Jewish Literary Criticism

I guess I've never put this obvious thought down: there is a critical Jewish literary approach which is akin to that of feminist or queer theory. This means that within a large corpus of books, there is a Jewish thread that needs to be teased out, analyzed, explored. Back in the '50s and '60s, critics said that the Jewish novel focuses or should focus on identity, and so perhaps with criticism. It's easier to do this with "Jewish literature" than with other literary traditions; but, this is why there are critical works on Jewish characters in books written by non-Jews, or on books which focus primarily on non-Jews. Here, identity formation might not be as crucial--we might be more concerned with anti-Semitic tropes, a la Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Something similar happens in reading these works that happens when a woman reads books written by men which focus on female characters: my girlfriend has said so of Anna Karenina, and then she cites Cixous's postulation of "feminine writing" which can be sometimes applied to males. Is there a "Jewish writing" which applies to goyim?

To my mind, this doesn't really have anything to do with a canon. Ha! Addendum: this can affect the canon in the same way as feminist and queer theory: discovering and reclaiming less popular but significant works. This actually intersects with feminist and queer theory, because we have women like Irena Klepfisz editing collections such as Found Treasures, or a rediscovery of Myron Brinig, the gay midwesterner.

Kazin: The Saint as Schlemiel

So good. I am too lazy to lift whole quotes from it at this moment.

Also, Ruth Wisse appears stupider and stupider to me every day. First she critiques gays for corrupting Yiddish, then speaks ignorantly about the women's movement. Wtf.

Several Things

1. Today, the rest of the galus is nearly insignificant, and the main identities of Jews are either American or Israeli (Europe used to comprise another third). For this reason I think I will finally foray into Israeli sifrut: they are my corollary, the other half of my bi-polarity.
2. Why do we write fiction? One reason is that there are certain historical events that can only be made meaningful or understood through literature. This is why my argument with the survivor of the Shoah was justified, that fiction about it isn't only a valid exploration, but it must be written. The lives of our literary ancestors find relevance in fiction--not in their fiction, necessarily, but in fiction about them. Dara Horn on Der Nister; Krause and Ozick on Bruno Schulz; Ozick on Glatshteyn; Englander on the martyred; and many more. Time has come for exploration on Stefan Zweig, his suicide, the letters he wrote that are probably lost, the books that Hitler burnt.
3. America is unrivaled in writing cheesy holiday songs; Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful to be cognizant of history.

We Are All Max Brod

We read Kafka autobiographically because there is no other way. And it's not the readers' faults. This is just in the unconscious literary discourse. We simply know too much about him; so much so, that we can't help but see his father, his paranoia, even the status of Jews in Europe at the time, the closing of fate so to speak. If only there were more allusions to Buber in his work (it's in his diaries).

I also get shivers every time I think of Kafka and Rilke in the same room, perhaps saying hello to each other (unlikely), not knowing who the other is.

The point of Heschel

Can we analyze life/culture/anything, yet remain idealistically Romantic?

I read the memoir of a young ex-Hasidic woman. After essentially enlightening herself, she admits she "still found delight in Shabbos poetry." To quote David Roskies, her tateh's reaction would have been, "What?! Shikse! This is Shabbos! We bentsch likht! Poetry shmoetry. Shabbos joy is obvious!"

Perhaps her words were not chosen so carefully; they are quite dry. While I don't know completely what the young girl thought, I'd like to hope she was somewhat sincere: that yes, she does find some things about Shabbat spiritual, mystical, or maybe even unexplainable.

It goes without saying that the young girl's prose was incomparable to that of Heschel's, as was her intellect and erudition. Yet reading Heshel is to experience Shabbos joy, it is to know he experienced Shabbos joy--yet he talks cogently and academically about religious topics. Heschel finds the perfect balance between nakhes and analysis.

Maybe I should try to shlep through Derrida's ideas about "the joy of the text"; sometimes I do feel like analysis is a chore, and suffuses joy. Sometimes, however, I feel like Heschel, philosophizing about Shabbat.

Ozick and Self-Haters

Ozick wants Babel to be as celebrated as Kafka (even though it won't happen). We should be asking why she isn't as celebrated as Philip Roth (even though we know it won't happen).

There is misogyny to be found in the consumption of Jewish fiction, despite the fact that more Jewish women than men are writing these days. Ozick is the self-hating sisters of Sara Smolinsky; Feministing says the same for Nicole Krauss, who isn't nearly as celebrated as her husband.

Related somewhat to Saul Bellow

I need to buy the new release of his letters. In one, he says something like "it's easy to get lost in the jungle of Jewish history; you need a machete."

His quote inspired me to think of this: but how do we deal with it? Do we rejoice? Or wallow in misery? Can we balance the two? To use a cliché: our history is an emotional roller-coaster.

I think this needs to be dealt with more directly in Jewish fiction: the theme that our history hones in on individuals, as if they're on the receiving end of a funnel, who must then reconcile the past--"weight of ancestry"-- with the immediate present. I think this is a job for the Rosenzweig/Lewisohn combo.
--To take another discrete example: Felix Mendelssohn. Is it sad that his grandfather was nearly an apostate and brought his family up as Christian? Sad as it is that Felix was baptized, he was still one of the greatest composers and instilled fear in Wagner. Felix Mendelssohn singularly represents this dichotomy, as do many Jews throughout history.

Perhaps the only character of Bellow's that grapples directly with this history is Sammler (unless you count Bellow himself, being Sammler's creator).

I still need to read Herzog. Humboldt was so good though.