This is something I wrote on April 25, 2006, as part of a final paper for my Jewish-American Fictions course, which was one of my favorite courses of my undergraduate career. It was, also, the last class I attended as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I wanted to create some poetry for the class, even though the course was on fiction, prose, not poetry. I am also trying to track down a sort of heart-wrenching poem I have about the Shoah and being a convert.
So, until then, here you are: A little piece of me, right around the time of my conversion to Judaism under Reform auspices.
Jewish-American fiction puts pen to paper, making an image of who
we are and where we've been. It's Tova Mirvis making my heart bleed
at the makings of a family figuring out when everything started changing
and Jonathan Safran Foer making "small prayers to G-d" out of
memory and religiosity. Jewish-American fiction places faces and makes
a mosaic out of the grab bag of the things that mean "Jewish." Turning
tradition into struggle, love and survival into the trappings of figuring out
what modernity means to the tradition of remembering. Jewish-American
fiction is a window to the outside world, as Jews and nonJews, and characters
kept inside story forms make it possible to peek outside and see what we do to
be Orthodox, Reform, lapsed, born again, a believer or dreamer, secular,
sane, insane, in love and out of love, living, dying and surviving.
But above all else, when we are bound to a book below lamplight,
it’s easiest to say that Jewish-American fiction is the definition of humanity.
I ended the paper with the following, If anything, [Bernard] Malamud is using Jews as the example: Humanity at its core is Jewish. It is survival, perseverance and remembering so as not to repeat. By saying “all men are Jews,” Malamud creates a most-powerful metaphor, and an example, for all religions, races and nations. He simply is saying “here is the beginning, here is who you are, don’t forget it."
In response to my final paper (which is much longer than these two excerpts), my professor gave me one of the greatest compliments I've probably ever received from someone, and this was just as I was converting the first time around! He said, "Jewishness, Jewish culture, is a matter of putting pen to paper – you’ve got that down, too. You have what my mother would have called a Yiddishe kupf – a Jewish head. You see the subtleties, the nuances in things. You see the humor that’s enveloped in tragedy, and the tears hidden inside the laughter." Here's one Jew who knew.
A sampling of some of the amazing things we read that semester, which I definitely need to revisit are:
- "Lady of the Lake
" by Bernard Malamud
- Maus I
and Maus II
by Art Spiegelman
- Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
- The Outside World
by Tova Mirvis
- "Electricity" by ... I can't remember. This bums me out greatly.
- "When You're Excused, You're Excused" by Bruce Jay Friedman
- The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman
- The Shawl
by Cynthia Ozick
And, if you know what's good for you, you'll purchase Bad Jews and Other Stories
by Gerald Shapiro. Would I lead you astray?
by Gerald Shapiro. Would I lead you astray? 
" by Dara Horn -- I started reading this quite some time ago and had to actually re-start it when I began again recently. I'm about 60 pages in, and aside from the confusion in transition between chapters 1 and 2, it's been pretty outstanding. The story is set during Civil War times and has a nice Jewish boy (or maybe not so nice) skipping out on his future nuptials for some war service. He gets an uncomfortable gig doing some uncomfortable (read: anti-semitic) work, but runs with it. That's about as far as I am, and it's a beautifully woven novel that moves incredibly fast. I'm still perplexed as to where the storyline is going, but being an immense fan of Dara Horn's "
," I'm incredibly hopeful. Here's hoping I'm not disappointed!
e Bridge
" by Julie Orringer. The problem is, I have a hard time putting it down, so it's on my bedside table, and I read it before going to bed each night, which actually has done wonders for helping to put me to sleep (can't say much for the staying asleep bit). It's a very fluid novel, save some of the parts that go into architectural mumbo jumbo that I just sort of breeze by. The focus of the novel is a Jewish gent from Budapest who heads to Paris for architectural school in pre-war times. He rallies around a group of Jewish fellows, falls for a mysterious woman with a scarred past, and eventually ends up back in Budapest (which is where I am now, and I still have a ton left to read, so I have no idea what's going to happen, so no worries about spoilers). The narrative and dialogue are brilliantly written, very period appropriate, and my only beef with the novel, as I said, is the random tangents on architectural stuff (also, sometimes the Jewishly peppered stuff seems forced). So, I know he's in architectural school and that the goings on at the Ecole d'Especial is very important, but the detail is a little obnoxious at times. I'm sort of mesmerized, however, with Orringer's attention to detail, and I'm really mystified as to where this novel is going, what with the war having started and me still having half the book left to read. The characters are so vivid, I feel like I'm walking the streets of Paris with them, eating at the same bars as them, and smelling the fresh bread they're purchasing. Pick this up, stat. 
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