SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Representations of Exurbia in Jewish-American Literature A Dissertation Presented by Michael Oil to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University May 2015 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Michael Oil We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Susan Scheckel – Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor, Department of English, Stony Brook University Peter Manning - Chairperson of Defense Professor, Department of English, Stony Brook University Heidi Hutner Associate Professor, Department of English, Stony Brook University Ranen Omer-Sherman Professor, Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Louisville This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Representations of Exurbia in Jewish-American Literature by Michael Oil Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University 2015 Jewish-American literature is conventionally thought to be urban in terms of sensibility and geographical setting. This is understandable given that the city, especially New York, has figured centrally in the genre. Yet the strong identification of Jewish-American writing with urbanism, I show in this study, has obscured a significant strain of exurban desire in the works of Jewish-American poets and novelists. Even the emerging subfield of Jewish spatial studies continues to overlook representations of rural areas and nature in Jewish-American literature despite its expressed commitment to examine sites previously ignored by literary scholars. My project begins to remedy this neglect by recovering and interpreting the complex of exurbanism in the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld, Yehoash, and I.J. Schwartz, and in novels and stories by Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Far from being sui generis, the exurbanism of these writers, I argue, is contiguous with the incipient naturism of Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) intellectuals, who sought to usher traditional European Jews into modernity, and inspired by motifs and ideals latent in Jewish liturgy, (neo-)Hasidism, the Hebrew Bible, and Yiddishkayt. Not surprisingly, Jewish-American literary exurbanism is also indebted to Euro- American pastoral, and specifically to such writers as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. A profoundly hybrid construction, Jewish-American literary exurbanism, I contend, inflects both Jewish and American identity, the former by valorizing a topos viewed as inherently assimilationist by Jewish traditionalists, and the latter through its critique of the masculinism, inwardness, and escapism that are associated with conventional forms of pastoral. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 1. The American-Yiddish Nature Poetics of Morris Rosenfeld, Yehoash, and I.J. Schwartz…………………………………………………………………………….20 2. Mentshlekhkayt in the American West: Bernard Malamud’s A New Life………………………………………………………………………………………..52 3. Romanticism and Remorse in Saul Bellow’s Herzog..….……………..……..…………79 4. Philip Roth’s Anti-Pastorals……………………………………………………………104 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...................139 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….141 iv “When we speak of a poet as being of a particular religion, we do not imply in him completeness or orthodoxy, or even explicitness of doctrine, but only that his secular utterance has the decisive mark of the religion upon it.” —Lionel Trilling, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” A wry New Yorker piece by Woody Allen a few years ago titled “Udder Madnesss” underscores the auteur’s famous affinity for the urban milieu and related animus towards the natural one. It begins with an actual excerpt from a Centers for Diseases Control press release reporting that approximately twenty people are killed by cows in the United States annually, and that in sixteen cases in one recent year, “the animal was deemed to have purposefully struck the victim…All but one victim died from head or chest injuries; the last died after a cow knocked him down and a syringe in his pocket injected him with an antibiotic meant for the cow. In at least one case, the animal attacked from behind” (31). In inimitable fashion, Woody Allen mines the CDC article for its latent comedy, allowing a representative, if unusually erudite and cerebral, “killer cow” (the piece’s subtitle) to explain for himself what inspired his murderous rage. He relates how the trouble began when the owner of his New Jersey farm, the famous Broadway producer Sy Pudnick—an “avid weekend” farmer who with his wife grows “corn, carrots, tomatoes, and a medley of other amateur crops, while their children play host to a dozen chickens, a pair of horses, a baby lamb, and yours truly”— invited a group of artists and intellectuals over one weekend for a get-together, as was his practice. Normally, says the cow, he enjoyed these gatherings on the Pudnick farm, which “rivals any pastoral tableau by Constable, if not in acreage then certainly in bucolic tranquility,” for it was “a joy…to be in proximity to New York’s fabulous glitterati…,” and was particularly excited on the weekend in question because one of the invited guests was a famous “writer- 1 director in cinema” who “sometimes took the lead in his own pictures” (32). Anticipating someone along the lines of Warren Beatty or John Cassavetes, the cow was deeply disappointed when the guest arrived and turned out to be a “wormy little cipher, myopic behind black-framed glasses and groomed loutishly in his idea of rural chic: all tweedy and woodsy, with cap and muffler, ready for the leprechauns” (32)—someone, in other words, who looked a lot like Woody Allen. To make matters worse, says the cow, the writer-director happened to be an insufferable whiner and braggart who started behaving badly from the moment he arrived at the farm. When he made a drunken pass at an actress one evening, the cow could take no more and came up with a plan to “strangle the nattering little carbuncle with a sash” from behind. And so, one afternoon, while the other guests were away on a nature walk that “a certain cringing homunculus, who carried on like Duse over the prospect of being in the woods among Lyme ticks and poison oaks,” refused to go on, the cow sneaked into the writer-director’s room and waited for him to return from the kitchen, where he was “cobbl[ing] together a costly sturgeon-and-beluga sandwich, ladling the bagel with a tsunami of cream cheese” (32). In the end, the cow says, he managed only to traumatize his intended victim, who (much in the fashion of the victim of the CDC excerpt) had to be transported to a local hospital after spraying himself with mace intended for the cow. To this day, according to the cow, rumor has it that the writer-director can’t stop talking about an “attempted homicide by a Hereford” (32). The comedy of “Udder Madness” derives largely from the sense that Jews don’t belong in the country, and it is a sense that neither the “rural chic” of the writer-director nor Sy Pudnick’s amateurish farming project can mitigate. If anything, the exaggerated performativeness of their respective versions and visions of pastoral only underscores it, which is precisely Allen’s point of course. The only real avatar of pastoral in the piece is the genteel narrator-cow; he alone 2 seeks to preserve the “bucolic tranquility” and integrity of the farm. Ridding it of the pernicious Jewish presence embodied in particular by the writer-director thus becomes his main objective. In this study I examine a much less well known and celebrated response to exurban environments in Jewish-American writing, one that features Jews seeking out and making such settings home. In doing so I pursue a set of related questions, among them, How do Jewish identity and exurbanism interact in the works of Jewish-American writers? Why is pastoral ideology often objectionable to them? Is the exurbanism of Jewish-American writers unprecedented in Jewish literary history? And how do these writers mobilize Jewish religion and spirituality towards ecocentric ends? These are the kinds of questions that have largely gone unexamined by literary scholars, surprisingly so in the case of those affiliated with Jewish studies. Against evidence to the contrary, they would appear to concur at least tacitly with an assertion Andrew Furman has made—that “Jewish American fiction writers in [the twentieth] century have, by and large, created a literature that either ignores, misrepresents, or, at its most extreme, vilifies the natural world” (“No Trees Please” 115). Why a view that Jewish-American literary writers feel alienated from the natural world should persist in the face of novels and poetry that testify to the opposite is worth examining. One reason for it surely has to with American Jews’ obvious strong ties to the urban milieu. Though Jewish-American history dates to the founding of the republic, it is with the great influx of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe beginning in the 1880s into American urban centers, and above all into the New York metropolis, that Jewish experience