These essays on representative Jewish and Irish writers are true to
the form's definition as an attempt or experiment rather than a
credo. Wohlgelernter defines the author's "excited imagination" by
thoroughgoing analysis of the work's constituent parts. He gives
particular emphasis to the author's own words and expressions,
those verbal inventions that linger in the mind long after the act
of reading or criticism. He finds a passionate love of words and
language forging a powerful link between Jewish and Irish
literature, rooted as they are in similar historical experience.
Both literatures engage the human struggle with life and death,
virtue and weakness, success and failure, dreams and nightmares,
all under the constant surveillance of tradition. Wohlgelernter
divides his book into four general categories: the Holocaust,
Jewish-American writers, Irish writers, and memoirs and
autobiography. His chapters on Holocaust literature engage a range
of literary perspectives that combine memoir, journalism, fiction,
and philosophical reflection in the writings of Ladislas Fuks, Lucy
Dawidowicz, Sabine Reichel, and Primo Levi. Chapters on postwar
Jewish writers including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip
Roth explore the ambivalences of assimilation with its
encroachments of a provincial past and dissatisfactions with
mainstream culture. Wohlgelernter notes how all yoke street
raciness and high cultural mandarin in a distinctive contribution
to American prose style. A similar richness of language and
preoccupation with the political and cultural claims of the past
characterize the chapters on the great short story writer Frank
O'Connor, the playwright Brendan Behan, and the Irish-American
journalist and novelist Pete Hamill. The last decades of the
twentieth century have seen a prolific outpouring of
autobiographical writing, and in the concluding section of the book
the author treats representative examples that amplify or reflect
on the personal and historical themes encountered in Jewish and
Irish fiction: assimilation, personal ambition, intermarriage, and
political allegiance. Among the writers treated here are Norman
Podhoretz, Calvin Trillin, James McBride, Ari Goldman, and Howard
Shack. Wohlgelernter's emphasis on the timeless, recurring themes
of literature is matched by a lucidity of style and soundness of
method that yield what is central to all criticism, namely insight.
"Jewish Writers/Irish Writers" will be of interest to literary
scholars, Jewish studies specialists, and cultural historians.
General
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