Although they often share geographic and linguistic origins, Jewish communities in Israel and America have come to be divided not only by language and location, but also by divergent conceptions of Jewishness. It would be easy to assume that the translation of literary works between these centers of Jewish life has helped bridge the gaps separating them, encouraging each to see itself as an organ of Klal Yisra’el. Omri Asscher's fascinating and original study on literary translation tells a different story, however. He considers the translation of Hebrew works into English for American Jewish readers, and vice versa, from the 1940s through the 1980s, focusing specifically on the ways that translations of texts between Diaspora and homeland perform ideological work, exposing a “subterranean struggle” (175) between “rival siblings” (back cover) with different conceptions of Jewish life and culture.
To this end, Asscher looks at the reception of literary works in and across both countries; sometimes, he points out significant instances of outright manipulation of translations. Two luminous examples at the start of the book introduce the scope and shape of Asscher's project. David Shahar's Hebrew novel His Majesty's Agent features an American Jewish character named Abie Driesel, an obvious parody of Elie Wiesel. In the English translation, however, Driesel's name was changed to Jules Levi, and passages that openly critique Wiesel and his brand of Jewishness were removed. The second example focuses on a 1971 review of Saul Bellow's Herzog in which the Israeli critic Alexander Barzel invites Sha'ul Bellow and his peers to “come home, to the nation's homeland” (2). These two moments show that the mediation of literary works for Jewish readers in both countries promoted and protected the ideals, values, and identities of the target culture—what Asscher describes as “a conversation of sorts, or negotiation of ideas, between two platforms of Jewish identity” (3).
The first three chapters consider the absorption of Hebrew literature in American Jewish culture between the 1950s and the 1980s, a period during which Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity. Asscher identifies trends in translation practices during these decades, including an effort to highlight connections between “Hebrew literature's national underpinnings and American historical myths,” which helped American Jews preserve a distinct sense of a Jewish and American national identity (45). Starting in the 1960s, Israeli writers, including Aharon Megged, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, began reflecting on the moral implications of the war of independence and the treatment of the Palestinian population. Asscher identifies two trends in the ways that American Jewish cultural agents responded to these critical accounts of the Israeli state. On the one hand, he argues that American cultural agents tended to describe them as “ethical expressions of moral opposition,” labeling Israeli writers as the “dissenting voice of the humanistic Left in the country” (58). On the other hand, he argues that these agents sought to “soften” and “blur” (59) expressions of moral criticism in these works. Such censorship extended from the choice of texts for translation to the ways those texts were translated and interpreted in mainstream venues.
The second chapter features a fascinating discussion of the ways that combat soldiers and Palestinian perspectives in these works were routinely modified or removed in translation, which, in turn, helped preserve Israel's moral image for American Jews. Asscher also considers how Jewish cultural agents in America responded to Israeli representations of Jewishness and Judaism that challenged Jewish American identity. He describes how Hebrew works that stressed the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, that openly denigrated Christians, or that highlighted the presence of antisemitic persecution were altered to help protect the standing of the Jewish community in America. These chapters, then, can help us better understand the ways that the translation process helped mitigate the tension between Zionism and morality, ensuring Israel's function as a source of collective identity for American Jews.
The final two chapters focus on the reception and framing of American Jewish works in Israeli culture during the same decades. Asscher discusses the tendency of Israeli cultural agents to “particularize” and “Judaize” universal aspects of works by prominent Jewish American writers, while also assuming a common destiny with their American counterparts. He shows how, in their reviews of novels by writers like Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, Israeli cultural agents overemphasized the difficulty of living as a Jew in the Diaspora, while at the same time elevating Hebrew and the State of Israel as essential components of an authentic Jewish existence. For Israeli writers and intellectuals like Hillel Halkin (who translated some of the American Jewish novels discussed in the book), Gershon Shaked, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, knowledge of Hebrew was a prerequisite for authentic Jewish creation; in reviews and essays on the translated works of well-known Jewish American writers, they presented cultural and literary life in Israel as superior to the American Jewish version, thereby elevating and promoting their own brand of Jewishness as the more “authentic” model.
Asscher's book mines a fascinating series of sources in measured and informative ways, from Robert Alter's course notes from a class he taught in 1970 at Berkeley, to editorials and reviews published in mainstream venues by a broad range of Jewish American and Israeli writers and intellectuals. Moreover, Asscher's work as a translator (Samuel Becket into Hebrew, among others) no doubt prepared him well to identify and interpret the sometimes-subtle changes made to the texts that he examines in the translation process. In fact, the reader relies on Asscher's abilities as a translator to identify ideologically motivated omissions and additions, such as when he differentiates between a word used in an English translation and the original Hebrew. I wondered at times if a politics of translation might extend to his translations as well—a question that might have been addressed.
Translation has historically played an important role in mediating Jewish cultures of the Diaspora. Although Asscher touches on some landmark translations of the Hebrew Bible in the introduction, he might also have also considered how translation shaped relations between German Jews and eastern European Jews in the nineteenth century—a different pair of “rival siblings” who advanced very different understandings of “authentic” Jewish life. Such quibbles aside, Asscher's book is impressive, and it stands out as the first full-length study of literary translation in the context of Israeli-American Jewish relations during the period in question. It will surely serve as an important resource for future scholars in translation studies, Jewish studies, and those focusing on homeland/diaspora relations.
