Exactly when did Jewish writing in America begin? Most people assume that it began in the last decades of the 19th century with the poetry of Emma Lazarus and the great wave of immigration from Europe. Though a good guess, strictly speaking, it is not quite accurate. In point of fact, Jewish writing in America appears to begin at the end of the 18th century when Reverend Gershom Mendes Seixas, the first native-born “minister” (that is how he referred to himself) of a synagogue to preach in English, hazzan of the Sephardic synagogue Shearith Israel, and an incorporator of Colum-bia College in New York, preached his famous sermons. In his May, 1798 “Discourse” (Wm. A. Davis & Co. for Naphtali Judah, Bookseller and Stationer, no. 47 Water Street, New York, 1798), he argued for French-American relations even though New York had many bitter opponents of the French Revolution.1 This text later would be published by the Jewish Publication Society. Of course, as advertised, this is “discourse” — not imaginative literature, and so one may rightly ask when it was that we first began to see fruits of the Jewish literary imagination in America. For this, we must wait until the 19th century; but even this terminus a quo proves a bit earlier than one might have guessed.

In the last decades of the 18th century, when America was a young republic, the novel was dismissed as an inferior literary form, of dubious moral value. Yet a member of the American branch of the prestigious English Franks family, one Isaac Franks, a New Yorker and veteran of the Revolutionary War, rose to defend the lowly novel. Found among the papers of this highly cultivated gentleman was a handwritten defense entitled “On Novel Reading,” dating from 1800. Franks was an avid novel reader and had come to the conclusion that “[i]gnorance and malignity may decry this species of writing; but in my opinion, the names Cervantes, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Roche, and Burney will and ought to command the admiration of those who possess feeling, discernment, and taste.”2

The Jews of early America may have been avid readers, but they were not yet writers of novels. The very first evidence of creative literary activity comes from the pen of the Charleston-born Penina Moise (1797-1880), whose volume of verse, Fancy’s Sketch Book, published in 1833, was the first book of poetry by a Jew — male or female — to be published in America. Though her verse was not especially inspired, it is worth noting that at a time when most Jews avoided writing about Jewish subjects (particularly in non-Jewish publications), in 1820, Moise contributed a poem to the Southern Patriot that prefigures Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet affixed to the Statue of Liberty:

Fly from the soil whose desolating creed,

Outraging faith, makes human victims bleed,

Welcome! Where every Muse has reared a shrine,

The respect of wild Freedom to refine ....

Rise, then, elastic from Oppression’s tread,

Come and repose in Plenty’s flowery bed.

Oh! not as Strangers shall welcome be

Come to the homes and bosoms of the free.3

In these first few decades of the 19th century, however, a few dramatists were writing plays, notably, Isaac Harby of Charleston, and the more famous Mordecai Noah of New York, who wrote about a dozen plays and still holds a minor place in the history of American drama. Nonetheless, Noah is probably best remembered for his fantastical scheme for a temporary asylum for Jews on an island in the Niagara River, near Buffalo, New York, which he called Ararat; here they could await their return to Palestine. None of these playwrights, most of whom were of Sephardic background, included any depiction of Jews or addressed Jewish subjects, except for one or two plays on Biblical themes.

By the fourth decade of the century, however, as poverty, political upheaval, and antisemitism provoked Jews across the ocean to move from one place to another in Europe, America soon began to attract a sizable emigra--tion from Germany and the Central European countries. By this time, a Jewish press had begun to establish itself; as early as 1820, Solomon Henry Jackson, a Jewish printer in New York, published a monthly called The Jew, and by mid-century, there were numerous newspapers, journals, and magazines, all intended to provide free expression for Jews. Within ten years, three journals representing the various religious denominations appeared: In 1843, the traditional Rabbi Isaac Leeser founded The Occident and American Jewish Advocate; in 1849, in New York, a British Jew, Robert Lyon, published The Asmonean, a journal of Orthodox Judaism; in 1854, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise established The Israelite, the organ of Reform Judaism.4 All three publications reserved considerable space for literary endeavor, because their editors felt that there was a noticeable lack of creative writing by American Jews. Indeed, one century later, the historian John Higham agreed, and he declared categorically that “in the middle of the 19th century there was no American Jewish Literature.”5

