Jewish Fiction Research Articles

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

An Interpretation of A Study of Jewishness Cynthia Ozick

A Study of Jewishness in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction (2021) is a masterpiece of Chinese research circles on Cynthia Ozick, and the latest contribution made by Chinese scholars to the study of American Jewish literature. This book presents an exhaustive overview of Cynthia Ozick’s studies at home and abroad, with emphasis on the Jewishness in Ozick’s fiction and it follows the principles of Ethical Literary Criticism in analyzing how Ozick inherits and develops the Jewishness in American Jewish fiction and its literary presentation. The author’s ‘Midrash’ of Cynthia Ozick shows great international perspective and nuanced understanding and empathy. There are three impressive features of the book Firstly, it is rich in materials with a large number of first-hand foreign research materials, and its content is decorous. The monograph is a comprehensive, systematic, and cutting-edge research in this field, which starts a new situation in the study of Ozick; Secondly, it focuses on Jewishness and its artistic expression in Ozick’s fiction by combining historical, cultural, and theoretical research with textual analysis, revealing the rich connotation and internal unity of the works, and demonstrating the researchers’ profound and thorough understanding of the research object. Thirdly, it features dialectical thinking. It dialectically analyzes writers and works from multiple perspectives such as feminist criticism new historicism criticism, postmodern narrative research, and cultural research, and makes horizontal and vertical comparisons in the historical context. The monograph demonstrates well the author’s penetrating dialectical thinking.

An Interpretation of A Study of Jewishness Cynthia Ozick

A Study of Jewishness in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction (2021) is a masterpiece of Chinese research circles on Cynthia Ozick, and the latest contribution made by Chinese scholars to the study of American Jewish literature. This book presents an exhaustive overview of Cynthia Ozick’s studies at home and abroad, with emphasis on the Jewishness in Ozick’s fiction and it follows the principles of Ethical Literary Criticism in analyzing how Ozick inherits and develops the Jewishness in American Jewish fiction and its literary presentation. The author’s ‘Midrash’ of Cynthia Ozick shows great international perspective and nuanced understanding and empathy. There are three impressive features of the book Firstly, it is rich in materials with a large number of first-hand foreign research materials, and its content is decorous. The monograph is a comprehensive, systematic, and cutting-edge research in this field, which starts a new situation in the study of Ozick; Secondly, it focuses on Jewishness and its artistic expression in Ozick’s fiction by combining historical, cultural, and theoretical research with textual analysis, revealing the rich connotation and internal unity of the works, and demonstrating the researchers’ profound and thorough understanding of the research object. Thirdly, it features dialectical thinking. It dialectically analyzes writers and works from multiple perspectives such as feminist criticism new historicism criticism, postmodern narrative research, and cultural research, and makes horizontal and vertical comparisons in the historical context. The monograph demonstrates well the author’s penetrating dialectical thinking.

Jewish Brazilian Post-Holocaust Fiction: The Body as a Source of Polymorphous Memory Discourse in Cíntia Moscovich’s Por que sou gorda, mamãe?

Abstract In this article, I propose a reading of the Brazilian novel Por que sou gorda, mamãe? (2006) through the prism of the body as an oblique signifier of polymorphous post-Holocaust memory discourse. I will be employing the idea of the “strange body” in the following, that is, an experience of estrangement that can arise from trauma-induced conflict or fracture and “is capable of testifying to complexes of social operations and realities well beyond not only a given subject, but also a given generation” (Atkinson 2017, 34). In Cíntia Mos­covich’s novel, this strange-bodiness is articulated through the uncanny presence of an obese Jewish female body; a body which bears witness to a subversive force of trauma and denounces the fascist ideology within the continuities of subtly intertwined European and Brazilian histories. European Jewish life in shtetlech, pogroms, exile, and the Holocaust merge not only with the Brazilian context of Jewish immigration, but also with the history of Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Deconstructing the Tropes of Communication in Jonathan Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This study is an attempt to examine Jonathan Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) that is supposed to represent contemporary moments of Jewish identity in the American context. Scrutinizing identity features of the young generations of Anglophone Jewish fiction from a social and psychological perspectives is a recommended trend This social psychological scrutiny, conducted throughout Breakwell's Identity Process Theory (IPT) (1986), of eliciting contemporary Jewish identity attributes is to be realized through the application of a deconstructive theoretical framework based on a neoreading of Derrida's master conception: différance. It is noticeable that the novel reflects a tendency towards overcoming traumatic moments that hinder communication among the American Jews and between them and other nations.

