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Discovery Guides

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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

Singer‟s “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, cele-

brated, 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

icons—often, though not always, connected to religious

Judaism—persists 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 Discov-

ery Guide discusses their achievement, along with four others

who wrote alongside or slightly after them: Bernard Mala-

mud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley. Collec-

tively, these authors exemplify the tension between tradition

and assimilationism in a context of increasing acceptance and

material comfort that exemplifies the trajectory of Jewish

American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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 depart-

ments 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,

Rosh Hashanah greeting card from the early 1900s: Russian Jews gaze at American relatives beckoning them to the United States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_United_States

Goffman: Jewish American Literature

ProQuest Discovery Guides http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/discoveryguides-main.php Released March 2010

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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 ten-

sion between assimilation and maintaining historical and reli-

gious 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.

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 writer—with his stories popularized in the Broadway musical Fiddler

on the Roof—Singer 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 per-

verse 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 su-

pernatural. 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 per-

haps 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 wasn‟t there” (qtd in Kim-Brown). Although Singer‟s 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

The Partisan Review began a period of Jewish American intellectual and literary ascendance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_Review



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stopped up with German worms.” Their work

destined to be forgotten, these Yiddish authors

could not understand the strange appeal of

Singer‟s stories in a wider American and liter-

ary context.

Singer himself started his career in the shadow

of his older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua

Singer (who died in 1945). Singer‟s early novel

The Family Moskat (1950) was translated into

English but largely ignored. Singer had fled

Poland in 1935, ahead of the Nazis, and The

Family Moskat is an epic memorial to this just-

lost 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 story‟s 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, particu-

larly through his bemused acceptance of human nature in its best and worst manifestations.

If short stories may be Singer‟s most successful form, such tales are paradigmatic for Jewish lit-

erature of both the old world and the new; indeed the short story is more central to Jewish litera-

ture 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. Singer‟s

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 relation-

ship with Franz Kafka, a modernist author of paradox and alienation who died young, embracing

his Jewish identity only in his last months. The story‟s narrator explains that, “Kafka wanted to

be a Jew, but he didn‟t know how. He wanted to live, but he didn‟t know this, either.” The di-

lemma 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 don‟t believe in God anyway, what‟s the difference if it‟s 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 di-

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978, Archive Photos, Taken from Proquest's eLibrary



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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 Singer‟s 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 in-

terrupted 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, ma-

neuevering between affairs with three different women, also refugees from Poland. In many of

Singer‟s novels, the protagonist‟s 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 Ameri-

can 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

Singer‟s “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 nu-

merous 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 nov-

elists, along with Bellow and Philip Roth (Singer is less quintessen-

tially American, a transplant who wrote in Yiddish and was trans-

lated). 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 Singer‟s super-

natural folk tales. Although Malamud did not speak Yiddish, critics

consider him to have brought the cadences and irony of that lan-

guage into American English.

Malamud‟s characters can be seen as following the tradition of

“Gimpel the Fool,” humble protagonists often living in obscurity.

Indeed, to suffer quietly seems Malamud‟s 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 hu-

man condition; we are born to struggle, although the Jews perhaps more. The Book of Job might

be seen as Malamud‟s 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 Proquest's Literature Online



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health as the story begins. Although “Angel Levine” ends with a vision of hope, it is not neces-

sarily the redemption of the biblical Job. Other stories hark back to eastern European persecu-

tion, 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, ex-

emplified by rhythms of the Yiddish language, albeit in English.

More so than his parabolic short stories, Malamud‟s 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. Malamud‟s later novels are less realistic,

employing the magic realism of his short stories on a larger canvas. The Tenants (1971) is a par-

able of black-Jewish relations, while God’s Grace (1982) portrays a post-apocalyptic world.

Following his death in 1986, Malamud‟s 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 Roth‟s 1974 attack on Malamud‟s 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 dis-

cussed than Singer, Bellow, or Roth.

Bellowing a New America

Saul Bellow‟s 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 scram-

bles 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. Bellow‟s only non-Jewish protagonist, Eugene Henderson, is an American in-

carnate, 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 wouldn‟t 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 America‟s Jews leave behind the past.



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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, Bellow‟s work

would continue to uphold Jewishness, albeit in a new con-

text. As Eugene Goodheart explains, “Bellow‟s career os-

cillates between the present- and future-mindedness of his

American identity and memories of the Yiddishkeit he im-

bibed with his mother‟s milk.” In the bulk of Bellow‟s ca-

reer, his characters form a new, hybrid identity, quintessen-

tially Jewish and quintessentially American, old world in-

tellectuals in a situation of unprecedented affluence and

freedom. In Herzog (1964), probably Bellow‟s most ac-

claimed novel, the protagonist, Moses Herzog, deals with a

situation prototypical for American novels at this time, no-

tably in John Updike‟s work: infidelity and divorce. Absent

the life-or-death issues of war and violence, absent poverty, divorce is probably the most mean-

ingful plot element for an affluent America. Moses Herzog is especially beset as his wife has be-

trayed 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 novel‟s 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 socialism—defined

as a skepticism with society as it exists in favor of an ideal vision—this 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

couldn‟t be easily pigeon-holed. In Mr. Sammlers Planet an elderly Holocaust survivor is pur-

sued 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 side-

walk, he experiences the human connection between the two. Sammler‟s 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 America‟s youth, seeing them as shallow

and selfish. In part this was a reaction to the protest culture of the 1960s and the campus “politi-

cal correctness” that followed. In part, though, it seems to stem from America‟s disconnect with,

and disrespect for, European culture and tradition, a critique made explicity by Bellow‟s friend

and University of Chicago colleague Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987).

The Dean’s December (1982), for instance, depicts a college campus thriving with callow, radi-

cal youth, notably the protagonist‟s nephew.

