No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster (review)

The old Jewish joke goes something like this: two Jews are sitting on a park bench on New York City's Lower East Side reading newspapers. Shmulik holds a copy of the Forverts and is shocked to see his friend Yankel engrossed in reading Der Stürmer, the Nazi propagandist newspaper. Shmulik turns to his friend and says:

"Yankel, what's the matter with you that you read such trash?"

"Trash?" responds Yankel. "Trash? You call this trash? In your newspaper we Jews are poor, we're starving, we're being killed in massive pogroms. In my newspaper, we Jews control the world's banks, we own Hollywood—we're the most prosperous people on the face of the Earth. Now you tell me who the fool is?"

While much critical attention has been given to the antisemitic figure of the Jew in nineteenth-century and modernist literature, not nearly as much has been written about its contemporaneous opposite: a philosemitic modernist portrait. Sharon Oster has set out to change this unfortunate state of affairs. Yet, not surprisingly, according to Oster, the news is not all good. In trying to create a contemporary Jewish figure "in time" (in their own era), modernist writers still needed to negotiate their understanding of the historical figure of the "noble Hebrew." Readers of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda will recall the trope of the noble Jew, a character who is not really of the era in which he or she appears, but rather a stand-in for ancient Jewish virtue—a quality upon which the New Testament is based. As Oster explains in this beautifully written and important book, the challenge modernist writers faced was to place this ancient Jewish figure back "in time" so as to become a living, breathing, contemporary (modern) character. As Oster states in her introduction: "I read philosemitic discourse as fundamentally about time, pervading the writing of even the most prolific literary realists of the era" (3).

Readers might understandably ask, why is this project of representing the Jew in realist and modernist literature so important, both then and now? The resulting Jewish characters that authors created were not just minor players on the American stage. Rather, according to Oster, once placed back in time (and not just a historical idealistic portrait of Biblical nobility), the figure of the Jew became a guarantor of a grand American future—the realized promise foretold in our founding documents and dramatized by an earlier generation of American writers. Oster convincingly argues that in the aftermath of the great Jewish migration to America, the challenge for modernist writers, both gentile and Jew, was to transform the myth of the Biblical Jew into a realistic, well-rounded character. As Oster frames it, to the prevalent Protestant writers of the age, Jews were "anachronistic" and thus were figures literally "out of time" (6). Through each chapter in her book, and in her close readings of writers as diverse as Edith Warton and Anzia Yezierska, what Oster does is place Jewish and gentile writers in dialogue with one another. In placing Jewish characters back in time, Oster create a more well-rounded portrait of Jewish literary characters.

So while many modernist and realist writers created Jewish figures that a contemporary ear might perceive as less than flattering, Oster's dramatic shift in temporal orientation is a welcome one that leads to a greater understanding of not just how major Protestant writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton perceived of and wrote about Jews, but also how Jewish immigrant writers like Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Anzia Yezierska wrote about their co-religionists, fellow recent immigrants to American shores.

Unlike so many scholarly works grounded in cultural theory, Oster's book is elegantly written, and No Place in Time helps readers understand a vitally important period of American literary history while explicating how that...