Not until after World War II did scholars and critics begin to pay much attention to American-Jewish writers as a group.Many of these--Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and others--have received public acclaim. While not all sharing the same tradition--one need only contrast the tradition informing the work of Saul Bellow and that informing the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer--most of these writers draw on some identifiable tradition. Certainly Nathan Asch is an American-Jewish writer, but he felt he had no tradition. Asch questioned his being an American and being a Jew and often wondered whether he was a writer. In 1936 he wrote his mother: "What does it mean to be a European Jew? To feel you are a Jew and yet you are not anything that Jews are known to be? To have no conscious Jewish culture..., to have never been in a Synagogue, to have known no...