SOURCE: "Marginality Revisited," in The Writer in the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue, edited by Richard Siegel and Tamar Sofer, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993, pp. 59-66.

[In the following essay, Solotaroff maintains that Jewish writers still occupy a marginal position in American culture, and that they could achieve renewed appeal by focusing on the subject of Israel.]

Twenty-five years ago, when American Jewish writing was in its heyday, much of the discussion of its prominence turned upon the issues of marginality.

Not the most precise concept, marginality had the implication of standing apart, as the American Jewish writer was perceived to do with respect to both sides of the hyphen. Being an outsider in both the American and Jewish communities, he was enabled to see what more accustomed eyes would miss at a faculty meeting in Oregon or on the screen of a western or in the Jewish dietary laws. Marginality also sometimes referred to the overlap between the two cultures where the postimmigrant writer had grown up and considered himself an expert on its various phenomena, ranging from Trotskyism and Freudianism to the riffs of Benny Goodman, the humor of Lenny Bruce.

As Irving Howe suggests, marginality also conveyed the sense of a waning and an adjustment of the more extreme condition of alienation that had been bred by the Depression, Marxism, and the Holocaust as well as by the anti-Semitism and Jewish chauvinism that the writer experienced growing up in the postimmigrant community of the 1920s and 30s. The progress of assimilation has continued to erode the traces of Jewish mores and ethos. The special angle of vision has blurred, and Jewish identity as a subject with a moral edge has tended generally to decline. This development is particularly marked, as one would expect, in the writers of the present generation—the David Leavitts and Deborah Eisenbergs. On the other hand, an unprecedented development in Jewish life is creating a different kind of marginality. If Jewish leaders like Arthur Hertzberg and writers like Philip Roth are correct, and I think they are onto something very important, the new and increasingly tense margin of Jewish consciousness and conscience lies in the preoccupation with Israel. As Rabbi Hertzberg has observed, Israel is the religion of American Jewry and as Mr. Roth has shown, Israel is a rich subject. Part of its great promise for American as well as Israeli writers is its uncanny replication of the precarious, unstable, hemmed-in, contentious, revered conditions of the Diaspora that have all but disappeared in America, which in turn has become the land of Jewish freedom, security, and normality that Zionism envisioned.

On the other hand, the sense of arrival, achievement, and opportunity that the breakthrough sponsored tended to exaggerate the significance of the marginality. After all, a margin that was broad enough to harbor Robert Warshow (an elegant film critic) and Manny Farber (an intensely demotic one), Stanley Kunitz and Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer, Irving Kristol and Paul Goodman was bound to be almost as broad as the mainstream it was supposedly set off from. Moreover, it was evident that for many of these writers to begin with, and for almost all of them as their careers subsequently developed, their American rather than their Jewish interests were much more evident. In the context of their careers the Jewish element was typically refracted through their shared disposition to radicalism and their recoil there-from: it was not until the mid-1960s that such concerns as the Holocaust and the security of Israel began to compete with anti-Communism as the issue of the hour. Similarly, the working out of a literary influence—of, say, Hemingway or Eliot or Edmund Wilson—created a more evident tension in a given career than did the effort to adapt a discernible heritage of Judaism or even of Yiddishkeit to American letters.

Instead, then, of being camped on some fertile bicultural margin, American Jewish writing has come to look more and more like the avant-garde of acculturation. Though the writer liked to think he was manning a risky outpost, he was often destined to find the day that the letter arrived from the National Book Awards or the American Academy of Arts and Letters or the English department at Amherst that he had been all along riding an escalator. The real figures of the margin were the European intellectuals, the Hannah Arendts and Hans Morgenthaus and Erik Eriksons and Max Horkheimers et al., whose power of detachment and perception were like a new sun in our sky.

The margin that American Jewish writers actually occupied was so narrow that it is better thought of as an edge. However diverse they may have been in their points of view, they shared a common situation: they stood at an extraordinary point in Jewish history: the end of the Diaspora mentality that was taking place in America. This disjunction between themselves and all those generations behind them of shted and ghetto Jews, and of a generation or two at most of partially and insecurely emancipated ones, created a characteristic edginess of identity: a concern with who one was now that being a Jew was no longer a fate, as it had been so recently and completely in Europe, but rather was now more like a fact, and not necessarily the central one, about oneself. Instead of the burdens of the chosen people there were now the exhilarations of a choosing one. Except that the terms could become reversed, since a mind-set of centuries doesn't vanish overnight. Hence the tensions, the sharp shifts of focus, the mood swings that characterized the fiction (the writing that was most at the cutting edge of the change) as one went, say, from the coiled anxiety of The Victim to the expansive confidence of Augie March to the bitter wages of the American Dream in Seize the Day; or from the American pastoral of The Natural to the ghettoized New York of The Assistant; or from one story in Goodbye, Columbus that deals with the overbearing piety of the old urban neighborhood to another story that rebels against the vacuous secularism of the new suburban life. Nonetheless, the main issue was already becoming clear or at least pressing for expression: as the mentality of pluralism waxed and of Galuth (exile) waned, the American Jewish writer recognized that he was less marginally American than marginally Jewish. What then did his passage from home (the title of Isaac Rosenfeld's archetypal novel) signify? What belongings was he taking with him?

