The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

To understand a culture, one must study its literature. There one finds the cultural memory that pertains to a particular people at a particular time in a particular place and that relates to the world as human beings have always related to the world, in terms of their passions.¹ The passions that philosophers have studied since ancient times find vivid expression in the Hebrew Bible and are abundantly evident in Jewish writing since those ancient days. As in antiquity, when the problem of “Jewish” identity first emerged, there has always been some difficulty in identifying the people. No one doubts that American Jews live in a particular place; however, there is nothing so obvious about who or what are the “Jewish people” in America, especially when one chooses to assign writers and readers to the group.

For example, Mark Shechner opens his excellent comprehensive 1979 essay in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing² with a slight disclaimer: It is difficult to “be cogent” about Jewish American writing “at a time when a coherent and identifiable Jewish culture and religion have effectively ceased to exist except in special enclaves” (191). He puts forward several ideas that have influenced the definition of Jewish literature: “Neither ‘Jewish writer’ nor ‘Jewish fiction’ is an obvious or self-justifying subdivision of literature, any more than Jewishness itself is now a self-evident cultural identity. . . . ‘Jewish fiction’ and ‘the Jewish novel’ are not ‘useful as literary categories . . . or national catchalls . . . [however] they do merit a place in social history’ “(191). In the years following Shechner’s analysis, the explosion of ethnic studies in American academies has motivated an upsurge in the academic study of Jewish American literature. With this phenomenon has come an easy assumption that Jewish American literature is a cohesive subgenre, if not “entirely obvious” or “self-justifying.”

Shechner gives a historical context to the category, however, by asserting that three conditions influenced those who became models for later Jewish writers: 1. “the traditional way of life that stressed the rigorous spiritual authority of the Bible, the oral authority of an extensive legal and ethical code, contained in the Talmud and its commentaries,” 2. “the democracy of learning,” and 3. “successive waves of Hassidic enthusiasm, Enlightenment liberalism, Zionism, trade unionism, and socialism . . . that undermin[ed] the traditional way of stoic pietism, stir[ring] Jews to revolt” (193). Bonnie K. Lyons adds to this account in an essay on Jewish American literature from 1930–1945: “Being Jewish means being part of a chosen people with a sense of uniqueness, purpose, and calling.”³

In a recent large anthology of the genre, Jewish American Literature, the editors assert that “Jewish American” is a better choice than “American Jewish” as it is in keeping with “Mexican American literature,” “African American literature,” “Asian American literature,” and “Native American literature.” The group name is subordinated to “American,” suggesting that it is the American-ness of the literature that is primary. As the editors note, the identity of the other groups is based on place and nationhood. Taking that fact as a starting point, the editors press further with questions about what is meant by “Jewish people.”⁴ The issues that concern them are essential in nature. However, because they are the same ones dealt with in many of the essays in this collection, I will not rehearse all the relevant matters. For purposes of this essay, a work is considered to be Jewish American literature if the author was born into a Jewish family or converted to Judaism and if the work concerns Jews in America. Literature written by authors who were born into a Jewish family or who converted to Judaism but have not written about Jewish life is not Jewish American literature, according to these criteria; rather, such works suggest the broad interest of Jews who live and write in America, as they indicate the wide variety in styles and subject matter expressed in the writing of both self-identified and nominally Jewish writers. These works are better placed in American literature than Jewish American literature; to impose on the works of someone born in a Jewish family who does not identify with the Jewish people or someone who does identify as a Jew but does not write about Jews is a move that tends to make the category Jewish American literature too broad and perhaps meaningless.

Philip Roth, in defending his fiction against charges of antisemitism, has made several significant contributions to a definition of Jewish American literature. In a 1960 interview he explained, “the story [“Defender of the Faith”] is by no means about the Jews. It’s about individuals who happen to be Jewish.”⁵ When asked about his caustic representations of Jewish suburban life, he responded, “I can’t deny I have feelings of anger and censure as a human being and a Jew although I would say this is not particularly a Jewish problem, but an American problem” (2). These early responses to questions about his fiction support Roth’s continuing assertions that he writes about Jews because that is what he knows. Such a claim—that that is all they know—would not be true for some writers who happen to be Jewish. While Roth’s explanations may appear to be simple, and in some sense are, they go very deep in terms of what it means to write fiction about a particular group—and they put limits on what we as readers can or should expect. They are not, after all, historians, theologians, or sociologists. Like all serious writers, they are people with a moral conscience and a powerful imagination—influenced in some ways by being Jews.

While the mood in contemporary literary theory is particularly hospitable to the concept of ethnic writing as a significant category (in fact, some literary theorists as well as English department offerings have little interest in any categories that do not represent people “on the margins”), such was not always the case. As in many areas, Jews favored in literature a place among the mainstream of the American way of life. Shechner declares that the American writers who had gained the most attention at that time, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, developed styles and themes that would surely appeal to writers in revolution—from the profound representation of the inner life in Hawthorne, the short story and psychological thriller of Poe, the resistance against an anxiety of influence in Emerson, to the social rebellion of Thoreau, and the stylistic and social code breaking of Whitman.

In a consideration of ethnic literature, Thomas Friedman has asked, “What is American Literature if not regional literature, a narrow focus that broadens into a national vision?” Thus one may read Jewish American literature with an eye to what American literature is; that is, the regional and ethnic literatures are not on the margins, but they are what make American literature. Similarly, Diane Matza warns against trying to pin down an ethnic literature.⁶ Yet, if we consider the American Jewish experience to be the experience of a culture, perhaps more than one culture, then we may find in Jewish American literature the particular memories of a group of people. While those whom we call members of this group are often only loosely connected to one another, in their literature may be discerned signs of those connections. They are connected by their feelings of insider/outsider, their ambivalence about their practice of religion, and their desire to live out the American dream.

If one wanted to study the effects of place on a group of people, the Jews would be an ideal group to take up because they have lived in so many diverse places. Since the Middle Ages, Jews have been lucky, or most times unlucky, according to their place of birth. The luckiest Jews, at least until the establishment of the state of Israel, have been the Jews of America. The freedom to worship was never contested, and the vestiges of antisemitism, expressed nationally in immigration restrictions and university quotas in the first half of the century, all but disappeared by the mid-twentieth century (when Jews became “white folks”).⁷ Within a half-century of the arrival of the greatest number of Jewish immigrants to the country, Jews were gaining admission to elite universities, entering professions, establishing businesses, and figuring as prominent members on the political and cultural landscape.

Nonetheless, one can read in place and space representations of the difficulties Jews have faced in America, difficulties not always different from those of non-Jews who were living in America for a century or more or from other immigrant or ethnic groups. American literature in general has frequently depicted America as a place of unlimited space—the frontiers figure prominently, whether they are geographic or intellectual. At the same time, American literature challenges the dearly held belief that the possibilities for success in America are limitless.

