In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

african americans and jewish americans S tarting in the early twentieth century with Jewish participation in Civil Rights organizations, but with much increased intensity from the 1960s on, a wealth of books, articles, and editorials has been published as part of an ongoing discussion about the nature of African American and Jewish American relations. By 1984, the volume of this debate as conducted in writing was such that Lenwood G. Davis could publish a book-length bibliography, Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, 1752–1984. The debate simply takes as its starting point that there is a relation between African Americans and Jewish Americans, and one might say that even if there had not been one, by now it would have been created by the very discussion itself.1 Much of that post-1960s debate acknowledges some historical similarities between the experience of Jews in the Old World and that of African Americans in the New, but then focuses on areas of friction between both groups in the U.S., especially in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The point of departure for this study, however, is the presence of literary similarities between African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories in the early twentieth century which exceed what could be solely explained by direct sociohistorical correspondences and are instead the result of the way both African American and Jewish American authors have conceptualized the “ethnic situation” in which they have found themselves. (I will discuss my use of the term “ethnic” in the second part of the introduction.) “Similar ” differs from “identical,” of course, and more notably, the issue of “race” and its social repercussions defies any easy comparison. That the ethnic situations are far from identical in the case of these two groups, however, only highlights that there are striking thematic correspondences between a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories, particularly in the way they conceive of ethnicity. INTRODUCTION I argue that the similarities between the three pairs of novels examined here—James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself, and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers—can be explained mainly with reference to two factors which are ultimately intertwined: cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman genre. To understand African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories of the first half of the twentieth century, it is not enough to look either at ethnic nationalism or at literary form, but one needs to consider the intersections of both. In exploring the relationship between African Americans and Jewish Americans, historians have often looked at African American/Jewish American relations in the early part of the twentieth century. Hasia Diner, for example, has studied interrelationships between Jews and African Americans in her 1977 book (republished in 1995) In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935, in which she focuses on the way Jewish Americans “used black people to construct their own identity in the United States” (xiii). In contrast to Diner, I am not concerned with how each group perceived the other, but with how each perceived itself. Literary critics have mostly focused on texts produced after World War II, on the literary and intellectual debate between authors, and on how the two groups imagined each other. Adam Zachary Newton, for instance, in Facing Black and Jew (1999), juxtaposes mostly post–World War II African American and Jewish American texts so that they may illuminate each other as he explores the “allegorical story about culture and nation” they tell (16). While I also am interested in culture and nation as reflected in texts, my method is more thematically oriented, more interested in direct similarities, and closer to the “invention of ethnicity” paradigm than is Newton’s book. Emily Miller Budick’s Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (1998) takes as its theme “how writers construct their separate, ethnic identities, textually, in relation to each” (1–2), and the texts she examines are all post–World War II as well, since as she says, “Jewish-black Dialogue as such does not commence in earnest until the 1960s” (10). Though Jeffrey Melnick agrees, in his excellent 1999 study A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song 2 : introduction [18.222.115.179] Project MUSE...

Share