In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked my first go round with Proust.
A few years ago, I read Ruth Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon. I went on to read several of her other books, including the engaging memoir, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation. (I’m a daily reader of Tablet Magazine and recently found 36 short profiles of people worth paying attention to, one of whom is Professor Wisse).
I still have a long way to go before engaging many of the prose works Professor Wisse esteems.
Yes, I did read the Saul Bellow on her list, Mr Sammler’s Planet. Going back over it, the following passage has been on my mind: “When they begin to call for blood, and advocate terror, or proclaim a general egg- breaking to make a great historical omelet, do they know what they are calling for? When they have struck a mirror with a hammer, aiming to repair it, can they put the fragments together again? ?”
Not yet to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry; recently, however, I did read his 1920 Diary : “My first requisition—a notebook. The synagogue caretaker Menashe accompanies me. I eat at Mudrik’s, same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their bewilderment, they expected the Soviet regime to liberate them, and suddenly there were shrieks, whips cracking, shouts of ‘dirty Yid.’”
No to Sholem Asch’s novel Three Cities but yes to his novel, The Nazarene, which provoked much ire at its author when it was published: “I was petrified with astonishment. I had never seen the like: a chaver, a learned communion of the learned, and a Rabbi to boot, seating himself among miserable drivers, tax collectors, half-heathens, men-of-the-earth, who are accounted utterly impure. Here he was, not only conversing with them, but drinking with them, as though they were members of one companionship of the wise, the knowers of the law.”
Yes to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, but I preferred Operation Shylock, which I’ve read three times.
No to Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous but yes to three volumes of his brother Aharon’s poems translated into English.
Yes to only part of Cynthia Ozick’s,“The Pagan Rabbi” and Other Stories, to wit, Yiddish, Or, Envy in America: “And to speak for Jews isn’t to speak for humanity? We’re not human? We’re not present on the face of the earth? We don’t suffer? In Russia they let us live? In Egypt they don’t want to murder us?”
No to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray, 1935) but I’ve read seven other novels by him, favoring Meshugah and Shadows on the Hudson.
Yes to Franz Kafka’s The Trial though Marthe Robert’s As Lonely as Franz Kafka had me much more engaged, for instance, the following: “The Jewish element [at Olga Studl’s pension at Schelesen, where Kafka went for his health in 1919] is a young woman, only, it is to be hoped, slightly ill. A common and yet astounding phenomenon. Not Jewish and yet not not-Jewish, not German and yet not not-German… possesses an inexhaustible and nonstop store of the brashest Yiddish expressions …”
Not yet read (but soon) Jacob Glatstein, The Glatstein Chronicles and yes to Richard J. Fein’s Selected Poems and Barnett Zumoff’s I Keep Recalling:The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein.
Yes, with cheerful gratitude, for Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin.
Yes to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, as well as every other work of his that has been translated by Robert Chandler.
Earlier this year I found the following from S. Y. Agnon in Peter Cole’s impressive Hebrew Writers on Writing— a work which adds many more titles to my ever-expanding lists--“Of the making of books there is no end. And if there’s no end to the making of books, all the more so with stories about them, for there is not a single book in the world, not even the smallest pamphlet, that doesn’t have its story—how many adventures its author, and the book itself, underwent in its making, and if we try to account for it all, we are not able.”
