Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature

By Hana Wirth-Nesher

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.



Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention.


The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust.


A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9781400829538

Hana Wirth-Nesher

Hana Wirth-Nesher is the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, Professor of English, and head of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel and the editor of What is Jewish Literature?, and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature.

Book preview

Cover: Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature by Hana Wirth-Nesher

Call It English

Call It English

the languages of

jewish american

literature

Hana Wirth-Nesher

princeton university press

princeton and oxford

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2009

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-13844-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 1948–

Call it English : the languages of Jewish American literature / Hana Wirth-Nesher.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12152-9 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-12152-4 (acid free paper)

1. American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism 2. United States—Literatures—History and criticism. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. 4. Jews—United States—Intellectual life. 5. Judaism and literature—United States. 6. Language and languages in literature. 7. Jews—United States—Languages. 8. Multi lingualism—United States. 9. Bilingualism—United States. 10. Jews in literature.I. Title.

PS153.J4W57 2006

810.9'8924—dc222005043106

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Goudy

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

eISBN: 978-1-400-82953-8

R0

נתתה שמחה בלבי

תהלים ד, ח

For Ilana, Yonatan, and Shira who fill me with joy

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1

Accent Marks: Writing and Pronouncing Jewish America

Pronouncing America, Writing Jewish:

Abraham Cahan, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud

Chapter 2

"I like to shpeak plain, shee? Dot’sh a kin’ a man I am!"

Speech, Dialect, and Realism:

Abraham Cahan

Chapter 3

I learned at least to think in English without an accent

Linguistic Passing: Mary Antin

Chapter 4

Christ, it’s a Kid!—Chad Godya.

Jewish Writing and Modernism: Henry Roth

Chapter 5

Here I am!—Hineni

Partial and Partisan Translations: Saul Bellow

Chapter 6

Aloud she uttered it— השם —Hashem

Pronouncing the Sacred: Cynthia Ozick

Chapter 7

Sounding Letters

And a river went out of Eden—Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman

Magnified and Sanctified—The Kaddish as First and Last Words

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Monumental Alphabet, Ben Shahn

© Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

1. Read Hebrew America

Permission, Habad of America

2. The Promised Land cover, first edition

Permission of the Leonard L. Milberg Collection, Princeton University

3. Mary Antin manuscript—MS verso p. 81, p. 84

Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. Courtesy of the Trustees

4. Henry Roth manuscript of Call It Sleep

Permission of the Henry Roth Literary Properties Trust Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

5. Page from The Puttermesser Papers

Permission, Alfred Knopf

6. Cover photograph and design for The Far Euphrates

Permission from Riverhead Books

7. Cartoon from Maus, p. 54

From Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Preface

It has always been difficult for me to pronounce the surname on my birth certificate, Wroclawski, the last official vestige of my father’s prewar life in Poland and bestowed upon me in Germany where we were displaced persons waiting for a visa that would eventually make us refugees in Pennsylvania. I could never reproduce the trill in that Polish r, but I didn’t have to struggle with it for long, because once we became naturalized United States citizens, my parents cast off this lingering mark of their European past, Americanizing their name to Wirth, which neither of them could ever pronounce due to that formidable th. Since German was my mother’s native language, she also gave up on the w, so that her American name, Virt, may have been well suited to her Austro-Hungarian tongue, but the irony was not lost on us that it was also in the language of those who had murdered their families and turned survivors into refugees in need of a new name. I grew up Hana Wirth, except when kindly schoolteachers and camp counselors Americanized it further by calling me Annie. When they did call me Hana, it was always in the broad nasal twang that rhymed with banana, a sound I detested so much that I found myself willing to settle for Annie.

