Literature

An analysis of Jewish American Literature and what the term implies with some special reference to Elie Wiesel’s Night.

In this essay I will discuss the difficulties in defining Jewish American Literature as a genre.  I will show that there are direct links between the growth of Jews as Americans and their acceptance into the mainstream of American Literature.  I will examine the term ‘Jewish American’ both in its position in a paradigm and through its oppositions.  In this essay I will also ask whether the genre is not merely reflective of a culture, but also in some part deliberately constructed with a view to defining a place for the Jew in modern America.  I will go on to discuss whether Elie Wiesel’s Night has undergone a similar construction with a view to assist the defining of a post-war America’s position in the wider world through its adoption as American Literature

The difficulties involved in defining a genre are manifold and can even include what would initially seem the simplest of tasks, naming the genre.  Chametzky et al have chosen to use the adjective Jewish as a prefix in their label Jewish American Literature.1 Other critics such as Harap have opted for the reverse with American Jewish Literature.  Harap asserts that ‘what is determinative is not the name, but the contrast’.2 Here at least, Chametzky would seem to agree when he states that the term Jewish in the context shown here is a ‘distinguisher’ that ‘merely modifies’ the label American Literature.  Chametzky goes on to suggest that the choice was merely one of conformation, of completing a paradigm already in existence with other modified canons such as African American Literature, Irish American Literature and Asian American Literature.  If it is true that we define ourselves both through connection with and in opposition to others, then the same must be true of our literatures.

Rene Descartes, in his search for what is true, began by dismissing every idea for which he could find the smallest doubt.3 Having, he thought, rejected everything, he found himself with one remaining truth.  He decided that his thoughts alone proved his existence and further concluded that the ability to think had been provided by God.  That this is a gift from God may or may not be true, but one thing is certain, Descartes would not have thought at all, at least not in any fashion he could have conveyed so eloquently, without language.  It has been said that, ‘No journey, no life, no narrative ever really begins.’4 Our self-awareness joins the discourse in medias res, in the middle.  From that point forth, we are defined by our position in the wider structure of things.  Similarly, ‘I’ cannot exist on its own.  It is not autonomous and can only exist in relation to others.  For a Jewish American to exist, there needs to be a cultural juxtaposition or, in structuralist terms, a binary opposition.  As we have seen, Chametzky argues that it is a paradigmatical chain that exists with Jewish American, African American, Irish American and so on.  However, if we are to look for further definition of Jewish American Literature, we might suggest that the paradigm above contains a contradiction in as far as the ‘others’ are not only familial, but also in opposition by virtue of the fact that collectively they form another group in Gentile Americans.

In the centuries prior to the twentieth, Jewish authors writing in English were not accepted into the mainstream of contemporary literature.  Accounts of the Jewish existence in early Christian Europe – 90% of Jewry at this time was of Eastern European origin – were read with interest, but novels written by Jewish Americans in an American context were rarely accepted into the canon.5 Yudkin tells us that the problem of Jewish authors breaking into the mainstream was one of relevance.  In the 1920s, for instance, we see a Jewish American literature filled with themes such as inter-marriage.6 It might be suggested that themes such as these could only serve to marginalise a group in the ‘melting pot’ that is America.  This kind of open display of fears of integration, as though the rest of America was not worthy, may have been seen as offensive to the population at large.  However, from inside the Jewish community these themes would have served to reflect a collective fear of their own demise in America through cultural assimilation.7 As we will go on to see, the fears of this mainly immigrant population would to some extent be dissipated over the coming years.

