Jewish Writers: A Literary Tradition

Session 1 — Welcome & The Tradition

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A tradition older than empires. Jewish literature begins in texts composed thousands of years before most of what we call “classic” Western writing. We orient ourselves in that long arc — from the Hebrew Bible through Yiddish Europe, immigrant America, the literature of witness, and living voices — so that everything we read this term has a place on a single timeline.
2. Witness, instruction, and beauty at once. A defining feature of this tradition is that a single passage can bear record of a people, teach a way of living, and achieve formal beauty simultaneously. We name those three modes early so we can watch them braid together in every later session.
3. Ecclesiastes as a meditation on time and limit. Ecclesiastes 3:1–15 sets human striving against the boundaries of time and mortality. Read as literature rather than doctrine, it becomes a sober, oddly consoling inquiry into how little we control — and what that frees us to accept.
4. Psalm 23 and the work of metaphor. The psalm sustains a single extended image — God as shepherd — across its whole length. We examine what a metaphor gains in comfort and coherence, and what it risks losing, when it carries the entire weight of consolation.
5. Reading scripture as craft. These texts survive partly because of how they are made: parallelism, repetition, rhythm, and compression. Treating them as deliberate literary objects lets us hear choices a writing workshop would recognize today.
6. Establishing our shared method. This course runs on close reading, honest disagreement, and patience with silence. We model those habits now — the habits we will return to for sixteen weeks — so the room belongs to readers, not to lecture.

Reading

• Ecclesiastes 3:1–15 (“To everything there is a season”) — King James Version. Public domain. Bible Gateway
• Psalm 23 — King James Version. Public domain. Bible Gateway
• Handouts will be provided.

Critical Reception

• Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) — Sefaria — the Hebrew text with classical and modern commentary alongside the English, for readers who want to see how the tradition reads itself.
• Wisdom — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — surveys the philosophical idea of wisdom that the wisdom-literature behind Ecclesiastes wrestles with.
• Bible — YIVO Encyclopedia — traces how scripture functioned as a living literary source within Jewish Eastern European culture.

In-Class Practice

Write three or four sentences beginning with “To everything there is a season” — continue the pattern, but use your own “seasons.” Share only if you wish.

Discussion Questions

1. What do you already bring to these texts — memory, faith, skepticism, something else? How does that shape how you read them?
2. Ecclesiastes 3 is often described as a meditation on time and limits. What does the passage say about human control over our own lives?
3. Psalm 23 uses extended metaphor. What is gained — and what might be lost — by describing God as a shepherd?
4. Both texts are thousands of years old and remain in circulation. What does that longevity say about them as literature?
5. What surprises you when you read these texts as literary objects rather than as religious ones?
6. If these passages were submitted to a writing workshop today, what would you say about their use of rhythm and repetition?

Homework

Choose one piece of writing — of any kind, any era — that you find yourself returning to across your life. Bring one sentence from it next week, and be ready to say in two or three sentences why it endures for you.

Session 2 — Sholem Aleichem

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The father of modern Yiddish literature. Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) turned Yiddish storytelling from a regional craft into a world literary form. His Tevye stories — the source of Fiddler on the Roof — gave the shtetl a comic, philosophically rich voice that traveled far beyond its origins.
2. Scripture, quoted and misquoted. Tevye constantly cites holy texts, often mangling or twisting them for comic effect. This habit characterizes him and enacts a deeper claim: that sacred language can be recruited into the struggle of ordinary, unjust life.
3. The dramatic monologue as form. Tevye talks at a nearly silent listener who barely interrupts. We study how that one-sidedness draws us into intimate complicity with him and shapes everything we are allowed to know.
4. Historical pressure beneath the comedy. Yiddish literature arose from a community under poverty, precarity, and antisemitic threat. We locate where that pressure presses up through the comic surface — the moments where the joke is also a wound.
5. Warmth for a complainer. Tevye complains almost without pause, yet we love him. We examine the technical means — voice, address, self-awareness — by which Sholem Aleichem manufactures affection for a difficult man.
6. Humor as a technology of survival. The central tension of the Tevye stories is how comedy holds faith and suffering together without resolving either. We ask whether the humor makes the tragedy more bearable or more devastating.

Reading

• A short Tevye sketch (approximately 12–15 pages). Public domain English translations are available. Free borrow via Internet Archive — Tevye the Dairyman and Railroad Stories. Handout also provided.

Critical Reception

• Sholem Aleichem — YIVO Encyclopedia — authoritative biographical and literary entry on the founding figure of modern Yiddish fiction.
• Sholem Aleichem 100 Years Later — YIVO Institute — curated reflections on his enduring cultural afterlife a century after his death.
• Yiddish Literature — YIVO Encyclopedia — situates the Tevye monologues within the world literature of Yiddish.

In-Class Practice

Write a brief monologue in the voice of someone trying to explain an unfair situation to an imaginary listener — with humor, and with genuine hurt underneath.

Discussion Questions

1. Tevye quotes scripture constantly — often misquoting or twisting it humorously. What is the literary effect of that technique?
2. How does Sholem Aleichem create warmth for a character who complains almost without pause?
3. The Tevye stories are told as monologues — Tevye talks at the narrator, who barely speaks. How does that form shape our relationship to the character?
4. Yiddish literature emerged from a community under enormous external pressure. Where do you feel that pressure inside this story, even when the tone is comic?
5. Does humor make tragedy more bearable in this text, or does it make it more devastating?
6. What does this story say about the relationship between faith and suffering?

