Editor’s Introduction

Here at Studies in American Jewish Literature we’re trying to claw our way toward normalcy—or at least what passes for normalcy at a small, narrowly read, boutique academic journal. But we’re not quite there yet. Special volumes, the first two issues we’ve put out since our extreme makeover last year were more or less abnormal: 31.1, which announced our reboot with a series of essays, position papers, and polemics by editorial board members; and 31.2, a festschrift honoring SAJL’s just-retired founding editor Dan Walden, guest edited by Alan Berger.

The current issue is, if anything, more eccentric than its predecessors. Besides the book review section, the entire issue has been given over to Sunny S. Yudkoff, a doctoral student at Harvard University who with her work here contributes significantly to scholarship on Mary Antin, on Jewish American literature and U.S. immigration more generally, and on the fraught relationship between historiography and literary practice. Author of the 1912 American best seller The Promised Land, Mary Antin immigrated to Boston in 1894 at the age of thirteen. Shortly after arriving, the precocious author described her transatlantic journey in a sixty-page Yiddish letter to her maternal uncle in Russia. In 1899, Antin translated the letter into English and published it as a booklet entitled From Plotzk to Boston. Excerpts of that text would eventually feature in the central chapter of The Promised Land. Yudkoff’s article, “The Adolescent Self-Fashioning of Mary Antin,” reconstructs the historical circumstances of both the Yiddish letter’s inception and its English translation. It also attends to the changes in plot and rhetoric that differentiate the two iterations. Yudkoff’s primary argument is that the calculated shifts from Yiddish letter to English booklet reveal Antin to be a writer eager to render herself and her story appealing to her American audience, and by considering both the context and content of these two early texts Yudkoff sketches a profile of Antin as an emerging American author who alternatively discloses and withholds her ethno-religious background (Judaism) and mother tongue (Yiddish) in response to the perceived demands of her various readerships and their social codes. A transcription and Yudkoff’s translation of Antin’s 1894 Yiddish letter accompany the essay.

Yudkoff’s work here, in equal parts curatorial and critical, offers a great contribution to the field of Jewish American literary studies. I say this not because her act of recovery expands the archive of the field—though it would be effortless enough to argue that it certainly does—but more importantly because she demonstrates the will, for lack of a better word, that underwrites the categorical coherence of the field and of the critical practices through which we invest it.

Depending on your perspective, the following may or may not seem relevant. Bear with me. As we prepare this issue for press, and as I write this introduction more specifically, I’ve been looking again at “The World and the Jug,” Ralph Ellison’s famous retort to Irving Howe’s 1963 essay about Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ellison, “Black Boys and Native Sons.” I happened to have assigned it for a seminar, but I now find it pertinent in this context. Against Howe’s charge, as Ellison renders it, that “Negroness” is a “metaphysical condition, one that is a state of irremediable agony which all but engulfs the mind,” Ellison counters that his racial identity is rather a kind of choice, a “perspective” on or “attitude” toward a complex array of multivalent cultural, social, and historical forces that cannot ever be restricted to one group and cannot ever be understood as bearing an incontrovertible or self-evident meaning. “More important,” Ellison insists, “being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures—an identification with the group as extended through the individual self which rejects all possibilities of escape that do not involve a basic resuscitation of the original American ideals of social and political justice” (131–32; Ellison’s emphases).

As I broadcast above, what I...