Just as William Dean Howells used the conventions of literary realism to create fictional depictions of New England middle-class life, so early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant writers found the conventions of the genre compatible with the representation of Jewish families in America. However, neither critics nor readers always thought of representation, with the many nuances of what we mean when we say that something is re-presented in an artistic form. American realism, building on the psychologically profound fiction of great American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, and the socially provocative novel Huckleberry Finn, provided late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Jewish American writers with a tradition they incorporated into the Yiddish culture they brought with them. When naturalism and social determinism appeared on the literary scene in the works of Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and, later, Edith Wharton, there developed an even greater natural affinity between immigrants and literary forms. One might argue that the presence of an increasing number of immigrants in America stimulated the forms—Jacob Riis photographed the physical conditions common to immigrant life, and writers recreated similar circumstances in fiction. Although such an absolute belief in the “truth” of representation has not defined the sole response to realism, it has been only in the last few decades that the “truth” of representation and the differing positions from which readers approach texts have become matters central to thinking about fiction

The significance of place in fictional representations cannot be overstated. No matter how universal the theme of a work of fiction, its setting is particular (unlike many poems and essays, for example). Even a writer such as Henry James who set much of his fiction in England and Europe, and who took up permanent residence in the former, was overwhelmingly interested in revealing aspects of American character in the foreign settings he chose. He discovered angles from which to view the significance of place—how Americans developed certain characteristics in their own place—and then acted them out in other locations, England or Europe. Thus even an American writer who set his stories elsewhere testified to the significance of place (America as the place where character was developed, England and Europe the places where the American character is tested and revealed).

Whereas place in this essay refers to the location of a work (America in general and a specific location in the country in particular), space refers to the precise setting of scenes, including the physical space itself and the characters who inhabit that space. Jewish American writers have not followed Henry James’s example in terms of leaving America to write about it, but they have brought the experiences—the traditions, the fears, and even the horrors—of other places to their writing. Representations of Jewish American life in literature suggest that place, the nations where Jews formerly lived as well as their American homeland, and space, the homes, workplaces, and meeting places of Jews and their non-Jewish compatriots, have varying and complex significance in Jewish life. The Jewish American texts discussed in this chapter take America as their location; they follow a common, though not absolute, tendency of fictional works to center on the domestic space.

Abraham Cahan’s novella Yekl (1893) exemplifies a fiction writer’s use of domestic relations to exemplify conflicts in immigrant Jewish American life. Cahan employs the home both metaphorically and realistically in this story of Yekl, the immigrant antihero who mistakes American assimilation for happiness. However, when the translation of the novel from Yiddish to English made it possible for Cahan’s work to be taken up by the non-Jewish literary community (Howells in particular), it was regarded as a work only about life in America.⁸ The predisposition to take fictional representations as “real” hardly led readers or critics to deconstruct the text. The comments of one critic, who compared Yekl to Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets in 1896 (Pittsburgh Bulletin), imply the straightforward analysis to which Cahan’s work might be subjected:

Indeed, many humorous incidents flavor the novel. In the opening page of the novel Jake delivers the following exposition to his fellow Jewish immigrant employees in the cloak shop:

Another amusing incident that is characteristic of the humor in the novel, while at the same time revealing Yekl’s antipathy toward Gitl as a symbol of the Old World, occurs when Yekl criticizes his wife for saying “fentzer”: “Can’t ya say veenda?” Yekl demands.¹¹ Although Yekl testifies to Cahan’s wit, the novel is scarcely only humorous. The author’s commitment to verisimilitude in terms of the plight of a transnational Jew could not have been expressed without a sense of the tragic aspects of human character.

However, the truth Yekl conveys may be far more complex than early critics believed. Recently the critic Matthew Frye Jacobson, for example, shed light on the complexity of place in Yekl in terms of authorial intention and reader response:

The “transnational debates” to which Jacobson refers are engaged by the immigrant couple in their domestic space.

Jake, as he is called by American friends, first arrived on American soil in Boston. As his diatribe quoted above indicates, he had not felt himself to be as enclosed there with other Jews, in a ghetto atmosphere, as he does in the present narrative time, in New York City. In Boston he had been interested in the great American pastime, sports, but in New York he has taken up dancing because, in the isolating ghetto community, he finds few English speakers with whom to enjoy his interest. As a sports enthusiast, he was able to keep his domestic life in place—sports did not challenge his loyalty to Gitl and Yossele, to whom he sent regular payments from which Gitl would be able to save enough to make the trip to America. The New York ghetto life kept him far more separate from English speakers; thus his interest in sports waned, and he took up the nonverbal social activity that brought him into the company of women, specifically one woman, Mamie. Ironically, when he spoke English, “broken” though his is, more frequently, he was mentally loyal to Gitl and Yossele; when he returned to a Yiddish-speaking community, he grew more distant (of course, time accounted for his disaffection as well). This complex interplay of language and culture articulates the tension between the immigrant’s experience of success—at the minimal but significant level of language—and his fears of failure. When he feels good about his progress in American society, he can hold his domestic life in an imagined positive place; when he identifies himself as a “greenhorn,” they become a primary reminder of his “otherness.” As part of a “charming tale” that he is “neither willing to banish from his memory nor able to reconcile with the actualities of his American present,”¹³ Jake’s family brings to his mind and heart a painful ambivalence.

As soon as the anxious greenhorn catches a glimpse of his small family, who have just completed their tedious journey across the Atlantic, “his heart sinks at his wife’s uncouth and un-American appearance” (28). Yekl’s vicious attitude toward Gitl finds many outlets, which the narrator presents from both his and her viewpoints:

The presentation of consciousness exemplified here—both Yekl’s and Gitl’s—attests to Cahan’s interest in giving voice to both sides of the assimilation question. As Jacobson puts it, Yekl embodies the “racialized view of immutable yiddishkayt that has a second dimension.”¹⁴ This other dimension, the distinction between masculinity and femininity, finds expression in Gitl’s fears concerning her husband’s insistence that she look and behave like an American woman. One might guess that Yekl would have been pleased that Gitl took advice from another woman as she tries to accommodate his desires. Yet what he desires is to have more control over his environment. Gitl’s makeup and hat and her adviser nettle him because they further his tendency to objectify her—to see her metonymically (the hat and makeup equal the person) and to use condensation (her adviser equals Gitl). In this way he creates what is for him an enabling psychodrama. The space of the home substitutes for the world outside.

When Gitl’s attempts to Americanize in her own way trigger Yekl’s rejection, it is evident that he cannot negotiate with Gitl or with the New World. Rather, his insecurity favors total immersion. Gitl’s attachment to identifying markers (wearing a wig, for example) make it easier for him to fall into Mamie’s arms, since her easy ways and apparent success in America not only take him from the marriage bed but also release him from the traditions that he regards as the only obstacles to his success. Yet, when Yekl and Gitl divorce, neither one experiences immediate happiness:

Ultimately, the novel figures the home ambivalently—a space where one longs to find acceptance and support, but where one must offer it in order to find it. The frustrated immigrant, no longer at home with old ways or assured in new customs or language, cannot proffer the love he does not feel. The “violent lurch” that describes both the streetcar’s movement and Yekl’s “heart”(68), forming the final image of the novel, places Yekl outside the home, connected to an uncaring outside world. Both a part of the naturalist novel and the transnational representation of Jewish life, Yekl articulates anguish in domestic life that challenges the nostalgic viewpoint from which individuals and groups sometimes regard the past.

