After the Schlemiel: American Jewish Literature Today

...And now for the bad news...

...And, most recently, for the cover of Newsweek...

...as Everyman, he ceases to be Jew...

...Someone who is prepared to act in history, rather than merely be acted through...

...In addition, there are a host of younger writers and poets who have not yet published books but whose writing is informed by a sensitivity to an authentic and knowledgeable Judaism: Joel Rosenberg, David Stern and Danny Siegel are perhaps the best known of this younger group...

...This, Marcus pointed out, was a sharp contrast to the kind of Jew who shows up in modern American Jewish literature: "We have had enough, finally, of the schlemiel...

...My purpose is not to attack these and other writers, who have admirably served the American, and yes, the Jewish public...

...The new State of Israel, which would let in a little light after all the darkness, was still three years away...

...For 1945 was a particularly precarious moment in Jewish history...

...A Jewish character must be able to recognize himself for who he is, and struggle with the implications of his Jewishness for himself and for others...

...The Holocaust had just ended, and while it was still almost impossible to comprehend what had happened, it was also right there, in all its enormity, and could hardly be ignored...

...we say 'tzum gezunt,' " or demeans its quality by such lines as ". . . to paraphrase Harry Golden, who says 'ess mein kind,' we say 'subscribe, subscribe,'" or includes among its articles such lines as "Thus it would seem that Roth's Jewish-American heroes are more immature than the first Hebrew, Abraham," and "Of all the great mysteries on earth and the wondrous phenomena to be observed in the behavior and institutions of presumably rational man, the phenomenon of the bestseller is among the most remarkable," what are we to think...

...Our normal instinct at the birth of such a journal would be to rejoice, to regard its birth as signifying a coming of age...

...the stories in The Pagan Rabbi and in Bloodshed and Three Novellas, her forthcoming book, deal not only with American Jews but with Jewish Jews — and even with Judaism...

...Can it be that for a people which takes literacy and literature so much for granted, the avant-garde cannot possibly arise from the ranks of writers...

...Nor do I believe that the measure of a writer is to be found only in his subject matter...

...As long as the same situation held for most of their readers, there was little problem...

...The protests against the idea of an American-Jewish literature might lead a cynical observer to conclude that Jewish writers do, in fact, form a kind of club — but one whose criterion for membership rests upon the capacity of its constituents to deny the existence of the club in the first place...

...Excluded from this list are the two giants from Europe, Singer and Wiesel, as well as the more popular writers like Uris and Potok who, whatever their literary shortcomings, have been far less reluctant to go to the heart of the Jewish experience...

...But we need someone else as well...

...History...

...The family is perhaps the most basic (and famous) fact of Jewish life, and is reflected throughout Jewish literature...

...New Jewish publications are not born easily...

...Not long ago we received the first issue of a small biannual journal entitled Studies in American Jewish Literature...

...On the other hand, the Jewish community, too, has its needs, and most of our Jewish writers are not fundamentally concerned with the serious issues of Judaism or the Jewish People...

...Another name that must be counted in this connection is that of theologian and novelist Arthur A. Cohen, whose novel In the Days of Simon Stern is a deep and thoughtful treatment of Jewish messianism...

...We have surely seen enough of the individual Jew as Everyman, the Jew lost in an alien world...

...It has yet to be registered forcefully in the world of culture, and one could follow theater, film, television and music for quite some time without stumbling on any evidence of it...

...we are not at all finished with him...

...About five years ago, Robert Alter, our most astute literary critic, wrote of a "tacit conspiracy" in American literary life, a kind of philo-Semitism whose purpose appeared to be "to foist on the American public as peculiarly Jewish various admired characteristics which in fact belong to the common humanity of us all...

...Now there is nothing wrong with all this: American Jewish literature has accurately and vividly portrayed some aspects of American Jewish life, and if we do not altogether care for the message, that is still no reason to slay the messenger...