Rosa Sonneschein’s Fin-the-Siècle Fiction: The Clashing Worlds of Zionism, Reform Judaism, Feminism and Conformity

Abstract Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932) was an important figure in late nineteenth-century American journalism, activism, and fiction. While a few brief studies were dedicated to her biography and to her role as a Jewish social activist, editor, and contributor to The American Jewess, no critical work has been devoted as yet to her literary production. The aim of this essay is to rectify this critical neglect by examining Sonneschein’s wide literary opus and by investigating its connection, if any, to the views she expressed as a journalist and a public speaker. This essay will explore Sonneschein’s threefold literary oeuvre, consisting of the following genres: Jewish fiction, non-Jewish fiction, and literary sketches. It will also try to explicate Rosa’s often conflicting stance with regard to Judaism, feminism, and Zionism, a standpoint which should be examined in the context of the fin-the-siècle’s turbulent changes American society had to cope with, especially pertaining to massive immigration, religious and social reforms, suffrage and temperance movements, etc.

Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction ed. by Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction ed. by Victoria Aarons Elizabeth Scheiber (bio) Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction Edited by Victoria Aarons Victoria Aarons Lexington Books, 2016. xxii + 211 pp. $100.00 hardcover. $44.99 paperback. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives is a collection of essays by different authors intended primarily for Holocaust scholars interested in critically engaging questions related to, as the title implies, narratives by authors who can be identified as third-generation Holocaust survivors. Typically, third generation refers to the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but, as some scholars in the volume point out, such a label is slippery and sets boundaries of identity that are not conducive to critical thinking. The label of “third generation” refers to a distance to the event that leaves a gap in time and/ or geography, and even identifying who constitutes a survivor can be tricky. This volume is not an attempt to settle questions of classification and representation once and for all. Instead, it presents an array of questions for readers to ponder, such as what third-generation writing accomplishes, by what means the authors attempt to understand what is unknowable, and how they foreground their search for the past and lack of ability to bring closure. Editor Victoria Aarons provides a good overview in her introduction entitled “Approaching the Third Generation.” She posits that the third generation inhabits a precarious position between proximity and distance, close enough to survivors but still at a remove from events, so their legacy requires a process of construction and contrived memory since it does not have direct access to the event. While the focus is on what third-generation narratives (both fiction and non-fiction) accomplish, the chapters span many nations, from Europe to North America and South America, and time periods, from the Second World War to the start of the 21st century. The first and final chapter emphasize what fiction accomplishes in this regard. In a journalistic chapter, “A Special Kind of Kinship: On Being a ‘3G’ Writer,” Erika Dreifus makes the point that fiction can bring a sense of interiority about an experience that nonfiction cannot. The volume then concludes with a piece of creative writing inspired by the works of Marcel Proust, “Simon and Mania” by Henri Raczymow, translated by Alan Astro. With its accumulation of memory and detail, it illustrates the way trauma can be experienced at a generational remove. Chapters two and three provide comparisons of second- and third-generation writers. In “Memory’s Afterimage: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Third Generation,” Victoria Aarons proposes that the space the second generation occupies is closer in time and emotion to the event, thus receiving [End Page 230] the uneasy inheritance of the Shoah while the third generation seeks these stories out, attempting a kind of contemporary midrash and merging memory and imagination to form a coherent narrative about the past. In “A Visible Bridge: Contemporary Jewish Fiction and Literary Memorials to the Shoah,” Avinoam Patt examines works by Sara Houghteling, Julie Orringer, Molly Antopol, Boris Fishman, and Daniel Torday, proposing that while the second generation seems to have co-opted the Holocaust in what can at times feel like appropriation, the third generation attempts to create memorials to the event, compelled to tell the “story that remains untold” (43). Chapter four, “Storytelling, Photography, and Mourning in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost” by Paule Lévy, is a scholarly examination of the limits of comprehension in our attempts to recapture the past. Archives are incomplete and photographs cannot capture the essence of a person, and visits to locations such as Auschwitz feel more like attractions or museums. In the end, the seeker realizes that there is no way to arrive at a sense of closure or completeness, and the book becomes a work of mourning, a kaddish to the dead. In chapter five, “Life after Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz,” Alan L. Berger contends that Dres’s graphic novel crosses genres: memoir, sociological inquiry, history lesson, and political primer as it explores post-Holocaust Jewish identity in France and Poland. Chapter...

