(Reviewer: Roy Robins, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century (2010) is an enormous and informative compendium of capsule biographies and concise critical essays on notable novelists, essayists, playwrights and poets. In the book’s foreword, editor Sorrel Kerbel abdicates herself from the admittedly impossible task of defining the Jewish writer. Indeed, to condense Jewish literature into a cluster of ideas and ideals is reductive, even offensive. And yet to deny the humanity, originality, intelligence and restless re-invention of so much of Jewish writing is equally short-sighted.
Jewish Writers is prefaced by five introductory essays: ‘American-Jewish Literature’ by Mark Shechner; ‘British-Jewish Literature’ by Bryan H. Cheyette; ‘Hebrew Literature in the 20th Century’ by Leon I. Yudkin; ‘Holocaust Writing’ by Sue Vice; and ‘Yiddish Writing in the 20th Century’ by Joel Berkowitz.
Shechner’s self-consciously idiomatic prose is appropriately muscular and rewardingly robust: ‘The children and grandchildren of butchers, grocers, peddlers, junk dealers, garment workers, even rabbis and scholars, came of age all at once in a kind of Jewish baby-boom and elbowed their way into the cultural arena by the force of their ambitions and the keenness of their intellects.’ The sentence echoes, in tone as well as theme, the opening line of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953), one of the most influential Jewish-American novels of the last century: ‘I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.’ Shechner praises the pre-Augie March Bellow as a stylist – he admires the ‘rhythmic and melodic tonalities’ of the author’s first two novels – while I would argue that he was anything but. Shechner argues that Bellow was ‘at his best as a writer when desperate and uncertain.’ But cannot the same be said of all artists?
In his essay, Cheyette looks at the limitations of Jews writing in, and about, Britain, and notes that ‘Jews have had to fight Britishness throughout their careers, and sometimes Britishness wins.’ He counsels writers to ‘transcend’ their ‘Britishness’, and to ‘use their Jewishness to extend the range of the novel in England well beyond its more parochial concerns.’ He asks, ‘What is it about Britishness that is so deforming?’ – a question answered recently and thoroughly by Anthony Julius, in Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010).
Yudkin’s essay examines modern Hebrew literature, from early experiments with streamof-consciousness to the innovative narrative techniques employed by contemporary writers such as A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz. The surveys by Vice (which takes note of everyone from Anne Frank to Aharon Appelfeld) and Berkowitz are equally incisive.
The book’s more than three hundred and thirty author essays vary in quality greatly. Several of the entries on British and North American writers are – to use Augie March’s word – a little too ‘freestyle’. Stephen Wade’s essay on Woody Allen shifts between easy sentiment and poststructuralist claptrap. Wade claims that Allen ‘textualizes the Representative Jew’, an assertion that is likely to make sense to no one. He writes that ‘Allen’s concerns with Jewishness in his major work are always difficult to access as his dominant methods are the application of parody and irony.’ But parody and irony, one could argue, are as valid and accessible entry points into critical analysis as any. Wade unintentionally demonstrates how difficult it is to give critical attention to comic writing, to place the ridiculous under the microscope of the serious (or, in this instance, self-serious).
Richard Tuerk’s entry on Saul Bellow eschews analysis in favour of endless synopsis. One feels as if one is being buried under a mountain of crib notes. ‘Summarizing the plots of Bellow’s work,’ Tuerk writes, ‘hardly does them justice.’ Quite.
In her entry on Steven Berkoff, Sally Whyte describes her subject as a ‘mesmerizing actor/ director’, as though she is writing a profile for her high school newspaper. In other words, there are instances when these essays are too academic, and instances when one wishes them to be more so.
Contributor Richard Crownshaw views the novelist Paul Auster’s work exclusively through the lens of Holocaust fiction (I suspect this entry began life as an essay on that subject, but it is injudicious to include it here), which is hardly representative of Auster’s oeuvre. There exists, then, an imbalance: Crownshaw’s thesis is narrow, while the book’s intention is broad. The result is to marginalize and misrepresent Auster, a writer who has many significant influences, themes and techniques.
Fortunately, the majority of these entries are lucid, rigorous and insightful. For contributor Gerald de Groot, E.L. Doctorow is ‘a master stylist without an individual voice’, an accurate assessment, which functions as both praise and rebuke. Edward A. Abramson is refreshingly critical of Bernard Malamud, whose ‘best writing focuses on Jews. When he turns to other groups – Italians, African Americans, WASPS [sic] – a certain edge is missing’. For contributor Louise Sylvester, Howard Jacobson (last year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize) ‘epitomizes the AngloJewish writer who holds both parts of this identity in equally unhappy juxtaposition.’ Linda Grant (herself an acclaimed novelist) assesses Andrea Dworkin with admirable sensitivity, while Alex Gordon’s entry on David Mamet is as compelling as one of his subject’s plays.
Kerbel (whose own entries on Marcel Proust and Isaac Babel are especially astute) should be commended on taking risks with some of her selections. For example, Norman Ravitch’s essay on Leonard Cohen is one of the best in the book. For Ravitch, the young Cohen was ‘an odder Bob Dylan, a less soulful Van Morrison, a more street savvy Nick Drake, forcing his love of popular forms into the most serious of artistic shapes.’ Ravitch’s entry works so well because his prose is elastic and imaginative, appropriately hip and inarguably informed, at once compact and somehow expansive.
Jewish Writers includes strong entries on French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese and Russian writers. Kerbel is a native South African, and the book includes essays on Sydney Clouts (by his wife, Marge Clouts), Nadine Gordimer (by Marcia Leveson), Ronald Harwood, Dan Jacobson and Sarah Gertrude Millin.
What, then – if anything – constitutes Jewish writing? Shechner comes perhaps the closest to an answer, when he notes that ‘[i]t would be a wonder if the trials of history were not reflected in literature and were not indeed the very heart and soul of it, not only in its themes but in its very character as a form of expression – its nervousness, its vividness, its fluxions of emotions.’ Literature is integral to Jews (the People of the Book), and Jews in turn are integral to literature, past and present, as this valuable and often vibrant volume attests.
Roy Robins was a 2010-11 Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts fellow. He was formerly the online editor for Granta magazine. He holds an MA degree in English Literature.