My mother always spoke to me in German and my father always read to me in Yiddish, alternating between fiction—Sholem Aleichem and Chekhov among his favorites—and columns of the Yiddish daily Der Tog Morgen Journal. In Hebrew School I learned Ashkenazi pronunciation for prayer and Bible study; at home I had a weekly Hebrew tutor who taught me modern pronunciation from work pages with pen and ink drawings of animals and children. I could recite the blessing for bread as if I were a heder child in Lodz (at least that was the intent), and I could recite The birds chirp as if I were in a Tarbut School in Vilna. Although I was being plied with English books to make sure that I would succeed in school, I was also spoken to or read to in the languages of my parents’ European past, and simultaneously I was being taught the Hebrew of transnational Jewish religious life along with, for a short time, the Hebrew of modern Israel, so that I could participate, even from a distance, in the rebirth of their ancient homeland.

When I immigrated to Israel later in life, Wirth was impossible to transliterate, and therefore it reverted to its Germanic origins, while Hana reverted to its Hebrew origins, by reinstating the gutteral first letter in Chana. My husband’s surname, Nesher, was the result of his father’s Hebraizing the German name Adler, an act more akin to the phoenix (being the sole survivor of his family) than the eagle, which it means in both languages. Whenever I pronounce my own name in Hebrew, my personal history becomes transparent, and I am promptly labeled an Anglo-Saxon, inaccurate in English genealogy but accurate in Israeli society where it simply means Anglophone. Like my parents whose accent was most pronounced when they uttered their own names, speaking my name in Tel Aviv gives me away. In contrast, writing it in Hebrew reveals an entirely different version of my past. Whereas the spoken name testifies to over thirty years in America, the written name points only to German origins. I would need to both speak and write my name, in two different alphabets, in order for it to convey its linguistic, cultural, and geographical layers.

Negotiating several languages in speech and in writing, with varying degrees of competence and affect, has paved the way for writing Call It English, which explores the multilingual dimension of Jewish American writing. Whereas Jewish writing has always been transnational and multilingual, American Jewish writing, when read in the framework of American literature, has often been regarded as one among other European ethnic literatures of the United States, and when read in the framework of Jewish literature, it has often been detached from the American literary and cultural forces that have also shaped it. Neither of these approaches exclusively can account for the unique contribution of Jewish American writing to the evolution of a transnational, multicultural American literary history. The key preoccupations of American Studies currently—transnationalism, translation, hybridity, diasporas and homelands—all characterize Jewish culture. Jewish American literature offers a rich array of texts for furthering our understanding of linguistic and cultural translation. Call It English, which takes its title and inspiration from the dazzling multilingual wordplay and cultural boundary crossings in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, is a book about American literature, about Jewish literature, and about the various combinations and intersections that have produced what we call Jewish American literature.

In this book, I will be discussing works along a wide spectrum of multilingual writing and literacy, from bilingual word play to linguistic passing. I will be focusing on the persistence and wide range of attachments and attitudes toward languages other than English, and their manifestation in artistic and cultural strategies that make use of the particular features of Yiddish and Hebrew, including the figural and spiritual dimension of the alphabet, the effect of transliteration, and the intersection of secular, ethnic, and religious associations between these languages.

