Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature

This is a wide-ranging, subtle study of how three Jewish languages—Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic—inform the writing of Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth, among others. Wirth-Nesher stresses not only the presence within these American writers' works of languages other than English (most masterfully in her analysis of Call It Sleep, justly foregrounded in her title), but also the traces left by the absence of these languages (as in her consideration of a completely American, monolingually-raised suburbanite in American Pastoral, whose speech impediment "turns [. . .] what used to be accent into stuttering" [154]).

Indeed, Wirth-Nesher is fascinating when she studies the trajectory of such metamorphoses; when she exposes, for example, how Cahan exploited accent to gain entry into an American literature then fascinated by dialect writing "from Twain and Crane to Creole and vaudeville dialectics" (84); how Antin instrumentalized writing as a way out of accent (one contemporary critic, we learn from Wirth-Nesher, saw Antin's abandonment of Yiddish language and Jewish folkways for American speech and behavior as analogous to Helen Keller's movement out of darkness and silence into a world of communication!); how Henry Roth goes beyond accent to incorporate multiple layers of interlingual play, thereby forging a modernist linguistic monument akin to Joyce's Ulysses. The portmanteau word Englitch in Call It Sleep serves Wirth-Nesher as a trope for the functioning of the text, as it overcomes the notion of mistake (or glitch), fashioning it into a (Freudian) slip, or a glissando (Yiddish glitshn = slip, slide). But more than Englitch, the presence in Henry Roth's novel of the enigmatic Aramaic seder song Chad Gadyo ("One Kid," transcribed significantly there as Chad Godya), about the slaughter of a baby goat, and of the slaughterers slaughtered—itself a kind of mise en abyme—gives Wirth-Nesher the occasion to show of what mettle she is made, as she interprets meanings the recurrent title of the song takes. She analyzes it as a kind of triple name for the Jewish God—Chad-God-Ya: Chad harks back to the Sh'ma, where "Adonai Echad" refers to the oneness of God; the syllable God is obvious; and Ya we find in Yahweh and Hallelujah. Yet the sacrificial theme of the song allows it to segue into Christianity, and so Wirth-Nesher links it to an apparently innocuous comment made by a witness to the child protagonist's near-suicide as he tries to make streetcar tracks give off nitsotsot, divine sparks: "Christ, it's a kid!" (86-91).

Wirth-Nesher is no less impressive when she analyzes the onomastic play in Seize the Day, where the protagonist, renaming himself Tommy Wilhelm, proves to be an avatar of the eponymous character in the story written by Bashevis Singer and translated by Bellow, Gimpel the Fool. In Yiddish, the title and character are Gimpl Tam, where Tam is pronounced like the English "Tom," as Wirth-Nesher notes; she could have added another dimension of similarity between Gimpel and Wilhelm, insofar as g and w alternate in such etymologically-related pairs as guard-warden, war-guerre, and Guillaume-William. Wirth-Nesher reads Seize the Day as no less than a "translation" (108) of Gimpel the Fool, explaining how carpe diem gives way to traditional morality.

As already noted with respect to Chad Godya, Wirth-Nesher exploits well what she refers to as "eye dialect" (83), the actual (and often impressionistic, and definitely unscholarly) transcriptions of Yiddish, Aramaic and Hebrew in the texts she studies. For example, Wirth-Nesher shares with us a gleaning from her consultation of Henry Roth's manuscript: the echad or echaud of the Sh'ma is corrected into ehod, apparently to make the rhyme with God clearer (91). Later writers, she shows, move beyond the compromise-position of Romanization of words from Jewish languages (all written with Hebrew letters), which makes them foreign both to the surrounding English text and their original form. Ozick, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and Art Spiegelman have actually placed words written in Hebrew characters within their texts, thereby exploiting, as Wirth-Nesher notes, the one element of the Kabbalah that has largely penetrated general culture: the notion that Hebrew letters themselves possess power, independent of what they signify. The book ends on a convincing examination of another vestige of Jewish culture that seems indelible: the presence, in Jewish American life and letters, of the Kaddish, a mostly Aramaic prayer, whose definite rhythms—along with its meaning apparently contradictory to its purpose (it sanctifies God's name rather than the dead who are remembered)—allow it to assume the most varied functions in the works of Allen Ginsberg and Tony Kushner, among others.

One major flaw mars this otherwise excellent study, an area of error all the stranger in someone whose titles include, as listed on the back cover, "head of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Tel Aviv University." This is Wirth-Nesher's disregard of common academic practice in transcribing Yiddish (the YIVO system). I refer not to cases where she quotes her writers' transcriptions, but where she employs her own. For example, mame-loshn appears two pages apart, equally incorrectly, as mameloshen and mamaloshn (6, 8). Rozhinkes mit Mandlen shows up correctly (136) after appearing as Rozhinkes mit Mandeln (135), with the German spelling Mandeln indicating a different pronunciation, a mistake all the more glaring as Wirth-Nesher argues in the same passage for a true understanding of "the historical facts that testify to a variegated Yiddish culture and literary world before the Second World War" (136).

Such errors are compounded by a misunderstanding of the emergence of Yiddish as a language, as evidenced in such comments as "Yiddish did evolve from German, while retaining the Hebrew alphabet" (137). As Max Weinreich has so forcefully stated, Yiddish was born as Jews, speaking some earlier Jewish language (a form of Judeo-Romance), adopted a vast number, but not the totality, of aspects of their German neighbors' speech. The same confusion appears when Wirth-Nesher writes, "Both Tommy and Tamkin are diminutives of Tom, the former in English and the latter in Middle German (and consequently in Yiddish)" (109). Consequently? The presence of a term in Middle High (left out by Wirth-Nesher) German does not have as a necessary consequence its presence in Yiddish; perhaps Wirth-Nesher meant "consequently in terms of the quick associations in the layperson's mind," but that is not what she said.

Her confusion of Yiddish and German appears most baldly when she says, speaking of Bellow's character, that the "Yiddish surname Herzog combines 'Herz,' 'heart' in German and Yiddish, and 'zog,' the imperative in Yiddish for 'speak'" (114). Wrong! "Heart" in Yiddish is harts, not Herz. One is simply perplexed. (Additionally, zog means "say," not "speak.") Such errors may not affect the thesis of the book or the thrust of its argumentation, but they show that the cause of Yiddish still has a long way to go in the academy, when such an exacting scholar engages in sloppiness regarding the language. Except for this grave error, the book is marvelous.