JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

*Rosenberg, the East End poet who died in World War I, while
Maurice *Edelman went further back to write Disraeli in Love
(1972), a portrait of the statesman in his youth. The largely interrelated
aristocratic families that dominated the Anglo-Jewish
community in the 19th century and even later were vividly
described in The Cousinhood (1971) by Chaim Bermant.
The nearer past continued to be reflected in literature,
Emanuel *Litvinoff ’s Journey through a Small Planet (1972)
depicting an East End childhood in the 1930s and Arnold
*Wesker in his play, The Old Ones (1973), evoking ideologies
and eccentricities of an older East End generation that is now
vanishing. The second part of David *Daiches’ autobiography,
A Third World (1971), describes the author’s years in the
United States, while Mist of Memory (1973) by the South African
writer Bernard Sachs portrayed a Lithuanian childhood
and full, contemplative years in South Africa – its politics, racial
conflicts, trade unionism, and Jewish attitudes.
Another book on South Africa, Dan Jacobson’s novel on
interracial marriage, Evidence of Love (1960), was translated
and published in the Soviet Union. Both Jacobson and Sachs,
like other South African Jewish writers, in recent years made
their home in England. Similarly, Canadians like Norman
Levine and Mordecai *Richler, though continuing to write
about Canada, became resident in England, and Richler’s St.
Urbain’s Horseman (1971) sharply described expatriates in the
film and television industry.
[Shulamit Nardi]
Starting in the 1980s Anglo-Jewish literature has undergone
something of a transformation. Instead of specifically
English concerns and forms of expression, many recent Anglo-Jewish
novelists are influenced by the American Jewish
novel and incorporate European Jewish history and the contemporary
State of Israel into their fiction. This marked lack
of parochialism is reflected in novels, often first novels, published
in the 1980s by Elaine *Feinstein, Howard *Jacobson,
Emanuel *Litvinoff, Simon Louvish, Bernice *Rubens, and
Clive *Sinclair.
In 1985, the London Times Literary Supplement indicated
a serious general interest in Anglo-Jewish literature by organizing
a symposium for English and American Jewish writers
on the role of Hebrew and Yiddish culture in the writer’s life
and work. In general, national British radio, television, and
press have devoted a significant amount of time to Anglo-Jewish
literature which, in recent years, has included many individual
profiles of Jewish novelists in England. Clive Sinclair
and Howard Jacobson, in particular, have achieved national
prominence with Sinclair, in 1983, designated one of the 20
“Best of Young British Novelists” and Jacobson’s Peeping Tom
(1984), his second novel, winning a special Guardian fiction
prize. Since 1984, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the London-based
research arm of the World Jewish Congress, has
organized a regular Jewish writers’ circle which has brought
together many Anglo-Jewish writers for the first time. This
group has grown out of a colloquium in 1984 on Literature
english literature
and the Contemporary Jewish Experience which included the
participation of the Israeli writer Aharon *Appelfeld and the
literary critic George *Steiner.
In contrast to Anglo-Jewish literature which includes
explicitly Jewish concerns, many Jewish writers in England
continue to abstain from overt expression of their Jewishness
in a fictional context. Prominent examples, in these terms, include
Anita *Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984), which won the
Booker McConnel Prize for Fiction in 1984, Gabriel *Josopovici’s
Conversations in Another Room (1984), and Russell Hoban’s
Pilgermann (1983). Against this trend, however, Anita
Brookner’s Family and Friends (1985), for the first time in her
fiction, obliquely refers to the author’s European Jewish background
and her The Latecomers (1988) makes explicit her grief
for a lost European past as well as her Central European Jewish
antecedents. Gabriel Josipovici’s literary criticism reveals a
profound interest and knowledge of Jewish literature. Two of
Josipovici’s novels, The Big Glass (1991) and In a Hotel Garden
(1993), are concerned, respectively, with a Hebraic understanding
of art and the continued European dialogue with Jewish
history. Josipovici has also published his much acclaimed The
Book of God: A Response to the Bible (1988) which has had a
considerable impact on his fiction. Josipovici has also written
the introduction to the English translation of Aharon Appelfeld’s
The Retreat (1985).
A young Anglo-Jewish playwright, who has emerged in
the last decade, is Stephen Poliakoff, whose plays have been
regularly produced in both London and New York. Older playwrights,
Bernard *Kops and Arnold *Wesker, continue to produce
drama of interest, especially Bernard Kops’ Ezra (1980)
and Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant (1977). Between 1977 and
1981 Harold *Pinter’s collected Plays were published to much
acclaim and Peter *Shaffer, the author of Amadeus (1980),
staged Yonadab (1985), a play based on Dan *Jacobson’s The
Rape of Tamar (1970), which played in a West End London
theater. Jacobson, who was born in South Africa and has lived
in England for nearly three decades, continues to produce fiction
of high quality as demonstrated by his autobiographical
set of short stories, Time and Time Again (1985) and his novel
The God-Fearer. The poet Dannie *Abse has published A Strong
Dose of Myself (1983), the third volume of his autobiography,
and his Collected Poems: 1945–1976 appeared in 1977.
Much Anglo-Jewish literature continues to situate Jewish
characters in a specifically English context. In a comic tour
de force, Howard Jacobson contrasts Englishness and Jewishness
in his popular campus novel, Coming From Behind (1983).
Jacobson’s Peeping Tom (1984) is a brilliant and lasting comic
treatment of the same theme. His The Very Model of a Man
(1992) and Roots Shmoots: Journeys among Jews (1993) are explorations
of his Jewishness.
Frederic *Raphael’s Heaven and Earth (1985) examines
Anglo-Jewishness in the political context of an amoral English
conservatism. A more conventional account of middle
class Jewish life in England – and its relationship to the State
of Israel – is provided by Rosemary Friedman’s trilogy, Proofs
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 439