Contemporary Literature articles from September 1993

Contemporary Literature archives from September 1993

Introduction: some reflections on contemporary American Jewish culture. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... The escalation of scholarship on the Holocaust, the expansion of publications in American Jewish history, and the proliferation of American Jewish literature in the 1980s suggest a renewal of interest, on the part of American Jews, in things...

An interview with Cynthia Ozick. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature) (Interview)
September 22, 1993... American Jewish writers too often face the unreasonable demand that they be responsible for reinforcing and revitalizing Jewishness. To yield to such a demand is to renounce the freedom of imaginative writing, an unthinkable sacrifice for a...

Urban rites and civic premises in the fiction of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Sandra Schor. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... Consider the following thought experiment: imagine the Jews as a rural people. In modern times this is not possible. The miraculous yields of Israeli agriculture are the product of the urban, modern sophistication of its farmers. There are no...

Film and the flattening of Jewish-American fiction: Bernard Malamud, Woody Allen and Spike Lee in the city. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... He swears he hears stealthy footsteps in the hall, takes a bread knife out of the kitchen table drawer, foolishly flings open the door and sees no one. Was it somebody real? Negative presence as though on film? The white figure of a black man...

Assimilation in recent American Jewish autobiographies. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... It is a constant refrain, emanating from temple pulpits, the Jewish press, and community leaders: the number of Jews marrying non-Jews has passed 50 percent; attendance at Jewish day schools is dropping; temple members are living high but...

The present is a foreign country: Lore Segal's fiction. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... In his Sketchbook 1946-1949, Max Frisch recorded in his opening section some trips into Germany in the spring and summer of 1946. His impulse was in part to escape from the years of confinement in neutral Switzerland into what remained of the...

Ventriloquists' conversations: the struggle for gender dialogue in E.L. Doctorow and Philip Roth. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... Gender politics is a crucial issue in contemporary American Jewish literature. One of the things that separates writers like E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth from earlier American Jewish writers is the growing pressure to renegotiate relations...

Visits to Germany in recent Jewish-American writing. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... The question of Germany--how to view it, how to respond to it, how to cope with its apparent return not just to normal life but to power and influence in Europe--begs the question of one's attitude toward the Holocaust. It induces even the...

Post-alienation: recent directions in Jewish-American literature. (Contemporary American Jewish Literature)
September 22, 1993... The years since World War II have been good for Jewish-American writers. During recent decades they have joined the mainstream of American fiction. Their works, reviewed regularly and often lauded in the critical press, are popular with the...