Discovery Guides

The Golden Age of Jewish American Literature

by Ethan Goffman
Introduction
The 1950s may be said to mark the start of a golden age of Jewish American literature, when it
evolved from an esoteric ethnic sideshow to a mainstream, indeed defining, part of American
culture. With the 1953 publication of The Adventures of Augie March, and its opening lines I
am an American, Chicago born, Saul Bellow announced that
Jews were now as much a part of American society as anyone
else. That same year the translation of Isaac Bashevis
Singers Gimpel the Fool into English (by Saul Bellow, no
less!) marked the ascendance of a very different strand of
Jewish literature in America, that which remembered, celebrated, and romanticized old world Judaism, that of Eastern
Europe, the shtetl, which had been wiped out forever by the
Nazis. The creative tension between these two strands, Jews
as quintessential Americans and Jews as old world cultural
iconsoften, though not always, connected to religious
Judaismpersists to this day (and indeed was present long
before the 1950s). The two authors would go on to win the
Nobel Prize in literature, Bellow in 1976 and Singer in 1978,
the only Jewish Americans ever to achieve this. This Discovery Guide discusses their achievement, along with four others
who wrote alongside or slightly after them: Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley. Collectively, these authors exemplify the tension between tradition Rosh Hashanah greeting card from
and assimilationism in a context of increasing acceptance and the early 1900s: Russian Jews gaze
American relatives beckoning them
material comfort that exemplifies the trajectory of Jewish at
to the United States
American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_
of_the_Jews_in_the_United_States

The mainstream recognition of Jewish American writers may

have owed as much to the historical moment, which combined guilt about the Nazi attrocities
with a huge opening of opportunity for Jewish Americans, as to the presence of major talents. As
Ruth Wisse describes it, American Jews were not only spared the Holocaust, they unwittingly
drew from the moral credit that accrued to its victims. Quotas in major American universities
that had previously limited the number of Jewish professors were lifted, and Jews filled departments of science, mathematics, and economics, among other fields. Even English departments,
which had considered Jews an element foreign to the culture they were preserving, swelled with
Jewish academics, the new keepers of the grand Anglo literary tradition. Although the special
circumstances of World War II, followed by an unprecedented economic boom, help explain the
rapidity of this change, it also fits within a larger American theme of widening the circle of
dominant culture, from those of English descent, to Germans, to Irish, Italians, and Jews. Along
with this widening circle has come a broadening of what is considered literature worthy of study
in universities. At the start of the 20th century American literature had been considered inferior,
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

unworthy of study alongside the great European classics. By

the 1950s American literature was considered its own, serious
field of study (though perhaps not as serious as the great works
of English literature). The ascent of Jewish American literature
may be considered to have marked a threshhold, the first of a
range of ethnic literatures that the academy would crown as
worthwhile.
Even by the 1950s a large number of Jewish American authors
had written about Jewish American themes, notably the tension between assimilation and maintaining historical and religious traditions. Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry
Roth are a few of the major names. Whether they received less
attention than later writers due to the quality of their work or
the cultural mood cannot be answered here. What is clear is
that Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer were, and are,
major authors who, over the course of their careers, produced
an enormous output of important works with a stunning range
of themes that forever altered the status of Jews in literature.

The Partisan Review began a period

of Jewish American intellectual and
literary ascendance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisa
n_Review

