SOURCE: "Jewish-American Literature," in Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution, edited by Robert J. DiPietro and Edward Ifiovic, The Modern Language Association of America, 1983, pp. 133-62.

[In the following essay, Tuerk presents a historical overview of Jewish-American literature in the twentieth century.]

In an essay entitled "The Jew as Modern American Writer" (1966), Alfred Kazin writes: "Definitely, it was now the thing to be Jewish." And in a book published in 1969, Donald L. Kaufman writes that in America, "the new look in postwar writing is Jewish." In an introduction published the next year, Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin declare: "To 'write Jewish' is in fashion." When viewed in a historical perspective, these statements are startling. As recently as 1944, Lionel Trilling proclaimed that "as the Jewish community now exists, it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew." But as Irving Malin and Irwin Stark point out in the introduction to Breakthrough (1964), "circumstances have radically changed"; a group of Jewish-American authors has "broken through" into the mainstream of American literature and become "an important, possibly even a major reformative influence in American life and letters." Yet, as Abraham Chapman observes in the introduction to his anthology, Jewish-American Literature (1974), until very recently in America, the Jewish author "has been viewed as an alien in the prevailing American culture unless the writing had nothing to do with Jews or anything Jewish."

Of course, all these statements oversimplify somewhat. In addition, all contain problems of definition; for example, exactly what do these writers mean when they use the word "Jew," and what does "Jewish-American" mean in the phrase "Jewish-American literature"? Although these questions may appear trivial, they are of the utmost importance to those who write about and teach Jewish-American—and, indeed, American—literature.

Before discussing Jewish-American literature, we must try to arrive at a workable definition of the word "Jew." According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, a Jew is anyone born of a Jewish mother or anyone formally converted to Judaism. Yet even this definition presents problems for the teacher of literature. Are persons who have converted away from Judaism still Jews? Large segments of the Gentile world would consider them Jews, as great numbers of converts in Europe discovered during the Hitler era. In America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, where total assimilation seems possible, the old saying "Once a Jew, always a Jew" no longer seems true. Instead, the word "Jew" now seems for many people to imply conscious choice. Abraham Chapman classifies as a Jew anyone of Jewish descent or any person who considers himself or herself a Jew. In his anthology of Jewish-American literature Chapman includes works by Bret Harte and Denise Levertov, the former because he had a Jewish grandfather and the latter because her father converted from Judaism and became an Anglican priest. Harte's and Levertov's ancestry would undoubtedly lead many non-Jews to call those two writers Jews. For purposes of this essay, anyone is a Jew who, as a result of either birth or conversion, whether formal or informal, considers himself or herself a Jew. Although, as we shall see, in connection with literature this definition probably presents as many problems as any other definition, it does give us something to work with.

Next, how do we define "Jewish-American literature"? Essentially, it is, of course, literature written by American Jews; it does not have to deal specifically with the ethnic dimension. There are many writers like J. D. Salinger whose writings rarely reflect their Jewishness. But, given the limitations of space, I have concerned myself with those works by American Jews who seem particularly or consciously concerned with their Jewishness. I recognize that even this perspective is insufficient and troublesome, for what happens to a work like An American Dream, by Norman Mailer? Mailer is a Jew (in a series of reviews in Commentary, he calls himself a "non-Jewish Jew"), and his main character, Stephen Rojack, is "half Jewish," whatever that means. Rojack's ascendance over the Irish Catholic Kennedy involves a definite ethnic dimension, but, except for mentioning that he is "descended from peddlers," Rojack's Jewishness (or lack of Jewishness) is minimally developed. Then again, even though essays have been written about, say, the Jewishness of Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King, the book still has no Jews in it. If we looked at Jewish-American literature as that which is in some way consciously concerned with the authors' Jewishness, recognizing that this is an abbreviated perspective, perhaps we can understand its success and examine the impact this extensive body of literature has made on American literary history and culture.

The works that fit into this category as we have defined it have certain tendencies in common. In their introduction to Breakthrough, Malin and Stark summarize these tendencies: "the American-Jewish writer has approached the divine by seeking to make his way to what is most human"; he searches "in the Old Country or New, in the image of the father or in the discoverable if unrecoverable past." Sometimes, "he violently assaults the corrupt values of his society, endeavors to mediate between the dualities which divide him from himself, recognizes suffering as the necessary condition of compassion, insists on the sanctity of life or—in the face of man's alienation from man as well as from God—reasserts … the centrality of love, in the reconstruction of the social order." These, then, are some of the central concerns of the authors of Jewish-American literature.

During the second half of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the major authors in American literature have been Jewish Americans, and many of their books have dealt with explicitly Jewish concerns, but this, as I have indicated, was not always so. Although Jews have been present in this nation continuously since before the Revolution, only recently have they begun to have a great impact on American literature. The first identifiable Jew in North America, Elias Legardo, came to Virginia in 1621. The first group of Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. They were fleeing from Brazil, which had just been taken over by Portugal, and the Portuguese had followed their usual practice of expelling all Jews who would not convert to Christianity. Because the Jews had fled originally from Spain and Portugal to Holland and from there had gone to parts of Brazil then under Dutch control, they naturally sought refuge in Dutch possessions. Most moved to the Dutch West Indies, but twenty-three sailed to New Amsterdam. Although Peter Stuyvesant did not want Jews settling there, the directors of the Dutch West India Company allowed them to stay. Of course, Jews have been present in New Amsterdam, later New York, ever since.

By 1776 about 2,500 Jews lived in America. Until about 1729 most of the Jews in North America were of Sephardic—that is, Spanish and Portuguese—descent. And even in 1852, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his poem, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," names like Abraham Alvares and Jacob Rivera were typical of American Jews. In 1830 there were only about 6,000 Jews in America, but by 1880 the number had grown to 250,000, largely as a result of large-scale immigration of German Jews. The defeat of Napoleon, who had done much to emancipate European Jewry, and the failure of the Revolution of 1848 caused many German Jews to come to this country and establish Jewish institutions here. The largest wave of immigrants, however, came between about 1881 and 1924, the period of the great migration, when approximately 2,750,000 Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States. Many fled from persecution, discrimination, and pogroms. Others sought economic and political equality and opportunity as well as religious freedom. Part of the group called the "new immigrants," these Eastern European Jews are the ancestors of about ninety percent of the Jews in America today.

The passage of restrictive immigration legislation in the early 1920s started to have a profound effect in 1924, and the waves of Jewish immigrants slowed to a trickle. Nonetheless, by 1924 the center of world Jewish culture had shifted from Europe to America.

