What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction
Files
Description
What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction examines the ways in which contemporary American Jewish writers reinvent and reconfigure stories of the Hebraic covenant as a way of conceiving, negotiating, and redefining Jewish identity in America. In attempting to locate a place for Jewish identity at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, American Jewish writers look to an imaginary "memory" to reengage a defining, central Jewish history that has, post-World War II, become diluted in American culture.
Publication Date
2005
Publisher
University of Delaware Press
City
Newark
Keywords
American fiction, Jewish authors, history, criticism, Jews, covenants, Judaism, literature
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
Table of Contents
The return of the covenant, or, Whose law is it, anyway? -- Biblical revisions and interruptions : Bernard Malamud's renaming of law and covenant -- Is it "good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews"? : Philip Roth's registry of Jewish consciousness -- Ancient acts of love and betrayal : Ethan Canin's "Batorsag and Szerelem" -- The orthodoxy unbound, or Moses in suburbia : Allegra Goodman's The family Markowitz -- The legacy of the disinherited : Thane Rosenbaum's Holocaust fiction.
Original Publication Information
University of Delaware Press
Recommended Citation
Aarons, Victoria. What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.