Reviews | February 11, 2020
Unencumbered Exuberance: Four Jewish Comic Novelists of Note
Bradley Babendir
In the titular essay of Adam Kirsch’s essay collection Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? the critic and poet recounts the ways in which many of his and my canonical forebears rejected the moniker. He quotes Philip Roth referring to “American Jewish Writer” as an epithet. Saul Bellow was slightly more diplomatic, saying, “I have tried to fit my soul into the Jewish-writer category, but it does not feel comfortably accommodated there. Lionel Trilling couldn’t find “anything in [his] professional intellectual life” that traced back to his Judaism.
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