Another reason the Jewish population would have felt marginalised in the early part of the twentieth century would have been their lack of shared experience with the wider American population.  To a large degree, the depression of the 1930s could be said to have unified America.  Most communities when faced with adversity will rally at least on some kind of spiritual level.  The Jewish heritage of suffering may have in some part helped to accommodate feelings of similarity between their community and the nation at large.  It is this theme, amongst others, that is examined in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.  The Bober family are undoubtedly Jewish, but, it can be argued, their Jewishness is not integral to all themes in the novel. Although set in post-war America rather than the depression, we see in this novel a collision between two men down on their luck.  It is true that the assistant in the story does become a Jew, but we could suggest that we also see a young man learning from his adopted father figure and taking his place as his improvement as a man reaches its climax upon the death of that paternal replacement.  Looking at the novel this way, we could almost lift this story and place it down in any racial setting.  It could be argued that it is Maurice Bober’s experience of suffering as a Jew that is the good influence on the younger Frank, but, equally, we could dismiss his Jewish background and still be left with an older, wiser man passing on his experience to an impatient younger man.  Also in Malamud’s novel, we can see a truer melding of the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘American’.  Unlike the novels of the 1920s discussed earlier (themes of mixed marriages), in The Assistant we see a Jew, Maurice, hold a higher moral position than the American, Frank, but, in an interesting development compared to the judgemental earlier novels, we also see the delinquent, Frank, bring to Maurice a reminder of the American dream in practise.  Maurice, due to historical events, seems committed to the idea that suffering is part and parcel of being a Jew.  It is Frank that is ill inclined to cast the suffering of his past in a long-term role in his life.  Frank has had bad luck, some of his own making, but he doesn’t allow himself to believe that it always has to be that way.  Maurice’s daughter is an American born Jew and in her we see the same beliefs as Frank holds, yet she is tied to her father not just because of Jewish family values, but also because of Maurice’s attitude vis-a-vis his lot in life.  Through Malamud’s characterisation of the daughter in The Assistant, we see a time of arrival through the progeny of the immigrants, of a second generation of Jewish Americans.

No longer burdened with either labels or the feelings of inadequacy or displacement of the immigrant, the second generation saw the American section of the Diaspora further dispersed.  By the 1940s, the Jewish population saw themselves as ‘part of the national fabric’.8 They were also to become the largest and most affluent Jewish community in the world.9 It is here that we see the ‘entering of the Jew’ into novels.  No longer were they caricaturised as stock, clichéd characters, but instead they were seen to take centre stage in some works.  However, the use of Jewish terminology in everyday language that began to surface in novels could be said to be one of the clearest indicators of how far the Jew had travelled in his journey of re-settlement.  No longer did mainstream authors feel the need to include a clarifying explanation of Jewish – mostly Yiddish – vocabulary.

In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, we see a novel that could to some degree attempt to reconcile the Jew with America and halt the flow of the idea that acculturation would mean the end of the Jewish race in their new found home.  In The Chosen, we see Potok adopt a device he goes on to use in other novels.  The catalyst for all that follows occurs within an environment one could describe as wholly American.  In this instance, the catalyst is an act of violence between two boys that occurs during a baseball game.  The use of baseball places the novel very much into context.  The novel is quite clearly American.  By making the main protagonist, Reuven Malter, a hard working American Jew with an open mind and juxtaposing him with the traditionalist Hasidim, we see the progressive America faced against the stalwarts from the East.  Inevitably, the East has to concede ground to the modernist America when Reb Saunders’ son, Danny, elects to relinquish his inherited destiny to become the next Tzadik in favour of becoming a psychiatrist.  By making this choice, Danny is confirming the Malter position that one can remain a faithful and observant Jew while still having your slice of the American dream.  A Jew that had felt the need to separate himself from his heritage to survive in America may be swayed by Potok’s convincing argument.  Also, in The Chosen, we discover the theme of Zionism that is also attached to the Malter’s through the campaigning of the father, Reb.  This positioning by the author places Zionism directly within his construction of the Malter’s as the liberal centre-ground.

The acceptance of the Jew into mainstream literature brought its own set problems in the eyes of some in the Jewish community.  Writers such as Bellow, Saul, Roth and Miller reject the prefix Jewish to their positions as authors.  They see it as reductive and wish to be seen as fully fledged members of the American literary world.10 They want to be seen to be as American as the next writer and feel as though this label will marginalise them.  What they have to say in their writing, they feel, should not be disadvantaged in its aim of reaching a wider audience by the inclusion of a prefix that could tend to suggest that their material is only relevant to a specific section of the reading public.  The following quote from Bellow could suggest that he did not feel the need to have his identity propped up by attaching Jewish to his American literature.  Harap reports, ‘I’ve [Bellow] never had a moments trouble with my identity.  I’ve always known what my identity is.’11 Equally, Roth has ‘doubted that Judaism or Jewishness determined his identity’.12 Yudkin contends that it was cultural assimilation that caused a crisis of identity amongst Jewish writers and the Jewish community. It could seem that those who wish to keep difference or otherness alive in Jewish American Literature have an agenda quite apart from the purely literary value of the various works alone.  Perhaps it is response to the attitudes of the authors mentioned above that others in the Jewish community feel the need to actively maintain a Jewish identity by constructing a Jewish literary culture.