Singer of the Jewish Past

Although Isaac Bashevis Singer is commonly thought of as extending the tradition of Yiddish
literature, among his contemporary Yiddish writers he was considered something of a usurper, a
sensationalist who distorted the literature. If Sholem Aleichem may be seen as the paradigmatic
Eastern European Jewish writerwith his stories popularized in the Broadway musical Fiddler
on the RoofSinger introduced an element of Jewish mysticism, of the supernatural, of demons
playing tricks, dybbuks inhabiting human hosts. Particularly in his early stories, he was a realist
of what to some readers is the extraordinary world of imps and spirits, forbidden desire and perverse longings framed by traditional Judaism (Baumgarten). Singer thus becomes a connection,
among assimilating American Jews, to a mythic past, certainly including elements of an actual
history and culture, but filtered through an idiosyncratic personality and sprinkled with the supernatural. Among his contemporaries in America, who combined folksy portraits of shtetl life
with social purpose born of Jewish radicalism, Singer stood out for his apolitical nature, or perhaps his skepticism regarding the ability of politics to change the world. That his father was a
rabbi perhaps gave him an additional link to a vanishing past, to a mystical, religious, rather than
a secular, version of Jewishness. Morris Dickstein explains that the striking novelty of his work
is that he leapfrogged traditions that were familiar to the Orthodox but were not part of modern
Yiddish literature, adding that his connection to preliterary folktales added a dimension to the
literature that really wasnt there (qtd in Kim-Brown). Although Singers early novels achieved
no success in America, his short stories would propel him to fame, setting him apart from other
Yiddish authors publishing alongside him in the Jewish Daily Forward. In Envy, Or Yiddish in
America, Cynthia Ozick satirizes the jealousy of these authors for a Singer-like figure. As an
aging Yiddish poet puts it in that story, he works in an obscure and dying language, A language
that never had a territory except Jewish mouths, and half the Jewish mouths on earth already
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

stopped up with German worms. Their work

destined to be forgotten, these Yiddish authors
could not understand the strange appeal of
Singers stories in a wider American and literary context.
Singer himself started his career in the shadow
of his older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua
Singer (who died in 1945). Singers early novel
The Family Moskat (1950) was translated into
English but largely ignored. Singer had fled
Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978, Archive Photos, Taken
Poland in 1935, ahead of the Nazis, and The
from Proquest's eLibrary
Family Moskat is an epic memorial to this justlost world. However, it was the surfacing of Gimpel the Fool that marked Singer as a sensation
and led to his success as a short story writer. The storys opening lines announce its author as a
fresh voice, seemingly timeless with an impish yet cynical sense of humor: I am Gimpel the
fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the
name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope,
glump, ninny and fool. Persecuted by his village, Gimpel acts the role of Jew as outcast, a
theme recurring throughout Singer (and indeed in Jewish literature). Reacting by going along to
survive, then alone leaving his village, Gimpel eventually achieves a kind of wisdom, particularly through his bemused acceptance of human nature in its best and worst manifestations.
If short stories may be Singers most successful form, such tales are paradigmatic for Jewish literature of both the old world and the new; indeed the short story is more central to Jewish literature than to European, in which the novel predominates. For Bernard Malamud and Grace Paley
the short story is clearly their greatest literary achievement, while it remains a major part of the
opus for every author discussed in this Discovery Guide, with the exception of Bellow. Singers
stories may be seen as dealing with the (often stressed) human relation to God, frequently
through otherworldly intermediaries, in paradoxical ways. In many Singer stories, such as The
Unseen, a demon toys with humans, tempting them to ruination. Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy, one
of his most famous tales, portrays a girl who dresses as a boy to become a rabbi, a youthful quest
for identity that combines elements of early feminism with the search for God and meaning in a
universe that seems empty, a perennial Singer theme. A Friend of Kafka recounts a relationship with Franz Kafka, a modernist author of paradox and alienation who died young, embracing
his Jewish identity only in his last months. The storys narrator explains that, Kafka wanted to
be a Jew, but he didnt know how. He wanted to live, but he didnt know this, either. The dilemma of assimilating European Jews is even stronger in America. The relationship of Jews to
Christianity is also a recurrent Singer theme, including the temptation to convert, the ultimate
assimilation. In The Bus a tourist in Spain explains why she gave in to her Christian husband:
Since I dont believe in God anyway, whats the difference if its Moses or Jesus? He wanted
me to convert, so I converted a bit. Despite all of the suffering, betrayal, fateful tragedies, and
angst portrayed throughout Singers stories, and despite the shadow of the Holocaust, Singers
humor remains, as does a (perhaps irrational) belief in the divine. In Something Is There, a
rabbi quarrels with the Lord of the Universe about all of the injustice on earth and doubts the diProQuest Discovery Guides

