ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century (1920-28), some Yiddish writers such as
David Pinski, Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Sholem Asch began
to appear in periodicals including Xiaoshuo Yuebao (Stories Monthly) and
Wenxue Zhoubao (Literary Weekly). Chinese left-wing writers like Mao
Dun and Lu Xun enthusiastically introduced Yiddish literature into China,
mainly because they thought the realist style of writing and the language revolution in Yiddish literature could be a model for their popularizing
vernacular Chinese writing.1 However, the Chinese cultural focus was soon
shifted from vernacular writing to the conflicts between the Communist
Party and the Nationalist Party (KMT), and, correspondingly, Jewish wri-
ters began to fade from Chinese attention. Our recent search of the catalo-
gue shows that the National Library of China only holds eight books
entitled ‘‘You tai’’ (the Chinese characters for Jew or Jewish) and four books
of Sholem Aleichem published from 1927 to 1979. It was only in the late 1980s that floods of Jewish writers, or to be more
precise, writers of Jewish origin, entered China and began to exert great
influence on contemporary Chinese literary writing. Along with the ‘‘Jewish
fever’’ of the book market in China since the 1990s, more than a hundred
‘‘Jewish writers’’ appeared in various lists of Jewish celebrities, such as
Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger and, of course, those Nobel
Prize winners of Jewish origin, including Nelly Sachs (1966), Joseph
Brodsky (1987 and Nadine Gordimer (1991), though many of them are not mentioned otherwise and quite a number of them, such as Thomas Mann,
Milan Kundera, and Samuel Beckett, are actually not Jewish. However,
most of them, including the renowned writers like Henri Bergson, Stefan
Zweig, and Marcel Proust are not read or studied as Jewish writers. So the
most influential and generally acknowledged ‘‘Jewish writers’’ – not only
because of their Jewish identity but also because of the Jewishness in their
works – to Chinese readers, according to our survey, are Franz Kafka, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Sholem
Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Cynthia Ozick, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Therefore,
our aim in this chapter is to study the critical reception of these writers and
their influence in Chinese literary circles as well as the cases of Bellow,
Kafka, and Singer.