Because marginality was an elastic concept in the 1950s and 60s, and because their generational experience was fairly similar and their relations often clannish, diverse figures such as the novelist Saul Bellow, the dramatist Arthur Miller, the poet Delmore Schwartz and the critic Alfred Kazin could be brought under the canopy of American Jewish writing and used to exemplify its fresh, independent, and heightened perspectives. In general, American Jewish writers and intellectuals were seen to be hovering intently between residual feelings of disdain for WASP elitedom ("the scrimmage of appetite," as Delmore Schwartz put it, "behind the hedges of privilege") and new or revived feelings of attachment to the postwar America that was diminishing the WASP hegemony and, to some extent, absorbing it. Their experience as born-again liberals or battle-hardened democratic socialists made them particularly alive to the ideological positions, distinctions, and cultural infiltrations that lay between the extremes of McCarthyism and Stalinism in the new political arena of the cold war. (Their political consensus and role playing as former Communists prompted Harold Rosenberg to refer to them in the late 1950s as "the herd of independent minds.") Similarly, their social background made them sensitive to the emerging society—urban, mobile, pluralist, and mass—that was dislodging the traditional communal, class, regional, ethnic, and religious markers of one's place in it. If political realism, urban savvy, and cultural mobility were now the name of the game, it figured that the keen-eyed products of Jewish skepticism and aspiration would have something pioneering to say about it in books like Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March, Paul Goodman's novel The Empire City, Norman Mailer's Deer Park, and Grace Paley's Little Disturbances of Man, as well as David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, Trilling's Liberal Imagination, Daniel Bell's End of Ideology, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer's Beyond the Melting Pot, and Leslie Fiedler's End to Innocence, etc.

The other—Jewish—side of the margin that the writer-intellectuals bestrode had something of the same dynamic of healed alienation and changes of heart and mind. The accounts of the bitter strife between immigrant fathers and acculturated sons that marked the literature of the 1940s gave way to a more positive evaluation of the Jewish heritage, often by the very same writers. Similarly, the Yiddish that had been so embarrassing when they were children was now the language of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the host of gifted fiction writers and poets before him who were being translated and anthologized. Their work reinforced the view that American Jewish writing was shaped by traditions of moral concern, erudition, dialectical thinking, and vast reserves of self-irony, the one international currency, to paraphrase Isaac Rosenfeld, that the Jews actually controlled. The margin was also said to sponsor a distinctive style that spurned the fanciness and reticence of the literary cafe for the position-taking, point-making insistence of the intellectual cafeteria.

All of which made good copy in the pages of Commentary, Midstream, and Partisan Review and, as literary sociology, was more plausible than most generalizations about groups of writers. There was no question that a breakthrough of sensibility was occurring, that it was changing the cultural climate, that it was enabling Jewish writers to feel they had a place as well as positions, and that their Jewish upbringing was no longer to be discounted.

The fiction of this era was characteristically a fiction of conscience, being the main locus of the edginess, for it was much easier for a Jew to stop observing the High Holy Days than to stop observing and criticizing how he and his fellow Jews were leading their lives in an open society. The permutations of the theme are everywhere evident. Now we can see that Saul Bellow's novel The Victim, published in 1947, is a major document in the changing of direction and emphasis of Jewish defensiveness from the source of its representative fiction to the object of it. The Victim, with one decisive blow of the imagination, turns the theme of anti-Semitism inside out by focusing on the prejudices and resistances of Asa Leventhal as they come under attack from Kirby Allbee, a fallen WASP and former colleague who claims that Leventhal has heedlessly ruined his life and owes him reparation. Most of Philip Roth's stories in Goodbye, Columbus some ten years later are similarly devoted to an aggressive and astute exposure of the moral ghetto of Jewish ethnocentrism cemented by self-righteousness that his young protagonists are struggling to escape from.

In Bernard Malamud's stories of this period, and notably in his novel The Assistant, the New York of the Depression is transformed into virtually five boroughs of conscience, a hard-pressed twilight zone of good and bad faith.

On the other hand, a novel like The Deer Park—or a play like Death of a Salesman or much of J. D. Salinger's chronicle of the Glass family—is dressed in diverse American styles, as it were, but feels Jewish because of the particular resonance, in each case, of its social and moral concerns. Indeed, much of the literature of "the breakthrough" brings to mind the classic joke about the nudge on the Fifth Avenue bus who can't restrain herself from asking the very proper gentleman in a seat across the aisle if he is maybe Jewish. He tries to ignore her, she persists, and finally he admits he is to shut her up. "That's funny," she says. "You don't look it."

Like the brilliant outcropping of modernism among the Yiddish writers of the 1920s, the literature of the American Jewish edge was fed by the dynamics of acculturation that would soon undermine its viability. A work like Cynthia Ozick's novel The Pagan Rabbi or I. B. Singer's Enemies, A Love Story feels like it is drawing its intensity from the death pangs of the Diaspora: the moral imagination of the writer reconstituting the ethos of Jewish survivalism even as it is fading from the lives of her or his secure middle-class American readers.

