Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In his seminal essay "Jewish-Americans, Go Home" (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled "crypto-Jewish characters,"
who are in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else--general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman.1
The essay castigates the trend of an entire wave of postwar male Jewish writers--Miller, Salinger, Wouk, Bellow, Roth, Mailer--who reinvented Jewish protagonists as non-Jews, or gave them "goyish" qualities in order to represent a "universal" form of American alienation. The writings of this generation, according to Fiedler, are negatively "marked by the abandonment of the Jewish character as a sufficient embodiment of the Jewish author's aspirations and values, and by the invention, beside him or in his place, of characters who are not merely non-Jewish, but are, in fact, hyper-goyim, super-Gentiles of truly mythic proportions: specifically, sexual heroes of incredible potency." For Fiedler, these prototypes are found in a vast corpus of works, from the Loman family of Death of a Salesman, to the half-Jewish protagonists of Salinger's short stories, to the Hemingwayesque, Gentile Henderson of Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and Norman Mailer's Sergius O'Shaughnessy in The Deer Park.
Fiedler never questions the place of these works within the Jewish American canon or asks whether they should be excluded from the rubric of Jewish American literature simply because the characters are not overtly Jewish or because the authors, such as J. D. Salinger, had abandoned Judaism as adults. Rather, Fiedler shows how these works are absolutely rooted in, and are the result of, the anxieties of postwar Jewish American life. For Fiedler, there is likely no trope more "Jewish American" than these "hyper-goy crypto-Jews."
Surprisingly, forty-five years later the works that Fiedler discussed in his essay as most representative of the postwar Jewish experience have been excluded from the canon of Jewish American literature.2 Yet, as this essay will show, to neglect them is to overlook a central movement in Jewish American writing of the 1940s and 1950s. That age produced a trend that catalogued the intense pressures writers encountered as they sought to navigate the postwar literary landscape and felt unable or...