The voice of America could be said to have been constructed from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) root.  Even though the largest religious sector in America is the Catholic one, WASPs have been at the core of the governing class.  As the controllers of what Marx called the means of production, it is the WASP ideology that has become prevalent.  With this in mind, we might further see why a body of critics and writers would wish to assemble a Jewish literary tradition.  An inherent part of Judaism is the fact that they do not evangelize in as far as they do not canvas for members.  It is a faith based on birthright and because of this they consider themselves a nation.  This has made them appear insular and has brought scorn upon them, but to a Jew it is considered a very important aspect with regard to protecting the faith.  However, as we will go on to see, a time came when the national good and the Jewish good came together in the shape of the Holocaust.  This common goal of promoting both the Jewish and American causes, we will show, is a primary reason why Elie Wiesel’s Night became part of the American canon.

Cunliffe suggests that ‘one can properly distinguish between English and American literature’.13 Matthew Arnold, however, thought otherwise when he stated that ‘we are all contributors to one great literature – English literature’.14 From Arnold’s claim we could argue that the existence of American literature, let alone Jewish-American literature, is a purely pedantic one.  We might ask how else we could account for a book written by a Hungarian in two other languages, Yiddish and French, being adopted by the American literary canon if not only because of its translation in to English.  This would seem to suggest that all a work needs to be considered American is the offer of publication in the American market.  This idea would seem too simplistic when discussing Night, so we should be inclined to look for further motivation behind its adoption.

Prior to the outset of the Second World War, America believed itself to be self-contained and somewhat insular in its politics (Mexicans, amongst others, may have disagreed).  After the war some sought to return to this way of life.  However, the war, or more accurately the victory, combined with the military supremacy displayed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave America the prospect of achieving the kind of global dominance it had previously ignored.  To unite a country toward a common goal, a common enemy has often been the glue used to bind the people.  Adhesive devices may come in several different forms from political indoctrination through fear, as seen in the McCarthy witch hunts, as well as through more subtle endeavours such as literary works.  Prior to the First World War, books such as The Riddle of the Sands were used to this effect in Britain.

Cunliffe also suggests that in 1960’s America ‘the national mood was nervous, aggressive, defensive, lost’.15 In a social study at the time David Riesman posited that Americans had become ‘other-directed’ whereas their predecessors had been ‘inner-directed’.16 Struggling with its new role as the world’s most powerful force, America sought a new identity that would suit its switch from insularity to global player.  As a result, the country found itself to be ‘a nation of no fixed standards or beliefs striving to resemble their next door neighbour’.17 It was perhaps in this cultural disarray that we see a reason for the splitting of America into groups and an emergence of cultural centred literary canons.

In his brief biography of Wiesel, Chametzky posits that ‘the burden of Elie Wiesel’s…writing has been to guide the world at large…toward silence in the face of an unspeakable event; the Nazi genocide, the European Jewish catastrophe’.18 In this statement what we see most clearly is that the ‘European Jewish catastrophe’ was not an American event.  We have seen that America has to some degree become the centre of the world at large.  Washington, for instance, is known by many as the capital of the free world.  With the term ‘free world’ we create an opposition in ‘a world that remains captive’.  This opposition in place, we must also assume that once the remainder of the planet is freed, Washington will become the capital of the entire world.

The Jewish community achieved a level of higher national importance in the post-war years.  As we have seen, they became more affluent and with affluence comes an increased share in political power and, as we have seen with the infiltration of Jewish (Yiddish and Hebrew) language, an increased influence upon the national ideology. Also, the post-war acquisition of Israel served this growth as did the economic demand of America which saw Jews being offered jobs in previously ‘closed door’ work situations.19 In Israel, Jews had a homeland; they could be from somewhere, no longer the roaming parasitical race they were often accused of as being.

Wiesel cut his novel from an eight hundred page initial print in Yiddish to the one hundred page version we know today. He said later that the style had to be “austere” and “sober,” as “pure as a police report’20.  With this reduction we are left with a novel that is almost completely void of any accusatory references.  Wiesel is content to tell the story only as it affects the Jews he describes in the concentration camps.  He would have been more than entitled to have vented his anger against those responsible, but, as we will see, this exclusion may have been exactly why it was adopted by the American canon.

