Jewish Authors

Traces 50 years' development of Jewish American fiction, poetry, and humor as it analyzes fictional portrayals of Jews themselves.

In the Mainstream represents the second in a multi-volume study of the Jewish American as both writer and character in our nation's literature. This book focuses on the period from 1950 to the 1980s. The author provides abundant evidence that by the end of the 1950s, Jewish writers had achieved full status in the realm of American fiction. His study examines precursors and strains of influence relating to this development, with special attention to the influence occasioned by Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, and Commentary.

Jewish Americans produced some of the most important writing in the U.S. in the twentieth century. This Companion addresses the distinctive Jewish American contribution to American literary criticism, poetry and popular culture. It establishes the broadest possible context for the discussion of Jewish American identity as it intersects with the corpus of American literature. Featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, the volume is valuable to scholars and students alike.

"There is so much to Louis Harap's three volumes, this extraordinary trilogy, that a reviewer can only hint at the depth, penetrating intelligence, research, and insight of the author. This is a monumental work." American Jewish Archives

In this collection of fifteen essays, Jewish Latin American writers speak for themselves about their lives, their literary work, their formative experiences, and the Jewish communities in Latin America and the United States.

Focusing on the way Jewish history -- particularly the Holocaust -- and tradition inform postwar Canadian and American Jewish literature, A House of Words offers innovative readings of the works of such influential writers as Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel, Mordecai Richler, Chava Rosenfarb, Philip Roth, and Nathanael West. Norman Ravvin highlights the concerns that these disparate writers share as Jewish writers as well as places their work in the context of the broader traditions of multiculturalism, post-colonial writing, and critical theory.

Arguing that Jewish North American writing is too commonly discussed as part of the mainstream, neglecting the Jewish aspects of the works, Ravvin places the writing of Bellow, Richler, Cohen, West, Mandel, Roth, and Rosenfarb within the Jewish context that the works demand. Ravvin depicts a Jewish cultural landscape within which postwar writers contend with community and identity, continuity and loss, and highlights the way this particular landscape is entangled with broader literary and cultural traditions. He considers Bellow and West alongside apocalyptic narratives, discusses Cohen in relation to the counterculture, examines Mandel's postmodern view of history, and looks at autobiography and ethics in Roth and Rosenfarb.

At once scholarly and poetic, A House of Words will appeal to the general reader of Canadian, American, and Jewish literature and history, as well as to specialists in these fields.