Yiddish Literature Goes South: Immigration and Race in I.J. Schwartz’s “Kentucky”

• In Event: Modernism and the Migration of Jewishness to the Americas

Abstract

Israel Jacob Schwartz’s (1885–1971) landmark 1936 epic poem “Kentucky” traces three generations of an Eastern European Jewish family through their immigration, acculturation, and assimilation in the American South. After leaving behind the cloistered Yiddish literary scene in New York City, specifically the literary circle DI YUNGE, Schwartz writes this epic inspired by his new surroundings in Kentucky.

This paper will examine the ways in which the poem grapples with the complicated racial dynamics at play in the 1930s, particularly in the American South. “Kentucky” portrays the tension of holding onto Jewish difference while reinventing oneself in America as white at the expense of black and indigenous figures, both real and imagined. As Toni Morrison explains in PLAYING IN THE DARK, “it is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their ‘Americanness’ as an opposition to the resident black population” (47).

Through a close reading of the poem “Jake,” I will demonstrate the modes that the second generation uses to opt into whiteness while the first generation cannot. The family dynamics in “Kentucky” lend to an inevitable multivocality within the rigid iambic pentameter that the poet maintains throughout. Schwartz takes the reader through Jake’s adolescence, ripe with potential and the somewhat futile process of assimilation, contingent on the established culture of racism. A close reading of the poem’s content and form reveals the dogmatism required to fit in as American despite and because of an inescapable specter of Jewish difference.

Author

• Julie Sharff, The University of Toronto