Jean's Honors Thesis

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>.