Anzia Yezierska provides an equally complex view of home as place in The Bread Givers. Sara Smolinsky, the first-person narrator, has five sisters, who, along with their mother, endure mistreatment at the hands of the father and husband, Reb Smolinsky. Trained in Jewish religious thought and observance, he rightly thinks of himself in one sense as an accomplished man. Nonetheless, he is constantly frustrated by his powerlessness in New York, where Talmudic learning cannot compete with business acumen. His struggle against his increasingly negative self-image and anger exacerbate his frustration because he has nothing to fight against except his family, who might have offered him solace if he were not so rigid in his traditional behavior. He tyrannizes his wife—whom he calls “Woman”—and daughters and sometimes his neighbors. Sara comments: “Of course we all knew that if God had given Mother a son, Father would have permitted a man child to share with him his best room in the house. A boy could say prayers after father’s death. God didn’t listen to women” (9). Yezierska’s novel is unabashedly feminist, although the ending compromises the strong feminist tone—perhaps because this is a work of realism.

Like Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennett, Reb Smolinsky has many daughters to see married. Rich sons-in-law would not only secure his daughters’ futures, but would bring him honor by association. His doggedness results in unhappy situations—he does not gain wealth or prestige through his daughters’ marriages, and they do not find the satisfaction they might have had he not denied them even a shred of autonomy.

First, Reb Smolinsky, attached to the wages the admirable and gentle Bessie earns, demands that her prospective fiancé, Berel Bernstein, pay for the wedding and set him up in business. Mr. Bernstein, willing to forgo a dowry, finds this reprehensible, but still desires to marry Bessie, who will not go to him without her father’s consent. Next Mashah falls in love with a piano player, Jacob Novak; although his family is wealthy, Reb Smolinsky’s disapproves of his profession. He tricks Jacob into staying away from his home, but Jacob figures out the deception and returns to beg Mashah’s forgiveness. When he plays the piano, Reb Smolinsky demands that he leave their home because he has played on the Sabbath. Fania’s suitor, Morris Lipkin, is a poor poet and hardly stands a chance with Reb Smolinsky, who succeeds in humiliating him enough that he gives up his claims on Fania. Having successfully ended three romances, Reb Smolinsky sets about arranging three marriages, each of which causes misery.

Although her father’s actions infuriate Sara, she cannot influence him for the better. However, the author creates an event that punishes him: he takes the money he received from Bessie’s marriage to buy a grocery store that has been stocked with fake goods. Reb Smolinsky is both tyrannical and foolish. The reader surely gives a sigh of relief when Sara leaves her home in both a literal and figurative sense. She would have lived with either Bessie or Mashah, but neither enjoys the sort of domestic tranquillity that would welcome a guest. Sara avoids reliving the scenes of her father’s tyranny in her sisters’ homes by renting a small dirty room for which she pays with her earnings at a laundry. In the evenings Sara takes classes and studies. While Sara imitates her father’s commitment to learning, she may have derived strength from her mother’s devotion. In a touching scene Mrs. Smolinsky comes to take care of Sara when she learns that her daughter is ill. Bringing food and comfort, she symbolizes the fulfillment of domestic love. The most positive scene of domestic support in the novel occurs in a small rented room.

Yet working and studying present such great challenges for Sara that she almost capitulates to her father’s values by accepting the attention of the acquisitive Max Goldstein. When she recognizes his money-oriented interests, she rejects him, an act that causes her father, upon hearing of it, to disown her. The imaginary place that she has inherited from him, the place of learning, provides her with enough stimulation to continue her efforts to earn a college degree, despite the lack of material or emotional support. For Reb Smolinsky, the value of learning functions as a place—he continues the tradition of Jews in which not land but learning creates a people. Thus, while Reb Smolinsky’s learning ties him to the lands where Jews have lived and written in the past, Sara’s learning earns her a place in America. Orthodox Jewish women, who do not partake of the commandments for learning, traditionally have made learning possible and meaningful for men. This significant though subordinate role, demonstrated in Yekl in Gitl’s relationship with Bernstein, is not specifically shown in The Bread Givers because Reb Smolinsky devalues his wife and daughters. However, without them he has nothing: in the context of this subordination of the women and elevation of the self, he finds his identity.

The intricate domestic dynamics that result from the nexus of orthodox Jewish custom and assimilation return to the novel when Sara, having achieved her dream of becoming a teacher, meets Hugo Seelig, a Jew, who is principal of the school where she teaches. While the narrative emphasizes the conflict between a woman’s desire for autonomy and her aspirations to marry, it simultaneously creates a longing for a positive love relationship amidst all the failed engagements and unhappy marriages. Hugo Seelig incorporates American success and the possibility of continuing Jewish learning without the trappings of immigrant status. On first meeting Sara, Hugo corrects her speech—putting his hands on her throat in a potentially erotic move, he instructs her on how to move her throat to pronounce a word. In a novel in which the first-person narrator occasionally uses nonstandard English, the emphasis on correct pronunciation is slightly ironic. Yet this is only one way that language functions as an indicator of hierarchical or insider/outsider relations.¹⁵

One evening, after Sara and Hugo have become engaged, they come upon Sara’s father on the street. He has turned into an almost unrecognizable beggar now that her mother is dead and he has divorced a second wife, who would not tolerate his abusive ways. Sara embraces her father, who is in no position to refuse her offer of a renewed relationship. He and Hugo develop a rapport based on Hugo’s desire to learn Hebrew. While Sara is not as fine an English speaker as Hugo, she will be left out completely when he learns Hebrew because Hebrew is a language only for men. Yiddish, which women speak, is not Sara’s language, nor will it be the language of Jewish American women in the years that follow Yezierska’s writing. Jewish learning would continue for a long time to be the province of Jewish males, as it is of Hugo and Reb Smolinsky. The males will be connected through this ancient language to the Jewish people and to the many places they have lived, while Jewish women would, in decreasing numbers, keep a “Jewish home” by following food laws and domestic rituals of the Sabbath and holy days. Because Sara will not be the one learning Hebrew, she may remain subordinate in some sense—in her home—just as she has been subordinate to Hugo outside the home.

The home serves in one respect as the place where the lives of immigrants’ daughters pay a high price for being female. Their father denies them the learning he values, he pushes them into undesirable marriages and fails to offer comfort or help when his actions wreak havoc on their lives. However, the daughters do return to their mother at various times—when she dies, they are reunited briefly in the home. The hierarchy established in the home by the commitment to the learning transmitted through Hebrew language paradoxically supports the hierarchies of male/female that women faced in America, while the commitment to this ancient language and its traditions sometimes creates estrangement from the world outside. The home validates the outside world as it keeps it out.

The “cost” of success for Jake in Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, as well as for Sara in The Bread Givers, introduces a theme that will dominate Jewish writing in twentieth-century America. Philip Roth has explored the terms of success in his fiction with increasing sophistication, and perhaps pessimism, over the years. His fictional accounts of Jewish life begin at just about the time Jews become “white folks.” That is, Jews are no longer counted as a distinct minority group, nor are Italians. They are put into the white category when American politics and culture instantiate the critical distinction between blacks and all other Americans. The eponymous story in the collection Goodbye, Columbus registers the entry of large numbers of Jews into upper-middle-class American life while it scrutinizes the distinctions between the newly rich Jews and their less fortunate coreligionists. In a 1959 review William Peden noted, “there is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion.”¹⁶ Indeed, these characteristics of fiction define Roth’s entire oeuvre.

