ABSTRACT
German Jews wanted to be Jews in the house and gentiles in the street but life turned this ambition completely topsy-turvy. The fact is that Jews have become gentiles in the house and Jews in the street. Israel Joshua Singer proves to have been a keen reader of Russian, Polish, German, and other literatures. His novels written as family chronicles and milieu studies were certainly inspired by Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, an author well known in the Yiddish-speaking literary circles of pre-World War II Poland. The family novel, painting-like and conceived as a triptych, renders a panorama of events and Jewish experience over three generations during the upheavals in the first half of the twentieth century. In the Carnovsky saga, Singer traces the destiny of some generations of Polish Jews who, David Carnovsky, live through the first half of the twentieth century in Berlin and finally find their way to the United States as refugees from Hitler's Germany.
