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American Jewish Fiction the Saturday Evening Post) as well as the articles supposedly written about him by critics such as Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, and Leslie Fiedler. Cynthia Ozick, as strident as ever, complained that Bech was even more ignorant than typical “indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelists” and characterized Updike’s sprinkling of Yiddish and Jewish nostalgia throughout the text as the superficial work of “the Appropriate Reference Machine.” The point of the Bech stories, though, is not an exploration of the depths of Jewishness but the comedy, and pathos, of the experience of being a writer in the United States: in a playful self-interview ostensibly conducted by Bech in 1971, Updike commented that in Bech, a Book he wanted to write “about a writer, who was a Jew with the same inevitability that a fictional rug-salesman would be an Armenian.” In other words, Updike was simply tipping his hat to the massive achievements of Jews in American fiction, and it is not like doing so took him away from his closer-to-home excavations of suburban and small-town American life (one of his finest novels, Rabbit Redux, appeared just a year after the first Bech collection). Bech may be only as Jewish as a non-Jew’s imagination could make him, but he is still very sympathetic—and a sign of his times. Further reading: The Complete Henry Bech (2001) collects the first batch of stories along with those published as Bech Is Back (1982) and Bech at Bay (1998), plus one bonus story. Updike’s novels include the tetralogy of Rabbit Angstrom books, published under one cover in 1995 and 2003, as well as 1968’s Couples. Updike has been the subject of much criticism, and, amazingly prolific as he is, has published hundreds of essays and reviews as well as a memoir, SelfConsciousness (1989). Joyce Carol Oates—a non–Jewish American writer who is about as prolific as Updike—has also written about Jews, for instance in The Tattooed Girl (2003). For a mirror image of the non-Jew writing as a Jew, see, among others, Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66pThe Book of Daniel By E. L. Doctorow RANDOM HOUSE, 1971. 303 PAGES. It has been reported that E. L. Doctorow tells his students, when it comes to writing historical fiction, “Do the least amount of research you can get away with, and no less.” At its best, the historical novel provides more insight than history and more pleasure than a novel; hewing close to the facts but disregarding them regularly for the sake of aesthetic and narrative pleasure, such fiction offers us not only a sense of what happened but also an argument for what it might mean to us. A publishing insider and gifted critic, Doctorow brings a powerful self-consciousness about historical fiction to his own masterful efforts in the genre, including The Book of Daniel, Ragtime (1975), and Billy Bathgate (1989). 94 The Book of Daniel, Doctorow’s third novel, centers on the son of a Jewish couple who were convicted of treason and electrocuted by the U.S. government during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. They’re not Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—in Doctorow’s novel, they’re called Rochelle and Paul Isaacson, and they have a son and a daughter rather than the two boys the real Rosenbergs had—but they’re close. The novel relates the story of their arrest, trial, and execution through the eyes of their son, who is understandably disturbed by the world he has grown up in—it isn’t easy being a surviving member of “a notorious family.” When he is not out sneering at the counterculture, Daniel spends his time at Columbia University’s Butler Library, procrastinating from his dissertation by reading up on the history of the capital punishments, such as knouting and burning at the stake, that preceded death by electrocution. In a fragmented and self-consciously postmodern narrative, Doctorow weaves in remarkable set pieces: a chilling scene from Paul Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York; a parody of a “Bintel Brief” letter to the Yiddish Forward; invocations of the psychedelic prophecies of the biblical book from which the novel takes its title; and learned mock-academic discourses on Disneyland, the history of communism, and a dozen other subjects. Beneath the raging surface of such virtuosity lies Doctorow’s concern for his characters and their suffering as well as his...

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