Jewish-American literature

The Jewish-American literature, the literature of the Jews in the United States , taking in the American literature a prominent place. In addition to a tradition of writing in English , it includes other languages, the most important of which was Yiddish . While the majority of authors and critics recognize the independence of Jewish literature, other authors refuse to be classified as “Jewish voices”. A clear assignment or delimitation is therefore not always possible without problems. Despite the diversity and dynamism in the literary reflection of the Jewish-American world experience, some recurring elements can be identified that characterize this area of ​​American literature in a special way, both in terms of linguistic and stylistic as well as in terms of the history of motifs and themes.

Overview

Starting with the autobiographical reports and the petitions of the Sephardic immigrants who settled the USA since the 17th century, Jewish-American literature continued to develop over the centuries until it finally included all literary forms - such as epic , poetry and drama  - a castle. The novels by Saul Bellow , Henry Roth , Bernard Malamud , Chaim Potok , Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth have a special place in the 20th century . These authors explore in their works alongside non-Jewish subjects and the conflicts involved in the confrontation between secular society and the Jewish tradition arise and which are perceived by the children and grandchildren of immigrants hardly less dramatic than by their ancestors themselves.

The conditions of Jewish life in the present and the importance of Jewish traditions in view of the experiences of the 20th century are also thematized in the works of Cynthia Ozick , who is increasingly turning to a more Jewish readership. Leon Uris , on the other hand, appeals to a broader readership with his historical novels, which depict the history of the Jews in the 20th century and the development of the State of Israel. Also, E. L. Doctorow uses in his novels and stories partly his own Jewish background experience, without allowing themselves to define or in any way limited to this.

The award-winning late debut novel Wartime Lies (1991) by Louis Begley , on the other hand, addresses the memory of the Holocaust and explicitly refers to the connection between individual and collective experience. The narrator describes how, as a nine-year-old boy in Poland, he was only able to survive the occupation by the National Socialists by denying his own identity. This memory of the narrator is determined by the self-tormenting accusations from the perspective of the survivor, who, knowing the history of suffering of his people, can only classify the disclosure of his identity forced upon him as a child with extreme pain.

With Harry Kemelman's detective novels , published between 1964 and 1996, the Jewish milieu also became part of American entertainment literature. In the place of Chesterton's Father Brown , Rabbi Small acts as an investigative amateur detective in a specifically Jewish environment that is also understandable for non-Jewish readers. Kemelman's successful Rabbi Small novels not only familiarize a larger readership with Jewish ways of thinking and customs as a side effect, but also reflect the changed position of Jewish storytelling in the US literary scene, which became increasingly marginal in the second half of the 20th century has lost.

Younger authors such as Alan Kaufman , Michael Chabon , Jonathan Safran Foer , Nicole Krauss or Allegra Goodman, on the other hand, continue to deal with the Jewish identity problem in their works; Other topics here besides the Holocaust are the increasing assimilation and the trend towards the rediscovery of Jewish traditions, especially among the younger generation. More and more recent Jewish-American literature also deals with the subjects of Israel , Zionism , anti-Semitism and " new anti-Semitism ".

For example, Joseph Brodsky , who only emigrated to the United States in 1972 at the age of 32 and received American citizenship in 1977, as a New York exile in his collection of essays Less Than One , published in 1986, deals with the deeply rooted anti-Semitism with which he was during struggled during his childhood and primary school in Leningrad, Russia . German translations of this anthology were published under the alternative titles Memories of St. Petersburg and Memories of Leningrad . Alongside Bellow and Singer, Brodsky is one of those American authors of Jewish origin who have so far been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for their works .

Early Jewish Literature

The origins of Jewish culture in North America can be traced back to colonial times, after Sephardic Jews sought refuge in Nieuw Amsterdam and Newport from 1654 . These foundations were increasingly expanded and strengthened in the 19th century with the immigration of Central European Jews, who mostly belonged to an enlightened Reform Judaism . A considerable amount of decidedly Jewish literature in the USA emerged soon after the arrival of the first wave of mainly Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe after the pogroms of 1831/1832.