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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

vine. Finally, as he lies dying, Something is there, the rabbi murmured. / The war between the
rabbi of Bechev and God had come to an end.
If short stories are perhaps Singers most influential form, his output of novels was prodigious.
They range from medieval historical tales to sweeping family narratives to shtetl memories to
Holocaust survivors in America. The Slave (1962), a novel set in 17th Century Poland, portrays a
love affair between a Jewish servant and a Polish woman. Shosha tells of an affair in Poland interrupted by the onset of the Nazis. Enemies, a Love Story, combines several paradigmatic Singer
themes, showing the travails of Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor fled to America, maneuevering between affairs with three different women, also refugees from Poland. In many of
Singers novels, the protagonists romances with multiple women, of very different background
and temperament, signify the choices pulling at him, between religious and secular, between Jew
and Christian, between old world and new, a range of options simply impossible to satisfy. It is
in his later novels that Singer portrays Jews in America, often Holocaust survivors and can lay at
least some claim to being a Jewish American novelist (beyond translating the shtetl for American readers). His portrait of America is a mixed one; true it is a savior from the Nazis, but it
takes away Jews traditions, perhaps their souls. As John Guzlowski documents, for Singer the
idols that America worships are materialism, sex, and violence; yet the portrayal is mixed and
contradictory. As voiced by various characters in several novels it is impossible to say which is
Singers real portrait of America, the beacon of hope or the crass thief of history.
Besides hundreds of short stories, 15 novels, and memoirs and nonfiction, Singer also wrote numerous books for children, many featuring Chelm, the legendary Jewish town of fools.
Malamud, Or Yiddishkeit in America
Born and raised in the United States, Bernard Malamud was at one
point considered part of the triad of defining Jewish-American novelists, along with Bellow and Philip Roth (Singer is less quintessentially American, a transplant who wrote in Yiddish and was translated). Of the three, Malamud stands most obviously in the tradition
of Yiddish literature, particularly in his short stories, which combine
the folksy realism of the East European masters with Singers supernatural folk tales. Although Malamud did not speak Yiddish, critics
consider him to have brought the cadences and irony of that language into American English.
Malamuds characters can be seen as following the tradition of
Gimpel the Fool, humble protagonists often living in obscurity.
Indeed, to suffer quietly seems Malamuds portrait of the human
condition. His epigraph All Men Are Jews (Benedict) points to a
sensibility less American than universal, and his stories are imbued
with a mythic, timeless quality. Jewish suffering, then, is seen as a pointed metaphor for the human condition; we are born to struggle, although the Jews perhaps more. The Book of Job might
be seen as Malamuds ur-text, with many of his characters little Jobs. The protagonist of Angel
Levine, for instance, loses his business, his son, and his daughter, and he and his wife lose their
Bernard Malamud, Copyright
Getty Images, Taken from
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

health as the story begins. Although Angel Levine ends with a vision of hope, it is not necessarily the redemption of the biblical Job. Other stories hark back to eastern European persecution, as in The Jewbird, wherein a bird is persecuted, first by other birds and then by humans.
The persecutors, however, are Jews; the human condition is to suffer and cause suffering.
Against a problematic humanity, for Malamud, our only defense is a wry, resigned humor, exemplified by rhythms of the Yiddish language, albeit in English.
More so than his parabolic short stories, Malamuds most famous novels are characterized by a
stark naturalism. While The Natural, his first novel, is a paradigmatic tale of an extaordinarily
gifted baseball player, his later novels are more Jewish and less prototypically American. In The
Assistant (1957) Frank Alpine an Italian American, betrays a Jewish storekeeper. The narrative is
one of atonement, and Alpine ends the novel by converting to Judaism, in Malamudian terms
joining the stream of humanity who suffer and, ultimately, do the right thing. The Fixer (1966) is
a historical novel of a Russian Jew unjustly imprisoned. Malamuds later novels are less realistic,
employing the magic realism of his short stories on a larger canvas. The Tenants (1971) is a parable of black-Jewish relations, while Gods Grace (1982) portrays a post-apocalyptic world.
Following his death in 1986, Malamuds reputation has gone into decline. This may be partly
due to the relatively small number of his publications. Their universal nature, too, may limit
them as part of an ongoing commentary on Jewishness in the American context. Yet Cheryl
Miller argues that Malamud might simply have been out of touch with the zeitgeist. She cites
Philip Roths 1974 attack on Malamuds portrait of the virtuous, suffering Jew, and argues that
Nothing was more at odds with Malamud than the spirit of the age that made the taboo-breaking
Roth into a celebrity. Whether this taboo-breaking was a hallmark of the 1960s and 70s, or is
an enduring feature of consumerist America, Malamud remains in eclipse, less read and discussed than Singer, Bellow, or Roth.
Bellowing a New America
Saul Bellows first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, develop themes of angst and
alienation common in both modernist and Jewish literature. The Adventures of Augie March,
however, a sprawling, picaresque novel combining elements of Henry Fielding and Charles
Dickens, yet transposed to the New World, announced a new voice in American literature. The
Jewish element of the novel, while always present, is normalized. Jewishness, then, becomes not
a mark of otherness, but simply one element of a new American identity, as Augie March scrambles for success, largely through his own effort and intelligence, making of him a quintesential
American.
Perhaps even more so than The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King (1959) is a
wild adventure novel, one that takes place in a mythologized version of Africa not based on the
actual continent. Bellows only non-Jewish protagonist, Eugene Henderson, is an American incarnate, a tremendous individualist searching a vast continent while finding his identity. In one
instance, he suggests that an African tribe should leave behind tradition, to create new traditions
as needed, claiming that the Romans defeated the Jews because they wouldnt fight back on
Saturdays and suggests that the tribe Live . . . to make another custom. This assertion of self
fashioning, of freedom, would seem to suggest that Americas Jews leave behind the past.
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

