Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Comedy of Endurance Sholem Aleichem 2. The Logic of Language and the Trials of the Jews Franz Kafka and Yosef Haim Brenner 3. Literature of the Russian Revolution From Isaac Babel to Vasily Grossman 4. Between the Wars The Singer Family of Warsaw 5. A Farewell to Poland Jacob Glatstein and S. Y. Agnon 6. Shoah, Khurbn, Holocaust Testimonies in Native and Adopted Tongues 7. The Zionist Fate in English Hands From George Eliot to A. M. Klein 8. The Immigrant Phase American Jewish Fiction from 1900 to 1950 9. Writing Beyond Alienation Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth 10. A Chapter in the Making Israeli Literature Author's Postscript Notes Suggested Reading from the Modern Jewish Canon Index

Preface

In the late 1960s, during a period of general expansion in higher education, I won permission to introduce courses on Yiddish language and literature at McGill University, where I was then teaching sections of the English literature survey. A decade earlier, when I was an undergraduate at McGill, not a single course in any department ... read full excerpt from: THE MODERN JEWISH CANON: A JOURNEY THROUGH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE ebook