No identifiable body of Jewish-American literature existed before the beginning of the twentieth century. Although several Jews wrote creative works, especially plays and poems, their writings are for the most part indistinguishable from works by non-Jews. Jewish authors before the twentieth century include Samuel B. H. Judah, Jonas B. Phillips, Isaac Harby, and Mordecai Manuel Noah. The most outstanding of these is Noah, who, although he tried to establish a Jewish state on Grand Island in the Niagara River, did not allow his plays to reflect his Jewishness. Penina Moise and Adah Isaacs Menken were nineteenth-century American Jews who wrote verse, and their verse did reflect their Jewishness. But even though Menken's verse reached a fairly large audience, she hardly achieved the distinction of Emma Lazarus, who was the only truly outstanding Jewish author before the turn of the century.

Lazarus was born in 1849. Her family traced its roots to pre-Revolutionary America. She avoided Jewish themes in her early work. But her meetings with Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe, her knowledge of the pogroms in Russia, and the publication of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) stirred Lazarus into asserting her Jewish identity in spite of her relatives' pleas that she not do so. As Sol Liptzin puts it, she was "shocked into dynamic activity by the suffering of Jews who had been victimized solely because of their Jewishness." Her most famous poem is, of course, "The New Colossus" (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Allen Guttmann considers Lazarus "Too derivative to be considered a major poet," but he says that "her passionate return to an identification with her ancestors makes her a forerunner of others who responded similarly to pogroms and… to the catastrophic exterminations of the 1940s." Guttman hails her volume of 1882, Songs of a Semite, as America's "first important work of Jewish poetry."

It was, however, the new immigrants and their children who began what we today think of as Jewish-American literature. In their accounts—both fiction and nonfiction—of their lives in the Old World, their journeys to the New World, and their problems adapting to life in America are to be found the material out of which modern Jewish-American literature grew. Most of these works remain period pieces, mere curiosities for the student of American literature or American culture. Several, however, give profound insight into the problems Jews faced in trying to adjust to the new culture they found in America. Some, like Mary Antin's autobiographical volume, The Promised Land (1912), may be read as songs in praise of assimilation. Others, like Abraham Cahan's classic immigrant novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), seriously question the assimilationist ethic.

In The Promised Land, Antin explicitly uses the biblical Exodus as the structuring metaphor for her own journey from Russia to Boston. America is her promised land, and, to her, that promise lies in assimilation. In America, she was "made over"; as an American, she experienced a "second birth." In the concluding paragraph of her book, she declares: "The endless ages have indeed throbbed through my blood, but a new rhythm dances in my veins," and she adds: "America is the youngest of the nations and inherits all that went before in history. And I am the youngest of America's children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage … Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future." She no longer feels that she is in exile; America is her Jerusalem. Just as she herself has, she thinks, become thoroughly assimilated into American life, she feels that all other immigrants can and should do the same.

But for many, the price of assimilation—giving up one's religion, one's language (usually Yiddish), and one's ties to one's point of origin—was too high. Many Jewish immigrants still felt themselves to be in exile even in America. And for them Antin's promised land was a place where they continued to eat the bread of affliction. One of those who seriously weighed the losses against the gains was Abraham Cahan. Born in 1860, just outside Vilna, Cahan received a secular education in Russia before he came to America in 1882, at the beginning of the waves of immigrants who were to change the face of Jewish America. He became active in union and socialist activities and helped organize the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper begun in 1897; he became its editor in 1902 and held that position until his death in 1951. That he should have questioned the ethic of assimilation is ironic, for through his column, "A Bintel Brief," in the Forward, he hastened the Americanization and eventual assimilation of countless Jews. Even though he could hardly have been called religious, he expressed outrage at the idea of a Jewish family's having a Christmas tree, but he also assured worried Jewish parents that playing baseball would not hurt their sons. In fact, he praised this American sport because it got the children outdoors and helped keep them healthy. In "A Bintel Brief," Cahan obviously saw his role as trying to enable his fellow Jews to come to grips with the day-to-day problems that beset them in America, and for them, Americanization seemed the best answer. Nonetheless, in his more serious literary work—his fiction—Cahan made it clear that he was not so sure.

As early as 1896, when he published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Cahan questioned whether Jews gained more than they lost when they embraced the American ethic with its premium on material goods. Even this early in his career he wondered whether the Old Country ways might not have been better. In the title story of The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898) Old and New World values clash directly; New World values win, but as a result, everyone is unhappy.

It is in his masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), that Cahan examines most thoroughly the effects of the desire for assimilation. Levinsky grows up in Antomir in Russia. His poor but pious mother wants nothing more than to see her son become a talmudic scholar. But when David comes home after an encounter in which some Gentile children rolling Easter eggs split his lip and tear off his cap, she runs into the street screaming that she is going to kill the boy who hurt her son. Fifteen minutes later she is carried home, mortally wounded; she dies the same evening. After continuing his talmudic studies and receiving board from various members of the community, David comes to America. Like Mary Antin, David says that his arrival in the New World was "like a second birth" in which he entered "a new world in the profoundest sense of the word." In America, Levinsky quickly loses his devotion to Judaism: he shaves off his beard, cuts his sidelocks, stops studying the Talmud, and develops a desire, never fulfilled, to study at New York's City College. Instead, like so many real-life Jewish immigrants, he goes into the garment business, first as a worker and then as a manufacturer. He becomes tremendously successful, but he is unhappy. Accordingly, he concludes his narrative by confessing:

I don't seem to be able to get accustomed to my luxurious life. I am always more or less conscious of my good clothes, of the high quality of my office furniture, of the power I wield over the men in my pay.… I still have a lurking fear of restaurant waiters.

I can never forget the days of my misery. I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak manufacturer.

Neither wholly an American nor wholly a Jew, David ends in a kind of no-man's-land without any identity that he can understand.

Between the extremes of assimilation, as achieved by Antin and sought by Levinsky, and alienation, which involves total refusal to accommodate oneself in any way to one's new home, lies acculturation, a kind of middle ground that enables one to remain a Jew, even a "good" Jew, and still be an American. In The Rise of David Levinsky, the Kaplans represent this middle position. Their American-born son Ruby studies the Talmud, and when Ruby reads the Talmud in Hebrew and interprets it in Yiddish, David is reminded of himself at age eleven when he read the Talmud while his mother beamed exactly as Mrs. Kaplan beams at Ruby. Mr. Kaplan even reminds David that "One has to be a Jew," advice that David does not heed.

