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On the last page of Bernard Malamud’s 1957 novel The Assistant, Frank Alpine endures a painful brit mila, a circumcision ceremony. In Malamud’s symbolic system, Alpine’s act is seen as a homecoming, as a sign of his finally belonging to the Jewish people. Frank’s circumcision is also a marker of his complete transformation from selfish sinner into a selfless saint, a symbol of his becoming a true mentsch—on par with his suffering mentor, Morris Bober. Much like Malamud’s conclusion to The Assistant, Philip Roth ends his 1986 novel The Counterlife with a discussion of circumcision. In a letter to his gentile wife, Maria, Nathan Zuckerman suggests that if their unborn child is a boy he would like the baby circumcised. Zuckerman writes: “Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity” (323). Yet here the comparison to Malamud ends, for in Roth’s novel Zuckerman’s circumcision represents a rejection of the pastoral sham of a life he had been living —it is in short an act of symbolic antipastoralism. Roth rejects the pursuit of perfection and purity1 reaffirming the Jewish covenantal relationship with God signified by Abraham’s brit mila (circumcision), the symbolic beginning of the Jewish people. Roth’s circumcision discussion, at the conclusion of The Counterlife , might also have inaugurated another resurgence: the reemergence, after a twenty-year hiatus, of serious critical attention by the literary establishment for Jewish American fiction. After years of neglect by the literary establishment, by 1997, for example, MELUS devoted an entire issue to the phenomenon of late twentieth-century Jewish American literature. Despite the increased critical exposure, perhaps the great prestige Jewish American literature held at the conclusion of the twentieth century might best be glimpsed in Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), which uses Judaism as a metaphor for inclusion into American academic and literary society. Coleman Silk, Roth’s light-skinned African American protagonist, passes as a Jew as a means of gaining acceptance at Athena College. Silk is a successful professor 169 CONCLUSION The Future of Jewish Fiction in America at Athena, a small liberal arts college, for many years before the political correct agenda of the day leads to his ruin. No matter what one thinks of Roth’s book, the fact that in a realistic work of fiction (despite its improbable plot twists), the idea that Jewishness is seen as the ticket toward respectability represents a sea change in Jewish American fiction , and one which needs to be taken seriously in future appraisals of the Jewish American novel. Stepping back from Coleman Silk for a moment, let us remember that in 1977, barely more than a quarter of a century ago, and only one year after Saul Bellow received the Nobel Prize for literature, Irving Howe edited an anthology called Jewish-American Stories. In his introductory remarks, Howe worried about the future of Jewish writing in America. Howe firmly believed that his introduction to the anthology would serve as the epitaph for the form. Howe wrote: “My own view is that American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience , it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories” (16). Howe, a socialist critic who upon entering “Alcove One” at City College left behind almost all vestiges of his Jewishness , could easily empathize with wanting to jettison a Judaism that in his mind was synonymous with the “streets and tenements of immigrant Jewish neighborhoods” (16). In Howe’s conception, Judaism was a religion of oppression. Therefore, for Howe, any literature dealing with Jewishness would fade into memory with the passing of the immigrant generation; possibly, he reasoned, Jewish literature might survive in the memories of the next postimmigrant generation. In hindsight, what Howe understood to be Yiddishkeit or Jewishness was actually the immigrant experience, an experience that had indeed been drunk to the lees within Jewish American fiction; had the next generation of Jewish writers attempted a continuation of writing concerned solely with the immigrant experience, no doubt Howe’s remarks in 1977 would have been prophetic. Of course, as I have hopefully established in American Talmud, that has not proven to be the case. Before we quickly dismiss Howe’s conflation of immigration/ Judaism, a nagging question persists: Was it ever really the case that Jewish...

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