Emma Lazarus was the first significant Jewish-American poet to respond to this in 1832 with her Songs of a Semite. The sonnet The New Colossus , composed by her in 1883, was engraved two years later in the base of the newly erected Statue of Liberty in New York and impressively reflected the growing influence of Jewish immigrants.

As in Mary Antin's autobiography The Promised Land (1912), Lazarus, in her greeting to the newcomers, contrasted the negatively drawn image of the Old World with the idea of ​​an idealistically transfigured New World , which was only critically questioned by the following generation of authors.

Yiddish-language literature played an important role in the Jewish families of Eastern Europe, which had already reached a high level of maturity in the 19th century through authors such as Mendele Moicher Sforim . This Yiddish literature also ended up in the United States with the more than two million Eastern European Jews who left their homelands between 1880 and 1920.

The first Yiddish writers to form a " school " in the USA were the "Sweatshop Poets", among whom the most important were Morris Winchevsky , David Edelstadt , Joseph Bovshover , Eliakum Zunser , and above all Morris Rosenfeld . This group had their creative time between 1880 and 1905. In their poems, the “Sweatshop Poets” denounced the inhumane working conditions to which the Jewish immigrants were exposed in the factories on New York's Lower East Side . This revolutionary poetry was followed in 1907/1908 by a new generation of Jewish authors who called themselves “ Di Yunge ” (“The Young”) and who sought beauty in literature rather than social criticism. The leading poets in this group were Mani Leib , H. Leivick, and Moyshe Leyb Halperin , but it also included storytellers such as David Ignatoff and Isaac Raboy .

As the Eastern European immigrants settled in and became absorbed in American society, the authors among them gave up writing Yiddish. One exception is Isaac B. Singer , who was born in Poland in 1904 and grew up in Warsaw, where he began to write stories. He emigrated to the USA in 1935. His stories take place in pre-war Poland and in the camps of Hitler and Stalin or tell of the fate of immigrants from Poland. Singer, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote first in Hebrew, later in Yiddish.

American ideals and Jewish immigrant experience

Jewish-American literature in the first half of the 20th century was particularly shaped by numerous biographies, novels and short stories, in which the fate of Jewish immigrants and the search of immigrants and their descendants for a permanent place in their new, still foreign homeland is discussed. A recurring central motif up to the end of the 1930s was above all the identity conflict in the area of ​​tension between the Old and New World.

The short novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Russian-born author Abraham Cahan , published in 1896, describes the immigrant Yekl's search for identity, which ends in tragicomic form with the protagonist's self-doubt and uncertainty about his future. However, Cahan contrasts the protagonist with the figure of the Talmudic scholar and English teacher Bernstein, who from a critically distant perspective succeeds in reconciling the cultural contrasts. Unlike in subsequent works, Cahan tries in this short novel to translate the typical features of Yiddish into English in order to support his sketch of the Jewish immigrant milieu. In 1917 Cahan took up the issue of the identity conflict of Jewish immigrants in the fictional autobiography The Rise of David Levinsky . The title hero is an Orthodox Russian Talmud student who soon experienced social advancement in the New York clothing industry after immigrating. In doing so, however, he becomes an over-adjusted American “allrightnik” who only recognizes the tensions and contradictions between past and present in retrospect. The loss of his European and Jewish homeland ultimately leads to his self-alienation and disorientation, which, however, is sometimes ironically overlaid by the nostalgic memories and the way the lament is presented.

Without such an ironic distance, Anzia Yezierska focuses on the discrepancy between the ideal and reality of life as an immigrant in the New World in her strongly autobiographical short stories and novels. Already in her first short stories, which were published in 1920 under the title Hungry Hearts , the main character characteristic of her, an intelligent and sensitive immigrant, whose material and ideal hopes or longings cannot be fulfilled in America. Even the protagonist of her 1925 novel Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New fails to build a new life according to her ideas and ideals. After rebellion against her Orthodox father and a college career, she returns to live with her family on the Lower East Side , but experiences that repeated role changes and distancing lead to a painful loss of identity. In her short stories and novels, Yezierska paints a picture of American society, which promises material success and individual self-fulfillment, but cannot offer the emotional security of the old homeland.

