, though it remains unnamable and resistant to ­systematization. Yiddish’s arrival in the world is imminent yet unexpected. In this way, Glatstein represents an important challenge to current models of both US literature and world literature: Glatstein is both of the US literary landscape yet he cannot imagine any secure arrival within its territory; Glatstein insists on the worldliness of his writing yet refuses the rhetorical codes of the institution of world literature. In imagining a world literature to-come Glatstein appears to join in the cosmopolitan longings that are typical of global modernism. Yet, parallel with other vernacular modernisms, Glatstein’s ghetto does not fully line up with utopian collectivities and instead announces its repeated disjunction. Both heard and unheard, Glatstein and other vernacular modernists mark the terrain of an impossible future, in and beyond the margins.

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Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature The Humble Language of Us All Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists—rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.1

So ends Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel lecture, delivered December 8, 1978, to a captive audience in Stockholm. Bashevis2 understandably concludes that the award is not only a recognition of his literary achievements but also a belated ­appreciation of all of Yiddish culture.3 One would expect then for his lecture to be plaintive, given the decline of Yiddish speakers following the Holocaust and the linguistic assimilation of Ashkenazi Jews dispersed across the globe. But Bashevis refuses to eulogize Yiddish in his lecture and even tries to avoid notes of sentimentality and nostalgia. His praise for the language in these concluding lines is ­optimistic and even future-oriented. Bashevis projects a universal horizon for Yiddish, derived from its mystical past and somehow escaping its decaying present. Bashevis’s remarks are strangely devoid of any actual accounting for the history of Yiddish and Yiddish literature. Bashevis effectively portrays himself as the last Yiddish writer and the language becomes his gift to the world. For Bashevis, Yiddish is the language of “martyrs and saints, dreamers and Cabalists.” ­The Christian undertones of “martyrs and saints,” the summary of all of modern ­secular Yiddish culture under the category of “dreamers,” and the simplification of all Jewish spirituality as kabbalah conveniently lines up with the Eastern Europe depicted in Bashevis’s own fiction. Such a characterization also departs significantly from the efforts of his fellow Yiddish writers, some of whom were very much alive; Bashevis was not the last Yiddish writer. Still, throughout his career Bashevis ­repeatedly declared his estrangement from any Yiddish literary collective, whose adherents, he claimed, followed a tradition marred by sentimentality and socialism.4 In interviews and public engagements, Bashevis made himself out Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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to be the sole heir to a nationally rooted folksy pessimism and mysticism, a ­self-presentation that privileged devotion to craft and language (or languages) over the demands of any ideology or collective identity. He would more often reference canonical figures of the Western canon than acknowledge any debt to previous or contemporary Yiddish writers. Though his work is deeply informed by Sholem Aleichem’s monologue, Bashevis would emphasize instead the influence of Baruch Spinoza, Charles Baudelaire, and August Strindberg.5 Among the few Yiddish ­writers that he would mention were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav and his brother I. J. Singer.6 While such stark isolationism was clearly a misrepresentation, this carefully curated literary pedigree imbued his work with a certain independence from a vernacular t­ radition and announced a concatenation with broader, universal categories.7 One could attribute the universalizing gesture of Bashevis’s 1978 lecture to the banality of the Nobel Prize speech genre, in which the winner feels compelled to mirror the rhetoric of the institution that has just honored (and paid) him. Or, read in a different vein, Bashevis’s universal figuration of Yiddish is an attempt to bolster his status as the language’s lone representative in the institution of world literature. It is Bashevis alone, as reactionary yet transcendent artist, who can save Yiddish from itself and secure its survival and privileged place in the hallowed halls of the universal library.8 Born at the turn of the century in Poland, coming of age in interwar Warsaw and interwar New York, reaching the pinnacles of US and world literature in the postwar and post-Holocaust era, Bashevis can be c­ onsidered the success story of Yiddish literature. After his death, Bashevis’s translated short stories were republished in three volumes in the prestigious Library of America series; at the time of their publication in 2004, Bashevis was the only “American” author to receive such an honor who did not write originally in English. Though his popularity has fluctuated over the past fifty years, his literary reputation has undoubtedly become global—from admiration in China to reappraisals in Poland.9 To the chagrin of many of his fellow Yiddish writers, Bashevis has become a fixture in US and global literary institutions. This market-driven version of Bashevis and his work certainly mirrors the ­fantasy of his Nobel lecture, and throughout his career Bashevis would explicitly write in ways meant to meet the demands, sometimes quite straightforwardly, of the institution of world literature. But this strategy of universalization represents only one strand in Bashevis’s work. When Bashevis imagines Yiddish as a “figurative” thing to be revealed “to the eyes of the world” rather than to a disavowed Yiddish literary tradition, he articulates both a desire for the world and the limits of that desire. The claim that Yiddish is “the wise and humble language of us all” reflects a crisis of ownership: only if Yiddish can be entirely Bashevis’s property can he then convey its treasures, translated under his authority, to a vague yet powerful global literary institution. Bashevis would come to realize that such e­ xclusive ownership is impossible and that unwieldy vernacular traces unsettle his translational

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project. This chapter tracks Bashevis’s efforts—and ­failures—throughout his career to embed Yiddish within the universal, through the confines of US and world literatures. In exploring a double bind between Euro-American codes of literary value and vernacular belonging, I argue that Bashevis produced a ghost world literature in which his global ambitions coexist with Yiddish specters that refuse to be universalized. After examining Bashevis’s early literary sensibilities in Poland and then his first struggles in the US, this chapter focuses on a series of short stories, written and published in Yiddish and in English in the ’60s and ’70s, in which Bashevis encounters the ghosts hovering at the foundation of his work. Hunchback demons in Miami Beach, Holocaust survivors in Montreal, and the living dead on the Lower East Side come together to announce the uncertainty of the act of translation and unleash forces—linguistic or otherwise—that haunt the text in its global circulation.

Globus: A European Model Bashevis’s first literary works came out of his initial identification with a European literary tradition. Bashevis was born into both a rabbinic family—Hasidic on his father’s side and misnagdic on his mother’s side—and a literary one. His two older siblings (I. J. Singer and Esther Kreitman) abandoned Jewish traditions to become important Yiddish writers, and the young redheaded Yitskhok soon joined their efforts to make Yiddish into the language of a modern European culture. When Bashevis first started writing in Warsaw of the 1920s, he produced short stories that were in line with the realism of writers like Knut Hamsun, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. These authors were central to the literary innovations introduced by Yiddish writers just a half generation older than Bashevis. His brother, I. M. Weissenberg, Joseph Opatoshu, Oyzer Warshawski, A. M. Fuks, early David Bergelson, and Yoshue Perle would aim to capture everyday life through a stylized but nominally objective naturalism.10 The internationally circulated realists were also important for other non-Jewish Eastern European literary circles, including the Polish Positivist movement which had a big impact on Bashevis’s literary apprenticeship.11 Following this naturalist model, Bashevis’s first short stories were stark portraits of the lower classes of Jewish society, highlighting the simultaneous failures of traditional Jewish life and the impossibilities of the urban present. These texts were narrated without the comfort of the ironic folksy storyteller of earlier Yiddish fiction, a narrator meant to inspire collective laughter and soften inevitable tragedy.12 Bashevis and his fellow Yiddish realists portrayed contemporary Jewish life in all of its brutality. For example, “Shamay Vayts” (1929) gives an account of the title character’s move to Warsaw after leaving his small shtetl behind.13 Shamay’s dilapidated furniture, his disheveled wife, and his own pepper-black beard are

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­ escribed in great detail as he attempts to gain a foothold in the publishing industry d of Warsaw. There is no narrative redemption for this greedy publisher of trashy literature; his financial and cultural assimilation results in the death of his pious wife while he remains grotesquely indifferent. The short story is relayed by an ­objective narrator whose descriptions (often in long list-like passages) are overloaded and overdetermined, a tendency of naturalism in which the writer attempts to capture the total moral depravity and spiritual poverty of urban life.14 Many of Bashevis’s other stories from this period similarly describe the animalistic and ­instinctual behavior of characters who battle the inadequacy of religious tradition while failing to meet the challenges of modernity.15 Bashevis’s naturalism was in stark contrast to what he perceived to be the ­prevailing modes of Yiddish literature during the interwar period. In essays from the 1920s Bashevis bemoans what he considered the dominant streams in Yiddish literature—those under the influence of the canonized klasiker of the previous generation (S.Y. Abramovitsh, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem) and those radical modernists who he felt were too beholden to aesthetic fads, fashionable ideologies, and the vagaries of political praxis.16 Though he considered many of these figures—both past and present—to be necessary to the development of Yiddish literature, he found their writing severely limited by its attachment to the sentimental and political whims of the masses rather than to the demands of realism as a purely aesthetic category. Eschewing the folkloric narrators of the klasikers, disdaining Asch’s romantic idealism, and rejecting new forms of modernist expressionism, psychological realism, and what would come to be known as socialist realism, Bashevis placed emphasis instead on meticulous description and dialogue.17 Thus Bashevis initially sought to link his writing with an international coterie of realists; his writing was not Yiddish literature or even Polish literature but part of a normative world literature. In his essay “Verter oder bilder” from 1927, Bashevis’s prime model for realist dialogue, devoid of lyrical impressionism, is Dostoevsky and not Peretz, the supposed Yiddish master of narrative polyphony.18 Though later in life Bashevis would portray this period as one of lonely apprenticeship, Bashevis found kindred spirits not only in his brother’s generation but also among his contemporaries as a member of the Yiddish PEN club and as a regular at the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists (Yidish literatn un zhurnalistnfareyn).19 He formed a particularly strong alliance with Arn Zeitlin with whom he collaborated to create the journal Globus. The name of the journal already speaks to the kind of scale to which the editors imagined Yiddish literature needed to aspire: nothing less than a global standard to ensure that Yiddish literature could compete among other nations at the table of world literature. To motivate their readers, Zeitlin and Bashevis reviewed current and past trends in European and world literature while consistently criticizing the radical modernism of the writers who sat just a few tables down from them at the club.20 Bashevis supported this

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approach (and supported himself financially) by translating recent works of world literature into Yiddish, including texts by Gabriele d’Annunzio, Karin Michaelis, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, and Knut Hamsun.21 Describing the founding of Globus, Bashevis later recalled that it “didn’t take us long to realize that what prevailed in Yiddish held true in all the world literatures, too.”22 This quote, in typical Bashevis fashion, portrays the editorial work as passive, as if universal achievement would occur of its own accord. To the contrary, during this period Bashevis espoused a deliberate and prescriptive literary ideology. Canonical European models of world literature figured for Bashevis as normative, institutional limits of literary production, a set of rules that Yiddish writers should adhere to if they wished to produce anything of aesthetic value. Bashevis relies on the same monolingual paradigm that Asch did, in which local, vernacular content is transformed, through an encounter with European form, into a universal literary object. Echoing the laws of compromise described by Franco Moretti, Bashevis advocated for a kind of world-writing that would situate Yiddish within a European family of literatures. Bashevis differs from Asch though in that he does not subscribe to a romantic redemptive project in which Judaism and Jewish ­languages have foundational roles. Bashevis wholly subordinates Yiddish literature to European norms, performing Jewish difference without necessarily privileging it. Bashevis’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray, 1935) is arguably the culmination of this approach, a work architectonically constructed to conform to European conventions while displaying overtly Jewish trappings. At first glance, the novel, which was serialized in Globus, seems to defy conventional realism in certain ways: the novel’s depiction of a shtetl’s fervor in reaction to the Sabbatean movement could easily be read as an allegorical attack on the “false messiahs” of modernism and radical political movements;23 the text pays close attention to ­supernatural and dark mystical forces behind characters’ actions, rather than ­psychological ones. However, all of these allegorical, fantastical, and folkloric ­elements are rendered within the strict confines of a historical novel about ­seventeenth-century Eastern Europe. The final chapters, written in the style of a religious chapbook (a mayse-bikhl), ground the text in Jewish literary tropes of the seventeenth century but are also evidence of the book’s mimetic aspirations. The goal was to produce a wholly contained Yiddish totality, fully translating the ­ambiguities, i­ ronies, and fragmentations of the Jewish national body into the c­ onfines of the European novel. The ability to reproduce the totality of Eastern European Jewish experience, in all of its ethnographic detail but without fetishization or nostalgia, could present Yiddish literature as equal in literary prestige to its European counterparts. That Bashevis chose a traumatic and controversial subject—the crisis in Jewish life following the Chmelnitsky massacres that exposed the failures and even sexual violence of Jewish messianic thinking, explicitly without any r­ edemptive

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­ orizon—serves to underscore his attempt to construct an uncompromising h realist vision of Jewish life rather than one that would exoticize it. In his introduction to the novel, Zeitlin labeled the text “a splendid anachronism,” noting the challenge of writing a novel of Jewish experience that would comply with European norms.24 Der Sotn in Goray can be considered the fulfillment of Zeitlin’s exhortation that “a literature must have its own way of reaching the world, resonating with the world. The world doesn’t need just simply art in Yiddish. To what end does one translate art, what is translation in the first place? If you give Jewish art to the mother world, you give what you’ve got!”25 In its synthesis between Jewish and non-Jewish forms, Der Sotn in Goray ­appeared to be the best way for Yiddish literature to participate in the institution of world literature. This participation though was almost entirely one-sided. No matter how adamantly Bashevis and his colleagues demanded that Yiddish literature adhere to European standards, their work still only circulated among Yiddish-speaking ­audiences and did not achieve the circulation and recognition that Asch received, especially in Poland. This was due in part to ambiguous and then strained relations with an interwar Polish literary establishment caught between internationalism, nationalism, and antisemitism. Jewish writers in Poland during the ’20s and ’30s— dispersed between at least three languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish) and several political and cultural formations—experienced instances of both acceptance and rejection, confrontation and withdrawal, when seeking out some kind of relationship with non-Jewish Polish literary institutions.26 Some, like Asch, put hope in the creation of a Yiddish PEN club, but this initiative was met with indifference and then hostility by their Polish counterparts.27 European markets, while receptive to the work of Asch, were not open to many other Yiddish writers. Not surprisingly, Bashevis’s work was not translated during this period and he did not participate in PEN conferences. He remained a respected but little-known Yiddish writer. In this early period, Bashevis advocated for the universality of European forms, encouraging, unknowingly perhaps, a politics of mimicry that, rather than push Yiddish onto the center stage, allowed for its erasure into the margins of Europe. This stands in contrast to Asch’s approach, which sought out maximum legibility and visibility, using translation as both technique and ideology. Without the institutional capital that Asch tirelessly collected, Bashevis’s early work—­ despite its translational stance, belief in Yiddish totality, and insistence on institutional compliance—did not yield any normative literary achievement. Bashevis’s time in Poland closed with an ironic symbol of this self-erasure: Der Sotn in Goray was the first publication of the Yiddish PEN club in Warsaw and was seen as a triumph and a new model for Yiddish fiction in Eastern Europe. Even so, Bashevis was already in the US, by invitation of his older brother, when it was printed in 1935.

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Demonic Realism and the Politics of Marginality Once Bashevis encountered the reality of Jewish life in the US, his ability to imagine a Yiddish totality, so essential to the European monolingual paradigm he had subscribed to, wavered significantly. The New York he found upon his arrival was hardly linguistically or demographically uniform in the ways Bashevis had portrayed Jewish space in his gritty Warsaw realism and historical fiction. The cultural and linguistic assimilation of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the US was swift and devastating. Bashevis summed up his sense of the future of Yiddish in the US in 1943 when he declared that a “language’s decline first becomes evident when it ceases to serve all purposes and is consigned to specialized functions.”28 If previously Bashevis saw the possibility of cultural cohesion as the condition for Yiddish participation in the institution of world literature, what could a Yiddish writer now produce in the fractured linguistic landscape of the US? After initial hesitations, Bashevis’s answer in the late 1930s and 1940s was similar to his fellow Yiddish writers: a closing of the ranks in service of a Yiddish culture produced exclusively for Yiddish speakers. When he arrived, he joined a dwindling yet active group of Yiddish cultural professionals, and his brother even secured him a spot in Abraham Cahan’s stable of novelists for the Forverts. But Bashevis did not know how to write for the Yiddish mass reader in the US, whose post-immigration interests were necessarily different than his Warsaw readers. According to Chone Shmeruk, Bashevis had suggested to Cahan the topic of his first serialized novel, the life of the false messiah Jacob Frank, on a whim. When Cahan took interest and even paid him an advance, Bashevis had to quickly retreat to the New York Public library to actually do the research required to be able to write the novel, which meanwhile was already being advertised in the newspaper.29 Bashevis soon despaired over the poor quality of the work, later attributing his failure to his longing for his Warsaw home.30 After a number of years writing a regular column aggregating and translating material from English-language magazines, Bashevis struggled to find a way to meet the needs of the unknowable mass reader yet still preserve the possibility of a Yiddish totality. Rather than mirror a fractured culture with a fractured literary style, as Molodowsky had argued during this same period, Bashevis proposed a radical (yet still reactionary) shift in his writing and in Yiddish literature more generally. In a series of essays written in the 1940s, Bashevis argued for an anachronistic devotion to a literature of the past that avoided both translation into English and the pitfalls of conservation and nostalgia. Paradoxically, the shift to the deep past allowed for a certain continuity in Bashevis’s writing: an anachronistic position allowed Bashevis to continue his vehement critique of Yiddish modernism and its presentist concerns while still rejecting Yiddish sentimentality. Citing the devastations of Eastern Europe and acculturation in the US, Bashevis asserted that the “dream of secular [veltlekh] Jewish culture . . . had played itself out” and damned those artists and

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a­ ctivists that still clung to utopian and populist ideals, from Asch’s romanticism to the continued socialism and Stalinism on the Yiddish street.31 This also meant a refusal to answer Molodowsky’s demand for prophetic action to save Yiddish literary sovereignty. In 1943, in a survey of Yiddish literature in Poland that was both critique and eulogy, Bashevis dismissed Yiddish modernism as “godly without a god, worldly without a world,” and referred to Yiddish nostalgia as merely an “aftergrowth of a great and rich culture.”32 Bashevis further argued for the complete abandonment of contemporary experience and the needs of contemporary readers for a retrospective model of Yiddish literary creativity that would be “bound to the past.”33 To avoid the trap of romanticism, Bashevis demanded that the Yiddish past be described in mythically resonant terms rather than nostalgic ones, its narrative strategy folkloric rather than historical, autobiographical, or even strictly realist. Bending the norms of European realism he had praised only a few years earlier, Bashevis developed during the 1940s what David Roskies has called his “demonic realism.”34 Spurning the genre of the novel, the currency of literary value in the institution of world literature and in the Yiddish press, Bashevis began to write short stories narrated by Jewish demons, placing Yiddish vernacularity at the center of his literary project. In the carnivalesque ventriloquisms of “Zeidlus the Pope,” “The Unseen,” “The Destruction of Kreshev,” “From the Diary of One Not Born,” and “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” Bashevis allows the voices of a fantastical past to speak in a rich, idiomatic, intertextual, and playfully transgressive Yiddish.35 For Bashevis, these figures had a vivaciousness lacking in his American reality: they are at home in an erotically charged Yiddish totality, telling jokes and indulging in language play in the face of death (something that was impossible to say about super-serious nostalgia). No longer burdened by the novel, Bashevis could gesture toward a fantasy world without feeling compelled to delineate its rules and limitations; the demons had only themselves to answer to and thus their language did not need to meet a test of legibility in translation. The turn toward the demonic vernacular gave Bashevis the narrative and artistic freedom that had been denied him as a devoted follower of world literature with its prescribed genres and a­ esthetic norms. It also allowed him to promote a form of highbrow Yiddish literary creativity, in opposition to Glatstein’s Anglo-modernism, Cahan’s socialist populism, and Molodowsky’s nationalist realism. Bashevis’s demonic fiction could combat the displacement he and his fellow Warsaw writers experienced after arriving in the US. Yiddish-speaking demons were at home in their timeless world and had no need to venture into the uncertainties of Jewish American culture. Demonic realism offered Bashevis a way out of the double bind between a lost past and an impossible present.36 As a literature of and for ghosts, Bashevis’s work of the 1940s celebrates its ­vernacular marginality while refusing to imagine any future for Yiddish culture. This stands in stark contrast to the deferred futurity that Glatstein proposed or Molodowsky’s reluctant devotion to the fractured present. At this stage in his career, Bashevis could not share Glatstein’s secular messianism nor did he feel he could

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identify with Molodowsky’s belief in a new Yiddish sovereignty. Bashevis institutes a frozen frame for literary play in which translation is not even under consideration as a utopian horizon, since Jewish demons have their own Yiddish monolingualism. Such a literature of the past disregards not only a future audience (in translation) but also neglects the contemporary, if dwindling, Yiddish-speaking audience. Bashevis divorces the demonic vernacular from its grounding in a Yiddish-speaking public that increasingly could not understand the demons’ ­vocabulary buried deep in Jewish oral and textual traditions of the nineteenth century. For Bashevis, there is great value in this self-imposed marginality. Beyond solving the challenges of meeting an impossible present, demonic realism privileges the individual artist over any social context for the literary act: There are many privileges and freedom in poverty . . . We are a marginal [zaytike] literature, an exception among the literatures . . . a literature whose entire weight rests on individuality and independence. Literature of mass appeal has no place here.37

The only authentic embodiment of Yiddish culture is a Yiddish-speaking demon ventriloquized by the Yiddish artist—by Bashevis himself. In this way Bashevis presents himself as the sole arbiter of Yiddish creativity, however marginalized it may be. Rather than watch as Yiddish cultural cohesion is torn apart by the vicissitudes of history, Bashevis takes ownership over the language, protecting its ­demonic universe within the confines of a new-old Yiddish totality: As realism continues to blur the boundaries between the artist and the craftsman, between inspiration and labor—so too will the true-born artist go in the opposite direction: to the individual, the concentrated, the symbolic, the mysterious. He will make use of facts, but they will never be a goal in and of themselves. And in this will be the ending of fact-collecting and the beginning of creativity.38

In this formulation, Yiddish creativity is separated from its contemporary conditions and given over entirely to the internal world of the artist. Glatstein’s ­paradoxical nationalism, which required a kind of bowing before the Yiddish ­language itself, is replaced by a defiant individualism that courts mystery and symbol over vernacularity. Bashevis justifies his embrace of marginality by holding fast to a defense of the individual and the potential transcendence of his art.

Broken Rules: The Case of The Family Moskat Even as Bashevis publicly set new standards for Yiddish literature, he himself was busy deviating from his own directives. Notably, as a young writer in New York who depended on the Yiddish press for his livelihood, he could hardly refuse to write for the masses. He could make demands of Yiddish literature under the cover of his “Bashevis” persona but, meanwhile, he had to put bread on the table using other

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pseudonyms: D. Segal authored scandalous journalism and entertainment fiction and Y.  Varshavsky was the writer of memoiristic or pseudo-scientific articles, among other anonymously penned columns. Bashevis responded to the fractured US landscape with his own fractured, yet controlled, literary identity that moved between the ghosts of a mythic Yiddish past and the market demands of the present. Inevitably the strictures of his demonic realism also gave way. When his brother Israel Joshua died suddenly in 1944, Bashevis lost his primary literary influence, but also saw an opportunity to emerge from underneath his brother’s shadow. Soon after, in 1945, Bashevis returned to the novel by serializing an epic family chronicle, Di familye Mushkat (The Family Moskat), expressly dedicated to his brother’s memory. The novel is an account of Jewish life in Warsaw from the turn of the century until the first bombs of WWII. Putting aside his commitment to a mythic Jewish past, Bashevis adopted a form of realism that directly mimicked the work of his brother, in particular his novel Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), which had been a success in Yiddish as a book and a play and later became a best-seller in translation into English in 1936.39 Neither hagiographic ethnography nor a fantastical, anachronistic account, Bashevis’s novel echoed his brother’s “homeless imagination” by creating a portrait of Jewish Warsaw that was deeply nihilistic about Jewish modernity while erecting a (complexly layered) monument to his destroyed hometown.40 The novel follows the members of the Moskat family, from the death of the patriarch Meshulem to the affairs of his grandchildren, including the family’s ultimate fall from grace on the eve of war; meanwhile, Bashevis also charts the development of a young intellectual who marries into the family, abandons his religious past, and finally comes to a philosophical and spiritual dead end. These two central figures are accompanied by a host of other characters, some of whom are inadequately or sporadically portrayed; the city of Warsaw itself figures as a vibrant background for the novel’s somewhat ponderous progress.41 There is little that is “marginal” about the narrative structure of the novel. The playful wordplay of Jewish demons is replaced here by the familiar third-person narration of the global realist novel. This departure from demonic realism and return to the novel led to Bashevis’s first concentrated attempt to have his work translated.42 He even worked with his brother’s former publisher, Knopf, in the hopes of reproducing his brother’s success. Translation occurred almost as a function of genre. After many difficulties, which included the death of the translator A. H. Gross before the manuscript was finished, and after rounds of negotiation over the accuracy and length of the translation, The Family Moskat came out in English in 1950. The sales of the book were poor, and what little money was earned was spread among the translators recruited to complete the manuscript.43 The novel’s lack of popularity in English was likely due to Bashevis’s choice of genre. The family chronicle set in a gritty urban space was widely popular in the US in the 1920s and ’30s, especially as a narrative of familial decline in the face of modernity’s apocalyptic violence. The Brothers Ashkenazi, along with several other

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Yiddish and Jewish American novels, fit this mold as sobering analyses of how the ravages of modern capitalism and the breakdown of traditional society lead to the dissolution of the Jewish family.44 Bashevis’s novel employs a similar organizing principle, with an even more apocalyptic ending: the philosophical and interpersonal failures of the main character mirror the fate of his family and the entirety of Eastern European Jewish life as the cleansing violence of war looms as the only horizon of possibility.45 Unfortunately for Bashevis, narratives of collective decline were no longer in fashion in the postwar period.46 In the wake of the war, readers were more interested in novels that celebrated or at least critically reflected new forms of American prosperity. Stephen Schryer has argued that the postwar period saw the rise of a “professional” class of writers who saw themselves as cultural educators invested, at times even patriotically, in transforming US society rather than demonstrating its decay.47 Popular fiction focused on the life of the suburban middle class, negotiating modernity for readers who had purportedly achieved the American dream in some fashion. Though this fiction continued to critique the era’s “uneasy conformity,” it had largely abandoned the apocalyptic violence of the interwar period.48 This new wave included a large number of Jewish American writers, from Saul Bellow to Herman Wouk, who could claim a sense of belonging in US culture above and beyond their ethnic or religious difference. As Theodore Solotoroff described it at the time, postwar Jewish American writers began imbuing their work with “the desire and drive of the Jewish intellectual to rise out of his early, circumscribed culture—his special hunger for a place in the world.”49 In contrast, The Family Moskat remained ensconced in a Yiddish totality bound for destruction. The poor reception of its English translation seemed to confirm the marginality of Yiddish culture, destined to reach the same dead end as Warsaw’s Jews. The fate of The Family Moskat in this way mirrors the fate of Der Sotn in Goray, two books that conform to canonized European forms and yet whose publications could find no foothold in the national contexts in which they came into circulation. Finding no way through the Polish and American windows, both novels left almost no mark on the institution of world literature—translated or ­untranslated—despite the ambitions of their creator. Thus, both within the strictures he created for Yiddish literature and in their transversal, Bashevis struggled to define the institutional parameters of his writing, retreating from the world while reaching out toward it at the same time.

A Fool in Translation Bashevis’s more celebrated arrival in English happened almost by accident, with the translation of his short story “Gimpel the Fool.” Much scholarship has been written about this “debut” story, from its Yiddish original in the pages of the labor

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Zionist Yidisher kemfer in March of 1945 to Saul Bellow’s translation with Eliezer Greenberg—first in Partisan Review in May of 1953 and then in Howe and Greenberg’s landmark A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954). Scholars have analyzed Bellow and Greenberg’s approximations and omissions; they have plumbed the psychoanalytical depths of a triumphant masochist narrator; critics have labeled the story as simultaneously a comedic farce, an improbable love story, and a miniature Bildungsroman of a self-proclaimed zaddik; and others have viewed the text as paradigmatic of the memorialization impulse in postwar Yiddish fiction.50 The multiple layers of the story, and likely several other factors, led a group of the New York Intellectuals, with Irving Howe at the forefront, to single out this story not only for canonization but as the impetus for turning Bashevis into the living representative of Eastern European Jewish culture. This story, for better or for worse, would go on to determine the categories through which Bashevis would be read throughout the rest of his career. That this would be the story to launch Bashevis’s fame is somewhat surprising. The story is firmly within Bashevis’s 1940s demonic realism. “Gimpel the Fool”/“Gimpl tam” is the monologue of Gimpel, a foolish and not so foolish, a simple and not so simple, resident of the shtetl of Frampol. Gimpel’s gullibility gains him the reputation as the town fool as he is made to believe that the Tsar is coming for a visit, that a cow has flown over the moon, and that the dead have risen in preparation for the coming of the Messiah. He is even duped by the townspeople into a marriage with Elka, who within five months gives birth to a child that Gimpel reluctantly (but wholeheartedly) believes is his own. Gimpel goes on to describe his slow awakening to the truth of his wife’s infidelities (though he remains devoted to her even after her death) and to the ways in which the townspeople had taken ­advantage of him. One night a demon tries to convince him to take revenge on the townspeople by urinating in the bread he sells them. He repents at the last moment after seeing a vision of his wife from beyond the grave and instead sets out “into the world” as a wandering, storytelling saint, revealing in the final passages that he is telling this story on his deathbed. The folksy yet deceptively ironic speech of the naive narrator is doubled by the theologically resonant and deviously rich vernacular of a seductive demon. Both come to life within Bashevis’s self-contained Yiddish universe. The final image of the wandering storyteller can be read as Bashevis’s selfportrait, the last Yiddish raconteur who prefers the power of the “imaginary world” over the betrayals of reality. Rather than directly counter the injustices of history, Bashevis prefers retreat to a totality of his own literary making, rejecting a reality dominated by Christianity and choosing the lone artist over the cruelties and deceptions of the Jewish community. If this story coincides with Bashevis’s reactionary demonic realism, how could it also propel Bashevis into the center of US literature and ultimately into becoming the representative of Yiddish in the institution of world literature? How could Bashevis’s retreat from the codes of world literature actually enable his circulation within its networks? The two contexts in which the translated story was printed

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help answer these questions, as both set the translational conditions for Bashevis’s work. To make sense as a text written for the world, Bashevis’s story had to be read in two different directions, as both a new precedent for Jewish modernism and as a mark of nostalgia for a lost past. When “Gimpel the Fool” appeared in May 1953 in Partisan Review, a central hub for US modernism and an outlet for young Jewish intellectuals, the story joined the journal’s concerted effort to actively introduce European and nonEuropean literary norms into the institutions of US literature. Bellow’s role as translator was essential to this process. Bellow was a well-regarded novelist of the group, and though his breakthrough work The Adventures of Augie March would only be published in September of that year, he was already representative of the kind of literary style that the magazine’s editors and writers celebrated. Bellow followed the formal innovations of interwar modernism while shifting focus from the alienated urban jungle to a new intellectual realm where the writer could find aesthetic and political autonomy.51 Bellow’s literary project thus mirrored in certain ways the aims of Bashevis’s Gimpel: the goal of both Augie and Gimpel is ultimately a kind of imaginative freedom. By appending Bellow’s name to Bashevis’s story, the editors of Partisan Review proposed a convergence of their voices. To be sure, certain aspects of the story, in particular its anti-Christian elements, had to be smoothed over to make this convergence more convincing, producing what Hanna Wirth-Nesher calls “both continuity and discontinuity, both survival of the Yiddish text for Jewish literature and accommodation of that text to American literature for American readers.”52 Bashevis’s apparent disdain for literature of the moment and of the masses—what in Yiddish would be the literary conservatism of a forgotten writer—was now suddenly in line with the postwar canonization of modernism as the champion of artistic autonomy.53 The genre of the short story was also a way to signal Bashevis’s relevance, even as it seemingly disqualified him from a proper place in the canon. As a celebrated genre of the small magazine, the short story put Bashevis in league with such stars of Partisan Review as Delmore Schwartz and Bernard Malamud. The form evoked the image of an old-world storyteller now transported into modernity. As a result, Howe could later describe Bashevis’s work thusly: He is a writer completely absorbed by the demands of his vision, a vision gnomic and compulsive but with moments of high exaltation; so that while reading his stories one feels as if one were overhearing bits and snatches of a monologue, the impact of which is both notable and disturbing, but the meaning withheld. Now these are precisely the qualities that the sophisticated reader, trained to docility before the exactions of “modernism,” has come to applaud.54

Howe notably is not interested here in totality or the anachronistic universe that Bashevis had wanted to evoke in his demonic fiction. What draws him to Bashevis’s work are “moments” and “bits and snatches” that point to some withheld meaning. The illegibility of Bashevis’s Yiddish vernacularity becomes for Howe a marker of

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modernist fragmentation rather than a reactionary defense of Yiddish creativity. In Howe’s eyes, Bashevis is an important precedent for the kind of modernism that the New York Intellectuals sought to preserve.55 Yet at the same time, it was crucial for the New York Intellectuals that Bashevis never exactly become their contemporary. There was value in considering Bashevis the symbol of an essentialized past Jewish culture and not part of its current American articulation. The story’s second appearance in Howe and Greenberg’s anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories made Gimpel part of a conservation effort for a lost culture. The editors conclude as much in the anthology’s introduction: [O]ur concern here is not with the future, not with prophecy. It is with the past, with the life and the warmth that come to us when we turn to the pages of Mendele, at the beginning, and Chaim Grade, at the end. Whatever the future, their past is certain. They wait for us, ready to speak, if we will only hear them.56

As much as Howe and Greenberg’s volume served as an intervention in the history of Yiddish in the US, it also pronounced the end of Yiddish literature, canonizing and ossifying it as part of a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.”57 Howe’s conservationist impulse limited Yiddish literature to the shtetl past, as he chose texts for the anthology that at times obfuscated the literature’s dynamic present. As a prelude to Jewish American modernism, Bashevis was placed alongside Sholem Aleichem and Peretz as part of a forgotten and lost heritage—all this while he was still a living and productive writer. In this way, Howe and his fellow Jewish American intellectuals could assuage the guilt they felt over their abandonment of traditional Jewish culture and their inconsistent, delayed, or non-existent r­ esponses to the Holocaust. By embracing a writer who straddled both modernism and ­traditionalism, they could use Bashevis as an artful and somehow “worldly” compensation for their neglectfulness. Howe arguably instrumentalizes Bashevis and other Yiddish writers to bolster the uncertain American present.58 Framed by these two publications, Gimpel and Bashevis appear as autonomous modernist storytellers and antiquated relics from an impossibly distant epoch. Throughout the next decade, as his fame increased, Bashevis was careful to perpetuate this image, even going so far as to only publish in English stories that came from a stylized shtetl universe. These stories were not entirely “demonic,” but they by and large conformed to stereotypes of a traditional past scandalized by sex and existential crisis. Only an anachronistic fetishized world could be made legible within the institutional confines of US and then world literature. Meanwhile, in Yiddish, Bashevis continued to develop his literary voice by further opening the breach he created with The Family Moskat; he resumed writing serialized novels for the Forverts, many of which were concerned with the American present. These texts were not chosen to be translated into English since they would not bolster Bashevis’s national and increasingly international reputation—and many remain untranslated to this day.59 While his demonic realism broke apart in Yiddish, it was recovered and reconstructed in English.

