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The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction
The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction
The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction
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The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction

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The Edward Lewis Wallant Award was founded by the family of Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman in 1963 and is supported by the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies. It is given annually to an American writer, preferably early in his or her career, whose fiction is considered significant for American Jews. In The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction, editors Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Shechner, who have all served as judges for the award, present vital, original, and wide-ranging fiction by writers whose work has been considered or selected for the award. The resulting collection highlights the exemplary place of the Wallant Award in Jewish literature. With a mix of stories and novel chapters, The New Diaspora reprints selections of short fiction from such well-known writers as Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, Julie Orringer, and Nicole Krauss. The first half of the anthology presents pieces by winners of the Wallant award, focusing on the best work of recent winners. The New Diaspora’s second half reflects the evolving landscape of American Jewish fiction over the last fifty years, as many authors working in America are not American by birth, and their fiction has become more experimental in nature. Pieces in this section represent authors with roots all over the world—including Russia (Maxim Shrayer, Nadia Kalman, and Lara Vapnyar), Latvia (David Bezmozgis), South Africa (Tony Eprile), Canada (Robert Majzels), and Israel (Avner Mandelman, who now lives in Canada). This collection offers an expanded canon of Jewish writing in North America and foregrounds a vision of its variety, its uniqueness, its cosmopolitanism, and its evolving perspectives on Jewish life. It celebrates the continuing vitality and fresh visions of contemporary Jewish writing, even as it highlights its debt to history and embrace of collective memory. Readers of contemporary American fiction and Jewish cultural history will find The New Diaspora enlightening and deeply engaging.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 5, 2015
ISBN9780814340561
The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction
Author

Victoria Aarons

Victoria Aarons is O. R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University and the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. She has published widely on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures and is a contributor to the two-volume compendium Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Avinoam J. Patt is Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization and administers the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2009) and co-editor with Michael Berkowitz of “We Are Here”: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010). He has been a contributor to several projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is co-author of the recently published source volume Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938­–1940. Mark Shechner is professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He has published widely on American literature and American Jewish fiction and intellectual life and has done extensive book reviewing over the course of his career.

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    The New Diaspora - Victoria Aarons

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Preface

    This is a Jewish story, so it starts with food. It was April 2011, and the editors of this anthology were sitting around a table at Rizzuto’s Italian Restaurant in West Hartford, CT, having lunch and planning out that evening’s Edward Lewis Wallant Award ceremony. While not a kosher deli, Rizzuto’s is our favorite restaurant in West Hartford, one that we routinely frequent to kibbitz over the books and readings of the past year and anticipate the current year’s event. At Rizzuto’s, if your taste doesn’t run to Italian salamis and French cheeses, you can get a good vegetarian platter. This particular occasion was the forty-eighth annual presentation of the Wallant Award to the recipient for 2010, Julie Orringer, for her novel The Invisible Bridge. An intimate and painfully detailed story of the ordeal of Hungary’s Jews during the Shoah, and in particular those who were assigned to work on the forced labor battalions or Munkaszolgálat, Orringer’s novel had swept the judges away and emerged as the unambiguous winner for the previous year’s prize. The ceremonial presentation of the award was to be that evening at the University of Hartford.

    But beyond our discussions of the evening, we began looking ahead two years, to 2013 and the fiftieth anniversary of the Wallant Award, whose initial winner was Norman Fruchter, for his novel Coat Upon a Stick in 1963. We marveled at the longevity of the award and the determination of its sponsors to pursue it over almost five decades. The Wallant Award’s track record for persistence and devotion to literature, and for making so many inspired choices of writers who were scarcely known at the time, called for recognition. The Wallant Award has been, from the outset, a one-family show, the family being Dr. Irving Waltman and his wife Fran, who founded the award in 1963 and kept it going with their own funds, dedication, and labor, though it now has institutional support from the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and support from a small phalanx of judges, currently Victoria Aarons, Ezra Cappell, Thane Rosenbaum, and Mark Shechner. Still, the Waltmans remain after fifty years the durable backbones of the enterprise, and they still read fiction along with the judges. In all, with the fiftieth anniversary of the prize just two years away, we felt that acknowledgment was due, if not long overdue, to the Waltmans, and what better form of recognition than a book? And so we embarked on this project, which began as a celebration of the Waltman family and their dedication to the life of literature, and that celebration gradually took on a life of its own.

    That life of its own, as we planned it, would divide the book into two sections. One would be a selection of former winners of the Wallant Award, presenting them through their more recent work. The other would be a selection of writing from the many other books that have crossed our desks in the course of our reading for the award. We believed that our reading had provided us with an overview of new fiction by Jewish writers in North America and that we had an obligation to share some of this abundance with others in order to, in effect, expand awareness of Jewish writing and celebrate it. Few people, other than the occasional book editor or reviewer or awards judge, are fortunate enough to see the bounty of writing that we do, and so we felt a responsibility to share at least some of our discoveries. In doing so, we wanted to try our hand at redefining what we talk about when we talk about Jews writing books in America. The more we have read, the less straightforward the work of definition has come to appear and, not surprisingly, the more multifaceted our discussions have grown.

    There is more first-rate writing in print than we have space for in this volume, and we have floated the idea among ourselves of a second volume. That is premature, we know, but we privately lament the works of fiction we had to rule out and the many important questions that we have left unasked. We know that we have only scratched the surface of the writing we would like to place before you and the conversations we would like to have. This volume, The New Diaspora, is a first step.

    By the end of lunch, we had a plan. Three and a half years later, you have a book. Enjoy.

    Victoria Aarons, Avinoam Patt, Mark Shechner

    September 1, 2013

    INTRODUCTION

    For the past eight years, this volume’s editors, Victoria Aarons, Avinoam Patt, and Mark Shechner, have served as judges and administrators for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Given annually to an American writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew, the Wallant Award was established fifty-one years ago by Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman in honor of the novelist Edward Lewis Wallant, who died in 1962 at the age of thirty-six. Inaugurated as a memorial book award at the Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford, CT, the Wallant Award has been given institutional support by the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies since 1986. The award historically has focused its attention on younger Jewish writers in America, frequently the authors of debut works of fiction. The initial Wallant Award in 1963, given to Norman Fruchter for his novel Coat Upon a Stick, has been given in subsequent years to writers including Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur A. Cohen, Francine Prose, Daphne Merkin, Steve Stern, Dara Horn, Thane Rosenbaum, Jonathan Rosen, Allegra Goodman, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Nicole Krauss, Ehud Havazelet, Sara Houghteling, and Joshua Henkin. While not inclusive, this is a robust list of writers, many of whom have gone on to major careers in American letters.

