Friday, January 13, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
A merican Jewish Literature Studies
By CHARLES MADISON
NEW YORK — "Studies
in American Jewish Litera-
ture" (State University of
New York Press) is the third
annual periodical of volume
length, edited by Daniel
Walden, devoted to Jewish
writers and writing. In this
instance it is mostly about
women in Jewish literature.
In the ,brevity of a book
review one can hardly do
justice to the content and
quality of 20 articles, some
of them dealing with a
single writer, and others
concerned with the success
or failure of Jewish women
characters. The natural
tendency of certain con-
tributors, not always self-
controlled, is to depict his or
her subject in the most
favorable light.
In writing about Anna
Margolin, for instance, the
only woman writing in Yid-
dish in this anthology,
Norman Pratt Fein, over-
states her favorable evalua-
tion when she asserts that
Margolin was "among the
finest Yiddish poets in
America during the early
20th Century." This of
course ignores such notable
poets as Yehoach and
Leivick, to mention only
two.
On the other hand,
some of the essays treat
quite critically writers of
prominence.
Abraham Cahan's depic-
tion of women and marriage
in his fictional writing is
discussed by Susan Kress.
Because Cahan was a
realist, and his setting is in
the early 20th Century
when Jewish immigrants
were crowding one another
in the onerous effort to gain
a foothold in their new
environment, he is shown to
write on both subjects as
they reveal their conflicts,
prejudices, jealousies and
limitations.
Four contributors write
about Anzia Yezierska who
as an adolescent had come
to the Lower East Side from
Russia. Settling in her
dingy and drab environ-
ment, working at menial
jobs while learning English,
but early dedicated to writ-
ing, she was soon composing
stories about the dire pov-
erty and dinginess of her
environment.
of
fiction
Writing
"passionate rhetoric" and
sentimental content, she,
after several efforts, suc-
ceeded in getting an editor
to accept one of her stories.
Thus encouraged, she soon
wrote "Hungry Hearts," a
novel characterized by sen-
timentality and melod-
rama, with stock char-
acters, heartless foremen,
and "charity ladies."
The story happened to
fit well the current film
requirements and was
bought by a Hollywood
firm for $10,000. This suc-
cess brought her to the
height of her popularity.
Her later fiction had the
same basic plots, with
strong contrasts in setting
and characters, and she ap-
pealed less and less to the
increasingly Americanized
Jewish reader. She contin-
ued to write to the end of her
life, but was forgotten long
before her death at the age
of 69.
The contributors, with all
good intention, agreed that
she did not belong to the
mainstream of Jewish liter-
ature in English.
Although "Studies in
American Jewish Litera-
ture" was to deal primarily
with Jewish women in fic-
tion, Ralph Melnick's arti-
cle on Ludwig Lewisohn is
included because he
stressed Lewisohn's deep
attachment to his mother,
which is rather forced since
such attachement was not
an uncommon experience in
homes in which the mother
is the more positive char-
acter in the family.
As a librarian in Char-
leston, where Lewisohn
grew up, it is to Melnick's
credit that he was able to
find and discuss the
school material written
by Lewisohn in his
adolescence.
Dena Mandel's essay de-
lineates Grace Paley's fic-
tion as the work of an
Americanized second-
generation Jewess who left
her conventional Jewish
environment and outlook to
devote her writing to social
protest and the peace
movement.
Ada Aharoni, Alan
Chavkin and Sanford Pins-
ker make Saul Bellow's
women the subject of their
essays. Although their
evaluations vary in insight
and merit, they clearly
stress that his women char-
acters tend in general to be
lonely, masochistic and not
fully realized.
This criticism is also
made in the two essays on
Bernard Malamud. Barbara
K. Quart states that his
characters "are isolated
men, and that his women
are set at a conscious dis-
tance . . . despite the intense
passion, lust, yearning, di-
rected at them." Thus "a
peculiar obliqueness char-
acterizes the way his heroes
relate to women," women to
whom they become
peripheral; creatures to love
in the abstract, but with the
heart "surprisingly cold
toward a known woman."
Malamud's men indeed
suffer from "intrinsic
passivity," though some
overcome it and attain a
desirable positiveness.
The contributors also
indicate that Malamud's
male characters are mar-
ried to their work.
His men, like Bellow's,
are critical of women, find
them dissatisfied; thus
neither writer succeeds in
creating three-dimensional
female characters, which
give their fiction an effect of
ambiguity and, in
Malamud's case, voy-
eurism. Their work as a
whole is of course admired
for its literary excellence.
Barry Gross's thesis
favors Philip Roth's
Portnoy's mother, seeing
her as a foil against the
-
more Americanized Jewish
mothers. He contends that
Roth measures his parents
against Jewish American
stereotypes, and his satiric
treatment of his mother im-
plies praise for maintaining
the morality of decent living
not easily found among
Americanized Jews.
Cynthia Ozick's Jewish-
ness and her desire to rec-
reate her own personal Yid-
dish literary past are the
subjects of Deborah H.
Weiner and. R. Barbara
Gitenstein. They also deal
with Ozick's problem of how
one can be a non-religious
writer and a Jew.
They indicate that
Ozick is generally critical
of western civilization
because it opposes Greek
ideals against those held
by Jews. In her youth;
strongly influenced by
the writing of Henry
James and modern art,
she tended to disdain the
world of her Jewishness.
Once she matured as a
writer, however, Ozick
turned back to her inner
self, and what she termed
idolatry in any form became
her deep concern and fear as
a threat to contemporary
Judaism. As she stated,
"Nature offers ease . . . His-
tory offers the hard life."
Nature is tempting, she
admitted, but Jewishness is
one's heritage and is aban-
doned at one's peril.
She is therefore critical of
other Jewish writers for not
being Jewish enough. She
struggles to be both: a
writer of magical prose and
a Jew.
Marilyn Goldberg writes
sympathetically about
writer Norma Rosen's
search for her authentic
Jewish soul — its essence
and nature. S. Lillian Kre-
mer's essay on Rosen stres-
ses her absorption in the
horror and meaning of the
Holocaust and its effect
upon her psyche.
"Emma Zunz: A Kab-
alistic Heroine" by
Jorge Luis Borges is the
subject of Edna Aisen-
berg's contribution.
"Studies in American
Jewish Literature" has
some very good writing and
critical astuteness. Inevita-
bly uneven in content and
quality, the volume as a
whole contains an inform-
ative analysis of Jewish
writing and provides a gen-
eral view of its scope and
character.
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