Contemporary American-Jewish Literature: Critical Essays ed. by Irving Malin (review)

Studies in American Fiction231 examines. What the reader might feel has been lost by way of the complexities of the history of consciousness he is more than compensated for by Lieber's invariablesensitivity to the nuances and integrity of individual works. University of MissouriJ. Donald Crowley Malin, Irving, ed. Contemporary American-Jewish Literature: Critical Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Cloth: $7.95. Between the 1880s and World War I, several million Jews from Russia and Poland arrived in the United States. Coming from small ghetto-towns (shtetls) and from cities like Odessa, they were normally orthodox Jews, although some were secularists. For all, America represented freedom from pogroms and anti-semitism. The possibility of becoming an American was an unknown quantity, an added attraction. Opportunity was also a magnet. In the New World, the dreams of most Jews came true, if not for them then for their children. AU the same, the average Jew experienced anti-Semitism, at least through the 1940s, though not in the same form as before. The processes of Americanization were working. Since World War II, however, in part due to the horrors of the Holocaust, some American Jews and most young Jews have felt comfortable enough to see themselves as Americans, who are Jews. Meanwhile, in the vacuum that existed in the 1940s, American Jewish writers responded as no other group to the urgent cultural need, as Sheldon Grebstein has phrased it. It is this group of writers and this set of circumstances that form the meat of Irving Malin's Contemporary American-Jewish Literature. In his Introduction, Malin connects such disparate writers as Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth, and others, through their rebellion against the religion they once learned, with their common "sense of irony and sacred rage." As for the book's title, Malin writes, "Only when a Jewish (by birth) writer, moved by religious tensions, shows 'ultimate concern' in creating a new structure of belief, can he be said to create 'Jewish literature'." Moreover, he adds, the controlling metaphor should be theological, the writers' search is for "new images of divinity in the absence of orthodox belief," in which they "consciously or unconciously celebrate traditional religious moments (exile, covenant, transcendence, etc.)." Though I would agree with the general direction of Malin's argument, I cannot accept the specifics. All of us who labor in these vineyards have the samedifficulties. The attempt to be precise, to resolve the question "What is a Jew?" or "Who is aJew?" is a perilous trap. Jews come in all varieties, in all colors, with all degrees of belief or unbelief, as the two sections of the book, "Overviews" (four reprinted articles), and "Close Views" (nine original or unpublished articles), show. For example, "Overviews" begins with an insightful piece by Theodore Solataroff describing Philip Roth as a writer of"comedies of Jews who discover in their hearts that they are neither more nor less human." David Daiches, picking up the idea of a break-through, suggests that the American Jewish writer has been liberated to use his Jewishness imaginatively to probe the human condition. For Allen Guttmann, looking at the larger picture, the ultimate consequence of acculturation is 232Reviews assimilation and intermarriage—though he sees secularism, not conversion, as the real threat to Jewish survival. In view of the differences involved, Robert Alter, who uses Kafka as his model, cautions writers that there is no formulaic way of identifying the Jewish characteristics of all Jewish writers. Most of these emphases and points of view are borne out by the articles in "Close Views." Malamud is the most Jewish writer of the movement, Sheldon Grebstein says, because of his themes of meaningful suffering; the comic element as escape valve; and his peculiarly ethnic style. Now if one accepts this analysis, even in part, itbecomes clear why writers like Edward Wallant and Bruce Jay Friedman achieve success with their themes of existentialism and impotence. With so little making sense, according to Marcus Klein, it seems proper for Wallant's protagonists to seek a new basis for living, and Friedman's to seek machismo, at the expense of the Jewish mother, a comic exaggeration. On the other hand, while these themes...