Call It English tells a story about both forgetting and remembering. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the passage out of Yiddish and into Hebrew, and counternarratives to this one, with observations about landmark achievements by Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, among others. Although fiction is the main subject of this book, the opening chapter regards poetry as well (its multilingual aspect deserves separate treatment, as does drama). Insofar as immigrant writing in English would enact the drama of language acquisition and translation strategies for a divided readership, it would be responding to American language debates, dialect literature, and nativism as well as accessing the languages and Jewish textual traditions that these writers had brought with them. Chapter 2 extends critical debates about local color that are generally confined to regions within the United States to linguistic terrain in Europe, and through a transnational reading of Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto demonstrates how early Jewish American writing is both like and unlike other ethnic traditions. The reciprocal influence of Cahan and William Dean Howells brings to light multilingual word play that marked a significant moment in the making of American dialect literature. Whereas Cahan’s novel deliberately inscribes accent into his prose by various artistic strategies that draw on Yiddish and Hebrew literary sources, Mary Antin’s autobiography, The Promised Land, is a record of evading and highlighting accent. In Chapter 3, her celebrated immigrant autobiography is read as a story of linguistic passing, at a time when racial passing preoccupied America and when nativist calls for correct English pronunciation served to monitor ethnic, racial, and class boundaries. Chapter 4 explores how Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep, poised between the immigrant and the ethnic experience, employs multilingual techniques to forge a Jewish American modernist aesthetic and to enact both the intersection of Jewish and Christian hermeneutics and the inextricability of native language and mother tongue. Chapter 5 focuses on Saul Bellow’s cross cultural translations, his Americanization of Jewish texts, and his role as a cultural mediator in Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Although a post-Holocaust perspective on multilingual Jewish culture plays a role in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, this is the primary focus of chapter 6, which is devoted to Cynthia Ozick’s writing. In this chapter, speech, translation, and accent are intertwined with the ethics of Holocaust literature, so that language acquisition and mother tongue take on new meanings in The Shawl and The Puttermesser Papers. Chapter 7 offers two contrasting contemporary approaches to Jewish American writing as exemplified by Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Aryeh Lev Stollman’s The Far Euphrates, where stuttering and prayer are intertwined with remembering and forgetting languages. One section of this chapter is also devoted to the ubiquitous Kaddish in Jewish American writing and culture, because it touches upon many of the topics of Call It English: liturgy and speech act, individual performance and communal response, continuity and discontinuity, utterance and intelligibility, divided readership, Jewish language and gender, transliteration and foreign typeface, and language as collective memory and site of desire and authenticity. The works in this book were chosen both to provide a historical framework, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, and to map generations in relation to immigration: the three immigrant writers in the first three chapters arrived on America’s shores at the ages of twenty-two, twelve, and two, and the writers in the second half are first, second, and third-generation Americans.

---

I could not have written this book without the conversations, advice, information, critique, and guidance of colleagues and students across many boundaries—linguistic, geographic, and disciplinary. I owe a great deal to my students at Tel Aviv University whose questions and insights over the years have kept me thinking and revising, and I have also learned from the different perspectives of students at the University of Konstanz and at the Johns Hopkins University where I had the opportunity to teach seminars on Jewish American writing to German and American students. My bilingual dialogues with Zephyra Porat have not only helped me to sharpen my ideas but they have also been inspiring. She has been an ideal reader and a generous friend. Alan Mintz and David Roskies guided me through my first essay on multilingual aesthetics written for Prooftexts more than a decade ago. Walter Benn Michaels, by engaging me in thought-provoking conversation, has helped to sustain my enthusiasm for this project from its inception. I am deeply grateful to Werner Sollors and Eric Sundquist for astute and detailed readings of the full manuscript, and for being such generous, supportive, and kind colleagues. The following people read parts of the manuscript and I have benefited from their comments and suggestions: Aleida Assmann, Sacvan Bercovitch, Emily Budick, James Chandler, Frances Ferguson, Susan Gubar, Michael Kramer, Renate Lachmann, Marilyn Reizbaum, David Roskies, Milette Shamir, Michael Wood, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Meir Sternberg, and Irene Tucker.

I have enjoyed two productive and enriching semester sabbaticals while writing this book. My deepest thanks to the Department of English at the Johns Hopkins University for the invitation to serve as Tandetnik Visiting Professor and to the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, where a Harry Starr Fellowship provided me with a stimulating environment in which to complete the manuscript. Particular thanks to Ruth Wisse and her seminar co-director Avi Matalon, for conducting such an interesting workshop on Jewish literature. I appreciate the support that I received from The Israel Science Foundation and from the Kurt Lion Foundation, which enabled me to share my ideas with students and faculty at the University of Konstanz. I am deeply grateful for the research assistance made possible by the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Fund for the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and for the warm support and friendship of Perry Haber.

