David Herman
Abraham Cahan and The Great Swarming
David Herman - Abraham Cahan and The Great Swarming
- Hello, my name is David Herman and I’m going to be talking tonight about Abraham Cahan, the great Jewish American writer, one of the first great Jewish American writers, and to try and put him in context to begin with because his sort of period of the late 19th century, early 20th century is much less well known for most readers than the post-war period, the great golden age of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and so on. Let me start with a question. When does Jewish American writing begin? Now the obvious answer, of course, is 1654. Obvious, but unfortunately wrong. Why obvious? Because that’s when the first Jews arrived in America. These Sephardic Jews, descended from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, were joined by a handful of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Germany later on. So, the first wave of immigration is largely Spanish and Portuguese, and that happens between 1654 and 1830. And then we get the second wave of immigration from 1830 to 1880, which is largely German. But for the rest of this talk, we’re going to be really focusing on the third wave of immigration, which was basically from Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, and that included Abraham Cahan. So, why is it wrong to say 1654? Well, in the “Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1,” which runs from 1590 to 1820, there are only two references to Jews. Jews did not matter in American history until the 19th century.
And specifically, Jewish literature didn’t matter till the very end of the 19th century. Leslie Fiedler, the great Jewish American critic, in his book “Waiting for the End,” published in 1964, wrote, “In the beginning, the Jewish author and the Jewish character, whether invented by Gentile or Jew, played only a slight and peripheral role in the literature of the U.S., and in the deep mind of the American people, which that literature at once reflects and makes. This is, in part, the result of the simple sociological fact that Jews were, in the earliest years of our nation, few and insignificant. There are no Jews in ‘Leaves of Grass,’” he goes on. “No more are there Jews included in that otherwise universally representative crew, the Manx, African, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polynesian, and Middle Eastern human flotsam of the world, who under a mad Yankee skipper sail a ship called after a defunct Indian tribe in the pages of Melville’s ‘Moby Dick.’ Nor does Huck Finn meet a single Jew, either ashore or afloat on the great river whose course he follows down the centre of civilised America. Nowhere in this early literature do we find a sense of Jewish ethnicity.” And crucially, there aren’t many Jews in America during this early part of the 19th century. In 1825, there are only 35,000 Jews in America. By 1848, there were 50,000. In 1861, there were 150,000. So the numbers were increasing, but there was still no significant Jewish literature in America. So, when does Jewish American literature as literature begin? The answer, let me suggest, is 1867. Why 1867?
Because in that year, Emma Lazarus, the great Jewish American poet, wrote her first poem with a Jewish theme in the Jewish synagogue at Newport. And two things happen in the next 20 to 30 years. Firstly, we get the first great Jewish American writers, starting with Emma Lazarus. And secondly, perhaps even more important, we get the third wave of immigration from 1880 to 1924 from East Europe and Russia. In 1880, there are 240,000 Jews in America. By 1924, when anti-immigration legislation really started to hit the number of Jews coming into America, there were 4.2 million Jews in America, 3% of the total population. And this is the third East European wave. And from here on, the next generation through to Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska in the 1920s, and Henry Roth and Mike Gold in the 1930s, were debating one enormously important question, important for the writers and important for their readers. Is New York the promised land or is it an accursed? “Woe is me, bitter is me, for what is my life? Why didn’t the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?” says Shenah Pessah in a story called “Hunger” by Anzia Yezierska in 1920. Then there’s this exchange from Henry Roth’s masterpiece, “Call it Sleep.” “They had been standing in this strange and silent manner for several minutes when the woman, as if driven by the strain into action, tried to smile and touching her husband’s arm, said timidly, ‘And this is the golden lamb?’ she spoke in Yiddish. The man grunted, but made no answer. She took a breath as if taking courage and tremulously, ‘I’m sorry, Albert. I was so stupid.’ She paused, waiting for some flicker of unbending, some word which never came, ‘But you look so lean, Albert, so haggard, and your moustache, you’ve shaved.’ His brusque glance stabbed and withdrew. ‘Even so you must have suffered in this land,’ she says.”
After Emma Lazarus, the major great Jewish American writers for the next 50 years are immigrants from Poland and the Russian Pale. And for the first 50 years, Jewish American literature is an immigrant literature by immigrants, about immigrants, and largely for immigrants. Henry James, the ultimate Gentile writer and occasional antisemite, wrote in a book called “The American Scene” in 1907 of a “great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken infinitely as soon as we had crossed to the East Side and long before we had got to Rutgers Street. There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scenes here bristled at every step with the signs and sounds imitigable, unmistakable, of a jury that had burst all bounds.” Henry James’s guide to the Lower East Side took him to the literary cafes of the area, which James called “torture rooms of the living idiom.” For there he heard the accent of the future, an ethnically altered language. Irving Howe, another of the great Jewish American critics comparable with Leslie Fiedler, wrote in his famous book “World of Our Fathers” in the 1970s, “Out of the immigrant milieu, there came pouring a torrent of memoir, fiction, and autobiography ranging from the cheap hokum of ethnic self-indulgence to serious works of art. Written in English, but often with Yiddish tonalities unconsciously preserved or deliberately imported, these writings mirrored the yearnings of nostalgia, the tyrannies of memory, the powerful measures of loss. Most of this writing turned out to be of small literary value. The very urgencies behind its composition hardening into narrowness of scene, parochial return, and mere defence. A handful of novels, stories, and poems may live.”
Leslie Fiedler agreed. “Up to the end of the last century,” by which he means the 19th century, “and in a certain sense, that century did not end for us until the conclusion of World War I, Jewish American literature remains not only theoretical but parochial.” There were a number of crucial questions which preoccupied the early Jewish American writers in the late 19th century and very early 20th century. Firstly, the question of language. Should they write in Yiddish or in English? Or should they find a new kind of English? A new kind of American English infused with Yiddish words, inflexions, and syntax. And for many of the Yiddish writers and the East European immigrant writers, the question of language was very complicated. On the one hand, there was Yiddish, mamaloshen, the language of the family, of the market, and of women. Secondly, there was Hebrew, the language of religion and law. And thirdly, there was English, the languages of Gentile neighbours and their host society. And the question of Yiddish itself was complicated because of course they spoke and read Yiddish and carried with them the Yiddish culture of Central East Europe. And the great early Yiddish modern writers like Mendele Sforim, Shalem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz were key figures who came to America as immigrants. Sholem Aleichem came to America in 1914, Jacob Glatstein came to New York, and Sholem Asch to America and was naturalised in 1920. But then comes a changing of the guard. Peretz dies in 1915, Shalem Aleichem dies in 1916, and Sforim dies in 1917.
