American Hebrew Literature

Abstract

Over two million Jewish refugees immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924, escaping poverty and persecution of the tsar and similar anti-Semitic regimes, until the 1924 Johnson-Reed (Immigration) Act constricted the passage through the country’s open gates. That migration included established and future Hebrew (Yiddish and English) literati whose contributions presaged the establishment, supplementing earlier immigrations by Sephardi, German, and other Jews, of a new world center of modern Hebrew literature and culture, much in keeping with its predecessors, large and small, back in Berlin, Italy, Galicia, and Russia. This one took root in the United States, waxed, and briefly competed with its growing “sibling” in Eretz Yisrael, only to wilt and wane, leaving behind virtually no progeny by the 1960s. When active, this geographically scattered center produced a considerable literary oeuvre, much of which remains the purview of the few able or interested to read it, while little has been translated and thematically marginalized in the shadow of Eretz Israeli concerns, modernisms, linguistic deviations, and nationalist programs. Hebraists in America identified with and saw themselves as direct heirs to their European Hebrew literary roots, drawing inspiration from the likes of S. Tchernichovsky and H. N. Bialik, poetry being the leading genre in the first decades. Yet, after a period of nostalgic looking-back, they also drew on models from English literature and the new landscape that opened before them. While depicting the world left behind, Hebraists also sought to Americanize their works and settings. Looking about them, they focused on the experience of the Big City, the great outdoors, and exotic locales from east to west. Perplexing though it might not have been, their palette also ran to the encounters with Gentiles, and, most intriguingly, they represented in Hebrew the lives and folk culture of Native and African Americans in lengthy compositions that rivaled those written in English. So while the nostalgic glances initially gave rise to a pessimism about America being the land that devours and assimilates its inhabitants, these soon gave way to an Americanization of Hebrew letters that became the expression of a settled community looking at the here-and-now in its representation of the Jewish (or Hebraic) experience and a mature sensibility that gave rise to the Bellows, Malamuds, Roths, Ozicks, Hellmans, and Ginsbergs from the second half of the 20th century onward. Though all Hebraists of those generations have passed away, a few new writers of Hebrew—Maya Arad, Reuven Namdar, and Robert Whitehill-Bashan among them—call America their home today (with other expatriates spending a long or short time outside Israel, among them Shelly Oria in the United States; Ayelet Tsabari in Canada; Yonatan Sagiv in the UK; Yossi Avni-Levy in Poland; and Adam Coman, Mati Shemoelof, and Itamar Orlev in Germany). Studies of American Hebrew literature are few in English, though some have recently appeared, prompting, hopefully, closer scrutiny of this center that was.