Encyclopedia of Jewish-American literature

Encyclopedia of

Jewish-American

literature





Encyclopedia of

Jewish-American

literature



Gloria L. Cronin

Alan L. Berger

Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature

Copyright © 2009 by Gloria L. Cronin, Alan L. Berger

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information

storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information

contact:

Facts On File, Inc.

An imprint of Infobase Publishing

132 West 31st Street

New York NY 10001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cronin, Gloria L., 1947–

Encyclopedia of Jewish-American literature / Gloria L. Cronin, Alan L. Berger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6085-6 (hc : alk. paper)

1. American literature—Jewish authors—Encyclopedias. I. Berger, Alan L., 1939– II. Title.

PS153.J4C76 2008

810.9’8924003—dc22 2008007872

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for

businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Depart￾ment in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755.

You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com

Text design by Rachel L. Berlin

Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi

Printed in the United States of America

VB KT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper and contains 30 percent postconsumer recycled content.

Introduction vii

Acknowledgments xi

A Survey of

Jewish-American Literature xiii

A-to-Z Entries 1

Primary Source Bibliography 332

Bibliography of

Secondary Sources 345

List of Contributors 362

Index 364

Table of

Contents



vii



About This Volume

The entries in this volume introduce more than 100

Jewish-American writers and their literary works.

The majority of these writers are American-born,

with some notable exceptions: Saul Bellow was

born in Canada, Isaac Singer in Poland, and Elie

Wiesel in Romania. Bellow and Singer spent most

of their lives in America; Wiesel continues to live in

America. Bellow and Singer were both Nobel lau￾reates in literature, while Wiesel is a Nobel Peace

Prize winner. Their disparate voices have helped

weave the complex fabric of Jewish-American

literature, while at the same time expressing the

relationship between Jewish particularity and the

tradition’s universal message of freedom as articu￾lated in the master narrative of the Exodus. This

narrative is also emphasized by other writers, such

as Emma Lazarus, a Jewish-American poet, whose

poem “The New Colossus” appears on the base of

the Statue of Liberty, which after 1886 welcomed

new immigrants to American shores. Most of the

Jewish-American authors in this book, like most of

the Jews in America, trace their roots to the Ashke￾nazim from eastern and central Europe, although

some few claim descent from the Sephardim of

Spain and North Africa.

Defining a Jewish-American Writer

Given the long history and many wanderings of the

Jewish people, we might well wonder what the term

Jewish-American means. The long-standing debate

concerning just who qualifies as a Jewish writer has

often been symbolically embodied in the argument

over whether to refer to oneself as an American￾Jewish author or a Jewish-American author. The

three major Jewish writers from mid-to-late-20th

century, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip

Roth, all at one time strenuously rejected the label

“Jewish writer.” Malamud even universalized the

definition of Jewishness, which he might have

characterized as the ability to grow morally as a re￾sult of suffering. Roth has aggressively contended

that he has no desire to do public relations for the

Jewish community. Of the three, only Bellow finally

acceded to being labeled a Jewish-American writer,

and then only near the very end of his life. All three

asserted strongly that they wrote about issues cen￾tral to the human condition. However, the current

stress on ethnicity and multiculturalism within the

American academy and Jewish America’s rediscov￾ery of its Judaic religious dimension have caused

the debate to flare up again. Wendy Shalit, in her

recent critique of American literary portrayals of

Introduction

viii    Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature

Orthodox Judaism, divides writers according to

their status as “outsiders” and “insiders.” She then

dismisses what she calls “Outsider insiders.” These

are Jews she calls the formerly Orthodox, or those

pretending to be religious. She sanctions only works

written by insiders who paint favorable portraits of

Orthodox Judaism. (See “The Observant Reader,” in

the New York Times Book Review, January 30, 2005.

For an intelligent discussion of this article, see Sara

R. Horowitz’s “Mediating Judaism: Mind, Body,

Spirit and Contemporary North American Jewish

Fiction” in the AJS Review 30, No. 2, pp. 231–253.)

