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Co-editing "Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology" was so time-consuming, it "came over me like a godlike cloud from heaven," said John Felstiner.

The Stanford professor of English and Jewish studies was asked to participate in the project by one of the co-editors, Kathryn Hellerstein, who had done her doctorate with Felstiner.

"I knowingly and unknowingly said yes, not knowing what a labor it would be in time, intensity and difficulty," he said.

But now he's feeling buoyed by the publication of the 1,221-page anthology. "Once I saw the cover, I didn't regret a moment of it."

Felstiner and Hellerstein will host an event in celebration of the anthology on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at Stanford. San Francisco poet Carl Rakosi, whose work is in the anthology, will read.

The event, which also features other readings and the music of George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein, is sponsored jointly by Stanford's Hillel Foundation and the university's program in Jewish studies, along with the Graduate Student Council and the English department.

During the course of compiling the anthology, work was distributed among the four editors, who also include Jules Chametzky and Hilene Flanzbaum. Choosing the selections was perhaps the least labor-intensive part, Felstiner said.

Editors also needed to acquire reprint permissions, write each section's introductions, write the head notes for each author, work out the footnotes, and compile the bibliography and its introduction.

And what differentiates Norton anthologies from other collections is their extensive use of footnotes. "Encyclopedic," Felstiner called them.

"When you read a writer like [Saul] Bellow or [Allen] Ginsberg, their work is studded with references to the world, life and culture," he said. "The average college audience is going to pick up 1 percent of those references."

Felstiner himself was responsible for 450 footnotes. He was able to find 448 of them.

The anthology is enormous in scope. The first section alone, called "Literature of Arrival, 1654-1880," includes sermons, letters, diaries, prayers, editorials and speeches.

There is a section on Jewish humor, which includes Woody Allen and Groucho Marx, and another, titled "The Golden Age of the Broadway Song," which includes Oscar Hammerstein II and Stephen Sondheim.

"We created those specific sections because we knew they were characteristic of Norton anthologies and how could you talk about Jewish American existence without those things?" Felstiner said.

Then there is "Jews Translating Jews," which Felstiner, who is also a translator, called "the little baby of mine."

"I feel happy to be able to bring foreign Jewish authors into the American mainstream by representing them in translation by Jewish poets," he said.

While the anthology includes some of the best-known Jewish American writers such as Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, many lesser-known writers are in the volume.

When asked how selections by particularly prolific authors were chosen, he said, "You go by your own personal tests." In some cases, one work was chosen by one editor but vetoed by others.

Felstiner, whose task it was to write the head note introducing Roth said, "It's difficult to do justice to a writer like him; he eclipses everybody."

In the end, "Eli, the Fanatic," a story from "Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories" that Felstiner called "funny and tragic," and an excerpt from "The Ghost Writer" were selected.

In "The Ghost Writer," Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman meets a woman whom he imagines is Anne Frank.

"I've been immersed in the Holocaust for 25 years," Felstiner said, "and I felt an obligation to represent that."

He is particularly proud of the book's cover, a painting by American Jewish painter Raphael Soyer that was his choice.

At first, Norton had selected another work for the cover, but in the end, the publisher's art department went with the Soyer image.

Felstiner chose it because it depicts either the Williamsburg or Brooklyn Bridge and shows both sexes equally.

Other Bay Area authors included are Mills College Professor Chana Bloch, who translates Yehuda Amichai; Shirley Kaufman, an Israeli poet with San Francisco roots; and Max Apple, author of "Roommates: My Grandfather's Story."

Some of Romanian-born Paul Celan's poetry is included too, as translated by Felstiner, "not in an act of vanity, but because he belongs there," he said.

Felstiner said much of the material in the book was new to him.

"I've learned so much," he said. "I'm using it in a class for the first time."