My thesis project aims to prove that living in New York City limits the ability to fully practice Judaism for the Jewish characters in novels by Jewish authors that take place from the Great Depression through the civil rights movement. In other words, I will analyze the relationship between loyalty to Jewish traditions and pressure to assimilate to city life during overall American times of hardship in these novels.
In Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave, the foursome of 30-something Jewish friends struggle to make it to the funeral of their old friend. It is the 1960s, and keeping up appearances is important among their current society. The men simultaneously mourn the loss of a friend with whom they have not communicated in years and their long-lost sincere friendship.
Markfield’s Teitlebaum’s Window follows a young Jewish boy in Brooklyn from the 1930s through the 1940s, and how the changing climate of America and New York City affects his immigrant family. The impact of the Great Depression is physically evident in the evolving storefront signage in the boy’s window.
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral explores the theme of “wanting to belong and refusing to belong” (Reading Guides). The novel reflects the rebellious attitude of youth in the 1960s at a time of American civil rights and turmoil of the Vietnam War. There is a themes of the severing of ties religious and otherwise.
In Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, Russian immigrant Morris Bober struggles to make a life for himself and his family in Brooklyn after World War II. He does not follow the laws of kashrut, he does not particularly observe the Jewish holidays and he faces anti-Semitism in his neighborhood. Being Jewish is almost a bullseye for perpetual suffering. Jonathan Rosen, in his introduction, says that The Assistant “should… be read as a provocative part of the literature exploring, and refashioning, America as a place where the true self is both lost and found” (Malamud xi). This implies that the conflicts the Jewish characters face in New York City threaten their inner Jewish core. At the same time, the Jewish characters grow to understand exactly who they are, no matter how much they adhere to this discovery.
Malamud’s The Tenants considers the relationship between a Jewish man and a black man living cooperatively in a tenement in New York City. Harry, the Jewish man, “believes he is sure of his own mature and defined identity, but his being is not complete without his less developed alter ego, Willie” (Spevack 35). This Jewish character’s identity is shaped by his inevitable encounter with a black man in New York City. The American civil rights movement makes the background for this story of mutual understanding.
My method of research, at the moment, consists of researching literary publications available through JSTOR. My findings are primarily book reviews, though I have been lucky to find some research articles. There is one publication that seems wonderfully appropriate to my research, but I cannot find a full-text version available online. From what I have found so far, researchers in the field of Jewish literature appear to analyze the texts themselves in addition to a variety of other research papers. I plan to read many literary analyses of the novels I am in the process of reading.
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Works Cited
Rosen, Jonathan. Introduction. The Assistant. By Philip Roth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. vii-xi.
Spevack, Edmund. “Racial Conflict and Multiculturalism: Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants.” MELUS. Vol. 22, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism (Autumn, 1997), pp. 31-54. 26 Sept 10 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/467653>.
Unattributed. “Reading Guides: American Pastoral by Philip Roth.” Bookbrowse LLC, 2010. 26 Sept 10 <http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfmbook_number
=1683>.
The theme of inter-generational conflict in American Pastoral demonstrates the collective desire to “one-up” or be different from one’s parents; in other words, to become more American. Of the youngsters of his neighborhood, Zuckerman says, “…we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours” (41). The ability to step forward and do something better comes from the immense American energy after the Great Depression, according to Zuckerman (40). Not only are Zuckerman and his childhood peers eager to move forward and make a name for themselves, but it is “mostly the friction between generations [that is] sufficient to give us purchase to move forward” (42). The children are highly aware of signs of immigrant status, like whether or not a neighbor’s mother has an accent (43). Keen to their surroundings, the children of Zuckerman’s area are observant of the indicators of “the minutest gradations of social position” (43) among their families.
Zuckerman reports a “generalized mistrust of the Gentile world” (41) at the time of his childhood and “exclusions the goyim still [wish] to preserve” (44) at his high school reunion, 45 years later. The words “gentile” and “goyim” both mean non-Jew, but “goyim” is slightly offensive. With the use of almost derogatory language when referring to non-Jews, Zuckerman demonstrates the lingering attitude of distrust.