The drive for assimilation or even for acculturation becomes a central issue in Jewish-American literature during the twentieth century. For some Jewish authors and Jewish characters, being a Jew seems to be unpleasant; they flee in horror from their ethnic and religious identity, or they describe their fellow Jews as crass, vulgar, materialistic, and ugly. Authors who fit into this category are often labeled self-hating Jews or even anti-Semitic Jews. Such labels, however, may often be misleading, and their use by critics may be even more misleading. Among authors who have perhaps rightfully been given these labels is Montague Glass, whose Potash and PerImutter (1910) humorously treats two partners in the garment industry whose lives consist of a series of shady deals and narrow escapes. Yet I doubt that readers of this book in the second half of the twentieth century find it nearly as offensive as Jewish readers of the first half of the century found it. True, its characters are, for the most part, unpleasant, and their desire to make deals and get money plays on negative stereotypes. But a genuine friendship develops between Potash and Perlmutter, with each for the most part willing to take considerable risks for the other. Another author who at least in one phase of his career seems to deserve these labels is Ben Hecht, who in the beginning of his novel, A Jew in Love (1931), wrote of "Jew faces in which race leers and burns like some biological disease." But Hecht later became an outspoken Zionist and defender of the Jews.

In fact, the list of authors who have been accused of putting their "Jewish self-hate" on paper at times reads like an honor roll of Jewish-American authors: Abraham Cahan, Meyer Levin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Herbert Gold, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Louis Untermeyer, Philip Roth, and even Isaac Bashevis Singer. As many critics are now recognizing and as several recognized even before 1920, whenever a Jewish writer describes Jews realistically, he or she is liable to be accused of being a Jewish anti-Semite. The usual argument runs that it would be fine to write realistic fiction in Yiddish and not allow it to be translated into English, but to write in English or to permit such works to be translated into English allows Gentiles to see them, thus making the author into an anti-Semite who wants to destroy the image of the Jew in the eyes of non-Jews. In A Young Man in Search of Love (1978), one of his autobiographical volumes, Singer presents a variation on this theme when he tells of his editor's saying to him:

Why write about thieves and whores when there were so many decent Jewish men and devoted Jewish wives? If such a thing were translated into Polish and a gentile read it, he might conclude that all Jews were depraved. A Yiddish writer … was honor-bound to stress the good in our people, the lofty and sacred. He had to be an eloquent defender of the Jews, not their defamer.

Similar questions have been asked of Jewish authors in America by their fellow Jews who possibly see in realistic accounts of Jews with both good and bad points a threat to their own precarious position in the United States. These attacks tend to have no relation to time and space; even though they may occur sixty years apart, the charges and the responses to them tend to be the same.

The defenders of the realistic works point out that the Jewish author has just as much right as any other author to portray people in all of their complexity and that a treatment of an evil or bad Jewish character in fiction will make no one but the already committed anti-Semite think that all Jews are bad or evil. They also, at times, point out that the critics, by seeing the work as a condemnation of Judaism and Jews, are often misreading the piece of literature. Two fairly recent examples are Budd Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and Philip Roth's short story "Defender of the Faith" (1959). Both stories have been condemned because they have unpleasant characters: in the former, Sammy Glick, who among other things runs from his Jewishness; in the latter, Sheldon Grossbart, who uses his Jewishness to get special favors for himself. What the negative critics overlook is that neither Glick nor Grossbart sets the moral standards in the stories, and neither is necessarily the central character in the work. In fact, the moral standards are in each work set by the narrator: Al Manheim in Schulberg's book and Nathan Marx in Roth's story. Neither of these characters actively renounces his Judaism; in fact, Marx is reembracing it. And these two may be the central characters in these two works.

Another important aspect of early Jewish-American literature is Yiddish drama. Although Yiddish theater still exists in America, its heyday is long past. Though it served primarily to provide an escape for Jewish-American immigrants from their daily drudgery, Yiddish theater nonetheless helped introduce some to the ways and customs of America and provided to a limited extent some genuine works of art for its audiences. In spite of some American settings, however, the dramas for the most part, critics agree, lie in the tradition of European Yiddish theater rather than Jewish-American literature. In fact, one scholar asserts, "Yiddish literature in substance is purely Jewish" and adds, "Geographically, Yiddish literature is in two parts, Russian and American, but these two parts developed into one aim; even the plots and themes are from the old country; the aim was for Yiddish literature to stand independently and self-sustaining among the literatures of the world." This same scholar feels that when Yiddish literature became aware of "world struggles in politics, economics, problems of other religious and ethnic groups," when "an involvement with desolation in a world bereft of morality and justice, infiltrated Yiddish literature," it "became anemic." Nonetheless, the Yiddish theater in America was so popular from before the turn of the century to World War I that something about it must be included here.

Abraham Goldfaden is regarded as the father of modern Yiddish theater. Born in the Ukraine in 1840, he began his acting career in the plays given at Purim time, performances believed to be descended from the simple plays that used to dramatize the Book of Esther. He later modeled the early shows he produced on his experiences in the Purim entertainments. For a while he worked with the Broder Singers in Romania, but soon engaged his own actors and singers and formed a troupe that toured Russia and Romania.

In 1883 a Russian edict prohibited the performance of Yiddish plays, so Yiddish theater companies moved, first to countries near Russia and eventually westward, often first to London and then to the United States, where they found large Yiddish-speaking communities eager for entertainment in their native tongue. In 1887 Goldfaden was invited by some of his actors to join them in New York City, but when he got there, he found such severe competition from established producers and scriptwriters that he went back to Europe. He returned to the United States in 1903, however, and remained until his death in 1908.

In the meantime, Yiddish theater flourished in cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and especially New York. The first Yiddish production in New York was probably The Selling of Joseph, put on by an amateur group in the 1860s. In August 1882 the first professional performance of a Yiddish play in America probably took place. Among the actors was Boris Thomashefsky, born in the Ukraine in 1868. Even though he was young, he is supposed to have been instrumental in getting the players invited to America. Before the turn of the century Thomashefsky was running the People's Theater. He wrote original plays and adapted others like Hamlet (1893) and Richard III (1895) for the Yiddish stage. In 1912 he built the National Theater in New York, where Yiddish drama flourished until after his death in 1939.

By the early years of the twentieth century the "golden epoch" of Yiddish theater in America had begun. At first, the Yiddish shows appealed to sentimentality. The plays depended on zingen un tantsen (singing and dancing); used stock comedy situations, often with American settings; and allowed the actors to improvise as they saw fit. Still, several producers tried to introduce artistry into Yiddish theater. They encouraged Yiddish writers and, like Thomashefsky, translated works from other languages, usually adapting them for the Yiddish stage. The most famous play of this sort is Jacob Gordin's Yiddish King Lear, produced in 1892 with Jacob Adler, the matinee idol, in the leading role.

