Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse

by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, Rachel Rubinstein, David Aberbach

Overview

Over the past four decades Ruth R. Wisse has been a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies in North America, and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society, culture, and politics. In this celebratory volume, edited by four of her former students, Wisse’s colleagues take as a starting point her award-winning book The Modern Jewish Canon (2000) and explore an array of topics that touch on aspects of Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.

Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon brings together writers both seasoned and young, from both within and beyond the academy, to reflect the diversity of Wisse’s areas of expertise and reading audiences. The volume also includes a translation of one of the first modern texts on the question of Jewish literature, penned in 1888 by Sholem Aleichem, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of Wisse’s scholarship. In its richness and heft, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon itself constitutes an important scholarly achievement in the field of modern Jewish literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674025851
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Series:	Harvard Center for Jewish Studies / Yanoff-Taylor Series
Pages:	750
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Justin Daniel Cammy is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College.

Dara Horn is the author of the novels In the Image and The World to Come.

Alyssa Quint is Professor of Jewish Literature, Princeton University.

Rachel Rubinstein is Jeremiah Kaplan Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish-American Literature and Culture, Hampshire College.

Marion Aptroot is Professor of Yiddish Culture, Language, and Literature at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.

Jeremy Dauber is Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Michael Kimmage is Associate Professor of History, Catholic University of America.

David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, and Irina Reyn.

Jed Dewey Wyrick is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at California State University, Chico.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

Part I: Making a Canon
• Writing Jewish
  Hillel Halkin
• Knocking on Heaven’s Gate: Hebrew Literature and Wisse’s Canon
  Alan Mintz
• Holocaust Literature: Foreshadowings and Shadowings
  David Aberbach
• Of Jews and Canons: Further Thoughts
  Ilan Stavans
• A Jewish Artistic Canon
  Ezra Mendelsohn
• Judging The Judgment of Shomer: Jewish Literautre versus Jewish Reading
  Justin Cammy
• The Judgment of Shomer or The Jury Trial of All of Shomer’s Novels
  Sholem Aleichem, translated by Justin Cammy

Part II: Reading Wisse’s Canonical Authors

• Daniel Deronda: “The Zionist Fate in English Hands” and “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews”
  Edward Alexander
• The Pleasure of Disregarding Red Lights: A Reading of Sholem Aleichem’s “Monologue ‘A Nisref’”
  Dan Miron
• The Hershele Maze: Isaac Babel and his Ghost Reader
  Sasha Senderovich
• The Open Suitcases: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Ven Yash Iz Gekumen
  Avarham Novershtern
• Seductions and Disputations: Pseudo-Dialogues in the Fiction of Isaace Bashevis Singer
  Miriam Udel-Lambert
• Gimpel the Simple and on Reading from Right to Left
  David G. Roskies
• Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Short Story “Androgynous”
  Susanne Klingenstein
• Building Bridges Destined to Fall: Biological and Literary Paternity in Appelfeld’s The Ice Mine
  Philip Hollander
• Life/Writing: Aharon Appelfeld’s Autobiographical Work and the Modern Jewish Canon
  Naomi B. Sokoloff
• Henry Roth, Hebrew, and the Unspeakable
  Hana Wirth-Nesher
• The Modern Hero as Schlemiel: The Swede in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
  Michael Kimmage

Part III: Conversations Across Canons and Between Texts

• Innovation by Translation: Yiddish and Hasidic Hebrew in Literary History
  Ken Frieden
• Creating Yiddish Dialogue for “The First Modern Yiddish Comedy”
  Marion Aptroot
• The Smoke of Civilization: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Di Klyatshe
  Marc Caplan
• Yiddish Canon Consciousness and the Dionysiac Spirit of Music
  Jed Wyrick
• Joyce’s Yiddish: Modernism, Translation, and the Jews
  Rachel Rubenstein
• The Transmission of Poetic Anger: An Unexploded Shell in the Jewish Canon
  Janet Hadda
• Guilt, Mourning, Idol Worship, and Golem Writing: The Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon
  Emily Miller Budick

Part IV: Interventions: Expanding Wisse’s Canon

• What’s So Funny about Yiddish Theater? Comedy and the Origins of Yiddish Drama
  Jeremy Dauber
• Naked Truths: Avrom Goldfaden’s The Fanatic of the Two Kuni-Lemls
  Alyssa Quint
• Memory as Metaphor: Meir Wiener’s Novel Kolev Ashkenazi as Critique of the Jewish Historical Imagination
  Mikhail Krutikov
• Shmuel Nadler’s Besht-Simfonye: At the Limits of Orthodox Literature
  Beatrice Lang Caplan
• Chava Rosenfarb and The Tree of Life
  Goldie Morgentaler
• Fiddles on Willow Trees: The Missing Polish Link in the Jewish Canon
  Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
• The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and the Challenges to the Modern Jewish Canon
  Leah Garrett
• Israeli Identity in a Post-Zionist Age
  Yaron Peleg

Part V. Writers, Critics, and Canons

• Bellow’s Canon
  Jonathan Rosen
• The Eicha Problem
  Dara Horn
• The Grand Explainer
  Cynthia Ozick
• Ruth Wisse Bibliography
• Contributors