A Forgotten Forerunner: Zelda Popkin's Novels of the Holocaust and the 1948 War

Abstract

Although her work has now fallen into neglect, Zelda Popkin (1898-1983) deserves a place in the history of American Jewish literature both for having written one of the first English-language novels with a Holocaust theme and for having published the first American novel about the Israeli war for independence. Small Victory (1947) and Quiet Street (1951) both demonstrate the difficulties that mid-century American Jews, wedded to the project of assimilation into middle-class American life, had in understanding the consequences of the destruction of European Jewry and the creation of an independent Jewish state.