Counterplots: Great 20th Century Jewish Americana
Discover the best 20th-century Jewish Americana books, from Philip Roth's *The Plot Against America* to Art Spiegelman's *Maus*. Explore fiction, memoirs, and graphic novels on identity, history, and the immigrant experience in this curated literary list.
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The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The chilling bestselling alternate history novel of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president whose government embraces anti-Semitism—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. “A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike...You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book Review One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
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Call It Sleep
by Henry Roth
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world.
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Jew Gangster
by Joe Kubert
With his father's words, Don't be a Jew gangster, still ringing in his head, a young man finds himself doing just that, as no other path in life opens for him. Easy money and easier women lure him into doing the dirty work of the local gang; it's not a pretty life, but he can eat well, and his mother's apartment continues to get heat all through the cold winter. But what he has to pay -- in flesh, in pride, in honour -- may not be worth all he earns. With the same intensity and eye for detail that he put into Yossel, Joe Kubert recreates a time when even the most innocent person was caught up in the dark underbelly of society.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Maus
by Art Spiegelman
The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.
