[A longtime editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a regular contributor to the New Republic, Howe is one of America's most highly respected literary critics and social historians. He has been a socialist since the 1930s, and his criticism is frequently informed by a liberal social viewpoint. In the following essay, he explains the contemporary period in Jewish-American literature as one in transition from a concentration on "Jewishness as experience" to "Jewishness as essence."]

The notion of marginality, often under the more imposing guise of alienation, became central to the self-understanding of Jewish American writers a few decades ago. A declared alienation was, in part, a way of preserving the psycho-social stance derived from Marxist politics while simultaneously abandoning that politics. It also reflected, in part, a genuine feeling of dislocation, or more exactly, of uncertain location, among young writers recently emerging from the immigrant streets but starting to find a place in the American literary milieu.

Among the more prominent of these writers, there was usually a mixed feeling about marginality or alienation. Saul Bellow succeeded, for a time, in writing out of quite contrary impulses and premises, no doubt because he felt the pressures of both. A sense of alienation is powerful in his early fiction, and reaches a tragic fulfillment in his wonderful short novel Seize the Day. But by the time he wrote The Adventures of Augie March he was already repudiating styles of marginality and declaring himself an enthusiast for the openness and (to use a term favored at the time) the "craziness' of the American experience—which might account for a certain willed quality in his work, a stress upon energy when energy would be enough. Philip Roth completed the turn from marginality.

For other writers of the time, marginality figured ambiguously. If it lurks behind Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, in his best stories he writes as if the immigrant milieu were self-sufficient, encompassing imaginatively and sustaining morally for its ethos of affliction and endurance. And thereby marginality seems to evaporate, as a mere indulgence. Something like this might also be said for earlier writers like Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs, both firmly planted in the immigrant space. They commanded a locale or better yet, a subject commanded them, and thereby they came into possession of a scale of values that allowed them terms of self-definition. Perhaps the most sensitive perception with regard to marginality appears in the work of Delmore Schwartz, especially in his beautiful story "America, America," where Shenandoah Fish (the very name a comic suggestion of psychic fissure) hopes, probably in vain, to dissociate himself from his own smugness as an intellectual looking down upon the older, immigrant generation.

In the experience, then, of the Jewish American writers marginality serves a number of uses:

These writers had left behind the immigrant world but its stigmata were still stamped on their souls. Nearing high culture but uneasy with its manners and maneuvers, they tried to carve out a little space for themselves, practically and imaginatively. If they were uncertain, however, as to who they were, they knew what they had been. Did not the mere fact of becoming an American writer signify a subtle betrayal, though why or of what was unclear. To stay with the old folks, we all felt, would mean provincialism and tedium; a refusal of gifts from Western culture. (Parenthetically, the great Yiddish poet Yaakov Gladstein once said to me, "We taught them how to read, and then they went to T. S. Eliot.") Such embarrassments, overcome after a time, reflected a transitional experience, just as Jewish American writing can itself be seen as a transitional experience.

Marginality was itself part of a tradition, inherited from the immigrant milieu. Rubbing up against an alien culture, the immigrant Jews had first to pull inward in order later to move outward, with collective identity serving as a springboard for individual dispersion. Yet in that interval the immigrant world gave its literary offspring a lovely blessing: it gave them memories, it gave them evocative place names and dubious relatives, it gave them thickness of milieu. Their marginality was thus indistinguishable, for a while, from an overpowering, and even oppressive sense of community. But that's what writers need: the pressure of inescapable situations.

The rhetoric of marginality also served as a strategy for the New York writers, identifiably Jewish yet not identifying themselves as Jews—a strategy by which they could briefly maintain what I'd call their politics after politics; by which they could band together for common ambitions; by which they could give symbolic status to an uneasiness they could not always name.

Perhaps the most important meaning, ultimately, of marginality was as a way to initiate, all but unconsciously, a link with nineteenth-century American writers like Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. Despite a professed distaste for the Emersonian tradition, which for many years I foolishly shared, the Jewish American writers were in part reenacting some of the styles and postures of that tradition. The great nineteenth-century American writers had been inspired by a vision of human possibility that, as it faded into helplessness and despair, also became a fierce critique of America society. Most Jewish American writers consciously aligned themselves with the cultural modernism of Europe, though uneasily, since they knew about its deep strains of reaction and even anti-Semitism. Yet I think it can be said in retrospect that American Jewish writing represented a slow coming to terms with American culture, first as a curious repetition of the strategies of American regionalism, in which writers breaking out of provincial settings create themselves as adversaries of a national center that is probably not even present, and second, as a partial and rather awkward inheritor of Emersonianism, not so much of its doctrines as of its adversarial stance. For the Jewish American writers were steadily becoming Americans, Americans above all.

In a fine essay, the Southern writer Eudora Welty discusses the ways in which the physical setting of a story establishes and validates its meanings. Place is where the writer "has his roots, place is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes it provides the base of reference, in his work the point of view." Far from being mere inert locale, place becomes an organizing principle in the work of fiction. Bellow's Chicago, Henry Roth's East Side, Daniel Fuchs's Brooklyn: to visualize these settings is to grasp theme and idea. As Welty writes: "The moment the place in which the novel (or story) is accepted as true, through it will begin to glow, in a kind of recognizable glory, the feelings and thought that inhabited the novel (or story) in the author's head and animated the whole of his work.… Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of 'What happened? Who's here? Who's coming' and that is the heart's field."

