Engaging America: Immigrant Jews in American Hebrew literature

American Hebrew literature, a corpus written primarily by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, challenges common notions concerning boundaries of land, language and identity. This dissertation interrogates these boundaries by investigating the place and function of America in three creative prose masterpieces of the corpus: Shimon Halkin's Ad mashber (1945), Reuven Wallenrod's Ki fanah yom (1946), and Ephraim Lisitsky's Eleh toldot adam (1949). I argue that these texts engage America at the heart of constructions of Jewish immigrant subjectivities, enacting a provocative interplay of American, Hebrew and Jewish codes, and thereby of land, language and identity. This interplay has heretofore been precluded by critical approaches which read these texts in dialogue primarily with the European Hebrew context or the Hebrew literary center in Palestine, or as treating America from the perspective of a marginalized, distant other. I offer new readings that demonstrate a degree of authority in America, overwhelming the range in perspectives on American Jewish life the works express, and despite the Hebrew writer's ideological marginality on the American scene. Each text proves very much of the place, so much so that the characters serve paradigmatically for the place, illustrating a profound sense of belonging that the authors' very decision to write in Hebrew has often been read to refute.My readings revolve around the primary medium through which each text engages America. I analyze Ad mashber's array of Jewish bodies, pointing to how these bodies speak otherness in America while simultaneously representing the American body itself. I argue that Ki fanah yom's preoccupation with time underscores a process of erosion and blind continuity overwhelming both American and Jewish national and cultural life. Finally, I read Lisitsky's Eleh toldot adam as a journey toward accommodation to place, culminating in the embrace of Hebrew textuality in American territoriality. Throughout, I draw upon Werner Sollors', William Boelhower's, and Sacvan Bercovitch's works as they reposition ethnic and immigrant literature centrally within an American cultural dynamic, draw attention to the multidirectional interplay of American and ethnic codes, and to the elastic symbology of America to contain diversity.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2008.School code: 0146