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Main Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Jewish Literature and..
Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Jewish Literature and Culture)Julian Levinson
How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture--in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman--led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.
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Exiles on Main Street Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture J u l i a n Le Le v i n s o n Exiles on Main Street Jewish Literature and Culture Series Editor, Alvin H. Rosenfeld Exiles on Main Street JEWISH AMERICAN WRITERS AND AMERICAN LITERARY CULTURE Julian Levinson Indiana University Press bloomington and indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail email@example.com ∫ 2008 by Julian Levinson All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. m a n u fa c t u r e d i n t h e u n i t e d s tat e s o f a m e r i c a Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levinson, Julian. Exiles on main street : Jewish American writers and American literary culture / Julian Levinson. p. cm. — (Jewish literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35081-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Jewish authors— History and criticism. 2. Jews—United States—Identity. 3. Group identity in literature. 4. Jews in literature. I. Title. PS153.J4L48 2008 810.9%8924—dc22 2007046930 1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08 To Lisa CONTENTS acknowledgments Introduction ix 1 PART 1 breathing free in the new world: transcendentalism and the jewish soul 13 1 Songs of a Semite: Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History 2 Ecstasies of the Credulous: Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl 37 16 PART 2 b at t l i n g t h e n at i v i s t s : my s t i c s , p r o p h e t s , a n d r e b e l s i n i n t e r wa r a m e r i c a 53 3 ''Pilgrim to a Forgotten Shrine'': Ludwig Lewisohn and the Recovery of the Inner Jew 56 4 Modernist Flasks, Jewish Wine: Waldo Frank and the Immanence of God 76 5 Cinderella's Dybbuk: Anzia Yezierska as the Voice of Generations 93 PART 3 yiddish interlude 119 6 From Heine to Whitman: The Yiddish Poets Come to America [ vii ] 121 contents PART 4 '' o r at i n g i n n e w yo r k e s e '' : t h e l a n g ua g e s o f j e w i s h n e s s i n p o s t wa r a m e r i c a 143 7 ''My Private Orthodoxy'': Alfred Kazin's Romantic Judaism 8 The Jewish Writer Flies at Twilight: Irving Howe and the Recovery of Yiddishkayt 171 Conclusion notes index 192 201 225 Illustrations appear on pages 109–117. [ viii ] 147 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS During the many years it took me to write this book, I was blessed with a mighty stream of good council and encouragement from teachers, colleagues, friends, and family. The book began life in the English department at Columbia University, and, though it retains only a few sentences from its original version, I would like to thank those who saw this project through to its first formulation: David Damrosch, Moshe Gold, Jonathan Levin, David Roskies, and Maura Spiegel. Over the past seven years, the University of Michigan has been a wonderful environment in which to grow as a scholar and as a human being, and I am grateful to my colleagues here for their support and insight. Among those whose attention to my work has made a tremendous di√erence, I include Sara Blair, George Bornstein, Todd Endelman, Jonathan Freedman, Zvi Gitelman, Mikhail Krutikov, Marjorie Levinson, Deborah Dash Moore, Anita Norich, Shachar Pinsker, Sidonie Smith, and Alan Wald. This manuscript also benefited from readers from the broader academic community, and I especially want to thank Jonathan Boyarin and Mark Shechner, who gave generously of their time and expert advice. Among those whose editorial assistance helped—really saved—me at various stages of the production of this book, let me also mention Patrick Barry, Alex Beringer, Olivia Bustion, Elliot Gertel, Joshua Lambert, Daniel Mintz, James Mitchell, and Valerie Moses. For his ready aid in all computing matters, I thank James Sullivan. I am deeply indebted to a number of individuals and institutions that provided resources and materials for my research. The Mellon Foundation and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture provided grants to support the early stages of my work. I am also grateful to the sta√s of the Hatcher Library at the University of Michigan, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where I performed much of my research. For help tracking down photographs and other documents, I am grateful to Nancy Shawcross from the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The sta√ of Indiana University Press has been extremely supportive throughout the process of transforming the manuscript into a [ ix ] acknowledgments book, and I would especially like to thank Janet Rabinowitch and Lee Sandweiss for believing in this project and Joyce Rappaport for editing the manuscript and entering the enormous changes I made at the last minute. I am truly inspired by the Frankel family's commitment to Judaic studies, and I want to thank them for their ongoing support of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. There are many others whom I would like to acknowledge, either for reading and commenting on sections of this book or for contributing in more general ways to its emergence. While this list could be exceedingly long indeed, let me mention Marc Caplan, Josh Cohen, Richard Cook, Benjamin Friedman, Adam Haslett, Rick Hilles, Jonathan Karp, Mark Kuzmack, Benjamin Lee, Ziv Neeman, Martin Scherzinger, Eden Steinberg, Nicolas Sywak, and Ori Weissberg. For her expert advice with my prospectus, I thank Joyce Seltzer. Also, because he promised me a job should all else fail, I would like to thank Massoud Badakhshan from the Haight Ashbury Music Center; and because he welcomed me to his table and taught me how to pray, I thank Rabbi Ahron Hecht from the Richmond Torah Center of San Francisco. Finally, my family has been an unending source of love and support over the years, and, for their ongoing faith in this project and tolerance of my intermittent self-enclosure within it, I extend my deepest thanks. I would like to thank in particular my parents Carl and Eleanor, my stepfather Stephen, my grandparents Gila and Harry (O''H), my siblings Gordon, Charlotte, Edward, and Rachel, my parents-in-law Marianne and Maynard, and my dog, Wheatie. My daughter, Chava, was born just as I was rethinking the original version of this work, and now, at five and a half, she is one of my most engaging and brilliant interlocutors. My wife, Lisa, has touched me and inspired me in ways I can hardly hope to express. I dedicate this book to her knowing full well that it is hers as much as it is mine. She knows every word of the manuscript, and lobbied nobly to save other bits from the trash. Through your devotion to me and confidence in my work—not to mention the unimaginable hours you have logged reading, commenting, and correcting—I have come to understand something of what the Spanish poet Pedro Salinas meant when he called one of his books La Voz a Ti Debida (My Voice Because of You). It is quite simply the fact that I would never have written this book had it not been for you. [x] Exiles on Main Street introduction America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. —Allen Ginsberg, ''America'' (1956) I When the Puritan settlers claimed the New World as their ''New Jerusalem,'' they laid the foundation for what would later emerge as the central Idea of America: that this would be a land of new beginnings, where the burdens of the past would be shrugged o√ and the road to salvation opened wide. How did this radical Idea influence the self-understanding of Jews when they began arriving en masse during the second half of the nineteenth century? Would they too embrace some version of the millennial vision crafted by their Puritan predecessors? Would they dissent from the reigning ideology of their new home in the name of Jewish tradition [∞] exiles on main street and cultural memory? Would they rearrange the terms of their tradition in line with the Idea of America? Such questions would not have been especially pressing, of course, for John Winthrop or Samuel Mather or Cotton Mather or any of the other Puritan preachers who sought to bring hope to their constituencies while steeling them for the task of taming the wilderness. Nor would Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, or Thomas Je√erson have given these questions much thought a century later when they proposed as a seal for the newly formed United States the image of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, with Moses at the helm, his brow illuminated by a pillar of fire. For all of their evocations of the ancient Israelites, the founders' rhetoric remained unmistakably analogical. If the Bible served as their guidebook, there was no confusion about the direction of history: it was moving forward and westward and the Jews were people from another time and place. Nonetheless, people who still considered themselves Jews did exist, and they too came to settle in America. How would they reshape their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? This is the central question I address in this book.1 To be sure, it is not a new question, and it has been asked in one way or another by generations of scholars, writers, demographers, journalists, and Jewish communal organizers. Most commonly the question of Jewish American identity has been addressed as though each term in the amalgam were a relatively stable, fixed entity. The goal, simply put, has been to see how much of the entity we call Jewishness has been retained and how much of the entity we call Americanness has been absorbed. When framed in this way, the question has often led in one of two directions, either to expressions of celebration and relief (e.g., ''You see, they remained Jewish after all''); or to pained admissions of defeat (e.g., ''You see, they're not even real Jews anymore''). Recent scholarship has developed much more nuanced approaches to this question, characterizing the dialogue between Jews and American culture as an ongoing, dynamic interaction between two entities that are themselves in a state of flux. Among the scholars who have moved beyond the ''either-or'' approach and whose work has influenced and inspired my own, I would include Hasia Diner, Arnold Eisen, Norman Finkelstein, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Andrew Heinze, Michael P. Kramer, Eli Lederhendler, Deborah Dash Moore, Jonathan Sarna, Je√rey Shandler, Donald Weber, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Stephen Whitfield.2 Using substantially different vocabularies, methodologies, and types of evidence, these scholars all testify to the ways Jewishness and Americanness have interacted with, overlapped, modified, and sometimes intensified each other—whether in the domain of literature, popular culture, religious practice, or that more [≤] introduction nebulous sphere we might call ''self-understanding.'' These scholars have pointed in di√erent ways to the inadequacy of accounts of ''vanishing'' American Jews and of Jewish American culture as a show of empty signifiers.3 They have underscored instead the unpredictability and, in different ways, the ongoing vitality of the Jewish encounter with America. I o√er this book as a contribution to this unfolding discussion. Focusing primarily on the realm of literary culture, I explore ways in which the exposure to American culture—in particular the visionary literary tradition identified with figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman—has provided Jews with new ways of understanding themselves as Jews. Let me quickly list (in the manner of one of Whitman's poetic catalogues) some of the encounters between Jews and American literary culture I consider in the chapters that follow (take a breath): Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) meets Emerson while she is an adolescent, begins writing poems in an Emersonian vein, and ends up producing poetic allegories about the ''soul of Israel''; Mary Antin (1881–1949) internalizes the language of Transcendentalism and ends up bearing witness to the ecstasies known only by pious Jews of the shtetl; Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) joins the culture of literary dissenters in pre–World War I Greenwich Village, becomes a close associate of H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, and