Writing our way home

This extraordinary collection is the first to present the unprecedented range of American Jewish fiction today, from the acclaimed immigrant and post-immigrant masters such as Singer, Bellow, Roth, Ozick, Malamud, and Paley to the new voices of post-acculturation like those of Mark Helprin, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Daphne Merkin, Allegra Goodman, and Adam Schwartz. Writing Our Way Home limns the dramatic transformation of Jewish life in the past three decades. Its stories arise from such developments as the emergence of feminism, the impact of Israel, the broken silence about the Holocaust, the return to - as well as flight from - tradition, and the birth of an egalitarian religious creativity alongside the further advance of assimilation. It also exhibits the writers' growing knowledge of modern and biblical Hebrew, the wellspring of a new Jewish literature. In bringing our consciousness of American Jewish fiction up to date, the editors emphasize the "open literary community" that has come into being. As Ted Solotaroff characterizes it, "the religious and the secular, the experimental and the traditional, the realistic and the surreal cohabit, and even sometimes nuzzle, more or less peaceably." At the same time, the editors find some developments particularly promising, such as the rekindled literary strategies of Judaism employed by writers "culturally confident" enough, as Nessa Rapoport points out, to turn nostalgic stereotypes into archetypes. Rich and provocative in themselves, these twenty-four stories announce that the Jewish imagination in late-twentieth-century America is flourishing in unforeseen and dazzling ways as its authors continue to extend a remarkably adaptive literary tradition across an array of contemporary contexts.