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Call It English: the Languages of Jewish American Literature

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Call It English: the Languages of Jewish American Literature 1 2 3 4 5 6 Call It English 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 S42 R43 3rd Pass Pages This page intentionally left blank 1 2 3 4 5 6 Call It English 7 8 9 the languages of 10 11 jewish american 12 13 literature 14 15 16 17 Hana Wirth-Nesher 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 princeton university press S42 princeton and oxford R43 3rd Pass Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press 7 8 Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 9 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW 10 All Rights Reserved 11 Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2009 12 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-13844-2 13 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows 14 15 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 1948– 16 Call it English : the languages of Jewish American literature / Hana Wirth-Nesher. p. cm. 17 Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 18 ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12152-9 (alk. paper) 19 ISBN-10: 0-691-12152-4 (acid free paper) 20 1. American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism 2. United States— 21 Literatures—History and criticism. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. 4. Jews—United States—Intellectual life. 5. Judaism and literature—United States. 22 6. Language and languages in literature. 7. Jews—United States—Languages. 8. Multi- 23 lingualism—United States. 9. Bilingualism—United States. 10. Jews in literature. 24 I. Title. 25 PS153.J4W57 2006 26 810.9'8924—dc22 2005043106 27 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available 28 29 This book has been composed in Goudy ∞ 30 Printed on acid-free paper. press.princeton.edu 31 32 Printed in the United States of America 33 1098765432 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42S 43R 3rd Pass Pages MASTER 1 2 3 4 5 6 For Ilana, Yonatan, and Shira 7 who fill me with joy 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 S42 R43 3rd Pass Pages This page intentionally left blank Contents 1 2 3 4 5 Illustrations ix 6 7 Preface xi 8 9 Chapter 1 10 Accent Marks: Writing and Pronouncing Jewish America 1 11 Pronouncing America, Writing Jewish: 12 Abraham Cahan, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud 13 Chapter 2 14 “I like to shpeak plain, shee? Dot’sh a kin’ a man I am!” 32 15 16 Speech, Dialect, and Realism: 17 Abraham Cahan 18 Chapter 3 19 “I learned at least to think in English without an accent” 52 20 Linguistic Passing: Mary Antin 21 22 Chapter 4 23 “Christ, it’s a Kid!”—Chad Godya.7624 Jewish Writing and Modernism: Henry Roth 25 26 Chapter 5 27 “Here I am!”—Hineni 100 28 Partial and Partisan Translations: Saul Bellow 29 Chapter 6 30 “Aloud she uttered it”— ʭʹʤ —Hashem 127 31 32 Pronouncing the Sacred: Cynthia Ozick 33 Chapter 7 34 Sounding Letters 149 35 “And a river went out of Eden”—Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman 36 “Magnified and Sanctified”—The Kaddish as First and Last Words 37 38 Notes 177 39 Works Cited 203 40 41 Index 215 S42 R43 3rd Pass Pages This page intentionally left blank Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 Monumental Alphabet, Ben Shahn 6 © Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Cover 7 1. “Read Hebrew America” 2 8 Permission, Habad of America 9 2. The Promised Land cover, first edition 55 10 Permission of the Leonard L. Milberg Collection, 11 Princeton University 12 3. Mary Antin manuscript—MS verso p. 81, p. 84 64 13 Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. 14 Courtesy of the Trustees 15 4. Henry Roth manuscript of Call It Sleep 92 16 Permission of the Henry Roth Literary Properties Trust 17 Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American 18 Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden 19 Foundations 20 5. Page from The Puttermesser Papers 147 21 Permission, Alfred Knopf 22 6. Cover photograph and design for The Far Euphrates 161 23 Permission from Riverhead Books 24 7. Cartoon from Maus, p. 54 169 25 From Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by 26 Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 27 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, 28 a division of Random House, Inc. 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 S42 R43 3rd Pass Pages MASTER This page intentionally left blank Preface 1 2 3 4 5 It has always been difficult for me to pronounce the surname on my birth cer- 6 tificate, Wroclawski, the last official vestige of my father’s prewar life in Poland 7 and bestowed upon me in Germany where we were displaced persons waiting 8 for a visa that would eventually make us refugees in Pennsylvania. I could 9 never reproduce the trill in that Polish “r”, but I didn’t have to struggle with it 10 for long, because once we became naturalized United States citizens, my par- 11 ents cast off this lingering mark of their European past, Americanizing their 12 name to Wirth, which neither of them could ever pronounce due to that for- 13 midable “th.” Since German was my mother’s native language, she also gave 14 up on the “w”, so that her American name, “Virt,” may have been well suited 15 to her Austro-Hungarian tongue, but the irony was not lost on us that it was 16 also in the language of those who had murdered their families and turned sur- 17 vivors into refugees in need of a new name. I grew up “Hana Wirth,” except 18 when kindly schoolteachers and camp counselors Americanized it further by 19 calling me Annie. When they did call me Hana, it was always in the broad 20 nasal twang that rhymed with banana, a sound I detested so much that I found 21 myself willing to settle for Annie. 22 My mother always spoke to me in German and my father always read to me 23 in Yiddish, alternating between fiction—Sholem Aleichem and Chekhov 24 among his favorites—and columns of the Yiddish daily Der Tog Morgen 25 Journal. In Hebrew School I learned Ashkenazi pronunciation for prayer and 26 Bible study; at home I had a weekly Hebrew tutor who taught me modern pro- 27 nunciation from work pages with pen and ink drawings of animals and chil- 28 dren. I could recite the blessing for bread as if I were a heder child in Lodz (at 29 least that was the intent), and I could recite “The birds chirp” as if I were in a 30 Tarbut School in Vilna. Although I was being plied with English books to 31 make sure that I would succeed in school, I was also spoken to or read to in the 32 languages of my parents’ European past, and simultaneously I was being taught 33 the Hebrew of transnational Jewish religious life along with, for a short time, 34 the Hebrew of modern Israel, so that I could participate, even from a distance, 35 in the rebirth of their ancient homeland. 36 When I immigrated to Israel later in life, “Wirth” was impossible to translit- 37 erate, and therefore it reverted to its Germanic origins, while Hana reverted to 38 its Hebrew origins, by reinstating the gutteral first letter in “Chana.” My hus- 39 band’s surname, Nesher, was the result of his father’s Hebraizing the German 40 name Adler, an act more akin to the phoenix (being the sole survivor of his 41 family) than the eagle, which it means in both languages. Whenever I pro- S42 nounce my own name in Hebrew, my personal history becomes transparent, R43 3rd Pass Pages xii • Preface 1 and I am promptly labeled an “Anglo-Saxon,” inaccurate in English genealogy 2 but accurate in Israeli society where it simply means Anglophone. Like my 3 parents whose accent was most pronounced when they uttered their own 4 names, speaking my name in Tel Aviv gives me away. In contrast, writing it in 5 Hebrew reveals an entirely different version of my past. Whereas the spoken 6 name testifies to over thirty years in America, the written name points only to 7 German origins. I would need to both speak and write my name, in two dif- 8 ferent alphabets, in order for it to convey its linguistic, cultural, and geo- 9 graphical layers. 10 Negotiating several languages in speech and in writing, with varying de- 11 grees of competence and affect, has paved the way for writing Call It English, 12 which explores the multilingual dimension of Jewish American writing. 13 Whereas Jewish writing has always been transnational and multilingual, 14 American Jewish writing, when read in the framework of American literature, 15 has often been regarded as one among other European ethnic literatures of the 16 United States, and when read in the framework of Jewish literature, it has 17 often been detached from the American literary and cultural forces that have 18 also shaped it.
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