Part of the conflict between people of Zuckerman’s age in the 1940s and their parents is that the “adults… [are] striving and improving themselves through [the children]” (42). Zuckerman says of his generation’s astuteness that there is an “unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things” (43). It is important for the young ones to interpret those around them to help carve a sense of self-identity. It is easy for them to “[grasp] how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive different human problem” (43). It is the very human problem that each family suffers that pushes the younger generation to move toward success.
The reader notes the presence of Jewish elements in Zuckerman’s life in the past and the present. Zuckerman mentions the yahrzeit candles some of his neighbors have when he is a child (43). Another element of Judaism is the goodie bag of rugelach that everyone receives at the end of the Weequahic High School reunion (46). Rugelach is an old, traditional variety of Jewish cookie. The phenomenon of the high school reunion brings together people who have not spoken in years. After growing into adults and being independent, everyone inevitably returns to the personality and energy of high school. Zuckerman says to an old friend, Mendy Gurlik, that “after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent” (51). This quote suggests that the Jewish men and women who grew up with Nathan Zuckerman spend years trying to be different, to be American, but the reunion returns them to the time when their shared raw Jewishness was impossible to hide. In their adult years, these people succeed in disguising their Jewish heritage in the hopes of acceptance and success in a “typical” or “mainstream” American life. This sense of “passing” is one of the central themes of American Pastoral and indicative of the necessity to relinquish one’s Jewish heritage in order to succeed. Just by participating in the reunion, Zuckerman can say he has an “uncanny sense that what goes on behind what we see is what I was seeing” (52). He is comfortably aware that everyone at the reunion is putting on a face, trying to be someone else. This “someone else” is someone they strive to be; someone like the Swede who manages to be the darling of the community for his near-gentile looks and abilities. That is to say, everyone at the reunion, though the majority are Jewish, are trying to downplay their Jewishness, which has been a natural behavior since before high school.
The reader sees the social barrier between Jews and non-Jews with the appearance of an old classmate with a shiksa, or Gentile woman, for a wife. The wife questions her husband, Schrimmer, about the nicknames she hears everyone calling each other at the reunion. She asks, “Why are they all Mutty and Utty and Dutty and Tutty? If his name is Charles, why is he called Tutty?” (57). To this, Schrimmer responds, “I shouldn’t have brought you… I can’t explain it… nobody can. It’s beyond explanation. It just is” (57). Not only does this exchange show the rifling animosity Schrimmer can still show for his Gentile woman who is his wife, but it broadcasts the kind of unique Jewish nickname-giving of the Newark Jewish community that divides it from its non-Jewish counterpart.
Zuckerman’s encounter with Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother and a classmate of Zuckerman’s, fills in a lot of blanks of information about the Swede. Most importantly, Zuckerman learns that the Swede has just died within the last week. Zuckerman concludes that the Swede must have known he was dying at their dinner meeting and wanting to express some unfulfilled emotions by speaking to a long-lost acquaintance (82). Unfortunately, the Swede never speaks about writing a book about his dad, as he mentions in his letter to Zuckerman imploring him to meet for dinner. How far had the Swede’s seemingly perfect life crumbled? Jerry says, tragically, that the Swede is “a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever” (68). What exactly did the Swede not escape? Is death the only thing that interrupted perfection?
Slowly, Zuckerman begins to realize the façade of the Swede. He, too, was trying to pass, but really lived a double life. Zuckerman learns from Jerry about the Swede’s revolutionary daughter, Merry, who detonated a bomb in a post office during the Vietnam War, killing one person. This is the first real chip in the perfect picture of the Swede’s life. Jerry recalls finding the Swede crying in a fancy restaurant’s bathroom stall following an otherwise pleasant family dinner about the alleged death of Merry (71). The failure in Merry is a sudden tragedy to the Swede. Of the Swede’s naivete, Jerry says, “Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, ‘Why are things the way they are?’ Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect?… The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question existed” (70). The Swede’s tragedy is important because it is the equivalent to the loss of his ability to pass, to be a real American. Jerry brings it one step further when he says, “That was [the Swede’s] fate – built for bearing burdens and taking shit” (70). Jerry is essentially breaking the image Zuckerman always held of the Swede. The Swede never really was perfect. He always had problems dealing with the expectations of others, and he never knew that life could be a different way until his only daughter became a murderer and an outlaw.
