Jewish American Fiction
Explore the finest Jewish American fiction with our curated list of must-read books. Discover compelling stories, iconic authors, and cultural insights in these acclaimed American novels.
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Jewish American Literature
by Jules Chametzky
A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.
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The Island Within
by Ludwig Lewisohn
First published in the late 1920s, The Island Within was Ludwig Lewisohn's first novel to focus on a Jewish theme. Emerging from the experience of World War I and the 1920s, this novel on alienation and mixed marriage (and much more) addresses itself with undiminished power and relevance—and poignancy—to the peculiarities of American Jewish life that continue through to this day.
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The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature
by Hana Wirth-Nesher
For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.
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American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a compulsively readable elegy for America’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and "one of Roth's most powerful novels ever" (The New York Times). Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.
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A Cynthia Ozick Reader
by Cynthia Ozick
""[Ozick's] range of influences is obvious in the fine selections of poems and short stories as well as essays from Art & Ardor (1983) and Metaphor and Memory (1989) that Kauvar has so sensitively chosen."" --Booklist ""[This collection reflects] the imaginative, inventive, and insightful Ozick. Some of the best of Ozick as poet, essayist, and fiction writer is represented in A Cynthia Ozick Reader."" --Library Journal ""Gathered here are some bristling, incandescent tales and thorny essays that show Ozick at her finest."" --The Seattle Times Cynthia Ozick is among the ten most important writers in North America today. This Reader brings her manifold talents together in a sampler of the many genres she explores. The poems, stories, and essays in this collection burst with all the energy of her capacious imagination. For those who have always lauded her, the Reader offers a representative selection; those new to Cynthia Ozick's work will revel in the discovery of a major writer.
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For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
by Nathan Englander
A work of stunning authority and imagination, Englander's debut contains ten energized, irreverent stories rooted in the weight of Jewish history and the customs of Orthodox life.
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Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse
by Irving Howe
Features the works of six major Yiddish poets and selections from the work of thirty-three others, with Yiddish and English on facing pages
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Call It Sleep
by Henry Roth
When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.
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Mr. Sammler's Planet
by Saul Bellow
Winner of the National Book Award in Fiction “An enduring testament and prophecy.” —Chicago Sun-Times A Penguin Classic Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a “registrar of madness,” a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. “Sorry for all and sore at heart,” he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler—who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings—a good life is one in which a person does what is “required of him.” To know and to meet the “terms of the contract” was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Stanley Crouch. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Collected Stories
by Grace Paley
At long last, here are all of Grace Paley's classic stories collected in one volume. From her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), Grace Paley's quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language have won her readers' hearts and secured her place as one of America's most accomplished writers. Grace Paley's stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, by her extraordinary capacity for empathy, and by her pointed, funny depiction a the small and large events that make up city life. As her work progresses, we encounter many of the same characters and revisit the same sites, bearing witness to a community as it develops and matures, becoming part ourselves of a dense and vital world that is singular yet achingly familiar.
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The Magic Barrel
by Bernard Malamud
A collection of thirteen short fiction stories, set in New York and Italy, by twentieth-century American author Bernard Malamud.
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The Education of Hyman Kaplan
by Leo Rosten
"The hilarious, timeless tale about a unique American experience"--Cover
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Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems
by Emma Lazarus
The first important American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus is remembered above all for her classic sonnet “The New Colossus,” whose phrases (“Give me your tired, your poor.”) have become part of the American language. In this new selection of Lazarus’s work, John Hollander demonstrates that in her relatively brief life she achieved real poetic mastery in a variety of modes. In early poems like “Phantasies” and “Symphonic Studies,” she explored fluently imagined inner landscapes suggested by the music of Schumann. Later, her deepening interest in Jewish history and culture was expressed in such powerful poems as “1492,” “The New Ezekiel,” and “The Guardian of the Red Disk.” Influenced both by American models, among them her poetic mentor Emerson, and by the poets whose work she translated, including Heinrich Heine and the medieval Hebrew poets Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Judah ha-Levi, she forged a poetic style of high technical accomplishment and moral passion. Long neglected, her work is revealed in this volume as an important contribution to American poetry. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
