Title: Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer (review)
Abstract: Derek Rubin, ed. Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. New York: Schocken, 2005. xix + 368 pp. $25.00.Instead of literary critics writing about what makes fiction Jewish or whether American Jewish fiction has lost its subject because of assimilation and distance from the immigrant experience, twenty-nine fiction writers talk to, around, and about these questions in Derek Rubin's collection of essays. The essays come from various sources and were written at various periods in the writers' lives, so the volume is not a collection of responses to the questions. Some of the authors write about themselves as writers, while others address the field of Jewish American fiction overall. Notably absent is Bernard Malamud, but the essays included are all lively, provocative, and contentious.Rereading Philip Roth's well-known essay, Writing about Jews, see his anger at the rabbinical attacks on Goodbye, Columbus, which accused him of Jewish self-hatred and of fostering anti-Semitism. His brilliant counterattack is two-pronged. First, he defends fiction itself: [T]his expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society (46). Second, he defends his own fiction against the charge of an unbalanced portrayal of Jews: [T]he test of any literary work is not how broad is its range-for all that breaddb may be characteristic of a kind of narrative-but for the depth with which the writer reveals whatever he has chosen to represent (50). He ends with a zinger: If there are Jews who have begun to find the stories the novelists tell more provocative and pertinent than the sermons of some of the rabbis, perhaps it is because there are regions of feeling and consciousness in them which cannot be reached by the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity (64).Two of the Jews drawn to Roth's provocative and pertinent fiction are younger writers included in the collection. One is Binnie Kirshenbaum, who describes reading about Brenda Patamkin when she was fifteen and experiencing a life-changing epiphany: I wept for Brenda. And wept for myself, because with reading Goodbye, Columbus came the realization that to be breathtakingly shallow was not the pinnacle of human achievement I'd cracked it up to be. My sky fell. My life would never be the same (221). Although Kirshenbaum has since embraced questions of Jewish identity, history, and theology, she concludes that her Jewishness is only one facet of herself and her writing: That am Jewish informs my writing the way that being a woman does and a New Yorker too. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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