Yet Bellow does not shed his Jewish identity to become a

new, deracinated American. Through memories of the
Holocaust as a negative prompt, and portraits of Jewish
American intellectuals as positive icons, Bellows work
would continue to uphold Jewishness, albeit in a new context. As Eugene Goodheart explains, Bellows career oscillates between the present- and future-mindedness of his
American identity and memories of the Yiddishkeit he imbibed with his mothers milk. In the bulk of Bellows career, his characters form a new, hybrid identity, quintessentially Jewish and quintessentially American, old world intellectuals in a situation of unprecedented affluence and
freedom. In Herzog (1964), probably Bellows most ac- Saul Bellow, Keystone/Getty Images,
claimed novel, the protagonist, Moses Herzog, deals with a Taken from Proquest's Literature
situation prototypical for American novels at this time, no- Online
tably in John Updikes work: infidelity and divorce. Absent
the life-or-death issues of war and violence, absent poverty, divorce is probably the most meaningful plot element for an affluent America. Moses Herzog is especially beset as his wife has betrayed him with his best friend, and the two expect him to deal with a situation of primal anger
with rational humanism. Herzog reacts by writing a series of anguished letters to friends, family,
academics and politicians about the great issues of his day, melding the personal, intellectual,
and social. The novels end offers a fresh start, a tip to America as the land of renewal.
Indeed, like many Jews of his day, Bellow had come to see America as a kind of haven for Jews.
If earlier Jewish intellectuals had maintained a favorable view of European socialismdefined
as a skepticism with society as it exists in favor of an ideal visionthis idealism was fading for a
portion of the intelligentsia, most notably the neoconservatives, with whom Bellow is sometimes
associated. Several of his later novels did explore such issues, although sometimes in ways that
couldnt be easily pigeon-holed. In Mr. Sammlers Planet an elderly Holocaust survivor is pursued by a black thief on the streets of New York. Although the highly educated Artur Sammler
appears to represent an old-world civilization now destroyed, and the black thief new-world
primitivism, in the conclusion, as Sammler watches the thief defeated and bleeding on the sidewalk, he experiences the human connection between the two. Sammlers Holocaust experience
had given the lie to the veneer of civilization, and this lie is once again exposed.
The works of the aging Bellow grew more critical of Americas youth, seeing them as shallow
and selfish. In part this was a reaction to the protest culture of the 1960s and the campus political correctness that followed. In part, though, it seems to stem from Americas disconnect with,
and disrespect for, European culture and tradition, a critique made explicity by Bellows friend
and University of Chicago colleague Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
The Deans December (1982), for instance, depicts a college campus thriving with callow, radical youth, notably the protagonists nephew.
If Bellows later novels were increasingly political, they remained complex, humanistic portraits
touched with humor and cynicism. His final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a fictionalized portrait of
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

