Novelists in the Nineties
In the 1970s, literary critics predicted the demise of the Jewish American
novel. A talented group of novelists proved them wrong.
By Sanford Pinsker
Reprinted with permission from the Spring 1997 issue of Reform
Judaism.
Jewish American novelists are like Jews themselves--easy to
recognize, but difficult to define.
Small wonder then, that many readers associate Jewish
American fiction with characters who sport Jewish names and live in largely
Jewish neighborhoods, eat lox and bagels at elaborate Sunday brunches, pepper
up their conversation by waving their hands and tossing in vivid Yiddish
phrases, and suffer from world-class guilt. No longer, for a new group of
Jewish American fictionists has emerged, and they don't have the slightest
interest in writing another Portnoy's Complaint, much less another Exodus
or Marjorie Morningstar.
Contemporary Jewish writers such as Steve Stern, Melvin
Jules Bukiet, Allegra Goodman, and Rebecca Goldstein bring to the table
intelligence, moral passion, magical realism, and perhaps most of all, a Jewish
writing no longer skittish about grounding itself in Jewish memory and Jewish
ideas. They differ from earlier generations of Jewish novelists who had
essentially one story to tell--namely, how they made their way from blue-collar
Brooklyn to the glittering, usually assimilated life in Manhattan. Irving Howe
once speculated that as the emotional and aesthetic distance from the Jewish
immigrant experience widened, we could only look forward to ever-thinner slices
of Jewish American social realism; and, as such, that it was probably time to
close the book on what he regarded as a rich chapter in the larger history of
regional American writing.
Steve Stern
By such reckoning, the stories of Steve Stern ought not to
exist. Set in Memphis, Tennessee, at a time when its Jewish ghetto ("the
Pinch") had a distinctive shape and feel, Stern brings to his highly
imaginative reconstruction a magical realism that, by crafty increments,
transforms the ordinary into the miraculous. The result are stories in which
virtually anything can happen--and usually does. Why so? Because "the
Pinch" is packed to overflowing with shopkeepers, gossips, no-goodnicks,
and inveterate dreamers--all tucked away, as it were, within the folds of a
larger Southern culture.
Stern cut his imaginative teeth as a folklorist (in 1983 he
served as director of the Center for Southern Folklore's Ethnic Heritage
Program). The oral histories he transcribed as part of his work began to
reassemble themselves in his mind. And thus it was that "the Pinch,"
in Stern's words, "rose up like the Lost Continent of Atlantis for me and
began to look like a home for my stories." The result is at once a
haunting memory and an intimation of the entirely new--for Stern so blends the
surface detail of what was with infusions of the fantastic that it is often
difficult to know where accuracy ends and magical realism begins. As one
character puts it, "It's like…being awake in your dreams."
Melvin Jules Bukiet
|
|
|
Melvin James Bukiet
|
If Stern discovered his Jewish milieu largely by
happenstance, other writers might argue that they had their fictional territory
staked out for them at birth. I am referring to the children of survivors, and
especially those writers who bring equal measures of moral passion and
unstinting craft to a subject that often perplexed their literary elders into
silence. Melvin Jules Bukiet is a case in point. He came to wide attention with
Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992), a collection set in
Proszowice, Poland, about Jews blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe.
Bukiet's unnamed narrator (he may be Bukiet's father, a source for many of the
stories; Bukiet himself; or, more probably, a combination of the two)
introduces himself in a language that seems at once altogether fresh and
hauntingly familiar: "Show me a Jewish home without a prodigy and I'll
show you an orphanage."
What separates the children of survivors from the survivors
themselves is that the work of the former is significantly darker than that of
their literary progenitors. The older writer, at least, could recollect the
world before the cataclysm. For the second generation, however, there is only
After, a word that shivers even as it perplexes--and that figures significantly
as the title of Bukiet's recently published novel. As he puts it, in an
expression of the new sensibility in perhaps its purest form, "In the
beginning was Auschwitz." Yet, Bukiet does not write about the Holocaust
directly. There are no scenes of selection, no gas chambers, no mass graves.
