ABSTRACT
Readers interpreting the foregoing chapters may be forgiven for developing the view that everything that happened which was of importance to this body of writing was in New York. Of course, there was Jewish life and culture in many other areas, but New York clearly had the mass immigration and also the first notable writers. It also had a focus for communication, media and the advancement of assimilation issues. A book such as Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961), which takes ‘Cascadia College’ in the West as a focus, is unusual. In addition, there was also the concentration of Jewish intellectuals which has had a sub-culture celebrated throughout the whole of the period in question. But by 1945 there had been such progress and change in terms of how Jewish Americans saw themselves that any study of the writing of this period needs to pinpoint the nature of that moment at which fresh perceptions were made. That particular period of transition, roughly from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, witnesses certain important phases. First, there is a reassessment of the 1930s and of ideological change; then Saul Bellow initiates a defined way of placing Jewishness within urban culture, and finally, a ‘new wave’ arrives with the early work of Philip Roth. Throughout this period we also have the stories of Malamud (and parallels in Yiddish with Isaac Singer), which take more interest in the persistence of European Jewishness within American life – a world of marriage-fixers, small businesses and superstition.
