After the Golden Age; Jewish Quartterly 248

American Jewish Writing in the Twenty-First Century

Jonathan Pearlman

• Publisher: The Jewish Quarterly
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781743822340
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This issue of The Jewish Quarterly examines the current generation of leading American Jewish writers as they grapple with challenges facing Jewish America today, including its relationship with religion, Israel, politics and multicultural America. After the Golden Age shows how a new wave of writers is charting and creating a modern Jewish world that is different from that of classic Jewish writers of the last century such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. In a ground-breaking essay, one of America's foremost literary critics, Adam Kirsch, provides a compelling account of a changing Jewish America. The issue also includes a report by Turkish writer Kaya Genç on antisemitism and conspiracy theories in Erdo?an's Turkey, and an essay by Australian writer Sarah Krasnostein on the extraordinary history and feats of the "enemy aliens" – the Dunera Boys – shipped from Britain to Australia in 1940.

After the Golden Age

American Jewish writing in the twenty-first century

Adam Kirsch

At the end of the twentieth century, American Jewish literature seemed to be stuck in a time warp. The most exciting writers of the 1990s were the same ones who had presided over the golden age of Jewish fiction four decades earlier. Philip Roth, who had emerged as American Jewry’s sharpest provocateur with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, began his transformation into its bittersweet elegist with American Pastoral in 1997. Norman Mailer, who became famous in 1948 for his World War II novel The Naked and the Dead, made headlines again in 1991 with Harlot’s Ghost, a 1300-page chronicle of the Cold War. Saul Bellow, who perfected the streetwise, intellectual voice of modern Jewishness in The Adventures of Augie March in 1953, had a last triumph in 2000 with Ravelstein, a roman à clef about the philosopher Allan Bloom. Even Bernard Malamud, who died in 1986, was on the New York Times list of the best books of 1997, with the publication of his Complete Stories.

Such endurance testified to the extraordinary talent of the Jewish writers born between 1915 and 1935, the first to make a lasting mark on American literature. But the failure of younger writers to overtake them seemed to bear out the gloomy diagnosis of the critic Irving Howe, who wrote in 1977 that “Jewish American fiction has probably moved past its high point”. In his essay “Strangers”, Howe argued that this literature was destined to flare brightly and then fade away because it had only one story to tell: that of being “stamped and pounded by the immigrant experience”.

The greatest American Jewish writers weren’t immigrants themselves. They were the children or even grandchildren of the Eastern European Jews who arrived by the millions starting in the 1880s. But they grew up in Jewish enclaves – whether that meant dirt-poor Humboldt Park, Chicago, where Bellow’s father delivered coal and bootlegged Prohibition liquor, or the petit-bourgeois Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, where Roth’s father sold insurance. In his 1951 memoir A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin wrote about the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where the world seemed to be divided into “the block and beyond”, and “anything away from the block was good: even a school you never went to, two blocks away”.

But the real “beyond” was America, where the gentiles lived. “Why were they there, and we always here?” Kazin demands, knowing that there was the home of everything beautiful and desirable – including the classic American literature to which he would devote his life as a critic. “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan – or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan,” wrote the intellectual Norman Podhoretz, another product of Brownsville.

To make that journey, it was necessary to cultivate an enormous propulsive force, like a rocket achieving escape velocity. This was the source of the energy and avidity that, at mid-century, became synonymous with American Jewish writing – the style of “writers who must hurry into articulateness if they are to be heard at all”, in Howe’s description. Bellow’s Augie March announces right at the start that he intends to gain admission to the great world, whatever it takes: “F irst to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Roth’s Alexander Portnoy uses a different body part as a siege engine: “Furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock.” Later he vows, “Through fucking I will discover America.”

Jewish writers agonised over the guilt of disobeying their parents, and later of failing to become good parents themselves

Though they weren’t fully aware of it, being too intent on the American future to take their bearings from the Jewish past, these writers were the product of a type of cultural explosion that occurred wherever Jews collided with modernity. When German Jews encountered Enlightenment ideas in the late eighteenth century, the conflict produced revolutionary writers such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx. The flowering of a secular, national Yiddish culture was catalysed by Sholem Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam became leading lights of Russian literature.

All of these writers turned away from Judaism in favour of socialism and nationalism, the reigning idols of modern Europe. In mid-twentieth-century America, however, such grand political visions had little appeal. Instead, the pioneering Jewish writers were drawn to American ideals of individualism and independence, and their central theme was the conflict between the new world’s promise of freedom and the traditional demands of Jewish solidarity. The guilt this literature famously expressed had nothing to do with religious belief, which American Jews were largely happy to jettison, and not much more to do with political allegiance, since Zionism didn’t yet dominate the American Jewish agenda. Rather, Jewish writers agonised over the guilt of disobeying their parents, and later of failing to become good parents themselves.