I received many valuable comments and questions from those who attended lectures based on chapters of this book on the campuses of Bar Ilan, Ben Gurion, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Hebrew University, the Jewish Theological Seminary (the Ginor Forum), Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rutgers, and Yale. Special thanks to Mary Murrell of Princeton University Press for such keen interest, encouragement, and editorial advice, and to Hanne Winarsky for guiding me through the preparation of the final manuscript.

I have been fortunate over the years to work with outstanding and devoted research assistants to whom I owe a great debt: Malkiel Kaisy, Amit Yahav-Brown, Sonia Weiner, Noa Levy, and Maya Klein. My exceptional friends Ellen Coin, Barry Fishkin, Barbara Schatz, Rick Schaffer, and Deborah Waber have opened their homes to me warmly and boundlessly during my research visits to the United States. Arie, Ilana, Yonatan, and Shira have taught me the many languages of love and the inadequacy of any language to express the joy that they bring to my life.

---

Sections of several of the chapters have been published earlier in different form, and I would like to acknowledge permission to reprint from these earlier versions: Part of the introductory chapter appeared as Traces of the Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing, in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); an earlier version of the Abraham Cahan chapter appeared as "‘Shpeaking Plain’ and Writing Foreign: Abraham Cahan’s Yekl," in Poetics Today, January 2001; part of the Henry Roth chapter appeared as "Between Mother Tongue and Native Language: Multilingualism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep" in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History (spring 1990), and as "Chad Gadya, ‘Christ, it’s a Kid!’—Writing Jewish America," in Princeton University Library Chronicle, October 2001; the section on Seize the Day in the Saul Bellow chapter appeared in an earlier version as ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’: Saul Bellows’s Translations, in New Essays on Seize the Day, ed. Michael Kramer (Cambridge University Press, 1999); the section on The Shawl in the Ozick chapter appeared as "The Languages of Memory: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl," in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York University Press, 1998); part of Sounding Letters appeared as Language as Homeland in Jewish-American Literature, in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Susannah Heschel, and Michael Galshinsky (University of California Press, 1998).

Chapter 1

Accent Marks: Writing and Pronouncing Jewish America

pronouncing america, writing jewish: abraham cahan, delmore schwartz, grace paley, bernard malamud

Far beyond the lights of Jersey,

Jerusalem still beckons us, in tongues.

—Linda Pastan, Passover (1971)

Contrary to some stereotypical misunderstanding, there is no

New Jersey accent.

—Philip Roth Interview (2002)

For decades, a New York–based radio station whose multilingual broadcasts served the needs of immigrant communities would identify itself in the following words: "This is WEVD, the station that speaks your language. For most of the Jewish listeners, this meant Yiddish. During the first half of the twentieth century, Yiddish fueled the immigrant and second generation community, with daily newspapers, theaters, novels, poetry, folksongs, and radio programs such as those on WEVD. All of this has been well documented, and all of this is history. In recent years, New York City subways have displayed bold posters of the American flag in the shape of an Aleph (first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), sporting a banner with the words Read Hebrew America. By dialing a simple toll-free number, 1-800-444-HEBRE(W), anyone can acquire information at any time about free classes in the language of our people" (see Figure 1). But what does speaking your language mean in these two advertisements, or in American Jewish culture more generally over the past century? In one case, Yiddish is a sign of the Old World, of an immigrant community tuning in to WEVD as a form of nostalgia. In the other, Hebrew is a sign of an even older identity, not of family history but of ancient history, not of relatives but of ancestors. One is listening, the other is reading; one is remembering, the other is re-enacting; one is Yiddishkeit, the other is Judaism. WEVD caters to an audience for whom Yiddish is palpably present; Read Hebrew addresses a public for whom Hebrew is conspicuously absent. One community’s linguistic home is still Yiddish, the other’s home is English, and only a moral or ideological imperative—Read Hebrew America—proposes to alter that.

