The Making of a List

The list that follows is the product of an intellectual adventure more akin to a lengthy roller coaster ride than a sedate gathering of minds. The eminent scholars and writers who came together around the long library table at the National Yiddish Book Center nearly a year ago to argue and elucidate the history of Jewish literature were geared for debates about Jewish identity, aesthetics, politics, linguistics, feminism, Zionism, and not a few other subjects. Huddled over coffee cups, yellow legal pads, computers, and Danish crumbs were some of the best minds of our generation -- people whose entire lives have been dedicated to books, knowledge, and the exploration of Jewish sensibility.

That sensibility filled the room, transcending the judges' personal origins in Brooklyn, Vienna, Mexico City, and Johannes-burg. Here were Ruth Wisse, standard bearer of Yiddish culture, and Ilan Stavans, the forty-year-old author of well over a dozen books. Robert Alter offered views from Berkeley via speaker-phone. Translator Hillel Halkin chatted in Hebrew with scholar Gershon Shaked. Glenda Abramson had traveled from England and Kenneth Turan from Los Angeles; Jeremy Dauber, the project director, was up from New York to help transform the judges' views into a coherent list.

The preamble to our listmaking was not, as one might expect, a discussion of what actually constitutes modern Jewish literature. When Aaron Lansky proposed the definition of Jewish books as those that explore Jewish experience or sensibility and are written by Jews, the judges readily agreed. The timetable would stretch from the Haskalah to today, and books in all languages would be considered, whether or not they had been translated into English. "Literature" would consist of poetry, drama, fiction, and memoirs, setting aside -- for now -- the wealth of nonfiction produced by modern Jewish writers. The entries would not be ranked ("that would take a hundred years," said one judge), but simply presented alphabetically by author.

What brought far more heat to the gathering was a debate about "greatness" itself. Ruth Wisse laid down the gauntlet by declaring that the list must stand for "intrinsic" rather than "perceived" literary merit: Artur Sammler, not Asher Lev; Isaac Babel, not Leon Uris. Simply because a book or writer had been important at one moment in time to hundreds of thousands of Jews did not render it great, Wisse and others asserted. In fact, a book's very popularity might render it suspect.

There at the beginning of the enterprise was the kernel of a continuing argument about mass appeal vs. aesthetic standards, about political vs. moral literature, about, as Ilan Stavans would later say, the high vs. the low brow. How would the group achieve diversity and accessibility without compromising its ideals? How could the judges announce a definitive body of Jewish literature without being accused, as Robert Alter put it, of "Jewish cultural imperialism"? Whom would the list be for?

There were no easy answers. When we speak of greatness, we speak inevitably of permanence, of texts that will be read a hundred years from now, and longer -- the penetrating poems and stories that teach us how to live in any age, in any nation. By this standard, the definition of greatness must transcend personal taste, expediencies, and literary fashion. But there is another standard, and a different purpose: the inclusion of the average educated man or woman into a community of readers able to exchange ideas across languages and borders and beliefs. Literature as a noisy party rather than a solitary prayer. The tension between the judges' interest in accessibility and their goal of defining a profound and lasting canon lent energy and passion to their deliberations for months.

The actual selection process was straightforward. Jeremy Dauber first compiled an inventory of more than 400 possible titles from the nominations of forty international experts and the Book Center's own membership. From this pool each judge chose or added titles, bringing to the first meeting his or her top choices. Only two books appeared on all of the judges' lists: Tevye the Dairyman and Call It Sleep, wildly disparate works written in different eras, yet each a powerful record of Jews struggling to adapt to modernity.

Then the judges' individual choices were presented, debated, title by title, and voted upon. Majority ruled. Discussion ranged from the gentle to the combative. "Puerile!" pronounced one judge about a book another acclaimed as "dazzling." "A bad Faulkner," was another judge's dismissal of a revered Israeli novelist. Common judgments were "unreadable," "incoherent," and, provocatively, "anti-Jewish." There were deeply felt exchanges: of Kafka, Gershon Shaked said, "When I remember myself in Vienna in 1939 -- I felt myself very like the person in The Castle." Of Proust, Hillel Halkin argued, "We need a case of a totally assimilated Jew on this list!" (Proust didn't make it.)

Scores of e-mails, phone calls and letters, and a second three-day session in February finalized the selections. Each judge chose one book as the subject of a Pakn Treger essay, and each judge contributed to the one hundred brief descriptions that follow (though authorship of these annotations does not reflect personal preferences, and no title appears on this list that is not the considered choice of the group as a whole). Wherever possible, we've indicated the book's original publication date beside its title. Some suggested editions of selected or collected works are also identifed by dates. In cases where no definitive edition exists, or where several different compilations have been published, we've provided the dates of the author's birth and death, to better locate the body of work in its historical context.

From this point on, we expect the list to have a life of its own, to generate debate, dissent and delight, as did the process of creating it. The books are in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Italian. They depict Jews confronting modernity at every possible juncture: in peace, war, poverty, wealth, love, and death. What unites them imaginatively is their deliberate, explicit depiction of the inner and exterior lives of Jews in all possible circumstances and straits. Kenneth Turan half-jokingly suggested that we announce the list with the tagline: "From Mendele to Maus." Therein lies the story: from the grandfather of Yiddish literature to a Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoon narrative about the Holocaust, and everything between.