The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Jewish American literature is traced back to the late 1800s. This first wave of writing was steeped in the experiences of immigrants, particularly European immigrants and their struggles building new lives in America. The next wave, roughly the period between 1930 and 1945, happily left immigrant culture behind and looked to America for hope in the face of crises such as the Depression and the Holocaust. Lewis Fried remarks, “Assimilation was a welcome fact of their American existence.”12 Most scholars, however, agree that the heyday of modern Jewish American literature began in the 1950s, and references to great Jewish American literature most often take us back to this period. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth came onto the scene and dominated Jewish American fiction for decades to come. No list of Jewish American writers was complete without their names.