Jewish American Literature & Culture

American Studies Seminar: The Promised Land
Syllabus Yiddishkeit Student Pages Resources Laura Leibman

The issue of gender has come up in a number of our discussions, both respect to women and men. A main question that has arisen are how are traditional Jewish notions of masculinity and femininity different than American ones.

MEN

  1. Jewish Archetypes
    1. Schlemiel (Loser)
    2. Schimazel (Passive)
    3. Tzaddik (Righteous Man)
    4. The Four Sons (Wise, Bad, Simple, One Who Doesn't Know How to Ask)
  2. American Archetypes
    1. Cowboy/Paul Bunyan
    2. Muscle Man or Boxer

 

WOMEN

Some topics we have discussed with respect to women are

  1. The Role of the Mother (The Chosen; Yezierska's Story)
  2. Changes for women during this era (Miranda's article; Della's Defamation League Artifact)
  3. Women & the Workplace: (Yezierska's Story; Della's comments; Orion's image of a Family at Work)

 

"Arthur & Tania on Beach."Miranda King's Family History Page, English 303 Reed College. .http://www.reed.edu/%7Ekingms/projects.html (3 March 2004).

Other Great Tide Gender Images:

"Parker family in logging camp." 1917. Orion Teal's Family History Page, English 303 Reed College. http://www.reed.edu/%7Etealo/familyhistory.html (3 March 2004)

What qualities distinguish the literature and culture of American Jewry from this era? When does an immigrant become an "America"? We have mainly focused on the following topics:


Although we did not agree on a region at the start of our discussion we seem to have mainly looked at Eastern European immigrants, mainly from Russia.

The question of the impact of Yiddish and European storytelling on Jewish American literature has come up repeatedly in class discussion.We discussed the following attributes that are possibly from due to the history of Russian censorship or of the Eastern European maggid tradition (Roskies 122):

  1. The monologue-in-dialogue narrative style
  2. the "oral" style
  3. Stories about language
  4. Problem of the industrial world verses the simple villager

We also talked about the use of both "yiddishisms" and "englishisms" in English and Yiddish texts.

Some excellent resources on the influence of Yiddish and Eastern European storytelling on style are as follows:

  • David Roskies' "the Story's the Thing"
  • Ruth Wisse's "Two Jews talking: A View of Modern Yiddish Literature"
  • Benjamin Harshav's "The Semiotics of Yiddish Communication"

These essays can be found in What is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher.

Leibman, Laura.
"Yiddish on Back of Photo of Alter Pincas in Butcher Shop." 1943.
Laura Leibman's English 303 Web Page. (3 March 2004)

You have been hired to be a consultant for a museum exhibit that combines literature and material culture about the Great Tide period. The exhibit should focus on immigrants from one particular country (e.g. Russia, Poland, Greece, etc.) You will need to supply answers to the following questions: What qualities distinguish the literature and culture of American Jewry from this era? When does an immigrant become an "America"?

Two arguments arose in the critical articles about humor:

  1. "The role of 'laughter'– and the Jewish-American satirical 'laughter at oneself'– as a characteristic attribute of Nadir’s work; seeking to understand the role of this attribute and its subsequent effect on (and role in) Jewish American culture and literature." See Joey's annotation of Kenneth Wishnia's“At Home in Exile: The Living Paradoxes of Moyshe Nadir’s Early 20th-Century American Yiddish Satire.” MELUS: Jewish American Literature 25, no. 1 (2000): 55-79.

    According to Wishnia, some Eastern European sources for this type of laughter include

  2. Boyer, on the other hand, argues that the roots of black humor in America stem from the Eastern European immigrant, particularly in the figure of the schlemiel (“the loser”) and the schlimazl as protagonists. He feels that this figure challenges traditional notions of American manhood. See Sophie's annotation of Jay Boyer's “The Schlemiezel: Black Humor & the Shtetl Tradition.” Humor: International Journal for Humor Research 4, no. 2 (1991): 165-175.

JOKES OR DEFAMATION? One of the things that we discussed in class is the way that jokes were used to create ethnic identity and community. Some Jewish Stereotypes that we noticed were parodied (or merely asserted) were

Della also raised the issue of stereotypes and defamation in her discussion of the newspaper article, "Jews Fight Defamation"(1920), supplied by the Ohio Historical Center Archives Library

The issue of space and of remapping space has come up repeatedly in our conversations. When we looked at Chaim Potok's The Chosen we talked about how space was remapped between Reuven's and Danny's apartments. We also talked about how Jacob Riis remapped the domestic space of New York homes to show where people in tenements lived.

SHTETL: One influence of Eastern European storytelling noted by Benjamin Harshav is the "iconography of the shtetl, its mythological behavior and language, as a microcosm of Jewish nature." (What is Jewish Literature? 146)

TENEMENTS: How does the tenement become the new microcosm of Jewish nature? What for Riis is this nature? What is it for the authors and critics we have read?

  • Riis provided some images of tenement life in How the Other Half Lives.
  • See Orion's Images of the Tenements for a discussion of how crowded space was and how desperate people were to make a living.

 
 
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