“Identity and Religious Traits in Jewish Literature–A Hansenian Reading of the Short Fiction of Bernard Malamud and Nathan Englander”

Abstract

At the end of the 1970s, Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse predicted the demise of Jewish American fiction as a result of the process of acculturation affecting Jewish communities. However, the booming literary production of a younger generation in recent decades has called into question this announcement of the death of Jewish American fiction. Based on Marcus Hansen’s theory of the third generation return, the current paper seeks to explore issues of identity and religion in the writing of Bernard Malamud and Nathan Englander, representatives of the second and the third generation of Jewish fiction, respectively. Malamud’s storytelling portrays an all-embracing vision of Judaism in that all his characters are universal projections of humanity, while Englander’s view on Judaism is that of a Jew raised in the strict yeshiva. However, his Orthodox upbringing permeates his writing entirely, shaping the unabashed way in which he views Jewish Orthodoxy and the Shoah.