At the end of the twentieth century, Jewish fiction is as inconceivable without the Holocaust as is the century itself without its two world wars, the Middle Ages without Christianity and Homer's Odyssey without the sacking and burning of Troy. Modern Jewish authors have either confronted the slaughter of their people and the elimination of Jewish culture in most of central and eastern Europe or they have not understood that they must confront it if they are to do important work. In either case, the cries of the doomed, however distant and muffled, are to be heard in and through their pages. The often terrible facts of history shunt like invisible trains across the landscape of the soul. It may not be superfluous to observe that these trains always arrive on time. Readers know about them, and await them, even if authors, or those who pretend to be authors, do not.

To say this is not in any sense to argue that contemporary Jewish- American authors ought to be religious Jews, or secular Jews, or Jews who consciously set out, either personally or indirectly, to deal with the consequences of the Holocaust. It is not to argue anything but the facts. Recognizably Jewish- American authors, like recognizably black American ones, are simply perceived, and usually perceive themselves, as emerging from a peculiar suffering and horror. The idea of ignoring their history of genocide and slavery respectively, however these authors choose to handle it, is difficult for most readers. The latest Jewish and black authors, too, usually find that scanting their history is well- nigh impossible. The tug toward superficiality and mordant wit is no longer as powerful as the need to pay some sort of homage, slack and skinny though it may be, to ineluctable human catastrophes whose legacies persist as wounds and poisons.

This is why Jewish- American fiction of the best sort— and what can this term possibly mean except fiction written about Jewish Americans, even when it is not, as in the case of John Updike, written by Jews?— has changed significantly over the past 30 years.