Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention.

The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust.

A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

This is simply a stunning book, and it is the book that Hana Wirth-Nesher's life experience and intellectual formation have meant her to write. There is no other student of American Jewish literature who possesses the tools and scholarly rigor to take on this topic, and there is no one else who delivers as abundantly on this promise. What at first seems peripheral or vestigial or even pedantic--the uses of Hebrew and Yiddish in American Jewish literature--is shown in a completely persuasive argument to turn to be of the first importance. In that sense, the book is path-breaking and will rewrite the map of the field.

No book traces the stories of Jewish sound, voice, tone, pun, metaphor, name, prayer, and sacred syllable with such consistency and brilliance.

[An] invigorating book about the multilingual sensibility which Jews who emigrated to the United States brought to their grappling with English. . . . This is not just a book about the Jewish American experience, but about how and why we all relate to language.

is a deeply informed and provocative attempt to explain the uniqueness of Jewish American multilingualism, and as such, it should be required reading for anyone teaching a course on Jewish American literature.

makes a rich, comprehensive, and welcome contribution not only to the study of American Jewish literature but more broadly to our understanding of the evolution of transnational, multicultural American history. It is unlike any other critical work on American Jewish literature. Given her command of Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as her deep familiarity with American literature generally and American Jewish literature in particular, Wirth-Nesher is unusually well-positioned, and she has made the most of her scholarly and analytical skills in a book that is original from start to finish.

Illustrations ix

Preface xi

Chapter 1: Accent Marks: Writing and Pronouncing Jewish America 1

Pronouncing America, Writing Jewish: Abraham Cahan, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud

Chapter 2: "I like to shpeak plain, shee? Dot'sh a kin' a man I am!" 32

Speech, Dialect, and Realism: Abraham Cahan

Chapter 3: "I learned at least to think in English without an accent" 52

Linguistic Passing: Mary Antin

Chapter 4: "Christ it's a Kid!"--Chad Godya. 76

Jewish Writing and Modernism: Henry Roth

Chapter 5: "Here I am!"--Hineni 100

Partial and Partisan Translations: Saul Bellow

Chapter 6: "Aloud she uttered it."-- --Hashem 127

Pronouncing the Sacred: Cynthia Ozick

Chapter 7: Sounding Letters 149

"And a river went out of Eden"--Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman

"Magnified and Sanctified"--The Kaddish as First and Last Words

Notes 177

Works Cited 203

Index 215