Homework

Watch or recall a scene from Fiddler on the Roof (or read a synopsis) and write a short paragraph comparing it to the source sketch: what did the adaptation keep, soften, or invent? Bring it to share.

Session 3 — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The only Yiddish Nobel laureate. Singer (1902–1991) is the sole Yiddish-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Gimpel the Fool” (1945) became a cornerstone of the American short-story canon, a meditation on innocence, cruelty, and faith in a world that may itself be foolish.
2. A translation by one of our own authors. Saul Bellow — himself a later figure in this course — translated “Gimpel” into English. We weigh what it means that one master rendered another, and whether knowing that changes how the prose sounds.
3. Is Gimpel actually a fool? The story’s central provocation is whether Gimpel’s credulity is weakness or a chosen, almost holy stance. We test what changes if we take his worldview entirely seriously rather than pitying it.
4. First-person narration and sympathy. Gimpel tells his own story, which both builds and complicates our trust in him. We examine how the voice earns sympathy and where it quietly asks us to doubt.
5. The supernatural and the ending. “Gimpel” turns on a vision near its close. We study how Singer uses the supernatural without breaking the story’s realism, and what the ending finally claims about belief and deception.
6. A destroyed world inside the tale. Singer wrote in Yiddish about a world that, by 1945, had been largely annihilated. We trace how that historical shadow sits inside a story set before the catastrophe, giving its comedy an elegiac weight.

Reading

• “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright held by the Singer estate; widely anthologized. Free borrow via Internet Archive — Gimpel the Fool.

Critical Reception

• Singer, Isaac Bashevis — YIVO Encyclopedia — definitive scholarly entry on Singer’s life, Yiddish output, and global reception.
• The Intellectual and Mystical Isaac Bashevis Singer — YIVO Institute — a lecture framing Singer as moral thinker and social critic beneath the folktale surface.
• Isaac Bashevis Singer — Library of America — overview of his collected work and his place in American letters.

In-Class Practice

Rewrite the opening two sentences of “Gimpel” in third person. Read both versions aloud. What changes?

Discussion Questions

1. The story’s translator is Saul Bellow — himself one of our later authors. Does knowing that change how you read the prose?
2. Is Gimpel actually a fool? What would it mean to take his worldview seriously?
3. Singer is writing in Yiddish about a world that, by the time of publication, had been largely destroyed by the Holocaust. How does that context sit inside the story?
4. The ending of “Gimpel” turns on a vision. How does Singer use the supernatural here, and to what effect?
5. What does this story say about the relationship between belief and deception?
6. How does Singer’s use of first-person narration create — or complicate — our sympathy for Gimpel?

Homework

Write a short paragraph (half a page) about a time when being “naive” — believing something others found foolish — turned out to be right. Bring it to share if you wish.

Session 4 — Anzia Yezierska

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A voice from the tenements. Yezierska (c. 1880–1970) came from a Polish shtetl to New York as a child and became one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Jewish immigrant experience in American fiction. Her stories burn with hunger — for education, beauty, and a place in a country that kept promising and withholding.
2. The “wrong” word as craft. The title says beautifulness, not beauty. We listen to what that slightly off, immigrant-inflected word does to the ear, and why Yezierska might have wanted exactly that friction.
3. Space as emotion. The apartment, the whitewashed walls, the landlord’s power — physical space carries the story’s feeling and its moral stakes. We trace how Yezierska builds emotion architecturally rather than through statement.
4. Punished for improving something. The plot turns on a woman who makes something beautiful and is destroyed for it. We examine how Yezierska frames the dangerous closeness between ambition and vulnerability for those without power.
5. The broken promise of America. The story dramatizes the gap between America’s promise and the immigrant’s reality. We ask what the country offered, what it withheld, and how the prose holds both at once.
6. Excess as the point. Yezierska’s prose is often called overheated. We weigh whether that passionate excess is a flaw to forgive or the very engine of her art — a style matched to a life lived at high pressure.

Reading

• “The Lost ‘Beautifulness’” from Hungry Hearts (1920) by Anzia Yezierska. Public domain. Project Gutenberg
• Handout provided.

Critical Reception

• Anzia Yezierska — Jewish Women’s Archive — scholarly entry on how she turned tenement hardship into fiction of literal and metaphoric hunger.
• Yiddish Literature — YIVO Encyclopedia — background on the Eastern European storytelling culture Yezierska carried into English.
• Becoming American — Library of America Story of the Week — context on Yezierska’s place in the American immigrant-fiction tradition.

In-Class Practice

Describe a physical space — a room, a street corner, a hallway — that carries a strong emotional memory for you. Four to six sentences.

Discussion Questions

1. The title uses the word “beautifulness” rather than “beauty.” What does that slightly wrong word do to your ear — and why might Yezierska have chosen it?
2. How does Yezierska use physical space — the apartment, the whitewashed walls — to carry the story’s emotional weight?
3. This story is about a woman who improves something and is punished for it. How does Yezierska frame the relationship between ambition and vulnerability?
4. What does this story say about the gap between the promise of America and the reality of immigrant life?
5. Yezierska’s prose is often described as passionate to the point of excess. Do you read that quality as a flaw or as the point?
6. Compare the protagonist’s hunger with Gimpel’s acceptance. What different survival strategies do these two characters employ?