The basic pattern of an initially enthusiastic and later critically questioned Americanization established in the works of Cahan and Yezierska was adopted by various Jewish-American authors in the period that followed. In contrast, Samuel Ornitz developed a specific variant of the affirmative model of life in the New World that Mary Antins had previously presented in her autobiography. In his novel Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923), which is counted among the more prominent works of the socialist literary movement and Jewish literature of the time, the picaro and antihero Meyer Hirsch effortlessly adapts to the criminal metropolitan environment and manages to rise as a corrupt judge the top of the New York justice system. Ornitz reckons with the allrightniks in his novel . H. die adapted Jews, as an avowed atheist in his novel, at the same time advocates abandoning the religious traditions and Americanization of Jewish immigrants, albeit under socialist conditions. The narrative style and the depicted excerpt from reality in Ornitz's novel also point to the likewise politically influenced novel Jews without Money (1930) by Michael Gold .

Even the Williamsburg trilogy Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936) and Low Company (1937) by Daniel Fuchs , which appeared in the time of the Great Depression , is set in a shattered milieu that is characterized by poverty, extreme social contrasts as well Exploitation, crime and general selfishness is characterized. The characters involved are equally compelled to look for a value system beyond Jewish tradition in order to maintain their personal integrity in the struggle for survival. In this broken social environment, in which one's own fate and social life can at best be reconnected with remnants of Jewish tradition at best, as in Low Company , Fuchs certainly finds material for humorous scenes or Schlemihl figures that later become characteristic Should be an element of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature of the 1960s.

In his novel Call It Sleep , published in 1934, Henry Roth depicts the life of the Jewish-American immigrants in the immigrant ghettos primarily from the perspective of a child. The novel, which was initially hardly noticed, was only a great success after a new edition in 1960, then found wide recognition and served as a Model for subsequent authors. In his work, Roth combines the issues of the immigrant problem and the generation conflict that had already been posted in a new form; In addition to the ambiguous promises of the New World, the central motifs of the novel include, above all, the opacity of reality and the search for identity. In contrast to the pronounced adaptation strategies of his father, David Schearl, who was six at the beginning of the main story, searches after immigration in 1907 in a series of various initiation trips for points of orientation in a new, hostile social environment in which he feels as an outsider. The multi-layered experiences and impressions are finally connected as a symbolic construction of a new reality in a kind of visionary sleep to a mystical concept that gives David the hope of being able to at least partially determine his future life. In the narrative technique and the form of the apprehension of reality, Roth is based on Joyce and his novel Ulysses , published in 1922 . Furthermore, like other Jewish authors before, he tries to preserve the characteristics of Yiddish in the English language. After a sixty-year break from writing, in 1994, shortly before his death, Roth published the first four volumes of his novel series Mercy of a Rude Stream, originally planned to consist of six works , after having published an anthology of his stories, interviews and letters written between 1925 and 1987 under the title Shifting Landscape in 1987 had been. Mercy of a Rude Stream traces the development of the protagonist Ira Stigman from 1914 to the 1920s in Harlem between Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants. Most of all, Stigman is looking for his own role as a writer; The development of identity is portrayed and reflected in retrospect from the double perspective of the adolescent and the old Ira.

1937 appeared Meyer Levin's realistic novel The Old Bunch, which traces the assimilation process of three generations on the West Side of Chicago ; Meyer Levin had already published a Palestine novel in English with Yehuda in 1931, thus breaking new ground.

Jewish-American existence as a universal metaphor

In the period after the Second World War , Jewish-American literature experienced a fundamental thematic reorientation, which was mainly influenced by two factors. On the one hand, the consolidation of assimilation among authors of Jewish origin led to an increasingly cosmopolitan awareness; on the other hand, the experience of the Holocaust also triggered a return to their own ethnic origin. Against this background, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish-American writers developed a tendency to transcend their own ethnic affiliation into the universal; The specifically Jewish experience of marginality was increasingly understood as an example of the general state of mind of people today and as a metaphor for the alienated existence of modern people.