There is a difference between the two Levov brothers in their ability to take what life gives them and continue moving, or passing. According to Jerry, it is the Swede’s lack of rage, or reaction, that keeps him from letting go of the loss of his daughter, ultimately leading to his death. On the other hand, according to Zuckerman, Jerry has “a talent for rage and another… for not looking back” (72). This talent for not looking back demonstrates the need to hold only the loosest bonds to where one originated in order to be able to move forward. This means, among other things, to not grasp onto Judaism so much because it would impede on the possible successes ahead.
A perfect self-observation Zuckerman makes is that he must have been sitting “in Vincent’s restaurant, childishly expecting to be wowed by [the Swede’s] godliness, only to be confronted by an utterly ordinary humanness” (72). Zuckerman processes it himself that the Swede is no different from him. He was not god-like, he did not have all the answers and he certainly did not pretend to be the same childhood hometown sports legend that he used to be.
Another way we see the tragedy of the Swede is that he was “fatally attracted to his duty… fatally attracted to responsibility” (72). The use of the word “fatally” suggests that in being so loyal to his responsibilities, or the norm or familiar, the Swede caused his own death by not properly responding to the crimes and death of his daughter with flexibility. Apparently, for the rest of his life it was all he could do to “bury this thing,” that “one day life started laughing at him and it never let up” (74).
The one thing that no one trying to be successful or to pass can escape is the body. While speaking with an old romantic interest, Joy Helpern, at the high school reunion, Zuckerman marvels at the changes in her “body, from which one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed this side of death” (79). That is to say, no one can escape the confines of his or her own body no matter how much he or she wants it. It will always be there, this relic of one’s heritage, one’s journey. This is important because it shows the desperation of Zuckerman’s peers who want to assimilate to such a degree that even their own bodies are a problem – they betray who they really are.
Zuckerman comes to his own conclusion about the post-Merry’s bombing life of the Swede: “Stoically he suppresses his honor. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life” (81). Furthermore, Zuckerman deduces that “[the Swede] had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense” (81). The loss of Merry is really what brings the Swede back down to earth and makes him god-like no longer in Zuckerman’s eyes. It is probably this very family tragedy to which the Swede was referring in his letter to Zuckerman, even though he never brought it up in person at their dinner. The haunting nature of the double life of the Swede plays itself in the notion that “the responsibility of the school hero follows him through life” (79). This school hero, this legend, was all a tangible dream for which the neighborhood was partly responsible.
The Swede’s problem with “making himself unnaturally responsible” is that he “keeps under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together” (88). The Swede must be so ingrained to the norm that he limits himself and causes hardship by not being more open. The Swede’s boyhood successes have influenced his constant desire to please by taking responsibility. These efforts bring him further and further from his Jewish religion. He is “an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not be being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead – by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world – he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regular American guy way” (89). This presents the indelible problem: the shed one’s Judaism in order to become American and be accepted by all.
The reader finally gets a clue about what might have led to the Swede’s downfall when it is revealed that the Swede kissed his 11-year-old daughter on the mouth at her request. Zuckerman’s interpretation of this event and its impact is that “never in his entire life… had [the Swede] given way to anything so alien to the emotional rules by which he was governed, and later he wondered if this strange parental misstep was not the lapse from responsibility for which he paid for the rest of his life” (91). Why is there an emphasis on responsibility or the lack thereof? Why does the Swede follow an instinct to be responsible for everything around him, controllable or uncontrollable? Is this mistake really the only time that the Swede did not meet his self-imposed standards, the real reason for his downfall, his inability to pretend anymore?