Sea Voyage Tales in Conversation with the Jonah Story

The article examines rabbinic and Christian, Syriac and Greek, narratives of miraculous rescue on a storm-tossed sea from a comparative perspective. Taking note of the narrators’ engagement in an ongoing intertextual dialogue with the biblical story of prophet Jonah, the authors highlight the new emphases introduced by late antique storytellers. The function of the adventures on the high seas as a means of establishing the protagonists’ religious identity and, consequently, strengthening the identity of the projected audience is shown to be shared by Jewish and Christian sources. Moreover, the article investigates the role assigned to the Other in Jewish and Christian travel fiction. The results may point to different attitudes toward the Other entrenched in the two cultures.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

Banning Jewish “Extremist” Literature in Russia: Conversion and Toleration in Historical Perspective

In 2017, Russia’s Ministry of Justice banned a nineteenth-century book written by the German rabbi Markus Lehmann, labeling it extremist literature. This article places current Russian efforts to stamp out religious extremism in a broader historical context of imperial productions of tolerance and intolerance and the impact on religious minorities. It examines the case of Jews in the Russian Empire and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of religious conversion, forced baptisms, and freedom of conscience in the realm of apostasy. Lehmann’s book, characteristic of nineteenth-century Orthodox Jewish historical fiction in German, used the historical memory of forced conversions of Jews in medieval and early modern Europe to forge a new path to integration in tolerant, Protestant environs. This article offers a historical and literary reading of Lehmann’s banned book against the longer arc of imperial Russian toleration and conservative appropriations of toleration for discrimination against minorities.

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s Oreo

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s <em>Oreo</em>

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction

Book Review| December 01 2018 Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction David Gantt Gurley. Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction. Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. Pp. 263. Julie K. Allen Julie K. Allen Brigham Young University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scandinavian Studies (2018) 90 (4): 580–583. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.90.4.0580 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Julie K. Allen; Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction. Scandinavian Studies 1 January 2018; 90 (4): 580–583. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.90.4.0580 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressScandinavian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction by David Gantt Gurley (review)

Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction by David Gantt Gurley (review)

David Gantt Gurley. Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. xii + 263 pp.

David Gantt Gurley. Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. xii + 263 pp.

‘You think your writing belongs to you?’: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature

This article examines a sub-category of recent Jewish post-Holocaust fiction that engages with the absent memory of the persecution its authors did not personally witness through the medium of intertextuality, but with intertextual recourse not to testimonial writing but to literature only unwittingly or retrospectively shadowed by the Holocaust. It will be proposed that this practice of intertextuality constitutes a response to the post-Holocaust Jewish author’s ‘anxiety of influence’ that, in the wake of the first generation’s experience of atrocity, their own life story and literature will always appear derivative. With reference to works by four such post-Holocaust authors, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (2013), Helen Maryles Shankman’s In the Land of Armadillos (2016), and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017), all of which engage intertextually with Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, it will be suggested that these authors are looking to return to a Kristevan practice of intertextuality after the predominantly citational recourse to antecedent material that has often characterized post-Holocaust literature. In the process, they also succeed in troubling recently popular conceptualizations of ‘postmemory’ literature as the ‘belated’ and ‘evacuated’ recipient of encrypted traumatic content inherited from the first generation that it must now seek either to preserve or to work through vicariously.

