Philip Roth's Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot Against America
This essay reads Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as testifying to the novelist's reengagement with and recovery of his essential Jewish racial identity as well as his re-vision of America as the promised land for its Jews. Situating the complex cultural politics of yiddishkayt in the matrix of the New Deal idealism of the Rooseveltian era, it addresses the novelist's engagement with American democracy that has safeguarded the Jews and other immigrants from being persecuted.
Handbook of American-Jewish literature : an analytical guide to topics, themes, and sources
Acknowledgments Introduction by Lewis Fried In the Beginning: American-Jewish Fiction, t880-1930 by David Martin Fine American-Jewish Fiction, 1930-1945 by Lewis Fried American-Jewish Fiction Since 1945 by Bonnie K. Lyons The Greening of American-Jewish Drama by Ellen Schiff American-Jewish Poetry: An Overview by R. Barbara Gitenstein Yiddish Dreams in America by Joseph C. Landis American Yiddish Literary Criticism by Hannah Berliner Fischthal A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish by Kathryn Hellerstein Makers of a Modern American-Jewish Theology by Arnold Jacob Wolf Zionist Ideology in America by David Polish American-Jewish Autobiography, 1912 to the Present by Steven J. Rubin Images of America in American-Jewish Fiction by Sanford E. Marovitz Eastern Europe in American-Jewish Writing by Asher Z. Milbauer Shadows of Identity: German-Jewish and American-Jewish Literature--A Comparative Study by Gershon Shaked (Translated by Jeffrey Green) Fiction of the Holocaust by Dorothy Seidman Bilik The Holocaust and Its Historiography: The Major Texts by Saul Friedman American-Jewish Fiction: The Germanic Reception by Sepp L. Tiefenthaler Guide to European Bibliography by Sepp L. Tiefenthaler Selected Reference Materials and Resources
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":