Nowadays, the primary language of American Jewry is neither Yiddish nor Hebrew.¹ Despite impressive bodies of literature in both of these languages produced in the United States, the language of American Jewry has become English, so much so that Cynthia Ozick has at one time suggested that English be referred to as the New Yiddish.² Still, it would be misleading to talk about American Jewry as entirely monolingual. Jewish American literature offers testimony of multilingual awareness not only among immigrant writers where we would expect this to be the case but also among their descendants who have retained attachments to languages other than English, at times despite their meager knowledge of them. In fact, the mere sound of the language or the sight of a letter from the Hebrew alphabet has often been sufficient to trigger powerful feelings of belonging or alienation. The works that I will be discussing in this book are captivating not necessarily because the authors have mastered more than one language but because they are negotiating between languages that they evade, repress, transgress, mourn, resist, deny, translate, romanticize, or reify. They are works of American literature with a Jewish accent.

Figure 1. National Jewish Outreach Program’s Read Hebrew America logo.

A short excerpt from Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep illustrates how both Yiddish and Hebrew leave their traces in Jewish American writing. Two small boys are accusing a third of having committed a double sin by tearing a page of a Yiddish newspaper for use as toilet paper. ‘So w’y is id a double sin?’ he asks. ‘ ’cause it’s Shabis,’ one of the boys calls out, ‘An dat’s one sin. Yuh can’t tear on Shabis. And because it’s a Jewish noospaper wid Jewish on id, dat’s two sins. Dere!’ ‘Yes’, the other chimed in. ‘You’d a only god one sin if you tord a Englitch noospaper.’ ³ Roth renders Yiddish accent in carefully designed phonetic transcription where English orthography and Yiddish sound intersect to produce interlingual puns that comment on this scene of transgression, as in noospaper, god, tord (close to turd), and Englitch. Since phonetic transcription is always a matter of what we see as much as what we hear, and always a matter of artistic choice rather than some illusory accuracy, the Yiddish accent marks in these expressions gesture both toward the English words that we read and the Hebrew alphabet without whose presence this passage would make no sense. Insofar as the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day has been interpreted in traditional Judaism as avoiding any labor that parallels God’s labor of creating the world, namely altering the state of matter, tearing a sheet of paper violates shabis, the Sabbath. The second sin, however, is the one that invokes one of the special features of Hebrew, namely the sacredness of the alphabet. Although the boys are obviously talking about a Yiddish newspaper, the Hebrew letters always have the potential of being combined into God’s name, the sacred tetragrammaton, and therefore they must not be defaced or desecrated. The linguistic story of Jewish American writing has been in large part a passage out of Yiddish, the language of immigrants, and a passage into Hebrew, the language of religious rites of passage so formative in Jewish identity.⁴ As the child of immigrants and as modernist American writer, Roth is poised between these two, as exemplified in this passage. On one hand, Yiddish-inflected speech affords him an opportunity for both social realism and artistic word play, while on the other hand, it gives him a venue for commenting on the holy or liturgical dimension of Hebrew, a continuous feature of Jewish culture on either side of the Atlantic.⁵ Moreover, the very word Englitch testifies to the Yiddish components in American English, as glitch is now standard usage for a slip, lapse, or malfunction.⁶ Jewish American writing is marked by numerous linguistic slips and lapses such as Roth’s, traces of Yiddish and Hebrew in English.