    In the eight years since we began working together, the award’s judges have read more than one hundred works of fiction—novels and short story collections—by Jewish writers living in the United States. Recently, as Jewish writers have gained increasing prominence in Canada, we have begun to include them in our considerations as well. In our deliberations, we exclude such marquee writers as Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Lethem, preferring to introduce new writers and recognize those whose work has been relatively neglected. Authors who have drawn our attention include our most recent prize winners: Ehud Havazelet (2007), Eileen Pollack (2008), Sara Houghteling (2009), Julie Orringer (2010), Edith Pearlman (2011), Joshua Henkin (2012), and Kenneth Bonert (2013). Other writers we have read with appreciation include David Bezmozgis, Tony Eprile, Robert Majzels, Rachel Kadish, Avner Mandelman, Scott Nadelson, Lara Vapnyar, Nadia Kalman, Jonathon Keats, Maxim Shrayer, Margot Singer, Joseph Skibell, Nathan Englander, and many others whose fiction has called attention to the diversity of Jewish expression in America. This is the tip of a vast continent of prose fiction whose full mass is still unmeasured, and this partial catalogue should give evidence to the shortsightedness of Irving Howe’s famous and now quaint prophecy that with the death of his generation of Jewish immigrant writers, American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories. Other than in books and sentiment, there just isn’t enough left of that experience.

    The evidence is plain that Jews are writing and publishing in ever-greater numbers and that North America is one of the epicenters of this burgeoning productivity. And it isn’t just the volume of production that is distinctive about this literature, but its attitude and reach. This new writing has its own signature, no longer defined by such hyphenated titles as Jewish-American writers and Jewish-American literature. Those terms have always been fraught, and writers themselves have protested their indiscriminate, reductive, and marginalizing use. Such terms are weighed down with ill-defined meanings, implying hybridized consciousnesses and crises of identity. Such dividedness is now barely in evidence. Philip Roth has announced of late that he prefers to be called a Newark-American writer, suggesting an ironic fusion of terms rather than an antagonistic schism. The novels and stories we read for the Wallant Award suggest that Jewish-American was never a term for the ages, but rather an idiom of convenience for a moment when Jews were ascending in the ranks of American culture and viewed themselves as split personalities, divided in loyalty and spirit, as if they lived the title of one of Lionel Trilling’s essay collections: The Opposing Self (1955). In our own estimation, the hybridizing metaphors have lost their utility even as the literature they purport to describe has grown more vigorous. Not surprisingly, to abandon that historically laden term has been to redefine North American Jewish writing as a richly diverse body of pluralistic fiction, a modern Jewish literary complex, to quote literary historian Dan Miron, that is vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse and looks ahead to new forms of Jewish self-awareness as much as it looks back for history, sustenance, and collective memory.

    Significantly, since the turn of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of Jewish writers who reside in North America are not Americans by birth. The United States and Canada are the ports at which they have dropped anchor and established their careers, though they come from elsewhere, and sometimes from other languages, such as David Bezmozgis (Latvia, to Canada); Joseph Kertes (Hungary/Canada); David Unger and Francisco Goldman (Guatemala); Ilan Stavans (Mexico); Tony Eprile, Shira Nayman, and Kenneth Bonert (South Africa); Anouk Markovits (France); Gigi Anders and Achi Obejas (Cuba); Keith Gessen, Nadia Kalman, Lara Vapnyar, Maxim Shrayer, David Shrayer Petrov, Gary Shteyngart (Russia); Sana Krasikov (Georgia); André Aciman (Egypt); Dalia Sofer and Gina Nahai (Iran); Danit Brown and Avner Mandelman (Israel); Ayelet Tsabari (Yemen, Israel, Canada). There is another group of authors who live in the United States but continue to write in their original languages, such as Guatemala-born Eduardo Halfon, whose El boxeador polaco has only recently been translated into English as The Polish Boxer. Emigrant writing in America is scarcely remarkable in itself, but the vast contribution at present by Jews surely can’t escape notice, and speaks to the intersection of cultures, histories, and identities that marks our time. This list of names may be a labor of pure demographics, a social history of literature, but it is a uniquely contemporary demographic: When have we seen anything like this influx of fresh voices and unique histories since the great migration of 1881–1924?

    The literature we regularly review in our judging does not appear to build solely or even primarily on the celebrated post–World War II fiction of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth. Whatever else may have been true of that generation, those writers lived at both edges of their hyphens—American-Jewish—and defined themselves or found themselves defined through their incongruities. I am an American, Chicago born, declaims Saul Bellow’s Augie March. A celebratory gesture of identity such as Augie’s would seem archaic now. Contemporary literature by American Jews easily dispenses with these hyperbolic declarations. New Jewish writing seems to have more in common with the broad currents of contemporary American fiction, so much of which is the work of émigrés. The new population of Jewish writers appears to mirror a broader movement in American literature: writers come from afar to seek sanctuary in America and to find their voices in a country and a language that offers them protection and opportunity. From that point of view, immigrant Jews are less special cases than they are typical examples of new Americans putting down roots in an adopted land and a new language. They are part of a larger global movement, and their literature reflects both their commonality with other cultures and their distinctive history.

    .   .   .

    Thus, formerly vital questions about identity have lost their traction, as an entire conceptual framework that once sustained them has begun to seem transient and inessential. Identity remains an issue, but often it metamorphoses into something else, ironized, detached from the traditional anxieties about acceptance and exposure. In our collection, the most candid instance of identity fiction is Eileen Pollack’s story The Bris, in which a father, nearing death, reveals to his son that he is not Jewish and begs the son to find him a mohel who will perform on him a deathbed bris so that, passing as a Jew, he can be buried in a Jewish cemetery beside his wife. The story is a classic identity-as-quandary fable upended, the Gentile in search of acceptance and self-validation now desiring to be a Jew.

