Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representations in the Postmodern World (review)

Reviews Philip Roth Studies 179 In his own analysis of pastoralism in the American trilogy, Royal notes how a failure to accept ambiguity and conflict often leads Roth’s characters astray. The very pluralism of this collection, the twentieth book-length study of Roth in English thus far published (and a few more are imminent), makes it essential for anyone studying or savoring the elusive master who once told an interviewer, “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends” (3). With friends like that, Roth remains an indispensable acquaintance. University of Texas at San Antonio Steven G. Kellman Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin, eds. Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representations in the Postmodern World. Albany: SUNY P, 2004. xi + 272 pp. $75.50/$25.95. An anthology titled Jewish American and Holocaust Literature is an ambitious undertaking, especially as the Jewish literary renaissance that was heralded in the pages of Tikkun in 1997 seems to be gathering rather than losing steam. On the one hand, this seems like an opportune moment to survey the state of the field; on the other hand, given the recent outpouring of major Jewish novels (for example , Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World, and Tova Mirvis’s The Outside World ), literary production is destined to outpace any critical undertaking devoted to these two related but not identical fields. Ultimately, the best essays in this volume live up to the editors’ stated goal of “showing how traditionally canonized Jewish American writers are being reread and reassessed through the lens of contemporary critical theory, and [. . .] extending critical assessment to the works of current Jewish American writers” (4–5). The first section of the volume is devoted to Holocaust literature. Alan Berger ’s essay on the literature of “hidden children” is a thematic overview and includes discussion of both memoir (Ruth Kapp Hartz’s Your Name is Renée and Nechama Tec’s Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood ) and fiction (Elizabeth Gille’s novel Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and Friendship, based on her own experience as a hidden child). The decision to treat Gille’s novel as memoir is a theoretically interesting one that raises all sorts of genre questions for Holocaust studies. Although Berger does not pursue this line of inquiry, his analysis of the religious identity issues that both the hidden children and their rescuers enact is compelling reading. The essays by Ellen Fine and Gila Safran Naveh artfully illuminate the aesthetic strategies that Ida Fink, Aharon Appelfeld, Claude Lanzmann, and Isaac Bashevis Singer use to simultaneously perform the limits of representing the Shoah and ensure the transmission of a 180 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 sense of trauma that does not admit closure or catharsis. As Thane Rosenbaum eloquently argues in “Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World,” the desire for “clarity and closure” (135) is an immoral response to genocide and terrorism; indeed, he posits that a post-Holocaust consciousness might teach us to mourn and to listen in silence to the ghosts that now haunt New York (readers of Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham will find this essay particularly uncanny). The second section of the volume, devoted to Jewish American literature, begins with two essays on Saul Bellow. Gloria Cronin, with her usual writerly acumen, focuses on Bellow’s use of tropes of blackness to figure “Western and American cultural collapse” (153). Thus, she places him squarely within the tradition of colonialist white American authors. However, the question of his Jewishness and the ways in which it might complicate this racialist reading of him merit much more attention. While Cronin exposes Bellow’s “liberal humanist, white consciousness” (151), Sarah Blacher Cohen locates both his Jewish gift for satire and the evolution of his spiritual vision in his humanist struggle. Reading these two engaging, provocative essays side by side suggests that Jewish literary studies needs to reflexively reconsider theoretical shibboleths about liberal humanism. Bonnie Lyons reads Roth’s American Pastoral as a window on future directions for Jewish American literature and thus affirms Roth’s continued centrality to the Jewish American canon...