Black-Jewish Relations in African American and Jewish American Fiction

📖 The Scoop

Students of comparative or American literature will find this new bibliography extremely useful in understanding the perspectives of American ethnic writers, for it is not only in how they describe and respond to white hegemony that we comprehend their worldview, but also through their depiction of interrelationships with other ethnic groups.

Although African American and Jewish American writers are more prolific than other ethnic writers in the U.S., this is the first study to list and describe the contexts in which these writers portray relationships between the two groups. The 410 entries are drawn from more than a century of novels, short stories, children's books, young adult books, and plays. Meyer analyzes the dynamic relationships between the characters, and the result is a more complete understanding of the complicated reality of ethnicity within a multicultural society.

While the issue of Black-Jewish relations is only tangential in some of the bibliography's novels (the largest genre group), it is central in many others. These include well-known texts like Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, and Chester Hime's Lonely CrusadeI>, as well as obscure but significant works such as Bernard Packer's The Second Death of Samuel Auer, Carl Ruthven Offord's The White Face, and several works by John A. Williams. In addition to author, title, and publication date indexes, Meyer provides a thematic index, which allows the reader to cluster texts by location, by the time in which they take place, or in terms of the issues they discuss (religion, interpersonal relationships, etc.).

Appropriate for both public libraries (reader's advisory) and academic libraries, this new title has wide-ranging implications for the study of ethnic American literatures.