ABSTRACT

When the roll call of ‘third-generation’ Jewish-American writers is taken, Amy Bloom’s name does not usually appear. Steve Stern, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman and Pearl Abraham, among others, have had their work frequently collected in anthologies of JewishAmerican literature and appear regularly in bibliographies of Jewish-American fiction.1 In spite of having been nominated for two of America’s most prestigious literary awards (the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award) Bloom, on the other hand, has so far been excluded from the JewishAmerican literary canon. True, she has only published four books, but this is one more than Abraham. True, also, that she seems not to be particularly preoccupied with questions of Jewish identity (though many of her characters are Jewish), but then nor was Chabon, until the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Why, then, the critical neglect of Bloom?2 It may be partly to do with her rather uncomfortable subject matter: her books contain more than their fair share of adultery, incest, miscegenation, paedophilia, transvestism, transsexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, alcoholism, mental and physical illness and disability, not to mention the odd accidental killing and suicide. You might expect a young (WASP) turk to deal with such controversial material, but when it comes to Jewish-American women it seems that many readers find anything stronger than ‘chicken soup for the soul’ difficult to stomach.3 Although Bloom herself dismisses the notion that there is anything extraordinary about her characters (they are, she claims, ‘just everyday, reasonably bright people from different kinds of backgrounds’) or their circumstances (‘I wish they were unusual but they seem to me in fact to be commonplace’, Birnbaum 2000: n.p.), it is difficult to accommodate her fiction in any of the established traditions of Jewish-American fiction, or indeed to locate in her work any of the themes conventionally regarded as quintessentially ‘Jewish’. As I have argued elsewhere (Brauner 2001: 5-9, 22-9), there are as many definitions of Jewish-American fiction as there are critics of Jewish-American fiction, but most of these definitions are rather conservative, focusing on religion and morality (which are often taken to be synonymous with each other) as the main paradigms of Jewishness.4