Homework

Write half a page on something America (or any institution) promised but did not deliver — to you, to someone you know, or to a community you’re aware of. Bring it to share.

Session 5 — Emma Lazarus

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Larger than fourteen lines. Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) is remembered for the closing lines of “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. We meet the far larger writer behind them — a lyric poet, dramatist, essayist, translator, and early Zionist of astonishing range.
2. The sonnet as argument. “The New Colossus” is a sonnet, and its meaning lives in its form. We study how the turn between octave and sestet lets Lazarus pivot from the old world’s “brazen giant” to the new world’s “Mother of Exiles,” making a political argument through structure.
3. The statue’s ventriloquized voice. Lazarus gives the Statue of Liberty speech. We examine what that act of ventriloquism gains — how putting words in a monument’s mouth turns a piece of public sculpture into a moral claim.
4. Catastrophe and discovery in “1492.” The poem yokes two events of one year: the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Columbus’s voyage. We read it for what it says about how ruin and possibility can share a single date.
5. Grief and defiance in “In Exile.” Written in response to Russian pogroms, “In Exile” balances mourning with a stubborn, forward-looking defiance. We trace how Lazarus keeps both notes sounding at once.
6. Nineteenth-century poems, twenty-first-century city. These poems of displacement were written long ago, yet they have become newly political. We ask how they read now, in Philadelphia, and whether their public life helps or hinders us as readers.

Reading

• “The New Colossus” (1883). Public domain. Poetry Foundation
• “1492” (1883). Public domain. Poetry Foundation
• “In Exile” (1882). Public domain. Poetry Foundation
• Handouts provided.

Critical Reception

• Emma Lazarus — Jewish Women’s Archive — argues she essentially created the role of the American Jewish writer.
• Emma Lazarus — Poetry Foundation — biographical and critical overview with a selection of her poems.
• Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems — Library of America — the authoritative edition restoring her full range beyond “The New Colossus.”

In-Class Practice

Write a short poem — it need not rhyme — that gives a voice to an object or a landmark. (A park bench. A bridge. A building.) Let the object speak about who it has seen.

Discussion Questions

1. “The New Colossus” is a sonnet. How does Lazarus use the form — particularly the turn between octave and sestet — to make her argument?
2. The poem speaks in the voice of the Statue of Liberty. What is gained by that ventriloquism?
3. “1492” deals with two events in the same year: the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Columbus’s voyage. What does the poem say about the relationship between catastrophe and discovery?
4. “In Exile” was written in response to pogroms in Russia. How does Lazarus balance grief and defiance?
5. Lazarus died at thirty-eight. Does that brevity change how you read her work?
6. These poems were written in the nineteenth century about the experience of displacement. How do they read in Philadelphia in the twenty-first?

Homework

“The New Colossus” is now political. Write a short reflection (half a page) on whether that public, political life makes it harder or easier to read as a poem — and bring an example of another poem that has become political.

Session 6 — Franz Kafka

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A central writer of the modern century. Kafka (1883–1924) wrote in German in Prague and became one of the most influential fiction writers of the twentieth century. Today’s two pieces — the parable “Before the Law” and the story “A Hunger Artist” — concern waiting, desire, and the inescapable logic of systems.
2. The parable that resists decoding. “Before the Law” has been read as a fable about religion, bureaucracy, colonialism, and the psyche. We treat its refusal to settle into one meaning as the point: a parable’s power lies in its openness.
3. The reader’s impulse to intervene. The man waits before the door his whole life. We attend to the moment we want to shout at him, because that impulse reveals what the parable is doing to us, not only to him.
4. Suffering as a talent. In “A Hunger Artist,” the artist’s gift is the capacity to suffer publicly. We use this conceit to think about art, audience, and the strange economy of recognition that consumes the performer.
5. The dark comedy. Kafka is famously bleak and famously funny at the same time. We locate where the humor actually lives in these texts and what it accomplishes — relief, complicity, or a deeper unease.
6. The manuscripts that should have burned. Kafka asked Max Brod to destroy his work; Brod refused, and we read the result. We consider how reading writing its own author tried to erase colors our sense of authority, intention, and chance.

Reading

• “Before the Law” (1915). Public domain. Multiple English translations available; handout provided. Wikisource
• “A Hunger Artist” (1922). Public domain. Project Gutenberg
• Handouts provided.

Critical Reception

• Existentialism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — frames the questions of freedom, absurdity, and inescapable systems that Kafka’s parables dramatize.
• Franz Kafka — Poetry Foundation — concise critical biography of Kafka’s life and influence.
• Death and the Afterlife — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — philosophical context for the waiting, finitude, and meaning that haunt both stories.

In-Class Practice

Write a very short parable — half a page — that begins: “There was once a person who stood before a door.” Do not explain what the door means.

Discussion Questions

1. “Before the Law” is three pages long and has been interpreted as a parable about religion, bureaucracy, colonialism, and the human psyche. Which reading felt most alive to you — and why?
2. The man at the door waits his entire life. At what point in the story did you want to shout at him? What does that impulse tell you?
3. In “A Hunger Artist,” the artist’s talent is the ability to suffer publicly. How does Kafka use this conceit to talk about art and about audience?
4. Both stories end in a kind of defeat — or do they? What would a redemptive reading of each story look like?
5. Kafka is often described as “darkly comic.” Where did you find the humor today?
6. Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Brod refused, and we are reading the results. How does that biographical fact color your experience of the work?