Instead, his fiction explores the long shadow of the Shoah. After (St.
Martin's Press) opens at the moment the camps are liberated and follows a group
of survivors as they scheme their way through a destroyed, thoroughly chaotic
landscape. Bukiet allows his characters the full range of humanity, from the
noble to the base, and in the process his vision will surely offend those who
have wrapped the subject in such veils of piety that only sanitized portrayals
are acceptable.
After drives home its point by assaulting our sense
of the tasteful, challenging the notion that decorum could be the same thing
"After" as is had been before.
Allegra Goodman
Allegra Goodman's stories explore the intersections between Judaism
and modernity. She concentrates primarily on the Jewish American family,
although in ways that make it clear that the Zeitgeist of the 1990s has given
the fabled institution some curious, often satiric, spins. With deep roots in
the community of observant Jews, the edge of her judgments may be tempered, but
that does not mean her satiric eye blinks in the face of hypocrisy.
Readers first met the indomitable Rose Markowitz and her
sons Ed and Henry in the pages of Commentary magazine and later between
the hard covers of an extraordinary collection of short stories entitled Sudden
Immersion (1989). That Allegra Goodman was a Harvard senior at the time
took one's breath away, not only because the stories were so masterfully
crafted, but also because they demonstrated prodigious wisdom. Many of the
early tales were set in the Hawaii of her childhood, as if she were out to
transport the social realism and biting satire of a young Phillip Roth from
Newark's immigrant Jewish suburbs to the unlikely landscape of lanai and lei;
but there were also intimations ("Early Variant" is one of them) that
Goodman had much wider ambitions. She understands the subtle ways in which
academic pretentiousness, contemporary culture, and Jewish Orthodoxy make shaky
efforts at coexistence. Most of all, however, Goodman has a knack for creating
characters we remember and care about, and she has an endless capacity for
human surprise.
Rebecca Goldstein
At first glance, Rebecca Goldstein seems like an older, more
intellectual version of Goodman. Her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983),
is part academic satire, part meditation on the tension between sexuality and
spiritual longing. As her fiction has evolved, Goldstein has focused more on
her roots, and like the protagonist who once tried (comically) to shuck off
Jewishness only to have it return, it has become an integral, abiding presence.
Born into a traditionally observant Jewish family, Goldstein
attended a rigorously Orthodox girls' yeshiva for her high school years. She
went on to perform distinguished academic work, first at Barnard and then at
Princeton, where she completed her Ph.D. in the philosophy of science.
Currently she teaches creative writing at Columbia University. Given all this,
it is hardly surprising that Goldstein's typical protagonists tend to be women
as long on academic smarts as they are short on confidence and common sense. Mazel
(Viking), her latest novel, is no exception, although Sasha, the Saunders
family's eighty-year-old matriarch, gives the old formula some new, unexpected
twists. To her daughter, a free-thinking philosopher formed by the sixties, and
her granddaughter, Phoebe, a mathematician who specializes in the
"geometry of soap bubbles," Sasha's stories of how she moved from the
restrictions of Old World Orthodoxy to stardom on Warsaw's pre-war Yiddish
stage are as deliciously layered at a Sacher torte; and her no-nonsense, yet
abiding love ("You're so open-minded," she chides her daughter,
Chloe, "that I think your brain must have fallen out!") not only
tells us much about "mazel," or luck, but also about the ties that
bind mothers to daughters, a Jewish past to a Jewish present.
Other writers (among them Tova Reich, Allen Hoffman, Robert
Cohen, and Thane Rosenbaum) could easily have been included here. Each is
distinctive, but taken together they represent a direction in Jewish American
literature that promises to make the next decades at least as rich as the ones
that gave us writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, I.B.
Singer, and Cynthia Ozick.
Sanford Pinsker is an
emeritus professor of humanities at Franklin and Marshall College. He writes
widely about Jewish literature and culture, and in recent years has been a
judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize, the Reform Judaism Prize, and the
National Jewish Book Awards.