So one of the things that made Jewish American literature possible was firstly the influence of Yiddish, its rhythms and its language, secondly, the death and eclipse of the great generation of Yiddish writers, and thirdly, the passing of Yiddish itself, brilliantly chronicled in a short story by Cynthia Ozick. The immigrant experience and the old world are seen anew. These writers had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world. They were born in Russia and East Europe. For example, Abraham Cahan was born near Vilna in 1860, Sholem Asch was born in Kutno in Poland in 1880, Joseph Opatoshu was born in Poland in 1886, and Jacob Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896. They write in Yiddish and for the Yiddish press and for cultural institutions established by the new immigrants. The first Yiddish newspapers are published in America in the 1870s. Yiddish theatre begins in America in 1882. Their stories are set in immigrant neighbourhoods and in the world of trade unions and the garment industry. It’s a world of poverty. It’s the world of the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and The Bronx, of whores, gangsters, tenements, and bars, and of course of the family. And then there is the theme of Americanization, especially for example, in the writings of Mary Antin, “The Promised Land” published in 1912. But then there’s also a sort of dialectic between the world of Americanization and the new country and the old country, a world of pogroms, dybbuks, rabbis, brothels, and prostitutes, religion. And there are the absences, the absence of ideas and intellectual culture, literariness and modernism. They’re writing at the time of Freud and the cultural revolution of 1900 to 1920, but their writing is untouched by it.
They’re writing at the heyday of modernism, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Eliot, Picasso, but their writing is untouched by it. They are marginal, outside the mainstream. They’re painfully aware of how marginal they are. In the story by Ozick that I referred to, “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” first published in 1969, Edelshtein, one of the key characters, says, “So you’re not interested?” Hannah, who is the young translator who Edelshtein hopes will translate his untranslated work from Yiddish, she says, “Only in the mainstream, not in your little puddles.” This story incidentally, if you haven’t read it, is largely based on the incredible popularity and fame and success of Bashevis Singer and the contrast between his career and success and those Yiddish writers who were not able to match his success and fame. So the themes of this early Jewish American writing are class mobility and assimilation, generational tensions between parents and children, arranged marriages versus romantic love, encounters with ethnic hatred, hypocrisy, and the world of the working class, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, tradition, a traditional world of older religious beliefs and traditional ethical standards, young protagonists, children and young people, and of course the symbols of America. Flag, song, the Statue of Liberty. It is a pre-modern old world versus a new world.
And this is the sort of setting of Abraham Cahan. Born in 1860, he died in 1951. And if we compare his life and career with Emma Lazarus, probably the previous great Jewish American writer, and he was probably the second great Jewish American writer, he wrote in prose, not verse. He was 11 years younger. He wrote some fiction and nearly all his journalism in Yiddish, and he was born in East Europe in a small Lithuanian village near Vilna. He was born in this village on July the 7th, 1860. His grandfather was a rabbi, his father, a teacher. He attended the Vilna Teacher’s Institute and he abandoned traditional religion and converted to socialism. And he comes to America on June the 6th, 1881, at the age of almost 21. And he works in a New York sweatshop in a cigar factory and then a tin factory, and he joins the labour movement, which is a crucial part of his formation. He wrote for two Yiddish socialist weeklies, and he becomes over the next few years, a teacher, a labour organiser, an editor, a novelist, and a journalist, and his first story in English is published in 1895. And then his first novel appears in 1896, “Yekl: A Tale of the Ghetto,” the ghetto being a crucial word for this whole generation. In 1897, he began working for “The Jewish Daily Forward,” and from 1903 to 1951 he edited “The Jewish Daily Forward.” In 1897, its circulation was less than 6,000.
By 1924, it was a quarter of a million. In 1898, he published a collection of stories called “Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish,” including his most famous short story, “A Ghetto Wedding,” which begins, “Had you chance to be in Grand Street on that starry February night, it would scarcely have occurred to you that the ghetto was groaning under the culmination of a long season of enforced idleness and distress.” It’s worth looking at a few of these phrases more closely. “That starry February night,” and on the other hand, “enforced idleness and distress,” which means poverty. So you have the language in these early first three paragraphs of groaning, distress, woe, self-torture, forlornly, piteous, desperation, ruin, abject martyrdom, famine, hopeless dearth. It is quite clear what kind of world this Jewish neighbourhood in the late 1890s, almost the turn of the century, was like. It was the world of the Lower East Side poor, peddlers. Nathan, a cap blocker, turned peddler hawking chinaware in Grand Street. Goldy, the heroine of the story, was employed in making knee breeches. And the young heroes, well the heroes are crucially young. Nathan, a thick-set fellow of 25 or 26, and Goldy his love. And it is a romantic story of the love, and later the marriage, of a young couple. And Goldy is described “as an epitome of exquisite femininity,” and it’s worth focusing on that phrase, “an epitome of exquisite femininity” because it’s the last epitome of exquisite femininity we’re going to hear in the world of castrating mothers, kvetching wives, and legions of ex-wives of the golden age of Jewish American literature.
The representation of Judaism and tradition is interesting in the story. There’s a man described as the bard, a tall, gaunt man with a grizzly beard and a melancholy face. There’s no sentimentality or rosy elegy glow about traditional Jewish learning and culture and religion. There’s the question of parents and orphans. “You and I are orphans,” Goldy says to Nathan, which raises a question, who are Cahan’s literary parents? A Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, almost 40, with no formal education in America, which tradition does he belong to? The story ends with the two, the young couple, walking home alone. And again, it’s worth looking at the language of this last few sentences. “When they found themselves alone in the deserted street, they were so overcome by a sense of loneliness, of a kind of portentous haunting emptiness that they could not speak so on they trudged in dismal silence.” This language of alone, deserted, loneliness, emptiness, “They could not speak.” This particular phrase, “They could not speak,” is a phrase that haunts Jewish American immigrant writers. Can they speak? Are they mute, dumb? Do they have a voice as writers, as readers? Henry James would’ve had no doubt about the answer to any of these questions. And then in the very last sentence, “An old tree whispered overhead its tender felicitations.”
An old tree as opposed to a new tree. We’re back to the world of the “starry night” of the first sentence. And “tender felicitations,” now there is a phrase. Enjoy these tender felicitations, the whispering trees, and the starry night ‘cause you ain’t going to get anymore once Herzog and Portnoy come on the scene, or even Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick. Remember Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice.” “'I’m surprised to see my neighbours making tra la la for Christmas.’ My father couldn’t think of what to say to that, then he decided, ‘You’re in America! In Palestine, the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe, you had pogroms. Argentina’s full of Indians. Here you got Christmas. Some joke, huh?’” Or Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy, or Yiddish in America” again. “Edelshtein was grief-stricken but elated after his wife’s miscarriage. ‘My sperm count!’ he screamed. Your belly! Go fix the machine before you blame the oil.‘” One definition of the genuine voice of Jewish American literature is no one whispers, full stop, let alone tender felicitations, full stop. But Cahan is best known for his novel, “The Rise of David Levinsky,” published in 1917. It’s his best known work, and the first four parts began appearing monthly in “McClure’s Magazine” in 1913. Malcolm Bradbury, the English writer and critic who used to teach at the University of East Anglia, whose pupils included Clive Sinclair and Kazuo Ishiguro, calls it “a fable of economic success and moral catastrophe.”
