What happened to Abraham?
Subtitle: reinventing the covenant in American Jewish fiction
By: Victoria Aarons.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Newark
Language: eng
Number of pages: 181
ISBN-13: 9780874139013
Subjects: American fiction -- Jewish authors -- History and criticism; Jews -- United States -- Intellectual life; Covenants -- Religious aspects -- Judaism; Judaism and literature -- United States; Judaism in literature; Jews in literature
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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The return of the covenant, or, Whose law is it, anyway?; title: Biblical revisions and interruptions : Bernard Malamud's renaming of law and covenant; title: Is it "good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews"? : Philip Roth's registry of Jewish consciousness; title: Ancient acts of love and betrayal : Ethan Canin's "Batorsag and Szerelem"; title: The orthodoxy unbound, or Moses in suburbia : Allegra Goodman's The family Markowitz; title: The legacy of the disinherited : Thane Rosenbaum's Holocaust fiction.