In 1918 Ukrainian-born Maurice Schwartz started in New York City the Jewish Art Theater, dedicated to producing artistically excellent dramas. The Jewish Art Theater lasted until 1950. An attempt to revive it in 1955 failed. After trying unsuccessfully to make motion pictures, Schwartz went to Israel hoping to establish a Yiddish art center, but he died in 1960, two months after opening in Yoshe Kalb, a play that he had earlier adapted from I. J. Singer's novel of that name.

The most important figure in the American Yiddish theater and one of the most important figures in world Yiddish theater is Jacob Gordin. Born in the Ukraine in 1853, he fled Russia for political reasons and arrived in America in 1891. Although before he came to America he had never written in Yiddish and never written a play, during about eighteen years of activity he supplied the Yiddish theater with almost eighty plays. Most were adaptations and translations in which he introduced natural Yiddish in place of Germanized dialogue and demanded that his actors stick to the scripts. Several of his plays are considered of lasting value, including God, Man and Devil (1900) and the previously mentioned Yiddish King Lear.

Other prolific playwrights include Moshe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner, who between them wrote about 180 mostly sentimental plays. Leon Kobrin wrote over thirty plays, including realistic dramas that try to give a faithful picture of life in America at the turn of the century.

The most outstanding works of Yiddish literature for the stage were written not in America, however, but in Eastern Europe. Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance was first produced in 1907, before he came to America. And the most famous and probably best Yiddish play is The Dybbuk by S. An-Ski, a pseudonym for Solomon Zainwill Rapoport, who died thirty days before his play was first produced, on 9 December 1920 by the Vilna Troupe. Both these plays remain powerful on the stage today, and both are available in paperback. With its emphasis on spirituality and its exorcism scene, The Dybbuk is especially moving.

By World War I the Jewish population of the Lower East Side of New York City was beginning to move away, and many younger Jews were unfamiliar with Yiddish. Thus, the Yiddish theaters in New York and elsewhere were losing their audiences. The theaters began to close. Even though Maurice Schwartz, as previously noted, kept his theater open until 1950, the golden epoch was past. Occasionally Yiddish plays are still produced in New York City and elsewhere, especially on university campuses, and as recently as 1968 Yiddish actors derived income from engagements at holiday resorts during the summers. But for the most part, Yiddish theater no longer functions as a living, vital force in America.

During the 1920s and 1930s Jewish life in America became increasingly complex as various pressures, both internal and external, were exerted on the Jewish-American community. As Sol Liptzin puts it, "Jewish life increased in complexity and difficulty even while the environmental forces of assimilation kept nibbling away at Jewish essence." And he adds that anti-Semitism, "which could formerly be dismissed as a mild irritant, began to take on virile forms as poisonous Nazi doctrines drifted across the Atlantic." Liptzin, of course, oversimplifies here. During the period before the Nazi takeover of Germany, many authors could not and did not dismiss anti-Semitism as a "mild irritant." Especially during the 1920s, many American authors responded with dismay to the anti-Semitism they found in America.

Born in Russia in 1882 and reared in the Midwest, Elias Tobenkin, a relatively minor author, questions the possibility of acculturation for Jews in an America that was, he felt, becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. Although in his first novel, Witte Arrives (1916), he espouses the ethic of the melting pot, in his third novel, God of Might (1925), he mirrors the bewilderment of a lot of American Jews who had begun to think that the doctrine of the melting pot involved not acculturation but complete assimilation, including giving up one's Jewishness altogether. In the first novel, Witte finally arrives when he decides that religious and ethnic differences are unimportant and that he will marry a Gentile of New England stock. In God of Might, the central character, Samuel Waterman, does marry a Gentile, only to discover that both small town America, where he lives, and big city America, in which he seeks refuge, demand either complete assimilation, including conversion, or total alienation of the Jew. In the course of his attempts to fulfill what he believes to be the American dream of individual freedom, Samuel discovers discrimination against Jews in banks, schools, universities, hotels, and apartment houses. He also becomes painfully aware of the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and of the Ku Klux Klan.

Ludwig Lewisohn is probably the foremost chronicler of American anti-Semitism before the 1930s. In his autobiographical volumes, Up Stream (1922) and Mid-Channel (1929), he describes his own struggles against anti-Semitism. Born in Berlin in 1882, Lewisohn came to America when he was seven years old. His family settled in South Carolina, where Lewisohn was brought up a Methodist. When he went to Columbia University to do graduate work, however, he discovered that the rest of the world did not care what he considered himself; the rest of the world considered him a Jew. Deprived of a graduate assistantship and of a job teaching English literature because he was a Jew (not until he was sixty did he get such a position, and that was at Brandeis University), Lewisohn found a job teaching German at a midwestern university. In his autobiographical volumes he describes his disillusionment with academic life, with the Midwest, and with American life in general; more important for our purposes, he describes his growing acceptance of and finally his love for his identity as a Jew.

In Jewishness Lewisohn eventually found all kinds of positive values. His final affirmation of his identity as a Jew was expressed through his espousal of Zionism; in his writing it is expressed in his novel The Island Within (1928), largely the story of Arthur Levy, a New York-born descendant of Jews who moved from Eastern Europe through Germany and eventually to America. Arthur and his sister Hazel experience repeated difficulties because of their lack of a firm Jewish identity, and in his profession as a psychiatrist, Arthur sees extreme examples of what Lewisohn believes can happen to Jews who lack a firm Jewish identity. After Arthur marries a Gentile and has a son, he starts to become more and more conscious of his inextricable ties to Judaism. His marriage falls apart, but he finally discovers "that Jews like himself who denied any tradition or character of their own were really trying to do a thing that was unhuman, that no one else was trying to do." For him, being a Jew and being human coincide.

Another outstanding Jewish author of fiction about Jews was Anzia Yezierska. Born in the Russian Pale in 1885, she arrived in New York when she was sixteen; she was most active as a writer during the 1920s. In her fiction she gives voice to the feelings of the women immigrants who wanted to make a place for themselves in the New World. Her first collection of stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), contains the basic idea that runs through her other works: no matter how bad America may be, it still has possibilities of becoming, as Mary Antin puts it, the promised land. In her novel of 1925, Bread Givers, Yezierska's central character, Sara Smolinsky, has to break away from her domineering father, who spends his time, he claims, studying the Talmud, who demands that his daughters act as his bread givers—that is, support him—and who arranges terrible marriages for several of them. Sara finally leaves her home, gets a college education, and becomes a teacher, a road that many of her real-life contemporaries followed. At the end of the novel, she is even able to understand and accept her father.

