T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

generational experience was fairly similar and clannish, manywrlters including Bernard Malamud could be brought under thecanopy of American-Jewish writlng and used to exemplify itsfresh, independent and heightened perspectives. The accounts ofthe bitter strife between immigrant fathers and accultured sonsthat marked the literature of the 1940's gave way to a morepositive evaluation of a Jewish heritage. The work of these newwriters relnforced the vlew that Amerlcan-Jewish writing wasshaped by traditions of moral centre, erudltlon, dialecticalthinking and vast reserves of self Irony. "There was noquestion that a breakthrough of sensibility was occurlnq, thatit was changing the cultural climate, that it was enablingJewlsh wrlters to feel they had a place as well as positions,and that their Jewlsh upbringing was no longer to bediscounted". (Solotaroff 1988,l) On the other hand the sense ofarrival, achievement and opportunity that the break-throughsponsored tended to exaggerate the significance of theaarginallty:After all, a margln that was broad enough to harbourRobert Warshow (an elegant fllm crltic) and MannyFarber (an intensely demotlc one) Stanley Kunitz andAllen Gihsberg, Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer,Irving Krlstol and Paul Goodman was bound to bealmost as broad as the mainstream it was supposedlyset off from. (Solotaroff 1988,l)I: was nct untll the mid 1960's that such concerns as the