goes on to become the most outspoken Zionist novelist America has ever produced; Waldo Frank (1889–1964) becomes a key figure in the revaluation of Walt Whitman in the 1910s and goes on to explore strategies for recreating Jewish mysticism in modernist literary forms; Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970) becomes an intimate friend of the iconic American philosopher John Dewey, and weaves the story of their relationship into a series of allegories for the rebirth of the prophetic Jew on the Lower East Side; I. J. Schwartz (1885–1971) translates Whitman into Yiddish and goes on to write Kentucky (1925), a Whitmanian epic in Yiddish about the adventures of a Jewish pioneer in the American wilderness; Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) writes On Native Grounds (1942), uncovering the rebellious impulse in modern American fiction, and then writes a series of autobiographies about growing up in Brownsville, culminating in a book unapologetically entitled New York Jew (1978); Irving Howe (1920– 1991) explores strategies of historical representation in the regionalist writings of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson and then devotes himself to recovering Yiddish literature in English translation, providing a link for a generation of Jewish writers and readers to the pre-Holocaust Jewish past.4 In each case, an encounter between a Jewish writer and American literary culture yields an occasion and a set of terms for redefining Jewishness. [≥] exiles on main street That writers revise their precursors is nothing new in this third decade since the publication of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. But I am less interested in tracing a Bloomian struggle for the mantle of ''strong poet'' than I am in exploring how a language for shaping Jewish identity is crafted, won, or discovered in the course of an encounter with American literary culture. I use the metaphor of ''shaping'' here to underscore the idea that identities are formed out of materials that already exist and to suggest that the act of fashioning an identity is in many ways analogous to the work of an artist.5 While I follow Bloom's lead by closely attending to the dynamics of revision and intertextuality, I do not abide by his premise that literary creation must be viewed first and foremost in terms of the individual's solitary battle against belatedness.6 I am also interested in what might be called the e√ects of literary production, the ways literature provides new resources for imagining oneself and one's relation to the world.7 I understand the act of writing not—or not only—in the Bloomian sense of confronting and battling the precursor, in order to find one's voice, but also as a quest to refurbish a tradition, to summon the voices of the past, and to sponsor ethical and political engagements. In the chapters that follow, I o√er a series of portraits of individual writers whose careers may be charted in one way or another along an arc of ''return.'' I have chosen writers whose imaginations were initially sparked by major currents in American literature, by movements such as Transcendentalism, American modernism, and Southern regionalism. In many cases, they went on to become some of the most vocal advocates of American literature, writing critical works that shaped the terms in which this literature has been read and understood.8 In one way or another, all of the writers in this study subsequently found their way to a heightened form of Jewish identification, although the ''Jewishness'' they turned to was uncertain and improvised and, in many cases, something they had never known. These movements toward Jewish identification were prompted in each case by a complex set of historical and personal developments. A recurrent theme of this study will be how a turn to Jewishness has provided a perspective from which to respond to crisis—be it the pogroms in Russia, the recrudescence of antisemitism in 1920s America, the Holocaust, or the phenomenon of ''deradicalization'' in Cold War America. Still, these writers remained, so to speak, within the orbit of American literature. The Jewishness they constructed for themselves reveals traces of the vocabulary and conceptual structures of American literary culture. It also shows the contours of fantasies—both positive and negative—that non-Jewish Americans had about Jews. In short, I forego the quest for some normative and stable ''Jewish sensibility'' that can be [∂] introduction either expressed or repressed and explore instead how Jewish writers have drawn on multiple resources to project new models of identity. My hope is to move from the idea that Jewish writers have some inherent or given ''Jewish experience'' to express and toward the idea that a new version of Jewishness can be formed in dialogue with American literary culture, its vocabularies, conceptual categories, and implicit politics. One of the reasons American literature has been a fruitful field for Jewish self-imagining is that this tradition has fostered a particular kind of oppositional idiom, rooted in the idea of the outsider as seer and cultural critic. As Sacvan Bercovitch has written, ''American writers have tended to see themselves as outcasts and isolates, prophets crying in the wilderness.''9 For Jews in America, this role has often seemed like a natural position to inhabit. Not only does it resonate with their historical memory of oppression and ongoing sense of themselves as an embattled minority, but it also connects with the traditions of socialism and anarchism that are a central chapter in American Jewish history. Moreover, the idea of the inspired American isolate resonates with themes in the prophetic traditions of Judaism, which have continued to function as the Jew's cultural inheritance, even when faith and observance have been abandoned. After all, as Bercovitch and many others have shown, the stance of the American writer can be traced back to Puritan discourse and ultimately to the texts of the biblical prophets. By adopting a ''prophetic'' stance, then, the Jew becomes typically American while also coming back into contact, at least potentially, with sources that are indigenous to Judaism. Having encountered the idea of the prophetic outsider in its American guise, the Jewish writer can reclaim this figure as particularly Jewish and as a precedent for him or herself. Every book about cultural history may be found guilty of highlighting only those writers or texts that are congenial to the book's overall thesis, and since this charge is no less imaginable here, I should hasten to note that this would have been a very di√erent book indeed had I chosen to concentrate on another group of figures, which might have included names such as Gertrude Stein, Mike Gold, Lillian Hellman, Nathanael West, Muriel Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, or Paul Auster. Each of these figures may be and has been called ''Jewish'' or ''half-Jewish,'' in the case of Salinger, but, to my knowledge at least, none has evinced any particular inclination to ''return'' to Jewishness. A study focusing on these latter authors might have a great deal to say about the directions taken by Jews in American culture, but considerably less to say about the ways in which Judaism and Jewishness have been reimagined and reconfigured. What I look at, then, are figures who have engaged in some kind of sustained and explicit meditation on the meaning of being [∑] exiles on main street Jewish. Considered together, these case studies reveal what might be imagined as a ''potential energy'' inherent within American literary culture that leads some writers to reclaim Jewish traditions at specific moments and in specific ways. Since the impulse to ''return'' to Jewishness is a pervasive phenomenon in modern Jewish culture in general, this study also suggests ways of linking Jewish American writers to the broader, international context of modern Jewish culture. As for the fact that I group together writers associated with a wide variety of di√erent genres (from poetry, to autobiography, to the novel, to criticism), I should say that at the back of my mind I have applied to each of these figures the Yiddish phrase kultur tuer, which might be translated as ''intellectual'' or ''cultural doer'' or, as I have thought of it, ''culture maker.'' I like this phrase for the sense of agency it connotes. If combined with Cli√ord Geertz's famous definition of cultures as ''webs of significance [that man] himself has spun,'' we gain a picture of Jewish writers actively engaged in the process of recreating the framework through which identity and the world itself is perceived.10 II If these tales of reclamation have seldom figured prominently in earlier accounts of Jewish writing in America, it is because such accounts have more commonly emphasized movements away from Jewish distinctiveness. Let me briefly identify a few of these approaches and suggest how and why the one o√ered in this book di√ers. The first typifies works such as Robert Alter's After the Tradition (1968); Allen Guttmann's The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (1971); Leslie Fiedler's essays in Fiedler on the Roof (1991); and, more recently, Ruth Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon (2001). In these studies the Jewish experience in America is generally charted as an inexorable process of cultural attenuation, and works of literature are consulted as evidence for this process. A given work of literature, that is, becomes a sort of barometer, measuring the level or extent of Jewishness within the larger Jewish community. For Fiedler, if Jewish American writers evoke the figure of Jesus, it is because the ''deep psyches'' of American Jews in general have been emptied of traditional Jewish mythology and theology, exposing them to ''foreign'' influences (not, as I will propose, because these writers are engaged in deliberate acts of repossession).11 For Wisse, the story of modern Jewish literature begins with the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and ends with Israeli writers like Yaakov Shabtai and Amos Oz. Englishlanguage writers in America are marginal to her canon, relegated to a cul[∏] introduction de-sac along a grand thoroughfare connecting Yiddish to modern Hebrew. If Jewish American literature deserves mention, it is because it supplies what Wisse calls ''negative evidence of a community that has traduced its values and followed strange gods.''12 Wisse herself plays biblical prophet here, bemoaning a people who have strayed from the true path. A second tendency draws on psychoanalytic models to explore how Jews have responded to the experience of being cast in the role of social and/or religious ''Other.'' Here a common kind of analysis seeks to illuminate strategies for reducing or neutralizing the perception of Jewish di√erence in the eyes of non-Jews so as to ease the process of Jewish assimilation into white America. Sander Gilman's voluminous work is representative of this approach.13 While he focuses on the German rather than the American situation, he o√ers ''Jewish self-hatred'' as a lurking, possible condition for all Jews in modern Western societies. Gilman then explains diverse kinds of Jewish creative productions—including both positive and negative portrayals of Jews—as reactions to being exposed to negative stereotypes: a negative portrayal mimetically reproduces what others are saying about Jews, and a positive portrayal is an e√ort to reconfigure or deflect some stereotype. A variant on this approach, which has been particularly influential in studies of race in America, is Michael Rogin's work on blackface performance, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1998). In Rogin's formulation, Jewish performers put on blackface as a way of symbolically ''washing themselves white,''14 of convincing their audiences (and perhaps themselves as well) that they belonged on the white side of the color line. From this perspective, Jewish popular culture, epitomized by the film The Jazz Singer (1927), functions pragmatically as a stratagem for easing Jews into whiteness. What Rogin and Gilman share is an underlying premise that the basic drama of Jewish life involves a desire to ''make it'' in the mainstream and to deny or deflect any interpretation of Jews that would pose a barrier. If Jews have been seen as not-quite-white or sickly or grotesque, it has fallen to the producers of Jewish culture to sanitize, purify, or ''whiten'' Jews. Yet another approach can be seen in Werner Sollors' Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986) and