This formula is too rigid to encompass all of Jewish

expression and omits the variety within Orthodoxy

itself. Shalit’s prescription is not likely to have much

long-term impact on Jewish-American writers, al￾ways notorious for being iconoclasts.

For the purposes of this volume, a Jewish￾American writer is of Jewish origin, resident in

America, aligned or not aligned with Jewish reli￾gious life in North America, and generally accul￾turated as a Jewish person. Practically speaking,

however, the writers included in this volume are

all self-identified as Jewish Americans and incon￾testably considered Jewish-American writers by

the American publishing industry, scholars, and

the reading public. Not surprisingly, these writ￾ers reflect a wide variety of attitudes toward Jew￾ish religion, ritual, and culture. What they hold in

common is their shared sense of their Jewish and

American heritages.

The Scope of This Book

We have designed this volume for high school and

college readers, academics and their students, and

the general public; to that end, we have reexam￾ined the scope of Jewish-American literature. The

important Jewish American Literature: A Norton

Anthology (2000) gives considerable weight to the

very early beginnings of Jewish-American litera￾ture and the pre-1970s moment but in some ways

fails to reflect the veritable explosion of Jewish lit￾erature of the last 40 or so years. This encyclope￾dia, although informed by history, takes its shape

from the thinking of the post-1960s American

cultural studies movement, committed to redraw￾ing the expanding American literary map subse￾quent to the civil rights movement, the women’s

movement, and the multicultural movement. We

have concentrated primarily on writers of fiction,

poetry, and drama, those genres most likely to be

of interest to teachers and students in high school

and college-level literature classes. By necessity,

we have left out the equally rich body of Ameri￾can Jewish literary and social documents: letters,

personal journals, Yiddish theater, song, radio,

television, and film script, despite their powerful

shaping influence on the American imagination.

Thus we have gone beyond the Norton anthology’s

emphasis on the very earliest beginnings of this

tradition, by giving deliberate weight to the tradi￾tion that emerges during the decades leading up to

and following World War II, the rapidly escalating

Jewish-American literary tradition of the second

half of the 20th century, and the remarkable liter￾ary energy evident in this, the first decade of the

21st century. We have also given much attention

to the post-1980s resurgence of Jewish-American

women writers, the second and now third gen￾eration of post-Holocaust writers, postmodern

writers, the so-called Jewish-American Literary

Revival, and the New York Resurgence. By carefully

considering the literary outpouring of the last 30

years, we hope to provide a snapshot of the richest

decades of Jewish-American literature and a clear

sense of the literary accomplishments of the chil￾dren and grandchildren of the decades dominated

by Bellow, Roth, and Malamud.

Useful Resources

We recommend several other useful resources for

users of this encyclopedia. The 1654–1880 period

is most thoroughly covered in Jewish American

Literature: A Norton Anthology (2000), which

also covers the 1950–70 period reasonably well.

Its headnotes are truly indispensable. The three￾volume critical history by Louis Harap—Creative

Awakenings: Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century

American Literature 1900–1940s, In the Main￾stream: Jewish Presence in Twentieth Century

American Literature 1950s–1980s, and Dramatic

Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-

Introduction    ix 

Century American Drama, Poetry, Humor and the

Black-Jewish Relationship—contains very detailed

coverage on the early history of this tradition.

Andrew Furman’s Contemporary Jewish American

Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of

the Exiled (2000) provides useful multicultural

critical/historical treatment of the post-1980s

writers and their works. Ezra Cappell’s important

American Talmud (2007) connects the contempo￾rary tradition of Jewish-American literature with

the ancient theological and ethical tradition of

Talmudic Midrashric commentary. Alan L. Berg￾er’s Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in Ameri￾can Jewish Literature captures the tension between

historical theology and the hovering presence

of the Holocaust while exploring the usefulness

and transformation of the traditional theologi￾cal understandings in the post-Holocaust world;

Berger’s Children of Job: American Second Genera￾tion Witnesses analyzes the international transmis￾sion of trauma and the role of covenantal Judaism

in the works of daughters and sons of Holocaust

survivors; Alan and Naomi Berger’s Second Gen￾eration Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust

Survivors and Perpetrators extends the study of

trauma by featuring essays of children of Jews and

Germans. Gloria L. Cronin and Blaine H. Hall’s

Jewish American Fiction Writers: An Annotated

Bibliography is an extensive collection of materials

that cover the critical conversation on 62 Jewish

American authors.