Homework

Recall a time you waited for something — permission, recognition, an answer — that never came. Write half a page describing what the waiting did to you, in Kafka’s mode of plain, patient detail. Bring it to share.

Session 7 — Bruno Schulz

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A great original, cut short. Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer and visual artist who published two slim collections before a Gestapo officer shot him in the street in 1942. From a small Polish town he made a body of work as strange and complete as any in European literature.
2. Hallucinatory prose. Schulz’s sentences stretch, balloon, and circle back, transforming the ordinary into the mythological. We attend to the experience of reading prose this dense — whether it registers as pleasure, as labor, or as both at once.
3. The shape-shifting father. The father figure recurs across the stories — talking to birds, becoming insects, dissolving into matter. We ask what Schulz accomplishes by letting a man continually transform, and how that mythologizes the domestic.
4. Time that does not advance. Schulz’s fictional world seems to swell and repeat rather than move forward. We examine his treatment of time and what it does to our sense of plot, memory, and mortality.
5. Roots in Jewish storytelling. Beneath the modernism lie midrash, parable, and the magical — deep currents of Jewish narrative. We trace where those roots surface in his transformations of a shop, a market, a season.
6. Kafka or Proust? Schulz is compared to Kafka for his strangeness and to Proust for his sensuous memory. We let today’s reading test which lineage fits — and what it means to write in the shadow of one’s own erasure.

Reading

• One or two pieces from The Street of Crocodiles (1934). Copyright. Suggested pieces: “August” and/or “Cinnamon Shops” (Wieniewska translation). Free borrow via Internet Archive.

Critical Reception

• Schulz, Bruno — YIVO Encyclopedia — authoritative entry calling him one of the greatest Polish writers of the twentieth century.
• The Many Realities of Bruno Schulz — YIVO Institute — talk on Schulz as visionary writer and painter and the mystery of his lost work.
• Polish Literature — YIVO Encyclopedia — context on the Polish-Jewish literary world in which Schulz wrote and was murdered.

In-Class Practice

Describe a room from your childhood, but distort one element — make something too large, too bright, too alive. Four to six sentences.

Discussion Questions

1. Schulz’s prose is almost hallucinatory — sentences stretch and balloon and circle back. How do you experience reading prose like this? Does it feel like pleasure, or work, or both?
2. His father is the central figure in many of these stories — a man who talks to birds, who becomes insects, who dissolves into matter. What is Schulz doing with this transformation?
3. How does Schulz treat time? Does his fictional world feel like a place that moves forward?
4. Knowing that Schulz and his entire community were murdered, how does that knowledge change the way you read his descriptions of ordinary life?
5. Where do you see the influence of Jewish storytelling tradition — midrash, parable, the magical — in his fiction?
6. Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, sometimes to Proust. Based on today’s reading, which comparison feels more accurate to you?

Homework

Write a half-page portrait of a person from your past whose personality was so strong it seemed to remake the world around them. Borrow one Schulz-like exaggeration. Bring it to share.

Session 8 — Primo Levi

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A session held with care. Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian-Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz. If This Is a Man (1947) is a foundational work of witness literature, and we read it slowly, with full attention and no rush — its weight is part of its meaning.
2. The chemist’s precision. Levi was a scientist before he was a writer, and his prose is exact, observational, and restrained. We examine how that clinical precision, far from cooling the material, makes the testimony more devastating.
3. “Shema” as command. The poem — its title means “hear” or “listen” — directly addresses the reader and serves as the book’s epigraph. We ask what Levi demands of us, and why he frames remembrance as an obligation rather than a request.
4. Describing versus bearing witness. There is a difference between recounting atrocity and testifying to it. We locate the moments where Levi crosses from description into witness, and what gives his words moral authority.
5. A world with its categories destroyed. Levi narrates a place engineered to abolish kindness, fairness, and logic. We study how his measured narrative responds to that deliberate destruction of the human without surrendering to it.
6. The reader’s obligation. This literature is often called “testimony.” We define the word and ask what specific duties it places on us as readers — what it means to receive a witness’s account responsibly.

Reading

• Short excerpt from If This Is a Man / Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. Free borrow via Internet Archive (Stuart Woolf translation).
• “Shema” by Primo Levi. Poetry Foundation.

Critical Reception

• Shema — Poetry Foundation — the poem with framing notes on its role as the book’s epigraph and direct address.
• The Concept of Evil — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — philosophical grounding for the moral questions Levi’s testimony forces open.
• Holocaust — YIVO Encyclopedia — historical context for the events Levi survived and recorded.

In-Class Practice

Write a short paragraph about something you witnessed — something small, even — using only what you observed. No interpretation. No feeling stated. Only what happened.

Discussion Questions

1. Levi was a chemist before he was a writer. How does his scientific precision shape the prose in the excerpt?
2. “Shema” (the word means “hear” or “listen”) is a direct address to the reader. What does Levi demand of us?
3. Levi writes about the camp with controlled, almost clinical language. Does restraint make this writing more or less powerful than expressionistic rage would be?
4. What is the difference between describing atrocity and bearing witness to it? How does Levi achieve the latter?
5. Levi describes a world in which ordinary human categories — kindness, fairness, logic — have been deliberately destroyed. How does his narrative respond to that destruction?
6. This literature is sometimes called “testimony.” What obligations does a reader have when reading testimony?

