1. See the chapter “Jewish-Americans, Go Home!” in Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin, ed. Fiedler, Leslie (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 91Google Scholar. The second quotation is from page 96.

2. The three most recent major anthologies and surveys of Jewish American writing do not include these “crypto-Jewish” texts, although they do contain other works by the authors. See, for example, A Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, ed. Chametzky, Jules, Felstiner, John, Flanzbaum, Hilene, and Hellerstein, Kathryn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001)Google Scholar; Lambert, Josh, American Jewish Fiction (JPS Guide) (Philadelphia: JPS Guide, 2009)Google Scholar; and The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Kramer, Michael P. and Wirth-Nesher, Hana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, the editors’ introductions to each of these books offer nuanced considerations on how Jewish American literature should be defined, suggesting that the trend is toward an increasingly inclusive definition. Thus, while Lambert's guide “excludes books that do not mention Jews,” he does include “novels by non-Jewish authors” (10). Wirth-Nesher and Kramer aim to cast “a wide net—historically, thematically, linguistically, and generically” (9), while the introduction to A Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature offers a compelling discussion of the problematics of the term Jewish American and/or American Jewish, asserting that in the end “this anthology means to expand the question of identity to encompass all its turns and folds” (3).

3. See Alter, Robert, “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares,” Commentary 45, no. 1 (January 1968): 54Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., 48.

5. The introduction to Norich, Anita's Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar gives an overview of the variations in response to the Holocaust between English and Yiddish authors. See pages 1–15.

6. See Bellow, Saul, “The Dangling Man,” in Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 3Google Scholar.

7. Dickstein, Morris's groundbreaking Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar shows the huge shift that occurred in American writing generally in response to the Depression and war. The book focuses extensively on the prominent role played by Jewish male writers in this sea change. Deborah Dash Moore's essay “When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American Jewry” and Hasia R. Diner's “Before ‘The Holocaust’: American Jews Confront Catastrophe, 1945–1962” demarcate the ways that war service and the experience of the Holocaust caused a profound shift in postwar Jewish life. These two essays are found in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Moore, Deborah Dash (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 23–44 and 83–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. persuasive, Michael Alexander'sJazz Age Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar delineates how first-generation immigrants had their own sets of profound anxieties that played themselves out in popular culture.

9. The most thorough consideration of the role of Kafka in the Jewish canon can be found in Miron, Dan's From Continuity to Contiguity: Towards a New Jewish Literary Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 303–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wisse, Ruth includes Kafka and The Trial in her influential The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Robert Alter problematizes the widespread reading of Kafka, 's works as Jewish in “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares,” Commentary 45, no. 1 (January 1968), 48–54Google Scholar.

10. For an illuminating glimpse into the fears some feel about creating inclusive definitions of Jewish American culture, see Whitfield, Stephen's essay “The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture,” in Moore, American Jewish Identity Politics, 243–66Google Scholar. Whitfield asserts that a maximalist definition (of the type that I am espousing here) wipes out what is specific to Jewish life. Yet I believe that to widen the net of inclusion is not to water down to nothing the Jewish factors of the texts, but instead to focus our attention on them, and to see how they are responsible in multiple ways for making postwar writing in America take on a Jewish tone. Whitfield's essay expresses in a dehistoricized manner the anxieties felt by those who see the reduction in active Judaism in America as a reduction in Jewish culture. He desires a “vigorous” Jewish response when, in fact, throughout time, Jewish cultural responses to the dominant society have rarely been “vigorous” and have generally been incredibly textured and subtle. This has, I believe, been a major factor in the Jewish resilience and vitality that he seeks out.

11. For a detailed analysis of the process of writing Death of a Salesman, see Bigsby, Christopher, Arthur Miller: 1915–1962 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 289–338Google Scholar.

12. Christopher Bigsby points out that Biff's dream of running a ranch is doomed to inevitable hardship, as can be seen when Miller wrote the screenplay for the film, The Misfits. Biff Loman had become Gay, “an ageing cowboy as bewildered by the collapse of his world as Willy Loman had been.” See Bigsby, 's essay, “Death of a Salesman: In Memoriam,” in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 127Google Scholar.

13. For a detailed account of the influence of the Depression on the Miller family, see the chapter “From Harlem to Brooklyn” in Christopher Bigsby's excellent new, comprehensive biography of Miller entitled Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 1–76.

14. Miller's revealing and emotional discussion of the impact of the Depression on his family, from which these statements are taken, are found in an interview conducted with Arthur Miller by Bigsby, Christopher and published in Arthur Miller and Company: Arthur Miller Talks about His Work in the Company of Actors, Designers, Directors, Reviewers and Writers, ed. Bigsby, Christopher (Norwich: University of East Anglia, Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies) 1990, 17–21Google Scholar.

