What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction
by Victoria Aarons
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Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2005
ISBN: 0-87413-901-5
Published in 2005
$37.50
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This book 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 biblical "memory" to reengage a defining, central Jewish history that has, post-World War II, become diluted in American culture. Here, the laws of the covenant become metaphors and allegories of invention, promise, and design, but also of alienation and despair. "Jewish law" is constructed as a root metaphor of the lost immediacy of identity, a discursive space for talking about the anxieties and apprehensions of secular, post-Holocaust Jewish culture and collective, assimilated identity in America. This study includes such contemporary writers as Philip Roth, Allegra Goodman, and Thane Rosenbaum, and others, whose fiction contributes to the ongoing dialogue about the complexities and possibilities for living as reconstructed Jews in contemporary America. Victoria Aarons is Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Trinity University.