Homework

Reflect in half a page: is it possible to write about the Shoah without diminishing it? What would “diminishing” it look like? Bring your reflection — we will open next week’s discussion from these.

A note: we will close this session with a brief moment of silence before the final reading.

Session 9 — Paul Celan

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Writing in the murderers’ language. Paul Celan (1920–1970) survived the Holocaust while his parents were killed in a Romanian camp. He chose to write in German — the language of those who murdered his family — a decision he made consciously and in anguish, and which shapes everything he wrote.
2. The fugue as form. “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”) borrows the repeating, overlapping structure of a musical fugue. We study how that formal choice carries unbearable content, turning repetition into both incantation and inescapability.
3. “Black milk of daybreak.” The poem’s most famous line is a paradox and an image at once. We read it across several passes, watching what it does to us on first encounter and what deepens on the third.
4. The compression of the late work. Celan’s later poems grow fractured, nearly impossible to paraphrase. We ask whether that resistance to paraphrase is a failure of communication or a hard-won achievement — language at the edge of what it can hold.
5. Celan beside Levi. Two survivors, two strategies: Levi’s measured Italian prose, Celan’s shattered German verse. We compare their approaches to witness and the different demands each makes on a reader.
6. The poet’s life and death. Celan died by suicide in 1970, at fifty. We weigh, carefully, how and whether biographical knowledge should change the way we read a poem — and the risks of letting it.

Reading

• “Death Fugue” / “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan. Multiple English translations available. Check Poetry Foundation for John Felstiner’s translation: Poetry Foundation
• One or two short late poems. Free borrow via Internet Archive — Poems of Paul Celan (Hamburger translation).

Critical Reception

• Paul Celan — Poetry Foundation — critical biography of Celan and the agony of writing poetry after the Shoah.
• Death Fugue — Poetry Foundation — Felstiner’s landmark translation with contextual notes.
• The Concept of Evil — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — philosophical frame for the moral abyss Celan’s imagery confronts.

In-Class Practice

Take a single line from “Death Fugue” — any line — and write a half-page response to it. Not an analysis. A response. What does it make you feel, remember, imagine?

Discussion Questions

1. “Death Fugue” is written in the form of a musical fugue — a repeating, overlapping structure. How does the formal choice carry meaning in a poem about the Holocaust?
2. The poem’s most famous line — “black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening” — is a paradox and an image. What does it do to you the first time you read it, and what does it do on the third reading?
3. Writing in German after the Holocaust — writing at all after the Holocaust — was a choice Celan made consciously and agonizingly. What does that choice mean?
4. Celan’s late poems are nearly impossible to paraphrase. Is that a failure of poetry or a success?
5. How does Celan’s work compare, in approach and effect, to Levi’s? (Both survived. Both wrote. One in Italian prose, one in German verse.)
6. Celan died by suicide in 1970, at fifty. How, if at all, should biographical knowledge change how we read a poem?

Homework

Bring a poem you know — or want to know — by heart, in any language. Write two or three sentences on why that poem and not another. Be ready to read or recite a few lines.

Session 10 — Bernard Malamud

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A master of the American short story. Malamud (1914–1986) is among the finest American short-story writers of the twentieth century, and “The Magic Barrel” (1958) is his masterpiece in the form. After the weight of Sessions 8 and 9, he returns us to the richness of American Jewish life — with magic, irony, and a deeply human plot.
2. Where the magic enters. The story is at once a realistic Lower East Side and a subtly enchanted place. We pinpoint exactly where the magic slips in and how Malamud keeps it credible rather than whimsical.
3. Finkle’s crisis of faith. Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student, undergoes a mid-story collapse of belief. We trace what causes it and debate whether his revelation is psychologically and morally convincing.
4. Salzman beyond comedy. The matchmaker Salzman is one of the great comic figures in American fiction. We examine how Malamud keeps him from flattening into mere comic relief and lets him carry the story’s mystery.
5. The famous ambiguous ending. “The Magic Barrel” closes on an image that readers have argued over for decades. We confront the ambiguity directly and ask what each reading of the ending costs and reveals.
6. “All men are Jews.” Saturated with Jewish cultural and religious reference, the story prompts Malamud’s own claim that “all men are Jews.” We ask what he meant, whether the context is a barrier or an invitation for fresh readers, and whether we agree.

Reading

• “The Magic Barrel” by Bernard Malamud. Copyright. Free borrow via Internet Archive — The Magic Barrel.

Critical Reception

• Bernard Malamud — Library of America — overview of the collected novels and stories and Malamud’s moral imagination.
• The Novels & Stories of Bernard Malamud — Library of America — the definitive three-volume edition with editorial context.
• Personal Identity — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — frames the questions of self and transformation that Finkle’s crisis raises.

In-Class Practice

Write the opening of a story in which someone is looking for something — a person, an object, a feeling — through an intermediary who may or may not be trustworthy.

Discussion Questions

1. Malamud creates a world that is both realistically Lower East Side and subtly magical. Where exactly does the magic enter — and how does Malamud keep it credible?
2. Leo Finkle, the rabbinical student, undergoes a crisis of faith mid-story. What causes it? Is his revelation credible?
3. The matchmaker Salzman is one of the great comic figures in American fiction. How does Malamud keep him from being merely a comic figure?
4. The ending of “The Magic Barrel” is famously ambiguous. What do you think happens?
5. This story is saturated with Jewish cultural and religious reference. How much does that context matter for a reader coming to it fresh?
6. Malamud said, “All men are Jews.” What did he mean, and do you agree?

