Focusing on a diversely rich selection of writers, the pieces featured in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative explore the community of Jewish American writers who published their first book after the mid-1980s. It is the first book-length collection of essays on this subject matter with contributions from the leading scholars in the field. The manuscript does not attempt to foreground any one critical agenda, such as Holocaust writing, engagements with Zionism, feminist studies, postmodern influences, or multiculturalism. Instead, it celebrates the presence of a newly robust, diverse, and ever-evolving body of Jewish American fiction. This literature has taken a variety of forms with its negotiations of orthodoxy, its representations of a post-Holocaust world, its reassertion of folkloric tradition, its engagements with postmodernity, its reevaluations of Jewishness, and its alternative delineations of ethnic identity. Discussing the work of authors such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon, Tova Mirvis, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Jonathan Rosen, Nathan Englander, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Tova Reich, Sarah Schulman, Ruth Knafo Setton, Ben Katchor, and Jonathan Safran Foer, the fifteen contributors in this collection assert the ongoing vitality and ever-growing relevancy of Jewish American fiction.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative
Part 1: Dialogues with Orthodoxy and History
1 “Hardly There Even When She Wasn’t Lost”: Orthodox Daughters and the “Mind-Body Problem” in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction, by Susan Jacobowitz
2 Southern Discomfort: Revisiting the Jewish Question in Tova Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxiliary, by Maya Socolovsky
3 The Ethics of After: Melvin Jules Bukiet, Holocaust Fiction, and the Reemergence of an Ethical Sense in the Post-Holocaust World, by Michael J. Martin
4 The Second-Generation Holocaust Nonsurvivor: Third-Degree Metalepsis and Creative Block in Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel Maus, by Michael Schuldiner
5 “Unfinished Business”: Journeys to Eastern Europe in Thane Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Jennifer M. Lemberg
Part 2: Folklore, Fantasy, and the Metanarrative
6 The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction, by Lee Behlman
7 A Tale Told about Idiots: The Chelm Story and Holocaust Representation, by Alexis Wilson
8 Laughter and Trembling: The Short Fiction of Steve Stern and Nathan Englander, by Monica Osborne
9 Metafictional Witnessing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, by Tracy Floreani
Part 3: (Re)inscribing Jewish Text and Identity
10 Putting the “Jewish” Back in “Jewish American Fiction”: A Look at Jewish American Fiction since 1977 and an Allegorical Reading of Nathan Englander’s “The Gilgul of Park Avenue”, by Adam Meyer
11 “Were it Not for the Yetzer Hara”: Eating, Knowledge, and the Physical in Jonathan Rosen’s Eve’s Apple, by Adam Sol
12 The Sweetheart Is Outside Herself: Writing the Contemporary Jewish American Writer in S. L. Wisenberg’s Ceci Rubin Stories, by Joe Kraus
13 Jewish American Fiction on the Border: Culture Confrontations, Double Consciousness, and Hybridity in the Work of Pearl Abraham, by Bart Lievens
Part 4: Authors in Their Own Words
14 Margins within the Margins: An Interview with Ruth Knafo Setton and Farideh Dayanim Goldin, by Derek Parker Royal
15 Picturing American Stories: An Interview with Ben Katchor, by Derek Parker Royal
Questions for Discussion
Contemporary Jewish American Fiction: A Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Derek Parker Royal is the founder of the Philip Roth Society as well as founding Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Philip Roth Studies. He is the editor of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Praeger, 2005), and his essays on American literature and graphic narrative have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel, Critique, MELUS, Shofar, Studies in American Jewish Literature, International Journal of Comic Art, The Mark Twain Annual, and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism.
