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8 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 The Jewish-American Writer, Emergent Israel, and Allegra Goodman's The Family Markowitz Andrew Funnan Andrew Funnan is an Assistant Professor in the Department ofEnglish Literature at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author ofIsrael Through the Jewish-American Imagination (SUNY Press, 1997), and his essays on Jewish-American literature have appeared in a variety of journals, including Contemporary Literature, MELUS, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Midstream. It is a perspicacious literary critic who can gauge the pulse of the Zeitgeist and usher in a new wave of literary productivity, who can anticipate those fIrst creative glimmerings in the eyes ofimaginative writers. In the realm ofJewish-American fIction, Robert Alter has proven himself a perspicacious critic, indeed. In 1966, he bemoaned the dearth of Jewish-American imaginings of the Holocaust: "With all the restless probing into the implications of the Holocaust that continues to go on in Jewish intellectual forums ... it gives one pause to note how rarely American Jewish fIction has attempted to come to terms ... with the European catastrophe."l As if on cue, Jewish-American writers (such as Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Edward Lewis Wallant, and Arthur A. Cohen, to name but a few) began to explore the Holocaust overtly in their work. And, since the 1960s, we have enjoyed a rather steady outcropping of Jewish-American fIction on the Holocaust-enough novels and short stories to merit book-length studies upon them, most notably Alan Berger's Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American-Jewish Writing (1985) and S. Lillian Kremer's Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (1989). Some twenty-one years after Alter's tacit prodding of Jewish-American novelists to take on the Holocaust in their fIction, he lodged his complaint over the concomitant dearth ofJewish-American imaginings of Israel. It seemed suspect to him that JewishAmerican writers "should so regularly imagine a world in which Israel was scarcely even a presence on a distant horizon."2 "Israel," Alter observed, "represented a fundamental alteration in the facts of Jewish existence, so that a fIction that simultaneously ignored the momentous challenge of renewed Jewish autonomy could lRobert Alter, "Confronting the Holocaust: Three Israeli Novels," Commentary (March 1966): 67-73, here p. 67. 2Robert Alter, "Defenders of the Faith," Commentary (July 1987): 52-55, here p. 55. The Jewish-American Writer, Emergent Israel, and Allegra Goodman 9 scarcely be thought to probe the problematic ofmod~m Jewish identity."3 One would I ... have been hard-pressed, in 1987, to challenge Alter's contentions. A few notable exceptions aside (e.g., Meyer Levin, Leon Uris, and Hugh Nissenson), Jewish-American writers seemed perfectly content to leave Israel to the Israeli writers.4 Given Alter's track record, it probably should have surprised no one that a surge of Jewish-American novels on Israel followed hard upon his comments above and continues apace today.5 I am thinking, primarily, of novels such as Anne Roiphe's Lovingkindness (1987), Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), Carol Magun's Circling Eden: A Novel ofIsrael (1995), Deena Metzger's What Dinah Thought (1989), Tova Reich's Master (If the Return (1988) and The Jewish War (1995). Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport's recent anthology of Jewish-American fiction, Writing Our Way Home: Contemporary Stories by American Jewish Writers (1992), and a special issue of Response on "Post-Zionism" (Summer/Fall 1996) also contain several stories set in Israel. Among other writers who have engaged Israel with the most focus and intensity in their work are Meyer Levin, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, Hugh Nissenson, and Chaim Potok. Critics have recognized and commented upon this aspect of their writing.6 Less 3Alter, "Defenders," p. 55. 4Several scholars of Jewish-American fiction have noted the dearth of Jewish-American imaginings ofIsrael. Naomi Sokoloff, for example, observed in 1991 that, "Given the importance of Israel for American Jewish identity and communal self-expression, considering the quantities of ink spilled on polemics about relations between the two cultures, and taking into account the increasing familiarity of each with the other, not much imaginative writing has addressed this topic in a...

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