15. See Kullman, Colby H.'s “Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller,” in Bloom's Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman, ed. Bloom, Harold (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), 114Google Scholar.

16. Miller, Arthur, introduction to Collected Plays (London: Cresset Press, 1958), 35Google Scholar.

17. McCarthy, Mary, introduction to Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1958 (London: Heinemann, 1959), xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

18. Fiedler, Waiting for the End, 91.

19. See Martin, Robert A., “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview,” Educational Theatre Journal 21, no. 3 (October 1969): 310–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This quotation is on pp. 314–15.

20. See Ross, George, “Death of a Salesman in the Original: The Yiddish Version Reveals the Real Willy Loman,” Commentary II (1951): 184–86Google Scholar. Jeffrey Shandler astutely notes that “such postulations of nonexistent Yiddish Urtexts that lie hidden beneath actual English originals imagine Yiddish as an extralinguistic phenomenon, a fundamental as well as a transcendent essence that can persist despite the absence of actual language.” See Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 122–23Google Scholar. Thus these Yiddish readings of Miller's play suggest much about the broader Jewish culture's desire to continue Yiddish. In one of the first essays to consider the Jewish aspects of the play, Shatzky, Joel's “Arthur Miller's Jewish Salesman,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2, no. 1 (1976), 7Google Scholar, furthered the trend by suggesting that Death of a Salesman would be more authentic in Yiddish. Shatzky states, “when the playwright stumbles in his use of language, when words sound strange in their context, it seems to me it is because Miller's feeling for Yiddish often interferes with his desire to eliminate all traces of it from his English.” Shatzky provides examples showing features of Yiddish speech. For further discussions of the Jewish literary cadences of the play, see Ruby Cohn, “The Articulate Victims of Arthur Miller,” in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: Modern Critical Interpretations, 41. Harap, Louis discusses the play's “use of Yiddishized English expressions” in Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black–Jewish Literary Relationship (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 124Google Scholar. Bigsby discusses how Jewish writers of Miller, 's generation “reveled in the English language, listened acutely to its differing accents and rhythms, often shot through with Jewish idioms and construction,” in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 484Google Scholar. See Harold Bloom's “Editor's Note,” in Bloom's Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman, xiii.

21. See Bloom, “Editor's Note,” xiii.

22. Mamet, David, “The Human Stain,” The Guardian, May 7, 2005Google Scholar.

23. For a full discussion of this, see Vogel, Dan, “From Milkman to Salesman: Glimpses of the Galut,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 10, no. 2 (1999): 172–78Google Scholar.

24. Miller, Arthur, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” Jewish Life 2, no. 5 (1948): 10Google Scholar.

25. Vogel, “From Milkman to Salesman,” 177.

26. As quoted from Bigsby's interview with Miller in Arthur Miller and Company, 28.

27. Ibid., 16.

28. Miller, Arthur, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 24Google Scholar.

29. See his interview with Bigsby in Arthur Miller and Company, 56. Bigsby, in fact, asserts that Biff's betrayal of his father's values is directly tied to Arthur's decision to go to college instead of remaining in Brooklyn to take on his father's business. See Bigsby, Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, 100–101.

30. See his interview with Bigsby in ibid., 61.

31. See, for example, Miller's 1947 piece “Concerning Jews Who Write,” 7–8, or Miller, 's essay “The Face in the Mirror: Antisemitism Then and Now,” in Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944– 2000, ed. Centola, Steven R. (London: Methuen, 2000), 205–208Google Scholar. Dinnerstein, Leonard examines the large rise in anti-Semitism during the war years in the appropriately titled chapter “Antisemitism at High Tide: World War II (1939–1945),” in his Antisemitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

32. Miller, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” 7–8.

33. For a discussion of the 1932 piece, see Bigsby's Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 325–26.

34. See, for example, Arthur Miller and Company, 21 and Timebends: A Life, 184. It is no wonder that Miller felt the need to convince the world (and perhaps himself) that his real intention in not making Willy Jewish came from a positive desire to make him into an everyman. To admit that anti-Semitism was a huge influence on this decision would have made him seem to be a fearful responder to anti-Jewish trends.

35. See Brater, Enoch's essay, “Ethics and Ethnicity in the Plays of Arthur Miller,” in From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, ed. Cohen, Sarah Blacher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 123Google Scholar, and Bigsby's discussion of the role of Odets on Miller in Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 311–14.

36. See Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 314.

37. The interview is written up in Gussow, Mel's book Conversations with Miller (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 195Google Scholar. See Roudan, Matthew C.é's essay, “Death of a Salesman and the poetics of Arthur Miller,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, 68–69Google Scholar.

