Starting in the 1930s, American Yiddish writers—poets, novelists, critics, and essayists—confronted the unfolding catastrophe in Europe. Intimately connected to a European world threatened with obliteration, Yiddish writers responded urgently to events overseas, as they had done during earlier periods of crisis. They grappled with the relationship of Jews to the surrounding world, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and their own relationship to the Jewish people and its traditions. Slightly later, in the early 1940s, and in different ways, American-born, English-speaking Jewish intellectuals also began to reckon with the destruction of European Jewry. As Anita Norich argues in her thought-provoking, deeply personal study, the two conversations overlapped to a surprising degree, as members of each intellectual community read and reacted, in varying degrees, to what their counterparts wrote. By making that point, Norich advances a major argument about American Jewish culture in the twentieth century. As she contends, American Jewish culture did not, contrary to the standard view, follow a straight chronological line along which Yiddish literary culture inexorably gave way to English. Without denying the shrinking numbers of Yiddish speakers after the 1920s, Norich rejects the conventional narrative of declension and, instead, stresses the vitality of Yiddish letters in the mid-twentieth century and their important role in the larger cultural firmament. “[T]he paths of Jewish cultural exchange,” she states, “were more open at this time than is usually supposed, with cultural periodicals in both languages aware of one another, commenting on one another's cultural and political stances, and even publishing authors who wrote in both Yiddish and English” (12). Discovering Exile thus effectively recasts American Jewish culture as a “bilingual, multi-valent, untidy, array that challenges the more familiar linear view of Yiddish decline and growing English dominance” (12).

Literary interchanges between English and Yiddish began long before the war years, one might add. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Yiddish literature appeared in English translation; Yiddish theater, literature, and the periodical press received attention (and praise) in prominent English-language journals; and Yiddish writers crossed over into English. There was even a short-lived magazine, East and West, dedicated entirely to bringing Yiddish literature to the English-reading public. The period analyzed in Discovering Exile reflects not the beginning of interactions between English- and Yiddish-speaking intellectuals, but rather their most significant manifestations during the 1930s and 1940s.

Yiddish writers reacted immediately to the war, but not uniformly. Some writers, concerned that Yiddish culture was becoming a yortsayt kultur preoccupied with commemorating deaths, urged colleagues “to cultivate their own gardens” (27). Others argued that Yiddish literature should serve to console the Jewish public. Among such figures, remarkably, were modernist poets who had, two decades earlier, “sought to free themselves of the strictures of writing within the confines of a Jewish audience.” Now, during the war years, they felt “compelled to speak in quieter cadences, returning to the very audience they had castigated only a few years earlier when they had sought to write Yiddish, and themselves, into literary modernism. Instead, they began to write elegies and lamentations, which were necessarily declarative, communicative, accessible” (27). Norich focuses on the modernist poet Yankev Glatshteyn, who founded, in 1919, a group known as the Inzikhistn, which championed free verse and a highly individualized, “introspective” approach to poetry. In 1938, Glatshteyn published “Good Night, World,” a seeming rejection of modernity that depicts the Enlightenment as “a dangerous, misguided flirtation” (47). His poem served as a “touchstone for Yiddish intellectuals in America faced with increasingly frightening news from Europe and seeking new ways to understand their own relationship to modernity” (42). An English translation was published just months after it first appeared, and at least seven others were published over the decades. Amid the flurry of debate prompted by “Good Night, World,” many critics interpreted Glatshteyn's poem as a call to return to “the ghetto,” but Norich offers a more subtle reading. What Glatshteyn's poem does, she writes, is gesture toward two antagonistic worlds, and then question whether the poet, in saying “good night,” is the one who leaves the modern world or whether it is the world that is about to go to sleep. Glatshteyn “calls the whole wide world into being, enlivens it, and announces the impossibility of doing precisely the one thing the poem is meant to do: ‘wipe out, stamp out all the alien traces.’ His bind is made horribly clear” (51). “Good Night, World,” according to Norich's assessment, is both “defiant and pathetic” (72).

In the following chapter, Norich examines the controversy that raged around the novelist Sholem Asch, the most famous living Yiddish novelist at that time. Asch was accused of apostasy because of his sympathetic depiction of Jesus in his novel, The Nazarene (1939). As if to fan the flames, Asch followed with two other novels—The Apostle (1943) and Mary (1949)—that completed what Glatshteyn referred to as Asch's “Christian trilogy” (75). For most (though not all) Yiddish readers and critics, Asch's sympathetic depiction of Jesus, albeit as a Jew, was an outrage. Whereas most Yiddish writers turned to Jewish tropes during the war years, Asch “tried to reconcile Jews and Christianity in order to break down the barriers between them” (120). English-language readers and critics were more sympathetic, seeing in his novels a compelling blend of Jewish and modern European culture, an example of the different sensibilities brought to bear by writers in each language.

Writers in English reacted differently toward the war in Europe. They expressed horror and mourning, but not with “the radical urgency of their Yiddish contemporaries.” Their consciousness was not “inescapably shaped” by the war, they did not forge a group identity in response to it, and they produced little in the way of imaginative literature dealing with it (28). In a well-known symposium on “American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” published in Contemporary Jewish Record in 1944, none of the questions posed alluded directly to the war. To the extent that participants addressed the war and the problem of antisemitism, their tropes were not explicitly Jewish, but those of alienation: “the inability to fit in or make sense of any social system, the individual disconnected from the self” (32). Yiddish writers, for their part, reacted angrily to the symposium, faulting participants for their lack of Jewish knowledge and alienation from the Jewish people. They viewed their English-writer counterparts as members of a spiritually empty, lost generation. Such an assessment, as Norich argues, was not entirely accurate—certainly not across the board—but it nonetheless reflected a stark difference in perspective and sensibility between Yiddish and English writers.

The chapter on the thirtieth yortsayt of Y. L. Peretz, the “father” of modern Yiddish literature, which occurred in 1945, rounds out Discovering Exile. The anniversary of Peretz's death precipitated an outpouring of appreciative, even hagiographic, essays, which marked a shift in Yiddish toward a “culture of mourning” (which was precisely what some writers had warned against). Accompanying this shift was the rise of a “nostalgic and laudatory” view of Eastern European Jewry, which had roots further back in time, but reached fuller expression than before and anticipated broader developments in postwar American Jewish culture. As a result, the “vital tensions” between tradition and rebellion in Peretz's fiction became flattened (112). In close readings of Peretz's work, Norich explores those tensions with sensitivity and insight.

Discovering Exile is a vital, compact study of a formative moment in American Jewish culture when writers in both English and Yiddish began to confront the Holocaust and its implications. Probing the politics of representation, Norich uncovers the crucial role of Yiddish in American Jewish culture and American literary modernism.