Walter Benn Michaels' Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism (1997)—both of them highly influential works in the study of American ethnicity. These studies o√er what might be considered structuralist accounts of the formation of ethnic identity. Dispensing with the premise that the ''margin'' and the ''center'' really constitute distinct spheres, they seek to understand how these spheres are constructed through a common set of terms and in relation to one another. Michaels explores how the discourse of race [π] exiles on main street stretches across works produced by ''ethnic'' and ''nonethnic'' writers. He also contends that the argument for cultural pluralism that emerged in the second and third decades of the twentieth century turns out to share the same structure as the exclusionary nativist argument.15 Sollors argues that the selves constructed by autobiographies such as Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) and Ludwig Lewisohn's Up Stream (1922) are structurally analogous to what has become a normative version of American selfhood, namely that of the American ethnic self, balanced between old and new worlds.16 Sollors reads evocations of ethnographic details, the translation of selected words from Yiddish, and the rejection (in the case of Lewisohn) of the standardized life of the masses as part of the warp and woof of American identity. In both cases, constructions of the Jew in Jewish American texts are seen as reflections of dominant symbolic structures and conceptions of selfhood. To lay claim to a form of Jewishness, for Sollors and Michaels, is to follow a reflex in the culture at large and to reproduce its own pervasive logic. They thus disavow the possibility that a voice constructed through ''dominant'' categories can meaningfully speak for or in the name of some antithetical set of values or aims (which, I might add, makes one wonder a bit about the status of their own critical discourse). In response to the first of these groups (Wisse et al.), I tend to be more agnostic about what constitutes a genuinely ''Jewish'' text. To attempt to measure feats of the Jewish literary imagination using a yardstick that registers only ''legitimate'' forms of Jewishness seems to me to foreclose the enterprise of criticism from the start. My goal has been to allow the writers to define Jewishness in and on their own terms. Of course, the ideal of openness implied here is in some sense illusory, since what one will call Jewish will somehow stand in relation to a relatively fixed set of traditions. But there is still a significant di√erence between trolling about for legitimate and illegitimate forms of Jewishness on the one hand, and exploring ways in which Jewishness has been reconfigured, on the other. My response to the second and third approaches, similarly, is that they leave little room for the imaginative, inventive, intentional, and dialectical processes of cultural production. In response to the psychoanalytical framework, I would propose that other dynamics might be discerned in the history of Jewish culture than the drive to assimilate. And in response to the construction-of-ethnicity folks, I propose that a construction of Jewishness can have multiple e√ects—depending on the political and social context, depending on the constituencies to which a text is addressed, and depending finally on the idiosyncratic ultimate recipient of a text or performance: the reader. I am interested in glimpsing some of the unpredictable results that might arise when structures of meaning are combined and rearranged. [∫] introduction Also, when Sollors and Michaels endeavor to demystify ethnicity, they beg the question of the deeper motivations that lead individuals to speak on behalf of larger constituencies in the first place. The work of demystifying, in other words, tends to crowd out any possibility of agency. To contextualize my own approach, I would point to a tendency that has emerged in Jewish studies over the past fifteen years or so to highlight the productive dimension of the interaction between Jewish and nonJewish cultures. From this standpoint, the walls of the proverbial ''ghetto'' are always permeable; interaction and not insulation typifies the Jewish relation with the ''outside world.'' An example of this premise in action is Amos Funkenstein's chapter on the interaction between medieval Jewish exegesis and Christian readings of the Bible in Perceptions of Jewish History (1993). Funkenstein discovers that Nachmanides is heavily influenced by medieval Christian typology, and that various concepts in his Torah commentary might be read as direct translations into Hebrew of Latin terms such as typos and figura.17 As Funkenstein reads him, Nachmanides' hermeneutical approach conjoins Kabbalistic, neo-Platonic, and Christian typological elements. A similar method might be discerned in Ernest Rubinstein's study, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's ''The Star of Redemption'' (1999), which foregrounds the role played by German Romanticism, and particularly the aesthetic philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, in Rosenzweig's ''New Thinking.''18 And finally, David Roskies's work on S. Ansky and the ''paradigm of return'' has proven most useful for my own work. Roskies traces Ansky's life as a three-part journey. Born into a traditional Jewish home in Vitebsk, he subsequently left home and became a passionate defender of the Russian folk, the narod, under the influence of Russian populist thought. He then returned to his own people, working as a collector of folklore and writing one of the signature works of modern Yiddish literature, The Dybbuk. Roskies interprets this third stage as a direct e√ect of the second: ''the very culture that seduced him away provided him with a rationale for and a means of retrieval.''19 In all three examples, a non-Jewish cultural form—Christian typology, German Romanticism, Russian populism—has proven indispensable to the work of cultural renewal: ''strange gods'' have enabled the refashioning of Jewish culture. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to imagine any form of Jewish life or culture that did not enter into commerce, dialogue, and psychic battle with neighboring cultures. What remains to be articulated is the occasion for this work itself, the scene of its writing, which might enable the reader better to grasp some of my own investments. Let me, then, intrude autobiographically and briefly locate the reader at a moment that will serve as the hypothetical point of [Ω] exiles on main street origin for this project. A little more than ten years ago, I was living in San Francisco, my hometown, having taken time o√ from graduate studies in English literature at Columbia University. Any lingering desires to write the thesis on Joseph Conrad and Henry James I had been planning were quickly dissolving in the esprit of a city known more for championing the joys of self-expression than for fostering the rigors of scholarship. Yet it was here of all places, home of The Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters, where a Human Be-In had once attracted 20,000 people hoping for immediate nirvana, that I found myself irrepressibly drawn to practice Judaism, to study Yiddish, and to pore over the novels, poems, essays, and autobiographies of American Jews. I had found a tiny community of Jews to pray with in a renovated garage at the home of a Lubavitcher Hasid, recently arrived from Crown Heights. I studied Uriel Weinreich's College Yiddish in the Jewish library, which was well stocked but always eerily deserted. I discussed Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg with a transplanted New Yorker and emeritus historian from U.C. Berkeley named Samuel Haber. I also befriended an experimental performance poet, Alan Kaufman, who invited me to do a solo act I had worked out—a version of ''Hava Nagila'' played on a heavily distorted electric guitar—during the ''Challapalooza Chanuka'' celebration he organized at a local club called Slim's. In addition to all of this, I was working part-time for a tiny Jewish foundation, which meant that I was in regular contact with a number of progressive Jewish organizations ranging from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York to the Shalom Center in Philadelphia to the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem. It wasn't exactly a ''Jewish community'' I had found, but something far more improvised, heterogeneous, and wayward than anything Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Zhitlovsky, or any other theorist of modern Jewish identity could ever have imagined. And yet my variegated spheres of engagement were held together within the balance of a single, often mysterious impulse to draw upon and ''root'' myself (the metaphor is strained) in the cultures and traditions of the Jews. I was also aware that my engagements were part of a larger American tradition of self-fashioning, even as I was often brought to reconsider my own relationship to America, and to wonder in what sense I might still be counted as a member of a diaspora community. What this study attempts, in sum, is to provide a genealogy for at least one version of Jewish American culture. In so doing it broaches larger questions about the relationship between ethnicity, religion, and literary culture in American life in general. The central object of my focus remains literary culture because, for one thing, my training and predilections have [ ∞≠ ] introduction led me to search for innovation in verbal art, and, for another, as I hope to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, literature has been one of the chief sites of innovation in Jewish American culture. My principle of organization is chronological, both because chronology reveals the shaping role of history and because I understand criticism as analogous in many ways to storytelling, and stories are easiest to grasp chronologically. Nevertheless, I should reiterate that my broader agenda here involves rethinking the benefits of constructing a master narrative for Jewish American culture. Such narratives, as we have seen, move all too easily from some idea of a substantive Jewishness to assimilation, from streetfront shuls to self-erasure. While the conditions under which literature is written change dramatically over time, many of the processes of reclamation and reformulation that I describe recur in successive generations. When one unhinges the work of literature from the master narratives commonly used to chart the ''Jewish experience,'' what emerges is a considerably less deterministic field of cultural production. [ ∞∞ ] PART 1 breathing free in the new world: transcendentalism and the jewish soul No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, ''The Poet'' A striking pattern emerges when we survey some of the representative literary works of American Jews from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the men tend to be melancholic while the women are exuberant. Consider the final chapter of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), where the protagonist, having just narrated his rise to financial success in the needle trade, comes to brood upon the psychic losses he has incurred along the way. The price of his American success, it turns out, is alienation from an inner self whose connections to the Old World seem as ineradicable as they are inexpressible. Levinsky embodies the American Jew as split subject, his fate underscoring the existential [ ∞≥ ] exiles on main street implications of a widespread Yiddish proverb from the period, Amerike iz a gonif (''America is a thief ''). He cannot help but look back in sadness at the pious lad he used to be, as we observe in the novel's final, haunting lines: ''David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue, seems to have more to do with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak manufacturer.''1 Sholem Asch creates a similarly agonized character in his Yiddishlanguage novel Onkel Mozes (Uncle Moses), published serially in Cahan's Jewish Daily Forward in 1918. Here the immigrant-cum-tycoon is Moses Melnik, who lords it over a sweatshop filled with his former countrymen from his shtetl, Kusmin. At the lowest point of his moral decline, Moses causes a group of striking workers to be beaten in front of his shop—a scene that dramatically expresses the corrupting e√ects of the American marketplace. Like Cahan's novel, Onkel Mozes builds to a scene of agonized self-reflection. Gazing at the grave of his long-deceased first wife, Moses recognizes that ''all his young life, his real