SOURCE: "Israel Revisited in American Jewish Literature," in Midstream, Vol. XXVIII, No. 9, November, 1982, pp. 50-54.

In the following essay, Field discusses the subject of Israel as an invigorating force in contemporary Jewish-American literature.

A few years ago Joyce Field and I interviewed Bernard Malamud. One exchange went as follows: "Characters in your fiction wrestle with their Jewishness. In response to a question, Morris Bober defines his Jewishness. Yakov Bok ultimately feels he must rejoin his people. But these characters and others seem to adapt as minority people to the pluralistic societies they find themselves in.

"One of our students recently noted that the current writers who frequently people their works with Jews—Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, I.B. Singer, etc.—and who explore serious matters concerning Jewishness, probe or suggest a variety of possible identities. These may involve religion, assimilation, acculturation, Bundism, social action, and so on.

"But...