Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
9 - Jewish American writers on the Left
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
Summary
The appeal of the Left
The literary category of US Writers on the Left was initially delimited by Daniel Aaron in his 1961 Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. The genus pertains chiefly to mid-twentieth century authors and literary intellectuals inspired by the ideas of Marxism, most notably through an attraction to the Communist-led cultural movement. During the first two decades, only a modest number of distinguished poets, novelists, critics, and dramatists declared themselves socialists; they fashioned an amorphous, somewhat Bohemian legacy of art in the service of the emancipation of the working class in the pages of publications such as the Masses and the Liberator. This heritage would be revivified in new form as a repercussion of the social crisis of the 1930s when an extraordinary number of the most gifted writers veered precipitously in the direction of the revolutionary Left. During the 1940s, this tradition of “littérature engagée” evolved as a constituent component of the cultural mainstream, but in the 1950s it was ultimately marginalized by the anti-radical political repression of the McCarthy era.
The Bolshevik rendition of Marxism is the conspicuous political feature at the heart of this legacy. Sundry of the most capable writers were passionately enthralled by the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, which they believed to be embodied in the activities and ideology of the Communist Party. Even Left critics of the Stalin regime often based their condemnation on writings by Lenin and Trotsky. The attraction remained potent through World War II but waned as the Cold War began.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , pp. 170 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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