American Jewish Fiction
American Jewish fiction refers to literature written by American authors of Jewish descent, often exploring themes of identity, tradition, and the immigrant experience. These works frequently delve into the complexities of Jewish culture and history in the United States, offering insights into the challenges and triumphs of the Jewish-American experience. Notable authors in this genre include Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick.
4 Key excerpts on "American Jewish Fiction"
eBook - ePubJewish American Literature since 1945
An Introduction
- Stephen Wade(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Heller, Mailer, Doctorow, and others continue to publish … but the novelty has worn off.’ 1 This illustrates the blindness to far more abiding and profound elements of recent Jewish experience in America, but also highlights the ways in which certain writers have purposely textualised Jewish life and belief, while others have simply used it as convenient material. Elkin, in an interview, for instance, talks about his story, ‘The Rabbi of Lud’ in merely comic terms, never mentioning any Jewish ‘theme’ at all. 2 Karl, in his dismissal, concludes by arguing that the decline of Jewish-American writing as a dominant and important factor only insofar as there are massive, all-embracing features which explain the ongoing concerns of American literature, and that Jewish writing has been subsumed into this. He lists ‘the pastoral, Jeffersonian tradition’ and ‘reliance on escape and liberation as resolutions of personal dilemmas’ for instance. Now, this could be easily said for any body of literature, and it avoids having to stop and consider the real case for a special difference, and indeed a renewal of vigour and sense of purpose. 3 One of the most significant reappraisals has been that of the achievements of Jewish women writers since the 1940s. The foundation texts of Yezierska and Edna Ferber gave a whole spectrum of potential meanings and expositions of the woman writer within either the main culture or from within ethnicity. Particular writers have written about these foundations and about the impact of the social revolution after the Second World War, for instance, in the significant rise in the number of women in employment, but equally, as Betty Friedan’s writings in the 1960s have shown, there was still an accepted rationale of the subservience of women and a pervasive ideology of domesticity and separate spheres...
eBook - ePubTaking A Long Look
Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
- Vivian Gornick(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Verso(Publisher)
...LITERATURE 1 Lore Segal In no literature in the world has the immigrant novel been more varied, more original, more persistent than in ours—and this for the most obvious of reasons. The word “America” has been experienced, for at least a hundred and fifty years, by millions all over the world, as a euphemism for the fabled land, where, washing up half drowned on a richly receptive shore, one is assured salvation of an undreamt-of order. So they have been driven to come—wave upon wave upon wave of Jews, Italians, Irish, Latinos, Asians, Africans—and, sooner or later, large numbers of them produce the written document—usually a work of fiction—detailing the disparity between the fantasy and the actuality: the one that is so powerful it seems to the writer that now just to utter the word America in quotes is to achieve metaphor. Only rarely do these novels have a life beyond the one given them on publication day. Even when well written, they are, all too often, claustrophobically enclosed by a tale of survival beyond which America itself remains an abstraction, hardly ever quickening into the life with which a real—rather than a testifying—protagonist would have to engage. A perfect example is Abraham Cahan’s 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky, an early rags-to-riches story with a strong psychological bent that fails to deepen precisely because Cahan’s character is sealed into a ghetto environment that remains static. Levinsky’s New York is crowded with Lower East Side Jews who hand him on, one to another, until at last he prospers, but the city itself never emerges as a place of vast and varied doings beyond the streets of the ghetto where the characters soon become indistinguishable. The sole development in the novel, finally, is Levinsky’s awareness of the absence of development. Yet the genre is a resilient one...
eBook - ePub- Dario Miccoli, Dario Miccoli(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Mizrahi fiction as a minor literature Yochai Oppenheimer This chapter traces the contours of the fiction written in Hebrew over the course of the last two decades by men and women who either came to Israel from Arab countries or were born to parents who arrived as part of that migration. This body of work bears, I argue, the imprint of experiences, cultural positions and ideas that, despite many differences and even contradictions, create a common space of writing that may be called Mizrahi fiction. This generalisation does not disregard the various kinds of Mizrahiyut – of being Mizrahi – that can be found in Israel, and the different literary paths that emerged in this period. I maintain, however, that in their work all these writers express, in one way or another, a common culture and awareness of the experience of immigration that they underwent either directly or via their families. A Mizrahi consciousness that ties together ethnic communities from different Eastern lands permeates the entire range of subjects that these writers address. It impinges on their conception of their individual and collective identity to the same measure that it touches on their relationship with the Hebrew language, their experience of Israeli time and space, their political positions and their gender perceptions. The writers themselves do not display a preoccupation with an ethnic uniqueness that developed before their arrival in Israel and, of course, afterward; rather, their concern is their encounter with Israeli society and culture...
eBook - ePub- Edward Alexander(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Their work “attests to the indissolubility of the Jews,” 3 albeit not necessarily in a positive way. (The Bible affords a formidable precedent for Jewish writers who take the sour view that the Jews are an eternal people but occasionally a nasty one.) Wisse’s skeletal theory of modern Jewish literature acquires flesh and muscle tissue as she makes her case for the quality as well as the existence of a Jewish canon in ten more or less chronologically arranged chapters about its major figures or schools or specific works. The chronological order is indispensable in a book that in effect proposes to tell the story of the Jewish people in the twentieth century through analysis of its major literary works and their authors because “modern Jewish literature is the repository of modern Jewish experience” (4). Her ten chapters center on the following writers, works, and themes: Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman; Franz Kafka and the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner; the Jewish writers of tsarist and Communist Russia, from Babel to Vasily Grossman; the literature (in Yiddish by all three writers of the famous Singer family and by Singer’s antagonist Jacob Glatstein, and in Hebrew by S. Y. Agnon) of and about the Poland of the 1930s; the literature of the Holocaust; literature in English (including, by honorary membership for relevant goyim, George Eliot’s DanielDeronda and James Joyce’s Ulysses) about the Zionist enterprise; works tracing the movement of the immigrant masses of Europe from Yiddish to English; recent American Jewish writers; and Israeli Literature (“A Chapter in the Making”). The intellectual background to Wisse’s original and ambitious work is complicated...