38. Miller, Arthur, “Preface: “Salesman at Fifty,” in Death of a Salesman: Fiftieth Year Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), xiiGoogle Scholar.

39. For a discussion of this, see Novick, Julius's “Death of a Salesman: Deracination and Its Discontents,” American Jewish History 91, no. 1 (2003): 97–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. My recent essay considers the Jewishness of the text. See “The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and Challenges to the Modern Jewish Canon.” The only criticism I could find that stated outright that Holden's family was in fact “middle-class urban Jewish” despite the fact that Salinger had “Anglicized them” was a 1958 piece by Maxwell Geismer. Geismer condemns Salinger outright for hiding the Jewishness in the text. See his chapter “J. D. Salinger: The Wise Child and The New Yorker School of Fiction,” in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, A Mid-Century View of Contemporary Fiction (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), 195–209Google Scholar. My essay, “The Kvetcher in the Rye,” is found in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Cammy, Justin, Horn, Dara, Quint, Ayssa, and Rubinstein, Rachel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 645–60Google Scholar.

41. Wirth-Nesher and Kramer discuss the complexities of Jewish American identity in their “Introduction: Jewish American Literatures in the Making,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, 1–11.

42. I am quoting from the 1991 Little, Brown, and Co. paperback edition of the book, p. 100.

43. See, for example, Howe, Irving's seminal 1946 essay, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Commentary 2, no. 4 (October 1946): 361–67Google Scholar, and Glazer, Nathan's “The ‘Alienation’ of Modern Man: Some Diagnoses of the Malady,” Commentary 3, no. 4 (April 1947): 378–85Google Scholar.

44. For a discussion of the ties between Valley Forge and Pencey Prep and Salinger's time at Valley Forge, see Hamilton, Ian, In Search of J D Salinger (London: Heinemann, 1988), 18–31Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 28.

46. The discussion of the school song is found in ibid., 28–29.

47. Salinger, Margaret A., Dream Catcher: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 31Google Scholar. This biography of Salinger is controversial because of the negative light in which she portrays her father.

48. Hamilton, In Search of J D Salinger, 20.

49. Discussions of Salinger's military service can be found in Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher, 50–69, Hamilton, In Search of J D Salinger, 80–98, and Alexander, Paul's Salinger: A Biography (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 78–105Google Scholar.

50. As found in Lutz, Norma Jean, “Biography of J D Salinger,” J. D. Salinger, ed. Bloom, Harold (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002), 6Google Scholar. His experiences in the war led Salinger to be briefly hospitalized in Nuremberg for a “nervous breakdown.” For a brief discussion about viewing the book in light of the war, see Freedman, Carl's essay, “Memories of Holden Caulfield—and of Miss Greenwood,” in Holden Caulfield, ed. Bloom, Harold (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005)Google Scholar. The essay is found on pages 165–81, while the discussion of its relationship to the war is on 175–77.

51. As quoted in an interview with Stern, Daniel in “The Art of Fiction, No. 52,” Paris Review 61 (Spring 1975): 3Google Scholar.

52. Interestingly, both Miller and Salinger read the Merriwell series. Miller discusses his youthful adulation of the series in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, 62, and Salinger's 1947 short story “The Inverted Forest” compares a macho jock student with Frank Merriwell. Although Merriwell had a huge influence on young men in America, no study has ever considered his role in the shaping of American culture. The only detailed, and very comprehensive, analysis of the series is from 1937, including a brief history of the dime novel, a biography of Patten, and a bibliography of his works. See Cutler, John Levi, Gilbert Patten and His Frank Merriwell Saga: A Study in Sub-literary Fiction, 1896–1913 (Orono: University Press of Maine, 1934)Google Scholar. For other discussions, see Boyle, Robert H., Sport-Mirror of American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 241–71Google Scholar, Oriard, Michael's Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 27–29Google Scholar; Higgs, Robert J., Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 19– 21Google Scholar; Messenger, Christian, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 165–71Google Scholar, and the entry “Merriwell, Frank,” in The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book, ed. Cox, J. Randolph (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 170–73Google Scholar. For overviews of the Merriwell genre of sport fiction, see Evans, Walter, “The All-American Boys: A Study of Boys’ Sports Fiction,” Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 1 (1972): 104–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Messenger, Christian, “Sport in the Dime Novel,” Journal of American Culture 1, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 495–505Google Scholar. Gilbert Patten wrote an autobiography that discusses how he came to create the series. See Frank Merriwell's “Father”: An Autobiography by Gilbert Patten, ed. Hinsdale, Harriet, assisted by Tony London (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 176–81Google Scholar.