Allan Bloom, has been criticized as overly political, yet also praised a complex human portrait of
an intellectual at war with the modern world. Bellows oscillating position as embattled Jewish
intellectual and contradictory humanist places him as central in the quest to define the Jewish position in America.
Philip Roth Faces the Wrath: The Bad Boy of Jewish Literature

Philip Roth, 1994, Archive Photos,

Taken from Proquest's eLibrary

Philip Roths Goodbye Columbus (1959) shocked the literary world with its critical portrayal of Jews. If previous
Jewish American literature had a certain concern for portraying Jews positively, Roth, taking a cue from Jewish comedians, was more than happy to illustrate, exaggerate, and
satirize Jewish dysfunction. In Goodbye Columbus this takes
its most extreme form in the story Defender of the Faith,
wherein a Jewish soldier takes advantage of his background
to avoid his duties. Yet the volume is little concerned with
the military, or with World War II, but concentrates on Jews
growing comfortable as they settle into the suburbs, and
scrambling to assimilate into American society. As Sanford
Pinsker argues, Roths characters, like Roth himself, often
seem cut off from the wellsprings of Jewish identity.
Whats Jewish about them is a cultural remnant, some yiddishisms, a rabbi here or there, in the later works a concern
with Israel. Whats Jewish American about them is something strongera recurring concern with reconciling identies, with a lingering outsider status, a sense of victimization,
amid a rising affluence and acceptance.

Roths reputation took a self-inflicted hit with the publication of his most notorious novel (and
biggest seller) Portnoys Complaint (1969). The novel takes the form of a long monologue to a
psychiatrist from its narrator, Alexander Portnoy, filled with gripes about his parents idiocy,
memories of masturbation, and lust for shiksaseverything Jews fear will appear as stereotypes
to the outside world. Even the distinguished critic Irving Howe, who had previously supported
Roth, decried the novel. With hindsight, however, Portnoys Compaint can be reevaluated as not
so much an attack on Jews as a satire on those who make such attacks, as well as a portrait of
universal truths about human beings hidden behind a veil of secrecy (in a way, we are all of us
Portnoys).
Among Roths various books perhaps his most critically successful is the Zuckerman Unbound
tetralogy (later expanded with a fifth, and still later a sixth, volume). The main character, Nathan
Zuckerman, is often taken for a version of Roth (as are many of his protagonists). Indeed, different characters in Roths output seem to be based on variations of the author and the people
around him, a metafictional game that Roth has played with great slyness throughout his career.
In The Ghost Writer, the first of the Zuckerman books, the protagonist falls in love with Amy
Bellette, who turns out to be Ann Frank, escaped from the Nazis and alive after all. Only she
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

