Thursday, March 4, 2010
Retrieving American Jewish Fiction: Ezra Brudno
D. G. Myers
The second in a series on landmarks in American Jewish literature.
Popular Jewish fiction in America began to absorb other Jewish literary models at a surprisingly early date. Ezra Brudno's novel The Fugitive, published in 1904 by Doubleday, Page, is a pioneering American example of what the scholar Alan Mintz calls the "novel of apostasy." A sprawling first-person chronicle written in the style of 19th-century Hebrew fiction and autobiography, it recounts an Eastern European childhood of poverty and persecution, a narrow and harsh early Jewish education, the arrival of sin (represented by sex and Spinoza), and the scrape with modernity that ends in an irreversible loss of faith. Brudno also tosses in a blood libel, the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Zionism, and the first account in English-language fiction of a pogrom.