life, lay buried there in his wife's grave. And there beside the grave was a vacant space—waiting for his body.''2 His ''real life''—the life of his spirit—is already dead and gone. What we learn from these novels is that in America, there is no chance for resuscitation, repentance, or return. And even if this negative view of America is read as a critique of capitalism, an expression of these authors' abiding socialist attitudes, the tone of these final scenes is wistful rather than strident: the task at hand is that of mourning, not rebelling. From the standpoint of Levinsky's and Uncle Moses's Jewish souls, coming to the New World is like walking the plank.3 How di√erent is it, then, to turn to the celebrations of the American experiment in the writings of Emma Lazarus and Mary Antin. As di√erent as these writers are from each other—the first an aΔuent New York–born Sephardic Jew; the second a Yiddish-speaking immigrant from the Pale of Settlement—they share a positive vision of America as a place where the deepest longings and aspirations of Jews might be fulfilled at long last. In numerous poems and essays, Lazarus evokes a ''soul of Israel'' that can finally emerge from its protective shell and unveil its deep reserves of spiritual power. And in her famous autobiography The Promised Land (1912), Antin describes a ''golden truth'' at the core of Judaism that has survived as an ''heirloom'' from her past and that continues to feed her spirit in the present. Rather than representing Jewishness and Americanness as distinct and antagonistic spheres, these writers imagine Jewishness as a spiritual essence that has endured.4 Where Cahan and Asch see a fracturing of the Jewish self in the New World, these women writers a≈rm underlying continuities with the past. Some vital Jewish core has remained [ ∞∂ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d intact, and, in di√erent ways and di√erent genres, they feel themselves called upon to bear witness to its power. Thus if we are to observe the interaction between Jewishness and Americanness in its most productive form, we would do well to begin with these two founding mothers of Jewish American literature. By beginning here, we avoid the pitfall of reading the mournful-Jewish-man narrative as the normative literary mode for American Jews. To account for the role of gender here, we should note that when David Levinsky brings to mind his Jewish past, what he recalls is an image of himself ''swaying over the Talmud''—Talmud study being one of the central practices of rabbinic culture, and traditionally reserved for men alone. Whereas Cahan uses a specific, embodied, and male-dominated ritual as a symbol for Judaism, Lazarus and Antin describe more ''spiritualized'' versions of Judaism, articulated through concepts such as the soul and the deep, private self. Such concepts, often associated in the Victorian imagination with femininity, reveal the powerful influence on their writing of Romanticism—specifically, as I will argue, its American o√shoot, Transcendentalism. It may turn out, paradoxically, that Lazarus's and Antin's ability to imagine an enduring Judaism in the New World will depend on their distance from the institutions of rabbinic culture and on their access to a rhetoric of spirituality whose provenance is largely Romantic and Victorian. In the following discussions, we will see how the motif of the Jewish ''soul'' emerges in Jewish American writing through a dynamic encounter with Transcendentalism. For a lineage of the body of ideas we are considering here, it is useful to recall Perry Miller's description of the New England Transcendentalists as ''children of the Puritan past who, having been emancipated by Unitarianism from New England's original Calvinism, found a new religious expression in forms derived from romantic literature and from the philosophical idealism of Germany.''5 Lazarus and Antin are both children of the Jewish past who, having been emancipated by American political culture, find new ways to express their identities as Jews in forms derived from Transcendentalism. The central proposition of part 1, then, is that when Lazarus and Antin reread Judaism through the lens of American Romanticism, they o√er ways of inhabiting Jewishness that any continued insistence on the centrality of rabbinic culture, narrowly defined, might ignore. [ ∞∑ ] 1 songs of a semite Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History The Jewish Question which I plunged into so wrecklessly & impulsively last Spring has gradually absorbed more & more of my mind & heart—it opens up such enormous vistas in the Past & Future, & is so palpitatingly alive at the moment—being treated with more or less ability and eloquence in almost every newspaper and periodical you pick up—that it has about driven out of my thought all other subjects—I have reached the point now where I must know Hebrew. —Emma Lazarus, Letter to Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, 1882 When Emma Lazarus wrote ''The New Colossus'' (1883), her famous homage to the ''huddled masses yearning to breathe free,''1 nobody thought of calling her a ''Jewish American writer.'' That Lazarus herself might be called a Jew—or some other declension of the term that circulated at the time, such as ''Israelite,'' ''Hebrew,'' or ''Semite''—was hardly in question. But the idea that American literature might contain a specifically Jewish [ ∞∏ ] songs of a semite subtradition, with a particular mode of address and a distinct set of concerns, had hardly been conceived in the America of 1883. While many of Lazarus's lyrics and narrative poems dealt explicitly with episodes from Jewish history, and even though the ''wretched refuse'' described in ''The New Colossus'' was clearly meant to include East European Jewish immigrants, the broader culture she inhabited did not possess a clear notion of what it could mean to be an American writer and a Jew at the same time.2 According to the nomenclature of her day, Lazarus would have been conceived primarily as a ''poetess,'' a term that in late Victorian culture stood for refinement and sensitivity, as well as sentimentality.3 It would not have been inconsistent with this role if the writer in question occasionally treated exotic themes—she might even be felt to possess some secret intimacy with darker, foreign peoples—but such themes would have been read as largely symbolic performances, the work of fancy rather than the expression of some deep, abiding loyalty. When in 1850 Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave her collection of love sonnets the title of Sonnets from the Portuguese, she was appealing to the notion of the poetess as conduit for the exotic, though nobody doubted that these were Browning's own creations or that their real connection to ''the Portuguese'' was tenuous at best. Though Lazarus was known to come from a Jewish family, her Jewish poems might have been read in a roughly similar way when they were first published. At times, indeed, Lazarus herself appeared to want to minimize the seriousness of her Jewish allegiances. When her volume of poems, including a verse drama on the martyrdom of a medieval Jewish community and assorted lyrics on Jewish themes, was published in 1881, she struck an apologetic tone in a letter to her friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (daughter of Nathaniel): ''My little book of 'Semitic' poetry is at last out. . . . It is sombre & tragic, but I hope you will care for it a little for my sake.''4 The volume was entitled Songs of a Semite, a bold statement perhaps, but also one that suggests some ambiguity about Lazarus's self-positioning as author, especially in the context of late Victorian poetry, with its predilection for the dramatic monologue form. Were these to be read as dramatic monologues written by a refined poetess from the hypothetical perspective of ''the Jew,'' or was Lazarus herself truly to be seen as the Semite in question and these poems as her true confession? It seems clear at any rate, that Lazarus's poems on Jewish themes placed considerable pressure on prevailing ideas of authorship in nineteenth-century America. For even if the phrase Songs of a Semite may evoke Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and even if Lazarus's selfe√acing note to Lathrop suggests an impulse to distance herself from these works, the fact remains that in many of Lazarus's works the distinction [ ∞π ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d between writer and Jew begins to collapse. In works such as the poetic cycle By the Waters of Babylon, as we will see, she explicitly thematizes the encounter between the modern American Jew and her ancient Jewish legacy. In retrospect, Lazarus heralds the beginning of what we can properly call Jewish American literature—especially if we mean by this a tradition of writers in America of Jewish descent who have grappled explicitly with the meaning of Jewishness.5 A few generations later, when Karl Shapiro called his 1958 collection Poems of a Jew, he may not have been consciously echoing Lazarus's Songs of a Semite, but the similarity in title reveals the continuity of its theme—the continuity, more specifically, of the sense of Jewish self-assertion as a bold and possibly subversive act in and of itself. How did Lazarus come to write these poems? How did her ''Semitic Songs'' rearrange the terms of late nineteenth-century American literary discourse? And how did she position herself as an American Jew in relation to the ''Semite'' in her works? An Emersonian Beginning Lazarus was born in 1849 into a prosperous family with deep roots in America.6 Her father's family were long-standing members of America's Sephardic elite; her mother's, the Nathans, were Ashkenazic in origin and similarly well-established in New York society (intermarriage between these groups was common throughout the nineteenth century).7 Both the Lazaruses and the Nathans had been in America since before the revolution; and both were members of the oldest congregation in New York, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue Shearith Israel. Her paternal grandfather served as synagogue president from 1846 to 1849 and had even coedited the country's first English–Hebrew Sephardic prayer book. By the time of Lazarus's birth, however, her father had substantially distanced the family from organized Jewish life, devoting his energies to rising in an expanding antebellum economy. He achieved great prosperity as a sugar refiner—the summer house he built in Newport, Rhode Island, was only the most conspicuous sign of his success. As might befit such a family, Moses Lazarus had his daughters educated by private tutors who taught them foreign languages and introduced them to classical and European literature. It was only natural, given this background, that when Emma Lazarus began writing poems in her early adolescence, she emulated the great European tradition stretching from Petrarch through Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Brownings. Impressed with his daughter's talents (and eager, perhaps, to bolster his claims to social legitimacy), Moses Lazarus had a collection of his daughter's juvenilia printed for private circulation in 1867. [ ∞∫ ] songs of a semite In an encounter that would set the course of her early career, the nineteen-year-old Lazarus met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who by the 1860s was the undisputed reigning dean of American letters.8 During the period just after the Civil War, Emerson was wont to o√er his services as literary mentor to aspiring young writers, including a number of women such as Helen Hunt Jackson and Louisa May Alcott. As Anne Boyd shows in Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (2002), Emerson played a key role in enabling many women writers to imagine themselves as artists. His personal mentorship and support of iconoclastic self-expression were instrumental in the development of a new model of female authorship that emerged in the 1860s and 1870s.9 So it was that when Lazarus followed up the meeting by sending him her poems, he responded with encouragement: ''I observe that my poet gains in skill as the poems multiply,'' he wrote. ''I should like to be appointed your professor, you being required to attend the whole term.''10 The avuncular tone here belies the seriousness with which he later read her work. Emerson became Lazarus's mentor, and, inspired by his example, she eagerly enlisted in his program for creating an indigenous and daringly original American literature. In his letters to Lazarus, Emerson encourages her in terms that recall his signature essays