In addition, within a decade of post-war literature, Saul Bellow , Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth , three first-rate authors and storytellers, whose works received great recognition worldwide and had a lasting impact on the image of Jewish-American literature for more than three decades . At the same time, Jewish prose lost its marginal role and moved to the center of American literary history.

In their novels and short stories, Bellow, Malamud and Roth depict different forms of Jewish-American existence, ranging from emotional and rational-analytical to comical-satirical confrontations with Judaism. Without actually forming a school, these authors feel ultimately ascribed to the Malamud motto, all men are Jews , ascribed to Malamud and sometimes fiercely opposed by orthodox literary critics , according to which the Jewish narrative characters or protagonists are not primarily representatives of a specific religious minority, but universal ones Are representatives of all modern people in their existential condition, whose suffering is representative of that of all people.

One of the outstanding young Jewish-American authors is Cynthia Ozick , who in her prose work particularly addresses the conflict or dichotomy between Jewish culture and tradition on the one hand and artistic-literary work on the other, using newer narrative techniques of postmodernism and forms of metafiction .

Jewish-American drama

Poster for a performance of Counselor-at-Law at the Mason Opera House in 1938

Anti-Jewish riots and the ban on Yiddish theater performances in Russia sparked a massive emigration of Jewish actors and artists from Eastern Europe in the 1880s, which led to Yiddish theater spreading to all parts of the Yiddish-speaking world. Against this background, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a Yiddish theater scene with several competing ensembles established itself in various American metropolises, but primarily in New York, as an integral part of Jewish immigrant culture.

The Yiddish playwrights hardly kept up with their writing; some of them wrote around 200 works. These quickly written pieces were canceled just as quickly; Sometimes the actors wrote their own plays for their actors and were often forced to deliver a new play every week. This resulted in an extensive repertoire of often folkloric and melodramatic pieces, in which current events were taken up in partly peculiar forms. In many cases, the pieces were tailored to the stars of the respective ensembles and were quite popular with the audience. At the same time, however, there was increasing demand for a more sophisticated Jewish theater from both audiences and critics.

The subsequent Jewish-American drama of the 20th century tied on the one hand with this folkloric tradition of Yiddish theater, but on the other hand developed at the same time between tradition and modernity as a reaction to the socially critical impulses of the new realism, which American literature especially since the time of the Great Depression. In the Pulitzer Prize winning play Street Scene (German street scene ) is Elmer Rice in 1929 amidst a naturalistic milieu sketch a day in the life of a Jewish family in a tenement in a New York slum represents a predominantly fractious multi-ethnic residential community; in Councellor-at-Law (1931) he paints the picture of a Jewish lawyer torn between the values ​​of the Old and New World.

The immigration problems in the different generations of a Jewish family are also discussed by Clifford Odets in his play Awake and Sing! thematized. The proletarian living situation of the family is determined by insecurity, constant lack, frustration and alienation; While the 22-year-old Ralph Berger tries to overcome despair through his belief in social change, the dreams and hopes of the other family members, especially the older generation, are mostly destroyed or corrupted by confrontation with social reality.

Arthur Miller made his playwright debut in 1936 with No Villain, which depicts a Jewish businessman struggling with unfair union strategies. Incident at Vichy (1964, Eng. Incident in Vichy ) deals with the issue of resistance and powerlessness among the victims of the Nazi regime and at the same time tries to redefine “being a Jew”. In the 1968 first performed piece The Price (dt. The price ) deals with Miller the question of individual moral responsibility in family and society and brings in the form of almost ninety years of Russian-Jewish antiques dealer Gregory Solomon, a figure from the Jewish tradition of storytelling on stage who counter the materialism of their environment with the value of interpersonal relationships. The theme of the Holocaust takes Miller in 1994 again in Broken Glass (dt. Shards ) and links it to the earlier central question for him of the relationship between private and public area or of interpersonal and political and moral responsibility. The play shows the different reactions of a Jewish couple in New York in the autumn of 1938 to the looming Holocaust, which are ominously related to the characters' relationship problems.