An interesting conjunction. David Levinsky, the hero, central character, leaves his old home in Lithuania and shtetl to come to New York with four cents in his pocket, and symbolically, crucially, he shaves off his beard and ear locks. It’s a rags to riches story, but it’s rooted and religious life is one that shifts to the secular life of alienation and what one might call complex sexuality. The first book is called “Home and School,” and the main character, David Levinsky, is born in 1865 in a city of 80,000 in the Russian Empire in an area which corresponds to present-day Lithuania. His father dies when he’s three, leaving him and his mother to fend for themselves. He grows up in abject poverty. Better off relatives send him to a private cheder for elementary instruction in Judaism and the Torah, and from abuse by some rich kids, he becomes one of the tougher kids, but also excels academically. At 13, he finishes his education at cheder, and begins Talmudic studies in a yeshiva. He meets and befriends Rabbi Sender, who has been supported by his wife while he spends 16 hours daily studying the Talmud. Reb Sender is one of “the most nimble-minded,” quote, unquote, scholars in the town and well-liked. He also befriends Naphtali, another student two years ahead of him. David and Naphtali often study together at nightly vigils until morning worship has come.
David begins to feel an inner conflict between the religious instruction he receives and his growing interest in girls. He also thinks of his childhood dislike for Red Esther, the daughter of one of the other families in his basement home. Meanwhile, a pole moves to Antomir, their hometown, and becomes a regular reader at the synagogue. The pole has memorised 500 pages of the Talmud and recites by memory. He begins, David begins memorising sections of the Talmud, but Reb Sender finds out and questions his motivation, which leads to a physical confrontation between David and the pole. David is harassed in the horse market during Passover by a group of Gentiles celebrating Easter. One Gentile punches him. His mother sees his split lip and goes out to set straight the Gentile who hit him, though advised not to, and she is beaten to death and dies that night. It is a world of religious faith, almost extreme religious faith, but it is also a world of antisemitic violence and abject poverty. After mourning, David moves into the synagogue, as was often customary for poorer Talmudic students, and continues his studies. As was also customary for poor Talmudic students, he eats days at the houses of benefactors who invite Talmudic scholars for one meal per week. By and large, however, he goes hungry until a rich Jewish woman hears of his plight. Finally well-fed, he reapplies himself to his studies. He’s however lost interest in the Talmud, and after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 and anti-Jewish riots, many Jews participate in the great New Exodus. David’s thoughts turn to seeking his fortune in America. He meets a woman called Matilda, who studied at a boarding school in Germany as well as at secular Russian schools.
She taunts him in Yiddish while conversing with her friends in Russian, a language David does not understand. She urges him to get an education in Russia, but he insists on going to America to work so he can finance his studies. Matilda is convinced and offers to finance his journey. He realises he’s deeply in love with her, and Matilda floats the idea of his studying at a Russian university again. When word arrives that her father is returning from his business trip, David returns to the synagogue. She stops by to give him the 80 rubles the trip would cost and wishes him luck. And on the first anniversary of his mother’s death, he goes to the train station and is seen off by his friends. And in 1885, he boards a steamer from Bremen in Germany to New York. And he spends most of the journey praying, reading Psalm 104 and thinking about Matilda. He meets a fellow passenger and wanders through the city. His fellow passenger, Gitelson, is recognised to be a tailor by someone and is off at work. David wanders about and is repeatedly called a greenhorn. At a synagogue he asked to sleep there for the night, but is told repeatedly America is not Russia. There he meets Mr. Even, a wealthy Jewish man who gives him money, clothing, dinner, and a haircut, including the very symbolic and important removal of his sidelocks, and arranges for lodging. He asked David not to neglect his religion and his Talmud, and David spends the money on dry goods and begins to work as a peddler, managing to pay for rent and food and makes no headway.
He changes to selling linens, but his heart isn’t truly in it. He is terribly homesick. His overall impression is that America is an impious land. An impious land and a desperately poor land for Jews from the Russian Empire. And this takes us back to this earlier question of the characters of these first 30 years of Jewish American literature, and the central figures experience New York, and America in general, as a disastrous place. It is not the golden land of their dreams. It turns out to be unfailingly a place of misery, of abject poverty, and of a place where they’re completely deracinated and in a state of emotional and spiritual exile and displacement. David, in the meantime, reflects on other peddlers and their coarse and exaggerated stories. And he learns to dance, tries to with his landlady, who rejects him and says that he’s no longer a greenhorn. He tries his former landlady who kisses him once, but rejects further advances. He enrols in night school, learns English, crucially, and tries to copy his teacher’s mannerisms. His teacher gives David a copy of “Dombey and Son” by Dickens. He neglects his work peddling and spends his time reading the book. David is fired, but impressed by his own progress learning English. He spends a lot of time in a music shop where he borrows a lot of nickels, dimes, and quarters he’s unable to repay.
After nearly two years in America, David has a chance encounter with Gitelson, the tailor from the ship, who is now successful and well-dressed while David is poor and shabbily dressed, and David begins an apprenticeship. He begins earning and saving, attending local Jewish theatre, and practising his English, working 16-hour days and saving aggressively. David hopes to save enough money to support himself so he can attend City College in New York, to which he refers as his new temple. During the garment industry’s idle season, he resumes his studies. He shows little interest in socialists and the garment workers union. He destroys his temple by using the money he saved up to start his own business in the garment industry. Not City College after all, but the garment industry. And one order he filled went to a company that went bankrupt, so he’s in debt. After a while, he gets a check from the company stating they’d reformed themselves and he is sent his payment. His business slowly starts taking off and he trades his studies for his business. He sets up his business to run while he goes across the country trying to sell his garments, and he goes on and on about selling cloaks. He visits a marriage broker and is set up with a woman. His fortune continues to grow. He also has to deal with socialists because he doesn’t pay his workers, mostly Orthodox Jews, terribly well, but they don’t complain. He’s set to marry this woman, but then something happens. Since the woman he is supposed to marry belongs to a religious family, on his trip to visit them he realises he can’t arrive so they’ll notice he travelled on the Sabbath, so he stops at resort for the night. There he is smitten by another woman, Ms. Tevkin, who is not attracted to him. He still falls in love with her because he’s been doing that pretty regularly for the past 400 pages, falling in love with women who don’t reciprocate his love.