and lectures. Echoing ''The Poet,'' he calls her attention to a greater reality accessible to those who eschew ingrained habits of mind and conventional ways of seeing: ''It is su≈cient happiness to have the eye opened to the miracle of nature, & the ear to that music which reports it, & which we call poetry'' (Rusk 6). The key Emersonian idea here is that of the su≈ciency of individual consciousness: one's inherent resources require no outside supplement. To goad Lazarus onward in this heroic adventure of consciousness, Emerson lays out a reading curriculum, ranging from Thoreau to the Bhagavad Gita, along with the warning that undue obeisance to past achievements can weigh down the spirit. In response to Lazarus's long poem Admetus, Emerson urges her to leave behind motifs from classical literature altogether: ''[T]hough you can throw yourself so heartily into the old world of Memory, the high success must ever be to penetrate unto & show the celestial element in the despised Present, & detect the deity that still challenges you under all the gross and vulgar masks'' (Rusk 10). Such directives resonate with basic Emersonian doctrine, going back to ''Nature'' (1837), in which he abjures the building of the ''sepulchres of the fathers'' and calls for ''a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition.''11 History, tradition, and memory all posed a threat to the fundamental task facing all Americans and writers in particular. As he wrote in ''Self-Reliance,'' ''The centuries are conspirators against [ ∞Ω ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d the sanity and authority of the Soul'' (Whicher 157). The individual soul was capacious enough to supply the writer with all he or she needed, and nature, not history, was the proper source and target for one's meditations. Whether Emerson had any awareness that Lazarus was a Jew or what he would have made of this fact are hardly clear. From Emerson's perspective in Concord in the 1860s, the reality of living Jews could hardly have been a matter of any great import. In any case, his prospectus for American culture looked to the creation of a new community of self-reliant individuals; questions of race or creed were irrelevant, at least in theory. It is clear, nevertheless, that insofar as Judaism has any explicit role in Emerson's writing, it is as a foil. When Emerson evokes ''Hebraism'' in his essays, it is as a limiting principle, as in Representative Men (1850), where he writes of the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg that ''[h]is perception of nature is not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. . . . The Hebraic muse, which taught the law of right and wrong to men, had an excess of influence for him'' (Whicher 212). Anticipating Matthew Arnold's wariness of the moral rigors of Hebraism, Emerson links the ''Hebraic'' with a binding legalism; ''mystical'' stands here for dogmatism, an otherworldly focus that blinds one to the immanent splendor of nature.12 In Emerson's paradigmatic essay ''Self Reliance,'' the figure of the ''Israelite'' is evoked explicitly as a type of spiritual failure: [Followers of creeds] say with those foolish Israelites, ''Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.'' Everywhere I am bereaved of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. (Whicher 163) Unwilling to activate their own powers of perception, the ''foolish Israelites'' embody the antithesis of the self-reliant individuality Emerson hopes to foster. Emerson's Israelites recite the fables of others, as if to admit defeat before the challenge of heeding the genius within. The goal Emerson sets for the American of his day, then, is to reclaim precisely the kind of spiritual autonomy surrendered by the Israelites in the wilderness. The temple that once stood in Jerusalem must become a symbol for the temple within. Emerson's e√ect on Lazarus at the time was evidently to buoy her up. She eagerly followed his directives and became his acolyte: ''I have only been reading Thoreau's Concord River & Letters, & a poem or two of Walt Whitman,'' she wrote him in June of 1868. ''But these writers are so in harmony with Nature that they do not take me away from the scene. I no [ ≤≠ ] songs of a semite longer wonder at your admiration of Thoreau . . . for he is now more alive to me than many who are living near me'' (SP 312). She too will turn away from the past, from memory, and track her own responses to the world outside. An example of Lazarus's early poetry at its most Emersonian is Epochs, a long work that builds upon an epigraph drawn from Emerson's essay ''Spiritual Laws'': ''The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts, but in the silent thought by the wayside as we walk.'' Lazarus fleshes out Emerson's appeal to interiority in a cycle of sixteen poems, each one devoted to a di√erent internal state. She moves through moments of negativity (e.g., ''Regret,'' ''Longing,'' and ''Grief '') before arriving at ''Patience'' and ultimately ''Peace.'' The final four lines of ''Peace'' envision a soul that has been released from all burdens: The mystic-winged and flickering butterfly, A human soul, that drifts at liberty, Ah! who can tell to what strange paradise, To what undreamed-of fields and lofty skies! (SP 49) The bouncing iambic rhythm recalls the long tradition of English poetry, but the sentiment is Emersonian. Lazarus's cycle underscores the teleological vision of Emerson's ''Spiritual Laws,'' referenced in her epigraph. She too imagines the soul as a vector driven by ''spiritual laws'' toward a future of boundless promise. Here in her early works, then, Lazarus writes as a Transcendentalist—a singer of American heroism and a researcher of the unencumbered soul. Nor did she ever lose this early enthusiasm for Emerson and his prospectus for American culture. More than a decade later, after her turn toward Jewishness, she wrote in her essay ''American Literature'' (1881) that Emerson's essays were the seed-bed from which a distinctly American school had flowered. His influence had penetrated to ''the very fiber of our best intellectual life,'' which she traced through Thoreau, Whitman, Bret Harte, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (SP 164). When Emerson died in 1882, Lazarus published a sonnet in his honor along with a long appreciation for The Century Magazine, citing his example as proof that a democratic society can foster moral and aesthetic refinement.13 But even as Lazarus sustained her enthusiasm for Emerson, her subsequent engagements with Jewish history led her to complicate and transform the poetics of Transcendentalists. As she emended the Emersonian principles that she had absorbed as a young writer to make room for expressions of Jewish loyalty, Lazarus revealed the power of American Romanticism to unleash ambitious creative energies while also demonstrating that Jewishness might very well [ ≤∞ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d stand for a di√erent set of priorities—and for a di√erent vision of the past and present—than that which Emerson had proposed for all Americans. The Theory of the ''Two Jews'' Sometime around the mid-1870s, Lazarus began to shift her focus away from the adventures of her own soul, and, as if to countermand Emerson's instructions, borrowed increasingly from European culture. Among her numerous experiments, which included a novel based on an episode from Goethe's life and a cycle of poems inspired by the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann, she increasingly took themes from Jewish history and tradition—a direction she would sustain to the end of her life. Among these ''Jewish'' works were a parable adapted from the Talmud and transcribed into blank verse (''The Birth of Man''); a long narrative poem based on a fifteenth-century epistle from a loyal Jew to his former master, the latter of whom became a bishop after conversion (''An Epistle from Joshua ibn Vives of Allorqui''); a verse tragedy about the martyrdom of a group of Jews in the medieval town of Nordhausen (The Dance to Death); and a host of shorter poems about biblical themes or about the ''Jewish soul'' as it had sustained itself across the centuries. Beginning in the early 1880s, Lazarus also became deeply involved in philanthropic activity on behalf of the persecuted Jews of Russia, writing strident essays in the popular press decrying antisemitism and joining forces with a group of wealthy Jews in New York to form the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jewry. They hoped to resolve the crisis facing Russian Jews by purchasing land in Palestine for the purpose of their resettlement.14 Most accounts of Lazarus's ''Jewish conversion'' explain it as a response to the pogroms that swept through Russia in the early 1880s. But while the pogroms undoubtedly summoned her to speak publicly on Jewish issues and no doubt preoccupied her enormously, we must also understand how her representations of Jewishness drew upon ideas and images that prevailed in the America of her day. We might note that the idea that individual Jews can be brought back to their people by witnessing anti-Jewish violence has a long pedigree in myth and history—from the biblical account of Moses witnessing the beating of a Jew by his Egyptian taskmaster to accounts of Theodor Herzl's ''conversion'' after witnessing the public degradation of Alfred Dreyfus in 1895. And so, in Lazarus's case, commentators look to the pogroms in Russia to play this catalytic role.15 Still, her new allegiances, not unlike Herzl's a few decades later (or, indeed, those of any Jew- [ ≤≤ ] songs of a semite ish writer who ''returns''), were shaped within terms that already existed in the culture she inhabited. Indeed, Lazarus's increasing fascination with things Jewish must be seen in the context of her dialogue with American literary culture. Let us, then, move beyond the idea of some inchoate Jewishness that simply welled up when she learned of the attacks on Russian Jews, and inquire deeper into the ways she constructed her Jewish aesthetic out of prevailing images and ideas. There are, to begin with, indications that Jews played a more complex symbolic role in the nineteenth-century American literary imagination than Emerson's easy dismissal of the Israelites would suggest. Even while symbolizing spiritual backwardness, Jews were also imagined as representing a direct link to the heroic biblical past—the very past that functioned symbolically as the paradigm for the settlement of America. The figure of the Jew could be seen, therefore, as at once a debased creature and a strangely evocative relic from the ancient past, a duality that we might call the theory of the ''two Jews.'' This dual view comes across in an article Walt Whitman wrote in 1842 for the New York newspaper Aurora, ''Doings at the Synagogue,'' in which he describes a chance visit he and his friends paid to the Crosby Street Synagogue in downtown Manhattan. As Whitman describes it, the scene was confounding in its strangeness: ''the whole a√air had much the aspect of an unintelligible mummery.''16 But, in spite of what he describes as the ''uncouth jabber'' and ''fantastic garb'' of the worshipers, Whitman could not divest himself of the thought that he was ''amid the people of ancient Jewry; the people who kept themselves apart from the contagion of the world.'' The sounds of the jabbering modern Jew clash with this solemn image of ''ancient Jewry,'' an image Whitman evokes with considerable respect. When William Dean Howells retraced Whitman's footsteps a half-century later, he similarly imagined that the Jews he encountered had stepped straight out of the Bible, ''that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the knowledge of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in heathen darkness.''17 Howells and Whitman both associate the Jews they encounter with a noble spiritual legacy, documented in the Bible. However uncouth and outlandish contemporary Jews may seem on the outside, these writers remain fascinated by the notion that modern Jews might retain an inner connection to the ancient Hebrews. This complex reaction to contemporary Jews is also reflected in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem ''The Jewish Cemetery at Newport'' (1858). Here the poet is startled by the prospect of a Jewish cemetery that stands out amid the vital natural world. (Note how the presentiment of Jews in America seems to startle these American poets): [ ≤≥ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea—that desert desolate— These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?18 What is ''strange'' to the