Yet, perhaps because of the persecution and suffering they so recently had endured, the new immigrants, as well as the native-born, eagerly began openly to express themselves in literature and no longer avoided Jewish subject matter. The magazines encouraged submissions of poetry, short fiction, and even novels, which they serialized in English as well as including translations from the German and French. Though in this early period, the caliber of the work left something to be desired, this seems to be the moment of the birth of an American Jewish literature.

Actually, the first novels written in English in America were by the organizer of American Re-form Judaism, the editor of The Israelite himself, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. In fact, he wrote much of the fiction that appeared in his publication. In eleven novels, his subject matter ranged from historical themes to contemporary stories. Wise’s agenda was to preserve Judaism while Americanizing his readers. His admirable impulses and tremendous energy notwithstanding, the quality of his voluminous literary efforts is at best mediocre. Nonetheless, Wise had literary followers who published regularly in The Israelite.

In fact, one of these contributors, Dr. Nathan Mayer, the author of several historical novels set in Europe and in the Biblical period, was to write the very first American Jewish novel that has a claim to literary quality and seriousness. Published in 1867, immediately after the Civil War, Mayer’s novel, set during and after the Civil War, entitled Differences, gives an informative account of Jewish life and commerce in the North as well as the South. His account of army life in general and its medical aspect in particular is especially interesting, and no doubt accurate, for Dr. Mayer participated as a doctor on the Union side during the conflict. What is also of interest is Mayer’s attack on the Northern Jewish mercantile class, whereas he says nothing negative about Southern Jewish slaveholders.6 As Louis Harap has commented, “ ... this novel does not deserve the almost total obscurity into which it has fallen. It has the distinction of being the first American novel by a Jew about Jews in which literary talent is exhibited, and it is more readable today than many other popular novels of its time.”7

Dr. Mayer’s novel may have been the kindling for Jewish literary creativity in the 19th century, but the fire did not at once burst into full flame. The next few decades saw a number of attempts at drama and fiction, yet, except for the poetry of a convert to Judaism, the beautiful but scandalous actress, intellectual, poet, four times married Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868), and the far more accomplished proto-Zionist, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), very little else was of much literary value. Moreover, in the case of Menken, though clearly a better poet than Penina Moise, she is probably remembered today more for her outrageous personality than for her literary output, despite her popularity within literary circles in America that included Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. Menken was the first American woman to appear on the stage flashing flesh-colored tights, and she “made her most spectacular appearance in the play Mazeppa (adapted from Byron’s poem) in which she rode up a steep ramp strapped to a fiery horse.”8 When she performed in London in 1864, “her Mazeppa angered the press, but she won the literati with her poems. Dickens, Charles Reade, and Rossetti were her friends. Swinburne described her as the world’s delight and claimed she was his mistress. She enjoyed a triumph in Paris in 1856; won over Gautier and George Sand; and became the mistress of the elder Dumas. Though she invented fanciful accounts of her origin, which was obscure, she took militant pride in her Jewishness.”9

Emma Lazarus, of course, is quite another story. She, perhaps, is the true mother of American Jewish literature — the quality of her writing, poetry and polemics, increased as she became ever more conscious of her Jewishness, until it became the recognizable sound of her creative voice.

Lazarus’s interest in Judaism through the 1870s had been mainly philosophical; she could not and did not attach herself to any particular Jewish cause. By the last years of the decade, she was in search of an authentic way to express her increasing Jewish consciousness. That moment came in the wake of two critical events: the Russian pogroms of 1881 and the concomitant May Laws of 1882 ignited her poetic imagination and her social conscience. These same events, of course, made America the magnet for what became known as the great wave of emigration; as such, they were the trigger for the next and crucial chapter in American Jewish literary as well as social history.

