A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 99
like that he heard me yell at a woman and my hand is still shaking. He runs a few
steps, he looks back to make sure I didn ’ t move an inch ” (363). Clearly, Zagrowsky
loves his grandchild. Yet Paley refuses to craft a disingenuous, saccharine conclusion.
Love coexists with, but doesn ’ t triumph over, Zagrowsky ’ s racism, as Paley reminds
us through her protagonist ’ s persistent anxiety over his grandchild ’ s complexion. “ I
got my eye on him too, ” Zagrowsky continues. “ He waves a chocolate Popsicle. It ’ s
a little darker than him ” (363).
After Alienation: Waning and Return
By the 1970s, the dazzling post - immigrant fi ction of marginality and alienation had
run its course, as a number of critics observed. “ Insofar as this body of writing draws
heavily from the immigrant experience, ” Howe argued in 1977 , “ it must suffer a
458
Andrew Furman
depletion of resources, a thinning - out of materials and memories ” ( “ Introduction ” 16).
While Howe may have overstated the case, the 1970s and early 1980s were, admittedly,
bear - market years for the Jewish American story. One thing was for certain. If Jewish
American fi ction was to survive it would have to change. In her essays and her own
stories, Cynthia Ozick heralded a new, post - ethnic wave of Jewish writing by calling
for a literature “ centrally Jewish in its concerns ” ( “ Toward ” 168). As Sanford Pinsker
noted, “ Ozick almost singlehandedly moved Jewish - American fi ction beyond the dare
of ethnic Jewishness to a more complicated, more demanding double - dare of a fi ction
fi rmly couched in Jewish ideas and rendered in liturgical rhythms ” ( “ Dares ” 282). The
battle between the pagan and the Hebraic, between Pan and Moses, has been Cynthia
Ozick ’ s primary theme. “ Great Pan Lives, ” the nature - loving Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld
declares in Ozick ’ s landmark story of 1966, “ The Pagan Rabbi ” (17). He thereby blurs
the distinction between the Creator and the created. Learning only too late that his soul
belongs to the Torah, not to the trees, Kornfeld hangs himself from a tree by his prayer
shawl. The story, like several of Ozick ’ s fi ctional works, might be understood as an
extended meditation upon the second commandment banning idolatry.
Ozick ’ s early stories (along with those of Hugh Nissenson) paved the way for a
new generation of story writers in the 1990s – the literary grandchildren of Bellow
et al. – who created Jewish characters beset by centrally Jewish concerns: the toxic
legacy of the Holocaust, the retrieval of extinct Jewish worlds (e.g., the European
shtetl , New York ’ s Lower East Side, and Jewish neighborhoods in the American South),
Jewish feminism, Israel, Jewish Orthodoxy, and the biblical resonances in the modern
world. In his wildly successful For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999) , Nathan Eng-
lander creates several Orthodox characters who grapple with issues of Jewish Law. A
Hasid in the collection ’ s title story, frustrated by his wife ’ s purportedly unending
menstrual cycle, receives rabbinic dispensation to conjoin with a prostitute to “ relieve
the pressure. ” In “ The Wig, ” Ruchama the wig - maker does her best to negotiate
between the Jewish laws of modesty and her desire for beauty and sexual fulfi llment.
Allegra Goodman has also powerfully depicted the tensions between Orthodoxy and
secularism. In “ The Four Questions, ” for example, Goodman evokes a contentious
Passover Seder as the family patriarch, Ed, must grapple with what he perceives to
be his daughter ’ s insufferable religiosity. During the service, he can ’ t help but notice
that Miriam ignores his more ecumenical fl ourishes. “ They had raised the children in
a liberal, rational, joyous way – raised them to enjoy the Jewish tradition, and Ed
can ’ t understand why Miriam would choose austerity and obscure ritualism ” ( Family
187 – 8). The stories collected in The Family Markowitz (1996) , generally, are among
the most incisive works to explore Jewish American family life since Philip Roth ’ s
Goodbye, Columbus . Marjorie Sandor ’ s haunting story collection, Portrait of My Mother
Who Posed Nude in Wartime (2003) – winner of the National Jewish Book Award in
fi ction – also continues the esteemed tradition of Jewish stories of the family.
Other emergent Jewish American writers to address issues of Jewish Orthodoxy in
the modern world include, most notably, Melvin Bukiet, Ehud Havazelet, and Joan
Leegant. In Leegant ’ s “ The Tenth, ” a rabbi must consider how to “ count ” Siamese
The Jewish American Story
459
twins for the number of ten Jewish men required to form the prayer quorum; Bukiet
holds the Jewish dietary laws up to extensive scrutiny through the travails of his
Kosher butcher in “ The Golden Calf and the Red Heifer, ” collected in While the
Messiah Tarries
(1995)
; fi nally, several of the quietly powerful, elegiac stories in
Havazelet ’ s Like Never Before (1998) examine the waning infl uence of Orthodox values
and rituals upon a wayward generation of Birnbaums in the 1960s.