The outstanding works of Jewish-American fiction to appear during the 1930s were Michael Gold's Jews without Money (1930), Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), and Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (1937). Many generalizations may be made about the Jewish-American literature of the Great Depression. For example, Angoff and Levin characterize the decade as one during which "writers" thought that "readers would not care to identify with Jewish fictional characters." Consequently, many Jewish "writers who had begun … by writing about people and backgrounds with which they were familiar soon abandoned Jewish material or falsified it." Others "tried to write honestly about the Jewish life they knew, … even attained critical acclaim," but "grew bitter over the lack of reader response and over publishing pressure to abandon such material." Some, most notably Henry Roth, stopped writing. Guttmann writes of "the novels of generational conflict" of the 1930s and 1940s. And Liptzin characterizes the 1930s as "the decade of the uprooted and estranged Jewish intellectuals," whom he calls "Jewish saplings that had wrested themselves loose from the cultural earth of their fathers and transplanted themselves in the rich soil of their adopted culture." Yet

their roots were severely damaged and their healthy growth impaired.… Revolting against both American and Jewish realities, they took refuge in hedonism, aestheticism, communism and psychoanalytic self-dissection.

Obviously, Liptzin is far too emotional in his condemnation of the writers of the decade. And as the three works mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph attest, the 1930s did produce some outstanding Jewish-American literature.

Michael Gold was born as Irwin Granich in New York in 1893; he grew up on the Lower East Side. By 1930 he was editing the New Masses and trying, of course, to win people to communism. In Jews without Money he presents a sympathetic picture of the immigrants and their children. The novel is largely autobiographical, and the narrator is a thinly disguised version of Gold himself. Especially poignant are his recollections of his parents and their dismay with a New World that was certainly not their promised land. His father uses the by-then ubiquitous words, "A curse on Columbus! A curse on America, the thief!"—words repeated often in the Jewish-American literature of the 1920s and 1930s, usually in Yiddish. And his mother expresses her nostalgia for the forests of her youth with the words, "Ach, America, the thief, where children only see dry, dead mushrooms in grocery stores." In spite of his avowed antireligious, communist sympathies, Gold gives a touching, realistic description of the poverty-stricken Jews living on the Lower East Side during the first two decades of the twentieth century; only in the last few pages does he give vent to his communist ideas. In spite of its many flaws, which critics have examined extensively, Gold's novel remains a touching, insightful description of the lives of ghetto Jews in New York.

Call It Sleep, by Austrian-born Henry Roth, however, has been justly hailed as a masterpiece. In Roth's story of the conflicts between David Schaerl and his father, Albert, the critic Daniel Walden, for example, finds re-created "the inner pain of the second generation and its social and familial roots." And Guttmann hails the novel as the "classic study of second-generation childhood." David's attempts to come to grips with his father's violence and his mother's overpowering love lead him into a chain of deceit that culminates in his questioning aloud something his father has been questioning in silence: is he the child of Albert Schaerl or of a Gentile with whom his mother, Genya, had an affair before she met Albert? Albert explodes, and David flees to the streets in panic. In his misery, he thrusts a milk dipper into the third rail of an electrified railway. After he almost dies from the shock, he is taken home, where Albert, for the first time in the story, shows true compassion for his son. Albert is probably able to show this compassion because he has finally spoken openly to Genya of his doubts and she has reassured him that David is indeed his child. Numerous critics have recognized Roth's debts to James Joyce and Sigmund Freud, but the overall story is entirely original. The book, however, lapsed into oblivion, to be resurrected in 1960, when it was reprinted and recognized as a masterpiece.

Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch treats the generational conflicts of twenty boys and girls who grew up on the West Side of Chicago, Levin's native city. The novel moves from 1921 to 1934 as Levin evokes a lost era in America's history. The account of the conflict between his bobby-soxers and their boyfriends, on the one hand, and their immigrant parents with their old country ways, on the other, enables Levin to investigate sympathetically the problems of adjusting to America. Although The Old Bunch was, as noted earlier, attacked as an example of Jewish anti-Semitism, Levin himself became a leader in the raising of Jewish consciousness and a strong supporter of Israel, where he spent most of his last days, and his novel is now regarded as one of the monuments of Jewish-American literature.

In a later story, "After All I Did for Israel" (1951), Levin illustrates the conflicting attitudes of many older American Jews toward the Jewish state, the desire to see to it that Israel continues to exist but also the hope that one's own children will not move to Israel. The central character in the story feels that he has been betrayed by the Jewish state, for which he worked so hard to raise funds, when he discovers that his son has decided to settle there.

Other important Jewish-American works of the 1930s include Hecht's A Jew in Love and Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), Daniel Fuch's Williamsburg Trilogy—Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937)—and Albert Halper's novel, The Chute (1937).

The 1940s were, of course, momentous for Jewish Americans and for Jewish-American authors. The defeat of Hitler and the founding of the state of Israel caused many Jews who had not previously been concerned with their identity as Jews to reassess their situations. A revivification of Jewish consciousness occurred as Hitler's racist policies convinced many Jews that they were only deluding themselves by believing that they could escape their Jewishness through total assimilation, including conversion to Christianity. On the more positive side, the founding of Israel in 1948 brought ethnic pride to many American Jews who felt that they had in a sense survived the Nazi attempts at genocide only through an accident of birth and that European Jews had been abandoned by most of the civilized world, including Britain and the United States. Nonetheless, in helping to found Israel, that same civilized world—especially the United States—acknowledged, many American Jews felt, that Jews too had a place in the universe. This feeling of ethnic pride was, of course, reinforced by the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Many American Jews felt a new sense of Jewishness, and this sense quickly manifested itself in literature. A popular manifestation was Gentleman's Agreement (1947) by Laura Hobson, daughter of Michael Zametkin, a Yiddish writer. In spite of its shallowness and sentimentality, Hobson's book does explore some of the problems, especially social ones, that the Jew faces in America and does denounce people who practice even less virulent forms of anti-Semitism.

