The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

—EMMA LAZARUS, "The New Colossus" (1883)

These well-known lines, uttered silently by the Mother of Exiles in Lazarus's celebrated sonnet, mounted on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and excerpted on countless souvenir knickknacks now on sale at the museum shop, are a turning point in the history of Jewish American literature.

I mean by this several things, historical and historiographical. Most basically, to call something a turning point means by definition that we understand something significant to have existed beforehand as well as afterward. We all know what came afterward—from Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin, to Anzia Yexierska, Michael Gold, Henry Roth, and Clifford Odets, to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and on and on to Austin Ratner and Joseph Skibell, the latest winners of the Sami Rohr Prize. But even among those of us who are scholars of Jewish American literature, few pay much attention to what came before Emma Lazarus penned her now canonized lines. ¹ So by referring to these lines as a turning point, I want to acknowledge that the history of Jewish American literature begins well before, and to assert that we would do well to know more about it. Moreover, I want to suggest at least part of the reason why our historiography has not yet taken the full measure of our history, why we know so little about early Jewish American writers and writing. By saying that Lazarus's lines are a turning point, I am arguing that they bear a certain relationship to the Jewish American writers who preceded her and a different relationship to those who came after her and that our failure till now to see them as a turning point is an ironic consequence of those differing sets of relations.

In their efforts to resurrect Lazarus's reputation, some recent scholars have argued that she "invented the role of the American Jewish writer," that she "heralds the beginning of what we can properly call Jewish American literature." ² I enthusiastically applaud their efforts, but I think such statements are misleading, even if we restrict ourselves (as one scholar suggests) to "writers in America of Jewish descent who have grappled explicitly with the meaning of Jewishness." ³ In the broadest sense, Jewish writers have struggled to define their Jewishness in America ever since Judah Monis recreated himself as a Jewish Puritan and The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth appeared under his name in 1722. ⁴ Certainly Lazarus's great-great-uncles Moses and Gershom Mendes Seixas preceded her with their attempts in the wake of the Revolution to define in their writing the place of the Jews in America and the place of America in Jewish history. ⁵ Think, too, of all those immigrant rabbis—Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise, and other members of the "American Jewish Pulpit"—who were struck with the wonder of America, preached an America-tinged Jewish theology, and (among other accomplishments) spearheaded the rise of the Jewish press in America. ⁶

But even if we restrict ourselves further to literature in the narrow sense, the statement is difficult to defend. To be sure, those Jews who secured a degree of respectability and success in the broader (but largely still rarefied) American literary world of the earlier nineteenth century did so without (and perhaps by not) wearing their Jewishness on their literary sleeves: Isaac Harby and Mordecai Manuel Noah in drama, Penina Moise in poetry. ⁷ Still, these writers—who, if they did not stand shoulder to shoulder with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant, nevertheless shared with them a stage, an audience, and a goal—were self-identifying, committed Jews. While they thought of themselves as fellow travelers in the quest for American...