Note: Many of the entries in this book on Saul

Bellow and his works are adapted and expanded

from Gloria L. Cronin’s previously published work.

xi

ab

Acknowledgments

This volume is lovingly dedicated to Professor

Dan Walden and his wife, Bea, in acknowledgment

of Dan’s foundational work in Jewish-American

literary scholarship and of their gracious friend￾ship to us all.

Our gratitude goes to the many contributors

to this encyclopedia, coming as they do from a

variety of backgrounds and religious traditions,

for their shared passions for Jewish-American lit￾erature. Their keen insights into the works and

authors about which they write provide the sub￾stance of this volume.

Special thanks are also due to Robert Means,

humanities librarian of the Harold B. Lee Library

at Brigham Young University; Andy Schultz and

Jack Mallard in Gloria Cronin’s office, for their

invaluable editing, technical assistance, and proj￾ect management; Bonnie Lander in Alan Berger’s

office, for her superb administrative assistance;

and our Facts On File acquisitions editor, Jeff

Soloway, for his astute guidance.

Gloria L. Cronin

Alan L. Berger

xiii

ab

A Survey of Jewish-American

Literature

Jews in American History

Jews originated from the desert cultures of the Mid￾dle East more than 4,000 years ago. Their history

and their literary culture find form in the Hebrew

Bible (or TaNaK), the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the

Midrashim. These are the beginning and founda￾tion of what would eventually become Jewish lit￾erature. Its American incarnation, however, came

after millennia of political autonomy, self-division,

eventual dispossession, exile, and dispersion under

the various empires of the Egyptians, Assyrians,

Persians, Greeks, and Romans. As recently as 900

c.e. the Jews began their European sojourn, some

settling in Spain, or elsewhere in Iberia, and others

in Italy, France, and Germany. Iberian, or Spanish,

Jews came to be called Sephardim, and developed

over time a Judeo-Spanish language known as La￾dino, as well as their own unique rituals. The Jews

who settled in central Europe became known as

Ashkenazim. These people developed the Yiddish

language and their own distinctive ritual life. With

the Christian persecutions of Jews in western Eu￾rope during the Crusades and during the plague

of the 14th century, Jews moved from central and

southern Europe into eastern Europe to live in small

villages, or shtetls. Mostly isolated from a large part

of Europe, they maintained their Yiddish language

and their intense devotion to their religious culture

and Hebrew sacred texts. By the 19th century, they

constituted the single-largest group of Jews living

anywhere and had created such famous centers of

learning as Vilna, Slobodka, Galicia, and others. By

this time, a Yiddish literary culture, oral and writ￾ten, was highly developed. Yiddish is a development

of Middle High German, with approximately 15

percent of its lexicon deriving from Hebrew and

Aramaic, with additional traces of Old French, Ital￾ian and, eventually, Slavic. It is that rich linguistic

archive containing more than 1,000 years of Euro￾pean Jewish culture that waves of Jewish immigrants

brought to America, the Golden Land, beginning in

the 1880s. After relative isolation in Europe, these

essentially medieval, orthodox, and mostly Hasidic

Jews arrived in America in an increasing flood. Many

of them had been dislocated by pogroms (govern￾ment-sanctioned violence) unleashed against them

in the political aftermath of the assassination of the

Russian czar Alexander II. Today, the descendants

of both Sephardic Jews and the more numerous

Ashkenazim continue to thrive in the United States,

though assimilation has taken its toll.