poet is not that the Hebrews are dead but that they were so recently alive—and here in the ''fair seaport town'' of Newport.19 The poet appears troubled by the disjuncture between these modern Jews and his idealized image of the ancient prophets, and yet the one seems inevitably to point back to the other. What makes the scene all the more arresting is the poet's sense that the Jews buried in Newport must have been fleeing a ''burst of Christian hate.'' The graves of the Jews lead him to reflect on some kind of failure within Christianity. And though Longfellow might have conceivably written these Hebrews into the Puritan story of deliverance in the New World, seeing them also as pilgrims in search of freedom as Mary Antin will later do, his poem describes them as eternal outcasts, as ''Ishmaels and Hagars.'' Longfellow cannot imagine the New World as a sanctuary for these Jews, whose foreignness is emphasized in the poem through their conflation with the mythological progenitors of the Arabs, the quintessential ''Orientals'' from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth-century America.20 Such texts by Whitman, Howells, and Longfellow show that a distinct spiritual power was associated with Jews in nineteenth-century America. They also suggest that the Jewish presence in the New World complicated the o≈cial mythos of American life. Modern-day Jews embodied a resistance to the ''New Jerusalem'' narrative, since they retained their sights, at least in theory, on the ''Old Jerusalem.'' (None of these writers, nor their readers, would have realized that leaders of Reform Judaism, such as Isaac [ ≤∂ ] songs of a semite Meyer Wise, were at this very instant dispensing with the traditional notion of Jews as an exilic people yearning for a return to Zion.) The idea of ''ancient Jews'' on American soil challenged the American claim to embody the future hopes of humankind. And if Emerson called in ''Nature'' for a turning away from the ''sepulchres of the fathers,'' Longfellow's poem hints at the challenges facing anyone who might engage in this project. At the very moment that Longfellow contemplates the ''fair seaport town,'' he, for one, remains fixated on Jewish sepulchres in the center of Newport, suggesting just how di≈cult this avoidance of ''the fathers'' might be. Read in relation to Emerson's declaration of cultural independence from the fathers, Longfellow's poem seems to register something approaching patricidal guilt, as if the slain progenitors of Christianity had returned to haunt the American poet precisely when he would enjoy his independence from the Old World (and his holiday in Newport). The point is that Jews are associated with an uncanny and lingering power (''the dead remain''), complicating Emerson's easy dismissals of the Israelite. Here is the Jew not as legalist nor as a type for spiritual weakness, but as a figure of uncanny persistence, connected to a noble past. By the 1870s the presence of actual, living Jews became an increasingly conspicuous fact of American life. This was the period of the first significant demographic transformation in the American Jewish community, whose population swelled from 15,000 in 1840 to approximately 250,000 by 1880.21 The new immigrants were largely poor merchants and tradesmen from German-speaking regions in central Europe, and their sudden presence established for the first time a class hierarchy within the American Jewish community. To understand how these newcomers were viewed by Jews and non-Jews alike, we must recall that this was also the heyday of the field of evolutionary biology. Recent studies by Matthew Frye Jacobson, Noel Ignatiev, Karen Brodkin, and Eric Goldstein have traced the e√ects of the popularization of racial science in nineteenthcentury America. They show that the period of mass European immigration, from the 1840s through the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a reorganization of the social hierarchy in America, ''a fracturing of whiteness'' into multiple scientifically determined races.22 Under the spell of racial thinking, Jews and non-Jews alike came to understand Jewishness as a racial as well as a religious category, though the precise relation between the two was seldom worked through in any systematic way.23 The di≈culty in sorting out these di√erences can be observed in the language that circulated after a notorious incident in 1877, when the wealthy German-born Jewish banker Joseph Seligman was denied access to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York.24 The grounds for this [ ≤∑ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d rejection, as explained by the hotel owner, Judge Henry Hilton, were that ''Christians did not like [Jews'] company and for that reason shunned the hotel.'' In elucidating his charge, Hilton distinguished between socially desirable Jews, whom he called ''Hebrews,'' and a class of objectionable Jews, whom he called ''Seligman Jews.'' As he explained in a front-page interview in the New York Times, ''[H]ere is the Seligman Jew, who represents nothing that is standard Hebrew; he is to the Hebrew what the shyster is to the law profession—he is the 'Sheeney.' He has made money; he must advertise it in his person. He is of low origin and his instincts are all of the gutter.''25 Hilton's dichotomy reflects a more pronounced (and more derogatory) version of what we saw in Whitman's article and Longfellow's poem. Once again we find a complex interweaving of two versions of the Jew: as ''standard Hebrew'' (an admired figure), and as ''Sheeney'' (a debased figure). The acceptable ''standard Hebrew'' would presumably be closer to the noble religious heritage that Whitman and Longfellow reference in their writings, while the ''Seligman Jew'' is closer to the racialized and degraded figures in their discourse. The endurance of these conflicting images suggests why Jews could not be relegated once and for all to the single category of Racial Other, a position that in any case was already taken by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Jews' ambiguous status was reinforced by their symbolic role in the national mythos as prototypes for America's original European settlers. The impulse to distinguish between two kinds of Jews may thus be seen to reflect distinct ideological needs in nineteenth-century American culture: to maintain a positive image of the biblical Israelite on the one hand, while demonizing the interloping and basely capitalistic ''dirty Jew'' on the other. Lazarus's family, given their deep roots in America, would have been ideal candidates for Hilton's category of the ''Hebrew,'' but given the impossibility of disentangling these figures once and for all, the negative alternative must also have been hovering closely by. The Faith of Fallen Jews For someone like Lazarus, who considered herself a Jew but who had little connection to any traditional communal life, this ambiguous identity might have been a source of anxiety, and one might be tempted to read her through the theoretical lens o√ered by Sander Gilman's theories, namely as a writer concerned with dispelling and ''purifying'' negative images of Jews.26 But I will instead suggest how the discourse of race seems also to have generated new kinds of allegiances and alignments. Indeed, Lazarus's response to the new discourse of race reflects what might be considered a [ ≤∏ ] songs of a semite productive function of racial thinking: the idea of race provides the grounds for her identification with East European Jews and by extension with a form of symbolic power linked back through time to the biblical past. Her connection to the Jews via race might have had advantages from her perspective since it meant that what Longfellow calls the ''grand dialect the prophets spake'' might be her rightful inheritance as well. At a moment when language, social class, and religious practice set clear boundaries between di√erent kinds of Jews, the idea of race could generate a new basis for solidarity both with contemporary Jews and ''ancient Hebrews.'' This development was reinforced by Lazarus's discovery in the 1870s of German Jewish historiography, a field that o√ered new ways of conceptualizing the Jewish experience across time.27 Especially significant was her study of Heinrich Graetz's multivolume History of the Jews, which she began reading under the tutelage of Gustav Gottheil, a newly arrived Reform rabbi from Posen. (Gottheil hoped to spark Lazarus's interest in Judaism so she might contribute to a new hymnal he was editing.) If history had become, in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's formulation, ''the faith of fallen Jews,'' we might say that it was precisely this ersatz faith that galvanized Lazarus's imagination.28 Referring to Graetz, a figure whose influence on modern Jewish culture can hardly be overemphasized, Lazarus later wrote that she was ''firmly convinced . . . of the truth of the axiom that a study of Jewish history is all that is necessary to make a patriot of an intelligent Jew.''29 What made Graetz so serviceable for Lazarus was his construing of Judaism through the Romantic vocabulary with which she was already familiar. Following the theorists of the Science of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, Graetz argued that Judaism could be reduced to a single idea, one that in Hegelian fashion is brought to ''maturity'' and revealed through the processes of history. ''If we survey Judaism in its broad outlines,'' Graetz wrote in 1849, ''and if we remove the husk from the grain—the productive ideas from the gross facts—we would come upon the original vital impulses that are implicit in the very idea of Judaism.''30 For Graetz, this idea of Judaism was first expressed as a protest against paganism: ''It is precisely to negate [the idea of paganism] . . . that constitutes Judaism's predestined vocation: to show the paucity of truth in paganism and its harmful e√ects on social morality.''31 Jewish history from Graetz's perspective is a continuous battle between worldviews in which Judaism figures at once as endangered minority and as challenger.32 The ''outer life'' of Judaism is a history of su√ering at the hands of an intolerant majority (the pagan world slips into Christendom in his narrative), while the ''inner history'' is a history of scholarship, pious devotion, and the sheer refusal to capitulate. Such a dualism could be readily mapped onto the dichotomy [ ≤π ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d between biblical Jew and hounded victim in the American imagination: what Graetz added was a sustained and impassioned analysis of how the originary ''idea of Judaism''—which in the American context is associated solely with the biblical period—had continuously expressed itself across time. The first works that Lazarus published in a Jewish periodical—a translation and two imitations of Heinrich Heine—reveal her newfound fascination with Jewish history. In 1823, two years before his conversion to Christianity and during a period of heightened antisemitism in Germany, Heine had conceived the idea for a three-part poem dealing with medieval antisemitism. He wrote the first section, ''Donna Clara,'' but soon abandoned the project, having sketched out the unwritten poems in a letter to his friend Moses Moser. Lazarus translated ''Donna Clara'' into English and used Heine's letter to complete his trilogy for him, in essence ''ghostwriting'' Heine's unfinished work and entering modern Jewish literature via Heine's abandoned project. The story of this poem's composition is a powerful symbol, underscoring the very di√erent possibilities for a Jew in nineteenth-century Germany and America. Whereas the German Jew converts to Christianity, hoping to gain his ''entry ticket'' into gentile society and abandoning his projected work on antisemitism, the American Jew completes the poem and launches a career as an uno≈cial public defender of the Jews.33 Heine's poem describes a midnight tryst in medieval Spain in which the world-weary daughter of an ''Alcalde'' meets her paramour, described simply as a ''handsome knightly stranger'' (''der schoene unbekannte Ritter''). In the moonlight, they exchange ''fond endearments,'' interspersed with the young woman's gratuitous expressions of antisemitism: ''I hate these gnats in summer / E'en as though they were a rabble / Of vile Jews with long, hooked noses'' (SP 187). Summoned back to her castle, the Alcalde's daughter asks the knight for his ''precious name,'' which he has so closely hidden. The knight lets out a ''gentle laugh'' and, while kissing her lips and forehead, declares in the poem's final