Red, Black and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature (review)

In the story of Jewish literature in the United States, Hebrew writers generally earn barely a mention. When Americanists do turn their attention to non-English language writing by immigrant Jews, it is often to Yiddish. But as Stephen Katz demonstrates in this study, dozens of Hebrew poets and prose writers produced a lively, if rarefied, literary culture in America in the first half of the twentieth century, characterized in many ways by its preoccupation with archetypically American landscapes and themes. In chronicling Hebrew literary production in America, Katz, along with Michael Weingrad in American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, expands upon Alan Mintz's groundbreaking 1993 edited volume Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects. These studies participate in an ever-growing body of critical scholarship on multilingual Jewish representations of and engagements with ethnic and racial difference in the United States.

Writing about Native Americans and African Americans was a means of reflecting on Jewish history and identity, but also a way of participating imaginatively in a new pluralistic and ethnically complex society. Not surprisingly, these efforts at cross-representation and cross-identification could be as problematic as they were well intended. Katz characterizes this duality as a paradoxical gesture of simultaneous separatism and acculturation, and observes that this fascination with the plight of "other Others" was a unique development in modern Hebrew letters, anticipating contemporary Israeli texts that take up questions of Arab and Palestinian identity and history.

For his readers who approach this study from the perspective of Hebrew literary scholarship, Katz makes the argument that America deserves attention in literary historical accounts of modern Hebrew writing. But this study makes a special contribution as well to the increasingly transnational, multilingual study of American culture, recently transformed by the challenges issued by diaspora studies to longstanding disciplinary linguistic, cultural, racial and ethnic boundaries. The writers of Katz's study worked at the nexus between their Eastern European geographical and linguistic origins (Hebrew was not a native vernacular for any of them), the arduous project of Jewish state-building in Palestine, where Hebrew was to be the national language, and the United States, where Jews enjoyed unprecedented freedoms but where Hebrew as a living literary language was doomed to disappear. Many of them would eventually leave the United States for Israel, but some of them would then return. Exile, nationhood, and homeland become charged, ambivalent, and unstable terms, often negotiated through the very texts that Katz examines in this study. Significantly, Katz's careful analyses of Hebrew representations of Indians and Blacks are followed by two concluding chapters on language and the land of Israel in the Hebrew American imagination, thus linking the imagined "frontiers" of America with those of Zion.

Following significant chapters on three major Hebrew epics on Native American themes published in the first half of the twentieth century by Benjamin Silkiner, Israel Efros, and Ephraim Lisitzky, Katz continues with careful close readings of poems and stories featuring Native and African-American characters by Simon Ginzburg, Abraham Regelson, Gavriel Preil, Hillel Bavli, Simon Ginzburg, and more. I venture to say that none of these texts will be familiar to students of American literature; few have been translated into English. Katz's study thus offers unprecedented access to a neglected field within America's literary landscape. Indeed, Katz positions these writers as "giving rise to the Bellows, Malamuds, Ozicks, Potoks and Roths of later years," as well as to "George Gershwin, Mel Brooks, and Leonard Bernstein" (76). By thus enlarging the body of work scholars usually associate with Jewish-American cultural production, Katz pushes the ever-expanding boundaries of American literary scholarship.