The strife between parent and child, past and future, Jew and American, was furious enough to propel the first generation of American Jewish writers all the way to the end of the twentieth century, by which time they were old enough to be grandparents or even great-grandparents. But Howe argued that as American Jews became more assimilated, they would lose touch with that primal, energising struggle. And the doldrums of late-twentieth-century Jewish writing seemed to bear this idea out.

The winners of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in the 1980s and 1990s included Bellow and Roth, and Israeli masters A.B. Yehoshua and Aharon Appelfeld; almost none of the others are still read today. In a 1999 essay, the novelist Anne Roiphe hopefully hailed “a new generation of Jewish writers”, including Allegra Goodman, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Pearl Abraham, Ehud Havazelet and Daphne Merkin. But among them, only Goodman went on to produce a substantial body of work. As a new century approached, aspiring Jewish writers must have felt like Edgar at the end of King Lear: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

*

Against this background, the publication of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in 2000, seemed like the answer to a prayer. “I’m not sure what the exact definition of a ‘great American novel’ is, but I’m pretty sure that Michael Chabon’s sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one,” wrote the critic Daniel Mendelsohn. Kavalier & Clay was a bestseller, and Chabon, born in 1963, became the first Jewish writer younger than Philip Roth to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The classic Jewish novel, as created by Bellow and Roth, was rooted in autobiography. For all its comic hyperbole, it kept a firm grasp on contemporary reality. Chabon broke new ground by turning from the present to the past and from realism to fable – or better, to the free interpretation of midrash, a genre with far deeper roots in Jewish literature than the realism of the modern novel.

The Holocaust is the defining event for American Jews, even though they weren’t among its victims

The sages of the Roman and Persian empires used midrash to rewrite the already ancient stories of the Torah in ways more acceptable to their own sense of logic and piety. These retellings added details, interpretations, even whole episodes that are nowhere to be found in the F ive Books of Moses, elevating moral and symbolic truth over literal accuracy. Similarly, all kinds of things happen in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that won’t be found in the history books. The golem of Jewish legend turns up in a Prague apartment; a man jumps off the Empire State Building and is yanked back up by a rope made of rubber bands; Salvador Dalí nearly suffocates while wearing a diving helmet at a Manhattan party.

But the most significant departure from reality has to do with Chabon’s choice of protagonist. Joe Kavalier is a young artist who smuggles himself out of Prague following the Nazi occupation of the city in March 1939 and finds refuge in New York with his cousin Sammy Klayman. At a time when the United States had all but closed its doors to European refugees, escapes like this were so uncommon as to be statistically miraculous. In 1939 the US quota for immigrants from Czechoslovakia was less than 3000, and after the Nazi takeover the demand was so high there was a ten-year waiting list. The premise alone, then, disqualifies Kavalier & Clay from being any kind of representative American Jewish story.

But being typical isn’t the only way of being truthful, as Joe and Sammy recognise when they invent the comic-book character that will bring them fame and fortune – the Escapist, a hybrid of Superman and Houdini who specialises in getting out of impossible traps. The Escapist is a fantasy, but Chabon suggests that American Jews recognise themselves in the character, since in historical terms the whole Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States was a lucky escape act. Without knowing it, the millions who emigrated between 1880 and 1920 got out in the nick of time. Starting in the 1920s, the United States began to severely restrict immigration, and the Jews who stayed behind would almost all be murdered.

In this sense, Kavalier & Clay suggests, the Holocaust is the defining event for American Jews, even though they weren’t among its victims. This would become a major new theme in twenty-first-century Jewish literature. For writers born in the 1910s and 1920s, the terms of their thinking about Americanness and Jewishness were set before the Holocaust took place, and it took a surprisingly long time for them to reckon with it seriously. As Saul Bellow confessed in a 1987 letter to Cynthia Ozick, “‘Jewish Writers in America’ (a repulsive category!) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry.”

The reason was simple: “I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties,” Bellow wrote. Most of his contemporaries – and not just the writers – could have said something similar. They were decisively oriented towards America and the future; Jewishness and the past seemed burdensome and far away. Bellow’s interjection in this very letter, dissociating himself from any such identity as “Jewish writer”, makes clear how deep this feeling went.

The great exception to the rule was Ozick herself. Born in 1928, Ozick began writing fiction under the influence of Henry James, developing what she describes as a vampiric obsession with the master. But her attempt to write like a nineteenth-century WASP led to artistic stagnation, and in the 1970s she remade her work by placing Jewishness at its centre in a challenging new way. Practically alone among writers of her generation, Ozick insisted that American Jewish life was simply another chapter in Jewish history – a golden chapter, perhaps, but one that would eventually end, just as in medieval Spain and nineteenth-century Germany.

