SOURCE: "Mutations of Jewish Values in Contemporary American Fiction," in Tradition and Change in Jewish Experience, edited by A. Leland Jamison, Syracuse University Press, 1978, pp. 184-97.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1966, Schwarz contrasts the literature of alienation with literature that affirms traditional values.

Contemporary American novelists are preoccupied with man's condition and his attempts to find meaning in it. This preoccupation has elicited opposite responses: no one is less capable than the writer of describing his times and his contemporaries; no one has this capacity in greater degree than the writer. The literary artist, it is argued, cannot be trusted as an elucidator of man's condition and fate because on the one hand he has escaped into incomprehensible imagery and symbolism, and on the other hand he sees in man only absurdity, self-deception and insignificance. No doubt something like this has happened, but it...