ABSTRACT
Ruth Wisse's skeletal theory of modern Jewish literature acquires flesh and muscle tissue as she makes her case for the quality as well as the existence of a Jewish canon in ten more or less chronologically arranged chapters about its major figures or schools or specific works. The chronological order is indispensable in a book that in effect proposes to tell the story of the Jewish people in the twentieth century through analysis of its major literary works and their authors because "modern Jewish literature is the repository of modern Jewish experience". Her lengthy analysis of Kafka's The Trial, for example, begins by noting that he had been following accounts of the notorious blood-libel trial of Mendel Beilis in Russia, which were frequently referred to in the Prague Zionist press simply as Der Prozess (i.e., the trial). Wisse herself is, of course, not only a committed Zionist but one of Zionism's most powerful polemicists.
