Saul N. Zaritt. <i>Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody Reviewed by Joseph Ozias</i>

Questions of definition have long haunted Jewish literature—what makes one a Jewish American author? How do these distinct identities overlap and form categories? Saul N. Zaritt rethinks these oft-asked questions by placing Jewish literature, particularly Jewish American literature written in Yiddish or with a Yiddish inflection, under the rubric of world literature. Zaritt begins by turning to an interview of Isaac Singer in which, when asked about what kind of audience he envisions when he writes, he says that he only assumes he could be “talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody” (1). The 1963 interview follows the deaths of countless Eastern European Jews and the decline of the Yiddish language in America as more and more Jews spoke English. While Singer could have simply expressed dismay at the state of the world and the dwindling use of the language, he pivots and instead rests himself and his work in a sort of “limbo.”It is this limbo-like state of existing in the unknown that leads Zaritt to question the ways that Jewish American writers both “conceive of world literature” and ultimately “how they place themselves” either within, outside of, or “in constant motion across and beyond” its “boundaries” (2). He looks to Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Singer, and Saul Bellow to trace their individual encounters with translation, categorization, and world literature. He frames his questions by exploring dilemmas faced by critics trying to “place” Singer and others who write in the Yiddish language; do they simply fall into the emerging category of “Jewish American literature,” or is the answer far more complex?The goal of Zaritt’s book, then, is to offer a model for “understanding the double bind of Jewish American writing in which Jewish vernacularity encounters the instabilities of world literature” (7). This “double bind” often winds up pitting each author’s Jewishness against even more challenging potential terms and categories such as “American” and “world.” Zaritt posits that world literature as a practice tends to “smooth over” differences these categories impose using “translation and normalization,” so he aims to “expose the undecidability of this promise, tracking the entanglement of Jewish writing within a world-system and its simultaneous failure to write beyond Yiddish and beyond being named Jewish” (7). Separated into four chapters, Zaritt’s book explores these questions and dilemmas by focusing on the careers of his four key authors. The first two chapters prove most useful in this regard, highlighting key examples of two very different ways writers might respond to these potential categorizations and the potential goal of universalization.The first chapter focuses on Sholem Asch and the institutionalization of Yiddish literature. Zaritt locates Asch in a conversation about the push and pull between the shtetl and the modern world, in which many authors seemed to view the two as conflicting ideals. He notes that while Asch would have been among the top Jewish authors on anyone’s list during the 1930s, ’40s, or ’50s, Asch’s philosophies, as well as his choice of literary subject, would seem to run counter to what led to success for other “modern writers.” Zaritt argues that Asch’s proposed intersection of the shtetl and the rest of the world was what set him apart. To explore this, Zaritt looks to Asch’s trilogy, Dray shtet, or Three Cities. Zaritt finds that while other authors were presenting their Jewishness “as a vague and ambiguous remnant,” Asch “performed his Jewishness as the condition of his place on the world stage” (39). This distinction is not the only one that Zaritt identifies; Asch’s wide variety of literary subjects, pointing toward a more global direction, serves as an example for how an author might transcend their language and the limitations imposed on them by their critics.Chapter 2 shifts focus to Jacob Glatstein, who would claim that to be a worthwhile Yiddish author you must consider yourself as existing within world literature, whether you are translated into other languages or not. Glatstein’s perspective was in direct opposition to Asch’s goal to write with a translation-oriented market in mind. While jumping from Asch to his near polar opposite in Glatstein, Zaritt expertly showcases just how varied the response among Yiddish writers in America could be. Glatstein highlights the importance of Jewish heritage and maintaining the original language it is being portrayed in; as Zaritt explains, to Glatstein, writing in Yiddish, as well as his identity as Jewish, was necessary for his work to extend beyond national borders. Zaritt examines Glatstein’s response to the merging of Yiddish language literature and world literature at large in the latter half of the 1930s. Glatstein, instead of working toward translation as a means of transcending his critical categorization, worked toward transcending the boundaries of a single genre: he wrote not just what traditionally would constitute “literature,” but poetry and criticism as well. Yidishtaytshn, his 1937 poetry collection, is where much of Zaritt’s reading falls, as it is where Glatstein writes about the tensions between the Yiddish language, translation, and other related themes. Zaritt sees Glatstein then as an essential figure in reworking current scholarship’s “center-margin paradigm,” by challenging recent thinking about the intersection of American and world literature. Glatstein is both within the bounds of American literature and yet cannot comfortably exist there.When Zaritt moves to Singer and Bellow, though, he muddies the waters as the writers’ relationships to both Yiddish and world literature become increasingly complex, and less overt. Zaritt treats Singer first, exploring the way Singer portrays himself as “the last Yiddish writer” and how this makes Yiddish seem like “his gift to the world” (99). This is a strange strategy for, as Zaritt reminds us, other Yiddish writers were still alive and writing alongside Singer. Still, Singer distinguished and separated himself from his contemporaries by rejecting their various mindsets and in the end becoming a more “market-driven” writer who tries to “embed Yiddish within the universal, through the confines of US and world literatures” but, importantly, as Zaritt argues, also “produced a ghost world literature in which his global ambitions coexist with Yiddish specters that refuse to be universalized” (101). When Zaritt finally turns to Bellow, it is a bit tougher to trace the initial thesis and see how Bellow follows the other three discussed authors (Zaritt in fact begins the chapter acknowledging how Bellow’s inclusion might seem surprising at first). Since Bellow balks at any categorization, it is already difficult to imagine him fitting into this conversation as Zaritt explains it. The “double bind” that Zaritt has referred to throughout the book was more readily apparent for the other writers. Here, Zaritt calls it a “hidden” double bind, acknowledging the difficulty of reading Bellow this way. Additionally, Zaritt’s discussion of these four authors leaves out very important female voices. While Zaritt does explore authors like Grace Paley and Anna Margolin, they are relegated to the epilogue; Zaritt explains this relegation, noting that “writing toward the world” in the way he claims Glatstein, Asch, Singer, and Bellow do, “often requires a specific gender performance” (155). Despite his treatment of these authors in the final pages, the earlier chapters could have done more to point toward this issue and included these authors in more depth.Despite this, and the counterintuitive final chapter, Zaritt’s book would be of interest to anyone studying the complicated roots of strained terms such as “Jewish American literature,” “Yiddish literature,” or “world literature” and the way they intersect. Contained in these pages is an exceedingly helpful dive into the way some of the major figures of modern Jewish American literature respond to, reject, or embrace this convergence, with the competing models of Sholem Asch and Jacob Glatstein being the standout revelation.