What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction examines the ways in which contemporary American Jewish writers reinvent and reconfigure stories of the Hebraic covenant as a way of conceiving, negotiating, and redefining Jewish identity in America. In attempting to locate a place for Jewish identity at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, American Jewish writers look to an imaginary "memory" to reengage a defining, central Jewish history that has, post-World War II, become diluted in American culture.
- American fiction,
- Jewish authors,
- history,
- criticism,
- Jews,
- covenants,
- Judaism,
- literature
The return of the covenant, or, Whose law is it, anyway? -- Biblical revisions and interruptions : Bernard Malamud's renaming of law and covenant -- Is it "good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews"? : Philip Roth's registry of Jewish consciousness -- Ancient acts of love and betrayal : Ethan Canin's "Batorsag and Szerelem" -- The orthodoxy unbound, or Moses in suburbia : Allegra Goodman's The family Markowitz -- The legacy of the disinherited : Thane Rosenbaum's Holocaust fiction.