During the 1940s Sholem Asch published East River (1946), a sentimental view of first- and second-generation American Jews in their attempts to become acculturated or assimilated. He also treated this subject in several earlier works, most notably Uncle Moses (1917; English trans. 1920). Asch was constantly at the center of various controversies, especially following the publication of his "Christological Trilogy"—The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1950). He wrote these three novels in an attempt to bring together Jew and Gentile; they represent Asch's desire somehow to undo the horrors of the Hitler era. But they succeeded only in creating a rift between Asch and many of his fellow American Jews, a rift so wide that the Polish-born Asch finally left America (he had become a citizen in 1920) and settled in Israel in 1956.

Probably the most important events in Jewish-American literature in the 1940s, however, were the publication of first novels by Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. Mailer's explicit treatment of Judaism and Jewishness is limited. His own negative-positive identification of himself as a Jew (as we have seen, he calls himself "a non-Jewish Jew"), is reflected in his ambiguous attitude toward Jews in his works. In his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), still considered his masterpiece by many critics, two Jewish characters—Privates Roth and Goldstein—figure prominently; Roth revolts against being identified as a Jew whereas Goldstein quietly accepts his Jewishness. But these two are not the central figures in this novel. Instead, it centers on Sergeant Croft, Lieutenant Hearn, and General Cummings as they lead soldiers attempting to capture a Japanese-held island in the Pacific during World War II.

In his later novels. Mailer touches on the Jewish dimension but never fully explores it. As has been noted, Rojack in An American Dream says that he is "half Jewish." When Rojack is asked what the other half is, he responds, "Protestant. Nothing really," a remark that certainly contains explosive implications when delivered by a "half Jew." Rojack is placing himself in a category similar to Mailer himself as a non-Jewish Jew. In Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer's nonfiction novel about his participation in the march on the Pentagon in 1967 in protest over the Vietnam War, Mailer asserts that "the one personality he found absolutely insupportable" within himself was that of "the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," a personality that in this book he nonetheless seems to find inescapable. For when he is sentenced to a prison term as a result of his activities in the march, he gives a speech in which he says that he is not a Christian, but he is "married to one," and he especially admires "her unspoken love for Jesus Christ." He concludes his speech by saying:

it is Sunday and we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam. Yes, we are burning him there, and as we do, we destroy the foundation of this Republic, which is its love and trust in Christ.

Then, he dutifully copies into his book an article that appeared in the Washington Post concerning his sentencing and his speech, including the ending of the article: "Mailer is a Jew." Ultimately he is forced to come to grips with his identity as a Jew—an identity forced on him by others.

Canadian-born Saul Bellow, to be sure, does not deny that he is a Jew. And he is indeed very much a Jewish author. Even in a novel like Henderson the Rain King (1959), which lacks Jewish characters and explicit discussion of Jewishness, critics find a pervasive Jewishness. But for Bellow, the Jew becomes a truly representative man, an Everyman who stands for all readers, both Jews and Gentiles. As Keith Michael Opdahl notes, "Bellow describes the Jewish experience in terms that make it representative of historical alienation and determinism." Nonetheless, Opdahl sees a true Jewishness at the heart of Bellow's vision; in his "celebration of the temporal world, his emphasis on community love, and his rejection of the formal for the spontaneous and individual" Opdahl finds elements of Hasidism. And Bellow's "love of the particular scene … even at the expense of larger form, conveying the sense that the particular may contain the larger mystery, may owe," Opdahl feels, "something not only to the Romantics but to the faith and the anecdotal, aphoristic literature of the Hasids."

Beginning with Dangling Man (1944), Bellow explores the problems of marginality faced by the Jew in America during World War II and the postwar period. A list of his works with central Jewish characters reads like a roll call of the most important works of postwar American fiction: Dangling Man, The Victim (1949), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift(1975), and The Dean's December (1982). These works have been widely acclaimed as literary masterpieces, so much so that Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His works show that Bellow is, as Guttmann rightly says, "par excellence the explorer of marginality, concerned with men situated somewhere between old and new, with comic and tragic characters in quest of their uncertain identities." As numerous critics have noticed, in his later works, especially from Herzog on, Bellow's central characters often break out of their alienation as they find their true identities.

Perhaps Bellow's explorations of marginality in part help explain his popularity and his importance for readers in the second half of the twentieth century. In explaining the willingness of post-World War II readers to accept fiction by and about Jews, Chapman writes that those readers are responding to "themes of alienation, human suffering, social criticism, the multidirectional quests for identity and meaning in a dehumanizing and irrational age." But the readers are also attracted by

the validity of an underlying attitude to life that derives somehow from the core of the Jewish experience: learning how to live and cope with the continuous expectation of uncertainty, contradictions, the unpredictable, the unanticipated, and the unfathomable, with the realization that adversity, trouble, grief, and sorrow … are the normal conditions of life.

This attitude is similar to the one Max Schulz in Radical Sophistication (1969) finds at the center of modern Jewish-American fiction. In his excellent study, Schulz writes that the "capacity for belief in the face of 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts' is a radical sophistication that the Jew, with a culture historically of long standing, is currently giving to a century convinced in its existential isolation of the incoherence of existence. It is as though these two critics are writing most particularly of Bellow, who exemplifies in work after work the very traits they mention.

As I indicated, the 1950s saw the Jewish author move to the center of—and possibly become the dominant force in—American literature. During this decade, in addition to Bellow and Mailer, major figures who were explicitly concerned with Jewishness and with Jews include Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alfred Kazin, and even the poet Allen Ginsberg. Among popular novelists whose works had an appeal that went far beyond Jewish readers were Herman Wouk, author of The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Marjorie Morningstar (1955), and Leon Uris, author of Exodus (1958). Although problems of Jewish identity hardly lie at the center of The Caine Mutiny, they are central to the story of Marjorie Morningstar, born Morgenstern, who initially rebels against her Jewishness but eventually returns to a middle-class, suburban, conservative position and even starts to attend synagogue regularly. Uris' novel depicts the Jews and non-Jews who helped found Israel as larger-than-life heroes with few, if any, flaws. Even though Exodus is the most popular Zionist novel ever written in America, it can hardly be taken seriously as a literary work. Like The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, it too readily slips into cliche and oversimplification. Nonetheless, these three works demonstrate the kind of popular appeal Jewish authors writing about Jewish characters had in America during the 1950s.

Among the more serious authors, Bernard Malamud is outstanding. Repeatedly in his novels and short stories, he explores the role of Judaism and Jews in the modern world. In The Assistant (1957) he reverses the age-old theme of conversion of the Jew to Christianity and shows a Christian, Frank Alpine, who goes through a formal conversion to Judaism. Malamud uses the grocer Morris Bober to explore the meaning of Jewishness in a secular age. Morris explains to Frank that Morris is indeed a Jew:

Nobody will tell me that I am not Jewish because I put in my mouth once in a while, when my tongue is dry, a piece ham. But they will tell me, and I will believe them, if I forget the Law. This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people. Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. We ain't animals. This is why we need the Law. This is what a Jew believes.