man publishes a book called Carnovsky that parallels Portnoys Complaint, including the fuss
that surrounded it (allowing Roth to satirize Irving Howe as a moralistic prude).
The Counterlife, published after the Zuckerman Unbound tetralogy, continues Roths metafictional games. When Zuckermans brother becomes a Zionist and moves to Israel, Zuckerman
follows; the novel portrays Israel, supposedly the Jews salvation, as filled with nervous Jews
surrounded and afraid of violent death, exactly as they had been in diaspora, while America appears as the Jews real salvation. Roth thus surprisingly reinforces the theme of a comfortable
American Jewry. The entire novel, however, turns out to be an alternative history to the real
Zuckerman, himself a fictional counterpart to the real Philip Roth. In his later novels, such as
Operation Shylock, an alternative Philip Roth appears, who, however, differs from the actual
writer, and who searches for an impersonator also named Philip Roth (in a strange turn of
events, in actual life a man claiming to be Philip Roth, but who was not, later appeared in Israel). The Plot Against America (2004) goes back in time, to the Roth family in pre-World War
II America, in an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president and persecutes Americas Jews, a reminder that Jewish status in the U.S. was not preordained.
A very different novel, American Pastoral (1997), has received critical attention as one of Roths
great achievements. The blond, blue-eyed Seymour Levov seems more quintesentially American
than Jewish, recalling the assimilating Jews of Goodbye Columbus, in a more epic form. The
events of the Vietnam War and student radicalization, however, disrupt Levovs idyllic lifeat
least for the Jews, Roth seems to be saying, if not for everyone, the idyllic, comfortable America
is only a temporary respite from the vicissitudes of history.
Cynthia Ozick and the Struggle for Jewish History
While critics repeatedly cite the triumvirate of the golden age of Jewish American as Bellow,
Roth and either Singer or Malamud, notable is an absence of women. As the feminist critic Susan
Gubar explains, The so-called Jewish American renaissance, . . . includes writersSaul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Stanley Elkin, Woody Allenwhose narrative
exuberance and sometimes comic, sometimes satiric experimental performances have no femaleauthored counterparts.Coming only slightly later, however, and in fact overlapping with the life
and work of the central male figures, is Cynthia Ozick, who draws on the same font of Yiddish
literature reconstituted in America and themes of Jewish identity in contact with an assimilationist society, as do the males. Ozick sees herself as in the same tradition as Singer and Bellow,
and shows little interest in being recognized by feminist critics such as Gubar.
Ozick is overtly Jewish. Pinsker describes her as the product of a background in which Jewishness meant religious study and observance, community affiliation and work on behalf of Israel.
Early in her career she declared that nothing thought or written in diapora has lasting value
unless it has been centrally Jewish (Art). She later backed away from that claim, and the obvious influence of European modernism on her work belies it, as does her obsession with Henry
James, an American ensconced in British culture. James is a strange role model for Ozick, given
his critique of the alien influence of Jews in New York. This modernist forefather illuminates a
paradox at the heart of Ozicks career, that she is herself a hybrid, hyphenated product (as is
Jewish American writing by its nature).
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Although self-consciously Yiddish inflected, Ozicks prose is extremely literary, her writing a
modernist palimpsest. Indeed, she has been described as the voice of the New York intellectual
brought to bear on the composing of fiction (Shechner). Her early short story The Pagan
Rabbi, in which a rabbi turns to worship of nature and hangs himself in a tree that he believes to
be a goddess, reveals religious questioning and angst in a new world that has jarred the historical
continuity of the Jewish people. Like The Pagan Rabbi, many of Ozicks short stories mix
Jewish themes, modern day America, and a touch of magic realism. Another related key theme is
the nature of art and the vexing question of whether it can or should be divorced from (in her
case Jewish) history and identity. Ozick, according to Susanne Klingenstein, writes within the
moral and intellectual framework of rabbinic Judaism about the subject that compels her, the unsettling nature of the creative imagination. At the same time she insists that she is keeping separate her obligations as a Jew and her desires as a writer.
Another central theme of Ozicks, upon which her work
of memory and change is brought to bear, is the Holocaust. The search for the meaning of art and literature in
light of the Holocausts destructive nihilism is central to
The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), a literary work based
upon a lost text, The Messiah, by the literary master
Bruno Schultz, killed by the Nazis in his prime. Although the manuscript is recovered, it is probably a
fake, and the protagonist burns it. Symptomatic of
Ozick, a literary work is a central symbol of the Holocaust, of a world destroyed, and it can be recovered
only briefly and in inauthentic form.
Ozick deals with the Holocaust most directly in The
Shawl (1989), her most famous work. The two-part novella begins with a short story of a forced march to a
Children from Auschwitz liberated by the
Red Army in January, 1945. The Holocaust
concentration camp in which Rosa, the narrator, prois central to much of Ozicks fiction.
tects her infant daughter, Magda, in a magic shawl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
Magda, however, is killed when Stella, Rosas niece,
steals the shawl. The second part of the novella takes place years later, when Rosa and Stella
have survived the death camp and moved to America. Rosa cannot escape the past and is haunted
by fantasies of Magda had she survived; she is also plagued by letters from a sociologist studying
the Holocaust in a reductive, dehumanizing way. The novella, however, ends on a note of hope
and possible romance, an intimation that new life is possible in the new world of America, that
the Holocaust will not remain forever an impenetrable blot.
A paradigmatic work for Ozick, mixing short stories and novellas from a swath of her career, is
The Puttermesser Papers (1997). Some critics see the protagonist, Ruth Puttermesser, as a version of Ozick herself, lost in a world of literature, more at home in books than with people. Yet
Puttermesser lacks two elements apparent in Ozicks life: a literary career and a strong Jewish
identity. She may therefore be more of a warning of what America can do to Jewish women,
stripping them of their identity, of a sense of place and purpose. As Peter Kerry Powers puts it,
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Goffman: Jewish American Literature

