When it comes to Jewish American literature, not to mention American literature in general, I confess to being a recovering snob. In graduate school my subject was Victorian fiction. With Austen, the Brontës, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot in my stable, I could not see how my friends who were studying American literature could even think about getting in the horse race. When I left English for Hebrew literature, I evinced a similar hauteur regarding the worth of the cultural products of American Jewry. Yes, there may be Henry Roth, Malamud, Bellow, and Philip Roth, but if we’re talking about the Jewishness of Jewish literature, there can be no reasonable comparison to Bialik, Brenner, Agnon, Uri Zvi Greenberg et al., not to mention the Hebrew language in which they wrote. My snobbishness was based on a widespread attitude at the time, which held that, despite its endearing ethnic quirks...