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As he began to publish more stories in English (increasingly in popular ­ agazines like Mademoiselle, Elle, and GQ), Bashevis was wary of ceding control m entirely to the editors and literary celebrities that initially took interest in his writing. Bashevis did not want to tether his literary reputation to Bellow, Howe, and the other New York Intellectuals or to any group of Jewish American writers.60 As a wholly independent artist, detached from other Yiddish and English-language American writers, Bashevis wanted to have the literary act attributed, first and foremost, to the persona of a single Yiddish writer.61 To protect his literary persona, Bashevis increasingly became intimately involved in the translation process. If the institutional acceptance of his work into US and global networks was contingent upon a particular image of Yiddish, then Bashevis wanted to have a hand in shaping that image. Previously Bashevis retreated into the past in order to claim ownership over Yiddish; now Bashevis sprang into action in the present in order to redefine Yiddish in English. After at first allowing translators who knew Yiddish to maintain authority over the translation, like Bellow and others, Bashevis gradually created a system that employed translators who, in fact, did very little translating.62 The process began with Bashevis dictating a literal English translation of the Yiddish text to the nominal translator, often reading directly from its published version in a Yiddish periodical. The task of the translator—who was often, quite problematically, a young woman—was to transform Bashevis’s immigrant English into proper English. Author and translator would then go over the new text to modify and clarify the English, either by omitting difficult concepts and phrases or by adding explanations and approximations.63 After submission to a magazine or journal the stories often went through a second editorial process that further transformed the text. As he refined this process, Bashevis saw these English versions as “second originals,” confounding later scholars and translators with the slight, but significant, changes between the Yiddish original and the English revision.64 The result of this process is a text deeply structured by institutional demand. The discrepancies between the original and the new translation are not always objectionable or controversial; the editorial process would sometimes improve a story that Bashevis had earlier written under deadline for the Yiddish press. Regardless of what or how much was changed in each version, what unifies Bashevis’s translation project is the importance of oversight, in which the Yiddish is transformed through a double-voiced ventriloquism. Bashevis’s own immigrant English hovers somewhere behind the text while a stylized “proper” English—the reflection of a younger woman’s voice—is recorded on the page. This doublevoiced text is then standardized for the postwar entertainment journal, whose goals are aesthetic achievement and legibility, in equal measure. Translation is thus a transgressive process for Bashevis but also a highly productive one. While the Yiddish original is in some way betrayed, the process itself is enlivening, at least temporarily. Bashevis did not hesitate to describe translation in openly eroticized terms:

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In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women, lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be Paradise on earth.65

Translation is an elicit sexual practice—one must transgress one’s marriage to Yiddish and instrumentalize women’s bodies to evade the death throes of the language; the copulation of an old-world language with the voice of American youth produces a new, living text at home in the paradise of world literature. In other interviews, Bashevis linked translation to a divine practice: Once someone told me, what would you do if you would meet the Almighty, and he will tell you, I’m ready to do you a favor—what kind of favor would you ask from him? And I would say to him: God almighty, do me a favor and become a translator from the Yiddish.66

Bashevis refers comically in both of these passages to the fallibility of translation, as both redemptive sin and impossible prayer, but in such a way that actually confirms his personal control over the process. The harem is for his pleasure, the divine translator is a favor to him from God. These fantasies reflect real structures of control: the harem that he describes is one that actually existed in that the ­majority of his translators were indeed women; and the divine power that determined the shape and value of these translations was none other than Bashevis himself. Rather than an unruly vernacular embedded in collective histories and in competition with other Yiddish writers, the Yiddish-in-translation that Bashevis devised gave him all of the authority and all the benefit. By controlling translation, Bashevis could more easily compartmentalize his multiple literary identities. As “second originals,” the translated stories exist in a realm separate from the Yiddish context. There is no need for fidelity or equivalence ­between the two versions for they are demonstrably different texts under different institutional pressures. The author himself gives permission for their separation and grants them discrete afterlives. In this way Bashevis stops short of Asch’s monolingualism. Bashevis pointedly did not believe in absolute translatability, repeatedly finding fault with translation as a process even as he deemed it necessary.67 Such an approach requires belief in his own power as the agent of a text’s legibility. Bashevis sees his task as writer-translator as entirely subservient to the institutional frames of literature. For Bashevis there are two different institutions: a dying Yiddish totality and a new global institution housed in the US. Translation, for all its failures, enables the partial survival of one world within the other—but not their complete convergence. This compartmentalization of Yiddish as a living-dead language owned by the living writer enabled Bashevis to envision a more optimistic future for the language without recourse to a romantic and redemptive intervention. In the early 1960s, in articles and lectures that railed against assimilation and the decline of Yiddish (even protesting the exclusion of Yiddish from the Zionist project), Bashevis imagined Yiddish not merely as a container of a specific past but as the model for all world literature:

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I cannot believe that in the midst of such a renaissance Yiddish will die. Yiddish was, is, and can remain the language of expressive Jewishness. Its existence does not depend on the number of schools and universities which teach it, but on the Jew’s unquenchable desire for individuality . . . Don’t regard me as a dreamer when I state that Yiddish literature, the literature of the Jews, has the power to drag not only itself, but all literature, out of the mire. . . . Our authors must be given the ­opportunity to travel all over the globe and come into contact with both Jews and non-Jews. . . . The masters of Yiddish, like the masters of every other language, are creating for the whole of humanity.68

Bashevis balances here between imagining Jewish culture as based on a principal of individualism and imploring Yiddish writers to place their work alongside the literature of the entire world. Through translation and through an allegorization of Yiddish, Bashevis seeks to combat assimilation by highlighting a Jewish universal or even a Jewish cosmopolitanism that travels “all over the globe.” Of course, the only Yiddish writer traveling the world to meet with non-Jews was Bashevis himself. Bashevis’s optimism requires a radical revision of the Yiddish past, and most ­importantly a rather instrumental relationship with the Holocaust. David Roskies has argued that for Bashevis the Holocaust seemed to confirm his pessimistic views regarding the previous norms of Yiddish culture and justified his need to break out on his own.69 While for many Jewish American writers the Holocaust loomed as a specter of guilt, for Bashevis the demise of Yiddish and the destruction of Eastern Europe gave him ultimate authority over the past. He felt empowered to manipulate that heritage as he saw fit: to take up with his demons, his thieves and prostitutes, or even to concentrate on his own biography, his own being-in-the-language. Moreover, in feeling free to invent his own Yiddishland, Bashevis was under no obligation to continually mourn the loss of Yiddish in front of his English-language audience. Rather than appeal to the sentimentality of his readers, Bashevis could conjure a mysterious (and therefore more attractive) image of the Eastern European past. One of the results of Bashevis’s autonomy from the Yiddish literary consensus was that, respected as he was at first in the Yiddish-speaking world, Bashevis was soon harshly criticized by his fellow Yiddish writers, who hardly considered him to be the language’s most representative writer.70 His immodest treatment of sexuality and his growing dedication to translation led many to accuse him of sensationalism and of writing explicitly for the English-language market. Glatstein was one such vocal critic, willing even to publish in English to make public his scathing assessment of Bashevis’s writing: This perhaps explains why Bashevis is so easy to translate. One has only to find a simple English equivalent for his memorized Yiddish root words . . . It is little short of amazing that this autodidact who has so poorly digested the “philosophies” he espouses in his memoirs should have gained stature as a world literary figure . . . In these stories Bashevis bares himself to an extent that makes Yiddishreading Jews shudder at such naked sadism, but it is cut to the measure of prevailing modes and is perfectly adapted to current fashions in world literature.71

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Glatstein finds that Bashevis’s writing in English courts the banal universalism he had been deploring since the 1930s. Glatstein’s critique is an exaggeration— Bashevis never simplified his prose in the way that Asch may have. Still, Glatstein immediately identifies how Bashevis’s translation practice aligns his writing with institutional demands rather than reflecting a dynamic vernacular reality. Though Bashevis pressed on with little regard for such protestations, he ­remained caught between conflicting literary communities. Translation created an opening in his literary universe, exposing the Yiddish mythological landscape to new, foreign institutional norms. At the same time, he continued to write for Yiddish readers that bristled at his privileging one institution of literature over another. As a result, though he considered Yiddish his property rather than a contested genealogy, Bashevis was constrained by the values of legibility and aesthetic totality. A Yiddish reader expected a particular kind of vernacular grounding; an English reader looked for a universal horizon of meaning. While Bashevis could claim that his work, and only his work, spoke for Yiddish culture on the world stage, his claim to artistic autonomy constantly came up against the demands of multiple cultural institutions.

Alone in the World Bashevis’s answer to these competing institutional demands was to turn his attention to what he considered the most important part of the literary act: the individual writer. Through much of the 1960s Bashevis continued to balance between two audiences, writing serialized novels about the American present for his Yiddish readers while translating into English stories, memoiristic writing, and novels about the Eastern European past.72 However, this neat divide was soon upended by the figure of a hesitant and troubled postwar Yiddish writer who began appearing in his stories. With this new character came the opportunity to “bring to the surface the fundamental internal contradictions in Bashevis’s narrative world.”73 The pseudo-autobiographical figure became a site for Bashevis to negotiate, in both languages, the multiple demands made on his work. One of the first of these stories was “Alone” or “Aleyn” (first published in Yiddish in the journal Svive in 1960 and then translated for Mademoiselle in 1962 by Joel Blocker), in which Bashevis turned to thematizing a double bind, writing and translating stories that featured a self-reflective Yiddish writer alone in the world.74 Throughout the rest of his career, Bashevis would periodically turn to this figure—at once a comedic Don Juan and a lost intellectual—who tries to make his way across the often treacherous or even haunted landscapes of North America, South America, and Israel on failed lecture tours, ruined vacations, and ill-fated love affairs.75 In these stories, Bashevis’s carefully constructed system is dramatically undone as the Yiddish writer encounters the instability of a Jewish vernacular in translation.

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In “Alone,” Bashevis introduces his autobiographical character by placing him in a stunningly liminal, multilingual, and international space, exiled from the heart of contemporary Yiddish culture in New York. The story, narrated in the first person, follows a Yiddish writer in Miami Beach as a hurricane strikes the resort city.76 Stuck in a crowded hotel, ostracized by Spanish-speaking South American tourists for reading Yiddish newspapers, and waiting for a letter from the “outside world” that never arrives, the narrator silently wishes to be alone. His wish is granted, ­apparently by some eavesdropping imp, and the hotel inexplicably and quite suddenly goes bankrupt, much to the dismay of the other guests, some of whom now stop speaking Spanish and revert, comically, to their native tongue, which is, of course, Yiddish. The narrator then finds a new hotel, completely empty save for the receptionist, a hunchback Cuban woman. He spends the rest of the day alone on the beach and meandering across the city. In his loneliness he imagines he has been transported to a biblical landscape where he sees himself as a modern-day Noah. When he returns to his room, the narrator longs for company, to be a fruitful Noah. The hurricane arrives and with it the Cuban hunchback knocks on his door and, in broken English, propositions the narrator. In order to seduce the writer, she attempts to best him at his own game, telling her life story as if ripped right from the pages of a trashy serialized newspaper novel. She says: My back is broken. But I was not born this way. I fell off the table when I was a child. My mother was too poor to take me to the doctor. . . . Why do you shake? A hunchback is not contagious. You will not catch it from me. I have a soul like anyone else—men desire me. Even my boss. He trust me and leave me here in the hotel alone. You are a Jew, eh? He is also a Jew . . . from Turkey. He can speak—how do you say it?—Arabic. He marry a German Señora, but she is a Nazi. Her first husband was a Nazi. She curse the boss and try to poison him. He sue her but the judge is on her side. I think she bribe him—or give him something else. The boss, he has to pay her—how do you call it?—alimony.  (E379, Y177–8)

Her story has the classic elements of shund, Yiddish pulp. The hunchback is the local, working-class, down-on-her-luck heroine having an affair with a figure of authority. The (curiously absent) hotel owner is himself embroiled in scandal—an Arabic-speaking Turkish Jew with a German ex-wife, previously married to a Nazi. The ex-wife had attempted to poison the hotel proprietor, but in the trial, in which the Turkish Jew tried to sue his wife, the woman bribed the judge—with money or with sex—and won, including alimony payments. The receptionist’s story puts the Yiddish writer in the position of the knight in shining armor come to save the neglected maiden. This shell of a story is of course all parody: the demon entices the writer from his high metaphysical perch and into the clutches of sin—and into the sentimentality of a trashy pulp novel. The hunchback tells her tale in broken English since her native tongue is Spanish. In the Yiddish text, this is indicated by the instructive

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“zi hot a zog geton in a gebrokhenem english,” “she spoke in a broken English,” and through the character asking for the right words for “Arabic” and “alimony” (Y176). Otherwise, as in Bashevis’s previous demon stories, she speaks a perfectly id­i­o­matic Yiddish. For instance, the line “My father, he no good, always drunk” appears as “der foter iz a shiker, a fardorbener tayvl,” “my father is a drunk, a degenerate demon” (Y177). In the English version, Blocker, likely with Bashevis’s help, took the artistic liberty to translate the hunchback’s speech into nongrammatical English. But what kind of English does a Yiddish writer speak? This question is obscured in both versions of the text. In Yiddish, the narrator sounds like a Yiddish writer; in translation, he speaks a perfectly idiomatic English. Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, German, and broken English—what does the demon want by mixing these languages within a shund narrative structure? The hunchback’s story offers a lesson in the pitfalls of translatability: she moves quickly and manipulatively between languages and cultures, breaking through boundaries in order to sentimentalize, entertain, and seduce—much like Bashevis himself. To avoid joining her in this behavior, the narrator responds to the hunchback’s subsequent advances by claiming that he must be faithful to the memory of a lover killed by the Nazis, to a wife in New York, and finally to an all-seeing God. Typical of many of Bashevis’s demon tales, it is the mention of love and faith in God that finally ­defeats the she-devil, who spits in the narrator’s face and storms out the door. The writer’s ideals of memory, love, and the divine have trumped the hunchback’s cheap narrative tricks. The next day this hotel closes too, and the narrator must leave, though without having received the much-awaited letter from the “outside world.” The writer’s resistance to temptation hardly inspires any sense of resolution. Although he has refused to give in to the temptation of shund and its translatability, in this way announcing a proposed return to the totality of demonic realism, the autobiographical figure continues to wander alone across the translated and transgressed US landscape. The narrator finds himself in a double bind: he longs to experience the singular transcendence of a Noah-like figure, separated and saved from the sinners of the world, yet he must constantly face the threat of being drawn into fruitless, sensationalist traps. The narrator’s devotion to universal notions of love, memory, and faith are hollow in comparison to the uncanny forces hiding behind every corner. These uncanny forces do not evoke a protected, fantastical past; the opposite, they draw the writer away from the vernacular and toward a translational future. The proposed separation between Yiddish and English is constantly interrupted by the multiple broken languages of experience. The linguistic undecidability of the text in both Yiddish and English—the uncomfortable convergence of broken vernaculars with some idiomatic ideal—undoes the writer’s performed piety. Such a conclusion makes a startling statement about the possibility of Yiddish finding a home in US culture and in the world through translation. The empty American landscape is potentially a space of biblical transcendence, but this ­emptiness is constantly interrupted by the translational desire, which results in the

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compromised union of Yiddish and broken English. The storm, the sensationalist plot, sexual desire, and demonic play constantly invade the writer’s fortress. Forced to engage with the world, he does so in fractured conversations. The writer ­remains hopeful that he will reach some other outside space, some singular linguistic experience. But this experience remains entirely out of reach. A Yiddish totality figures as a letter that never arrives, a last word that has not been said and will never actually be said in Yiddish. Instead, the language must be translated if it is to survive in this multilingual landscape in which people hide and break their languages. In startling contrast to the systems of independence, control, and translation that he constructed for himself, Bashevis admits that to write beyond Yiddish is to engage in a constant struggle for inadequate compensation within a translational economy; such a system invites the constant threat of the world’s demons.

Becoming American in Montreal “Alone” marked one of the first times that Bashevis allowed demons to cross the Atlantic and take root in the US. But these demons were no longer mythological figures from a lost, universalizable totality; now they made palpable the failure of totality in a translational context. It is no wonder, then, that Bashevis did not ­immediately have many of these autobiographical stories translated into English; his translation-system had gained him increased fame and he did not need to produce texts that demonstrated its instability.77 It was only after “The Lecture” (1965/67) that Bashevis began to regularly turn to his author-narrator. This story opened up a series of self-evaluations, in which the author meditates on what it means to be a Yiddish writer in the US. But unlike “Alone,” where the demon is some foreign, sensationalist threat, Bashevis here takes up the question of the writer’s responsibility to his lingering Yiddish ghosts.78 “The Lecture” opens with the narrator boarding a train in New York bound for Montreal where he will deliver a lecture that offers an “optimistic report on the future of the Yiddish language” (586).79 The experience of riding the train through the winter landscape activates the narrator’s memory and he feels transported to the Poland of his youth. Fearing dark memories and increasingly suspicious of his fellow passengers, the writer retreats into his reveries (and into his flask of cognac), deferring any arrival in the past for philosophical and literary pursuits in the present. He even dismisses his own lecture, threatening to throw it out the window— “Let the paper and ink return to the cosmos, where there can be no errors and no lies. Atoms and molecules are guiltless; they are a part of the divine truth” (589–90). When his delayed train finally arrives at the station in Montreal, his wish to escape is left unfulfilled. The people still awaiting his arrival are not the organizers of the lecture but an elderly woman and her daughter, both Holocaust survivors who had read the writer’s work in the DP camps. They take him to their apartment, a kind

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of reincarnation of the Polish shtetl but in a state of decay. The two women are caricatures of the past: the elderly woman garrulously demonstrates her mastery of vernacular Yiddish speech but obsessively turns the conversation to her experience at Auschwitz; her daughter Binele is a devoted caretaker but reminds the writer of a pale “Hassidic boy,” her sickly pallor draining her femininity and rendering her sexually illegible to the writer (591).80 As the narrator settles in for a cold night, he realizes that he has somehow lost the manuscript for his lecture. He is upset at first and then strangely pleased that his optimistic account of the current prospects of Yiddish has disappeared. In an internal monologue, he begins to make an argument against Yiddish literature only to be interrupted by Binele’s screams. She has found her mother dead in the middle of the night. The narrator struggles to comfort a frantic Binele while simultaneously doing battle with the mother’s ghost that immediately haunts the apartment. It is only in the morning, after encountering a Canadian French-speaking neighbor (they communicate only in hand-gestures) that any order comes to the house. The story ends with the narrator clutching his US passport as his ticket out of this Polish nightmare in one hand while attempting to offer some comfort to Binele with the other. Throughout the story, Bashevis’s narrator struggles between two functions of literature. The writer’s deepest desire is to see his literary vocation as a form of escape. Even as dark parallels to a violent past beset the narrator—he goes so far as to imagine himself entering Majdanek—he fantasizes about an alternative space. He longs for the cosmos, for some way to discard the memories and associations that turn every snowy landscape into an evocation of Poland. The literary mind can potentially throw off all earthly concerns to concentrate on transcendent possibilities promised by the institution of world literature. But throughout the text the writer is reminded of a second function of literature as constitutive of collective solidarity. The optimistic lecture he would have given indulges a self-serving fantasy of his triumph as a writer who comforts his remaining Yiddish readers. The Yiddish writer can seemingly bring the memory of Poland to life and give it flesh and bone in the present, however decrepit and vulnerable that life may be. The two women repeatedly call the narrator’s attention to this second, vernacular function of literature. It is the reason they wait for him at the station, hoping to catch a glimpse of the writer who “saved” them in the camps: “After the war, they began to send us books, and I came across one of your stories. I don’t remember what it was called, but I read it and a darkness lifted off my heart. ‘Binele,’ I said— she was already with me then —‘I’ve found a treasure.’ Those were my words . . . . ” (593). Rather than join “guiltless” molecules as part of some divine truth, here the writer’s work has a more practical function; the old woman likens his work to a physical treasure, a kind of talisman with magical, revivifying properties. Echoing popular ideologies of Yiddish as a replacement for a national territory (kmoyteritorye, a pseudo-territory), the old woman grounds his literary work in actual Yiddish-speaking bodies.81

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The two functions of literature—both as an escape from reality and that which constitutes the vernacular present—remain in tension throughout the story. The sense of an anachronistic Yiddish totality that had animated Bashevis’s work of the 1930s and ’40s now appears as a devastating threat to the postwar Yiddish writer. How can the past come to constitute a present that is so radically foreign from it? The lecture symbolizes the impossibility of this encounter, figuring as both fantasy and nightmare. Bashevis did in fact write such a lecture during this period. In one version, later published as “The Future of Yiddish and Yiddish Literature,” Bashevis argues for the vitality of Yiddish as a source of Jewish creativity, despite its decline: “Jews will always revert to it, and the more they study it, the greater will be the treasures they discover.”82 In the essay, Bashevis envisions a continuity between a disappearing past and a vibrant Jewish future. In “The Lecture” such optimism is rejected, and the narrator even welcomes the loss of the manuscript: The loss of the manuscript, I thought, was a Freudian accident. I was not pleased with the essay from the very first. The tone I took was too grandiloquent. Still, what was I to talk about that evening? I might get confused from the very first sentences, like that speaker who had started his lecture with, “Peretz was a peculiar [modner] man,” and could not utter another word.  (595)

Bashevis makes a clever Yiddish pun here: the word for peculiar, modner, is very similar to the word for modern, moderner; the speaker, having accidentally declared that a peculiar person was the father of modern Yiddish literature, has already lost all credibility and can no longer continue his lecture. Bashevis thus intimates that the very idea of Yiddish as a modern thing is too strange. Recalling Bashevis’s anachronistic stance of the 1940s, Bashevis asks if Yiddish literature can even speak about the present. Dedication to contemporary experience in Yiddish inevitably leads to a malformed and artificial thing. Bashevis’s autobiographical stand-in thus indicts himself, implying that his attachment to modern literature leads him to a peculiar—liminal and precarious—place, where optimism is impossible.83 Escape from this predicament proves difficult as there seems to be no outrunning the wretched present of Yiddish: “I had the eerie feeling that the dead woman was trying to approach me, to seize me with her cold hands, to clutch at me and drag me off to where she was now . . . Bony fingers stretched after me. Strange beings screamed at me silently” (597). The dead woman persists as a specter that inhabits the imaginations of the living, dragging the writer back to Poland: “A deep despair came over me. It was a long, long time since I had seen such wretchedness and so much tragedy. My years in America seem to have been swept away by that one night and I was taken back, as though by magic, to my worst days in Poland, to the bitterest crisis of my life” (599). The language is dying, becoming a ghost of a ghost, a constantly renewed trauma that seems to prevent survival and rebirth, in the US or in the cosmos.

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It is only a translational encounter that offers a third option between the ­ iametrically opposed functions of literature. The downstairs neighbor who offers d his help speaks in French and the narrator responds in English; they do not understand one another, but the writer still feels “it was good to be with another human being for a moment” (600). The daughter, Binele, has become as much a corpse as her mother whereas the non-Yiddish speaking neighbor can provide living comfort. When the neighbor leaves the apartment, the narrator quickly looks to find his footing in a new English-language identity: I wanted only one thing now—to return as quickly as possible to New York . . . Who knows? Perhaps my whole life in New York had been no more than a hallucination? I began to search in my breast pocket . . . . Did I lose my citizenship papers, together with the rest of my lecture? I felt a stiff paper. Thank God, the citizenship papers are here. I could have lost them, too. This document was now testimony that my years in America had not been an invention. Here is my photograph. And my signature. Here is the government stamp. True these were also inanimate, without life, but they symbolized order, a sense of belonging, law. I stood in the doorway and for the first time really read the paper that made me a citizen of the United States. I became so absorbed that I had almost forgotten the dead woman.  (600)

This passage is nothing less than a pledge of allegiance to the US. Lost in Yiddishland and tortured by Yiddish ghosts, the writer finds solace and a sense of belonging in the US. This feeling of citizenship is sparked by a fumbling return to English, the only possible language of communication—even if not understood— and a confirmation of a new container for Yiddish outside of the language itself. No longer confined to the Yiddish totality of Eastern Europe the writer can find a home for Yiddish elsewhere. Its institutional trappings—his citizenship papers— are key to the narrator’s new sense of security. The US is where his identity as a writer becomes legible.84 This is not where the story ends however. In dialectical fashion, the writer then seeks to incorporate the ghosts into his new sense of home by offering some comfort to the surviving daughter. After all, his late arrival is an indirect cause of the mother’s death. He feels a sense of responsibility to the ghosts, to make them part of his “elsewhere” literature. The Yiddish and English versions of the story offer two very different solutions. The Yiddish concludes as follows: :‫כ׳זאג‬ ָ ‫טאטויִ רטן נומער אויף איר ָארעם און געהערט ווי‬ ַ ‫כ׳האב דערבליקט ַא‬ ָ . . . ‫ ווי ַא ברודער‬. . . ‫ֿפאטער‬  ָ ‫ ווי ַא‬. . . ‫אײך‬ ַ ‫ איכ׳ל ַזײן מיט‬,‫– בינעלע‬ . . . !‫ֿפאר אונדז ַא יום־טוֿב‬ ַ ‫ אײער קומען איז געווען‬. . . !‫ט‬ ַ ‫געהא‬ ַ ‫ שרעקלעך ליב‬. . . !‫געהאט‬ ַ ‫אײך ליב‬ ַ ‫– זי׳ט‬ . . . . ‫ּפגעֿפאלן‬ ַ ‫רא‬ ָ ‫און בינעלע איז אויף מיר ַא‬ I noticed a number tattooed on her arm and heard myself say: “Binele, I will be there for you . . . like a father . . . like a brother . . . ”

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“She loved you! She loved you so terribly! Your coming was like a holiday for us!” And Binele fell into my arms . . .85

The English version, written in Bashevis’s own hand on a corrected typescript of the translation is as follows: I saw a number tattooed above her wrist and heard myself saying: “Binele, I won’t abandon you. I swear by the soul of your mother . . . . ” Binele’s body became limp in my arms. She raised her eyes and whispered: “Why did she do it? She just waited for your coming . . . .”  (601)

In the Yiddish version, the image of the tattooed number calls the writer to remain devoted to the survivors as a father and a brother. One continues to write in Yiddish out of familial devotion, as an embrace, as an act of love. Yiddish, as vernacular home, remains a physical bond between its speakers. Yiddish even takes on a religious function, as his presence is confirmed as a holiday (a yontef) for the spiritually bereft of the Yiddish world. As Binele falls into his arms it is clear that even as he embraces his new American identity he still commits himself to providing for his Yiddish ghosts. In the English version by contrast, the narrator does not make such a sentimental declaration of love; instead his commitment to the survivors is phrased in negative terms, “I won’t abandon you.” Moreover, he sets himself apart from Binele and her mother—“I swear by the soul of your mother” and not his own mother (emphasis mine). In the English version, the writer remains an outsider who intercedes in their family affair. The final words of the story are not an embrace but a refusal. Binele’s mother had mistakenly waited for the Yiddish writer as one waits for the messiah; the narrator’s silence confirms that his writing will perform no miracles and will bring no redemption. He remains, as ever, devoted to the few surviving Yiddish readers, but the possibilities of translation and the fact of his American identity constitute a necessary escape from the self-destructive nightmare of Yiddish. There is no lecture or piece of Yiddish writing, no matter how optimistic, that will save Yiddish from its non-future. Literary survival is a much more practical thing, and it begins in the US, under its laws, and under its language. “The Lecture” presents the writing of Yiddish literature as an inherently selfcontradictory practice. The writer feels a moral obligation to Yiddish vernacularity and to those who have suffered its fate, but he also admits his larger ambitions: to survive in the US and then escape into the cosmos. The act of writing Yiddish literature already places the writer in a liminal space, between languages and ­between the present and the past. The act of translation is certainly absurd: it is like speaking of the dead in English to a non-Jew who only knows French. Even so, it still provides law and order and, more importantly, a sense of institutional belonging. In this story, Bashevis acknowledges the US as his linguistic and

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geographic home despite being haunted by the ghosts of a traumatic past. Bashevis accepts translation as a necessary compromise and proposes the world as his ultimate destination.

Ghost World Literature “The Lecture” would go on to win Playboy’s short fiction award for 1967, which likely motivated Bashevis to write and translate more tales of the contemporary Yiddish writer taking up with his ghosts. Now, rather than see these undead figures as part of a mythologized universe, Bashevis used them as a way to stage a meeting between the Eastern European past and the American and globalized present. Subsequent stories in this vein often begin with a stranger seeking out the writer at the Forverts office downtown, at his apartment on the Upper West Side, or in one of the many cafeterias he frequented; Bashevis’s stand-in also accidentally finds such characters along his travels to Canada, South America, and Israel. The role of the writer in these stories is often limited to setting up the narrative frame and interjecting at certain moments; mostly the narrator’s function is to amplify the monologue of a lost Yiddish-speaking soul. These acts of ventriloquism also demarcate a blurred boundary between the living and the living-dead, between the peripatetic writer and the remnants of the past. Each short story offers a meditation on the perils of the boundary—what it might mean to make use of the undead and their vernacularity and what responsibility the writer has to those who earn him a place in the world-to-come of literary prestige. A prominent example is the story “The Cafeteria,” which chronicles a series of encounters between the writer and Esther, a survivor of both the Holocaust and Stalin’s prison camps.86 They meet in a cafeteria where Esther is the lone youthful figure among a group of decrepit and dying Yiddishists. Their initial connection is cut short when the cafeteria is unexpectedly closed by a fire. As they meet again over the next several years she becomes more depressed and sickly, recounting in her monologues her inability to find a husband, her pessimism surrounding German reparations, and even her lack of interest in the writer’s work. When they finally meet at the writer’s apartment it is not a romantic rendezvous but her confession: she swears to have visited the cafeteria the night before its burning only to find a group of men dressed in white robes sitting at a table with Hitler at its head. Intrigued by her vision but not certain of its veracity, the writer distances himself from Esther. Years later, and despite hearing rumors of her suicide, the writer sees Esther on the street looking uncannily youthful again with a gentleman on her arm, a man the writer seems certain is a long-dead Yiddishist. Half-convinced that both are walking corpses, the writer complains in the story’s final lines: “Why did Esther choose that particular corpse? She could have gotten a better bargain even in this world” (E84), indicating that if she had chosen the writer as a lover she would have remained among the living.87

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Most critics have analyzed this story as a form of “Holocaust Literature,” arguing that the main goal of the text is to give voice to a traumatized survivor and ­acknowledge her physical and psychic suffering.88 This reading focuses on the politics of witnessing and confession in the text but misses its more pressing concerns. Even as Bashevis mostly relinquishes the stage to Esther, the ultimate purpose of the story is to explore the material and spiritual economy that governs the triangular relationship between Yiddish ghosts, the Yiddish writer, and his global audience. Esther represents the seduction of a Yiddish totality, its seeming vivacity even after its deadly traumas. With her idiomatic Polish Yiddish and the hellish fire of her eroticism, Esther is a source of Yiddish vernacularity, the very grounds of the writer’s creativity. But as in “The Lecture,” Esther’s status as a living-dead figure also threatens the Yiddish writer-in-translation. Communion with Esther will not result in a normative family but in spiritual distortions and erotic perversions. There is, however, a moment when the convergence of the ghostly past with the writerly present seems possible. Esther implores the writer to give legitimacy to her nightmarish visions: “this evening it occurred to me that if I couldn’t trust you with a thing like this, then there is no one I could talk to. I read you and I know you have a sense of the great mysteries” (E79, Y62). The writer is confirmed as the authority for Yiddish speech and as someone who has access to the transcendent. The writer can be a bridge between worlds. But he hesitates, transforming her ­experience—which she had labeled as “plain fact”—into a “vision . . . An image from years ago remained present somewhere in the fourth dimension and it reached you just at that moment” (E80, Y65). The writer insists on rendering her tale into something figurative, a “vision” rather than a concrete experience. This mirrors what translation often does—taking that which is articulated, precariously, in the vernacular and turning it into something legible and normative in an imperial language. To trust Esther and validate her speech, in its precarity, would mean joining her in an uncanny, ghostly totality that would unhinge this world. While the writer is unwilling to join Esther, he does instrumentalize her. After their final meeting, the writer’s fame in translation begins to increase: I continued my scribbling [shraybekhtser, writing of little worth] . . . Four times a year, I sent checks to the federal government, the state . . . A teller entered some numbers in my bankbook and this meant that I was provided for . . . I saw with amazement that all my efforts turned into paper. My apartment was one big wastepaper basket. From day to day, all this paper was getting drier and more parched. I woke up at night fearful it would ignite. There was not an hour when I did not hear the sirens of fire engines.  (E81–2, Y67)89

The writer’s financial gain is the direct result of his ability to turn the words and experiences of figures like Esther into paper—both the paper of his stories and the paper money that he receives for them. These papers then serve as kindling to renew the source of his writing; the stories continuously reenact a small holocaust

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that ensures the writer’s literary success. Rather than provide some comfort for the living-dead, the writer appears to derive great benefit from their state of decay and perpetual immolation. His writing is both an act of memorial and the constant repetition of the traumatic event. Esther’s ghostly presence is a constant threat to this process, proof and admonition of his guilt. Thus, the story functions as both Esther’s and the writer’s confession. The possible union between the writer and Esther would be an act of absolute fidelity that the writer, a Don Juan who courts multiple languages and multiple audiences, cannot promise. He chooses translation over vernacularity, prefers paper to live speech, and ultimately condemns himself to live with his success at the expense of the living-dead. As a reminder of this imbalanced economy, ghosts continue to haunt his every breath and threaten to set his apartment aflame. His ability to reside, physically, within the networks of US and world literature is contingent upon ghosts who openly defy the certainty and legibility of literary institutions. Even as Bashevis admitted, in stories like these, an uncertainty within the logic of his translational literary project, he continued to garner recognition from the institutional arms of US and world literature. By the 1970s, Bashevis was a widely known and celebrated author, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1978. In 1981 the critic Leslie Fiedler could summarize his career in global terms: What this means in Singer’s case is that his fiction is not merely read, received and reviewed in American English, but exported to Europe, East and West, and to the Third World along with other items of Jewish American culture, including the novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. It was, therefore, as an American as well as a Jew that most of the world perceived Singer at the moment of his receiving the Nobel Prize.90

Fiedler concludes that Bashevis’s American and global fame has earned him a place in the halls of world literature. Still, even with seemingly universal praise, something of Bashevis’s fractured literary universe could not fully meet the ­demands of the institution. This is partially reflected in his being known as a writer of short stories rather than as a novelist. The Library of America series preserves Bashevis’s translated short stories while leaving out his fifteen translated novels, not to mention unpublished ones still waiting to be discovered in the Yiddish press. Even during his lifetime Bashevis watched somewhat bitterly as his novels, the genre of world literature, received mostly lukewarm receptions while his children’s literature earned him award after award.91 Bashevis’s accommodation to the norms of world literature secured him and the Yiddish language a tenuous survival that depended on a particular definition of the language and a particular image of the Yiddish writer. In this way, Bashevis’s reliance on literary institutions and on his own celebrity mirrors the path taken by Asch. Both writers begin from a vernacular home but are ultimately interested in that which might be achieved beyond Yiddish. The

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s­ uccess of Bashevis in translation can mean both the triumph of Yiddish and its destruction; in claiming authority over Yiddish Bashevis ties its fate to his own. As a figurative thing, Yiddish becomes available to all of humanity, but only as filtered through the prism that Bashevis provides. In taking on this responsibility, Asch carefully curated which universalizable aspects of the vernacular past would be presented before his multiple audiences. At times, especially at the beginning of his career in translation, Bashevis followed this exact strategy. However, in the short stories analyzed here Bashevis allows for cracks to appear in his prism. In these moments, Bashevis evokes a model closer to Glatstein’s, in which the vernacular is allowed to speak for itself, regardless of the consequences for one’s reputation within the institutions of US and world literature. Notably though, Bashevis never expresses a desire to fully inhabit the ghetto and never subordinates his ­artistic autonomy to the Yiddish language as Glatstein does. Instead he consistently (and misogynistically) locates the vernacular in women’s bodies that he can partially control, as temptation and threat that can be domesticated in some way though never fully resolved. Shifting between worldly ambition and vernacular confession, Bashevis produces a kind of ghost world literature. Translation and accommodation give Bashevis institutional standing in the face of the decline of Yiddish. But in moments of self-reflection, Bashevis also allows ghosts and demons of the vernacular past to haunt his work. His writing appears to circulate freely in global networks but specters lurk that would unhinge it from these same circulatory structures. In his first English interview, Bashevis would sum up this tension by describing “a feeling that I’m talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody.”92 On the one hand, Bashevis did indeed write increasingly for nobody, since his fiction in the pages of the Forverts was read by a dwindling readership. Even today almost no one reads Bashevis in Yiddish; many scholars have not read much of his work in the original, in particular those works that only appeared in the press. On the other hand, for the sake of the millions, Bashevis considered the US his new literary home and English the language of second originals. Howe would comment that Bashevis “seemed really to live nowhere at all, though everyone had his address.”93 Ghost world literature holds up the possibility of institutional survival while ­acknowledging that the literary text, especially in its vernacular (re)articulation, can lead to an unknowable elsewhere. Bashevis’s writing imagines a redemptive and stable future for Yiddish and also produces more ghosts—hunchbacks, reincarnated mothers and lovers, and even Hitlers on the Upper West Side. In flitting between the universal and the vernacular, Bashevis admits that the much anticipated letter will never arrive, the lecture will not be given, and the ghosts will never entirely fade from view.

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Between Heaven and Earth saul bellow and the dialectics of world literature English, Translation, and Jewish Vernacularity The first three chapters of this book have focused on Jewish American writers whose language of original composition was nearly always Yiddish, a condition which significantly shaped their encounter with the institution of world literature. Regardless of their market ambitions, aesthetic choices, or ideological positions, Asch, Glatstein, and Bashevis all wrote from a position of explicit vernacular ­entanglement. In their choice of language they immediately faced a double bind between the uncertain (or even threatened) locality of Yiddish and the promises of a universal conception of literature, between writing for nobody and for millions. On the one hand, to write modern literature in Yiddish, especially in the postwar period, required confronting the potential of translation and the promise of ­security in the institution of world literature. On the other hand, Yiddish writers had to contend with the untranslatability of Jewish vernacularity and their responsibility to a shrinking Yiddish readership. In negotiating this double bind, each writer imagined the convergence of Yiddish, America, and the world: Asch ­believed in the responsibility of the Yiddish writer for the world’s redemption, ­especially in the new opportunities afforded by translation through the American window and into the global market; Glatstein rejected such a monolingual paradigm and devised a vernacular modernism that deferred institutional demands while claiming an inherent Jewish worldliness; and Bashevis sought to compartmentalize his vernacular and translational personae only to admit their uncomfortable juxtaposition in the haunted American landscape. Taken together these three writers demonstrate that Yiddish American writing has an uncertain relation with institutional constructs, and their commitment to Yiddish, as vernacular grounding, unsettles the possibility of arrival and legibility within a world-system. This double bind is less obvious, though no less present, when turning to Jewish American writing in English. At first one might assume that a writer producing work in a global language like English would be released from such undecidability. Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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Free from the shtetl–world vector, such a writer may view English as their mother tongue and obscure any mark of ethnic particularity. For many Jewish American writers of the postwar period, Yiddish does not hover as a precondition, a languageghetto out of which one needs to escape. At home in US culture, the “native” Jewish American writer has what appears to be a clearer path to the institution of world literature. However, as will be argued in this chapter, a writer’s choice of language does not eliminate the need for translation as a literary strategy. When a text in English is labeled “Jewish” or when a text evinces a concern with Jewish vocabularies, a legibility gap has already opened up. What happens when the mechanisms for translating a Jewish vernacular are relegated to the background and Jewishness is signaled through thematic tendencies, emotional sensibilities, biographical accident, or stylistic quirk rather than language of composition? The title page of a book may not credit a translator, yet there is a rush, especially among critics, to identify Jewish markers in a text and single them out for special explication. Sometimes the text itself invites this speculation. Most scholarship on Jewish American writing in English treats these moments of ethnic particularity as an opportunity for a kind of apologetics. Claiming a text or a writer as Jewish can double as a request for institutionalization, in which the reader forces into existence, as Benjamin Schreier points out, a legible Jewish population to which this literary object adheres.1 A critic seizes on a fragmentary moment in a text in order to bolster a larger national discourse, thereby translating the vernacular object into a hierarchy of coherent nationalities. This act of naming and translation allows the text to become decipherable through distinct cultural categories—to become both Jewish and American, or to be seen as the Jewish part within a larger American whole. Rather than a moment of untranslatability, Jewishness is explained away as the incidental particularity on the dialectical path toward the universal. Saul Bellow has often been read in this way, and though he bristled at being labeled a “Jewish writer,” Bellow often related to the Jewishness of his work in dialectical fashion. In a lecture he gave in 1988, Bellow reiterated his long-standing frustration with “the identity problem,” yet he cryptically admitted that “my first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew.” For Bellow, Jewishness was a condition of his existence, “my ‘given’ and it would be idle to quarrel with it, to try to revise or efface it.”2 Bellow’s Jewishness, in this formulation, is coincident with the cosmos—a marker of particularity that cannot be discarded yet needs no explanation alongside the more important task of finding one’s way through the universe. This allows Bellow to define Jewishness, by lecture’s end, as a form of contemplation that contributes to the writer’s ability to provide a record of “what the twentieth century has made of me and what I have made of the twentieth century.”3 That is, one’s Jewishness is initially determined by the seemingly random course of Jewish history; but that history is only important in as much as it forms a part of a universal narrative whose ultimate subject is the creative individual. For Bellow, as for many critics and scholars of Jewish American

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writing, this is the only horizon of meaning that has any value, in which one’s ­vernacular grounding is instrumentalized toward a broader institutionalization of the human as such. In contrast, this chapter begins from the premise that Jewishness is not a “given” biological, historical, or spiritual fact. What happens when Bellow names himself a “Jew”? What translational strategies make such a statement possible and what of the untranslatable vernacular is obscured in this gesture? In the following I aim to recover the double bind of Bellow’s fiction even as he repeatedly attempts, dialectically and in defense of his literary universe, to resolve its tensions or ignore its implications. Bellow’s desire for the cosmos, often mirrored in his rejection of the “noise” of contemporary life and his transvaluation of individual freedom, is complicated by the staging of a vague, translated, and indeterminate Jewish sensibility. Bellow tries to compensate for this recurring tension on the level of the sentence: Bellow’s literary style translates and aestheticizes the language of an immigrant past to produce a new American English that balances descent into the vernacular with a reach for sublime metaphor. As a result, Bellow’s work participates in what I call a “parochial” world literature—writing that hinges on the possibility of the local as a site of transcendence. This chapter focuses on moments in Bellow’s work, with special attention to the 1960s and ’70s, where this translational strategy runs up against recurring vernacular uncertainties that frustrate the institutional ­arrival that Bellow so deeply desires.

