The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction ed. by David Brauner and Axel Stähler (review)

Despite its size and scope, and its self-declared ambition to “deghettoise Jewish fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a more meditative than assertive volume.¹ In part this diffidence arises out of the book’s commendable desire to question its own terms (“Modern,” “Jewish,” “Fiction”), albeit this questioning takes place alongside the admission that, as Mark Shechner puts it in his preface, “[e]ven in literary studies we live by branding” (viii), and, for practicality’s sake if nothing else, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. For editors David Brauner and Axel Stähler, this line is definitely not a hyphen: that habitual conveyor of “hybridised identity,” as in the descriptors “Jewish-American” or “British-Jewish” (5), has been eschewed not only by Brauner and Stähler but also by other recent editors of comparable (though more expressly American) volumes.² The hyphen is rejected by Shechner, too, as exclusionary, used “less to describe a literature than to fence out the unwelcome: no Dickens, no Melville, no Hemingway” (xvi). I am not sure where Dickens, Melville, or Hemingway would fit in the gap where the hyphen once stood, but it makes sense that these sequential adjectives are more neutrally descriptive than their forebears. A further reasonable step is Brauner and Stähler’s division of the book into three sections, “American Jewish Fiction,” “British Jewish Fiction,” and “International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction.” The editors explain that they intend “Jewish” to be the main adjective, to be modified by “American,” “British,” and so on, in order to avoid the “de facto hegemony that American Jewish literature has enjoyed within Jewish studies,” and to offset the misconception that all Jewish literature must somehow be a subset of American literature (5).

In this, Brauner and Stähler are certainly successful: simply the fact of covering such a rich variety of works from all over the Jewish world unsettles, if it does not utterly topple, the hegemony they notice. Surveying and summarizing a wealth of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book mostly steers clear of those authors we might expect to be at the center of such an examination, focusing instead on female writers, on works that are the product of less familiar migration patterns than the “usual” diasporic journeys, on more obscure authors and stories that will likely be unknown even to expert readers. When familiar American Jewish figures like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow do appear, they are seen from an unaccustomed angle: Aimee Pozorski, for instance, finds Roth’s Patrimony to be “as much a Holocaust memoir as it is a memoir of Roth’s confrontation with his father’s cancer diagnosis, illness and death” (64), and she reads it alongside the anti-Semitic tradition that associates Jews with disease. Sasha Senderovich looks at the “self-orientalisation” of Soviet Jews in works by Jewish writers from the USSR like Gary Shteyngart and David Bezmozgis; while Sarah Lightman explores the questioning possibilities of the Jewish graphic novel, suggesting that “[c]omics, with their ongoing negotiation of text and image on each individual page, parallel the theme of a constantly changing sense of identity and [. . .] a fluctuating relationship with God” (121). Victoria Aarons looks at the emergence of Roth, Bellow, and Bernard Malamud as American Jewish short-story writers against “the backdrop of a radically changing American ethos” (51), movingly connecting the emergence of this hyphenated—though not, any longer, literally hyphenated—identity with that of the conflicted and, we might say, conflated clerk in Malamud’s The Assistant: “I suffer for you . . . I mean you suffer for me” (51).

The section on British Jewish fiction deals with works that are largely less known, but whose description and analysis here suggest that their relative obscurity is undeserved. Following David Brauner’s Post-War Jewish Fiction (2001), for instance, it seems essential for Roth scholars to read novels as closely related to...