He breaks it off with his fiancee. He befriends their family and supports their socialist causes, and she marries someone else. He reflects on how lonely he is and wishes he’d been a socialist rather than a capitalist. He says he isn’t happy, and in spite of the women who want him, the only girl he can think of is Miss Tevkin. So what do we make of this book? In summary, it’s a rags to riches story, a classic rags to riches story, that begins with the metamorphosis of someone who arrived with just four cents in his pocket to someone who’s worth more than $2 million. Secondly, he’s an immigrant. It’s a rags to riches immigrant story. And the book has been described as one of the earliest and one of the most notable pieces of Jewish immigrant fiction, describing a Jewish immigrant’s process of Americanization. Cahan died of congestive heart failure on the 31st of August, 1951 at the age of 91 in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York. Cahan’s education of immigrants, his work through “The Jewish Daily Forward,” and his commitment to socialism influenced the Jewish immigrants in New York who came into contact with his work. He hugely influenced Jewish American culture at a crucial moment for that culture as it changed from an immigrant culture to the first Jewish American culture.
And next comes a new generation of Jewish American writers in the 1930s. Mike Gold, who wrote a famous novel called “Jews Without Money,” Henry Roth, who wrote the wonderful “Call It Sleep,” Nathanael West, author of “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” and in my humble opinion, the greatest of them all, Delmore Schwartz, a poet and writer who produced the masterpieces about the Jewish American immigrant experience, and they paved the way for a completely new chapter in the history of Jewish American literature. So with Cahan begins this fiction or this creative phase of rags to riches stories about the male experience. Anzia Yezierska for example, a very important woman writer of the same period, is focused on the experience of Jewish American women, immigrant women who become American women. Cahan’s focus, not in the story about the ghetto wedding, but in his masterpiece, “The Rise of David Levinsky,” is about the experience of young men, giving up their religious faith and their religious background, and becoming American and secular and making money and giving up dreams of City College in order to make money. And what happens during 1920s and '30s is you get a different kind of arguably less lachrymose and melancholy of Jewish immigrant fiction. And then comes the crucial turning point in the 1940s and '50s when you get the first novels by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, the first plays by Arthur Miller. And you get a completely different world from the Lower East Side. You get the world of the suburbs, which are the background to “Goodbye, Columbus,” Philip Roth’s first major book. You get the world of Jewish intellectuals like Herzog in Bellow’s famous novel.
You get the engagement with American politics, especially by Roth, starting with writing novels about Nixon and then later about the Vietnam War and race in America. And Miller, of course, with “The Crucible,” which was always seen as an allegory for McCarthyism. And Mailer, of course, who wrote about the politics of his time, both in his fiction and his reportage. And Heller, who of course wrote “Catch 22” about his experience in the Second World War. So we get a complete broadening out of Jewish American fiction. After the war, these writers become celebrities in a way that Cahan never was outside the Yiddish-speaking world of the Lower East Side, or Anzia Yezierska for that matter, or even Mike Gold and Delmore Schwartz. The story of Delmore Schwartz is brilliantly told by Saul Bellow in his novel “Humboldt’s Gift.” Bellow was a great admirer of Schwartz and a close friend of Schwartz and was fascinated by his life as a what the French call a poete maudit, accursed poet. So Cahan is a sort of transitional figure, you might say, in the history of Jewish American writing, and he is best known as a pioneer, one might say.
As somebody who chronicled the transition from immigrants from a world of cheders, of poverty, who came over to New York and experienced more poverty and more disillusion and disappointment in the Lower East Side, and then made the famous journey from rags to riches. So, I hope that gives you some sense of Cahan, some sense of that crucial background and context to Cahan’s writing, which is that of that Jewish American literary generation from the 1880s to the 1920s, and how that paved the way for a new generation of Jewish American writers who crucially failed to produce the kind of shelves full of huge novels that people like Bellow and Roth and Mailer and Heller produced, that enormous body of work that was so characteristic of the golden age of Jewish American writing after the war. And that really what these earlier writers did was produce slim volumes.
They never had literary careers in the same sense. And yet, of course, Bellow in particular was very attached to the world of Yiddish writers. He famously translated “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which launched Singer’s career because it appeared in English in “Partisan Review,” which was the one of the chief literary periodicals of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. So Bellow was fascinated by these figures. Cynthia Ozick, another great novelist and short story writer, was also fascinated by these Yiddish writers, including Singer and the Yiddish writers who didn’t achieve the fame that Singer achieved. So, there is a very complex and fascinating history to these different phases of Jewish American writing, and Cahan, we should remember, as a key figure in a very early and important formative stage. So, please, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate. In fact, I can see that there are already some.
Q&A and Comments:
Monty Golden says, “These guys didn’t do a course in creative writing at some university. They weren’t constrained by the rules and regulations of syntax and the disciplines of the English language when they switched to writing in English. This is more obvious in Jewish lyricists who worked in Tin Pan Alley in New York.”
Monty, these are all, these are really important and interesting points. Thank you very much for raising them. Of course, they didn’t do a course in creative writing at some university, firstly, because they couldn’t get into many of these universities, which had very strict quotas about how many Jews they could take. Lionel Trilling, who was Jewish but famously became the first, when he became a professor at Columbia, became the first Jewish professor of literature at an American university, at an Ivy League university. So they couldn’t afford to go to private universities. This is why City College was so important in the story of David Levinsky because it was a public university so it was free, whereas of course he couldn’t have possibly afforded Columbia University on the Upper West Side or New York University in Greenwich Village, let alone somewhere like Harvard or Princeton or Yale. So, no, you’re absolutely right. They didn’t do a course in creative writing. And you’re absolutely right also to raise the question of Jewish lyricists who worked in Tin Pan Alley in New York and many of whom became famous thanks to two things really, musicals on Broadway, which exploded between the wars and then after the war, and films. So “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” for example, from “The Wizard of Oz” was written by Yip Harburg, a New York Jew. And of course, you know, Gershwin and Bernstein, ans so on, but sometime later. Many of the great lyricists via the Broadway shows or for American films were were Jews. So, I’m grateful to you, Monty, for both of those points.
Q: Now, somebody called Marilyn asked whether Howard Fast was Jewish, “and do you consider him to be a writer with a Jewish sensibility?”
A: With a Jewish sensibility. Yes, he was Jewish. You raise a very interesting question here, Marilyn, about what defines Jewish American writer as Jewish or indeed as American, for that matter, since so many of these early Jewish American writers came from East Europe or the Jewish Pale in the Russian Empire. And I think one way of looking at them is to say they really had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world. And it was really the next generation, and certainly the first great post-war generation, and indeed all the great post-war generations of Jewish American writers, who one could say were more American than East European or Russian. And in fact, somewhere here in my notes, I have a list which I didn’t want to read out 'cause it’s so incredibly long. But if you look at many of the figures from this period of 1880 to 1920, these significant decades on either side of the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was born in Lithuania in 1869, came to America in 1885. Harry Houdini, the famous escapologist, came to America in 1878. The mother of the Marx Brothers came to America in 1879. Cahan, as we said, came from Lithuania in 1882. The Warner Brothers, all of them came to America in 1883. Allen Ginsberg, the great Jewish American poet, his paternal grandfather came to America in the 1880s. E.L. Doctorow’s grandfather, E.L. Doctorow is probably still best known for his novel “Ragtime,” came from Russia to New York in 1885. Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn of Hollywood fame came to America in the 1890s. Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin, came to America at the age of five in 1893. Asa Yoelson, best known as Al Jolson, was born in a small Lithuanian town in 1886 and came to America in 1894. Leonard Bernstein’s parents came to America in the early 1900.
