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  • American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States by Michael Weingrad
  • Omri Asscher (bio)
American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States Michael Weingrad Syracuse, NY: Syracuse university press, 2011. XXVIII + 275 Pp.

In this study of Hebrew literature written in America, Michael Weingrad outlines and discusses the major ideological, thematic, and stylistic trends underlying this previously scarcely known body of literature. His book serves as a lucid and engaging introduction to a group of immigrant Jewish writers, most active during the first decades of the twentieth century, whose passionate Jewish nationalism and devotion to the Hebrew language had led them on an alternative, much more troubled and marginalized path than that of mainstream American Jewry, their own works being similarly marginalized, both then and today, in comparison to the Jewish literature of those decades written in Yiddish or English.

The Hebraists produced “lyric and epic poetry, short fiction and novels, essays, criticism, polemic, memoirs and translation”; however, “theirs was a brief flourishing, with a heyday from roughly 1915 to 1925 that was always based more on hopes and aspirations than on solidity and permanence” (xxiii). Today, these writers’ unyielding Hebraic ideology in the face of the zeitgeist of their time, as portrayed in Weingrad’s study, seems touchingly quixotic. As Alan Mintz points out in his foreword to the book, “There was virtually no such thing at the time as a native speaker of Hebrew. In fact, only a small minority of male immigrants possessed the competence to read Hebrew texts” (xi). In this respect, the American Hebrew writers were even more culturally isolated than their contemporaries of [End Page 218] the first Aliyot of pioneers to Palestine. Unlike the growing Yishuv in Eretz-Yisrael, where Hebrew education was being gradually institutionalized, allegiance to the Hebrew language was upheld by social norms, and the next generations created a readership of native Hebrew speakers—the American Hebraists were increasingly on their own. Their decision to write in a language unspoken, and barely read, in their own country, both reflected their alienation from the American Jewish cultural mainstream and further anchored it.

“The programmatic failure of the Hebraists,” Weingrad writes, “is mirrored by their invisibility in American Jewish popular memory” (xxiii). In his study, Weingrad shows how these writers were partially responsible for this invisibility, consciously maintaining their own marginality, as they were “uninterested in and often vehemently opposed to the hybrid and highly Americanized forms of Jewish identity and culture that emerged in the course of the twentieth century” (xxiii). Their troubled and ambivalent American identity, their self-definition as “American and as not American” (xxiv), as they find expression in their literary works, are the main focus of this book.

Weingrad pursues his subject in seven chapters, organized thematically and by and large also chronologically. In the first two chapters, he discusses the sources of the Hebraists’ vexed relationship with the United States (and particularly New York City), and their related, no less vexed approach to literary modernism. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the ways in which themes such as the American Indians and small-town Christian America were engaged in their literature as a means to explore Jewish American internal issues, such as national and religious survival. Through the study of Hebrew works dealing with the early American Jewish nationalist Mordecai Manuel Noah, chapter 5 touches on the Hebraist conception of America as a merely temporary refuge. Chapter 6 focuses on the two finest and most critically acclaimed American Hebrew poets, Gabriel Preil and Shimon Halkin, and their contradicting takes on Jewish national identity in America; and chapter 7 concludes the book by describing the state of Hebrew literature in America today, and depicting the Hebrew “traces” found in some works by contemporary Jewish-American writers.

The first five chapters compose the main bulk of the book and present its main thesis; here, through analysis of various key works, Weingrad lays out the Hebraists’ aesthetic, thematic and ideological tendencies, providing good reasons to think of them as a coherent, though not necessarily homogenous, group of writers. The poets, in particular, shared a romantic “maskilic” perception of literature, and “adhered to...

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