Introduction

Approximately five hundred Jews lived in the United States in 1700. The majority lived in the Newport, Rhode Island, area, while the rest settled primarily in New York City; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Philadelphia. Newport was particularly attractive because of the relatively liberal political administration of Roger Williams, who vied for a strict separation of church and state. There is little evidence to indicate a concentrated persecution of the Jews in any of the original American colonies. Many of the cultural values with which Jews were identified, such as thrift, industry, and a devout adherence to the word of God, were also values of a Puritan America; by the time of the First Continental Congress in 1774, when the chafe of British oversight had become intolerable, the colonists may well have felt an immediate kinship with the Jews in their midst. After all, Jews personified the Protestant work ethic, and many colonists believed that they, like the Jews, were God’s chosen people, badly abused by a powerful nation.

Early Jewish American literature

The earliest Jewish American writers to produce widely recognized fictional narratives were journalists who also wrote for the popular stage, such as the early nineteenth century melodramatists Mordecai Manuel Noah and Samuel B. H. Judah. An editor of the National Advocate and the founder of the New York Inquirer, Noah avoided including Jews in his most popular melodrama, Siege of Tripoli (1820), as did Judah in his most popular work, A Tale of Lexington: A National Comedy, Founded on the Opening of the Revolution in Three Acts (1823). As such, there is nothing identifiably Jewish American about their writing.

The first Jewish American writers to speak from a decidedly Jewish perspective were women poets. Taking the ancient Jew as its subject matter, Fancy’s Sketch Book, published in 1833 by Penina Moise, was one of the few such collections to reach a large audience in its day. However, Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus (1883) is by far the more familiar now, if for no other reason than that one of its passages, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses,” became the Statue of Liberty’s invitation—and by extension, America’s as well—to the disenfranchised of the world.

Lazarus’s enthusiasm for America as a “melting pot” was shared by a number of early Jewish American novelists, Israel Zangwill to name but one. In The Melting-Pot, the 1908 drama that coined the phrase, Zangwill envisions a land where Jew and Gentile can live and labor in harmony, if only they are willing to become, first and foremost, “Americans.”

The possibility for inclusion must have been appealing to Jewish immigrants in particular. The history of Jews was one of persecution and homelessness; it is no wonder then that the possibility that the United States could provide a place where the Wandering Jew could finally put down roots became perhaps the single most persistent concern of the Jewish American novel. However, a second overriding theme surfaced more or less concurrently with this one.

Henry Harland’s Mrs. Peixada (1886) and The Yoke of the Thorah (1887) deal with Jewish Americans who, while coming of age in the ghetto, are willing to marry outside their faith against the wishes of their elders. Such story lines anticipate the generational concerns of much later novels, such as Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and Albert Halper’s Sons of the Fathers (1940), and later still the novels of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, in which children come to feel estranged from their parents’ way of life, yet have no meaningful alternative of their own. Hebrew, both literally and metaphorically, becomes the language of the father, a distant, often foreign tongue that speaks of restraint, denial, and suffering in a world of possibility and plenty. As Halper describes the relationship between the generations cited in the title of Sons of the Fathers,

A related concern of early Jewish American novels is perhaps more daunting—namely, the fear that Jews may be able to find a proper place in mainstream, mercantile, American culture only by sacrificing what is most sacred to the Jew’s human experience: being a Jew. This dilemma is first addressed seriously in Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Like Noah and Judah before him, Cahan was primarily a journalist, making his mark as an editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a Jewish socialist newspaper. Unlike Noah and Judah, however, Cahan was more an artist than a popular entertainer. His novel deals with a young Russian Talmudic student who travels to the United States, enters the garment industry, educates himself, and begins his rise to the top of American society. If the American Dream is a dream of success, he achieves it. He becomes rich and powerful. He discovers, however, that the American Dream is most of all a secular dream; paradoxically, having found his place in America, he feels spiritually lost and without a home.

