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  • A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman
  • Shelley Fisher Fishkin (bio)
A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History. By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 198 pp.

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History seems to promise an encyclopedic volume of ambitious scope about the places that have inspired Jewish American writers and that their work has helped bring alive. That book should be written—but it is not the book at hand, and readers who come to this book with such grand expectations will be disappointed. Rather, Michael Hoberman explores the role of "place" in the work of a handful of Jewish American writers. These explorations do not cohere around a grand narrative. What Hoberman does give us is a series of original and stimulating meditations on a collection of eclectic figures. Despite Hoberman's assertion in the introduction that the book "posits the idea of homecoming as the dominant motif in Jewish American literary history," such an overarching, unifying theme does not really link the book's chapters (4). But that is a strength, not a weakness. Each chapter ventures into different territory, raising distinctive and interesting questions in the process.

Hoberman bemoans the centrality of the conceptual framework of the "immigrant model" to Jewish literary history. Such a framework implicitly acquiesces to "the view that Jews who arrived in America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were, by [End Page 157] definition, anomalous strangers in a strange land as opposed to active agents in the fashioning of a dynamic national culture" (4). The first chapter, "'In This Vestibule of God's Holy Temple': The Frontier Accounts of Solomon Carvalho and Israel Joseph Benjamin, 1857–1862" offers a rebuke to this view. A special strength is its analysis of the ways in which Carvalho's and Benjamin's accounts of travels in the American West reject some of the familiar tropes and stances deployed by other contemporary chroniclers of the region. Nineteenth-century reminiscences of Western exploration were often characterized by self-aggrandizing, hyperbolic boastfulness. But the narrative we get from Carvalho, a portrait artist and daguerreotypist who joined John C. Frémont's expedition, is characterized by embarrassment, modesty, humility, and self-effacing humor. Carvalho's memoir of his 1853–1854 trip across the Rocky Mountains shares with the reader an honest account of his humiliating first buffalo hunt in which "he inadvertently shot and killed a male buffalo (buffalo hunters generally killed females, whose bodies offered significantly more meat)," a mistake for which he was repeatedly ridiculed (21). Carvalho also acknowledges the erroneousness of his first impression of Indians. Although he first "considered the Indian little better than a cannibal" and was "disgusted" by their hunting and eating habits, he "got bravely over it," as he put it, and was soon enjoying buffalo steaks and venison with his Cheyenne hosts (9). And while the majority of chroniclers of Western exploration were doggedly secular, Joseph Benjamin found that gazing at the mountains of California filled him with "the most religious of feelings," leading him to offer us what Hoberman calls "deliberately Jewish inflections of the romantic sublime" (25).

Here and throughout the book, Hoberman makes excellent use of the work of previous scholars of Jewish American literature and culture such as Sarah Phillips Casteel, Rachel Rubinstein, Moses Rischin, Hasia Diner, Barbara Mann, and Bryan Stone. He deftly integrates their aptly phrased insights into the story he is telling in his own voice, expanding on their comments with his own analysis. In the notes section, Hoberman helpfully situates phenomena he is describing in Jewish American writing in the context of canonical works of American Studies on related topics.

Readers may be surprised to find a chapter devoted to discussions of works of urban history in a book about American literature, including works like The Hebrews in America (1888) by Isaac Markens; The Settlement of the Jews in America (1893) by Max Kohler; The Jews of Philadelphia (1894) by Henry Samuel Morais; and The Jews of South Carolina from the Earliest Times to the Present (1905...

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