Modernity is a condition that admits all peoples regardless of whether they or anyone else around them seeks to place them in it. The actual Jews who immigrated from the Pale of Settlement to the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s were inadvertent time-travelers. In Sharon Oster’s reading of American realist literature, on the other hand, what Jewish immigrants symbolized matters more than who they were. In No Place in Time, fictive and poetic depictions of Jews from this period (by both Jewish and gentile authors) comprise a “synecdochic pattern” that forms an “assemblage of images” (2), and the meanings that attach to this pattern and these images suggest that the time travel was neither incidental nor contingent. Rather, these figures of Jews offered all Americans something that they needed: “redemptive cultural value” (2–3), or a path forward into an urbanizing future.
Oster’s thesis is fairly complicated...