Homework

Write half a page about a time you found something — or someone — through a strange or circuitous route you would never have planned. Bring it to share if you wish.

Session 11 — Saul Bellow

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The novelist who enlarged the form. Bellow (1915–2005) won the Nobel Prize and three National Book Awards, bringing intellectual ambition, philosophical restlessness, and the pressure of the Jewish immigrant experience into the mainstream of English-language fiction.
2. The Bellow sentence. His sentences are long, observation-laden, and constantly digressing into philosophy — the sound of a mind working at full speed. We examine that style as both an experience to undergo and a deliberate method.
3. Sympathetic failure. Tommy Wilhelm, of Seize the Day, is a man in free fall. We study how Bellow makes failure not pathetic but sympathetic, even dignified, and what that does to our judgment of him.
4. A single day’s compression. The novel unfolds across one day. We consider how that tight time frame intensifies pressure and forces a lifetime of reckoning into a few hours.
5. Jewishness as style. Bellow’s cultural anxiety, intellectual energy, and diasporic restlessness surface not only in subject but in the very texture of his prose. We trace how identity becomes sentence-level music.
6. Reading Bellow now. Bellow was criticized for his portrayals of women and a certain grandiosity of male self-pity. We read him historically and critically, asking how he lands today versus in 1956 — and what he adds to the tradition we are building.

Reading

• Opening section of Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow. Free borrow via Internet Archive.
• Optional: Short essay by Bellow (instructor will suggest a specific title at Session 10).

Critical Reception

• Saul Bellow — Library of America — overview of the collected novels and Bellow’s reshaping of American fiction.
• Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964 — Library of America — the authoritative volume containing Seize the Day with editorial notes.
• Saul Bellow — Poetry Foundation — concise critical biography placing him in the American canon.

In-Class Practice

Write a paragraph in which a character walks through a familiar space and thinks three or four different thoughts at once. Use semicolons liberally.

Discussion Questions

1. Bellow’s sentences are long, loaded with observation, and constantly digressing into philosophy. What is the experience of reading prose like this?
2. Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Seize the Day, is a man in free fall. In what ways does Bellow make failure sympathetic?
3. The novel takes place in a single day. How does Bellow use compression of time?
4. How does Bellow’s Jewishness — the cultural anxiety, the intellectual energy, the diasporic restlessness — manifest in his prose style?
5. Bellow was criticized for his portrayals of women, and for a certain grandiosity of male self-pity. Does reading him today feel different from how it might have in 1956?
6. What does Bellow add to the tradition we’ve been building across this course?

Homework

Write half a page on what “seizing the day” actually requires — and whether you have ever done it, and when. Bring it to share if you wish.

Session 12 — Philip Roth

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Celebrated and controversial. Roth (1933–2018) was among the most acclaimed and most argued-over American novelists of his generation. His essay “Writing American Fiction” (1961) is a landmark attempt to describe what mid-century American absurdity demands of the novelist.
2. Reality outrunning the novelist. Roth’s essay argues that American reality has become so outrageous that fiction can barely keep up. We test that claim against our own moment and ask whether it has grown truer or quainter.
3. Class, desire, and Goodbye, Columbus. The novella opens with immediate, socially specific desire. We examine how Roth uses class tension to complicate what begins as a love story, turning attraction into a study of American striving.
4. Satire versus betrayal. Some Jewish readers accused Roth of betraying his community in his portrayals. We draw the difficult line between satirizing a group and betraying it, and ask where Roth falls.
5. Roth’s irony in the tradition. Roth’s irony has deep roots. We compare it to Sholem Aleichem’s and Singer’s earlier in the course, asking what Jewish literary irony does and how Roth raises its pitch.
6. What fiction is for. The essay reveals Roth’s convictions about the purpose of fiction. We connect those to his startling 2012 retirement — a writer who stopped — and ask what that silence tells us.

Reading

• “Writing American Fiction” (1961) by Philip Roth. Free borrow via Internet Archive — Reading Myself and Others.
• Opening of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) by Philip Roth. Free borrow via Internet Archive.

Critical Reception

• Philip Roth — Library of America — overview of the nine-volume edition and Roth’s central place in postwar fiction.
• Philip Roth: Novels & Stories 1959–1962 — Library of America — the volume containing Goodbye, Columbus with editorial context.
• Philip Roth — Poetry Foundation — concise biographical and critical profile.

In-Class Practice

Write a short paragraph describing a social situation — a party, a family dinner, a neighborhood event — with as much comic precision as you can. Let the writing be slightly uncomfortable.

Discussion Questions

1. In “Writing American Fiction,” Roth argues that reality in America has become so outrageous that the novelist can barely keep up. Does that argument feel true to you today?
2. Goodbye, Columbus begins with desire — immediate, social, specifically American. How does Roth use class tension to complicate what starts as a love story?
3. Roth was sharply criticized by some Jewish readers for his portrayals of Jewish characters. What is the difference between satirizing a community and betraying it?
4. How does Roth’s use of irony compare to the irony we’ve seen in Sholem Aleichem or Singer?
5. What does the essay tell you about what Roth thinks fiction is for?
6. Roth announced his retirement from fiction in 2012 and lived another six years without writing. What do you make of that choice?