Even as the first great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants reached America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrant Jews began to write novels in English. The memories, new experiences, and emotions of this major upheaval of their lives, along with the juxtaposition of conflicting cultures, were a gold mine of literary potential. Most of the new immigrants who wrote fiction chose to do so in their native Yiddish, but a surprising number elected to write in their new language. Speculation as to why they chose to write in English suggests that it was as much from a desire to expose a larger, native American audience to the Jewish immigrant, as from their impulse to conform to America. This urge toward reciprocal adjustment was both catharsis and apology; it satisfied a deep need to reconcile the dilemma that now confronted them.

The Jewish immigrants frequently found themselves in the position of having to maintain a balance between two forces: the firmly transmitted heritage of European-Jewish values, and the need to survive in an alien environment. It was not that many of these new Americans had never been exposed to secular ideas, for the work of Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) had already shaken shtetl stability, but in America both internal and external repressions had, as Irving Howe has put it, “liberated their Old World selves, so long frustrated and misshapen.”10 The price of liberation was high: the conflict among ingrained religious values, awareness of European intellectual activity, and the drive for economic survival in America, generated severe tension and too often resulted in alienation, frustration, or failure.11 What is more, such diaspora dilemmas were to persist throughout the next century, the balance weight between Jewishness and Americanism moving from one side to the other at various times, raising the question as to whether there is a real difference between Jewish-American or American-Jewish.

The very first Eastern European immigrant novella to be written in English, and published in New York in 1896, was Abraham Cahan’s Yekl; A Tale of the New York Ghetto. The work was encouraged and then glowingly reviewed by the important American novelist and critic, William Dean Howells. A work of realism — Cahan was an avid reader of the Russian realists — of incisive sociological and psychological depth, its subject was timeless enough for it to become the basis of the 1977 film, Hester Street. Cahan, the longtime editor of the Yiddish daily Forward, acknowledged his debt to his mentor, Howells, in the very title of his 1917 epic novel of Jewish immigrant life, The Rise of David Levinsky; Howells’s most famous novel was The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells’s novel tells the tale of a man’s journey from financial riches, but spiritual squalor, to financial fall, yet spiritual elevation. Cahan’s novel traces the opposite route, from material poverty to financial success, but at the cost of the spirit.

Cahan, then, led the way for a literature that was to enrich American society and letters through a vitality unbridled by Puritan tradition and genteel Victorian manners and energized by passionate emotions and the struggle to survive. Away from home and only a margin-al participant in the new country, the new writer was plagued by internal conflicts he himself created, even as he was the victim of social and economic discrimination. Either the new immigrant tried to imitate the alien culture, rejecting his own tradition, or he retreated into the shell of parochial old-world ways, inevitably alienating himself from his own children. Either alternative was costly, and neither without frustration; as evinced by second- and third-generation Jewish-American writers, the process of Americanization often left the descendants rootless and spiritually barren.12 For the next half century, the great subject of American Jewish literature would be the price of immigration and the struggle for its re-wards. The mise en scène most always would be the Lower East Side, both as fact and as metaphor.

As the first decades passed, the setting remained the Lower East Side or its equivalent, but the style and sophistication would reflect the effect of America and the education of the writer. In these years, the legendary Anzia Yezierska put into print the passionate yearning of intelligent and ambitious women exposed to the freedoms of secular America, but trapped in the prison of ghetto poverty and old world rituals and pieties. “I am a Russian Jewess,” one of her characters laments, “a flame, a longing. A soul consumed with hunger for heights beyond reach. I am the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires.”13 If Cahan’s David Levinsky worshiped outside the Temple of City College, never to enter, the legendary Yezierska marched herself right into the sanctuary of Columbia College where she beguiled the very symbol of American education and WASP manners, John Dewey, and ultimately became romantically involved with him. Later, in 1989, this most unlikely but intriguing love affair would become the subject of a novel by Norma Rosen.