On the Knees of My Soul To further emphasize the hidden double bind of Bellow’s fiction, I begin with a brief foray into a period in which Bellow’s work was most aggressively universalized— just after winning the Nobel Prize in 1976. Bellow was understandably inundated with congratulatory notes from family, friends, and colleagues. Norman Mailer, with whom Bellow shared a sometimes amiable rivalry, sent this reluctant telegram: “After all Saul, why not cheers and congratulations?” Robert Penn Warren offered sardonic advice: “Dear Saul: For once the swedes didn’t make a mistake! Heartfelt congratulations, Ever yours, Red P.S. Invest wisely.”4 Beyond these personal messages, Bellow’s archives contain the large amount of fan mail he received, ranging from amorous entreaties to uninvited interpretations (sometimes quite personal) of his work. Sister Liam O’Sullivan, a nun from the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles in the Bronx, New York, wrote on the morning of the announcement of the prize, October 21, 1976: “This is the Day which the Lord has made, with the co-operation of Saul Bellow. Let us be glad and rejoice that the Nobel Prize has come your way as well as to U.S.A.” Sister O’Sullivan then ­describes, in a style reminiscent of Bellow’s own prose, how she spent the early morning waiting feverishly to learn the news and then how she dashed off quickly

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to the chapel to get “ ‘on the knees of my soul’—like Herzog—and offer strong prayers,” imploring the angels “to run—no—gallop—no—fly or whatever angels do to be there on the spot for the final decision in favor of Saul Bellow.” The nun tells of how she exulted upon hearing the good news, which she ascribed to Jesus’s intervention and to her own prayers. After mentioning the festive cake bought for the entire convent in honor of this special occasion, she concludes: “Marvelous how books can bring us humans together—linking even Heaven and Earth.”5 The letter’s homage to Bellow is instructive for how it is possible to read the Jewish markers of his work and transform them as part of a universal conception of literature. Sister O’Sullivan’s mixture of high and low registers—her own comic frenzy combined with the running-galloping-flying of the angels—closely mirrors Bellow’s mock-sublime style. Here though, O’Sullivan places Bellow’s literary voice within a cosmos that is explicitly structured by Christian theology. Similarly, she renders Bellow’s autobiographical character Herzog, the sensitive Jewish intellectual of his 1964 novel, as a man of Christian prayer. Herzog’s Yiddish-inflected speech and Jewish immigrant nostalgia are discarded in favor of his potential as an Emersonian “Man Thinking.” As the composer of letters sent and unsent in the semi-epistolary novel, Herzog does indeed get “on the knees of your soul” in a desperate act of introspection; but Sister O’Sullivan does him one better in that her prayers, in the Herzogian mode, are indeed answered.6 Bellow is awarded the Nobel Prize in part due to the nun’s pleas. Herzog’s Jewishness is thus obfuscated and then mobilized as a vehicle for universal insight, upholding a Christian ­humanism. All of Bellow’s and his characters’ transcendent longings, which take up so much of his work—the hope for renewed romantic transcendence, the belief in the triumph of Western civilization—are suddenly realized through Sister O’Sullivan’s intervention and then confirmed by the cachet of the Nobel Prize.7 The letter’s conclusion summarizes this achievement by offering a definition of world literature that in many ways remains the lens through which Bellow’s work continues to be read. Sister O’Sullivan first confirms the earthly power of his fiction, how it “brings us humans together” in this world to form a global community of readers. She then claims that Bellow’s writing also gives readers access to the next world. Bellow’s literary creations link “Heaven and Earth” by putting readers directly in touch with the universal. Echoing the ambitions of the Nobel Prize yet imbuing them with a specifically Christian intonation, Sister O’Sullivan prescribes a kind of writing that may begin within a particular community but which aims for both global circulation and divinely inspired achievement. This reading and mimicry of Bellow employs a powerful dialectic that erases the vernacular uncertainty of Bellow’s writing in favor of a Christian universal. One is tempted to counterpose this letter with one that would restore some kind of Jewishness to his work—perhaps a reader who found Herzog’s use of Jewish languages a confirmation of Bellow’s deep commitment to the Jewish people. Yet, reading the vernacular back into a Bellow text runs the risk of essentializing his

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work as entirely contained within a Jewish totality, as if Herzog’s own evocation of a distinctly Christian prayer position did not already indicate the multidirectionality of Bellow’s prose. Moreover, Bellow’s desire for the world (or the “cosmos”) is clear enough such that claiming some exclusive Jewish ownership over Bellow is impossible. Sister O’Sullivan’s ambitious letter invites a reading of Bellow’s work that proceeds in at least two directions: on the one hand, one needs to recover those vernacular traces that a universalizing reading of Bellow would erase; on the other hand, one must identify the structures within his writing that invite just such a reading. Both directions require a critical examination of the translational strategies that Sister O’Sullivan so aptly discovers in Bellow’s work. This means adopting Sister O’Sullivan’s framework without recourse to its faith in the authority of the church. In reading Bellow with and against this letter, I ask: What happens when we read into the failures of Bellow’s translational strategies without offering some institutional security as recompense? What happens when the individual artist bent on literary transcendence encounters the unsettling demands of vernacular belonging?

The Bellow Dialectic and the Globalization of the Novel To understand the instabilities of Bellow’s fiction it is useful to first outline the dialectical structure that informs his literary universe, especially as his novelistic thinking crystalized in the 1960s and ’70s. Many scholars concur that the overarching aim of Bellow’s writing, from his first novel Dangling Man (1944) to his last Ravelstein (2000) is to “uncover, or to recover, signs of the depth that has gone missing, a depth in life that Bellow constantly construes as an inner life.”8 While what constitutes this inner life, and how exactly his autobiographical characters approach it, shifts from text to text, each novel remains preoccupied with the tension between private feelings and their imbrication in society. By opposing the private and the public, Bellow sets up the possibility of a synthesis, often suggested in the conclusions of his novels, in which both the fantasy of individual freedom and the acknowledgement of a social contract are incorporated within a reinvigorated self-consciousness. This dialectic begins from Bellow’s often-repeated critique of the noise of the contemporary world, in which he mourns the decline of “real culture” and the rise of what he views as the spiritually bankrupt ideas of pseudo-intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians. Bellow insisted that “we live in a technological age which seems insurmountably hostile to the artist” who must create art even as he is inundated by an overflow information and is forced to confront a state of perpetual crisis.9 “Literature itself has been swallowed up,” as Bellow puts it in one essay.10 The situation has become so dire that “modern distraction, worldwide irrationality, and madness threaten existence itself.”11 For Bellow this was a crisis of

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i­nstitutional proportions, where those bodies that were constructed to protect ­culture were failing, in particular with the rise of the new campus radicalism of the period. Though he had come of age in the 1930s and ’40s as a Trotskyite, Bellow had largely abandoned revolutionary politics for a considered support, though not without trenchant criticism, of institutions like the university (where he had been gainfully employed for two decades). During the political climate of the late 1960s, and in particular following a contentious question session after a lecture he gave at San Francisco State University in 1968, Bellow became deeply critical of the New Left.12 Without hesitation he grouped left-wing rage and protest with what he considered the other superficial distractions of the postwar age, all of which threatened the autonomy and creativity of the true artist. Bellow’s critique reached its apex with his novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), where Bellow gives voice to his vitriol through an Anglophile Jewish intellectual and Holocaust survivor. The eponymous character fumes at student protesters and deplores their sexual promiscuity; the novel infamously includes racist depictions of a black pickpocket whose essentialized animal sexuality, in contrast with Sammler’s vulnerable body, symbolizes the breakdown in civil society. The novel expresses Bellow’s deep disappointment with the American present, the culture’s perceived abandonment of Enlightenment values, and his feeling that the world was on the brink of nothing less than total collapse: “New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world.”13 Having been a victim during the destruction of Europe, Sammler ­deplores the decay of contemporary US culture and is even more disturbed by the lack of institutional stability that would counteract such decline. Reflecting Bellow’s own increasingly reactionary views, the novel concludes with Sammler’s embrace of the “old system,” a longing for the firm social contract that familial intimacy implies, in contrast with the chaos of the public sphere. Bellow’s disapproval of contemporary politics and its ideological fervor is mirrored in the Orientalism that structures his novels. Even though Bellow has been consistently praised for his ability to capture the American present, the majority of his novels are not contained by the distance between Chicago and New York and depend on juxtaposing his midwestern outpost with metropolitan centers and ­colonial peripheries.14 The noise of modernity is at least partially the result of what the Bellow protagonist sees as a new and unwelcome global horizon, which distracts the true artist from more important local concerns of intimacy and feeling. The picaresque escapades of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) end in France (where Bellow composed much of the book), after a stopover in Mexico, even though his fate is meant to be essentially American and anchored in immigrant Chicago. In Henderson The Rain King (1959), the main character forgoes further adventure in Africa to return to the Midwest with new self-understanding gained after his adventures and philosophical discussions with the natives. Herzog’s trip to Poland and affair with a French-speaking Japanese woman are more significant

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elements of the novel than most readings would indicate. The characters of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) journey to Africa in search of beryllium and fortune, vacation in Spain, make movie deals in France, and write screenplays about the North Pole, Italy, Africa, and New Guinea, all while trying to find inner tranquility.15 The comedy of world travel is meant to expose the weakness of the Bellovian protagonist while reproducing a map of imperial control. Each point on the protagonist’s global itinerary has an assigned cultural value: Chicago is the site of ­familial belonging and potential personal transcendence; New York is a literary and intellectual center, but its noise and radicalism seem spiritually and artistically bankrupt; Europe is a possible haven, the source of the greatest achievements of Western civilization, but its violent history is too terrible a burden. Distinct from these centers of cultural power are the global margins—Mexico, Africa, the North Pole, Indonesia. In Bellow’s novels, these are sites of savage primitivism and abject parody whose primary function is to bring financial gain to the protagonist or, ­finally, to motivate a return to Chicago, the site of immanent transcendence. Thus, even as he derides its pitfalls, globalization (as an object of critique and parody) serves as an essential element in the dialectical structure of Bellow’s novels.16 For Bellow, the path away from the noise and toward the self must pass through a series of global and national stations—without lingering too long on any one of them. The act of true self-reflection can only be arrived at through the negation, translation, and incorporation of the world’s (often comical) impurities. By portraying and then rejecting European havens and exotic colonial outposts, Bellow admits that the noise of globalization is constitutive of modern consciousness but that the true artist should seek to overcome its demands to gain a more accurate and internally motivated view of the world. In this way, the triumphant retreat to Chicago is only legible through the failed geographies that surround it. Chicago exists in opposition to the global but in direct contact with the world of the soul. This dialectic echoes what Mariano Siskind calls “the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global.” One of the functions of the novel is to “render the historical process of globalization visible . . . mak[ing] the process of globalization available for reading audiences to work through the transformations they are experiencing at home.”17 Bellow dutifully includes a global purview in his novels, reflecting his own travels and in deference to the prevailing economic and cultural conditions of the period.18 At the same time, by novelizing the global, the novel can institute a clear hierarchy that would confirm the triumph of EuroAmerican universalism over an objectified periphery, “putting into circulation ­effective accounts of the global reach of the bourgeoisie in terms of the production and reproduction of discourses of universal adventure, exploration, and colonial profit.”19 The Bellow novel portrays global margins as a way to mirror contemporary experience while buttressing his own universal project. The colonizing gaze of his fiction flattens a host of postcolonial landscapes and subjects to serve the interests of the individual artist.

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This rather crude Orientalism—the instrumentalization of the exoticized other for the sake of the construction of the universal—is one of the engines of Bellow’s fiction. The comedic noise of globalization is often doubled by similarly instrumentalized portrayals of women, who are reduced to distractions or objectified as vehicles of support, love, or hate. They are insufficiently mapped out sites where the protagonist pauses for a moment during his all-important spiritual journey.20 African Americans receive analogous treatment in Bellow’s fiction, where their presence in the American landscape is either erased or symbolized as the mark of civilizational decay.21 By obscuring these “foreign” sites under the guise of comedy and the grotesque, and by admitting the struggles of his protagonist to resist their entreaties, Bellow can offer an answer to the trials of modernity that synthesizes through obfuscation and universal promise: Bellow’s fiction always concludes with the hesitant belief in the redemptive triumph of the individual’s imagination over these distractions. It is this dialectical engine that performs “complex negotiations of race, ethnicity, and nationality which also guarantee Bellow his place in American literature.”22

The Parochial Universal and its New Public The question is what exactly happens when the Bellovian character returns to his creative solitude in Chicago, the site of local transcendence. As an extension of the larger canonization and depoliticization of modernism during this period, Bellow contends that the writer must disregard the noisy demands of the masses or the dictates of ideology and turn inward, following the autonomous instincts of the artist. Bellow writes that “the important humanity of the novel must be the writer’s own. His force, his virtuosity, his powers of poetry, his reading of fate, are at the center of his book.”23 This literature “is produced by the single individual, concerns itself with individuals and is read by separate persons.”24 For Bellow the focus on the personal (and the erasure of the other) produces a more accurate portrayal of the human experience: “What I am saying is that the accounts of human existence given by the modern intelligence are very shallow by comparison with those that the imagination is capable of giving, and that we should by no means agree to limit imagination by committing ourselves to the formulae of modern intelligence but continue as individuals to make free individual judgments.”25 Bellow’s individualism would, at least initially, avoid attachment to any social construction and place the self at the center of a transcendental artistic project. For Bellow’s characters this involves the adoption of a passive–aggressive stance to the world, in which progress is only possible through a retreat inward and a rejection of external demand. The conclusions of Bellow’s novels often report on a character’s decision to act, not in any practical or concrete way that would participate in some larger social structure, but on the level of consciousness.26 For

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Bellow, the work of the soul is the highest form of activity, an anti-historical and anti-political position that privileges the individual over the collective. In his novels, Bellow’s characters approach this site of parochial transcendence in a variety of ways. In Bellow’s very first novel, The Dangling Man (1944), the protagonist’s solitary confessions are meant to aid in developing his own “private language,” a process that continues in Henderson’s Reichian ruminations and in Herzog’s transactions with Romanticism.27 Thirty years later, Bellowed still ­focused on the work of internal reflection. Humboldt’s Gift centers around the main character’s study of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, an early twentieth-century spiritual school of thought aimed at uniting philosophical and mystical traditions. Steiner remained an important source of philosophical and spiritual investigation throughout the 1970s and ’80s, seemingly taking on an outsized importance in his writerly project.28 What Bellow found attractive about Steiner’s system of thought, in particular during this period, was its focus on the development of the soul and its imaginative capacity—the ability to awaken from spiritual sleep to true consciousness—while shutting out the distractions of modernity. Moreover, the mystical transcendence and immortality of the soul that it promised could counter the finality of biological death, a topic which greatly concerned Bellow following the passing of a number of friends around this time.29 Bellow’s stand-in in Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine, takes anthroposophy as a devotional practice that could bring about the kind of individual freedom that Bellow so desperately searched for: “When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole sinning earth.”30 The individual, with his imaginative faculty, need only look inward in order to contemplate, constitute, and even redeem the entire universe. Despite this localized idealism, the key to the fantasy of individual freedom is, dialectically, its failure. In the logic of Bellow’s literary universe, Bellow must give up his absolute freedom in addition to rejecting the noise of global modernity in order to arrive at some productive synthesis between the two. Thus, in each novel the character’s devotion to the personal is compromised in some way. Initially, this is often framed in passive terms, as the outside world invades the writer’s personal fortress without warning. However, in the positivist orientation of the text, even this invasion can lead to the protagonist’s benefit. In Humboldt’s Gift, Citrine’s global adventures lead him away from the work of the soul, but they also lead him to great financial gain and finally to a spiritual reckoning: “such sums as I made, made themselves. Capitalism made them for dark comical reasons of its own. The world did it.”31 The noise and wealth of fame can negatively occupy his imagination, but material comfort makes his solitary retreat possible. As a consequence of this inevitable invasion, the Bellow character typically ­remains skeptical even as he longs for private fulfillment. Bellow’s criticism of the various institutions of culture, from New York literary circles to the new role of writers in the university, was thorough and devastating. Bellow’s desire to recover

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“the depth of life” was tempered by his sense that there is no protection from the misanthropy of the modern public arena.32 As Michael LeMahieu puts it, “a pervasive skepticism qualifies Bellow’s modernist responses to this modernist situation, in which the presence of doubt and the threat of fraudulence are ever present.”33 This critical mode also extends to Bellow’s evaluation of his own intellectual and spiritual practices; his characters may find themselves interested in one intellectual trend or another but they always have reservations or invite distraction. In Humboldt’s Gift, Citrine’s enthusiasm for Steiner’s thought runs up against its more obscure and ­ridiculous aspects: Steiner’s serious investigations of things like Goethe’s color theory are accompanied by long discourses on reincarnation, Buddha on Mars, life in ­ancient Atlantis, and quite a bit of explicitly Christian mysticism—all of which irks Citrine. Even when he is finally able to perform various Steinerian meditations, he is constantly interrupted—especially by the various “reality-instructors” that dominate the novel, from the farcical gangster Cantabile to Citrine’s more sentimental attachments to family members, to current and former lovers, and to dead friends. In ­admitting the failure of the private fantasy, Bellow comes to an understanding of the social contract that conditions the artistic act, even if it also figures as a threat. In managing the tension between the private and the public, Bellow comes to an idiosyncratic, yet internally coherent definition of the relationship between his writing and the institution of world literature. For Bellow, the self-reflection practiced in the pages of a novel is meant to “create a new public, summoned up by the forces of his [the writer’s] truth.”34 Unfazed by market conditions or the logic of global circulation, Bellow considers world literature a function of one’s writerly orientation toward an invented public. Following the critic Wyndam Lewis, Bellow identifies two models of readership: there is, on the one hand, the large public as accessed by nineteenth-century writers who held the attention of entire nations; on the other hand, there is the elite audience of twentieth-century modernism.35 Bellow envisions his work somewhere between these two poles, his own version of Bashevis’s hovering between millions and nobody: “Which is not to say that I, along with every writer, do not want as large an audience as possible, but there are limits to such a desire. I want to be read on my own terms.”36 Bellow defends art in the face of popular culture by having the artist forcefully dictate the conditions of his writing over and against the demands of current fashions. Bellow adopts a Heideggerian concept of “worlding” in which the literary text not only creates its own internal world but in so doing shapes the world around it. In this way, Bellow reserves the right to define the institutional terms of his artistic production while also offering his own work as a normative force in the world. Bellow self-servingly fantasizes about a kind of writing that would move beyond responding to the superficial perversions of contemporary global culture. Instead it would move toward establishing a “true culture” with global potential that still does not concede the possibility of local transcendence. In synthesizing private and public writing, Bellow soothes his deep desire for canonization and critical

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acceptance by offering his own work as the standard for restoring traditional ­institutions he felt were under threat from without and within. For Bellow, the best kind of writing enacts a confluence of the personal, the universal, and the global.37 World literature for Bellow is a dialectical process: writing is a parochial event translated into universal forms and then circulated on a global scale.

Jewish Sentimentality Bellow’s defense of civilization and the institution of world literature relies on writing that merges private and public spheres. This confluence is reflected initially in Bellow’s thinly veiled fictionalizations of his life and in the way he voices his own ideological and philosophical concerns through his protagonists. His novels are both autobiographical confessions and an attempt to render his experiences, in fictional form, as paradigmatic for the American present. The characters themselves also use this narrative strategy: Bellow’s protagonists are constantly drawn to both lone rumination and dramatic disclosure. Thus, even as the novels are meant to be the concern of “individuals” they also serve as public statements about all of US culture, about the state of the world, and about humanity in general. The tension between the personal and the civilizational is resolved through the dialectical structures of the novels: the Bellovian character, after much struggle and protest, commits to finding a communal outlet for his emotional excess: Tommy Wilhelm accepts the burden of emotional connection in Seize the Day (1956); Sammler resolves to meet “the terms of his contract”; Herzog will start afresh, newly committed to the practicalities of a life led with other people. While these resolutions begin from a protagonist’s embrace of personal attachment, they double as the foundations for the character’s renewed public engagement. Such conclusions propose a translatability, belatedly gained, between an inscrutable personal language and the language of human connection. In order for the lost intellectual to find his place in the world he needs to devise a mechanism that will make communication possible. Wilhelm is frustrated throughout Seize the Day by the seeming impossibility of such a translational condition: Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham, Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. “I’m fainting, please get me a little water.” You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be

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understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons were no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?38

Wilhelm’s “private thinking” constantly runs up against the demand for legibility, in which the most trivial of acts must be understood within the narrative of the entire history of civilization. Translation, in its least successful form, is a repeated practice in which a personal language struggles to meet the horizon of meaning determined by familial belonging and the larger social order. By the end of the novel however, in a flash of emotional excess, Wilhelm is suddenly able to forge a connection, as he weeps uncontrollably at the funeral of a total stranger. Wilhelm is able to reach “toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” because of the merging of individual and public sentiment, even if there remains some incongruence between them.39 The factor that makes this confluence possible, for Wilhelm, is nothing less than a “blaze of love,” the consummation, only momentarily gained, of mutual need and desire.40 At the heart of this sudden, emotionally charged translationality is Bellow’s sentimental relation to his Jewishness. The transformation from self-reflection to public accounting in Bellow’s literary universe often begins from a reorientation toward his own immigrant past, turning to a Jewish genealogy as a way to spur the search for universal synthesis. In the dialectical structure of Bellow’s novels, the return to the self, the return to Chicago, starts with a return to the familial past, its traumas and its nostalgic warmth. Wilhelm’s search for love begins with confronting his Jewish father and the emotional energy tied up in that failed relationship. Mark Shechner calls the Jewish side of Bellow’s dialectics his “ghetto cosmopolitanism, a quality of mind that arises out of the peculiar conditions of Jewish life and experience in the diaspora, in which two different and opposed worlds are desperately yoked in the mind of each Jew.”41 Jewishness, for Bellow, is an emotional rawness inherited from the essential barbarity of the immigrant generation. The Bellovian character means to recover this direct connection to human feeling, as he learned it as a child, in defiance of the polite civility of assimilation and Americanization that he learned as an adult.42 The “Jewish opera,” to borrow Donald Weber’s term, has more human resonance than the cold strictures of contemporary societal norms.43 This ghetto sentimentality has a universal character to it and signals the possibility of a cosmopolitical transformation. Jewishness thus figures as an archive of personal memory that may lead one back toward an immanent universal. Bellow’s character Dr. Braun announces this aim in the conclusion to the short story “The Old System” (1968): Oh, these Jews—these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying . . . But what did you understand? Again, nothing! It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—might, mind

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you—eventually, through its gift which might—might again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death. And again, why these particular forms—these Isaacs and these Tinas? When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes—the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness where the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago.44

“The Old System” presents the recollections of Dr. Braun as he considers the lives of his cousins Isaac and Tina and their extended immigrant family. Braun’s memories juxtapose old world sensibilities with new world successes—often centering around grudges about money and marriage that upend familial intimacy.45 Though as a scientist he seeks to avoid such emotional surfeit, Braun is overwhelmed in the final pages by the deathbed reconciliation between Isaac and Tina. In aligning himself with the immigrant generation, Braun is driven to attribute to Jewishness not any particular national or political consciousness—Braun gestures toward the Holocaust and the State of Israel but never in any sustained way—but a certain affective intensity. Dr. Braun’s conclusion is to join his dead relatives, almost ­unwillingly, in a reenacted emotional outburst. This exploration of deep familial love though is immediately translated into a parallel exploration of a universal horizon. These “particular forms” from Braun’s Jewish past become instances of a cosmological wonder, the local spasms of universal experience.46 It is this “old system” that Bellow’s protagonists repeatedly seek to recover, a form of “immigrant loving,” “potato love,” and filial allegiance that one inherits passively, genealogically. This attachment to the past sets the Bellow protagonist apart from other family members, many of whom want to Americanize and become part of the noise of contemporary life. Citrine reports the following in Humbolt’s Gift: My father became an American too and so did Julius. They stopped all that ­immigrant loving. Only I persisted, in my childish way. My emotional account was always overdrawn. I never have forgotten how my mother cried out when I fell down the stairs or how she pressed the lump on my head with the blade of a knife. And what a knife—it was her Russian silver with a handle like a billy club. So there you are. Whether it was a lump on my head or Julius’s geometry, or how Papa could raise the rent, or poor Mama’s toothaches, it was the most momentous thing on earth for us all.47

While others discard this family archive, Citrine holds on to his inherited Jewish sensibilities as a mode of contemplation. Jewishness is not a political act or a religious practice for Bellow’s main character, nor does it automatically render him foreign or alien to the world around him; it is above all a set of memories, a linguistic or historical condition, a consciousness. Jewishness as determined by emotional outburst stands in contrast to more fashionable forms of Jewish modernism that interested many of Bellow’s fellow

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Jewish American writers, including most prominently his friend Delmore Schwartz. Bellow often sought to disassociate himself from writers who made larger, categorical claims about Jewishness, including notions of Jewish alienation. Bellow pursued this debate most directly in his portrayal of Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift, a novel he began writing shortly after the writer’s death in 1966. The novel centers around the attempt to understand his friend’s passing and to process Bellow’s guilt for having survived to achieve global fame.48 The different approaches to Jewishness that he and Schwartz espoused play a crucial role in the plot. Schwartz’s stand-in, Von Humboldt Fleisher, is described as a “culture-Jew” devoted to the temples of “Marxism, Freudanism, Modernism, the avant-garde.”49 For Humboldt as for Schwartz, his Jewish immigrant past is a source for critical and creative ­insight more than sentimental attachment. Above all, Jewishness is a mark of alienation and homelessness and therefore a hallmark of his modernism. Schwartz wrote in 1944: [T]he fact of being a Jew became available to me as a central symbol of alienation, bias, point of view, and certain other characteristics which are the peculiar marks of modern life. [. . .] And thus I have to say (with gratitude and yet diffidence ­because it has been so different for other Jews, different to the point of death) that the fact of Jewishness has been nothing but an ever-growing good to me, and it seems clear to me now that it can be, at least for me, nothing but a fruitful and inexhaustible inheritance.50

For Schwartz, as for many of the New York Intellectuals, seeing their Jewishness as an expression of modernist alienation conveniently allowed their religious or ethnic heritage to merge with their artistic and philosophical tastes. In celebrated short stories like “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (1937) and “America! America!” Schwartz exposes the gap between the American-born intellectual and his immigrant parents to better describe the existential angst of the era. Employing his otherness in order to join modernist convention, Humbodlt becomes “a Yiddisher mouse in these great Christian houses”51 who still produces “ballads [that] were pure, musical, witty, radiant humane . . . . Yes, Humboldt’s words were impeccable. Genteel America had nothing to worry about.”52 Being a Jew for Schwartz, as for Humboldt, is a way to participate in contemporary discourse and its symbolization of outsider cultures. While Citrine admires Humboldt’s ambition, he also goes out of his way to show that Humboldt’s approach to Jewishness leads to what he considers the anxiety and exhaustion that plagues contemporary society. Humboldt is portrayed as a broken figure: in breathless and meandering monologues, fueled by alcohol and stimulants, he obsesses over fame and wealth and grows paranoid, jealous, and even afraid of antisemitism. In Citrine’s estimation, Humboldt’s outsider status is self-victimizing and self-defeating rather than universalizing, drawing him away from truly valuable forms of introspection. Some critics have read the novel as both a memorial and indictment of Schwartz, a eulogy that doubles as a criticism

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of his deteriorating art, his supposed limited imagination, his obsession with ­material gain, and his failure to fulfill his potential as a “World-HistoricalIndividual.”53 Humboldt’s poorly symbolized Jewishness highlights this critique by rendering the Schwartz character as someone unable to ground himself in personal experience. By instead relegating Jewishness to a figure of the past or an object within one’s emotional life, Bellow frees his autobiographical character to busy himself with higher pursuits and avoid the clamor of discourse that so plagues Humboldt. Humboldt in turn finds this passivity suspicious, challenging Citrine on his absolute devotion to personal freedom: You lean back like a king, relaxed, and let all these human problems happen. There ain’t no flies on Jesus. Charlie, you’re not place bound, time bound, goy bound, Jew bound. What are you bound? Others abide our question. Thou art free! . . . You’re always mooning in your private mind about some kind of cosmic destiny. Tell me, what is this great thing you’re always working on?54

Humboldt’s criticism of Citrine, however well performed, actually confirms a central argument of the novel. Even if Humboldt’s challenges ring true, his own position is so thoroughly ridiculed that the reader cannot help but be attracted to Citrine’s rejection of all ideological and historical obligations.55 Jewishness and other forms of cultural expression are conditions of his existence but they do not prevent him from pursuing a “cosmic destiny.” Jewishness, as a tool of personal memory, actually activates the self while sidestepping historical or ­political consequences. Bellow’s espousal of sentimental, nostalgic Jewishness rejects modernist ­notions of the figural wandering Jew while celebrating an intensely local Jewishness that marks one as embedded in the American landscape rather than excluded from it. In a lecture from this period Bellow stated, “I do not, because I am Jewish, feel isolated in America. Alienation is a concept that has no attraction for me. I dislike the term ‘alienation’ as much as I dislike the word ‘Establishment.’ ”56 For this reason Bellow bristled at being grouped with other postwar Jewish writers like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley.57 In trying to distance his writing from any canon of Jewish American literature, Bellow often repeated a version of this quip: “It has been painful to me to find that Roth and Malamud . . . and I have at times been thought of as a Hart, Shaffner & Marx of literature; and our product identified as having come from some sort of shop.”58 Hart, Shaffner, & Marx is a Jewish-owned manufacturer of men’s clothing based in Chicago—Bellow lamented the transformation of his writing into a product that could be branded as Jewish and thereby siloed away from more general literary categories. He disdained the thought of doing “public relations” for American Jewry and rejected the idea that his Jewishness made his work more marketable.59 Bellow claimed that while he wrote about Jewish characters he did not want to remain tied to Jewish civilization, culture, or any other kind of identity politics

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that would limit his artistic freedom or qualify his participation in the institution of world literature. Despite these objections, critics and scholars have often circled around the specter of Jewishness in Bellow’s literary universe, repeatedly trying to identify an essentially Jewish foundation to his literary project. L. H. Goldman’s Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (1983) can be seen as representative of a trend in scholarship which highlights the Jewish sources of Bellow’s writing (especially after having received the Nobel Prize) in order to prove the centrality of Jewish languages, culture, and identity to Bellow’s worldview. Goldman can state without hesitation that Bellow’s “writings epitomize the moral vision that is an integral part of the Jewish outlook. . . . His views, which stem from the tenets of Judaism, become the themes and perspectives of his fiction, and they in turn, affect the tone, character, and style of all his works.”60 Defining Jewishness in the widest terms possible, critics like Goldman seek to tie Bellow’s work to a religious and moral tradition that can be named as exclusively Jewish, even as Bellow’s work does not make this connection explicit. While scholars admit that representing Jewishness as feeling and memory makes Bellow’s Jewishness somewhat vague, they understand this gesture as Bellow’s firm commitment to Jewish communal life.61 The attempt to understand the essential Jewish character of his fiction was first undertaken by Ruth Wisse, who identified the figure of the schlemiel as the model for Bellow’s protagonists.62 Others have followed this same strategy in trying to translate Bellow’s universal ambitions back into a Jewish vocabulary.63 Many of these studies suffer from various forms of essentialization by creating fixed and problematic definitions of Jewishness and by isolating those parts of Bellow’s works that confirm the given scholar’s preconceptions of Jewish identity, most often linked either to the Holocaust, the State of Israel, or both. These studies make claims on Bellow so as to advocate for a particular incarnation of Jewish American culture as well as to promote Bellow as a valuable asset in the storehouse of Jewish civilization. In this way, they perform a parallel though differently motivated act of translation, in which Bellow is made legible within a unified articulation of Jewishness. The ultimate goal of these readings is the institutionalization of Jewish American writing within the hierarchies of US literature. These narrow readings fail to account for the dialectical logic of Bellow’s work in which the indeterminacy of Jewishness, as sentiment and memory, enables a different institutionalization as part of Bellow’s longed for universal synthesis. As Amy Hungerford has argued, the flattening or emptying of religion serves to preserve an unchecked belief in a universalized (and Christianity-infused) religious imagination.64 Bellow’s Jewishness is simply another strand in the writer’s web of intellectual, philosophical, and theological pursuits and only received sustained (and still partial) attention later in his career.65 Elizabeth Jane Bellamy notes that “Judaism is both central to Bellow’s characters and unpredictably refracted by the

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multiplicity and instability of their Jewish identity.”66 The vagueness of Bellow’s Jewishness, its seeming multiplicity and idiosyncrasy as tied to personal experience, can be quickly and wholly translated into the universal, along with all of the Chicago immigrant grit and other markers of particularity. Rather than a nagging form of alienation or the language of a wholly distinct identitarian politics, Bellow’s Jewishness is his alone, subordinated within his literary universe, to be instrumentalized at his command.