Although Frank replies, "I think other religions have those ideas too," he nonetheless finds Judaism tremendously attractive.

Frank is especially concerned with what he considers Jewish suffering. When he asks Morris "why it is that the Jews suffer so damn much," Morris replies, "They suffer because they are Jews." Then Frank says, "they suffer more than they have to," and Morris responds, "If you live, you suffer. Some people suffer more, but not because they want to. But I think if a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing." Not content with generalities, Frank asks Morris why he suffers, and Morris replies, "I suffer for you."

The need to define a Jew runs through The Assistant. It surfaces at Morris' funeral, for example, when the rabbi says:

When a Jew dies, who asks if he is a Jew? He is a Jew, we don't ask. There are many ways to be a Jew. So if somebody comes to me and says, "Rabbi, shall we call such a man Jewish who lived and worked among the gentiles and sold them pig meat, trayfe, that we don't eat it, and not once in twenty years comes inside a synagogue, is such a man a Jew, rabbi?" To him I will say, "Yes, Morris Bober was to me a true Jew because he lived in the Jewish experience, which he remembered, and with the Jewish heart." Maybe not to our formal tradition—for this I don't excuse him—but he was true to the spirit of our life—to want for others that which he wants also for himself.

Three more works by Malamud in which Jewish identity is of the utmost importance are the short stories "The Lady of the Lake" and "The Last Mohican," both collected in The Magic Barrel (1958), and the novel The Fixer (1966). In "The Lady of the Lake," Henry Levin travels to Europe after World War II. "In Paris, for no reason he was sure of, except that he was tired of the past—tired of the limitations it had imposed upon him," he decides to call himself Henry Freeman and to deny that he is Jewish. In Italy he meets and falls in love with Isabella del Dongo, who repeatedly asks him whether he is Jewish. Suspecting that she is an anti-Semite, he insists that he is not. Ironically, when he asks her to marry him, she refuses because she thinks that he is not Jewish. She reveals that she is tattooed as a result of having been sent to Buchenwald, and she replies to Henry's proposal: "I can't marry you. We are Jews. My past is meaningful to me. I treasure what I suffered for." In "The Last Mohican" Arthur Fidelman, who is also in flight from his Jewishness, is forced by Shimon Susskind to acknowledge his relation to his fellow Jews after Susskind steals Fidelman's suit and burns a chapter of a book on art that Fidelman is writing.

In The Fixer Yakov Bok, living in prerevolutionary Russia, intitially passes as a Gentile and denies that he is a Jew. He even goes to work for an outspoken anti-Semite. When a boy is murdered and Bok is accused, he admits that he is a Jew. The long tale of his imprisonment follows, a period during which he finds himself more and more isolated. Consistently refusing to acknowledge faith in the God of the Jews, he nonetheless finds himself labeled a Jew, and even he realizes that he cannot escape from his Jewishness. Toward the end of the novel, Bok thinks: "One thing I've learned, … there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.… You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed." And he adds, "If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature, it's the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!" By this time Bok has become a kind of national hero for the Jews and revolutionaries, who try unsuccessfully to release him from the carriage in which he rides to trial. The carriage continues along streets lined with crowds, among whom are "Jews of the Plossky District. Some, as the carriage clattered by and they glimpsed the fixer, were openly weeping, wringing their hands. One thinly bearded man clawed his face. One or two waved at Yakov. Some shouted his name."

Another treatment of the return to a Jewish identity occurs in Alfred Kazin's autobiographical volume, A Walker in the City (1951). In this work, Kazin, an eminent critic of American literature, returns to his roots in Brownsville, roots from which, earlier in his career, he had tried hard to escape. Guttmann places Kazin's book in a larger context. "Once the mythic voyage from Antomir to New York was successfully completed," Guttmann writes, "David Levinsky was able to look back upon his youth and articulate his doubts." Similarly, "Once the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation had moved from the urban shtetls of Chicago and New York to America's wider world, they too were able to indulge themselves in memories of community and in moments of regret." And he adds, "The most poignant and complex literary statement of these second thoughts is probably Alfred Kazin's memoir, A Walker in the City."

A shtetl is a small, rural community in Eastern Europe; a large percentage of the new immigrants came to America not from ghettos in large cities but from shtetlach (to use the Yiddish plural). Guttmann implies that they reproduced these shtetlach in the big cities in America, only to escape from them again and then to return to them in memory, as Kazin does in A Walker in the City.

Kazin tells a tale of "making it" (to borrow Norman Podhoretz' phrase) in the New World. He leaves his Jewish neighborhood to enter the mainstream of American life, but he chooses in this book to make the mental excursion into the past, back to his roots, just as he at times makes the physical trip by subway back to Brownsville and moves "From the Subway to the Synagogue," as he entitles his first chapter.

During the 1950s at least two other writers of importance appeared, Philip Roth and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg is another figure who is uncomfortable with his Jewishness, even going to the point of appearing to renounce it. In a passage strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman's "Chanting the Square Deific," Ginsberg calls himself in "Kral Majales" (1967)

    a Buddhist Jew
who worships the Sacred Heart of Christ the
   blue body of Krishna the straight back of Ram
the beads of Chango the Nigerian singing Shiva
    Shiva in a manner which I have invented.

Exactly what a Buddhist Jew may be is, of course, unclear, but, like Mailer, Ginsberg at least admits here that he realizes he cannot entirely escape his Jewish identity.

In his earlier works, Howl, and Other Poems (1956) and especially Kaddish and Other Poems: 1958-1960 (1961), almost in spite of himself Ginsberg acknowledges his Jewishness, especially in Kaddish, his largely autobiographical lament for the death of his mother. Kaddish is, of course, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and although his parents did not bring Ginsberg up in a Jewish religious context, it is interesting that he places his entire poem in that context by means of its title.

As has been noted, Philip Roth's fiction has been the center of repeated controversy about Roth's relation to his fellow Jews. He has often been accused of being anti-Semitic. In a scathing attack on Roth, Irving Howe even goes so far as to write, "I think it clear that Roth, despite his concentration on Jewish settings and his acerbity of tone, has not really been involved in this tradition [of Jewish self-criticism and satire]. For he is one of the first American-Jewish writers who finds that it yields him no sustenance, no norms or values from which to launch his attacks on middle-class complacence." Thus, Howe dismisses those critics who place Roth in the tradition of the prophets of old.