1492–1880: Jews and

American Settlement

Jewish history in the New World began with the ar￾rival of the Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus

in 1492. This was well before John Smith estab￾lished Jamestown in 1607 Virginia and well before

the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The

first European Jew to set foot in the New World

xiv    Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature

(actually Cuba) was Christopher Columbus’s inter￾preter Luis de Torres. Though Torres spoke Spanish

and Hebrew, and knew Aramaic, Arabic, and Latin,

he disappointed Columbus because he was unable

to communicate with the “Natives.” The falling

out with the Natives that followed caused Torres

and several other Spanish Marranos (“swine,” or

crypto-Jews forced to convert to Christianity, who,

nevertheless, secretly held to their Jewish faith)

to remain behind with him. Hence, in 1492 Tor￾res and his coreligionists became the first Jews to

settle in the New World. News quickly spread that

Jews were settled and trading lucratively in the New

World. As the Spanish Inquisition took an increas￾ingly violent toll of Jews, (they were compelled to

convert to Christianity or be killed), many Spanish

and Portuguese Jews soon migrated to the Ameri￾cas. In the American Southwest, Spanish Marranos

participated in the 16th-century conquest of these

desert territories. Jews were also settling in Virginia

as early as 1621, just one year after the Pilgrim fa￾thers landed in Massachusetts. In 1654, 23 Dutch

Jews fleeing Recife, Brazil, from which they had

been expelled when Portugal recaptured the col￾ony from the Dutch, arrived in the Dutch colonial

port of New Amsterdam on the French ship Sainte￾Catherine. This ship was known later to Jewish his￾torians as the “Jewish Mayflower.”

Jews also sought to settle in New Amsterdam,

later called New York, then only a wretched, muddy

fort settlement that had been founded in 1625 by

the Dutch West India Company. This small settle￾ment of 1,500 people, mainly involved in the beaver

pelt trade, was rimmed by rough wooden palisades

designed to repel Algonquin Indians. Its north side

eventually became the famous Wall Street, home

of the New York Stock Exchange. Peter Stuyvesant,

then director general of Colonial New Amsterdam,

sought to bar the Jews from New Amsterdam, rely￾ing on the traditional Christian anti-Semitic belief

that Jews were enemies of Christ. The directors of

the Dutch West India Company located in Amster￾dam overruled Stuyvesant on both financial and

moral grounds. The directors wrote Stuyvesant:

“[M]any of the Jewish nation are principal share￾holders” in the West India Company. Addition￾ally, they noted the “considerable loss” suffered by

the Jews in Brazil. The directors therefore decreed

that Jews could “travel, trade, live, and remain” in

New Netherland as long as “the poor among them

shall not become a burden to the company or to

the community, but be supported by their own

nation” (Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A

History, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

2004, p. 2). By 1680 the first Jewish burial ground

in the United States was established in what is now

Chatham Square, lower Manhattan. The year 1682

saw several Jewish trading posts scattered along the

Delaware River into southeastern Pennsylvania.

With the arrival of William Penn that same

year, and the founding of Philadelphia as a toler￾ant Quaker city committed to religious freedom,

Philadelphia became the first real center of Jewish

settlement in America in the 18th century. From

this amazingly tolerant city the beautiful Jewish

society figure Rebecca Gratz (b. 1781) emerged as

a brilliant letter writer. A noted philanthropist, she

planned the first Hebrew Sunday school in Amer￾ica. There were also Jews in the Port of Charleston

early in the 1680s, and by 1702 Carolina Jews were

able to vote in elections. Unfortunately, those Jews

who settled in Louisiana in 1724 have left almost no

record of their lives. In 1706 the New York Jewish

community established Kehilot Kodesh Shearith

Israel, Holy Congregation, Remnant of Israel, the

oldest Jewish congregation in America. Once the

British took over the colonies, the rules of wor￾ship were relaxed and other Jewish congregations

began to form. The Massachusetts Bay colony of

Rhode Island, founded in 1635 by Roger Williams,

and the Providence Plantations on Narragansett

Bay, became early colonial American refuges for

Jewish pioneers.

By 1759 the Newport congregation of Jeshuat

Israel had begun to build the Touro Synagogue,

now a national historic site. Jewish merchants

began arriving in Boston during the early 1700s.

By 1776 several Jews enlisted as soldiers during the

Revolutionary War. In Charleston, South Carolina,

Jews quickly numbered among the Southern gen￾try, and many even owned slaves. In the Southeast,

Mississippi, and Alabama, Jews settled before 1783