Zuckerman shows us that the Swede so long crated fell apart after the realization that the Swede’s whole life changed after that illicit 10-second kiss (92). Putting himself in the Swede’s shoes, Zuckerman tells us, “All the triumphs, when [the Swede] probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his very virtues came to seem vices. There was no longer any innocence in what he remembered of his past” (93). The self-judgement leads the Swede to believe that his whole life has been a sham, that he has never truly passed for a stable, got-everything-together all-American man. The intention of the kiss is supposedly to relieve Merry of her tensions and make her feel comfortable, but it may have resulted in Merry’s unfortunate, obstinate stutter. Thus, the Swede concludes, “What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended” (93).
The Swede’s crestfallen attitude about the consequences of his actions influences him for the rest of his life. Relating his life to the handicap of his only daughter’s stutter, he “no longer had any conception of order. There was no order. None. He envisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of control” (93). This loss of control is synonymous with his loss of responsibility, his waning life force soon leading to his death.
There is more lack of practice of Judaism in reference to the Swede’s family. His teenage daughter takes Saturday trips to New York City to meet with other political radicals during the Vietnam War. Saturday is supposed to be Sabbath observed by all Jews, which includes not doing any work. Traveling to New York City constitutes as work, and we see that the Swede makes no mention about a possible disappointment in Merry’s failure to observe the Sabbath. Also, when Merry is younger, she sees speech therapists for her stutter on Saturdays. One surprising element of Judaism, though, is when the Swede is angered by Merry’s Catholic trinkets given to her by her Gentile grandparents. After it becomes clear that the trinkets are not going away, the Swede has a talk with Merry, explaining that Jews do not have crosses or pictures of Jesus Christ hanging in their rooms, and that these objects should be hidden when the Swede’s own parents come to visit (94).
Merry’s weekend trips to New York City are even more disrespectful of the laws of Judaism in that she neglects the laws of kashrut, or the eating restrictions. One of these restrictions is that meat and cheese should not be eaten in the same meal, and it seems Merry often enjoys cheeseburgers while in New York City (105). Merry has many arguments with her dad, the Swede, about her activities and whereabouts on these trips, and she astutely says to him during one such argument, “You think everything that is f-foreign to you is b-bad. Did you ever think that there are some things that are f-foreign to you that are good?” (110). Herein lies the problem with the Swede: he likes everything to be at a comfortable, controllable norm, and when things get too “extreme” he does not feel safe and secure.
Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant is one of the seminal works of Jewish fiction in the 20th century. Morris Bober is the Jewish grocer who cannot break the cycle of perpetual poverty. He “never alter[s] his fortune, unless degrees of poverty [mean] alteration, for luck and he [are], if not natural enemies, not good friends” (16). Bober’s modest neighborhood grocery store has not grown much over the 20 some-odd years it has been open. He life he has made for his family and himself after World War II in Brooklyn is not much. The store is open for most Jewish holidays, so the family obviously does not particularly note or celebrate them (reference?) Being one of only a handful of Jewish merchants in the neighborhood makes Bober a target for harsh anti-Semitism: his store is robbed by two men who say bigoted phrases, like “You’re a Jew liar” (25) and “Your Jew ass is bad, you understand?” (26). This event leads to Bober losing the mere $10 he earns that day, in addition to suffering a crippling blow to the head.
Ida Bober, Morris’ wife, accurately depicts their misfortune when it comes to the business:
Everything we did too late. The store we didn’t sell in time. I said, ‘Morris, sell now the store.’ You said, ‘Wait.’ What for? The house we bought too late, so we have still a big mortgage that it’s hard to pay every month. ‘Don’t buy,’ I said, ‘times are bad.’ ‘Buy,’ you said, ‘will get better. We will save rent.’
It is a hardship even to sell the grocery store. Is the difficulty due to prejudice, the Brooklyn neighborhood, or general lack of wealth after World War II?