Homework

Recall a piece of writing that made you laugh and then feel slightly ashamed of laughing. Write half a page describing it and the discomfort. Bring it to share.

Session 13 — Cynthia Ozick

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A rigorous moral imagination. Ozick (b. 1928) is among the most morally serious writers in contemporary American literature. “The Shawl” (1980), only four pages long, achieves through compression what other works reach across hundreds — a Holocaust narrative that must be read more than once to be received.
2. Density in four pages. We examine how Ozick packs such overwhelming meaning into so small a space, and what she leaves out so that what remains can carry maximum weight.
3. Symbol and object at once. The shawl is both a charged symbol and a literal, functioning object in the story. We study how Ozick holds both registers simultaneously without letting either collapse into the other.
4. A third approach to the Shoah. This is our third Holocaust text. We set Ozick beside Levi’s testimony and Celan’s verse, asking what her fiction can do that prose memoir and lyric poem cannot.
5. The close-third-person distance. The story is told in close third person — intimate, but not first-person confession. We ask what that narrow distance accomplishes, and how it shields and exposes the reader at once.
6. The ethics of representation. Ozick has written extensively about what writers owe the dead. We engage that obligation directly and ask whether, after reading “The Shawl,” we feel she has met it — and what its closing silence means.

Reading

• “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick. Copyright. Available in The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories — free borrow via Internet Archive. (The standalone Vintage volume may also be searched at archive.org.)

Critical Reception

• Holocaust — YIVO Encyclopedia — historical and cultural context for the catastrophe Ozick represents in fiction.
• The Concept of Evil — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — philosophical frame for the ethics of representing atrocity that Ozick confronts.
• Cynthia Ozick — Library of America Story of the Week — context on Ozick’s moral seriousness and her place in American letters.

In-Class Practice

Write a story — no more than half a page — in which an ordinary object becomes the center of enormous emotional weight. Do not state what the object means. Show it.

Discussion Questions

1. “The Shawl” is four pages long. How does Ozick achieve such density of meaning in so small a space?
2. The shawl functions as a symbol, but it also functions as a real object in the story. How does Ozick hold both registers at once?
3. This is the third Holocaust text we have read. How does Ozick’s approach differ from Levi’s and Celan’s?
4. The story is told in close third person — intimate but not first-person confession. What does that choice do?
5. Ozick has written extensively about the ethics of Holocaust representation — what writers owe the dead. Do you feel, after reading this story, that she has met that obligation?
6. The story ends in silence. What kind of ending is that?

Homework

Bring the smallest story — the briefest piece of writing — that has ever stayed with you. Write two or three sentences on what it contained and why it lodged in you.

Session 14 — Grace Paley

Main Points of the Lesson

1. An original American voice. Paley (1922–2007) was a New Yorker, feminist, and pacifist, and one of the most original short-story writers in American literature. “A Conversation with My Father” (1972) is among the funniest and most moving pieces in this course.
2. A story about storytelling. A daughter and her dying father disagree about how stories should end — he wants plot, she resists it. We read the piece as an argument about narrative itself, conducted through fiction.
3. The same story, told again. Paley tells the same small story multiple times within the larger one. We examine what each iteration adds, and how revision becomes the subject rather than a stage of the work.
4. The frame raises the stakes. The dying father at the bedside turns a seemingly literary debate into a matter of life and death. We study how the frame loads an aesthetic argument with grief and urgency.
5. Three modes at once. The story is comic, warm, and genuinely sad — simultaneously. We trace the technique by which Paley keeps all three alive without letting any one cancel the others.
6. A new voice for the tradition. Paley’s female, neighborhood, and political voice reshapes the lineage we have been tracing. We ask what her democratic, multi-voiced fiction — steeped in Talmudic and Midrashic habits of mind — adds to it.

Reading

• “A Conversation with My Father” by Grace Paley. Copyright. Free borrow via Internet Archive — Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Critical Reception

• Grace Paley — Jewish Women’s Archive — entry on her fusion of feminist politics, neighborhood voice, and Jewish storytelling.
• Grace Paley — Poetry Foundation — critical biography emphasizing her poetry and short fiction.
• Grace Paley: Collected Stories — Library of America — the authoritative edition gathering her short fiction.

In-Class Practice

Tell the same event twice — once with a clear beginning, middle, and end; once without a resolution. Read both versions aloud. Which feels more honest?

Discussion Questions

1. The father wants a simple story with a plot. The daughter resists. Who do you agree with?
2. Paley tells the same story multiple times within this story. What does each iteration add?
3. How does Paley use the frame — the dying father, the daughter at his bedside — to raise the stakes of what seems like a purely literary argument?
4. The story is comic, warm, and genuinely sad. How does Paley keep all three modes alive simultaneously?
5. What does this story say about the relationship between hope and fiction?
6. How does Paley’s female voice, her neighborhood voice, her political voice, change the tradition we’ve been reading this semester?

Homework

Write half a page answering: what do you think stories are for? Has your answer changed over the course of your reading life? Bring it to share.

