About the Author

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.

Reviews

Wisse (Yiddish and comparative literature, Harvard; A Little Love in Big Manhattan) views Jewish 20th-century literature as a complex group of elements (group cohesion, social justice, and religion) that are not bound by language or place. Concentrating on the Ashkenazic Jewish tradition, she covers Yiddish, Russian, English, and Hebrew literature. Wisse, for whom Jewish identity and survival are important topics, has critical comments to make on left-wing ideas. Her discussions of Y.H. Brenner, the Singers (Hinde Esther, I.J. Singer, and I.B. Singer), Jacob Glatstein, S.Y. Agnon, and modern Israeli literature are especially valuable. Wisse describes the great currents of modern Jewish life, socialism, the destruction of European Jewry, assimilation, and Holocaust writings. Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, A.M. Klein, David Grossman, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth are also included in this wide-ranging survey of modern Jewish life and literature. Recommended for Jewish literature and studies collections."Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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.