sure how I Jewishly identify myself
now, but I still have ties with Ortho-
doxy through my family. But I am
not concerned with my Jewishness. I
take it for granted."
Michael Chabon, author of the
best-seller, The Mysteries of Pitts-
burgh, is "comfortable enough [with
Judaism] that it doesn't chafe me. It
doesn't feel like a burden. But I have
a feeling that were I to attempt to
practice it more, it may make me
uncomfortable. To be a good practic-
ing Jew, you have to do some things
that set you apart."
Like others in his generation, Mr.
Chabon could not answer with any
certainty whether he was a "Jewish
American writer."
"I definitely consider myself an
American writer," said this distant
relative of one of the first major
American Jewish writers, Abraham
Cahan, author of The Rise and Fall
of David Levinsky. "To some extent,
I suppose, I'm a Jewish writer. I'm
Jewish, and some of my characters
are Jewish. But I'm not sure what
role Judaism has in my work. The
novel I'm working on now is an at-
tempt, in a sense, to answer that
question. One central character is
trying to figure out what role
Judaism plays in his life."

As Legitimate As
Updike

Cynthia Ozick: "Ethnicity is not the way to go."

no place at all. Out of desperation, I

got a job with a local folklore society.
They made me the Jewish connec-
tion' and I interviewed the survivors
of Pinch, an old Jewish neighbor-
hood in downtown Memphis that's
now desolate and just about has only
freeway ramps. Of five old buildings
that had been synagogues, only one
survives. It's now a transvestite
disco."
While interviewing ex-Pinchniks,
said Mr. Stern, "my heritage arose
out of the sea like Atlantis. It was
very consoling. I took a long way
around to discover my Judaism."
Although Mr. Stern describes his
Jewish knowledge as "mostly book-
learned," critics and other writers
consider his work — which could
loosely be called "Jewish magical-
fantasy" — an attempt to renew
some of the lost vitality of earlier
Jewish folktales. To Cynthia Ozick,
Mr. Stern is "very lively, full of vi-
tality. He wants to recapture some of
the verve of Jewish life." And
Southern writer Lee Smith said Mr.
Stern "read[s] like some crazy com-
bination of Barry Hannah and I.B.
Singer, combining the earthy and
the mystical — mud and fire and
heavenly light."
No surprise that Mr. Stern should
be linked with Isaac Bashevis
Singer. That is where his literary
home lies.
"I confess," he said, "to an affinity
with Isaac Singer. What I found in
some stories by him, and by a

50

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1990

whole school of Yiddish writers who
have just about vanished from
everyone's memory, is that I can
identify with them better than with
some of the newer fiction. Their
characters are authentically valid as
human beings, and yet have a
folkloric dimension. Roth and Bellow
may have thrown out the baby with
the bath water by taking almost a
deliberate stance to separate them-
selves from the past. And then you
have the single survivor of the im-
migrant generation, I.B. Singer, who
continues to mine the field. And lo
and behold, it's rich!"
Other new writers also felt a con-
siderable lack of debt toward the
generation of writers that im-
mediately preceded them, although
they may greatly admire their art.
"The older Jewish writers had
more of an ambivalence toward be-
ing Jewish," said Allegra Goodman.
"A lot of the comedy of Philip Roth
and Woody Allen comes out of their
anxiety. Their generation had less
an acceptance of their ethnicity. My
generation has much less am-
bivalence and more love of the self.
Not to say there are no tensions, but
there is more acceptance of what
Jews are."
"To the older generation, it seems,
Jewishness was so much more of a
barrier," said Rebecca Goldstein. "It
was something they had to break
through. That was one way for them
to come to terms with it. I come from
an Orthodox family. I'm not quite

The American Jewish experience
has often been paralleled in Ameri-
can Jewish fiction by:
• The first generation of Jewish
writers — immigrants themselves —
who wanted to quickly become
Americans, yet also hold onto the
immigrant experience.
• The next generation of writers
— the children of the immigrants —
who wrestled in their writing with
being Jewish in America, especially
as their generation moved first into
affluence and then into the suburbs.

• And now, the emerging genera-
tion of Jewish fictionalists that is
still defining itself.
This most recent generation may
be the most difficult of these groups
of writers to define, perhaps because
the American Jewish experience has
become increasingly diffused and
fragmented. Rare is the day that
there is no doctrinal or political
bickering among Orthodox, Reform
and Conservative Jews; seldom is
the week that lacks a crisis in the
Middle East that tests American
Jews commitment to Israel — or,
even their need for Israel. Given
these incessant calamities, the ques-
tion that periodically plagues the
Israeli and American Jewish com-
munities, "What is a Jew?," may end
up being transmuted in these new
writers' fiction into "What is an
American Jew?"
If so, this could mean that Ameri-
can Jewish writing, from its incep-
tion, will have gone from celebrating
(with some confusion, and, maybe,
some regret) the immigrant experi-
ence; to sifting through that genera-
tion's ways and mores and determin-
ing its children's place in a WASP-
dominated America; and, finally, to
treating Jewish life as an estab-
lished norm in America, as
legitimate a subject for literature as
a novel by Cheever or a tale by Up-
dike.
But as this new generation takes
its place on the literary stage, a few
things are reasonably certain. One,
many of the newer, more important
Jewish writers are women, partly
because, as editor Ted Solataroff
said, "women are in the ascendancy
in all of American creative life. In
Jewish writing, there's a new think-
ing about women's relation to tra-
dition."
Two, much of the fury and,
perhaps, some of the hyper-
intellectuality that marked the sec-
ond generation of American Jewish
writing will be dissipated in the
work of the newer generation. Their
deeper acceptance of their Jew-
ishness will temper any ire. And hy-
per-intellectuality is more a mark of
the generation that was influenced
by Yiddishkeit than the writing pro-
grams in universities, which is
where many of today's younger
writers get their start.
And finally, there may be no Great
Masters among this new generation.
Or if there are, they may not receive
the adulation or praise — or be
laden with as many literary or
oracular expectations — as those
who preceded them, at least, as ear-
ly in their writing careers as their
predecessors. This, said Mr.
Solataroff, seems to be true of the
entire literary culture, not just of
American Jewish writing.
"We don't have the same distinc-
tions that we once did between
major and minor writers," he said.
"There's just too much talent around
for there to be dominant writers." ❑