lines, ''I, Senora, your beloved, / Am the son of the respected / Worthy, erudite Grand Rabbi, / Israel of Saragossa'' (SP 188).34 The knight imitates the style of the noblewoman's aristocratic discourse in a declaration that makes her confront her worst fears: she has fallen for the dirty Jew who seemed a handsome knight. Heine symbolically exacts revenge on his own society by figuring the Jewish speaker as someone who flawlessly imitates the rules of Spanish decorum (as Heine and Lazarus strictly adhere to the rules of prosody), even despite being labeled as an unassimilable alien. Heine's ''Donna Clara'' is a telling example of the kind of poem Graetz had in mind when he nominated Heine as the consummate Jewish poet of [ ≤∫ ] songs of a semite the nineteenth century. Graetz looks to Heine first and foremost as an opponent of Christendom, as somebody whose veins were ''imbued with true Jewish spirit,'' in spite of his apostasy. Heine's renunciation of Judaism was not true apostasy, Graetz proposes, but rather like the covert acts of ''combatants who, appropriating the enemy's uniform and colors, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.''35 With his portrait of Heine as a combative Jewish poet, ''hiding out'' in the German language, Graetz anticipates contemporary theories that link minority writing to subversive forms of mimicry and underhanded critique.36 Lazarus, too, seems drawn to Heine for his rebellious spirit, but, given her Emersonian background, his Jewish rebellion will have a metaphysical as well as a social import. When she adapts Heine's poetics for her own American Jewish project, the Jew will stand for not only a hated Other, as in ''Donna Clara,'' but, as we will see, a figure imbued with prophetic vision. After completing the remaining poems in Heine's trilogy, Lazarus wrote a series of poems that return to the medieval past to stage the conflict between Jew and Christian. In these poems, Lazarus evokes the Jew as a vulnerable figure whose su√ering reveals the depths of Christian hypocrisy. An example is ''Raschi in Prague'' (1880), based on a legend holding that the renowned medieval exegete was put to death while visiting the Jewish community of Prague. Lazarus's Raschi becomes another eloquent Jewish hero and a tragic figure undone by an intolerant gentile world. Another example is ''The Guardian of the Red Disk,'' a dramatic monologue from the point of view of an evil Christian citizen of Malta in 1300 who is celebrating the decree of the Fourth Lateran council of 1215 requiring Jews to wear identifying badges. The speaker's fears about Jewish contamination (''it sets my flesh a creep to think!'' [SP 184]) recall and amplify the association of Jews with the uncanny that permeates Longfellow's poem on the Jewish cemetery (''the dead remain''). Lazarus's most fully developed treatment of Jewish history, and her most extensive work on a Jewish theme, is The Dance to Death: A Historical Tragedy in Five Acts (1882). A ''closet drama'' (meant to be read, not performed), the work deals with the annihilation of the Jewish community of Nordhausen for allegedly poisoning the drinking wells and causing the black plague. It is worthwhile briefly to trace its somewhat byzantine plot since this work clearly reveals how Lazarus weaves biblical images and motifs into an account of antisemitism and spiritual resistance. Seen as a response to the outbreak of the pogroms in Russia, Lazarus's tragedy might be read as a specifically American contribution to the tradition of modern Jewish literature of destruction, a tradition that includes works such as Hayyim Nachman Bialik's ''The City of Slaughter.''37 Lazarus's tragedy begins with the apparition of a prophetic blind man [ ≤Ω ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d in the medieval town of Nordhausen; the man presents an urgent warning to the Jews: ''Everywhere torture, smoking Synagogues, / Carnage and burning flesh. The light shines out / Of Jewish virtue, Jewish truth, to star / the sanguine field with an immortal blazon'' (SP 117). Although an angel has revealed to him a mounting threat to the lives of local Jews, they refuse to heed the warning: ''But truly we are blessed in Nordhausen / Such terrors seem remote as Egypt's plagues'' (SP 114). As it turns out, the Christian establishment does resent the Jews, and a campaign against them takes shape, spearheaded by the Landgrave. In a sub-plot, an illicit a√air develops between Prince William, son of the Landgrave, and Liebhaid, daughter of the town's most respected Jewish elder. Lazarus stages here a version of the Book of Esther: Liebhaid's father, Suesskind, blesses the union, encouraging his daughter to exploit her connections to calm the rage of the Landgrave, to ''change his scorn / Of the Jew's daughter into pure a√ection'' (SP 127). The Purim-story motif becomes explicit as the Prince recalls learning of a Purim celebration and of that ''holy time's bright legend . . . of the queen, / Strong, beautiful, resolute, who denied her race / To save her race.'' He thus appeals to his beloved, ''You are my Esther—but I, no second tyrant'' (SP 128). The redemptive conclusion of the Book of Esther is preempted in this narrative, however, as the Landgrave's evil counselor, Schnetzen (a stand-in for Haman), convinces the Landgrave that his son has fallen for a Jewish plot and a specially brewed ''love-elixir.'' The evocation of the Esther story ironically belies the town's Jews' insistence on the remoteness of the biblical world and its hardships: the historical persecution of Jews has continued, but this time without the saving intervention of God. Just as the Jews' tragic fate is being sealed, Suesskind reveals before a city hall assembly that his alleged daughter, Liebhaid, is no Jewess at all, but the daughter of Schnetzen, the Haman-figure. Suesskind explains that she was saved from a fire when she was a few days old. As the Jews are preparing to be executed, Suesskind urges Liebhaid to acknowledge her Christian birth, marry the prince, and avoid a fate that is not properly her own. Here the Book of Esther subtext transforms into that of the Book of Ruth. Liebhaid responds to her adoptive father: ''If I be o√spring to that kite / I here deny my race, forsake my father . . . Thy God is mine, / Thy people are my people'' (SP 163–164). These lines echo Ruth's speech to her motherin-law: ''Whither thou goest, I shall go . . .'' (Ruth 1:16). Where Liebhaid had been preparing to operate as the Jew in the alien Christian camp, she now embraces her role as the born-Christian in the Jewish camp. In the play's dramatic final scene, the Jews (along with Liebhaid) are led into a giant fire, where they accept their martyrdom by dancing in the flames. In a stirring final speech, the Jewish elder, Suesskind, announces that in time [ ≥≠ ] songs of a semite their deaths will be avenged. The ''lamp'' of Jewish truth will be preserved in times to come for the ''Jew-priest, Jew-poet, Jew-singer, or Jew-saint'' of the future (SP 169). With this speech, Lazarus hints at the function of her own work, which constitutes a response to the injustices su√ered by Jews throughout history and at her historical moment as well. She is herself the ''Jew-poet'' her protagonist prophecies. In ''The New Colossus'' the image of the lamp will return as the symbol of American freedom (''I lift my lamp beside the Golden door''); here we see it as a specifically Jewish inheritance and Lazarus herself, implicitly, as its bearer in the present. Lazarus's The Dance to Death must be seen in the context of her increasingly prominent role as a public Jew at the height of the pogroms. Indeed, she envisioned the publication of The Dance to Death as itself a public act: in a letter to The American Hebrew accompanying the play's manuscript, she writes that ''it would be highly desirable to publish [the play] now, in order to emphasize the cruelty of the injustice done to our unhappy people.''38 It is illuminating that on the one occasion that Lazarus chose a pen name for herself—when she entered an essay contest sponsored by the Y.M.H.A. in 1884—she invented the name ''Esther Sarazal.''39 With the writing of The Dance to Death, then, Lazarus has developed a conception of Jewish art as public intervention: Lazarus becomes herself an ''Esther'' who, like the figure of Liebhand in the play, moves into the gentile world as a loyal Jewish emissary. The Prophetic Voice The vision of Jewish history in The Dance to Death reflects what Salo Baron has described as the ''lachrymose'' view of Jewish history typical of German Jewish historiography, namely the view of Jewish history until the Enlightenment as an unremitting tale of humiliations and woe.40 But, as we have seen, Lazarus also emphasizes that the ''lamp'' of truth has been passed down through Jewish history, with her own poems providing a new form for its expression. In her works from the mid-1880s onward, Lazarus moves from the Heine-esque ironic mode and from the tragic form of The Dance to Death to poems that imagine a spiritual rebirth in contemporary America. The record of violence against Jews has continued to pile up, with the outbreak of the pogroms signifying but the latest in a long, lachrymose history, but in America a new dispensation has dawned. And from the standpoint of America, Lazarus sees herself called, elected, to proclaim a new rising of the Jew. An example of Lazarus's prophetic mode is ''The New Ezekiel,'' a short poem constructed as a series of questions followed by a series of bold [ ≥∞ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d assertions. Like Whitman's article on the Crosby Street Synagogue, the poem begins by expressing wonder at the gulf dividing a debased modern Jewry from their ancient heritage: ''Is this the House of Israel, whose pride / Is as a tale that's told, an ancient song? / Are these ignoble relics all that live / Of Psalmist, Priest, and Prophet?'' (SP 232). Rather than simply marveling at this gulf, however, Lazarus imagines an ongoing connection to the biblical past, linking the present to an originary revelation. Evoking Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones, she heralds a rebirth of the Jewish spirit, coupled with a return of prophecy to Israel: ''The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word / Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men stand! / I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord / And I shall place you living in your land'' (SP 232). The poem's conceit is that God has delivered this message to the poet, who becomes a modern-day Ezekiel beholding a vision of Jewish spiritual rebirth, presumably in their ancestral homeland. Themes such as Israel's abominations and of God's punishments, which are central to the discourse of biblical prophecy, are absent. Instead, the figure of Ezekiel provides an image for the Jewish American poet who has suddenly gained access to the powers of vision and speech. Instructively, Lazarus's evocation of Ezekiel echoes and recasts the opening paragraph of Emerson's ''Nature,'' when he asks rhetorically, ''Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?'' (Whicher 23). But whereas Emerson calls upon his readers to turn away from the ''dry bones of the past'' and enjoy an ''original relation to the universe,'' Lazarus imagines a repetition in the present of the very same miracle that Ezekiel witnesses. For the modern Jewish poet, inspiration comes not from turning away from the past, but from reimagining oneself as the inheritor of its power. In the last work to be published in her lifetime, Lazarus constructs an extended allegory for her assumption of the role of Jewish poet–prophet. By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose is a cycle of seven poems that projects a view of Jewish history from the expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the pogroms of 1881, to the arrival of masses of Jewish immigrants in America, and finally to the appearance of the Jewish poet in the New World. With these ''little poems in prose,'' divided into numbered passages, she moves away from her more familiar Victorian forms toward an idiom that recalls the King James Bible. These poems are coded as specifically ''Jewish'' through this evocation of biblical discourse.41 The language of the Jewish imagination, Lazarus implies, is the language of the Bible (even if hers is a version of biblical discourse linked to the quintessential Protestant translation). The first poem, ''The Exodus,'' recalls the expulsion from Spain through the template of the biblical Exodus narrative. A bedraggled collec[ ≥≤ ] songs of a semite tion of Jews flees Spain as a hostile local villager ''sets on their trail his yelping cur.'' Just as Lazarus's ''despairing exiles'' are leaving Spain, the ''world-unveiling Genoese'' (SP 242–243), Columbus, is also departing for the New World, heralding the future protection of Jewish exiles in the New World.42 But the image of the Jew as homeless victim is gradually displaced by the image of ''Israel'' as a heroic principle of endurance. In the second section, ''Treasures,'' the poet directly addresses ''Israel,'' imagined as an entity containing a diamond buried beneath a ''coal-black prison.'' 