Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (review)

Bpok Reviews 169 complete with Yiddish accent, stubbly beard, yarmulka, and comically exaggerated head and hand movements. An RSC production oftwo decades ago contrasted Patrick Stewart's mean and miserly Shylock with a dignified Tubal (the play's only other Jewish male), greying at the temples, wearing frock coat and high hat, and disapproving ofhis vulgar fellow Jew. Victorian antisemitism, like othervarieties, feared the wealthy, cultivated Hebrew and mocked the grubby unassirnilable "kike." Despite its narrow focus on a single play, this thoughtful book, written in a graceful jargon-free prose, shows how that one work provided late Victorian culture with a powerful tool for thinking about (and avoiding) the question of how to deal with its women and Jews. Michael Shapiro Department of English University ofIllinois atUrbana-Champaign Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller Budick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 252 pp. $54.95. In this richly textured scholarly work, Emily MillerBudickprobes the relations between Jewish- and African-Americans as expressed in modem literature. As a former American, a religious Jew living in Israel, Budick believes she stands outside of the conundrumofthe African-American-Jewish-Americanrelationship atan "ideologically informed critical distance" (p. 6) and, therefore, can tease out aspects ofthe relationship that are taken for grantedby the engaged participants. Her work is particularly plangent because she implies that much ofJewish-American ethnic writing reveals a "failure to consolidate ethnic identity within the Jewish community itself' (p. 12), a fact that is in dramatic contrast to the African-American community whose "careful course ofcultural preservation and separateness ... succeeded in transforming our idea ofAmerica" (p. 6). Budick's intention is to illuminate the ethnic identities of African- and JewishAmericans by examining their "mutual construction" ofidentity in literature. However, what lifts Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation from a merely literary discussion is her insistence on an implicit comparison between Jewish-American identity and "that other national identity that proved for many Jews (the writer of this study included) irresistible ... the state ofisrael" (p. 150). For Budick, the difficulties Jewish-Americans face in constructing an identity in this pluralist society are epitomized by Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, the novel that provides the paradigm for Budick's literary critique. Malamud's novel ends with two tenants of the same house, both writers (one black and one Jewish), killing each other in a violent and horrible way. Unlike most other critics who explicate the obvious confrontation, Budick chooses to examine Malamud's treatment of Jewish material in the novel to illustrate "thefailure ofAmerican Jews to consolidate an American identity that preserves Jewish content" (p. 13). The "most Christian" of the major modem 170 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 Jewish-American writers, Malamud, Budick argues, not only "resisted being labeled a Jewish American writer" (p. 13) but in his use ofthe universalizing metaphor ofthe Jew as sufferer, subordinates Jewish identity to Christian theological tradition. This metaphor , "all men as Jews and all Jews as Christs" (p. 15), underpins the inability of Malamud's Jewish character, writer Harry Lesser, to move out ofthe building in which he is a tenant and to finish the book on which Lesser has been working for many years. In Budick's reading, Lesser faces a sterile future because ofhis identity confusion: "the problem that Malamud's Tenants and the other texts that stand behind it raise is whether universalism includes or excludes, expresses or denies, the different ethnic groups it would subsume" (p. 52). Lurking behind this novel, Budick claims, is the socio-cultural dialogue between Jewish- and African-Americans aboutwho shouldhave cultural dominance in America, a debate that informed both Malamud's authorial intentions and the critical reaction to the novel. The history ofthe exchange begins in media res with the angry response of Ralph Ellison and other African-American intellectuals to the assumption of cultural hegemony by Jewish-American critics, a response triggered by Irving Howe's declaration that Richard Wright was the "quintessential black writer" (p. 21). Ellison argued that Howe, although claiming the position ofoutsider, ultimately supported the existing white power structure and that, while Jewish-Americans identified with the oppression ofblacks, the Jewish relationship to white American culture was...