Failed Translations What happens though when Bellow’s translational approach to Jewishness meets a vernacular limit? Is there a possible reading of Bellow that challenges the translatability that motivates Bellow’s parochial universalism yet avoids the nationalist appropriations of Jewish American literary studies? How can we name the Jewishness of Bellow’s writing without demanding its adherence to a coherent Jewish subject? Where do markers of Jewishness within Bellow’s work become undecidable things rather than levers within a system of identity and control? One place to begin such an unsettling of Bellow’s work is to examine what is often considered his most impressive aesthetic achievement, his synthetic ­approach to the American idiom. Beginning with his “breakthrough” in The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow has often been praised for employing what he called “a street language combined with high style,” an effusive diction that evokes and then breaks convention by incorporating immigrant speech and urban slang, often for the sake of comedic or romantic effect.67 The most prevalent “street language” hovering behind this innovation is Yiddish, Bellow’s mother tongue and the language of the immigrant community of his childhood. In this way Bellow proposes a synthesis between high and low registers, between a vernacular foundation and a universal horizon. Some critics found this to be a violation of US English, especially Katherine Anne Porter who abhorred the “deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish, and dull old worn-out dirty words— an appalling bankruptcy in language.”68 But most have seen Bellow’s jazz-like ­improvisations as ushering in a new standard for US literature.69 I contend that it is more accurate to view this proposed synthesis as signaling an aesthetic fantasy rather than confirming the creation of a new institutionally sanctioned mode of writing. Bellow’s transformation of Jewish vernacularity within a cohesive literary language can be seen as an exhaustingly repetitive and obsessive act of compensation. Take for instance the often-quoted opening lines of The Adventures of Augie March: I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to

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knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so i­ nnocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Augie March can be considered a kind of picaresque novel that is structured as a set of variations on a single theme.70 Bellow’s prose style matches this improvisational structure in its constant vacillation between registers. This seemingly spontaneous movement has an ideological aim: to tether vernacuarlity to logocentric aesthetic norms.71 In this opening passage, the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric is answered by a reference to Heraclitus, seemingly demonstrating the hybrid convergence of street language and high culture. But this allusion is already evidence of an internal contradiction. If the main character does it all his “own way,” why does he feel it necessary to quote Heraclitus, as if to lend some external, classical authority to his street wisdom? Moreover, the colloquialisms of the passage are constantly mirrored by a reaching toward the (vague, undetermined) lyrical sublime. In the first sentence, Augie corrects his own geographical origin— not just Chicago, but “somber Chicago.” The addition of “somber” makes the opening sentence more evocative, romantic, and even somewhat mysterious, without saying very much about Chicago itself. Throughout the novel and then as a dominant strategy in his subsequent writing, Bellow constructs a language that is charged with three impulses: one toward answering the demands of realist convention, as filtered through the dominant modernist modes of the postwar period; a second toward the humor, candor, and intimacy of an invented (and not necessarily “authentic”) street language; and a third impulse toward an imaginative aesthetic ideal, a romantic, monolingual plateau of artistic freedom, which is constantly gestured toward and to which all else is subordinated. Consider this passage from Herzog (1964) mentioned earlier in this chapter:   At first there was no pattern to the notes he made. They were fragments—nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations or, in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, Trepverter—retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs.   He wrote, for instance, Death–die–live again–die again–live.   No person, no death.  And, On the knees of your soul? Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor.  Next, Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceit.   Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him.   Choose one.72 This passage is the first description of Herzog’s unsent “letters,” the internal monologues (in italics) directed at friends, family, and historical figures (dead or alive) that make up much of the novel. The use of letters is indicative of the text’s

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­ odernist affinities, evoking the tradition of the epistolary novel within the m ­fragmentary stream-of-consciousness strategies of Anglo-American modernism. The evocation of a legible literary convention is then given a Yiddish name, trepverter (literally step-words), a neologism attributed to the protagonist’s mother that refers to the retorts one comes up with only after having stepped away from the conversation. Thus the European literary form is put on the same plane as an intensely local vernacularity, enacting their convergence as equally valid forms of expression. The text announces a confluence of Western form and vernacular speech, exactly the synthesis that motivates Bellow’s local universalism. However, trepverter is not as “local” as Bellow’s narrator would have the reader believe: trepverter is actually a calque of the French idiom l’esprit de l’escalier, likely a result of interactions between Yiddish and French-speaking communities of Montreal, where Bellow spent the first nine years of his life.73 In this way, the modernist structure of the text is only partially balanced by its vernacular articulation, which itself is already shot through with translational valences. The contents of the letters themselves then announce a departure from translational imbalance into the realm of metaphysical reflection, thereby justifying the mixture of high and low forms. Herzog’s italicized letter-fragments focus on the grand questions of human existence—life, death, and self-knowledge, while quoting from Proverbs (26:4–5). For comedic effect, couched in the middle of these more serious pursuits, is the juxtaposition of Christian prayer (“on the knees of your soul”) with the mundanity of everyday life (“Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor”). In this comic disjunction Herzog pokes fun at his overwrought solemnity by comparing his earnest prayers to housecleaning. At the same time though, this comedic strategy implies that the ultimate goal is to arrive at true knowledge. The trepverter are reminders of one’s failures to say the right thing, yet they also point the way, retrospectively, to metaphysical reflection. In the end, the bon mot that remains unsaid in the moment later finds its proper place in the pages of the novel. Readers are meant to understand that while he struggles to communicate with those around him, Herzog-Bellow is a master of the written word, shaping the fragments of life into novelistic totality. What then are we to make of the use of the term trepverter? The word is mined from Herzog’s immigrant past and the complexities of migrant language contact to help create a new English. Bellow’s language aims to forge a coherent self out of “guttersnipe” colloquialisms, emotional overindulgences, and canonized literary vocabularies—a self that is then capable of a purified aesthetic practice. This dialectical process produces a synthetic vernacular of constant, exhausting compensation. Words and concepts like trepverter must be repeatedly translated; the ­imprecision of a family language must be shaped in a way that meets institutional demand, while at the same time signaling emotional and semantic excess. Bellow’s style requires negotiation between a remembered and not yet recovered past and the raw but soon-to-be aestheticized present. The laughter that a line like “scrub

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the floor” induces does not solve the tension between high and low registers, ­between Christian and vernacular forms of worship, but rather seeks to obfuscate it. The employment of trepverter thus signals a desire—and the failure of that desire—to arrive at the grand synthesis that the Bellow protagonist proposes.74 Bellow was not alone among US writers of the period who proposed new literary styles that aimed to enact the convergence of modernist convention and ethnic, vernacular speech.75 Bellow’s precedent in Jewish American writing was the novel Call It Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth, which was still quite obscure and likely ­unknown to Bellow in the 1950s and would only be rediscovered and canonized in the mid-1960s. This modernist text thematizes its linguistic fragmentation, in which a “devotion to English literature could not entirely compensate for his emotional tie to Yiddish and Hebrew.”76 Roth’s novel is careful to distinguish between linguistic worlds, between immigrant speech and a new American idiom, and the novel’s conclusion announces a difficult departure from immigrant childhood into the new language of the modernist American present. Bellow’s prose defies, at least aspirationally, Roth’s perceived incongruity between the past and the present, between Jewish otherness and a grounded American identity. Bellow’s protagonists do not leave the past behind; they obsessively, and optimistically, return to it. Bellow’s optimism similarly contrasts with the modernist prose of another ­obscured text that would later be rediscovered, No-No Boy (1957) by the Japanese American writer John Okada. Okada’s prose adopts a similar approach to Roth’s in juxtaposing seemingly neutral third-person narration with interior monologue, a strategy which gives way to linguistic excess and reflects a fundamental imbalance within the protagonist.77 Okada refuses to arrive at an assimilationist synthesis between Japanese and American identities, a negative dialectics staged as a kind of noir thriller without narrative resolution.78 While Bellow employs narrative and stylistic strategies that run quite similar to these two contemporaries, he consistently tries to enact the dialectical convergence of the multiple linguistic registers that constitute his prose. Bellow refuses to even recognize the double bind that informs his translational approach. As a result, the failure of the synthesis is obscured behind constant and repeated stylistic improvisation, an overflow of verbiage that often overburdens Bellow’s novels.79 This obscured failure is occasionally transferred from the translational style of a Bellow novel to its philosophical concerns. In Citrine’s dealings with Steinerian thought in Humboldt’s Gift, he struggles to fully adhere to its spiritual instructions, and in one instance encounters a problem with how to square Steiner’s universalist aims with his emotional attachment to an immigrant past. As a novice in the movement’s various meditative practices, Citrine is instructed to perform a Goethe-inspired meditation on a rosebush: one is meant to learn the basic laws of life through intense contemplation of an object in nature and thereby come to understand the world through the interplay of fact and theory.80 Citrine then continues to a secondary Steiner meditation, which entails the transfer of this concept

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into the spiritual realm. Instead of contemplating an object in nature for the sake of nature itself, one contemplates its alignment with a spiritual icon or symbol, like a cross wreathed in roses, in order to apprehend the spirit in and of itself. Finding the image of the cross uncomfortable, Citrine replaces it with a streetlight from his Chicago childhood, since “for reasons of perhaps Jewish origin I preferred a lamppost.”81 Thus, he substitutes a Christian symbol with one that recalls his Jewish, immigrant past, as if there was an automatic equivalency between the two. Note though the inclusion of the dangerous qualifier “perhaps,” indicating the uncertainty that surrounds this substitution. Citrine wants to achieve transcendence in the Steiner meditation by replacing one object of contemplation with another, so that the recollected, emotionally volatile Jewish past can become a cross to bear, the Jewishly inflected memory replacing Christian iconography. The replacement, however, proves inadequate; Citrine soon suspends his meditation and the spiritual practice remains incomplete. In this case, the local, vernacular experience prevents, rather than inspires, transcendence. The return to Chicago brings about a sense of disjunction and ­untranslatability: a lamppost signals a particular kind of urban, immigrant experience and cannot be entirely subsumed under the symbolism of the cross and the institutional authority that it implies. Despite the visual similarity with a crucifix, the lamppost is not a spiritual icon and holds no redemptive capacity. The Bellow protagonist tries to imbue the immigrant landscape with emancipatory power, but this translational strategy inevitably fails, reflecting a double bind that impedes the dialectics of the novel. In a previous draft Bellow referred to these lingering markers of Jewishness as a collection of “certain oddities of sentiment, residues of irrationality.”82 Despite Bellow’s attempt to gather these residues together into a coherent universal practice, one that could be canonized within the institution of world literature, there remains a vernacular uncertainty that reasserts the fragmentation at the heart of Bellow’s literary universe.

Legacies of Disavowal Of all the writers considered in this book, Bellow has had the most lucrative afterlife. In the decade and a half that has passed since his death, Bellow’s works have continued to circulate widely. While Asch’s novels are mostly out of print, Bellow’s are regularly reissued with new covers, new introductions, and new translations into hundreds of languages. The 2010s has seen a surge in publication, especially with the expansion of access to scholarly material related to Bellow’s writing: a volume of collected letters appeared in 2010; a contentious yet sympathetic memoir was authored by Bellow’s son, Greg Bellow, in 2013; a new selection of Bellow’s nonfiction appeared in 2015, which includes the more contentious essays left out of a previous volume from 1994; a new biography by Zachary Leader was recently

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completed, its two volumes and over 1500 pages documenting the entirety of Bellow’s literary career; two “companions” to Saul Bellow, a Cambridge Companion and a Political Companion, are now available to aid students and scholars; and a forthcoming documentary about Saul Bellow is in the last stages of production.83 Each of these publications has been greeted with much fanfare, as Bellow allies, heirs, and former rivals rush to weigh in on the latest reconsideration of the “great American writer.” Without a doubt, Bellow has achieved the kind of institutional recognition that his literary project tries to bring into being. Through Bellow, Jewish American writing often shares this institutional status. The legibility of the category of “Jewish American literature” is in part due to Bellow’s fame and to the ways in which he allowed his literary persona to be ­labeled Jewish.84 The translational strategies that Bellow employed in his work were adopted by other Jewish American writers, from his most direct heirs like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick to newer generations of writers. The invention of Jewishness as malleable consciousness or as an emotional intensity allows for a kind of circulation in which a text is not expected to construct a bridge between distinct national entities, between the Jew and the American. The purveyor of this type of Jewish collective identity—or not even an identity—can be understood in any number of languages. The canonization of this translational strategy has ­allowed for the rapid and expansive universalization of Bellow’s fiction, but it also has contributed to the robust defense of his Jewishness. The idea of Jewish American literature is often meant as a claim of ownership over that which aesthetically and ideologically defies ownership. “Compelled to define a literary ­archive that no longer had to be about anything specific,” the discipline of Jewish literary history must contend with “a concept of identity no longer representationally tethered to an indexical referent.”85 This is the power of Bellow’s legacy for the institution of Jewish American literature, despite—or because of—his refusal to even join such an exclusive club. What Bellow offers is a model of Jewish naming, even a hesitant form of identification, that immediately disavows such categorization for the sake of a universal project—for nobody and for millions. For Bellow there is great security in this mode of literary self-erasure. Bellow was fond of repeating an anecdote about his first meeting with the Hebrew writer, and fellow Nobel Prize winner, S. Y. Agnon in Jerusalem in the 1960s. Agnon asked if Bellow’s work had been translated into Hebrew, and if not, he had better “see to it immediately, because, Agnon averred, they would survive only in the Holy Tongue.” Bellow then disputes Agnon’s claim that Hebrew is the only language where a Jewish writer is “safe,” pointing to the fact that “Jews have been writing in languages other than Hebrew for two thousand years.”86 Bellow implicitly shares Agnon’s desire for some kind of security, that there is a need for a translational mechanism that would incorporate specific Jewish experiences into the universal. For Agnon, Hebrew itself embodies that universal in its capacity to render Jewish vernacularity—in Yiddish or in any other language—part of the cosmological

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order as determined by Jewish theopolitical codes. Assuming Agnon was only “half serious” (which he certainly was not), Bellow turns instead to what he considers more lasting and more secure categories—“spirit, originality, beauty”— while finding Jewishness to be an “accident” of history and culture.87 One goal of Bellow’s fiction is to transform the accident of his Jewishness into the most transcendent of artistic achievements, thereby escaping parochial obscurity though both self-erasure and self-aggrandizement.88 Attaining such security requires a deep belief in the autonomy of literature and its translatability. The fervent energy of Bellow’s prose, its effusiveness, can be attributed to his immense desire to constantly balance between identification and disavowal. It is no surprise that, as Louis Menand explains, Bellow’s novels tend to “sag in the middle,” that he wrote on “sheer enthusiasm, then surfaced after a hundred pages or so and wondered how to get back to shore.”89 In the dialectics of his prose, Bellow spends a lot of time dwelling in the uncomfortable and undecidable conditions of his characters’ lives. He then attempts, by accretion, to find some way out of the morass. This escape occurs by dint of the prose’s inertia, as if the overflow of self-reflection might force the character, by the novel’s end, to embrace the synthesis built into his speech. Thus, Bellow’s work represents both a climax and a regression in the convergence of Jewish American writing and world literature. Bellow obtained the global recognition Asch had so longed for, and Bellow’s defense of civilization, while different in political content, mirrors Asch’s ambitions for the ideological impact of literature—as an institution and as a metaphysical construct. If Asch imagines a zaddik on the beaches of Nice, Bellow imagines a universalized writer on the streets of Chicago.90 Bellow even shares aspects of Asch’s ecumenical tendencies.91 But, like Asch, Bellow’s writing is vulnerable to the limits of a naive belief in translatability. In his work the literary imagination is proposed as a normative force that may not usher in the world’s redemption but is certainly meant, in ­reactionary terms, to bring about the nostalgic return of “higher consciousness” and “true culture.” With these sweeping goals comes an incomplete process of flattening, a dialectic destabilized by “residues of Jewish sentiment” and vernacular inconsistencies. While Bellow argues, even more aggressively than Asch, that such uncertainty is surmountable, an undecidability still lingers at the foundation of his literary universe, a gap between the articulation of a desire and the exhaustive cycle of failed compensation. One remains suspended, like Sister O’Sullivan and like Herzog, on the knees of one’s soul still waiting for the worldly announcement.

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Epilogue anna margolin, grace paley, and the politics of listening This book has studied Jewish vernacularity in its fragmentation, examining how Jewish American writers seize upon its potential legibility in order to find a place in the institution of world literature and how they return to its traces when confronting the incommensurability of their writerly projects. In each chapter I focus on moments of undecidability, where Jewish American writers face a double bind, unable to reconcile the Jewish and non-Jewish narratives that constitute their writing. Methodologically, this has required examining the intersection of compliance and resistance, canonization and marginalization. In writing for millions and for nobody, Jewish American writers inhabit spaces in which they must speak in the multiple voices of translation: Sholem Asch on the beaches of Nice adopts the voice of a nineteenth-century shtetl zaddik; Jacob (Yankev) Glatstein (Glatshteyn, Gladstone) migrates between Popocatépetl and Chelm; Isaac (Yitskhok) Bashevis Singer (Zinger) finds himself on the beach in Miami or freezing in Montreal, longing for Warsaw but looking toward New York; and Saul (Shloyme) Bellow (Belo, Bellows) imagines an arrival in the cosmos from the streets of Chicago.1 The anxiety over the need to be read and then the anxiety over being read too much are the result of an uneasy politics of translation that surrounds these writers’ works. This volatility is reflected in a comingling of localities and globalities and even in the uncertainty of their names and surnames. One way these writers have tried to overcome this instability is by believing in an institution of literature of their own making. That is, while multiple publics make claims on their work, they cling to the possibility of an institutional security that would depend on their own literary choices. Despite vernacular disjunction, each of the four writers considered in this book, under the guise of a lonely artist in search of autonomy, imagines the future fulfillment of the promises of world literature. There is some reward, forever withheld, for their steadfast loyalty to their writerly practices. As (self-appointed) masters of language, purveyors of memory, and defenders of creative freedom, they can claim some authority—over Yiddish or over literature more generally—without having to contend with the Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. Saul Noam Zaritt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Saul Noam Zaritt. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863717.001.0001

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concrete strictures of global markets and networks. In this way they portray themselves as simultaneously victims and conquerors—victims of globalization and its brutal banality and conquerors of a separate realm of universal value. This fantasy of cultural hierarchy that has yet to come into being paradoxically makes any writer potentially all the more legible; the rules of entry into such a normative structure have yet to be formulated and thus one’s own writing can dictate the terms. The writer’s claim to power, even if that power has not yet been seized, can mitigate institutional erasure. Even a writer like Glatstein, who is initially denied membership in the world republic of letters, can imagine that he deserves citizenship. Belief in one’s future legibility requires writing conditioned by the possibility of translation. It is this feature of Jewish American writing that has allowed Jewish vernacularity to become so central to US culture in its imperial expansion. In refusing to erase the Jewish vernacular yet believing in its ultimate legibility, Jewish American writers have helped to institutionalize Jewish vocabularies within the globalizing force of American English. In Bellow’s prose style and its persistence in the work of his “heirs” Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and even Woody Allen, in the afterlives of Klezmer via American revival and European adaptation, in the genealogy of vaudeville humor through the Borsht Belt to Hollywood’s global reach— in these and many other instances of Yiddish in American discourses, a postvernacular incarnation of the language has become part of the monolingualism of US cultural imperialism.2 Despite or even because of its untranslatability, Yiddish circulates widely, as a fragment, in the institution of world literature and beyond. This is why it can be difficult to perform exclusively postcolonial readings of the texts considered in this book—especially those by Asch, Bashevis, and Bellow— that might rescue them from implication within structures of hegemonic control. Their collective belief in the security that the institution of world literature might provide requires that they adopt an imperial imaginary, in which they invite the universalization of Jewish vernacularity and advocate for its global proliferation. Even so, I have argued throughout that Yiddish and Jewish vernacularity cannot be entirely subsumed within the fantasy of institutionalization and that the narrative of complete integration into US culture is only a partial account of Jewish American writing. While Yiddish has been at times associated with various territorial projects and has been located in multiple literary centers between Eastern Europe, the US, the Soviet Union, South America, and beyond, it has never been contained by a single cultural establishment. From its entry into modernity, Yiddish has been a precarious vernacular threatened by Jewish and non-Jewish language reformers, by forces of assimilation and acculturation, and by the violence of mass extermination. These threats, colonial and Enlightenment driven, often prevented the institutionalization of the language, even as Yiddish writers advocated for normalization along European lines. Yiddish is a language of translation and untranslatability, a supposedly forgotten and perpetually “dying” language that continues to linger, as at least partially illegible, in Jewish American culture. This uncertainty partly explains why Asch, Bashevis, and Bellow subordinate Jewish vernacularity to their status as celebrity writers. As a language of indeterminate

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cultural value, Yiddish can figure as an obstacle or even a threat to the kind of safety that institutionalization can offer. For these three, their mastery of the language is more important than the language itself; though a Jewish vernacular grounds their universal projects it is their ability to manipulate that language toward universal ends that determines their aesthetic achievement. Recall that for Asch and Bashevis, their ability to stand in place of Yiddish, as literary celebrities, is meant as a self-serving compensation for the language’s decline. Bellow emphasizes his Jewish origin yet disavows its ultimate signification in his cosmological self-positioning; Bellow would always claim the status of writer over and above being named a Jew. This is why Glatstein is such an important counterpoint to models of cultural ambassadorship, literary celebrity, and artistic autonomy. Glatstein never places himself and his work above Yiddish and consistently effaces his literary persona in deference to Jewish vernacularity as its own cultural force. Though he assumes some potential legibility for his writing and for Yiddish literature more broadly within global modernism, Glatstein consistently defers his arrival within the institution of world literature under the mark of a secular and hopeless messianism. By writing toward a world literature to-come Glatstein takes a stance of anticipatory even celebratory waiting that privileges the autonomy of Yiddish over his own ­artistic freedom. Especially in his work of the late 1930s, Glatstein declares that his creative fortress is not a universal palace of literature where the artistic genius may find some respite. He characterizes his writing as sequestered in the crumbling confines of the Yiddish language itself; whatever achievements he may garner as a Yiddish writer are attributed to the language and not exclusively to the writer. This self-imposed marginality requires a different kind of deep faith, in which the poet’s genius depends on the “world measures” of his language rather than any individual achievement. While it is no secret that this book’s sympathies lie with Glatstein and his selfabnegation, there is no avoiding the gendered stance that he still shares with the other figures of this project. In performing the roles of defenders of some cultural purity—particularist or universalist—Glatstein and the other writers in this study assume a kind of self-possession as cultural authorities that can either secure their own writerly project or speak on behalf of a Jewish or Yiddish collective. In this imaginary, it is men who can be legible or who have the power to refuse legibility. Asch does not hesitate to speak on behalf of the entire Judeo-Christian civilization; Bashevis and Glatstein both embody Yiddish in its last moments; and Bellow wants to call into being a new public dictated by the terms of his own artistic freedom. Either mournful or emancipatory, there is a forcefulness or even militancy to these claims to identity and representation. Writing toward the world often requires a specific gender performance.3 What might it mean to write without this recourse to institutional legibility and patriarchal authority? Is there a kind of world-writing that would not require the performance of masculine autonomy or would not need to project a messianic futurity? What would it mean, to borrow an Arendtian concept, to write “without

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a banister”?4 Of course there are categories of writers for whom writing “without a banister” is not a choice but a condition, such that their work necessarily hovers around the inevitability of a non-arrival elsewhere. In these concluding pages, I consider two writers, Anna Margolin in Yiddish and Grace Paley in English, who, in the logic of world literature, cannot be agents of cultural representation even if their work depends on the same translational modes of their male contemporaries. Instead they approach the institution of world literature from the side and without ever expecting that its redemptive promises apply to their work. They too balance Jewish vernacularity with the vocabularies of western modernity, yet they return more often to the act deferral introduced by Glatstein and the space of the “maybe” suggested by Bashevis. This “tiptoed waiting,” as Margolin describes it, leads to a literary imaginary less determined by the politics of world-making or the geographies of literary markets and networks; Margolin and Paley’s works, in their emphasis on the aural over the spatial, point to the possibility of a world literature to-come defined by a form of vernacular listening. Anna Margolin, a pseudonym of Rosa Lebensboym, is difficult to place within the expected hierarchies of Yiddish literature in the US. Margolin began publishing poetry in 1920, after two decades in which she was active in Yiddishist circles in Europe and the US and was employed as a journalist in the Yiddish press. Her debut occurred at the height of the clash between two groups of Yiddish poets in the US: the modernist In zikh movement, partly led by Glatstein, had recently been established as a conscious departure from the somewhat older but still contemporaneous symbolist group Di yunge. Margolin’s first poems were hotly debated by the rival groups in the cafes of the Lower East Side, as many immediately identified the maturity of the new writer’s poems yet did not know how to place their poetics within the two schools. There was something illegible about the poems, so much so that to mitigate their uncertainty many of the literati assumed they were written by a man under a female pseudonym.5 Even after her identity as a woman was confirmed, Margolin continued to confound critics during the short twelve-year window in which she published her poetry. Though her work occasionally conformed to the expectations of “women’s poetry” with its attention to the domestic sphere and to themes of love, it did so from a melancholic, cold, and even queer perspective. The speaker of her poems is a fractured subject that longs for connection yet always encounters immovable impasses, oppressive silences, and irreparable loss. In keeping with this fragmentation, her work stylistically and linguistically disavows any connection to a Jewish literary tradition. Her sparse prosody avoids Hebraic vocabularies while making more overt allusions to European trends like imagism and acmeism.6 As part of a poetics of masking and ossification, her writing enacts a flattening of Yiddish by partially muting its Jewish intertextuality. As a result, her poetry is distinctly translational in that its vocabulary skews toward the modern European. This translationality, however, is not aimed toward the circulation of her work, and the flatness of her language does not contribute to its legibility. The opposite—the opaqueness

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of a poem is a signal of incommensurability, a reluctance or inability to produce a more personal accounting. In this way, her work stops short of the demands of both Yiddish and worldly institutions. In keeping with this illegibility, Margolin’s poetry is deeply pessimistic, often commenting on the failure of language as such. The poem “Beautiful words of marble and gold” lingers on the deep chasm between the hard forms of language and the immediacy of feeling, lamenting how the poem arrives too late and only suffocates emotion: “In fact, I didn’t want these poems. // But others—like fire and joyful storms / that swiftly shred the transparent forms. // Too late.”7 The poem cannot adequately reflect the immediacy of experience; it is a beautiful thing of “marble and gold” that remains at a cold distance from the body and its vulnerabilities. The poem’s coherence as a work of art in the European tradition, its alliance with “Else Lasker-Schüler, Rilke, and Baudelaire” as the poem declares, is repeatedly rendered as a hollow gesture. The poem closes with the a­ rtistic speech act figuring as “the weak smoke of the last cigarette” that rises to meet the “iron mask of the sky.”8 Margolin writes in the face of a silence that threatens to  close around her entire writerly project and prevent arrival in any ­institutional home.9 If the world of Margolin’s poetry is one of hollow, opaque structures, if her writing’s ideal addressees are beyond reach, where exactly do her poems land in the end? Margolin’s last published poem, “Ikh vil dir, dem beyzn un dem tsartn” (I want, angry and tender one, 1932) suggests a shift away from the redemptive position of world-making, away even from the earth-as-home paradigm often associated with an essentialized femininity. Instead, Margolin returns to the possibility of waiting, an ongoing practice that begins from the act of listening: ,‫צארטן‬ ַ ‫ דעם בייזן און דעם‬,‫איך וויל דיר‬ ‫מײן איז געווען‬ ַ ‫ ווי‬,‫דערציילן‬ .‫ווארטן‬ ַ ‫ֿפון שטענדיק ָאן אויף שּפיץ ֿפינגער ַא‬ .‫ ניין‬.‫אויף ליבע? ניט אויף ליבע‬ ,‫ ַא שטים‬,‫נאר אויף ַא ווּונק‬ ָ ,‫שטערן‬ ‫ווײט ווי ַא‬ ַ ‫דאך‬ ָ ‫נאענט און‬ ָ ‫ווי ָאטעם‬ ‫וואס אים‬ ָ ,‫אויף יענעם יובלענדיקן רוף‬  .‫צוגעמאכטע אויגן קען מען בלויז דערהערן‬ ַ ‫מיט‬ ‫ די רחֿבות און דעם חן‬,‫דאך ליב די ערד‬ ָ ‫האב‬ ָ ‫און‬ .‫הארטע‬ ַ ‫וואר די‬ ָ ‫ די‬,‫ די ליבע זינד‬,‫ּפראסטן ַזײן‬ ָ ‫ֿפון‬ ‫גאנצע לעבן איז געווען‬ ַ ‫דאס‬ ָ – ‫דאך‬ ָ ‫ און‬,‫דאך‬ ָ ‫און‬ .‫ווארטן‬ ַ ‫ אויף די שּפיץ ֿפינגער ַא‬,‫הארכן‬ ָ ‫ַא‬ I want, angry and tender one, to tell you how it was with me, always waiting on tiptoe. For love? Not for love. No.

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Just for a hint, a miracle, a voice— close as a breath, yet distant as a star for the jubilant call that can be heard only with closed eyes. I love the earth, after all [dokh], the breadth and charm of ordinary life, its beloved sins, its harsh reality. And yet, and yet [dokh]—all my life was listening, waiting on tiptoe.10 The poem is structured around a negative dialectics, in which Margolin rejects a number of possible targets for her poetry and instead gestures toward something that cannot be contained by the poem itself. The speaker hovers around the act of waiting and disavows any resolution. In its opening stanza, the poem denies what would be the expected horizon of women’s writing—love. The break between the third and fourth lines is quite powerful in this regard: the word “vartn” (waiting) is left on its own at the end of the line, as if “love” would be the natural object of the substantivized infinitive, only to emphatically reject that suggestion in the next line. Later, in the third and final stanza, the speaker acknowledges a secondary solution: the speaker could ease her existential angst by inhabiting the stereotypically feminine space of the mundane, the corporeal, and the earthly, summed up in the idea of an “ordinary life,” “fun prostn zayn,” where “prost” can also refer to something crude and unrefined. The speaker dismisses this potential sanctuary with the repeated word “dokh,” a modal particle that appears three times in the final stanza and in each instance functions as a syntactical way to undermine desire; the reader knows from the third word of the stanza that any love for the earth will not be enough, that a “yet” will come to undo any resolution.11 Notably, here is where the only Hebraic words in the poem appear; only in the rejected fantasy of as essentialized femininity can one find the “rakhves” (breadth) and “kheyn” (grace) for a Jewish literary tradition. The poem sees love and recourse to the body as normative potentialities that predetermine writing yet do not adequately account for the artistic forces that drive the speaker. In place of these disavowed targets, the poem offers the image of “tiptoed waiting” and couples it with the act of listening. The belatedness of speech, the topos of Margolin’s poem “Beautiful words of marble and gold,” is offset by the act of listening, which is always early; in Bakhtinian terms, the listening subject is one of the necessary preconditions for speech.12 Connecting the acts of waiting and listening to poetry performs a kind of self-abnegation. In Margolin’s formulation, writing would always be deferred into the future since it can only occur after listening has taken place, an event that remains outside the poem. The “I” of the poem is forever, throughout her life, still waiting to hear some jubilant call. The poem professes a deep belief in communicability, even if it has not yet transpired: the poem inscribes in the act of waiting an eventual bond between the self and the other, as both a distant “wink” and an intimate breath. Significantly, this event does not seem to

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rely on any institutional structure (like a literary tradition) or on some planetary alternative. The speaker signals toward some elsewhere that is not spatially bound but rather opened up by the aural. The poem anticipates a leap from one’s tiptoes into the air, where the voice’s vibrations exist, where real and immediate speech might be possible. This elsewhere cannot be contained, cannot even be seen (or surveilled), for it is of the air, both ephemeral and beyond the page. In this way, Margolin closes her poetic career with a written disavowal of writing and its institutional trappings. Glatstein’s fantasies of arrival, in the ghetto or in a new vernacular world literature to-come, are countered by Margolin’s unqualified retreat that doubles as an almost ecstatic leap into the air. Margolin’s sense of futurity comes without the recovery of a vernacular past. The speaker of her poetry is not listening on tiptoe for the voices of the Yiddish street with a mind toward recreating to a Jewish totality. Margolin’s world, even if rendered in Yiddish, is determined by the poles of the cosmic (a distant star) and the intimate (the breath of a lover), while the scales of the national or the global are left unconsidered. The material, institutional conditions of writing modern Yiddish literature in the US are part of the “ordinary” life that remains outside of the poem’s reach. Margolin leans toward the future without recourse to a synthesis of the particular and the universal, producing an unsettling negative dialectics. Margolin’s place in Yiddish literary circles mirrors this disavowal of institutional bounds. Though she was respected by her contemporaries, she never took on the role of a literary authority. Avraham Novershtern reports that Margolin planned several essays that would have incisively reflected on her poetics and on the state of Yiddish literature more generally; but they all remained unfinished and unpublished.13 Illegible to both Yiddish and English-language institutions, Margolin cannot be assigned a place within a literary hierarchy and its lines of influence. To be sure, Margolin was recuperated in the 1970s and ’80s by such writers and translators as Adrienne Rich, Ruth Whitman, Marcia Falk, Irena Klepfisch, among others who sought to recover the voices of women within a lost Yiddish literary tradition.14 The feminist continuity that this later recovery proposes runs counter, productively so, not only to male-dominated postwar canonizations by Howe and others but also undoes the pessimism of Margolin’s own poetic universe. The worlding of the Yiddish writer, especially as a woman, requires the renegotiation of her self-imposed disappearance. Thus, Margolin’s written disavowal of writing has a rather different kind of afterlife than Glatstein’s or Bashevis’s pessimism. Zohar Weiman-Kelman argues that Margolin’s writing participates in a “queer expectancy,” a strategy of reading that identifies continuities between otherwise unrelated Jewish women writers over and against (hetero)normative lines of influence. While I share WeimanKelman’s interest in an “un-expected encounter” with the past, I hesitate to glean from Margolin’s strident pessimism “models of lineage and of continuity” that would be resistant to hegemonic structures.15 As I have argued throughout, the

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proposal of an alternative redemptive history often reinscribes the normative center as its necessary foil. Margolin’s writing is not separate from the dominant literary trends that surround her work; her poetry is often deeply invested in them. What then might be the afterlife of Margolin’s poetics of listening, in conjunction with Glatstein’s world literature to-come? What would it mean to adopt a strategy of waiting and listening as part of a world-writing named as both American and Jewish? Echoes of this approach are difficult to find in popular narratives of Jewish American writing. Most accounts of Jewish American literature are explicitly about one’s arrival as American and Jewish and eschew the deferral of identity. The most well-known and canonically embraced figures of Jewish American writing, from Bellow to the present, are an impatient crowd; they declare themselves “American born” or announce, Here I Am, as in the title of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2016 novel. Hardly models of expectant listening, more often their work is characterized by an overabundance of speech, following the models of Bellow and Philip Roth. In as much as these figures turn to a vernacular past, to Yiddish or to some other language, it is often in order to describe the present rather than to observe any incongruent and fragmented relationship with literary history. For Bellow as for many after him, the Jewish past is an archive to be mined for aesthetic gold. The treatment of Bashevis—translated, anthologized, and buried within Yiddish while still a living and productive author—is part of the dialectics of a world-writing focused on the transcendent individual who listens more intently to his soul than to the cacophony of Jewish languages. To be sure, though Bellow and his acolytes remain the dominant figures of Jewish American literary studies, their translational practices do not exhaust the models of postwar Jewish American writing. Paley, while never in explicit dialogue with Margolin, is a writer who comes closer to her practice of listening, and it is worth exploring how the two meet through and beyond their discontinuities. Rather than propose a genealogy, queer or otherwise, that would unite them, I contend that a more productive approach is to identify their shared institutional illegibility and examine how Paley’s pronounced vernacular attachments enact a conjoined but necessarily different orientation to the world. The act of listening is a crucial lever in Paley’s writerly project. Paley repeatedly claimed that she found her literary “voice” by “break[ing] though my own deafness . . . When I was able to get into somebody else’s voice, when I was able to speak in other people’s voices, I found my own.”16 Many of Paley’s early stories from the 1950s are monologues not of the lyric “I” but of her parents’ immigrant generation, most prominently the “aunts” that populate her fiction. Shaina Hammerman and Naomi Seidman argue that “[r]ather than taking the young writer’s traditional prerogative and presenting a critique of the moral failings of society from the perspective of a young protagonist who functions, in this sense, as representative of the writer and the writer’s generation, Paley allows an aging generation to have its say, and places the younger character in the position of

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receiver and listener.”17 In this sense, Paley’s listening is quite different from Margolin’s in that rather than a gesture toward an unspoken future Paley’s fiction is a deferral to the voices of a knowable past. Paley’s attentiveness to hybrid and vernacular speech coincides with Bellow’s “street language combined with high style,” but also quickly departs from it.18 Paley admits that Bellow “freed the Jewish voice in some ways that I didn’t even recognize,” but she revises the emancipatory vector built into Bellow’s prose.19 Rather than constantly strive for a predetermined universal poetic language, a demand that requires constant and exhaustive compensation for the use of a low linguistic register, Paley bends her language toward the vernacular. “The stylistic uniqueness of [Paley’s fiction] seems to be fed rather than ‘broken’ by the Yiddish that reverberates beneath it.”20 In her 1956 story “Goodbye and Good luck,” the line “I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh” echoes the ungrammatical speech of the immigrant generation even as it produces an aesthetically stunning construction.21 The phrase “only more stationary in the flesh” is not a sublime compensation for the broken English of “I wasn’t no thinner then.” Both parts of the sentence call attention to the body and its everyday conditions without reference to a higher literary register. The art of the sentence comes in how “stationary in the flesh” rearranges an immigrant vocabulary toward something unexpectedly poetic. That is, Paley’s style works by careful bricolage without a particular language hierarchy as a guide. Paley’s attention to language is thus also quite different from Margolin’s flattened Yiddish. Paley’s language is anything but hard and obscure. Subordinating the authorial self to the ignored voices of a vernacular past, Paley’s poetics of rearrangement creates a prose of ineluctable intimacy. Paley’s short texts can be read as excerpts from an ongoing conversation, often staged between friends, family members, and lovers. Margolin’s reluctant and lamented loneliness, as mirrored in a language of hardened isolation, is wholly different from Paley’s circling around the family, biological or otherwise, as the structure of her literary universe. In this context translation has opposite functions for the two writers: for Margolin the self remains forever untranslatable, hidden behind the cold indifference of language as such and always just out of reach; for Paley, the self can be located in the potential continuity between speakers, the result of a particular kind of listening grounded in a translatable everyday vernacularity. The literary act, for Paley, is thus the conscious manipulation of a rediscovered past toward the unexpected personal voice. At the same time, and despite their divergent paths, the position of listening allows for the possibility of Margolin and Paley’s shared disjunction. In tilting their writing toward the as-yet-unheard, both writers begin from an assumption of ­institutional illegibility. Their writing evinces a curiosity for the unknown or the unknowable: “[Literature] really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you’re curious about.” The result of literary exposition is the “illumination of what isn’t known” and what does not line up with the

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patriarchal system.22 Just as Margolin’s name is immediately misread by her fellow Yiddish writers, just as she assumes the failure of her arrival in Yiddish cultural circles, so too does Paley write with suspicion toward the literary establishment: The other thing was that I didn’t like literary life. I was afraid of it. I didn’t want to be part of it in any way, so that must have entered into the way I began to write . . . . I felt something peculiar was happening. I’m probably doing something wrong, I thought. I was writing about those lives that no one would be interested in. I was putting in all those kitchen scenes that no one would care about. And I was writing in a funny way that probably nobody would like. But I had a great commitment to finish.23

Paley’s admission in this passage is both an indictment of a cultural sphere dominated by men and a disavowal of the literary establishment as such and its structures of meaning. Her voice, as a woman who values the kitchen as a site of power, is simply not registered; it is peculiar, wrong, and funny. In turning her ear toward this elsewhere and allowing it to become the stuff of literature, Paley in some sense answers Margolin’s tiptoed waiting. For Paley, these are the voices that are worth amplifying toward a new way of speaking to and for the world and beyond literary institutions. What would it mean to “finish” such a project, a kind of closure that Margolin’s precipitous tiptoeing would preclude? Paley’s writing appears to suggest a parallel institutionalization, which would restore aunts and mothers to canonical status. Significantly though, Paley refuses to employ ideas of compensation or the righting wrongs, avoiding installing some strict moral economy. Paley’s “commitment” is to art that is about “justice,” which she defines as “the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden.”24 Paley’s stories do not enact a calculated intervention that would tip the balance definitively toward a particular end. Her writing is concerned with discovery, the accumulation of supplemental voices that have been there, subterraneously, all along. This is, in part, the translational height of her work; her project is one of providing access to a hidden world and often translating its contents for a diversity of readers. In exploring the depths of that which is hidden under rocks Paley undoes Margolin’s flattening, revealing a multiplicity of voices that are endlessly translatable and never fully translated. There is no “finishing” such a project, but the commitment to finish is important all the same, for Paley’s list of those who deserve justice is quite long, starting with her own Jewish locality but extending to the entire world. Thus, it is no surprise that even though Paley is not as institutionally praised as Bellow or Roth her work is still widely translated and globally circulated. Paley explicitly aims to push the boundaries of how the human experience is narrated. Thus her writing cannot be wholly contained within a Jewish totality, even if it must begin from a Jewish vernacular position. Like Bellow, Paley offers mostly vague definitions of the role Jewishness plays in her writing, describing it as “sound and feeling . . . ordinary speech, ordinary stories, inflections and tunes.”25 This allows for her writing’s expansive genealogy:

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Starting from the neighborhoods of my childhood and my children’s childhood, in demonstrations in children’s parks or the grownups’ Pentagon, in lively neighborhood walks against the Gulf War, in harsh confrontations with ourselves and others, we have remained interested and active in literature and the world and are now growing old together.26

The politics of Paley’s vernacular grounding are both more specific than Bellow’s and wholly unconcerned with the possibility of escape. Eschewing Bellow’s retreat into a literary fortress, Paley invites the noise of life into her fiction without proposing a dialectical hierarchy between the personal and the political. The Jewish neighborhood and the Pentagon inhabit the same space; the confrontation with the self is simultaneous with the confrontation with the other. In this way, Paley shares Margolin’s undecidability, refusing a dialectics in which a Jewish origin would be instrumentalized toward a universal horizon. Such an approach also means that Paley cannot entirely be attached to her Jewish origin. The world is a space in which a Jewish way of speaking inhabits and motivates disjunction rather than institutional legibility. One of Paley’s early protagonists describes the relationship between Jewishness and the world in uncertain terms: Jews have one hope only—to remain a remnant in the basement of world affairs— no, I mean something else—a splinter in the toe of civilization, a victim to aggravate the conscience . . . . I am only trying to say that they aren’t made for geographies but for history. They are not supposed to take up space but to continue in time.27

Paley’s protagonist is confident in her sense of Jewishness despite continually ­revising the terms of her argument: Jews are a remnant, a splinter, an aggravating victim, bound by time rather than space. Echoing figurations of the wandering Jew, the character nonetheless seeks to employ Jewish vocabularies that would point toward a redemptive horizon. Through an unsettling of history, which begins from a vernacular grounding (in the basements of world affairs) and with feet on rough splintering ground, Paley proposes something quite different than personal or national redemption. For all its local affinities, Paley’s writing, like Margolin’s, anticipates a leap into an unknowable elsewhere. If Margolin still awaits a jubilant call, Paley does not hesitate to make the call herself, resulting in a form of writing both domestic and prophetic. It is here that Paley returns to the politics of listening: it is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time.28 In Greek mythology, Cassandra is able to see into the future, yet she is cursed in that no one believes her prophesies. Cassandra’s speech is simply illegible. In Paley’s world literature to-come, a literature that begins in vernacular disjunction, that speaks with Jewish vocabularies but is never contained by them, it is the possibility of listening, on one’s tiptoes perhaps, that allows for some hope, impossibly far away and impossibly near.