literature

• Jules Chametzsky et al .: Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. WW Norton & Company , Inc., New York / London 2001, ISBN 0-393-04809-8 .
• Kurt Dittmar: Assimilation and Dissimilation. Manifestations of the issue of marginality in Jewish-American storytellers (1900–1970). Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / Las Vegas 1978, ISBN 3-261-02441-0 .
• Lewis Fried (Ed.): Handbook of American-Jewish Literature. An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources. Greenwood Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-313-24593-2 .
• Andrew Furman: Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma. Return of the Exiled. Syracuse University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 978-08156-2846-0 .
• Allen Guttman: The Jewish Writer in America. Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. Oxford University Press, New York 1971.
• Michael P. Kramer, Hana Wirth-Nesher: The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-79293-2 .
• Derek Rubin (Ed.): Who We Are. On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. Schocken, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8052-4239-2 .

swell

1. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here p. 440.
2. ↑ See Franz Link: Jewish narrators. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 93 ff.
3. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here p. 448.
4. ↑ See Franz Link: Jewish narrators. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 95.
5. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here pp. 441 f.
   See also Franz Link: Jewish storytellers. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 93 ff.
6. ^ Dieter Langewiesche, Jürgen Osterhammel, Paul Nolte, Hans Ulrich Wehler: History and Society. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003, p. 122.
7. ^ The Sweatshop Poets. Di Yunge.
8. ↑ See Franz Link: Jewish narrators. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 93.
9. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here p. 442.
10. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here pp. 442 ff.
11. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here p. 444.
12. ↑ For example, the renowned literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler described the novel as "a neglected masterpiece" after its re-publication in 1960.
    See the review in the Spiegel from December 14, 1970: David im Slum. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
    See also Martin Schulze: History of American Literature. Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , p. 551.
13. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here pp. 444 f.
14. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here p. 445.
15. ↑ See Franz Link: Jewish narrators. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 93 f.
    See also Alfred Hornung: Postmodernism to the Present and Heiner Bus: Jewish-American Literature. Both in: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literature history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , here p. 320 and 445.
16. ↑ See in detail Peter Freese : Bernard Malamud. In: Martin Christadler (Ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 112-123, in particular pp. 112 f. and 120.
    See also Alfred Hornung: Postmodernism to the Present - The Jewish-American Novel - Bernard Malamud. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. 2nd updated edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 320 ff.
17. ↑ See the article by Elaine M. Kauvar: Ozick, Cynthia. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , July 2017, available online at [1] , accessed March 9, 2017.
    See also the section The Anxiety of Belatedness in the article by Morris Dickstein: Jewish-American Fiction, also published online in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , July 2017 at [2] , accessed March 9, 2017.
18. ↑ Cf. Brigitte Dalinger: "Trash", "Jargon" and beautiful appearance - Jewish experience / s in the Jewish theater. In: Frank Stern and Barbara Eichinger (eds.): Vienna and the Jewish experience 1900–1938 · Acculturation - anti-Semitism - Zionism. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78317-6 , pp. 427–438, here p. 432.
    See also Brigitte Dalinger: Spielorte und Orte . In: Handbuch Jüdische Kulturgeschichte. C III Theater, online publication by the Center for Jewish Cultural History at the University of Salzburg. Retrieved May 3, 2015.
19. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here pp. 451 f.
20. ↑ See Heiner Bus: Jüdisch-American literature. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 440-453, here pp. 451 f.
    See also Hubert Zapf: The belated genre: the American modern drama. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 283-305, here p. 305.

See also

• List of American writers
• History of the Jews in the United States

Web links

• Morris Dickstein: Jewish-American Fiction. Article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature from July 2017.
• en: Category: Jewish American writers . List of Jewish-American writers.