Throughout the next decades, immigrant life remains as background as novelists tell stories that reflect the ethos du jour. In 1923, quite in tune with the Jazz Age times of high living and high crimes, Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch & Jowl appeared on the book stands with a tough guy, a brash tone, and an ironic stance. This story of a Lower-East-Side lawyer turned crooked and growing more corrupt and more corpulent by the day is an im-plicit attack on capitalism, unscrupulous business dealings, and the inevitability of crime and violence as a re-sult of ghetto life. Ornitz, a socialist, it should be noted, was named in the 1950s as one of the Hollywood Ten. Again, in 1930, the Lower East Side is the setting for the first proletarian novel in America — Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money; and the immigrant ghetto is the backdrop for what may be the best immigrant novel written by a Jew, Call It Sleep — a novel informed by the intellectual influence and confluence of Freud, Joyce, and Marx. Williamsburg — another immigrant neighborhood — is the setting for Daniel Fuchs’s Williamsburg Trilogy, as it is in Chicago for Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch. And so on, through the Thirties. The same, moreover, holds true for the Forties and Fifties in the works of Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Jerome Weidman, Bernard Malamud — among many others — as Jewish-American fiction finally began to penetrate the mainstream of American literature to become the eagerly awaited new work to appear on The New York Times Best Seller List.

In styles ranging from sardonic to ironic, from the fabulous to straight-out comedy, this postwar proliferation of writers sought to escape the world of the immigrant, sometimes rejecting it outright, sometimes seeking to understand it, sometimes lamenting, sometimes mocking the unbridgeable gap between the generations — but the power of the past seemed always to intrude. There is the early fiction of the Chicago University-educated Philip Roth, for example, whose mocking attitude towards the out-of-the-ghetto-into-the-suburban-gilded-ghetto Jewish philistines just barely masks his repudiation of the immigrant past. Irving Howe has put it this way: “... despite his use of Jewish settings and his acerbity of tone, he was not really part of that tradition — it yielded him no terms of criticism or value. Indeed, his importance in the development of American Jewish writing was that, finally, he seemed to be cut off from any Jewish tradition.”14 Nonetheless, at this moment in America, Jewish-American literary history seemed to have reached its golden age. Saul Bellow famously quipped that Bellow, Malamud, and Roth were the Hart, Shaffner and Marx of American Jewish writing.

Yet, just as Irving Howe was writing the very story of the culture that bred these writers, he was also moved to mourn their demise:

It hardly mattered how the background of Yiddish served in the fiction, just as long as it was still there, the starting point from which writers could move on private journeys of the spirit. But once that Yiddish world began to crumble, once it no longer offered its silent buttress to the imagination, these writers had sooner or later to enter a state of crisis. They began to face problems like those which Yiddish writers faced after the Holocaust: what remains for a novelist once the world of his youth has been destroyed, that world which overwhelms his every page even though, and perhaps just because, he is running away from it? ... For the American Jewish writers there remained of course America, but as a subject for fiction, America, as many of them discovered, is very large, very slippery, very abstract, very recalcitrant.15

A sad eulogy indeed, but mindful of Mark Twain’s famous cable that the report of his death was an exaggeration. Howe’s assessment, circa 1976, however, was not the earliest dire prediction about the future of American Jewish literature. He had been preceded by Allen Gutt-mann’s 1971 study, Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. Guttmann, a professor of American Studies at Amherst College in the Sixties, with an interest in Jewish radicalism, had written the most thorough and up-to-date study of Jewish American literature. Having concluded in 1971 that Jews had virtually reached the completion of the process of Americaniza-tion, Guttmann recalled that as early as 1964 he had “rashly conjectured that the renaissance of Jewish writers had very nearly run its course.” “If present tendencies continue,” he had remarked, “Negroes are more likely than Jews disproportionately to fill the ranks of dissent and to imagine in novel and in poem another country better than the one we live in now.” Guttmann comments in the final paragraph of his 1971 book: “This does not yet strike me as a foolish remark. Paradoxically, the survival in America of a significant and identifiably Jewish literature depends upon the unlikely conversion to Judaism of a stiff-necked, intractable, irreverent, attractive generation that no longer chooses to be chosen.”16