In Goodbye, Columbus, a novella in which the incredible number and acuity of realistic details alone give a stunning picture of mid-fifties middle-and upper-middle-class Jewish life in New Jersey, the home is the site of both the niggling mannerisms of the previous generation and the dissolution of family relations due to geographical mobility. Neil Klugman’s parents have moved to Phoenix, leaving him to the care of his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max; that is, Neil has graduated from college and is working as a librarian, but either his income or custom places him in his relatives’ modest home, where their habits come from a world that is not unknown but still distinctly foreign to Neil. His aunt coaxes him to eat food he does not enjoy, while in his girlfriend Brenda Patimkin’s home he finds food temptations not only at the table but kept in surplus amounts in the basement. Unaccustomed to the phantasmagoric selection of delicacies with which the basement refrigerator is stocked, Neil stuffs his pockets with cherries from the bushels he discovers. At the same time, he is aware of the Patimkins’ ample liquor supply—a variety and quantity unknown in most Jewish American homes.

Place—in the form of his aunt and uncle’s home—signifies what Neil wants to give up or transcend: the mediocrity and stagnation of the average Jewish working-class life. Yet he is as disconcerted by the Patimkins’ markers of affluence as he is attracted to the newness. As he drives out of Newark to the cool breezes of Short Hills, a suburb Aunt Gladys says no “real Jews” live in (41), Neil imagines Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max “sharing a Mounds Bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of afterlife” (6).¹⁷ His nostalgia for a life he simultaneously rejects offers a glimpse into what becomes a more common phenomenon, especially in the later part of the century when Jewish Americans, in acknowledging the devastating consequences of the Holocaust, long for a European life many never knew or romanticized before.

Neil’s encounters with a young black boy who frequents the library to study a book of Gauguin paintings symbolize the longing Neil ambivalently shares with the boy to transcend his present place for more exotic and beautiful landscapes. One day a man asks Neil to find this same book for him. Neil tells the man that the book is checked out so that the boy will not be disappointed when he comes to read it. When the man returns another time, Neil decides that the better plan would be for the boy to check out the book. The boy, barely understanding what that would entail, finally tells Neil that if he took the book to his home it would be destroyed. Neil, as obtuse about the boy’s circumstances as the Patimkins are about his own, suggests that he keep the book hidden in a desk at his home. The boy’s home would be no more receptive to the Gauguin book than is Neil’s home to the idea of the Patimkins’ home. The scenes with the African American youth obviously register racially based differences in American life, but the Patimkins’ lifestyle as compared to Neil’s Newark existence discloses more subtle class distinctions that inform Jewish society in America.

Roth portrays the Patimkins with great wit and insight into Jewish American life. Mrs. Patimkin pays attention to whether a Jew is Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform (though she says “reformed”), declares her allegiance to Jewish institutions—synagogues and women’s organizations—and in one especially hilarious scene misunderstands Neil’s question about whether she knows Martin Buber to be a question about a local resident: “Is he orthodox or conservative?” she asks. Mr. Patimkin, who owns Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks, does not score points for his intellect, according to his daughter Brenda, though he wins her affection. All the Patimkins are athletically inclined: Mrs. Patimkin had been an accomplished tennis player; Mr. Patimkin plays golf and coaches his younger daughter, Julie, in the sport. Ron, the oldest child, played sports at Ohio State University and would apparently have liked to become a gym teacher. That desire is easily squelched as he is eased into a role at Patimkin Sink when he becomes engaged. Brenda has won many medals for horseback riding and is now a competitive tennis player and good swimmer. Sports are limited to the country club, though a lot of time at home is spent practicing a sport. Athletics are not a profession for the Patimkins or their social equals; rather the pursuit of the “good life” includes sports because they signal that one has leisure time and money. While blacks learned to play basketball in part because of two aspects of their circumstances, the lack of space in the urban setting and little money to spare made a sport that required only a small court and no equipment save a net a good choice, Americans who had physical space and money could play golf and tennis and could swim, ideally at country clubs. Restricted from membership at clubs all around the country, Jews built their own country clubs. As well as playing sports at the country club, the Patimkins finance a lavish wedding at the club, hire servants, and consume the best material goods American society has to offer.

The story of the Patimkin family has generally been read in terms of Neil’s attraction and repulsion to it. In that story, and not outside of Neil’s awareness, is the poignant story of Brenda. She is not only pivotal in the story in terms of what it means for someone like Neil Klugman to become involved with a rich and beautiful college-age woman, but in terms of what her place in the family reveals about American life through the lens of a Jewish family. It is not unusual that a fictional daughter marks the place where cultural ways are most glaringly revealed. Beginning with Lot’s daughters, who are sacrificed by their father to men demanding sexual favors so that he might save his male guests, who otherwise would have been surrendered to the men, daughters are both loved and offered on the marketplace by their fathers. One after another, Jane Austen’s novels retell the story of daughters who need to marry. Seldom do they have a mother to emulate or one who protects them; the marriages always seem enviable, but they serve the fathers’ purposes as much as they fulfill the daughters’ desires (this is glaringly obvious in the case of the daughters who are not the heroines of the novels). Henry James’s fictional daughters are placed unabashedly by their fathers on the market, and, when they are unsuccessful, they rarely get pity from a father figure. Daughters are the site of political and psychological recklessness in much late twentieth-century fiction, including Roth’s American Pastoral. Mrs. Patimkin expresses contempt for her daughter because, Brenda tells Neil, “She is jealous. It’s so corny, I’m ashamed to say it” (19). Neil had already regarded her in a way that recalls Snow White’s stepmother:

Brenda explains that her mother had “had the best back-hand in New Jersey” (18) and that she, Brenda, has been intrigued by photographs in which her mother’s exceptional beauty is evident. When she mentions the photos to her mother and suggests that they have one blown up so that she can have it at school, her mother chastens her with the claim that they have better things to do with their money. Money is an issue between the mother and daughter; Mrs. Patimkin chides Brenda for shopping at Bonwit Teller, insisting that Orbach’s is good enough. Brenda considers her father to have barrels of money and can think of no reason not to spend it. As Neil muses, Brenda’s “life . . . consisted to a large part of cornering the market on fabrics that felt soft to the skin” (18–19).

What is at stake is no less than the survival of each woman’s identity—Mrs. Patimkin’s has already been painfully altered and Brenda’s is in jeopardy of heading in the same downward direction. When Neil asks Brenda how she thinks her sister Julie, ten years her junior, will fare, Brenda quips that she will probably do better than herself. Julie, who was introduced in the narrative in the act of hitting golf balls in the yard with her father, while, Neil conjectures, other children her age are out playing with one another, represents the possibility that a female child might not be sacrificed to the needs of the parents, but she functions more to emphasize Brenda’s already determined future. Brenda may be right, but she suggests at another point that in a few years Julie will be as despised by her mother as Brenda.