3. Buried in the bowels of earth, rugged and obscure, lies the ingot of gold. 4. Long hast thou been buried, O Israel, in the bowels of earth; long hast thou slumbered beneath the overwhelming waves; long hast thou slept in the rayless house of darkness. 5. Rejoice and sing, for only thus couldst thou rightly guard the golden knowledge, Truth, the delicate pearl and the adamantine jewel of the Law. (SP 243) Lazarus's point that the truth of Judaism must be excavated from the ''bowels of the earth'' reflects the theory of the ''two Jews'' we have already seen as a prevalent feature in the nineteenth-century American imagination. Here she uses the image of the earth to represent the external, ''natural'' circumstances of Jewish life, the circumstances that create the debased or racialized Jew. The true Israel—the ''Hebrew'' or biblical Jew we have seen—remains inchoate, ''slumbering.'' The ''jewel of the Law'' has been concealed beneath this exterior. Coupled with this drama of Jewish perseverance, the poem also develops a narrative showing the poet's own coming to awareness. In the fourth section, ''The Test,'' the poet shifts perspective from the migrating Jews to an ''I'' who belongs to the American present. She calls to mind a parade of noble Jewish types, ''a Prophet with four eyes''; ''a Poet, who plucked from his bosom the quivering heart''; and ''a placid-browed Sage'' (SP 245). Her ''test'' comes when she is confronted by the contemporary descendant of such noble figures: ''I beheld the shuΔing gait, the ignominious features, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto'' (SP 245). Can the contemporary poet detect signs of a noble heritage beneath this exterior? Eventually this question gets formulated as a challenge to the reader: ''But thou—hast thou faith in the fortune of Israel?'' (SP 246). As if to goad the reader onward, the final poem in Lazarus's cycle o√ers a series of instructions: 12. Thou shalt say to the bigot, ''My Brother,'' and to the creature of darkness, ''My Friend.'' [ ≥≥ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d 13. And thy heart shall spend itself in fountains of love upon the ignorant, the coarse, and the abject. 14. Then in the obscurity thou shalt hear a rush of wings, thine eyes shall be bitten with a pungent smoke. 15. And close against thy quivering lips shall be pressed the live coal wherewith the Seraphim brand the Prophets. (SP 246–247) Once again the seemingly debased East European Jew (a figure who seems always to be male) turns out to possess concealed powers, uniquely accessible to the Jewish poet of today. When the addressee of the poem embraces this figure (''Thou shalt say to the bigot, 'My Brother' ''), she is suddenly released into the plenitude of speech, a transformation evoked through the scene of Isaiah's theophany, when his lips are purified by a piece of coal.43 The image from Isaiah works to overcome the division between the grotesque East European Jew and the empathetic American Jew. After all, Isaiah is branded by the Seraphim because he feels himself to be impure and dirty. This would suggest an association between Eastern and American Jew, both of whom stand in need of purification. Finally, Lazarus's sequence dramatizes a dual transformation: the American Jew redeems the Eastern Jew by recognizing his inner treasure, and the Eastern Jew redeems the American Jew by reconnecting her to the Jewish past. When the American Jew identifies with the East European Jew, she comes into contact with a deeper spiritual reality (''in the obscurity thou shalt hear a rush of wings'')—which is also figured as an encounter with the substratum of her own being. ''By the Waters of Babylon'' thus stages Lazarus's return to the Jewish fold, as modern poet and as witness to the endurance of the Jewish soul through history. By invoking in her title the image of the psalmist weeping in Babylon, Lazarus aligns the Jewish American writer with other Jewish singers in exile. Her indebtedness to Emerson is still palpable, but with a crucial, Jewish di√erence. In Emerson's letters to Lazarus, he called upon her to reject inherited ways of seeing and to ''detect the deity that still challenges you under all the gross and vulgar masks.'' Emerson's entire project might be summarized as an e√ort to name and a≈rm this ''deity,'' which he sometimes called the ''over-soul'' and sometimes simply ''the self.'' When Lazarus responded to this Emersonian challenge, she discovered a trope for spiritual power in ''Israel,'' an image for a collectivity that had preserved its truth during the long nightmare of history. Lazarus retains Emerson's faith in the continuing availability of inspiration, while asserting that the source and origin of this inspiration is in history as much, if not more, than in nature. [ ≥∂ ] songs of a semite During the last years of her life, Lazarus dedicated herself to the study of Hebrew, a logical extension of her e√orts to craft a ''biblical'' Jewish poetics. Over the next years, she became su≈ciently proficient in Hebrew to translate directly from the original. Just before she died, she completed a translation of a short lyric by al-Harizi entitled ''Consolation,'' which was published in The American Hebrew: Oh, were my streaming tears to flow, According to my grievous woe, Then foot of man in all his quest, On no dry spot of earth could rest. But not to Noah's flood alone, The covenant's bright pledge was shown, For likewise to my tears and woe, Behold once more revealed—the Bow!44 This brief work attests to a sustaining faith amid exile. Without faith in the covenant, the poet would be in such distress that he would set loose a flood of tears comparable to Noah's flood. The final lines, where Noah's vision of the rainbow is evoked as an answer to the poet's tears, contain an ambiguity in the original. Al-Harizi's text reads: Ki gam lidmai niratah ha-keshet (literally: ''For also to my tears appeared the rainbow''). This could mean either that the poet has actually seen a rainbow or, what is more likely, that he takes consolation from the memory of Noah's having seen it. By rendering the line as a visionary experience in the present (''Behold once more revealed—the Bow!''), Lazarus suggests that the covenant reproduces itself in every generation, as visionary experience. As in her own poems, Lazarus's translation retains Emerson's faith in the continuing availability of inspiration, while also asserting that the source and origin of this inspiration is the old covenant between God and Israel or, indeed, the faith in the covenant expressed by a medieval Hebrew poet. Lazarus's turn to Hebrew translation and her e√orts to sing on behalf of Jewish faith and endurance suggests, finally, that her muse resides neither on Parnassus nor on Sinai, but within Jewish history itself. It is in Jewish history, in the eloquence and piety of historical figures from Rashi to al-Harizi and revealed in collective acts of martyrdom and devotion, that Lazarus discovers a plenitude of meaning and a power that for Emerson exists solely in the present and in nature. Lazarus's turn to Hebrew translation and her e√orts to craft a ''prophetic'' poetics in English express her own version of piety and her conviction that it was possible to resituate herself within the continuity of Jewish history and to speak on behalf of its further unfolding. [ ≥∑ ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d On a final note, we might consider that American literature contains something of a precedent for Lazarus's portrayal of the Jew in the character of Hester Prynne, who occupies an analogous symbolic position in Hawthorne's Puritan community in The Scarlet Letter as the Jews in the medieval village of Lazarus's The Dance of Death. Numerous parallels link Lazarus's medieval Jews with Hester Prynne: both have been condemned for crimes against the Christian order; both are feared as figures of corruption and have been relegated to the margins of established society; both are specifically referred to as ''oriental'' (recall Hawthorne's description of Prynne as possessing ''in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic,—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful'');45 and both come to possess a heightened insight into the inner lives of their Christian neighbors. Lazarus seems directly to recall Hawthorne's text when she describes the Jews' badge in ''The Guardian of the Red Disk'' as a ''scarlet stamp of separateness, of shame'' (emphasis added), and when in ''Raschi in Prague'' she again evokes the badge as a ''brand of scarlet degradation.'' The point here is that the American literary tradition seems already to have marked a space for the heretic/pariah. When Lazarus writes her Jewish figures into this space, she calls forth the range of implications already present in Hawthorne's text. What is most suggestive about this parallel is that Prynne is of course not merely a figure for the shunned outcast; she also embodies the principles of liberation and rehabilitation in Hawthorne's text. Particularly in her speeches to Dimmesdale in the forest, where she exhorts him to ''begin all anew!'' Prynne represents the voice of the New World in its most antinomian guise: ''The world's law was no law for her mind'' (267). By the concluding chapter of The Scarlet Letter, Hester has become a quasi-prophetic figure, advising those who approach her in need that ''a new truth would be revealed'' (241). Lazarus's Jewish figures will also be associated with prophetic insight, though their ''new truth'' is figured as an endurance and revival of an ''old truth.'' Lazarus, the American prophet as Jew, does not finally consign herself to the wilderness, where she might sing a song without precedent. Rather she positions herself within the mainstream of history, as the recipient of an ancient heritage whose truth is unchanging. [ ≥∏ ] 2 ecstasies of the credulous Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl Prophets, messiahs, miracle workers might have their day, still the Jew was conscious that between him and God no go-between was needed; that he, as well as every one of his million brothers had a portion of God's work to do. —Mary Antin, The Promised Land In 1898, eleven years after Lazarus's death, a firsthand account appeared in the New York weekly The American Hebrew by a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Antin, in which she described her experiences as an immigrant en route to America. The text, later published in book form under the title From Plotzk to Boston, originated as a long letter Antin wrote at the age of eleven, in Yiddish, to her uncle back home.1 It had been rendered into English and adapted for publication with the help of Boston's most prominent Reform rabbi, Solomon Schindler—a radical social reformer [ ≥π ] b r e at h i n g f r e e i n t h e n e w w o r l d and leading advocate for new immigrants.2 But even as more acculturated Jews had a hand in shaping the young Antin's language, it was evident that the weight of authority within Jewish American discourse around immigration had begun to shift from the well-established Jewish communities gazing upon the newcomers to the immigrants themselves. Published in the same periodical in which Emma Lazarus's Jewish poems had appeared a little over a decade earlier, Antin's account o√ered readers a chance to test Lazarus's hypothesis about the spiritual fortitude of those shtetl Jews who were suddenly clamoring at the gates of the New World. Here was the voice of one of the ''huddled masses'' herself, representing her own experience and uncovering details about Jewish life in the Old World that American-born Jews had only imagined (or read about in the writings of Heinrich Graetz). In short, here was the immigrant Jew not merely as symbol of the Old World, nor as object of charity, but as writer. What Antin presented in From Plotzk to Boston and later in her celebrated autobiography, The Promised Land (1912),3 was not only evidence of the courage and tenacity of the immigrants, but also of their fervent patriotism and