The Claim for Identity of the American Jewish Post-War Fictional Individual in the Modern World.

Twentieth century can be seen as an endless cycle of crisis that brought about transformations of the modern psyche as well as a great impact on the general literary thinking of the time with its burden of anxiety, its consciousness of modern nihilism and its hunger for moral recovery. This moment coincides with the start of a "Golden Age" for Jewish American Literature as well. Leading figures in this literary Jewish "renaissance" were Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Isaak Bashevis Singer, Grace Paley and others. They upraised the Jewish American literature from a non-inclusive ethnic sideshow to a mainstream. In most of their writings, the need to transcend alienation results from the Jewish suffering human condition as social outcasts. Jews had come to see America as a kind of heaven for themselves; this is why their preoccupation to express belongingness in some naturalistic American premises in almost every literary work is to be justified. The present paper will attempt to give a general picture of a parabolic transcending that starts with Ozick's conservative devotion to Jewish heredity and holocaust memory and transforms into Paley's liberal celebration of America's multicultural community. The illustrative sections will act as coordinates in this conceptual and transcendental parabolic 'diagram' which will offer good ground for the exploration of this feeling of otherness dominating the intellectual and historical consciousness of the post-war fictional individual in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]