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Fiction

from Part II - Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2015

Hana Wirth-Nesher
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Summary

This chapter sketches two ways of narrating Jewish American literary history, namely first-person singular narration and third-person narration. Immigrant narratives represent the process of migration and assimilation and help to give shape to an individual's transformation. Gold's Jews without Money, more an unstructured memoir than a novel, is a first-person-singular narrative of twenty-two chronologically arranged vignettes. The year 1934 witnessed an aesthetic revolution in Jewish American fiction with the publication of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Roth's new third-person narration takes small David's point of view with strikingly beautiful images. Though the end point in both narrating ways is alienation, the readers have to decide whether the story of increasing assimilation that begins with Antin and Cahan or an alternative story that, inspired by Daniel Deronda, would start with Nyburg's Jewish idealism and Lewisohn's dissimilation might have more resonance today.
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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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  • Fiction
  • Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107261341.005
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  • Fiction
  • Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107261341.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fiction
  • Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107261341.005
Available formats
×