Allen Ginsberg’s mother came to America in 1905. Grace Paley’s parents came from the Ukraine. Henry Roth was born in Galicia in 1905 and came to America in either 1906 or 1907. Meyer Schapiro, the great art historian, was born in Lithuania in 1905, came to America in 1907. Ben Shahn, the great illustrator who designed the Penguin editions of Saul Bellow’s novels in the 1970s, was born in 1908, came to America in 1908. Leo Rosten, who wrote “The Joys of Yiddish,” was born in a lodge in Poland in 1908, came to America in 1911. Irving Howe’s parents came to America in 1912. Abraham Belo, spelled B-E-L-O, the father of Saul Bellow, came from St. Petersburg to Canada in 1913, and Saul was born in 1915 in Canada and came to Chicago in 1924. Mark Rothko came from Dvinsk to Portland, Oregon, 1913. Grace Paley, the daughter of Xenia and Manya Gutzeit came from the Ukraine to New York in 1905. Or they came to New York in 1905, and she was born in America in 1922. Their name was Anglicised to Goodside by immigration officials. Philip Guston, the artist whose exhibition is just about to open at Tate Modern, was born in Montreal in 1913. His parents left Russia in 1905.
And so on, and so on, and so forth. Norman Mailer’s father, Barnett Mailer, a Russian Jewish immigrant. The Russian parents of Cynthia Ozick. Paul Muni, born in Galicia in 1895. Philip Roth’s paternal grandfather was an Orthodox Yiddish-speaking immigrant from Galicia. Leslie Fiedler, the critic who I quoted earlier, had Yiddish-speaking grandparents. Charles Bronson, the actor, was born Charles Buchinsky. And on and on and on. The Hungarian parents of Estee Lauder, who was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens in 1906. So, it is quite hard to find major writers, songwriters, screenwriters, Hollywood producers, short story writers who were not Jewish, or the sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters of Jewish immigrants from Poland and the the Russian Pale.
Sandra Weiswasser, I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly, says wisely, “Don’t forget 'The Assistant’ by Bernard Malamud.” You’re absolutely right, Sandra, I shouldn’t forget “The Assistant” by Bernard Malamud. Malamud was a key figure in that golden age that I referred to earlier of the 1950s and ‘60s, and figures in one of the great Roth novellas, “The Ghost Writer” in which there are two writers, one based on Malamud, one based on Saul Bellow. And Malamud was a key figure. I think one can divide, I would say, the Jewish American writers of what I call the golden age, that sort of period from the 1940s through to the 1980s and '90s, that’s a half century period. I think you could divide those in some ways between those whose reputations have really not survived as well, and that would, I’m afraid, I think, include Bernard Malamud and probably Norman Mailer, and possibly even if you exclude “Catch 22,” Joseph Heller. And those who are still regarded as sort of great writers of that period, Arthur Miller, of course, and Bellow and Roth. And Bellow and Roth, Bellow in particular, saw Malamud as part of their triumvirate, if you like, of great Jewish American writers during that period. “The Assistant,” “The Fixer,” he was a sort of major novelist, but time has not been kind to him. One might say that in the '50s and '60s, Jewish American women writers had a very tough time getting the recognition they undoubtedly deserved.
And in this group I would include Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, now 95 and still going strong. I spoke to her the other day. And indeed we spoke about this very issue about what it was like for a young woman writer. She was a student at Lionel Trilling’s seminar at Columbia University in 1951. She was one of only two women in the class, and Trilling constantly mixed up their names and clearly only had time really for the male students. And then when she becomes a writer and makes her sort of breakthrough in the '60s, it’s the heyday of all these guys that I was talking about, Malamud, Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Heller and so on, and it was a real struggle for Cynthia Ozick and for many other Jewish American female writers to break in when so much attention was focused on these very loud and ambitious men who dominated the American literary, not just the Jewish American, the American literary scene, during that period. So thank you for reminding me about Bernard Malamud. I should have mentioned him.
Q: Ah, here we go. Okay. Yana Yapu Alfred Krumholtz. Forgive my delay in getting round to your question. “Why such a contrast between the American literary evolution and writing in Britain?”
A: Yana, I hope I’ve pronounced your name correctly, that is a really interesting and important question. And there is no doubt that there has been such a contrast, and there is no doubt that Britain has been the poor relative, the Anglo Jewish literature, has been a poor relative of American Jewish literature, forever, always. I mean, throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st century. Why is that the case? Okay, now this is a sort of difficult and complex question, but please bear with me. One explanation is that it wasn’t just a question of Jewish American writers in America. There was also a very important cultural context, which was the world of Jewish American critics. I quoted Leslie Fiedler and Irving Howe, I mentioned Lionel Trilling. There were many others. There were Jewish American literary editors, and of course there was the opportunity for people to write, for Jewish American writers, to write for places like “The New York Times Book Review” and “The Wall Street Journal” and “Partisan Review” and so on, to talk about their friends, but also just people they were interested in, writers they were interested in. So Irving Howe, for example, when “Call It Sleep” by Henry Roth was republished in the 1960s, I think, Irving Howe reviewed it for the front page of “The New York Times Book Review.” Irving Howe is a big name in those days in the world of Jewish American writing and criticism, but also of American writing and criticism. And for him to say this is a major masterpiece, this book by Henry Roth, he was absolutely right to say that, it is a masterpiece, that is really significant. For Saul Bellow, already the author of three novels, he was already, had taken off in his own career.
For him to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer for “Partisan Review,” was very significant for the import, if you like, of Isaac Bashevis Singer into English-speaking American literature. That was a kind of important calling card, if you like. Britain just didn’t have, for all kinds of reasons, didn’t have the same kind of larger Jewish American culture, Jewish literary culture. There wasn’t an equivalent figure to Lionel Trilling in Britain. Queenie Leavis was Jewish, F.R. Leavis was not. You couldn’t really say that Queenie Leavis had the same power culturally in Britain in mid-20th century Britain as Trilling had in mid-20th century America. There weren’t the agents, there weren’t the publishers, there weren’t the critics. There just wasn’t that same culture. And this isn’t to demean. I’m a great admirer and I’ve written quite a lot about Anglo Jewish writers in the postwar period like Alexander Baron, whose first war novel “From the City, From the Plough” sold half a million copies, 500,000 copies, and was recently republished in a series of war books published by the Imperial War Museum. But it is also worth noting that Alexander Baron was born Alexander Bernstein and he had to change his name according to the publisher’s Jonathan Cape, because this was just immediately after the Second World War, because they said there wasn’t enough room on the spine of the book for Bernstein so perhaps he could change it to something like Baron. And Baron, interestingly, is somewhat less, not only has fewer letters, it also is less Jewish than Bernstein. This is not a coincidence.
