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 | Call It English: |
Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States. Hana Wirth-Nesher is the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, Professor of English, and head of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel and the editor of What is Jewish Literature?, and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. "[An] invigorating book about the multilingual sensibility which Jews who emigrated to the United States brought to their grappling with English. . . . This is not just a book about the Jewish American experience, but about how and why we all relate to language."--Samantha Ellis, Times Literary Supplement "Call It English is a deeply informed and provocative attempt to explain the uniqueness of Jewish American multilingualism, and as such, it should be required reading for anyone teaching a course on Jewish American literature."--Steven Fink, American Jewish History "No book traces the stories of Jewish sound, voice, tone, pun, metaphor, name, prayer, and sacred syllable with such consistency and brilliance."--Choice Endorsements: "Call It English is an extraordinary book that will force a revision of our understanding of English-language Jewish American literature from the perspective of multilingualism. Cogently argued and vividly written, it offers a substantially new approach to the field and fresh and compelling readings of major authors from Abraham Cahan to Philip Roth."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University, author of Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature "A book, as its author says, about forgetting and remembering, Call It English takes us on a marvelous journey into different territories of fiction, above all those where writing and identity struggle to survive and make themselves new. In this perspective Jewish American writing appears as both more various and more continuous than we have thought, and if we continue to call its dominant idiom English we shall do so now in full awareness of the many lives and languages that are hiding in that name."--Michael Wood, Princeton University, author of The Road to Delphi and The Magician's Doubts (Princeton) Illustrations ix Subject Areas: | |||||
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