Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination by Jennifer Glaser (review)

Abstract

One of the consequences of the post–World War II shift in the status of Jews in America was the changing regard for Jewish suffering. If a blame-the-victim mentality was pervasive in American culture generally during the first half of the twentieth century (whether regarding victims of rape, domestic abuse, bullying, racism, or bigotry), that logic adhered particularly strongly to Jews. Before the war, Jews were often regarded as deserving their ill treatment—whether one viewed Jewish sins as religiously or ethnically based. But World War II—in which the most horrific abuse was inflicted on Jews—had the ironic effect of changing that line of thinking. In the decades after, and to some extent during, World War II, one of the ways that Americans made sense of their involvement in the European conflict was as a means of helping suffering Jews. That logic that defined Jewish suffering as deserving of sympathy also set in motion a new literary landscape. As early as 1952, the voice of a German-born, Jewish girl living in Amsterdam was on the way to becoming an American cultural phenomenon. And decades after the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, that new regard for Jewish suffering continued to shape the American literary scene in increasingly unexpected ways. Literary scholar Jennifer Glaser’s Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination delves into that postwar American Jewish literary scene. World War II and the Holocaust are secondary and background topics in this study, but as part of their legacy, the literary history that Glaser brings to light should be of interest to those who study the twentieth-century RACH EL G O RDAN UNERSITY OF FLRIDA