Jonathan Cape, thank you very much. You know, so there was a world of gentile, literary antisemitism might be putting it perhaps a bit strongly, but perhaps not altogether strongly. British literary culture during the 1930s, but also after the Second World War, was a much more gentile and Gentile place than American literary culture. And it’s also worth reflecting on moments like the question of Ezra Pound being awarded a prize, the famous Bollingen Prize for American Literature just after the Second World War, which figures like Saul Bellow vehemently opposed because they said Pound was an antisemite, which of course he was. He was a supporter of Mussolini, which indeed he was. But for a major Jewish writer, albeit a young Jewish writer at that time like Saul Bellow, to really take up arms on this issue, for Arthur Miller, a Jewish American playwright, to take on the House of Un-American Activities at the heyday of McCarthyism. These were incredibly important moments and they have no equivalent in the history of mid-20th century or post-war British Anglo Jewish literary culture, except for one particular moment, which we should not forget, which is Emmanuel Litvinoff delivering an attack on T.S. Eliot for his antisemitism, which was a very important moment. So I hope that, sorry, I’m aware that time is running short, so I won’t go on any longer on this issue. But thank you very much, Yana, for raising that very important question.
Q: “Is there a list of the authors and works that you referred to? I would love to be able to read some of these.”
A: No, although there is the “Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature,” which was published, oh, back in the '90s? Maybe the '80s? If you look that up on Amazon, it is a fantastic anthology of Jewish American writing with really interesting footnotes and introductions to the individual writers, but also to the larger history of Jewish American literature. So I strongly recommend it. It is in hardback, it is almost a thousand pages, it is quite expensive, but that would be, I think, the best way to start.
Q: Irving Gerskowitz asks, very interestingly, “Have you looked at Jewish writers who settled in Canada?”
A: No, is the answer. I suppose the best known would be Mordecai Richler, who settled in Canada. Best known for his novel “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” made into a film with the great Richard Dreyfuss. Settled in Britain for a period during the 1950s and '60s, wrote for “The Jewish Quarterly” in London, then returned to Canada. Adele Weisman as well, a novelist less famous than Richler, but nevertheless an interesting literary figure. Those are the two come immediately to mind. I’m afraid I haven’t really given this much thought. I will do so. So, thank you very much, Irving.
Shelly Shapiro says, “The famous later Jewish writers you mentioned like Heller didn’t really write about anything Jewish. They are just Jewish by birth or ethnic group. Also as a Jewish woman, I find it tedious to read books always blaming Jewish women.” Well, Shelly, thank you. That’s a very interesting point. I beg to disagree with you about Heller. “Good as Gold,” one of his novels, could not be more Jewish and the central figure could not be more Jewish. Mailer perhaps less so. Miller perhaps a more interesting story in that he didn’t really write very much about the Holocaust until very late, relatively late in his career. And there has been a sort of ongoing debate about whether characters like Willy Loman are Jewish or are not Jewish. And what about all the Christian imagery in his famous play “All My Sons”? You know, it’s a very interesting debate going on about how, not whether Miller himself is Jewish, but how Jewish Miller’s writing is, which is a different question, of course. Bellow and Roth and Malamud are the three most Jewish of the great Jewish American writers. “I find it tedious to write books, always blaming Jewish women,” you say. Well this has been, Shelly, you’re not the only woman who feels that way, and I think this has been a real problem for the posthumous reputations of both Bellow and Roth in particular. They are sort of infamous for the way they depict Jewish women, particularly wives and ex-wives. I think we have to be a little bit careful here. You know, three biographies, stroke memoirs of Roth came out a few years ago and many of the reviews said, “Well, look, Roth didn’t like women. He wrote about his first wife horribly. He wrote about Claire Bloom, his famous second wife, horribly. He just was an out and out misogynist.”
And I think this is simply untrue and one shouldn’t mistake a writer for the man or the man for the writer. They are two different things very often. And it is worth looking at who were the people who visited Roth on his deathbed? Who were the people who spoke at his funeral? Who were the people who spoke at his memorial service and at subsequent memorial services? And you will find that many of them were indeed women. Mia Farrow was a very close friend. Zadie Smith became in later life, a very close friend. There were quite a number of women who have played a very important part in Roth’s life who he did not necessarily have affairs with and did not marry. But you know, these are contentious issues. Bellow was married many times and wrote horribly about ex-wives. That is simply a fact. Whether you think that means that he can’t be taken seriously as a writer is another matter, but both have, you may like to hear, Shelly, have suffered in terms of their posthumous reputation for the way they wrote about women.
Judith Skolnik says this talk has made her want to revisit so many of these writers’ works. Thank you very much, Judith.
Q: Monty Golden is back with a very nice question. “Why don’t you do a lecture on the life of Delmore Schwartz? The tragic story of the great white hope of American literature, a truly tragic figure.”
A: I couldn’t agree more. He was a truly tragic figure. He wrote one of the great poems, possibly the greatest poem of Jewish American literature. And he was, well, yes he was a truly tragic figure. And I would love to return to Delmore Schwartz. You are absolutely right, he was really a fascinating figure and I hope to do so.
Monty also mentions Herman Wouk, another Jewish American writer. There are many, you know, let me be honest here, there are many Jewish American writers I didn’t mention. I, especially among the post-war group, and I largely focused on the best known, I would say. And perhaps, would it be unkind to say that Herman Wouk was a little bit on the middlebrow side compared to some of the others? And of course there’s then another great generation which followed Bellow, Roth, and and so forth, which is the generation of Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, and perhaps we will get round to those at some point.
Yana Yapa Alfred Krumholtz. “So Leo Rosten tried in a way to soften the hard edge of the immigrant experience by writing the Hyman Kaplan collections.” Absolutely true. Slightly later generation. I mean, I think the problem for the generation of Cahan and Yezierska and then later Mike Gold and so on, is that they were really at the suffering edge of the Jewish American immigrant experience, the poverty, fleeing the pogroms and poverty of the Russian Pale and of Poland, and then coming to the desperately poor world of the Lower East Side, which they chronicled very powerfully. So perhaps it was right to soften the hard edge or perhaps it was not right, but I think Cahan’s reputation and that of Anzia Yezierska and others was precisely that they made no effort to soften the hard edge. They used this kind of peculiarly sentimental language of tender felicitations, and so on, in the full knowledge that they’re writing stories of tremendous emotional power. Leonard Zedensky.
“At the same time, close by there were many great Canadian Jewish writers. A.M. Klein,” thank you, “Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen,” of course, “Mordecai Richler and many more.” Thank you, Leonard. I’m grateful. I’m afraid I don’t know about A.M. Klein or Irving Layton. Leonard Cohen, of course, a great, great lyricist, and Mordecai Richler as I mentioned, major writer. So Canadians, yes, that was an oversight. I appreciate that.