Since Mrs. Patimkin is still beautiful, and since she can afford many luxuries, and she could probably still play tennis, even if not at her youthful level, one wonders why she is jealous of her daughter. Roth has crafted the story too carefully for her to be dismissed as simply a cantankerous woman. Several contradictions in her attitudes and assertions lend insight into her character. Mrs. Patimkin considers herself to be Orthodox, while her husband is Conservative. Although she keeps a kosher home, when she interrogates Neil one has the sense that her activities in Hadassah constitute the whole of her religious affiliation. In terms of her values, according to Brenda, she acts as if the family still lives in Newark, but she disapproves of Neil in part because he does in fact live in Newark and has a modest job. She has a maid, but she resents Brenda’s failure to take part in any housework. Mrs. Patimkin is ambivalent, ambivalent as a Jew and ambivalent as an American woman. Although she tells Neil that Brenda had been an excellent Hebrew School student and regrets her daughter’s loss of interest in Judaism, she apparently has offered only a kosher kitchen and her own membership in Hadassah as incentives toward Brenda’s continuing religious study.

Mrs. Patimkin’s day precedes the time when adult Jewish education began to flourish all over the country, when women who had not had a bat mitzvah studied and became adult b’nai mitzvah, and when women became presidents of synagogues, not just presidents of sisterhoods. Had she wanted to pursue a different life in the secular world, Mrs. Patimkin would have had few opportunities for work that suited a woman in the upper middle class. Some women may have wished for different lives for their daughters, and those women may have had the wherewithal to steer their offspring in new directions. Such women rarely appear in fiction; rather, female fictional protagonists are remarkably free of mothers. Mrs. Patimkin offers a highly realistic insight into the place of Jewish women of the 1950s who enjoyed material and social ascent. They showcased the gains their husband had made. Who would people the country clubs on weekdays, decorate and maintain the increasingly lavish homes, or entertain guests, if not they? If women’s liberation had not arrived, neither had men’s, and the husbands were unlikely to find pleasure in domestic duties. Nor could the hardworking man advertise on his own the leisure that increasing incomes made possible. It was the women, in high heels and skirts even in their homes, who made this new leisure evident. Post-World War II society depended on the consumer wife, while new notions of privacy in America provided a model for aspiring Jewish women.¹⁸

Brenda was probably right, and Roth therefore prophetic, as he has been in other places,¹⁹ when she predicted that Julie would be better off than she. During the 1970s life changed for American middle-class women, and Jewish women, who often held college degrees, entered the workforce, returned to universities to graduate programs, went to professional schools, started businesses, kept their maiden names, headed organizations—in numbers previously unknown and seemingly unthought of. Why would Mrs. Patimkin not have considered Brenda an ally in the world of women whose lives were constricted by the demands of consumer culture? While Roth does not flesh out the reasons for Mrs. Patimkin’s aversion to Bonwit Teller and preference for the bargains found at Orbach’s, the narrative makes evident that she identifies herself in some ways with her old life in Newark. Brenda exemplifies a rejection of a disappearing lifestyle her mother cannot recapture and has not replaced to her satisfaction. She has no advice to offer Brenda on how to create a different sort of existence; at the same time, the manner in which Brenda mirrors the life she is now living repels her.

The disheartening relationship between Brenda and her mother helps to explain an odd passage in the narrative when Brenda tells Neil that her father had shown her three hundred dollars he hid for her in the attic in case anything happened. The only things Brenda needs to be protected from are her mother’s wrath and her future as a woman just like her mother. The relationship between the Patimkinsis not fully developed; however, when Neil thinks that Mrs. Patimkin, a “wild princess,” has become the servant to the king’s daughter, his thoughts suggest that Mrs. Patimkin has lost her place as first woman in the house. She no longer exhibits the best backhand but now occupies herself with keeping the castle. Money won’t protect Brenda from her mother’s wrath, of course, and, once Mr. Patimkin has given his daughters lessons in sports, he has nothing else to offer but money. The intersection of Jewish interests and the new abundance of American middle-and upper-middle-class life find expression in Goodbye, Columbus—with great humor—from the opening scene at a country club where rich Jews wile their time away to the lavish wedding of Brenda’s brother, Ron.

Newark, New Jersey figures as well in Roth’s American Pastoral (1998), a novel that, among other things, investigates the motivations and consequences of Jewish Americans’ economic and social mobility with the insight of a writer who has developed an unflinching critique of American life in the second half of the twentieth century. The critic Timothy Parrish writes, “with his work in the 1990s it has become obvious that Roth—in Cynthia Ozick’s words—’is being catapulted along a fascinating trajectory’ which is culminating in an expression of Jewish identity that no one—not Irving Howe or Philip Roth—could have imagined thirty years ago.”²⁰ It almost seems as if, once Roth’s characters are let loose from the confines of their Jewish neighborhood in Newark, they are set on self-destructive paths. This is not to say that Newark offered an idyllic life in Roth’s fiction, but that the economic and social achievements Americans make as they climb up an invisible ladder brings new risks. Along with various social and personal areas of angst, Goodbye, Columbus anticipates the father/daughter relationship in American Pastoral—a relationship that transgresses boundaries that did not come into play in the earlier work. The protagonist, Seymour Levov, known as the Swede because of his fair hair, complexion, and blue eyes, is haunted by the memory of the kiss that he and his eleven-year-old daughter shared on a hot summer day, the last of many days they had spent together in their beach cottage. “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother”(89), Merry, who could not overcome her habitual stuttering, had requested. “Sun-drunk” from a morning playing in the sand and surf with Merry, the Swede had looked down and had seen “the red bee bite that was her nipple” (89). Perhaps in an effort to stifle an erotic response to what he saw, the Swede retorted with a brief but brutal, “N-n-no” and demanded that she fix her suit strap.

Yet, perhaps because he was as stunned as was Merry at his mimicry, the Swede signals both their potential erotic attachment to one another and the shame that this attachment and his criticism as well cause: “Just as he had decided that he and she could find their way back from their summer romance” (90), punctuated by occasions when Merry ran through the room with only a towel to fetch a dry swimsuit, yelling “Nobody look” (89) and walked in on him in the bathroom, “He lost his vaunted sense of proportion, drew her to him with one arm, and kissed her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking him for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for” (91). When Merry’s life turns toward tragedy—she throws a bomb at the local post office, killing the town doctor as the act of a 1960s radical whose stuttering is symbolic of her inability to articulate, or probably to comprehend beyond an elementary level, the national problems that bring mayhem to that decade of American life—the Swede wonders, “What did he do to her that was so wrong? The kiss? That kiss? So beastly?”²¹ Seymour’s response recognizes one sort of transgression, but avoids the other, the boundary-crossing of a Jew into a gentile community where his daughter disrupts the tranquillity of the bucolic and homogeneous town with an assault that transcends the repressed violence that characterizes her home life.²²

One of the remarkable things about the kiss and all that follows is that Roth presents this as a quintessential scene of Jewish American life. That is, the narrator, Zuckerman, “dreams” the life of the Swede, the older brother of his friend Jerry. The Swede was handsome, great at sports, and, not surprisingly, popuiar. Nathan Zuckerman had idolized him. In 1985, when the Swede was fifty-eight and Nathan fifty-three, they accidentally met at a Mets game. Ten years later the Swede wrote to Nathan asking him to meet to discuss a tribute he wanted to write in honor of his father, who had died the year before. Still intrigued by his youthful idol, Zuckerman met with him, but the matter of the tribute never came up. A few months later, Zuckerman encountered Jerry at their forty-fifth high school reunion and mentioned the meeting, only to be told the shocking news that the Swede had died.