    The self, the grandly declared and anxiously defended self that once reigned as the dominant subject of earlier generations of Jewish writers in America, has all but disappeared. Once upon a time, an entire movement that stretches back to the early decades of the twentieth century could be epitomized by a phrase from Alfred Kazin’s memoir, A Walker in the City: I was so happy I could not tell what I felt apart from the evenness of the heat in which I walked. . . . I was me, me, me, and it was summer. From Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers through Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, with its plangent refrain of I want, I want, I want, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint with its silent Dr. Spievogel taking notes in the background, the insistent me, me, me had a force and implacability that made the obsessional self virtually a cornerstone of Jewish writing in America. The writer’s freedom to reinvent himself as a larky (Saul Bellow’s term), or haunted American, was the measure of his initiation into the American republic of individuality. This New World agenda, however, could not have achieved its full expression without a dash of Old World sponsorship—specifically a Mitteleuropean import in the form of the feverish theories and daunting professional apparatus of psychoanalysis. While psychoanalytic theory in all its extravagant varieties—Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, Adlerian, and Kleinian—captured the imagination of so many American writers, the vast institutional network of analysts and clinics and institutes was on the ready to provide logistical support. Psychoanalysis promised not only to open the doors of perception for writers—where id was, there ego shall be—but also to lift the malaise of alienation from which they declared themselves to be suffering. Fiction absorbed psychoanalysis at a moment in history when a writer’s mission was to keep a fever chart of a character who was often a thinly disguised stand-in for himself: Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, Bellow’s Moses Herzog, Malamud’s Arthur Fidelman. Saul Bellow describes Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift as a man who "owned a set of Freud’s journals. Once you’ve read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life you knew that everyday life was psychopathology." Saul Bellow’s novels and the self-lacerating heroes of Philip Roth answer most clearly to this preoccupation with mapping the unexplored catacombs of the American self by means of Mitteleuropean and Jewish theories of the unconscious. For critic Lionel Trilling, Freud served as one of the building blocks of his sturdy critical enterprise. Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg apprenticed themselves to the sexological principles of Wilhelm Reich. Bellow’s friend Isaac Rosenfeld spent hours in an orgone box.

    A mode of investigation that seemed so pioneering mere decades ago is now so far removed from Jewish writing in America as to seem as out of place as, say, Jewish stories about whaling. The therapist is as hard to find as a harpoon. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, Sigmund Freud has become something of an historical curiosity, a folk tale, a bobe mayse. Freud appears in Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic as a disciple of Wilhelm Fliess’s oddball theories of the nasal reflex neurosis as the organic basis for hysteria. The patient, Emma Eckstein, whom Fliess mistreated with history’s most famous nose job, turns out in Skibell’s book to have been in fact possessed by a dybbuk. Here ancient folklore trumps the modern. Freud appears as a narcissist and adulterer in Freud’s Mistress by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman and as a stony-hearted brother who abandons his sisters to the Nazis in Freud’s Sister by Macedonian novelist Goce Smilevski. The inventor of the Oedipus complex who gave intellectual nourishment, not to say promise of remedy, to a generation of Jewish writers and thinkers in mid-twentieth century, has become himself a museum piece of intellectual history. And along with Freud has departed the self to which his theories had once given profound meanings.

    In much of the best newer fiction, the arias of me, me, me have faded into choruses of us, us, us, the Jews as a collective body embedded in history, culture, and a collective memory. Virtually all the writers in our anthology are not only uninterested in the self-analyzing and self-indulgent oy vey psychodramas of the past, but they also no longer question their connection to the tribe. Gone is the alienation that they once attributed to being strangers in a strange land, who could say with Cynthia Ozick I am third generation American Jew, perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal.

    We readers no longer encounter the self-irony associated with early Roth or the assimilation angst that characterized Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky and his many descendants. Contemporary Jewish fiction writers take it as a given that they are Jews just as much as they are Americans, or, for that matter, Canadians, Russians, Latvians, or Israelis. Hyphens have given way to syntheses; they now look more like bridges than barriers. Left behind are Abraham Cahan’s Yekls who change their names to Jake. Somewhere in the dark backward and abysm of time are Saul Bellow’s philosopher clowns, with intellects to quote Heidegger and souls that say quack at the sight of women. Out on the margins are Ozick’s Jewish characters, perfectly acculturated yet perfectly marginal. In retreat are Henry Roth’s immigrants who tiptoe through America as if it were booby trapped with land mines. Missing from the new literature are disorders like Alex Portnoy’s, in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Gone are the anxious, phobic, dislocated Jewish protagonists for whom America is a landscape of frustrated desire. In their place, we find history.

    .   .   .

    At no time before have Jewish writers in America turned so repeatedly to history for their visions and inventions. The prevailing time setting of Jewish writing in America, from Abraham Cahan through Philip Roth, had been the contemporary. Seize the Day, proclaims the title of one of Saul Bellow’s early novels, the day meaning this day, the present, the here and now, in the words of Dr. Tamkin, the therapist-clown of Seize the Day. Capturing the moment was the collective mission of fiction in the previous century, as if authorship was a responsibility that called upon writers to witness the manners and morals of their own era. Manners, Morals, and the Novel, the title of an influential 1940s essay by Lionel Trilling, argued that the novel’s first duty was that of observation and recording. The novel, according to Trilling, delivers the news. It tells us about the look and feel of things, how things are done and what things are worth and what they cost and what the odds are. A sense of duty to one’s time has not entirely disappeared from Jewish writing, as we discover in the novel that won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for 2012, The World Without You, by Joshua Henkin. A panorama of contemporary middle-class habits, manners, and conflicts, the novel resembles Jane Austen’s domestic family dramas, but here transported from England to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. And in many of our anthology’s fictions, by, say, Eileen Pollack, Francine Prose, or Peter Orner, the routines and motives of daily life, the look and feel of things, remain under sharp scrutiny. Only in the case of Henkin’s novel, the Austenesque world of family intrigue is set against a background of a brutal political assassination elsewhere in the world, as one of the family is murdered, in the manner of Daniel Pearl, by Islamic radicals in Iraq. (The actual Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan.) In Henkin’s novel, we have the look and feel of things in the Berkshires sharing the same stage, even the same page, with utter horror.

