In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

among those that do. Peter J. Bailey’s Reading Stanley Elkin (1985) is one of several reasonable introductions to the author’s oeuvre, and some of Elkin’s sparkling essays—he was a Ph.D. and lifelong professor of English in St. Louis— can be found in Pieces of Soap (1992). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59pThe Last Jew in America By Leslie Fiedler STEIN AND DAY, 1966. 191 PAGES. It is a strange pleasure to read the imaginative literature written by an author best known as a critic; the question is always whether the critic’s insights into the genre can inform but not overwhelm his fiction—and the answer, almost universally, is no. This is certainly the case of Leslie Fiedler, the author of spectacular works of criticism such as Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). In Waiting for the End (1964) and the remarkable essay “The Jew in the American Novel” (1959), Fiedler proved himself to be among the ablest interpreters of American Jewish writing, and it is only sporting to admit that these analyses reach insights far more valuable than those found in Fiedler’s attempts to write stories and novels. Having said that, even the loopiest of Fiedler’s fictions are worth a read for their intelligence, satire, and curmudgeonly humor. Arguably Fiedler’s most successful story, “The Last Jew in America” appeared in a volume in 1966 alongside two similarly titled tales, “The Last WASP in the World” and “The First Spade in the West.” Together, the three fictions flesh out life in the improbably named Lewis and Clark City, “a square town, in the very middle of a square state . . . tucked away between Montana and Idaho.” Though this description seems to indicate Wyoming, the city itself, distinguished by its university, sounds more like Missoula, Montana, which happens to be the place where Fiedler lived and taught, at Montana State University, from 1941 to 1964. The title story treats the town’s Jewish population, mostly composed of “so-called Jews from the faculty” flown in from the Northeast to teach the “sons of ranchers and miners and real estate salesman and used car dealers” who make up the student body. In the story, Jacob Moscowitz tries to round up a minyan on Yom Kippur; following him as he approaches the few Jewish small-business owners, Fiedler explores the variety and tenuousness of Jewish identification in this small western town, inserting details of pop culture and intellectual life wherever he can. He touches on old debates (Forverts vs. Freiheit, Stalinists vs. Trotskyites), offers his own contemporary rewrite of the Kol Nidrei prayer, and demonstrates how even atheistic Jews can strive for fellowship in exile. The second story transports a gentile son of Lewis and Clark City, a prize-winning poet named Vincent Hazelbaker, to a Jewish wedding in New Jersey, reversing the situation: all of his literary associates, love interests, and psychiatrists are Jewish, so Vin stumbles around feeling like an endangered species. So does Ned York, the 85 Titles American Jewish Fiction African American bar owner at the center of the third story. All three fictions treat the experience of being an outsider—a position that inspired Fiedler’s fascination and sympathy throughout his life, no matter how persistently people admired and accepted him. Like his characters, Fiedler showed remarkable facility for outraging people, not only with his polemics but also with personal insults and bad behavior; and even his fiction can be offensive (Fiedler’s prominent use of the word “spade,” for one example, though perhaps less offensive at the time of publication, is unfortunate). But, like the man, the stories demand to be taken as they are: brash, funny, occasionally brilliant. Further reading: Fiedler’s fictional output was limited to a handful of novels and collections; Nude Croquet (1969) contains short stories from a 20-year period and offers a sense for Fiedler’s varying tactics and interests as a writer of fiction. Fiedler on the Roof (1991) contains the critic’s iconoclastic essays on Jewish culture. Mark Royden Winchell’s Too Good to Be True (2002) offers a critical account of Fiedler’s life and works. For an even shtickier take on Yom Kippur than in Fiedler’s title story, see Allen Hoffman’s novella Kagan’s Superfecta (1981), and for fiction published by another American Jew better known as a critic, see the collection of Lionel Trilling’s stories, Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories (1979). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60pGreen: A Novella and...

Share