If Bellow‟s later novels were increasingly political, they remained complex, humanistic portraits

touched with humor and cynicism. His final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a fictionalized portrait of

Saul Bellow, Keystone/Getty Images, Taken from Proquest's Literature Online



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Allan Bloom, has been criticized as overly political, yet also praised a complex human portrait of

an intellectual at war with the modern world. Bellow‟s oscillating position as embattled Jewish

intellectual and contradictory humanist places him as central in the quest to define the Jewish po-

sition in America.

Philip Roth Faces the Wrath: The Bad Boy of Jewish Literature

Philip Roth‟s Goodbye Columbus (1959) shocked the liter-

ary world with its critical portrayal of Jews. If previous

Jewish American literature had a certain concern for por-

traying Jews positively, Roth, taking a cue from Jewish co-

medians, 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, “Roth‟s characters, like Roth himself, often

seem cut off from the wellsprings of Jewish identity.”

What‟s Jewish about them is a cultural remnant, some yid-

dishisms, a rabbi here or there, in the later works a concern

with Israel. What‟s Jewish American about them is some-

thing stronger—a recurring concern with reconciling iden-

ties, with a lingering outsider status, a sense of victimization,

amid a rising affluence and acceptance.

Roth‟s reputation took a self-inflicted hit with the publication of his most notorious novel (and

biggest seller) Portnoy’s 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 shiksas—everything 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, Portnoy’s 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 Roth‟s 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, differ-

ent characters in Roth‟s 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

isn‟t, and it turns out that Zuckerman has imagined the whole thing. Later in the series, Zucker-

Philip Roth, 1994, Archive Photos, Taken from Proquest's eLibrary



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man publishes a book called Carnovsky that parallels Portnoy’s 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 Roth‟s metafic-

tional games. When Zuckerman‟s 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 ap-

pears 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 Is-

rael). 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 perse-

cutes America‟s 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 Roth‟s

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 Levov‟s idyllic life—at

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 writers—Saul Bel-

low, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Stanley Elkin, Woody Allen—whose narrative

exuberance and sometimes comic, sometimes satiric experimental performances have no female-

authored 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 assimila-

tionist 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 Jewish-

ness 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 obvi-

ous 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 Ozick‟s 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, Ozick‟s 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 Ozick‟s 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 un-

settling nature of the creative imagination. At the same time she insists that she is keeping sepa-

rate her obligations as a Jew and her desires as a writer.”

Another central theme of Ozick‟s, upon which her work

of memory and change is brought to bear, is the Holo-

caust. The search for the meaning of art and literature in

light of the Holocaust‟s 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. Al-

though 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 Holo-

caust, 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 no-

vella begins with a short story of a forced march to a

concentration camp in which Rosa, the narrator, pro-

tects her infant daughter, Magda, in a magic shawl.

Magda, however, is killed when Stella, Rosa‟s 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 ver-

sion of Ozick herself, lost in a world of literature, more at home in books than with people. Yet

Puttermesser lacks two elements apparent in Ozick‟s 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,

Children from Auschwitz liberated by the Red Army in January, 1945. The Holocaust is central to much of Ozick’s fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust



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“Puttermesser is a character in search of history, or more precisely, an ancestry, a living connec-

tion to the past that will give her life meaning beyond her mundane efforts in a civic bureauc-

racy.” All that Puttermesser has left is her literary imagination, which seems to be the source of

the book‟s magic realism. Puttermesser creates, or one day there appears, a female golem, who

procedes to take over Puttermesser‟s 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 iden-

tity.

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 in-

flected language, Paley can easily be placed among major Jew-

ish American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century,

and indeed fits squarely in Susan Gubar‟s characterization of

“narrative exuberance and sometimes comic, sometimes satiric

experimental performances”as defining elements of Jewish

American literature. Although Paley published only three vol-

umes of short stories and some poetry collections during her

long life, she is something of a literary icon, an American origi-

nal. An overt radical, a heir of Jewish socialism, Paley claimed

to be too busy with her activism—protesting nuclear arms and

the Vietnam War, among other issues—for a prodigious literary

output. Yet her voice is unique, a mixture of New York dialect,

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 levi-

tated into a tree, watching the world below, a kind of omniscient narrator looking down at the

park and characters that constitute the world of Paley‟s fiction, yet jolted by an anti-war demon-

stration into political awareness.

Faith, a recurring character throughout Paley‟s 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 cross-

purposes 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 femi-

nist era, though in a way far more affirming of the human community than that of Ruth Putter-

messer. 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

Grace Paley, Getty Images, Taken from Proquest's Literature Online



11

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 can‟t write a normal story, with a be-

ginning, a middle, and an end. The narrator dutifully does so, though in such a way as to under-

cut the assumptions of traditional narrative, revealing Paley‟s idiosyncratic postmodernism as a

valid take on America‟s 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 Paley‟s 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, Paley‟s stories, despite a concern with left-wing themes, with old socialists and war pro-

tests 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, Paley‟s 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 doesn‟t count

Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O‟Conner as ethnic) to have achieved

great influence in the U.S. Indeed, it might have been the notable American literature for a pe-

riod. 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 cen-

tered field, with a strong American branch, to an international and polyglot array in which hy-

phenated and multiple identities proliferate.

Yet the place of Jewish American literature in this new order is strangely marginal. True, an ar-

ray of new authors—Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander,

and Michael Chabon among others—continues to appear. These newcomers refute a thesis ad-

vanced 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 lit-

erature. 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 genera-

tion‟s assimilationist shame and returns to a strong identification with an ethnic group‟s history.

However, the newcomers to Jewish American literature seem more scattershot than the Bel-

low/Malamud/Roth generation, are not part of some greater literary movement. Perhaps this is



12

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 collec-

tion 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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