    However, as collective Jewish experience becomes increasingly the touchstone for significance, more writing grapples with history than ever before. The last decade of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first have seen a profusion of new, young Jewish writers for whom the Jewish experience—defined in a variety of ways—shows itself to be, as Allegra Goodman’s Ed Markowitz would have it, unmistakable, not to be denied . . . the thundering of history (Mosquitoes, from The Family Markowitz). In particular, the literary preoccupation with the Holocaust among Jewish writers, especially in the decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century, has taken on considerable momentum. Here the Holocaust has become the psychic and emotional site of an originating, defining moment of trauma. As Melvin Jules Bukiet, the child of survivors, says, in the beginning was Auschwitz (Nothing Makes You Free). For post-Holocaust writers of the second and third generations, the Holocaust has ineradicably shaped their lives, but as a kind of silhouette, for the memories of such defining events are borrowed, or, as the title of Thane Rosenbaum’s second novel, Second Hand Smoke, suggests, second-hand. As Jonathan Safran Foer’s narrator in the novel Everything is Illuminated insists, The origin of a story is always an absence, a gap in the narrative that one hopes to fill by looking back. From absent or imperfect memory emerge narratives of continuing trauma.

    As the Holocaust recedes in time and we face the end of direct, survivor testimony, the obligation to preserve the memory by other means becomes all the more critical. Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Bukiet, Ehud Havazelet, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Harvey Grossinger, Joseph Skibell, Nicole Krauss, Julie Orringer, Sara Houghteling, Edith Pearlman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and many other writers not represented in this anthology engage either directly or indirectly with the Holocaust and its aftershocks. In doing so, they acknowledge a legacy of loss and accept an obligation to carry memory into the future. This is a past whose stories, as one of Julie Orringer’s characters says, from the very beginning, were absorbed . . . through her skin, like medicine or poison (The Invisible Bridge). The events of the Holocaust constitute an unwanted inheritance, as one of Thane Rosenbaum’s characters laments, but one impressed on the children of survivors, the DNA . . . forever coded (An Act of Defiance, in Elijah Visible). Such a past, as one of Ehud Havazelet’s characters puts it, seeped across the walls and floor . . . no longer something to be recalled from a distance—it was there in front of him, to walk into if he dared (To Live in Tiflis in the Springtime, in Like Never Before).

    For subsequent generations, dreams, visions, and memories, real and imagined, reemerge. In Nathan Englander’s story Free Fruit for Young Widows (in the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) a young Israeli boy learns brutal lessons about when it is morally permissible to murder, even men who are innocently eating lunch, because failing to do so could result in your own death. Ehud Havazelet’s novel Bearing the Body, whose dramatic center is located in San Francisco, shows us how contemporary consciousness may yet be stalked and shadowed by the Shoah. Some approaches may rely on the symbolic and fantastical, while others draw from extensive archival research, documented chronicles, and recorded interviews in reconstructing a world that has been lost. Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition, set in Paris both before and after the Shoah, looks at the Nazi looting of museums and private art collections during the war. Houghteling documents the history of systematic and ruthless looting as if the war were waged from the beginning for plunder. As one absorbs her drama of paintings lost and found, one is tempted to see the Nazi passion for conquest in a new light entirely.

    Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge painstakingly examines the Nazi occupation of Hungary and the fate of Hungarian Jews. Here Orringer shows the intersection of History—the war against the Jews—and personal histories through the confluence of exhaustive research and the penetrating radar of her own keen imagination. The Invisible Bridge follows the fate of a Hungarian Jewish family, the Lévis, from the individual, middle-class aspirations of their pre-war existences into the collective desperation of wartime, as Jewish men are forced to work in the labor gangs behind the front lines in Hungary, the Munkaszolgálat, where conditions are as lethal as those at the front. This novel is a memorial to those who died. There is a stunning moment at the novel’s close when those Hungarian Jews who survived the war fill the synagogue searching for names of families and friends, and it is in the long recitation of names that the author recreates the devastation and enormity of loss that Hungary’s Jews experienced:

    There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Böhm. Braun. Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Dániel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenberger. Engel. Fischer. Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz. János. Jáskiseri. Kemény. Kepecs. Kertész. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lázár. Lindenfeld. Mirkovitz. Martón. Nussbaum. Ócsai. Paley. Pollák. Róna. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek. Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebök. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vámos. Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. . . . They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names.

    This list itself, a solemn drumroll of names, speaks to the huge, almost unimaginable numbers murdered. The Invisible Bridge is a contemporary kaddish, a Yizkor Book, a chronicle of remembrance.

    Some other notable books we have read in our tenure as judges that foreground or background the Shoah include Gita Schwarz, Displaced Persons (2010); Margot Singer, Pale of Settlement (2009); Eugene Drucker, The Savior (2007); Ida Haettmer-Higgins, The History of History (2011); Norah Labiner, German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons (2010); Aryeh Lev Stollman, The Illuminated Soul (2003); David Unger, The Price of Escape (2011); Steve Stern, North of God (2008) and The Frozen Rabbi (2010); and Joseph Kertes, The Darkest Hour (2010). Examining a different but related disaster is Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), which explores the Argentinian dirty war of 1976–83 and the particular targeting of Jews by the military junta that ravaged Argentina during those years. Jewish historicism may also extend to the appropriation of historical forms and discourses, for Jewish writers pay homage to the past by resurrecting old and even ancient forms of storytelling. Folk tales and legends from the Jewish oral tradition supply endless forage for modern writers. Steve Stern, for example, finds inspiration for his Memphis stories in The Legends of the Jews, compiled over a century ago by Louis Ginzberg, and the method of Jewish lore and aggadah underlie the whimsical tales of the Lamed Vov by Jonathon Keats in his Book of the Unknown. Dara Horn weaves the Jewish past, present, and future together in The World to Come, tracing the history of a Chagall painting over several generations of a Jewish family, while referencing the works of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitch, who wrote under the name of Der Nister, The Hidden One.

    Some of Pearl Abraham’s fictions (not included in this volume) are modern renderings of the tales of the great Hasidic master Nachman of Bratslav. See in particular her novel The Seventh Beggar, which replays in contemporary dress a famous unfinished parable by Nachman of Bratslav. Possibly the most ambitious use of historical forms to be found in this anthology involve the pages of Apikoros Sleuth by Robert Majzels, which mimic the layout of the Talmud page, complete with Mishnah, Gemara, commentary by Rashi, Tosefot, Mesoret Hashas, and other commentaries. Only, all voices are those of Majzels himself, who applies the Talmudic method to a modern detective story. Much of contemporary literature draws from the ancient tradition of Midrash, interpretive and explanatory narratives that both fill in the gaps and extend the stories of the past.

