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  • A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman
  • Jessica Lang (bio)
A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History. Michael Hoberman. Rutgers UP, 2018. 198 pages. $99.95 cloth; $28.95 paper.

The title of Michael Hoberman's A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History is inspired by Seymour "the Swede" Levov, the protagonist of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), who, in that text, purchases "a hundred acres of America," thus symbolizing a sense of belonging for himself and future generations. With this reference, Hoberman alludes to the sense of place—its presence, absence, meaning, and formative influence—that propels forward even as it roots the Jewish American literary imagination. Hoberman's superb study extends from the 1850s to the new millennium. Considering the relationship of Jewish American writers to the land and geography they inhabit and shape (and that, in turn, shapes their identities), Hoberman navigates a delicate triangulation of Americanness, Jewishness, and Jewish Americanness. The richness of Hoberman's work is partly a feature of its extensive chronology, which includes 150 years of literary history, and partly due to his careful comparisons that are geographically, literarily, religiously and culturally diverse and bring together an uncommon range of places, authors, texts, and histories. Hoberman offers a fresh perspective on a body of literature that, for all its familiarity, challenges "preconceived notions of Jews as either oppressed outsiders to or excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4).

One of the work's strengths is its organization, which outlines a map of Jewish American literary history. The book is divided into six comparative essays, five of which focus primarily on a comparison between two authors or two texts (the second chapter compares two cities, New York and Philadelphia). While comparative essays are the bread and butter of literary studies, Hoberman takes advantage of this model to introduce other elements that complicate and deepen his analysis, taking it in new directions. The book moves linearly, but also, and with equal care, circularly: writers document their searches for return, home, place, and meaning that tie together their identities as Jews and Americans. In addition to considering the impact of physical place on authors' lives and writing, [End Page 206] Hoberman weaves his argument about America as a place of homecoming for diasporic Jews into descriptions of departures from religious practices and attempts to return to them. The ancient histories and stories of the wandering Jew, the ghetto Jew, the Old World Jew, and the peddler Jew find their place in Jewish American texts that document the shopkeeper Jew, the businessman Jew, the farmer Jew, the Holocaust survivor, and the American rabbi.

The book's six chapters are informally divided into three sections. The first two chapters examine the travel writings of Solomon Carvalho and I. J. Benjamin (chapter 1) and the influence of Jewish communities on the development of America's oldest cities (chapter 2). In this section, Hoberman most deliberately positions Jewish American writers as participating in dominant themes and dynamics that mark American literature and serve as an influence on Jewish American literature. Carvalho's writing reflects not only the language found in the ancient texts of synagogue liturgy but also Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist language. Trained as a painter by the renowned Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully, Carvalho employs a "painterly vocabulary" that is romantic and stilted but brings together a language of divinity that has distinctly Jewish and American strains. The second chapter, which compares the urban locales of New York City and Philadelphia, establishes the idea of a Jewish colonial revival, initiated by Sephardic and German Jews in the late 1800s. Jewish revivalists claimed that their American identity was largely founded on Jewish involvement in developing the nation's oldest cities that ensured essential commercial and civic growth. Showcasing the breadth of his research, Hoberman references works by Max Kohler, Emma Lazarus, Isaac Markens, Abraham Cahan, Henry Samuel Morais, and Charles Daly. He also references the anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish sentiments inscribed by Henry James and Jacob Riis. Revivalists in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Newport, and other American cities...

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