As it turned out, the two critics, Howe and Gutt-mann, were both right and wrong. Howe was right about the departure of the world of his fathers from American Jewish literature, but he was wrong to predict that this would cause its death. Guttmann was right to predict that African-Americans would replace Jews in the literature of dissent; but he could not see that, like the Jews, the African-Americans’ own centrality in-evitably would give way to the next minority group in the age of American multicultural and then global literature. Furthermore, who is to say that dissent was then, or would be, the essential category for fiction? In his role as seer, Guttmann has proven to be not a little myopic, especially when he concluded that the future of an identifiably Jewish literature in America depended “upon the unlikely conversion to Judaism” of a generation (presumably his own and the next) “that no longer chooses to be chosen.”

It is now apparent that a significant number of Jews in America have chosen to continue the Jewish narrative — both in life and in literature. Howe and Guttmann each began on the secular left: Howe in the Thirties as a Trotskyite, Guttmann in the Sixties as a New Leftist. Both became academics and both specialized in American studies — Howe in American literature and politics, Guttmann in American culture. Both wrote books about the Jewish experience in America — Guttmann’s on the course of American Jewish fiction, Howe’s on the larger picture of the Jewish immigrant world and its aftermath. Though surely both would have considered themselves on the left, Howe, the Thirties socialist, deplored the style and substance of the Sixties New Left. But after the explosive events in the Jewish world surrounding the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Howe’s opposition to her account, followed by the Six-Day War in Israel, and his confession that his response to the Holocaust came late, Irving Howe turn-ed his literary attention to the world of Yiddishkeit and became more involved in contemporary Jewish life, producing his important study, The World Of Our Fathers, and a number of anthologies of Yiddish and Jewish American writing — fiction, poetry, memoirs, as well as many essays and articles on a variety of Jewish subjects — as if to ward off his own diagnosis. Guttmann, however, became the image of his own prediction, turning to baseball and the history of sports for his major research and writing.What indeed could be more American than baseball? At the time of their prognostications, however, neither could envision an American Jewry that out of its very Americanization would follow its literary imagination along new freeways to write about such considerations as the return to religion, the world of Orthodoxy, the varieties of Judaism, spirituality, the role of women in Judaism, the State of Israel and its meaning for American Jews, the Holocaust and the children of the Holocaust and its survivors, gay and lesbian Jews, secularism, and the latest theme, diasporism.17

Irving Howe had claimed that after the demise of Yiddish culture as imaginative sustenance, “[f]or the American Jewish writers there remained of course America, but as a subject for fiction, America, as many of them discovered, is very large, very slippery, very abstract, very recalcitrant. Can it really be said that any of these writers have thus far grasped a portion of the larger American experience with the authority they have shown in writing about the immigrant Jewish experience?”18 As if to take up this very challenge, Philip Roth in his finest work, American Pastoral, as well as in The Human Stain, indisputably has “grasped a portion of the American experience” with authority.

Whether as American Jews or as Jewish Americans — depending on which is the noun and which the modifier — America was the new “starting point from which writers could move on private journeys of the spirit.” Some of these journeys are particular to Jewish life, and some are universal concerns expressed in the Jewish context. Granted, the immigrant world does sometimes show up in contemporary writing, but it can do so only third hand; yet, there is a very long list of contemporary Jews who are, have been, and will continue writing as Jews in America — indeed, that has been true ever since Howe and Guttmann despaired of that continuity. With a list that includes among the older generation such creative writers as Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Norma Rosen, Philip Roth (as well as the late Bernard Malamud), and among the younger writers Pearl Abraham, Melvin Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Francine Prose, Jonathan Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Steve Stern — the list grows longer and longer by the year — who can deny that these and so many others obviously have “chosen to be chosen.”•

About the author
Carole S. Kessner is Professor Emerita in Comparative Studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is the author of The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals (New York University Press) and a wide range of articles and essays in English Literature and Jewish Studies. She is currently working on a bio-graphy of Marie Syrkin. She will lecture on “Jewish Literature in America” in Skidmore College’s July 2003 Summer Seminars in Judaic Studies.