    .   .   .

    So we are back around at the end to where we started—the startling resemblance of Jewish writing in America to a diaspora, though the preponderance of this literature is being written in a single language: English. And even that we can’t be certain of, since the full dimensions of Jewish genealogy and self-identification cannot be fully known. Those of us who live in a largely Ashkenazic world, and a post-Haskalah Ashkenazic world at that, know precious little about the Sephardic writers in our midst, or the Ashkenazim of Latin American origin, or the crypto-Jews of Mexico and the American Southwest, who may well be a vast population. Are Latino-Latina Jews in the continental United States writing fiction in Spanish? There must be some, perhaps many; their names are just not known to us. The same might be said of Russian, Arabic, and Farsi (Persian) emigrants, just to name a few, who have their own cénacles, their own journals, their own reading series, and perhaps even their own masters. Alan Mintz’s recent book on Hebrew poetry in America, Sanctuary in the Wilderness, reminds us that Hebrew had its own abundant literary life in the United States and still may. And Hana Wirth-Nesher, in Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature, argues that an emphasis on the democratic value of speech . . . coupled with resistance to one uniform language, enabled Jewish Americans to shape English as well as to be shaped by it. Writers come to our awareness through the print media and the Internet, which for the vast majority of us are available only in English. But who is to say for certain that fiction writing in other languages is not thriving in North America? The marketing networks through which we get our literature are notoriously selective, and much, we have no doubt, does not pass through them.

    Nevertheless, we see emerging in the American literary scene a condition that roughly resembles the Jewish literary diaspora of a full century ago, during the great flowering of Jewish culture in a dozen languages, including Polish, Czech, Italian, German, Serbian, Russian, French, Hungarian, Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Many writers wrote in two or more languages, like S. Y. Abramovitsch (popularly remembered as Mendele Mocher Sforim) and S. Y. Agnon. Many writers read as many as four or five languages. Such multilingualism might have provided a key to survival. Bruno Schulz translated Franz Kafka into Polish and both drew upon and extended Kafka in his own extravagant metamorphic fantasias (see Street of Crocodiles and Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass, both published by Penguin Books in the Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth). Isaac Babel, fluent in Yiddish, French, and Russian, wrote one of his greatest stories in homage to French writer Guy de Maupassant. Babel’s inability to write of life convincingly in French, however, doomed him to return from France to the Soviet Union in 1933, where Stalin caught up with him. Danilo Kiš was utterly peripatetic, having been born in Serbia and hidden during the war by his mother in Hungary; he divided the last years of his life between Belgrade and Paris.

    A listing of the multilingual and displaced writers in the Jewish diaspora can go on for pages, but we need to mention in passing a writer who is not in this volume but whose life sums up the diasporic existence and the multilingual imagination. John Auerbach’s (1922–2002) childhood was lived in Polish and Yiddish, his young adulthood in German, and his middle age in Hebrew. After the Shoah, he lived on a maritime kibbutz in Israel, where he divided his time between seafaring and writing. He wrote only in English: meticulous, laser-clean literary English. He did so in imitation of the literary hero of his youth, Joseph Conrad. We have the testimony of Saul Bellow, in the prefaces to both of Auerbach’s books, Tales of Grabowski and The Owl and Other Stories, that Auerbach’s spoken English was flawless. As a youth in occupied Warsaw, Auerbach had the fortune to be allowed out of the ghetto on a work detail, a plakówka, and during one detail he tore off his Star of David armband and emerged from a men’s room as Wladislaw Grabowski (the fictionalized name). It was a Superman trick, but in real life. To make good on the transformation, he had to not simply pretend to be another, but, as he put it, he also had to change the wavelength of his brain, give over his books, his philosophy, his Kierkegaard, and become ruthless and insensitive to suffering, free of remorse, of regret, of sorrow, of conscience (Tales of Grabowski). He headed for Danzig (now Gdansk) to work in the shipyards as an indentured Polish laborer and miraculously survived the war and imprisonment in the Stutthof concentration camp, then emigrated to Israel. There he began to write fiction, but only in English, and managed to get to America, where he married an American actress, Nola Chilton, and made the acquaintance of Saul Bellow.

    Why tell this story? We tell it here for the miracle of survival and the miracle of literature that was made possible by it, but also because it presents us with a writer who answers to no standardized rubrics and who has no textbook place in any national literature. Was Auerbach an Israeli writer? A Polish writer? A Jewish-Polish-Israeli-American writer? Unhampered, but also unaided, by any of the above appellations, he was just a writer and a reminder that in order to for us to discover literature and allow it to affect us, we have to keep our ascriptions on a short leash. What captures him best perhaps was his hunger to write, indeed in his fourth or maybe fifth language (Yiddish, Polish, German, Hebrew, English), and to forge out of his implacable determination an English prose that rivals Conrad’s for grittiness and impact. We may think of Auerbach as a hero of survival, and he is certainly that. But for us, he is a hero of the word. Writers do not always belong either to where they came from or to where they wound up. They belong to the written word, which is its own kingdom.

    A recent book by Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, titled jewsandwords, reminds us of the paramount importance of words in Jewish culture. Ours is not a bloodline but a textline, they write. Their many examples converge upon the textuality of learning in all Jewish communities:

    [Jewish] children were made to inherit not only a faith, not only a collective fate, not only the irreversible mark of circumcision, but also the formative stamp of a library. It was not enough for the youngsters to follow the universal rites of passage—watch and emulate their elders, learn how to work or fight, and heed ancestral tales and songs by the fireside. Oral traditions and physical emulation could not suffice. You had to read from the books, too.

    Reading books as a customary part of Jewish education resonates throughout jews-and-words as a core ingredient of Jewish identity, not only as a marker of Jewish difference but also as a key to the axial lines of character and culture. This focus is particularly critical because the Ozes identify themselves as secular Israeli Jews and make an argument for the essential Jewishness, indeed the historically validated Jewishness, of people like themselves: Jews who have maintained a distance from rabbinic authority and the core theocentric precepts inscribed in Jewish liturgy and ritual. Yet they hold their secularity to be scripturally based—no Bible, no Jews, even for Jews who do not follow the path of Halakhah, the law: Self-conscious seculars seek not tranquility but intellectual restlessness, and love questions better than answers. To secular Jews like us, the Hebrew Bible is a magnificent human creation. Solely human. We love it and we question it.

