Crafting the Jewish Writer: Jewish Writing, Professionalism, and the Short Story in Post-War America.

Abstract

This dissertation considers the place of the short story in the post-war efflorescence of American Jewish writing. If focuses particularly on the strategies that Jewish writers deployed, through their uses and meta-fictional portrayals of the short story form, to negotiate between Jewish and professional personae. The short story is at once a vehicle of entry into single-author publication and a generally insufficient guarantor of further publication, a forum for experimentation and an emblem of high-art mastery. In works foregrounding the liminality of the short story as a marker of professional attainment, I argue, writers of Jewish fiction interrogated their professional, Jewish, and Jewish-professional identities in the postwar American literary scene. Many writers of Jewish descent or of Jewish subject matter have professed ambivalence (if not hostility) to being labeled Jewish writers. Between their own Jewishness and their work, these writers maintain a barrier of professionalism, arguing that their work, whatever else it is, stands in relation to them as work and not as scarcely-mediated expression of their selves or their cultural origins. Chapter one compares two approaches to the definition of Jewish writing—Jewish communal and literary-professional—in anthologies edited by Harold U. Ribalow (This Land, These People, 1950) and Saul Bellow (Great Jewish Stories, 1963). Chapter two examines Tillie Olsen’s enlistment of the short story form in Tell Me a Riddle (1961), in the service of a post-Communist politics that draws on narratives of Jewish socialism to link the discontinuities in a writer’s career with the political ruptures confronting the political Left in the early Cold War. Chapter three moves from Olsen’s concern with gaps in political commitment to Cynthia Ozick’s treatment of the truncated careers of Yiddish writers in her 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Chapter four concludes with an analysis of Philip Roth’s investigation of Jewish literary professionalism in his 1979 novella The Ghost Writer.