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{ Endnotes } Introduction 1. Grace Farrell Lee, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992), 3. 2. For a more detailed exploration of the incommensurability of the vernacular in the context of its imperial relations see Shaden  M.  Tageldin, “Beyond Latinity, Can the Vernacular Speak?” Comparative Literature 70, no. 2 (2018): 114–31. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23. 4. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25. Hayot’s formulation owes much to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Creation of the World; or Globalization (Albany: State University of New York, 2007). 5. “The world is always the plurality of worlds: a constellation whose compossibility is identical with its fragmentation, the compactness of a powder of absolute fragments.” JeanLuc Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 155. 6. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 37–8. 7. David Damrosch, “Frames for World Literature,” in Grenzen der Literatur, ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis, and Gerhard Lauer (New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 513, 496. Advocates for the systematization of a field of knowledge often describe proposed norms as flexible in order to soften the assumed stringency of categorization. But the concept of “flexibility” actually serves to confirm a hegemonic discourse, characterizing a system that is malleable enough to reincorporate deviation. Larisa Reznik, following Derrida and Judith Butler, states that “it is precisely their flexibility and capacity to accommodate repetition with a difference that makes norms so difficult to change.” Larisa Reznik, “This Power Which Is  Not One: Queer Temporality, Jewish Difference, and the Concept of Religion in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem,” Journal of Jewish Identities 11, no. 1 (2018): 146. 8. Pascal David, “Welt,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1217. For a broader account of the term see Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013), 175–90. 9. Damrosch, “Frames for World Literature,” 496–7. 10. The convergence of the world and the globe speaks to the drive of capitalism to impose “the same system of exchange everywhere.” Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72. Throughout this book I use the term “global” to refer to this capitalist system and the ways in which cultural objects circulate within it. The global diaspora of Ashkenazi Jewry thus refers to the migration of Jewish populations along the networks of global capital; global modernism refers to the movement’s implication within the material and ideological constraints of global capitalism.

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11. Olam means the physical world, arguably, in only one verse in the biblical canon (in Ecclesiastes 3:11), and even this instance is disputed. 12. For a selection of the various competing definitions of olam see Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 761–3; Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of Targumim, Talmud and Midrashic Literature (New York: Putnam, 1903), 1052; Yehoshua Shteynberg, Milon hatanakh (Tel Aviv: Yizrael, 1964), 622; Avraham Even-Shoshan, Milon Even-Shoshan (Tel Aviv: Hamilon hekhadash, 2003), 1353–4; Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, Milon halashon ha’ivrit (Jerusalem: La’am, 1950), 4365–75; Rémi Brague, “Olam,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, 733–4. 13. The idea of Hebrew as a “world language” echoes a formulation by Tal Hever in “Lo khaya, lo meta: ‘ivrit kilshon ‘olam,” Moznaim (December 2016): 15–18. 14. Maynard Mack, ed., Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (New York: Norton, 1956), xvii. 15. Shmuel Niger [Charney], “Yidishe literatur un velt-literatur,” Literarishe bleter, January 18, 1929, 42. Translation mine in tandem with Zeev Duckworth. “Niger” is a pseudonymous replacement for the author’s legal last name Charney, which comes from the Polish czarny, meaning “black.” The Yiddish word niger has racial connotations related to Africans and African Americans, and Charney may have chosen the name, problematically, as a way to symbolize by way of analogy his own marginalization. I choose to use his legal name Charney so as to avoid propagating the racial slur. See Eli Bromberg, “We Need to Talk about Shmuel Charney,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (September 2019): https://ingeveb.org/articles/we-need-to-talk-about-shmuel-charney. 16. Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalism and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4–5. 17. Mufti, ibid., 77–9. Mufti makes this claim by linking Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur, and the national imaginary it implies, to Herder’s conceptualization of the nation in relation to the mythologized Oriental other. 18. See Baidik Bhattacharya, Postcolonial Writing and the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (New York: Routledge, 2018), which argues that world literature has from its origins as a term been embedded in Orientalist discourse and continues to be informed by the conditions of the postcolonial. 19. Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 19–20. For further elaboration of this see Siraj Ahmed, Archeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 21–4. 20. The most comprehensive history of the Yiddish language remains Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glaser and trans. Shlomo Noble (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 21. According to the dictionaries of Ben-Yehudah and Even-Shoshan, olam is first used to mean “public” or “audience” in rabbinic literature of the eleventh century, appearing for instance in Rashi’s commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. It is likely that this meaning of the word is borrowed from the French monde, which can mean both the world and society at large. 22. There has been an increased focus recently on the way the concept of world literature is limited by audience, in particular the ways in which world literature has a local dimension: “world literature is almost always experienced by readers within the national context in

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which they live, and more particularly within the national markets in which books are published, reviewed, and assigned in classes . . . it is the nation that frames most experiences of world literature, at least as much as it is world literature that frames any national canon.” David Damrosch, “World Literature as Figure and as Ground,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K. Heise (New York: Routledge, 2017), 134. See also Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), which examines how in Mexican literature the idea of world literature is constructed through the material conditions of the local. 23. Jacob Glatstein, “Yidn in der velt-literatur,” Inzikh 5, no. 5 (November 1936): 157. 24. Barthes speaks of the institution of literature as a “form” in On Racine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 160 (italics in original). Referring to literature as an “institution and as a work,” Barthes sees the act of literary-making as taking place within an institutional framework constituted by a system of codes and sub-codes (chains of signifiers and signifieds). See Barthes, “Rhetorical Analysis” in The Rustle of Language (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 83–9. 25. Luis Althusser, On The Reproduction Of Capitalism: Ideology And Ideological State Apparatuses (New York: Verso, 2014). 26. Mufti, Forget English!, 98. 27. This statement is reported by Irving Howe in Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 452. 28. Debra  A.  Castillo, “Gender and Sexuality in World Literature”, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 393–403. 29. Gerhard Bach and Blaine Hall, eds., Conversations with Grace Paley (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1997), 106–7. 30. Many point to the American Comparative Literature Association’s report on the state of the discipline from 2004 as the crystallization of this shift in the field, published as Haun Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). See also Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 31. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 9–10. 32. Moretti drew the most attention for his article “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000): 54–68. The arguments presented there were later expanded in Graphs, Maps, Trees (New York: Verso, 2005) and then Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). These works build off of Moretti’s earlier mapping projects, most notably Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998). Due to the controversial notion of “distant reading” as opposed to the entrenched practice of close reading, the critiques and reactions to his work are many in number. For an immediate response see Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (July–August 2002): 35–45. Beyond Gayatri Spivak’s reserved response in Death of a Discipline, 107–9, see Nirvana Tanoukhi’s summary of reactions to Moretti in “The Scale of World Literature,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 605–7. See also Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 17–18; Mufti, Forget English!, 94–6; Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 43–4. Morretti’s work has even

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been criticized for its narrow use of statistical analysis, specifically his lack of statistical modeling; see Richard Jean So, “All Models Are Wrong: A Response to Franco Moretti,” PMLA 132, no. 3 (2017): 668–73. 33. A selection of studies that share Moretti’s strategy of seeing literature as a reflection and refraction of the global marketplace include: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (New York: Continuum, 2008); Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 34. Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (January–February 2005): 72. This sentiment is also taken up, though less explicitly, in Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 34–44. 35. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. 36. For Damrosch’s most recent elaboration of his optimism see the special issue “Debating World Literature” of the Journal of World Literature 3, no. 3 (August 2018), in particular the introduction by Damrosch and Omid Azadibougar, in which they call for  theories of world literature that “advance transnational ideas that are excellent antidotes for cynics who insist on closing the doors of the world on themselves and on others” (227). 37. Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Verso, 2015). 38. A similar strategy can be identified in B. Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Mani replaces the global market with the library, documenting its material history as a way to measure the institutional reach of world literature. Mani’s term “bibliomigrancy” echoes Damrosch’s focus on circulation while allowing for the flexibility of Beecroft’s ecology. In Mani’s account, the library is a constantly shifting institution whose nationalist, imperialist, and cosmopolitan orientations invariably overlap and contest one another. Still, at the foundation of Mani’s history is an institutional constant, in which world literature is only possible through measuring the conditions of circulation. 39. Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 40. Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 27. 41. Cheah, What is a World?, 19. 42. Moretti, “Conjectures,” 58. For Casanova the novel is the currency within the economy of world literature, The World Republic of Letters, 171. 43. Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) is an important precedent for Cheah and Ganguly, though it does not share their utopian tendencies. Slaughter departs from Moretti to describe the dominance of the novel (the Bildungsroman in particular) not in positivist terms but as the colonial imposition of European narrative forms, a cultural surrogate that enforces the project of globalization where law and capital are too weak to impose their will.

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44. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 78–9. 45. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 21. 46. Siskind, Cosmpolitan Desires, 18. 47. Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 7. 48. Erich Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” in Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 254. 49. Mufti, Forget English!, 79. 50. Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 103–17. Naming “worlding” as a distinctly modern horizon of meaning is of course debatable, given that the ancient world can also be distinguished by imperial structures and various “world pictures.” See for instance the transtemporal designations of the world offered by Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature. In contrast, Eric Hayot, following Heidigger, argues that modernity distinctly emphasizes the scientific capacity to picture the entire world. See On Literary Worlds, 26–9, 118–20. 51. Mufti, 9. 52. Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” 264. 53. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 101. 54. Ibid., 72–4. Spivak’s planetarity is somewhat analogous to Nirvana Tanoukhi’s use of the term “landscape.” Tanoukhi proposes a different approach to scale: instead of constantly zooming out with the logic of globalization, literary comparatists must “pursue directly a literary phenomenology of the production of scale, which can begin to elucidate the diverse forms of entanglement between literary history and the history of the production of space— and the function of literary criticism as an intermediary poetics.” Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature,” 614. 55. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 31 and elsewhere throughout Spivak’s work. This too is a term of Derrida’s, from The Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 2005), 32. 56. Homi K. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, edited by Laura García-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Rochester: Camden House, 1996), 195–6. 57. Ibid., 205. 58. Mufti, Forget English!, 19. 59. Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 29. 60. Mufti, Forget English!, 17. 61. Apter, Against World Literature, 3. 62. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148. Italics in the original. See also Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 252–5, among many other instances in which Derrida employs the idea of undecidability. Undecidability is also the lever of Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (especially page 49) and appears throughout her An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 63. Gayatri Spivak and David Damrosch, “Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch,” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 4 (2011): 468.

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64. Yasmin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 65. Anita Norich’s Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2013) serves as a model here and throughout for tracking the complexities of translating Yiddish into English and other languages. Norich focuses on how distinct languages meet through the intervention of translation. By considering translation as part of the process of a language’s modernization even before any moment of overt cultural exchange, I expand Norich’s definition of translation; throughout this book translation is a global event that conditions the text rather than a singular interaction (or a series of interactions) between languages, writers, translators, and texts. See Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) where translation is a site for the constant entanglement of Jewish and Christian modernity. Also instructive here is Lital Levy, “Before Global Modernism: Comparing Renaissance, Reform, and Rewriting in the Global South,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 3, no. 3 (August 2018): https://doi.org/ 10.26597/mod.0066. Levy argues that the modernism of non-Western cultures, in colonial and semi-colonial conditions, is not merely the result of twentieth-century decolonization and subsequent adaption of Western norms but actually begins with the translation and rewriting of Western works that took place during reform projects of the nineteenth century. This is where “global” modernism begins, in Levy’s estimation, resulting in a new genealogy of “non-Western modernity” that appears more indigenous. While I agree with Levy’s focus on translation, I find her emphasis on the possible independence of the nonWestern (“untethered” from Western aesthetics) to be a limited description of the mechanics of modernity, which I argue always involves the simultaneity of disjunction and complicity. See also Levy’s central interlocutors, Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Leah Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” Comparative Literature 54, no. 3 (2002): 215–28; and Eli Rosenblatt, introduction to “Slavery or Serfdom: A Preface to the Yiddish Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Annotated and Translated,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (November 2015): https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/slaveryor-serfdom. 66. Jewish participation in the institution of world literature can take place in any number of “Jewish” languages and a comprehensive account of Jewish world-writing would have to include the myriad of exchanges between Jewish and non-Jewish languages and the practices of translation embedded within a single Jewish language. Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, modern Hebrew and many others are often analyzed as “fusion” languages that combine various local languages with Hebraic and Aramaic vocabularies as well as idiosyncratic syntax and pronunciation, among other distinguishing features. For the most canonical account of Jewish fusion languages see Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 599–657. For an outline of a Jewish world literature in its linguistic multiplicity see Lital Levy and Allison Schachter, “Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational,” PMLA 130, no. 1 (2015): 92–109, which will be discussed in more depth shortly. See also Monique Balbuena, Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 67. Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, “Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004), 31–3.

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68. See John David Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 83–114. 69. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Other examples of studies that investigate how US state power informs cultural production include Harilaos Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Joseph Keith, Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Andy Doolen, Territories of Empire: U.S.  Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); William  J.  Maxwell, F.B.  Eyes: How  J.  Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 70. To name just a handful of the influential studies that inform this book, but in no way fully represent the vast amount of scholarship that covers this strand in American studies: Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Marc Shell, ed., American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Jose David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For an attempt to bring together some of these approaches alongside Jewish American writing see Dean Franco, Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 71. See for example the work of Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) for an exploration of how the regionalism of canonical US writers depended on the parallel deployment of literary cosmopolitanism. See further discussion in Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 111–40. See also June Howard, The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place–Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), especially 1–47, for a consideration of how the regional and the global are intertwined in US culture. Gayle Rogers, in Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), examines the importance of the Spanish empire for understanding the exceptionalism and then imperialism of US literature. 72. Important studies in this vein include Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) among many others. For an exploration of the entanglements of Asian American

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poetry, Orientalism, and American modernism see Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 73. See Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 74. Tara Stubbs and Doug Haynes, eds., Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017); Yogita Goyal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Jeffrey  R.  Di Leo, ed., American Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 75. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “Introduction,” in American Literature as World Literature, 8. 76. Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Antonio Barrenechea, America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016); Yuan Shu and Donald  E.  Pease, eds., American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015); Richard Jean So, Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Globalizing American Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 77. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature, 2. 78. Ibid., 25. 79. Brian Edwards, After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 12–13. 80. Wai Chee Dimock, introduction to American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, ed. Wai Chee Dimock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2. This sentiment echoes Dimock’s earlier claims for thinking of American literature “through other continents”: “Rather than being a discrete entity, [American literature] is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures. These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, forms of attachment—connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world. Active on both ends, they thread America [sic] texts into the topical events of other cultures, while also threading the long durations of those cultures into the short chronology of the United States. This double threading thickens time, lengthens it, shadowing in its midst the abiding traces of the planet’s multitudinous life.” Through Other Continents, 2. 81. The attempt to preserve an American origin can be found even in those formulations that take fragmentation into account: “Considerations of what lies beyond the nation take American literature, if not all nationally-centered literature, into the realm of world literature, one where discontinuities are just as important as continuities; where globalization brings local concerns to bear on nonlocal ones; where America becomes continuous with the world, and vice versa” (Di Leo, American Literature as World Literature, 10). Notice how Di Leo initially wants to admit the reality of discontinuities, but quickly contains them within the “continuous” whole of America with the world. 82. This deferral of homecoming echoes but also challenges the interrogation of homecoming “as the dominant motif in Jewish American literary history” in Michael Hoberman’s A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 4.

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83. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 84. Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 85. Jose David Salvidar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), xv–xviii. 86. Limiting ourselves to the term “Jewish” does not exhaust the longer genealogy of this particular imagined community. Following its genealogy would take us beyond Europe to the ancient precedents of Jewishness, where the terminology immediately erodes beneath our feet, so much so that many scholars hesitate to name texts and communities as “Jewish” but rather something like “Hebrew,” “Israelite,” “Judean,” and the like. See Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 87. Benjamin Schreier, The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 88. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 45. 89. Cynthia Baker, Jew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 8–9. 90. Hanna Wirth-Nesher, ed., What is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994). The locution “Jewish American writing” is borrowed from Irving Howe, a figure who will appear repeatedly in these pages; he speaks of “the writing of American Jews” in World of Our Fathers, 585. 91. On the genealogy of Jewish American literary history and the persistence of an “emergence” narrative of Jewish literary success see Benjamin Schreier, “The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence,” American Literature 91, no. 1 (March 2019): 121–50. 92. For an example of how scholars describe a variegated field while still suggesting a single narrative unity see Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Wirth-Nesher and Kramer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–11. A somewhat more nuanced and fragmented account appears in Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed., The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 93. For examples of how this approach requires a broad historical span see Irving Howe’s introduction to Jewish American Stories, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Signet, 1977), 1–17, and the introduction to Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, ed. Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (New York: Norton, 2001), 1–16. 94. My conceptualization of “Jewish American literature” echoes a series of important critiques of its histories and historiographies. Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 21–6, employs the concept “Klezmer America,” which invokes the American revival of the Eastern European musical genre to account for the racial and ethnic complexity of Jewish American culture in contrast to its proposed uniformity. Benjamin Schreier’s The Impossible Jew, 12–13, employs the idea of an “impossible Jew” to critique the identitarian politics of scholarship on Jewish American literature, which takes as its starting point Michael P. Kramer’s “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,” Prooftexts 21, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 287–349. See also his previously cited “The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence,” for his account of Jewish American literary history’s attachment to Jewish legibility in negotiation with the dominance of multiculturalism in the academy in the 1960s and ’70s. Hanna Wirth-Nesher’s Call It

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English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–31, analyzes the multilingual foundations of Jewish American writing, foregrounding the lingering, if often repressed, presence of Yiddish and Hebrew within Jewish American literary discourse. Among Adam Zachary Newton’s insights on Jewish American writing I cite here his identifying “a dynamic of displacement” internal to the project of American literary history in “Zitsn af shpilkes,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 31, no. 1 (2012): 84–90. See also Dean Franco, Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 95. In emphasizing a zig-zag motion to Jewish literary thinking, I share a similar methodology to Leslie Morris, The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 96. The translational foundations of Yiddish do not exhaust its cultural articulations. Typically, Yiddish is described in contradistinction to Hebrew and Aramaic (also known as loshn-koydesh, the holy tongue, the languages of religious practice and rabbinic thought and literature), thereby creating a dichotomy between a profane vernacular and a divine language of spiritual knowledge. This rather simplistic binary elides Yiddish’s multilingualism and its long literary history, not to mention the complex histories of Hebrew and Aramaic. Still, the popular typology was used by Jewish Enlightenment figures and then by Zionists (as well as anti-Jewish clerics and politicians) to deride Yiddish as a deformed language, a zhargon, that should be eliminated in favor of normative languages. For many this meant the eventual abandonment of Yiddish for linguistic assimilation into Russian, Polish, German, a modernized Hebrew, and finally English. Paradoxically, to envision modern Hebrew as a language of Enlightenment entailed the fusion, calquing, and translating of vocabulary from the mother tongues of early Hebrew speakers, mainly Yiddish, Russian, and Arabic. See Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120–32. At the same time, Yiddish’s status as a language of the folk led Yiddishists, Jewish socialists, and diaspora nationalists to hail Yiddish as the national language, often through the erasure of its translational properties for the sake of its normative capacities. For a brief review of these stereotypes with reference to the large amount of scholarly material on the subject, see Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 5–11 and Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 7–24. For an account of the attempts to normalize Yiddish as a cultural institution see David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 97. Studies on the ways in which Yiddish figures in the multilingualism of US literature include Wirth-Nesher, Call it English; Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Lawrence Alan Rosenwald, Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 82–121; and Joshua Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 227–79. 98. An appreciation of Jewish linguistic accomplishment is implicit in Wirth Nesher’s Call it English, and forms the subtext of Donald Weber’s “Accents of the Future: Jewish American Popular Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, 129–48. This strategy is at the heart of much scholarship on Bellow’s style, in particular when critics praise the novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953); see Steven G. Kellman, “Bellow’s Breakthrough: The Adventures of Augie March,” in The Cambridge Companion to

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Saul Bellow, ed. Victoria Aarons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). A celebration of Jewish forms of American English is prominent in popular culture, from the perceived Yiddishification of English to the banal comedy of Yinglish. See for instance Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yinglish (New York: Signet, 1992) or Wallace Markfield, “The Yiddishization of American Humor,” Esquire, October 1965, 114–15, 136. 99. It should be noted that Yiddish is not the only Jewish language to unsettle the Jewish American experience. I focus on Ashkenazi and specifically Eastern European strands of this history, which came to dominate Jewish American culture but should by no means be understood as the absolute representation of all Jews in the US, despite such a tendency in much contemporary scholarship. More work in particular needs to be done on the linguistic afterlives of Sephardic Jewish immigration. See Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1–22. 100. Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7. 101. By “writing on the border” I refer to the paradigm of American writing theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). This formulation also echoes Homi Bhabha’s notion that “to vernacularize is to ‘dialectize’ as a process; it is not simply to be in a dialogic relation with the native or the domestic, but it is to be on the border, in between, introducing the global-cosmopolitan ‘action at a distance’ into the very grounds—now displaced—of the domestic.” Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmompolitanism,” 202. 102. The idea of Yiddish in the US as a temporary phenomenon is largely the argument of Avraham Novershtern in his monumental collection of studies of Yiddish literature in the US, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi: sifrut yidish be-artsot ha-brit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2015), where he claims that “the modern creativity of Yiddish in America was the possession of only the generation of immigrants” (12). Novershtern’s monograph takes a rather lachrymose arc. In studies of the major Yiddish writers who lived and wrote in the US, he repeatedly describes the rise and then fall of Yiddish literature, from its populist beginnings to its translational ends, enumerating its unique and productive circumstances on the one hand and its grave limitations on the other. For Novershtern, translation is a sign of compromise and decay, an admission of betrayal and a signal of the loss of Yiddish totality. I hope to complicate this teleological view by considering Yiddish a lingering supplement in Jewish American writing and something more than the ephemeral cultural production of an immigrant enclave. 103. Leopold Zunz, “Die jüdische Literatur” (1845), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gerschel, 1875), 42. As quoted and translated by Andreas B. Kilcher, “ ‘Jewish Literature’ and ‘World Literature’: Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Concept of Literature,” in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Boston: Brill, 2007), 299–325. 104. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2003), xi. 105. For more on the genealogies and futures of Jewish Studies within the academy see Andrew Bush, Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Andrew W. Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). My approach here is particularly indebted to Adam Zachary Newton, Jewish Studies as Counterlife: A Report to the Academy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

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106. Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. For a compelling if at times overdetermined account of the centrality of anti-Judaism for the West see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013). 107. It can be argued that this trend begins with Chana Kronfeld’s On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and continues with the work of her many students. In the field of Hebrew literature see for instance Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Haguf hatsiyoni: le’umiyut, migdar, uminiyut basifrut hayisraelit hakhadashah (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007); Hannan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon (New York: New York University Press, 2001) and Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014); Hamutal Tsamir, Be-shem ha-nof: leumiyut, migdar ve-subyektiviyut ba-shirah ha-Yisraelit bi-shnot ha-khamishim ve-ha-shishim (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006). 108. Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 403–20. 109. See for example the bold work of Marc Caplan, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) where he compares Yiddish and African literatures as constitutive of peripheral modernities and modernisms. For a recent summary of the achievements of this trend in Jewish literary studies see Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures, eds. Joshua Miller and Anita Norich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016) where the concepts of multilingual minor Jewish literatures receive their most updated articulation. Three other important studies that prefigure my work in certain ways, in particular their attention to the transnational and the inter/multilingual (though with a focus on Europe) are Shachar Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015). 110. In addition to their previously cited PMLA article “Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational,” Levy and Schachter also edited a special issue of Prooftexts 36, no. 1–2 (2017). 111. Levy and Schachter, “Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational,” 93. 112. Levy and Schachter, “A Non-Universal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature,” Prooftexts 36, no. 1–2 (2017): 18–19. 113. Sander Gilman makes a similar argument in Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 8–9. For a recent critique of multicultural pluralism and its reductive categories of race, gender, and sexuality see Christopher  B.  Patterson, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 114. Another example of this kind of alternate systematization can be found in Debra Caplan’s Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), which constructs a global map of Yiddish theater as an empire independent from, though in contact with, global networks of cultural exchange.

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115. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susan Heschel, “Introduction” to Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susan Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 9. See a similar, though less hopeful, formulation in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew” (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), where the editors see “a virtue in this ambivalent positioning which characterizes Jewish history and culture both then and now” (3). My critique of this final recourse to a legible Jewish foundation follows Lila Corwin Berman’s formulation that “all too often the most that historians can say is that there are many different types of Jews and many different types of Jewish spaces, even as each can still be— or, in some historians’ views, must be—characterized as Jewish. Variety here operates to obscure the essentialism of a foundationalist discourse.” Lila Corwin Berman, “Jewish History Beyond the Jewish People,” AJS Review 42, no. 2 (November 2018): 287. For an allied critique of these “constructive” visions for Jewish Studies, see Schreier, The Impossible Jew, 54–5. 116. Corwin Berman, “Jewish History Beyond the Jewish People,” 275. 117. The idea of a “Jewish Cultural Studies” and a “critical Jewish Studies” is usually traced to the edited volume Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 118. Two examples of such an approach come in recent monographs by Miriam Udel and Naomi Seidman. Udel’s Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2016) traces the figure of the picaro in its Jewish articulation, emphasizing the struggles of modern Jewish writers to meet the demands of European progress by writing simultaneously within and against the norms of world literature. Seidman’s The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016) follows modern Jewish engagements with the problem of love, resulting in a “modern Jewish sexuality—as experience and discourse—[that] has been culturally powerful, not only marginal, and sometimes culturally powerful in its very marginality and queerness” (300). 119. Corwin Berman, “Jewish History Beyond the Jewish People,” 290. 120. Newton, Jewish Studies as Counterlife, 80. 121. Ibid., 22. 122. Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind, 40. 123. Bryan Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 3 (September 2017): 427, 438. For an answer to Cheyette’s argument in this essay and the various binaries it perpetuates see Michael Rothberg, “For Activist Thought: A Response to Bryan Cheyette,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 1 (January 2018): 115–22. Both essays come in the wake of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry’s special issue on Jewish Studies and postcolonialism from January 2016. 124. For background on In shpan (in harness) see Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 78–82. For further studies of the possible connections and departures between Jewish studies and postcolonial studies see Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek  J.  Penslar, “An Introduction,” Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005), xii–xxiii; Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xvi–xxxi; Steven E. Aschheim, At the Edges of Liberalism:

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Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 21–38. 125. “The singular is the always universalizable, never the universal. The site of reading is to make the singular visible in its ability.” Damrosch and Spivak, “Comparative Literature/ World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch,” 466. 126. Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), xii–xiii. 127. In settling on the possibility of overlapping spaces I echo the conclusions of Dean Franco in his recent The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). Franco’s key term is the “neighbor.” See in particular 158–64. 128. Shmuel Niger [Charney], “Yidishe literatur un velt-literatur,” Literarishe bleter, February 22, 1929, 148. Translated in tandem with Zeev Duckworth.

Chapter 1 1. For further accounts of the symbolic function of the shtetl see Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) and Jeffrey Shandler, Shtetl: A Vernacular History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 2. The term “tear in the heart” (hakera shebalev) is from the Hebrew writer M.Y.  Berdyczewski. See Avner Holtzman, El hakera’ shebalev: Mikhah Yosef Berditsevski, shenot hatsemikhah (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1996). 3. For a detailed account of these narrative strategies in Hebrew see Alan Mintz, Banished from their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). For a more recent study of the process of Bildung in the modern Jewish imaginary see Miriam Udel, Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2016). 4. Arn Zeitlin, “Di figur Ash,” Literarishe bleter, December 19, 1930, 13. 5. Sholem Asch, “Opgeredt fun harts,” Haynt, April 23, 1937, 5. Later in the article Asch even tells of a time he was introduced at an event in New York in 1922 as the writer of A shtetl to which he protested vociferously, citing his many novels about New York as proof. 6. Zeitlin, “Di figur Ash,” Literarishe bleter, December 19, 1930, 13. 7. My use of the term “ambassador” follows Kirsten Silva Gruesz in Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): “The ambassador’s constant performance—the way he shifts from role to role and takes on different identities, the suggestive connections between public poetry and oratory—gestures at one of the generative contradictions of ambassadorship. The demands of the time put a premium on the hasty building of national identities, and the cultural ambassador obligingly sets out to represent the national body by codifying through metaphor and figurative language its cultural identity, its specificity. Yet the most significant measure of his success at doing so is external: only when audiences outside the national sphere recognize and applaud his construction of the national essence does it become, for him, truly valid. Translation is a measure of this external validation” (19). 8. Sholem Asch, “A ruf tsum lezer fun yidish,” Literarishe bleter, September 25, 931, 1. This essay doubled as a plea for Yiddish readers to support the Yiddish book industry. It was published simultaneously in a number of other publications, including Haynt and others, akin to an official press release by the Yiddish PEN club.