The early twentieth century

Novels published shortly after World War I, such as Samuel B. Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl (1923), voiced some of the same concerns as Cahan, but only in passing. Most of these books were issued amid a great burst of postwar prosperity and therefore seem naïvely optimistic. Generally, these novels chronicled the ascent of their protagonists from the ghettos of New York City’s lower East Side to the heights of American prosperity, for the sky, apparently, was the limit for any Jew who appreciated the value of personal initiative paired with formal education; however, such a vision of upward mobility was as short-lived as it was trusting in the promise of the United States, and these works were soon replaced by the proletarian novels written in response to the Great Depression.

Although novels such as John Steinbeck’s account of Oklahoma sharecroppers, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), are classified as “proletarian” writing, the proletarian novel was an urban, Jewish American phenomenon. It signaled a new generation of Jewish American novelists, the American-born children of Jewish immigrants who were coming of age during a period when American capitalism was being challenged more seriously than ever before in the twentieth century. It also signaled the first time that Jewish American novelists as a group defined a place for themselves in American literature.

Their work reflects the left-of-center politics that became attractive to so many out-of-work Americans during the depths of the Depression. Michael Gold was surely the most doctrinaire of the group. Gold was the editor of The New Masses, the American Communist Party’s influential literary magazine; in his Jews Without Money (1930), it is communism that promises a better future. So great was Gold’s impact that a hard-line Marxist-Leninist agenda is often attributed to the other proletarian novelists as well, though Nelson Algren (Somebody in Boots, 1935), Roth (Call It Sleep), Meyer Levin (The Old Bunch, 1937), Halper (The Foundry, 1934), Isidor Schneider, and Daniel Fuchs demonstrated more faith in collective bargaining and trade unionism than in communist doctrine. Even at their most dogmatic they seemed to be utopian writers as much as anything else. They envisioned a way to bring the compassion and values of Jewish orthodoxy to the factory and the mill, a compromise between the sacred and the profane. To paraphrase Algren, theirs was a utopian socialism, a vision of “the New Jerusalem being built on the ashes of failure of American capitalism.” The writing often has an almost religious fervor about it. In Schneider’s From the Kingdom of Necessity (1935), for instance, readers are told that the protagonist

The work of Fuchs should be of particular interest to anyone studying the development of the Jewish American novel. Fuchs is better remembered for his Hollywood screenplays (The Human Jungle, 1954; Interlude, 1957; Jeanne Eagels, 1957) than for his novels, yet his Williamsburg trilogy (Summer in Williamsburg, 1934; Homage to Blenholt, 1936; and Low Company, 1937; published in one volume as Three Novels, 1961; also as Williamsburg Trilogy, 1972) remains an important literary achievement. The trilogy takes its name from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in New York City. At the height of Jewish immigration to the United States, the lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City was more densely populated than Calcutta, India, and Jews gradually had to make their way across the Williamsburg Bridge to the outskirts of Brooklyn to find space in which to live. Fuchs’s characters, who live in Williamsburg, begin to cast their eyes back toward Manhattan’s Madison Avenue. In this regard their longings are reminiscent of those Ornitz characters who wished to leave their ghetto tenements and better themselves. However, there is a difference in how Fuchs treats such material: Unlike his predecessors, Fuchs infuses humor into his work. He is as much a satirist of human nature as he is a chronicler of upward mobility, and much that will be attributed to later Jewish American novelists such as Philip Roth—caricaturing the Jewish mother for comic effect, for instance—was pioneered by Fuchs.

The Holocaust and postwar fiction

World War novelsWar II and the Holocaust had a tremendous impact on Jewish literature, particularly in Europe. Holocaust survivors such as the Italian novelist Primo Levi and the Romanian Aharon Appelfeld offer unique perspectives on what it meant to be a Jew in the twentieth century by virtue of the ordeals they suffered. Levi addresses his experiences during the Holocaust in two autobiographies, Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959; revised as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 1961) and La tregua (1963; The Reawakening, 1965), then drew from them obliquely in his novel Se non ora, quando? (1982; If Not Now, When?, 1985).

