ABSTRACT
In Chapter Seven of The Modern Jewish Canon , “The Zionist Fate in English Hands,” Ruth Wisse veers slightly from her attempt to define the literary canon to a consideration of how well English literature has been able to admit the autonomy of modern Jewish people. Wisse limits her canon to Jewish writers who, whether they write in Yiddish, Hebrew, or some Gentile tongue, evince respect for the autonomy of Jewishness and the centrality of Jewish national experience. Their work must “attest to the indissolubility of the Jews,” although not necessarily in a positive way. Another requirement for admission to Wisse’s canon is that “in Jewish literature the authors or characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews.” But here she announces that before considering how Jewish literature has dealt with the Zionist enterprise she will discuss two works by non-Jewish authors, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), “the classic of Zionism,” and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), “the classic of modernism,” to discover “how Jews can, and cannot, survive the dilemma of English generosity.” 1
