The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture » (2nd Edition)

Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Born in Romania and raised in Montreal, she was the first professor of Yiddish Literature in North America (at McGill University, where she helped to found the Jewish Studies Department in the late 1960s). She has written or edited eight previous books on Jewish literature and culture, including The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, published by the University of Chicago Press, and If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Wisse admits that making selections for a modern Jewish canon was far from easy: "The modern list will probably never be as firmly redacted as the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, because no contemporary community is as confident as its ancestors, and because moderns are generally warier of any process that smacks of authority." In spite of difficulties, Wisse, who teaches Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, goes through what she believes are the greatest works reflecting the extraordinary varieties of 20th-century Jewish experience, from Sholom Aleichem's Tevye stories to the near-stream-of-consciousness, post-Zionist novel Past Continuous by Israeli Yaakov Shabtai. But whether dealing with well-known writers, such as Nobel laureates S.Y. Agnon, I.B. Singer and Saul Bellow, or introducing readers to such little-known but significant writers as the early Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner or the Canadian A.M. Klein, Wisse writes thoughtfully and insightfully. She places each work in a historical, cultural and linguistic context (Jewish literature is unusually polyglot), probes its worldview and the writings of other scholars and critics. Wisse has a gift for succinctly capturing a work's narrative and moral import, as in this statement about what she calls "one of the finest political novels in the Western canon," Singer's Satan in Goray: "Evil is never so powerful as when it claims to be redemptive, the promise of redemption is never so persuasive as when it follows great suffering, and no suffering will compare with `forcing the end' of history." Some readers will quibble with her choices, but no matter; Wisse has provided a great service to those interested in modern Jewish imagination, world views and sensibilities. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction
1. THE COMEDY OF ENDURANCE Sholem Aleichem
2. THE LOGIC OF LANGUAGE AND THE TRIALS OF THE JEWS Franz Kafka and Yosef Haim Brenner
3. LITERATURE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION From Isaac Babel to Vasily Grossman
4. BETWEEN THE WARS The Singer Family of Warsaw
5. A FAREWELL TO POLAND Jacob Glatstein and S.Y. Agnon
6. SHOAH, KHURBN, HOLOCAUST Testimonies in Native and Adopted Tongues
7. THE ZIONIST FATE IN ENGLISH HANDS From George Eliot to A.M. Klein
8. THE IMMIGRANT PHASE American Jewish Fiction from 1900 to 1950
9. WRITING BEYOND ALIENATION Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth
10. A CHAPTER IN THE MAKING Israeli Literature Author's Postscript Notes Suggested Reading from the Modern Jewish Canon Index