SOURCE: "The Assimilation of the American Jewish Writer: Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow," in Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986, pp. 46-57.

In the following essay, which was originally published in Jahrbuch fir Amerikastudien in 1964, Chametzky illustrates the developments in literary control that occurred over three generations of Jewish-American writers.

The starting point for these observations is the appearance of two publications at the end of the 1950s. On 6 November 1959, the Times Literary Supplement was devoted to "The American Imagination," a sequel to TLS's first special supplement on American literature five years earlier. The 1959 issue included a long article on a subject not previously mentioned: "A Vocal Group—The Jewish Part in American Letters." The year before, Mr. Leslie Fiedler delivered three important and provocative lectures surveying what he called, martially enough, "the breakthrough" of the American...