Using some precise details about Seymour’s life, Zuckerman recounts what “must have been” the life of the Swede, his wife, his daughter, and his parents. Just as the immigrant Lou Levov’s great financial success as a glove manufacturer rehearses a common success story of Jewish immigrants in the mid-twentieth century, so Seymour’s inheritance of the business and move away from Newark to a conspicuously non-Jewish area in the countryside of New Jersey and Jerry’s success as a physician provide realistic images of Jewish American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

The middle-class Newark home where the Swede and Jerry grew up fails to provide a model that either son chooses to replicate exactly. Although Jerry does not play a central role in the novel, his flamboyant spending, boastful manner, and multiple divorces reflect in an exaggerated way a change in the demeanor of American physicians in the booming years of the second half of the century. Seymour’s marriage is consistent with a new American trend as well—an increase in interfaith marriages. Thinking back to Goodbye, Columbus, one can construct some general ideas about the changing values that influence Jewish Americans. Taking the success of his father’s business to new heights, Seymour uses his wealth and gentile wife, the former “Miss New Jersey” in the Miss America Pageant, to gain entry, if only on the margins, into the gentile world. Marshall Bruce Gentry claims that “the simplest of the major charges against Swede is that he accepts the injustices of capitalism.”²³ Yet, as Sandra Kumamoto Stanley notes, “What the Swede never understands is how his pastoral vision of America could give birth to Merry’s anger.”²⁴ Both of these observations lend credence to the idea that daughters suffer at the hands of fathers who are driven by the dictates of success in a capitalist world. The Jew who envisions the pastoral world as a part of the American dream that is open to all and is founded on material accomplishments recalls Yekl and Reb Smolinsky as much as he evokes images of Horatio Alger or, alternatively, Jay Gatsby.

Seymour’s father, Lou, decides to tolerate his son’s marriage to a non-Jew if she declares that she does not believe in Christ. For Merry, matters are more difficult. Her parents’ indecisive approach to religious affiliation leaves her to her own devices, which involve her in attaching herself first to the religion of one parent and then to the religion of the other. Her identity is further confused by her mother’s beauty, which she has not inherited. The most significant and well-remembered accomplishment of her mother’s life was becoming Miss New Jersey in 1949—an award that, though it had been won by one Jewish woman (Bess Myerson, in 1945), was hardly the province of Jewish females then or stuttering and overweight women at any time. When Merry expresses interest in Christianity, the material symbols work to threaten her Jewish grandparents. Since Merry cannot inherit what her mother had in the larger society, she might have welcomed support for what she could get from her father—Judaism. Seymour’s parents are loving grandparents; the reader might fantasize a meaningful Jewish existence for Merry. However, Roth rarely creates situations that are enhanced by religious activity. Rather, he charts in the case of Merry the experience of perhaps many children, offspring of religiously unaffiliated intermarried couples, who want to have similar experiences to their friends. They may long for some religious life—perhaps only because children want to be like their friends as much as possible. In any case, whichever way Merry turns, she is thwarted. She embodies the anger that the youth of the 1960s expressed, although she cannot articulate her frustrations adequately. Her stuttering figures as a metaphor for her identity—a nonfluent American girl who cannot find a place where she can speak her piece.

The representation of the senior Levovs offers a nostalgic longing for a Jewish American life that could not be continued into the late twentieth century. Lou’s satisfaction as an immigrant made good would have been all Yekl could have imagined; his success, however, sets a new bar for his sons. If American success concerned fewer socioeconomic expectations and more nonmaterial gains, Lou’s sons would have found plenty to work toward. While the entire novel is a creative discourse against American superficiality, prejudice, and ego-driven existence, particular scenes function to give a succinct view of such: an early scene in Newark that makes clear the misery in American life that has resulted from the division of a society into black and white (a division that profits the Jews), Dawn’s beauty contest trophy and later search for beauty through plastic surgery as a response to her daughter’s disappearance, and the final scene, a dinner party during which Seymour realizes that Dawn is having an affair with a neighbor, whose membership in the community is sanctioned by generations of American citizenship, and where Lou Levov is stabbed in the cheek by a disgruntled woman to whom he attempts to give sympathetic advice.

Lou’s paternalism and his wife’s domestically oriented life find challenges in late twentieth-century America. Feminist and race issues altered the landscape of American life; women and people of color rightly envied the place of white men. In the complicated changes that have taken place and not taken place, the criteria for success in America have not changed. When Seymour wonders, “What could have wounded Merry?” he refers to the sort of psychic wound that regularly features in contemporary fiction. The “wound” is something to which one returns—Merry cannot overcome her wound; Philip Roth returns again and again to the wounds that people suffer when either they or those close to them mindlessly follow the dictates of society. Those dictates may be the American work ethic, a puritanical view of life, an endless need for material consumption, or a growing rootlessness.

The story that Zuckerman dreams resonates with American readers because it describes so many aspects of American life. Yet the comments that Zuckerman makes early in the novel speak to Roth’s postmodern interest in epistemology:

This is pretty disappointing news, especially when Zuckerman adds that writers, more than others, get people wrong. After all, don’t we read novels to get it right? On the one hand, Roth creates a realistic portrait of Jewish American and American life; on the other hand, he acknowledges that no one is transparent and that our best attempts to understand others will fail to some extent. He, however, does not get it wrong when it comes to representing American society.

Many Jewish Americans writers have made the Holocaust the subject of their writing. Among those writers are nonsurvivors as well as survivors. Emily Budick argues that for Roth “speaking or writing the word Holocaust is the American Jew’s inheritance and destiny; though how that destiny will be voiced will not be for any one writer (Jewish or non-Jewish) to decide.”²⁵ Cynthia Ozick recalls the image of the wandering Jew in The Shawl, originally published as two stories, “The Shawl” (1980) and “Rosa” (1983), in the New Yorker. In the first story a young Jewish woman of about twenty-four, her baby of about a year, and her fourteen-year-old niece are on a march. It becomes clear by the second page with the reference to the yellow star they were made to wear that the march is to a concentration or death camp. Homeless and unprotected, persecuted, they signify the most horrific happening to Jewish life, the ultimate representation of homelessness. The baby Magda “flopped on with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the pencil legs faltered where the light began.”²⁶ Magda’s “pencil legs,” referred to several times, anticipate the role that the act of writing plays in the text. After Magda is killed—she runs on her thin legs to reach the shawl that Stella has taken from her and is shot by a guard—Rosa is fully articulate only when she writes, and she is comforted, though the comfort is meager, only by her writing. Her attachment to the shawl, on the other hand, indicates her silence: when she witnesses Magda’s fall “from her flight against the electrified fence . . . she took Magda’s shawl and filed her worn mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried”(10).

The powerful depiction of Rosa in “The Shawl” as knowing more about what would happen in the barracks—that Magda would be killed—than would have been possible illustrates a problem in holocaust fiction. The philosopher Berel Lang, who has written extensively about the Holocaust, argues that “‘The Shawl’ (along with several other texts he cites) exemplifies a particular sort of misrepresentation:

While the inclusion here of Lang’s noteworthy contention is not intended to undermine the effect of this analysis of The Shawl, it points to two issues that are relevant here. First, the fact that some writers cannot imagine that what they know about the Holocaust was not known to those who experienced its effects, from the early days of the Nazi round-ups on, suggests that the ubiquity of the Holocaust in the writing of Jews (what Roth refers to) has had just this effect of rewriting history. Second, like all fictional texts, holocaust fiction tells as much (sometimes more) about the time during which the fiction was written as it does about the time during which the fiction is set. As suggested above, Yekl expresses the transnational concern of Jewish identity; American Pastoral reflects the concern with Jewish assimilation at the end of the twentieth century, even though much of the novel takes place decades earlier.