Session 15 — Yehuda Amichai

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The great modern Hebrew poet. Amichai (1924–2000) is the most celebrated Hebrew-language poet of the twentieth century. Born in Germany, he emigrated to British Mandate Palestine as a child, fought in Israel’s wars, and wrote poems of startling intimacy and metaphysical play.
2. The sacred and the everyday. Amichai’s poems repeatedly bring the sacred down into daily life — or lift the daily up into the sacred. We find one such moment in the assigned poems and study how he fuses the two registers.
3. Certainty and openness. “The Place Where We Are Right” argues that nothing grows where people are certain they are right. We read it for what it says about the relationship between conviction and the openness that love and thought require.
4. War and a contested city inside the work. Amichai lived through repeated wars in a contested Jerusalem. We trace how that history lives inside poems that often appear, on the surface, tender and domestic.
5. Accessible is not simple. His poems welcome a first-time reader and reward a second. We distinguish the “accessible” from the “simple” and test whether Amichai’s apparent ease conceals real complexity.
6. Completing the poetic arc. Amichai writes in Hebrew — language of the Bible and now of a modern state. We ask how that doubled resonance closes the arc of Jewish poetry we have traced from Emma Lazarus through Paul Celan.

Reading

• Yehuda Amichai, “The Place Where We Are Right” — On Being
• Yehuda Amichai, “Wildpeace” — Poetry Foundation
• Additional poems available at Poetry Foundation. Some collections may be under copyright; the Poetry Foundation offers several poems freely.

Critical Reception

• Yehuda Amichai — Poetry Foundation — critical biography naming him one of Israel’s finest poets, with a free selection of poems.
• Hebrew Literature — YIVO Encyclopedia — context on modern Hebrew as a literary language Amichai helped reshape.
• Personal Identity — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — frames the questions of self, memory, and place that animate Amichai’s lyrics.

In-Class Practice

Write a short poem — it need not rhyme — that begins with a large abstract concept (love, justice, God, memory) and ends with a very small, specific, concrete image.

Discussion Questions

1. Amichai’s poems are often described as bringing the sacred down into the everyday — or the everyday up into the sacred. Find one moment in today’s poems where that happens.
2. “The Place Where We Are Right” is a poem about being certain. What does it say about the relationship between conviction and openness?
3. Amichai lived through several wars and spent his life in a contested city. How does that fact live inside his poems?
4. What is the difference between a poem that is “accessible” and one that is “simple”? Is Amichai’s work simple?
5. How does Amichai’s relationship to the Hebrew language — the language of the Bible, now also the language of a modern state — create a particular resonance in his poems?
6. Looking back at Emma Lazarus and Paul Celan: how does Amichai’s voice complete the arc of Jewish poetic tradition we’ve been tracing?

Homework

Bring a poem you love in translation. Write two or three sentences on what you imagine is lost and what is kept across the move between languages.

Session 16 — Capstone & Contemporary Voices

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Three living voices. We close by hearing three contemporary writers — Etgar Keret, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander — who came of age in the aftermath of the Shoah, in a complex Israel, and in a wildly plural America. Together they show the tradition still being written.
2. Keret and the surreal short. Keret’s flash fiction is radically brief and often surreal. We connect it backward to Kafka’s parables and Schulz’s transformations, asking how the very short, very strange story persists as a Jewish literary mode.
3. Krauss and inherited memory. Krauss’s fiction carries loss and memory across generations. We read her opening pages for how contemporary writers hold the Shoah and exile at one remove — through people born after.
4. Englander, satire and reverence. Englander’s stories satirize and honor religious life at once. We examine how he sustains comedy and seriousness together, extending the irony we traced from Sholem Aleichem through Roth.
5. What has changed, what has stayed. We take stock of Jewish writing since Roth, Bellow, and Paley — what subjects, anxieties, and freedoms are new, and what threads run unbroken through the whole sixteen weeks.
6. The room becomes the text. This session belongs to the group. The student-chosen passages you bring become our final reading, and the course ends with the tradition handed, quite literally, to the readers in the circle.

Reading

• Very short piece by Etgar Keret (Israeli flash fiction, b. 1967). Suggested: one story from Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. Free borrow via Internet Archive.
• Short excerpt from Nicole Krauss (b. 1974). Suggested: opening pages of The History of Love. Free borrow via Internet Archive.
• Short excerpt from Nathan Englander (b. 1970). Suggested: a story from For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Search Internet Archive for a free borrow; instructor will also distribute excerpt in class.
• Student-chosen passages — please bring something to share.

Critical Reception

• Hebrew Literature — YIVO Encyclopedia — context for the Israeli line that runs through Keret back to Amichai.
• Yehuda Amichai — Poetry Foundation — a touchstone for the modern voice these younger writers inherit.
• Contemporary American Fiction — Library of America Story of the Week — frames the living American tradition Krauss and Englander extend.

In-Class Practice

Write three or four sentences — to be shared if you wish — in response to this prompt: “The piece of writing from this course that I will carry forward is _, because ___.”

Discussion Questions

1. What do these three contemporary writers inherit from the tradition we’ve spent sixteen weeks reading?
2. Keret’s flash fiction is radically brief and often surreal. How does it connect to Kafka? To Schulz?
3. What has changed in Jewish American writing since Roth, Bellow, and Paley — and what has stayed the same?
4. Of all the writers we’ve read this semester, whose voice has stayed with you most persistently? Why?
5. Is there a question this course raised that it did not answer?
6. What will you read next?

Homework

Choose your next book from this tradition — by an author we read or one we did not — and write a few sentences on why you chose it. The course ends, but the reading continues.

Closing: A final reading — chosen by the group — to end the course.