Call it English: the languages of Jewish American literature

Abstract

HANA WIRTH-NESHER'S CALL IT ENGLISH: THE LANGUAGES OF JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE, PRINCETON: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006 JAIME CLELAND What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember, wrote historian Marcus Lee Hansen, whose 1938 formulation of the generation gap, now popularly known as Hansen's law, finds new expression in Hana Wirth-Nesher's book Call It English. In her explication of some of the major landmarks of twentieth-century Jewish American literature, Wirth-Nesher traces the evolving attitudes of immigrants and their descendants toward language. The humblest European shtetl dweller would have been conversant in, at minimum, Yiddish for home life; Hebrew for prayer and study; and Polish, Russian, or another language in which to communicate, when necessary, with the Gentile majority. In the United States, however, the richness of this multilingualism seemed to pale beside the promises of English. While the jealously guarded purity of majority languages in Europe served to reinforce the difference between Gentiles and Jews, similar efforts in the United States proved abortive, and much Jewish American life came to be conducted in English exclusively. But while immigrants and their children might be eager to repudiate Yiddish, the marker of immigrant difference, and even Hebrew, a religious language in a secular society, their grandchildren continue to be haunted by the phantom languages of the past, as Wirth-Nesher demonstrates. Fluent, idiomatic English was the desire of new immigrants like those Wirth-Nesher discusses in the book's early chapters; a status symbol in itself, it also seemed to offer access to wealth, prestige, and everything the Golden had to offer. Strong command of written English earned autobiographer Mary Antin accolades from no less than President Theodore Roosevelt, who considered her a great American; the flawless literary English displayed in The Promised Land (1912) was a convincing argument to readers that assimilation of immigrants was possible and desirable. Yet such a performance could be convincing only in writing. The persistent Yiddish inflections in her speech meant that Antin required a venue where she could efface her accent, her earlier languages, and anything else that could potentially confuse or insult a Gentile audience. In contrast, Abraham Cahan's success with his novel Yekl (1896), under the mentorship of literary realism proponent William Dean Howells, rested not on Cahan's own fluency, but on his depiction of regional accents. Yekl may rename himself Jake, but his inability to pronounce that name is only one of the indications that his dreams of assimilation are in fact delusions. Thus, Cahan may seem to have been accepted only provisionally, to the margins rather than the mainstream. Yet his relationship with Howells is more complex: Howells, for Cahan, functions as a gatekeeper to the American literary market, yet Cahan, for Howells, possesses the capital associated with Europe. In the context of American English, each may envy the other. By the middle of the century, as second-generation American Saul Bellow began his career, the Jewish American reading public was fluent in English, and this, coupled with greater general-audience awareness of the basics of Jewish religion and culture, meant that Bellow should have been able to write with confidence. But while Jewish Americans may have been admitted to the mainstream, much work was required to keep them there. It was not until the 1970s, Wirth-Nesher suggests, that Bellow was able to outgrow his role as cultural mediator (105), an ambassador to the Gentiles whose job was to portray Judaism not only as nonthreatening, not only as equally valuable, but as cut from the same cloth as Christianity. This privileging of English went hand in hand with a repudiation of Yiddish, or mame-loshen (literally mother tongue), whose speakers tended not to pass the language down to their American children. …

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