I knew that serious Jewish-American writers were in trouble several decades ago when I began giving my classes in “Jewish-American Fiction” a chance to vote on their favorite text in a survey course that included a catholic variety of Jewish authors, from Abraham Cahan to Pearl Abraham. The novel that won, hands down, every semester, every year, was Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, a perfectly good novel for junior high school readers but not especially challenging, I thought, for college students. Why, I kept wondering, didn’t they choose Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep or Saul Bellow’s Herzog? After mulling this question over for a couple of years, I decided (a) that estimations about art should never be put to a democratic vote; and (b) that I had to discontinue my end-of-semester questionnaire.
Curiously, I experienced something of the same disappointment when, as one of the judges nominating books for a prestigious Koret prize, I watched as Jonathan Safran Foer mowed down competition that included Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Steve Stern. A friend of mine tried to console me that pointing out that Foer’s post-modernism appealed to contemporary readers as Bellow and Ozick’s old-fashioned modernism did not. Perhaps, but I think the explanation is simpler: the bulk of those who sent in email votes had read Everything is Illuminated but not Ravelstein.
Here are some of my interviews and opinions on American-Jewish literature.
