Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century by Allison Schachter (review)

Allison Schachter’s premiere book, Diasporic Modernisms, is like an album of snapshots that, when examined together, offer a fuller understanding of how Jewish language writers produced literature uniquely unbound by national affiliation via the creation of a modernist aesthetic in the historical contexts of their travel toward literary centers; emigration based upon personal ideals; and the Diaspora associated with anti-Semitism. While Schachter focuses on key figures in Hebrew and Yiddish literature—S.Y. Abramomovitsch, Yoseph Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabriel Priel, and Kadia Molodowsky—her successful framing of their texts is, in itself, rather borderless, as it inspires connections both within and outside of Jewish-language writing of the Modernist era and beyond. While the overlapping temporalities of Schachter’s subjects in conjunction with their constant movement among Jewish literary centers—New York, Pre-State Palestine, Eastern Europe and Russia—makes the book a bit confusing, the perplexity is a main part of Schachter’s point: Hebrew and Yiddish literature evolved in the realms of fragmentation they reflect in form and content. Moreover, with its plethora of useful citations and enlightening historical backdrop, the book is accessible to readers without a deep prior knowledge of Jewish languages and cultures.

In a book about Modernism and the transcendence of its typical boundaries, Schachter exposes stylistic tactics such as “fictional prologues, multiple narrators, [and] embedded stories,” that appear in American and European versions of Modernism (10); yet a cross-textual study of Jewish-language literature and the seminal texts of nation-based Modernism seems a natural application of Schachter’s text, one that would undoubtedly reveal the related strategies of nation-based Modernism which includes local color fiction. For example, Schachter’s analysis of the many scenes in Hebrew and Yiddish literature that take place on train cars immediately evokes James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), where the feelings of homelessness rise in the racially passing narrator who occupies a train car with a cross-section American types. “The fictional preface” Schachter describes in her study of Brenner was a key tactic for local color writers across the board (76).

In Schachter’s discussion of how gender plays into her thesis, particularly when she talks about Leah Goldberg, one might also see a parallel to studies on Zora Neale Hurston who similarly struggled with Goldberg’s “literary dilemma: how to write a modernist […] prose that, while assimilating multiple literary histories, can contain a female subjectivity” (151). And certainly, the first three chapters of Diasporic Modernisms decode what seems to be the genetic history of contemporary writers. When readers learn of Dovid Bergelon’s Yiddish short stories, bursting with autobiographical gestures and doppelgangers, as he rewrites and argues with “the traditional Jewish tropes of exile and diaspora,” Philip Roth’s predecessor, whether Roth read Bergelson or not, seems eerily to have infiltrated the creativity in Roth’s bloodline (85). In fact, Bergelson’s tactic of “mise-en-abime, a story framed within a story inside another story,” especially as Schachter describes it in “Tsvishn emigrantn” (Among Refugess), where a “young stranger is not only a character in the frame narrator’s imagination but is also his alter ego,” seems to me a precursor of Roth’s and other writers’ Post-Modern aesthetics (114–115).

Thus, Diasporic Modernisms is not only important for its eloquent and often brilliant close reading and analysis of Jewish-language writing in the sense that it resurrects significant texts, perhaps in tandem with a sort of Yiddish revival taking place since 1977 to the present; it is also momentous in its relevance to conversations about the global trends in literature today, where questions of audience, questions about Israel’s formation and national status, and questions concerning translation abound. In this book, literature is allowed to fight with its categorization, and myths about nationhood and their linguistic affiliations break open for closer inspection.

Schachter’s project...