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American Jewish Fiction Further reading: Schulberg’s Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (1981) offers the author’s real-life experiences, as far as he remembers them. He wrote a number of other novels and nonfiction studies, but his other enduring contribution to American culture was the screenplay for On the Waterfront (1954), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando. Other authors who have handled the Jewish experience of Hollywood in various eras include Leslie Epstein, Albert Goldman, and Daniel Fuchs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32pJewish Cowboy [Der Yidisher Kauboy] By Isaac Raboy YIDDISH: ICUF, 1942. 311 PAGES. ENGLISH: TRANSLATED BY NATHANIEL SHAPIRO. TRADITION BOOKS, 1989. 297 PAGES. From Edward Meeker’s turn-of-the-century vaudeville routines to Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), the notion of a Jewish cowboy has long been a source of hilarity. But to the Yiddish novelist Isaac Raboy, being both a Jew and a ranch hand was no joke: Raboy spent a couple of years laboring on a North Dakota farm, and the autobiographical protagonist of his novel Der Yidisher Kauboy does the same, partly in the hopes that “by demonstrating his skills and his willingness to work hard, he would salvage the good name and reputation of the Jewish people.” Jewish Cowboy is not, then, as one might expect, a fish-out-of-water comedy, but rather a sensitive coming-of-age story. Hewing closely to the author’s real-life experiences, Raboy’s protagonist, Isaac (“Eye,” for short), ships out to the North Dakota prairie after graduating from a New Jersey agricultural college. This academic training supplements the intimate knowledge of horses he picked up during his Bessarabian boyhood, and the North Dakotans he meets remind Isaac of Eastern European peasants, so he isn’t completely unprepared for the exigencies of farm life. At the same time, much of what the young man knows about the West derives straight from the movies, and his academic training is not respected by the farmers. As one of his professors writes in a recommendation letter, “Isaac knows more about horses than he knows about himself”—or, for that matter, about other people. So while he bonds with the farm’s prize stallion, he has more trouble with the exploitative and anti-Semitic ranch owner; the other hired hands; and the only two women in sight, the owner’s kindly Chicagoborn wife and a young woman who is basically an indentured servant, both of whom fall in love with the young Jew from the East. The novel’s minor plot intrigues—pay disputes, farming accidents, stifled emotional revelations—provide a frame for Raboy to explore his interests in the development of Isaac’s poetic sensibility, in the eternal exploitation of the working classes and minorities by the rich, and, most of all, in the nobility of horses and physical labor. After being labeled a “dirty Sheeny,” Isaac abandons North Dakota and returns to his family in New York, suggesting how difficult it 52 would have been for a Jew to make a life on the prairie. At the same time, though, Raboy demonstrated how seductive the dream of the frontier was to him and to his readers, milking his stint on the farm for literary inspiration over and over, treating it in his first novel, Herr Goldenbarg (1913), and in his memoirs, as well as in Jewish Cowboy—which is, for the time being, the only one of his books available in English translation. Further reading: Raboy was associated with the Yiddish literary cohort Di Yunge, and his novels dealt with farm life in Connecticut (1918’s Der Pas fun Yam) as well as more typical urban and old-country stories. Aside from the standard Yiddish-language sources, biographical material on Raboy can be found in Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature (1972). Recordings of Meeker’s slapstick vaudeville hit “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy” can be found widely online, but both of the silent films titled The Yiddisher Cowboy, from 1909 and 1911, have probably been lost to posterity. The Frisco Kid (1979) and HBO’s series Deadwood offer more recent takes on the role of Jews in the Wild West. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33pThe Family Carnovsky By I. J. Singer YIDDISH: MATONES, 1943. 518 PAGES. ENGLISH: TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH SINGER. VANGUARD, 1969. 405 PAGES. Israel Joshua Singer was born in Poland, but he had already been living in the United States for 10 years, and had been an American citizen for 4, when he first published...

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