With regard to the Holocaust, Ozick ’ s own story, “ The Shawl, ” published in the
New Yorker in 1981, represents a more direct evocation of the atrocity than most earlier
fi ctional accounts (e.g., Malamud ’ s “ The Loan ” ). The story depicts the psychic terror
that grips Rosa in a death camp, where she must witness the gradual starvation of her
infant daughter, Magda, and her adolescent niece, Stella. Ozick trenchantly evokes the
warped relational dynamics that prevail under such circumstances. Rosa, for example,
projects much of her animus toward Stella rather than toward the Nazis: “ Rosa gave
almost all her food to Magda, Stella gave nothing. … They were in a place without
pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella ’ s bones without pity ” (5).
In the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers, many of them children
of Holocaust survivors, would emerge to explore in their stories the toxic legacy of
the Holocaust upon the “ second generation, ” to borrow Alan L. Berger ’ s terminology.
Rebecca Goldstein ’ s “ The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish, ” represents one of the more chill-
ing stories in this genre. The story begins as the narrator, a child of survivors, describes
the heroic deeds of her namesake, Raizel Kaidish, as recounted to her by her mother.
A prisoner at Buchenwald, Kaidish takes an enormous risk to save her best friend ’ s
life. Tragically, they are both murdered by the Nazis after an informant betrays them.
Kaidish
’
s legacy proves overwhelming for the narrator as her mother relentlessly
reinforces the moral lesson of Kaidish ’ s act. Saddled with such pressure, Goldstein
depicts her narrator ’ s retreat into an amoral philosophy, yet fashions a haunting con-
clusion that forces the reader to reevaluate the contrasting post - Holocaust visions of
mother and daughter.
Thane Rosenbaum also examines the painful legacy passed down to a child of Holo-
caust survivors in each of the stories collected in his debut work of fi ction, Elijah Visible
&nb
sp; (1996) . Through the ordeals of his protagonist, Adam Posner, Rosenbaum evokes the
dysfunctional psychological immersion of the “ second generation ” in the European
atrocity, their ambivalence toward Judaism, and their unyielding urge to reconstruct
the experiences of their parents. In “ Cattle Car Complex, ” for example, Posner, a New
York lawyer, suffers a psychological trauma after his elevator malfunctions and traps
him inside. The experience transports Posner, psychologically, to a Nazi cattle car.
“ This is not life – being trapped in a box made for animals! ” he cries (7 – 8).
Lev Raphael addresses a similar theme in the stories collected in Dancing on Tisha
B ’ Av (1991) . What makes Raphael ’ s stories unique is that his protagonists must
reckon not only with their identities as children of Holocaust survivors but also with
their homosexuality. In “ The Life You Have, ” Raphael condemns both Nazism and
the homophobia of mainstream Jewish America, and enacts a provocative narrative
leveling of these manifestations of hatred. Other especially powerful contemporary
460
Andrew Furman
stories of the Holocaust include Harvey Grossinger
’ s “ The Quarry, ” Nathan
Englander ’ s “ The Tumblers, ” and Melvin Bukiet ’ s “ The Library of Moloch ” and
“ Himmler ’ s Chickens. ”
The enterprise of retrieving lost or waning Jewish worlds – and retrieving Jewish
modes of writing – through the artistic imagination is a prevailing current of the
Jewish American story. In Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1991) , for example, Bukiet
imaginatively reconstructs the Polish shtetl , Proszowice, the setting for each of the
twelve interrelated stories, while his more recent “ The Two Franzes, ” collected in A
Faker ’ s Dozen (2003) , transports us to prewar Prague. In several stories collected in
The County of Birches (1998) , Judith Kalman also powerfully evokes pre - Holocaust
Europe, Budapest specifi cally. Berlin is the site of Aryeh Lev Stollman ’ s imagination
in “ Die Grosse Liebe, ” collected in The Dialogues of Time and Entropy (2003) , as his
Canadian protagonist, who “ grew up understanding that one did not ask questions of
a personal nature, even to one ’ s parents, ” meditates upon his dead mother ’ s favorite
German movie to explore the pain of her wartime exile from Europe (47). And in
Barbara Klein Moss ’ s “ Rug Weaver, ” an Iranian Jewish rug dealer recalls his cruel
imprisonment in Teheran following the Islamic revolution. The tumultuous contem-
porary Israeli landscape also increasingly emerges as a locus for the Jewish American
imagination in such stories as Stollman ’ s “ Mr. Mitochondria ” and “ The Adornment
of Days, ” Nathan Englander ’ s “ In This Way We Are Wise, ” and in Jon Papernik ’ s
debut collection, The Ascent of Eli Israel (2002) . The prevalence of the European shtetl
and Israel in the contemporary Jewish American story bespeaks the broadening reach
and daring of the Jewish American imagination.
Steve Stern has set his sights on reconstructing a Jewish universe closer to home
in several story collections, most notably Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987) and The
Wedding Jester (1999) . In his stories, Stern focuses primarily upon a motley assortment
of Jewish characters living alongside the honky - tonks and pawnshops of the Pinch
– an actual Jewish neighborhood in Memphis – prior to the Holocaust and World
War II. “ The Tale of a Kite, ” collected in The Wedding Jester , represents one such story
and presents an interesting counterpoint to Philip Roth ’ s “ Eli, the Fanatic. ” In the
story, the Jews of the Pinch, like the Jews of Roth ’ s Woodenton, fear what the Gentile
majority will think when a group of Hasidic “ fanatics ” moves into the neighborhood.