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9. Chone Shmeruk, “Le-toldot sifrut ha-‘shund’ be-yidish,” Tarbitz 52, no. 2 (1983): 325–54. 10. Miron, A Traveler Disguised (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 26–33. 11. It is important to note here that Yiddish played a significant role in political formations as well as cultural ones, especially for the socialist Bund and other forms of Diaspora nationalism. See Simon Rabinovich, ed., Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012). 12. Several general overviews of Yiddish culture view the rise of a modern Jewish consciousness in Eastern Europe as the result of institutional formations. For instance David Fishman’s The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture “examines the institutional infrastructure that modern Yiddish culture, like all modern cultures, developed in order to sustain itself and flourish” (vii). That a culture might exist independent of institutional control remains outside of Fishman’s purview, which focuses on the Yiddish press, theater, and political and scholarly organizations. 13. Miron, The Image of the Shtetl, 128–56. 14. Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11–39. 15. For a selection of studies on Jewish urbanization see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 16. For further background on the centrality of the newspaper for modern Jewish culture see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) and Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). On the one hand, “the Jewish street” could appear as a marker of nationalist solidarity—and indeed a Yiddish newspaper’s focus on international Jewish experience was at times combined with an explicit endorsement of Zionism or Jewish nationalism of one form or another. On the other hand, a large number of newspapers held socialist and communist positions, producing a kind of collectivism explicitly in line with internationalist ideologies. In many ways, to write the history of the Yiddish press is to follow the tension between these different forms and mythologies of collective identity. 17. The idea of the “professional writer” in Yiddish is quite difficult to define. Isaac Meir Dik is sometimes considered the first of such professional Yiddish writers and Isaac Bashevis Singer the last. See David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 56–98. Professional Yiddish writers are often associated with a populist impulse, in contrast to modernists who claim absolute devotion to the artistic act. See for instance the Yiddish symbolists in the US, who often bragged of working in the sweatshops during the day and writing poetry at night. See Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1–6. 18. Asch was by and large dependent on the Yiddish press throughout his life. Though he published in translation widely, his income from these publications was scarce or sometimes non-existent. Asch often complained of being cut off from his European royalties, either because of unauthorized reprints of his work or due to wars and political conflicts preventing payment. With the rise of Nazism in Germany it became even more difficult to secure these

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funds. See Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch: An Introduction to his Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), 97. Meanwhile, Asch received regular payments from the various Yiddish newspapers that printed his work. 19. In his fiction and criticism, written in both Yiddish and English, Cahan contributed to both Yiddish literature and US literature within clear aesthetic parameters. His approach arguably began from his own Russian grounding; Cahan took part in introducing Russian literature into literary conversations in the US, in particular through his relationship with William Dean Howells. Cahan was also greatly influenced by Howells’ realism of the American street and combined it with legacies from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and others. For a discussion of the convergence of Cahan’s fiction and his criticism see Eitan Kensky, “Facing the Limits of Fiction: Self-Consciousness in Jewish American Literature” (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2013), 66–123. That being said, Cahan’s commitment to “proper” literature was tempered by the need to appeal to a mass readership. The serialized novels of Asch and others had to meet a standard of readability for the average reader, and as such hedge closer to middlebrow than highbrow. In addition to these high profile novels, the pages of the Forverts still regularly published shund to attract the widest readership possible. See Avraham Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi: sifrut yidish be-artsot ha-brit (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015), 651–2. 20. For further background on Cahn’s influence see Ellen Kellman, “The Newspaper Novel in the Jewish Daily Forward, 1900–1940: Fiction as Entertainment and Serious Literature” (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 2000). 21. See for instance their exchange of letters from 1926–30: Abe Cahan to Sholem Asch, 1926–30, Sholem Asch Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Though littered with financial disputes, these letters represent some of the better years of their relationship, which would ultimately sour and break off completely with Asch’s turn to writing his “Christological” novels, beginning with Der man fun natseres/The Nazarene (1939). Cahan refused to publish the novel in the Forverts and he would even turn to criticizing Asch’s “new direction” in a series of articles and then in an excoriating book, Ashs nayer veg (New York, 1941). See the essays on this topic in Nanette Stahl, ed., Sholem Asch Reconsidered (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2004), 251–78 and Hannah Berliner Fischtal, “Sholem Asch and The Shift in his Reputation: The Nazarene as Culprit or Victim?” (PhD Diss., City University of New York, 1994). 22. For an analysis of one of Asch’s earlier serialized novels in the Forverts, see Ellen Kellman, “Power, Powerlessness, and the Jewish Nation in Sholem Ach’s Af kidesh haShem,” in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, 106–20. 23. Despite Asch’s hesitance to explicitly advocate for socialism he would still claim to have written the first “proletarian novels” in his Motke ganef (1915) and Onkl Mozes (1917), both of which depict, at least superficially, the darker sides of capitalism. See Asch, “Opgeredt fun harts,” 5. 24. For more on the parallels between Dray shtet and War and Peace see Theodore  L. Steinberg, Twentieth-Century Epic Novels (Cranbury: Rosemont Publishing, 2005), 56; and Mikhail Krutikov, “Russia Between Myth and Reality: From Meri to Three Cities,” in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, 104–5. 25. Early writers of modern Yiddish literature often struggled with the novel as a form of high literary culture, in particular the historical novel, which is often associated by critics with national self-determination. From Sholem Aleichem and Abramovitsh’s first trials

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with the “romance” to Opatoshu’s historical novel In poylishe velder (1922–9), Yiddish writers grappled with the challenge of producing extended, large-scale portrayals of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and beyond. A full explanation as to why this was a struggle—whether this was due to a lack of influential Jewish figures in modern history dominated by nonJewish state actors, a reluctance to move beyond the confines of the shtetl, or a discomfort with a foreign genre and its many genealogies—is difficult to determine. Isaac Bashevis Singer claimed that it was the result of there simply not being a tradition for a Yiddish historical novel; see Bashevis, “Pundeko retivto,” Globus 15 (September 1933): 86. These struggles ran parallel to those of Hebrew literature as well. See Dan Miron, “Domesticating a Foreign Genre: Agnon’s Transactions with the Novel,” Prooftexts 7, no. 1 (1987): 1–27 and Udel, Never Better!, 15–24. 26. Franz Werfel, “In Praise of Schalom Asch,” The Living Age (February 1931): 596–8. This is a translation of Werfel’s speech on the occasion of Asch’s visit to Vienna. The text of the speech was originally published in the Neue Freie Presse, December 2, 1930, and then translated for The Living Age, a liberal literary magazine in Boston. 27. Asch’s opinions about the Soviet Union as expressed in the novel undoubtedly reflect his visit to Moscow in 1928. For a detailed account of this episode see Gennady Estraikh, “Sholem Asch’s Moscow Sojourn, 1928,” in Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, eds. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 56–72. 28. Sholem Asch, Farn mabl: Peterburg (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1931), 176; Three Cities (New York: Putnam, 1933), 112–13. 29. For other explorations of these moments of miraculous translation see Steinberg, Twentieth-Century Epic Novels, 79 and Mikhail Krutikov, “Russia Between Myth and Reality: From Meri to Three Cities,” in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, 96. 30. Sholem Asch, Farn mabl: Peterburg, 374–5; Sholem Asch, Three Cities, 232–3. The discrepancies between the Yiddish original and the English translation, particularly surrounding words of Hebraic origin is due to the German translation, upon which the English is based: “Ich bin . . . zu der Erkenntnis gekommen, daß es doch eine Weltordnung [seykhl-hayosher] gibt, die alles zusammenhält . . . Steigen Sie empor, junger Mann! Reißen Sie sich los von dem Dunkel Ihres eigenen kleinen Lebens, dann werden Sie das große Licht sehen, den mächtigen Puls, den großen Herzschlag der Welt [velt-harts] fühlen!” Petersburg (Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1929), 382–3. 31. See Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, trans. Arnold Band, “The Story of the Seven Beggars,” in The Tales (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 266–70. 32. Moskve, 516, translation mine. The English version somewhat changes the focus of the  ending to the love story and its redemptive capacities rather than Asch’s more homosocial emphasis: “Now tell me—what are you thinking of doing? Your beard has gray hairs in it already.” “I’m going to begin all over again,” returned Zachary firmly. Silently the teacher stretched out his bony hand to him. As Zachary watched Helene at her daily task the thought flashed through his mind: “While I’ve been jumping over the tops of houses she has been spending herself here day after day, drop by drop . . .”  (Three Cities, 899) 33. Nachman Mayzel, “Der groyser yontef fun der yidisher literatur,” Literarishe bleter, 19 December 1930, 1. See also Shmuel Niger [Charney], “Sholem Ash: Peterburg—farn mabl,” Di tsukunft 34, no. 8 (August, 1929): 568. Charney comments that this was Asch’s “first great

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work where there is unity and wholeness,” where Asch had captured the totality of the modern Jewish experience. Charney would make similar comments about the second volume of the novel, Varshe, the second “floor” in the exquisite “building” Asch was constructing. See Shmuel Niger [Charney], “Sholem Asch: Varshe,” Di tsukunft 35, no. 8 (August, 1930): 577–82. 34. For an example of the criticism Asch received, see the work of the Soviet Yiddish critic Max Erik in Sholem Asch, 1900–1930 (Minsk: Vaysrusishe visnshaft-akademye, 1931). To be sure, it is difficult if not impossible to measure precisely the reception of any Yiddish writer from this period, in particular due to the global dispersion of Yiddish readers and the multiple contexts in which a single text was read. The evaluations in the Yiddish press that I have cited do not represent a generalized or common reading of Asch but rather are the views of influential yet certainly biased readers. Though Asch’s work had been printed regularly in the Yiddish press for decades, it is hard to say how much of a given newspaper’s readership actually read the weekly installments of his novels. It may be that readers valued the prestige of a figure like Asch but did not actually read his work. Needless to say, it is clear that Asch and many of his critics took this prestige for granted. 35. Mayzel, “Der groyser yontef fun der yidisher literatur,” 2. 36. Sholem Asch, “Referat fun Sholem Ash in PEN-klub vegn der nayer yidisher literatur,” Haynt, September 28, 1932, 4; reprinted as Sholem Asch, “Di rede fun Sholem Ash vegn der yidisher literatur,” Forverts, October 18, 1932, 3. 37. For instance Asch complains that a Hebrew translation of his novel is printed in Palestine in 3500 copies, where a robust book-reading culture exists among a population of only 200,000; meanwhile the Yiddish edition is printed in 1000 copies even though there are millions of readers. Ibid. 38. Asch, “A ruf tsum lezer,” 1. 39. Sholem Asch, “Der hitlerisher teror un di PEN-klubn,” Literarishe bleter, April 12, 1933, 262. 40. For a brief account of Asch’s success in Germany see Kerry Wallach, “America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions of American Poverty in Serialized Novels by Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, and Michael Gold,” in Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, eds. Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 202–6. 41. Stefan Zweig, “Gerburtstagsgruß an Scholem Asch,” Die literarische Welt, no. 43, October 24, 1930, s. 1. See Armin Eidherr and Karl Müller, eds., Jiddische Kultur und Literatur aus Österreich (Klagenfurt: Drava, 2003), 112. Zweig’s comments, translated into Yiddish, are quoted in Mayzel, “Der groyser yontef fun der yidisher literatur,” 2. They have also been reproduced in Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch, 98 and 251–2, notes 15 and 16; A.  A.  Roback, Curiosities of Yiddish Literature (Cambridge: Sci-Art Publishers, 1933), 122–3. My translation is from Mayzel’s Yiddish. 42. For further discussion of the “belatedness” of Yiddish literature see Harriet Murav, David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). 43. Sholem Asch, “Di rede fun Sholem Ash oyfn PEN-kongres,” Literarishe bleter, July 5, 1929, 2–3. 44. Asch was intimately connected to the interwar humanism of several German Jewish intellectuals. For instance, Stefan Zweig believed strongly in an international humanism

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that would ensure personal freedom while uniting all of humanity in a kind of brotherhood. Zweig’s humanism was of an elitist variety, a humanism designed for a group of cultured and moneyed intellectuals, and was often more of an expression of nostalgia for an idealized Habsburg past. Thus, Zweig’s and others’ conception of world literature was intimately tied up with ideas of European empire. These intellectuals would often express a broad desire for a universal unification of humanity while retaining a certain liberal, elitist stance that privileged their European pedigree. See Ritchie Robertson, The “Jewish Question” in German Literature: 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 112–29 and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, “Hotel Patriots or Permanent Strangers? Joseph Roth and the Jews of Inter-war Central Europe,” European Review of History 23, no. 5–6 (2016): 814–27. For further background see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and Abigail Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). Thank you to Sam Spinner for directing me to these sources. 45. “Wir alle weben ein Kleid—unsere Welt. Und mit unserem Körper an die Schöpfung, mit unserer Seele an den Schöpfer gebunden, sind wir alle eine Einheit.” Sholem Asch, Woran ich glaube (Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1932), 78. 46. Sholem Asch, “In vos ikh gloyb,” Di tsukunft 37, no. 10 (October 1932): 595. 47. Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 48. Louis Kronenberger, “Sholom Asch’s Great Trilogy,” The New York Times, October 22, 1933, BR1. 49. The success of Asch’s novel was not unlike the success of the German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s novels, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and The Road Back (1931), both of which were best-sellers. All Quiet on the Western Front would even be made into a highly successful movie. See John Whiteclay Chambers, “The Movies and the Antiwar Debate in America, 1930–1941,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 36, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 44–57; Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). While Remarque’s and Asch’s novels had vastly different goals, in particular Remarque’s pessimism in comparison with Asch’s hesitant optimism, they appear to have had a similar function within the American market. What likely appealed to American readers was that both writers shared a disappointment with the ideologies of Europe. These authors’ rejection of violence and war reflected their disillusionment with European nationalism, which had led to so much devastation during World War  I.  This ran parallel to a growing interest in texts that showed the disintegration of Europe and indirectly supported the growing international prominence of the US as a political force. Moreover, both novels provided the American public with a stylized and engaging version of recent European history through the eyes of native, but translatable, informants. While Asch’s novel did not receive nearly the same attention that Remarque’s did, both novels were perceived to offer a detailed description of contemporary Europe for US readers. 50. Peter France, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 86–9. 51. Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13–16. See also Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America

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(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). This literature often also concerned itself with the very process of the immigrant’s Americanization. See Gordon Hutner, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 96–110. 52. See for instance Leo  W.  Schwarz, ed., The Jewish Caravan (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935) and A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937). These collections published such disparate authors as Joseph Opatoshu, David Pinski, S.Y.  Agnon, Devora Baron, and Hayim Nakhman Bialik. See Jeremy Shere, “Collective Portraits: The Anthological Imagination of Leo W. Schwarz,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 25–47; Wendy  I.  Zierler, “The Caravan Returns: Jewish American Literary Anthologies 1935–2010,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 470–87. 53. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 83–141 and “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer,” in A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 168–83; Sollors, Ethnic Modernism, 59–64. 54. To be sure, not all American writers were invested in legibility, linguistically or formally. See Joshua  L.  Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135–81. 55. The fact that works about and by Jews were published more frequently does not necessarily mean that Jewish immigrants had achieved acceptance in American society. The 1930s also saw the rise of antisemitism in the US. These publishing efforts can be seen, in part, as an attempt to counter popular negative stereotypes of Jewish culture. See Shere, “Collective Portraits,” 26–9. 56. Gordon Hutner, What America Read, 132–3. 57. Shloyme Rozenberg, Sholem Ash fun der noent (Miami: Farlag Shoulzon, 1958), 120–1. 58. Nakhman Mayzl, “Sholem Ash derklert dem kharakter fun dem nayem roman vos er shraybt farn Forverts,” Forverts, October 5, 1932, 8. 59. Since writing Reb Shloyme nogid (1913), a portrait of his father’s life in the shtetl, Asch had turned his attentions to historical novels and novels of immigration, what the critic Shmuel Charney dubbed his “diaspora novels.” See Shmuel Niger [Charney], Dertseylers un romanistn, (New York: CYCO, 1946), 362. The shtetl sometimes appeared as the background for a story but rarely was its center, as novels focused instead on a character’s arrival in the city after leaving the shtetl behind. 60. Mayzl, “Sholem Asch derklert dem kharakter fun dem nayem roman vos er shraybt farn Forverts,” 8. 61. For a classic exploration of the Hasidic zaddik see Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1992). 62. For a genealogy of the rebbe as rebel, see David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 67–88. 63. Dan Miron outlines a thematic tension in Asch’s work between texts that follow a romantic tradition and those that skew toward a more pessimistic naturalism. The glowing poem of A shtetl is published in tandem with Dos koyler gesl (1903) which describes a pogrom; Reb Shloyme nogid (1913) is written the same year as Meri, which takes aim at the

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spiritual vacuity of St. Petersburg Jewry. See Dan Miron, “God Bless America: Of and Around Asch’s East River,” in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, 163. 64. For a discussion of how various strands of Asch’s previous novels meet in Der tilimyid see Miron, “God Bless America: Of and Around Sholem Asch’s East River,” 157. 65. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the Yiddish version as it appears in Der tilim-yid (New York: Morgn frayhayt, 1936) and the English version as it appears in Salvation (New York: Putnam, 1951). I will be referring to the main character as Yekhiel, the transcription of the name according to YIVO transliteration standards. In the 1934 English Putnam edition the name was transliterated as “Jechiel” according to German spelling and pronunciation. In the revised version of 1951 it was changed to “Yechiel,” a spelling more easily identified by American readers. 66. The plot line of the Sabbatean Jew was completely edited out of the first translation of the novel into English in 1934, though it had been kept in the German translation. Perhaps editors were concerned that American readers would not be familiar with the history of Shabtai Zvi, the seventeenth-century false messiah, and would be confused by three different sources of spiritual power, rather than the binary structure of Judaism and Christianity. The chapters about Yekhiel’s first teacher were restored in the 1951 translation. 67. The character of the Polish lord is arguably Asch’s attempt to come to terms with the politics of independent interwar Poland. The lord’s democratic intentions yet violent actions—he viciously beats the peasants and shows no compassion for his Jewish leaseholder—followed by his dramatic suicide can be read as Asch’s ambivalent view of a newly nationalist and increasingly antisemitic (and therefore self-destructive) Poland. The lord’s brief encounter with Yekhiel shows him admiring the budding rebbe’s spiritual strength (“Wydawski’s rage was immediately over; more, the calm, curiously frank [gloybiker, full of faith] look in Yechiel’s great eyes pleased him,” Y237/E165); yet he is unable to fully recognize him as an equal. This scene reflects Asch’s contemporary calls for solidarity among Jews and non-Jews in Poland against both foreign threats and the rise, internally, of antisemitism: “The great masses of peasants and workers know that the stone which is aimed at the head of a Jew, the bomb which is thrown at a Jewish store, the knife which is thrust into a Jewish heart, is aimed at them, against their own liberty, against their own institutions.” Sholem Asch, “A Word to the Poles,” in Sholem Asch Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 13; Yiddish original can be found in Sholem Asch, “A vort tsum poylishn mentsh,” Haynt, October 29 and November 5, 1937. With soaring rhetoric and passionate appeals to universal values, Asch repeatedly imagined the masses uniting to counter the violent nationalism of the Polish government. Asch even called for Polish writers to lead the charge by abandoning their destructive obsession with nationalist concerns and joining Jewish literature in ushering in the goals of world literature (Asch, “A Word to the Poles,” 14). Asch’s call was answered, in a certain sense, when in 1932 he was awarded the Polish order of Polonia Restituta in recognition of his literary achievements. Friends and colleagues immediately demanded that he reject the honor in protest of the authoritarian regime of Józef Piłsudski. Despite these demands, Asch worried about the repercussions of his refusal. More importantly, he was hopeful that the award could be a symbol for new relations between Jews and Poles. He ultimately accepted the award, much to the chagrin of his fellow Yiddish writers, though he would later return it. See Sholem Asch to Borekh Vladek, January 10, 1932, in Shmuel Charney, Sholem Ash: zayn lebn, zayne verk, 412–14; Sholem Asch to the Polish Ambassador in France, October 15, 1936,

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Sholem Asch Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Rozenberg, Sholem Ash fun der noent, 125–32; Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch, 103–4; Hannah Berliner Fischtal, “Sholem Asch and The Shift in his Reputation: The Nazarene as Culprit or Victim?” 133–6. 68. See for instance the entries for “tilim,” “tilim beys-medresh,” and “tilim zoger” on the EYDES website, http://www.eydes.de/Usr4484BE03AC/index/wi2/wi2-26.html. 69. The psalms as a shared religious tradition was part of Asch’s initial plan for the novel: “The most characteristic aspect of this story is that both, the Jewish world and the Christian, do battle with the help of the psalms. In the psalms they seek power and means, and each of the hard-fighting sides thinks that he serves the one and only God . . . ” Mayzl, “Sholem Ash derklert dem kharakter fun dem nayem roman vos er shraybt farn Forverts,” 58. It has been argued that, because of its propensity for parallelisms rather than figurative language, the Psalms is a text more easily translated than others. See Ruth Aproberts, “Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure,” PMLA 92, no. 5 (October 1977): 987–1004. This kind of biblical interpretation—a philological practice devoted to uncovering the fundamental (and therefore universal) forms and genres of ancient texts—is arguably the methodological foundation of modern biblical scholarship. Such a scholarly approach has its own contingent histories, many of them wrapped up in concerns similar to Asch’s regarding the encounter of Jewish and non-Jewish forms of knowledge. Some contemporary scholarship on the Bible seeks to undo these reductive and flattening reading strategies. See Jacqueline Vayntrub, Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (New York: Routledge, 2019). 70. During their battle, which takes place in the minds of both characters, Yekhiel acknowledges that “the others had also rights in Heaven, that powerful spirits were on their side also. It was amazing—their forces were not the forces of evil and impurity. The Others had merits of their own, unknown to him” (E283, Y404). The Yiddish also includes the admission that they “hobn a groysn tsad bam tish,” have a large seat at the table. The priest, for his part, has a special affection for Jews, though he thinks they have erred in not accepting Jesus (E290, Y415). 71. See b. Avoda Zara 3a, b. Baba Kama 38a, and b. Sanhedrin 59a. 72. Der tilim yid, 505; Salvation (1934), 332. I quote here from the 1934 translation because in the 1951 edition the entire episode of the train station was removed. It is unclear why. 73. Yehoyesh, “Mishley,” in Toyre, neviim uksuvim, band 2 (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1937), 25. 74. A selection of such effusive reviews include: Y. M. Nayman, “Sholem Ashs ‘tilim yid,’ ” Haynt, October 26, 1934, 9; Leo Finkelshteyn, “Der epos fun folkstum,” Literarishe bleter (December 7, 1934): 3–4; Shmuel Niger [Charney], “Di kunst fun gloybn, Sholem Ash: der tilim yid,” Di tsukunft 40, no. 1 (January 1935): 53–7. Charney reprinted his articles praising Der tilim-yid in, Dertseylers un romanistn, 457–72 and then in Sholem Ash: zayn lebn, zayne verk (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1960), 210–27. See also Siegel, 109–10. 75. See YIVO to Sholem Asch, September 9, 1931, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, in which YIVO’s leaders announce their intention to nominate Asch for the Nobel prize. For a contemporary evaluation of Asch’s attempt to preserve the memory of Jewish Eastern Europe see Magdalena Sitarz, Literature as a Medium for Memory: The Universe of Sholem Asch’s Novels (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013). 76. Louis Kronenberg, “Profound Compassion,” The New York Times, 7 October 1934, BR7.

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77. Ibid. 78. John Cournos, “A Jewish Saint Who Lived by the Spirit, Not the Letter of the Law,” The New York Sun, October 3, 1934, 25. 79. Ludwig Lewisohn, “Epic Art,” The Nation, October 17, 1934, 451–2. 80. David Mazower, “Tug-of-War: Sholem Asch and His Translators,” Pakn Treger 65, Summer 2012, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/pakn-treger/ tug-war-sholem-asch-and-his-translators. 81. Sholem Asch, Salvation (1951), v. 82. See Sholem Asch, “Der tilim-yid,” Forverts, October 15, 1932, 9. 83. The title of the German translation, Der Trost des Folkes (the consolation of the people) functions in a similar way to the English Salvation, with a more overt connection to German ideas of nationalism. The translation (by frequent Asch translator Siegfried Schmitz) was published in Zurich by a subsidiary of the Zsolnay Verlag but received very little attention in the German press, which was by then dominated by Nazi censors. Asch scrambled to find other ways to get his work circulated in Europe, imploring his friend Joseph Roth to put him in touch with a French translator and publishing house, offering to cover all expenses. See Joseph Roth to Blanche Gidon, April 11, 1935, in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (New York: Norton, 2012), 405–6. The French edition would only be released in 1939, just a year before German occupation, under the title Le Juif aux Psaumes: Roman (Paris: Flammarion, 1939). Though reviews were positive, Asch would leave France for the US later that year. See André Billy, “Les livres de la semaine,” L’œuvre May 14, 1939; Pierre Lœwell, “Le vie litteraire,” L’orde, May 15, 1939. 84. Asch, “Opgeredt fun harts,” 5. 85. Ibid. 86. Roskies, Search for a Usable Past, 80–1. 87. For a description of Asch’s disappointment at not receiving the Nobel Prize in literature see Rozenberg, Sholem Ash fun der noent, 136–7 and Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch, 102. 88. Sholem Asch, What I Believe, 102. 89. For an example of a critique of Asch’s grammar see Shmuel Niger [Charney], “An entfer Sholem Ashn,” Der tog, June 13, 1937, 4. Asch defended his deviant grammar in opposition to what he felt were the prescriptivist notions of Yiddish philologists in “Opgeredt fun harts,” 5. See also Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch, 110. 90. Asch, What I Believe, 201. 91. Mayzl, “Sholem Ash erklert dem kharakter,” 8.

Chapter 2 1. Jacob Glatstein, Prost un poshet (New York: F. Glatshteyn, 1978), 44; reprinted from Glatstein’s article “In der velt-literatur,” Der tog-morgn zhurnal, June 24, 1962, 2. See also Jacob Glatstein, In der velt mit yidish (New York: Alveltlekhn Yidishn Kultur Kongres, 1972), 264, where he writes “a great Yiddish writer is already a world-writer, whether he’s known or unknown.” Throughout this chapter and book I use the spelling Jacob Glatstein, which is the way Glatstein spelled his name in English. In Yiddish, spelled phonetically in YIVO standard transliteration, his name is Yankev Glatshteyn, and this spelling has been used in several translations and scholarly works. Legally, especially when registering copyrights, he

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used the Americanized last name Gladstone, a last name that all of his children were given. These slippages between Yankev and Jacob, between Glatshteyn, Glatstein, and Gladstone, speak to the larger questions of translation that are a central concern of this chapter. My choice of Jacob Glatstein is merely one translation among many, an approximation based on Glatstein’s own ambivalence toward the conditions of writing in Yiddish in the US. 2. For Glatstein’s canonization as a Holocaust poet see his work’s appearances in Lawrence  L.  Langer, Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and a Guide (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012). Glatstein was himself involved with an anthology of Holocaust literature: Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, Samuel Margoshes, eds., Anthology of Holocaust Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969). The poem “A gute nakht velt” and Ozick’s 1969 story will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. 3. Glatstein, Prost un poshet, 44–5. 4. Ibid., 44. The Yiddish word “mimeyle” is from Aramaic meaning “of itself.” 5. Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 6. Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12–13. 7. Marc Caplan, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in  Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 25–51. Caplan is aware of an opposite vector in Yiddish literature that seeks out territorialization (or reterritorialization), but in his comparative work with African literatures he focuses on the peripheral as a way to “define a historically and formally grounded theory of peripheral literature as an integral component of global modernism” (12). 8. Ibid., 50. 9. Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 78–85. 10. See Sunny Yudkoff, “The Adolescent Self-Fashioning of Mary Antin,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 32, no. 1 (2013): 4–35; Brooks E. Hefner, The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 108–26. 11. David Hollinger, The American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 67. 12. Leslie Fiedler, To the Gentiles (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 183. 13. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 8. 14. Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). 15. The International Jew (Dearborn: Dearborn Publishing, 1920), 86. 16. Ibid., 10. 17. For further background on Henry Ford’s antisemitism see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Victoria Woeste, Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 18. W.  H.  Auden, “The Wandering Jew,” The New Republic, February 10, 1941, 186. Reprinted in The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson

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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 113. The final quote is from Kafka’s aphorisms; see Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Harvill Secker, 2006), 26. 19. W. H. Auden, “Henry James and the Artist in America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1948, 40. Reprinted in The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, 302–3. 20. Neil Levi, Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 3. 21. Ibid., 4. 22. Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–28; for an account of modernism that eschews the logic of cosmopolitanism for a renewed theorization of internationalism see Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 23. Caplan, 13. 24. Robert Crawford, “Modernism as Provincialism,” in Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 216–70. 25. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956). See also Walter Benn Michaels, Our America, 74–7. 26. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) for a discussion of how the lost vernaculars of Europe (the Irish language, French patois, Italian dialects) became objects of powerful and generative nostalgia for European modernists like Seán í Ríordáin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. 27. Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7. 28. Ibid., 9–10. On this topic see also Hefner, The Word on the Streets, 8–18. Hefner includes a critique of those modernist scholars that instrumentalize the role of mass culture and think of it as separate from modernism. For Hefner the mass ornament is vernacular culture; it may be embedded in a periphery, but that periphery is entwined with the vocabularies of modernity such that it is not as removed from the center as a dialectical mode of thinking would propose. 29. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 30. Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry, 9. See also Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 6–9, where her adoption of the term “chimera of form” refers to the way in which the impossibility of internationalism still becomes constitutive of the “containment model” of modernism and its cosmopolitical critique. The failure of internationalism exists simultaneous to its being imagined wholly within the artistic act. 31. Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Major and Minor Discourses of the Vernacular: Discrepant African Histories,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 179–200. See also Jessica Berman,

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Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) for an objection to the usual segregation between politically engaged writing and more aesthetically concerned writing in favor of an account of modernist narrative as transnationally situated and ethically committed, even in its most experimental or “marginal” manifestations. 32. Hayot and Walkowitz, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, 7–8. 33. There are several recent studies of Jewish-language modernism that explicitly examine this tension between Jewish nationalism and European form, often by linking aesthetic innovation to geographic mobility. See for instance Shachar Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Rachel Seelig, Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Miriam Udel, Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Scott Spector, Modernism Without Jews: German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 34. Benjamin Harshav, “Introspectivism: A Modernist Poetics” in The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 175–86. There is a clear similarity between In zikh manifestos and those of Imagism, as pointed out by Lauren  A.  Benjamin in “Inzikhism, Imagism, and Visionary Modernism,” a paper given at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, 2014. The text of this talk can be found at https://picturesplacesthings.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/inzikhism-imagism-andvisionary-modernism/. 35. Irving Howe later judged Glatstein as the equal of many American modernists, including Robert Frost and Edwin Robinson, see Irving Howe, “Foon Mein Gantzer Mea (Of All My Labors), by Jacob Glatstein,” Commentary, January 1958, 86–8. In his introduction to an anthology of Jewish American literature, Irving Howe argued that provincialism and universalism go hand in hand for the best of US writers, including Jewish ones: “The literature of these regions—New England, the ‘old Southwest,’ the Midwest, later the settlements of European immigrants, and then the Jews and the Blacks—become part of our national literature once they manage to shake off provincial self-centeredness yet retain the pungency of local speech and the strength of local settings. Then, by a sometimes wonderful leap of the imagination, they can move directly from regional preoccupations to a moral and metaphysical universality. This is what happens to Twain, and later to Faulkner.” Irving Howe, introduction to Jewish American Stories (New York: Signet, 1977), 1. In a similar vein, Harold Bloom, when considering poetry of American Jews, favored the Yiddish poets over any English language poet for their devotion to particularity; see Harold Bloom, “The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry,” Commentary, March 1972, 69–74 and Alistair Heyes, “Bloom and Judaism,” in The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 97–144. 36. Glatstein, Arn Leyeles, Nokhem-Borekh Minkov, eds., In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider (New York: Maisel, 1920), 5–6; translated by Anita Norich in Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 774. It is likely that Leyeles was the theoretician behind this manifesto and wrote most of it. While Glatstein’s work from this period does not entirely conform to Leyeles’s demands, it certainly shares Leyeles’s modernist idea of the world and the writer’s role in it. 37. Inzikh, 19; American Yiddish Poetry, 780.

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38. Inzikh also can be seen as a participant in the modernist globality of the “little magazine.” See Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 39. Avraham Novershtern, “In di videranandn fun yidishn modernizm: metapoetishe lider bay dem frien Glatshteyn,” Yivo-bleter 1 (1991): 214–48; Ruth Wisse, “1935–6, a Year in the Life of Yiddish Literature,” in Studies in Jewish Culture in Honor of Chone Shmeruk, eds. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniasnsky (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1993), 86. 40. Itay Zutra, “In zikh (1930–1940): Yiddish Modernism in Search of Jewish SelfConsciousness” (PhD diss., The Jewish Theological Seminary, 2010), 50–1. 41. Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 265. 42. Jacob Glatstein, Yidishtaytshn (Warsaw: Ch. Bzshoza, 1937), 40. The translation of this untranslatable poem is from Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 275. The poem was first published in Inzikh (August 1935). 43. Yidishtaytshn, 41; American Yiddish Poetry, 277. 44. T. S. Elliot, “Four Quartets,” in The Collected Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1958), 141. This is a connection made by Zutra, “In zikh (1930–1940): Yiddish Modernism in Search of Jewish Self-Consciousness,” 54. 45. Avraham Novershtern, “In di videranandn fun yidishn modernizm: metapoetishe lider bay dem frien Glatstein,” 230–2. 46. I am indebted to David Roskies for the image of the Yiddish-to-come. See David Roskies, “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing,” Poetics Today 35, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 277–82. 47. Jacob Glatstein, “Der marsh tsu di goyim,” Inzikh 3, no. 14 (July 1935): 55–62. Translations quoted throughout come from Jacob Glatstein, “The March to the Goyim,” trans. Saul Noam Zaritt, In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (January 2017): https:// ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/the-march-to-the-goyim. 48. Ibid., 57. 49. Ibid. 50. Zishe Weinper, At the Rich Man’s Gate: Poems (New York: Coward-McCann, 1935); Iser Talush [Muselevich], The New Bethlehem (New York: B.  G.  Guerney, 1935); Harry Sackler, Festival at Meron (New York: Covici, Friede, 1935). 51. Ruth Wisse adopts Glatstein’s critique and pushes it toward an even more chauvinist conclusion in her essay “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 142–3. 52. Such a claim is remarkably similar to the arguments made in 1944 by Max Horkheimer and Theodor  W.  Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 53. Jacob Glatstein, “Yidn in der velt-literatur,” Inzikh 5, no. 5 (November, 1936): 157–60. For coverage of the book fair see Eugene Reynal, “The Forthcoming New York Times National Book Fair,” The New York Times, November 1, 1936, BR3, and the several other articles about the fair in the book review section of that day’s edition. 54. I. J. Singer spoke on a panel entitled “Far Places” with fellow immigrant writer Louis Adamic, travel writers Carleton Beals and Harrison Forman, the world traveler and illustrator Cyrus Leroy Baldridge, and the ambassador to Denmark Ruth Bryan Owen (the first US female ambassador). See “Program of the Book Fair,” The New York Times, November 1, 1936, N8.

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55. Jacob Glatstein, “Yidn in der velt-literatur,” 157. 56. Jacob Glatstein, “Der marsh tsu di goyim,” 60. 57. The lone exception to this generalization is James Joyce. Ulysses (1922) briefly became a best-seller in 1934 when the book was issued in the US for the first time after having been banned for twelve years. 58. Jacob Glatstein, “Tsvishn eygene,” Inzikh 8 (May 1938): 120–1. 59. “A gute nakht velt” was first published in Inzikh 8, no. 3 (April 1938): 66–7. It was then collected in Gedenklider (New York: Yidisher kemfer, 1943), 41–2. The poem was one of the few works of Glatstein’s to be translated into English very soon after its publication, by Joseph Leftwich with the title “Back to the Ghetto” in 1939 and then several times subsequently. For an analysis of the translation history of the poem see Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 66–96. 60. Gedenklider, 41. Translation is from Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 305–7. 61. Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 46. See also Ruth Wisse, “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” 140–2. 62. For an alternate reading of the ending of the poem see Norich, Discovering Exile, 59. 63. For a detailed description of this proposed unity—and the concurrent political battles that nevertheless ensued—see Norich, Discovering Exile, 17–41. 64. Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Out) was first serialized in Inzikh (October 1934–December 1937) and was then published as a book in 1938 (New York: In zikh, 1938). Ven Yash iz gekumen (When Yash Arrived) was serialized in the weekly literary magazine Der yidisher kemfer in 1940 and published as a book later that year (New York: Farlag Sklarski, 1940). The third volume was never completed, though a fragment, under the title Ven Yash iz tsurikgeforn (When Yash Returned), was published in Di tsukumft (November 1941): 82–4, and then republished in Di goldene keyt 30 (1956): 256–61. The two books were translated into English in the 1960s as Homeward Bound, trans. Abraham Goldstein (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969) and Homecoming at Twilight, Norbert Guterman (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1962). Both were recently retranslated together as The Glatstein Chronicles, ed. Ruth Wisse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Page numbers in parentheses after quotes from these texts refer to the two Yiddish book editions and this most recent translation. 65. Glatstein wrote Ven Yash iz geforn explicitly in relation to Adamic’s book, reflecting particularly on the gaps between their respective audiences: “When Adamic writes about Yugoslavia for American readers, he has an eager and engaged audience, as if he were writing about cannibals . . . How can I come to Yiddish readers and serve them exotica from the shtetl, which they already know much too well? The shtetl has already been lauded, rhymed about, and seasoned with pepper. I can’t rely in advance on the interest of the Yiddish reader if I come to tell them about ‘Jewish national costumes.’ Adamic has a captive audience when he talks about the thought of his people.” (Jacob Glatstein, “Ven Yash iz geforn,” Inzikh 6 [1934]: 178–80). This quote comes from the introduction to the serialization of the novel in Inzikh. When the text was published as a book this introduction was omitted. Despite the vast differences between the two literary undertakings, it can be argued that Glatstein aspired to a similar dialectic outlined by Adamic: one novel about the journey back to the shtetl, a second novel about the narrator’s experiences there, and a third novel describing a triumphant return to the US. Glatstein had planned a trilogy that would

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potentially announce a continuity of Yiddish creativity from a threatened Eastern European origin to an American future. But, the first two books that Glatstein completed made such a synthesis impossible, and the third book of the trilogy remained unfinished. 66. The monologue delivered by a Jew from Bogota is also a commentary on Sholem Aleichem’s short story “Der mentsh fun Buenes-Ayres,” in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, band 5 (New York: Forverts, 1942), 71–88. A translation into English is available in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 166–77. 67. Ven Yash iz geforn contains a series of interactions with a group of young Soviets returning after tours in the US as students or diplomatic visitors, with a couple of Jews among them. The scenes of their drunken revelry on the boat are part of larger meditation on the Soviet project, revealing Glatstein’s critique of Stalinism. While the narrator clearly admires their vitality and idealism, he is wary of their sloganeering and ideological posturing, which act as a cover for their libidinal indulgences and the lack of true equality in their country (Y106–8, E78–9). At one point the narrator comments “[I] asked the October Revolution to toast the Lublin of my youth. I had cursed and blasphemed, mustering all the Russian I still retained. Moscow should not be so high and mighty: It was about time that everybody knew there was a Lublin in the world and that Moscow owed it a debt. My native city deserved the Order of Lenin” (Y97–8, E71). In opposition to the cosmopolitanism of Moscow, the narrator offers the provincial worldliness of his hometown, Lublin. These comments directly reflect Glatstein’s own misgivings about Jewish participation in state and international socialism during the 1930s. See Glatstein, “Komintern versus yidintern,” Inzikh 4, no. 19 (December 1935): 3–12 and “Mit Trotskin—vuhin?” Inzikh 6, no. 2 (February 1937): 40–52. See also Ruth Wisse, “1935/6—A Year in the Life of Yiddish Literature,” 83–90. 68. For further exploration of the fractured Jewish conversations of this novel see Dan Miron, afterword to Jacob Glatstein, Kesheyash nasa, trans. Dan Miron (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 205–21; Leah Garrett, “The Self as Maranno in Jacob Glatstein’s Autobiographical Novels,” Prooftexts 18, no. 3 (1998): 207–23; Leah Garrett, Journeys Beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 123–65. 69. Translation mine. The English translation (“came out sounding more like John Masefield than a proper Yiddish poem”) misses the negation of Yiddish and Jewishness that Glatstein sees in the poem. John Masefield was a contemporary English writer and at the time was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. 70. Most scholars have presumed Steinman to be an echo of I.  L.  Peretz, but recent research by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska confirms the character to be a portrait of the writer Moshe Feinkind. See Jacob Glatstein, “Prost un poshet: a yidisher historiker in Lublin,” Der tog-morgn zhurnal, November 12, 1965, translated by Sunny Yudkoff and Saul Zaritt as “A Jewish Historian from Lublin,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (January 2017), https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/a-jewish-historian-from-lublin; and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, “A Writer in the Spa: Identifying Jacob Glatstein’s Protagonist,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (January 2017), https://ingeveb.org/ blog/a-writer-in-the-spa-identifying-jacob-glatsteins-protagonist. 71. For an opposite reading of this ending, in which the narrator remains trapped within the “sclerotic” confines of the sanatorium, see Sunny Yudkoff, “The Narrowing of the

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Creative Vein: Yankev Glatshteyn and the Poetics of Sclerosis,” Prooftexts 36, no. 3 (2017): 324–5. 72. Kadya Molodowsky, “Oyf eygenem ‘hefker,’ ” Svive 1 (January–February 1943): 2. 73. Ibid., 4. 74. Ibid., 6. 75. Kadya Molodowsky, “Tsu di problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” Svive 3 (May–June 1943): 55. 76. Molodowsky’s literary responses to the crises of Jewish life in the US during and following the Holocaust were varied and complex. For a fuller account see Kathryn Hellerstein, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 323–47 and “Finding Her Yiddish Voice: Kadya Molodowsky in America,” Revue d’Etudes Anglophones (Summer 2002): 48–68. 77. For an examination of the ways in which a number of emigre writers from Poland still found themselves attracted to a Russian model of the reading public see Ofer Dynes, “Hagirah shel sofer yidish le-amerika: Aharon Zeitlin kemikre mivkhan,” MA Thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2008. 78. Kadya Molodowsky, Fun Lublin biz Nyu York: tog-bukh fun Rivke Zilberg (New York: Farlag Papirnene Brik, 1942), 268; A Jewish Refugee in New York, trans. Anita Norich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 166. 79. Molodowsky, “Tsu di problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” 60–1. 80. Glatstein, “Der marsh tsu di goyim,” 56. 81. Jacob Glatstein, “Yidn in der velt-literatur,” 160. 82. The figure of l’avenir recurs throughout Derrida’s later work. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 83. David Roskies, “The Achievement of American Yiddish Modernism,” in Go and Study: Essays and Studies in Honor of Alfred Jospe, eds. Raphael Jospe and Samuel Z. Fishman (Washington: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1980), 353–68. 84. For detailed explorations of Glatstein’s postwar poetry see Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 132–78 and “Yankev Glatshteyn: Mourning the Yiddish Language,” American Imago 45, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 271–86; Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015). While it may have appeared that Glatstein abandoned much of the trappings of modernism in the postwar period (preferring rhyme and less experimentation), Glatstein still argued that any description of monumental destruction, even the most straightforward, would inevitably be embedded in the modern. See A.  Tabachnik, “An Interview with Jacob Glatstein,” Yiddish 1 (1973): 41. This interview was originally conducted in 1955. A recording of the interview (in Yiddish) can be found at https:// archive.org/details/JacobGlatsteinInterviewedByAbrahamTabachnickPart1 and https:// archive.org/details/JacobGlatsteinInterviewedByAbrahamTabachnickPart2. 85. Jacob Glatstein, “The Fame of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Congress Bi-Weekly, December 27, 1965, 17–19. 86. See for instance Glatstein’s assessment following Delmore Schwartz’s death: “The strange flower [flants] of a Jew in American poetry (though Delmore Schwartz also wrote prose)—the combination of Delmore and Schwartz, who could not put down roots, neither with the Jews nor with the non-Jews—will quickly be forgotten.” Jacob Glatstein, “Der toyt fun an eynzamen poet,” in In der velt mit yidish, 282–5.