...But given the fact that so many of them have made that choice, one is entitled to ask why American Jewish writers — the avant-garde of the larger culture — have lagged so consistently behind the consciousness of the Jewish spirit...

...The tendency of many Jews in academic life is to go to great lengths to stress the scholarly nature of their work, as though to show the rest of the academic world that it is, indeed, of serious merit...

...These themes included the moving of a family to a new place, the struggle for power within the family, the difficult relationships between fathers and sons, but especially between sons and sons, which extended into an exploration of the relationships between Jews and Gentiles, the difficulties of Jewishness in a new land, and the effect on the individual of cultures in conflict...

...What we have here, though, is a peculiar exception which appears at first blush to be a celebration of mediocrity...

...Spirit...

...A new publication does not come into the world without labor pains...

...Not surprisingly, it is Cynthia Ozick, not as essayist but as storyteller, who has been in the forefront of this new movement...

...Jews may be dominant, but the case for the dominance of Jewishness, whether as ideology or even as sensibility, is less easy to make...

...The problem is not that Jewish writers have been writing about the wrong things...

...One would have a particularly strong impression of the virtues and liabilities of the Jewish family...

...But when the opening editorial misuses Yiddish, as in "Thus to ourselves...

...they haven't...

...But one would have only the slightest awareness that anything momentous had occurred in the 1940's, in Europe, in Palestine, or anywhere else, for that matter...

...The notion of a particular Jewish sensibility is...

...Still, it is not entirely clear why Jewish writers have fallen behind the rest of the community, and explanations to the effect that the writers are only nominally Jewish do not answer the question...

...prosaic, steady, reliable, following in the footsteps of his father...

...During these last 30 years the rest of the American Jewish community has made strong gains indeed, especially in adapting itself to the radically new position of leadership in which it suddenly found itself in 1945...

...But the temptation should be avoided, for if we succumb to it, we obscure the achievements we have yet to make, and we depress the potential for the emergence of an American Jewish literature that reflects more honestly the recent changes in Jewish life...

...This is surprising precisely because it is in literature that Jews have made their most conspicuous mark in American culture, so much so that the period since 1945 has often been characterized as a "Jewish era" in American letters...

...Writing in Response two years ago, Alfred Marcus postulated that American Jewish literature of recent years had been a kind of literary Genesis...

...we require, at this point, a sense of the community, of the people...

...One would also learn a great deal about America, especially the America of the 1960's, with its political turmoil, its attacks on various institutions, the new sense of artistic freedom, the details of black and other national movements, and the apparent demise of liberalism...

...occasionally a rabbi would inveigh against a writer's negativism, or lack of authenticity or respect, but for the most part these were philistine complaints, easy enough to dismiss...

...One would know the sociology and psychology of American Jews in some detail — far better, in fact, than if one had read non-fiction works on these subjects...

...But at the same time Jews in general could no longer avoid the knowledge that they were not like the rest of the world, and the traditional tension between the Jewish community and its writers entered a new phase...

...And their argument is not without point when they claim that it may be inadvisable to group together writers who have little in common other than ethnic origin...

...Some years back, the critic Marvin Mudrick even tried to use the idea of the family to describe Jewish writers...

...But what, finally, would be the overall vision of American Jewish life after reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Mailer, Rosenfeld, Richler, Paley, Gold, Markfield, Friedman and the rest...

...Both bondage and redemption are, of course, themes of Exodus — and also of the 1940's...

...But the change has also been subtle, and has, therefore, gone largely unnoticed by the non-Jewish world, and even by much of the Jewish world...

...Vision...

...By this, Marcus meant that American Jewish writing tended to be about one or more of the major themes of the first book of the Bible, and especially about the dynamics of families...

...But we are now in a different time and place, and the very phenomenon that has insisted that American Jewish literature be taken seriously as Jewish expression now demands that it go beyond the facile notion of Jewishness it so frequently draws upon...

...I do not mean to suggest that writers who are Jewish have a special obligation to write about Jews...

