In 1994, Hana Wirth-Nesher published an edited volume entitled What Is Jewish Literature? that includes essays by leading writers and critics endeavoring to define Jewish literature. Among the articles in this collection is a 1918 essay by the Yiddish critic Baal-Makhshoves (the pen name of Isidor Elyashev, 1873–1924), which, in many respects, is the jumping-off point for Wirth-Nesher's Call It English. In this essay, Baal-Makhshoves contends that Jewish literature, from its inception, has always been bilingual. More than that—modern Jewish writers “breathe” between many languages, Semitic as well as European. Echoing the pronouncement of God's unity in the Shema prayer, Baal-Makhshoves contends that Jewish literature is a unity within its linguistic plurality: “It is one and its name is one.”Footnote ¹

Wirth-Nesher's book applies Baal-Makhshoves's insight to the multilingual aspects of Jewish American works written in English. Like all good literary criticism, which includes both close readings and an investigation of their broader cultural implications, Wirth-Nesher's chapters combine astute observations about individual words, names, translation choices, biblical and liturgical allusions, and interlingual puns, with clearly argued analyses of their significance in the larger (Jewish) American culture. According to Wirth-Nesher, “for many Jewish American writers subsequent to the immigrant generation, Hebrew and Yiddish are sources of self-expression and identity even if the authors cannot ‘remember’ them in the sense of ever having possessed them as a means of communication” (5) As such, these writers weave Jewish languages into their English writing as means of emphasizing Jewish particularity. Conversely they “forget” or conspicuously omit these other languages as a means of insisting on the universality of their work.

Wirth-Nesher's study is organized largely chronologically, beginning with Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), the first major American Jewish fiction writer, and culminating with late twentieth-century works by Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Aryeh Lev Stollman. The chapter on Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) focuses on Cahan's use of Yiddish dialect as well as liturgical references. Wirth-Nesher looks closely at Cahan's protagonist Jake's peculiar immigrant speech patterns, which tend to identify him as a crude, body-oriented boor. Responding to the expectations for vernacular realism as dictated by William Dean Howells, Cahan uses an exaggerated immigrant dialect that verges on antisemitic parody in order to assimilate as a writer in the American realist vein.

In sharp contrast, the next chapter, on Mary Antin's classic 1912 immigrant memoir The Promised Land, focuses on the repression of the Jewish accent and the upholding of standard English as a means of passing into American culture. To contextualize Antin's memoir within the culture of her day, which was becoming increasingly suspicious of immigrants, Wirth-Nesher presents fascinating research from early twentieth-century manuals of diction and pronunciation, which denounced mongrelism in language, comparing mistakes in diction and address to such breaches of etiquette as “eating with a knife” (59). Under the pressure of these cultural forces, Antin's memoir strains to downplay immigrant or Hebraic traces and adopt standard, even Christian, patterns of English.

As part of her story of conversion to the gospel of America and her sacred embrace of English, Antin offers an account of her first acquaintance with non-Jewish languages, beginning with Russian words B-O-G (God) and K-A-Z-A (goat). According to Wirth-Nesher's close reading of this linguistic encounter, goat is a fitting sequel to God, given the biblical tradition of atonement ritual through a scapegoat, and the way that this ritual is later used as metaphor both by Jews and Christians, albeit in very different ways. The gap between Jewish and Christian uses of biblical metaphor is particularly salient in Antin's memoir, particularly in her use of Exodus and Promised Land imagery in her retelling of her conversion to Americanness. Although the Hebrew Bible and Judaism are the original source of the idea of the “Promised Land,” the Christian supercessionist adoption of this metaphor that Antin inherits means that for America to be her Promised Land, Antin must repress the Judaic (Israel-centered) understanding of the term.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the way small details and motifs recur and ramify over the course of its chapters. For example, the attention to accent, dialect, and interlingual puns seen in the chapter on Cahan and the close analysis of the metaphorical significance of the God/goat nexus in the chapter on Antin both reappear in the next chapter on Henry Roth's classic 1932 novel Call It Sleep. We learn from Wirth-Nesher that the protagonist of this novel about the “sundering of an immigrant child” (79) is aptly named Schearl, which means “shears.” We listen as in the accented tongue of David's father Albert, the Golden Land of America is reduced to “Bronzeville, a city of bronze, which is actually Brownsville, a city of earth” (82). Wirth-Nesher notes how in this novel, orality and speech become vehicles for simultaneously representing holiness and desecration.

In terms of Roth's use of the goat-kid motif, Wirth-Nesher analyzes a scene in which young boys in a heder are being drilled before Passover in the recitation of Chad godya (one lone kid), which David recites expertly to the delight of his melamed. And she notes how the kid motif recurs in the climax of the novel, when David electrocutes himself and an onlooker exclaims: “Christ it's a kid!” Wirth-Nesher masterfully explains the significance of this micro-wordplay as signaling a process of Americanization, wherein the seder is abandoned for “the kid of Easter, a Christianizing that is inherent in the acquisition of English” (89) In contrast to Cahan, who embraces accent as a form of local color literature, and Antin, who effaces her Jewish accent in order to pass as an American, Roth reclaims both accent and multilingual wordplay as means of producing a work of high modernist fiction.

Throughout this book, Wirth-Nesher grants exquisite attention to the many meanings of names. Her close reading of the operations of the Yiddish/Hebrew word tam in I. B. Singer's Gimpel tam, which Saul Bellow translated into English, as well as in Bellow's novella Seize the Day, in which the protagonist renames himself Tommy and consorts with a pseudo-mentor named Tamkin, and her analysis of all the other names in the novella are nothing short of masterful. The same obtains to her excavation of the German sources of the names in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, and her explanation of the ways name-choices signal a straddling of cultures and generations, as in the naming of the third-generation daughter, Merry Levov, in Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

Wirth-Nesher also offers an incisive analysis of Merry's pathological stuttering in the Roth novel, as indicative of a Jewish American neurosis about passing. The theme of stuttering also connects back to Antin's account of passing and her choice to mold her story after the model of the biblical Moses, Judaism's first stutterer. In this case, as in all of her readings of the eruptions of biblical, liturgical, or vernacular Yiddish sources into American Jewish literature, Wirth-Nesher shows how traces of the Jewish literary past enlarge the time frame of the work, situating it within a longer and broader global tradition.

Given the expansiveness of this thesis and Wirth-Nesher's insistence, like Baal-Makhshoves, on a broad Jewish literary multilingualism, the conspicuous absence in this study of any treatment of Sephardic/Ladino sources in American Jewish literature is somewhat lamentable. The Sephardic origin of the first major American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, and the recent work of such writer-scholars as Ilan Stavans to highlight Sephardic American literature both suggest that including this element might have been a rich, even organic addition. That said, the omission of Sephardic elements detracts only minimally from an otherwise illuminating and comprehensive study.