Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (review)

Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 129 bashful prophet sometimes borrowed from his brother Aaron, the talkative one. (p. 310) In the final paragraph, as Judaic motifs slyly envelop the two Black brothers, Harry surrenders himself to verbal alchemy. He is not unlike his creator, for while Stern's phantasmagoric inventiveness and linguistic virtuosity can often transform the dross of everyday life into twenty-four-carat literary gold, at the end of this tour de force, for all of its stylistic brilliance, one longs for some plain, old-fashioned tying up of loose ends of Harry's ruptured relationships and sense of personal failure. Without some such closure or a more explicit rejection of closure; the book's celebration of the imagination ends on a troubling note of self-indulgent evasiveness. Michael Shapiro Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature andJewish Identity, by Leslie Fiedler. Boston: David Godine, 1991. 184 pp. $19.95. Leslie Fiedler's new book is as much about the author's own struggles with Jewish identity as it is a collection of essays on literature and Jewish identity more broadly conceived. Fiedler writes about Malamud, Mailer, Singer, Styron, joyce's Bloom, the Book of Job, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, but his real subject here is himself as a passionate but ambivalent Jew. During the 1960s and 1970s, Fiedler won prominence as an expositor \ of American Jewish writers, but looking back today at the books ,and authors he championed then, he finds little of continuing interest or vitality. The Jewish American novel, he concludes, is a thing of the past, but even in its day it was more goyish (Fiedler's favorite, most frequently repeated epithet) than Jewish. Why? Because the authors of this once insurgent, highly popular strain of post-war American literature "were only vestigially, marginally, minimally Jewish in any traditional sense of the word" (po 59). Moreover, as writers who had deeply absorbed the mythological structures of the culture to which they had assimilated so eagerly, they wrote out of a tradition that was "not merely non-Jewish but anti-Jewish" (po 68). Fiedler, who does not hesitate to place himself among 130 SHOFAR these figures (they include Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Miller, Salinger, and West), writes shrewdly and often perceptively about latent patterns of acculturation in American Jewish literature and devotes some of his best pages to exposing the inherently Christian character of many of the most popular of American Jewish novels. Thus, in his search for the Jewishness of the American Jewish writer-including, most problematically, the Jewishness of Leslie Fiedler himself-the author comes up largely empty. It is more than a little ironic, therefore, as he notes in a piece of wry selfconfession , that he has won substantial fame as a purportedlyJewish critic of an ostensibly Jewish American literature: I had been blessed by the ... gentiles among whom I have made my career. . . . They had assumed I was a Jew; and, seeking to make amends for the Holocaust, they have opened up to me-along with other Jewish Americans of my generation-academic posts and cultural distinctions, access to which had earlier been barred to those descended from the Killers of Christ. I have, that is to say, profited from a philoSemitism as undiscriminating as the anti-Semitism in reaction to which it originated. And to make matters worse, I have shamelessly played the role in which I have been cast, becoming a literary Fiedler on the roof of academe (p. 177). To be sure, the subject matter of so much of Leslie Fiedler's work and his manner of engagement with it underline his Jewishness, but it is a Jewishness largely without positive determinants. From his childhood on, we learn, the antisemites have continued to remind the author he is a Jew, but otherwise he equates alienation and his coveted role as an outsider with beingJewish, just as he once equated radical leftist politics with being Jewish. Fiedler, however, is smart enough to know that these things hold no promise whatsoever for a Jewish future. And so, in the end, he faces the prospect of being without any means to carry on...