ABSTRACT
Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the emergent, or new, literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as hyphenated, as American-, Anglo-, Australian-, Canadian-, Irish-or South African-Jewish, etc., and in the minds of some it has simply been equated with Jewish-American literature.2 Of course, the definition of what ‘Jewish literature’ is proves to be notoriously difficult (see, for example, Wirth-Nesher 1994a,b: 3; Siegel 1997: 17-22; Budick 2001: 2-3), and to enquire into the nature of a ‘Jewish literature in English’ initially may seem of secondary importance. Yet, English is nowadays spoken by the majority of Jews living outside Israel (Rubinstein 1996: 2-5) and is the language also of a number of ‘returnee’ writers in Israel. Next to Hebrew and the ever-retreating Yiddish, English has thus become the major language of contemporary Jewish literary production; it has even been suggested that Israeli authors writing in Hebrew ‘have the [translated] English version in mind from the start, because there lie international fame and hefty advances’ (Green 2001: 95).3