Appelfeld directed his attentions to the writing of fiction. His first novel was Badenheim, ’ir nofesh (1975; Badenheim 1939, 1980), and though he continued to publish after its translation, Badenheim 1939 remains his best-known work. None of these chronicle the realities of his own internment and eventual escape, but the death camps are seldom far removed from the hearts and minds of his characters. They are often unwary Jews, well respected in their communities, whose lives are overtaken by the Nazis in the early years of the war, as in Badenheim 1939, Tor-ha-pela’ot (1978; The Age of Wonders, 1981), Kutonet veha-pasim (1983; Tzili: The Story of a Life, 1983), To the Land of Cattails (1986; also known as To the Land of the Reeds), Be-’et uve’onah ahat (1985; The Healer, 1990), and Unto the Soul (1994). Other novels depict Jews who are struggling after the war to reclaim their place in the world, as is the case in Bartfus ben ha-almavet (1988; The Immortal Bartfuss, 1988) and Al kol hapesha’im (n.d.; For Every Sin, 1989).

Jewish American fiction flourished after 1945. To offer even the slightest list of Jewish American authors who rose to prominence after World War II is to list some of the most influential writers in the canon of contemporary American literature: E. L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Chaim Potok. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) was a debut that had a great impact following the war, earning its twenty-five-year-old author a berth at the forefront of American letters.

The novel recounts a long and lethal patrol by a U.S. Army platoon on an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. Two of these soldiers, Herman Roth and Joey Goldstein, are Jewish. Roth, the better assimilated of the two, is more quickly accepted by the other men, but he is without the moral compass necessary to internalize what he is going through. Goldstein, by contrast, is devout. His worldview is that of an ancient Hebrew, and he is one of the few characters in the novel for whom the patrol has any meaning. Goldstein is paired in the novel’s final chapters with Ossie Ridges, a Southern fundamentalist Christian, as they carry a wounded soldier on a litter through the jungle. Theirs is a Sisyphean chore that ends in failure, but it serves to unite them. Both Goldstein and Ridges have what the other men lack, a sense of a well-ordered universe in which humankind is in the hands of a punishing God, and such understanding stirs in each a compassion for the suffering of the other.

Philip Roth’s first novel-length work, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), takes its title from the dream of its protagonist, Neil Klugman. Klugman’s dream puts him aboard a masted sailing ship moored in the harbor of a paradisal island. An undertow begins to draw the ship out to sea. Powerless to stop the ship’s departure, Klugman watches as beautiful native goddesses on the shore bid him farewell, chanting “Goodbye, Columbus, Goodbye,” while the paradise before him grows more distant by the minute. The book’s title and dream images befit much that Roth has written and certainly represent an experience shared by Roth protagonists as otherwise diverse as Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, and Roth’s recurring alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman: The nearer one comes to the America of one’s dreams, the more certain one can be that it will never be discovered.

Roth’s work has at its core several additional consistencies. His novels often deal with Jewish American writers who are at or near the top of their public lives, rich and famous novelists with no shortage of creature comforts or sensuous and willing women in their lives; yet they live in the depths of personal despair, at odds with their current wives or former wives and haunted by their parents. Sooner or later this estrangement manifests itself in psychic and physical pain. The greater the suffering they experience, the more self-obsessed they become; the more self-obsessed they become, the more estranged they become from others and the greater their pains. It is a vicious cycle, but a comic one as well.

Roth gets much comic mileage out of psychosomatic—or at least undiagnosable—afflictions, including Alexander Portnoy’s trips to his analyst in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and Nathan Zuckerman’s wrenching back pains in The Anatomy Lesson (1983). His protagonists lack the spiritual wherewithal required to negotiate the problems they face; their complaints have more to do with their souls than with their minds and bodies. This harkens back to matters Roth deals with first in his depiction of Klugman, who is from a working-class Newark, New Jersey, Jewish household. Shortly after his discharge from the Army, Klugman falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a Smith College student who is home for the summer and whose family lives in a fashionable and religiously mixed Newark suburb called Short Hills. Klugman resents Patimkin for the countless ways in which her life has been made easier than his own because of her parents’ money, but he is envious as well. Is it Patimkin he loves, or is it Short Hills and all the material pleasures it represents? Late in the novel, Klugman uncharacteristically tries his hand at a prayer. “If we meet You at all, God, it’s that we’re carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of You.…Where do we meet? Which prize is You?” Within moments, Neil thinks he has his answer: “Which prize do you think, schmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses. . . .”