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87. Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Commentary, November 1969, 33. 88. Ibid., 35. 89. See Ozick’s essay “Toward a New Yiddish,” in Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 151–77. 90. For more thorough readings of “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” see Elaine Kauvar, Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 53–66; Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 47–62; Leah Garret, “Cynthia Ozick’s Envy: A Reconsideration,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 24 (2005): 60–81; Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 114–16; Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 16–65; Ken Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 200–10; Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 243–55; Kathryn Hellerstein, “The Envy of Yiddish: Cynthia Ozick as Translator,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 31, no. 1 (2012): 24–47. 91. A. Tabachnik, “An Interview with Jacob Glatstein,” 45. 92. Yankev Pat, Shmuesn mit yidishe shrayber (New York: CYCO, 1954), 86. 93. Ibid., 91, 94. 94. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 452. 95. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 96. The metaphor of the ghetto for the description of Jewish writing serves as the conceit for Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner’s introduction to Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1–23. They endeavor to describe the porous boundaries of Jewish writing by invoking the image of a “wall-less” ghetto. My contention is that the figuration of walls is in fact indispensable to the survival mentality that often accompanies the nationalist tendencies of many Jewish writers. For many writers, it is important that there in fact be walls as a way to distinguish the Jewish collective from other religious, ethnic, racial, and national entities. But it is equally important that there be many ways to climb over, under, and through these barriers.

Chapter 3 1. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 9. 2. As encountered previously with the many names of Jacob Glatstein, the monikers of Isaac Bashevis Singer are a well-known problem for scholarship. Itshele, Yitskhok, Yitskhok Zinger, Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavsky, D. Segal, Isaac, Isaac Singer, I. B. Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer—these are just a handful of the various names the writer used during his long career. Yiddish readers commonly knew him simply as Bashevis (a pseudonym related to his mother Bas-sheva, chosen to distinguish himself from his older brother), and for convenience and so as to follow the conventions of Yiddishist scholarship I will refer to him as such throughout the chapter. This is not a neutral choice, as it privileges the obscured and invented last name “Bashevis” over the more translatable “Singer.” For more on the function of Bashevis’s multiple names for his writing in the Yiddish press see Avraham Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi: sifrut yidish be-artsot ha-brit (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015), 642–3.

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3. Most scholarship tends to agree with the notion that Bashevis’s Nobel Prize was meant to honor more than the writer’s own work. See Ilan Stavans, ed., Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album (New York: The Library of America, 2004), 80–2. 4. Here are just a few examples from interviews in which Bashevis declared his distinctiveness from the Yiddish literary tradition, as found in Grace Farrell, ed., Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992): “I don’t write in a Yiddish tradition. What is thought of as the Yiddish writer’s tradition is a sentimental and a radical tradition. He is always wanting to make the world better and complaining about the lot of the Jews. I am neither a sentimentalist nor a radical” (34); “So, from a literary point of view, I went my own way. Also, these people were all on the socialistic side. They always thought about creating a better world. And, because of this, they were sentimental, which is not my way; I would like to see a better world, but I don’t think, really, that men can create it” (72); “The Yiddish tradition, in my mind, is a tradition of sentimentality and of social justice. These are the two pillars, so to speak, of the Yiddish kind of emotions. They are always for the underdog, very much so, and they are always sentimental. When I began to write I already felt that this kind of tradition is not in my character. I am not a sentimental person by nature” (126). 5. For an example of how Bashevis and Sholem Aleichem might be read together see Miriam Udel, Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 33–66. 6. “I’ll tell you, I feel myself naturally a part of the Jewish tradition. Very strongly so! But I wouldn’t say I feel myself a part of the Yiddish tradition. Somehow I always wanted to write in my own way, and I never felt that I was somebody’s disciple. For instance, Sholem Aleichem, who was a great writer, always used to say that he was a disciple of Mendele Mocher Seforim. That was very modest. But I don’t have these feelings. The only person I have a lot to thank for—from whom I learned a great deal—was my brother, I. J. Singer, who was ten years older than I. But even here I wouldn’t say I was my brother’s disciple. I would almost say that I tried to create my own tradition, if one can use such words.” Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, 8. See also David Neal Miller, ed., Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), a volume in which scholars try to determine Bashevis’s difficult relationship to other Yiddish writers. 7. For a further, and more damning, exploration of the various references to other writers that Bashevis includes in his translated works, see Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am hayehudi, 182–3. 8. Many of the late appreciations of Bashevis reproduce the image of Bashevis as the last Yiddish writer, who embodies the old world yet produces universal literature. See for example: Irving H. Buchen, Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past (New York: New York University Press, 1968); Marcia Allentuck, ed., The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); Grace Farrell Lee, From Exile to Redemption: The Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). 9. For a review of the reception of Bashevis in China see Xiaowei Fu and Yi Wang, “The Influence of Jewish Literature in China,” in The Jewish-Chinese Nexus: A Meeting of Civilizations, ed. M. Avrum Ehrlich (New York: Routledge, 2008), 123–7 and Guo Qiang Qiao, The Jewishness of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). For background on Bashevis’s reception in Poland see Agata Tuszynska, Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac

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Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998) and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Polska Isaaca Bashevisa Singera: rozstanie i powrot [Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Poland: Exile and Return] (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie, 1994). 10. David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 273; Moshe Yungman, “Tekufat Polin be-yetsirato shel Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Hasifrut 27 (1978): 122–3; Ruth Wisse, “Singer’s Paradoxical Progress,” Commentary 67 (February 1979): 33–8, reprinted in Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (1981): 148–59. For an overview of Yiddish naturalism see Y. Y. Trunk, Idealizm un naturalizm in der yidisher literatur (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1927) and Di yidishe proze in Poyln in der tkufe tsvishn beyde velt-milkhomes (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in Argentine, 1949). 11. For Bashevis’s ambivalent relationship with Polish language and literature see Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, “The Role of Polish Language and Literature in Bashevis’s Fiction,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 134–47. 12. The role of S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Mendele and Sholem Aleichem’s various personas in mitigating and translating the tensions of modernity has been extensively explored in Yiddish literary scholarship. The most important analysis of these devices remains the work of Dan Miron in A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973) and The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). For a more recent intervention in Miron’s typology, especially with regard to Sholem Aleichem, see the first two chapters of Miriam Udel, Never Better! 13. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Shamay Vayts,” in A mol in a yoyvl: zamlbukh far beletristik (Warsaw: Kletskin, 1929), 80–103. 14. For an extended close reading of this story see Joseph Sherman, “Radical Conservatism: Bashevis’s Dismissal of Modernism,” in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, eds. Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 208–14. 15. For more on Bashevis’s writing during the 1920s see David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, 273–4; Moshe Yungman, “Tekufat Polin be-yetsirato shel Isaac Bashevis Singer,” 118–33, also in English, “Singer’s Polish Period: 1924–1935,” Yiddish 6, no. 2–3 (1985): 25–38; and Elias Schulman, “I.  B.  Singer’s Early Fiction (1925–1935): A Critical Bibliographical Study,” Yiddish 14, no. 2–3 (2006): 42–66. 16. Bashevis, “Tsu der frage fun dikhtung un politik,” Globus 1, no. 3 (1932): 39–49. Most Yiddish modernists of the interwar period aligned themselves with the tradition of I.  L.  Peretz, many having sought out his approval as young writers in the prewar years. These writers viewed Peretz’s early experimentation as license for innovation in Yiddish literature, at times leading to forms of literary expression that went well beyond Peretz’s work. Peretz Markish, a leading Yiddish modernist in Poland, remarked on the tenth anniversary of Peretz’s death that “the greatest service done by Peretz for Yiddish literature was that he did not anchor his work in regrowth and repetition, but rather in pushing and driving his work beyond itself, further and further into the future! Breathe in his unrest in broad spaces, wake the spirit of a living personality and through it multiply the love for a renewing Yiddish literature.” Literarishe bleter, April 10, 1925, 11. Writing on the eighteenth anniversary of Peretz’s death, Joseph Opatoshu echoed Markish’s statements, claiming that

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“Peretz is the constant agitator, the unrest that disturbs any sense of contentment, doesn’t let anything become frozen. It is not by chance that one can find in Peretz all of the directions of the new Yiddish literature.” Literarishe bleter, April 7, 1933, 229. For further exploration of Peretz’s influences see Nachman Mayzel, Yitskhok Leybush Perets un zayn dor shrayber (New York: Ikuf, 1951); Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 57–9 and Y.  L.  Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 37–40; Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 127–9. For a review of the complex reception of Peretz in the Soviet Union, see Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 242–50. 17. Bashevis, “Verter oder bilder,” Literarishe bleter, August 26, 1927, 663–5. See Joseph Sherman, “Radical Conservatism: Bashevis’s Dismissal of Modernism,” 215–16. 18. “Verter oder bilder,” 663. For an account of Peretz as master of Jewish speech see David Roskies, “The Small Talk of I. L. Peretz,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, May 2016: https://ingeveb.org/articles/the-small-talk-of-i-l-peretz. 19. Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Little Boy in Search of God (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 154–5. 20. Zeitlin’s notes on the comings and goings in “World Literature” appeared in Globus numbers 16–18. The second number of Globus included a cover article honoring the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death, largely considered the first theorist of world literature: Gavriel Ashkenazi, “Gete (tsu zayn 100-tn yortsayt),” Globus 2 (1932): 1–15. A review of contemporary Polish literature was written by Stefan Pomer, “Di yingste poylishe literatur (an iberblik),” Globus 1 (1932): 72–7. For the editors’ critiques of Yiddish modernism see “Notitsn,” Globus 18 (1933): 84, where the author (most likely Zeitlin) berates the “analphalbetism” of the modernists, the “shraybekhtser fun ot di shtuts-tshampionen,” the scribbling of these champions of idiocy. See also the exchange of letters between Zeitlin and Shmuel Charney published in Globus numbers 3–7 from 1932. To be sure, interest in world literature was also reflected in the more mainstream literary journal Literarishe bleter, which included regular columns in the 1920s and ’30s entitled “Velt-literatur” or “Veltkhronik” and then “Fun der velt-literatur,” some of which may have been written by Zeitlin (see for instance Literarishe bleter, January 1, 1933, 13). 21. For background on Bashevis’s translation efforts see Stephen  H.  Garrin, “Isaac Bashevis Singer as Translator: ‘Apprenticing in the Kitchen of Literature,’ ” in Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, 51–7. There was a significant campaign to translate world literature into Yiddish during this period, sparking numerous debates when the number of translated books grew to outnumber original works. See the numerous articles on this topic published in the Warsaw based Bikher-velt in 1928–9; for further background see Amy Rebecca Blau, “Afterlives: Translations of German Weltliteratur into Yiddish” (PhD Diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005). Simultaneous to the translation of works of world literature, Bashevis (along with Zeitlin) also produced popular literature and sensationalist humorous sketches under various pseudonyms, purportedly to earn money. Bashevis was able to compartmentalize his literary production between that which he deemed of high literary value and that which put food on the table. For more on the dual life of Yiddish writers producing both shund and “serious” literature see Nathan Cohen, Sefer, sofer, ve-iton: merkaz hatarbut hayehudit bevarsha, 1918–1942 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003), 93–112 and Chone Shmeruk, “Le-toldot sifrut ha-‘shund’ be-yidish,” Tarbitz 52, no. 2 (1983): 325–54.

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22. Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Little Boy in Search of God, 164. 23. Ruth Wisse, Introduction to Satan in Goray (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996), xxxix–xli. For an account of the complex movement between politics and allegory in the novel see Eitan Kensky, “Facing the Limits of Fiction: Self-Consciousness in Jewish American Literature” (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2013), 200–5. 24. Arn Zeitlin, “Fun di aroysgeber,” foreword to Der Sotn in goray (Warsaw: Yiddish PEN Club, 1935). Quoted in Ruth Wisse, Introduction to Satan in Goray, xxxix. 25. Aaron Zeitlin, “Der kult fun gornisht un di kunst vi zi darf zayn (protest un animaymin),” in Varshever shriftn (Warsaw: Literatn-klub bam fareyn far yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn, 1926–7), 6. For a similar set of reflections and demands of Yiddish literature see Zeitlin’s “Memoryal vegn dem araynnemen di yidishe shriftshteler in dem alveltlekhn PEN farband,” in Varshever shriftn, 1–15. For a history of the composition of these manifestos see Yekhiel Sheintuch, Bereshut harabim ubereshut hayahid: Aaron Zeitlin vesifrut yidish (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 335–6. 26. Jewish writing in Poland during the interwar period was at times critiqued out of nationalist antisemitic sentiment; but it also was deplored by liberal critics who viewed any kind of national identification as parochial and detrimental to an internationalist mode of Polish literature. Sometimes this criticism was voiced by writers with their own fraught relationships to Jewishness, as in the writers Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski. For more on the complexity of Jewish writing in Poland see Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1992); Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003); Natalia Krynicka, “Les rapports culturels entre Juifs et Polonais à la lumière des traductions littéraires (1885–1939)” (Phd Diss., Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010); Maria Antosik-Piela, “ ‘Jesteśmy zawsze na wpół trefni’: Rozmowy z pisarzami jidysz na łamach ‘5-tej Rano’ i ‘Nowego Głosu,’ ” [“We Are Always Half-Suspect”: “5-ta Rano” and “Nowy Głos” Interviews with Yiddish Writers”] Kwartalnik Historii żydów 252, no. 4 (2014): 675–89; Karolina Szymaniak, “Trup, wampir i orzeł. Polski romantyzm w kulturze jidysz u progu dwudziestolecia międzywojennego” [Dead body, vampire and the eagle. Polish Romanticism in Yiddish Culture at the beginning of the 1920s], in Polacy-Żydzi. Kontakty kulturowe i literackie, ed. by Eugenia Prokop-Janiec (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2014), 107–23; Karolina Szymaniak, “Speaking Back: On Some Aspects of the Reception of Polish Literature in Yiddish Literary Criticism,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 28 (November 2015): 153–72. 27. See Nachman Mayzel, “Mit velkhe verk darfn mir kumen tsu der velt-literatur?” Literarishe bleter, February 15, 1929, 125–7; for further background see Nathan Cohen, Sefer, sofer, ve-iton, 72–7. 28. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” Svive 2 (1943): 2; “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” Prooftexts 9 (1989): 5. 29. Bashevis’s first Forverts novel, Der zindiker meshiekh (The Sinful Messiah), was a middlebrow approximation of Der Sotn in Goray, and soon after the publication of its first chapters Bashevis became embarrassed by its faults. On the relationship between Der Sotn in Goray and the new Frankist novel see Chone Shmeruk, “The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 118–28. See also Janet Hadda, “Bashevis at Forverts,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, 173–81 and Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi, 640–1 and 648–9. This initial period of Bashevis’s career in the US is often mislabeled as a “literary silence.” Bashevis continued to write through his struggles, arguably

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developing the wide range of his journalistic voice during this period. See Eitan Kensky, “Facing the Limits of Fiction: Self-Consciousness in Jewish American Literature,” 186–200. 30. For Bashevis’s disappointment about his first works in the US see Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lost in America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1981), 139–42. 31. Bashevis, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” 8; “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” 9. 32. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Arum der yidisher literatur in Poyln,” Di tsukumft 48 (August 1943): 471; “Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland,” Prooftexts 15, no. 2 (May, 1995): 120. 33. Bashevis, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” 8; “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” 9. The Yiddish writer is “a shklaf fun der fargangenhayt”—Bashevis literally demands that one be a “slave to the past.” 34. David Roskies, “Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish Literary Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, eds. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87. Many of my comments here about Bashevis’s short stories from the 1940s follow Roskies’s readings in A Bridge of Longing, 266–306. See also Joseph Sherman, “Bashevis/Singer and the Jewish Pope,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, 13–27. For an account of Bashevis’s multiple positions for and against realism during the 1940s see Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi, 644–9. 35. Some of these stories were published in Yiddish literary journals of the 1940s and others were collected as additional stories in the reprint of Der Sotn in goray (New York: Farlag Matones, 1943). 36. For a detailed exploration of the ways in which Warsaw Yiddish writers experienced the process of emigration in the 1930s see Ofer Dynes, “Hagirah shel sofer yidish le-amerika: Aharon Zeitlin kemikre mivkhan” (MA Thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2008). While Bashevis offers here the fantastic solution of demonic realism, other Polish-Yiddish writers, according to Dynes, followed different paths, including the invention of a new literary elite, then abandoning that elitism in order to accommodate the interests of a fading mass Yiddish readership, translation into English and Hebrew, or writing in Hebrew from the start. 37. Bashevis, “Di grenetsn fun kinstlerishn vort,” Forverts, March 16, 1952. 38. Bashevis, “Realizm vi a metod,” Di tsukumft 49 (February 1944): 115. 39. Di brider Ashkenazi was serialized in the Forverts beginning in January 1935 and the book was published in three volumes in Warsaw in 1936. The English translation was done by Maurice Samuel and published by Knopf in 1936. The Yiddish play was first staged at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in 1937, directed by Maurice Schwartz. For a summary of the various reactions to these editions and links to further research see Miranda Cooper and Eitan Kensky, “The Brothers Ashkenazi: Reading Resources,” The Yiddish Book Center, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/great-jewish-bookclub/2018-book-club-resources/brothers-ashkenazi. 40. Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 41. Novershtern offers an even bleaker account of the novel’s construction, arguing that the balance between character and plot is awkward and poorly executed. This he attributes to the material conditions of its composition as a serialized novel, written in piecemeal and under the pressure of the weekly installment. Novershtern claims that Bashevis made many stylistic and structural changes to the novel midway through such that the final product is the record of the author’s experimentation rather than a cohesive thing. Kan gar ha’am hayehudi, 661–90.

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42. Though The Family Moskat is generally considered the first translation of Bashevis into English, parts of Der Sotn in Goray had previously appeared in a translation by Maurice Carr, Bashevis’s nephew, in an anthology edited by Carr entitled Jewish Short Stories of ToDay (London: Faber and Faber, 1938). It is unknown how involved Bashevis was in this translation. See Faith Jones, “The Real First Translation of Bashevis into English,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (September 2015): https://ingeveb.org/blog/the-real-firsttranslation-of-bashevis-into-english. 43. Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 129–30. 44. Asch had written several well-received novels, set in Europe and in the US, that explored this theme (including Three Cities); Abraham Cahn’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) also use the breakup of the traditional family as the background for describing the struggles of Jewish life in urban America. Leslie Fiedler labeled this literary trend the “urbanization of violence,” in which the senseless destruction previously associated with nature was now understood as a thoroughly human affair native to the modern city. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 482. 45. The English version ends with the words “Death is the Messiah. That’s the real truth,” further capping the nihilism of the novel. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Family Moskat (New York: Knopf, 1950), 611. The Yiddish version includes an additional chapter where the younger generations of the Moskat family find refuge in North America and Palestine. See Bashevis, Di familye Mushkat (New York: Shklarsky, 1950), 758–60. On the differences between the two endings see I.  Saposnik, “Translating The Family Moskat: The Metamorphosis of a Novel,” Yiddish 1, no. 2 (Fall 1973): 26–37 and Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi, 685–90. 46. See Irving Howe’s comparison between Bashevis and I. J. Singer in “The Other Singer,” Commentary, March 1966, 78–82. Howe claims that I. J. Singer’s work appears “a bit oldfashioned to young people brought up on Faulkner, Camus and Genet.” The family chronicle was out of place in a postwar literary atmosphere where readers “accept as necessary or even desirable the disintegration of the traditional novel” (78). 47. Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in PostWorld War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 48. Gordon Hutner, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 269–328. 49. Theodore Solotoroff, “A Vocal Group: The Jewish Part in American Letters,” The Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1959, 652. 50. The following is just a sampling of the many treatments of this story: Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 130–1; Joseph C. Landis, “ ‘Gimpl Tam’ and the Perils of Translation,” Yiddish 14, no. 2–3 (2006): 110–15; Janet Hadda, “Gimpel the Full,” Prooftexts 10, no. 2 (1990): 283–95; David Roskies, “Gimpel the Simple and on Reading from Right to Left,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 319–40; Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 255–63; Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 200–20; Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call it English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature, 101–6; Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 47–51; Shoshana Olidort,

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“Proverbial Language and Literary Truth in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Prooftexts (forthcoming). 51. Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class, 18–24. 52. Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English, 112. For more on the background of Bellow’s translation, see 100–106 and Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 262. 53. For more on the importance of autonomy for modernism, especially in the postwar, see Andrew Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 54. Irving Howe, “Demonic Fiction of a Yiddish ‘Modernist,’ ” Commentary, October 1960, 350. 55. Howe does admit that the label of “modernist” was hard to maintain given that Bashevis still railed against all forms of Yiddish modernism, hence his use of quotation marks around the term. 56. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 71. For further background on this and other Howe anthologies see Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3, no. 1 (1983): 109–14 and Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 171–91. 57. The “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” is a phrase introduced by Salo Baron in “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?,” Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 515–26. 58. The idea of Howe using Yiddish culture to redefine the Jewish American present was suggested to me by Benjamin Schreier. See his forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). 59. Der feter fun Amerike (The Uncle from America) was serialized in the Forverts from 1949 to 1951, Shotns baym Hudson (posthumously translated as Shadows on the Hudson) in 1957, A shif keyn Amerike (A Ship to America) in 1963. None were translated into English during this period nor at all during Bashevis’s lifetime. 60. Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 131. For a further account of the tensions between Bashevis and Bellow see Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Knopf, 2015), 446–7 and The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 (New York: Knopf, 2018), 207–8. 61. Some of Bashevis’s desire for control over translation can be attributed to his need for autonomy but also can be linked to his continued critique of modernism. Bashevis remained staunchly critical of many of the newer trends in postwar fiction, in particular US writers who employed the same experimental techniques he derided earlier in his career. See Bashevis, “Di tsukunft fun der literatur,” Forverts, December 17, 1972 and “Parazitn in der kunst fun undzer tsayt,” Forverts, December 24, 1972. 62. In addition to Bellow, those who translated directly from the Yiddish included: Isaac Rosenfeld (a writer and a friend of Bellow’s who also grew up in an immigrant family in Chicago), Shlomo Katz, Norbert Guterman, Jacob Sloan, Joseph Singer (I. J. Singer’s son), Shulamith Charney and Elizabeth Shub (both related to the Yiddish critic Shmuel Charney), Mirra Ginsburg, Ruth Whitman, Chana Faerstein (later Chana Bloch), and Aliza Shevrin. 63. Ruth Whitman, “Translating with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Irving Malin (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 44–7; Dvorah Telushkin, Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: William

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Morrow and Company, 1997). See the film The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, directed by Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser (2014), for further testimonies from other Bashevis translators. 64. On Bashevis’s term “second originals” see Farrell Lee, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, 51. For discussion of how scholarship has dealt with the multiple originals of Bashevis’s work see Anita Norich, “Isaac Bashevis Singer in America: The Translation Problem,” Judaism 44, no. 2 (1995): 214–17. 65. Bashevis, “On Translating My Books,” in The World of Translation: Papers Delivered at the Conference on Literary Translation, May 1970 (New York: PEN American Center, 1971), 113. Despite rumors, it is unclear if Bashevis in fact engaged in sexual relations with his translators. In Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, Hadda reports that several translators “encouraged me to accept a fascinating but implausible fact: that Bashevis had slept with all his translators, except for the one who happened to be telling me about all the others” (9). 66. Quoted in The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer (2014), 6:53. 67. In the previously quoted PEN speech, Bashevis repeatedly voices his various frustrations with translation, expressing them in misogynist terms: “looking down on translators can be compared to looking down on women. We cannot do without them.” Bashevis, “On Translating My Books,” 112. 68. From the lecture “Yiddish and Yiddish Literature, 1962” located in the Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. This lecture includes translations and adaptations of a number of articles Bashevis published in Yiddish in the Forverts around the same period. 69. “Bashevis was not only unshaken by the Holocaust; he felt vindicated by it. Now liberated from the petty politics and illusory dreams of the entire Yiddish writers’ club, he was ready to strike out on his own. The seed of redemption was contingent on the fall.” David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, 280. 70. Irving Howe noted, “It is hardly a secret that in the Yiddish literary world Singer is regarded with a certain suspicion or at least reserve.” Irving Howe, “Demonic Fiction of a Yiddish ‘Modernist,’ ” Commentary (October 1960): 350–1. 71. Jacob Glatstein, “The Fame of Bashevis Singer,” Congress Bi-Weekly 32 (December 27, 1965): 17–19. 72. Bashevis’s translated novels of the ’50s and ’60s were all set in the past: Satan in Goray was translated in 1955; The Magician of Lublin (1960) followed the erotic escapades of a nineteenth-century magician; The Slave (1962) told of a Jew sold into slavery following the Khmelnytsky massacres in the seventeenth century; The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969) form two parts of a sprawling historical novel about a nineteenth-century Jewish family in Poland. A collection of childhood reminiscences (In My Father’s Court, 1962) consists largely of portraits of those characters that came to seek rabbinic counsel with his father and is not much of a self-portrait. 73. Avraham Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am ha-yehudi, 180. Novershtern argues that a new autobiographical approach led Bashevis to his least successful literary efforts. Novershtern examines two autobiographical novels, Shosha (Yiddish, 1974; English, 1978) and Meshugah (Yiddish, 1981–2; English, 1994), claiming that the Eastern European setting of Shosha provides a more compelling background to the tensions between tradition and modernity while Meshugah, which takes place in New York, is merely an empty erotic escapade with little or no literary merit. For Novershtern more generally, Yiddish in the American landscape is a dead end, a fact which he claims prevents Bashevis from creating complex

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main characters for plots that take place in the US. Novershtern imposes a teleology of decline over Bashevis’s work, from his strong Eastern European early work to his translational, artistically bankrupt later work. I would counter this argument by pointing to the longer autobiographical strain in Bashevis’s work, of which these two novels are very late additions. Moreover, there is a reason that Meshugah was only translated in the 1990s and published after his death; it is simply a poorly written and constructed novel. It is certainly fair to critique Bashevis’s larger approach to the novel as a genre, save for perhaps the more studied construction of Satan in Goray (which Novershtern does not hesitate to praise as Bashevis’s only successful novel, especially for its rootedness in Eastern European history and folklore). I contend that the autobiographical figure of the short stories, contained within a short dialogical framework and without the burden of  novelistic totality, offers a much more compelling exploration of the narrative impossibilities of the postwar Yiddish writer in the US than his novels do. Furthermore, if Bashevis’s work is evaluated through the centrality of the short story genre and by taking into account the contingencies of translation, a very different image of his oeuvre appears than one of gradual, inevitable decline. 74. Bashevis, “Aleyn,” Svive 1 (1960): 9–18 and “Alone,” Mademoiselle, October 1962, 118–19 and 172–5; “Aleyn” was reprinted in Gimpl Tam un andere dertseylungen (New York: Tziko, 1963), 168–79; the English translation was reprinted in Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), 48–60, and then Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer (New York: The Library of America, 2004), 371–80. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the Gimpl Tam and Collected Stories versions, respectively. The story’s translator, Joel Blocker, a journalist and editor for Newsweek, who would go on to publish Bashevis’s first interview in English a year later in Commentary, likely knew very little Yiddish, if any. 75. For an alternate account of Bashevis’s autobiographical writing, in comparison with his siblings, see Anita Norich, “The Family Singer and the Autobiographical Imagination,” Prooftexts 10, no. 1 (January 1990): 91–107. A full catalogue of over seventy autobiographical short stories can be found in Shiri Shapira, “The Author-Narrator in Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger’s Short Fiction,” MA Thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017, 87–97. 76. To further underscore the autobiographical aspect of the story, Bashevis began visiting Miami Beach regularly in January of 1950 and would eventually purchase a residence there in which he would live out the end of his life. 77. Between 1960 and 1965 Bashevis wrote nine short stories involving an autobiographical narrator, but only three were translated into English during this time. Others would only be translated in the late 1960s or 1970s; some were never translated. See Shapira, “The AuthorNarrator in Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger’s Short Fiction,” 87–8. 78. Bashevis, “Di forlezung,” Forverts, December 10, 1965, 2–3; December 11, 1965, 2, 7; December 17, 1965, 2–3. The English translation appeared as “The Lecture,” Playboy, December 1967, 184–5 and 294–300; the translation was left uncredited but archival material in Bashevis’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center reveal that the translation was completed by Mirra Ginsburg with the author’s edits. The story was reprinted in The Seance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 65–83 and Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer, 596–601. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the Library of America edition. Significant differences from the Yiddish version will be noted throughout.

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79. Bashevis would likely have been on his way to give a lecture at the prestigious Montreal Jewish Public Library. For background on this institution and the Yiddish circles of Montreal see Rebecca Margolis, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905–1945 (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2011). 80. As noted earlier, Bashevis’s sexist instrumentalization of women was an essential lever in his writing. For Bashevis, the sexual dysfunction of a woman is symbolic of a larger cultural decrepitude, which can or must be resisted by the sexually prolific male writer. 81. The conception of Yiddish as a “pseudo-territory” is from Borekh Rivkin, a Yiddish critic during the interwar period. See Boris Rivkin, Grunt-tendentsn fun der yidisher literatur in Amerike (New York: Ikuf Farlag, 1948); an essay of his on this topic was translated by William Gertz Runyan in David Damrosch, ed., World Literature in Theory (Malden: Wiley and Blackwell, 2014), 71–84. 82. Bashevis, “Di tsukunft fun yidish un yidisher literatur,” Forverts, April 9, 1967; translated by Sol Liptzin as “The Future of Yiddish and Yiddish Literature,” Jewish Book Annual 25 (1967/68): 70–4. 83. This self-indictment is similar to Bashevis’s contemporary critiques of a number of modern Jewish writers. In his review articles in the Forverts, he would often claim that Jewish writers’ commitment to modernism leads to their being unmoored from Jewishness. For instance, in his critique of Bruno Schulz, Bashevis sees his becoming “unrooted” (oysgevortslt) from a Jewish atmosphere as the cause of his writing being limited to parody and caricature. Significantly, he views Schulz as having created “a literature on top of another literature” rather than something that would grow organically from Jewish “roots.” Bashevis, “A bukh fun a poylish-yidishn shrayber in english,” Forverts, January 12, 1963. I am grateful to Adam Zachary Newton for pointing me to this parallel. 84. This passage reflects Bashevis’s sense of having found a home in the US. When accepting the National Book Award in 1974 he proclaimed “I am happy to call myself a Jewish writer, a Yiddish writer, an American writer.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Acceptance Speech for the 1974 National Book Award in Fiction,” Yiddish 2, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 9. See also Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 163–6. 85. Translation mine. Ginsberg’s original translation was torn from the manuscript and replaced with Bashevis’s hand-written translation. 86. Bashevis, “Di kafeterye,” Di tsukunft, March–April 1968, 121–9. A translation appeared as “The Cafeteria,” in The New Yorker, December 28, 1968, 27–33. The story was translated by the author and Dorothea Straus, the wife of Bashevis’s publisher Richard Straus. The majority of the differences between the Yiddish and English versions appear to be edits for length and concision, likely the work of Rachel Mackenzie, Bashevis’s editor at The New Yorker. Bashevis had only recently begun publishing stories in The New Yorker, beginning with “The Slaughterer” in November, 1967. “The Cafeteria” was reprinted in A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 77–96 and in Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions (New York: Library of America, 2004), 68–84. The Yiddish version was reprinted in Mayses fun hintern oyvn (Tel Aviv: Farlag  Y.  L.  Perets, 1970), 43–71. Page numbers in parentheses refer to these last two editions. 87. The meaning of the ending is clearer in the Yiddish: “Zi volt gekont krign a gresere metsiye tsvishn di lebedike . . .” (71). This can be literally translated as, “she could have gotten a better catch among the living . . .” The key term here is metsiye, which is a Hebraic word meaning both a bargain in trade as well as an object of affection or erotic attraction,

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especially within the economy of Jewish marriage. Changing “tsvishn di lebedike” (among the living) to “in this world” imbues the ending with a suggestive mystical quality (this world as opposed to the next world). The original ending, published in 1968 in Di tsukunft, does not include this last line and has: “far vos hot Ester opgeklibn grod dem dozikn mes?” (129)—“why did Esther choose that particular corpse?” (84) This could be interpreted as saying that she could have chosen the narrator, who is also to be counted among the living-dead. 88. See S. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 205–7; Jan Schwarz, “ ‘Death Is the Only Messiah’: Three Supernatural Stories by Yitskhok Bashevis,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, 111–14. 89. The Yiddish includes a few more sentences that continue the passage’s reference to various valuable and flammable objects, including the paper upon which honorary doctorates, lectures, letters, and checks are printed. All of these dangers press upon the writer’s mind, “vos iz avade oykh papir,” which is also likely made of paper (Y67). 90. Leslie Fiedler, “Isaac Bashevis Singer or the Americanness of the American Jewish Writer,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (1981): 125. 91. See for instance Bashevis’s thinly veiled attack on his critics in his “Why I Write for Children,” in Nobel Lecture, 13–14. 92. Farell Lee, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, 3. 93. Irving Howe, Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2010), 96.

Chapter 4 1. Benjamin Schreier, “The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence,” American Literature 91, no. 1 (March 2019): 121–50. 2. Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America,” The New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/10/27/jewish-writer-america/. 3. Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America–II,” The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/11/10/jewish-writer-america-ii/. 4. All quotes from letters of congratulations are from the Saul Bellow papers, Special Collections University of Chicago. 5. Sister Liam O’Sullivan was a graduate student in addition to being a nun. (At the time, nuns took on the name of the saint to which they dedicated their service, regardless of the gender of the saint, hence the name Liam.) She wrote her dissertation on Bellow’s fiction, entitled, “Saul Bellow’s ‘Man Thinking’ ” (PhD diss., St. John’s University, 1978). It concludes with a sentiment similar to the one that closes her letter of congratulations: “For the Bellow Man Thinking thought is finally a serious question for wisdom; a spiritual adventure whereby he explores the unmapped areas of the self—the immortal soul—its relation to God and the whole of Creation” (301). 6. Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Penguin, 2003), 5. 7. Though Sister O’Sullivan’s prayers were indeed answered by the Nobel Prize committee her own letter remained, at least according to Bellow’s archive, unanswered. Several years earlier she had exchanged several letters with Bellow and even interviewed him on a trip to Chicago in preparation for the writing of her dissertation.

