The late Gerald Shapiro, the author of delightful short stories about midwestern Jewish life collected under the title Bad Jews, once described the world of many American Jewish authors as “saturated with ‘Jewishness’ though not necessarily with Judaism itself.” His observation can be applied to many of the writers Adam Kirsch considers in Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? and Other Essays. Throughout these thoughtful and graceful pieces, Kirsch devotes considerable attention to the diversity and complexity of American Jewish fiction, but his real interest is the interface between literature and religion throughout the Western canon: “…what poetry and religion have in common is that they are both idioms in which we can talk seriously about the things that matter most” … For me, being a Jewish writer involves a consciousness that religion and poetry also have inescapable social, historical, and political dimensions … modern Jewish literature … is generally on uneasy terms with traditional belief and practice.”
Taken as a whole, these essays reveal Kirsch’s focus on a Jewish approach to the world that is pragmatic, emphasizing the quotidian life lived here on earth now, and characterized by a special relationship to texts that originates in Talmud study. He contrasts this mode with a Christian outlook in which, while “[c]ontemporary poetry is not often religious, but … is still intensely, covertly metaphysical … The poet is for the modern world what the prophet and the philosopher were in ancient times: the person who sees into the essence of things, who knows what the world really is and how it should be.”
Some of this tension is inherent in the fundamental theological and philosophical differences between Judaism and Christianity, as well as in their diverging-and-intertwining historical paths. But Kirsch’s point is somewhat obscured by the fact that the Jewish authors he considers write fiction, while his Christians are poets. Kirsch himself is a well-regarded formalist poet and public intellectual whose ten books include two volumes of poetry, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, and Why Trilling Matters, a discussion of the seminal literary critic Lionel Trilling, whose work is now generally forgotten.
Kirsch’s essays reflect a wide-ranging interest in poetry, but whether he is considering the Book of Psalms or contemporary poets such as Kay Ryan, Seamus Heaney, and Christian Wiman, his emphasis on the spiritual is foregrounded. For example, writing about a change in Wiman’s work after the experience of first falling in love and then receiving a cancer diagnosis, Kirsch notes that “[f]leeting moments of grace had always appeared in his [Wiman’s] poetry, but previously his emphasis was on their disappearance, their refusal to stay and last. Now there is a determination to find the truth of the world in grace’s arrival, rather than its departure.” Throughout his discussions of poetry, he demonstrates an appreciation of the English poet Philip Larkin.
Kirsch makes no effort to balance his essays about classical and contemporary poetry with his discussions of Jewish writers; his work reflects a keen appreciation of the diversity of literature and a sharp critical mind. He acknowledges that all Jewish writers are not cut from the same cloth — references range from Herman Wouk, to Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, and Norman Mailer, to Cynthia Oczik, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the Book of Psalms, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher, and Tony Kushner — not to mention the medieval Talmudist Rashi, the Autobiography of the late eighteenth-century author Solomon Maimon, and Moses Mendelssohn, a leading philosopher of the haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment, who “insisted that it was possible to be both a modern thinker and an Orthodox Jew.” Kirsch considers them all Jewish writers, but is troubled by the idea that “there is something problematic about the idea that it is possible to be Jewish in form, in style, in habit and manner of thought, without being actually Jewish in content and subject matter.” Thus, he wonders, “[i]f a mind is trained to study the Talmud, we have no problem calling it a Jewish mind; if a mind is trained to study physics, and it happens to belong to a Jew, is it still a Jewish mind?” He acknowledges that American Jewish identity has turned the Holocaust as “a source of the sacred” and recognizes that the mid-twentieth century “now looks like the golden age of American Jewish letters … This literary moment, with lasted roughly from the 1950s to the 1970s, can be explained by a confluence of two factors. First was the decline of anti-Semitism that followed the Holocaust … Second, and probably more important, was the coming of age of the first native-born generation of American Jews.” But he does not consider the long-term consequences of successful assimilation on Jewish thought.
Because he is so emphatic about the importance of traditional Jewish exegesis to their interpretation, Kirsch tends to overlook the importance of twentieth-century Jewish thought on modernism. For example, although he acknowledges the importance of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who “stood at the center of so many of the major conflicts of Jewish modernity.” he dismisses him as “a Jew…who speaks as one who has inherited the form of that tradition [i.e. tradition Jewish exegesis] without its content.” He is respectful to Benjamin, but ultimately dismissive of the contributions of secular Judaism to modern Jewish literature. For some readers, this disregard will signal more than just narrow tastes.
Although Kirsch provides serious — often profound — discussion of who qualifies as a “Jewish writer” and whether there is such a thing as “Jewish literature,” I was disappointed that he pays no attention to the question of who is a “Jewish reader.” Many assimilated American Jews — even those who serve as communal leaders and regularly attend religious services—have little depth of Jewish education. Throughout my own youthful studies in English literature, I often bemoaned the fact that I could identify Christian archetypes in literature, but could not identify any Jewish content beyond socio-political representations. Some years ago, I took a two-year course formally titled “Meah,” but what I referred to as “remedial Judaism,” in which physicians and attorneys and professors and other well educated secular Jews were introduced to the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and medieval and modern Jewish history. A few years later, while studying German literature in translation, I was thrilled to read a legend collected by the Brothers Grimm in which a king has 12 sons, the youngest of whom is named Benjamin — a story that clearly originated in the Biblical narrative about the patriarch Jacob and his sons.
Kirsch hints at this when he discusses the argument that “a Jew who spent his life analyzing Talmudic debates and a Jew who spent his life analyzing the poems of T.S. Eliot or the novels of Henry James are essentially doing the same thing. Both are engaged in the Jewish activity of interpretation, the discovery of meanings in texts … This is a reassuring idea for an assimilated American Jew, since it seems to make it possible to be authentically Jewish without knowing anything in particular about Judaism.” Kirsch clearly does not agree with this attitude, arguing that “what makes literature Jewish is its decision to engage with Jewish texts and vocabularies … Doing this does not require an extensive knowledge of Jewish tradition … but it does require an instinct for finding the elements in that tradition which can be used, or even misused, in order to communicate a modern truth.” The depth of his own knowledge and the breadth of his reading that comes across in this essay collection clearly positions Kirsch within the tradition of Jewish writers who have made “a place for himself or herself in that ancient lineage.”
[Published by Yale University Press on March 19, 2019, 232 pages, $26.00 hardcover]