Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Royal, Derek Parker

Titel

Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative

Ist Teil von

• Shofar (West Lafayette, Ind.), 2004-03, Vol.22 (3), p.1-11

Ort / Verlag

West Lafayette: University of Nebraska Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2004

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It is appropriate that the collection in this volume begin with two essays on [Allegra Goodman]. She, perhaps more than any other writer of her generation (with the possible exception of [Art Spiegelman]), has garnered both popular and critical success, making her writing on Judaic issues particularly significant. As [Mark Shechner] puts it, in the assemblage of contemporary Jewish writing, Allegra Goodman is "the homegirl and everyone's sweetheart" (39). Victoria Aarons demonstrates why this is so in her essay. What makes Goodman's writing resonate, she argues, is its engagement with the postmodern media-driven world of image and immediate gratification, especially in its relation to Jewish heritage and community. The stories of The Family Markowitz show how, in Aarons's words, "the seductions of American life and the language of contemporary cultural icons eclipse the past, obscure identity, erase the `memory, real or imagined,' historic or mythic." Many of Goodman's characters approach their identity with ambivalence, fearing the loss of their Jewishness while at the same time suspicious of donning it wholeheartedly. Concentrating on Goodman's early short fiction, Aarons shows how the author reinvents Jewish subjectivity through the negotiation of competing contemporary forces. In a similar manner, Maya Socolovsky explores the different ways in which Jewish orthodoxy functions in Goodman's narratives -- an emphasis that would have been unheard of, with one or two exceptions, in fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. She focuses on Goodman's first novel and the ways in which the American promise of self-definition plays out within the orthodox community. Structuring her ideas around issues of geographic space and subject interiority, Socolovsky demonstrates the ways in which Kaaterskill Falls serves as one kind of response to "finalizing" criticism. She argues that just as the author's characters use Judaic heritage to inform their own contemporary identities, Goodman uses her "inheritance" of the Jewish American literary past to craft her own notions of a post-assimilative Jewish identity. By doing so, Goodman essentially maps out one possible direction for contemporary Jewish American writing.