American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States by Michael Weingrad (review)

In the early years of the twentieth century, the dream of a resurrected Hebrew as a conduit of modern Jewish culture was alive and well in many places outside of Mandatory Palestine, including the United States. There a small, marginal, and diverse group of traditionally-educated European-Jewish immigrants tended to the embers of this dream. These latter-day Maskilim published Hebrew-language poetry and prose, newspapers and journals, and sought to create a vibrant, indigenous Hebrew-language culture in America. In his first book, Michael Weingrad paints in broad strokes this largely unknown "counterhistory of American Jewish culture" (xvii), and probes the conflicted American identities of the Hebraist authors and their literary characters. Although the American Hebraist dream ultimately did not come to pass, Weingrad makes a compelling case for its relevance on account of the vision, educational institutions, and literature it left in its wake.

In chapter one, "America is my Cage: New York City and the Hebraist Alienation from America," Weingrad articulates the ambivalences of the early Hebraists towards their nascent American identities by exploring the multivalent uses of New York City's geography in the poetry of Shimon Ginzberg (1890-1944). Interestingly, the Hebraists were dissimilar from other immigrant groups in that they were unable to adopt the Puritan theological interpretation of America as the Promised Land. For them, the true Zion had a physical existence in the nascent Hebrew-speaking Yishuv; America thus remained a wilderness.

Although the Hebraists were unsure what to make of New York, they did know how Hebrew literature should be written. The second chapter, "The Poetry of an Upturned World: Modernism and American Identity in American Hebrew Literature" sketches the contours of the fiery debates in the 1920s regarding literary modernism. Yiddish authors in America and Hebrew authors in Palestine strongly advocated a more modernist poetics. However, the American Hebraists maintained an unfashionably strong affinity for Romanticism, privileging the traditional devices of formal language and bucolic settings over the gritty realities of city life.

While some Hebraist literature pastoralized or biblicized New York, other works sought out the pastoral and the biblical on the American horizon writ large. One way they did this was via the American Indian, a motif explored in the third chapter, "Going Native: The Indian in the American Hebrew Imagination." Hebraist authors, Weingrad argues, found in the romanticized notion of the Native American a site of authenticity and a symbol of Americanness to which they could relate. Additionally, Hebraists' "Judaization" of the Native American enabled them to explore the possibility of cultural extinction. Focusing primarily on book-length works by Benjamin Nahum Silkiner, Israel Efros, and Ephraim Lisitsky, Weingrad suggests that the incorporation of the American Indian elevated Hebraist poetry out of its perceived marginality to the role of cultural ambassador. A similar widening of Hebraist horizons was their discovery of small-town America, analyzed in the fourth chapter, "I Am Not in New York: Hebrew Encounters with Rural, Small-Town and Christian America." Through his readings of works by Hillel Bavli, Shimon Halkin, Lisitzky, and others, Weingrad elucidates the Hebraists' great cultural affinity with small-town America, stemming from a shared reverence for the Bible. (132) While the Hebraists' attraction to the Native American is somewhat fantastical, their engagement with small-town America appears to be a moment of arrival. In these works, the American reader may first recognize America; it is also the first time the mostly pensive Hebraist literature may elicit a chuckle.

Becoming more comfortable in the United States, the Hebraists eventually found an American they could lionize. In Chapter five, "Messiah, American Style: Mordechai Manuel Noah and the American Refuge," Weingrad traces the literary afterlife of one Jewish American writer and diplomat whose proto-Zionist activities preceded Herzl by fifty years. Weingrad argues that Mordechai Manuel Noah (1785-1851)—who set the cornerstone for the Jewish "City of Refuge...