What distinguishes Stern ’ s story from Roth ’ s, however, is the narrative awe at the
transcendent powers of the holy. In “ The Tale of a Kite, ” as in many of his stories,
Stern infuses the Pinch with magical qualities, and more palpable redemptive pos-
sibilities. In this respect, his fi ction harkens back to the Yiddish masters of the nine-
teenth century. Stern, then, has not only reinscribed the lost Jewish world of the Pinch
into our collective memory, but has retrieved and reinvigorated the surreal, magical
mode of Jewish storytelling, rife with dybbuks and demons, popularized by such early
writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. Other writers have revitalized
earlier Jewish modes of writing, as well. Gerald Shapiro, for example, reinvigorates
the schlemiel tradition in three hilarious story collections, From Hunger (1993) , Bad
Jews (1999) , and Little Men (2004) , transplanting the saintly Yiddish fools of Singer,
The Jewish American Story
461
Y. L. Peretz, Sholom Aleichem, and Moishe Kulbak, to the urban American streets
of Chicago. Joseph Epstein ’ s stories in Fabulous Small Jews (2003) also owe a clear debt
to this tradition.
The prodigious recent literary output of Jewish American fi ctionists has prompted
some observers to assert that a new renaissance in Jewish American letters is under
way. The Jewish magazine Tikkun , for example, published a literary symposium on
“ The Jewish Literary Revival ” in 1997. Whether or not we are in the midst of a liter-
ary renaissance, per se, it is clear that Jewish writers, as a collective, found their voice
in the 1990s. They largely jettisoned the merely nominal Jewish protagonists and
broad ethical humanism of an earlier generation of writers and turned inward, instead,
to create a more essentially Jewish literature. As Mark Krupnick has observed, “ It
does appear that Cynthia Ozick ’ s program for Jewish writing has been in the process
of being carried out ” (304).
The New Immigrants
The surging “ Jewishness ” of the contemporary Jewish American story is unsurprising,
perhaps, given our multicultural zeitgeist. That is, the increasing particularism of
the Jewish American story might be seen as part of a larger literary and cultural
phenomenon – a response to the widespread receptiveness among readers, and demand
even, for multicultural voices and visions. No one could have expected, however, that
a second wave of Jewish immigration from Europe would fuel a second round of fi ction
to evoke the particular contours of the immigrant experience. The classifi cation, New
Immigrants, has generally been used to refer to the great wave of immigrants from
Asian and Latin American countries since 1965, prompted by revisions to US immi-
gration law in that year. Yet a twenty - and thirty - something generation of immigrant
Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union – writers who emigrated as children to
America and Canada in the late 1970s and 1980s – has also just begun to emerge.
Gary Shteyngart ’ s audacious novel, The Russian Debutante ’ s Handbook (2002), repre-
sents the most signifi cant literary contribution written by this cohort. But two recent
story collections, Lara Vapnyar
’
s
There Are Jews in My House (2003) and David
Bezmozgis ’ s Natasha
(2004)
, also suggest
that we are on the cusp of a new and
signifi cant literary movement in Jewish American letters.
Several of the broad themes from the earlier period of Jewish American immigrant
fi ction resonate in the writing of this emergent generation: the diffi culties associated
with acquiring a new language, the early adulthood forced upon immigrant children,
who must help their parents navigate their new terrain, and the economic and psy-
chological hardships associated with exile, generally. Like several of the immigrant
story collections of the early twentieth century, There Are Jews in My House and Natasha
both contain some stories set in the old world and some in the new world. Some
stories have a foot planted in both locales, evoking the bifurcated identity of their
exiled protagonists.
462
Andrew Furman
However, the stories of Vapnyar and Bezmozgis distinguish themselves from the
works of their predecessors in at least as many ways as they recall these works. Stylisti-
cally, Bezmozgis ’ s and Vapnyar ’ s prose is spare and unadorned, clipped and powerful
(consistent with much contemporary writing in English), yet more highly literate
than the prose of the fi rst generation of Jewish immigrant writers. The fact that
English, for better or worse, has increasingly emerged as the lingua franca across the
globe may account, at least in part, for the precociously self - assured prose of the new
immigrants. From a thematic standpoint, the Holocaust, which occurred after the
fi rst great wave of European Jewish immigration, fi gures prominently in these stories.
The title story of Vapnyar
’
s collection evokes the curiously strained relationship
between a Jewish woman and the non - Jewish woman who hides her and her young
daughter in Nazi - occupied communist Russia, while Bezmozgis ’ s “ An Animal to the
Memory ”
ponders the extent to which Holocaust remembrance should shape the
identity of a young immigrant protagonist, learning afresh in Toronto what it means
to be a Jew. Vapnyar ’ s and Bezmozgis ’ s stark evocation of the contemporary sexual
mores which bear down upon their immigrant protagonists (e.g., Bezmozgis
’
s