Jewish Fiction
In Grandpa's House
Philip Sendak, a Polish American Immigrant, came to America in 1913, and while he was the father of Maurice Sendak, who wrote and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are, Philip wrote just one book about his family and his tale of immigrating called In Grandpa’s House. The book is 40 pages, with several of Maurice’s illustrations. Judaism permeates throughout the story, with Judaica showing up in the drawings and description of Philip’s religious parents and grandparents. Describing the immigration, the book jumps from Philip’s early years in a shtetl in Poland to depicting a boy named David who loses his family members and journeys to find them in a forest filled with mystical beings. While that makes the book harder to follow, this fear about the idea of things changing hits the reader and is noted to have inspired Maurice Sendak to write Where the Wild Things Are.
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry was born in 1937 in Hawaii and studied writing at Brown University. Lois Lowry herself is not Jewish, but was inspired to write Number the Stars based on the personal story of a Danish friend of hers.
The story is both a piece of history and evidently topical. Annemarie Johansen is a 10 year-old living in Copenhagen during the time of Nazi occupation who worries about what will happen to her Jewish friend and neighbor Ellen Rosen. While the Johansen’s fight to keep Ellen and her family safe, Ellen removes her Star of David necklace for protection. Annemarie’s uncle takes the Rosen family to Sweden, and by the end of the novel, it is not known if they have survived and will return after the war.
Lowry wrote the book to inspire young readers to develop their sense of ethics and humanity. In the face of doubt and turmoil, do you stand up for the other? She has said that conversations that inspired the book allowed her to see that "for the first time...that historic events and day to day life are not separate things." The book is still read world over today and received the 1990 Newbery Medal.
Hungry Hearts
Anzia Yezierska also came to America from Poland in 1898 along with her parents and nine other siblings.
Yezierska had very religious parents and a father who solely studied Torah.
Hungry Hearts was Yezierska’s first book. It was a collection of stories about her being raised on the Lower East Side. A character in Hungry Hearts declares, “My one story is hunger.” Yezierska had caught the attention of film director Samuel Goldwyn, who offered Yezierska $100,000 to write the screenplay for the film (in 1922; in 2016, this would be nearly one and half million). She felt uncomfortable writing her story with money; she was not used to this and went back to New York. Her initial work garnered a large fan base, but towards the 1940s, her work was seen as too Jewish-her work left Jewish immigrants feeling mocked.
saac Bashevis Singer was lauded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 for “his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” Born in Poland in 1904, the son of two religious Jews, he was soon on a similar track, enrolling in a Rabbinical School in 1921. He quit to write for a Yiddish literary magazine and wrote short stories on the side. After publishing his first book, Satan in Goray, in 1935, Singer went to New York. He started working for The Forverts.
His first major work was titled The Family Moskat, about a Polish Jewish family before the war. Most of his stories were set in Poland with characters facing existential and spiritual questions. Singer wrote Enemies: A Love Story, where a Holocaust survivor deals with his own desires and family relationships. Singer’s novel Shosha was written the same year he was given the Nobel Prize. The prize drew attention to the Yiddish language, which all of his work was published in, giving it both positive attention and awareness that it was on the decline as a language.
The Magician of Lublin was published in 1960 and is about Yasha Mazur, a Houdini-like figure who is famous in 1870s Poland for his magic. He is half Jewish, and half gentile and wants to leave his wife for female fans he has in the towns he tours throughout. This was his second novel.
Zlateh the Goat is a collection of seven short stories initially written in Yiddish by Singer, with Maurice Sendak providing the illustrations. The book came six years after The Magician of Lublin.
The Yiddish are Coming is an alphabetical tour of the Yiddish language published in 1994. Nothing ties the story together from page to page, but comical vignettes assist in the reader’s understanding of Yiddish. It is an ideal book for something just gaining exposure to Yiddish, especially since the Yiddish words are written in English. The book is slim and quick to read, accessible to both children and adults.
Martha Wolfenstein was born in Germany in 1869, but moved to St. Louis in 1870 so her father, Rabbi Samuel Wolfenstein could become the Rabbi of Congregation of B'nai El in St. Louis, and then moved with her family to Cleveland Ohio where her father ran the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Society. She was influenced in her writing by Leopold Kompert's Judengasse, the Jewish Street. She published Idyls of the Gass in 1901, a novel featuring a female lead that talked about hardships in the ghetto. Four years later, she published a collection with the Jewish Publication Society called A Renegade and Other Tales. She passed away at 36 from tuberculosis.