Despite this compact illustration of my subject and despite the echo of Roth’s novel in my own title, I am not claiming that his work is representative in the sense that all Jewish American writers treat these languages uniformly. On the contrary, I am arguing that while the linguistic heritage for the majority of Jewish writers in English has been Yiddish and Hebrew, they have negotiated these languages in diverse ways. Representation of accented speech, for example, has ranged from the strident Yiddish American dialect in Abraham Cahan’s work to accented speech restricted to non-Jewish American characters in Saul Bellow’s novels. And the spectrum is as wide for Hebraic and liturgical inscriptions as well, from the blasphemy of Henry Roth to the reverence of Cynthia Ozick. The two New Jersey epigraphs to this chapter from contemporary writers attest to the hold of Hebrew and Yiddish on the imaginations of Jewish American authors. Linda Pastan begins her poem Passover with I set my table with metaphor and then surveys the display of Jewish ceremonial dishes—Down the long table, past fresh shoots of a root / they have been hacking at for centuries, / you hold up the unleavened bread—a baked scroll / whose wavy lines are indecipherable.⁷ Each item of food on the poet’s Passover table signifies more than its traditional role according to the Haggadah, the narrative and ritual of the seder, such as the root that symbolizes the bitterness of slavery (maror) or the unleavened bread that symbolizes the haste of the divine deliverance from bondage (matzah). For Pastan, the root that has been hacked at for centuries is also the tenacity of the Jewish people to survive persecution, while the serrated lines across the matzah appear as indecipherable Hebrew script. The inseparability of the ritualistic items and the language of their origin, of what is eaten and what is spoken, awakens a longing in her this one night a year for a distant origin, where far beyond the lights of Jersey / Jerusalem still beckons, in tongues.⁸ In contrast to this exilic yearning for the ancient mother tongue, Hebrew, Philip Roth shakes off any vestige of immigrant Yiddish by insisting that New Jersey is a miraculous terrain of accent-less speech—there is no New Jersey accent—by which he means that he does not speak like a Jew. In a recent interview, he admits that there is a New York accent, but there was only one language in my neighborhood, American English.⁹ Roth’s repeated disavowal of accent marks in his speech leaves its trace on his writing, as I will discuss in this introduction and in the final chapter. His linguistic situation is proof enough that not knowing a language is not an indicator of its influence, since it may be harder to abandon what cannot be grasped. As a second generation American, Roth never learned Yiddish, and as a result, communication with his grandmother was confined to the language of emotion, which is powerful but not very informative. As for Hebrew, I ceased being smart in Hebrew school. Given that he found himself dumb with respect to both the passage away from Yiddish and the rite of passage toward Hebrew, it is not surprising that muteness, stammering, and accent will haunt his writing, not because he has no command of these languages but because he is disturbed by the notion that he should know them.

Those writers whose works reveal traces of Yiddish and Hebrew (or Aramaic), whether they are immigrant or native-born Americans, have either strongly identified with, even celebrated, this continuity in their writings, or they have kept their distance by ironic treatment of characters’ speech or by self-conscious declarations of English exclusivity. My contention is that for many Jewish American writers subsequent to the immigrant generation, Hebrew and Yiddish are sources of self-expression and identity even if the authors cannot remember them in the sense of ever having possessed them as a means of communication. Their understanding of what these languages signify is always the result, borrowing from Werner Sollors, of both descent, a continuous cultural legacy, and consent, an embrace of American English that also structures their sense of those Jewish languages and accents. Their remembering, therefore, is not the result of an essential Jewishness that hearkens back to some racial memory but the result of socialization where practices, expectations, and assumptions about the entanglement of language and identity linger in their consciousness. Immigrant authors and their literary descendants will either weave these languages into their English writing as they emphasize the particular, which is the case for most of the writers in Call It English, or they will profess their forgetting in their insistence on the universal, as in the case of Mary Antin and Philip Roth.¹⁰

One language has never been enough for the Jewish people: shmuel Niger (1941)

