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Thus, the era of the Jewish Renaissance opens with a bang and
closes with a whine.
SUBJECT OF LITERARY CRITICISM
If American Jewish fiction appears to have peaked in 1969,
scholarly criticism about American Jewish fiction was just be
ginning. Until 1960 there was only one full-length book on the
subject, Joseph Mersand’s
Tradition in American Literature: A
Study ofJewish Characters and Authors.
In the sixties two new books
appeared: Irving Malin’s
Jews and Americans
and Sol Liptzin’s
The Jew in American Literature.
Then, in 1971 Allen Guttman,
a former sixties radical now turned Amherst academic, pub
lished his comprehensive
The Jewish Writer in America: Assimila
tion and the Crisis of Identity.
And in 1978, Irving Howe, that
former thirties Marxist-socialist, later turned Brandeis academ
ic, produced his acclaimed
The World of our Fathers
which con
tained a long essay on American Jewish literature. Though sep
arated by a generation, what Guttman and Howe shared was
their tones of personal self-appreciation and eulogy for the
death of American Jewish literature. Here I offer a short quo
tation from the conclusions of both works on the subject. First,
Guttman:
What are the
literary
consequences o f the virtual conclusion
o f the process o f Americanization? . . . In 1964 I rashly conjec
tured that the renaissance o f Jewish writers had very nearly run
its course . . . Paradoxically, the survival in America o f a signif
icant and identifiably Jewish literature depends upon the unlikely
conversion to Judaism o f a stiff-necked, intractable, irreverent,
attractive generation that no longer chooses to be chosen.
The following is a quotation from Howe’s chapter on American
Jewish writers:
. . .once that Yiddish world began to crumble, once it no longer
offered its silent buttress to the imagination, these writers had
sooner or later to enter a state o f crisis . . . . For the American
Jewish writers there remained o f course America, but as a subject
for fiction, America, as many o f them discovered, is very large,
very slippery, very abstract, very recalcitrant. Can it really be
said that any o f these writers have thus far grasped a portion
KESSNER AND SOF IA / SELECTED BIBL IOGRAPHY OF LITERARY CR IT IC ISM
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