Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature Carole S. Kessner Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature, edited by Gloria L. Cronin and Alan L. Berger. New York: Facts On File, 2009. xiv + 391 pp. Upon opening the newly published Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature, I felt a sudden rush of poignant emotions. The book begins with a brief introduction followed by the moving words that “this volume is lovingly dedicated to Professor Dan Walden and his wife, Bea, in acknowledgment of Dan’s foundational work in Jewish American literary scholarship and of their gracious friendship to us all.” As if this dedication were not enough to jog myriad memories, I was keenly conscious of the fact that my review of this encyclopedia was scheduled to appear in the very issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature that was to be the last issue edited by Dan Walden, the longtime editor of that journal, who was retiring after thirty-six years of devotion to recording the literary history and evolution of Jewish American literature. These details called to mind the fact that Walden’s own entry into the field of Jewish American literature came quite before there was a field. His anthology, On Being Jewish: American Jewish Writers from Cahan to Bellow,1 was published almost forty years ago. Walden’s vanguard collection introduced his readers to such unknown names as Minnesota-born James Oppenheim (1882–1932) or Myron Brinig (1896–1921), a Montana-born Jewish novelist of some popularity who wrote twenty-eight novels but by 1974 had faded into obscurity, and it included excerpts from a current female novelist, Norma Rosen, as well as the very popular belle lettres trio, Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. On Being Jewish was one of a very small number of books and essays that played a big part in creating a kind of canon of Jewish writers in America; in addition, it suggested a syllabus for the pioneers of academic courses in American Jewish literature—though it was quite a job in those days to find much in print. Nostalgia and retrospect, however, are not the main purpose of the new encyclopedia. The editors, Gloria L. Cronin and Alan L. Berger, have designed it for “high school and college readers, academics and their students, and the general public”(viii). For this wide-ranging audience they have determined to “reexamine the scope of Jewish American literature,” and they explain that the intent of the encyclopedia is to reflect the “explosion of Jewish literature of the last forty or so years.” Although informed by history, it “takes its shape from the thinking of the post-1960’s American cultural studies movement” and is “committed to redrawing the expanding the American literary map subsequent to the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the multicultural movement.” To this end, the volume [End Page 111] includes entries for over one hundred Jewish American writers as well as entries for some of their literary works. Inevitably, the Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature tackles the over-argued definition of the Jewish American writer, including the disputation concerning the either/or labels “Jewish American” or “American Jewish.” Although this is a volume in a series of Encyclopedias of American Ethnic Literature (American here placed before the ethnic attribution), Cronin and Berger have chosen to come down on the side of Jewish as adjective, American as noun. As for the definition, they have arrived at the following statement: For the purposes of this volume, a Jewish-American writer is of Jewish origin, resident in America, aligned or not aligned with Jewish religious life in North America, and generally acculturated as a Jewish person. Practically speaking, however, the writers included in this volume are self identified as Jewish Americans and incontestably considered Jewish-American writers by the American publishing industry, scholars, and the reading public. Not surprisingly, these writers reflect a wide variety of attitudes toward Jewish religion, ritual, and culture. What they hold in common is their shared sense of their Jewish and American heritages. (viii) In addition to the above rather all-inclusive definition of the subject, Cronin and Berger provide a survey of Jewish American Literature as well as an...