Leslie Fiedler's The Last Jew in America (1966), the first [and title novella] of three novellas in a single collection, is set in the small Western college town of Lewis and Clark City, Montana. But the story, in the tradition of the oft-touted (and occasionally scorned) college novel goes beyond narrow academic concerns. It deals with the efforts of one Jacob Moscowitz … to bring together those Jews in the community … in order to reawaken whatever sense of Jewish identity still remains in their malnourished souls. (p. 412)
Jacob had originally moved West to convert the natives to socialism. But the effort had been a dismal failure; the Party could hardly have made a worse choice, either in Jacob Moscowitz the Old World Jew with the Yiddish accent, or the mythic "Western" ambience they have placed him into. The situation only serves to make more apparent the isolation Jacob finds himself in…. Years later Jacob will transform (or convert) this earlier mission into a more viable quest: to get together a minyan, or quorum, made up of half-or fully assimilated Jewish professors at the local university.
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