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8. Michael LeMahieu, “Bellow’s Private Language,” in Wittgenstein and Modernism, eds. Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 248. 9. Saul Bellow, “The Thinking Man’s Waste Land,” Saturday Review, April 3, 1965, 20. Reprinted in Saul Bellow, There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Tayler (New York: Viking, 2015), 204. 10. Saul Bellow, “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs,” Modern Occasions 1, no. 2 (1971): 162. 11. Saul Bellow, “A World Too Much With Us,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 9. Reprinted in Bellow, There is Simply Too Much to Think About, 279. 12. For further background on this incident see Andrew Gordon, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, eds. Gloria  L.  Cronin and Lee Trapenier (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 153–66; and Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 (New York: Knopf, 2018), 46–50. 13. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin, 1995), 252. 14. Many have suggested that Bellow is one of the few able to write “the great American novel.” Salman Rushdie, himself a star of world literature, described The Adventures of Augie March (1953) thusly: “If there’s a candidate for the Great American Novel, I think this is it.” As quoted in Nicolette Jones, “The Order of Merit,” The Sunday Times, March 13, 1994. Martin Amis stated that Augie March “is the Great American Novel. Search no further.” In “A Chicago of a Novel,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, 114. See also Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 169–74. 15. For background on Bellow’s interest in Spain see Andrew M. Gordon, “Saul Bellow’s Spain,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 36, no. 1 (2017): 61–70. 16. Bellow would often complain that readers and critics misunderstood the humor of his books—that parodies of the global periphery were all part of the comedic side of his novels and should not be taken too seriously. This was particularly true of the reception for Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt’s Gift. For instance, Bellow opined that reviewers of Humboldt’s Gift “didn’t seem aware that it was a funny book.” Interview on Channel 13, New York, March 22, 1977, as quoted in Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), 241. For an alternate view of the role of comedy in Humboldt’s Gift see Sarah Blacher Cohen, “Comedy and Guilt in Humboldt’s Gift,” Modern Fiction Studies 25 (Spring 1979): 47–57. Bellow responded to such comments by avoiding any substantive confrontation with the serious critiques of his novels, retreating behind the vagaries of humor rather than defend the darker aspects of his books. Needless to say, I take this humor very seriously as a foundational component of Bellow’s literary universe. 17. Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 26. 18. While Bellow, famously, had not visited Africa when he wrote Henderson the Rain King, he did indeed make an excursion to Africa in search of beryllium prior to writing Humboldt’s Gift. See Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 120–6. 19. Mariano Siskind, “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature,” Comparative Literature 62, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 343. 20. The often negative or instrumental role women play in Bellow’s fiction is a topic that has been addressed but deserves more attention. See Maggie McKinley, Masculinity

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and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–75 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 91–114. 21. For more on Bellow’s consideration (and erasure) of blackness, see Carol R. Smith, “The Jewish Atlantic—The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, 101–27. 22. Ibid., 123. 23. Saul Bellow, “Sealed Treasure,” The Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1960. Reprinted in Bellow, There is Simply Too Much to Think About, 109. 24. Saul Bellow, “Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology,” in Technology and the Frontiers of Knowledge: The Frank Nelson Doubleday Lectures (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 9. Reprinted in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, 258. 25. Bellow, “A World Too Much With Us,” 9. 26. For more on the question of passivity in Bellow’s work see Darryl Hattenhauer, “Tommy Wilhelm as Passive–Aggressive in Seize the Day,” Midwest Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1995): 265–74 and Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow: Against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 27. LeMahieu, “Bellow’s Private Language,” 237–47. 28. Though not nearly as popular as Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner drew the interest of Andrei Bely, Wassily Kandinsky, and Franz Kafka, and gained new adherents, including Bellow, following the publication of new translations of his works into English in the 1960s. See Gary Lachman, Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work (New York: Penguin, 2007). Bellow’s interest in Steiner was genuine but also tempered by a healthy amount of skepticism. The novel’s main character, Charlie Citrine, records his hesitations in the midst of his study and practice of Steiner’s philosophy (265–6). Still, Bellow attended anthroposophy meetings and read extensively the works of Steiner and his followers. He exchanged letters with prominent Steinerian Owen Barfield (though it was a troubled exchange where Barfield criticized aspects of Bellow’s novel that showed a mixed understanding of anthroposophy); see Saul Bellow: Letters 368–9, 399–401 and Barfield’s letters among Saul Bellow’s papers. Bellow also wrote the foreword to a collection of Steiner’s lectures published in 1983 (The Boundaries of Natural Science). For further background see James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 437 and Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 238–50. 29. Gloria  L.  Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 164–5. Initial reactions to Humboldt’s Gift saw the novel as a fictional soapbox for Bellow’s preaching on Steiner’s teachings. See Herbert J. Smith, “Humboldt’s Gift and Rudolf Steiner,” The Centennial Review 22, no. 4 (1978): 478–89. 30. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Penguin, 2008), 402. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. Saul Bellow, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” in The Arts and the Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 30. Reprinted in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, 239. 33. LeMahieu, “Bellow’s Private Language,” 247. 34. Saul Bellow, “Cloister Culture,” The New York Times, July 10, 1966, 3. Reprinted in Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, 211. 35. For a concise description of Bellow’s reading of Wyndham Lewis see Alden Whitman, “For Bellow, Novel is a Mirror of Society,” The New York Times, November 25, 1975, 44; see

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also Bellow, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” 232–3. Lewis most clearly articulated these ideas in Men Without Art (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). Bellow likely identified with Lewis because of their shared tendency to view themselves as victims. See Andrea F. Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 120–1. 36. Joseph Epstein, “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1976, 92. Reprinted in Conversations with Saul Bellow, 135. 37. Bellow’s ambivalent stance toward the public status of his writing in opposition to his personal aesthetic concerns reflects what Stephen Schryer has called “the fantasies of the new class.” Bellow abandons most forms of practical and direct political action while retaining the fantasy of the universal power of the literary act. The ideal novel will not conform to a social need but rather endeavor to create its own audience. Schryer explains that this postwar stance orients Bellow’s writing toward a newly educated and growing middle class—“at once a response to the intellectual elite’s newfound prominence in U.S. society and a reflection of that elite’s ongoing powerlessness.” Stephen Schryer, Fantasy of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14. Schryer sees Sammler’s Planet as a prime instance of the genealogy of this new class fantasy, explaining what Bellow envisioned as the postwar intellectual’s cultural impact and public vocation. 38. Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (New York: Penguin, 1974), 83–4. 39. Ibid., 118. 40. Ibid., 85. 41. Mark Schechner, “Saul Bellow and Ghetto Cosmopolitanism,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4, no. 2 (1978): 35. 42. Atlas, Bellow: A Biography, 336–7. 43. Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to the Goldbergs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 156–73. 44. Saul Bellow, “The Old System,” in Collected Stories (New York: Viking, 2001), 116. 45. It is important to note the misogyny of this story, despite its elegant evocation of the complexities of memory. The figure of Tina is portrayed as bitter, spiteful (particularly about money), overweight, and oversexualized, not to mention the other women mentioned briefly and derogatorily throughout the story. 46. For an extended reading of the division between the “new” and “old” system in this short story see Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life in Saul Bellow’s ‘The Old System,’ ” The Saul Bellow Journal 19, no. 1 (2003): 23–9. 47. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 303. 48. Notebooks in Bellow’s archives with drafts from as early as 1966 (just months after Schwartz’s death) are labeled “D. S. Novel” and describe the moment, on a flight between New York and Chicago, when a fictional Bellow reads of the writer’s passing in the newspaper. The autobiographical character is stirred by the haunting photograph of the beaten-down poet that accompanied his New York Times obituary. Bellow is likely referring to this obituary: “Delmore Schwartz Dies at 52; Poet Won 1959 Bollingen Prize,” The New York Times, July 14, 1966, 35. 49. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 159. 50. Delmore Schwartz, “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record (February 1944): 14.

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Schwartz’s comments echoed those of many others, including Bellow’s own childhood friend Isaac Rosenfeld, “The Situation of the Jewish Writer,” in Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), 121–3. 51. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 126. 52. Ibid., 10. 53. David Kerner, “The Incomplete Dialectic of Humboldt’s Gift,” Dalhousie Review 62, no. 1 (1982): 14–35; reprinted in Saul Bellow, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 161–77. See also this contemporary review of Humboldt’s Gift: Louis Simpson, “The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz,” The New York Times,December 7, 1975, 38, 40–3, 48, 52, 56. 54. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 123. 55. For more on Bellow’s aversion of history see Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Humboldt’s Gift and Jewish American Self-Fashioning ‘After Auschwitz,’ ” in Witness the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 162–82. 56. Saul Bellow, “Lecture to American Friends of Hebrew University Upon Receiving the S. Y. Agnon Medal for Literary Achievement,” n.d., typescript, Saul Bellow Papers, Special Collections of the University of Chicago. The question of moving beyond the problem of alienation occupied many of the members of the Partisan Review group, leading to a symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May 1952): “for better or for worse, most writers no longer accept alienation as the artist’s fate in America; on the contrary, they want very much to be part of American life.” See also Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class, 2011), 1–2. 57. See for instance the critic Ted Solotoroff ’s claim that that Bellow’s rebellious spirit and refusal to follow literary codes marked him as part a distinct group of Jewish “outsider” writers. Theodore Solotoroff, “A Vocal Group: The Jewish Part in American Letters,” The Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 1959, 652. 58. Saul Bellow, “Jewish Writers are Somehow Different,” The National Jewish Monthly, March 1971, 50. 59. Saul Bellow, “The Swamp of Prosperity: On Philip Roth,” Commentary, July 1959, 79. Reprinted in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, 72. The critic Leslie Fiedler earned Bellow’s ire by theorizing the marketability of Jewish American literature. His comment on “the bandwagon which travels our streets, its calliope playing Hatikvah” nearly ended their friendship. Leslie Fiedler, “On the Road or the Adventures of Karl Shapiro,” Poetry 96, no. 3 (June, 1960): 171–8. Bellow replied to the article with an acerbic letter to Fiedler: “What you think you see so clearly is not to be seen. It isn’t there. No big situations, no connivances, no Jewish scheme produced by Jewish minds. Nothing. What an incredible tsimis you make of nothing! You have your own realities, no one checks you and you go on and on. You had better think matters over again, Leslie, I’m dead serious.” It is ironic that Bellow responds to Fiedler’s claims in the very language of stereotype (tsimis) that he appears to reject. (Thank you to Avi Steinberg for this last insight.) Saul Bellow to Leslie Fiedler, Tivoli, June 24, 1960, Saul Bellow: Letters, 197. 60. L. H. Goldman, Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1983), vii–ix. 61. See for instance L. H. Goldman, “Thirty Years of Bellowmania: Saul Bellow’s Equivocality as Jewish American Writer,” in Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage, eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar (Warangal, India: Nachson Publishing, 1983), 98–107. Goldman

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concludes his essay by trying to identify the essential Jewishness of Bellow’s work despite the difficulty of the task: “The Jewish community, however, while it would prefer a more specifically Jewish content, recognizes that not only are the protagonists Jewish, but so are the perspectives, and the problems depicted and omitted are basic concerns that trouble the Jewish community” (107). 62. Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 92–107. 63. The following is only a selection of studies that try to read Bellow’s “Jewish poetics”: Arnold Jacob Wolf, “Saul Bellow, Jew,” Judaism 50, no. 2 (2001): 241–6; Ada Aharoni and Ann Weinstein, “Memorial: Judaism as Reflected in the Works of Saul Bellow,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 25 (2006): 26–39; Arnold Eisen, “Choose Life: American Jews and the Quest for Healing,” in Healing and the Jewish Imagination: Spiritual and Practical Perspectives on Judaism and Health, ed. William Cutter (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2008), 15–41; Richard Kreitner, “Antique Horizons: Jewish Romanticism and the Luftmensch in the Novels of Saul Bellow,” The Saul Bellow Journal 25 (2012): 1–25; Ben Siegel, “Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, 29–56; Alan L. Berger, “On Being a Jewish Writer: Bellow’s Post-War America and the American Jewish Diaspora” in Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, 81–95; Larissa Sutherland, “Jewish Poetics in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959),” Prooftexts 37, no. 1 (2018): 102–28. 64. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 65. Bellow turned to more explicitly Jewish topics in the late ’70s and ’80s, devoting book-length meditations on the State of Israel (To Jerusalem and Back, 1976) and the Holocaust (The Belarossa Connection, 1989). These two texts represent difficult negotiations of what Bellow viewed as belated response to catastrophe. But these pieces are rightly considered to be partially outside the norm in Bellow’s work. 66. Elizabeth Jane Bellamny, “Humboldt’s Gift and Jewish American Self-Fashioning ‘After Auschwitz,’ ” 163. 67. Conversations with Saul Bellow, 282. 68. Porter made this statement in an interview with Enrique Hank Lopez, “A Country and Some People I Love,” Harpers, September 1965, 68. 69. Martin Amis, “The American Eagle: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1995; Philip Roth, “Rereading Saul Bellow,” in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Vintage, 2000), 142–3. 70. Miriam Udel, Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 179–82. 71. On Bellow’s logocentrism see Michael G. Letman, “Toward a Language Irresistible: Saul Bellow and the Romance of Poetry,” Papers on Language and Literature 22, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 429–47. 72. Bellow, Herzog (New York: Penguin, 1992), 5. 73. My gratitude to Miriam Udel and Cecile Kuznitz for alerting me to the calque between trepverter and l’esprit de l’escalier. 74. Bellow’s employment of Yiddish here runs parallel to his involvement in the translation of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” into Yiddish by his friend Isaac Rosenfeld. Michaeal Boyden refers to the meeting of Yiddish and high modernism in these

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young Jewish American writers as evincing “creative possibilities of discontinuity,” in which the symbolic use of Yiddish signals its attempted disavowal. See Michael Boyden, “Postvernacular Prufrock: Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow’s Yiddish ‘Translation’ of T. S. Eliot’s Modernism,” Journal of World Literature 3, no. 2 (2018): 174–95. 75. For an exploration of the diversity of ways postwar Jewish American writers manipulated Jewish vernacularity in Russian and Yiddish see Gabriella Safran, “Authenticity, Complaint, and the Russianness of American Jewish Literature,” Prooftexts 36, no. 3 (2018): 255–85. 76. Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call it English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 98. 77. See in particular John Okada, No-No Boy (San Francisco: Combined Asian American Resources Project, 1976), 15–17. 78. Joseph Entin, “ ‘A Terribly Incomplete Thing’: No-No Boy and the Ugly Feelings of Noir,” MELUS 35, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 85–104. 79. Though Bellow was an obsessive editor of his writing, his compositional process was distinctly uneven. Bellow would spend an extensive amount of time working through the beginning of a novel, but once he perfected the opening he wrote through the middle parts of the novel fairly quickly before struggling or rushing to come to a conclusion. This resulted in novels that at times seemed to lose their way. For instance, even Bellow admitted that The Adventures of Augie March should have been two hundred pages shorter; see Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 440. On the difficulties Bellow faced when writing the opening of Humboldt’s Gift, see Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, 268–72. 80. “The highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Color Theory, ed. R. Matthei (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 76; Werke (Hamburg Ausgabe), 12.432. 81. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 225. 82. Saul Bellow Papers, Special Collections University of Chicago. 83. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I served on the academic advisory board of this film, currently titled The Adventures of Saul Bellow and directed by Asaf Galay. 84. Leslie Fiedler’s first conceptualizations of Jewish American literature came out of his readings of Bellow. See Leslie Fiedler, To The Gentiles (New York: Stern and Day, 1971), 56–64 and Benjamin Schreier, “The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence,” 129. 85. Ibid., 142. 86. Saul Bellow, introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories, ed. Saul Bellow (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), 14–15. 87. Ibid., 16. 88. Joseph Litvak might refer to this self-effacing yet self-serving strategy as a form of sycophancy, in which one betrays one’s “outlaw relatives” in order to win society’s approval, a betrayal which involves an “anxiously false comedy, a cringing imitation of comedy . . . turn[ing] comedy into seriousness.” Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 12. This characterization of postwar Hollywood culture in the face of the HUAC hearings does not entirely line up with Bellow’s approach to Jewishness, which I think should be judged more generously than betrayal. At the same time, there is something to the logic of Litvak’s argument that does

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echo Bellow’s tendency to do violence to that which is closest to his protagonist under the guise of comedy and in the name of a serious universal project. 89. Louis Menand, “Young Saul: The Subject of Bellow’s Fiction,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2015, 76. 90. Bellow did not entirely share Asch’s belief in the importance of celebrity, but it would be inaccurate to claim that he shied away from fame. Profiles of Bellow would often state that he was “an intensely private man who shuns the talk-show circuit and the trappings of celebrity” (Conversations with Saul Bellow, 171). While this may have been true in contrast with someone like Norman Mailer, it was not difficult to get Bellow on camera or entice him to talk about his work. 91. By ecumenical I mean both Bellow’s interest in the religious sensibilities of anthroposophy and his broad approach to religious experience. Bellow often emphasized his belief in the spiritual tenets of religious systems while despising their institutional and ideological orthodoxies, including and especially Christianity. Bellow would recall fondly his first contact with the New Testament while sick in a hospital in Montreal, a scene he recounted several times. See Herzog, 26–7 and 314. This episode was also recorded in Bellow’s letter to Stephen Mitchell, W. Brattelboro, June 22, 1991, Saul Bellow: Letters, 483–5.

Epilogue 1. Bellow’s family name was originally Belo in St. Petersburg and became Bellows on their move to Canada in 1913. See James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 6–9. 2. On aspects of the convergence of postvernacular Yiddish and popular American culture see Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 155–76. 3. This is not to say that women have not been recognized as central figures of world literature or as writers capable of speaking toward and beyond the nation. As previously noted, writers like Kadya Molodowsky and Cynthia Ozick explicitly adopt literary strategies that would emphasize the public horizon of their work. Contemporary editors and critics increasingly include women as part of their anthological projects, as a way to correct presumptions about female domesticity and present women as “instinctive and inveterate peripatetics” that “grapple with the most pressing questions of their day.” Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord, At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 5. That being said, the impulse toward recuperation or the plea for recognition doubles as a form of institutionalization. What I ask in this Epilogue is what it might mean to write toward the world without deference to patriarchal structures of meaning. 4. Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975 (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), 473. 5. Avraham Novershtern, “ ‘Who Would Have Believed that Bronze Statue Can Weep’: The Poetry of Anna Margolin,” in Anna Margolin: Lider (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), vi–ix. 6. Barbara Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2002): 502.

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7. Anna Margolin, Anna Margolin: Lider, 59; translation is from Anna Margolin, Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin, trans. Shirley Kumove (Albany: State University of New York, 2005), 111. 8. Margolin, Lider, 60; Drunk from the Bitter Truth, 113. 9. For a longer reading of this poem see Kathryn Hellerstein, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 296–8. 10. Margolin, Lider, 137; the translation is a modification of Drunk from the Bitter Truth, 275. 11. The Yiddish word dokh, akin though not exactly equivalent to the German doch, is a modal particle that can variously take on the function of an adverb, a conjunction, or an indication of mood as a way to mark shared knowledge between speaker and interlocutor. In its first appearance in the stanza Margolin uses it to comment on one’s capacity to love the earthly: “I love the earth, after all [dokh].” This dokh, as an afterthought, is meant to indicate that while such love should be obvious it still comes under some suspicion, thus necessitating some reemphasis. Later in the stanza it is used as a conjunction, “And yet, and yet—all my life was/a waiting” which effectively negates the first half of the stanza by suggesting that the speaker’s love of the earth is not as fulfilling as it should be. By placing divergent usages of the word in such close proximity, their functions collapse into one such that the nearly neutral dokh of the first line is imbued with the negative mood of its later appearance. 12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 13. Novershtern, “ ‘Who Would Have Believed that Bronze Statue Can Weep,’ ” l–liii. 14. Adrienne Rich first translated Margolin for Irving Howe, ed., A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969); Marcia Falk published her translations in Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Penguin Books, 1987); Ruth Whitman’s translations are gathered in her An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (New York: October House, 1966). 15. Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), xxx. 16. Gerhard Bach and Blaine  H.  Hall, eds., Conversations with Grace Paley (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 107. 17. Shaina Hammerman and Naomi Seidman, “Between Aunt and Niece: Grace Paley and the Jewish American ‘Swerve,’ ” Prooftexts 32, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 179. 18. Gloria  L.  Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 282. 19. Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, “An Interview with Poet and Fiction Writer Grace Paley,” Poets and Writers, March 17, 2008, https://www.pw.org/content/interview_ poet_and_fiction_writer_grace_paley?article_page=2. 20. Hammerman and Seidman, “Between Aunt and Niece: Grace Paley and the Jewish American ‘Swerve,’ ” 190. 21. Grace Paley, The Collected Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 3. Originally published in Accent: A Quarterly (Summer 1956): 158–66, and then in her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 7–22. 22. Grace Paley, A Grace Paley Reader, ed. Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 236–7.

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Endnotes 23. Conversations with Grace Paley, 206. 24. A Grace Paley Reader, 237. 25. Conversations with Grace Paley, 160. 26. Paley, The Collected Stories, xi. 27. A Grace Paley Reader, 57. 28. Ibid., 241.

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{ Index } Abramovitsh, S. Y.  37, 40, 102 Adamic, Louis  86 The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow)  111, 133, 144–45, 205n14 Agnon, S. Y.  149–50 Aleichem, Sholem  40–42, 64, 82, 102 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) 181n49 “Alone” (“Aleyn”) (Bashevis)  116–19 Althusser, Louis  12 ambassador, cultural  39, 60, 63–64, 71, 176n7 American cultural identity and otherness  69–70, 105, 182n55. See also ethnic studies, as discipline; multicultural pluralism The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Kaplan)  23 anthroposophy  136, 206n28, 211n91 Antin, Mary  70 Anzaldúa, Gloria  173n101 Apter, Emily  21 Arendt, Hannah  33 Asch, Sholem  36–66; on America  25; background of  4–5, 37; Charney on  60, 179n33, 182n59; Der man fun natseres/The Nazarene  51, 53, 63, 178n21; Der tilim-yid/ Salvation  4, 54–63, 183nn65–67, 184n69–70, 185n83; Dray shtet/Three Cities  44–47, 48, 52, 53, 179n32, 181n49; Glatstein on  80; God of Vengeance  38; on institutionalization of Yiddish literature  48–50, 104, 128; “In vos ikh gloyb”  50–51, 53; as Jewish cultural ambassador  39, 60, 63–64, 71, 176n7; Lieberman’s criticism of  93; literary career of  38–40, 176n5, 177n18, 199n44; name of  62, 151; newspaper serializations by  43–44; political viewpoint of  178n23, 179n27, 182n63; readership of  180n34, 180n37; Reb Shloyme nogid  56, 182n59, 182n63; A shtetl  38, 42–43; vernacularity of  64–66; What I Believe 50–51, 53, 64, 65; Woran ich glaube  50–51; on world literature  4, 22, 53–54, 67 assimilation 105. See also American cultural identity and otherness Auden, W. H.  13, 14, 72, 96–97 Auerbach, Erich  18–19 Badiou, Alain  14 Baker, Cynthia  27

Barthes, Roland  12 Bashevis Singer, Isaac  99–127; “Alone” (“Aleyn”)  116–18; background of  5–6, 100, 101, 202n76; “The Cafeteria”  124–26, 203n86; demonic realism of  105–7, 112, 198n36; Der feter fun Amerike 200n59; Der Sotn in Goray/ Satan in Goray  103–4, 109; Der zindiker meshiekh 197n29; Di familye Mushkat/The Family Moskat  108–9, 199n42, 199n45; ghost world literature of  4, 6, 101, 124–27; “Gimpel the Fool”  109–12; Glatstein on  115–16; Globus and  102–4; on individual writer  116–19; “The Lecture”  119–24, 202n78; literary career of  126–27, 201n72, 202n77; literary categorization of  28, 101–4, 194n4, 194n6; name of  151, 193n2; Nobel Prize award and lecture of  1, 99, 100, 126, 194n3; “Shamay Vayts”  101–2; translations and  113–15, 200n61, 201n65, 201n67; “Verter oder bilder”  102; women and  113–14, 127, 201n65, 201n67, 203n80; on world literature  4; on Yiddish language and literature  1–2, 99–101, 105, 128 Baudelaire, Charles  100 “Beautiful words of marble and gold” (Margolin) 155 Beecroft, Alexander  16 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane  143–44 Bellow, Greg  148 Bellow, Saul  128–50; The Adventures of Augie March  111, 133, 144–45, 205n14; Dangling Man  132–33, 136; dialectic of  132–35; fame and 211n90; Henderson The Rain King 133, 205n16; Herzog  131, 133, 136, 138, 145–47; Humboldt’s Gift  134, 136–37, 140–42, 147–48, 205n16; on Jewish American literature, as genre  28, 142; Jewish sentimentality of  138–44, 209n61, 209n65; literary career of  148–50; Mr. Sammler’s Planet  133; name of  151, 211n1; Nobel Prize award and recognition of  130–31, 143; “The Old System”  139–40; parochial transcendence in works by  4, 6, 130, 135–38, 211n91; as a part of new wave of fiction  109–10, 207n37; Seize the Day 138–39; vernacularity of  6, 22, 129–32, 144–48; women and  205n20; on world literature  4; writing process of  210n79 Bergelson, David  37, 63, 101

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238 Berman, Lila Corwin  175n115 Bhabha, Homi  20, 173n101 Bialik, H. N.  81, 82, 87 Blocker, Joel  116 Bloom, Harold  188n35 Bourdieu, Pierre  12 Bread Givers (Yezierska)  70 Brickhouse, Anna  26 The Brothers Ashkenazi/Di brider Ashkenazi (Singer)  80, 108, 198n39 “The Cafeteria” (Bashevis)  124–26, 203n86 Cahan, Abraham  29, 43, 63, 64, 178n19, 178n21 Call It Sleep (Roth)  147 Caplan, Marc  72, 186n7 Casanova, Pascale  15 Chabon, Michael  29 Charney, Shmuel: on Asch’s works  60, 179n33, 182n59; name of  164n15; on world literature  10, 12, 34–35, 64 Cheah, Pheng  16, 17 Cheyette, Bryan  33 Cournos, John  61 Damrosch, David  8, 15–16 Dangling Man (Bellow)  132–33, 136 deferral, as poetic theme  85–86 demonic realism  105–7, 112, 198n36 Derrida, Jacques  8, 10, 21–22, 34, 95 Diasporas of the Mind (Cheyette)  33 Dik, Isaac Meir  40, 177n17 Dimock, Wai Chee  17, 24–25, 170n80 Edwards, Brian T.  24 Eliot, T. S.  73 Elle (publication)  113 “Envy, or Yiddish in America” (Ozick)  67 epic novel genre  44–45. See also novel, as genre ethnic studies, as discipline  23, 26, 31. See also American cultural identity and otherness Falk, Marcia  157 The Family Moskat/Di familye Mushkat (Bashevis)  108–9, 199n42, 199n45 Fanon, Frantz  33 Fiedler, Leslie  70, 126, 199n44, 208n59 Foer, Jonathan Safran  29, 158 Ford, Henry  70–71 Forverts (publication)  42, 43, 44, 63, 105, 124, 203n83 Frank, Jacob  105 Der fraynd (publication)  43 Frost, Robert  75 Fuks, A. M.  101 Fun Lublin biz Nyu York (Molodowsky)  92

Index Ganguly, Debjani  16–17 gendered hierarchies and literary marginalization  13–14, 154–55, 157, 211n3. See also women ghetto, Glatstein on  82–86, 95, 97, 193n96 ghost world literature  4, 6, 101, 124–27. See also world literature Giles, Paul  24 “Gimpel the Fool” (Bashevis)  109–12 Glatstein, Jacob  67–98; “A gute nakht velt”  67, 83–85, 190n59; on Bashevis  115–16; on the “ghetto”  82–86, 95, 97; “Jews in World Literature”  80–81; literary career of  69–70; literary categorization of  29, 152, 153; “The March to the Goyim”  79–80; name of  151, 185n1; on other Yiddish writers  80; on the politics of homecoming  85–93; synthetic modernism of  74–79, 192n84; Ven Yash iz geforn  86–88, 90, 190nn64–65, 191n67, 191nn69–71; Ven Yash iz gekumen  88–90; on world literature  4, 5, 12, 13, 68–69, 79–81; on world-writing  67–68, 81–82, 93–98, 128; Yidishtaytshn  76–79, 82, 94–95 global and globalization, as term  19, 163n10, 167n54. See also world, as term and concept Globus (publication)  39, 60, 63–64, 102–4, 176n7, 196n20 God of Vengeance (Asch)  38 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang  10, 14, 23, 137, 147, 164n17, 196n20 “Goodbye and Good luck” (Paley)  159 The Good Earth (Buck)  53 “Good Night World” (“A gute nakht velt”) (Glatstein)  67, 83–84, 90, 186n2, 190n59 GQ (publication)  113 Greenberg, Eliezer  110 Gross, A. H.  108 Harshav, Barbara and Benjamin  76–77 Hart, Matthew  29, 73 Haynt (publication)  42, 44, 176n8 Hayot, Eric  8 Hebrew language and literature: modernism and  69, 76, 147; novels, as genre in  37; by Polish writers  104, 198n36; traditions of  42, 94, 172n94; translated works  9, 28, 62, 118, 149, 168n66, 172n96; as a world language 164n13. See also Jewish American literature; US literature; world literature Heidegger, Martin  7–8 Henderson The Rain King (Bellow)  133, 205n16 Herder, Johann Gottfried  51–52 Here I Am (Foer)  158 Herzog (Bellow)  131, 133, 136, 138, 145–47 Hirschbein, Peretz  42

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Index Hollinger, David  70 homecoming, politics of  85–93, 170n82 Howe, Irving  110, 111–12, 171n90, 188n35, 200n55 humanism  45, 47, 70, 71, 131, 180n44 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow)  134, 136–37, 140–42, 147–48, 205n16 Hungerford, Amy  143 “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Schwartz) 141 institutions: of Jewish American literature  149, 151–54, 160; as term  12; of world literature  12–20, 164n18, 165n24, 166n38; of Yiddish literature  40–42, 48–50, 104, 128 internationalism 187n30 The International Jew (Ford)  70–71 “In vos ikh gloyb” (Asch)  50–51, 53 In zikh (movement and journal)  63, 75–76, 79–80, 154, 189n38 Jewish, as term  26, 171n86 Jewish American literature  3–7; academic studies on  29–35; categorization of  26–29, 171n94; gendered hierarchies in  13–14, 154–55, 157; institution of  149, 151–54, 160; on shtetl-world binary  36–40, 41, 54; theoretical intersectionality of  7; vernacularity and  128–29. See also Hebrew language and literature; US literature; world literature; Yiddish literature Jewish American modernism  5, 69–74, 177n17. See also modernism “Jewish street”  40–42, 44–53, 63, 92, 177n16 “Jews in World Literature” (Glatstein)  80–81 Joyce, James  72, 190n57 Kaplan, Amy  23 klasiker  37, 102 Klepfisch, Irena  157 Knopf Publishing  108 Krauss, Nicole  29 Kreitman, Esther  101 Kronenberger, Louis  52 Kronfeld, Chana  69 Kultur-lige 41 l’avenir  95 Leader, Zachary  148 Lebensboym, Rosa. See Margolin, Anna “The Lecture” (Bashevis)  119–24, 202n78 LeMahieu, Michael  137 Leo, Jeffrey Di  24 Levi, Neil  72 Levin, Harry  17 Levy, Lital  31, 168n65

239 Lewisohn, Ludwig  61 Lieberman, Chaim  93 Linketski, Yitzkhok Yoel  40 listening, politics of  151–61 Di literarishe bleter (publication)  39, 60, 63–64, 176n7 Litvak, Joseph  210n88 Lott, Eric  70 Lowe, Lisa  26 Mack, Maynard  9 Mademoiselle (publication)  113, 116 Mailer, Norman  130, 211n90 Malamud, Bernard  111, 126 “The March to the Goyim” (Glatstein)  79–80 marginalization, literary: Bashevis on  106–7; gender and  13–14; Glatstein on  13, 69, 75, 96–97; of Yiddish writers  63–64 Margolin, Anna  6–7, 14, 154–58, 160 Mayzel, Nachman  47 Melas, Natalie  34 Menand, Louis  150 Mencken, H. L.  23 Mendele Moykher Sforim. See Abramovitsh, S. Y. Micheals, Walter Benn  70 Minton, Melville  53 Miron, Dan  31 modernism  5, 69–79, 147, 168n65, 177n17, 187n28, 192n84, 200n55 The Modern Jewish Canon (Wisse)  30 Molodowsky, Kadya  14, 90–93, 192n76, 211n3 monolingualism  19–20, 51–52. See also translation, practice and product of; world literature Moretti, Franco  15, 103, 165n32 Der Morgn-zhurnal (publication)  92 Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow)  133 Mufti, Aamir  10, 13, 18, 20, 21, 164n17 multicultural pluralism  19–20. See also American cultural identity and otherness The Native’s Return (Adamic)  86 The Nazarene/Der man fun natseres (Asch)  51, 53, 63, 178n21 newspaper serialization  43–44. See also names of specific publications Newton, Adam Zachary  33 Nomberg, Hersh David  42 No-No Boy (Okada)  147 Norich, Anita  84, 168n65 North, Michael  73 The Norton Anthology of World Masterpiece 9 novel, as genre  16–17, 22, 43–45, 164n43, 178n25 Novershtern, Avraham  173n101, 198n41, 201n73

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Index

240 Okada, John  147 olam/oylem  9, 11–12, 34, 164n11, 164n21 “The Old System” (Bellow)  139–40 Onkl Mozes (Asch)  44 Opatoshu, Joseph  101 Orientalism  10, 13, 133, 135, 164n18 O’Sullivan, Liam  130–31, 204n5, 204n7 Ozick, Cynthia  14, 67, 96, 149, 211n3 Paley, Grace  6–7, 14, 158–61 Park, Josephine Nock-Hee  97 “parochial world literature”  130 Partisan Review (publication)  110, 111, 208n56 Paul Zsolnay Verlag (publisher)  52 PEN International  41. See also Yiddish PEN club Peretz, I. L.  37, 102, 195n16 Perle, Yoshue  101 philology 30–31 picaro 175n117 Pinski, David  42 planetarity  19, 20, 33, 167n54 Playboy (publication)  124 poetry  14, 73, 76–79, 96, 154–58, 188n35 Poland, Jewish literature of  104, 197n26, 198n36 Porter, Katherine Anne  144 Pound, Ezra  73 The Promised Land (Antin)  70 Proust, Marcel  72 pulp novels  41, 80, 117–18. See also novel, as genre Putnam Publishing House  53 Reb Shloyme nogid (Asch)  56, 182n59, 182n63 Reisen, Avrom  42 Remarque, Erich Maria  181n49 Rich, Adrienne  157 Roskies, David  105, 115 Roth, Henry  147 Roth, Philip  96, 126, 142, 149, 152, 158 Rozenberg, Shloyme  53 Rushdie, Salman  205n14 Sackler, Harry  80 Saldivar, Jose David  26 Salvation/Der tilim-yid (Asch)  4, 54–63, 183nn65–67, 184n69–70, 185n83 Satan in Goray/Der Sotn in Goray (Bashevis)  103–4, 109 Schachter, Allison  31 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  51 Schreier, Benjamin  26, 129, 200n58 Schwartz, Delmore  96, 111, 141, 192n86 Seidman, Naomi  158, 175n118 Seize the Day (Bellow)  138–39 “Shamay Vayts” (Bashevis)  101–2

Shmeruk, Chone  105 Shomer (Nahum-Meir Shaykevitsh)  40 shtetl: as literary setting  60–61, 182n59; –world trajectory  36–39, 41, 54 A shtetl (Asch)  38, 42–43 shund-literatur  41, 80, 117–18 sifrut olam 9. See also world literature Singer, I. J.: Bashevis on  100, 194n6; criticism of  199n46; death of  108; lectures by  80, 189n54; literary career and works by  63, 80, 101, 108, 198n39 Singer, Isaac Bashevis. See Bashevis Singer, Isaac Siskind, Mariano  17 Solotoroff, Theodore  109, 208n57 Spinoza, Baruch  100 Spivak, Gayatri  19, 20, 34 Stein, Gertrude  73 Steiner, George  26–27 Steiner, Rudolf  136, 206n28 Strindberg, August  100 Svive (publication)  90, 92–93, 116 synthetic modernism in Yiddish  74–79, 192n84. See also modernism Talush 80 Tanoukhi, Nirvana  167n54 taytsh  28, 76–77, 79, 82, 94. See also Yiddish language telepoeisis 34 Three Cities/Dray shtet (Asch)  44–47, 48, 52, 53, 179n32, 181n49 trans-Americanity  26, 33 translation, practice and product of  9, 21–22, 113–16, 123, 168n65. See also monolingualism trash literature, as genre  41, 80, 117–18 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (Howe and Greenberg)  110, 112 trepverter  146, 147 Trilling, Lionel  23 Di tsukunft (publication)  51 Udel, Miriam  175n118 undecidable paradigm  21–22 universality of world literature  9–11, 176n125. See also world literature US literature  23–26, 52–53, 170nn80–81. See also American cultural identity and otherness; Jewish American literature; names of specific authors and titles; world literature Vaynper, Zishe  80 Ven Yash iz geforn (Glatstein)  86–88, 90, 190nn64–65, 191n67, 191nn69–71 Ven Yash iz gekumen (Glatstein)  88–90

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Index

241

“vernacular cosmopolitanism”  20 vernacularity  2–3, 6–7, 128; of Asch  64–66; of Bellow  6, 22, 129–32, 144–48; Bhabha on  173n101; of Glatstein  69, 81; of Paley 160–61 “Verter oder bilder” (Bashevis)  102

of  9–11, 176n125; Yiddish literature and critique of  79–82. See also Hebrew language and literature; Jewish American literature; US literature; Yiddish literature World Republic of Letters (Casanova)  15 Wouk, Herman  109

Walkowitz, Rebecca  54 Wallerstein, Immanuel  14 Warren, Robert Penn  130 Warshawski, Oyzer  101 Weiman-Kelman, Zohar  157 Weissenberg, I. M.  101 Welt  8, 11 Weltliteratur  10, 164n17 Werfel, Franz  44–45, 52 What I Believe (Asch)  50–51, 53, 64, 65 When Yash Set Out (Glatstein)  86–88, 90 Whitman, Ruth  157 Williams, William Carlos  73, 75 Wirth-Nesher, Hanna  111 Wisse, Ruth  30, 143, 189n51 Wissenschaft des Judentums 29–30 women: Bashevis and  113–14, 127, 201n65, 201n67, 203n80; Bellow and  205n20; literary marginalization of  13–14, 154–55, 157, 211n3 Woran ich glaube (Asch)  50–51 world, as term and concept  7–8, 163n5, 163n10 “worlding”  7–8, 16, 167n50 world literature: Asch on  4, 53–54, 67; Bashevis on  4; Bellow on  4; ghost world literature  4, 6, 101, 124–27; Glatstein on  4, 5, 12, 13, 67–68; institution of  12–20, 164n18, 165n24, 166n38; local context and  164n22; multidirectionality of  8–9, 163n7, 166n36, 168n66; oylem and translational limits of  11–12; universality

Years of Grace (Barnes)  53 Yiddish language: Bashevis on  99, 105, 113–15; Bellow’s use of  147, 209n74; origins of  11, 28, 172n96; political formations and  177nn11–12; taytsh  28, 76–77, 79, 82, 94; vernacularity of 3. See also Jewish American literature Yiddish literature: Bashevis on  1–2, 99–101; critique of world literature and  79–82, 90–91; institutionalization of  40–42, 48–50, 104, 128; Novershtern on  173n101; synthetic modernism and  74–79, 192n84; tradition of novels in  43–44, 178n25. See also Jewish American literature; US literature; world literature Yiddish PEN club  38, 48–50, 102, 104, 176n8. See also PEN International Der Yidisher kemfer (publication)  109–10 Yidish literatn un zhurnalistnfareyn (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists)  102 Yidishtaytshn (Glatstein)  76–79, 82, 94–95 Yildiz, Yasemin  22, 51 YIVO Institute  41, 60, 184n75 Di yunge  63, 75, 154 zaddik, as literary character  55–61, 110 Zeitlin, Arn  37, 39, 102, 103 Der zindiker meshiekh (Bashevis)  197n29 Zunz, Leopold  30 Zweig, Stefan  49, 52, 180n44