Nonetheless, Roth is a powerful force in modern American literature, and repeatedly he creates characters who are consciously aware of and concerned with their Jewishness. In "Eli the Fanatic" in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), for example, when confronted by the Yeshiva of Woodenton, Eli becomes intensely aware of his Jewish heritage and vows that he will pass it on to his son. And even a Jew as notorious as Alexander Portnoy, who tries to escape from his Jewish past by making love with shikses (Gentile women), feels himself strangely moved when he goes to Israel; his landing in "the land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being," causes him to be "impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning soft-ball games in Newark." In novels like Goodbye, Columbus (1959), My Life as a Man (1974), The Professor of Desire (1977), and Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Roth explores characters involved in love-hate relationships with their own Jewishness, people who, like Portnoy, often begrudgingly admit that in their own personal histories they can find miniature versions of the history of the Jewish people. In his baseball story, The Great American Novel (1973), Roth parodies the whole idea of writing "the great American novel." In this book, which Roth places solidly inside American literary tradition by his use not only of baseball but also of parodies of major works of American literature and of American literary traditions, Jews and Jewishness are by no means central, so Roth's discussion of "Jewish Wheaties" and the "seventeen-year-old Jewish genius" who makes them seem out of place; the whole idea of Jewishness seems irrelevant.

During the 1960s, several writers seemed to move in slightly different directions. They returned to exploring fictional worlds that are almost exclusively Jewish, and often the Jews in those worlds are Orthodox. The foremost example is Chaim Potok, whose novels tend to center on tensions, not between Jews and non-Jews, but among various Orthodox Jews. The Chosen (1967) and The Promise (1969) treat the lives of Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter as these characters try to reconcile their traditional beliefs with modern reality. The novels are rich in description of Hasidic and non-Hasidic Orthodox life in New York City during and especially after World War II. Potok continues to treat traditional forms of Judaism in My Name Is Asher Lev (1972), the story of a Hasidic Jew who becomes a painter.

Other writers of the 1960s and 1970s have returned to similar themes, treating Jews, often in connection with Orthodox concerns, even though Orthodox Judaism continues to attract a smaller and smaller percentage of America's Jews. Cynthia Ozick, for example, in the title story of The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories (1971), tells the tale of Isaac Kornfeld, a brilliant Talmudist and a respected, promising young rabbi who studies pagan nature religions and becomes convinced of their validity. He deserts his wife Sheindel after falling in love with a tree nymph. When he is no longer able to have sexual relations with the nymph, he uses his tallis (prayer shawl) to hang himself from the nymph's tree. Hugh Nissenson, on the other hand, tends to set his stories in Israel, and in his novel My Own Ground (1976) he returns to the almost exclusively Jewish Lower East Side of turn-of-the-century New York. Even when his narrator, Jacob Brody, leaves New York City in the last few pages of the book, he comments almost exclusively on his relation with other Jews.

In an essay entitled "American Jewish Writing, Act II" (1976), Ruth R. Wisse examines trends in this literature during the 1970s. She concludes that:

… it is Philip Roth and not Cynthia Ozick, or Hugh Nissenson, who can best afford to write about the American Jewish reality. For American Jews today in their numbers live not on Nissenson's Lower East Side or in Ozick's hasidic shtetl [a reference to the short story, "Bloodshed"] but in "Woodentown," the home of Eli Peck [of Roth's "Eli the Fanatic"].

Wisse writes that for those who, unlike Roth,

… take Judaism seriously as a cultural alternative, and wish to weave brilliant cloth from its ancient threads, the sociological reality of the present-day American Jewish community would seem to present an almost insurmountable obstacle.

Of course, no general study of Jewish-American literature can even approach completeness without some discussion of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who even though he supervises and even helps translate his works, still writes in Yiddish and treats for the most part the now destroyed Jewish communities of his native Poland. His few stories set in America, as well as his numerous novels, stories, and autobiographical volumes written in America, testify to his growing importance in the American literary tradition. That he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 testifies to his international importance and to the vitality of the Yiddish language, even though few people now consider it their native tongue. Singer's treatment of a lost culture in such works as The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Spinoza of Market Street, and Other Stories (1961), The Manor (1967), and Shosha (1973), as well as in his three autobiographical volumes—In My Father's Court (1966), A Little Boy in Search of God (1976) and A Young Man in Search of Love (1978)—provides Americans living in the second half of the twentieth century with a panoramic view of the Eastern Europe from which the ancestors of most of America's Jews came. And his stories set in America, some of which are collected in Passions (1975) and Old Love (1979), show his extraordinary sensitivity to the lives of Jews, especially Jews who escaped from the Nazi terror, in the New World. Although his works really stand outside the mainstream of present-day Jewish-American literature, they will probably have a profound effect on Jewish-American works to come.

Notable because of its absence from this discussion is poetry by American Jews about Jewish themes. There are, of course, many Jewish-American poets besides Emma Lazarus and Allen Ginsberg who write about Jewish themes. Their works, however, are really not as consistently good as are works of Jewish-American prose writers. I agree with Harold Bloom, who, in "The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry" (1972), asserts that "though it causes me real grief to say this, the achievement of American-Jewish poets down to the present moment remains a modest and mixed one. There are no Bellows or Malamuds among them, though there are a few signs that this melancholy estimate some day may need to be revised upward." As promising Jewish-American poets who have produced at least some verse "of considerable distinction," Bloom mentions Allen Grossman, Alvin Feinman, Robert Mezey, and Geoffrey Hartman.

It is then in prose, especially prose fiction and autobiography, that Jewish-American authors have excelled up to now. Jewish-American literature has emerged as one of the central forces in the literature of the American nation. Although before and during World War II a Jewish-American author was often urged to change his name and write about non-Jews and non-Jewish themes, today his works about Jews and Jewishness are read repeatedly by numerous non-Jews who see themselves mirrored in the trials and tribulations of which they read. Guttmann theorizes that modern Jewish-American authors are so popular in part because "many of them are only nominally Jewish and present fictional worlds all but indistinguishable from those presented by other writers of their generation." This criticism, however, clearly cannot apply to the fictional worlds of writers like Ozick, Nissenson, and especially Potok, whose characters can exist only in a Jewish milieu and only as Jews. Yet these authors, too, enjoy widespread popularity. As we have seen, there is indeed a good deal of truth to the statements with which we began this essay, for Jewish authors and Jewish writing are indeed a predominant force, if not the dominant force, in American literature during the second half of the twentieth century.