Barry Epstein. “Tell us about "The Forward” newspaper in Cape Town, used to get it. It took six weeks to get to Cape Town.“ And he read it from beginning to end. "Thanks for an interesting lecture.” I don’t really know very much about “The Forward” newspaper because that, you know, falls perhaps more into the area of social history than of literary history. But the circulation rose dramatically. And Cahan was the editor for an extraordinarily long period and managed to combine editing it with writing short stories and “The Rise of David Levinsky” as well. So I think I would have to do some more research, and time’s somewhat against me, so if you’ll forgive me for copping out, Barry, I will perhaps, I hope, get back to that another time. Or it might be something that Trudy Gold would be interested in talking about also.
Q: Monty Golden. “Did you know Esther Kreitman who lived and died in London? Sister of I.B. Singer.”
A: Well, now Monty, this is a very interesting point. Yes. I didn’t know her personally, but Clive Sinclair, the late great Clive Sinclair, a very fine short story writer, novelist, and essayist, and critic, terrific critic, wrote the best review I’ve ever read of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” and was literary editor of “The Jewish Chronicle” for a few years in the 1980s. He wrote a PhD about the Singer family because of course there were two brothers who both became prominent writers, I.J. Singer and I.B. Singer. And Esther Kreitman, who was the one who came to London, whereas both brothers went to New York, moved to New York from Warsaw. And it is a absolutely fascinating story, and if you ever get a chance to track down Clive Sinclair’s PhD, in its published form, Monty, I can’t remember the title off the top of my head, but I’m sure you can find it on Amazon or any good bookshop. And of course Esther Kreitman is one of those Jewish women writers who I referred to earlier when I was talking about Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick and so on, whose reputations have risen with time in recent years, I’m delighted to say.
Q: And Sfir Raven, I hope I’ve pronounced your name correctly, says, “What about Isaac Bashevis Singer?”
A: Talking of the Singer family. Well, indeed, but of course he was not interested in the immigrant world in America so much as the old world of dybbuks and Orthodox Jews and so on. So it’s a slightly different category. And of course he only started to become translated much later on in the postwar period. And so it doesn’t really fit this particular chapter of Jewish American immigrant writing.
Q: Barbara. “Did the Lithuanian Jews identify as Lithuanians similar to how the German Jews identify as Germans?”
A: I’m afraid you would really have to ask a Lithuanian Jew, I think. My sense is they did. German Jews, that’s a tricky comparison, of course, because German Jews had such a difficult relationship with Ostjuden, most famously in the story of Hannah Arendt, of course, who looked down very much at East European Jews and the Judenrate, famously, which led her to be despised, and this is not too strong a word, by people like Isaiah Berlin and Saul Bellow and Alfred Kazin. I don’t really know enough about Lithuanian Jews, I’m afraid, so I will, I’m afraid, have to pass the bark.
And Monty Golden returns with, “Esther Kreitman was a Yiddish language novelist.” Absolutely. As were her brothers. That’s absolutely right.
Q: Romaine says, “Is the British literary world more antisemitic than the American literary world, past and present?”
A: Wow. There is a question. There is a question. Let’s say it was not un-antisemitic, both in the way that non-Jews wrote about Jews, most famously Dickens on “Oliver Twist,” on Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” most famously T.S. Eliot, most famously Henry James, who was as much part of the British literary world as he was part of the American literary world. Pound, who was part of the British literary world, as well as part of the American literary world, also antisemitic. So, and plus what I was referring to was not so much the writers as the world of publishing, the world of reviewing, and you know, that matters. When people like Alexander Baron later in his career found it harder to get published, when Clive Sinclair found it hard to get published, when various other Anglo Jewish writers of the 1950s found it hard to get published, that was not so much because of other antisemitic writers, it was because of antisemitic, possibly, question mark, antisemitic publishers. Were they antisemitic not to be more interested than they might have been in some of these Jewish writers? After all, Alexander Baron, as I say, half a million copies of “From the City, from the Plough,” it was one of the great novels about the Second World War and his publishers asked him to check to Anglicise his name and lied about why. That’s the terrible thing.
So, you know, was it more antisemitic than the American literary world? No, it was not. Ezra Pound was part of the American literary world. Henry James was part of the American literary world. I read that quotation from “The American Scene,” quote unquote, the title of that piece by Henry James. Trilling was very ambivalent about his Jewishness and was much disliked by many of the more overtly Jewish writers and critics among his contemporaries, especially at “Partisan Review.” So, you know, these are very complicated questions and I think, forgive me if this sounds cowardly, but I don’t think I have time to really give this the attention it deserves and I hope to return to it another time. It is a very important question, and thank you very much, Romaine, for raising it.
Esther Blackman. “I learned about many of the Jewish writers of that time at the University of Judaism in the late ‘60s. Having just arrived from Israel as a young student, it was a revelation to me. We hadn’t learned about Jewish American writers in Israel at the time.” Well, Esther, yes, you are absolutely right, because this has really only become a major subject of critical inquiry and intellectual inquiry in more recent years. This was not something that was discussed by, for example, Lionel Trilling, or for example, Steven Marcus, both eminent Jewish critics, or for example, Harold Bloom or Jeffrey Hartman, major, major Jewish literary critics at Yale. So, there is a very good PhD or book to be written about when people began to take the question of Jewish American writing as a subject seriously and why it took so long. And in a way, you could argue it was only because people like Bellow and Heller and Mailer and Malamud and Miller became so famous, and then later Mamet and Neil Simon, and so on and so forth, that that paved the way for a greater inquiry into their predecessors, people like Mike Gold, people like Abraham Cahan. And it took the feminist movement to then say, “Wait a moment, enough about all these men already. What about these women writers who are fantastic?” And they are fantastic. You know, Cynthia Ozick is one of the great writers. Her novel “Antiquities,” her most recent novel, published when she was in her early 90s let me say, is a great novel. It’s not a good novel, it’s a great novel. Her stories, “The Shawl,” one of the great Holocaust short stories. Her short story “Envy, or Yiddish in America” is a great short story. And both those short stories that I mentioned are available in the “Norton Anthology.” So yes, you know, it is a really fascinating subject which has a very complicated and interesting history.
Q: Betty Lowenstein or Lowenstein, “Are you familiar with Adele Weisman, a Canadian writer who wrote the wonderful, 'The Sacrifice’ and ‘Crackpot’?”
A: Absolutely. I mentioned her very briefly in passing earlier on. She was a wonderful woman. I had the privilege of knowing her when I was very young. Believe it or not, I was once very young, and “The Sacrifice” and “Crackpot” are her two best novels. And she was a lovely woman and a fine writer, and thank you for mentioning her.
Carol Kessel. “Thank you for the presentation, which woke up memories of reading so many of the authors you spoke about in the ‘60s, '70s, and '80s.” Thank you, Carol.
