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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.

Looking back after seventy-seven years, readers find the most haunting passage in The Grapes of Wrath to be Tom Joad's famous farewell to his mother, the “I'll be there” passage. Although Leslie Fiedler dismissed it as “fashionable left-wing soapbox rhetoric,” he misses the point. The death of the socialist dream conjures a ghost, and a ghost, by definition, “never dies, it remains always to come and to come back.” A specter is haunting The Grapes of Wrath—the specter of Tom Joad.

Taking as its point of departure Irving Howe’s much maligned prediction of the inevitable demise of Jewish American literature after his own celebrated generation, this essay asks us to not to disprove Howe by looking forward to the current crop of talented writers, as has been the tendency in Jewish American literary criticism, but rather to look back to establish the literary tradition that Howe constructed and eulogized. The essay identifies two competing narratives of Jewish American writing--the long one identified by historians and some literary critics that goes back to the earliest waves of Jewish immigration to America, and the short one identified by Howe’s cohort, a narrative that begins (and ends) with this cohort and reflects their resistance to being identified as members of a conformist Jewish American community whose sensibilities they rejected. The essay thus questions the dominant narrative of Jewish American literary history that was given force by the power of Howe’s, Alfred Kazin’s, and Leslie Fiedler’s landmark works.

InThe Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces \"compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction. Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic \"history in the second half of the twentieth \"century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.

The literary critic [Leslie Aaron Fiedler], who has died from Parkinson's disease and cancer aged 85, once described himself as \"an urban American Jew, who came of age intellectually during the depression; who discovered Europe for the imagination before America: who was influenced by Marxist ideas, communist and Trotskyist; who wanted desperately to feel that the struggle for revolutionary politics and the highest literary standards was a single struggle (but who had more and more trouble believing it as the years wore on); whose political certainty unravelled during the second world war.\" Yet Fiedler was also the Jew in academe, a none too common sight until Lionel Trilling wedged his liberal foot in the door, and Jewishness, and its relation to American culture, would be a continuing concern. Indeed, having surfed the wave of Jewish cultural prominence, Fiedler later came to accuse himself, in Fiedler On The Roof (1991), of becoming a kind of licensed performer. Somewhere, there was a risk of particularities, religious or historic, being dropped into the American blender and sold back to Jews now embraced because they no longer seemed particularly Jewish. The old Jewish aim and fear of assimilation was being realised in what was simul-taneously a triumph and a defeat. Fiedler was concerned with this in 1965, and still concerned in 1991

Other books by Dr. Fiedler include \"No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature\" (1960); \"Pull Down Thy Vanity and Other Stories\" (1962); \"The Second Stone\" (1963), a novel; \"Waiting for the End\" (1964); \"The Last Jew in America\" (1966); \"The Return of the Vanishing American\" (1968); \"Nude Croquet: The Stories of Leslie A. Fiedler\" (1969); \"The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler\" and \"The Stranger in Shakespeare\" (both l972); \"A Fiedler Reader\" (1977); \"Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self\" (1978); \"What Was Literature?\" (1982); \"Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity\" (l99l); and \"Tyranny of the Normal\" (l996). The son of Jacob J. Fiedler and Lillian (Rosenstrauch) Fiedler, Leslie Aaron Fiedler was born in Newark, N.J. A habitue of the Newark Public Library, he read Thoreau at 12 and Marx at 13. He was almost arrested for a Trotskyite soapbox address he delivered as a teenager in 1933. Dr. Fiedler's politics were perhaps best classified as radically contrarian, however. He earned the enmity of many fellow New York intellectuals when he defended the criminal convictions of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s.

Witholt talks about Leslie Fiedler, a prominent and outspoken figure in literary studies in the year 1948 to 1980. Fiedler who published hundreds of essays, novels, and short stories, began his career with a conscious break after World War II and was an early advocate for myth readings and discovered archetypes where none bothered to look. Witholt states that Fiedler who died in 2003 was considered as a 'literary provocateur' and as one of the most prestigious contemporary American intellectuals in 1972.