Wiesel’s story of hell in the camps with its absence of a scathing assault on the German race could be said to have left it with an adaptable quality.  The novel could be said to argue that evil exists wherever it is perpetrated; that wherever there are crimes against humanity, the holocaust in some part is still alive.  Wiesel himself visited Russia during the cold war as a witness to the plight of soviet Jewry.21 In this visit we see the author of Night placed in such a position that we might feel an association between Russia and the holocaust.  With the Russians in Berlin, constructing them as the new Nazis may have seemed the natural choice by the Americans.  Already the saviours of the world, who else should adopt the role of father and protector than America and what better a cause to fight against than that of those that would commit the atrocity that was the holocaust.

Wiesel has always been firm in his belief in the uniqueness of the Holocaust. He wrote, ‘It never happened before. It can be compared to no other event’.22 This uniqueness can on some level be seen as an attractive proposition for adoption by an America that is setting out its stall.  A new country leading a new way may have found such a unique and altruistic cause almost impossible to refuse.  In contrast to Night’s lack of a stance with regard to blame, Wiesel once said that they [every Jew] ‘should set apart a zone of hate — healthy, virile hate — for what the German personifies…’23 As we have suggested, this view, with the Germans defeated, was transposed upon the new enemy, the USSR, and it can be further suggested that ‘every Jew’ became every American in the pursuit of that cause.

It has been said that Night has become ‘almost an article of faith’.24 St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that an article of faith is ‘any revealed supernatural truth which is distinct in itself from other such truths but which unites with them to form the organic whole’.25 We might ask ourselves, with Aquinas’ definition in mind, whether the holocaust has become, in some way, part of Judaism itself rather than just part of Jewish history.  America could be said to have adopted the holocaust as a cause célèbre.26 In a country where free speech is considered an inalienable right, it has become illegal to publicly deny that the holocaust happened.  As the Jewish population in America is a tiny percentage, it seems reasonable both to question why the country took the opportunity to pass this law and to posit the idea that it may have been just one more part of America’s adoption process with regard to the holocaust.

Arriving at a firm conclusion in such a small examination as this would be disrespectful to the process of literary classification, but nevertheless, we can make some generalisations regarding the question.  We have seen in the argument of Chametzky a cultural need for the Jewish community to clearly define their position in the American literary world.  We have also seen that the development of the Jewish American novel is not only reflective of Jewish experience as Americans, but also, at times, has sought to define a role for the community that allowed them to be both Jewish and American.  We can assume that there is such a thing as a Jewish American novel for two clear reasons that we have seen in this essay.  The first is that there has been a clear and consistent discourse on the matter.  Discussion alone would tend to suggest that there has to be a tangible topic.  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we have seen authors such as Potok set out with the clear intention of producing such works.  Furthermore, in Elie Wiesel’s Night we have seen a novel that is clearly not American.  It neither features Americans nor is it situated within America, yet it has been firmly placed within the American canon.  Through this positioning we have seen that literature need not depict a national experience to be included in that nation’s culture.  Night, it would appear in some part, gained its place through America’s desire to be seen as the opposers of tyranny.  The novel’s non-accusatory stance left it open to be applied to evil no matter where it existed.  God died in Elie Wiesel’s camps and was resurrected in America.

Bibliography

Bennett, Andrew, and Royle, Nicholas, An Introduction To Literature, Criticism and Theory, 3^rd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2004)

Brown, Robert McAfee, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity, (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)

Chametzky, Jules ed. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)

Cunliffe, Marcus, The Literature of The United States (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967)

Descartes, Rene, Discourse On method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1968)

Franciosi, Robert ed. Conversations (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002)

Harap, Louis, Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 1900-1940s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)

Harap, Louis, In The Mainstream: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 1950s-1980s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)

Malamud, Bernard, The Assistant (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)

Potok, Chaim, The Chosen (London: Penguin Books, 1970)

Potok, Chaim, The Promise (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970)

Silber, John, http://www.holocaust-history.org/codoh/silber-letter-01.shtml 6 January 2006

Wynne, John J. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01755d.htm 6 January 2006

Yudkin, Leon Israel, Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1982)

Wiesel, Elie, Night (London: Penguin Books, 1981)