PEOPLE

WHO
WILL BE
THE NEXT
PHILIP
ROTH?

The new generation of
American Jewish
writers is more
accepting of being
Jewish than its
predecessors, but is
much less famous.

Steve Stern: "Living in the South, it never occurred to me I had a tradition on which I could fall back."

ontrary to rumor, reports
of the death of American
Jewish writing are pre-
mature. Jews are still
writing stories and
novels with Jewish themes or inspi-
rations, but their works are often
undiscovered or under-appreciated.
What is gone is the day when a
new opus by a Jewish writer was
front-page news, when a book by
Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud or
Saul Bellow was a Literary Event of
the highest order.
The new generation's vision of
Judaism is different from their
seniors' — maybe more accepting,
certainly less ferocious, sometimes
less informed. And they are less ur-
ban and more widely geographically
dispersed than was the older genera-
tion that often lived in the shadow of
the Jewish world of New York. Saul
Bellow may have lived as far away
as Chicago, Herbert Gold as distant
as San Francisco, but theirs was an
urban sensibility and, often, a New
York sensibility.
Instead, we now have the likes of
Steve Stern, 42, author of Lazar
Malkin Enters Heaven, who was
raised in Memphis and lives in
upstate New York; Michael Chabon,
27, a frequent contributor to The

C

ARTHUR J. MAGIDA

Philip Roth: Did he throw out "the
baby with the bath water by
separating himself from the past?"

48

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1990

Special to The Jewish News

Arthur J. Magida is a senior writer for
our sister newspaper, the Baltimore
Jewish Times.

New Yorker, who was raised in
Columbia, Md., halfway between
Baltimore and Washington; Allegra
Goodman, now only 23 (although a
fellow writer joshed that she was a
"12-year-old prodigy"), who was
raised in an Orthodox family in
Hawaii.
Because the lure and power of
New York, the city that once almost
defined the American Jewish expe-
rience and, especially, the Jewish
immigrant experience in America,
has diminished for these newer
writers, more recent Jewish fiction
has a broadei sense of place and,
perhaps also, a broader sense of be-
ing American. In this writing, there
are fewer skyscrapers and alleyways
and delicatessens. For sure, there
are no automats. In one sense, the
new generation of writers is a
Diaspora generation: their accents
and rhythms are innocent of the
Lower East Side or the Bronx. They
are out there being American and
being Jewish at the same time,
often, balancing the cusp of tradition
and assimilation and not quite sure
where it will all lead.
The generation epitomized by
Roth, Bellow and Malamud was
"pre-pluralistic," said Ted
Solataroff, an editorial consultant at
Harper & Row now working on an
anthology of post-1967 fiction by
American Jews. "But now, the ex-
oticism of the Jewish background no
longer has any dominance. No
longer are there the issues of