On Jewish Literature: A Polemical Position Paper

I come to the study of Jewish literature from an odd position—not an entirely unique one, to be sure, but one that has clearly (mis?-) shaped my own thinking on the subject. Setting aside my Grouchoesque (and Woody Allenish) desire not to be the member of any club that would have me as a member, my path was set by my parents' utter lack of anything having to do with Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. We might want to read this as a classic case of assimilation, denial, self-hatred, except for the fact that both had reason for their disregard. My father grew up in pre-Nazi Germany the son of a banker (who won an Iron Cross in World War I, then lost everything in the 1920s) and a department-store heiress; they went from being hautes bourgeoises to menial workers more or less overnight. The economic catastrophe of the Depression was as nothing to my father, however, as the arrival of the Nazis, following whose ascent he was defined for the first time as irrevocably rather than contingently Jewish, and sent from Gymnasium to a cheder for education. There, he encountered teachers who resented the assimilated upper-middle class of Hamburg as much, perhaps more, than they did the Nazi overlords; whenever Dad made a mistake he'd be hit on the hands so many times they bled, which only intensified the punishment. He responded by making his own freedom—long bicycle trips to Denmark, a sense of liberation rather than exile when my grandmother sent him to stay with an old beau in Manchester; affirmation of status in the United States, where he changed his name from Friedmann (man of Peace) to Freedman (newly freed man). As for my mother, she didn't to the best of my knowledge encounter her own Jewishness until she was farmed out as a charity case to family friends by her desperate traveling salesman father following her mother's nervous breakdown; she felt as humiliated by not knowing a word of the prayers the foster family chanted every night as by their evident ease, wealth, and condescension. Her way out of Brooklyn was English literature: she fell in love with Jane Austen while an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, so much so that she named the Irish setter we adopted after the novelist, so much so that she read and reread all of Austen's novels until her death, even while beset by a case of dementia so bad that she barely recognized her surroundings.

Given both of these trajectories, it would be hard for me to escape my parents' lack of Jewish self-identification. I avoided the usual rituals of male Jewish identity formation in the suburbs—Hebrew school, bar mitzvah training, Jewish summer camps—without a single thought. As I continued to do: when Rabbi Arnold Wolf famously indicted, on Kol Nidre, to their faces, the Jewish critics at Yale who were my teachers for abjuring their connection to Jewish life, I felt the normal sense of pleasure at the discomfiture of my professors, but not at all included in the indictment. Indeed, I was actually at my psychiatrist uncle's house that night, the house where my cousin once famously served ham for a Passover seder (all other meats being sold out in the Upper West Side, what else was she to do?). ¹

So on the one hand, Jewish I was not. On the other hand, could any of the facts I have outlined above be any more Jewish? Near-radical assimilation, Nazis, hideous melamidim, escape, diaspora, intermarriage, intramarriage (my father was a German Jew, my mother, the daughter of Russians), madness, the redemptive power of literature—Jane Austen was Lionel Trilling's favorite, too—the Upper West Side, Zabar's, the paschal ham (you have to have some vestigial faith to be so oblivious): the topoi of Jewish life ran through my experience without my really knowing it: hell, Philip Roth even dandled me on his knee when I was a baby—really! So I was ready to slough off my training to turn...