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Title: The Modern Jewish Canon : A Journey Through Language and Culture by Ruth R. Wisse ISBN: 0-684-83075-2 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 25 September, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A learned, warm, and witty book
Comment: This humane and compassionate book is the kind of scholarship I thought had vanished in a morass of structuralism, deconstruction, hermaneutics, and the other polysyllables of Academic Mandarin.
Professor Wisse fulfills the subtitle of her book on Hebrew, Polish, English, Yiddish, Russian, and German literature dealing with Judaism and Jewish life: a journey through language and culture. It is a journey that describes life on the kibbutz, in the ghetto, in the Pale of Settlement, in the camps, and in the United States and sets all of these Jewish lives in their context of Western history and literature and politics.
I don't read or speak most of the languages in which these literatures are written. I'm not familiar with most of the texts, which is my loss. Professor Wisse manages, through quick descriptions and well-chosen quotations, to give a careful reader some notion of a field that is unfamiliar. I don't think I'll ever think of some of these writers again without thinking how they put their religion, their politics, and their lives on the line.
This is especially moving when she comes to the description of the Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew; Khurbn in Yiddish). Most of us are familiar with the DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Anne Frank). What I didn't know was how many diarists whose names are unknown except to scholars and (like the Unknown Soldier) to God wrote as the means of combat available to people of the Book: keeping the record; literary resistance. Her summation of this section is memorable: "Like soldiers who die for their country, these Jews obeyed the imperative to document over the imperative to live."
Her section on Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer combines biographical information on a famous writing family, shrewd psychoanalytic and textual criticism, and then opens up to the larger context of English literature. Her discussion of Tevye the Dairyman as a kind of inverse of King Lear is a revelation, and her comments on the vastly successful FIDDLER ON THE ROOF simultaneously set it at its rightful value as Judaism and its much larger value as a document of popular culture and a talisman for many cultures. And not much later on, she's talking about Gershom Scholem, the Cabalist scholar.
What's impressive about this entire section (in addition to what I've mentioned) is that she deals with this literature as itself, without resorting to comparisons such as "this is magical realism, only it's not Latin American."
She isn't afraid to speak with her own voice, which is one of strong convictions and considerable, balanced wit. I howled at the Yiddish version of Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that she quoted, and I laughed even more at the way she dealt with Leon Uris' EXODUS, which did indeed serve its purpose in keeping a Jewish spirit alive in Russia, surprisingly, but which she doesn't consider part of a Jewish canon, but as popular, not particularly well-written fiction that she refers to as winning Israel "the popularity of a dance around the golden calf."
The book is a powerful argument in favor of a culture maintaining its own culture rather than assimilating until it's gone; it's also very much a work in the making: Wisse cites a number of texts she'd have liked to include, with the inference being that there will be more.
I hope there are. And I hope that Professor Wisse produces more books of this high caliber. "As with the Bible," she concludes in her Postscript, "the world will also value what the Jews find of value to themselves."
This needs to be said. And then it needs to be applied to every culture, with the wisdom gained from books like this.
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Title: Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology by Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, Kathryn Hellerstein ISBN: 0393048098 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 02 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: If I Am Not For Myself by Ruth Wisse ISBN: 0743229614 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 17 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jacob Sloan ISBN: 0374524793 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 31 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem ISBN: 0805210695 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev, Hillel Halkin ISBN: 1841952427 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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