Puttermesser is a character in search of history, or more precisely, an ancestry, a living connection to the past that will give her life meaning beyond her mundane efforts in a civic bureaucracy. All that Puttermesser has left is her literary imagination, which seems to be the source of
the books magic realism. Puttermesser creates, or one day there appears, a female golem, who
procedes to take over Puttermessers life, making her mayor of New York City, a fantastical turn
of events that quickly ends in disappointment. In other chapters, Puttermesser flirts with unlikely
loves who dissipate as surely as her other fantasies. She is the modern feminist, single woman,
adrift, perhaps a warning of what America means to those who have forgotten their Jewish identity.
Grace Paley: Faith in Diversity
Notably different than Cynthia Ozick, an icon of feminist critics
although less studied by Jewish Americanists, is Grace Paley.
With her profusion of New York Jewish voices and Yiddish inflected language, Paley can easily be placed among major Jewish American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century,
and indeed fits squarely in Susan Gubars characterization of
narrative exuberance and sometimes comic, sometimes satiric
experimental performancesas defining elements of Jewish
American literature. Although Paley published only three volumes of short stories and some poetry collections during her
long life, she is something of a literary icon, an American original. An overt radical, a heir of Jewish socialism, Paley claimed
to be too busy with her activismprotesting nuclear arms and
the Vietnam War, among other issuesfor a prodigious literary
Grace Paley, Getty Images,
output. Yet her voice is unique, a mixture of New York dialect,
Taken from Proquest's Literature
Online
Jewish and otherwise, with literary modernist and postmodernist
experimentation. Her characters babble a stream-of-consciousness, broken up by dialogue from
outside characters, forming a rich pastiche, at times engaging in psychological alteration of space
and time. In Faith in a Tree, for instance, Faith Darwin Asbury spends much of the story levitated into a tree, watching the world below, a kind of omniscient narrator looking down at the
park and characters that constitute the world of Paleys fiction, yet jolted by an anti-war demonstration into political awareness.
Faith, a recurring character throughout Paleys stories, may be seen as a stand-in for the author,
though unlike Paley, Faith is a single mother. Indeed, many of the women in Paley live at crosspurposes with men, who are gently satirized as unreliable, seeking short-term pleasure while
leaving women to raise the children. Faith lives through the trials of a single mother in the feminist era, though in a way far more affirming of the human community than that of Ruth Puttermesser. If Ozick disapproves of rootless America, Paley celebrates its multiculture community,
the rich interconnections of Jews, Irish, Italian, black, Puerto Rican. In The Loudest Voice, for
instance, a Jewish child initially fearful of appearing in a Christmas play comes to accept it as a
part of American culture. Jewish culture, Paley seems to say, is not threatened by American
Christianity and can be enriched by existing alongside it. The Long Distance Runner explores
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another cultural juxtaposition when Faith returns to her old neighborhood, now an African
American outpost. Although it takes on the troubles of a segregated community, the story can
also be seen as a celebration of how one vibrant American sub-culture is replaced by another.
With mischievous satire, Paley also takes on criticism of her style as strange and opaque in A
Conversation with my Father, wherein her father, dissastified with people in trees talking
senselessly, voices from who knows where, asks why she cant write a normal story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The narrator dutifully does so, though in such a way as to undercut the assumptions of traditional narrative, revealing Paleys idiosyncratic postmodernism as a
valid take on Americas complexity. Resisting the predictable arc of conventional stories Paley
often supplies surprises at the end. Indeed, she satirizes this tendency in the story-within-a-story
of A Conversation with my Father, when a drug addict, as if through a miracle, avoids a bleak
death and lives a kind of sainted life.
Another story key to Paleys ethos is Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which reveals a
certain skepticism about the revolutionary generation of the 1960s that Paley so enthusiastically
joined with, about the ability of that generation to create enormous changes at the last minute,
to replace old society with the new. Liberal certainty is also questioned in the story Zagrowsky
Tells, when the narrator annoints Faith the Queen of Right. With their multiplicity of voices,