The Bobers’ daughter, Helen, is the symbol of changing America. Her father, Morris, laments at his inability to support her during her childhood years, saying, “for myself I don’t care, for you I want the best but what did I give you?” (21). Helen replies, “I’ll give myself… there’s hope” (21). Even though times are hard, Helen holds hope for the future, which assumedly requires even further limitation of Jewish practice to succeed economically.
Ida Bober calls a regular Polish customer “die antisemitke” (32), or the anti-Semite. Though Ida senses the anti-Semitic attitude, the customer’s daily payment for a roll and the occasional pickle is necessary to stay in business. In the same vein, the customer’s anti-Semitism must be put on hold for the novelty of a “Jewish roll” or “Jewish pickle” (32).
The ubiquity of hardship in this post-war era is present in the new character of Frank Alpine, also known as “the stranger” who visits this small Brooklyn town and eventually works for Morris. While Morris questions the stranger’s history and how he came to Brooklyn, the stranger simply says, “I had a rough life” (33).
Philip Roth is another renowned writer in the Jewish scholarly world. His novels explore the neuroses and internal conflicts of Jewish characters. American Pastoral is perhaps the last novel in which his memorable character, Nathan Zuckerman, appears. Zuckerman’s relationship with a not-so-Jewish-looking Jew is the focus and evolution of American Pastoral.
Physically, Seymour Irving “the Swede” Levov, of Zuckerman’s memory and present experiences, does not look like a Jew. While describing the Swede of the past, Zuckerman says, “Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov” (3). Not only is the Swede an enigma in physical beauty, but in physical strength, too. The Swede’s abilities in basketball, football and baseball earn him legend status as a high school student in the neighborhood and beyond. Of Swede’s individuality and importance, Zuckerman says he is “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get” (10). This attitude suggests that at the time of Zuckerman’s high school years, the late 1940s, it is seen as a disadvantage to success to be Jewish. The only way, apparently, for Jews to make a name for themselves within their community is to bolster the successes of a boy whose talents they think are so non-Jewish that they bring them to a higher level of value. But what provokes this attitude that beauty and natural talent for sports like Swede has is non-Jewish? HE cannot be the only Jew that has played on a high school football team. What exactly promotes his status as a legend, and how does it affect his neighbors’ attitudes towards their own Jewish identities as related to their abilities to succeed?
Part of the Swede’s mystique, according to our ever-observant Zuckerman, is his “talent for ‘being himself’” (19). This statement insinuates that Jews of that era ordinarily have to pretend to be something they are not. This is confusing, then, because Zuckerman may be suggesting that all Jews have those talents, but the Swede is the only one confident enough and self-assured enough to use them. Further along, Zuckerman says that the Swede has “the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles, who appeared never to have to struggle to clear a space for himself” (19). This skewed remark demonstrates the preeminent attitude that families with more money had fewer struggles. In reality, the Swede’s grandfather and father have struggled to pull together and maintain a successful glovemaking business to support the family. Of course, Zuckerman does not learn about this history until he meets Swede for dinner 50 years after high school.
This dinner is imperative to teach Zuckerman that the supposed glory of the Swede is not everything he thinks it is. The Swede does not escape prostate cancer, death in the family or divorce. Do these revelations make Swede less of a goy (non-Jew) than before? Should he now be considered “more Jewish” for having endured more public struggles?
It is interesting to try to break apart and evaluate Zuckerman’s childhood adoration for the Swede. Like others, he is enchanted by the Swede’s athletic skills that seem to lift the Jewish community of Newark out of its World War II stupor and depression. Zuckerman speaks eloquently about Swede’s celebrity and his relationship top Judaism:
The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us… in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns. Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness – just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star. (20)
Zuckerman’s almost Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness-esque adoration for Swede shows several problems in his own self-identity and his relationship with Judaism. First, Zuckerman notes that the Swede, being just another Jew from the block, will inevitably bear children with names that are less and less Jewish over the generations. This demonstrates the waning importance of obvious Jewish identifiers like names in the community. At the same time, the Swede represents everything the Jews want to be and nothing that they are. They see in him something Jewish, but cannot place their finger on it. He has become so non-Jewish in nature and behavior that he the most noteworthy Jews of all. Zuckerman aptly states, “I don’t imagine I’m the only grown man who was a Jewish kid aspiring to be an all-American kid during the patriotic war years” (19-20). This demonstrates the desire to shed Jewish identity in order to become more American. In other words, one cannot be American unless he or she releases his or her Jewishness.