53. Baker, Kevin, “Introduction” to Bernard Malamud, The Natural (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), xiiGoogle ScholarPubMed.

54. As Kevin Baker writes of The Natural, “Readers of a certain age will recognize the model for the book. Up until perhaps a generation ago, most public libraries still held shelves full of boys’ sports novels. They were a venerable line of American hack writing, churned out relentlessly by sportswriters and novelists, or even by a major college basketball coach such as Clair Bee…. The hero was sometimes a professional athlete, more often a high-school or college star…. In The Natural, Malamud draws heavily upon this genre, then stands it on its head.” See Baker's introduction to Malamud's The Natural, viii.

55. Malamud discusses what inspired him to write The Natural in “The Natural: Raison D’Etre and Meaning,” in Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, ed. Cheuse, Alan and Delbanco, Nicholas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 41–46Google Scholar.

56. Or to quote Turner, Frederick W. III, Malamud, “has been able to invest this boy's game with tragi-comic qualities,” from his essay “Myth Inside and Out: The Natural,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, eds. Leslie, and Field, Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 112Google Scholar.

57. Philip Roth felt that Malamud created moral allegories, where “generally speaking, the Jew is innocent, passive, virtuous…. the Gentile, on the other hand, is characteristically corrupt, violent, and lustful.” Certainly Roy Hobbs embodies these traits, although in the end he has the possibility to change. For Roth's quite negative views on Malamud's fiction, see his essay “Imagining Jews,” New York Review of Books 21 (October 3, 1974): 22Google Scholar.

58. For a discussion of this term, see Roskies, David's Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 141–44Google Scholar.

59. See Bandy, Susan J., “The Female Voice in American Sports Literature and the Quest for a Female Sporting Identity,” in Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature, ed. Cocchiarale, Michael and Emmer, Scott D. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 99Google Scholar.

60. For analysis that focuses heavily on the “Arthurian parallels” in The Natural, see Ducharme, Robert, Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud (Paris: Mouton, 1974)Google Scholar; Hershinow, Sheldon J., Bernard Malamud (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 16–28Google Scholar, and Hays, Peter L.'s “Malamud's Yiddish-Accented Medieval Stories,” in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, ed. Astro, Richard and Benson, Jackson J. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977), 87–96Google Scholar.

61. Robert Ducharme, Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud, 12. Iksa Alter convincingly reads The Natural as a reworking of the “Horatio Alger archetype wherein the hero must choose between two opposing concepts of success” all within a larger body of Malamud's work that “presented the decline of the American dream into the nightmare of an entire civilization in decay.” See her essay “The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud,” in AMS Studies in Modern Literature 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1981), 2–4Google Scholar.

62. See, for example, Alter, Robert's discussion of how The Natural “entertains more than it convinces” because it is not based on the reality that Malamud knew: Jewish immigrant life; in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing (New York: Dutton, 1969), 118Google Scholar.

63. Cahan, Abraham, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper, 1960)Google Scholar.

64. For an incisive recent book on first-generation Jewish American writing, see Levinson, Julian's Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

65. Alfred Kazin noted in his review of Malamud's second novel The Assistant that Malamud has an “utterly objective ear for the harsh and plaintive American Yiddish speech.” See “Review of The Assistant,” Commentary 24, no. 1 (July 1957), 89. Solotaroff, Robert discusses how Malamud was raised with Yiddish/English (or Yinglish) in Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 6–7Google Scholar.

66. Malamud, The Natural, 5.

67. The major biography of Malamud is Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life by Davis, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Malamud's daughter, Smith, Janna Malamud, wrote a memoir entitled My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)Google Scholar. As with Salinger's daughter's biography, this one is also controversial because of the often negative portrait of the father.

68. Both quotations are found in Philip Davis's Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life, 13–14.

69. Ibid., 116.

70. Malamud discusses the promise of America for Jews in his essay “Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience,” in Talking Horse, 189.

71. Kevin Baker's “Introduction” to Bernard Malamud The Natural, xii.

72. Davis writes that “The young Malamud was otherwise physically awkward, and poor at sports: the future author of The Natural threw a baseball like a girl, said Wittkin.” See Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life, 33.

73. Miller's later plays linked “the Holocaust directly and profoundly to the American psyche.” See Antler, Joyce's “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” American Theatre 12, no. 2 (February 1995): 16Google Scholar. Isser, Edward analyzes the full range of Miller's writing on the Holocaust in “Arthur Miller and the Holocaust,” Essays in Theatre 10, no. 2 (1992): 155–64Google Scholar. For Salinger, his daughter claims he said that “he writes about half-Jews because, he says, that's what he knows best.” Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir, 20. And for Malamud, nearly early every work after The Natural was about Jews.