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Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America

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Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America By Daniel Rochelson Mintz A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Dissertation Committee: Professor Anita Norich, Chair Professor Jonathan E. Freedman Associate Professor Julian A. Levinson Professor Deborah D. Moore © Daniel R. Mintz 2013 DEDICATION For Meri-Jane and Joel, Sarah, Sam and Karl ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of a great many people. My profound thanks are due to my chair, Anita Norich, for her patient guidance, incisive readings, steadfast support, keen practical advice, and for her friendship; and to Julian Levinson, Deborah Dash Moore, Jonathan Freedman, and Patsy Yaeger, for their generous and insightful comments on the dissertation manuscript, for their sage counsel throughout the writing process, and for innumerable occasions of support, encouragement, and illumination. I am grateful, also, for the intellectual and professional direction provided by Todd Endelman, Sarah Blair, Alan Wald, Michael Awkward, Kerry Larson, Susan Najita, Carol Bardenstein, and Danny Hack throughout graduate school and in the early stages of this project’s formation; to Nancy Cho and Susan Jaret McKinstry, whose examples of passion, learning, and humane engagement with literature and with students inspired me to enter the profession, and whose encouragement and support have been sources of strength; and to Karen Sutton and Peggy Haun Monteil, who fostered the deep joy and fulfillment I find in conversations about culture. The financial support of the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature, and Marshall Weinberg provided invaluable time and resources to focus on this project. Jan Burgess and Senia Vasquez have provided kind and expert administrative support in negotiating the University’s many and branching bureaucratic paths. iii I am grateful for the advice and critiques offered on portions of this project by the USists Consortium at the University of Michigan, the University of Michigan Judaic Studies Capstone Seminar, the 2010 AAJR Summer Graduate Student Seminar, and the Stanford University Jewish Studies Graduate Colloquium. I am also particularly indebted to Inger Bergom, Nick Block, Tom Clark, Sara Feldman, Adam Freelander, Molly Hatcher, Sasha Hoffman, Emily Kopley, Dan Kupfert-Heller, Kenny Ligda, Spencer Piston, Ben Pollak, Molly Sandomire, David Schlitt, and Oren Segal, for their care, assistance, and camaraderie, which in many ways, large and small, I have felt while completing this work. Finally, the constant support of my family has made the troubles of the dissertation less bitter, and the joys, more savory. Thanks beyond words to my parents, Meri-Jane Rochelson and Joel Mintz, who raised me with a reverence for books and for the sanctity of the minds they represent, and to Serafima Mintz, my sister, friend, and teacher. My grandparents, Pearl Rochelson, Samuel Mintz, and Eleanor Mintz, encouraged me from the beginning of this project. Though Grandma Pearl and Grandpa Sam didn’t live to see its conclusion, their love continues to inspire me. My friendship with Grandma Ellie is a treasured gift. Thanks, too, to my parents in-law, Eva and Brian Allison, who have welcomed me warmly into their family, and have supported me with kindness and love. My son Sam has started recently to sit at my computer in front of an open text document, typing nonsense. “Daddy,” he says, “I’m working on my chapter.” His brother Karl begins to babble. My love for them only deepens as we discover each other, and has buoyed my completion of this work. In this joy, and in so much else, Sarah Allison has been my partner. Her lively intelligence and wit have touched all of the ideas in this text, to the ideas’ great benefit, and to my own. I am grateful, in this acknowledgment and always, always, to her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION....................................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTERS Foreword ...................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Jewish Writing vs. Jewish Writers: Genre and Authorship in Post-War American Anthologies of Jewish Fiction ........................ 12 Chapter Two: Maturity, Form, and Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle: From “Early Genius” to “Fragments and Scraps” ........................................................................ 56 Chapter Three: “Literature Isn’t Little Stories!”: Cynthia Ozick’s Poetics of Littleness and the Construction of Jewish American Authorship .......................................................................................................... 110 Chapter Four: “I Am the Kind of Person who Writes this Kind of Story”: The Jewish Writer as Jewish Professional in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer ........................... 150 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 199 v ABSTRACT This dissertation considers the place of the short story in the post-war efflorescence of American Jewish writing. If focuses particularly on the strategies that Jewish writers deployed, through their uses and meta-fictional portrayals of the short story form, to negotiate between Jewish and professional personae. The short story is at once a vehicle of entry into single-author publication and a generally insufficient guarantor of further publication, a forum for experimentation and an emblem of high-art mastery. In works foregrounding the liminality of the short story as a marker of professional attainment, I argue, writers of Jewish fiction interrogated their professional, Jewish, and Jewish-professional identities in the postwar American literary scene. Many writers of Jewish descent or of Jewish subject matter have professed ambivalence (if not hostility) to being labeled Jewish writers. Between their own Jewishness and their work, these writers maintain a barrier of professionalism, arguing that their work, whatever else it is, stands in relation to them as work and not as scarcely-mediated expression of their selves or their cultural origins. Chapter one compares two approaches to the definition of Jewish writing—Jewish communal and literary-professional—in anthologies edited by Harold U. Ribalow (This Land, These People, 1950) and Saul Bellow (Great Jewish Stories, 1963). Chapter two examines Tillie Olsen’s enlistment of the short story form in Tell Me a Riddle (1961), in the service of a post-Communist politics that draws on narratives of Jewish socialism to link the discontinuities in a writer’s career with the political ruptures confronting the political Left in the early Cold War. Chapter three moves from Olsen’s concern with gaps in political commitment to Cynthia Ozick’s treatment of the truncated careers of Yiddish writers in her 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Chapter four vi concludes with an analysis of Philip Roth’s investigation of Jewish literary professionalism in his 1979 novella The Ghost Writer. vii 1 FOREWORD In an essay titled “Clearing My Jewish Throat,” (2005) written for Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) A Jewish American Writer, a collection in which Jewish writers discuss the place of Jewishness in their work, Grace Paley offers this account of the beginning of her career as a writer: In 1959, three volumes of short stories were published to reviews that cheered the authors. They were then told by their publishers that they’d have to write a novel. Short stories were not a popular genre. (The collections, Tell Me a Riddle, Goodbye, Columbus, and The Little Disturbances of Man, are still in print some forty-five years later, still read at homes, libraries, schools.) Obediently, Tillie Olsen and I made an honest effort. She labored at Yonondio [sic] for years, starting and stopping as life permitted, and it was finally published. I tried for about two years and a hundred pages to make a novel, saw that it was no good, and have written short stories and poems ever since. Philip Roth, equally obedient, was successful, writing the big books so truthfully and well that the Jews were angry at him for at least fifteen years before they became extremely proud. In any event we were all Jews. Of course we hoped that Americans, the regular kind, were listening too. (13) 1 Paley’s career is admittedly unique, and not only among Jewish writers, in being constructed almost entirely out of stories and poems (and then mostly out of stories) with no published novel either buoying or weighing down her oeuvre. But nonetheless Paley’s suggestive relation of the short story form to the situation of the Jewish writer has significance
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