Abramson, Edward A. “Bernard Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship.”
The Yearbook of English Studies. Vol. 24, Ethnicity and Representation in
American Literature, 1994. 146-156. Modern Humanities Research Association
Web 19 Oct 10 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3507887>.
The article’s thesis:
My contention is the Bernard Malamud is not only far from being an author concerned with the plight of one small grouping of humanity, but that when he treats Jewish matters, most often he universalizes Jews, Jewish culture, history, and Judaism to such an extent as to render them no more than bases from which to explore the human condition.
Alter, Iska. “The Natural, The Assistant, and American Materialism.” The Good
Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981. 1-26. Rpt. In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 129. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web 19 Oct 10 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420047439&v=2.1&u=cuny_ccny&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w>.
The thesis:
To embody his concerns as a Jew, an artist, and a moral man, Malamud has evolved a style that is uniquely his. Its fusion of the fabulous and the factual, called “lyrical realism” by the Yiddish critic Mayer Shticker, is the fictive analogue to the Chasidic belief that the mystical connection to God is to be found not in ascetic isolation, but through man’s participation in the ordinary activities and mundane events of daily existence.
Spevack, Edmund. “Racial Conflict and Multiculturalism: Bernard Malamud’s The
Tenants.” MELUS. Vol. 22, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism (Autumn, 1997),
pp. 31-54. 26 Sept 10 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/467653>.
The problem of this article is stated in multiple questions:
One main goal of this essay will be to examine whether Malamud adheres to a belief in a clearly delineated formal and thematic mainstream at the beginning of the 1970s, or whether he ventures to depart from traditional mainstream attitudes towards non-Western peoples and their forms of literary expression. Another key problem arises directly from this fundamental issue: may Malamud’s novel (with its theme of racial antagonism in the United States, as well as its reflection on the varieties of literary forms of expression) be seen as anticipating the multiculturalism and canon debates of the 1980s and 1990s? Should Malamud’s work thus be seen merely as problematic (commenting on the current state of affairs in 1971) or perhaps also as somewhat prophetic (attempting a prognosis, whatever its accuracy, of future developments)?
Shear, Walter. “Culture Conflict in ‘The Assistant’.” The Midwest Quarterly. 7.4
(Summer 1966): 367-380. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. James P. Draper and Jennifer Allison Brostrom. Vol. 78. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis:
In The Assistant two cultures, the Jewish tradition and the American heritage (representing the wisdom of the old world and the practical knowledge of the new), collide and to some degree synthesize to provide a texture of social documentation which is manifested in a realistic aesthetic. However, the dichotomy is preserved and in fact given emphasis through an entirely different aesthetic presentation, one which tends to project the characters as types and treats their motivations, environments, and ideas as symbolic threads which link the narrative to the deeper level of personal significance from which the elements of human strength and weakness manage to emerge in the actions which both define and dramatize culture as a phenomenon.
Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “Mourning the ‘greatest generation’: myth and history
in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” Twentieth Century Literature. (Vol. 51). .1 (Spring 2005): p1. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis of this article can be summarized in this quote: “I would argue that in American Pastoral, Roth, in the guise of his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, returns to a consideration of the sixties, but with a less satirical, more elegiac voice.”
Tuerk, Richard. “Jews Without Money as a Work of Art.” Studies in American
Jewish Literature. 7.1 (Spring 1988): 67-79. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis:
Jews Without Money may be “simple.” Still, it is more than a series of vivid, episodic, factual but roughhewn sketches of East Side life with a radical ending. It is, in fact, the end product of much revision, and it often comes closer to fiction than fact.
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