Writing Jewish

Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature

by Hana Wirth-Nesher

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224 pages

Hana Wirth-Nesher's Call It English tells the story of a group of twentieth-century American fiction writers who call the language in which they write their narratives English. In calling "it" English, the writers Wirth-Nesher gathers under this banner register the degree to which English is not merely a language to be used but a problem, an aspiration, an object of mourning, a reification. What Wirth-Nesher traces in her collection of readings of works ranging from the short stories, novels, and memoirs of immigrant writers Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin to second- and third-generation Jewish American writers like Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and Myla Goldberg, is the shifting presence of Yiddish and Hebrew in their largely English-language narratives. And to the degree that English is, for them, something always requiring at least a second thought, it is never quite the exclusive topic of Wirth-Nesher's book. In that sense, the imperative of her title, which she borrows from Henry Roth's 1934 novel Call It Sleep, insists too much, deliberately. (Or you could call it Yiddish. Or Hebrew.)

Inasmuch as the writers whose work she discusses move from those whose native spoken language was Yiddish through those who grew up as English-speaking children of Yiddish-speaking parents to what Cynthia Ozick describes as "the first generation to think and speak and write wholly in English ... since the coming forth from Egypt five millennia ago" (Ozick 9, qtd. in Wirth-Nesher 128), we might be tempted to understand the narrative Wirth-Nesher offers here to be a familiar story of assimilation, with local details thrown in for color. It is the achievement of Call It English and its particular focus on the shifting relations of Yiddish and Hebrew not only to English but to one another that it operates to reveal the inadequacy of that assimilation narrative. In part, Nesher's erudite and textured readings uncover an emotional ambivalence among certain writers about the movement from "calling it English" to English unmodified and un-urged. In the very same passage in which she marks her generation's status as exclusive English speakers, writers, and thinkers, Ozick goes on to declare, "English is a Christian language. When I write English, I live in Christendom." But Ozick is not merely lamenting an alienation from a cultural past that becomes authentic to the very degree to which it is no longer accessible. As Wirth-Nesher elaborates in her final chapter, while Jews have been positioned on the multicultural map over the past two decades as white Euro-Americans, such a definition does not reflect the fact that "their countries of origin are not their cultural homeland," and that "religion is not a significant cultural signifier in America (where faith is a private matter and shared across racial and ethnic lines)" (162). In Wirth-Nesher's narrative, Hebrew largely supplants Yiddish over the course of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century as the "Jewish language" in relation to and against which Jewish American writers define their own English writing and speaking. To be sure, the disappearance of Yiddish can be cast in the most banal narrative of immigrant assimilation as English replaces Yiddish as the language of these writers' everyday interactions. But the fact that, from the outset, Yiddish has been both denigrated and relied upon as an alternative to the loshn-koydesh [holy tongue] Hebrew in which these same Jews prayed and studied, and from which the language drew its alphabet and significant elements of its vocabulary, means that the use of Yiddish can no more be cleanly cast off than it was unambivalently embraced. And in that sense, Wirth-Nesher's narrative is powerful--and historically resonant--as much for what stays the same within it as for the transformations it registers.

In this spirit, Wirth-Nesher opens her study with an overview not merely of the labile relation of Hebrew and Yiddish but of Jewish bilingualism as it is practiced and theorized. A decade after the 1908 Czernowitz (Bukovina) Conference, during which prominent Yiddish (mainly Socialist-Bundist) writers and activists had made a play to elevate the cultural prestige of Yiddish literature in the context of a nascent (and ideologically Hebraist) Zionist movement by proclaiming Yiddish "a Jewish national language," (many radical conferees had pressed to declare it the exclusive Jewish language), Baal Makhshoves [Israel Isadore Elyashev] observed that the mark of Jewish literature has always been its bilingualism. Moreover, this trend did not begin with the emergence of Yiddish in middle and eastern Europe but operated even at the moments Hebrew supposedly reigned supreme: the Book of Daniel moves back and forth between Hebrew and Chaldean; the Pentateuch and prayer book interweave Hebrew and Aramaic, and Arabic is featured prominently in medieval Jewish philosophical writing. Such bilingualism did not always exhaust a Jew's daily linguistic range, Wirth-Nesher reminds us. "Even the shtetl dweller with little formal secular education, such as Sholem Aleichem's Tevye, negotiated between the mame-loshen (mother tongue) of domestic and worldly Yiddish and the loshn-koydesh, the holy tongue of Hebrew-Aramaic. By necessity, he would also have acquired enough Ukrainian to secure his income as a dairyman." (6)