Irv Kushner. “Post-war writers, the ones you focused on largely, did not deal with Jewish themes. Malamud and whoever wrote 'The Pawnbroker’ and several others did.” Well, Malamud of course did. “The Assistant,” obviously. And Bellow did write about Jewish themes. Well, “The Victim” is about antisemitism, plain and simple, published in the 1940S. “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” was his first major novel to engage with the Holocaust. And there is a fascinating exchange, by the way, if you happen to get hold of Saul Bellow’s letters edited by Benjamin Taylor, try and get the hardback edition if you can, which there’s a fascinating exchange between Cynthia Ozick and Bellow when Ozick takes Bellow to task on why did it take him and his more famous contemporaries, more famous than Ozick, I mean, not more famous than Bellow, so long to get round to writing about the Holocaust? The same would be true of Arthur Miller, of course, It would not be true of Roth, who of course published that extraordinary story, “Eli, the Fanatic,” one of the great American short stories about the Holocaust in his collection, published in 1959, the title which temporarily escapes me. However, so they did deal with Jewish themes. Perhaps not as much as some of their younger critics would like, but they did and it would be unfair to say they didn’t. Whether they did early enough is a very important question. Whether they did enough, full stop, very important question. So that we’ll have to save for another day also, but thank you, Irv, for raising such an important question.
“Alison Peck, Canadian, a star. Heard her at Jewish Book Week.” Thank you, Sheila. I’m receiving a whole free education here about Canadian Jewish writing. Thank you, all. And Harriet de Koven also name checks Leonard Cohen. Thank you. “The Yiddish Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts,” writes Linda Silpa, “is a wonderful resource.” Yes. “If you don’t know about it, it and its story are an American Jewish story.” You’re absolutely right, and my very dear friend, David Mazower, brother of the great Jewish historian Mark Mazower, who is a professor at Columbia University, he is very much involved with the Yiddish Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. And thank you very much for name checking that and drawing it to our attention. I really do appreciate it. It’s a very fine institution. And indeed, you know, you would have to say, going back to the question of the difference in the American Jewish culture, British Jewish culture, that American Yiddish culture, the cultural institutions which promote and support Yiddish culture, are very significant in America and are more significant than their equivalence in Britain. Forgive me for causing controversy here.
Rita K. “Thank you very much for your kind message.”
Romaine. “I hope we’re not going to be too moralistic in viewing the writing of Philip Roth. Agree with you the writing and the person need to be separated,” and Rita K. says, “Ditto.” Thank you, I do agree with you about this. It’s very important to judge writers about their writing, not about what one thinks to be their private lives, especially when their private lives may be rather different from the views represented by certain biographers and indeed ex-wives.
Q: Jeremy Fraser. “Did you mention H.L., Mencken?
A: No, I didn’t and I’m very sorry for that. There were a lot of people I didn’t mention, both in the talk and in the subsequent question and answer session. So, I do appreciate it. I was a little bit short on time, but thank you very much for mentioning Mencken.
Q: And somebody else, George Hoenig and Olga Weiss say, "Bashevis Singer?”
A: Well, clearly we’ll have to come back to Bashevis Singer. I have actually given a talk on Bashevis Singer for the Lockdown University, but perhaps I should come back to that another time.
Mimi Elbass. “The book ‘Writing Our Way Home,’ edited by Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport contains contemporary stories by American Jewish writers.” Absolutely. Ted Solotaroff, fascinating figure. Interesting author in his own right, major critic in America, not as well known as he should be here. Yes, there are a number of very important anthologies and maybe if Trudy happens to be listening or hears a recording of this, perhaps she and I should discuss whether there’s a talk to be given on anthologies of Jewish American writing and their impact and their history.
Harriet De Koven, I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly. “Views on Robert Zimmerman, Nobel Laureate in Literature. Better known of course as Bob Dylan.” There just isn’t time. I’m so sorry. It’s a fascinating question and perhaps, again, we’ll come back to that.
Ruth Book. “‘Commentary Magazine’ is the great source for information on the Jewish writers.” Absolutely true. “Commentary Magazine” is, “Partisan Review” is, and “Dissent,” edited by the late, great Irving Howe. Those three major Jewish, largely Jewish American magazines, which post-war, you know, published a lot of the major Jewish American writers and critics and intellectuals. So yes, thank you Ruth for pointing that out. You’re absolutely right.
Yana. “In England, one problem with antisemitic agents who wouldn’t take on Jewish writers, a significant exception was Helga Green.” Thank you. Yes, of course there were significant exceptions, and of course that has a complicated history as well in that, you know, later on, you know, it became easier to be a significant Jewish literary figure than it was in the sort of 15 years or so immediately after the Second World War. So, people like Frederic Raphael, and obviously Howard Jacobson, and Bernice Rubens, and you know, many others had significant and important careers. The young Naomi Alderman. Yes, without question. But there was a problem particularly in the years after the war, and I think this was perhaps the period, the period of the Bollingen Prize being awarded to Ezra Pound, the period of Eliot’s, after “Strange Gods,” after “Dark Gods”? His famous lectures which have been accused of antisemitism by Anthony Julius and other critics. Yes, so, there were many factors and it’s, again, a complicated history.
Q: Shelly Shapiro. “What about Chaim Potok who wrote positively about Judaism?”
A: Absolutely. Again, dare I say a different generation. I was trying to focus on this sort of period 1880 to 1920. Chaim Potok comes along later. You could say about Chaim Potok, possibly if you’re being unkind, which I’m not, but Chaim Potok and Herman Wouk possibly belong to that slightly middlebrow phase of Jewish American writing. Question mark, question mark?
Louise Sweet. “The Yiddish Book Centre is directed, I believe, by Shalem Asch’s grandson.” Fascinating. I didn’t know that. That is very interesting to know.
“J.D. Salinger deserves mention,” says Sandra Weiswasser. Absolutely, yes.
Ah, Monty Golden. “Mencken was not a Jew, but a virulent antisemite.” I’m going to leave that to the two of you to fight out.
Q: Harriet de Koven. “Could you do a subsequent session on Bob Dylan?”
A: Well, I don’t think I’m quite the right person. My dear friend, Professor Bryan Cheyette, who is a great Bob Dylan fan, would I’m sure love to do that.
I think, I’m sorry, it is 6:24. I have terribly overrun, and I’m afraid there are many more interesting questions to answer and respond to, perhaps would be a more modest way of putting it. I’m out of time. I’m going to be back, you’ll be horrified to know, on Tuesday at the same time when I’m going to be talking about another great Jewish writer, but interestingly an Anglo Jewish writer with a very complicated posthumous history, the great writer and artist, Isaac Rosenberg. I do hope you can join me on Tuesday evening, five p.m. UK time, so I guess midday U.S. time. Please do join me then, and thank you so much for all your fascinating questions and for such an interesting debate.
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.