Klugman suspects that happiness is to be found not in physical pleasures or material possessions but rather in what in European shtetl tales of the nineteenth century would have been called being a “good and virtuous man.” Still, virtue is a slippery concept. A ritzy department store and the goods available within it are not.

Roth’s characters come to a situation with a much better grasp of secular matters than they have of their spirits, and something of the same thing is true of Saul Bellow’s protagonists as well. Like those of Roth, Bellow’s protagonists are second- and third-generation American Jews who are several times removed from their deepest spiritual roots and who have much clearer knowledge of themselves as consumers and Americans than they have of themselves as Jews. Therein rests their dilemma. They are often seasoned literary men, or at least highly successful in their chosen careers, and, like Bellow himself—who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a Pulitzer Prize, and two National Book Awards—have been handsomely rewarded by the world at large.

In the course of the novel Bellow’s protagonists go through a spiritual crisis. The dimensions of the crisis change from book to book, yet it is fundamentally the same in each work. Something is awakened in their souls that will not let them rest. Something, they sense, is amiss in how they have lived their lives, and the comedy begins as their attempts to set things right only make matters worse. Having accompanied his astrophysicist wife Minna to Eastern Europe, for instance, Albert Corde, the university administrator of The Dean’s December (1982), senses that the court case in which he has been involved back in Chicago speaks of an evil that neither his wife’s capacity for science nor his own capacity for logic and reason can comprehend. It is an amazing moment of recognition for a high intellectual such as Corde, yet it serves only to paralyze him rather than move him to act.

Bereft by personal and financial problems, Charlie Citrine, the artist protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift (1975), turns to meditation and Rudolph Steiner’s quasi-mystical Theosophy. The title character of Herzog (1964) tries to restore order to his life by writing letters and reconstructing his personal history for any and all who are willing to listen. The novel ends with Herzog in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, having left the big city behind. He lies on his couch in the novel’s final pages and speaks aloud with no one there to hear him; though he thinks this will help him resolve his problems, he only succeeds in talking himself into further confusion. It is surely more than an autobiographical impulse that leads Bellow to make so many of his protagonists famous writers and fervent talkers, for the task he is putting before them is nothing short of articulating the unspeakable, and they fare no better than one might expect. Each protagonist has had a fleeting glimpse of some ultimate cosmic order in the universe. Each has experienced some longing of the spirit that defies translation into words.

Chaim Potok is the American novelist whose temperament and interests seem to be nearest to what readers expect of European authors. His earliest novels are his most formidable and perhaps still his most frequently read. Potok is at once a religious scholar and a creative artist, and his The Chosen (1967) and The Promise (1969) deal with the Jews’ search for meaning, not only through prayer and study but also through the protagonists’ encounters with the diversity to be found in modern Judaism itself, such as Hasidism, Orthodox Judaism, and Conservative Judaism. Subsequent novels, such as In the Beginning (1975) and The Book of Lights (1981), cast a wider net in an attempt to locate the place of Jews in twentieth century history. His protagonists discover that the defining moments of the twentieth century were horrors of staggering dimension, such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, but they avoid the alienation and despair to be found in so much of contemporary writing. They discover in these horrors the fruits of a spiritual quest that affirms rather than denies their most deeply felt religious beliefs.

Late twentieth century

The 1990’s witnessed the emergence of several talented Jewish American writers, particularly Lev Raphael, Melvin Bukiet, Steve Stern, and Allegra Goodman. Crime novelist Raphael (Winter Eyes: A Novel About Secrets, 1992; Let’s Get Criminal: An Academic Mystery, 1996; The Death of a Constant Lover: A Nick Hoffman Mystery, 1999) offers Nick Hoffman as his protagonist, an English professor at the State University of Michigan who finds himself solving murder mysteries between teaching classes and grading papers. These crimes inevitably shake him free of the ivory tower of academia in which he is trying to live his life, but they do more than that. In the process of investigating crimes, he is apt to be reminded that he is twice removed from the mainstream American experience he has sought in becoming a professor, first because he is a Jew, second because he is gay.