then, Paleys stories, despite a concern with left-wing themes, with old socialists and war protests and racial interactions and female solidarity, resist easy closure and create a vivid portrait of
a complex and contradictory America. As with Bellow, although from a very different political
perspective, Paleys work exemplifies how literature resists easy ideology.
The Place of Jewish American Literature
Jewish American literature may be considered the first ethnic literature (if one doesnt count
Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery OConner as ethnic) to have achieved
great influence in the U.S. Indeed, it might have been the notable American literature for a period. Also, it likely opened the door for, and was quickly followed by, a flowering of interest in
African American literature, in multicultural literature, in post-colonial literature, and in an array
of international literature written in English. Literature has thus changed from a European centered field, with a strong American branch, to an international and polyglot array in which hyphenated and multiple identities proliferate.
Yet the place of Jewish American literature in this new order is strangely marginal. True, an array of new authorsArt Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander,
and Michael Chabon among otherscontinues to appear. These newcomers refute a thesis advanced by Irving Howe in 1977 that Jewish American literature was past its prime, that as the
travails of Jewish immigration and identity formation in a new land subsided so would this literature. Adam Meyer argues that the new wave of Jewish American authors is symptomatic of a
common trend among immigrants, in which a third generation overcomes the second generations assimilationist shame and returns to a strong identification with an ethnic groups history.
However, the newcomers to Jewish American literature seem more scattershot than the Bellow/Malamud/Roth generation, are not part of some greater literary movement. Perhaps this is
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due to Jews having been in many ways reframed as white, as mainstream Americans, perhaps
also to the questionable place of Israel in the domain of international literary tastemakers.
Andrew Furman describes the perception that Jews in America have simply not suffered enough
to be considered a minority or multicultural group. In any case, what we have today is a collection of individual, often extremely talented, writers dealing with Jewish themes in various ways
and to various degrees, but which can no longer be seen as a movement. Of the writers of the
golden age only Roth, and occassionally Ozick, continue scribbling away; yet their collective
achievement remains a monument to literary and cultural history. America will never be the
same.
References
Baumgarten, Murray. Intersections and modern urban identities: Isaac Bashevis Singer,
American Jewish Writers and the Jewish Street. Judaism, (Summer 2000) 49:3
Benedict, Helen. Bernard Malamud: Morals and Surprises. The Antioch Review (Winter, 1983)
41:1
Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The
Return of the Exiled. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Eugene Goodheart. The Jewish Writer in America. Sewanee Review (Winter 2008) 116:1
Gubar, Susan. Jewish American Women Writers and the Race Question. The Cambridge
Companion to Jewish American Literature. Michael Kramer & Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Guzlowski, John. Isaac Singer and the Threat of America. Shofar, (Fall 2001) 20:1
Howe, Irving. "Introduction," Jewish American Stories, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Mentor,
1977).
Kerry Powers, Peter. Melus (Fall 1995) 20:3
Kim-Brown, Caroline. Isaac Bashevis Singer: Master Storyteller. Humanities (July/August 2004)
25:4
Klingenstein, Susanne. In Life I Am Not Free: The Writer Cynthia Ozick and Her Jewish
Obligations. Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, eds.
Jay Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.
Meyer, Adam. Putting the Jewish Back in Jewish American Fiction: A Look at Jewish
American Fiction from 1977 to 2002 and an Allegorical Reading of Nathan Englander's
The Gilgul of Park Avenue." Shofar (Spring 2004) 22:3
Miller, Cheryl. Why Malamud Faded. Commentary (June 2008) 125:6
Ozick, Cynthia. Art and Ardor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
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Pinsker, Sanford. The Tortoise and the Hare: Or, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and the Vagaries
of Fiction Writing. The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2005) 81:3
Shechner, Mark. Cynthia Ozick. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century
American Short Story. Blanche Gelfant, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
Wisse, Ruth. Jewish American Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American
Literature. Michael Kramer & Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.

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