Following this brief barely seven-full-page story, the story “Rosa” takes place in Miami, Florida, home to a whole host of Jewish retirees. Rosa Lublin has demolished her store in New York, where she had specialized in antique mirrors, which symbolize the continual reflection of her past life into her present consciousness. Her home is now a single room in a hotel where “instead of maid service there was a dumbwaiter on a shrieking pulley.”²⁸ The silence of the dumbwaiter and the shrieking of the pulley suggest both Rosa’s silence and her shrieking—the shawl in the mouth and out of the mouth.²⁹ The silence that Rosa meets from a world that does not want to listen is the subject of one of her letters to Magda—sometimes she writes to Stella, who has been her financial support since she smashed the store, and sometimes to Magda. To the first she writes in English, though her English is “crude”; to Magda she writes in a “brittle most excellent literary Polish” (14).

The most significant encounter Rosa has in Miami is with Persky, who comes from Poland. Their initial meeting, in a laundromat, results in a lasting friendship because Persky is determined to make Rosa his friend. He tells her of his past: he was a button manufacturer (Rosa loses a button on her dress; he would like to keep her “buttoned up”—not closed off, but “together”); his wife is mentally ill and institutionalized; he supports his son, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, and he has two daughters who married successful businessmen. His story is fairly enough representative of the life of a Jew who came from Poland, as he did, in 1920. The very fact of contingency—of the sheer luck but enormous consequence of geography—finds expression in the meeting of these two people. As Berel Lang argues, “geography is not destiny—but neither is it an historical irrelevance.”³⁰ Never after the Holocaust could American Jews whose families had immigrated anytime before World War II take lightly that significant personal fact. In Rosa’s words to Mr. Persky, “My Warsaw isn’t your Warsaw” (19). His America is not her America either: Persky is at home; Rosa feels herself to be homeless. She thinks:

The single-line paragraph follows Rosa’s reading of a letter from James W. Tree, a professor of social pathology, who has been “amass[ing] survivor data as rather a considerable specialty” (36). Suggesting the possibilities of “acute cerebral damage, derangement, disorientation, premature senility . . . hormonal changes, parasites, anemia, thready pulse, hyperventilation,“Dr. Tree asks Rosa to join his study “by means of an in-depth interview in [her] home” (38). The narrative expresses the superiority of writing over interviewing—that is, Rosa’s writing over Tree’s interviewing—but writing is not sentimentalized:

Rosa inscribes the untraceable, creating a life for Magda and an imaginary world for herself, but she knows that her act is “to lie.”

Although Magda’s “pencil legs scribbling this way and that” represent a writing of one history of the Jews, Rosa’s continual writing expresses Ozick’s brilliant articulation of the silence, despair, and delusion of a Jew who is not only without a home but whose home and culture have been destroyed. Rosa responds in kind by destroying her store and by rejecting the Jews whom she observes in Miami. The Jewish women she scrutinizes but refuses to acknowledge are “old socialists: idealists. The Human race was all they cared for” (16). Her reaction to the women, in particular, mirrors the cynicism about Jews who “make it in America” reflected in any number of Jewish American writers:

Rosa mocks the women in part out of jealousy, indicated in her rumination, “She had no one but her cold niece in Queens, New York” (17). She envies them not only their successful grandchildren but their at-home existence in America. The Jews’ ability to become more American than non-Jewish Americans finds expression in Jewish jokes and Jewish fiction. In Woody Allen’s story “No Kaddish for Weinstein,”³¹ the protagonist is described as having “suffered injustices and persecutions because of his religion, mostly from his parents. True, the old man was a member of the synagogue, and his mother, too, but they could never accept the fact that their son was Jewish. ‘How did it happen,’ his father asked?” (206). This reversal of the proverbial worry of children that their parents may be different than other folk expresses a particular social phenomenon of the 1950s—the assimilationist desires of some Jews that were allowed freer expression than they had been heretofore. The parents’ membership in a synagogue follows a typical move of Jews from a Yiddish immigrant identity of “Jew” to “Judaism.” American Jews are represented as consuming as many material goods as any Americans, but they are also shown to progress professionally and economically. In many cases Jews are shown to have lost the imaginary place that characterized the early fiction, as Weinstein’s father’s query so aptly represents.

The Shawl expresses a longing for an imaginary place that is attenuated, though not entirely gone. The retired Jewish men Rosa observes read Yiddish newspapers, and the women cook recipes handed down through the generations. Rosa’s Jewish world has disappeared. The entire world of European Jewry, hundreds of synagogues, hundreds of thousands of homes, and millions of books, have been destroyed, and, most important, the Nazis exterminated six million people. Rosa’s envy for other women’s motherhood—their children and their grandchildren—finds clear expression when she thinks that the philosophers talk about the meaning of life—but that the meaning of life is motherhood: “Motherhood—I’ve always known this—is a profound distraction from philosophy, and all philosophy is rooted in suffering over the passage of time. I mean the fact of motherhood, the physiological fact. . . . To pass on a whole genetic system” (41). The end of Rosa’s motherhood, the death of Magda, symbolizes the end of centuries of Jewish European life. In the final lines of the narrative, Rosa accepts Persky into her life. To acknowledge Persky, who embraces life, despite personal disappointments, Rosa must let go of Magda, the reminder of death. This positive end must be seen in the light or perhaps the darkness of the end of her line, representing the end of the line of six million people. Sara Horowitz, using a term coined by the poet Paul Celan, explains that second-generation writers, “those who were not there (such as Cynthia Ozick), bear witness for the witness.”³²

In some ways a postscript to “The Shawl,” Roth’s The Plot Against America refigures the destruction of European Jewry into the dilemma of American Jewry. The novel revises history to have Lindberg defeat Roosevelt for a third term as president, acknowledging in this alteration of American events the lasting connection among Jews worldwide. Like the Jews in Europe, the Jews in America are removed from their homes, the safe places that American Jews have come to feel are inviolable.

The first-person fictional account of the experience of the Roth family (all the names are the same as those of Philip’s family) includes divisions as well as integrity within the family. Philip’s older brother, Sandy, at first refuses to believe that Lindbergh’s administration will oppress the Jews. Philip’s older cousin, who lost his leg in battle, gets into a fist fight with Philip’s father over their differing political views. The violence of their fight recalls the violence that intrudes into the narrative of American Pastoral (Merry bombing the post office).³³

The freedoms cherished in American society have been challenged on many fronts; in this novel their assured nature is called into question in the Jewish American home. Once again, Philip Roth represents through the experience of Jews in America some of the most significant cultural and political events in the country. In The Dying Animal, published in the spring of 2001, two lovers refer to Osama Bin Laden’s expected attempt to blow up an American site at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on home as the place where the experiences of the outside world have their most intense expression, his narratives have dramatic and realistic coherence.