With this backward-looking and fundamentally pessimistic view, Ozick was naturally drawn to the Holocaust as a subject, producing perhaps the greatest piece of Holocaust fiction by an American, the story “The Shawl”. She didn’t hesitate to make Jewishness central to her identity as a writer, pondering theological questions like the incompatibility between Judaism and the “idolatry” of modern art. And she made use of the techniques of midrash, fable and magical realism, writing stories about a rabbi who falls in love with a tree and Jewish partygoers who levitate. In all three respects, Ozick was the key influence on twenty-first-century Jewish fiction, helping to steer it onto a new path that was also an older one.

The Jewish writers who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s followed Ozick in putting the Holocaust at the centre of their worldview. At exactly the moment when European Jewry was being annihilated, American Jewry was becoming the freest and most prosperous Jewish community of the last 2000 years. Why were we blessed and they cursed? How could American Jews pay their debt to the six million?

Kavalier & Clay is a parable of this survivor’s guilt. At first, Joe Kavalier can only justify his luck in escaping to America by turning his comics into anti-Nazi propaganda: “If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.” Instead of enjoying his success, he uses the money he earns from the Escapist to charter a ship to bring young refugees, including his brother, to America.

But Joe soon realises that even a bestselling comic book won’t bring the United States into the war – it took Pearl Harbor to do that. Then the ship carrying his brother is torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German submarine. The revelation of his powerlessness shatters Joe, and the second half of the book – dealing with his wartime service in Antarctica, his postwar disappearance and his eventual return – asks how it might be possible to recuperate from the rage and despair of the survivor.

Chabon is certain that revenge on the enemies of the Jews isn’t the answer. During the war, Joe develops a mad plan to fly across the Antarctic wastes and kill a lone German scientist whose radio broadcasts he has detected. But when he accomplishes this, he realises that he has betrayed himself. “The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German’s blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying,” Chabon writes.

The only ethical way to respond to a history of death and loss, Kavalier & Clay finally insists, is to create a future of life and love. In the novel’s last section, Joe returns to Sammy, reunites with his true love, Rosa, and reveals himself to Tommy, the son he conceived with her before the war but never met. It is a bittersweet but affirmative ending, suggesting that in America the Jews can create a new world to compensate for the one that was destroyed.

This reconstruction demands a new attitude towards Judaism. In Kavalier & Clay, all the Jewish passion that once went into religion is redirected into popular culture. Comic books, Joe reflects, offer the truest kind of escape:

That was magic – not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world – the reality – that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.

For comic books, you could substitute Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, Hollywood movies, TV sitcoms and stand-up comedy – all the popular arts where Jews made such an enormous impact on American culture. Like The Jazz Singer three-quarters of a century earlier, Kavalier & Clay implies that the Jews’ new religion is entertainment, and that they are better off for the exchange.

Chabon solemnises this conversion late in the novel, when Joe pays a visit to Houdini’s grave in Queens and notices “that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and there, wherever there was a seam or a crack”. This is, of course, what Jews have done at the Western Wall in Jerusalem for centuries. In the New World, Chabon suggests, the supreme showman and real-life escapist is a more fitting recipient of Jewish prayers.

*

In its celebration of America as a Jewish homeland and of culture as a replacement for religion, Kavalier & Clay can be seen as the last great Jewish novel of the twentieth century. In its rejection of realism and its sense of the centrality of the Holocaust, it is also the first great Jewish novel of the twenty-first century. The same qualities can be found in most of the important Jewish novels written since, starting with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.

Published in 2002, when its author was twenty-five years old, Everything Is Illuminated sold 150,000 copies in hardcover and was quickly adapted for film. Critics placed it in the company of classics like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. Another key reference point is Gabriel García Márquez: Trachimbrod, the shtetl in Everything Is Illuminated, is an Ashkenazi version of Macondo, the Colombian village whose outlandish history is told in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Unlike Macondo, Trachimbrod was a real place, a Jewish village in western Ukraine that was destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. In the novel, however, it serves as a funhouse mirror in which the history of Eastern European Jewry can be reflected in antic and tragic forms.

Foer’s maternal ancestors, the Safrans, came from Trachimbrod, and the novel relates the present-day visit of “Jonathan Safran Foer” to Ukraine in search of traces of the past. In particular, he is trying to track down a woman known as Augustine, who appears in an heirloom photograph; he believes she was responsible for saving his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust. The story of this journey is told in letters written by Jonathan’s incompetent Ukrainian translator, Alex, whose braggadocio and malapropisms (“I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa”) anticipate Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat. Alex’s observations create a portrait of the Jonathan Safran Foer character as a clueless, neurotic American – he is, for instance, inordinately terrified of a smelly dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.

These people must be supercharged with vitality, even to the point of cartoonishness, if they are to be seen at all

These sections of Everything Is Illuminated alternate with episodes from the history of Trachimbrod, told w...