The Opposite of Jewish: On Remembering and Keeping in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Throughout the Bible, God repeatedly commands memory: the Israelites are to remember and keep the commandments. This essay considers the role of remembering and keeping a record of past generations as against remembering and keeping religious tradition. It investigates the way that recitation rather than ritual becomes the locus of memory in three contemporary Jewish novels: Dara Horn's In the Image (2002); Katie Singer's The Wholeness of a Broken Heart (1999); and Eileen Pollack's Paradise, New York (1998). All three novels are fraught with biblical imagery, with their female protagonists all functioning as modern incarnations of Serah bat Asher, the biblical woman who remembered and kept the memory of Israel in Egypt. Like Serah, these contemporary women stand apart from the tradition and yet gain their identity by recording its genealogies and recounting its stories.