This essay began with the claim that “to understand a culture, one must study its literature.” In the first extended example of Jewish literature, Cahan’s Yekl, the transnational concerns of Jews figure significantly into the representation of Jewish life in America. Late twentieth-and early twenty-first century fiction, by writers from all over the world, takes up global matters, suggesting that any “culture” is inextricably linked to larger world, not only national, matters. Ozick’s The Shawl is just one instance of the impact of worldwide events on the subject matter of fiction. Roth’s uncanny mention of a terrorist event in a novel published just before September 11, 2001, anticipates the global concern with terrorism expressed in much recent fiction.³⁴ Yet the space of the home retains its privileged position in even fiction that incorporates global and/or transnational events and concerns. In Jewish American fiction as well as other fiction, the dynamics of family life and intimate relationships offer insight into the particular desires, habits, and experiences of individual groups, inscribing the diverse and changing experiences of the group.

1. Philip Fisher discusses literature and the passions in The Vehement Passions (New Haven, 2002), introduction.

2. Mark Shechner, “Jewish Writers,” in Daniel Hoffman, ed., The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Cambridge, 1979), 191–239.

3. Bonnie K. Lyons, “American Jewish Fiction Since 1945,” in Lewis Fried et al., eds., Handbook of Jewish American Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources (Westport, CT, 1988), 61–89.

4. Jules Chametzky et al., eds., Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2001), 1–16.

5. “The NBA Winner Talks Back, Martha McGregor/1960,” in George J. Searles, ed., Conversations with Philip Roth (Jackson, MI, 1992), 1.

6. Thomas Friedman, from a talk given at Utica College in April 1985, also printed in Utica College Occasional Papers, an in-house publication. Quoted in Diane Matza, ed., Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy (Hanover, 1997), 1.

7. Karen Brodkin discusses the American phenomenon of race in the 1950s in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998).

8. Contemporary readers of Jewish American fiction are likely to know the works of Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New York, 1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), in particuiar, and Anzia Yezierska; although Hungry Hearts (1920) and The Children of Loneliness (1923) are less well-known than The Bread Givers (New York, 1925). James Oppenheim (1882–1932), an American-born Jew, grew up in a middle-class home in New York. Working as a teacher and a social worker in the slums of the Lower East Side, he reflected in his writings on his experience as assistant director of Hudson Guild Settlement and later the Hebrew Technical School for girls. His works include Dr. Rast (1909), The Nine-Tenths (1911), and Pay Envelopes (1911). Arthur Bullard (1870–1929) studied social conditions of the early twentieth century, worked in social service as a member of the University Settlement in New York, and later as a probation office that represented the Prison Association of New York. He traveled to Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central Europe and wrote about these experiences. His novel The Fugitive (1904) incorporates many of the experiences of his travels, but in one section deals exclusively with Jewish life in America. His sensitivity to the rigors of life incumbent on immigrant laborers is evident in Comrade Yetta (1913), a novel he dedicated “to organized workers.”

9. Pittsburgh Bulletin, August 8, 1896, quoted in Richard Weatherford, Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1973), 46–47.

10. Cahan, Yekl, 3–4.

11. Ibid., 33.

12. Jules Chametzky, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (Amherst, 1977). Matthew Frye Jacobson, “The Quintessence of the Jew: Polemics of Nationalism and Peoplehood in Turn-of-the-Century Yiddish Fiction,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York, 1998), 103–11. According to Jacobson, Yekl is much like the works of Leon Kobrin, Jacob Gordin, Bernard Goren and the poetry of Morris Winchevsky, Abraham Liessen, and Morris Rosenfeld. These were generated in social and political contexts in which Yiddish thinkers on both sides of Atlantic were absorbed with the question of Jewish identity itself and its relation to other ethnic religious racial or national groups on the world scene (104). On Cahan, see also Sanford E. Marovitz, Abraham Cahan (New York, 1996).

13. Cahan, Yekl, 22.

14. Jacobson, “The Quintessence of the Jew,” 106.

15. Hana Wirth-Nesher writes that the courtship scene between Hugo and Sara “intertwines desire for English and sexual desire as the body is roused to produce consonants without debasing traces of other languages.” “Language as Homeland in Jewish-American Literature,” in David Biale et al., ed., Insider/Outsider (Berkeley, 1998), 212–30.

16. “In a Limbo Between Past and Present,” New York Times, May 17, 1959. 4.

17. Philip Roth, “Goodbye, Columbus,” in Goodbye, Columbus (New York, 1959), 1–136.

18. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988).

19. E.g. , Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (Boston, 2001).

20. Timothy Parrish, “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar September 1, 2000, 84–99. Cynthia Ozick quoted in Elaine M. Kauvar, “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick,” Contemporary Literature 34.3 (1993): 373.

21. Roth, American Pastoral, 92.

22. Marshall Bruce Gentry writes that “Philip Roth’s American Pastoral contains a feminist subversion of its dominant male voices: the protagonist Swede Levov, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman, even author Roth. While reviews treat Swede as a good man punished for his virtues, the novel’s women refute his reputation as the world’s nicest guy. Swede’s major faults are that he accepts the injustices of capitalism, that he never genuinely loves women, and that he does not think for himself. In creating ambiguity about his stance toward Swede, Roth may be admitting he has built a house of fiction that causes women to become bombmakers.” “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar, September 1, 2000, 74–83. Although I cannot specifically take up Gentry’s intriguing claims about Roth’s feminism here, the essay offers a fascinating way to consider the novel.

23. Ibid., 78.

24. Sandra Jumamoto Stanley, “Mourning the ‘Greatest Generation’: Myth and History in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (March 2005): 1–24.

25. Emily Budick, “Acknowledging the Holocaust,” in Ephraim Sicher, ed., Breaking Crystal (Urbana, 1998), 329–43.

26. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York, 1990), 7.

27. Berel Lang, “Representation and Misrepresentation: On or about the Holocaust,” presented at the Representations of the Holocaust in Literature and Film II: Consultation at the College of William and Mary, April 2006. Quoted with permission of the author.

28. Ozick, The Shawl, 15.

29. Michael G. Levine offers a psychoanalytic analysis of Rosa’s silence and of other aspects of the novella in “‘Toward an Addressable You’: Ozick’s The Shawl and the Mouth of the Witness,” in Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, eds., Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (New York, 2004), 396–411.

30. Berel Lang, “Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide,” in Judaism 53.3–4 (Summer/ Fall 2004): 253–59.

31. The story is in Woody Allen, Without Feathers (New York, 1972), 205–11.

32. Sara Horowitz, “Auto/Biography and Fiction After Auschwitz,” in Sicher, Breaking Crystal, 276–94.

33. Roth’s The Human Stain (Boston, 2001) includes several violent scenes, centered on the amorous relationship between the protagonist, a professor born to a black family who passes as a “white” Jew, and a woman who cleans houses and milks dairy cows and her Vietnam veteran partner. On Roth see also Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport, CT, 2005); and Mark Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth (Madison, 2003).

34. The following examples of highly esteemed fiction that incorporates global matters into plot and character are only a few on a list of many: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007), Don Delilo, Falling Man (2007), John Updike, The Terrorist (2006), Ian McEwan, Saturday ([2005] which was regarded to be predictive of the terrorist events in London in July, 2005), Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2004), Azar Nafasi, Teaching Lolita in Tehran (2003), Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans (2003) and The Unconsoled (1999), Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000), and Jose Saramago, blindness (1995).