Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
5 - Hebrew literature in America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
Summary
The existence of a substantial body of Hebrew literature written on American shores is one of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American cultural history. In 1927, there were 110 Hebrew authors living in the United States, according to Daniel Persky, a columnist for the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadoar, which had been published in New York since 1922. Among this large number were at least a dozen Hebrew poets with serious bodies of published work and a smaller yet still substantial number of major prose writers, dramatists, and essayists. There were Hebrew publishing houses, Hebrew literary clubs and writers associations, and many Hebrew periodicals and literary journals that appeared over the course of the twentieth century. Hebrew belles-lettres were allied to a cultural and educational movement that established a network of Hebrew colleges and Hebrew summer camps and exerted enormous influence on the development of Jewish education in America.
There are many obvious reasons why Hebrew culture failed to thrive in America, but the reasons why its struggles and achievements have been forgotten are less obvious. This question, which is essentially a question about cultural memory, is entangled with the sad fate of Yiddish in America and the brilliant success of Hebrew in Israel. In contrast to Hebrew, Yiddish had a firm basis in the Jewish immigrant masses – in the music halls and the tabloids, at home and in the streets. When Yiddish declined under the force of galloping Americanization, it was the remembrance of popular culture that became the substance of nostalgia during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , pp. 92 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003