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Jewish Writers In America:
A Place in the Establishment
- Abstract
SOME MONTHS ago Leslie Fiedler addressed himself in Poetry magazine to the question why, “in a time of cultural philosemitism,” Jewish poets have failed to achieve a measure of the prosperity of “their opposite numbers in prose.” The immediate object of his attention was Karl Shapiro’s Poems of a Jew; most of his space was devoted to an assessment of Shapiro’s career; his judgments about the latter, and his tentative answers to the question posed were neither startling nor tendentious. One aspect of the piece, though-its treatment of a heterogeneous group of successful Jewish novelists-did bring the reader up short. Fiedler began his remarks by observing that “We live in a time when everywhere in the realm of prose Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile culture.” Later he claimed that the transformation of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, figures of ancient American myth, into Holden Caulfield and Augie March, “leaves the best Jewish writers amused, the second best embarrassed, and the worst atrociously pleased!” And at one point he went so far as to speak jocularly of “Wouk and Salinger, Bellow and Malamud, Philip Roth and Uris” as the “bandwagon which travels our streets, its calliope playing Hatikvah.”
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