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The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture
What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon , her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.
416 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 11, 2024
Coming to this after her autobiography, Free as a Jew, and critic Adam Kirsch's surveys of The People and the Books and The Blessing and the Curse covering the key titles in Jewish literature in different languages (all reviewed recently on GR), I found Wisse's hefty study thick on a standard combination of plot summaries, critical insights, biographical and thematic contexts, and chapters organized topically and roughly chronologically across the European, North American, and Israel communities' contributions.
She skims past many writers, and barely mentions at all Joseph Roth, say, or Chaim Grade, but she's entertaining on Leon Uris' potboiler, and sly towards fading Bernie Malamud, who appears slated for oblivion. She features scribes deserving rediscovery like Henry Roth or A.M. Klein; she provides a reading list of key talents with a representative title. One whose take may make me revisit a text, as she explores Mr Sammler's Planet insightfully. That too I reviewed the other day, but Wisse, as a good professor should, succeeds in me evaluating anew my earlier judgement on that pivotal Saul Bellow turn towards a firmly Jewish immigrant-intellectual.
The pace for me didn't quicken much, beyond a neatly compact look at the Brothers Singer and their sister Esther Krienman, all of whom managed to get to New York City while their youngest sibling, Moyshe, perished in what Wisse I think correctly tries to call the Shoah (used, see an endnote, as early as Kristallnacht) in Hebrew and the "Khurban," the term she used herself as a girl fleeing Romania in a Yiddish clan coming to Canada circa 1940, as a relevant aside from her own personal journey told later in her subsequent saga.
Until the present book meets its match and finds its footing in her noteworthy investigation of how Hitler, rather than Queen Elizabeth I or James Stuart, gave his surname to a literary era, ironically. Which tried to eradicate Yiddish but whose testifiers employed their own array of languages to attest to atrocities, and how rather than the would-be victors winning how to tell their war, that its victims and survivors won, however, a tainted triumph. For the Jewish remnant will always be subsumed by Gentile majorities.
She shows how the deference to using the term "Holocaust" has a Christian universalist tinge, and how that interpretation colors how works such as Anne Frank's diary (when filmed and staged in the 1950s) and Elie Weisel's non-Yiddish versions of La Nuit/Night have featured prominently, and as perennial set-texts in schools, in tamping down sparks of religious or in-group flare-ups. We see how Weisel revised his account so as to play up or down dramatic elements for wider audiences.
(In passing, but very apt, Wisse's T.A. at Harvard, Dara Horn, went on to pen People Love Dead Jews--also reviewed by me--where her excursus on Anne Frank becomes one of that 2021 essay collection's standout entries, riffing on her former teacher's arguments in Modern Jewish Canon.) While I remain puzzled why certain talents were shortchanged in her coverage, Wisse's examination of the impacts of the Shoah on the abilities of languages in the Ashkenazi lands which its Jewish speakers chose to contend with the overwhelming onslaughts they faced and feared and fought off remains a valuable contribution to literary criticism, and how these horrors may not outlast the last witnesses, chillingly. For already, since this appeared, followers such as Horn warn of new denials.
She skims past many writers, and barely mentions at all Joseph Roth, say, or Chaim Grade, but she's entertaining on Leon Uris' potboiler, and sly towards fading Bernie Malamud, who appears slated for oblivion. She features scribes deserving rediscovery like Henry Roth or A.M. Klein; she provides a reading list of key talents with a representative title. One whose take may make me revisit a text, as she explores Mr Sammler's Planet insightfully. That too I reviewed the other day, but Wisse, as a good professor should, succeeds in me evaluating anew my earlier judgement on that pivotal Saul Bellow turn towards a firmly Jewish immigrant-intellectual.
The pace for me didn't quicken much, beyond a neatly compact look at the Brothers Singer and their sister Esther Krienman, all of whom managed to get to New York City while their youngest sibling, Moyshe, perished in what Wisse I think correctly tries to call the Shoah (used, see an endnote, as early as Kristallnacht) in Hebrew and the "Khurban," the term she used herself as a girl fleeing Romania in a Yiddish clan coming to Canada circa 1940, as a relevant aside from her own personal journey told later in her subsequent saga.
Until the present book meets its match and finds its footing in her noteworthy investigation of how Hitler, rather than Queen Elizabeth I or James Stuart, gave his surname to a literary era, ironically. Which tried to eradicate Yiddish but whose testifiers employed their own array of languages to attest to atrocities, and how rather than the would-be victors winning how to tell their war, that its victims and survivors won, however, a tainted triumph. For the Jewish remnant will always be subsumed by Gentile majorities.
She shows how the deference to using the term "Holocaust" has a Christian universalist tinge, and how that interpretation colors how works such as Anne Frank's diary (when filmed and staged in the 1950s) and Elie Weisel's non-Yiddish versions of La Nuit/Night have featured prominently, and as perennial set-texts in schools, in tamping down sparks of religious or in-group flare-ups. We see how Weisel revised his account so as to play up or down dramatic elements for wider audiences.
(In passing, but very apt, Wisse's T.A. at Harvard, Dara Horn, went on to pen People Love Dead Jews--also reviewed by me--where her excursus on Anne Frank becomes one of that 2021 essay collection's standout entries, riffing on her former teacher's arguments in Modern Jewish Canon.) While I remain puzzled why certain talents were shortchanged in her coverage, Wisse's examination of the impacts of the Shoah on the abilities of languages in the Ashkenazi lands which its Jewish speakers chose to contend with the overwhelming onslaughts they faced and feared and fought off remains a valuable contribution to literary criticism, and how these horrors may not outlast the last witnesses, chillingly. For already, since this appeared, followers such as Horn warn of new denials.
November 30, 2008
I barely remember reading this book. I'm not really into literary summary books- however, I do remember learning a great deal about Yiddish literature from this.
January 18, 2022
What a wonderful journey about Jewish writers through their work. This is a must read for those interested in the history of Jewish writers. What a beautiful tribute.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews