THE MODERN JEWISH CANON

Wisse (If I Am Not for Myself, 1992) seeks to define a modern canon of works—in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German, Polish, Italian, and English—through which Jews have expressed their sense of who they are and what they have come to be in the years since the monopoly of their sacred literature was broken during the Enlightenment.

The phrase “Jewish canon” immediately suggests Torah in its fullest sense—the sacred book par excellence and the great corpus of exegesis and commentary that have grown up around it over two millennia and have been through most of that time the center of Jewish education and the source of Jewish identity. After an introduction that discusses the notion of canon, Wisse’s ten chapters consider examples of “canonical” Jewish fiction from the Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem to the Hebrew literature of modern Israel. She writes incisively about a representative work of each writer and manages to sustain a sense of dialogue among the works she examines in each chapter; even readers familiar with all of the writers discussed will find new insights here. But there are limitations to this approach, as the author herself admits. Her canon is restricted ethnically to Ashkenazi Jews; it is restricted in genre to long works of prose fiction; and some important and interesting writers like Chaim Grade are mentioned only in passing. More fundamentally, Wisse never quite faces the tension between the old Jewish canon and the modern one she has constructed. What is the relationship between the national or cultural reading of Jewishness operative in this canon and the religion of Judaism? The Zionist project seems to function here as the telos of modern Jewish history, as Israel becomes the geographical and spiritual center of Jewry and Hebrew replaces Yiddish as its most widely spoken language. Yet in Shabtai’s novel, with which this study ends, Israeli society seems frozen in anomie and despair. Is it only the pressure of Arab hatred that makes it so?

A worthy effort that suffers from its own cloudy aims.