    The fiction in The New Diaspora is overwhelmingly secular, even if the private beliefs of some writers may be halakhically observant. The modes in which the stories are written—realistic, allegorical, folkloric, fabulistic, comical, romantic, agitprop, protest, confessional, stream-of-consciousness, historical, documentary, roman à clef, roman fleuve, epic, epistolary, or picaresque—are all secular literary genres that Jews have adapted to their expressive needs and values in modern times, beginning with Sholem Yankev Abramovitsch (Mendele Mocher Sforim) in the middle of the nineteenth century. Abramovitsch, der Zeyde, or grandfather, as Sholem Aleichem called him, opened the shuttered gates through which entered such Yiddish and Hebrew writers as Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, S. Y. Agnon, S. Ansky, H. N. Bialik, Israel Joshua, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, writers in European vernaculars like Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, and the vast number of writers who claimed the Enlightenment as an adopted patrimony and discovered within the Western literary canon a capacious array of forms in which to work. For this generation, with the possible exception of the latecomer Kafka, the habits of reading, writing, and commentary were nurtured by the Torah-based parent-child, question-and-response education, which was spirited, it was playful, it was about ideas, it encouraged curiosity, and it required reading. It compelled very young children to read, and at the same time it showed them how compelling reading can be. And yet this learning, in their view, did not possess the coercive power to compel a life according to Halakhah in all cases, but rather inspired habits of inquiry and exploration that allowed writers and intellectuals to propel themselves successfully into the world on their own terms—Isaac Babel becoming a journalist with the Red Army, for example—and to forge their own syntheses between the Jewish and the European, the Jewish and the Cossack, the Jewish and the German, the Jewish and the American parts of their lives. Even as the Jews were thrust into modernity by all the devastating means that Europe brought against them, there remained in all a residue of devotion. The bivalent Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel, who identifies with the brutal Cossacks he rides with but writes tenderly of the Jewish villages he finds himself bivouacked in, are productions of the collision of modernity with traditional observance among writers of his generation. Just as striking are the drawings of Bruno Schulz in which sadomasochistic motifs appear alongside portraits of devout rabbis at prayer. (See in particular the erotic drawings collected in The Book of Idolatry.) Here one sees plainly, even among those writers who had traveled farthest on the journey to modernity, that nucleus of reverence underlying their modern preoccupations.

    Most of the authors of the stories and excerpted book chapters in The New Diaspora are several generations removed from the world that cherished Talmud-Torah instruction for every male Jewish child, and some are descendants of the left-wing anti-rabbinic culture of Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers. Indeed, we have little doubt that scattered among our authors are red-diaper grandchildren. If our writers represent a normal cross-section of American Jews, then that is bound to be the case. We do know that the Russian/Soviet born writers we have included—Bezmozgis, Kalman, Shrayer, and Vapnyar—grew up in an environment of compulsory secularization under Soviet Communism, but who can say how much traditional learning any of them absorbed at home sub rosa? Surreptitious learning can be bootlegged into any home, even if it is by way of Pushkin rather than Genesis. Surely, in many cases, the love of reading was nurtured by Yevgeniy Onegin and not the legends of the Jews. To be sure, some of our American-born writers did have Talmud-Torah educations, and one of the more spectacular productions of our writers in recent years is New American Haggadah (2012), translated afresh from Hebrew by Nathan Englander and edited by Jonathan Safran Foer. Though Englander has drifted away from his religious upbringing, he acknowledges that the religion leaks into the writing. And I guess the writing leaks into the religion as well. I am a pro when it comes to ritualistic behavior, everything prescribed and timed and structured, everything right or wrong. And once I got serious about writing, I discovered that I’d adopted a lot of these forms. You write hard, every day, six days a week, and on the seventh you rest (quoted in Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, edited by Paul Zakrzewski). Israeli-born Ehud Havazelet had a similarly observant upbringing: his father was a rabbi and a professor at Yeshiva University. While his break with religion was more bitter and convulsive than Englander’s, he does not look back to the earlier self with nostalgia for a lost unity of being: And that’s why the traditional certainties are so alluring. If you know, ‘I’m a Jewish man and I behave this way,’ you’re supposed to have that solid identity. I don’t. I never did. I don’t believe most people do (An Interview with Ehud Havazelet, Boswell magazine [online], October 2000). The very existence of this book is premised on a faith in the existence of deep historical textlines that bind all our writers into a Jewish complex of thought marked by some unity of practice, some unity of history, and some continuity of belief, however attenuated.

    The belief in wholeness, however, comes up against the shattered realities of Jewish life. Jewish history is a broken history, broken again and again since the fall of the Second Temple, until the idea of a continuum makes no sense apart from its discontinuities: its breaks, its flights, its catastrophic losses, its pogroms and inquisitions, its amnesias, its traumas, its multilingualism, its sectarian pluralities and apostasies, its ferocious polemical skirmishes, its intersections, its absorptions, its borrowings, its ideological splinterings and factional rivalries, its schismatic polarizations, its multiple exiles and irretrievable losses, its Kabbalistic mysteries and Sabbatian pilgrimages, its dispersions and its aliyahs. Any effort to make continuous sense of Jewish writing without factoring in a thousand fractures will face an impossible task. Jewish writing—not unlike Jewish history—might be thought of in terms of its ruptures rather than its structures. And yet, in rejecting the lachrymose history of Jewish woe and affirming the potential for a fruitful Jewish diasporic existence, we find some of the periods of greatest Jewish literary productivity are precisely in the long periods of peace between those ruptures.

    .   .   .

    So this anthology is built necessarily out of compromises. Half of it follows the founding rubrics of the literary prize that brought the editors together in a shared purpose, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Accordingly, the overwhelming numbers of the books we read for the prize even now are written by Americans born in the United States for American readers. Those selections that are keyed to the award reflect that original intention. However, a founding idea that suited the tidier and more compartmentalized literary horizon of 1963 is bound to prove too confining for the far more disorderly world we now inhabit, when fiction writing in the US is ever more the work of emigrants with their own stories to tell. Thus, the second part of our table of contents may be thought of as the more experimental, more open-ended half of the book, with three stories by authors born in Russia (Shrayer, Kalman, and Vapnyar), one by a Latvian-born writer (Bezmozgis), one by a South African-born writer (Tony Eprile), one by an Israeli now living in Canada (Avner Mandelman), one by a Canadian (Robert Majzels), who uses the form of the Talmud as the template for telling a detective story. Here indeed is the vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse literature we are looking for.

