5 - Making It Into the Mainstream 1945–1970

Summary

The years between 1945 and 1970 stand as one of the most overdetermined periods in the history of Jewish American fiction and in which Jewish American writers broke into the mainstream of American literature. These years saw the appearance of popular middlebrow novels that digested historical transformations into easily consumed, frequently sentimental narratives. This chapter discusses the emergence of the hegemonic concept of identity that multiculturalism heralded, and in which American Jews have shared just as much as everybody else. The postwar period saw literature that can be fruitfully analyzed as asking to be read through a multicultural lens, as offering readers anthropological access through which to fix Jewish culture as an object of examination. Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which is every American's favorite Jewish literary reference, and Saul Bellow's The Victim which explores anti-Semitism, can be seen to bookend the Jewish American fiction of the period.