Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative

1 Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative Derek Parker Royal In Jewish American fiction studies, it has become common practice to reference Irving Howe’s pronouncement on what he saw as the waning influence of this literature —so much so, in fact, that the mere mention of it serves as a critical, if not hackneyed, rite of passage for those engaged in contemporary narrative. Indeed, the constant citation of it (present introduction included) begins to take on the cadence of an ironic mantra, one chanted to invoke the spirit of literary authenticity . One is even tempted, given our sound bite-laden culture, to encapsulate his views with the pithy phrase, “the Howe Doctrine.” It all began in the introduction to his 1977 collection of Jewish American stories, where Howe broods over his belief that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories. Other than in books and sentiment, there just isn’t enough left of that experience .”1 To a certain degree, such an outlook is understandable, coming from the author of World of Our Fathers (1976), a text whose foundation is the Jewish immigrant experience. Yet what makes this literary forecast uniquely poignant is that it introduces a first-of-its-kind manuscript, the collection of “contemporary” Jewish American narratives. In one fell—yet curious—swoop, Howe celebrates the centrality of Jewish American literature at the same time that he mourns its passing. It is as if a distinguished collector had displayed, for all his guests to see, a grand exhibition of significance. Yet in the process of doing so, he kills off 2 derek parker royal the very subject of his admiration, much like a butterfly collector must place his specimens in ethyl acetate before they can be properly mounted and showcased. The very act of finalizing the literary moment secures its place in history, creating in the process an inert yet brilliant museum piece. While such a simile may appear excessive on first reading, one should keep in mind that Howe was not alone in ringing the death knell, or perhaps saying Kaddish. In a 1976 article, Ruth Wisse, a critic that Howe himself cited to confirm his suppositions, uses rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Howe’s. “The career of American Jewish literature would seem to have reached a turning point,” she provocatively asserts, eventually concluding that “for those who take Judaism seriously as a cultural alternative, and wish to weave new brilliant cloth from its ancient threads, the sociological reality of the present-day American Jewish community would seem to present an almost insurmountable obstacle.”2 Perhaps even more dour, although not nearly as referenced as Howe’s or Wisse’s, is Leslie Fiedler’s unequivocal assertion roughly ten years later that “the Jewish American novel is over and done with, a part of history rather than a living literature.”3 These grim predictions serve as a backdrop, ironically enough, for what has become over the past several years an emergent body of scholarship on the most contemporary generation of Jewish American writers. The present work is a collection of essays that challenge Howe’s and Fiedler’s notions of finality. With a variety of forms and focusing on a diversely rich selection of writers, the contributors to this volume assert the ongoing vitality of Jewish American fiction. They find in authors such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon, Tova Mirvis, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Jonathan Rosen, Nathan Englander, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Tova Reich, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ruth Knafo Setton, Farideh Dayanim Goldin, and Ben Katchor an argument against the kind of conclusiveness reported by Howe, Wisse, and Fiedler. Or, to paraphrase another famous literary dictum, each of the essays in this collection underscores the fact that reports of the death of Jewish American fiction were exaggerated. Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing critical awareness of what many have seen as a Jewish American literary revival. In 1992 Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport published Writing Our Way Home, a collection of short stories that emphasizes the postimmigrant as well as the postassimilation experience. This thematic focus, they argued, resulted in a new direction for Jewish American writing that promised to be fruitful. This energy, as the editors saw it, was fueled largely by a renewed interest in Jewish religion and...