    The most spectacular of the emigrations is from Russia. And as we learn from the pioneering research of scholar Adrian Wanner, this isn’t just an American phenomenon, but one with corollaries in Germany, France, and Israel. A particular aspect of the Russian invasion that may prove vexing for some is that the Russians define themselves as Jewish, when they do at all, in cultural terms only. Indeed, none of them is religiously observant. But it is not just faith and observance that so many of these writers have turned their backs on, it is the very ascription of Jewishness that we as readers are keen to attribute to them. In an interview, Russian writer Anya Ulinich (not in this anthology) complained, pointedly: What is ‘Jewish’ Fiction? Is there also ‘Jewish math’? ‘Jewish sculpture’? Or is it inadvertent, like having a big nose and curly hair? . . . I’d like to think that I just write fiction. Those of us who assemble anthologies in the untroubled certainty that something called Jewish fiction exists, and that we are in the business of mapping its terrain, need to be aware that our map may be self-serving and revealing of our own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations, and that the boundaries we draw around our literature need to be flexible, porous, and endlessly open to question. We find it particularly helpful to invoke Miron’s Jewish literary space, in which all sorts of literary phenomena, contiguous and non-contiguous, move, meet, separate and put more and more distance among themselves. Nobody . . . possesses a monopoly over Jewishness, he adds. That includes ourselves.

    And yet, within the broader boundary diffusion, we may see what appears to be a deep conversation between American and Israeli literary communities. Quite apart from the effects of the Russian emigrations, which have complementary effects on American and Israeli literatures, we can witness a fluent interchange of writers to and from each nation. In this anthology we’ve included Israeli-born Avner Mandelman now living in Canada, but headed the other way was Allen Hoffman, winner of the Wallant Award in 1981, who made aliyah to Israel soon thereafter and continued while there to write and publish fiction in English. We observe the easy academic interchanges in areas of literature and literary studies, according to which dozens of scholars on both sides either lecture or hold professorships in each other’s countries. Major Israeli writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman have developed solid audiences in the United States, thanks to the abilities of their translators, respectively Nicholas de Lange and Jessica Cohen. Nathan Englander is an English-language translator of Israeli writer Etgar Keret. This fluidity of intellectual/cultural interchange manifests itself in The New Diaspora through the numerous stories by American writers that are set in Israel, with characters who are tourists or adventurers: Joshua Henkin, Sex on the Brain; Joan Leegant, The Baghdadi; Curt Leviant, Say It Isn’t So, Mr. Yiddish; Scott Nadelson, Oslo; Tova Reich, Dedicated to the Dead; Margot Singer, Deir Yassin; and Aryeh Lev Stollman, Mr. Mitochondria. It is not premature to begin to speak of a fluently binational imagination that finds itself equally at home in Israel or the United States. Indeed, there are presently websites dedicated to the integration of Jewish writings from around the globe, though in practice the American and the Israeli are by far the dominant literatures. See in particular Nora Gold’s JewishFiction.net, which is dedicated to Jewish writing from wherever it may appear. This raft of words, to borrow a phrase from novelist Peter Manseau, between the Jewish Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, appears to be growing quite without friction on either side, as writers recognize their own stake in being part of a larger frame of discourse.

    We might even have among our writers an accomplished diaspora of one. Edith Pearlman, winner of the Wallant Award for 2011, locates her stories from anywhere on the map that she may inhabit with her capacious imagination, including Jerusalem, Central America, tsarist Russia, London during the Blitz, and locales across Europe and the United States, including the invented community of Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. Her characters are variously wanderers, tourists, missionaries, outcasts, refugees, desperate children of the Kindertransport, displaced persons, adopted children and their bewildered adoptive parents, Jews in search of a minyan on Yom Kippur in nameless banana republics, doomed civil servants in the employ of fading dictators somewhere south of Mexico and just north of Hell, Cambodians cooking their meals on the floors of their Manhattan apartments, autodidact scholars who specialize in Dickens and Maimonides. I’m not interested in Judaism, says a character in her story Settlers, only in Jews. They’re so complicated. Such a phrase might serve as an epigraph both for her collection of stories and ours: not Judaism but Jews as they are, in their bewildering idiosyncrasy and variety, and in their perilous place in history.

    Two questions emerge: (1) Is there a story behind these stories? (2) Was our selection of texts determined by a story we wanted to tell? To the second question, the answer is a firm no. At no point in our considerations did the editors ever discuss a desire to shape the collection in any direction other than to show the writers through their best work. Our choices were dictated by (1) past Wallant Award winners whom we hoped to represent through their best writing and (2) the abundant other writing that has crossed our desks over the past eight years. We did desire to show the quality of craftsmanship that we found in the fiction being written in English in North America by Jews and for Jews. One of the very great pleasures of our work has been that of reading itself, abundantly, promiscuously, sometimes with scarcely a pause between books. It is a deep pleasure, a pleasure beyond the aesthetic appreciation of lapidary phrases artfully arranged into stunning paragraphs. We experienced also the satisfaction of touching down in a history that for us is always absorbing, in a textual tradition that begins with the written Torah and is alive in thought and dialectic, in a unique cast of mind that is at once blunt, fierce, contentious, earthy, pliable, worldly, utopian, and durable, and in a tradition of storytelling in which any story might prove to be a parable, a midrash, a lesson, a dream, a bobe mayse, or something perversely cryptic about metamorphoses and insects.

