"Something Dreadful and Grand"

"Elaborate analogies between Irish and Jewish history, between Irish and Jewish subjectivities, occur with surprising frequency throughout American literature. They recall James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and episodes of Ulysses, Douglas Hyde's analogies during the Celtic Revival between learning Hebrew and learning Irish, and a myriad of claims of an unusual relationship between these peoples that goes beyond comparisons of their respective diasporic histories.^ But how does one describe this uncanny relationship, one often marked by hostility, affinity, and ambivalence, without essentializing people whose origins, class affiliation, educations, life experiences, and so on are enormously different? "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconsciousdescribes a complex allosemitism and allohibernianism through a variety of cultural texts with which immigrant Irish and Jewish Americans were most engaged: popular music of the Tin Pan Alley era, tenement literature from Anzia Yezierska and James T. Farrell through the posthumous publication of Henry Roth's An American Type, and proletarian and socialist-inflected drama by Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Eugene