Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody

252 Pages·2020·1.921 MB·English

by  Saul Noam Zaritt

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/09/20, SPi
Jewish American Writing and World Literature
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/09/20, SPi
oxford studies in american literary history
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor
Family Money The Moral Economies of
Jeffory A. Clymer American Authorship
Susan M. Ryan
America’s England
Christopher Hanlon After Critique
Mitchum Huehls
Writing the Rebellion
Realist Poetics in
Philip Gould
American Culture,
1866–1900
Living Oil
Elizabeth Renker
Stephanie LeMenager
The Center of the World
Antipodean America
June Howard
Paul Giles
Unscripted America
Making Noise, Making News
Sarah Rivett
Mary Chapman
Forms of Dictatorship
Territories of Empire Jennifer Harford Vargas
Andy Doolen
Anxieties of Experience
Propaganda 1776 Jeffrey Lawrence
Russ Castronovo
White Writers, Race Matters
Playing in the White Gregory S. Jay
Stephanie Li
The Civil War Dead and
Literature in the Making American Modernity
Nancy Glazener Ian Finseth
Surveyors of Customs The Puritan Cosmopolis
Joel Pfister Nan Goodman
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/09/20, SPi
Jewish American Writing and
World Literature
maybe to millions, maybe to nobody
Saul Noam Zaritt
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/09/20, SPi
1
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© Saul Noam Zaritt 2020
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First Edition published in 2020
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{ Acknowledgments }
The writing of this book was made possible due to grants from the Memorial
Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship at
the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, the Vladimir
and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial
Fellowship in East European Jewish Literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research, the Arete Fellowship at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Friedman
Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis,
Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, and the Freed Research Fund at the
Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.
Excerpts from University of Chicago Papers by Saul Bellow are courtesy of the
Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, used by
permission of The Wylie Agency LLC, copyright VC 1976 by Saul Bellow.
Portions of an earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in the article “The World
Awaits Your Yiddish Word: Jacob Glatstein and the Problem of World Literature,”
Studies in American Jewish Literature Vol. 34, no. 2, 2015, pages 175–203, ©2015 The
Pennsylvania State University; this article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania
State University Press. Sections from Chapters 3 and 4 were included in “Maybe
for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability
of World Literature,” American Literary History Vol. 28, no. 3, pages 542–73. This
article is used by permission of Oxford University Press.
I feel fortunate to be able to say that a good amount of what follows is the result
of sustained dialogue with teachers and colleagues in seminars and at conferences,
in offices, bars, and cafes, in living rooms and dining rooms, and through various
technologies digital or otherwise. For their generosity and insight I am grateful to
Nasia Anam, Dina Berdichevsky, Svetlana Boym, Menachem Brinker, Leyzer
Burko, Madeleine Cohen, Daniel Costello, David Damrosch, Jeremy Dauber,
Morris Dickstein, Dean Franco, Luis Girón-Negrón, Rachelle Grossman, Stefanie
Halpern, Adriana X. Jacobs, Raphael Koenig, Annette Lienau, Barbara Mann,
Adam Zachary Newton, Avraham Novershtern, Allison Schachter, Benjamin
Schreier, Marc Shell, Mariano Siskind, Samuel Spinner, Adam Stern, David Stern,
Susan Suleiman, Karolina Szymaniak, Miriam Udel, Anna Wainwright, and Sunny
Yudkoff. I am also thankful to my grandparents, parents, and brothers (and their
families) for sustaining and cultivating a shared love of language—certainly some-
thing of our many conversations found its way into these pages.
Jewish American Writing and World Literature was first a dissertation but is now
a much different thing, and I have largely Gordon Hutner to thank for it.
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vi Acknowledgments
His demand for clarity—on the level of the sentence, paragraph, chapter, and
book—was instrumental in the book’s reformulation. I also want to acknowledge
the anonymous peer reviewers, whose critical insights helped me better articu-
late the ambitious claims of the book. I am grateful to Aimee Wright, Eleanor
Capel-Smith, Christine Ranft, and Katie Bishop at Oxford University Press for
their attentive editorial work.
This project began somewhere in the two or three feet between the offices of
David Roskies and Alan Mintz. They both share what Alan, of blessed memory,
once called a “polemical enthusiasm,” a form of collegiality in which an interlocu-
tor constantly challenges your ideas with the goal of extending the conversation
rather than proving one thing or another. This polemicism has a warmth to it,
doubling as an eager yet modest invitation to continue talking. My hope is that this
book does just that.
Finally, my infinite gratitude to my comrades Mihaela Pacurar, Miriam Pacurar,
Eliška Pipšimaus, and Tsilke Dropkitten.
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{ Contents }
Note on Transliteration and Translation ix
Introduction: Jewish American World-Writing 1
1. A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the
Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature 36
2. A World Literature To-Come: Jacob Glatstein’s
Vernacular Modernism 67
3. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature 99
4. Between Heaven and Earth: Saul Bellow and the Dialectics
of World Literature 128
Epilogue: Anna Margolin, Grace Paley, and the
Politics of Listening 151
Endnotes 163
Works Cited 215
Index 237
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/09/20, SPi
{ Note on Transliteration and Translation}
In transliterating Yiddish text I have generally utilized the system established by
the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. For proper names I have preserved con-
ventional spellings that widely circulate in English-language scholarship rather
than render them through the transliteration system (e.g. Sholem Asch rather than
Sholem Ash).
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.