ABSTRACT
The marriage plot has long been a generic component of the novel, but postmodernism fragments the self and unhooks relationships from social hierarchies and ethnic affiliations, dismantling marriage and the marriage plot. Postmodern Jewish novelists are no different in their turn to eroticism as a central drive of individual lives, but in doing so they reflect the secularization of Jewish culture and the abandonment of traditional courtship practices and stable family structures for casual relations and assimilation into universal, global identities. Romance, once the staple of the modern novel, has become a story of how marriages break down and end in solitude. The chapter tracks this trend and puts into conversation novels by Zeruya Shalev (Love Life, Husband and Wife) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) to show how tensions in gender and sexual relations reflect conflicts of self and history.
