Studies in American Jewish Literature

This is an exquisitely written, field-changing book. Scholarship on Jewish material culture tends to employ one of three methods: text-driven, object-centered, or object-driven approaches. Long known as one of the leading figures of the textdriven approach, Barbara E. Mann demonstrates in The Object of Jewish Literature how viewing literature through a material culture lens illuminates not only the way twentieth-century Jewish literature is shaped by a dialogue with historical circumstances, but also how that literature has been used to memorialize and re-member worlds fractured by war and social change. Mann is interested in both books as objects as well as the depiction of objects within the texts she explores. The Object of Jewish Literature retells the story of twentieth-century Jewish literature through a transnational methodology that spans continents and linguistic traditions (Hebrew, Yiddish, and English). One of the most useful aspects of Mann's approach is her focus on literary form and genre, which will allow readers to apply her analysis to writers beyond those she covers.

The Object of Jewish Literature is divided into six memorable chapters, each of which covers one literary genre. The chapters move us forward in time, building off of each other in a graceful fashion. The first chapter opens by defining the Jewish Imagism movement, Mann's term for "the broad set of poetic trends emerging in the early twentieth century in mostly urban, cosmopolitan settings" (19). Most of these poems employed visual or material strategies as a means to adapt formalism to modernism. Mann begins the chapter by recasting the defining moments [End Page 191] of modernism in Jewish terms: the establishment of Tel Aviv (1909), the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911), and the Kishinev pogrom (1913). (For Latin American literature, one might add the Tragic Week in Argentina of 1919.) Mann then compares the era's competing Yiddish manifestos to proclamations by Pound and Williams, and notes how writing in Jewish languages was a "more visible instance" of the "tangled relationship between sacred and secular literary form" (24, 28). Mann's examples transverse Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and several continents.

Chapters 2 and 3 take us through to high modernism by looking at literary magazines and fiction. Chapter 2 explores the "little magazine," which as Mann notes, was a staple of modernist prose. These were journals that typically included a range of genres but were self-consciously "high" literature. Little magazines likewise nurtured conversations between writers and artists. For example, Yiddish and Hebrew little magazines tended to see Hebrew fonts as a crucial building block in the readers' experience (53). The material experience of the magazines as objects, Mann argues, was crucial, as was the journals' ability to travel across the wide spaces of the Jewish diaspora. Chapter 3 shifts our focus to a longer format: the modernist novel. Mann concentrates on Dovid Bergelson's Nokh alemen (The End of Everything, 1913), Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), and S. Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday (1945), thereby creating a bridge between Yiddish, English, and Hebrew storytelling. These works were chosen for their "exemplary and distinctive attention to material culture and the meaning of things," and in doing so illuminate the ways in which Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century was embedded in a changing physical world (88). Thinking about the books as objects reveals how materiality mattered for Jewish life between the world wars. Here Mann usefully relates her methods to that of Bill Brown, one of the foremost critics of American literature and material culture, thereby revealing the way in which her argument connects to larger social changes of which Jews partook.

Chapters 4 and 5 bring us to two genres that Jews created or embraced following World War II: the yizker book and graphic novels. I found these chapters to be some of the most exciting. Although often dismissed as neither literary nor historical enough, Mann notes that yizker books...