Who We Are

Rubin (Utrecht Univ.; coeditor, Religion in America: European and American Perspectives) has collected essays from 29 Jewish American writers, of which about half were written especially for this volume. Arranged chronologically by the authors' date of birth, beginning with Saul Bellow and ending with Yael Goldstein, the essays represent three generations of writers. Some of the themes explored include religion, the immigrant experience, the destruction of European Jewry, and the autonomy of the imagination. Pearl Abraham, Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, and Allegra Goodman write of the place of religion in Jewish American literature; Binnie Kirshenbaum describes the upper-class suburban Jew as a writer; Lev Raphael writes from a gay perspective; Thane Rosenbaum and Jonathan Rosen write about literature and Jewish life from the viewpoints of a lawyer and an editor; Lara Vapnyar writes about emigration from Russia to the United States; and Johanna Kaplan's "Tales of My Great-Grandfathers" is a wonderful evocation of the Jewish European past. Other notable contributors include Chaim Potok, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and E.L. Doctorow. A wide-ranging and eclectic group of essays, this collection c.