The Sons of Phil: Rothian Self-Satire and Self-Incrimination in Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament and Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure

Shalom Auslander and Gary Shteyngart are two of the most prominent new voices to have emerged in Jewish-American fiction in the 21st century. In addition to their fiction, they have both published memoirs—Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament (2007) and Shteyngart’s Little Failure (2014)—that follow the narrative trajectory of Bildungsromane and are, as their titles suggest, characterised by a self-satirising, self-incriminating comedy. In this article, I will argue that this comedy emerges from an intertextual dialogue with the work of Philip Roth, so that we might call Shteyngart and Auslander—adapting the ‘Sons of Ben’ label given to a generation of Caroline authors who regarded themselves as disciples of the Renaissance poet and playwright Ben Jonson—‘sons of Phil’. Tracing the affinities between the work of the two writers and that of Roth, I argue that their ‘works of semi-autobiography’ cannot be accommodated in the redemptive, ethical model of Jewish fiction that has been proposed by a number of recent critics, but rather are animated by the paradoxically self-fulfilling and self-abasing impulse identified by Shteyngart: ‘I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary’ (Shteyngart, 2014: 148).

Jewish Humor and Woody Allen's Short Fiction

ABSTRACT Woody Allen's short fiction has received much less scholarly attention than his films. Scholars who have investigated the humorous qualities of Allen's short stories and casual pieces have noted his penchant for absurdity and non sequitur, his use of the Little Man as a vehicle for humor, and the linguistic dimensions of his joke scripts rather than his Jewish comic sensibilities. Beginning with a brief overview on how Jewish humor has contributed to the comic achievements of American culture and drawing on analyses of the main characteristics of Jewish humor, this article adds to the scholarship by exploring the influence of Jewish humorous traditions on Woody Allen's short fiction.

Editors' Introduction: Other People's Roths

Editors' Introduction Other People's Roths David Brauner (bio) and Debra Shostak (bio) Ever since its inception, Philip Roth Studies has been publishing essays dealing with Roth's relationships with other writers, exploring the ways in which his work has directly influenced, and been influenced by, novelists, dramatists, poets, philosophers, and critics; and the ways in which his works can be read intertextually—placed in dialogue with that of precursors, peers, and a younger generation of writers. In this special issue, however, we wanted to highlight some of the ways in which Roth (which is to say, his work, his public persona, and his cultural presence) has been adapted, appropriated, and translated (literally and metaphorically) by others. Consequently, this special issue features a range of forms to explore the Roths that emerge in and around other voices. We include academic essays—on the film adaptations of The Humbling (by Andrew Gordon) and Indignation (by David Gooblar), on Listen Up Philip (which implicitly invokes Roth not just in its title but in numerous other ways articulated by Tanguy Bérenger), on the uses Jonathan Franzen has made of Roth in his fiction and non-fiction (by Michael Kalisch) and on the uses Roth has made of Yeats (by Jack Knowles). The issue is enriched by an account of the challenges and opportunities afforded by the process of translating Roth into Hungarian (by Anna Nemes), an interview with a visual and performance artist (Bryan Zanisnik) who has developed a complex relationship with Roth over the course of a number of artworks and a legal dispute, and an exuberantly satirical reinvention of Roth in the form of a story by Tim Parrish, who will be known to many readers of the journal for his excellent body of critical work on Roth. What unites all these pieces—and all the various versions of Roth that these artists, film-makers, translators, and writers have produced—is a tension between reverence and irreverence, and/or a struggle to arrive at an authentic version of Roth that is at the same time a subjective reinvention of him. In this way, "Other People's Roths" both contributes to existing conversations on Roth and begins new ones. [End Page 6] David Brauner David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading (UK) and Executive Co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. He is the author of three books: Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001), Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015) with Axel Stähler and of a special Lorrie Moore issue of The Journal of American Studies (46.3) with Heidi MacPherson. His essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, including The Journal of American Studies, The Yearbook of English Studies, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Review, Canadian Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature and Philip Roth Studies. Debra Shostak Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature and co-chair of the Department of English at the College of Wooster, Ohio. Co-editor of Philip Roth Studies, she is the author of Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America. She has published widely on contemporary American fiction and on film. Copyright © 2017 Purdue University

“A Grave Experiment”: Emma Wolf’s Marriage Plots and the Deghettoization of American Jewish Fiction

“A Grave Experiment”: Emma Wolf’s Marriage Plots and the Deghettoization of American Jewish Fiction