Title: Identity and religious traits in Jewish literature : a Hansenian reading of the short fiction of Bernard Malamud and Nathan Englander
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2021, vol. 47, iss. 2, pp. 69-86
Extent
69-86
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-2-6
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144877
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
At the end of the 1970s, Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse predicted the demise of Jewish American fiction as a result of the process of acculturation affecting Jewish communities. However, the booming literary production of a younger generation in recent decades has called into question this announcement of the death of Jewish American fiction. Based on Marcus Hansen's theory of the third generation return, the current paper seeks to explore issues of identity and religion in the writing of Bernard Malamud and Nathan Englander, representatives of the second and the third generation of Jewish fiction, respectively. Malamud's storytelling portrays an all-embracing vision of Judaism in that all his characters are universal projections of humanity, while Englander's view on Judaism is that of a Jew raised in the strict yeshiva. However, his Orthodox upbringing permeates his writing entirely, shaping the unabashed way in which he views Jewish Orthodoxy and the Shoah.
Note
The research of this paper was supported by the project CEI Patrimonio, University of Almería.
References
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[24] Lyons, Bonnie (2007) Nathan Englander and Jewish fiction from and on the edge. Studies in American Jewish Literature 26, 65–72. | DOI 10.5325/studamerjewilite.26.2007.0065
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[27] Mesher, David (2000) The Malamud factor: Recent Jewish short fiction. Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 49 (1), 120–127.
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[33] Schechner, Mark (2000) Bernard Malamud. In: Gelfant, Blanche H. (ed.) The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 353–358.
[34] Sollors, Werner (1986) Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[35] Walden, Daniel (2002) Days of wonder, nights of light. Studies in American Jewish Literature 21, ix–xiii.
[36] Weber, Donald. (1991) Reconsidering the Hansen theory: Generational metaphors and American ethnic studies, American Quarterly 42 (2), 320–332. | DOI 10.2307/2712931
[37] Wisse, Ruth R. (1976) "American Jewish writing, act II". Commentary 61 (6), 40–45.
[2] Abramson, Edward A. (1994) Bernard Malamud and the Jews: An ambiguous relationship. The Yearbook of English Studies 24, 146–156. | DOI 10.2307/3507887
[3] Alter, Robert (1966) In the community: Malamud as Jewish writer. Commentary 42 (3), 71–76.
[4] Archdeacon, Thomas J. (1990) Hansen's hypothesis as a model of immigrant assimilation. In: Kivisto, Peter and Dag Blanck (eds.) American Immigrants and their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
[5] Berger, Alan L. (1997) Children of Job. American Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. New York: State University of New York Press.
[6] Bershtel, Sara and Allen Graubard (1992) Saving Remnants: Feeling Jewish in America. New York: Free Press.
[7] Carver, Raymond (1989) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Vintage.
[8] Caso, Frank (1999) Review of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Booklist, March 1, 1150.
[9] Dickstein, Morris (1997) Ghost stories: The new wave of Jewish writing. Tikkun 12 (6), 33.
[10] Englander, Nathan (2013) What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. New York: Vintage.
[11] Englander, Nathan (2007) The Ministry of Special Cases. New York: Vintage.
[12] Englander, Nathan (2003) The last one way. In: Zakrzewski, Paul (ed.) Lost Tribe. Jewish Fiction from the Edge. New York: Perennial, 3–21.
[13] Englander, Nathan (1999) For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. New York: Vintage.
[14] Fiedler, Leslie (1986) Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston: Godine.
[15] Fishman, Sylvia Barack (1991) American Jewish fiction turns inward, 1960-1990. The American Jewish Year Book 9, 35–69.
[16] Flanzbaum, Hilene (2019) Nathan Englander's 'Anne Frank' and the future of Jewish America. In: Aarons, Victoria and Holli Levitsky (eds.) New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures. Reading and Teaching. Albany: SUNY, 205–222.
[17] Furman, Andrew (2000a). Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma. Returned of the Exiled. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
[18] Furman, Andrew (2000b) American short stories of the Holocaust. In: Gelfant, Blanche H. (ed.) The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 94–101.
[19] Grauer, Tresa (2003) Identity matters: Contemporary Jewish American writing. In: Kramer, Michael and Hana Wirth-Nesher (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, 269–284.
[20] Gussow, Mel (1999) Captured in stories, the world he left; for author's debut, tales of Orthodox Jews. The New York Times, 5 July. [Accessed on: 10/11/2020].
[21] Hansen, Marcus L. (1938) The problem of the third generation immigrant. Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society, 1–20.
[22] Howe, Irwing (1977) Introduction. In: Howe, Irwing (ed.) Jewish American Stories. New York: New American Library, 1–17.
[23] Lemberg, Jennifer (2015) The Holocaust in American Jewish fiction. In: Brauner, David and Axel Stähler (eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 138–148.
[24] Lyons, Bonnie (2007) Nathan Englander and Jewish fiction from and on the edge. Studies in American Jewish Literature 26, 65–72. | DOI 10.5325/studamerjewilite.26.2007.0065
[25] Malamud, Bernard (1996) Talking Horse. Edited by Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco. New York: Columbia University Press.
[26] Mendelsohn, Daniel (2006) The Lost. A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: Harper Perennial.
[27] Mesher, David (2000) The Malamud factor: Recent Jewish short fiction. Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 49 (1), 120–127.
[28] Meyer, Adam (2004) Putting the 'Jewish' back in 'Jewish American fiction:' A look at Jewish American fiction from 1977 to 2002 and an allegorical reading of Nathan Englander's "The Gilgul of Park Avenue". Shofar 22 (3), 104–120.
[29] Náhliková, Michaela (2010) Jewishness as Humanism in Bernard Malamud's Fiction. Olomouc: Palacký University.
[30] Pinsker, Sanford (2014) Anne Frank and the 'what if?' school of fiction, The Sewanee Review 122 (2), 340–344. | DOI 10.1353/sew.2014.0048
[31] Pinsker, Sanford (1997) Dares, double-dares, and the Jewish-American writer, Prairie Schooner 71 (1), 278–285.
[32] Rosen, Jonathan (1997) Eve's Apple. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[33] Schechner, Mark (2000) Bernard Malamud. In: Gelfant, Blanche H. (ed.) The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 353–358.
[34] Sollors, Werner (1986) Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[35] Walden, Daniel (2002) Days of wonder, nights of light. Studies in American Jewish Literature 21, ix–xiii.
[36] Weber, Donald. (1991) Reconsidering the Hansen theory: Generational metaphors and American ethnic studies, American Quarterly 42 (2), 320–332. | DOI 10.2307/2712931
[37] Wisse, Ruth R. (1976) "American Jewish writing, act II". Commentary 61 (6), 40–45.