    If our book of stories is about anything at all, it is about the tradition of storytelling itself, aggadah, which, in all varieties of Jewish observance and culture—Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Hassidic and Yeshivist, Lubavitcher and Satmar, Reform and secular, Russian and Israeli, and all hybrid identities and schismatic communities in between—holds a special place as a center of gravity that gives weight and significance to individual lives. Working on this book has given us occasion to reflect on writing in our own emotional economies. In their book New American Haggadah, authors Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer reflect on the defining power of storytelling in Jewish ritual life: "We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human life—our lives—dignity" (v). Time and again, we hear stories of Jews who continued to write under circumstances that most of us would regard as impossible. We recall here the story of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, whose overcoat was found to contain his last poems when his body was exhumed from a mass grave after his death in 1944 in Hungary. We would also point to the story of Yiddish writer Naftali Herts Kon, whose poetry was burned in the Soviet Union, confiscated in Poland in 1960, and only recently restored to his family in 2011 after lengthy and expensive legal battles. So, too, Isaiah Spiegel, who wrote short stories and poems while incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto, and after the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon his fortuitous survival, he returned to Lodz to reclaim his hidden manuscripts so that they might be brought to light. Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote that the imperative to record events and feelings during the war was so strong that Jews kept diaries even under the most impossible conditions, writing memoirs even in forced labor camps. Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, continued writing even though paralyzed by ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, by blinking his eyes as his wife pointed to letters.

    There may be thousands of such instances. Writing itself, for Jews, has been that center of gravity that has given weight and meaning to their lives. This anthology is more than anything a celebration of storytelling itself as the still point in the turning world for Jews—something we tacitly understood when we set out to assemble it more than three years ago.

    BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

    In the course of writing this introduction, the editors have made reference to a number of literary critics and historians. Rather than supply the formal apparatus of footnotes or bibliography, we will just provide here a narrative bibliographic account of our sources. Literary texts have been cited in-line in the text, while critical and historical source materials are cited in this supplement.

    Irving Howe’s quote is from his introduction to Jewish-American Stories (New York, Signet, 1977). Quotes from Israeli literary historian Dan Miron are primarily from From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). A handy summary of Miron’s book may be found in Shachar Pinsker’s review in The New Republic (December 8, 2011). The quotation attributed to Cynthia Ozick about being acculturated and marginal is from her essay Towards a New Yiddish: Note, in Art and Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Knopf, 1983). The phrase strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings is from the fictional Dr. Otto Spielvogel’s frontispiece to Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969). Lionel Trilling’s essay Manners, Morals, and the Novel is from his collection The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950). This book is presently available in the Harcourt Uniform Edition of Trilling’s work published in 1979. In that collection may also be found the two essays that outline Trilling’s positions on psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud: Freud and Literature and Art and Neurosis. The Opposing Self, published in 1955, a subsequent Trilling essay collection, is also now most easily available in the same Harcourt Uniform Edition. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s jewsandwords was published by Stanford University Press in 2012. Reference to Hana Wirth-Nesher is to her Call It English: The Languages of Jewish-American Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Alan Mintz’s Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry was published by Stanford University Press in 2012. New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer with new translation by Nathan Englander, was published by Little Brown in 2012. For the recent history of Russian writers in America, we’ve relied on Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). A summary of Wanner’s basic arguments may be found in Russian Jews as American Writers: A New Paradigm for American Multiculturalism? in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. (Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2012). Wanner’s global perspective includes the effect of the Russian literary invasion on French, German, and Israeli literatures, as well as American. See also the testimony of Maxim Shrayer in Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). The quote from Anya Ulinich is from the MELUS article. For Naftali Herz Kon, see Paul Berger’s article in the Jewish Daily Forward (forward.com/articles/180733/naftali-herts-kons-works-wrenched-out-of-polands-c/). A brief introduction to John Auerbach’s writing can be found in the original Toby Press advertising blurb (www.tobypress.com/books/grabowski.htm). An account of Auerbach’s American-born actress-wife Nola Chilton and her revolutionary work in Israeli theater can be found in the Haaretz story of her one-woman show produced in Israel at the age of 91: One-Woman Show: At 91, Nola Chilton is not here to appease the audience (Haaretz, April 12, 2013). Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo’s World of Our Fathers was published by Harcourt in 1976. Bruno Schulz, known to most readers as a story writer in the collections Street of Crocodiles (New York: Walker and Company, 1963) and Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (New York: Penguin, 1988), was also an accomplished artist, and his drawings may be found in The Book of Idolatry (Warsaw, Poland: Interpress Publishers, 1983) and The Drawings of Bruno Schulz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). Nora Gold’s online fiction blog can be found at JewishFiction.net (www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/current-issue). For Emanuel Ringelblum, see Joseph Kermish (ed.), To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986).

    PART I

    Selections by Edward Lewis Wallant Award–Winning Authors

    1

    Joshua Henkin

    SEX ON THE BRAIN*

    1998

    Men are praying on the airplane. Sara can see them from where she sits, skullcapped men, some with beards and payes, swaying in the aisles while the flight attendants roll their carts past them, pouring drinks. They’re over the Atlantic, the sky bright and clear through the window. In Israel, the sun has already set. The crowds have left the Wailing Wall, and downtown on King George Street soldiers loiter in front of the Mashbir and American teenagers lean against storefronts eating falafel and square slices of pizza. Everywhere in the world, Jews pray toward the Wailing Wall. Three times a day, morning, afternoon, and night. Except on an airplane God plays tricks with the sun. So when should a Jew pray on an airplane? Always? Never?

    Next to Sara a blond man sits impassively, reading a copy of Time. He may be a soldier, she thinks, the blond ones especially, the ones who look Swedish, the ones who read Time. Undercover Israeli soldiers on the airplane just in case. She thinks of Yossi, the guy who picked cantaloupe back on the kibbutz. Yossi was Swedish, a Swedish oleh who served in the Israeli Air Force and who later, everyone suspected, worked for Mossad.

    Her meal comes. It’s orange chicken stamped in Hebrew and English with rabbinic approval, and across the front are instructions not to unseal the package before giving it to the passenger. The silverware comes in plastic. Sara’s a vegetarian, and she’s ordered a special meal but the airline has forgotten it, so she slices the perforation on the tin foil and eats what she can, julienned carrots, a few stray peas not doused in gravy, a piece of sponge cake. She orders a club soda and sips from it. She tries to fall asleep.

    It’s morning when they land in Tel Aviv, and as Sara sets foot on the tarmac, the woman in front of her gets down on her knees to kiss the ground. This startles Sara, though the first time she visited Israel she kissed the ground, too. She’s here alone now; no one knows she’s coming. Last she heard, people were leaving the kibbutz. Socialism’s a failed experiment, everyone likes to say. Zionism is, too, she thinks, judging from the fact that everywhere she travels she sees Israelis. Israelis in the Louvre, Israelis in the Vatican, Israelis at the Great Wall of China. Israelis everywhere but in Israel, yet they return to the country

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