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Reviews Philip Roth Studies 183 while she complains about and is motivated by his laxity (108). Religion has both the power to illuminate and alienate. Aarons’s book comes at a time when debates abound about what it means to be a “Jewish” author, about which authors should be included in or dropped from the canon, and when controversies about how Orthodox Jews are (or should be) depicted or portrayed (and by whom) are being explored. What Happened to Abraham? is timely and cogent, a valuable resource for those who seek a better understanding of the powerful forces at work in modern Jewish fiction. Aarons argues that “for so many of the characters who emerge in the fiction of American Jewish writers at the end of the twentieth and the turn of the twenty-first centuries , the law of the Patriarchs becomes the metonymy for an accumulation of contradictory markers of identity, including, ironically, both enlightenment skepticism and a desire to believe in the origins and authority of ‘Jewish law’” (23). Aarons enhances our understanding of these tensions and contradictions. Queensborough Community College, CUNY Susan Jacobowitz Derek Rubin, ed. Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. New York: Schocken, 2005. xix + 368 pp. $25.00. Instead of literary critics writing about what makes fiction Jewish or whether American Jewish fiction has lost its subject because of assimilation and distance from the immigrant experience, twenty-nine fiction writers talk to, around, and about these questions in Derek Rubin’s collection of essays. The essays come from various sources and were written at various periods in the writers’ lives, so the volume is not a collection of responses to the same questions . Some of the authors write about themselves as writers, while others address the field of Jewish American fiction overall. Notably absent is Bernard Malamud, but the essays included are all lively, provocative, and contentious. Rereading Philip Roth’s well-known essay, “Writing about Jews,” I see his anger at the rabbinical attacks on Goodbye, Columbus, which accused him of Jewish selfhatred and of fostering anti-Semitism. His brilliant counterattack is two-pronged. First, he defends fiction itself: “[T]his expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society” (46). Second, he defends his own fiction against the charge of an unbalanced portrayal of Jews: “[T]he test of any literary work is not how broad is its range—for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative—but for the depth with which the writer reveals whatever he has chosen to represent” (50). He ends with a zinger: “If there are Jews who have begun to find the stories the novelists tell more provocative and pertinent than the sermons of some of the rabbis, per- 184 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 haps it is because there are regions of feeling and consciousness in them which cannot be reached by the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity” (64). Two of the Jews drawn to Roth’s provocative and pertinent fiction are younger writers included in the collection. One is Binnie Kirshenbaum, who describes reading about Brenda Patamkin when she was fifteen and experiencing a lifechanging epiphany: “I wept for Brenda. And I wept for myself, because with reading Goodbye, Columbus came the realization that to be breathtakingly shallow was not the pinnacle of human achievement I’d cracked it up to be. My sky fell. My life would never be the same” (221). Although Kirshenbaum has since embraced questions of Jewish identity, history, and theology, she concludes that her Jewishness is only one facet of herself and her writing: “That I am Jewish informs my writing the same way that being a woman does and a New Yorker too. But is that the sum total of who I am and what I know? Do I not want to, need to, venture beyond these borders?” (227). Also affected by Roth’s early work, British-born Jonathan Wilson writes, “Portnoy ’s Complaint is also, if only she could see it, the book of my mother’s life. Sophie Portnoy IS Doris Wilson: the only...

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