5. Into the mainstream

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the early twenty-first century, rotating around the concept of aterritoriality to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres to the present day. At the center are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature does not have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders.

Strategies of investigating and translating poetical prose of the classical and contemporary English short stories

The article considers the notion of prose poeticalness from linguistic and translation points of view. Prose poeticalness can be defined as the introduction of poetic features into the prose text with the help of such devices as extended metaphors, intertextual allusions, stylistic convergence, syntactical and phonetic repetitions. The investigation involved the analysis of the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde, the short stories by Kate Chopin and Dylan Thomas, which are referred to as classical prose, and the contemporary American flash fiction stories. The strategy of investigating prose poeticalness involved determining the devices of prose poeticalness in each text, defining the linguistic and stylistic components of these devices and their functions. As a result of our research, it is determined that the most foregrounded device of poeticalness is stylistic convergence. In the classical short stories, convergences function in bigger text fragments, they are based on the extended antropomorphic metaphors or similes in the interaction with alliterations. The stylistic convergences are used for poetical description of nature as human beings possessing the ability to speak, to think, to love (Wilde, Thomas), and even as gods (Rob Carney). Biomorphic tropes are used as the core of convergences, as a device of poetical description of people in the stories by Thomas, fairy tales by Wilde, in the flash fiction stories by John Updike, Grace Paley, Leigh Wilson and other writers. In the contemporary flash fiction stories, convergences foreground the ideas of sympathy, tolerance; they help to create a strong emotional effect. The strategy of rendering stylistic convergences in translation of the poetical prose consists in the exact reproduction of images applying literal translation or synonymic substitution and retaining the sound effect in trope components. Mythological and biblical allusions used as a system in the text are a device of poeticalness typical for Thomas's stories. The strategy of translating implicit allusions involves retaining the intertextual comments and giving explication in the text or in the footnotes. It is suggested that the prospects of further research lie in investigating poeticalness in the novels of contemporary writers.

Epilogue

The Epilogue offers a reflection on the possible “elsewheres” of Jewish American writing, looking for further articulations of Glatstein’s non-institutional world literature to-come in the writing of Anna Margolin and Grace Paley. Margolin in Yiddish and Paley in English rarely expected recognition from patriarchal institutions, yet they were writers who depended on the translational modes of modern literature as part of their writerly practices. They inscribe in their work a futurity that is beholden to Jewish vernacularity while searching for new vocabularies for personal and collective redemption. Reading the politics of “tiptoed waiting” in Margolin’s final published poem and parsing the genealogy of justice in Paley’s writing, this chapter considers what it means to inhabit a world literature to-come grounded in a practice of vernacular listening.