Tillie Olsen, feminist and working-class writer,grew up in Wyoming and Nebraska, areas which have not often been the childhood homes of America's Jewish authors. This might explain why, despite the fact that some of her urban working-class characters are Jewish, Olsen's work does not center around the Jewish experience. Feminism and humanism--not Judaism--are at the heart of her writing. While American-Jewish writers often explore the relationship of assimilation and identity to American-Jewish life, Olsen deals with these two concerns in terms of the lives of women and the poor. Hence, like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud, Olsen does not restrict herself to that which is exclusively Jewish. Because Henry Roth's depiction of ghetto life in Call It Sleep (1934) is analogous to her descriptions of urban poverty, he is the Jewish writer whose fiction is closest to her own.

In addition to her attention to working-class...