JPS Guide to American Jewish Fiction (review)

Billed as “[a] guide to great novels and short story collections,” Josh Lambert’s 206-page book is structured somewhat like Leonard Maltin’s familiar Movie and Video Guides. Lambert’s discussion of his 125 selected “greats” among fiction by or about Jews moves forward chronologically, using a consideration of each work as a springboard for short essays (typically two pages). Entries explain plot and characters, explore socio-historical contexts of the book and its publication, and evaluate the book’s strong and weak points, along with any awards or prizes it or the author has won. More historical than literary in orientation, this guide is most likely to appeal to educators, libraries, curriculum and book club planners, and general readers interested in how the publication of books with Judaic themes changed over time.

By organizing his guide according to individual books—beginning with Nathan Mayer’s Differences (1867) and ending with Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis (2007)—rather than authors, Lambert makes room for several entries on authors who have written prolifically across the decades, like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, and those whose evolving fiction shaped and reflected sequential cultural trends. Sustained consideration of American Jewish fiction as a whole is contained in Lambert’s 12-page introduction, which focuses on the institutions that facilitated publishing as well as the books involved. The introduction and individual entries capably trace the development of major themes and concerns within Jewish fiction, such as immigration, assimilation and intermarriage, politics, and ideologies. Each entry is capped with very useful suggestions for “Further reading” of additional works and authors, along with indications of how those further readings might be employed.

Throughout, the guide offers many perceptive insights. Unfortunately, however, many entries lack the dimension of literary analysis. The author also seems uninterested in gender analysis, which has emerged as a critical tool. Thus, the discussion of Grace Paley’s Collected Stories informs readers the stories are “masterworks,” and asserts that frequent protagonist Faith Darwin is “semi-autobiographical,” but makes no reference to Paley’s distinctive, elliptical prose style, or to her passionate argument with conventional gender role and racial constructions. Tillie Olsen’s powerful Tell Me a Riddle (1961) is reduced to “more or less the story of Olsen’s life.” We read nothing of the literary artistry of Olsen’s intensely poetic, nautilus-structured explorations of the slipperiness of memory, and the power of personal, maternal, political, and ideological passions. Undiscussed is Olsen’s searing condemnation of the human betrayal and loss hidden in conventional gender-based exploitations—the denouement of the entire piece.

Lambert seems tone deaf to those authors such as Olsen, Paley, Ozick, and Rebecca Goldstein who utilize keen intellect and literary brilliance to skewer gender stereotypes. For example, in his discussion of Rebecca Goldstein’s ground-breaking novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), the author evaluates her fiction on pietistic grounds, first deriding it for illustrating the characteristic “of modern fiction that it trades both on the loftiest of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, and at the same time on the most debased sensational and voyeuristic impulses . . . cravings, lusts, and anxieties (whodunit? will they kiss? what’s going to happen?).” Surely such paradoxes were equally true of European authors like Stendahl, Flaubert, and Mann and of numerous foundational English classics by Fielding, Hardy, and others. Concluding his discussion, Lambert mistakenly asserts that Goldstein’s protagonist, Renee Feuer, “is valuable as a representative of the many Modern Orthodox men and women who pursue brilliant careers in physics or chemistry, still praying three times a day and believing in the Torah and its teachings.” Instead, in Goldstein’s book Renee has abandoned Sabbath and Kashruth observance, but feels drawn to warmth, integrity, and gemilut hasadim, the acts of lovingkindness, she sees enacted by such positively drawn Orthodox characters as her father or her sister-in-law, Tzippy.

As Lambert predicts, this reader laments the “unfair neglect” of some favorite authors who haven’t been included. However, while neither the books...