Bukiet, the child of Holocaust survivors, writes with the charming spirit of a fabulist in his short-story collection While the Messiah Tarries (1995). This dose of charm is somewhat deceptive, however, as he proves in After (1996) and Signs and Wonders (1999), both of which are laced with comic acid. Signs and Wonders, set at the end of the twentieth century, follows Snakes Hammurabi, a burlesque version of Christ-like savior, as it explores a modern world that is well beyond any chance of salvation. After, written in the picaresque tradition, is set in the final days of World War II as the Nazi concentration camps are being liberated by the Allies. Bukiet’s picaro protagonist is nineteen-year-old Isaac Kaufman, a concentration camp survivor who emerges from his experience a rogue, a nihilist, and a victim who has learned to savor the pleasures of the victimizer. The novel follows Kaufman and two comrades across Europe in a scheme to liberate a fortune in Nazi gold and virtually anything else that might strike their fancy.

Steve Stern has published short stories (Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, 1986), novellas (A Plague of Dreamers, 1994), and novels (Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground, 1991), but perhaps his greatest achievement is his creation of Pinch, a backwater Jewish immigrant community in Memphis, Tennessee, in which much of his fiction is set. Ignored by upwardly mobile Memphis, Pinch is an enclave where magic is still possible, and, in Stern’s quite competent hands, even probable. Stern has all the skills of shtetl storytelling at his disposal, but he has a distinctly modern sensibility that prevents his fiction from becoming an imitative homage to a literature that no longer seems to speak of contemporary times.

Many critics believe that Goodman has established herself as the Jewish American writer who is most clearly the heir of Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Bellow, and Roth. In 1989, she published a novel titled Total Immersion, followed by two short-story collections—The Family Markovitz (1996) and Kaaterskill Falls (1998). A number of the stories in the collections first appeared in The New Yorker, and they benefit from collecting, if only because seeing them together makes one conscious of the consistency of her authorial concerns. The former novel deals with three generations of one Jewish American family; Rose, the grandmother, tries to make sense of two grown sons and a world that defy her understanding. The irony is that Rose is closer to her granddaughter Miriam than she is to either of her own children, not only because Rose and Miriam share a generational enemy in common but also because Miriam is willing to embrace a Judaic tradition that neither of Rose’s sons can fathom. Kaaterskill Falls takes its name from an upstate New York town in which Jews are a minority. The stories follow several Orthodox Jews of the baby-boomer generation who have traveled to Kaaterskill for the summer. At the center of this community are the Shulmans, who have opened a general store in the area. The Shulman elders are much less able to embrace Judaism wholeheartedly than are their grown children, who are ultimately more comfortable being Jews than are their parents.

Jewish American literature continues to ponder whether assimilation into the fabric of American life is tonic or toxic to the Jewish experience. Is it possible to be a Jew in a meaningful sense and also take one’s place within American culture? Whether written by Jews or Gentiles, American novels are no more sure today than they have ever been. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) is narrated by a yuppie whose ventures into the fashionable night life of New York City have resulted in a powerful cocaine addiction. This has cost him an enviable job, the woman he loves, his family, and his future. In one scene, he gets on the subway and sits beside a Hasidic Jew who is studying the Talmud. Says the narrator,

Jewish American writers who continue to wrestle with the same issues as their predecessors include Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, 2000, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 2007), Jonathan Rosen (The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, 2000, and Joy Comes in the Morning, 2004), Nathan Englander (The Ministry of Special Cases, 2007) and Amy Bloom (Away: A Novel, 2007). Many, too, are pushing the limits of the novel form. These writers include Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, 2002, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005) and Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers, 2004), whose widely popular, two-volume graphic novel Maus: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus: And Here My Troubles Began (1991; also known as Maus II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills) continues to be read and studied as a classic of Holocaust literature.

Bibliography