SOURCE: "The Jewish Novelist in America," in The Schocken Guide to Jewish Books: Where to Start Reading about Jewish History, Literature, Culture, and Religion, edited by Barry W. Holtz, Schocken Books, 1992, pp. 274-302.

In the following essay, Shechner surveys twentieth-century Jewish-American fiction, focusing on those writers who declare their Jewish self-consciousness in their work.

Prologue

From the start, writing by Jewish novelists in America has been a vast enterprise. Seen from afar, the house of Jewish letters may resemble a bustling sweatshop, where writers arranged by rank and by file turn out books the way garment makers used to turn out apparel for the American clothing market. If that image belies the isolation and enclosed sensibility of the writer's enterprise, it does suggest the scale of the Jewish entry into American letters along with the hothouse atmosphere in which that literary endeavor has flourished. Writing remains, as tailoring...