In his recent Hebrew book, Here Dwells the Jewish People, the Israeli literary critic Avraham Novershtern presents a comprehensive theory of American Yiddish literature in all its variety, focusing on its “coherence” and “complexity.” David Roskies writes in his review:
By shleymut (coherence), Novershtern means that Yiddish literature and culture is a world unto itself. Novershtern emphatically rejects a comparative approach, which examines Yiddish within the multiethnic or multilingual expanse of American literary culture writ large. These comparative approaches . . . have yet to shed new light on any linguistic corpus in particular, and merely confirm what we already know about the fate of all immigrant literatures on American soil. Novershtern instead marshals impressive evidence that American Yiddish cultural production cannot be studied in isolation from its other two major centers, Poland and the USSR. . . . As a cultural artifact created by and for immigrants, the give-and-take between Old World and New would prove to be the most permanent and productive vein of American-Yiddish literature.
[Novershtern’s other interpretive category], murkavut (complexity), means that the needs and aspirations of both producers and consumers of this culture were contradictory and dynamic. The relationship between Old World and New was fiercely oedipal, exploitative, and competitive. For every paean to America there are a dozen counterexamples. For every expression of nostalgia for the Jewish past there is an expression of rebellion and rejection. When closely examined, the very phrase, “here dwells the Jewish people,” taken from a poem by H. Leivick, bespeaks the love-hate relationship of the poet toward the Yiddish-speaking masses. The poet is both insider and outsider; looking with a critical eye at “the inner workings of Jewish existence,” he stands at a visible remove therefrom, “even though, fundamentally, he ought to be considered flesh of its flesh.” The poet’s cognitive map of the American-Yiddish polity, moreover, so clearly inspired by [New York’s] Lower East Side, owes far more to the remembered past than it does to the lived present.
Read more on In geveb: https://ingeveb.org/articles/review-here-dwells-the-jewish-people