Malamud's subsequent career—Bober, the righteous grocer in The Assistant, and Yaakov Bok, the wily victim of the blood libel in The Fixer, giving way to the Levins and Dubins of academic life, the Fidelmans and Lessers of the arts—provides a paradigm of sorts of the transition that has marked the careers of writers who were raised, to a greater or lesser degree, as Jews who lived in America but have spent the greater part of their adult lives as American novelists or playwrights, poets or critics who happen to be Jewish. As assimilation continues to practice its diluting and dimming ways, it seems evident that the interesting Jewish bargain or edge in American fiction will be more and more in the keeping of writers like Cynthia Ozick, the late Arthur A. Cohen, and Tova Reich, or younger ones like Nessa Rapoport, Daphne Merkin, and Allegra Goodman, who are anchored in the present-day observant Jewish community and who are drawn to the intense and growing dialogue between Judaism and modernity under the impact of feminism, the sexual revolution and the Holocaust. In other words, what remains of the former margin is likely to present itself in the tensions between spiritual and secular being, much as it does for the Christian writer. I'm referring, of course, to Judaism as a living, complex history and faith rather than as shtick, as in Joseph Heller's God Knows.

Meanwhile, a new and fertile and increasingly tense margin of Jewish consciousness and conscience has come into being and has only begun to be explored: that is, the relations of American Jews to Israel. Indeed, as Philip Roth has shown in the brilliant second chapter of The Counterlife, Israel is our counterlife.

"In the Diaspora a Jew like you lives securely," Shuki Elchanan, Mr. Roth's Israeli commentator par excellence, remarks to Zuckerman, "while we are living just the kind of imperiled Jewish existence that we came here to replace.… We are the excitable, ghettoized, jittery little Jews of the Diaspora, and you the Jews with all the confidence and cultivation that comes of feeling at home where you are."

That is the objective side of the situation, as Mr. Roth sees it. He views the subjective one no less incisively: Israel as the very image of the confused desires of American Jews. Again to quote Elchanan: "Reasonable people with a civilized repugnance for violence and blood, they come on tour from America, and they see the guns and they see the beards, and they take leave of their senses. The beards to remind them of saintly Jewish weakness and the guns to reassure them of heroic Hebrew force…and out of them flows every sentimental emotion that wish fulfillment can produce. A regular pudding of emotions. The fantasies about this place make me sick."

The rest of The Counterlife pales for me beside the vigor and interest of this chapter called "Judea"—as does, to my mind, the body of recent American Jewish fiction. There is an elan everywhere in the pages of Zuckerman's effort to rescue his brother from the fanatic West Bank settlers. Such is generally the case when a mature writer hits upon a genuinely new subject. This extraordinary twist of the dialectic of Jewish history whereby American has become, in large part, the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of full emancipation from the past and Israel has become, in Elchanan's words, the country where "every Jewish dilemma there ever was is encapsulated"—creates, in effect, a multivalent international subject that awaits its Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Hugh Nissenson and Mark Helprin, two of the most gifted novelists of the middle generation, began their careers by writing about their experience in Israel. Both have developed into shapers of myth, and I'd love to see what each of them would make of the American-Israeli subject now. But the American writer doesn't have to leave home or the immediate realities to tackle this theme, so strongly does the fate of Israel affect and shape the consciousness of American Jews, so firmly is it lodged at the top of the national community's agenda. Since the Six-Day War the survival of Israel has been the paramount concern of organized Jewish life and probably the paramount source of Jewish identity. Given this pervasive and deeply entrenched mind-set, the remarkable thing about Jonathan Pollard the spy is not that he is an anomalous kook, about whom the less said the better, as Jewish officialdom would have it, but rather that he embodies the crisis of conscience that would beset almost any American Jew who came into possession of information that he or she believed to be vital to preserving Israeli lives and that was being withheld. An embarrassment to say the least to the Jewish community's public relations, Pollard is at the same time the product of its ideology, and to say that he was acting out his bizarre fantasies is to corroborate the force of the "counterlife" that Roth has begun to explore.

Other fiction writers, I believe, will follow his lead. Since the Palestinian uprising and the government's response, Israel has moved even closer as a subject; it looms now not only as the hero of our illusions but as the victim of its own; the face that shone its light upon us now bears a grimace, a scowl, a timeless shrug. To the extent that American Jews are marginal Israelis, we find ourselves connected once again to the Diaspora and to the condition of radical doubt that has produced much of its salient modern fiction, from I. L. Peretz and Isaac Babel to Kafka and Joseph Roth, from I. J. Singer's Brothers Ashkenazi and André Schwartz-Bart's Last of the Just to E. L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel and Cynthia Ozick's Cannibal Galaxy. We also find ourselves connected to a country with powers and problems that the Diaspora never dreamed of. A Likud government with a free hand in the West Bank and Gaza for the next four years pretty much insures that both the powers and problems will increase and that American Jews will feel even more implicated.

In the overlapping area of consciousness that Israeli and American Jewish writers share, the seeds of a new fiction are waiting to sprout.