Knowledge of more than one language has always characterized Jewish civilization, whether the Jews were dispersed among the nations or residing in their homeland. In Warsaw at the turn of the century, a Jew might have spoken Yiddish at home, prayed and studied holy books in the Beit Midrash in Hebrew and Aramaic, transacted business in Polish, and read world literature in Russian or in German. In Alexandria in the same period, a Jew might have spoken French at home, prayed and studied in Hebrew and Aramaic, read a Ladino newspaper (also known as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo), and conducted his professional life in Arabic. 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 loshnkoydesh, the holy tongue of Hebrew-Aramaic. By necessity, he would also have acquired enough Ukrainian to secure his income as a dairyman. European Jewish culture was constituted of the rich symbiosis of these languages, of their complementary and hierarchical relation to each other. Insofar as Hebrew tended to define the sphere of prayer, ritual, study, and law, it occupied a masculine position in diasporic Jewish culture; insofar as Yiddish was generally confined to the more mundane spheres of the home and the marketplace, it was often defined as a feminine world.¹¹ But there were many exceptions to this polarization, particularly in the emergence of a flourishing and wide-ranging modernist Yiddish literature whose themes and readership cut across gender lines. The extent to which bilingualism is rooted in European Jewish life is expressed by Max Weinreich in his History of the Yiddish Language: a Jew of some scholarly attainment, born around 1870, certainly did not express only his personal opinion when he declared that the Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch had been given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.¹²

Before Shmuel Niger made the case for bilingualism as a constant feature of Jewish writing—one language has never been enough for the Jewish people— in his Yiddish Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, published in America in 1941, Baal-Makhshoves had already made this claim in eastern Europe at the turn of the century. As early as 1918, he observed that the mark of Jewish literature had always been its bilingualism.¹³ Although he was taking this position within the ideological wars of the Czernowitz conference and the antagonism between Hebrew and Yiddish,¹⁴ he traced the bilingual status of Jewish literature back to the Bible. In every text that is part of the Jewish tradition, Baal-Makhshoves wrote, there existed implicitly or explicitly another language, whether it be Chaldean in the Book of Daniel, Aramaic in the Pentateuch and the prayer book, Arabic in medieval Jewish philosophical writings, and, in his own day, Yiddish. Bilingualism accompanied the Jews even in ancient times, even when they had their own land, and they were not as yet wanderers as they are now, he wrote. "We have two languages and a dozen echoes from other foreign languages, but we have only one literature.¹⁵ When Baal-Makhshoves refers to bilingualism, he means not only the literal presence of two languages but also the echoes of another language and culture detected in so-called monolingual prose. Don’t our finer critics carry within them the spirit of the German language? And among our younger writers, who were educated in the Russian language, isn’t it possible to discern the spirit of Russian?"¹⁶

Since Baal-Makhshoves and Niger singled out multilingualism as a prominent feature of Jewish literature, scholars and critics have continued to highlight it in their various studies of Jewish writing. As Ruth Wisse has observed, the politically anomalous Jews generated a multilingual literature in their refusal to make language synonymous with national identity and in their corresponding eagerness to master coterritorial cultures.¹⁷ Bilingual and multilingual poetics has been at the center of literary scholarship of modern Hebrew and Yiddish writing, exemplified in the work of Benjamin Harshav, Yael Feldman, Dan Miron, and Gershon Shaked, among others.¹⁸ European Jewish immigrants brought this multilingual legacy with them to the New World, where their encounter with American English was bound to alter their attitudes toward and their practice of these tongues. Immigration to America dramatically altered this traditional need for bilingualism: separation of church and state on one hand and the melting pot ideology on the other made Jewish affiliation a matter of individual conscience, and held out the promise of acculturation and assimilation. Immigrants fervently believed that English was the ticket to successful Americanization, and therefore becoming a naturalized citizen meant first and foremost a linguistic transformation. In Mary Antin’s triumphant rhetoric, I thought it miracle enough that I, Mashke, the granddaughter of Raphael the Russian . . . should dream my dreams in English phrases.¹⁹ Several decades later Cynthia Ozick noted, Since the coming forth from Egypt five millennia ago, mine is the first generation to think and speak and write wholly in English.²⁰ The English language that Jewish immigrants were eagerly adopting as their own, however, was more elastic, more open to other languages, than those that Jews had encountered in Europe. Although Webster’s strategy for