...Now, philo-Semitism is obviously a rare event, and it is certainly tempting to embrace it uncritically...

...Marcus went on to describe Moses, the central figure in Exodus, whose greatness encompassed several important and positive types: the political and social leader, the judge and lawgiver, the confronter of God, and the leader from bondage...

...But surely we are entitled to wish that a journal which should mark a new maturity and self-respect for Jewish literature would be more serious and more thoughtful, and we are entitled to hope that in subsequent issues it will represent and encourage the flowering of a Jewish literature that has long been needed and that is now possible...

...The blunt fact is that Jewish writing in America since 1945 has not only made little substantial Jewish progress in 30 years, but in many ways it has actually regressed...

...Or — and I am inclined towards this view — might it be that authentically Jewish writing has already been born, but is still in its infancy, and will reach maturity in another five to ten years...

...It must move beyond its present state, toward Shmot — it must, in other words, adopt the right names...

...Moreover — and this is indeed surprising — the change has not yet become manifest in American literature...

...In a striking essay entitled "Toward Yavneh," Cynthia Ozick had already discussed the dilemma of the Jewish writer, proclaiming that the task that lay ahead was difficult and challenging...

...Alter went on to argue that such broad and positive qualities as vividness, compassion, humor, pathos and, of course, morality, had suddenly, as a result of the large number of successful Jewish writers, come to be seen as inherently and almost exclusively "Jewish...

...Jewish writers were understandably ill-equipped to respond to all this, and sought instead to express themselves in the only terms they had available — the universal terms that, incidentally, the rest of the world could also understand...

...We needed him, and we need him still...

...Yet one looks in vain for protests against the grouping together of black, female or Southern writers on the part of those who are so categorized...

...The Jew becomes Everyman...

...The first issue deals with Isaac Rosenfeld, Cynthia Ozick, Roth, Malamud and others...

...It is just that they have consistently failed to write about many of the right ones...

...Part of the immaturity of American Jewish writing lies in the great lengths to which many Jewish writers have gone in denying that there is such an enterprise in the first place...

...Finally, there was Philip, the youngest, nervous and delicate, "least committed to the past and most troubled by the future, whom all the family fusses over and is apprehensively fond of...

...Reading American Jewish writing from 1945 to the present — with a handful of recent exceptions — one would learn a great deal about the conflict of cultures, the process of assimilation, upward mobility, and, no less important, the psychic inner life of American Jews...

...Cohen's next novel, A Hero in His Time, is about a Soviet Jewish poet...

...The acceptance of Jewish, writers in America until now has been directly related to their ability to universalize their writing, to enervate the Jewishness that informs them, and finally to secularize it so deeply that it becomes accessible to everyone...

...Saul came next, flashy, charming, willful and cynical, "home only for the High Holidays when he puts on a skullcap and a pious face for services...

...One would learn all this just as one would have learned, a generation earlier, about the problems and hopes of immigrants, the nature of Jewish poverty, the benefits of liberal democracy, and so on...

...They must, in other words, follow the lesson of the sho-far: It was only by blowing through the narrow end of the instrument that their music could ultimately make sense to the wider public...

...Sociology and psychology are important...

...Nor was Marcus the only one to speak in these terms...

...Jewish writers, she claimed, even at the risk of losing some of their popularity, must write more seriously about their own people and about Jewish issues...

...Jewish history, in the starkest and most concrete terms imaginable, thrust itself forward in the 1940's in a way it had not done since the first century of the Common Era...

...however, highly misleading...

...Mudrick saw Malamud, Bellow, and Roth as brothers, sons of the same patriarch...

...But all of this was insufficient for American Jewry in the 1970's, and extending his conceit, Marcus called for a new direction: "Beresh.it, this new beginning, remains only a beginning...

...Here again, the analogy to the family is helpful...

...T Mhe idea of the family is helpful in understanding this whole process...

...Bernard, the eldest, was rather traditional...

...But a people lives on other things as well...