Introduction

Jewish American literature has long been, and continues to be, a multilingual enterprise, with significant work published in at least five languages (English, Spanish, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew). The literary study of Jewish American writing, however, has been overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach unable to encompass its diversity, or to locate that diversity in the multilingual and multicultural landscape of American literature as a whole.

—Conference brochure, Multilingual Jewish Literature in Multicultural America, University of Chicago, November 2007

On 8–9 November 2007, an international conference was held at the University of Chicago, titled Multilingual Jewish Literature in Multicultural America. Three sessions addressed wide-ranging topics, such as Anglo-Jewish Literature and Yiddish, Yiddish and Hebrew Literature in America, and Multilingual Jewish Literature.¹ The conference was one of many contemporary indicators that multilingualism and multiculturalism have been firmly established methodologically and theoretically in the study of Jewish American literature. What is still the case, however, is an adherence to an English-only practice, largely due to the way scholars are trained in the field of Jewish American studies. Moving beyond lip service to a multilingual and multicultural credo, and actually implementing it in the form of literary history, close readings, and theoretical innovation remains a main challenge. In his recent book Lawrence Rosenwald characterizes American writers in a way that is also applicable to students, teachers, and scholars in the field of Jewish American studies:

In the multilingual American literary scene, great writers went to their graves never having read a word of one another’s work, and for that matter not knowing of one another’s existence. How can we tell a single story about lives that never touch?²

One answer to Rosenwald’s question derives from a discussion of translation as a key practice for bridging the gap between Jewish subcultures and majority cultures who speak non-Jewish languages. Highlighting and utilizing translation has long been an important aesthetic tool of Anglo-Jewish literature in America from Abe Cahan and Henry Roth to the contemporary writers Michael Chabon, Steve Stern, and Dara Horn. The use of Yiddish and Hebrew words and phrases in playful exploration of the multilingualism of characters, narrative structures, and cultural contexts has become the sine qua non of Jewish American literature and other hyphenated Jewish literatures. The majority–minority axis between English and minor Jewish languages in its midst, however, tends to favor a colonial appropriation of the minority languages in American English. Minority languages are typically filtered through the majority discourse in the form of translation and foreign language elements that are mostly Yiddish and Hebrew words and phrases in transliteration.

Isaac Bashevis Singer is an interesting borderline case highlighting the in-between status of the Jewish writer in America. He has been appropriated as an American writer, and yet is resistant to such claims through remaining rooted in Yiddish literary history, features that he skillfully employed to succeed as a writer in America. In 2004, at Singer’s centennial, the Library of America published a three-volume edition of his stories, marking the first time that a fiction writer whose work was published in a language other than English appeared in this prestigious series. Additional attempts have been made to turn Singer into the quintessential American writer because of his penetrating portraits of uprooted immigrants and survivors in New York. Singer’s style and narrative formulas, however, derive primarily from his subversive recycling of the monologues and folk tales of the great Yiddish writers Y. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. For a post-modern storyteller working in the Yiddish literary tradition, it takes quite a bit of squeezing to fit Singer into an American literary framework.³ The question of what is Singer’s real oeuvre, the Yiddish versions published in the Yiddish newspapers and journals or the English translations which were primarily done by others, crystallizes the fate of a Jewish diasporic writer caught between languages, continents, and epochs. Singer and other post-Holocaust Yiddish writers such as Aaron Zeitlin and Chaim Grade, who spent more than half their creative lives in America, belong to the margins of...