Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher

Reviewed by: Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher Elazar Ben-Lulu (bio) Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews. By Omri Asscher. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. 256 pp Hebrew literature, like the literature of other national cultures in their infancy, was one of the important ways in which the identity of the emerging national entity was deliberated and presented. Basic questions in Zionist thought fascinated literary journals, and the work of contemporary writers and poets was perceived as profound manifestation of the change taking place in the life of the people. Along similar lines, American Jewish novelists have offered some of the more revealing dissections of collective and individual Jewish identity on American shores. Reading Israel, Reading America compellingly and thoroughly explores the politics of translation as it shapes the understandings and misunderstandings of Israeli literature in the United States and American Jewish literature in Israel. The book contains five chapters: (1) "The Zionist Transformation" (2) "Ethical Conundrums" (3) "Israeli Jewishness for American Eyes" (4) "Jewish American Literature Makes Aliyah" (5) "Judaism in Translation." In these chapters, Asscher's textual and semiotic analysis affirms the important relationship between American Jewish and Israeli Jewish cultures—a connection established both on the micro and macro levels—by focusing on the translation and reception of literary works that express ideological, ethical and ethno-national perceptions and attitudes. The process of translation, in both directions, often reflects a political and social divide between ethno-national views and the diasporic view. Translation is inherently a practice that crosses spatial and linguistic and cultural boundaries; it is a political act. It tends to move on a dialectical axis and expose new interpretations and views regarding the "authentic" source, demonstrating a tension between source and imitation, while (at least ostensibly) trying to match and maintain the writer's intention. The agents involved in the translation process therefore reflect social and cultural contexts and stimulatingly construct them. Scholars have treated these agents as particularly revealing research subjects in the sociological study of translation. Asscher vividly examines the ideology of these cultural agents in the literary field and provides a deep description of the main trends in the translation and integration of Hebrew literature in America and American Jewish literature in Israel in the second half [End Page 568] of the twentieth century while also outlining the collective portrait they helped shape in those years in the respective literary fields. Anthropologists have suggested exploring culture as a text. Asscher invites us to read the text as a culture, one that is replete with contrasts, harmonies, contradictions, tensions, and also reciprocity. According to Asscher, the existence of a major Jewish community in the target culture is indeed a fact of great importance when it comes to translating Hebrew literature, and it is worth linking the features and status of translated Hebrew literature in the American literary field with the role assigned to it by its Jewish readers in America. Against this backdrop, Asscher shows how the practice of translation operates in a liminal space which creates both creativity and radical acts. Yet while Asscher suggests that we cannot always infer from particular manipulations in translation the existence of general translation norms in those years, or even the consistent behavior of a single translator, he reveals the existence of "protective" tendencies in the English translation of charged passages related to ethical issues, Jewish/non-Jewish relations, and homeland-diaspora discrepancies. As an anthropologist, I came to think of the texts' migration from east to west and from west to east as a certain kind of metamorphosis. The text undergoes a rite of passage; it changes, but it also varies from renewal to change. Does the translation really manage to document what the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls "ethnoscapes," landscapes of unified group identity? The flow of ideas in the transnational movement of objects and texts reveals power relations among different communities. The translated texts reflect a global movement but also reveal the connection between the source and target localities. Not only are the Jews, a genealogical people, in constant movement, but so are the texts they (re)produce...