The heart's field. A lovely phrase. The heart's field for many American Jewish writers will forever be grey, packed streets that they kept in memory long after the actuality was erased.

American Jewish fiction has primarily been a fiction of immigrant life, intimately known and nervously recalled. Delancey Street, Pitkin Avenue, Napoleon Street, these are inducements, props, stimulants. Place, insofar as it becomes "the heart's field," also entails a cluster of inherited styles and values, ways of life—as well as specifically literary styles yoking together mandarin refinements with gutter vividness, inherited demotic with acquired high culture. What this meant for the American Jewish writers was, above all, the advantages, and limitations also, of an inescapable subject, with abundance of memory turned into discipline of narration.

American Jewish fiction, drawing heavily upon the immigrant locale, finds its substance and its value in a Jewishness of experience. The most recent Jewish writers, perhaps as talented and probably more knowing than their elders, lack this resource; for them Jewishness appears as a problem, a sentiment, a commitment. Harold Brodkey in one story has a character say that "being Jewish was a great truth," but what that truth consists of, and how it manifests itself in life, seems very elusive in his writing. This is not a fault, it is a condition. For we are witnessing a transition from Jewishness as experience to Jewishness as essence. Intellectually, the latter may even be preferable, since the Jewish experience of the earlier American Jewish writer was one in which much of Jewish tradition, learning, and knowledge had been lost. Those who think of, or write about, Jewishness as an essence—a religious or metaphysical content—may indeed be seeking to affirm a stronger connection with the Jewish past. But for literature, for the writing of novels and stories, the experience of the writers who came out of the immigrant milieu provided a richer setting, a more accessible dramatic substance, a more powerful and enclosing subject.

And that is why I am a little skeptical about Ted Solotaroff's prescription, if it is that, at the end of his paper: that writers turn to the relations between American Jews and Israel. For intellectual debate, political analysis, cultural essays: yes. For fiction, it all seems to me too entangled with polemic, too distant from common life. And the example of the Pollard case that he gives strikes me as better for a Graham Greene or a Joseph Conrad than for the younger Jewish American writers. I do not wish to seem dogmatic on this matter; the future may prove me wrong. But my inclination is to believe that while there remain of course many areas of American Jewish life open to scrutiny, from the suburbs to the makhers to the universities, they are too diverse, too lacking in dramatic concentration, too unfocused conceptually for ready fictional treatment. There is, in short,—or so I think—a crisis of subject matter and it is not likely to be overcome very soon.

But this crisis—which, in the barest shorthand, I designate as the transition from Jewishness as experience to Jewishness as essence—is only secondarily a literary one. It is actually becoming the crisis of nonreligious Jews themselves, who search, with varying degrees of seriousness and authenticity, for some residual—symbolic, analogical, "cultural"—fragments with which to retain a Jewish identity steadily being drained of substance. No example of this could be more poignant than some recent writings of Harold Bloom, in which he tries to establish, in a sort of inspired madness of analogy, Freud, Kafka, and Scholem as new centers of conviction for secular Jewishness: an effort he himself admits must at best be confined to an elite and that ineluctably cuts itself off from what has traditionally been source and base of Jewish existence, namely, the folk as community of shared belief.

Finally, a few words on the question: Why so much talk about American Jewish writing? In American literature it is a fairly minor phenomenon. There has not been one Jewish writer comparable to the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century gentile American novelists and poets. What we can reckon with is one major novel, Call It Sleep, Fuchs's fine trilogy of Jewish life in Depression Brooklyn, some of Schwartz's stories, a few novels by Bellow, etc. Impressive, but hardly warranting the hullabaloo that has occurred. I have a few speculations:

1. It was all part of Jewish self-consciousness, Jewish self-advertisement, part of the painful struggle of a minority, non- Christian subculture, to establish itself in America. A certain amount of exaggeration was unavoidable.
2. It was also part of the effort of the Partisan Review circle to consolidate its claims to literary importance. If the New Critics had Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell, then the New York critics came back with Schwartz, Bellow, and Malamud. A certain amount of exaggeration was unavoidable.
3. The interest of the American Jewish community in American Jewish writing (it doesn't by the way extend to Israeli writing) served it in extremely important ways. This helped, or seemed to help, fill the spiritual vacuum that has become increasingly evident—a glaring emptiness—at the center of American Jewish life. With the fading immigrant Yiddish culture and the disinclination of most American Jews to take religion seriously, the Jewish community became dimly aware that it needed "something" other than check writing, banquets, and lobbying to justify its claims to cultural substance. Half in submission and half in resentment, it turned to the very Jewish American writers it felt to be excessively "negative." There followed a serio-comic misunderstanding which forms all too large a part of what passes for so-called Jewish American culture.

And then, even this began to slip away. It did not last. It could not.