A Monolingual World Literature

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. Asch’s fame in the interwar period, in Europe and then in the US, in Yiddish and in translation, relied on his belief in the possibility for reconciliation between Jews and Christians, especially through the creation of a unified redemptive literary institution. Focusing on his novels Three Cities and Salvation, the chapter posits that Asch is a model for a monolingual world literature, which may be written in multiple languages but whose texts seek to employ a mutually translatable universal vocabulary. This chapter counters this faith in translation by reading vernacular incongruity back into Asch’s texts, revealing a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments.