In his column last week, Josh Glancy was absolutely right to praise Joseph Roth, one of the great Jewish writers of the 20th century, and to speak of “the wave of Jewish genius and creativity that emerged from the Enlightenment and Emancipation” (The Jewish diaspora is going through an age of mediocrity, 14 October). Glancy singles out Joseph Roth but he could have added many others: Soviet writers like Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman, central Europeans like Kafka, Stefan Zweig and Bruno Schulz, the first great Jewish-American writers, such as Henry Roth and Nathanael West.
Glancy then asks two fascinating questions: “Where did that energy come from? And do we still have it?” I agree with his answer to the first question, the creative tensions between being an outsider and an insider, “Leaving the ghetto [or the shtetl] but never washing off the smell of onions.”
So many of these great writers, and the following generation, came from the periphery of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Ukraine or, like Henry Roth, were immigrants to America. This tension between being a Jewish outsider and aspiring to be an insider in a new world helped create this explosion of literary Jewish creativity in the first half of the 20th century. Take Babel’s Red Cavalry, the opening pages of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep or Kafka’s Metamorphosis. They are all about the tensions and challenges of being Jewish in the modern world.
What about Glancy’s second question ,though: Do we still have that creativity? He is surprisingly negative about contemporary Jewish writing and here I disagree strongly. There are two problems. First, he only cites Jonathan Safran Foer’s weakest novel, Here I Am. Second, one of the obvious counter-examples, as Glancy acknowledges, is modern Israeli writing, but it only receives one short paragraph at the end.
His thesis could not be more wrong. Take Jewish-American writing. The golden age of Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth was always going to be hard to follow, but in the past 20 years we have had some extraordinary writing: Nathan Englander’s For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, (2005) and most recently Louise Gluck, awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities (2021) and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus (2021). Then there is the explosion of Jewish-American non fiction, such as Dara Horn, Adam Kirsch and Masha Gessen, the new generation of Russian-American immigrant writers such as Ilya Kaminsky and Boris Dralyuk, and screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin. An age of mediocrity? Really?
Glancy rightly acknowledges the “fraught creative brilliance” of Israeli fiction though he doesn’t mention any names. He could have mentioned David Grossman, Etgar Keret, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen or Yoram Kaniuk, or the many TV writers who have put Israeli screen drama on the map.
And then there are Jewish-European writers like Patrick Modiano (recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature), Maria Stepanova, the Dutch novelist Marcel Möring and, of course, our own Howard Jacobson and Deborah Levy.
Prizes are not everything, of course, but five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the last 20 years are Jewish and look at the recent winners of the Wingate Prize: Nicole Krauss, Ayelet Gundar-Goshan, Shalom Auslander and David Grossman.
The reasons for this creative explosion are very similar to the reasons Glancy gives for the golden age in the early 20th century: the tensions between insiders and outsiders and writing in response to great historical changes and dramas.
He talks about the “affluent, comfortable lifestyles” of present-day Jewish writers. Is this true of the Russian-Jewish immigrant writers who have settled in America, of Israeli writers addressing the great dramas of contemporary Israel or of European writers like Modiano writing about Vichy France or Marcel Möring’s In A Dark Wood, which begins with Jacob emerging from the forest, where he has hidden during the war?
And look at the best of the contemporary Jewish-American writers who have written about very uncomfortable subjects such as the Holocaust (The History of Love, Everything is Illuminated), Israel (The Natanyahus) and the murder of the Yiddish poets by Stalin (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges). Or look at titles like Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank or Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. It is precisely because so many of these writers are living in or have fled dangerous places or are engaging with the dark history of the Jews, that contemporary Jewish writing is so good.
As great as Joseph Roth? Perhaps not. But exciting literature that will endure for years to come.
David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer.
