Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural historian Ilan Stavans focuses on its multilingual and transnational nature. Stavans presents a wide range of traditions within Jewish literature and the variety of writers who made those traditions possible. Represented are writers as dissimilar as Luis de Carvajal the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Anzia Yezierska, Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Irving Howe, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Amos Oz, Moacyr Scliar, and David Grossman.

The story of Jewish literature spans the globe as well as the centuries, from the marrano poets and memorialists of medieval Spain, to the sprawling Yiddish writing in Ashkenaz (the Pale of Settlement' in Eastern Europe), to the probing narratives of Jewish immigrants to the United States and other parts of the New World. It also examines the accounts of horror during the Holocaust, the work of Israeli authors since the creation of the Jewish State in 1948, and the ingathering of Jewish works in Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, and South Africa at the end of the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic introduction to Jewish literature presents its subject matter as constantly changing and adapting.

"An in-depth, thorough exploration of modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the 21st century, rotating around the concept of "aterritoriality" to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres from 1492 to the present. At the centre of it are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature doesn't have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders"--